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Science and Honor Betrayed, Let the Tumbrels Roll
When I was a kid, scientists in the movies were either good guys who used their knowledge and skills to solve the problem and kill the monster or the aliens or they were bad guys (“mad scientists”) whose ego caused them to misuse science in an attempt to rule the world. Those movies never had incompetent scientists trying to fake science and skill to gain power and influence; that would be the movie we are seeing now.
We could start working the script with a long look at the execrable Neil Ferguson who became famous by persuading British authorities that millions of Britons would die from Mad Cow Disease. He made equally stupid predictions about swine flu and bird flu. There is nothing in this man’s professional record that would suggest he has any credibility, but damn if the U.K. and the U.S. didn’t base their initial response on his preposterous COVID model which was followed by his even sillier prediction of mass deaths if any nation dared let up on lockdown or closure interventions.
The Real Science Was Available
There was a lot of existing real science to guide our understanding of SARS-COVID-19, starting with the indispensable R. Edgar Hope-Simpson (1908-2003). He began his medical practice in 1932-3, the year of a major influenza outbreak. That experience prompted painstaking lifelong research into epidemic diseases. He was one of the first to link chickenpox to shingles. The insight that viruses could remain dormant in the body for decades shaped his understanding of other viral diseases.
One of his key insights was that a transmission model of a sick person transferring the infection to an adjacent uninfected person was inadequate and incomplete. If it were that simple, it would be easy to identify and isolate the infected. The starting point would be more obvious. The patterns of outbreaks would be different. But flu outbreaks occur simultaneously across entire regions as if the virus was already widely present and was just waiting for the right conditions. (Studies from stored sewage samples in Milan and Red Cross blood donation samples found that COVID-19 was likely already present across Europe and the US as early as the autumn of 2019.) This introduces the notion of seasonality, a broad variance in conditions like temperature, sunlight exposure etc. that makes potential transmitters active and novel spread possible.
I recommend this article addressing the open questions posed by Hope-Simpson about the state of our knowledge about viral epidemics.
It’s the Seasonality, Stupid
The seasonality-driven behavior of flu epidemics also points to the likelihood of dormant agents awaiting the right conditions. COVID-19 exhibited exactly this kind of pattern. It does not mean that there is no personal transmission from symptomatic persons. It does mean that that is not the only or perhaps not even the primary means of transmission.
Western Europe, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts all peaked in reported cases number in the initial wave on almost the same day in mid-April 2020 with identical case curves. Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia shared a slightly flatter, identical curve a week later. The entire southern tier of the US and Mexico shared an even flatter curve peaking at the end of July and early August. The interior states peaked sharply in late autumn and the whole country saw a rise in early winter. It is simply not possible that some lone travelers from China in early 2020 started a serial infection to cause these simultaneous regional outbreaks.
You could look at the changing slope of the case curve in any jurisdiction and predict within 48 hours when that number would peak (assuming consistent reporting). And yet the Director of the CDC spoke of “impending doom” at a time when US cases were clearly already on a downslope. Minnesota’s COVID czar and Biden advisor Dr. Michael Osterholm predicted “10-14 weeks” of “our darkest days” almost on the exact day Minnesota’s fall-winter outbreak began its downslope.
Being oblivious to the seasonality of COVID also caused bizarre, magical thinking among journalists and people who should know better. The mindset was to look at the time when cases were increasing, find some scapegoat or supposed cause then when the numbers declined, credit some policy intervention. Anthony Fauci had the audacity (or ignorance?) to tell the US Senate on July 7, 2020, that the decrease in cases in NY was due to Cuomo and DeBlasio following CDC guidance.
Mask mandates as the cause of decreases in case numbers was an especially popular misconception. One of the dumbest from the WSJ:
Below are the spring 2020 COVID case number graphs (Y-axis values removed) for NY, NJ, MA, Italy, and Sweden. As an exercise for the student, identify the jurisdictions and indicate which did or did not follow CDC guidance. Then explain to the class why Dr. Fauci’s assessment of NY case patterns was utter and complete BS.
