Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

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Was Tanzania vindicated on Covid testing claims?

Exactly four years ago in May 2020, the former chemistry teacher and late-Tanzanian president John Magufuli made a speech that has since been removed from much of the internet. In it, he revealed that he secretly sent samples of goat meat and fruit juice to the country’s official PCR testing lab – and the samples came back as 'positive' for the novel coronavirus.

In April 2021 I wrote the following article for News Africa magazine which can be read below.

A scientist with a PhD in chemistry, President Magufuli abandoned Covid-19 testing after his own trials allegedly showed fruit juice tested positive for the virus. Yet despite being widely ridiculed at the time, many are asking whether the late Tanzanian president was right, with European courts declaring tests unreliable – while the inventor of the Covid-19 PCR test is facing a multi-million-dollar law suit for ‘misleading’ world governments.

In May 2020, the former chemistry teacher and late-Tanzanian president John Magufuli made a speech that has since been removed from much of the internet. In it, he revealed that he secretly sent samples of goat meat and fruit juice to the country’s official PCR testing lab – and the samples came back as 'positive' for the novel coronavirus.

Magufuli’s simple stunt threw into question the claim that PCR tests were the ‘gold standard’ for diagnosing Covid-19, as the SARS-CoV-2 virus is commonly known in the media.

The statement unleashed ridicule and condemnation against the president from the rest of the world and led to him being smeared as a ‘Covid-denier’ in Western media. The BBC, for instance, incorrectly reported that Magufuli ‘used the results to justify his denial of the virus’.

However, President Magufuli never denied the existence of the Covid-19 – he simply questioned the accuracy of the PCR test used to diagnose the virus.


If successful, it could lead to national governments being sued by businesses and individuals over lockdowns, mask mandates and other restrictions imposed on the basis of ‘positive’ Covid-19 tests.

The law suit against Drosten and his colleagues was spurred by an independent review of their ‘gold standard’ Covid-19 tests by 22 international scientists, which claims to have exposed 10 major flaws of the way the PCR tests were being used to detect the virus.

The alleged flaws and conflicts on interests of the scientists behind the tests, led Fuellmich to declare that ‘those responsible for it must be criminally prosecuted, and sued for civil damages'.

Dr Mike Yeadon, former vice president and chief scientist of Pfizer, who co-authored the review, highlighted another major flaw with the PCR test in ‘its propensity to suffer from contamination’.

He said that the ‘integrity of a PCR is very easily destroyed by invisible levels of contamination even in the hands of an expert, working alone and on a small handful of samples’.

The Nobel-prize winning inventor of the original PCR method, Kary Mullis, famously said in 1993 that his technology was never meant to diagnose a virus, adding: ‘It doesn’t tell you that you are sick. These tests cannot detect free, infectious viruses at all.’

This crucial fact was completely ignored many years later by countries around the world that bought millions of PCR tests to conduct mass Covid-19 testing on their citizens, many of whom were ‘asymptomatic’ – showing no symptoms of being sick with the virus.

There is mounting evidence that shows the PCR test is unreliable, resulting in false-positives and was never designed to test for a live virus. Dr Pieter Borger described the PCR test as having ‘no relevance for the diagnosis whatsoever’.

While Dolores Cahill, Professor of Translational Science at the University College Dublin, warned early on in the pandemic that ‘a positive PCR coronavirus test may testify to the presence of the common cold’.

Concerns about the use of PCR tests are growing around the world. The pathologist Dr Clare Craig explained, for instance, how one Spanish study showed that ‘87 per cent of people in hospital who tested positive for Covid on PCR had not been infected according to antibody testing’.

‘Even for those with Covid on intensive care, 53 per cent did not have antibodies.

‘Every test can go wrong and we can check how well they are working by comparing with other tests.’

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But it’s not just the tests’ inability to distinguish between different viruses that concerns Ballan. She fears that the samples are being amplified to such an extent – known as ‘cycles’ – that they are picking up traces of dead virus in patients who were previously infected and have since recovered.

