October 11, 2022
Dear Friends and Family,
This marks the half-way point of this series. Recapping: first, was the comparison of U.S. overall results with the rest of the world, followed by the strategic approach to the Covid pandemic by the White House Task Force. This being a critique, a counterview of the strategy was presented. Then we looked at the performance of the country’s public health agencies in depth – early treatments, data & testing, lockdowns, and masks. This information was on the critical side, as that is the essence of a critique.
This segment analyzes two of the major influencers in the execution of the Covid Pandemic strategy. In a nutshell, one would have to conclude that the media promoted hysteria and the politicians were very politically partisan. Both primarily focused on mitigating the spread of the virus and little on the social and economic consequences of the implementation. There were exceptions, but they were few. Net, not a pretty picture for either group, in my opinion. After reading the excerpts see if you agree.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
This marks the half-way point of this series. Recapping: first, was the comparison of U.S. overall results with the rest of the world, followed by the strategic approach to the Covid pandemic by the White House Task Force. This being a critique, a counterview of the strategy was presented. Then we looked at the performance of the country’s public health agencies in depth – early treatments, data & testing, lockdowns, and masks. This information was on the critical side, as that is the essence of a critique.
This segment analyzes two of the major influencers in the execution of the Covid Pandemic strategy. In a nutshell, one would have to conclude that the media promoted hysteria and the politicians were very politically partisan. Both primarily focused on mitigating the spread of the virus and little on the social and economic consequences of the implementation. There were exceptions, but they were few. Net, not a pretty picture for either group, in my opinion. After reading the excerpts see if you agree.
Happy Learning,
Harley
COVID PANDEMIC CRITIQUE – SEGMENT 9
MEDIA AND POLITICIANS -- EXCERPTS
THE MEDIA: The media, especially the American media, committed early on to portraying the coronavirus as far riskier than it was and the vaccines as safer. Elite outlets like the New York Times went out of their way to foment panic and ignore positive news. Throughout 2020, many scientific studies offered reassuring data, especially the low risks Sars-Cov-2 posed to kids and young adults, and their safety in schools. Practically everything pointed the same way.
Meanwhile, the models that had predicted apocalyptic outcomes proved wrong. Aside from a few bad days in New York City in March and April 2020, American hospitals were never close to being overrun. In fact, they were so empty in the spring of 2020 that many laid off workers. Even in New York, the field hospitals and medical ships went largely unused. But no one seemed to notice, much less care. Instead, the Times, CNN, and the rest fixated on a single number, the count of Americans who had (reportedly) died from the coronavirus. Cable networks offered real-time tallies. They never put the figure into context. They never explained that our methods for recording Covid-linked deaths were likely producing overcounts. Or that even with our aggressive counting, the Covid death figure represented just over 10% of all American deaths in 2020. Most important, they never explained that Covid almost exclusively targeted the very old and sick.
If reporters had taken a hard look at the data around lockdowns, public opinion might have shifted. But they didn’t. Throughout the spring of 2020, major news organizations never considered the possibility that lockdowns might have failed or even been counterproductive. They barely even mentioned the failure of the models to predict hospitalizations. They ignored the reality that hospitals were half empty almost everywhere – and that even in New York the field hospitals had gone mostly unused.
As Covid hit, governors in many states seized unprecedented control of their citizens. They refused to reopen the schools. They imposed draconian rules on businesses. They forced people to wear masks, even outside. Hugely powerful social media companies such as Facebook and tech giants such as Google and Amazon went even future. Those companies blocked videos and books and groups that questioned the value of the lockdowns – from which these same corporations have profited enormously. The social media companies worked with organizations such as the World Health Organization to become quasi-government censors. In suppressing honest debate and dissent, they set a dangerous precedent – and fed the rise of wilder conspiracy theories. The people who have caused the panic, show no sign of letting up, no sign they plan to let us get back to normal anytime soon.
Source: Pandemia by Alex Berenson (2021).
