As we’ve been saying on the Ron Paul Liberty Report for some time, in this period of coronavirus and the naked power-grabs by authoritarian politicians from all levels of government, if there is any hope to claw back some of our liberties it will come from the bottom up.

Politicians are drunk on power and they are not about to enter any kind of 12 step program. 

But throughout the country it is the people who are fighting back. And they are scoring tremendous victories. On a small scale, a hundred flowers are blooming daily as Americans who perhaps yesterday were not at all political, or who went along to get along, are realizing what is at stake and are standing up.

The elites laughed at the “flyover country” folks in places like the Lake of the Ozarks who ignored demands that they practice “social distancing” and wear masks in public over Memorial Day weekend and simply went out and had a good time. In fact the elites and the sycophants openly wished these people would contract Covid and die as punishment for ignoring the orders of their “betters.”

That’s how sick things have become.

Here in Texas the speaker of the house Dennis Bonnen – ostensibly a conservative Republican – has warned us lowly citizens that if we want big daddy government to allow us to conduct business again in this state, we need to bow down and scrape. 

He told USA Today that if we don’t wear masks whenever we go outside, we can’t have our freedom back:

I don’t know what message they are sending other than the message of stupidity that they’re not going to wear a face covering in public. Well, pick it. Either you want the economy open or you want to be selfish and not wear a face covering when you are out in the public.

The corrupt Dennis Bonnen may think he can push Texans around, but perhaps he’s had his own mask on too tight and is suffering from hypoxia. 

Down here in Brazoria county a strong independent spirit runs through the vibrant and active homeschool movement. In fact Texas homeschoolers and particularly Brazoria County homeschoolers have been the backbone of Ron Paul country. 

Earlier this month, a group of homeschoolers mobilized and began challenging the ridiculous closures of playgrounds throughout Brazoria County through direct action.

It is the most outrageous abuse of power to deny children the ability to go outside in the sun, help virus-killing vitamin D to flow through their systems, and get the exercise that is most directly associated with a healthy immune system and resistance to coronavirus. 

Government restricting children from that which keeps them healthy is not “science” – it’s criminal.

So this group, the “Park Patriots,” took action. First they descended on a park in Lake Jackson, Ron Paul’s hometown, and after the city workers called the police on them they gave the police a lesson in the law and law enforcement. They ended up at city hall and successfully got the vice mayor to admit that there was no force of law behind the forced shutdown of parks. Officials pretended they had the authority to deny citizens the facilities they were forced to pay for, but in the end a “guideline” is quite different than a law.

The mothers returned to the park and let their kids loose on the playground. Victory indeed.

Today the “Park Patriots” struck again, trudging up to Angleton’s “Freedom Park” to again let their homeschooled kids loose on the taped up playground – and to reclaim their freedom.

As they arrived they began dismantling the tape and the other impediments to children using the facilities:

The orange fencing keeping children from enjoying the park that their parents paid for ended up exactly where it belonged:

One of the children – in this case your author’s own daughter – relished the idea of smashing through the ridiculous “caution” tape on the swings:

Once again it was city workers who called the police on the people who pay their salaries – notice a pattern here? – and soon enough some squad cars showed up. 

What followed was the greatest example of how citizens can reclaim their own liberty by simply standing up to authoritarians. By simply working up the courage to say, “we’re not going to take this anymore.” Here is a short video of the essence of the exchange between the homeschool mothers and fathers of Brazoria County when the police tried to strong-arm them to leave the park:

Ironic how the officer with “We The People” tattooed across his arm showed up with such contempt for the actual people. One of the homeschool fathers hit the perfect note when he reminded the officer that it was in fact the park itself that belonged to the same “We The People” he was wearing on his arm.

Also of interest is that when the officer’s falsely asserted authority to remove the children from the park was obliterated by the excellent rhetoric of the parents, how only response was the bizarre “y’all anti-vaxxers?” Bad move, officer!

Finally, the officer, totally defeated by the arguments of the parents, turned heel and walked away, leaving his colleague dumbfounded and alone. She also turned around and walked away. 

One group of parents broke off to go to the city hall to directly challenge authorities and the other group remained at the park. 

Eventually the officer returned to the homeschoolers remaining at the park. He tried to act friendly at this point. “The chief of police has decided that you can remain at the park.”

Victory:

And thanks to these brave and dedicated homeschoolers, “Freedom Park” is free again:

We can all make a difference. We can all fight for our freedom, one small battle at a time. We can all help defeat the tyrants.

And finally: Don’t mess with Texas…homeschoolers!

As we’ve been saying on the Ron Paul Liberty Report for some time, in this period of coronavirus and the naked power-grabs by authoritarian politicians from all levels of government, if there is any hope to claw back some of our liberties it will come from the bottom up.

