PS: And don’t touch the poison-shots. They’re strictly for mugs - and for profit. If you have any suspicion that you may be coming down with covid, slam up the C intake to at least 30 grams a day, in water, taken half-hourly round the clock in divided doses, and research as a priority where you can get some of the other proven-effective treatments. And otherwise, don’t panic. It’s simply inappropriate, and lays you wide open to abuse.
Morning ED, cheers for the response. You raise interesting points, as usual.
I disagree. Imagine you have asthma and obesity and you’re living your life pretty ok managing those conditions. Then you get covid. Blood clots in the lungs, the works.
Did you really die of asthma and obesity? Nope. You could have lived another number of years. You died of covid, plain and simple. That’s what should be reported in my opinion. I just don’t see how that leads to multiple counting.
If you have covid and got hit by a car, the cause of death isn’t 50% covid, 50% car. It’s “they got hit by a car”.
It’s even more important in a pandemic as the covid party of the triplet can easily spread in your neighborhood, which your obesity or asthma is unlikely to do.
From a public health response it’s covid that killed you and also means that covid is now spreading in your area - both immensely important facts that you want to make sure headline all reporting in that area.
Also let’s not forget (as Mercolis and Henele do) what the actual guidance was - to write covid in the first box when it was assumed that was the main cause of death. There is scope for physicians to determine what they believe was the primary cause of death, and write it down.
This fractional “fuzzy logic” style of accountibg for death will only massively under-count the true number (as they are obviously trying to do) to no benefit whatsoever and huge public harm. I find that way more misleading. The “50% heart-disease and 50% hit by a train” approach feels very weird to me.
Yep. And these handbooks were never stress-tested during an actual live pandemic for a novel virus. At a time when the pandemic response team had been disbanded by a president who magically thought that the “virus would disappear like a miracle”. I’d say changing the practice was a good idea.
I know there was an influenza pandemic in 2009, but remember that influence has a whole other, independent way of monitoring it - the influenza surveillance programme - a constant and nationwide effort. They had nothing like that to monitor and manage the much more deadly coronavirus.
It could be that the CDC ended up over-counting covid cases, but this is not the proof of it. All that this shows is that they wanted to keep a much closer eye than usual on this disease. The CDC’s own stats show that they have a pretty good idea of who died of what and with what co-morbidities. Dr Henele says as much in the transcript, which he takes as some kind of “proof” that he’s right. I’m my mind it shows the opposite.
Hmm. Italy was already in lockdown by then. Lombardy was already a war-zone. The diamond princess was a disaster zone. South Korea was fighting for it’s life… In the eyes of the professionals this was already looking extremely dangerous. The WHO effectively declared a pandemic at the beginning of march (and even earlier depending how you want to define it).
They changed the reporting to make sure to raise the importance of covid tracking. Waiting 2-3 months with public debate, congressional debate etc. seems like pure madness to me. You have to work as quickly as possible during the initial stages of the pandemic to get your response in place. Something that they totally failed to do in every other metric, by the way, as did the UK.
And again. I come back to the fact that Henele claims that this change led to over-counting. Where is the proof of that? I see none. Even in Henele’s own paper, he only gets to over-counting by ignoring everyone with a co-morbidities. That’s a far bigger error in my book.
The simple question is what is the proof that this way of reporting led to over-counting? I’d like to see that.
Cheers bwana
PP
Lol! They should be so lucky! 
Morning RG,
I’m not saying that. It is clearly possible that the numbers have been fiddled. To my mind this situation is the mirror image of the Russian Hacked the US election story.
Could the Russians have hacked the DNC in the US election and interfered? Of course. They have the capability. Did they do that? I want to see some proof.
In the current situation:
Could the CDC have fiddled the numbers of Covid deaths? Of course. Did they? Show me the proof.
There is zero proof in the Henele piece. None. Lots of conjecture and lots of being upset about not following peace-time protocols during war-time. That’s it.
I would like to see something stronger than that to make up my mind. Till then I’m going to follow the advice that a wise and good friend of mine has told me:
I think I’ll wait and see.
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Good morning PP (11.58? I just made it :). Thanks for another thoughtful reply.
"I disagree. Imagine you have asthma and obesity and you’re living your life pretty ok managing those conditions. Then you get covid. Blood clots in the lungs, the works.
Did you really die of asthma and obesity? Nope. You could have lived another number of years. You died of covid, plain and simple. That’s what should be reported in my opinion. I just don’t see how that leads to multiple counting."
You can’t ignore co-morbidities, including age. Deaths without them due to covid are rare.
It’s doctors who are filling out the certificates and if they mention co-morbidities it’s because they think they played a role. Just the same as, if they think Covid played a role it probably did. But if you prioritize one ailment over the others (‘because it’s a pandemic’) you are loading the numbers. If you do do that you must accept the numbers are inflated, because you inflated them.
It’s not just the form-filling that’s inflating the numbers, it’s the PCR test. People who test positive are testing positive for the presence of Sars2 in unknown quantities in their body, including miniscule ones. Covid-19 is a disease that can result from this - yet the diagnosis is that you have Covid-19. But we’ve also allowed politicians to change the definition of a disease. Yes you can probably transmit the virus with no symptoms but you would need to have a viral load - most who test positive will not have. But every positive is counted as a ‘case’ using incremental mis-descriptions.
