The Biden administration has just extended its COVID scam, the "emperor's new clothes," by renewing the declaration of Public Health Emergency.  A recent poll shows that 52 percent of Americans still think the U.S. is in grave danger from COVID.  Is that true?  Was it ever?  Is Washington's COVID narrative and response plan good medical science? 

The word "science" has been turned on its head by Washington.  When Dr. Fauci proclaims, "I represent science"; when Twitter cancels Dr. Robert Malone; and when an academic journal censors a vaccine safety study, they subvert true science.

When one applies the scientific method to data about COVID, vaccines, and Washington mandates, one conclusion is inescapable.  Everything Washington said and did was wrong and unscientific.

The title includes "short-term" because there are no long-term or even moderate term data on outcomes: efficacy and adverse impacts.  Though that is public health malpractice, it did not stop Washington from promulgating numerous medically improper, socially devastating mandates and advisories.  

The first and most egregious official medical falsehood represented that COVID was a grave national health hazard.  The danger was massively exaggerated.  For the healthy adult population, the chance of death because of COVID infection is similar to the seasonal flu.

Only elderly and immuno-compromised Americans, estimated at 2.3 percent of the population, are at serious risk of death due to infection with COVID.  The official number of "COVID deaths" is greatly exaggerated.  Autopsy studies and CDC demographic data show that 73 to 88 percent of these COVID deaths were people who died not from COVID, but because of multiple pre-existing conditions — cancer, kidney or heart failure, chronic lung disease, autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis.  While all COVID deaths had a positive test, only six percent had no pre-existing comorbidity.  COVID deaths included a 55-year-old motorcycle accident victim because a blood sample taken in the ER was positive.

Thus, 132,000 to 297,000 of the 1.1 million Americans reported as "COVID deaths" over two years actually died due to their viral infections.  Over two years before COVID, the CDC reported 140,600 deaths due to seasonal flu.  While any death is a tragedy, COVID never presented an existential threat to the nation.  Comparing COVID to bubonic plague represents ridiculous unrealistic hyperbole.  It is Washington-generated disinformation. 

Children are a special case, an example of Washington's medical malpractice.  According to CDC data, the risk of death from COVID in those under 18 years of age is less than 0.03 percent.  Their natural or inherent immunity provides better protection than any vaccine against any disease known.  PSAs urging parents to vaccinate their kids — "safe, effective, and doctor approved" — were Orwellian speech from the book 1984.  The jab was not medically indicated, was more dangerous than the disease itself, and was approved only in the mind of a bureaucrat M.D., Fauci, who had never practiced medicine on a child in his career.

Before vaccines were available, clinical physicians sought treatment options for patients ill with COVID.  Ivermectin is an anti-parasite drug that also has anti-viral properties.  Despite decades of safe usage, both the FDA and the CDC issued advisories saying ivermectin was "not approved for treatment or prevention" of COVID.  Hospitals and pharmacies took this as an official prohibition and refused to allow physicians to prescribe the drug.  A Minnesota medical board sought to punish a physician for trying to save a dying patient with ivermectin.  The ivermectin story demonstrates the triumph of politically correct groupthink over medical science.

The mask mandate highlights the reason Americans lost faith in the Washington medical establishment and the COVID Response Team agencies and spokespersons: Dr. Fauci; CDC director Rachel Walensky; Francis Collins, the infamous NIH censor-in-chief; FDA advisories; and Joe Biden. 

At various times, Fauci said masks were unnecessary, were helpful, were mandatory, wear two masks.  He promised that masking would suppress contagion with COVID.  Biden consistently wore a mask before cameras, but not while visiting nonagenarians Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. 

A number of studies including CDC data proved that masks do not work.  Despite all this evidence, Fauci was seen nightly demanding we wear masks and keep away from each other (social distancing).  A mask became a medical talisman and obvious virtue signal.  Covering the mouth and nose proved that the wearer cared about others and believed in a benevolent government, and that Fauci was using good science to keep us safe from a deadly danger.  A mask was one's entrance ticket (while keeping your distance, please!) into stores and clinics.  No mask, no food. 

