Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax seemed to understand that Mark Schulte's Jan. 12 column was a bit of bogus conspiracy-mongering -- that's why it starts with the disclaimer that "The author is a non-clinician." Indeed, Schulte's bio describes him as "a retired New York City schoolteacher and mathematician who has written extensively about science and the history of science."
Schulte's column is all about coronavirus death counts. After highlighting that 4,000 COVID-19 deaths were reported on Jan. 8 and noting that the average death count was much lower in the first four days of January than the next four days, he immediately went into conspiracy mode:
Therefore, the average daily increase in deaths, between Jan. 5 and 8, is 3,812, compared to an average of 1,999 between Jan 1 and 4.
This extraordinarily suspicious 91% average increase could have resulted from the departments of health, in Democratic-controlled cities and states, unscrupulously underreporting their death tolls in the first four days of 2021, and then overreporting their totals in the second four days.
Indeed, my first Newsmax article about the COVID epidemic, on April 16, 2020, extensively documented that the departments of health of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Andrew Cuomo, were repeatedly “fudging” their overlapping deaths totals.
Or, you know, it's because the first four days of January took place over a holiday weekend, when reporting might be less than complete because people who were normally reporting numbers were off work.
As you might have surmised, Schulte's goal here is to push the right-wing conspiracy theory that COVID deaths have been artificially inflated:
Finally, that 4,000 Americans were killed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, on two consecutive days last week, is just the latest “Fake COVID Epidemiology,” disseminated by completely untrustworthy Democratic politicians, including, Mayor Bill de Blasio, NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and the governors and mayors of other dysfunctional Deep Blue states and cities.
No wonder Newsmax slapped a disclaimer on Schulte's column.
Schulte likes to play games with numbers, particularly on coronavirus. Here are a few more columns on the subject:
- Biden Repeats 'Big Lie' 200K More COVID Deaths in 2020
- CDC's Flawed Epidemiology: 299,000 'Excess' Deaths in 2020
- Joe Biden Again Propagates False COVID Death Tolls
In his Jan. 28 column, Schulte complained that President Biden noted that coronavirus death toll reached the number of Americans killed in World War II, howling that was a "heinous" comparison because those dead from coronavirus were a smaller proportion of Americans than during World War II and are mostly elderly with a much lower "productive years of life lost" than the mostly young men killed during the way.
Schuilte has also forwarded numerous conspiracy theories about purported irregularities in the presidential election. In a Jan. 5 column, he complained that Joe Biden allegedly benefited from too much "anomalous turnout" during the election, adding, "Finally, if Democrats and their legion of cohorts in the 'Fake Liberal Media' are convinced that Biden won the election fairly, why are they so fanatically obstructing honest examinations of the legality of votes in four to six states?"
That's the caliber of columnist Newsmax has these days.
