Authored by Stacey Lennox via PJMedia.com,

Some of us have been questioning the COVID-19 death counts reported by the CDC through the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) for some time.

Of course, CNN and the corporate media love the likely elevated counts to push their narrative. Lockdown Inc. loves them to justify their destruction of lives and livelihoods. A report from the Freedom Foundation, a Washington State think tank, explains why. The foundation’s original analysis of deaths in the state found the number may have been inflated by as much as 13%:

In May, a report released by the Freedom Foundation, an Olympia-based free-market think tank, revealed the DOH was attributing to COVID-19 every death in which the deceased previously tested positive for the virus. However, it’s clear that catching the disease and dying of it are two very different matters.

Washington’s data was riddled with cases – as much as 13 percent of the total – in which the death certificate made no reference to COVID-19 as a cause of death. In several cases, even gunshot deaths were chalked up to the virus.

While the Department of Health did remove 200 deaths from the count, the Freedom Foundation did another analysis. Combining data sources from the Department of Health for nearly 2,000 deaths as of early September, the new analysis found that 170 death certificates did not mention COVID-19. Another 171 deaths had no causal connection to the virus. According to the Post Millennial, the group estimates Washington’s death counts could be inflated by as much as 20%.

New data from the CDC regarding the conditions contributing to deaths where COVID-19 is also involved clearly demonstrates deaths from the virus are overestimated nationwide. This is not surprising given the loose guidelines for attributing a death to COVID-19 and the financial incentives through public and private insurance to put COVID-19 on a patient’s chart.

First, as I have written several times, many COVID-19-positive people who were terminally ill died a few months before they otherwise would have. These “pull-forward deaths” often happen with influenza and pneumonia when a person is elderly or severely compromised. For example, the data shows 3,622 people over the age of 75 died of hypertensive renal disease with kidney failure. Kidney failure is a progressive and terminal condition, even with kidney dialysis. An additional 939 in the same age group died with lung cancer as well as COVID-19.

Second, the report demonstrates most younger patients were also suffering from a different severe illness if they died from COVID-19. On the same line for kidney failure, a total of 18 people under the age of 35 passed away with this condition and COVID-19. Ten people under the age of 35 died with acute lymphoblastic lymphoma (ALL) in addition to the virus. The average five-year survival rate in this age group is between 68.1% and 85%, leaving the distinct possibility that these were the sickest ALL patients.

These are just a few examples of terminal conditions that could have been examples of a pull-forward death. Since there is nothing in the NCHS guidance to require symptoms or evidence of active COVID-19, it is impossible to tell whether or not these were pull-forward deaths. As Washington demonstrates, some of this error will come from state-level practices. New York, for example, backdated 3,700 “presumed COVID-19 deaths” early in the pandemic.

The above does not even include the broad class of ICD-9 Codes referred to as “Intentional and unintentional injury, poisoning, and other adverse events.” This report contains 9,343 deaths associated with everything from drug overdoses to traumatic accidents and suicide. These deaths alone equal 3% of the current number of total deaths.

It is long past time for the CDC and NCHS to require some evidence of a severe illness from COVID-19 rather than simply a positive test. There are significant numbers of lab values and imaging changes that, taken together, can reasonably be assumed to paint a clinical course that includes active illness from COVID-19. The best test would be a viral culture. If the virus or viral debris in a patient’s system cannot replicate in a culture, it can’t be a cause of death.

A positive PCR test within 28 days, the current standard Washington is now using, is also unacceptable, especially with the number of asymptomatic cases. A virus that never makes you sick or only makes you mildly ill will not kill you or likely contribute to your death. Rather, you are likely one of the 30-60% of people with reactive immunity from other coronavirus exposure. Likewise, if someone already suffers from a terminal illness, unless the end-stage events include symptoms of severe COVID-19, it should not be counted among the causes of death.

A scroll through the spreadsheet and a bit of clinical knowledge supports the estimate of the Freedom Foundation as a minimum number. Americans deserve transparency and accuracy at this point. It is a dereliction of duty for the CDC and NCHS not to tailor their guidelines to the disease progression of a COVID-19 infection capable of contributing to a person’s death.

by Benjamin Fearnow Source: Newsweek

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul said “no science” is able to corroborate mask mandates across the country, warning Americans that “submission” is the real aim of public health officials.

The Republican senator on Saturday reiterated remarks he made to Fox Business Thursday that “there’s no science to keeping schools closed, and there’s actually no good science to keeping restaurants closed, in fact there’s no good science that anything we’ve done has changed the trajectory” of the pandemic.

