On Saturday, a protest to “stop the Islamic takeover of New York City” took place near Gracie Mansion, the residence of New York City’s mayor. The protest was led by a man named Jake Lang, a right-wing activist and provocateur. A group of counter-protestors were also present. One of the counter-protesters, identified as Emir Balat, lit and threw an IED (improvised explosive device)—a jar wrapped in black tape with nuts, bolts, and screws inside, with an external fuse—at the protesters. Witnesses saw flames as it traveled through the air. The IED extinguished when it landed. Had it exploded as intended, the metal pieces inside would have burst forth as shrapnel, inflicting maximum carnage. Balat then ran down the street and received a second device from another man, lit that device, but dropped it as he ran down the street.

These facts—plus that a protester used pepper spray against counter-protesters—were established yesterday, and disclosed in a briefing by the NYPD Commissioner. (The one exception is that initially it was unclear whether the items were dummy bombs or real. Today the Commissioner confirmed the devices were not hoaxes or smoke bombs, but actual IEDs.)

Yet media coverage of the incident gave the impression that the anti-Islam protesters threw the IED. Here is the NYT headline (which I “corrected” in my image at the top of this post):

Smoking Jars of Metal and Fuses Thrown at Protest Near Mayor’s House.

The formulation “thrown at protest” is deliberately ambiguous, leading readers to believe the protesters threw the IED. The subhead “Six people were arrested after anti-Islamic protesters led by the right-wing activist Jake Lang clashed with counterprotesters near Gracie Mansion” adds context about a “clash” with counterprotesters, but even after reading that, at best, readers might be confused about who threw the IED.

NBC handled the incident similarly. Their tweet was posted at 7:30pm yesterday, after the Police Commissioner’s briefing, when details about who threw the IEDs was already known.

Notice the language : “suspicious devices found outside Gracie Mansion, home of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, during anti-Islam rally and counterprotest.” The devices were simply “found” near Gracie Mansion, not thrown by Balat.

ABC was similarly vague.

Below is the lede in an article in Gothamist, an online publication owned and operated by New York Public Radio (WNYC):

A few paragraphs later we get to the counterprotesters, but attribution of the bomb thrower is avoided.

The device thrown during Saturday’s protest was ignited during a confrontation between roughly 20 supporters of far-right activist Jake Lang and about 125 counterprotesters gathered near the mayor’s official residence.

The article is an exercise in linguistic contortion, the two reporters writing everything possible without saying that it was a counterprotester who threw the IED.

Even the caption under the image of the suspect simply refers to “a man” throwing the explosive during the protest.

As most people know, the standard for news articles is the Five Ws — Who, What, When, Where, and Why. The news outlets deliberately did not inform audiences up front the “who,” even though that information was known. The NYT ultimately got to this information in its article’s fifth paragraph, and Gothamist eventually gave the names of the suspects but assiduously did not say they were counterprotesters.

Given that the “anti-Islam” nature of the protest was given prominence in the headlines, it’s also relevant that the Times and many other outlets did not include mention that as Balat was detained he appeared to say “Allahu Akbar,” a Muslim declaration of faith. The video evidence of him saying this is also corroborated by an AFP reporter on scene.

Today, Mayor Mamdani posted about the incident on X. Like the media reports, he highlighted the bigoted characteristics of the protestors, but did not mention who threw the IEDs, by far the most newsworthy component of the story.

The mayor overtly gives the impression that the Jake Lang protesters were the ones who threw the explosive device. There is no other way to read his post because it doesn’t even mention that there were counter-protesters present. He obviously knows the truth about who intended to blow people up, but he chose to purposely obscure this and mislead the public.

Below is a corrected version of his tweet:

This is how narratives are created in the public conversation. People not following the incident closely, and just glancing at headlines, may likely come away with the impression that the Jake Lang group were the ones who threw explosives. While Lang’s politics and tactics may be odious, being wrong or mean or bigoted is protected by the first amendment as free speech. Throwing bombs is not. Fortunately, the explosives failed.

