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Fire Wallensky
“I’m going to pause here, I’m going to lose the script and I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom. We have so much to look forward to. So much promise and potential of where we are and so much reason for hope. But right now I’m scared…We are not powerless. We can change this trajectory of the pandemic, but it will take all of us recommitting to following the public health prevention strategies consistently while we work to get the American public vaccinated.” — Dr. Rochelle Wallensky, Director of the Centers for Disease Control.
I must disagree with Dr. Wallensky.
There is no scientific reason to believe that the virus will spread anywhere near as much as it did at this time last year, much less justify an inference of “impending doom”.
- COVID-19 is weirdly seasonal. The big case curves in NJ, NY, and MA all peaked on the same day—April 27 and the shape and duration of that curve was almost identical to that of Italy, Spain, and even Sweden about three weeks earlier. The southern tier of the US and Mexico shared a flatter curve that peaked across that entire region in the last week of July and the beginning of August. And the interior of the US experienced its common wave and peak months later. Therefore we should reasonably expect some kind of an uptick at the same times in the same places but not some large lasting surge that some experts still seem to think is possible. There was always a Gompertz curve in play.
- So, any expected uptick is highly predictable by date and region rather than a cause for generalized panic.
- An enormous number of people have been exposed, infected, and/or vaccinated (or dead) so the raw numbers and percentage of possible infection targets are greatly reduced and dropping. It is not possible for the bug to reprise its horrific debut even if there is not yet the functional equivalent of full herd immunity.
There is no scientific reason to believe that any of the “prevention strategies” implemented during the past year have had any effect so “recommitting” to them would be pointless.
- If you make side-by-side comparisons of states (or countries) which shared the same COVID region/season pattern but which differed with respect to policy, there is no difference attributable to NPIs. FL, TX, AZ, and CA shared the same wave but implemented different policies with no observable difference in the case or death curve trajectories. MN and WI are almost identical in climate, population, and density. MN COVID mandates went to absurd lengths. WI was prevented by courts and the legislature from doing the same. WI had a slightly higher case/million rate. MN had slighter higher deaths/million, in other words, no difference.
- Mask mandates have achieved no measurable difference in any meaningful comparison of jurisdictions. [By the way, if someone trots out the Kansas “study” of cherry-picked data and artificial date cutoff to claim that masked counties did better, I will be happy to share the real data. CDC trotted out that “study” to deflect attention from the about-to-be-released Danish finding that 6,000 volunteers (half of them mask-wearing, half without) saw no difference in COVID outcome.]
- Lockdowns and closures have had small to non-existent efficacy. (You can start here but there is a lot more out there ). The absurd arbitrary early closing times for restaurants, magical occupancy percentages, the sheer atrocity of school closings, and the variations of the applied“social distance” fetish all convey the illusion that experts are using some kind of fine-tuned control dials to limit the spread when in fact all of this is eyewash done so that experts and politicians can appear to Do Something About It –no matter the cost. None of this helped and the costs are monstrous and ongoing.
- The expert consensus in place at the time COVID arrived was that border closing, quarantines, lockdowns, and mask mandates would have only marginal, short-term effects with possible serious downsides. [See, Preparedness for a High-Impact Respiratory Pathogen Pandemic, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, Sept 2019 ] so the sudden assumption that the science said any of this would actually work was a politically inspired fiction.
- We have not yet begun to fully quantify the deaths from suicide, overdose, despair, and financial ruin. We have not yet seen the extent of delays in cancer diagnoses and treatments. Despite the documented damage to kids, Dr. Wallensky has not aggressively called out those who close schools against the recommendations of the pediatric profession, and in spite of the mountain of data about COVID’s minimal impact on kids and their very limited role in transmission. Why has she not done so?
There is no reason to expect that COVID-19 will continue to be anywhere near as lethal as it was last year.
- It appears that the quality and efficacy of treatment have vastly improved since this virus first appeared (and maybe the prevalent variants of COVID-19 are less lethal?).
