The 5 Biggest Scandals [so far] Of The Coronavirus Response

By Jefferey Jaxen

Much of the developed world is facing a long, hot ‘summer of the mask,’ as politicians and public officials bring down new orders to cover the faces of their populations. 

A sanity-seeking public has mostly been met with “facts” that shift daily and politicized science that leaves core truths elusive. There have been scandals that spur questions about what is really happening behind this extended virus campaign. Clearing the air of the smokescreen of fear and narrative-driven headlines, major mishandling and open fraud have been smeared across the coronavirus landscape. 

Here are just five scandals to consider: 

1. Double Counting

Early in the pandemic, testing was the cornerstone of information gathering to understand more about Covid-19. The race was to see how many antibody tests governments could throw at their populations. 

Yet issues emerged almost immediately, according to The Telegraph, as both the UK’s The Department of Health and Social Care and Public Health England each confirmed double-counting of tests. This inflated the daily reported diagnostic test numbers by over 20%, with that proportion being much higher earlier in the crisis, before home test kits were added to the daily totals.

Almost 350,000 more tests have been reported in Government data than people tested since the start of the pandemic.

      2. Antibody Tests

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recently updated ‘Interim Guidelines for Covid-19 Testing’ immediately raised eyebrows. Early on, the public was told that greater testing capacity would inform health officials when it was safe to restart the economy, get back to school and get on with life. Buuuut….Not so fast! Now, according to the CDC:

“Serologic test results should not be used to make decisions about grouping persons residing in or being admitted to congregate settings, such as schools, dormitories, or correctional facilities…Serologic test results should not be used to make decisions about returning persons to the workplace.” 

But at least the tests are accurate right? Uh…..:

“In most of the country, including areas that have been heavily impacted, the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibody is expected to be low, ranging from less than 5% to 25%, so that testing at this point might result in relatively more false positive results and fewer false-negative results,” the CDC writes. 

The CDC also tacitly admitted that not much is understood about Covid-19 antibodies, stating that “until the durability and duration of immunity is established, it cannot be assumed that individuals with truly positive antibody test results are protected from future infection.”

Yet antibody formation is exactly what is being used to determine the success of the new Covid vaccines in development by Moderna and others.

CDC’s interim guidelines also don’t take into account fraudulent testing kits with no oversight from the FDA. The situation has broken down so spectacularly that the House Committee on Economic and Consumer Policy had to step in. Take a listen to its chair Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi:

3. Nursing Homes 

Thousands of deaths in New York nursing homes are direct fallout from Gov. Cuomo’s orders and have been nothing short of devastating. NY Post columnist Michael Goodwin wrote that the nursing homes were ‘killing fields.’ A March 25 directive, which has since been scrubbed from the New York State health department’s website, directed nursing homes to pack residents in without knowing or being able to determine their virus status. 

New York saw over 6,000 nursing home deaths. Cuomo blamed the deaths on God, President Trump and The NY Post.

Meanwhile, a tally by the Associated Press found 45,500 deaths across the USA when looking at assisted living facilities, nursing homes and staff.

The House committee overseeing the federal response to the coronavirus crisis recently announced it has launched a sweeping investigation into the country’s five largest for-profit nursing home companies. The committee is demanding details about their structure, executive compensation and preparedness for the coronavirus crisis.

U.S. Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.) called for a separate investigation into New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s nursing home orders during the coronavirus pandemic. During a (virtual) news conference Thursday morning, Reed stated “We estimate potentially as many as twice the number of 6,200 of our grandparents were killed by Governor Cuomo’s order.”

4. The Hydroxychloroquine Treatment 

The world all but shut the door on hydroxychloroquine after The Lancet published its now infamous study claiming the common drug was decreasing patient survival and leading to “increased frequency of ventricular arrhythmias.” 

A medical community freely prescribing nearly six million doses per year of hydroxychloroquine pre-coronavirus suddenly became concerned about the drug’s adverse effects. The World Health Organization (WHO) instantly turned its back on the drug, shutting down its global trials midstream.  

But hold the press! The Lancet was forced, due to the global, open source efforts of public investigation, to retract the paper. In what has been dubbed ‘one of the biggest retractions in modern history,’ the data aggregator ‘company’ Surgisphere would not produce the full data or agreements with the over 600 hospitals around the world it claimed to be working with. The WHO announced it was restarting its trials after weeks of suspension. 

With suspicious timing, the day after The Lancet retraction, Oxford’s RECOVERY trial halted its hydroxychloroquine arm claiming the drug showed no benefit. Its trial, along with WHO’s, have since been highly criticized for needlessly using dangerous doses of the drug on its patients. Echoing Surgisphere-like behavior, Oxford has been slow to release their data as well. Author James Todaro, MD wrote on Twitter:

“It’s been almost 2 weeks…Can Oxford University stop fiddling around with the HCQ Recovery Trial data and just release it. After the Surgisphere/Lancet study, we all know the independent peer-review on here is what counts.”

5. Modeling Disaster 

We’ve saved the best/worst for last! Who could forget Neil Ferguson, author of the largest failed model in the world?

Imperial College of London’s Neil Ferguson used old, poorly crafted coding, described as ‘sim city without the graphics’ to extrapolate that millions may die from the coronavirus early on. Variations inside the model were so large one could drive a lorry through them. Ferguson’s fouled-up predictions were incorporated by both the U.S. and UK to justify lockdowns and other suffocating measures populations are still wrestling to remove to this day. 

Did Ferguson step down? Nope. Not for his trash model, at least. It was only after he was caught breaking the very quarantine rules he helped to establish, a now common trend by ‘officials’ during the pandemic, that he left his governmental position with a top scientific advisory group in disgrace.

The public is overstretched. We are weary of continued heavy-handed government enforcement. Talk of a second wave looms. It threatens to extend and restart lockdowns and further erode the economy.

Eleven states now require every resident to wear a face covering while in public, with California becoming the latest addition onThursday. How this will all end is anyone’s guess. 

One thing is for sure: The public is laser-focused on government hypocrisy, mismanagement and fraud like never before.