Remember the mega-hit book The Bonfire of the Vanities? While a work of fiction, the book shone a harsh light on the all-too-real world of lies, corruption, and hypocrisy in high places. In one of my favorite scenes, the power-couple protagonists attend a party at the home of the aptly named Bavardage family, where all the guests blab at each other with deep-fake enthusiasm, making sure to display their “boiling teeth” at all times.
Like the high society portrayed in the book, the Covid regime was replete with rot, from taped-up basketball nets and masked toddlers to vaccine passports and… slogans. Some of the slogans were carefully crafted by governments, while others sprang from the weeds of social media. They all drew from the same playbook, capitalizing on fear and using emotional manipulation to activate people’s guilt circuits. They served as thought-stopping mantras that precluded honest communication about the pandemic. To anyone with even a slightly nuanced worldview, their plodding earnestness grated like an earworm.
With three years of pandemic history behind us, it’s high time to put these clunkers to bed.
I’ve collected a baker’s dozen of the slogans that have dogged us for the past three years, and explain why they deserve to be torched and thrown into an unmarked grave.
Two weeks to flatten the curve. Here’s a case where a big fat laugh emoji would do the job of a thousand words. Anyone remember what happened when the two weeks were up? Yeah, so do I. The “experts” decided that we need to keep doing something. And that something was more lockdowns.
Stay home, save lives. This sanctimonious and bossy slogan sent the message that mental health didn’t count, livelihoods didn’t count, arts and culture didn’t count, religious communion didn’t count, and the dreams people had spent years pursuing didn’t count. The only thing that counted was preserving metabolic life—or at least, pretending we were doing that.
Follow the science.I’m not the first person to note that the only constant in science is change. Questioning science is science. But that’s not even the main reason “Follow the science” makes no sense. Science is information. It tells you what is, not what to do about it. That depends on our values: How important do we consider attendance at school? Live music and theater? Comforting people at the end of life? There are no mathematical coefficients for weighting these parameters. Health policy professor Leana Wen put it well in a recent Washington Postarticle: “Underneath it all is values: Whose rights are paramount? The individual who must give up freedoms, or those around them who want to lower infection risk? Yes, science should guide such debates, but it cannot lead all the way to the answer.”
We’re all in this together. Is that so? Was the worker delivering DoorDash orders in the same boat as the Netflix-and-chill couples perfecting new sourdough recipes during lockdown? Was the event planner who lost a 10-year business in the same boat as the Amazon shareholders? Was the foreign student stuck in a low-ceilinged apartment in the same boat as the well-connected mom who hired a power tutor for her kids?
Muh freedumb.During Covid, safety became the all-consuming preoccupation and freedom got branded as right-wing stupidity. Freedom to take a walk on the beach? Stop killing the vulnerable! Freedom to earn a living? The economy will recover! The demotion of freedom—that noble ideal of liberal democracy—to a caricature has been painful to observe. Without freedom, we have nothing resembling a life. Pandemic or not, freedom needs a place at the discussion table.
Mask it or casket. Hyperbole much? The glib phrase was designed to frighten, rather than inform, its cuteness making it all the more irritating. When a statement deviates so sharply from reality, it loses its power. People don’t take it seriously, even if they insist on Twitter that they do.
The virus doesn’t discriminate. This one was especially weaselly because it contained a grain of truth that people could latch onto. Young or old, healthy or frail, anyone could catch the virus. But the risk of serious harm from the virus was orders of magnitude higher in certain groups, especially the old and frail. Experts downplayed this sharp risk gradient, plunging everyone into an abyss of fear. Not cool.
Can’t do X if you’re dead. We heard this a lot in the early months, as a justification for maintaining this or that restriction. You can’t attend a jazz concert if you’re dead. You can’t go backpacking in Nepal if you’re dead. For all its slickness, the slogan doesn’t stand up to logical scrutiny. It sets an actual scenario (restriction on an activity) against an improbable counterfactual (dying if the restriction is lifted). It’s like warning someone who’s about to drive across country, which is riskier than taking a bus, that “you can’t enjoy the coastal cities if you’re dead.” Said nobody ever.