- LTCs have significantly improved screening measures (and governors no longer force infected persons into them).
- COVID-19 has already killed a significant share of the most vulnerable which also reduces potential additional mortality.
- Whatever the combination of causes, the mortality rate is vastly lower than a year ago. If we look at NY where COVID hit earliest and hardest one year ago, the lethality of COVID has plummeted even as increased testing has greatly increased the number of reported “cases.” Deaths have dropped from a peak of 1,000 deaths to a few dozen despite many more reported COVID-positives:
- And according to the CDC’s own excess death count, the death rate from COVID is in steep decline and way below this time last year when the pandemic started to take off. The trend does not suggest “impending doom”:
The tone and substance of the Director’s comments are grossly irresponsible. Stoking fear in order to foster a political climate conducive to the re-imposition of costly and demonstrably ineffectual policies is outrageous as well as scientifically groundless.
In conclusion: Primum non nocere. Like her immediate predecessors, Dr. Wilensky is endorsing a policy mindset of COVID monomania to the exclusion of all other public health and human cost considerations. The NPIs she endorses have saved no one (don’t get me started on the most recent published dog’s breakfast claiming over 200,00 “preventions”) but they have seriously harmed children in particular, disrupted other needed medical care for many, caused economic and personal ruin and triggered harms that will unfold for years. There is no professional or moral justification for her behavior nor for the devastating lack of balance in her policy recommendations and priorities. She should resign or be fired.
Published in General
Tomorrow afternoon, if we are home, I will be participating in a “telephone town hall” with The Man With The Sneer (my nickname for our congress-critter), about Covid and other issues. I will make sure to have this post open on my phone so I can quote from it. The information is priceless-thanks!
You should look at Kevin Roche (healthy-skeptic.com) and Ivor Cummins ( thefatemperor.com) for data, sources and insights not available anywhere else.
Masks are totalitarian. Anyone who advocates for them wants to see me under the boot of the state. My 4 year old grand daughter would not recognize me in a mask. Why are people doing this to our children????
because they are evil and dumb and phony and arrogant
The epitome of the dumb evil phony arrogant political class is Gavin Newsom, who can barely read. He is dyslexic.
I am not making fun of dyslexia. I am making fun of Gavin Newsome. California has a special needs governor.
Los Angeles has a mayor Eric Garcetti who pretends to be straight but everyone at city hall knows he considers bath houses to be essential businesses.
Masks are totalitarian. And we have a persistent proponent. Per Ace of Spades:
[Begin Quote]
Panic-Monger and Pandemic [REDACTED] Scot Adams continues making the case that it’s okay to give government and corporations the power to create a Chinese-style social credit surveillance system, because the government and corporations will of course turn this system off the moment the pandemic is over:
It is now officially time to stop paying any attention to this idiot.
[REDACTED] this guy, [REDACTED] his weird obsession with hypnotizing people, and [REDACTED] all the Pandemic [REDACTED].
[End Quote]
Cuz, as soon as this World War thing is settled we’ll drop that emergency payroll tax.
You make me LOL.
And what is more I’ve been watching his stuff for some months now and (besides the fact that he consistently puts me literally to sleep) I’ve finally written him off as — in my view — a self-boosting, inconsistent, manipulating (meaning lying) unknowledgeable (meaning truly ignorant) fool. He got me interested by touting science, when he repeatedly elevated “engineers” as the ultimate in innovation and problem solving (e.g. Elon Musk). But then he really holds self-made billionaires as the truest visionaries (e.g. Jeff Bezos).
And then what he really does say over and over is that
we (his audience) can never understand science, only what we hear reported as science second hand
there’s no such thing as common sense, and
he’s a persuader who could hypnotize us through his videos and we’d never know it.
And when he wants his audience to disbelieve something he arbitrarily dismisses it as unbelievable.
