Some Observations On the Efficacy of Masks in a #COVID19 World
By Kevin Kilty | Watts Up With That? | March 16, 2021
Some weeks ago, Pat Frank suggested that I might consider writing an essay about the efficacy of masks and mandates to wear masks during this pandemic. I hesitated doing so at first, but March 8th I noticed another research effort on the part of the CDC to justify masks as a prophylactic strategy.[1] This effort seems very deficient in my view and so this essay resulted. What I write here is a summary of a much larger work in progress.
Lincoln Moses and Frederick Mostellar long ago suggested that public policy be organized as experiments so that we might learn of its effectiveness, or lack thereof, and avoid successive failures.[2] When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived last spring, I wrote that we didn’t need to go through successive battles with exponential processes, but that we appeared not ready to gather useful data and evidence about the effectiveness of social distancing and other advice in this battle.[3] Considering the tendency of people to don a mask against all sorts of bad air is so universal that even screen writers employ it to add realism to a disaster scene, one would think we would know something about their effectiveness.[4] We do and we don’t. While I am told by some people employed in medicine along with many amateurs that masks are essential to controlling spread of SARS-COV-2; highly reputable authorities, many of them, thousands of them, make much more modest and even opposite claims.[5]
How might we analyze these competing claims? I see three avenues of attack: First, we can examine theoretical reasons for and against masks from a mechanical perspective. Second, there are limited experiments known as randomized clinical trials available, all of which have some deficiencies and limited pertinence. Third, we can examine observations of the progress of this epidemic as shown by cases in the light of local mandates. These observations and the methods used to evaluate them are quite deficient in many ways, but they do tend toward similar conclusions.
Mechanical Considerations
The CDC, WHO, and local departments of health have issued a variety of advisories about masks which they update periodically. A typical advisory begins as follows:
“Because the virus is transmitted predominantly by inhaling respiratory droplets from infected persons, universal mask use can help reduce transmission.”
As a rationale for masks this fails because it does not mention a necessary prior element. In order to work, masks have to attenuate the guilty aerosols. The individual aerosols involved could be only a micrometer or few micrometers in size. The individual virions are in the range of 50-130 nanometers.[6] I have looked at a number of cloth masks that one can purchase and found their pore sizes to be 0.05 to 0.15 millimeters. This is 1000 times larger than virions and hundreds of times larger than small aerosols. No wonder these packages of masks should come with disclaimers. Adding to this issue of excessive pore size is that cloth masks are not made of certified materials, are manufactured to no standard, are often ill-fitting displaying gaps aside the nose and on the cheeks, or pulled down below the nose, and sometimes placed over a beard. Flat surgical masks do better at times with the excessive pore size problem but still present issues with poor fit and gaps.
There is a mask that corrects most of these deficiencies. The N-95 mask is made of qualified materials and manufactured to a standard. These masks attenuate 95% of particles in the size range of 0.3 to 0.5 micrometers. However, they still require attention to fit to reduce gaps, and they are not guaranteed to halt very small aerosols the size of individual virions. A news article last summer in the Japanese newspaper, The Asahi Shimbun,[7] summarized measurements that researchers made on particle attenuation of cloth, gauze, and N-95 masks, supports what I have summarized here. Cloth and gauze masks have zero effectiveness; while N-95 masks perform to specification, but only if fitted and worn properly. And even then there is no guarantee they prevent the transmission of disease.
There is one more mechanical aspect to ponder. Often in a crisis people will offer what expertise they can – they recycle their expertise. Something I am doing here. Recently a number of researchers in the field of fluid dynamics have weighed in with measurements and simulations (as one would expect) using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The AIP journal Physics of Fluids produced a special issue in October 2020 highlighting the physics of masks. One study uses CFD to model persons wearing masks inside and outside, in various conditions of air flow, to address ability of masks to attenuate aerosols ejected from a cough or a sneeze.[8] They state in conclusion…
“… our results suggest that, while in indoor environments wearing a mask is very effective to protect others, in outdoor conditions with ambient wind flow present wearing a mask might be essential to protect ourselves from pathogen-carrying saliva particulates escaping from another mask wearing individual in the vicinity.”
This means, I presume, that masks are useful in a situation when all around are sick, and sneezing, wheezing, and coughing — in other words, in a Covid ward of a health care facility. What does “very effective” mean? If it means a very great attenuation of particles, greater than 95% say, then this still has to be interpreted in the light of findings that as few as 300 virions can lead to disease.[9] However, one would think that if coughing and sneezing are the issue, then covering a cough or sneeze should do as well, or perhaps even better when one considers the problem of ill-fit and aerosol escaping through gaps. My experience since March 2020 is that I never encounter anyone in public who are so sick that they are simply sneezing and coughing with abandon.
This computational fluid dynamics approach to determining the efficacy of masks resembles the equivalent modeling approach to climate change. They imply that models define reality when, in fact, it should be that observations and measurements do. There is no means to turn CFD models into clinical outcomes.
In summary, there are mechanical reasons to suppose that masks could reduce the spread of virus in some settings, but none appear pertinent to the materials used to construct masks, or to the ways the public wear them in about 98% of situations. Opposed to supposing that masks might work, or modeling how they might work, we can only learn what efficacy they have by making experiments or observations.
Experiments
The closest thing I have found to true experiments regarding masks are a small number of randomized clinical trials (RCTs). A surprisingly few RCTs involving masks and respirators have been done.[10] I will summarize only two of these. Of these one is pre-COVID-19 and not controversial, and the other is post COVID-19 and subject to controversy and censorship.
There are many respiratory diseases which circulate in the human population. The recent epidemics of MERS, SARS, Ebola and influenza provoked a search for effective non-pharmaceutical interventions. In one example, a group of doctors became interested in how well cloth masks performed for preventing infection in hospitals because such masks are in wide use in the developing world. This trial involved 1607 volunteers at 14 hospitals in Hanoi, Vietnam working in high-risk wards. There were three arms in this RTC: cloth masks, surgical masks, and a control arm of “standard practice” which involved some mask usage but at about one-half the compliance rate of the two treatment arms. The study took place over a four week period, and was to the authors’ knowledge, the first RCT involving cloth masks. Among their findings were that particle attenuation was virtually nil in the cloth masks (97% infiltration), and surprisingly poor in these particular medical masks (44% infiltration). The rate of infection in the cloth mask wearers was double that in the medical mask wearers; medical masks showed some effectiveness, but this contradicted earlier studies showing no efficacy to the medical masks.[11] The researchers conclude that cloth masks should not be advocated for health-care workers, at least until a much better design of such is produced.[12]
The second RCT was performed in Denmark last spring and was subject to censorship by our social media as well as facing some publication resistance.[13] It involved 4862 participants who completed the study. It is more pertinent to this essay because it addressed the efficacy of masks outside of a health care setting. Participants were divided into a control group asked to refrain from wearing masks when out of their home and a treatment arm asked to wear a mask when out of the home for three hours per day. Both groups were ask to follow other social distancing guidelines in order to prevent confounding of masks and distancing which have similar if not identical effects. The primary measured outcome was the number of participants showing SARS-CoV-2 or other respiratory viral infections after one month as determined from PCR testing or hospital diagnosis.
