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This story from local NBC affiliate 25 News in Chicago “IDPH Director explains how COVID-19 deaths are classified” might be helpful for those of you who have not yet fully understood what is going on. Watch the embedded video of Dr. Ngozi Ezike, Director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, speaking about how COVID-19 deaths are classified. Note the governor of Illinois to her left looking on.

The ordinary way in which a profound truth is being transmitted is what is so striking about this clip. Those paying attention are being told matter-of-factly that COVID deaths are not from COVID but are listed as COVID deaths because the person who died had been diagnosed with COVID at the time—even if what killed them was clearly something else. It would be like being given a few weeks to live from terminal cancer and contracting influenza and having your death classified as an influenza death.

Remember when I told you on this blog that, in Pennsylvania, 70 percent of those who died were in long-term care facilities and that nationwide around 5% of persons are in long-term care? This population is typically in long term care because they are at the end of their lives, aged and/or dying of often multiple health problems. If they had COVID at the moment of their death, were they listed as a COVID death? Any other year and the death certificate would say something else—cancer, heart failure, etc.—but this year, in these months of mass hysteria, COVID is the cause of death?

In New York City, the majority of hospitalizations involved people who sheltered-in-place. Turns out that they are disproportionately aged and/or suffer from poor health. They are not sheltering so much as they are firm and homebound. New York governor Andrew Cuomo was recently scratching his head over this. But isn’t it simple, Governor? This population is at risk for hospitalization throughout the year. This year, if they are diagnosed with COVID, are they listed as a COVID death?

These numbers Johns Hopkins keeps feeding the public, how many of these are people who died with COVID and not from COVID? Even CDC’s more reasonable provisional numbers. From COVID? Or with COVID?

Is COVID being determined by a label arbitrarily applied by doctors who have been incentivized to list COVID as the cause of death? This is what Elon Musk was recently talking about Joe Rogan’s show (cued up below). This is what the doctors at Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield, CA were saying—you know, the doctors whose press conference YouTube censored because it violated “community standards.” Hospitals could do this with any number of labels, but why would they? Unless they get more money if they list the deaths as a COVID deaths.

Progressives are now up in arms because Deborah Birx of the White House Coronavirus Task Force says she can’t trust the CDC’s numbers and that the number of COVID deaths is being exaggerated. I doubt Birx is a MAGA hat wearing Republican. But this is the director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, Dr. Ngozi Ezike saying these things. I can’t be sure Ezike is not a MAGA hat wearing Republican. I don’t want to make any hasty assumptions. But I bet she isn’t.

To amplify my point, this is what Ezike said back in April:

“If you were in hospice and had already been given a few weeks to live, and then you also were found to have COVID, that would be counted as a COVID death. It means technically even if you died of a clear alternate cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it’s still listed as a COVID death. So, everyone who’s listed as a COVID death doesn’t mean that that was the cause of the death, but they had COVID at the time of the death.”

Here’s a suggestion: If COVID is not the cause of death, then it isn’t a COVID death. I have been saying this all along, so I’m not astonished by the fact of the matter. That she said it—that’s a bit astonishing. And she said it with governor of Illinois standing right beside her. Do I need to note that the media has made nothing of it? What was it that Michael Parenti said about this? “The media does not so much tell you what to think. The media tells you what to think about.”

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This article in The Washington Post, “There is a more accurate way to compare coronavirus deaths to the flu,” is a weak attempt to beat back the skeptics. It suggests that deaths assigned to COVID-19 are caused by COVID-19. We have established that, as a matter of policy, if you die with COVID-19, it will be recorded as a COVID-29 death—even if you die of something else. (See above)

The CDC estimates flu deaths because they have reason to believe that deaths caused by influenza are undercounted. But in the case of COVID-19, we have deaths being attributed to COVID-19 that have a different cause, but default to COVID-19. This inflates the count of COVID-19 deaths. If we were to assign deaths to a rhinovirus when that rhinovirus is present, we could horrify the public. A lot of people get colds. Some people die from them. That’s right, rhinoviruses are a cause of acute lower respiratory tract problems with a fatal outcome.

In most cases of flu-like and cold-like illnesses, the actual virus or other pathogen is undetermined. You may have experienced a severe flu-like illness and test negative for the influenza strain(s) the test covers. You could well have a coronavirus or a rhinovirus. You could die from either. But if you’re healthy or not too old (if your immune system works properly), death is very unlikely.

It is important to understand that pneumonia isn’t just a thing in itself. Pneumonia is an infection that inflames the tissues of one or both lungs. The lungs fill with purulent material, (albeit not always) causing cough and fever. A variety of pathogens, including bacteria, fungi, and viruses, can cause pneumonia. Bacteria and viruses can and often are copresent. Every year in the United States, hundreds of thousand of people are hospitalized with pneumonia. Tragically, tens of thousands of them will die. Without testing every case, we cannot know how many pneumonia deaths are from the flu or from something else. The objective way to proceed is to assess all deaths from pneumonia by testing to determine what pathogens are present. We then have to establish a cause.

In the end, the article becomes unsure of itself and resorts to asking us to trust certain experts. But the experts are redefining the normal as something extraordinary and using the redefinition to scare the wits out of the public. As I have said, this is a classic moral panic. And it has been remarkably effective. Polls show that a majority of Americans believe they cannot return to work without a vaccine. Dr. Fauci is suggesting that schools cannot reopen until there is a vaccine because students cannot feel safe without one.

First, there may never be a vaccine. But, more importantly, we don’t need a vaccine to go back to our lives. This virus is not that serious.

This video of Anthony Fauci is more satisfying. US Senator Rand Paul takes Fauci to task for his failed predictions and, more generally, the failure of epidemiologists to forecast the character of the pandemic.

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Here’s another example of scaring the public, in this example an attempt to scare the public away from their right to assembly and free expression. The Independent recently published an article with this headline: “72 people test positive for coronavirus after mass lockdown protest in Wisconsin.” This bit in the article exposes the headline as exemplary of fake news: “The information comes to light after last month hundreds of people in Wisconsin attended a mass protest at the governor’s stay-at-home order. However, it is not possible to say if any of these cases trace back to the rally as the health department is not tracking attendance of specific events.” In the article’s body, it’s admitted that the headline is made up. “But it is technically true,” I can hear people say, “At least it’s not technically a lie.” Be honest: the headline is substantively false.

Can readers have a story about 72 people who tested positive for coronavirus who did not attend any mass gathering? Don’t tell me they don’t exist. There are thousands of cases of coronavirus in Wisconsin.

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The media reinforces the double consciousness that is characteristic of the progressive mind. I have spend some time in the CDC data this morning and found something interesting. As reckoned by the CDC’s cumulative record of death certificates that identify COVID-19 as cause of death, more than half of all deaths in the United States from COVID-19 occurred in just two states: New Jersey and New York. New York accounts for 40 percent of all COVID-19 deaths nationwide. New York City alone accounts for more than a quarter of the deaths in the United States.

The New York situation is quite revealing. Trump is being blamed for the deaths from the virus (he’s a racist for suggesting that reporters take a look at China) and now he is social Darwinist extraordinaire for wanting to open up the country (so people can work and feed their families). At the same time, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, who is opening up his state, is receiving very little media wrath. Quite the contrary. His state accounts for 40 percent of the deaths in the country and the media finds his CNN chats with his hypocrite brother, Chris, to be “just the thing we need.”

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The Los Angeles Times, in the article “The economic devastation wrought by the pandemic could ultimately kill more people than the virus itself,” tells us the following: “The United Nations predicts that a global recession will reverse a three-decade trend in rising living standards and plunge as many as 420 million people into extreme poverty.”

Sheltering in place is a First World luxury. It will come back to bite the affluent. But for the rest of the world, the lockdown is devastating now and will grow worse in the near future. “Hunger is already rising in the poorest parts of the world, where lockdowns and social distancing measures have erased incomes and put even basic food items out of reach.”

The article goes on: “The economic devastation the pandemic wreaks on the ultra-poor could ultimately kill more people than the virus itself.” I will tell you this now: it will kill more people than the virus. I have been saying this from the early days of the crisis (read my blog), as soon as it became clear that the those in charge of our lives and livelihoods were intent on carrying on with it for any longer than a short while.

Some folks couldn’t wait to share pictures of corpses and caskets to shame those of us who were concerned about the totality of policy effects. What about the corpses and caskets from starvation because the lockdown devastated the global economy? Are you eager to share those? I’m not.

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Finally, in local news, The Green Bay Press Gazette tells us “Why people shouldn’t skip regular health care due to the COVID-19 crisis.” I will cut to the chase. Hospitals across the country are experiencing too few customers. Between COVID-19 not panning out, the mass canceling of “elective” procedures and surgeries, the media frightening citizens away from seeking medical attention, and the government telling people not to leave their homes, profits for the medical-industrial complex are flagging and they are laying off staff. More importantly, the shareholders are sad. They need money so they don’t have to work. So don’t wait for a vaccine (except to send your kids back to school). Head down to your local hospital and get seen today by the veterans of the war against the invisible enemy.