It feels crazy that I signed a publishing deal with MIT Press four years ago. At the time, I expected it to take me about a year to write the book. Whoops! In reality, it took about three years. (The last year was mostly spent going through rounds of polishing the text and many, many months of waiting—the book publishing industry moves extraordinarily slow.)

In part, the book took years because I wrote many articles during the same period, which took me away from the book (even if some of the work on the articles ultimately found its way into the book in one form or another). But, mainly, I did a lot of research. I read study after study after study. And then I often read the studies that were cited in the original study. And then read the studies that were cited in the studies that were cited by the original study. And on and on. Why did I do this? Because it bothers me not knowing the truth.

An Abundance of Caution takes you on a journey. It goes back in time, recounting the ideas and work of early scientists and philosophers. The book reveals medical triumphs, like how, exactly, in the 1700s, it was discovered that giving British sailors lemons and oranges prevented them from getting scurvy—and how that triumph so many years ago explains much of the policy failures during the Covid pandemic. The book also reveals how our intuitions are often wrong, particularly with medicine and public health: The fact that so many pandemic interventions seemed to many people—including, most of all, the “experts”—like they should work, but actually didn’t, is part of a long history.

Throughout the book threads of media criticism, political science, psychology, sociology, and the foundations of evidence-based medicine are woven together. I wanted to explore: How do we know what is true? And why do we—as a society, and as individuals—make the decisions we make when we have limited information?

Because the book is published by an academic press, it needed to go through peer review. One of the things I’m most proud of and excited about is that both reviewers of the manuscript roughly said: “Zweig takes very complex ideas and makes them accessible and incredibly engaging.”

I think one of the reasons the book has garnered an enthusiastic reaction thus far is that I approach its topic apolitically. I don’t have a political axe to grind or an agenda, other than trying to describe reality, to make my contribution to pulling us one step out of Plato’s cave, away from the shadows and toward the light.

BUY THE BOOK:

If you’re a subscriber to my substack and you haven’t yet ordered the book, now is the time. Seriously, what are you waiting for? Imagine the equivalent of 100 of the best posts I’ve ever written—that’s the book.

You can purchase An Abundance of Caution now at Amazon, and other major online retailers. It (hopefully) is in your favorite local bookstore. If it’s not, demand they order it!

COME TO A LAUNCH EVENT:

I’m doing three major book launch events, in New York, Berkeley, and DC, co-hosted by my friends Jesse Singal, Lee Fang, and Jenin Younes, who each will lead a conversation about the book, followed by a Q&A, and then some partying! New York and DC have SOLD OUT their allotment of tickets that include a copy of the book. And Berkeley has literally 1 ticket left that includes a book. Discounted tickets, that do not include a free book, are on sale now for a limited number of remaining slots.

Get your tickets for:

Berkeley, this Saturday, 4/26, at 3pm!

New York, next Monday, 4/28, at 6pm!

DC, a week from Friday, on 5/2, at 6pm!

Read | Watch | Listen:

If you want a teaser of the book’s contents:

I was on Megyn Kelly’s show yesterday for nearly an hour-long interview.

Here’s a 12-minute clip of the MK interview.

Matt Welch interviewed me on The Fifth Column podcast.

The Free Press and The Atlantic, both ran excerpts.

The Wall Street Journal had a terrific review, as did Town Hall (hard to argue with its title: “David Zweig’s Covid Book Is a Must Read.”)

Author and podcast host Michael Shermer called An Abundance of Caution “Arguably the most important book of the past 5 years.”

Coming up: On Wednesday I’ll be on CNN with Jake Tapper, and on Thursday I’ll be on the CBS Morning Show. Many more podcasts, radio interviews, and other coverage to come.

