Now that the lock downs are starting to be lifted and governors are starting the slow transition back to normal chicken littles in government and the media are demanding we not get too comfortable with the idea. After all things may necessitate a second shut down where the government forces us back into our homes again. The lifting is a sort of test run to see if we can responsibly handle our freedom or if the state has to crack down on us again for our own good of course. While a great many people are likely to take umbrage at this as judging by the protests and increasing number of lawsuits it is worth looking at the major reasons the lock down occurred. Virtually everything we are being told about the virus to justify these shutdowns is wildly inaccurate and the lies under-girding this government action need to be openly disputed by the media. Only by accurately reviewing the risks and rewards can we determine what if any further action is warranted. Permitting a double dip lock down on the basis of faulty information is irresponsible. So its worth looking at the most used claims about the virus. 1) You Can Catch the Coronavirus From Asymptomatic People Health professionals continue to hype the claim that those who are infected with the virus can transmit it AT LEAST 48 hours before they show symptoms. Expert after expert trots this out and this claim has been a rallying cry for the shut downs. The problem? There is absolutely no evidence that it is true. Rather researchers have simply assumed the truth of this without anything solid to back it up. As a study from Nature explained: A study in Nature Medicine of 94 confirmed Covid-19 patients found that people were most infectious right before they started to show symptoms. The researchers obtained data about people who had gotten Covid-19 as well as those who had been around them before and after they got sick. Based on this they estimated that 44 percent of people who caught the virus from the studys participants had gotten it from people who felt healthy at the time. They also found that someone who is mildly sick could have been just as contagious as someone with more severe symptoms. Maybe they arent coughing as much as someone feeling more seriously ill but the virus can still spread through talking sneezing and coughing. The first and most obvious problem with this is that by definition someone who is sneezing and coughing is not asymptomatic. They are showing symptoms. So the reported evidence speaks against the underlying claim. Yes the person hacking up their lungs may insist they are fine...but common sense tells us they are not. Much like the alcoholics assertion that he has had nothing to drink today (as he reeks of liquor) is not evidence of his sobriety the sick persons assertion he is fine is not either. Even ignoring that problem using the after the fact remembrances of those who have gotten the virus is not a reliable way to study anything. The human mind is remarkably bad at remembering trivial details. So taking a persons later claim that they were not around anyone who sneezed or coughed as proof is poor research. Simply because someone doesnt remember being around someone sick doesnt mean that they were not. Moreover they can have no knowledge if they touched a surface covered with the virus and then absentmindedly touched their eyes or mouth. The researchers in essence took two or three dots and constructed a rather elaborate picture which the dots themselves are not enough to reasonably infer. Every study which claims to have found this connection has a complete lack of actual evidence but relies instead on anecdote or assumption. At least some researchers are more forthright about these limitations: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/22/21230301/coronavirus-symptom-asymptomatic-carrier-spread And what about people who are carrying the virus but dont ever get sick the true asymptomatic carriers? Can they spread it too? We simply dont know yet. Hopefully further studies will figure this out because it could lead to more informed decisions about how to eventually end the pandemic. Were it solely guesswork and filling in blanks it would be bad enough...but here we actually have significant evidence against the proposition. Like the flu the coronavirus seems to pass through mucus transmission primarily through coughing and sneezing which sprays aerosol droplets. This either lands on other people infecting some of them or on hard surfaces where the virus lives for some time with the possibility of contamination through touch. Before a person shows symptoms they are not spreading such droplets. Many doctors have used the large numbers of asymptomatic people to push the theory that this must mean that such people are passing the disease but this doesnt follow. While the virus may be multiplying exponentially in their bodies there is no actual method of transmission until they begin showing symptoms. And indeed testing has shown that there is no presence of coronavirus in the exhalations of numerous confirmed infected patients even when the samples are taken six inches from their mouths. Indeed were it not for this completely baseless theory we would be ignoring the coronavirus as a mild flu. But because of the claim that it is a sneak ninja killer stealing from victim to victim undetected and unstoppable we have been convinced to cower in our homes. These wildly speculative claims based on illogical guesswork are highly irresponsible in the light of the damage they have wreaked on our society. 2) Coronavirus is a risk to everyone no matter how old or healthy they are Contributing to the panic is the endlessly repeated claim that coronavirus is no respecter of persons. Doctors of dubious quality (such as psychiatrists and therapists) tell us we are all equally at risk. We must therefore be afraid. Be very afraid: At this point its hard to imagine that anyone could really ignore the danger of the coronavirus or imagine that they are somehow immune to it. And yet that is exactly what happened and is happening across the United States as people still hold coronavirus parties head out to packed beaches and parks and tell themselves and their families that it simply wont happen to them. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/denying-reality-coronavirus-has-made-it-more-dangerous-everyone-ncna1175916 And yet this is simply untrue; it has no basis whatsoever in reality. According to the official data 758 healthy Americans under the age of 50 have died of the coronavirus https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/08/young-people-coronavirus-deaths/. Assuming those statistics are true this is a sad moment for each of those families but hardly a reason for anyone else to restructure their lives. Out of the more than 1 million confirmed cases let us round up and say that 1000 healthy people died for easy math. This means that there is less than a .01 risk of mortality among healthy people who have been confirmed as catching the virus. This is a negligible risk for anyone under 50 without a previous health condition. Your chances of dying by covid are roughly on par as being struck by lightning. Indeed over the same time period the flu has killed over 3 times as many healthy people. According to the CDC in the 18-49 range the flu has killed 2450 people. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html Add in the 478 under age 18 and you have a nearly fourfold risk of death from the flu. Yet rightfully so the average american would scoff at the idea that all of America should shut down because of a risk that size to healthy people. Why would this be different? Despite the wide amount of vaccination for pneumonia there are 1.3 million emergency room visits because of pneumonia every year. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/pneumonia.htm Again there are no cries of pandemic or calls for quarantine. And this is something we supposedly have great immunity to. Again if anything the wide numbers of asymptomatic carriers show that the virus is almost certainly less serious than advertised. If you catch it you have a coin flip chance of even knowing. And if you realize you caught it your chance of developing serious symptoms is about that of the flu. But what about new fears of strokes being a common symptom for the healthy? There were reports of five healthy young people suffering strokes after showing covid symptoms https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/04/29/coronavirus-covid-19-caused-strokes-young-patients-nyc-doctors/3046447001/. The doctors simply have no explanation for this. It could be connected or it could be a fluke. The fact that these stories are highly localized in a very small sample seems to suggest something else perhaps even doctor error is at play. It is a tragic fact that healthy people have strokes often inexplicibly https://www.bbc.com/news/health-20969593. The fact that a few covid positive people had strokes then doesnt mean covid causes strokes much like the fact that obese people drink diet soda doesnt mean that diet soda causes obesity. Correlation does not equal causation. The one thing the above quoted Dr. Barth is correct on is that the misinformation about the virus is causing very real risk distortion and misallocation of funds. Assuming that everyone everywhere is of equal risk to catch the virus makes us ignore that in reality the virus is concentrated almost exclusively in elderly and weakened patients. By needlessly panicking people about their risk we have caused massive amounts of people to forgo needed medical care resulting in unknown amounts of deaths. We have also spread the resources equally across society instead of placing them where they are needed most. Such poor choices are not merely unwise they kill. By deliberately misinforming the public we create great mischief and untold injury. 3) The Coronavirus is Super-Contageous and Ultra Lethal How contagious is the coronavirus? The truth? We have absolutely no idea. Scientists use a number called R0 to express how many people each infected person contaminates. The problem is the number is complete and utter guesswork. It is impossible to actually know how many people are being infected by each symptomatic person. Thus scientists weigh factors that may or may not give an accurate picture of the viruss spread but do not inform us in any way about how easy it is to contract the virus. R0 for whatever good it does at expressing how quickly a virus spreads doesnt tell us anything about the virus itself. This is no hyperbole. The scientific community is forthcoming that R0 is a variable ever changing number: https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-contagious-r-naught-average-patient-spread-2020-3 There is no R0 there is an R0 in a population Elizabeth Halloran a biostatistician at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and University of Washington told Business Insider. A recent CDC study found that the coronaviruss R0 was as high as 5.7 in the early days of its Wuhan outbreak. ... The likelihood that an infected person gets someone else sick depends on many factors which can be tough to estimate and vary based on circumstances.Those can include: the way the virus gets transmitted (through the air or in bodily fluids); whether a virus is contagious during its incubation period; how long that incubation period lasts; and how many people the average patient has contact with. (That varies widely from patient to patient of course: A person who gets sick might stay inside for the next week or they might continue to take public transportation to their job socialize with friends and family and visit a new location). Obviously right now the virus is spreading but is it true that each person is making two others sick or is it simply a very efficient one to one ratio? We actually have no idea. Primarily because there is no accurate way we CAN measure this. R0 is in this way nothing we cannot simply see for ourselves and say in the more simple way of: its spreading