Subj : Breaking pandemic news --> We are 100% certain that MichaelE does **not To : Michael Ejercito From : HeartDoc Andrew Date : Mon May 19 2025 13:45:54 XPost: sci.med.cardiology, alt.atheism, sci.med XPost: alt.christnet.christianlife Michael Ejercito wrote: > HeartDoc Andrew, in the Holy Spirit, boldly wrote: >> Michael Ejercito wrote: >> >>> https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/1kn24i0/a_ragtag_group_of_covid_truthtellers_go_to/ >>> >>> >>> A Ragtag Group of Covid Truth-Tellers Go to Washington >>> >>> Kelley Krohnert, a wife and mother who lives just outside Atlanta, >>> started a website in 2020 to hold government agencies accountable for >>> their Covid data. (Kendrick Brinson for The Free Press) >>> During the pandemic, they were ostracized. Now, they’re influencing >>> public policy. >>> By Carrie McKean >>> 05.14.25 — Health and Self-Improvement >>> --:-- >>> --:-- >>> Upgrade to Listen >>> 5 mins >>> Produced by ElevenLabs using AI narration >>> 200 >>> 211 >>> Earlier this week, we ran a collection of pieces by the new leaders of >>> American public health—doctors Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, and Vinay >>> Prasad—all of whom just happen to have contributed to The Free Press. >>> Five years ago, they raised serious questions in our pages about >>> lockdowns, shuttered schools, and vaccine mandates—questions for which >>> they were vilified. Now, all of them have been not only vindicated, but >>> promoted to some of the highest offices in public health. But these >>> leaders are only part of the story. Behind them is a ragtag group of >>> ordinary Americans who also asked questions during the Covid era, and >>> kept asking them, even though they were belittled, discredited, and >>> ostracized. In today’s piece, reporter Carrie McKean profiles these >>> individuals, and asks them: How can we move forward? How can these new >>> leaders restore our faith in public health? >>> —The Editors >>> >>> >>> Five years ago, Kelley Krohnert, a wife and mother who lives just >>> outside Atlanta and runs a small photography business, was, like most of >>> us, filled with dread and confusion. It was the early days of Covid. At >>> the time, the Georgia Health Department wasn’t keeping a public record >>> of the number of cases. So Kelley, who’s in her forties, began plugging >>> numbers she saw on the news into her own spreadsheet and started a >>> website, Covid-Georgia.com, to share her data, gaining a wide following >>> on Twitter (now X) under the handle @KelleyKGa. >>> >>> It didn’t take long for Krohnert to start noticing statistical errors, >>> which grew only more common as time went on. The CDC’s own “unofficial” >>> Covid Data Tracker of cases from across the nation often reported higher >>> pediatric death counts than the official numbers on the National Center >>> for Health Statistics website. And the media often reported those higher >>> numbers. As time went on, the CDC reported that 4 percent of Covid >>> deaths were children, when their own data showed it was .04 percent. In >>> 2022, she discovered that a frightening study cited by the CDC during >>> its push for a pediatric Covid vaccine vastly inflated the disease’s >>> risk to children; for example, it compared 26 months of Covid-associated >>> deaths to one year of deaths from other causes. >>> >>> >>> “These were mistakes and errors a middle-school student wouldn’t make,” >>> Krohnert said of errors she found in CDC Covid data. (Angela Weiss/AFP >>> via Getty Images) >>> “These were mistakes and errors a middle-school student wouldn’t make,” >>> Krohnert told me. She didn’t start out with any inherent suspicion of >>> the government. She expected officials to be a trusted source of >>> information and to deliver level-headed guidance. But the more she >>> burrowed into the Covid numbers, the more problems she saw. And >>> remarkably, all the errors she identified made things seem worse and >>> more dangerous than they were. >>> >>> Krohnert did get some recognition and vindication. After she alerted the >>> authors of the study about their errors regarding Covid’s risks to >>> children, they immediately made corrections, and the CDC eventually >>> stopped claiming Covid was one of the top five killers of children. Yet >>> Krohnert said the agency never responded to her directly. It also >>> characterized