Category: Coronavirus

No, We Can’t ‘Trust the Science’

By James Gorrie

February 12, The Epoch Times

Commentary

The title of a new Oxford University study, “COVID-19 is a leading cause of death in children and young people in the US,” is as shocking as it is misleading. The headline is frightening because it was meant to be.

But is the SARS-CoV-2 virus really one of the most lethal threats to American children and young people up to the age of 19?

Experimental Mass Vaccination Pushed by Fear, Sensationalism

Let’s take a closer look at Oxford’s assertion.

Since the study describes the virus as “a leading cause of death” in children, one would suppose that it would be near the top, right? If not No. 1, it certainly would be No. 2 or perhaps No. 3.

But that isn’t the case.

Actually, as the writers of the article concede, COVID-19 is only the eighth-ranked cause of death, responsible for only about 2 percent of deaths of American children. The relationship that the researchers (or the person who wrote and/or approved the headline) draw between the ranking and the importance of it is inverse, to say the least, and largely irrelevant.

Since when is an eighth-place causal ranking a “leading cause” of anything, particularly when that ranking has a statistical value of about 2 percent? It’s simply not true, so why try to make that case?

Now, contrast the sensationalist Oxford study with another UK study published in November 2022, which is calmly titled “COVID-19 deaths in children and young people in England, March 2020 to December 2021: An active prospective national surveillance study.”

Note the lack of hyperbole in that study’s title. It’s entirely neutral and objectively descriptive. More importantly, however, is the fact that the researchers found that over 22 months, with all co-factors considered, COVID-19 was responsible for 1.2 percent of deaths in the younger-than-20 age group in England. Granted, 1.2 percent is less than 2 percent, but that difference is marginal relative to the remaining 98 or 98.8 percent.

The researchers rightly concluded in the study that “death due to COVID-19 is very low in CYP (children and young people), even with the emergence of new SARS-CoV-2 variants.”

On a side note, COVID-19 has supposedly surpassed the flu as a significant cause of childhood deaths in 2022. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in the 2018–19 season, there were 136 pediatric flu deaths reported, and 188 in the 2019–20 season.

But in the 2020–21 season? Just one.

Imagine childhood flu deaths dropping by 99.99 percent in a single year. That’s an amazing medical accomplishment that one would think would capture headlines around the world.

Children rest at a community vaccination center after receiving a dose of Sinovac Biotech’s CoronaVac COVID-19 vaccine following the COVID outbreak, in Hong Kong on Feb. 25, 2022. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

An attempt is made to explain the drop. The narrative goes as follows: Under lockdown, the 2021 flu season affected a much lower number of people than usual in all major regions of the United States. And yet, somehow, the COVID-19 virus, a variant of the common cold, was just that much smarter than the flu virus and could infect millions of people.

It will be interesting to see 2022’s flu report when it comes out in April.

Deception and the Drive to Vaccinate Children

What can one make of the seemingly exploitative attitude of the Oxford study? Why would Oxford University and its researchers overstate the risk that the virus poses to young people?

One explanation could be for the sheer sake of exploitation itself. It’s difficult not to recognize two closely related facts concerning Oxford University and COVID-19.

First, Oxford University has reportedly received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation made sure that much of that money went into Oxford research that resulted in the AstraZeneca mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. AstraZeneca has since seen billions of dollars in profit from its COVID-19 vaccine business.

Second, the Gates Foundation reportedly funded pharmaceutical companies and nongovernmental organizations (NGO) in the UK, such as the Wellcome Trust, an international vaccine research and development group, and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. These groups have a mutually supportive relationship with almost zero accountability.

A big part of the global COVID-19 agenda and funding effort, which is led by the CDC, is to vaccinate children, even though the science tells us that they’re at very low risk of being harmed by the disease. Coincidentally, the CDC and the World Health Organization are also funded by the Gates Foundation. A suspicious mind might conclude that describing COVID-19 as “a leading cause of death in children” could be an effort toward pushing more vaccines onto more children.

