New Details Show Extent To Which Medical Professionals Are Dealing With Covid Cranks- Like Scott Atlas - The New Pandemic Advisor

How the Covid cranks see themselves: As a kind of newly minted version of Galileo, And Scott Atlas- who wants to get 2 million plus Americans killed to get to a Covid resolution.  Call him "Doctor  Death"

"There's a new plan being pushed in the White House that proponents hope will kill the virus and get the president re-elected, And that plan is to just let most of all of us get infected. And if more than two million people have to die as a result, well, so be it.  That may sound crazy or  hyperbolic but that is really what it is.  That plan is being pushed by a guy named Scott Atlas who this month became Trump's pandemic advisor.  He fancies himself as the anti-Fauci and he says America should embrace a strategy of herd immunity.  

This strategy has been tried before in Sweden and it was a disaster. The strategy led to five times as many deaths as its neighbors and they suffered the same level of economic setback.  The outcome then was just a lot more dead Swedes, no economic benefit.  This is where we are today, after months and 185,000 dead.  The sheer nihilistic absurdity." - Chris Hayes, on 'All In',  last night

"It is a bit crazy. We are many months  into this and we know some things that work and which don't in terms of not having a lot of people die and not having your economy destroyed. Sweden is not the model for any of us. And even Scott Gottlieb former FDA commissioner has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying as much and why this stuff keeps coming up. This feels to me like laziness.  We don't want to do the hard work in protecting American lives.  There's just this strategy of let's let it go and see where it goes. Well, we know where it goes."  Dr. Ashish Jha, Director of Harvard's Global Health Institute. 

The header in The Sunday Denver Post piece from Aug. 23rd ('Doctors Battle Tidal Wave Of Covid Misinformation', Business, p. 5K) I almost passed over because I was sure I'd read about it all before. But I was wrong.   Though I'd written previous posts on this batshit insanity,  e.g.

• The Right's COVID Science Deniers, Hacks, Cranks &...

    I'd really had no idea how deep the mental rot of deranged beliefs went and the degree to which medical professionals - the real ones, not the fakes trotted out by Trump - were up against a tidal wave of bullshit, blarney and bollocks.  For example, as the Post article notes, I wasn't aware that at least 800 people world wide had died - and thousands more hospitalized-  because they'd ingested highly concentrated alcohol to kill the virus.  The findings were published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.   

   Even more concerning to many medical professionals is the extent to which false information is spreading online in the U.S. (such as related to masks and lockdowns) and which may be responsible for 40,000 or more of the more than 180,000 U.S. deaths.  Much of this emerged in an online conference in July in which the groundwork had been laid to measure the harm of virus-related misinformation online.  These falsehoods and misinformation "have undermined efforts to get people to wear masks and fueled a belief the seriousness of the disease is overblown."

    Among the primary sources of misbegotten memes have been the crackpot Judy Mikovits (featured in the mockumentary 'Plandemic'), and the Stanford "meta research" quack John Ioannidis - who claimed the lockdowns were implemented without adequate evidence, and the fatality rate of Covid-19 is not much worse than seasonal flu. 

    According to Daniel Allington, a senior lecturer at King's College, London, the toxic effects of the tidal wave of misinformation are now evident in the statistics.   As he pointed out (ibid.):

   "This is no longer just an anecdotal observation that some individual doctors have made. This is a statistically significant pattern we can observe in a large survey."

    This also has confirmed my fear that a large swath of the American public can no longer reason or think critically.  Their minds have become receptacles - or perhaps better unwitting hostages- to parasitical mind viruses, such as from 'Plandemic'.   These people, not all without college degrees, have little or no grasp of the virus' biology. Nor do they grasp that science is a process of self-correction in the context of successive approximations.  If the Trumpkin "counter revolutionaries",  cranks and quacks grasped that they'd know that initial errors or wrong assumptions (or prescriptions for behavior)  are nothing new as a novel phenomenon is confronted. 

   But crank beliefs are only a part of how the medical system itself is being undermined.  In the Post piece we meet Dr. Howard Mell, an ER physician in an Illinois suburb of St. Louis who relates how he was falsely accused (by a patient's wife)  of filling out a death certificate to make money off Covid. 

   Mell tried to explain to the distraught woman that the form was accurate and also that his pay wasn't based on the cause of death. However, she was having none of it, yelling:

    "We've seen online how you guys get more money!"

    Thus her brain had been totally taken over by some online mind rot meme.  This is why Dr. Joseph Varon at Houston's United Memorial Medical Center decided last month  to allow direct filming of scenes inside an ICU - as televised on assorted MSNBC segments.  In an interview later he explained he hoped by actually seeing these scenes of what front line medical staff are doing, people will drop the infernal (and idiotic) belief that it's all a "hoax" or "Plandemic".   Or that ER docs are getting paid to incorrectly fill out death certificates.

