I think one of the biggest problems with misinformation on the left is the combination of polarization with the fact that conservatives have been marginalized in large swaths of academia (to a lesser extent same problem with journalism).
This creates a dynamic where experts are reluctant to stand up and call out misinformation of ideologically charged topics on the left. Sure, they won't endorse it and will deny it's true if asked but if they try and correct that misinformation people will immediately suspect them of shilling for conservatives (why are you trying to convince people that police violence isn't a serious issue rather than combating such and such misinfo from the right).
And I fear this is a much bigger problem than many people realize. People on the right may not have as many fancy degrees but they can tell that experts aren't being straight with them but they can't necessarily tell where or when that is happening.
Indeed, I often think it's the true but misleading facts pushed by the left that do more damage. False claims can be refuted but selective citation of fact and clever manipulation of the discussion issue are often things that are very hard to reply to unless you can and do go read the original research. So it becomes rational for many people on the right to simply throw up their hands and distrust all experts on everything.
The political homogeny of academic is an underrated problem. I think there was a dust-up a while back about a commonly used authoritarian scale. It only measures right wing authoritarianism and somehow nobody noticed for years. That's a pretty big foul-up, given that left wing authoritarianism killed a lot of people in the 20th century and is still a problem. How reliable is the research on authoritarianism if it only measures right wing authoritarianism? That makes me a lot more skeptical of any academic work on authoritarianism.
A lot of the early scholarly research on fascism (often glossed as “authoritarianism” to the exclusion of left-wing authoritarianisms) was basically glorified political opposition work from either anti-fascist or liberal perspectives - which, in turn, still haunts a lot of the contemporary “authoritarian personality” work. Which is a shame, because there are genuine psychological traits that can be attached to political movements’ supporters - but it’s extremely difficult to determine what those are without beginning from a politically-adulterated hypothesis that just makes the whole thing an exercise in motivated reasoning.
Great point…working in academia I am struck by how bright and generally ethical the people I work around are. However, they still
Need to get tenure, and researching things that politically charged in a right leaning direction probably is not a good way to accomplish that.
Also there are probably some issues with group think. I would not want to be a conservative researcher because the methodological standards would be so much higher. I just had a paper kicked back with some truly absurd critiques that I am pretty sure were included because the finding was insufficiently liberal. Not even conservative, just not positive enough for the reviewers biases.
" I often think it's the true but misleading facts pushed by the left that do more damage."
It doesn't matter how often you think it; that's still a tough argument to make. For my part, I often think about the differential death rates from COVID and thereby come to the opposite conclusion.
Yeah, but the right only went nuts on COVID because leftists at the FDA got the vaccine approval delayed by so much the Trump lost the election. If he had been able to take more credit for the vaccines they would have ended up coded right wing.
Do you now, or did you ever, believe that Hunter's notorious laptop was a Russian plant and/or that Trump paid prostitutes to pee on a hotel bed in Moscow?
My level of interest in Hunter Biden is matched by my interest in the antics of Billy Carter, Jimmy's brother, back in the 1970s.
While I thought Buzzfeed was wrong to publish the Steele dossier, I think that if the prostitute story were true, that would rank at about #500 on the list of heinous things Trump did before, during and after his presidency.
I don't give a damn, either, what recreational drugs Hunter Biden may have imbibed or whether he canoodled with his brother's widow, cheated on taxes, cavorted with prostitutes, or fathered a love-child that he refuses to support. But evidence that he and his uncle Jim, and possibly his father, were enriched by influence peddling in China and Ukraine, among other places, and that the influence they were peddling was that of the person who is the incumbent President of the United States is of considerable concern to me, and should be of concern to you as well. More specifically, the primary concern is whether and how implicit obligations arising from payment for the influence being peddled may affect Joe Biden's official conduct or policy choices pertaining to China, Ukraine, or elsewhere.
Oy! There are none so blind as those who will not see.
For starters, there's the testimony of Hunter's former business partner Tony Bobulinski re, among other things, the significance of the cryptic question "10 held by H for the big guy?" in email received from another partner in the same venture. https://www.c-span.org/video/?477307-1/tony-bobulinski-statement-hunter-biden
And you might ask yourself this: why was an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch willing to pay Hunter $83,000 per month while his father was the US Vice President and why did it cut his monthly stipend to less than half that amount two months after his father's term as VP expired? https://nypost.com/2021/05/26/hunter-bidens-ukraine-salary-was-cut-after-joe-biden-left-office/
That problem exists, but I think at least as big a factor is more mundane: it's not just about what experts feel comfortable saying it's which experts (or "experts") are amplified in the media. From my own tiny corner of academia I see a huge gap between those who are the actual leaders in my field, and those who get the media attention and presented in it as the leading voices. Occasionally there is an overlap between the two, but it is slim, and doesn't reflect the range of opinions among experts (even when amplifiying a lot of non-expert and academically marginal opinions)
P.S.
I haven't looked into this deeply, but I strongly suspect that this problem - which doubtless always existed to some extent- is getting worse. In the past, I suspect, the average culutre/science rellated journalist was better educated and better able to judge. More importnatly, the means to find experts to interview involved more traditoinal gatekeeping that coudl have worked better (though imperfectly). In the age of twitter however knowledge is "democratized" in a way that prioritizes the social media savvy, and- I suspect- the cultural familiar or preferred (e.g. for us media, American born experts of a certain class background and certain genders and races if possible) over the gneuinely leading figures (publishing the imporotant groundbraking articles and books, respected in the field etc)
The right murdered its intellectuals and let the vultures pick at the corpses.
The left murdered its intellectuals, and then skinned the corpses, and then stitched the skins together into an intellectual costume, and wears the costume around when it wants to feel authoritative.
Does the left deny individual differences or group differences? My impression was the latter, and that only a pretty small fraction would deny statements like "some people are naturally smarter/more athletic than others"
If you look carefully I think you'll see that's much less a factual disagreement than a value disagreement. Or at least the factual disagreement isn't one that's clearly settled.
In an ideal world you'd have an RCT that denied some youth gender transition surgery gave it to others and then somehow got an unbiased measure of which group is happier 20 years later. We don't have anything like that -- and the few pieces of information we do have are pretty heavily confounded -- so everyone is basically just guessing and trying to weigh how harmful they thing mistakes in each direction might be.
And given how little clear empirical evidence we have on long term effects everyone is basically just reporting their priors not a claim abour rigorous scientific evidence. I think it would be better to be clear about that point but the truth is alot of medicine seems very certain but is based more on what physicians find plausible than you might think.
40 comments and I guess I’ll be the first to mention the first issue that made *me* realize that my side (the Left) doesn’t have a monopoly on misinformation: nuclear power.
And it looks like I’ll also be the first to mention the issue that made me realize the Left is just as scientifically illiterate, subject to cognitive bias, and hypocritical as anyone: Covid. I was - and still am - stunned at the lack of nuance on the Left... that even wanting to calmly discuss costs and benefits of policy interventions in 2020-2021 made me into some kind of conspiracy theorist who wasn’t ‘following the science’ (as ridiculous and widely repeated as the phrases ‘defund the police’ and ‘believe all women’) ...and how Covid hawkery became nothing more than a blind anti-Trump political identity. (Anti-Trumpism is worthwhile... but sacrificing reason and wisdom in its name is not).
Bottom line....humans are humans. If you ever find yourself in a room full of people who all agree on something, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Covid is a great point. The misinformation on the right has been well documented, but Europe’s success at returning most kids to school (even during spring of 2020) was ignored. It is amazing to still see a number of masked people walking outside: these people have ignored the science as much as the right.
Indeed...or the fact that UK National Health maintained a glimmer of common sense by staying the course in not vaccinating otherwise healthy <17yo’s - who (shown in repeated studies...follow the science!) were at effectively zero risk.
One of my favorite - of hundreds - of headslap moments was a colleague insisting the word ‘experimental’ didn’t apply to the vaccine. Even though the first sentence of the FDA waiver we all signed started with the sentence, “This is an experimental vaccine.”
