How the authorities systematically lied to the public about the threat of COVID-19 in 2020
A comprehensive summary of the public health, media, and left-wing political establishment's manufacture of a mass hysteria event of historic proportions
On January 3, 2022, 41-year-old schoolteacher Sarah Beam was arrested by Houston police and charged with endangering a child after her 13-year-old son was found in her car trunk. Ms. Beam’s explanation? Her son had a respiratory infection and needed to be tested for COVID-19. To avoid being potentially exposed, she locked him in the trunk and drove to the testing site. Her risk of dying from COVID-19? Between 1-in-11,000 and 1-in-38,000, or approximately the same as the lifetime risk of being struck by lightning.
The hysterical behavior of people like Sarah Beam was avoidable: by putting out accurate information about the real threat from the pandemic. The authorities failed in that task: they systematically lied about the actual risk of death from COVID-19.
The risk of death from COVID-19 was estimated to be incredibly high early in the pandemic, reportedly as high as 17% in China in January 2020. These estimates gradually came down. On March 3, 2020, the Secretary-General of the World Health Organization declared that the mortality rate from COVID-19 was 3.4%, to enormous media coverage. Despite this, leading scientists at the time knew and immediately commented that this figure was almost certainly too high, some suggesting figures of 1-2% and others suggesting figures closer to “some strains of influenza”. Indeed, a paper published online in February by then-CDC Director Robert Redfield and Anthony Fauci suggested that the mortality rate “may be considerably less than 1%”. Due to undercounting of cases, experts also knew that during outbreaks of novel pathogens, the estimated mortality at the beginning of the pandemic appears almost always dramatically higher than it really is. For example, during the earliest weeks of the swine flu pandemic, the swine flu was predicted to have a mortality rate of 5.1%; the final estimate turned out to be 0.02%, 200-times lower.
By March 9, 2020, John Ioannidis was already publishing thoughtful pieces warning against exaggerating the threat. His thoughtful analyses of the data that led to estimates of the death rate very similar to those that we know to be accurate today. He wrote:
Early reported CFR figures also seem exaggerated. The most widely quoted CFR has been 3.4%, reported by WHO dividing the number of deaths by documented cases in early March. This ignores undetected infections and the strong age dependence of CFR. The most complete data come from Diamond Princess passengers, with CFR = 1% observed in an elderly cohort; thus, CFR may be much lower than 1% in the general population, probably higher than seasonal flu (CFR = 0.1%), but not much so.
Observed crude CFR in South Korea and in Germany, the countries with most extensive testing, is 0.9% and 0.2%, respectively, as of March 14, and crude CFR in Scandinavian countries is about 0.1%. Some deaths of infected, seriously ill people will occur later, and these deaths have not been counted yet. However, even in these countries many infections probably remain undiagnosed. Therefore, CFR (or, more properly called, infection fatality rate, counting as cases all infected individuals) may be even lower rather than higher than these crude estimates.
That is right: the WHO was reporting figures strongly at odds with then-existing expertise within epidemiology and infectious disease. Why would the World Health Organization intentionally provide figures that it knew were false?
To make matters worse, the media relentlessly amplified WHO’s 3.4% figure, and public health officials not only did not correct the record and put the brakes on the hysteria, but made policy consistent with it. The media then relentlessly ridiculed Trump for reporting the figures that were more consistent with prevailing scientific opinion within the field; the media denounced these figures as “misinformation”, as has been documented by Matt Orfalea’s must-see video. Strikingly, Trump was later vindicated: his 0.5% figure was later confirmed by scientists as almost exactly the median death rate globally: 0.47%. (It turned out to be around 0.07%, or 1-in-1500, in those under the age of 70.)
The public health establishment, through the mouthpiece of the World Health Organization, was responsible for promoting a dramatically inflated figure. Meanwhile, the media was responsible for amplifying this figure and selectively neglecting and suppressing figures that were much more consistent with the scientific evidence at the time.
Only a few brave scientists, such as Jay Bhattacharya and John Ioannidis, broke ranks to promote authentically scientific views about the real mortality rate on popular platforms. They were relentlessly attacked and their reputations tarnished by mainstream public health officials.
What accounts for the insistence by the public health establishment and the media on figures that were inflated and at odds with prevailing scientific evidence and opinion at the time? Why did our institutions deliberately promote fear? Why did they suppress legitimate dissent?