Listen to the experts. OK, but which experts? The scientists that governments allowed to speak? What about the scientists with hundreds of citations in prestigious journals but divergent views? Can we listen to them, too? And what about mental health experts? Or economists? Historians? Bioethicists and philosophers? A pandemic isn’t just a scientific problem to solve, but a human one. Scientists do not get to decide what gives meaning to life and what trade-offs are worth making when steering the human family through a pandemic. Some of the sharpest insights about Covid have come from people outside of science. We ignore them at our own peril.
My mask protects you, your mask protects me. More naked emotional manipulation. The message was clear: if you don’t mask, you’re a bad person (presumably a fate worse than death). In fact, the mask is more of a cultural signifier than a viral transmission blocker. As the recent Cochrane review of physical interventions to slow viral transmission has made clear, whatever evidence exists for community masking is underwhelming at best.
Pandemic of the unvaccinated. That one aged rather poorly. A February 2023 Lancetarticle concluded that the “SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are insufficiently efficacious in preventing infections.” We can debate the fine points, but by now we all know that vaccinated people both catch and transmit Covid. What’s more, a Danish meta-analysis was unable to find credible evidence that mRNA vaccines reduced mortality, leaving statisticians with the unenviable job of torturing the data in subgroup analyses. (Perhaps six-toed people born on a Tuesday have lower hospitalization rates during the month after getting their boosters.) I started out with a lot of hope in the vaccines. I got vaxxed up and boosted myself. But let’s call a spade a spade: the vaccine purveyors overpromised and underdelivered.
You may be done with Covid, but Covid isn’t done with you. The statement isn’t the gotcha that people think it is. Of course Covid isn’t done with us. Neither is the common cold or the flu. Neither are thunderstorms and volcanoes and earthquakes and a thousand other forces of nature. When people say they’re done with Covid, they simply mean they’re done turning the world into an infection control zone. “I believe that pandemics end partially because humans declare them at an end,” says University of New Hampshire history professor Marion Dorsey, quoted from a Scientific American article titled “People, not science, decide when a pandemic is over.” Spanish flu chronicler John Barry concurs: a pandemic ends “when people stop paying attention to it.” And there’s nothing the shrinking cast of Covidians can do about it.
Stay safe. These words, generally used at the end of a social interaction, became the verbal equivalent of touching wood—a knee-jerk utterance to ward off the evil eye. It always reminded me of the “praise be” muttered by the handmaids in Margaret Atwood’s iconic novel: mechanical and dystopian. One of my friends responds to the words with “Stay dangerous.” Stay alert, stay curious, stay ready to think for yourself. If there’s anything I wish for us all in year four of the Covid era, it’s this.
An economist digging below the surface of an IMF report has found something that should shock the Western bloc out of any false confidence in its unsurpassed global economic clout...
G7 leaders meeting on June 28, 2022, at Schloss Elmau in Krün, Germany. (White House/Adam Schultz)
Last summer, the Group of 7 (G7), a self-anointed forum of nations that view themselves as the most influential economies in the world, gathered at Schloss Elmau, near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, to hold their annual meeting. Their focus was punishing Russia through additional sanctions, further arming of Ukraine and the containment of China.
At the same time, China hosted, through video conference, a gathering of the BRICS economic forum. Comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, this collection of nations relegated to the status of so-called developing economies focused on strengthening economic bonds, international economic development and how to address what they collectively deemed the counter-productive policies of the G7.
In early 2020, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov had predicted that, based upon purchasing power parity, or PPP, calculations projected by the International Monetary Fund, BRICS would overtake the G7 sometime later that year in terms of percentage of the global total.
(A nation’s gross domestic product at purchasing power parity, or PPP, exchange rates is the sum value of all goods and services produced in the country valued at prices prevailing in the United States and is a more accurate reflection of comparative economic strength than simple GDP calculations.)
