From Dr. Birx to the Brookings Institute, the experts are busy rewriting history and making stuff up, claiming a full year of lockdowns could’ve reduced deaths by almost three quarters. Whatever happened to Sweden and even our own state of Florida? Do they really believe this garbage themselves?
The “experts” are out in full force, completely rewriting the history of the pandemic and making completely unsubstantiated claims about how things could’ve been, presumably if Biden was in office. On CNN, Dr. Deborah Birx claimed that the “vast majority” of the close to 550,000 deaths attributed to coronavirus could have been prevented. “I look at it this way. The first time we have an excuse,” she told notorious coronavirus doom peddler, CNN’s Sanjay Gupta. “There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”
Dr. Birx’s unsubstantiated claims are echoed in an equally unsubstantiated “study” from the Brookings Institute that determined 400,000 deaths were avoidable through the widespread use of face coverings, social distancing, and testing of all things prior to the vaccine roll out that started last December. The study, of course, is complete nonsense, produced by Andrew Atkeson, an economics professor at the University of California. The underlying claim, echoed dutifully by the media, is that a “patchwork” of restrictions, along with Trump himself are responsible for the deaths.
The Guardian describes it as follows, “Trump was criticised for downplaying the seriousness of the virus, making numerous false claims, including that its effects were no worse than flu, predicting Covid-19 would ‘just disappear’ and referring to it in racist terms. He pressed for cities and states to reopen through last summer as a second wave pushed the death toll higher. He also ridiculed the wearing of masks…”
To call this a complete rewriting of history is an understatement. First, Trump acted on the virus before everyone else, shutting down travel from China, approving Operation Warp Speed, otherwise known as the most successful government program in the past 50 years, and ultimately taking testing away from the CDC. Speaking of testing, the US has far outpaced the rest of the world since last summer, millions of tests are conducted per day. Second, from the sainted Dr. Anthony Fauci to former Surgeon General Jerome Adams, the experts themselves said not to wear masks up until mid-April. You cannot blame people for doubting the experts when they themselves destroyed their own credibility. Third, there is no evidence whatsoever that pushing to reopen the economy was the cause of a large number of deaths.
Otherwise, one only need take a cursory look at the data to refute these crazy claims. The United States currently has 1,668 deaths per million of the population, accounting for 547,762 total deaths as of March 30th. These absolute numbers rank us 12 in the world in deaths per capita. Belgium, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Hungary are all higher, meaning major countries in Europe fared just as “poorly.” Spain, France, Sweden, and Switzerland all performed better. The range, however, is relatively narrow up and down from the US performance, Sweden has 1,303 deaths per capita, Belgium 1,996. It should also be noted that there are not uniform standards to determine coronavirus deaths. Belgium and the US have both adopted broad classifications, where a COVID-19 death doesn’t even require a positive test. Other countries are more stringent. No one to my knowledge has attempted to normalize these numbers for obvious reasons.
Regardless, Sweden never really locked down at all if you recall. They didn’t shut down their schools, mandate masks, or close restaurants, only banned large gatherings and took steps to protect seniors. This was a topic of much consternation for the very same experts now claiming lockdowns were the answer to everything. Time Magazine for example declared that the Swedish model was a disaster. Healthline told us it couldn’t work in the US. Others said their approach was “surreal.”
Well, they had over three hundred less deaths per capita than the US. How is it possible that a country that did far less than the United States fared better, if the experts are operating under the assumption that we should have done more?
Of course, such fine points are never explained. Instead, the claim is that we could have magically reduced deaths per capita by 73% if only Trump wasn’t in office. To put this claim in perspective, that would put our deaths per million at 450, better than any major country in Europe including all of what are usually considered our peers. Germany, long considered one of the gold standards in the death rate, currently sits at 915 per million. Canada, also considered a country with an excellent response, is currently at 608 per million.
