By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Readers will remember that, based on their Covid performance under two administrations, I have often called for the CDC to be burned to the ground, the rubble plowed under, and the ground salted. Now President-elect Trump has picked “Jay Bhattacharya, who backed COVID herd immunity, to lead National Institutes of Health,” so perhaps the same fate awaits NIH. and I should not be too picky about the accelerant used or the match thrown there, either.
Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University, notionally allowing him to appropriate the honorific “Dr.,” which the press obseqiously bestows upon him, but out here in reality he’s no more a “Dr.” than Jill Biden. Bhattacharya also allows himself to assume the title “physician” in his Wikipedia entry, which is unfortunate. According to the Federation of State Medical Boards, “[M]ost jurisdictions restrict individuals holding a physician credential from publicly representing themselves as physicians unless they hold a medical license in that jurisdiction.” However, no “Jay” (Jayanta) Bhattacharya is licensed to practice in the state of California. Wikipedia also deems Bhattacharya to be a “scientist” — as does (“real scientist”) an uncharacteristically careless Matt Taibbi — but that’s only true if you regard mainstream economics as a science. It isn’t.
Bhattacharya is also an author at the dark-monied Brownstone Institute[1]. Readers will recall that Brownstone’s Tom Jefferson was First Author for John Conly’s now discredited anti-masking study at the Cochrane Institute (actual scholarship here), and that Brownstone’s Carl Heneghan was functionally an Unlisted Author, though he didn’t list himself in credits. Neither disclosed their Brownstone affiliation. All this violated Cochrane’s famously strict standards, although when Cochrane Library editors “engaged” with the authors while writing their “Statement,” these matters never came up. Suffice to say I don’t have a great deal of confidence in how Brownstone, or its authors, do business.
Which brings us to Bhattacharya’s main claim to fame: his co-authorship (with Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta) of the Great Barrington Declaration (so called; the town of Great Barrington, MA has repudiated any connection). The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) was published on October 4, 2020 (that is, not even a year into our multi-year Covid pandemic, and before the first release of Operation Warp Speed vaccines in December, 2020). GBD takes the form of an open letter; there are signatures at the bottom and everything. Formally, then, GBD is a genre piece, as Science-Based Medicine points out:
I’d like to take a trip down memory lane to revisit various examples of science denialists using similar “declarations,” “petitions,” and “open letters” to give the false appearance of strong scientific support for their positions. Why? Because declarations like this, although they can be used for good (such as when US climate scientists recently signed an open letter to Congress reaffirming the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is the primary driver of climate change and the overall warming of the climate), more frequently such letters are propaganda for pseudoscience. Indeed, such “declarations,” “open letters,” and “petitions” signed by physicians and scientists represent a technique that goes back at least to the tobacco companies lining up lists of doctors to testify to the safety of cigarettes. (One particularly ludicrous example from R.J. Reynolds in the 1940s claimed that 113,597 doctors preferred their cigarettes.) The idea was (and is) to give the false impression of a scientific controversy where none exists and to appeal to the authority of scientists and doctors to support their claims.
GBD uses the RJ Reynolds technique, even having a form at the bottom for “co-signers,” which eminent “Medical and Public Health Scientists and Medical Practitioners” like Dr Johnny Bananas and Prof Cominic Dummings happily took advantage of.
Substantively, GBD is — ideology aside — remarkable chiefly for its utter lack links or cites, or evidence of any kind; if we published GBD as a post at Naked Capitalism, readers would laugh at us, as well they should. Be that as it may, GBD has two main points: herd immunity and focused protection. The Harvard Crimson summarizes:
Their declaration calls for those with the lowest risk of death from the virus to go about their lives as they would have prior to the pandemic while keeping the more immunologically vulnerable under continued social distancing — hence the term “focused protection.” The idea behind this strategy rests on herd immunity, which is when a large enough proportion of the population becomes immune to a disease that its transmission becomes unlikely. Immunity without a vaccine, however, requires infection.
To quote GBD itself — I’d pull on my yellow waders, but my hazmat suit has booties already — on herd immunity:
As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
And on focused protection:
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection [reverential caps in the original].
Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.
Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.
Since 2020, an enormous literature, a vast and tangled polemic, has grown up around GBD; it would take many days for your humble blogger to follow the twists and turns. So I will simplify matters by asking the following question for each claim:
What did the authors have to know at the time they made the claim for the claim to be true?
That seems to me to be the most fair, since we’re not holding Bhattacharya responsible for scientific work done subquently from October 2020. Let’s take each in turn. I’ll quote the initially plausible same passages, but this time I’ll add some helpful notes. First, Herd Immunity[2]:
As immunity builds[A] in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations[B] will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon[C]) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality[D] and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
[A] For this to have been true, there must be no waning immunity. How did the authors know that? (In fact, “breakthough infections” were real, and a mountain of evidence shows that multiple reinfections are frequent.)
[B] For this to have been true, there must be no immune escape. How did the authors know that? (In fact, SARS-CoV-2 mutates often, as the continuing waves of infection from new variants show.)
[C] For this to have been true, there must be a case of herd immunity being achieved through infection, without vaccinations[3]. Were the authors familiar with such a case?
[D] For this to have been true, mortality must be the only medical test of successful anti-Covid policy. How did the authors know this, in October 2020, without knowledge of long-term sequelae? (In fact, Long Covid is a serious issue, as is the impact of Covid on the labor force generally.
Now, Focused Protection. There are many more notes, because there’s so much more handwaving:
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death[E] to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better[F] protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection [reverential caps in the original].
Adopting measures[G] to protect the vulnerable[H] should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent testing of other staff and all visitors[I]. Staff rotation should be minimized[J]. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home[K]. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside[L]. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented[M], and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.
Those who are not vulnerable[N] should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing[O], and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching[P]. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk[P] may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity[R].
[E] Comment: As in [D], mortality must be the only medical test of successful anti-Covid policy.
[F] Comment: “Better” is doing a lot of work there. “Better” than nothing?
[G] For this to have been true, the proper measures must have been known. Did the authors know them? (In fact, there was great controversy, helped not at all by CDC’s twists and turns on non-pharmeceutical interventions, isolation periods, etc.)
[H] For this to have been true, the vulnerable must be separable from the non-vulnerable. How do the authors know that is possible? (In fact, it is not; see here and here).
[I] For this to have been useful — that is, to convert “should” into “shall” — there must be sufficient staff on the labor market with acquired immunity, and nursing homes must be able to test for it. How did the authors know that was possible? (In fact, nursing home practice on Covid was a scandal and a debacle, and that’s before we get to Cuomo turning them into death traps).
[J] For this to have been true, nursing homes must be capable of minimizing staff rotation. How did the authors know they could? (In fact, many nursing home staff are part-time, and work at several nursing homes.)
[K] [I] For this to have been useful — that is, to convert “should” into “shall” — “essentials” must be known. How did the authors know that was possible? (For example, prescription drugs would vary by the household.)
[L] Comment: Bhattacharya seems to have no notion — or carefully omits — indoor ventilation, as with HEPA filters, Corsi-Rosenthal boxes (invented August 2020), or simply opening windows.
[M] For this to have been true, multi-generational approaches must be implementable. How did the authors know that they were? (Since Bhattacharya merely handwaves with “approaches,” it seems likely they are not (unless one considers non-pharmaceutical interventions, which I don’t think Bhattacharya has in mind. See here and here.)
[N] Comment: As in [H].