Speaking with Breitbart News at the Turning Point USA convention—a gathering of young conservatives—in West Palm Beach, Florida, Paul said minor health precautions as simple as washing one’s hands and keeping socially distant have made “no difference” in slowing the spread of coronavirus.

Paul, who practiced ophthalmology for 18 years before becoming a senator in 2010, ridiculed government mandates and just about any other public health measure taken since the start of the pandemic in March. Previous reports have noted that Paul’s medical certification is contested by some national ophthalmology board members.

He warned young Americans their high school graduation ceremonies and possibly their 10-year wedding anniversaries a decade from now will be banned by the government if “we’re not careful” to protect our individual freedoms today.

“Every one of the mandates—and you look in country after country, state after state — you look at when the mask mandates went in—the incidents went up exponentially after the mandates. Restaurants, nobody can eat in a restaurant, there’s no science behind any of that,” Paul told Breitbart’s editor-in-chief, who mocked masks as “face diapers.”

Regardless of Paul’s remarks, the federal government that employs him does not agree with his anti-mask sentiment. “Wearing a cloth face mask, practicing social distancing, and washing your hands are good practices that help protect us and our neighbors from COVID-19 as our economy reopens,” the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) tells Americans in a statement issued this summer. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has also put out similar warnings to health-conscious citizens looking to curb the spread of COVID-19.

Paul embraced the Breitbart editor’s mockery of wearing masks, noting later in the interview, “It’s like wearing your underwear. You might as well cut your underwear up and wear your underwear as protection. It doesn’t work.”

“None of it really makes any sense, and there’s no epidemiological evidence. You know, it’s like, ‘Wash your hands, stand six feet apart,’” Paul continued.“There’s no evidence that that slowed down the [spread]. The trajectory of the virus hasn’t been altered at all by any of these things.”

Charles Hugh Smith Source: Of Two Minds

Sure they want them. Can it actually be done?

Authorities around the world have made it clear that they will do “whatever it takes” to vaccinate their citizenry with one of the first available vaccines. Authoritarian states may mandate universal vaccinations while less authoritarian states will favor a “carrot and stick” approach of offering benefits to the vaccinated and exclusions from employment, education, travel and most of everyday life for those who refuse to be vaccinated.

To identify the vaccinated and unvaccinated, many nations are planning to issue ID cards or “vaccine passports.” As an abstraction, this seems straightforward, but if we start digging into the actual operational requirements of this mass ID card issuance and distribution, a number of common-sense issues arise.

Vaccination cards will be issued to everyone getting Covid-19 vaccine, health officials say (CNN)

First and foremost, it’s unknown how long the immunity offered by the vaccines will last. It’s still early days, so there is conflicting evidence: some claim the vaccines will be longer-lasting than the natural immunity of those who caught the virus and recovered, while other evidence suggests the immunity might decay after six months. Despite claims that natural immunity is long-lasting, a non-trivial number of people who had Covid have been re-infected.

Nobody knows how long either natural or vaccine immunity will last because not enough time has elapsed to collect sufficient data.

Given these intrinsic unknowns, how long will the ID card be valid? It’s easy to imagine variations in individual responses such that the vaccines’ effectiveness decays more rapidly in 20% of the vaccinated. This variability would introduce tremendous unknowns that no ID card could reflect: is the holder of the card at Month 10 still immune or not?

If the duration of the vaccine’s effectiveness is variable, then an ID card could be misleading. In other words, being vaccinated with a variable-duration vaccine tells us nothing about the individual’s actual immunity down the road.

Given these unknowns, the vaccinated may need booster shots in the future, and the ID cards would have to be re-issued. The task of keeping track of hundreds of millions of vaccination records, identities and then issuing ID cards is a non-trivial task.

To thwart black-market fake-ID cards, the security measures will have to be equivalent to a driver’s license or passport. Have you applied recently for either of these forms of ID? The process is painfully slow. The systems in place to process state drivers’ licenses and U.S. passports are already strained, and which agency is prepared to verify the identity of 280 million adult citizens, confirm the validity of their vaccine and then issue ID cards–and then repeat this process in a year?

If the procedures for issuing vaccine ID cards are slapdash due to time constraints–for example, downloading a digital record from the vaccine distributor or a printed card–these will likely be vulnerable to being duplicated or spoofed. Fake vaccine distributors will pop up issuing bogus digital records, hackers might download and sell digital records from trusted sources, and so on.

