CONGRESSIONAL MUDDLE OF DISHONOR

As a Cornell undergrad, I dated a series of Jewish women. This wasn’t deliberate. There were many Jewish women there. As there were then no smart phones or computers, young men and women spent more time face-to-face. They got to know and sometimes like each other. Stuff happens.

After we’d been an item for a few weeks, one of these women told me that she wanted to bring me home for her family’s Passover Seder, which was many months away. Though an existentialist and not religiously observant, she spoke enthusiastically about this annual ritual. It sounded interesting. I said I’d be happy to come along.

A few months later, we had a pitched argument about the nature of our relationship and what we didn’t like about each other. As she was walking away, I called out, “I guess this means I’m not invited to the Seder.”

She turned around, frowned sharply, waved her hand disgustedly, turned back around and resumed walking.

Often, people miss the point. Sometimes I do, too. Though on that occasion, I did so intentionally.

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In its Covid post-mortem, Congress also intentionally misses the point.

After supposedly hearing from hundreds of witnesses, reading thousands of documents, listening to thousands of interviews and taking much testimony, the US House of Representatives’ Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic recently released a 520-page (large type, extensively footnoted) document entitled After Action Review of the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward. While I don’t closely follow the media, it seems that this report hasn’t received much media attention. Focus has shifted to drones and corporate executive executions.

Seemingly written by the Republican majority, the report has some worthwhile content. It properly concluded that none of the mitigation measures: the lockdowns, school closures, masks or testing worked, and that these caused tremendous damage. The Subcommittee points out some of the human toll of locking down: depression and anxiety, increases in overdoses and suicide attempts, especially among young people and cognitive and developmental losses in infants and young children.

The Subcommittee also condemns the banning of low-cost therapeutics and the wildly inflationary effects of printing trillions of dollars to smooth over the effects of inducing a societal and economic coma. The report observes that the poor became poorer while the rich became richer and that at least $450 billion of Covid relief money was stolen or is otherwise missing.

Anyone paying attention in early 2020 could/should have predicted all of these outcomes. Thus, when I read this report, I wondered—again—why more Republicans didn’t forcefully oppose these measures at that time, when it would have mattered. Doing so would have distinguished them from Democrats, who were plainly, opportunistically inciting terror and panic.

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Overall, the report is a politically-tainted, muddled mess.

The Subcommittee found that gain-of-function research, funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) through the US-based non-profit EcoHealth Alliance, encompassed manipulation of SARS-like viruses led to a lab leak of an enhanced virus, which those responsible covered up. This seems true, and relevant as to overall Scamdemic motive and culpability. But it’s not centrally important. The key question is: what should—or rather, shouldn’t—have been done about a respiratory virus that didn’t threaten healthy people under 70, no matter where it came from.

More on that near the end of this post.

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The report falsely asserts that that the injections “saved millions of lives.”

Sickened Covid “vaxxers” know by experience, and non-vaxxers know by hearing from ill vaxxers, that the shots plainly failed, as had been firmly and repeatedly promised, to stop infection and spread. All of the dozens of injectors I know have gotten sick multiple times. Given that this infection-blocking pledge plainly failed, vaxx backers defaulted to the stance that the shots prevented hospitalizations and saved lives. But no uninjected person I know has ended up in the hospital. And as I’ve pointed out in previous posts, researchers have resorted to such cheesy tricks as counting the injected as “unvaccinated” until six weeks after their first shot; thus, the jabbed who died in those six weeks were counted as “unvaxxed.” Such chicanery, which includes but isn’t limited to, healthy vaccinee bias, nullifies such research’s findings.

The sole reference for the Subcommittee’s claim that “the shots saved millions of lives” is a single online—otherwise unpublished and not peer-reviewed—modeling exercise by a big-money, Med/Pharma promoting entity that calls itself “The Commonwealth Fund.” As public health physician David Bell has pointed out, the model’s “life-saving” estimates are based on the dubious assumption that Covid incidence would have been far higher in years 2 and 3 of the pandemic than in the first year; such an incidence curve would be highly unusual for a respiratory virus, especially one that creates natural immunity. The model also assumes that 2021 Covid variants were as potent as those found in 2019-2020. This assumption is plainly unsound: viruses typically evolve into less lethal forms. By 2021, SARS-CoV-2 had weakened into the Omicron variant, in accordance with basic biology.

No random clinical trials have been done to prove that, on a net basis, the shots saved lives over an extended period. It seems more likely that the shots have shortened lives. Many have noticed, as I have, that some of the vaxxers they know have sustained serious injuries or died of non-Covid causes, such as heart attacks, strokes or cancers. Sustained excess death rates in highly-vaxxed nations corroborate anecdotal evidence that, on balance, the shots have hastened, not delayed, death.

Despite praising the shots for saving lives, the Subcommittee notes the unusually high rate of vaccine adverse events reported, and early knowledge of myocarditis in young adults that, together with their very low risk from Covid-19, made school and college mandates indefensible.

Relying on the report, many will baselessly insist that the Covid mitigation measures were worthwhile because these bought us time until the vaxxes could rescue humanity. This Pollyannish stance ignores that those healthy and under 70 were at microscopic risk of viral death and never needed to inject. The Subcommittee also failed to seriously analyze whether a novel class of pharmaceuticals, i.e., mRNA shots, should have been given to billions of people without conducting thorough, longer-term studies. This is the first time anything resembling this has been done.

It's astounding that Republicans or Democrats continue to put their imprimatur on the lousy shots. The Subcommittee report, released after Trump’s election, seems intended to foreclose continuing criticism of the shots, which Trump praised from 2020-2024 until campaign rally audiences continually, rightfully booed him for bragging about Operation Warp Speed.

