June 1, 2020
Shouldn’t We Expect More From Our Public Health Agencies?
By Michael D. Shaw
It’s time that we strip away the politics, and examine the plain and obvious facts surrounding the long-term epic failure of our public health agencies. Since COVID-19 is on everyone’s minds, let’s start there.
The most glaring and utterly horrific aspect of this is how our leaders decided to quarantine the healthy, and ignore the most vulnerable. This recent piece from Forbes lays it out…
43% of all COVID-19 deaths have taken place in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Or, to put it another way, 43% of all COVID-19 deaths are taking place in facilities that house 0.62% of the U.S. population. And, depending on what state you’re talking about, the percentage can be much higher. Minnesota clocks in at an astonishing 81%. There is also a big contrast between the way states handled the matter of COVID-19 in these facilities. Florida governor Ron DeSantis had an aggressive screening policy in place, while New York governor Andrew Cuomo forced these facilities to accept all COVID-19 patients. The “force” policy was also in place in New Jersey and Michigan.
In fact, as the Forbes article details, Florida did most things right, yet—up until recently—the legacy media was lavish in its praise of Cuomo, who did virtually everything wrong.
It hardly takes a genius to realize that nursing home patients are at such high risk, but where were Cuomo’s “experts”? Stanford University epidemiologist John Ioannidis sounded the alarm back in March: “Even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses have been known for decades [to] have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect people in nursing homes.”
Public health leadership has succumbed to crass and corrupt politics with respect to the mortality numbers on COVID-19. In most of the cases where it was possible to distinguish those who died WITH the virus from those who died FROM the virus, the “FROM” tally was far lower. Yet, the higher numbers are nearly always reported.
Michael Fumento relates a ridiculous example:
“A male corpse was found in a Colorado park with a 0.55% alcohol level. That’s well above the lethal limit. The coroner declared cause of death as alcohol poisoning. But…the state’s Department of Public Health and Environment (DPHE) insisted on categorizing it as a COVID-19 death.” He details irregularities in other states, but they all seem to be justified under the rubric of motivating/scaring the people to take the pandemic seriously. Perhaps they aren’t familiar with the boy who cried “wolf.”
As to the notion of massive indiscriminate lockdowns, this is now being rigorously questioned on multiple fronts. They may not make a difference in the impact of the disease. The economic and non-COVID medical implications are devastating, and threaten to dwarf the consequences of COVID-19 itself. The origins of the lockdown theory are far from inspiring, and its very notion had already been debunked in 2006! Telegraph columnist Sherelle Jacobs eviscerates the lockdown actions.
As even the most casual observer will have noted, the positions and recommendations from our learned leaders have changed so many times, it is easy to lose count. After all, how “expert” can these experts be if they are revealed to be simply reporting each new iteration, rather than correctly predicting them?
Briefly moving on from COVID-19, it is nothing less than appalling as to how public health policy—foolishly touting the virtues of a low fat/high carb diet—ginned up our current epidemic of obesity and thus type 2 diabetes. The resulting hyperglycemia is simply the body’s reaction to excess caloric intake. And, if that weren’t bad enough, putting so many of these obese people on insulin will only exacerbate the problem. Insulin drives the sugar back into fat storage, thus increasing the weight, which often means the patient needs more insulin—and a vicious cycle has been unleashed.
As bad as COVID-19 is, the complications of diabetes and the resulting mortality are far worse. These are but two examples of how public health policy has failed us all.