Unfortunately, social media companies censored even reasoned data or contrarian opinion that challenged COVID-19 shutdowns. Twitter began censoring and removing any tweets and information they deemed as disputing COVID-19 information. Twitter techs became the arbiters of accurate medical information. The media shaped the COVID-19 story, and that drove polls in an election year that drove politicians to shut down states and keep the social and economic fabric down into the greatest freefall in American history.
Source: COVID-19 Lockdowns on Trial by Michael Betrus (2020).
A Second Wave: In summer 2020, a second major wave of the virus struck. While the first wave had hit the Northeast and Midwest, the new epidemic was concentrated in the Sunbelt. The surge stretched from Miami to Los Angles, from Houston to Nashville, a region encompassing almost 150 million people. The regional epidemic offered further evidence that the virus was highly seasonal – and that indoor transmission was its main driver. Summer humidity in the South and triple-digit temperatures in the Southwest had forced people indoors.
The usual media suspects predicted doom. On July 10, the investigative reporting website ProPublica published an article about Houston headlines “All the Hospitals are Full.” But the headline had quotation marks around it. It was a comment by someone quoted in the article – the trick media organizations had learned to use when they wanted to offer frightening headlines that the data in their articles did not support. In fact, all the hospitals in Houston weren’t full. They weren’t close to full. They had thousands of empty beds throughout July. Weeks later, as the Sunbelt spike faded and France, Spain, and the rest of Europe headed into a second wave that dwarfed the first, these stories and Fauci’s testimony would look unintentionally ironic. But reporters just didn’t care. Over and over, they attacked Trump and the American response without comparing our death rates to those in Western Europe, the most obvious benchmark. (In fact, they ignored European nations except during those few weeks over the summer of 2020, when Spain, France and Italy seemed to be doing better than in the U.S.).
Source: Pandemia by Alex Berenson (2021).
By mid-2020, a total of 42 hospitals in the U.S. had closed, primarily due to the elimination of all elective medical care, such as colonoscopies, cardiac surgeries, and cancer treatments. Of course, many Americans who truly needed medical care were dissuaded by the media from going to a hospital – they had been scared away. Even with corrupt data collections, it became harder and harder to find enough dead people to fuel the ongoing fear pandemic, so the media pivoted and replaced daily death and hospitalization trackers with a new statistical category: “Case Numbers.” Most dishonest of all, case numbers reflected nothing but the ongoing expansion of inappropriate testing of healthy people throughout the country, with false positive rates exceeding 80% due to inappropriate use of the PCR test.
Initially, Americans were told that the experimental vaccines – approved only under an emergency use authorization – would be necessary to protect the vulnerable, who were mainly old and sick people. This group quickly expanded to include everyone over age 65, regardless of health status. Next came healthy middle-aged adults, then college students, and then teenagers. Forced vaccination of all students down to age twelve, in both public and private schools, is now spreading throughout the country. This universal vaccination hysteria is being fueled by media that knowingly disseminate propaganda rather than actual news, frequently attacking anyone who points out the known fact that children are simply not affected by this virus in any significant numbers, and that hospitalizations and deaths in children are extremely rare. More children die every year of seasonal flu.
Source: United States of Fear by Mark McDonald M.D. (2021).
THE POLITICIANS: If the news in the Times and other outlets was grim, the tone on Twitter – especially in tweets from people living in New York City – was far worse. The peak of the Twitter panic came on April 6, when a New York City councilman who was chair of the Health Committee warned that the city was about to bury corpses in its parks. New York seemed to be spiraling out of control. Local, state, and federal governments hastily built field hospitals across the city to cope with the expected tsunami of patients.
Not just in New York but around the country, the political-journalistic class all knew who was responsible for the unfolding disaster: Donald J. Trump. By late March, the fear and anger were aimed as much at Trump as the virus itself. The narratives were intertwined. The virus will devastate us. The president has failed us. The most apocalyptic predictions nearly all came from the left. Trump did not do himself any favors. He repeatedly made foolish and sometimes false statements about Covid. Yet on the most important point of all, Trump was right – right from almost the very beginning. He believed the death rate from Covid would be “a fraction of 1%” as opposed to the 3% to 4% being reported at the time.
