by Alex Berenson, Unreported Truths:
Only two facts matter: the virus’s risk was tiny for anyone who wasn’t already very sick, so lockdowns were a terrible idea; and the vaccines made no difference to the course of the epidemic.
PART ONE OF TWO)
The left wants you to forget what happened in 2020.
I don’t mean Covid. As today’s drumbeat of “Five Years Later” stories proves, woke reporters don’t want you to forget Covid — or how scared you were of the virus back then. In fact, they’re annoyed you’ve “rewritten history” and forgotten your fear.
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But of course you’ve forgotten that fear. Because you know the truth. In July 2021, as the relentlessly grinding American Covid death clocks passed 600,000, I wrote one of the truest, cruelest sentences of my career:
I’m just going to say it: 600,000 deaths has never looked more like zero.
Six hundred thousand deaths has never looked more like zero.
True then. Truer now. The reason isn’t just that Covid had an initial infection fatality rate of 0.3 percent (maybe less), meaning that on its first pass it would kill about 1 in 300 people who got it.1 The reason is that more than the flu — and far more than the panickers will admit even now — Covid targeted the very old and the very sick.
I’ll never forget asking my doctor how many of his patients had died of Covid. He has since retired, but at the time he was in his eighties. Given his age and the fact he was in New York City, I assumed he’d have lost a half-dozen or more. The answer was one, a guy in his nineties.
Yes, the death of (almost) any human being is a tragedy.
But that sad, true, banal fact does not mean society must do anything and everything it can to prevent every death. Everyone dies, sooner or later. Pretending we can undo that reality, like pretending we can make pain disappear, is not merely false but wrongheaded. It inevitably produces perverse and wretched outcomes. Pain and death are our portion as human beings. We can not make them vanish, only delay them a bit, if we’re lucky. We are not gods, and we are surely not God.
But politicians (and doctors) sometimes like to think they are. If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy, Governor Andrew Cuomo famously said on March 20, 2020, as he signed the executive order that locked down New York.
No. Like all leaders, Cuomo’s job was far smaller, though more complicated; not to wave a wand and make death vanish, but to balance the interests of the healthy and the sick, the young and the old.
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By mid-March 2020, even as the panic was only starting, the scientists with the best access to the data — in particular from the Diamond Princess cruise ship quarantined in Yokohama, just outside Tokyo — knew how age-stratified Covid’s risks were.
Maybe the reports from China could not be trusted, but the Japanese and Italian figures could. They unequivocally showed that the illness was far more dangerous to people over 75, even 80, than anyone else.
The rest of us needed a few more days to understand this truth. But by the end of March, it was obvious to anyone paying attention.
As I wrote in PANDEMIA (and, honestly, if you want to remember that first year, you really should pick up a copy of PANDEMIA if you haven’t already read it), New York City’s proved the opposite of what the media claimed.
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New York had everything going against it — very high density, apartments and subways to produce rapid spread, a stressed municipal hospital system, an unhealthy population — and yet the coronavirus did NOT (Sorry, edited to add “not”) overrun its hospitals. The city’s high death rates that first month probably had more to do with an overreliance on ventilators and panic at badly run nursing homes than anything else.
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