“Sooner or Later,
Everyone Sits Down to a Banquet of Consequences”

On the very first day of this year I wrote that the pandemic was over and that only the most brainwashed true believers would cling to the absurd narratives that enabled it. Since then, all of it has been exposed to be falsehoods, cluelessness and lies:

• Vaccines were never tested or proven to stop transmission.
• The fatality rate was around 0.005%
• Ivermectin worked
• Masks don’t
• Lockdowns did more damage than good

…and the final straws for the credibility of all involved:

• This thing came out of a lab, and
• “Safe and effective” turned into “sudden and unexpected”

Innumerable careers, reputations and lives have been destroyed in order to enforce a completely debunked narrative as truth. The mainstream media, Big Tech, governments at all levels, neo-liberal glee clubs like the WEF, all coordinated to gaslight the entire population of the world that we were facing existential annihilation, and would have to henceforth trade in our civil liberties and basic human rights to these authorities to escape it (get ready to hear that one again…)

The economic damage is only now beginning to be felt in runaway inflation with central banks powerless to contain it, at risk of destroying what’s left of the economy.

We don’t need to enumerate the litany of injustice, ridicule and persecution  anybody who tried to counter these absurd narratives had to endure. Lost friends, family, jobs, position, businesses, cancelations, deplatformings – all of it.

So it is unsurprising now that the edifice is crumbling, that those who feathered their nest being “on the right side of history”, seeing that it’s all turning to dust in realtime, are trying to back away from their complicity.

The name of the game now is to try to extract oneself from the most intense and virulent outbreaks of mass formation psychosis in recorded history:

You can f*ck right off with this shit. pic.twitter.com/YmDiHIR7TU

— Clifton Duncan. (@cliftonaduncan) October 31, 2022

There are many who were up to their eyeballs in this who will now try to frame themselves as “the voice of reason” who were trying to introduce some rationality into the conversation.

— Mark Jeftovic, The C̶r̶y̶p̶t̶o̶ ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) July 10, 2022

The most nauseating part of #EndTheMandates and #NoMoreLockdowns is going to be when every sociopathic zealot who wanted to literally wreck your life for non-compliance will start taking victory laps and pretending they were always champions of The Great Reopening…

— Mark Jeftovic, The C̶r̶y̶p̶t̶o̶ ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) February 9, 2022

Don’t believe them.

Nothing Forgotten. Nothing Forgiven.

If the globally botched pandemic response accomplished one thing, it was to open many people’s eyes to how obsolete and ill equipped our current institutions are for handling a global crisis in this new, decentralized, multi-polar world.

While these oligarchs and technocrats believed they had Divine Right to “re-imagine” every aspect of our lives for some grandiose Great Reset; it’s these self-appointed elites and the sclerotic, self-serving institutions they inhabit who are going to get their asses re-imagined. With a vengeance.

Here’s a few ways that you can start to reclaim your life, and take your power back from those who abused it and used their positions against you:

1. Vote out any politician who imposed lockdowns or vaccine mandates – regardless of party affiliation. At least the ones who doubled down on them after it became clear how destructive and ineffective they were.
2. Cancel all paid subscriptions to the mainstream media – you’re better off supporting the many independent outlets and those doing real journalism and providing high-signal content.
3. Advocate for defunding state-run media apparatuses: NPR in the US, CBC in Canada, BBC in the UK, et al. Stop watching it, listening to it or reading any of their articles. Whatever you do, never click their stories in your timelines or on an ads on their websites. Starve them out.
4. Time for a Big Tech cleanse: Start looking at alternatives to Big Tech. Try using alternative search engines like Duck and Presearch, Facebook is quickly becoming irrelevant (while Twitter may be fun for awhile longer given the meltdowns over the Musk takeover), and there are other places ascending like Gettr, Minds and MeWe.
5. Remember who wouldn’t do business with or employ you: Chart your own course and from now on if you’re hiring, or scouting vendors, check their socials: were they demonizing lockdown skeptics? Hashtagging “#Freedumb”? (Better start scrubbing those timelines, mofos)
6. Buy Bitcoin. Yes, I’m shilling BTC because Bitcoin is the global opt-out – stacking sats is calling b/s on everything – and for the past two years everything has been b/s.

You can put that pandemic amnesty where the sun don’t shine. pic.twitter.com/NGIaMvLb5L

— Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@EvaVlaar) November 1, 2022

Macron’s thugs attacking a…healthcare worker. Hospital staff treated like dangerous criminals. Still blows my mind that it happened.

