I know it’s wrong to compare them to holocaust deniers but really, it’s in the same ballpark.
Here’s senator Joni Ernst from Iowa, the latest COVID hot spot in America:
Reporter: You mentioned something I want to clariy about the COVID numbers and maybe being inflated by health care providers inorder to get more reimbursement. I want to give you maybe an opportunity to clarify your thought here?
Ernst: Well, and again, this is what I’ve heard from health care provider and others. I cant actually look at that information, biut I have heard it from health care providers, that they do get reimbursed higher amounts if it’s Covid-related illness or death., So, because of the additional expense for PPE and the treatment tha might be necessary for Covid-19.
Reporter: Do you think the numbers are being inflated because of that?
Ernst: That I’m not sure. And again, that’s why I want somebody to really go back and do a good fact check on this. And I don’t have the means to do that …
But I do think that should be discussed because I heard the same thing on the news. You know, traveling across the state today, is that they’re thinking there may be 10,000 or less deaths that were actually singularly COVID-19.
Arrrrrgh!
Dr. Tom Friedan former head of CDC:
There is a plain and simple truth here. More than 200,000 Amricans died in excess of historical rates between March and July. The death rate is a fact. Everything else is inference.
If you die from cancer and you also have diabetes, that doesn’t mean you didn’t die from cancer. That means you had another condition. If you die from COVID and you also had diabetes that doesn’t mean you didn’t die from COVID. The fact here are extremely clear. The US death rate and the most reliable way of measuring this is what we call the excess mortality rate, the number of deaths beyond the historical base line…. And it is extremely clear there are well over 200,000 excess deaths in the US already.
That’s a combination of three things.
1. someone who died and the doctor said, it was COVID. That’s the 185,000 number
2. people who died from COVID but there wasn’t a test or they died at home or it wasn’t recognized to be COVID
3. people who might have had aheart attack or other serious problem and they didn’t go to get care because they were afraid or the health care system was overwhlemed.
That’s the bottom line. We’ve lost over 200,000 American lives, many of them preventable, because the response to this pandemic here in the US has not been nearly as effective as many other countries have done.
I cannot believe anyone has to explain that even one adult person, much less a US Senator and the president of the United States:
This is astonishingly stupid but it does clear one thing up. Ernst believes the best hope of getting re-elected is to lash herself as tightly to Trump and QAnon as possible. I have to assume that’s because she’s a true believer herself.
And this loon is on theJudiciary and Armed Services Committee.