Impending Doom, By David Stockman

 An insightful article by David Stockman, a former Director of Budget of the Reagan administration full of numbers and insight.

Impending Doom, Indeed!

By David Stockman

David Stockman's Contra Corner

April 1, 2021

We will not mince words. America is indeed suffering from a dangerous plague – a plague of misanthropic fear-mongering from the likes of Dr. Fauci, the Scarf Lady and the Biden’s new CDC director, among countless others of the self-designated Virus Patrol.

All three took to the mainstream media in recent days, with new CDC director Rochelle Walensky getting positively teary-eyed as she allegedly veered off-script to sound yet another Covid Alarm:

“I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom,” Walensky said, appearing to hold back tears.

“We do not have the luxury of inaction. For the health of our country, we must work together now to prevent a fourth surge.”

What? Where? Wait!

Here’s the source of Doom. Well, if you have your magnifying glass handy you might possibly spot it – the squiggle down there in the yellow box below!

Actually, she was not nearly done. When it comes to paint by the numbers exaggeration and hysteria the following is hard to top.

 It seems that the reason for Walensky’s alarm is that from the winter-flu season peak on January 13th, when the 7-day moving average reported 251,912 so-called “new cases”, the 7-day rate had plummeted by 77.8% to 55,840 on March 15th, but as of March 28 it was down by only, um, 75.3%!

The nation is recording a seven-day average of about 57,000 new Covid-19 cases per day, a 7% jump over the last week, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said during a White House news briefing on the pandemic.

You can’t make up this kind of calculated mendacity, including, presumably, the off-script scripted tears.

That’s especially because it’s now an established fact that upwards of 60-80% of these “new cases” are not medical cases at all: They are asymptomatic individuals who got swabbed and had their nasal secretions run to at 35-40+ CTs on the PCR test, which immense magnification systematically generates false positives based on harmless RNA fragments and dead viral debris.

Yet with only 15,000 to 20,000 actual infected cases per day at best, of which 95% will not result in serious illness, hospitalization or death, the head of the CDC is out yelling fire in the theater still another time.

“I remain deeply concerned about this trajectory,” Walensky said. “We have seen cases and hospital admissions move from historic declines to stagnations and increases. We know from prior surges that if we don’t control things now, there is a real potential for the epidemic curve to soar again.”
Walensky urged the public to “take this moment very seriously,” adding people should continue to wear masks, stay 6 feet apart and avoid crowds or traveling. “We can turn this around, but it will take all of us working together,” she added.

We have bolded the last sentence because that’s what the political class is really all about. They are forever searching out societal ills–some real, mostly imagined – that require state-orchestrated collective action to remedy. After all, that is how they gain power and pelf in the arena of politics and governance, and on that score the Covid-Hysteria was made to order. 

By contrast, under a regime of spontaneous markets and social order, tens of millions of uninfected or asymptomatic people would never be getting Covid tests in the first place, and they certainly would not have been quarantining or shutting-down their normal economic and social lives.

All of that flowed from the misbegotten predicate that the coronavirus was some kind of modern Black Plague equivalent, but with a hideously perverted twist: Namely, that to stop its spread the healthy and well should be isolated at home or via distancing and masks on the infinitesimal chance that they might unknowingly have a sufficient viral load to transmit the pathogen in the community.

The fact is, back in the more benighted times of earlier centuries, they quarantined the sick, not the well; and when people got sick from seriously dangerous pathogens, they stayed home because they were too sick to wander around the community.

Stated differently, in the face of serious general contagions, society didn’t need officialdom constantly beating the tom-toms to induce fear-based changes in behavior that were not warranted by the facts at hand.

To the contrary, in the midst of real pandemics, communities quickly apprehended the dangers and organized themselves to cope. And when the sick stayed home or were committed to treatment or isolation facilities, real contagions and viruses eventually burned themselves out.

Not this time. There was no spontaneous community defense because the Covid is lethal to only a small subset of the population, consisting of the very elderly with weak immune systems and the co-morbid already suffering from other life-threatening conditions.