Later this week I’ll post more of the press on my website: DavidZweig.com

Final Note:

The best way that this book can make a difference is through word of mouth. It also makes for a fantastic Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and graduation gift! Nothing says “I think you are a smart person” like giving someone a 450-page book with hundreds of endnotes! Worst case, even if it’s unread, it’ll look impressive on a bookshelf, or it’ll make for a good doorstop. Please Buy now!

Thank you to everyone for all of your support,

Dave

Most of you have likely heard that Jay Bhattacharya was confirmed this week by the senate to be the next head of the NIH. It would be hard to have scripted a more satisfying narrative arc than for the man who was maligned in 2020 as a “fringe” epidemiologist by Francis Collins, the head of the NIH at the time, to now be the head of the NIH himself.

Another heretic, who dared to question the establishment, Dr. Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon and researcher, in addition has been confirmed as the new Commissioner of the FDA. Marty is a brilliant and gifted man (and I’m also honored that he blurbed my book).

Whether one agrees or disagrees with some or many of Bhattacharya’s views, it’s inarguable that he’s a man of integrity. Bhattacharya, who has an MD from Stanford School of Medicine, and a PhD in economics, also from Stanford, has spent decades as a scholar and researcher, devoting his professional life to trying to improve public health.

I first met Jay in the fall of 2020 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, at an event spearheaded by Martin Kulldorff, at the time a Harvard biostatistician. Kulldorff had invited me to hear his and Jay’s pitch, which they made with the Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, for an alternative approach to the pandemic. At some point I’ll tell the full story of what happened in Great Barrington. But for now I can just report that, needless to say, as I chatted with Jay by a fireplace late into the night, I never, in my oddest flight of fancy, would have imagined this turn of events.

Another person in Great Barrington I met that weekend was Jenin Younes. A fellow burgeoning outcast, Jenin and I hit it off, and have remained friends ever since. And so, in my own plot twist, four-and-a-half years later Jenin is joining me at my book launch event in Washington, DC.

Like my NYC and Berkeley events, which are co-hosted by my friends Jesse Singal and Lee Fang, Jenin will lead a conversation with me about my new book, An Abundance of Caution, followed by a Q&A, and then some serious partying!

Tickets for the DC event on 5/2 are on sale now! The ticket is $30 and includes a book (which retails for $40), so the event is essentially free. Because we are ordering the books in bulk, they must be ordered far in advance, so the free book offer will expire soon. We’ll update the ticket page when books are no longer on offer.

Tickets are still available for the Berkeley launch event on 4/26 and the NYC launch event on 4/28! Berkeley is getting close to selling out, and NYC tickets are also moving fast. And the free book offer will expire soon. So order your tickets for Berkeley and NYC now!

And if you’re in the DC area, get your tickets now!

See you in Berkeley, NYC, or DC soon!

Dave

Subscribe now

I’m thrilled to announce I’ll be doing an event in Berkeley, CA, with the investigative journalist, Lee Fang, on Saturday, April 26th. I’ve been a fan of Lee’s work for a long time, and I’m so excited and grateful that he’s going to help celebrate and launch my book, An Abundance of Caution, which comes out that week! The event is at 3pm, and you can order tickets HERE. The event includes: Lee Fang in conversation with me about the book, followed by a Q&A, book signing, a FREE book (retail price $40), food from an amazing local taco truck, snacks, and plenty of beer and wine and other drinks. (If you already preordered the book, then give your free copy to a friend.) All this for just $48.

Like the NYC event, we will be making zero dollars off this event. The ticket cost covers a discounted book, amazing food, and drinks. Lee is participating for free. And a generous friend and fan is offering his house for the event. (The event will be outdoors, unless it’s bad weather.) My motivation for all this is simple: It is important for the truth to come out about the pandemic, and my aim is that this book, which is the result of years of research, will serve as a historical record. The more the book circulates, the better chance it has to serve as a corrective against many false narratives about the pandemic and, more broadly, to reveal how conventional wisdom and the experts can easily lead us astray.