The outcome produced an infection rate of 2.1% in the control arm against 1.8% in the treatment arm. However, the confidence interval of odds ratio (CI of 0.53 to 1.23) included a value of 1.0 almost at its center, suggesting no significant difference in outcomes. If one were to yet insist that the small difference in attack rate (42/2392=1.8% versus 53/2470=2.1%) is nonetheless an important risk reduction, the absolute risk reduction implied (0.003) translates into 30,000 hours (90 hours/0.003) of mask wearing to prevent one case of COVID-19 when community prevalence is around 2.0%. Take that as you may.
There is an interesting series of response letters to this study that are published along with it. These make some legitimate points about design deficiencies. It is certainly true that a study involving masks cannot be a “true RCT” because one cannot blind a study involving masks to a clinical end. The wearer knows they are wearing a mask, and so does the rest of the public. I won’t belabor this point by describing what can go wrong in an unblinded study. Another criticism focuses on using PCR tests, with their false positives and negatives, to measure outcome – a problem which will return in the next section about observations. However despite some criticism, one might note that the outcome of the CHAMP study, in which U.S. Marine Corps recruits were subjected to rigorous social distancing, hygiene and mask wearing resulted in just about the same attack rate as found in this study.[14] I doubt it is possible in the present politicized and hysterical atmosphere to do an RCT on any non-pharmaceutical intervention that could satisfy critics, but none that I know of have shown significant effectiveness of masks.[15]
Observations
Before launching into a discussion of what observations concerning the epidemic may mean, a brief segue into the incubation period and other influences on reporting is instructive. The incubation period of Sars-CoV-2 is probably ten or fourteen days long. Following exposure there is a probability on each successive day of someone becoming a case with half of the ultimate cases developing by day five or six.[16] The process behaves like a low pass filter with a delay. Figure 1 shows this. One-hundred exposures on day zero, presuming all result in cases, produces rising numbers until 19 cases occur on day five. Then they decline to zero.
This has two important considerations. First, it smooths the results of any factor producing a change to R, the reproductive ratio, and makes such changes harder to detect. That is, it reduces resolution. Second, it produces a correlation of cases day to day, so that counts of cases on successive days are not independent of one another, and this has the effect of reducing the degrees of freedom in observational data.[17]
Add to this the distortions resulting from common graphing options like 7 to 21 day averaging done with one-sided (causal) filters; and distortions which resulted from switching from clinical diagnosis to “lab confirmed” cases resting on PCR tests, and what one has is a mess. It is easy to reach a point where what a graph shows today is what might have happened three weeks earlier.
Figure 1. From a single exposure event cases climb for many days afterward in the incubation period. This behaves like a low-pass filter with a delay.
One does not have to search extensively to find evidence suggesting that epidemics proceed unhindered despite all sorts of mandates. I know of no epicurve showing a clear effect. Figure 2, using data drawn from the Covid Tracking Project, for example, shows a comparison among Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. Despite mandates of various rigor, introduced at different times, the epicurves are virtually the same.[18] The Swiss Policy Research Group produced a nice twelve-paned panel, found here, which makes comparisons among various countries, with the same result – masks have no obvious benefit. A more detailed time series of cases in four German cities during April, 2020 also shows no benefit;[18] however, I would criticize these time series as being of such short duration following the mandatory mask order as to have possibly missed the period of greatest effect, if there is one, just over incubation delay.
Figure 2. Comparison of epicurves from three neighboring states, with timing of mask mandates shown. This was done by @ianmSC on Twitter using data drawn from the Covid Tracking Project.
The global data firm Dynata reported that by the first of July mask wearing in Houston and south Florida was likely to be 80% even before mandates; yet these places saw multiple large waves of infection thereafter.[20] California and New York applied rigorous mask mandates, yet still went through several large waves in the summer and autumn. The USA as a whole, in which 39 states imposed mask mandates in April or before, exhibits an epicurve almost identical, except for vertical scale, to Wyoming, the smallest state, even though Wyoming applied no state-wide mandate until November 9. The CDC reported that most people contracting COVID had worn masks, although self-reporting is notoriously inaccurate.[21]
There are many problems with our observational data. Death counts have been biased by incentives provided to hospitals over payments for COVID-19 deaths.[22] While many states tried to build useful epicurves by placing cases on date of symptom onset, many publically available data sets were built by date of case report and become dominated by the cycle of bureaucratic testing and reporting rather than by characteristics of the disease. To see how these differ Figure 3 shows Colorado data from 08/02/20. The difference is stark with a dominant seven day cycle which some people have confused with a dynamic of the disease and which disappears in the date of onset rendition. A subtle effect like mask usage is likely to be lost in these extraneous influences.
Figure 3. Comparison of epicurves by date of onset vs. report date.
The case data is a mess because when it began early in 2020 cases were confirmed through symptoms or at least a probable contact with another case, but eventually became dominated by mass testing of people without symptoms using PCR tests. Once this mass testing took hold even states trying to maintain an epicurve by date of onset could no longer do so. Figure 4 shows the curve for the state of Wyoming which became dominated by the weekly cycle of PCR testing which began at the University in Laramie in mid-august, but really took effect with return of students around September 1. Because so many of the “lab confirmed” cases had no associated symptoms a full one-third of cases remained always under investigation and the date of report became the de facto date of onset.[23]
This university provides an interesting case study in itself. The total number of cases from the start of the epidemic to the 31st of August in the entire county was134 – less than one case per day. The university instituted a very rigorous set of rules for reopening including mask wearing in all settings inside and out, rules for limiting number of persons in university vehicles, foot traffic patterns inside buildings, dedicated entrances and exits, periodic sanitation of all surfaces, social distance guidelines and even a web site to report persons not following rules. I did a few informal surveys around campus in September and October and thought mask compliance was between 80 and 90%.