slowly spreading fast or not at all. It is a metric of limited usefulness and doesnt mean what the news is portraying it to. Even with this limited usefulness it is worth noting that the R0 data on coronavirus is less than useless because the numbers were absolutely fudged. In Wuhan China researches assigned an arbitrary value of 5.3 to the virus which would mean it is spreading at epidemic level proportions. However to do this they had to disregard the actual data they had on the virus. Early data on the spread of the virus suggested an incubation period of roughly identical to the flu and an average doubling date (which means exactly what it says the rate of time it takes the number of cases to double) of 6 to 7 days. While this gives us a relatively unimpressive R0 of 2.3 which is troubling but not hysteria level panic inducing researchers simply assumed that it would have a doubling date of 2 to 3 days giving a much higher R0 of 5.7. https://www.healthline.com/health/r-nought-reproduction-number#prevention These numbers have never been repeated in any other population also highlighting the fraudulant nature of their creation. Estimates from Wuhan must therefore be discarded as not real measurements of the virus. So how rapid is the spread of the virus? Well the only other solid data we have that we base all our numbers on is the Princess Diamond Cruise Liner. A boat filled with the sick and elderly (the very population most susceptible to corona) with limited health care confined in a very limited close space unable to leave. You know nothing like any place in America outside of a nursing home. Out of the 3711 people on board only 700 got sick. In this high risk populous 18 reported no symptoms and only 1.1 (8 people) died. This is literally the worst case scenerio. 1.1 of the sick and elderly will die. The Princess Diamond Cruise then represents an exaggerated case of just how bad the virus can be. The only place that could possibly resemble this demographic is a nursing home. Yet even over the course of a month of constant contact 75 remained infection free. So while we have no solid data on just how contageous the virus is we do know it is not very fatal. Outside of the sick and elderly the virus is mostly no big deal. Cases where people under 50 die with no preexisting condition are as we have seen exceedingly rare. For most people the virus is not something they should be concerned about. If they catch it their chances of suffering serious complications are extremely remote and death is highly unlikely.For virtually everyone who gets it it is a mild flu not the stuff of nightmares. 4) Social Distancing Works to Save Lives Many have claimed that social distancing has mitigated the tragedy of the coronavirus. Government actions have saved lives and had those actions been taken sooner quite a few of those who succumbed to corona would not have died. As one headline put it: Researchers from Imperial College in London say that without steps such as social distancing Covid-19 could have killed 40 million people this year. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3077646/coronavirus-social-distancing-could-save-millions-lives-study Really the claim goes by causing untold misery we have saved millions! Even ignoring the incorrect under-pinnings of this claim as exposed in prior articles the claim still seems to lack empirical data to support its claims. It seems to be a recycled version of the defense of the Obama stimulus: jobs created or saved argument. The original model didnt work as planned so we simply shift the metric. It couldve been worse. This lie requires unpacking three interrelated errors. First the base models for social distancing are based on old outdated information from the 1930s and later scientific error. A study done three years ago claimed that the flu virus flew about six feet in the air where it then magically hung...suspended. https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/news/20180119/flu-may-be-spread-by-just-breathing and https://baptisthealth.net/baptist-health-news/airborne-threat-flu-may-spread-just-breathing-study-finds/ Apparently physics no longer applied and magic took over. Even at the time the claims were suspect. Repeated testing had shown that sneezes traveled well in excess of six feet as did coughs being propelled at something like 100 and 50 miles per hour respectively. Moreover these same studies had shown that sneezes projected more droplets into the air than coughs (no doubt because they were expelled more forcefully). Now a study was claiming the contrary with no real data to support it flying in the face of repeated confirmed experimentation. Further it also claimed contrary to an overwhelming body of evidence that there was no difference in droplet projection between breathing and sneezing. The claims were not just revolutionary they were plainly false. Yet they were widely reported. Six feet is the distance we need to stay away from a flu victim to avoid the virus and you can catch it by breathing news stories reported. The overwhelming failures of the study were ignored for the claims that would later form the basis of the social distancing narrative. Yet a study that has several obvious falsehoods as findings should be viewed as tainted. While not every error should discount scientific discoveries a researcher who makes six pronouncements and four of them are obviously wrong has engaged in either dishonesty or slipshod research. There is no baby to save when we throw out the bathwater. These results not surprisingly were never duplicated. Later research done specifically in the coronavirus context has confirmed these findings were errors. Sneezes can carry the coronavirus at least 27 feet maybe more. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/03/30/coronavirus-social-distancing-mit-researcher-lydia-bourouiba-27-feet/5091526002/ This makes the six feet window of the social distancing narrative completely useless as a measure of protecting ourselves. Much like a bomb detonating and taking out everything in a mile radius there is not necessarily a difference between being a block further away if you are still inside the blast radius. Further since the virus can live on the smooth surfaces common in stores for a week https://health.clevelandclinic.org/how-long-will-coronavirus-survive-on-surfaces/ the number of people who go into a store is irrelevant if they touch surfaces contaminated with the virus and then touch their faces. The same measures we engage in to protect ourselves from the flu are thus the best ways to avoid coronavirus. Why should this matter? Arent any proactive measures better than nothing? A condom may not be 100 successful at protecting against STDs but its certainly preferable to going without. Here the answer is no for a very simple reason. There is no proven efficacy of these measures primarily because the evidence tells us they do not work. Creating a false sense of safety is worse than doing nothing. It creates what is called moral hazard in economics. By creating a false sense of security we encourage people to engage in risky behaviors that they otherwise would not take. Instead of being cautious in other words the individual believes that they are adequately protected and acts accordingly. This is quite a bit worse than doing nothing at all. And here the social distancing guidelines appear to be more about doing something and being seen doing something than doing something right. Next we must point out that upon coverage of coronavirus Americans without any guidance from government took steps to limit their own exposure. Initial estimates were that Americans were spreading the virus at a much higher rate. Before the first government lock downs went into place that number had dropped dramatically. Without the heavy hand of the state individuals figured out how to protect themselves! Almost all of the limiting of the spread was done pre-government action of any kind. Right now it hovers at about the same level meaning that the government lock downs have had little effect on the spread of the virus. The final remaining drop is just as likely to be the remnants of pre-existing action as opposed to a result of governmental policies. In any event it is far from certain that such a miniscule drop is worth the costs imposed to achieve it. Now we have a serious problem. Despite claiming that the lock downs are working corona deaths did not seriously begin to rise until nearly two weeks after the lock down orders went into effect well past the outer edge of the dormancy period. Whereas the orders went into place in mid-March when the death toll was a whopping 50 a week by the end of the month the death toll was up to 2650 in a week. Two weeks later 11747 deaths in one week nearly a month after quarantines went into effect. (Even more bizarrely the same time flu deaths started a sharp downward trend.) https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm It is difficult to look at these numbers and claim governmental policies a sweeping success. How did the death toll multiply by a factor of 220 if the governments orders were working? If Americans were defying the stay at home orders in those kinds of numbers why werent flu deaths also on the rise? Whatever the explanation is the one thing that is very clear is that if the governments numbers are to be believed government ordered social distancing was a complete and utter failure. And if as suggested before we have an alternative answer for why the numbers climbed we must also accept that social distancing is not the panacea we have accepted it to be. Ultimately we have a policy that seems ineffectual at best based on slipshod science as it is and completely disasterous at worst. Raw data must lead us to reject a double dip solution where we allow further government shut down. If at first you dont succeed and you create untold disaster you dont try again. 5) Coronavirus Infections Remain Underreported This claim makes very little sense on its face. As reported in previous articles the evidence is overwhelming that coronavirus cases are being OVER counted. Cases are being included where corona is clearly not the likely cause of death. In response to common criticism on the right doctors have stated that they will not count obvious suicides and poisonings as corona deaths just because the virus is present...which of course makes one believe they were doing this before. Nevertheless many officials continue to float the claim that somehow the coronavirus death tally is inaccurate because of undercounting. A great example of this is from ProPublica: Experts say its possible that some of the jump in at-home death stems from people infected by the virus who either didnt seek treatment or did but were instructed to shelter in place and that the undercount is exacerbated by lack of comprehensive testing. Its also possible that the increase in at-home deaths reflects people dying from other ailments like heart attacks because they couldnt get to a hospital or refused to go fearful theyd contract COVID-19. Mark Hayward a sociology professor at the University of Texas-Austin whos an expert on mortality statistics said all of those deaths are part of the overall burden of the pandemic." He said an uptick in deaths specifically in ProPublicas findings for Massachusetts and Detroit indicates an undercount is occurring. The problem is as Mr. Haywards comments suggest these deaths regardless of their actual cause are being presumed as covid deaths. And in most states presumed covid deaths are being included as covid deaths. We can talk about the medical guidance requiring reasonable certainty but every doctor who has been asked to explain what that means cannot answer. The fact that some people are dying at home and not being counted until a little later doesnt provide any support for the idea that the virus is being undercounted. Yes people may be dying at home in higher numbers but their bodies are still being found and tested. The CDC confirms that testing has been done on a great many cadavers though such testing often takes as long as 8 weeks. That any given coroners office may not have testing available doesnt mean they cannot take a sample and send it to the CDC. This has been both advised and practiced since March. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/guidance-postmortem-specimens.html Yes it may be true that (now) suicides and poisonings are not being counted as covid deaths as per https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/17/fact-check-covid-19-death-toll-likely-undercounted-not-overcounted/2973481001/ but this does not mean that other obvious deaths are not being included. BBC is no corona denier organization and yet they reported: The death figures being reported daily are hospital cases where a person dies with the coronavirus infection in their body - because it is a notifiable disease cases have to be reported. But what the figures do not tell us is to what extent the virus is causing the death. It could be the major cause a contributory factor or simply present when they are dying of something else. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51979654 See also https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200401-coronavirus-why-death-and-mortality-rates-differ How in the world does this mean deaths are undercounted? If anything it provides more support for the idea that the numbers are overcounted...yet again. Many are pointing to the uptick in death overall but there is a problem with this logic. Fewer people are calling 911 and visiting hospitals for all conditions across the board. A large portion of these deaths are concededly those who otherwise would have gone to the hospital and lived but due to corona fears stayed home. Such deaths are thus attributable to the panic over the virus not the virus itself. Moreover as the hospitals simply are turning away elective conditions-cancer heart attack etc-there are people dying in large numbers because they had to wait until their disease progressed to emergency room level...which they may not have had a chance to call for....at which point their odds of survival plummeted. It is dishonest to use our bad policy leading to other deaths to justify more bad policy. 6) We Should Defer to Medical Professionals As a way of shutting down debate we are constantly told that we need to defer to medical professionals. When protesters demanded the reopening of the economy medical professionals took to the news to furiously denounce them: You have no right to put us all at risk. Go Home and Sign up here to die for the economy." We wanted to go down there and just provide the alternative side and say Hey you know this isnt about freedom to go out. Its about responsibilities to other citizens. Mostly we went there to just sort of say Hey we disagree Bruhn told ABC News. I think that its too soon to open the country. If the medical community says we need to shut down we need to shut down. If we need to social distance we need to social distance. Only those who are qualified should offer an opinion on what we should do! (This of course doesnt stop non-medical personnel who are in favor of shutdowns from opining only those opposed.) The problem is while medical professionals can certainly offer medical advise deferring to them on shutdowns gives them expertise out of their area. Deciding whether we need to shut down requires consideration of collateral consequences which are not just outside of doctors expertise but which they routinely admit to not considering. Consider an extreme hypothetical. Doctors demand that we completely quarantine ourselves and go outside for absolutely nothing. In deciding whether this is a sound idea we must ask non-medical questions. How will people get their food? How will people get medical care? How will people get assistance from lawbreakers who do not follow these rules. Regardless of the wisdom of segregation these questions cannot be brushed aside lest we create a greater problem than we fix. If everyone is forced to survive off of what they have in their closets for a month they will almost certainly starve in droves. There are non-medical considerations people take into account in deciding whether to follow a doctors advice. If we acknowledge that an individual has a right to decide to decline cancer treatment even though it may be in his best interest the same must be true here. Financial concerns quality of life versus length side effects versus symptoms all of these come into play. While we accept that a doctor may have superior medical knowledge to the individual we also seem to tacitly admit that the individual has superior knowledge to the doctor on knowing what is in his best interest. The doctor in short can tell him everything he needs to know on the medical side but only he can weigh the value of that medical advice against all of his other interests of which the doctor can have little or no knowledge. Perhaps a drug can guarantee a cure for a painful but not life threatening disease but make him unable to work for a year. Whether it is worth it to be out of pain is a question only the individual can determine. How much more so is this true in weighing the values of society as a whole with millions of competing interests? How many people will weigh the risk of the virus to be negligible compared to the risk of financial ruin? How many people will decide that the risk of loss of length of life is less important than the certainty of loss of quality of life. What is the risk that quarantine itself will cause unforeseen consequences like increased drug and alcohol abuse mental disease or domestic abuse and suicide? Is the increased loss in life expectancy for the poor which will be delayed for decades worth the increased year or two on the life of the elderly that we see today? Is the risk in increase in crime from higher poverty and lower living conditions an acceptable one? These are primarily sociological questions outside of the doctors expertise. This takes more importance when we highlight just