The Morning Briefing: COVID Panic Merchants Might Want to Try Not Lying

Top O’ the Briefing

Happy Tuesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. I don’t know why beef can’t be pulled and pork shredded.

We’re really running out of institutions and leaders we can believe in here in the good old United States lately. Maybe roller derby hasn’t been corrupted yet, but I can’t be terribly sure about even that.

The Wuhan Chinese Bat Flu pandemic ushered in a new class of power brokers, and they haven’t exactly shown themselves to be the best society has to offer. In the early pandemic days, a lot could be forgiven. Everyone was flying blind then. A year and a half later, one would presume that they would be getting better at this, but they’re not.

So they lie. Or dance around the truth a lot.

There has been speculation by the less trusting among us for a while now about the veracity of the reports of COVID hospitalization numbers, since those are one of the primary weapons of the people most heavily invested in keeping the public panic level at a fever pitch.

For about the millionth time since the pandemic began, the nutjob skeptics were right.

Matt covered it:

Many of us have been skeptical about official COVID figures for over a year now. Today, as COVID hospitalization rates are being cited regularly to justify drastic (and unconstitutional) COVID countermeasures, The Atlantic points us to a study from Harvard Medical School, Tufts Medical Center, and the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System that suggests official COVID hospitalization rates are overstating reality by a factor of two.

I’ve also heard anecdotal evidence from acquaintances in the medical profession who work in hospitals about rather expansive interpretations of what constitutes a COVID patient for the records. None of this is proof of complete systemic rot, of course, but it’s obvious that there are some flies in the truth ointment. Matt’s conclusion:

Last year, it was widely suspected that COVID death counts were inflated because hospitals were financially incentivized to assume a COVID-19 diagnosis and patients who died with COVID but not from COVID were possibly all counted as COVID deaths. In Florida, a fatal motorcycle accident was listed as a COVID-19 death. An investigation has shown other deaths were falsely attributed to the coronavirus in the state as well. In Washington state, gunshot victims were listed as COVID-19 deaths. Now it seems that hospitalization rates, which are contributing to the increased panic about COVID, may also be inflated.

Megan had another, even more disturbing story about the once-respected medical profession:

A leaked Zoom call between doctors and marketing staff at Novant Health New Hanover Regional Medical Center in North Carolina has gone viral. It shows staff plotting to “scare” the public with inflated COVID numbers. “I guess my feeling at this point and time is maybe we need to be completely a little bit more scary [sic] to the public,” says Dr. Mary Rudyk, who served as the former chief of medical staff. “There are many people still hospitalized that we are considering post-covid but we’re not counting in those numbers, so how do we include those post-covid people in the numbers of the patients we have in the hospital?”

“We’re calling them recovered now,” replies an unidentified staff member. “From our standpoint, we would still consider them a COVID patient because they’re still healing. We can talk offline on how we run it up to marketing.”

“I think we have to be more blunt, we have to be more forceful,” says Rudyk.

“If you don’t get vaccinated you know you’re gonna die. Let’s just be really blunt to these people,” she continues, scoffing at vaccine-hesitant people.

Seriously, these people are unhinged.

When you’re truly on the side of right you don’t have to prevaricate, fudge statistics, or flat-out lie.

To complicate matters, when these people aren’t lying to the public, they are being completely incoherent.

No hearts or minds are going to change about getting vaccinated while a bunch of lying lunatics are running the asylum. It’s rough business when there is a public health crisis this massive and doctors who should be healing people are meeting with the marketing folk to figure out the best way to make crap up to be more “scary.”

I will say that I don’t think Anthony Fauci is a pathological liar. He’s just a power-mad idiot who gets almost everything wrong and then easily moves on without any remorse whatsoever.

Yeah, things are really looking up here.

Everything Isn’t Awful

This art teacher uses one continuous stroke to create incredible drawings! https://t.co/97uWSn5jwG pic.twitter.com/eyC53jL4cc

— Good Morning America (@GMA) September 13, 2021