A Narrative That's Too Big To Fail
The "millions saved" meme won't die: Part 6
In the most recent episode of Bari Weiss’s Honestly podcast, Atlantic writer Helen Lewis raved about the quality of The Science during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I’m giving science, incredibly, like an A-minus,” Lewis enthused.
The public health experts, moreover, were correct not ever to concede error of any kind. If the scientists had ever admitted they were wrong, Lewis insisted, the critics would “gleefully” say they got “everything wrong.” Better to feign omniscience.
As the core of her argument, Lewis repeated the new get-out-of-jail-free card: with the Covid-19 vaccines, “millions of deaths have been avoided.”
Then Daniel Engber, writing in the Atlantic – surprise – opened his February 3, 2023, article on the Covid-19 vaccines with the same claim:
In the U.S. alone, millions of lives have been saved by a rollout of extraordinary scope.
Engber cited the go-to Commonwealth Fund model which asserts the vaccines spared 1.087 million U.S. lives in 2021, and an additional 2.168 million in 2022. These are extraordinary claims. Excess mortality in nearly every high-income, high-vaccine nation was worse in the vaccine years of 2021-22 than the pandemic year of 2020. Both Covid deaths and non-Covid deaths rose with vaccine distribution. In many of these nations, 2022 was also worse than 2020, and 2023 is off to an inauspicious start, too. For young and middle-age people, overall health is far worse in 2021-23 than in 2020 and before.
And yet…by inflating the counterfactual number of speculative Covid deaths beyond all rational bounds, Commonwealth’s model asserts a fantastical number of saved lives.
We refuted these claims directly in a response to Brink Lindsey’s overview of Covid policy, which urged a more heavy-handed militaristic pandemic response. We followed up when Commonwealth literally doubled the aggressiveness of its claims for 2022.
As you can see, Commonwealth’s estimates are hallucinatory. They claim that, absent vaccines, 6.9 times more Americans would have died of Covid in 2022 than 2020. They entirely disregard the effects of recovered immunity, the milder Omicron variant, and common sense. They generate a hypothetical variant that’s something like 10-times more pathogenic than real-life Covid. They don’t even pretend to understand how the vaccines, through evolutionary pressure and immune escape, might have extended the life of the pandemic, leading to far more total infections and lost lives.
Establishment members of the media and policy community, however, have embraced the “millions saved” claim as an all-purpose refrain to absolve themselves of catastrophic mistakes, which are generating, now going into year four, unprecedented morbidity and mortality.
This is why the millions-saved hand-wave is doubly duplicitous. Because the truth is just the opposite: in 2021-2023, high-income nations across the globe are suffering unprecedented excess mortality overall, and strikingly, among young and middle-age cohorts.
It’s quite a trick to be “saving millions of lives” in the midst of the worst ever peace time drop in life expectancy and mortality rise among young healthy people. Ms. Lewis grades the picture below an “A-minus.” Yet many nations with far less state capacity and far lesser reserves of The Science have not suffered nearly so much.
If you want to understand the otherworldliness of the millions saved thinking from another perspective, we deployed a silly basketball analogy here:
Defenders of the The Science are smart to pursue this strategy. The actual data and science are complicated and don’t favor their arguments. The narrative is paramount. To avoid discussing specifics, or admitting failure, they’ve replaced real world events – deaths – with the glossy refrain of a superficial model.
Moreover, even if the headline number is shown to be ridiculous, they’ve moored people’s thinking around “lots of saved lives.” Maybe the number was exaggerated; so what. By repeating a simple message, it anchors the conversation. The good PR move is not to argue the causes of extreme excess mortality but to claim something so ostentatiously opposite of the truth that you avoid the real discussion.
Remember, if the experts (and narrative engineers) admit being wrong about anything, people might realize they were wrong about nearly everything.
Above all, the narrative must not collapse.
Comments on State Capacity Covidology
The One Million Lives Saved Claim: Part 1
Double Down Hallucination: Part 2
Who Really Wanted to Speed Remedies?: Part 3
Defending Steph Curry: A Computer Model: Part 4
Where Did All the Workers Go?: Part 5
A Narrative That’s Too Big To Fail: Part 6
Mortality Play: 2020 vs. 2021-22: Part 7
Japan Matches Germany's 2022 Mortality Spike: Part 9
Society of Actuaries Shows Continued Young Adult Mortality Spike: Part 10
Dr. Hotez’s Data Is Highly Flawed: Part 11
Covid and the Golly Folly: The blind spot of gee whiz technology futurism: Part 12
One of the many reasons I stopped paying for Bari’s publication. They uncritically accept whatever self-proclaimed expert is in front of them. Nellie is hysterical but they are ignorant of noticing objective facts or differentiating between debunked models and observed actual outcomes. Thank you for pushing back.
I thought the exact same thing after listening to the podcast. Zero pushback from Bari. Thought she’d be more objective.