Nick Hudson, the South African who co-founded the international research group Pandemics Data & Analytics, told NewsAfrica that PCR testing was ‘being deployed in the wrong way.’

He doesn’t doubt President Magufuli’s claims that engine oil, fruit and meat tested positive for Covid-19, adding that ‘its sensitivity is being ramped up to an absurd level’ that everyday items like tap water have been returning false positives for Covid-19.

‘Cycling these tests up to such an extreme sensitivity has given rise to this notion of the ‘asymptomatic’ case – another medical absurdity.’

Hudson, like most independent scientists, scoffs at the notion of asymptomatic spreaders of the virus, questioning how someone can spread a respiratory disease ‘if you don’t have symptoms’.

It’s a position supported by several studies around the world, which found little or no evidence of asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic spread.

This hasn’t stopped labs running tests on people without symptoms, though. In Canada, for example, not a single province has run tests below the suggested 30 cycles. While one province, Quebec, has run tests as high as 45 cycles.

This has led to inflated ‘cases of Covid-19’, according to the scientist.

It’s a problem Hudson thinks may be common in South Africa too.

He revealed that one lab he had contacted had been running tests at up to 42 cycles – something he described as ‘utter madness’.

Hudson fears the mis-use of PCR in this way may have led to thousands of healthy people being incorrectly misdiagnosed as infectious, and, in turn, contributed to the government’s decisions to impose draconian lockdowns that have impoverished millions and led to economic stagnation in the African powerhouse.

Such examples led Dr David Bell, a former World Health Organization (WHO) programme head, to praise President Magufuli’s response to the virus.

He told NewsAfrica that the late-Tanzanian leader was one of the few world leaders to correctly follow the WHO’s guidelines for dealing with a respiratory illness.

‘There is not compelling evidence elsewhere that mass PCR testing has averted significant Covid-19 mortality, once community transmission is well established,’ explained Bell.

‘Magufuli had a science background and would have understood that PCR tests are appropriate for detecting sequences of genetic material, not as a sole way of defining ‘cases’ as is used, against WHO advice, in many other countries.’

The WHO has repeatedly warned against mass-testing of asymptomatic people.

This apparent misuse of PCR testing by countries like South Africa and Canada hasn’t gone unnoticed beyond the scientific community.

In November, 2020, an appeals court in Portugal made a landmark ruling stating that ‘the PCR process is not a reliable test for SARS-CoV-2, and therefore any enforced quarantine based on those test results is unlawful’.

The judges, Margarida Ramos de Almeida and Ana Paramés, referred to several scientific papers on the PCR tests, including a study by Jaafar et al, which found that when running PCR tests with 35 cycles or more the accuracy dropped to three per cent, meaning up to 97 per cent of positive results could be false positives.

With evidence mounting against PCR accuracy, the WHO issued a warning statement on December 14, that using a high CT value will result in false positives and advised labs to use the ‘positivity threshold’ recommended by the manufacturer.

Meanwhile, just two days after President Magufuli was laid to rest in March, an Austrian administrative court acknowledged the limitations of PCR and antigen testing, declaring ‘PCR tests have no diagnostic value’. This view was echoed in April by one of Germany’s lower courts, which described PCR tests as not ‘suitable for determining an ‘infection’ with the SARS-CoV-2 virus’ and ordered the lifting of various restrictions in the region in question, Weimar.

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The Pharmaceutical Industry Is out of Control, Safety Standards Have Divebombed

Hedley Rees, Managing Director of Pharmaflow who has worked in the pharmaceutical industry for over 40 years, describes the recent plunging of manufacturing, regulatory, and safety standards (30 minute video)

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The Guardian: Impact of pandemic on wellbeing of the young and the economy must not be trivialised

Mental health of young people is deteriorating, and shows up in employment data. More action is needed

From the outset it was obvious the coronavirus pandemic would be brutal on the UK’s young people. Just how brutal has only become apparent over time.

Children, teenagers and adults in their early 20s were the least likely to have adverse physical consequences but suffered most from the restrictions put in place to prevent the virus spreading. Children were deprived of education. Teenagers were stuck in their homes and unable to see their friends in person.

