by Joel S. Hirschhorn
Sometimes it pays to step back in history to understand exactly how something monumental was created. This is the story of how one Big Lie turned our world upside down and ruined the lives of millions of people.
It is hard to believe that one Big Lie could have created all the pandemic controls, especially lockdowns, school closings, and quarantines, that devastated our lives, our economy, and our society. But it happened.
A very powerful, influential person told the world in early 2020 that the new China virus that leads to COVID-19 infection was especially lethal. This quickly pushed a fast, enormous response to protect public health. Was the truth being told? It was not. There was an exaggeration of the new virus lethality for the entire population. In truth, it was only severe for the oldest age category. Helped by corrupt data from the CDC, the overstatement of COVID lethality continues today to maintain public fear.
First, it is important to discuss the meaning of critically important terms. What the Big Lie was all about had to do with the fatality or death rate of what early in 2020 was seen as an invading new virus coming from China. How should we think about the fatality rate of a virus?
Terminology
One simple and correct way to examine fatality rate is to look at how many people die from the infection caused by the virus: the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR). But another possible way would be to invoke the Case Fatality Rate (CFR); the fraction of documented cases of people with the virus that resulted in death.
How can you know how many people are infected? A lot of testing would be necessary. For our COVID pandemic, there has been, surprisingly, very little wide blood testing across the whole population. Many people with infections have no symptoms or just mild ones and do not seek testing or medical attention. The CDC has done a terrible job of getting good data on infection numbers.
As to cases ascribed to COVID, there are reasons why that number surely underestimates how many people are really infected. Why? The reason is because only some people, usually with symptoms, get tested and if found positive become a case. On the other side, the PCR test method most widely used has often been implemented in a way to get false-positive results. This is mainly because the number of cycles the test is run is far too high (above 25) and picks up fragments of the virus (or any coronavirus) that does not document real COVID infection. Thus, the CFR is not a reliable or accurate measure of the real death rate despite widely published case numbers.
Key moment in history
During a March 11, 2020 hearing of the House Oversight and Reform Committee on coronavirus preparedness, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, put it plainly: “The seasonal flu that we deal with every year has a mortality of 0.1%,” he told the congressional panel, whereas coronavirus is “10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu,” per STAT news. [0.1% also expressed as .001]
He also said: “The bottom line: It is going to get worse.” He stated: “The stated mortality, overall, of [the coronavirus], when you look at all the data including China, is about 3%.”
That figure of 3%, far from reliable, is 30 times greater than the figure given for the seasonal flu. Fauci exaggerated to create a crisis simply by implying great lethality for everyone infected by the new COVID virus.
It should be noted that CDC has found the flu IFR ranged from 0.1% (the figure cited by Fauci) to 0.17% [.0017] from 2014 to 2019 because seasonal deaths vary significantly.
With the help of big mainstream media, what Fauci said put the country into convulsions. It created the foundation for authoritarian contagion controls driving a spike into the lives of Americans. Fauci intentionally created the pandemic by creating fear.
New York City analysis
An interesting analysis was made for IFR for New York City at the height of the pandemic in May 2020. It illustrates how both death and infection data can be fine-tuned to get an IFR. As to deaths, blood testing found that 19.9% of people had antibodies indicating infection, yielding a number of 1,671,351 infected. As to deaths from COVID, there were three components: 13,156 confirmed, 5,126 probable, and 5,148 excess for a total of 23,430, which may have overstated deaths. Probable meant likely COVID death but not confirmed through testing. Excess meant the number above the expected seasonal baseline level. Using the total deaths divided by total infected produces an IFR of .014. This is higher than the usually quoted flu value [.001] for the height of the pandemic in high-density New York City and without consideration of variations among the most vulnerable groups. A high rate of fatality for elderly people would cause a deceptive high value for IFR for the entire population.
Deaths certainly have declined significantly in the past year and more (even as the high transmissivity delta variant has probably maintained high levels of infections). Why? It is because of far better actions in hospitals and because infected people have surely learned a lot about home treatments to catch COVID infection early after initial symptoms and possibly a positive test. Cutting the deaths in half for the same number of infected people results in an IFR of .007, probably a more realistic figure for today.