“You’ve said many times that the US is doing far better than any other country when it comes to testing. Why does that matter? Why is this a global competition to you when every day Americans are losing their lives and we’re still seeing more cases, every day?” asked Weijia Jiang, a CBS reporter. 

The president is a cheerleader for American success. He is trying to give Americans some hope that the nation is on top of the situation. It’s Trump’s modus operandi to be upbeat and patriotic. His attitude is in stark contrast to those in the establishment who are pessimistic and reflexively down on America. Trump’s optimism, which is characteristic of his business career, is interpreted in the frame of Trump Derangement Syndrome, a syndrome fueled by a grim view of American exceptionalism.

Trump responded calmly to an absurd question: “They’re losing their lives everywhere in the world and maybe that’s a question you should ask China—don’t ask me, ask China that question.” Trump has frequently deflected criticism of his presidency and the administration’s response to this crisis by pointing to China. Anybody who has watched only a handful of his press conference is well aware of Trump’s pivot-to-China strategy.

In back of Trump’s response is a frustration that the president and I share. Why aren’t reporters going after China? China failed to contain the virus and lied about and distorted the situation for weeks while the virus spread across the planet. The deaths in question should be laid at the doorstep of the Chinese Communist Party. Moreover, indeed especially in light of China’s culpability, why is the press praising China’s response to the virus while treating criticisms of China as “racist” and “xenophobic”? Trump was responding to a pattern. His intent behind his question is obvious to an objective observer. But journalism is not objective. It’s partisan.

You see the pattern in conversations with people on social media. Recently, I was accused of pursuing a “yellow peril” narrative when I criticized the totalitarian regime of China for its actions. I pursue a critique of the Chinese Communist Party because, as a Marxist, I care about the working class generally and the proletarians of China in particular (since they’re the ones under the thumb of the CCP). The CCP as the embodiment of the Chinese people is a necessary assumption in order to make the claim that criticism of the CCP is racist—an assumption that is on the face of it absurd. Noam Chomsky was recently recorded pursuing this absurdity in an attack on populism. The tick emanates from the stealth Maoism that has long demented the Western left. 

But don’t expect the media to explain that to you. They have an agenda. It just so happens that the reporter who asked the question is Chinese-American. Without hesitation, she leveraged her racial identity to fashion an opening for the media to once again push the narrative that the president is a racist. The charge is blindly accepted by the regressive left: a racist president at the helm of a racist nation obsessed with liberty.

Ms Jiang said to the President: “Why are you saying that to me—specifically—that I should ask China?” Her question was a rhetorical one, of course. Fleshed out it reads: “I am racially Asian and ethnically Chinese, how could you say such a thing to me? Because you’re a racist. Didn’t you call this the ‘China virus’?”

Reflect on this for a moment: “Why are you saying that to me—Specifically—that I should ask China?” Because you’re the one who asked the question?

The president responded with, “I’m not saying it specifically to anybody, I’m saying it to anybody that asks a nasty question.”

“That’s not a nasty question,” Ms Jiang stated. 

But it is a nasty question. And Jiang exploiting her racial and ethnic identity to paint the president as a racist is just as nasty. I regret that it has be pointed out that there was nothing inherent in that answer that makes it racist, but in the present situation, I have to point that out, even if it means that I will be accused of supporting a racist president (I don’t support Trump, for the record). I’m making this point not only to defend the person who has been unjustly treated in this regard from the very beginning, whatever his flaws, but as an observer who is deeply concerned with the way in which the establishment uses race to polarize the American people in order to advance the managed decline of the American Republic and, more broadly, Western civilization. The goal of making this about race is all about delegitimizing a populist president in order to increase the likelihood that the establishment candidate (presently Joe Biden) will win the White House and the power elite who have been running down this country for decades will once again enjoy the power to push their globalist agenda, which includes empowering China culturally, economic, and politically. 

Those who pursue this agenda have no shame. The utterly mediocre Brian Stelter at CNN said that “what we saw in that exchange with Weijia Jiang was something that has racial overtones. It’s racist to look at an Asian American White House correspondent and say, ‘Ask China.’” For Stelter and others the race of the person asking a question carries magical powers that transform a question that has nothing to do with race because Stelter and his ilk can only see people in racial terms. Jiang, a US citizen, is routinely identified as an “Asian American reporter.” When is a white reporter ever announced as a “European American reporter”? Answer: never.

As we have seen, progressives, aided by the establishment media, are trying to pin a murder in Georgia on the president (see my blog entry “Did Arbery Die to Perpetuate a False Narrative About Contemporary American Society?”) This is a pattern.

Remember when the media took Trump’s “Some very find people on both sides” remark, made in the context of the Charlottesville situation in the summer of 2017, out of context to make it appear as if he supported white nationalism? Rosie Gray, of The Atlantic, a publication that recently lamented Western concern for personal liberty while praising China’s systematic violation of it, wrote at the time, “President Trump defended the white nationalists who protested in Charlottesville on Tuesday.” In the case of Jiang, the media are making out Trump’s frustration at the failure of the media to hold China accountable for their actions to be anti-Chinese racism (the trilateralists pulled a similar trick during the 1970s-80s when Americans workers grew concerned over Japan’s unfair trading practices). They set him up for this up weeks ago by demanding that he talk about the virus in a way we have never before talked about virus, by avoiding reference to it by its origins.

Rank and file progressives are out of touch with reality. But the work they’re doing with their accusations of racism has a function, namely to marginalize those who raise questions about a totalitarian regime that the transnational elite counts among its partners in the global network of banks and corporations, a structure that is in its fundamental character set against the interests of working people.

Jiang is also female, which is also being leveraged against Trump. He’s a sexist. Indeed, Joe Biden must be elected president whether he pushes a staff member against a wall and forcibly inserts his fingers into her vagina because Trump is a sexist. That’s Trump Derangement Syndrome.

I remember as a kid that we said we were striving to overcome racism because it divided the people. But the establishment realized that dividing the people this way was too good of an idea to let it go. So they kept it going. The New Civil Rights is about keeping racial antagonisms going, leveraging them as a weapon to wield against ideological enemies. And Trump is the ideological enemy of the moment. But Trump is, of course, the face of populism in the moment. Populism must be stopped. That’s how somebody like Adam Schiff can persuade half of Congress to impeach and vote to remove the president. The people narrowly avoided the overturning of a fair and democratic election. They do not intend to allow four more years of this.

In this farewell address, Dwight D. Eisenhower, two-term President of the United States, and Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force in the European theater in the great war against Fascism, said the following:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. 

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Many of you will recognize these words. Particularly those of you on the libertarian left who are concerned with the concentration of power in the military-industrial complex. Much as been made of them. However, less has been made of the words that immediately followed:

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

We have become Eisenhower’s worst fears. Enabled by progressivism, the technocracy has won. Science and technology are now concentrated in the hands of a vast corporate power, the media mouthpieces of this small network of corporations running interference by projecting an official scientific outlook while marginalizing those doing the important work in science: dissenting from doctrine.

Famously, albeit years late, and too partisan for my tastes, political theorist Sheldon Wolin, in Democracy Incorporated, described our situation as “inverted totalitarianism,” a managed and illiberal democracy, run by corporations, economic concerns trumping all other considerations.

Richard Grossman, director of Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy, understood inverted totalitarianism as progressivism’s triumph over populism, the latter an attempt to bring power back to the people, to make government accountable to concerns closer to them. Grossman lay out his argument in several talks available on the Internet (“Defining the Corporation, Defining Ourselves” and “Challenging Corporate Law and Lore”). In his account, progressivism, its institutionalization totalized under the Roosevelt Administration in the crisis of depression and war, vanquished populism; or, more accurately, banished it to conservative circles, and with it labor democracy. This was the roots of the war on labor and the left Robert F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson pursued in earnest, laying the groundwork for the aggressive transnationalization of the corporate establishment, successive administrations moving farm and factory overseas and drawing cheap labor here to replace American workers, ceding national sovereignty to the international order of financial innovators. In a word, globalization.

As Grossman points out, not even the monarchs of feudalist and early capitalist period tolerated corporate power when it threaten sovereignty. Indeed, as Grossman tells us, corporations held power under absolutism, as well, but it was power delegated by the monarch. Corporations that exceeded their authority were called before the king to be reprimanded, the recalcitrant not dressed down but dismantled, their charters revoked. This is why Thomas Jefferson, a primary author of the American Republic, said of banks and corporations that “the selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.” His conclusion from the observation: “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” The “aristocracy of moneyed corporations” is an accurate description of power in the present-day state of affairs.

