This OpEd ran in today’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News.
It’s in response to Daily News columnist Terrence L Day’s critiquing me for being wrong about Covid.
Buckle up.
Terence L. Day’s critique of President Trump provides a convenient segue into discussing the necessity of prebunking—especially regarding the Covid narrative that I’ve addressed over the past 45 months. I suspect Day’s reference to ‘a certain nuclear engineer who contributes to the Moscow-Pullman Daily News’ points to me, given my frequent contributions on the subject.
Thank you, Day, for highlighting the notion of ‘prebunking’. For the past 45 months, I’ve consistently used this column to proactively refute the establishment’s Covid narrative.
Back in April 2020, just one month into Covid hysteria, I wrote an editorial that turned out to be prescient. I argued that the danger posed by Covid was wildly overstated. I knew this to be the case because the cruise ship Diamond Princess, with an overwhelmingly elderly population, had 308 passengers and crew with confirmed symptoms, yet the majority (318) were asymptomatic. A total of 14 passengers (0.3%) died.
In that same editorial, I discussed the coronavirus outbreak onboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Of the 4,800 sailors onboard, one 40-year-old died (0.02% of the crew), and the majority again were asymptomatic.
I argued that those two death rates (0.02% – 0.3%) would be the bookends for the actual Covid death rate.
Sure enough, a report published in October 2
020 by the US government’s National Institute of Health noted that the death rate was indeed 0.23%: shorturl.at/BMOV6. “In people younger than 70 years, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.31% with crude and corrected medians of 0.05%.”
Yet those NIH results, which were released before the vaccines were even available, were never discussed. And the politicians and political physicians at the CDC/NIH were still saying that the death rate was over 3%.
If a small-town newspaper columnist can nail the Covid death rate in April 2020, then why couldn’t the CDC/NIH? As I argued in that April 2020 editorial, the world should have dealt with Covid the same way as an exceptionally bad flu epidemic: isolate the infected, quarantine the exposed and the vulnerable, and otherwise go about life as normal, just like Sweden did.
But there’s no money to be made nor power to be gained by taking the reasonable approach. How else would Pfizer and Moderna make billions off the experimental Trump vaccine? The economic fallout was predictable: mom-and-pop shops shuttered while large corporations thrived, illustrating the one-sided consequences of pandemic policies. In the words of President Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” even if that crisis must be created.
Then came the lockdowns. I praised University of Idaho President Scott Green for being a visionary in keeping UI classes open for live attendance. Meanwhile, progressive columnists argued that UI students were going to spread Covid around town and kill Moscow residents.
Progressive columnists lectured us about how Pullman was doing it all right and Moscow was doing it all wrong. Yet, despite being adjacent to Latah County, Whitman County reported nearly twice as many Covid deaths (104) compared to Latah (55). Why?
Finally, my November 2020 editorial evoked a demand for my head on a platter. With a mask on it. I dared write about the complete worthlessness of cloth masks.
Anyone with military training in chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare knows that cloth masks are a joke. Or two cloth masks (thank you, Dr. Fauci).
In that November 2020 editorial, I cited a study in “Annals of Internal Medicine“ showing that cloth masks and high-quality surgical masks don’t work against an aerosol virus. Further, in that November 2020 editorial, I wrote:
“We have politicians playing medicine, with power-hungry people using COVID-19 as an excuse to gain greater power. Taking a burn-it-to-the-ground approach, they have closed businesses and schools; cancelled weddings and funerals; increased suicides, domestic violence, alcohol, and drug abuse; made family members die alone in hospitals; and thrown the working poor out of the workforce by labeling them ‘non-essential.’”
So, thank you, Terence Day, for challenging me to prebunk your Biden talking points. My columns have consistently sought to preemptively challenge those deceptions, an effort that seems to resonate given the unfolding of events.