F*ck your ‘pandemic amnesty.’pic.twitter.com/kWrJQqdXYU

— Nat (@Arwenstar) November 1, 2022

There will be no pandemic amnesty. #NoPandemicAmnesty

By the time this is all over, we’re more likely to see pandemic tribunals.

This post was originally my comment to a person on Facebook, which somebody then deleted. This person repeatedly throws out the 1.2 M deaths worldwide number and I finally lost it and posted a response to him after he scolded people for “spreading disinformation and not listening to science”. He actually told people disputing the Second Wave Hysteria to “shut up and listen to the government and science”.

As one of my all-time favourite economists, Thomas Sowell, would say…. “Oh dear, where to begin?”

1 million or 1.2 million deaths worldwide sounds like a big number and on its own you can use it to club “Covidiots” into silence, that is, until you actually look at it.

For starters, bandying out a number, any number in isolation is meaningless. For any number to have any relevance, to anything, it has to be part of a data set or otherwise part of some meaningful comparison.

If we take the 1.2 million COVID deaths worldwide, at it’s face (more on that below), the obvious question then becomes “is that good or bad?”

The most useful signal we can get from a global  COVID death toll is how it compares to what is called the “Absolute Fatality Rates” globally, which is simply the rate of all fatalities from all causes.

From the charts, we can clearly see, there was a lot of excess mortality in March and April, and then, like every other meaningful metric around Coronavirus, it drops off drastically and starts to level out, with a slight seasonal rise as we head into the winter.

Interestingly, in “no lockdown” Sweden, it turns out their absolute death toll is much lower than one would think:

It could possibly come in lower by the end of the year, but if not, will come in not that much higher. Not as high as, say, the US or England.

If reducing fatalities is the goal, there is a much easier way to do that

Sadly, a lot of people die every day, and I’m sure you’ve seen memes on social media on how many more people die from other causes like Tuberculosis (1.4M in 2019) than COVID-19.

In the US, where the COVID death toll currently sits at 225K, it is estimated that medical malpractice kills 250K Americans a year.

But an even bigger number, according to the WHO, is that alcohol abuse kills 3 million people annually, and that number will surely go even higher this year given the massive spike in mental illness, domestic violence, child abuse, depression and suicide caused by the lockdowns.

If this is about saving lives, we could literally bring those alcohol related deaths to zero, turning it off like the flick of a switch by instituting a global ban on alcohol. We could do it tomorrow. Should we? The lives we save may include your own.

In fact if we banned alcohol then we could let Coronavirus run and still be ahead nearly 2M preventable deaths annually, provided COVID-19 kept going with the same intensity it was going in March and April, which it clearly isn’t (see below).

Of course, nobody would seriously entertain that, and they could probably articulate some decent logic around why we shouldn’t.

But they may dismiss it without considering how closely the lockdown approach toward reducing COVID fatalities is analogous to a worldwide ban on alcohol to eliminate alcohol related deaths would be. Especially since we also know that a large portion of coronavirus fatalities die with COVID-19 and numerous other comorbidities* than of it (however, see my footnote on that at the end of this post).

In that sense, alcohol related carnage is very similar. Few alcoholics drink themselves to death outright. Far more kill themselves (and others) in car accidents, commit suicide, or wreck their livers, hearts, kidneys, brains or generally run themselves down so low nearly anything else will finish them off.

Second Wave Hysteria

Case counts are clearly rising again globally, that much is true and we have oodles of data to track it. With it, there come fears of the dreaded “Second Wave” of fatalities.

In the often cited Spanish Flu of 1918, the bulk of the fatalities came in the second wave. However, the Spanish Flu was a very different pandemic than the one we have today. That one attacked people right in the early years of the prime-of-life  age curve:

Scientists believe the nature of that strain caused “cytokine storms”, the phenomenon where the immune system overreacts and attacks itself. In a perverse twist of fate, this made the population with the strongest immune systems more vulnerable to the flu.

Contrast with COVID-19 where nobody disputes that the most vulnerable members of the population are the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions that render them immuno-compromised. In this sense, comparing 1918 to COVID-19 is not accurate or useful.

So, bear this in mind as I put in the graph below of how the Coronavirus Second Wave is playing out when it comes to case counts vs fatalities:

If we were in for a 1918-style Second Wave fatality overrun, we would see it in the data. As I pointed out in my previous post, the above data comes from the Province of Ontario, but pretty well all graphs from locales undergoing second waves in case counts, look the same. The fatalities are riding the floor (that “spike” in the fatality count was a data correction where they took previously missed data from the proceeding 90 days, and added them all to 2 data points), but the case counts are going up, as are the number of tests.