The concentration of young adults working in hospitality meant they were most vulnerable to being furloughed or losing their jobs. It was a recipe for an increase in unhappiness and mental illness – and so it has proved. People in their early 20s are more likely to be out of work because of ill health than those in their early 40s.

All this would be bad enough had young people gone into the pandemic in good shape. But as a new academic paper shows, the mental health of young people has been deteriorating for a decade and a half. This is not just a UK phenomenon. The same has been found to be happening in more than 30 other countries.

It used to be assumed that there was a U-shaped trend to wellbeing, with happiness declining as young people entered middle age and then rising again as they got older. David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, and his two co-authors of the paper, Alex Bryson and Xiaowei Xu, show that this is no longer the case. Their evidence suggests the younger you are, the unhappier you are. In the UK and the US the trend is particularly pronounced among young white women.

The study looks at whether people feel anxious or are in despair, with the latter measured by asking survey respondents how many days out of the last 30 their mental health has not been good. If someone says every day is a bad mental health day, they are classified as suffering from despair.

Approximately 8% of all UK respondents were classed as being in despair in 2009-10, rising to 12% in 2020-21. Among men under 25, despair has doubled from 5% to 11% since 2009. The percentage of young women in despair rose even more sharply, from 8% in 2011 to 20% by 2020. It also doubled (from 9% to 18%) among women aged 25-44. The increase among older women was much less pronounced.

The deterioration in the mental wellbeing of the young can be traced back to the scarring effects of the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008-09. This was a time when the banks almost went bust, the supply of credit dried up, economies contracted and unemployment rose sharply. The paper argues that the employment prospects of new entrants to the labour market at the time of the GFC may have suffered irreparable damage.

The period since has been one of wage stagnation. According to the Resolution Foundation thinktank, the average UK worker is about 40% – or almost £14,000 a year – worse off than if earnings had continued to grow in line with their pre-financial crisis trend.

Incomes of young people have been especially hard hit, so much so that the current generation is likely to be the first for a century to be poorer than their parents, and have levels of home ownership comparable with their grandparents. There are clearly economic reasons behind rising unhappiness among young people, although these do not explain why reported levels of wellbeing have fallen among 10- to 16-year-olds who are yet to enter the world of work.

More recently, three other factors may have played a part, the authors of the paper say. The first is the underfunding of mental health treatment in the US and the UK, where delays in access to care may have prolonged spells of ill health.

The second is the increasing use of smartphones, which became more widely available at about the same time as the upward trend in cases of despair began to appear.

“There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that the rise in ill-being of the young is associated with the rise in the use of the internet and smartphones. The timing fits almost exactly, both the use of the internet and the declining mental health of the young, and especially for young females, both started climbing from around 2011,” the paper says.

Finally, there is the impact of Covid, which, although it cannot explain the deterioration in mental health among the young during the GFC and its aftermath, may well have accelerated the trend. Putting young people in effect under house arrest was always asking for trouble.

Government ministers are worried about the negative impact inactivity is having on the economy, and will have further cause for concern when the latest labour market figures are released on Tuesday. These will show that the number of people out of the labour force because of ill health is up by a third on pre-pandemic levels.

Rishi Sunak recently announced a crackdown on sickness and disability benefits in order to end a “sicknote culture” and “over-medicalising the everyday challenges and worries of life”. The prime minister is in danger of trivialising the deep-rooted nature of a problem that will only be solved by tackling the causes of unhappiness and increasing the budget for mental health services.

It may mean age restrictions on access to social media for children. It certainly means that when there is another pandemic, the full long-term costs on all age groups of lockdown restrictions are taken into account. That wasn’t the case in 2020, with disastrous results.

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Not sure where to put this wide ranging conversation, but it is worth a listen.

