It's time for a new COVID approach

I had another son come down with coronavirus. That makes two out of three. The first was back in March. He’s made a full recovery except for his sense of smell. It’s not completely back, but it’s getting there. The second son is almost over it and close to the end of his quarantine period.

I was thinking about the grandmothers on both sides of our family. These two boys of mine are the only ones actually safe enough to visit them. Then I started thinking what a great place to be that is. Can you imagine no longer being afraid of this virus? Can you imagine no longer needing to wear a mask?

Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not suggesting everybody get this thing. It can be lethal for some people, but we pretty much know who. You

have an elevated risk of death if you have underlying health issues, if you’re elderly, or if you’re obese. What a fortunate thing to know. We’re not that lucky with most viruses. The Spanish Flu killed indiscriminately. The average age of death was 27. Even so they didn’t shut down the entire economy. Large gatherings were canceled, but they never shut down restaurants or retail stores. Historians point to three waves of the Spanish Flu, but it was primarily the so-called second wave that made it so deadly. World War I ended and troops carrying the virus returned to their homelands. American soldiers quickly spread the virus across our country and an estimate 675,000 people died. Most of that was over a three month period in the last quarter of 1918.

By the summer of 1919 the disease was pretty much gone. Despite everything we’ve tried to do we’re seeing the same trajectory for COVID. Only this time we’re prolonging the misery. This is the first time in history that we’ve quarantined healthy people. What is generally a three month ordeal has turned into six with no end in sight because we’ve put the virus into slow motion.
These viruses seem to have minds of their own. They reach a certain infection level and then they’re done. Herd immunity. With Spanish flu it was about a third of the world’s population. If COVID is similar then we have a ways to go. I don’t want to get coronavirus, and I’m not encouraging you to purposely get it either, but it appears the virus is going to infect a certain percentage of the population before it’s gone. By hiding otherwise healthy people from it we’re merely delaying the inevitable.

I know you’re hoping we get a vaccine before a third of the population is infected, but how is the vaccine any different from herd immunity? In other words, if the healthy among us already had it then a vaccine wouldn’t be necessary. And there could be negative health effects from a vaccine.

I’ve written here about all the studies that show Vitamin D deficiency being linked to bad cases of COVID. It’s almost criminal that our so-called health experts haven’t been telling everybody to get their Vitamin D levels checked. Low Vitamin D is the source of so many other illnesses it would not be bad advice even if we weren’t fighting COVID. Why they’re not mentioning it is beyond me. But we never stop hearing about the masks. It’s almost as if they’re wanting to see how pliable we are.

We want to survive it if we get it, but we can’t continue to run and hide. We have to stop allowing this virus to control our lives.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast and I'm Calling Bovine Scatology.

The Democrats are unified around division

I was amused at the theme of this year’s Democratic Convention. Unity. They announced the theme then proceeded to divide the country. The only thing they’re unified on is division.

All of a sudden the coronavirus is Trump’s fault. Is anybody buying this? Hard to tell. The first night of the “convention” tanked. It was 28 percent lower than the opening night four years ago. That’s to be expected given the circumstances, but it was also about content. It was—in a word—boring. Everything was pre-recorded. Heck, Michelle Obama’s speech was pre-recorded even before Joe Biden had picked Kamala Harris as his running mate, which left some viewers wondering if she had simply snubbed her. How busy are you that you can’t wait until Joe picks the running mate before you record your speech?

Meanwhile, Donald Trump was on tour making a couple of stops in battleground states. The Democrats complained that tradition states the opposing candidate lays low during the other party’s convention. Donald Trump is nothing if not unconventional. He actually had a live audience. It was so much more exciting than anything on DNC-TV.

What the Democrats harped on was how bad Trump is. Andrew Cuomo said Trump didn’t create division, but division created Trump. That’s actually true to a certain extent. What created Trump was a lack of awareness from both major parties. The reason Trump connected is because he was saying some things neither party would dream of saying out loud. We have to build a wall. We have to stop getting raped by China. We have to embrace capitalism and completely shun socialism.

For too long the Republicans have gone along to get along. Can you imagine what a Romney presidency would’ve looked like. We’re better off that he lost. It gave America four more years of unbridled liberalism to figure out that’s not what this country is all about. If there’s any single person who’s most responsible for Donald Trump it’s Barack Obama. The vote in 2016 was not only about Hillary, it was about more of Obama. The people rejected it.

But not by much. Trump was savvy enough to actually campaign to the Electoral College. The Democrats were campaigning to win the popular vote. Both won, but Trump won the only one that counts. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but the Democrats may be doing the same thing again.

This business of mail-in voting—which I call mail-out voting—is not popular with the American people. Try as they may to convince people it’s the same as absentee voting, it’s not. Absentee voting is when you personally request a ballot. Mail-out voting is when they mail out a ballot to everybody who’s registered to vote, regardless of whether they’re dead or they’ve moved.

President Trump has been watching this coming for months. It’s like sitting across the street from a bank and watching it get robbed in slow motion. OK, there’s the getaway car pulling up. Now they’re getting out of the car. Alright, they’re putting on the ski masks. They’re walking in the door. They’re getting ready to rob the bank! That’s what Trump’s been seeing, and the mainstream media want you to think he’s delusional. Instead, they want you to believe he’s taken over the post office and is scooping up drop boxes all over the country, neither of which is true.

But that’s the playbook of the Democrats, and it has been for quite sometime. They don’t have a platform. All they have to sell is fear itself.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast and I'm Calling Bovine Scatology.

Football's out. What's next?

