PLAGUE JOURAL January 2021: David the Lionhearted, Part 2: Lying with Links
David Leonhardt of the New York Times "The Morning" demands more masks but offers no evidence that they work.
Part two of a piece I wrote in January 2021 after reading a particularly alarmist piece in the Times “Morning” email from David Leonhardt in which he described his distress at seeing some Midwesterners without masks, and hospitality workers who failed to discipline them.
The Times has led a nearly two-year campaign to get everyone under masks, using deception, bullying, and sheer repetition to attain an outcome that would be meaningless to the spread of the coronavirus but would contribute significantly to our confusion, division, and anomie.
Leonhard’s original email was from January 22nd, 2021, titled “A Vaccine Road Trip.” Everything below refers to the contents of the email. See part one for more context.
Dateline Breckenridge, Colorado, January 2021
Lying with Links
The Times has developed a new communication trick, a propaganda telegram. They need to fill our screens with thousands of stories, yet they have very little information, so they give us a lot of empty repetition. (In May, George Floyd, a Black man, was killed at the hands of Derek Chauvin, a white officer. . . .) Laid onto this filler are a few simple messages meant to instill fear and anger and to generate the desired political opinions. The Times uses links to deliver these messages. The linked articles are irrelevant, often even contradicting the message delivered in the text of the links themselves. Our eyes scan the fluff and filler (experts warn, public health officials say, Trump falsely claims) and land on the bright blue underlined words that seem to convey authority. These are the messages the Times wants us to absorb. They tell a simple story of disobedience and anti-safety, and readers are filled with rage at their neighbors for their bad politics and dangerous behavior.
Leonhardt warns us not to lose sight of our core beliefs now that vaccines are coming: “In the short term, masks and social distancing probably matter even more than vaccines.” In the first link, just 76 words into the article, he tells us that many Americans are “refusing to wear masks.” The Times knows we won’t click the link to see what the fuss is about.
But I clicked, and landed on another Times story (the Times is endlessly recursive), containing a colorful map and some boilerplate language about “public health officials” who “believe that face coverings can substantially slow transmission of the coronavirus.” No evidence, no names for these officials: just the party message. Health officials believe. In the article called “A Detailed Map of Who Is Wearing Masks in the U.S.,” we learn, as we have learned since the beginning, that states on the coasts (blue) are good and that states in the middle of the country and the South (red) are bad.
Yet, further down the article, there is a surprise, a subhead that tells us, “Mask use is high.” We learn that “around 80 percent of Americans say they wear masks frequently or always when they expect to be within six feet of other people.” The article is from mid-July 2020, now six months old. Testing increased dramatically during the summer, and positive cases were turning up wherever people went indoors into sealed, dry, air-conditioned homes, across the Sun Belt in June and the Midwest in July. The impulse to wear masks was rooted in fear, not evidence. Although sunshine on our faces was better for us than masks, the media pushed masks, and many public officials began requiring them in all “public” places, including outdoors. Even in July, when wearing a mask everywhere outside the home was among the most unnatural and unscientific things to do, 80% of Americans reported that they were doing so, according to the Times.
Further down the July article, we get a bar graph of 21 countries ranked by the percentage of the population who say they “Wear a Mask When They Leave the House” (itself a broad and imprecise metric). As in every survey or study about masks, we can see here that correlations between masks and coronavirus outcomes are weak, and they generally run the opposite direction from what the Times would have us believe.
The graph shows that Italy and Spain are among the most masked countries in the world. Nearly 85% say they “always” wear a mask in these countries, and most others report that they sometimes do. Yet, these two countries have among the world’s worst coronavirus outcomes. The U.S. is in the middle of the chart, with 59% reporting they “always” wear a mask when they leave their house, and only 14% reporting that they “never” do. In mid-July, when the article was published, temperatures were in the 80s and 90s in New York City (to pick a representative populous place) and the sun shone for nearly 15 hours a day, making masks not only uncomfortable but anti-safe outdoors. If mask-wearing was high in July, where would it now, in January, after another half year of scare headlines and real increases in cases and fatalities after the autumn cooling across most of the country? Although it is January, the Times links to summer data. Because they assume we won’t follow the link, the news need not be new.
According to the graph, ten countries have lower mask compliance than the U.S., including Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, most of which have been praised lavishly by our media for how well they “handled the virus.” (The chart includes only developed countries; a graph of all countries would show many more with low rates of masking, including almost all hot countries near the equator). These ten developed countries are not mask-free because they “beat” or “handled” the virus; masking was never popular in these places. Masking is a political and cultural choice, not a rational choice informed by evidence. Masking belongs to religious faith we now call “science.”
Later in Leonhardt’s email, we get more alarmism and yellow journalism: “Study after study has shown that masks reduce the virus’s spread. Yet millions of Americans have decided they would prefer more Covid—for their communities and potentially for their families and themselves—to more masks.” According to Leonhardt and the New York Times, people who walk bare-faced in a park want their neighbors to get sick.
The words “study after study” are underlined in blue, indicating that multiple studies provide evidence that masks reduce the spread of the virus. Each word has its own link, so we have three handy studies. But we know from clicking a lot of links about masks and other tenets of Covid ideology that there will be no evidence in the articles. The “studies” are bogus.
The first link went to a Times story from October about the sham study telling us we could save 130,000 lives if we wore masks: “The Price for Not Wearing Masks: Perhaps 130,000 Lives.” That article links to the familiar (to those who follow links) Nature study featuring colorful graphs and maps, complex formulas, unfounded assumptions, and 51 citations. The study of 130,000 lives saved has been one of the most popular exhibits for those pushing masks, although it provides no evidence of anything. The Times article about the study includes its own escape hatch: “Other experts cautioned that, as with any model, the new estimates are based on many assumptions and should not be seen as predictions.” We are supposed to believe the headlines and links, and everything else is just jargon masquerading as science, giving us the illusion of journalism.
