RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/covid-19s-catastrophic-pandemic-fear-andrew-harrod/

“We’ve had severe viral pandemics over the years, but this was the first pandemic of panic” with COVID-19, write the authors of the new book, The Price of Panic:  How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe.  This insightful, lucid work carefully exposes how global elites in academia, media, and politics responded to the latest coronavirus outbreak with botched societal cures truly worse than the disease.  

“The global response to COVID-19 vastly exceeded that to any other pandemic in history,” note the trio of Biola University biology professor Douglas Axe, statistician William M. Briggs, and Catholic University professor Jay W. Richards.  They detail the devastation of unprecedented lockdowns worldwide; for example, United Nations World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley has warned that disrupted food supply chains could cause 300,000 deaths daily.  “Never before had scores of countries around the world chosen to perform such economic harakiri in unison,” resulting in epidemic ravaging of wealth and health, like increased suicides.

The initial impetus for these socioeconomic plagues came from academic epidemiological models that “were so wrong they were like shots in the dark,” the authors note.  They focus in particular on studies from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics & Evaluation (IHME) and the “single, untested, apocalyptic model from Imperial College London” (ICL).  The United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) then promoted the Imperial College projections of 40 million COVID-19 deaths worldwide.  

“We’re shocked that anybody believed these astounding numbers,” the authors respond.  The ICL model entailed the “shocking but bogus claim that 3.4 percent of coronavirus infections were fatal,” while the “2018–19 flu had a case mortality rate of about 0.1 percent.”  Accordingly, the Imperial College model predicted that COVID-19 would effectively equal the notorious 1918 Spanish flu, which killed between 18 and 58 million.

In reality, the author’s statistical source, Worldometer, counted 1.2 million COVID-19 deaths on November 12, hardly a historically unprecedented loss given other little-noticed viral outbreaks.  WHO estimates that perhaps 650,000 die annually from flu-linked illness in a bad flu season.  The 1968–1969 Hong Kong flu also killed between 1-2 million people.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/politics-and-pulitzers-bruce-bawer/

Three decades ago, I spent about a year on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. A year was enough. The NBCC’s principal activity was awarding annual prizes, and each member of the board belonged to a committee devoted to choosing that year’s winning book in one category or another. I was on the criticism committee. The job involved reading dozens of books, whole boxfuls of them – although in most cases glancing at a few pages was enough to justify tossing a volume aside and moving on to the next – and, in consultation with the other committee members, picking five finalists for the entire board to vote on.

That year, two books stood out for me as prizeworthy. One was Camille Paglia’s magnum opus Sexual Personae, which impressed me with its quirky brilliance. Almost every page contained a provocative assertion worth pausing over and pondering. When it came to the point in the process at which the entire board crowded around a large table to pronounce on the books selected by the various committees, it was these assertions, these bold statements, that got Paglia in trouble: one member after another, when it came to be his or her turn to comment on Paglia’s book, had already selected a specific sentence, which he or she would read out aloud, outraged at its utter lack of political correctness, and then say something to the effect: “We can’t give a prize to a book that includes that!”

My other favorite that year in the same category was Shelby Steele’s first book, The Content of Our Character, which brought common sense to the dialogue about race in America. That book drew some flak too, because it challenged decades of received wisdom, but after intense debate, Steele won, and I was honored to present him with his prize at the awards ceremony. Although not everybody on the board was thrilled with Steele’s message, they did welcome the opportunity to give an award to a black person. Being able to do so was considered extremely important. Indeed, when we got around to debating poetry books – a category on which roughly half of the board members simply excused themselves (“pass!”), explaining that they didn’t feel comfortable pronouncing on contemporary poetry – there was one potential finalist with a simple English surname, which meant he was probably either a WASP or black. This was pre-Internet, of course, so it wasn’t easy to find out such things, but it was quickly agreed that we had to determine the author’s race before voting on the nomination.

That experience with the NBCC taught me a few lessons. The main one was that political correctness, even then, made a big, big deal.