Statistics

Coronadoom Misinformation Model Says What It Was Told To Say

Repeat after me (yes, this includes all you regulars, too): All models only say what they are told to say.

Thank you.

Now let’s see this headline: “COVID-19 misinformation cost at least 2,800 lives and $300M, new report says“.

The spread of COVID-19 misinformation in Canada cost at least 2,800 lives and $300 million in hospital expenses over nine months of the pandemic, according to estimates in a new report out Thursday…

The authors suggest that misinformation contributed to vaccine hesitancy for 2.3 million Canadians. Had more people been willing to roll up their sleeves when a vaccine was first available to them, Canada could have seen roughly 200,000 fewer COVID cases and 13,000 fewer hospitalizations, the report says.

Alex Himelfarb, chair of the expert panel that wrote the report, said that its estimates are very conservative because it only examined a nine-month period of the pandemic.

The two hundred and thirty page behemoth is called, for some vague reason, Fault Lines. Written by, they say, an “Expert Panel on the Socioeconomic Impacts of Science and Health Misinformation”. Experts.

And it was peer-reviewed! By named people, like, yes, “John Cook, Assistant Professor, Center for Climate Change Communication, George Mason University (Fairfax, VA).”

Let’s also talk about “systemic racism”, because why? Because our authors do: “[B]elief in conspiracy theories, for example, is linked not only to cognitive predisposition, but also to lived experiences and resulting levels of trust in authoritative knowledge institutions”.

Can there be unlived experiences?

“…First Nations…colonialism…ongoing experiences of racism and violence…stigmatization based on ethnicity…”

Wake up, dear reader!

What does all this have to do with the coroandoom? I don’t know. The authors find it all deeply relevant, though. They go on for dozens and dozens and dozens more of pages with stuff like this. Woke whining. Here’s something about Q-Anon, there’s something about the Soviet Union, it that corner is genetically modified food, and in this one homeopathy, and finally—and you could see this coming eighty two miles away—global warming. Excuse me. “Climate change.”

Belief in the “Deep State” and “Cultural Marxism”, we are told, brings one past the, yes, “Anti-Semitic Point Of No Return”. Why? Never mind.

It isn’t until we’re somewhere around page 55 that “vaccine “hesitancy” is brought in. And mostly about MMR and the like. And then it was back to “climate change” (p. 63). We learn “Misinformation has reduced public support for climate action”. Which special inset Box 3.3 “Framing Carbon Taxes as ‘Job Killing’.” Oh.

I guess the proper conclusion that allowing government, and its designees, more power and money to control “climate change” will harm individuals, such as by killing jobs—hello, Keystone Pipeline workers—is “misinformation.”

Which reminds us of our chant: In order for there to be Official Misinformation, there must necessarily be Official Truths, and et cetera. You know the rest.

They do, too. For they have subheadlines like (p. 136) “Curtailing Misinformation Through Legislation” and “Legislating transparency by mandating the disclosure or flagging
of misinformation would discourage its spread”. You get the idea. Official agencies must be in charge of producing, promulgating, and policing Official Truths.

Yet what does any of this have to do with coronadoom!? We don’t learn until the Appendix (p. 147), where they hide their model.

It is—don’t laugh—an “Agent-based model”, i.e. a simulation (my paragraphifications and emphasis, and cutting the references):

This type of model facilitates dynamic simulations, where heterogeneous individual “agents” (in this case, simulated people in Canada) are given characteristics that influence their outcomes….

The Panel used reported epidemiological data, which capture all the underlying dynamics that played out in Canada between March and November 2021 (e.g., masking, social distancing, lockdowns, personal behaviour).

In this model, the number of cases varies among scenarios because the incidence rate is different between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, and misinformation alters how many of the agents are vaccinated.

The Panel’s model did not incorporate a transmission model because there was a lack of data on the impact of social distancing and masking.

Instead, given the model was built from real-world data, the results have accounted for social distancing and masking indirectly through the incidence rates.

In practice, vaccinated people are less likely to spread COVID-19 to others; since reduced likelihood of transmission is not captured in the model, the results are conservative.

If you can imagine the hubris behind the claim that they captured “all” dynamics—all!—you, too, can be a scientist.

You can go through the details at your leisure, but it comes down to this: this model was told to say “misinformation kills”. It was run, and it spit out “misinformation kills.”

The authors, amazed, gazed in wonder at this output and announced “misinformation kills.” Because science.

Readers might be interested to know what they report said about coronadoom vaccine injuries.

Nothing.

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Categories: Statistics

15 replies »

  1. A minute’s searching reveals the Council of Canadian Academies is funded by the Canadian government (“…has received at least $54M since 2005.”). The current board consists of women, foreigners, and a homo, all flashing their idiot Facebook grins. CAA is a lying whore for the satanic mass-murdering globohomo bank cabal.

  2. Some guys in the UK are doing yeomen’s work reporting on details of their “Ministry of Truth.”

    Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson are medical researchers. They stumbled into the Deep State nightmare during the global government crack down on free speech and honest debate, as they, much like Dr Briggs here, sought out, analyzed and reported on various government-led violations of human rights.

    Their substack is: Trust the Evidence
    https://trusttheevidence.substack.com/

    Their article today is:
    “The Ministry of Truth: If you speak out, be careful – you might find the government is spying on you.”

