I have a vivid memory of when I realized that virtually every piece of information I heard from “mainstream media” was a lie. It was in May of 2020. I was driving back to Boston from our place in New Hampshire. Listening to NPR as I had in virtually every car ride since I was a child, I heard them discussing coronavirus cases and mortality. As I listened, I heard someone speaking who certainly knew the right questions to ask, the context that would have defined the gray areas, the data even then available that could have allayed fears. Instead of doing these things, I listened as they scrupulously avoided doing any of that. I was so furious I started yelling (to myself) “They’re lying! They’re lying!”

Since March of 2020, I had been scouring all aspects of coronavirus data, reading every new article on PubMed, trying to understand my own risks, and those of my family. By April, it had become clear that something wasn’t right with the flow of information, that obvious scientific next-steps weren’t being taken (or published). By May, it was clear that the way the media was presenting the information, regardless of extant science, was geared towards spreading panic in service of various policy prescriptions, not towards helping people to understand the situation. But not till this drive did the scope become clear to me.

I wasn’t some “crazy Trumper.” Like many in 2016, I was absolutely gob-smacked when Trump won. It’s totally possible I cried. In March of 2020, I was so disgusted with Trump’s Covid press conferences, I changed my registration back to Democrat, and voted for Biden in the democrat primary.

But on that day in May, driving down I-95 in my red Tacoma, a flip switched in me as violently as I switched off the radio. This time, I was able to recognize every lie and every manipulation for what it was. As I fumed, I began to wonder. “What else are they lying about?… Trump?!” I mulled it over for a while, realizing that all of the information I got about him was served to me, and always with a healthy side of disdain—none of it primary sources. Then I remembered “grab ‘em by the pussy.” Nope, Trump was still bad. But then to play Devil’s advocate I asked myself, “what about Bill Clinton?” hmm…

When I got back, I canceled all of my subscriptions, changed my registration back to Republican, and signed up to volunteer for the only Republican campaign I could find—a total nut-job, but hey, it was Massachusetts.

I relay this anecdote because I think this week there are probably a reasonable number of people asking themselves why they keep getting politically whip-sawed—particularly after the yanking of “sharp as a tack” Joe, and the voteless installation of Kamala. There are probably even some who find themselves, as I was in that truck four years ago, asking how much of what they’ve been told for the last 5 years, 10 years, 50 years, 100 years ???, is a lie.

From 2018

I believe the short answer is basically “most of it.” I have no idea when it started—certainly by the War in Iraq—but beyond that, who knows. In my diagnosis, it is censorship that enables these lies, and that censorship is the reason that tens of millions of very well-educated people keep getting bitch-slapped by reality. I have come to view censorship as the primary author, not just of the Covid catastrophe, but of the rancor that attends and divides us on virtually every issue. If you stay with me for a bit, I will try to both explain and back up these statements.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

After we, the “Legion of Randos on Twitter” beat “The Experts TM” in the great battle of Covid, I started to try to understand what had made the debacle of 2020-2022 possible. I always read a lot, but I shifted what I read to history and philosophy as hopefully better keys to the riddle—histories of the rise of totalitarian regimes, both communist and fascist—marxist philosophy, postmodern philosophy, feminist philosophy, contemporary history. Anything to try and understand how the vast majority of the people in our country had participated in—and heartily supported—what was a fairly obvious—and wildly harmful—lie. During that period, details about the nature of our own particular debacle started to come out—Fauci’s cover-up of what he clearly viewed as a likely lab-leak, and his demonization of everyone who dared to question him; Fauci’s coordinated attack on the Great Barrington Declaration; the American Federation of Teachers’ role in keeping schools closed, and children masked; the Hunter Biden laptop, and on, and on.

Propaganda is bad, but it is censorship that destroys a society, censorship that paves the way for atrocities. Propaganda without a vigorous censorship component is fairly weak sauce. Whatever precept it propounds can be debated, de-bunked or simply mocked (or memed) into oblivion. But when propaganda is backed up by censorship, it can easily out-shine the truth. Because then propaganda finds itself in possession of a robust and stealthy defense that the naked truth lacks.

This last fact, that censorship is stealthy, is what makes it so toxic—especially in a liberal democracy with nearly absolute freedom of speech as its bedrock principle.

Why? Because in a society that values free speech so highly, abrogating that freedom requires a very compelling justification. Indeed, we don’t even censor literal nazis. The reason for defending the nazi’s right to utter intolerable speech, is that failure to do so allows would-be censors to label as “intolerable” all speech criticizing those in power. You either defend the nazi’s right to speak, or you have an explosion of government-designated nazis to as the censors’ swathe inexorably widens.

This is how censorship causes division. To get dispensation for the civically heinous act of violating a person’s first amendment rights, the aspiring censor must claim that the would-be target is hateful in whatever degree is required. Thus do attempts to stop “hate speech” result in a metastatic explosion of hate. Under the guise of curtailing hate, would-be censors gin-up hate against their targets by linking them to state-designated hate groups—misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, climate-deniers, conspiracy theorists, whatever the moral panic du jour might be. Designating the targets as a kind of anti-mascot allows the would-be censors to call for their censorship. By placing them beyond the pale, the censors’ targets’ rights to free speech may be constrained. The censors make it clear that even those who would repeat or even hear the claims of the censored are complicit. Thus do the victims find few defenders, as would-be defenders stand aside, and most refrain from even hearing the targets’ arguments, fearful of contamination even from such an intellectual distance. This is the process that the censors use to narrow the aperture of acceptable dialogue, constraining it to only those avenues and outlets that refrain from criticism, and repeating the smears of the censored in the friendly outlets. A friend of mine, Theo Jordan has aptly named this “hatecraft.”

And boy does hatecraft work. Social media and traditional media are aflame today with people who are genuinely afraid of their fellow citizens, believing them to be all of the the things the media has labeled them. They truly fear, and honestly loathe, those of their countrymen who voted for Donald Trump. Below is just one example from the top of my X feed. The post is from a friend of mine—a democrat till COVID—who wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal, explaining her rationale for voting for Donald Trump. The author of the email quoted below is apparently a semi-famous actor from the show Twilight, who used his own name and personal email address to send this filth.

The man who wrote this is to be pitied, having been blinded by institutionally-sponsored and sanctioned hate. This hate has been deliberately engendered by our media, our government, and the institutions that run cover for it. Could this happen to you, could it have happened to you? It happened to me (I mean, not that bad; but still).

In 2016, I remember learning that the caretaker for our home in New Hampshire was voting Trump. Once I was out of his presence, I flew into a rage. Then I stopped myself. I knew he was a good man—a very, very good man. I knew that whatever was motivating his vote was not hate, because he didn’t have a hateful bone in his body. While I still did not vote for Trump in 2016, I became deeply skeptical of the narrative around Trump’s voters, and never used an -ist to describe them again.

If you have been tempted to justify other people’s votes for Trump as motivated by any of the usual -isms, to think that the black and latino men who supported him are the colored faces of white supremacy, or motivated by misogyny, that women voted for Trump because they were cowed by their husbands, or that Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan or Elon Musk are evil people (even though you likely loved some or all of them a few years back), I would suggest that you, too, have been at least somewhat blinded by this whole-of-society propaganda and censorship operation—by the state-sponsored hatecraft. It is a gross subversion of your liberty to be fully-informed, about which you have every reason to be furious.

Let me reiterate: YOUR rights were violated by government censorship—even if you were not censored. This wide-ranging censorship has caused YOU harm. Not because your voice was not heard, but because you were robbed of the opportunity to hear the dissenting voices of others, and to better understand—and counter, if possible—their reasons. If you were blind-sided by the results of this election, it is this theft that is to blame.

Censorship harms everyone: its targets it mutes, but its real victims are those whom it blinds and deafens. Censorship leaves them constantly off balance, lashing out at ill-defined phantoms in the funhouse mirror of its distorted reality, rather than at the censors who have blinded them.

Censorship brought us Trump. No matter what the media wants to claim, the reason people like me voted for Trump (in 2016 and 2020, too, not just in 2024) wasn’t because of some inherent degeneracy, but rather because of our fury over the policies and cultural insanity of the last four years and beyond. Criticism of those policies and positions was muted by censorship and marginalized by hatecraft. This allowed these policies and positions to find their way into law and culture unrefined by the chisel of debate, manifesting in their crudest and most barbaric forms. Russiagate, lockdowns, extended school closures, zoom school, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, open borders, fake-infrastructure-fueled inflation, woke supremacy, the trans stuff, the censorship industrial complex itself: none of these policies or cultural fads would have survived open debate. Had they been thrown aside, or at a minimum implemented in less monstrous forms after criticism reined them in, the fury that brought Trump to office would have been dampened—likely the few percentage points needed to deprive him of a second term. (And so, ironically, I find myself somewhat glad that they went so full-bore, but that is for another post).

If perhaps, as a Democrat voter, you don’t believe that you were personally harmed by any of the policies or narratives I mentioned above, let me suggest another which might resonate better. As a Democrat voter hoping for a Democrat president (any Democrat president, I presume) rather than Trump, you were harmed by the censorship and propaganda that propped up Joe Biden, both that which claimed his fitness for office in 2020 and 2024, and that which muted the many valid criticisms of his policies. The same mix of propaganda and censorship propped up Kamala, and lead you to believe that she would win the election. It is no stretch to say that censorship brought you Donald Trump. In its absence you would have had better candidates and better policies.

Both the run-up to president Biden’s election, and the period of his governance are marked by glaring examples of the typical censorship/propaganda cycle:

1. Censor

   Limit discussion and propagation of criticisms and ideas. (Only illegal if done by the government).

2. Demonize

   Demonize critics under the banner of some popular smear (right wing, hate speech), thus permitting censorship of the targets, and marking as off-limits any venue which would platform the demonized and censored. (Not illegal, just distasteful).

3. Propagandize

   Manufacture a counter narrative which has undergone credibility-laundering, attaching the credibility of trusted institutions and people to prop up the lie, and shutdown debate. (Only illegal if done by the government).

The cycle works in this direction when trying to discredit some criticism or story harmful to the preferred narrative. When trying to shape the preferred narrative, it works in reverse order.

In future posts I will walk through many of the other examples noted above, and demonstrate how this cycle manifested in each.

But before I walk through some of the many tactics that were applied during the 2020 election, let’s remember where it ended, and how valid criticism (as if there were any other kind) was throttled by another whole-of-society propaganda operation.

THE ELEVATION OF BIDEN

In 2020, Joe Biden was brought to power on a litter of lies supported by the media, government bureaucracies and state-funded NGOs. He was held aloft by suppression of criticism and demonization of his critics.