[0] For this to have been true, Covid would have had to be transmitted by fomites. How did the authors know this? (In fact, #CovidIsAirborne. [L], meeting outdoors, suggests that Bhattacharya advocates airborne transmission. Here, Bhattacharya advocates fomite transmission. Does Bhattacharya believe that protecting the vulnerable — or even a coherent “Declaration” — is possible with no theory of tranmission?)
[P] For this to have been true, airborne tranmission in school facilities would have had to be ruled out. Did the authors know that it had been? (In fact, airborne tranmission of Covid in schools is significant.)
[Q] For this to have been true, people would have to be aware of that their risks are. How did the authors know that was possible? (In fact, Covid transmits asymptomatically. You might not even know that you have it. Since the damage from Covid is cumulative, people already infected with Covid cannot necessarily know their own risks, absent frequent testing, with Bhattacharya does not advocate.)
In summary, I hesitate to use the word “fantasy” to characterize GBD. However, “handwaving” and “wishful thinking” will certainly do. “Protecting the vulnerable’ my sweet Aunt Fanny.
So much for the charlatan part. Now for eugenics. Why would be characterize Bhattacharya’s work as eugenicst? Respectful Insolence makes the case:
I would argue that eugenics has basically won out over public health. Because SARS-CoV-2 killed mainly—although far from exclusively—the elderly and those with chronic illnesses, views aligning with that of antivaccine crank Del Bigtree, in June 2020 encouraged his followers to “catch this cold” in order to help achieve “natural herd immunity.” The unspoken subtext that reveals the eugenicist intent—usually denied and maybe even not acknowledged, but there nonetheless—is how Bigtree also ranted about those most at risk of COVID-19 having made themselves that way by engaging in high risk behaviors that led to chronic disease, such as drinking and smoking to excess and overeating. (Obesity is a major risk factor for severe disease and death from COVID-19.) Of course, the one risk factor for severe disease and death from COVID-19 that no one has any control over is how old we were when the pandemic hit, given that the risk of severe disease and death climbs sharply with age. I like to point out that, as much as GBD proponents claim that “focused protection” would keep the elderly safe, it couldn’t, can’t, and won’t, because unless you quarantine all the elderly indefinitely they will have interaction with the “low risk” younger people out there necessary to help take care of them. One only has to look at the debacles that occurred in nursing homes early in the pandemic to appreciate how “focused protection” was always a pipe dream, a concession tacked onto the eugenicist vision of the GBD to make it seem less eugenicist.
If you think I’m going too far, just look back a bit. Do you remember how often COVID-19 minimizers would justify doing less (or nothing) to stop the spread of disease because it “only kills the elderly”? I do, and such rhetoric came not just from bonkers antivaxxers like Del Bigtree, either. Do you remember the arguments against vaccinating children against COVID-19 because it “only” kills a few hundred of them a year? I do. Never mind that, on a yearly basis, COVID-19 kills about as many children as the measles did before the vaccine was licensed 60 years ago, adjusted for population? It’s a leading cause of death among children now. “Bioethics”-based arguments not to vaccinate children against COVID-19 are the same old antivax arguments against vaccinating children, just recycled for a new virus, with “esteemed” doctors telling us that we need to accept children dying of COVID-19 “as a matter of course.”
Lebensunwertes Leben. In practice, that’s exactly what GBD brought about. I’d find Bhattacharya and GBD’s “compassion” a lot more persuasive if they’d run a full court press on ventilating schools (and not just shoving kids back into air filled with lethal pathogens), and if their idea of delivering essentials to the elderly was anything more than a pipe dream. I mean, don’t these guys have the budget to write some model legislation?
In any case, the first Trump administration embraced GBD immediately upon its release, in October 2020:
The White House is embracing a controversial “herd immunity” strategy in response to the coronavirus, according to a briefing given by anonymous senior officials.
The strategy would allow the virus to spread freely with the belief that most of the population would develop a degree of immunity. It advocates shielding the more vulnerable to limit loss of life.
Two administration officials, who were not authorized to give their names, gave the briefing to media organizations….
They cited a controversial document, the Great Barrington Declaration….
Of course, it didn’t take long for reality to catch up with the “herd immunity” fantasy. To cite but one of many example, in 2021: “COVID-19 herd immunity? It’s not going to happen, so what next?”
Any notion that COVID-19 was going to last for just a few months was very much misplaced in 2020. Especially after it was recognised that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was largely spread through the airborne route, all indications were that it would cause repeat bouts of waves. This is what happened in the flu epidemic of 1918.
In addition very few scientists predicted that we would see the type of mutations that occurred over such a short period of time. This has resulted in the virus becoming both more transmissible and more able to evade immune responses.
The evolution of the virus has been so rapid that the Delta variant, which is currently dominating the world, is at least twice as transmissible as the ancestral virus that was circulating.
What this means is that herd immunity is no longer a discussion the world should be having. We should start to avoid using that term in the context of SARS-CoV-2, because it’s not going to materialise – or is unlikely to materialise – during our lifetimes.
Oh well. Never mind[4]. Let ‘er rip (which Biden, after all, did, rationalizing and normalizing GBD with his “vax only” policy of mass infection without mitigation). Let’s look on the bright side: Bhattacharya is now head of the NIH (rather like David Frum becoming a Democrat and venerated editor of The Atlantic after doing so much to get us into Iraq). Jake, it’s The Swamp. You can still make bank even when your mistakes are deadly! Normalcy hath its charms, I suppose.
NOTES
[1] From DeSmogBlog:
According to its website, “Brownstone Institute accepts no quid pro quo donations and receives no money from governments, pharmaceutical companies, or other large and well-known foundations such as the Gates Foundation.”21
The Brownstone Institute offers potential contributors the option to donate via cryptocurrency, which it describes as a “non-taxable event,” suggesting that “donors do not owe capital gains tax on the appreciated crypto that is donated and can typically deduct the fair market value of the donation on their taxes. The organization states that it “do[es] not and will not share donor names.
Those names presumbly being one or more squillionaires, quite possibly from Silicon Valley, and perhaps crypto bros.
[2] Taking Bhattacharya’s version of herd immunity as read. For a less simplified version, see here.
[3] JAMA, “Herd Immunity and Implications for SARS-CoV-2 Control“:
[T]here is no example of a large-scale successful intentional infection-based herd immunity strategy.
There are only rare instances of seemingly sustained herd immunity being achieved through infection. The most recent and well-documented example relates to Zika in Salvador, Brazil. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, as other countries in Europe were locking down in late February and early March of 2020, Sweden made a decision against lockdown. Initially, some local authorities and journalists described this as the herd immunity strategy: Sweden would do its best to protect the most vulnerable, but otherwise aim to see sufficient numbers of citizens become infected with the goal of achieving true infection-based herd immunity. By late March 2020, Sweden abandoned this strategy in favor of active interventions; most universities and high schools were closed to students, travel restrictions were put in place, work from home was encouraged, and bans on groups of more than 50 individuals were enacted. Far from achieving herd immunity, the seroprevalence in Stockholm, Sweden, was reported to be less than 8% in April 2020,7 which is comparable to several other cities (ie, Geneva, Switzerland, and Barcelona, Spain).
The population of the United States is about 330 million. Based on World Health Organization estimates of an infection fatality rate of 0.5%, about 198 million individuals in the United States are needed to be immune to reach a herd immunity threshold of approximately 60%, which would lead to several hundred thousand additional deaths.
[4] Brownstone Institute, 2023: “While reasonable at the time, the Declaration’s confidence in herd immunity proved overambitious.” I hope the annotations have persuaded you that Bhattacharya’s “confidence” “at the time” was grossly misplaced. As for “overambitious”…. BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA! Herd immunity was the conceptual linchpin of the entire enterprise!
