Joe Biden, or his handlers, are suggesting that, if elected, he’d implement a nation-wide mask mandate.
He says he’d make the case “with scientists” for every state, every county, every jurisdiction, to create and enforce mandatory mask laws. No scientist can, however, if objectively examining the data, agree with Joe Biden.
If Biden should be elected, he would not take office, of course, until January. He therefore assumes masks would still be necessary at this point. Yet they aren’t needed now, if they ever were.
The official CDC weekly count of deaths attributed at least in part to the coronavirus, showed 214 deaths for the week ending 12 September. These are early counts and will rise due to late reporting. In any case, attributed deaths have been dropping rapidly since the first week of August.
If the trend in fatalities continues, and there is no good reason to suspect otherwise, the number of deaths will fall to “background level” by October, or November at the latest. We use the phrase “background level” to relate that this version of the coronavirus will likely never disappear.
Even Anthony Fauci would agree with that statement. In a recent Cell paper with David M Morens, Fauci wrote “viral genetic descendants of the 1918 influenza pandemic virus are still causing seasonal outbreaks throughout the world, and still killing cumulatively millions of people a century later”.
This is true, and it is even true in the presence of flu vaccines. Flu variants stick with us. So do coronavirus variants, a cause of the common cold. This new one causing COVID-19 is therefore likely to be around for at least years to come.
But that does not mean it will be causing large numbers of deaths. Certainly not enough deaths to require, by threat of jail or fine, every single citizen to wear masks.
The efficacy of masks in preventing transmission of disease in healthy populations is anyway not proven. Most studies show mixed results, at best. A recent paper by Jingyi Xiao and others in Emerging Infectious Diseases analyzed ten separate studies, each examining the efficacy of masks. There was no benefit in preventing transmission of flu.
This is only one of dozens of such studies. At the least, there is no clear cut case for mandatory masks, and even evidence against their use.
Given that deaths have been dropping, and assuming the trend continues, why are people still nervous about coronavirus? Because of massive increases in testing, a subject we discuss in our upcoming book The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe.
Attributed deaths peaked in mid-April, a time when testing was at low levels. Attributed deaths began to fall by late April, fading to a low in late June, re-peaking in late July, and now dropping to very low levels.
But testing ramped up and up, and then up some more. According to the COVID tracking project, there were a peak of 926,441 tests on 24 July. On one day alone!
These tests are picking up minor and asymptomatic infections, or even past infections, or in the case of false positives no infections at all, yet the media is labeling all positive tests “new cases”.
When the public, and unfortunately many government officials hear “new cases”, they assume the worst. It is these non-case “new cases” that accounts for the continuing panic.
A similar situation happened in 2008 and 2009 with Swine flu. After deaths dropped to near zero in the summer of 2009, the NIAID funded a “FluChip”, a cheap and widely available test. “New cases” driven by increased testing soared throughout the rest of the year, but deaths stubbornly refused to re-peak.
Testing for coronavirus is only now coming down slowly, even as deaths drop far below traffic fatality numbers. (According to the National Safety Council about 746 people die on average every week in crashes.)
Masks are no longer necessary, if they ever were. Creating new crimes for not wearing them long after a pandemic has ended is not medically, or ethically, justifiable.
Update People showing the voluminous evidence from the medical literature (even that with p-values doing their best!) are now called “mask truthers”. It’s funny that here and elsewhere truth is being used as an insult. I mean, they could have said “mask deniers” or “math liars” or whatever. Instead it’s truth.
This article was written in collaboration with Doug Axe and Jay Richards to hawk this essential must-have book.
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On Amazon, it says “The world will reopen and life will go on, but what kind of world will it be when it does? It can’t be what it was, because of what’s just happened.” Seriously, what evidence does anyone have that the world will “reopen”? People have become too stupid to live on their own, so reopening is highly unlikely.
Masks are what people hate the most, as long as the government kept sending those checks, stopping repos, etc. As long as there are few consequences to the lockdown, the masks will be the target of the anger. IF we ever reopen, the violence will make Somalia looks like a civilized country. Pentup anger will burn most of the cities to the ground. People pretend like everthing will just go back to normal or “the new normal” (stupid, stupid term, by the way), but it will not. Not until years of violence occur and the anger finally burns out. When the money stops coming, the masks go and the stores reopen, violence will shut the world down in less than 6 months. You cannot lock up people this long without that result. Why do you think North Korea just shot the people who got Covid? They live lockedup and knew better than to do what the rest of the fools did. They never speak of “reopening” or “more freedom” and one should never do so once the line into total tyranny and destruction has been crossed. Once locked down, forever locked down. (Fauci, of course, killed about 70,000 people by lying about masks and the need for them early on. Had he not lied, people would never have gotten Covid. But you can never question the Shaman. It could be he’s lying NOW, but again, you can never question the Shaman.)
