We’ve been had, and Trump knows it
While President Trump closed the U.S. border against entry from China at the end of January, his overall instinct was right. The CCP virus was nasty, but no worse than a supercharged flu.
Health professionals overwhelmed Trump and his inner circle with doomsday scenarios, bullied by panic-obsessed virologists and epidemiologists — begging for attention and copying the alarmist playbook from the climate/global warming extremists, allied with the MSM Trump-haters.
And now the government has completely suffocated economic demand, creating a depression, an unnecessary calamity that is destroying lives, livelihoods, families, and fortunes for a generation. It is becoming apparent that the end-of-the-world predictions, computer models warning of an apocalyptic black plague worldwide, are all wrong.
Those paying attention were warned that the worse-case scenarios were hysterical, by the likes of Stanford epidemiologist John P.A. Ioannidis.
In dramatic fashion, U.K. Imperial College scientist Neil Ferguson published a doomsday scenario on March 16. Now, just ten days later, he has reversed his outlook, essentially settling on a prediction no worse than a bad flu season.
Most telling, the two U.S. public health icons, Drs Fauci and Birx, are both saying the extreme models that provoked extreme measures bear little resemblance to the actual data on the ground. From the New England Journal of Medicine March 26 co-authored by Fauci:
This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} and 36{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}, respectively.
Re: Dr. Birx from The Hill:
Birx, speaking at a White House press briefing, singled out a recent study on the United Kingdom that originally predicted 500,000 people would die from the virus and has since been revised down to predict 20,000 deaths in the U.K. She said the data the government has collected does not show that 20 percent of the U.S. population would be infected with COVID-19, cautioning against predictions that say so.
“When people start talking about 20 percent of a population getting infected, it is very scary but we don’t have data that matches that based on the experience,” Birx said.
“There’s no … reality on the ground where we can see that 60 to 70 percent of Americans are going to get infected in the next eight to 12 weeks,” Birx later continued.
Perhaps Trump had no other option than to go with the flow when this crisis unfolded. But he is not usually a slave to consensus. He was elected because he is a contrarian. His contrarian antennae have already sent signals that he must reset the economy, pronto.
Trump wants America to reopen by Easter. Despite his ambition being ridiculed and criticized, he’s right to pivot from hysteria to rebound.
About the author: Geoffrey P. Hunt is a retired senior executive of a global industrial firm.
Read more at www.americanthinker.com
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Michael Clarke
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In the dim and distant past there were the seekers of the ‘Future’ they used Crystal balls.
They were soon to be persecuted as witches when their dire predictions turned out to me lite more than a means to make money.
Beware Computer Modelers are getting a similar reputation, which as a computer man with 60+ years experience at the highest level could deliver much.
Computer graduates are flocking to these high pay jobs while the real benefits of computer science get left behind.
I have no answers but many questions about those Computer Modeler prophets.
To make doomsday projections and then reduce them by a factor of 10 or more just a few days later indicates to me that crystal ball technology should be revived.
Michael Logician
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Finn McCool
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Ferguson has previous for this kind of malarkey. He hyped up the swine flu ‘pandemic’ to hysterical proportions and sat on the WHO’s emergency committee for the outbreak. Interestingly he also had numerous conflicts of interest with various vaccine manufactures. To quote Ferguson
“One of the key decisions which has to be made this week by the world community is how much do we switch over current vaccine production for seasonal flu to make a vaccine against this particular virus.”
The WHO changed their criteria for announcing a pandemic of level 6 and promptly swine flu became a pandemic. What was not known at the time was that Governments were contracted to but the vaccine only if a pandemic was announced by the WHO.
Pharmaceutical companies made a mint. Unfortunately, swine flu turned out to be a pig in a poke. The virus mutated and the vaccines became useless.
This time round, Ferguson has manged to cause mass panic and close down the world’s economy.
I disagree with your point on computer science being left behind. My suspicion is that he had to retract his garbage because so many people with a laptop and a Python interpreter at home proved him wrong very quickly. Data Science is no longer in it’s infancy.
Ferguson is a disgrace to his profession.
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Squidly
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The United States needs to discontinue funding the WHO and disengage from the WHO completely. The WHO is one of the most corrupt organizations on the planet and should not be getting a single dime of our taxpayer funds!
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Christian Loosli
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Allready now they live on private money. No taxpayers money won’t do the trick they allready complete in private hands.
https://www.politico.eu/article/bill-gates-who-most-powerful-doctor/
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Steve Parker
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Anthony S. Fauci telling the media that death rate is 10x higher than what he is telling fellow academics
This guy is not credible
“If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.”
Anthony S. Fauci, March 26th, in a paper written for the New England Journal of Medicine
ONE DAY LATER …
“The mortality rate is about 10 times [the flu],”
Reference: Renaissance Horizon: https://www.youtube.com/post/Ugw7fFIObgfBEQ5w4hN4AaABCQ
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fifth_disciple
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I come to PSI to read articles about the scientific community. If I want to read political porn there are plenty of other options. Please don’t corrupt this site and divert it from it’s original purpose.
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geran
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Fifth, the problem is corrupt politicians and bureaucrats have perverted both the physical and medical sciences. We have little choice but to fight back, and WIN!
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Dick Clark
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Trump also knows that if he oversteps his bounds that he will be executed ( suicided) Kennedy style.
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