It seems that the CDC and the media has caught up to what I have been writing about in BeeLine for the last month or so.
Covid cases and hospitalizations are surging to levels much higher than in the previous two summers.
Respiratory viruses don't typically spread easily in the summer months. The exception with Covid over the last two years has been a spike in cases across the Sunbelt as people sought refuge from the heat indoors.
Confirmed cases currently are three times (and more likely much higher due to home tests) the levels last year at this time. Hospitalizations are double what they were last year. Many of these are undoubtedly incidental infections in that the patient is in the hospital for something else. However, that would have also been the case last year.
Last week the CDC announced that more than 50% of the United States was in an area of "high-risk" based on its hospitalizations measures.
The CDC then came out with a recommendation that all people in these "high risk" counties wear masks indoors.
It will be interesting to see how many state and local officials and businesses attempt to follow this guidance.
Are we going to see schools attempt to put masks on school children in a month?
How many people are going to buy what the CDC is trying to sell again?
The fact is that there continues to be no scientific study or evidence that supports the general use of masks to prevent the spread of Covid or other respiratory viruses.
That was the case before Covid ever appeared. It is the same 2-1/2 years later.
For example, University of Louisville researchers used CDC data in a recent study to attempt to support a hypothesis that statewide mask mandates and mask use were associated with lower COVID-19 case growth rates in the United States.
However, the researchers found no significant differences in case growth between mandate and non-mandate states during periods of low or high transmission.
Conclusions: Mask mandates and use are not associated with slower state-level COVID-19 spread during COVID- 19 growth surges. Containment requires future research and implementation of existing efficacious strategies.
I wrote over two years ago about the Canadian Dental Society research that was conducted in 2016 on the use of face masks in dental offices in the prevention of respiratory viruses.
That study found that face masks gave almost no protection to dental professionals from viruses. As you can imagine, there can be extensive generation of airborne material during the majority of dental procedures so this is an important issue for dental offices.
The study also addressed the question as to why face masks have been so universally accepted for so many years by medical professionals if they offered little protection. The answer given was that no one had really studied the issue in decades. It had just been accepted without question and it was not a high profile enough issue that involved big dollars that attracted much research. It was the medical equivalent of an urban myth.
Interestingly, as mask use mandates were increasingly used during the pandemic, the Canadian study was purged from the internet in that it did not fit the narrative.
Japan is reporting almost 200,000 cases per day. On a per capita basis that is over three times what the United States is reporting right now.
Japan has over 82% of every man, woman and child fully vaccinated and 69% boosted.
The latest surge in the U.S. is also surely going to result in more calls for boosters.
We will undoubtedly hear that if more people were boosted we would not be seeing this surge.
The United States does lag a number of other countries in booster uptake.
Compare per capita boosters administered in the United States to a range of other countries around the world--Gibraltar, Israel, U.K. South Korea, Australia, Germany, Portugal, etc.
Now compare cumulative Covid cases in the United States to these same countries.
The United States has reported fewer cumulative Covid cases per capita than all of the countries above that have had higher vaccination and booster uptake.
Does this suggest that the United States should be embarking on a massive booster campaign?
As I have stated from the beginning of the vaccination effort, there may be good reasons for those who are older and vulnerable to be vaccinated (and boosted) against Covid.
However, the risk/benefit equation of the vaccines for the young and healthy is far different.
The data on the vaccines also now seems clear that any efficacy is short-lived.
The vaccines may actually make you more vulnerable to the virus in the first couple of weeks after being administered before providing a protective benefit for several months and then quickly receding to marginal efficacy.
It is yet unclear what continual Covid vaccinations do to your natural immune system.
The suggestion in the data above is that boosters may hurt more than help over the long term.
Despite the data, you can be sure that the public health authorities are going to be promoting masks and boosters leading up to the Fall.
The reality is that they have nothing else to talk about in order to attempt to maintain relevance.
If they were honest, they would admit to the failure of their mask and vaccines guidance.
On July 21, 2021 Joe Biden was telling the world that "you're not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations."
On July 21, 2022 the White House announces that double vaccinated, double boosted Joe Biden has tested positive for Covid.
I can relate.
Two weeks ago I tested positive for Covid after avoiding it for over 2-1/2 years.
Unlike Joe Biden and Tony Fauci, I am not double vaccinated and double boosted. I did not take Paxlovid but I did follow some of the protocols from front line doctors who treat Covid regularly.
I also followed a prophylactic regimen of taking daily doses of Quercetin, zinc and Vitamin D for the last two years.