Thanksgiving travel and the Sturgis bike rally were not “superspreader” events. There were no “superspreader” events. No governor brought COVID-19 “under control.” COVID did its thing in exactly the seasonality-governed pattern that would be expected. Nothing anybody did altered that pattern anywhere. Yet there was an astonishing volume of published garbage about policy impacts on COVID-19. And there is no sign that real scientific understanding is going to break through anytime soon given the enormous investments in bad journalism in support of bad policy.
Ignoring Actual Science
A restatement of WHO guidance published by Johns Hopkins in September 2019 entitled Preparedness for a High-Impact Respiratory Pathogen Pandemic summarized the state of the art with respect to handling an influenza-like outbreak. The science cited indicated that (a) quarantines and border closings were a waste of time and resources precisely because of the manner and timing in which these kinds of viruses spread; (b) Lockdowns and closures may or may not provide a short-term reduction in infections (“flattening the curve”) but won’t work if attempted for a longer duration. Even if an extended lockdown provides further reduction, it would come at an unacceptably high cost, and (c) there is inconclusive data about the effectiveness of masks compounded by the likelihood of supply problems of high-end PPE in the event of sudden massive demand.
Sounds to me like WHO nailed it in Sept 2019. Too bad the “experts” did not read much less follow their own science when COVID-19 hit.
First, Do No Harm
Our genius leaders (under the guidance of our “experts”) gave us economically destructive, porous, utterly stupid, and completely ineffective closures and lockdowns at horrific cost along with the asinine “phased” re-openings with elements like absurd restaurant capacity percentages as if some idiot actually believed there was a magic control knob in the governor’s office. The science told us this would all be both ineffectual and needlessly costly. One cannot approve or forgive this line of interventions and claim to be following the science or sincerely acting out of an abundance of caution. Dozens of studies have confirmed that the lockdowns and closures had zero effect on COVID spread and that data began emerging over a year ago. This is no longer disputable.
The “experts” have almost all blown off the disastrous rise in mental health issues for kids, the effect of delayed medical treatments, increases in suicides, and drug overdoses all directly attributable to the consequences of the programmatic attempts to curtail COVID, attempts which all failed as the science told us they would and we still did a lousy job of protecting the elderly. I would argue that the evidence is clear that the NPIs killed more younger people than did COVID. Why were these costs (predictable and obvious from the beginning) never part of the policy equation? Voters getting tired of scare tactics, economic loss, and mask mandates weighed on the policy decisions but excess deaths among younger people (who were not at much risk from COVID) never seemed to be a factor.
The fact that kids rarely get COVID, very rarely experience symptoms, and are very, very poor transmitters is the science. However, that was never the basis for school-related policy. Kids were knowingly hurt for the benefit of others and that injury had nothing to do with spread containment.
Where is the Spirit of Inquiry? The Scientific Impulse?
There appears to be no curiosity about the obvious failure of the NPIs. In particular, why aren’t we exploring the reasons for the indisputable fact that mask mandates had no measurable effect on spread anywhere on the planet? The infuriating response that MDs and surgeons know what they’re doing so only an ignorant rube would question the utility of masks is yet another symptom of the failure to do science and point to framed diplomas instead. The actual numbers demand an explanation, not elitist snark. Cites of studies that people who work in professional medical settings get COVID less often is not an answer–surgeons don’t wear the same mask to the Safeway or Pizza Hut then back to the surgical suite. Seriously, though why didn’t mask mandates work at all, anywhere?
“I Am God”-Dr. Jed Hill (Alec Baldwin Malice (1993)
A good friend who is a world-class plaintiff’s medical malpractice lawyer once told me that an arrogant defendant was like money in the bank. If a doc is going to act like a god then the jury will require that he deliver godlike outcomes. That should go double for lawyers at blue-chip firms who overcharge and deliver nothing. Moreover, all professionals in public service have a duty of honesty, professionalism, and candor that should be a matter of sacred trust. Dr. Fauci is Exhibit A for the depressing proposition that our permanent government is run by self-promoting, accountability-free incompetent weasels. How did that happen?
