Shelley Luther, American Patriot? Jailed for Re-Opening Her Dallas Salon

Yes, Bill, you were a little naive, and maybe that’s better than being too cynical. You have the tough job of going on record night after night and week after week. I’ve been listening to your podcasts about the topic from the start. You let yourself get spooked by the “experts” and their campfire ghost stories of virus infections. You didn’t ask the right questions: every viral lower respiratory infection follows the same path. So do some bacterial lower respiratory infections. It’s only a matter of how fast it grows, that is, whether it can overwhelm the immune system and kill the patient.

It is wrong to say that in February the only thing we had to go by was Dr. Neil Ferguson’s model showing 2 million deaths in the US. From the start we knew as fact that only the elderly were at serious risk. But we had more that was easily deduced if the observer is not distracted by the smoke and mirrors. We had Wuhan, an urban area of ten million, in which the virus spread uncontrolled for at least two months. Then they began to quarantine the sick (and anyone else who wasn’t cooperating the way they wanted), and fought the spread for two months. In that four month time a whopping 44k people got sick enough to notice, and 4% of them died.

That does not an epidemic make. That falls short of a peak month of flu season in a comparable US urban population. Many people have been militating from the start against alarmists waving big numbers around but not comparing those numbers to other causes of death (flu, vehicular deaths, cancer, and so on). The 4% fatality sounds dangerous, but consider that China is still a third world nation in many respects. Their standards of medicine, food safety, and hygiene are far below ours. Credible medical experts remarked in February that first world nations should see something closer to 1% fatality.

On Dr. Ferguson’s numbers specifically, never believe the models when they can’t show how that model actually ties in to reality (called similitude in engineering). He never talked about data was he using, such as fatality rate (obviously 1% would have ¼ of the deaths) and transmission rate (R0 was sheer speculation, and remains elusive). This is how many of us deal with climate alarmism, and the same healthy skepticism should have innoculated us against this Wuhan flu panic.

Nobody should have believed anything the ChiComs claimed about this virus. They’re Communists, and it’s their job to lie to protect their government and to harm their enemies (whom they euphemistically call competitors). I certainly never trusted them, never believed that only 44k were infected, never believed it didn’t spread human-to-human, never believed when they claimed they had eliminated it.

Seriously, who believed ChiCom reports in April that there were zero new cases? They realized that it actually looked bad to claim zero, because although the US press and their counterparts in Europe ate it up, that propaganda was too obviously false. They’re now claiming that they get one or two cases a week, as though to prove that their reports on the virus are true, rather like the dictators who point to a one or two percent protest vote as proof of a fair election.

It is not armchair quarterbacking to say, now that the disease has clearly past the peak in 49½ states, that we should have believed what our lying eyes told us rather than the media/activist fear-mongery and “authoritative” hand-waving.