Fact-checking a Covid-19 fact-checker

After Microsoft affiliate NewsGuard did a 'fact-check' on the American Institute of Economic Research and the Great Barrington Declaration, AIER did one of NewsGuard using its own published standards. NewsGuard failed.

Who Fact Checks the Fact Checkers? A Report on Media Censorship | American Institute for Economic Research - Phillip W. Magness:

August 11, 2021 - "The advent of fact-checker journalism may be wearing out its welcome. Perhaps the increasing politicization of American life is a contributor to the downward spiral of the fact-checking profession that is primarily run by politically engaged reporters, not expert specialists in the subjects they assess.... Not that any one group of experts should have the authority over the truth either. Self-appointed media gatekeepers are a ticking time bomb of political censorship, waiting to be unleashed when the temptations are too great and the necessity for impartiality is even greater. With White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki calling for collusion between social media companies and the government to censor 'misinformation', this threat seems to be as close as ever.... 

"This brings us to a relatively new, but powerful company known as NewsGuard, which claims a partnership with Microsoft and gleaming spotlights in major outlets. Its staff and board boast powerful connections to the government, finance, and the media. According to an Op-ed in Politico written by NewsGuards’ CEO, rather than simply being a fact-checking company that can only debunk stories after they go viral, NewsGuard rates entire websites’ trustworthiness. This new strategy is aimed at discrediting the very source that alleged misinformation or disinformation may come from. NewsGuard publishes lengthy 'nutritional labels,' rating websites on various criteria of journalistic importance and outlining its reasons for giving certain ratings.... After receiving a recent request for comments on a 'fact-check' article by NewsGuard regarding AIER and the Great Barrington Declaration, we decided to investigate the rise of the fact-checking phenomenon itself, including this strange new company’s own performance in evaluating the content of other websites. 

"We soon discovered that NewsGuard falls far short of the very same criteria for accuracy and transparency that it claims to apply to other websites. Most of the company’s fact checkers lack basic qualifications in the scientific and social-scientific fields that they purport to arbitrate. NewsGuard’s own track record of commentary – particularly on the Covid-19 pandemic – reveals a pattern of unreliable and misleading claims that required subsequent corrections, and analysis that regularly conflates fact with opinion journalism in rendering a judgement on a website’s content. Furthermore, the company’s own practices fall far short of the transparency and disclosure standards it regularly applies to other websites....

"A revealing example may be found in NewsGuard’s treatment of the 'lab leak' hypothesis for Covid-19’s origins. Media coverage of the lab leak theory – which posits that the pandemic originated through the accidental infection of workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who were studying coronaviruses in bat populations – has changed dramatically in recent months after a closer examination of evidence led several scientists to lend it credence.... For over a year prior to these recent developments however, NewsGuard aggressively 'fact checked' and penalized other websites for even raising the possibility of a lab leak. Some of the most aggressive attacks came from John Gregory, NewsGuard’s 'Deputy Editor for Health' policy and also the primary correspondent in AIER’s exchanges with the company.... According to a statement that the company sent to AIER:

NewsGuard either mischaracterized the sites’ claims about the lab leak theory, referred to the lab leak as a “conspiracy theory,” or wrongly grouped together unproven claims about the lab leak with the separate, false claim that the COVID-19 virus was man-made without explaining that one claim was unsubstantiated, and the other was false. NewsGuard apologizes for these errors. We have made the appropriate correction on each of the 21 labels....

"AIER’s own experience with NewsGuard revealed a similar pattern of carelessness and misrepresentation by Gregory and other writers for the company. Gregory contacted us on behalf of NewsGuard in early June 2021 requesting comments on several articles relating to Covid-19 pandemic policy and the Great Barrington Declaration. AIER’s Phil Magness obliged the request by offering to answer his questions in good faith, but quickly discovered that they carried heavy political biases arising from Gregory’s own personal beliefs about Covid-19, healthcare policy, American politics, and related subjects.

"In one such example, Gregory asked a prejudicial question that attempted to implicate AIER with showing partisan political biases in our publications: 'We also note that AIER.org refers to itself as nonpartisan. Why then do its articles routinely criticize Democrats'.... Gregory’s question, however, selectively cherry-picked only two articles on our site where we criticized Democratic politicians. It made no mention of the many examples where AIER has similarly criticized Republicans.... Gregory’s questions displayed a similar pattern of conflating normative policy positions taken by individual authors on AIER’s website – essentially opinion articles, and all properly identified as such – for positive or empirical claims, which could then be 'fact checked.'.... When Magness replied to Gregory by calling attention to the difference between normative and positive arguments as well as the editorial diversity of external contributors to our daily publications, he ignored the distinction....

"Even more problematic was NewsGuard’s portrayal of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), signed at AIER in October 2020. Gregory’s synopsis of the GBD contained numerous false and misleading claims that were brought to the attention of his company almost immediately after their publication. Repeating a charge from another website, Gregory wrote that 'none of the three [GBD authors] had published peer-reviewed research about the COVID-19 pandemic at the time they authored the declaration.” This claim is false. GBD co-author Jay Bhattacharya was part of a team of scientists from Stanford University that conducted one of the first wide-scale seroprevalence studies of Covid-19 at the outset of the pandemic [published] in the Journal of the American Medical Association in May 2020. When contacted by AIER about this error in his article, Gregory ... appended it with a snide denigration of Bhattacharya for being 'listed as the seventh author” on the study (Bhattacharya was in fact a principal co-author but was listed last, as per a convention with how some medical journal articles identify senior ranked investigators. Bhattacharya was also a primary media contact about his study’s findings at the time of its release).

"NewsGuard’s depiction of the GBD contained other clear misrepresentations of its contents and positions. For example, Gregory wrote that the GBD 'argued that restrictions meant to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus, such as face masks … should be eliminated for people considered to be at lower risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19.' The text of the GBD makes no mention of face mask policy though – only lockdowns and similar restrictions on schools and businesses. NewsGuard did not respond to multiple requests from AIER to correct this erroneous characterization...

"In an email to AIER, NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill stated 'when we make judgments about health care sites…we rely on – and quote — sources who are the experts.' This is not the case with their assessment of the GBD. Rather than quoting scientific experts, NewsGuard’s review of the GBD relies primarily on a statement by former UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock – a politician who has no formal scientific or medical training. In a passage quoted by Gregory, Hancock stated that 'the Great Barrington declaration is underpinned by two central claims and both are emphatically false. First, it says that if enough people get covid, we will reach herd immunity. That is not true…we should have no confidence that we would ever reach herd immunity to covid, even if everyone caught it.' Hancock’s statement, however, is at direct odds with mainstream science on immunology. The World Health Organization specifically defines herd immunity as the combined total of immunity acquired by vaccination and by natural infection and recovery. Although it differs from the GBD authors on how to most effectively reach this point, the WHO does not dispute the existence or attainment of herd immunity itself.... 

"Hancock’s statement, cited as authoritative by NewsGuard, further contended, “The second central claim [of the GBD] is that we can segregate the old and vulnerable on our way to herd immunity. That is simply not possible.' This is not a scientific statement, but rather Hancock’s own political opinion. A detailed plan arguing for the feasibility of focused protection measures was published by the GBD authors to accompany the Declaration itself. More importantly, the scientific literature on Covid-19 mitigation documents clear evidence that the success (or failure) of a country to 'shield' its nursing homes through a focused protection strategy is a primary factor in its overall mortality rate. A study by John P.A. Ioannidis in the journal BMJ-Global Health compared the nursing home shielding ratios of several countries, concluding that they 'varied markedly in the extent to which they protected high-risk groups.' Contrary to Hancock’s political claims, Ioannidis concluded: 'Both effective precision shielding and detrimental inverse protection can happen in real-life circumstances. COVID-19 interventions should seek to achieve maximal precision shielding.”

