Thijs van Rens, associate professor at the University of Warwick and a research affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London, has some valuable observations on the madness, in particular, of locking down the young.
Coronavirus strongly discriminates against age. Of all Covid-19 deaths in the UK, about 90 per cent have been of people over 65 years old. Yet, the policy response to the pandemic relies on blanket restrictions, or those that vary by geography but not by age. This is illogical and suboptimal policymaking.
The distinct age-risk pattern of the virus, which was clear from the earliest Chinese data, led economists including Daron Acemoglu at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Andrew Oswald at Warwick university, to argue that a sensible policy should be fashioned around an age gradient. Let younger people run the economy and keep older people out of the way until a vaccine is discovered.
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There seem to be two main arguments against releasing the young. It is said to be unfair to older people. Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, described such a policy as “age-based apartheid”. However, it is the virus that is discriminating, not the government. Insisting on a blanket policy in the face of hugely different risks across age groups is like requiring pedestrians to wear seat belts.
The second argument is that it would be impossible to protect older people if young people were released because they live in the same homes. This is a valid concern, because the majority of transmissions happen within households or residential settings such as care homes. But how common are multigenerational households in Britain?
In my work with Professor Oswald, we found that multigenerational households are very rare in the UK. Studying data for 2.6m people, we found that 96 per cent of workers under the age of 35 do not live in the same home as someone over 65. Of workers of any age, 92 per cent do not live with someone aged 65 or over.
This means that if we were to release only young workers who do not share a home with older people, we could lift restrictions on the vast majority of the workforce.
That fanned the panic, which Democrats counted on. That allowed them to shut down their states. To destroy the Trump boom economy. And to make the case for massive micromanagement of individual citizens. You know, the Great Reset, which Canada’s Justin Trudeau admits will be the pretext for enacting a pre-existing globalist agenda.
Joe Biden’s son Hunter sought illicit millions from China and was subject to Chinese blackmail. We know that from the laptop the FBI hid in a basement and the media wouldn’t report on. What we don’t know? Whether Biden directly coordinated his strategy with China. Or if he simply and cynically figured out on his own how to make the COVID crisis worse.
Vanity Fair reported back in October that Joe Biden advisors pressured the company Pfizer to hold off announcing its vaccine until after the election. The magazine clogs the story with plenty of propaganda language. It disguises this political pressure as “scientific” caution, but the facts are clear.
The Biden team was desperate to keep Americans scared and locked down in their homes until their ballots were cast. Chief among those exerting such massive political pressure was Ezekiel Emanuel. He’s the euthanasia enthusiast who’d withhold life-saving medicine from anyone over age 75.
This seems shady as hell, from a story on Oct. 22.
It seems that Biden’s gambit worked. That Disney Animatronic Dead “President-Elect” Joe Biden will successfully dodge the legal challenges to his victory. I hope I am wrong. But if I’m not, we need to know precisely the kind of shell of a man we’re dealing with. And who are his closest and most important allies.
The biggest and most effective of these, it’s clear, is the COVID virus. Or the Wuhan Flu, is you want to use the scientific convention in existence until Beijing snapped its fingers, and worldwide media obeyed it. To all appearances, Joe Biden obeyed China, too. He directly cooperated, at every stage, with a Chinese biowarfare attack on the rest of the world. The reward he sought in return? The White House. Should his election stand, the lesson the world will draw from it should be clear: Friends of China prosper. Get the hint?
Was Biden Following Orders, or Just Sniffing Out His Interests?
Joe Biden’s son Hunter sought illicit millions from China and was subject to Chinese blackmail. We know that from the laptop the FBI hid in a basement and the media wouldn’t report on. What we don’t know? Whether Biden directly coordinated his strategy with China. Or if he simply and cynically figured out on his own how to make the COVID crisis worse. Then ride it to win the election. Either scenario would explain his actions. The one theory that wouldn’t is that Biden was a patriotic American, doing the best he could.
Ask yourself: Why did Joe Biden oppose Donald Trump’s life-saving travel ban on China? China had locked down its own country to travel, and was welding people to die in their apartments inside Wuhan. What’s the patriotic explanation of Biden back in January smearing Trump as “xenophobic” for rejecting travelers whom China wouldn’t admit? China sent a million possible carriers out to the world like Japanese Zeros on Pearl Harbor morning. They spread the disease, so China didn’t suffer alone. They brought it first and worst to Italy, where we saw horrific scenes of hospital wards turning into morgues. What part of that was it right for Joe Biden to wish on Americans?
Why Kill All Those Old Folks?