Deception Surrounds Everything About the Virus

Oxford certainly isn’t the only highly rated institution to twist the facts to fit the narrative and blind people from reality. Denying and withholding medical data on vaccine injuries and deaths is the policy of medical and drug bureaucracies in the United States and elsewhere.

Signs are held up at a rally against COVID-19 vaccine mandates in New York on Oct. 12, 2021. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Dr. Deborah Birx, former response coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force during the Trump administration, said she deliberately misled then-President Donald Trump by exaggerating the risk of asymptomatic transmission of the virus to justify longer and more extensive lockdowns. It wasn’t about following the science that led to economically and socially disastrous lockdowns in the United States. It was about following the politics.

As for the vaccines themselves, Big Medicine and Big Pharma colluded with Big Tech, Big Media, Big Academia, NGOs, and the Biden administration to deny and censor any bad news about the experimental mRNA vaccines that were pushed in the United States and much of the rest of the world.

More than that, medical doctors with stellar reputations and research achievements were banned, humiliated, fired, censored, and otherwise publicly pilloried for daring to provide alternative and simple treatments with a proven 80 percent reduction in hospitalizations and a 75 percent reduction in deaths.

Furthermore, recently uncovered documents show that the CDC was aware of mRNA vaccines causing myocarditis but refused to disclose those facts.

This denial and manipulation of science aren’t restricted to the United States. Scotland has recently seen a rise in neonatal deaths, up from 2 per thousand to 4.9, but medical authorities have ruled out the mothers’ vaccine status as a factor in the deaths without even checking. The neonatal deaths, which apply to infants up to four weeks old, are recorded as stillbirths to avoid alarm or vaccine hesitancy.

Their reasoning? They don’t want anyone to draw “the wrong conclusions.”

Or, perhaps, the right ones.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

After we return to normalcy and hopefully soon, we will need to take steps to avoid the next pandemic.  If we don’t come up with contingency plans that will contain future outbreaks, we will be forced to relive the insanity that we are now experiencing because of unpreparedness.

These are my suggestions:

-          The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the rest of our intelligence community, who failed to protect us from this pandemic, need to be watching the rest of the world for future outbreaks like the Wuhan Virus.

-          The Center for Disease Control (CDC), which also failed to be prepared for this pandemic, needs to work closely with the CIA to begin an analysis of any new virus to identify how it is transmitted and how it can be contained.

-          When an outbreak is found, all travel to and from the affected area needs to be banned immediately until we know the extent of the outbreak.

-          Our borders and all points of entry to the United States need to be completely secure.

-          Illegal entry into the United States needs to be treated as a felony.  Individuals entering the United States illegally must be detained, quarantined, and returned to their country of origin.  Repeat offenders should be incarcerated.

-          Legal immigration should include extensive physical examinations for possible diseases that can affect the general population.  Individuals with diseases that could create a pandemic should be isolated until they are no longer a threat to the rest of the population.

-          Should outbreaks occur in the United States, the CDC needs to have protocols in place for immediately testing people in the affected area to identify those who can spread the contagion.  Those at risk of spreading the contagion need to be isolated until it is safe for them to return to the community.

-          Travel in and out of infected areas will be immediately suspended until the danger has passed.

-          All people in infected areas need to begin wearing PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) when in public.

-          People in infected areas need to enter all buildings (i.e. schools, workplaces, stores, restaurants, and entertainment areas) by first using hand sanitizers before removing their PPE. (For those of you who have been on a cruise, the use of hand sanitizers has been a practice in all cruise ship dining areas.)

-          The CDC needs to be proactive in finding vaccines and medications to protect the population for strains of viruses that have been identified.

-          Every state needs to have mobile hospitals that can be immediately deployed where needed.  The number of these hospitals should be based on the population of each state.

-          Supplies of PPE should be available in stores so that they can be purchased.

I welcome any suggestions to make sure we are fully prepared.