The answer involves many reasons, including:
Those in government and the media, and many in the health and research professions, felt that they were wiser than others and so better able to lead the pandemic response. In a sudden and unexpected emergency, the situation is frequently more dangerous than first thought, so extreme measures at avoiding that still yet to be quantified danger do, reasonably often, turn out to be wise. However, these people failed to assess the problems which would arise from overly-scaring the public, and so ultimately reducing the trust the public has in the so-called experts, which could prove to be genuinely deadly in a future, genuinely dangerous, crisis. (For instance, it would not be surprising if the current round of bird flu went wild in humans, since it has killed large numbers of mammals in particular, fortunately isolated, situations.)
There was a self-aggrandizing sense of urgency and importance.
They imagine themselves as being seen, in the present - and especially the longer term - as the heroes of the pandemic, who warned about its seriousness rather than responded in a lukewarm fashion, and so saved thousands or millions of lives.
There was a lot of money to be made from selling patented, high-profit, drugs, vaccines, quasi-vaccines and monoclonal antibodies, as well as the PCR testing. If higher principles did not prevail, anyone with a financial interest in these would promote the greatest level of fear they could.
Anyone who knew that most people's immune responses are a fraction of what they should be - with excessive, self-destructive, inflammatory responses as well - due to having only a fraction of the 50 ng/mL (125 nmol/L = 1 part in 20,000,000 by mass) level of circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D would respond that the best way of tackling the emerging pandemic is to get as many people as possible (without false information or coercion) to supplement vitamin D3 properly to attain such a level. (Please see the research cited and discussed at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/.)
However, most of these people had no idea about this because they are not at all interested in simple, unglamourous, inexpensive, and so not very profitable, solutions to health problems when they can make money from sales of more expensive approaches or be directly paid a fraction of the billions of dollars in funding which is made available for any scary health condition.
These researchers, such as virologists, and the whole research and pharmaceutical medical complex, are "terrified of vitamin D", as Pierre Kory put it in his recent interview with Tucker Carlson: https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1768033041568727391. (Transcript of this section of the interview: https://nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/dr-pierre-kory-talks-with-tucker.)
There was also a long-term, well funded, military interest in mRNA "vaccines" which could be quickly customized to suit novel diseases. In March 2020, almost everyone - stupidly and due to their own overly narrow interests - thought the only way to avoid a disastrous pandemic was to attain herd immunity, primarily by vaccination. That required firstly very rapid development, approval and mass production and distribution of these vaccines and secondly a very high proportion of the population agreeing to be injected with them. The sooner the better . . . the less natural infection and the more transmission stopping, severe disease reducing, vaccine-induced immunity, the batter.
The emergency use authorization the CDC gave these mRNA and adenovirus vector so-called "vaccines" was conditional on there being no other form of treatment for the disease in question. This was further reason for raising alarm and corralling the whole population into a sense of dependence on vaccines, with "flatten the curve" masking, social distancing and lockdowns holding the pandemic at bay until the cavalry arrived: a phalanx of medical professionals with their steely needles to penetratively administer, with a little painful sacrifice on the part of the vaccinee, the life-saving fluids, just descended from the Gods of super-sophisticated vaccine research and manufacturing.
This sense of urgency pushed these people into maximizing the sense of danger: to motivate research, funding and widespread acceptance of the future vaccines.
Those on what passes for the left also responded tribally by denying the veracity of anything Donald Trump said. If he had said the sky was blue, the pseudo-lefties would have insisted it was a shade of green or some other colour. This is part of the reason why they came to insist that the SARS-CoV-2 virus arose from zoonotic transfer - because Trump said it probably came from a lab release.
A further reason these researchers and other so-called experts, and those who rallied in their support, chose the zoonotic transfer hypothesis, and continue to do so now, is that the truth of the matter is that the pandemic was *caused* by experts such as themselves. These so-called experts want *more* funding with few controls over what they insist is a wise, heroic, essential aspect of health policy - research on pathogens to develop narrowly focused, patented, profitable, pseudo-glamorous vaccines, quasi-vaccines, monoclonal antibodies and anti-viral drugs. This includes conducting the gain of function research which lead o SARS-CoV-2 being created in the lab. Their approach necessitates billions and billions of dollars in funding and lots of social status for all researchers and administrators like themselves.
So effed up. Johnny I. is a legend. Crazy town for several years as the population was encouraged to indulge their paranoia and neuroses. Eye opening as to the darkness that lurks beneath the surface.