Long ago, I promised to explain how I realized, even before the spring 2020 lockdowns, that the still-evolving ‘pandemic response’ was a hoax. How, by early March 2020, I decided the impending lockdowns, for which ‘experts’ were clamoring, were just a pretext to enact an elite political agenda.
I made it a long story. The Part 1 executive summary is this: When the ‘novel’ virus emerged, I was on an isolated military base overseas. Access was tightly controlled so there was no immediate threat of an outbreak. The corporate media reports we saw on Armed Forces TV plainly intended to inspire panic. So from mid-January through the spring of 2020, I researched online medical resources. I focused always on the main question: How likely is this ‘novel virus’ to kill or disable me, or someone I love? The answer was plainly ‘not very’ and it seemed to get less likely the more I learned. So from my faraway perch, as I watched the madness unfold, I tried to discern the ulterior motives behind the fear-mongering, and the lockdowns that it enabled. Some were obvious from the start: The Democrats, the permanent federal bureaucracy, the Chinese Communists, and the legacy media (who carry water for them all) shared an obvious interest in exploiting the virus to discredit Donald Trump, wreck his booming economy and drive him from office. Other agendas took shape only only later.
Now here’s the full-length feature:
In January 2020 I was the senior medical provider at a clinic for private contractors on a US military base overseas. We had 3,300 employees – cafeteria workers, carpenters, HVAC techs and the like – mostly from East Africa and South Asia. I’d been on the job three months, but I had worked for the same company for several years before that, on a related project.
It was probably mid-January before I had my first conversation about Covid. It was prompted by a mainstream cable news report on Armed Forces TV in one of the chow halls. Grainy black and white video of Chinese hospital workers in full hazmat suits aired above an alarmist chiron. Our chief medic, an MD in his native Nepal, asked what I thought. I was skeptical. I remembered the 2009 swine-flu frenzy. This wasn’t the first virus ever to jump species, I said. There’s a whole family of coronaviruses. Most commonly they cause colds or a flu-like illness. The last two to emerge, MERS and SARS-1, had been very lethal, yet they hadn’t prompted nearly this degree of hype. I wasn’t going to freak out just because some talking head wanted me to.
I expect I sounded a bit cavalier. My colleague seemed doubtful. ‘They’re saying it’s quite lethal all the same.’ In fact, his seemed a perfectly appropriate level of concern over a deadly epidemic in a country neighboring his own. I recognized that my own skepticism rested more on what I knew about the media than what I knew about the new virus. So after we spoke, I started nosing around journals like JAMA and Stat News to learn more. I maintained a steady focus on the key question: How likely is this virus to kill or disable me, or someone I love?
Most of what I learned over the next month was reassuring. A lot of early SARS-CoV-2 knowledge came together for me in mid- to late February 2020, as cases surged in places more transparent than China. We learned a lot: The virus was highly infectious, but its case fatality rate was less than 4%. Together, those attributes suggested an infection fatality rate perhaps a hundred times lower than the CFR, just what you’d expect. (The distinction between IFR and CFR is crucial. More below.) We learned the virus was lethal almost exclusively to people who were quite old, chronically ill or both. We learned it posed little risk to school-age children or young adults. Cases were surging around the world, so containment was out of the question. I and others had already begun to suspect that the virus might have spread far beyond China weeks or months before the Chinese decided to publicize the December outbreak in Wuhan.
There were troubling reports that the virus seemed to cause deep venous blood clots. I learned that the first Russian to die with Covid, a woman in her mid-60s, had actually died from a pulmonary embolus. I laboriously translated a remarkably level-headed article from Russian media, lenta.ru, a transcript of a virologist’s lecture to a worried university faculty in Russia’s Far East. The virologist made it very plain that in the context of a respiratory virus, a 4% CFR was nothing to freak out about. Russian media seemed refreshingly free of brazen Western-style obfuscation of comorbidities and actual causes of death, already very noticeable. In Russia, apparently, there was little partisan sparring over The Science (™). Or much else, given Putin’s 80% approval.
You know what? We know how to prevent blood clots. Barring an effective vaccine, which might not be available for years, eventually everyone was going to get Covid, just like seasonal flu. Almost everyone who wasn’t already at death’s door was going to do just fine, and (unlike flu) perhaps develop some immunity. Just like flu, the virus might go endemic and recur seasonally. What’s more, experienced doctors, like Didier Raoult in France, were getting promising results with an early-treatment regimen based on hydroxychloroquine, a repurposed anti-malarial also prescribed for rheumatic arthritis. We might, in short, be able to avoid advanced Covid complications altogether.
