The Graveyard of False Covid Claims By Kyle Smith Is it any wonder people are at the boiling point when so many influential figures seem to have developed an allergy to the truth?
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/the-graveyard-of-false-covid-claims/
O n the Fourth of July, President Biden said, “Two hundred and forty-five years ago, we declared our independence from a distant king. Today, we’re closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus.”
How’d that turn out?
Bad predictions, bad information, and a habit of stomping all over the truth are a big part of the reason why so many Americans are feeling not just depressed but actually angry about what’s going on with the virus.
Six months after Biden’s “Mission Accomplished” moment, caseloads are at record levels, an average of 1,500 people a day are dying from Covid, and, far from being independent from the virus, we seem to be its seething subjects. Teachers are refusing to go back to school in Chicago and elsewhere, while strict mandates remain in effect in many locales such as New York and Los Angeles County, where two-year-olds are required to wear masks indoors, and masks are even required outdoors at large gatherings, such as the Super Bowl slated to be held in L.A. on February 13.
All this after we were told we were in the mopping-up phase. Studying the virus seems to work a lot like Hollywood, where, as William Goldman famously put it, nobody knows anything.
Consider that a Supreme Court justice said something utterly asinine the other day: “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators,” claimed Sonia Sotomayor. Only about 5,000 children are hospitalized with, or because of, Covid. Suddenly the Supreme Court is a fount of misinformation.
Why are people suspicious about the vaccines? One reason is that so many high-ranking people made untrue claims about them. Biden, in a July town-hall appearance, said: “You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.” So far, New York State alone has logged more than 650,000 breakthrough cases of Covid, with more than 20,000 of those leading to hospitalization. Managing expectations by acknowledging from the start that a life-saving vaccine nevertheless could not prevent infections across the board would have helped.
That the left-wing cultural establishment works to declare certain well-supported ideas unsayable is obvious. The Great Barrington Declaration, which called for focused protection of vulnerable groups as opposed to broad economic and social restrictions, looks mostly correct today but has been subjected to a sustained campaign of vilification. (Its Wikipedia page, for instance, is obviously being edited by extremely hostile observers.) In April, the authors of that statement, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (of Stanford), Dr. Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), and Dr. Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), held a roundtable discussion explaining their views to Florida governor Ron DeSantis. The video of the conversation was then suddenly and without explanation censored on YouTube.
The campaign to prop up masking may properly be called a misinformation spree; the evidence that ordinary cloth masks do any significant amount of good is somewhere between unconvincing and nonexistent. Yet after Mississippi and Texas dropped Covid restrictions in March, Biden said, “The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking in the meantime: ‘Everything’s fine, take off your masks.’ . . . It’s critical, critical, critical that they follow the science.”
Following the science didn’t lead to the conclusion that the kinds of masks most people wear are effective. As study after study cast doubt on the efficacy of cloth masks, CNN expert Dr. Leana Wen admitted, “Cloth masks are little more than facial decoration,” and former FDA chief Scott Gottlieb said, “A cloth mask is not going to protect you from a virus that spreads through airborne transmission,” though it might protect you from other viruses that spread primarily via the droplets associated with coughing and sneezing.
Yet the CDC, which is known to allow its recommendations to be corrupted by the influence of hyper-fearful teachers unions, continues to recommend that kids wear masks in school, which is taken as an edict by many Democrat-run cities and states. This is a cruel and ineffective response to an almost-nonexistent problem.
Some three-quarters of American Covid deaths have been suffered by people over 65, and 93 percent by those over 50, but there have been almost no outbreaks associated with schools because kids tend not to catch the virus or pass it on. “Schools aren’t the problem. They never have been,” writes Aaron E. Carroll in The Atlantic. A CDC paper claims that “success in preventing the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into schools depends upon controlling community transmission and adhering to mitigation measures in schools, particularly masking” — yet in the exact same paper, the same researchers admit that their study of Florida, where schools have been forbidden to force children to mask since they reopened in August of 2020, adds to a “growing body of evidence suggesting that COVID-19 transmission does not appear to be demonstrably more frequent in schools.” Notice how everyone stopped talking about how DeSantis’s insane anti-masking stance was going to kill all the children?
Cloth masks, as commonly worn, do little to no good to stop viral spread, but the developmental and psychological costs of children being forced to wear them indefinitely are becoming increasingly apparent. Far more kids have died of car accidents than of Covid in the last two years, but no one thinks zero is a reachable goal for children’s deaths in cars.
CDC director Rochelle Walensky is starting to sound like the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration when she suggests that maybe we need to learn to live with Covid instead of fatuously trying to stamp it out. Yet she still hasn’t rescinded the mask “guidance” for children. Is it any wonder people are at the boiling point when so many high-ranking figures seem to have developed an allergy to the truth?
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