Whenever you read of the effects of “the Coronavirus Pandemic” or anything along these lines, know that it is not COVID-19, but the reaction to it, the rise of the Flat-Curve Society and the Corona Walkers (or, as my friend calls them, the “Coronaites”), that has left, within the span of about a month, has fundamentally transformed everyday life in America for the worst.

It is the Great UnReason of 2020, not The Virus (as COVID-19 is now known), that has driven tens of millions of Americans out of their jobs and divested thousands of American small business owners of their livelihoods.

It is the Great UnReason of 2020—spearheaded by the Flat-Curvers in Big Government and Big Media—that, under “Shelter-in-Place” orders, has isolated people from their families, friends, and communities.

It is the Great UnReason of 2020 that has devastated with one fell swoop a 22 trillion dollar economy while transforming all other “essential businesses” into something like prison cafeterias where food servers operate from behind cages and, at least in the case of some grocery stores, armed security officers watch to make sure that everyone is observing “Social Distancing” protocols.

It is the Great UnReason of 2020 that has led to the indefinite revocation of the United States Constitution.

It is the Great UnReason of 2020 that brought about the shutting down of churches and other houses of worship.

It is the Great UnReason of 2020 that has resulted in the indefinite collapsing of civil society.

It is the Great UnReason of 2020, in other words, that has birthed OPERATION: COSMIC CONFINEMENT.

That “the Great UnReason of 2020” is an apt moniker for this surreal phenomenon will be seen by the following considerations.

Numbers: Diagnosis

As David Crowe, in his painstakingly researched, meticulously argued paper, “Flaws in Coronavirus Pandemic Theory,” notes, despite what Big Media and Big Government would have the rest of us believe, “There is very little science happening” vis-à-vis The Virus.

“If the virus exists,” Crowe writes, “then it should be possible to purify viral particles.” He elaborates:

“From these particles RNA can be extracted and should match the RNA used in this test.  Until this is done it is possible that the RNA comes from another source, which could be the cells of the patient, bacteria, fungi etc. There might be an association with elevated levels of this RNA and illness, but that is not proof that the RNA is from a virus.  Without purification and characterization of virus particles, it cannot be accepted that an RNA test is proof that a virus is present.

In order to know that a virus is causing disease or illness, we first need to be able to isolate the viral particles from everything else that is transpiring around it and extract RNA from those particles.  Only then, upon matching it with the RNA in the test, would it be possible to determine whether the RNA found is actually that belonging to a virus.

This has not been done.

Another problem is that the illness of which The Virus is said to be the cause is constituted by symptoms that are loose and scarcely unique, or even particularly distinctive. “Definitions of important diseases are surprisingly loose,” Crowe continues, “perhaps embarrassingly so.” He observes that while the definition of SARS was “self-limiting,” that of “COVID-19…is open-ended” (emphasis added) [.]

“This strange new disease, officially named COVID-19, has none of its own symptoms.  Fever and cough, previously blamed on uncountable viruses and bacteria, as well as environmental contaminants, are most common, as well as abnormal lung images, despite those being found in healthy people.”

Brilliantly, Crowe delivers the coup de grace of his argument through a piece of logic that is unanswerable:

“Yet, despite the fact that only a minority of people tested will test positive (often less than 5%), it is assumed that this disease is easily recognized.  If that was truly the case, the majority of people selected for testing by doctors should be positive” (emphases added).

Investigative journalist Jon Rappoport expands upon the unreliability of the diagnostic test for The Virus.  Before the PCR (the standard COVID-19 test) “was ever permitted to make claims about THE QUANTITY OF VIRUS that is replicating in a patient’s body,” Rappoport remarks, an experiment should have been undertaken that would have determined whether the PCR “can actually predict illness in the real world, in humans, not in the lab” (boldface original, emphasis added).

This experiment has never been performed.

Rappoport explains why this renders the PCR virtually worthless or, at the very least, scientifically disreputable:

“Quantity is vital, because, in order to even begin talking about whether a virus can cause disease, millions and millions of virus must be actively replicating in a patient’s body.”

