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It Really Was the Stupidity
“Never attribute to conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” — Hanlon’s Razor
The systemic damage done to the world’s democracies during the COVID-19 pandemic was so great that it is tempting to imagine the hidden hand of powerful figures orchestrating the Great Reset. The horrifically costly NPIs were so obviously futile that there had to be deliberate organized malice at work to suppress the statistically obvious need to change policy.
There was indeed malice but not of Bond villain caliber. In reality, we put morons in charge and when their failures became evident, they and their moron-adjacent allies in media and academia doubled down and attacked and silenced dissidents. The Great Reset was perhaps merely a secondary infection.
In his depressing account of his time on the White House COVID task force, Scott Atlas describes weeks and months of utterly pointless meetings over which the incomparably mediocre Dr. Deborah Birx presided. She had a penchant for meaningless statistics and like Anthony Fauci and CDC Robert Redfield, she never seemed to notice the rather pronounced regional case curves and continued to attribute increasing numbers to a failure to implement NPIs and any declines as proof of policy success.
Unlike anyone else involved, Atlas kept bringing actual data and studies to these meetings. He repeatedly made the point that lockdowns and school closures have horrific costs and do not address the real problem of protecting a well-defined vulnerable population. The needle never moved.
After quite some time, he organized a heavyweight panel of actual experts which panel was repeatedly stalled before finally getting to speak to Trump. And their message (the eminently sane recommendations of the Great Barrington Declaration) was somehow reported in the media as a “let ‘er rip until herd immunity” plan—Trump advisors want us to die!
This panel was not proposed until the September before the election so (a) it was rather late in the game and (b) was thus always going to be turned into a partisan football no matter how much distortion was required to do so. Lots of people who knew better viciously piled on the Harvard, Stanford, Oxford all-start team Atlas assembled because the choice had been reduced to “the science” or Trump. The moron-adjacent social media, major news outlets, and campus hive mind framed the issue in terms that made the morons seem like responsible actors.
[By the way, Gov. DeSantis gets rave reviews from Atlas because, unlike so many others, DeSantis got into the weeds on facts and numbers and was able to discuss them and implement policies accordingly. Despite an enormous elderly population, Florida’s senior death rate remains lower than most states likely because of a particular focus on their protection rather than futile general suppression mandates.]
Mike Pence oversaw the task force and was not inclined to buck Birx. His inertial instincts failed the country but he reasonably feared the media-driven political blowback from dumping someone many in the White House already knew was an idiot. They still got hammered on the COVID issue anyway and lost the election largely because of it.
You get the impression from Atlas that Trump had better instincts about the futility of the lockdown/closure approach than Pence but overall the administration (and Kushner) was afraid of being accused of turning against “the science” and thus stand accused of endangering lives. So morons still called the shots to the virtual end of the Trump Administration and still do.
The terrifying takeaway from Atlas’ book is that American COVID policy was never the result of a well-grounded good-faith, empirically disciplined policy debate. It was simply the inertial byproduct of incredibly mediocre people placed in charge of policy. How is it possible that a collection of vaguely malignant buffoons could have so much unchecked authority and power in a developed democracy?
On Ricochet, we were discussing COVID “seasonality” using actual data as early as the summer of 2020. Atlas describes being stunned that in mid-2021, the head of the CDC held up a Worldometer graph from a single state and opined that this proved masks worked. Even the lay political members of the task force realized that this was nonsense. Redfield was clearly clueless about the form and regularity of regional COVID case waves, regardless of policy differences within the region. How can that be? I can identify at least ten people on Ricochet who appear to have done more detailed work on COVID policy than the trio that ran the national policy: Birx, Fauci, and Redfield. Even when we disagree, people here provide links to papers and numbers.
Consider how Fauci, et al., handled the issues raised by the Great Barrington Declaration:
Collins is the head of NIH, the premier medical research institution in the USA and he is not only flat wrong about the science behind the Great Barrington Declaration but offers the weirdly vicious notion that these prominent scientists are “fringe” types who need to be “taken down?!”
Presumably, the distinguished Dr. Fauci would respond to this email with a number of key studies at his fingertips given that he is a major architect of the national strategy and personally represents and speaks for science itself:
A cite from a junk piece in Wired! This is the level of exchange by the great minds running national health policy! But if that wasn’t persuasive enough, in follow-up emails Fauci later links to The Nation and an article in the WaPo quoting–Fauci. [More on this at Brownstone.]
That was around the same time Redfield went on TV and said masks provided more protection for the elderly than vaccines and spewed venom about the Atlas/Great Barrington view of COVID with additional misstatements.
If you ever clicked on a link provided in a COVID post on Ricochet, there is a good chance you’ve done more substantive research than the buffoons who destroyed so much wealth, so much serenity and so many lives to the continued praise from lazy idiots who claim to be professional journalists.
Could people that mediocre ever concoct an actual conspiracy to bring down western civilization or is it the sheer weight of pure stupid that has brought us to this state of affairs? Be afraid either way.
Published in General
GEOD is God Emperor of Dune, the fourth book — Children is the third book. I haven’t read them in years, although I did do the audiobook of the main one recently. It’s been a long time, but I can’t recall much of anything from books 2 and 3. Perhaps I attribute all later quotes to the fourth book, heh.
Have not read that account. Where does it appear?
It’s what turned him away from Marxism….
Yes. I have met a number of people in government or consulting who found that originality, substance and thinking outside the box scares residents of the box.
This is very true.
I’m forgetting the name of the MidWestern non-fiction author who has written detailed books about the life and death of The Great Lakes.