87 comments
Comments are closed.
Thank you, Lambert.
I think that one of my criteria for “whom to pay attention to” will include “attitude toward JB.
By that metric, the “America This Week” team are out, as Kirn seems highly appreciative of Battacharya. (I’m already dismayed by Taibbi’s apparent skepticism toward MMT; it seems like few people have enough cognitive bandwidth to have sound views on a wide range of topics; NC principals are practically unique in this regard, IMO [though perhaps I am overly confident of my own ability to make such assessments]).
Agreed, Samuel Conner: The interesting thing about the Great Barrington Declaration, herd-immunity fantasies, and Bhattacharya is that support for Bhattacharya indicates a certain hole in many commentators’ thinking. I’m also noticing this inability-to-get-it in Thomas Fazi, Jimmy Dore, Kim Iversen, and, maybe, Joe Rogan.
It is studied ignorance. The key is deliberately not understanding that there is no herd immunity for the class of viruses that COVID19 is part of.
It leads to the question of what other blind spots one must watch out for in their constant postings…
Further, a great immorality (not just a flaw) of the Great Barrington Claque is their lack of concern for infection of children and young people. Hey, reopen the elementary and high schools. Hey, open the universities. And what happened? Superspreader events.
> Superspreader events
Classrooms being 3Cs spaces, and Covid being airborne. As I wrote: “Shared air is a social relation.” That is, I think, a truth that libertarians cannot accept. Liberals too, for that matter. Let’s do brunch!
Let us not forget that classroom teachers put up furious resistance to resuming in-person teaching. They, rightly, saw themselves as being on the receiving end of viral particles spread by their low risk pupils and then being the ones who carried those viruses home to their own families, many of which contained elderly members.
So if there is no herd immunity for this class of viruses, then how are the vaccines helpful? It is more than obvious that they aren’t, but people like you want us to believe that they work. You can’t have it both ways… use your head and a bit of critical thinking.
You either have a reading comprehension problem or are deliberately straw manning DJG. He said nothing about the vaccines. You tone and posture are COMPLETELY out of line. Commenting here is a privilege, not a right, and you just got yours revoked.
There is no herd immunity. The immunity for Covid looks to be 6-8 months. But there were people getting repeat cases in early Omicron within weeks. Many complaints on Twitter.
The vaccines reduced the severity of cases and odds of death and Long Covid a great deal under wild type, less so under Delta and not much under Omicron, particularly now with all new variants. With wild type, you died a bad death, coughing your lungs out over weeks as they turned into bloody goo.
There is evidence now that the vaccine protection is pretty short-lived and it taxes the T-cells enough for the hard on your system mRNA vaccines that there is greater susceptibility after that period. Novavax is a more traditional vaccine design and is believed to be less problematic for boosters. Same likely true of a whole virus vaccine like Sinovac.
> Kirn seems highly appreciative of Battacharya
I’m guessing it’s the halo effect. Bhattacharya was censored, after all (though I suppose I should put on my yellow waders for that story, too). And censorship is Taibbi and Kim’s thing. I would think they would be able to separate Bhattacharya being censored from Bhattacharya’s work product, but apparently not.
Carpet tack, meet carpenter’s hammer.
This may help a little, an animation explaining herd immunity. This video was made before the pandemic, so it is a good choice to explain a difficult concept that the Great Barrington Declaration misunderstands, but I expect the NC commentariat will find better. Note that in this illustrates herd immunity through durable vaccination against human pathogens such as measles. Herd immunity is why those who cannot tolerate vaccination are protected when immunity levels in the population are high enough. Thus, 95% vaccination against measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) protects virtually everyone from these very serious, previous common, diseases.
But something left out of most of the commentary regarding SARS-CoV-2 is that scientists have known (or should have known) that durable immunity to coronaviruses has been elusive for more than 70 years, since the first avian bronchitis virus was described. ABV is a coronavirus and from what I have been able to learn (others certainly know a lot more than I do) the poultry industry (sic) has yet to develop an effective vaccine for it. There is no good reason to expect something different for a human coronavirus.
When I read that Trump had recruited Battacharya, I figured why not? Just another clown for the Trump circus. But here is the thing. That Great Barrington Declaration was just a convenient way for government to justify a herd immunity approach with Covid and Battacharya was central to it. It was the cheapest way to deal with the Covid pandemic so that nothing would fundamentally change. But if they tried to come out with a declaration to use herd immunity to deal with the common flu, not even our co-opted main stream media would go along with that one as every man and his dog would understand that the flu does not work that way. That is why every year the flu vaccine is attenuated to the latest strain. But even though we could see in real time how Covid evolved into different strains, government would continue to hide behind the Great Barrington Declaration. So in the US alone, people like Battacharya have hundreds of thousands of deaths on their ledgers. Hey, maybe he can be the new Fauci. You know – ‘America’s Doctor.’
> But something left out of most of the commentary regarding SARS-CoV-2 is that scientists have known (or should have known) that durable immunity to coronaviruses has been elusive for more than 70 years
Thanks. I looked for this, couldn’t find it. After five years and the degradation of search….
If you’ll throw me a link I’ll update the post.
I have MANY in my discussions of the UK REACT studies. I even had a table showing the durability of immunity with MERS the longest at 34 months and it showed the common cold as the shortest, at 6 months. Try searching the backstage.
My basic information came from a veterinarian colleague’s poultry science textbook. According to her, this is common knowledge among among DVMs. Alas, I cannot consult with her because she died of a heart attack a few weeks ago at a much too young age (i.e., younger than yours truly) after dealing with a particularly nasty bout of Long Covid that lasted two years. An intermittent heart problem was one of her symptoms and she was convinced this would kill her. She was always right. The COVID eugenicists on the other hand would see nothing in this but a coincidence. We were graduates of the same university, twice, and had known each other for a very long time. Yes, I remain angry.
Condolences. Just about the same here. Our very esteemed large animal vet had their partner of 34 years keel over of a heart attack, no symptoms, no warning, no previous evidence of cardio vascular mischief. And twenty years younger than this writer. The vet had contracted Covid at least once since 2020.
Related: This pre-covid article studies how the receptor binding of another coronavirus (HCov-229E — which is one of the viruses that cause the common cold) has varied over the last 50 years, thereby defeating antibodies that block receptor binding:
Taken together, our results suggest that immune evasion contributes to if not explains the extensive receptor-binding loop variation shown by HCoV-229E over the past 50 years. HCoV-229E infection in humans does not provide protection against different isolates
So, not a fan?
Nor an air conditioner!
But didn’t Joe ‘take off your mask’ Biden follow Great Barrington with the proviso that the ‘vaccine’ would solve the problem and keeping children out of school wouldn’t have its own unknown consequences? Seems what the above is saying is that Covid (a man made disease??) is different from the past viruses on which Barrington was based–no ‘long flu’ for example–but I’m not sure that means the authors were acting in bad faith. It could be that in the situation we found ourselves there were no risk free approaches.
At any event almost any replacement for Fauci is likely to be an improvement. There’s evidence the man was an outright villain.
I doubt that covid was man made. My feeling remains that it was an animal virus that got into man one way or another. And the anti-health establishments such as WHO and CDC and etc. ( and the authors of the GBD) thanked their lucky stars for such a fortuitous disease to come along so fortuitiously and give them a chance to get it propelled, spread, entrenched and pandemicised in order to advance the Jackpot Agenda.
