Category: President Trump

Medical treatment is, for the first time in our history, political. But before I rant on that topic I need to admit my theory about SARS-CoV-2 has been proven wrong. My theory was based on the conviction that it was impossible for our government, regardless of who was president, to react with enough speed and decisiveness to get ahead of a virus. I went onto speculate that the reason the virus seemed to be growing less lethal was it’s points of attachment were being forced into their original configuration by Mother Nature.

Ultimately I could still be proven right, but I lost confidence in my theories because SARS-CoV-2 is no longer acting in the way I predicted it would. For three months the pandemic conformed to my predictions almost to the letter, but it isn’t now, so I was wrong.

So what now? It’s time to new set of facts and here they are copied from a post I can’t find at the moment so I can’t credit the author. It is now time to come to terms with the fact that;

a) I am probably going to get COVID-19 at some point,

b), I am almost certainly going to survive it, and

c), I might very well give it to someone else.

My new assumption is that this is a year-round virus that’s eventually going to infect 100 million people and kill roughly 1/4 of one percent of those infected. I’ve accepted those numbers. Unfortunately, millions of others have not. Many people have no sense of where this is headed, and I understand why. They’ve been betrayed by a hysterical media that insists on covering each new reported case as if it were the first case.

The McAllen/Edinburg area of South Texas has been experiencing an outbreak of SAR-CoV-2 which has filled the hospitals, filled the morgues and has resulted in the deployment of U.S. Army medical teams to help us cope. I now know several COVID 19 patients all of whom were OCD about mask wearing and hand washing. As we can see from Hollands example masks are not the answer; avoiding the three C’s: (confined spaces, crowded places, and close contact) seems to be much more important. We have known that since the start of the pandemic but only Japan has codified the 3 C’s into social policy.

The increase in cases comes from mass mobile testing at various sights around the Rio Grande Valley. The sudden increase in deaths is not a mystery because we now know morbid obesity is a real problem with COVID-19. McAllen and Edinburg combined to win the dubious distinction of  the fattest metro area in the country in 2019. When it comes to comorbidity we are number 1!

Added to the mix is the fact this area is tightly controlled by democrats and the hospital systems rely of federal funding because they are Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI’s) which means they get access to cash the rest of the country kicks in because reasons.  The majority of doctors here follow The “Fauci Strategy” which is “to keep early infected patients quarantined at home without treatment until they developed a shortness of breath and had to be admitted to a hospital. Then they would they be given hydroxychloroquine. The Food and Drug Administration cluelessly agreed to this doctrine and it stated in its hydroxychloroquine Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) that “hospitalized patients were likely to have a greater prospect of benefit (compared to ambulatory patients with mild illness).”

The other problem with the South Texas outbreak is we are told nothing about it. We hear how many test positive, and we get a daily COVID 19 related death count. There is no context, no explanations about why we are experiencing deaths at much higher rate than the rest of the country. There is also zero coverage of the false positive problem just as there is zero coverage of the inflated death count problem. But this is Texas so the one thing we do get news about is the state going after unemployment fraud which is rampant in the age of COVID-19.

Richard Cortez, an elected Hidalgo County judge who was (reportedly) a great CPA before he went on the bench has issued back to back shelter in place orders that not one person in this county is following. The gyms remain open as do the few restaurant that have not gone under yet. My friends at the (veteran owned and operated) 5×5 brewery are watching four years of hard work and every penny they ever earned slip away because the town of Mission, TX decided they were not an essential business.

We the people are no longer listening to the “experts” who have impinged on our lives and destroyed our economy. But ignoring them is all we can do, for those of us who have lost our businesses and livelihoods there is always the ballot but down here if you’re not voting democrat your vote counts for nothing.

Adding fuel to the fire is our controlled media who labels the Sturgis motorcycle rally a “super spreader” event while ignoring the tens of thousands of BLM protesters who assemble nightly to burn, loot, rage, and attack police officers. Completing our new circle of misery we have the Biden campaign. Joe Biden is obviously experiencing a severe mental decline and that process appears to be accellerating rapidly.

Joe Biden is incapable of completing a coherent sentence and his decline will rob us of the only thing worth watching this fall – the Presidential debates. Biden is not going to participate because he can’t participate and everyone except the controlled media knows that.

I remain concerned that the controlled media narrative is so far removed from observable reality that it cannot be sustained. Yet here we are, August of 2020 and we are still in semi lockdown over a disease that 99.9% of the population has no problem beating, especially if they are fortunate enough to have a doctor who prescribes HCL, zinc, Z-packs and steroid inhalers.

This is worse than a bad twilight zone episode, but how does it end? The elites have been unmasked as petty partisan scum with inaccurate models. When questioned they respond with petulant arguments from authority (a well known logical fallacy). They and the media have forfeited any trust we had in them and at some point there will be a reckoning. Inshallah that reckoning will take the form of the rule of law being applied to elites in the same way it is being applied to small business men and women who are trying to make a living despite arbitrary, politically motivated tyranny from elected democrats across the land.