Politicians are drunk on power and they are not about to enter any kind of 12 step program. 

But throughout the country it is the people who are fighting back. And they are scoring tremendous victories. On a small scale, a hundred flowers are blooming daily as Americans who perhaps yesterday were not at all political, or who went along to get along, are realizing what is at stake and are standing up.

The elites laughed at the “flyover country” folks in places like the Lake of the Ozarks who ignored demands that they practice “social distancing” and wear masks in public over Memorial Day weekend and simply went out and had a good time. In fact the elites and the sycophants openly wished these people would contract Covid and die as punishment for ignoring the orders of their “betters.”

That’s how sick things have become.

Here in Texas the speaker of the house Dennis Bonnen – ostensibly a conservative Republican – has warned us lowly citizens that if we want big daddy government to allow us to conduct business again in this state, we need to bow down and scrape. 

He told USA Today that if we don’t wear masks whenever we go outside, we can’t have our freedom back:

I don’t know what message they are sending other than the message of stupidity that they’re not going to wear a face covering in public. Well, pick it. Either you want the economy open or you want to be selfish and not wear a face covering when you are out in the public.

The corrupt Dennis Bonnen may think he can push Texans around, but perhaps he’s had his own mask on too tight and is suffering from hypoxia. 

Down here in Brazoria county a strong independent spirit runs through the vibrant and active homeschool movement. In fact Texas homeschoolers and particularly Brazoria County homeschoolers have been the backbone of Ron Paul country. 

Earlier this month, a group of homeschoolers mobilized and began challenging the ridiculous closures of playgrounds throughout Brazoria County through direct action.

It is the most outrageous abuse of power to deny children the ability to go outside in the sun, help virus-killing vitamin D to flow through their systems, and get the exercise that is most directly associated with a healthy immune system and resistance to coronavirus. 

Government restricting children from that which keeps them healthy is not “science” – it’s criminal.

So this group, the “Park Patriots,” took action. First they descended on a park in Lake Jackson, Ron Paul’s hometown, and after the city workers called the police on them they gave the police a lesson in the law and law enforcement. They ended up at city hall and successfully got the vice mayor to admit that there was no force of law behind the forced shutdown of parks. Officials pretended they had the authority to deny citizens the facilities they were forced to pay for, but in the end a “guideline” is quite different than a law.

The mothers returned to the park and let their kids loose on the playground. Victory indeed.

Today the “Park Patriots” struck again, trudging up to Angleton’s “Freedom Park” to again let their homeschooled kids loose on the taped up playground – and to reclaim their freedom.

As they arrived they began dismantling the tape and the other impediments to children using the facilities:

The orange fencing keeping children from enjoying the park that their parents paid for ended up exactly where it belonged:

One of the children – in this case your author’s own daughter – relished the idea of smashing through the ridiculous “caution” tape on the swings:

Once again it was city workers who called the police on the people who pay their salaries – notice a pattern here? – and soon enough some squad cars showed up. 

What followed was the greatest example of how citizens can reclaim their own liberty by simply standing up to authoritarians. By simply working up the courage to say, “we’re not going to take this anymore.” Here is a short video of the essence of the exchange between the homeschool mothers and fathers of Brazoria County when the police tried to strong-arm them to leave the park:

Ironic how the officer with “We The People” tattooed across his arm showed up with such contempt for the actual people. One of the homeschool fathers hit the perfect note when he reminded the officer that it was in fact the park itself that belonged to the same “We The People” he was wearing on his arm.

Also of interest is that when the officer’s falsely asserted authority to remove the children from the park was obliterated by the excellent rhetoric of the parents, how only response was the bizarre “y’all anti-vaxxers?” Bad move, officer!

Finally, the officer, totally defeated by the arguments of the parents, turned heel and walked away, leaving his colleague dumbfounded and alone. She also turned around and walked away. 

One group of parents broke off to go to the city hall to directly challenge authorities and the other group remained at the park. 

Eventually the officer returned to the homeschoolers remaining at the park. He tried to act friendly at this point. “The chief of police has decided that you can remain at the park.”

Victory:

And thanks to these brave and dedicated homeschoolers, “Freedom Park” is free again:

We can all make a difference. We can all fight for our freedom, one small battle at a time. We can all help defeat the tyrants.

And finally: Don’t mess with Texas…homeschoolers!

As we’ve been saying on the Ron Paul Liberty Report for some time, in this period of coronavirus and the naked power-grabs by authoritarian politicians from all levels of government, if there is any hope to claw back some of our liberties it will come from the bottom up.

Politicians are drunk on power and they are not about to enter any kind of 12 step program. 