Beyond that, the”science” provides no basis at all for the notion that healthy or asymptomatic people transmit the virus. The political class’ false project of “stopping the spread”, in fact, buried the real science which overwhelmingly ixnays the whacko theory that healthy people going about their ordinary business are stealthy vessels of disease and death. 

Instead, Fauci et. al. have seized upon the prosaic mechanics of human activity centered around social congregation, which inherently generates the probability that a respiratory virus–whether relatively benign or deathly – will spread through the community, and called it “the science”.

But that is not the science of Covid at all, which actually says that for 95% of the population it is not a lethal pathogen, as we will amplify below.

Instead, “community spread” is just an obvious mechanical fact of social life that got peddled as the “science” of lockdowns and became the basis for the whole regime of economic-martial law that has been stood-up since March 2020.

In any event, the sheer destructive absurdity of the matter was crystallized this weekend by the 55-year government lifer and windbag, Anthony Fauci, who has single-handedly made a mockery of “the science” and the U.S. Constitution during the past 14 months.

Said the sainted Dr. Fauci on the weekend CBS show:

“When the children go out into the community, you want them to continue to wear masks when they’re interacting with groups or multiple households,” Fauci proclaimed during an appearance on CBS News.

Fauci added that “children can clearly wind up getting infected” even if other kids they play with have been vaccinated against coronavirus.

With respect to the bolded phrase, what in the world is this dope talking about?

Of course, kids get infected with all kinds of germs which pass-around the classrooms and playgrounds, but in the case of the Covid, few of them get sick, virtually none are hospitalized and, thankfully, a nearly invisible fraction become fatalities.  

Indeed, after a full year of this full-on Covid-Hysteria, here is what we know about the “kids”. To wit, there are 73.2 million of them in America (17-years and under), yet only 238 of them are reported by the CDC itself as being among “all deaths involving Covid-19″.

As a statistical matter that represents just 0.3 mortalities per 100,000 population. The tip-off that this is ultra-thin gruel by any standard can be illustrated many different ways, but here are three of them:

1. For the same 17 years and younger population during the same period (weeks of February 1, 2020 to March 24, 2021), the mortality rate from all causes other that WITH-Covid was 51.9 per 100,000 or 160X higher;
2. The WITH-Covid mortality rate for the truly vulnerable population 85-years and older was 2,460 per 100,000 or 7,500X higher.
3. The pediatrics association estimates that kids account for 13% of Covid “cases”, but have accounted for only 0.05% of deaths – meaning that the survival rate is 99.993%.

Nor is that all. Even the CDC tables show that nearly 20% of the WITH-Covid deaths in this age cohort also included pneumonia; and that there were also 602 deaths from pneumonia that did not include a positive Covid test or physician’s diagnosis.

Stated differently, among the entire youthful population of 73.2 million, there were 194 deaths from pure Covid versus 602 cases from pure pneumonia and another 179 deaths attributable to influenza.

So why in the world is Dr. Fauci worried about children being “infected”?

The answer is simple: He isn’t.

His game is stopping the spread for its own sake, and taking 73 million children hostage to the dictates of the Virus Patrol is all in a day’s work.

In fact, when it comes to the science of picking statistical pepper out of what is self-evidently numeric fly-shit, Dr. Fauci has few peers.

Thus, he told his fawning CBS host on Sunday that 10,000 additional, mostly false positive, cases are a new reminder that normalization is still a grave danger. In fact, he allowed that maybe by mid-summer people can go back to baseball parks, but only if they sit far apart and wear a mask!

ANTHONY FAUCI: …I’ve said many times to you that when you’re coming down from a big peak and you reach a point and start to plateau, once you stay at that plateau, you’re really in danger of a surge coming up. And unfortunately, that’s what we’re starting to see. We got stuck at around 50,000 new cases per day, went up to 60,000 the other day, and that’s really a risk.

…What we’re likely seeing is because of things like spring break and pulling back on the mitigation methods that you’ve seen. Now, several states have done that. I believe it’s premature,” Fauci said.