Nevertheless by October 15, six weeks later, the county had added 780 cases of which 551 (71%) were connected to the U.W. campus. The rules and masks appeared to present no barrier to the spread of our mini-epidemic.[24]
Figure 4. Confirming cases using lab PCR tests caused the appearance of a seven day period in the epicurve.
Evidence provided to support mask mandates consisted mainly of a single study.[25] There have been many criticisms of this study, including one which suggested it be retracted.[26] However, ignoring its controversy for the moment, let’s just focus on what the authors have to say.
They state, first of all, that masks may have effectiveness as large as 85%, but that this estimate has low confidence – precise number but narrow confidence interval. Second, they notice a diminished effectiveness between N95 respirators on the one hand and cloth masks with 12 to 16 plies on the other. No one wears cloth masks with even one-fourth as many plies. Thus, this can’t be an endorsement of cloth masks. No one has unlimited access to N95 respirators,[27] and couldn’t because there is not enough manufacturing capacity to supply them to the public in general. Thus, this “essential” study does no more than reiterate what the other sources of information, including the measurements of particle attenuation reported in the Asahi Shimbun article, have to say. Its recommendations are not pertinent to reality of mask wearing by the general public. This is an unscientific rationale.
A more recent effort to promote masks as essential to controlling the pandemic appears to me to have many shortcomings.[28] This is a retrospective study of the history of the epidemic on a county level, referenced to timing of mask mandates and orders to close or limit restaurant traffic between March 2020 and October 2020. It is what economists would call an “event study”.[29] Problems with the study include:
- The event involved in an event study should be independent of the data. It is not in this case. Mask mandates were generally applied through political pressure during a pandemic wave. Often applied when the wave had begun to wane.
- Mask mandates are probably hopelessly confounded with other orders such as closure of restaurants. According to the researchers themselves, the mask mandates began in April in 39 states, and restaurant closures began in 49 states in March and April. Two influences atop one another. The claim to having a mask measurement unconfounded by closures cannot be true, or there was a lot of data sorting involved which becomes another confounder.
- The paper is missing details about the statistical methods and calculation of significance.
- Even if significant in a statistical sense, the effect seems very small.
The worst flaw seems to me to be a subtle one. The underlying data of the CDC study are curves of cumulative cases and deaths, which I have already explained are flawed to begin with. However, the typical cumulative curve, being a logistic curve, has a particular shape that begins as an almost exponential rise but quickly passes through an inflection with constantly diminishing slope as it approaches a horizontal asymptote. Such a curve will display a long sequence of days in which the case rate declines. An average of daily changes over segments of this decline, even with noise added, which are then referred to an earlier time period, will produce results just like those in the CDC study. No matter what the cause of the limit to an epidemic, the result is the same. What has happened is the CDC has chosen a statistic having a nearly perfect expectation to the characteristics of a logistic curve from any limiting influence, and cannot draw a distinction between the null hypothesis and a particular alternative. It is like circular logic.
Conclusions
There are situations, health care settings mainly or situations of extreme community prevalence with a lot of coughing and sneezing in public, where masks serve a useful purpose. Yet, people who insisted last spring that the epidemic would go away with mask mandates could not have been more wrong. Every consideration shows this.
Nearly all the masks we see people wearing are constructed to no standard, made of varying sorts of cloth, are poorly fitting, are worn with near complete disregard for effectiveness, reused who knows how many times, used for what else we know not, and are often completely open at the cheeks, nose, chin and beard. They appear mainly useful for making a person touch their face constantly.
How about experimental or observational evidence from the present pandemic? The only experimental evidence is consistent with the benefits being so small they cannot be distinguished from occurrence by chance. Probably no new experimental evidence will become available for the following reason: People have probably changed their behavior drastically during this pandemic leading to too many confounding factors to identify the effect of just one. As the epidemic wanes recruiting sufficient subjects for RTCs becomes difficult.
Masks mandates are not a risk free intervention. They have a poor effect of civil society, they absorb resources, they possibly carry health risks of their own, and they certainly contribute to mistaken notions of safety and risk. Masks seem to me like a solution to a political problem which should alone raise skepticism about all claims.
References/Notes:
1- Gery P. Guy,Jr. et al, Association of State-issued Mask Mandates and Allowing On-Premises Dining with County-level COVID-19 Case and Death Growth Rates, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e3.htm?s_cid=mm7010e3_w, last accessed 3/8/2021.
2-Lincoln Moses and Frederick Mostellar, Experimentation: Just do it!, In Statistics and Public Policy, Bruce D. Spencer Ed., Oxford U Press, 1997.
3-Futile Fussings: A history of Graphical Failure from Cattle to #coronavirus https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/03/31/futile-fussings, last accessed 03/13/2021.
4-Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for example.
5-I have a collection including about three-dozen essay, opinion pieces, and research papers, discussing the topics of social distancing, mask mandates, lockdowns, school closures. These include contributions by Dr.s Scott Atlas, John Ioannidis, Paul Alexander, Donald Henderson, Jay Battacharya, Sunetra Gupta, Carl Henehgan, Tom Jefferson, Martin Kulldorff, and others; and almost all of these have been ignored, scorned, or censored in some way.
[6]-Individual virions are mentioned as having various sizes ranging from 50 to 130 nanometers in various internet sources. Corona viruses are pleomorphic which means they have a variety of shapes.
7- Cloth face masks offer zero shield against virus, a study shows, Nayon Kon, The Asahi Shimbun, July 7, 2020.
8-Ali Khosronejad, et al, Fluid Dynamics simulations show that facial masks can suppress the spread of COVID-19 in indoor environments, AIP Advances 10, 125109, (2020); https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0035414;
9-Referenced in Imke Schroeder, COVID-19: A Risk Assessment Perspective, J Chem Health Saf., 2020 May 11: acs:chas.0c00035
10-Tom Jefferson, and Carl Heneghan, Masking lack of evidence with politics, Center for Evidence Based Medicine, July 23, 2020. In particular the authors note the surprisingly small number of RTCs considering the great importance of controlling respiratory disease.
11-C. Raina MacIntyre, et al, A cluster randomized trial of cloth masks compared with medical masks in healthcare workers. BMJ Open 2015;5;e006577. doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2014-006577. Two earlier studies conducted in China by same group found no effectiveness for medical masks.
12-By significant in this context the authors mean a 95% confidence interval that does not enclose a relative risk of infection of 1.0, but is entirely above or below 1.0.