Football’s being canceled left and right and basketball will surely follow. Why? Because people are scared. Are they justified? Not really. Don’t get me wrong, COVID can be quite deadly with the wrong people, but most of us aren’t the wrong people.

Swiss Policy Research put out a list of 30 COVID facts that everyone should read. Some of the highlights include this little factoid. If you’re of school age or working age the risk of your dying from COVID is about the same as your risk of dying on the car ride to work. Think about that. Your risk of dying on the way to work is obviously not zero, but it’s not enough to even concern you. Here’s something else they found. Up to 80 percent of all people who test positive will have no symptoms. In other words, while you’re freaking out over getting it, there’s a chance you’ve already had it never knew it.

Even with the higher risk age group of 70 to 79-year-olds, 60 percent remain symptom-free. They say about 95 percent of people who get this thing only suffer moderate symptoms or less.

Of course, it’s that 5 percent we need to worry about. Hardly a week goes by that I don’t see another study linking Vitamin D deficiency to serious symptoms of COVID. Vitamin D is so important for a wide swath of health-related issues, including your immune system. Why do we never hear Drs. Fauci and Birx urging you to get your Vitamin D checked? In fact, I went in for my yearly physical and asked my doctor if they were going to check my Vitamin D. He said they hadn’t planned on it, but they could. They did. Mine was very low. I’m now taking Vitamin D daily to try and get it back to a normal level.

Why is this not routine? Vitamin D is one of those essential things we should be checking, and it’s so easy to fix if your system is out of whack. It’s tied to so many ailments, yet doctors rarely recommend getting it checked, and no one on the national level has identified it as a possible complication with COVID, despite numerous studies.

Here’s something else from the Swiss Policy Research. The median age of people dying from COVID around the world is over 80. This is something we’ve known since the get-go, yet we continue to foolishly put COVID-positve patients back in nursing homes. In many countries, upwards of two-thirds of all the extra deaths occurred in nursing homes. Imagine if we took two-thirds of the deaths out of the count. This disease would not be nearly as scary. Unless you’re in a nursing home it’s very likely you’ll never die from it. 

In fact, it’s very unlikely that you’ll die from it period. While we’re looking at probably 200,000 or more deaths before this thing is done, well over 600,000 people die each year in the U.S. from heart disease. Same for cancer. Yet we don’t sit around in a panic over either of those diseases. I know, you can’t catch heart disease or cancer, but remember that first stat. If you’re school age or working age you have a better chance of dying on your way to work than dying from COVID.

So, what’s my point? My point is we have to go back to our lives. College-age football players have virtually no chance of dying from this. Canceling football unduly adds to the panic. Stop it. Just stop it. 

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast and I'm Calling Bovine Scatology.

The COVID hypocrites

How do you know the COVID crisis is being politicized? Because the politicians who impose the harsh restrictions don’t abide by their own rules. Take, for example, the mayor of Nashville. He launched an investigation that rivaled the Lindbergh baby case when someone dared have a house party and invite a couple of hundred people. Mayor Cooper vowed to bring those responsible to justice. Yet this was the same mayor who invited thousands to join him downtown in the middle of a pandemic to protest police brutality all the while knowing other similar protests across the country were turning into riots. Right on time, his protest did too. No social distancing. No adhering to his own orders against large groups.

But Mayor Cooper is hardly alone. Governor Andrew Cuomo returned from a trip to Georgia where he met with officials sans a mask. When he returned, he was asked by a reporter if he was going to quarantine per his own order. Negatory. He was, as he put it, an “essential worker.” Tell that to the families of dead relatives in nursing homes with whom he placed COVID-positive patients. So, the governor is an essential worker, but a guy trying to run a restaurant and put bread on his family’s table is not? Nice.

Early on, when hair salons were shut down, a video surfaced of Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago getting her hair done. This after she shot a PSA scolding women that “getting your roots done is not essential.” Apparently the mayor getting a haircut was. Her excuse? “I’m in the public every day.” OK. What exactly is that supposed to mean? It means the rules don’t apply to me because I’m the ruling elite.

Then there was Congressman John Lewis’s funeral. It was in Georgia, a state on the list of hotspots for DC Mayor Muriel Bowser. If you visit Georgia, even step foot in the state, you’re required to quarantine for 14 days. But not if you’re a politician who attended John Lewis’s funeral. Bowser classified the Lewis funeral as “government activity,” thus exempting anyone who attended from having to quarantine. In other words, the rules don’t apply to us ruling elites.

We’ve seen the same total disregard to the rules when it comes to Black Lives Matter protests and riots. You’re fine going to those, just don’t try to go to a church service. And don’t even think of gathering at a bar in downtown Nashville. Several bars were cited for violating the mayor’s edicts. The city attorney opined that protests were protected by the Constitution, but congregating at a bar was not. I beg to differ with that opinion. The Constitution doesn’t distinguish between gathering at a bar and gathering at a court house with rocks. I offered some unsolicited advice to the bars under siege by the city. Have a protest every night. You can protest the mayor’s unfair lockdowns. You can protest for or against Black Lives Matter. Doesn’t really matter. If the city says protests are immune from prosecution then just protest something. Anything.

They didn’t take my advice, and they're now in court fighting the crackdown. So, now the city authorities are on the case of the rogue house party and the belligerent bachelorettes. Yes, a bachelorette party got rowdy when they couldn’t get a large table together and left the restaurant in a huff. And one of the ladies coughed on an employee. OMG! The woman faces assault charges if they can find her.

It’s apparent that people don’t appreciate different rules for the rulers and the ruled.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast and I'm Calling Bovine Scatology.