Then there’s the extra burdens being placed on the staff of airlines, cruise lines, etc. to scan these documents and deal with rejected cards. Who will have the legal authority to deal with claims that a rejected card is actually valid? How many smaller establishments simply won’t have to staff to do more than glance at the card?

Do authorities have the means to issue hundreds of millions of absolutely secure vaccine ID cards and then monitor all the attempts to find loopholes and weaknesses in the process? If authorities think that strict penalties will limit this activity, they underestimate the difficulty in getting such penalties enforced by overloaded court systems.

In nations with strong traditions of civil liberties, there will be pushback against mandatory vaccinations with essentially untested vaccines and against national databases tying identity to vaccination cards–a situation ripe with potential for abuse.

Authorities don’t seem to grasp that many of those hesitating to get vaccinated are not anti-vaxxers; they simply see the vaccine approval process as deeply flawed for common-sense reasons: for example, there is simply not enough data on safety, duration and real-world efficacy.

Authorities are counting on the “carrot” of air travel, cruises and concerts to persuade skeptics to get vaccinated despite their concerns. What authorities don’t seem to realize is that a great many people value their health, privacy and agency far more than they crave air travel, cruises or concerts. They will gladly forego all these activities until more reliable data is collected, peer-reviewed and distributed for analysis.

The more draconian the measures designed to pressure people into getting the vaccines, the greater the reluctance of skeptics who see the draconian measures as additional evidence the vaccines are half-measures being forced on the populace as a means of imposing a false assurance that all is well and “normal” will return as soon as the skeptics cave in and get vaccinated.

There’s also the possibility that the virus could mutate in ways that moot the vaccines’ effectiveness. While this is widely considered unlikely, it’s not impossible, either. If a mutated virus arises that evades the vaccine, then what value will the vaccine ID card have?

An idea that’s simple as an abstraction–vaccine ID cards–turns out to be extremely difficult once real-world operational realities must be dealt with. The fact is the first vaccines have been rushed to approval with virtually none of the testing demanded of previous vaccines raises common-sense concerns which cannot be dissolved with force or carrots and sticks.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,

Maybe you have some sense that something fishy is going on? Same. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

• Coronavirus lived on surfaces until it didn’t.
• Masks didn’t work until they did, then they did not.
• There is asymptomatic transmission, except there isn’t.
• Lockdowns work to control the virus except they do not.
• All these people are sick without symptoms until, whoops, PCR tests are wildly inaccurate because they were never intended to be diagnostic tools.
• Everyone is in danger of the virus except they aren’t.
• It spreads in schools except it doesn’t.

On it goes. Daily. It’s no wonder that so many people have stopped believing anything that “public health authorities” say. In combination with governors and other autocrats doing their bidding, they set out to take away freedom and human rights and expected us to thank them for saving our lives. At some point this year (for me it was March 12) life began feeling like a dystopian novel of your choice.

Well, now I have another piece of evidence to add to the mile-high pile of fishy mess. The World Health Organization, for reasons unknown, has suddenly changed its definition of a core conception of immunology: herd immunity. Its discovery was one of the major achievements of 20th century science, gradually emerging in the 1920s and then becoming ever more refined throughout the 20th century.

Herd immunity is a fascinating observation that you can trace to biological reality or statistical probability theory, whichever you prefer. (It is certainly not a “strategy” so ignore any media source that describes it that way.) Herd immunity speaks directly, and with explanatory power, to the empirical observation that respiratory viruses are either widespread and mostly mild (common cold) or very severe and short-lived (Ebola).

Why is this? The reason is that when a virus kills its host, it cannot migrate. The more aggressively it does this, the less it spreads. If the virus doesn’t kill its host, it can hop to others through all the usual means. When you get a virus and fight it off, your immune system encodes that information in a way that builds immunity to it. When it happens to enough people (and each case is different so we can’t put a clear number on it) the virus loses its pandemic quality and becomes endemic, which is to say predictable and manageable. Each new generation incorporates that information through more exposure.

This is what one would call Virology/Immunology 101. It’s what you read in every textbook. It’s been taught in 9th grade cell biology for probably 80 years. Observing the operations of this evolutionary phenomenon is pretty wonderful because it increases one’s respect for the way in which human biology has adapted to the presence of pathogens without absolutely freaking out.

And the discovery of this fascinating dynamic in cell biology is a major reason why public health became so smart in the 20th century. We kept calm. We managed viruses with medical professionals: doctor/patient relationships. We avoided the Medieval tendency to run around with hair on fire but rather used rationality and intelligence. Even the New York Times recognizes that natural immunity is powerful with Covid-19, which is not in the least bit surprising.

