Today the Wall Street Journal has a story on how the debt-ridden households of America are coming to the end of their ropes. But its MSM narrative for the default calamity now gathering a ferocious head of steam could not be more ass-backwards:
Lenders are declining to defer payments for some borrowers who were behind on their payments before the coronavirus laid waste to the U.S. economy.
Baloney!
Or as Dennis Prager tartly observed:
The forcible prevention of Americans from doing anything except what politicians deem ‘essential’ has led to the worst economy in American history since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is panic and hysteria, not the coronavirus, that created this catastrophe.
The blindingly obvious truth is that the coronavirus didn’t do it. The Donald’s doctors did.
That is, Fauci, Redfield and Birx. They are Swamp Creatures all, respectively Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Director of the CDC and the global AIDS factotum from the State Department.
And we do mean Swamp Creatures. Between them they have been on the public teat for 132 years as either direct payrollers or harvesters of government grants.
It goes without saying, therefore, that they have no clue how the real world economy works; and that never having met a payroll, raised capital, faced fierce competitors, wrestled with business strategies or struggled to make cash inflows and outflows balance out, they are apparently under the delusion that the blooming, buzzing, throbbing mass of dynamic enterprises that comprise America’s $22 trillion GDP has an on and off switch.
Even then, our real beef is that all three have made so many hideous mistakes during their long years on the government teat, and especially during the last three months of the Covid Hysteria, that they would have been fired long ago in the real world of business.
Indeed, they might have even been fired in the fake world of business called the “Apprentice”, back when the Donald was actually running a real Reality TV Show.
Thus, when the Red Suzerains of Beijing went into the brutal martial law lockdown of Wuhan and the first US case was publicized on January 21, Fauci was asked on Newmax TV whether we “need to worry about this one”.
Said St. Anthony:
Well, you know, obviously, you need to take it seriously and do the kinds of things that the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security are doing. But this is not a major threat for the people of the United States, and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.
Let’s see.
Having allegedly spent 52 years investigating viruses and pandemics at the NIAID including 38 years running the joint, you’d think that in the face of something as sinister as the brutal martial law lockdown in Wuhan—a city where Fauci’s own NIAID money and minions were operatives at the Wuhan virology laboratory—the good doctor might have been less cavalier about the dangers; and might have also noted that approximately 20,000 Chinese and Americans travel back and forth by air between China and the US each and every day, creating a clear risk of transmission.
But five days latter on January 26 Fauci gave a a further reassuring interview to John Catsimatidis, a syndicated radio host in New York, who asked: “Should they (Americans) be scared?”
‘I don’t think so,’ Fauci said. ‘The American people should not be worried or frightened by this. It’s a very, very low risk to the United States, but it’s something we, as public health officials, need to take very seriously.’
At a press conference on January 28th at which a bevy of Trump’s doctors including the Secretary of HSS said “Americans should not worry about their own safety,” Fauci also addressed concerns about whether the virus could be easily spread by asymptomatic carriers.
‘The driver of respiratory outbreaks is symptomatic people, not asymptomatic carriers,’ said Fauci.
Within less than 40 days, of course, Fauci authored the notorious guidelines that essentially put millions of actual and potential asymptomatic citizens under house arrest. But as of February 12 Fauci was still pretty relaxed, saying during another news interview:
It’s still an evolving situation. We don’t know exactly where it’s going to go, what the pattern is.
But by February 16 as US cases started to increase, he was talking out of both sides of his mouth on “Face the Nation”. When the host asked him whether he agreed with Trump’s statement that the virus could “tick down in the warmer months ahead”, he was seeing it both ways:
This virus, we don’t know. But it is not unreasonable to say that influenza, for example, which peaks in the winter, you would certainly expect it by March, April and May to taper down, as well as typical common cold coronaviruses. That’s not an unreasonable statement. However, we do not know what this particular virus is gonna do so. So we would think it would be a stretch to assume that it’s going to disappear with the warm weather.