But throughout the country it is the people who are fighting back. And they are scoring tremendous victories. On a small scale, a hundred flowers are blooming daily as Americans who perhaps yesterday were not at all political, or who went along to get along, are realizing what is at stake and are standing up.

The elites laughed at the “flyover country” folks in places like the Lake of the Ozarks who ignored demands that they practice “social distancing” and wear masks in public over Memorial Day weekend and simply went out and had a good time. In fact the elites and the sycophants openly wished these people would contract Covid and die as punishment for ignoring the orders of their “betters.”

That’s how sick things have become.

Here in Texas the speaker of the house Dennis Bonnen – ostensibly a conservative Republican – has warned us lowly citizens that if we want big daddy government to allow us to conduct business again in this state, we need to bow down and scrape. 

He told USA Today that if we don’t wear masks whenever we go outside, we can’t have our freedom back:

I don’t know what message they are sending other than the message of stupidity that they’re not going to wear a face covering in public. Well, pick it. Either you want the economy open or you want to be selfish and not wear a face covering when you are out in the public.

The corrupt Dennis Bonnen may think he can push Texans around, but perhaps he’s had his own mask on too tight and is suffering from hypoxia. 

Down here in Brazoria county a strong independent spirit runs through the vibrant and active homeschool movement. In fact Texas homeschoolers and particularly Brazoria County homeschoolers have been the backbone of Ron Paul country. 

Earlier this month, a group of homeschoolers mobilized and began challenging the ridiculous closures of playgrounds throughout Brazoria County through direct action.

It is the most outrageous abuse of power to deny children the ability to go outside in the sun, help virus-killing vitamin D to flow through their systems, and get the exercise that is most directly associated with a healthy immune system and resistance to coronavirus. 

Government restricting children from that which keeps them healthy is not “science” – it’s criminal.

So this group, the “Park Patriots,” took action. First they descended on a park in Lake Jackson, Ron Paul’s hometown, and after the city workers called the police on them they gave the police a lesson in the law and law enforcement. They ended up at city hall and successfully got the vice mayor to admit that there was no force of law behind the forced shutdown of parks. Officials pretended they had the authority to deny citizens the facilities they were forced to pay for, but in the end a “guideline” is quite different than a law.

The mothers returned to the park and let their kids loose on the playground. Victory indeed.

Today the “Park Patriots” struck again, trudging up to Angleton’s “Freedom Park” to again let their homeschooled kids loose on the taped up playground – and to reclaim their freedom.

As they arrived they began dismantling the tape and the other impediments to children using the facilities:

The orange fencing keeping children from enjoying the park that their parents paid for ended up exactly where it belonged:

One of the children – in this case your author’s own daughter – relished the idea of smashing through the ridiculous “caution” tape on the swings:

Once again it was city workers who called the police on the people who pay their salaries – notice a pattern here? – and soon enough some squad cars showed up. 

What followed was the greatest example of how citizens can reclaim their own liberty by simply standing up to authoritarians. By simply working up the courage to say, “we’re not going to take this anymore.” Here is a short video of the essence of the exchange between the homeschool mothers and fathers of Brazoria County when the police tried to strong-arm them to leave the park:

Ironic how the officer with “We The People” tattooed across his arm showed up with such contempt for the actual people. One of the homeschool fathers hit the perfect note when he reminded the officer that it was in fact the park itself that belonged to the same “We The People” he was wearing on his arm.

Also of interest is that when the officer’s falsely asserted authority to remove the children from the park was obliterated by the excellent rhetoric of the parents, how only response was the bizarre “y’all anti-vaxxers?” Bad move, officer!

Finally, the officer, totally defeated by the arguments of the parents, turned heel and walked away, leaving his colleague dumbfounded and alone. She also turned around and walked away. 

One group of parents broke off to go to the city hall to directly challenge authorities and the other group remained at the park. 

Eventually the officer returned to the homeschoolers remaining at the park. He tried to act friendly at this point. “The chief of police has decided that you can remain at the park.”

Victory:

And thanks to these brave and dedicated homeschoolers, “Freedom Park” is free again:

We can all make a difference. We can all fight for our freedom, one small battle at a time. We can all help defeat the tyrants.

And finally: Don’t mess with Texas…homeschoolers!

As we’ve been saying on the Ron Paul Liberty Report for some time, in this period of coronavirus and the naked power-grabs by authoritarian politicians from all levels of government, if there is any hope to claw back some of our liberties it will come from the bottom up.

Politicians are drunk on power and they are not about to enter any kind of 12 step program. 

But throughout the country it is the people who are fighting back. And they are scoring tremendous victories. On a small scale, a hundred flowers are blooming daily as Americans who perhaps yesterday were not at all political, or who went along to get along, are realizing what is at stake and are standing up.

