The good news is that the bad news is wrong

February 24, 2021. I am using the title of a thirty-five year old book by Ben Wattenberg to preview today's thought. A 2010 review of the book includes the filling cogent summery: "Wattenberg's overall theme was that much of the "bad news" you read and heard on a daily basis wasn't really "bad" at all. In fact, often good news was deliberately distorted by special interests in order to gain financially or otherwise."

This meme can be applied today, especially to the constant drumbeat of bad news about "climate change," wokeism on campus, and the ongoing global pandemic. I'll refer you to the ever-engaging, evidence-driven 'Tony Heller' to show the deception rampant in the politically driven, hypocritical 'reporting' on 'climate change,' and leave the nonsense about campus wokeism -- its own special brand of hypocrisy and foolishness -- to another post, and just summarize the primary problem with the Covid reporting, primarily testing, mortality, and tunnel vision.

The overly sensitive and unreliable Covid testing process, centered on the notoriously unreliable PCR testing protocol, leaves a to significant question all the reports on 'cases,' 'infections,' and other words or terms used to describe people with a non-random, questionably 'positive' PCR test, and makes one's head spinning thinking of all the untested people, the people who have the virus yet no symptoms, and the mortality rate differences across age groups and various co-morbidities. Basically, the PCR test prevents nothing, proves little, predicts even less, and provides almost no valuable information as to the policies needed to cur deaths from the virus.

As to mortality, the overwhelming evidence of the presence of pre-existing co-morbidities in 'Covid deaths' makes thee public, popularized raw counts of 'Covid deaths' wildly exaggerated. True, some 'experts' will point to co-morbidities that Covid may have caused, but that is not the issue nor the measure used here, which is pre-existing co-morbidities. In truth, while we may have a reasonable estimate of those who died with Covid, there is much less evidence of deaths from Covid. Just look at those deaths accompanied by a confirmed, reliable Covid test and no other co-morbidities and the raw Covid death count can drop by 90 to 95%. The simple fact that most Covid victims are of advanced age, with excess weight (high BMI), and/or assigned to a nursing home for significant health reasons, all of this is where the 'experts' and journalists need to focus: Prevent the spread of the virus with traditional hygiene and public health practices (e.g., wash your hands, clean your kitchen and bathroom surfaces often, eat foods that build your immune system, maintain a healthy weight, stay home when you are sick, avoid large crowds of people with questionable hygiene) and protect the most vulnerable.

To date, it appears that the virus has not caused 'excess deaths' when compared to the quickly increasing -- 'pre-existing' -- mortality rates in the United States that stem from the growth of the elderly population driven by baby boomers. Mortality rates in the US have climbed steading in the last 8-10 years, from about 0.8% to 0.9%, at the same time that the total population has grown and the sub-population of US elderly has grown from 40 million to 55 million in the past ten years. Clearly, nursing home populations have grown, and they do not cure anything. Those entering nursing homes are not going to ever get better, and many more of their occupants will end up in hospice care than back in a private home. Covid appears to have increased mortality rates among the elderly, but it is not unreasonable to speculate that this mortality rate will decline in the current and coming year, after Covid has claimed the sickest of the sick.

Today's journalists tend to have very liberal or progressive values and a clear 'progressive' agenda. Rather than seek out important facts or explain complicated statistics, they tend to use the easy and simple (an often wrong) numbers, to rely on confirmatory bias in asking 'experts' who share the reporter's biases, to assign scientific credibility to personal opinion and biases, and to use dire forecasts while rarely comparing the present with past forecasts. This produces a profound tunnel vision, an inattention to matters that happen outside the elite media's comfort zones, i.e., the cultural and economic centers of the country and world, and a desire to placate and please their peers, with their own awards for their own work, never holding themselves accountable in any substantive way for their numerous mistakes, biases, false news, and failed forecasts.

As Twain notes, never has so much scientific and public policy nonsense been manufactured from so few facts. And it gets better. According to a widely-repeated legend, one major American newspaper actually printed his obituary and, when Twain was told about this by a reporter, he quipped: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Another common variation of the line uses the words “…have been greatly exaggerated.”