When did you know that The Pandemic™ was a manufactured crisis?

The Twitterati have become occupied with questions about "When did you know?"

Some Twitter users are hoping to “go viral” with the query “When did you know?” as in “When did you know that the ‘vaccines’ were harmful?”  In this essay, I take up the question of “When did you know?” with respect to COVID itself: How and when did you come to understand that COVID was no big deal and that the COVID phenomenon was more of a manufactured crisis designed to give license to the State to extend dictatorial powers over society?  But, really this is a tale about more than just knowledge.  It is a tale of two Greek words.  There is “gnosis,” as in “knowledge” of manufactured crisis, but before gnosis might come “skepticism” as in “When did you first become skeptical of the idea that COVID was a big deal?”

One could have found many reasons to be skeptical. They would inlcude:

Political opportunism

There were plenty of people who endeavored to politicize the SARS outbreak of 2003, the MERS outbreak of 2012, and the Ebola outbreak of 2014 in order to make the Bush Administration and then the Obama Administration look bad.  The Administrations had to make an ostentatious point of responding.  Ultimately, responding amounted to nothing more than generating a few episodes of Safetyism theater, and it is not obvious that the Administrations really suffered any decline in approval ratings, but the point is, people will look to inspire hysteria from such episodes.  It would have been natural to expect the same with respect to SARS-2 (COVID), but a big difference is that the effort to manufacture crisis out of COVID had the support of the Administrative State, starting with the CDC.  In the SARS, MERS and Ebola episodes, the CDC will have behaved defensively.  It will have endeavored to demonstrate that it had these viruses under control.  But not COVID.  In the case of COVID, the CDC endeavored to inspire fear and hysteria, which leads us to …

Strategic withholding of data

It would have been easier to discern that the COVID phenomenon was not going to turn out to be worse than a bad flu had the CDC provided a reasonable picture in numbers of what was going on in the early going.  The CDC could have done what the Italian health authorities had done.  The Higher Institute of Health in Italy (the Istituto Superiore di Sanita) would weekly post even just a few statistics indicating something about the age distribution of fatalities attributed to COVID.  These statistics included the mean and median ages by sex of fatalities attributed to COVID, and one could see that these ages corresponded closely the mean and median ages of all-cause deaths.  In other words, COVID really was taking away the immunologically-suppressed.  Such people may be young, but, in general, such people tend to be the oldest among us who are not long for this world.  They are the kind of people whom a bout of flu or pneumonia could take away from us.  And that is basically what happened: A virus with the potency of a severe flu virus swept through the population and took away the most vulnerable.

I learned of the reporting of the Istituto Superiore di Sanita by clicking through this piece from Bloomberg: “99% of Those Who Died From Virus Had Other Illness, Italy Says” (March 18, 2020).  We were lucky that there were some news outlets that were reporting some actual news. And note what the headline implies?  It implies that the most vulnerable among us—those whose health had already been failing—were the ones most susceptible to COVID.

In the early going, the CDC could have illuminated the fact that COVID really was a pandemic of the immunologically-suppressed.  Instead it would headline counts of cases and counts of fatalities attributed to COVID.  An unschooled public would naturally interpret the fatalities as fatalities that would not otherwise have soon occurred absent COVID.  One was implicitly invited to conclude that each fatality took years and years of high-quality life away from the COVID victim.  But, that was and is incorrect. The COVID toll was concentrated on people who already were not long for this world. That fact, however, did not stop observers in the media from hysterically observing that the COVID toll had proven to be “worse than the Vietnam War” when the American death toll exceeded 60,000.  Those people observed hysterically that the COVID experience was “worse than World War II” when the COVID death toll exceeded 400,000.  But, before the advent of COVID, the annual all-cause death toll in the United States was about 2,800,000.  That was about seven World War II’s a year—every year.  And no one had cared.  Hmm …

These days the annual death toll is about 3,000,000.  It has become stubbornly elevated over the pre-COVID annual death tolls, and life expectancy has declined.  Younger people are succumbing to non-COVID conditions at elevated rates.  This is puzzling, because, the toll of COVID was concentrated on the unhealthiest among us; after COVID had burned through the population, the remaining population should be healthier.  The life expectancy of that remaining population should increase, but it hasn’t.  What is going on?  The health authorities have a lot of ‘splaining to do.

With the advent of Monkey Pox in the post-Trump era, the CDC reverted to defensive posturing.  The Monkey Pox phenomenon proved to be rather contained.  It proliferated in the male, homosexual population, but it soon burned out.  Farr’s Law kicked in.

