Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

A retrospective of the Covid narrative in America

First, some of the lies.

The first lie came from the man the Trump Administration selected to lead its pandemic response, Dr. Fauci. He said citizens should not rush out and buy masks, as they wouldn’t do any good and the Covid virus really wasn’t all that serious a thing to worry about.

Come to think of it, he was actually telling us a truth or two there, but it wasn’t his intention. A few months later, Fauci admitted he lied because there was a mask shortage at the time and he didn’t want a run on masks to make them unavailable to health care workers.

Then came what I will call the Vaccine Deal. The narrative was that if we got vaccinated, we would soon no longer have to wear masks or socially distance and things like schools and libraries could go back to normal. Furthermore, if 80 or 90% of us got vaccinated, it would stop the spread and we could eradicate the disease.

Remember that? I sure do. I got vaccinated, too. In fact, I refused to believe initial reports that vaccinated people could spread the virus, figured the unvaccinated were being foolish, and even leaned in favor of vaccine mandates in the late winter and early spring of 2021.

But the reports kept coming, the authorities admitted that the vaxxed could still carry the thing, and my left-libertarian instincts told me that trying to force Americans who already had every reason not to trust their government, employers, or institutions to get vaccinated would do more harm than good, and my instincts were definitely right about that.

In any case, in some states, vaccinated or not, proof of vaccination or a negative test AND a mask is still required for admission to restaurants and other public venues. Which just proves that the Vaccine Deal was just another lie.

Now let’s look at some of the worst of the damned lies, and there are many to choose from. One big one is the corporate media, and in this case I include every media outlet that accepts advertising revenue from Big Pharma, railed that unvaccinated people were threatening the vaccinated by taking up hospital beds because they were too stupid or selfish or Republican to get vaxxed and were now getting sick.

It is true that hospitals admit a lot of Covid patients, but not necessarily because they are even showing symptoms. I personally know of several people who tested positive for Covid and were promptly hospitalized for “observation.” It turns out that hospitals in “high-impact areas” get paid $50,000 by the federal government for every Covid patient admitted.

In this capitalist economy, if you think that hospital and HMO administrators aren’t issuing instructions to admit every Covid patient they can, and anyone needing admission for anything else that doesn’t pay as well be damned, I’ve got tropical rain forest in Colorado to sell you.

A damned lie by omission is that same corporate media will never mention that little fact if they can possibly help it. Can’t make the advertisers look like the predatory bastards they are. Wouldn’t be prudent.

The most irritating damned lie to me personally is the liberal media narrative that anyone who questions what “reliable sources” like the New York Times or the Bezos Post or Dr. Fauci say is automatically a crazy anti-vaxxer Trumper conspiracy theorist. How can someone who got vaccinated, and urges others to take the first double-dose vaccine because it has been proven to exponentially reduce symptoms, be an anti-vaxxer?

Liberal Covid alarmists and fearmongerers don’t care, and their favorite statistic is the gross number of infections and Covid deaths, which brings me to statistics.

Sure, the gross number of infections has gone up because there’s a lot more testing than there was a year ago. As for Covid deaths, it seems that there is a federal requirement that Covid be named the cause of death if someone dies with Covid.

My source there is the woman who heads the Illinois Department of Health, who said that in a press conference. Somebody died of gunshot wounds and the cause of death was Covid, so naturally that aroused some curiosity. She said they were required to report Covid as a cause of death, and walked right off the stage. I wonder if she still has a job.

I had wondered about this for over a year. The news would say that some 99 year old person died of Covid. Really? Were there co-morbidities, or a more proximate cause of death? The reports never say, do they?

Of course not, because if they did, the true death toll would be lower, and I’ll bet you that it’s by at least a factor of ten. But it’s kind of hard to scare people of a pandemic that kills mostly those with pre-existing conditions, and then only a small percentage of them. Far easier to just spout the raw infection rate and say everybody’s going to die if people go out anywhere or have guests over without masks and proof of vaccination.

Which is probably why there’s another Covid alarmist narrative going around that the Covid deaths have been vastly underreported. It seems that quite a few county coroners ignored the federal mandate out of a sense of professionalism: They refused to list Covid as the cause of death when it wasn’t the proximate cause of death, which is what coroners are traditionally supposed to do. How dare they? Must be Republicans, according to the liberal Covid alarmist narrative.

I’ll end this segment with a fun statistic. How many people died of Covid after attending NFL and college football games this fall without masks? I haven’t been able to find a single story on such an incident, so I conclude the answer is zero. Whatever happened to superspreader events? They don’t talk about those anymore, do they?

Now a little truth, courtesy of the World Health Organization and the African doctors who have actually treated people with the Omicron variant. According to the WHO, Covid is here to stay. It will go endemic, I’d say it already has become endemic, will continue to mutate into more infectious and less symptomatic strains, and will soon become just another common cold.

The South African virologist who first identified the Omicron variant described the symptoms as “seriously mild,” and the media and American government fearmongering as “a tempest in a teacup.”

I see all of the efforts to scare people and to discredit those who question the official Covid narrative as authoritarian ones. The good news is that the Biden Administration is already backing away from Covid mandates, but very slowly, probably so as to not antagonize the Democratic base that they’ve been scaring the shit out of for the last year and a half.

It’s time to end all Covid mandates and imposed restrictions. I have far more trust in my neighbors and relatives, even Republican ones, than I do in a federal government and corporate media that has lied so much to me for the last 20 or so years. The pandemic will officially end when the federal government, in spite of its desire to increase the profits of Big Pharma, finally admits that Covid is now no more than just another common cold.

But will they? They’re so corrupt that I just don’t know. Whatever happens I do know that they will continue to lie to us about a good many things. Mark Twain gave me my title. I’m sure he wouldn’t be surprised at all.

Thanks for reading, Happy New Year, may 2022 not be 2020 too, good night, and good luck.