13-Henning Bundgaard, et.al. Effectiveness of adding a mask recommendation to other public health measures to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection in Danish mask wearers, Annals of Internal Medicine, 18 November 2020. https://doi.org/10.7326/M20-6817
14-Andrew G. Letizia, et al, SARS-CoV-2 Transmission among Marine Recruits during Quarantine, N Engl J Med 2020; 383:2407-2416. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2029717
15- Not finding significant protection, significant in the statistical sense, does not mean masks are completely ineffective, or counter-effective, but rather that their effect was not so large that it could be distinguished from a chance outcome at some level, usually 95%, of confidence.
16-P.E. Sartwell, The distribution of incubation periods of infectious disease, Amer. Jour. Hyg., 1950, 51:310-318. Sartwell lists coronaviruses as having a log mean of 0.4 (2.5 days) and dispersion of 1.5. However, a recent training class stated a median of 5-6 days for SARS-CoV-2. I used 5 days for purposes of producing Figure 1.
17-swprs.org/2018/10/01/covid-19-intro/ search for the English language version.
18- This panel of four German city graphs can be found at swprs.org/face-masks-evidence/ last accessed on 3/12/2021
19-This is well known, but see for example, chaamjamal, Illusory Statistical Power in Time Series Analysis, April 30, 2019, https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/40/30/illusory-statistical-power-in-time-series-analysis/ last accessed 1/18/2020
20-WSJ July 29, 2020.
21-CDC report referenced in article at The Federalist, CDC Study Finds Overwhelming Majority Of People Getting Coronavirus Wore Masks, October 12, 2020 https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/12/cdc-study-finds-overwhelming-majority-of-people-getting-coronavirus-wore-masks/
22-Payments for covid deaths, but not for others is incentive enough to bias results.
23-My attempts to learn how many cycles were being employed to report PCR results revealed that no one at any responsible agency in my state knew. All they would do is refer me to a misleading and wrong page at the supplier of the tests. However, a news item reported that researchers at Wayne State University a variety of cycle numbers are used to report results nationally including numbers from 25 to above 37. Viral Loads In COVID-19 Infected Patients Drop, Along With Death Rate, Study Finds Researchers find “a downward trend in the amount of virus detected.” Joseph Curl, DailyWire.com, Sep 27, 2020
24-UW to implement enhanced covid-19 testing program Monday, UW press release, Oct. 15. Data from this also mentions the university expects to perform 15000 tests per week. Yet my asking questions revealed that no one seemed to know what to expect from false positive and negative results. Amazingly few people recognize that interpreting the outcomes of PCR tests is a matter of conditional probability and cannot be done reliably without other information. Even one-half of the faculty and students at Harvard medical school did not know this according to an example from Julian L. Simon in his book “Resampling: The New Statistics, 1997.”
25-Derek K Chu, MD, et al, Physical distancing, face masks, and eye protection to prevent person to person transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19: a systematic
review and meta-analysis, The Lancet, v 395, issue 10242, p1973-1987, June 27, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31142-9
26-For example, the Center for Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM) at Oxford University objects to its social distancing conclusions.
27-The term “N95 Respirator” is ambiguous. These respirators are designed to be tight fitting, but most N95s are manufactured for construction, while there are N95s specifically manufactured to prevent disease transmission. Unfortunately the studies cited do not present a clear picture of which N95s were employed.
28-Refer to note #1 above. But in addition to my concerns listed here more were raised in Paul E. Alexander, The CDC’s Mask Mandate Study: Debunked, AIER, March 4, 2021 https://www.aier.org/article/the-cdcs-mask-mandate-study-debunked/ last accessed 3/13/2021
29-John Staddon, Scientific Research: How Science Works, Fails to Work, and Pretends to Work, Routledge, 2018, p. 124.
Magic Hour for Gates
By Gary Jordan | Wake The F*** UP | March 15, 2021
Bill Gates wants to know everything about you.
He wants to control every aspect of your life.
His insatiable thirst for the supervision and scrutiny of every human being alive has sparked a US$1 billion investment that will blanket the earth in video surveillance satellites, providing real-time feedback with a mere one-second delay. He advocates for Orwellian digital tools to track your every move and has bankrolled US$1.7 billion to provide artificial intelligence that will be used to scan each and every visitor to major event venues worldwide. He wants to do away with end-to-end encryption, so he can snoop on your private conversations. He wants to know when and where you travel and who you travel with. He wants you to eat whatever he says you should eat, drink whatever he says you should drink, think how he wants you to think and know only what he wants you to know. Plus he wants to dictate what goes inside your body.
But he doesn’t want you to know a lot about him.
For instance, in spite of the countless hours he spends babbling on mainstream media, as he preaches to the masses – letting them know what’s good for them – with the aid of obsequious hosts and fawning presstitutes, he consistently fails to mention (or be questioned) of his links to predatory paedophiles. He doesn’t want you to know about any of that. He still believes in personal privacy after all it would seem – especially when it’s to his advantage.
Gates hasn’t, for example, revealed very much about his links to Jeffrey Epstein and the Lolita Express. He also keeps mum concerning his connections with a collector of child pornography and a suspicious video production business, based out of Seattle, known as Magic Hour.
Not a word. Deafening silence.
Joining a long list of fellow filthy rich and filthy minded miscreants such as former US President Bill Clinton, former Israeli President Ehud Barak, Hollywood stars Alec Baldwin and Kevin Spacey and celebrity lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, Bill Gates has indeed boarded the Paedo Plane and spent considerable periods of time in the company of Jeffrey Epstein. Although you would never have thought so, given the lack of media attention it receives, the flight manifests do indeed show that the world’s number one vaccine vendor was a passenger. On top of this, we know that Gates also donated US$2 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which the University described as a ‘gift’ from The Gates Foundation, ‘directed’ by Jeffery Epstein.
What’s more is that Bill Gates knew, throughout several of their meetings, what Jeffrey Epstein truly was – a paedophile and a trafficker of children for the rich and famous. He knew of the crimes Epstein was guilty of committing. Regardless, Gates continued to meet him and continued to conduct business with him.
Another curious link between Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein is Boris Nikolic. This is something else that Gates has not been so quick to discuss live on air. Nikolic is a former science and technology advisor to Bill Gates and the two men were involved in a biotech venture capital firm in which Gates invested money. On the death of Epstein, it was discovered that Nikolic was named in his will as a successor executor and would be responsible for taking care of his estate, in the event that the first two named executors were unwilling or unable to do so.