"When asked by AIER about their continued reliance on Hancock as a source despite the scientific misinformation contained in his assessment of herd immunity as well as his overall lack of scientific qualifications, Gregory responded that it 'was and is relevant to explaining the views of those who criticized the Declaration.' Neither Gregory nor NewsGuard responded to follow-up questions about how they reconciled this position, the political nature of Hancock’s comments, or Hancock’s lack of scientific credentials with Brill’s assertion that they 'rely on – and quote — sources who are the experts' in the subject matters they evaluate.

"In addition ... Gregory included links to further readings about the Declaration from an extremely dubious source: 9/11 Truther and conspiracy theory blogger Nafeez Ahmed of the Byline Times website. Between October 2020 and the present, Ahmed has promoted a flurry of increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories about the GBD, including a false allegation that it was secretly financed by libertarian billionaire Charles Koch in apparent coordination with the British Ministry of Defence and – strangest of all – the proprietor of a resort hotel located in Wales.... When asked about NewsGuard’s promotion of links to Ahmed’s blog, Gregory ... stated that Ahmed’s claims were not used to calculate NewsGuard’s ratings and were only included to provide a 'history' of the GBD. It did not appear to concern Gregory that Ahmed’s 'history' was an unreliable conspiracy theory of his own imagination.... NewsGuard has not altered or removed the links to Ahmed’s allegations despite its promotion of documented falsehoods about the origins and funding of the GBD. Even more astounding, NewsGuard currently rates Ahmed’s blog with a score of 82.5/100, giving it full credit for “gathering and presenting information responsibly.” This pattern evinces a clear double standard in which NewsGuard promotes sources that do not appear to meet their own published minimum standards for reliability and uses them to denigrate the credibility of AIER and the GBD.

"In sharp contrast to the generally disparaging approach he took to covering the GBD, Gregory holds other websites that attack the GBD in high esteem. In one example, Gregory extended a score of 87.5/100 to CovidFAQ.co, a website set up by a group of pro-lockdown activists in the United Kingdom. CovidFAQ is a joint project of conservative member of Parliament Neil O’Brien, 'neoliberal' activist Sam Bowman, and academic Stuart Ritchie. Pro-lockdown UK political strategist Dominic Cummings recently referenced their work as part of a 'decentralised' political campaign to discredit the anti-lockdown movement and the GBD, which he proposed while serving as an advisor to Prime Minister Boris Johnson. In his article for NewsGuard, Gregory credits CovidFAQ for “not repeatedly publish[ing] false content.” The website’s track record is at clear odds with Gregory’s assessment.

"In January 2021, CovidFAQ published a lengthy attack on the GBD that contained multiple errors and misrepresentations of the Declaration’s contents. In one example, the authors of CovidFAQ claimed, 'The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration have never given an answer' to how they would implement a focused protection strategy in place of lockdowns. In reality, the GBD website contains a detailed 1,800 word plan for implementing focused protection. When AIER’s Phil Magness alerted CovidFAQ co-owners Stuart Ritchie and Sam Bowman to this error in January 2021, the website’s editors modified the text to read, 'The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration have never given anything approaching an adequate answer' to how they would implement focused protection (emphasis added). Rather than a factual correction, CovidFAQ’s change inserted their own editorial commentary expressing disagreement with the GBD’s published focus protection strategy as a way of disguising CovidFAQ’s earlier misrepresentation.... Gregory’s NewsGuard rating of the CovidFAQ website specifically linked to CovidFAQ’s deceptive edit about the GBD, and described it as having met 'NewsGuard’s standards for regularly issuing corrections.'

"NewsGuard concluded its assessment by repeating a false story from October 2020, claiming that the GBD’s signature list contained fake names such as 'Dr. Johnny Bananas” to inflate its signature count. This story misrepresents the products of an intentional hoax by pro-lockdown journalists including the aforementioned Nafeez Ahmed to flood the website with false signatures. In reality, 'Dr. Johnny Bananas' and similar hoax submissions were removed from the GBD website within a few hours of their discovery. An audit of signatures conducted by AIER found that false names amounted to only 0.1% of total signatures on the GBD prior to their removal, with the largest cluster of false names deriving from Ahmed’s hoax campaign on October 9th. NewsGuard did not include any of this context in its article, nor did Gregory permit AIER an opportunity to comment on the misinformation contained in its account of the false signatures.

"To briefly summarize, NewsGuard’s coverage of Covid-19 policy and the GBD in particular suffers from a recurring pattern of frequent errors that warrant correction, reliance on fact checkers and other figures who lack qualifications to make scientific assessments, biased depictions designed to disparage or undermine the scientific credibility of the petition, and the promotion of false information from dubious secondary sources.... NewsGuard’s staff primarily evaluates scientific claims by appealing to the authority of public figures who they designate as 'experts' on the subject in question. Their approach generally avoids direct examination of the evidence surrounding contested claims, and instead cherry-picks a figure to treat as an authoritative final word. As their liberal use of Hancock to evaluate the GBD illustrated, many of their preferred authorities are political officeholders rather than persons trained in scientific or social-scientific methods....

"If we’re going to be on this topic, we might as well check to see if NewsGuard is a reliable website by its own standards. Indeed, with its partnership with Microsoft and its roster of accomplished staff, the public should understand what kind of organization this is. To test how NewsGuard holds up to its own rating system, we subjected its website and practices to the same criteria it uses to evaluate other sources. The results reveal a website that preaches a very different standard for others than it adheres to in its own work.... 

"NewsGuard applies a 100-point scorecard to the websites it rates.... Our Rating of NewsGuard: 36.25/100. This website fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards, and should be used with extreme caution as a source for verifying the reliability of the websites it purports to rate.

"The truth is best sought through the marketplace of ideas where reason and evidence are the weapons of choice. When we see fact checkers like NewsGuard, who not only fail to uphold their high-sounding principles but even publicly encourage working with the government to suppress speech, we should raise red flags. NewsGuard’s behavior illustrates the tired idea that, during events like Covid-19, we should simply do as we’re told and not question the government or its experts. On this matter, they have shown themselves to be either unable to appropriately moderate public discourse or act as little more than cheerleaders for favored political figures and their preferred policy approaches to Covid-19. It wouldn’t be a stretch if they happen to be both."

Read more: https://www.aier.org/article/who-fact-checks-the-fact-checkers-a-report-on-media-censorship/

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Donald Trump and the lockdowns

Trump, Covid, and Despotism | American Institute for Economic Research - Donald J. Boudreaux: 

Donald Trump announces "15 days to slow the spread," Mar. 16, 2020. Wikimedia Commons

December 22, 2012 - "I continue to be at a loss to explain the support of so many people for – and the silence of so many other people in the face of – Covidocratic tyranny. When at a loss to explain, one naturally experiments with possibilities. Here’s one possibility for the U.S. experience: Some of the people who support Covid restrictions, or who see in them nothing ominous, are blinded by a fear greater than their fear of Covid-19. This greater fear is that of being thought by others, and by themselves, to be insufficiently hostile to Donald Trump and Trumpism. 

"Because state governments that imposed only relatively light Covid restrictions were more likely to be red than blue, and because the mainstream narrative from early on cast Trump with the anti-lockdowners, many people with antipathy to Trump apparently concluded that lockdowns and other Covid restrictions are acceptable for the simple reason that these measures are opposed by Trump and his base. The thinking seems to have been this: To be pro-Trump is to be anti-science, therefore, to be anti-Trump is to be pro-science. And to be pro-science specifically is to be pro-Fauci, Birx, CNN, and the New York Times, because these persons and media are anti-Trump. 

"People reached this conclusion without much investigation of the realities of Covid restrictions, or of Trump’s actual role in affecting a response. Careful investigation of the governments’ responses reveals that these were, and remain, dangerously disproportionate to the dangers posed by Covid. As for Trump, he played a key role in implementing lockdowns. Reviewing Scott Atlas’s new book, A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America, John Tierney writes: 

But Atlas lays the ultimate blame for the lockdowns – 'a crime against humanity' – on Trump himself, because he allowed [Dr. Deborah] Birx and her allies to remain in charge. 'This president, widely known for his signature "You’re fired!" declaration, was misled by his closest political intimates,' Atlas writes. 'All for fear of what was inevitable anyway – skewering from an already hostile media.' 