Look up at the diplomas on the wall, shut up and trust me is the mantra for much of what currently ails much in our society. Mandatory reliance on very sketchy climate modeling, the complete fiasco of the world response to COVID-19, and the lightly credentialed new “scientific” understanding of race, sex, and society all reek of arrogance attached to political agendas that enshrine the “expertise” that claims to justify such agendas.
People think I’m kidding when I keep calling for show trials over the handling of COVID. I am not. There has to be an accounting somehow. Science was betrayed. Public trust was horrifically abused. The rich prospered while the rest suffered. The rule of law was bent to the breaking point. There should already be tumbrels headed for the guillotine. The bourreau should already be sharpening the blade.
How do we ensure that this never happens again if we don’t bring down those who failed, misled, and promoted their own importance at the expense of science, truth, and the welfare of the nation?
Thus endeth the rant.
Published in General
Masks were studied B.C. (before Covid) and it the CDC concluded that masks were not effective for the general public for protection from respiratory infections. Considering how common respiratory infections are, the mechanics of spread are poorly understood. We spend billions on scam global warming science and yet spend hardly anything to understand the mechanics of aerosols, droplets and fomites.
I’ve just been skimming the news this morning, trying to make some sense out of what is happening with the CDC this week.
I just want to thank you again for writing this comprehensive review of the course of the pandemic. From what I can tell, it’s the only sane analysis on the Internet.
This needs to happen, but I don’t know how to make it so.
Ha! Good luck!
Like MarciN I also want to thank you for writing this. It provides much to consider.
P.S. I’ve had my shingles vaccine.
It’s called the “synoptic delusion” in economics — the notion that there’s someone or some group in government (or “public” health) that knows enough to run an economy from the top, or to manage a viral pandemic. Unfortunately, a lot of people fall for the false promises of the deluded and vote them more power over our lives.
I predict there will be no accountability. It’s a feature of progressivism to never, ever admit progressives got it wrong. So juvenile.
Written by George Orwell and Franz Kafka.
Produced by Rod Serling.
Directed by Stanley Kubrick.
Starring Bill Murray if we are going for a dark comedy or Anthony Hopkins for drama.
Cinematography by Timothy Leary
I know I’m late responding to this … but real life intrudes.
I’m not denying that there may be a seasonal factor to the later stages of the pandemic. I’m talking about the initial stage … Feb – May 2020.
I think it really takes a comprehensive background in the fields of epidemiology and public health in order to be sure we’re not engaging in a big exercise in confirmation bias here. Citing a few books and articles that support a preferred narrative strikes me as more confirmation bias than anything.
It takes a lot of effort and time in order to understand what epidemiologists know and why they have the opinions and policy recommendations that they do. I was struck by the fact at the time that all, I repeat, all of Neal Ferguson’s critics showed absolutely no evidence that they understood anything he wrote. It seemed to me that he was deliberately, even maliciously misrepresented the whole time. His projections when taken the right way were reasonable and tuned out to be fairly correct, but much of it depended on how things developed as to which of the scenarios he described applied. But all of the attention was on the most extreme scenario he published, which did not apply. And then there was all the nonsense about which person Ferguson was boinking and when.
The same goes for the projections provided by IHME, which were rolling projections that were adjusted on the fly according to new data coming in. The projections and their accuracy were grossly misjudged. The outcomes were always within the confidence limits they published. But because the latest projections didn’t match the old critics called it error or that IHME was flip flopping or some such.
Regarding the lockdowns. We were told to lock down, but we never did. Instead the “lockdown” was so porous as to be non-existent. There were so many exceptions deemed “essential” that it wasn’t even worth the effort. Models showed that if there were even one big box store kept open to which everyone in a community could go the whole effort was defeated, and that’s how our “lockdowns” were done. All it achieved was the ruination of a lot of lives and livelihoods of those not considered essential, and all for nothing. The longer the lockdowns didn’t work the longer they went on. What a fiasco.