Further, the coronavirus crisis could not have been more ill-suited to Trump’s personality. Contrary to what the left insisted, Trump did have strengths as a leader – notably, a willingness to trust his instincts and take bold action. But he had a serious weakness too – narcissism, a lack of empathy, and a failure to master details. The U.S. and world needed reassurance in March 2020. Trump could be entertaining. He was never reassuring. He didn’t know how to be. Instead, he resorted to his usual bluff and bluster and picked pointless fights with reporters – all of which was increasingly out of touch with the nation’s mood, a mood the media eagerly fed.
Thus, while governors such as Cuomo benefited from the equivalent of a wartime bounce and saw their approval ratings reach the high 70s or even 80s, Trump’s approval ratings rose only slightly in mid-March and then faded. And so, whether because they genuinely feared the virus, believed it was kryptonite to Trump’s chances of reelection, or both, reporters attacked Trump relentlessly. Meanwhile, they held up Fauci as the real hero of the epidemic.
Over and over, they claimed that Trump’s failures had caused tens or even hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. Yet the anti-Trump narrative was largely untrue. So why was the narrative wrong? In part because Trump’s powers were surprisingly limited. One hundred and sixty years after the Civil War, American federalism remained strong. Unless Trump declared martial law, he could not have locked down the entire country even if he wanted to. Individual governors had that power. A similar dynamic would play out in the debate over school re-opening, where Trump was unequivocally in the right, but where he turned out to be almost powerless. But more important, the critics never clearly explained why.
Even as they attacked Trump, media outlets lionized Democratic governors such as Cuomo, despite the massive death toll in New York. Over time, the media’s negative picture of the federal response, even as reporters largely ignored the failures in Democratic-run states, would appear increasingly calculated – and effective.
Source: Pandemia by Alex Berenson (2021).
Florida’s Success Story: Florida was always in particular danger from this virus because of its unique demographics. It has an especially vulnerable population, since more than 4.4 million seniors live there. By percentage, Florida ranks second highest of all states in residents over 65 and it has more than 440 certified nursing homes. The demographics, though, were not the real reason why Florida was exceptional. The genuine difference lay in the state’s leadership. Governor DeSantis stood out among governors, because he was one of the very few who actually knew the data.
To protect Floridians, the governor had enacted the target protection of the elderly I had spoken about. For instance, he set up two dozen “COVID-only” facilities for residents who tested positive and forbade hospital discharges to nursing homes. That prevented the reintroduction of the virus back into nursing homes – something several other governors failed to do, thereby tragically killing thousands of elderly people. DeSantis had further prioritized protective equipment and more frequent testing of nursing home residents and staff. He also admitted his earlier mistake of shutting down elective medical procedures.
He and his education commissioner, Richard Corcoran, had issued a directive in July that all school districts should be reopened for in-person learning by the end of August. He was fully aware of the “break-outs” on university campuses, highlighted by the media, were misleading, because they were almost exclusively test-positive cases in healthy and asymptomatic young people with almost no risk of serious illness. At that point, tens of thousands of cases had been detected as students returned to campuses, but none had even been hospitalized.
Governor DeSantis also correctly explained to the media that 90% of positive PCR tests were isolating people who were not contagious. That level of knowledge was not just rare for a government official; the policy implications of that fact were never even acknowledged by the other Task Force members. He also asked me specifically about asymptomatic spread. I noted it was true that asymptomatic spread occurred, but “the number one place for spread is in the home” and “from adults to children, not the other way, typically … it can happen that children spread, but that’s not a common direction.” I also cited data from the August 2, 2020, contact tracing study of Switzerland showing how rarely cases begin in schools. Children had been proven to have remarkably low risk from COVID all over the world, including the U.S. for anyone who prioritized the education of children and young Americans, there was no scientific case for closing the schools.
Source: A Plague Upon Our House by Scott W. Atlas, MD (2021).
