The Covid Merchants of Death
What do we call public officials, journalists, and medical professionals who contribute to the minimization and coverup of a widespread, deadly disease?
Thirty times. This is the factor by which the US could be undercounting Covid cases during the ongoing fourth wave, which many are unaware is even happening (masking in public in the US is now virtually nonexistent, and our vaccine uptake remains abysmal compared to similar countries):
The United States is now in its fourth-biggest Covid surge, according to official case counts – but experts believe the actual current rate is much higher.
America is averaging about 94,000 new cases every day, and hospitalizations have been ticking upward since April, though they remain much lower than previous peaks.
But Covid cases could be undercounted by a factor of 30, an early survey of the surge in New York City indicates. “It would appear official case counts are under-estimating the true burden of infection by about 30-fold, which is a huge surprise,” said Denis Nash, an author of the study and a distinguished professor of epidemiology at the City University of New York School of Public Health.
Covid has turned out to be far worse than the denialists and their enablers in the media have attempted to portray it, in the service of opening up the economy prematurely, hawking conspiracy theories about vaccines and social control, and more innocently though certainly more rarely, a genuine distress at lockdowns (such as they were) and other disruptions to normal life. That Covid was minimized in the US is no longer controversial, but the extent of the deliberate misinformation campaign is only beginning to emerge. From The Miami Herald:
Florida’s COVID-19 data was so inaccurate, incomplete and delayed during the first months of the pandemic that government officials and the public may not have had necessary information to determine the effectiveness of the state’s COVID-19 precautions and the best plan to fight the virus, according to a state report released Monday.
Covering the state’s pandemic response from March to October 2020, the yearlong analysis by the Florida Auditor General found missing case and death data, unreported ethnic and racial details, and incomplete contact tracing as the coronavirus spread across the state. In addition, the report concluded that state health officials did not perform routine checks on the data to ensure accuracy and did not follow up on discrepancies. …
State auditors reviewed a sample of 2,600 tests taken at three state-run testing facilities and found that state-contracted laboratories failed to return results for nearly 60% of tests. …
Once cases were identified, health officials were to contact all COVID-positive individuals within 48 hours of being diagnosed, according to state guidelines.
However, auditors found that the state never spoke with 23% of infected individuals. Those who the state did contact were often reached over a week after testing positive, leaving ample time for them to spread the virus to others.
This is not the first instance of Florida inhibiting access to Covid data with the goal of hiding the disease’s spread, even going so far as to retaliate against one of its own whistleblower scientists:
Rebekah Jones, the data scientist who helped create Florida's COVID-19 dashboard, has turned herself in to police, in response to an arrest warrant issued by the state.
Jones is charged with one count of "offenses against users of computers, computer systems, computer networks and electronic devices," the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said in a statement Monday.
Jones has said she lost her job after refusing requests to manipulate data to suggest Florida was ready to ease coronavirus restrictions. Jones says she's being punished for continuing to speak out about how Gov. Ron DeSantis is handling COVID-19, citing her arrest and a raid on her home last month.
FDLE said in its statement that "evidence retrieved from a search warrant on December 7 shows that Jones illegally accessed the system sending a message to approximately 1,750 people and downloaded confidential FDOH data and saved it to her devices."
More shamefully, it was only a few months ago that Florida governor Ron DeSantis publicly chided a group of high school students for wearing masks in his presence and repeated the (by then well known) lie that masks are an ineffective barrier to Covid infection:
A visibly annoyed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis admonished a group of high school students for wearing face masks at an indoor news conference Wednesday, saying it was time to stop what he called “this COVID theater."
The Republican governor approached the students and asked them to remove their masks as they waited for him at the press event at the University of South Florida in Tampa. The college is located in an area where the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends indoor masking due to high COVID-19 risk.
“You do not have to wear those masks. I mean, please take them off. Honestly, it’s not doing anything. We’ve got to stop with this COVID theater. So if you wanna wear it, fine, but this is ridiculous," he said, letting out an audible sigh and shaking his head.
Here is an elected official giving wildly dangerous health advice to the public, an action which in any functioning society would result in censure, loss of employment, or much worse. Instead, he will be rewarded politically.
A large part of the reason Covid has been successfully minimized is its victims’ tendency to be non-white, economically disadvantaged, and employed in the service sector, three designations that have historically led to poorer health outcomes in general in the US:
University of South Florida epidemiologist Jason Salemi's research confirmed associations between COVID-19 mortality rates and socioeconomic position, gender, ethnicity and race.
In collaboration with a team of epidemiologists from the COVKID Project, Salemi, an associate professor in USF's College of Public Health, launched a national investigation into COVID-19 deaths in 2020 with data released by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics.
The study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, analyzed nearly 70,000 adults, ages 25 to 64, who died from COVID-19.
Salemi's research shows:
The mortality rate of low SEP [socioeconomic positions] adults is five times higher when compared to high SEP adults, and the mortality rate of intermediate SEP adults is two times higher.
White women make up the largest population group considered high SEP. In contrast, nearly 60 percent of Hispanic men are in a low SEP.
