A Year in the Life of a Disordered World

“The perverse effect of the Freedom Caucus…has been to push policy to the left. By refusing to compromise and therefore making it impossible for the House to act, they often empower the Democratic Senate to wield greater power.” - Law & Liberty

Discussion

Was everyone counting incorrectly?

I don't know, but at the time there were questions and reports of different numbers from different sources. We just didn't know and we had issues of calling it Covid when it was a car accident. That got me curious about how I could figure out from just looking at facts how many more people were dying during the Covid outbreak. So I looked at funeral home data from 3 different funeral homes in about a 100 mile radius of where I lived. I chose them because their data was free online. I had to count the number of obituaries each year. What I discovered was that there was no greater number of deaths in 2020 than there were in each of the 3 to 4 years preceding 2020 and in some cases 2020 was not the year with the highest number of deaths.

With that information in hand, I am back to the position that forcing Covid vaccines- especially on those who had already had Covid- was authoritarian. But as concerned as I am about an authoritarian president, as a Christian, I am more concerned about the lack of grace on this issue from fellow Christians. It is as if for some, getting vaccinated has become the new legalism.

I am not one for pushing a vaccine, but just trying to dispel myths. It is easy for people to question things. You can pretty much question anything and frame it in bad ways and if people have an element of naivity or susceptiblity they will believe it. No one really tried to analyze the safety data that were questioning the data. They took a biased view that it must be bad, and anecdotally someone who took it had chest pains. Everyday someone in this country and maybe more than a few, just fall over dead while walking around. Did walking kill them? We gave a vaccine to a high risk population (those were were susceptable to health problems), at some point after they took the vaccine they felt something. We have a lot of amateur sleuths trying to interpret safety data, which is extremely complex. And they think they find something. Every drug that is required to have a warning label has headaches listed as a side effect. Do you know why? Because federal law requires that all observed conditions during the various clinical trials have to be noted in the safety space. Well when you go into a clinical trial you need to get off of coffee, tea, soda... because caffeine can affect the efficacy of a drug. Well when someone gets off of caffeine they get a headache.

>>Is there a data source you would trust?<<

I’d like to say yes, but with the obvious dissimulation and obfuscation coming from the WHO and CDC (among other governments and organizations) about Covid, and recommendations changing due to politics, I’m not sure which source I would trust. It’s still not clear to me (given the obvious cases that were counted as Covid deaths just because the disease was present) whose data would be trustworthy, given the inputs from many sources all over the country, many of whom were motivated by different factors to inflate the statistics.

>>We have a lot of amateur sleuths trying to interpret safety data, which is extremely complex. And they think they find something.<<

I guess I’d have to put myself in the category of “amateur sleuth,” but I have never claimed that I have found any damning information about the vaccines. Given the relative harmlessness of this disease for healthy people, and the relative newness of the mRNA vaccine technology and lack of decades of test data, not to mention that no long-term studies will be available for years yet, I simply felt that the new vaccine was a risk I didn’t want to take, and I felt that people should not have been forced to take it. Nothing I have seen since has changed my mind on either of those.

Dave Barnhart

mRNA vaccines and the technology behind them have been tested since the 1990's. So more than 25 years. So there has been decades of test data in both animals and humans. They were never put into production because they degraded too quick and were not as effective. It was the introduction of lipid nanoparticles that could preserve the mRNA that made it as effective as it is today. And that took place just a few years before the introduction of COVID. The mRNA COVID vaccines were tested amongst 10's of thousands of people prior to being approved for emergency use. Vaccines don't require long term studies, they are not a drug. The mRNA vaccine only lasts a few days in the body. And because it uses the natural mechanisms of the body, the risks are extremely low. It is actually an amazing scientific engineering feat. The vaccine is very effective. What wasn't anticipated is the extremely quick changes that COVID would take, and the rapid spread of it across the world. Other viruses like the flu don't create new variants every other month and they don't spread across the world in a matter of days. There are seasons that it follows. That was not anticipated during the early months of the virus and the creation of the vaccine. It wasn't that science was hiding anything, it was that they were building it as it was rapidly advancing and killing millions of people.

A lot of people looked at the Anti-Fauci and anti-COVID vaccine information as a competing truth against the scientific community. What most people were naive about is that practically all of the information was being produced and disseminated across a complex network of information sites by just 12 people. And practically all of it traces back to Dr. Joseph Mercola a 67 year old physician in Florida. So be very careful on whether you don't trust WHO or the CDC or Fauci, but you trust information from people you had no clue who they were and that they were profiting off of this complex web of disinformation. They didn't have to prove anything, they just had to put enough disinformation to sow doubts. A very low hurdle to cross and one that most American's are fine with accepting as truth. Of course Dr. Mercola gets to sit in his multi-million home and large bank accounts thanks to this misinformation and the lack of understanding from most Americans.