The corporate media is persistent in promoting the canard that XBB.1.5—nicknamed “Kraken” by ideological pseudo-scientists more interested in marketing the virus as a dangerous and deadly pathogen—is spreading “wildly” wherever the variant gains a foothold.

“Kraken” COVID variant XBB.1.5 has achieved projected dominance in the U.S., comprising an estimated 43% of cases this week, according to an updated forecast from the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention released Friday.
BQ.1.1, also known as Cerberus, came in second, fueling an estimated 29% of cases. It was dominant last week. BQ.1, Cerberus’ parent variant, came in third, at an estimated 16%. All other variants were projected to comprise 3.9% or less of cases.
As Kraken continued on its warpath this week, U.S. COVID deaths rose 44%, with the seven-day average ascending upward from 2,705 last week to 3,907 this week.

If you read nothing else but this article from Forbes, you might be forgiven for thinking the XBB.1.5 recombinant Omicron SARS-CoV-2 subvariant is a dangerous and deadly infectious pathogen. Yet while the picture being painted is one of XBB.1.5 spreading rapidly throughout the United States. The picture painted by the actual data is far less bleak and far more hopeful.

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Forbes is certainly doing its level best to sell fear to a credulous public, despite a complete lack of data to sustain the Pandemic Panic narrative regarding XBB.1.5. From the earliest emergence of the subvariant, the data simply has failed to show a burgeoning public health crisis.

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XBB.1.5: The Plague Returns...Or Not.

A good part of the corporate media’s fear porn has been centered on China’s seemingly massive COVID outbreak amidst the ending (or is it the collapse?) of Xi Jinping’s Zero COVID policy. Yet another part of the corporate media has been turning its attention to…

24 days ago · 18 likes · 10 comments · Peter Nayland Kust

Even where XBB.1.5 is spreading rapidly, hospitalizations have peaked and are trending downward. This has been the case even two weeks ago, when the media was first starting to hype the “Kraken” as the latest deadly subvariant of the original SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Moreover, the narrative manages to periodically shoot itself in the foot time and again. In the latest example of narrative self-sabotage, New York City health officials are warning people that XBB.1.5 is more likely to infect those who have dutifully received the demonstrably dangerous and deadly mRNA inoculations.

"Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5 now accounts for 73% of all sequenced COVID-19 cases in NYC," the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene tweeted on Friday. " XBB.1.5 is the most transmissible form of COVID-19 that we know of to date and may be more likely to infect people who have been vaccinated or already had COVID-19."

In Gotham at least, the public health officials are openly telling people that the mRNA inoculations make you more vulnerable to XBB.1.5, rather than less.

Yet while the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene frets about XBB.1.5 targeting those who submitted to the mRNA Mark Of The Beast, they forgot to mention a couple of important statistics: While deaths are up in Kings County (the most populous section of New York City), cases have been trending down of late.

Additionally, hospitalizations are also trending down, and have been during the exact weeks XBB.1.5 was becoming the dominant strain in the Greater New York Area.

With hospital admissions and cases declining, it is mathematically certain that deaths will peak and begin trending down before too long as well. The nature of infectious respiratory pathogens makes that outcome inevitable.

Declining cases and hospitalizations in the face of proliferating XBB.1.5 make the strain’s apparent affinity for inoculated individuals somewhat problematic.

Even if the affinity can be demonstrated statistically, the practical impact on both individual and public health is minimal—XBB.1.5 is not making people all that sick, for they are demonstrably not winding up in hospital.

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Even in Boston (Suffolk County, Massachusetts), where cases are rising and where XBB.1.5 is dominating, deaths are still practically nonexistent.

Hospitalizations are likewise trending down, and by a greater margin than in New York City.

The downward trend has been occurring concurrently with XBB.1.5’s rise to dominance in HHS1 Region 1.

In HHS Regions 1 and 2, if anything the rise of XBB.1.5 means people are demonstrably less sick than before. Perhaps instead of “Kraken” the subvariant should have been named “Kitten”—it certainly appears as harmless as one.

Even as corporate media continues to hype XBB.1.5 as the grim and foreboding “Kraken” of viruses, the data continues to show that XBB.1.5 falls far short of being a plague on anyone’s house.

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XBB.1.5: The Plague That Almost Was

What a difference a week can make. In one week’s time the United States has gone from the umpteenth coming of the COVID plague to a Gilda Radner-esque “Never mind!” Last week, the corporate media was having a case of the vapors over XBB.1.5—even though the data never quite measured up to the narrative (again…

18 days ago · 18 likes · 5 comments · Peter Nayland Kust

Claims that XBB.1.5 poses any manner of major public health risk are demonstrably false, and are absolutely disproven by the CDC’s own data sets. Even claims of a threat to individual health have to be regarded as dubious when one looks at the CDC’s data. When people are not dying and not winding up in hospital there can be no threat to anyone’s health.