If the reporting of confirmed cases of The Virus was truly science-based, the following experiment, or something very much like it, would have been performed at the outset of the Great Pandemic:

“Here is the experiment.  Assemble a group of 500 volunteers, some sick, some healthy. Take tissue samples from them, and give the samples to PCR technicians.  The technicians will never see or know who the 500 volunteers are.

“The techs run these samples through the PCR. For each sample, they report which virus they found, and how much of it they found.

“In patients 34, 57, 83, 165, and 433, we found a great deal of the following disease-causing viruses.

“Now we un-blind those specific patients.  By the test results, they should all be sick.  Are they? Aren’t they? Then we would know.  We would know how accurate and relevant the test is in the real world.”

Well, we would be significantly closer to knowing than we are at the present moment, for this experiment would have to be repeated numerous times with new groups of 500 or so patients per group and new sets of PCR technicians before we could claim to know that The Virus causes the illness with which it’s being identified.  The subsequent rounds of testing are necessary in order to confirm or refute the initial findings.

As Rappoport says, “This is the way the scientific method is supposed to work” (emphasis added).

His verdict is to the point: Until such time as this experiment occurs, “all case numbers [of COVID-19] derived from the PCR should be thrown out.”

There is still another reason why the case numbers cannot be trusted and it has to do with the absence of a “second vital experiment.”

Since it is impossible to look into the human body in real time to discern whether millions of virus are actively replicating, the only alternative in the real world consists of electron microscopy.  Rappoport tells us how this would pan out:

“Suspecting the existence of a new disease-causing virus, researchers should line up, at the very least, several hundred people who seem to have the new disease. Tissue samples should be taken from them. Using correct steps of centrifuging these samples, specimens of the results should be examined and photographed under the electron microscope.”

Then researchers must ask:

“In every one of the several hundred photos, do the researchers see many identical particles of a virus they’ve never seen before; and do the researchers see that these many particles are the same from photo to photo?”

Rappoport informs us that if the answer to this inquiry is in the affirmative, “and if more than one group of researchers independently carrying out this procedure on the patients’ tissue sampled achieves the same result…then, this is as close as you can come to saying you’ve discovered a new disease-causing virus” (italics added).

Yet even this is not the end of the story, for other “researchers with other patients should attempt to replicate the above findings.”

Rappoport reveals the damning truth:

“This vital experiment has never been done in the case of COVID-19.  Not even close. Therefore, researchers can’t make a true claim to have discovered a new disease-causing virus.” 

These skeptics belong to the ranks of numerous distinguished doctors from around the world who have been busy challenging the official narrative from day one—but whose voices, tellingly, have not received any attention by either Big Government or Big Media.

Perspective

Dr. John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine, Health Research and Policy and of Biomedical Data Science, and Professor of Statistics at Stanford University, conducted a study with two of his colleagues. Their objective, basically, was to determine the risk of death by The Virus in people under 65 years of age and those without underlying conditions.  They proceeded to accumulate data from COVID-19 “hotspots” in both Europe and America.  In the former, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland are the places on which the study focuses, and, in America, Louisiana, Michigan, Washington state, and New York City.

Europeans under 65 years old with COVID-19 account for 5%-9% of all deaths (in the hotspots of eight countries).  Americans under 65 years of age with COVID-19 account for 30% of all deaths in three hotbed locations. This means that Europeans with The Virus in this demographic have a 34-73-fold lower risk of dying from it than those 65 or older, and Americans under 65 with The Virus have a 13-15-fold lower risk of dying than those 65 or older in New York City, and the states of Louisiana, and Michigan.

To put this in perspective:

“Based on the data until April 4, for the whole COVID-19 fatality season to-date (starting with the date the first death was documented in each [hotspot] location) the risk of dying from coronavirus for a person <65 years old is equivalent to the risk of dying driving a distance of 9 to 415 miles by car per day during COVID-19 fatality season.”

