The Bearer of Good Coronavirus News

Stanford scientist John Ioannidis finds himself under attack for questioning the prevailing wisdom about lockdowns.

This is reposted from the April 24, 2020 opinion column in the Wall Street Journal  by Allysia Finley

Defenders of coronavirus lockdown mandates keep talking about science. “We are going to do the right thing, not judge by politics, not judge by protests, but by science,” California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom said this week. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer defended an order that, among other things, banned the sale of paint and vegetable seeds but not liquor or lottery tickets. “Each action has been informed by the best science and epidemiology counsel there is,” she wrote in an op-ed.

But scientists are almost never unanimous, and many appeals to “science” are transparently political or ideological. Consider the story of John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford’s School of Medicine. His expertise is wide-ranging—he juggles appointments in statistics, biomedical data, prevention research and health research and policy. Google Scholar ranks him among the world’s 100 most-cited scientists. He has published more than 1,000 papers, many of them meta-analyses—reviews of other studies. Yet he’s now found himself pilloried because he dissents from the theories behind the lockdowns—because he’s looked at the data and found good news.

In a March article for Stat News, Dr. Ioannidis argued that Covid-19 is far less deadly than modelers were assuming. He considered the experience of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined Feb. 4 in Japan. Nine of 700 infected passengers and crew died. Based on the demographics of the ship’s population, Dr. Ioannidis estimated that the U.S. fatality rate could be as low as 0.025% to 0.625% and put the upper bound at 0.05% to 1%—comparable to that of seasonal flu.

“If that is the true rate,” he wrote, “locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.”

Dr. Ioannidis, 54, likes metaphors. A New York native who grew up in Athens, he also teaches comparative literature and has published seven literary works—poetry and fiction, the latest being an epistolary novel—in Greek. In his spare time, he likes to fence, swim, hike and play basketball.

Early in his career, he realized that “the common denominator for everything that I was doing was that I was very interested in the methods—not necessarily the results but how exactly you do that, how exactly you try to avoid bias, how you avoid error.” When he began examining studies, he discovered that few headline-grabbing findings could be replicated, and many were later contradicted by new evidence.

Scientific studies are often infected by biases. “Several years ago, along with one of my colleagues, we had mapped 235 biases across science. And maybe the biggest cluster is biases that are trying to generate significant, spectacular, fascinating, extraordinary results,” he says. “Early results tend to be inflated. Claims for significance tend to be exaggerated.”

An example is a 2012 meta-analysis on nutritional research, in which he randomly selected 50 common cooking ingredients, such as sugar, flour and milk. Eighty percent of them had been studied for links to cancer, and 72% of the studies linked an ingredient to a higher or lower risk. Yet three-quarters of the findings were weak or statistically insignificant.

Dr. Ioannidis calls the coronavirus pandemic “the perfect storm of that quest for very urgent, spectacular, exciting, apocalyptic results. And as you see, apparently our early estimates seem to have been tremendously exaggerated in many fronts.”

Chief among them was a study by modelers at Imperial College London, which predicted more than 2.2 million coronavirus deaths in the U.S. absent “any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour.” The study was published March 16—the same day the Trump administration released its “15 Days to Slow the Spread” initiative, which included strict social-distancing guidelines.

Dr. Ioannidis says the Imperial projection now appears to be a gross overestimate. “They used inputs that were completely off in some of their calculation,” he says. “If data are limited or flawed, their errors are being propagated through the model. . . . So if you have a small error, and you exponentiate that error, the magnitude of the final error in the prediction or whatever can be astronomical.”

“I love models,” he adds. “I do a lot of mathematical modeling myself. But I think we need to recognize that they’re very, very low in terms of how much weight we can place on them and how much we can trust them. . . . They can give you a very first kind of mathematical justification to a gut feeling, but beyond that point, depending on models for evidence, I think it’s a very bad recipe.”

Modelers sometimes refuse to disclose their assumptions or data, so their errors go undetected. Los Angeles County predicted last week that 95.6% of its population would be infected by August if social distancing orders were relaxed. (Confirmed cases were 0.17% of the population as of Thursday.) But the basis for this projection is unclear. “At a minimum, we need openness and transparency in order to be able to say anything,” Dr. Ioannidis says.

