“You could say I lost my faith in science and progress…
I never saw no miracle of science,
That didn’t go from a blessing to a curse”
Sting, If I Ever Lose My Faith in You
“I do this real moron thing, and it’s called thinking.
And apparently I’m not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions.”
George Carlin
“Everybody’s on the take
Tell me, are you on the take too?”
The Strokes, Eternal Summer
Everyone is sick of talking about covid-19, but it needs to be talked about dialectically until there is understanding because the establishment isn’t letting this one go. This isn’t a left vs right thing, it is as it has always been, power blunting understanding and drawing division while the people go around in circles. Covid-19 is tough to write about when you’re not actively spreading fear about it; non-fear based discussion is deemed dangerous and controversial. Of course the rationale from the masses who support the actions taken by power believe what is being done is pragmatic and responsible mostly resting on the premise that since authority says it, then it must be true, and many of those people are of the mind that if one engages in the heresy of dissent it’s assumed you must be an ignorant hateful wanker and selfishly want to kill the weak and elderly when you don’t agree with the talking heads on the glowing idiot box.
To make matters worse the “left” has continued its slide into embracing neoliberal values and promotes a form of intransigent soft censorship, where dissent isn’t really banned outright, it’s just reactively shamed, labeled as dangerous, and pushed to the fringes where it can be safely quarantined. Lest something else other than status quo rhetoric infect naive minds, which according to the establishment such talk will kill countless people and we know the establishment just cares so much their hearts bleed for the less than 1% labeled as pandemic deaths. Perhaps our rulers deeply empathize with what it’s like to be such a tiny fraction of the population.
They care so much that power is enacting every authoritarian measure they’ve always wanted to enact, and billionaires just happen by covidcidence to be consolidating even greater wealth, by total accident to be sure as they’d never intentionally profiteer in a time of crises when they already have so much. I’m equally sure the excess wealth flowing to the already wealthy will benevolently trickle down to the masses eventually because billionaires like Bezos and Gates have such enormous hearts don’t you know.
They have always been thinking of other people when they primitively accumulate ever greater wealth while others starve, they are after all brilliant philanthropists, so you know their hearts must be in the right place. And sure, they could just solve food scarcity and homelessness by themselves in the US, but what would that teach the people? These super geniuses are simply too wise to just outright allow people to freely live on the land of the earth that’s been cordoned off by the powers that be and outrageously priced for the common person. For these wise people know that greatness is forged in the crucible of suffering, so billionaires want the people to learn how to fight through difficulties and compete with their fellow humans for survival. Thanks billionaires.
However they are apparently very concerned about solving this covid-19 thing for the good of the people. They don’t seem too concerned over creating the conditions for poor health globally through their socioeconomic actions, but again, they are very worried about treating the symptoms manifested from their endless hoarding of resources.
Meanwhile the majority of people are gleefully happy to trade liberty for ostensible safety provided by the ownership class. A deal that’s never worked out very well for the people in the past, but now once again we’re told it’s different this time. The people are assured it’s all for our own protection, because governments, corporations, and the medical establishment just love us so much that they must act like a stern paternal force for our own good.
The institutions of scientific “progress”, the medical industrial complex, and centralized government structures that brought you endless war, monetary imperialism, Agent Orange, nuclear proliferation, the war on drugs, an opioid epidemic for kickbacks, the CIA, lobotomies, mass incarceration, radical environmental degradation and so on, well they evidently saw the error of their ways when covid-19 came along and are now a collective of near perfectly enlightened bodhisattvas looking out for your health and well being. Forgive me for not buying into the idea that the actions taken by power have been motivated by doing what’s for the good of the people, rather I believe the radical thought that some of the most narcissistic people ever to live on planet earth are doing what narcissists do and thinking primarily about their own interests and don’t care about who they hurt in the process of getting more for them and securing their held power.