Makes me believe there is something to the idea of long term waning of religious affiliation being replaced by political and social ideologies.
But was that really sufficient reason not to vaccinate? “Zero risk” is an idea people get from medical studies with frequentist statistics that count death (and maybe ventilation) as the only risks. But a week of being unpleasantly sick is itself a risk, that most studies ignored! (And they usually couldn’t figure out how to study transmission to others.) As far as I can tell, myocarditis was the only harmful side effect they documented (again, they basically ignored the day or two of being sick from the vaccine itself) and it’s not clear that this risk was sufficient to endorse non-vaccination.
A big problem in all of this is that the medical establishment doesn’t know how to do anything other than binary decisions based on statistical significance (which is also why you get this insistence of the FDA labeling things as “experimental” in misleading ways, which then gives people an excuse to ignore it).
It’s always funny to me how Covid hawks love to dismiss vaccine risks and side-effects (‘so you get a touch of myocarditis - what’s the big deal?’) and maximize the harm and risk of Covid symptoms *in the exact same way* that vaccine skeptics minimize Covid symptoms (‘so I couldn’t breathe for 2 weeks...no harm there!’) , over-emphasize vax risks, and waive away vax benefits... And inevitably the studies behind these positions will be labeled as ‘flawed’ and ‘shoddy’ by the other side.
It’s like two opposing football fans arguing about a pass interference call.
And that’s kind of what I was going for in my original post. Covid made it clear that the Left does things the same way as the Right - our hearts make the decisions and our brains rationalize them after the fact...And so it goes.
But the risks of myocarditis were/are extremely small and, if not mistaken, mostly tied to certain demographic groups. Not even close to the same risks as damage from Covid, at least for unvaccinated and those with comorbidities.
Yes, everything in medicine is cost/benefit. I dont personally think the myocarditis was ignored- as a physician, I had easy access to all the data, and it still was a no brainer to get vaccination. Nothing is without risk and two of the largest killers in medical deaths are Tylenol and aspirin.
There were logical reasons to vaccinate the younger cohort b/c they could still spread the disease but of course that is a different cost/benefit analysis. The vaccine imo is not more dangerous than dozens of other vaccines people have been taking for years for diseases that pale in comparison to Covid eg Tetanus which kills a few dozen people a year as opposed to 1M.
I personally find that science and medical data is very good as there is a culture of being careful and exact in science, but then the media is mostly about getting eyeballs and so they will oversell or sensationalize the data. That is very prominent in climate science.
Covid was a relatively low risk disease in the younger cohorts, but very contagious, which is why it killed over 1 million which is about 1 out of three thousand people. One NIH estimate is that vaccines saved about 800K lives. That is what you need to weigh the myocarditis and other side effects against.
Some on the left and some on the right do the same things, but the conspiratorial nonsense on the right emerged as a surprisingly large cohort back to the Obama Birther thing which was absolute nonsense that made no sense (somebody is going to sneak out of Hawaii to give birth abroad and the newspaper is in on the conspiracy when they announced the birth) and to follow that trajectory to QAnon and Dominion Voting.
So I would say that there is obviously misinformation on both sides but on the right there is a greater presence like that Trump won the election and it is believed by half of that side and litigated by the leader of that side.
I dont want to get into whataboutisms, maybe I am. Disinformation on the Left as a serious problem and there is a need to be objective. Much of what I hear on CNN or NPR is liberal spin and perhaps it is more dangerous because it is subtler bias than the pure bullhockey that Tucker Carlson will entertain (while being aware that it is pure bull).
With the benefit of retrospect, Covid seems like it must have been engineered for maximum social and political polarization. I will only speak for myself, but I’m pretty sure that during that whole period I had a number of genuinely rational, logical thoughts that can be counted on one hand. The less said about the rest, the better.
I can understand if people who managed to hold on to nuanced views during that time feel frustrated at having been marginalized or worse by their social circles. Those people are right to feel frustrated, even angry or betrayed. But I think the thing to remember is always that there was never, ever going to be a nuanced and enlightened discussion about anything. Due to many factors, polarization around basically everything Covid-related - and all of the cognitive distortion that entails - was sadly inevitable, at least at population scales.
I guess if I wish anything had been done differently, it would have been for elite individuals and organizations to have had more humility around that and to recognize that they were operating within a deeply polarized environment. But again, that’s only an insight available with hindsight, at least to me.
One of the things about Covid is it's now more widely understood that viral infections can trigger a variety of other health problems. Until Covid, most people did not realize that influenza can trigger strokes and heart attacks.
When it comes to the question of whether Covid triggers diabetes, that's another one of those things where it is possible that it's happening but the studies that have found this aren't very good quality so we really don't know if it's an artifact or a real effect and if so how big it is. (If it happens in Covid, it probably also happens in other Coronavirus infections.) It is plausible, because enteroviruses probably trigger it, so it's a good idea to do better quality science to figure out if it does happen.
And this is where I usually start ranting about how during we produced a small amount of good science and a massive quantity of mediocre to crappy quality of science that doesn't really do much to answer the important questions.
The study compared kids who contracted COVID to the kids who had contracted some other viral infection, and the COVID kids developed diabetes at a higher rate. I mean, yes maybe other viral infections also cause diabetes, but the rate of diabetes diagnosis in teenagers went way up during the pandemic, among kids who got COVID. And this is not nothing.
With studies like there are always issues with confounding factors. It doesn't look like they did a great job of matching the kids with Covid compared with other viral infections. The other problem is that they're defining Covid infections as the presence of a diagnosis and then looking for diabetes diagnosis codes after the Covid diagnosis. These types of studies have a lot of problems, not the lease of which being that people who are going to get a formal Covid diagnosis are different from people who don't or who are diagnosed with a different respiratory infection. This is why we should be trying to confirm or disprove studies like this using better methods.
When it comes to the increase in diabetes in kids over Covid, some of that increase is in Type ii diabetes, which tracks with increases in obesity. At least some of the increase in childhood diabetes is a result of closing parks and shutting down youth sports as well as more access to high calorie food in during the pandemic.
What fraction of children and adolescents who are not obese are diabetic? And how many of those who became diabetic after contracting Covid were non-obese? The cited study doesn't say.
What I'm getting at is this: is it justifiable to impose deleterious restrictions (e.g., barring classroom attendance) on everyone in a broad age-group in order to mitigate risk to a relatively small and identifiable sub-group?
Unfortunately, the rate of obesity in teenagers is not small; about 20% of US kids are obese. Moreover, if your plan was "Open schools for thin kids but not fat kids" I think you should rethink it.
Am I correct in inferring your answer to the question I asked is yes?
Allowing thin kids in and barring fat ones isn't the only alternative, but from a utilitarian perspective it's arguably better than shutting everyone out. A better policy, I'm thinking, would be to open classrooms for any child, fat or thin, whose parent or guardian requests his/her admittance after being informed of relevant health risk, while providing distant learning to those opting out.
That doesn't seem to be a helpful distinction here. First, we don't know whether the kids who were diagnosed with COVID and then diabetes were previously healthy. Moreover, even if they were pre-disposed to diabetes, predisposition to diabetes is huge in children. According to the article, one in five US adolescents has pre-diabetes. I understood the return-to-school types to be recommending reopening schools for all kids, not just four-fifths of them.
Although an alarming number of kids have pre-diabetes, the study didn't look at whether it was the kids who had pre-diabetes who got COVID and subsequently diabetes. So (A) it could be kids without pre-diabetes who got diabetes, we don't know and (B) I'd say kids who have pre-diabetes and nothing else are "otherwise healthy," although others might disagree.
I look forward to a time sometime down the road when passions have cooled and we get the benefits of cool, rational analysis that states the obvious that, yes, misinformation on the right about COVID was far, far more damaging than that on the left.
