One of the great grifter movies, aside from the Clinton and Obama presidencies, is The Sting. Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman) and Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford} team up, “to pull off a complicated scheme known simple as the Big Con,” a racket to crush Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) and his empire.

We have had several iterations of the Big Con over the past four years, with Gondorff and Hooker played by a rotating cast including James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Joe Biden, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. All schemed and conspired to destroy Donald Trump and his family and presidency.

The latest sequel features Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx as the grifters and swindlers, using the Chinese coronavirus as the Big Con to keep President Trump from winning a second term in the White House. In the movie, the con succeeded but in Washington D.C., the con-verse is happening, with the schemes blowing up in the faces of the deep state grifters.

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In the past week, two pillars of the COVID Con collapsed: deaths and positive tests. Back in April, the news was all about death counts. Fox News ran a death tally on the screen, much like the running score of football game. Cable news shows talked about nothing but rising death counts, spreading fear porn to justify recommendations for staying at home and shutting down the U.S. economy.

The first crack in the pillar occurred in early May when task force member Dr. Birx claimed, “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust.” She believed the CDC was inflating Wuhan flu mortality by as much as 25 percent.

The pillar of COVID deaths crumbled just days ago when the CDC updated their mortality numbers to reflect deaths “from COVID” versus deaths “with COVID.”

Death with COVID means that George Floyd is counted a COVID death because he tested positive at autopsy. This is similar to the case of a Colorado man dying of alcohol poisoning but the death was later blamed on COVID. Washington public officials counted gunshot fatalities as COVID deaths.

The new CDC statistics show that only 6,640 deaths are due to COVID alone, rather than the commonly reported 164,280 deaths allegedly associated with COVID. In other words, only 4 percent of media sensationalized deaths were due solely to COVID and not other underlying medical conditions.

Could COVID have been a contributory factor? Sure, but what about the underlying comorbidities such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, even terminal cancer, all of which significantly increased the risk of death from COVID or even the seasonal flu. The CDC summarized it succinctly, “For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned.”

What this means is that those at lower risk, younger and healthier, are extremely unlikely to die from the Chinese flu, and shutting down the economy to protect the healthy makes little sense, unless economic destruction is the ultimate goal.

Not surprisingly, this revision received little attention in the DNC media, covered only by conservative news sites like Gateway Pundit. Not only ignored, but the truth was suppressed with Twitter blaming the updated CDC numbers on QAnon and removing tweets discussing the new data.

It seems the left wants QAnon to be the new “vast right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton once blamed for reports that her husband was having sex with a young White House intern. Yet the CDC numbers are on their website and the blue dress spoke for itself.

As death counts became suspect and testing ramped up, the media did a smooth sashay to case counts, or positive tests. Death counts and hospitalizations were flat, suggesting herd immunity was present in many parts of the country. To justify keeping businesses, churches, and schools closed, the DNC media now focused on positive tests.

A positive test means simply that there are viral particles in a person’s respiratory tract. They have been infected months ago and the sensitive PCR test detected dead viral fragments. A positive test does not mean a person is sick or contagious. And more testing means more positive cases, leading to so-called “surges” that were anything but.

Days ago, in of all places, the New York Times, the second pillar of the COVID Con crumbled, as they reported,

The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.

Most of these people are not likely to be contagious and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time.

Sensitivity of the PCR tests has to do with amplification of genetic material from the virus. The fewer cycles required, the higher the viral load and greater likelihood of being contagious. By setting the threshold of amplification cycles too high, the test is overly sensitive.

Imagine a home security alarm so sensitive that it is triggered by a wind gust or leaf hitting a window. The homeowner will certainly be alerted if an intruder is attempting to break in, but the alarm will be going off constantly with false, or in the case of the virus, non-clinically significant positives. Or as the NY Times put it,

Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk — akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left.

33 amplification cycles may be the upper limit for detecting live virus, according to the CDC, but many commercial labs are using 40 cycles as a positive test, in essence sounding the burglar alarm when a bird lands on the back deck.

The NY Times found, “Up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus.” Yet lockdowns of businesses and schools continue based on these wildly inaccurate numbers.

Is this purposeful or incompetent? I suggest the former. President Trump downplayed testing in favor of therapeutics such as hydroxychloroquine. The Democrat-media establishment immediately pushed for more testing and told everyone that hydroxy was as deadly as cyanide.

Fox News crank Neil Cavuto said of hydroxy, “It will kill you.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, claiming an “evidence-based” approach to combating the Chinese flu, pushed for “testing, testing, testing.” Yet both of those admonitions were fear-based, not evidence-based.

Here we are now with deaths and positive cases overstated by 90 plus percent, all to create fear and uncertainty ahead of a presidential election. How many excess deaths can be attributed to media gaslighting? How many people delayed necessary medical care or cancer screening, afraid to leave their homes over the daily barrage of fear porn from CNN and Fox News?

This is information warfare, weaponizing medical data to influence an election, regardless of the cost in lives and economic damage. But the Big Con is being exposed, darkness to light. Hopefully voters are noticing and awakening to the con pushed by the left and the media.

Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a Denver-based physician and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in American Thinker, Daily Caller, Rasmussen Reports, and other publications. Follow him on Facebook,  LinkedIn, Twitter, Parler, and QuodVerum.