“This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it” ― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
I don’t easily buy into conspiracy theories; anyone with a creative mind and active imagination can connect dots and propose a plausible theory involving good guys and bad guys.
The internet can take something that is simply the result of wrongheaded people making bad decisions and turn it into an elaborate theory overnight. On the other hand history provides ample enough evidence of absolute evil to justify keeping an eye out for human conspiracy to commit mischief.
With all that on background I have had a nagging feeling over the past few weeks that we are somehow being played. And I will say the appearance of Ezekiel Emanuel’s article, U.S. Must Stay Locked Down For 12-18 Months Until There’s A Vaccine, set off my sensors. But still, it’s hard to tell the difference between a conspiracy to do harm and an opportunistic “never let a crisis go to waste” maneuver. The shutdown of the American economy due to COVID–19 - whether due to a grand scheme or simply the result of human foibles in the face of imperfect information - is almost irrelevant at this juncture; the damage is real. Trying to fix the damage inflicted on us by statisticians posing as epidemiologists by continuing to follow their advice is a mistake. Try running your business strictly on the stats without factoring human behavior into the equation and see how quickly the enterprise will fold.
What if the epidemiologists are wrong? What if this massive shutdown is nothing more than a delay of the inevitable? What if they are trying to manipulate and outfox the course of nature and they’re wrong? What if you really can’t fool Mother nature, as some of their fellow epidemiologists suggest. For instance, Stanford University epidemiologist John Ioannidis, co-director of its Meta-Research Innovation Center, who makes this startling claim:
If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR [virus] tests, the number of total deaths due to ‘influenza-like illness’ would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average.”
This was not written by some right-wing crank claiming coronavirus is a conspiracy to deny President Trump a second term, or an excuse to bring down capitalism.
It’s from a sobering and illuminating essay by Stanford University epidemiologist John Ioannidis, co-director of its Meta-Research Innovation Center, published in the life sciences news site STAT.
And then there’s Knut Wittkowski, formerly head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at the Rockefeller University in New York City, who has this to say:
(Knut Wittkowski,) a veteran scholar of epidemiology has warned that the ongoing lockdowns throughout the United States and the rest of the world are almost certainly just prolonging the coronavirus outbreak rather than doing anything to truly mitigate it…“[W]hat people are trying to do is flatten the curve. I don’t really know why…if you flatten the curve…it takes more time.
“With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity. About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won’t even have recognized that they were infected, or they had very, very mild symptoms, especially if they are children. So, it’s very important to keep the schools open and kids mingling to spread the virus to get herd immunity as fast as possible, and then the elderly people, who should be separated, and the nursing homes should be closed during that time, can come back and meet their children and grandchildren after about 4 weeks when the virus has been exterminated,” he added.
If the future of the country is to rest on the shoulders of epidemiologists at least let them be epidemiologists who actually do real science:
Asked about Anthony Fauci, the White House medical expert who for weeks has been predicting significant numbers of COVID-19 deaths in America as well as major ongoing disruptions to daily life possibly for years, Wittkowski replied: “Well, I’m not paid by the government, so I’m entitled to actually do science.”
Dear Mr. Presient: we the people are getting dangerously close to taking up our pitchforks and torches.
Please fire the “experts” and get America back to work.
NOTE: I know Raj would appreciate it if I acknowledge that he was most probably right about this from the start.
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