“I would expect that as we get through the summer – late spring, early summer – there’s going to be a relaxation where you’re going to have more and more people who will be allowed into baseball parks, very likely separated with seating, very likely continuing to wear masks.”

We undercover the real motivation behind this blithering crackpottery below, but for want of doubt consider this data. The on age-adjusted deaths from all sources during the 2020 Year of the Covid is now in, and the thin green bar on the far right margin speaks for itself.

The age-adjusted death rate in the US was only a tad above its recent level, and actually much lower than it was during the entirety of the 105 years between 1900 and 2005. Yet we are still being told about Impending Doom and Sleepy Joe is calling upon governors of some of the Red States who have finally come to their senses to reimpose the mandatory mask requirement.

And that’s the Spoiler Alert. This whole Covid enchilada has not been about public health all along.

Its an excuse for increased social control and aggrandizement of the state that the political classes have opportunistically seized upon, and are now determined to perpetuate indefinitely with new variants, new pretexts and new assaults on constitutional liberty, fiscal sanity and free market prosperity.

Notwithstanding the above, we actually can imagine a pathogen which would be as deadly as Ebola, as transmissible as the worst strain of SARS-2 and a Grim Reaper of one and all, regardless of age, health status or prophylactic measures taken.

While that might justify a sweeping economic Lockdown and government campaign to stop the spread on the grounds that society was being literally invaded by an army of fatal pathogens, the crucial point is this: The Covid has now proven itself in spades to be just the opposite of that theoretical deathly contagion.

And for want of doubt, we don’t mean modestly dissimilar. We are talking about upside-down, black and white, opposite-end-of-the-earth different.

Truly, the data below tells you all you need to know as to why the Virus Patrol is and has been dead-wrong all alone. Sweeping nonparmaceutical interventions (NPIs) have been unjustified from the get-go, as has the relentless blunderbuss campaign by the arms of the state to stop the spread of the coronavirus dead-in-its-tracks.

The reason is simple. The Covid is a pathogenic bully that hones in with malice aforethought on the very most vulnerable segments of the population. That is, those exhibiting the immunological frailties of old age, life-threatening comorbidities or rare genetic predispositions for immune system overreaction to this viral interloper, especially in the form of cytokine storms where the human body essentially attacks and kills itself.

On the one hand, the proof that the Covid is not a universally deadly pathogen is in the aggregate pudding. Based on the overwhelming findings of serological studies (i.e. blood serum tests for antibodies), upwards of 125 million Americans have been infected to date, albeit most of this number have not been symptomatic or confirmed via the wholly unreliable PCR test.

Even among the 30 million who have tested positive – including many individuals who have tested positive multiple times in order to get free of government or employer restrictions – less than 10 million have been seriously ill, fewer than one million have been hospitalized, and even by the CDC’s expansive counting system, about 525,000 have died.

That computes to a 0.4% IFR (infection fatality rate), which ain’t no Black Plague or Ebola equivalent. Full stop.

Indeed, even at this most aggregated level, the Covid does not present as a marauding army of death. In no way shape or form does it merit the “deathly” prefix that has become embedded in the vocabulary and word processors of the mainstream narrative.

In fact, even when you use age as a crude proxy for health status, there are virtually no community-spread illnesses that have the kind of extreme skew to the least healthy as shown in the table below.

This is the mortality rate per 100,000 for the period from February 1, 2020 through March 24, 2021, and the mortality figures are extracted from the CDC’s own expansive count of WITH-Covid deaths.

Population/ WITH-Covid deaths/ rate per 100,000 by Age Cohort:

• 0-17 Years: 73.2 million persons/ 238 deaths/ 0.33 per 100k;
• 18-29 years: 53.6 million persons/ 1,916 deaths/ 3.6 per 100k;
• 30-49 years: 84.5 million persons/ 20,717 deaths/ 24.5 per 100k;
• 50-64 years: 62.9 million persons/78,883 deaths/ 125.4 per 100k;
• 65-74 years: 31.5 million persons/ 115,381 deaths/ 366.4 per 100k;
• 75-84 years: 16.0 million persons/ 146,310 deaths/ 916.2 per 100k;
• 85+ years: 6.6 million persons/ 162,583 deaths/ 2,460.0 per 100k;
• All ages: 328.2 million persons/ 526,028 deaths/ 160.3 per 100k.

