Your Predictions Were Wrong, But I Will Still Put You On Television And Let You Predict Some More

In October 2021, I saved an article about how we were through with the spread of Covid-19 because I wanted to see how the predictions bore out.  You can still read the article at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/briefing/covid-caseload-retreat-us-cases.html.  I was curious to see how the predictions panned out.

They panned out badly.

For example, Big Pharma Pimp Scott Gottlieb predicted in the article that "I’m of the opinion that this is the last major wave of infection."

A month later the Omicron variant appeared and drove the case report to new highs.

Oops.

Well, Gottlieb did qualify his prediction with a "Barring something unexpected", but a new variant is hardly something unexpected when dealing with a virus.  Regardless, one would think the dude would lose some credibility by being so far off the mark.

Ah, but you see, we live in Joe Biden's America, where incompetence gets rewarded apparently, so a year later, Gottlieb was still appearing on CBS's Face The Nation, pimping for Big Pharma, and having his arse kissed by mainstream media (note in the appearance linked here [no human besides me also apparently read the transcript since it has items such as "faith in the nation" on it--she's saying "Face The Nation"] how he doesn't talk about how adding the Covid-19 vaccines to the childhood immunization schedule allows the pharmaceutical companies, primarily Pfizer and Moderna, to continue to be shielded from liability for vaccine-caused injuries/death once the vaccines' emergency authorization expires, which, call me cynical, probably explains more about the rush to put them on the childhood schedule than just getting indigent kids access to the vaccines--you can read more about that here).

The article's writer, David Leonhardt, fared about the same, writing, "Whatever the next few months bring, the worst of the pandemic is almost certainly behind us." 

Actually, the worst was ahead as far as cases went, though we can be somewhat charitable to Leonhardt in that deaths in the winter of 2021-2022 didn't quite reach the height of the deaths of the winter of 2021-2022.  He also seemed to think that the Covid-19 vaccines worked, writing, "Of the more than 700,000 Americans who have died from it, nearly 200,000 probably could have been saved if they had chosen to take a vaccine."

Yet, the vaccines weren't even approved in the States until mid-December 2020, by which point about 300,000 Americans had already died, and that's leaving aside the problems with categorizing deaths as caused by Covid when the person may have been infected with Covid but really died of something else (such as a gunshot wound), so Leonhardt is arguing that half of the 400,000 Americans who died of Covid from mid-December 2020 to early October 2021 could have been saved if they had taken the vaccine.  It's not clear where he gets those numbers from, but it hardly matters, as it soon became obvious that being vaccinated did nothing to prevent transmission and infection.  The best he could argue would be that vaccination prevented death, but on a statistical basis Covid-19 already had a case fatality rate of something akin to the flu even before the vaccines and that has not substantially changed since (you can read a debunking of a similar claim here).  At the time of the writing, it was already clear that the vaccines weren't what was hoped for (they have subsequently looked much worse as now people with multiple boosters are more likely to get infected and the mRNA vaccines seem to have serious side-effects including death), so Leonhardt should have known better even then.

So did Leonhardt have to eat crow or find a new job?

Nope, a year later he was still at The New York Times offering the same level of dumb commentary such as this one:  https://twitter.com/DLeonhardt/status/1578392908297904133.  I mean call me crazy but I suspect the main reason that there's more deaths in Republican counties than Democratic counties is because people in rural counties (which skew Republican) are on average older than people in urban counties (which skew Democratic).  Someone should let Leonhardt know that older people die on average sooner than younger people do.  We could also let him know that viruses tend to spread faster in urban areas (which is why the virus deaths early on are concentrated in Democratic counties; the virus took longer to reach the rural areas).

Admittedly, predicting the future of a virus is difficult, but maybe the lesson is that one shouldn't act like one knows stuff one doesn't, or, worse, like some of these public health folks and panicked journalists have done, lie (reading books such as The Real Anthony Fauci, Pandemia, Gone Viral, and A Plague Upon Our House make it hard to take seriously anything coming out of a government agency or mainstream media where the virus panic is/was concerned).  It's no wonder trust in public health and mainstream journalism continues to decline.  At some point this must be mended.  A good start would be holding people accountable for their work.  If the boneheads making the predictions in this article aren't apologizing and trying to do better, then they shouldn't still be plaguing us with their ill-informed opinions and trying to mandate vaccines that don't work on children and promoting other daft ideas.  Instead, they're still shoved down the public's throat while anyone who is actually closer to reality gets treated like a dissident if not insane conspiracy theorist by people who don't also critically think and just pass on wholesale the opinions and talking points they get programmed with (American liberals unfortunately have been even more prone to this than American conservatives were in the last few years, which is unfortunate because in the past the liberals were usually a bit brighter; now, they seem to want to outcrazy the conservatives, all while trying to tell us how the conservatives are crazy).

Sigh.  I won't make any predictions on things actually changing for the better, but I sure hope they do.  Maybe if we all work together and more people start thinking for themselves, they will.

My latest novel, Fast Guy Slows Down, doesn't feature any predictions that I recall, but it does feature some laughs.