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Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Smith’s Corona Halacha MANIFESTO

Exposing the Lies We’ve Been Told About Covid, Shutting Shuls, Supposed “Upticks” and More

By Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Smith

September 17, 2020

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Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Smith
Passaic Park, New Jersey
(973) 771–6503
PassaicClarity@gmail.com
By the Grace of G-d
10 Elul 5780
August 30, 2020

L’chvod* HaRosh HaYeshiva, Rabbonim[1], Members of the Passaic-Clifton COVID-19 Task Force[2], Members of the Medical Committee of the Passaic-Clifton COVID-19 Task Force[3], Shlita[4]:

Sholom u’vrocho,

It is imperative that this community be restored to a rightful setting where Torah is paramount, and individuals are respected.

In the ongoing debates about masks and coronavirus vaccines, I suggest that the masks and the prospect of vaccines are a valid concern but still is a distraction.  The real issue is that the government has decreed who is essential and who is not essential.  Essential people can make a living.  Those decreed non-essential cannot make a living and either starve or become a ward of the state.  There is no basis or definition in any law, just decrees.  The fact that the Jews are not singled out is no comfort – this is war against humanity.  The danger of such decrees cannot be overstated, and they must be rejected.[5]

There is no place in Torah for a Jewish community to be governed by a committee of medical doctors.  Nor by an unelected committee composed of Rabbonim, politicians and doctors.

The concept of a doctor in Torah, and the permission to heal, is based on a personal relationship between a doctor and an individual patient where the doctor is both an expert in a relevant disease and knows the patient personally.  Such a doctor is a doctor that a Rov has permission to listen to and to take into consideration the medical insights of the doctor as to that patient.  However, a doctor cannot make decrees for a community of individuals that he has never met, or knows nothing of their health, and/or regarding a disease that he has no personal experience with.

Civilization is going through the writhing pangs of the establishment of public health supremacy which intends to overrule all other considerations, including Torah.  Public health is not ‘refuah’ in Torah.  Public health is not a substitute for Torah.

In Round One of the Public Health decrees, the Rabbonim were overwhelmed with pressuring doctors and threats of ventilator shortages[6] and news reports of hospitalizations and deaths and not given proper access to evaluate the metzius hadevorim and innocently made decisions accordingly.  But there has now been plenty of time to become knowledgeable and there remains time to use the remaining days and weeks to become knowledgeable.

A Rov must educate himself in the metzius hadeovrim.  He must also educate himself in the skills necessary to understand and evaluate the metzius hadevorim. For example, in the current situation, a Rov must learn basic statistics and understand a numerator and a denominator and the elements that contribute to the increase and decrease of each of those and what effect that has on such output numbers as infection rates and mortality rates.  Just as a Rov cannot make a ruling in industrial kashrus without taking the time to investigate and understand modern food production methodologies, so too a Rov cannot merely ratify the recommendations of a doctor or a group of doctors who have been trained and influenced in universities and training programs to further the public health program.[7]

Furthermore, a Rov must investigate alternative viewpoints.  Science is predicated upon a process of hypothesis and challenge.  It is impossible to claim that a decision is made based on ‘science’ if no challenge is allowed or investigated.  Just as a Dayan cannot make a ruling without hearing the opposing side, decrees cannot be made upon the people, if they can be made at all, without a thorough investigation as to whether Torah and the metzius hadevorim support such a decree.

A Rov must research and understand the cruel history of public health and its methods and goals.  That is part of the metzius hadevorim.

Continue reading…

From Emes News, here.

BLASTING Rosh Hashanah Corona Restrictions…

It’s a Schmad!

“Health Minister Edelstein says the public will be allowed to gather and pray on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, in a ‘very limited’ fashion.” (Times of Israel)

This is a Schmad, religious persecution. A grand total of 182 people under the age of 70 have died from or with COVID19 in Israel. I say from or with because the death certificates list COVID19 even if the person only tested positive for it but died from cancer or a heart attack.