There were also the Transhumanist and Depopulation Agendas that clearly existed between the deviant physics teacher-cum-hedge fund manager and Bill Gates, which raised an eyebrow or two. Gates, who comes from a family renowned for their active involvement in eugenics, and Epstein, who once expressed a wish to seed a race by impregnating women at a ranch in New Mexico, seemed suitably joined at the hip in their bizarre and disturbing world views. Epstein was a generous donor to the World Transhumanist Association and was reported to have lashed out at scientists from Harvard University, who he criticized for attempting to eliminate poverty and hunger, stating that they were contributing to the overpopulation of the planet by doing so. Gates himself has never shied away from openly declaring his burning desire to eliminate this perceived issue, and has even suggested that the use of vaccines may be the way forward in solving it.
Birds of a feather flock together? The softball media approach to Gates fails to enlighten us on these topics.
Lack of journalistic attention, deliberate or otherwise, was evident when arrests at the Gates’ mansion in 2013 in Washington State went unreported for over nine months after they had taken place. These arrests would link Gates to yet another paedophile. A criminal court trial was opened after engineer, Rick Allen Jones, was found to be in possession of child pornography. It was discovered, after a tip-off from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, (NCMEC), that Jones had traded over 6000 graphic images of child abuse and rape with other perverts. One of these images had been traced back to the Gates household, where Jones worked and where he was arrested. Others were labelled by him to signal that they were images containing scenes of bestiality and urophilia. Intriguingly, a couple of them were even given the label ‘Melinda’. Several of them contained photographs of missing children who were known to the NCMEC.
The arrest of the engineer was later followed by an admission and a conviction. A 3000 page Seattle Police Department report gave further details that were absent from the press reports and indicated that the paedophilia extended to a much broader network. For starters, part of the report mentions a man by the name of ‘Brett’ who, according to police, referred to Rick Allen Jones in email correspondence as ‘Uncle RJ’. Brett’s email domain is from a company called Magic Hour, who claim to create ‘video magic at your fingertips’ and there is evidence in the police report that emails were exchanged between him and the engineer. Whether they were of a pornographic nature or not is uncertain, however we do know that part of the reference to Brett from Magic Hour is redacted and coded, which suggests that it is a description of child sexual abuse.
What is notable is that Magic Hour has a long list of big-name clients listed on their website. These include AT&T, McDonalds, Hewlett Packard, Holland America and, of course, Microsoft. I have reached out directly to them (so have others I researched this case with) and asked about Brett and their relationship with ‘Uncle RJ’. To date, I have not received a response. Nor has anybody else to the best of my knowledge.
Most frustrating of all is the fact that the warped engineer is a free man today and has not done any jail time for his crimes. Magic Hour continues to operate, still boasting of their celebrated customers, with their link to Rick Allen Jones and his child pornography stash remaining a mystery.
Bill Gates, of course, is never quizzed about these subjects. When you can afford to spend millions of dollars bribing the media, you ensure that you are exempt from such analysis. The subject matter discussed in this article will not be aired on CNN or BBC. We cannot expect, anytime soon, to hear Anderson Cooper or Don Lemon broach these facts. In the meantime, we are expected to ignore the elephant in the room and acquiesce to Bill Gates’ demands. We must stay tight-lipped and heed his advice. Depressingly, many do.
In the meantime we drift further into our Brave New World; one that sees innocent people locked up for not wearing a mask or for invoking their right to protest, as immoral, degenerate, child-abusing individuals like Rick Allen Jones walk with impunity on our streets. Bill Gates, the man who employed this reprobate and who wined and dined serial child abuser, Epstein, is held up as a saintly saviour, destined to protect us all from whatever danger he can conjure up for us – with no accountability and no attempt from the CIA agents masquerading as journalists in the mainstream media to get to the truth.
Undoubtedly, the plandemic has served as a great diversion for Gates, taking attention away from his affiliations with the most depraved in our society. But, it is high time now that he started to answer some very basic questions. Such as, why was a known distributor of child pornography, one he employed, sending emails to a man who was directly involved in a video production business which lists an organization that Gates founded as a client? Why were some of the pornographic images discovered in his employee’s trove of exploitation and abuse marked in the name of Bill Gates’ wife? Why did Gates continue to associate with Jeffrey Epstein, despite the knowledge of his abuse of underage girls? Why did he use the private plane of a child molester, when he has a plane of his own? Why didn’t Gates make his donation to MIT directly? Why did he pay it through Epstein? Why was a business associate named as an executor to Epstein’s will?
As verifiable, hard evidence exists in the form of police reports, court documents and bank statements, Gates cannot pull off his usual ploy – dismissing facts as wild conspiracy theories. He cannot gaslight the public any longer.
As a man who feels he has the right to know the ins and outs of everyone’s business and who inserts himself into the spotlight of every major world crisis, the least he can do is answer for the aforementioned connections. If it was you or I who was associated with an infamous child trafficker, or who had employed a trader of child pornography in our homes, you can be sure we would be asked to explain ourselves. There is no reason why Gates shouldn’t have to do the same.
In my book, The COVID-19 Illusion; A Cacophony of Lies, many of the characters at the forefront of the Coronavirus pandemic are placed under the microscope. They all have skeletons in the closet. This includes Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (a man who has connections to terrorism and genocide), Dr. Anthony Fauci (a man who championed the poisonous and deadly AZT drug and approved its use on AIDS victims) and Professor Neil Ferguson (a man with a knack for getting it wrong via his erroneous computer-simulated projections). By far though, the person who is most shrouded in controversy is Bill Gates.
On top of the aforementioned connections with paedophilia, Gates has also been implicated in the suffering of children in Third World nations, as a direct result of his medical interventions – namely vaccination campaigns. His insertion into public health protocol arises even though he is not a doctor and does not have a medical degree. A report from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health showed how his polio vaccines were responsible for 491,000 cases of paralysis in children in the state of Utter Pradesh, India. He has been accused of unethical practices and his experimental HPV vaccine drive was criticized for being deliberately misleading to vulnerable village girls. His team of vaccinators were also discovered to have bullied parents and forged documents. In Africa, his meningitis vaccine campaign alone caused the paralysis of 50 children and the Gates Foundation-funded GSK malaria vaccine is known to have killed 151 infants.
Again, if it was you or I practicing medicine without appropriate qualifications, how do you think we would be treated by authorities?
There can be no further evasion for Bill Gates. His silence on these matters must end. The public wants to know about the effects of his vaccines on children in Africa and India. They want to know about his connections to child abusers in the West. They have a right to ask and a right to know.
The farting cows and fake breast milk lectures can wait.