In theory, corporations are animals of the state. But, unlike their predecessors, states are now the servants of corporate power. Corporations have not only captured politics. They have captured science. And they relentlessly distort its assumptions, methods, and findings.

So we see a thing like the permanent-military complex come into existence in the post-WWII period, fully arrived in Eisenhower’s day. The trepidation in his words telling us that he didn’t see it coming or he was keen on convincing himself that its coming lay in the future. In the latter, he could then could wax noble in his farewell and warn of its coming, while absolving himself of the tyranny realized in his day, that emerged under his watch, masking his failure to stop it. Frankly, he looks haunted in that video.

Whether Eisenhower saw it in real time, C. Wright Mills saw it clearly in the moment. In The Causes of World War Three, written in 1959, he wrote:

The atrocities of The Fourth Epoch are committed by men as “functions” of a rational social machinery—men possessed by an abstracted view that hides from them the humanity of their victims and as well their own humanity. The moral insensibility of our times was made dramatic by the Nazis, but is not the same lack of human morality revealed by the atomic bombing of the peoples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And did it not prevail, too, among fighter pilots in Korea, with their petroleum-jelly broiling of children and women and men? Auschwitz and Hiroshima—are they not equally features of the highly rational moral-insensibility of The Fourth Epoch? And is not this lack of moral sensibility raised to a higher and technically more adequate level among the brisk generals and gentle scientists who are now rationally—and absurdly—planning the weapons and the strategy of the third world war? These actions are not necessarily sadistic; they are merely businesslike; they are not emotional at all; they are efficient, rational, technically clean-cut. They are inhuman acts because they are impersonal.

Weber might have written these words. Indeed, he did write these words in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published in 1905:

Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. Today the spirit of religious asceticism—whether finally, who knows?—has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs.

Military discipline is the ideal model for the modern capitalist factory…. organizational discipline in the factory has a completely rational basis. With the help of suit-able methods of measurement, the optimum profitability of the individual worker is calculated like that of any material means of production. On this basis, the American system of “scientific management” triumphantly proceeds with its rational conditioning and training of work performances, thus drawing the ultimate conclusions from the mechanization and discipline of the plant. The psycho-physical apparatus of man is completely adjusted to the demands of the outer world, the tools, the machines—in short, it is functionalized, and the individual is robbed of his natural rhythm as determined by his organism; in line with the demands of the work procedure, he is attuned to a new rhythm though the functional specialization of muscles and through the creation of an optimal economy of physical effort

This whole process of rationalization, in the factory as elsewhere, and especially in the bureaucratic state machine, parallels the centralization of the material implements of organization in the hands of the master. Thus, discipline inexorably takes over ever larger areas as the satisfaction of political and economic needs is increasingly rationalized. This universal phenomenon more and more restricts the importance of charisma and of individually differentiated conduct.

Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, published in 1963, analyses the situation of a man who was merely “doing his job” and “obeyed orders,” that he “obeyed the law.” The work covers the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi found guilty of war crimes and hanged in 1962. Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Holocaust, had tasked Eichmann with managing the logistics of transporting Jews from the ghettos to the extermination camps during the Judeocide. Eichmann carried his task forward with no inconsiderable success. His ambitions, Arendt argues, were more bureaucratic than ideological.

Noam Chomsky, author of the landmark Manufacturing Consent, put this well in his notorious debate with William F. Buckley on Firing Line in 1969:

A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe such events. I think that’s more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity. And therefore I think that it’s, in some sense, the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and violent.

One of the benefits of listening to voices who see things clearly and see things coming is that they give us a perspective beyond the consciousness that blinds us to the enslaving structures that produce that consciousness. It may be the case that in a future world we won’t be able to see the reality in front of us. For many people, that world is the present one. Contemporary progressivism is a clinic in false consciousness. The scientific-industrial complex, its latest manifestation the medical-industrial complex, has become an ideological force shaping our worldview. It appears to be even more destructive than the military-industrial complex, which of course it includes, but taken on its own reasonably reassessed as a tick of American-style rationalization. The scientific-industrial complex has overtaken the world.

This essay is a follow up to a recent blog entry: Science and Conspiracy: COVID-19 and the New Religion. I encourage you to read it.

This essay is not about Ahmaud Arbery’s shooting death at the hands of Gregory McMichael and his son Travis McMichael. The men have been charged with murder and a court will likely hear the case. This essay is about the way a collection of moral entrepreneurs are plugging the shooting into a narrative they portrays contemporary America as a country where anti-black prejudice is ubiquitous. From that standpoint, Arbery’s death is not just the homicidal actions of two white men with guns in a pickup truck, but the result of a pervasive white supremacy that puts all black men at special risk for racist violence.

There was a time in our country where such a generalization would hold up under scrutiny. The literature on the history of racism and lynching in the United States is extensive. I have contributed to this literature in an essay published in The Journal of Black Studies, “Explanation and Responsibility: Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide,” and an empirical article in Crime, Law, & Social Change, “Race and Lethal Forms of Social Control: A Preliminary Investigation into Execution and Self-Help in the United States, 1930-1964.” I also blogged about this on Freedom and Reason, in the entry “Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide.” But the narrative no longer holds up and I’ve become increasingly troubled by the ideological practice of selecting and amplifying events in ways that distort the relative risks black people face in America.

Before moving to a discussion of why the narrative is not only wrong but harmful to black Americans and the general interests of the American working class regardless of race, I want to clarify the matter of appropriate and inappropriate resort to abstraction. Race is a social invention constructed from ancestry. Racism is the ideology in which phenotypic or physically apparent variation are said to be meaningfully organized into groupings called “races.” Since there is no underlying biological truth to this claim, supposing race is a real thing commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness or reification. However, aggregate statistics on demographic and behavioral characteristics can provide evidence for meaningful generalizations. Whereas it is inappropriate to substitute an abstraction, such as white person, for a concrete individual identified as white and attempt to make all whites responsible for that individual’s actions (there is no empirical basis for such a generalization), it is appropriate to look at the demographic patterns of crime and violence to determine the relative risk individuals with certain identities face. The progressive left elevates the inappropriate resort to generalization to the level of truth, while dismissing the appropriate use of abstraction as so much noise. This is emblematic of the postmodernist sensibility that underpins identity politics.

Let’s look at appropriate abstractions. Blacks constitute approximately 12 percent of the US population. Black males are less than half that percentage. Yet black males are responsible for more than half of all homicides that occur in the United States. The victims of black male homicide are overwhelmingly other black males. The intraracial character of crime is typical across several Index Crime categories identified in the Uniform Crime Report published by the FBI. While the UCR has been problematic in the past, it is accurate with respect to the most serious crimes. Moreover, overrepresentation of blacks in serious crime is also found in the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).

These facts are not controversial in terms of their broad accuracy of representing actual phenomena. To the extent that there is interracial homicide, white people are more likely to be victimized by a black perpetrator than a black person is to be victimized by a white perpetrator. When it comes to robbery, to take another serious crime of violence, black males are much more likely to target white victims than the other way around. The brute fact is that black males are overrepresented in serious crime. Indeed, over half of all prisoners are violent offenders and their overrepresentation in our penitentiaries is explained by their overrepresentation in serious crime. (See “Mapping the Junctures of Social Class and Racial Caste: An Analytical Model for Theorizing Crime and Punishment in US History.”)

In sum, the facts do not support the claim that the greatest risk to black males are white people. Quite the contrary.

Moreover, the statistics do not support the claim that black men are more likely to be killed by police officers than a white man, a particular narrative Arbery’s death is (inappropriately) being leveraged to sustain (social media is flooded with memes of this character). See the work of Roland Fryer’s 2016 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.” See also my entry on this topic which summarizes these and others findings: “Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect.”

So while it is true that the police are more likely to interact with black civilians, as pointed out by Kevin App and colleagues in Pulled Over, in part because blacks are more likely to be engaged in activities that draw the attention of the police, police are loathe to shoot black males. What we are seeing presently in the moral panic about the shooting is not based on a legitimate resort to evidence, but the agenda of progressives trying to resurrect Black Lives Matter in an election year, for political purposes, a movement that was from the beginning based on a myth about interracial violence present-day America. Whites are being made out to be folk devils sui generis.

This agenda has been given a powerful voice in the figure of Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a possible Vice-Presidential candidate to run alongside former Vice-President and long-time Senator Joe Biden (who has a troubled history with respect to race relations), who accuses President Donald Trump of using rhetoric that green-lights racists. Bottoms claims that the lynching of Arbery (and I will leave to one side conceptual quibbles about how lynching should be defined) can be traced back to Washington.