Then the pandemic hit and the global economic reset that followed made the IMF projections moot. The world became singularly focused on recovering from the pandemic and, later, managing the fallout from the West’s massive sanctioning of Russia following that nation’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The G7 failed to heed the economic challenge from BRICS, and instead focused on solidifying its defense of the “rules based international order” that had become the mantra of the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden.
Miscalculation
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an ideological divide that has gripped the world, with one side (led by the G7) condemning the invasion and seeking to punish Russia economically, and the other (led by BRICS) taking a more nuanced stance by neither supporting the Russian action nor joining in on the sanctions. This has created a intellectual vacuum when it comes to assessing the true state of play in global economic affairs.
U.S. President Joe Biden in virtual call with G7 leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Feb. 24. (White House/Adam Schultz)
It is now widely accepted that the U.S. and its G7 partners miscalculated both the impact sanctions would have on the Russian economy, as well as the blowback that would hit the West.
Angus King, the Independent senator from Maine, recently observed that he remembers
“when this started a year ago, all the talk was the sanctions are going to cripple Russia. They’re going to be just out of business and riots in the street absolutely hasn’t worked …[w]ere they the wrong sanctions? Were they not applied well? Did we underestimate the Russian capacity to circumvent them? Why have the sanctions regime not played a bigger part in this conflict?”
It should be noted that the IMF calculated that the Russian economy, as a result of these sanctions, would contract by at least 8 percent. The real number was 2 percent and the Russian economy — despite sanctions — is expected to grow in 2023 and beyond.
This kind of miscalculation has permeated Western thinking about the global economy and the respective roles played by the G7 and BRICS. In October 2022, the IMF published its annual World Economic Outlook (WEO), with a focus on traditional GDP calculations. Mainstream economic analysts, accordingly, were comforted that — despite the political challenge put forward by BRICS in the summer of 2022 — the IMF was calculating that the G7 still held strong as the leading global economic bloc.
In January 2023 the IMF published an update to the October 2022 WEO, reinforcing the strong position of the G7. According to Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the IMF’s chief economist, the “balance of risks to the outlook remains tilted to the downside but is less skewed toward adverse outcomes than in the October WEO.”
This positive hint prevented mainstream Western economic analysts from digging deeper into the data contained in the update. I can personally attest to the reluctance of conservative editors trying to draw current relevance from “old data.”
Fortunately, there are other economic analysts, such as Richard Dias of Acorn Macro Consulting, a self-described “boutique macroeconomic research firm employing a top-down approach to the analysis of the global economy and financial markets.”
Rather than accept the IMF’s rosy outlook as gospel, Dias did what analysts are supposed to do — dig through the data and extract relevant conclusions.
After rooting through the IMF’s World Economic Outlook Data Base, Dias conducted a comparative analysis of the percentage of global GDP adjusted for PPP between the G7 and BRICS, and made a surprising discovery: BRICS had surpassed the G7.
This was not a projection, but rather a statement of accomplished fact:
BRICS was responsible for 31.5 percent of the PPP-adjusted global GDP, while the G7 provided 30.7 percent.
Making matters worse for the G7, the trends projected showed that the gap between the two economic blocs would only widen going forward.
The reasons for this accelerated accumulation of global economic clout on the part of BRICS can be linked to three primary factors:
residual fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic,
blowback from the sanctioning of Russia by the G7 nations in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a growing resentment among the developing economies of the world to G7 economic policies and
priorities which are perceived as being rooted more in post-colonial arrogance than a genuine desire to assist in helping nations grow their own economic potential.
Growth Disparities
It is true that BRICS and G7 economic clout is heavily influenced by the economies of China and the U.S., respectively. But one cannot discount the relative economic trajectories of the other member states of these economic forums. While the economic outlook for most of the BRICS countries points to strong growth in the coming years, the G7 nations, in a large part because of the self-inflicted wound that is the current sanctioning of Russia, are seeing slow growth or, in the case of the U.K., negative growth, with little prospect of reversing this trend.