"No matter. It seems that starting in Spring 2020 hordes of people, many of whom would otherwise have protested the horrifying expansion of government powers and the tasering of civilization, either vocally or silently supported Covid restrictions, convinced that these restrictions were wise and justified, or at least tolerable, because these were thought to be opposed by Trump and his base.

"Whatever were (and are) the dangers to civilization posed by Trump and his supporters, these dangers are less extreme than are the dangers posed to civilization by supporters of lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and many other Covid restrictions. Covidocratic tyranny is no more justified by science than are any of the wrongheaded notions peddled by Trumpians, yet the consequences of Covidocratic tyranny are far more ominous than are the likely consequences of any policies that can reasonably be supposed to come to pass from Trump & Co. ...

"[O]ne of the differences between supporters of Covidocratic rule and Trumpians is that the former have stronger footholds in institutions traditionally associated with science and a more virulent will to control, or even to 'recreate,' society.... Yet because progressives, unlike Trumpians, are presumed by the intelligentsia to be well-intentioned, highly informed, and objective – and because social-engineering schemes conform with sacred superstitions – progressives’ policy demands are widely perceived as appropriate. These sacred superstitions hold that society is either inert or destructively chaotic to the extent that ordinary men, women, and children aren’t coercively prescribed and proscribed in fine detail by the progressive state....

"Starting even before Trump’s presidency, readers of my blog, Café Hayek, found harsh criticisms of Trump, especially on the two policy issues about which he seems to care the most: trade and immigration. Trump’s demeanor is appalling, his ignorance formidable, his megalomania insufferable, and his venality vast. And because, as Scott Atlas reports, Trump foolishly acquiesced to Fauci and Birx’s 'crime against humanity,' Trump bears much of the blame for America’s overreaction to Covid.

"Yet as much as I fear Trump and the nationalist-right’s assault on liberal values, I now fear even more the rising authoritarianism in response to Covid. The fact that most supporters of today’s Covid authoritarianism are also opponents of Trump does not render this authoritarianism acceptable. Today’s situation is all the more dangerous precisely because those now running the show, compared to Trump (who, let’s not forget, is no longer in power), seem to many people to be well-intentioned and guided by 'the science.'"

Read more: https://www.aier.org/article/trump-covid-and-despotism/

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How is social order possible?

On Hayek’s “Kinds of Order in Society,” Part I | American Institute for Economic Research - Donald J. Boudreaux: 

December 6, 2021 - "F.A. Hayek wrote several books and articles that are justly famous.... But because Hayek’s professional life spanned more than 60 years – from the mid-1920s until the late 1980s – the corpus of his work is enormous, with most of it being relatively obscure.... But my very favorite of Hayek’s many superb but lesser-known works is his paper that first appeared in the Winter 1964 issue of New Individualist Review: “Kinds of Order in Society.” This paper is a work of genius. A great deal of confusion about society, and about government’s role in it would be swept away were this paper’s core message more widely understood....

"Among the assumptions at the foundation of this article is that we human beings extend our ability to achieve our goals by cooperating with each other. And the greater is the number of individuals with whom we cooperate, the greater is the number of goals that we can successfully pursue. This fact explains the omnipresence of human cooperation. Such cooperation began eons ago in small hunting and gathering bands in which each individual personally knew those with whom he or she cooperated. Today, this cooperation literally spans the globe and occurs among billions of people, nearly all of whom are strangers to each other.

"When the cooperation is only among individuals who know each other personally – that is, only among a very small number of persons – it’s easy for each person to comprehend the nature of the cooperative arrangement.... But cooperation on such a small scale doesn’t allow individuals to achieve as much as each can achieve by including in the cooperative effort more individuals. The inclusion of more individuals brings to the cooperative effort not only additional muscle power but, far more importantly, additional and more diverse brain power – that is, more human creativity. The inclusion of more individuals also encourages greater specialization, which in turn results in each task being done more expertly, more uniformly, and faster.

"The human mind, however, isn’t evolved to be able to know more than a few hundred individuals. If we cooperated only with individuals we know, the span of our cooperation would remain extremely narrow.... Fortunately, our inability to personally know more than a handful of fellow human beings is offset by our instinct to adopt and follow rules. By following rules we can, and do, increase the number of individuals with whom we cooperate beyond the number that we personally know.

Source: Utopia, You Are Standing in It!

"An example is trade, which has at its base this rule: Each person is entitled only to what other people voluntarily give to him or her. No one gets to take other people’s stuff without their permission. Under this rule, if Jones wants some item, say an axe, owned by Smith, Jones understands that he can get this axe only by persuading Smith to give it to him. And especially if Smith is a stranger to Jones, the most obvious way for Jones to persuade Smith to give him the axe is for Jones to agree to give some other item ... to Smith in exchange.... Trade allows each of us to tap into the unique talents, interests, and endowments of our trading partners, be they neighbors across the street or strangers across the ocean. And trade is possible because its most basic rule is easily understood by every human being regardless of cultural background.

"Trade is not the only activity made possible by our rule-following instincts. Without sophisticated rule-following behavior, life in groups larger than the small band would be impossible. Think of yourself in a big city. You know not to practice playing your trumpet or your drums at midnight, and you know that other people follow a similar rule, which enables you – and others – to rely on being able to sleep each night. You know that when you come with your filled grocery cart upon a queue at the supermarket checkout lane, you take your place at the back of that line – and you’re content to do so because you know that other people will follow the same rule. You know that you aren’t allowed, without invitation, to enter premises belonging to other people. You know what green lights and red lights mean to motorists. You know that even though the restaurant serves you food before you pay for it, that you must pay for it when you’re done dining.

"Because humans are rule-following creatures, you thrive amongst strangers. By following the rules that prevail in a society, not only are harmful and disruptive encounters kept to a minimum, each individual – by knowing that countless strangers will follow the same rules that he or she follows – is able to plan courses of action in ways that would be impossible if rules didn’t exist.

"Our rule-following behavior gives rise to ever-more complex – and ever-more productive – patterns of cooperative interaction. These patterns are not only not designed by anyone, they could not possibly be so designed. Furthermore, these patterns cannot be directly observed and understood in the same way that our hunting and gathering ancestors could directly observe and ‘fully’ understand their simple cooperative endeavors. And yet, because we today still have the same brains as did our hunting and gathering ancestors, we are unable, without real intellectual effort, to perceive – and much less to make sense of – the complex patterns of social cooperation in which each of us participates daily.

"In “Kinds of Order in Society,” Hayek identified two categorically different kinds of orders – 'spontaneous orders' and 'organizations' – that are both common and useful to humans. Each of us is part of both kinds of orders. Yet we instinctively suppose that only one kind of these orders – namely, organizations – is possible. As I’ll explain in my next column, our instinct of interpreting all order as being the consequence of conscious organization is the root of much mischief."

Read more: https://www.aier.org/article/on-hayeks-kinds-of-order-in-society-part-i/

Also read: On Hayek’s “Kinds of Order in Society,” Part II

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The two kinds of social order

On Hayek’s “Kinds of Order in Society,” Part II | American Institute for Economic Research - Donald J. Boudreaux:

December 15, 2021 - "I concluded my previous column by blaming much policy mischief on the human instinct (perhaps a better word is 'habit') of interpreting all social order – including economic order – as being the consequence of conscious organization. This conclusion reflects the fact that my worldview is influenced so heavily by the work of F.A. Hayek, not least his relatively obscure 1964 New Individualist Review article, 'Kinds of Order in Society.' In this remarkable essay, Hayek identified two kinds of social orders, 'organizations' and 'spontaneous orders.' [stress added]. These orders differ from each other categorically.