    As for Dr. Mell, he reports (ibid.) the situation has not improved. 

    "Several times per week he meets someone who believes false medical information that was discovered online."

   The damnable thing is that the correct information CAN be found online, with a minimum of due diligence. So why isn't it?  I suspect there are two reasons: 1) the actual information isn't as attractive (or exciting)  as the misinformation. More often than not an understanding of basic scientific principles is already assumed which the non-specialist doesn't have the patience to assimilate. And (2) the minds of too many casual readers are already co-opted by preconceived beliefs or negative attitudes, i.e. a distrust of science, or regarding scientists as "elitists".  Both of these in tandem can wreak havoc and help spread disinfo and falsehoods.

  Then there is the problem of "confirmation bias" which reinforces the negative aspects noted above.  That is, the tendency to find confirmatory evidence for what one already believes.  For example, let's say - despite all the medical evidence on lockdowns being the best way to control the virus' spread after a surge - a person with an existing negative attitude reads this from the WSJ Weekend edition: 

   "We've never before responded to a contagion by closing down whole countries."

    This from a contrarian imbecile and sometime novelist named Lionel Shriver, in a WSJ interview.   The above quote was clear enough to mark her as imbecilic (given we've never before beheld a contagion like Covid - with a huge contingent of secret spreaders among the populace) but her quote on racial issues in the U.S. confirms it, e.g.:

     "The far left's consuming obsession with race has been building for years. Then for months these same folks have been cooped up, fuming over their computers.

   So the 2020 explosion of Black Lives Matter  was enabled by Covid. Floyd's killing merely lit the fuse."

     In other words, being shuttered in lockdown conditions flipped the brains of the  millions of latent protesters and caused them to go literally ape shit, and act out in the streets.  Not because of some higher purpose but because being locked in for months drove them partially bonkers. As I said, case closed on Shriver's imbecility. 

       Back to the report on Covid idiocy in the D. Post:  Dr. Ryan Stanton - an ER physician in Kentucky - disclosed that a number of sick patients waited until it was nearly too late to visit a hospital with Covid symptoms. "They were convinced by what they had read online that 'Covid was no big deal'."

       According to Dr. Stanton (ibid.):

         "They thought it was just a ploy, a sham, a conspiracy. It just blew my mind that they could just put these blinders on and ignore the facts."

       But that barely scratches the surface of how nonsense has infected people's minds. One paramedic cited in the piece, Thomas Knowles, reported being "troubled" - after searching social media for virus misinformation. He found a range of false claims such as doctors taking people's blood for research than leaving them to die, as well as injecting them with nanoparticles to control behavior. In Knowles own words (ibid.):

    "I've never personally encountered such a strong, consistent - and so clearly coordinated from somewhere - a collective of people so entrenched in their false belief."

      But let's also bear in mind that the brain rot starts at the top, i.e. with the top office holder in the land: Trump. And now we know he's appointed another notorious Quack - Scott Atlas - as a medical "advisor." and the Anti-Fauci.   As noted in a recent WaPo expose, 

     https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-coronavirus-scott-atlas-herd-immunity/2020/08/30/925e68fe-e93b-11ea-970a-64c73a1c2392_story.html

     Atlas, another Stanford screwball (from its Hoover Institution), is promoting a "herd immunity" approach which could leave over 2 million Americans dead in order to complete  according to the Post's assessment.  This is the moron Trump has offering him advice to pass on to the rest of us.   One suspects Trump ditched Stella Immanuel, one of "America's Frontline Doctors"  
   
    as his go to quack after too many sensible people caught on to her demon shtick, i.e. spreading B.S. about demons' involving themselves in our health as a "residue" of human intercourse with them.   Meanwhile Top Quack Scott Atlas' plan is  based upon a:

   “herd immunity” strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, "

      Trouble is, as Dr. Ashish Jha pointed out on 'All In' last night, millions would have to die before this could materialize.  Dr. Jha referenced Atlas' invocation of the Swedish model, but as we know:

    "Sweden’s handling of the pandemic has been heavily criticized by public health officials and infectious-disease experts as reckless — the country’s infection and death rates are among the world’s highest. It also hasn’t escaped the deep economic problems resulting from the pandemic."

      But addle-pated conservos and their quacks love it because it requires minimal control aspects, basically reducing the approach to "let 'em live or let die". 

