The Big Picture

Ed Feser, a very smart man and excellent writer, wrote a piece a couple days ago titled Covid-19 vaccination is not the hill to die on. As usual, it’s all very well thought out and clearly presented, what I’ve come to expect from Dr. Feser. My objections to it have little to do with the points he’s making, but rather from the big picture he assumes, a big picture I utterly reject.

Here’s the Big Picture based in reality: We have repeatedly forgotten. We have used the Memory Hole, and then rewritten what just happened. We suppress the cognitive dissonance with one Just So story after another. Our situation under the endless lockups and mandates, the maskings and travel restrictions, the wanton destruction of a million small businesses, the enforcement of compliance by a million Karens backed by medical, media, and government hacks and sociopaths, is not an environment within which doing as we are told and making seeming rational concessions is going to result in anything positive.

Our situation most closely parallels an abusive boyfriend/enabling girlfriend relationship. We, the abused public, are supposed to believe that it’s our fault, if only we would do exactly what he says, then he’d stop hitting us. And when we bring up his lies, we only get hit some more, so we’d rather believe that his lies are out fault, too, than confront him and get hurt some more. And only people who don’t understand us keep saying it’s his fault, that we have to stop listening to him! No! He’s a good boyfriend! Things will be fine once we learn to do as we’re told!

Dr. Feser chooses to largely ignore this history of lies and manipulation, or pretend they didn’t happen, or were somehow not the official positions, so that he can coolly argue from philosophical principles. Those principles, and his logic, are impeccable. But they are an irrelevant diversion. Implicit is the assumption that, if we just go along with the experimental drug jab, that, somehow, our violent boyfriend will finally calm down and things will be OK. If you keep in mind what has actually happened rather than swallowing the latest Just So story, the questions become: why not this hill? What would the right hill look like? In reality, we KNOW it’s not going to stop on its own, because it hasn’t yet for reasons that change after the fact, over and over. If not now, when?

Spelling it out, since many seem to have forgotten:

A. From the very first, from February and March of 2020 on, everything presented through the press about the SARS-2 outbreak was distorted, if not out and out lies. Every factor that could be used to terrify people was amplified; every factor that mitigated against panic was ignored or lied about. Examples:

• The experience of Wuhan, where about 1,000 had died as of March, was always presented as if the population of dead people was effectively random, as if anyone could catch SARS-2, suffer severe sudden respiratory distress, and drop dead on the street. In reality, all but a very few of the dead were elderly sickly people. Healthy people were at very slight risk, just as they are now.
• We all heard about Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor who, according to the story, tried to warn everybody about SARS-2 in December 2019, then, contracted the disease and died in February – but not before posting a selfie with him on a respirator.* That he was one of very few people, as in single digits, who, in a city of millions, had not been sickly, elderly, or, usually, both before catching the bug was not emphasized.
• We heard all about the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and the 14 people who, over the months following, died. We didn’t hear about the several thousand people on the ship – most people! – who didn’t even catch the virus, despite near-ideal conditions for spreading it: packed together, nowhere else to go, sharing facilities, breathing the same air. It was not emphasized that all 14 people who died were elderly passengers, that no member of the crew died. What the Diamond Princess demonstrated: that elderly sickly people are at some risk, but that the risk to younger, healthier people is effectively zero.
• We did not hear about the USS Theodore Roosevelt 24×7, where out of 5,000 crew, only 3 got seriously ill and only one died – and he had underlying heart conditions. Why the one and not the other? We heard only horror stories where everyone was assumed to be at mortal risk; we did not hear about stories where no one reasonably healthy was at much risk at all.

B. Once the Coof spread to Italy, people totally freaked out, again assuming the Coof was something that could kill anybody. The average age of the Italian victims was 81 years old. Almost all the deaths took place in nursing homes – where old, sickly people go to die – or in hospitals – where the seriously sick people are. Nowhere was the overall poor state of Italian healthcare discussed, nor the standard practice under Italian nationalized medicine of rationing by age: old people go to the end of the line in virtually all cases. Once again, the data screams that younger people were at minimal risk.

