COVID Revisionist History

 

Needing podcasts for my two hour bicycle rides, I am always willing to try something new.  Carole Hooven appeared on a podcast called "Dishcast," and its host, Andrew Sullivan, did a creditable job with her so I tuned in to his interview with a Princeton professor, Frances Lee, who wrote a book, "In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us," from which I learned:

Andrew Sullivan

1. Children who were held out of schools--which, of course the authors argue was unnecessary and fruitless--suffered irreparable harm, and rendered into a lost generation of under performing half wits, and all because people like Tony Fauci and the CDC were doctrinaire, unwilling to listen to reason, and dictatorial and too sure of their own superior knowledge.

2. Masking was all theater and should never have been tried, and Tony Fauci was against it before he was for it, and so which was it Tony?

3. Even the vaccines were a failure and social distancing was ridiculous and look at what happened when all those gay guys in Provincetown, MA went out to bars having been full vaccinated and got COVID anyway.

4. And even Francis Collins now says it was a lab leak.

Dr. Frances Lee

Of course, neither of these two Ivy Leaguers listened to a single minute of This Week In Virology, (TWiV), the podcast out of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons during the pandemic, or if they did, apparently the content went right over their heads.

But there is a whole fad of books now about how stupid and arrogant Fauci and friends were during the pandemic, and how much harm his policies did and how Ron DeSantis was right all along.

When I hear these podcasts, or read this revisionist history, I usually find myself wondering: On what planet did these people spend the majority of their time during that pandemic?

Nowhere in these anti-establishment renditions is there mention of those 18 wheel rigs lined up outside Mt. Sinai Hospital, Roosevelt Hospital, Bellvue Hospital, The New York Hospital, Columbia, which were stacked to the roof tops with the bodies because the morgues could not hold them all. Nowhere mentioned is the estimate that with the best data, 3 million Americans were going to die, although, in the end, likely because of public health measures like quarantines, distancing, maybe even masking and certainly the vaccine, only 1 million died, so likely 2 million were spare owing to public health measures. 

Of course, with COVID, most of the data was hard to parse and it's always tough to be sure when people died at a nursing home, how many actually died from COVID.

The TWiV Team

But, had Andrew Sullivan listened to Dr. Fauci on TWiV, he would have heard him say, repeatedly, "You know, we're in a data free zone here. I'm giving you the best advice I can, right now, based on what we know today, but two weeks from now, I may well be saying the opposite, after new studies get done."

He was hardly arrogant. One thing you can say about Fauci, and this has been his hallmark since he was at Cornell, is Fauci has always been surprisingly not arrogant, and has always been aware of having grown up in an apartment over his father's pharmacy in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, went through high school, college and medical school on scholarships.  He may not be exactly humble; he's confident, but he is not arrogant. 

He did not think masks would help, initially, because to a virus the pores in a mask look like the Holland Tunnel, but when it turned out droplets were a problem, he embraced masks, and what is so onerous, really, about wearing a mask? Low cost, possibly high return.

And as anyone who actually took the time to listen to the 4 hours a week of TWiV, during those years 2020-2022, the Provincetown outbreak would have been no surprise: The vaccine was never expected to provide protection from infection or disease. Like the influenza vaccine, it was hoped it would prevent intubation in an ICU and death, which it did. Vaccinated people caught COVID, but they did not die and most did need to be hospitalized

Yes, Sweden opted to keep kids in school, and it's not clear Sweden suffered more deaths, but comparing Sweden to the US is like comparing New York City to Claremont, New Hampshire. In urban populations, in countries with dense concentrations of population, infectious diseases tend to be spread differently. And, for the most part, deaths in the Red states were more likely because the Red state folks did not follow public health advice.

The professor and Mr. Sullivan made much of the way people in power behaved, like Boris Johnson's "party gate" and Gavin Newsome's visit to the winery, as if they really knew all along isolating people was worthless and so they party-ed on. As if...

And as for the lab leak: As Fauci has said, anything is possible, but lab leak is not the likely culprit, not when a far more likely culprit exists: wet markets.  The TWiV crew has addressed this repeatedly, and they've marshalled the details of what evidence exists--the finding of the exact virus in the drains at the wet market, the timing and pattern of the spread of the virus from the market, the fact that multiple other viral epidemics have emanated from these markets in the past, the culprit vectors, pangolins, bats, all add up to a beyond a reasonable doubt it was a crossover virus making the leap, as so many other viruses (SARS among them) have done in the past. 

You did not need to invent a Jack the Ripper to explain deaths when you had the Black Plague ripping through town.

And so what if it was a lab leak? Ted Cruz would have you believe that Tony Fauci's NIH funded the Wuhan lab to make this virus, and it escaped or was deliberately loosed upon the world by some James Bond type villain in China,  so it's all Tony's fault. In fact, Tony Fauci would be only too happy to help the Wuhan lab work with this virus and other potential threats like it, so we can avoid pandemics in the future.

Professor Lee and Mr. Sullivan are not a unique species. There is a type of academic and a type of news media specimen who thrive on playing the role of the smart guys, who are not afraid to speak truth of power, if not to power, who are clever enough to see past the prevailing wisdom to the truth, which is available to hard headed thinkers, who can "do their own research" and get past the establishment to the truth.

They are, at base, conspiracists. 

But they are wrong and wrong headed.

And they are, whatever else they are, Monday morning quarter backs, who have never had a shot fired in anger at them, and never had to make hard calls under duress. 

They are, to use Spiro Agnew's immortal phrase, "effete elitists."