A look back at Covid

Bendintheriver

An event that democrats took ahold of and ruined lives with.

I remember watching an obnoxious democrat scream at a man with his wife and two kids in a Lowe's. The family wasn't wearing masks. The gentleman politely told the lady the truth which was backed up by science and common sense: Masks don't do anything to protect anyone. The bitch would have none of it. Eventually a woman working the cash register stepped in and asked the woman to leave if she couldn't control herself. The rat was screaming loud and making a scene. The perfect example of democrats feeling the power to force people to do what they wanted them to do

Everything we all knew as individuals came true. Masks didn't work, the vaccine would not keep you from getting Covid, children needed to go back to school, businesses needed to be back open, that billions were being wasted by democrats with zero accountability, that Ivermectin was a viable alternative, etc. No democrat has had to pay any penalty for their bullshit.

Fascinating quick read.

Pandemic School Closures: “Abundance of Caution” Reveals the Bad Science

The deeper Zweig dug, the more his sense of astonishment—and then of outrage—grew. As early as March 2020, it was clear that Covid, unlike influenza, posed little threat to children. Nor were schools major centers of virus transmission, studies showed. In other words, the scientific evidence supporting long-term school shutdowns was weak, the author discovered, while the policy’s negative impacts were potentially devastating.

Zweig pitched his editors at the New York Times: How about an article detailing the scientific case for reopening schools? They weren’t interested. Nor were several other outlets he had worked with. Eventually, the article ran in the tech magazine Wired. The piece had little impact on the national debate over school closures, not because it wasn’t persuasive but because there was no national debate over school closures.

As in other elite communities, Zweig’s neighbors posted “In this House We Believe” signs in their yards stating, “Science Is Real.” Government officials, including New York governor Andrew Cuomo, relentlessly insisted that their policies were based on “data.” But when Zweig and a handful of other researchers convincingly challenged the scientific case for school closings, the blue-state voters and policymakers took little notice. The media, which normally prides itself on curiosity and skepticism, refused to question the overnight consensus. “The narrative was set,” Zweig writes. 

In contrast, European policymakers took the research involving Covid and children seriously. By May, most European countries were beginning to reopen their schools. Liberal Americans usually think European nations are more enlightened on issues of social policy. But U.S. media and public health leaders mostly ignored the European example. When pressed, they waved away the disparity, insisting that European countries had “controlled” the virus prior to reopening schools, unlike the U.S. under the erratic President Trump. It wasn’t true, but it fit the narrative. American schools stayed closed.

Mandavilli’s piece also relied on an unpublished study showing that children infected with Covid carry high viral loads, which would imply they are highly contagious. That claim turned out to be false, and the study was later revised to reach the opposite conclusion. But the damage had been done. Mandavilli’s penchant for cherry-picking dubious reports that supported her preconceptions, while ignoring research that didn’t, would remain a pattern throughout the pandemic. (Readers might recall how, in 2021, Mandavilli tweeted her hope that people would “stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots.”)

For the next year and more, most public health leaders and media outlets would stay in lockstep over their embrace of school closures and dismissal of the lab-leak hypothesis. The latter issue is not Zweig’s focus. (Matt Ridley and Alina Chan’s book Viral provides a good overview.) But it is striking how, in both cases, the media, public officials, and even esteemed scientists leaned into a consensus based not on scientific data but on political tribalism.

The big X-Factor in all this, of course, was President Trump. For the media and public-health establishment, Trump and his fellow Republicans were assumed to be ignorant, anti-science blowhards. Whenever Trump and his allies took a position (or simply asked a question), all right-thinking people had to line up on the opposite side.