In other words, even in those places where the pandemic is most keenly felt, for the vast majority of people under 65 years of age, “the risk of death is in the same level roughly as dying from a car accident during daily commute.”

In New York City, the highest risk for those under 65 “corresponds to the risk of dying in a traffic accident while traveling daily from Manhattan to Baltimore round trip [close to 400 miles a day] for…25 days.”

As for people who are 40 years old or younger, they “have almost no risk at all of dying [.]”

And remember, this pertains to those who have contracted The Virus in its hotspots. The conclusion?

“Therefore, for the vast majority of countries around the world and for the vast majority of states and cities in the USA…the risk of death from COVID-19 this season for people <65 years old may be even smaller than the risk of dying from a car accident during daily commute.”

Last month, Ioannidis reminded us that “patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 [The Virus] are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes.”

This being the case, “as most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future.”

The Diamond Princess Cruise ship and its quarantine passengers constitute the one situation in which an entire, closed population was tested.  While fatality rate was 1.0%, Ioannidis reminds us that “this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.”

He also informs us—what few of us ever consider and which the fear-mongers in Big Government and Big Media would never dare mention now—is that “even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses that have been known for decades can have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect elderly people in nursing homes” (emphasis added).

“Could the Covid-19 case fatality rate be that low?  No, some say, pointing to the high rate in elderly people. However, even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses that have been known for decades can have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect elderly people in nursing homes.”

Ioannidis adds that had we not known about a new virus, and had we not checked patients with PCR tests, “the number of total deaths due to ‘influenza-like illness’ would not seem unusual this year.”

No, “we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average.”

Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, a specialist in microbiology who was a professor at the Johannes Gutenburg University in Mainz and head of the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hygiene, is also one of the most cited research scientists in Germany.  Last month, he said that while fear was growing over the possibility that The Virus could infect “1 million” people, causing “30 deaths” per day over the next 100 days, “we do not realize that 20, 30, 40, or 100 patients [who have tested] positive for normal coronaviruses are already dying every day.”

Regarding the measures of OPERATION COSMIC CONFINEMENT (“mitigation”), he writes that they

“…are grotesque, absurd and very dangerous [.] The life expectancy of millions is being shortened. The horrifying impact on the world economy threatens the existence of countless people. The consequences on medical care are profound. Already services to patients in need are reduced, operations cancelled, practices empty, hospital personnel dwindling. All this will impact profoundly our whole society.

“All these measures are leading to self-destruction and collective suicide based on nothing but a spook.”

Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, a German physician specializing in Pulmonology, upon noting that coronaviruses constitute 7%-15% of viruses found in all respiratory illnesses, proceeds to account for the mass hysteria generated by Big Government (which includes the Scientific Establishment) and Big Media: “Politicians are being courted by scientists…scientists who want to be important to get money for their institutions. Scientists who just swim along in the mainstream and want their part of it.”

Because of the self-interest of many individual scientists, “what is missing right now is a rational way of looking at things.”

For example, we “should be asking questions like, ‘How did you find out this virus was dangerous?’, ‘How was it before?’, ‘Didn’t we have the same thing last year?’, ‘Is it even something new?’”

Joel Kettner is a professor of Community Health Sciences and Surgery at Manitoba University, former Chief Public Health Officer for Manitoba province and Medical Director of the International Centre for Infectious Diseases. His comments are particularly instructive:

“I have never seen anything like this, anything anywhere near like this. I’m not talking about the pandemic, because I’ve seen 30 of them, one every year.  It is called influenza.  And other respiratory illness viruses, we don’t always know what they are. But I’ve never seen this reaction, and I’m trying to understand why.

“I worry about the message to the public, about the fear of coming into contact with people, being in the same space as people, shaking their hands, having meetings with people.  I worry about many, many consequences related to that.”

Hendrik Streeck, a German HIV researcher, epidemiologist and clinical trialist, is also a professor of virology and the director of the Institute of Virology and HIV Research at Bonn University.  He assures us that this “new pathogen is not that dangerous” and, in fact, “is less dangerous than Sars-1 [the Swine Flu].”