"Organizations are consciously designed arrangements of human beings, each with an assigned task or set of tasks. Each organization is meant by its designer, or designers, to achieve a particular goal. An example is a hunting party arranged and carried out by our hunting-and-gathering ancestors. Another example of an organization, one familiar to us today, is a restaurant.... The crucial fact is that the restaurant, like the prehistoric hunting party, is consciously organized to pursue a particular goal in a particular manner.... And so the actions of every person in an organization can and will be judged by how well those actions contribute to the achievement of the organization’s goals.... 

"Spontaneous orders, like organizations, are highly useful to individuals. But unlike organizations, spontaneous orders are not designed and created. They emerge as unintended consequences of the actions of persons, each of whom is pursuing his or her own individual goals with no awareness that those actions will give rise to a larger order. While a spontaneous order assists each individual in the pursuit of his or her goals, such an order, unlike an organization, itself has no goal towards which it aims. And because a spontaneous order as such has no goals, the actions of the individuals whose choices give rise to the spontaneous order cannot be judged by how well or poorly they promote the goal of the spontaneous order – for, again, the spontaneous order has no goals.

"The most obvious example of a useful spontaneous order is language. Language is clearly (to use a phrase much-favored by Hayek) the result of human action but not of human design. Languages emerged from human beings attempting to communicate with each other. Yet no one consciously decided what specific words and sounds refer to, or mean, in any language.... Being undesigned, it follows that language was not designed to serve any purpose or to achieve some particular goal.... And yet language does indeed enable each of us as individuals to better pursue our own goals. The shopper uses language to explain to the store clerk just what items he wishes to buy, and the store clerk, at the end of her work day, uses language to inform the cab driver of her destination. But the shopper and the store clerk, by using the same language, are not together acting to achieve some higher goal. Further, it would be mistaken to describe language as having among its goals the service of the shopper and of the store clerk.

"Another example of a spontaneous order is the global market. No one designed today’s division of labor – with some of us working as plumbers, others of us as web designers, yet others of us as butchers, brewers, bakers, or baseball players. And no one designed the indescribably complex pattern of exchange relationships that enable each of us to enjoy the fabulous prosperity that each of us enjoys. And yet these phenomena are real. They are the result of human action but not of human design. The market, like language, provides enormous assistance to each of us as we each pursue our own individual goals. But the market, also like language, has no overarching goal toward which it aims.

Source: Ryan Miller blog

"The human mind, alas, is much less comfortable with spontaneous order than with organization. Individuals interacting with each other in ways that no one planned seems, to many people, to be obviously inferior to individuals interacting with each other according to a plan. Just look at successful corporations; they’re planned to fulfill a particular goal. Likewise, when a government is in a desperate shooting war against other governments, it takes control of the economy and directs it according to a plan designed to defeat the dreaded enemy. Surely – the reasoning goes – the economy would produce much better results if it, too, were always run according to a plan rather than left to drift aimlessly with no intended direction.

"Since the publication in 1776 of Adam Smith’s Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, economists have made a compelling case that the material results of competitive market processes will be far superior to those produced by government interventions designed to bring about particular, concrete outcomes. But although Hayek agreed with this conclusion, in his criticisms of government planning he often emphasized a different point – namely, that insofar as economic arrangements are planned by government, each individual is conscripted to serve ends that are not of his or her choosing.

"A beautiful feature of spontaneous orders is that they maximize the scope of each individual to choose – and to pursue with much hope of success – his or her own unique goals without having to agree with the goals chosen by others or to have to sacrifice his or her goals to the goals of other people. Also, in a spontaneous order no individual is thwarted in the pursuit of his or her goals simply because these goals are inconsistent with some overarching plan.

"We humans often use homeowners’ associations, firms, and other organizations to improve our prospects of achieving particular goals. But the undeniable usefulness of organizations in certain circumstances should not be mistaken as evidence that organizations are superior to spontaneous orders. Each of these two kinds of order in society has its proper place. And just as it would be foolish to expect, say, a business firm that produces automobiles to emerge spontaneously without someone intending to create such a firm and plan its operation, it is foolish to expect that the economy as a whole can be successfully planned and operated as if it were a business firm or a military unit.

"There are, to repeat, two kinds of order in society. It’s time we stopped glorifying and overestimating one, and ignoring the reality, or discounting the marvels, of the other." 

Donald J. Boudreaux is a senior fellow with American Institute for Economic Research and with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University; a Mercatus Center Board Member; and a professor of economics and former economics-department chair at George Mason University. He writes a blog called Cafe Hayek and a regular column on economics for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Boudreaux earned a PhD in economics from Auburn University and a law degree from the University of Virginia.

Read more: https://www.aier.org/article/on-hayeks-kinds-of-order-in-society-part-ii/

Also read: On Hayek’s “Kinds of Order in Society,” Part I

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NIH boss planned 'takedown' of Great Barrington Declaration scientists

Fauci, Emails, and Some Alleged Science | American Institute of Economic Research - Phillip W. Magness & James R. Harrigan:

December 19, 2021 - "From October 2-4, 2020, the American Institute for Economic Research hosted a small conference for scientists to discuss the Covid-19 lockdowns. Just four days later, Dr. Francis Collins, the retiring Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), would call ... three of the scientists in attendance 'fringe epidemiologists,' in a directive he sent to Anthony Fauci and other senior staff of his agency.... Those three, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford were simply doing what any good scientist would do: They were following the evidence. They wrote the Great Barrington Declaration [GBD] as they parted company at AIER, posting it for all to see.

"So why was Dr. Collins so intent on impugning these three scientists? It’s hard to know exactly, mostly because any scientist worth his salt should have been happy to see further research being done. That is, after all, how ignorance is replaced by knowledge. But Collins ... was pretty sure he knew all he had to know... In an email obtained by AIER through a Freedom of Information Act request, Collins told Anthony Fauci, CCing Lawrence Tabak, Deputy Ethics Counselor at NIH, that he wanted 'a quick and devastating published take down (sic)' of the Great Barrington Declaration’s premises. One wonders why he would CC the Deputy Ethics Counselor on this, given the trouble these people seem to have with ethics, but here they were in October of 2020. 

"Fauci wrote that same night to let Collins know that there was already a devastating take down of the Great Barrington Declaration…in that august scientific publication Wired.... There, science reporter Matt Reynolds told us there was no 'scientific divide' over herd immunity, but that’s not the funny part. The funny part came when Reynolds declared quite confidently that we no longer had anything to worry about, as lockdowns were – as of October 2020 – a thing of the past. 'The problem [with the GBD] is that we aren’t in lockdown,' Reynolds explained. '[I]t’s hard to find people who are advocating for a return to the lockdown we saw in March. When the Great Barrington Declaration authors declare their opposition to lockdowns, they are quite literally arguing with the past.'  This Fauci-endorsed passage may be one of the worst takes of the entire pandemic. Less than a month later, lockdowns came roaring back with a vengeance.

"Fauci wrote to Collins again the next day, this time referencing a breathless op-ed by Gregg Gonsalves*, a public health professor at Yale, in The Nation. And here we arrive at yet another funny part. Gonsalves’ article was not exactly a critique of the Great Barrington Declaration. Instead, Gonsalves went after Martin Kulldorff, who in an interview with the leftist magazine Jacobin quite reasonably pointed out that the lockdowns hurt the poor more than most talking heads were willing to admit. Gonsalves’s grievance was that by interviewing Kulldorff, Jacobin had broken the lockdown 'solidarity' of other far-left websites including the Nation and the Boston Review.

"By October 10, the lines were well drawn, and Fauci thrust himself into the middle of the media hootenanny that was clearly emerging. Collins emailed again to boast about calling the three scientists 'fringe' in the Washington Post, although he told Fauci that their ongoing campaign to take down the GBD 'will not be appreciated in the W[hite] H[ouse].' The White House, Fauci retorted, was 'too busy with other things to worry about' the GBD. There was an election to deal with, after all.

