What Have You Learned, Grasshopper?

If you weren't around in the early 1970s, you may not get the title reference. It comes from the iconic TV series "Kung Fu," starring David Carradine. Carradine's character is an orphan growing up in a monastery in (appropriately) China, where he learns the ancient martial art of Kung Fu from his mentor, Master Po, who nicknames the lad "Grasshopper." As Po teaches the boy various life lessons, he asks the question in this post's title.

What the Curmudgeon is applying this question to is the pandemic, and the Grasshopper in question is his audience in the collective. Sixteen months after this fiasco first hit our radar, and now that it is in the rear-view mirror (and if you think it's not, you clearly don't look at the data, you only watch liberal news sources; the seven-day average of daily new cases in the U.S. as of this writing is the lowest since March 28, 2020, when most of us still didn't know what this virus was called, we just knew we couldn't find toilet paper) - now that the mask theatre is over in all sane places, now that businesses are fully open in all sane places (and even California and New York, for crying out loud), now that the vast majority of Americans are no longer staying at home, now that leisure travel has normalized - what have we learned?

Before I set forth my take on the key lessons learned from the pandemic, let me lay out a few caveats, less I offend (though I surely will, assuming there's anyone left who reads this blog who hasn't unfriended my alter ego on Facebook). Every death from this virus has been a tragedy, and if you've lost a loved one or a friend, I'm sorry for your loss. If you were ill from it, I'm sorry for that too, and I hope you're healthy now. I'm going to put forth some numbers as pure data points, but I recognize that every number represents a human life. So does the number of people who die from suicide (I lost a loved one to that cause of death in 2020). So does the number of black kids killed by gang violence, which you don't hear about in the media, because cops didn't kill them. So does the number of people killed by drunk drivers. So does the number of people who overdose on fentanyl smuggled across our southern border, which has increased dramatically this year. So does the number of kids who die of the flu every year. You get the idea. Death is tragic, regardless the cause.

Also - if wearing a mask makes, or has made, you feel safer, that's okay with me. If you're vaccinated, or plan to be in the near future, that's your choice. I'm not making any judgements about any choices anyone makes, or has made, about this pandemic. Hey, early on, I was looking for masks when there were none to be found, and we had a grocery-sanitizing routine that would rival surgery prep. Then we started looking at data. But not everyone does, and not everyone follows the same sources of information, and that's okay. So whatever your view, whatever your choice, you do you. But let me do me. And please, instead of just swallowing whatever CNN or Joe Biden or Tony Fauci says - look at some actual numbers, in their proper context. That's what this post is intended to provide. Don't agree? That's okay.

Having gotten that out of the way, herewith are the Curmudgeon's lessons from the SARS-Cov2 pandemic. Warning: it's a long read, 20 minutes or so, with a lot of data. That's good; data supports facts. You won't find data behind propaganda. But don't worry, the takeaways are numbered, so feel free to read a few at a time, then come back for more.

1. 1984 arrived about 36 years late. This lesson hit close to home: Every EC post related to the virus from the Spring of 2020 that my alter ego shared to Facebook showed up in his Memories this year as "Content Not Available" - meaning that the Zuckerbergians censored it. The Curmudgeon takes pride in the fact that he is viewed as a threat by the Orwellian Zuckmeister, because that is proof that the Curmudgeon speaks the truth. Big Brother Zuck leaves his fellow propagandists alone.

2. Everyone's an expert, and most Americans are gullible. Chiropractors posted Youtube videos proclaiming expertise about virology. An enterprising young woman without a medical degree created a Facebook profile titled "Your Local Epidemiologist" and used it as a platform to parrot every precious word that Tony Fauci uttered. And otherwise smart people lapped that stuff up like it was etched by the Almighty on stone tablets brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses himself, and they helped it spread across social media like a California wildfire. Oh, and all my Facebook friends jumped from being constitutional scholars to being epidemiologists faster than SARS-Cov2 can jump from a maskless sneezer to the poor mouth-breather crossing his path.

3. The pangolin is innocent. We can pretty much put the myth that this thing leapt from an animal to a human to bed. The earliest infected humans, we now know, worked in the Wuhan lab where this thing was likely engineered. Well, not engineered exactly, but modified from bat viruses to adapt readily to humans - supercharged, we now know from Wuhan Tony's emails, to be highly infectious to humans. And those early cases showed a virus that had already adapted to human transmission.