Streeck explains:

“The special thing is that Sars-CoV-2 [The Virus] replicates in the upper throat area and is therefore much more infectious because the virus jumps from throat to throat, so to speak.  But that is also an advantage: Because Sars-1 replicates in the deep lungs, it is not so infectious, but it definitely gets on the lungs, which makes it more dangerous.”

The aforementioned constitute just a sampling of medical specialists whose voices have been conspicuously excluded by the self-appointed guardians in Big Government and Big Media of the official narrative on The Virus.

The Predictions

Just last month, the Experts informed us that in the absence of “mitigation” procedures (i.e. OPERATION COSMIC CONFINEMENT) up to 2.2 million Americans would die and, by “as early as the second week in April” there would be “an eventual peak in ICU or critical care bed demand that is over 30 times greater than the maximum supply” available?

Even with “mitigation,” the Imperial College of London forecasted that more than one million Americans would die.

This should sound to everyone as absurd a figure today as some of us knew it was then.

Nor can anyone, including any of the Experts, any longer take seriously the prediction of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that the number of dead Americans would be anywhere between 200,000 and 1.7 million.

FiveThirtyEight’s April 2 summary of a survey of “public health officials” fares no better to anyone paying any attention just two weeks later.  It projected that there would be approximately 263,000 dead.

And not too long before that the model supplied by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), the model that informs the Trump administration’s course of action, determined that 240,000 Americans would drop dead from The Virus.

Yet shortly after the Surgeon General promised us that Holy Week would be the Week of Infamy, worse than Pearl Harbor and 9-11 combined, the Experts were forced to revise their apocalyptic predictions precipitously downward.

The most recent IHME model tells us that 60,000 or so Americans could die from The Virus.

Yet even this number is surely substantially higher than the real number, for as we now know, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) instructs physicians to identify as the cause of their patients’ deaths COVID-19—even if they hadn’t been tested for it, and even if they were already in terminal condition due to the existence of other preexisting conditions.

From the CDC:

“COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease causes or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death. Certifiers should include as much detail as possible based on their knowledge of the case, medical records, laboratory testing, etc. If the decedent had other chronic conditions such as COPD or asthma that may have also contributed, these conditions can be reported in Part II [listed as “secondary” causes]” (boldfaced type mine).  

As Alex Berenson, former reporter for The New York Times, summarizes it: “Confirmed lab tests are not required [.]”  Confirmed testing need not apply.

The governments of Italy, Germany, the UK, and Austria have as well been extraordinarily liberal in how they have determined cases and mortality rates for The Virus.  Because, at one time during The Great UnReason, Italy was depicted as the “epicenter” of the “pandemic,” it is worth looking at it.  Were Italians suffering the ravages of a second bubonic plague, as Big Media had the world believe?  Well, let’s look at it:

For starters, of all of Italy’s reported deaths from The Virus, certificates for only 12% of them actually list it as the cause of death.   

Moreover, a whopping 99% of all those whose deaths were attributed to The Virus had at least one co-morbidity, and 80% had two co-morbidities.

And let’s not forget that the average age of COVID-19 patients in Italy was between 79-81 years of age.

Walter Ricciardi, an adviser to Italy’s heath minister, conceded the following:

“The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in the hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus” (italics added).

In summary, the number of cases of Virus deaths in Italy was artificially inflated by a whopping 88%!

Why, though, we may wonder, would anyone, like government actors, enact prescriptions that are designed to inflate the numbers of people who die from The Virus?

Well, for starters, and as some brave whistleblowers within the medical community have confirmed, hospitals, via Medicare, are receiving significantly more money ($4,000) for each patient diagnosed with The Virus, and that much more money ($39,000)for everyone who is placed on a ventilator.

As Dr. David Brownstein put it, the explanation for this blatantly unscientific manner of counting COVID-19 statistics, this apparent eagerness to inflate the numbers, boils down to one simple maxim: “Follow the money.”