"As the bedfellows became more strange, Gregg Gonsalves wrote directly to Collins, thanking him for his undiplomatic approach. For his part, Gonsalves became ever more hostile and profane, in his remarks on the GBD. 'This f*****g Great Barrington Declaration is like a bad rash that won’t go away,' Gonsalves tweeted, shortly before reaching out to Collins. A day earlier, the Yale professor also began promoting unhinged conspiracy theories about the GBD and AIER that traced to the blog of a former 9/11 Truther movement activist. 

"Some of the emails between Collins and Fauci sent in response to AIER’s FOIA request have been redacted, but surrounding context makes it pretty clear that they were looking for a way to impugn the GBD further if it came up at the White House Covid Task Force meeting on October 16. That morning, Fauci emailed Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator. He pressed the need for her to oppose the GBD, and set the stage for an attack on Scott Atlas, who was the most friendly champion of the GBD on the Task Force. Fauci, it turns out, had to miss the October 16 task force meeting, though he likely breathed a sigh of relief when Collins emailed him two days later. 'Atlas did not take part in the [task force] meeting on Friday,' Collins wrote, 'and the Great Barrington Declaration did not come up.' Another partially-redacted email hints that Fauci celebrated this outcome. Atlas’s opposition to the lockdown faction on the task force 'is driving Deb [Birx] crazy,' he continued.

"Fauci and Collins were not done, though.... Our story picks up again in earnest on November 2, when Fauci’s chief of staff Greg Folkers replied to an email that was not made public in pursuance to AIER’s FOIA request. It seems pretty clear, though, that Fauci asked Folkers for a list of sources that would allow him to argue effectively against the GBD. The email’s subject line references a previous correspondence from Fauci 'as discussed,' noting that Folkers had 'highlighted the three i found most useful' (sic).

"Multiple sources, and particularly Scott Atlas’s recently-published account of his time on the task force, have noted that Fauci often relies on aides to curate lists of sources in advance of his many media appearances. He seldom reads the scientific literature on Covid-19 himself, and instead arrives at meetings with staff-prepared talking points. It appears that Folker’s email was an answer to one such request for talking points to attack the GBD scientists.... 

"Fauci frequently portrays himself as a staunch defender of science who stays above the political divide and remains outside of partisan debates. In light of that, you might expect that Folker’s response to Fauci’s request would yield a small sample of scientific analysis on the logic behind lockdowns, even if only in a format bullet pointed by his staff. But you’d be wrong. Folkers sent Fauci a list of seven political op-eds and articles opposing the GBD from popular media outlets.

"So yeah. Science."

Read more: https://www.aier.org/article/fauci-emails-and-some-alleged-science/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

* - signatory of the John Snow memorandum

AIER responds to anti-GBD screed in BMJ

Medice, cura te ipsum | British Medical Journal (letter to the editor):

September 16, 2021 - "In their essay 'Covid-19 and the new merchants of doubt' (BMJ Opinion, 9/13/21, https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/09/13/covid-19-and-the-new-merchants-of-d...), Gavin Yamey and David Gorski present themselves as defenders of sound scientific principles in the face of 'denialism' related to the Covid-19 pandemic. These authors specifically target the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), and the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) as sources of what they imply is a misinformation campaign about the efficacy of Covid-19 public health measures. Unfortunately, it seems to us that Yamey and Gorski have misrepresented both the GBD and AIER....

"In October 2020, AIER hosted a small academic conference on the costs and consequences of lockdowns with three highly qualified medical scientists, Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya. These scientists received no compensation for their participation, which came about due to a mutual recognition that the medical, social, and economic harms of lockdowns were being neglected as countries around the world pursued an aggressive lockdown strategy. At the time the evidence of the efficacy of lockdowns was being debated (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.22.20160341v3). This novel approach conflicted with existing public health recommendations for respiratory pandemics from as recently as 2019 (https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/pubs_archive/pubs-pdfs/..., https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/pubs_archive/pubs-pdfs/..., https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789241516839-en...).

"During the conference, journalists including science writer David Zweig, Forbes’ John Tamny, and Jeanne Lenzer, who reported it for The BMJ (https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3908), conducted a wide-ranging question and answer session with the scientists, which AIER videotaped for release to the public (https://gbdeclaration.org/video/). At the conclusion of the conference, the scientists drafted the GBD as a general statement of public health principles, calling for an end to lockdowns and outlining an alternative strategy of “focused protection” for vulnerable communities (https://gbdeclaration.org/focused-protection/). While AIER is proud to have hosted the conference that produced this document, its text and principles originated entirely with the scientists - indeed, the idea for a general letter came about spontaneously on the afternoon of October 4 as the conference drew to a close.

"Yamey and Gorski’s allegations of fossil fuel and tobacco company interests in AIER are unfounded. These stem from their misunderstanding of AIER’s financial assets as independently managed by our investment subsidiary, American Investment Services. As with any investment fund, these holdings inevitably include stocks from hundreds of companies, none of which have any bearing on our editorial positions. This would be akin to suggesting that Yamey’s own pro-lockdown position is tainted by Duke University’s multi-billion dollar foundation - built from the tobacco fortune of James Buchanan Duke - or that Gorski’s medical work is ethically compromised by the presence of fossil fuel stocks in Wayne State University’s $400 million endowment. To portray either as a source of financial influence appears to display a misunderstanding of the very nature of investments, which are a way of ensuring an institution’s long-term financial stability - not a payoff from the firms whose stocks are owned.

"Are financial theories about AIER and the GBD really where these authors want to hang their hats? For the record, AIER publishes its own financial reports every year (https://www.aier.org/financials/). Anyone who wants to see where the money comes from, or where it goes can simply navigate to our website and do so. There are no tricks. There is no deception.

Sincerely,

Phillip W. Magness
Senor Research Faculty & Interim Director of Research and Education
American Institute for Economic Research

James R. Harrigan
Senior Editor

American Institute for Economic Research

Read more: https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2268/rr

All articles and resources listed at https://bmj.com/coronavirus are freely available for the duration of the covid-19 pandemic or until otherwise determined by BMJ. They may be downloaded or printed for any lawful, non-commercial purpose (including text and data mining) provided that all copyright notices and trade marks are retained.

The Great Barrington Declaration one year on

The Great Barrington Declaration One Year On | American Institute of Economic Research - Phillip W. Magness & James R. Harrigan:

October 5, 2021 - "From October 2-4, 2020, the American Institute for Economic Research hosted a small conference for scientists to discuss the harms of the Covid-19 lockdowns, and maybe hint at a path back to normal life. Organized by Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya, the conference made a scientific case for shifting away from the heavy-handed lockdowns of the initial Spring 2020 outbreak. On their final day together in Great Barrington, the scientists wrote a short statement of principles, calling it the Great Barrington Declaration. This Declaration, their Declaration, touched a nerve well beyond the scientific community, and well beyond anything they or AIER could have expected....

"The aim that our guests had in offering the Great Barrington Declaration was to spark scientific dialogue that had been missing from the lockdown discussions until that point. It was AIER’s goal to facilitate this dialogue. The Declaration was a success in bringing, for the first time since the pandemic started, an anti-lockdown voice to mainstream policy discussion. The signatories’ stance was generally in line with the pre-pandemic plans that many, if not most mainstream authorities, (the World Health Organization, the epidemiology center at Johns Hopkins University, and the Centers for Disease Control to name just three) held. People tend to forget what the pre-2020 conventional wisdom on pandemics even was.

"As successful as we think the Great Barrington Declaration was, it failed in a number of respects.... We did not, for example, anticipate the vilification the Declaration would receive from any number of people, ranging from the progressive left to self-described libertarians. Immediately after the website launched, it was hit by a hoax signature campaign instigated on Twitter by pro-lockdown journalist Nafeez Ahmed. Most of the fake signatures were caught within hours and removed, but not before a hostile news media used them to manufacture a false story about their own self-created controversy over signatures from 'Dr. Johnny Bananas' and similar easily-caught pseudonyms.... 