Right now the slope of the case count far exceeds the slope of the fatalities.

For the fatalities to come in anywhere near the Second Wave of 1918 scenario, the slope of the fatality line needs to blast off in a near vertical line right now. In the Ivor Cummins interview he mentioned Dr. Sunetra Gupta’s work indicating that COVID seems to peter out when it hits 20% of the population (but I can’t find the cite). If true, it is hard to envision a scenario where that is mathematically possible.

If not true, and we’re about to experience a Second Wave of fatalities, it would be impossible to occur without seeing it in the data and right now, all of the data, everywhere is showing either a moderate rise with seasonality, or an aggregate, overall decrease in fatalities.

It’s also been pointed out that the rationale behind the lockdowns was to prevent the healthcare system from being overrun. Aside from a few notable exceptions in Phase 1, that didn’t happen. If we look at the data now, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen now, either. When I first started posting about the second wave numbers, I pointed out that even the ICU cases line was diverging from the hospitalizations line (right side, below). Right now it looks like the total hospitalizations are lower in Wave 2, then they were in Wave 1, even against a case count exceeding previous highs.

All of this should be good news, but for some reason, people become very upset when you try to walk them through this. I’m open to all logic, data and science based objections or counter-points to where I am wrong on this, bearing in mind that “SHUT UP AND LISTEN TO THE GOVERNMENT AND SCIENCE” isn’t a logical, scientific or data driven counter-argument.

What to do next.

I would close out with two additional reading exercises, one, I would go look at The Great Barrington Declaration and if you think they’re approach of focused protection makes sense, sign it. Number two: have a look at the comparison of The Great Barrington Declaration with what’s called “The John Snow Memorandum“.

If you want to follow my work, and I seem to be covering more about the lockdowns lately, then sign up for the mailing list here, or follow me on Twitter here.

Footnote on Comorbidities

(*The number you see bandied around a lot is 94% of all COVID-19 fatalities had comorbidities. This number largely keys off CDC data that only 6% of fatalities list only COVID-19 as a c.o.d. If you look at the CDC data on what the comorbidities are, the biggest one accounting for close to half of all fatalities, especially in the elderly, is pneumonia and influenza.  I think it’s inaccurate to just net-out all of those cases and dismiss them as comorbidities because that is one of the most common ways respiratory viruses manifest. But that said, the data, when you consider comorbidities and the looseness with which COVID gets added to c.o.d’s, what all this means is that the headline number for fatalities is the top boundary. They aren’t higher, and they are probably for all practical purposes, lower).

In part 1 I talked about two COVID-19 / Great Reset themed conspiracy theories that were spreading in Canada and why embracing or amplifying them made lockdown skeptics look like lunatics who could more easily be dismissed.

There is no shortage of science and data to challenge the flawed policies of the governments whose basic playbook has been: lockdown, close economy, print money, ignore data, and double down.

This may be a good time to quickly outline my arc of how my views on the pandemic shifted over time.

My journey from Zombie Apocalypse to lockdown skeptic

I began monitoring the reports of a new virus emerging out of China in January. On January 23rd I emailed a friend advising him to go out the next day and pick up some N95 masks. By the first week of February I was stocking up on food, medical supplies, cash, and weapons while advising friends and family to do the same. I was bracing for a full breakdown of the global supply chain and a collapse of the global economy.

Based on early reported numbers of an R0 around 3.1 with an IFR of 5%, it looked like we’d see doubling times of 15 days. By March all three levels of government, city, province and national were reporting case rates and fatalities daily. I put together a spreadsheet and using those numbers as a model I forecasted Toronto to have 1.7M cases by the end of June. If the IFR really was 5%, or even 3%, it would mean between 51,000 and 136,000 fatalities.

This was terrifying, so as the world started locking down, it seemed to make sense. In fact I was wondering why we were still allowing inbound flights from hotspots like China? There were rumblings from The Clerisy like the New York Times that blocking flights from China would be racist. This was the early innings of the politicization that was to follow.

But then, a curious thing happened. The rate of change in infections and fatalities started coming down, drastically.

By June it was clear to anybody following the data that this was, at least for now, largely in the rearview mirror. I had been in touch with an old friend who now ran IT for several hospitals. In January he was trying to get administrators to take COVID seriously. By May, they had built 4 additional ICU wards across their hospitals and they were sitting empty. Worse, resources were being denied to other medical uses. He was beginning to wonder if maybe this wasn’t going to be as bad as we both originally thought.