Perhaps the Subcommittee repeated the “Vaxx good!” mantra to build morale and momentum as Trump takes office. Or maybe doing so is another manifestation of Pharma’s bipartisan sphere of Congressional influence.

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The Committee also wastes time asserting that the Chinese withheld information regarding early Covid cases and that the WHO should have acted faster once it became aware of a health concern in Wuhan and that such earlier action would have greatly curtailed the spread. Emphasis on source containment is misplaced. In a globalized world, viruses are inevitably carried around. It seems likely that SARS-CoV-2 was released in the fall of 2019. Thawed November 2019 American blood bank samples contained SARS-CoV-2. The viral horses were out of the barn. Thus, the WHO declaration of a Public Health Emergency in December 2019 rather than January 2020 wouldn’t have helped much.

The report naively presumes that the spread of an aerosolized virus with many mild cases, in a dense city and province, could have been stopped weeks or months after transmission began, without spreading in China and beyond. Bear in mind that the Subcommittee found that lockdowns and masks didn’t stop viral spread.

The Subcommittee also condemns the policies promoted by the WHO and notes the WHO’s influential private-sector funding and apparent geopolitical capture. The report fails to explain how the more forceful imposition of the WHO’s harmful pandemic policies would have provided a net benefit. Yet, it recommends that, going forward, the WHO should have more direct power to enforce health regulations on countries and their populations, overriding both national and individual sovereignty.

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In life, and in the report, what’s unsaid is often more important than what is said.

The Subcommittee ignored: rampant misattribution of other-cause deaths to Covid, widespread data distortion regarding infection fatality and case fatality rates and mass-scale iatrogenic death via hospitals’ abuse of ventilators, sedatives and Remdesivir.

It also fails to discuss the Defense Department’s usurpation of public health, nor government, media and Big Tech’s censorship of anti-panic voices. Nor does the Subcommittee mention the unconstitutional rent moratorium, the Plexiglas, air filtration and sanitizing boondoggles, the arbitrary lines between essential and nonessential workers, nor the push for election-distorting mail-in ballots. The Subcommittee also fails to reckon with basic biology concepts relevant to infectious diseases. Each of the foregoing is a major omission.

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Adopting the same general, trite approach of other mitigation advocates, the Subcommittee blandly blathers that the mitigation failed because federal and state governments didn’t prepare, communicate and coordinate well enough. Such anodyne analysis is another effort to misdirect attention away from the crux of Coronamania: the whole thing was a massive scam. There was no need to stockpile masks and ventilators that didn’t work, to coordinate government entities to effect extraordinary, and extremely harmful measures or to communicate better so as to maximally broaden the destruction.

The desultory report reads as though it was written by a committee, whose members resemble the apocryphal group of blindfolded people individually describing an elephant after each palpating a single part of that beast. While raising important examples of the harm imposed on the population, their health, and economies over the past five years, the Subcommittee marginalizes the core reality: governments can’t crush or control respiratory viruses and such viruses don’t kill large numbers of healthy people.

Conceding this fundamental reality would have required the Subcommittee to admit that which cannot be admitted: in March, 2020, Republicans, including Trump, failed to stop Democrats, the Biosecurity apparatus and Public Health bureaucrats from exploiting a respiratory virus and thus, allowing and causing much greater harm than the virus itself could ever have caused. Once Trump opened that door with an Emergency Declaration and funded the mitigation, he set the stage for the ensuing madness.

Trump wants to put Covid in the rear view so he can fulfill other agenda items without getting bogged down ascribing, or facing, accountability. To the very limited extent that he mentions Covid, he, as do many others, bemoans the purportedly horrible virus, rather than the overreaction to it.

The shotgunned report also points fingers at a few Covid miscreants, including Fauci, Cuomo and Daszak, in order to mollify those who still wish to hold responsible, via some Nuremberg-type tribunal, the many who directed the mitigation. The report’s subtext seems to be: “We generated a document that shames some people and entities who deserve it. These cranky, vindictive Covid skeptics who haven’t been distracted by watching sports, monitoring celebrities’ lives or holiday shopping need to be satisfied with this limited takedown. We must look to the future, not dwell on the past.”

Those in power in 2020-22 don’t want anyone to remember that they authorized or tolerated lockdowns, school closures, masks, tests and unimaginably profligate giveaways of public money. Besides, prosecutions would be futile. Anyone with political clout and/or jack will evade indictment or buy pardons. Plenty of that going on recently.

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Nobody talks anymore about Sweden’s low-key Covid response. For decades, progressives saw Sweden as the paragon of enlightened social and medical policy. Yet, oddly, during Coronamania, Sweden became a pariah. In March or April, 2020, I saw a PBS Newshour segment about Sweden’s laissez-faire Corona approach. As the narrator expressed muted revulsion regarding such recklessness, crowds of adults were shown sitting in cafes and teens bumped into each other playing street hockey in an asphalted park. At that time, Trump disdained the Swedish public health officials, mockingly enunciating, as he does, “The Herd,” and implicitly likening the Swedes to cattle being led to slaughter. But the US could/should have mimicked Sweden by allowing normal life to go on for the non-old and healthy.

Unsurprisingly, and despite all of the demagoguery, the virus didn’t annihilate the Swedes. To the contrary, from 2020-24, Sweden had the lowest excess mortality rate in Europe and had many fewer excess deaths than the US or UK. Most importantly, during that time, Swedes lived life, with the benefits of having done so.