Most important, “what we need is data. We need real data. We need data on how many people are infected so far, how many people are actively infected, what is really the death rate, how many beds do we have to spare, how has this changed.”

That will require more testing. Dr. Ioannidis and colleagues at Stanford last week published a study on the prevalence of coronavirus antibodies in Santa Clara County. Based on blood tests of 3,300 volunteers in the county—which includes San Jose, California’s third-largest city—during the first week of April, they estimated that between 2.49% and 4.16% of the county population had been infected. That’s 50 to 85 times the number of confirmed cases and implies a fatality rate between 0.12% and 0.2%, consistent with that of the Diamond Princess.

The study immediately came under attack. Some statisticians questioned its methods. Critics noted the study sample was not randomly selected, and white women under 64 were disproportionately represented. The Stanford team adjusted for the sampling bias by weighting the results by sex, race and ZIP Code, but the study acknowledges that “other biases, such as bias favoring individuals in good health capable of attending our testing sites, or bias favoring those with prior Covid-like illnesses seeking antibody confirmation are also possible. The overall effect of such biases is hard to ascertain.”

Dr. Ioannidis admits his study isn’t “bulletproof” and says he welcomes scrutiny. But he’s confident the findings will hold up, and he says antibody studies from around the world will yield more data. A study published this week by the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health estimated that the virus is 28 to 55 times as prevalent in that county as confirmed cases are. A New York study released Thursday estimated that 13.9% of the state and 21.2% of the city had been infected, more than 10 times the confirmed cases.

Yet most criticism of the Stanford study has been aimed at defending the lockdown mandates against the implication that they’re an overreaction. “There’s some sort of mob mentality here operating that they just insist that this has to be the end of the world, and it has to be that the sky is falling. It’s attacking studies with data based on speculation and science fiction,” he says. “But dismissing real data in favor of mathematical speculation is mind-boggling.”

In part he blames the media: “We have some evidence that bad news, negative news [stories], are more attractive than positive news—they lead to more clicks, they lead to people being more engaged. And of course we know that fake news travels faster than true news. So in the current environment, unfortunately, we have generated a very heavily panic-driven, horror-driven, death-reality-show type of situation.”

The news is filled with stories of healthy young people who die of coronavirus. But Dr. Ioannidis recently published a paper with his wife, Despina Contopoulos-Ioannidis, an infectious-disease specialist at Stanford, that showed this to be a classic man-bites-dog story. The couple found that people under 65 without underlying conditions accounted for only 0.7% of coronavirus deaths in Italy and 1.8% in New York City.

“Compared to almost any other cause of disease that I can think of, it’s really sparing young people. I’m not saying that the lives of 80-year-olds do not have value—they do,” he says. “But there’s far, far, far more . . . young people who commit suicide.” If the panic and attendant disruption continue, he says, “we will see many young people committing suicide . . . just because we are spreading horror stories with Covid-19. There’s far, far more young people who get cancer and will not be treated, because again, they will not go to the hospital to get treated because of Covid-19. There’s far, far more people whose mental health will collapse.”

He argues that public officials need to weigh these factors when making public-health decisions, and more hard data from antibody and other studies will help. “I think that we should just take everything that we know, put it on the table, and try to see, OK, what’s the next step, and see what happens when we take the next step. I think this sort of data-driven feedback will be the best. So you start opening, you start opening your schools. You can see what happens,” he says. “We need to be open minded, we need to just be calm, allow for some error, it’s unavoidable. We started knowing nothing. We know a lot now, but we still don’t know everything.”

He cautions against drawing broad conclusions about the efficacy of lockdowns based on national infection and fatality rates. “It’s not that we have randomized 10 countries to go into lockdown and another 10 countries to remain relatively open and see what happens, and do that randomly. Different prime ministers, different presidents, different task forces make decisions, they implement them in different sequences, at different times, in different phases of the epidemic. And then people start looking at this data and they say, ‘Oh look at that, this place did very well. Why? Oh, because of this measure.’ This is completely, completely opinion-based.”

People are making “big statements about ‘lockdowns save the world.’ I think that they’re immature. They’re tremendously immature. They may have worked in some cases, they may have had no effect in others, and they may have been damaging still in others.”