Then, over the summer despite the clear slowdown in the severity of the pandemic, the policy response to it intensified. And then it all became political. Questioning the efficacy of continuing the lockdowns became associated with being alt-right. Pro-Trump. Or worse. A Narrative War ensued. If you questioned official policy, you got deplatformed. I documented numerous instances of this over on AxisOfEasy.

Now we’re in the fall and the case counts are back up and Second Wave Hysteria is in full effect. The only problem is, the fatality rate is on the floor. Another problem is this shouldn’t be a problem. It should be good news!

The fatalities are up slightly with the season, but nowhere close to tracking the case counts as they did in wave 1. This could be for a number of reasons (more testing, the most vulnerable were hit in wave 1, etc) but no matter how you slice it, the graphs pretty well everywhere look like this:

In this case, we’re talking about the Province of Ontario, which has to date nearly 70,000 cases total and slightly over 3,000 deaths. Nothing like the 1.7M cases and 50K to 136K fatalities my original model predicted for Toronto alone.

What does that mean?

It means my model was wrong!

Which is ok, and fortunate, in fact. Now I’m not an epidemiologist, so I’m allowed to get my models wrong. But what I did do, that policy makers and experts are not doing, is re-examining the premises in the face of new data.

The Imperial College / Neal Ferguson model that inspired much of the global lockdowns is an extreme example of this. It turned out to be total shitcode, but it hasn’t impacted the policy response. Not one bit.

There is no justification for more lockdowns

Which brings us to the Triggernometry podcast I mentioned in Part 1, which I never did get around to adequately summarizing. It’s a great conversation with those merry comics Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster and their guest this episode: biological engineer Ivor Cummins.

When you challenge the prevailing orthodoxy around anything COVID, it’s not uncommon for people to hysterically shriek at you that have to follow science and look at the data! Well, that’s what Cumins has done and here’s the upshot of what he (and many others) have found:

• We should not have locked down over the summer. With cases and fatalities down it was the ideal time to let the virus spread amongst the low risk population to get further toward herd immunity.
• Forcing mask wearing at the nadir of the pandemic (the summer) was a flawed policy that leaves no exit strategy. We’re basically in masks forever now.
• 40 years of published science indicates that masks (especially surgical and cloth masks, as opposed to N95) don’t make much of a difference when it comes to these types of pathogens, but four or five hastily rushed papers from over the summer of this year say otherwise.
• The argument against pursuing a herd immunity strategy because of the so-called “long timers”, people who get COVID, and experience ongoing, long term and possibly life long effects is not a compelling argument. Statistically these cases are low, but more importantly they are not unique to COVID-19. We always have these edge cases with long term effects in seasonal flus and other diseases.
• The fatality curve is playing out along established patterns regardless of whether their were lockdowns or not.
• The first lockdown was understandable. A second one is completely unjustified.

Unfortunately what has happened is this has become about politics and ideology instead of public health. The real world, long term health effects of lockdowns and a crashed economy, the mental health issues, suicide, domestic violence and substance abuse are very real, and have now surpassed the damage being caused by the virus itself. I seem to remember two doctors in California who warned this would happen who were deplatformed and vilified for saying it.

The science and the data are out there, but those who push it forward are frequently accused of “reading what they want to see in the data”. If you revisit the two charts I posted above, that clearly show how case counts have diverged from fatalities, which are flat, I was told exactly that by people when I posted those charts a month ago.

Them: You’re just seeing what you want in that data.

Me: Aren’t these two curves clearly diverging, and one is flat?

Them: Just wait two weeks.

Me: Aren’t you literally extrapolating what you want to see in the data by saying that?

Them: These alt-right denialists are too much.

Well the two weeks, four weeks, six weeks everybody keeps telling me to wait for their extrapolation to kick in have come and gone and we can clearly see that the worst of the COVID-19 induced destruction is in the rear-view mirror. If the numbers change and new data emerges that changes things, I will modify my opinion accordingly. That’s the way it’s supposed work. 

But we live in an age where policy makers working off of hypothetical models and career politicians with zero real world experience and no economic skin in the game are egged on by billionaire monopolists philanthropists and their pet projects in narcissism “re-imagining society”.  They don’t know how to do anything other than double-down on failure while everybody else bears the consequences.

We need to reopen the economy and start picking up the pieces from all the other collateral damage we’ve caused.

Here is the entire Triggernometry video, I highly recommend watching it and circulating it among your colleagues.

Related Reads:

• The Great Barrington Declaration: Read it, sign it
• Showdown: The Great Barrington Declaration vs. John Snow Memorandum