Moreover, while G7 membership remains static, BRICS is growing, with Argentina and Iran having submitted applications, and other major regional economic powers, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, expressing an interest in joining. Making this potential expansion even more explosive is the recent Chinese diplomatic achievement in normalizing relations between Iran and Saudia Arabia.
Diminishing prospects for the continued global domination by the U.S. dollar, combined with the economic potential of the trans-Eurasian economic union being promoted by Russia and China, put the G7 and BRICS on opposing trajectories. BRICS should overtake the G7 in terms of actual GDP, and not just PPP, in the coming years.
But don’t hold your breath waiting for mainstream economic analysts to reach this conclusion. Thankfully, there are outliers such as Richard Dias and Acorn Macro Consulting who seek to find new meaning from old data.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made at least 25 statistical or numerical errors during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the overwhelming majority exaggerated the severity of the pandemic, according to a new study.
Researchers who have been tracking CDC errors compiled 25 instances where the agency offered demonstrably false information. For each instance, they analyzed whether the error exaggerated or downplayed the severity of COVID-19.
Of the 25 instances, 20 exaggerated the severity, the researchers reported in the study, which was published ahead of peer review on March 23.
“The CDC has expressed significant concern about COVID-19 misinformation. In order for the CDC to be a credible source of information, they must improve the accuracy of the data they provide,” the authors wrote.
The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.
Most Errors Involved Children
Most of the errors were about COVID-19’s impact on children.
In mid-2021, for instance, the CDC claimed that 4 percent of the deaths attributed to COVID-19 were kids. The actual percentage was 0.04 percent. The CDC eventually corrected the misinformation, months after being alerted to the issue.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky falsely told a White House press briefing in October 2021 that there had been 745 COVID-19 deaths in children, but the actual number, based on CDC death certificate analysis, was 558.
Walensky and other CDC officials also falsely said in 2022 that COVID-19 was a top five cause of death for children, citing a study that gathered CDC data instead of looking at the data directly. The officials have not corrected the false claims.
Other errors include the CDC claiming in 2022 that pediatric COVID-19 hospitalizations were “increasing again” when they’d actually peaked two weeks earlier; CDC officials in 2023 including deaths among infants younger than 6 months old when reporting COVID-19 deaths among children; and Walensky on Feb. 9, 2023, exaggerating the pediatric death toll before Congress.
“These errors suggest the CDC consistently exaggerates the impact of COVID-19 on children,” the authors of the study said.
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – March 24, 2023 – Researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine have been awarded a five-year, $7.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Helping End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) initiative.
Credit: Wake Forest University School of Medicine
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – March 24, 2023 – Researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine have been awarded a five-year, $7.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Helping End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) initiative.
The NIH HEAL initiative, which launched in 2018, was created to find scientific solutions to stem the national opioid and pain public health crises. The funding is part of the HEAL Data 2 Action (HD2A) program, designed to use real-time data to guide actions and change processes toward reducing overdoses and improving opioid use disorder treatment and pain management.
With the support of the grant, researchers will create a data infrastructure support center to assist HD2A innovation projects at other institutions across the country. These innovation projects are designed to address gaps in four areas—prevention, harm reduction, treatment of opioid use disorder and recovery support.
“Our center’s goal is to remove barriers so that solutions can be more streamlined and rapidly distributed,” said Meredith C.B. Adams, M.D., associate professor of anesthesiology, biomedical informatics, physiology and pharmacology, and public health sciences at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
By monitoring opioid overdoses in real time, researchers will be able to identify trends and gaps in resources in local communities where services are most needed.
“We will collect and analyze data that will inform prevention and treatment services,” Adams said. “We’re shifting chronic pain and opioid care in communities to quickly offer solutions.”
The center will also develop data related resources, education and training related to substance use, pain management and the reduction of opioid overdoses.
According to the CDC, there was a 29% increase in drug overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2020, and nearly 75% of those deaths involved an opioid.
“Given the scope of the opioid crises, which was only exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s imperative that we improve and create new prevention strategies,” Adams said. “The funding will create the infrastructure for rapid intervention.”
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