Bill Gates needs to start speaking about his crimes. It’s well past time he was held accountable for them.
thecovid19illusion@protonmail.com
THE RUSSIAN HYDRA
By Paul Robinson | IRRUSSIANALITY | March 16, 2021
If you want to understand international affairs but only have time to read one academic article, the one I’d recommend would be Robert Jervis’ “Hypotheses on Misperception,” published in World Politics in 1968. It contains 14 hypotheses about how states misperceive one another, creating many of the problems which endanger international security. None of it is exactly rocket science, but it’s the kind of obvious truth that needs to be said, and then repeated over and over again, because people seem to be unable to take it in.
I give the article to students in my defence policy course so we can discuss things such as “Hypothesis 8 is that there is an overall tendency for decision-makers to see other states as more hostile than they are,” and “Hypothesis 9 states that actors tend to see the behavior of others as more centralized, disciplined, and coordinated than it is.” Obvious stuff, as I said, but it comes in useful when we move on to discuss other matters such as this week’s class topic, which was hybrid warfare.
Long-term readers of this blog will know that I’m not a fan of the concept of hybrid warfare, but as it’s something students of defence policy will hear a lot about I kind of have to discuss it, for which purpose I googled around looking for suitable diagrams to use to explain the idea. In the process, I came across this one that accompanied an interview a couple of years ago with a guy called Mark Voyger who was at one time a special advisor to Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, the former Commanding General of US Army Europe.
I thought this depiction of the Russian ‘hydra’ with multiple tentacles emanating from a central core to attack the ‘target nation’ was great because it so clearly demonstrates hypotheses 8 & 9 mentioned above, as well as highlighting the absurdity of the hybrid warfare concept.
For what it does is label absolutely everything ‘war’. Intelligence, diplomacy, law, social-cultural activities, cyber, information, energy, economic relations, infrastructure, crime, and conventional military forces are not just intelligence, diplomacy, law etc. They’re WAR!! Which if you think about it is kind of odd. Isn’t diplomacy meant to be kind of the opposite of war? Why are social-cultural activities (e.g. cultural exchanges) war? Why are information or economic relations war? It’s an extraordinarily paranoid view of the world, in which everything another state, or its citizens do, is part and parcel of a campaign to destroy us from within. They don’t trade with us to get rich. No, they trade with us to subvert us! And so on.
In short, the hybrid warfare concept is pretty much an embodiment of hypothesis 8, allowing those who propagate it to exaggerate threats, and make just about everything a matter of security. That, if you think about it, is more than a little scary. Trade, diplomacy, culture, etc. shouldn’t be securitized. But it’s also conceptual dodgy – after all, when everything is war, then the term war loses any meaning as something distinct.
Beyond that, the Russian hydra model in the diagram above perfectly illustrates hypothesis 9 – i.e. the tendency, “to see the behavior of others as more centralized, disciplined, and coordinated than it is.” For in the diagram, all the tentacles come out of a single core, suggesting that the Russian political leadership is coordinating everything everybody in Russia does and directing it towards a single common purpose – destroying the “target nation.” Which is of course absurd – not only does it exaggerate the Russian state’s power and abilities, but it also ignores the fact that many of those engaged in activities such as cultural exchanges, trade, the media, etc., etc., are following their own agendas not those of the state.
Unfortunately, the hydra model seems quite well entrenched in Western thinkers’ minds. I was looking today at the British government’s new review of foreign and defence policy, and it had the following to say:
A more integrated approach supports faster decision-making, more effective policy-making and more coherent implementation by bringing together defence, diplomacy, development, intelligence and security, trade and aspects of domestic policy in pursuit of cross-government, national objectives. The logic of integration is to make more of finite resources within a more competitive world in which speed of adaptation can provide decisive advantage. It is a response to the fact that adversaries and competitors are already acting in a more integrated way – fusing military and civilian technology and increasingly blurring the boundaries between war and peace, prosperity and security, trade and development, and domestic and foreign policy.
You get it – foreign, “malign” states have fully integrated policies, “blurring the boundaries between war and peace” by coordinating defence, diplomacy, trade, etc., etc, in a seamless strategy of aggression.
And here we run into another danger of the hybrid warfare theory. On the basis of the myth of the hybrid ‘hydra’, Western states are now arguing that they need to become the hydra themselves. I can’t see it ending well.
How Do Big Media Outlets So Often “Independently Confirm” Each Other’s Falsehoods?
NBC News’ national security reporter and long-time de facto CIA spokesman Ken Dilanian purporting to “independently confirm” a false CNN story, Dec. 8, 2017
By Glenn Greenwald | March 16, 2021
There were so many false reports circulated by the dominant corporate wing of the U.S. media as part of the five-year-long Russiagate hysteria that in January, 2019, I compiled what I called “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story.” The only difficult part of that article was choosing which among the many dozens of retractions, corrections and still-uncorrected factual falsehoods merited inclusion in the worst-ten list. So stiff was the competition that I was forced to omit many huge media Russiagate humiliations, and thus, to be fair to those who missed the cut, had to append a large “Dishonorable Mention” category at the end (note: the Intercept’s site seems to be down for the moment, rendering that first link inoperable).
That the entire Russiagate storyline itself was a fraud and a farce is conclusively demonstrated by one decisive fact that can never be memory-holed: namely, the impetus for the scandal and subsequent investigation was the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign had secretly and criminally conspired with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election, primarily hacking into the email inboxes of the DNC and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. And a grand total of zero Americans were accused (let alone convicted) of participating in that animating conspiracy.
The New York Times’ May, 2017 announcement of Robert Mueller as special counsel stated explicitly that his task was “to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials” and specifically “investigate ‘any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.’”
The related secondary media-created conspiracy theory was that the Kremlin clandestinely controlled U.S. political institutions by virtue of sexual and financial blackmail held over President Trump, which they used to compel him to obediently obey their dictates. “I don’t know what the Russians have on the president, politically, personally, or financially” was the dark innuendo which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her media allies most loved to spout. “Prestige news” outlets created their own Q-Anon-level series of art designed to implant in Americans’ minds a slew of McCarthyite imagery showing the Kremlin (or an iconic Moscow cathedral they mistook for the Kremlin) having fully infiltrated Washington’s key institutions.
Cover story of The New Yorker, Feb. 24, 2017
But that all came crashing down on their heads in April, 2019, when Mueller announced that he was closing his investigation without charging even a single American with the criminal conspiracy that launched the entire spectacle: criminally conspiring with the Russian government to interfere in the election. Again: while Mueller — like so many Washington special counsels before him — ended up snaring some operatives in alleged process crimes committed after the investigation commenced (lying to the FBI and obstruction of justice) or unrelated crimes (Manafort’s financial sleaze), the 18-month aggressive, sprawling investigation resulted in exactly zero criminal charges on the core claim that Trump officials had criminally conspired with Russia.
