COVID-19 turning out to be a huge hoax perpetrated by media

Comment by Jim Campbell

January 30th, the Chinese government can’t be trusted, they lie to their citizens.

To a degree, the same can be said about what they want us to know, while at the same time diverting us from reality when it suits their need.

In this case, it provides a story of unknown veracity as the word of God coming directly from the Bible.

Yes, people who were elderly were put in rest homes received no medical treatment and left to die.

Media hyped the virus and alarmed Americans to the point of shutting down the economy Follow Us Search Search Keyword.

Media Virus Illustration by Greg Groesch/The Washington Times more >

The Washington Times

By Joseph Curl

July 30th,, 2020

When the postmortem is done on the media’s coverage of COVID-19 (and it will be), it will be clear that the virus was no Black Plague, it’s not even the flu on a bad year.

SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, has killed 56,749 Americans as of Tuesday.

That’s not good. But it’s not as bad as the 2017-2018 flu season when 80,000 -plus perished.

And it’s a long cry from what all the experts were warning about just a few weeks ago: First, they predicted 1.7 million Americans dead; then they redid the models (this time apparently entering a few more “facts”) and said 100,000-240,000 dead.

SEE ALSO: Eighty percent of the population has little or nothing to fear from COVID-19

Now, a major model relied on by the White House Coronavirus Task Force predicts about 70,000 dead by the end of August.

And for that we shut down the U.S. economy?!

As the coronavirus swept across China, then Europe — then everywhere — the U.S. media breathlessly reported every terrifying number, almost gleefully.

Their ratings soared, of course, as they scared the hell out of every American, many of whom have stayed home for the last 40 days, emerging only to buy toilet paper, but even then clad in masks and tiptoeing in fear.

SEE ALSO: Liberal media smears against Liberty University show the dire need for impartial reporting

But here are some facts: Simply said the Chinese government cannon be trusted.

• Fatality Rate

A recent Stanford University antibody study estimated the fatality rate from the virus is likely 0.1% to 0.2%. The World Health Organization (WHO) had estimated that the death rate was 20 to 30 times higher and called for isolation policies.

On which version do you think the media focused?

In New York City, the U.S. epicenter of the pandemic, the death rate for people 18 to 45 years old is 0.01%, or 10 per 100,000 in the population.

People aged 75 and older, though, have a death rate 80 times that. For children under 18, the rate of death is zero per 100,000.

That’s zero.

• Health and Age

More than half of the COVID-19 deaths in Europe occurred in long-term care or nursing-home facilities. At least one-fifth of the deaths recorded in the U.S. so far have occurred there.

Nearly all the patients hospitalized for the coronavirus in New York City had underlying health conditions, according to a recent study.

“Health records from 5,700 patients hospitalized within the Northwell Health system — which housed the most patients in the country throughout the pandemic — showed that 94 percent of patients had more than one disease other than COVID-19, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association,” Fox News reported.

The study found 42% of the patients were overweight and 53% had hypertension, and the others suffered from a variety of ailments.

• Far More Widespread

Millions and millions of Americans have already been infected with the virus — even though the U.S. media continues to report the low numbers provided by Johns Hopkins, which says that 998,000 Americans have contracted the virus as of Tuesday.

An antibody study was conducted last week in New York City and found that 1 in 5 (21.2%) of residents have already been infected with the coronavirus. There are 8.5 million people in New York City, so that would mean 1.8 million New Yorkers have had the virus.

At the time of the study, there were 16,249 deaths in the city attributed to COVID-19, which means the death rate in the city was 0.89% at the time — far lower than reports in the U.S. media.

Results of the antibody survey last week in Los Angeles found as many as 442,000 Los Angeles County residents might have already been infected with the coronavirus by early April, a number far higher than the 8,000 cases confirmed at the time.

The survey suggested that the death rate from the virus could be as low as 0.18% of COVID-19 patients, which means the actual death rate in the city is far lower than reported.

The Daily Mail reported Monday that “coronavirus may kill 70 times fewer patients than official UK death figures suggest, studies have shown.” The Mail said a similar fatality rate — 0.19% — was found in a study of residents in Helsinki, Finland.

A study, this one by Dr. Justin Silverman, estimates that there were 8.7 million coronavirus infections in the U.S. between March 8 and March 28. And as of April 17, 10% of Americans have been infected — which is roughly 33 million Americans.