It is possible (maybe even likely) the bizarre controlled media narrative will be with us for years to come. I do know this; when I test positive for the COVID-19 I am immediately heading to Corpus Christie to be treated by a physician (friend of FRI and founder of The Scalpel podcast Dr. Keith Rose) who has a  300(+) -0 record with SARS CoV-19.  I know he will use science, not politics, to treat me. Every American should have the same confidence in their doctor but, now that medicine is political, that is not going to happen.

A few weeks back there was a Black Lives Matters protest in downtown McAllen, Texas. They did not get far before being confronted by a local man with a chain saw. The man was screaming racial slurs which he, uncharacteristically for these parts, helpfully translated into English for those who are a little rusty with the lingua franca.

The man was arrested after scattering the handful of over socialized, under educated, upper middle-class white kids who were protesting in support of Black Lives Matter. Black lives are not a thing in South Texas where blacks are less that 1% of the population and the vast majority are Hispanic.

So, while the rest of you are dealing with riots and cancel culture  we are dealing with an outbreak of SARS CoV-2 that is threatening to overwhelm our hospitals. As is expected with democrat declared emergencies nobody actually knows any SARS CoV-2 patients, the local hospitals are still laying people off and hemorrhaging money. Despite a total lack of any evidence other than news people droning on about increased numbers Hildalgo County Judge Richard F. Cortez decreed that as of midnight tonight (19 June) masks must be worn in all businesses, at all times in the Rio Grande Valley. Even when you are working out in a gym.

I do not believe the new COVID numbers for the Rio Grande Valley and nor should you. Dellridge Health & Rehabilitation Center in Paramus New Jersey leads the nation in nursing home deaths according the Federal Center for Medical and Medicaid Services (CMS). CMS reported that Dellridge had 753 deaths (in a 96 bed facility mind you). The facility had reported 16 deaths of patients who tested positive for COVID-19.

We know the media and the CDC have engaged in gross inflation of the COVID numbers and it is not a mystery why. Any attempt verify an increase in COVID numbers at local hospitals in McAllen are thwarted by armed guards and recalcitrant public affairs officers. There is no way to know what the hell is going on because trusting the government or media to tell us what is happening is for knaves or fools.

As is the case in every progressive district across the land our  judiciary is dangerously unaccountable and mostly a validation mechanism for the imposition of elite opinion. Elite opinion is Orange Man Bad and they have been engaged is a systematic campaign to undermine the President since before he was elected.

The SARS CoV 2 response will go down in history as the most blatant example of expert class arrogance and media malfeasance. Quoting from this piece by Stacey Lennox:

Economies across the world were shut down based on a model that was blatant panic porn built on shoddy code. Even more maddening is the fact expert Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College had a history of getting almost every prediction he ever made completely wrong.

What is now at stake are the reputations of the scientific expert class, the Federal bureaucracy, the media, and virtually every big money interest, from the pharmaceutical industry to Silicon Valley to Hollywood. If President Trump gets four more years those special interests are suddenly not  going to be so special.

Where is the first place you heard about hydroxychloroquine? President Trump’s COVID update where he mentioned it and stuck by his belief, based on reporting by front line physicians, that it worked. Just last week the authors of a study published in the medical journal The Lancet that said treating coronavirus with hydroxychloroquine could be fatal retracted their findings.

Hydroxychloroquine cost $3.00 per treatment. Remdesivier, which doesn’t even work well, costs $1,400 per treatment and it has a patent. Do you believe big Pharma was not behind the coordinated assault on the effectiveness of a drug that was proved to work on SARS CoV1, which has identical modes of attachment with SARS CoV2? Maybe it was all a coincidence, what do I know?

One thing I know is the doctors in the Rio Grande Valley are using (but have run out of) Remdesivir. Hospitals in the RGV are considered by our government to be  “Hispanic Serving Institutions” which entitles them to lots a federal grant monies. They are rule followers to the nth degree and despite knowing hydroxychloroquine and zinc will work they are not about to do anything to jeopardize grant monies. So they use Remdesivir, but have run out of the stuff and are now using Tylenol.

Welcome to the revolution. On one side are the American people who believe in our founding principals that guarantee every American has equal opportunity for success. We’ll call them the Ameri- cans . On the other side are Americans who believe in the French Revolutions concept of equal outcomes for all. We’ll call them Ameri-can’ts. The Ameri-cant’s are rioting, claiming the country is inherently racist and all the ” Four Olds” (old customs, old ideas, old habits and old culture) must go . Have you ever heard of the four Olds before? Here’s a quick reminder:

The campaign to destroy the Four Olds began in Beijing on August 19, 1966, shortly after the launch of the Cultural Revolution.

The last crew to use the four olds killed millions of their own citizens. In America that is not going to happen because the one thing that democrat progressives cannot do is export their organic lunacy and blatant anarchy outside the urban centers they control. Unlike China (or any other country) we have the 2nd Amendment, you want to defund the police and place the responsibility for my security on me? I have no problem with that at all.  I am one an Ameri-can’s and most of us are well armed.

My prediction is the President will win by a landslide this November. This country is still majority Ameri-can’s and we bend our knee to no man.  The remaining weeks running up to the election are going to be painful to watch given the media’s continuing encouragement of rioting. And we may face the painful prospect of no NCAA football this fall  (I don’t watch or care about the NFL or any other professional sport).

