Modeling, Fame and Crisis-Politics

With the redoubtable Dr. Anthony Fauci popping up in the news again, admitting that (surprise!!) he always knew the vaccines he urged everyone to get wouldn’t keep us from contracting or spreading COVID, it seemed a good time to post an update of an article from early 2020.

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Let’s have a show of hands here. Everyone who ever heard of Dr. Anthony Fauci before the middle of March 2020, please raise your hands… Anyone? Hello????

Nope, I never heard of him, either. Overnight, Dr. Fauci became a national figure – a real media-star. The president defers to his advice on the Corona-epidemic. Reporters ask him how bad the epidemic will be, and how long it will last. They want to know when the country’s economy can restart. Can it ever be restarted? Will we have Round 2 (or 3 or 4) with the virus? Can we expect a new shutdown when that occurs? Etc., etc.

Modeling.

In response, the Doc has issued ever-higher model-generated projections of infections and deaths – each new estimate being scarier than the last. He said we might have 240,000 deaths in the USA – maybe a million, or even 2 million – and he warned that we’ll have a rerun in the fall. He and other medical experts – who seem to regard the nation’s economy as “not their department” – recommend a nationwide shutdown of movement and commerce. This wounded the greatest economy in history – fortunately not fatally.

In a previous article, “Model-mania”¹, I pointed out that projections produced by climate-models are questionable because the assumptions – and even the data, in some cases – which drive them are nearly impossible) to verify. Costly public policy should never be based on such projections.

This caution should also apply to epidemiological models. Basing draconian public policies on projections calculated by models that employ incomplete data and unknown assumptions – which in some cases are just educated guesses – can lead us to economic disaster. To some degree this has already happened. Data are one thing; model projections are another. Both do not have the same cachet.

Old guys like me, who have seen an epidemic or two, look at these projections of a million or more dead and ask, “Can this really be true?” Even the great Spanish flu pandemic² of 1918 wasn’t this bad, and we’ve got a century of medical research and experience behind us now.

Am I arguing that the Corona-virus wasn’t dangerous? Not at all. Medical professionals of my acquaintance say the virus is highly contagious, and infected individuals remain contagious longer than with other viruses. But those pros have kept mum about the projections we saw on TV. Modeling is not an exact science, and in some cases it might not be science at all.

Retired modelers, including yours truly, are watching our political leaders’ uncritical acceptance of these model-generated predictions with a (very) jaundiced eye. Is this for real? Or did something else drive the scarier and scarier predictions that had people hiding in their houses and our economy on the ropes?

Fame

I see two important factors pushing these increasingly scary predictions. I’ll probably get hell for saying this, but I think one distinct factor is “fame.” As I have noted in other articles, the media’s operative question is always: “Where’s the conflict.” Tranquility and good order generate no TV appearances and sell no newspapers. Reporters want “death, injury, blood and pain.”

Disaster-experts, like Dr. Fauci and others of his pedigree, work under the same discipline. Right now they are – as the TV producers at poolside like to say – “hot properties.” Liberal media loved them because they were predicting doom, which meant wreckage of the Trump economy. At one point I heard some info-babes gushing about Dr. Fauci and proposing that he be voted “sexiest man of the year.” I admit that this gives hope to old guys like me, but is this serious “reporting?” If you want to know why public trust of Big Media is in the dumpster, look no further.

All seriousness aside though, these hot properties – suddenly plucked out of obscurity and thrust onto the national stage – knew that once the epidemic is under control and the economy is humming again, they’ll go back to being nobodies. No more news-conference appearances, standing next to the president. No more bantering with comely hostesses on TV news-shows. As they say in show-biz, “It’ll be over, baby.”

So…in their place, what would you do? Pronounce the epidemic “under control” as soon as possible? Publish diminishing mortality-rates? Tell everybody to be careful, but say that it’s safe to go back to work? Admit that the “vaccines” don’t have the same long-term effectiveness of the smallpox vaccinations we got as kids.

Or would you try to draw the emergency out a little bit longer? – just to be safe, of course. Maybe keep it going for several months, or even a year or two (or three or four)? Warn that we’ll have to go through it all again, in the fall? Say that we might never return to status quo ante? Keep hyping the masks that we know don’t really do a blessed thing?

‘After all,’ you might say, ‘we’re just looking out for the safety of the American people. Does anyone really mind taking an extra two- or three-month vacation? Where’s the harm?’

Most of those doctors and health-officials probably haven’t calculated things so crassly. But would some new media-stars be tempted to keep the scare going? I’m sure most of them are above that, but fame can turn anybody’s head. Last I checked, we’re all human.

And doesn’t that go double for reporters who have hit the big time by hyping the medical, social and economic effects of COVID-19? Do they want it to end? (Seriously?) Normalcy is not a story. Nobody becomes famous by reporting that all is well. And Fame is a powerful tempter.