“With the rhetoric that we hear coming out of the White House,” she said on CNN’s State of the Union, “I think many who are prone to being racist are given permission to do it in an overt way that we otherwise would not see in 2020.” The connection between Trump’s rhetoric and Gregory McMichael and his son Travis McMichael is a claim made without any evidence. I could not with any integrity pin this shooting on Trump. I suspect that he is as horrified by the video as the average person. But readers should note that Bottoms is in the same breath acknowledging that what happened to Arbery is so rare that it would likely not have happened without a Donald Trump presidency. Just leave out the bit about Donald Trump and Bottoms is on solid ground.

What Bottoms’ admission means is that those journalists who make this shooting out to be representative of race relations in America, especially those progressives who have taken to social media to once more raise the alarm about white privilege, are wrong to leverage such a horrific event in this way, even if the perpetrators acted with racist motive. This is not the America of the post-Reconstruction period. It is a very different America, an America where the risk to blacks by white racist violence is vanishingly small, extraordinary in its occurrence.

Indeed, the risk to blacks in America is far greater in the black community, where structural inequalities and cultural attitudes have disorganized society and made violent crime an ordinary fact of daily life. Rather than dealing with this reality, the progressive left, while skirting the problem of social class (which I will come to), reflexively strives to portray whites as the singular cause of the problems of the black community, a claim for which there is no evidence, wrenching out of context a rare event and misrepresenting it as a sign of an epidemic of white supremacist violence enabled by the original sin of white privilege. This claim has the character of theological truth, This is not our reality.

Ahmaud Arbery’s shooting death at the hands of the McMichaels is a terrible thing. The justice system is working as it should in bringing them up on charges of murder (although it may have hesitated when it shouldn’t have). But Arbery’s death cannot (or at least should not) be purposed in the way pundits, politicians, and progressive memes suggest. More than the inappropriate resort to generalization, to only care about the victims of homicidal violence when their perpetrators are white or police officers suggests a genuine lack of concern about the fate of black males in American society.

All this indicates that black homicide victims are only important when they can be used to perpetuate a political agenda that claims that the United States is a society that operates fundamentally on the basis of white supremacy, an objectively false narrative. And it must be pointed out that the exploitation of Arbery’s deaths for these purposes functions to further divide the proletariat by race, disorganizing the solidarity the working class so desperately needs in its struggle against capitalism. What lies ultimately at the heart of the urban violence that disproportionately harms black Americans is a social system that is inadequate to human rights and needs. Progressivisms appear to exist today only to disrupt our consciousness of this reality.

The divisive piece is why Joe Biden has taken up the agenda. His pandering has a grand purpose. Arbery’s shooting “resonates in so many ways across threads of our history into the present day,” he said at a virtual roundtable with black lawmakers, pulling the past too easily into the present. “By now many of us have seen that harrowing footage of Ahmaud Arbery out on a jog on a beautiful day in February in Florida, in Georgia, shot down in cold blood, essentially lynched before our very eyes, 2020 style.” It’s as if only the year has changed. Biden noted that the family deserved justice before adding: “But our nation deserves it as well. We need to reckon with this, this goes on. These vicious acts call to mind the darkest chapters of our history.” 

“This goes on.” Let those words roll around in your brain. It does not go on. Those dark chapters are in our past. We have reckoned with this. Decades ago. To be sure, our history is undeniable to those prepared to admit to it (count me among them), but it is also undeniable that the supremacy of whiteness is not our present or our future. To make this murder out as an indictment of America not only sustains a false narrative about our country, it denies the progress we have made as a country. That we overcame white supremacy is a sign of what is right about the American project. Denying this accomplishment drives a wedge between the working people of this country on the basis of race, which, when you strip everything else away, is what racism was about in the first place.

As with the press conference with doctors at Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield, California on April 24, 2020, Plandemic, a documentary about the COVID-19 hysteria, is being pummeled by the running dogs and useful idiots of the medial-industrial complex. As with the doctor’s press conference, YouTube (along with Facebook and other social media platforms) quickly moved to censor the documentary. While this blog entry, as was my blog entry on the Bakersfield doctors, is inspired by the media frenzy and social media action surrounding the documentary, I will not pursue here a defense of Plandemic. I simply cannot pursue that matter right now given other commitments. However, I will take this opportunity to make some points about how the rhetoric and status of science are used by corporate propagandists and their lackeys to discredit and marginalize those who raise objections to the medical-industrial complex.

This would be the case regardless of whether Plandemic was correct in whole or part. It was not unexpected that Plandemic would trigger pro-vaccine zealots. The memes and takedowns had to come fast and furious on social media. It’s a reflex. As some readers will surely already know, one of the targets of pro-vaccine zealotry has been lawyer and environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The true believers go after him the same way industries across the spectrum went after Ralph Nader, Rachel Carson (remember how the chemical manufacturers came after her?), and anybody else who stood and stands up to corporate power and the corruption of conflict of interests. It doesn’t matter whether RFK, Jr. or Dr. Judy Mikovits, the research scientist featured prominently in Plandemic, is a crank. RFK, Jr. is routinely painted as an “antivaxer” even while he is pro-vaccine. “I am for vaccines,” RFK, Jr. said in an interview with Science. “I am pro-vaccine. I had all my kids vaccinated. I think vaccines save lives.” But if you don’t swallow hook, line, sinker the claim of the pharmaceutical oligopoly, then you are an “antivaxer” even when you vaccinate your own children. Just like if you question what chemicals we should inject into our environment and bodies and with what processes we manufacture these chemicals you suffer from a psychiatric disorder called “chemophobia.”

Why does the truth matter so little to these people? Because it is the demand that the medical-industrial complex change the way it does business that is at issue not vaccine safety. Vaccine safety doesn’t matter to the industry. They are protected from liability anyway (learn about the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and its billions of payouts bankrolled by your tax dollars). What matters is the billions in profit vaccines generate. Its about the shareholders not the stakeholders. Given the number of viruses in the world, the sky is the limit in terms of large and sustainable profits for the investor class. So industry propagandists recode skepticism as paranoia. This is a standard method for shutting down critical thinking. This intervention has been most powerfully effective among progressives, who operate with a profound double consciousness concerning regulatory institutions such as the CDC and the FDA. On the one hand, we must uncritically accept their claims regarding pharmaceuticals, while acknowledging that the Washington establishment is beholden to the industries polluting land, air, and waters, what is called regulatory capture. Progressives are horrified by the FDA and USDA regulation of the meat industry, to take the obvious example. Pharmaceuticals? Meh.

So here we are with folks in a frenzy on social media admonishing us in the most strident terms imaginable to “trust science.” Be a good dog. Don’t spit in the fan. But, hell, a good scientist doesn’t even trust himself. That’s why a scientist never claims to have proven anything and why he gets up everyday trying to disprove his claims and the claims of others. Faith in science is why the history of science is littered with the corpses of stupid ideas—and the human and other victims of policies and practices based on those ideas (not to mention the research subjects upon whom those ideas were “established”). They never talk about how scientists as human beings are status and wealth seekers with massive egos, insatiable appetites, and destructive ambitions. They never talk about how industry pulls eager scientists into their money-making web, directs their research, and corrupts them.

Have you noticed that most of the people saying “trust science” are not scientists themselves? How they will mock those who also aren’t scientists for thinking they know science when they themselves are not scientifically literate but are absolutely sure they know which scientist is right? How they don’t usually even spend any time actually looking at the science in question? Rather they appeal to some authority who “confirms” their opinion, opinion generated by partisan ideological commitments. Or they just attack those whose claims do not align with their opinions with memes and ridiculous analogies, even when their targets are scientists. The “new skepticism” on the progressive left is not skepticism at all, but a mob who finds (more like fed) experts in support of their views and then promote them as if they represent the One True Science. Actual skeptics become conspiracy theorists, cranks, quacks, and wing nuts—like the person who might ask the Witchfynder General whether the Malleus Maleficarum is the best way of dealing with persons with disturbed psyches. Or, for that matter, whether the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association is. Watch out for pitchforks and torches while they gaslight you.

If two groups of scientists make competing claims, who are you supposed to trust? Of course you go with the group of scientists who are saying what you wish to be true. Wrong. Confirmation bias. You educate yourself and study the science. Or you tell the truth: “I don’t know.” Or, even better, be honest and say, “I don’t care to know. I only care to believe this because it serves some agenda I may or may not know I serve.” Appeal to authority is not science. Experts make stupid claims—often claims that they don’t even believe. Take Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College (please!). This isn’t the first time this man has been spectacularly wrong. “But he is an expert!” Yeah, so were the monsters who performed lobotomies. Thanks for the global economic meltdown, Neil. Hope your trysts were satisfactory (I hope she or her family are not at risk from your COVID-19 infection).