Does any person reasonably believe it was ever possible for us to do twice as well as Germany and 50% better than Canada, even assuming they counted deaths the same way? Of course not. You see, no one actually believes that. These are smart people. They know what they are doing and they know that most of their guidance has proven either unworkable or completely false, but they say it anyway.
It’s even worse than that, however, because what they are really saying makes even less sense. The only mechanism that could possibly have achieved such a reduction in the death rate was to continue the strictest lockdowns, those implemented in late March and April, for over a full year. No holidays, no restaurants, no travel, no socialization, no visiting family members, no nothing, for a full year! In some cases, outdoor parks were even shut down, meaning you weren’t even supposed to get out and take a walk. They believe you should have been locked in your home as long as they wanted, for your own protection of course.
Again, does anyone actually believe that was ever an option? Did any of these experts ever claim their brilliant plan was to lockdown for a full year or more? Of course not, but they’ll say it now anyway.
It’s even worse than that, however, because these same Democrat politicians and public health experts were completely fine waiving social distancing rules for their preferred constituents. Hence, 1,200 public health experts signed a letter last summer in support of the racial justice protests. They said specifically, “we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from demonstrators’ ability to gather and demand change. This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders.”
Now, they want to rewrite history and forget all of this ever happened. The brazenness of their lies is truly astounding, almost as astounding as their misunderstanding of how America works. When they refer to our “patchwork” approach, they’re really attacking our federalist system where the federal government has little power over the day to day operations of the states. Instead, each state governor, much closer to their own people than Washington, DC, is in charge. This, obviously, enrages them as they seek one-party, one-government rule, meaning they want residents of Florida who were spared a lot of the restrictions to suffer just like New York. Therefore, even if Trump were as pro-lockdowns as they like, he still couldn’t have forced Ron DeSantis to accede to his demands.
It’s even worse than that, however, because they flat out refuse to consider the relative performance of states with and without draconian mandates. Florida, for example, has had no mask mandate and no limits on restaurant capacity since last August. New Jersey and New York have had both. New Jersey leads the pack with 276 deaths per 100,000 people, New York is second with 249. Massachusetts is also locked down and masked up, they are third with 247. Florida, on the other hand, is at 155.
Rather than accepting what these ridiculous studies and experts say without question, how about someone in the media actually asks them to explain this discrepancy? If these techniques work so well, how come there is no visible pattern between restricted states and unrestricted states and their death rates?
They never say, of course, because they don’t know and it doesn’t fit their narrative. Instead, they lie: Mask mandates and restrictions of some form were in place in almost 40 states, many like New Jersey have had them for going on a full year. None of these actions had anything close to a 73% reduction in the death rate. Not a chance, and they know it, while acting like none of this happened and everyone’s been at a one-year Woodstock 2020 festival. The truth is that most Americans have been practicing some form of social distancing the entire time. If these techniques worked, we would see some impact in the death rate. The idea that just a little more lockdown would have saved us all is makes absolutely no sense.
Dr. Birx, in particular, is an especially egregious case of rewriting history. She was actually there, providing advice that proved wrong many times, just like Dr. Fauci. In fact, she was the one telling everyone that the pandemic was winding down after the initial surge last spring. The New York Times reported at the time, “‘All metros are stabilizing,’ she would tell [White House staff last spring], describing the virus as having hit its ‘peak’ around mid-April. The New York area accounted for half of the total cases in the country, she said. The slope was heading in the right direction. ‘We’re behind the worst of it.’ She endorsed the idea that the death counts and hospitalization numbers could be inflated.”
Where was CNN’s Dr. Gupta with the obvious follow up question on that? Nowhere of course, because it’s all lie. The experts aren’t interested in the truth. They’re interested in covering their own asses and blaming America first. That should be obvious to everyone by now, but we keep doing this dance. Bruce Springsteen once sang, “The wise men, they’re all fools, what do do? ” Today, they’re both fools and frauds, but don’t tell the media that. They’ll keep pumping out this nonsense forever.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 