It is important to get your tickets NOW. 1) The event might sell out. 2) The free book offer will end very soon because the books need to be ordered in bulk far in advance of the event.

See you there!

Dave

I’m thrilled to announce I’ll be doing an event with journalist, author, and podcast host extraordinaire, Jesse Singal, on Monday, April 28th, at The Village Underground in New York City. We’ll be celebrating the publication of my book An Abundance of Caution, which comes out that week! The event is at 6pm, and you can order tickets HERE. The event is $30, but every ticket holder will receive a copy of the book, which will be waiting for you at the venue. (The book retails for $40, but I’ve worked out a bulk discount.) If you’ve already preordered the book—thank you so much, btw!—please give your free copy to a friend.

We will be making zero dollars off this event. I wanted the cost of the ticket, instead of generating profit, to simply cover the cost of the book. Here’s why: It is important for the truth to come out about the pandemic, and my aim is that this book, which is the result of years of research, will serve as a historical record. The more the book circulates, the better chance it has to serve as a corrective against many false narratives about the pandemic and, more broadly, to reveal how conventional wisdom and the experts can easily lead us astray.

The format for the event is Jesse will lead a conversation with me about the book for around 40 minutes. Then we’ll open it up to a Q&A for 20 minutes. Then I’ll sign books, and people can chat, drink, and mingle. Afterward, whoever wants to do so can join me and others at a nearby bar for more festivities.

It is important to get your tickets NOW. 1) The event might sell out. 2) The free book offer will end very soon because the books need to be ordered in bulk far in advance of the event.

But wait, there’s more! In the next day or two, I will share details for two more book launch events!:

Berkeley, CA, on Saturday, April 26th, and Washington, DC, on Friday, May 2nd.

If you want a live event in your area, and think we can draw a large crowd, reach out to me, and we’ll see if we can make it happen.

See you soon!

Dave

Subscribe now

What was not revealed to the American public is that Deborah Birx, the head of the White House coronavirus task force, knew 15 days was a ruse. Birx admits in her book, Silent Invasion, that in one of her meetings where “15 Days” was being pitched, that she “left the rest unstated: that this was just a starting point.” She goes on:

No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that.

Birx fashioned herself quite the manipulator and boasts of the “chess” moves she made, changing tactics for the goals she wanted to achieve as she presented various cases to the vice president, members of his staff, and, ultimately, the president. At one point she describes her pitch of a travel ban as yet “one brick in the construction of a larger wall” of measures she planned to push for. But, she said, “I couldn’t do anything that would reveal my true intention.”

The marks for her trickery weren’t only those in the White House. Her true target, of course, was the American public. Early on, the CDC had encouraged no more than 50 people to gather. Birx advocated for a limit of ten people. But not because that was backed by any solid scientific data. Rather, Birx explains:

“Ultimately, cross-household gatherings needed to be stopped entirely. Limiting gatherings to ten had been a first step and was consistent with my spoonful-of-sugar approach. Starting at fifty, as the CDC was advising, would require many more moves to get to zero.”

Birx said she “knew” that whatever number Americans heard they would “round up.” If they were told 50, they would gather in groups up to 100 people. If the public was told 250, “they would hear 500.”

The disdain for the elected politicians and government appointees she worked with was only surpassed by her condescension toward the citizenry, which, in her view, was not to be trusted with the truth, but instead to be infantilized. Just as 15 days was never her goal, neither was a limit of ten people in gatherings. “If I pushed for zero (which was actually what I wanted and what was required), this would have been interpreted as a ‘lockdown’—the perception we were all working so hard to avoid.”

