The COVID Grifters Won't Quit

A week ago yesterday, Dr Rochelle Walensky, the CDC chief, made her teary prophecy of "impending doom" from a new wave of COVID. Almost on cue, as shown above, the New York statistics, which had been leading so-called national totals, peaked and appear to have resumed a decline.

There's nothing new about this. The Imperial College model in March of last year predicted that,

by October [2020], more than 500,000 people in Great Britain and 2 million people in the U.S. would die as a result of COVID-19.

The model also predicted the United States could incur up to 1 million deaths even with “enhanced social distancing” guidelines, including “shielding the elderly.” Imperial’s modeling results influenced British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to impose a nationwide lockdown and influenced the White House as well.

I don't mean to minimize the effects of the pandemic. On the other hand, at this point, we can be confident that COVID is neither the Black Death nor ebola, and the continued projections of disaster we hear from the same moral entrepreneurs at the top of the public health establishment are damaging its hard-won prestige and undermining its ability to control future disease.

Just yesterday, in researching that post, I ran across a new public health grifter who seems to have gained credibility by hitchhiking on Dr Walensky's efforts to spread panic, Dr Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. He went on this past Sunday's talks to spread the bad news:

A leading epidemiologist from the University of Minnesota says he believes the United States is in a fourth wave of a COVID-19 surge.

Dr. Michael Osterholm appeared on FOX News Sunday, where he said the spike in cases right now is due to the coronavirus variant first found in the U.K. — B.1.1.7. — which is now spreading here. It’s much more contagious and can be more serious.%;">

. . . “We are the only country in the world right now experiencing this increasing number of cases due to this variant, and at the same time opening up, not closing down. And the two basically are going to collide,” Osterholm said.

He says the good news is the vaccines in the U.S. protect against the variant B117.

As I noted yesterday with the remarks he made on an upper-midwest COVID spike that simply isn't taking place, the guy isn't in touch with the facts. The UK, home of the terrible UK variant, is actually reopening, despite his claim that the US is the only place that is. But Osterholm's record goes beyond this -- the UK variant has been his hobby horse for a while. On February 4, more than two months ago, he said on CNN

Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm compared a UK coronavirus variant to a “Category 5 hurricane” churning off the coast, saying some strains could cause a “major surge” in new cases in the US.

A mutation that could allow Covid-19 to escape antibody protection has now been found in samples of a rapidly spreading strain in the UK, according to a report. Experts say it's too early to predict whether this development will impact the trajectory of Covid-19 around the world.

“I think amongst my colleagues, they would agree that this variant from the United Kingdom, which is now beginning to circulate much more widely in the United States, poses a huge challenge to us. And that in just a few weeks, we could be seeing case numbers increase very dramatically,” Osterholm said on CNN’s “New Day.”

But "a few weeks" after his February prediction of an impending category-5 hurricane, nothing of the sort took place. In fact, with several states loosening or eliminating restrictions since then, from California to Florida, cases in those and neighboring states have oontinued to decline.

I'm not sure what the payoff is for any of these figures, Walensky, Fauci, Osterholm, or Birx. Birx in fact ended her career, forced to retire after it surfaced that she'd traveled to a vacation home to celebrate Thanksgiving with extended family after telling the plebs not to do this. Fauci, Walensky, and Osterholm have probably peaked in income, all likely making well into six figures with perks, benefits, and honoraria without the appearances on the talks, and given their age and demonstrated incompetence, they probably won't advance in the future, even if people will say nice things about them at their retirement dinners.

So why keep spreading panic instead of telling people it's time to get the shot and go back to life? My guess is it's narcissism, fed by the media, which explots them for clickbait.