This month, Dr. Ronald B. Brown had a daring paper published in Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, conservatively entitled Public health lessons learned from biases in coronavirus mortality overestimation.

“The subject of this article is disruptive, to say the least, although it is not as obvious from the title,” Dr. Brown told me in an email. “The manuscript cites the smoking-gun, documented evidence showing that the public’s overreaction to the coronavirus pandemic was based on the worst miscalculation in the history of humanity, in my opinion. My manuscript underwent an intensive peer-review process. You are the first media guy who has responded to my invitation.”

It’s sadly no surprise the media has not kept Dr. Brown’s phone ringing with interview requests. The abstract, in itself, contains a firecracker where he says:

“Results of this critical appraisal reveal information bias and selection bias in coronavirus mortality overestimation, most likely caused by misclassifying an influenza infection fatality rate (IFR) as a case fatality rate (CFR).”

Is that not what we’ve seen? The number of people they said would be buried in mass COVID-19 graves better reflects how many people simply ended up with a cough and fever.

Dr. Brown added that CDC and WHO documents show that the case fatality rate for influenza was similar to the coronavirus, implying that the lockdowns were pointless. His paper questions why the 2017-2018 influenza season in the United States did not “receive the same intensive media coverage as COVID-19.”

He points out that “the accuracy of coronavirus tests rushed into production during the pandemic were unknown.” And he explores how the media began focusing on an increase in coronavirus cases while ignoring the decrease in death rates.

Much of the article looks at how lockdowns and anti-social distancing probably had little or no effect on reducing COVID-19 deaths. He says that “the public’s belief that mitigation measures were responsible for reducing coronavirus mortality may be a post hoc fallacy if lower mortality was actually due to the overestimation of coronavirus deaths.”

Speaking on the damage done by the counter-measures, Brown writes: “The ethics of implementing fear-based public health campaigns needs to be reevaluated for the potential harm these strategies can cause.”

His report includes this mind-map on how we were all mind-warped:

You can read Brown’s full paper at Cambridge University Press. It succinctly dismisses the notion that the corona craze has anything to do with welfare of the people. As Albert Camus warned: “The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.”