There’s a pandemic of more than just COVID-19 right now. There’s also a pandemic of pseudoscience, misinformation, disinformation, and just plain bad science….
The problem, of course, is that estimating, for example, prevalence of exposure to COVID-19 and case fatality rates is very difficult in the middle of a pandemic…
It goes double for the Bakerfield duo who’ve become the darlings of Fox News and COVID-19 deniers, Drs. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi. …
Erickson and Massihi’s video, it turns out, is a slick mix of statements, made by doctors in that are mostly true mixed with misinformation and bad science thrown together to give a message that is probably true (COVID-19 likely has a case fatality rate considerably lower than estimates made early in the pandemic) but exaggerated (it’s as low as influenza), all in service of a political message (“we should reopen America because COVID-19 is not that dangerous”).
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I’ll conclude by quoting something that Dr. Erickson said that I actually agree with, “It takes work to understand this stuff.” It absolutely does take work to understand this stuff. [T]they clearly haven’t done the work necessary to “understand this stuff.” Instead, as I said above, they’re fake experts, armchair epidemiologists who don’t even know enough to know what they don’t know.