When he wants his audience to believe him he says with sweeping gestures, “I feeeeel…”
and when he wants his audience to believe something else, he says, “Don’t you feeeel…?”
And he insists that masks simply have to work, because it just stands to reason.
Oh, then he says that the universe is a computer simulation.
He’s either a nut, or he’s playing everybody.
Scot Adams’ real genius is in communications and rhetoric. He understands that you do not trust people who lie to you and he understood that Trump has real skills of persuasion that his enemies were too narcissistic to acknowledge. I enjoy his stuff on occasion, and he has taught me a few things I should have seen for myself, but I have long stopped believing in and looking for gurus. For genuine insight and vision I naturally prefer Dogbert. Or PJ O’Rourke.
And no creature can ever understand the totality of science, it is a topic as vast as Creation. Our colleges have been geared for decades that the farther your studies extend, the narrower the scope of your work. I tend to side with Heinlein on this, that specialization is for ants, but some specialization is necessary to fuel new discoveries.
I certainly agree with this.
As far as understanding science goes, he says that we haven’t been trained to understand or critique it, so we shouldn’t believe any of it. He goes on to say that there’s no such thing as common sense. And then he says that some scientific things must be true because he “feels” obviously its true.
Yes, he has unique insights on occasion, but his insights are wrong at least as often as they’re right. I can’t understand his simplistic support of the pandemic restrictions.
I’m just glad you watch all that garbage, so I don’t need to.
Well, I stopped.
Since the pandemic started, he has been disappointing.
Specialization serves some purposes. I mean, if I need brain surgery, I don’t really care if the surgeon is a rocket scientist as well. But in two short generations, we have managed to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Few people are around who understand how to look at things from a needed over view and think about what happens when two or more systems link up. Those among us who excel at that often end up punished rather than rewarded. Consider the case of Andrew Wakefield, who for a short moment in his earlier life, linked his understanding of gastroenterology up with the science of vaccines. Then he made an astounding discovery and thought the vax industry would take it from there. He had no idea of what would happen next.
Old Bathos, Wallensky is covering the bets at the gaming table.
Since the COVID vaxxes are already being discovered to promote COVID, through shedding, there is a real need to come up with some science-y explanation that there are these weird variants out there. (So the gullible portion of the public doesn’t start to consider the risks of these vaccines.) So part of Wallensky’s job right now is to continue the legacy media hypnosis drill on the dangers of COVID, the supposedly very real dangers of this infection that 99.05% of all humanity survives. So she is mentioning that there can be expected a third, fourth, and I would assume a coming fifth and sixth wave that humanity will need to consider. (Bill Gates discussed quite carefully how humanity was facing a surge of pandemics in the coming years. He went so far as to call 2020 to 2030 “the decade of vaccines.”
When I am on the other computer, I will post the interesting graphic that has been replicated at least a million times, although Google states it doesn’t exist any more.
The text states a young Bill Gates happily saying: “So if we create the viruses that can infect a computer, then we can sell the public the anti virus software to stop them.
Then the next panel shows an older Bill Gates saying, “If we create the viruses that infect human beings, then we can…” with his voice trailing off as he looks gleefully at a vaccination needle.
Yes, but nonetheless, let me just say this because I found him so gob-smackingly obtuse.
For an example of his ignorance, he once lectured at length that planes do not stay aloft due to the Bernoulli principle, but due to planing, like a water ski. He flatly said that the it was not the Bernoulli effect. Why did he say this? Because his wife flies her airplane upside down.
Now, I’m open to questioning rote science, but for example U2s, like gliders, don’t stay aloft by planing.
Granted. But he was right when he said that all the evidence needed for the steal was the unlawful eviction of election observers. The fact that he is a conceited celebrity blowhard does not detract from the shining truth of that very obvious statement.
Yes, and I think he was certainly right about that. I suppose he’s got his place. But I stopped watching.
And besides, his constant repetition and qualifying every statement 3 or 4 times, puts me to sleep. (And I think he’s hypnotizing me!)