The elites laughed at the “flyover country” folks in places like the Lake of the Ozarks who ignored demands that they practice “social distancing” and wear masks in public over Memorial Day weekend and simply went out and had a good time. In fact the elites and the sycophants openly wished these people would contract Covid and die as punishment for ignoring the orders of their “betters.”

That’s how sick things have become.

Here in Texas the speaker of the house Dennis Bonnen – ostensibly a conservative Republican – has warned us lowly citizens that if we want big daddy government to allow us to conduct business again in this state, we need to bow down and scrape. 

He told USA Today that if we don’t wear masks whenever we go outside, we can’t have our freedom back:

I don’t know what message they are sending other than the message of stupidity that they’re not going to wear a face covering in public. Well, pick it. Either you want the economy open or you want to be selfish and not wear a face covering when you are out in the public.

The corrupt Dennis Bonnen may think he can push Texans around, but perhaps he’s had his own mask on too tight and is suffering from hypoxia. 

Down here in Brazoria county a strong independent spirit runs through the vibrant and active homeschool movement. In fact Texas homeschoolers and particularly Brazoria County homeschoolers have been the backbone of Ron Paul country. 

Earlier this month, a group of homeschoolers mobilized and began challenging the ridiculous closures of playgrounds throughout Brazoria County through direct action.

It is the most outrageous abuse of power to deny children the ability to go outside in the sun, help virus-killing vitamin D to flow through their systems, and get the exercise that is most directly associated with a healthy immune system and resistance to coronavirus. 

Government restricting children from that which keeps them healthy is not “science” – it’s criminal.

So this group, the “Park Patriots,” took action. First they descended on a park in Lake Jackson, Ron Paul’s hometown, and after the city workers called the police on them they gave the police a lesson in the law and law enforcement. They ended up at city hall and successfully got the vice mayor to admit that there was no force of law behind the forced shutdown of parks. Officials pretended they had the authority to deny citizens the facilities they were forced to pay for, but in the end a “guideline” is quite different than a law.

The mothers returned to the park and let their kids loose on the playground. Victory indeed.

Today the “Park Patriots” struck again, trudging up to Angleton’s “Freedom Park” to again let their homeschooled kids loose on the taped up playground – and to reclaim their freedom.

As they arrived they began dismantling the tape and the other impediments to children using the facilities:

The orange fencing keeping children from enjoying the park that their parents paid for ended up exactly where it belonged:

One of the children – in this case your author’s own daughter – relished the idea of smashing through the ridiculous “caution” tape on the swings:

Once again it was city workers who called the police on the people who pay their salaries – notice a pattern here? – and soon enough some squad cars showed up. 

What followed was the greatest example of how citizens can reclaim their own liberty by simply standing up to authoritarians. By simply working up the courage to say, “we’re not going to take this anymore.” Here is a short video of the essence of the exchange between the homeschool mothers and fathers of Brazoria County when the police tried to strong-arm them to leave the park:

Ironic how the officer with “We The People” tattooed across his arm showed up with such contempt for the actual people. One of the homeschool fathers hit the perfect note when he reminded the officer that it was in fact the park itself that belonged to the same “We The People” he was wearing on his arm.

Also of interest is that when the officer’s falsely asserted authority to remove the children from the park was obliterated by the excellent rhetoric of the parents, how only response was the bizarre “y’all anti-vaxxers?” Bad move, officer!

Finally, the officer, totally defeated by the arguments of the parents, turned heel and walked away, leaving his colleague dumbfounded and alone. She also turned around and walked away. 

One group of parents broke off to go to the city hall to directly challenge authorities and the other group remained at the park. 

Eventually the officer returned to the homeschoolers remaining at the park. He tried to act friendly at this point. “The chief of police has decided that you can remain at the park.”

Victory:

And thanks to these brave and dedicated homeschoolers, “Freedom Park” is free again:

We can all make a difference. We can all fight for our freedom, one small battle at a time. We can all help defeat the tyrants.

And finally: Don’t mess with Texas…homeschoolers!

With a new CDC report confirming that the Covid-19 death rate is far, far lower than originally estimated, and Covid deaths plummeting across the country, desperate governors are ignoring facts and imposing even more authoritarian measures to oppress the population. With rebellion breaking out everywhere, at what point are we going to see a clash between a population no longer believing the coronavirus myths (that it is ten times more deadly than the flu, for example) and a political class drunk on power? Watch today’s Liberty Report:

In the saga of the virus and the lockdown, the wisdom of the crowds, that is the wisdom of each of us, was thwarted by bad data, perhaps intentionally bad. On the other hand, the ersatz wisdom of the collective bureaucracy in federal, state and local health agencies was based on crafted data. In the end data didn’t matter, as the bureaucracies were more concerned with their natural territorial imperative, which is to rule and control.