     The other side of this Trumpy horse manure is the yen to try to push a vaccine as workable, safe and effective by Nov. 3rd - so El Dotard can claim bragging rights.  And so we behold numerous efforts to peddle such baloney, basically a politically motivated operation to assist Trump in getting re-elected.  But I have no intention of going for any vaccine before next year, because I am 99.99999% certain none will be fully tested (e.g. including Phase 3) before then.  The other aspect is that if a poor vaccine is rushed, there is little doubt it will quash any normative public vaccine effort. And that's the last thing we need given the existing conspiracy ideations about vaccines, and the potential for this virus to spread.

    Finally, the latest lunacy to creep into the conspiracy  memo-sphere is that the COVID 19 death toll is overstated.  Fortunately, Dr. Anthony Fauci has slammed this low I.Q. bunkum and the right wing idiots spreading it. As noted in The Guardian,Fauci told NBC:

    “There is absolutely no evidence that that’s the case at all.  I think it falls under the category of something that’s very unfortunate – these conspiracy theories that we hear about. Any time we have a crisis of any sort there is always this popping up of conspiracy theories.”

     The  primary source of these horse shit claims and conspiracy canards- let us remember - is none other than Donnie Dotard. Another reason we need to get his fat, orange ass out of office lest he lower the U.S. median I.Q. by another 50 points by 2025.


       See Also:
     https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-pulse/2020/08/17/how-scott-atlas-caught-trumps-ear-789964
     
     Excerpt:
     
   Atlas, a fellow at Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, repeatedly used his TV hits to argue that fears about coronavirus outpace reality, a message that appealed to Trump and his advisers.  Atlas has also argued against expanded Covid-19 testing, including a proposal championed by White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx to scale up home testing through methods such as saliva tests. .. And recently, in a task force meeting, Atlas told Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor, that science does not definitively support government mandates on wearing masks.

   And:

The Trump Administration | Covid-19 | Economic Policy

The Freedom Caucus Is in Charge of Covid-19 Policy, and We're All Going to Die

And:

  

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Sweden Shouldn't Be America's Pandemic Model - WSJ

    Excerpt:

     Proponents point to Sweden as a successful model of this approach. Swedish government officials initially sought to let the virus run largely unchallenged in the general population while taking steps to protect the elderly. The Swedish view was that the country could reach herd immunity without jeopardizing the economy. But holding up Sweden as an enlightened model misreads important parts of its experience.

    Many Swedes pulled back from normal activities to shelter themselves from infection anyway, even younger and middle-aged people. The country experienced 5,821 Covid deaths in a population the size of North Carolina. And Sweden is far short of herd immunity, even as the country’s economic recovery ranks among the worst in its region. A May survey of Swedish exposure to coronavirus found that 6.7% of those aged 20 to 64 had evidence of past infection, along with 4.7% of those younger than 19 and 2.7% of those 65 and older. Stockholm, the country’s single large population center, also has a much lower density than most American cities. That reduces Sweden’s risk of continued epidemic spread.

      Yet embrace of the “Swedish model” is based on assumptions that sidestep some of these facts.     The biggest misconception is a belief that there’s a large reservoir of Americans who are  already immune to Covid.   It’s important to protect the old and the vulnerable, who are at the highest risk of severe illness and bad outcomes. But like most issues of medicine, it isn’t a binary choice. Given the uncertainties of how this virus spreads and its high risk of infirmities, it would be unwise to abandon efforts to limit Covid spread wherever possible. That means continued universal masking, social distancing, and diagnosing and tracing of individual cases.

The Right's COVID Science Deniers, Hacks, Cranks & Quacks Don't Get To Wrap Themselves In Galileo!

"We're living in a moment when the U.S. is a laughingstock or a subject of pity around the world.  Look at the chart of nations and all who've gotten their cases down, some at or near zero. Then look at the graph going straight up. That is us, our cases are skyrocketing.  We are living in this tragedy, this national humiliation for all to see."  - Chris Hayes, on 'All In', July 2nd

The Right's clowns and cranks as well as quacks, now appear to have gotten inside the head of Ari Schulman, author of an article entitled: 'The Counter Scientific Revolution - Coronavirus And The Galilean Right' (New Republic, July-August, p. 22)   See e.g.

https://newrepublic.com/article/158058/coronavirus-conservative-experts-scientific-counterrevolution

First, there is no "scientific counter revolution" marshaled by the likes of the crackpot Judy Mikovits (featured in the mockumentary 'Plandemic'), or the Stanford "meta research" quack John Ioannidis - who claimed the lockdowns were implemented without adequate evidence  - and who I skewered in a previous post, i.e.

WHO Are These Anti-Lockdown Medical Quacks That Ke...

Wherein I pointed out critics' objections to a paper by Ioannidis, e.g.

"These critics have pointed out - the study was "not random in selection"  and "disproportionately weighted toward white women under 64".  

