The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Lies, Damned Lies, and COVID-19

Posted on | August 4, 2026 | No Comments

After watching people spend two days arguing about a statistical factoid wielded by David Frum, it occurred to me: “What is the source of that statistic?” Apparently, nobody else had thought of this question, and so let’s quote David Frum’s article in The Atlantic:

The American right sacrificed its supporters to its COVID-era delusions and lies. Right-wing politicians and media influencers disparaged masking. They derided safety advice against indoor gatherings. They spread crazy lies about COVID vaccines once those became generally available. Many conservative Americans who made the mistake of trusting their political and media leaders paid with their life.
Pew Research Center compared the 20 percent of the U.S. population who lived in the country’s most pro-Trump counties with the 20 percent who lived in the most pro-Biden counties. The most pro-Trump counties suffered nearly 70,000 more COVID deaths than the most pro-Biden counties did.

THE PEW RESEARCH CENTER? You’re making arguments about medical policy based on work by a polling company? Because that’s really the meat-and-potatoes of what Pew does. The fact that they’re a 501(c)3 non-profit doesn’t really change the reality that Pew Research began as a polling operation, founded by the former president of Gallup.

At various times, I have seen Pew Research publish studies about demographic trends that were very informative, but that doesn’t allay my skepticism about their March 2022 article, “The Changing Political Geography of COVID-19 Over the Last Two Years.” We may begin by saying, if you were still afraid of COVID-19 in March 2022, you must be some kind of extreme hypochondriac, the type of person who wore a mask while driving alone in your car. Taylor Lorenz, basically.

Some people are herd animals by nature, and these were the people most eager to comply with the crazy lockdown rules of “15 Days to Slow the Spread,” without ever questioning the logic of those rules.

In case you’ve forgotten, the original rationale of the first COVID-19 lockdown was that the virus was spreading so rapidly that hospitals would soon be overwhelmed with victims, that there would be a shortage of medicine, equipment and personnel to treat patients. This was what “15 Days to Slow the Spread” was about and, when that ended, it was “Six Weeks to Flatten the Curve” — in other words, a total of two months of lockdown, to prevent the medical system from collapsing under the burden of the pandemic. In other words, by mid-May 2020, it would be safe to let life return to normal, but OH DEAR GOD WE CAN’T LET THAT HAPPEN, Democrats and the media collectively screamed, once the initial two months of COVID-19 lockdown were over.

What ensued after that was more about the psychology of mass hysteria than it was a question of public health policy, and the COVID-19 hysteria had very clear political outlines. By mid-2020, we had enough data about hospitalizations and deaths from the virus to know that, unless you were over 70, or obese, or had some other condition that impaired your immune system, COVID-19 wouldn’t kill you. For the vast majority of healthy younger Americans, COVID-19 was just a nasty variety of flu.

Something else that had become apparent by mid-2020 was that statistics about the pandemic were being manipulated to exaggerate the threat, as an excuse for extending lockdowns indefinitely.

In hindsight, this was all insanity. Florida, which with its large population of retirees was home to a disproportionate number of those most vulnerable to the virus, was basically wide open from the summer of 2020 onward. They did this by focusing their attention on protecting senior citizens, while letting everybody else, especially school children, go about their daily lives. Meanwhile, public schools were shut down for the entire 2020-2021 school year in many Democrat-controlled parts of the country. Despite the evidence that Florida’s strategy was correct — the sky didn’t fall when Florida reopened — liberals refused to reconsider their permanent-lockdown mentality, which is the most obvious reason why, in March 2022, Pew Research felt the need to publish an article claiming that GOP-dominated areas had a higher COVID-19 death toll.

Go look at the nifty charts, which claim to show that, while the Democrat-leaning counties had the highest death tolls up until October 2020, the GOP-leaning counties came roaring back thereafter, and were particularly hard hit by the “Delta” and “Omicron” variants of COVID-19 that struck after August 2021. Where were they collecting this data? You have to click a link to see the “Methodology” section, which doesn’t do anything to allay my skepticism about the findings. The article includes a chart pointing out that pro-Biden counties had higher COVID vaccination rates (over 75% in those that Biden won by more than a 25-point margin) than pro-Trump counties (less than 60% in counties that Trump won by more than a 25-point margin), while also mentioning that the data on COVID deaths doesn’t distinguish between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. Which is kind of important, because the vaccines were what the big arguments were really all about after Biden got elected.

The vaccines didn’t work — vaccinated people still got the virus — and they didn’t prevent the virus from spreading. This was especially true once new variants like Delta and Omicron appeared in 2021. You don’t have to be any kind of crazy anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist to see that the vaccines were an expensive failure. I got the vaccine in August 2021 just because I realized that politicians were trying to use data about vaccination rates as an excuse for more lockdowns, and I didn’t want to be used as a statistic in their propaganda: “White guys in Appalachia are the problem!” But just because I’m not dead doesn’t mean the vaccine saved my life, which is what David Frum is trying to use this Pew Center study to prove, yet even Pew doesn’t claim it shows anything about vaccines and death rates. And excuse my skepticism about the entirety of the Pew Center’s methodology on this study.

By the way, as Frum notes, the Pew study claims to show a gap of nearly 70,000 total deaths between the 20% of the population in the most pro-Trump counties (238,791 deaths total) and the 20% in the most pro-Biden counties (170,084 deaths total). Practically all of that difference is attributable to the Delta/Omicron “surges” from August 2021 to the end of February 2022. Am I the only one scratching my head, trying to remember thousands of people who allegedly were dying of COVID in February 2022? Because I’ll be darned if I recall any such thing.

All of this, however, is really just part of Frum’s defense of Anthony Fauci, whose dishonesty is now proven beyond all doubt. Most of us have moved on from all that — I am not sitting around nursing any grudges over what happened five or six years ago — but the Trump-haters can’t stand that Saint Anthony of the Blessed Science might be held accountable, and they’re using dubious statistics to defend him.



 

Category: Science

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