Ask yourself again why blue-state governors such as Andrew Cuomo (now facing an Emmy Award for impersonating a U.S. governor) dumped virus patients on nursing homes. Why kill off tens of thousands of America’s most vulnerable? I have found no rational explanation for doing that. Or for leaving thousands of beds empty on medical ships such as the U.S.S. Comfort, and field hospitals such as Samaritan’s Purse set up.Please Support The Stream: Equipping Christians to Think Clearly About the Political, Economic and Moral Issues of Our Day.
If such a virus dump on the elderly had happened in just one state, I’d chalk it up to incompetence. But this policy was apparently coordinated. It only happened in blue states, such as New York, New Jersey, Michigan and California. And the massive die-off of veterans and grandmas in those states helped pad the death tolls.
Fanning the Panic, for the Great Reset
That fanned the panic, which Democrats counted on. That allowed them to shut down their states. To destroy the Trump boom economy. And to make the case for massive micromanagement of individual citizens. You know, the Great Reset, which Canada’s Justin Trudeau admits will be the pretext for enacting a pre-existing globalist agenda.
Remember, my friends, the virus is very smart. It knows to spread when people sing in church. But not to spread when they loot cities to demand we defund the police. The virus knew better than to spread when Democrats harvested votes. Or rallied by the thousands to protest the danger of in-person voting. But it absolutely would have spread and killed millions if people had to show up and show ID at polling places.
The Virus: Too Smart for Us
Such a crafty virus. It made sure that the only safe time to announce an upcoming vaccine against it would be … just two weeks after the election the Democrats were counting on it to win them.
Maybe Joe Biden is right: this virus is so hyper-intelligent and powerful we’d better ally with it. And with China. Resistance is futile.
An innumerate population is easily driven batshit crazy with fear when it is presented with thousands and thousands of new “cases” – exclamation pointed and frantically, breathlessly touted by Face-Diapered media personalities (just the right word) who long ago ceased being reporters, if they ever were.
I had a “case” of headache this morning – probably from reading (again) about all the new “cases” of WuFlu. What is it with this “cases” thing? Does the media really not understand the difference between “cases” of something and whether people die from it?
Lot of “cases” of headache in this country.
Also indigestion, menopause and acne. If the media reported the daily tally of these, you’d think there was a . . . crisis. Of course, the media does not do this. And didn’t do it, previously, with the common cold or the seasonal flu. If it had done so we’d have been “locked down” andwearing face diapers years ago. There are millions of “cases” ofthese things every year – in part because there are hundreds of millions of people in the country and it’s inevitable a percentage of them will get sick each year.
This never used to be considered a “crisis.” It was normal because it was life. Including, sometimes, death.
In 1799, George Washington caught a cold while riding the fence line during a snowstorm in December at his Mount Vernon home; being an older guy at this time, the cold worsened and – we don’t know for sure, but the evidence suggests – developed into pneumonia, which is hard to shake when you’re older, especially when the quack doctors attending you decide to bleed you as the “cure.”
Washington died – but the country wasn’t locked down. Because in those days, Americans understood that getting sick was part of life, especially when most people didn’t die because they caught a cold.
But then, in 1799 there was also no saturation media – able to speak with one very loud voice – drum-rolling a horrific-sounding “case” count on the hour, accompanied by lurid graphics and ominous implications.
The latter italicized to make the point which they always do – without actually saying it.
The daily “case” count is intended to make the viewer believe that mass death will follow. They practically lead the poor horse’s muzzle to the water trough. It is a deliberate attempt to pump up the numbers when the relevant number – the percentage of “cases” who end up dead – continues to decrease. Not just in numbers but also percentages – which is a function of the number of “cases.”
An excellent example of this deliberate (it has to be – stupidity and journalistic negligence can no longer account for what is going on; it is too blatant at this point) shell game of death is the reportage of what is going on in South Dakota.
Or rather, what hasn’t.
This state is one of the only ones not “locked down” – because it has a governor, Kristi Noem, who does not believe in practicing what she calls “herd leadership,” by which she means imposing on South Dakotans what has been imposed on New Yorkers, Californians and Virginians, oh my!
Meaning, she left it up to South Dakotans to lead themselves. To weigh the risk of getting sick vs. the risk of getting dead and weigh those things against the certainty of going broke or out of business and leading a sad, neurotic, Face-Diapered life as the “new normal.”
Dutifully – you might even say gleefully – the media jumped as one on the chance to report “skyrocketing” cases of Corona in the not-locked-down/not-treat-everyone-as-a-Face-Diapered-leper state. “The number of confirmed cases has risen from 129 to 988 since April” – exclamation-pointed the New York Post a couple of months ago. Which went on to tantalize its readers with the schadenfreude news that “the state is now home to one of the largest single clusters of coronavirus outbreaks” – i.e., “cases” – in the entire country!
