by Steve Templeton, Activist Post:
As I was writing Fear of a Microbial Planet last year, I noticed some patterns emerge. Again and again, I found examples of instances where, in a rational world, the actions of authorities in response to COVID or other disease threats should be obvious, expected, and in the best interests of the public. However, in each instance, I was compelled to acknowledge reality and follow up with “But that didn’t happen.” Because the response often wasn’t rational—it was mainly driven by politics and hysteria, and every irrational and non-evidence-supported act could be explained through this lens. As a result, the phrase is by far the most repeated in the book, and so I thought it would be interesting to compile ten examples of when a strong denial of reality ruled and common sense was abandoned.
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- The death of infectious disease, pre-1980s (Chapter 5):
In the years following World War II, improved sanitation, mass production of antibiotics and vaccines, and increased use of DDT resulted in plummeting death rates from infectious diseases in first-world countries. Filled with the confidence of these concrete successes, experts began to set goals for the eradication of many infectious diseases. Many books were published on the subject, including Man’s Mastery of Malaria in 1955 and The Evolution and Eradication of Infectious Diseases in 1963, all trumpeting the unlimited potential of technological innovations to wipe infectious disease from the earth once and for all.
But that didn’t happen. The advent of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s killed the hubris of disease eradication, as it became more obvious that eradicated infectious diseases would simply be replaced by other diseases that were much harder to eliminate. The old, bad habits of centuries of epidemic responses, those driven by fear and ignorance and the blaming of others, returned, and habits that would lead to campaigns of disinformation, mass hysteria, and germophobia have remained the norm for pandemics real and imagined ever since.
- Media wildly exaggerating the risks of HIV infection among heterosexuals (Chapter 5):
It was the responsibility of health officials and scientists to inform the public about their risks of HIV infection, and it was the responsibility of the media to disseminate that information in a way that would empower individuals to make choices about their health without creating mass panic and irrational anxieties in those who had low risk of infection. But that didn’t happen. As Michael Fumento chronicled in his contrarian book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, six years after the first group of gay men with acquired immune deficiencies were identified, the risks of heterosexual transmission of HIV were still exaggerated and sensationalized. Oprah Winfrey, one of the most influential TV talk show personalities of all time, opened one of her shows in early 1987 with a panic-promoting monologue:
Research studies now project that one in five—listen to me, hard to believe—one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years. That’s by 1990. One in five. It is no longer a gay disease. Believe me.
As you can probably guess, one in five heterosexuals were not dead by 1990. Not even close.
- Embrace of COVID alarmists like Eric-Feigl Ding (Chapter 7):
Feigl-Ding has an extraordinary talent for making non-issues into issues, issues into crises, and crises into cataclysmic events of biblical proportions. How does he do it? He starts with emotive declarations in ALL CAPS. His first viral tweet on January 20, 2020, began with “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD!” He then referred to the reproductive number (which shows how fast the virus spreads) for the “new coronavirus is a 3.8!!!” That was completely misleading in the context of SARS-CoV-2, but the number more accurately reflected the growth of his Twitter followers, which spiked overnight as the tweet gained steam. His liberal use of emojis—including sirens, warning signs, and scared and crying faces, were well-placed to grab attention in every feed. Once his followers grew to hundreds of thousands, he began getting media coverage on CNN, MSNBC, and quoted in major newspapers. He was even recommended as a COVID expert by Twitter, with a recommendation appearing in the feeds of new users or anyone who searched for terms like “COVID-19” or “coronavirus.”
It gets worse. Feigl-Ding’s alarmist misinformation about COVID didn’t end with his first viral tweet. He tweeted about a preprint paper claiming to identify HIV-related sequences in the SARS-CoV-2 genome. The paper was quickly retracted, but not before meetings of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other high-level officials were called to discuss how to deal with the paper’s claims. He tweeted alarm about Mexico’s early 50 percent positivity rate of COVID testing, while ignoring the fact that testing was limited in Mexico to at the time to people who were seriously ill. He also confused virus reactivation with reinfection, a difference anyone that had taken a basic virology class would know.
On MSNBC, he made the patently absurd claim that the SARS-CoV-2 variant Omicron was more severe in children than in adults. Continuing his parent-targeting fear-mongering, he championed public school closures, but went silent when his hypocrisy was exposed when it was made public that his wife and kids moved to Austria so that his children could attend in-person schools. He continued to make predictions about COVID death tolls that had no basis in reality, and was even publicly challenged by representatives of Denmark’s Statens Serum Institut for tweeting misleading graphs showing surges of deaths after COVID restrictions were lifted in Denmark in February, 2022. Some of his followers would defend him from these fact-based challenges with Twitter mob attacks and mass-trolling of his critics, thus discouraging many more public callouts of his constant stream of baseless and outlandish claims.
One would think that his expertise in infectious disease immunology would be carefully verified by media outlets before interviewing and labeling him an “expert.” But that didn’t happen. Feigl-Ding is an epidemiologist with an expertise in nutrition, not infectious disease. Although he did get his PhD from Harvard in 2007 after dropping out of medical school, his claims of being a “Harvard Epidemiologist” were based on an unpaid visiting-scientist appointment at Harvard in nutrition. His pre-pandemic expertise was in the health effects of diet and exercise, with absolutely no experience in pandemic or respiratory virus epidemiology.