"If you have covid and got hit by a car, the cause of death isn’t 50% covid, 50% car. It’s “they got hit by a car”. "
But an accident isn’t a co-morbidity; to have covid zoom to the top of a pile of illnesses - replacing them, even - is to miscount.
“This fractional “fuzzy logic” style of accounting for death will only massively under-count the true number (as they are obviously trying to do) to no benefit whatsoever and huge public harm. I find that way more misleading. The “50% heart-disease and 50% hit by a train” approach feels very weird to me.”
It massively under-counts the true number…of what? The thing that you are counting doesn’t mean anything - it’s people who are more likely to have covid-19, but probably don’t. When you say “massively”, and “huge public harm” there’s no objective standard there. Even if you believe these upwards urgings are for a reason, in academia are you not supposed to acknowledge biases that are likely to arise from your standards?
Anyway, multiple co-morbidities are innately fractions. I didn’t propose that to BE the counting method - it can be the reality that we are hoping to measure. I mentioned it because that seems to have got lost in the emotive concerns like being ‘in a pandemic’ and needing to avoid ‘massive public harm’. Ironically, but predictably, a pandemic and massive public harm are exactly what we now have.
" Also let’s not forget (as Mercolis and Henele do) what the actual guidance was - to write covid in the first box when it was assumed that was the main cause of death. There is scope for physicians to determine what they believe was the primary cause of death, and write it down. "
I think the guidance was nudging Covid. Ref[15] in the legal document is the official guidance for 24/3/20.
“Will COVID-19 be the underlying cause? The underlying cause depends upon what and where conditions are reported on the death certificate. However, the rules for coding and selection of the underlying cause of death are expected to result in COVID-19 being the underlying cause more often than not.”
(my emphasis)
" If the death certificate reports terms such as “probable COVID-19” or “likely COVID-19,” these terms would be assigned the new ICD code. It Is not likely that NCHS will follow up on these cases. " (my emphasis)
" COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death. " (not my emphasis)
It looks like at every stage once Covid is mentioned it’s getting nudged upwards.
At any rate, these writers are pushing the law, and the CDC flouted it. We can argue that it was the right thing to do, but you started by slating these challenges to the process as being ‘false’ - do you still adhere to that, or have they at least raised valid points, that ‘the pandemic’ in your view excuses?
PP I’m going to have to leave it there (at least for now), I didn’t mean to get so into this! I’m glad we did though, that’s how we firm up. Interested in any final summary or closing remarks if you care to make any.
Cheers for the exchange! Great to be able to have it.
ED
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It’s a very interesting and highly relevant conversation.
I recall reading about the London pea-soupers: what we’d call smog these days. In a way (and it’s a crude analogy I realise) the smog could be the trigger for a serious health episode which proved fatal in some cases.
So: was burning excess coal the culprit, or temperature inversions that made the smog so enduring (days at a time)? Or was it a victim’s frailty (the very young and the very old, the poorly nourished), or was it asthma, CPD, etc, that the smog exacerbated? And so on.
The only way to even make guesses is to record every variable and then start to test hypotheses. When faced with a seemingly novel threat the sudden changes to ways of recording data don’t seem unreasonable, as @PontiusPrimate has said.
I have no doubt that statistical models have been flawed, to a greater or lesser extent, also that a degree of zealous over-recording probably has taken place, many iatrogenic factors (over-use of ventilators etc), and that the overall picture has been distorted.
My impression of the Mercola/Dr H conversation, based on the transcript alone, was they were egging each other on towards a set of conclusions both had settled upon.
Much the same tendency, but leading to drastically different conclusions, could be said, and has been, of Fauci, Whitty et al.
Uncertainty can be highly unsettling. Sometimes though the best response is to say “we don’t know…”, and try to manage the risks until the position is clearer.
In the UK where society was thoroughly polarised by Brexit, and the US where Trump-derangement- syndrome had been at fever pitch for three years, the hysterical political climate** made that highly unlikely. Add media hysteria, behavioural nudging etc, and… here we are. It was the perfect time, in some ways, for a pandemic to break out, if a pandemic broke out. Something happened that’s for &@#%*¢¥ sure
** egregore, as @RhisiartGwilym put it a day or two ago, is the exact right word for this!
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Hi ED
yes - a good back and forth and a good chance to explore this important issue. For me the whole thing - now and the last time - boils down to:
- should we count people with co-morbidities in the Covid death toll?
It all really comes down to that. Dr Henele and others on his side say that we should remove people who died from Covid if they had any co-mobidities. I don’t agree for reasons I’ve explained ad nauseam and therefore won’t continue to waffle on about.
Digging into the detail of Dr Henele’s paper, I don’t see any actual proof that the new way of recording Covid deaths overcounted anything. The only way that I see to overcount is to pretend that someone died of Covid who isn’t, in fact, dead. Or to pretend that someone died of Covid when they clearly died of something else (car-crash, cancer etc.) The new reporting clearly says to put as much detail as possible, and nowhere says to claim someone died of Covid if they didn’t. I see no evidence of doctors faking the cause of death, I only see them being encouraged to explain with as much detail as possible. I noticed the piece in the CDC paper that you highlight:
My question to you is, given they were at the beginning of a tidal wave of Covid cases, does that seem surprising to you? It’s not to me. The point about likely or probable Covid simply reflected the lack of any kind of test in the first few months of the pandemic in the US (the CDC test was faulty and had to be abandoned, remember?). That means that diagnosis would have often had to be made by a clinical examination (ground glass opacity in the lung x-ray etc).