The media has been hyping COVID-19 since Day One, alarming Americans to the point where they voluntarily went along with shutting down the entire economy — a mistake that will likely reverberate for a decade or more.

Even as U.S. states begin to re-open — based on the data, which shows a far lower fatality rate than reported and a much wider spread of the virus — the media continue to report on what they deem frightening numbers over the deadly virus.

They aren’t, and it isn’t. COVID-19 is a bad flu at worst. And the media should be held accountable for telling us otherwise before they knew the facts

2020: The Year That Boiled the Frog.

The things we’ve lost this year (so far). 

By Malcolm Pollack • July 30th, 2020

Here we are, a little over halfway through 2020.

Events have moved so quickly that most people are having a hard time keeping up and are simply coping as best they can.

More has changed in these past few months than at any other moment in our lifetimes, and many things that would have seemed unimaginable just a year ago have come to pass.

2020 has ratcheted us into an entirely new world—and it is in the nature of ratchets that they don’t move in reverse. Let’s survey the damage.

China, rocked back on its heels by America’s newfound resistance to its cheating and bullying, released a plague upon the world.

(Whether the outbreak was planned or not, it is clear that the Chinese Communist Party intentionally suppressed information and warnings about the novel coronavirus, and allowed it to spread around the globe.

What better way to smash its enemies, America in particular, than to destroy their economies?)

America responded with a robust immune response that nearly killed the patient. (It may kill it yet.)

A drastic quarantine was imposed upon the nation, and a roaring economy bludgeoned to its knees.

Unemployment, which had been at the lowest levels in half a century (and for blacks and Hispanics, the lowest ever recorded) soared to Depression-era levels. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses have failed. 

Governors and mayors imposed quarantines, severely restricting commerce and assembly, entirely at their whim.

The determination of “essential” businesses and activities—which, for many smaller enterprises, meant the difference between life and death—was glaringly, often contemptuously, capricious. 

Nietzsche famously defined happiness as “the feeling that power increases—that resistance is being overcome.”

In politics, war, and international affairs, the temptation to see what you can get away with is always there, and times of crisis provide the ideal opportunity.

(So well does this work that the cleverest and most ambitious will find a way to create a crisis if events fail to provide one.) 

For many governors and legislators—in particular those Democratic politicians and political strategists who, in this critical election year, felt themselves losing ground as the Trump-era economic boom continued—the “Wuhan Red Death” was like manna from heaven.

Everyone knows that a good economy favors incumbents and that hard times favor an expanding state—and so the sudden appearance of this pestilence was an astonishing stroke of luck, a kind of deus ex machina.

Opportunities to seize emergency powers are as rare as Willie Wonka’s golden ticket; usually one has to start a war, or burn down a parliamentary headquarters, to create them.

Yet here was just such an opportunity, tied up with a bow and stamped “Made In China”. Our overlords lost no time. 

Think of what we’ve lost: Professional,  amateur, college, and high-school sports, as well as youth athletic leagues: gone.

(Yes, there is some baseball now, but in empty stadiums—and the prospects for football, basketball, etc. are dim.)

The schools are all closed. Parents who depend on the schools to look after their children during working hours cannot return to the workforce.

The entire movie industry: gone.

Theater: gone

Concerts: gone

Summer camps: gone

Bars: gone. (Here in Massachusetts, they will be closed until there is a vaccine, which for many businesses, if not most, is a death sentence.

Restaurants: either closed or operating under draconian restrictions. Many places still do not allow indoor dining and those that do permit it only at reduced capacity. The restaurant business has thin margins under the best of circumstances, and you can be quite sure that nearly all restaurants are currently losing money

Travel: decimated. (This includes hotels, car rentals, etc.

Public gatherings: churches, parties, funerals, weddings, reunions, school commencements, club meetings, cookouts, marathons, and so on: gone.

Gyms and fitness studios, closed—many permanently.

That’s only a partial reckoning—but what a list it is!

If one were asked, a year ago, to name the things that make up ordinary civic life in America, it would have been, more or less, the same list. All of it is gone.

(A year ago, could we have imagined New York or Boston without an open bar? But here we are.)

Meanwhile, our governors, giddy with power, decide for us daily what we can or cannot do, our basic right “peaceably to assemble” notwithstanding. Jog by yourself on a beach? Attend an outdoor funeral?

You’ll very likely be arrested. Form a mob of thousands and crowd the streets to bray about an officially sanctioned political grievance? By all means, please proceed. 