Brownstein observes that the CDC as well has a material interest invested in increasing the reported number of cases of The Virus, for the more out of control a problem it appears, the more money it can extract from Congress for future research.

There is, still, a third reason why there is a concerted effort to jack up the number of Virus cases.

“The Government has a reason to increase the death numbers for COVID as the final numbers will be much lower than the original projections which were used to lock down our economy. The Government has to justify the policies it has implemented. If the numbers are too low, public outcry will begin.”

For sure.

Dr. Brownstein maintains that COVID-19 is a serious matter, a “pandemic.” However, as a doctor who “was taught to be meticulous when putting the cause of death on a certificate,” he has no patience for the CDC guidelines that now require that he and his colleagues dispense with this perennial professional standard when it comes to this single virus.

OPERATION COSMIC CONFINEMENT (“Social Distancing”)

Rather than apologize to the American public for the paralyzing fear that they promoted over projections of infections, shortages in medical supplies, and fatalities that didn’t come even remotely close to materializing, the architects of OPERATION COSMIC CONFINEMENT have patted themselves on the backs for the lower actual numbers.

If not for their historically unprecedented operation—what they euphemistically refer to as “mitigation” and/or “social distancing”—their projections, they now insist, would have come true:

We were wrong because we were right.

This is the Orwellian line to which the position of the Experts reduces.

However, there is more than one problem with this stance.

First, Science 101: Correlation does not equal causation.  The proposition that the draconian measures imposed upon Americans have actually succeeded in “flattening the curve” is a proposition that must be tested.

Second, despite their repeated appeals to “science,” the verdict that OPERATION COSMIC CONFINEMENT precluded the Apocalypse promised by the Experts has about as much science behind it as any of the other dogmas of the official narrative.

For starters, we know that there are countries and even American states that did not shut down their economies and jurisdictions but which are no worse and, in some instances, actually in better shape than those that did go this route.

Of course, there is also a ton of other demographic and cultural considerations that must be factored into account when attempting to derive an honest verdict on this question, for the places compared may not be all that comparable.

The basic point here, though, is that for as plausible as it may sound on its surface that OPERATION COSMIC CONFINEMENT has succeeded in “Stopping the Spread!” plausibility is no substitution for science. It is anything but a foregone conclusion that “mitigation” has been successful in preventing disaster.

Second, a recent study conducted by Yitzhak Ben Israel, a professor at Tel Aviv University in Israel and a member of the research and development advisory board for Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, strongly puts into doubt the proposition that if not for OPERATION COSMIC CONFINEMENT, the dire forecasts of the Experts would have come to pass.

The Virus has reached its peak and is declining—everywhere.  To repeat, irrespectively of whether the country participated in OPERATION COSMIC CONFINEMENT or exempted itself from it, The Virus exhibits the same pattern: After about six weeks it peaks and then proceeds a precipitous decline by the eighth week.

Third, that The Virus numbers are on a decline is a fact that even the CDC confirms. And this has been the case for over three weeks.  Yet what data has been gathered implies that factors other than OPERATION COSMIC CONFINEMENT, considerations like cold weather, herd immunity, and growing knowledge of how to treat patients, account for the downward trajectory of The Virus.

Josh Mitteldorf, for example, using data from OurWorldInData.org, notes that Russia, which has no COSMIC CONFINEMENT and cold weather, has a virtually non-existent COVID-19 death rate. Mexico and Brazil have had warm weather, no COSMIC CONFINEMENT, and a very low Virus death toll.  Japan has medium cold weather, no COSMIC CONFINEMENT, and a low death rate.

To provide perspective, Mitteldorf notes that, given the CDC’s own numbers, in recent years, the scale of deaths per million population of the seasonal flu has ranged from a low of 34 to a high of 175.  In America, to date, the cumulative death rate per million population of The Virus is 67.5.

Conclusion

In summary, from the outset and all throughout, the so-called “Coronavirus Pandemic” has been the pretext for a new era. We may call it “the Age of UnReason.”