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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/debunking-the-latest-round-of-covid-hysteria/

Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we talk Omicron, preview the upcoming January 6 coverage, and tally 2022’s already growing list of media misses.

Age of Omicron

The pandemic has been a wellspring for poor reporting and analysis for portions of three calendar years now, with reactions to the spread of the Omicron variant serving as a catalyst in the opening days of 2022.

Some habitual hysterics, including Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, a public-health scientist who previously taught at Harvard, have sought to use the emergence and spread of Omicron to argue for more restrictions and mandates, mocking the idea that it’s milder than previous iterations of the virus. Feigl-Ding even went so far as to suggest  that “whoever arrogantly pushed the ‘#Omicron is mild’ [narrative]” be fired. In support of his theory, Feigl-Ding points his more than 600,000 Twitter followers to rising pediatric-hospitalization rates.

However, these data neither vindicate Feigl-Ding’s perspective, nor convict those he’s criticizing. A report from the New York Times indicates that overlapping cases attributable to both the Delta and Omicron variants – as well as lower vaccination rates in children – are what’s driving the rise in hospitalizations. The fact that the vaccines were approved later for children than they were adults, as well as the lack of consequences of infection for them relative to their parents and grandparents, has resulted in fewer of them being inoculated.

Moreover, the rising number of hospitalized children who have tested positive for the virus include many who arrived at the facilities with other medical issues. In fact, the Times report stated that “around the country have reported positivity rates as high as 20 percent among children. But the vast majority were asymptomatic and arrived at the hospital with other health problems.” What’s more, one study of southwest Pennsylvania – where Omicron has emerged as the leading variant –  showed that “the proportion of pediatric admissions requiring intensive care services had dropped by half since early fall, and has continued to fall in the last month.” Pediatric coronavirus hospitalizations still have yet to come close to matching the typical amount of seasonal pediatric flu cases seen in a year.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/we-must-accept-covid-19-as-an-endemic-disease

Never mind how virulent the coronavirus is. The key point is that it is now endemic.

Perhaps it will become milder over time, perhaps it won’t. Obviously, we must hope that it does, that it follows the same trajectory as other viruses, becoming less lethal but more transmissible until it joins that sprawling family of rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, and, indeed, coronaviruses that we collectively call “colds.”

But as far as public policy goes, the lethality of COVID-19 is a second-order issue. The more immediate question is whether it is feasible to slow its spread and, if it is, whether there are advantages in doing so.

If we think, for example, that widespread vaccination might heap high a protective rampart, then there are arguments for vaccine passports, possibly even for compulsory inoculation. If we think that the disease can be eliminated, then there are arguments for stringent suppression measures. If we think that dangerous new mutations can be kept out, then there are arguments for border restrictions and quarantines.

But what if none of these things is true? What if COVID-19 is as ineradicable and endemic as influenza? What if it comes and goes seasonally, leaving its victims with a dollop of immunity that wanes over time? What if, like the flu, it regularly mutates, meaning that recovery from one version bestows only partial protection against others? What if it is checked rather than halted by vaccines — again, like flu rather than, say, polio?

If we are dealing with such a disease, a recurrent respiratory virus, then almost all the measures that we have put in place around the world are pointless.

Let me repeat that: Almost all of them are pointless.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/02/the-truths-we-dared-not-speak-in-2021/

As the long year of 2021 finally came to a close, there were a number of truths Americans on the Left found themselves privately acknowledging but unable to say in public for fear of doing damage to their political cause, their own reputations, or their sense of security. But as 2022 advances, it will become even more difficult to hide these truths. 

Collusion, RIP

No one wishes to speak of the “dossier” anymore. Everyone knows why: it was never a dossier. It was always a mishmash concoction of half-baked fantasies and outright lies, sloppily thrown together by the grifter and has-been ex-British spy and Trump hater, Christopher Steele—all in the pay of Hillary Clinton, the original architect of the collusion hoax. 

Steele himself admitted that he had no sources or notes to substantiate his “research.” Most of those who had seeded the dossier around Washington now either agree it was fake, or “partially” false, or remain silent in embarrassment. 

The perpetual NeverTrump revisionism is reduced to “The Russian Hoax Hoax,” in pathetic fashion suggesting Putin still colluded with Trump and such “collusion” is provable even without the dossier. 

The logic is Orwellian: in 2017-2020 we heard, “But the dossier shows that ….” In 2020-2021 we heard, “Whoever said the dossier had anything to do with Russian collusion?” 

