Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
The clearest success that worked against Covid was the vaccines, and it is the main thing Trump, RFK, MAGA, and MAHA are attacking. These substantial attacks will result in deaths.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCaD4vh4XhI
“A Georgia man who opened fire on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters, shooting dozens of rounds into the sprawling complex and killing a police officer, had blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press on Saturday.
…
“Kennedy is directly responsible for the villainization of CDC’s workforce through his continuous lies about science and vaccine safety, which have fueled a climate of hostility and mistrust,” said Fired But Fighting, a group of laid-off employees opposing changes to the CDC by President Donald Trump’s administration.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/georgia-authorities-identify-suspect-cdc-133247085.html
“Chronic absenteeism—often defined as when a student is absent for more than 10 percent of the school year—skyrocketed during the pandemic. According to AEI’s absenteeism tracker, by 2022, national chronic absenteeism increased by 89 percent when compared to three years prior. While absenteeism has declined from its 2022 peak in most states that report such data, 2024 figures show it remains higher than pre-pandemic levels. Absolute rates of absenteeism varied broadly state by state. In Alabama, students had the lowest rate, peaking at 18 percent in 2022 and falling to 15 percent in 2024. By contrast, nearly half of all students in Washington, D.C., were chronically absent in 2022, dropping to a still-staggering 40 percent in 2024.”
…
“According to Polikoff’s research, low-income students in particular are facing persistent increases in absenteeism when compared to pre-pandemic numbers.”
https://reason.com/2025/06/05/chronic-absenteeism-hasnt-gone-away-after-lockdowns-research-shows-poor-kids-are-hurt-most/
“The EU’s executive told member countries they can repurpose hundreds of billions of euros in Covid-19 relief money to fund defense projects, reflecting a radical shift in priorities since the days of the pandemic.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/change-spending-plans-or-risk-losing-billions-brussels-warns-eu-countries/
“the murder rate in 2024 not just falling from the 2020 spike but returning to pre-COVID levels. That brings us to the present, and to a question: Could 2025 see the lowest murder rate ever recorded?”
…
“Fewer people are being killed than they were during a major homicide increase” is not compelling messaging, to be sure. But that’s not what’s happening here. We’re not talking about a record decline after a precipitous surge; we’re talking about a record low, period. While it’s still possible that won’t pan out, the fact that it’s even on the table after a bloody few years is such good news that journalists might even consider leading with it.”
Could this be aided by aging demographics?
https://reason.com/2025/05/27/could-2025-see-the-lowest-murder-rate-ever-recorded/
“When it became clear that overdoses had risen dramatically in 2020, experts surmised that it had something to do with the social and economic disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the government’s response to it—an impression confirmed by subsequent research.
A 2024 study found that “volatile drug use during the COVID-19 pandemic was common, appeared to be driven by structural vulnerability, and was associated with increased overdose risk.” Another study published the same year concluded that “policies limiting in-person activities significantly increased” drug death rates.
If pandemic-related disruption drove the 2020 overdose spike, the return to normal life seems like a plausible explanation for subsequent decreases, although the death toll was still about 14 percent higher last year than it was in 2019. Last fall, University of North Carolina drug researcher Nabarun Dasgupta and his colleagues suggested other possible factors, including wider availability of naloxone, an opioid antagonist that quickly reverses overdoses.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/21/by-trumps-logic-biden-deserves-credit-for-a-dramatic-drop-in-overdose-deaths/
Trump’s NIH Chief Lets Loose on Fauci, Vaccines and Covid Cover-Ups
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/05/14/jay-bhattacharya-nih-chief-vaccines-covid-interview-00345488
Vaccines clearly saved a lot of lives; lockdowns…it’s not clear they were worth their heavy costs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l0E78e7XnI
“A February 2025 review study of ivermectin randomized controlled trials in Annals of Medicine & Surgery concluded that ivermectin showed no significant impact on critical outcomes such as mortality, mechanical ventilation, viral clearance rates, ICU admissions, or hospitalization rates compared to controls. Similarly, a February 2025 review article of randomized controlled trials by a team of Indian pharmaceutical researchers observed that “we consider Ivermectin ineffective in the management of COVID-19 disease, both as treatment and prophylaxis.””
https://reason.com/2025/03/11/do-hydroxychloroquine-and-ivermectin-work/
“In addition to tracking deaths attributed to COVID-19, researchers aim to account for those missed by formal diagnoses by calculating excess deaths. Excess deaths are typically defined as the number of deaths during a particular period above the usual, expected number of deaths under normal conditions.”
…
“A February 2024 article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calculated excess deaths between March 2020 and August 2022, concluding that around 1.2 million Americans had died of COVID-19. A January 2025 analysis in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Statistics in Society Series A calculated excess pandemic mortality in the United States for 2020 and 2021 at 920,731. Interestingly, Stanford biostatistician John Ioannidis, a skeptic of worst-case COVID-19 pandemic claims, and his colleagues calculated in a December 2023 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article that the U.S. suffered 1,220,295 excess deaths between 2020 and 2023. Notably, they also calculated that the U.S. actually experienced 3,456 fewer than expected deaths of Americans aged 14 and under during that period. Considering that all of these calculations use data from 2023 or earlier, they suggest that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s current count of 1,225,281 American deaths from COVID-19 and related causes is somewhat conservative.”
https://reason.com/2025/03/12/how-many-americans-have-died-of-covid-19/