I’m not convinced they had any option other than ignore Covid altogether, which would have been a much more misleading set of stats.
Anyway. I’m not arguing that the death count isn’t inflated. I don’t believe it’s inflated by anywhere near a value that makes a material difference to the outcome, though. It’s clear that a huge number of people have died (sorry Rhis) and saying “but their co-morbidities made them extra vulnerable” doesn’t mean we don’t count them.
Thanks for all your thoughtful comments. I appreciate having to think through these issues.
Cheers
PP
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How is it clear that a huge number have died? Clarity is the last thing that this villainous mess reveals. I don’t see how anyone can produce actually-reliable numbers - or even near estimates - right now. Especially with an unknown number of players looking to distort them. Maybe eventually, but not yet. There may indeed turn out to have been a lot of excess deaths, but it’s simply over-trusting the information that’s about right now to make a certain pronouncement, because the contamination with unadmitted agendas is too widespread.
Morning bwana,
In a large part through consistent on-the-ground reporting like this, and the testimonies of frontline doctors. But, as usual, they and their exhausted, shattered and dead colleagues are ignored because they don’t fit the sceptic narrative.
But you knew I would say, right? Because you’ve asked me this a hundred times and I’ve answered it the same way a hundred times. I know that no evidence will ever be good enough for you, my friend, as you have made up your mind it’s a hoax, so these good doctors and reporters just don’t exist.
I love you bwana, but I won’t answer this question again. The evidence is out there when you’re ready to see it.
Cheers
PP
Hi @KarenEliot
Yes, this is a good analogy in many ways. It would be even closer if we start from a situation with no smog. All the underlying problems exist: poverty, illness, malnutrition etc. Then we start burning coal which creates the smog, and then thousands of people start dying.
Should we argue that - no those people were sick anyway so we should exclude them from the stats. Let’s try and find out how many perfectly healthy, rich, strong people were killed directly and only by the smog before trying to decide whether to enact any public health measures?
No need to fix the environment. Only a tiny handful of healthy, strong, rich people died directly from smog alone, so it’s not really a problem. Really those poor and sick people should focus on making themselves healthy and strong. It’s their fault really.
That will never seem right to me, but that’s almost exactly the argument of those who want to ignore the co-morbidities in the covid issue.
At least Dr Henele and Mercola do a good job of emphasising that there are treatments that will likely improve people’s chances, and these treatments would make people healthier and reduce the problem. But how are the poor and the vulnerable (immigrants etc) supposed to afford it even access any of those treatments? The argument is technically true but practically useless…
Thanks for the smog example - it really helped to clarify the situation in my mind even further.
Cheers
PP
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Thanks PP.
To answer your question
PP: “My question to you is, given they were at the beginning of a tidal wave of Covid cases, does that seem surprising to you? It’s not to me”
It would be surprising if the aim was to provide objective count, but if they want to bias the count (or even make sure it can never be undercounted, which may come to the same thing) then that’s no surprise.
But your question evades my point which sparked your question. Surprise or not is not the issue - my point was that it increased the weight of Covid in the death verdicts (amongst the other boosters).
And its counting that we are discussing! If you think in terms of tidal waves you can’t count anything properly, and you’ll soon have tidal waves.
What about my question - we can argue whether the CDC were right to break the rules or not. But if that’s your main line of argument, would you accept that is a shift from the stance that Helene and Ealy brought two bogus or bonkers cases to the court?
It seems to me a perfectly valid legal case, alleging the CDC broke the law, which they detail adequately.
More pointedly, do you stick with the bogus/bonkers line?
“It all really comes down to that. Dr Henele and others on his side say that we should remove people who died from Covid if they had any co-mobidities”
Lawyers complaining about broken laws and over-counting is not the same as removing people - bendy language everywhere, leading to a bendy process? I did suggest how they should be retained but you had practical objections (fractical? 
) to that.
Your assertion that they ‘died from Covid’ is also loading the discussion - can you accuse legitimate complainers of wanting to remove people with comorbidities, while you are removing their co-morbidites?
The bold items in my last post indicate that over-counting has been pushed into the counting method.
We didn’t really discuss the PCR positive overcounts which were part of my ‘overcounting’ case. I don’t know anyone who when pinned down doesn’t accept that they cause overcounting due to fragments arising from the low Ct cycle threshold.
I might U-turn backpedal adjust my position slightly, and add a time caveat. While the false PCR positives are sure to be inflating the Covid numbers now (with not only more testing, but also way more people having had past exposure without being sick), I think this was less of an issue in the so-called ‘first wave’ - certainly in the UK when they only tested people when they turned up sick.
The innate pedant in me says that if you interfere with the integrity of the fundamentals in a long game, a price will be paid long term. I think that’s happening now - whatever justifications might have existed at the beginning, the overcounting in the process set in motion last spring threatens to give us more mud than water to look at now.