What is obvious to you escapes me. We agree that there were and are rightists advocating weird stuff. However, it was the left that shut down cool rational discussion, locked down the economy, closed the schools, insists that vaccinating very low risk individuals, to note a few policies that yielded great harms. While this happened with Trump in office, it was largely Democratic governors who pushed the extremes, and a massively left leaning press that attacked sane discourse.
Perhaps not, but restrictions imposed on the unvaccinated put them at considerable disadvantage. And those imposing them generally made no allowance for immunity from prior Covid infection or diminishing immunity from prior vaccination.
No, they aren't, any more than they're the party of regulation. Democrats have long believed in mandatory vaccination, and mandatory seatbelt laws, and restrictions on alcohol and tobacco, and regulation of medication, including many surgical procedures. There's just one particular surgical procedure where they have observed that existing regulations often are much more restrictive of bodily autonomy than the interests they serve justify.
Vaccinating low risk people did not cause great harm. Shutting schools did. Locking down economies did, but these are all risk/benefit situations that are not always apparent to begin with and I dont fault people for being overly cautious in a situation where you can't predict the consequences.
Governors varied, left was more often on the over cautious side, but the damage on the right from vaccine denial, and one of the strongest predictors of vaccination was being a Republican, caused thousands of unnecessary deaths so that the death rates correlate very closely with living in a red state. The states with the highest death rates- OK, AL, TX, WV had a death rate about 4x as high as the lowest- VT, HI, MA, CT, so one might consider that of the 44,000 deaths in TX, some 33K would still be alive.
Of course there could be many other factors involved, so that is a little simplistic but the correlation between deaths and vaccination rates is so great that it is fairly evident and hospital data showed that varying with time/available vaccines/variant the death rates in the unvaccinated were 3-7x greater.
I think once the vaccines rolled out, there was clear overshoot on school and business closings, but I dont see that about misinformation but just about being overcautious in a situation where you dont know what the results will be.
You are correct that I shouldn't have included vaccinations of low risk people as being a great harm. That's overstated. I still think it was irrational. The accounts I've read numbering excess deaths don't support your statistics. I'd appreciate your sources for that data so I can understand better.
It may be not be a good judgement to vaccinate young people, I think it was good judgement given the low complication rate, but certainly not irrational, in that the rationale is clear. Younger people can transmit the virus. If it were just a consideration of their risk without the contagion issue perhaps, but I can think of many other vaccines, eg tetanus booster, which do much worse on benefit analysis and prevention.
In reviewing this I might not have chosen TX as an example as they have one of the highest death rates (3rd worse) and a low vaccine rate (21 worst) but not as low as many others. I compared their death rate to the death rate in the highest vaccination states and the math was how many less people would die if they had identical death rates. Now, that assumes that the difference in deaths is only about vaccination, but there are obviously other variables, but the strongest correlation one can find in death rates is vaccination and the strongest correlation in vaccination is politics, where all the high vaccine states are blue and the low vaccine states are red. In fact it is uncanny how closely they track, and that is most notable because the early deaths in NY and NJ were before vaccination, and those had the highest death rates pre vaccine, but they were passed by all the low vaccine states.
As you can see it varies by time which is some about the different variants but also as time went on more of the unvaccinated got the disease and thus had immunity and the death rate for the unvaccinated fell from its peak of 10x the vaccinated to now down to 5x, so I actually under estimated that and it is the unvaccinated dying at 5-10x the rate.
Given those numbers you could mathematically calculate then number of deaths attributable to failure to vaccinate, and Kaiser Foundation did that for the period from 6/21 to 3/22 after the vaccines had rolled out and found that "These vaccine-preventable deaths represent 60% (234K deaths) of all adult COVID-19 deaths since June 2021, when vaccines were widely available "
If you extrapolate that using the 60% preventable to the current, knowing that since 6/21 some 600K people died we can get a figure of 360,000 people who died needlessly for not vaccinating.
Thank you. You've given me much to study and digest. Not being gifted with working with numbers as you clearly are, it will take me a while. I appreciate that you took time to provide a thoughtful reply.
Greater harms than NOT doing any of those things? Pre-vaccination, I think that's very unclear, and I think opting for the potential harms of those things (which can be at least somewhat mitigated via stuff like economic bridge stimulus and at home learning) over the harms of runaway societal infections was a pretty reasonable call.
Post-vaccination, yeah, I think most of the remaining restrictions were overdone (but were also much more rare and less impactful).
Very early, long before vaccinations became available, there were data that demonstrated that the young (excluding comorbidities) were of miniscule risk, those in middle age got sick but rarely died, and the elderly were at high risk. Policies were adopted that were strictest respecting the lowest risk group, despite evidence from Sweden that conclusively demonstrated that school closures were irresponsible and irrelevant. Researchers, prior to the pandemic, concluded that masking was not purposeful with regard to a respiratory virus. There was a massive campaign to dismiss and discredit that information and other facts.
I agree with you that initially, before we had any data, radical steps could be justified. But after I find the conduct contemptible.
I understand your frustration; I share it. I agree that bad decisions were made, and a lot of those decisions were made by either explicitly Democratic politicians or Democratic-coded organizations.
I think where I would offer a friendly challenge is that you appear to be wanting an alternate universe in which scientific results can be dispassionately evaluated and debated to arrive at optimal policy, which is unfortunately not how the world works, even though I really wish it did. If anything, I wish scientists had been more vocal about insisting that their results were data points rather than conclusive results, and more vocal about saying why “follow the science” is a really misleading and dangerous slogan.
But I think the point is that there is no alternate history where we did a better job with Covid policy if only the left had been a bit less left-ier and/or if a silent majority of level-headed people had been allowed to take charge. I think if you want to say that the state of the American left in 2020 and 2021 made it particularly susceptible to promoting counterproductive Covid policy, that’s fine and I largely agree. But polarization 30 years in the making and accelerated by the Trump era did lead to mass cognitive distortions that gave us the suboptimal policies we got, and I’m not sure there’s any way out of that.
Maybe so Marc - but that’s a different question. I don’t doubt the Right spewed dangerous nonsense about Covid, my point is simply that I was under the impression that I lived in a world where the unscientific/evidence-free/overly-simplistic/emotional positions were about 95% Right and 5% Left. Covid woke me up to it being more like 60% - 40%. That is profoundly disappointing and has caused me to doubt many things I used to be sure of...
I disliked the idea of that Chris Mooney book from 2007, "The Republican Brain", positing that the Republicans more vulnerable to misinformation because of deeply psychological and neurological reasons. That strikes me as bogus (if a Republican becomes a Democrat, does the structure of their brain change?)
But I think the right and the Republicans have a more symbiotic relationship between their elites and their followers in disseminating and amplifying misinformation than we see on the Democratic side. That is a very dangerous echo chamber. Look at Fox News -- do its lies shape the thinking of its audience or does its audience force Fox News to lie so much? That's right: it's both! The same for Republican leaders and their voters.
There's simply nothing like this on the Democratic side. We're not pure and sometimes we fall for stories that are too good to give up* but the echo chamber is far weaker on our side.
* The latest is the "banning" of the Amanda Gorman book. It was removed from the elementary school part of one library to the middle school part, but still available to anyone. This is not the end of the world (even if letting *one* obnoxious parent be the cause of this is ridiculous), but it has become the bloody flag for the Left. Same for the exaggerated response to the "banning" of the David statue at the Tallahassee school -- there turned out to be some nuance there. (Same for Covington, same for etc etc).
Our side can do better, but it's still wildly unbalanced.
Democrats, *by and large*, are not followers or looking for direction from a strong leader the way a lot of Republicans are. It doesn’t make us immune from disinformation, but it diminishes the echo chamber and the “Dear Leader Is Always Right” tendencies.
Tired of hearing how DeSantis was the reasonable one here. Ladapo is a crazy person, and anyone who trashes fauci without mentioning any of the idiocy coming from Florida has lost their sense of perspective.
Is your stance that he did not in fact discourage vaccinations?
Or that the appointment of ladapo is not relavent and his appointment did not discourage vaccinations?