At this point, there are now countless examples of the campaign and the government pressuring social media companies to remove true content that was damaging to Joe Biden’s candidacy. Some examples, like the one below, are more egregious, systemic and manipulative than others.

Reporting by Matt Orfalea unearthed a video of Rob Flaherty (currently in the Biden administration) describing how during the campaign it reached out to platforms and flagged as “misinformation” for removal, various posts discussing corruption, Biden’s mental fitness, or his record on the crime bill (all true information, or at a minimum open to debate.) Clicking on the image below will take you to the video where he discusses this—you owe it to yourself to click.

Removal was only the first step, the next was essentially “target rehabilitation.” One of Flaherty’s co-workers describes how after people were exposed to “disinformation” such as questions around Biden’s mental fitness (which they had flagged for facebook and twitter for removal), they micro-targeted the users who were exposed prior to the posts’ removal in order to provide counter-balancing content to “fix” the accurate perception they received from the “misinformation” they were exposed to. They did this using psychographic targeting, behavioral cues and other techniques used by Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 campaign to influence voters. Again, please click and watch—this was directed at YOU.

It is worth noting that these actions, while distasteful, are not illegal, with the exception perhaps of pressuring the platforms to remove the content. What’s more, in a normal information milieu, they are not even particularly harmful. The actions described above could only have effectively changed the narrative in a society stuck in the censorious stew from which we are only slowly extracting ourselves. For these tactics to work, it requires that the media to fail to do their job, not investigating or engaging with these criticisms, and looking the other way when stories are suppressed. It also requires a public that, through fear of being tarred with the demonizers’ brush, will not engage with information presented on demonized channels. Always, to be effective, propaganda and counter propaganda required both censorship (removal from the platforms), and demonization (labeling those who levy or publish the criticisms as outside the bounds of “polite society”).

Further, these actions did not take place in a vacuum. They took place at a time when the Election Integrity Project (detailed below) and other “public-private partnerships” were putting pressure on these platforms both to remove content, and to pressure them to change their terms of service. As a result, these requests to remove content were surrounded with a penumbra of coercion.

All of these things were occurring virtually simultaneously with the wholesale censorship of the “Hunter Biden Laptop” story.

The laptop story perfectly embodies the Propaganda/Censorship Cycle:

1. Censor as an information firebreak.

2. Demonize to close the information aperture: All those sharing are participating in Russian efforts to destabilize our elections, and must not be listened to nor platformed.

3. Propagandize with counter narrative: 50 Former Intelligence Officials Claim Laptop is Russian Disinformation

Step 1: Censor

On October 14th, 2020, the NY Post broke the story about the laptop, containing emails that provided compelling evidence of Biden’s influence peddling and potential kickbacks. Within hours of publication, the Post’s Twitter account was locked, and sharing across Facebook, Twitter and other platforms was completely blocked, not even allowing the sharing of the link through direct messages.

The companies acted so swiftly because they had effectively been pre-propagandized. The week prior to the release of the story, the FBI had informed the platforms to be on the look-out for a Russian hack-and-leak operation related to Hunter.

This is the despite (or because of?) the fact that the FBI knew the hard drive was real, because they had been notified of it in 2019 by the owner of store, subpoena’ed it, took possession and indeed had the original with which they could have easily corroborated it. Instead, they did the opposite.

The platforms had been even more thoroughly pre-propagandized weeks earlier, with multiple executives at Twitter and Facebook, as well as various other media and NGO's attending a“tabletop exercise” at the Aspen Institute, gaming out an 11-day “hack-and-dump” scenario relating to Hunter Biden. Source, Michael Shellenberger, Twitter Files Part 7. The scenario presented at this event, and uncovered through the Twitter Files is below, and is uncannily similar to what was actually released only a few weeks later—and subsequently censored, by people who participated in this very event (and then joked privately about how close it was to this exercise).

2. Demonize.

Having been so thoroughly prepared to doubt their lying eyes, the media, including social media platforms had no problem claiming they were censoring the story due concerns about veracity, and accusing those who were trying to share it of being Russian assets. This despite the FBI having confirmed to Twitter on the day of the release that the contents of the hard drive were in fact authentic.

3. Propagandize.

Within a week, a letter was organized by 50 former intelligence officials to cast doubt on the authenticity of the laptop, claiming it “had all the hallmarks of a Russian information operation.” The FBI chose to stay mute during this, as did the many media attendees of the Aspen Institute’s now wildly fishy “table top exercise.” The effect was to codify the socially acceptable talking points, and ensure that those who dared discuss the laptop further were targeted with hatecraft, receiving the “Russian asset” label. All of this allowed Biden to brush the allegations off during the debate, and—once again—to falsely label Trump a “Russian Asset.” It allowed the moderators to back Biden up, without losing all credibility, as they reiterated the “consensus view” that it was “Russian Disinformation.”

Perhaps even more shocking, the false letter from “the 50 former” appears to have been engineered by Anthony Blinken, currently Secretary of State to President Biden. (Blinken denies this). From former acting-CIA Director Morell :

In private sworn testimony, Morell told the House Judiciary Committee that Antony Blinken, now secretary of state, was the senior campaign official who reached out to him “on or before” Oct. 17, 2020, three days after The Post published an email from the laptop suggesting Hunter had introduced his Ukrainian business partner to his father, then-Vice President Biden.

The collusion to misinform by our government and our media seems to know no bounds. And yet somehow, there is always another foul frontier to find.

During this same period, the “Election Integrity Project” (EIP) was actively engaged in flagging and recommending that social media platforms remove posts for “mis-” and “dis-information.” From Michael Shellenberger’s Public News:

The media has run cover on this, attempting to claim that a) the government was not the actual entity requesting that the content be removed, and b) the requests were just suggestions, not coercive. Yet many of the tickets created to monitor and manage these requests were created by the non-profit Center for Internet Security, CIS, which receives funding from CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—a government agency. Additionally, many of the emails show that CISA is CC’d, effectively telling the platforms that “big brother”, the guardian of the nation’s “cognitive infrastructure,” is indeed watching—and weighing your Section-230 protections in the balance.

This arrangement is explicitly prohibited by the supreme court. Again, from Public News:

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, it is “axiomatic” that the US government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”

Thus, these actions are a violation of the first amendment. Nonetheless, Alex Stamos, the director of the EIP talks about how they [the EIP] “fill the gap of things the government couldn’t do” legally. Here he describes explicitly how the EIP acts as a glove to keep the government’s actions free from its censorious fingerprints—exactly as the supreme court has indicated they may not do.

Source, Racket news.

Do you feel manipulated? Those who would answer that they don’t care, Trump was so bad that the manipulation was worth it, have given permission to future and worse manipulation, and ceded their personal sovereignty to unknown entities whose motivation—because of their total opacity—cannot possibly be understood (if you have special insight, please share in the comments below!) Given how deceptive these entities have proven to be, and how badly their policy prescriptions have played out, we all owe it to ourselves to hold accountable those actors we can identify. Turn off the radio, turn off the TV. It’s time we take back our personal sovereignty, widen our information apertures, and tune out the hatecraft.

Epilogue

These actions were all taken prior to the 2020 election, prior to Biden coming to power. It should surprise no one that once in power, these efforts to alter reality ramped up considerably. I will leave the details of those shenanigans for future posts, and leave you with two final morsels.

The first is the alacrity (weeks after the inauguration!) with which this group got the old gang together to resume and enhance their censorship-by-proxy activities—this time with a focus on COVID and vaccine misinformation, reconstituting the EIP as the Virality Project. From reporting by Andrew Lowenthal, Network Affects here.

And lastly, a deep-dive describing and depicting the scope and interconnectedness of this vast censorship and propaganda apparatus.

But remember, it’s all a conspiracy theory…

Source and details, Racket News.

Further Suggested Reading and Reporting.

Judiciary committee’s report on Biden Whitehouse Censorship with many primary sources, including unredacted emails.

House Committee on Weaponization of Government Report

Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi. Reporting and primary sources from investigations into the Twitter Files.

The Orf Report Matt Orfalea. A variety of censored media, including various video montages

Public News, Michael Shellenberger, et al

Network Affects, Andrew Lowenthal

The Free Press, Bari Weiss et al

Human Flourishing Aaron Kheriaty, private plaintiff in Murthy vs. Missouri censorship case headed back to the supreme court.

The Brownstone Institute Censorship Working Group

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,”

This phrase, misattributed to Voltaire, has largely come to dominate—and confuse—our understanding of the importance of free speech in a free society. That misunderstanding seems to be at the heart of the very lukewarm response elicited by the exposure of “the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history" un-earthed through discovery in Missouri v. Biden now before the Supreme Court.  

The trouble with this framing of free speech is that it focuses on hateful speech, framing the imperative to defend the utterance of hateful speech as a form of polite, reciprocal tolerance, necessary for the smooth functioning of a liberal society. If ever there were a framing that caused one to miss the forest for the trees, this is it.

The primacy free speech enjoys here in the U.S. has nothing whatever to do with some dewy-eyed ideal of tolerance. Rather, it owes its primacy to pragmatism. Freedom of speech is the best tool we have to ascertain the truth of any given matter. Like a sculptor transforming a shapeless piece of marble into a work of art, free and open debate chisels away at the falsehoods and misapprehensions in which the truth lays embedded. Restrict debate, and the gradual emergence of that truth will be delayed or deformed, with the result imperfect at times to the point of monstrosity.

The reason we must “defend to the death” the right to utter “intolerable speech,” is that failure to do so results in the swift and certain condemnation as “intolerable” all speech that diminishes the power or legitimacy of those in power. More succinctly, we must defend the pariah’s right to speak or everyone who crosses the regime, conveniently becomes a pariah. You either do as the ACLU did in 1978, defend the nazi’s right to speak, or you have an explosion of government-designated “nazis.” You may perhaps have noticed an exponential rise in the prevalence of “nazis” and an ever-expanding panoply of -ists since our country’s commitment to free speech faltered? Yeah, me too.

No matter the political leanings or the content of the criticism, all those who have dared to critique the diktats of those in power for the last several years have been swiftly moved outside the pale, designated often times literal nazis. It is this that explains the awesome scope of the censorship exposed in Missouri v. Biden, now before the Supreme Court.

Government says “lockdown,” you say “wait, what about…” “Shut up, nazi!”

Government says “mask-up,” you say “wait, what about…” “Shut up, nazi!”.

Government says “keep the schools closed,” you say, “wait, what about…”“Shut up, nazi!”

Government says “inflation’s not real,” you say, “wait, what about…” “Shut up, nazi!”

Government says “get the shot, the booster, the second booster,” you say, wait, “what about… and … and …” “Shut up, shut up, shut up, nazi!”

Government says “close the nuclear plants,” you say, “wait, what about…” “Shut up, nazi.”