Not so with SARS and MERS, which were naturally transmitted from animals to humans. Those viruses took time to adapt to humans as they spread. SARS-Cov2 was already adapted. In a lab. As a result of gain-of-function research. Funded by a U.S. agency. Led by Dr. Anthony Fauci.

4. And, having followed that chain of events, we know that the Father of COVID-19, as it is also known - the Engineer of SARS-Cov2 - was then put in charge of managing the response to the pandemic unleashed by a mistake in the lab that he enabled to develop it. Is that wise? Or is it allowing the leader of the inmates to run the asylum? Fauci engaged in experimentation using human subjects of the kind not seen since Tuskegee or the Third Reich, except Fauci didn't discriminate against blacks or Jews. He enabled the engineering of a virus that he knew could be unleashed upon the entire world.

5. To further our criticism of Dr. Fauci, he has offered up more flip-flops than a Ron-Jon's surf shop in a Florida beach town. But more importantly, he has lied - repeatedly. His biggest lies were about the virus's origins, and about the effectiveness of masks. Let's address the latter as a separate lesson learned.

6. Masks. Don't. Work. Early on in the pandemic, having noted on a trip to Hawaii just prior to this thing breaking wide open that a number of Asian travelers were wearing masks, the Curmudgeon asked a friend whether masks are effective. At the time, Fauci et. al. were saying they weren't needed, because they don't work. But the Curmudgeon had to wonder if these Asian travelers were on to something, because after all, the virus - and so many other viruses - was born in their backyard.

The Curmudgeon's friend is a wicked smart retired veterinarian who, prior to working for a multinational pharma company as a research vet (studying, among other things, coronaviruses and vaccines), was in private practice for nearly two decades, during which time he performed numerous surgeries. This was his response regarding the purpose of masks:

"We wore masks in surgery to keep a sterile field sterile. And what we were worried about was bacteria, not viruses. Bacteria are boulders; viruses are pebbles. A virus would pass right through a mask."

This is precisely what Tony Fauci told a colleague in an email who had asked him, in February 2020, whether she should wear a mask on a trip. On an airplane. Where you're still required to wear a mask. Even though the air filtration is better than in a restaurant. Where you're no longer required to wear a mask. But I digress. Fauci told his colleague that masks would be ineffective against a virus due to the small size of the droplets, which would pass right through the mask.

Fauci was "confronted" with the flip-flop between that early position and his later position that masks are the most effective defense against transmission of the virus - and, indeed, that "it's just common sense" (so much for "the science") that two masks are even more effective. ("Confronted" is in quotes because the questions actually came from a Fauci-friendly reporter from a left-leaning news outlet, the only sources to which Fauci will grant interviews.) His response?

He said that the science changed, and that "we now know things we didn't know then." Well, no sir. The science, as it pertains to the size of a virus, has not changed at all. Are SARS-Cov2 droplets suddenly the size of bacteria? Nope. The change that he and other "experts" have referred to is the "discovery" that asymptomatic people cant transmit the virus. That has diddly-boo to do with the size of virus droplets. But just as importantly, this is a coronavirus. So is the common cold. We've always known that an asymptomatic person can transmit the common cold, or the flu, or any other virus. As many as 50% of flu infections come from asymptomatic people. We know this. If this is news to you, turn in your doctor card. Be sure and dust off the Cracker Jack crumbs first.

Back to the size of virus droplets. Given the fact that they didn't change, there are only two possibilities (this is a logic problem, kids). Either Fauci was wrong from the get when he said masks are ineffective against transmission of viruses due to the small size of the droplets, in which case he shouldn't be a doctor in the first place; or, when he subsequently began saying that masks are effective, he began lying. Either/or. There is no option C. And I do think he's qualified to be a doctor, frighteningly. (So was Josef Mengele, but we didn't put him in charge of cleaning up the experiments he created.) So the conclusion is that he lied. And he's been lying ever since. A lot.

7. The shutdowns were unnecessary and ineffective. Look at the data. U.S. cases fell from mid-July 2020 to mid-September, when most of America was open for business. Cases peaked in early January, and fell precipitously after that, in spite of the fact that the vaccine rollout hadn't hit 50% until just recently. What else changed in early January? After the election results were in, testing cycle thresholds were dropped nationwide, resulting in a very sharp drop in the reporting of false positive results. Hmmm. More on that later.