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Frontiers in Sociology: Is society caught up in a Death Spiral? Modeling societal demise and its reversal

Michaéla C. Schippers , John P. A. Ioannidis, and Matthias W. J. Luijks

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Using the metaphor of a corporate heart attack, Fitzgerald discerns a hidden, subtle and overt phase of decline (Fitzgerald, 2005). In the hidden phase, denial or willful blindness often prohibits management from taking (the right) actions. Against their better judgment, they hope if they ignore it, the market will not notice. In that phase, on average a third of a company’s competitive value is lost. If a new market challenge presents itself, the company is often unable to face the challenge. In the subtle phase, the decline becomes more obvious for those who are observant and know where and how to look and how to interpret what they see. By the end of this phase, often a full two-thirds of the company’s competitive value is lost. Unfortunately, many companies only start to admit and address the problem in the overt phase. By that time, the problems are so big and ingrained, that addressing them has become extremely difficult. While many managers do watch the company’s financials, they often fail to address other metrics such as market-share trends, customer turnover and staff satisfaction. Often these drivers are the earliest predictors of corporate performance. Important blockers of performance are distrust, bureaucracy and low performance expectations, while drivers are decisiveness, accountability and acknowledgement of work. It is key to identify and quantify early warning signals, e.g., an excess of staff, especially managers, a decrease in lower-level workers, tolerance of incompetence, and lack of clear goals (Lorange and Nelson, 1985). Reversing organizational decline starts with the realization and recognition that the organization is in decline. These danger signals should then be aligned with a concrete plan to change. A dialog between top-down and bottom-up is needed (Lorange and Nelson, 1985). If the company is able to take those steps, follow-up monitoring is needed to make sure the changes that are proposed and made are effective (Lorange and Nelson, 1985). While in the early phases underreaction may be the problem, in later phases, the danger comes from overreaction (cf. Lai and Sudarsanam, 1997; Hafsi and Baba, 2022).

We believe that similar processes may happen at the societal level. Recent examples of societal systemic shocks are 9/11, the 2008 global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis (Centeno et al., 2022). On a societal level, researchers studying policy success and failure have started to investigate the role of policy under- and over-reactions (Maor, 2012, 2020). Policy overreactions are “policies that impose objective and/or perceived social costs without producing offsetting objective and/or perceived benefits.” (Maor, 2012; p. 235). For instance, preemptive overreaction is a form of policy that will often rely on persuasion by presenting “facts” in a certain way, manufacturing a perceived threat, and using messages to swing the public mood (Maor, 2012). An example is the cull of all pigs in Egypt during the swine flu crisis in 2009, even though zero cases had been reported (Maor, 2012). An important explanation is that in such cases groupthink may play a role. Groupthink, the forced conformity to group values and ethics, has symptoms such as collective rationalization, belief in inherent morality, stereotyped views of outgroups, pressure on dissenters, and self-appointed mind guards (Janis, 1972, 1982a,b; Janis et al., 1978). Preemptive overreaction shows that one is taking forceful and decisive action against a perceived threat, that may never materialize, and motives could be political and/or monetary gain (Maor, 2012).

While the period before the COVID-19 crisis may have been characterized by relative policy underreaction to complex social problems, also referred to as “wicked problems,” such as hunger and poverty (Head, 2018; Head B.W. 2022), the current times may be characterized by overreaction to certain problems. The COVID-19 crisis seemed to be characterized by groupthink and escalation of commitment to one course of action, at the expense of other possible solutions (Joffe, 2021; Schippers and Rus, 2021). Initial low-quality decision-making was followed by decisions that made things worse (Joffe, 2021; Schippers and Rus, 2021). The sheer scale and severe disruption caused by these policies has increased inequalities (Schippers, 2020; Schippers et al., 2022), an important marker of societal decline (Motesharrei et al., 2014)