With a real lockdown the whole thing might have been over in a few weeks. (As it appears happened in China, but, then again, who can say?) But the conclusion for a lot of people is not that it was done wrong but that lockdowns don’t work, period. They certainly do not work when done the way we did them.
One might reasonably argue that a real lockdown can’t be done in a free society, that only an authoritarian government like the CCP, which mandated that families be welded into their apartments and that food and supplies be delivered to them by special workers, is capable of a real lockdown. That’s a reasonable argument, and we might just skip the lockdowns as unworkable the next time. I fear that people are so wedded to policies based on politics that a reasonable agenda isn’t possible, though, and no one will have learned anything from what has happened. Instead, there will be people calling for faux lockdowns again.
The survey article makes the point about Vit D deficiency, how widespread it is, the importance of melatonin, and sunshine exposure in boosting the immune system and making the nasal passages a more hostile environment to microbes including viruses. I think that should be the policy prescription going forward.
What was most alarming was that flu shots seemed from the data presented to have a negative effect on those over 60 in terms of transmissibility.
The article also called into question whether transmission of viruses came from those exhibiting symptoms or from some other source. The assumption has been that transmission of viruses is exactly like that of bacterial agents. This article doesn’t offer a solution but calls it into question.
You might find the healthyskeptic interesting:
https://healthy-skeptic.com/2021/07/28/what-more-can-i-say/
Background and originally linked at powerline blog:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/07/delta-variant-bullet-points.php
Confirmation bias? I am obsessively looking at data and trying to account for it. I am not the one defending credentialism in the face of a large scale scientific failure. I was expressly told by CDC, Fauci and experts that SARS-COVID-19 was sui generis and that nothing like the patterns of past respiratory pandemics would apply. Seasonality would not occur. That was wrong.
I am not selling a theory. I am wondering why so much existing science was jettisoned by experts in service to politicians. And why what has been recommended does not work.
You presented links to studies where even crappy cloth masks showed great differences in outcome, even in the range of 70-80% and yet comparing jurisdictions we find not even a small noticeable reduction where mask use is near-universal. Why doesn’t that trigger the slightest glimmer of curiosity on your part?
Ferguson? Seriously, do any of his colleagues at Oxford or Imperial College think he is NOT a media hound? His final opus (a) apparently assumed the backside of the spring case curves was attributable to NPIs so (b) reopening will cost millions of lives. It was utterly preposterous. Including improbable worst case numbers one knows will have media impact is cynical self-promotion. If you really believe Ferguson is a serious scientist indifferent to the media’s appetite for scary numbers then I have a bridge to sell you. His successor at Oxford has been a major, open critic of his methodology. Like bad climate science, when you somehow consistently incorporate assumptions that generate scary predicted outcomes over a very wide (meaningless?) range, it is, shall we say, goal-oriented science?
And please don’t lecture us about the deep thinking and professionalism that has gone into the operant policy recommendations. I knew that Wallensky, Osterhaus and Fauci were wrong in real-time—no hindsight required. Politicians have been told what epidemiologists thought politicians and bureaucrats wanted to hear.
Where is the peer-reviewed support that six feet is magic and not 7.5 or 5 feet? I read the CDC guidelines for schools—how many permutations of rather thin assumptions can bureaucrats do? A lot. And with zero acknowledgment of the data about kids and COVID or the heavily documented experience of thousands of schools around the world that did not close or mask up.
Even a porous lockdown should have produced a blip. In DC half a million people did not come to work for months. Businesses closed. The frequency of contact declined exponentially. Surely we could point to the data and see some difference. At least a temporary downturn changing the Gompertz curve… Why didn’t that happen? When we were only permitted to go to the grocery store, before mask mandates, why didn’t those few open places where we went become hotspots? They did not.
Your lack of curiosity about the absence of outcomes consistent with alleged expert understanding of transmission and prevention is striking. When the attending doc tells the family of the decedent the treatment should have worked, that is OK only in the event of a rare exception. With COVID, what should have worked did not work anywhere. The correct response is to try to ask why, not double down on the primacy of deference to credentialed sensibilities. Why didn’t mask mandates work even a little bit? Why didn’t even a porous lockdown help a little bit? Why didn’t any mass gatherings like Sturgis trigger an outbreak?
