The so-called experts on COVID-19 can’t even agree with themselves
We’re told by non-experts we all must listen to our coronavirus experts, but even the world’s foremost pandemic experts cannot agree about COVID-19 expertise, writes Tim Blair.
Opinion
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"People are starting to realise that we are actually depending on science,” Swedish climate godling Greta Thunberg told a CNN coronavirus program last week.
“We need to listen to scientists and experts."
At which point CNN should have obeyed the education-dodging panic priestess and thrown her off the broadcast.
As US columnist Stephen Miller put it: “I’d love to hear from and listen to a scientist and expert but they keep putting the scoldy teen in front of my face instead.”
Still, even if we followed the holy child’s advice, to which experts might we listen?
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After all, coronavirus epidemiology isn’t climate alarmism, where the only dispute between media-approved authorities are over whether a) we’ll all be dead in 50 years, b) we’ll all be dead in ten years, or c) we’re already dead and presently exist in an after-worldly hell of endless fires, disease and Warney-themed Fox Sports cricket retrospectives.
Medical authorities have widely varying opinions on how best to deal with coronavirus. Sweden’s chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell disagreed with other Nordic medicos and successfully lobbied for only partial closures, which seem to be working.
Scandinavian countries are icily competitive with each other. Tegnell has lately been taunting his neighbours.
“In the autumn there will be a second wave. Sweden will have a high level of immunity and the number of cases will probably be quite low,” he told the Financial Times.
“But Finland will have a very low level of immunity. Will Finland have to go into a complete lockdown again?”
Stick to the Moomins, Anders. Authorities elsewhere offer divergent views. “The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted just how many ways that scientists and other academic experts can disagree,” Staffordshire University’s Alyson Nicholds wrote in April.
“How can the experts be so profoundly at odds?”
Good question. Dr Tony Fauci, a leading member of the Trump administration’s White House Coronavirus Task Force, doesn’t even agree with himself.
As Fox News’s Tucker Carlson recently noted, Dr Fauci has variously insisted that “people should not be walking around with masks” but now argues that mask-wearing “should be a very regular part of how we prevent the spread of infection”.
He claimed in January that the coronavirus “is not a major threat for the people in the United States” but now, as the Los Angeles Times reports, says reopening the US too quickly “could lead to avoidable suffering and death”.
Dr Fauci is all over the shop, which, to be fair, gives him plenty of company. Meanwhile, just about the only people who agree with China’s assessment of its own coronavirus countermeasures are those ridiculous saps at the UN’s morally-corroded World Health Organisation.
“The speed with which China detected the outbreak, isolated the virus, sequenced the genome and shared it with WHO and the world are very impressive, and beyond words,” the WHO’s Director General Tedros Adhanom gushed a few weeks into the outbreak.
“So is China’s commitment to transparency and to supporting other countries. In many ways, China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response. It’s not an exaggeration.”
He’s right about that. It’s more like completely insane communist propaganda.
China’s “commitment to transparency”, by the way, now involves threatening trade sanctions against Australia for merely asking that the coronavirus outbreak be independently investigated.
As Dr Ted would say, this is not an exaggeration.
Impressively, some prominent folk have resisted offering commentary on medical matters and are instead limiting themselves to their proven areas of expertise.
In the case of Greens senator Larissa Waters, this involves crying about inequality.
“Unless we recognise that women are bearing the brunt of the impact of restrictions we can’t plan for a recovery that ensures we all come out of this better than we were before,” Waters wrote last week in an email to supporters.
“The Australian Bureau of Statistics has just released data that shows that 55 per cent of job losses in April were women and that women who are still in work have had, on average, an 11.5 per cent decrease in hours, compared to 7.5 per cent decrease for men.”
Those aren’t huge differences, but any diversity at all is completely toxic to the Queensland senator, who previously campaigned against “toys being marketed as just for girls or just for boys”.
Like all Greens, Larissa also imagines herself to be an economics genius. And like all Greens, Waters obtained her economics wisdom from Venezuela’s prestigious Institute of Going Broke and Eating out of Garbage Bins like Cats that Themselves are Waiting to be Eaten.
“This pandemic has shown,” Waters announced to her fans, “that there is enough money available to do all the things that need doing.”
Of course, that’s easy for Larissa to say. Her grandchildren won’t be paying off Australia’s coronavirus lockdown debts.
They’ll all be otherwise occupied swimming towards our remaining dry land – somewhere south of Tennant Creek, if expert climate change predictions are accurate.