Thanks to media fearmongering and an abuse of power by California politicians, no UFC fights are coming in the near future
MMA fans were supposed to be celebrating the return of fight week and thanking the fight gods that UFC 249 was not only saved, but featured a bolstered lineup to boot.
Instead, thanks to political cowardice from the higher-ups at Disney and ESPN, there will be no fights going down on April 18 at Tachi Palace in Lemoore, California.
Despite the fact that the testing and protocols in place (including private jets for the athletes to eliminate the dangers of commercial flights at this time) would make the event safer to go to for the fighters, their camps, and the production staff than a trip to their local grocery store, California's inept politicians (set off by an article from the failing New York Times which derided the UFC for putting the event together) were successful in their bid to shut down the event by putting pressure on ESPN's parent company, Disney.
Showing off just how ridiculous the media's coverage of the event was, the WWE has still been taping events (and is scheduled to hold another live event today, even after one of their staff has tested positive for the virus) yet has drawn nowhere near the criticism that Dana White and the UFC have received, despite their reportedly more stringent precautions.
MMA fans are no doubt used to this garbage from the pathetic "journalists" and analysts that cover the sport - they regularly deride the fans and fighters, inject politics into everything rather than simply doing their job, and many are so openly far-left you'd be hard pressed to find five MMA media members that haven't openly praised socialism on their Twitter feeds.
Dana White remarked recently that "the weakest, wimpiest people on Earth cover the biggest, baddest sport" and he is absolutely correct. Just take a look at the likes of Luke (Puke) Thomas, Jonathan Snowden, and Dave Doyle and you'll get a good idea why most MMA fans and fighters dislike the sport's media members.
The same media outlets that make a living covering the UFC and get free VIP tickets and access (which the company needs to end immediately) to the UFC's events have been trashing the promotion and Dana White relentlessly for trying to stage an event during this "pandemic", endlessly virtue signalling despite the mounting evidence that suggests the lockdowns were not only ill-advised, but likely more damaging than the virus itself.
Even after all of the models used to create the western world's response to the COVID-19 outbreak have fallen completely flat, their authors continue to maintain their predictions by pretending that social distancing accounts for the drastic declines in projected deaths and hospitalizations despite the fact that their initial projections included social distancing measures from the beginning.
While New York (for a variety of reasons) has been hardest hit and overwhelmed by the virus, the vast majority of areas in the United States are far below capacity and have even been forced to furlough nurses and doctors thanks to the mandate to stop non-essential surgeries and services.
In fact Kings County in California, the county in which Lemoore resides and where the UFC had secured as a venue for UFC 249, has had just 8 total confirmed cases of COVID-19 to date with no deaths.
Media members were quick to state that the UFC would be putting an unnecessary burden on the nearby hospital and its staff by holding an event there and would be taking up resources (for ringside physicians as well as potentially the hospital) needed elsewhere, but the reality is the exact opposite - the hospitals in the area are nowhere near capacity and in fact the administrators would happily take in any patients it could, even if they wouldn't say so publically; they need the money just like everyone else does during this ill-advised lockdown.
Likewise, physicians in the area are not overwhelmed and as an added bonus the UFC could even look to hire physicians for ringside duties that have been negatively impacted by this response to the outbreak.
The Truth About COVID-19 and the Lockdowns
The beauty of proper scientific method rather than projections based on flimsy assumptions is that new evidence is constantly being brought to light and those assumptions can be tested.
More and more evidence is coming to light that completely destroys the very basis for the lockdowns from the start - the spread of the virus was already far more prevalent than what was assumed and when antibody testing is finally rolled out, total infections may dwarf even the most generous prior estimates.
Just the other day a phlebotomist in Chicago stated that far more patients were testing positive for COVID-19 antibodies (meaning they've had the virus and already gotten over it, possibly without even exhibiting symptoms or being aware they were sick) than testing positive for the virus itself (meaning they're currently infected).
If true on a larger scale (which every indication points to this being accurate), this means that infections may have already been rampant before shelter-in-place orders were even issued in many regions.
An ongoing study in Germany that's randomly antibody testing citizens in a small town has found that so far roughly 15% of citizens had already had the virus (though it's unclear if they're also testing those same people for current infection, which would likely raise that number) lowering the death rate to at-most 0.37% in Germany, a far cry from the rates the media has been touting.
The entire idea behind a "quarantine" is to isolate the infected or the immunocompromised most at risk, but because of the amount of asymptomatic or presymptomatic carriers, the western world has opted for the Chinese model that forces isolation for everyone. The problem is that the evidence is increasingly showing that while asymptomatic carriers can transmit the illness, it's at far less of a rate than was assumed and the spread in communities was already far worse than thought before lockdowns were enacted, rendering them all but useless.
Those that were comparing the coronavirus to a bad season of the common flu have been berated and attacked by media members and social media mobs, yet as time goes on the comparison is looking more and more apt.
While it's provably more contagious than the flu for symptomatic carriers, the real death rate is at most slightly higher than a bad flu season and the illness is actually less severe than the flu for the majority of people it infects (particularly children, who have shown incredible resilience to the virus).
The latest projections from the IMHA model being used by the US government are predicting roughly 60,000 or less deaths with coronavirus in the US by the end of summer - now what were those flu numbers again?
The US saw an estimated 80,000 flu-related deaths in the 2017 winter season just a few short years ago according to the CDC - a season which saw New York forced to build temporary hospitals to house excess patients - yet nowhere near this level of hysteria accompanied coverage of the flu season.
Defenders of the lockdowns have repeatedly stated that social distancing is the reason why the COVID-19 death tolls are falling far short of projections and without that distancing we'd be seeing far higher numbers like the initial models, however they fail to take into account that those projections included the effects of social distancing.
And that's all before we get into just how ineffective social distancing actually was in this case because the virus is immensely more common in the population than those models ever thought possible. If their projections for the lethality of this virus were even close to accurate, we'd easily see millions dead by now, but we don't.
For a look at how the lockdowns are faring compared to let's say Sweden, a country that outright refused to implement lockdowns or enforce social distancing measures?
The media has had a field day blasting Sweden for their "irresponsible" approach to the virus and their unwillingness to commit economic suicide for little-to-no effect, but Sweden stuck to their guns. Openly stating that many epidemiologists and communicable disease specialists disagree with the lockdown policies being implemented but were afraid to come forward given the attacks from news organizations and social media mobs, Sweden chose to listen to reason and scientific fact rather than panicked models by constantly wrong doom-predictors.
Journalists quickly pointed out the rising death tolls in Sweden not long ago and blamed the government for those deaths, yet now they are silent. Why? Because Sweden was right.
While cases per capita in Sweden are similar to other countries and far less than hardest-hit areas like Spain and Italy, their death rate was slightly higher than Denmark and Finland which spiked media uproar on their response. Yet their "wave" of cases and deaths was the same if not better than many locked down nations and their deaths are already sharply declining, with their deaths per capita far lower than the likes of Spain, Italy, France, and the UK.
This is a far cry from what the media was claiming Sweden would suffer, predicting mass death and chaos due to their refusal to bow to authoritarian measures.
Though the media and even health officials are touting a 1-2% or higher mortality rate for the illness based largely on how many people have tested positive compared to deaths, the reality is that the denominator for that equation is vastly understated as has been shown from the get-go.
In fact, I've written about just how poor and misleading the statistics being presented by the media and "leading epidemiologists" (ie. the ones the news chooses to highlight, ignoring others that disagree and offer much more realistic models) are just a few weeks ago here.
These issues have been brought up repeatedly by doctors and scientists, but their pleas for logic and rational response have fallen on deaf ears. Most recently highly respected Stanford professor of medicine John Ioannidis published a paper on the risks of COVID-19 and concluded that strategies focusing specifically on protecting elderly and high-risk individuals to manage the pandemic rather than the entire populace, something that many experts had been advising from the start, rather than full lockdowns are the way to go.
We know that infections are orders of magnitude more widespread than even the most damning models that countries based their responses on, yet the deaths incurred and even the hospitalizations required are vastly under what was predicted. The navy hospital ships and massive temporary hospitals set up in New York to help with the overwhelmed hospitals where the media has been focusing its concern on, are still almost entirely empty despite New York currently in the peak of the outbreak according to experts.
There's also the prevailing myth that each illness causes death in a vacuum - if the common flu kills let's say 30,000 in the US this year, and COVID-19 kills 60,000, that's 90,000 dead from the two just this year right? Wrong.
The numbers are not reporting causes of death, but deaths with that illness. As touched on in my previous article, this is an important distinction that seems to go completely unnoticed or misunderstood by the general public.
There is tremendous overlap in morbidities from illnesses, and what we are seeing now from the numbers being released to the public is rather bizarre - reported numbers of deaths from things such as heart attacks and strokes (which if anything, should be higher than normal given the increased risk when infected with a respiratory illness not to mention added stress in general) are way down in most countries dealing with coronavirus, leading many to question the validity of the numbers of coronavirus deaths and the lack of other illnesses and causes of death being reported.
All of this and we haven't even touched on the complete failures of the WHO during this entire ordeal (particularly their leader, a Chinese plant who tried to appoint a war criminal in Robert Mugabe as the WHO's goodwill ambassador and who is accused of covering up multiple health scandals in the past in his home country of Ethiopia) and the efforts of the CCP to botch every nation's response to the virus, from misinformation to faulty test kits and masks.
As one last point regarding the initial models that the lockdowns were inspired by, I'd like to once again look at the Imperial College UK's "plague of the century" projections which were cited by the WHO, mainstream media and governments alike.
As you may recall from my prior piece on the novel coronavirus, the man who created the Imperial College's damning model, Dr. Neil Furguson, has a history of being dead wrong on his projections in regards to viruses. Not only was he astronimically off in his predictions of death from the swine flu not too long ago, but in the early 2000's he was one of the men primarily responsible for the UK government's execution of hundreds of thousands of sheep due to fears of mad cow disease transmitting to humans from them (to date not a single human death from mad cow disease has been traced back to sheep).
Ferguson seems to be particularly fond of comparing new viruses to the Spanish flu as well; when H5N1 (or avian/bird flu) was first making waves, one Dr. Neil Ferguson was leading the charge in overstating the death toll the virus could cause. Likening it to the Spanish flu, Ferguson said that as many as 200 million people could die from bird flu.
Many years later, total reported deaths to date according to the WHO are a staggering 455 worldwide. He was off by...just about 200 million. But who's counting?
California and their Abuse of Power
Anyone following the story of UFC 249's cancellation knows that the reasons for its failure were entirely political, but what people seem to be completely ignoring is just how bad the abuse of power in this case was.
After the New York Times ran a piece blasting the UFC for attempting to put together the event during this pandemic, California politicians were quick to jump on the offensive. Senator Dianne Feinstein (the same leftist crackpot that is embroiled in an insider trading scandal stemming from this same pandemic) was the first politician to publish a letter demanding the UFC call off their event, before Governor Gavin Newsom himself called the higher ups at Disney to compel them to stop the event.
The fact that California politicians were reaching out to Disney and never once reached out or spoke to the Tachi Yokuts tribe, the owners of the land in which UFC 249 was to be fought on, is telling and shows an issue that goes much beyond simply stopping a sporting event, but rather ignoring the rights of the First Nations and abusing their power to influence events occuring on tribal lands.
Even in a "public health crisis", the California governor and his cronies have no right or ability to dictate what tribes do on their land, and yet instead of defending the First Nations and their rights, the media has celebrated a state government trampling all over the rights and wishes of indigenous peoples.
This is hardly suprising given the totalitarian actions by many politicians and police forces across various states (particularly California) during this pandemic - the mayor of LA is offering rewards to people who report social distancing violators to police, police in various states are issuing fines and criminal citations to pastors and church goers despite the fact they're following social distancing guidelines and on private property, and police arrested a lone paddleboarder in Malibu for disobeying the state's stay-at-home orders.
When the courts re-open, lawyers are going to have a field day thanks to the unlawful and frankly absolutely anhorrent actions being taken by police at the behest of power abusing politicians.
Many people are claiming that pandemics are "special circumstances" and that people's rights can be suspended or stopped because of this (even stated here by an ignorant police officer fining drive-through church goers in Mississippi) - the constitution cannot be trampled on by a governor's orders and is meant to be maintained especially under special circumstances.
The fact that people think a pandemic is cause for rights to be "suspended" is not only an egregious lack of knowledge regarding laws, but also of completely ignoring history - the constitution was written amidst a cholera pandemic and the men writing it had lived through times where diseases ravaged communities on a scale we cannot comprehend in modern times, so claiming those documents wouldn't apply because of a "pandemic" is sheer stupidity.
This pandemic has turned out to not only be incredibly overblown, but is being used by people in power as a political tool and just like many other prior crises, people's liberties and rights are being trampled on in the name of "safety" and "security".
As such, it's time for people to get back to living their lives and seeing reality for what it is. The UFC fought hard to lead that charge, whether it be for their own financial sake or not, and their case shows exactly how the rights of people are being abused by those in power.
It's time for Disney to grow a backbone and support reason and fact, though we all know the company will bow to whatever the media demands - after all, it's a company that has repeatedly hired accused and convicted pedophiles such as Brian Peck to work with children yet somehow these scandals receive no coverage from mainstream media - I wonder why?
While the UFC's plans for UFC 249 have fallen through, they are reportedly working on developing infrastructure on a private island to host events far outside the jurisdiction of any prying politicians.
It will certainly be interesting to see if Disney still nixes the idea considering political powers have no sway over a private island and likely won't even take interest in the matter given it's far outside their boundaries - the media will still likely take issue with the event however, no matter how many precautions the UFC takes to ensure safety.
Whether that will be enough to dissuade the company from fulfilling their contract with the UFC however is up in the air, especially given the fact that if Disney/ESPN continue to put the kibosh on the UFC's plans to hold events, they will actually be in breach of their contract and be forced to pay out anyway even if they get nothing in return.
If they continue to put the UFC in a bad position, that will soon turn into a bad position for them as well - it's likely that they have already been forced to pay the UFC at least something in order to get them to cancel UFC 249, given that the UFC's owners are in a very serious financial dilemma that requires cash flow if they are to keep their 51% stake in the UFC, their lone profitable sector.
If they continue to nix the UFC's events, it will be Disney/ESPN that's in breach of their contract by not allowing the UFC to fulfill their part of the deal - their choices essentially become paying the UFC millions for events that aren't being held and thus generate Disney no money, or letting the UFC host those events (which will no doubt earn ESPN money, particularly given the hungry sports fans at the moment) even if they do face a bit of scrutiny.
The UFC is doing everything it can to live up to their contracted 42 events per year, and if Disney continues to force them to wait, it could get very messy.
Only time will tell how much longer fight fans have to wait to get their fix, let alone how long people have to continue to hide in their homes and lose money because a few failed projections said it was needed, but hopefully we see fighters in a cage - and people back at work - sooner rather than later.