I keep going back to that January 10th interview with the CDC director on ABC’s “Good Morning, America.” I talked about this interview in another post (https://areamanonfire.com/?p=336). There, I focused on what Rochelle Walensky said about the PCR test, how the test was never authorized to evaluate contagiousness (see the interview here https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/news/video/cdc-director-responds-criticisms-covid-19-guidance-82131389).
As I tried to convey in the fantasy segment of that post, Walensky’s statement failed to pique the curiosity of mainstream journalists who somehow failed to grasp the implications of this revelation and, hence, failed to ask the obvious follow-up questions. (It’s just one miserable failure after another with these journalists.) Having thus failed (again), the corporate press chose to focus on something else Walensky said.
Among the other things Walensky said during the interview was this tidbit:
“…the overwhelming number of deaths—over 75%—occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities. So, really, these were people who were unwell to begin with. And, yes, it’s really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.”
The “encouraging news” became fodder for Twitter controversy, as critics accused Walensky of being callous toward disabled people. Walensky responded by reassuring everyone on Twitter that the CDC is committed to protecting the most vulnerable:
“We must protect people with comorbidities from severe #COVID19. I went into medicine – HIV specifically – and public health to protect our most at-risk. CDC is taking steps to protect those at highest risk, incl. those w/ chronic health conditions, disabilities & older adults.”
(See Newsweek article here: https://www.newsweek.com/cdc-rochelle-walensky-tweets-backlash-comments-omicron-death-comorbidities-1667329.)
Of course, the Newsweek article makes no mention of how dangerously close Walensky’s reassurance comes to the “focused protection” strategy of the much-maligned Great Barrington Declaration (https://gbdeclaration.org/), which, by the way, has been subjected to censorship, despite the fact that the declaration was authored by preeminent epidemiologists from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford University who merely restated the fundamental principles of their field in response to the irrational, fear-based, one-size-fits-all policies of the COVID Regime.
(For the ugly details, see here https://brownstone.org/articles/faucis-war-on-science-the-smoking-gun/, here https://www.aier.org/article/twitter-censors-famed-epidemiologist-martin-kulldorff/, and here https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/10/12/why-has-google-censored-the-great-barrington-declaration/).
One might ask why Walensky herself is not being censored for saying something that the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration have been saying since at least October 2020—something for which they have been repeatedly censored.
Meanwhile, other critics of Walensky latched on to her statement about comorbidities and deaths. According to Walensky, more than 75 percent of deaths involved at least four comorbidities. This means at least 75 percent of these “COVID-19 deaths” are highly questionable. Critics believed Walensky had just confirmed, finally, what they suspected for a long time. For these critics, the statement provided further evidence that COVID death counts have been inflated.
Or so it seemed.
A wily “fact-checker,” however, was quick to point out that the initial ABC news clip had been edited to exclude that part of the interview in which Walensky made it clear that she was referring to a recent study of vaccinated people. The “encouraging news,” then, was limited to the vaccinated people in this study. She was not talking about all COVID-19 deaths (see https://www.mediaite.com/news/fact-check-cdc-director-did-not-claim-75-of-all-covid-deaths-involved-four-or-more-serious-comorbidities/).
Walensky’s critics turned out to be mistaken on this point—understandably so, as no one watching the interview could have known what the editors left on the cutting room floor. Of course, reading between the lines of this fact-check, we know what we are supposed to believe. Our “fact-checker” would have us believe that these critics are totally wrong to think that COVID-19 deaths have been inflated.
Nothing else to see here, folks. Everything’s fine. The experts are in charge. Go back to sleep.
But were these critics wrong to question the official numbers?
I find it revealing that our so-called fact-checker never bothers to ask the obvious follow-up question—a question that would occur to any thinking person who is genuinely interested in finding out the truth: If Walensky was only talking about breakthrough cases in that one particular study, what’s the story with COVID-19 deaths in general?
Indeed, the encouraging news here is the suggestion that COVID-19 deaths have been over counted among vaccinated people. Now, could it be that COVID-19 deaths overall have been over counted in the same way—i.e., by not making that crucial distinction between deaths with COVID-19 and deaths from COVID-19?
I have to give credit to Reuters for asking the question. According to Reuters, “The CDC did not immediately respond to a question from Reuters over whether comparable statistics concerning comorbidities existed from a study of all COVID-19 deaths, not just in the vaccinated.” (See https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-walensky-study-idUSL1N2TS0S2.)
Exactly.
Still, I wonder: If the CDC did not respond immediately to the question, did it respond belatedly? I also wonder why no such study exists. Or, if a study does exist, why isn’t the CDC quick to produce it?
Regardless, in the absence of such a study, a good starting point for the intellectually curious might be the CDC website. (Of all places to look!) There, we find provisional COVID-19 death counts, including a table showing comorbidities. We also find this summary of Table 3, under “Comorbidities and other conditions” (as of 1/30/2022), which should be front-page news:
“The number of deaths that mention one or more of the conditions indicated is shown for all deaths involving COVID-19 and by age groups. For over 5% of these deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned on the death certificate. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death” [emphasis added].
(See https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Comorbidities.)
That’s interesting.
So, if “over 5%” (we’ll be generous and round up to 6%) …if 6% of death certificates identify COVID-19 as the only cause of death, then that means 94% of deaths involve at least one comorbidity or other serious condition. It is also interesting to note that, within this subgroup, there are, on average, 4.0 additional causes of death listed on the death certificate.
Might this be grounds for suspecting that COVID-19 deaths overall have been over counted—perhaps wildly over counted?
And let’s not forget Italy. Remember Italy, the place where COVID hysteria really took off outside China?
Of course, everyone remembers! Everyone remembers that as early as March 26, 2020, the Italian Health Institute released a report showing the average age of people dying of or with COVID-19 to be 78. The report also showed that the vast majority of “COVID-19 deaths” involved two or more comorbidities. Here’s the breakdown:
2.1% died without any co-morbidity;
21.3% died with 1 co-morbidity;
25.9% died with 2 co-morbidities;
50.7% died with 3 or more co-morbidities (as of March 26).
(See https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-COVID- 2019_26_marzo_eng.pdf.)
According to the official numbers in Italy, 97.9 percent of COVID deaths involved at least one comorbidity. More than half had three or more comorbidities.
Might this be grounds for suspecting that the threat of COVID-19 has been wildly exaggerated from almost the beginning? Can we at least agree that counting all these people as “COVID deaths” is misleading, if not fraudulent?
From the beginning it was clear who the vulnerable people were. The last time I checked, human biology is the same in Italy as it is in America. (Someone might want to fact check that.) So, why would we expect different outcomes here?
At this point it’s hard to escape the conclusion that certain powerful corporations have a vested interest in deceiving the public, and that power-tripping government bureaucrats and politicians are all too eager to play along, perhaps because they see an opportunity in crisis.
…And you never want to let a good crisis go to waste.
Right, Rahm?
That’s right, Area Man! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yeA_kHHLo )
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