Until one day, this strange institution called the World Health Organization – once glorious because it was mainly responsible for the eradication of smallpox – has suddenly decided to delete everything I just wrote from cell biology basics. It has literally changed the science in a Soviet-like way. It has removed with the delete key any mention of natural immunities from its website. It has taken the additional step of actually mischaracterizing the structure and functioning of vaccines.

So that you will believe me, I will try to be as precise as possible. Here is the website from June 9, 2020. You can see it here on Archive.org. You have to move down the page and click on the question about herd immunity. You see the following.

That’s pretty darn accurate overall. Even the statement that the threshold is “not yet clear” is correct. There are cross immunities to Covid from other coronaviruses and there is T cell memory that contributes to natural immunity.

Some estimates are as low as 10%, which is a far cry from the modelled 70% estimate of virus immunity that is standard within the pharmaceutical realm. Real life is vastly more complicated than models, in economics or epidemiology. The WHO’s past statement is a solid, if “pop,” description.

However, in a screenshot dated November 13, 2020, we read the following note that somehow pretends as if human beings do not have immune systems at all but rather rely entirely on big pharma to inject things into our blood.

What this note at the World Health Organization has done is deleted what amounts to the entire million-year history of humankind in its delicate dance with pathogens. You could only gather from this that all of us are nothing but blank and unimprovable slates on which the pharmaceutical industry writes its signature.

In effect, this change at WHO ignores and even wipes out 100 years of medical advances in virology, immunology, and epidemiology. It is thoroughly unscientific – shilling for the vaccine industry in exactly the way the conspiracy theorists say that WHO has been doing since the beginning of this pandemic.

What’s even more strange is the claim that a vaccine protects people from a virus rather than exposing them to it. What’s amazing about this claim is that a vaccine works precisely by firing up the immune system through exposure. Why I had to type those words is truly beyond me. This has been known for centuries. There is simply no way for medical science completely to replace the human immune system. It can only game it via what used to be called inoculation.

Take from this what you will. It is a sign of the times. For nearly a full year, the media has been telling us that “science” requires that we comply with their dictates that run contrary to every tenet of liberalism, every expectation we’ve developed in the modern world that we can live freely and with the certainty of rights. Then “science” took over and our human rights were slammed. And now the “science” is actually deleting its own history, airbrushing over what it used to know and replacing it with something misleading at best and patently false at worst.

I cannot say why, exactly, the WHO did this. Given the events of the past nine or ten months, however, it is reasonable to assume that politics are at play. Since the beginning of the pandemic, those who have been pushing lockdowns and hysteria over the coronavirus have resisted the idea of natural herd immunity, instead insisting that we must live in lockdown until a vaccine is developed.

That is why the Great Barrington Declaration, written by three of the world’s preeminent epidemiologists and which advocated embracing the phenomenon of herd immunity as a way of protecting the vulnerable and minimizing harms to society, was met with such venom.

Now we see the WHO, too, succumbing to political pressure. This is the only rational explanation for changing the definition of herd immunity that has existed for the past century.

The science has not changed; only the politics have. And that is precisely why it is so dangerous and deadly to subject virus management to the forces of politics. Eventually the science too bends to the duplicitous character of the political industry.

When the existing textbooks that students use in college contradict the latest official pronouncements from the authorities during a crisis in which the ruling class is clearly attempting to seize permanent power, we’ve got a problem.

by Anna Wilde Mathews

More nursing homes around the country will start getting a Covid-19 vaccine Monday, but the impact of the massive effort will partly depend on winning over front-line workers like LaShundra Williams, who say they are skeptical of the shots.

Ms. Williams, 40 years old, is a certified nursing assistant at St. James Veterans Home in St. James, Mo., and she says she is unlikely to agree to get the shots, even though her son is currently ill with Covid-19. She recently watched a webcast by nursing-home doctors about the safety and benefits of the vaccines, hoping for reassurance, but came away unconvinced.

She is still worried that a vaccine might make her anemia worse, and she thinks the shots are being authorized for broad usage too quickly.

“It’s too new,” she said. “I’m just not comfortable.”

The federal long-term-care vaccination program, led by CVS Health Corp. and Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., will begin its broad rollout in a dozen states this week, with hundreds of facilities slated for visits during the next few days. But surveys have signaled that many staffers are reluctant to get the shots, and some already have been declining them in the limited number of facilities where vaccinations have been administered.