"Ahmed also let loose what can only be called a flurry of increasingly unhinged conspiracy theories, falsely alleging that the GBD was somehow financially orchestrated by the Koch brothers, the British Ministry of Defence, and even a resort hotel property in Wales. Although Ahmed has a long history of conspiracy theorizing including the promotion of kooky claims about a controlled demolition bringing down the Twin Towers on 9/11, his ravings about the GBD were credulously adopted and shared by prominent scientists, journalists, and any number of other people who should have known better. (For the record, AIER received $68,000 in Koch funding over the last ten years. And that sum was used entirely to offset the costs of a single economics conference in 2017, with no links whatsoever to the GBD)....

"The Declaration even came under attack from a targeted propaganda campaign at the highest levels of the British government. Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust and a pro-lockdown advisor to the UK’s SAGE committee, revealed as much in a recent book about the pandemic. Per Farrar’s account, Dominic Cummings – then serving as chief advisor to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson – announced that he would orchestrate 'an aggressive press campaign against those behind the Great Barrington Declaration and to others opposed to blanket Covid-19 restrictions,' seeking to discredit any scientist who questioned the wisdom of his government’s lockdown strategy.

"In a broader and more basic sense, the Declaration was written during a period of deep uncertainty. No one really knew what the correct Covid answers were, but the signatories followed the evidence as it emerged. Most importantly, no one had any way of knowing that vaccines were so close to being available to the public. And while the specific strategies of last fall and winter might well have been different had the signatories known what we know now, everything they wrote was compatible with the anti-lockdown message at the heart of the Declaration....

"So how well did the lockdowns perform in practice? Given the intense criticisms leveled at the GBD, one might be inclined to think they worked rather well. But they didn’t.... First consider how the lockdowners have continuously shifted their accounts of the very same policies they advocated. In the weeks that followed the GBD, its critics crafted a well-honed and widely repeated message. Lockdowns, they insisted, were already a relic of the past – perhaps a suitable strategy for the uncertainties of spring 2020’s 'first wave,' but no longer a serious consideration.... After a year and a half or so of lockdowns, we can safely dismiss this response. Less than a month later, the UK returned to full lockdown. Dozens of other countries around the world followed suit in mid-November. When cases spiked again in the United States over the winter, several states reimposed these very same 'strawman' lockdown policies that the GBD’s critics dismissed with a wave of their hands in mid-October. Not that any of them would ever admit as much now. Quite the contrary.... One new conspiracy theory even faulted the GBD’s authors for allegedly delaying the reimposition of another UK lockdown by a few weeks the previous fall...

"More pro-lockdown epidemiologists seemed inclined to grasp the central theme of the badly misnamed John Snow Memorandum in the Lancet – drafted in direct response to the GBD. This petition, co-organized by Gurdasani and other pro-lockdown scientists, predictably claimed that drastic nonpharmaceutical measures such as business closures and shelter-in-place orders had a large effect on reducing Covid transmission in the spring and summer of 2020. Recent data indicate that this statement is overblown, and common sense should have researchers looking for the tradeoffs that have to be made in these sorts of large-scale public policies. Be that as it may, the Snow Memorandum was built upon unreliable pro-lockdown studies out of Imperial College-London that have since been discredited....

"So through it all, what have we learned and what should come next? First, vaccines have been a game changer, and will continue to be so. A forthcoming Covid-19 treatment pill from Merck might well be even bigger. And there are certainly other treatments coming that we don’t know about yet, that will only emerge through the innovative processes of scientific discovery.

"Also unknown at present are the costs of the lockdowns. These will be felt for years, if not decades, and will go well beyond lost wages. What will all those foregone cancer screenings mean, in the end? What about all those people who suffered mental health crises as they were confined to their homes alone? What about substance abuse costs? And what of the various financial catastrophes that so many people suffered?

"The benefits of the lockdowns are still ambiguous at best, this after a year and a half. We still have no clear empirical evidence that they delivered anything close to what they promised. But because science has been so completely politicized, it will take years longer to arrive at the truth than would have otherwise been the case. Here, we are left to offer advice with a nearly 2,500-year track record: First, do no harm."

Read more: https://www.aier.org/article/the-great-barrington-declaration-one-year-on/

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9/11: Remembering the truly forgotten

Remembering the Truly Forgotten, Twenty Years Later | American Institute for Economic Research - Peter C. Earle:

September 11, 2021 - "Today, a feeling that has simmered for years will rise to a fever pitch. The nation will honor New York City firefighters, police officers, Port Authority employees, medical personnel and first responders, and military servicemen killed in the Pentagon. There will be some mention of ... the passengers who died.... There will be no shortage of salutes to the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines killed in the global war on terror which, launched in Afghanistan shortly after 9/11, also came to involve action in Iraq, Syria, the Philippines, Mali, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, and other nations....

"I write this to celebrate the truly forgotten. There are no elegies for them; no concerts, flags, or bumper stickers. The closest thing they have to monuments are the random sections of beams from the Twin Towers that were distributed to town and county parks nationwide after the attacks. Those beams, twisted and deformed, once supported floors. And 20 years ago today, at about the time that this article is published (8 a.m. Eastern), those floors were already alive with the footsteps of traders, brokers, portfolio managers, accountants, tech workers, customer service representatives, and administrative personnel engaged in the lifeblood of global commerce: finance. 

"It can be easy to forget the people who were actually targeted in the World Trade Center attacks. It’s increasingly customary to do so, in fact.... Individuals dealing in financial markets, negotiating transactions, and managing great amounts of capital are often assumed to be wealthy, corrupt, or engaged in elaborate and ultimately unproductive activity, or some combination of the three. None of those labels invite much sympathy –– even considering the horrors that so many people in these scrutinized fields faced on that day. Nationwide, on this 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001, more will be said about military service dogs than the thousands of hardworking, productive people killed in downtown Manhattan that day....

"What tens of thousands of men and women in the North and South towers of the World Trade Center did all day, every day, was not simply 'pushing pieces of paper around'. What they did was nothing less than lay the foundation upon which the modern world sits and functions. 

"For time immemorial, human beings have struggled to determine the best means of producing goods and services.... Among competing means of production, regardless of the proposed output, there is some combination of inputs and processes that is the most economically efficient. Only prices, generated in market exchange, fulfill that calculation function adequately. Those prices, by reflecting the current consensus valuation of producers and consumers, allow planning. They send signals to all other market participants regarding scarcity, abundance, and shifts in the overall appraisal of countless resources.... [T]here are no other means of adequately determining where and how resources are being combined into the most customer-satisfying goods or services.... 

"William N. Goetzmann, professor and director of the International Center for Finance at Yale University, puts the birth of financial concepts at the root of civilization itself.... Financial practices, building off of the social technology of money and private property rights, forged and continue to govern virtually our entire world. But those practices are not automated, which is why financial professionals ranging from asset managers and speculators to algorithmic developers, accountants, and clerical personnel are so critical.... 

"And so, 20 years after one of the most awful days of my and countless others’ lives, I honor and praise the memory of the people who worked in the World Trade Center. I honor those who were slaughtered that sunny, blue, and virtually cloudless Tuesday morning. When they perished, most of them were still at their desks, donning headsets or handling phones, squawking our arcane language of growth and prosperity.... To the 12 or 13 dealers, traders, brokers, and other individuals based in the towers with whom I transacted and developed a rapport for years, who were gone in a flash: I remain grateful for your service, skills, and friendship. To my friend B, killed 20 years ago today, enduring esteem.... None of you are forgotten, nor will I let you be."

Read more: https://www.aier.org/article/remembering-the-truly-forgotten-twenty-years-later/

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Lockdown zealots embrace conspiracy theory

Quacks in the Ivory Tower: How Conspiracy Theorizing Took Over Lockdown Science | American Institute of Economic Research - Philip W. Magness:

June 19, 2021 - "Is the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) simply a front for a secret global eugenics plot, hatched at AIER [American Institute of Economic Affairs] by the British Ministry of Defence and financed by the Koch Brothers as part of an ongoing effort to force climate change, tobacco, and Covid-19 infections on our senior citizens? Such claims may sound like the farcical ravings of an internet paranoiac, yet precisely this narrative has gained a shocking amount of currency among ostensibly serious public health scientists and journalists since the Declaration launched last October 4th....

