“The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75 percent, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with.”

That declaration by the director of the Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, is one of those fall-out-of-your-chair moments. You’re tempted to repeat it several times just to be sure every syllable is in the right place.

Did she mean the deaths of all the people who died of Covid? Seventy-five percent. Or did she mean the people who died with Covid? The preposition, we have learned, matters muchly. “Of” means Covid is the murder weapon. “With” means Colonel Mustard did it with a poker in the library, and Covid was just standing in the corner. Listen carefully to the tape of Walensky on Good Morning America and it sounds like she means “with.” How many people actually died of Covid has been a dark CDC secret from early on.

OK. Seventy-five percent due to Colonel Mustard. Oops. Not just the Colonel. He has accomplices: Miss Scarlet with a candlestick, Professor Plum with a revolver, and Mrs. Peacock who is handy with a dagger. Together they are the “four comorbidities.” Like the Three Musketeers. Oops. That’s not quite right. The 75 percent of those who died hadat leastfour comorbidities. Some had five, six, maybe ten. We need all the characters from Clue and maybe more. Aunt Agnes with a flamethrower. Baby Bobby with a bamboo tube and a curare dart. And surely not all the casualties had the same four comorbidities. Inspector Hercule Poirot would at this point detrain the Orient Express and walk back to Brussels through the snow. The CDC has more than 15,000 personnel. It is mathematically possible that every single one of them was in the library when Blanche breathed her last.

My apologies to those to whom this comes too close to home. A little derision is sometimes needed to keep our sanity. But let me get up off the floor and back into my chair. What Dr. Walensky is now telling us is that Covid-19 posed a mortal danger to that fraction-of-a-fraction-of-a-fraction-of-a-fraction of really unwell people. We already knew this because the CDC told us that “More than 81 percent of Covid-19 deaths occur in people over age sixty-five” and “the number of deaths among people over age sixty-five is eighty times higher than the number of deaths among people aged 18-29.” Now we know that those who died were really sick. Maybe so sick that were already dying and Covid had nothing to do with it, except that it was convenient for the CDC, the hospitals, the pharmaceutical companies and various people in political office to pretend that Covid was the return of the Black Death.

Of course, many of us have been skeptical all along about the reported numbers, but the CDC has stalwartly told us, no, things are really bad. What loosens Dr. Walensky’s lips at this point?

We are left to wonder. Is it the widespread recognition that the vaccines are not very good at stopping the transmission of the virus? Is it that the boosters administered to people outside the red zone of age and comorbidity are more likely to harm than to protect? Is it that the Great Scare is losing its edge faster than a melting icicle?

We can trust that somewhere in the Batcave of the Biden administration a decision has been handed down. Now is the time to cool the Covid hysteria. Word must go out that Omicron is only my head cold.

No doubt, weaning people off masks, social distancing and shutdowns will be difficult. Devotion to Faucism has taken root like Chinese bittersweet along our roadsides, choking out the native foliage. The comparison to a salvation cult is too easy to make. By comparison, the salvationist cults I used to study were far more questioning of their premises and closer in spirit to the séance-busting Houdini or doubtful Richard Dawkins than the Fauci-ites are to questioning their master’s pronouncements. My guess is that Fauci will soon be cashing in his reported $350,000 per year federal retirement package — the largest in the history of the federal government.

I’d also advise Dr. Walensky to steer clear of the library. She has the quadruple comorbidity of knowing too much, lying too often, panicking too many and reassuring too faintly. At least she shouldn’t go in there with Ron Klain fingering a piece of rope or Jill Biden pinching a hat pin.