My last post, which featured findings from a study by Professor Geneveive Briand of Johns Hopkins analyzing deaths from all causes in our year of COVID, finding that while deaths attributed to COVID were up, deaths from other causes, like cancer and heart disease, were down so in the end it was sort of a wash. My friend and former colleague Elena wrote Prof Briand an email congratulating her for her bravery and received in response 2 links I’ll share here. The first goes to the Johns Hopkins newsletter addressing their decision to pull Prof. Briand’s report https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2020/11/a-closer-look-at-u-s-deaths-due-to-covid-19. If you look carefully in the newsletter, you’ll a find a link to a PDF of Prof. Briand’s original report. While it’s got “retracted” plastered all over it, you can easily read through that to get at what she actually said.
The other link is to a YouTube of Prof. Briand’s 11/11 presentation: COVID-19 deaths: a look at U,S, data https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TKJN61aflI. She’s an economist, not a physician. But sometimes economists have a unique way of looking at a situation. Look at Levitt and Dubnar’s Freakonomics https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1202.Freakonomics.
Elena grew up under Romanian Communism, and tells me she gets sad when events happening around us now remind her of the old days. She says this squelching of Prof. Briand reminds her of those times. Elena enjoys living in the land of the free, and is not afraid to exercise her first amendment rights. She wrote a letter to the editor of the Detroit Free Press, which was published last Sunday, and I show you below.
Clearly, our leaders have applied their “help” for us with a very heavy hand. The time for some questioning and civil disobedience is here. COVID’s not going to wipe us out. Measures our leaders continue to apply just could.
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