And what does it mean to test positive? It means that the PCR test detected viral matter. The person may not be infected at all. There are many cases where family members have asserted that the deceased did not have any symptoms of COVID19, but the hospitals insisted on marking COVID19 on the death certificate. He or she was exposed to the virus. That’s all. But we are exposed to many viruses every day. The body fights them off. This is the first time in history that natural processes of good health are deemed to be sickness.

Moreover, the test in Israel uses a very high level of magnification. In Germany, they test at 30 cycles. In Singapore 32 cycles. In America, 34. But in Israel, they test at the ridiculously high level of 37 cycles. The more cycles, the more magnification. This is a hypersensitive test that detects the slightest viral matter. When the press tells you that there were 3,000 new infections the press is lying. They are LIARS. All the test shows is that the person was exposed to the virus. The person in the vast majority of cases is not now a case, not a patient, not sick. But over and over we hear of the infection rate expanding. What’s expanding is testing at 37 cycles of magnification.

All over frum neighborhoods, there are campaigns to test for the virus. Are they doing this in Chiloni neighborhoods? Some people did an experiment. They called up the health ministry and said a yeshiva bochur was exposed to somebody who tested positive. What should he do? Get tested, he was told. They called again and said a university student was exposed to somebody who tested positive. What should he do? Don’t get tested, he was told. You might force your classmate to go into bidud (quarantine) if you do. This experiment was repeated multiple times with the same result each time. The government is trying to frame religious Jews in particular.

That isn’t to say that they aren’t harassing the entire country, just not as much. Over 1 million people in Israel have been put into quarantine over the last six months. That’s over 11% of the population. And the secret police watch over it all, creeping into phones, and spying on people, and arresting, intimidating. And very few of the people whose lives have been turned upside down have been infected to any degree. The State of Israel was founded by violent militants and they created a culture of militarism. It’s a mentality that is everywhere evident in this society but has gone to ridiculous degrees over COVID19. The leaders act like they are in a war with Arabs. They think it’s 1948. One half-expects them to order everyone to shut their lights at night for fear of enemy COVID bombers locating the cities. They are a pack of dictators, wanna-be military commanders who have locked a million healthy people into quarantine.

And what if these people really were infected? That’s actually a good thing because 98% of them don’t get sick but they develop immunity. 80% of people who test positive show no symptoms at all. 18% show minor symptoms. As Dr. Scott Atlas, MD, of Stanford University explains:

But there’s a more fundamental point that I want to make sure have time to address and that is this idea that somehow has evolved that we must stop cases. That was never the policy, that should never be the policy when you have an infection that 99% of people have no problem with. It’s no big deal if low-risk people get the infection. It’s really irrational to somehow keep apart healthy younger people, to insist that they should wear a mask, or that there should be some limit in restaurants. If you are high risk, you are high risk. But the most recent data shows that the infection fatality rate for people under 70 is 0.04%. That’s one-one hundredth of the original number. And what that means is for people under 70 years old your infection fatality rate is less than or equal to seasonal flu. If people want to shut down things because of that kind of risk then we better shut down all the schools and restaurants during November through April [every year] because that’s the flu season. The same risk people for this are at risk to die from the flu. And so there’s been a complete loss of common sense here.

(Interview on Drive In with The Morning Ritual with Garret Lewis, June 26, 2020. 6:18-11:21)

Dr. Atlas, a world-famous public health expert, is President Trump’s new Coronavirus adviser. He tells us that the way to protect the vulnerable is to allow younger, healthy people to be exposed to the virus:

It doesn’t matter that young healthier people get the infection. In fact, there’s a positive. Because we know the way to get immunity in the population is to have more people who are lower risk get the infection and become immune. That’s the whole point of giving vaccines to stop the pathways of the virus to the most risky people. That’s why we give widespread populations vaccines, for herd immunity. And the way naturally to get herd immunity is to have low-risk people have the infection, they build up immunity, and eventually, the pathways to the high-risk people are blocked. There’s nothing wrong with more cases. The only thing that counts is protecting the people who are going to die. (Ibid.)