Adding:

"He leaves out the demographics most susceptible to the virus (African Americans and the elderly) then has the nerve to trot out this B.S.  that the fatality rate is comparable to seasonal flu?   I call quackery! "

Second, Schulman's complaint appears to be mostly with the legit scientific establishment, though he does concede the experts' initial "dilatory announcements" (such as "fudging the question of whether masks were needed") contributed to an opening for Trump to exploit them to his own ends with his anti-mask, anti-science narratives.   As Schulman puts it:

"As President Trump has shown, where trust declines, debunkers abound. Though the dysfunctional politics of expert-administered modern science claims a distinctly left-leaning valence and genealogy, it has lately found the American right to be an obliging host organism. "


 But this exploitation by Trump and the Right's diehard science deniers or skeptic quacks does not endow their position with any genuine "counter science"  based on evidence.  Nor does it confer on them the mantle of Galieo Galilei which they are now attempting to grab. (I.e. to show they are victims of an orthodox establishment like Galileo was of the Inquisition, when he proposed his heliocentric theory to counter the geocentric  - Ptolemaic - one embraced by the Roman Catholic Church)

This is false analogy because Galileo was the ultimate empirical scientist who came to his theory by patient observations, such as studying the motions of the moons of Jupiter, as well as conducting other experiments (e.g. inclined plane) in which he also tested for errors and faulty assumptions. Something the Trumpkins never do.  Nor do they grasp that science is a process of self-correction in the context of successive approximations.  If the Trumpkin "counter revolutionaries",  cranks and quacks grasped that they'd know that initial errors or wrong assumptions (or prescriptions for behavior)  are nothing new as a novel phenomenon is confronted. 

Ok, Schulman does acknowledge this up to a point but then insists his real issue is with the media and other public institutions just imbibing the experts' pronouncements, as if they can't be challenged. As he writes:

"The problem is not merely the experts were wrong - that is to be expected. It is, rather, that our lead institutions and public information outlets continually teated the assurances of experts as neutral interpretations of settled science when they  plainly were not.  And these expert recommendations were translated into the dominant political discourse not mainly as a difficult judgment about to how to act against a novel, poorly understood threat - but as a pretext to police the boundaries of public opinion, to sneer at its dissenters."

But cripes, what would one expect in the middle of a pandemic the likes of which no one has seen before? Do we really want every Tom, Dick and Suzy sounding off and the media judging their opinions with equal weight  to experts?  And look, by mid -April it was pretty damned clear what needed to be done, i.e. masks were needed like in Asian nations, and  extended lockdowns were the primary key to snuffing the virus' spread early on.   This was not rocket science, or as ambiguous an aspect as Schulman makes it out to be.  In particular, flattening the curve was a genuine observable effect of necessary behaviors in those nations that took Covid-19 seriously.   By which I mean had a nationally coordinated response, as opposed to a piecemeal 'do as you please" one like for the U.S.  We also have more than enough evidence from sundry nations'  curves that both masks and lockdowns prevented exponential increases. These exponential increases in case loads now happen to be overwhelming our U.S. hospitals. 

I suspect, because no national mask mandate was ordered,  which yes - needed some serious "sneering at dissenters" like these knuckledragging fools:


But what interested me is the genesis of the Right's connection to Galileo or these crackpots being referred to   (by Schulman) as "the Trumpian, Galilean Right".  Evidently it began with Judy Mikovits whose grievances against her original academic (virology) community led her to deliberately make insipid comparisons with Galileo. As Schulman describes it:

"Mikovits is the most telling of the Covid skeptics. Plandemic depicts her as a persecuted truth-teller daring to speak out against a corrupt scientific orthodoxy. (Anthony Fauci features as a key villain in the film and in Mikovits’s counter-theories about the virus.) Her book Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science, published in April, offers as an epigraph Galileo’s reply, according to lore, to his Vatican inquisitors after being condemned as a heretic—“Eppur si muove” (And yet it moves). In anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s foreword to the book, he expands on the alleged Galileo parallel, and describes Mikovits as a “revolutionary” offering “censored and ‘dangerous’ science,” who suffered a “lynching” at the hands of the establishment. Coronavirus skeptics on the right have eagerly embraced this image of counter-experts as martyrs, heroes standing up to the Inquisition—and the counter-experts themselves have largely embraced the role."

Well, you can't make this crap up, folks. There it is.   But don't be fooled!  Mikovits is no latter day Galileo, far from it.   If any comparison is valid it would be with Immanuel  Velikovsky,  the Russian psychotherapist who scribbled the book, 'Worlds in Collision'.  This farrago of pseudo scientific rubbish argued that  Jupiter belched out a comet with a nucleus the mass of the planet Venus.  It then passed  so close to Earth it caused its rotation to halt (coinciding with Joshua's famous trumpet blast)  - and in addition-  triggered the precipitation of carbohydrates (from hydrocarbons) resulting in the manna falling from the skies to feed the wandering Israelites.  

