In a piece entitled, “The Coronavirus Hoax,” which first appeared at the RonPaulInstitute.org website, American patriot, hero and former congressman Ron Paul argues that the entire reaction to the coronavirus is a grand hoax. It’s all scripted, he explains, to bring in authoritarian government without any real justification, and he implies the virus itself is likely no more dangerous than the seasonal flu.

We reprint Ron Paul’s full column below.

While Ron Paul is a living legend and one of the most moral and courageous individuals to have ever walked the halls of the US Congress, we would be negligent in our own duties if we did not point out how horribly wrong Ron Paul’s conclusions have become on this issue. We do not challenge Ron Paul’s morality, or honesty or dedication to humanity, but we do challenge his arguments and (bad) conclusions.

Flatly stated, Ron Paul is horribly, dangerously wrong about the coronavirus. His article is so misguided, my first reaction was that someone must have hacked his website.

So I waited a few hours to even write this response. Alas, his original piece is still posted, which means he indeed wrote it. That’s far more disturbing than the idea of the Ron Paul Institute website being hacked, by the way.

To understand why, take a look at these two graphics. The first is the map of coronavirus cases spreading across the USA at an exponentially accelerating rate:

And secondly, take a look at this parabolic rise in the number of cases which have so far been confirmed in the USA:

Notice the shape of this curve? It’s not going to flatten anytime soon unless President Trump invokes some aggressive social distancing measures. With the world case fatality rate now settling in at around 5.7%, the United States of America is now on track to see millions of infections and deaths if we don’t change course.

A 5.7% case fatality rate is 57 times more deadly than the seasonal flu, yet Ron Paul offers the same tired, obsolete argument of Rush Limbaugh and others who are trying to downplay all this by claiming it’s, essentially, “just the flu.”

There are over 7,000 dead people around the world right now who might beg to differ, if they weren’t already dead. Because of the multi-week lag time of deaths vs. new infections, in another two weeks, the number of dead around the world will be tens of thousands. And by this summer, if nothing more is done to aggressively stop the spread of the coronavirus in the USA, there will be hundreds of thousands dead in the United States alone.

Ron Paul is the former congressman who correctly warned us about the dangers of compounding national debt interest and why the Federal Reserve would eventually lead us to bankruptcy and collapse. Yet today, Paul fails to see the dangers of “compounded” / exponential viral infections and skyrocketing death rates that occur once the hospitals get overrun. Paul was right about the Fed and fiat currency, and given the way things are going right now, we may get both a financial collapse and a public health collapse at the same time. (Can we finally audit the Fed then?)

Mr. Black Swan, meet Mrs. Black Swan.

I’ve run the projection models. Using the best numbers available from the 181,000 infections which have already been tracked, we know that 15-20% of those who are infected require hospitalization. If one-half of the US population gets infected — about 165 million people — that equates to as many as 33 million people requiring extended hospital treatments lasting several weeks.

But of course there aren’t even one million hospital beds available in the entire country. And most of them are already full. So if we do nothing, the hospitals are quickly overrun by serious and critical patients. Once the hospitals are no longer capable of responding, the case fatality rate skyrockets to something close to 10-15% instead of just 2% or even 5.7%.

If we do nothing in America, there is no question we will see literally millions of deaths this year, with the numbers really accelerating through June and July. There will be no elections in November under this scenario, and the Trump administration will be finished, with coronavirus-denying conservatives discredited for a generation, much like the post-Nixon era where the word “conservative” was considered almost a pejorative.

In his article below, Ron Paul imagines that people who aren’t under quarantine will go to the beaches to get sunshine and fresh air, preventing the spread of the virus. That’s some very ambitious wishful thinking. Just to get to the beach, people will share public transportation vessels where the virus will spread through enclosed, shared air, just like we saw on the Diamond Princess. And if everybody heads to the beaches, then the beaches will be the very crowds through which the coronavirus spreads.