Government says “women aren’t real,” you say, “wait, what about…” “Shut up, nazi”.

We’re experiencing an information total war, resulting in blanket shutdown of any and all debate on each and every topic the government would prefer not to discuss. The cost to truth from this censorship carpet-bombing has been enormous. Lacking the refinement that comes from criticism and debate, the policies issuing from this informational hellscape are brutal and barbaric.

This information total war has been largely successful. Regime critics have been swiftly censored, defamed, and marginalized. The result is that most of the population continues to believe that the criticisms of government policies and actions over the past several years were levied by a bunch of cranks whose objections were largely based on gut level assumptions, political affiliation, or knee jerk reactions. That many of those criticisms and warnings ended up being accurate is attributed to dumb luck. Thus, the public has little sympathy for the targets of government censorship, precisely because of the success of the censorship, and its complement, the propaganda generated to fill the vacuum left by the disappearance of truth. However, the public itself is harmed in myriad ways by this censorship, and not in any abstract fashion.

First and foremost, this censorship regime has harmed the public because the suppression of dissenting views resulted in the creation and deployment of a whole host of truly awful policies. Certain of its omniscience the government repeatedly censored, defamed and marginalized those who raised objections to its policies. Contrary to the propaganda narrative used to justify its censorship, the arguments against various of the government policies were based on sound reason, science, and data, the opponents often highly credentialed in the relevant field.

How many people know that one of the first critics of our maximalist approach to COVID was one of the most well-respected, frequently-cited scientists in the world, Stanford’s John Ionnidis? Or that his criticisms mirrored the guidance of the U.S.’s actual extant pandemic plans?

How many people know that even from the very first, the opposition to masking was in fact based on its known futility, citing research from the CDC itself, published in May of 2020 (and recently vindicated by another systemic review by Cochrane)? Or that the most vocal opposition came from industrial hygienists (1, 2, 3) and others whose explicit job is to create specifications for safe work environments, including PPE?

How many people know that the opposition to the hysteria around hospital capacity was based on acknowledgement by hospital executives that 30% of COVID patients were in the hospital with COVID, versus for COVID? Or that this inflationary mis-characterization was incentivized by government payouts? Or that they were using HHS’s own data showing hospital capacity to have been no issue whatsoever in the U.S. except in extremely localized areas and for extremely short periods—and hence easily remediable.

How many people know that the opposition to vaccine mandates, beyond being based on the obvious, and perfectly reasonable objection that there was no long-term data on their safety, was also based on published research showing no relationship between vaccination rates and disease transmission?

Or the concern that “original antigenic sin” could lead to mass vaccination resulting in negative efficacy, and that early published researched was demonstrating exactly that trend? Or that one of the those who opposed vaccine mandates on ethical grounds was the director of medical ethics at one of the largest UC campuses?

The answer to all of these questions is, far too few. The sole reason for this widespread ignorance is government censorship. We have censorship to thank for the creation and implementation of divisive, harmful and unjust policies. Lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports all find their origins in the truth-starved, debate-deprived offices of our behemoth bureaucracies. Their continuance well after their futility was demonstrated empirically, and the harms they would cause already beginning to manifest can likewise be attributed to the same benighted bedfellows.

In addition to being harmed by the content of these censorship-protected policies, the public was further harmed by the division they created. Because these policies were propped up by censoring dissent and defaming dissenters, the debate was no such thing. Instead, framing it in Manichean terms of good and evil, the censors cast large groups of the population as enemies of the people, effectively engaging in a government-executed hate crime targeting tens of millions of people. This censorship-fueled division didn’t just tear the country apart, it cut straight through the center of families, yielding countless divorces, and many millions of families estranging loved ones--all due to government-promoted lies. The polarization that has so demoralized us was a feature, not a bug, of the policies implemented by our politicians and bureaucrats.

Through the pervasive action of this wide-ranging government censorship/propaganda effort, vast swathes of the American people have been and continue to be weaponized against their fellow Americans. The faith these people had in institutions has been perverted to serve the institutions, not the people. This credulity-weaponization encompasses not just Joe Schmoe on the street, but extends all the way to the Supreme Court, where in oral arguments last year, several justices made claims whose easily verifiable falseness would have made them blush, if they weren’t so wholly taken in by the censorship and propaganda operations of the broader U.S. government.

By acting as the witting or un-witting dupes of this vast censorship/propaganda operation, the credibility of virtually every civic institution in the U.S. has been eroded possibly to the point of no return. Those whose credibility can be salvaged will be decades in the doing. Unfortunately, many, if not most, of our institutions and their denizens remain the censor’s reliable handmaidens, now seeming to hope the censors might somehow hide the gushing efflux of their credibility.

Among the harms that have been visited upon the American people through this censorship operation, vaccine injuries must also be counted. Our government not only censored questions and concerns, it acted as the marketing department for the vaccine manufacturers. However, there was one very important difference—if the manufacturers had been doing their own marketing, each ad would have had the long list of potential side effects and counter-indications that is required of all other pharmaceuticals. These risks were simply not communicated, except at the time of injection in the form of a long list of contra-indicated conditions. However, if at that time one were to realize that one had one of the contra-indicated conditions, in many parts of the country, one would still have had no choice but to get the shot. Doctors who granted medical exemptions were threatened by the state to such a degree as to make exemptions virtually inaccessible, regardless of a doctor’s medical judgement. Vaccine mandates made getting the shot a requirement for engagement in public life and countenanced no exceptions. This coercion effectively nullified informed consent for the entire American public, and thus, any adverse reaction ought to be considered fair game for redress. But it is the young and those who had already had COVID who present a picture of unalloyed harm. For these groups, the vaccines provided no benefit—only risk. Thus, every single adverse event incurred in these groups must be viewed as direct, personal harms caused by a government-sponsored censorship operation. That this particular strain of censorship benefited private companies at the same time that it harmed the American people adds grievous injury to the ongoing insult.

It is particularly demoralizing to realize that the polarization deliberately fomented by our government seems likely to protect its perpetrators from accountability. Everywhere, we see polls and articles about how fatigued people are by politics. And yet we have no other recourse to address this vast “censorship leviathan”. It is now the go-to tool with which our government effects policy. The only way to change it is to remove from power those people who support this censorship regime and to dismantle the regime’s complex apparatus. Ultimately, government censorship reduces our society to just two groups of people: the censors and the censored. While it remains in place, the ranks of the censored will be ever-expanding as the censors require ever more censorship to ensure people continue to disbelieve their lying eyes.

Unfortunately, the study is rife with methodological flaws. This is an observational study, which means it is incapable of ascribing cause. This is because observations can be heavily confounded. Let’s look at the most obvious confounder, testing.

The authors acknowledge that they do not have testing data for the different districts.

The importance of this cannot be over-stated. Testing rates matter hugely—test more, find more cases. It’s just how it works. If you don’t have a testing baseline, you don’t have a baseline at all. Back in August of 2021, the CDC specifically exempted masked contacts from contact-tracing. It was, in fact, their most valuable weapon in the war to keep kids masked. This is because schools (and parents) were told, if both kids are masked, then even if one tests positive, the other masked child is not considered a closet contact, and so does not have to be quarantined at home. Few administrators were able to resist.

The authors note that the “test-and-stay” program—which included contact tracing that excluded masked contacts from being defined as close contacts—was made optional in January 2022. They state that too few schools chose to maintain test-to-stay to make a difference.

However, there are several issues with that statement. First of all, we see from the slide below, that rather than removing the “test-to-stay” program, it simply made it optional. Schools were able to continue doing the “test-to-stay” program. So what you actually see here, is two totally different testing options that could be chosen.

Excerpt: MA DOE COVID Testing Guidance

In fact, this may account for nearly all of the differences. Let’s look at the changes. The authors provide a slide of all the school districts that lifted mask mandates that also opted out of the “test-to-stay” program. That chart is shown below. They do not provide a similar chart for the schools masked schools that chose the other option, i.e., to continue with pooled testing and “test-to-stay”. I presume this is likely because most of the schools that maintained mask mandates continued using the “test-to-stay” program.

If that is the case, what we are looking at is two totally different testing modalities being applied by the two groups. Seeing that the “did not lift” group is the one with the highest pooled testing rate, and that the variation increased after the mask mandates were lifted, that seems like exactly what we are looking at.

Beyond this GBH news reported that in April opt-ins in Boston Public Schools for pooled testing were running at just 22% of students.

We simply have to have a testing baseline, and the same testing modalities to even begin to compare.

Alexis K @AlexisKat6

@EpiEllie @Emily_Burns_V “They question whether the pool testing program offers an accurate sense of infections present in the schools if participation rates in the program are low.”

wgbh.orgBoston schools boost COVID prevention efforts with $3 million in additional fundingChanges come amid sharp criticism from parents and school nurses about lax contact tracing.

9:05 PM ∙ Nov 10, 2022

Alexis K @AlexisKat6

@EpiEllie @Emily_Burns_V “Parents have to opt into the program & some nurses say only a third to half of students participate at some schools. BPS said it does not have an accurate district-wide participation rate at this time but GBH News reported that the participation rate was just 22% last April.”

9:07 PM ∙ Nov 10, 2022

The authors note that “test-to-stay” and was abandoned by most of the un-masked districts. Contact tracing was also abandoned at that point in those districts. However, what this ignores, is the kind of testing these un-masked districts were doing.

When school districts opted out of “test-to-stay” they had to opt in to weekly antigen testing. The authors note that most of the un-masked districts opted out of “test-to-stay” and in to weekly antigen testing. This means that every one of these districts was asking their students and staff to administer twice-weekly at-home rapid antigen tests, and then to report them to the school—effectively catching every single positive cast of those who opted in. If they tested positive, while the close contacts weren’t required to quarantine, the person who tested positive was.

Let’s contrast that with the schools that elected to keep masks, and “test-to-stay”. Again, the authors don’t tell us if the school districts that didn’t lift their mandates continued with the “test-to-stay” option, but the much higher level of pooled testing (which was the backbone of the “test-to-stay” program), and the authors not including that information in the supplement, suggests that in fact it was the case. Any school that elected to continue “test-to-stay” and masking was still required to perform contact tracing. However, any contact tracing would still, per CDC guidelines, exempt any contacts where the interaction was between two masked people. Thus, while students in schools who dropped mask mandates were testing twice per week, effectively catching every case, in schools that continued “test-to-stay,” masked close contacts would not be asked to test, even if they had been in the the presence of a positive case.

Is it possible to estimate how many cases might have been missed due to this difference in testing? Yes, it is. This is because, quite a while ago, the CDC published an MMWR with contact tracing information on a completely masked school. In this study, we see that the number of secondary cases that arose from each of these masked children was 0.66 additional cases. Each masked teacher generated an average of 3 additional cases.

