“[W]e would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in Great Britain and 2.2 million in the U.S., [plus deaths from] the potential negative effects of health systems being overwhelmed…” — Imperial College covid-19 Response Team, modeling report, 3/16/20

“Coronavirus Death Toll Estimate drops Again: Top covid-19 Model Shows Predicted U.S. Fatalities Have Fallen by [Another] 12 Percent from 68,841 to 60,308 — Just Three Weeks After It Projected that 84,000 Would Die.” — The [UK] Daily Mail, 4/18/20

“We won’t know how valid the models are until we move all the way through the epidemic.” — Dr. Deborah “Scarf Queen” Birx, task force press conference, Whitehouse.gov, 4/4/20

The so-called “experts,” the same bunch using bogus climate models to predict Planet Doomsday for over three decades, have rolled out disease-and-death modeling as the only true “scientific” basis for setting government policy on the Wuhan pandemic. It’s all about facts and data, we are told over and over. What could go wrong?

Everything. Calculations by both the UK’s Imperial College and the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation [ihme] — the “Murray model” touted by Dr. Birx — have been catastrophically inaccurate. Yet they were the reason we deliberately shut down the American economic engine, for the first time in history.

The models predicted so many hospitalizations and deaths that “flattening the curve” via social distancing and quarantining the healthy was forced upon the entire nation. But instead of overflowing hospitals, we have empty wards and massive layoffs of health care workers. And the number of U.S. deaths of the Wuhan virus will likely end up being very close to the number of deaths in the average flu season.

But the modelers — who have never been right once — are somehow allowed to revise their predictions as often as they want. As I always say, the doomsayers are never wrong. They get to issue apocalyptic warnings, and when the facts come in showing they wildly overestimated the threat they can say, “Oh, that’s because our warnings averted the worst. We saved you!” The truth is just the opposite. The modelers are ruining us:

Project Fear

• “This week, New York City started counting deaths as coronavirus fatalities if the patient had not been tested for the disease but was suspected postmortem of having it. This relaxed standard increased the U.S. death count by 17 percent.” — Heather Mac Donald, also reporting that nyc accounted for 37 percent of national deaths, in The Hill, 4/18/20
• “It’s imperfect data, but we’re going to use it … because it’s the one we have.” — Lorenzo González, Puerto Rico Health Secretary, admitting their covid-19 data was distorted by counting some positive cases twice, AP, 4/18/20
• “In this country, we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality … There are other countries that, if you had a pre-existing condition, and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the icu and then have a heart or kidney problem, some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a covid-19 death … The intent [in the U.S.] is if someone dies with covid-19, we are counting that as a covid-19 death.” — Dr. Deborah Birx, task force briefing, Fox News, 4/7/20
• “[T]he model has so far overestimated the number of beds needed to treat pandemic patients. The forecast predicted … that the United States would need around 164,750 hospital beds for covid-19 patients on [April 4]. Yet the covid Tracking Project… reported only around 22,158 currently hospitalized coronavirus patients nationwide … The model estimated that 65,434 patients would need hospital beds in New York state on [April 3]. In reality, there were 15,905 hospitalizations in that state … according to the covid Tracking Project.” — Just the News, 4/5/20
• “I’ve looked at all the models. I’ve spent a lot of time on the models. They don’t tell you anything. You can’t really rely upon models.” — Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at nih, quoted in The Washington Post, 4/2/20
• “Several researchers have apparently asked to see Imperial’s calculations, but Prof. Neil Ferguson, the man leading the team, has said that the computer code is 13 years old and thousands of lines of it [are] ‘undocumented,’ making it hard for anyone to work with … Reasonable people might wonder whether something made with 13-year-old, undocumented computer code should be used to justify shutting down the economy.” — The Wall Street Journal, 4/1/20 
• “We’ve seen all too terribly the consequences of those who denied warnings of a pandemic. We can’t afford any more consequences of climate denial.” — Barack Obama, hyping coronavirus and climate model propaganda, on Twitter, 3/31/20
• “Looking at what we’re seeing now [in the models], I would say between 100,000 and 200,000 [deaths]. But I don’t want to be held to that.” — Dr. Fauci, on cnn, 3/30/20
• “If we do things … almost perfectly, we could get in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 fatalities.” — Dr. Birx, on nbc’s “Today,” 3/30/20
• “[Y]ou’ve all seen the models. You’ve seen the models from Imperial. You’ve seen the models from Columbia [University]. We’ve reviewed 12 different models … we went back to the drawing board … And when we finished, the other group that was working in parallel … [ihme] and Chris Murray ended up at the same numbers … All of the flu models predicted anywhere between 1.6 and 2.2 million fatalities…” — Dr. Birx,  WhiteHouse.gov, 3/29/20
• “[I]t’s anywhere in the model between 80,000 and 160,000, maybe potentially 200,000 succumbing to this. That’s with mitigation.” — Dr. Birx, WhiteHouse.gov, 3/29/20
• “All the predictions say you could have an apex needing 140,000 beds and about 40,000 ventilators. I don’t have a crystal ball … I don’t operate here on opinion. I operate on facts and on data and on numbers and on projections.” — Gov. Cuomo, 3/27/20, demanding Trump send 30,000 ventilators, quoted at The Blaze. At its peak on 4/8, New York needed fewer than 6,000 ventilators and is now shipping them to other states.
• “‘You Pick the 26,000 People Who Are Going To Die’: New York’s Cuomo, in Plea to Trump Administration for Ventilators.” — MarketWatch, after which Trump pointed out that New York already had stockpiles of ventilators and Cuomo had to admit this was true, 3/24/20
• Doing nothing = 2.2 million deaths; modest mitigation = 1.5 million deaths; serious mitigation = 1.1 million deaths; massive suppression for a long time = 200,000 deaths. — “Here’s the Punch-in-the-Gut Version of the Imperial College Coronavirus Study” chart, Mother Jones, 3/17/20

Oops

• “A flood of new research suggests that far more people have had the coronavirus without any symptoms, fueling hope that it will turn out to be much less lethal than originally feared … [S]aid Dr. Michael Mina of Harvard’s School of Public Health … [new statistics] suggest ‘we have just been off the mark by huge, huge numbers’ for estimating total infections.” — AP, 4/20/20
• “[T]he dreaded ‘surge’ of coronavirus cases — which some credentialed experts had warned would overwhelm Florida’s hospital system — has not happened. In fact, fewer than 3,000 coronavirus patients have ever been hospitalized in Florida … [D]espite clear evidence that Florida’s pandemic is past its peak, the same experts whose predictions have failed so often before are forecasting the state’s outbreak will get worse.” — “Florida Has Beaten the Surge … Will the Media Notice?” in The American Spectator, 4/15/20
• “Report: Coronavirus Fatality Rate Much Lower than Anticipated, Close to Flu’s 0.1 Percent.” — Law Enforcement Today, citing 4/11/20 study in The Economist, 4/14/20
• “[H]ere are New York state [decreasing] numbers for new hospitalizations, icu beds, and intubations … and this is with hospitals coding every possible case as [covid-19] because of the 20 percent bonus. Nobody who needs a bed is getting sent home, there is no triage …” — Alex Berenson, former New York Times reporter, attaching charts from Governor Andrew Cuomo’s briefing, on Twitter, 4/13/20
• “[I]f you flatten the curve, you also prolong, to widen it, and it takes more time. And I don’t see a good reason for a respiratory disease to stay in the population longer than necessary.” — Knut Wittkowski, former head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at Rockefeller University, advocating “herd immunity,” The College Fix, 4/7/20
• “The hospitals are eerily quiet, except for covid-19. I have heard this sentiment from fellow doctors across the United States and in many other countries. We are all asking: Where are all the patients with heart attacks and stroke? They are missing from our hospitals. Yale New Haven Hospital, where I work, has almost 300 people stricken with covid-19 … yet we are not yet at capacity because of a marked decline in our usual types of patients. In more normal times, we never have so many empty beds.” — Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz, in “Where Have All the Heart Attacks Gone?” in The New York Times, 4/6/20. Ask Team Scarf if they’re being counted as covid-19 cases.
• “To put [the model] figures into context, let’s consider influenza. The cdc estimates that the current flu season has sickened between 39 million and 55 million Americans and resulted in 24,000 to 63,000 deaths. (Seasonal flu has a case-fatality rate of approximately 0.1 percent.)” — Alex Berezow, usa Today, 4/4/20
• “University Projections of covid-19 Hospitalizations Turn Out to Be Four Times Too High.” — The College Fix, 4/2/20
• “If we’re going to shut down the entire nation’s economy to ‘flatten the curve’ based on the projections of a single model [ihme], it shouldn’t be too much to ask that the model approximate reality when it comes to hospitalizations.” — Sean Davis, editor, The Federalist, Twitter, 4/2/20
• “The distinction between dying ‘with’ covid-19 and dying ‘due to’ covid-19 is not just splitting hairs.” — Dr. John Lee, UK pathologist, pointing out that people with various terminal illnesses who die are being counted as victims of coronavirus, which has dramatically skewed the numbers internationally, The UK Spectator, 3/29/20
• “More needs to be known about these models. Do they correct for age, pre-existing conditions, changing virulence, the effects of death certification, and other factors? Tweak any of these assumptions and the outcome (and predicted death toll) can change radically … Governments must remember that rushed science is almost always bad science.”  — Dr. John Lee, The UK Spectator, 3/28/20