Politics

The second factor pushing today’s epidemic-hype is politics. (I shock myself by even saying it.) Even Hottentots in Africa know that Democrats waged a relentless political war against President Trump since before his 2016 election. That war continued through his entire term and beyond – right up to the present day. After all previous efforts by Mr. Trump’s enemies to knock him out of the ring failed, they weaponized the Corona-epidemic for a final blitzkrieg to try to unseat him in November. As we know now, that offensive was successful.

Despite everything that Democrats (and even some Republicans) have thrown at him – including the ugliest Impeachment proceedings in our history – Mr. Trump performed wonders. His roaring economy – featuring historically low unemployment, soaring income levels, and a booming stock market – amazed the world and confounded his enemies. It was always the ace in his re-election deck. But finally (miraculously) the Corona-virus gave those enemies a golden opportunity to upset Mr. Trump. It was almost too good to be true.

Of course, Mr. Trump’s closure of the nation’s commerce and his recommendations that most people stay home caused some of the economic damage. The economy ground to a halt and threw millions out of work.

At first, Mr. Trump said the shutdown would last only until Easter (April 12, 2020), but then he was persuaded to extend it until April 30^th. As the unemployment figures for March were released, media-organs joyfully predicted the worst economic crash since the Great Depression. Some said the epidemic was “Trump’s Katrina.” And one commentator said, “Another Republican administration, another recession…” (So much for all “pulling together.”)

Democrats in the House of Representatives followed Rahm Emanuel’s famous maxim of never letting a good crisis go to waste. With machine-like precision, while Mr. Trump was addressing the pandemic,  Nancy Pelosi’s House majority cranked out “stimulus” bills that not only added over $2.5 trillion³ (i.e., $2,500,000,000,000) to the national debt, but also contained a carload of goodies drawn from the progressive wish-list. These included:

Union Giveaways:

• Nullification of White House executive orders on federal collective bargaining;
• Codification of taxpayer-funded union official time;
• Requiring that a labor union representative sit on every airline’s board of directors;
• Multi-employer pension bailouts;
• Permanent minimum wage hike to $15 for any business receiving federal COVID-19 aid;
• Cancelation of all debt owed by the U.S. Postal Service to the Treasury.

Green New Deal:

• All airlines receiving assistance required to offset carbon emissions for domestic flights by 2025;
• A $1 billion “cash for clunkers” program, where the Department of Transportation buys fuel-inefficient planes from airlines if they agree to buy new ones.
• Expansive new tax-credit for solar and wind energy.

Federalizing Elections:

• Mandates on how states must run elections, including: ballot-harvesting; required early voting; same-day registration; and no-excuse vote-by-mail.
• Subjects states to costly litigation if they cannot implement these stringent mandates ahead of the 2020 election.

Immigration Provisions:

• Require Homeland Security to automatically extend visas and work authorizations that would expire within the next year, including those with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Temporary Protected Status – for an amount of time equal to their prior visa, authorization or status;
• Limit Customs and Border Patrol’s ability to close processing centers if there is a health crisis on the border;
• Allow certain funding to go to sanctuary cities.

Mandates on Business:

• Permanent changes on who can serve on corporate boards of directors for companies that receive assistance for payroll and operating costs;
• Mandatory disclosure on supply-chain management;
• Diversity disclosure required for boards of directors of all publicly traded companies.

(Is this a great country, or what?)

Most of these radical items were cut from the final bills, but some survived and were put to use in the elections of 2020 and 2022.

To my knowledge, no previous medical crisis in our history has been used to wound a sitting president or to enact proposals that could never be approved in stand-alone votes. To call this a dangerous precedent hardly conveys the peril it represents to our republic. If we continue in this way, we won’t be able to put the pieces back together.

Moreover, if Dr. Fauci isn’t prosecuted for “medical misconduct,” I would say the concept will have lost all meaning. And all that money paid to pharmaceutical companies for those phony vaccines that didn’t work should be returned to individuals and government organs that paid it.

“Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!” (Isaiah 5:21) 

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1. See http://thebullelephant.com/model-mania/
2. The 1918-’20 worldwide Spanish Influenza epidemic killed an estimated 50 million people, including some 675,000 Americans. Some estimates of world-wide deaths run as high as 100 million. (All of these figures are estimates which can’t be verified.)
3. How long would it take to spend $1 trillion? If you could spend $1 million a day, you would need 2,738 years to blow the whole bundle. But this doesn’t account for interest that might be earned. Even interest of 1% would amount to $10 billion a year – which is 27 times the $365 million you’re trying to spend. (Eyes glazed over yet? Think some Congress-people might be reacting similarly?)