Opinion by Becket Adams

April 02, 2020 08:49 AM

No institution has failed the public worse during the COVID-19 pandemic than the news media.

It seems impossible that this should be the case, especially considering the federal government’s sluggish, incoherent, and unfocused handling of this crisis. But even the federal government has managed to get some things right. The same cannot be said for our self-important Fourth Estate.

From the very beginning, corporate media got the story wrong, publishing article after article assuring readers that the virus was not as dangerous or serious as it sounded.

“Is this going to be a deadly pandemic?” Vox asked on social media on Jan. 31. “No.”

Later, after it became clear the pandemic that began in China was indeed a fatal, fast-moving global disaster and the bodies started to stack up, major newsgroups in the United States changed tacks, abandoning earlier efforts to downplay the seriousness of the disease to champion the Beijing-approved talking point that says it is “racist” and “xenophobic” to refer to the virus by its city or country of origin.

“Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s coronavirus tweet echoes anti-Chinese racism. He must apologize,” the Sacramento Bee’s editorial board demanded on March 10 after the House GOP leader used the term “Chinese coronavirus” in a tweet. Prior to its editorial, the Sacramento Bee published no fewer than five news headlines featuring the exact term “Chinese coronavirus."

As corporate media rushed to condemn the terms it coined, its individual members embraced a number of demagogic talking points and outright falsehoods, perpetuating junk arguments and total lies in a none-too-subtle effort to score political points.

It gets worse.

Since the pandemic came to U.S. shores, members of the White House press corps have attended coronavirus briefings for the explicit purpose of peppering the president and his response team with insipid questions about whether it is racist to use terms such as “Wuhan virus” and “Kung flu.” Members of the press have belittled and talked down to the healthcare experts charged with leading the White House’s response efforts. Reporters and pundits ridiculed a business owner who overhauled his facilities so that they are now focused mostly on producing cotton face masks. NBC News has even suggested that the president is responsible for an Arizona couple who drank fish tank cleaner thinking it would protect them from the virus.

Worst of all, U.S. newsgroups have taken to praising despotic regimes that are hostile to the U.S., including Russia and China, going so far as to parrot their propaganda. CNN, for example, published a report on March 21 comparing the U.S. unfavorably to Russia, which CNN claims has its coronavirus cases mostly under control thanks to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The figures touted in the CNN report come directly from Moscow.

Elsewhere, major media have blindly accepted Beijing’s laughable assertion that it has halted the spread of the disease in Wuhan and in other places.

“How uncomfortable is it,” asked MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, “that perhaps China’s authoritarian ways did prevent this? Meaning, had China been a free and open society, this might have spread faster?”

Chinese authorities knew about the virus in December when it first appeared in the city of Wuhan. Instead of taking measures and sharing what it knew about the disease with the international community, China’s government engaged in a massive cover-up. The Chinese Communist Party suppressed the sharing of relevant information, arresting and punishing medical professionals who tried to warn people that there was something going around with SARS-like symptoms.

China’s deception and incompetence, all of which led to its gross mishandling of the COVID-19 outbreak, are a matter of historical fact. Yet ostensibly free and independent journalists in the U.S. eagerly repeat Beijing’s coronavirus case counts anyway, "reporting" uncritically China’s totally unbelievable claim that new incidents of infections have remained essentially flat since late February.

On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. intelligence community has determined that China “has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths.”

Don’t hold your breath waiting for corrections from the same journalists who reported last week that the U.S. has more known coronavirus cases than any country in the world. You certainly should not expect a correction from New York Times editors responsible for the March 18 report titled “Its coronavirus cases dwindling, China turns focus outward.”

The Bloomberg news alert, by the way, came just hours after a number of journalists and pundits interpreted a tweet from a New York Times reporter to mean the White House’s stated “goal” is to reach 100,000-240,000 deaths from the virus. (This most certainly is not the administration’s goal.)

In other words, the news media’s handling of the crisis has been consistently wrong and tendentious from the get-go. It has only gotten worse since then.