World Health Organization
At an October 2020 meeting of the World Health Organization, Dr. Michael Ryan, the Head of Emergencies revealed that they believe roughly 10% of the world has been infected with Sars-Cov-2. This is their “best estimate.” This figure was based on the average results of all the broad seroprevalence (blood) studies done around the world. The message was that the virus is nothing as deadly as everyone predicted. At the time the global population was roughly 7.8 billion people, if 10% have been infected that is 780 million infections. The global death toll then attributed to Sars-Cov-2 infections was seen as 1,061,539. That’s an infection fatality rate of roughly or 0.14% [.0014]. This is consistent with seasonal flu and the predictions of many experts from around the world, and inconsistent with the dire picture given by Fauci.
Great analysis
Now consider the detailed analysis “Public Health Lessons Learned From Biases in Coronavirus Mortality Overestimation” by Ronald B. Brown published in August 2020. He has doctoral degrees in public health and organizational behavior.
Here are highlights from this article that focused on what Fauci said.
“The validity of this estimation could benefit from vetting for biases and miscalculations. The main objective of this article is to critically appraise the coronavirus mortality estimation presented to Congress.”
[What Fauci said] “helped launch a campaign of social distancing, organizational, business lockdowns, and shelter-in-place orders.”
“Previous to the Congressional hearing, a less severe estimation of coronavirus mortality appeared in a February 28, 2020, editorial released by NIAID [Fauci’s department] and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Published online in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM.org), the editorial stated: ‘…the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%).’ Almost as a parenthetical afterthought, the NEJM editorial inaccurately stated that 0.1% is the approximate case fatality rate of seasonal influenza. By contrast, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that 0.1% or lower is the approximate influenza infection fatality rate, not the case fatality rate. “
Brown correctly hit the key semantic issue: CFR versus IFR.
“IFRs are estimated following an outbreak, often based on representative samples of blood tests of the immune system in individuals exposed to a virus. Estimation of the IFR in COVID-19 is urgently needed to assess the scale of the coronavirus pandemic. “ [Now, over a year later this has not happened.]
Brown correctly emphasized, “it is imperative to not confuse fatality rates [CFR and IFR] with one another; else misleading calculations with significant consequences could result.” [That is exactly what Fauci engineered.]
Brown said the 1% figure in the testimony was consistent with the “coronavirus CFR of 1.8-3.4% (median, 2.6%) reported by the CDC.” [As I write this data in The Washington Post shows a CFR of 1.6%. This substantiates that the health care system has made progress in curbing COVID deaths. But this current CFR is still 16 times higher than the IFR figure for the seasonal flu. IFR remains the issue.]
Now, Brown gets to the heart of the problem: “A comparison of coronavirus and seasonal influenza CFRs may have been intended during Congressional testimony, but due to misclassifying an IFR as a CFR, the comparison turned out to be between an adjusted coronavirus CFR of 1% and an influenza IFR of 0.1%.” [Did Fauci, the widely lauded expert, not know what he was doing? It is hard to believe this. If he knew, then we have the explanation for the Big Lie.]
By May 2020 “it was clear that the coronavirus mortality total for the season would be nowhere near 800,000 deaths inferred from the 10-fold mortality overestimation reported to Congress [emphasis added]. Even after adjusting for the effect of successful mitigation measures that may have slowed down the rate of coronavirus transmission, it seems unlikely that so many deaths were eliminated by a nonpharmaceutical intervention such as social distancing, which was only intended to contain infection transmission, not suppress infections and related fatalities.”
As to getting good data to determine IFR, Brown noted: “A revised version of a non–peer-reviewed study on COVID-19 antibody seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California, found that infections were many times more prevalent than confirmed cases. As more serosurveys are conducted throughout the country, a nationally coordinated COVID-19 serosurvey of a representative sample of the population is urgently needed, which can determine if the national IFR is low enough to expedite an across-the-board end to restrictive mitigating measures.” [In other words, with systematic blood testing, if we have an IFR for COVID like the IFR for the seasonal flu, then the many disruptive and costly actions by the public health establishment are not justified. And they never were!]