So the lockdown endangers the elderly and chronically ill.

I know a few people who have received positive results on the PCR test. Most have no symptoms at all. One or two have a few minor ones. I know of 4-year-olds in bidud, isolation. No symptoms except mental illness setting in from the utter lunacy of the way the diabolical leaders are handling this situation. People with symptoms are better in a day or two. It’s like a minor cold for most of them.

I have asked many people, do you know anyone who is sick. Everyone said no. Every single one said no. One had an aunt that was sick a few months ago. In six months, I found one person who knows someone who once was sick. What kind of epidemic is that? If there were an epidemic there’d be waiting lists for burials. You’d spot hearses on your street every day. This week, I was trying to find a shiduch for a 60 year old Kohen but couldn’t think of any almanas. If there were a pandemic, there would be plenty of almanas, Lo Aleinu.

Oh, you know of a case that’s severe? And your cousin knows of that case. And you all keep talking about it and talking about it. Maybe you read about it on Yeshiva World News, the misnamed Zionist propaganda website. The media repeats these stories, over and over. Everyone talks about the same single case. Sounds like a thousand people but it’s one.

But we don’t make public health decisions by talking about a single case you know. You can go view car wrecks with body parts all over the road. Hard thing to see. Are you going to ban cars forever? How about a visit to the hospital rooms of cancer patients? It’s gruesome.  Every ward in the hospital is gruesome, even the maternity ward has tragedies. Maybe you’ll view a film of a person choking to death on a chicken bone? That’s quite hard to watch. If you saw that would you say that we should never eat chicken again? We can never eat again because you know a case of one guy that choked. People get struck by lightning. Should we lock ourselves in our houses every time a cloud appears in the sky? People get electrocuted. Should we remove all electronics from our lives? Have you ever seen a person get electrocuted? It’s horrible.

This is not how you make public health decisions. You need to look at data. The health minister of Israel, an aspiring dictator, told us today that he won’t tolerate any discussion on the lockdown. He’ll take you to a Corona ward and you’ll understand. That’s how he makes decisions for the entire country. No need for data. No need for an understanding of immunology. Just loudmouth declarations of emotion — Israeli style.

In Israel, presently there are 480 seriously sick people from COVID19 out of a population of 9,200,000.

That is a tiny percentage. Meanwhile, 7,000 people will die this year in Israel from illnesses produced by cigarette smoking. 2,500 will die from pollution, 900 will die from the flu. How do I know? Because that’s what happens every year. So where were the lockdowns last year, where is the ban on smoking, why don’t they fix up the factories in Haifa? It’s been many years since birth defects were reported to result from that pollution in Haifa. Anybody shut down the factories? All you life lovers, where have you been? Surely that would cost less than the $6.5 billion NIS that this lockdown is going to cost, to go with the billions from the prior lockdowns. Are we so concerned with human life — one life is like the universe? That one concept has become the whole Torah in the goyishe brains of some people. Suddenly, we care about life? 10,000 a year are dying from the illnesses I just described. I never heard hysteria about them before. Just ban smoking, you’ll save 70,000 people a decade. No lockdowns required. 800 die a year from second- hand smoke! You can save 8,000 innocent people a decade. And what about the million and a half babies aborted in Israel? You love life so much? You value every Jewish life? Where have you been?

Maybe the difference is that banning smoking will not obstruct religious practice. Maybe closing or fixing the factories won’t destroy the Jewish religion. Ah, maybe that’s it. And maybe that’s why this latest lockdown starts on eruv Rosh Hashanah and goes through Simchas Torah! Can they be any more obvious?

Want to know who knows what a fraud this all this? The Prime Minister. Netanyahu was caught on video, riding in a car, saying “By the way, you don’t have to worry about this Corona. It’s all nonsense.” I have seen the video. He knows it’s nonsense, but he is shutting down the country, shutting down the Orthodox communities in particular.