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The process of societal decline is complex and may include social-ecological traps, or a mismatch between the responses of people and the social and ecological conditions they face, e.g., depletion of natural resources (Boonstra and De Boer, 2013; Boonstra et al., 2016). For the current review, we feel that the handling of the COVID-19 crisis may have been an example of overreaction making use of non-pharmaceutical interventions that accelerated existing societal problems, such as inequalities (Schippers, 2020; Schippers et al., 2022). Most countries opted for very similar solutions, with forced lockdowns and aggressive restrictions. Countries that chose a different course of action were highly criticized (Tegnell, 2021). Many countries eventually faced excess mortality rates that were highly unequal across groups, exacerbating preexisting inequalities (Alsan et al., 2021; Schippers et al., 2022). Over-reaction was fueled by (unreliable) metrics (Schippers and Rus, 2021; Ioannidis et al., 2022) and groupthink, resulting in irrational or dysfunctional decision making (Joffe, 2021; Hafsi and Baba, 2022). Furthermore, emotions during crises tend to run high, escalating the risk of harmful overreaction both by policy makers and the general public (Sunstein and Zeckhauser, 2010). Governments may suffer from an action bias, a tendency to take action whether it is needed or not, including excessive actions (Patt and Zeckhauser, 2000) despite information that the policies may do more harm than good (for reviews see Joffe and Redman, 2021, Schippers and Rus, 2021; Schippers et al., 2022). Unnecessary crisis response as a form of policy overreaction may sometimes occur as a way to shape voters perceptions of a decisive and active government (Maor, 2020). Excessive action and exercise of control over societal structures, e.g., public health, may enhance centralization of power and decision-making, and authoritarianism (Berberoglu, 2020; Desmet, 2022; Schippers et al., 2022; Simandan et al., 2023). When governments make use of mass media to spread negative information, a self-reinforcing cycle of nocebo effects, “mass hysteria” and policy errors can ensue (Bagus et al., 2021). This effect is exacerbated when the information comes from authoritative sources, the media are politicized, social networks make the information omnipresent (Bagus et al., 2021), and dissenting voices are silenced (Schippers et al., 2022; Shir-Raz et al., 2022). This may lead to a vicious cycle of ineffective dealing with crises, low-quality decision-making and dysfunctional behavior, intensifying the current crises and leading to new ones, and eventually societal decline and even collapse.

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At the same time decline in organizations was often triggered by the COVID-19 crisis and non-pharmaceutical interventions implemented to reduce viral spread, such as closing of restaurants and “non -essential” shops (Brodeur et al., 2021). As early as April 2020 in the United States, the number of active business owners decreased by 22% within just 3 months (Fairlie, 2020; Brodeur et al., 2021). Taken together with other effects such as rising inequalities, increase in immigration, changed labor market, damaged mental health and well-being, this is arguably a big shock to societal cohesion (Silveira et al., 2022), increasing state fragility and decreasing state legitimacy (Seyoum, 2020).

Repeated low-quality decision-making

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In the COVID-19 and accompanying economic crisis for instance, there is evidence of such an action bias (Winsberg et al., 2020; Magness and Earle, 2021, p. 512; Schippers et al., 2022). People often assume that a big problem needs harsh and drastic solutions, while less drastic, but precise solutions, as well as targeted, evidence-based interventions can work better than aggressive solutions (cf. Brown and Detterman, 1987; Wilson, 2011; Walton, 2014). Action bias, along with escalation of commitment and sunk cost fallacy may have played a role in the suboptimal decision-making processes surrounding the COVID-19 crisis (Schippers and Rus, 2021). Combined with the (in hindsight) overestimation made by experts of the expected infection fatality and of the buffering effects of several aggressive measures (Chin et al., 2021; Ioannidis et al., 2022; Pezzullo et al., 2023) led to a disastrous chain of self-perpetuating decision-making. (Magness and Earle, 2021; Murphy, 2021). Instead of dialing back, the general political climate and response doubled down on the measures and on defending a narrative in their support, leading to a Death Spiral of low-quality decision making and serious consequences.

