Flashback Sunday: Anthony Fauci Feb 17, 2020 said "there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask", danger from coronavirus is "just minuscule"

He couldn't have been more wrong, and on both counts no less.

Coronavirus went on to kill far more than flu ever has since 1918, and other "experts" now chalk up those low flu numbers partly to mask-wearing. 

USA AWAY, here in Feb 2020:

"If you look at the masks that you buy in a drug store, the leakage around that doesn't really do much to protect you," he said. "People start saying, 'Should I start wearing a mask?' Now, in the United States, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask." ...

Fauci doesn't want people to worry about coronavirus, the danger of which is "just minuscule." But he does want them to take precautions against the "influenza outbreak, which is having its second wave."

Coronavirus went on to kill 346,000 in the USA in 2020, but the flu killed just 700 over the entire 2020-2021 season.

The irony is the experts quoted by Scientific American now attribute the low number of flu deaths to mask wearing and social distancing, both of which Fauci only later embraced to stop coronavirus, but which has now gone on to kill an additional 440,000 despite those measures and mass vaccination:

Since the novel coronavirus began its global spread, influenza cases reported to the World Health Organization from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres have dropped to minute levels. The reason, epidemiologists think, is that the public health measures taken to keep the coronavirus from spreading—notably mask wearing and social distancing—also stop the flu.

Prevalence of COVID-19 in 2020 was just 6.1% of population (20m cases in 328m people) because it didn't really hit the country until March. In 2021 to date, prevalence is higher at 8.7% (28.923m cases in 332m people), about the level typical for influenza in an average year.

Why, when people have been masking, social distancing, and getting vaccinated?

Clearly something(s) has(have) stopped influenza, but the definitive transmission mechanism of coronavirus remains unsolved.

Similarly no one so far has explained how white tail deer populations have become riddled with coronavirus: We do not know how the deer were exposed to SARS-CoV-2. 

A new Penn State study is pretty certain hunters are somehow responsible:

“The viral lineages we identified correspond to the same lineages circulating in humans at that time,” said Kapur. “The fact that we found several different SARS-CoV-2 lineages circulating within geographically confined herds across the state suggests the occurrence of multiple independent spillover events from humans to deer, followed by local deer-to-deer transmission. This also raises the possibility of the spillback from deer back to humans, especially in exurban areas with high deer densities.”

But I doubt it's because they breathed on them out there in the woods.

The vectors must be human urine and feces, but to this day no one is focusing on those to explain the continuing crisis.

Canadian court dismisses Michael Mann's libel claim with prejudice, Mann withholds his climate data to this day

Michael Mann "Hockey Stick" Update: Now Definitively Established To Be Fraud:

A prominent skeptical climate scientist in Canada named Tim Ball accused Mann of fraud in generating the Hockey Stick graph.  The famous quote, from a February 2011 interview of Ball, was “Michael Mann should be in the State Pen, not Penn State.”   In March 2011, Mann sued Ball for libel, focusing on that quote, in the Supreme Court of British Columbia in Vancouver.  Here is a copy of the Complaint.  (Note:  In British Columbia, the Supreme Court is not the highest appellate court, but rather the trial-level court for larger cases.)  The case then essentially disappeared into limbo for eight plus years.  But on Friday, August 23, the British Columbia court dismissed Mann’s claim with prejudice, and also awarded court costs to Ball.  As far as I can determine, this was an oral ruling, and no written judgment nor transcript of the ruling yet exists.  I have asked Ball to send them along as soon as they exist.

The story of Ball’s vindication, and of Mann’s shame, is a somewhat long one, and turns on Mann’s flat refusal to share publicly the data and methodology by which he constructed the Hockey Stick graph.  In about 2003 a very talented Canadian mathematician named Steve McIntyre began an effort to replicate the Mann/Bradley/Hughes work.  McIntyre started with a request to Mann to provide the underlying data and methodologies (computer programming) that generated the graph.  To his surprise, McIntyre was met not with prompt compliance (which would be the sine qua non of actual science) but rather with hostility and evasion.  McIntyre started a blog called Climate Audit and began writing lengthy posts about his extensive and unsuccessful efforts to reconstruct the Hockey Stick.  Although McIntyre never completely succeeded in perfectly reconstructing the Hockey Stick, over time he gradually established that Mann et al. had adopted a complex methodology that selectively emphasized certain temperature proxies over others in order to reverse-engineer the "shaft" of the stick to get a pre-determined desired outcome.

Michael Mann Of Penn State Claimed He "Shared" The Nobel Peace Prize For Almost Five Years

As reported here. And the guy still won't say in the revised bio to whom the Nobel was actually awarded: "jointly" to the IPCC and Al Gore. The IPCC and Al Gore shared the prize, not the IPCC authors, the IPCC and Al Gore.

"He shared the Nobel Peace Prize"

"He contributed to the award of the prize", but to whom exactly?

Ah, to these, exactly.

Penn State Alumni Newsletter In November 2007 Bragged That Global Warming Promoter Michael Mann Shared In The Nobel Peace Prize Awarded To The IPCC And Al Gore

And worse, the association puts Mann on the same level as a real Nobel winner like Paul Berg who was a named winner who shared the Prize for Chemistry with two others. Michael Mann cannot be said to have shared the Peace Prize with Al Gore and the IPCC, nor can any of the other 2000 members of the IPCC or however many there were be said to have shared it, either. To say this diminishes the achievement of named winners of prizes who may have won them alone or in company with other named individuals.

