(LifeSiteNews) – More than 30,000 Americans were killed by being placed on ventilators for COVID-19 through April 2020, according to an astonishing analysis by attorney and investigative journalist Michael Senger.
In his October 5 newsletter, Senger reviews data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) “on all-cause excess deaths by state during peak lockdown in April 2020,” and determines that “over 30,000 Americans appear to have been killed by mechanical ventilators or other forms of medical iatrogenesis throughout April 2020, primarily in the area around New York.”
“The first pattern that emerges from this data,” he wrote, “is a clear correlation between population density particularly in low-income areas, cold weather, and excess deaths per capita,” which shows “New York City, with New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts generally experiencing the greatest percentages of excess deaths per capita for each week of April 2020.”
But while at first glance this might seem to suggest an especially deadly strain of COVID-19 hit the region at that time, Senger says that thesis would be undermined “by the fact that states like Vermont and New Hampshire, which are both very close to New York, had some of the lowest percentages of excess deaths of any states. Even more remarkably, Maine is very close to New York and had virtually no excess deaths to speak of throughout April 2020.”
What best explains the discrepancy, he argues, is that “the area around New York experienced a particular hysteria for the use of mechanical ventilators in spring 2020 to an extent that other states did not,” citing “hundreds” of examples of news articles about a fervor for ventilators disproportionately gripping New York and New Jersey.
“Given we now know that patients over age 65 were more than 26 times as likely to survive if they were not placed on mechanical ventilators, it’s not hard to see how this hysteria for mechanical ventilators in the New York area accounted for the particularly high excess death rates in that region,” Senger wrote.
While acknowledging the lack of sufficient investigation into the question to yield conclusive answers, Senger offers a minimum of 30,000 as a “conservative estimate based on the data above by using the percentage of excess deaths in a comparable state that did not experience as much ventilator hysteria.
New York was one of the first states whose COVID response, initially touted as a model in the press, soon turned into a cautionary tale for housing nursing home residents with the infected, causing thousands of needless deaths. More broadly, reviews have found that the lockdowns favored by more liberal states were either ineffective at saving lives, or that what benefit they offered was outweighed by far greater harms.
Last March, the left-wing Associated Press admitted that “California and Florida have experienced almost identical outcomes in COVID-19 case rates,” despite the former imposing some of the most draconian lockdown measures in the country and the latter remaining mostly open, and that the mortality gulf between Connecticut and South Dakota was similarly small despite the wide gulf in their responses to the virus.
In April 2021, Simon Fraser University economics professor Douglas Allen published a study concluding that while lockdowns saved 22,333 years’ worth of lost life worldwide, they also caused 6.3 million years of lost life, making the policies’ net long-term harm 282 times worse than their benefits, thanks to the combined toll of canceled or delayed care for other medical issues, and the psychological harm of lost jobs and social isolation, among other factors.
In February 2022, a meta-analysis published in Johns Hopkins University’s Studies in Applied Economics found that “lockdowns have had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality,” but have “imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted.”
In April, the fiscally conservative Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CUP) ranked all 50 states on the equally weighted metrics of health, economic, and educational outcomes. They gave 18 states an A or B grade. Of those, 16 were led by Republican governors, including the top six performers: Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Montana, South Dakota, and Florida. By contrast, the six states and jurisdictions to receive an F grade are all led by Democrats: Illinois, California, New Mexico, New York, the District of Columbia, and New Jersey.
While government COVID-19 mandates remain far from resolved, Democrat leaders and public health officials have backed away from some of them over the past year as it became clear they were not only ineffective and harmful, but deeply unpopular as well. In January, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admitted the Biden administration’s decision to cut in half the isolation guidance for infected Americans based in part on “what we thought people would be able to tolerate.”