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In another instance of corporate media Pandemic Panic Narrative self-sabotage, the WHO is reported as claiming what by now should be intuitively obvious: XBB.1.5 lacks the requisite genes to make people sick.

The omicron XBB.1.5 subvariant does not have any mutations known to make people sicker when they catch the virus, according to a World Health Organization risk assessment published Wednesday.

Specifically, the WHO has stated:

XBB.1.5 does not carry any mutation known to be associated with potential change in severity (such as S:P681R).

The WHO also highlights something that the corporate media has been downplaying in its ~~progaganda~~ reporting on XBB.1.5—the variant is prevalant mainly in America, and at that mainly in the Northeastern United States.

Based on its genetic characteristics and early growth rate estimates, XBB.1.5 may contribute to increases incase incidence. To date, the overall confidence in the assessment is low as growth advantage estimates are only from one country, the United States of America.

Indeed, this is clearly demonstrated by the HHS regional data on variant propagation. Moving into HHS Region 3, which is directly adjacent to HHS Region 2, we see a dramatic dropoff in the prevalance of XBB.1.5.

In Philadelphia, cases have more or less plateaued in recent weeks, while deaths have again dropped down almost to zero.

Hospitalizations are also largely plateaued.

Moving across Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh (Allegheny County), we see cases and deaths are trending modestly higher.

However, hospitalizations have peaked and are trending down.

Extending the analysis all the way out to Chicago, we find the same patterns once more. We have a downward trend in cases (even though deaths are trending up)….

…And we have a downward trend in hospitalizations.

Yet while all these different cities show similar patterns particularly as regards hospitalizations, they have vastly different levels of XBB.1.5 among sequenced test samples. HHS Region 5, which encompasses Illinois, shows XBB.1.5 to be not at all dominant.

It is important to keep this data always uppermost in one’s mind, because this is the data which highlights the degree to which the corporate media lies to promote its Pandemic Panic Narrative.

For example, Fortune Magazine also argues that XBB.1.5 has pushed hospitalizations in New York to a 12-month high.

New York COVID hospitalizations are at their highest level in nearly a year just after a new, ultra-transmissible COVID variant XBB.1.5, known as Kraken, achieved dominance in the northeast U.S.
Current in-state COVID hospitalizations are near 4,000—the highest level since February, according to the New York State Department of Health.

Yet, as the data clearly shows, that is simply not possible.

While it is technically accurate to say that hospitalizations are at a 12-month high, most of that increase predates the emergence of XBB.1.5, and the weeks of XBB.1.5’s greatest dominance are the last couple of weeks, during which hospitalizations declined.

Whatever pushed up COVID hospitalizations in Kings County (New York City), New York, XBB.1.5 is not a major cause. It simply comes too late to the game for that to be a sustainable hypothesis. Quite the contrary, XBB.1.5 is associated with New York’s declining hospitalization rates.

When we look at the cases in Kings County starting from January 1 of 2022, we see at once that there is no long-term upward trend, compared to the big Omicron wave that was just winding down at the beginning of 2022.

Statewide hospitalization data for New York from HHS (courtesy of Johns Hopkins), demonstrates once more that there is no hospitalization crisis—and not even much if anything of a hospitalization surge since before XBB.1.5’s emergency.

No matter how we dissect the data, the end result is always the same: There is no public health crisis attributable to XBB.1.5, nor is there even a significant individual health threat attributable to XBB.1.5. XBB.1.5 is no monster, is no Kraken, and is arguably not even much of an infectious respiratory pathogen. At most, XBB.1.5 is a bad common cold.

As has been true throughout the “pandemic”, the corporate media hysteria over XBB.1.5 is almost entirely a fabrication. The threats and the risks attributed to the subvariant are not supported even by the CDC’s own epidemiological data.

This is an important but often overlooked aspect of the epidemiological data: long before clinical research on the SARS-CoV-2 genome confirmed many aspects of the virus long suspected by independent thinkers the world over, the epidemiological data showed there was at least a possibility of some behaviors, while proving the rest were an absolute impossibility. The epidemiological data of cases, deaths, and hospitalizations will always give the most accurate, the most complete, and the most nuanced description of COVID-19 as an infectious respiratory disease.

At no time, and certainly not within the past eighteen months, has the epidemiological data ever supported the Pandemic Panic Narrative. Ironically, the data maintained by the same corrupt institutions peddling the lies has been the earliest and most reliable revelator of those lies.

Data always leads back to reality, no matter who gathers it.

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