Cheers
ED
2 Likes
Hi Ev,
I realise that it might have seemed that I was not answering your specific questions on purpose. I think I could have joined a few dots a bit better and I’ve remembered that you don’t actually reside inside my head where the full conversation went down! I’ll try and be very careful and specific in this post to answer your points. Sorry if this gets long. Here goes:
Fair enough. I didn’t find it that surprising from the context, but I can respect that it smells fishy to you.
Yes, but did it? That seems to be begging the question. When the CDC specifically ask for all the details to be written down on the death certificate, is anyone actually increasing weight of a particular verdict? This is the crux, and to my mind it remains “unproven”. If we push the fact that someone was asthmatic or had high blood pressure into the second box, in order to record that person died of blood clots in the lungs due to covid, just exactly how have we increased the weight of any verdict of death? Remember, the doctor is advised to enter Covid only if they think it played a major role in the death of the patient. If the doctor doesn’t believe that, then they are not asked to do it.
Whoa there old friend! I used “bogus” and “bonkers” with pinpoint, even (dare I say it?) scientific specificity! Actually, of course I didn’t. But generally I was calling the public health argument “bogus”, and the legal one “bonkers”. The reason that I used the word “bonkers” is that, I agree that technically they didn’t follow the law in getting the forms changed, but I thought it would have been “bonkers” for them to wait 2-3 months before sorting out their tracking and reporting of the brand new virus that was all the rage this year. So yes, I can agree they broke the law, but I think it was justified - I stand by “bonkers”. Clearly I’m not alone in the judgement, as Dr Henele says from the transcript:
“We have sent physical copies [of their paper] to every U.S. attorney and their aides. We sent out over 247 mailings in October. We’ve gotten zero response on any of them. We sent out an additional 20 to 30 to various people at the Department of Justice and we’ve gotten zero response back on that. We’ve also sent out accompanying digital email communications with all the information including the formal petition, and we’ve gotten zero
response back on any of that to this point.”
My guess is that a lot of people think the same way I do. The CDC would have been bonkers to follow “peace-time” procedure, during “war-time”.
But it is the same Ev. The broken laws - I grant you - is a weird new thing, but the alleged overcounting is simply a desire to remove people who have co-morbidities from the stats of covid deaths. That’s exactly what Dr Henele said - several times. For example:
“So on page 20 of the paper, we have a big graphic, and that graphic shows what the estimated actual fatality count should have been as of August 23 of this year”
What does the graphic on page 20 of the paper show? Covid deaths with co-morbidities stripped out. That’s what he thinks it should have been.
Another example:
“To understand the significant implications of these guidelines and how they substantially emphasized COVID-19 as a cause of death, while simultaneously deemphasizing comorbidity (pre-existing conditions) in cause of death records, we encourage readers to review our previously published reference[18]; If COVID Fatalities Were 90.2% Lower, How Would You Feel About Schools Reopening?”
How do you think the authors come to the conclusion that Covid fatalities were 90.2% lower? I’ll give you one guess. There are more quotes that say the same thing.
It’s simply all about not counting covid deaths if the deceased had a co-morbidity. That’s where the exact title of this thread comes from. The 94% number is reached by not counting covid deaths with co-morbidities. It’s all about that single point…
Firstly, I’m not removing co-morbidities, let’s stop saying that. They are all getting accurately captured along with all the other detail that the guidelines specifically ask the doctors to note down. How do I know this is true? Because none other than Dr Henele admits it in the transcript. Secondly, as I have argued many times before, if someone has obesity (a high risk comorbidity) , gets covid and dies would you argue that this person died of obesity? I really hope not. Dr Henele, on the other hand, would want to see that death recorded as “died of obesity” and ignore the covid part. That’s exactly what his legal argument is all about. It’s exactly what he said all the way through the transcript and the paper. It’s how he gets to the 94% inflated number. This is why I call the public health argument “bogus”. I also stand by “bogus” by the way
Incidentally, that person also didn’t die of 50% obesity and 50% covid. That person died because blood clots formed in their lungs and they drowned. That’s what covid does. The whole question of not counting deaths of people with comorbidities was brought to a very clear point in my head by @KarenEliot’s post on the smog, and my subsequent reply to that. I don’t think I have a lot more to say on that.
No, it didn’t. At least in my opinion. It expressed the belief that during a covid pandemic, covid is likely to become a major reason for death. At least that’s how I read it. I could, of course, be wrong.
Yeah - I avoided that because (a) I’m sick to death about talking about PCR, and (b) as I said in one of my early responses, I’m trying to keep focused on the deaths and the stats around deaths, not cases. Perhaps I could gee myself up to wade into the PCR stuff again… depends how urgently you want to do that!
That’s an excellent point that I hadn’t even thought of. See - you definitely don’t need me to talk PCR. I think you’ve covered it perfectly yourself! 