Another analysis
The title of this September 2020 article by Len Cabrera is “Mistake or Manipulation.” An initial point made was: “A review of the early events mentioned in Dr. Brown’s paper and the lack of any corrections to the record suggest that the misstatement [by Fauci] before Congress was not a mistake.” If not a mistake, then it was intentional.
This point was dead on: “In his testimony, Dr. Fauci claimed the mortality of flu was 0.1% and that the case fatality rate of COVID was 3% but could be as low as 1% with asymptomatic cases. This is an apples-to-oranges comparison of the flu’s infection fatality rate (IFR) to COVID-19’s case fatality rate (CFR).”
And this critical point was made: “All cases are infections, but not all infections are confirmed cases, so the number of infections always exceeds the number of cases, making IFR less than CFR.” In other words, if the number of deaths is the same, then a lower denominator for calculating CFR compared to that for getting the IFR results in a higher number for CFR.
Are we to believe that the esteemed Fauci did not know this? Or is it reasonable to conclude that Fauci knew exactly what he was doing, namely using some simple data to create a pandemic crisis that required massive authoritarian government actions? Fauci set the stage for his wait-for-the-vaccine pandemic strategy that he sold to President Trump. This required that the government establish blocks to the wide use of the safe, cheap, effective, and FDA-approved generic medicines already found to cure COVID in early 2020, namely ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Details about these early treatment protocols are given in Pandemic Blunder.
Here is another point made: “A careful viewing of the testimony suggests the line [COVID being 10 times worse than flu] was not a mistake. Dr. Fauci was specifically asked if COVID was less lethal than H1N1 or SARS. Rather than refer to his own NEJM article saying SARS had a case fatality rate of 9-10% (3 to 10 times worse than COVID), Dr. Fauci said, “Absolutely not… the 2009 pandemic of H1N1 was even less lethal than regular flu… this is a really serious problem that we have to take seriously.” He repeated that COVID’s “mortality is 10 times that [of influenza]” and concluded with, “We have to stay ahead of the game in preventing this.”
This also was a prescient view: “This was a perfect series of switches: IFR to CFR, voluntary isolation for the sick to mandatory isolation for everyone, two weeks to flatten the curve to indefinite lockdown until there’s a vaccine. (If you think it will be voluntary, you’re not paying attention.)”
Add this to the quest for truth: “A study in France looked at all-cause mortality data from 1946 to 2020 and concluded that ‘SARS-CoV-2 is not an unusually virulent viral respiratory disease pathogen” because there is no significant increase in mortality. Of the deaths in 2020, the study said, ‘unprecedented strict mass quarantine and isolation of both sick and healthy elderly people, together and separately, killed many of them.’”
Here is the article’s correct conclusion: “Sadly, many politicians were duped and went along with the recommendations for lockdowns and masks that followed from Dr. Fauci’s 10-times-deadlier testimony. Don’t expect them to admit their mistakes, either. Perhaps the only thing harder for a politician than telling the whole truth is admitting a mistake.”
What is the truth?
If you listen to many experts, you hear this truth based on CDC data: 99.8 or 99.9 percent of people across all ages who get infected by COVID do not die. That means that the IFR overall is .001 or .002. In other words, it is not much worse than the flu IFR, but it does vary with age.
In September 2020 these CDC age related data were reported:
Updated survival rates and IFR by age group:
0-19: 99.997%, IFR .003%
20-49: 99.98%, IFR .02%
50-69: 99.5%, IFR .5%
70+: 94.6%, IFR 5.4%
Note that through age 49 the IFR is less than the average for flu of .1% but higher for older people. Only for the 70+ group is the IFR more than 10 times greater. Is what Fauci said in his congressional testimony accurate? What if Fauci had said something in tune with that reality? The vaccine program he pushed should have focused on the elderly, not the entire population.
