Brownstone Institute
A Closer Look at the Covid Mortality Rate
Article from the Brownstone Institute
One of the most consistent efforts made by “experts” during the early stages of the pandemic was to attempt to impress on the public that COVID was an extremely deadly disease.
While it’s clear that for the extremely elderly and severely immunocompromised, COVID does present significant and serious health concerns, the “experts” did their best to convince people of all age groups that they were in danger.
Initially the World Health Organization, in their infinite incompetence, made a substantial contribution to this perception by claiming that the mortality rate from COVID was shockingly high.
In March 2020, with precious little data, the WHO made the alarming claim that 3.4% of people who got COVID had died.
CNBC reported that an early press conference by WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus compared that expected mortality of COVID-19 to the flu:
“Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press briefing at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva. In comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected, he said.
This stood in contrast to previous estimates, which were also above 2%:
“Early in the outbreak, scientists had concluded the death rate was around 2.3%.”
While “experts” could be forgiven for being unsure about the death rate of a brand new illness with very little data available, the fear-mongering and world-altering policy enacted based on these estimates has caused incalculable damage.
It’s now widely known and accepted that these estimates were wildly incorrect, off by orders of magnitude.
But a new paper out from one of the world’s leading experts confirms that they were off even more than we previously realized.
John Ioannidis is one of the nation’s leading public health experts, employed at Stanford University as Professor of Medicine in Stanford Prevention Research, of Epidemiology and Population Health,” as well as “of Statistics and Biomedical Data Science.”
You’d think that those impeccable qualifications and a track record of being one of the most published and cited scientists in the modern world would insulate him from criticism, but unfortunately that’s no longer how The Science™ works.
Ioannidis first drew the ire of The Keepers of The Science™ early in the outbreak, when he cautioned that society might be making tremendous decisions based on limited data that was of poor quality.
He also took part in the infamous seroprevalence study conducted in Santa Clara County, led by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
That examination, which looked at antibody prevalence in the San Jose area, came to the conclusion that COVID was already significantly more widespread by March and April 2020 than most people realized.
This had wide-ranging implications, but the most important revelation was that the estimates of COVID’s mortality rate used by “scientists” and the WHO were almost certainly much too high.
Those estimates were created under the assumption that COVID cases were overwhelmingly detectable; that cases were captured by testing and thus tracking deaths could be achieved with a “case fatality rate,” instead of “infection fatality rate.”
That was the mistake Tedros and the WHO made two and a half years ago.
Of course, for providing substantial evidence and data that COVID was less deadly than initially feared, Ioannidis (and Bhattacharya) was attacked from within the “expert community.”
In what has now become a familiar insult, those behind the study were vilified as COVID minimizers and dangerous conspiracy theorists who would get people killed by not taking the virus seriously enough.
But Ioannidis remained undeterred, and with several authors, he recently released another review of the infection fatality rate of COVID. Importantly, the paper looks at the pre-vaccination time period and covers the non-elderly age groups; those who were most affected by COVID restrictions and endless mandates.
The Numbers
The review begins with a statement of fact that was almost entirely ignored by lockdown “experts” throughout the pandemic, but especially when restrictions, lockdowns and mandates were at their peak early on.
The infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID-19 among non-elderly people in the absence of vaccination or prior infection is important to estimate accurately, since 94% of the global population is younger than 70 years and 86% is younger than 60 years.
Emphasis added.
94% of the global population is younger than 70 years old.
6% of is older than 70 years old.
86% is younger than 60 years old.
This is relevant because restrictions overwhelmingly impacted the 86-94% of people who are younger than 60 or 70 years old.
Ioannidis and his co-writers reviewed 40 national seroprevalence studies that covered 38 countries to come to determine their estimates of infection fatality rate for the overwhelming majority of people.
Importantly, those seroprevalence studies were conducted before the vaccines were released, meaning the IFR’s were calculated before whatever impact vaccines had on younger age groups.
So what did they find?
The median infection fatality rate for those aged 0-59 was 0.035%.
This represents 86% of the global population and the survival rate for those who were infected with COVID pre-vaccination was 99.965%.
For those aged 0-69, which covers 94% of the global population, the fatality rate was 0.095%, meaning the survival rate for nearly 7.3 billion people was 99.905%.
Those survival rates are obviously staggeringly high, which already creates frustration that restrictions were imposed on all age groups, when focused protection for those over 70 or at significantly elevated risk would have been a much more preferable course of action.
But it gets worse.
The researchers broke down the demographics into smaller buckets, showing the increase in risk amongst older populations, and conversely, how infinitesimal the risk was amongst younger age groups.
- Ages 60-69, fatality rate 0.501%, survival rate 99.499%
- Ages 50-59, fatality rate 0.129%, survival rate 99.871%
- Ages 40-49, fatality rate 0.035% survival rate 99.965%
- Ages 30-39, fatality rate 0.011%, survival rate 99.989%
- Ages 20-29, fatality rate 0.003%, survival rate 99.997%
- Ages 0-19, fatality rate 0.0003%, survival rate 99.9997%
They added that “Including data from another 9 countries with imputed age distribution of COVID-19 deaths yielded median IFR of 0.025-0.032% for 0-59 years and 0.063-0.082% for 0-69 years.”
These numbers are astounding and reassuringly low, across the board.
But they’re almost nonexistent for children.