Inconvenient Timeline

• 1/21/20: “This is not a major threat for the people of the United States and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.” — Dr. Anthony Fauci, Newsmax
• 1/26/20: “The American people should not be worried or frightened by this. It’s a very, very low risk to the United States. It isn’t something that the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about.” — Dr. Fauci, on “The Cats Roundtable” with John Catsimatidis, podcast, 1/26/20, quoted at Fox News
• 1/29/20: “President Donald J. Trump announced the formation of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force … [to] lead the Administration’s efforts to monitor, contain, and mitigate the spread of the virus, while ensuring that the American people have the most accurate and up-to-date health and travel information.” — WhiteHouse.gov. Meanwhile, the Democrats and the media were 100 percent focused on impeachment; this was the same day abc 6 News reported: “Democrats Say Americans Want Witnesses at Trump Impeachment Trial.”
• 1/31/20: “[To protect Americans] from the threat of this harmful communicable disease, I have determined … to restrict and suspend the entry into the United States, as immigrants or nonimmigrants, of all aliens who were physically present within the People’s Republic of China … preceding their entry or attempted entry into the United States … [and we] should take all necessary and appropriate measures to facilitate … quarantine of persons allowed to enter the United States who may have been exposed to this virus.” — President Donald Trump, Whitehouse.gov
• 1/31/20: “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia — hysterical xenophobia — and fearmongering to lead the way instead of science.” — Joe Biden, campaigning in Madison, IA, reacting to Trump’s travel restrictions to Asia, Reuters
• 2/9/20: “Today our city is celebrating the Lunar New Year parade in Chinatown, a beautiful cultural tradition with a rich history in our city. I want to remind everyone to enjoy the parade and not change any plans due to misinformation spreading about coronavirus.” — Oxiris Barbot, New York City health commissioner, on Twitter
• 2/24/20: “That’s what we’re trying to do today is to say everything is fine here.” — Nancy Pelosi, hugging locals in San Francisco’s Chinatown and urging people to visit, nbc Bay Area News
• 2/29/20: “No. Right now, at this moment, there’s no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day by day basis. Right now the risk is still low.” — Dr. Fauci, asked on nbc’s “Today” if people “want to go to malls, and movies, maybe the gym, as well … [s]hould we be changing our habits?” quoted at Breitbart
• 3/2/20: “This isn’t our first rodeo … Excuse our arrogance as New Yorkers … we think we have the best health care system on the planet right here in New York … we don’t even think it’s going to be as bad as it was in other countries.” — Gov. Andrew Cuomo, after the first New Yorker was diagnosed with the coronavirus after her flight from Qatar, in The New York Times. Cuomo said investigators would track down every person on the patient’s flight, but it never happened.
• “Since I’m encouraging New Yorkers to go on with your lives [and] get out on the town despite Coronavirus, I thought I would offer some suggestions … go see ‘The Traitor.’” — Bill de Blasio, New York City Mayor, on Twitter
• 3/9/20: “If you are a healthy young person, there is no reason if you want to go on a cruise ship, go on a cruise ship.” — Dr. Fauci, White House press conference, Forbes, 3/9/20
• 3/11/20: “If you are not sick … you should be going about your life.” — Mayor de Blasio, nyc.gov
• 3/25/20: “[W]e welcome people from across the globe. We have people coming here, we have people who came here from China, who came here from Italy, who came here from countries all around the globe. We have international travelers who were in China, and who were in Italy, and who were in Korea and who came here.” — Gov. Cuomo, press conference, Rev.com
• 3/26/20: Dr. Fauci co-authors a study in The New England Journal of Medicine concluding that covid-19 may be more akin to influenza (with a fatality rate of .1 percent) than a more serious disease like sars or mers.