So what will be with tefillah on Rosh Hashanah? That will be permitted by the masters, the kings, the dictators of the so-called Jewish democracy in a “very limited” fashion.  You hear that? Very limited.  For 70 years they have waited for this. And now they can conduct their Schmad and portray themselves as heroes for all who are too naive, too stupid to see it.

So what are the limitations? Essentially, it’s that 20 people can daven together outside, you know, in the parking lot. All day long in a parking lot in the heat, suffocating under a dirty mask with pieces of garbage and pigeon waste under their feet. In shuls, it’s a 10 person limit in most cases, in larger buildings more ‘capsules’ are permitted by the tyrants. But Rosh Hashanah davening cannot be staggered. It’s an all-day thing. You can’t have the first minyan at 7:00 and the second minyan at 9:00. So what does this mean? You can fit only a small portion of the men in the buildings. And what about the women? Everyone go find a parking lot and some kind of Shatz? This is what these animals, these pigs want to do to Rosh Hashanah. Woe to Klal Yisroel to have fallen to such a state. And all who supported the Zionists over the decades bear the guilt!

And what do alleged Orthodox Jews say about this? What do the people who claim to know just what Rosh Hashanah means, what Yom Kippur means, what a minyan means? Have they traded in Torah Judaism for the latest religion: pukuach nefesh? That’s the new religion. Life! Life!

How goyish is that? It’s totally goyish. Life without Torah makes you a goy. This worship of life for life’s sake is goyish. The average age of death from or with COVID19 in Israel is 80.4. One of the heads of Shaarei Tzedek hospital said that they didn’t lose one young healthy person and nearly everyone who died there had a year to live from other illnesses. Yes, we must get those terminally ill 80 year-olds another six months at the expense of our religion, at the expense of their grandchildren’s lives.

That’s not to say that lockdowns help them. As I explained the lockdowns limit herd immunity and endanger the terminally ill. But we have all become so hysterical about conquering death, about life for life’s sake, about extending the age of mortality just a tiny little bit so we can brag at World Health Organization conferences that the State of Israel is high in the rankings, we have become so irrational with this goyish, secular goal that we actually are endangering people by obstructing herd immunity. We have become simpletons.

We endanger people in other ways too. I have a family friend whose father feared going to the doctor during this time and suffered a massive heart attack. He is now a vegetable on life support. Others have reported such stories. There are many cases of suicides among the elderly who can’t deal with all the isolation. Dr. John Ioannides one of the most respected scientists on the planet says that a billion people worldwide are in danger of starvation because of the lockdowns. Lockdowns are not just inconvenient, they cost lives. Dr. Scott Atlas estimates that the far more limited restrictions in America kill more people each month than the virus has in its entire run.

Nobody conquers death. We will all die someday. Those who live for olam hazeh can’t deal with that. They want to push off the gehennom that awaits them by staying alive at all costs rather than by doing teshuva.

Goy! Shaygetz! The doctors who cause this hysteria are apikorsim. They are Esav. So, too, are the so-called rabbis that bow to them. The baal habatim are running Klal Yisroel right now, except in a few faithful communities.

The yomim noraim lockdown is only part of this Schmad. We have been in one kind of lockdown or another since Pesach. There are two yeshiva ketanas near my home. One was shut down entirely until they moved the whole thing to some kind of lockdown facility in another city. Another is partially open. 2/3 of the bochurim and the Rosh Yeshiva are in bidud. He’s been in bidud numerous times. He returns, he goes back. He’s not sick. He was in the presence of a bochur who was in the presence of somebody who tested positive for exposure to the virus. Nobody is sick. I stopped by the building this morning. The place is nearly empty of rabbis and bochurim. There were as many Arab construction workers in the building as Jews.