Yet as late as fall 2021, Fauci was still fear-mongering about the risks of COVID to children in order to increase vaccination uptake, saying in an interview that it was not a “benign situation:”
“We certainly want to get as many children vaccinated within this age group as we possibly can because as you heard and reported, that this is not, you know, a benign situation.”
It’s nearly impossible for any illness to be less of a risk, or more “benign” than a 0.0003% risk of death.
Even in October 2021, during that same interview with NPR, Fauci said that masks should continue on children as an “extra step” to protect them, even after vaccination:
And when you have that type of viral dynamic, even when you have kids vaccinated, you certainly – when you are in an indoor setting, you want to make sure you go the extra step to protect them. So I can’t give you an exact number of what that would be in the dynamics of virus in the community, but hopefully we will get there within a reasonable period of time. You know, masks often now – as we say, they’re not forever. And hopefully we’ll get to a point where we can remove the masks in schools and in other places. But I don’t believe that that time is right now.
Nothing better highlights the incompetence and misinformation from Dr. Fauci than ignoring that pre-vaccination, children were at vanishingly small risks from COVID, that vaccination uptake amongst kids was entirely irrelevant since they do not prevent infection or transmission, and that mask usage is completely ineffective at protecting anyone. Especially for those who didn’t need protection in the first place.
The CDC, “expert” community, World Health Organization, media figures — all endlessly spread terror that the virus was a mass killer while conflating detected case fatality rates with infection fatality rates.
Yet now we have another piece of evidence suggesting that the initial WHO estimates were off by 99% for 94% of the world’s population.
Just for some perspective, here’s the difference visually portrayed between what the WHO claimed and what Ioannidis found:
Even if the lockdowns, mask mandates, capacity limits and shuttered playgrounds worked, the dangers of the virus were so minuscule that the collateral damage instantly and immediately outweighed any potential benefit.
Economic destruction, increased suicide attempts due to seemingly indefinite isolation, horrifying levels of learning loss, increasing obesity amongst kids, plummeting test scores, increased poverty and hunger, supply chain problems, rampant inflation; all of it is a direct result of policies imposed by terrified, incompetent “experts.”
Their estimates were hopelessly, catastrophically wrong, yet they maintained their unchallenged sense of authority for multiple years, and still receive awards, praise, increased funding and a sense of infallibility amongst politicians and decision-makers.
If sanity and intellectual honesty still existed, these estimates would be front page news for every major media outlet in the world.
Instead, because the media and their allies in the tech, corporate, and political classes promoted and encouraged lockdowns and restrictions while censoring dissent, it’s ignored.
Nothing could be more perfectly COVID than that.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
By 
Who Controls the Administrative State?
President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.
It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.
The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.
How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.
All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.
The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.
Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.
This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.
The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.
The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.
The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.
There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.
Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.
After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?
So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.
What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.
We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.
All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.
What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.
For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.
That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.
There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.
First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.
That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.
Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.
In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.
Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?
Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.
Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.
If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.
The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?
Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.
Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
By
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterizations of things I have said that are simply not true. When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Within hours, my news feed was populated with angsty articles hand-wringing about the future of vaccines under Kennedy, whom legacy media and the establishment are certain would confiscate life-saving vaccine programs, raising the spectre of mass waves of illness and death.
In particular, this quote from Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the only Republican who voted against Kennedy’s confirmation, appeared over and over again:
“I’m a survivor of childhood polio. In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”
Yet, I could not find one piece of mainstream coverage of this quote that mentioned the astonishing fact that 98% of polio cases in 2023, the most recent year for which we have full data, were caused by the polio vaccine.
You read that correctly. In 2023, 12 wild polio cases were recorded (six in Afghanistan, six in Pakistan), with a further 524 circulating vaccine-derived cases, mostly throughout Africa. This trend is in keeping with data from the previous several years.
An important contextualising detail, wouldn’t you think?
The cause of this polio resurgence is that the world’s poor are given the oral polio vaccine (OPV), which contains a weakened virus that can replicate in the gut and spread in feces, causing vaccine-derived outbreaks.
People in rich countries get the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which does not contain live virus and therefore does not carry the risk of spreading the very disease it’s vaccinating against.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and vaccine-promoting organisations say that the way out of the problem is to vaccinate harder, as the argument goes that outbreaks only occur in under-vaccinated communities.
This may be well and good, but the total omission of the fact from media coverage that the goalposts have shifted from eradicating wild polio (not yet complete but nearly there, according to the WHO) to eradicating vaccine-derived polio (the main problem these days) underscores that this is why hardly anyone who knows anything trusts the media anymore.
A member of my extended family has polio. It’s nasty and life-altering and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
That’s why I would hope that any vaccines given would be safe – contracting polio from the supposedly preventative vaccine is the worst-case scenario, second only to death.
This is Kennedy’s expressly stated aim.
“When people actually hear what I think about vaccines, which is common sense, which is vaccines should be tested, they should be safe, everyone should have informed consent,” he said at his confirmation press conference.
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterisations of things I have said that are simply not true.
“When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Grown-ups who support vaccines can walk and chew gum. From the point of view of the public health establishment, the polio vaccine has prevented millions of cases and has nearly eradicated the disease.
At the same time, the world’s poorest are afflicted with polio outbreaks which we can work to prevent, and the safety of all polio vaccine products on the market should be subject to the rigorous standards applied to all other medicines.
Unless you think that poor people don’t matter, in which case the status quo might suit you fine.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
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