SUMMARY: There is anger about the ensuing loss of life – about the anguish of senior citizens dying alone from direct order by predominantly Democratic governors. Anger for children being tossed aside as partisan politics and the legislators responsible caved to political pressure and ignored all childhood health experts. All the while, these people were claiming to follow the science. There is anger about the authoritarian shutdown of businesses. Not to mention the fallout from universal financial insecurity, with many under the pressure of lockdowns succumbing to addictions that they had previously overcome or the emergence of new mental and physical health maladies.
Many measures enforced by politicians everywhere, with the majority being Democratic, ignoring common sense and scientific data as they shut down beaches, playgrounds, and National Parks while allowing Big Business to remain open. People were allowed to continued packing the Goliath mega-stores, yet unable to jog along on a path without wearing a mask. The unscientific policies, how the experts make their recommendations, the lack of transparency, appeals to authority, and poor science communication made the politicians advice seem arbitrary, high-handed, and pointless.
Despite the best and even noble efforts of so many, the overall landscape of COVID-19 has been dominated by accident and force, rather than reflection and choice. It is overwhelmed by fear, panic, personal ambition, and anger. As a result, the knowledge of facts – and the pursuit of truth that relies upon facts as its basis – is at risk. The information driving the crisis response and that which is being conveyed on television by reputable reporters and contributors is largely based on information from preprints, observational studies, and opinion pieces. As a result, it’s difficult for the public to understand the difference between legitimate, date-driven science and that which is equivalent to anecdotal reports informed merely by a desire to share preliminary knowledge or, regrettably, to make a sensation. This ultimately allows people who don’t know what they are doing to cherry-pick data and use it to support their own agenda, all in the name of science. It also creates a vacuum of confusion and apprehension when the preliminary information is subsequently determined to be wrong.
Source: Panic Attack: Playing Politics with Science in the Fight Against COVID-19 by Nicole Saphier, MD (2021).
This is the true story of how media hysteria, political partisanship, overreliance on unproven technology, and scientific illiteracy brought the U.S. and the world on the brink of breakdown. The true story of how we trashed civil liberties we had treasured for generations. How we denied school to our children and destroyed small businesses. The true story of how we locked down and hid our faces from one another on the thinnest possible evidence. Of how a public health emergency became big business overnight, as governments spent trillions of dollars to fight the coronavirus – and unnecessary lockdowns destroyed small businesses, hugely enriched giant corporations, and forced people off paid employment onto government checks. How we spent a year hiding the risks and overestimating the benefits of vaccines based on a radical new biotechnology. And how we then tried to force the shots on tens of millions of unwilling Americans – while censoring those who raised questions about them. All in response to a virus much less dangerous than the Spanish flu, much less Ebola. A virus that is less dangerous to healthy children and young adults than influenza. A virus that killed slightly more people worldwide than diarrhea or Alzheimer’s disease in 2020.
Source: Pandemia by Alex Berenson (2021)
MEDIA AND POLITICIANS -- EXCERPTS
THE MEDIA: The media, especially the American media, committed early on to portraying the coronavirus as far riskier than it was and the vaccines as safer. Elite outlets like the New York Times went out of their way to foment panic and ignore positive news. Throughout 2020, many scientific studies offered reassuring data, especially the low risks Sars-Cov-2 posed to kids and young adults, and their safety in schools. Practically everything pointed the same way.
Meanwhile, the models that had predicted apocalyptic outcomes proved wrong. Aside from a few bad days in New York City in March and April 2020, American hospitals were never close to being overrun. In fact, they were so empty in the spring of 2020 that many laid off workers. Even in New York, the field hospitals and medical ships went largely unused. But no one seemed to notice, much less care. Instead, the Times, CNN, and the rest fixated on a single number, the count of Americans who had (reportedly) died from the coronavirus. Cable networks offered real-time tallies. They never put the figure into context. They never explained that our methods for recording Covid-linked deaths were likely producing overcounts. Or that even with our aggressive counting, the Covid death figure represented just over 10% of all American deaths in 2020. Most important, they never explained that Covid almost exclusively targeted the very old and sick.