It took a subsequent essay by the late science writer Isaac Asimov to finally put to rest most of this horse manure after he showed any such halting of Earth's rotation would have converted all its rotational kinetic energy into thermal energy and melted the crust.

So the Right's anti-maskers and anti-lockdown quacks and cranks are not "Galileans"  but latter day Velikovskians.    Nor are they "martyrs"  but rather cynical tools (in the case of the 'professionals') out to use politicization of the virus to help Trump's economic agenda to reopen prematurely.  As if to try to justify his unwillingness to all out pillory them, Schulman writes at one point:

"The product of these dynamics has not been, as we are often told, a Republican rejection of science itself—of its methodologies, its hunger for knowledge of the world, its desire for mastery over nature, its admiration for the excellence on display in rational inquiry. Rather, it has been the adoption of an outsider’s stance to the current scientific establishment—to its particular institutions, and to the pronouncements of its expert class."

"Outsider's stance", bollocks!  All of this followed endless debates  "over embryonic stem cell research, abortion, physician-assisted suicide, and cloning—in which liberal partisans claimed the mantle of science for their side."   But truth be told, serious science backed up most of the practical positions, such as for stem cell research and abortion.  (Cloning has since been determined not all it was originally cracked up to be, and again I emphasize the word "originally" before the actual experiments were conducted in detail.)

Then, fortunately,  Schulman -   perhaps realizing he got carried away with what might be construed as too much sympathy for the Trumpie quacks, cranks and zombies -    writes: 

"the Trump era has given all but free rein to the right’s adoption of the Galilean stance. Perhaps this was inevitable: It is the clearest model available in our culture’s scientific mythology, however tenuous a relationship it may bear to history, of a figure dissenting from mainstream scientific views, one who sees himself as persecuted by a corrupt orthodoxy to which he is the rightful heir. The Galileo myth is also continuous with a long history of scientific gadflies who see themselves carrying forward the legacy of the Enlightenment model of skeptical inquiry: the radical individual freed from the oppression of institutions, in something of a funhouse-mirror image of the real work of science. The problem we’re now seeing, however, is that the Galileo model now often eventuates not only in counterinstitutional inquiry, but also in bad science. Though the Galileo posture is a response to a genuine alienation—and some real persecution—it is also an all too convenient pose."

And it’s crucial to recognize how the debunking style of the latter-day Galilean pose departs from the earlier modes of opposition to the scientific establishment. Whereas those were attempts—sometimes robust, sometimes cynical—to establish a set of countervailing scientific institutions, the Galilean mode is a free-floating anti-institutionalism. It is, to cite an old saw, the dilemma of the dog chasing a car: It wouldn’t know what to do if it caught it.

President Trump’s relationship to science during the pandemic offers a sobering instance of just how badly things can go once the dog catches the car. Even now that they hold the reins of power over crucial elements of the scientific establishment, he and his defenders have evinced an inability to understand how to relate to the scientific discourse in anything other than an aggrieved outsider’s role."

Well, at least he comes to that sound judgment near the end.  Better than not at all, so I could at least recognize some content as from The New Republic and not The National Review!

See Also:

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Dear Trumpers: Eat Shit and Die, Eh?

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WHO Are These Anti-Lockdown Medical Quacks That Keep Doing Dotard's Work For Him?

Health worker blocks Trumpie wackjobs over the weekend in Denver. One WSJ op-ed twit claimed the protester "risked contamination" of the ER - not realizing he was wearing a costume designed for the purpose of protest.

The chaotic, reckless, and  incompetent American response to the coronavirus pandemic, especially in a politically polarized and dysfunctional landscape, has spawned a formidable propaganda push.  On some days I swear the intensity is nearly as much as that mounted against serious, anti-Warren Commission JFK assassination researchers - like the late Mark Lane, Peter Dale Scott and  James Di Eugenio.   But we should not be  surprised at the level of propaganda - or that some scientists have been recruited to abet it - much like climate denier scientists willing to be paid whores for the fossil fuel industry.  This is the nation we inhabit, riven by a "partisan" pandemic - so you need to take care where you get your information.

