Dakota Beacon

            Oh, to be a fly on the wall in the White House during prickly Coronavirus Task Force debates. Drs. Anthony Fauci, Deborah Brix, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams are the face of the task force. They argue for the need to mitigate the spread of the Wuhan Flu. Result? An economic lockdown resulting in 16 million unemployed costing the US economy $22 trillion.

            Those less visible members include several cabinet members along with Larry Kudlow, Director of the National Economic Council and Steve Mnuchin, Treasury Secretary. These people are trying to mitigate the damage to the US economy. Regard them as contrarians growing in popularity.

            Angelo Codevilla, author of The Ruling Class, is another very prescient contrarian. In this time of virus-generated public policies, consider his thesis. “This Ruling Class, educated at prestigious universities and convinced of its own superiority, has everything to gain by…expanding the reach of government. This class maintains that it knows what is best and continually increases its power over every facet of American life ….[T]his Ruling Class does not represent the interests of the majority of Americans …” They have no connection with people who make the country work.

            I don’t believe Fauci et al are incompetent or ill intentioned. They may not consciously have joined The Ruling Class, but they have aligned themselves by virtue of being in the upper bureaucratic echelon. They create results; they influence wide national policy without being elected.

            Coronavirus models play an important part in public policy decision-making. But they are not above critique. They are like campaign polling models. When was the last time these models projected an election winner? And then there are the much-vaunted apocalyptic manmade climate change models projecting the end of life on earth. Deadlines come and go and we’re still here.

            Models are just that – models, prototypes, mathematical equations based on stated or unstated assumptions. Models receive data in the form of variables and then compute projections. If the left-hand side of the equation does not replicate reality, the right-hand side can only represent gibberish. GIGO -- garbage in, garbage out. Pity the public upon whom such projections are bestowed. That is where we are with the Wuhan virus shutdown.

            Models must be scrutinized for errors in assumptions, data selection, or abuse in application. Too often a missing perspective or context will skew the outcome. I have some familiarity with modeling outcomes. In 1987 my boss and I, working for AGS Management Systems, marketed project management software to Dr. Fauci.

            Reflect on these numbers. We don’t know the number of people who will contract the Wuhan Flu. Wild guesses range from 0.02% to 0.8%. We do know that 98% of those who catch it will recover. Contrast this with declining model estimated death tolls of 2.2 million, then 240,000, then 100,000, then 81,000. Any deaths are sad. Compare this to the 2018-2019 flu death toll of 34,200 and the 2017-2018 flu death toll of 61,000. In 2019 US deaths from all causes totaled 8,782 daily. Do people die with or from the Wuhan Flu? Models count “from” regardless of other underlying illnesses.

            Again, Angelo Codevilla, this time on the American Greatness website (4/2/20), “Doctors, Doctored Numbers, and Democracy – Many of our so-called health experts are acting less like good doctors and more like bad politicians. The New York Times on Tuesday reported: ‘The numbers the health officials showed President Trump were overwhelming. With the peak of the coronavirus pandemic still weeks away, he was told, hundreds of thousands of American could face death if the country reopened too soon.’

            “These numbers, many millions of infections, hundreds of thousands of deaths, were ones that ‘health officials’ had been spreading through a sensation-hungry media for some time. Together with a poll question that framed the choice just so, they had already helped produce another set of numbers: ‘Voters overwhelmingly preferred to keep containment measures in place over sending people back to work prematurely.’”

            “To make intelligent decisions about countermeasures, we would need have hard data about all these matters. Yet, for two months, doctors such as Anthony Fauci have messed up millions of lives and commandeered trillions of dollars while scaring the hell out of people and watching curves based on projections based on meaningless numbers.”

            “In short, Fauci, et al., are showing themselves to be typical of our bureaucracy: over credentialed, entrusted with too much power...”

            Is the closing down of the US economy warranted? Are we waiting for permission from experts like Drs. Birx and Fauci to re-open the US economy?

            Meanwhile, the electric media portray President Trump as a bloodthirsty killer for suggesting any near-term opening of the US economy. They go after Trump the same way the Chinese Communist Party went after the whistleblower doctors in Wuhan.

            Americans elected Donald Trump because they rejected what the Ruling Class was doing to the country. They trust Trump as leader, not as one of The Ruling Class.

            Mark these words. The first coronavirus death following President Trump’s steps to loosen restrictions will be used in campaign ads against him.

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).