If reporters had taken a hard look at the data around lockdowns, public opinion might have shifted. But they didn’t. Throughout the spring of 2020, major news organizations never considered the possibility that lockdowns might have failed or even been counterproductive. They barely even mentioned the failure of the models to predict hospitalizations. They ignored the reality that hospitals were half empty almost everywhere – and that even in New York the field hospitals had gone mostly unused.
As Covid hit, governors in many states seized unprecedented control of their citizens. They refused to reopen the schools. They imposed draconian rules on businesses. They forced people to wear masks, even outside. Hugely powerful social media companies such as Facebook and tech giants such as Google and Amazon went even future. Those companies blocked videos and books and groups that questioned the value of the lockdowns – from which these same corporations have profited enormously. The social media companies worked with organizations such as the World Health Organization to become quasi-government censors. In suppressing honest debate and dissent, they set a dangerous precedent – and fed the rise of wilder conspiracy theories. The people who have caused the panic, show no sign of letting up, no sign they plan to let us get back to normal anytime soon.
Source: Pandemia by Alex Berenson (2021).
Unfortunately, social media companies censored even reasoned data or contrarian opinion that challenged COVID-19 shutdowns. Twitter began censoring and removing any tweets and information they deemed as disputing COVID-19 information. Twitter techs became the arbiters of accurate medical information. The media shaped the COVID-19 story, and that drove polls in an election year that drove politicians to shut down states and keep the social and economic fabric down into the greatest freefall in American history.
Source: COVID-19 Lockdowns on Trial by Michael Betrus (2020).
A Second Wave: In summer 2020, a second major wave of the virus struck. While the first wave had hit the Northeast and Midwest, the new epidemic was concentrated in the Sunbelt. The surge stretched from Miami to Los Angles, from Houston to Nashville, a region encompassing almost 150 million people. The regional epidemic offered further evidence that the virus was highly seasonal – and that indoor transmission was its main driver. Summer humidity in the South and triple-digit temperatures in the Southwest had forced people indoors.
The usual media suspects predicted doom. On July 10, the investigative reporting website ProPublica published an article about Houston headlines “All the Hospitals are Full.” But the headline had quotation marks around it. It was a comment by someone quoted in the article – the trick media organizations had learned to use when they wanted to offer frightening headlines that the data in their articles did not support. In fact, all the hospitals in Houston weren’t full. They weren’t close to full. They had thousands of empty beds throughout July. Weeks later, as the Sunbelt spike faded and France, Spain, and the rest of Europe headed into a second wave that dwarfed the first, these stories and Fauci’s testimony would look unintentionally ironic. But reporters just didn’t care. Over and over, they attacked Trump and the American response without comparing our death rates to those in Western Europe, the most obvious benchmark. (In fact, they ignored European nations except during those few weeks over the summer of 2020, when Spain, France and Italy seemed to be doing better than in the U.S.).
Source: Pandemia by Alex Berenson (2021).
By mid-2020, a total of 42 hospitals in the U.S. had closed, primarily due to the elimination of all elective medical care, such as colonoscopies, cardiac surgeries, and cancer treatments. Of course, many Americans who truly needed medical care were dissuaded by the media from going to a hospital – they had been scared away. Even with corrupt data collections, it became harder and harder to find enough dead people to fuel the ongoing fear pandemic, so the media pivoted and replaced daily death and hospitalization trackers with a new statistical category: “Case Numbers.” Most dishonest of all, case numbers reflected nothing but the ongoing expansion of inappropriate testing of healthy people throughout the country, with false positive rates exceeding 80% due to inappropriate use of the PCR test.
Initially, Americans were told that the experimental vaccines – approved only under an emergency use authorization – would be necessary to protect the vulnerable, who were mainly old and sick people. This group quickly expanded to include everyone over age 65, regardless of health status. Next came healthy middle-aged adults, then college students, and then teenagers. Forced vaccination of all students down to age twelve, in both public and private schools, is now spreading throughout the country. This universal vaccination hysteria is being fueled by media that knowingly disseminate propaganda rather than actual news, frequently attacking anyone who points out the known fact that children are simply not affected by this virus in any significant numbers, and that hospitalizations and deaths in children are extremely rare. More children die every year of seasonal flu.