If my prediction is wrong then we get to experience what happens when you try to force “equality in outcomes” (Jacobinism to the historically literate) to a country founded on the principal equal opportunity for all. A country where the citizens are armed and where trampling on individual liberties is not tolerated. I don’t think that will work so I hope for the best while not fearing the worst.

As COVID Anxiety is turning into COVID rage I am putting my streak of forecasting exactly how the SARS COVID 2 pandemic will play out on the line with another bold prediction. As this comes to pass remember you heard it here first (unless you listen to the No Agenda podcast). The SARS COVID 2 pandemic is over, the numbers of new infections may increase but the numbers of those patients requiring ICU treatment or dying from the virus will continue to plummet. This is because the virus was manipulated for gain of function experiments and once it got out of the lab and into nature; Mother Nature, recognizing a freak when she sees one, is forcing the virus back to its original state which is an annoyance to humans not a death dealing pathogen.

I am making this prediction from the work of Chris Howard, PhD (Biochemistry) and his wife Lynn Howard, MD (Pathogenic Microbiology and Infectious Disease Specialist). The paragraphs below are my notes from their presentation which can be found here. 

Coronaviruses are found in most animal species in humans there are over 100 different variants of coronaviruses,  Historically they are nothing more than an annoyance, they cause  and viral sinus infections, or common colds. They have a distinct ability to penetrate epithelium cells, your first line of defense in the immune system, so when you find a virus that penetrates that epithelium and activates to enter a host cell then you pretty much have an annoyance and it’s usually a respiratory issue.

Coronaviruses have never been that virulent until the SARS 1 epidemic in 2001 -2002. We were originally told SARS 1 was found in bat caves  but if you look at the genetic sequence of SARS 1 RNA and compare it to SARS found in bats there are many similarities however they are not identical. The assumption is that it made a zoonotic leap from the bat to the human and in doing so mutated.  That sounds reasonable until you look at the sequence themselves and realize what has changed is not your typical zoonosis mutation. If  you dig deeper you’ll discover that many years ago (80’s and 90’s) we were manipulating viruses to learn more about them, and by manipulating them we made them more transmissible, more infectious, and more virulent. This supposedly teaches scientist and epidemiologist epidemiological behavior of potential pathogens and this type of study is called gain of function research.

When virus’s mutate and jump from to a different species or change hosts the main driver of those changes is evolutionary pressure to be able to bind better. Viruses themselves do not change; they are around for one thing; to make more viruses. When a virus finds a good mode of attachment, you will see less change in the virus. Both SARS 1 and the SARS 2 have identical modes of attachment from the ACE 2 inhibitor binding to S1. S1 splitting to the TMPRSS 2 binding site which opens the virus leading to exocytosis into the cell.  There’s no difference between SARS 1 and SARS 2 in that respect except for the internal dynamics of the virus’s which means it was man-made.

SARS COVID 2 (the etiological agent is for the disease state) is a chimera which by definition is made in a lab. Chimera’s take a target virus, incorporate other characteristics from other viruses to create something different.  A pertinent example of gain of function would be to use a COVID virus to create an HIV vaccine. HIV is a retrovirus and they don’t have that ability to penetrate epithelium. Vaccinating someone for HIV is not possible so scientists are trying to  find a way  to carry a vaccine (or antigen in this case) through the epithelium.

When the genome of SARS COVID 2 was uncoded there were four subsets that are identical to portions of the genome of HIV. That impossible in nature, it could not have happened to the COVID virus in a laboratory..

For viruses’ evolutionary pressure usually is based on the binding; it doesn’t change the internal RNA or DNA strands of viruses. With chimeras as they reproduce you get a shift back towards the original, natural type of virus. As a chimera goes through patient after patient and population after population mother nature recognizes it to be a freak. When you hear there are now 30 strains of CVOID 2 there are not really 30 different strains (they all have identical binding site) it’s same virus changing enough to revert back to the original wild virus which is, to humans, an annoyance, not a life or death threat.

Lynn and Chris Howard practice what is known as precision medicine. Precision medicine is a catch phrase for using your genetics and using epigenetics to take a very precise approach to optimizing your health. This is high end medicine targeting wealthy, high end clients like professional athletes and I imagine that is why their research is not receiving more attention from our know-nothing press.

If you look at how the SARS COVID 2 pandemic has progressed it is clear (to me at least) the Howard’s have articulated the Occam’s Razor solution. It is the simplest of competing theories and thus (most likely) the closest to the truth.  Mother Nature does not take kindly to the release of genetically manipulated organisms into the wild. She recognizes them and eliminates them with the same pitiless certainty she applies to all her creatures that are unable to respond to evolutionary pressures only she knows and understands.

With each passing day the evidence that the lockdowns were a massive waste of time and money accumulates. In South Texas where the wearing of face masks has been optional for a week I often am the only person in the local HEB not wearing a mask. Masks do not protect you from viruses nor do they prevent you from spreading a virus if you have one. Mask wearing is Kabuki theater just like TSA checkpoints in our airports. We have been victimized by politicians and medical “experts” who have been wrong about every aspect of this pandemic. When confronted with the conflicting facts from the ground they have doubled down with unreasonable, unconstitutional, ineffective actions that terrorize the uninformed and are destroying our economy. For this they will pay. Inshallah.