We can take the existing case rates, and cases and extrapolate the population of all of these groups. From there, we can use these estimates to see how many cases might have been missed, due to the suppression of masked cases, due to the close contact definition. The results are below. Using this estimate of additional cases, the masked districts would have missed, somewhere around 5700 additional cases—which would bring the case rates largely in-line with the un-masked districts.

The next logical question is, what were the case rates in the community for each of the districts? In fact, we can see that they were largely similar, with some slight differences, and with the surrounding town of the masked districts on the higher level amongst the three groups. This is quite consistent with the estimate above.

Again, we don’t have the testing protocols for either, but the fact that there were two options, and that there seems to be a bifurcation in pooled testing, suggests that the masked and un-masked groups used largely different testing modalities.

Indeed, one of the authors seems to suggest this in one of her rebuttals to questions raised when the article was brought out for pre-print.

This is the ultimate logical fallacy. Children and teachers missed school not because they were sick, but because of testing practices designed to catch every single case—even if asymptomatic—and then required those cases to miss a certain number of days in quarantine. The other test-and-stay, coupled with masks allowed those districts not to “find” cases in masked students and staff, thereby allowing them not to miss school—but seemingly having no impact on transmission.

Several months back, we did an analysis of masked, and un-masked districts across the 500 largest districts to see if masking did indeed reduce days missed. It turned out that the opposite was true. In fact, masked districts missed approximately 4x the amount of school as un-masked districts.

Why did masked districts miss more school? We don’t really know, but I suspect it comes down to control. Districts that masked also tested more. They also were more likely to have more draconian isolation policies. Districts that didn’t mask less so. This is borne out in the data. What we see in the data is that masked districts do have higher case rates, which would be expected both from their testing practices, and their seasonal patterns—nearly 2.5x higher during the January peak. But kids in masked districts missed nearly 4x more school than un-masked, meaning that the choices employed around forced quarantine were much higher even than the difference in the case rate.

Like so many other mask studies, you could drive a truck through the holes in this mask study. Without the baseline testing data, it is simply impossible to make comparisons.

Way back in May of 2020, the CDC did a systemic review of all extant randomized controlled trials of masks and other mitigations. They found no impact. Given this, they noted an urgent need to better understand transmission of respiratory illnesses. Instead of doing that work, and conducting real, randomized controlled trials of mask efficacy, the CDC and public health community continues to churn out one bad piece of science after another to justify their policies.

Republicans still have an opportunity to build a broad and lasting coalition for 2024, built on a powerful, positive pro-freedom and pro-family message—Florida shows that. But they need to take the time to better understand the would-be members of their coalition, and to try to craft policies that are appealing to all parties.

I wrote in my last piece that I am and will for the foreseeable future be a single issue voter.

After this cycle, my vote will always be for the party that represents the most decentralized power structure, and the greatest respect for individual rights and responsibility. For me, the new f-word is “federal”.

The coalition that was building prior to Dobbs—was a pro-child, pro-family, pro-freedom, pro-personal liberty and responsibility one. Many women never dreamed that Roe could be over-turned, so they were OK siding with pro-life Republicans—because they figured it didn’t matter. “My body, my choice” was thrown out as a sneering example of Democrat hypocrisy, when it came to vaccine mandates. Republicans hammered on Democrats that their abortion policies were extreme and out of touch with the majority of Americans, all the while ignoring that the only nationally-accepted position for Republicans, is no abortion at any point, with no exceptions—not 15 weeks with well-articulated exceptions to protect the life of the mother, as Republican pundits constantly remind us is the consensus view of Americans.

For myself, I was quite nervous about the permanence of this coalition. What I had come to understand from a constitutional perspective, was that Roe had been wrongly decided—even Ruth Bader Ginsberg acknowledged this. Thus, if a case were to come before a more originalist court, it would likely be over-turned. Speaking to pro-choice people, they truly did not believe that this was a real possibility. And pro-life people were dismissive of the significant importance this issue held for pro-choice women. Unless efforts were undertaken by these groups to understand one another, it was not a question of “if,” but “when” this coalition would implode. Now we know when.

Before I go on, we need to set a few baselines. A majority of women and men do believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

I know many of my readers see a woman’s right to abort a baby as fundamentally at odds with the baby’s right to life. But in order for us to continue with this discussion, it is important for this group of readers to understand—even if they do not agree—that a majority of women in the U.S., including many who joined this pro-freedom coalition do not see it that way. They do view it as a right, the freedom to choose. You may disagree vehemently, but that is not what we are discussing here. We are discussing why this coalition dissolved, and ultimately what can be done to restore it—because I think it can be restored and both “sides” make considerable strides towards the achievement of their, pro-child, pro-family, pro-freedom—and limited government—goals.

After Dobbs, pro-choice women who wanted to stay in this “Pro-freedom” coalition had to make a choice between which of their freedoms they valued more highly, their reproductive freedom, or freedom of speech, association, and all the other freedoms that were encroached upon, or fully suspended over the last 2.5+ years. But it was a bitter pill to swallow for many. Making your partners swallow bitter pills is not the foundation of a strong coalition. In this case, it proved to be its dissolution. Why?

Women—and particularly mothers—were a major force in drawing the curtain and exposing the harmfulness and cold political calculation of COVID policies, particularly as they affected children. But such women were a minority. There are a large number of women—just as there are a large number of men—who still believe either a) we had to do this or b) we just didn’t know. For these people, when asked to choose between one freedom and another, they chose the one they viewed as under assault right now—reproductive freedom (you might not like that phrase, but we’re trying to understand others now). The falsehood of Osterism, that “we just didn’t know,” that it won’t happen again, or worse, that it was necessary—but at any rate that it is in the past—is quite widely accepted, particularly among swing voters.

For some apoplexy will now be setting in, with mental sputterings of “But they should have known! Why are they so stupid?” That won’t help win them over—and yes, we need them.

We need them, because widespread understanding that the policies of the past two years were both harmful, and known to be unnecessary before, during and after their implementation is crucial to making sure these policies—and worse—do not get re-implemented. Freedom is a winning message. Republican anti-abortion policies inject hypocrisy into that message for many.

For myself, I view the reality-destroying policies of the left as a totalitarian ideology that will consume all rights. But I am an outlier. Particularly among women.

Now, let’s turn to how we re-build this coalition, and protect ourselves from the predations of this incipient totalitarianism, shall we?

As I noted in my last piece, despite having come to believe that the pro-life position has the moral high ground, I remain pro-choice. There are several reasons for this, but chief among them is that I don’t want government involved in legislating morality. The government destroys almost everything it touches. Why on god’s green earth would we trust it with morality? The second is that humans are fallible. Just ask Herschel Walker. We often fail to live up to our values.

Beyond this, I think we need to assess the ultimate goals of restricting abortion. If the goal of restricting abortion is to increase birth rates, it doesn’t seem to work that well. While there is a slight correlation, it is not strong. What’s more, viewed politically, in the top half of states for abortion rates, are many swing states. This includes, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Arizona—even Texas is right around 25.

While abortion utilization is not tightly linked to birthrate, I do believe that in creating the idea that abortion is a right, the left has created an ideology that is anti-natal, and anti-child. When we look at the rates of access to in-person education in the 2020-21 school year there is also a weak correlation between higher level of access to school, and lower abortion rates. If Georgia and Florida are removed, the R^2 value jumps over 0.3. As I have noted previously, I genuinely do believe that the states that kept schools open do value children more highly, and a higher proportion of pro-life voters, and lower abortion rates is a part of that.

Is it possible to harness the pro-natal, pro-child aspects of the pro-life movement, without resorting to bans and restrictions? To heal this pro-freedom coalition? I believe it is. I don’t believe that mandates and bans are good policy tools. I believed it with regard to vaccines and I believe it with regard to abortion. I think if we instead cast our goals as being supportive of children and families, with metrics such as increasing birthrates, improving education scores and choice, making it easier for families to thrive, and reducing the rate of abortions (which have been falling since 1990, until a resurgence in 2017 under president Trump)—there is ample room for common ground.

Below are just a few ideas that I think are consistent with a pro-natal policy approach. These are policies that would advance the pro-life agenda, without infringing on the freedom of choice that is so highly valued by pro-choice voters. All of them would, I think, help to create a more pro-natal, pro-child country, founded on a pro-freedom framework.

1. Re-humanize fetuses. I think it is important that we begin to re-internalize that fetuses are humans—it dehumanizes us to claim otherwise. Abortion should be a choice (in my mind), but it should be a hard choice. In most circumstances it should be made unnecessary by birth control. Making mothers—and fathers, if available—see an ultrasound of their babies, and see the actual process of the abortion they are considering before they make the decision to abort, is a reasonable step towards trying to re-humanize fetuses. It does not remove choice, but it does inject awareness and responsibility.

2. Adoption should always be offered as an option. If a women’s right to choose is paramount, then making sure she is aware that adoption is a real choice, and the supports that are available for that decision, is part of making an informed choice.

3. Tax dollars should not be used to support abortion, nor doctors forced to perform them. There are far too many ways to get an abortion—including chemical, by mail—to make it necessary for either of these things. Pro-choice people do not typically understand how profoundly evil pro-life people view abortion, nor how sincerely held that belief is. It is like telling an abolitionist that slavery is acceptable in some cases. No one should be forced to support something they see as profoundly evil with their tax dollars—much less their own hands.

4. Gestation-based bans. If gestation-based bans are put in place, e.g. 15-20 weeks, they ought to be in line with broader—not just pro-life—public opinion. Beyond this, they need to have clearly articulated exceptions, especially for the health of the mother. It is important that no doctor hesitate to deliver life-saving care to a woman in crisis in the latter portion of her pregnancy, because he or she thinks they may be prosecuted for doing so. But on the other hand, nor should “mental health” crises be used to justify late-term abortions.

5. Continued reduction of the abortion rate through informed choice. Getting an abortion doesn’t mean you have control of your reproductive health, it is the opposite. It means something didn’t work as planned. We empower women, when we give them the tools not to need an abortion.

6. Pro-pregnancy. Mama-care? While I am not generally a fan of government run healthcare, covering the medical costs associated with pregnancy for all women who choose to give birth would likely increase the number of women choosing adoption, or even to keep their own children. Few things would likely increase the birthrate more. And it is a time-limited program—you’re only pregnant for 9 months.

7. GI-style Bill for Caregiving Parents. One of my own personal hobby horses has been that if we want more people to choose to be parents, we need to view parenting as a valuable job, viewing the skills acquired during that time as transferrable to other fields—just like we view military experience. Tax incentives to companies to support training for hiring parents who were primarily caregivers would be one way to make this a reality. Or perhaps training stipends for needed transitional education (as long as it is linked to requirements of real employers).