Many Americans were the proverbial frog in the pot. Gatherings of ten would soon be gatherings of zero. When fifteens days expired, the authorities would extend the lockdown-that-wasn’t-to-be-called-a-lockdown by an additional thirty days. And when schools were first closed “out of an abundance of caution,” for tens-of-millions of kids a few weeks would turn into three, six, twelve, and even eighteen months. This was a thing that, well, just happened. (As the media continues to remind us, the pandemic closed schools, not policy makers and administrators at the behest of the experts.)

Over time, many others, though, particularly small business owners whose livelihoods were destroyed, churchgoers no longer able to attend services, and families with kids who struggled mightily with the isolation and challenges from “remote learning,” began to realize the water was boiling.

Of course, in her deceptions Birx believed she was doing the right thing. Ethicists can argue whether one’s conviction in the righteousness of their pursued ends justify the means. But the problem (beyond ethics) was that many of Birx’s assumptions and beliefs were very wrong. As I reveal in my forthcoming book, An Abundance of Caution (out 4/22!), the models that Birx had based so much of her policy recommendations on, many of which were imposed on several-hundred-million people, were deeply flawed. The various projections of cases and deaths that could be avoided by social distancing—which, we were told, included, critically, school closures—were based on very dubious assumptions and, as I show, in some cases, even made up figures.

During the pandemic, most of the Left viewed Trump as a dangerous moron; and in an emotionally satisfying, yet childish binary, the “experts” were seen as wise and forthright. It is deeply unmooring for people of good will to come to terms with the reality that the experts were not the ballast they perceived and wished them to be. As the economist Paul Romer told me after receiving an advanced copy of my book, “An Abundance of Caution is a disturbing but important read.”

Subscribe now

Dear Silent Lunch readers:

This newsletter has been on pause much, much longer than I anticipated. I apologize for the radio silence.

There are two main reasons for the extended hiatus. First, I found that completing edits on my book (more on that in a moment!) was much more time-consuming and labor-intensive than I would have liked. Second, an opportunity outside of journalism came my way, which has taken up most of my bandwidth.

That said, I’ve missed working on this newsletter. And I’m going to start posting again here at Silent Lunch. I’m very excited to resume bringing you the unique reporting and commentary that you came to expect and enjoy. However, the schedule is likely going to be erratic, at least for a while. Because of that, I’m keeping the paywall down and paid subscriptions will remain paused, even as I bring you new material.

Now, on to the big news:

Finally, after years of work, An Abundance of Caution, my long-awaited book is finally coming out! I’m honored that MIT Press is publishing the book, which is especially noteworthy given that I’m not an academic. An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, is a searing indictment of the American public health, media, and political establishments’ decision-making process behind one of the worst American policy failures in a century—the extended closures of public schools during the pandemic. My goal for the book is for it to serve as a historical document, and for it to blow readers away, revealing the true story about what really happened, with extraordinary heretofore-unknown details that will enrage, fascinate, and inform.

The book is being released on April 22, but I urge you to preorder it now. It is available for preorder at every major online bookstore, so please order from wherever you prefer. I’ve linked to Amazon because they offer a price guarantee, which means you will get the discounted price they apply to most new books once they go on sale.

Preorders for books are extremely important. Publishers and their distributors (in MIT Press’s case it’s the behemoth, Penguin Random House) decide how many resources to allocate toward marketing and selling a book based in significant part on preorders. Bookstores also track preorders and often choose whether to carry a book and, if so, how many copies to order based on advanced demand. In short, preorders carry an outsized influence on a book’s success.

An Abundance of Caution is 100X anything I’ve ever done. If you’ve enjoyed my investigative journalism, this book will take you on a journey like you’ve never been on before.