As with any serious propaganda effort, if it is to gain "clickbait" in the competing media environment, there must be willing shills and quacks ready to sell out.  The sellout depends upon their spewing enough balderdash and bollocks to confuse the casual reader and make their arguments/ complaints seem plausible.  In this case, the arguments and complaints are against the medical specialist majority who point out that in the absence of a vaccine - or effective treatment- the only weapon left in the quiver is the social lockdown.  As prime evidence these genuine experts have  cited the example of the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918.  Specifically, how those communities that opened up for business too soon saw inundated  hospitals, morgues, funeral homes and even ordinary homes (where residents had to store the corpses in closets and basements ).  As noted in The Colorado Springs Gazette yesterday, p. 1A:

"In the fall of 1918, the number of cases finally appeared to be leveling off in Denver. Business owners pressured government officials to let them open back up, according to a history by Stephen Leonard, a professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver. 

Theater owners marched on the mayor’s office complaining that restrictions were costing them $50,000 per week. The mayor relented. On Nov. 11, Denver residents flooded back into the streets to celebrate the end of World War I. It turns out, they were playing Russian roulette with the virus. Two weeks later, the city recorded 605 cases of Spanish flu and 22 deaths on a single day. Stay-at-home orders and other restrictions went back in place and the economy stalled anew."

Do the quacks that are trotted out now for positive spin get any of that?  Have they seen the 21 pages of obituaries  (with photos)- all Covid patients- such as recently appeared in The Boston Globe?  I doubt it. Else they'd not make stupid comparisons to "seasonal flu" or try to suggest "data" that indicates the severity isn't much worse than that.  I already cited one quack,  Joseph A. Ladapo (of UCLA),  who claimed in a recent op-ed that "the shutdowns if prolonged will only make matters worse."      Adding that even when restrictions are lifted "we will emerge right back where we started.... and no matter what our hospitals will still be overwhelmed."

 In  response to Ladapo's  loose nonsense I noted his obsession with the fatality rate -which, yeah, can be reasonably debated given our too low testing - but must not be conflated with the potential of this virus to overrun medical resources.  (Especially in the wake of the most recent finding of "silent hypoxia" seeded by the virus).  I use the same argument against the more recent anti-lockdown shills, including Dr. John Ioannidis  (WSJ, op. cit. p. A13, 'The Bearer of Good Coronavirus News') and  Dr. David Katz who appeared on Real Time Friday night - mostly as Bill Maher's  politically incorrect pet.

In the case of Ioannidis, we read (ibid.) - according to his WSJ PR - propaganda shill  Allysia Ginley (author of the piece):

"He's published more than 1,000 papers yet he's now found himself pilloried because he dissents from theories behind the lockdowns - because he's looked at the data and found good news." 

What's this 'good news'?   Well, in a March article published in Stat News he's argued that Covid-19 is "far less deadly than modelers were assuming" - with a likely fatality rate "comparable to that of seasonal flu."    The study on which the piece was based used data from some 3,300 people in San Jose, CA, to do an antibody test analysis.  The finding was that the actually number of infected people was 50-85x greater than actually found with the antigen tests (which most people are seeking and for which there exists a dearth of reagents, swabs etc.) Anyway Ioannidis & Co. thereby concluded that because the number of infected was so much greater then the actual fatality rate had to be vastly lower - from 0.12 % to 0.20 %, or about the same as a bad seasonal flu.

That's pretty cool considering that - as critics have pointed out - the study was "not random in selection"  and "disproportionately weighted toward white women under 64".  Jeezus Peace! He leaves out the demographics most susceptible to the virus (African Americans and the elderly) then has the nerve to trot out this B.S.  that the fatality rate is comparable to seasonal flu?   I call quackery! Indeed, given newly released data in a separate antibody study (using professional statistical standards) discloses the Covid-19 virus is "far more lethal" than flu, it pretty well proves Ioannidis is a quack.

We further learn he's  taken issue with the Imperial College study announced some 6 weeks ago., i.e.  "If data are limited or flawed their errors are being propagated through the model".

That's pretty choice - leveling charges on "flaws and data errors" when his own study is rife with selection bias. It did try to correct  for the selection bias  by "weighting the results according to sex, bias and ZIP code",   but everyone who's done serious statistical research knows that sort of ex post facto tweaking is mostly B.S.  In an analogous sense, I pointed out the multiple selection biases introduced in relation to the research of  an astrophysics quack,  Jason Lisle.  This character (who also believes in a "young Sun")   attempted to substitute 'local correlation tracking' (LCT)  for a failure to resolve granules in his work and thereby obtain accurate data  e..g.

Why Jason Lisle is wrong in his Solar Super-granul...

Meanwhile,  unlike Lisle, this guy Ioannidis has earned much of his status and renown doing "meta - analyses", i.e. analyzing the foibles, flaws in others' research.  Maybe it's time to reintroduce  Ioannidis to the old saw "Physician, heal thyself".  Or in this case, medical researcher learn from your own critiques!

