The Better Letter: Mail Call
I get email.
The most recent editions of TBL (here and here) generated a much larger pile of commentary than normal. The biggest number of responses were from doctors thanking me for my straight-talk on vaccines.
Facts – and reality, more broadly – are inherently messy. And, remember, we look at facts that may tend to disconfirm what we hold dear differently than facts which may tend to affirm our priors. About a disconfirming fact, we ask if it must be true. About a confirming fact, we consider if it can be true. In a world chock-full of information (real, fake, and everything in between), particularly about a fast-moving health crisis at the bleeding edge of scientific inquiry, one can always find reasons to doubt what we don’t want to believe and to accept that of which we are already convinced.
That’s why my overarching view of how to deal with Covid-19 begins with doctors. As I have noted before, doctors have real expertise, relevant experience, and serious skin in the game. Therefore, for me, the most compelling statistic about Covid is that more than 96 percent of surveyed American physicians are fully vaccinated against it. That nearly all doctors have chosen to get fully vaccinated tells me most of what I need to know.
What’s more, when I talk to doctors now – some in my family – their outlooks have changed considerably, but not about the virus or vaccines. Today, they are profoundly angry – a moral anger that is deep and existential – that they are risking their lives and livelihoods during their second, third, or fourth wave of a pandemic to treat so many patients who could have avoided being seriously ill simply by getting a shot.
Over the first half of 2021, about 99 percent of Covid hospital admissions in America were among those who hadn’t been fully inoculated, while more than 99 percent of the people who lost their lives to Covid-19 were not fully inoculated against the virus. American Covid deaths have long passed American World War II deaths and people are still creating reasons not to get vaccinated.
I don’t get it; doctors even less.
“Anger is the best word, honestly,” one South Carolina doctor said. This is an anger that is painful and overwhelming to be near, much less feel.
You needn’t take my word for it, but you should listen to your doctors. If you haven’t, please get vaccinated.
Not all the feedback was as positive as that provided by doctors, however. What follows are four pieces of correspondence that were less than complimentary and my responses to them. Mail call! It’s a special mid-week edition of TBL.
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Mail Call
“I was a bit disappointed and dismayed at your brief comments regarding the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan, and your dig at the Biden administration.
“…As I know you are a baseball fan …… it seems to me that launching off at the last player at bat in a game lost in first innings does nothing to facilitate a better player, a better team, or increase the probability of a better outcome in the next game. Though I am now a retired business executive, I distinctly recall the best lessons learned, and the path to lasting improvement, came from those times when we did not live up to our mission.
“These are serious times in America where we need serious people like yourself to lead by example.”
Thank you for the kind words, but I disagree with your assessment with respect to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I think we can walk and chew gum at the same time.
I agree with you that we should begin “a long overdue process of understanding how we found ourselves trapped in 20 years of infinite loops of poor judgment. Assignment of blame over Afghanistan is the hallmark example of a bipartisan failure. History is full of stories of how things are a mess when you are on the losing end of a conflict.”
However, in my judgment, it is also the case that the withdrawal was a catastrophic failure. There was inadequate planning, poor execution, and unkept promises galore (such as those about not leaving Americans behind and protecting locals who aided us over the years). Plus, we gifted the Taliban with something like $85 billion worth of military equipment and talk, bizarrely, of them as “partners.”
Last Wednesday, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that the new leaders of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan have “challenging track records.” In 2017, Afghanistan’s new number one let his son blow himself up as a suicide bomber, for goodness’ sake. Challenging, indeed. The Taliban isn’t “partnering” with us and joining the “international community” anytime soon. President Biden’s claims that the withdrawal was an “extraordinary success” are Trumpian in their grandiose ridiculousness.
There is a good argument to be made for leaving Afghanistan. Our airlift has been Herculean and heroic. However, the execution of our withdrawal, overall, was monumentally botched. Leaving Americans (and those who aided us) behind was unconscionable.
“Your [sic] back with your CNN tabloid politics.”
Since I generally don’t watch CNN except during weather emergencies, I can’t really respond to the criticism as stated. However, since you so helpfully included a “cut and paste” of a “news” article that I take to outline your position on the pandemic, there is something for me to talk about.
The article is disinformation through-and-through.
It turns out (thanks, Google) the “cut and paste” is this article from The Epoch Times. As posited by The Atlantic, “conventional descriptions of The Epoch Times don’t adequately capture the singular mix of straight news, religious belief [the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong], conspiracy-peddling, Sinophobia, science denialism, legitimate grievance, and political expediency at the heart of the institution — a mix that, despite the paper’s mysteries, makes it a strangely fitting poster child for this unsettled moment.”
Based upon this article, that’s kind.
The article cites and quotes three doctors by name.
James Neuenschwander is an anti-vaxer who owns a for-profit entity called Bio Energy Medical Center, focusing on “energy balance and natural ways of healing.” He claims to be board certified in “integrative medicine,” which is a brand, not a specialty.
Peter McCullough is a cardiologist and anti-vax advocate being sued by his former hospital for illegitimately affiliating himself with its facilities and continuing to use his former professional titles – such as “vice chief of internal medicine at Baylor University Medical Center.”