"Nafeez Ahmed, a writer from a London-based blog called the Byline Times ... has spent the better part of the last year posting conspiratorial bromides against scientists who question lockdown ideology. Fresh off of an unsuccessful Twitter campaign to flood the GBD’s website with fraudulent signatures during the week after it went live, Ahmed shifted his tack in mid-October with a new charge. In a succession of blog posts, he purported to show that the GBD was part of an elaborate scheme by libertarian billionaire Charles Koch to force the reopening of the American economy in spite of Covid’s risks, using AIER as its front. After outlining the financial portion of his conspiracy theory, Ahmed quickly appended a new 'partner' in the alleged plot: the British Ministry of Defence, which he implied to be the source behind the GBD’s website. To top it off, this growing plot was allegedly orchestrated through the owner of a resort hotel in Wales....

"Contrary to Ahmed’s wild imagination, Charles Koch had absolutely no involvement with the Great Barrington Declaration or AIER’s hosting of the conference that produced it  ... (the few exceptions where a Koch-network organization has weighed in on the subject at all tend to take a pro-lockdown stance, such as the Mercatus Center’s Tyler Cowen, who awarded a research prize to Neil Ferguson of Imperial College for his Covid-19 lockdown model. AIER was one of the first high-profile critics of Ferguson’s model and continues to track its abysmal performance over the last year.)

"Although Ahmed’s batty narrative about the GBD’s origins does not withstand even minimal scrutiny, his conspiracy theories spread like wildfire on the pro-lockdown side of the epidemiology profession, and among the journalistic outlets that support them.... Paul Krugman ... promoted the product of Ahmed’s ravings.... Several of the most widely-quoted critics of the Great Barrington Declaration in the press seized on the same narrative and began repeating tall tales about nonexistent funding sources and the wholly imaginary British Ministry of Defense website scheme. Some even added new fringe theories of their own.... 

"David Gorski, a professor of medicine at Wayne State University and one of the media’s favorite go-to sources for quotes denouncing the GBD, published a blog post on October 12th where he liberally quoted and endorsed Ahmed’s conspiracy theories.... Gorski appended his own paranoid attack by branding the GBD a 'eugenics-adjacent' plot to cull and 'sacrific[e] the elderly' in the name of economics.... Gorski’s attacks are not only symptomatic of a deeply disturbed state of mind – they’re unbecoming of a scientific professional, let alone one that the media enlists for expert quotations as a primary interlocutor of the GBD.

"So did Eric Feigl-Ding*, one of social media’s most aggressive promoters of school closures and the fringe 'Zero Covid' theory. Deepti Gurdasani* of Queen Mary University in London, a principal organizer of the pro-lockdown John Snow Memorandum, similarly promoted the Byline Times conspiracy theories about the GBD’s funding. As did Gabriel Scally*, a UK-based epidemiologist who serves the pro-lockdown 'Independent SAGE' group. David Fisman*, a Canadian epidemiologist who aggressively pushed for lockdowns and school closures in Ontario, is another fan of Ahmed’s conspiracy theories....

"Justin Feldman*, a self-described 'epidemiologist of social inequality' at Harvard, ... has published a nonstop stream of frenzied allegations against lockdown critics in the public health profession, usually consisting of unsubstantiated innuendo about shady pecuniary motives behind their scholarship.

"Duke University epidemiologist Gavin Yamey* offered a 'huge shoutout to Dr. Nafeez Ahmed' for supposedly uncovering the bizarre conspiracy linking the GBD website to the British Ministry of Defense and the Welsh hotel proprietor. Elsewhere he praised the Byline Times’s 'great investigative journalism' about the GBD. Half a year later he still asserts that 'Charles Koch shaped [pandemic] policy in the US' through a group of scientists who have no tangible connection to Koch’s philanthropy.

"Columbia University virologist Angela Rasmussen*, another frequent critic of the GBD in the press, embraced the funding conspiracy theory ... accusing the three scientists of being part of a 'propaganda campaign' in the service of AIER’s supposed goal of 'ignore the pandemic, let’s get back to making money via unfettered capitalism.'

"Martin McKee*, a public health professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who denounced the GBD as a 'fringe view' shortly after its publication, has a habit of giving his endorsement to Ahmed’s conspiracy theories about the very same document. Ahmed’s crazy tales of intrigue have another fan in Robert Dickinson*, a professor of medicine at Imperial College London and signer of the pro-lockdown John Snow Memorandum. Snow Memorandum signer Hisham Ziauddeen* promotes the same conspiratorial claims, in addition to his own blogging against the GBD for Ahmed’s outlet. Epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves of Yale, another of the media’s favorite sources for ad hominem-laced anti-GBD hot takes, apparently concurs with Ahmed’s paranoid ravings. So does the University of Washington’s Carl Bergstrom*, another press favorite for expert statements defending lockdowns. 

"Keep in mind that these endorsements of Ahmed involve claims that are not simply dubious or uncharitable interpretations – they are factual falsehoods that have entered the talking points of scientific experts who simply agree with their associated political connotations and believe that repeating them enough will discredit an opposing viewpoint. As matters of scientific analysis though, it would not be inaccurate at this point to state that leading academics on the pro-lockdown side of the Covid political debate are now regularly relying upon the paranoid ravings of a conspiracist blogger as one of their primary sources for attacks upon the Great Barrington Declaration."

Read more: https://www.aier.org/article/quacks-in-the-ivory-tower-how-conspiracy-theorizing-took-over-lockdown-science/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

* - signatories of the John Snow Memorandum

Only ending lockdowns can stimulate economy

Only Ending Lockdowns Can Stimulate the Economy | American Institute for Economic Research - Thomas L. Hogan:

March 18, 2021 - "Last week, President Biden signed legislation that will increase fiscal spending by $1.9 trillion. While often referred to as a 'stimulus' bill, it might be better described as 'relief' (although in truth, most of the spending is neither for relief nor stimulus). The prior week, a strong employment report showed that the US economy added 379,000 jobs in February, bringing the national unemployment rate down to 6.2 percent....

"The labor market has mostly recovered from the major disruptions of a year ago. Unemployment has fallen to less than half of its 14.7 percent peak last April and is now very close to the US long-run average around 6 percent. Unfortunately, the national average of 6.2 percent is not a good representation of the current state of the US economy due to an unusually wide dispersion in state-level unemployment. 

"According to the most recent data available, as of January there were ten US states with very low unemployment rates of 4 percent or less. These rates are historically low. For example, only five times since the Great Depression has the US average reached as low as 4 percent. At the same time, however, six states plus the District of Columbia have very high unemployment rates above 8 percent. These too are historic highs, only seen three times nationally since the Great Depression. What is causing this unprecedented divergence between states? Government lockdowns and business restrictions....

"The table ... shows the six states and Washington, DC with unemployment rates above 8 percent and the ten with low rates of 4 percent or less, along with the rankings of their restrictions as of early January according to two sources. The WalletHub rank is a weighted average of '14 key metrics […] from whether restaurants are open to whether the state has required face masks in public and workplace temperature screenings.' The stringency index is from the database of US state level Covid-19 Policy Responses from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (CGRT) based on '18 indicators such as school closures and travel restrictions.' In both measures, high numbers represent greater restrictions. 

"Of the seven with unemployment rates of 8 percent or higher, five are in the top half of coronavirus restrictions according to both WalletHub and the Oxford CGRT. Washington, DC ranks 21st on each index, although the official number likely understates the true stringency due to its dependence on the federal government. The other exception is Nevada, which ranks 25 out of 51 according to WalletHub but just eighth by the Oxford CGRT. Google mobility data for Nevada have been very low, suggesting that activity has declined more in Nevada than in other states. Considering that Nevada––and Las Vegas in particular––is a major tourist destination, the decline potentially has as much more to do with government rules in other states, which require quarantining upon return, as it does with individuals to restrict activity on their own. 