At the nursing home at John Knox Village, in Pompano Beach, Fla., which became one of the first U.S. facilities to get the vaccine last Wednesday, about one-third of staffers participated, according to Mark Raynor, director of health-care services. “It comes down to fear of the unknown,” he said.

In Chester, W.Va., the Orchards at Foxcrest, which includes a nursing home, assisted-living center and independent units, had about 65% of eligible staffers agree to get the vaccine Thursday and Friday. Matt Murray, vice president of operations, said the company mounted an extensive information campaign. The community has faced a recent Covid-19 outbreak, including two deaths, he said, and executives hope more staffers will agree to get shots in a later visit.

After its outbreak is over, Mr. Murray said the community plans to start requiring employees who haven’t been vaccinated to wear N95 masks at all times, except while eating or drinking. Those who have received the two required shots will be allowed to use less-restrictive surgical masks, and only in patient areas. “The goal is really to encourage people to get vaccinated,”and also to protect residents and employees, he said.

Genesis Healthcare Inc. and ProMedica Senior Care, major nursing-home operators that had people vaccinated at initial facilities last week, both said they aimed for only about half of their staffers to get shots during the first visit, so their administration could be staggered. They were able to fill all available slots.

Despite efforts to bolster testing and protective equipment in nursing homes, cases and deaths have continued to surge inside the facilities, closely following increases in the virus’s spread outside their walls. In the week ended Dec. 6, there were 4,525 deaths in nursing homes, according to data released Thursday by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That was a 56% increase from the 2,893 deaths in the week ended Nov. 15.

Researchers say staffers exposed to the virus in their communities are likely unknowingly conveying it to vulnerable nursing-home residents, highlighting the urgent need to vaccinate workers. “If you have enough of your staff that is immune, they will be less likely to introduce it into the building,” said Morgan Katz, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University. Getting half of the staff vaccinated is an absolute minimum, and facilities should aim for everyone to get the shots, she said.

A survey of 1,676 U.S. adults released Dec. 15 by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 71% would definitely or probably get a Covid-19 vaccine if it was found safe by scientists and offered free. Among the groups with the highest levels of vaccine hesitancy were Republicans, people aged 30 to 49, rural residents and Black adults. Also, 29% of those who said they worked in a health-care delivery setting said they would definitely not or probably not get vaccinated.

In a mid-November survey of nursing-home and assisted-living-facility staff in Indiana, by researchers at Indiana University, only 45% of 8,243 respondents said they would consider receiving a Covid-19 vaccine as soon as it was available. Others said they would be willing to take it later. The survey, accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, found that 70% of those unwilling to get the vaccine were concerned about side effects.

“There’s just a great deal of mistrust,” said Lori Porter, chief executive of theNational Association of Health Care Assistants, an advocacy group, which found in its own survey that nearly 72% of certified nursing assistants didn’t want to receive the vaccine. “A lot of my CNAs, their responses have been, ‘No one cares about old people and no one cares about us and we don’t intend to be guinea pigs.’ ”

Nursing assistants are generally paid low wages to work in facilities that are often thinly staffed.

Zenobia Carden is a 35-year-old certified nursing assistant who worked in a nursing home earlier this year and is about to start a new job at a residence for people with developmental disabilities. She said she has seen firsthand the impact of the coronavirus, which killed several residents of the facility where she used to work. She debated what to do, but ultimately decided that getting the vaccine still felt too risky to her.

Ms. Carden, who lives in Bartlesville, Okla., worries about potential long-term side effects, as well as shorter-term ones like headaches, because she already suffers from migraines.

“I’m scared,” she said. “It takes years to come out with a vaccine, and for them to come out with it this quickly—I don’t trust it.”

Nursing-home owners are trying to convince workers that the shots are safe by holding webinars and other sessions to share information, having top executives get publicly vaccinated and highlighting employees who are choosing to get the shots early.

PruittHealth Inc., a Norcross, Ga., company with about 102 nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, said each staffer who receives the vaccine will get a free breakfast at a Waffle House restaurant, and also be entered in a continuing raffle that will deliver prizes such as TVs. “We want to really create some excitement,” said Neil Pruitt, chief executive.

Lawyers have said that employers are generally legally allowed to mandate Covid-19 vaccines for workers, a stance reinforced last week in guidelines released by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But nursing-home owners have said they don’t plan to require the vaccine. Many facilities are already facing staffing squeezes after months of pandemic challenges.

Source: The Wall Street Journal