An endemic pandemic

January 26, 2022. Without insulting the millions of people that have died while infected with the Covid virus, it is worth noting, twenty-two months into the promised two-week American meltdown, just how ineffective the progressive politicians, pundits and pandemic bureaucratic experts have been in providing a clear understanding of Covid, in providing constructive advice in terms of treatment, prevention and control of the pandemic, and in offering people useful strategies, lifestyles and options to manage their way through the pandemic.

There have been problems from the start, beginning with the kid glove treatment of and acquiescence to the Chinese government and medical officials, in acknowledging the role of (gain of function) research, some of it funded by the very center in the United States charged with preventing and controlling disease, in starting and spreading the original Covid virus, as early as late 2019. When the news started to trickle out, of China and impact the U.S., starting with a nursing home in Washington state, the progressive politicians strenuously objected to policies and practices to limit the global spread of the virus, calling restrictions "racist" and actually encouraging people to further the spread with events in New York and with Nancy Pelosi in Chinatown. Worse, New York governor Mario Cuomo acted forcefully -- then lied about his actions -- to put sick elderly patients back in the nursing homes that became the primary location for 'Covid' deaths.

From the start, the problem of asserting deaths FROM Covid versus deaths WITH Covid has been a problem that health officials made into a multi-million person death count by deciding to choose that any presence of Covid, not even necessarily established with a positive test, would be grounds for assigning Covid as THE cause of death. This subjective, biased, bureaucratic judgment has probably inflated any count of 'Covid' deaths by a factor of ten, perhaps even more. Later admission, that 94% of 'Covid' deaths included at least two co-morbidities and, later, that 75% had four or more co-morbidities, only confirmed the obvious observation that 'Covid' deaths were concentrated among those over the age of eighty, the already sick, the obese, and the unhealthy.

An aside. An example of 'expert stupidity' I gleaned from radio interview I heard from an Oshkosh doctor who said, of course Covid patients have co-morbidities, because Covid causes things like pneumonia. Only the co-morbidities that impacted deaths were pre-existing risk factors, not outcomes of a stint in the hospital or of a case of Covid.

There was a problem with respirators and ventilators, first the shortage of them during the supposedly short "flatten the curve" period, then later, after learning that these devices did not provide great success in treatment, the same 'experts' rejected the value and use of re-purposed or legacy drug treatments to save lives, especially with ivermectin.

Another aside, on ivermectin. I saw an assertion that 'proved' ivermectin could not treat Covid patients, because Covid was a virus and ivermectin was an anti-parasitic drug. In truth, Covid infection manifests itself in parasitic attacks on the lungs, and while not eliminating the virus -- just as there is no 'cure for the common cold' virus -- ivermectin provided life-saving symptomatic relief and a potential passage through the infectious period.

Then there were the 'gold standard' PCR tests and their abuse of amplification to increase the likelihood of positive test results, along with the disclaimer by the inventor of the test that it was not designed to be a Covid test. The 'gold standard' has become 'fool's gold,' and as pressures promoted by politicians to test more people, symptomatic or not, the number of positive tests could not do anything other than increase. Add in evidence of underestimates of false positives, shoddy lab work on completing the tests (like the case where 85 positive tests from NFL plays were all found to be negative -- a 100% error rate), and the modification of the definition of a 'case' going from having to include symptoms to one where a (faulty) positive test was enough to create a case, and you have a near-perfect storm of pro data and statistics being offered as 'science.'

All the same time, progressive politicians, pundits and political bureaucrats treated their self-declared and self-fueled pandemic as a chance to 're-set' the world economy, claiming to create greater equality and justice, when in fact they were impoverishing hundreds of millions of people, destroying tens and tens of millions of jobs, and increasing income and wealth inequality at a previously unachieved rate, as the pharma and tech titans found their corporate incomes and stock portfolios booming while the "little man in the street" at times ended up on the street, sometimes because they were protesting this treatment but also because they lost their jobs, incomes and housing.

Without exhausting the radar with more examples and evidence, including more valid statistics, the conclusion offered from all this was that from the proverbial get-go, politicians thought that they wanted to and needed to eradicate Covid from the planet, and that the best way to buttress their argument to do this was to exaggerate the death toll while ignoring the negative economic and social consequences of their pandemic policies.

Most people of any serious gray matter in their heads have accepted this virus and its variants as an endemic rather than a pandemic. It is not going away, but we can live with that, if only we truly follow the science, consider all the direct, indirect and unanticipated economic, social and mental effects of public policy, and protect the most vulnerable with focused attention on prevention of serious symptoms and therapeutics for the sick.