John Hopkins Study Concludes That Covid Had Almost No Impact on All-Cause Death Rates, But Is Immediately Deleted After Publication

Noting that the Emperor Has No Clothes is now a speechcrime.

Covid did kill people, yes. But the overall number of deaths remained constant through the pandemic.

Conventional wisdom is that COVID-19 has caused thousands of deaths in the United States and nearly 1.5 million worldwide. This perception has been directly challenged by a study published by Johns Hopkins University on Sunday, November 22.

Genevieve Briand, assistant program director of the Applied Economics master's degree program at Johns Hopkins University, critically analyzed the impact that COVID-19 had on U.S. deaths. According to her, the impact of COVID-19 on deaths in the United States can be fully understood by comparing it to the number of total deaths in the country.

According to study, "in contrast to most people’s assumptions, the number of deaths by COVID-19 is not alarming. In fact, it has relatively no effect on deaths in the United States."

Wait, what? Really?

That's what it says. And, it should come as no surprise that not long after the study was published it was deleted within days.

The article was censored, it was claimed, because it was being used to "spread misinformation," which is now of course the Censors' go-to justification for censorship, just barely edging past "hate speech" or "causes harm."

The author of the article which explained the study (that is, a scientist crunched the data, a reporter wrote it up) responded thusly:

Today, on November 27th, The News-Letter officially posted their reason for retracting the article, stating inaccuracies in the analysis. I am frustrated at the explanation, and I think it is disrespectful to Dr. Briand's hard work putting data together and doing an honest analysis. If her analysis was to be contradicted, then at least an equal-level analysis should be done to provide more data and thus a new conclusion. Dr. Briand and her work deserve such respect.

I have received many messages asking the reason for taking the article down, and so I would like to officially express my opinions here. I even got emails saying that thanks to me, people now will not be wearing masks or practicing social distancing. They called me "a COVID denier and a minimizer" and that I have no idea the damage and the lives cost in me writing such an article. I was devastated to receive such accusations, but I stand my ground. The goal is never to undermine the effects of COVID-19 but to suggest a possible over-exaggeration in death numbers due to the pandemic.

In addition, another study finds that lockdowns have no impact on covid death rates:

A new study published by Frontiers in Public Health concluded that neither lockdowns nor lockdown stringency were correlated with lower death rates.

Researchers analyzed data from 160 countries over the first 8 months of the pandemic, testing several factors--including demographics, public health, economy, politics, and environment--to determine how they are correlated with COVID-19 mortality.

"Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate," the researchers said.

The researchers found that the criteria most associated with a high death rate was life expectancy, though higher COVID death rates were also observed in certain geographic regions.

In other Political Panic news:

Almost all covid-related news in the US is bad news, while in Europe, it's mixed. Both the good news and bad news are reported.

And this trend extends to allegedly "conservative" media-- because this isn't about The Science (TM).

It's about beating Trump.

Ninety one percent of stories by U.S. major media outlets are negative in tone versus fifty four percent for non-U.S. major sources and sixty five percent for scientific journals. The negativity of the U.S. major media is notable even in areas with positive scientific developments including school re-openings and vaccine trials. Media negativity is unresponsive to changing trends in new COVID-19 cases or the political leanings of the audience.

That last is an interesting point. It would be reasonable to assume that negative COVID coverage is part of the liberal media’s effort to drive President Trump from office, and to some degree I have no doubt that this is true. But "conservative" news outlets have shown more or less the same pessimistic bias...

Powerline blows that point off immediately, concluding that this must just be what Americans want.

It doesn't occur to them for one second to consider even the possibility that the "conservative" media has many shared agenda-items with the leftwing media. As well as a lot of shared Social Class DNA.

Another mayor ignored his own covid lockdown orders, this time in Canada.

Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens broke COVID-19 regulations Wednesday last week when he dined at the Nico Taverna restaurant with seven other people at the table.

Just hours earlier, Dilkens was among mayors from the region who called for a "zero tolerance approach" when it comes to enforcement of COVID-19 regulations.

At the time, Windsor-Essex was under yellow "protect" status on Ontario's COVID-19 response framework -- and the maximum number of people allowed to be at a table together was six.

CBC News was made aware of the incident after it was sent a photo of the dinner group that was posted to Instagram.

After inquiries from CBC News, Dilkens made a statement to city council Monday afternoon. He called the incident an "unfortunate error on my part" that "should not have occurred."

Speaking of tyrants ignoring their own edicts: Axios' jackass "journalist" Dan Primack took time out to publicly call out a neighbor on Thanksgiving for daring to have guests over -- but was taken to task for having never once called out a politician ignoring lockdown orders.

A related point:

Related:

posted by Ace at 01:13 PM

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