None of the above is intended to be prescriptive, comprehensive, or even correct. There may be many unintended consequences that I have not thought of. My goal in putting these things out there is to show that I, as someone who is pro-choice, want to try to find common ground with people who are pro-life to help forge a lasting alliance that is both pro-natal, and pro-freedom.

We can do this. I think we must do this, or 2024 is going to be bleak. Let’s start the conversation. What do you think?

The political establishment—left and right—want desperately to move on, to pretend the last 30 months didn’t happen. With very few exceptions (Ron DeSantis, Kirsti Noem, Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, Ron Johnson, and a few others, later), they betrayed their core values. Many Republicans and so-called Libertarians quickly capitulated the primacy and importance of individual liberties. Whereas supposedly equality-loving democrats embraced policies that in no uncertain terms screwed women, children and the poor. The 2020 democrat campaign slogan might as well have been “protect the rich, infect the poor.” Or “only the rich need to learn.” They’d all very much like that you forget about that. They’d like to go back to the fights they know how to fight, the golden oldies that turn the bases out, and turn us against each other. But COVID policies turned the whole thing on its side, jumbling us all up and resulting in all sorts of hitherto unheard of alliances. And when your business is maintaining the status quo, that is very dangerous.

Which is why Emily Oster is pleading for an amnesty.

ProfEmilyOster @ProfEmilyOster

My latest in @TheAtlantic

theatlantic.comLet’s Declare a Pandemic AmnestyWe need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.

10:41 AM ∙ Oct 31, 2022

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First, let’s be clear to whom Emily Oster is speaking. She’s speaking to the furious well-educated suburban women who are swinging towards Republicans in this cycle, even in the bluest of states. Because it was the bluest of states that were hit hardest by these policies. It was in blue states that the schools were closed longest, that the economic devastation was worst, that crime spiked the most, where masks were required longest. The damage done by these policies is at its beginning, not its end. Dr. Oster, would like women to believe that it was all just a mistake, a mis-understanding, and remember that it is the Republicans who are looking to limit the freedoms that really count. That while democrats had no problem sacrificing the well-being of our living children for three years in support political power, it is Republicans that pose the real threat.

The problem for Emily is that while the hardcore democrat base of women voters never questioned any of these policies, others did—and they incurred significant personal costs for doing so.

Emily Burns😊 DMs welcome #TeamReality @Emily_Burns_V

Embarrassed for my gender. Who could possibly want more of this shit? And at what point did more education start making exclusively women stupider? Ugh.

Mauty480 @Mauty480

This right here says it all https://t.co/yq2Ztw7YJ3

7:01 PM ∙ Apr 10, 2022

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An embarrassing portion of well-educated women acted as the regime’s stormtroopers. They sicced social media mobs on any who dared to voice a question, much less dissent. The pain of having family, friends and neighbors turn on them for voicing an opinion or asking a legitimate question caused many women to seek out others with similar questions.

In so doing, we found a smart, snarky, data-driven community pushing back hard on the totalizing power of a government trying to re-define reality. In some cases women were the generals, in others we were the infantry, going forward and taking constant fire from above, so that some recently discredited truth might once again retake its rightful place in the sun of acceptable opinion.

Emily Oster would like us to forget that. But we can’t—and I hope we won’t—because we were there bringing the government’s own data to shine a light on the lies it so ceaselessly manufactured. These weren’t lies of omission, they were lies of commission. They were lies that were wrought by smelting the credibility of science and medicine in the fires of politics to create weapons wielded by the powerful against us. They literally called us terrorists for our opposition.

Now, after having been called terrorists by our governments for arguing for the well-being of our own children, Dr. Oster wants us to forget that. In asking us to forget, she beseeches those who strayed from the flock to return, to believe that it is not their shepherd who takes them to slaughter that would do them harm, but the wolf lurking unseen in the shadows of the wood. So now we must talk about abortion.

What democrats, and their credibility-launderers like Oster want women to do, is to put two things on the scales. One one side, is the harm that was done to your children, to you, to your community over nearly three years. On the other is the fear of a loss of access to abortion services. What they are hoping, is that their female base will believe the lie that Dr. Oster is peddling, that it was all just an unfortunate mistake, and could never happen again. It’s in the past! Don’t worry about it. Likewise, they will hope that their female base will forget that rather than living in 1972, with limited access to contraception, we live in 2022, where contraception that is more than 99% effective is inexpensive and widely available, even if paying out of pocket; that this contraception, includes abortion pills, which can be accessed anywhere in the country by mail up to 10 weeks of gestation. They want you to forget about the interstate commerce clause which would make hindering this nearly impossible—even, or especially, with a conservative court. They want you to forget that a flight to an abortion-providing state is at most a $200 plane ride away. Or that should you fail to secure an abortion, the worst-case scenario results in a baby you choose to give up for adoption. They want you to forget that if they win the senate, they would still have to overturn the filibuster to do this, and the important political stabilization that the 60-vote threshold provides. They want you to forget that they failed to legally codify access to abortion for 50 years. And they want you to forget that there is no way on earth they are going to give up the only issue they have to reliably stoke fear, drum up dollars, and drive women to the polls. Not a chance in hell.

But it wasn’t a mistake. It was a political calculation, and on the cost side of that equation was the education and welfare of our kids—and so much more. The people who made this calculation wagered that the fear that they could drum up around access to abortion could be used to distract women from the manifold harms these policies caused to children and/or that they could craft a narrative that would mask the truth. If you understand the cynicism of that decision, you have to expect the same cynicism on the other side of the equation.

I say all of this as someone who is pro-choice. I grew up VERY pro-choice. The last two+ years have resulted in a significant moderation of my position. I saw “my people”—not so much democrats, as well-educated, affluent, supposedly classically liberal people—thoughtlessly embrace every new flavor of authoritarianism. Thus, when seeking out new allies, I took the time to understand where people who are pro-life come from, and I have come to believe that the moral authority lays with that position. I have come to believe that the horror of abortion that characterizes conservative politics does honestly come from reverence for creation, and a deep-seated respect for individuals and the families that nourish them. I have no doubt that these things are at the heart of why more conservative states were more likely to keep school open. They value their children.

The narrative that conservatives seek to limit access to abortion in order to keep women down is a just that—a story. In order to prop it up, fetuses had to be literally dehumanized, and the narrative bolstered with overtly anti-natal supporting philosophies, philosophies which, in their anti-natalism rob life of most of its meaning for most people. For women, this anti-natalism is expressly anti-mother, hence, anti-feminine, transforming motherhood—one of the few truly transcendent human experiences—into a dupe’s prison.

That said, I remain pro-choice, fundamentally because after the past two+ years, all I want is the government smaller and weakened in every possible capacity. I don’t want the government legislating or coercing morality (we’ve had quite enough of that over the past few years) any more than I want it coercing medical decisions. Further, I believe that the vicissitudes of life can make such government interventions result in dangerous corner cases.

But despite being pro-choice, I have become a single issue voter. My vote this cycle is a vote for vengeance against the party that kept my kids masked for two years; that robbed me of my best friends, and strained every relationship I have; that caused us to move to an entirely different part of the country; that perverted a discipline that I love, and which I use to navigate my life (science); and that then lied about doing it, and called me a terrorist for being upset about it. After this cycle, my vote will always be for the party that represents the most decentralized power structure, and the greatest respect for individual rights and responsibility. For me, the new f-word is “federal”.

While I can only speak for myself, my experience has been that in the aftermath of our leaders’ decision to break and reset the world, there are new coalitions forming. I don’t think I’m alone in my efforts to try to better understand the positions of others who became my “comrades in arms”—and I have felt that reciprocated, with the possibility of compromise arising out of mutual respect and in the face of a greater perceived mutual threat. At the moment, I think this is only happening on the “right”. But if the democrats get the drubbing that looks likely in the mid-terms, this will also happen on the left; it’s why this drubbing needs to happen. Such a shake-up can only be to the good. Indeed, our leaders may yet have gotten a “Great Reset”—just not the one they were hoping for.

In this newly emerging political and ideological landscape, I think the votes of women will be great importance.

Moms in general, but SAHMs in particular played a very significant part in the grassroots pushback of COVID policy malfeasance. I believe this was due to three key things. First, COVID policies created many more SAHMs, as the exigencies of virtual school made work impossible. Second, these SAHMs experienced the harmful impacts of COVID policies directly for years in their own lives, and in those of their children. Third, I think that stay-at-home moms ended up being a very important and vocal minority because they could be. You can’t fire or cancel a stay-at-home-mom, and there is significant power in not being anonymous.

As women, we have felt far more acutely than at any time in the past what it really means for government to interfere in our lives—controlling whether our children go to school, whether we can socialize, or go to a gym, or a restaurant, how many people can be invited to our home, whether we can spend holidays with family, whether we can run our businesses. These are all violations, violations of our personal liberty that harmed us, our children, and our communities, and which were done solely in service to political power. We have internalized this, and many will not be quick to forgive.

Emily is asking us to forgive a mistake. There was no mistake. There was a political calculation that harmed us, but even more, that harmed our children. The harm was considered acceptable because those who undertook it, took the votes of women for granted. They assumed they could lie and manipulate us into believing these harms were necessary, or barring that, unintentional. If we, as women, want our votes to be courted in the future by either party, we must vote to punish the past three years treachery.

After we have exacted some political retribution, if there is acknowledgement of the wrongs committed and contrition for those wrongs, then we can talk about amnesty. My next post will address the “terms” of such an amnesty, as I see them.

Other great rebuttals… (all great follows).

bad cattitude

emily oster's no good, really bad, terrible idea

brown university econ professor emily oster is out with a new missive in the atlantic (where else?) and it seems to be generating quite a lot of heat. perhaps this is because it is so seemingly self-s…

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2 years ago · 837 likes · 469 comments · el gato malo

Wood House

Osterism

Dr. Emily Oster, the Brown University economist who spent a good part of the pandemic response denying that her own data indicted the uselessness of masking kids in schools, published an article in The Atlantic today, calling for “a pandemic amnesty.” Short version: Let’s chalk up the devastation caused by fear-driven policies to benign ignorance and go…

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2 years ago · 80 likes · 47 comments · E.Woodhouse

eugyppius: a plague chronicle

Emily Oster proposes “a pandemic amnesty,” suggests that “we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID”

I don’t know much about the American pandemic pundits, but I gather that Brown University economist and “parenting guru” Emily Oster is far from the worst of them. Her Twitter timeline suggests she spent the early months of the pandemic terrified about the virus until school closures took their toll on her kids, at which point she repositioned herself a…

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2 years ago · 910 likes · 591 comments · eugyppius

Vinay Prasad's Observations and Thoughts

Pandemic accountability

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in many bad policies being implemented. We need accountability so that we never institute these policies again. Let me enumerate some structural solutions The person who heads the National Institutes of Health funding (or any of the Institutes) should not be setting federal policy. Either decide who gets funded, or set pol…

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2 years ago · 513 likes · Vinay Prasad

The New Normal

“Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty”—Not

I’ll admit, I nearly spit out my coffee when I saw Brown Professor Emily Oster’s new headline in The Atlantic this morning. It’s the headline we’ve been waiting to see—and, in the revisionist, gaslighting style that’s become the journalistic norm on the response to Covid—it’s about the closest thing to an outright admission of guilt that we’ve seen sinc…

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2 years ago · 247 likes · 124 comments · Michael P Senger

The day of reckoning is nearly upon us, and as it nears, blue state governors across the land are trying to deny the length of school closures, their role in it, and to distance themselves from the catastrophic results.