Perhaps the only way it could be discouraged is through text in an executive order? Seems like an odd view... maybe you should clarify your stance (and point).
What was it about the left's position on nuclear power that makes you say that? Sure, you can nut-pick people on the left fear mongering and pushing misinformation, especially if you go back 40 or 50 years, but from a modern policy standpoint, the left's track record on support for nuclear power is as good as, if not better than, the right's position.
The Vogtle plant is the only nuclear power plant to be built in the last 50 years and it was built because Obama included funding for it in his all-of-the-above energy plan. (Little known fact - the program that provided $400 million for the failed Solyndra project also provided around $10 billion in funding for Vogtle).
The Biden Administration and the democratically controlled legislature was the first to provide nuclear power with production tax credits to compensate it for its clean output.
As is frequently the case one persons nut is another's reasonable example.
Greenpeace and other environmental orgs have been rabidly anti-nuclear for years, and so have many dem politicians. Not as bad today as it was a decade ago, but Bernie Sanders for example has been pretty aggressively anti for a long time.
Fair points Magellan. Matt’s recent article on the ‘climate left’ gets into this a little bit - you should check it out. There is a strain of pro-abundance and tech-neutrality in the center-left that offers occasional tepid support for nuclear power, but the activist climate left (eg Sierra Club, eg authors of the Green New Deal) is usually reflexively anti-nuke.
The discourse around nuclear power is extremely infuriating in my native Germany. After Fukushima the Greenpeace view on the issue basically became the consensus in Germany. There was no pro-nuclear party left (except for the right-wing extremists from the AfD). Along with the majority of the population, I relatively recently realized that this formerly dominant view is not as ironclad as I had thought. Since then, the more I have been looking into it the more blatant misinformation I have discovered in Green/left circles. And in many cases it is so absurd that it is very hard to imagine how it could not have been the result of bad faith.
The annoying thing is that soild majorities of Germans now are in favor of nuclear power in some capacity; even among Green party voters it is not a clear cut issue. But it just takes so much longer for the politico-journo class' bubble to pop: on German twitter one could get the impression that almost nobody in Germany is in favor of nuclear power.
The influential actors just seem so much harder to convince than the general population on this issue (not least because they are just as beholden to lobbysim, in this case from the "Energiewende" politico-industrial complex - as actors on the right). And so they have pushed through this zombie-policy of nuclear phaseout even though it will cost them votes.
There are nutcases at both ends of the spectrum, and right wingnuts who believed that water fluoridation was promoted by commies with malicious intent are a case in point. But to imply that this notion is, or ever was, widespread among US conservatives is tendentious misinformation.
I was making a joke. About right-wing conspiracies in the 1950s, about why Portland doesn't currently fluoridate for New Age hippy reasons, and about how Portland has a very much above average number of communists.
Maybe I'd have caught your drift if I'd known the "fair city" in question is Portland. Or maybe not. That fear of fluoridation caught on with New Age hippies is news to this Boomer, who remembers when it was an exclusive obsession of rightwing loonies.
This is something I feel very strongly about. I'm in academia, and I consider myself lefty/liberal, but I agree 100% that the right does not have a monopoly on misinformation and harmful ideology.
A *huge* problem on the left is the uncritical (heh) embrace of the belief that America is fundamentally racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and every other -ist and -phobic there is, and if you deny it, you yourself are racist, bad, blinded by your white fragility, etc. The misinformation about police shootings of Black men is just a small part of it. Matt Y had a brilliant piece a couple years ago about Tema Okun's work on how punctuality, hard, work, valuing the written word, and so on are signs of white supremacy. There's a quote from "White Fragility" that says (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "Whenever a Black and white person interact, the question to ask is not, Did racism take place? but How did racism manifest itself in this interaction?"
Can you think of anything more defeatist? If you are white, you *cannot* interact with Black people in any way shape or form without racism hanging over you like a deadly curse. You are doomed to spread racism wherever you go! But you must not complain or protest, because then you will just demonstrate how racist you really are. And if you show that you're hurt in any way, you will be guilty of "making it all about yourself" and "demanding emotional labor from Black people" and "making Black people feel unsafe with your white tears."
How are we supposed to have a healthy, thriving, multiracial, diverse society when people think this way?
Second, and I don't blame Matt Y for not touching this fun topic, but the far left/ progressive folks have made an absolute hash of gender issues. There's sex and gender and gender identity that you feel in your soul and gender presentation and gender-nonconforming and what gender others perceive you as and trans and nonbinary and genderqueer and genderfluid and agender and I have no idea how any of these fit together anymore, and if you question any of it you risk stepping on a landmine labeled "vile transphobe who wants queer/trans people to LITERALLY DIE."
I don't know what the solution is, but as they say in AA, the first step to recovery is to admit that you have a problem.
I'll give one concrete example of the clusterfudge that is the discourse around gender issues. A few years ago, I was reading a comment thread on coming out as trans, and one of the commenters used the word "femme."
As far as I could gather, that commenter used "femme" as a word for people who are *perceived by others as female*, regardless of whether they are cis women, trans men who are still perceived by others as women, trans women who can successfully "pass," or nonbinary folks whose appearance is coded feminine.
Well that one word unleashed a total s**t storm in the comments. People started accusing the commenter of using the word that is literally violent, because "femme" excludes trans women who feel that they are women, but who cannot convincingly "pass" as such. This was triggering and traumatizing and unacceptable. Other commenters tried, reasonably IMHO, to make the argument that it's *useful* to have one word meaning "people who are perceived by others as women, regardless of how they identify," e.g., when discussing sexism. But the "you are an evil transphobic POS if you use the word femme" crowd would not be appeased and the thread degenerated into insults flying back and forth. I withdrew from the thread as from a flaming car wreck, relieved that I had not commented.
I don't doubt for a second that this is true -- I've been on the receiving end of that for questioning Covid-era at-home-schooling policies (was accused of wanting to send kids to, and I quote, "death camps"). It was frustrating and annoying and upsetting.
But then I look at what Dem politicians say, and contrast that with what GOP politicians say, and then look at the actual LAWS that the GOP is passing....and I have a hard time being too worked up about some people being dumb and assholes online.
I think one of the biggest problems with misinformation on the left is the combination of polarization with the fact that conservatives have been marginalized in large swaths of academia (to a lesser extent same problem with journalism).
This creates a dynamic where experts are reluctant to stand up and call out misinformation of ideologically charged topics on the left. Sure, they won't endorse it and will deny it's true if asked but if they try and correct that misinformation people will immediately suspect them of shilling for conservatives (why are you trying to convince people that police violence isn't a serious issue rather than combating such and such misinfo from the right).
And I fear this is a much bigger problem than many people realize. People on the right may not have as many fancy degrees but they can tell that experts aren't being straight with them but they can't necessarily tell where or when that is happening.
Indeed, I often think it's the true but misleading facts pushed by the left that do more damage. False claims can be refuted but selective citation of fact and clever manipulation of the discussion issue are often things that are very hard to reply to unless you can and do go read the original research. So it becomes rational for many people on the right to simply throw up their hands and distrust all experts on everything.
The political homogeny of academic is an underrated problem. I think there was a dust-up a while back about a commonly used authoritarian scale. It only measures right wing authoritarianism and somehow nobody noticed for years. That's a pretty big foul-up, given that left wing authoritarianism killed a lot of people in the 20th century and is still a problem. How reliable is the research on authoritarianism if it only measures right wing authoritarianism? That makes me a lot more skeptical of any academic work on authoritarianism.
A lot of the early scholarly research on fascism (often glossed as “authoritarianism” to the exclusion of left-wing authoritarianisms) was basically glorified political opposition work from either anti-fascist or liberal perspectives - which, in turn, still haunts a lot of the contemporary “authoritarian personality” work. Which is a shame, because there are genuine psychological traits that can be attached to political movements’ supporters - but it’s extremely difficult to determine what those are without beginning from a politically-adulterated hypothesis that just makes the whole thing an exercise in motivated reasoning.