From the important recent report “COVD-19: Restoring Public Trust During A Global Health Crisis” are age data and COVID CFR [through Feb. 16, 2021]. Note these are Case Facility Rate data, meaning that the figures are very exaggerated because the number of infected is very much higher than the number of cases: probably 100 million more infections than cases. Thus, the total across all age groups of 1.701%, [.01701] should be corrected to .289% [.00289]; this is about three times higher than the cited flu IFR, not the 10 times higher given by Fauci. It would be much lower for the less than 70 population.
A very recent article said this: “While estimates of COVID-19’s infection fatality rate (IFR) range from study to study, the expert consensus does indeed place the death rate at below 1 percent for most age groups.” Fauci did indeed overhype COVID for all but the very elderly. This supports the view of the eminent Dr. Peter McCollough that a wise COVID vaccine strategy would have been to target the elderly, not the entire population.
The widely acclaimed medical researcher John P. Ioannidis of Stanford University has examined IFR for COVID in considerable detail. In October 2020, he said this: “The infection fatality rate of COVID-19 can vary substantially across different locations and this may reflect differences in population age structure and case-mix of infected and deceased patients and other factors. The inferred infection fatality rates tended to be much lower than estimates made earlier in the pandemic.” At that time, he said:” Across 51 locations, the median COVID-19 infection fatality rate was 0.27% (corrected 0.23%).” This was higher than the Fauci quoted value for the flu (.1%), but not 10 times greater.
A new report from the defense department gives data on 5.6 million fully vaccinated Medicare participants age 65 and older. There were 161,000 recent breakthrough COVID infections and the IFR was .021. It noted an IFR for this group of .12 (about five times greater) during the March to December 2020 period when there was far less effective hospital care and no mass vaccination. Both IFRs for elderly Americans are greater than the quoted typical flu value, but far from a very lethal viral infection.
Recently, it was reported that according to the CDC, “More than 39 million Americans have been diagnosed with coronavirus infection since the pandemic started in 2020.” Using that figure, that may be too low because only 1.4 million blood samples were tested, together with the current CDC value of about 700,000 COVID fatalities results in an average IFR of .018. Why are 39 million infected people low? Many medical experts have said it is because that there are probably some 100 million Americans with natural immunity resulting from COVID infection. The keyword to question in what CDC did is “diagnosed.” In other words, people who were tested and found positive. But clearly, a large fraction of asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic people did not get tested. So, what if you add 100 million to the 39 million figure and then use that as the denominator, with 700,000 deaths in the numerator, and calculate the IFR? You get an IFR of .005. which is not ten times higher than the flu value cited by Fauci in his congressional testimony [actually 3 times higher than the high end of flu IFR values].
Podcaster Jack Murphy, who founded Liminal Order, deduced that because the CDC said there were twice as many people who were infected with COVID, then it automatically meant that the lethality rate must be cut in half, commenting that the virus that had killed 646,000 Americans in the last 19 months is “far less lethal than already known.”
Murder Motivation
To accept the entire argument for a Big Lie it is necessary to explain the motivation for Fauci to intentionally tell the public that the new China virus was extremely lethal. So much worse than seasonal flu. So awful that extreme government action was needed.
It is relevant to note that in January 2017 Fauci warned the Trump administration, in a public talk, that no doubt there would be a “surprise outbreak” of a new infectious disease pandemic. “The thing we’re extraordinarily confident about is that we’re going to see this in the next few years,” he said. He got what he wanted. Maybe all the talk about a “plandemic” was spot on. Maybe Fauci had insights because he was funding the work at the Wuhan Laboratory to develop extremely toxic viruses.
What Fauci said about high lethality set in motion an onerous set of government actions justified based on protecting public health. Why would anyone want to overstate the lethality of the new COVID-19 virus? It was the only way to use onerous pandemic control and management methods that Fauci favored. It was necessary to set in motion a COVID vaccine program. Most of all, his strategy was used to create very high levels of FEAR in the public so that they would accept his favored government actions.
Understand this: Fauci is not a trained public health expert, nor a trained epidemiologist or virologist. He was a plain physician who over many decades as a top NIH bureaucrat accumulated enormous power. He never did what true public health experts have an ethical obligation to do. That is to tell the public both the positives and negatives of public health policies and actions.