Yes, your inner pedant might be right! But it might not. It all depends on the details, right? The primary change that Henele is complaining about was simply to make it easier to track Covid statistically. That feels like an important thing to do, during a covid pandemic. It doesn’t lose any information - it all gets recorded. I don’t see that this “massively inflates” covid deaths. I see that it prioritises covid record-keeping. That’s doubly important because there are systems already in place to track a lot of the other co-morbidities anyway (as there is with 'flu - I pointed this out earlier) but there was no official system in place to keep track of covid. It seems very reasonable to me that the CDC made the choice they did. Even if the way they decided to do this technically broke the law by ignoring the 2 month wait and public/congressional debate. It was an emergency after all, and the team that would have usually dealt with this problem had been disbanded by the President.
As I said a few times now. I’m not saying that I don’t think that the numbers could have been inflated - they might have. I’ve not seen any real convincing proof yet. But I’m pretty sure that they have not been inflated by 94%! That seems to me to be (using a highly technical term) - bogus.
Cheers for the thoughts as usual. It’s really a pleasure discussing this with you.
PP
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Pleasure is 50% mine…
OK VERY briefly…
“not alone in the judgement” - based on no replies. Same number of replies I’ve had to cast-iron questions of people with vested interests, or who are under structural professional pressure to avoid engagement on the subject of their misconduct.
Hold that thought a mo…
I see, by bonkers you meant ‘would be bonkers not to’ - so my complaint becomes a type II bonkers error, Lol.
Bonkersness could be applied to either side due to possible consequences, so matter of opinion I guess.
(workload:=workload/2. Yes! 
)
I won’t concede ‘bogus’ is reasonable though, as I think the onus is on the law breakers to justify their sneaky changes (I expect to see the Oliver North defence in court), and it’s also on their supporters shouting down people who have legitimate concerns. I don’t think you have justified your support because you’ve been talking about tidal waves and wars before this was necessarily true. A question being begged, indeed 
and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And a lot of people agree with me, too - so is your appeal to ‘democratic’-style support not akin to cancelling the election because your opponents are using bogus arguments?
ED: “my point was that it increased the weight of Covid in the death verdicts”
PP: "Yes, but did it? That seems to be begging the question. When the CDC specifically ask for all the details to be written down on the death certificate, is anyone actually increasing weight of a particular verdict? This is the crux, and to my mind it remains “unproven”. "
I think this is a specious hope. As I’ve said, it was clearly the aim, as the instructional document I referred to indicates:
(i) “Will COVID-19 be the underlying cause? The underlying cause depends upon what and where conditions are reported on the death certificate. However, the rules for coding and selection of the underlying cause of death are expected to result in COVID-19 being the underlying cause more often than not.” (my emphasis)
(ii) " If the death certificate reports terms such as “probable COVID-19” or “likely COVID-19,” these terms would be assigned the new ICD code. It Is not likely that NCHS will follow up on these cases. " (my emphasis)
(iii) " COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death. " (not my emphasis)
Now, (i) says that covid-19 is expected to be the underlying cause of death more often than not. Even if there are ten co-morbidities, and even if the patient has no Covid symptoms!
(ii) says a probable/likely Covid of 51%+ becomes, essentially, 100% for the purpose of claiming it was a Covid death. That would be up to doubling it.
(iii) says any contribution becomes 100% covid for policy purposes.
So I don’t think I need to prove this would inflate the numbers!
" Remember, the doctor is advised to enter Covid only if they think it played a major role in the death of the patient. If the doctor doesn’t believe that, then they are not asked to do it."
This is at odds with (iii) - “all contributions welcome, no matter how small”
This is pushing covid for all it’s worth - and as you agree with the pushing, you should accept that the outcome IS to increase covid-verdicts, as intended, and not argue there’s no proof it didn’t! And that anyone who says it did is making bogus arguments.
Anyway I can’t add any more to this point, to me you seem to be in denial.
(I lied about the brevity…)
“What does the graphic on page 20 of the paper show? Covid deaths with co-morbidities stripped out. That’s what he thinks it should have been.”
Not quite - the graphic shows the number of deaths obtained without overturning a system that was in operation for 17 years, with no legal process. A new illness doesn’t have squatters rights - Covid deaths can’t be ‘stripped out’ before they are even in. Can I suggest these various covid-promoting (early doors I mean) expressions of yours are an echo of the big bang that was the CDC’s enthusiastic desire to promote bring about handle the pandemic before it was that big.
(And must we ignore that in February last year the WHO instructed doctors not to give antivirals for the virus stage, nor steroids for the acute stage - the best treatments?)
Suppose they are wrong - the systemic overcounting could lead to a ‘tidal wave’ of false fear that, being the US, would reverberate round the world - as it did - leading to world clampdowns that would themselves cause untold deaths and wreck economies and remove freedoms, and of course cause widespread civil strife.
In fact it DID all that - the only disagreement being in the word ‘false’. Yet the CDC is only one part of the NIH which answers to the Federal government. Where did it assume the authority to take such risks and liberties, even with US data? The effect could be like pushing a nuclear button. There simply MUST be questions to answer.
By the way is the CDC not to a large degree the pharma companies in the US?
The CDC is in bed with Big Pharma - Easy Health Options® (random link, so must be true )
"If COVID Fatalities Were 90.2% Lower, How Would You Feel About Schools Reopening?”
(etc). I think your elaborations around this point make sense from your viewpoint, but crucially depend on a hunch that covid was a world emergency that had to be addressed in this way, when a lot was done to ensure it seemed that way.