What it is ain’t exactly clear; and that’s an understatement. In the past national emergencies brought the country together, at least a for awhile. From the reaction to 9/11 to the legions of people conducting water rescues after Houston flooded a few years back, we have always come together as a people to face down a threat. When the COVID-19 virus was discovered it appeared to bean an existential threat. Based on modeling from epidemiological experts we expected millions, then hundreds of thousands, then tens of thousands of deaths and this with the extreme lock down measures included in the modeling.

The models were not just wrong they were not even close. We now know, based on COVID -19 antibody testing in California, Boston, and Iceland that the infection fatality rate (IFR) is somewhere between 0.1 and 0.3 percent. The more testing we do the lower the IFR drops as the number of positives (the denominator) increases.

Last week a trio of Silicon Valley legends (T.J. Rodgers, Joe Malchow, and Yinon Weiss) conducted a regression study to determine if the rate of lock down  in each state had a statistically significant effect on the number of reported cases. They found the correlation coefficient on early vs late (or no) lockdowns was 5.5%. That number is so low that it is essential no correlation. The lockdowns had no effect on the outcome in each of the 50 states.

One of the most eminent Professors of Epidemiology, Medicine, and Population Health, John P.A. Ioannidis, MD, DSc  has again warned, we are making high-stakes decisions without reliable data. Yet the narrative marches on with the media and authorities using the case fatality rate (CFR), not the infection fatality rate (IFR) to justify their caution.

So what now?

Unfortunately there is no what now; instead there is a deeper polarizing division within the population. A good percentage of the population would agree with my timeline and assessment. But it is also apparent there is a large percentage of Americans who believe there is a deadly virus out there that will scythe through the population if we lift the various lockdowns affecting 43 of the 50 states.

There is no way forward if we cannot, as a nation, agree on or define the threat. The problem now is defining the threat becomes a threat to the reputations of the leading scientists running our public health system, powerful academic institutions like John Hopkins and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, as well as powerful philanthropists like Bill Gates and, of course, the legacy media.

The failure to adopt to the virus as it has presented itself is, according to physicians on the front line, costing lives. John Hinderocker from the Powerline blog explains the details in this post. He quotes from Dr. Paul Marik, Chief of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the Eastern Virginia Medical School, Critical Care COVID Management Protocol

It is our collective opinion that the historically high levels of morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 is due to a single factor: the widespread and inappropriate reluctance amongst intensivists to employ anti-inflammatory and anticoagulant treatments, including corticosteroid therapy early in the course of a patient’s hospitalization. It is essential to recognize that it is not the virus that is killing the patient, rather it is the patient’s overactive immune system. The flames of the “cytokine fire” are out of control and need to be extinguished. Providing supportive care (with ventilators that themselves stoke the fire) and waiting for the cytokine fire to burn itself out simply does not work… this approach has FAILED and has led to the death of tens of thousands of patients.

As Powerline further notes:

The systematic failure of critical care systems to adopt corticosteroid therapy resulted from the published recommendations against corticosteroids use by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the American Thoracic Society (ATS) amongst others.

It appears the most effective treatment for COVID-19 is a combination of very inexpensive, readily available drugs. This will prove catastrophic for reputations of those who continue to insist that mass testing and a proven vaccine or effective drug targeting the virus like remdesivir, the antiviral medicine from Gilead Sciences , are required before the lockdowns can end.

The lockdowns are going to end and they are going to end soon. Shelter in place  type orders have proved an incredibly destructive policy, and the harms have not been distributed evenly across the United States. Some people are suffering much, much more than others.

Yet the lockdown continues here in Texas with the Kabuki theater of partial openings. Restaurants cannot turn a profit when they are forced to run at 50% capacity. I’m not sure why you would open movie theaters but keep gyms closed given the co-morbidity associated with lifestyles of the large and lethargic.

Getting the population out into fresh air and sunshine to bolster their immune systems with some exercise would seem to be what public health officials should want to do. But what they are doing is pretending they can calibrate the economy to limit exposure to a nasty bug despite the fact that “science” in the form of epidemiologic  studies and regression analysis would tell you these steps are not helping – they are hurting.

As Texas and other states come out of lockdown there will be more positive tests because there will be more tests. What we will not see is a giant wave of critically ill patients needing ICU beds. That hasn’t happened yet and it is not going to happen now or in the future.  When what is not going to happen, happens, what are the elites and the press and all the politicians who have been crying wolf for months now going to do? Who know? Owning up and admitting their mistakes is not part of their DNA so we can rule being honest out.

The great and powerful Texas historian T.R. Fehrenbach once wrote that America is a land so great that even fools cannot destroy it. We are in the middle of seeing his thesis tested. Let’s hope he was right.