These same groups of authorities hope to hit the next Jackpot jackpot with the emerging ManBirdCow flu.
And Battacharya ( Trump’s choice thanks to Trump’s election) will do his best to help it along.
Maybe Battacharya is not hand-rubbingly gleefully evil the way Fauci is/was. Maybe Battacharya can be analogised as being “Harris” to Fauci’s “Clinton”.
Burning down NIH seems like an accelerationist desire. I would prefer to see NIH, CDC, etc. purged, pressure-washed, decontaminated, etc. But that may not happen.
There’s an intriguing hypothesis that the CV was engineered with the intent to be an innocuous easily-transmitted low-symptom vector for other viral antigens, basically a method of involuntarily and surreptitiously vaccinating large populations without having to deal with the logistical headaches of production, administration, consent, etc., etc., related to conventional (and even mRNA) vaccines. The property that CVs do not induce durable humoral immunity is an advantage in this context, since the vector can be re-used for other antigens as new viral threats emerge.
I encountered this in a YouTube interview of Robert Redfield. I have the impression that RR is not highly regarded in the NC community and I have no independent basis on which to assess the hypothesis.
It’s an intriguing thought, though — that GoF work was done with a notionally (or arguably, from the perspective of the researchers) laudable intent. If that is what actually happened, it plainly worked out very very poorly.
“I encountered this in a YouTube interview of Robert Redfield.”
Are you referring to the Dana Parish interview?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEbo3d8rd_Q
Transcript:
https://danaparish.substack.com/p/my-redfield-interview-transcript
Thank you; that’s the one.
One of the things that dismayed me about this interview was what I interpreted to be RR’s apparent indifference to NPIs. OTOH, he was in favor of “Warp-Speed” scale efforts to develop anti-viral therapies, which was not pursued by either DJT or JRB administrations.
I had never previously heard of Dana Parish; don’t know whether she is a reliable or dubious interpreter of events.
As I recall there are DARPA records (leaked? foia’d?) that document the desire to test an orthopox-vectored aerosol vaccine on bats, in the wild. This was actually unsusprising: Back in 2020 Ecohealth still had literature online where they promoted the idea of using transmissible vaccines to neutralize human pathogens in wildlife populations.
To my mind this is evidence, not of laudable intent but rather of an attempt to create a “useable” bioweapon, or at least something that could be pitched as such: Weaponizing a highly transmissible human pathogen requires a means of rapidly and covertly immunizing populations one would wish to protect. On the other hand the notion of mass vaccinating wildlife in this way doesn’t survive minimal scrutiny and is not terribly credible as an actual motive.
I do not think I have seen the Congressional final report on the Coronavirus pandemic covered anywhere, but I might have missed it.
It concludes that the U.S. National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that the possibility that COVID-19 emerged because of a laboratory or research related accident is not a conspiracy theory.
That generally is a fair minded view. The virus could have come from the lab. There’s been a new well-regarded study since then that provides more evidence for it coming from the wet market.
A big problem with the lab leak theory is the lack of any cases at that time at the lab. All staff were tested right after the initial outbreak and all were negative. There is an old saying about bombmakers, that they wind up eating their own cooking, as in regularly losing fingers or suffering other injuries.
How could all the staff have tested negative? The first place for the lab leak is at the lab. How could contaminated material have possibly gotten to the wet market if an infected lab employee did not bring it there by being infected?
There were reports of upper respiratory illness in that lab shortly preceding the outbreak. In addition to wiping out or restricting access to genetic sequencing data, I would assume that CPC would produce clean bills of health for Wuhan staff. This was on top of the checklist in case shit hits the fan.
The lab did the testing, not the CPC, and its top staff quickly announced the result.
Covid wild type was not primarily an upper respiratory ailment. It quickly settled into the lungs. Unlike later variants, it bound to ACE-2 receptors. This was winter in China. Upper respiratory ailments are common in the winter.
The Communist Party of China doesn’t do the testing, but controls its scope and relevant information flow. From the onset, there was enormous economic and ideological pressure to shape the narrative away from inconvenient facts.
Until more data gets declassified, all we have is this inconclusive tidbit (courtesy of ChatGPT, but known not to be a hallucination):
“There is evidence suggesting that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) became ill in November 2019, before the first publicly reported cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan. According to U.S. intelligence reports, these researchers sought hospital care with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and seasonal illnesses.”
Sorry, there were cases in Italy in SEPTEMBER 2019:
COVID-19 was circulating in Italy from September 2019, according to a study by the Italian National Cancer Institute.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/11/coronavirus-italy-covid-19-pandemic-europe-date-antibodies-study/
The World Economic Forum most assuredly does not carry water for China.
And you treat Western “intelligence reports” as evidence of anything? I have an interview with Larry Johnson soon where he explains how deeply the CIA is involved in fabricating news that will be posting soon.
This is very useful! Thank you!
May I be allowed to agree to disagree?
Well, probably not. Too bad.
> May I be allowed to agree to disagree?
Of course, though some reasons would be helpful!
Here are two people who find Jay Bhattacharya to be “a deeply sincere and compassionate human being” having met him. Desmet is unlikely to be a eugenicist given his book on the psychology of totalitarianism, and Clare Craig is explicitly critical of eugenics.
Presumably Stanford doesn’t award someone who is a dummy an M.D. in 1997 for attending the Stanford University School of Medicine, and a Ph.D.’s in economics in 2000 for attending Stanford University. Having a degree in medicine makes him a hell of a lot more of a “Doctor” than Jill Biden. Given this, calling him a charlatan seems disingenuous, whatever one’s opinion on the declaration. Sorry to say, I don’t think this is your best work, Naked Capitalism!
Are you serious? So Bhattacharya can give a good meeting. That proves absolutely nothing about his eugenicism.
There were swathes of the then-elites, all across the US, UK, and Europe, who argued for eugenicism before the Nazi death camps made that not respectable. And their case included compassionate-seeming arguments about the suffering endured by those living lives with bad genes: presumed earlier deaths, disability, mental infirmities.
The authors of your tweets apparently are unwilling to consider that their support of Bhattacharya is support of eugenicism. That is CLEARLY what the GBD produces. So they lack discernment with respect to members of the “cool kids” club. Hardly new in elite circles.
One example of affect telling you nothing about true character is the staffs at the Nazi gas chambers. Someone wrote an entire book about them. They were, no kidding, lovely people. Devoted parents and spouses, got on well with each other, many nice parties. One big happy team!
You straw man Lambert with the word “dummy”. Charlatans are typically very intelligent con artists. It’s their marks that are the dummies.
You talk past the fact that Bhattacharya would not be allowed to call himself a “Dr.” suggesting he is or even was a physician in most states. I know someone PERSONALLY who went to prison in Texas for four and a half years for letting his customers call him “Doctor” (he had been a licensed doctor in NY). So don’t posture that this is not a legitimate beef.
I know someone PERSONALLY who went to prison in Texas for four and a half years for letting his customers call him “Doctor” (he had been a licensed doctor in NY).
This is seriously confusing. In Europe and the UK, any PhD holder is called doctor.
Obviously it should be illegal to practice medicine without a license, so if he did that and then was sent to prison, then I understand. However it seems very odd for someone to be sent to prison simply because people use the title he earned.
Even more so if he practiced medicine in another state/country. Could you provide a link to a story that explains what was done that was illegal? Clearly I do not understand what the law says in the US, and my google searches do not provide any clarity.
Thanks!
No, the medical board had already tried going after him for practicing medicine without a license. He beat that with details on what he was doing and how it was outside licensing requirements.
