"Team Pandemic" vs. "Team Reality."

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Former New York Times science reporter Alex Berenson characterizes the debates about Covid as "Team Pandemic" against "Team Reality."  The first pushes government and pharmaceutical industry narratives. The second attempts to work around the blockades thrown up by the first, find the real story, and protect their own health.

It turns out to be a fight of credentialism versus expertise. On one side are the people who flash their diplomas from revered institutions, or point to their job titles and demand that you listen to them. They employ fancy graphics paid for by taxpayers and pharmaceutical profits to dazzle audiences.

Team Pandemic supports coercive measures: mandatory masking, lockdowns, social distancing, vaccine passports, vaccinations, second vaccinations, third vaccinations, fourth vaccinations… They backup their demands through deplatforming, ostracism, revocation of licensure, denial of admission, denial of boarding public transportation, fines and even prison.

Team Reality asks, almost always in vain, for the legal and medical justification for these unprecedented restrictions.  What are the risks?  Do the benefits outweigh them?

On Team Reality are a wide, nonstandard assortment of people who question the narrative. These include doctors who have actually treated Covid; scientists with expertise in epidemiology, public health, vaccines, virology and so on. Many have vast numbers of peer-reviewed journal papers to their credit. Though they started out with excellent credentials, Team Pandemic is stripping them of as many as possible: getting them fired, taking away licenses to practice medicine, and forcing publishers to reject their submissions.

Some members of Team Reality, Peter and Ginger Breggin, Robert F Kennedy Junior, Alex Berenson, and Robert Malone off the top of my head, have authored best-selling books.

Credentials notwithstanding, Team Reality has vastly more real world success. Some rose to important leadership positions. Some have major inventions and scientific research to their credit. There are serial entrepreneurs.

The makeup of Team Pandemic is more uniform. Most are academics at second-tier institutions. Some have published books, no bestsellers that I know of.

Ordinary people often advertise themselves by their credentials. They will drop the name of Harvard or MIT, or prestigious companies where they worked. In general they do so only if the credentials outshine their lifetime accomplishments. Richard Feynmann would not introduce himself with "I went to MIT." In an amusing anecdote from his "Surely you're Joking Mr. Feynmann" he writes that when a woman asked him what he had done during the war, he replied truthfully "Help build the atomic bomb." That set him back so far that he resolved to bury his credentials in the future. His accomplishments speak for themselves.

Serial entrepreneur and multimillionaire Steve Kirsch mentions his MIT background only to make the point that the pointy heads running that institution, to which he donated a building bearing his name, wouldn't even let him speak about Covid.

Credentialism cuts straight across the JQ.  Average members of the tribe generally support the government. They are vaxed and boosted. But the brightest lights on Team Reality include Alex Berenson, Steve Kirsch, Joel Smalley, Jessica Rose, Simone Gold and Brett and Heather Weinstein.

Adherents of Team Pandemic question my credentials and trot out their own when I propose that it is a mistake not to read arguments from both sides. If Steve Kirsch and Alex Berenson are wrong, they should satisfy themselves that they know why, just as I have satisfied myself that Katelyn Jeletina and Eric Topol are wrong.  They are not interested. They burnish their MIT medallions and call me an uneducated fool for even suggesting that they do some research. They don’t understand that what matters is not us, but whether the sources we rely on are correct.

Psychologists have been saying since the beginning that it will be hard to change minds. People who have been vaccinated vehemently oppose any notion that they might have made a mistake, and grasp at every piece of evidence to support the wisdom of their decision.

Kirsch extrapolates a probable three quarters of a million deaths from the vaccines in the US alone.  It cannot be proven or disproven by government statistics – they don't want to know. It appears it will take bodies in the streets before anybody changes their mind.

My parochial interest is that the government of Ukraine not force my children to receive the jabs. At this point it seems unlikely. Europeans are avoiding them in droves despite almost universal endorsement from their governments. Ukrainian people didn't want them in the first place, and we have a war going on in the second.

I wrote this because I find it amusing that the JQ insiders have dissed me so thoroughly on a separate email thread. I write everything in the same register as here – respectful, the best English I can muster, no egregious profanity – and the responses I get from people who would style themselves my intellectual superiors exhibit all of these flaws. What can you do except laugh?

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone where the good-looking woman and the women in training are enjoying beach weather down at the river.  On account of the war there are no motorboats and no helicopters. I love it!

Graham