Fortunately, we knew this day would come, and we had our receipts well-prepared.

In the image below, I highlighted Michigan, since Gretchen Whitmer is the most recent to blatantly lie about the length of school closures in her state. But you can click into the interactive dashboard to see your state.

Tabular form is equally interesting. It gives us a sense for just how very skewed by political party these decisions were. The only states that break the streaks are purple states. For example, Vermont, a reliably democratic presidential vote has a Republican governor. Conversely, North Carolina and Kentucky—the only “red” states to find themselves caught up in the blue wave of bad policy—have democratic governors.

This is not news. I and many others have now been screaming this into the algorithmic void that is Twitter’s left-wing censors for approaching two years.

Emily Burns😊 DMs welcome #TeamReality @Emily_Burns_V

Some things are symptoms of a greater problem. The chief responsibility of any society is the nurturing and development of its young. Thus, the negative of "% in-person schooling" is like an x-ray for our country, showing us where there is deep, systemic rot. @justin_hart

6:26 PM ∙ Dec 10, 2020

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The image that this article leads with is 100% in-person schooling. But fear not, we also have hybrid and virtual for every single week of the year, for every single state. Unfortunately, even these weekly averages obscure the very punctate nature of the harm. A state might end up showing a relatively larger proportion of in-person schools, thanks to “redder” suburbs, exurbs, or rural areas, whereas the districts in the largest population centers remained fully remote, or getting credit for “hybrid” with masked zoom-in-a-room. The same is no doubt true of the recently released test scores—acute failure in certain areas will be masked by the accomplishments of students in other areas.

How did we come by this data? When our leaders shut down the world, a scrappy little company called Burbio had to completely change its business model. They started doing weekly calls with school districts across the country to track school opening plans, and subsequently which districts were offering 100% in-person, 100% virtual, or hybrid. They tracked 1200+ districts totaling nearly 50 million children (virtually all U.S. school children). I bought access to the data, and we published a digest of it on Rational Ground—a record to correct the inevitable walk back.

I remember when I first got access to the granular weekly district data and started pouring through the spreadsheets, I thought “Oh my god, I have to get this right out!” Then it dawned on me that in fact there was no rush, no one in the main stream media, or any of our institutions had any interest in getting this information out—which is why it was being collected and made available by a small company, and not the department of education. The narrative at the time was that schools had to be closed, deliberately ignoring two key elements. The first was that tens of millions of children did have access to full-time, in-person, often un-masked education for ALL of the 2020/2021 school year. The second, was the near perfect correlation with school opening and political affiliation. The purple maps above that Burbio released on a weekly basis pointed pretty obviously to this divide. However, because they also looked a bit like population density maps (denser populations, more democrats), the vast numbers of children in red areas receiving full-time in-person education could be easily underestimated. I spent the entirety of my Florida vacation sitting on a chaise lounge in Miami parsing data. Once done, the depth of the red/blue divide was clear, the magnitude of the impending harm obvious, and the lack of attendant health benefits unmistakable.

Brit Hume @brithume

Great thread on Covid. What a terrible failure lockdowns and school closures have been.

Emily Burns😊 DMs welcome #TeamReality @Emily_Burns_V

1/many COVID has been politicized. Children and families in blue states are paying the price. On average, in red states, 3x as many children have access to 100%, 5-day/week in-person learning as in blue. Nearly 4x as many children in blue states are 100% remote (sources @ end) https://t.co/rFh9SJrRDU

1:52 AM ∙ Feb 10, 2021

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Nonetheless, despite the harms visited upon blue state residents by their leaders, the political response was, and remains quite muted.

But by far the most visceral memory I have is sitting in a neighbor’s house in summer of 2021, enjoying what had been a wonderfully normal evening. We’d met up with some neighbors at a large event held nearby, and walked back in a large group to their home. We spent the remainder of the evening drinking and talking into the early hours of the morning, almost as if it were 2019. Speaking with the husband about COVID policy (because what else was really worth talking about?) at some point he asked me—somewhat apprehensively—“but you are vaccinated, aren’t you?” I answered honestly, “No. I’m not at risk, and it’s not sterilizing, so I see no reason to risk any potential as-yet-unknown side effects.” His wife—an extremely fit woman in her late 40’s—recoiled in disgust. With a sneer, she reiterated, “you’re not vaccinated?” To which I replied again, “No, I’m not.” Her revulsion was palpable. If she could have shot shards of protective plexiglass Elsa-style, she would have. It clearly required everything in her being not to throw me out of the house. She turned on her heel and left without saying goodnight. I left immediately thereafter. These were neighbors whose children attended the same school as our, rode the same bus, belonged to the same country club and lived 3 doors down from us.

What I knew then—that the vaccines were not sterilizing and did not stop either infection or transmission—was already known and published in the clinical trial results, and well-respected, non-controversial journals. Pfizer had acknowledged months before in October of 2020 that it had not designed the trials to look for either of these things. They and others had subsequently telegraphed this to the press, resulting in a bevy of articles in late 2020 and early 2021 discussing the value of vaccines that reduced the severity of illness, but not infection. This knowledge—which Dr. Deborah Birx has also acknowledged being aware of—was presumably the reason that President-elect Biden so confidently claimed in December of 2020 that no one would be forced to take the vaccine—after all, why would you force it if it weren’t sterilizing? If it didn’t stop infection and transmission?

And yet, my liberal, well-educated, affluent neighbors were so ignorant of these data and this information as to treat a neighbor as a pariah.

Why? Why was it that intelligent, well-educated people couldn’t be bothered to consider an alternate opinion, had a nearly allergic reaction to the issue even being raised?

It felt of course, like they were the (possibly)-unwitting participants in a propaganda operation. We now know this is exactly what they were. We now know that the Biden administration’s efforts to “encourage” vaccination, included a full-scale propaganda campaign. I would encourage you to scroll through this document and consider all of the ways in which you were propagandized. Did these "vaccine engagement packages” involve “grants”, or just coercion? It seems likely that they involved some kind of compensation, as well, given that later on in the document there is a specific section on “earned media”. The distinction between earned media and other media, is that you cannot pay for earned media—suggesting that much of the rest was indeed paid for.

Excerpt 1 from FOIA request

Excerpt 1 from FOIA request

And sure as night follows day, a few weeks after the planned rollout of these “vaccine engagement packages” to the “entertainment agencies,” they started churning out propaganda—presumably to the meter of the checks’ clearance. But of course, pure propaganda like that shown below, is unlikely to sway anyone but the most jelly-brained.

So, naturally, tasked by the government with “encouraging” vaccination, entertainers and comedians “rose to the challenge”, employing more subtle methods, instead deciding to mock and deride people who had any hesitancy for any reason.

So, within a few short weeks, we have Bill Burr, one of unknown scores (or more) of comics mocking Americans at the behest of the U.S. government, and quite possily on the dime of U.S. taxpayers.

Bill Burr/Conan O’Brien skit mocking “Anti-Vaxxers”

Let that sink in…our government coerced—likely paid—some Americans to mock others, to encourage them to take a vaccine which this same government knew did not stop transmission. They did this at a time when vaccination rates for at-risk groups—those over 65—were incredibly high, with nearly 80% of the elderly having received one dose even in the least-vaccinated states.

Given a lack of any health benefit at this point, the federal government was essentially engaged in a massive marketing campaign on behalf of private companies. And they were doing it by coercing, and possibly paying highly-placed, highly-respected Americans to generate fear, disgust and disdain of other Americans—even while they knew there was no longer any plausible public health imperative (if there every could be for such an action).

The federal government engaged in a marketing campaign which demonized some Americans, likely with funds provided by those same Americans. Worse still, had Pfizer and Moderna engaged Mr. Colbert or Mr. Burr themselves to incorporate their ads into their segments, in addition to costing them far more than whatever the government may have paid, those ads would have been followed by the obligatory list of potential side effects (which are, and were, known to occur). But because all of the marketing for the vaccines was taken on by the government, no such information was every appended to any of their advertisements.

They would likewise have had to rattle off a list of contraindications and precautions, a list which—as anyone who has ever gotten* a COVID-19 shot know—is quite long indeed.

Yet, because these ads masquerading as entertainment were part of a government propaganda effort, no such warnings were included. This was true even though this taxpayer-funded marketing/propaganda campaign also targeted children, despite being conceived in April of 2021, before vaccines were even approved for children 12-15 (May 10, 2021).

Excerpt 2 from FOIA request

Never mind 5-12 year olds, whose vaccines weren’t approved until October 29, 2021—by which time these children and their parents had been subjected to months of un-nuanced government propaganda to take a vaccine with no long-term safety data, which the government knew did not stop transmission, and hence had not possibility even of collective benefit, for a disease that posed no risk to the children personally.

Despite high uptake in all groups, but especially at-risk groups, the Biden administration apparently remained unsatisfied with the results of the summer’s propaganda efforts.

After liberally sprinkling the bitter seeds of disgust via government-sponsored dis-infotainment, the Biden administration upped the ante. They falsely declared a “Pandemic of the Unvaccinated”, and trained upon the tens of millions of unvaccinated Americans—a majority of whom were children—the fear and loathing they had been ratcheting up for months via every extant cultural lever.

Excerpt 3 from FOIA request

The rhetoric that was used from August on was ruthlessly Manichean. The vaxxed were good, the unvaxxed were beneath contempt, ought to be denied medical treatment, literally left to die—if not outright killed.

