Originally Posted by
natepro
I hadn't really read this clown's Newsweek article, but Jesus it's bad.
"Most of us did not speak up in support of alternative views, and many of us tried to suppress them. When strong scientific voices like world-renowned Stanford professors John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, or University of California San Francisco professors Vinay Prasad and Monica Gandhi, sounded the alarm on behalf of vulnerable communities, they faced severe censure by relentless mobs of critics and detractors in the scientific community—often not on the basis of fact but solely on the basis of differences in scientific opinion."
He actually cites Scott ****ing Atlas as someone we should've listened to! :laugh2:
I hadn't heard of Jay Bhattacharya, so I looked him up. On March 24th, 2020 he wrote an opinion piece in the WSJ called "Is the Coronavirus As Deadly As They Say?" Some selections from the op-ed:
"If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified. But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high."
Currently 1.12 million in the US have died from COVID, though most experts would say the number is probably higher given that people are testing at home more - if at all - now, and there's no way we're catching all COVID deaths either. And, of course, these deaths are with the shelter-in-place and quarantines; the idea that they would've magically been less without them is obviously ridiculous.
"This does not make Covid-19 a nonissue. The daily reports from Italy and across the U.S. show real struggles and overwhelmed health systems. But a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million.
...
If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic, then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible."
I'm not a mathematician, but I'm pretty sure 1.12 million is significantly closer to two million than it is to 20,000 which, by his own standard laid out here, means focusing on "older populations and hospitals" wasn't sensible.
And yet Kevin Bass wants to shame people for not listening to him.
He also name drops John Ioannidis, who also opposed mask mandates and lockdowns, and wrote in Stat News on March 17th, 2020:
"If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like illness.” If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams."
Again, we're at 102 million known infections, and 1.12 million known deaths; obviously a far cry from 3.3 million and 10,000. Again, Bass wants us to be shamed for not listening to someone when doing so would've clearly resulted in more deaths.
Bass also says we should've listened to Vinay Prasad. What did he say about our response to COVID?
"When democratically elected systems transform into totalitarian regimes, the transition is subtle, stepwise, and involves a combination of pre-planned as well as serendipitous events. Indeed, this was the case with Germany in the years 1929-1939, where Hitler was given a chance at governing, the president subsequently died, a key general resigned after a scandal and the pathway to the Fuhrer was inevitable."
He also said "School closure is like the Iraq war" and "It's [school closures] the domestic equivalent of the Iraq war." Both are obviously not true, and absurd comparisons for a multitude of reasons.
Bass characterizes these statements as "sounded the alarm on behalf of vulnerable communities" and makes no mention of the things they actually said.
Bass also completely downplays the many things Trump said about COVID and tries to portray him as some kind of voice of reason that we should've listened to more: "When former President Trump pointed out the downsides of intervention, he was dismissed publicly as a buffoon."
Let's see what Trump said about COVID:
April 3, at the White House: “The C.D.C. is advising the use of nonmedical cloth face covering as an additional voluntary public health measure. So it’s voluntary. You don’t have to do it. They suggested for a period of time, but this is voluntary. I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.”
“I just don’t want to be doing — I don’t know, somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk, the great Resolute Desk. I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens — I don’t know, somehow I don’t see it for myself. I just, I just don’t.”
March 23, White House briefing
“America will again, and soon, be open for business — very soon — a lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting [...] We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”
35,000 were dead at this point.
March 31, White House briefing
“I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead. We’re going to go through a very tough two weeks [...] It's is not the flu. It's vicious.”
177,000 dead at this point.
And that last one was one day before April, when it was supposed to disappear:
Feb. 14, addressing the National Border Patrol Council: “There’s a theory that, in April, when it gets warm — historically, that has been able to kill the virus. So we don’t know yet; we’re not sure yet.”
Like a miracle!
Feb. 27, at a White House meeting: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”
**** this Kevin Bass guy. You don't get to go on Tucker and say we should've listened to this collection of *******s and then try to act like you're some kind of non-partisan scientist who's actually attending an unnamed medical school.