The most frightening aspect of the coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) epidemic in the US is that it brought about exaggeratedly heightened fear of death. That fear, once magnified to proportions which become palpable to the individual, became the basis for dreadful economic and medical policies from governments and crushed the natural optimism of the public.

In early days, we were caught in a squeeze of conflicting information. Was COVID-19 a bioweapon gone rogue and destined to indiscriminately wipe out young and old? Or, was it another bad flu or perhaps an extremely bad flu? After all, initial information showed the victims were concentrated in a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington. 

No cases were reported amongst the homeless on West Coast streets. No deaths among children were reported. And in the closed world of cruise liners and later a military ship, there were lots of early cases and some deaths. As time passed, there was little more bad news. We should have been suspicious of the data.

We were mainly focused on the case fatality rate (CFR: deaths as a percent of diagnosed cases) which were frighteningly high. We worried about the infection fatality rate (IFR), but there was too little data and testing available to have any idea how many people were or ultimately would be infected. 

But those concepts – CFR and IFR – are not the most important strategic measures of the severity of the disease. It is the death rate, properly defined and understood, that should matter for long-term policy makers, our erstwhile more level-headed thinkers, in determining policy.

In the past few weeks, we have obtained more useful data in the US. There were secrets lurking in the data, waiting to be uncovered, that could help ascertain what was really happening. The purpose of this report is to do just that – to ascertain what the data are telling us. It also gives us the basis for judging the appropriateness of past and present policies

So, let’s begin with a simple question: what is the relevant death rate due to COVID-19? There are many definitions in the epidemiological world such as the CFR and IFR mentioned above. My focus is on the overall death rate – actual and projected. Until we have more widespread testing for COVID-19, we cannot know with any accuracy how many people were infected by the virus. We cannot know what proportion of the population has some sort of natural or acquired immunity. 

We do not even have accurate data on how many people have died from COVID-19 alone versus COVID-19 plus some other complications that were already present such as diabetes, morbid obesity and prior respiratory complications, any one of which might equally have been the proximate cause of death. There is ample evidence, especially in the Northeast region that there has been “over classification” (a euphemism for data bias). We do not have the demographic details for those infected and those who died. But we do have death data, and it is more accurate than the number of cases and the number of infections.

To understand how our minds have been misdirected in understanding the real risks associated with COVID-19, let’s begin with a brain teaser. It will awaken our numerate minds in preparation for understanding the data deception and misunderstandings that prevail.

When is 1.7% greater than 98.3%? 

In the bizarro world of COVID-19 reporting that is the case – 1.7% is greater than 98.3%. Specifically, deaths among a narrow 1.7% group of the population are greater than deaths from the other 98.3%. Numerically a death may be a death, but from a policy point of view, to be blunt about it, not all deaths are the same.

Fact #1: 1.7% of the population in the US resides in long-term medical care facilities (LTMCFs) and total 5.7 million. 

Fact #2: The residents of LTMCFs accounted for 38,800 or 53% of all COVID-19 deaths (based on recent data). The rest of the country, the 98.3%, have experienced approximately 34,600 deaths, or 47% of the nation’s total COVID-19 deaths. 

The Death Rate at LTMCFs Is Stunning

That means the death rate, deaths expressed as a percent of those living in medical care institutions, is 0.682%, more than 50 times the death rate of the rest of the population at 0.012%. The death rate for the overall populations is 0.022%. 

That should leave you speechless.

We have a COVID-19 problem, but we have an even greater and more serious LTMCF problem that is clouding our understanding of the contagion and therefore what our best public health policies should be. Shutting down the economy, the world wherein the 98.3% live and prosper was too draconian. The feared overloading of the hospital system with emergency patients, which was short-lived, was disproportionately coming from the residents of LTMCFs, not the general public.

The data have been there all along, but they were not properly collected, catalogued and analyzed.

Much of the data in this report came from a landmark study by Gregg Girvan and Avik Roy of the Foundation for Research of Equal Opportunity. Their work was based on data collected through May 10th, 2020 for most states. Since their publication, revisions have been incorporated as states have corrected or updated their data since the original report. The calculations given above are imputations from the updated data. 

At this point, we do not know what the ultimate count of deaths and the death rate will be, but what we have in hand are statistics that are very indicative and telling of the gross misunderstanding that the public and federal, state and local decision-makers have been working with on which to base their decisions.

Long-term medical care providers to the aged and medically infirm (per the Girvan-Roy study) consist of: Nursing homes and skilled nursing facilities; Assisted living facilities, i.e., residential care communities or personal care homes; Adult day service centers; Home health Agencies; and Hospices. 