Flourishing societies strike a healthy balance between rights and privileges. When one grows too much at the expense of the other, a nation declines: on the one hand toward impotent mediocrity, on the other into tyranny.

What once we cherished, we now are taught to despise. How long can a nation that disgusts itself continue to exist?

The rights in question here are not negative rights of the sort found in the Constitution, which boil down to particular variants of a more general right not to be interfered with by the government, but rather positive rights—rights to goods that require expense and effort to provide—which necessarily involve a positive compulsion on someone’s part to provide them, these rights effectively indenture one segment of society to another. 

As more and more of these goods become mere entitlements, rather than rewards to be earned through productive labor, the burden upon the productive segment of society increases, even as that segment dwindles—and the nation sags toward impotent mediocrity.

Privileges, on the other hand, are by definition blessings bestowed by those in power.

It is always and everywhere a hallmark of tyranny that all rights, even negative rights, are redefined as privileges granted or withheld according to the interests of the powerful. That’s exactly what’s happening now: our supposedly inalienable rights to assemble, to do business, to worship in church, etc., have abruptly, and with no discernable process of public consent, become privileges. That is no longer the rule of law; it is the rule of men.

But this is not the only erosion of the rule of law we have seen in 2020. 

While millions of working Americans have been forced by decree to abandon their jobs and businesses, the streets of major cities have been taken over by state-approved, angry, anarchist mobs.

These mobs have destroyed and defaced both public and private property, terrorized citizens, assaulted the police, and committed crimes ranging from vandalism and looting to arson and murder.

The police have tried bravely to maintain order, but have so far been overwhelmed—and in many cases even told to stand down—as the rioters went about their business.

Meanwhile, the police have been vilified and slandered as racist brutes, as politicians have pledged to reduce funding for their police departments or eliminate them altogether.

Thus as formerly rights-bearing citizens are commanded by fiat to stay home and shutter their businesses, violent mobs run wild in the cities, and the police buckle under withering assault—not only from the mobs they face, but also from a hostile press and their own mayors and city councils—we can add “rule of law” to the list of things we have lost in 2020.

Here’s another thing we’ve surrendered: our faces.

The face we present to the world is our “sign,” our flag of individual distinctness.

Our faces, and the richness of expression they make possible, are the primary medium of interpersonal communication.

They are the book from which others instinctively read our characters, our thoughts, and our moods.

To “show one’s face” is the most basic act of participation in civil society; to “lose face” is always and everywhere painful and humiliating.

When we face one another we connect as social beings; there is a reason why popular social media and communications platforms have names like Facebook and Facetime.

Moreover, why do fundamentalist Muslims insist upon covering the faces of their women? It is precisely to prevent this connection, this humanizing and socializing interaction. It is a means of possession, of control.

Now, like the burqa-clad women of the Dar al-Islam, we all must cover our faces, except in the isolation of our homes.

The effect of this is powerfully leveling and atomizing; it works in an insidious way to break down the horizontal ligatures that bind us together as a society.

And as we sit unemployed at home, awaiting our relief checks, the result is an increasing deflection of all social connections from the horizontal to the vertical: away from the people around us, and toward the sovereign power above us, from which all blessings increasingly flow.

In this way, with every faceless and “socially distant” passerby now a potential carrier of pestilence, attraction gives way to repulsion.

We see fewer and fewer people in person and keep more and more to ourselves until it all begins to feel normal.

We have lost another essential feature of American life: the richly rewarding human experience of being a distinctive and self-reliant member of an organic and multidimensional civil society.

Finally, the shared belief that America is, at its roots and in its heart, something worthy and good crumbles further.

The bedrock of the American mythos—the founders, the Constitution, the ennobling natural law principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the confidence in the approval of Providence expressed in our national motto, and the sense that we are links in a great chain that connects the sacrifices of our ancestors with the duty of living Americans to preserve the blessings of law and liberty for our children’s children—these have all fallen away, precipitously, in this annus horribilis.

What once we cherished, we now are taught to despise.

How long can a nation that disgusts itself continue to exist?

All of this, and more, have we lost in the space of less than a year—yet most of us have simply . . . adjusted.

For those of us old enough to have the perspective of historical parallax, it is a disturbing reminder of some of humanity’s darkest lessons: lessons that far too many of us seem to have forgotten, if we ever learned them at all.

THE END