They sent a prosecutor after him with the trumped up “calling himself a doctor” which they made stick with a judge who allowed him to provide no evidence or testimony. He did have a MD working with him running a lab so the patients had fallen into calling the MD “Dr. X” and his colleague “Dr. Y” and the non-MD had not corrected them.
He had been a licensed doctor of chiropractic in NY.
I did say that saying you are a doctor as in implying you are a medical practitioner, regardless of your educational attainment, is a crime in many states. That applies even more to Bhattacharya than it does to my acquaintance who went to prison. But people like Bhattacharya are not held accountable the way little people are.
Ah… thank you for the clarification. Wild story.
> having met him
Austchwitz was a plum assignment. The guards held lovely picnics. But personalia have nothing to do with the post.
It seems to me that you’re reacting only to the headline. Do consider reading the entire post. I said that I wouldn’t :”do business” with the dude; what makes Bhattacharya a charlatan is GBD itself, as I show in exhaustive detail, starting with the precedent of Big Tobacco. Or do you think that being a charlatan is a matter of vibes, instead of deeds and words?
Adding, that adverb, “deeply.” Watch out for it.
Yes, the postnomials give Bhattacharya the right to call himself “Doctor,” just as they do Jill Biden. But the inference that he is a physician does not follow. As for “dummies,” they come from all academic institutions with the Best and the Brightest from Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Stanford,* Berkeley, Oxford often leading the world down some very dark paths. This is old news.
*Off hand I do not remember any of the principals in Halberstam’s book being from Stanford but that is immaterial.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the next pandemic comes sooner than later.
In the early 1970s, there was a memorable BBC series on PBS and accompanying book entitled, The Ascent of Man, by Jacob Bronowski; turning Darwin’s “Descent …” on its head, Bronowski focused on our scientific and cultural, not biological, evolution. With the appointment of people like Jayanta Bhattacharya, Sebastian Gorka, and others, this process seems to have reversed direction.
For this tea leaf (reading), much thanks.
One very small note: the second [P] should I think be a [Q] instead.
From the Wikipedia entry on the Great Barrington Bloviation: “At the time, COVID-19 vaccines were considered to be months away from general availability.[4] The document presumed that the disease burden of mass infection could be tolerated, that any infection would confer long term sterilizing immunity, and it made no mention of physical distancing, masks, contact tracing,[10] or long COVID, which has left patients with debilitating symptoms months after the initial infection.[11][12]”
Yep. A further problem is that it may be that Trump and advisors picked Bhattacharya for his activities around COVID, but other big questions that the National Institutes of Health necessarily are involved with will included fluoridation of water, other vaccines such as measles, problems with drug-resistant tuberculosis, continuing research into sickle-cell disease, and so on. Does Bhattacharya have any special insight into these areas? Or has he used up all of his powder on COVID?
I realize that Bhattacharya’s entry at Wiki isn’t dispositive, but I don’t get any guidance from it, either.
Wikipedia is a joke. It’s full of inaccuracies and downright propaganda. No sense in using it as a source. And you’re right, you won’t “get any guidance from it, either.”
I suspect when it comes to totally non “controversial” things like ” how many species of lemurs in Madagascar”, that Wikipedia may well be reliable. When it comes to things where people have a “point of view”, then Wikipedia is just a battlefield where opposing teams of editors wage never-ending combat to see who can delete whose entry from the battlefield.
On Compassion. The clause of the Great Barrington Memo that I reproduce below kept catching my eye. I recall that the Democrats kept talking about Biden’s enormous compassion. Today, I learned that Biden is so compassionate that he pardoned his prodigal son of crimes and corruption that reached the highest level of the state.
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity,
Risks and benefits? This is thorough twaddle. Having investigated Buddhism, having read the Flowers of Saint Francis, I can assure you that the Buddha didn’t wander around doing a cost-benefit analysis of suffering.
If anything, it seems that Bhattacharya and gang are best at public-relations campaigns, which by their nature are written on air. I’d expect Bhattacharya’s term at the National Institutes of Health to include very important things like a change of name and a contract with a very expensive design studio (a couple of hundred thousand quatloos) to revamp the logo.
I’ll take the Sermon to the Birds any day.
> The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity,
So is compassion a risk or a benefit? Let me guess….
Thank you for publishing this. I have been greatly disappointed by the past two administrations and their handling of COVID policy. Doesn’t look like we are headed for any kind of improvement (not surprisingly).
No masks, no air filtration… “everything’s fine!”.
” Two, three, many Jackpots”.
” Let a thousand plagues plague.”
OK Lambert – if we’re going to take ‘what we knew then’ about the risks as a starting point, perhaps you could detail what we knew then about the potential costs of the most significant of the NPIs – that of lockdowns. Was it not the case that most of the pre-pandemic preparation strategies had ruled them out as being of cost potentially far greater than those of ‘letting it rip’ (even if that were what the GBD proponents were proposing). Certainly here in the UK there was no analysis of the potential costs conducted by Boris Johnson’s government. In that light, the GBD wasn’t such an extreme proposition – it was the imposition of, for all intents and purposes, the house arrest of entire populations that was the extreme response. What evidence was it that was so convincing back then that warranted that extreme step to be taken when the potential costs had previously been deemed to high too pay?
Please. Just because a few wingnut influencers made bank by bending themselves out of shape because they couldn’t go to the all-you-can-eat buffet at Applebee’s for a couple months in our pissant lockdowns is no reason to abandon the very notion of quarantine, which has been saving lives as an effective public health measure since the 14th century (Christian Era).
In any case, what would you recommend as a starting point, if not “What we knew then”? What we were going to know at some point in the future?
I hope you find the happiness you seek. Elsewhere.
Lambert was far too kind. I was working myself up to a proper thrashing but he got here first.
You made an assignment, which is a violation of our written site Policies. The onus is on YOU, buddy, to substantiate your unfounded claims about lockdowns, as in provide links and analysis. And you made it with unwarranted ‘tude.
Aside from laziness, the reason you didn’t is your whinging is false. For the better part of two decades running into Covid, there was plenty of handwringing about the lack of any planning about what to do when a pandemic inevitably hit. So your “preparation strategies” is a fabrication. or what we call here Making Shit Up, another violation.
In addition, both lockdowns and refusals to adopt GBD did better. China, Australia, and New Zealand locked down hard and don’t have the level of endemic infection the US has. The big reason China relented was very uneven of the management of the lockdowns (particularly distributing food) since it was done not just by city/community but by district. Enough did badly to cause discontent. It also looks as if they were actively undermined in the politically powerful Shanghai.
I know American businesspeople who were here during SARS. They still praise the Asian response. Lockdowns in afflicted communities, trict individual quarantine, and very high compliance with masking.
Sweden, which went full on GBD, had officially said it was a big mistake. More deaths per capita and no economic benefit relative to their neighbors.
Sweden had the lowest all cause excess mortality rate of all 29 countries in the European Union from 2020 to June 2021 . ( U.K.’s O.N.S.) It was tied with the lowest in the OECD countries.
I assume this was not intentional but irrelevant comparison and cherry-picked time frame. Only valid comparison is to other very low pop density countries. See my long comment debunking this line of argument below.
My favorite part about Sweden’s approach was how they killed elders with morphine:
And on “all cause mortality” figures, Goodhart’s Law; you have supplied a classic example.