her as just “a person with a web page or a blog” in an >>> email that became public following an FOIA request to the study’s >>> authors. And it plowed ahead with approval of the childhood Covid >>> vaccine. After Krohnert replied to a post by Surgeon General Jerome >>> Adams that defended Covid vaccine trials, he posted a thread. “You trust >>> your electrician / plumber / tax preparer. You should trust your doc,” >>> Adams wrote. >>> >>> As for the inflated case numbers? Eventually, the CDC quietly removed >>> 72,277 misattributed deaths from the Covid Data Tracker, a data >>> correction attributed to Krohnert’s advocacy by The BMJ (formerly the >>> British Medical Journal). >>> >>> Looking back now through the fog of Covid, it is easy to overlook the >>> data nerds, virologists, epidemiologists, and ordinary citizens like >>> Krohnert who, scattered across the country, doggedly fact-checked the >>> U.S. government. For their efforts, they were censored and shadow-banned >>> on social media, scorned by polite society, and discredited as >>> dangerous, science-denying conspiracy theorists by high-level government >>> officials and the mainstream media. But they persisted, and 40 to 50 of >>> them eventually connected on Twitter, creating an informal group they >>> dubbed “Rational Ground/Team Reality.” >>> >>> >>> In 2022, Kelly Krohnert discovered that a study cited by the CDC during >>> its push for a pediatric Covid vaccine vastly inflated the disease’s >>> risk to children. (Michael Nagle/Xinhua via Getty Images) >>> And since then, times have changed. Today, Team Reality is seeing their >>> recommendations adopted by the federal government. >>> >>> One of the medical experts who broke with the consensus during the >>> pandemic and joined forces with Rational Ground, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a >>> professor of health policy at Stanford University School of Medicine, is >>> now the director of the National Institutes of Health. Two weeks ago, in >>> one of his first official actions, Bhattacharya announced that the NIH >>> will accelerate the rollout of a plan to make available to the public >>> all data gathered from taxpayer-funded NIH scientific research studies. >>> It’s a policy recommendation consistently put forth by members of >>> Rational Ground. >>> >>> “I believe very strongly that the products and data produced by >>> scientific projects paid for by the public should be available to the >>> public,” Bhattacharya told me in an email. Just 26 percent of Americans >>> have a great deal of confidence that scientists are working for the >>> public good, a recent poll found. Bhattacharya said rebuilding that >>> fractured trust is at the core of what he must accomplish in his new job. >>> >>> >>> “It was a kind of pinch-me moment,” said Justin Hart, a 53-year-old data >>> and marketing consultant based in San Diego, about a gathering a few >>> weeks ago with Bhattacharya near Washington to celebrate the appointment >>> of the “fringe epidemiologist,” as he was baselessly called by former >>> NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, to run the agency. >>> >>> Just two years ago, Hart, his wife Jenny, their toddler daughter, and >>> Bhattacharya had walked the halls of Capitol Hill, passing out a >>> one-page Rational Ground advocacy sheet and fruitlessly seeking >>> conversations with lawmakers willing to consider their heterodox views. >>> >>> Hart and Bhattacharya connected in the early days of the pandemic thanks >>> to mutual friends at Stanford. A small group gathered to meet after >>> reading an article by Dr. John Ioannidis, a Stanford statistician and >>> professor of biomedical data science. He said some of the same things >>> they had all been thinking, including his warning in March 2020 that >>> public-health officials were making consequential decisions without good >>> data and calling the Covid response a potential “fiasco in the making.” >>> >>> From there, Team Reality grew. They became supporters of the Great >>> Barrington Declaration, a document written by Bhattacharya and two >>> colleagues, advocating for focused protection for those most vulnerable >>> to Covid, and a return to close-to-normal life for the rest of society. >>> The team plowed ahead with their advocacy, taking solace in their ragtag >>> community when they faced the