Americans Are Suffering ‘Delusional Psychosis’ About CCP Virus, Psychiatrist Claims

Americans Are Suffering ‘Delusional Psychosis’ About CCP Virus, Psychiatrist Claims
A couple walks along empty Stone Street in the financial district of New York City on Nov. 30, 2020. in New York City. (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)
Mark Tapscott
12/2/2020
Updated:
12/2/2020
So much misinformation and exaggeration about the lethality of the CCP virus—also known as the novel coronavirus—has been broadcast by government officials and the media that many Americans are suffering from a “delusional psychosis,” according to Los Angeles child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr. Mark McDonald.

What began as fear of a then-unknown disease called COVID-19 has since evolved into what McDonald described to The Epoch Times on Dec. 1 as a national condition in which “there is a delusional psychosis that has taken over where people are impervious to rational thinking.”

“They don’t want to give up the mask, they don’t want to give up the social distancing,“ he said. ”[People] are impervious to reason, to logic, to education at this point. They are psychotically managed by their fear.”

McDonald says the condition is most prevalent in Los Angeles, where he practices, and New York, places that he described as “ground zero for this.”

The government-imposed controls that were initially temporary in March have been repeatedly extended for months and have now “become social controls exercised by us,” he said.

“It’s actually coming from us, our parents, our children, our neighbors; it’s coming from businesses, corporations.”

McDonald noted that several of his friends were banned out of fear of the contagion from being with their families during Thanksgiving and will be at Christmas as well, despite having no symptoms of the disease.

“I have shopkeepers who have assistants who will not step forward to the counter to hand food to people, including me if I’m not wearing a mask,” he said.

“I have people who are yelling at me if I get into an elevator without a mask to go 10 seconds up to another floor, so we don’t need policing any more, we just need each other.”

Noting that approximately 268,000 people have died because of the CCP virus in the United States, compared to an annual average of 45,000 flu deaths and about 600,000 cancer deaths, The Epoch Times asked McDonald how he puts such figures in perspective.

“Well, first, I think the keyword here is perspective,“ McDonald said. ”When New York Mayor Bill de Blasio started to shut down New York City, close restaurants, bars, schools, basically put everybody in a state of house arrest, he said, ‘If these policies that I am enacting save one life, it will be worth it.’

“That is idiocy. We do not ever make public health policy based on saving one life. We look at perspective, we look at cost, we look at assets.”

McDonald said federal data on CCP virus deaths “are highly suspect” because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has acknowledged that “94 percent of the deaths had an average of three co-morbidities, meaning they were probably going to die within the next 6 to 12 months anyway.” The 94 percent figure refers to coronavirus death cases, in which the official certificate of death named the disease.

McDonald said more than half of those who died were 80 years old or older, while the average life expectancy, based on all causes of death, in the United States is currently 79 years.

“So, if half of the people who have died purportedly of coronavirus are over the age of 80 and they had three or more co-morbidities, that speaks to the fact those people died with it rather than of it,” he said.
How deaths of individuals with both coronavirus and co-morbidities should be classified statistically has been an area of debate among officials, statisticians, and public health policymakers since the onset of the disease.
McDonald also pointed to a recent lecture by a Johns Hopkins University economist who, based on CDC data, suggested total deaths due to all causes in the United States for 2020, compared to the previous eight years, don’t reflect a massive increase attributable to the disease.

“All of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers,” said the lecturer, professor Genevieve Briand.

Shortly after the school’s student newspaper reported the lecture, however, the story was retracted because, the editors said, the study “has been used to support dangerous inaccuracies that minimize the impact of the pandemic.”

The editors further claimed that the lecturer’s claim that the data shows no excess deaths attributable to the disease contradicted a CDC claim of 300,000 such deaths. The CDC page from the agency’s COVID Data Tracker cited by the editors didn’t make such a claim.
McDonald said he views the CDC “as no longer credible, [because] they have issued so many reversals of their own policies and decisions.” He was referring to the agency’s initial denials that masks are effective at preventing the disease spread and subsequent reversal from that position.
Similar reversals have occurred by the CDC regarding the effectiveness of social distancing and on the issue of whether surfaces should be repetitively cleaned to avoid spreading the disease.

McDonald said that in a recent CDC study, “Eighty-four percent of the people they studied who contracted coronavirus reported to the people running the study that they wore masks ‘all of the time or most of the time.’”

The CDC didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

Contact Mark Tapscott at [email protected]
Mark Tapscott is an award-winning investigative editor and reporter who covers Congress, national politics, and policy for The Epoch Times. Mark was admitted to the National Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Hall of Fame in 2006 and he was named Journalist of the Year by CPAC in 2008. He was a consulting editor on the Colorado Springs Gazette’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series “Other Than Honorable” in 2014.
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