It is now obvious the modeling driving the COVID-19 response was wrong. They caused the nation to overreact and now that we realize COVID-19 is not the threat we were told it was what do we do?  What theTrump Administration just did, right in front of you, was disappear the models, switch data sets, and start talking recovery. It was awesome to watch made more so by the fact that not many people realized what they were seeing.

During Thursday’s Corona Virus Task Force presser all mentions of modeling were gone, replaced with slides from the   US Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network. From the linked article:

Birx said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be relying on its existing surveillance practices for “influenza-like illnesses,” which will be attuned to look for coronavirus, and fielding more new tests even for asymptomatic people to get better fidelity about the pervasiveness of the virus.

It appears the death rate from this virus will not exceed the number of flu deaths from the 2018-2019 flu season. We are learning, through anti-body testing, that the China Flu bug arrived here earlier than thought and has already passed through a good percentage of the population.

This is fantastic news but we’re not celebrating, or relaxing the lockdown, or re-starting the economy.

In Texas our governor has just appointed a commission to look at how to open up the state. When he announced the members of the commission he included Ross Perot, who died a year ago, which is suspicious. We are weeks away from spring football practice and the governor, instead of acting on facts, is appointing dead people to commissions. That is not very Texan like and I wish we had a better leader like one of the seven governors who were not bullied into economic suicide by hysterical progressive elites.

On the very day Governor Abbot announced his strike force Governor Inslee of Washington State launched a tweet storm of unhinged ad hominem attacks on the President. He is convinced The Wuhan will mow down millions if we dare break the protocols established to flatten a curve that never came, predicted by models that were wrong.

The insistence of progressives politicians in believing the obviously flawed models of elite academics is going to, without question, kill Americans. And we don’t need models to know how many. Citizen Journalist Betsy McCaughey points out:

No model or guesswork is required to foresee the deadly impact. Job losses cause extreme suffering. Every 1% hike in the unemployment rate will likely produce a 3.3% increase in drug overdose deaths and a 0.99% increase in suicides according to data provided by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the medical journal Lancet. These are facts based on experience, not models. If unemployment hits 32%, some 77,000 Americans are likely to die from suicide and drug overdoses as a result of layoffs. Scientists call these fatalities deaths of despair.

The impact of layoffs goes beyond suicide, drug overdosing and drinking. Researcher Michael French from the University of Miami points out the death rate for an unemployed person is 63% higher than for someone with a job. It is obvious that the unwarranted and unnecessary lockdowns come with a butchers bill that is larger than the COVID-19 threat.

Why can’t our leaders see this? There are dozens of pieces coming out daily pointing out the same thing yet the narrative continues on as if the pandemic is performing as predicted. 

After the terrorist attacks on 9/11 our country went through a spasm of federal government action to “make us safe”. What came of that was the TSA. The TSA is in the business of ‘Security Theater‘; it fails, over 95% of the time, security tests. They routinely allow weapons and ammunition to be unintentionally carried onto aircraft, something I’ve done myself. No security professional mistakes the TSA as anything other than Kabuki Theater. If you want safe air travel screening you need to do it like the Israelis do, but we won’t do that because of Muh Racism.

The Kabuki theater being generated by this crisis is going to be continued  ‘social distancing’ and mask wearing. As Dr John Lee, joining hundreds of other reality based front line physicians like Keith Rose and Jonathan Greach, point out there is no direct evidence the lockdowns are working. The argument that social distancing and mask wearing slows the spread of the Wuhan virus makes sense, but then again so does the argument for developing  herd immunity.

It is impossible to evaluate scientific data when the credentialed experts working the data do not agree on what it is saying. Occam’s Razor is a solid approach and it was the reason I have said at the start of the Pandemic, that we were too slow and bug had long ago escaped into the population. I had no way of knowing it would prove mostly benign but it did and here we are.

The truth about the threat of COVID-19 is obvious. The reluctance of progressive democrats to accept that their academics, experts, and pundits were wrong is fascinating to watch, but this isn’t funny. Lives are now in jeopardy by continued forced unemployment and forced loss of assets on the part of local and state governments.  If this does not end quickly we are going to lose more than the 2020 NCAA football season.

The projected fatality numbers from the Wuhan Flu are sinking like a stone which is no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the story line. From the start I have maintained the COVID-19 projections and mitigation steps were total BS based on my conviction when the federal government has closed the proverbial  barn door the horses are long gone. It is not “anti-science” to be skeptical of government claims to expertise in medical, social and political matters, it is “pro-historical.”

But there is no reason to take the word of a retired Marine on this topic. Dr Keith Rose explains, in an enjoyable 50-minute podcast, the medical perspective on the over-reaction to COVID-19. He is spot on and using contemporary data to explain why we should be getting back to work.

It is now so obvious that the Wuhan flu modeling is wrong that the legacy press now accuses republican politicians of using the bogus numbers to intentionally scare the public into reelecting them.

We have shuttered our economy, sentenced an unknown (but large) number of citizens to penury in an attempt to slow a virus we know very little about. To this day we have no idea how far it has spread or how deadly it really is. When we listen to “experts” explain why the mitigation steps are necessary keep in mind those experts do not know or understand the characteristics of the COVID-19 virus any better than you do. They are guessing at both its virility and morbidity based on obviously inaccurate computer modeling based on flawed data obtained from an untrustworthy international competitor.