Same with shuls. They are shells of their former selves. Long-running shiurim have stopped. There are signs on the walls not to use the books. Minyanim that used to be packed are poorly attended, in part because of the rules limiting attendance. One shul that always had people learning in it, at least a half a dozen at all hours, save maybe 2 – 5 AM, now has one or two, sometimes none. A know a guy who went there for slichos today. He said they raced through slichos like they were trying to catch a train. He’s not going back, he said. This shul is not Dati Leumi. It’s not even yeshiva-light. It’s one of the more yeshivish places, so-called Israeli yeshivish which we are told means really schtarke. The place is nearly closed and has been so for months. I know teenage boys who used to go there after school to learn Gemara. The boys are in a funk now, in a daze. They don’t know what to do with themselves. There are many like this. There are bochurim all over the streets, just wandering around.

Yiddishkite is largely a religion of the mind. Duties of the heart comprise many of our most basic mitzvos. A person needs peace of mind to function as a Jew. All this government oppression, police oppression, tergiversations, instability, and panic are destroying people’s minds.

Pint-sized weddings are being held on rooftops. Young women wait their whole lives for the wedding. They dream of their weddings. It’s their one moment in the spotlight, the kickoff of their lives. How about starting your life with a whimper?

I have been to online bar mitzvahs, vorts and shalom zachars in parking lots. In my town historically, shalom zachars are packed. You can’t get in the room. And parking lot shalom zachars? 4 people show up. They stay for 10 minutes.

The wicked ones have been trying to destroy Torah for two hundred years. They want to turn us into Esav, into materialists who worship worldly things. The haskalah took many. Then Zionism stole away so many more. The lure of land, and armies and flags and building construction was too much for many. It appealed to their yetzer hara for materialism.

But it didn’t grab everyone. A small portion of Klal Yisroel stayed faithful. So now we have Corona. It is yet another trick. Ah, we’ll make this one into a mitzvah too. We are saving lives! Life. Guard your health says the Torah. “Vi’nishmartem meod l’nafshoseichem.” The same communities where fatty diets are the mainstay and children are stuffed with candy poison day and night suddenly are screaming to guard the health. The same Israelis who inspect every fruit with their dirty hands, pick up every donut before choosing one to buy, who put their bare rolls on the dirty food store conveyor belt are suddenly obsessed with disease transmission. Hypocrites!

In the sefer Chafetz Chaim al HaTorah [Va’eschanan] the Chafetz Chaim explains why the posuk of “vi’nishmartem meod l’nafshoseichem”, which includes the commandment to guard one’s health, uses the term of nefesh, rather than the term guf. He explains that while engaging in the process of guarding physical health, one may not thereby trample on his spiritual health.

And what is spiritual health if not Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur? What is life without a real Rosh Hashanah? What is life with a “very limited” Yom Kippur? That’s life? No, it’s not life. It’s death. Do you hear me? It’s death.

And what about the talks we get year after year? Our life hangs in the balance. It will all be decided on Rosh Hashanah. Did we mean it? Are we just parroting words? On Rosh Hashanah, we crown the king. Has Corona become the king? Is the health minister the king? Is the government security cabinet the king?

Hashem is the King! Hashem is the King! Hashem is the King! HASHEM IS THE KING!!! Are we to crown Him in the parking lot on top of the pigeon waste!

We shall see who grasps what Rosh Hashanah means in just a few days. We shall see who really believes in the power of Rosh Hashanah and who has sold his soul to the secular, heretical Zionists, Esav, and his little army.

Esav came with 400 men. Yaakov davened to Hashem.

Which are you? What are you going to do?

Outspoken Professor Yoram Lass on the Corona Panic

Professor Yoram Lass to Arutz Sheva: ‘Pandemic psychosis’

Former HM Director: ‘Pandemic psychosis virus is new means of communication; social networks never existed in previous viral pandemics.’

Mordechai Sones , 13/08/20 12:34

Arutz Sheva spoke to Former Health Ministry Director Professor Yoram Lass, who has been outspoken and unembarrassed in his criticism of Health Ministry COVID-19 policy.

