PLAGUE JOURAL January 2021: David the Lionhearted Part 1: Fear, Masks, & Fauci
David Leonhardt of the New York Times "The Morning" demands more masks but offers no evidence that they work.
February 2022: Recently, many thoughtful writers and podcasters have praised David Leonhardt at the New York Times for what they view as his reasonable reporting on Covid. He began writing the Times’ “The Morning” emails in mid-2020, continuing in the tradition of his colleague Donald McNeil, peddling fear and anger, pretending that Trump caused the virus and that Biden would fix it. Now, a year later, with cases higher than ever and with growing concerns about crime and inflation, Biden needs a boost, so Leonhardt’s tone has brightened considerably. Now, he tells us that kids may survive grade school (although we need to keep the masks on just in case).
I wrote the message below from a hotel in Breckenridge, Colorado, after reading Leonhardt’s email of January 22nd, 2021. I’m posting it now that the mainstream media is struggling to balance two opposing goals: supporting Biden and spreading fear. The fear sells subscriptions and gives journalists and editors power. If they keep us afraid, they can keep us behind masks and perpetually angry at conservatives and independents. The relentless campaign against “anti-maskers” and “anti-vaxxers” is meant to hurt Republicans but will alienate rational Democrats and has the unintended consequence of raising doubts about vaccines.
Amidst the praise for Leonhardt and some of his now-“reasonable” colleagues elsewhere, we should remember what these people were saying until recently, with the same information we have today. (The only change is that we now have a more transmissible version of the virus and we know that vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission).
This is Part One of a series.
Dateline Breckenridge, Colorado, January 2021
Fear of Non-Coastals
Masks are so central to our policy that they are practically all we talk about, write about, legislate about. (We also keep small businesses and schools closed.) I woke up this morning—1/22/2021—to a New York Times “The Morning” email containing a hand-wringing lament about insufficient masking called “A Vaccine Road Trip,” by David Leonhardt, a writer I hadn’t noticed before. It has the predictable end-of-times tone and the inevitable language of human omnipotence: Trump “handled” our virus poorly; now Biden must “get it under control.” How? With masks, of course.
The headline reads, “Good morning. The Biden administration has a huge amount of work to do to get the virus under control.” What kind of “work” does Leonhardt imagine? When all we know is masks, proximity, and lockdowns, what else can Biden do but push for more masks, distance, and lockdowns? He is helpless against our national groupthink, buried in the fog of the Times and other media, incapable of an original thought or listening to a thoughtful person. Since the beginning of our pandemic, the Times and other mainstream media have discredited or ignored all independent thinkers in favor of a narrow, dogmatic, mostly wrong set of ideas.
Leonhardt begins, “I took a 1,600-mile road trip this week that has left me even more amazed at how poorly the United States has handled the coronavirus—and more worried about how much work the Biden administration has to do to get it under control.” Leonhardt is appalled at seeing people “ignoring” signs requiring masks at gas stations and hotels during his travels. He says, “I came home from my trip shaken by what I had seen.” He offers a couple of examples, including, “At a Fairfield Inn in Ohio, a middle-aged couple sat unmasked on a lobby sofa for hours, drinking beers and scrolling through their phones. The hotel staff evidently did nothing about it.”
Do we believe that a grown man is “shaken” by seeing a middle-aged couple drinking beer quietly with bare faces? (By the way, Leonhardt is an Old High German name meaning “brave.") How did we get here? What if Leonhardt were to visit a Nordic country, where virtually no one wears masks? Or countries in Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, or in all the parts of the world where few people wear masks (and where cases are low)? Would he have to be institutionalized? The people at the Times are professional alarmists. Leonhardt despairs that Biden’s plea for Americans to mask for 100 days may not be taken seriously, and he suggests that perhaps what we need is more discussion: “Maybe the calls to action can come from a diverse array of celebrities, politicians and business executives.” When ideology fails to solve the problem, apparently, the solution is to pump out more ideology.
Fauci & Celebrity
The tendency to view human behavior as the cause of all outcomes was present from the start. The politicized and human-centric view clearly pre-dated our pandemic, so uniform was the message from the start—from the media, from their “experts,” from the late-night comics, and ultimately from our friends and family. Although masks were unimportant or harmful at the beginning, by April the media had decided masks were essential. Without them, how could we know we were in a pandemic?
In March, Fauci told us not to wear masks, which was consistent with the prevailing medical wisdom at the time. By April, he said we must wear masks. Nothing had changed. There was no new “science.” The media decided that Fauci’s first message was the lie, designed to protect meager mask supplies for front-line workers. Can we believe that? In which instance did he have a greater incentive to mislead: when he was unknown to the general public, or when he was becoming a regular guest on CNN and MSNBC? Early on, when ventilators were all the rage, the media scared us about ventilator shortages and hoarding. Ventilators cost between $25,000 and $50,000 each. Masks cost about twenty cents. We were never going to be in short supply.
A two-and-a-half-minute history of our Covid-response policy:
Someone I know told me her original mask order was delayed a week or so from Amazon, but she was an early adopter. I have a fat box of masks from an Amazon order I placed on June 22nd 2020, around the time the first businesses in my area required them. I don’t know when the first signs went up in stores, but I know these are the only masks I’ve bought, and I bought groceries throughout, eating almost every day. Masks were easy to get for those who wanted them. Everyone, no matter how indigent or low-tech, was suddenly wearing one. They are everywhere. Discarded masks litter the streets and sidewalks. It is not credible that Fauci feared shortages of these cheap eyesores.
Fauci’s initial advice to avoid masks was the authentic one. It was early, before he learned what the media expected of him. He was a government bureaucrat at the time, but he realized he could be a celebrity. His early advice was consistent with the medical consensus and with the recommendation from the World Health Organization. In 2019, Fauci scoffed at the idea (minute 17:15) of wearing a mask to protect against the spread of a virus. It may have been the last time he gave sound health advice: get some sleep, watch your diet, don’t smoke, don’t drink too much. He continued to recommend against masks in February and March of 2020. By late March, the dominant media was in charge of our health policy, and rationality was out the window.
In 2016, a Canadian dentistry journal called Oral Health published a paper titled “Why Face Masks Don’t Work: A Revealing Review.” We don’t know what the paper says because Oral Health removed it in 2020 with a terse statement, writing, “The content was published in 2016 and is no longer relevant in our current climate.” In our new pandemic, research and information were no longer relevant.
There was no reason to believe that masks protected either the wearer or others from the spread of the virus. We have run perhaps the world’s largest experiment, with hundreds of millions, maybe billions of people wearing masks worldwide, and we still can’t find any evidence that they do anything good. Trump wasn’t keen on masks, so the media demanded universal masking. Fauci wanted to be on TV, so he became pro-mask without providing any explanation for the about-face except for the fib about protecting front-line workers and vague suggestions that the science had evolved. For his service, he got to keep his title as our country’s “leading medical expert” and continued appearing on television telling Americans to do irrational things in the name of science (which he equates with authority).
We knew from the beginning that focusing resources on the old and the fat was best, outdoors is better than indoors, and sunlight damages viruses. The real social distancing was 26 feet, not eight, and that virus particles emitted indoors can stick around for hours.
So, we did exactly the opposite.