By the end of the month on February 29 he was tacking even more when he said on on NBC’s “Today” show that,
…..the risk of disease at the time was ‘still low’ but stressed that the situation ‘could change’ once cases of community spread were reported in the US.
So it was only in mid-March, when the now utterly discredited Imperial College model appeared with its 2.2 million US death projection, that Fauci and the Donald’s other doctors sprung into full on Covid Hysteria mode.
That, in turn, resulted in the Donald’s panicked reversal on March 13 when he precipitously declared a national emergency late Friday afternoon so as to not further spook the stock market, or so he thought.
But what green-horn Trump clearly didn’t think about was that the declaration of a national emergency was a screaming invitation to all of his political enemies—and especially the Trump-hating CNN/MSM—to got into full-throated fear-mongering about the Covid-19 now that it had reached the level of a Trump-endorsed national crisis.
In a flash, in fact, the political door was thrown wide-open for the Dem mayors and governors to unleash what quickly became the stay-at-home and lockdown mayhem. That’s because they now had full political cover to attack their own economies, and were being green-lighted to fall back on Uncle Sam for tens of billion of Federal booty to replace what would otherwise have been an instantaneous drain on their own treasuries.
Needless to say, upon pivoting on a dime from “it’s no problem” to “I’m now a War President” doing battle with a deathly pandemic, the Donald simply made himself hostage to his camarilla of doctors, who were now free to step up their fear game and thereby bask in the adulation of the national press corps that was fresh out of antiTrump bullets.
That is, RussiaGate had been interred at the hand of Mueller himself; UkraineGate came a cropper as fast as it was stood up by the House Dems; and and the Impeachment Assault ended with the proverbial whimper, not a bang.
Indeed, the Donald’s utterly misbegotten and destructive daily Coronavirus Task Force briefing, which commenced at the time, allowed these three obscure career Swamp Dwellers to become overnight TV stars.
So even as Deborah Birx was rechristening herself as the Scarf Lady from Foggy Bottom, the Donald gave her and the others all the rope they needed to hang him out to dry as the promulgator and sponsor of Lockdown Nation:
‘To unleash the full power of the federal government I am officially declaring a national emergency,’ President Trump announced Friday (March 13) during a press conference. ‘Two very big words.’ This declaration will ‘open up access’ to federal funds — some $50 billion — to fight COVID-19, he said.
Why, yes, those were two very big words indeed. What they did was essentially unleash the Donald’s trio of doctors to turn what was a nasty seasonal flu epidemic into the second coming of the Bubonic Plague, and with it, the most devastating governmental assault on capitalist prosperity in modern history.
In today’s on-line world, there is probably no better real time measure of the pulse of business activity in the social congregation precincts of the American economy than Open Table reservation activity.
Not since midnight on January 17, 1920, when the 18th Amendment (Prohibition) became effective, has business activity in a major sector of the economy (bars and saloons) crashed with such cliff-diving intensity.
Within days, reservations were down by, well, 100 percent!
Here’s the thing. When did the Donald’s doctors ever explain why they changed their mind on a dime?
When did they conclude that the new coronavirus (SARS-C0V-2), which had been already gene-sequenced by late January, constituted an utterly new, death star pathogen that differed from all other seasonal viruses and coronaviruses in terms of its:
The answer, of course, is they never did. The Donald’s doctors were too busy being TV stars basking in the power and fame that came from being the Czars of Lockdown Nation.
Yet the one and only faintly plausible basis for the brutal Lockdown Nation regime that has been foisted on the American people is that all five of the above propositions were true and could have been proven beyond any reasonable doubt at the time the Open Table index plunged straight down in the chart above.
Actually, none of them could have been validated in mid-March when the horrible deed of Lockdown Nation was launched and none of them can be remotely supported now, as we will further elaborate in Part 4.
But suffice it here to start with the easy ones. We now know, and it had been fairly evident all along, that the SARS-COV-2 virus travels through the population at the same or even slower speed than the annual influenza viruses. And among children, it is decidedly less contagious and moves far slower than is the case for common influenza.