- The US government pivots to exaggeration of COVID risks to scare people into changing their behavior (Chapter 7):
Now you might think that public health officials and leaders would see this widespread ignorance and misperception of risk and try to allay the public’s fears by providing clear and accurate information. But that didn’t happen. At least, it didn’t happen for long. For example, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIH/NIAID’s early comments on COVID-19 to colleagues and the public were very matter-of-fact and much more reassuring than his later statements. On February 17th, he told USA Today’s editorial board, “Whenever you have the threat of a transmissible infection, there are varying degrees from understandable to outlandish extrapolations of fear.” On February 26, 2020, he told a CNBC panel “you can’t keep out the entire world” when asked about travel restrictions on inbound flights from China. Fauci also noted that while he thought China had been effective in containing the virus, they used methods which he called “draconian” that he doubted would be adopted in the US. The same day, he told CBS correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook in an email that, “You can mitigate the effects, but you cannot avoid having infections since you cannot shut off the country from the rest of the world.” He also warned against panic. “Do not let the fear of the unknown (i.e. a pandemic of a new infectious agent) distort your evaluation of the risk of the pandemic to you relative to the risks that you face every day. The only thing that we can do is to prepare as best as possible and do not yield to unreasonable fear.”
This is fantastic advice, and it would be hard to improve upon it! Dr. Fauci was clearly concerned about collateral damage caused by panic. However, the very next day he began to hedge a bit. In an email to actress Morgan Fairchild, who had worked with him during the 80s on HIV messaging, he wrote that community spread was becoming a problem in other countries, and might progress to a global pandemic. “If that occurs we will surely have more cases in the USA. And so for that reason, the American public should not be frightened, but should be prepared to mitigate an outbreak in this country by measures that include social distancing, teleworking, temporary closures of schools, etc.” He was also still concerned about irrational fear and panic. On February 29th, he told the hosts of the Today Show, “Right now, at this moment, there’s no need to change anything that you’re doing on a daily basis. Right now the risk is low.” Then he warned that things could change, “When you start to see community spread, this could change and force you to become more attentive to doing things that would protect you from spread.”
Very soon, community spread was confirmed. “Before there was a major explosion like we saw in the Northeastern corridor driven by New York City metropolitan area–I recommended to President Trump that we shut the country down,” Fauci told an audience at his alma mater, Holy Cross, later in October, 2020. Pressure from Fauci and White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx eventually led to a press conference on March 16th, 2020, in which President Trump told the nation to shut down. When pressed upon the reason for the changes, Dr. Birx replied that “We’ve been working with groups in the United Kingdom. We had new information coming out from a model and what had the biggest impact in the model is social distancing, small groups, not going in public in large groups.” More specifically, a mathematical model from Imperial College-London was used that assumed that lockdowns would work, and unsurprisingly predicted that lockdowns would work and save millions of lives. A model that assumed a preventable catastrophe was all the maximizers needed to demand action.
A month later, Fauci would say that shutting down earlier could have saved more lives. Later in the year, he would lament that the US didn’t shut down more stringently, “Unfortunately, since we did not shut down completely the way China did, the way Korea did, the way Taiwan did, we actually did see spread even though we shut down.” As I mentioned earlier, places that shut down also saw massive collateral damage, which would have been even worse in the US if the preferred “draconian” response had been implemented.
Many other places implemented incredibly harsh lockdowns that failed even more miserably. Peru, for example, had one of the harshest lockdowns in the world, and was rewarded for it with one of the highest death rates. Most of South America had a very hard time with COVID outbreaks, as did North America and most of Europe, while most of Asia did not, despite differences in mitigation efforts. I will get more into pandemic response scorekeeping in Chapter 13, but suffice it to say, lockdowns weren’t the panacea the maximizers claimed they would be.
Once committed to shutting down a country without much evidence that the benefits will outweigh the costs, leaders and health officials will become keenly aware of any confirmation that they made the right decision, and equally resistant to any disproof. In the United States, state leaders were ultimately responsible for pandemic policies, and this ensured there would be 50 different strategies and outcomes for comparison. Unsurprisingly, most media outlets favored the most draconian responses. The more people were isolated at home, grasping for every bit of terrifying information they could get, the better.
- Predictions of doom for reopening states (Chapter 7):
Among US states, there were clear gaps in policies. Some continued stay-at-home orders much longer than others, mandated masks in public and schools, and kept “non-essential” businesses closed for months. Only one state, South Dakota, never closed or issued mandates. Others opened up after the initial wave passed and never closed again. Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp announced on Monday, April 20th that the state would reopen on April 27th. This announcement was not well-received. “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice” blared a headline in the Atlantic two days later. Fortunately, the article itself was less over the top than the title. It profiled business owners who were scared to open, quoted multiple bipartisan critics, and cited Georgia’s lousy testing capacity and recent outbreaks as reasons it was courting certain catastrophe.