The New Normal

A Look Back at the Demonization of the Unvaccinated

Social media has been in an uproar since a member of European Parliament posted a video of a hearing in which a Pfizer director admitted the company never tested whether its Covid mRNA vaccine prevents transmission prior to its approval for emergency use…

Read more

2 years ago · 135 likes · 102 comments · Michael P Senger

People don’t like the comparison with Nazis, but there is no other movement it resembles so closely as that. This was a coordinated attempt by the government—our government, funded with our money—to engender fear and loathing of one part of the population by the majority. This was done with a goal of total disenfranchisement, even to the point of death. And it often succeeded in both goals.

All this hate was fomented and orchestrated by our government, and directed towards large parts of our citizenry. The rationale for this monumental othering was wrong—not just morally, as it must always be, but factually—and our government was fully aware that the rationale was wrong. Our government encouraged its citizens to demonize, disenfranchise, and mock—sometimes, tragically, to death—other citizens who made a personal decision not to get vaccinated with a vaccine with no long-term safety data, despite knowing there could be no net social benefit (and having promised there would be no such coercion). They knew all of this, and did it anyway.

The reason they did it is as immaterial as Hitler’s reasons for massacring the Jews. What matters is the action. This was a vile hate crime perpetrated by our government against our friends, neighbors, children, and in many cases, selves. It needs to be acknowledged as such. I don’t go so far as to say that the people whose credulity and meanness abetted them in this task need to be punished, but the do need to recognize what happened, their role in it, and feel a sense of shame if not for their participation, then at least for their credulity.

* “As anyone who has ever gotten a COVID-19 shot knows”. I put this asterisk, because I did ultimately get the jab, and I don’t want to misrepresent myself. I didn’t do it for my health, but nor did I do it because I was compelled to by my government, or to gain any social privileges. Ultimately, I got it to preserve harmony in my marriage. (My husband wanted to go on a trip to a foreign country, and I couldn’t go because of my vax status. Ultimately we still didn’t go). I’m not proud of it, nor do I feel “protected”—but I’m older, so if there are harms, the scope is limited. The kids weren’t, and every day I am glad of that. When Boston implemented its vaccine mandate, as a family, we refused to patronize any establishment in the city until it was lifted. I have never used my vaccine card to access anything—and I never will. Ultimately, the vaccine mandate was the straw that broke the camel’s back and resulted in our moving to Texas from the northeast. It wasn’t because we thought it would last, or because we couldn’t get around it. It was because it was wrong. Its passage and the wide support it enjoyed showed me that far from having any humility about the dark passage we were traversing, a majority there are still glorying in being the tip of the government’s spear—happy to inflict harm wherever they are told—notwithstanding the self-righteous lawn signs claiming that “love is love.”

In a little over a week, my son will miss the opportunity of a lifetime—a chance to perform at Carnegie Hall—because he is not vaccinated for COVID-19. While New York City dropped its vaccine mandate weeks ago, Carnegie Hall has retained theirs. What’s that you say? Carnegie Hall is a private organization, and therefore may discriminate freely? I’ll address the problems of rampant, socially-sanctioned discrimination, and the [lack of] scientific rationale for doing so later. But first, let me ask, what if Carnegie Hall received $10 million of federal grant money (and it did)—my tax money and yours—in exchange for staying closed for 17 months? Is it still acceptable for them to turn away large swaths of the population—particularly children—from their doors? Given that we the people provided funding to bridge it to its present state, it doesn’t seem so to me.

The CARES act, passed in 2020 provided $75 billion in funding to arts and cultural organizations impacted by the pandemic. The American Rescue Plan Act added another $350 billion to that number. Part of that funding was $16 billion to a program called the “Shuttered Venue Operators’ Grants,” or SVOG. This money began being disbursed in June of 2021, when venues in many “red states” had been open and operating for more than a year.  

Carnegie Hall applied for and received $10 million from this fund on 7/2/2021—this is a grant, not a loan. It does NOT need to be re-paid. It is a straight-up transfer from you and me, to Carnegie Hall. Despite “our” generosity, Carnegie Hall remained shuttered for an additional 3 months after it received its grant—until October 6th, 2021. But of further interest is that even in NYC, organizations such as Madison Square Garden and the Barclays Center—which were not eligible for this program—chose to open months before. The Barclays Center re-opened in February of 2021—8 months before Carnegie Hall. Is it possible that anticipation of these funds encouraged Carnegie Hall to stay closed? I think so.

There are other concerns as well. While organizations like The Barclays Center, which were not bailed out with ARPA funds, immediately revoked their vaccine mandate when NYC lifted theirs, arts organizations like Carnegie Hall—whose bottom lines were heavily padded with federal tax dollars—often chose not to revoke their vaccine mandates. Is it possible that their choice to continue to exclude audience members (and hence potential revenue) was facilitated by these extremely generous gifts provided by you and me? Once again, I think it is entirely possible.

Arts organizations—and artists—have been some of the most “COVID-crazy” throughout the pandemic: vocal voices for shut-down and disruption of any and every flavor. Is it possible that part of their zeal stemmed from a desire to steer federal funds in their direction? Once again, I think it is not at all unlikely. I know many people who are on the boards of major arts organizations in various places across the country. While early in 2020, these organizations were concerned about surviving for even a few months, now, thanks to gobs of federal bail-outs, every one of these organizations (that I have heard of) finds themselves with the strongest balance sheets in their histories. This is despite remaining closed for months or years, offering nothing in the way of programming to their communities, and now, in many cases, excluding large portions of their potential customer base. It seems to me that this is one of the most salient examples of government programs creating perverse incentives. But just how perverse are these incentives?

If the financial cushion provided by the federal government is indeed making it possible for arts organizations like Carnegie Hall to engage in discriminatory policies such as vaccine mandates, what are the true repercussions of that discrimination?

Not long ago—as recently as February of 2020, in fact—arts organizations like Carnegie Hall, and other representatives of the “high arts”, were aware that they had a serious problem attracting younger audiences, and especially younger audiences of color. And so, massive outreach initiatives were undertaken to engage the young and minorities. Fast-forward two-and-a-half years, and the same organizations now have explicit policies that exclude—at a minimum—50% of audiences under 18 (due to vaccine mandates). In NYC (which has VERY high child vaccination rates for all races), more than 40% of children between 5 and 17 are excluded—nearly 500,000 children. From a race perspective,  56% of black children, 45% of white children, and 40% of Hispanic children are excluded from NYC’s vaccine-mandating cultural institutions. At a minimum, I suppose, we can take comfort that only 1% of Asian children are excluded.  

These policies don’t follow the usual patterns. White children in NYC are the least likely to be fully vaccinated—and hence the most likely to experience exclusion due to vaccine mandates. In our new social justice lens, this is likely viewed as a plus. But let’s look a little more closely.

When examined on a borough-by-borough basis, we see that in Manhattan—the most affluent borough—white children are fully-vaccinated at far higher rates than blacks and Hispanics. It is only in the outer boroughs where white children are less vaccinated. This strongly suggests that what we are really looking at are not racial disparities, but class differences. The result is that every effort to discriminate based on vaccination status ends up being a de facto exclusion of the middle and lower classes by the upper classes. Whether or not that is intentional or not, remains to be seen. But it is no doubt being felt by those who are being excluded.

For me, this fact was uniquely hammered home last November when I did a virtual town hall for a group of Ugandans. I was asked to speak about lockdowns. In November of 2021, Ugandans were STILL in lockdown. Children had not been allowed to attend school AT ALL since March of 2020. But the thing that truly floored me was that Uganda was implementing a vaccine mandate—with only 0.6% of its population fully vaccinated. The vaccine mandates literally preserved access to society only for those in the top 1%.  This is an object lesson, but it is a powerful one. Vaccine mandates exist not to improve health outcomes, but so that some groups—usually elites—can exclude other groups from participation in society.  

Once it became clear that the vaccines did not stop infection and transmission, vaccine mandates left the field of public health, and entered the territory of punitive social exclusion—as much here, as in Uganda. These mandates have already cost millions of Americans their jobs, and they continue to exclude tens of millions of people from society in various states—especially children. They need to go, and the companies and organizations that maintained them after data demonstrated their futility should be subjected to the special scorn we reserve for bigots and hypocrites. Certainly, such discriminatory policies ought to be unthinkable in any organization that received millions of tax dollars in federal bailouts—or which prides itself on inclusion.

One of the reasons we were told masks were essential for school kids this year was that masks would reduce the likelihood of school closures, by reducing disease incidence. Unfortunately, like so much the CDC has promised, the opposite turns out to be true.

Children in masked districts experienced, on average, 4-times the number of disrupted learning days as those in mask-optional districts (Figure 1). The same districts also had 2.5 times higher case rates during the same period as we demonstrated in analysis published on March 9th, 2022.

Figure 1

This result is as important as it was expected. The CDC promised that whatever potential (and willfully ignored) harms might come to children from two full years of forced masking, they must be risked, due to the added safety and schooling that masking would ensure. Neither claim ended up being true. As we demonstrated in our analysis of March 9th, during the January peak of the omicron wave, masked districts had 2.5-fold higher case rates than un-masked districts. Yet, during the same period, as we saw in Figure 1 above, those same schools experienced more than 4-fold higher rates of school disruptions—significantly higher rates of disruption even than their increases in case rates.

Figure 2

January, when the omicron wave peaked, naturally, saw the highest rates of school closures. Virtually all school closures in February were among masked schools.

Figures 3 and 4

Among the top 500 school districts (which account for 40% of the nation’s school children), 35% of children in mask-required schools experienced school disruptions, where only 11% of children in no-mask/mask optional schools experienced such disruptions. Additionally, those disruptions were longer, with mask-required schools experiencing an average shutdown of 4.74 days vs. 3.39 for mask optional.

Figure 5

Later, I will discuss why these results are not surprising. But before I do that, I must acknowledge that in some ways they are surprising. The reason these results are surprising, is that in August of 2021, in an attempt to “encourage” school masking, the CDC changed the definition of a close contact. After the change, a person was not considered a close contact if both people were masked. This put incredible pressure on schools to make masking mandatory, because it allowed children who were (by any real definition) closet contacts not to be tested, and hence to be able to stay in school—even if they might in fact be infected. This policy ensured that parents in mask-optional schools would be required to test their children at much higher rates, due to more inclusive exposure rules for these settings.

To put this into perspective, based on the CDC’s August revisions to the close contact definition, none of the exposed teachers or students in this Feb 2021 CDC study, would have been asked to test, because masking was required at the school, and they would not have been considered close contacts. (The study notes that “inadequate mask use” was observed in clusters A, C, E, G, and I, but it is unlikely that under the new definition, a school would dare to tell parents that their children who were masked were still going to be sent home to quarantine for 10 days, for “inadequate” mask use.)

Figure 6, excerpt from CDC study

Thus, despite the CDC’s definition of a close contact favoring masked schools in terms of requiring less testing, masked schools still saw higher rates of disruption than mask-optional/no-mask schools. Beyond that, they saw higher rates of disruption even relative to their higher case rates.