Serious journalists are now challenging the coronavirus narrative. From the linked article:

Alex Berenson has been analyzing the data on the crisis on a daily basis for weeks and has come to the conclusion that the strategy of shutting down entire sectors of the economy is based on modeling that doesn’t line up with the realities of the virus.

We will not know how easily this bug is transmitted or how deadly it is without extensive testing of the general population for COVID-19 antibodies. That provides an accurate denominator to use with the body count for determining lethality. When we have an idea on infection rate we still may over-state the Wuhan lethality as the legitimacy of the nominator  (body count)  is now questionable.

Remarkably, our meritocratic elites insist on doubling down on their flawed models and assumptions. We have seen Dr Anthony Fauci, continiously equivocate over the use of hydroxychloroquine in treating the Wuhan despite the fact that it obviously works. The legacy media, on cue, has been blasting away at the off label use of the anti malarial with articles like this one in today’s USA Today; What do you have to lose talking hydroxychloroquine? Potently your life.

What the press has refused to do is ask how many medical professionals in New York City are taking hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic. (anecdotally the number is high, but who knows)? That the drug works is now so obvious the  governor of Michigan has switched from outlawing its use  to demanding millions of doses.

An even worse example of ignoring the obvious is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the White House adviser for health policy under former President Barack Obama. He just said the following in a April 7th interview:

Realistically, COVID-19 will be here for the next 18 months or more. We will not be able to return to normalcy until we find a vaccine or effective medications. I know that’s dreadful news to hear. How are people supposed to find work if this goes on in some form for a year and a half? Is all that economic pain worth trying to stop COVID-19? The truth is we have no choice.

If we prematurely end that physical distancing and the other measures keeping it at bay, deaths could skyrocket into the hundreds of thousands if not a million.

Do any of you honestly believe that lifting our half ass quarantine will lead to a million deaths? That is obvious lunacy, a real time demonstration of cognitive dissonance among our meritocratic elite. The reality is the models used by our expert class were wrong, any attempt to attribute the flatting  curve to the effectiveness of social distancing or cower in place orders is disingenuous.

The reaction to the Wuhan flu virus clearly demonstrates the futility of using computer modeling to make dynamic decisions in an environment characterized by limited, conflicting,  intelligence coupled with the demand for immediate action. A combat experienced infantry battalion commander would have the ability to make better decisions that react faster to the threat then an epidemiologist. One has trained to make life and death decisions quickly with a bias for action,  the other has trained in microscopic sleuth hunting and generating and manipulating data for use in academic research papers.

Maybe one of the lessons learned here will be to bring experienced high pressure decision makers into the process. Given the as incalculable damage to the economy and the lives of millions of our fellow citizens by flawed decision making one would hope for several volumes of lessons learned from federal, state and local officials.

There should foreevermore be healthy skepticism about our academic and scientific elites, the legacy media, seedy federal politicians who used this crisis to push their agendas, and state and local officials exercising excessive ’emergency’ powers. Special attention needs to be paid to elite institutions that drove us over this cliff; they are compromised by Chinese money and need to divest from it. Their research labs and programs are infested with Chinese spies; and there is no reason to continue to ignore this belligerent behavior from China.

You may not find the  Harvard Department of Health Management and Policy accepting a 350 million dollar naming endowment from China alarming, but I do. It is now the T.H. Chan School of Public Health and if you think the flow of money into institutions that formulate public policy is benign you are not paying attention to what is happening with the COVID-19 pandemic.

When the dust settles there better be some scalp collecting along with a transparent investigation into how and why the experts were (again) completely wrong about COVID-19. We have to develop better strategies that protect the vulnerable without shutting down our economy.

Argument from authority is defined as “Insisting that a claim is true simply because a valid authority or expert on the issue said it was true, without any other supporting evidence offered.” It is a classic logical fallacy that is used to stifle conversations that are becoming uncomfortable to those in authority.  There are technical areas that I know little about, and in those areas my observations are worthless, we all have that problem. One of the areas where I am not rank amateur is epidemiology, thus I feel comfortable weighing in on this important topic.

In fact, back when combat helmets were made of steel (as were the men who wore them), I was dispatched ashore at the Beirut International Airport to find the source of a para-typhoid bug that had damn near killed several artillerymen. I was an advanced lab technician  and my job was to obtain samples from sources the Environmental Health officers ashore had identified as potential problems. I obtained the samples, put the them in transport medium to take back to the ship (USS Guam LPH-7).  I then attempt to isolate the pathogen so we could target it with effective antibiotics instead of shotgunning every antibiotic we had into the fallen Marines.

I never isolated the bug, about a week into my attempt we pulled out of Beirut and headed for liberty call in Haifa, Israel.  Once we pulled the plug on the Beirut I autoclaved all the samples and prepared to fly back home. We clearly knew the problem Salmonella Paratyphoid but we never isolated or identified the strain.

I had forgotten all this until I started the Apocalypse Not series and got so much pushback from my liberal friends that I concluded I might be an asshole for writing what I was thinking. But I know a lot of assholes and I also know I’m not like any of them, so I’m continuing my attempt to explain why what you are seeing, has little resemblance to what the experts are telling you is happening.

