COVID-19 Pandemic Era Misinformation Final Scorecard
Truth was a major COVID casualty - it's time for a reckoning.
I started writing the first Pure Science Substack post, Is Florida Mishandling COVID-19?, two years ago out of frustration with the way the media, many “scientists” and many “experts” were misrepresenting and abusing science; an abuse that became much more apparent with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite the wishes of autocrats and some mainstream media hysterics, the pandemic phase for COVID-19 is now over. Thus, with the second anniversary of that first post, I thought it would be appropriate to do a (hopefully) final review of many of the contentious issues and misinformation that sprung from the pandemic.
Lockdowns: Little or No Benefit at Great Cost
“You had to have something (lockdown) to immediately shut down the tsunami of infection,” adding, “that lockdown was absolutely justified.”
So claimed Dr. Anthony Fauci at a recent Wayne State presentation. He was Director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and COVID-19 policy tsar for Trump and Biden until his retirement. Also, early in the pandemic in June 2020, he claimed that lockdowns saved millions of lives. He also famously claimed that attacks on him were “attacks on science.” Far be it for me to attack science, but Fauci is a scientific fraud with no credibility left.
The conclusion of my first Substack post was that lockdowns provide little benefit at great economic and social cost. We use the word lockdowns as a broad category including school closures, business closures, restrictions on gatherings, etc.
Since that article much better evidence has been collected by others which shows this fact more conclusively, and which demonstrates the great societal cost.
Phil Kerpen and others provide some excellent analysis from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which convincingly demonstrates that states that employed lockdowns more intensely did not have better COVID-19 mortality outcomes.
Kerpen found that there is no significant correlation between the degree with which each state employed lockdowns and health outcomes, measured as an average of excess deaths and COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people (adjusted for state variations in mean age and metabolic-health). Excess deaths are the actual death rates from all causes minus the expected number of deaths based on pre-pandemic trends.
The graph below shows the health outcomes (Y axis) of the various states as Z scores (a statistical measure of deviation from the average) as a function of “Economic Score”, which the authors derive from the changes in unemployment and GDP of each state. Clearly, some states such as CT, NJ, NY, and IL severely damaged their economies via lockdown with no benefit. The one exception is Hawaii which I will address shortly.
This pattern observed with US states is repeated when we examine mortality of various countries.
In 2020 we were told by most of the mainstream media that Sweden’s lockdown-free policy was “deadly folly” and how “Sweden’s pandemic experiment had flopped”. One of the premier medical journals, The Lancet, calls out Sweden’s “failed national approach.”
Data compiled by the magazine The Economist shows something different. The Economist continuously calculates excess deaths for most countries from the beginning of the pandemic to the present. Excess deaths are frequently a more accurate measure of COVID deaths because it does not depend on the wide variations in how deaths are categorized (i.e. died from OR with COVID OR untested).
The chart below shows excess deaths per 100,000 population during the period 1/1/2020 to 8/23/2023 for the developed European countries and a few other notable other countries, including the US and New Zealand.
The first notable point is that Sweden's excess death rate is lower than the majority of its developed European neighbors, the United States, and the world as a whole. Thus, claims of failure for the Swedish COVID-19 policy are nothing but propaganda.
The second notable point is the extremely low excess death rate of New Zealand during the pandemic. As is the case with Hawaii, which also had extremely low mortality relative to the other states, New Zealand was able to effectively close its borders during the pandemic prior to widespread infection and the availability of vaccines. This kind of intervention is the only type of lockdown that has proven effective.
Lockdown Damage
I addressed the harms related to school closures and forced masking in a Feb. 6, 2022 post titled Stringent School COVID-19 Policies are Child Abuse. Still, the harm caused by lockdowns has not received sufficient attention:
There are an estimated 75 million more people in extreme poverty (< $1.90 /day) worldwide because of lockdowns. Extreme poverty frequently leads to premature death.
Lockdowns are estimated to have caused excess deaths of over 170,000 Americans per an NBER Study described in the NYT.
Average fall US 2021 math test scores in grades 3-8 were 0.20-0.27 standard deviations (SDs) lower relative to same-grade peers in fall 2019, while reading test scores were 0.09-0.18 SDs lower. This is a very significant drop.
One study found that school closures at the end of the previous 2019-2020 school year are associated with 13.8 million years of life lost. An NIH analysis found that life expectancy for high school graduates is 4 to 6 years longer than high school dropouts. The OECD estimates that learning losses from pandemic era school closures could cause a 3% decline in lifetime earnings, and that a loss of just one third of a year of learning has a long-term economic impact of $14 trillion.
The social isolation associated with COVID-19, in particular due to lockdowns, caused a 25% increase in the prevalence of anxiety and depression worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.
Masks: Community Mask Mandates Didn’t Work
“Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory-confirmed influenza/SARS-CoV-2 compared to not wearing masks (RR 1.01, 95% CI 0.72 to 1.42; 6 trials, 13,919 participants; moderate-certainty evidence).”
“The use of a N95/P2 respirators compared to medical/surgical masks probably makes little or no difference for the objective and more precise outcome of laboratory-confirmed influenza infection (RR 1.10,95% CI 0.90 to 1.34; 5 trials, 8407 participants; moderate-certainty evidence). Restricting pooling to healthcare workers made no difference to the overall findings.”
These two quotes are from the Cochran Review, published in January of this year. Cochran is a non-profit that has established a stellar reputation for providing definitive summaries of emerging medical knowledge. The conclusion of the 12 international infection specialists, who compiled a meta analysis of 78 randomized control trials regarding mask effectiveness, is unambiguous that community masking doesn't significantly affect virus spread.