Source: United States of Fear by Mark McDonald M.D. (2021).
THE POLITICIANS: If the news in the Times and other outlets was grim, the tone on Twitter – especially in tweets from people living in New York City – was far worse. The peak of the Twitter panic came on April 6, when a New York City councilman who was chair of the Health Committee warned that the city was about to bury corpses in its parks. New York seemed to be spiraling out of control. Local, state, and federal governments hastily built field hospitals across the city to cope with the expected tsunami of patients.
Not just in New York but around the country, the political-journalistic class all knew who was responsible for the unfolding disaster: Donald J. Trump. By late March, the fear and anger were aimed as much at Trump as the virus itself. The narratives were intertwined. The virus will devastate us. The president has failed us. The most apocalyptic predictions nearly all came from the left. Trump did not do himself any favors. He repeatedly made foolish and sometimes false statements about Covid. Yet on the most important point of all, Trump was right – right from almost the very beginning. He believed the death rate from Covid would be “a fraction of 1%” as opposed to the 3% to 4% being reported at the time.
Further, the coronavirus crisis could not have been more ill-suited to Trump’s personality. Contrary to what the left insisted, Trump did have strengths as a leader – notably, a willingness to trust his instincts and take bold action. But he had a serious weakness too – narcissism, a lack of empathy, and a failure to master details. The U.S. and world needed reassurance in March 2020. Trump could be entertaining. He was never reassuring. He didn’t know how to be. Instead, he resorted to his usual bluff and bluster and picked pointless fights with reporters – all of which was increasingly out of touch with the nation’s mood, a mood the media eagerly fed.
Thus, while governors such as Cuomo benefited from the equivalent of a wartime bounce and saw their approval ratings reach the high 70s or even 80s, Trump’s approval ratings rose only slightly in mid-March and then faded. And so, whether because they genuinely feared the virus, believed it was kryptonite to Trump’s chances of reelection, or both, reporters attacked Trump relentlessly. Meanwhile, they held up Fauci as the real hero of the epidemic.
Over and over, they claimed that Trump’s failures had caused tens or even hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. Yet the anti-Trump narrative was largely untrue. So why was the narrative wrong? In part because Trump’s powers were surprisingly limited. One hundred and sixty years after the Civil War, American federalism remained strong. Unless Trump declared martial law, he could not have locked down the entire country even if he wanted to. Individual governors had that power. A similar dynamic would play out in the debate over school re-opening, where Trump was unequivocally in the right, but where he turned out to be almost powerless. But more important, the critics never clearly explained why.
Even as they attacked Trump, media outlets lionized Democratic governors such as Cuomo, despite the massive death toll in New York. Over time, the media’s negative picture of the federal response, even as reporters largely ignored the failures in Democratic-run states, would appear increasingly calculated – and effective.
Source: Pandemia by Alex Berenson (2021).
Florida’s Success Story: Florida was always in particular danger from this virus because of its unique demographics. It has an especially vulnerable population, since more than 4.4 million seniors live there. By percentage, Florida ranks second highest of all states in residents over 65 and it has more than 440 certified nursing homes. The demographics, though, were not the real reason why Florida was exceptional. The genuine difference lay in the state’s leadership. Governor DeSantis stood out among governors, because he was one of the very few who actually knew the data.
To protect Floridians, the governor had enacted the target protection of the elderly I had spoken about. For instance, he set up two dozen “COVID-only” facilities for residents who tested positive and forbade hospital discharges to nursing homes. That prevented the reintroduction of the virus back into nursing homes – something several other governors failed to do, thereby tragically killing thousands of elderly people. DeSantis had further prioritized protective equipment and more frequent testing of nursing home residents and staff. He also admitted his earlier mistake of shutting down elective medical procedures.