If that were not sufficient to make every person who drowned the country in this crazed conspiracy theory feel enormous shame (and it should have been), the former FBI Director’s final Report explicitly stated that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election.” In many cases, the Report went even further than this “did not establish” formulation to state that there was no evidence of any kind found for many of the key media conspiracies (“The investigation did not identify evidence that any U.S. persons knowingly or intentionally coordinated with the IRA’s interference operation”; the “evidence does not establish that one campaign official’s efforts to dilute a portion of the Republican platform was undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia”; “the investigation did not establish that [Carter] Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election”). The Report also barely even dignified let alone confirmed the long-standing, utterly deranged Democratic/media conspiracy theory that the Kremlin had taken over U.S. policy through blackmail.
The Advocate, Mar. 10, 2017
For a few weeks following the issuance of the Mueller report, Democrats and media figures gamely attempted to deny that it obliterated the conspiracy theories to which they had relentlessly subjected the country for the prior four years. How could they do otherwise? They staked their entire reputations and the trust of their audience on having this be true. To avoid their day of reckoning, they would hype ancillary events such as Paul Manafort’s conviction on unrelated financial crimes or Michael Flynn’s guilty plea for a minor and dubious charge (for which even Mueller recommended no prison time) or Roger Stone’s various process charges to insist that there was still a grain of truth to their multifaceted geopolitical fairy tale seemingly lifted straight from a Tom Clancy Cold War thriller about the world’s two largest nuclear powers.
But even they knew this was just a temporary survival strategy and that it was unsustainable for the long term. That the crux of the scandal all along was that key Trump allies if not the President himself would be indicted and imprisoned for having conspired with the Russians was too glaring to make people forget about it.
That was why former CIA Director John Brennan assured the MSNBC audience in March — just weeks before Mueller closed his investigation with no conspiracy crimes alleged — that it was impossible that the investigation could close without first indicting Trump’s children and other key White House aides on what Brennan correctly said was the whole point of the scandal from the start: “criminal conspiracy involving the Russians . . . . whether or not U.S. persons were actively collaborating, colluding, cooperating, involved in a conspiracy with them or not.” Brennan strongly insinuated that among those likely to be indicted for criminally conspiring with the Russians were those “from the Trump family.”
As we all know, literally none of that happened. Not only were Trump family members not indicted by Mueller on charges of “criminal conspiracy involving the Russians,” no Americans were. Brennan believed there was no way that the Mueller investigation could end without that happening because that was the whole point of the scandal from the start. To explain why it had not happened up to that point after eighteen months of investigation by Mueller’s subpoena-armed and very zealous team of prosecutors, Brennan invented a theory that they were waiting to do that as the final act because they knew they would be fired by Trump once it happened. But it never happened because Mueller found no evidence to prove that it did.
In other words, the conspiracy theory that the media pushed on Americans since before Trump’s inauguration — to the point where it drowned out most of U.S. politics and policy for years — proved to have no evidentiary foundation. And that is one reason I say that the sectors of the media pretending to be most distraught at the spread of “disinformation” by anonymous citizens on Facebook and 4Chan are, in fact, the most aggressive, prolific and destructive disseminators of that disinformation by far (nor was it uncredentialed YouTube hosts, Patreon podcasters or Substack writers who convinced Americans to believe that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons and was in an alliance with Al Qaeda but rather the editor-heavy prestige outlets such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, NBC News and The Atlantic).
With the crux of the Russiagate conspiracy theory collapsed, U.S. media outlets began acknowledging — because they had to — that none of it was vindicated by Mueller’s report. To do so, they abruptly nullified a rule that had been in place since Mueller’s appointment: one may not speak ill of the former FBI Director because he is a patriotic man of the highest integrity and to malign him is to undermine the Brave Men and Women of the FBI Who Keep Us Safe. The only self-preservation tactic they could find to salvage their credibility was to turn on Mueller, quite viciously. Overnight, the storyline emerged: the conspiracy theory we pushed on you was correct all along, but Mueller was a coward and failed in his patriotic duty to say so.
While the hypocrisy of watching a media that for months demanded reverence for Mueller turn on a dime to accuse him of being a borderline-senile, unpatriotic coward was quite amazing, it was at least some progress toward acknowledging the undeniable reality that the media had collectively failed. Their dark conspiracies and predictions of doom were pipe dreams. They flooded the country with disinformation for years about all of this. And while they characteristically engaged in exactly zero self-reflection or self-critique — preferring to heap all the blame on Mueller instead for failing to find the evidence that is still out there of their cognitive derangements — it at least consecrated the fact that this scandal ended in humiliation for them.
When I created my top ten list of media Russiagate debacles, choosing the top ten was difficult but choosing the top spot was not. It is worth briefly revisiting that particular journalistic humiliation because of what it reveals about ongoing media behavior.
On the morning of December 8, 2017, CNN went on the air with one of the most cataclysmic and breathless scoops of the entire Russiagate saga. The network hauled out all of its most melodramatic graphics, music and host voice-tones to signify that this was it : the smoking gun, the ultimate bombshell, the final nail in the coffin, inescapable proof for their conspiracy theory. The big huge scoop notably came from its Congressional reporter Manu Raju (one of the favorite dumping grounds for false leaks by leading House Democrat Russiagate fanatics such as Rep. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell (D-CA)).
According to this historic CNN revelation, a stunning and incriminating email had been obtained by “congressional investigators,” and “multiple sources” conveyed its contents to CNN. This email proved, said CNN, that Donald Trump Jr. was given advanced access to the archive of DNC and Podesta emails ultimately published by WikiLeaks on September 14, 2016. This earth-shattering email to Trump, Jr. was dated September 4 — ten days before WikiLeaks began publishing — and this, in the minds of CNN, proved somehow that the Trump campaign was in on the plot from the start.
