Experts Shocked
On Tuesday, the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee voted 19-2 to recommend Omicron-specific Covid-19 vaccine boosters. It was a big shock, because no one can ever tell how the expert panel will vote on Covid-19 questions.
Nonetheless, news stories about the vote noted a tone of doubt in the discussion:
“None of us has a crystal ball and we’re trying to use every last ounce of what we can from predictive modeling and data that’s emerging to try to get ahead of a virus that's very crafty," said top FDA vaccine regulator Peter Marks.
"Unfortunately, looking in the past doesn’t help us a great deal to look in the future for [a] virus that has baffled a lot of us and made predictions almost irrelevant," said acting panel chairman Arnold Monto, a University of Michigan epidemiologist.
This virus, she’s a wily beast! We’ve never had one that can change before! She’s baffled us, crafty bitch-goddess, with her fierce and wild ways! But anyway, here’s what our predictive modeling says will happen next, and here’s what we recommend doing about it. We’re the experts, after all.
Meanwhile, here’s the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank speaking at a forum on central banking this month:
“I think we now understand better how little we understand about inflation.”
So the public health experts are baffled by the consistent failure of their predictive models, and the economic experts are baffled by the consistent failure of their predictive models. It’s like a chef who keeps trying to grill a steak, only to find that he’s burnt another lemon pie. “I SWEAR TO GOD I THOUGHT THIS ONE WAS A BEEF THING.”
These people aren’t stupid, but they’re stupid in practice because they show up to the game with the weight of what they know people in their position are supposed to say and think. Fashionable experts, in-group leaders in their status-compliant position in a field, aren’t reviewing the evidence — ever — but are instead reviewing a performative checklist dotted with social status land mines.
They’re on a team, so they say the team slogans.
Paul Krugman, asked what the Trump-era economy would look like, said it would be terrible. Paul Krugman, asked what the Biden-era economy would look like, said it would be wonderful.
In neither case was he thinking about the question. He was thinking about which side he’s on, and what status he wishes to maintain, and which fashionable rooms he wishes to be welcomed in.
If that’s how expertise works, we no longer have have any. We have actors who play the brow-furrowing expert role, but have no real job beyond intoning the message of the day. It says on this card that we recommend even more Covid vaccines for everyone. Let’s break for lunch!
But, mercifully, that’s not invariably how expertise works. And this is why politicians and trend-policing media figures are so completely baffled by experts like Robert Malone or Ryan Cole, or Geert Vanden Bossche or Clare Craig or Peter McCullough, experts who follow the evidence wherever it goes. Tone and social reception tells you a lot: Does an expert say things that aren’t comforting, that sound a little…not on the team? That person clears the first barrier, and you can start assessing the specifics of what they say. Look for journalists who are offended and triggered, and try to find the person who hurt their feelings. That person may turn out to be wrong, but he won’t turn out to be Paul Krugman wrong.
This essay couldn't be more timely or appropriate. I was just thinking about performative behavior. Public health advisors have been wrong on every single aspect of COVID--spread and containment, lockdowns and school closures, masking, medical management, and of course, the vaccine. The data are abundantly clear. And yet, so many of my fellow physician friends and colleagues still keep repeating all of the same crap. For a brief time, I was puzzled. Why?
I put a lot of time and effort into sharing information and studies that would bring them from 2020/2021 into 2022. I'm pleased to say I successfully red pilled a few, but the majority have continued the same talking points. And that's when I realized that it's more important for them to "say the right thing" than to say the RIGHT thing.
Doesn't sound like things end well for a mimetic society...
Never has there been a more obsequious regime apologist than Paul Krugman. Before Robert Wenzel passed away he would make a point of routinely establishing what an idiotic turd Krugman is with his little origin story of how co-ops work etc. It was the financial crises that initially got me searching for the people like Peter Schiff that called out the subprime mortgage crises before it erupted and people like Krugman wrote smug columns about how fucking great everything was. Now that everyone knows of someone who has been adversely impacted by the jab (unless they're the type so hopelessly biased that they would pray to Pfizer for easing their suffering after being hospitalized with "mild" myocarditis) there will be an entire generation looking to people like Mike Yeadon, Robert Malone, Jessica Rose, Simone Gold, Pierre Koury, Peter McCollough and the 17,000 physicians of the Rome declaration and the 40,000 public health professionals of the Great Barrington Declaration and know everything they need to know about the cathedral while they wring their hands and try to spin their incompetence/malevolence into some kind of "no one could have done/known better" bullshit narrative. I hadn't seen Paul Krugman's name in a long time. Even though I know the reason he is promoted and exists, it still boggles my mind that someone that has so obviously been wrong and full of shit for more than a decade can still be taken seriously by anyone.