Great point…working in academia I am struck by how bright and generally ethical the people I work around are. However, they still
Need to get tenure, and researching things that politically charged in a right leaning direction probably is not a good way to accomplish that.
Also there are probably some issues with group think. I would not want to be a conservative researcher because the methodological standards would be so much higher. I just had a paper kicked back with some truly absurd critiques that I am pretty sure were included because the finding was insufficiently liberal. Not even conservative, just not positive enough for the reviewers biases.
" I often think it's the true but misleading facts pushed by the left that do more damage."
It doesn't matter how often you think it; that's still a tough argument to make. For my part, I often think about the differential death rates from COVID and thereby come to the opposite conclusion.
Yeah, but the right only went nuts on COVID because leftists at the FDA got the vaccine approval delayed by so much the Trump lost the election. If he had been able to take more credit for the vaccines they would have ended up coded right wing.
Thanks, JSG! I was just about to write a scathing reply but your comment made me realize it was sarcastic. Whew!
Do you now, or did you ever, believe that Hunter's notorious laptop was a Russian plant and/or that Trump paid prostitutes to pee on a hotel bed in Moscow?
My level of interest in Hunter Biden is matched by my interest in the antics of Billy Carter, Jimmy's brother, back in the 1970s.
While I thought Buzzfeed was wrong to publish the Steele dossier, I think that if the prostitute story were true, that would rank at about #500 on the list of heinous things Trump did before, during and after his presidency.
I don't give a damn, either, what recreational drugs Hunter Biden may have imbibed or whether he canoodled with his brother's widow, cheated on taxes, cavorted with prostitutes, or fathered a love-child that he refuses to support. But evidence that he and his uncle Jim, and possibly his father, were enriched by influence peddling in China and Ukraine, among other places, and that the influence they were peddling was that of the person who is the incumbent President of the United States is of considerable concern to me, and should be of concern to you as well. More specifically, the primary concern is whether and how implicit obligations arising from payment for the influence being peddled may affect Joe Biden's official conduct or policy choices pertaining to China, Ukraine, or elsewhere.
Find me some real evidence that Joe Biden was involved and I'll get interested in this issue. Until then, I'll pass.
Oy! There are none so blind as those who will not see.
For starters, there's the testimony of Hunter's former business partner Tony Bobulinski re, among other things, the significance of the cryptic question "10 held by H for the big guy?" in email received from another partner in the same venture. https://www.c-span.org/video/?477307-1/tony-bobulinski-statement-hunter-biden
And you might ask yourself this: why was an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch willing to pay Hunter $83,000 per month while his father was the US Vice President and why did it cut his monthly stipend to less than half that amount two months after his father's term as VP expired? https://nypost.com/2021/05/26/hunter-bidens-ukraine-salary-was-cut-after-joe-biden-left-office/
Similarly, why did the well-connected mainland-Chinese tycoon Ye Jianming funnel millions of dollars through various channels to companies in which Hunter had a primary interest? What did Ye expect to get in return? https://www.wsj.com/articles/house-republicans-report-hunter-biden-james-comer-joe-biden-family-china-c0c506c7?st=xwg4r8bru6vh6nz&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
You are clearly just fanning the flames of weak accusations from the far right.
That problem exists, but I think at least as big a factor is more mundane: it's not just about what experts feel comfortable saying it's which experts (or "experts") are amplified in the media. From my own tiny corner of academia I see a huge gap between those who are the actual leaders in my field, and those who get the media attention and presented in it as the leading voices. Occasionally there is an overlap between the two, but it is slim, and doesn't reflect the range of opinions among experts (even when amplifiying a lot of non-expert and academically marginal opinions)
P.S.
I haven't looked into this deeply, but I strongly suspect that this problem - which doubtless always existed to some extent- is getting worse. In the past, I suspect, the average culutre/science rellated journalist was better educated and better able to judge. More importnatly, the means to find experts to interview involved more traditoinal gatekeeping that coudl have worked better (though imperfectly). In the age of twitter however knowledge is "democratized" in a way that prioritizes the social media savvy, and- I suspect- the cultural familiar or preferred (e.g. for us media, American born experts of a certain class background and certain genders and races if possible) over the gneuinely leading figures (publishing the imporotant groundbraking articles and books, respected in the field etc)
The right murdered its intellectuals and let the vultures pick at the corpses.
The left murdered its intellectuals, and then skinned the corpses, and then stitched the skins together into an intellectual costume, and wears the costume around when it wants to feel authoritative.
Warrens Authentic Latinx Burritx Cafe
Many Bernie supporters still believe that the primaries were rigged; It's exhausting.
Does the left deny individual differences or group differences? My impression was the latter, and that only a pretty small fraction would deny statements like "some people are naturally smarter/more athletic than others"
If you look carefully I think you'll see that's much less a factual disagreement than a value disagreement. Or at least the factual disagreement isn't one that's clearly settled.
In an ideal world you'd have an RCT that denied some youth gender transition surgery gave it to others and then somehow got an unbiased measure of which group is happier 20 years later. We don't have anything like that -- and the few pieces of information we do have are pretty heavily confounded -- so everyone is basically just guessing and trying to weigh how harmful they thing mistakes in each direction might be.
And given how little clear empirical evidence we have on long term effects everyone is basically just reporting their priors not a claim abour rigorous scientific evidence. I think it would be better to be clear about that point but the truth is alot of medicine seems very certain but is based more on what physicians find plausible than you might think.
40 comments and I guess I’ll be the first to mention the first issue that made *me* realize that my side (the Left) doesn’t have a monopoly on misinformation: nuclear power.
And it looks like I’ll also be the first to mention the issue that made me realize the Left is just as scientifically illiterate, subject to cognitive bias, and hypocritical as anyone: Covid. I was - and still am - stunned at the lack of nuance on the Left... that even wanting to calmly discuss costs and benefits of policy interventions in 2020-2021 made me into some kind of conspiracy theorist who wasn’t ‘following the science’ (as ridiculous and widely repeated as the phrases ‘defund the police’ and ‘believe all women’) ...and how Covid hawkery became nothing more than a blind anti-Trump political identity. (Anti-Trumpism is worthwhile... but sacrificing reason and wisdom in its name is not).
Bottom line....humans are humans. If you ever find yourself in a room full of people who all agree on something, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Covid is a great point. The misinformation on the right has been well documented, but Europe’s success at returning most kids to school (even during spring of 2020) was ignored. It is amazing to still see a number of masked people walking outside: these people have ignored the science as much as the right.
Indeed...or the fact that UK National Health maintained a glimmer of common sense by staying the course in not vaccinating otherwise healthy <17yo’s - who (shown in repeated studies...follow the science!) were at effectively zero risk.
One of my favorite - of hundreds - of headslap moments was a colleague insisting the word ‘experimental’ didn’t apply to the vaccine. Even though the first sentence of the FDA waiver we all signed started with the sentence, “This is an experimental vaccine.”
Makes me believe there is something to the idea of long term waning of religious affiliation being replaced by political and social ideologies.
But was that really sufficient reason not to vaccinate? “Zero risk” is an idea people get from medical studies with frequentist statistics that count death (and maybe ventilation) as the only risks. But a week of being unpleasantly sick is itself a risk, that most studies ignored! (And they usually couldn’t figure out how to study transmission to others.) As far as I can tell, myocarditis was the only harmful side effect they documented (again, they basically ignored the day or two of being sick from the vaccine itself) and it’s not clear that this risk was sufficient to endorse non-vaccination.
A big problem in all of this is that the medical establishment doesn’t know how to do anything other than binary decisions based on statistical significance (which is also why you get this insistence of the FDA labeling things as “experimental” in misleading ways, which then gives people an excuse to ignore it).
It’s always funny to me how Covid hawks love to dismiss vaccine risks and side-effects (‘so you get a touch of myocarditis - what’s the big deal?’) and maximize the harm and risk of Covid symptoms *in the exact same way* that vaccine skeptics minimize Covid symptoms (‘so I couldn’t breathe for 2 weeks...no harm there!’) , over-emphasize vax risks, and waive away vax benefits... And inevitably the studies behind these positions will be labeled as ‘flawed’ and ‘shoddy’ by the other side.