This tells us that there is something else at work. What is it? As was noted in our prior article, the monthly variation of case rates in mask-optional vs. mask-required districts likely reflects differences in seasonality. Southern states, which are more likely to be mask optional, have two smaller COVID seasons, a summer and a winter season, where mask-required states are more likely to be in northern areas, which experience a much smaller summer season, and a larger winter season (and a small spring shoulder season, which we are just entering). Yet even in this case, as was noted above, the difference in observed case rates is lower (2.5 times higher) than the difference in school disruptions rates (4 times higher).

Nor is the answer vaccination rates. The states where schools were more likely to have mask optional districts are also those that have lower vaccination rates. The difference is especially stark amongst school-age children (we’ll do a follow-on analysis that shows the exact relationship).

So what is it?

I believe it is the myth of control—of which masks are the most potent outward manifestation—that is to blame. This is why I say this is not a surprising result.

In an analysis I performed last year, by far the strongest correlation to masking rates was low access to in-person schooling (unemployment was the other—COVID deaths were not linked—nor were cases as was demonstrated in this peer-reviewed article).

Figure 7

The image in Figure 8 below (which links to an interactive dashboard), shows the average number of full-time, in-person school weeks offered to each state’s children during the 2020/21 school year. Those states where the myth of control was most pervasive saw staggeringly lower rates of in-person learning. Maryland and Washington, both with nearly 100% compliance for masking last year, delivered just 2 full weeks of full-time, in-person instruction per child—compared to Florida, where children were offered the full 40 weeks of full-time, in-person instruction. In Hawaii, the mask, mandate, and general-control-mecca, the average kid received zero weeks of full-time, in-person instruction.

Figure 8 (linked to interactive dashboard)

Thus, we have seen this pattern before, the pattern where the level of mitigation efforts correlates not to decreased disease, but rather, to decreased access to in-person education. Fortunately this year, the differences are smaller, and the magnitude of loss, less. But the lesson remains: More masks, equals less school (and, paradoxically—but probably not causally—more COVID).

Data and Methods.

Data on weekly mask policies for the top 500 school districts was purchased from burbio.com. Data from Burbio.com’s school closures tracker was also accessed. Only districts for which mask policy was available were included, i.e. the top 500 districts (accounting for 40% of U.S. public school students). For each school closure, the status of the mask policy in place during the week prior to the closure was used. This ensures that the closures reflect mask policy in place at the time, though in most districts, there was very little movement on mask policy over the course of this period. For each closure, the number of children impacted was multiplied by the number of days of the closure. These were then aggregated according to mask-policy type in place at the time of the closure. The denominator, student learning days by mask policy, was calculated by multiplying the number of children in each district by policy type, and by the number of days.

Further descriptions of the methods are accessible in the fourth tab of the dashboard.

If you would like to further discuss the methods or data used in this analysis, we would be happy to provide further clarification, and answer any questions. We cannot provide access to the mask policy data by week and district, as that data was purchased from www.burbio.com, but you are more than welcome to contact them to purchase access to that data. But we are happy to discuss the nature of that data with you.

Potential Further Analysis…

1. Comparison of disrupted school days by district, relative to cumulative in-person learning delivered in 2020/21 school year. (Hypothesis: this will be highly negatively correlated.)

2. Demographic characteristics of the districts that experienced the highest rates of disrupted learning days. (Hypothesis: this will show that the districts with the highest closure rates also had the largest minority populations.)

3. Comparison of mask policies in place in 2021/22 vs. access to in-person learning offered in 2020/21 school year. (Hypothesis: The place with highest mask compliance in 2020/21 will also be most likely to force masking.)

4. Looking forward, changes in achievement levels relative to pre-pandemic performance, based on % of school weeks spent masked. (Hypothesis: the places with the highest rates of mask-required school weeks will show the highest rates of learning loss—this will be the final shoe for masks)

5. Average masking rates, relative to vaccination rates (only available by state). (Hypothesis: the states with the highest vaccination rates are highly correlated to low levels of mask-optional instruction.)

6. What else would you like to see?

Since the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year, millions of students across the country have been attending school un-masked. You’d think the CDC and others would be curious about the difference between masked districts and un-masked districts. Unfortunately, scientific curiosity is no longer a hallmark of the CDC—particularly as it pertains to children and masks.

But the data are there. And as with so much in this pandemic, they tell a story different from the one the CDC is spinning.

Burbio.com has been tracking weekly mask status for the 500 largest school districts, comprising approximately 40% of the nations ~51 million public school students.

With these data in hand, the question is, “Is there a difference in the case rates between masked and un-masked districts?”

While we don’t have access to district level case rates, we can use the pediatric case rates at the county level as a reasonable proxy for the school case rates, as most children in a given county are in public schools, and most counties tend to be either masked or un-masked, not a mixture.

The result of that analysis is below. As you can see, except for a slight edge in October, masked districts fare 2-4x worse than un-masked districts. Why would that be?

Well, it’s not really that hard to figure out. In October of 2021 Southern states—which were more likely to offer mask-optional instruction—were just finishing up their summer case surge. Maskier Northern states hadn’t yet started their winter case surges. But, once the winter wave started to take off, masked-up Northern states started to perform far worse. Not because masks made it better or worse, simply because they made no difference. Seasonality appears to have a far, far greater impact on case rates than any of the non-pharmaceutical interventions we have employed—and certainly more than masks.

Now, if I were using CDC research practices, I would simply ignore the October data I have above, and use the other data where case rates in masked districts sky-rocket during the omicron wave to “prove” that masks make case spread worse. The CDC and others in public health have used this particular trick in countless examples—that is, employing “research” that exploited seasonal differences in case rates—to justify mask mandates and much else. It started with the infamous-to-me MGH study, which used as its “control” an earlier period, and the “intervention period” as the later period, when cases were falling naturally due to seasonality. They did it particularly blatantly in the Kansas mask study, which ignored the period when the data no longer supported their conclusion. And they did it again at the end of last summer when they tried to blame the summer surge on differences in vaccination levels, rather than differential regional seasonality.

However, unlike the CDC, I am not intellectually dishonest. So I will walk you through both the strengths and weaknesses of this data, what it shows, and where we need more information.

First to the strengths. This pattern is remarkably similar to that visible in Emily Oster’s data from the 2020/21 school year, and analyzed by @boriquagato. That is, un-masked schools showed higher case rates early in the year, around October, but later in the year, case rates in masked schools vastly outstripped them. According to Emily Oster, “We do not find any correlations with mask mandates.”

Given this difference in regional seasonality, looking at case rates within a given state is more instructive. The graph below shows Georgia, which has a mix of policies in its districts. Looking at the data, it is clear that there is no pattern where masked or un-masked are uniformly higher. In some counties, like Fulton county, there are multiple policies in place for different districts. Given that the case rates were extracted from the CDC’s monthly pediatric case rates by county, the table below shows the case rates for masked, un-masked and partial districts in a given county as equivalent. Again, this is because we do not have district level pediatric case data, only county level. But we can also see that the vast majority of counties have only one type of policy in place, which suggests this is a reasonable proxy to use.

It would be ideal to have case rates by district, as well as testing rates. But at the moment, this is what we have. You may use the dashboard to explore any state and the difference in pediatric case rates by mask policy in each county. As you do so, you will see that there is no pattern that emerges.

While this conclusion remains at-odds with the CDC’s many gerry-rigged, cherry-picked mask studies, it is in-line with higher quality studies, including the one from Emily Oster cited above. Another study which divorced seasonality from its analysis by looking at the period of case growth, irrespective of when in the year that growth occurred, found no impact from state-level mask mandates. Even the Bangladesh study, which has been widely-touted as being the final “proof” that “masks work”, actually is in-line with this data. This is because while that study reported a 10% relative decrease in infections, most people fail to realize how trivial the absolute difference was, specifically from 0.76% to 0.69%, a difference of less than one-tenth of one percent. When the authors released the raw data, it was found that this amounted to just 20 fewer cases among 340,000 people over the course of four months. Even this number would likely be wiped out, given the myriad flaws in the study.

Interestingly, the CDC’s own meta-analysis of 14 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) found no impact from masks on flu transmission—again, inline with this data. (Meta analyses of RCTs are the highest quality of evidence).

Even the many shoddy mechanistic studies can be viewed to be in-line with this data, if one presumes—as the abstract above implies—that the mechanisms they are testing are wrong. The meta-analysis cited above states a need to better understand the mechanisms of person-to-person transmission, because it is clear that the mechanisms explored and which provided the justification for masks, were clearly not representative of how actual viral transmission occurred.

This is likely because the vast majority of the mechanistic studies look at aerosols larger than 5 microns. This despite the fact that since at least 2008 we have known that fewer than 0.1% of exhaled aerosols were larger than 5 microns. While this has not been the focus of research it should have been, since the advent of COVID-19, we now have even more granularity on this. To date, replication-competent virus has only been found in aerosols smaller than 1 micron. Those studies that further sub-divide aerosols below one micron have only found replication-competent virus in the 0.25 - 0.5 micron range. While this may seem odd at first, it becomes less so, when one realizes that less than 1% of the aerosols we exhale are larger than 1 micron.

The respiratory aerosols that carry COVID-19 correspond nearly perfectly to the size of cigarette smoke. The vast majority are below 1 micron, with the majority clustered around 0.28 microns—the average particle size for cigarette smoke is 0.25 micron.

This is significant. Given that we now know that the only aerosols found to carry infectious virus are the same size as cigarette smoke, it means that there is not even mechanistic plausibility for the masks having an impact on case transmission. See the videos below.

Emily Burns😊 DMs welcome #TeamReality @Emily_Burns_V

2/ This is because we know that these aerosols are nearly identical in size to cigarette smoke (see last tweet). Cigarette smoke, and by extension, the respiratory aerosols carrying COVID are NOT STOPPED by masks, or caught. They are redirected—see video.

9:07 PM ∙ May 27, 2021

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Every shred of empirical evidence we have is in line with this. As indeed are the highest quality studies—the RCTs. We jettisoned 100 years of science that showed us that masks did not stop respiratory viruses, and the mechanisms for why that was the case. The only reason we did so, was because Asian nations which masked up quickly early on had lower rates of COVID. All other possibilities for those outcomes were precluded, including the much more logical possibility of some kind of broader pre-existing cross-immunity.

Asians are still wearing masks. Maybe it wasn’t the masks?

Please subscribe for more analysis. I will be doing various follow-on analyses based on this and other data, as well as exploring other harmful aspects of our policy response to the pandemic. You can also follow me on Twitter, @Emily_Burns_V, and look at other analysis I have done on mask research here.