The fact that some BELIEVE in masks speaks to the utter stupidity and ignorance of Americans. We are no smarter than the ancient people who had their Shamans. Our Shaman is Fauci the Great and Magnificent. We worship him. The worship word is “science”, which is meaningless, but useful to try and intimidate non-believers and annoying heretics. It’s all at the level of the uneducated, always terrified existence humans lived 5000 years ago, with technology replacing the rattles and feathers of the Shaman. Masks, our devolution.
Speaking by phone with an old High School friend; intelligent, solid marriage, good family, 35 years working for same employer. Conversation lightly veers into corona, I express some doubt as to the numbers. He immediately gets angry, doesn’t want to hear it – two hundred thousand people are dead! The topic cannot be discussed. He knows I stopped drinking the kool-aid years ago, while he comes from a kool-aid drinking family and he never stopped drinking the stuff. Corona, like global warming, trannies, and change, are articles of faith in the Kool-Aid religion, and anyone who questions them are hateful hitlerian heretics. That kool-aid is one powerful drink. Other than that he’s a great guy. No doubt he thinks the same of me.
My friend tells me his daughter’s husband, a representative In the Minnesota statehouse, is such a passionate and aspiring politician that he went and got himself a tattoo of Paul Wellstone. Paul Wellstone, the community organizing, communist college professor revolutionary ( and incidentally, Sheri, a Jew) that nice Minnesotans elected to the U.S. Senate. Kool-Aid is as popular as jello desserts up where I hail from, but how they can stand stand the stuff I don’t know.
Hersteria will be the doom of the American Hegemony. It’s not *all bad* – the death of the Universities comes ever closer too!
Reminder: Back around August 15 a big story in nearly every major outlet was that we would hit 200,000 deaths in the US by Labor day. They cited numbers from the John Hopkins trackers in their stories, so that is the benchmark about whether the prediction was correct or not. By that benchmark, we still have not hit 200,000 deaths.
Now some may say I’m quibbling because currently we’re at about 199.5 k deaths, so by rounding we’ll hit that number soon enough meaning that they were only off by a little more than two weeks. But remember: this was a prediction in the middle of August, only 3 days before labor day, so time-wise it has taken almost twice the time they thought to hit their prediction. Additionally, at the time of the prediction deaths were at 170k so they were not predicting 200k deaths, but only the 30k new deaths. I can’t find historical data from John Hopkins, but according to the CDC a little over 20k people died between the time of the prediction and Labor Day, meaning that reality was about a third below their prediction.
Now remember: at Labor day the IHME predicted that by January 1 we’d have about 400k deaths assuming lockdowns are reinstituted when death rates get too high, about 600k deaths assuming no more lockdowns, and that even with full mask usage sub 250k deaths would be impossible. They’ve since revised their predictions to about 450k dead with no more lockdowns, about 380k with lockdowns but no increase in mask usage, with sub 250k deaths still being impossible.
My naive prediction: we are currently going at the rate of at most 30k deaths per month, though this is slowing in most of the country. So deaths at Jan 1. will certainly not be above 320k, and more likely will be around 240-280k. This will happen even with lockdowns ending in red states and no universal mask mandate. On January 1, should President Trump be reelected, we will be told that we will likely have about 800k-1 million total dead by the end of 2021.
Of course if Biden is reelected we will be told that deaths will soon be almost nothing. Then again, according to Biden we already have 200 million dead, so there’s not that many uninfected left to be able to die.
Correction to the previous comment: The prediction was made about 3 weeks before labor day, not 3 days.
Also – how did this end up in the New York Times of all places:
https://archive.is/9cXV9
In fact, “the threshold that separates humanity from barbarism has been crossed,” Mr. Agamben continues, and the proof is in Italians’ treatment of their dead. “How could we have accepted, in the name of a risk that we couldn’t even quantify, not only that the people who are dear to us, and human beings more generally, should have to die alone but also — and this is something that had never happened before in all of history from Antigone to today — that their corpses should be burned without a funeral?”
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It’s rather bizarre that the party most vociferously claiming to be the party of “THE SCIENCE,” is also the one which has been for some time now captive to an aggressive and vocal minority which denies basic biology when it comes to human sex differences.
Sheri: I can’t quite make out what your position is. On the one had you say, “The fact that some BELIEVE in masks speaks to the utter stupidity and ignorance of Americans,” which seems to indicate you’re in line with Brigss and others who objections to them based on “the science”, but then you say Fauci is responsible for 70,000 deaths by “lying about masks and the need for them.”
