Do Fauci's virus claims add up? FaceBook forbids a discussion

FaceBook censors Ron Paul based on bogus Politifact 'Fact-Check'

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2020/march/18/facebook-censoring-ron-paul-based-on-bogus-politifact-fact-check/

By DANIEL McADAMS
Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
Social media behemoth Facebook has just acted to censor and suppress Ron Paul's latest weekly column,

The Coronavirus Hoax
http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2020/march/16/the-coronavirus-hoax/

based on a hatchet job by the notoriously biased Politifact organization.

At issue is Dr. Paul's statement that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci's claim that the coronavirus is "ten times more deadly" than the seasonal influenza virus is “without any scientific basis." Fauci made the claim recently in testimony before the US Congress in a move that significantly ramped up the fear factor in the US over the virus.

The Politifact "fact check" is literally drenched in sarcasm and bias, with Ron Paul being described as "a sometimes conspiracy-minded Texas doctor" and Fauci described as a "universally trusted person."

For a "just the facts" analysis, that's a lot of editorializing.

The Politifact hit piece admits that, "It’s not yet known what the death rate from the current coronavirus, COVID-19, will be," but concludes nevertheless that, "early data indicate it is more than 10 times higher than the death rate for the flu."

So if you don't know how can you know?

One reason to question the "scientific basis" of Fauci's claim is that Fauci contradicted his own statement before Congress in a recent article he co-authored in the New England Journal of Medicine.

If a scientist writes one thing in a scholarly journal and testifies very differently before Congress, does it not raise questions as to the "scientific basis" of the divergent claims?

Here are the two Anthony Faucis. Which one is scientifically based? Both can't be:

He's got the whole world in his hands
and he speaks with forked tongue

Excerpt from the New England Journal of Medicine, March 15, 2020:

If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1 percent. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1 percent [about one in 1,000] or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1958) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had fatality rates of 9 to 10 percent and 36 percent, respectively.

Excerpts from Congressional testimony, March 11, 2020

People always say, "The flu does this, the flu does that..." but Covid-19 is "10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu...I think that's something that people can get their arms around.

Conant inserts comment:
Fauci's testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee includes the following:

Probably for the practical understanding of the American people, the seasonal flu that we deal with every year has a mortality of zero point one percent. The stated mortality overall of this, when you look at all the data, including China, is about three percent. It first started off as two and now three. I think if you count all the cases of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection, that probably brings the mortality rate down to somewhere around one percent, which means it is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu. I think that’s something that people can get their arms around and understand.

I do not know when Fauci and his coauthor submitted their article to the medical journal, but we cannot rule out that for some reason Fauci changed his mind about the death rate after submitting the article. It may also be the case that his personal view was muted in favor of that of his coauthor. On the other hand, the Journal statement is highly credible, based on simple logic. Even so, Fauci does not cite any epidemiolgical data to support his claim, raising a legitimate issue as to its scientific basis. So I would say Paul has a point in questioning that aspect of Fauci's testimony.

By the way, notice Fauci's use of the term "stated mortality." Is he referring to the ratio of deaths to confirmed cases? If so, he is, for some obscure reason, being deceptive, as is evident in the context of the journal statement.

The propagandistic tone of Politifact's ad hominem attack can only give rise to suspicion that perhaps there is a conspiracy to bring about a crisis in order to suppress democracies, as Dr. Paul suggests. Suppression of Paul's opinion came after "big tech" sought "guidance" from the government about dissemination of "responsible" information.

Founded by the Poynter Institute, Politifact is an outfit with a clear political agenda and it is not to promote truth and accuracy in the media. Rather, it is all about suppressing media outlets with which they disagree. It is all about a McCarthyite push to control the flow of information.

Interestingly enough, major funders of the Poynter Institute include "open society" advocate George Soros along with Charles Koch (both founders and major funders of the Quincy Institute. Soros loves an "open society" as long as it does not in any way challenge his own political biases. If anyone holds different views, he'll spend millions to shut down debate.

The Poynter Institute is also funded by the United States government itself, via major grants from the National Endowment for Democracy. So here is what happens when you scratch below the surface a bit: The suppression of views like those of Ron Paul which are unpopular among those who control the foreign policy narrative are actually financed by the US government itself.

Do any of our dear readers support the U.S. government taking our tax money and using it to shut Ron Paul up?

How is it that FaceBook tries to sell itself as politically neutral, just making sure only facts are allowed through, while at the same time partnering with such a politically biased and unethical organization as Politifact and the Poynter Institute? Is FaceBook really about fostering a lively debate or is it about controlling the narrative favored by the Washington elites?

We have fact-checked Politifact's fact checkers and we find them to be biased, sloppy, and inimical to the values we should share as Americans in favor of open debate.

And Facebook? End your suppression of Dr. Ron Paul's op-ed on the coronavirus!

March 19, 2020: New information released, after I published this article from Ron Paul Institute, from the CDC shows that of the 508 patients known to have been hospitalized in the United States for Covid-19, about 20 percent of those were ages 20 to 44 and another 18 percent were between the ages of 45 and 54. If the data are accurate, we might have a different situation, though it still remains true that it is rare for a non-senior to die of the disease. Those figures do not show which hospital admissions were precautionary and which were urgent.