8. The follow-on effects of the shutdowns will be with us for a while, and are evidence that the "experts" who thought the shutdowns were necessary and a good idea are a bunch of dumbasses. Lumber prices. Gas prices. Labor shortages. Travel logjams. Inflation. A housing bubble. Chicken shortages, for crying out loud.

9. For the vast majority of us, there is little, if any, reason to get vaccinated. This is a simple matter of statistics. For the average American, you have about a 10% chance of getting the virus. However, statistically speaking, the overwhelmingly greatest factor influencing transmission (not mortality; more on that later) is population density. So, for a guy like me living in the Kansas City metro vs. NYC, my odds are a bit lower. And, as a white male, my odds are lower still, closer to about 6%. That means I have a 94% chance of not contracting the virus. Given that we now know the vaccines' efficacy rate is only about 90%, not the 94% originally hyped, I'm better off taking my chances. Even if we just take the average one-in-ten odds of getting the virus, it's a statistical push. So if there is any chance whatsoever of complications from the vaccine, there's no point in running the risk. Especially since, given my age and lack of significant co-morbidities, I have at least a 98% chance of surviving the virus if I contract it. If I were 85 and had multiple co-morbidities, the math would be different.

Now, I'm not a conspiracy theorist when it comes to the current vaccines against this virus. I don't see them as "experimental." I do know that they do not have full FDA approval though; they only have emergency use authorization. I also know that the mRNA technology is unproven, and the long-term effects in terms of auto-immune impact are unknown - and that means just that, they're unknown. Those effects could be nothing. Or they could be significant. It's too soon to know. I also know that the adverse reactions to this vaccine are a statistical anomaly, but at the same time they are undoubtedly being under-reported, and if any other vaccine had this many adverse reactions reported, it would have been pulled off the market by now. There is ample evidentiary precedent for this.

Bottom line: I am not in the conspiracy theory camp regarding these vaccines, nor am I an anti-vaxxer in general (I get the flu vaccine every year, because I'm around my grandkids, who are at-risk when it comes to the flu, whereas I'm not around anyone who's in the SARS-Cov2 at-risk population). But I do know statistics, and I know my odds are the same with the vaccine or without it. So as long as there are any question marks about it, I'm waiting. When there are traditional vaccines available that have full FDA approval, I'll be more likely to sign up.

It makes even less sense to me to vaccinate kids. The mortality rate among those aged 0-17 is infinitesimally small: less than .0005%. Yet the CDC is now studying an alarmingly high incidence of myocarditis among young people who've been vaccinated. Now, only 275 cases have been reported in the U.S. But that's between about three and 30 times the number expected. And in Israel, where this side effect first showed up, a number of kids have died. Again, any other vaccine - especially without full FDA approval - would be pulled off the market with an incidence rate of a potentially fatal side effect that high.

Now, some news reports are screeching about how new "variants" (a word that should be scrubbed from the English language, as its only purpose is to scare people who don't know any better) are more dangerous to kids. Really? Then show me the data. Show me how cases among kids are increasing. Show me how deaths among kids are increasing. You can't. Because they're not. There have been zero COVID deaths among those aged 0-17 years in the month of June, 2021. But there's been at least one death from myocarditis following the vaccine.

Some reporting has indicated that, for most of these cases, the condition clears up within a few months. But I wouldn't want my kid to have heart inflammation for several months as a result of a vaccine intended to prevent an illness that, for the overwhelming majority of kids (like more than 99.99%), will not only not affect them for four months, they probably won't even know they have it, and it won't affect them for a minute. Having said all that, it's every individual's - and parent's - choice. So if you've vaccinated your kid, or plan to, you do you. I assume you can weigh the risk-reward for yourself.

10. This thing has been massively overblown. It's no more than a bad flu season. Sorry, fearmongers; the truth is in the data. If you plot a graph of excess mortality per capita in the U.S. by year, 2020 looks a lot like the 1968 and 1957 influenza pandemics. (There were no shutdowns for either of those. No one wore masks. They were both viruses. Asymptomatic people could transmit them.) The 2020 pandemic gets compared to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Not. Even. Close. Excess mortality per capita that year was a huge spike compared to 2020, 1968 and 1957.