scorn of the mainstream. >>> >>> “We had people who were apolitical, people who were Democrats, people >>> who were very conservative Republicans,” said Hart. “It’s amazing how >>> unifying it can be when the government starts pushing around our kids >>> and impinging our freedoms.” >>> >>> >>> Matt Shapiro, who goes by the handle @PoliticalMath on X, describes >>> himself as a right-of-center, “insatiably curious” >>> artificial-intelligence engineer. (William DeShazer for The Free Press) >>> Matt Shapiro, who goes by the handle @PoliticalMath on X and lives >>> outside Atlanta, signed up early in the pandemic to process data for The >>> Atlantic’s Covid Tracking Project, the most complete data repository of >>> Covid’s impact in the U.S. Shapiro describes himself as a >>> right-of-center, “insatiably curious” artificial-intelligence engineer >>> with a background in data management, and he was eager to put his >>> data-mining skills to work for the common good. His work became a >>> “full-time Covid hobby,” he said. Shapiro joined other volunteers—“good >>> people trying to do an important thing”—to input data, analyze trends, >>> and make data-based recommendations to help shape public health. >>> >>> But when the data told a story that contradicted the Centers for Disease >>> Control and Prevention’s recommendations, for example, that Covid spread >>> as quickly in places with mask mandates as it did in places without >>> them, his mostly left-leaning colleagues on the team went silent. “All >>> my data friends that I had made doing all this work together were just >>> like, ‘Not touching that,’?” he recalled. >>> >>> Shapiro said he was mocked and isolated for questioning the predominant >>> narrative that shuttering schools and businesses was lifesaving. More >>> alarming to him were the massive implications such conformity had for >>> society. “That’s not the story we’re telling ourselves about who we >>> are,” he told me. >>> >>> >>> Tracking Covid data became Matt Shapiro’s “full-time hobby” during the >>> pandemic, he said. (William DeShazer for The Free Press) >>> It was different with Rational Ground/Team Reality. Members of the group >>> worked to provide data for Dr. Scott Atlas, a Covid adviser during the >>> first Trump administration, who used their findings to refute CDC >>> assessments at briefings. They advised governors and state-level Covid >>> task forces, like that of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and federal >>> lawmakers such as Andrew Clyde of Georgia and Dan Crenshaw of Texas, all >>> Republicans. They held regional gatherings and relentlessly pursued >>> grassroots campaigns to correct and call out errors wherever they found >>> them. >>> >>> In such a diverse group, there was often sharp disagreement. “We’ve had >>> people rage-quit,” said Hart. “Like in any human endeavor, we definitely >>> have our moments where people don’t see things in the same way, but we >>> had an open forum where we felt like we could hash it out and discuss >>> things.” >>> >>> >>> Five years later, Team Reality is still advocating for institutional >>> reforms based on what they saw during the pandemic. Under the leadership >>> of Bhattacharya, some of those changes are already happening. They want >>> safeguards to protect the American people from overreaching government >>> authority, and they think that constraining power and increasing >>> transparency will ultimately help restore trust in public health. >>> >>> To achieve this, they want public-health policy discussions to be >>> robust, with dissenting voices and a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis >>> of any public-health policy proposal before it becomes enforceable, even >>> in emergency situations. >>> >>> >>> “Government scientists do not have a monopoly on the truth,” NIH >>> director Jay Bhattacharya told The Free Press. (Andrew Harnik via Getty >>> Images) >>> “Public health policy decisions need a high quality of evidence >>> demonstrating a good amount of benefit for a small amount of >>> imposition,” said Krohnert. “With Covid, we got the opposite: >>> low-quality evidence demonstrating a small amount of benefit with >>> massive impositions and untold costs.” >>> >>> They also call for radical transparency. Because CDC guidance during >>> Covid was often based on desired outcomes rather than actual