Statistical Conjecture
The raw stats around the pandemic are promulgated 24 hours a day on nearly every major media distribution outlet and are also the primary basis upon which power justifies its actions. And there is no justification for their actions even if the pandemic was everything they say it is and worse because when power becomes more aggressive you don’t just hand them what little liberty you have left because they push your fear buttons.
Grains of truth are sprinkled into almost every lie and the common trick played by power is to use fragments of truth often lacking proper context or nuance to lead to convenient conclusions that benefit them. The public reacts to the statistical numbers around covid as if they’d never seen a rigged stat put out to drive the narratives’ of powers before. Like for instance, are there still any true believers of unemployment stats? Trump himself spoke the partial truth about it before he was in office, stating that unemployment numbers Obama was boasting were conveniently ignoring the nuances of the labor participation rate. I’m paraphrasing of course, nonetheless it was a relevant point he was making, but ultimately a convenient thing for him to do because when Trump got in office, and the numbers were artificially low, he then promoted the same stat as a positive despite the fact he had just contested it when it looked good for Obama.
You see, here’s what a liar does, they state whatever is convenient to their agenda. And just because Trump says shit related to covid-19 not being legit, doesn’t mean it’s true or false, it only means that it’s a convenient thing for him to say at the moment. But to the public who hates him, each time Trump offers dissent, however convenient it might be, it reinforces the opposite is true in their minds. So when he questions any part of the covid-19 story it reinforces the idea that the prevailing narratives are accurate whether they are or not.
What I’ll argue here is that a similar type of misdirection, conveniences, and contrivances behind the unemployment stats are what is behind the stats of this stated pandemic. In the scope of this essay I cannot refute all the claims around the pandemic at once, so I’ll focus here primarily upon the validity of the morbidity numbers written down as covid-19 since that does seem to be the primary driver of their argumentation.
Challenging the Accuracy of Death Certificate Stats
The way deaths have been attributed to covid-19 are heavily massaged and it’s in plain view. The cause of death charade is exposed on the dangerous conspiracy theory website wikipedia. If you do a quick little internet search for the term “cause of death” what will be in the top ten results on most search engines is the wikipedia entry. And the first section after the summary under the heading of “Accuracy Concerns” states: “A study published in Preventing Chronic Disease found that only one-third of New York City resident physicians reported believing that the present system of documentation was accurate. Half reported the inability to record “what they felt to be the correct cause of death”, citing reasons such as technical limitation and instruction to “put something else”.”
When the physician is told to put something else by someone that never interacted with the patient, again forgive me, just doesn’t sound real scientific like, at least not if you’re going to base any research or public health policy on death certificate stats. By the way, this isn’t a covid-19 related thing, this is how it’s always been done. When people talk about flu deaths, it’s often conjecture too. Overall there isn’t real science being done here in regards to determining cause of death, and it’s widely believed accurate data is necessary in any field of research. The phrase “garbage in, garbage out” comes to mind, and in this case some doctors themselves are openly admitting to putting heaps of garbage in – They are taking a guess knowing they have technical limitations or doing what they’re told and rarely go back to correct that assessment ever even if evidence later says otherwise. The same wikipedia article states: “and fewer than three percent reported ever updating a death certificate when conflicting lab results or other new information became available”
Further, old age is not written down as a cause of death according to the same wikipedia article: “Old age is not a scientifically recognized cause of death…As an indirect or non-determinative factor, biological aging is the biggest contributor to deaths worldwide.”
So they’re boldly admitting old age is the biggest contributor to deaths worldwide, yet they negate this concept almost in totality on death certificates. I guess because aging just “contributes” to death and is somehow never the cause of? Being that they refuse to admit old age can outright kill you wouldn’t this stance infer that medical science believes on some level in immortality? They make the claim that by putting down the truth, which is that humans aren’t immortal and getting old kills people, “…does not benefit public health or medical research.” Ah yes, I hate it when the truth doesn’t benefit medical research. Best never to let a death go to waste, got to maximize the potential of each death to support medical fraud. How efficient.