The first two medical care providers for seniors are referred to as long-term medical care facilities (LTMCF) and are the source of the data. Data for the other three elder care facilities are not collected or were not available for the Girvan-Roy study. In fact, it has been acknowledged that there continues to be underreporting of deaths related to LTMCFs. Some providers are just not reporting. In other cases, the residents die in hospitals and they are not categorized as LTMCF deaths. Nonetheless, the data are sufficient to draw some useful if not stark observations. 

What about the Flu and Pneumonia Death Rates in Earlier Years?

To even better understand these death rate figures, it is useful to put them into the context of what we know about death rates from the flu before the arrival of COVID-19. Is the COVID-19 death rate worse, better or about the same as prior flu seasons? We should expect the rates to be worse because there is no vaccine whereas most people get a vaccine shot for the routine flus that are expected each year.

In 2017 the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that annual deaths from all causes were 2.8 million or 0.866% of the population. The leading causes of death, in order of magnitude, were heart disease, cancer, accidents, respiratory disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, flu & pneumonia and suicide. 

Just looking at the Flu & Pneumonia (FP) cause, in 2017 it accounted for 55,672 deaths or 0.017% for the population as a whole. Death from FP, as you would expect, fell hardest on people over 75 totaling 38,078 deaths. That translates into a FP death rate of 0.180% for those over-75 group, which is a little more than 10 times the death rate for the overall population. For the rest of the population under 75 the death rate was only 0.006%, or or 1/30th of those over 75 (0.006% vs 0.180%). 

What this means at this point is that in the aggregate the overall COVID-19 death rate is slightly worse than the flu death rate in a prior year (0.022% vs 0.017%). However, for seniors in LTMCFs, the COVID-19 death rate is 100 times greater than the flu and pneumonia DR was for those under 75 in 2017 (0.682% vs 0.006%) and nearly 4 times greater than those over 75.

In summary the COVID-19 death rate is far more skewed to those older than 75 and those residents in medical care facilities for the aged.

(bigger)

What Does the Future Hold?

Looking ahead we obtained the most recent forecast from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. They are considered by many medical professionals as the most thorough modelers. On May 18, 2020 the IHME released the results of the third run of its new model. They predict that by August 4, 2020 a total of 143,357 Americans will die of COVID-19. That forecast nearly doubles the number of COVID-19 deaths. It is worth noting that each run of the model has produced lower forecasts for future deaths. There are detractors of their modeling procedures, but it is the best we have at the moment.

One interesting medical research report suggests that a significant portion of the population has natural immunity to COVID-19. In the May 14 edition of Cell, published by Elsevier, the researchers found:

T cell responses were detected in 40-60% of unexposed individuals. This may be reflective of some degree of cross-reactive, preexisting immunity to SARSCoV-2 in some, but not all, individuals… suggesting cross-reactive T cell recognition between circulating ‘common cold’ coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2. 

This might be why there are so many reports of asymptomatic cases of COVID-19. That also may mean the IHME forecast will be revised down even more.

However, COVID-19 has brutal consequences for people over 75. That detail cannot be minimized. But what policies would that suggest?

Did We Adopt the Right Policies?

What do these data suggest about the medical and economic policies that have been adopted by the federal, states and local governments?

The carnage of COVID-19 is concentrated in elder care facilities not in the population at large. The policies and procedures, including lockdowns and state-of-the-art personal protection practices for those facilities, should have been more thoroughly thought out based on useful data. 

Keep in mind, about 70% of the elder care facilities are for-profit. Yet they are not free-market enterprises; enterprises free to do what they think is best. These for-profit facilities are licensed and regulated by the several Departments of Health of the states. They do what the state tells them to do. 

The governors and mayors, and their medical and science advisers, made the decision to pack them in, force them to house and retain infected and returning infected patients. They chose to divert PPE supplies to hospitals, not the elder care facilities. This characterization is based on reports in the press. One certainly hopes there were some communities that did a better job. There is reason to believe that is the case because some assisted living facilities have reported no deaths.

As COVID-19 deaths mounted, not a word was officially spoken about where they were occurring. Fear was stoked that it was a population-wide epidemic. We should ALL lock down. 

What a costly mistake, a mistake that continues to this day. Governors and mayors with fresh data insights into the truth still want to be central planners and determine which businesses can re-open and to what degree, who should still shelter or socially distance. They send out teams to draw circles in the grass defining where groups can camp out and place police monitors in all the parks to warn people to stay within the circles. At this point they are just imaginary prisons, but they are prisons.

Madness, sheer madness. 