There is a reason why, amid the coronavirus pandemic, the press is the least trusted institution in the U.S. compared to hospitals, schools, daycare centers, state governments, President Trump, and Vice President Mike Pence, according to recent Gallup polling data.

This is what happens when an entire industry is bad at its job.

Source: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/no-institution-has-failed-the-public-worse-than-the-news-media-during-the-covid-19-pandemic?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Beltway+Confidential&utm_term=www.theweeklystandard.com&utm_content=20200402141236

By Sandy Fitzgerald    |   Tuesday, 24 March 2020 02:33 PM

President Donald Trump Tuesday said he was the person who canceled the deal to pass coronavirus legislation in excess of $2 trillion after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi included "a lot of things" that had nothing to do with people who have been put out of work because of closures over the spreading coronavirus epidemic.

"I canceled the deal," he said in a Fox News virtual town hall. "I said, 'I'm not going to send that deal.' Nancy Pelosi came and put a lot of things in the deal that had nothing to do with the workers, that has to do with an agenda they've been trying to get passed for ten years."

Trump said he told Vice President Mike Pence and several other key Republicans that there was "no way" he would sign the deal.

"We almost had a deal the day before," said Trump about an agreement between the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

"It was really a good, solid deal," said Trump. "All (of a) sudden they start throwing all the little green new deal stuff in. The board rooms, what they look like. 'We want clean energy; we want all this stuff. Let's stop drilling oil.' They had things that were terrible. Windmills all over the place, all sorts of credits for windmills. To kill the breeze and ruin the real estate, right? A lot of problems."

But the bill does have "great things" for the nation's companies and workers as well, said Trump.

"I want to protect our workers," he said. "Workers first. But you have to protect companies like Boeing. They had a real bad year, let's face it...we can't lose a Boeing. We can't lose those companies. If we lose those companies we're talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs, millions of jobs."

But the faster the economy can reopen, the better, said Trump.

"We have a pent-up energy that's going to be unbelievable," he said. "We will bring it back fast."

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/trump-pelosi-bill-stimulus/2020/03/24/id/959745/

Here’s 4 Reasons COVID-19 Should Be Spot-Welded Forever To China

Written by K. Walker on March 19, 2020

President Trump continues to call COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” much to the Media’s disdain. Here is why President Trump is right and the Leftists in the Press are wrong…

First, it has nothing to do with Sinophobia — which is xenophobia against China and the Chinese people. This isn’t about Chinese people at all. This has everything to do with the government of China.

This global pandemic can be set squarely at the feet of the brutal, totalitarian dictatorship that is the Chinese Communist Party.

Today, the economy is in freefall, restaurants are closing, people are losing their jobs, schools are closed, and people are isolating themselves thousands of miles away from where this illness began.

And it all could have been avoided.

In the Washington Post, Marc Theissen wrote, “We are in the midst of a pandemic lockdown today because the Chinese Communist regime cared more about suppressing information than suppressing a virus.”

Theissen then went on to outline several ways that they allowed the disease to spread.

They Lied About The Risk Of Human-To-Human Transmission

As early as December, doctors in Wuhan knew that the coronavirus was being spread human-to-human because medical workers were contracting the virus. Despite this, the head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention declared on state television in mid-January that “the risk of human-to-human transmission is low.”

They also allowed a major gathering to occur in the epicenter of the outbreak knowing that the virus could be passed between humans putting thousands at risk and allowing the virus to spread around the globe.

Theissen writes:

On Jan. 18, weeks after President Xi Jinping had taken charge of the response, authorities allowed a Lunar New Year banquet to go forward in Wuhan where tens of thousands of families shared food — and then let millions travel out of Wuhan, allowing the disease to spread across the world.

If the Chinese regime had taken action as soon as human-to-human transmission was confirmed, the spread could have been contained.

