Bloomberg Businessweek on record deaths from drug overdoses

Drug overdoses of all kinds killed almost 84,000 people in the U.S. from August 2019 to July 2020.  That's 23% more than in the previous 12-month period, and the highest number of overdose deaths recorded in a single year.  Opioids accounted for more than 61,000, or 73% of those deaths.

~ Valerie Bauman and Ian Lopez, "A Crisis With No End in Sight," Bloomberg Businessweek, March 1, 2021

Bob Moriarty on Covid death statistics

Everything you’re being told about COVID... is a lie, okay?  Mathematically it would be impossible for the United States to have 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s cases.  If you test positive for COVID, and you go to the hospital for any reason, the government picks up the tab.  So literally everybody that goes to a hospital that doesn’t have insurance, the government’s picking up the tab.  Now the government knows the hospital’s lying, the hospital knows they’re lying, but they’re taking 22-week preemies and saying they’re dying of COVID.  They can’t die of COVID, they’re going to die anyway.  They’re taking people who were shot and saying they’re dying of COVID. They didn’t die of COVID, they were shot.  There were people that were in car accidents, and people who were in motorcycle accidents, people who had heart attacks, people who had strokes. And everybody who dies who doesn’t have insurance all of the sudden has gotten a stamp on their left hand saying COVID.  Well it’s bullshit.  It’s not true.

~ Bob Moriarty, "Bob Moriarty: You Don't Have to Make Every Bet," Energy and Gold Ltd., August 10, 2020

Dr. Malcolm Kendrick on Covid-19 death certification in the UK

[D]eath certification is certainly not an exact science. Never was, never will be. It’s true that things are somewhat more accurate in hospitals, where there are more tests and scans, and suchlike.

Then, along comes Covid-19, and many of the rules – such as they were – went straight out the window. At one point, it was even suggested that relatives could fill in death certificates, if no-one else was available. Though I am not sure this ever happened.

What were we now supposed to do? If an elderly person died in a care home, or at home, did they die of Covid-19? Well, frankly, who knows? Especially if they didn’t have a test for Covid-19 – which for several weeks was not even allowed. Only patients entering hospital were deemed worthy of a test. No-one else.

What advice was given? It varied throughout the country, and from coroner to coroner – and from day to day. Was every person in a care home now to be diagnosed as dying of the coronavirus ? Well, that was certainly the advice given in several parts of the UK.

~ Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, "I’ve Signed Death Certificates During COVID-19. Here’s Why You Can’t Trust Any of the Statistics on the Number of Victims," RT Opinion, May 28, 2020

Gregory van Kipnis on Covid-19 death statistics

As COVID-19 deaths mounted, not a word was officially spoken about where they were occurring [residents of long-term medical care facilities accounted for 53% of all COVID-19 deaths]. Fear was stoked that it was a population-wide epidemic. We should ALL lock down.

What a costly mistake, a mistake that continues to this day. Governors and mayors with fresh data insights into the truth still want to be central planners and determine which businesses can re-open and to what degree, who should still shelter or socially distance. They send out teams to draw circles in the grass defining where groups can camp out and place police monitors in all the parks to warn people to stay within the circles. At this point they are just imaginary prisons, but they are prisons.

Madness, sheer madness. 

Though that is an easy and superficial observation to make, what is really unsaid, and not easy to admit, is that large numbers of politicians and bureaucrats have revealed their true nature. Speeches decorated with declarations of “better safe than sorry” and “planning is better than no planning” reveal they are authoritarians by nature; central planners of the worst kind. 

In conclusion, the relevant death rate for policy purposes has been obscured. The consequence has been inappropriate policies. They have resulted in a bizarro world of highly restricted commercial functioning and immense economic destruction, alongside no evidence that lives were saved and growing evidence of second-tier loss of life resulting from lockdown.  

~ Gregory van Kipnis, "Focus on the Covid-19 Death Rate," AIER.org, May 24, 2020