By the time Covid had spread throughout Europe, the numbers from Wuhan, the Diamond Princess, Iran, USS Theodore Roosevelt, and Italy were readily available to healthcare people and governments. Any cool heads looking at those numbers (and there were thousands of us!) saw the obvious screaming from the numbers: This disease it not a meaningful threat to reasonably healthy people. Old, sick people are at risk. All the numbers that have come out since have confirmed this. Yet, rather than taking rational steps to protect the vulnerable, an entire mythology was created, under which millions of Americans would die if extreme steps to isolate the healthy from each other were not taken.

What this graph shows: People over 75, who have a high overall risk of dying, also have a high overall risk of dying if they catch COVID; that, conversely, if you are under 50, your risk from COVID is, effectively, zero – COVID adds nothing to your overall background risk. (REMINDER: everyone eventually dies of something. Risk is never zero until you are dead.) Also note that this is ‘deaths involving’ and therefore overstates COVID’s lethality. Graphs from anywhere in the world from every stage of the ‘pandemic’ show the same outcomes.

C. The whole idea of lockdowns was sold as ‘flattening the curve’. This is a slightly technical concept: the theory is that, by slowing the spread of a highly contagious disease, we can keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. In other words, millions would die who would have lived if only they had received proper medical care. Note and do not forget this: All the huge projected death numbers used to justify the lockups are based on two assumptions: that Covid was going to inevitably spread like wildfire, and that – IMPORTANT! DON’T FORGET – that Covid is imminently treatable, so that proper treatment circa 2020 would prevent millions of deaths. Thus, lockups would save lives by making sure proper medical treatment was available to those who did contract the virus.

Flattening the curve was said to be important because the *models* show that *most* of the *projected* deaths result, not from simply contracting the disease, but from patients not being treated due to the healthcare system getting overwhelmed. This is important not to forget: the models projected that so many people would get sick and require hospitalization that there would not be enough healthcare capacity to take care of them, that the death toll would rise out of control – the ‘people dying in the streets’ scenario – unless we ‘flattened the curve’. At no point in this argument is there a reduction in people who would die regardless of hospitalization – in a rare nod to reality, the models all assumed there’s a baseline number of people who are going to die no matter what ‘we’ do, it’s only excess deaths caused by lack of hospital capacity that lockdowns to ‘flatten the curve’ address.

DO NOT FORGET THIS! Lockups were justified to flatten the curve. The theory under which this was done does not support or even suggest the idea that lockups would somehow reduce overall deaths except insofar as those deaths resulted from hospitals being overwhelmed.

So, follow the logic: the curve – technically, the area under the curve – represents the number of people who will die no matter what ‘we’ do. “Flattening the curve” means taking steps to prolong the outbreak, so that the number of people who get sick and die at any one time never gets too high for the healthcare system to handle. 15 days is what the models suggest as the ‘right’ amount of time to lockup everybody. After that, lockups merely prolong the outbreak without saving any lives. That’s what the argument, as bodied forth in the models, says.

What happened instead:

• Lockups were announced across the nation starting in March of 2020.
• They quickly became indefinite, in direct contradiction to the theory under which they were imposed.
• At no point anywhere in the nation were any healthcare systems under any real threat of being overwhelmed. The closest was New York, where a navy hospital ship and a National Guard field hospital were deployed, only to never admit a single patient, and, after a few weeks, to be quietly taken down & withdrawn. Side note: and you never heard about this, right?
• By the end of April, 2020, Covid deaths had fallen to very low levels – but the lockups were not lifted. Never was an objective threshold announced that would trigger the end of the lockups, because no such threshold existed.
• Locally (Bay Area, CA) the rules for lockdowns were as follows: churches were specifically closed; homeless encampments (of which we have many) were specifically exempted. Because?
• In April, just as the death numbers were collapsing (just as Spring broke out across the country, and as was widely predicted by those of us who correctly viewed the Coof as another seasonal virus), states around the nation announced a switch to mail-in ballots. On what basis was the now-fading virus assumed to be a threat 7 months out, the kind of threat lockups would prevent?

In sum: lockups – specifically, the lockup of healthy people showing no symptoms of Covid – were imposed under one theory, a theory under which lockups of longer than 15 days were not helpful. Then, somehow, the reasoning changed, or rather, fear led people to accept the extension of the lockups without any logical explanation. Despite the collapse of Covid deaths at the end of April 2020, state governments committed themselves to keeping the Coof lockups in place through elections, by switching to mail in ballots, for which there was no other excuse. REMEMBER THIS.