The pushback from my earlier posts can all be summed up with “are you an authority? No? STF up then”.  The classic argument for authority response. Turns out I am an authority, I even have a degree (associates but still a degree) in medical technology and had mad, cutting edge, microbiology skills back in 1984. So, from this point forward remember that everything I say comes from a position of authority.

Now look at this:

And this:

I believe what we are about to experience demonstrates the limitations of modeling. I have never believed the man-made climate change hysteria because it was based on models. The United States Marine Corps is about to become completely irrelevant as it sheds infantry, tube artillery and attack helicopters in favor of missiles, and that plan is based exclusivly on modeling. The lesson we are all about to learn is that modeling and reality are different things. In reality there are too many unknowns we cannot explain or anticipate that are never captured in computer models.

A relevant example of this can be seen in the reality of our current heavy handed public health measures. The biggest concern of every emergency management official when discussing the implementation of quarantines is public unrest. Yet around the country the public has accepted these extreme measures, have cooperated with authorities, and have caused no unrest (yet). The public unrest may yet surface but to date the American public is handling the destruction of their lives and livelihoods with remarkable equanimity.

What happens in two or three weeks when the crisis we have been told is eminent fails to materialize? What about the citizens who have been ruined by lockdowns and forced closures for a bug that was no worse than a flu bug? How will we look at “the experts” in the future when, once again, they were not a little wrong, but dead wrong about the nature of this pandemic?

The overreaction to this flu should drive a stake through the heart of man made climate change because the models supporting that theory are based on more speculative data then epidemiological models. That may be the only silver lining in this crisis.  I doubt identity politics, political correctness, open borders, and encouraging homelessness have long shelf life now either.  Those are issues of concern for affluent, educated people who have the time and resources to spend a lifetime worrying over shit they can’t change or understand.

My 1 virus 2 strain theory is surfacing again as people who are not experience virus hunters like myself catch up.  People are starting to understand the Pandemic has failed to materialize outside of New York City and the Pacific Northwest. The fatality rate in those two areas remains low, well below the morbidity and mortality of a regular flu bug. I understand that those numbers can shoot up and the bug suddenly start killing people in Ghenghis Khan type numbers because the New York Times told me so in this nifty graph they made to explain a complex event you cannot see out in flyover country.

Even the Huffpo took a break in their 24/7 Trump Derangement Syndrome outbursts to publish “Is It Possible That You Had The Coronavirus Earlier This Year?” This article mirrors comments I’ve been seeing on Facebook as thousands of people speculate the flu bug that burned through the population in December/January was most likely the Wuhan flu. We will not know if that theory is true until we develop a test for COVID-19 antibodies. But the observations of my fellow citizens matches mine and I have to remind you I am an authority. My 1 virus 2 strain (which I’m unilaterally modifying to a 1 virus multiple strains because of expert reasoning I can’t explain to you damn laymen)  theory has more fact behind it than the NYT’s graph.

I am concerned about the millions of Americans who are stuck at home with no money, no food, no job, and bored children. The measly 1400 bucks that may show up in a few weeks is too little, too late to help them. What happens when the people understand that we have been fooled again by charlatans who will weather the storm they created without a problem or concern in the world? The people who are posing the unreasonable restrictions on every aspect of your life do not have to worry about getting tested, access to a ventilator if they fall ill, not having any money in the bank, or food in the house.  In fact they will make money buying stock at fire sale prices and (of course) rewarding themselves by allocating more tax money to themselves.

This analysis by the ever prescient Kimberly Strassel, writing in the Wall Street Journal, which you can now read because the paywall is down, sums up the new stimulus package nicely:

‘Missing from their list is an important category, which underlines an inescapable fact: Government mostly “Cares” for government. Bills that hand out money are written by appropriators. And appropriators never miss an opportunity to expand departments, agencies, bureaus and commissions. A rough calculation suggests the single biggest recipient of taxpayer dollars in this legislation—far in excess of $600 billion—is government itself. This legislation may prove the biggest one-day expansion of government power ever.”

Talk about never letting a crisis go to waste.

There is good news from this crisis; celebrates, professional athletes, and social influencers are no longer important or relevant. I like that because I find celebrity and pro sports culture unappealing.

Joe Rogan the actor/comedian is now irrelevant, Joe Rogan the podcaster is very relevant.   On the 10th of March he had on Michael Osterholm, an internationaly recognized expert on infectious disease, and the podcast was downloaded 17 million times. It unquestionably freaked out a large proportion of his vast audience. Here are some quotes from the interview:

First of you have to understand the timing of it in the sense that is just beginning and so in terms of what hurt pain suffering death is account happened so far is really just beginning. I think what people don’t quite yet understand and is this really is acting like an influenza virus something that transmits very very easily through the air we now have data to show that you’re infectious before you even get sick….I brought some numbers and we estimate that this could require 48 million hospitalizations, out of 96 million cases actually occurring and  over 480,000 deaths over the next three to seven months with this situation so this is not one that to take lightly.