The problem was, during roughly the same period I found this reassurance, the media-driven public reaction to the virus’ spread had spun off into an alarmist mirror image of my own, best exemplified by some bug-eyed harpy I heard on TV shrieking ‘it’s not just like the flu!’ Had I overlooked something important? I backtracked and reevaluated. The harpies had made dire predictions of millions dead, but their clinical insights were second-hand and anecdotal. They commonly cited implausible computer models ginned up by non-medical academics. (The most famous was Neil Ferguson at Kings College.) You can’t boss a virus around and make it kill more people that it wants to. But you can easily design a computer model to make it look like it might, yielding the results that your sponsors demand. Garbage in, garbage out.
Needless to say, my perspective wasn’t widely shared. Most everywhere, most everybody was just terrified. Terror rarely fosters sound decision-making. It drives some people mad. One day in February I saw two separate patients, from two separate departments, on the same afternoon, both wheezing from having inhaled chlorine bleach fumes all day. There were zero Covid cases on base. But their supervisors had ordered them to drop everything, every couple of hours, throughout the day, and scrub down every office surface with bleach, to prevent Covid. Our 3,300 employees numbered an even 1/100,000 of the US population, so I reckoned that similar hysteria Stateside could easily generate 200,000 ER visits a day for respiratory distress.
One reason for the media terror campaign was obvious. Donald Trump had recently defeated Democrats’ second impeachment effort. The hacks were in the throes of advanced Trump Derangement Syndrome, desperate to exploit Covid to thwart his re-election later that year. Talking heads invoked the virus to blame the president for every Covid death, every perceived policy error, every shortage of PPE or equipment.
Sometime in mid-February 2020, I wandered past a TV in our clinic which was airing a press conference by the White House Covid Task Force. A reporter posed a question about Covid mortality, relative to influenza. A task force spokesman, a spry-looking little old man, replied dismissively, ‘Oh, this is ten times more deadly than seasonal flu.’ (I later learned this was the famous Anthony Fauci, of whom I’d already read.) His assertion jarred me, not just because it was absurd, but because he had to know better. Now, I’m not an infectious disease specialist, just a jack-of-all-trades ER guy. I’m not even a doctor, just a PA. So here’s the simple four-step analysis I undertook:
[1] Plainly the new virus was at least as infectious as influenza – likely on account of aerosol spread, not just respiratory droplets. (Also, we were told, people with no symptoms are infectious, though that’s not common with respiratory viruses and may also be a lie.) Never mind the agitprop, SARS-CoV-2 was a rather typical coronavirus that, in most patients, caused nothing more than an influenza-like illness (ILI).
[2] Tests were in short supply in the early weeks of the pandemic. In general, only patients sick enough to seek hospital care were being tested for Covid. Of those who tested positive, 3% to 4% were dying. That is the case fatality rate (CFR). The infection fatality rate (IFR) is the same numerator, the number of people who die, over a much larger denominator, the total number of people infected. Because it was so infectious, the total number of untested people with Covid and mild symptoms was certain to be much higher than the number of patients with positive tests. I presumed numbers typical of seasonal flu: 100 (or more) patients with mild illness for every really sick patient with a positive test. Thus a CFR of 4% would yield an IFR about 0.04%.
Where did I get that 1:100 ratio? WHO guesstimates that 5%-15% of the world population gets flu each year. Assuming a world population of 8 billion [actually about 7.8), that’s 400 million to 1.2 billion flu patients. WHO further states 3-5 million of those develop ‘severe seasonal flu’ each year. 3 million / 400 million = 0.75%, and 5 million / 1.2 billion = about 0.42%. To err on the side of caution and make calculation easier, I rounded up to 1%: that is, 1 very sick flu patient out of every 100 flu patients total. The true ratio, obviously, is a bit lower, between 1:133 and 1:238.
[3] I read up on ‘severe seasonal influenza,’ the 3 to 5 million annual cases mentioned above. They are patients sick enough to be considered for hospitalization, plus they have either a positive flu test, or classic flu symptoms in the setting of a confirmed local epidemic. WHO claims 290,000 to 600,000 of these very ill flu patients die. This is crucial: The annual cohort of ‘severe seasonal flu’ patients is closely analogous to the February 2020 cohort of patients with positive Covid tests, because only the sickest Covid patients were even getting tested.
[4] I did some more arithmetic. Even using the smaller numerator, 290,000 flu deaths, over the larger denominator, 5 million severe seasonal flu patients, yields a CFR of 0.058 or 5.8%. This is almost 50% higher than was being claimed for Covid in winter/spring 2020.
