70+: 94.6%, IFR 5.4%
Note that through age 49 the IFR is less than the average for flu of .1%, but higher for older people. And only for the 70+ group is the IFR more than 10 times greater. In other words, only for the oldest group is what Fauci said in his congressional testimony accurate. What if Fauci had said something in tune with that reality? The vaccine program he pushed should have focused on the elderly, not the entire population.
From the important recent report "COVD-19: Restoring Public Trust During A Global Health Crisis" are age data and COVID CFR [through Feb. 16, 2021]. Note these are Case Facility Rate data, meaning that the figures are very exaggerated because the number of infected are very much higher than the number of cases: probably 100 million more infections than cases. Thus, the total across all age groups of 1.701%, [.01701] should be corrected to .289% [.00289]; this is about three times higher than the cited flu IFR, not the 10 times higher given by Fauci. And it would be much lower for the less than 70 population.
A very recent article said this: "While estimates of COVID-19's infection fatality rate (IFR) range from study to study, the expert consensus does indeed place the death rate at below 1 percent for most age groups." Fauci did indeed overhype COVID for all but the very elderly. This supports the view of the eminent Dr. Peter McCollough that a wise COVID vaccine strategy would have been to target the elderly, not the entire population.
The widely acclaimed medical researcher John P. Ioannidis of Stanford University has examined IFR for COVID in considerable detail, In October 2020 he said this: "The infection fatality rate of COVID-19 can vary substantially across different locations and this may reflect differences in population age structure and case-mix of infected and deceased patients and other factors. The inferred infection fatality rates tended to be much lower than estimates made earlier in the pandemic." At that time, he said:" Across 51 locations, the median COVID-19 infection fatality rate was 0.27% (corrected 0.23%)." Higher than the Fauci quoted value for the flu (.1%), but not 10 times greater.
A new report from the defense department gives data on 5.6 million fully vaccinated Medicare participants age 65 and older. There were 161,000 recent breakthrough COVID infections and the IFR was .021. It noted an IFR for this group of .12 (about five times greater) during the March to December 2020 period when there was far less effective hospital care and no mass vaccination. Both IFRs for elderly Americans are greater than the quoted typical flu value, but far from a very lethal viral infection.
Recently, it was reported that according to CDC work "More than 39 million Americans have been diagnosed with coronavirus infection since the pandemic started in 2020." Using that figure, that may be too low because only 1.4 million blood samples were tested, together with the current CDC value of about 700,000 COVID fatalities results in an average IFR of .018. Why is 39 million infected people low? Because many medical experts have said that there are probably some 100 million Americans with natural immunity resulting from COVID infection. The key word to question in what CDC did is "diagnosed." In other words, people who were tested and found positive. But clearly a large fraction of asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic people did not get tested. So, what if you add 100 million to the 39 million figure and then use that as the denominator, with 700,000 deaths in the numerator, and calculate the IFR? You get an IFR of .005. Not ten times higher than the flu value cited by Fauci in his congressional testimony [actually 3 times higher than the high end of flu IFR values].
Podcaster Jack Murphy, who founded Liminal Order, deduced that because the CDC said there were twice as many people who were infected with COVID, then it automatically meant that the lethality rate must be cut in half, commenting that the virus that had killed 646,000 Americans in the last 19 months is "far less lethal than already known."
Murder Motivation
To accept the entire argument for a Big Lie it is necessary to explain the motivation for Fauci to intentionally tell the public that the new China virus was extremely lethal. So much worse than seasonal flu. So awful that extreme government action was needed.
It is relevant to note that in January 2017 Fauci warned the Trump administration, in a public talk, that no doubt there would be a "surprise outbreak" of a new infectious disease pandemic. "The thing we're extraordinarily confident about is that we're going to see this in the next few years," he said. He got what he wanted. Maybe all the talk about a "plandemic" was spot on. And maybe Fauci had insights because he was funding the work at the Wuhan Laboratory to develop extremely toxic viruses.
What Fauci said about high lethality set in motion an onerous set of government actions justified on the basis of protecting public health. Why would anyone want to overstate the lethality of the new COVID-19 virus? It was the only way to use onerous pandemic control and management methods that Fauci favored. It was necessary to set in motion a COVID vaccine program. Most of all, his strategy was used to create very high levels of FEAR in the public so that they would accept his favored government actions.
Understand this. Fauci is not a trained public health expert, nor a trained epidemiologist or virologist. He was a plain physician who over many decades as a top NIH bureaucrat accumulated enormous power. He never did what true public health experts have an ethical obligation to do. That is to tell the public both the positives and negatives of public health policies and actions.
The point is this: By pushing the need for pandemic actions to address a very lethal virus a host of government actions produced so much economic, social and personal hardships and dislocations. And many analyses have concluded that more Americans died from the government actions than from the COVID virus. Perversely, pandemic public health actions actually harmed public health. But with widespread mainstream media support Fauci got away with everything.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily. Fauci is guilty of criminally negligent homicide stemming from his initial and very public overstatement of the lethality of the COVID virus. Those who have screamed for his prosecution have a valid case.
With his power he created policies that created data to support this lethality claim. One big action was to create a testing protocol using the PCR technology in ways that created very high case levels. The inventor of that technology said it was inappropriate for diagnosing the viral infection. Millions of COVID cases resulted from running PCR equipment at very high cycle rates [high than 25]. Meanwhile the government never did widespread blood testing to get data for knowing the IFR.
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