Was there really a 'pandemic?'

A pandemic is defined by the rate of spread of a disease. Not by how serious the disease is, or how many people die. You could have a global pandemic of a harmless disease that gives you a slight sniffle for 24 hours and then goes away, provided it spreads quickly enough. But probably nobody, including the WHO and doctors, would notice.

At least that's the definition the WHO uses, which is not the same as the classical definition.

So by the WHO's definition of a pandemic, yes, Covid was a true pandemic.

In the popular imagination, a pandemic is when many people die. This is where things get tricky. It is hard to separate deaths from Covid itself, and deaths from other causes. There's a mass of overcounting that occurred. To say nothing of the huge number of iatrogenic deaths:

• Kidney failure from Remdesivir.
• Lung damage and other complications from early intubation (ventilators), including secondary bacterial pneumonia which (in contrast to the previous SARS outbreak) was often not treated with antibiotics.
• Suppressing early treatment and refusal to give patients Vitamin D.
• The as-yet unexplained surge in prescriptions for midazolam injections in British nursing homes. Involuntary euthanasia?

(You'll notice I'm excluding vaccine deaths from this list.)

How many of those Covid deaths could have been prevented with more focus on the at-risk population (the elderly) and less on upheaving society and transferring billions from the working class to the elites? Probably a lot.

But even if we ignore these serious questions and take the data at face value, it is clear that Covid, including the very serious early strains, is about as dangerous as a bad flu season for most people, but not that much more dangerous. And we've know it from very early on.

In 2020, the WHO published a peer-reviewed estimate of Covid’s overall Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) to be about 0.23% globally. Soon afterwards another peer-reviewed study revised that figure downward to about 0.15% globally.

The latest research from John Ioannidis et al finds a global IFR of 0.03% and 0.07% for the 0-59 and 0-69 age groups, much lower than previously estimated, and lightyears from the early hysterical fears of fatality rates up to 10%.

In comparison, a bad flu strain typically has an IFR around 0.1% (excluding the 1918 Spanish Flu which was truly horrific) and the seasonal flu is around 0.01% or so.