September 19, 2023

As if there were not enough scandals with COVID and its horrendous mismanagement by the government, Steven Hayward of Powerline has found yet another one — a causal link between whether “COVID” was listed as a cause of death or a contributing factor, and federal funding dollars.

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He has a chart on Power Line, showing the steep drop in deaths due to COVID, or with COVID an underlying factor that spanned from March 2020 to February 2022, the first part of the COVID pandemic. Then the line on the chart continues, steeply dropping as from a cliff as of March 2022 to May 2023.

See the chart here.

And why did people suddenly stop dying of COVID?

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Well, because hospitals were suddenly not getting federal funding dollars for claiming COVID as a cause of death.

This was clearly something a lot of us suspected, given the huge death rate from COVID in the U.S. as compared to other places in the world, particularly undeveloped countries, and the individual reports of gunshot victims, drug overdose victims, and cancer victims getting COVID listed on their death certificates as the primary causes of their deaths. Only in rare, politically important instances for the left was this practice not followed — as in the death of George Floyd, who more likely died from a drug overdose than police manhandling, yet also had COVID in his system, too. COVID was not listed as his cause of death. 

But for hundreds of thousands of less politically useful Americans, it most certainly was.

Hayward notes that it’s a case of “follow the money.”

Supposedly we’re on the cusp of—or already in the middle of—another COVID variant outbreak, with calls for reviving mask and vaccine mandates. The Branch COVIDians will not be denied. Funny thing, though. Is it merely a coincidence that the sharp drop in COVOD diagnoses coincided with the end of special federal reimbursement for COVID cases? 

The money came from the CARES Act passed by the Democrat-led Congress, which included the $178 billion “Provider Relief Fund.”