COVID-19 crisis and rising inequalities

In the context of the COVID-19 crisis, some have stated that this is a great leveler and that “we are all in this together,” however, this is clearly not the case: vulnerable groups have been unevenly negatively impacted (Ali et al., 2020). Inequalities have risen steeply since 2020 (Schippers et al., 2022). While this trend was already visible before the pandemic started (for a review see Neckerman and Torche, 2007), especially billionaire wealth increased dramatically early during the crisis (Schippers et al., 2022; Inequality, 2023). Between March 18, 2020, and October 15, 2021, billionaires’ total wealth increased over 70%, from 2.947 trillion to 5.019 trillion, and the richest five saw an increase in 123 percent. Since then, gains have decreased modestly, because of market losses (Collins, 2022). Corporate profits also spiked as giant corporations used the excuse of crisis-related supply chain bottlenecks to drive up the prices of gasoline, food, and other essentials (Inequality, 2023). While CEO pay increased, general worker pay lagged behind, increasing the CEO-worker pay gap in the United States (Inequality, 2023). To prove this in 2019 average CEO pay was $12,074,288 per annum compared to a median worker yearly pay at the 100 largest low wage employers of $30,416 in the United States; in 2020 yearly average CEO pay was 13,936,558 (a 15.42% increase) for workers it was 30,474 (a meager 0.19% increase; Inequality, 2023)

In effect, global billionaires made 3.9 trillion dollars by the end of 2020, while global workers earnings fell by 3.7 trillion, as millions lost their jobs around the world (International Labour Organization, 2020; Berkhout et al., 2021; p. 12). The lowest-income workers were hit the hardest. In total, it has been estimated that during the crisis, by 2021, 150 million people were driven into extreme poverty (Howton, 2020). With widespread continuing demise, even the rich may start to lose. The crisis has worsened many other aspects of inequality, such as educational, racial, gender, and health inequalities (Byttebier, 2022; for a review see Schippers et al., 2022). Nevertheless, the elite may continue to centralize power and make decisions that are not in the interest of most people (Desmet, 2022). As the “masses” end up being in a downward spiral of dwindling incomes, not being able to pay for essentials, such as food, gas, and medicine, they may experience significant financial barriers and may avoid health care in order to save on costs (Weinick et al., 2005), leading to worsening health status for millions (Schippers et al., 2022). Socio-economic determinants of health are often the result of persistent structural and socio-economical inequalities, exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis (Ali et al., 2020; Schippers, 2020). The term syndemic describes “a set of closely related and mutually reinforcing health problems that significantly affect the overall health status of a population, against the background of a perpetual pattern of deleterious socio-economic conditions” (Bambra et al., 2020; Byttebier, 2022, p. 1036). Prior pandemic crises such as the Spanish flu and other economic shocks led to an increase in inequalities and unequal health and wealth outcomes (Bambra et al., 2020). Sudden economic shocks, such as the collapse of communism, are related to an increase in morbidity, mental health decline, suicide, increased ill health and deaths from substance use (Bambra et al., 2020). These effects were experienced unequally in poorer regions, and among low-skilled workers, exacerbating health inequalities (Bambra et al., 2020). Interestingly, after the 2008 financial crisis, countries that chose not to cut back on health and social protection budgets, had better outcomes than countries that made austere cuts in those budgets (Stuckler and Basu, 2013; Bambra et al., 2020). In current times, people lower on the social ladder bore the brunt of the negative side effects of the measures, in health, lifestyle changes as well as decrease in income (Schippers et al., 2022), even increasing their vulnerability to viral diseases (Enichen et al., 2022).

The dysfunctional situation in most countries worldwide strengthens the incentives for mass migration into Western countries that still offer better prospects, in theory at least. However, this challenge, if mishandled, may lead to importing poverty (Martin, 2009; Murray, 2017) creating an underclass, and further proclivity of an unequal society and possibly a Death Spiral Effect (cf. Gomberg-Muñoz, 2012; Peters and Shin, 2022). Furthermore, there is some evidence that poverty gives rise to higher crime rates (Dong et al., 2020). In the US, even minor crimes are severely punished, and imprisonment of poor people escalates inequalities (Wacquant, 2009; Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009a).

