PLAGUE JOURNAL June 2020: More Bogus Studies Offer the Press a Way Out; Lives Saved
Re-opening: Using fear and praise to keep the story alive.
[Note: All Plague Journal entries were written as events unfolded. I have edited the drafts for clarity, but the tone and content are original, reflecting what we could see at the time.]
New Studies Praise Us
If we killed people by not locking down fast enough, now we learned that we had saved even more. From Vox on June 9th: “2 new studies show shutdowns were astonishingly effective.” We know it’s hooey by the typically Voxian use of “astonishingly,” which lets us know they don’t believe it (whether they know it or not). The subhead read, “In the United States, the public health measures averted 60 million infections, researchers found.” Who are these “researchers”? Are they something like “experts”?
The article is all politics, with the pandemic buzzwords and the language of the movement. Now that many Americans had the sneaking feeling we’d been had, it was important for the press to come up with some new science to prove that it was all worth it, that they had been right all along.
Both cited studies are from Nature. One of the studies featured an expert from Berkeley who examined “non-pharmaceutical interventions” and used “econometric methods.” The article featured a bizarre chart that might as well have been written in Zoroastrian, with lines and colorful circles and the names of countries and restrictions and a lot of numbers. Although we’d heard from the start that Trump was an absent leader and that governors were keeping us safe (blue) or killing us (red), and although we know that the death rate in New York City was about 120 times higher than the death rate in Honolulu, this flimflam study reduced the behavior of 330 million Americans to a handful of broad and vague practices, which were now measured for their effectiveness.
Measures included, “slow the spread guidelines,” “work from home,” and “other social distance.” Somehow, all human activity over the last three months in America could be reduced to these bumper stickers. I know people who continued going to an office throughout (though not required to) and others who barely dared to look out the window. How could this be, when the study told us everyone did exactly the same things at exactly the same time? The researchers knew more than Santa Clause.
A table suggested that France alone “averted” a total of 45 million COVID-19 cases, quite an achievement in a country of just 69 million people. The same table showed 1.4 million “confirmed COVID-19 cases averted” in France. How they confirmed aversions, we may never know. In a table labeled, “Effect of Individual Policies,” we see a list of actions, with lines and balls and a lot of scientific-looking numbers displayed in decimal form. Here is a description of France's behavior at one point:
Cancel events, no gathering, other social dist. [graphic of black ball in a horizontal line ominously on the left side of a vertical axis] -0.24 (-.38, -0.10) -21.57.
It looks as if France really fucked things up that week. Or was that the week they beat it? It was hard to say. Powerful stuff. Overall, though, we did it: 45 million French infections “averted” and 60 million averted in the U.S.!
Vox hit all the essentials of yellow journalism, with scare headlines in huge print, often of minor news; lavish use of pictures, or imaginary drawings; use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts.
Below the graph, Vox shows another image from Berkeley, a comparison of two animated U.S. maps featuring growing red circles indicating the results we had and the results we would have had if we’d been insufficiently strict, the red circles on the right growing terrifyingly as time advanced, ultimately eating the entire country. It was an astonishingly effective illustration of our astonishingly effective shutdowns, and it was nonsense.
The scare balloon is always red—red for alarm, red for danger, red for blood, red for Republican, and red for stop, stop everything. Just stop. We will let you know when you may proceed.
The other study cited by Vox showed a simple enough graph, showing five “Governmental interventions” on the vertical axis: “Lockdown,” “Public Events,” “School Closure,” “Self Isolation,” “Social Distancing Encouraged.” That looks simple enough. In case we fear it’s not scientific, we learn that they introduced a “Bayesian mechanistic model.” The article credits 19 authors, including “Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team” and Neil M. Ferguson himself (the original scare-monger who created the model that led to lockdowns).
The danger is that many people believe these things, and repeat them to each other as if they are true or meaningful. Everyone knows the lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment, but few know that the experiment was cooked and the conclusions are false. The media are pushing a political narrative, which simply changes when inconvenient developments appear. The fake study from Columbia University a few weeks earlier claimed that we would have saved 36,000 lives if we had shut down a week earlier (as if there’s a single definable shutdown). The point of that study was to show that Trump and other Republicans killed a lot of people by not being strict enough.
Now, a few weeks later, the message was that politicians and the press saved us by being strict in exactly the right amount. It was a story that changed from failure to success overnight: look what we did for you! It is theoretically possible that both stories could be true. We could have saved 60,000 and failed to save another 36,000, but that wasn’t the message we were meant to take away, and the numbers weren’t important. The numbers just had to be large enough to impress us. The change in tone, from failure to success, revealed the political motivations behind the stories.
Why the change? Because we all saw the protesters and rioters breaking every rule given to us by the New York Times and CNN for the previous three months, who were now suddenly on the side of mass public gatherings after being against them for so long. A lot of people had already recognized that the information we were receiving was misguided and that the safety practices were largely for show. Now it was glaringly obvious. Because they couldn’t tell us in June to avoid mass gatherings, they pretended the lockdowns of April and May had made us safe. The studies were trying to convince us that the press and the leaders who listened to them had been right all along, and we should thank them. The lockdowns worked so well that we no longer needed them.
Create an enemy, scare people, demand an emergency response, then justify the actions and take credit for keeping people safe. It’s an old playbook. Hitler told the German people that his army had to invade Poland because Polish forces had attacked Germans along the border. (They had not). The Vox article sententiously claims, “Together, these findings show that public health measures to limit the spread of the pandemic worked.” They had not.