They began viewing the pandemic as a political opportunity to saddle a very effective president -- effective at bleeding power from the deep state and ceding it back to the people via their representatives -- with a "deadly" virus that would wind up killing fantastical numbers of Americans.
As of this writing, there have been some 33.6 million cases of COVID-19 and nearly 600,000 deaths, but these figures don't add up and they never did.
By comparison, for instance, there are anywhere from 40 million to 65 million cases of influenza each year, though that highly contagious virus kills a fraction of that many people -- only about 30,000 or so a year.
What's more, this year we really didn't have a "flu season," and we are told that's because of our masking efforts.
Really? Because that makes no sense; if masks worked for influenza, why didn't they do a better job of stopping the novel coronavirus?
There's more. COVID-19, we know, has an extremely high recovery rate. Something close to 99.5 to 99.7 percent of people who have contracted the virus recovered from it. So, how it is possible to have far fewer COVID-19 infections than an average flu season but a far higher death rate from a virus from which humans are highly recoverable?
Simple: It all depends on how coronavirus (and flu, and other) deaths are counted. And that's where the deep state comes in.
Dr. Thomas T. Siler, MD, writing at the American Thinker, notes it's time to "demand a recount" of COVID-19 deaths:
America counts COVID-19 deaths differently from other countries. According to Dr. Deborah Birx, speaking at the start of the pandemic, “if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.”
However, we must acknowledge that there is a difference between dying from COVID-19 and dying with COVID-19. This is a familiar uncertainty for doctors during the winter flu season.
In most states, 40-60% of the people dying of SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, are elderly persons with multiple medical problems who live in nursing homes. A portion of this same cohort dies every year from the seasonal influenza virus. When that happens, did the flu kill them or was it their cancer, heart failure, strokes, or liver problems? Doctors use their best judgment to fill out the death certificate correctly, but they do not categorize all of them as “flu” deaths.
Siler notes further that the CDC says only 6 percent of people who died with COVID-19 had no other preexisting health problems. Meanwhile, the other 94 percent "had an average of four medical conditions already affecting their health," he wrote.
He goes on to say it doesn't mean that just 6 percent of COVID deaths resulted directly from the disease, but it also doesn't mean that 100 percent of the deaths of people with preexisting conditions were caused by COVID, either.
"Applying that same logic to COVID-19 means that conservatively 25-50% of the deaths labeled from COVID-19 more likely died with COVID-19," he wrote.
Siler went on to cite a study published in October 2020 in the bulletin of Science, Public Health Policy, and the Law which noted that the CDC, in March 2020, changed the way it began counting deaths from the way it had been counting them for the previous 17 years, and without notifying the public or Congress, as required by law.
The change resulted in a grossly inflated number of COVID deaths, Siler writes.
"It’s true that the COVID-19 infection is a real threat to the elderly with other medical conditions (e.g., diabetes, obesity, etc.) and this group must be protected. Still, parts of our government and media seem to have made a concerted effort to make the SARS-COV-2 pandemic appear more deadly than it actually is," the doctor noted.
And that lie was used to help get rid of a president no one in the DC deep state liked.
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