It’s like two opposing football fans arguing about a pass interference call.
And that’s kind of what I was going for in my original post. Covid made it clear that the Left does things the same way as the Right - our hearts make the decisions and our brains rationalize them after the fact...And so it goes.
But the risks of myocarditis were/are extremely small and, if not mistaken, mostly tied to certain demographic groups. Not even close to the same risks as damage from Covid, at least for unvaccinated and those with comorbidities.
Yes, everything in medicine is cost/benefit. I dont personally think the myocarditis was ignored- as a physician, I had easy access to all the data, and it still was a no brainer to get vaccination. Nothing is without risk and two of the largest killers in medical deaths are Tylenol and aspirin.
There were logical reasons to vaccinate the younger cohort b/c they could still spread the disease but of course that is a different cost/benefit analysis. The vaccine imo is not more dangerous than dozens of other vaccines people have been taking for years for diseases that pale in comparison to Covid eg Tetanus which kills a few dozen people a year as opposed to 1M.
I personally find that science and medical data is very good as there is a culture of being careful and exact in science, but then the media is mostly about getting eyeballs and so they will oversell or sensationalize the data. That is very prominent in climate science.
Covid was a relatively low risk disease in the younger cohorts, but very contagious, which is why it killed over 1 million which is about 1 out of three thousand people. One NIH estimate is that vaccines saved about 800K lives. That is what you need to weigh the myocarditis and other side effects against.
Some on the left and some on the right do the same things, but the conspiratorial nonsense on the right emerged as a surprisingly large cohort back to the Obama Birther thing which was absolute nonsense that made no sense (somebody is going to sneak out of Hawaii to give birth abroad and the newspaper is in on the conspiracy when they announced the birth) and to follow that trajectory to QAnon and Dominion Voting.
So I would say that there is obviously misinformation on both sides but on the right there is a greater presence like that Trump won the election and it is believed by half of that side and litigated by the leader of that side.
I dont want to get into whataboutisms, maybe I am. Disinformation on the Left as a serious problem and there is a need to be objective. Much of what I hear on CNN or NPR is liberal spin and perhaps it is more dangerous because it is subtler bias than the pure bullhockey that Tucker Carlson will entertain (while being aware that it is pure bull).
With the benefit of retrospect, Covid seems like it must have been engineered for maximum social and political polarization. I will only speak for myself, but I’m pretty sure that during that whole period I had a number of genuinely rational, logical thoughts that can be counted on one hand. The less said about the rest, the better.
I can understand if people who managed to hold on to nuanced views during that time feel frustrated at having been marginalized or worse by their social circles. Those people are right to feel frustrated, even angry or betrayed. But I think the thing to remember is always that there was never, ever going to be a nuanced and enlightened discussion about anything. Due to many factors, polarization around basically everything Covid-related - and all of the cognitive distortion that entails - was sadly inevitable, at least at population scales.
I guess if I wish anything had been done differently, it would have been for elite individuals and organizations to have had more humility around that and to recognize that they were operating within a deeply polarized environment. But again, that’s only an insight available with hindsight, at least to me.
17 year olds were at effectively zero risk if you ignore things like diabetes. I don't think you should ignore diabetes as a risk though. And it's not the only potential sequela. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2789303#:~:text=COVID%2D19%20increases%20the,Morbidity%20and%20Mortality%20Weekly%20Report.&text=Although%20people%20with%20diabetes%20have,contribute%20to%20new%2Donset%20diabetes.
One of the things about Covid is it's now more widely understood that viral infections can trigger a variety of other health problems. Until Covid, most people did not realize that influenza can trigger strokes and heart attacks.
When it comes to the question of whether Covid triggers diabetes, that's another one of those things where it is possible that it's happening but the studies that have found this aren't very good quality so we really don't know if it's an artifact or a real effect and if so how big it is. (If it happens in Covid, it probably also happens in other Coronavirus infections.) It is plausible, because enteroviruses probably trigger it, so it's a good idea to do better quality science to figure out if it does happen.
And this is where I usually start ranting about how during we produced a small amount of good science and a massive quantity of mediocre to crappy quality of science that doesn't really do much to answer the important questions.
The study compared kids who contracted COVID to the kids who had contracted some other viral infection, and the COVID kids developed diabetes at a higher rate. I mean, yes maybe other viral infections also cause diabetes, but the rate of diabetes diagnosis in teenagers went way up during the pandemic, among kids who got COVID. And this is not nothing.
With studies like there are always issues with confounding factors. It doesn't look like they did a great job of matching the kids with Covid compared with other viral infections. The other problem is that they're defining Covid infections as the presence of a diagnosis and then looking for diabetes diagnosis codes after the Covid diagnosis. These types of studies have a lot of problems, not the lease of which being that people who are going to get a formal Covid diagnosis are different from people who don't or who are diagnosed with a different respiratory infection. This is why we should be trying to confirm or disprove studies like this using better methods.
When it comes to the increase in diabetes in kids over Covid, some of that increase is in Type ii diabetes, which tracks with increases in obesity. At least some of the increase in childhood diabetes is a result of closing parks and shutting down youth sports as well as more access to high calorie food in during the pandemic.
What fraction of children and adolescents who are not obese are diabetic? And how many of those who became diabetic after contracting Covid were non-obese? The cited study doesn't say.
What I'm getting at is this: is it justifiable to impose deleterious restrictions (e.g., barring classroom attendance) on everyone in a broad age-group in order to mitigate risk to a relatively small and identifiable sub-group?
Unfortunately, the rate of obesity in teenagers is not small; about 20% of US kids are obese. Moreover, if your plan was "Open schools for thin kids but not fat kids" I think you should rethink it.
Am I correct in inferring your answer to the question I asked is yes?
Allowing thin kids in and barring fat ones isn't the only alternative, but from a utilitarian perspective it's arguably better than shutting everyone out. A better policy, I'm thinking, would be to open classrooms for any child, fat or thin, whose parent or guardian requests his/her admittance after being informed of relevant health risk, while providing distant learning to those opting out.
“Otherwise healthy” 17-year-olds is the key clarifying word, I think. Comorbidities and risk factors change everything.
That doesn't seem to be a helpful distinction here. First, we don't know whether the kids who were diagnosed with COVID and then diabetes were previously healthy. Moreover, even if they were pre-disposed to diabetes, predisposition to diabetes is huge in children. According to the article, one in five US adolescents has pre-diabetes. I understood the return-to-school types to be recommending reopening schools for all kids, not just four-fifths of them.
My apologies - I thought you were saying that 17-year-olds with diabetes had higher risks.
That’s why I included the phrase ‘otherwise healthy’.
Even though I don’t know what ‘sequela’ means...I’d say we are in agreement.
Although an alarming number of kids have pre-diabetes, the study didn't look at whether it was the kids who had pre-diabetes who got COVID and subsequently diabetes. So (A) it could be kids without pre-diabetes who got diabetes, we don't know and (B) I'd say kids who have pre-diabetes and nothing else are "otherwise healthy," although others might disagree.
COVID was definitely the moment that broke me into realizing my side does misinformation, too.
I look forward to a time sometime down the road when passions have cooled and we get the benefits of cool, rational analysis that states the obvious that, yes, misinformation on the right about COVID was far, far more damaging than that on the left.
What is obvious to you escapes me. We agree that there were and are rightists advocating weird stuff. However, it was the left that shut down cool rational discussion, locked down the economy, closed the schools, insists that vaccinating very low risk individuals, to note a few policies that yielded great harms. While this happened with Trump in office, it was largely Democratic governors who pushed the extremes, and a massively left leaning press that attacked sane discourse.
Did vaccinating low risk individuals cause great harms?
Firing them for refusing to do so caused tremendous harm.
