The COVID Con

Dr. Joondeph
Brian C. Joondeph, M.D. To view full version of the original article, click here.

INFLATED DEATH COUNTS

Back in April, the news was all about death counts. Fox News ran a death tally on the screen, much like the running score of football game. Cable news shows talked about nothing but rising death counts, spreading fear porn to justify recommendations for staying at home and shutting down the U.S. economy.

The first crack in the pillar occurred in early May when task force member Dr. Birx claimed, "There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust." She believed the CDC was inflating Wuhan flu mortality by as much as 25 percent.

The pillar of COVID deaths crumbled just days ago when the CDC updated their mortality numbers to reflect deaths "from COVID" versus deaths "with COVID."

Death with COVID means that George Floyd is counted a COVID death because he tested positive at autopsy. This is similar to the case of a Colorado man dying of alcohol poisoning but the death was later blamed on COVID. Washington public officials counted gunshot fatalities as COVID deaths.

The new CDC statistics show that only 6,640 deaths are due to COVID alone, rather than the commonly reported 164,280 deaths allegedly associated with COVID. In other words, only 4 percent of media sensationalized deaths were due solely to COVID and not other underlying medical conditions.

Could COVID have been a contributory factor? Sure, but what about the underlying comorbidities such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, even terminal cancer, all of which significantly increased the risk of death from COVID or even the seasonal flu.

The CDC summarized it succinctly, "For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned."

What this means is that those at lower risk, younger and healthier, are extremely unlikely to die from the Chinese flu, and shutting down the economy to protect the healthy makes little sense, unless economic destruction is the ultimate goal....

INFLATED "CASE" COUNTS

As death counts became suspect and testing ramped up, the media did a smooth sashay to case counts, or positive tests. Death counts and hospitalizations were flat, suggesting herd immunity was present in many parts of the country. To justify keeping businesses, churches, and schools closed, the DNC media now focused on positive tests.

A positive test means simply that there are viral particles in a person's respiratory tract.

They have been infected months ago and the sensitive PCR test detected dead viral fragments. A positive test does not mean a person is sick or contagious. And more testing means more positive cases, leading to so-called "surges" that were anything but.

Days ago, in of all places, the New York Times, the second pillar of the COVID Con crumbled, as they reported:
The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.   
Most of these people are not likely to be contagious and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time.  
Sensitivity of the PCR tests has to do with amplification of genetic material from the virus. The fewer cycles required, the higher the viral load and greater likelihood of being contagious. By setting the threshold of amplification cycles too high, the test is overly sensitive.

Imagine a home security alarm so sensitive that it is triggered by a wind gust or leaf hitting a window. The homeowner will certainly be alerted if an intruder is attempting to break in, but the alarm will be going off constantly with false, or in the case of the virus, non-clinically significant positives. Or as the NY Times put it:
Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk -- akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left.
33 amplification cycles may be the upper limit for detecting live virus, according to the CDC, but many commercial labs are using 40 cycles as a positive test, in essence sounding the burglar alarm when a bird lands on the back deck.

The NY Times found, "Up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus." Yet lockdowns of businesses and schools continue based on these wildly inaccurate numbers....

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Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a Denver-based physician