data-driven >>> science, Shapiro said, data from any publicly funded study should be >>> publicly available. “If you collect data with our taxpayer money, it’s >>> our data, and you should have to show it to us, rather than only showing >>> it if it achieves some end-policy goal,” he said. >>> >>> Bhattacharya agrees. “Government scientists do not have a monopoly on >>> the truth, which is most likely to be found by a spirit of open-minded >>> investigation, including by members of the public with access to the >>> same data as public-health officials,” he told me. >>> >>> Humility is an uncommon virtue for top government officials, but >>> Bhattacharya knows better than most how the experts can get things >>> wrong. “On topic after topic. . . Rational Ground analysts outperformed >>> and corrected government agencies,” he told me. “Rational Ground often >>> relied on data that agencies like the CDC had made publicly available to >>> correct the CDC itself on its misinterpretations of its own data.” >>> >>> >>> Matt Shapiro said he was mocked and isolated for questioning the >>> predominant narrative during Covid that shuttering schools and >>> businesses was lifesaving. (William DeShazer for The Free Press) >>> Opening the data to the public could help extremists misrepresent data >>> and take it out of context, but the benefits outweigh the risks, said >>> Krohnert. “Blocking access to data is not going to prevent bad actors >>>from spreading misinformation. If anything, it adds fuel to the fire, >>> because they can make up what they want and claim it’s from some study >>> the government ‘doesn’t want you to see,’?” she said. >>> >>> Other hoped-for reforms go far beyond data reporting. It’s about what >>> gets studied to begin with. During the pandemic, policy decisions with >>> enormous effects, such as universal masking or standing six feet apart, >>> we now know were based on flawed research, or often just guesswork. But >>> according to Hart, the federal health agencies resisted funding studies >>> that might refute CDC recommendations. >>> >>> Then there is the matter of institutional conflicts of interest. For >>> example, Hart was dismayed to learn that the same people who sit on NIH >>> grant committees to decide where funding goes also make policy >>> recommendations. >>> >>> Such conflicts are a problem. After watching the CDC make so many >>> errors—and always in the same direction—Krohnert co-wrote a paper for >>> the open-access Social Science Research Network, with Dr. Vinay Prasad, >>> the new head of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics >>> Evaluation and Research, calling for a firewall between the government >>> entities that gather statistics and those setting policy as a shield >>> against “real or perceived systematic bias.” >>> >>> Krohnert also thinks there need to be better conversations about the >>> nature and efficacy of CDC recommendations, which can be overly cautious >>> and reflect a low tolerance for risk, such as its recommendation not to >>> eat raw cookie dough. As a result, the general public often ignores the >>> CDC’s advice. >>> >>> >>> “Blocking access to data is not going to prevent bad actors from >>> spreading misinformation,” Krohnert said. “If anything, it adds fuel to >>> the fire.” (Kendrick Brinson for The Free Press) >>> Since their recommendations can take on the force of law, official >>> recommendations by the CDC ought to include room for dissent—or at least >>> some wiggle room, depending on the circumstances, Krohnert said. For >>> example, a recommendation to wear masks to prevent the spread of disease >>> might come with a qualification that it might not be appropriate in >>> every situation, so that pediatric speech-therapy clinics and preschools >>> needn’t worry about getting sued for failing to follow the agency’s advice. >>> >>> And though they do want sweeping reform, Team Reality don’t want to burn >>> the house down completely. Krohnert said she doesn’t want to render the >>> CDC useless. Just the opposite. She believes that Americans need >>> entities they can trust, though government power usually should be >>> limited to the ability to recommend and not compel. >>> >>> “Public-health enforcing isolation of very sick, very contagious people >>> is not particularly controversial,” she said. “But during Covid, we had >>> public-health enforcing quarantine of healthy individuals. >>> >>> “We just seemed to skip over all the ethics of that.” >>> >>> There is, understandably, some concern that, as the editors of The Free >>> Press wrote yesterday in an editorial about public health, “this >>> administration’s approach to reform often uses a hacksaw when a scalpel >>> is called for.” And yet, the people Trump has selected to lead the NIH, >>> CDC, and FDA are highly credentialed, well-respected, and extremely >>> competent, and they are advocating policies that are as careful as they >>> are radical. “These aren’t Robespierre lieutenants being elevated to >>> judge, jury, and executioner when the revolution was won,” said Hart. >>> “These are the people who should’ve been running things in the first place.” >> >> In the interim, we are 100% prepared/protected in the "full armor of >> GOD" (Ephesians 6:11) which we put on as soon as we use Apostle Paul's >> secret (Philippians 4:12). Though masking is less protective, it helps >> us avoid the appearance of doing the evil of spreading airborne >> pathogens while there are people getting sick because of not being >> 100% protected. It is written that we're to "abstain from **all** >> appearance of doing evil" (1 Thessalonians 5:22 w/**emphasis**). >> >> Meanwhile, the only *perfect* (Matt 5:47-8 ) way to eradicate the >> COVID-19 virus, thereby saving lives, in the US & elsewhere is by >> rapidly (i.e. use the "Rapid COVID-19 Test" ) finding out at any given >> moment, including even while on-line, who among us are unwittingly >> contagious (i.e pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic) in order to >> "convince it forward" (John 15:12) for them to call their doctor and >> self-quarantine per their doctor in hopes of stopping this pandemic. >> Thus, we're hoping for the best while preparing for the worse-case >> scenario of the Alpha lineage mutations and others like the Omicron, >> Gamma, Beta, Epsilon, Iota, Lambda, Mu & Delta lineage mutations >> combining via slip-RNA-replication to form hybrids like "Deltamicron" >> that may render current COVID vaccines/monoclonals/medicines/pills no >> longer effective. >> >> Indeed, I am wonderfully hungry ( >> https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/6ZoE95d-VKc/m/14vVZoyOBgAJ >> ) and hope you, Michael, also have a healthy appetite too. >> >> So how are you ? > > I am wonderfully hungry! While wonderfully hungry in the Holy Spirit, Who causes (Deuteronomy 8:3) us to hunger, I note that you, Michael, are rapture ready (Luke 17:37 means no COVID just as eagles circling over their food have no COVID) and pray (2 Chronicles 7:14) that our Everlasting (Isaiah 9:6) Father in Heaven continues to give us "much more" (Luke 11:13) Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) so that we'd have much more of His Help to always say/write that we're "wonderfully hungry" in **all** ways including especially caring to "convince it forward" (John 15:12) with all glory (Psalm112:1) to GOD (aka HaShem, Elohim, Abba, DEO), in the name (John 16:23) of LORD Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Amen. Laus DEO ! USENET source: https://newsgrouper.org/sci.med.cardiology/204802/204824 Positive control on USENET: https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/7ixdk7t6Bk8/m/xpbS2z7QAAAJ Suggested further reading: https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/5EWtT4CwCOg/m/QjNF57xRBAAJ Shorter link: http://bit.ly/StatCOVID-19Test Be hungrier, which really is wonderfully healthier especially for diabetics and other heart disease patients: http://bit.ly/HeartDocAndrew touts hunger (Luke 6:21a) with all glory ( http://bit.ly/Psalm112_1 ) to GOD, Who causes us to hunger (Deuteronomy 8:3) when He blesses us right now (Luke 6:21a) thereby removing the http://WDJW.great-site.net/VAT from around the heart ....because we mindfully choose to openly care with our heart, HeartDoc Andrew <>< -- Andrew B. Chung, MD/PhD Cardiologist with an http://bit.ly/EternalMedicalLicense 2028 & upwards non-partisan candidate for U.S. President: http://WonderfullyHungry.org and author of the 2PD-OMER Approach: http://bit.ly/HeartDocAndrewCare which is the only **healthy** cure for the U.S. healthcare crisis --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 * Origin: SpaceSST BBS Usenet Fidonet Gateway (255:255/999) .