So Covid was a bit (or maybe a lot) less lethal than seasonal flu. If I could figure that out, plainly Fauci could, too. He had become a media darling by then. It followed that he was lying, in collusion with the media terror campaign. But why?
In late February and early March, a series of bizarre official utterances clarified matters greatly. First, the ChiComs claimed, with straight faces, to have achieved ‘zero Covid’ with a barbaric lockdown in Wuhan. This was brazen gaslighting. Their Wuhan lockdown was brutal theater: The Chinese had allowed the virus to spread all over the world before imposing any travel restrictions. Nobody believed them, and many said so. I couldn’t imagine that anyone would even pretend to. But then in quick succession, first WHO (whose director, Tedros, the ChiComs had handpicked for the job) and then Fauci publicly conflated Covid’s 3.4% CFR with its much lower IFR. In short, they announced publicly that we were 100 times more likely to die from Covid than was actually the case.
The ChiComs had made it very clear, very early they wanted Europe to emulate their Wuhan lockdown. If they could get one western democracy to destroy its own economy and jettison civil liberties, there would be immense pressure on the rest to do the same, ostensibly ‘to save lives’ - but really just to make the west more like China politically, while less competitive economically. Plainly the White House Covid task force wanted lockdowns too, as soon as Europe’s example made them politically viable. Fauci kept up some double-talk, telling the press as late as March 9 that young healthy people could keep partying on cruise ships. But that was just a smokescreen. A week later the task force signed off on lockdowns.
The intelligence wing of the federal bureaucracy had spent years trying to oust Trump over charges of ‘Russian collusion’ fabricated by his 2016 campaign foes. Lockdowns to me looked like a similar ploy. Trump was skeptical, but vulnerable: His Covid task force was a veritable Augean stable full of Trojan Horses. The permanent US bureaucracy plainly shared a political agenda with the CCP, who were furious at Trump’s hardball trade tactics: Lock down, wreck the economy, get rid of Trump, then let’s get back to business as usual.
So what about The Science (™) of lockdowns?
After the 1918-20 Spanish Flu (the first pandemic after germ theory became settled science) a consensus among scientists emerged that lockdowns of whole societies and economies would do little to slow a pandemic. Any marginal benefit, they agreed, would be far outweighed by the socioeconomic damage it would do. That consensus lasted more than a century and withstood the next four influenza pandemics, in 1957-58, 1968-70, 1977-79 and 2009-10.
Let’s meet Michael P Senger, a California attorney who blogs on Substack at ‘The New Normal.’ His excellent book ‘Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World’ came out in late 2021. In 150 lucid, readable pages with 600 footnotes, Senger clarifies much that bewildered me in early 2020, watching from afar as the west went mad.
He relates how the CCP quietly deployed an army of social-media activists to sow panic with fake Covid horror videos. The lay public wasn’t reading journals or doing flu arithmetic, it was watching fake ChiCom fear-porn videos. After tens of millions of shares, large swathes of the public were terror-stricken.
Senger outlines the web of CCP influence among western scientists and officials that led them abruptly to jettison the century-old anti-lockdown consensus, based on nothing more than fraudulent Chinese claims. He reckons almost nobody in a policy-making position actually believed the Chinese. But top western academics and officials who pushed for lockdowns, he notes, were professionally and financially linked to the CCP and were at least willing to pretend they did.
Something Senger didn’t address troubles me more than the ChiCom subversion. After the virus claimed its first American lives in February, I watched on social media as my fellow medical providers – collectively always prone to groupthink – started jumping on the alarmist bandwagon. Aerosolized (‘airborne’) viral transmission is very real. The alarmist quacks pretended loose cloth face-coverings would stop it, but that wind and sunlight wouldn’t. Alongside the dubious notion of ‘asymptomatic transmission,’ masks cued the public to fear the very air they breathed. The quacks further demanded ‘shelter in place’ orders, abruptly forgetting that respiratory viruses spread most efficiently indoors, at close quarters. That’s why we get more of them in winter: We spend more time together indoors.
As winter turned to spring 2020, the quacks quite literally went medieval, soaring backward through time to the age when authorities thought ‘miasma’ (bad air) caused bubonic plague. To stop the spread of miasma, they used to barricade plague victims and their families in their homes, along with the rat reservoir and the flea vector.