The appeal to authority is a faith-based exercise. Cherry picking scientists you want to tell you to be afraid so you hide in your basement is like relying on clergy for doctrine and guidance. COVID-19 is like the devil. What does Donald Trump call it? “The invisible enemy”? Whatever we think we can trust in the world, the last trustworthy practice is that which is based in faith. Yet, after centuries of Enlightenment, people are treating science like religion. And since there are plainly different churches on the terrain of this picture of science, scientific debate becomes a sectarian affair. Each have their own clergy. But only one of them has the truth. And that is why the zealots want social media corporations to censor information. They have to smash the heretics. And they have the corporations and the assets class at their back.

So it is that you either you believe that the virus was the result of a person in eating an infected bat at a wet market in Wuhan China (the theory the Communist Party promotes) or you believe it was a bioweapon engineered by the Chinese government (which the Chinese Communist Party denies). Are these the only two options available?

We might as well just toss away the first option without much trouble. The first documented cases weren’t found in people eating bats. Bat-eating proles represent the Chinese Communist Party slagging the average Chinese person, whom they loathe (you do not deny people freedom if you love them). The authorities bleached the wet market in question so it’s not like you can falsify the claim anyway. It’s a stupid theory.

As for second option, why would the virus necessarily need to be created in a lab? Is it not possible that the biotech labs in Wuhan working with coronaviruses, in particular SARS type coronaviruses (this one is SARS-CoV-2, the successor of SARS-CoV), had an accident? Why, in 2018, were US science diplomats sent on repeated visits to the lab working on this reporting back to US State Department of serious problems with the work being conducted there, especially around safety? (State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses, The Washington Post.) Why would the chief researcher at the Wuhan Institute of VirologyWuhan, Shi Zhengli, tell Scientific America that, when the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention called her in to look at samples of the virus, she wondered, “Could they have come from our lab?” (“How China’s ‘Bat Woman’ Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus.” She changed her story to say she knew it could not possibly have come from her lab.) Why would this researcher suspect the virus came from her lab if her lab wasn’t working with SARS-Cov viruses? Why would they call her in if they assumed that it was possible that it did? Why did the international community come together in 2014 to emplace a moratorium on gain-of-function research when it learned that researchers were altering potentially lethal viruses to become infectious in humans? And why would the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci at the heart of this research, announce in 2017 that they would resume funding gain-of-function experiments involving, among other things, SARS coronavirus. (“Ban on gain-of-function studies ends,” The Lancet.) Is it troubling that Fauci is so sure that this virus did not come from a lab? Is it not true that the SARS-Cov virus from 2003 has on more than one occasion escaped containment and sickened individuals? All these questions are based not on conspiracy but on facts. All these questions are simply matters of record turned into questions. Does anybody really believe that the Chinese Communist Party intends to abide by international law? The CCP is the modern-day equivalent of the Nazi Party. They put people in concentration camps and harvest organs from prisoners and political enemies. It appears that blind trust in science begets blind truth in communists. But why is the United States taxpayer funding research in knowingly unsafe labs in China working with SARS viruses?

So how about a third option? All the evidence suggests that this came from a lab accident that the CCP tried to cover up, thus allowing the virus to escape China and infect the world. This is branded a “conspiracy theory.” Why is challenging the official narrative of the Chinese Communist Party and the scientists in their employ a conspiracy theory? (By the way, there are conspiracies and one can have theories about them. Ask any prosecutor who has works a criminal conspiracy case.) Whose side are people on? The people of the world, which includes the Chinese people, or the Chinese Communist Party?

As for Plandemic and the people asking how to stop it, you don’t stop it—you rebut it. And you do so in a sober and charitable manner. Like a good scientist. That’s the way things work in a free and open society. Totalitarian societies like China remove posts and videos. Free societies don’t. I understand why Forbes and other corporate state propaganda units push totalitarianism. Liberty is for them contingent on their interests. I know progressives admire China’s approach. For them, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is an instruction manual (sorry to be cliché). But this is America. Wave the freedom flag high. Trust the proles to figure it out. Stopping being such an elitist snob.

This is grim work, but it has to be done. Looking at deaths per million, from all causes, and calculating deaths in excess of the average deaths for a given period, one finds that, whereas healthcare services in Great Britain are reporting more than 32,000 deaths in that country over the initial six-week period, the metric measuring all deaths over the same period finds around 11,000 deaths above the normal, roughly two-thirds that number, assuming all excess deaths are attributed to COVID-19. These deaths are disproportionately occurring in long-term care facilities. In fact there is a record number of deaths in long-term care facilities against comparable periods. One finds a similar pattern in Sweden.What this suggests is that a significant proportion of deaths that are occurring are being attributed by healthcare services to COVID-19, deaths that otherwise would be attributed to something else, typically influenza. But, strangely, influenza deaths have come to a sudden halt and now most pneumonia cases are being attributed COVID-19.

We use deaths per million because that allows us to know if something unusual is occurring in a population and to then look at what might explain excess deaths. This is why demography is so important and why reporting by bureaucracies are problematic (for example, bureaucracies are subject to definition creep). Average deaths in comparable periods do not normally vary much without extraordinary cause. If 30,000 people die in the United Kingdom from a single cause, then that is an unusual occurrence that would be reflected in deaths per million. We would see approximately 30,000 excess deaths for the period. But excess deaths are one third that figure for the same time frame. We could assume that 20,000 deaths were somehow avoided to allow room for 20,000 COVID-19 deaths. But why would that be the case? Why are we expecting there to be 20,000 fewer deaths in this time frame? It was not the lockdown that was implemented on March 23 that kept people out of their cars, for example. At best that would have only a minimal impact. If we are reasonable, then we consider that 20,000 deaths are being attributed to COVID-19 that would otherwise be attributed to another cause or other causes, but very likely influenza. In other words the 30,000 being attributed to a cause are consuming a large proportion of normal deaths in the comparable period.

So, suppose in a normal year in the UK there are 20,000 deaths from influenza. These are pneumonia cases typically explained by influenza. Without blood serum tests, it is difficult to distinguish between different causes of pneumonia. But health services usually chalk up those deaths to influenza. Deaths from influenza are relatively stable over time. Suppose that we find in a comparable period a year with 10,000 excess deaths. We look at them and see they are pneumonia deaths. We could say that this was a bad influenza year. But let’s say they are COVID-19. But the NHS says there are 30,000 deaths from COVID-19. That not only means that 10,000 of those excess deaths from pneumonia are from COVID-19 (and we are assuming this), but that there were 20,000 fewer pneumonia deaths from influenza. There is no reason to believe this is true. It would contradict the standard epidemiological models that successfully predict the influenza burden every year.

Here’s a dramatic analogy to illustrate the point. Suppose the world alleges a genocide occurred in a communist country taking 3 millions lives. Suppose we look at deaths per million and find an excess of 100-200 thousand deaths. We would not suspect that this was just an odd year in which millions of expected deaths did not occur in order to allow for 3 million deaths by genocide. Maybe there was large-scale killing. One-two hundred thousand is not a small number of deaths. And in this case at the hands of human agents. But it wasn’t 3 million people who were killed. We would reasonably suspect that normal deaths—say, from poverty and hunger—are being redefined as deaths by genocide that in fact had other causes. Why would we redefine deaths from other causes to represent deaths by genocide? Politics. Ideology. 

* * *

Obviously I’m down with worker protections. But the threats made by teachers unions in the United States to keep schools closed is absurd. Protect the vulnerable. Let the rest of humanity go about their business. I heard an idea being floated that we should test students every week and do contract tracing. Anybody who suggests that’s feasible, let alone reasonable, is talking out of their ass. It’s as if people have collectively forgotten basic scientific understanding and moved to full-on stupid panic. How could anybody with any experience in a public education setting believe that you could contain the spread of a virus or any other crud short of shuttering the schools? Children are viral and bacterial factories. If the virus is so awful, then end public education now. But if it’s so awful that we had to shut down society, then we should never re-open society because the virus is still just as awful. 

Except that it’s not. For those people who are not in the high risk categories, this illness is rarely fatal. If there is a fatality in a healthy person, then one should look very carefully into the patient’s history to find out if there was an underlying condition. Half the people who get this virus are asymptomatic. In around 90% of the people who get this virus, it is, at most, mild. The majority or large pluralities of deaths from this virus are occurring in long-term care facility among those who are severely ill. Sorry to be blunt about it but many of these individuals would have died this year or next year anyway from the conditions that made COVID-19 dangerous for them—especially in light of the inadequate facilities housing them. We have never treated a virus this way. And there have been viruses to come down the pike that have been a lot worse.