Farr’s Law is basically the proposition that unsustainable processes may have the appearance of ramping up exponentially, but they will then give way to exponential decay.  A problem is that, as a process is ramping up, it may be impossible to know when the ramping up will switch off and give way to decay.  That said, one can imagine that when the ramping up does stop and the volume of cases and fatalities start to decay, the health authorities will take credit.  But, they will likely be taking undue credit, because infectious processes will burn through a population and exhibit exponential decay with or without public policy interventions.  The how, why and when of it may be a puzzle, which Farr himself observed, but the fact that infectious disease will burn through a population, run its course, and disappear is just that: a fact.  But, sure enough, the Monkey Pox phenomenon made it into the news.  The CDC made a show of “Doing Something.”  The Monkey Pox eventually disappeared.  The CDC claimed undue credit.

Strategic manipulation of data

Strategically withholding information is one thing.  The health authorities may perceive advantages to strategically manipulating information. They may, for example, have made a point of over-counting COVID cases and fatalities.  Indeed, they have given healthcare providers (hospitals) incentives to over-count cases and fatalities, for the federal government made a point of paying hospitals a bounty for each COVID fatality they had reported.  So, we may have all heard of cases by which, say, a person had died in a motorcycle accident, but leave it to the healthcare providers to stick a swab up the motorcyclist’s nose, run the infamous PCR tests to the point of exhaustion, all in an effort to find fragments of DNA that might be consistent with COVID infection.

It gets worse.  Case counts and fatalities attributed to COVD lend themselves to affirmatively distorted metrics.  Just divide the number of fatalities by case counts to derive a “case fatality rate” (CFR), and then report that number to the press.  It would have been easy—and, indeed, was easy—to report fatality rates in excess of 5% in the early going.  What we would really like to know, however, are “infection fatality rates” stratified by age.  To do that, we’d like to know how many people have actually been infected.  Such a number may be hard to discern given so many cases may go undetected, especially if they involved no obvious symptoms.  But, all along, the data have been consistent with the proposition that the only younger people who have succumbed to COVID have been unhealthy (morbidly obese or immuno-suppressed).

The withholding of data and the manipulation of data illuminate the unimportance of case counts and counts of fatalities attributed to COVID.  These things also illuminate the importance of better metrics, most notably “excess mortality”.  Excess mortality has made it into much of commentariat by this stage, and nary too soon, but, better late than never.  It gets to the question of how many people would not have died but for the advent of COVID.  It turns out that COVID really did induce some volume of excess mortality.  But since that mortality was concentrated on those people who were most likely to succumb to some health condition in the near future, we should expect excess mortality to go negative after COVID had burned through the population.  And that is what the data show for the oldest age cohorts.  But not for younger people, especially people of prime working age.  Other things are going on, and it is hard not to conclude that those other things were induced by poor public policy and by “vaccine” harms.

Historical experience

One thing one can credit the CDC with doing early on was maintaining narratives about earlier pandemics.  It was from visiting the CDC that I myself first became acquainted with the great flu pandemics of 1958 (“The Asian Flu”) and 1969 (“The Hong Kong Flu”).  It was at the CDC site that I also learned that the CDC understands that the median age of death attributed to the Spanish Flu (1918-1920) was 28.  It was 28, not 80.  In other words, the Spanish Flu likely did induce an enormous volume of excess mortality in terms of both the number of lives lost and the number of high-quality years of life lost.  Indeed, the age distribution of the harms induced by the Spanish Flu are more like the age distribution of harms induced by war.  An ignorant and hysterical class of professional commentators may have compared COVID to Vietnam and the Second World War, but the mean and median age of death in those conflicts were a lot closer to 20 than to 80.  War takes away healthy young people.  COVID took away unhealthy people, who, no surprise, tend to be the oldest among us.

Where are the adults?

An obvious reason to have been skeptical of the prospect that COVID would be a big deal was the fact that the health authorities appealed to a cheap, easy and obvious Safetyism.  To anyone smart enough to understand that case counts and counts of COVID fatalities were stupid, unreliable, uninformative or, worse, dis-informative metrics, it would have been obvious to look around for useful metrics like all-cause excess mortality or all-cause mean and median ages of death.  Instead, the authorities treated everyone like children, talked to them like children, encouraged them to think like children.  And much of population went along with it, including most people in the laptop class and in the universities.  These people, who should have known better, declined to put childish ways of thinking aside and to offer leadership to everyone else.  They declined to help people think through what was—and what was not—going on.  Indeed, to this date, elites still generally preach masking and “vaccination,” notwithstanding the mounting evidence that the former is useless (and even harmful) and that the latter is affirmatively harmful, especially to younger people.  But, the self-anointed best-and-brightest at places like Yale University still insist that students on campus get up to date on their vaccinations and wear masks.  Are there no adults anywhere?