    They link to, and discuss, a report published today (in PDF at the link below) by BigBrotherWatch,
    “Ministry of Truth: the secretive government units spying on your speech.”
    https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Ministry-of-Truth-Big-Brother-Watch-290123.pdf

    It sure seems that Normals need to begin using legal channels. It seems obvious that the government actions–in Europe and the USA, at least–violate constitutional rights of citizens. Public exposure of these violations has not (yet) resulted in defunding, arrests, or other punishments. The vile lash-up of PC-Progs and neocons has active, well-funded Lawfare organizations that conduct legal assaults against Normals. It’s time for Normals to use the same channels. Class action suits?

  3. “For they have subheadlines like (p. 136) “Curtailing Misinformation Through Legislation” and “Legislating transparency by mandating the disclosure or flagging of misinformation would discourage its spread”. You get the idea. Official agencies must be in charge of producing, promulgating, and policing Official Truths.”

    Don’t these people know that those of us who mistrust the “Powers that Be” will dig in our heels if those same ‘Powers that Be’ push us to do something that we do not want to do.

    The Coronadoom fiasco has, I estimate, at least doubled my friends who are now ‘misbelievers’ in the government and their agencies.

  4. A lot of your critics take “models only say what they are told to say” to mean “models are completely arbitrary; nothing is derived in them.” But the truth is that while there are some things derived in models, in most cases there were so many assumptions made (that they model was “told to say”) that the model has no clear relationship to reality. In my personal count here are the assumptions made by this model:

    -The only way that a “vaccine hesitant” person can decide to “refuse” the vaccine is through “misinformation.”
    -Someone who gets the vaxx will be less likely to catch COVID-19, will be less likely to get a severe hospitalization if infected, and less likely to die even if severely hospitalized.
    -There are no risks of any side effects whatsoever from the vaxx.
    -The above three assumptions are justified because the official data contains all underlying dynamics.
    -The model is actually conservative because it doesn’t track the reduction in transmission from the vaxx, since there was no data on this (in direct contradiction to the previous point.)
    -85% of the population was initially “willing” to get the vaxx (based off a single survey, which it is assumed to be representative, and that no one lied on it.)
    -Of the remaining population half were “reluctant” but would have taken the vaxx if not misled by “misinformation.”
    -Anyone who said that COVID-19 was even exaggerated was suffering from “misinformation.”
    -Similarly anyone who said that the vaxx could have side effects which were not discussed in mainstream sources was suffering from “misinformation.” These choices were made because the panel agreed that both ideas were conspiracy theories.
    -In order to calculate the “damage” of misinformation they compared to a scenario where everyone who cold get the vaxx got it (even though there own model starts with a “vaccine refusing” population even before misinformation starts turning the “vaccine hesitant” into “vaccine refusers.”) Thus it is ultimately assumed that only “misinformation” could ever keep someone from taking the vaxx.
    -The writers of the report were actually honest enough to admit that model does not establish a causal link between “misinformation” and refusing the vaxx, but rather this was assumed to make the model work.
    -It is said that the 12-17 age range was only included because they could have been mislead by their parents. Thus another assumption is that only adults can suffer from “misinformation.”
    -Since hospital costs were not available for all territories, an average was used to substitute for those territories, though really any number could have been assigned.
    -And of course the diseases were modeled according to a chosen probability distribution around the observed mean, and a total range of 10% above or below the mean (where 10% seems to have been arbitrarily chosen.) Notably, this random distribution was the only way in which “uncertainty” was discussed, meaning that all other assumptions above were done with 100% certainty.

  5. “Can there be unlived experiences?” I don’t know Briggs but we’re all about to find out,
    the way they see it we all came here in test tubes and we’re all leaving on PCR Schwab’s..
    People forget it was originally ‘Agenda 21’. Rah Rah Ukraine!

  6. All this is basically to create official sounding sound-bites from official experts so that official media can officially headline and officially repeat official propaganda to the public, most of whom are no longer officially watching or listening to them, if CNN is any indication. The truckers protest didn’t grow so large because Canadians subscribe to the CBC, who tried to turn it into Jan 6-Too.

  7. For those unfamiliar, the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) is Canada’s state broadcaster. The CBC is heavily taxpayer subsidized to around $1.1 billion per year. Broadcast over-the-air and required carry on all cable/satellite TV packages. Similar to the BBC, CNN, etc., it is heavily biased towards leftist ideologies. Despite that, I doubt many people under the age of 65 watch the CBC, except for hockey games.

  8. I don’t believe any noise I hear coming out of the face of any authority figure, expert, leader, politician, bureaucrat, journalist, academic, or teacher anymore. I wasn’t always this way. This is what they have accomplished with thirty years of climate/racism/TDS/China flu/trans doom hysteria and fraud.

  9. Just because the Governments on this continent are controlled by globohomo clowns is no reason to lose faith in democracy is what a lot of people are saying but I find that more and more men are rooting for Putin.

  10. It was not misinformation that the government absolved the manufacturers of the vex from any liability for their product. Why do that if you didn’t expect problems?

  11. As soon as you see John Cook’s name attached to something it should be dismissed out of hand as a lie and quackery.

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