D. Lies, damn lies, and statistics. From Day 1, the reported numbers around this panic have been nonsense. The media went with whatever sounded scariest, without any regard to what the numbers mean. A partial list:

• What is a COVID death? Is is counted the same in Wuhan in January as in New York in March or California in 2021? By even talking of death totals across states and across time, let alone talking about cumulative worldwide totals, we are assuming that always and everywhere a COVID death means the same thing. Is this true? In Wuhan and China in general, it seems a Covid death is one where sudden acute respiratory distress resulted in death. That’s certainly what Dr. Wenliang meant by it – that was what he was raising the alarm about back in December of 2019. In the US, since about April of 2020, what the CDC lists is deaths ‘involving’ Covid, which, according to their methodology, is any death where the death certificate lists Covid in either part A – the sequence of events that lead to death – or part B – any contributing factors. Until October of 2020, a diagnosis of Covid was encouraged if the victim showed any 2 symptoms even without a positive test (after October, a positive test was required.) The only two symptoms where Covid differs from the flu are: loss of taste & smell, and sudden acute respiratory distress. Thus, someone in a nursing home, who has a 6-7 month median life expectancy once they are rolled in past the front door, who had a fever and a cough, or had aches and trouble breathing, was to have Covid listed at least in part B regardless of all underlying conditions and without a positive test result. Over half, and perhaps as high as 2/3, of all deaths ‘involving’ Covid have been among nursing home patients; 2/3 have been among elderly people. DON’T FORGET: about 60% of the time (the other 40% are dementia patients, who take longer to die) gramma or dad are in the home because they are dying of something. Having Covid show up as ‘involved’ in their deaths is not what a sane person means by ‘Covid killed them’. Yet these deaths ‘involving’ Covid are routinely reported as Covid deaths, AND rolled in with the deaths in China and the rest of the world as if the numbers represent the same thing.
• The CFR, or Case Fatality Rate, is still reported as ‘your chances of dying if you get Covid. No. That’s would be the IFR – the Infection Fatality Rate. For an infection that causes NO or MINOR symptoms 98%+ of the time, the difference between the two numbers is likely to be extreme. Here’s why: if I have no symptoms, I’m a lot less likely to seek medical care, get tested, and become a ‘case’. Early on, before the terror set in, somebody with no symptoms was not getting tested; it was very likely somebody with minor symptoms was not getting tested. It’s a guess, but I’d guess that cases are outnumbered by infections by a wide margin: many millions of Americans and people worldwide have been infected, had no or minor symptoms (and acquired a high level of immunity!) but never became cases, because what sort of rabbit goes to the doctor for a cough and a low fever? One that goes away in a day or two and is treatable with Tylenol? Very sick people are thus overrepresented in case numbers, meaning the case fatality rate significantly overstates lethality.
• Put the two together: deaths ‘involving’ Covid divided by ‘cases’ = CFR. Deaths ‘involving’ seriously overstate what a normal sane person means by ‘died from’; cases understate infections. Getting all basic math here: the CFR thus overstates risk. That’s how people have come to think they have a 1.7% (the current number off the CDC website) of dying if they get the Coof.
• As of last week, about 435 Americans under 18 have had their deaths attributed to Covid – had deaths ‘involving’ Covid. There are between 70 and 75 million such kids in America. Vastly more have died of pneumonia than have had their deaths attributed to Covid. Is this information, available right off the CDC website, widely known? Why not? Why are we even talking about giving an experimental drug to kids who are at microscopic risk?

Note: these are the official numbers readily available from the CDC or John Hopkins. If you look at the numbers reported through the press (and then referenced by political hacks), it gets much worse. One recent example: Apoorva Mandavelli is an award-winning science reporter. She recently reported:

• Over 900,000 kids had been hospitalized since Covid broke out. Correction: actual number was over 63,000. Ms. Mandavelli was off by a factor of 15.
• Sweden and Denmark had started offering single doses of the Moderna ‘vaccine’ to children. Correction: Sweden and Denmark had halted the use of the Moderna ‘vaccine’ for children.
• The FDA is meeting next week to authorize the Pfizer/BioNTech ‘vaccine’ for children. Correction: this issue will be discussed next month.