Remember, we're talking per capita here, which you have to do for comparative purposes. Populations grow. Let's break down the numbers for comparison.

2020 SARS-Cov2 pandemic: 34,259,904 U.S. cases, 613,388 U.S. deaths, total U.S. population 372,817,890 (as of this writing). That's 10.3% cases per capita, .19% of the population died *with* the virus (more on that later), and a CFR (case fatality rate) of 1.8%, about half the number we were originally presented with in early 2020. We'll talk about age (and co-morbidities) in more detail later, but most of the deaths were among those aged 65 and older.

1968 flu pandemic: 100,000 U.S. deaths, total U.S. population 200,700,000. That's .05% of the population. However, most of the deaths were among those over 65 years of age, as was the case with SARS-Cov2. And in 1968, Americans in that age cohort represented less than 10% of the population, vs. 16.5% of the population in 2020, thanks to the aging Boomers. So, adjusting for population distribution, 2.75% of the 65+ population died of the flu in 1968, vs. 3.6% of this virus in 2020. Pretty close.

1957 flu pandemic: 116,000 U.S. deaths, total U.S. population 172,000,000. That's .07% of the population. However, in 1957, less than 9% of the population was over the age of 65. So again adjusting for population distribution, 3.7% of the 65+ population died of the flu in 1957, vs. 3.6% of SARS-Cov2 in 2020.

That's right: the 1957 flu pandemic was deadlier on a per capita basis, adjusted for population distribution, than the COVID pandemic. Yet no masks, no shutdowns. Now, you may say "what about people younger than 65?" Two answers: first, the flu is far deadlier for kids than SARS-Cov2, so a flu pandemic is going to be more deadly, in general, for those younger than 65. (We'll talk later about why, then, most of the people who died in the flu pandemics were over 65.)

Second - keep reading.

11. If you're under the age of 60 and have no serious co-morbidities, this thing wasn't even a bad flu season. Consider that 83% of U.S. deaths presented with at least one co-morbidity. That's more than 500,000 of the 600,000 reported U.S. deaths. No co-morbidities? COVID only took about 100,000 people.

Patients over the age of 60 accounted for less than 18% of COVID diagnoses, but more than 69% of COVID deaths. Patients over the age of 69 accounted for less than 5% of diagnoses, but more than 42% of deaths. About 80% of total U.S. deaths were among those aged 65 and older. That's nearly 500,000 of the 600,000 U.S. deaths. Combine those two factors, and the virus probably took about the same number of lives as the flu in an average year - 35,000 or so.

This thing is a killer, alright - if you're old. Especially if you have co-morbidities, which elderly folks are more likely to have.

12. There actually have not been 600,000 U.S. deaths from the virus. Let's say you had a co-morbidity like heart disease. You get the virus, and die of a heart attack. They list the virus as the cause of death, and note that you died "with" COVID. But you died from a heart attack, something to which you were pre-disposed. The flu could have brought on a heart attack. Running up the stairs could have. Deaths were overstated due to this - which by the way, was an intentional change in cause of death reporting methodology at the outset of the pandemic. Previously, primary cause of death was listed as the thing the deceased died from. At the beginning of the pandemic, the CDC changed the reporting methodology to call cause of death COVID if the deceased had the virus at the time of death, even if death was caused by something else.

Also, the CARES Act included a subsidy for hospitals for each COVID death in their facility. Makes sense, right? Takes care of the front line. Well, I personally know of one hospital whose practice it was to move all actively dying patients to the COVID wing - even those who had tested negative immediately before. Think this abuse was isolated? Don't be naive. There was an incentive, and there was no monitoring, no accountability. So we have no idea to what extent SARS-Cov2 deaths have been overstated. But we can be sure they have been.

13. The most important statistic to scientists and medical professionals is not the CFR, or case fatality rate, it's the IFR, or infection fatality rate. That's the number of deaths divided by the number of people infected, rather than reported cases. Why is that important? Because people may get infected, but are asymptomatic, and never get tested. If we go by the CFR, we over-estimate how deadly a disease actually is. The IFR is the true measure of lethality.