The second link (after, in “study after study”) takes us to the summer study in Kansas that purported to find divergent results for two sets of counties, one that complied with a statewide mask mandate and one that did not. We’d seen this study many times as well. From the CDC, called “Trends in County-Level COVID-19 Incidence in Counties With and Without a Mask Mandate — Kansas, June 1–August 23, 2020,” it contains many serious-sounding words, but they are a smokescreen. We learn, for example, that “Thirteen (54%) mandated counties and seven (9%) non-mandated counties had implemented at least one other public health mitigation strategy not related to the use of masks (e.g., limits on size of gatherings and occupancy for restaurants).” In other words, counties that masked did many other things also. The researchers make no attempt to isolate the effects of masks from the other measures.
The data add up to nothing meaningful:
During June 1–7, 2020, the 7-day rolling average of daily COVID-19 incidence among counties that ultimately had a mask mandate was three cases per 100,000, and among counties that did not, was four per 100,000 (Table). By the week of the governor's executive order requiring masks (July 3rd–9th), COVID-19 incidence had increased 467% to 17 per 100,000 in mandated counties and 50% to six per 100,000 among non-mandated counties. By August 17–23, 2020, the 7-day rolling average COVID-19 incidence had decreased by 6% to 16 cases per 100,000 among mandated counties and increased by 100% to 12 per 100,000 among non-mandated counties.
In other words, from early June to early July, before mandates were imposed, cases in some areas exploded 467% (“mandated counties”), and in other areas, just 50% (“non-mandated counties”). Is it surprising that the counties with the greatest increases would be most inclined to embrace the new mask mandate? (The authors don’t even try to explain why the mandated counties saw such an explosion. By the logic of the media, people in counties that ultimately went for masks must have been grossly irresponsible in June.) We hear constantly that masks provide substantial—almost magical—protection against the virus. Even politicians who may be skeptical of the claim want to be perceived as decisive, firmly on the side of safety and science. As we see in so many places around the world, positive cases cause masks, which tells us nothing about the efficacy of masks.
Here is the show-stopping finding:
After the governor’s executive order, COVID-19 incidence decreased each day in mandated counties (mean decrease = 0.08 cases per 100,000 per day; 95% CI = –0.14 to –0.03); in non-mandated counties, incidence continued to increase each day (mean increase = 0.11 cases per 100,000 per day; 95% CI = 0.01–0.21).
It’s a lot of noise. (You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style). To simplify: the week the mandates took effect (July 3rd-9th), counties that complied with the mask mandate were experiencing three times as many new cases as counties that did not comply (seventeen per 100,000 compared to six per 100,000). Given the higher case counts in the first set, we could expect larger declines. What goes up comes down. (Remember the curve?)
Mandate counties saw declines of less than one per day over the following six weeks. During the same period, non-mandate counties remained flat, climbing just one-tenth of one percent per day. None of this takes into account a nearly infinite number of other factors, such as demographics, age or health of the populations, presence of care homes or meat plants, other “safety” measures enacted, even the actual masking behavior of the people in these counties.
At the end of the period studied, the week of August 17-23, mandated counties had gone from seventeen to sixteen new cases while non-mandated counties had gone from six to twelve. Even after their flagrant disobedience, non-mandated counties had 25% fewer new weekly cases than mandated counties. And what happened after August 17th-23rd, we will never know. These studies are built to be as opaque as possible, and the authors cherry-pick dates to give the results they want.
Here’s a chart with a much larger dataset and timeframe. Like the studies that provide so much fuel to the media, it ignores weather, age, obesity, and any policies other than mask mandates. Cases rise and fall dramatically, but they do so regardless of masking requirements or behavior. If you look at small populations or narrow timeframes, you can find anomalies that seem to prove your case. If you flip a coin six times and it comes up heads four times, you can say the coin has a bias for heads; if you flip it 10,000 times, heads or tails will lead for short stretches but in the long run will be evenly matched. A large sample of masked places compared with non-masked places shows a similar dead heat:
In the summer, we saw a thousand headlines about spreading in red states. We were supposed to be angry at these rubes and their leaders. Yet the timeline for this outrage began in May or June, after the vastly greater devastation had taken place in many Eastern blue states in March and April. We could predict that the states with the greatest spreading in March would see declining rates a few months later, especially as temperatures warmed. The headlines praised the Eastern states for their “handling” of the virus. The media had been silent about the low rates in the South in March and April, but now wanted us to believe Southern states were home to the most irresponsible people on earth. The scare balloon is always red.
The third linked article from the New York Times (study after study) proving the efficacy of masks is as familiar as the first one. It is—of course—the silly computer animation published by the Times under the headline, “Masks Work. Really. We’ll Show You How.” It is their favorite “evidence” for the efficacy of masks, and it contains no evidence of anything. ‘The editors at the Times are just children playing with comics. They must have linked to this piece of nonsense hundreds of times.
Ten months into our pandemic, the Times can find only three meaningless and over-worked pieces of propaganda to make their case for mask science. I suspect that Times journalists do not select the articles for their links, although one wonders how they allow their names to go onto the byline given the dishonesty. Perhaps an intern or a robot attaches links from a narrow Times-approved library of pseudoscience and cartoons. The whole mission is careless and rote. David Leonhardt may have no idea what gets attached to his words. But he knows he’s terrified of a middle-aged couple sitting quietly in a hotel lobby in Iowa, and he believes masks will fix everything.