The COVID experts are frauds

Causal connections in medicine are best made by content experts with biases rooted in deep knowledge of the topic at hand.  This isn’t what happened with COVID.  Pandemics don’t happen often enough for there to be experts.  Instead, we have public health officials that have now staked their reputations on endless prophylactic mitigation measures to control COVID that use every piece of data to demonstrate that states that followed their advice were superior to those that did not. 

A clarifying example from the Fall of 2020 involves the highly credentialed, well spoken, (now COVID Whitehouse czar) Dr. Ashish Jha, who has long been an advocate for improving health using data.  Mid-pandemic he strived to do so in a thread that compared and contrasted a good state (Michigan - Democrat governor) with a bad state (neighboring Ohio - Republican governor).  

Figure 1. A comparison by Dr. Jha of the fate of Michigan and Ohio as they relate to mitigation measures. Michigan implemented restrictions in the fall, Ohio did not.  When Dr. Jha is tweeting in December he notes Michigan’s curve has been bent, but Ohio has not., with increased hospitalizations.  Except, winding the clock forward to Spring 2021 shows Michigan suffering a large spike in cases, hospitalizations and deaths while Ohio does not.

The thread concluded that Michigan’s mitigation measures worked, while misbehaving Ohio that lacked the political will to impose restrictions meant a case spike and subsequent mass deaths to follow.  Of course, we now know that the fall outbreak in Ohio did cause some deaths, but not nearly as many as predicted, while Michigan’s victory lap was short lasting as a rapid rise in cases and hospitalizations in the Spring of 2021 pushed the healthcare system there to the brink.  

In the prescient words of Wesley Pedgen, Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, commenting on modeling of mitigation effects on viral spread in March 2020 : “hiding infections in the future is not the same as avoiding them” .  His view, that may very well be the most resilient of all the attempts at prediction, is that a virus can be contained for some period of time, but cannot be stopped. Mitigation simply delays the spread of a virus.  Any population with vulnerable individuals that begins to circulate will start spreading the virus again.

Shamefully, the simple models in the Spring of 2020 used to sell the public on costly social distancing strategies were outright obfuscations of this simple fact.  The New York Times was caught red-handed by Pedgen as the figure below demonstrates. 

Figure 2. NYtimes graphic noting the benefit of 2 months of mitigation is misleading because it isn’t complete.  Upper panel is as represented in the NY Times.  Lower panel is Wesley Pedgen’s continuation of the chart demonstrating lockdowns just save people now so they can get COVID later.

Would policy makers and the people they supposedly represent make very different decisions if they knew the only plan to avoid significant viral spread would be to lock down until a vaccine was available at a time when there was no assurance what the timeline of a safe vaccine was? What if the vaccine only worked to stop spread for a short time before viral mutations allowed the virus to transmit freely?

None of this uncertainty was conveyed to politicians. They were lead by the public health expert class to believe that there was a narrow path to travel to control COVID. Risk calculators based on community COVID transmission levels, masks, and lots of testing were the ticket to controlling COVID.

Long, viral threads from the credentialed class were consumed by large swaths of the public that hungered for someone to tell them how they could stay safe from COVID and still maintain some semblance of the old pre-COVID life. The Chairman of Medicine of the University of California San Francisco used a risk calculator to assure himself and everyone else it was safe for him to visit his very elderly, and ill father in Florida.  Another physician live blogged an international trip to India to visit her family. 

It was incredible.

It was like watching digital shamans go through the 10 steps of an intricate rain dance.

It doesn’t help that panic makes for must-watch-TV, which in turn means instant fame for formerly obscure virologists, epidemiologists and deans of public health who indulge in worst case scenarios. 

The more definite the proclamations of disaster, the more definitive the recommendations that will crush the virus, the more likely you become a recurring TV guest, or a recurring source for print journalists, or star in your very own cover photo shot by a pool wearing sunglasses.

Mainstream journalists seem to have little interest in keeping score to see how the talking heads are doing.   Michigan and Ohio supported a certain narrative.  Until it didn’t. 

But by then everyone has moved on to the next snapshot that supports a certain policy prescription.  It was a popular past time among the know-it-all class to point to the southern waves of COVID in Florida and Texas as penance for not listening to the establishment on a variety of mitigation measures.  It didn’t matter to the chattering class that Florida had been ‘open’ well before the Summer wave… the prospect of using misfortune to make a political point was just too juicy for the establishment media and their political crony sources to ignore.  When southern state cases ebbed, and states with virtuous governors faced spikes, suddenly the air was filled with the “inevitability of seasonal viral surges.”

The hypocrisy went largely unnoticed by the legacy media with some notable exceptions (Charles Blow writes for the New York Times) 

Random people on twitter (the now famous @ianmsc) were much better at pointing out the emperor had no clothes.

Those who spoke about tradeoffs and didn’t provide neat little talking points about stopping the virus were the ones that got it right. Johan Giesecke, epidemiologist and professor emeritus in Sweden wrote in the Spring of 2020 - “Our most important task is not to stop spread, which is all but futile, but to concentrate on giving the unfortunate victims optimal care”.

Instead, we embarked on an economy crushing, child crushing, soul crushing exercise to stop COVID, and everyone got COVID anyway. If the contention is that delaying COVID was “worth it”, the current excess mortality comparisons are not ringing endorsements of that strategy. Sweden has essentially had no excess mortality since February 2021. Compare that to the United States experience.

And no, the immediate neighbor Norway comparisons aren’t particularly convincing, either.

And yet not a single one of these cretins who destroyed society as we knew it and would do so again if given the opportunity have any insight into the depths of their incompetence. Every day is an opportunity to create an alternative reality where masks must continue on children because of some horrendously confounded study either about the efficacy of masks or the long term effects of COVID.

These are not good faith interlocutors. They belong to a hyper-educated intellectual idiot cult that craves power. Its not enough that they are allowed to vaccinate their own children every 4 months with the same vaccine forever, they want to force you to do the same to your children. You may have decided that the risks of sending your child to school is worth it, but they will force schools closed because they don’t feel safe.

The immediate danger to America isn’t Putin invading Ukraine, or Nancy Pelosi rattling China’s cage by visiting Taiwan, its America’s neurotic, hyperanxious academic elite that want you to use a risk calculator based on some made up assumptions to decide if you can visit your 90 year old father.

America’s health is best preserved by ignoring and defunding these charlatans and their decerebrate followers.

Anish Koka is a Cardiologist. Follow him on twitter @anish_koka.