Special Notice 37

CORRUPTION IN THE COVID-19 COMMUNITY

By William J. Dodwell June 18, 2020

· In March I wrote an article entitled “Can We Trust the COVID-19 Scientific Community?” bit.ly/2N8yOxU

Although skeptical, I was not ready to impugn that group’s integrity. But less than three months later, I conclude that, like climate-change and the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, the COVID-19 community is seriously compromised. This charge applies to certain scientists, hospitals, researchers, elected Democrat officials, medical literature, pharmaceutical firms, and health experts who have politicized or otherwise exploited COVID-19. How so? Let us count the ways.

- The World Health Organization (WHO) consorted with China to conceal the initial impact of the Wuhan coronavirus. Properly, President Trump withdrew U.S. membership costing the organization some $440 million annually.

- Many American epidemiologists openly support China’s prohibition against investigations into the Wuhan origin of the COVID-19 virus out of solidarity with the profession. This pandering to China undermines the search for a vaccine and adds to the death count. Could payoffs be at play here?

- The U.S. inaugurated nationwide lockdowns based on a now discredited 2.2 million U.S. coronavirus deaths projected by researcher Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London. But oddly, that was 100 times his projection for the UK, even though the U.S. has only five times the UK population. That error, on which President Trump relied with concurrence of Dr. Fauci, led to national alarm and grossly overestimated hospital capacity, equipment and supply requirements.

- Leading COVID-19 expert, Dr. Fauci, and Democrat governors kept moving the goal posts for a return to normalcy. Starting with just “bending the curve”, mass mitigation continued according to various timetables, including a wait for a vaccine in some quarters. The apparent attempt to delay economic recovery until November to hurt Trump’s reelection became increasingly transparent.

- Two prestigious medical journals, The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine, published articles about COVID-19 based on fraudulent data that bypassed the standard peer review process. Following objections raised by the medical community, the authors withdrew their works when they could not get the cooperation they needed from their data provider to respond to critics.

- Inflated death rates make the disease seem more serious than it is. They encourage longer and more draconian mitigation practices that suppress the economy to the detriment of President Trump’s reelection. Health officials redefined death to include comorbidities coincident with COVID-19. Some doctors said hospital authorities forced them to classify deaths as COVID-19 against their will. A particular motivation for hospitals is a government payment of $13,000 for each COVID-19 classified death, and $39,000 for each patient on a ventilator. In addition, some hospitals harboring COVID-19 patients proactively admitted and comingled non-COVID patients. What’s more, New York Governor Cuomo and other Democrat governors ordered nursing homes with non-COVID residents to accept COVID patients rather than send them to newly erected near-empty facilities. More than 5,000 deaths occurred thereafter in New York. To induce the nursing homes to comply, Cuomo surreptitiously enabled legislation that protected the owners from legal liability in exchange for a $1 million campaign contribution. What was the motive of these governors, hospitals and nursing homes? Might it be to swell the death count for political and economic purposes? Hey, they were going to die soon anyway.

- Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist, Jennifer Nuzzo, Democrat Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and others crusaded for social-distancing only to support an exception for Black Lives Matter protesters. Astonishingly, Nuzzo said the dangers of systemic racism exceed the virus. So much for science.

- Scientists, governors and media have engaged in a concerted effort to dismiss cheap hydroxachloraquine as a COVID-19 therapeutic, despite promising trials. Has the pharmaceutical industry orchestrated this cabal to permit the emergence of a new and much more lucrative substitute? What’s more, the media dismiss the drug simply because President Trump supports it. How’s that for journalism?

- Dr. Fauci and others support delaying school openings under the ruse of protecting children from infection and avoiding the spread to family members, despite evidence children are virtually immune to the virus. The political goal is to keep one parent out of work to care for a child and thus hamper the economic recovery.

- Reticence in the COVID-19 community about certain realities is suspect. Issues include: 1) The self-attenuation of the virus according to its genetic life cycle that one researcher says is about eight to ten weeks. 2) A considerable majority of cases are asymptomatic or involve only mild illness. 3) Asymptomatic cases do not transmit the disease. 4) Silence about indefinitely deferring a return to school, even though evidence shows the coronavirus does not affect children. 5) Studies show the ineffectiveness of lockdowns and masks. 6) The coronavirus does not spread efficiently in open air, especially in warm weather. 7) There's little mention of declining infection and death rates as aggressive testing programs identify undetected cases. This revelation would make the coronavirus seem too much like the seasonal flu.

- The contradictions about the effectiveness of masks. Both Dr. Fauci and Surgeon General Jerome Adams initially dismissed the need for masks only to revert to wearing them in public in response to the political winds.

- The left savors the prospect of a “new normal” founded on fear mongering and resultant acquiescence to government mandates, as well as on a new reliance on government assistance. This experience sets the stage for invoking COVID-19 again as a pretext for future malicious government interference.

- A unified force currently promotes an oncoming COVID-19 second wave to create alarm in the hope of blunting the reopening phase. In fact, certain researchers project hospitalizations and deaths that are orders of magnitude beyond both actual experience in the first wave and cases identified during a reopening. At one point, Dr. Fauci said definitively that a second wave is inevitable. He recanted later partly based on new testing results. The left misleads by reporting new cases identified from more extensive testing are actually second wave cases. In fact, they may be first wave cases that were not detected before the new testing regimen.

Mistruths and omissions about the nature of the Wuhan coronavirus, its scope, its severity, projections, mitigation protocols and therapeutics, abetted by economic and political interests, contributed to a grossly misjudged cost-benefit calculus. This has resulted in unnecessarily cratering the economy and spending several trillion dollars on stimulus. And the left continues the artifice in an effort to stall the recovery by delaying the reopening and propagating fear about a second wave to hurt President Trump in the November election. Indeed, like climate-change, and AIDS in the 1980s, much COVID-19 reporting skirts science in favor of self-interest.