Criticizing “Covid Revisionism”

Gregg Gonsalves back with more hysteria about the “next looming pandemic”

I’m a little late responding to this piece that appeared in The Nation on April 25, 2024, written by none other than Gregg Gonsalves, one of our favorite social media influencers posing as a serious scientist. This one is invoking fear of “performing as badly” during this next looming pandemic (maybe “bird flu?”) as we did during Covid. I fear that his metric for performance is skewed in a very different vector direction than yours and mine. I haven’t read this piece, so I’ll be reacting to it in real time. Here it is.

The Covid Revisionists Are Endangering Us All

That’s an interesting use of language; “Covid revisionists.” I assume that he would have loved to be able to use the term “denialist,” but can’t because of the number of critics of the Covid response, like Bret Weinstein, that do not doubt in any way that SARS-Cov-2 exists and has been isolated. So he uses “revisionists,” presumably to imply that anyone who wasn’t in favor of lockdowns and mandatory masks and vaccines is somehow rewriting the history of the pandemic. That accusation can go both ways—remember the line, “If you’re vaccinated, you’re a dead end to the virus. You can’t transmit?” I wonder if he will address this. As always, emphasis is mine throughout.

The article begins in dramatic fashion:

We seem to be in the midst of a strange period of Covid revisionism. A peculiarly American mix of narratives has been popping up in different places over the past few months. The thing about these takes, though, is that they are totally at odds with each other.

“A peculiarly American mix of narratives”—interesting. I’m curious what these “peculiarly American narratives” are—will this be something significant?

On the one hand, we’re getting a triumphalist tribute to our performance during the first four years of the (ongoing) pandemic. At the same time, we’re being told we got it all wrong in our response to Covid. Either way, these narratives don’t bode well for our future.

The answer to my question appears to be no. This isn’t particularly significant or news at all. I like the insertion of the word “ongoing”—we’re going to be in the Covid pandemic forever, people!

Addressing this quote—we got it “wrong” in which direction? Gonsalves goes on to answer this by criticizing four “narratives,” as represented by an article or articles or collection of essays. One such article was written by a David Wallace-Wells in the NYT, saying that we did “better” than countries such as Uganda, Zambia, Chad, Zimbabwe or Mozambique. Gonsalves takes issue with that because, compared to other G7 countries, we did terribly. However, the metric being used to determine how “well” a country did is “official covid deaths,” which we know is subject to statistical manipulation and even outright deception; and which ignores entirely all the collateral damage the covid response caused, and doesn’t even mention the serious adverse events associated with the fast-tracked vaccines.

He then directs us to two pieces whose theses are basically that it was wrong to close schools. The pieces were written by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Tressie McMillan Cottom, also in the NYT. Criticizing school closures makes Gonsalves very, very mad. Apparently he wants more school closures and, presumably, during the “next pandemic,” more lockdowns as well. I’m curious if he mentions the vaccine. I won’t bore you with too many quotes about the school closure issue, but will highlight this one:

Let’s put it bluntly. Kids aren’t supposed to die, and yet they did. And while it is true that “opening schools, with safety measures” could minimize transmission, safety measures were not equally available to all. But these details get elided in the narrative that is being pursued here.

I hate that I have to say this, but of course kids aren’t supposed to die, yet they do, tragically; and they did, tragically, before Covid. There still remains not a shred of evidence that Covid affected child mortality. Did anyone else notice the peculiar phenomenon during the early days of Covid of people that, beforehand, seemed to have never even thought of death as being something that happens to everyone eventually? That’s how powerful the narrative was; people that had never given much thought to their own mortality were suddenly hypnotized to believe that their death was imminent, when prior to Covid it had been simply theoretical. It was a very strange psychological phenomenon.

The last piece under consideration involves the lab leak hypothesis. (Is anyone else tired of hearing about this yet?) The piece was written by the former NPR editor Uri Berliner, and Gonsalves laments that believing in the lab leak hypothesis is somehow related to not being “woke.” As he says: “But the implication here is that “wokeness” trumps the importance of lab safety and biocontainment for scientists, even those who work with these dangerous pathogens on a regular basis.” Huh? I think this is some kind of roundabout defense of DEI, but the language is so tortured it’s hard to understand what he is trying to convey.