Most disagreements among scientists, he notes, reflect differences in perspective, not facts. Some find the Stanford study worrisome because it suggests the virus is more easily transmitted, while others are hopeful because it suggests the virus is far less lethal. “It’s basically an issue of whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist. Even scientists can be optimists and pessimists. Probably usually I’m a pessimist, but in this case, I’m probably an optimist.”

Open Letter to New York City and State Representatives and Lawmakers

***See media coverage below***

We want answers: How is mass testing and contact tracing going to be done by May 15th according to the Governor’s blueprint, when large swaths of the city’s population are unaccountable, undocumented, homeless, and living in the shadows?

Queens Village, NY – Governor Cuomo announced that New York State will be on lockdown until May 15 in order to diminish the spread of the deadly virus and to insure there will be no renewed outbreak, and then will re-evaluate when to “Un-Pause NY.”  In other words, after May 15th the Governor would assess whether or not New York could even move to Phase One, which is a gradual lifting of restrictions. 
 
When asked when the lockdown will be over, he said: “It’s over when you have a vaccine. And that’s 12 to 18 months away.” Also, de Blasio recently announced that the city is canceling all non-essential events including concerts, festivals, and parades, through June to slow the spread of the virus.
 
At this point no one, not the governor or any other elected official knows when New York will be safe to open for business and people can return to their jobs and normal lives, whether it will take weeks, months or over a year as he has intimated. It’s common sense that New York City cannot survive a lockdown of 12 to 18 months. It may not even survive more than a month of the current economic shutdown, with the concurrent outbreak of business bankruptcies, crime, mental illness, domestic violence, drug overdoses, and general breakdown of law and order and civil society. A lockdown going into June will be disaster for the city.
 
Many important measures in the governor’s blueprint to get back to a “new normal” are practicing social distancing, staying home, keeping non-essential business establishments closed, stockpiling PPE, and other measures. But the key element is mass testing and contact tracing. Cuomo said “Why is testing so important? Testing is how you monitor the rate of infection. Testing is how we find people with the virus and trace their contacts. The challenge is to bring testing up to scale.”
 
The big question is how is this mass testing and tracking going to occur by May 15th when large swaths of the city’s population are unaccountable, undocumented, and living in the shadows? This includes the city’s most virus-prone populations: over one million illegal immigrants, more than 78,000 homeless, and 1500 inmates recently released from city jails.
 
This is not a partisan issue. This is about protecting all New Yorkers and getting NYC back to work safely and securely. It is well known that many immigrants here illegally are scared to visit a doctor or hospital to seek treatment for fear of being arrested and deported. How much more unlikely will it be that they would divulge their name, address and personal information for testing or submit to interviews for their contacts?
 
Now that everyone must be identified, tested, and traced, how are we supposed to identify and do the same to the illegal immigrant population of the city? The hardest hit pandemic hotspots in NYC are Elmhurst, the epicenter of the virus, Corona, Jackson Heights and Flushing, and other towns, home to vast proportions of the city’s illegal immigrants. Shouldn’t these hotspots of the disease be the first zip codes tested rather than Bayside, Oakland Gardens, Douglaston, for example and other zip codes with a significantly lower number of cases?
 
Will the DMV release the information on the data-protected Driver’s Licenses issued to illegal aliens? Will the IRS release their Tax ID data? How will public health personnel locate and verify that they are tested and document the results? Can churches and community associations be relied upon to gather and turn over data to health officials?
 
Since the virus hit, the undocumented and homeless populations have taken over our subway system, which is a big contributing factor to New York’s excessive number of infections and fatalities. In contrast, cities without massive underground public subway systems, such as California’s municipalities, have much lower rates of infection.  How will the MTA clean and disinfect our subways and prevent another massive outbreak from homeless and undocumented riders when the city comes out of lockdown?
 
These questions are just the beginnings of an issue that no one is talking about. This is the tip of the iceberg of a momentous task to implement the guidelines in order to safely move the city to lifting the restrictions and getting back to work. No one is addressing it. We want answers, otherwise it is not out of the question to fear the worst consequences for our city. Can we see a repeat of the history we never learned from, the real chaos and disaster, on the level of the Great Depression, the Black Plague, or the Spanish Flu?  We want answers to our questions from our city and state representatives and lawmakers!

