COVID Hysteria Degrades Public Discourse

COVID Hysteria Degrades Public Discourse
An internal medicine resident sits in a waiting area before receiving a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at a hospital in Aurora, Col., on Dec. 16, 2020. (Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)
James Dale Davidson
1/24/2022
Updated:
1/27/2022
Commentary
“Our public health agencies—together with their cronies in mainstream media, Big Pharma, and Big Tech—have been conspiring for almost two years to keep you very afraid ...," Dr. Al Sears, a Florida-based doctor, wrote on Jan. 16.

“One way they have been keeping you scared is by vastly inflating the number of deaths that are actually attributed to the virus.

“It’s a story you won’t hear about from most media outlets. Still, countries across the globe are quietly lowering the number of deaths caused by Covid. Take Italy, for example. A couple of weeks ago, Italy’s National Institute of Health (ISS) made a shocking revelation. They admitted their country’s official number of Covid-19 deaths had been greatly miscalculated. And they revised the numbers to reflect that 97% of reported ‘Covid deaths’ were probably not due to Covid after all.

“It turns out that of the 130,000 deaths that were registered as official Covid fatalities, only 3,800 were directly attributed to the virus. The others died with Covid, but not from Covid. It’s a distinction our government hierarchy refuses to accept.”

Think about it. Italy’s National Institute of Health revises down the official number of COVID-19 deaths by 97 percent. That’s a significant fact.

But I would bet a significant amount of money that you have heard not a whisper of it.

A toxic combination of “political correctness,” Big Tech censorship, and crony capitalist special pleading has effectively twisted the public dialogue about COVID-19 in a fashion that heightens hysteria and public fear.

Government officials want to intimidate you into ceding your freedom and autonomy.

Big Tech social media companies block “irresponsible viewpoints” because they fear political retribution. For example, social media firms have received treatment in Russia and China, which provides a forward-looking perspective on what reasons these corporations are afraid.

Pharmaceutical companies understandably are keen to continue making windfall profits on vaccines and COVID-19 treatments.

Back-of-the-envelope calculations show that the companies behind the most successful COVID-19 vaccines, Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna, are making billions and billions—combined profits of $65,000 every minute.

Bear in mind that vaccine producers aren’t selling their products on the market. They are just filling orders. As Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, told the Harvard Gazette: “It is better to think of the vaccine, not like a new product coming to market ... but rather more like a government purchase, like buying a rocket for NASA or a tank.”

The incentives that pharma companies have to cultivate the terror of COVID-19 are too obvious to require much elaboration. Hence, the unsurprising declaration from the scientist who created the AstraZeneca vaccine. She said that it was “increasingly obvious (at least to her!) that this pandemic is not done with us.”

Don’t get me wrong. The vaccines represent an amazing scientific achievement, and they are obviously a blessing to everyone whose lives they saved.

Still, the purveyors of vaccines are subject to crony-capitalist temptations, every bit as much as are the makers of rockets or the newest version of the Abrams super tank. In this case, they have a vested interest in scaring you about the dangers of the COVID-19 virus.

Of course, determining the cause of death is an art of which coroners (more appropriately, “medical examiners” and sometimes “forensic pathologists”) are justly proud. The history of coroners is intimately tied to the government’s interest in profiting from the death of individuals or criminal proceedings.

The earliest coroners came into being soon after the Norman Conquest. The office of coroner was formally established in England in September 1194. Initially, the motivation for establishing the office of coroner was fiscal. The coroner was a crown official who traveled the countryside, conducted investigations, held court, settled disputes, and levied fines. The coroner served as a check on sheriffs and bailiffs.

In due course, the coroner became responsible for determining the cause of death of an individual or more than one person when people died together. Their duties include visiting crime scenes to examine a body, transporting the body to the morgue, and conducting an internal and external examination of the body to determine the actual cause of death.

That kind of rigor wasn’t extended to distinguish persons dying with COVID-19 from those killed by COVID-19. Early in the pandemic, I read a fascinating argument advanced by two doctors in California, drawing attention to the slippery statistics that overstated deaths from the pandemic.

They argued that anyone who died after testing positive for COVID-19 was added to the COVID tally, quite apart from whether COVID-19 was reasonably implicated as the cause. Thus, a COVID-positive pedestrian run over by a bus would be counted as a COVID-19 victim.

That sort of nonsense underscores the importance of genuine freedom of speech. It’s more difficult for the authorities to frighten the public into ceding their freedom. The hope for informed civic discourse depends on circumventing political controls on thought.

James Dale Davidson is a highly acclaimed economist and financial forecaster who has cemented his legacy through his renown investment newsletter Strategic Investment, which has been in publication since 1987. One of Davidson’s biggest fans include billionaire Peter Thiel, who says Davidson inspired him to start PayPal and cited Davidson as “his favorite stock picker.”
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