Those three issues are not nearly as interesting as the last piece he criticizes.

Our last example of Covid revisionism comes from inside the house, in a compilation of essays by Sandro Galea, the dean of the Boston University School of Public Health. His new book, Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time, chastises his peers in a way that seems off the mark.

He begins with:

First, Galea suggests that public health “got political” during the pandemic, in part as an overreaction to “an empowered right-wing and the Trump administration’s frequent hostility to public health.” This is a deeply ahistorical reading of public health, one that fails to recognize that it has always been political.

Okay, Gonsalves is actually correct about this. Public health itself as a concept is little more than 200 years old, so it is an extremely modern innovation. It’s a nice idea that unfortunately is extremely easily manipulated to become a mechanism of ultimate control over individual liberties. The solution, however, is not to defend the authoritarian overreach of the public health establishment because it has “always been political.” He also misses no chance to come down on The Great Barrington Declaration like a ton of bricks.

Galea has a soft spot in his book for the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter published by lockdown skeptics in October 2020. He’s fond of it not because, he says, he believes in its assumptions or prescriptions but because the rest of us tried, judged, and convicted the authors in the court of public opinion instead of judging it scientifically. Galea fails to mention that the Great Barrington Declaration was not a scientific manuscript, but a document issued by a right-wing think tank. It was never proposed for scientific review.

Here we go again with the same playbook that was used, and continues to be used, in AIDS. Control the peer review process so that only papers supporting the official narrative are allowed to be published, even if they later get retracted. Therefore, those critical of the official narrative are forced to voice their opinions elsewhere, but since “elsewhere” is neither a peer reviewed journal or a mainstream media appearance, their voices are discounted on that circular basis. Oh, and throw in “right wing” as well for insurance.

This article is long, and if it has a point, other than we should have locked down even harder, I’m not sure what it is. At one point, Gonsalves points out that this entire issue is really about class. What is he actually saying?

Except this all makes us more vulnerable to the next pandemic, by suggesting that mitigation efforts were overzealous, not supported by the data, did more harm than good, and were “just political,” and that what happened to us was not so bad in terms of international comparisons.

[…]

It’s incumbent on those of us in public health to push back against these narratives from the media, from within certain quarters of public health and clinical medicine. Lives depend on it. There is a lot to learn from the past four years, and holding fast to the facts does matter, even if it’s not what some want to hear. With the potential for a new pandemic happening sooner than later, with the specter of H5N1 influenza (“bird flu”) on the horizon, this revisionism needs to be nipped in the bud now.

This is his big snappy conclusion: This revisionism needs to be “nipped in the bud” because of “bird flu.” I really don’t think people are going to fall for “bird flu” for the, what, fourth time at least? Remember H1N1 in 2009? I’m also not sure exactly what he thinks needs to be “nipped in the bud.” Criticizing school closures and lockdowns? Supporting non-mainstream-approved narratives? That’s certainly what he really means; he’s saying the quiet part out loud here. He’s literally resurrecting the “stay home, stay safe” mantra of Spring 2020 like anyone is going to fall for that. And furthermore, lockdowns cannot work unless you lock down before whatever pathogen is of concern even emerges. No, this is quite obviously an appeal to authority; no matter that the authorities in question clearly do not have our best interests at heart. “It’s incumbent upon those of us in public health to push back”—oh, please. There comes a point when the victims simply refuse to comply with their oppressors any longer. Gonsalves knows that and it scares him. It’s obvious from his apocalyptic use of language—“we’re all going to die if we don’t DO SOMETHING!” All of this for a hypothetical “next pandemic” that isn’t even happening. “Do something!” doesn’t always end well; after all, it brought us AZT and all its toxic relatives.

What I find the most interesting about this piece is what was not mentioned. Not one word was spent defending the Covid vaccines and boosters at all. That says everything you need to know about what the mainstream media and the public health authorities really think about these shots. The fact that one of the most establishment of establishment shills, Gregg Gonsalves, won’t even dare to bring up the failed vaccines in his criticism of Covid critics and of the Covid response in general speaks volumes. I would really love to see that article defending the vaccines, Dr. Gonsalves. Consider this a challenge.

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