Communicating Fear

Generating fear among a population is the best technique to gain control over them.  Fear is particularly easy to achieve when using a complex discipline, that few people understand, and communicating it in a way that distorts reality.  Good health, for the overwhelming majority of Americans, is ever elusive and loss of good health or life is devastating to contemplate, for us or people that we love.  Medical science has become so complex, with myriad contradicting information, we have developed a system that can confuse even professionals. This can be achieved by reporting in percentages, graphic analyses or relative risk ratios.  Any of these statistical techniques has the ability to deceive or confuse the interpreter.  One of my favorite quotes from Mark Twain is: “There are three kinds of lies; lies, damned lies and statistics.”

Drug companies, news outlets and marketing departments often find alarmism the best method to push a product, story or agenda.  This type of communication targets the limbic regions (emotions and behavior) of the brain rather than the cortical brain (attention, awareness, perception, thought, judgment).  The limbic system is a subcortical (unconscious) region of the brain with influence over the endocrine (hormones) and autonomic nervous systems.  In other words, using specific language that manifests emotion, has important implications on physiology, through hormonal or autonomic control.  Our cortical brain detects changes in the physiology (increased heart rate, cortisol levels, catecholamine levels, etc.) and we respond to this stimulus, reflexively, trying to achieve physiologic homeostasis.  Emotional responses are subconscious and often irrational as the conscious (cortical) brain controls judgment.  Limbic regions of the brain are more primitive than the cortical regions and, based on evolutionary theory, more critical for survival.

To better recognize the deceit, whether accidental or intentional, we have to understand the difference between absolute and relative risk.  If someone tells us that a drug can reduce our risk of a stroke by 75%, many of us would determine efficacy in this drug.  Let’s say that the absolute risk of stroke in the study population was 4/100,000 (.004%), in the placebo group.  Then, in the treatment group, the risk of stroke was 1/100,000 (.001%).  This medication prevented 3 strokes out of 100,000 people.  In this scenario, the absolute risk of a stroke is incredibly low in the placebo and treatment group; however, this is a 75% risk reduction.  As you can see, to better understand whether the side effects of a medication are worth the risk, it is important to know absolute risk, not relative risk.  

As we have seen, over the last month, the Delta variant of the coronavirus is spreading aggressively across the world.  We are told that the Delta variant represents a high percentage of the cases of the coronavirus, specifically in America.  Reports are as high as 68-84% of the cases are this specific subtype.  In order to get this information, genomic sequencing has to be performed and this cannot be done at any lab.  Most of these samples have to be sent away (sometimes to different states) and results would take a long time to obtain.  Also, not every positive test is sent for genomic sequencing as we don’t have the resources or capability to test all samples.  If you look at the image attached to the blog, you will see that less than 5% of the positive coronavirus samples are being sequenced in Nevada out of nearly 8,800 samples.  Interesting to note, there have been 152 coronavirus diagnoses in Nevada in the past 14 days (roughly 11 new cases per day) and 132 were the Delta variant (or 87%).  Statistical representation can be quite deceiving on the surface and it is important to look at them closely.

https://nevada.app.box.com/s/cn62n76n2c5tmmb7wrz5cgxfh1xzxckx

To make better sense of the data, we need to consider mortality risk, by age, of COVID-19 versus all cause mortality by age.  This will more accurately represent the threat that COVID-19 imposes on society.  In 2018, here is the data for all cause mortality, predating COVID-19, for all age groups:

Risk of all cause mortality by age group:

• Under 1 year – 1.1% (1,100/100,000)
• 1-4 – 0.048% (48/100,000)
• 5-14 – 0.027% (27/100,000)
• 15-24 – 0.14% (140/100,000)
• 25-34 – 0.26% (260/100,000)
• 35-44 – 0.39% (390/100,000)
• 45-54 – 0.79% (790/100,000)
• 55-64 – 1.8% (1,800/100,000)
• 65-74 – 3.6% (3,600/100,000)
• 75-84 – 8.9% (8,900/100,000)
• 85 and over – 27.4% (27,400/100,000)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/241572/death-rate-by-age-and-sex-in-the-us/

Here is the data on COVID-19 mortality by age group (COVID-19 mortality % x all cause mortality %):

• Under 1 year – 0.002% (2/100,000)
• 1-4 – 0.0003% (0.3/100,000)
• 5-14 – 0.0003% (0.3/100,000)
• 15-24 – 0.0002% (0.2/100,000)
• 25-34 – 0.01% (10/100,000)
• 35-44 – 0.027% (27/100,000)
• 45-54 – 0.08% (80/100,000)
• 55-64 – 0.2% (200/100,000)
• 65-74 – 0.49% (490/100,000)
• 75-84 – 1.3% (1,300/100,000)
• 85 and over – 3.6% (3,600/100,000)

https://datavisualizations.heritage.org/public-health/covid-19-deaths-by-age/

What this data shows is that all cause mortality increases with age and specifically over the age of 85.  In a given year, after the age of 85, a person’s risk of mortality, for any reason is 27.4%.  Consequently, the risk of mortality from COVID-19, after the age of 85, is 3.6%.  Of the deaths that occur, in a given year, after the age of 85, 13% (3.6/27.4 x 100) are a result of COVID-19 and 87%, are of other causes.  There are numerous ways to represent these numbers through percentages that can appear more alarming.  We have to be astutely aware of this deception.

I refer to this as deception because there has been a lot of investment in the development of the coronavirus over the years.  Like I have shared in one of my earlier blogs, the CDC does hold the patent on the coronavirus isolated from humans, testing methods to detect the coronavirus and test kits for it:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US7776521B1

It is also interesting that Richard Rothschild (owner of all central banks in the world) has a patent on the system and method for testing for COVID-19, which was issued in 2015:

pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/patent/US-2020279585-A1

When an entity (CDC) that owns and controls the virus, the system of testing for the virus and the narrative surrounding the virus, one begins to wonder if the deception is intentional.