Critics Were Silenced To Cover Up The Communist Party’s Terrible Handling Of COVID-19

The Chinese Communist Party cannot be seen as wrong or weak, so if they make a mistake, they erase the mistake. This is the way totalitarian regimes work.

Thiessen continues:

According to the Times of London, Chinese doctors who had identified the pathogen in early December received a gag order from China’s National Health Commission with instructions to stop tests, destroy samples and suppress the news.

We know that the Chinese government silenced more than doctors, it was anyone critical of the way that the regime was handling the spread of the virus.

Related: Here Are 5 People That Have Been Silenced For Criticizing The Way The Chinese Gov’t Handled COVID-19 Outbreak

China Won’t Close Wet Markets

These markets have questionable if any food safety standards with exotic animal meat for sale. Often, animals are held live in cages and killed on the spot to prove that they are “fresh” despite, as Melissa Chen writes in The Spectator, that the animals are “sometimes festering in their own fecal matter.”

Pictures and video clips circulated on Weibo and other social media platforms showed the range of animals on sale — wolf pups, rats, peacocks, raccoons, porcupines, snakes, crocodiles and foxes, all jammed side-by-side in flimsy cages awaiting their own slaughter, making it easy for zoonotic diseases to leap from species to species and from animals to humans…

…The Chinese preference for wet markets and exotic wildlife has deep social, historical and cultural roots. Around 1960, Chairman Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward led to agricultural collapse and the starvation of tens of millions of people, a trauma that continues to make an indelible print on China’s collective psyche today. For one, it necessitated a scarcity mindset. Under starvation conditions, does it really matter what vessel of bodily flesh was delivering your next caloric intake? Why would you squander any body part? There’s an old Cantonese saying that goes, ‘anything that walks, swims, crawls, or flies with its back to heaven is edible’.

Chen, who writes about the traumatic experiences of visiting a wet market in Singapore’s Chinatown with her mother as a child concludes the article stating that it’s not xenophobic to criticize lack of hygiene in wet markets and the consumption of exotic animals that can pass along diseases to humans.

It’s perfectly appropriate to criticize China’s rampant consumption of exotic animals, lack of hygiene standards and otherwise risky behavior that puts people at risk for zoonotic infections. Until these entrenched behaviors based on cultural or magical beliefs are divorced from Chinese culture, wet wildlife markets will linger as time-bombs ready to set off the next pandemic, which in a globalized age is proving only too easy to do…

…After countless infections and death, the obliteration of trillions of dollars and the radical retooling of modern life as we know it, the least China could do is introduce higher food safety regulations, eradicate all wet markets and ban the wildlife trade, once and for all.

Source: The Spectator U.S.

Chinese Propaganda

Simply put: China lied. But then, that’s what China does. They’re good at it.

The Chinese propaganda apparatus is a formidable, well-oiled machine.

It isn’t a free and transparent government accountable to the people, it controls people by authoritarian means.

They also control the narrative. China just ordered several U.S. journalists from The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal to return their press passes within 10 days.

The same totalitarian system that lied about putting 1 million Uighurs in concentration camps lied about the outbreak of this virus, creating a global pandemic. If China were an open and transparent society, with an accountable government, Americans might not be on lockdown today.

The Useful Idiots on the Left, in the Partisan Press, and even at the World Health Organization (WHO), have parroted the Chi-Com talking point that acknowledging the origin of the virus is suddenly a racist thing to do. They have lambasted the President for countering a Chinese conspiracy theory stating that the virus originated with the U.S. Army and was spread to China.

Some have suggested that calling this pathogen the “Wuhan virus” — or as President Trump recently called it, the “Chinese virus” — is racist. That is absurd. MERS is called the “Middle East Respiratory Syndrome” because that is where it originated. Moreover, the Chinese regime continues to lie, spreading a conspiracy theory that the source of the virus is really the U.S. Army.

Source: Washington Post

This global pandemic began in China, spread from China, and is completely a result of suppression, coverup, denial, and lies by the Chinese Communist Party.