The point is this: By pushing the need for pandemic actions to address a very lethal virus a host of government actions produced so many economic, social, and personal hardships and dislocations as a result. Many analyses have concluded that more Americans died from government actions than from the COVID virus. Perversely, pandemic public health actions harmed public health. But with widespread mainstream media support Fauci got away with everything.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily. Fauci is guilty of criminally negligent homicide stemming from his initial and very public overstatement of the lethality of the COVID virus. Those who have screamed for his prosecution have a valid case.
With his power, he created policies that created data to support this lethality claim. One big action was to create a testing protocol using the PCR technology in ways that created very high case levels. The inventor of that technology said it was inappropriate for diagnosing viral infection. Millions of COVID cases resulted from running PCR equipment at very high cycle rates [high than 25]. Meanwhile, the government never did widespread blood testing to get data for knowing the IFR.
The other major way to keep up public support for pandemic controls was to ensure high numbers of COVID deaths. This was done through directives on how death certificates should be filled out and through financial incentives for hospitals to certify deaths as COVID ones. A recent analysis that in March 2020 CDC changed guidelines on how death certificates were to be filled out. This is different than the procedure used for 17 years prior to this change. This study found a COVID fatality figure of 161,392 with the new reporting versus 9,684 for the older procedure. There is little doubt that COVID death data, even accounting for some overcounting because of people dying not from any COVID influence, have been too high. This means that IFR data have been too high.
The combination of false high levels of cases and deaths helped maintain public fear of a very lethal virus. That is not correct for nearly all people younger than 70 years old.
Conclusions
To sum up: COVID was intentionally overhyped by Fauci as a very deadly disease to justify the most extreme public health actions. This was the Big Lie. Most valid data now show COVID lethality is like that for seasonal flu for the vast majority of people. But accepting that truth would not have justified the array of excessive government actions used for the false pandemic.
Yes, many people have died from COVID, but deaths have been overreported and infections underreported. Most deaths – at least 85% – could have been prevented by using generic medicines, such as ivermectin. There is no doubt that a great many people die with COVID but not FROM COVID, also arguing for a low IFR. At one point the CDC said that only 6% of deaths resulted only from COVID, making the IFR much lower than the flu IFR.
Finally, recognizing the true lower IFR for COVID the whole rationale for mass vaccination collapses, especially in view of very high levels of adverse effects and deaths from the vaccines themselves.
This makes perfect sense if you appreciate that the COVID IFR is now like the flu IFR for most people, especially if you recognize that CDC has found the flu IFR ranged from 0.1% (the figure cited by Fauci) to 0.17% from 2014 to 2019.
Understanding that the lethality of COVID is far from the terrible picture painted by Fauci at the very beginning of the pandemic is key to weighing the risk/benefit ratio when deciding to get vaccinated. For most people, the risk from the vaccine is greater than the benefit. Only the elderly has a good reason to get the shot. Some 81 percent of COVID deaths are for people over 65. As has been pointed out by many people, the average age of most COVID deaths for elderly victims has been consistently higher than the average life expectancy ages.
A new article has made important observations. The main one is that countries with low vaccination levels have been doing better than those with mass vaccination programs, like the US. The results are consistent with a widely accepted understanding that the vaccines do not effectively stem virus infection or transmission. More vaccination equated to more viral spreading.
The new study ended with advice to learn “to live with COVID-19, in the same manner, we continue to live a 100 years later with various seasonal alterations of the 1918 Influenza virus.”
Dr. Joel S. Hirschhorn, is author of Pandemic Blunder and many articles on the pandemic, worked on health issues for decades. As a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he directed a medical research program between the colleges of engineering and medicine. As a senior official at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the National Governors Association, he directed major studies on health-related subjects; he testified at over 50 US Senate and House hearings and authored hundreds of articles and op-ed articles in major newspapers. He has served as an executive volunteer at a major hospital for more than 10 years. He is a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and America’s Frontline Doctors.