Not only do masks fail to provide protection against COVID, but they can cause harm.  Adverse effects of masks were not investigated by mask-mandaters.  One study of children's masks revealed a number of dangerous pathogens, ones that cause tuberculosis, meningitis, diphtheria, Lyme disease, and others.  It is troubling that such studies were not done by the CDC or NIAID (Fauci).  The report was initiated and paid for by the parents of children in Gainesville, FL. 

Additional adverse effects of masking were neither studied nor quantified by Washington.  Education was severely impaired as children could not see the facial expressions of teachers or fellow students.  Masking makes business communication inefficient. 

Mandatory social distancing, closures of schools and businesses, and prohibition against gatherings effectively produced national quarantine through quasi–martial law.  Lockdowns were implemented purportedly to "flatten the curve" of illness and reduce the burden of COVID patients on limited medical resources.  Cost/benefit analysis of lockdowns was strongly negative.  There were no established benefits.  There were devastating costs: social, economic, medical, and loss of constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.  

Never before in history have physicians quarantined a healthy population during a pandemic, and for good epidemiologic reason: it doesn't help.

Facts surrounding mRNA vaccines are clear despite attempts to distort, subvert, censor, and cancel true (accurate) science.

(1) Many important questions about the vaccines were not answered before release because the necessary tests were not done.  Boosters were not tested at all!

(2) Test results were manipulated to suggest greater efficacy and safety.

(3) Quality control for production was shoddy.

(4) The EUA (emergency use authorization) was granted based on a massively exaggerated danger to the public and grossly inadequate medical test data.

(5) Bureaucrats, viz., Fauci, Collins, and many NIH scientists, were paid more than $350 million in royalties by pharmaceutical companies.  One can only guess at the effect this had on their objectivity.

(6) There was a coordinated and initially successful campaign to downplay or outright suppress information about adverse effects of mRNA vaccines.  One of the developers of mRNA technology, Dr. Robert Malone, was labeled a misinformation spreader because he warned about likely medical dangers of the jab, especially the lack of follow-up medical data.  Pfizer executives pressured Twitter to censor physicians who argued with the official narrative.

Some of the dangers associated with the jab include death, particularly in athletes, and especially teenagers; myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle); coagulation disorders; neurologic complications; cancer, as well as "turbo" (unusually aggressive) cancer; life-threatening allergic reactions; menstrual irregularities in women; and low sperm count in men. 

Imagine how many Americans would have taken the jab if PSAs had warned the public of these potential dangers.  

Possibly the most damaging, long-term consequence of Washington's COVID "big con" was loss of public faith in previously trustworthy institutions such as the CDC, the NIH, NIAID, the FDA, most self-styled expert scientists, and the federal government in general.  They played fast and loose with scientific data, manipulated results, altered methods of tracking, and changed definitions to defend the official narrative.  Authorities denied natural immunity, a physiologic fact taught to every med school graduate.  Even Pfizer scientists admit that natural immunity is more protective than vaccine-induced. 

An article showing adverse effects of the jab was censored by the journal publisher before it was even peer-reviewed!  In late 2020, recently retired NIH director Francis Collins demanded a "quick and devastating published take-down" of the Great Barrington Declaration, a reasonable and true science–based approach to COVID.  As the Twitter files being released now show, Big Tech — i.e., Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube — were agents of federal (Democrat) policy.  They mislabeled and censored anything that questioned Biden's and Fauci's facts or proclamations.  They canceled anyone who dared show data that conflicted with official truth.

When the above became known to the general public, and when life experience was the opposite of what Washington said it was, Americans simply lost trust in people with big titles, banks of microphones, and huge readerships. 

There are dozens of embedded URL references provided herein to verify the assertions made.  Readers: Decide for yourself what is fact versus propaganda.  Based on evidence, decide who spoke truly and who did not.  Most important, decide what to do with that knowledge. 

Deane Waldman, M.D., MBA is professor emeritus of [ediatrics, pathology, and decision science; former director of the Center for Healthcare Policy at Texas Public Policy Foundation; and author of the multi-award-winning book Curing the Cancer in U.S. Healthcare: StatesCare and Market-Based Medicine.

Image: qimono via Pixabay, Pixabay License.