So which is it? Fauci was objectively right when he opposed masks early on and said there was no need for them (as was the Surgeon General, WHO, etc. – all of whom have since reverse course for political reasons, not scientific ones). That doesn’t make Fauci (or the others) any less of a snake for a variety of reasons (He’s bad news all around, and deeply corrupt and compromised by conflicts of interest. Like so many in “public health industry” today, he’s also a wholly owned subsidiary of Gates Foundation). But, three is no evidence that any of those 70,000 people you point to would have never gotten Covid and would be alive today had Fauci endorsed general public mask wearing sooner.
Biden is a senile fool who can’t find his a$$ in the dark. He’s being run by the CCP and the Red Army via Antifa stooges. Whether he is elected or not, the American Communist Revolution has begun and will continue. Violence begets violence, and Biden is at heart a violent thug who has always relied on threats of violence to get his way.
When the conversation with friends invariable veers into CV-19 territory, I tell them, “I’m a numbers guy, and I spend a lot of time examining the corona numbers instead of listening to the talking heads, politicos, etc.” Then I say, “You are not going to like what I’m about to say.” Invariably the friends nod and prepare themselves for the worst, but then I say, “It’s over. The whole thing ended months ago… back in June or May. The hospitalizations and deaths have been dropping. It’s the clunky test cases that are making the news, and those numbers are worthless.” The confused looks are fun to see, but at least some are asking questions.
I have a fun conspiracy theory…
Recently Birx and the press were all about the alleged 200,000 infalted covid-dead.
Remember when Biden was on camera claiming that 200,000,000 Americans would be dead by the time his speech was over?
I’m betting the teleprompter actually said 200,000, which Biden was supposed to say.
Then the plan was that following that, Birx would’ve then announce the 200,000 toll later on.
Then all the press would put out multiple pieces praising Biden as an oracle!
Unfortunately, things didn’t go according to plan when Biden had another of his episodes and said 200,000,000.
I can’t prove it, but I have a gut feeling it is true!
@Uncle Mike
The “American Communist Revolution” started a very long time before now. As a matter of fact, in the 1890’s. Everyone celebrates Teddy Roosevelt as one of the “great” presidents, but always seem to forget that he was a progressive socialist, and that when he ran as a third party candidate in 1912, the proper name for his “Bull Moose Party” was the American Progressive Party. His actions split the Republican vote, allowing Wilson, the Democrat, to win by plurality. Teddy was responsible for creating many federal bureaucracies, and setting the stage for more.
Wilson oversaw the creation of the Federal Reserve, as well as the ratification of the 16th and 17th Amendments, which allowed the income tax, and the popular vote for Senators, one of the last vestiges of states rights after the War for Southern Independence. He also signed the “Trading With the Enemy Act” of 1917, which arrogated dictatorial powers to the Executive. It was expanded during the administration of Teddy Roosevelt’s cousin Franklin in 1933, to intervene in all sorts of areas heretofore not considered to be the purvue of government, and create even more Executive powers that violate the Constitution. There were also many communists in the administration of FDR and Truman. Read the Venona Papers for insight into this.
The communists had an active plan to infiltrate all levels of US institutions, using the precepts laid out by Gramsci. Governmental bureaucracies at all levels, federal, state, and local. Schools at all levels. The Catholic Church-see Bella Dodd and her testimony before HUAC in 1952. The media-everything was infiltrated. We are at the end stage of that ongoing revolution now. This is the final push to implement the technocratic and ultimately communist One World Government. Biden is just another tool to be used towards this end. He isn’t being run by the Chicoms or the Russians, but by the NGO’s who are implementing their new world order under cover of the UN. Read Agenda 2030 published by the UN.
We as a people have been trained to accept communism, and we have. Look at the “Ten Steps to Revolution” laid out by Marx, and you will find that we have “achieved” each one. That is the reason that so many go along with the Coronadoom restrictions, even when facts are laid out for them; facts gleaned from the government’s own agents such as the CDC. We have been programmed to accept the narrative.
We are not in beginning of the communist revolution in America, but in its terminal phase. There are a few, a very few who will refuse to submit, and die on their feet, but the majority will embrace the changes, wear the mask of submission, take the mark of the beast, living out the remainder of their pathetic lives until they decide to use the euthanasia option which will be offered them.
It is time to choose, submit or fight, because outside of supernatural intervention, there is no help coming.
My prediction is that total all cause deaths for the year will be roughly 0.9% of the actual population (which grows each year) just like it has roughly been for decades, if I am remembering correctly, so roughly 3 million out of a bit more than 330 million by the end of the year by the census bureau population clock which only estimates residents and not US citizens overseas (not 328, that’s an old estimate now). The UN estimate, which may include those, is a bit over 331 million.