I would like to think that the things I did resulted in my mild symptoms and relatively quick recovery just as I know that Biden and Fauci and others believe the vaccines or Paxlovid kept them out of the hospital. However, who is to really know in any individual case?
My symptoms included some achiness, a low grade fever and being tired. These symptoms lasted for about 36 hours.
After about 72 hours, I felt great but a lingering fatigue came upon me about a day later and stayed with me for about a week with no other symptoms, Simply stated, I just did not have my normal energy for about a week to ten days.
However, less than two weeks after the first symptoms, I was playing 18 holes of golf in 95 degree weather.
I hope Mr. Biden has similar success in his recovery.
I cannot think of anything worse for the country than if he does not have a full and quick recovery.
It would be a devastating blow to the morale and confidence of the nation to see its leader hampered by this virus over 2-1/2 years into the pandemic after so much was promised from the vaccines and Paxlovid.
You have to believe that the public health establishment is living on pins and needles right now with the fear that Biden may not recover quickly.
That is probably not a likely scenario but it would be an event that would have considerable consequences and impact if it occurred. It would almost be the definition of a "Black Swan" event.
There isn't a scenario I can conceive of that would be worse for the public health establishment than for a double-vaccinated, double-boosted Joe Biden to end up with a severe case of Covid considering the narrative that has been promoted over the last two years.
Biden's positive Covid result comes about a month after Dr. Tony Fauci had his own bout with the illness.
Fauci was also treated with Paxlovid but ended up with a rebound case of the disease after taking the standard 5-day course of the drug. He ended up feeling much worse the second time around and took a second course of Paxlovid.
Pfizer states that rebound cases are rare so let's hope that holds true for Biden.
I dare say that it will not be good for the PR department of Pfizer if Biden also has a rebound case of Covid after taking Pavlovid and being quadruple-vaccinated.
I have to say that it is hard not to look at the events every day that have unfolded with Covid and not think...
However, Kamala Harris only has a 26% overall favorable percentage in the same poll.
Who would think we would have someone in the White House with a 31% job approval and most Americans fervently wants to make sure that man stays healthy and on the job?
That is probably even truer of those who disapprove of Biden's performance than those who approve.
In the early days of the pandemic it was apparent that the Covid virus was primarily a concern for the old and with vulnerable health conditions.
That was clear in the Diamond Princess outbreak in Japan as well as the deaths we saw in Italy early in the pandemic back in March, 2020.
In fact, this is a chart I published in these pages on March 15, 2020 detailing the age breakdown of the 780 deaths in Italy from Covid as of that date.
You will note that 87% of the Covid deaths in Italy at that early date were in those over the age of 70.
There were more deaths among those over age 80 than all of the deaths for everyone else below that age.
There had been no deaths for anyone below the age of 30.
I was reminded of this fact as I recently looked at Covid deaths in the United States now that we have some 2-1/2 years of experience.
Over 1 million deaths have been listed by the CDC as being associated with Covid in that period.
However, despite lockdowns, school closures, vaccines mandates and all the rest, the risk of death from Covid by age has not changed substantially compared to what we saw in those early days.
Over 75% of the deaths from Covid in the United States have been in those age 65 or older.
Only .9% of deaths have been in those under age 18. By contrast, that age group represents 22% of the U.S. population.
There have been more deaths in those age 85+ with Covid than all of the deaths with Covid from everyone below age 65.
The statistics are the same in Australia even though almost all Covid deaths have been in the last year (over 90% of Covid deaths in Australia have occurred after the vaccines were introduced).
This chart from the Australian government shows Covid deaths by age group since the beginning of the pandemic.
It is even closer to the early experience in Italy than the United States numbers.
85% of Covid deaths in Australia have been in those age 70 or older.
There have been more deaths of those age 80 or older than all younger age groups combined.
However, it looks like it might get even worse in Australia (95% age 16+ fully vaccinated and over 70% boosted) in the near future.
Hospitalizations are soaring down under right now.
The good news in the United States of late has been that despite the fact that reported Covid cases are running about 4 times what they were at this time last year (more likely at least 10 times higher considering home tests that are never reported), hospitalizations and deaths are only about 50% higher.
Source: The New York Times
However, these are still shocking numbers considering what we were originally told regarding the effectiveness of the vaccines in preventing infection (since admitted to be untrue) as well as the continuing argument that they prevent severe disease and death.