In round terms, the above shows that 81% of all WITH-Covid deaths have been among the 16% of the population (54.1 million) 65 years and older. By contrast, the the 64.4% of the population under 50 years (211.4 million) accounted for just 22,900 or 4.4% of the WITH-Covid deaths tallied by the CDC.

Yet it is the under 50 years population – the Kids, the socially congregating 20-30 year olds and the core working age population 30-50 years – that has borne the brunt of the Lockdowns and NPIs. Self-evidently, these measures were not imposed for their own protection since their risks of death from Covid were infinitesimal compared to the ordinary risks of life.

As shown in the table below, for instance, the risk of death from all causes other than WITH-Covid during the last 14 months for the 18-29 years cohort was 183.1 per 100,000. That’s 51X greater than the 3.6 per 100,000 risk of dying from Covid during the same period for the 53.6 million members of this most socially active and interactive cohort of the US population.

Even in the case of the core working age population age 30-49, the all causes (other than Covid) risk of death was 283.3 per 100,000 or 12X greater than the incidence of WITH-Covid deaths (24.5 per 100k).

Of course, the Virus Patrol might argue that the WITH-Covid deaths were preventable by stern Lockdowns and other NPIs, while deaths from, say, heart disease or respiratory illnesses were not. In fact, that’s exactly what the Scarf Lady argued on a weekend show this past Sunday.

Had the Donald not been such a obstinate dolt, Dr. Birx essentially claimed, and strictly followed the advice of herself and Fauci et. Al, most of the WITH-Covid deaths would not have happened.

The “vast majority” of the almost 550,000 coronavirus deaths in the US could have been prevented if Donald Trump’s administration had acted earlier and with greater conviction…. “There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”

If we were Sleepy Joe, we’d probably risk a chauvinism charge and say, c’mon woman!

Here is the seven-day moving average of deaths WITH-Covid for two of the most open states (Texas and Florida) compared to the the nation’s Lockdown capital of California. For the past 370 days, the curves have risen and fallen pretty much in tandem with the normal flu seasonality, and in recent months California has taken a turn for the worse relative to Texas and Florida.

Indeed, since Governor Abbott belatedly saw the light and opened Texas completely in early March, the data are so compelling as to make a complete fool of the Scarf Lady, as shown below:

Texas: 7-day new cases average:

• March 2 (before): 6,663
• March 28 (after): 3,320

Texas: 7-day new deaths average:

• March 2 (before): 231;
• March 28 (after): 107

The fact is, there is now overwhelming proof among both the states and among different countries that the vast disparities in Covid-control regimes didn’t make any difference in mortality and other health outcomes. Dr. Birx was not talking science, she was spouting political cant.

Internationally, the case of Sweden should finally tell Dr. Fauci, the Scarf Lady and the rest of the Virus Patrol to shut-up and go home. After 14 months of firmly resisting the Wuhan Lockdown Model that was foolishly adopted in the US, the UK and throughout much of Western Europe, half of Sweden should be dead by now if the egregious fear-mongering of the Virus Patrol was even remotely correct.

In fact, based on preliminary data from EU statistics agency Eurostat, Sweden had 7.7% more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years. By contrast, countries that opted for several periods of strict lockdowns, such as Spain and Belgium, had so-called excess mortality of 18.1% and 16.2% respectively.

In all, twenty-one of the 30 countries with available statistics had higher excess mortality outcomes than Sweden.

Here’s the thing. The misbegotten one-size fits all regime adopted by the Donald’s advisors in March 2020 didn’t happen because America’s admittedly lumbering Federal and local governments weren’t capable of targeting protective measures on the nation’s 54 million or so population of the most vulnerable Americans.