During the 1957-58 influenza pandemic (H2N2), 116,000 Americans dead from the Shanghai flu—out of a population of 175 million. During the 1968-69 influenza pandemic (H3N2), 100,000 dead Americans from the Hong Kong flu—out of a population of 200 million. During the 2019-20 COVID-19 pandemic, 38,000 Americans dead from the Wuhan virus (so far)—out of a population of 328 million. These are all CDC numbers. The fact is that SARS-CoV-2 is not the worst virus to hit America since the Spanish flu (the H1N1 strain that is still with us). Not even close. Deaths per millions statistics with the Shanghai and Hong Kong flu seasons were much, much higher than the deaths per millions statistics for the Wuhan virus. 

I was not alive in 1957, but I was in 1968. I don’t remember hearing anything about the Hong Kong flu. Had we gone through a panic like the one we’re going through right now, I would surely remember it.

* * *

This virus is generally safe among healthy adults and children. There have probably been at most around a thousand deaths in those 45 years of age or younger. At most only around 100 deaths for those 25 and younger. Those persons who do die in these age ranges likely have underlying conditions and immunocompromised systems. Even those over the age of 45 are very unlikely to die from this disease without other health problems. This virus rarely kills on its own. There is a heightened risk for death among the elderly. But those who are in nursing homes and assisted living facilities are especially at risk for death. Only about 5% of the elderly are in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Yet in the state of Pennsylvania 70% of those who died from COVID-19 were in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. There are similar numbers across the country. This is horrifying.

There are two big scandals surrounding the COVID-19 situation. First there is the scandal of locking down society when the vast majority of population is not at risk of serious problems from this virus. That’s the really big scandal. We shut down society for a virus that isn’t particularly lethal. The second scandal is how horrible our nursing homes and assisted living facilities are. We need a congressional investigation into the conditions in which our most vulnerable populations live. And we need to hold the administrators of these facilities criminally responsible for large scale death among these populations. The very groups that are institutions are supposed to look out for the most utterly failed to keep those populations safe. Clearly locking down society did not protect the most vulnerable among us.

* * *

You can’t run an epic fear campaign this hard and for this long and not expect to see dramatic effects. A poll found that 8 in 10 respondents said they would not feel comfortable dining in at a restaurant, and two-thirds wouldn’t want to shop in a clothing store. They’re being told by authorities that they shouldn’t feel safe in these situations and it has worked. Rationally, they are in no appreciably greater danger in these places, so it is not a matter of the public coming to this position based on reason or experience. The fear has been manufactured. This has been the most successful propaganda campaign since the crime wave hysteria in the post-WWII period. The public appears well-conditioned to accept totalitarianism. 

US payrolls fell by more than 20 million jobs last month. That’s a decade’s worth of job gains wiped out in few weeks. The economic consequences of this will likely last for a decade or more. The government will not subsidize millions of workers to shelter in place. Eventually, people will have to come out of their caves and go back to work. Millions have lost savings, health care, homes, and memories. The attempt to mitigate a virus has produced an unmitigated societal disaster.

* * *

Here’s a few things that I’m going to say right now to get it out of the way. I will not get a vaccine for this—if they develop a vaccine. Get jabbed if you want. I’m not getting jabbed. If that means that I get passed over for opportunities in life, then consider my refusal and suffering a protest against irrational and oppressive demands. I will not wear a mask unless I am around vulnerable people in close quarters. In other words, I will wear a mask in situations where I would wear a mask anyway. And then not for my safety, but for the safety of the vulnerable. I will take no special precautions in my social activities for this virus. I am not going to treat my brothers and sisters as disease vectors. I will not support policies that stigmatize people for carrying this virus. Social distancing and social isolation are cruel and unusual and reveal the pathology of safetyism, a crippling new religion of fear of the normal. The mask, the isolation, the mocking, shaming—these are rituals to reinforce the myth that social life of dangerous. It makes a fetish of mere existence.

The CDC announced today that 37,308 have died in the United States from COVID-19, a far cry from more nearly 70 thousand claimed by the media. These CDC numbers, based on death certificates, are updated through May 1, week ending April 25 (from February 1). The number one will find in a Google search, which presently stands at 68,276, are from the World Health Organization, the running dogs of the Chinese Communist Party.

This virus is not as deadly as they told us even if we calculate the numbers using confirmed cases. For those who are not very old or who suffer from a handful of health conditions, this virus is not very deadly at all. Those younger than 45 years of age, have seen fewer than 1000 deaths from this virus. That’s a death rate of 0.08% (assuming 1.18 million confirmed cases). If you look into those cases you will no doubt find a condition which made those persons vulnerable. For those younger than 25 years of age, there have been fewer than 100 deaths associated with this virus. That’s a death rate of 0.008%, a vanishingly small number. Again, there will be health problems that explain this. When you consider that the true number of cases is between 25 and 85 times higher than the number of confirmed cases, then the death rate is many times lower (I true you can do math). These deaths, as tragic as they are, do not justify all of the harm to health, jobs, security, and well-being, that this shut down has brought about.

I’ve been saying from the beginning that we should’ve protected the vulnerable and let this virus burn through the population. We should do that now. We should not go a day longer with the lockdown. The evidence is clear that the policies pursued by the federal government and the various states represent a monumental error. We are all paying dearly for this mistake.

* * *

As expected, those who are confronted with these numbers thank the lockdown for “fattening the curve.” But what is the evidence that the lockdown saved lives? Hospitals across the country laid off employees because they canceled appointments to make room for a wave of patients who never materialized. Hospitals have ventilators coming out of their ears. Only in a few places were hospitals overwhelmed, and that wasn’t because of the virus but because of mismanagement and ruthless cost cutting to maximize salaries of administrators, doctors, and shareholders. Flatten the curve is not science. It’s ideology.

However, social distancing probably accomplished this: keeping the population of health persons from developing herd immunity, which means we’re going to have to suffer this virus in the future with a greater force than we would have had we done what I recommended.

For our awareness of the disease until mid-March, there were fewer than fifty deaths. For a pneumonia season, COVID-19 was sharply truncated arriving when it did (likely from a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China). Next fall we’re going to have a full season of COVID-19, and we will confront the virus without having acquired herd immunity. Moreover, there will be no vaccine (there may never be). So to the extent that one could say that we saved lives this time around, when we weigh that against the health, security, and well-being of people next time around, we see that the policies pursued still amount to a monumental error. In an previous blog entry, I called it a pyrrhic victory.

Had we let healthy adults get this virus, those who are vulnerable would enjoy more protection, because there would be fewer carriers of the disease. We’re told that opponents of the lockdown want the vulnerable to die. But it’s actually the opposite of what they claim. If healthy adults get the virus, they will likely have an immunity to it. Since most people don’t know they have it, fewer people with it means fewer transmissions of the disease. Herd immunity reduces community spread.

On top of more COVID-19, we will likely be mired in an economic depression, which means that we will be severely hampered in dealing with this disease—and a myriad of other health matters—next fall. Real swift thinking there, flatten-the-curvers. Thanks for chucking basic biology out the window.

* * *

Re: this obnoxious claim that those who want to open society “want to kill grandma.” Here’s their dilemma. Approximately half a million people are killed every year in Europe from air pollution. Around 5 million people are killed globally annually because of air pollution. That number must be very great in America, as well, much greater than deaths from COVID-19 (and now even greater than when I put this challenge to Facebook’s fearmongering wokescolds on May 1). Deaths from air pollution are set to decline substantially because of the economic shutdowns across the globe. When the shutdowns are lifted, dirty economic activity will resume. Which means that the pollution that kills so many people will return and kill again.

Are those who argue that those who want to re-open the economy want to kill grandma with COVID-19 going to also argue that those who want to re-open the economy want to kill grandma with air pollution? Are they prepared to be consistent and argue that we should not reopen the economy because pollution has lethal consequences? Moreover, are they prepared to accept responsibility for the benefits of economic growth that has killed so many people in the past? After all they were prepared to tolerate tens of thousands of flu deaths every year for the sake of keeping society open. Why COVID-19 and not pollution? Why COVID-19 and not influenza?

* * *

This “flattening the curve” business is absurd even if limited to the claim that we didn’t want to overwhelm hospitals. You don’t close schools and shutter the economy to not overwhelm hospitals. Those populations are extremely unlikely to get sick from this virus. You want hospitals for people who need medical attention; you don’t cancel tests and procedures in anticipation of a crisis that, for most places, never occurred, nor was likely to occur based on what we were seeing. A lot of people saw their cancer go undiagnosed and grow during this period. Cancer and a lot of other medical conditions. There is no evidence that bottlenecks in our hospitals had anything to do with the virus. It had to do with the way the health care system operates. And then only in some places. That’s a scandal that the media should look into.

* * *

Among the left-liberals freaking over people protesting the lockdown, it makes sense that a population sheepishly submitting to extreme restrictions on the freedom of movement would be less inclined to defend other basic freedoms of citizens such as assembly and speech. The lockdown has been effective in entrenching a general authoritarian attitude among progressives. They see individuals with guns as an opportunity to trash liberty and validate their own authoritarian desire. The call for the Bill of Rights to be abrogated by the public health authorities.

