Recent comments by CDC Director Rochelle Walensky have sparked serious questions about how COVID-19 deaths are counted.
In an interview with Good Morning America, the director said 75% of COVID deaths are among those with at least four co-morbidities — obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, etc. The agency later clarified Walensky was talking about those who are vaccinated.
On Fox News Sunday, she said 40% of COVID patients came to the hospital with another ailment, and tested positive for the virus after they got there.
Her remarks call into question COVID accounting. Is the death total inflated by those who have the virus, but would have died of something else anyway?
Is the CDC making the numbers sound worse to aid its vaccination campaigns?
If people are going to be convinced to take precautions against COVID, including getting vaccinated, they have to trust the information they’re getting from official health sources.
We know from earlier reports that different states and even different hospitals tally COVID stats by their own policies. There is no national standard.
The virus has taken a heavy toll on the nation, but without a standardized method of deciding what’s a COVID death and what’s not, we can’t quantify the true impact.
Child care scam
President Joe Biden still has hope for getting his Build Back Better bill passed through Congress. A key piece of the package is a child care subsidy. Biden says it will particularly help women return to work and that would ease the labor shortage. Look more closely, however, and the mandates for guaranteed wages and other cost-hiking provisions of the bill will increase the price of child care for everyone, but only some parents will get the subsidy. And religious facilities, a major provider of child care, might be excluded. See our editorial.
Informers or instigators?
Court filings continue to reveal fascinating details about the government’s sting of the rag-tag band of extremists charged with plotting the kidnapping of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The latest tidbits disclose the FBI used lots of high-tech spy gear, including cameras in key fobs, to build a case. The five defendants say they were entrapped, and had no intention of kidnapping the governor. They blame the 12 or so FBI operatives and informants who were embedded in the group for hatching and encouraging the plot. The upcoming trial promises to shed light on whether the government is inflating the domestic terrorism threat.
ETC.
Hospitals are once again warning they’re at risk of being pushed over the edge by the COVID surge, saying they are short-staffed and overworked. And once again I’m asking why they don’t bring back the hundreds of employees they suspended for not getting vaccinated, now that we know both the vaccinated and unvaccinated can spread the virus.
The Democratic base gave Joe Biden high marks for his divisive and angry Jan. 6 speech, so he gave it again Tuesday in Georgia. The Howard Beale act will soon wear thin, I think.
This doesn’t sound like a mandate for Joe Biden’s plan to reshape the American economy with more federal spending. A CNBC Change Research survey finds 60% of voters say the president is botching the economy, and 56% say they didn’t benefit at all from Biden’s massively expensive American Rescue Plan.
Coal continues to dwindle as a power source in the U.S. 85% of the power generating capacity that will go off-line this year will be coal plants.
This sounds too easy: A new study says older people who eat mushrooms more than twice a week are half as likely to get dementia.
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BUT how dare CONSERVATIVEs speak about those sorts of things, lest the tech masters WHINE “You are spreading misinformation”.