He and his education commissioner, Richard Corcoran, had issued a directive in July that all school districts should be reopened for in-person learning by the end of August. He was fully aware of the “break-outs” on university campuses, highlighted by the media, were misleading, because they were almost exclusively test-positive cases in healthy and asymptomatic young people with almost no risk of serious illness. At that point, tens of thousands of cases had been detected as students returned to campuses, but none had even been hospitalized.
Governor DeSantis also correctly explained to the media that 90% of positive PCR tests were isolating people who were not contagious. That level of knowledge was not just rare for a government official; the policy implications of that fact were never even acknowledged by the other Task Force members. He also asked me specifically about asymptomatic spread. I noted it was true that asymptomatic spread occurred, but “the number one place for spread is in the home” and “from adults to children, not the other way, typically … it can happen that children spread, but that’s not a common direction.” I also cited data from the August 2, 2020, contact tracing study of Switzerland showing how rarely cases begin in schools. Children had been proven to have remarkably low risk from COVID all over the world, including the U.S. for anyone who prioritized the education of children and young Americans, there was no scientific case for closing the schools.
Source: A Plague Upon Our House by Scott W. Atlas, MD (2021).
SUMMARY: There is anger about the ensuing loss of life – about the anguish of senior citizens dying alone from direct order by predominantly Democratic governors. Anger for children being tossed aside as partisan politics and the legislators responsible caved to political pressure and ignored all childhood health experts. All the while, these people were claiming to follow the science. There is anger about the authoritarian shutdown of businesses. Not to mention the fallout from universal financial insecurity, with many under the pressure of lockdowns succumbing to addictions that they had previously overcome or the emergence of new mental and physical health maladies.
Many measures enforced by politicians everywhere, with the majority being Democratic, ignoring common sense and scientific data as they shut down beaches, playgrounds, and National Parks while allowing Big Business to remain open. People were allowed to continued packing the Goliath mega-stores, yet unable to jog along on a path without wearing a mask. The unscientific policies, how the experts make their recommendations, the lack of transparency, appeals to authority, and poor science communication made the politicians advice seem arbitrary, high-handed, and pointless.
Despite the best and even noble efforts of so many, the overall landscape of COVID-19 has been dominated by accident and force, rather than reflection and choice. It is overwhelmed by fear, panic, personal ambition, and anger. As a result, the knowledge of facts – and the pursuit of truth that relies upon facts as its basis – is at risk. The information driving the crisis response and that which is being conveyed on television by reputable reporters and contributors is largely based on information from preprints, observational studies, and opinion pieces. As a result, it’s difficult for the public to understand the difference between legitimate, date-driven science and that which is equivalent to anecdotal reports informed merely by a desire to share preliminary knowledge or, regrettably, to make a sensation. This ultimately allows people who don’t know what they are doing to cherry-pick data and use it to support their own agenda, all in the name of science. It also creates a vacuum of confusion and apprehension when the preliminary information is subsequently determined to be wrong.
Source: Panic Attack: Playing Politics with Science in the Fight Against COVID-19 by Nicole Saphier, MD (2021).
This is the true story of how media hysteria, political partisanship, overreliance on unproven technology, and scientific illiteracy brought the U.S. and the world on the brink of breakdown. The true story of how we trashed civil liberties we had treasured for generations. How we denied school to our children and destroyed small businesses. The true story of how we locked down and hid our faces from one another on the thinnest possible evidence. Of how a public health emergency became big business overnight, as governments spent trillions of dollars to fight the coronavirus – and unnecessary lockdowns destroyed small businesses, hugely enriched giant corporations, and forced people off paid employment onto government checks. How we spent a year hiding the risks and overestimating the benefits of vaccines based on a radical new biotechnology. And how we then tried to force the shots on tens of millions of unwilling Americans – while censoring those who raised questions about them. All in response to a virus much less dangerous than the Spanish flu, much less Ebola. A virus that is less dangerous to healthy children and young adults than influenza. A virus that killed slightly more people worldwide than diarrhea or Alzheimer’s disease in 2020.
Source: Pandemia by Alex Berenson (2021)
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