50% higher numbers of hospitalizations and deaths this year compared to what we saw last year hardly seems to be an endorsement of the "effectiveness" of the vaccines for anyone looking at the data objectively.
If someone said that these would be the results a year ago would anyone have agreed that should be considered "a success"?
Recall that Joe Biden was saying the following almost exactly one year ago today.
Biden speaking at CNN Town Hall in Cincinnati, July 21, 2021
Do you think he was a little off the mark?
I can't decide if he was further off on this or his statement that inflation was going to "transitory".
It would seem to me that the next several months are going to tell us a lot about where we go next with Covid.
The optimistic view is that the high level of cases we have seen over the last year, with proportionally less leading to hospitalizations and deaths, has created a level of herd immunity that moves Covid permanently to an endemic disease much like the seasonal flu.
The pessimistic view would be held by Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche who sees heavily vaccinated countries on the precipice of another mutation in the virus that will make it even more contagious and deadly than we have seen previously.
When I first started studying what Vanden Bossche was saying a year ago he stated that one of the things to watch for as the pandemic unfolded was whether cases failed to drop below previous lows despite the vaccination effort.
He argued that this was an indication that the virus was continuing to mutate and build within the population in what he called a "valley of fitness". He predicted this would invariably lead to another surge in cases as the virus worked around the vaccines and resulted in another variant.
Are we seeing that occurring in the United States right now in that case levels are higher now than they were at this time of year in pre-vaccine 2020 or immediately after the aggressive vaccine push in the first six months of 2021?
Confirmed Covid Cases in U.S.-7-day average Source: The New York Times
Is the next variant slowly and imperceptibly building in the population such that it won't be long before it is dominating the population in ways we don't want to imagine?
Is Vanden Bossche correct in his prediction that those most vulnerable in the next wave will be those who are most vaccinated and have the poorest natural immunity?
Few could imagine what we have witnessed since last year at this time despite everything we were told that the vaccines would do to prevent that result.
Geert Vanden Bossche is one who warned us. Nobody in any position of authority listened.
I documented his prediction in these pages almost one year ago that we would see an astounding surge in Covid cases that would be particularly evident in the most vaccinated countries.
We can only hope that he is wrong about where Covid goes next.
Let's hope that the virus does not leave that "valley of fitness".
Let's also hope we don't see this all end in the final prediction Vanden Bossche made over a year ago and which I wrote about last September.
He (Vanden Bossche) predicts that once the reality dawns on the populace of how horribly this pandemic has been mismanaged, leading to massive unnecessary death tolls in those who chose to be vaccinated - that the realization will lead to a form of revolutionary outbreak by a deeply disenchanted and grieving public. Because heads will have to roll. He even thinks that ultimately this will affect how people view vaccines in the future and might even require banning the use of the word vaccine due to the negative impact that current mass vaccine use will have. He really put a lot of thought to his vision of the future!
This reality is even harsher when considering the data above shows that the vast, vast majority of people really had no reason to get vaccinated based on what we knew about the risks of Covid from the very beginning. That has stayed true to today.
The decision to push mass vaccination on the population (most of which had small risks) destroyed any ability to develop herd immunity. It may also be responsible for the endless string of variants we have seen which has extended the length of the pandemic. Let's hope that Vanden Bossche is not correct and those mass vaccination efforts do not also also result in unnecessary illness and death.
The next few months may tell us once and for all who has been right... and who has been wrong...about our response to Covid.
The answer to that question will undoubtedly have broad implications for the future of our institutions and our society.
I pray Vanden Bossche is wrong. I fear that he is not.
How many times have I have seen a liberal politician with an agenda say something like Adam Schiff did recently as he was pushing the climate change agenda?
Schiff is clearly unhappy that Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) is not willing to sign on to the radical "Green" agenda of the House Democrats.
Time is always running out.
If we don't act soon, we are all doomed.
Does anyone remember this statement from Alexandria Ocacio-Cortez in 2019 that had the same message?
How about Al Gore's statement in 2006 "that unless drastic measures were taken within the next ten years the world would reach a point of no return?
Or this claim in 1989 by a senior United Nations environmental scientist that entire nations would be wiped off the face of the earth by the year 2000 if climate change was left unchecked?
Not reversed by the year 2000? That was 22 years ago.
It seems that the same claim has been made over and over again the last 35 years.
We always only have a narrow period of 10,11 or 12 years to act or we are doomed.
Never mind if none of the predictions ever come true,
It does not stop the next politician from making a similar claim.
Of course, the mainstream media plays off of this narrative and that is why any heat wave is now referred to as "unprecedented".
