#11:06 p.m.
...the data in the Times analysis generally spanned the period from the start of the vaccination campaign until mid-June or July, before the Delta variant became predominant in the United States.
Which makes it utterly irrelevant.
Just a few days ago I wrote that I don’t trust the New York Times or CDC on COVID-19 and today the Times played me for the fool I am and I fell for it. The Times is America's "newspaper of record"; but it is also quasi-official as Paul Krugman once described himself during the Obama years. James Reston was confidante to presidents, before him Walter Lippmann counseled FDR. And then there is this:
...Edward Snowden made the fateful decision to share sensitive documents with reporters...he had to figure out which news outfit to trust.
Snowden's decision was based on this:
Snowden's choice was the bitter harvest of seeds sown by the Times almost a decade ago. In the fall of 2004, just ahead of the November general elections, the Times' news leadership spiked an exclusive...disclosing massive warrantless domestic eavesdropping by the NSA.
White House officials had warned that the results of such a story could be catastrophic.
The Times...quashed the story, despite the objections of the two reporters, their editor...and several of their colleagues.
...Snowden believed he could not rely on the newspaper's judgment...
So yeah, there's all of that, some very recent, some not so recent, some in the last half of the last century, some in the first half. In other words, it has been continuous for at least almost a century.
There has seemed to me a clear full-court press that the Biden White House, the CDC and the Fourth Estate are prosecuting together with each other on behalf of the vaccines and against the "breakthrough" cases. Not I, but a Penn-Annenberg professor said she thought the CDC was hiding data on breakthrough hospitalizations. There were the secret slides, the speak-first-then-show-the-science. There was CDC stopping tracking of Delta infections just as Delta was taking names and kicking all of our asses. That came from Bloomberg, not the Times. There was the Times ignoring the CDC hiding the data in the Mesa County, Colorado investigation of breakthrough infections, hospitalizations and deaths behind vagueries like "significantly higher." There has always been Times COVID beat reporter Apoorva Mandavilli, in whom I have always lacked faith. And then there was today. The box. The Times is trying too hard. It worked on me! For half an hour. And man, I felt like the champ of chumps. The box was the propaganda of desperation
Since I don’t trust the Times or CDC I guess I’ll go back to Johns Hopkins? Or see if Bloomberg reports daily on COVID.
[I DON’T KNOW IF] I WAS WRONG
As if aimed at an audience of one, the New York Times published this box on its front page within the last hour.
...the data in the Times analysis generally spanned the period from the start of the vaccination campaign until mid-June or July, before the Delta variant became predominant in the United States.
I excerpted long passages from the article and then redacted them before hitting "publish." The above is the money shot. You can read it and make your own judgments.
3:35 p.m.
I WAS WRONG
I was wrong and am sincerely relieved and grateful to the Times.