how little doctors know about the virus itself their only area of claimed expertise. As per https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/we-still-dont-know-how-the-coronavirus-is-killing-us.html: In an acute column published April 13 the New York Times Charlie Warzel listed 48 basic questions that remain unanswered about the coronavirus and what must be done to protect ourselves against it from how deadly it is to how many people caught it and shrugged it off to how long immunity to the disease lasts after infection (if any time at all). Despite the relentless heroic work of doctors and scientists around the world" he wrote theres so much we dont know." The 48 questions he listed he was careful to point out did not represent a comprehensive list. And those are just the coronaviruss known unknowns." Doctors ultimately know as little (or as argued here less) than the average citizen. They are just as likely to overreact and panic as any other citizen. If a doctor cannot answer the most basic questions about the disease he doesnt have an informed opinion to offer. Why would an uninformed medical opinion be of any more value than an uninformed lay opinion...or for that matter an informed lay opinion? Clearly it would not. A wise man will readily admit what he doesnt know and proceed cautiously as the evidence warrants but that is not what is occuring here. Instead we are rushing to drastic solutions that no evidence supports the necessity of. Whereas the medical community first told us that the virus was no big deal and to focus instead on the flu it has now demanded we panic heavily a recommendation that is clearly against its own ethos to first do no harm. We have gone from one extreme to the other. And the knowledge of the medical community has not significantly improved on the subject. It is following the lay community on this subject not the other way around. We also must acknowledge that strong political forces are influencing at least some in the medical community. It would be nice if government agencies like the CDC were immune from political pressures and public sentiments...but believing that is naive. The evidence that the CDC bows to government pressure on things big and small is overwhelming. From a recent Huffington post story that the CDC will alter the wording of their reports to ensure funding (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/when-medical-terms-get-politicized-people-get-hurt_n_5a39e987e4b025f99e1322be) to altering findings and choosing speakers based on congressional intervention (https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Politics/story?id=3235565&page=1) the political pressures the CDC faces are real and they effects have been repeatedly observed. And these effects are not limited to government agencies. Hospitals have already bowed to political pressures to reclassify life saving and extending treatments such as chemo and heart transplants as non-essential. Federal standards for determining cause of death have repeatedly changed as have state ones and hospital officials are to follow these guidelines. There can be little denial that politicians with no medical expertise are directly influencing and in some extreme cases dictating medical policy. Many in the medical community have criticized some of the more extreme innovations. Shunting needed medical resources from cancer and heart disease into provably less serious coronavirus is generally seen as unwise and unsafe...but THOSE informed medical opinions have been ignored. Politicians not doctors are often the ones calling the shots. Unfortunately politicians need not legislate to distort the medical process. Money plays a serious role as well. Federal and state funding is directly tied to corona expenditures. Both the number of tests done and the number of positive tests recorded influence how much funding each hospital gets. Supplies that a hospital might need are more likely to be approved in a corona rich environment than one with no recorded cases even if the latter hospitals need for supplies is greater. Obviously not every doctor will fudge his numbers to obtain funding but the power of a purse is a strong influencer. Enough doctors will succumb to these pressures to skew the results. None of this is to demonize such professionals. Doctors are people too subject to the same failings as lesser men. Many will genuinely believe that they are serving the greater good even as they mislead the public intentionally or not. The problem is by cloaking their uninformed opinions often influenced or even dictated by non-medical professionals as dispassionate unbiased professionally sound advice they are distorting the public perception. That they are doing so outside of their expertise makes it so much worse. Ultimately the attempt to shut down debate is not to keep only informed opinions in the mix but to ensure contrary views are not heard. This is illegitimate no matter who is causing it. The massive amount of misinformation published by those who are in favor of shutdowns is quite frankly staggering. Yet such misinformation has led to horrific outcomes while failing to make any noticable progress in the fight against the unseen enemy. Over a decade ago similar alarms were raised about H1N1 and dire predictions were raised. Ultimately the doomsday scenerios were proven unfounded and after much ink was spilled the overinflated death toll was quietly lowered. A few years ago the same thing was done to the killer flu season. Our medical professionals may be smarter than the average bear but that has blinded them to their own shortcomings. They are allowing themselves to be moved by public opinion and to move it further in turn. It is a self fulfilling loop. They are quite literally scaring us to death. We must not allow them to double dip on their folly. The consequences might prove even more fatal and disasterous the second time around than the first. Society is nothing for doctors to tinker and toy with no matter how benign their intentions are.