And just because someone dies with a positive covid-19 test doesn’t mean it had a thing to do with their death. It only means the test for covid-19 came back positive. For we know that many who have covid-19 are asymptomatic, so therefore the viral load should be considered first to know if covid had any affect at all on their death. It’s incredibly sloppy science to make such conjecture without drawing more causal lines first, especially considering how these death certificates are being used to draw conclusions about the lethality of disease and public policy. And because the profile of this virus is so similar to cold and flu it becomes difficult to discern whether cold and flu season overall is simply getting worse or if a novel virus is having some effect, which they don’t seem to have accurate enough data to prove either way.
Unless they are testing for viral load and eliminating other common viruses as a cause at the same time along with properly gauging the effects of comorbidities there is little chance you’re going to accurately be able to tell what the cause of death is in many cases, especially with people who are older and potentially have accrued a lifetime of chronic conditions. Cold and flu leading to pneumonia could be the third or fourth most prominent comorbidity, but at some point it was going to be something that got them if their immune system becomes too weak. Of course, this type of analysis is likely impractical to do on each death in question, which is why the stats alone shouldn’t be so heavily relied upon to form public policy on cold and flu type viruses which have proven to be uncontainable overall and further authoritarian policies to lockdown the world to stop them are more likely to make the cure worse than the disease on several levels.
In the public spectacle though a reframing happens in corporate media that instantly labels dissent as conspiracy (poisoning the well of dissent) and speaks with an unfounded arrogance of being 100% correct when in fact in many cases they just aren’t. To engage in some poisoning of the well myself, the pro-war, pro-idiocy, pro-establishment corporate media and the sold-out medical industrial complex who price gouges people to stay alive, well these honest folk, they disagree completely with any notion the veracity of death certificates can be challenged. In one corporate media “fact“ check they speak to the cause of death and comorbidity argument as follows:
“These data come from death certificates, and the death certificate is designed to only capture information on causes of death,” Anderson said, explaining that COVID-19 would then not be “an incidental or trivial factor.”
The underlying cause of death is the condition that began the chain of events that ultimately led to the person’s death,” Jeff Lancashire, acting associate director for communications at the National Center for Health Statistics, told PolitiFact.”
As I previously stated, what is written down on the death certificate is far from a concrete science, and here you can see they are speaking to the idea that the death certificates are almost infallible, when in fact there are doctors who have issues over their accuracy. And undoubtedly in many cases what began the chain of events leading to death was having a weakened immune system due to other conditions, not covid-19.
The lack of accuracy/honesty on these death certificates is astounding in the US and in some cases they don’t test for covid-19 at all and write it down as such. According to an article in politico a few months back they openly told the public they were adding people to the covid death toll in New York sans testing. As stated here: “The latest statistics include probable coronavirus deaths through Monday…Probable deaths were recorded as people who did not have a positive lab test for Covid-19, but did have Covid-19 or something similar listed as the cause of death on their death certificate.“
Real scientific like. If they are going to claim there is a pandemic and cause massive strife along with economic panic while doing so then perhaps they shouldn’t rest their argument on the widespread conjecture written down on death certificates. If covid-19 is more dangerous than flu as they say, we’ll never really know so long as conjecture is elevated to scientific fact.
In Summary
There is much here I didn’t get to address in the covid-19 sphere of argumentation, but I can hear the counterarguments going already filling that space. For true believers enough evidence can never be presented, however I’m thankful to anyone who listened with an open mind. I didn’t automatically reject the narratives of covid-19 coming from power, with an open mind I listened to their stories, and then I thought they were full of shit because I saw open contradictions and logical incongruities in their narratives.
I cannot state enough that bullshit is the standard level of communication and the impetus behind policy decisions coming from established centralized power structures since forever. That doesn’t mean they are wrong by default, or always wrong about everything, again, there are grains of truth here and there. They are just mostly full of shit, and they must tell copious lies to continue to rule over you. Because if they told the truth, that they need to keep the people scared and desperate to keep them in line, well the people wouldn’t like that so much. So they pull bullshit like this.