If Hope-Simpson was right and prior asymptomatic transmission and dormancy underlie the pandemic, what should the policy be? Can anything be done? Clearly the key to controlling the spread was not sneezing into cloth six feet away from each other, nor mass testing, nor locking down. And yet the experts keep recommending the same things…
And while I am ranting about professional failure, why hasn’t there been a more rapid, comprehensive effort to evaluate treatment options? After almost 200,000,000 cases, why don’t we have an officially sanctioned handle on whether Ivermectin or whatever works? Why don’t we have a universal treatment protocol by now? Or do we? It is not as if this is a rare disease.
Death rates for COVID are dropping fast. Is that because the treatments are better? Weaker bug? Fewer vulnerable targets? I understand the nature of research planning and structure, peer-review etc but shouldn’t this kind of progress occur faster in a connected age? What is the bottleneck?
P
Kevin Roche is a godsend. His work on COVID has been brilliant.
It is simple, I know far too many people who vote for Democrats because they have already bought into the lie that Democrats are ‘good people.’ This is their ‘truth’, and it would be too painful to allow facts to interfere with their reality. So they dutifully follow what ever advice is asserted, regardless how often the science changes. It’s like they have neither long or short term memories.
Which was my point: They’re really NOT intelligent, and they ARE easily duped.
This is epic, Old B. And I might even like your comment #44 better than the original post.
Please send a version of this to all 50 state health commissioners. I will gladly pay for postage. PM me to let me know how I can help and where to send your check. For reals.
Lockdowns are idiotic. They were never a researched public health measure, they were just some kind of knee-jerk reaction based on childish thinking. They kill more than the hope to protect. If lockdowns worked, then Australia and New Zealand would not still need lockdowns. Sweden did it right.
I thought this would be a big topic of conversation in 2020. Instead, several proposed treatments were said to be ineffective, and then the whole discussion just got shut down and abandoned. Not sure if this is true, but I read somewhere that the emergency approval for the vaccines could only happen because there were no treatments.
In theory, lockdowns spread out infections and thus also reduce the total number a little. In April 2020 I would have agreed that a Chinese-commie max style lockdown for two weeks would have ended the pandemic. I now realize that is bollocks. It is stunning that anyone still believes that. Our experts’ assumptions about transmission are more porous than our lockdowns. It is noteworthy that the idealized flattening did not happen (see the happy theoretical model in pic below). If you look at any COVID-seasonality regional groupings and look at places within that group where there were attempted lockdowns there was zero shift. Peaks still occurred at the same time across entire regions. Nobody shifted or flattened anything anywhere.
I do not resent or blame credentialed/official people for not having all the answers. However, when people cite science as the basis of their authority, I do expect that when the data clearly demonstrates the limitations (charitable word choice) of their understanding that that should spark some humility and scientific curiosity. Instead, we still get “Harrumphs” about how much the credentialed ones know that we don’t while they simultaneously advise our elected officials to continue doing things we now know with absolute empirical certainty don’t work –and at enormous cost.
I am pretty sure people were reporting attempts to use HCQ, Vitamin D, Ivermectin early on. One practitioner reported that HCQ works well but only in certain dosages while others said it was useless. Vitamin D studies were all over the map and contradicted each other. I was surprised that federal health agencies did not fund big studies ASAP about treatments. Instead, it seemed like they just sat back in DC and said that they were just not sure anything worked. Wake us when you guys out there somehow achieve certainty or if a big drug company wants us to fast-track a proprietary cure.
This has been an interesting phenomenon throughout the last two years.
I’ve heard many people express surprise at the difference between the alarmism in the press versus the lackadaisical behavior they actually saw in a lab or a doctor’s office or a hospital.
Massachusetts has been a hot spot for the pandemic. For two years now, Covid-19 has been the front and center story every day in every newspaper throughout New England. And every reporter has seemed to have an endless supply of statistics being issued from the fountain of the Massachusetts public health department.