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Currently, the optimism of connectivity and the internet and the possibilities for open source democracy seem to have faded (Rushkoff, 2003). Censorship has set in, along with a loss of scientific freedom (Da Silva, 2021; Kaufmann, 2021; Shir-Raz et al., 2022). The scientific debate was stifled during the COVID-19 crisis and dissenting views were censored (Shir-Raz et al., 2022). Suppression tactics resulted in damaging careers of dissenting doctors and scientists regardless of academic or medical status (Shir-Raz et al., 2022). This has led to a loss of trust in science and institutions (Hamilton and Safford, 2021). Worse, when knowledgeable scientists with reasonable arguments and rigorous data are suppressed, this could offer ammunition to conspiracy theorists to claim that orthodox science is non-tolerant and wrong. Especially centralized censorship may increase certainty in radicalized views (Lane et al., 2021). Anyone questioning. science’ and official governmental narratives may be called a conspiracy theorist, as a way of discrediting and delegitimizing critics (Giry and Gürpınar, 2020). It has been argued that conspiracy theories are also a sign of dissatisfaction with governance, society or policies, and some conspiracy theories may turn out to be true (Swami and Furnham, 2014).

Surveillance capitalism, the collection and commodification of personal data by corporations, shifts the power of governments toward large companies (Big Other). These corporations have the power to observe and influence human thinking and decision-making for example via direct advertising. Direct advertising has become far more aggressive (Schwartz and Woloshin, 2019), especially for products of little benefit and high sales (DiStefano et al., 2023). Effective direct advertising can be guided by surveillance capitalism. This can be a tool for business (knowing customers preferences) but also an invasion of privacy (Zuboff, 2015, 2023, see also Yeung, 2018). Worryingly, strategic actors such as large corporations and governments (i.e., the elite) can unevenly influence the media (media bias), possibly leading to an increasingly narrowing of the definition of “facts/true knowledge” versus “fake news/disinformation,” e.g., stating that only governmental or other elite-endorsed narratives represent the. truth’ (cf. Gehlbach and Sonin, 2014). People and scientists that differ in their views from the official narrative, can be censored, marginalized and expelled, even if they are prudent in their publications and wording within the debate (cf. Prasad and Ioannidis, 2022). Some authors have even contended that this combination may bring us on a path toward totalitarianism (Desmet, 2022), and have called for a way to rethink and uphold democracy and democratic principles (Della Porta, 2021; Ioannidis and Schippers, 2022), as well as democratic control of technology (Gould, 1990).

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The COVID-19 crisis and measures of unprecedented severity and duration are related to many negative side effects and increase inequalities worldwide (Marmot and Allen, 2020); hence stress, health, and trauma for vulnerable populations must be addressed (Whitehead and Torossian, 2020). It may take a long time to recover from the economic fall-out and rise in inequalities (Whitehead and Torossian, 2020). Governments should take individual and societal well-being as a spearhead for decision-making in the upcoming years (Frijters et al., 2020). Hopefully, with effective interventions, the tide can be turned and a positive spiral can be induced (e.g., Schippers and Ziegler, 2023). However, while many ideas and proposals may emerge, implementing them without rigorous trials may add further waste after we have already endorsed too many failed interventions.

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https://www.sensible-med.com/p/anthony- ... oronavirus

Anthony Fauci failed during the coronavirus response

A new paper in Science Advances by Bendavid and Patel shows how and why

The first two weeks of March 2020 were jolting. Governments read the Imperial College London report (modeling a million deaths in the US), watched horrifying scenes in Bergamo (a city with median age in the 80s fyi), and collectively embraced policies that had no precedent in human history: The global closing of borders, schools, business, and the use of the police state to enforce this lockdown. School closure would persist in places like LA and SF for 18 months, devastating poor and minority children.

Lockdown was specifically advocated for by Anthony Fauci (‘15 days to stop the spread’/ ‘hunker down’/ ‘shelter in place’), and Fauci would go on to make hundreds of other specific policy recommendations. Although he initially rejected it, by April 2020, he recommended community cloth masking to slow the coronavirus (an intervention for which we now have randomized data showing it doesn’t work).

Fauci opposed Ron DeSantis in numerous TV interviews in spring 2020 when DeSantis reopened schools. He called school reopening reckless— though it was widely embraced in western Europe at the time, and now clearly the correct policy choice.