Professor Lass does not suggest that minor errors have been made in determining Israeli mitigation policy, rather he says the Health Ministry is disseminating completely erroneous data; there is no “excess mortality” in Israel, no plague, and, as a rule, the so-called “dead because of coronavirus” did not die from coronavirus.

Everyone was concerned during the opening days and weeks of this crisis, after hearing projections by experts that predicted millions of deaths, and seeing images from China, with people falling on the ground in mid-stride and dying in the streets.

At one point however, some experts began to be skeptical. Did you personally experience such a shift, and if so, when, and what was the cause?

“Even in the early days of the coronavirus epidemic back in January 2020, I was looking at the data – not at the pictures – at the data from China. I knew that on a monthly basis – every month – one million Chinese approximately died every month. And the numbers coming out of the coronavirus epidemic were so small.

“Up to this point – and I believe the data – up to this point, less than five thousand Chinese people died from the coronavirus. Which is negligible; there is no plague. There is not even an ‘event’ in China.

“The same in Japan, where we have one-hundred-twenty-million people, and about one thousand people ‘dying from coronavirus’, and they did not die from coronavirus; they died from old age, cancer, heart attack, and so on.

“So, from the early days I knew there is no epidemic in eastern Asia. There is no epidemic in the Middle East. There is an epidemic event in western Europe and in the United States, which is comparable to a very severe influenza epidemic, that’s all. So the world destruction is not justified.”

People find it hard to believe that the entire government apparatus of experts and dedicated civil servants could get it so wrong with something so big. Is there a way to explain this?

“What we have is a pandemic psychosis. And the pandemic psychoses virus are the new means of communication, namely, the social networks which never existed before in previous viral pandemics; that’s the answer.

“People and governments are out of their minds. They see horror pictures. And the horror picture – which is true for a certain moment, a certain date, a certain location, but has nothing to do with the real picture – they look at these pictures and immediately it becomes a policy.

“So this is my answer: People, including governments, are out of their minds. And look at the situation in Sweden, who remained calm, rational, and look at the situation in Belgium, where they had this severe lockdown. Twice as many dead people in Belgium, if you compare Belgium to Sweden – twice as many – with severe lockdown.”

In May, Prime Minister Netanyahu appeared on a video of the Coronavirus Global Response International Pledging Event, calling for quote, “better diagnostics, treatments, and a safe and effective vaccine”. He joined a long list of world leaders reading an identical script.

Just this week, the Health Ministry admitted that cause of death for anyone in Israel is determined by the practitioner in charge according to World Health Organization guidelines. Therefore, any COVID-19-positive patient who died during hospitalization will likely be reported as COVID-19 death. Are Israeli policymakers independent?

“Israeli policymakers follow the directions of the World Health Organization, which are absolutely wrong.

“According to WHO, if people die from cancer, from old age, from coronary heart disease, even from a road accident – if incidentally you have a positive coronavirus test, policymakers are obliged, according to the WHO, to write down ‘coronavirus’ as the cause of death, which is insane, and which is part of the insanity and the wrong numbers which are being currently published by governments around the world.”

From INN, here.

ESSAY: How the International Ruling Class Used Corona Bogeyman to Stifle Resistance

Essay 07.17.2020

And how to unlock ourselves.

Panicked by fears manufactured by the ruling class, the American people assented to being put essentially under house arrest until further notice, effectively suspending the habits, preferences, and liberties that had defined our way of life. Most Americans have suffered economic damage. Many who do not enjoy protected status have had careers ended and been reduced to penury. Social strains and suicides multiplied. Forcibly deferring all manner of medical care is sure to impose needless suffering and death. In sum, the lockdowns’ medical and economic dysfunctions make for multiples of the deaths and miseries of the COVID-19 virus itself.

Bad judgments and usurpations—the scam, not the germs—define this disaster’s dimensions. The COVID-19’s devastating effect on the U.S. body politic is analogous to what diseases do to persons whom age (senectus ipsa est morbus) and various debilities and corruptions had already placed on death’s slippery slope.