Back to the WSJ  PR puff piece, we further see Ioannides  unloading on the pro-lockdown medical specialists, i.e.:  "There's just some sort of mob mentality operating here that just insists this has to be the end of the world, that the sky is falling".  Here, I had to again call "Q-U-A-C-K"  and would have even if he had published 1 million papers .  Too harsh?   Not at all! Ioannidis'  bollocks about the "sky is falling" sealed it for me that he's either a  witting (or unwitting) Trump tool or willing quack.  Because none of the medical specialists and epidemiologists who've advised that the lockdown is our only weapon, including: Drs. Anhony Fauci, Harvard's  Ashish Jha   and Penn State's Zeke Emanuel, have said "it's the end of the world" or the "sky is falling".  They have said that no social distancing or lockdown  risks the inundation of the medical care and health system, the realistic nightmare scenario.  Especially in an environment in which the number of respirators, N95 masks and general PPE are so critically low - thanks to the incompetent and criminal Trump bunch - so that front line ER and ICU docs, nurses are having to re-use masks week after week.  

Another dumb remark of Ioannidis was:"We have some evidence that negative news is more attractive than positive news, gets more clicks."  Which makes me wonder which parallel world he inhabits.  Because at least on Brane Space, whenever I've posted anything on the pandemic the reads are 40- 50 percent fewer than other topics, including for the mathematical and physics diversions. Go figure!  There is also something to be said - as NY Times' Jennifer Senior points out ('In Praise of Pessimism'), for being a "defensive pessimist" in a time like we're in.   As she writes:

"What, you may ask, are defensive pessimists? They are people who lean way into their anxiety, rather than repress it or narcotize it or allow it to petrify them into stone. Because if things start going downhill, defensive pessimists will be the ones with their feet already on the brakes."

I've also found defensive pessimists  - among whom are most of my friends, acquaintances- are more able to separate noise from signal in our saturated media realm. They are also more likely to spot BS from a mile away, and avoid being snookered like too many in the population.  They also tend to have more active agency and critical thinking skills.  So, yeah, they are drawn to more "negative" accounts because they suspect (rightly) they are more likely invested with reality, as opposed to Pollyannish propaganda like Ioannidis tries to foist on us.

 Further research discloses that Stanford harbors a nest of these quacks (not surprising given it's the site of the Hoover Institution) who are carrying water for FOX, and "making Trump's talking points for him."  In fact, all the work of these ideologically contaminated bozos needs to be ignored, like Jason Lisle's bunkum in pseudo-astrophysics. In line with my objections (above)  Marm Kilpatrick, an infectious disease researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz has noted in respect of the antibody-based Stanford study. “The authors have made no efforts to deal with clearly known biases and whole study design is problematic.”  Other critics have contended the Stanford  (antibody) analysis is troubled because it draws sweeping conclusions based on statistically rare events, and is rife with sampling and statistical imperfections.

Perhaps  it ought not surprise anyone that two other Stanford quacks (Eran Bendavid,  Jay Bhattacharya) had earlier received prominence in another WSJ op ed  ('Is COVID-19 As Deadly As They Say', p. A16, March 25).  Indeed,  the  pair's nonsense was widely circulated on pro-Trump websites,   and you got the same screwball analysis as Ioannidis. They wrote, “A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health. We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns.”

The Imperial College  report, was released  by an epidemic modeling group at Imperial College London..  The bottom line conclusion from one of its lead authors - Neil Ferguson - was that: the potential health impacts were comparable to the devastating 1918 influenza outbreak.  Also, and this is the kicker, would “kind of overwhelm health system capacity in any developed country, including the United States unless measures to reduce the spread of the virus were taken."

 That is the core  aspect for lockdowns, not the death or fatality rate per se, which none of these goofballs gets. One indeed wonders if any of these "rebels"  has seen the evening news coverage showing the interior of ERs with a shortage of ventilators, and the dead bodies having to be put into refrigeration trucks for storage. This was revealed via a jarring video released 2 weeks earlier showing the inside of an overwhelmed ER at Elmhurst hospital in Queens.  This was compliments of Dr. Colleen Smith - who became a COVID-19 victim herself- probably from not having adequate protective equipment.

 Yet another medical quack not yet discussed is David Katz, who appeared on Bill Maher's isolated setting version of Real Time in a one on one.  Katz bloviated for 10-15 minutes along similar lines to Ioannidis, and mostly just reinforcing Maher's confirmation bias. That is,  that this virus isn't much worse than flu and certainly that a lockdown  is an overreaction.   

All Maher succeeded in doing is reveal "even more dangerous quackery" -  his own - in hyping Katz. This from a guy (supposedly high IQ) but still leery of vaccines, e.g.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/bill-maher-believes-people-should-want-to-get-coronavirus

As noted from the above link:

On Friday night, instead of opting for a despicably racist rant against China over the novel coronavirus or blaming the media, Bill Maher welcomed Dr. David Katz, a doctor and ex-instructor at the Yale School of Medicine, onto his show Real Time.