The only way we'll ever get to the IFR is if every person in the world gets an antibody test. That should be the focus, not trying to get every person in the world vaccinated. Once we know how many people have antibodies, we'll come closer to knowing how many people were infected. Then, we'll have our denominator. And then, if we divide deaths from the virus by that denominator, we'll probably find that for people without co-morbidities, the IFR is no greater than that of influenza.

14. The other important reason to have everyone tested for antibodies is that we might find we're already at herd immunity. But the CDC doesn't want you to look at it that way. While their website still defines herd immunity in terms of those who have been infected plus those who have been vaccinated, the Director has publicly stated that herd immunity refers only to immunity through vaccination. Health officials have never applied this definition before.

We don't even have reliable case numbers, and that's not just because we don't know about all the early asymptomatic infections (or symptomatic, but untested, infections). China was hiding this thing early on, and suppressing their numbers. So was Russia. Then, as testing became widespread, there was a desire for political reasons to overstate the case numbers. (Had the pandemic not occurred during an election year, the whole thing would have looked quite different. But then, maybe it's no coincidence that it occurred during an election year.)

So the testing cycle thresholds were manipulated higher. Here's how the PCR test works. It detects bits of the virus in the sample taken. The test is run over a number of cycles, and each cycle has a chance of detecting more bits of the virus. The more cycles you run, the more likely you'll detect a bit of the virus. But -

At some point, you may start detecting dead virus cells. In other words, the subject may have had the virus, but it's no longer active, so they can't spread it. They've recovered. It's no longer an active case. They were one of those early asymptomatic infections. So counting them as an active case is a false positive. One epidemiologist (a qualified one) said that a cycle threshold above 35 would produce too many false positives. (Fauci himself later said the same thing.) The same epidemiologist said that using a cycle threshold of 40 or above would overstate cases by a significant number. She used the analogy of finding a hair from a serial killer's head in a room full of people six months after the killer left, and determining that he's still a threat to the people in the room.

On November 13 - after the election - the CDC updated its FAQs to include information on the effect of cycle thresholds on test results. Only this year, the WHO released guidance on cycle thresholds, and many states began quietly reducing theirs. Kansas, for example, had been using a cycle threshold of 42. In early January, it dropped its threshold to 35. Other states that had had high thresholds, and then dropped them in January, included New York, California, and North Carolina. All three are in the top 10 among U.S. states in reported SARS-Cov2 cases.

So we don't know the number of cases, we don't know the number of infections, and we don't know the number of deaths caused by the virus. (I suppose if those high-cycle tests were picking up dead virus cells in people who had been infected and didn't know it, maybe that gets us closer to total infections. But the best measure is still to get everyone an antibody test.)

The bottom line, though, in terms of herd immunity, is this: let's say the case count is accurate. So 10% of the population has immunity through infection. We know that some number above that has been infected and didn't know it, and they have immunity too. (I know the "experts" are saying that they may not, but they did with every other virus known to man, including every other coronavirus, so their fearmongering has no scientific foundation. There is no evidence to support it.) And, reportedly one has about 60-70% immunity from having at least one dose of vaccine, and over 52% of the population have had that. So we're somewhere north of 62% immunity.

More importantly, 92% of those over 65 have had one shot, and 80% of that population have been fully vaccinated. That's the population the vaccination effort should have been focused on. The rest of us should be getting antibody tests.

15. Back to the flu for a minute. If the flu is more deadly for kids than other illnesses, why were most of the deaths in the 1957 and 1968 flu pandemics among those aged 65 and older? Because most of the deaths from all causes in 1957 and 1968 were among those aged 65 and older. Why? Because most of the deaths in any year are among those aged 65 and older. We're born, we grow up, we age, we get old, we die. The older we get, the nearer death we are. Ask any actuary.

Read the next paragraph slowly. Read it carefully. Read it more than once. Think hard about what it means, about what it says about all the fear-mongering and bad reporting and false Faucisms and stupid political mandates we've suffered through over the last 16 months.

You know what the average age of COVID deaths is? Eighty-six. You know what the average age of deaths in the U.S. in any given year is? Eighty-six.

So, Grasshopper - what have you learned?

I have to say that what I've learned simply confirms - with hard data, and words we now know came from Herr Fauci himself - what I already believed, or at least suspected. You see, when the government and media and public health officials (who are part of the government) start to get all ginned up about something, my BS meter tends to bury the needle in the red. And the needle's been bent for a little over a year now.