FWIW: Here you go for the UK’s pre-pandemic plans from 2011:
“Restrictions on public gatherings and public transport
4.21 There is very limited evidence that restrictions on mass gatherings will have any significant effect on influenza virus transmission14. Large public gatherings or crowded events where people may be in close proximity are an important indicator of ‘normality’ and may help maintain public morale during a pandemic. The social and economic consequences of advising cancellation or postponement of large gatherings are likely to be considerable for event organisers, contributors and participants. There is also a lack of scientific evidence on the impact of internal travel restrictions on transmission and attempts to impose such restrictions would have wide-reaching implications for business and welfare.
4.22 For these reasons, the working presumption will be that Government will not impose any such restrictions. The emphasis will instead be on encouraging all those who have symptoms to follow the advice to stay at home and avoid spreading Herje their illness. However, local organisers may decide to cancel or postpone events in a pandemic fearing economic loss through poor attendances, and the public themselves may decide not to mix in crowds, or use public transport if other options are available…”
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/responding-to-a-uk-flu-pandemic
Regarding the cost-benefit analysis – or the absence thereof – the UK covid inquiry has heard evidence that there wasn’t any.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-65888152
And as for Sweden – on the basis of overall excess mortality, the Swedes were amongst the best in Europe – in the bottom five according to the ONS:
“The five countries with the lowest cumulative excess mortality up to week 26 2022 in the ONS’ comparisons of all-cause mortality between European countries and regions release, were amongst the lowest across all measures available; these were Denmark, Iceland, Luxembourg, Norway, and Sweden.”
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/comparingdifferentinternationalmeasuresofexcessmortality/2022-12-20
So I’ll ask again, what evidence specifically was it that led to the pressing need for lockdowns? The Diamond Princess? The US Navy outbreaks?
This is the best you can do? Garbage in, garbage out comparisons?
Influenza? Coronavirus is not an influenza, so any study on an “influenza pandemic” (the every decade to two decade outbreak of a particularly virulent strain) is irrelevant. SARS-2 had a R0 and CFR much higher. In Feb 2023 alone, more people in the US died of supposedly now mild Covid than had of flu in all of 2022. From January 2020 to August 2023 in the US, 1,141,000 died of Covid, 567,000 of Covid + pneumonia, and 22,000 of influenza: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113051/number-reported-deaths-from-covid-pneumonia-and-flu-us/
Oh, and let us not forget the knock-on effects, that wild type had the dying in hospital beds coughing up their lungs as they turned to bloody goo for 2-3 weeks, tying up hospitals and ERs to the degree that you had 36+ hour waits in many big cities so that people with treatable emergencies like heart attacks were dying or suffering lasting impairment due to not being seen quickly enough?
We have repeatedly debunked cross-European comparisons. The Nordic countries have vastly lower population densities than the rest of Europe. So please don’t try that sleight of hand.
The highly prestigious Nature debunked the Sweden approach. From a write-up in the Los Angeles Times:
Again, the germane comparison is Norway and Finland, which have very low population densities, like Sweden.
And the policy did not greatly help the economy either:
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-03-31/sweden-covid-policy-was-a-disaster
A shorter take from Business Insider:
https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-covid-no-lockdown-strategy-failed-higher-death-rate-2021-8
A lot of early 2020-21 data and discussions, closely held, aka inhouse only, from Germany’s Robert Koch Institute, the RKI, were leaked this summer. FOIA requests produced more information. This has been ignored by the MSM. Utube has nothing. Rumble has some things, mostly in German language. You can find it if you look. The IRK’s early inhouse discussions among the scientists indicate they thought lockdowns and other early steps were incorrect. But, those steps were what the politicians demanded and so science bent to the politicians’ narrative demands.
There was an early similar episode in the US of scientists bending to pressure when early on several scientists examining the virus suggested that it really didn’t look like a natural product. At which point F put pressure on the scientists to change their assessments, and undermine any story about lab leak, etc. You may remember that episode.
My 2 cents.
Sorry, the stats do not even remotely support your implicit contentions.
https://x.com/ashishkjha/status/1860690707284943236
“Smart and experienced” eh? And “compassionate” too? What a change!
I think Oz and Battacharya are inspired choices…
Wolensky and Fauci were a hard act to follow, but these two promise to outdo them when it comes to platitudinous mass murder.
It’s going to be entertaining to hear their excuses when the next pandemic hits a population with widespread immune dysfunction, something that could occur as soon as early next year.
I am impressed, outdoing Brandon when it cokes to effing up takes talent.
A charlatan for president merit a charlatan for tis post.
I guess this is the “altruistic punishment” some were talking about before the election (here and elsewhere) in action.
As I will keep saying when apropos . . . ” don’t blame me. I voted for Harris”.
then you can only be blamed for genocide.
The reason I look with favor on Bhattacharya is the research he (with colleagues) did early in Covid: a study of residents in Santa Clara County to determine how many had been infected with the virus. The conclusion: many had been infected without their knowledge (i.e., no symptoms or minor nondistinctive ones) and hence the infection rate was much higher at that time than expected. ( International Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 50, Issue 2, April 2021, Pages 410–419, https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyab010.)
In addition, his assessment of death rates suggested a figure much lower than the CDC claimed. (Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say? Current estimates about the Covid-19 fatality rate may be too high by orders of magnitude.) By Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya. Wall St. J.,March 24, 2020. I think the CDC’s figures have indeed been shown to be too high.
The reason you “look with favor on Bhattacharya” is that he confirmed your priors, not that the Santa Clara study was any good. It was strongly criticized at the time for inexcusably bad sampling.
From GM via e-mail:
Note that that does not include rampant Covid death undercounting, particularly in nursing homes. That is very frequent with the elderly; my mother died of a pulmonary embolism but the hospital put the cause of death as “natural causes” as in she just fell over from old age. The undercount in the US is at least 16% and likely greater: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/21/us-covid-death-rate-testing-reporting
More from GM:
KLG added:
Post election fever dreams and buyer’s remorse among subsets of the hoi polloi are naturally contrasted with the focused ‘head like a hole’ American hoi oligoi and their plutocracy that is always keen on advancing their (its) own economic interests at the expense of an inconsequential, expendable class.
So it is hardly surprising that, “The invisible hand behind the Great Barrington Declaration was that of Jeffrey Tucker, the former editorial director of a libertarian think tank named the American Institute for Economic Research, headquartered in the Massachusetts town of Great Barrington. A casual look at Tucker’s history reveals beliefs firmly opposed to public health. He penned a 2016 essay advocating for child labour, as well as an article arguing that “the time to smoke is when you are a teen,” since “your lungs are strong.” He remarked that he didn’t know what people meant when they called cigarettes addictive: “It’s not like cigarettes take away your free will,” which is an easy line to write when your think tank is invested in Philip Morris International, the tobacco giant. To associate with such a man when you pretend to care about public health speaks volume.”
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-critical-thinking-pseudoscience/bhattacharya-decide-fate-medical-research
See also, for example,
“Magness and Harrigan ask whether “financial theories about AIER and the GBD” are where we want to hang our hats. The answer is: obviously. The AIER’s support of the GBD and AIER’s own sources of financing are important to understanding its ideological agenda and motives, for example, its well documented climate and tobacco denialism. Naomi Oreskes, co-author of Merchants of Doubt and a scholar of science denialism, wrote about AIER and the GBD in her book Why Trust Science?, stating that AIER “promotes anti-scientific discussion of climate change, much of which promotes the familiar canard that climate change will be minor and manageable.” As we said previously, scientists should understand that, when it comes to AIER, we are dealing with “a well-funded sophisticated science denialist campaign based on ideological and corporate interests.””