For crying out loud, the Federal government (via Medicare/Medicaid) actually knows the social security numbers, preferred physicians and health facilities and medical conditions of damn near every single American over 65 years.

It could have put on a full court press of notifications, advisories about health risks, prophylactics and treatments and provided financial support and protective services wherever warranted at a tiny fraction of the fiscal and economic costs that have been incurred by the NPI strategies.

So why wasn’t this targeted approach taken?

There is a very simple and deeply disturbing answer. To wit, there was nothing in this targeted approach for publicity-hounds and wanna be power players like Dr. Fauci and the Scarf Lady, who would have otherwise soldiered on in relative obscurity in the backwaters of the Federal public health apparatus.

Worse still, once these wanna be Federal power players bamboozled the Donald (easy enough to do) and basically redefined a targeted medical challenge as a sweeping, across-the-board public health crisis, the governors, mayors and other petty officials throughout the land were unleashed to impose economic martial law, and they did so on the basis of dubious and rubbery local statues.

Needless to say, this unconstitutional, unplanned, disorganized blunderbuss of interventions turned into a totalitarian nightmare within a matter of weeks.

Even then, there was no excuse. The data from the Covid-struck cruise ship called the Diamond Princess was already in, and it showed that among even a senior citizen-aged population of about 3,711 guests and crew, of which 712 (19%) were confirmed cases or became symptomatic or ill, only a tiny fraction needed hospital care and just 14 died.

That made for a IFR of just 0.4%, assuming all passengers were infected owing to close quarters at sea. At worst, the IFR was 2.0% if you assume the improbability that only the 712 passengers who were tested and diagnosed as Covid-positive had been infected.

Moreover, among the ship’s crew of 1,045 with a median age of 36 years, there were 145 positive cases, but zero deaths.

By contrast, among the 2,666 passengers on board with a median age of 69 years, there were 567 positive cases. Yet all of the fatalities were among these far older passengers, and virtually all of those who succumbed were in their 70s and 80s.

In short, when the 14th passenger, who was in his late 70s, died on April 14th, the entire profile of the Covid had been live fire tested and demarcated: It wasn’t a deathly pathogen for society as a whole, and it was fatal for just a small subset of the elderly population over 70 years.

Needless to say, the Diamond Princess lessons never got the time of day once the White House Coronavirus Task Force was up and running, and conducting it nightly reality TV show.

Then-and-there, the public health apparatchiks turned the Federal government’s Covid response into an all-of-society political crusade to accomplish the impossible: Namely, extinguish a novel respiratory virus that by its very nature was destined to spread to most of the population, and could have been permitted to do so had it been accompanied with protective measures targeted on the vulnerable.

Under that kind of regime, real medical science would have been the driver. We are referring to hundreds of thousands of trained physicians and health care institutions providing one-patient-at-a-time care and treatments. That is, the real science would have been brought to bear on sick patients – including the kind of ad hoc improvisations and off-label treatments that quickly emerge from the decentralized medical community when a novel medical threat arises.

As it happened, by contrast, we got a clumsy, sometimes brutal social control regime targeted mainly on the healthy from the public officials who were not remotely competent to manage anything as stunningly complex and interdependent as the American economy and social order. And whatever their ad hocery and constantly changing advice, rules and orders were based upon, it wasn’t “the science”.

Worse still, the pseudo-science behind the NPI regime quickly got hyper-politicized once the Donald discovered that he had been bamboozled and began to let loose with randomized doubts about the undertaking that he had authorized and sanctioned.

Accordingly, within a few weeks the most extreme form of Faucist public health nonsense became the sanctioned orthodoxy among the anti-Trump political class and media organs. And wearing a mask became the very badge of honor in a purported war on the Covid that actually amounted to a political war on the Trumpian Right.

If there were any doubts, Biden removed them this week when he called upon Red State governors to reinstate their mandatory mask orders, and adopted the same misbegotten language that was used in the state-aggrandizing War on Poverty by LBJ, War On Drugs by Nixon and War on Energy by Carter, among others.

“We still are in a war with this deadly virus,” he said. “And we’re bolstering our defenses, but this war is far from won.”