Likewise, it has been evident for weeks and weeks that the Covid is not an random sample Grim Reaper, but a vicious assailant against the old, frail, and already afflicted with life-threatening medical conditions.
The chart below is just based on age cohorts and tells you all you need to know about the folly of universal quarantines.
And, of course, if you were to further over-lay morbidity conditions on this age-based segmentation, the picture would be even far more dramatic. That is, it would actually constitute prima facie evidence that the doctors’ plot to extinguish the virus after it had been roaming freely among the US population for at least 50 days was the very definition of gross malpractice.
Still, Dr. Fauci can’t seem to cope with the blithering truths embedded above or restrain himself when it comes to keeping the public on the knife’s edge of fear. That much was evident when Tennessee Senator Alexander asked him about colleges re-opening this fall:
Senator Alexander: ‘What would you say to the chancellor of the University of Tennessee Knoxville or the principal of the public school about how to persuade parents and students how to return to school in August?’
Dr. Fauci: ‘I would be very realistic with the chancellor and tell her that in this case, that the idea of having treatments available, or a vaccine, to facilitate the reentry of students into the fall term would be something of a bit of a bridge too far.
‘If this were a situation where you had a vaccine, that would really be the end of the issue in a positive way. But as I mentioned in my opening remarks, even at the top speed we’re going, we don’t see a vaccine playing in the ability of individuals to get back to school this term.’
Huh?
As is evident in the data above, the WITH Covid death rate for the college age population cohort (15-24 years) is slightly less than one per million!
No one, but no one, who is certifiably sane would shutdown America’s 24 million strong higher education institutions owing to the risk of death at 1 per million…..unless there was some other angle to the scheme.
And, of course, there is. Dr. Fauci and the Donald’s other doctors apparently fear that college students may go home during Thanksgiving break for Turkey Dinner with grams and gramps.
But for crying out loud. That’s not medical advice, nor is it rooted in epidemiology or any other science.
It’s an out and out social control maneuver, and reflects a policy designed to thwart, rather than enhance, the only thing which ever kills off a virus—the corona variety or any other.
Namely, herd immunity.
We have a lot more on that topic on Part 4, but its opposite of universal quarantine is surely medically dubious and an absolute economy killer.
That is, the doctors plot since mid-March has been essentially to put the entire US population under house arrest in order to protect the 2-5 percent of the population which is old, frail, medically afflicted and therefore uniquely vulnerable to a virus that otherwise has mild impacts on nearly everyone else it infects.
Yesterday, we noted that the data for Illinois demonstrates this truth in spades. With fully half of the state’s reported WITH Covid fatalities having occurred in nursing home, the especially brutal form of Lockdown Nation being imposed by Governor Pritzker is flat-out irrational.
But it also amounts to taking the vast bulk of Illinois’ 12.5 million population hostage in order to protect people who are essentially institutionalized and therefore outside of the ebb and flow of daily commerce and economic life in the state.
But for want of doubt, this table on WITH Covid deaths among Illinois 100 counties amounts to a withering indictment of the doctors’ universal quarantine policy.
Millions of lives and tens of thousands of businesses have been uprooted, especially in the out-state areas of Illinois. And yet in fully half of the state’s counties there has not been a single WITH Covid death!
Needless to say, this is not the first time Dr. Fauci has left a trail of Hysteria in the wake of his malpractice. Way back in 1983 when he was trying to make himself famous and move up the ladder at NIAID, he famously claimed that hugging your family members could result in the transmission of AIDS!
That’s right. One scientist and doctor was the sole author of a paper published in the prestigious medical journal JAMA, which stated that AIDS might be transmissible through “routine close contact, as within a family household.”
That turned out not to be even remotely true, of course, but in the meantime the media had widely propagated the myth, naturally setting off a wave of hysteria.
Nevertheless, within months the author was promoted to chief of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, a position Dr. Fauci, regrettably, still holds.
Reprinted with permission form David Stockman’s Contra Corner.