Members of the Queens Village Republican Club
April 21, 2020

Additional Media Coverage

One America News Network

WABC Radio: Rich Valdes – This is America – Coronavirus Special (start 11:00 minutes)

Queens GOP Club Demand Answers From Cuomo, de Blasio over COVID-19
Queens County Politics

Open Letter to NYC Elected Officials from the Queens Village Republican Club
Yahoo Finance

The Global Threat to U.S. Hegemony

By Professor Nicholas Giordano

Professor Nicholas Giordano

If the last month has proved anything, it should be the threat that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) poses to the global community. For decades, American administrations, except for the Trump administration, have placated China. They acquiesced out of fear that we will lose access to cheap goods and the potential 1.3-billion-person marketplace. It is due to this benign approach that many of us are on lockdowns, and the U.S. economy, as well as the global economy, are in shambles.

Over the course of the last 30 years, the Communist government of China has been working on their grand strategy to become the dominant superpower by 2049. They grew their economy and increased stability to maintain their authoritarian rule. They continued, unencumbered, to build their national military strength. Now they are ready for the last two major goals. The first being to weaken Taiwan’s international standing that will allow China to recapture Taiwan. The second is far more detrimental, and that’s to replace the U.S. world order.

While China has been working on multiple fronts to achieve these objectives, they faced little pushback from the U.S. and the global community. We willingly underestimated China’s capabilities. America was afraid to use the full weight of our power and strength to ensure countries are playing by our rules. After all, we are the benign superpower. In fact, our policymakers and the corporate elite were fearful of calling out the CCP because they worried China would cut off access to their markets. Just look at the pathetic attempt by the NBA, and athletes like Lebron James, who bowed down to China after the GM of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, dared to criticize the CCP’s hardline approach in Hong Kong. Failures like these embolden the CCP and continue the perception that the U.S. is weak and feckless.

China continually thumbs its nose at the international order, and their strategies to acquire power are extraordinarily sophisticated. China weaponized their currency and the economy by continuing to devalue the Yuan and increase trade deficits throughout the world. They want the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to replace the World Bank, where the United States has the largest voting share. All in an effort to replace the dollar as the world’s currency.

They have a coordinated corporate espionage and intellectual property theft on a massive scale. They force companies to sign partnership agreements if they want access to China’s marketplaces. This has cost the United States trillions of dollars over the last 20 years. They routinely conduct cyber intrusions, penetrating our critical infrastructure and key resources in an effort to exploit vulnerabilities. They infiltrated college campuses throughout the country to cultivate the next generation of American engineers and scientists to be assets for future intelligence endeavors. They set up Confucius Institutes to immerse Americans in “Chinese culture and history” when it is really nothing more than a propaganda machine designed to influence students to the CCP.

Perhaps, the most dangerous of all is China’s Belt and Road Initiative. A number of countries are desperate for money, and the CCP has laid out debt traps throughout the world. China entices these countries with a money supply, particularly for large critical infrastructure projects. The stipulations of the loan are that a Chinese company must be hired to run the project. The people of the country are employed for the menial labor, but Chinese labor is brought in to actually operate the facilities. If a country is unable to pay back the loan, the CCP then owns the infrastructure facility. If a foreign country controls your airports, electricity plants, port system, water supply plants, etc. do you have sovereignty or are you held hostage by the CCP? Quite genius if you think about it.

The U.S. needs to wake-up. The lies and deception have cost tens of thousands of lives, and have plunged our economy, and the global economy, into a recession, perhaps even a depression. It is time countries join together and hold the CCP accountable. It is time we bring critical manufacturing sectors back to the U.S. It is time to reduce our dependency on China. It is time we lead the world again and take our power back.

Nicholas Giordano is Professor of Political Science at Suffolk Community College and host of The P.A.S. Report Podcast

Open America Now!

By Phil Orenstein

Editor’s Note: Jerry Matacotta, historian, and founder of History Seminar Series at QCC provided historical background and assistance for this column.

We Republicans cherish our Freedom. We believe in our country’s birthright in Liberty. We want America open for business. We are Americans, a brave, proud and free people. We’re not good little obedient subjects of big government bureaucrats.  We want America open now!