Jeffrey Barke is another activist with false and controversial views about the pandemic, most famous for pulling out a handgun during a video and claiming it is more protection against Covid than masking.
So, The Epoch Times found three of the tiny, tiny minority of doctors who are anti-vax (and get paid for it) without seeking out any recognized experts in the field. The majority, even an overwhelming majority, can be wrong, of course, and so can experts, generally, but that’s more than a little suspicious.
The article cites the usual litany of reasons to avoid vaccination: phony diagnoses, data limitations, over-counting of Covid cases, and increasing cases of infection among the vaccinated. What it doesn’t provide is decent data to support its claims or to overcome the plain fact that vaccination, while not working as well as everyone hoped, is doing a very good job preventing severe illness and death.
“Pandering to the desires of mainstream media target markets is how the mainstream media makes money. And recently they have been making lots of money.
“Just wondering... do you consider yourself a part of ‘the media?’
“And who do you consider to be ‘mainstream media?’”
You’re correct about the pandering, but it’s relatively new as an overt business strategy. In the fairly near-past, when advertising paid the bills for print media, there wasn’t nearly the pressure to pander.
In my view, for example, Maggie Haberman of The New York Times is an excellent reporter. She was tough in her coverage of Donald Trump, but her most persistent and aggressive critics came from the left. They accused her of being a “water carrier for the 45th president” because she was also generally fair.
This (relatively) new territory makes media bias more overt and more pronounced. Reading multiple sources with differing viewpoints is more important than ever.
I don’t consider myself part of the media. I’m not a journalist and have never worked as one. I don’t report stories. And I provide TBL for free.
Asking the makeup of the mainstream media is an excellent question. I generally think of it as “legacy media” – the sources of news coverage that have been around a long time in print and broadcast formats. I subscribe to plenty of MSM outlets: The New York Times; The Wall Street Journal; The Washington Post; The Atlantic; The New Yorker; Morningstar (which isn’t just media, of course); Christianity Today; and Bloomberg.
My “new media” sources: The Dispatch; The Athletic; The Bulwark; and a variety of Substacks (such as Astral Codex Ten, Matt Taibbi, Scot McKnight, Noah Smith, Freddie DeBoer, Glenn Loury, and Andrew Sullivan). I subscribe to various newsletters from all of these sources (e.g., the brilliant Jason Zweig) and, of course, read #FinTwit and the work of its “members” (too many to list) regularly and carefully. Aggregation and curation provided by Tadas Viskanta (Abnormal Returns) and Joe Calhoun (Real Clear Markets) are invaluable for the world of finance.
Podcasts make up a big hunk of “new media,” and I have been privileged to appear on many excellent ones. Of course, there are many excellent podcasts that would never have me on.
I’d love to hear from readers what good sources (I’m sure many) I’ve missed.
“People do not believe the covid death statistics and this is why: [This link to an Illinois official correctly pointing out that anyone who dies with Covid is counted as a Covid death even if the proximate cause of death is something else].”
Our allegiances influence how we see the world and what we deem true to a shocking extent and with numbing regularity. Opposing “teams” view such things as controversial calls by officials, candidate debate performances, and even science through their own partisan lenses. To make a bad situation worse, the smarter one is, the more susceptible – smart people are better at coming up with clever ways to view the “problem” as not a problem, rationalizing their views, and finding information that seems to support what they thought all along. And, to put a nice cherry on top, the ever-increasing universe of data provides more and more opportunity for “seeing things differently.”
Facts are messy. To some extent that’s a good thing. One of the big red flags re Bernie Madoff should have been that his alleged returns were so consistent. Therefore, I’m not troubled about deciding to make the data cleaner by not asking thousands to different doctors to decide if Covid caused a death or not.
The Covid death claims, overall, can also be checked by looking at the excess death data. For example, the U.S. suffered roughly 360,000 more deaths than the five-year average between January 26 and October 3, 2020, compared to 209,000 confirmed Covid deaths during that period. Accordingly, it appears that our Covid death numbers are probably too low, despite counting every death of someone with Covid as a “Covid death.”
We should also pay attention to base rates. Since roughly three-in-four American adults are vaccinated, counting every death of a person who tests positive as a “Covid death” will increase the numbers of those described as “hospitalized vaccinated” and “vaccinated deaths” today. Accordingly, the suggestion that this manner of tabulating the data juices the numbers in a way that helps the case for vaccination is unfounded, at least since half of us were vaccinated.
Totally Worth It (9.11 Memorial Edition)
My 9.11 stories are here.
Saved on 9/11, by the Man in the Red Bandanna
Slain Priest: 'Bury His Heart, But Not His Love'
Feel free to contact me via rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or on Twitter (@rpseawright) and let me know what you like, what you don’t like, what you’d like to see changed, and what you’d add. Don’t forget to subscribe and share.
Of course, the easiest way to share TBL is, like our correspondent above, simply to forward it to a few dozen of your closest friends.
Thanks for reading.
Issue 79 (September 13, 2021)