People were not told the figures that were being rammed down their throats for over a year were doctored, for the purposes of shoring up covid figures. What made a body like the CDC think it had the authority to take such action? It’s essentially a health and political revolution undertaken on the basis of a health scare that none of the authorities made any attempt to address by normal means, and indeed seemed to actively oppose useful treatments
Indeed your ‘smog’ argument needs to be put into this setting. What makes you think the CDC were trying to get the right variables? That beggars belief. Most people who die from Covid are deficient in vitamin D and/or vitamin C - are they collecting this essential vitamin status? No - CJ’s post about Microsoft’s warnings away from wicked thoughts - ie these two vitamins - represent the CDC’s position on them. Which is, trying to suppress them, along with Ivermectin and HCQ.
To pursue your “it’s a war” analogy, if it was a war it was declared by a minor player and was about as far from a last resort as could be imagined - a Nuremberg case.
So if you accept all that, we’re done
Cheers and thanks.
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“…and indeed seemed to actively oppose useful treatments.” - (Evvy).
That’s the key killer fact in all this argument. And I’d say that anyone who tries to deny its reality is simply kidding themselves. The - obviously captured-by-crooks - ‘regulatory’ public agencies who committed that crime - sic! - of denying, censoring and suppressing proven-effective by mid-2020, and long known to be pretty safe treatments, is an unmistakable sign that the whole covid event has been wilfully distorted and used for nefarious purposes.
That’s the point that is conclusively important. There’s really no need to trickle into the sand with endless arguments about just how harsh the covid flu is (pretty nasty for an unlucky minority, it seems) or exactly how many it’s killed (maybe a slightly higher than average-flu number - perhaps).
That last question is something that’s going to be argued for quite a while before it rumbles away into history. (We’re STILL re-visiting the imponderable question of how many were really killed by the ‘Spanish’ flu, FFS!) And - let’s be quite clear about this - at the moment no-one, repeat no-one anywhere, can claim legitimately to have enough reliable information about it to come to a solid, judicious judgement. The deliberate obfuscation of what’s really going on by the malign criminals with their on-the-make hands in the till in this game have simply made that degree of precise discrimination impossible - yet.
So - do we need to go on picking at it just now?
Clearly, something bad is happening. There is a nasty, probably novel illness about. But it really doesn’t seem to be anything like as bad as the shysters are screaming continuously through their lying propaganda system (ramshackle India, with its literally millions of inadequately supplied and cared-for, at-risk people, being the current, as-I-write-this focus for the screaming).
The really bad thing that’s happening is that the shysters are trying to stampede us all towards a new socio-politico-economic arrangement which will feed their psychotic addictions, and bugger up the rest of us - and the Earth - royally.
That’s the key insight that matters. We should treat covid as if it were a baddish flu, acknowledge that we already have a range of effective treatments, which DON’T include seriously-criminal, untested and not particularly effective gene-tampering injections, and get on with pulling the world back into something like normal again. We need to get behind that assertion by a collection of medical and immunological professionals, that there is NO global medical emergency, and stop letting the crooks get away with trying to lie that there is.
And affectionate cheers and friendly vibes to all my buddies who’ve got their feathers ruffled over this. Just smile and be at peace, friends, and … ta-da! … wait and see! 
Morning Ev
Let’s refocus. It feels like you are agreeing with Henele that the changes to the reporting has resulted in massive overcounting of covid deaths. I say that I can’t see how that would happen. We have had a fairly abstract conversation about breaking laws and sneaky intent etc. Let’s try the following:
Can you explain to me with a simple example exactly how Covid deaths would have been inflated by the new system. Just give me a concrete example to think about.
I think that would be helpful, and get to the real meat of the question.
Yes, because it strips out people with comorbidities from the Covid death toll. That’s the point, and that’s why it had to change. I can give you a precise example of what I’m talking about here, but lets do one example at a time.
Cheers
PP
Yes, some good points there, RG, but it misses the key question that we are discussing.
If people died, because they were denied treatment, then they died of Covid (and might have been saved). That in no way shows the numbers to have been inflated. Those people actually died of actual covid, just as recorded on the death certificate.
Henele, (and Ev) seem to believe that for everyone who died of Covid, 16 others were fraudulently recorded as having done so. That seems complete nonsense to me and I’m curious how they justify that. That’s what I’m trying to get to the bottom of here.
Cheers
PP
It will probably be worth keeping an eye on how this project goes. It’s UK-focused.
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Hi again PP
I think Rhis’s point is relevant because you can’t suddenly pretend we all trust the CDC to be wanting to do the best for patients when we don’t, and they clearly aren’t. Did you notice the WHO and BJ announcing they will start trialling anti-virals? With 3m officially dead, a bit late there, mates.
I didn’t say the over-recording had to be massive everywhere - that’s hyperbole, I think need some sobriety is needed, including in the language. I also think you exaggerate my position in your reply to Rhis, then claim it’s complete nonsense. I didn’t say for every one dying of Covid there were 16 fraudulently so recorded. The average number of co-morbidities was 2.6. Any fraud wouldn’t be by the people recording the deaths but the overall intent of the CDC is likely to have been fraudulent as they exceeded their legal powers while having a large conflict of interest.