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2268/rr-1
The true purpose of the GBD was to manufacture doubt about the competence of the medical establishment to manage the pandemic. Unquestionably, the establishment made some mistakes—SARS-Covid 19 was, after all, a novel virus that was beyond the experience of any human being, living or dead—but for the most part, they got things right.
It is vitally important to note that manufacturing doubt is exactly the same strategy employed both by the tobacco industry with regard to the harmful effects of tobacco use and the fossil fuel industry with regard to global warming caused by burning fossil fuels. Combating such disinformation campaigns is especially difficult in the age of the internet, a new technology that supercharges the spread of information, both true and false. I believe it was Mark Twain who said that a lie can travel round the world before the truth gets its pants on. It’s never been more true than right now.
Much as I enjoy both NK writers and the well-informed commentariat, Covid is the one issue where I find myself in disagreement.
Back when the lockdowns were in full swing I did a survey of all the pandemic preparedness plans I could find, focusing on pre-2020 documents to see what the state of knowledge was before the crisis erupted, ie when people writing those documents were cool headed and not under various kinds of pressure.
This included the CDC, ECDC, WHO, and multiple countries and universities. Granted, a lot of those focused more on influenza rather than coronavirus, but I think most of the conclusions are broadly applicable to both. These pandemic preparedness plans went into lengthy discussions about different proposed measures and the evidentiary basis behind them.
And what I found was that their recommendations were broadly in line with what the GBD authors proposed, so I do not see why they should be called charlatans (at least not on account of the GBD).
Attempting to paralyze an entire society to stop a respiratory virus had always been understood to be unworkable and unrealistic, causing incalculable damage, almost certain to exceed any benefits. That was the state of scientific knowledge before the crisis (and politics) intruded, generating mountains of dubious research and noise.
Regarding Sweden, I would say there are pretty good arguments that they got right. And it seems they did not in fact regret their policy choices.
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/sweden-during-pandemic
Policy-choosers rarely regret their policy choices.
How do the targeted victim-populations ( and their surviving loved-ones) in Sweden feel about their policy-choosers’ policy choices?
No, see my debunking below. The periodic bad influenza years bear no comparison to SARS or a other high CFR coronaviruses
The approach to SARS-1 included lockdowns (more limited because it had not spread much when they saddled up) and isolation. SARS-1 was eradicated. The memory of the SARS success led to more masking and willingness to isolate with SARS-2 (even now I see offices shutting here over Covid outbreaks) and their resulting vastly lower overall Covid incidence over time v. the US. Lockdowns did reduce spread and lower the baseline level now, see China, NZ, Australia. The US has 5% of world pop and has had 25% of Covid deaths. And you defend GBD?
And your defense of the GBD completely ignores the massively higher death toll from Covid than influenza EVEN NOW, greater susceptibility across nearly all the population to other respiratory infections. Long Covid, whose incidence increased, and other T-cell depletion ailments are also up like cancer, particularly heretofore unusual and fast-moving cancers. Covid also lowers IQ and leads to earlier onset of dementia.
This approach is indefensible. Asia did differently based on its SARS-1 experience and has much better results. The West has no excuse.
This is from our GM apropos the UK study quoted earlier in the thread:
A small, but necessary, correction:
Some countries barely counted, or not at all. Very large countries — India, China, Indonesia, etc. And then by some point in 2023 everyone basically stopped.
This is why the US has 25% of COVID deaths — it is 25% of the officially acknowledged ones, i.e. 1.2M out of around 7M.
In reality the global death toll is by now around ~30M and the US has ~1.5M of those.
So 5% for ~4% of the world’s population. Which is about what is expected, because much of the world is a lot younger than the US, i.e. the population-wide IFR there is lower.
“Some countries barely counted, or not at all. Very large countries — India, China, Indonesia, etc.”
Forgive a correction. I know nothing about the other countries mentioned, but China counted meticulously from the earliest days in 2000 and continued to count. While China never required vaccinations, the Chinese produced vaccines early on and encouraged the use even to the extent of having health workers go home to home with several vaccine choices including eventually an oral vaccine.
GM has been all over all the data since early Covid. I would not doubt him on this point. Even a quick search shows a BMJ article disagreeing with your claim:
https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p2
China however, did for a while and perhaps through all of zero Covid, do a fair bit of contact tracing.
China let it rip in early 2023.
Officially it has recorded less than 6,000 deaths since 2019.
Do you seriously believe that?
When they practiced ZeroCOVID, they did stamp it out. And if you have no cases, you don’t have deaths. Although they did lie about the deaths during the outbreaks that they did have, because there were zero deaths reported for several tens of thousands of such cases in 2021 and 2022.
When they let it rip they just stopped counting and reporting altogether.
The death toll in China when they let it rip was around 3 million in that initial wave. We know that because that is what it was proportionally when Hong Kong let it rip in 2022, while still reporting (HK is no longer counting and reporting either), though they also undercounted by 30%-50% (we have all-cause mortality data for HK, but not for China). And Hong Kong has much better hospitals that rural China, so you expect the IFR to be lower there.
That for the initial wave. Obviously there were subsequent waves and deaths after that.
The overall death toll worldwide is around 30M. India accounts for 20% of that, China for at least 10%, Indonesia has at least 1M dead, the USA has 1.5M, Russia has 1.5M, Pakistan and Bangladesh, where we have even less data than for India, but we have to assume it went down similarly, must have lost 1.5-2M between the two of them, Brazil lost 1M, Mexico at least 700,000, and so on.
Forgive me, I never intended to be in any way impolite and regret being at all foolish in my comments.
The Chinese life expectancy data I showed may well be incorrect through 2022, and may again be incorrect through 2023.
Since I just happened to be alerted to what would be the coronavirus epidemic on December 30, 1999, I followed developments in China daily into 2023. I may have failed to understand what was happening from the beginning, but I tried to understand.
I am sorry to have interfered.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1oKZW
January 15, 2018
Life Expectancy at Birth for China, India, Indonesia and Philippines, 2007-2022
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1oKHb
January 15, 2018
Life Expectancy at Birth for China and India, 2007-2022
Thank you. I so much appreciate being corrected:
I may well be quite incorrect, but I have relied on the Chinese life expectancy data and the data through “2023” continue to show a steady year to year increase in Chinese life expectancy:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1BTRh
January 15, 2018
Life Expectancy at Birth for China and Thailand, 2017-2022
I had a much longer reply, but it seems to have been swallowed by a browser malfunction. So I will keep it brief.
You can argue that the UKs pandemic plan was wrong, fair enough – but then so was everyone elses. The UK was not an outlier, and neither was the GBD, it accurately reflects what had been established science up until then. The documents contain extensive discussion of the known science and back it up with plenty of citations. If lockdown proponents want to argue that is all wrong and things should have been done differently, they should do so with better science. My humble opinion is they generally failed to do so.
The economic and social costs of interventions were always known to be massive. As another commenter pointed out, at least a cost-benefit analysis should have been carried out to try to figure out if the solution would end up being more damaging than the disease.
Once the crisis erupted and politics intruded into it, the informational landscape quickly became overwhelmed with shoddy science, making even our best informed discussions very difficult.
Incorrect — the Chinese and initial Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Australian, NZ, etc. plans were the correct plans.
Had they been followed worldwide, we would have actually solved this problem, which is one that has a fully worked out algorithmic solution.
Endemic COVID was imposed on the world primarily by Western elites.
Other countries had a choice — sever all relationships with the West and form their own bubble, or agree on endemic COVID in their countries too. For all sorts of other additional reasons, the former path would have been a good one to follow, but once again, elites make decisions in the interests of the elites themselves, so we ended up with endemic COVID worldwide.