Witness the headlines about the recent heat wave in the U.K.
Haiti and the Dominican Republic are neighboring nations on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean.
Haiti is on the west end of the island and the Dominican Republic stretches to the east.
Hispaniola lies just southeast of Cuba and just west of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean Sea.
Although Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same island, the quality of life of their citizens are vastly different.
GDP per capita is about 6x higher in the DR as it is in Haiti as are average incomes.
Life expectancies are about ten years longer in the DR as they are in Haiti.
Population density in Haiti is almost double what it is in the DR.
There are twice as many hospital beds and six times as many doctors in the DR per capita as there are in Haiti.
Looking at the background data you would think that Haiti would be extremely vulnerable when confronted with a pandemic brought about by a virus such as Covid-19.
You might conclude that another natural disaster awaited Haiti when you consider that only 1% of the population has been vaccinated compared to 55% in the DR.
How has it worked out between the two countries?
The DR has had about 25 times the number of confirmed cases per capita that Haiti has had since the pandemic began.
Granted, this number is undoubtedly misleading because of Haiti's scant health resources which clearly is resulting in many undiagnosed or missed cases that are not recorded.
In that case, deaths from Covid is a better measure and should be more reliable.
However, deaths from Covid in the DR are reported to be about 6 times higher per capita than they have been in Haiti since the beginning of the pandemic.
How is it that Haiti, in which almost no one is vaccinated, in a country with scant health resources, has only a fraction of the Covid cases and deaths as neighboring Dominican Republic?
Is this not curious?
It is almost as if no one had ever created a test for Covid or a narrative around it that anyone would have noticed.
Have we ever seen any pandemic like this in the history of mankind?
Have we ever seen a vaccine that promised more and delivered less when you look at the actual data?
If you doubt that consider the Covid situation on the neighboring island of Puerto Rico right now.
87% of everyone age 5 and older in Puerto Rico are fully vaccinated. This is much higher than the vaccine rate in the DR.
Right now Puerto Rico has the highest number of reported cases per capita of any U.S. state or territory.
Puerto Rico has over 40 times the number of cases now as it did at this time last year.
Confirmed cases in Puerto Rico are also nine times higher than the DR right now.
New Reported Covid Cases in Puerto Rico-7-day average Source: The New York Times Covid Tracker
Notice that Puerto Rico had relatively few Covid cases until after the vaccines were introduced in early 2021.
Hospital admissions this year are over 3x what they were at this time last year for all ages.
Source: The New York Times Covid Tracker
For the most vulnerable age 70+ age group (90%+ fully vaccinated), hospital admissions in Puerto Rico are 4x what they were last year.
Deaths were averaging .3 per week last year. Puerto Rico has been averaging about 6 deaths a week this year---a 20-fold increase.
It is all quite curious.
Yet almost no questions are asked.
And most assuredly no answers are ever given as to how this is possible based on the public health narrative that keeps being repeated over and over again irrespective of facts like these that are right in front of us but are conveniently ignored.
Sri Lanka is an island nation of 22 million people located just off of the southeastern area of India.
It is colored in green in the map below.
It was previously known as Ceylon before the name was changed to Sri Lanka in 1972.
Right now Sri Lanka is a cautionary tale of what can happen to a nation when you have too much political corruption, too much debt, too much inflation, not enough foreign reserves, not enough energy, not enough food production and your government is overly enamored with currying favor with Western green globalist elites by following an ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) agenda.
However, being environmentally green and socially responsible does little to help people when they have life to live. and they can't live it.
Haven't we human been here before?
As I have mentioned in these pages before, people get a little testy when they have no energy and no food.
That is what has occurred in Sri Lanka in recent days.
The people had enough and rose up in a real insurrection.
Protestors stormed the President's mansion and caused him to flee the country this weekend.
By the end, they were swimming in the President's pool.
The protestors also set the Prime Minister's house on fire. He had only been in office one month.
How did Sri Lanka get here?
Years of political turmoil and corruption.
Too much debt and foreign borrowings.
A heavy reliance on imports.
Covid exacerbated problems in the local economy which resulted in taking on more debt.
The Sri Lanka Central Bank printed a lot of new currency in the last three years.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Foreign reserves were quickly dissipated for imported goods making it harder and harder to buy essential imports like fuel.
Prices of fuel and other essentials started rising.
The ESG crowd convinced the government to ban imported chemical fertilizers and required farmers to farm organically. Crop yields plummeted over two consecutive growing seasons.
The argument was that it would help the foreign reserve situation and also be environmentally smart.
However, one oberver points to that decision as the most critical error Sri Lanka made.
But the biggest and main problem causing Sri Lanka’s fall was its ban on chemical fertilizers in April 2021. Many other developing nations had to deal with similar challenges, including covid and high foreign debt, but have not collapsed. The bottom line is this: over 90% of Sri Lanka’s farmers had used chemical fertilizers before they were banned. After they were banned, an astonishing 85% experienced crop losses.
The numbers are shocking. After the fertilizer ban, rice production fell 20% and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient in the grain just months earlier. The price of carrots and tomatoes rose five-fold. Tea, the nation’s main export, Domestic rice production fell by 14 per cent from 2021 to 2022, thereby undermining the nation’s foreign currency and ability to purchase products from abroad.
While there are 2 million farmers in Sri Lanka, 70% of the nation’s 22 million people are directly or indirectly dependent on farming. “We are furious!” said one rice farmer in May. “Angry! Not just me - but all the farmers who cultivated here are angry.”
In November 2021, Sri Lanka tried to reverse course, but it was too late. Rajapaksa said, “we don’t have enough chemical fertilizers in the country because we didn’t import them. There is a shortage.” By the end of last August, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa had declared a state of emergency.
What, exactly, were Sri Lanka’s leaders thinking? Why did they engage in such a radical experiment?
With food in short supply, inflation rose even higher if you could get the food at all.
When you have little energy, little food, you have printed a lot of money and the music starts slowing down this is what you get.
Two weeks ago the Prime Minister admitted that Sri Lanka's economy had completely collapsed.
This is a screenshot from the University of Southern California (USC) Office of Sustainability web page that links to the USC Sustainability Plan. USC is a private educational institution.
A key goal of the program is to increase student, faculty and staff participation in alternative transportation programs.
I was thinking about all of this talk about "Sustainability" when I saw last week that UCLA and USC were applying for membership in the Big Ten athletic conference.
I was wondering how putting all of your athletes on fossil fuel powered aircraft for competitions as far away as New Jersey and Maryland (the closest Big Ten member currently is Nebraska) is consistent with a "Sustainability Plan".
College athletic conferences were initially formed taking account of geography considering regional rivals and the desire to limit travel costs and the time that student athletes spent out of the classroom.
That seems to no longer to be a concern even when it means that thousands of student athletes will have to travel long distances to their sporting events in fossil fuel guzzling jet aircraft.
For example, the carbon imprint of a cross-county flight on a wide body aircraft per traveler is 931pounds per passenger.
A 350 mile trip on regional flight (about the distance from LA to San Francisco or LA to Phoenix or Tucson to play current PAC 12 rivals results in only 222 pounds of carbon emissions per passenger.
It might be one thing if this concerned a couple of football games per year.
However, affiliating with the Big Ten will mean that all sports teams at UCLA and USC will travel thousands of miles to play others schools in the conference.
Here are the current athletic teams at UCLA according to its athletics web page.
If climate change and sustainability efforts are the most important challenge of our lifetimes, according to these colleges and the state of California, why are they making a decision that will increase carbon emissions that is fundamentally at odds with that narrative?
And for what would be considered an incidental purpose related to the educational purpose of the institution?
Why?
Of course, it is all about money.
The importance of the climate change agenda declines rapidly when money is involved or it simply conflicts with what the powers that be want to do in their own lives.
Look no further than the oceanfront mansions of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.
Or the private jets that show up at all of the climate change conferences.
If they really believed what they tell others why would they act this way?
UCLA and USC moving to the Big Ten is just another example of the hypocrisy on this issue.
One of my favorite songs of all time is "God Bless the USA" by Lee Greenwood.
The song is also sometimes referred to as "Proud to Be an American".
It's lyrics begin like this.
If tomorrow all the things were gone
I worked for all my life
And I had to start again
With just my children and my wife
I thank my lucky stars
To be living here today
'Cause the flag still stands for freedom
And they can't take that away
And I'm proud to be an American
Where at least I know I'm free
And I won't forget the men who died
Who gave that right to me
And I'd gladly stand up next to you
And defend Her still today
'Cause there ain't no doubt
I love this land
God Bless the U.S.A.
Greenwood collaborated with the United States Air Force Band, the Singing Sergeants and vocal group Home Free during the pandemic on a terrific version of the song that is worth watching on July 4th.
Democrats control the White House, House of Representatives and the United States Senate. There are two Democrats representing Arizona in the U.S. Senate. Democrats control four of the five seats on the Pima County Board of Supervisors.
Bring your anger?
I would say the system is working pretty well for them.
It is hard to understand anything I have cited above while at the same time millions of people are trying to cross our borders right now to be in the United States of America. A lot of them are trying to get to Tucson, Arizona which is just 70 miles north of the Mexican border.
Why do we see the scorn we do about the United States of America from Democrats in particular?
It seems apparent that a big reason the young have negative views about America is due to our liberal education system that spends more time maligning the United States and its Founders than extolling its virtues.
They love to push the narrative to their students that everything about the United States is illegitimate in that it was founded by a bunch of rich, white men who created a system based on slavery and were primarily concerned with protecting their own self interests.
Of course, this narrative fails to mention that our Founders were generally the elite in the American colonies. The British system had worked out well for their self interests. They were "the 1%" in that day and age.
By declaring independence from the British, they put all that they had at risk--their lives, their livelihoods, and their riches..
As Benjamin Franklin put it so aptly to the other Founders right after they put their names on the Declaration of Independence.
Why did they do it?
They valued freedom and independence for themselves and their fellow Americans more than their own self-interests.
How many would do the same today?
The United States founding is also maligned and students are taught that the country is evil because it was established on a foundation of slavery.
The narrative that many Leftists believe today is that the United States of America is inherently flawed and evil because slavery was not explicitly forbidden in its founding documents. The argument follows that all of the Founders, at a minimum, were complicit in supporting the institution of slavery and that everything that follows is forever tainted and illegitimate.
I find it amusing that the primary thing that progressives seem to have that supports their view that the country is inherently flawed is to cite things from 250 years ago. I guess none of the good that the country did over the next 250 years counts? Being the first country in the world to provide power to the people to govern themselves. Providing the highest standard of living to people in the history of the world. Confronting and defeating the axis of evil (Germany and Japan) in WWII. Rebuilding those countries and returning those countries to the citizens after they had been defeated. When has that ever been done in the history of mankind?
It should also be remembered that our Founders inherited the slave system from the British. It was not an invention by our Founders. In fact, a little known fact is that in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson included a provision that attacked slavery and the King's actions in "suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce."
This passage was deleted in the final Declaration that was approved but I think it pretty clearly shows that Jefferson was not aiding in "the construction of institutionalized racism and subjugation of racism" as has been alleged by Leftists. He was actually attempting to deconstruct it.
Yes, some of the Founders owned slaves but most of those were inherited. Most of our Founders wanted to curtail and find a way out of slavery. That is one of the main reasons that slaves were only counted as 3/5 in census calculations for the number of reps each state got in Congress. It was done to limit the influence of the slave states so they could not expand the practice. It was to put pressure on those states to end the practice. Notice it did not apply to free black citizens. They were fully counted. It only applied to slaves. It was a penalty.
Why did Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers accede to removing this language in the Declaration of Independence? Quite simply, if they were to be successful in breaking away from Great Britain, and gaining independence, all 13 colonies had to be totally united. If not, as Franklin said, they all might hang separately.
The larger goal of independence from Great Britain took precedence as it was not possible to move forward without all colonies being united on the issue of slavery. Several southern colonies simply would not sign on to the Declaration of Independence with that passage in it. The Founders wanted freedom from Great Britain. They were not going to achieve that goal by dividing the colonies at the outset.
Tough compromises are necessary on tough issues. Moving forward allows for a fight for another day. Retaining the status quo accomplished nothing for the cause of freedom in the 1770's---for anyone---colonists or slaves.
Jefferson was later instrumental in making sure there was a ban on slavery in the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 and it was Jefferson who as President initiated the legislation that banned the importation of any more slaves.
Were the Founders perfect? No.
Did they create a perfect United States of America? No.
However, they made it a whole lot better than it was. They also established a foundation of freedom that endures today. Should that not account for a fair and balanced view of the contributions of Jefferson, Washington and others who founded the United States at great risk and cost to themselves?
The framework they established also provided a model that has provided rights and freedom for billions of other people on this earth that was unheard of before these men made that Declaration of Independence in 1776.
Our Founders were not inherently flawed. They devised a system of government that has survived longer than anything in existence in the world today. Think about it. UK, France, Germany, China. Russia, Japan are all operating under a different governing system than they were 200 years ago. The USA has endured. These men were flawed? No, they were geniuses.
Today is the day to celebrate their contributions.