This brand of authoritarian sentiment is all over social media. People are clamoring to not only have their own freedom stripped from them (and then glorify their sacrifice), but to see the freedom of everybody taken away. If this was the point of this exercise, then mission accomplished. We’re becoming Communist China. Of course, their authoritarian is qualified: those measures perceived as restricting those freedoms with which they identify, even if imaginary, are great injustices justifying protest. They just don’t think those who have a different point of view should have that same freedom.

COVID-19 doesn’t scare me. I’ve looked at the evidence and there’s nothing really extraordinary about this virus, certainly nothing that justifies the state’s response to it. we are plainly in the midst of mass hysteria. It’s the left-liberals and progressives who demand the shuttering of society, the radical curtailment of personal freedom, and the arbitrary violation of basic human rights, and shame of those who still wish to be free—they’re the terrifying element in all this. 

I might have expected that politicians would impose draconian measures amid a manufactured crisis. Those actions represent a long trend in the diminishment of freedom and democracy in America and around the world. Remember what we know: the world is governed by a corporate state apparatus that routinely dispenses with democratic principle and individual liberty. Now they’re using public health to justify totalitarian action. What can’t they justify with this new authority?

* * *

Finally, on this accusation of selfishness, I have an autoimmune disorder and two of the leading comorbidities that put me at special risk for serious complication from COVID-19 and a host of other diseases. I’m spring chicken, either. I would hate to think people would lose their jobs, homes, and savings on account of my personal circumstances. I don’t want my age or conditions to hurt or oppress others.

I wouldn’t care much for the wellbeing and freedom of others if I desired that they be shackled by my infirmities. I don’t like to shame people, but it’s a selfish way to think about one’s existence to think otherwise. Please don’t stay home or wear masks for my sake. Live your life. If you need my permission, then I’m giving it to you. But you really don’t need my permission. You need to get the government off your back. Liberty is the most precious thing in the world.

Remember, defending liberty is not a rightwing issue.

In this essay I take on the “debunking” claims surrounding the claims of Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Messihi of Accelerated Urgent Care, whose press conference was removed from YouTube for violating its community standards. Susan Wojcicki, CEO of that social media platform, announced on April 23, the day before Erickson and Messihi’s press conference was posted, “Anything that goes against WHO recommendations would be a violation of our policy and so remove is another really important part of our policy.” I will focus on the criticisms of Erickson’s arguments. They are often uncharitable, irrelevant, or wrong.

The alleged debunking is best described as the action of a fog machine. Because the video was widely shared and is particularly effective (and Erickson is a compelling figure), those who wish to keep alive the myth that COVID-19 is a unique threat to Americans and who insist, therefore, that extreme government measures of shelter-in-place, social distancing, and the wearing of masks are justified, recognize they need to delegitimize the messenger.

Of course, one may quibble with aspects of the claims made in the video. But highlighting the adversarial character of normal science is not debunking. Few studies are without criticism. Indeed, the frenzy of media claims that the doctors’ presentation have been debunked substitutes for any actual debunking. And while consumers of the articles and videos claiming to be debunking are distracted by this manufactured controversy, the antibodies studies that backup the doctors’ arguments are disappearing from the news cycle, hidden in the fog.

In fact, many the counterarguments to the claims in question don’t work. I show you why in this essay. I will trust readers to be familiar with the arguments. If it appears at any point that my characterization of a point amount to a straw man argument I am more than happy to make corrections.

First, I need to make sure readers understand the simple fact that the true number of cases is much higher than the number of confirmed cases. This is an uncontroversial fact in the scientific community even if the media continues to neglect or distort that fact. That means that the actual death rate is much lower than what the public is being told or led to believe. But the media continues to obscure this reality.

For example, a CNN article published today on the Michigan protests states: “More than 41,000 people in Michigan have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 3,789 have died, according to state health officials. Only two states have more coronavirus-related deaths.” Whenever the media state the figure this way alongside the death toll, they’re engaging in an exaggeration of the lethality of this virus. Putting it like this makes the death rate appear to be over 9 percent. They never do this with the flu. If they did, the death rate from the flu would be over 9 percent. That is revealing in itself. However, this is the correct way to put the statistic: “More than 41,000 people in Michigan have tested positive for the coronavirus.” It must be put this way because we know that many times the tested number have been infected with a virus.

What is the true prevalence of this virus? Here are scientific studies that address the matter:

• Just updated (April 30, 2020), researchers at Stanford University published a study, “COVID-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California,” that, using a sample of 3,324 specimens, weighted for population demographics, found that 2.8% of the county’s residents, that is 54,000 persons, have been infected with the COVID-19 virus. That is many more times the 1000 confirmed cases at the time of the survey (April 3-4). In other words, the actual prevalence of COVID-19 antibody was 54 times higher than the number of positive blood serum tests. The upward confidence bound found that it could be 85 times higher (or 4.2%).

• A study of Los Angeles County, conducted by the University of Sothern California, published on April 20, 2020, found that, an estimated approximately 4.1% of the county’s adult population, and possibly as many as 5.6%, had antibodies to the virus. That translates to approximately 221,000 to 442,000 adults in the county who have had the infection, an estimate is 28 to 55 times higher than the 7,994 confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported to the county by the time of the study in early April. The large number of participants were recruited using a database that is representative of the county population. “We haven’t known the true extent of COVID-19 infections in our community because we have only tested people with symptoms, and the availability of tests has been limited,” said lead investigator Neeraj Sood, a USC professor of public policy at USC Price School for Public Policy and senior fellow at USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. 

• A study of New York State residents found that 14.9% of people tested positive. In the New York City, 24.7% of have antibodies for the virus. The results of this study were announced by Governor Andrew Cuomo on April 23.

Any serious critique of the doctors at Accelerated Urgent Care would keep these numbers in mind. More than this, the principle of charity, if observed, would cite these studies in every communication about this case as supporting the doctor’s claims. Any decent human being, knowing the extent and depth of fear experienced over this virus would assure people that it is not nearly as dangerous as they have been led to believe or might have come to believe on their own without access to pertinent and accurate information. To fail to do these things is an intentional act to keep from the audience important information it needs to make a reasoned judgment. It is, in other words, propaganda.

It’s not as if we haven’t known this all along. Consider the writings of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the lead members of the  Trump Administration’s White House Coronavirus Task Force. For example, on February 28, 2020, in an editorial published in The New England Journal of Medicine, he writes, “On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%. In another article in the Journal, Guan et al. report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.”

Here are the main criticisms and my rebuttals:

• Random sampling is necessary to extrapolate in the manner Dr. Erickson extrapolates. His thousands of tests, encompassing half of the residents in the country he serves, finding that 6% of those tested had positive results, are not representative of the population. But do they need to be? It is not explained why if so. They are in line with the number of those who tested positive for antibodies in the other studies and these are representative. The critique deploys technical language to obscure the significance of the fact reported.

• The representativeness of the tests he administered is a bit of a red herring since Dr. Erickson relies on California state numbers available at the time for his primary extrapolation. These are big numbers. There were 33,865 positives from 280,900 blood serum tests in California at the time of the press conference. That means that 12% of cases tested positive. Critics say this is not random, either. But, again, does it need to be? What we should be emphasizing is that this is not the number of cases, but the number of positive tests. To repeat, the true prevalence of the disease is much higher, as the scientific studies cited earlier clearly show.

• Dr. Erickson performs the extrapolation using the population of the state of California (39,500,000), the number of positive tests, and the 1,227 deaths assigned to COVID-19 the time: 1,227/(0.12 x 39,500,000) = 0.00026 or 0.03%. He concludes that COVID-19 is not worse that influenza. Crucially, the tests are mostly those who are sick. Even without a random sample, it is a reasonable extrapolation; Erickson can be off by a lot and still have his argument. Do the calculations using the antibody tests cited above. We know from the antibodies studies in California that the rate of infection is between 28 and 85 times greater than what testing shows. For New York, the prevalence is even greater than Dr. Erickson’s extrapolations. The studies confirm the rough order of magnitude of his extrapolation.

• If these are sick people, two things follow: (a) they are sick from something else (like influenza); (b) the finding is a death rate is 0.03% among people sick with COVID-19. For (a), since most cases were not positive for SARS-CoV-2, many of those cases of flu-like illness are likely influenza. It would be much lower than this if all of those who are not sick but who are infected with the virus are considered. For (b), we know that, for the vast majority of people, the disease is asymptomatic or mild, estimated to be somewhere between 80 and 95% of cases. They generally aren’t tested. In all likelihood, his number is too conservative.

