CDC Now Agrees with Conspiracy Theorists and Science Deniers
New government guidelines say to treat covid-19 and flu the same
“Covid-19 is no worse than the flu.” Three years ago, that statement would have gotten me banned from social media, made me a science denier and possibly become the target of a government investigation.
Today, that’s pretty much the official statement of the Centers for Disease Control.
Last week the CDC released an updated recommendation for how to deal with respiratory viruses. In it, it rescinded its long-standing recommendation to isolate for five days after testing positive for covid. Now, you can treat covid just like the flu – stay home if you’re sick, cover your mouth when coughing or sneezing, wash your hands and breathe plenty of fresh air. Of course, they’re still recommending vaccinations for covid and the flu.
This is quite a change from the hardcore stance that comparing covid to the flu is misinformation. That was actually viewed as a threat to our nation. As recently as December 2022, the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency issued a video urging children to report and combat misinformation by tattling on their adult relatives. Their example: A statement made by a young girl’s uncle that “Everybody knows that covid is no worse than the flu.”
The Biden Administration issued orders to Twitter and other social media platforms to do more to censor “misinformation” like this just two years ago. People who said such ignorant things were science deniers and conspiracy theorists. Now it’s the standard line from the government.
Was Covid a Killer?
Wait, didn’t millions die from covid? Good question.
The CDC lists 1.18 million deaths in the United States from covid. But we know, both from official and anecdotal sources, that not all covid deaths were actually the result of covid. For example, one doctor told me that if a 90-year-old with terminal cancer contracted covid and died, she was listed as a covid death, even though she would have died within a few months anyway – and maybe had died from the cancer, not covid.
Almost all the deaths in the United States from covid were among elderly people and those with comorbidities. Those dying of covid suffered from an average of four comorbidities – some as high as 10 – and were already walking a steady path toward death. Anyone whose immune system was taxed by poor health had the most risk.
Some of the early deaths from covid also came from a misguided attempt to place patients on ventilators. A number of doctors early on raised the alarm that the ventilators were doing more harm than good. So it’s unknown how many of the deaths could have been prevented with better intervention.
The Disappearing Flu
Another crazy thing happened during the pandemic. The flu did a vanishing act worthy of David Copperfield.
According to CDC statistics, the four flu periods prior to the pandemic, through the 2019-20 period, accounted for 143,000 deaths. Since then, it lists about 5,000 – none for the 2020-21 period! At the very least, that seems suspicious. (The CDC estimate for the 2022-23 period was around 21,400 with 72 percent of those being people older than 65 and just 7 percent of those under 50, although apparently they don’t have final stats yet.)
The question then is how many of the “covid” deaths from 2020-2023 were actually from the flu?
As you can see, if we start whittling away at the deaths that could have come from other causes than covid, but were listed as covid, the number shrinks considerably.
The bottom line always was from the very start that if you were even reasonably healthy and younger than 50, the risk of death from covid was negligible, certainly no more than from the flu.
Yet we were admonished to “trust the science” that covid was a deadly virus, far worse than the flu. Those of us who questioned the actual danger of covid, who claimed it seemed no worse than the flu, were called science deniers and a danger to society.
Now, though, the science is showing covid is no worse than the flu. So all along, it was the so-called science deniers who were the only ones who actually trusted the science.