Outside of the few who have gained (and are still gaining) power and wealth from the panic, Americans are asking what it will take to end this outrage—not to modify it with any “new normal” decided by who knows whom, on who knows what authority. Since no one in authority is leading those who want to end it, Americans also wonder who may lead that cause. What follows suggests answers.

What history will record as the great COVID scam of 2020 is based on 1) a set of untruths and baseless assertions—often outright lies—about the novel coronavirus and its effects; 2) the production and maintenance of physical fear through a near-monopoly of communications to forestall challenges to the U.S.. ruling class, led by the Democratic Party, 3) defaulted opposition on the part of most Republicans, thus confirming their status as the ruling class’s junior partner. No default has been greater than that of America’s Christian churches—supposedly society’s guardians of truth.

Truth

Since obfuscation, pretense, and lies concerning the COVID-19 are the effective agents of the panic and of the seizure of arbitrary power, truth and clarity about it are the foundational requirements for escaping its effects. Here is a dose.

From early March 2020 on, the best-known authorities on epidemics—the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control—presented the COVID-19 respiratory disease to the Western world as a danger equivalent to the plague. But China’s experience, which its government obfuscated, had already shown that the COVID-19 virus is much less like the plague and more like the flu. All that has happened since followed from falsifying this basic truth.

Our “best and brightest,” at first having minimized fears of person-to person contagion during January and February, during which the disease spread from China to the West, then declared that the virus is unusually contagious, and posited—on zero factual basis—that it would kill up to one in twenty persons it infected—5% infection/fatality rate (IFR). Based on that imagined fatality rate, they adopted mathematical models from Britain and the University of Washington that predicted that up to two million Americans would die of it.

The U.S. Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) modeled the authoritative predictions on which the U.S. lockdowns were based. Its model also predicted COVID deaths for un-locked-down Sweden. On May 3 it wrote that, as of May 14, Sweden would suffer up to 2800 daily deaths. The actual number was below 40. Whether magnifying this falsehood was reckless or willful, it amounted to shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater. What justifies listening to, and paying, people who do that kind of science?

Establishing any infectious disease’s true lethality is characteristically straightforward: test a large sample of the population proportionately representative of location, age, sex, race, socioeconomic categories. Follow up with the subjects a month later to add up the rate of infections and learn the results thereof. Period. Today, we still lack this definitive, direct knowledge of COVID’s true lethality because bureaucrats have prevented widespread testing for the purpose of firmly establishing the one figure that matters most. That is because that figure’s absence allows them to continue fearmongering.

In May the Centers for Disease Control, by then discredited professionally (though not, alas, in the mass media), was forced to conclude that the lethality rate, far from being circa 5% was 0.26%. Double a typical flu. The CDC was able to keep the estimate that high only by factoring in an unrealistically low figure for asymptomatic infections—never mind inflated figures for deaths. But the U.S. government, instead of amending its recommendations in the face of reality, tried to hide reality by playing a shell game with the definition and number of COVID “cases.”

During March and April, the authorities had defined as “cases” people sick enough to be hospitalized, who also tested positive. Whoever divided the number of reported deaths (a number inflated by a CDC directive to count deaths due to other causes as being due to COVID) by the number of cases thus defined, was predictably scared and willing to heed “the best advice”—namely societal lockdowns—on how to stay safe. That turned out to be ruinous in and of itself. At the time, they defined the number of these “cases” as the “curve” which we were supposed to sacrifice so much to “flatten,” lest the wave of hospitalizations overwhelm our health care system. Because their premises were wrong, that wave never came.

Instead, in May, as various non-official surveys were published showing that the majority of those who tested positive for COVID either barely knew that they had been infected or had not known at all, these very authorities doubled down their dishonesty. They began labeling mere infections as “cases.” They divorced reporting of these “cases” from reporting of the number of deaths, and warned the inattentive public about “spiking COVID cases” as if infection carried a serious risk. They also promoted widespread testing of wholly asymptomatic persons for current and past infections, the results of which tests were sure to produce a surging number of new “cases” thus defined.