The FBI—that in part used their paid informant Steele’s lies to birth FISA warrants—now disowns it. The entire 22-month, $40-million Mueller charade ended up in tragicomic style with Robert Mueller under oath denying he knew much of anything about either the purveyor of the dossier, Fusion GPS, or the dossier itself. 

James Comey when asked about it and the investigations it spawned, on 245 occasions under oath claimed he lost his memory or had no knowledge of it. 

The Russian collusion hoax will go down in history as one of the most shameful examples of Washington, D.C. mass hysteria, and of a concentrated effort to destroy an elected president, in modern American political history. 

In the end, we always come back to where we started: Hillary Clinton. 

She used the three firewalls of the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie legal firm, and Fusion GPS, to pay Steele, a foreign national, likely barred by law from providing such dirt to a U.S. presidential campaign. 

Steele then grabbed Clinton and FBI money, and in lazy fashion made a few calls to the now indicted Igor Danchenko, a Russian working in Washington, D.C. at the left-wing Brookings Institution, along with a Clinton crony Charles Dolan doing business in Moscow. Presto, Steele typed up their myths, in scary intelligence white-paper fashion, and passed them off as top-secret “Russian sources.” The dossier became the “proof” needed to show that Trump, in the words of former CIA director John Brennan, was “treasonous” or, as former Director of National Intelligence General (ret.) James Clapper alleged, was a “Russian asset.” 

The Russian collusion hoax is now akin to Joe Biden’s cognitive decline; everyone knows it, but few bother to state the obvious—or rehash their now embarrassing earlier denials. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/people_are_dying_but_not_the_ones_you_think_for_the_reasons_you_think.html

While the mainstream media, at least in 2020, tracked deaths with the fanaticism of an insurance company, they’ve always lacked accuracy. That’s why it matters when a major American insurance company, which is in the business of accurate data about deaths, announces that Americans in the 18-64 age bracket are dying in unprecedented numbers. The same data suggests that these aren’t COVID deaths, which makes them much more sinister.

OneAmerica is a major insurance company located in Indianapolis with annual revenue of around $2 billion and total assets of around $74 billion. This is not a fly-by-night internet “insurance” company. OneAmerica is the real deal, selling both individual and group life insurance, and it has data and actuarial tables that go back 145 years. It’s also a progressive company that boasts about “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” right on its home page. In other words, it’s not some “scary” right-wing reactionary firm.

During a news conference last week, OneAmerica’s CEO, Scott Davison, had a startling announcement—working-age Americans are dying in unprecedented numbers:

“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”

Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.

“And what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic,” he said.

“Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.”

More remarkably still, these are not COVID deaths. Instead, they are totally different death count from the COVID count the media insisted we know during Trump’s last year and jettisoned during Biden’s first year.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/should_donald_trump_run_in_2024.html

With the turn of the calendar to 2022, Republicans are not only looking to the 2022 midterm elections but to the prospect of Donald Trump running in 2024. Trump is hugely popular with the party’s base and that popularity freezes the plans of other possible candidates for the 2024 nomination. Trump’s hold on that nomination is brittle, however, because of his age. On election day in 2024 Donald Trump will be 78 years old. That is one year older than Ronald Reagan’s age when he left office in 1988.

Looking at the 2024 contest from the other side of the race, there is no reason to expect that Joe Biden will get the nomination. He has been in office for less than one year, and only diehard Democrats believe that he is not suffering from incapacitating mental deficits. The only question is which foreign adversary will take advantage of his weakness: China, Russia or Iran. So the most likely scenario is for Biden’s resignation in 2022 or early 2023.

Trump may be popular now, but once the voters have been shocked by the disaster of one  septuagenarian president why would they roll the dice on a 78-year-old Donald Trump holding office to age 82? It’s a very bad bet, especially when there are younger, capable Republicans available. Ron DeSantis is at the top of the list of strong candidates for the presidency, but by 2023 we should have other governors and several senators eager to reach for the nomination.

I believe the above makes a strong case that it would be unwise for Donald Trump to run for the presidency in 2024. That presents the big question: how to persuade Trump to play the role of “kingmaker” in late 2022 and step back from his own candidacy?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/video-frontpagemagcom/

In this new video, JP Sears sheds light on a trans swimmer from U Penn who is destroying women in competition and setting records. Why is she so much faster than all the other women? Don’t miss the video below!