Of course, in these phony wars what amounts to statistical noise is transposed into heavy duty warnings, such as CDC Director Walensky’s cry of doom Monday morning that we are facing an impending 4th wave breakout owing to some tiny squiggles in the incoming case and mortality data.

Then again, if you can spot this incipient breakout in the chart below, your eyes are surely better than ours.

In fact, there is no uptick in the overwhelming majority of states, if such upticks of positive PCR tests results were meaningful, which they are not. Just six states, which are shown in color below, account for most of the national uptick, and these are the six most consistent and heavy duty Blue State Lockdown regimes!

Notwithstanding the meaningless statistical noise shown above, the establishment media has now been house-trained to replicate and amplify the false alarms issued by officialdom.

Here is the nonsense that the media megaphones at POLITICO were quick to issue upon Walensky’s doom pronouncement. Self-evidently, what is really transmissible is the mainstream party line, not the disease:

Covid strikes back – Pardon this interruption to the “everything is awesome” narrative. Because Covid-19 is surging again, leaving the CDC director with a sense of “impending doom” regarding a fourth wave in the pandemic.

Debbie Lai, chief operating officer of Covid Act Now, told POLITICO Nightly’s Renuka Rayasam that the country’s Covid trajectory is deteriorating: “There may be a fourth surge underway, with cases now growing in two-thirds of states versus half before the weekend.”

The numbers: New cases jumped by 11 percent over the past week to a seven-day average of about 60,000 daily cases, according to an interagency memo dated March 29 and obtained by POLITICO.

Likewise, a WSJ paint-by-the-numbers story obsessed on the same trivia.

The US reported 507 deaths for Sunday, down from a day-earlier 741 but up from 447 a week earlier.

Well, here’s the fact of the matter. Every day about 8,200 American die on average, and more in the winter-early spring months. So the Sunday-to-Sunday difference cited by the WSJ amounts to 0.7% of the daily mortality average; it’s a statistical fluctuation, not news or information.

Needless to say, these statistical noise emissions – even though they are heralded with bated breath in the MSM – are still just plain noise. And they are also a testament to the utter lack of context in which Sleepy Joe’s war on this ostensibly “deadly virus” is being waged.

As indicated earlier, here is the mortality rates for the same seven age cohorts shown above – but this time for all causes of death except WITH-Covid. What it shows is the obvious point that mortality rates are a function of age, but that compared to the all-causes curve depicted below, the Covid skew to the very elderly is in a class all by itself.

To wit, the ratio of deaths from all causes other than Covid for the 85 and older population is 164X higher than for the 0-17 years cohort. And that’s not even in the same ballpark as the 7,455X ratio for the incidence of Covid deaths as between the oldest and youngest Americans.

Medical science and targeted help versus a blunderbuss non-science based political power grab is what the so-called Covid crisis has been about since the very beginning. It was another false crisis defined by the political class and their media subalterns to facilitate a further aggrandizement of the state.

All Causes Mortality Except Covid: # of deaths/rate per 100k, February 2020-March 2021:

• 0-17 years: 70,731 deaths/96.6 per 100k;
• 18-29 years: 98,083 deaths/183.1 per 100k;
• 30-49 years: 239,400 deaths/283.3 per 100k;
• 50-64 years: 581,170 deaths/923.8 per 100k;
• 65-74 years: 694,765 deaths/2,206 per 100k;
• 75-84 years: 840,052 deaths/5,260 per 100k;
• 85 years & older: 1,045,660 deaths/ 15,819 per 100k;
• All age groups: 3,509,979 deaths/ 1,069 per 100k

Nor are these data unique to the US. Covid is an elderly-assaulting bully the world over.

But rather than protection of the bottom two classes of the population, the Covid became an excuse for house arrest and economic and social disenfranchisement of the bulk of the population that was never in serious danger, as the chart below makes so stunningly clear.

Yet the apparatchiks who falsely seized power are not about to give it up – vaccinations, herd immunity and plunging cases notwithstanding.

That’s the real impending doom.