There are several areas where covid numbers are likely to be being boosted, which might result in a big overall increase. But I wouldn’t say any one component is necessarily ‘massive’. (Think eg two to the power N)
One of these is in the related issue of PCR tests. I think my point that you liked about the Ct cycle mattering more now than in the first wave is correct, and is I think confirmed by UK excess deaths data BTW. But anywhere there is random PCR testing it will inflate covid deaths as even asymptomatic people who die will be covid deaths, as will those who had mild covid symptoms but serious co-morbidities. The covid part will float up due to the extraordinary buoyancy given it by such rules as the CDC made-up ones.
It’s worth pointing out that many people counted as Covid deaths will not even have had Covid the disease but Sars2 the virus; indeed some will not even have a virus by traditional definitions (something else that changed - before covid, does that suggest anytihng?), but just some Sars2 fragments.
There are a few people in the chain before a verdict on a death (eg relative, doctor, nurse, health visitor, locum, hospital doctor, certifying doctor, coroner) and they will not all have spoken to each other, they are all encouraged to give covid the nod. In the UK if you call the doctor with covid they say whatever you do, stay away from me - so they may not be tested and just think they have covid. In the US there was a system of giving thousands of extra insurance dollars per patient to hospitals if they said they had covid (might have been just in New York state, but that’s where the focus was at the start). This was abused and seems to have led to people getting harmful unnecessary ventilator treatment.
I’ve shown in my three twice-posted excerpts how the recording system was altered with the purpose of pulling covid to the top, whether it was relevant or not. You agree with the CDC that this was the way to go.
To need further evidence that that will exaggerate covid deaths in this scenario is like demanding proof that a ball will move when you kick it. Rather than being a question of information forensics, it’s more like a Newtonian principle!
I really need to stop, I don’t think I’ll convince you anyway.
Cheers
Evvy
Hi Ev
Two quick points. I’m absolutely not exaggerating your position, assuming you agree with Mercola and Henele. From the transcript, their position is very clear:
" and the science is that they artificially inflated, manipulated and changed the definition of a death to the point where there are 16 times as many people who are dying than truly died from the disease."
If you agree with Henele, that’s what you are agreeing to. Perhaps you don’t agree after all? I think it’s (to use my technical term) bogus.
Also, I’d love to see your actual example of how the reporting changes could lead to this level of inflation. That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it? Just one simple example showing how the change in reporting led to this huge inflation of numbers. It would be a shame to end this discussion before we had a chance to think about such an example, as I believe it will clearly show how unlikely all this inflation is. Surely that would be useful?
Looking forward to it!
Cheers
PP
Hi PP
[I learned a bit in running once I started writing this post (trying to post the information for you to read, to save me from doing it . Well it worked before ) but I just left it all in as it better reflects where we left off]
I agree with Henele that their detailed exposition of the legal fiddles should be taken to court as it has clearly exaggerated the covid deaths. In some cases it will have marked a covid death that should have been somewhere about 1/16, as a whole death - for example when there are a lot of co-morbidities, or when covid didn’t play a role but was passed up through the system due to the changes and the additional covid hype.
I didn’t look at the interview or the transcript - as I said I looked at the legal document that was the basis of the court case(s).
My position doesn’t mean the magnification is times 16. I think you are right that Henele does claim this but I can’t say if this is justified or not without knowing the basis - ie the old method of counting that the CDC ditched.
As far as our discussion goes it’s academic because you claim there is no built-in exaggeration and I say there is but I don’t need anything like 16 times. Though, I don’t think they’ll have gone to this trouble on a bogus pretext that would be sure to fall apart in court so I think there is no justification for ‘bogus’.
These are the references from the legal document that Henele refers to
[1] COVID-19 Provisional Counts - Weekly Updates by Select Demographic and Geographic Characteristics
And this is ref[18] which they say you should read if trying to understand the counts:
Childhealthdefence is Robert F Kennedy’s creation. RFK has a long history of successfully prosecuting big corporations. So I’d be surprised if this is BS.
This is interesting:
" “Should “COVID-19” be reported on the death certificate only with a confirmed test? COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death. Certifiers should include as much detail as possible based on their knowledge of the case, medical records, laboratory testing, etc. If the decedent had other chronic conditions such as COPD or asthma that may have also contributed, these conditions can be reported in Part II. (See attached Guidance for Certifying COVID-19 Deaths)”"
CHD says
" This matters because the Part I causes of death are statistically recorded for public health reporting, while Part II does not hold nearly the same statistical significance in reporting. This March 24th NVSS guideline essentially allows COVID-19 to be the cause of death when the actual cause of death should be the comorbidity according to the industry-standard 2003 CDC Handbook. It can be a bit confusing, so we will present an example shortly for clarity."
(Translated: Part II = ‘long grass’). So it is the co-morbidities that are being stripped off by the changes. They have said that in only 5-6% of cases do people die with only covid. Therefore in the other 94% the co-morbidities matter.
I think the explanation of how it worked is here:
" The CDC’s 2003 Handbook suggests that COVID-19 should be listed either at the bottom of Part I or in Part II of a death certificate, rather than as the top line item in Part I, despite Dr. Fauci’s describing in multiple press interviews, that medical examiners and coroners would not be doing this, which disregards any knowledge of the March 24th orders by the NVSS to do so."