I confess I stopped following the story every day because (a) I stopped trusting the statistics and (b) I became interested in the cumulative statistics. Those were increasingly hard to find. The image the breathless reporters conveyed of the Massachusetts health department was one of energy and commitment to dealing with the pandemic as it affected our state.
At some point in August 2020, the case numbers in Massachusetts seemed to be coming down dramatically, and I was curious to know if that was my imagination or if it really was abating. So I went to the Massachusetts public health Covid-19 websites that I had been looking at daily six months earlier. I was shocked to see that they had not been updated since late May. I can’t begin to describe how surprised I was to see that. It was as if the people who were updating those pages daily for the preceding twelve months had suddenly left the room, all at once, and the statistics were frozen in time.
What had happened in between was the press’s attention had gone off to the election.
Massachusetts peaked in mid-April in a lovely almost bell curve. Everybody rushed to decide what “caused” the drop? Lockdowns? Tracking? Masks? Social distancing & good practice finally getting through to the rubes? Nobody had any curiosity as to why the curve was identical to NY and NJ and extremely similar to western Europe. We even had all not yet figured out that rushing to use ventilators may not be the best idea. Some people (mean culpa) figured that the wave was big enough and widespread enough that something akin to herd immunity was involved and there would be no reprise.
Maybe the illusion that it had passed lessened the incentive to rigorously study treatment data. Maybe our medical reporting system sucks (the one part of Obamacare I endorsed heartily was mandatory electronic medical records. Licensed researchers would not have names but could instantly scour and compare outcomes across millions–the potential knowledge return and speed would be enormous…)
And front-line docs rarely have a lot of time to participate in much less initiate research.
We could have been so so much better prepared for the later waves…
From Coronavirus – For Health Professionals (michigan.gov)
What protocols should I use to treat a COVID-19 patient?
The above has the following A prologue to the Introduction and doesn’t appear to have been updated since.
“This Document is appended as the Crisis Standards of Care for the State of Michigan.
Clinical information is current as of 3/27/20.”
None of the other documents, as can be discerned by their titles, address treatment for hospitalized Covid patients.
Seasonality matters. Here is a graphic I posted in the Masks thread:
And here are a couple more related graphs:
Let’s visit Europe:
A couple of months ago I stopped following the numbers here in Michigan. Just checked them out again today and compared them to last years numbers.
But anyone going to their tracking site should first understand it takes this state three plus weeks to register most, but not all “Covid” deaths, and considering it’s generally three weeks between contracting the virus and most deaths that result, it is improper to look at the current day’s figures.
So looking at confirmed new cases for 6/15/21 and 6/15/20 and deaths for 7/06/21 and 7/06/20 comparing them. The number of new confirmed cases in 2021 were 1/5 of those from the same date 2020, yet the number of deaths for the 2020 and 2021 dates are almost identical.
So what is happening here? Is the virus suddenly 5 times deadlier? It’s not supposed to be for those vaccinated or who have had it and recovered.
Is the state missing over 80% of the cases compared to those they were discovering last year? Not likely.
From the state’s Coronavirus data site, “If a death certificate is matched to a confirmed COVID-19 case and that record in the MDSS (Michigan Disease Surveillance System) does not indicate the individual died, the record is updated to indicate the death and the appropriate local health department is notified.” So a person doesn’t have to die from Covid, they just have to be on the list of confirmed cases if they die to get added to the list of Covid deaths.
The main doc has tons on monitoring, PPE for staff and specimen collection but I must have missed the part about medications. Was there one? Glad I did not get sick in Michigan in March ‘20. Research and editing sponsored by funeral industry?
Or the Michigan variant is so deadly it is killing people before they can be tested positive. Or like Minnesota used to, the report date is recorded as the diagnosis date and report batches create a sudden retroactive spike. Or they a screwing with attribution criteria…
No, that’s the best they could do. You noticed it was mostly copy paste from older protocols nothing to do with Covid, right?