Coronavirus: Thread

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https://internationalman.com/articles/david-stockman-on-the-parallels-between-the-covid-hysteria-and-the-salem-witch-trials/

On The Parallels Between The COVID Hysteria And The Salem Witch Trials

It would not be going too far to say that the eruption of
irrationality and hysteria in America during the COVID-19 period of
2020-2021 most resembled not 1954, when Senator McCarthy set the
nation looking for communist moles behind every government desk, or
1919, when the notorious raids of Attorney General Mitchell were
rounding up purported Reds in their tens of thousands, but the winter
of 1691-1692. That’s when two little girls—Elizabeth Parris and
Abigail Williams of Salem, Massachusetts—fell into the demonic
activity of fortune-telling, which soon found them getting strangely
ill, having fits, spouting gibberish, and contorting their bodies into
odd positions.

The rest became history, of course, when a malpracticing local doctor
claimed to have found no physical cause for the girls’ problems and
diagnosed them as being afflicted by the “Evil Hand,” commonly known
as witchcraft. Other ministers were consulted, who agreed that the
only cause could be witchcraft and since the sufferers were believed
to be the victims of a dastardly crime, the community set out to find
the perpetrators.

Within no time, three witches who were famously accused —the Parris’
slave, Sarah Good, an impoverished homeless woman and Sarah Osborne,
who had defied conventional Puritan society. Many more followed, and
as the hysteria spread, hundreds were tried for witchcraft and two
dozen hanged.

But there is a lesson in this classic tale that is embarrassing in its
verisimilitude. Namely, one of the best academic explanations for the
outbreak of seizures and convulsions which fueled the Salem hysteria
was a disease called “convulsive ergotism”, which is brought on by
ingesting rye grain infected with a fungus that can invade developing
kernels of the grain, especially under warm and damp conditions.

During the rye harvest in Salem in 1691 these conditions existed at a
time when one of the Puritans’ main diet staples was cereal and breads
made of the harvested rye. Convulsive ergotism causes violent fits, a
crawling sensation on the skin, vomiting, choking, and,
hallucinations—meaning that it was Mother Nature in the ordinary
course working her episodically unwelcome tricks, not the “Evil Hand”
of a spiritual pathogen, which imperiled the community.
Similarly, in 2020 there Was no Evil Hand Sci-Fi Pathogen

The truth is, in 2020 it was also Mother Nature—likely abetted by the
Fauci-sponsored gain-of-function researchers at the Wuhan Institute of
Virology—who disgorged one of the nastier among ordinary respiratory
viruses.

Such viruses, of course, have afflicted humankind over the ages,
which, in turn, has evolved marvelous adaptive immune systems to cope
with and overcome them. So again, there was no Evil Hand sci-fi
pathogen at large that was something new under the sun, nor a disease
that was extraordinarily lethal for 90% of the population.

In the grand scheme of things, therefore, the COVID-19 pandemic has
already been recorded as an unfortunate bump on the road to longer and
more pleasant lives for Americans and much of the rest of the world,
too. That truth is strikingly depicted in the chart below.

While the all-cause mortality figure for 2020 did not exist when the
CDC published the chart above, the green line would have depicted it
as only a tiny upward blip—of which there have been several during the
last 120 years shown above.
Was COVID-19 an Analogue of the Spanish Flu?

Indeed, the true analogue is the year 1918 when an estimated 675,000
Americans succumbed to the Spanish Flu from a population (100 million)
just 30% of today’s level.

In that case, the green line in the chart above (all cause deaths)
pushed up by nearly 400 per 100,000 population compared to the pre-war
baseline (1914). By contrast, the excess rate in 2020 over 2019 was
just 118 per 100,000.

And, yes, there is the sad fact of senseless dough-boy deaths on the
killing fields of France embedded in these 1918 numbers, but it turns
out that upwards of 45% of the conventionally reported 117,000 GI
(gastrointestinal) deaths were not from German bullets, but the
Spanish Flu that ripped through the massive US training camps that
were hastily-assembled after Wilson foolishly declared war in April
1917 with no meaningful standing army to fight it.

So on the true measure of pandemic lethality—deaths from all
causes—the COVID-19 was not even in the same ballpark as the Spanish
Flu. And as the chart also shows, the former occurred way down the
green line curve that is actually the ultimate rebuke to today’s
on-going COVID-policy disaster.

The US age-adjusted death rate in 2020 (828 per 100,000) was actually
67% lower than it had been in 1918 (2,542 per 100,000) because since
then a free capitalist society has gifted the nation with the
prosperity and freedom to progress that has ushered in better
sanitation, nutrition, shelter, life-styles and medical care.

It is those forces which have pushed the green line relentlessly to
the lower-right corner of the chart, not the Federales atop their
bureaucratic perches in Washington.
Hope for a New Great Barrington Declaration to Serve as Antidote to
the Totalitarian Lockdown

At length, perhaps some future historian will need to find the
“convulsive ergot” theory of 2020 to explain the COVID-Hysteria
because the explanation will not be found in the “science” embedded in
what will be a tiny blip in the green line of the chart above.

The Great Barrington Declaration was penned by three fearless world
leading epidemiologists—Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Dr. Sunetra
Gupta of Oxford University and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Sanford—and was
a powerful antidote to the Evil Hand theory then raging through the
MSM and political class of almost every stripe.

At essence, it said the real science was that America was not being
attacked by a Grim Reaper visiting death upon one and all regardless
of age, health status or physical circumstances, but, instead, was a
highly selective respiratory disease variant that honed-in tightly on
the immunity-impaired aged and co-morbid.

Accordingly, the one-size-fits all Lockdown policy was dead wrong, and
what was needed was highly targeted help, protections and treatments
for the smallish minority of the vulnerable, which policy would
presently lead to the attainment of “herd immunity” and the ultimate
extinguishment of the pandemic in the normal way.

Colonial America found its way out of the Salem aberration in 1692,
and surely 330 years and much science later it can do so again,
exposing the 21st century miscreants who brought on this insensible
hysteria as it does.

*  *  *

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