"Nine of the ten states with unemployment rates of 4 percent or less are in the bottom half of both indexes of coronavirus restrictions. Vermont is the one exception. Google mobility data show active movement across the state that would position it in the middle range among all US states. Vermont may be closed according to the law, but it seems to be open in practice.

"While rates of unemployment have likely fallen since January, the state-level data reveal a consistent pattern. Unemployment rates are directly related to the strictness of coronavirus lockdowns and business restrictions. Closed states have high unemployment because it is illegal for businesses to employ people....

"The goal of fiscal policy is to draw unemployed people and resources into the economy.... But this cannot happen in states with strong lockdowns and legal restrictions that prevent businesses from operating.... Fiscal spending is also not helpful in states with low restrictions. Unemployment is already low in these states, so there are few unemployed workers to draw upon. More government spending will encourage wasteful production, as businesses invest in and workers are bid into pursuits that are less efficient and may be ultimately unsustainable."

Read more: https://www.aier.org/article/only-ending-lockdowns-can-stimulate-the-economy/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

COVID-19 patients sent to nursing homes in NY

Was Governor Cuomo Responsible for the Death of Thousands of Nursing Home Inhabitants? American Institute for Economic Research - Ethan Yang:

June 19, 2020 - "The 56th Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo,... has enjoyed a sky-high approval rating due to his leadership during the ongoing [COVID-19] crisis. However, his record is far from stellar. He may have easily committed one of the greatest atrocities of the crisis: Mandating the transfer of over 4,500 COVID-19 patients to nursing homes full of vulnerable and elderly individuals which eventually saw over 6,000 deaths....

"On March 25th, Governor Cuomo issued an executive order forcing nursing homes to receive patients from overflowing hospitals. The order mandates that 'During this global health emergency, all NHs must comply with the expedited receipt of residents returning from hospitals to NHs'.  As a result over 4,500 COVID-19 patients were forcibly transferred from hospitals to nursing homes regardless of their capacity to accept them.

"According to the Associated Press, 'New York has not mandated testing in its more than 1,150 nursing homes and long-term care facilities'. In fact, the executive order went further to forbid the required testing of COVID-19 within the facilities. The language was as follows: 'No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. NHs are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission'....

"Cuomo himself had said protecting nursing home residents was the state’s top priority, once calling the threat “fire through dry grass. Cuomo was correct about the vulnerability of nursing homes, as the weeks following the executive order saw 6,000 deaths out of the 100,000 New York citizens inhabiting nursing homes.... Nationwide, more than 45,500 residents and staff have died from coronavirus outbreaks at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, according to a running count by The Associated Press. That’s about 40% of more than 115,000 total deaths. Nursing home residents are less than 1% of the U.S. population....

"On May 10, 2020, the executive order was thankfully rescinded, but the Governor and his officials have certainly mounted a defense of their decision. Pro Publica writes that the state Health Department was lax if not completely uninvolved in monitoring what happened after patients were sent to nursing homes. There are also disputed claims on whether or not the state was even recording deaths in nursing homes until late April....

"Pro Publica states that 'The Cuomo administration would not say who conceived of the order or answer the question of whether it believed the order had led to additional deaths. The administration said the Health Department was conducting 'a thorough review' of COVID-19’s impact on nursing homes....

"During a press conference on May 20 Governor Cuomo ... stated that 'anyone who wants to ask, why did the state do that with COVID patients in nursing homes? It’s because the state followed President Trump’s CDC guidance'.... Politifact determined this statement to be 'mostly false'.... CDC guidance did not call for the mandatory transfer of patients to nursing homes nor did it prohibit further testing for COVID-19. An official at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services cited a March 13 document that clarifies 'A nursing home can accept a resident diagnosed with COVID-19 and still under Transmission Based Precautions for COVID-19 as long as the facility can follow CDC guidance for Transmission-Based Precautions.'"

Read more: https://www.aier.org/article/was-governor-cuomo-responsible-for-the-death-of-thousands-of-nursing-home-inhabitants/

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"Lockdowns saved 3 million lives" claim not proven

Professor Lockdown Now Claims to Have Saved 3.1 Million Lives | American Institute for Economic Research - Phillip W. Magness:

June 9, 2020 - "The problem of causal inference presents one of the great challenges of empirical analysis. While it is relatively easy to find patterns in data that appear to move over time in response to overlapping events, it is much harder to show that those events specifically caused the data to move as expected. Think about how presidents often cite positive economic data such as GDP growth or the stock market as vindication of their own economic policies. Prior to early March 2020 this was a favorite tweeting topic of Donald Trump, although his predecessors almost all made similar claims....

"[C]onsider the ongoing question about the effectiveness of the COVID-19 lockdown policies employed in several U.S. states as well as other countries. A causal inference test of the lockdowns would require clear evidence of different outcomes between states that adopted shelter-in-place rules and states that did not. Given the complex multitude of confounding variables affecting COVID-19 transmission and mortality rates, isolating causality from the lockdown policies is no easy task.

"That brings us to a new report published in the journal Nature by the epidemiology team at Imperial College-London (ICL).... This is the same epidemiology research center whose agent-based simulation model convinced the American and British governments to switch to a lockdown strategy.... The paper [in Nature] and an accompanying press release from the university put numbers to this claim, asserting that the lockdowns saved an estimated 3.1 million lives in Europe.

"Although this headline-grabbing claim will likely be treated as a vindication of the lockdown approach by its political supporters, a closer look at the analysis suggests the Imperial College team reached this conclusion without offering a viable causal inference strategy. As they describe in the paper, 'By comparing the deaths predicted under the model with no interventions to the deaths predicted in our intervention model, we calculated the total deaths averted in our study period' [stress added - gd]....

"Put differently, the epidemiologists reached their estimates by taking the difference between observed deaths and their own agent-based simulation.... They then depict the difference as if it demonstrates the validity of their own simulation model, despite providing no evidence that their original simulation was correct....

"If that line of argument sounds familiar, it’s because Donald Trump beat the Imperial College team to the punch. Citing the now-infamous March 16th ICL report by Imperial’s Neil Ferguson, the American president now regularly claims vindication for his own support of the lockdowns on account of the difference between its 2 million-plus projected death toll and the actual count of just over 100,000 as of this writing. As Trump tweeted on May 26, 'For all of the political hacks out there, if I hadn’t done my job well, & early, we would have lost 1 1/2 to 2 Million People, as opposed to the 100,000 plus that looks like will be the number.'

"Whether used by Imperial College or Trump, this line of argument falters as social science because it assumes the validity of the very same forecast it purports to demonstrate. Rather than testing the causal inference that lockdowns reduced the COVID death rate, it takes [its] own forecasted death rate as a given and then purports to calculate the number of lives saved by simple subtraction from its own model....

"The new paper essentially acknowledges as much in noting that 'the counterfactual model without interventions is illustrative only and reflects our model assumptions.' Rather than investigating this seemingly-crucial assertion further, let alone subjecting it to empirical testing, the authors indulge in a handwaving exercise that simply declares: '[all scenarios broadly show the same trends]. Given this agreement in differing scenarios we believe our estimates for the counterfactual deaths averted to be plausible'....

"The result is not a valid exercise in social scientific analysis, nor is it even an empirically robust test of the ICL model’s performance. Like Trump’s tweeting about both the economy before March 2020 and his own claimed role in reducing COVID deaths after the lockdowns, it is an exercise in statistical astrology. Sadly, unlike Trump’s tweets, however, the ICL managed to convince Nature, a top journal in the profession, to publish these unfounded claims."

Read more: https://www.aier.org/article/professor-lockdown-now-claims-to-have-saved-3-1-million-lives/

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