Seen here:

Five Penn State scientists, all members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize when the 2,000-member IPCC and former vice president Al Gore were recognized for their work on climate change issues.

The five Penn State scientists and IPCC members are: Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences; William Easterling, dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and professor of geography and earth system science; Klaus Keller, assistant professor of geosciences, Michael Mann, associate professor of meteorology; and Anne Thompson, professor of meteorology.

They join the select company of Paul Berg ’48, the only Penn State alumnus to win a Nobel Prize. Berg, the “father of genetic engineering,” shared the 1980 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Harvard Professor Walter Gilbert and Cambridge Professor Frederick Sanger. The Nobel committee recognized Berg for his groundbreaking construction of the first recombinant-DNA molecule—a discovery that paved the way for scientists interested in understanding the interactions between the chemical structure of DNA and resultant biological structure, or function, of an organism.

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Al Gore can claim to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, and the IPCC can claim to, but none of the individual panel members can claim to have shared in the winning of that prize. Michael Mann did not win the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace. Mann has had to retract his own claims to the prize as reported here:

Disgraced Penn State University (PSU) climatologist, Michael Mann, concedes defeat in his bogus claims to be a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Mann’s employer this weekend began the shameful task of divesting itself of all inflated claims  on university websites and official documentation that Mann was ever a Peace Prize recipient with Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Thanks to a tip off from respected climate researcher, Dr. Klaus Kaiser, myself and Tom Richard (who scooped the original Nobel story) obtained “before and after” copy images from PSU websites as records of this damning retraction. (follow the link above for the screenshots)

Evidently alumni sites have not been purged.

First Black President Brings Record High Poverty And Inequality As The New Normal

You talkin' to me?

Hm. Imagine that.

From the Associated Press story, here:

The nation's poverty rate remained stuck at 15 percent last year despite America's slowly reviving economy, a discouraging lack of improvement for the record 46.5 million poor and an unwelcome benchmark for President Barack Obama's recovery plans.

More than 1 in 7 Americans were living in poverty, not statistically different from the 46.2 million of 2011 and the sixth straight year the rate had failed to improve, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. Median income for the nation's households was $51,017, also unchanged from the previous year after two consecutive annual declines, while the share of people without health insurance did improve but only a bit, from 15.7 percent to 15.4 percent.

"We're in the doldrums, with high poverty and inequality as the new normal for the foreseeable future," said Timothy Smeeding, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in income inequality. "The fact we've seen no real recovery in employment and wages means we've just flatlined." ... 

"This lack of improvement in poverty is disappointing and discouraging," said John Iceland, a former Census Bureau chief of the poverty and health statistics branch who is now a Penn State sociology professor. "This lack of progress in poverty indicates that these small improvements in the economy are not yet being equally shared by all."

Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in poverty, agreed.

"Everything's on hold, but at a bad level; poverty and income did not change much in 2012," he said. "So child poverty is still too high and family income is still too low. The recession may be over, but try to tell that to these struggling families. Don't expect things to change until the American economy begins to generate more jobs."

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Way to go, Brownie!

Marxist Professors Outnumber Conservatives Three to One

And the big joke's on you: your kid goes deep into debt to pay the salaries of the proponents of the god that failed.

Kevin Hassett in "Marxist Professors Are Gift to Climate Skeptics" here for Bloomberg explains the politics of climate science:  

A 2007 survey of more than 1,400 professors by sociologists Neil Gross of Harvard University and Solon Simmons of George Mason University is as damning an indictment of an organization as you are ever likely to see.

The authors compiled the political affiliation and beliefs of the professors, who were asked to identify themselves along a spectrum from very liberal to very conservative. Across all fields, 44 percent identified themselves as liberal or very liberal, while 9.2 percent identified themselves as conservative or very conservative.

Strikingly, the data were even more tilted in the physical and biological sciences. There, 45.2 percent of professors identified themselves as liberal, while only 8 percent said they were conservative.

The authors dug deeper than many previous studies and established some startling findings.

In the social sciences, 24 percent of professors identified themselves as liberal “radicals” and 18 percent as Marxists. Only 4.9 percent of social scientists identified themselves as “conservative.”

So there are almost five times as many self-identified liberal radicals on our faculties, and more than three times as many Marxists as there are conservatives. Last I checked, Marxism has been utterly discredited. Yet there are still Marxists everywhere, poisoning the minds of our children. Conservatives, on the other hand, are a rarity.

While there isn’t enough data to address the question, it is safe to assume that no other profession is so tilted. In a society about evenly split between liberals and conservatives, achieving such a bias requires serious effort. It doesn’t happen by accident.

If you want to run conservatives out, you need to discourage dissertations that might reach conservative conclusions. You need to shun young students if their work questions liberal orthodoxy. You need to control the academic journals, rejecting papers submitted by identifiable conservatives.

You need to celebrate work that supports the political bias of Democrats. If your research shows that higher minimum wages are terrific, an endowed chair is yours for the taking. Question whether a higher minimum wage might cause higher unemployment, and find your place on the bread line.

For years, I have watched the economic community act this way. The hacked East Anglia e-mails confirm that exactly this type of conspiracy is in place. They show climate experts plotting how to keep the lid on research that didn’t support the prevailing view on global warming. In one e-mail, Michael Mann of Penn State University proposed boycotting an academic journal because it had published an article that provided evidence contrary to global warming canon.


There's more at the link.