There was an update on April 14th, the above may refer to that.
They highlight a big quote here
" The ability for medical examiners and coroners to register their best medical opinion was neutered by the March 24th NVSS guidelines."
This is immediately follow by
" Let’s review what would have happened had the CDC decided to use their 2003 Handbook rather than adopting new rules for COVID-19 reporting"
Herein lies the answer - after some nitty-gritties they say
" If each state were publishing comorbidity data, and if each state used the CDC’s 2003 Revision Handbook as they do for all other death certificates, the actual COVID-19 fatality totals would be approximately 90.2% LOWER than they currently are based upon an extrapolation of the data that is available"
There’s then further discussion over certificates etc.
Pontius it looks clear to me this isn’t BS - though I accept you might not agree with the old method of counting, even though the rest of the world did. I would counsel that that’s because you already trusted in tidal waves and pandemics (another definition changed in advance) based on the data before it was objectively evaluated. And the evaluation was preceded by the changes. You therefore faced the apparent predicament of what would have been the normal data not supporting your hunch.
I think I/we could reasonably bail out here - it’s clear there is exaggeration of the figures, and I don’t need it to be 16 times to justify my view. I expect their claim is correct if based on the counting system that existed for the previous 17 years. Therefore it is not bogus, though dommsayers would claim it was mad not to get in a mad panic.
For your part you may insist the old way was wrong - we can agree to differ though I’d like to see your justification without appealing to the altered data.
I think we’ve got hold of most of what was between us. Thanks for the exchange I look forward to any comments. Can’t chew the fat on this any more right now but maybe that (and you latterly moving to highlight the main outstanding issues, that seemed to help) helped our focus.
It would be fun to have a mock re-run of our discussion in ‘robust’ Hulk style for a larf
Cheers
Evvy
Hi Ev
So, I did read the transcript, the paper and the CDC recommendations that they refer to. You have spent many posts here defending Henele’s position. Out of all the documents available, it is clear that the position Henele is putting forward (and which you are therefore defending) is:
1 - Henele believes that the death toll is massively inflated. Not just a little bit inflated, but massively so - 16 fraudulent cases for each true case.
2 - Henele consistently does his best to try and scrub out deaths of people with co-morbidities from the covid record (as we discussed above. His figure on page 20 only makes sense as it scrubs deaths with co-morbidities from the record)
3 - Henele’s legal case is entirely based on the CDC not waiting for a minimum of 2 months and getting the public/congressional discussions going.
I’ve been pretty clear about my thoughts on Henele’s position:
(1) is clearly nonsense. Even you don’t believe that, so there’s no one left defending it. I think we can just dispense with that claim as… what’s the word? Oh yes, bogus
(2) seems very wrong to me for reasons I’ve explained many times. I’ve yet to see anyone explain why it’s right to exclude people from the death toll who have high blood pressure, for example. Again, even you don’t seem to be arguing that it’s right to exclude such people from the death toll, so once again I’m not sure if anyone is really defending that position, so perhaps we can just dispense with this one too.
(3) The legal case is utter foolishness, and none of the hundreds of lawyer or justice department officials that they approached (as of the time of the transcript) even bothered to reply to them. And you can usually find a lawyer to take any case, if you have the money. Waiting for 2-3 (or more) months during the exponentially increasing phase of a global pandemic, before working out your record-keeping system would have been utter madness in my opinion.
In the end, I’m not sure how much you do actually support any of Henele’s concrete points above (1-3)… Maybe you could clarify at some point? You do, however, say that:
and yet, when I asked you for a concrete example of just how such exaggeration might be accomplished in the real world ,you are unable to come up with a single example. Not one single example of how the death toll for covid might be exaggerated, other than by darkly hinting at “sneaky intent” etc. - but, my old friend, that is just not any kind of proof. The simple question that is unanswered here is how does changing the order in which the cause of death is recorded inflate the numbers? I mean… how?
It’s a bit of a shame that you didn’t take the opportunity to try and come up with a concrete example to show how how the change in the reporting led to these alleged massive exaggerations. That is the heart of the matter under discussion, and the heart of the reason why Henele feels like he needs to go to court and would have given us a real world situation to think about.
If you ever do get round to thinking of such an example, then I would be happy to discuss it, and we can consider how likely such examples were to occur in real life. If not, then I’m happy to leave it as an unproven conjecture that I simply don’t believe, and wait for any evidence or whistle-blowers to be forthcoming, much like the “Russia hacked the US elections” story.
Cheers bwana.
PP
EDIT: Actually, one important point I didn’t make on co-morbidities. The CHD article you cite actually gives a perfectly good reason for why the CDC made the changes they did. By making the change, the CDC were able to track both Covid and the co-morbidities accurately (even Henele himself admits this). Had they not made the changes they did, they would have tracked only the co-morbidities and lost track of Covid. Of course, this is exactly what Henele wants in order to try and scrub the covid deaths, but it would have been incredibly and completely wrong to record things in this way. I can explain in more detail if you like, but the CHD clinches the argument for me that Henele’s thinking is plain wrong on all this.