Though that is an easy and superficial observation to make, what is really unsaid, and not easy to admit, is that large numbers of politicians and bureaucrats have revealed their true nature. Speeches decorated with declarations of “better safe than sorry” and “planning is better than no planning” reveal they are authoritarians by nature; central planners of the worst kind. 

In conclusion, the relevant death rate for policy purposes has been obscured. The consequence has been inappropriate policies. They have resulted in a bizarro world of highly restricted commercial functioning and immense economic destruction, alongside no evidence that lives were saved and growing evidence of second-tier loss of life resulting from lockdown.  

Reprinted with permission from the American Institute for Economic Research.

The media elites and their cheering section in the medical community are apoplectic over President Trump’s announcement that he is taking a common anti-malaria drug as a protection against Covid-19. While many doctors have experienced successes in trials with the drug, including guest Dr. Armstrong, President Trump is being raked over the coals for his decision. Are politics taking precedent over “the science” when it comes to this (and other aspects of the “pandemic”)? Dr. Armstrong was recently featured on the Laura Ingraham Show on Fox discussing the positive results of his testing hydroxychloroquine in a Texas senior care facility. Don’t miss today’s Liberty Report:

The Deep State propaganda machine is spinning at hyperdrive. You are being repeatedly told that unmasking is common. Nothin unusual here. Move along. Reminds me of the scene from the Naked Gun when faux detective Frank Drebin tried to tell people they were not seeing what they were seeing.

Leave it to lying Jimmy Clapper to pop up as one of the prevaricators eager to feed a false meme to a gullible public. He is caught up in the unmasking with his metaphorical pants down around his ankles and his hideous junk exposed–simply put, Clapper spied on Michael Flynn. Here is Clapper’s pathetic attempt to put lipstick on this crooked pig:

Former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper said Thursday it is ‘routine’ to ‘unmask’ American citizens who have been caught up in surveillance of foreign individuals as Republicans spark an uproar over allegations that officials spied on former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Clapper and other apologists are counting on your ignorance of intelligence community processes and procedures for collecting intelligence. What I find shocking is that there are thousands of intelligence professionals who understand that Clapper is spewing total bullshit but, because of their hatred of Donald Trump, stay silent and allow Clapper’s lies to go unchallenged.

Let us start with the basics. The document that Acting DNI Grenell declassified last week regarding the “unmasking” of Michael Flynn gives us only the names and dates that requests were made to the NSA. But those requests came in response to a NSA intelligence report or document that the requestors had read. That means finished intelligence.

The following is an example of the formatting and content of the type of NSA messages that the Obama people were reading when they encountered an “unnamed” American citizen and just had to know who it was.

The type of message that had Michael Flynn’s name carried the following classification headers (if you click on the link it will take you to a very interesting NSA document that addresses the whole issue of spying on Americans):

TOP SECRET//COMINT-GAMMA/ORCON/NOFORN

Next you get the Message report number, in this case it is SERIAL 3/00/532318-12, and the the sender and addressee information. In the image immediately below, DIRNSA refers to the Director of NSA, “COS KINGSTON” is the CIA Chief in Kingston, Jamaica. Note that other agencies such as DEA, DIA, FAA and even INTERIOR are sent copies of this message.

Next comes the content. It is vital that you understand that this type of report is not just the raw take–i.e., an unedited transcript of the conversation with no commentary. The reports that inspired the readers to ask for the name of the unnamed American were produced in response to specific collection requirements. If you have never worked in the intelligence field, you probably have the false notion that intelligence collectors wake up each morning, scan news headlines for the sexiest, most provocative stories and then decide that is the information they will collect for that day. Nope. Does not work that way at all. It is a very bureaucratic process.

NSA, unlike CIA, scoops up all electronic communications, such emails, phone calls, text messages. The volume of “take” is so gargantuan that most of the information is never processed or analyzed. The initial scrubbing comes via computer systems and algorithms designed to weed out wheat from chaff. But at some point that intelligence gets into the hands of an analyst. The decision about what to publish and analyze normally is based on collection plans. A collection plan is a list of priority issues or persons that the Director of National Intelligence, acting on behalf of the President, uses to tell the specific intelligence agencies–NSA and CIA in particular–what they need to collect. 

Let me give you a specific example from own experience. In the aftermath of the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in March 1992, I led an interagency US Government team to the region to discuss terrorist threats and upgrading aviation security. While at our Embassy in Buenos Aires, we had a sit-down with the Chief of Station–Bill. I told Bill that the only intel we had seen at that point of time was from a liaison service and indicated that Hezbollah was behind the attack. I asked Bill if they were having any luck going after Hezbollah.