The Cochrane Review should have been the end of this issue, but it wasn't. Karla Soares-Weiser, Editor-in-Chief of the Cochrane Library, without consulting the 12 scientists who compiled the analysis, later tried to subvert the report, claiming:
“It would be accurate to say that the review examined whether interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses, and that the results were inconclusive”
This claim by the Editor is FALSE and is clearly contradicted by the quotes in the review. Karla Soares-Weiser’s actions have threatened the integrity of Cochrane and has lead to false claims that the Cochrane Review has been retracted by former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and New York Times occasional “science” writer Zeynep Tufekci.
Not surprisingly Fauci gets masks wrong and even this year was still suggesting kids wear masks in school!
What Fauci and these other authoritarians can't comprehend is that although a properly fitted N95 mask (or similar) significantly reduces the virus load into and out of the wearer’s mouth, community mask protocols requiring long term continuous mask wearing fail because the subjects are human, and they will take the masks off to eat, sleep, exercise, and to be around loved ones - or in other words, act like humans.
COVID Origin: The Wuhan Lab (Of Course)
A year ago I published COVID 19 Origins Cover-Up, detailing the overwhelming evidence that the SARS2 virus was developed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab, from which it most likely spread accidentally to the public. Academics and the media insisted for years into the pandemic that the lab leak was a conspiracy theory based on the influential Proximal Origin paper, and similar claims by Fauci and Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Since that Substack post, additional information has further cemented the lab origin theory as an almost certainty.
Unredacted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) disclosures obtained by The Intercept this year reveal that, while the authors of the Proximal Origin paper were publicly ruling out a man-made virus origin, they were admitting the virus looks “engineered” in (what they thought were) private emails.
In June of this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that three Wuhan Institute of Virology lab workers, including Ben Hu, a scientist who had done extensive laboratory research on how coronaviruses infect humans, became ill in November 2019 with symptoms that American intelligence officials said were consistent with either Covid-19 or a seasonal illness. This occurred prior to the outbreak at the wet market.
COVID Vaccines: Saved Millions But Vaccine Disinformation is Endemic.
In September, the US FDA approved a reformulated COVID-19 booster shot that is designed to work more effectively against currently circulating variants. The agency recommends the booster for all individuals 6 months and older. The FDA claims the new vaccine is safe and effective.
However, there is no clinical data that it provides a net benefit to anyone, and this may be especially true for young, healthy people, and those who had COVID previously. Very likely there is net harm to some of these groups, as there was for prior boosters. Authors Kevin Bardosh et al. report in The Journal of Medical Ethics:
“Booster mandates in young adults are expected to cause a net harm: per COVID-19 hospitalization prevented, we anticipate at least 18.5 serious adverse events from mRNA vaccines, including 1.5–4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalization).”
I'm not sure which is worse, individuals who claim that COVID-19 vaccines NEVER HAD any benefit, or government officials and institutions that push vaccines on populations for which there is no benefit or net harm.
It's easy to forget, but at one point the COVID-19 vaccine was non-controversial. Operation Warp Speed, which funded the development of multiple vaccines made available to the US public in mass quantities in under a year, was an undeniable success, and one with near universal support.
In early 2021, I impatiently waited, just like almost every other senior I knew, for my opportunity to get jabbed with the vaccine. I even was “boosted” in December of 2021, explaining my logic for doing so in a Substack post called Omicron & COVID-19 Boosters.
The COVID-19 vaccines became contentious because of government mandates and the subsequent misinformation created to support mandates.
The putatively well-intentioned desire to maximize vaccine uptake resulted in lies told by government officials and their uncritical cheerleaders in the media. Specifically:
Biden repeatedly told lies such as
“If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the ICU unit and you’re not going to die.”
“You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.”
Rochelle Walensky repeatedly lied and reversed CDC policy due to apparent political pressure, claiming: “Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.”
Not to be outdone, Fauci said “When people are vaccinated, they can feel safe that they are not going to get infected.”
All of these claims were lies; each of these fully vaccinated and boosted government officials went on to become infected with COVID-19 (twice each) within a year. There is good evidence these officials knew these claims were lies at the time these claims were made. Despite pledges from candidate and President-Elect Biden that vaccine mandates should not be imposed, the Biden administration imposed one on our military personnel and tried to impose a vaccine mandate on employers. Additionally, thousands of people were fired from their jobs, and there was a time when unvaccinated people were not even allowed into restaurants in some of the country’s largest cities.
Make no mistake, the vaccines saved, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of US citizens, and undoubtedly millions worldwide. The initial two dose regimen of Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccines, along with the J&J single dose shot, all proved efficacious against COVID infection, hospitalization, and death. The 1st booster shot also provided significant benefit for some groups. However, the benefits disappeared in as little as 5 months, particularly in the elderly, and each new round of booster proved less effective than prior COVID vaccines.
Forcing individuals to submit to a vaccine that does not stop infection or virus transmission is not just unjustified, but extremely damaging to the public’s trust in science.
The FDA recommendation of the new COVID-19 booster for everyone over 6 months of age is unjustified. Dr. Vinay Prasad, who has led the attack against the abuse of science during COVID with his Substack, Vinay Prasad's Observations and Thoughts, goes further and suggests the new vaccine should not be approved without Randomized Control Trials - Pfizer or Moderna certainly have the profits and time to do so. It should make you wonder why these vaccine makers don’t think RCTs are necessary and why the FDA is not requiring such trials.
The COVID-19 Era was fertile ground for abuse of science and science disinformation. I’ve tried to pack as much information as possible (with supporting links) into this summary post so that it can serve as a reference document. If you like this post (and even if you don’t) please leave a comment, share this post with someone you think might find it interesting, and if you haven’t already, subscribe to Pure Science to automatically receive similar posts in the future.
Well researched and presented.