Note what’s going on here, and in similar ways in a limitless number of other examples: Basic information that 5 minutes of googling around could get good, properly sourced confirmation for is instead reported without sources on Page 1 and then ‘corrected’ on some back page. The errors only go in one direction:

• 900,000 versus 63,000. Where did the 900,000 number come from? People should get fired over this level of incompetence, instead of receiving ‘science’ ‘journalism’ awards. (Also note no context is provided – that 63,000 number over 19 months is completely mundane, the sad but simple reality that a certain number of kids end up in the hospital every year.)
• The Swedish and Danish governments published some announcement about their policies regarding use of the Moderna ‘vaccine’ for children – right? Otherwise, where did this ‘information’ come from? How could an award winning ‘journalist’ get something so basic so wrong?
• Again, the FDA scheduling a discussion of using the Pfizer/BioNTech ‘vaccine’ on children has to have come from some official notice somewhere, almost certainly available online. How could an award winning ‘journalist’ get something so basic so wrong?

In all three cases, the ‘errors’ favor panic: huge numbers of children are being hospitalized! Sweden and Denmark are jabbing children! The FDA is rushing a meeting to approve jabbing children! OH NO!!!! I have yet to see an error made in the other direction.

E. Following ‘the Science’. Let’s say I was telling you about a baseball game I saw where the home team was down 19 runs in the bottom of the 9th, when 20 consecutive batters hit home runs on 20 consecutive pitches to pull out the victory. Or that I’m a lawyer who came across a case in the morning, had it heard at noon, appealed, and had the appeals court rule in the afternoon, appealed again and was heard by the Supreme Court that evening. Do those scenarios sound plausible? The more you know about baseball and our legal system, the less plausible they seem, if utterly ridiculous implausibility can be called less plausible.

So, to pick one example: within days of the beginning of masking mandates, we were being told that 70 studies had confirmed that masking slows the spread of Covid. Now, those of us familiar with how real science works saw immediately that the very idea that 70 studies could be conceived of, spelled out in sufficient detail to perform, funded, and executed, then undergo the criticism and review essential to science, all within a few months or weeks, AND that all 70 of those studies reached the same conclusion, is every bit as unlikely as 20 consecutive home runs in the bottom of the 9th or getting the Supreme Court to hear your case on the same day you first filed it. In other words, completely laughable.

Yet, in this and in all other cases involving Covid, raising any question about any study or report presented as ‘the science’ immediately got one labelled a crack pot, a denier, and, ultimately, a *terrorist*!

We few who are scientifically literate, who know that only con men and frauds tell you to ‘follow the science’ without having reviewed and understood the evidence first, have been protesting in vain since Day 1 of this preposterous panic. No, the ‘science’ has not shown:

• That Covid is particularly deadly to the vast bulk of people. Rather, it is a threat to shorten the lives of those already dying of something else – people in nursing homes, for the leading example. Otherwise, to everyone else, it is not even as deadly as the common flu.
• That lockups, masking, social distancing, and travel restrictions of healthy people, and the destruction of millions of small businesses, are somehow necessary to prevent millions of deaths.
• That asymptomatic people are a significant disease vector. This is a *theory* for which there is precious little *evidence*, yet all lockups, masks, social distancing, travel restrictions of healthy people are based on it.
• That ‘vaccinating’ children protects anybody. Kids are at effectively zero risk (as close to zero as bitter reality allows) so the jab doesn’t protect them, and since asymptomatic transfer has not been shown to be a serious problem, all we are doing by giving kids the jab is allowing old people to imagine they are safer while putting kids at risk of side effects.
• That the lingering effects of Covid are any worse than the lingering effects of pneumonia.

And so on. The absolute horrific face of satanic anti-science: attempting to use government force to silence critics. No, no, a thousand times no! Criticism is not optional in science! Any claim must, as in MUST, have the evidence supporting it presented to the scrutiny of adversarial critics, and answer their objections. Then, and only then, is any claim considered to have been supported by science – and even then, such claims are conditional and tentative. That’s how science works. The very idea of authority apart from evidence, of ‘scientific consensus’, is a certain sign con men and frauds are at work. ‘Expertise’ counts for exactly nothing – evidence is everything.

