The average American believed in 2020 that they had a 25% risk of dying from COVID-19

How the establishment intentionally deceived America

Between March 2020 and June 2021, scientists at the University of Southern California asked Americans what they thought their risk of dying from COVID-19 was.

The average answer in April: 25%.

Real figure: 0.2% [1].

In 2020, U.S. government systematically spread misinformation and hysteria about COVID-19 to intentionally create a panic.

The fruits of their labor: a perceived mortality rate a full 100-fold higher than the actual mortality rate.

Recently, I have written that the WHO exaggerated the mortality rate—at 3.4%.

But before I came across these data, I did not really fully understand the full extent of the deception.

The public did not keep close track of the numbers. It gauged the deadliness of the virus based on the general atmosphere of fear. And the fear in early 2020 propagated by the media was paralyzing. It led to these estimates.

Again, 25%.

Let us therefore ask the following question:

Were those who were saying that the mortality rate of COVID-19 was the same as influenza closer to the truth?

Or were those who led the public to believe that the mortality rate was 25%?

You know what I think: I genuinely think that the people claiming that COVID-19 was no more deadly than influenza—in a certain very real sense, I think these people were actually not spreading misinformation, but correcting it.

The mortality rate during this period was less than 1%. Scientists at the time knew that.

And they knew that the public believed that the mortality rate was 25%. They had full access to these data at the time.

Why didn’t they correct this misconception? Why did they continue to peddle fear instead of telling people the truth about the virus? Why did they pounce on Trump when he did tell the truth? Why did they consistently mislead the public?

Because they wanted people to fear.

It was bad public health. It robbed the public of the capacity to make informed decisions about their own personal health or to have an intelligent conversation about the pandemic response. By systematically overexaggerating the risk of the virus, an inflated understanding of the benefit of various interventions was the result. And when benefits are inflated, they are inflated relative to risks. People therefore underestimated the harms compared to benefits. And they systematically did harm by over-intervening. They intervened even when the harms exceeded the benefits, because they were misled about the benefits of the intervention, because they were misled about the risks of the virus.

They intervened unnecessarily. They locked down unnecessarily. They restricted human rights unnecessarily. Because they did not have a rational or accurate understanding of the virus.

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities," as Voltaire famously wrote.

And that was the story of the pandemic.

Why did the authorities want this outcome?

Why did they want people to fear way out of proportion to the actual threat?

Why did the authorities want people to intervene far more than they would have if they had had a rational and accurate understanding of the actual threat?

Someday, we will need to reckon with what the public health establishment did to this country during the pandemic.

Their lies led to unspeakable evil.

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[1] To be clear, at its peak in early 2020, the mortality rate in the United States was about 0.73%, according to this paper in The Lancet. The discrepancy between this figure in the Lancet and the above in the Santa Clara paper owed mainly to the fact that the Santa Clara paper is a community sample—not from nursing homes, where most of the carnage took place.