We stand with President Trump who is plotting our course to economic recovery, to open the economy quickly: “We’re winning our battle, we’re winning our war… We want to get our country back to where it was. We want to open our country and we want to do it quickly.”

To blame the virus on Trump or anyone else, as the media and politicians are doing, is either ignorant or evil. The fault is not Trump’s, it’s not Italy’s, not the bats nor the Wuhan wet markets. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the cause of the global death count and the collapse of the world’s economies. But politicians and journalists bankrolled by the CCP and their global affiliates, who want to keep the country closed, are blaming Trump in order to defeat him in November. The New York Times concocted a narrative that Trump was incompetent and late to act and now people are dying. The Boston Globe headliner was “Trump’s coronavirus advice just might kill us.”  House Speaker Pelosi accused Trump of deception and lies leading to “unnecessary deaths and economic disaster.” The Democrats and the media are saying the blood is on Trump’s hands, not China’s.  They are on the side of the enemy, Communist China, and they have no qualms about playing politics with the virus, destroying our country, shutting down our economy, and if possible keeping the pandemic going until November to get rid of Trump.

While the rest of New York State and the country are desperately yearning to open the economy and breathe the fresh scent of freedom once again, Mayor de Blasio, wants to keep society closed. In a decision that rattled even Governor Cuomo, he announced that all city schools would remain closed for the rest of the school year sending the message that the CCP virus won. Keeping our schools, businesses, beaches and restaurants closed for so long as de Blasio intends to do, are decisions that can destroy the lives and fortunes of millions of New Yorkers. He needs to be shut down and locked up.

Wartime presidents Lincoln, Wilson and FDR invoked the War Powers Act, and although President Trump is loath to use it, he should do so, and arrest de Blasio for sedition. History’s traitors and defectors were rightfully punished and imprisoned for aiding and abetting the enemy and inciting opposition to America, as our nation went to war and rose up to battle the enemies of freedom.

Exploiting the pandemic just like his leftist colleagues, AOC and Ilhan Omar who recently called for a socialist overhaul of the federal government, de Blasio and other Democrat lawmakers are going after the landlords, calling on the Rent Guidelines Board to freeze rents for all regulated apartments, and to allow New Yorkers to pay rent with their security deposits.

In their violent overthrow of the capitalist system, the bloody communist revolutions of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, the first step was to go after the landlords and confiscate their land and estates, which was distributed to the impoverished peasants, who then became slaves of the tyrant government. Communist revolution is part of de Blasio’s DNA.

De Blasio capitulated to the CCP in the war against this invisible viral enemy versus humanity. De Blasio’s declaration of defeat is like sentencing New Yorkers to prison in their houses for months.  It’s holding NYC hostage to the virus. It’s FDR surrendering to Japan after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Instead of rallying all New Yorkers saying “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” de Blasio surrendered, giving everyone in the city fear and paranoia.

There needs to be a city-wide outcry against de Blasio shouting him down from every open window. But where are our city’s politicians, where are our religious leaders, where are the activists, the community organizers? Where are their booming voices now that we need them to get our city back on track, to re-open our city, protect our school kids, save our fellow New Yorkers from economic collapse, fear and desperation? Alas, they are all in hiding, scared to death of the CCP virus, hunkered down in isolation, living in bondage, hording their toilet paper.

The Spanish Flu killed 675,000 in the U.S. but political leaders still led, the city council still met, and people still voted. When the Blitz hit England and bombed the House of Lords, Parliament still met and gave the people hope and courage. Our heroic firefighters and police officers ran into the burning towers on 9/11 giving up their lives to save our fellow New Yorkers. In the worst of times, leaders rose up fearlessly leading their constituents to have faith, hope, and conquer the enemy.

We don’t have any real leaders today except for President Trump, our Commander in Chief, who is courageously leading the battle to defeat the CCP virus! He’s guiding us to be strong, to know that faith defeats the pandemic, courage wins the battle, hope is triumphant.

How many more months are people going to stay imprisoned in their homes and look out their windows? We say no longer! Open our city and let us breath free, do business, dine at our favorite restaurants, have meetings, go to the beach, to weddings, to the game, to church, to synagogue, socialize, drink beer with friends, be free! Most importantly, to vote! To vote every Democrat out! Boot out the enemies of freedom! Elections have consequences. Voting matters now more than ever! Open America Now!