Bill’s answer stunned me–he said “no, it was not part of the collection plan.” In Bill’s world (and that of other intel community bureaucrats operating as intel collectors), your annual evaluation determines whether you get promoted and make more money. A key part of that evaluation, especially for a Chief of Station, is measuring how well you did in providing the sources and reports that met the priorities identified in the collection plan. You did not get praised or rewarded by diverting intelligence resources to an issue or target not on the collection plan. Since Hezbollah was not on the plan when the bomb went off in Buenos Aires, the CIA was not collecting intel or trying to recruit sources to get such intel. The intel the US Government was getting on Hezbollah in South America was coming to us from other governments.

I returned to Washington, DC and wrote Hezbollah in South America as a collection priority, it was added subsequently to the overall collection plan. Never forget that bureaucratic processes and procedures reign supreme in both the intel and FBI worlds.

I want you to look at the list of the people who unmasked Flynn in the aftermath of the 2016 election and look specifically at the number of separate reports that contained Flynn’s name. Thirty nine separate people asked 14 different days for the NSA to tell them the identity of the “unnamed” American cited in the intelligence report he or she was reading. In response to those requests Michael Flynn’s name was revealed or “unmasked” to those 39 people.

The document declassified by DNI Grenell shows that there were 14 unique days when the NSA received requests to “unmask”–the first was on 30 November 2016 by UN Ambassador Samantha Power and the last came on 12 January from Joe Biden. There were two separate requests on the 14th of December by Samantha Power, which indicates two separate NSA reports. Samantha Power would not have to submit two requests for the same document.

The documents that had the name of Michael Flynn were formal NSA intelligence reports. They were purposefully created either in response to a US intelligence community collection plan or were produced by a foreign intelligence outfit, in this particular case an organization like the British version of the NSA–the GCHQ. GCHQ could easily identify Michael Flynn or anyone else tied to the Trump team as a valid target for collection. Signals or communication intelligence collected by the Brits from targeting Michael Flynn would be put into a British intelligence report and then passed to the NSA. NSA officers are co-located in the UK with GCHQ. There is no prohibition on the NSA accepting “liaison” reporting from GCHQ and then disseminating it people with appropriate clearances throughout the US Government.

Here is an example of the kind of report that one of the people wanting to unmask Michael Flynn might have seen:

After reading this report you want to know, “who are the redacted names?” That is how an unmasking request starts.

What is so unusual and bizarre is that there are at least 14 different NSA intelligence reports with Michael Flynn’s name popping up in a 45 day period. That is not accidental or incidental. If you are driving down the road and your car breaks down and you go to a nearby bar to call for a tow and see your pastor in the bar with your neighbor’s wife, that is accidental or incidental intelligence collection.

What happened to Michael Flynn is akin to the jealous husband hiring a private investigator to follow his wife and find out who she is sleeping with. That is not incidental. That is purposeful. 

The intelligence collection and creation of intelligence reports in the NSA were not incidental nor accidental. It was done with a purpose and with the help of foreign intelligence.

As I noted in an earlier article, the fact that Michael Flynn’s December 29 conversation with the Russian Ambassador is missing from this list could have been because the material was before a Grand Jury and/or it was collected by the CIA. Thanks to Andy McCarthy’s explanation, the Grand Jury explanation is probably not valid. That leaves the CIA, which means John Brennan’s CIA did it using something like the Special Collection Service. Ed Snowden described capability in his book:

I remember sitting on the left bank of Lake Geneva with the local personnel of the SCS, or Special Collection Service, a joint CIA-NSA program responsible for installing and operating the special surveillance equipment that allows US embassies to spy on foreign signals. These guys worked down the hall from my vault at the embassy, but they were older than I was, and their work was not just way above my pay grade but way beyond my abilities—they had access to NSA tools that I didn’t even know existed.

The people in the intelligence and law enforcement community, current and former, that were spying on Donald Trump and his team want you to believe that nothing untoward or wrong was done. That is the ultimate lie. I hope the preceding explanations help you see that fact.

Reprinted with permission from Sic Semper Tyrannis.

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.

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.

Wisconsin’s supreme court has ruled that the governor’s ordered lockdown of the state is unconstitutional. Bars and restaurants threw their doors open to willing customers and the celebration was like the end of prohibition. The lockdown crowd warns of “chaos” if people are allowed to go about their business of their own free will. Also today: tyrannical Michigan governor strips 77 year old barber of his license. Watch today’s Liberty Report:

Ironically, as coronavirus deaths continue to decline in the US and as more states are “opening up,” there appears to be an increase in mask wearing. Are the face masks going to prevent the spread of the virus? Will they protect people from the virus? Or may they actually cause harm to some people? Or…even: are they a new form of “virtue signaling,” a show of submission to the “authorities”? Plenty of prominent MDs – including Fauci not long ago – have condemned the mass masking of America. Are they right? Watch today’s Liberty Report: