"The More Masks Fail, The More We Need Them"

August 21, 2021

Masks Aren't Working Anywhere...So We Must Keep Using Them

https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_90,h_90,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9391318b-5cf0-46bc-b9d9-2c7bb38c1445_400x400.jpeg

IM

2 hr ago

https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/the-more-masks-fail-the-more-we-need?r=kt9k9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=twitter

When the CDC changed their guidance in May to say that vaccinated individuals no longer needed masks, many in the general public thought that it signaled the end of the pandemic. The majority of politicians quickly dropped most COVID-related restrictions, because, as many of us had been saying for a year, masks were the visible reminder that the country “was in the middle of a pandemic.” As we’ve seen afterwards, that was, unfortunately, wildly incorrect.

Testing, inescapable media panic, and the incompetence of public health officials results in an unending pandemic, under current definitions. The CDC’s devotion to pseudoscience and the organization’s apparent predisposition to irrational fear, impossibly poor risk analysis, and their recent expressions of doubt on the long-term efficacy of the vaccines have made it abundantly clear that they have no end game for COVID.

Their decision to return to recommending mask mandates for all, the death of science, as it were, has been followed by many corporations, cities and several states. And there is no vaccine on the horizon to provide an easy way out. What possible justification can there be for them to revert back to their guidance on vaccinated masking? They’ve now downplayed the efficacy of the vaccines they’ve relentlessly pushed, and refuse to acknowledge the reality that COVID cases will always exist, especially with how hard we look for them. What is the end game?

While we have no way to predict how far down the anti-science rabbit hole the CDC will continue to sink, we can look at how their guidance, their recommendation to wear masks is faring in a number of areas in the US and beyond that have followed their evidence-free advice.

Louisiana

One of the greatest gifts the CDC unwittingly gave us with their habitual flip flopping is the opportunity to compare areas with and without mask mandates. They provided us the ability to have some semblance of a “control” group, which is obviously quite valuable when examining the possible impact of masks. With many governors or local politicians reluctant to return to mask mandates, the True Believers in The Science™ have created an easy comparison point.

One such state is Louisiana, where Governor John Bell Edwards, a True Believer, mandated masks again out of desperation at his state’s rising case rate. Nearby, Arkansas and Mississippi did not mandate masks, despite Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson’s best efforts.

Unsurprisingly, they’ve followed the same trends regardless:

In fact, case growth in Arkansas appears to have slowed earlier and might be reaching a plateau.

The complete context of cases in these three states clearly showcases the futility of masks and their associated policies, does it not? They’ve had nearly identical curves for the entirety of the pandemic, regardless of mask policy or timing. Cases go up and down at identical intervals, despite the states removing their mandates at wildly different times.

It’s the same story that plays out everywhere. Masks go in, masks go off, cases rise and fall regardless, government, experts and media ignore it.

Nevada

In late July, just a few days after the CDC’s dramatic reversal, Governor Steve Sisolak of Nevada mandated that 12 counties, comprising most of the population of the state, return to mask wearing.

Let’s see how it went!

Cases continued to rise and remained at much higher population adjusted levels than the small counties without mandates.

It’s a consistently astonishing phenomenon that politicians have convinced themselves that something that’s already failed to prevent the most substantial wave of infections will somehow work this time.

It does not work. Anywhere. Ever.

Georgia

Unsurprisingly, given that the current wave is disproportionately affecting the South, Georgia’s seen a significant increase in cases recently too.

Equally unsurprising is that a few major cities in the state have responded by mandating masks, while the rest of the state hasn’t followed suit.

Naturally Atlanta mandated masks just a day after the CDC’s new guidance:

And in a truly shocking turn of events, it did not stop cases from rapidly rising.

But they weren’t the only ones, Savannah and Athens also caved to desperation and mandated masks…

https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4a6a27d8-507a-494e-b1ea-a8bf7b19e025_5289x2983.png

…with the same complete lack of success compared to the rest of Georgia’s counties.

California

It will come as no surprise that a number of counties in California have mandated masks; few states are as committed to pseudoscience as the Golden State.

We’ve already seen how completely ineffective masks were in Los Angeles:

It did not work. And, three weeks later, hospitalizations have continued to increase as well:

It’s remarkable how committed the groupthink is to continued failure due to cowardice, fear and desperation to avoid media criticism.

Hawaii

And then there’s Hawaii.

Hawaii never removed their mask mandate, the only state to keep a mask requirement for everyone, regardless of their vaccination status. They’ve had overwhelming compliance throughout the pandemic, and are rapidly approaching a year and a half of consistent mask wearing rules.

Yet cases have reached new highs:

It’s not just cases, hospitalizations are well above previous peaks too:

The more masks fail, the more we need them.

International

The mask failure isn’t just limited to the United States either. Other countries and areas are experiencing the same thing. Most importantly, Israel, where masks, previously credited with lowering the curve, were brought back after only nine days:

https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb7496ead-c152-4595-826d-4b59cd52e41d_5293x2983.png

Despite the aggressive push for N95 masks by some experts, German states with N95 mandates have fared no better than those without a requirement for the supposedly more effective masks:

More importantly though, Saxony became the first German state to remove their mask mandate on July 13th. This creates a compelling comparison point to Bavaria and Berlin, with regards to their N95 mandates. So what’s happened?

Saxony’s doing BETTER. Not just the same, better. Two states requiring N95’s, one state not requiring masks at all, and not only has it not made a difference, the N95’s are doing worse.

Failure. Constant, unending failure. Everywhere you look.

Meanwhile, in Japan, pandemic records are falling nearly every day, as their outbreak continues to worsen:

Over 25,000 cases were reported on August 19th, a rate of 200 per million, despite much lower testing rates than in the US. For context, 200 per million is roughly equivalent to the rate of new cases in places like Spain or South Africa, higher than current rate of Denmark, Mexico, Brazil, and double that of Sweden. Many mask proponents will admit that Japan has been unable to prevent outbreaks with universal masking, but defend their results by referencing that their population adjusted rates are low. That argument is no longer valid.

Japan was the media darling due to their mask usage, their “mask culture,” their willingness to comply — and it’s all come crashing down.

Speaking of Denmark, they removed the last of their mask requirements recently, after previously removing the mandate in indoor environments in June.

Cases dropped for several weeks afterwards, before rising again in July, although to levels far below those seen in the UK or other European countries.

The push for masking, as always, boils down to a combination of incompetence, cowardice, fear, and political pressure.

Experts enjoy the ability to be seen as “doing something,” and must never appear to be “anti-mask,” since it would immediately discredit them in the eyes of their peers, the greater scientific community and their ideological compatriots.

Politicians want the “get out of jail free” card that masking provides; the opportunity to blame others for poor results. The “it would have worked if you’d all just listened to me” line of defense. The media simply outsources all critical thinking to like-minded ideologues and refuses to acknowledge or take seriously the few brave experts willing to tell the truth.

And as a result, corporations, whose decision makers are exclusively influenced by the same media sources, like The New York Times, follow right along. Regardless of the anti-science, despicable pieces regularly appearing in those outlets, such as suggesting that actually, masking kids is good for their learning ability.

But everywhere you look, the cultural groupthink is dramatically failing. Counties and states following the CDC’s new guidance are not succeeding, and those ignoring it are faring no worse. Locations that never removed masks, such as Hawaii and Japan, are seeing their highest numbers of the pandemic, but manage to escape the vitriol and hatred leveled at Ron DeSantis because they’re following orders and implementing what the hive mind of acceptable opinion mandates.

The dramatic, predictable failure resulting from the CDC’s science-ending reversal would, in a sane world, be cause for intellectually honest experts to revisit their guidance and accept that their efforts to “control” infections is always doomed to fail. But naturally, we’re seeing the exact opposite. The more masks fail, the more we need them.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott wouldn’t have tested positive for COVID if he’d worn a mask, states that ban mask mandates in schools could face retaliation from the federal government, and in perhaps the clearest indication of futility, indoor masking in Los Angeles has failed so comprehensively that outdoor masks are now required too.

And all of this is in direct contradiction to the inevitable outcome, as acknowledged by more “moderate” COVID experts:

https://cdn.substack.com/image/twitter_name/w_36/mugecevik.jpgMuge Cevik @mugecevik

@MerylSwanLake @Boghuma The reality is we will get infected w/ covid at some point in our lives & likely multiple times throughout our lives. 2 doses reduce the risk of worse outcome pretty well. I understand boosting elderly & immunocompromised, but there is nothing to justify boosters for all.

These supposed “mitigations and “interventions” are supposed to prevent cases when that is a complete impossibility, given the reality that everyone will be exposed and infected, perhaps multiple times.

But of course, the theater must continue. The more it fails the more we need it.

Edited August 21, 2021 by WaccineChinawatiiRaporn
pics not displayed

August 21, 2021

Graphs to pair with the information in the above article . . .

August 21, 2021

Come on! Copy, paste & upload the pictures, 2 minutes max.

And the article & graphs are at least interesting to read & look at after 1-1/2 years of this experiment.

You don't have to read it, not like I put a mask to your head.

August 21, 2021

Interesting commentary, though I am sure some members will equally bring science to reflect a different position as so much of the debate shows during these times!

My position is this. Masks are a preventative measure. Consistently I have read arguments from both sides saying the virus spreads in droplets from the nose/mouth of one person to another. Hence why masks, that cover the nose and mouth, are seen by many to assist in retarding the spread of the virus.

My strictly non-scientific observation is that many in the Human race will not use masks effectively, because of a stated position or belief in non-use, poor education in use of a mask, medical and/or religious beliefs or simply normal human forgetfulness! Too many are simply swayed one way or the other by their personal beliefs in statements of others. (TV Hosts, Politicians, Opinion Jocks etc)

I was in Phuket during the first wave and mask compliance in terms of use was high. But in a manner of weeks after the wave had ended, mask use had greatly reduced even though the Province still required them. People tried to get back to some sort of normalcy believing the threat had passed and the appearance of normality was bolstered by the lack of mask wearing.

Masks are becoming a piece of safety clothing or fashion. Their use or not is being driven by the natural human conscious and sub-conscious. Accordingly, I don't see wearing masks as a viable long term solution. Too many have spent years perfecting their "look" to hide it behind a piece of clothing. Our reliance on body language for true transmission of a message has also not adapted to the use of a mask. (There are many who still say that a man with a beard is hiding something his face wants to show apart from crumbs. )

Skin Cancer advocates have been trying to get people to wear simply wear a hat in the hot sun to protect themselves for many,many years! What chance do we have of enforcing mask wearing on an ongoing basis? However, in the current fight I also believe not one solution or method has yet proven to be an absolute winner including the use or non-use of any protective measure like masks. Hence we should keep trying all measures, just like bringing all weapons to a battle.

August 21, 2021

2 hours ago, WaccineChinawatiiRaporn said:

Masks Aren't Working Anywhere...So We Must Keep Using Them

Many years ago I was working for a very large commercial bank in Dallas that was failing because being in Texas many of its customers were in the oil business and oil fell to $8 per barrel and they were defaulting on their loans.

To try to assure investors, depositors, and employees the executives issued a letter with all the steps they were taking to solve the problems. I looked at another employee and said, this doesn't solve anything.

He uttered " Remember most actions are initiated to create the illusion of solving the problem.

The same is true with Covid. Government is continually pressed as to what they are doing to address the problem. Since no one knows the real answer they start issuing edicts no matter how ludicrous and no matter how unfounded. However that gives them something to point to when pressed as to what they are doing to confront the covid infection. It matters little that there is no evidence that any of the steps are effective.

I have no doubt that the government will assemble all the best and brightest minds. They will have the experts present facts and documentation showing how best to fight the covid virus. They will hold debates with the scientists and they will determine what is the best and most effective way to combat the covid virus.

They will employ that most effective way, but not until they have tried every other conceivable lamebrain option first.

August 21, 2021

3 hours ago, WaccineChinawatiiRaporn said:

Masks Aren't Working Anywhere...So We Must Keep Using Them

https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_90,h_90,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9391318b-5cf0-46bc-b9d9-2c7bb38c1445_400x400.jpeg

IM

2 hr ago

https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/the-more-masks-fail-the-more-we-need?r=kt9k9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=twitter

When the CDC changed their guidance in May to say that vaccinated individuals no longer needed masks, many in the general public thought that it signaled the end of the pandemic. The majority of politicians quickly dropped most COVID-related restrictions, because, as many of us had been saying for a year, masks were the visible reminder that the country “was in the middle of a pandemic.” As we’ve seen afterwards, that was, unfortunately, wildly incorrect.

Testing, inescapable media panic, and the incompetence of public health officials results in an unending pandemic, under current definitions. The CDC’s devotion to pseudoscience and the organization’s apparent predisposition to irrational fear, impossibly poor risk analysis, and their recent expressions of doubt on the long-term efficacy of the vaccines have made it abundantly clear that they have no end game for COVID.

Their decision to return to recommending mask mandates for all, the death of science, as it were, has been followed by many corporations, cities and several states. And there is no vaccine on the horizon to provide an easy way out. What possible justification can there be for them to revert back to their guidance on vaccinated masking? They’ve now downplayed the efficacy of the vaccines they’ve relentlessly pushed, and refuse to acknowledge the reality that COVID cases will always exist, especially with how hard we look for them. What is the end game?

While we have no way to predict how far down the anti-science rabbit hole the CDC will continue to sink, we can look at how their guidance, their recommendation to wear masks is faring in a number of areas in the US and beyond that have followed their evidence-free advice.

Louisiana

One of the greatest gifts the CDC unwittingly gave us with their habitual flip flopping is the opportunity to compare areas with and without mask mandates. They provided us the ability to have some semblance of a “control” group, which is obviously quite valuable when examining the possible impact of masks. With many governors or local politicians reluctant to return to mask mandates, the True Believers in The Science™ have created an easy comparison point.

One such state is Louisiana, where Governor John Bell Edwards, a True Believer, mandated masks again out of desperation at his state’s rising case rate. Nearby, Arkansas and Mississippi did not mandate masks, despite Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson’s best efforts.

Unsurprisingly, they’ve followed the same trends regardless:

In fact, case growth in Arkansas appears to have slowed earlier and might be reaching a plateau.

The complete context of cases in these three states clearly showcases the futility of masks and their associated policies, does it not? They’ve had nearly identical curves for the entirety of the pandemic, regardless of mask policy or timing. Cases go up and down at identical intervals, despite the states removing their mandates at wildly different times.

It’s the same story that plays out everywhere. Masks go in, masks go off, cases rise and fall regardless, government, experts and media ignore it.

Nevada

In late July, just a few days after the CDC’s dramatic reversal, Governor Steve Sisolak of Nevada mandated that 12 counties, comprising most of the population of the state, return to mask wearing.

Let’s see how it went!

Cases continued to rise and remained at much higher population adjusted levels than the small counties without mandates.

It’s a consistently astonishing phenomenon that politicians have convinced themselves that something that’s already failed to prevent the most substantial wave of infections will somehow work this time.

It does not work. Anywhere. Ever.

Georgia

Unsurprisingly, given that the current wave is disproportionately affecting the South, Georgia’s seen a significant increase in cases recently too.

Equally unsurprising is that a few major cities in the state have responded by mandating masks, while the rest of the state hasn’t followed suit.

Naturally Atlanta mandated masks just a day after the CDC’s new guidance:

And in a truly shocking turn of events, it did not stop cases from rapidly rising.

But they weren’t the only ones, Savannah and Athens also caved to desperation and mandated masks…

https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4a6a27d8-507a-494e-b1ea-a8bf7b19e025_5289x2983.png

…with the same complete lack of success compared to the rest of Georgia’s counties.

California

It will come as no surprise that a number of counties in California have mandated masks; few states are as committed to pseudoscience as the Golden State.

We’ve already seen how completely ineffective masks were in Los Angeles:

It did not work. And, three weeks later, hospitalizations have continued to increase as well:

It’s remarkable how committed the groupthink is to continued failure due to cowardice, fear and desperation to avoid media criticism.

Hawaii

And then there’s Hawaii.

Hawaii never removed their mask mandate, the only state to keep a mask requirement for everyone, regardless of their vaccination status. They’ve had overwhelming compliance throughout the pandemic, and are rapidly approaching a year and a half of consistent mask wearing rules.

Yet cases have reached new highs:

It’s not just cases, hospitalizations are well above previous peaks too:

The more masks fail, the more we need them.

International

The mask failure isn’t just limited to the United States either. Other countries and areas are experiencing the same thing. Most importantly, Israel, where masks, previously credited with lowering the curve, were brought back after only nine days:

https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb7496ead-c152-4595-826d-4b59cd52e41d_5293x2983.png

Despite the aggressive push for N95 masks by some experts, German states with N95 mandates have fared no better than those without a requirement for the supposedly more effective masks:

More importantly though, Saxony became the first German state to remove their mask mandate on July 13th. This creates a compelling comparison point to Bavaria and Berlin, with regards to their N95 mandates. So what’s happened?

Saxony’s doing BETTER. Not just the same, better. Two states requiring N95’s, one state not requiring masks at all, and not only has it not made a difference, the N95’s are doing worse.

Failure. Constant, unending failure. Everywhere you look.

Meanwhile, in Japan, pandemic records are falling nearly every day, as their outbreak continues to worsen:

Over 25,000 cases were reported on August 19th, a rate of 200 per million, despite much lower testing rates than in the US. For context, 200 per million is roughly equivalent to the rate of new cases in places like Spain or South Africa, higher than current rate of Denmark, Mexico, Brazil, and double that of Sweden. Many mask proponents will admit that Japan has been unable to prevent outbreaks with universal masking, but defend their results by referencing that their population adjusted rates are low. That argument is no longer valid.

Japan was the media darling due to their mask usage, their “mask culture,” their willingness to comply — and it’s all come crashing down.

Speaking of Denmark, they removed the last of their mask requirements recently, after previously removing the mandate in indoor environments in June.

Cases dropped for several weeks afterwards, before rising again in July, although to levels far below those seen in the UK or other European countries.

The push for masking, as always, boils down to a combination of incompetence, cowardice, fear, and political pressure.

Experts enjoy the ability to be seen as “doing something,” and must never appear to be “anti-mask,” since it would immediately discredit them in the eyes of their peers, the greater scientific community and their ideological compatriots.

Politicians want the “get out of jail free” card that masking provides; the opportunity to blame others for poor results. The “it would have worked if you’d all just listened to me” line of defense. The media simply outsources all critical thinking to like-minded ideologues and refuses to acknowledge or take seriously the few brave experts willing to tell the truth.

And as a result, corporations, whose decision makers are exclusively influenced by the same media sources, like The New York Times, follow right along. Regardless of the anti-science, despicable pieces regularly appearing in those outlets, such as suggesting that actually, masking kids is good for their learning ability.

But everywhere you look, the cultural groupthink is dramatically failing. Counties and states following the CDC’s new guidance are not succeeding, and those ignoring it are faring no worse. Locations that never removed masks, such as Hawaii and Japan, are seeing their highest numbers of the pandemic, but manage to escape the vitriol and hatred leveled at Ron DeSantis because they’re following orders and implementing what the hive mind of acceptable opinion mandates.

The dramatic, predictable failure resulting from the CDC’s science-ending reversal would, in a sane world, be cause for intellectually honest experts to revisit their guidance and accept that their efforts to “control” infections is always doomed to fail. But naturally, we’re seeing the exact opposite. The more masks fail, the more we need them.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott wouldn’t have tested positive for COVID if he’d worn a mask, states that ban mask mandates in schools could face retaliation from the federal government, and in perhaps the clearest indication of futility, indoor masking in Los Angeles has failed so comprehensively that outdoor masks are now required too.

And all of this is in direct contradiction to the inevitable outcome, as acknowledged by more “moderate” COVID experts:

https://cdn.substack.com/image/twitter_name/w_36/mugecevik.jpgMuge Cevik @mugecevik
@MerylSwanLake @Boghuma The reality is we will get infected w/ covid at some point in our lives & likely multiple times throughout our lives. 2 doses reduce the risk of worse outcome pretty well. I understand boosting elderly & immunocompromised, but there is nothing to justify boosters for all.

These supposed “mitigations and “interventions” are supposed to prevent cases when that is a complete impossibility, given the reality that everyone will be exposed and infected, perhaps multiple times.

But of course, the theater must continue. The more it fails the more we need it.

Tremendous post.

Many thanks for this

August 23, 2021

On 8/21/2021 at 7:23 AM, AdamX said:

Tremendous post. Many thanks for this

Fully agree, this is a great article packed with REAL LIFE data that provide evidence that mask-wearing does not have ANY effect on the trends of infection-spreading or hospitalization.

The reaction of the mask-addicts when confronted with this is of course somewhat DILBERT-like:

August 23, 2021

The Raven Paradox is a paradox arising from the question of what constitutes evidence for a statement.

Observing objects that are neither black nor ravens may formally increase the likelihood that all ravens are black even though, intuitively, these observations are unrelated. This problem was proposed by the logician Carl Gustav Hempel in the 1940s to illustrate a contradiction between inductive logic and intuition.

Statement/Claim: All Ravens are Black.

Therefore anything that is not black is not a Raven.

Therefore a red bus and a green apple is evidence that All Ravens are Black is correct/true.

Raven paradox - Wikipedia

Masks in a closed environment have been proven to slow the spread of a virus when people are close to each other.

Fact check: Studies do show face masks and lockdowns slow the spread of COVID-19 | Reuters

BUT - what is the paradox??

Is the paradox the use of (irrelevant?) stats to back up the claim that wearing masks dont work for Covid19, or does those stats merely show that people dont wear them properly and many not at all.

Is the paradox the use of clinical studies that show that wearing masks in a closed (clinical) environment slows the spread of a viral infection, or does those studies merely support the claim that wearing masks will slow/stop the spread of Covid19.

People will take whatever facts support their statement and overlook any paradoxes, and they will also ignore all other facts/figures, that do not support their statement.

August 23, 2021

53 minutes ago, AussieBob said:

The Raven Paradox is a paradox arising from the question of what constitutes evidence for a statement.

Observing objects that are neither black nor ravens may formally increase the likelihood that all ravens are black even though, intuitively, these observations are unrelated. This problem was proposed by the logician Carl Gustav Hempel in the 1940s to illustrate a contradiction between inductive logic and intuition.

Statement/Claim: All Ravens are Black.

Therefore anything that is not black is not a Raven.

Therefore a red bus and a green apple is evidence that All Ravens are Black is correct/true.

Raven paradox - Wikipedia

Masks in a closed environment have been proven to slow the spread of a virus when people are close to each other.

Fact check: Studies do show face masks and lockdowns slow the spread of COVID-19 | Reuters

BUT - what is the paradox??

Is the paradox the use of (irrelevant?) stats to back up the claim that wearing masks dont work for Covid19, or does those stats merely show that people dont wear them properly and many not at all.

Is the paradox the use of clinical studies that show that wearing masks in a closed (clinical) environment slows the spread of a viral infection, or does those studies merely support the claim that wearing masks will slow/stop the spread of Covid19.

People will take whatever facts support their statement and overlook any paradoxes, and they will also ignore all other facts/figures, that do not support their statement.

I love this kind of analysis as it instantly points out where logical fallacy is in the arguments of people on the pro side of the lockdown debate.

Here are two other useful sites that help when debating people who will not address the core issue.

Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies (yourlogicalfallacyis.com)

Hierarchy of disagreement - RationalWiki

August 23, 2021

This one is really good too if anyone wants to take the time to read it . . .

https://www.city-journal.org/panic-pandemic

The Panic Pandemic: Fearmongering from journalists, scientists, and politicians did more harm than the virus.

The United States suffered through two lethal waves of contagion in the past year and a half. The first was a viral pandemic that killed about one in 500 Americans—typically, a person over 75 suffering from other serious conditions. The second, and far more catastrophic, was a moral panic that swept the nation’s guiding institutions.

Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, the American elite flouted the norms of governance, journalism, academic freedom—and, worst of all, science. They misled the public about the origins of the virus and the true risk that it posed. Ignoring their own carefully prepared plans for a pandemic, they claimed unprecedented powers to impose untested strategies, with terrible collateral damage. As evidence of their mistakes mounted, they stifled debate by vilifying dissenters, censoring criticism, and suppressing scientific research.

If, as seems increasingly plausible, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 leaked out of a laboratory in Wuhan, it is the costliest blunder ever committed by scientists. Whatever the pandemic’s origin, the response to it is the worst mistake in the history of the public-health profession. We still have no convincing evidence that the lockdowns saved lives, but lots of evidence that they have already cost lives and will prove deadlier in the long run than the virus itself.

One in three people worldwide lost a job or a business during the lockdowns, and half saw their earnings drop, according to a Gallup poll. Children, never at risk from the virus, in many places essentially lost a year of school. The economic and health consequences were felt most acutely among the less affluent in America and in the rest of the world, where the World Bank estimates that more than 100 million have been pushed into extreme poverty.

The leaders responsible for these disasters continue to pretend that their policies worked and assume that they can keep fooling the public. They’ve promised to deploy these strategies again in the future, and they might even succeed in doing so—unless we begin to understand what went wrong.

The panic was started, as usual, by journalists. As the virus spread early last year, they highlighted the most alarming statistics and the scariest images: the estimates of a fatality rate ten to 50 times higher than the flu, the chaotic scenes at hospitals in Italy and New York City, the predictions that national health-care systems were about to collapse. The full-scale panic was set off by the release in March 2020 of a computer model at the Imperial College in London, which projected that—unless drastic measures were taken—intensive-care units would have 30 Covid patients for every available bed and that America would see 2.2 million deaths by the end of the summer. The British researchers announced that the “only viable strategy” was to impose draconian restrictions on businesses, schools, and social gatherings until a vaccine arrived.

This extraordinary project was swiftly declared the “consensus” among public-health officials, politicians, journalists, and academics. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, endorsed it and became the unassailable authority for those purporting to “follow the science.” What had originally been a limited lockdown—“15 days to slow the spread”—became long-term policy across much of the United States and the world. A few scientists and public-health experts objected, noting that an extended lockdown was a novel strategy of unknown effectiveness that had been rejected in previous plans for a pandemic. It was a dangerous experiment being conducted without knowing the answer to the most basic question: Just how lethal is this virus?

The most prominent early critic was John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford, who published an essay for STAT headlined “A Fiasco in the Making? As the Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold, We Are Making Decisions Without Reliable Data.” While a short-term lockdown made sense, he argued, an extended lockdown could prove worse than the disease, and scientists needed to do more intensive testing to determine the risk. The article offered common-sense advice from one of the world’s most frequently cited authorities on the credibility of medical research, but it provoked a furious backlash on Twitter from scientists and journalists.

The fury intensified in April 2020, when Ioannidis followed his own advice by joining with Jay Bhattacharya and other colleagues from Stanford to gauge the spread of Covid in the surrounding area, Santa Clara County. After testing for Covid antibodies in the blood of several thousand volunteers, they estimated that the fatality rate among the infected in the county was about 0.2 percent, twice as high as for the flu but considerably lower than the assumptions of public-health officials and computer modelers. The researchers acknowledged that the fatality rate could be substantially higher in other places where the virus spread extensively in nursing homes (which hadn’t yet occurred in the Santa Clara area). But merely by reporting data that didn’t fit the official panic narrative, they became targets.

Other scientists lambasted the researchers and claimed that methodological weaknesses in the study made the results meaningless. A statistician at Columbia wrote that the researchers “owe us all an apology.” A biologist at the University of North Carolina said that the study was “horrible science.” A Rutgers chemist called Ioannidis a “mediocrity” who “cannot even formulate a simulacrum of a coherent, rational argument.” A year later, Ioannidis still marvels at the attacks on the study (which was eventually published in a leading epidemiology journal). “Scientists whom I respect started acting like warriors who had to subvert the enemy,” he says. “Every paper I’ve written has errors—I’m a scientist, not the pope—but the main conclusions of this one were correct and have withstood the criticism.”

Mainstream journalists piled on with hit pieces quoting critics and accusing the researchers of endangering lives by questioning lockdowns. The Nation called the research a “black mark” for Stanford. The cheapest shots came from BuzzFeed, which devoted thousands of words to a series of trivial objections and baseless accusations. The article that got the most attention was BuzzFeed’s breathless revelation that an airline executive opposed to lockdowns had contributed $5,000—yes, five thousand dollars!—to an anonymized fund at Stanford that had helped finance the Santa Clara fieldwork.

The notion that a team of prominent academics, who were not paid for their work in the study, would risk their reputations by skewing results for the sake of a $5,000 donation was absurd on its face—and even more ludicrous, given that Ioannidis, Bhattacharya, and the lead investigator, Eran Bendavid, said that they weren’t even aware of the donation while conducting the study. But Stanford University was so cowed by the online uproar that it subjected the researchers to a two-month fact-finding inquiry by an outside legal firm. The inquiry found no evidence of conflict of interest, but the smear campaign succeeded in sending a clear message to scientists everywhere: Don’t question the lockdown narrative.

In a brief interlude of journalistic competence, two veteran science writers, Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee, published an article in Scientific American decrying the politicization of Covid research. They defended the integrity and methodology of the Stanford researchers, noting that some subsequent studies had found similar rates of fatality among the infected. (In his latest review of the literature, Ioannidis now estimates that the average fatality rate in Europe and the Americas is 0.3 to 0.4 percent and about 0.2 percent among people not living in institutions.) Lenzer and Brownlee lamented that the unjust criticism and ad hominem vitriol had suppressed a legitimate debate by intimidating the scientific community. Their editors then proceeded to prove their point. Responding to more online fury, Scientific American repented by publishing an editor’s note that essentially repudiated its own article. The editors printed BuzzFeed’s accusations as the final word on the matter, refusing to publish a rebuttal from the article’s authors or a supporting letter from Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School. Scientific American, long the most venerable publication in its field, now bowed to the scientific authority of BuzzFeed.

Editors of research journals fell into line, too. When Thomas Benfield, one of the researchers in Denmark conducting the first large randomized controlled trial of mask efficacy against Covid, was asked why they were taking so long to publish the much-anticipated findings, he promised them as “as soon as a journal is brave enough to accept the paper.” After being rejected by The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA, the study finally appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the reason for the editors’ reluctance became clear: the study showed that a mask did not protect the wearer, which contradicted claims by the Centers for Disease Control and other health authorities.

Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins with 350 publications to his name, submitted a critique of lockdowns to more than ten journals and finally gave up—the “first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere,” he said. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard, had a similar experience with his article, early in the pandemic, arguing that resources should be focused on protecting the elderly. “Just as in war,” Kulldorff wrote, “we must exploit the characteristics of the enemy in order to defeat it with the minimum number of casualties. Since Covid-19 operates in a highly age specific manner, mandated counter measures must also be age specific. If not, lives will be unnecessarily lost.” It was a tragically accurate prophecy from one of the leading experts on infectious disease, but Kulldorff couldn’t find a scientific journal or media outlet to accept the article, so he ended up posting it on his own LinkedIn page. “There’s always a certain amount of herd thinking in science,” Kulldorff says, “but I’ve never seen it reach this level. Most of the epidemiologists and other scientists I’ve spoken to in private are against lockdowns, but they’re afraid to speak up.”

To break the silence, Kulldorff joined with Stanford’s Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford to issue a plea for “focused protection,” called the Great Barrington Declaration. They urged officials to divert more resources to shield the elderly, such as doing more tests of the staff at nursing homes and hospitals, while reopening business and schools for younger people, which would ultimately protect the vulnerable as herd immunity grew among the low-risk population.

They managed to attract attention but not the kind they hoped for. Though tens of thousands of other scientists and doctors went on to sign the declaration, the press caricatured it as a deadly “let it rip” strategy and an “ethical nightmare” from “Covid deniers” and “agents of misinformation.” Google initially shadow-banned it so that the first page of search results for “Great Barrington Declaration” showed only criticism of it (like an article calling it “the work of a climate denial network”) but not the declaration itself. Facebook shut down the scientists’ page for a week for violating unspecified “community standards.”

The most reviled heretic was Scott Atlas, a medical doctor and health-policy analyst at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He, too, urged focused protection on nursing homes and calculated that the medical, social, and economic disruptions of the lockdowns would cost more years of life than the coronavirus. When he joined the White House coronavirus task force, Bill Gates derided him as “this Stanford guy with no background” promoting “crackpot theories.” Nearly 100 members of Stanford’s faculty signed a letter denouncing his “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science,” and an editorial in the Stanford Daily urged the university to sever its ties to Hoover.

The Stanford faculty senate overwhelmingly voted to condemn Atlas’s actions as “anathema to our community, our values and our belief that we should use knowledge for good.” Several professors from Stanford’s medical school demanded further punishment in a JAMA article, “When Physicians Engage in Practices That Threaten the Nation’s Health.” The article, which misrepresented Atlas’s views as well as the evidence on the efficacy of lockdowns, urged professional medical societies and medical-licensing boards to take action against Atlas on the grounds that it was “ethically inappropriate for physicians to publicly recommend behaviors or interventions that are not scientifically well grounded.”

But if it was unethical to recommend “interventions that are not scientifically well grounded,” how could anyone condone the lockdowns? “It was utterly immoral to conduct this society-wide intervention without the evidence to justify it,” Bhattacharya says. “The immediate results have been disastrous, especially for the poor, and the long-term effect will be to fundamentally undermine trust in public health and science.” The traditional strategy for dealing with pandemics was to isolate the infected and protect the most vulnerable, just as Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists recommended. The CDC’s pre-pandemic planning scenarios didn’t recommend extended school closures or any shutdown of businesses even during a plague as deadly as the 1918 Spanish flu. Yet Fauci dismissed the focused-protection strategy as “total nonsense” to “anybody who has any experience in epidemiology and infectious diseases,” and his verdict became “the science” to leaders in America and elsewhere.

Fortunately, a few leaders followed the science in a different way. Instead of blindly trusting Fauci, they listened to his critics and adopted the focused-protection strategy—most notably, in Florida. Its governor, Ron DeSantis, began to doubt the public-health establishment early in the pandemic, when computer models projected that Covid patients would greatly outnumber hospital beds in many states. Governors in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were so alarmed and so determined to free up hospital beds that they directed nursing homes and other facilities to admit or readmit Covid patients—with deadly results.

But DeSantis was skeptical of the hospital projections—for good reason, as no state actually ran out of beds—and more worried about the risk of Covid spreading in nursing homes. He forbade long-term-care centers to admit anyone infected with Covid and ordered frequent testing of the staff at senior-care centers. After locking down last spring, he reopened businesses, schools, and restaurants early, rejected mask mandates, and ignored protests from the press and the state’s Democratic leaders. Fauci warned that Florida was “asking for trouble,” but DeSantis went on seeking and heeding advice from Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists, who were astonished to speak with a politician already familiar with just about every study they mentioned to him.

“DeSantis was an incredible outlier,” Atlas says. “He dug up the data and read the scientific papers and analyzed it all himself. In our discussions, he’d bounce ideas off me, but he was already on top of the details of everything. He always had the perspective to see the larger harms of lockdowns and the need to concentrate testing and other resources on the elderly. And he has been proven correct.”

If Florida had simply done no worse than the rest of the country during the pandemic, that would have been enough to discredit the lockdown strategy. The state effectively served as the control group in a natural experiment, and no medical treatment with dangerous side effects would be approved if the control group fared no differently from the treatment group. But the outcome of this experiment was even more damning.

Florida’s mortality rate from Covid is lower than the national average among those over 65 and also among younger people, so that the state’s age-adjusted Covid mortality rate is lower than that of all but ten other states. And by the most important measure, the overall rate of “excess mortality” (the number of deaths above normal), Florida has also done better than the national average. Its rate of excess mortality is significantly lower than that of the most restrictive state, California, particularly among younger adults, many of whom died not from Covid but from causes related to the lockdowns: cancer screenings and treatments were delayed, and there were sharp increases in deaths from drug overdoses and from heart attacks not treated promptly.

If the treatment group in a clinical trial were dying off faster than the control group, an ethical researcher would halt the experiment. But the lockdown proponents were undeterred by the numbers in Florida, or by similar results elsewhere, including a comparable natural experiment involving European countries with the least restrictive policies. Sweden, Finland, and Norway rejected mask mandates and extended lockdowns, and they have each suffered significantly less excess mortality than most other European countries during the pandemic.

A nationwide analysis in Sweden showed that keeping schools open throughout the pandemic, without masks or social distancing, had little effect on the spread of Covid, but school closures and mask mandates for students continued elsewhere. Another Swedish researcher, Jonas Ludvigsson, reported that not a single schoolchild in the country died from Covid in Sweden and that their teachers’ risk of serious illness was lower than for the rest of the workforce—but these findings provoked so many online attacks and threats that Ludvigsson decided to stop researching or discussing Covid.

Social-media platforms continued censoring scientists and journalists who questioned lockdowns and mask mandates. YouTube removed a video discussion between DeSantis and the Great Barrington scientists, on the grounds that it “contradicts the consensus” on the efficacy of masks, and also took down the Hoover Institution’s interview with Atlas. Twitter locked out Atlas and Kulldorff for scientifically accurate challenges to mask orthodoxy. A peer-reviewed German study reporting harms to children from mask-wearing was suppressed on Facebook (which labeled my City Journal article “Partly False” because it cited the study) and also at ResearchGate, one of the most widely used websites for scientists to post their papers. ResearchGate refused to explain the censorship to the German scientists, telling them only that the paper was removed from the website in response to “reports from the community about the subject-matter.”

The social-media censors and scientific establishment, aided by the Chinese government, succeeded for a year in suppressing the lab-leak theory, depriving vaccine developers of potentially valuable insights into the virus’s evolution. It’s understandable, if deplorable, that the researchers and officials involved in supporting the Wuhan lab research would cover up the possibility that they’d unleashed a Frankenstein on the world. What’s harder to explain is why journalists and the rest of the scientific community so eagerly bought that story, along with the rest of the Covid narrative.

Why the elite panic? Why did so many go so wrong for so long? When journalists and scientists finally faced up to their mistake in ruling out the lab-leak theory, they blamed their favorite villain: Donald Trump. He had espoused the theory, so they assumed it must be wrong. And since he disagreed at times with Fauci about the danger of the virus and the need for lockdowns, then Fauci must be right, and this was such a deadly plague that the norms of journalism and science must be suspended. Millions would die unless Fauci was obeyed and dissenters were silenced.

But neither the plague nor Trump explains the panic. Yes, the virus was deadly, and Trump’s erratic pronouncements contributed to the confusion and partisanship, but the panic was due to two preexisting pathologies that afflicted other countries, too. The first is what I have called the Crisis Crisis, the incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians. It’s a longstanding problem—humanity was supposedly doomed in the last century by the “population crisis” and the “energy crisis”—that has dramatically worsened with the cable and digital competition for ratings, clicks, and retweets. To keep audiences frightened around the clock, journalists seek out Cassandras with their own incentives for fearmongering: politicians, bureaucrats, activists, academics, and assorted experts who gain publicity, prestige, funding, and power during a crisis.

Unlike many proclaimed crises, an epidemic is a genuine threat, but the crisis industry can’t resist exaggerating the danger, and doomsaying is rarely penalized. Early in the 1980s AIDS epidemic, the New York Times reported the terrifying possibility that the virus could spread to children through “routine close contact”—quoting from a study by Anthony Fauci. Life magazine wildly exaggerated the number of infections in a cover story, headlined “Now No One Is Safe from AIDS.” It cited a study by Robert Redfield, the future leader of the CDC during the Covid pandemic, predicting that AIDS would soon spread as rapidly among heterosexuals as among homosexuals. Both scientists were absolutely wrong, of course, but the false alarms didn’t harm their careers or their credibility.

Journalists and politicians extend professional courtesy to fellow crisis-mongers by ignoring their mistakes, such as the previous predictions by Neil Ferguson. His team at Imperial College projected up to 65,000 deaths in the United Kingdom from swine flu and 200 million deaths worldwide from bird flu. The death toll each time was in the hundreds, but never mind: when Ferguson’s team projected millions of American deaths from Covid, that was considered reason enough to follow its recommendation for extended lockdowns. And when the modelers’ assumption about the fatality rate proved too high, that mistake was ignored, too.

Journalists kept highlighting the most alarming warnings, presented without context. They needed to keep their audience scared, and they succeeded. For Americans under 70, the probability of surviving a Covid infection was about 99.9 percent, but fear of the virus was higher among the young than among the elderly, and polls showed that people of all ages vastly overestimated the risk of being hospitalized or dying.

The second pathology underlying the elite’s Covid panic is the politicization of research—what I have termed the Left’s war on science, another long-standing problem that has gotten much worse. Just as the progressives a century ago yearned for a nation directed by “expert social engineers”—scientific high priests unconstrained by voters and public opinion—today’s progressives want sweeping new powers for politicians and bureaucrats who “believe in science,” meaning that they use the Left’s version of science to justify their edicts. Now that so many elite institutions are political monocultures, progressives have more power than ever to enforce groupthink and suppress debate. Well before the pandemic, they had mastered the tactics for demonizing and silencing scientists whose findings challenged progressive orthodoxy on issues such as IQ, sex differences, race, family structure, transgenderism, and climate change.

“The less educated lost jobs so that professionals at minimal risk could feel safer as they kept working at home on their laptops.”

And then along came Covid—“God’s gift to the Left,” in Jane Fonda’s words. Exaggerating the danger and deflecting blame from China to Trump offered not only short-term political benefits, damaging his reelection prospects, but also an extraordinary opportunity to empower social engineers in Washington and state capitals. Early in the pandemic, Fauci expressed doubt that it was politically possible to lock down American cities, but he underestimated the effectiveness of the crisis industry’s scaremongering. Americans were so frightened that they surrendered their freedoms to work, study, worship, dine, play, socialize, or even leave their homes. Progressives celebrated this “paradigm shift,” calling it a “blueprint” for dealing with climate change.

This experience should be a lesson in what not to do, and whom not to trust. Do not assume that the media’s version of a crisis resembles reality. Do not count on mainstream journalists and their favorite doomsayers to put risks in perspective. Do not expect those who follow “the science” to know what they’re talking about. Science is a process of discovery and debate, not a faith to profess or a dogma to live by. It provides a description of the world, not a prescription for public policy, and specialists in one discipline do not have the knowledge or perspective to guide society. They’re biased by their own narrow focus and self-interest. Fauci and Deborah Birx, the physician who allied with him against Atlas on the White House task force, had to answer for the daily Covid death toll—that ever-present chyron at the bottom of the television screen—so they focused on one disease instead of the collateral damage of their panic-driven policies.

“The Fauci-Birx lockdowns were a sinful, unconscionable, heinous mistake, and they will never admit they were wrong,” Atlas says. Neither will the journalists and politicians who panicked along with them. They’re still portraying lockdowns as not just a success but also a precedent—proof that Americans can sacrifice for the common good when directed by wise scientists and benevolent autocrats. But the sacrifice did far more harm than good, and the burden was not shared equally. The brunt was borne by the most vulnerable in America and the poorest countries of the world. Students from disadvantaged families suffered the most from school closures, and children everywhere spent a year wearing masks solely to assuage the neurotic fears of adults. The less educated lost jobs so that professionals at minimal risk could feel safer as they kept working at home on their laptops. Silicon Valley (and its censors) prospered from lockdowns that bankrupted local businesses.

Luminaries united on Zoom and YouTube to assure the public that “we’re all in this together.” But we weren’t. When the panic infected the nation’s elite—the modern gentry who profess such concern for the downtrodden—it turned out that they weren’t so different from aristocrats of the past. They were in it for themselves.

August 23, 2021

6 hours ago, WaccineChinawatiiRaporn said:

This one is really good too if anyone wants to take the time to read it . . .

https://www.city-journal.org/panic-pandemic

The Panic Pandemic: Fearmongering from journalists, scientists, and politicians did more harm than the virus.

The United States suffered through two lethal waves of contagion in the past year and a half. The first was a viral pandemic that killed about one in 500 Americans—typically, a person over 75 suffering from other serious conditions. The second, and far more catastrophic, was a moral panic that swept the nation’s guiding institutions.

Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, the American elite flouted the norms of governance, journalism, academic freedom—and, worst of all, science. They misled the public about the origins of the virus and the true risk that it posed. Ignoring their own carefully prepared plans for a pandemic, they claimed unprecedented powers to impose untested strategies, with terrible collateral damage. As evidence of their mistakes mounted, they stifled debate by vilifying dissenters, censoring criticism, and suppressing scientific research.

If, as seems increasingly plausible, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 leaked out of a laboratory in Wuhan, it is the costliest blunder ever committed by scientists. Whatever the pandemic’s origin, the response to it is the worst mistake in the history of the public-health profession. We still have no convincing evidence that the lockdowns saved lives, but lots of evidence that they have already cost lives and will prove deadlier in the long run than the virus itself.

One in three people worldwide lost a job or a business during the lockdowns, and half saw their earnings drop, according to a Gallup poll. Children, never at risk from the virus, in many places essentially lost a year of school. The economic and health consequences were felt most acutely among the less affluent in America and in the rest of the world, where the World Bank estimates that more than 100 million have been pushed into extreme poverty.

The leaders responsible for these disasters continue to pretend that their policies worked and assume that they can keep fooling the public. They’ve promised to deploy these strategies again in the future, and they might even succeed in doing so—unless we begin to understand what went wrong.

The panic was started, as usual, by journalists. As the virus spread early last year, they highlighted the most alarming statistics and the scariest images: the estimates of a fatality rate ten to 50 times higher than the flu, the chaotic scenes at hospitals in Italy and New York City, the predictions that national health-care systems were about to collapse. The full-scale panic was set off by the release in March 2020 of a computer model at the Imperial College in London, which projected that—unless drastic measures were taken—intensive-care units would have 30 Covid patients for every available bed and that America would see 2.2 million deaths by the end of the summer. The British researchers announced that the “only viable strategy” was to impose draconian restrictions on businesses, schools, and social gatherings until a vaccine arrived.

This extraordinary project was swiftly declared the “consensus” among public-health officials, politicians, journalists, and academics. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, endorsed it and became the unassailable authority for those purporting to “follow the science.” What had originally been a limited lockdown—“15 days to slow the spread”—became long-term policy across much of the United States and the world. A few scientists and public-health experts objected, noting that an extended lockdown was a novel strategy of unknown effectiveness that had been rejected in previous plans for a pandemic. It was a dangerous experiment being conducted without knowing the answer to the most basic question: Just how lethal is this virus?

The most prominent early critic was John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford, who published an essay for STAT headlined “A Fiasco in the Making? As the Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold, We Are Making Decisions Without Reliable Data.” While a short-term lockdown made sense, he argued, an extended lockdown could prove worse than the disease, and scientists needed to do more intensive testing to determine the risk. The article offered common-sense advice from one of the world’s most frequently cited authorities on the credibility of medical research, but it provoked a furious backlash on Twitter from scientists and journalists.

The fury intensified in April 2020, when Ioannidis followed his own advice by joining with Jay Bhattacharya and other colleagues from Stanford to gauge the spread of Covid in the surrounding area, Santa Clara County. After testing for Covid antibodies in the blood of several thousand volunteers, they estimated that the fatality rate among the infected in the county was about 0.2 percent, twice as high as for the flu but considerably lower than the assumptions of public-health officials and computer modelers. The researchers acknowledged that the fatality rate could be substantially higher in other places where the virus spread extensively in nursing homes (which hadn’t yet occurred in the Santa Clara area). But merely by reporting data that didn’t fit the official panic narrative, they became targets.

Other scientists lambasted the researchers and claimed that methodological weaknesses in the study made the results meaningless. A statistician at Columbia wrote that the researchers “owe us all an apology.” A biologist at the University of North Carolina said that the study was “horrible science.” A Rutgers chemist called Ioannidis a “mediocrity” who “cannot even formulate a simulacrum of a coherent, rational argument.” A year later, Ioannidis still marvels at the attacks on the study (which was eventually published in a leading epidemiology journal). “Scientists whom I respect started acting like warriors who had to subvert the enemy,” he says. “Every paper I’ve written has errors—I’m a scientist, not the pope—but the main conclusions of this one were correct and have withstood the criticism.”

Mainstream journalists piled on with hit pieces quoting critics and accusing the researchers of endangering lives by questioning lockdowns. The Nation called the research a “black mark” for Stanford. The cheapest shots came from BuzzFeed, which devoted thousands of words to a series of trivial objections and baseless accusations. The article that got the most attention was BuzzFeed’s breathless revelation that an airline executive opposed to lockdowns had contributed $5,000—yes, five thousand dollars!—to an anonymized fund at Stanford that had helped finance the Santa Clara fieldwork.

The notion that a team of prominent academics, who were not paid for their work in the study, would risk their reputations by skewing results for the sake of a $5,000 donation was absurd on its face—and even more ludicrous, given that Ioannidis, Bhattacharya, and the lead investigator, Eran Bendavid, said that they weren’t even aware of the donation while conducting the study. But Stanford University was so cowed by the online uproar that it subjected the researchers to a two-month fact-finding inquiry by an outside legal firm. The inquiry found no evidence of conflict of interest, but the smear campaign succeeded in sending a clear message to scientists everywhere: Don’t question the lockdown narrative.

In a brief interlude of journalistic competence, two veteran science writers, Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee, published an article in Scientific American decrying the politicization of Covid research. They defended the integrity and methodology of the Stanford researchers, noting that some subsequent studies had found similar rates of fatality among the infected. (In his latest review of the literature, Ioannidis now estimates that the average fatality rate in Europe and the Americas is 0.3 to 0.4 percent and about 0.2 percent among people not living in institutions.) Lenzer and Brownlee lamented that the unjust criticism and ad hominem vitriol had suppressed a legitimate debate by intimidating the scientific community. Their editors then proceeded to prove their point. Responding to more online fury, Scientific American repented by publishing an editor’s note that essentially repudiated its own article. The editors printed BuzzFeed’s accusations as the final word on the matter, refusing to publish a rebuttal from the article’s authors or a supporting letter from Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School. Scientific American, long the most venerable publication in its field, now bowed to the scientific authority of BuzzFeed.

Editors of research journals fell into line, too. When Thomas Benfield, one of the researchers in Denmark conducting the first large randomized controlled trial of mask efficacy against Covid, was asked why they were taking so long to publish the much-anticipated findings, he promised them as “as soon as a journal is brave enough to accept the paper.” After being rejected by The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA, the study finally appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the reason for the editors’ reluctance became clear: the study showed that a mask did not protect the wearer, which contradicted claims by the Centers for Disease Control and other health authorities.

Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins with 350 publications to his name, submitted a critique of lockdowns to more than ten journals and finally gave up—the “first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere,” he said. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard, had a similar experience with his article, early in the pandemic, arguing that resources should be focused on protecting the elderly. “Just as in war,” Kulldorff wrote, “we must exploit the characteristics of the enemy in order to defeat it with the minimum number of casualties. Since Covid-19 operates in a highly age specific manner, mandated counter measures must also be age specific. If not, lives will be unnecessarily lost.” It was a tragically accurate prophecy from one of the leading experts on infectious disease, but Kulldorff couldn’t find a scientific journal or media outlet to accept the article, so he ended up posting it on his own LinkedIn page. “There’s always a certain amount of herd thinking in science,” Kulldorff says, “but I’ve never seen it reach this level. Most of the epidemiologists and other scientists I’ve spoken to in private are against lockdowns, but they’re afraid to speak up.”

To break the silence, Kulldorff joined with Stanford’s Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford to issue a plea for “focused protection,” called the Great Barrington Declaration. They urged officials to divert more resources to shield the elderly, such as doing more tests of the staff at nursing homes and hospitals, while reopening business and schools for younger people, which would ultimately protect the vulnerable as herd immunity grew among the low-risk population.

They managed to attract attention but not the kind they hoped for. Though tens of thousands of other scientists and doctors went on to sign the declaration, the press caricatured it as a deadly “let it rip” strategy and an “ethical nightmare” from “Covid deniers” and “agents of misinformation.” Google initially shadow-banned it so that the first page of search results for “Great Barrington Declaration” showed only criticism of it (like an article calling it “the work of a climate denial network”) but not the declaration itself. Facebook shut down the scientists’ page for a week for violating unspecified “community standards.”

The most reviled heretic was Scott Atlas, a medical doctor and health-policy analyst at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He, too, urged focused protection on nursing homes and calculated that the medical, social, and economic disruptions of the lockdowns would cost more years of life than the coronavirus. When he joined the White House coronavirus task force, Bill Gates derided him as “this Stanford guy with no background” promoting “crackpot theories.” Nearly 100 members of Stanford’s faculty signed a letter denouncing his “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science,” and an editorial in the Stanford Daily urged the university to sever its ties to Hoover.

The Stanford faculty senate overwhelmingly voted to condemn Atlas’s actions as “anathema to our community, our values and our belief that we should use knowledge for good.” Several professors from Stanford’s medical school demanded further punishment in a JAMA article, “When Physicians Engage in Practices That Threaten the Nation’s Health.” The article, which misrepresented Atlas’s views as well as the evidence on the efficacy of lockdowns, urged professional medical societies and medical-licensing boards to take action against Atlas on the grounds that it was “ethically inappropriate for physicians to publicly recommend behaviors or interventions that are not scientifically well grounded.”

But if it was unethical to recommend “interventions that are not scientifically well grounded,” how could anyone condone the lockdowns? “It was utterly immoral to conduct this society-wide intervention without the evidence to justify it,” Bhattacharya says. “The immediate results have been disastrous, especially for the poor, and the long-term effect will be to fundamentally undermine trust in public health and science.” The traditional strategy for dealing with pandemics was to isolate the infected and protect the most vulnerable, just as Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists recommended. The CDC’s pre-pandemic planning scenarios didn’t recommend extended school closures or any shutdown of businesses even during a plague as deadly as the 1918 Spanish flu. Yet Fauci dismissed the focused-protection strategy as “total nonsense” to “anybody who has any experience in epidemiology and infectious diseases,” and his verdict became “the science” to leaders in America and elsewhere.

Fortunately, a few leaders followed the science in a different way. Instead of blindly trusting Fauci, they listened to his critics and adopted the focused-protection strategy—most notably, in Florida. Its governor, Ron DeSantis, began to doubt the public-health establishment early in the pandemic, when computer models projected that Covid patients would greatly outnumber hospital beds in many states. Governors in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were so alarmed and so determined to free up hospital beds that they directed nursing homes and other facilities to admit or readmit Covid patients—with deadly results.

But DeSantis was skeptical of the hospital projections—for good reason, as no state actually ran out of beds—and more worried about the risk of Covid spreading in nursing homes. He forbade long-term-care centers to admit anyone infected with Covid and ordered frequent testing of the staff at senior-care centers. After locking down last spring, he reopened businesses, schools, and restaurants early, rejected mask mandates, and ignored protests from the press and the state’s Democratic leaders. Fauci warned that Florida was “asking for trouble,” but DeSantis went on seeking and heeding advice from Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists, who were astonished to speak with a politician already familiar with just about every study they mentioned to him.

“DeSantis was an incredible outlier,” Atlas says. “He dug up the data and read the scientific papers and analyzed it all himself. In our discussions, he’d bounce ideas off me, but he was already on top of the details of everything. He always had the perspective to see the larger harms of lockdowns and the need to concentrate testing and other resources on the elderly. And he has been proven correct.”

If Florida had simply done no worse than the rest of the country during the pandemic, that would have been enough to discredit the lockdown strategy. The state effectively served as the control group in a natural experiment, and no medical treatment with dangerous side effects would be approved if the control group fared no differently from the treatment group. But the outcome of this experiment was even more damning.

Florida’s mortality rate from Covid is lower than the national average among those over 65 and also among younger people, so that the state’s age-adjusted Covid mortality rate is lower than that of all but ten other states. And by the most important measure, the overall rate of “excess mortality” (the number of deaths above normal), Florida has also done better than the national average. Its rate of excess mortality is significantly lower than that of the most restrictive state, California, particularly among younger adults, many of whom died not from Covid but from causes related to the lockdowns: cancer screenings and treatments were delayed, and there were sharp increases in deaths from drug overdoses and from heart attacks not treated promptly.

If the treatment group in a clinical trial were dying off faster than the control group, an ethical researcher would halt the experiment. But the lockdown proponents were undeterred by the numbers in Florida, or by similar results elsewhere, including a comparable natural experiment involving European countries with the least restrictive policies. Sweden, Finland, and Norway rejected mask mandates and extended lockdowns, and they have each suffered significantly less excess mortality than most other European countries during the pandemic.

A nationwide analysis in Sweden showed that keeping schools open throughout the pandemic, without masks or social distancing, had little effect on the spread of Covid, but school closures and mask mandates for students continued elsewhere. Another Swedish researcher, Jonas Ludvigsson, reported that not a single schoolchild in the country died from Covid in Sweden and that their teachers’ risk of serious illness was lower than for the rest of the workforce—but these findings provoked so many online attacks and threats that Ludvigsson decided to stop researching or discussing Covid.

Social-media platforms continued censoring scientists and journalists who questioned lockdowns and mask mandates. YouTube removed a video discussion between DeSantis and the Great Barrington scientists, on the grounds that it “contradicts the consensus” on the efficacy of masks, and also took down the Hoover Institution’s interview with Atlas. Twitter locked out Atlas and Kulldorff for scientifically accurate challenges to mask orthodoxy. A peer-reviewed German study reporting harms to children from mask-wearing was suppressed on Facebook (which labeled my City Journal article “Partly False” because it cited the study) and also at ResearchGate, one of the most widely used websites for scientists to post their papers. ResearchGate refused to explain the censorship to the German scientists, telling them only that the paper was removed from the website in response to “reports from the community about the subject-matter.”

The social-media censors and scientific establishment, aided by the Chinese government, succeeded for a year in suppressing the lab-leak theory, depriving vaccine developers of potentially valuable insights into the virus’s evolution. It’s understandable, if deplorable, that the researchers and officials involved in supporting the Wuhan lab research would cover up the possibility that they’d unleashed a Frankenstein on the world. What’s harder to explain is why journalists and the rest of the scientific community so eagerly bought that story, along with the rest of the Covid narrative.

Why the elite panic? Why did so many go so wrong for so long? When journalists and scientists finally faced up to their mistake in ruling out the lab-leak theory, they blamed their favorite villain: Donald Trump. He had espoused the theory, so they assumed it must be wrong. And since he disagreed at times with Fauci about the danger of the virus and the need for lockdowns, then Fauci must be right, and this was such a deadly plague that the norms of journalism and science must be suspended. Millions would die unless Fauci was obeyed and dissenters were silenced.

But neither the plague nor Trump explains the panic. Yes, the virus was deadly, and Trump’s erratic pronouncements contributed to the confusion and partisanship, but the panic was due to two preexisting pathologies that afflicted other countries, too. The first is what I have called the Crisis Crisis, the incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians. It’s a longstanding problem—humanity was supposedly doomed in the last century by the “population crisis” and the “energy crisis”—that has dramatically worsened with the cable and digital competition for ratings, clicks, and retweets. To keep audiences frightened around the clock, journalists seek out Cassandras with their own incentives for fearmongering: politicians, bureaucrats, activists, academics, and assorted experts who gain publicity, prestige, funding, and power during a crisis.

Unlike many proclaimed crises, an epidemic is a genuine threat, but the crisis industry can’t resist exaggerating the danger, and doomsaying is rarely penalized. Early in the 1980s AIDS epidemic, the New York Times reported the terrifying possibility that the virus could spread to children through “routine close contact”—quoting from a study by Anthony Fauci. Life magazine wildly exaggerated the number of infections in a cover story, headlined “Now No One Is Safe from AIDS.” It cited a study by Robert Redfield, the future leader of the CDC during the Covid pandemic, predicting that AIDS would soon spread as rapidly among heterosexuals as among homosexuals. Both scientists were absolutely wrong, of course, but the false alarms didn’t harm their careers or their credibility.

Journalists and politicians extend professional courtesy to fellow crisis-mongers by ignoring their mistakes, such as the previous predictions by Neil Ferguson. His team at Imperial College projected up to 65,000 deaths in the United Kingdom from swine flu and 200 million deaths worldwide from bird flu. The death toll each time was in the hundreds, but never mind: when Ferguson’s team projected millions of American deaths from Covid, that was considered reason enough to follow its recommendation for extended lockdowns. And when the modelers’ assumption about the fatality rate proved too high, that mistake was ignored, too.

Journalists kept highlighting the most alarming warnings, presented without context. They needed to keep their audience scared, and they succeeded. For Americans under 70, the probability of surviving a Covid infection was about 99.9 percent, but fear of the virus was higher among the young than among the elderly, and polls showed that people of all ages vastly overestimated the risk of being hospitalized or dying.

The second pathology underlying the elite’s Covid panic is the politicization of research—what I have termed the Left’s war on science, another long-standing problem that has gotten much worse. Just as the progressives a century ago yearned for a nation directed by “expert social engineers”—scientific high priests unconstrained by voters and public opinion—today’s progressives want sweeping new powers for politicians and bureaucrats who “believe in science,” meaning that they use the Left’s version of science to justify their edicts. Now that so many elite institutions are political monocultures, progressives have more power than ever to enforce groupthink and suppress debate. Well before the pandemic, they had mastered the tactics for demonizing and silencing scientists whose findings challenged progressive orthodoxy on issues such as IQ, sex differences, race, family structure, transgenderism, and climate change.

“The less educated lost jobs so that professionals at minimal risk could feel safer as they kept working at home on their laptops.”

And then along came Covid—“God’s gift to the Left,” in Jane Fonda’s words. Exaggerating the danger and deflecting blame from China to Trump offered not only short-term political benefits, damaging his reelection prospects, but also an extraordinary opportunity to empower social engineers in Washington and state capitals. Early in the pandemic, Fauci expressed doubt that it was politically possible to lock down American cities, but he underestimated the effectiveness of the crisis industry’s scaremongering. Americans were so frightened that they surrendered their freedoms to work, study, worship, dine, play, socialize, or even leave their homes. Progressives celebrated this “paradigm shift,” calling it a “blueprint” for dealing with climate change.

This experience should be a lesson in what not to do, and whom not to trust. Do not assume that the media’s version of a crisis resembles reality. Do not count on mainstream journalists and their favorite doomsayers to put risks in perspective. Do not expect those who follow “the science” to know what they’re talking about. Science is a process of discovery and debate, not a faith to profess or a dogma to live by. It provides a description of the world, not a prescription for public policy, and specialists in one discipline do not have the knowledge or perspective to guide society. They’re biased by their own narrow focus and self-interest. Fauci and Deborah Birx, the physician who allied with him against Atlas on the White House task force, had to answer for the daily Covid death toll—that ever-present chyron at the bottom of the television screen—so they focused on one disease instead of the collateral damage of their panic-driven policies.

“The Fauci-Birx lockdowns were a sinful, unconscionable, heinous mistake, and they will never admit they were wrong,” Atlas says. Neither will the journalists and politicians who panicked along with them. They’re still portraying lockdowns as not just a success but also a precedent—proof that Americans can sacrifice for the common good when directed by wise scientists and benevolent autocrats. But the sacrifice did far more harm than good, and the burden was not shared equally. The brunt was borne by the most vulnerable in America and the poorest countries of the world. Students from disadvantaged families suffered the most from school closures, and children everywhere spent a year wearing masks solely to assuage the neurotic fears of adults. The less educated lost jobs so that professionals at minimal risk could feel safer as they kept working at home on their laptops. Silicon Valley (and its censors) prospered from lockdowns that bankrupted local businesses.

Luminaries united on Zoom and YouTube to assure the public that “we’re all in this together.” But we weren’t. When the panic infected the nation’s elite—the modern gentry who profess such concern for the downtrodden—it turned out that they weren’t so different from aristocrats of the past. They were in it for themselves.

Excellent analysis about how the media is abusing the People for their own benefit and how politics is such a dirty game that they will use a pandemic to gain votes - both sides.

I would add to this analysis a broader scope and focus. Most of what is stated I agree with, but there was a larger 'player' involved at the beginning. If we go back in time to the SARS and MERS outbreaks, there was a 10-14% and a 20-30% death rate from those two previous viral infections. As a result of those outbreaks, there was created within WHO and all 'connected' Govt organisations (like CDC in USA), a protocol and process whereby if there was another outbreak like Mers or SARS then they could all work together, under WHO guidance, to achieve a 'better' response. Now we are in early 2020 and it looks very much like there is another outbreak, but unlike SARS or MERS, the initial reports indicated it was both 'deadly' like MERS and SARS, and also highly contagious like Influenza. WHO decided to fire up their 'pandemic protocol' in March/April 2020 and away it all went.

If you give a bureaucracy (like WHO or CDC) the 'power' to control people and make their existence important, then they will use that power eventually - and the more power they have, they more they will pharkk it all up - that is a fact. AND once they start things going - they are extremely reluctant to stop.

There are five major problems with bureaucracies: red tape, conflict, duplication, dictatorship, and waste. This global pandemic has shown all of those problems very clearly. There is also a sixth problem - they are rarely ever held accountable because they are experts at avoiding blame and deflecting responsibility.

Sign In

"The More Masks Fail, The More We Need Them"

Recommended Posts

WaccineChinawatiiRaporn

Masks Aren't Working Anywhere...So We Must Keep Using Them

Louisiana

Nevada

Georgia

California

Hawaii

International

Link to comment

Share on other sites

WaccineChinawatiiRaporn

Link to comment

Share on other sites

WaccineChinawatiiRaporn

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Smithydog

Link to comment

Share on other sites

longwood50

Link to comment

Share on other sites

AdamX

Masks Aren't Working Anywhere...So We Must Keep Using Them

Louisiana

Nevada

Georgia

California

Hawaii

International

Link to comment

Share on other sites

BlueSphinx

Link to comment

Share on other sites

AussieBob

Link to comment

Share on other sites

AdamX

Link to comment

Share on other sites

WaccineChinawatiiRaporn

The Panic Pandemic: Fearmongering from journalists, scientists, and politicians did more harm than the virus.

Link to comment

Share on other sites

AussieBob

The Panic Pandemic: Fearmongering from journalists, scientists, and politicians did more harm than the virus.

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Join the conversation

Join Thaiger Talk Today!

Latest Posts

New Topics

Tell a friend

Important Information