• Another complaint is that, without COVID-19, those with comorbidities would not have died. It is said that comorbidities merely help COVID-19 kill people. But many people die with COVID-19 not from it. The public is not told this obvious fact—and not because it is obvious. Most people who die from COVID-19, given risk of death in light of age and condition of health, will die this year or next year without COVID-19. Moreover, those likely to die with COVID-19 are not only at risk to die anyway from their ailments (sorry to be blunt), but, since they are not testing many of these patients, they can’t know if they died from influenza or a bacterial infection. We know from the tests that most sick people test negative for SARS-CoV-2, which means that what is sickening them is another pathogen, probably influenza (at least the CDC would have said so in another year), which has conveniently disappeared from the landscape. In other words, if a person have pneumonia, it may not by SARS-C0V-2 causing it. If they are on a ventilator, it is not be because they have COVID-19.

• Since the vast majority of healthy persons survive COVID-19, it is obviously not true that COVID-19 kills people with the certainty the government and media claim. A bullet to the head will very likely kill a healthy person. COVID-19 is very unlikely to kill a healthy person. This matters when we talk about causation. I say that to say this: that the comorbidities associated with death in suspected cases are common only means that these ailments are more likely to be the cause of death. The claim that if there were rare one could say COVID-19 isn’t what killed them, a critique one hears, is nonsensical. If these cormorbidities were rare, they would easily be ruled out as a cause of the death, since most people would die without them. But they don’t. So the argument is backwards.

• Dr. Erickson is criticized for saying that the death rate from the flu is the same. His claim is countered with studies showing an overall death rate from COVID-19 is higher than 0.03%. A typical account uses a widely accepted study from China showing that the death rate is 0.66% overall. That is higher than 0.03%. Interestingly, the estimates used in this study rely on undiagnosed cases, they are extrapolations, which, according to his critics, should disqualify it (which disqualifies much of what the CDC does—but then, the critics operate with a double consciousness on estimating virus cases). However, this statistic is revealing in that, while 0.66% is greater than 0.03%, it is much smaller than the case-fatality rates routinely cited or suggested by the media. And, by the way, the same study shows that the death rates for children 9 and younger is 0.0016%, while people over 80 years of age die at a rate of 7.8%. In other words, the death rate for healthy adults is much less than 0.66%. So is it worse than the flu? Maybe. But the point is that it is much less worse than the public is led to believe by government and media. Much, much less worse. In other words, it is not unusually deadly.

• Another criticism is that the claim that the failure of COVID-19 to kills massive numbers of people means the initial models were wrong does not take into account the impact of social distancing in changing those projections. But the claim that social distancing reduces deaths is not supported by the evidence. Governments and media outlets keep saying this, but they have no data to back up that claim. That chart we keep seeing with the trend lines is propaganda. All social distancing is likely doing is preventing the population from acquiring herd immunity. And that is a bad thing. Which is one of Erickson’s points about the problem with the lockdown. And he’s right. We need immunity for this thing. There is no vaccine and it will come back.

• Finally, there is a claim that, whether or not we think that COVID-19 is especially deadly, we are doubling deaths because COVID-19 piggybacks off of the flu and that, somehow, this is an important rebuttal to Dr. Erickson’s argument. It’s a red herring. But it does raise a problem for the pro-panic crowd. Flu deaths have been running over the last nine years at around 50 thousand annually. There is not much variation around mean in the long-term, but the last several years have been particularly bad at around 60 thousand. Yet, this year, the CDC says we’re done with flu deaths at 24 thousand. Just in time for COVID-19. There is no explanation for why deaths from the flu are so much less than they have been in past recent years. Moreover, there isn’t a doubling in pneumonia deaths, which is what we’re actually talking about (since most pneumonia deaths do not have an established cause). There is a greater number of deaths this year than last year, to be sure, but the CDC estimates that as many as 95 thousand people died in the 2017-18 flu season. So we are at this point pushing up against the 2017-2018 numbers, numbers that were regarded as so unremarkable that the media did not even bother to report them. And to stop you from asking why they simply say, “This is not the flu,” a true statement that is beside the point.

As I stated at the outset, the alleged debunking is best described as the action of a fog machine. It’s a propaganda campaign by desperate authoritarians. Because the video was widely shared and makes a compelling argument from a confident doctor, those with power and purchase who desire to keep the COVID-19 myth of extreme death going recognize they need to kill the messenger. YouTube did its part by making it difficult to see what Dr. Erickson actually argues by removing the video. So this has become something of a one-sided conversation. I am bringing the other side back into the debate.

It’s ironic that the public is asked to tolerate vaccine injuries among the few for the sake of the masses, by producing herd immunity, yet during the COVID-19 pandemic the masses are asked to forego herd immunity for the sake of a few. 

Before there was a vaccine for chicken pox many parents made sure their kids got it so that the risk to adults who had not gotten it would face less risk. And the parents benefitted, as well, as their immune systems got a boost. 

Chicken pox is not fun. And it’s not risk free. Some kids develop serious complications. But we were infected as kids because the disease was a lot more serious among adults. And not a few adults. Get it now so you don’t get it later. 

COVID-19, like influenza, is a risky proposition for older people. If we want to protect people in the future, then we need herd immunity to this disease now. We also need this now so people will be healthy to go about their lives. We live in an economy where we depend on people being at work. We need healthy children and adults to get this disease and carry the antibodies.

People like to come back and say that it is unclear that this disease produces antibodies. They add to the horror of the unknown about the virus when they say this. But why is this claim useful? Since the vast majority of people survive this infection—most don’t even know they have it—there is nothing to lose by treating it like other viruses.

I am continually amazed by the public policies of so many countries surrounding this event. The time to contain the virus was before it left central China. Once it was out, the only thing to do was to protect the vulnerable and let it blow through the population. We should not have closed down our schools.

It’s as if world governments acquired a strange tunnel vision. There was no thinking about the future. There was no big picture thinking. They forgot the basic science of infectious diseases. That we have immune systems.

Make sure to note this. Put it in your journal. It’s the left-liberals and progressives, those who claim to be the scientifically-minded ones, who make fun of conservatives, who got this the most wrong. They’re the ones on Facebook shaming people for not staying home or not wearing masks when they go out. They’re the ones who are demanding people sacrifice liberty for the sake of their poor understanding of science and penchant for overreacting to the realities of the world.

The news story, “Brown Count COVID-19 Cases Increase to 856 Amend Aggressive Testing at Plants,” is quite revealing even if it doesn’t mean to be. This is the buried headline in the story: “The rise in positive tests is attributed to aggressive testing.” Pay close now. “Brown County has received 2,200 testing kits from the state to use on workers at the meat packing facilities.” Paying attention?

The CDC did not provide the county with thousands of tests to conduct a scientific study of the county. Why? We can debate that, but this part is not debatable given everything we know and have known for weeks: if the CDC had mandated testing countywide we would “discover” that SARS-CoV-2 infection is not unique to these facilities. SARS-CoV-2 infection is everywhere. They’re now saying that it is likely that a billion people will be infected worldwide. Don’t panic. A recent tests of thousands of prisoners found thousands of prisoners have been infected and over 95 percent of them have no symptoms. The vast majority of people who have SARS-CoV-2 don’t even know they have it.

I’m a criminologist by trade and our discipline saw a very similar thing happen in the 1970s when more reporting and better record keeping—the reporting and record keeping used to produce the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) by the Federal Bureau of Investigations—produced a dramatic jump in crime rates, statistics that were then used by authorities to justify vastly expanding the carceral apparatus and warehousing millions of people.

The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), conducted by the United States Department of Justice, found the opposite trend during the same period. Why? Because the NCVS uses representative sampling and thus can be used to draw inferences about patterns in the population. It’s called science. The UCR, in contrast, is based on crimes reported to the police. Not science. It’s the difference between scientific polling and a website asking you to vote for the greatest heavy metal band.

There is a direct analogy here with the way the COVID-19 moral panic is being represented. Those representing the facts are not ignorant of science. The distortion of the situation must deliberate. Again, why they are doing this is debatable. But they appear scaring you in order to justify shuttering society and disrupting the supply chain. In any case, that is the function of the representation.

I want people to understand that, as more tests are conducted, there will be more reported COVID-19 cases. More reported cases does not mean more death or even more disease. The actual presence of COVID-19 is not determined by testing. In other words, the test does not give you COVID-19. Get it? That wasn’t obvious before? What it does mean is that as the number of reported cases go up, the proportion of deaths assigned to COVID-19 (and there are shenanigans going on there, as well) goes down.

Let me repeat what should be obvious to anybody with a working knowledge of inferential statistics. The jump in cases in these facilities is because of selective testing. Go back to the buried headline of this study: “The rise in positive tests is attributed to aggressive testing.” They are telling the public what they are doing. This way they cannot be accused of lying. But there are different ways to lie.