When compared, the mortality rate of low SEP Hispanic men is 27 times higher than high SEP white women.
"The degree to which it takes a toll on communities is very unevenly distributed and we wanted to call attention to that issue," Salemi said.
The National Center for Health Statistics uses one's level of education as a measure of socioeconomic status because it is considered a more stable indicator of SEP over time. In tandem, the team categorized each person's SEP by their level of education -- low SEP adults had no education beyond high school, intermediate SEP had at least one year of college attendance and high SEP adults had at minimum a bachelor's degree.
The findings reveal a person's level of education is strongly associated with occupation segregation -- with the majority of low SEP adults employed in working-class jobs across all gender, race and ethnicity groups in the United States.
Covid is not unique in this aspect: all diseases and disadvantages in the US are suffered disproportionately by the working class. It is also deadlier than believed to another often-ignored group, children:
In the US, nearly six times more kids and teens died from Covid in one year than did from the flu, according to a new analysis of pediatric mortality data.
Millions of kids get sick with the seasonal flu each year. But although it can be dangerous — especially for those who are unvaccinated — it's much less lethal than Covid. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, childhood flu deaths during the regular season have ranged from 39 to 199 since 2004. Meanwhile, in 2021 alone, more than 600 children died from Covid-19, according to the analysis done by Jeremy Faust, a professor at Harvard University Medical School and physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Faust used death data from the CDC to compare Covid deaths during the pandemic to flu deaths over the last decade, to highlight the differences in severity between the viruses in kids.
Covid is capable of destroying kids’ lives in other ways as well:
Losing a parent may be one of the most destabilizing events of the human experience. Orphans are at increased risk of substance abuse, dropping out of school, and poverty. They are almost twice as likely as non-orphans to die by suicide, and they remain more susceptible to almost every major cause of death for the rest of their life.
Because of the pandemic, some 200,000 American children [worldwide, the number is over 10 million] now face these stark odds. Even after two years that have inured the country to the carnage of the coronavirus, the scope of the loss is so staggering that it can be hard to comprehend: Caregiver loss during the pandemic is now responsible for one out of every 12 orphans under the age of 18, and in every public school in the United States, on average two children have lost a caregiver to the pandemic. COVID-19 case counts rise and fall, but “orphanhood doesn’t come and go. It is a steadily rising slope, and the summit is still out of sight,” Susan Hillis, a co-chair of the Global Reference Group on Children Affected by COVID-19, told me. “It’s not like you’re an orphan today and then you’re recovered in two weeks.”
What do we call a public figure who uses their authority and influence to peddle disease and death that overwhelmingly impacts the disadvantaged, the marginalized, and the young and the elderly? What words could be used to describe the likes of Leana Wen, David Leonhardt, Alex Berenson, Joe Rogan, Glenn Greenwald, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and countless others who are surely beginning to realize the extensive, fatal destruction their words and actions have wrought? It is unfortunately likely that none of these Covid apologists and merchants of death will do anything but fall silent and hope their brash, egotistic push for “normalcy” and the unchecked spreading of disease will be forgotten. The enormity of their sins, and the pain, suffering, debilitation and death they directly caused and cheered along is simply too great to recognize and rationalize through feigned apology or even heartfelt contrition. These celebrants of “business as usual” ushered in a plague that will now never leave us, in the process priming potential future victims (everyone) to accept the threat of constant infection and enfeeblement and ensuring that all future pandemics will be ignored and similarly minimized.
The difference between their words and the actions of a serial killer are different only by the degree of immediacy of the outcome. Early in the pandemic, their ignorance of Covid’s deadliness or transmissibility might have provided them with some degree of plausible deniability, but by mid-2020 they were no longer able to claim this. They knew quite clearly that their words were causing some number of deaths; critics will be quick to note that there is an important difference between personally killing someone and speaking words that result possibly only obliquely in their death, but the concession here is purely practical and not moral, the result of recognizing that we reside in the real world in which civilization requires leadership and organization endowed with bureaucratic protections which recognize that not all unnecessary death is preventable. In return for this protection and their very comfortable lifestyles, our leaders, intelligentsia, and medical professionals are held to higher standards than those with no real influence—if a random shop worker claims that drinking horse medicine cures Covid, it is much less damaging than if the President does so. The Covid merchants of death have violated this trust and must be held accountable in the court of public opinion.
It didn’t have to be this way. China’s massive success dealing with Covid has enraged the media class in the US, who smear its lifesaving efforts as authoritarian overstep and dystopian population control. China lost 1000 times fewer people than the United States when adjusting for population, and its mitigation programs, while not perfect, are overwhelmingly supported by the Chinese. The million+ Americans who are no longer with us would probably agree that more stridently enforced non-pharmaceutical interventions to stop the spread of the disease would have been a good idea. They are no longer able to voice their opinions, thanks to the efforts of the Covid denialists who have transformed themselves into disease-spreading hucksters who are still employed despite spewing forth such rank, stultifying ignorance as this:
Leonhardt going so far as to engage in solipsism and pseudoscience to muddy the waters around masking guidelines, which were never actually enforced in the US