From his description, as well as my dealing with the worlds of environmental matters, there seem to be two types of scientists. There are those who are true devotees of science. And there are those who are interested in mastering the art of bureaucratic conquest, for the sake of career success.
Once in a while a rare individual comes along who is good at both situations, and those are the people we really need to have in the game, to fight the good fight and literally save the world. (John Froines, who was instrumental in saving Calif from the ravages of the toxic MTBE, comes to mind as I type this.)
So in the case of the Great Lakes, the trout and bass were under attack and starting to flounder. (Sorry, pun.)
So initially Problem A was considered to be the culprit. The guy at whatever agency overseeing the problem who came up with his idea as as the one that would save the fish was heralded as the local sports fishermen’s hero. (Fishing for trout and bass was a huge industry in the summer with tourists being the salvation of many coastline Michigan towns.)
So all sorts of grant money was applied for to be used for the purpose of eliminating Problem A.
End of Part One
Part Two
The money is pouring in, when low and behold, a different guy realizes that it is actually Problem B that is affecting the fish. Only by now the Big Money is going to the first guy’s department, which is expanding. The first guy is now much more powerful. After all he has spent months developing relationships with the politicians who matter locally and in Washington. Now the last thing he would want to do is stop his program, reduce the numbers of employees in his fiefdom etc.
So the idea that Problem B is the real problem, and that only by solving it will the fish actually thrive means very little. The real solution is put on the back burner, until finally there is no escaping the fact that solving Problem A was a nothing burger.
If there is no major factor that can stop the public from realizing that the environmental agency and its lead scientists must abandon the solution to Problem A and solve for Problem B, time will still have been lost and money misspent. But in the end, things will take a turn for the better.
(Of course by then the original scientist bureaucrat might be taking credit for the more humble scientist who came up with the real solution, and who has by now been demoted to working in the institute’s basement. But sadly, such is life.)
However in the matter of COVID, the huge amounts of money propping up the “killer pandemic and major plague of the 21st Century” are allowing the virus its position as the all consuming, society shutting down matter of Ultimate Evil.
The way COVID is and has been framed make it very hard to diminish. Possibly 98% of all the politicians who matter have been paid off to continue the narrative that keeps the charade going.
But the politicians could have done very little to persuade the public without the media doing so much more.
End of Pt 2
Pt 3
It just came out over in Gr Britain that 391 million lbs was offered to Britain’s media, like the BBC and The Guardian, to massage the COVID message as that of a killer plague. Not only did the bought and paid for media elevate an infection with a 99.9% survival rate for healthy people under 70 to almost overnight be considered the worst thing to ever happen in the modern era, but the fact that there were available remedies was also hidden away from the public by the media.
In the USA, not only were those in the political world and those who were in the media responsible for COVID becoming King Kong, but the Fed government’s payouts, thru MediCare and MediCaid played a huge role. When a person who tested positive for COV entered the hospital, 13,000 additional monies would be offered to that hospital’s administration. If the patient was put on a ventilator, another 39,000 bucks was offered.
These inducements seem to have been enough for hospital admins to see to it that the PCR tests ran at 38 to 40 cycles, guaranteeing a diagnosis of COV+.
And the hospital admins apparently did not care ventilator involvement ensured 70 to 90 % of all those placed on them would become COV fatalities.
That was done by an entirely different staff and a different editor. Many years prior to anything related to COVID.
I think you can find it both in Knowledge and Decisions and in his autobiographical A Personal Odyssey, as well as in some of his columns and interviews.
Briefly mentioned in this article at City Journal:
City Journal is well worth subscribing to.
Thank you. I have been reading Sowell lately. I keep a quote of his posted on my office door.
The conclusion drawn from the study was that post menopausal symptoms should be treated with the lowest doses of hormones for the shortest time possible since hormone replacement therapy increased risks for heart attack, stroke, and breast cancer. Previous studies had shown benefit from HRT for cardiovascular risk and were neutral regarding breast cancer.
The study was performed in women who were a decade or more post menopausal (median age 62) who had not previously taken HRT. The hormones that were used were Premarin and progesterone. At the time the study was done there was a known risk of thrombotic disease due to these agents that appeared to be avoided by transdermal or vaginal estrogen as these avoided first pass through the liver, which was where oral estrogens induced increases in clotting factors. So an outdated treatment was used. The study was stopped when trends were observed that did not reach statistical significance. The results nevertheless were treated as if they were statistically significant, and applied to women a decade younger, which was egregiously and intentionally wrong. A woman age 50 has a dramatically different cardiovascular risk status than a woman in her 60s. Indeed, the design of the was to maximize the risk of HRT with the aim of intimidating doctors to limit HRT, which appeared to be based on a feminist political agenda. The idea was to cause harm to research subjects to induce change in physician behavior, At the time of the study it was NOT common practice to give HRT to women in their 60s who had not been on HRT previously. So the study was designed to address a clinical question that no one was asking. Further the study included women who were smokers. HRT was then and is now contraindicated in smokers but smokers were included in the study, a direct harm that should never have been allowed. Another major risk factor in HRT is obesity, and this was never thoroughly evaluated as a variable in the study.
The study is still touted by the NIH as the largest study of women’s health ever done and the definitive study to guide HRT. It is extremely difficult to accord any legitimacy to our NIH experts.
Thanks so much for filling in my sketchy memory! It’s so egregious to conduct such politically slanted tests to meet an agenda. I’m just grateful that stopping them was the right decision for me. But not thanks to their results!
Precisely.
I recently reread the Dune series, and every book from Children of Dune on are stuffed full of quotable material about governments and the dangers of bureaucracy. I earmarked a bunch, when I get time I’ll type them up in a post.