It was no accident that the places that locked down hardest in March 2020, like New York City, had so many deaths and came closest to getting overwhelmed. That’s what happens when you herd people together in the multigenerational housing so common in NYC, when you close primary-care clinics, stop treating everything except Covid, frighten the old and sick into avoiding their doctors, and send Covid patients back to their nursing homes to infect everyone else. Heart attacks, strokes, cancer and diabetes complications don’t take a holiday just because the mayor closed your clinic. Doctors, nurses and midlevels - the alarmist quacks who promoted such edicts - should have known better. They have lots to answer for. Most seem unrepentant.
We were assured lockdown would last just ‘two weeks to flatten the curve.’ Besides being the lamest mass-action slogan ever, just what you’d expect from our new midwit technocrat rulers, it was especially annoying because it was such a brazen lie: It was plain some governors and mayors were going to keep their citizens locked down a lot longer, because it wasn’t about flattening the curve. It takes more than two weeks to destroy a big economy like ours.
We’ve recently learned to call the madness that overtook so many of us ‘mass formation psychosis’ and similar terms. Military organizations, for reasons I hardly need explain, are especially susceptible to such psychoses. All through spring 2020, at my overseas military outpost, there were no Covid cases. There was almost no way for Covid to get on base. You had to fly in. We were in the middle of nowhere, there was no off-base liberty, locals weren’t allowed on base, and for our ground troops, ‘social distancing’ from the locals while on patrol had been a tactical imperative since long before Covid. Moreover, very early in the pandemic, as soon as it was clear the virus had escaped China, the base commander had sensibly set up a ‘quarantine compound.’ All personnel returning to duty from outside the theater had to spend two weeks there, monitored twice daily by my team for fevers and respiratory symptoms.
But in early March, a series of bizarre orders descended from on high. All the chow halls became take-out only. No more sitting down to dinner with your pals. All the gyms were closed. At the PX and other stores on base, strict capacity limits and 6’ social distancing was rigorously enforced by extremely brusque MPs, NATO ‘allies’ from eastern Europe. If more than one person was driving around in a vehicle, all had to mask up. (Of course, the worthless, loose ear-loop masks were deemed just fine.)
In short, our command began behaving as though there were ‘active communty spread’ on base. I don’t think they were lying. You can’t really hide a Covid outbreak. They just fell victim to a superstitious, premodern fear of miasma. This reinforced my growing sense that the real pandemic was one of mental illness.
Next, the military told us that everyone 60 and older, or with ‘high risk’ medical conditions, was subject to termination and repatriation. Ostensibly the reason was that the base hospital had only a limited number of ventilation machines. Critically wounded troops had priority, and the hospital just couldn’t take care of hundreds of elderly intubated contractors. But I suspected ulterior motives. Contractors undergo a rigorous health-screening process. The military was defining conditions like prediabetes and well-controlled hypertension as ‘high risk.’
I had just turned 60, but I’m still 6’1”, 160 pounds, the same height and weight as when I was 17. I take no meds. I run triathlons. So I approached the young Army doctor in charge of the base’s Covid response. He was not yet 30. His primary job was field surgeon for one of our infantry formations. I pointed out that in case there was an outbreak on base, it made no sense to send me home: He was going to need all the help he could get. To bypass the ventilator concerns, I offered to sign a Do Not Resuscitate / Do Not Intubate advance directive. ‘I’m not worried about Covid,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine. But if I’m wrong, when the cytokine storm kicks in, just push my cot over in the corner and let me drown quietly in my own secretions.’
The young officer’s reaction – his look of shock, mumbling and general air of discombobulation – was priceless, the high point of my otherwise miserable final month on base. It was as if nobody had ever said anything like that to him before. Perhaps there was a generational disconnect too: If we had occupied Vietnam with today’s military, I’m pretty sure the NVA would have overrun us in a matter of weeks.
He eventually stammered something about ‘liability.’ That made no sense, because advance directives like DNI/DNR orders explicitly protect providers who enact them from liability. Besides, it’s next to impossible to win a lawsuit against the military over medical mistakes in a war zone. But I didn’t force the issue, because the truth was, closing the gyms had been my final straw. I didn’t really want to stay anymore.
So in early April, I and hundreds of other greybeards were herded onto cramped charter jets based out of Spain. Thirty hours later, we landed on the eastern seaboard of an America in the throes of moral and mental breakdown.
And, oh yeah – there was a virus going around too.
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Hello from the UK. Many thanks for your post. It certainly was a psy-op and COVID 19 is the 'flu re-branded to make more money for big pharma etc. The problem many people have, as I once had, was understanding what the 'flu actually is. I finally understood in 2020. I wrote a Covid 19 Summary in October 2020 but this is my overarching summary with sublinks.
https://baldmichael.substack.com/p/what-is-the-flu-aka-covid-19-and