My Wuhan Virus-phobic friends and relatives pooh-poohed my assertion that the pandemic death statistics were being hyped and inflated by the news media and the CDC to keep the public terrified and in doors (and, quite possibly, unable to participate in a fair election.) For all I know they still don’t believe it, in part because the infuriating hasn’t been shouted from the roof-tops. A lead story on ever news network and a headline in every newspaper would be appropriate. It shouldn’t take all that, of course: I figured out we were being conned when the New York Times started running scare obituaries about 92-year-old black women who were “killed by Covid” while they were also suffering from cancer, high blood pressure and diabetes.
I had, frankly, forgotten about the fact that the news media still hasn’t taken responsibility for their unethical fear-mongering until I stumbled upon this, from July 18, 2023, in the 17th paragraph of a New York Times subscriber newsletter piece called “A Positive COVID Milestone” by David Leonhardt. He was one of the worst of the Times’ progressive op-ed writers until he was demoted. Leonhardt wrote: “The official number [of Wuhan deaths] is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had [the] virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death….CDC data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.”
A third? A third? That’s not a small statistical glitch: it’s a lie. Why hasn’t that been investigated? Who made the decision to count those as pandemic deaths? Where’s the accountability? Why didn’t the Times, which made sure its front page scared as many readers as possible day after day, check the criteria for the statistics when it published them?
If the Times now guesses that the inflation of the death stats were a third, how do we know they weren’t even greater? Editor to Leonhardt: “Hey, this 50% figure will have people up in arms. Let’s make it, say, 33%. You’re estimating anyway, right?”
Leonhardt, meanwhile, was a hack as usual. “Probably” exaggerated? I guess I’m a stickler, but I’d call a 33% over-count more than an “exaggeration”: it’s deliberate deception. Sure, there have been articles in medical journals and elsewhere since 2022 that suggested, speculated and theorized that the CDC over-counted the pandemic deaths, but there has never been a definitive pronouncement that couldn’t be dismissed as a conspiracy theory or a minority opinion.
This one is personal for me. The lockdown wrecked my ethics training and lecturing business; the Marshalls lost money in 2021, 2022, and 2023. We had to sell our investments, our credit rating was sunk; we nearly lost the house; and the anxiety eventually contributed to my wife’s death. If there isn’t going to be any accountability, at least the public needs to know how completely corrupt the news media, “scientists” and our government agencies were and are to perpetrate this hoax.
Ethics Alarms 
Right there with you Jack.
“The political left has shown its pattern of propaganda lies within their narratives so many times since 2016 that it’s beyond me why anyone would blindly accept any narrative that the political left and their lapdog media actively push?” Steve Witherspoon
“Why Hasn’t This Been a Headline Yet?”
#1 reason is that “the ends justify the means”.
This was apparant to me as I worked in health care at the time. A car accident vicitm with fatal head injuries had a death certifcate which lsited COVID asa contributing casue ot hsi demise.
The inefficacy of the vaccine became quickly apparant when the vaccinated showed up not only once but a series of times infected with the virus.
Our fatal mistake was that the CDC , WHO, Fauci and other professioanl chose to quarantine the healthy rather than the ill.
The sad fact is, the scientific and medical bureaucracy are experts at deflecting major errors, some of them as large or larger than this. They cut their baby teeth on 33% and only start to sweat when the error is 2:1 against. Let the climate change fraud be your guide.
It’s like when I see these right-wing clowns calling for Fauci’s imprisonment. Whether or not he deserves it is irrelevant — there is simply no stomach for it and in any case, he would be tried in DC where his chances of winning the lottery are equal to the chance of his conviction.
I sense your pain, Jack, but I confess I did not feel it. I was able to completely escape l’affaire COVID-19 with no meaningful or lasting consequences, and I suspect I am in the broad majority. Trying to get accountability for something that is now in the distant past for most of the public mind is quixotic, to say the least.
It sucks, and you are right. But there will be no meaningful remonstrance. It is simply ancient history in the minds of most of the public. Your story saddens me, but alas.
The adverse consequences of the Wuhan hysteria affected everyone, just not directly or immediately. A whole generation of was handicapped by social and academic obstacles. Businesses that could have thrived were destroyed. Live theater was perhaps permanently crippled. Baseball was stuck with the stupid “ghost runner.” Joe Biden was elected President. People began relying more on phones, texts and social media than, you know, meeting each other. The population was made insensitive to Big Brother overreach.
All true. Alas, my point still stands.
I recently wrote a tax return for a surgeon whose hospital wouldn’t allow him to operate during 2020.
He is bankrupt and probably lost millions – not to mention all of his employees who are out of work.
I personally was very fortunate but not all were.