Fauci supported vaccine mandates and border closure. He repeated the false statement that 6ft of social distancing had an empirical basis. Many in the media and medicine think criticizing him is unfair— he did the best he could with what he knew at the time—but it is fair to criticize a scientist who presented his views as facts when they were at best speculation. And, moreover, there is one criticism that no one can deny:

Although he was director of the NIAID, and although he controlled a 5 billion dollar infectious disease research budget, he chose to launch, fund and conduct precisely ZERO randomized trials of non-pharmacologic interventions.

No trials of masking vs no masking, or n95 masking vs cloth masking. No trials of 3ft vs 6ft distancing. No trials of staggered school reopening or closure. No trials of cohorting. No trials of varying testing strategies. No trials of masking kids 2 to 5 (which only the US did)). He went on TV and made confident assertions about what was best, time and again, and, though he could have tested any one of his assertions, he repeatedly failed to test them. My full video detailing his performance is here.

This is not how a scientist behaves. Science fundamentally means subjecting your theories to empirical testing— (you can even implement while you test)— but failing to run any studies is a failure. Even people who think randomized trials are difficult and impractical must concede that ZERO can’t be the correct number for a pandemic which is cost societies 20 trillion dollars, and killed 7 million + people, globally.

A new paper in Science Advances shows just how monumental Fauci’s failure, and other global leaders, including Tedros at WHO, has been. Here is the paper:



In it, Eran Bendavid and Chirag Patel do something clever. They perform observational, regression analyses to ask which COVID19 pandemic measures actually (a) slowed covid spread (b) increased covid spread and (c) had no effect on covid spread. This is precisely like many other studies that have been performed that have found conflicting results— lockdowns work vs. lockdowns didn’t work.

But Bendavid and Patel don’t just perform 1 study— they perform 100,000 studies. They perform nearly every (sensible) possible analytic plan of the data. Basically, they ask, if 10,000 future research teams, each perform 10 studies on COVID policy measures, what might that distribution of findings look like.

Before I tell you their answer. Let me tell you one thing that makes their study very robust. To validate their method, they asked if measles vaccinations policies slowed the spread of measles in the US. (This is a falsification test that Jena and I advocated for in JAMA). They found that ALL MODELS showed significantly that it did. In other words, if policies actually work, this method is able to prove that they work.

But for COVID policies, Bendavid and Patel’s result was different. Here is the raw data for all analyses (L) and just policies begun in 2020 (R)





Few models showed that COVID policies— closing schools, banning gatherings, shelter in place— helped. A few showed that they did not SPREAD COVID. But the VAST, VAST majority showed no significant effect on transmission. They didn’t work.

No effect is probably the correct answer. Beyond voluntary behavioral change, I doubt nearly any official policy response resulted in different outcomes— neither beneficial or harmful—with respect to viral spread.

School closure was a complete fiasco because while it didn’t slow viral spread (or did so only marginally—we have several papers supporting this conclusion); it robbed a generation of kids of several grade levels— a devastating blow that will shorten their lives. We wrote about this years ago.



And policies like 6ft were based on nothing and used to hamper school reopening.



What does the Bendavid and Patel paper mean?

It means that Anthony Fauci and a handful of other leaders globally who set global pandemic policy did so in a way that we learned absolutely nothing and most likely (at least by sheer number of model results), did nothing to change COVID spread.

Here is what the authors write, “The concentration of estimates around a zero effect weakly suggests that government responses did little to nothing to change the COVID-19 burden.”

We should be embarrassed that we used the police state to enforce border closures, ticket people in parks, arrest churchgoers, and folks refusing to wear a cloth mask, while we had no credible evidence these policies helped others, and while Fauci and others who advocated for them, made literally no effort to test if they work.

All lives were changed by the pandemic response and Bendavid and Patel show that for most of the big questions we will never— not now or ever— have conclusive proof they helped or hurt.

That is Anthony Fauci’s greatest failure. The man who controlled 5 billion dollars in research funding, who called himself a scientist, who went on TV 20 times a day to tell us what would help, and who ran zero randomized studies of any non-pharmacologic intervention.

The COVID19 pandemic did not happen during the middle ages, but we leave it just as ignorant as our ancestors who left the Black Death.

[stickdog99]