F. Just So stories. At every point, in the unlikely event anyone even notices that the story has changed and that our leaders have contradicted themselves, out roll the Just So stories to explain away the contradiction so that we can continue to panic. It has become an art form – raise the obvious contradiction inescapably embedded in the various panic claims, and no intelligence is spared in coming up with an story that explains the contradiction away. A few examples:

• When Fauci at first said masks for the general public were not a good idea, and then changed to saying that masks were absolutely necessary, he told the following Just So story – he had to lie to us the first time for our own good, so that medical professionals could get all the masks they needed, and only when supplies for the medical profession were secured, did he dare tell everybody to mask up. DO NOT FORGET THIS. Fauci has stated as a principle that he will lie to us for our own good. AND because we little people are not allowed to question the claims of our self-appointed betters, our own good is exactly and only what Fauci says it is. If he feels it is for our own good that we stay panicked, then he will – by his own admission – lie his ass off to keep us panicked. These are the people we are trusting for information, indeed, we are officially ‘terrorists’ if we fail to trust them!
• That asymptomatic people are a serious threat to spread Covid. On the off chance that we notice that there’s no good evidence this is true, we are told the Just So story that it might be true, there are anecdotes, and thus we need to act as if it is true, otherwise we are putting everybody at risk. Thus, the need for those restricting our rights to provide the evidence is reversed: they can restrict our rights unless we provide evidence that they shouldn’t – and they are the sole judges of all evidence. We’re simply ‘terrorists’ if we don’t go along.
• That the same measures that have utterly failed to end the ‘pandemic’ have somehow ended the flu. Flu deaths have all but disappeared worldwide since March, 2020. The obvious explanation: since the flu and Covid have almost exactly the same symptoms, flu deaths have been misattributed to Covid. The Just So story: the same masks, socials distancing and lockups that have failed to stop one airborne respiratory virus – Covid – have miraculously stopped another airborne respiratory virus of the same size that uses exactly the same vectors. 20 homers in the bottom of the 9th!
• That the claim that Covid can be successfully treated REQUIRED by the flatten the curve argument doesn’t disprove the complete lack of any good treatments that is the sole justification for the rushed approval of the ‘vaccines’ and the subsequent mandates. If I can’t be saved from Covid by routine medical care, then ‘flattening the curve’ doesn’t work; if routine medical care can save me, then vaccines are not needed. I can just hear the Just So stories being generated to explain this away. Reality: we were being told whatever story was believed to trigger enough panic so that we would comply with restrictions of our rights. When lockups were being justified, one set of stories; now that vaccines are being mandated, another set of stories.

There is plenty more to be said, but I’m stopping here for now. Bottom line: REMEMBER. REFUSE TO MEMORY HOLE INCONVENIENT TRUTHS. We have been lied to over and over again. We have been manipulated and abused. Notice that I didn’t even discuss here whether the experimental drugs being mandated are safe and effective. I merely point out that the people who insist that we get them in order to travel, to socialize, to buy and sell, to live a life not as a cockroach ARE THE SAME PEOPLE WHO HAVE LIED TO US OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

Therefore, for me, this ‘vaccine’ mandate is the hill to die on, as is this latest masking command. I will not comply. Dr. Feser’s logic is impeccable; his implied premises – that we are dealing with sane people with good intentions – is, frankly, crazy. We are not dealing with people of good intent. We are the abused girlfriend. Nothing we do is going to appease our crazy, abusive boyfriend. He has no intention of reforming. He like things just they way they are, where he gets to bully and belittle and gaslight us. If you disagree, please state the objective, measurable events (that make any objective sense) that would cause our leaders to announce an end to the Covid panic. Well? I’ll wait.

* In a fashion that could not have been any more striking or convenient, the heroic young doctor with the pregnant wife stands up to the Communist government, gets censured and threatened for spreading panic, then becomes one of the very few healthy people who dies of Covid – but only after posting pictures of himself in a lovely state-of-the-art hospital room wearing a respirator. Please note: in reality, Wuhan is a third world hell-hole, slums and tenements and poverty everywhere, where the likelihood of any sickly elderly commoners getting admitted to anything like the room in the doctor’s selfie is zero. But it makes for good propaganda.