Now, even if Trump had been shown the archive in advance by WikiLeaks or someone else, it would not have remotely proven that the Trump campaign was a participant in the plot, but let us not get detained on that hypothetical. The CNN story was treated by the entire liberal sector of the press as the most devastating and incriminating evidence yet produced to prove the truth of the Russiagate conspiracy theory, with one particularly loyal Democratic partisan-writer using an image of a nuclear explosion to convey its significance:
Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall, Dec. 8, 2017
As it turns out, there was one small problem with the CNN story: it was completely and utterly false. The email to Trump, Jr. on which the entire bombshell was based was sent after WikiLeaks began publishing the archive, not before. And it was sent not by some super-secret inside source with the Kremlin or WikiLeaks, but by a random member of the public who, having read about the WikiLeaks publications in the newspaper, emailed Trump, Jr. to encourage him to take a look.
How “multiple sources” all got the date on the email wrong — mis-reading it as September 4 rather than the real date of the email: September 14 — was never explained by CNN. That is because corporate media outlets believe they owe the public no explanation or accountability for the massive errors they commit.
But what was most notable about this episode is that it was not just CNN which reported this fraudulent story. An hour or so after the network shook the political world with its graphics-and-music-shaped bombshell, other news networks — including MSNBC and CBS News — claimed that they had obtained what they called “independent confirmation” that the story was true.
All of these media outlets, reading Orwell as if it is an instruction manual, have now scrubbed most of the humiliating videos where they did this from the internet. But one can still watch here as NBC News’ national security reporter and long-time de facto CIA spokesman Ken Dilanian breathlessly tells an MSNBC host, who herself can barely maintain her composure, that he has spoken with “sources” who have provided independent confirmation of the CNN story, thus adding NBC News’ imprimatur to it. Shortly thereafter, CBS News did the same.
All of this prompted the obvious question: how could MSNBC and CBS News have both purported to “independently confirm” a CNN bombshell that was completely false? The reason this matters is because the term “independently confirm” significantly bolsters the credibility of the initial report because it makes it appear that other credible-to-some news organizations have conducted their own investigation and found more evidence that proves it is true. That is the purpose of the exercise: to bolster the credibility of the story in the minds of the public.
But what actually happens is as deceitful as it is obvious. When a news outlet such as NBC News claims to have “independently corroborated” a report from another corporate outlet, they often do not mean that they searched for and acquired corroborating evidence for it. What they mean is much more tawdry: they called, or were called by, the same anonymous sources that fed CNN the false story in the first place, and were fed the same false story. And just as CNN did — repeated what they were told (almost certainly by Democratic Congressional members and/or their staff) without independently investigating it, because they knew any anti-Trump story would please their partisan audience — NBC News pretended they had obtained “independent confirmation” when all they had done was speak to the same sources that fed CNN.
This episode is so worth recalling not only because it is one of the most stunning and pathetic media humiliations of the Trump era — though it is that — but also because the shoddy tactic that drove it is still in full use by the same media outlets. We just saw proof of that again with a major Washington Post “correction” — which should be called a retraction — of one of the most-discussed news stories of the last six months: the Post’s claims about what Trump said when he called a Georgia election official while he was still contesting the 2020 election results.
On January 9, The Washington Post published a story reporting that an anonymous source claimed that on December 23, Trump spoke by phone with Frances Watson, the chief investigator of the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, and directed her that she must “find the fraud” and promised her she would be “a national hero” if she did so. The paper insisted that those were actual quotes of what Trump said. This time, it was CNN purporting to independently confirm the Post’s reporting, affirming that Trump said these words “according to a source with knowledge of the call.”
But late last week, The Wall Street Journal obtained a recording of that call, and those quotes attributed to Trump do not appear. As a result, The Washington Post — two months after its original story that predictably spread like wildfire throughout the entire media ecosystem — has appended a correction at the top of its original story. Politico’s Alex Thompson correctly pronounced these errors “real bad” because of how widely they spread and were endorsed by other major media outlets.
This is a different species of journalistic malpractice than mere journalistic falsehoods. As I detailed in February and again two weeks ago, the U.S. public was inundated for weeks with an utterly false yet horrifying story — that a barbaric pro-Trump mob had savagely murdered Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick by bashing his skull in with a fire extinguisher. That false tale about the only person said to have been killed at the January 6 riot other than pro-Trump supporters emanated from a New York Times report based on the claims of “two anonymous law enforcement officials.”
As it turns out, Sicknick’s autopsy revealed that he suffered no blunt trauma, and two men arrested this week were charged not with murder but assault and conspiracy to injure an officer: for using an unidentified gas. In reporting those arrests, even The New York Times acknowledged that “prosecutors stopped short of linking the attack to Officer Sicknick’s death the next day” because “both officers and rioters deployed spray, mace and other irritants during the attack” and “it remains unclear whether Officer Sicknick died because of his exposure to the spray.”
Many liberals defenders of these corporate media outlets insist that these major factual errors do not matter because the basic narrative — Trump and his supporters at the Capitol are bad people who did bad things — is still true. But these errors are enormous. That Trump, Jr. received that email from a random member of the public after WikiLeaks began publicly publishing documents transforms the story from smoking gun to irrelevant. That Trump did not utter the extremely incriminating quotes attributed to him in that call at least permits debate about whether he did anything wrong there and what his intent was (encouraging the official to find the fraud he genuinely believed was there or pressuring her to manufacture claims with threats and promises of reward). And there is, manifestly, a fundamental difference in both intent and morality between deliberately murdering someone by repeatedly bashing their skull in with a fire extinguisher and using a non-lethal crowd-control spray frequently used at protests even if it is ultimately proven that the spray is what caused Officer Sicknick’s death (which is why those two acts would carry vastly different punishments under the law).
But all of this highlights the real crisis in journalism, the reason public faith and trust in media institutions is in free fall. With liberal media outlets deliberately embracing a profit model of speaking overwhelmingly to partisan Democrats who use them as their primary source of news, there is zero cost to publishing false claims about people and groups hated by that liberal audience.
That audience does not care if these media outlets publish false stories as long as it is done for the Greater Good of harming their political enemies, and this ethos has contaminated newsrooms as well. Given human fallibility, reporting errors are normal and inevitable, but when they are all geared toward advancing one political agenda or faction and undermining the other, they cease to be errors and become a deliberate strategy or, at best, systemic recklessness.
But whatever else is true, it is vital to understand what news outlets mean when they claim they have “independently verified” the uncorroborated reports of other similar outlets. It means nothing of consequence. In many if not most cases — enough to make this formulation totally unreliable — it signifies nothing more than their willingness to serve as stenographers for the same anonymous political operatives who fed their competitors similar propaganda.
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The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | October 12, 2022
Almost three years ago science entered a new dark age.
Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, seems to agree. He has been compiling a list of the examples of anti-science we have unfortunately become used to.
I have listed his thoughts so far but the list is continually expanding... continue
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