Dr. Katz, who consistently flaunts his Yale ties despite the fact that they were severed in 2016, has become something of a right-wing darling after penning a controversial New York Times op-ed on March 20 titled “Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease?” In it, Katz argues against the self-isolation policies put in place by most of the U.S., instead saying the country should isolate the elderly and infirm, which would thus “allow most of society to return to life as usual and perhaps prevent vast segments of the economy from collapsing. Healthy children could return to school and healthy adults go back to their jobs. Theaters and restaurants could reopen, though we might be wise to avoid very large social gatherings like stadium sporting events and concerts.”

Following his op-ed, Katz has made appearances on Fox News touting his hole-filled theory, thereby co-signing a network that’s called the pandemic a “hoax”; repeatedly downplayed it; and spent hours and hours pushing hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure, even though it’s been determined by most of the medical community to do way more harm than good following a series of poisonings and deaths. On top of that, a convincing refutation of Katz’s ill-advised piece was published in The New York Times from those currently at the Yale School of Public Health that read, in part: 'it is not yet known who all of the most vulnerable people are. We believe that  it is easier, quicker and more efficient to reduce transmission over all than to permit high levels of transmission in the community but somehow keep it from afflicting susceptible people in our highly networked world.'

Despite all this, there was Katz on Maher’s HBO show regurgitating the arguments he made in his ridiculed Times piece—which he wrote when we were at 200 deaths nationwide; we’re now at 52,400 deaths and climbing with strict shutdowns and social distancing in place. "

To Katz’s argument that everyone should want to get infected with COVID-19, Maher actually  replied, “Yeah, I think you make a lot of sense there. And I think it’s a shame—you talk about politicization, that people like you who sound reasonable, maybe it’s not the exact one true opinion you hear somewhere else, has to go on Fox News.”     Seriously, Bill?  He has to go on FOX News because that is the place for pushing hoaxes, hoax "cures" (like hydroxychloroquine) and quacks like Katz.

 Another aspect of Katz I learned: He was rightly pilloried by skeptics back in 2008 for propounding the concept of  "fluidity of evidence".  In fact there is no such thing. Evidence either exists in an objective form or it does not, there is no 'fluidity' about it.   As noted from Science Blogs (June 18, 2008)

"No, he is not happy at all. Specifically, he is not happy with the skeptical blogosphere. He apparently feels that we nasty, close-minded skeptics have been so very unfair in our discussions of him. Specifically, he is not happy how several of us have called him to task for his remarks at the 1st Annual Integrative Medicine Scientific Symposium held in April at Yale University. In particular, what stood out (and provoked the sarcasm and contempt of several bloggers devoted to discussing scientific medicine and going after quackery) was Dr. Katz's fanatastically Orwellian advocating for a more "fluid concept of evidence" in evaluating so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative" medicine. His remarks were lambasted in particular by Professor David Colquhoun (who characterized his remarks as "not science" and "not even common sense"), 

Incredibly,  Katz also claimed  on Real Time that it’s “the liberal ideology that seems to be so resistant to talking about unemployment and the economy,” when amid the COVID-19 crisis, the progressive left wing of the Democratic Party—Bernie Sanders, AOC and the like—have been fighting hard for workers and arguing for rent cancellation as well as giving $2,000 a month to each household during the shutdown.  Maher's response? A bot -like nod of the head, no challenge, no criticism - despite having interviewed Sen. Sanders only a few weeks earlier (April 3rd Real Time) and being told first hand the mission. 

All of which explains why Janice is no longer able to watch Maher, as he  has allowed an original welcome independence of thought to descend into a form of stupidity in the name of misplaced political incorrectness.   The reason Katz is not on stations other than FOX is that he is a transparent quack, a useful idiot for the lowbrows and spin masters that infest Trump TV - and useful for the Trump bunch to exploit. 

Sadly, Maher seems to be going along this same arc as the useful (to Trump, FOX) medical quacks.  No doubt Ioannidis isn't appearing on sober  and serious cable sources for the same reason. Why have that Trump tool babbling his bullshit  on All In or Maddow  when you can have Harvard's Prof. Ashish Jha  relating sound data and research instead?   

People need to be aware of these aspects when they choose their sources of information, media. Don't get suckered into the Trumpian bullshit orbit!

See Also:

Economic Policy

Why Are Working People Forced to Sacrifice for the Common Good But Not the Titans of Capitalism?

And:

Virginia pastor died of coronavirus after Facebook post doubting its threat