FOLLOWING THE SCIENCE: Part I

The CDC Bouncing Ball

Meet Dr. Bunsen Honeydew a Muppet character described as a bald, yellow-green skinned, bespectacled, lab-coated, absent minded scientist. Bunsen's experiments usually cause great harm to his very nervous and long-suffering assistant Beaker. In many ways Bunsen Honeydew was much like Anthony Fauci with this exception; Bunsen Honeydew was fictional and funny. Tony Fauci was neither.

In the beginning, we were told to “follow the science”. Then we were told to “trust the science.” Then we were told that Tony Two Masks is “THE science”. So what is “the science” about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 and where do we find it? Let’s return to our top public health doc, Rochelle Walensky, M.D., Director, CDC and see what she has to say about “the science” of COVID-19.

We’ll begin at the beginning.

Testing
At first CDC told us ALL, symptomatic or not, that we should ALL be tested for a SARS-CoV-2 infection because those nasty asymptomatic folks were recklessly spreading the virus without your knowledge. AND the only test of value was the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR). And so EVERYONE got tested and the testing lines fed by paranoia of sudden potential death grew day by day. And just to ensure that a PCR test would return a positive result CDC instructed laboratories to run the test in such a way as to provide artificially inflated positive results.

Why would CDC instruct laboratories to ensure that PCR would provide a positive result? Because inflated positive results are vital to an administration plan to demand that everyone become vaccinated and at some appropriate future date to show voters that they have ended the COVID-19 scourge. IF the administration first inflates the test results and then corrects that “error” it can make the case that it was their efforts that ended the pandemic.

That was Rochelle Past. Here is Rochelle Present.

The PCR test is unreliable because of its penchant for false positives generated by fragments of “dead” SARS-CoV-2 which can be found up to 12 weeks post infection in your body.

So if the test isn’t reliable how do you know if you have COVID-19? You don’t. What better way to keep you reliant on a vaccine to prevent your untimely death? And if you can’t rely on the PCR test to tell you if you have COVID than how do you know? The answer is the COVID-19 Case Definition.

Case Definition
Every illness has a definition so that the diagnosing physician can determine what his or her patient is suffering from and then plan a course of treatment. At first the determination of whether a person had COVID-19 or not was determined by a combination of ever emerging symptoms and a positive PCR test. But that didn’t produce the case numbers that CDC and Tony Two Masks needed to drive up the numbers of the potentially critically and mortally ill and so Rochelle fixed the case definition.

Now all you need is either a certain set of symptoms OR, not “and”, a positive PCR test. With this new strategy the case numbers skyrocketed. Lockdowns began. Restrictions on personal freedom were imposed. “Mask” wearing became mandatory (a topic for another day). The economy crashed.

Nevertheless, the were still millions of Americans who did follow the science, did track the number of cases as a percentage of the US population and concluded that Rochelle’s story was a wee tad bit exaggerated so they didn’t comply. And then it got interesting.

Mortality: from or with?

Having not sufficiently scared Americans into compliance with CDC “guidelines” (again a topic for another day) Rochelle needed to make SARS-CoV-2 really scary and what better way to do that than to show the recalcitrant just how deadly this virus is. And the best the way to do that is to report that everyone who died and had COVID-19 at the time of their death — most assuredly died from COVID-19 and not just with COVID-19.

But Rochelle had problem. In order to change the coding rules that physicians across the country and around the world use to record Cause of Death (COD) Rochelle needed to submit the change for public review and comment and most importantly review and approval by the Office of Management and Budget; a step required by law in the Administrative Procedures Act. But Rochelle knew that this most likely would be an insurmountable hurdle and so she ignored that legal requirement and in March of 2020 (see CDC Alert 19; March 2020) she simply notified the world of the change and COVID-19 attributable mortality skyrocketed.

Two days ago Rochelle noted that about 75% of all those listed as having died from COVID-19 had most likely died with COVID-19 and a host of serious co-morbidities. In other words, a lot of really sick people who died tested positive for COVID somewhere between entering a hospital and dying.

The stage was now set. Constantly increasing numbers of cases and deaths had been ensured by manipulating how testing is conducted, the definition of a COVID-19 case and how COD will be recorded when COVID-19 is alleged to be involved.



Tomorrow, in Part II we will venture into vaccines, the epidemiology of age related cases and mortality, treatments, and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.