Media Malpractice

• “Keep in mind, Americans are dying during these [Trump] briefings. During yesterday’s briefing, between 5:30 and 7:45, there were 93 reported deaths.” — Katy Tur, msnbc anchor, on Twitter, 4/14/20
• “It was an editing mistake. We took immediate steps to remove it from all platforms and shows.” — cbs spokesperson, after cbs News aired footage of an Italian hospital during a segment about U.S. hospitals, in The Washington Examiner, 4/8/20. Yet the same footage appeared again a few days later with another piece about U.S. hospitals on cbs News Digital.
• “There are plenty of reasons to believe that the coronavirus death toll is actually being significantly undercounted, in fact, rather than overcounted.” — Aaron Blake, providing no evidence for his assertion, The Washington Post, 4/8/20
• “This Is Trump’s Fault.” — David Frum, NeverTrumper, The Atlantic, 4/7/20
• “Is Coronavirus Donald Trump’s Katrina?” — Chris Cillizza, cnn, 3/8/20
• “Leading in Confirmed Cases, the U.S. Will Be the World’s Coronavirus Epicenter Within Days — and It’s Trump’s Fault.” — Paul Krugman, The Chicago Tribune, 3/26/20
• After daily being consumed by articles and tweets about the sociopathic behavior of Donald Trump and the coming tsunami of Coronavirus infection and death, I came across … how [Natasha] Ott … felt symptoms on Monday, March 10 … [and] a little more than a week later she was dead of pulmonary failure. In the intervening time, her symptoms became so severe that she took a covid-19 test, but it didn’t come back by the time she died … Natasha Ott who may have lost her life because there were too few covid-19 test kits by Trump’s heinous design” — Buzzflash, 3/22/20. Ott was tested twice and both came back negative, reports The [New Orleans] Times-Picayune.

Folks, models are not science. We might as well be using tarot cards! We shut down the economy based on “experts” who were not elected and who we’ve never seen or questioned. Their methods have never been tested or examined — they’ve never been right yet — and we’re expected to accept their apocalyptic conclusions on faith. Trump should bring the modelers to the task force press conferences and let them be interrogated by the media. Or, better yet, send them packing.

Coronavirus photo ©2020 Finnbarr Webster/Contributor/Getty Images; Fauci photo ©2020 Shutterstock