The answer to all this is only achieved through social isolation, not crowds at the beach or employees in office buildings.

Even worse, as this epidemic sweeps across America because the conservatives told everybody it was no big deal, the majority of deaths will occur among older people who tend to vote conservative. This is exactly how a walking Alzheimer’s patient named Joe Biden wins the November election: Via the deaths of millions of Trump supporters who failed to take precautions because Ron Paul, Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Drew told them this was, “no worse than the flu.”

In other words, the kind of dangerous denialism being demonstrated by Ron Paul right now is exactly what might end up putting Hillary Clinton in the White House next January, if she runs as Biden’s VP.

And pro-Trump conservatives are playing right into the hands of the globalists.

Ron Paul and other conservatives who are still pushing a form of hard denialism need to wake up and realize the dire nature of the catastrophe they are shaping and promoting. For if we’re not careful, they will be actively working to destroy Trump and put a left-wing lunatic in the White House, all in the name of “stopping tyranny” and protecting liberty.

How’s that liberty going to look after millions of Trump supporters are dead and a zombie named Biden wins the November elections?

Here’s Ron Paul’s original article, which is chock full of misinformation and, in my opinion, horribly sloppy thinking that arrives at precisely the wrong conclusions. I’m not questioning the man, but I am questioning his conclusions:

ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2020/march/16/the-coronavirus-hoax/

Governments love crises because when the people are fearful they are more willing to give up freedoms for promises that the government will take care of them. After 9/11, for example, Americans accepted the near-total destruction of their civil liberties in the PATRIOT Act’s hollow promises of security.

It is ironic to see the same Democrats who tried to impeach President Trump last month for abuse of power demanding that the Administration grab more power and authority in the name of fighting a virus that thus far has killed less than 100 Americans.

Declaring a pandemic emergency on Friday, President Trump now claims the power to quarantine individuals suspected of being infected by the virus and, as Politico writes, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease.” He can even call out the military to cordon off a US city or state.

State and local authoritarians love panic as well. The mayor of Champaign, Illinois, signed an executive order declaring the power to ban the sale of guns and alcohol and cut off gas, water, or electricity to any citizen. The governor of Ohio just essentially closed his entire state.

The chief fearmonger of the Trump Administration is without a doubt Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Fauci is all over the media, serving up outright falsehoods to stir up even more panic. He testified to Congress that the death rate for the coronavirus is ten times that of the seasonal flu, a claim without any scientific basis.

On Face the Nation, Fauci did his best to further damage an already tanking economy by stating, “Right now, personally, myself, I wouldn’t go to a restaurant.” He has pushed for closing the entire country down for 14 days.

Over what? A virus that has thus far killed just over 5,000 worldwide and less than 100 in the United States? By contrast, tuberculosis, an old disease not much discussed these days, killed nearly 1.6 million people in 2017. Where’s the panic over this?

If anything, what people like Fauci and the other fearmongers are demanding will likely make the disease worse. The martial law they dream about will leave people hunkered down inside their homes instead of going outdoors or to the beach where the sunshine and fresh air would help boost immunity. The panic produced by these fearmongers is likely helping spread the disease, as massive crowds rush into Walmart and Costco for that last roll of toilet paper.

The madness over the coronavirus is not limited to politicians and the medical community. The head of the neoconservative Atlantic Council wrote an editorial this week urging NATO to pass an Article 5 declaration of war against the COVID-19 virus! Are they going to send in tanks and drones to wipe out these microscopic enemies?

People should ask themselves whether this coronavirus “pandemic” could be a big hoax, with the actual danger of the disease massively exaggerated by those who seek to profit – financially or politically – from the ensuing panic.

That is not to say the disease is harmless. Without question people will die from coronavirus. Those in vulnerable categories should take precautions to limit their risk of exposure. But we have seen this movie before. Government over-hypes a threat as an excuse to grab more of our freedoms. When the “threat” is over, however, they never give us our freedoms back.

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