The New York Times piled on – “5,898 cases,” it reported the other day.
Oh, the humanity!
But what about the dead humanity?
In all of South Dakota – about 885,000 people – all of 75 people have supposedly died from – or with – the Corona virus in their system as of last week. The with is important because it credits WuFlu/Corona with a lethality it lacks. “Cases” of the very elderly who die of other things – such as being very elderly – are claimed as Corona victims if Corona is found in their bodies at autopsy. Which is like attributing the condemning of a house eaten up by termites to the bad storm that finally pushed it over last night. It is rotten – just the right word – in both instances.
A deliberate, malicious effort to deceive. To use fear for a political purpose, which – to her immense credit – Governor Noem did not do. She is a relic of a time when American leaders were not always rotten.
Which explains why she has been targeted. Vilified as “uncaring,” irresponsible.”
Granny will die!
Also why the number of deaths attributed to the WuFlu in her state – in most states – is rarely mentioned and never parsed.
A fractional mortality rate that decreases with each uptick in “cases” doesn’t a “crisis” make.
An innumerate population is easily driven batshit crazy with fear when it is presented with thousands and thousands of new “cases” – exclamation pointed and frantically, breathlessly touted by Face-Diapered media personalities (just the right word) who long ago ceased being reporters, if they ever were.
Americans should pause and reflect on the lies they are being sold. Masks are just a form of psychological manipulation. Many reputable physicians and scientists have said they are worthless and potentially harmful. Lockdowns are meant to condition people to obey without question.
On April 21st the Washington Post savaged Georgia governor Brian Kemp’s decision to begin opening his state after locking down for weeks. “Georgia leads the race to become America’s No. 1 Death Destination,” sneered the headline.
The author, liberal pundit Dana Milbank, actually found the possibility of Georgians dying to be hilarious, suggesting that, “as a promotion, Georgia could offer ventilators to the first 100 hotel guests to register.”
Milbank, who is obviously still getting paid while millions are out of work, sees his job as pushing the mainstream narrative that we must remain in fear and never question what “experts” like Dr. Fauci tell us.
Well it’s been three weeks since Milbank’s attack on Georgia and its governor, predicting widespread death which he found humorous. His predictions are about as worthless as his character. Not only has Georgia not seen “coronavirus…burn through Georgia like nothing has since William Tecumseh Sherman,” as Milbank laughed, but Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have seen a steep decline since the governor began opening the state.
Maybe getting out in the fresh air and sunshine should not have been prohibited in the first place!
In fact, as we now have much more data, it is becoming increasingly clear that the US states and the countries that locked down the tightest also suffered the highest death rates. Ultra locked-down Italy suffered 495 Covid deaths per million while relatively non-locked down South Korea suffered only five deaths per million. The same is true in the US, where non lockdown states like South Dakota were relatively untouched by the virus while authoritarian-led Michigan, New York, and California have been hardest hit.
In those hardest hit states, we are now seeing that most of the deaths occurred in senior care facilities – after the governors ordered patients sick with Covid to leave the hospitals and return to their facilities. There, they infected their fellow residents who were most likely to have the multiple co-morbidities and advanced age that turned the virus into a death sentence. Will these governors be made to answer for this callous disregard for life?
Yesterday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar admitted the obvious: “We are seeing that in places that are opening, we’re not seeing this spike in cases.” So why not open everything? Because these petty tyrants cannot stand the idea of losing the ability to push people around.
Shutting down the entire United States over a virus that looks to be less deadly than an average flu virus – particularly among those under 80 who are not already sick – has resulted in mass unemployment and economic destruction. More Americans may die from the wrong-headed efforts to fight the virus than from the virus itself.
Americans should pause and reflect on the lies they are being sold. Masks are just a form of psychological manipulation. Many reputable physicians and scientists have said they are worthless and potentially harmful. Lockdowns are meant to condition people to obey without question. A nation of people who just do what they are told by the “experts” without question is a nation ripe for a descent into total tyranny. This is no empty warning – it’s backed up by history. Time to stand up to all the petty tyrants from our hometowns to Washington DC. It is time to reclaim our freedom.
This is absurd.It is a well known established fact that not all get immunity.People cured of the virus have again become infected.This negates the usefulness of “immunity cards.”
How can Fauci and Gates not know this?Clearly, they have a different agenda.
If you thought Bill Gates was intelligent, think again.
The moron wants the economy locked down for 18 months until his vaccine is ready.18 months in a locked down economy means no one will be alive to vaccinate with his toxic concoction.
MCViewPoint 