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Jimmy Gleeson's avatar

AS I am going through this, I can already hear what those in the narrative would say in response. "It's not just about death," and. the other one, "why all this focus on death alone?"

Most of what those of us who are not indoctrinated do is dissent against the narrative. And initially we were treated to the hyperbole of the Ferguson model. 3% dead was what they stated, and then other hyperbole like "it will be as bad as the Spanish Flu" (now we know that even the Spanish flu wasn't as bad as the Spanish Flu.)

They are the ones that created the narrative, we didn't want to wake up, counting deaths, asking about death certificates, tracing down the origins of the death, and realizing that death records were far from as cut and dry as the medical professionals claim that they are. We did this because they were the ones who created policies predicated on these assertions. "Facts" as they call them, that aren't factual at all.

I wished we lived in a world where we, humans, didn't have to do the labelling, but we are, and thus the data of "cause of death" is only as good as those who determine it. Back in 2003, It took six months to diagnose my mother with what would eventually kill her in July of that same year.That's just for figuring out what was wrong with a living person. And yet we live in this almost parochial world where we can determine death from a positive PCR test?

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Turfseer's avatar

Jessica Hockett’s unpublished op-ed isn’t just a time capsule—it’s a scalpel, slicing through the bureaucratic fog and data games that defined the COVID-19 response in Illinois. What’s striking isn’t just how meticulously she sourced the anomalies—the suicide retroactively counted as a COVID death, the May fatality logged in August—but how calmly and clearly she assembled a case for skepticism. No wild theorizing, no performative outrage—just facts that speak loudly enough to make officials squirm.

Her refusal to "dumb it down" or make it about herself shows integrity, especially in a media landscape where personal anecdotes are often used to mask a lack of rigor. The piece reads like a quiet indictment—not just of how the data were manipulated, but of a media class too timid (or too captured) to publish anything that didn’t flatter the state’s narrative.

She was right to stand by every word. The only scandal bigger than what she uncovered is that the Tribune sat on it.

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