And they toyed with reporting deaths by attributing to COVID any that “involved” or looked as if they might have involved it. They then included pneumonia, influenza, and COVID into the category PIC. That is how the death figure came to exceed 100,000. But if the CDC had used the same criterion that it did with the SARS virus, namely “severe acute respiratory distress syndrome,” the figure by the end of June would have been some 16,000.

Such naked ploys could succeed only because the media colluded in them. The New York Times’ May 27 lead story ominously blared: “California is the fourth state with more than 100,000 known cases.” Meanwhile, the number of deaths attributed to COVID continued dropping from ever-lower bases. By the July 1, even using the CDC’s inflated figures for COVID-responsible deaths, COVID-19’s Infection Fatality Rate for people under 70 was 0.04%. But rather than ask how clarion calls of danger comport with decreasing reports of deaths that may somehow be associated with it, the ruling class agitated to reverse returning to normal life. Be afraid, be very afraid. Heads the House wins, tails you lose.

Irrefutable if indirect indication that COVID is no plague also comes from comparison between the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 during any given period with the number of deaths due to all causes for the same period—despite official inflation in the number of deaths attributed to the virus.

The Imperial College, London’s tally for Great Britain, broken down by age of death, shows that the chances of dying from COVID-19 infection roughly track the chances of death from all causes at any given age, except for the very young. For men, the chances of death co-incident with the virus don’t exceed 1%, or the average death rate, until age 70. For women, they don’t exceed the average death rate until close to age 90. In Spain, the death rate for infected persons over 90 years old was 10%.

The measure of “excess deaths” tells a similar story. During the six-week peak of the COVID event in 2020, deaths in the U.S. exceeded deaths during the same period in the previous year by 82,000. Considering that, concurrently, the 2020 flu season was one of the worst on record (typically the flu is responsible for some 50,000 deaths during the season) and given the CDC-mandated conflation of COVID numbers with others, the COVID-19 pandemic in and of itself did not amount to much—except in New York City, for reasons only partly known. By the week of June 20, 2020 the CDC was reporting ZERO excess deaths—meaning that the figure for weekly deaths was within the long-term normal curve for that time of the year.

Not incidentally, in 1957 some 116,000 Americans (out of a population two thirds of today’s size) died of the flu. Ten years later, the toll was 100,000 and in 2019 it was 61,000. By June 2020 the (inflated) toll from COVID-19 stood at 100,000.

In short, COVID-19 is not America’s plague. It did not shake America. The ruling class shook it. They have not done it ignorantly or by mistake. They have done it to extort the general public’s compliance with their agendas. Their claim to speak on behalf of “science” is an attempt to avoid being held accountable for the enormous harm they are doing. They continue doing it because they want to hang on to the power the panic has brought them.

BTW: Whenever you hear someone claiming to speak on science’s behalf, referring to authorities rather than to facts and logic, you may be sure that person is a fraud.

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From The American Mind, here.

How Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetzky’s Ruling Kept Corona Out of Some NY Nursing Homes

Excerpt from Mishpacha’s interview:

Early on, a talmid called with a complicated question. As an operator of several nursing homes, he was being forced to accept residents who’d tested positive for the virus as they were released from hospitals that no longer wanted them. Despite the clear danger to their current residents and staff, the nursing homes were being given no choice.

Rav Shmuel told him unequivocally that to accept these patients was a form of retzichah, murder, since it put the other residents at serious risk. But then, on a conference call, the governor informed all nursing home operators that failure to accept the patients would mean losing their licenses.

The talmid called Rav Shmuel again. Lose your license, the Rosh Yeshivah ruled, but you can’t put your elderly residents in danger.

The nursing home operator listened to his rebbi.

Weeks later, he stood tall as the only major nursing home operator in the state of New Jersey who didn’t lose a single resident to Covid-19.

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