Perhaps not, but restrictions imposed on the unvaccinated put them at considerable disadvantage. And those imposing them generally made no allowance for immunity from prior Covid infection or diminishing immunity from prior vaccination.
Idk aren’t Democrats the party of bodily autonomy?
No, they aren't, any more than they're the party of regulation. Democrats have long believed in mandatory vaccination, and mandatory seatbelt laws, and restrictions on alcohol and tobacco, and regulation of medication, including many surgical procedures. There's just one particular surgical procedure where they have observed that existing regulations often are much more restrictive of bodily autonomy than the interests they serve justify.
C'mon, get real. They may not be "the party of bodily autonomy," but Democrats are clearly more pro-regulation than Republicans.
Vaccinating low risk people did not cause great harm. Shutting schools did. Locking down economies did, but these are all risk/benefit situations that are not always apparent to begin with and I dont fault people for being overly cautious in a situation where you can't predict the consequences.
Governors varied, left was more often on the over cautious side, but the damage on the right from vaccine denial, and one of the strongest predictors of vaccination was being a Republican, caused thousands of unnecessary deaths so that the death rates correlate very closely with living in a red state. The states with the highest death rates- OK, AL, TX, WV had a death rate about 4x as high as the lowest- VT, HI, MA, CT, so one might consider that of the 44,000 deaths in TX, some 33K would still be alive.
Of course there could be many other factors involved, so that is a little simplistic but the correlation between deaths and vaccination rates is so great that it is fairly evident and hospital data showed that varying with time/available vaccines/variant the death rates in the unvaccinated were 3-7x greater.
I think once the vaccines rolled out, there was clear overshoot on school and business closings, but I dont see that about misinformation but just about being overcautious in a situation where you dont know what the results will be.
You are correct that I shouldn't have included vaccinations of low risk people as being a great harm. That's overstated. I still think it was irrational. The accounts I've read numbering excess deaths don't support your statistics. I'd appreciate your sources for that data so I can understand better.
It may be not be a good judgement to vaccinate young people, I think it was good judgement given the low complication rate, but certainly not irrational, in that the rationale is clear. Younger people can transmit the virus. If it were just a consideration of their risk without the contagion issue perhaps, but I can think of many other vaccines, eg tetanus booster, which do much worse on benefit analysis and prevention.
The information on per state death rates is here from the CDC https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/covid19_mortality_final/COVID19.htm . The information on vaccine rates is here from John Hopkins https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/vaccines/us-states
In reviewing this I might not have chosen TX as an example as they have one of the highest death rates (3rd worse) and a low vaccine rate (21 worst) but not as low as many others. I compared their death rate to the death rate in the highest vaccination states and the math was how many less people would die if they had identical death rates. Now, that assumes that the difference in deaths is only about vaccination, but there are obviously other variables, but the strongest correlation one can find in death rates is vaccination and the strongest correlation in vaccination is politics, where all the high vaccine states are blue and the low vaccine states are red. In fact it is uncanny how closely they track, and that is most notable because the early deaths in NY and NJ were before vaccination, and those had the highest death rates pre vaccine, but they were passed by all the low vaccine states.
Now the figure of unvaccinated dying at 3-7x the rate is my recollection of those numbers which were published daily from John Hopkins in the NYT and being a numbers obsessive I tracked them, but let me see if I can find a source. Here it is, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-covid-19-deaths-by-vaccination-status
As you can see it varies by time which is some about the different variants but also as time went on more of the unvaccinated got the disease and thus had immunity and the death rate for the unvaccinated fell from its peak of 10x the vaccinated to now down to 5x, so I actually under estimated that and it is the unvaccinated dying at 5-10x the rate.
Given those numbers you could mathematically calculate then number of deaths attributable to failure to vaccinate, and Kaiser Foundation did that for the period from 6/21 to 3/22 after the vaccines had rolled out and found that "These vaccine-preventable deaths represent 60% (234K deaths) of all adult COVID-19 deaths since June 2021, when vaccines were widely available "
https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/covid-19-continues-to-be-a-leading-cause-of-death-in-the-u-s/
If you extrapolate that using the 60% preventable to the current, knowing that since 6/21 some 600K people died we can get a figure of 360,000 people who died needlessly for not vaccinating.
Thank you. You've given me much to study and digest. Not being gifted with working with numbers as you clearly are, it will take me a while. I appreciate that you took time to provide a thoughtful reply.
Greater harms than NOT doing any of those things? Pre-vaccination, I think that's very unclear, and I think opting for the potential harms of those things (which can be at least somewhat mitigated via stuff like economic bridge stimulus and at home learning) over the harms of runaway societal infections was a pretty reasonable call.
Post-vaccination, yeah, I think most of the remaining restrictions were overdone (but were also much more rare and less impactful).
Very early, long before vaccinations became available, there were data that demonstrated that the young (excluding comorbidities) were of miniscule risk, those in middle age got sick but rarely died, and the elderly were at high risk. Policies were adopted that were strictest respecting the lowest risk group, despite evidence from Sweden that conclusively demonstrated that school closures were irresponsible and irrelevant. Researchers, prior to the pandemic, concluded that masking was not purposeful with regard to a respiratory virus. There was a massive campaign to dismiss and discredit that information and other facts.
I agree with you that initially, before we had any data, radical steps could be justified. But after I find the conduct contemptible.
I understand your frustration; I share it. I agree that bad decisions were made, and a lot of those decisions were made by either explicitly Democratic politicians or Democratic-coded organizations.
I think where I would offer a friendly challenge is that you appear to be wanting an alternate universe in which scientific results can be dispassionately evaluated and debated to arrive at optimal policy, which is unfortunately not how the world works, even though I really wish it did. If anything, I wish scientists had been more vocal about insisting that their results were data points rather than conclusive results, and more vocal about saying why “follow the science” is a really misleading and dangerous slogan.
But I think the point is that there is no alternate history where we did a better job with Covid policy if only the left had been a bit less left-ier and/or if a silent majority of level-headed people had been allowed to take charge. I think if you want to say that the state of the American left in 2020 and 2021 made it particularly susceptible to promoting counterproductive Covid policy, that’s fine and I largely agree. But polarization 30 years in the making and accelerated by the Trump era did lead to mass cognitive distortions that gave us the suboptimal policies we got, and I’m not sure there’s any way out of that.
Maybe so Marc - but that’s a different question. I don’t doubt the Right spewed dangerous nonsense about Covid, my point is simply that I was under the impression that I lived in a world where the unscientific/evidence-free/overly-simplistic/emotional positions were about 95% Right and 5% Left. Covid woke me up to it being more like 60% - 40%. That is profoundly disappointing and has caused me to doubt many things I used to be sure of...
I'll go for 70/30.
I disliked the idea of that Chris Mooney book from 2007, "The Republican Brain", positing that the Republicans more vulnerable to misinformation because of deeply psychological and neurological reasons. That strikes me as bogus (if a Republican becomes a Democrat, does the structure of their brain change?)
But I think the right and the Republicans have a more symbiotic relationship between their elites and their followers in disseminating and amplifying misinformation than we see on the Democratic side. That is a very dangerous echo chamber. Look at Fox News -- do its lies shape the thinking of its audience or does its audience force Fox News to lie so much? That's right: it's both! The same for Republican leaders and their voters.
There's simply nothing like this on the Democratic side. We're not pure and sometimes we fall for stories that are too good to give up* but the echo chamber is far weaker on our side.
* The latest is the "banning" of the Amanda Gorman book. It was removed from the elementary school part of one library to the middle school part, but still available to anyone. This is not the end of the world (even if letting *one* obnoxious parent be the cause of this is ridiculous), but it has become the bloody flag for the Left. Same for the exaggerated response to the "banning" of the David statue at the Tallahassee school -- there turned out to be some nuance there. (Same for Covington, same for etc etc).
Our side can do better, but it's still wildly unbalanced.
