A Pandemic of Misinformation

Team Apocalypse and its allies within the Democratic party have done everything possible to suppress the hard truths that swirl around COVID-19. For over 10 months the Team and its media allies have used fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) to reinforce a catastrophist narrative. They have been strong advocates of policies that are not only ineffective, but harmful. They insist that its all about "following the science" and/or "listening to the scientists," even though there is little if any science to support their actions, and they pick and choose to listen to only those scientists that reinforce their narrative (Anthony Fauci comes to mind.). They have done great damage to lives and livelihoods, and they will NOT be held accountable.

Among the many scientific voices who have tried to fight the Team's false and dangerous narrative is Scott Atlas, M.D.. Atlas has been vilified with ad hominem attacks (a leftist strategy that is intended to shut down anyone who questions their catastrophist narrative) even as the points he makes cannot be refuted. He writes about "a pandemic of misinformation:"

Americans need to understand three realities. First, all 50 states independently directed and implemented their own pandemic policies. In every case, governors and local officials were responsible for on-the-ground choices—every business limit, school closing, shelter-in-place order and mask requirement. No policy on any of these issues was set by the federal government, except those involving federal property and employees.

Second, nearly all states used the same draconian policies that people now insist on hardening, even though the number of positive cases increased while people’s movements were constrained, business activities were strictly limited, and schools were closed. Governors in all but a few states—Florida and South Dakota are notable exceptions—imposed curfews, quarantines, directives on group gatherings, and mask mandates ...

Third, the federal government’s role in the pandemic has been grossly mischaracterized by the media and their Democratic allies. That distortion has obscured several significant successes, while undermining the confidence of ordinary Americans. Federal financial support and directives enabled the development of a massive, state-of-the-art testing capacity and produced billions of dollars of personal protective equipment. Federal agencies met all requests for supplemental medical personnel and hospital-bed capacity. Officials in the Health and Human Services Department have told me there are no unmet requests for extra resources.

And with all of that, the virus spread, cases rose, and deaths among the old and the infirm grew. The reality is that COVID-19 followed the path of other SARS viruses. Although it was somewhat more virulent, the extreme measures adopted within a number of blue states did nothing to stop the spread and at the same time, did great harm to those who couldn't metaphorically hide in their basements but had to venture out to work (or were not allowed to). Atlas continues:

In this season when respiratory virus illnesses become more common and people move indoors to keep warm, many states are turning to more severe restrictions on businesses and outdoor activities. Yet empirical data from the U.S., Europe and Japan show that lockdowns don’t eliminate the virus and don’t stop the virus from spreading. They do, however, create extremely harmful health and social problems beyond a dramatic drop in learning, including a tripling of reported depression, skyrocketing suicidal ideation, unreported child abuse, skipped visits for cancer and other medical care.

It adds up to a future health disaster. “For younger people, the lockdowns are so harmful, so deadly, there’s really no good justification,” says Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, especially when considering their extremely low risk from Covid-19.

States and cities that keep their economies locked down after highly vulnerable populations have been vaccinated will be doubling down on failed policies that are destroying families and sacrificing children, particularly among the working class and poor.

The media has done its best to misinform the public with political attacks about who is to blame for this pain and misery even as it diminishes the great achievement of the new vaccines. The decline of objectivity in journalism has been evident for years. Now we see that even respected scientific journals, which are supposed to vet and publish the best objective research, have been contaminated by politics. Social media has become the arbiter of allowable discussion, while universities intimidate and suppress the free exchange of ideas necessary to uncover scientific truths.

Throughout this period the media has been despicable in its actions, its dishonesty, and its complicity to use the virus for political purposes. The media will pay no price for any of that and in fact, achieved its political aims by contributing to the ascension of Joe Biden as president.

UPDATE:

Although their attempt to control the narrative has now reached a point where legitimate criticism and hard scientific fact is being censored by far too many media outlets, the truth about the debacle created by Team Apocalypse (i.e., Democrats, media journo-hacks, government apparatchiks) is slowing beginning to reach the pubic consciousness. More and more citizens are pushing back against blue state politicians who have instituted freedom-crushing policies that are both ineffective and harmful.

Once the media determined that "case" count was a primary means for increasing FUD and therefore a potent political weapon, COVID-19 death scoreboards were augmented with corresponding "case" scoreboards. No matter that a significant percentage of cases are asymptomatic and the case count will naturally increase as testing increases exponentially (why else the demand for so much testing), "cases" became an irrational indictment of Trump and lead to his ouster from office.

The problem for Team Apocalypse and the case counters is that from 20% to as much as 70 percent of cases are asymptomatic (different studies show a broad range of results)—that is, the "infected" person exhibits no symptoms at all—none. Jeffrey Tucker comments:

Sometime in summer [in conjunction with the newfound emphasis on "cases"], the idea of asymptomatic spread started to trend, bit by bit. It finally went to an explosion of interest in the first week of June. It trailed off again until very recently.

Asymptomatic spread was the answer given to the great question: I’m not sick so why should I have to be locked down? Why are we quarantining the healthy? And what possibly could it mean, in any case, to be sick without symptoms? Why are half the PCR-positive tests assigned to people who otherwise seem to be perfectly fine? 

All these valid questions came to be answered by this one phrase: asymptomatic spread. You might not feel sick. You might not ever have symptoms from SARS-CoV-2. Still, you could be an even worse super spreader without knowing it, infecting people all around you who will carry it to people who will die from the disease. This was also the moment when, subtly and imperceptibly, we were being asked to think of our fellow citizens not as human beings with dignity and rights but pathogen-carrying disease vectors. We had to be masked, all of us, because we are secretly filthy and unclean: we cannot be allowed to breath near others, so even with a mask we must stay 6 feet away. 

(As I type these words, I feel sure that if anyone reads them in ten years, the reader will assume I’m writing fiction or engaged in wild hyperbole. To the future reader: this is all true.) 

On June 7, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, told a press conference that from the known research, asymptomatic spread was “very rare.” “From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual.” She added for emphasis: “It’s very rare.”

In fact, a Chinese study indicates that:

Stringent COVID-19 control measures were imposed in Wuhan between January 23 and April 8, 2020. Estimates of the prevalence of infection following the release of restrictions could inform post-lockdown pandemic management. Here, we describe a city-wide SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid screening programme between May 14 and June 1, 2020 in Wuhan. All city residents aged six years or older were eligible and 9,899,828 (92.9%) participated. No new symptomatic cases and 300 asymptomatic cases (detection rate 0.303/10,000, 95% CI 0.270–0.339/10,000) were identified. There were no positive tests amongst 1,174 close contacts of asymptomatic cases. 107 of 34,424 previously recovered COVID-19 patients tested positive again (re-positive rate 0.31%, 95% CI 0.423–0.574%). The prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Wuhan was therefore very low five to eight weeks after the end of lockdown.

"No positive cases among 1,174 close contacts.  NONE!! NOT ONE.

Gosh that means that many of the COVID "cases" reported are a threat to virtually no one. They're good for hyping hysteria, but not very good at transmitting the virus. I wonder when ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, 60 Minutes, the NYT, WaPo, LAT ... are going the share that rather important information with us.

With every passing day, the idiocy of our misguided approach to COVID-19 becomes more apparent. Driven by a narrative that is both dishonest and anti-scientific, our country has suffered needlessly while in the grip of media-driven hysteria. The policies and half-truths fostered by Team Apocalypse are the reason.