I got an email from a friend – a successful, well-educated man. He shares many of my views on economics and business, but his views on public health are what I’d call “conventional.” Which means that he has always thought my ideas about COVID – the virus, the government reaction, and the vaccines – were crazy.

Attached to his email was an article published in a mainstream media outlet arguing that the “facts” promoted in 2020 through 2023 by the World Health Organization, the NIH, and the CDC were basically valid – that COVID was a deadly virus and that the shutdown of our economy and the mandates on masks and distancing and vaccinations saved millions of lives.

I was going to dissect and dismember the article. It would have been easy because it was so full of factual errors and long-since-disproven claims. But I thought that rather than spend a half-hour on that I’d spend a few hours collecting the many reports being published these days that support my position – especially my belief that the vaccines did more harm than good.

So, that’s what I did last night. I spent about four hours putting together no fewer than 30 reports on no fewer than 20 recent studies – all of which were scientifically valid and half of which were based on sizeable populations. And then, when I went to save it, the damn thing somehow disappeared!

I spent another hour and a half unsuccessfully trying to retrieve it before I realized that any attempt to help my friend see the truth by overwhelming him with evidence would be futile. Like many major public issues today, the debate on the lethality of COVID and the effectiveness of the vaccines has been, for most people, rooted in personal political prejudices, all of which are supported regularly by bad or good data and arguments located and delivered based on algorithmic fingerprints.

So, following that logic, I decided that, instead, I should be writing a piece about why I’m not going to bother to write about the COVID story anymore.

But by a happy coincidence, one of the COVID-related articles that slipped into my inbox this morning was a new report on “all-cause mortality studies” – which, because I didn’t fully understand how important they can be in the vaccine debate, I hadn’t included in my previous reporting.

“Hell,” I thought, “let me give it another try.”

And so I did.

But before I get into that, here’s something that might help to bring my friend over to my side on COVID, even if he isn’t willing to consider the all-cause mortality argument…

I read yesterday that Kash Patel said that he and his team had uncovered evidence that almost everything the government health organizations and mainstream media have been telling the public for five years was wrong. Not just wrong, but consciously propagated bullshit.

His team is in possession of documents and communications showing that officials in government agencies worked with Big Pharma lobbyists and liaisons to suppress critical information – about the virus’s origins, vaccine safety, and even effective treatments – that was brushed aside.

“The full story will be revealed soon,” Patel promised, and “it’s going to shake up a lot of people’s beliefs about this entire pandemic.”

We’ve been promised full reports before that haven’t materialized, so I’m going to hope for the best but prepare for worst by assuming that none of that info will see the light of day – and by doing the next best thing, which is to publish and explain the ugly facts as they are exposed.

Which brings me to this…