"Hands up don't shoot", Rebekah Jones. Kyle Rittenhouse, etc etc. Many such cases
Democrats, *by and large*, are not followers or looking for direction from a strong leader the way a lot of Republicans are. It doesn’t make us immune from disinformation, but it diminishes the echo chamber and the “Dear Leader Is Always Right” tendencies.
Excellent (and scary) Kevin Drum post on just this subject today: https://jabberwocking.com/conservatives-actively-want-to-believe-only-lies/
Right.
Tired of hearing how DeSantis was the reasonable one here. Ladapo is a crazy person, and anyone who trashes fauci without mentioning any of the idiocy coming from Florida has lost their sense of perspective.
What, exactly, was idiotic in DeSantis's relevant policy, in your opinion?
Actively discouraging vaccination, exactly, was idiotic.
Your notion of exactitude is looser than mine. In which of his many executive orders did DeSantis do that? A cited quote would be helpful.
Is your stance that he did not in fact discourage vaccinations?
Or that the appointment of ladapo is not relavent and his appointment did not discourage vaccinations?
Perhaps the only way it could be discouraged is through text in an executive order? Seems like an odd view... maybe you should clarify your stance (and point).
What was it about the left's position on nuclear power that makes you say that? Sure, you can nut-pick people on the left fear mongering and pushing misinformation, especially if you go back 40 or 50 years, but from a modern policy standpoint, the left's track record on support for nuclear power is as good as, if not better than, the right's position.
The Vogtle plant is the only nuclear power plant to be built in the last 50 years and it was built because Obama included funding for it in his all-of-the-above energy plan. (Little known fact - the program that provided $400 million for the failed Solyndra project also provided around $10 billion in funding for Vogtle).
The Biden Administration and the democratically controlled legislature was the first to provide nuclear power with production tax credits to compensate it for its clean output.
As is frequently the case one persons nut is another's reasonable example.
Greenpeace and other environmental orgs have been rabidly anti-nuclear for years, and so have many dem politicians. Not as bad today as it was a decade ago, but Bernie Sanders for example has been pretty aggressively anti for a long time.
And yet Vermont is the most nuclear powered state!
So your argument is that he is anti-nuclear AND ineffective?
Most anti-antiperspirant AND ineffective. Thank god.
It's probably the most wood stove powered state, too. So what?
Fair points Magellan. Matt’s recent article on the ‘climate left’ gets into this a little bit - you should check it out. There is a strain of pro-abundance and tech-neutrality in the center-left that offers occasional tepid support for nuclear power, but the activist climate left (eg Sierra Club, eg authors of the Green New Deal) is usually reflexively anti-nuke.
Oops - Matt’s article on the Climate Left was from December 2022
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/the-climate-lefts-plans-for-the-next?r=bhq7n&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
The discourse around nuclear power is extremely infuriating in my native Germany. After Fukushima the Greenpeace view on the issue basically became the consensus in Germany. There was no pro-nuclear party left (except for the right-wing extremists from the AfD). Along with the majority of the population, I relatively recently realized that this formerly dominant view is not as ironclad as I had thought. Since then, the more I have been looking into it the more blatant misinformation I have discovered in Green/left circles. And in many cases it is so absurd that it is very hard to imagine how it could not have been the result of bad faith.
The annoying thing is that soild majorities of Germans now are in favor of nuclear power in some capacity; even among Green party voters it is not a clear cut issue. But it just takes so much longer for the politico-journo class' bubble to pop: on German twitter one could get the impression that almost nobody in Germany is in favor of nuclear power.
The influential actors just seem so much harder to convince than the general population on this issue (not least because they are just as beholden to lobbysim, in this case from the "Energiewende" politico-industrial complex - as actors on the right). And so they have pushed through this zombie-policy of nuclear phaseout even though it will cost them votes.
Because it will turn them into communists? (Oh, wait...)
There are nutcases at both ends of the spectrum, and right wingnuts who believed that water fluoridation was promoted by commies with malicious intent are a case in point. But to imply that this notion is, or ever was, widespread among US conservatives is tendentious misinformation.
I was making a joke. About right-wing conspiracies in the 1950s, about why Portland doesn't currently fluoridate for New Age hippy reasons, and about how Portland has a very much above average number of communists.
Ah, so!
Maybe I'd have caught your drift if I'd known the "fair city" in question is Portland. Or maybe not. That fear of fluoridation caught on with New Age hippies is news to this Boomer, who remembers when it was an exclusive obsession of rightwing loonies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr2bSL5VQgM
Smh
Thank you for this excellent column, Matt Y.
This is something I feel very strongly about. I'm in academia, and I consider myself lefty/liberal, but I agree 100% that the right does not have a monopoly on misinformation and harmful ideology.
A *huge* problem on the left is the uncritical (heh) embrace of the belief that America is fundamentally racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and every other -ist and -phobic there is, and if you deny it, you yourself are racist, bad, blinded by your white fragility, etc. The misinformation about police shootings of Black men is just a small part of it. Matt Y had a brilliant piece a couple years ago about Tema Okun's work on how punctuality, hard, work, valuing the written word, and so on are signs of white supremacy. There's a quote from "White Fragility" that says (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "Whenever a Black and white person interact, the question to ask is not, Did racism take place? but How did racism manifest itself in this interaction?"
Can you think of anything more defeatist? If you are white, you *cannot* interact with Black people in any way shape or form without racism hanging over you like a deadly curse. You are doomed to spread racism wherever you go! But you must not complain or protest, because then you will just demonstrate how racist you really are. And if you show that you're hurt in any way, you will be guilty of "making it all about yourself" and "demanding emotional labor from Black people" and "making Black people feel unsafe with your white tears."
How are we supposed to have a healthy, thriving, multiracial, diverse society when people think this way?
Second, and I don't blame Matt Y for not touching this fun topic, but the far left/ progressive folks have made an absolute hash of gender issues. There's sex and gender and gender identity that you feel in your soul and gender presentation and gender-nonconforming and what gender others perceive you as and trans and nonbinary and genderqueer and genderfluid and agender and I have no idea how any of these fit together anymore, and if you question any of it you risk stepping on a landmine labeled "vile transphobe who wants queer/trans people to LITERALLY DIE."
I don't know what the solution is, but as they say in AA, the first step to recovery is to admit that you have a problem.
I'll give one concrete example of the clusterfudge that is the discourse around gender issues. A few years ago, I was reading a comment thread on coming out as trans, and one of the commenters used the word "femme."
As far as I could gather, that commenter used "femme" as a word for people who are *perceived by others as female*, regardless of whether they are cis women, trans men who are still perceived by others as women, trans women who can successfully "pass," or nonbinary folks whose appearance is coded feminine.
Well that one word unleashed a total s**t storm in the comments. People started accusing the commenter of using the word that is literally violent, because "femme" excludes trans women who feel that they are women, but who cannot convincingly "pass" as such. This was triggering and traumatizing and unacceptable. Other commenters tried, reasonably IMHO, to make the argument that it's *useful* to have one word meaning "people who are perceived by others as women, regardless of how they identify," e.g., when discussing sexism. But the "you are an evil transphobic POS if you use the word femme" crowd would not be appeased and the thread degenerated into insults flying back and forth. I withdrew from the thread as from a flaming car wreck, relieved that I had not commented.
I don't doubt for a second that this is true -- I've been on the receiving end of that for questioning Covid-era at-home-schooling policies (was accused of wanting to send kids to, and I quote, "death camps"). It was frustrating and annoying and upsetting.
But then I look at what Dem politicians say, and contrast that with what GOP politicians say, and then look at the actual LAWS that the GOP is passing....and I have a hard time being too worked up about some people being dumb and assholes online.
Wow - Godwin’s law and “think of the children!”, the combination of which is like the conversation-stopping royal flush.
Good gravy, where were these comments? Twitter? Or somewhere more niche (yes, activist Twitter is niche, but you know what I mean)?
It was an online advice column. I won't name it, because I like it overall and I don't want to make it look bad.
No worries - I was just wondering if it was something more generalist or more community-specific (sounds like the former).