P.S. It is instructive to look at how the elites treat COVID these days. At Davos they have testing protocols, air purifiers, UV lamps, etc. etc. So they also did at the BRICS meeting in Kazan, with increasingly strict protocols if you wanted to get closer to Putin, Xi and co. This in late 2024. What does that tell you?
What you wrote is complete BS.
Smallpox is a respiratory virus, and what was done in the 1950s, 60s and 70s when the last outbreaks were being extinguished?
They “paralyzed entire societies”.
Because the goal was to get rid of it, and they got rid of it.
Those pandemic plans are for influenza, and for the relatively mild versions of it, i.e. 1957 level.
If they also planned to follow the same plans for a 1918-level event then, well, that speaks about the people who put together those plans, not about what proper epidemiological practice should be.
In this case we didn’t have an influenza pandemic (something that is indeed difficult to control because of the nature of the non-human reservoirs), and not a mild 1957-level one either. We had the first introduction of a dangerous new pathogen into the human population in a very long time. Long after the principle had been established that such a thing would not be allowed again and that we would also strive for altogether eliminating as many of the existing ones as we can.
Now we have endemic SARS and public health as an idea has been destroyed.
You see it with the reaction to the slowly unfolding monkeypox and H5N1 catastrophes — there is zero attempt being made to stop them. That is all a consequence of what happened in 2020.
The technical tools existed (and still exist) to eradicate SARS-CoV-2 completely from the human population, on a time scale of six months to a year, and the resources to do it also existed (and still exist). It was the political economy aspect of the problem that sabotaged that possibility — doing so threatened the foundations of the current oligarchic neoliberal capitalist model. Thus NC’s position on the issue being both the right one and perfectly consistent with everything else written here
I never heard of entire societies being paralyzed in the campaign to eradicate smallpox. Could you point to a source so I can look deeper into that? I have not studied the smallpox case in much depth, but my understanding was that having a sterilizing vaccine made eradication possible because of lasting immunity. This would not apply to covid.
Would you elaborate a bit further on what technical tools you believe would make eradication possible? Perhaps we are talking about different things.
This is the all-time-classic textbook example of how you do outbreak containment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Yugoslav_smallpox_outbreak
For COVID, the Chinese algorithm, which worked every time they applied it, is:
1) Hard lockdown
2) Cordon sanitaire around the red area
3) Closed borders
4) Strict masking for those who have to go out
5) Mass testing of the whole population to find out the infected, and testing of wastewaters to make sure there are no hidden cases
6) Centralized quarantine for the cases identified by testing
7) Go back to 5) until elimination.
Again, this worked every time.
Mass testing was not even needed in 2020 — China originally, and then Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand and a few other places extinguished it several times without it — but then it evolved and the R_0 became even higher so it kind of is necessary now, otherwise you would be spending six months to a year on a single outbreak.
With mass testing, even at the current huge levels of transmission, you could stamp it out even in the US within 4-6 months. Worldwide it will take a few years because of how many war-torn failed countries you have, and how much trust in public health authorities withing the population will have to be rebuilt.
The problem is who pays for the lockdown and for the mass testing.
And this is where the political economy aspect of the problem kicks in. You would have to take from the rich to fund that effort, because there is no other place to take resources from when most of the rest of the population is not working.
But under neoliberal capitalism, we never take from the rich, the only transfer of wealth that is allowed is taking from the poor and giving to the rich.
So in effect we had the grandest act of premeditated mass murder in human history, committed by the current elites (all over the world, but it was initiated and determined by Western elites) in order to preserve the current unfair socio-economic system, which would have been threatened by such a dangerous precedent.
And, of course, they took advantage of the situation following the disaster capitalism manual to engineer yet another wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in the process, to screw everyone else doubly and triply.
“This is the all-time-classic textbook example of how you do outbreak containment.”
Really, really nicely done.
Yves here. In the >2 million comment history of this site, I have stooped to editing reader comments fewer than 5 times. I decided to hoist this blacklisted comment on a now-dead thread because the commenter kept reposting it, despite now using a fake e-mail address that includes idontcare.
This is a demonstration, since Thucydides is so invested in having the last word, how he got himself banned. Had he bothered reading our written site Policies, which he agreed to as a condition of commenting, he would have seen that our rules are about good faith argumentation. He has instead both engaged in broken record (repeating arguments that were debunked) and Making Shit Up multiple times. First was that the pandemic was well underway by mid 2019. He seems not to realize that were are, hands down, the leading aggregator of Covid data and studies. The ONLY evidence of Covid circulating in 2019 is in Italy, in November, as I recall no more than 3 cases, and they back sequenced it to guesstimate that their first case was in September, and managed to find some confirming evidence in cancer case data from that period. There is a huge amount of commerce between China and Italy due to the fashion trade, BTW. And despite December being winter and dry heated air being more favorable to transmission of wild type, the mass outbreak was in China, not Italy. Italy has an older population and when Covid got bad, it was hit very hard, so the idea that Covid could have been circulating at anything more than a very small level is a huge leap. Another Making Shit Up is addressed by our GM, whose comments are interspersed below, in the howler that China is not a large country. Another policy violation is the attempt to argue from unsubstantiated authority: “Knowing how policy is done and implemented”. Buddy this site is rife with people who know that beat well, including yours truly.
We have found consistently that readers who are losing a debate often go to great lengths to have the last word so as to maintain the appearance of having won. That type is the most likely to resort to bad faith argumentation.
The entirety of Thucydides’ comment is below. I have added GM’s rebuttals.
Well, I begin to see why we disagree. What you describe may work for small, geographically more or less defined outbreaks. But I really dont see how it can be applicable to country-wide level, esp large countries, for the required amount of time. Knowing how policy is done and implemented, I find that to be unrealistic and unworkable.
To me it is clear that by the time the crisis erupted into public view, the virus was already well beyond our possibilities to contain it, and for that I blame the chinese and their lack of transparency. On a side note, there is some evidence suggesting that the pandemic was already underway by mid 2019, at least 6 months before the general public became aware of it. Perhaps because it was summer in the northern hemisphere it did not become noticeable right away? But my point is the horse had left the proverbial barn too long ago to attempt a lockdown.
You said it yourself, the countries that did it successfully did so only for a time, but the moment you ease up the virus is right there. So you incur in immense damages just to end up at more or less the same endpoint, but a little later.
1) most people (and countries) dont have a high level of energy and food supplies to ride out a hard lockdown. Many of the systems that keep life going dont have that many redundancies to deal with unexpected situations. Deferred work and maintenace pile up and snowball, supply chain disruptions cascade through the system the longer it goes on.
3)[sic: Thucydides did not have a 2)] many states dont have the institutional capacity to implement hard lockdowns, so there is always leakage. Just as an example, I happened to visit war-torn Syria during that time. In 2 weeks there I saw perhaps a grand total of half a dozen facemasks in the entire country.
4) even if you stamp it out in your country, there will remain reservoirs of the virus in other populations. Also, while the lab leak hypothesis looks more plausible today, at the beginning of the pandemic, we were working with the hypothesis that there was an animal reservoir somewhere. My understanding is that candidates for eradication should not have a zoonotic reservoir?
And lastly, i continue to hold smallpox is not a good example to pin our comparisons to. First, it took decades to eradicate. Second, there were vaccines providing lasting immunity and breakthroughs were relatively rare, afaik, this is not so with covid (or influenza, for that matter)