Seventeen days later do any of those predictions sound likely to you? Granted maybe we dodged the bullet because of the lock downs and social distancing. My expert opinion is that is unlikely, the bug has been here since November and not one expert I know of can explain the curious lack of bilateral pneumonia cases that should be evident around the country given the virulence of the pathogen and delay in its detection (thanks to China, not Trump).

My county in South Texas is now on lock down,  if you leave the house for an unofficial reason and you could be fined 1000 bucks.  We have no Wuhan Virus cases in the county and the “shelter in place order” is scheduled to last two weeks. President Trump said he wanted to get the country back to work by Easter Sunday but we are on lockdown until the day after Easter Sunday….. maybe that is a coincidence, or maybe that is a dig at a President the elites despise, but who is growing more popular with the people by the day…you decide.

For now the only thing we can do is “shelter in place”, cooperate with the authorities and watch out for our neighbors. This is the land of the free which is why we should support our civic leaders but at the same time express our alarm at the destruction of our economy. Arguments from authority are a cowards way out of explaining what is increasingly obvious, cannot be explained.

My first Apocalypse Not post speculated that the Wuhan Corona Virus had already washed through the continental United States. I based that on my understanding of viral transmission rates combined with the length of time between the arrival of the virus and the start of mitigation efforts.  I had no explanation why the virus had passed through the population without sending massive numbers of Americans to the hospital. I have an explanation now.

On the 3rd of March The Oxford Academic National Science Review published a study titled On the origin and continuing evolution of SARS-CoV-2. An extract from the overview is pasted below:

Population genetic analyses of 103 SARS-CoV-2 genomes indicated that these viruses evolved into two major types (designated L and S), that are well defined by two different SNPs that show nearly complete linkage across the viral strains sequenced to date.

Dr Michael Skinner, Reader in Virology, Imperial College London, explained the findings this way

• They speculate that the L form might be more ”aggressive” but that is not an adjective we normally apply to viruses, where we talk about transmissibility, fitness, virulence.
• ”Viruses have to be able to replicate in each sequential host and transmit serially between them. It is quite possible for one form of the virus to be better at replication, another at transmission.

What he is saying is the  L strain is the most aggressive at replication which is why it is a potential killer. The S strain is easily transmittable but less aggressive. The paper went on to note that infection by the S strain provides immunity from the L strain and speculates that only the S strain is transmitted through aerosols.

This would explain the significant lag time between the arrival of the virus and a noticeable surge in hospitalizations. In fact there is still no noticeable surge of hospital admissions for pneumonia in the USA. I just goggled that and found nothing.

There are three facts at play: the first is  the virus arrived in the USA long before the first case was diagnosed. The second is there are two strains; one the is easily transmissible but not deadly and one that is not easily transmissible and very deadly. The third is there have been no reported increase in admissions or deaths from bilateral viral pneumonia.

The current panic being stoked by the legacy media and the actions being taken by  politicians are based off modeling by  highly credentialed  experts. The models have predicted that we are on the brink of a massive surge in hospitalizations due to respiratory complications (bilateral pneumonia). These results have to be taken seriously despite knowing the models have serious limitations.

In response the President has started daily press briefing with his China Virus team and they have been trying to talk down the panic with facts. Dr. Deborah Burke, who has been speaking at the daily press briefing with the President, had this to say about models.

Reporter: “Can you speak to the study predicting as many as 2.2 million people in the United States could die if there were not this kind of action taken by the government”.

Dr Burke: “ So I think you know the models are models and are  based on input and they’re based on infectiousness without any controls. I can tell you we’ve never seen that level of infection modeled up to 2.2 million in mortality… I have dealt with a lot of modelers in my time, they are wonderful people, but they all have their favorite inputs and they all have their favorite integration functions, so we’re evaluating all of those so we can integrate and create the best model for the United States based on the best data.

The State of Texas has now joined the panic and demanded all gyms, restaurants, and bars close. The damage that will done to our economy is incalculable and remember there has been no surge in deaths or hospital admissions reported yet in the USA.

There is no reason to believe the models without seeing evidence that the models are correct. Tweets like the one below are not helping anyone, Dr. Scott Gottlieb has less observable truth behind his tweet then I do with my two strains, no apocalypse theory.

Each day that ends without a reported spike in viral pneumonia deaths should be raising questions. In this era of diminished corporate  media, desperate for clicks and page views, it is difficult to tease out what is important. What is important is an explanation as to why so many senior leaders are taking such drastic action. Is this based solely of computer models and WHO concerns? That is hard to believe but what other explanation is there?

I do not know if the testing being developed for the Wuhan virus can differentiate between the L and S strains. I suspect,  just as Dr Burke has said repeatedly, that the number of reported cases will skyrocket as more testing comes on line. I also suspect that there will be no giant spike in COVID-19 deaths because the COVID-19 S strain has already washed through the population.

Time will tell, but if we don’t see a giant spike in hospital admissions soon we’ll know we have dodged a huge bullet thanks to the hyper competitive nature of Mother Nature. Having a mild flu out-compete a deadly flu for hosts, thereby saving the host reservoir for another day…you can’t make that kind of stuff up.