I am excited to share that the book has gotten an incredible early reaction from some of the smartest and most respected public intellectuals, writers, and scientists:

“An Abundance of Caution is a book the world badly needed. David Zweig writes crisply, with a rare combination of journalistic rigor and empathy. But his book is unsparing in revealing how frustratingly predictable many of the mistakes made during the pandemic were—and how partisanship was used to suppress the pursuit of science and undermine the public interest. As much as some might hope to forget the pandemic, An Abundance of Caution is indispensable reading for preventing the next catastrophe.”
—Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight and author of Silver Bulletin

“This book is important. It tells a disturbing story. Faced with the erosion of its legitimacy and authority, the scientific community needs to engage seriously with Zweig’s analysis.”
—Paul Romer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, and Director of the Center for the Economics of Ideas at Boston College

“For those interested in the failure of evidence-based medicine and public health to protect our children during prolonged COVID school closures, An Abundance of Caution is a uniquely rigorous, incisive, and must-read account.”
—Jeffrey S. Flier, MD, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Former Dean, Harvard Medical School

“A powerful analysis of the largest public health intervention in modern history. Using a clear, scientific approach, Zweig asks piercing questions that shed light on medical dogma propagated by groupthink.”
—Marty Makary, MD, Johns Hopkins surgeon and author of Blind Spots

“Through both his reporting and his congressional testimony, David Zweig was one of the only journalists brave enough to tell the truth about the ill-fated school closure policies during the pandemic. His book is a meticulously researched history of unpopular, scientifically unsupported, socially catastrophic policy decisions.”
—Matt Taibbi, investigative journalist, bestselling author, and publisher of Racket News

There will be more to come from Silent Lunch soon. In the meantime, preorder your copy of An Abundance of Caution (and perhaps a second or third copy for a friend or family member) now.

Thank you,

Dave

Hi, Silent Lunch subscribers.

I am, finally, in the final round of edits on An Abundance of Caution, my book examining the epic failure of public policy around American schools during the pandemic. Alas, the book won’t actually be published for quite some time (publishers tend to operate at a glacial pace). But the bulk of the work—and, given the size and complexity of the book, it is a lot of work—has to wrap up far in advance. Reluctantly, I’ve come to the realization that I’m not able to finish the book and at the same time provide you, dear readers, with excellent and regular content.

On top of all this, I’ve also begun a long-term commitment to some outside research work.

So, I’m going to put Silent Lunch on pause until I finish the manuscript, at which time I’ll be able to get back to the newsletter in earnest.

Paid subscribers: during the pause you will NOT lose any money. All monthly subscribers will have their payments suspended until the newsletter resumes. And all annual subscribers will have their subscriptions extended by whatever duration the newsletter is paused. To reiterate, you will not be charged during this time.

The good news is once we resume expect more of what you love from Silent Lunch. I have a backlog of ideas and pieces in process that I’m excited to finish and share.

In the meantime, for those readers who haven’t seen some of Silent Lunch’s biggest hits, check out:

“Did the Entire Media Industry Misquote a Hamas Spokesperson?,” an investigative piece that reveals the rot of the mainstream media, and that, amazingly, is closing in on 100,000 views;

“When a Renegade Church and Zealous County Health Department Collide,” my exposé of the extreme lengths health officials took—including spying on American citizens—to try to enforce pandemic rules; and

“The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association Want the Government to Censor Americans,” a dive into a legal brief authored by our nation’s most powerful medical organizations that argued for the government to infringe on Americans’ right to free speech.

Those stories and the rest are available here:

I’m always accessible via email, and love hearing from readers. So feel free to reach out any time—dave@davidzweig.com.

Be well, and thanks for being a Silent Lunch reader,

Dave

The AP report was reprinted or covered by media around the country, from major national outlets, including NPR and PBS, to innumerable local news operations from New York to California.

At first, this may seem like a story of government waste, albeit waste that was the result of well-intentioned over-purchasing during an emergency. But a brief investigation suggests that much of this equipment did not need to be discarded. And the fact that authorities, and their advisors, operated without even a modicum of due diligence is indicative of a pervasive problem with the public health establishment.

You may wonder why the states don’t simply hold on to these materials, such as masks and gowns, in case they are needed in the future. The answer, we are told, is that much PPE has a limited shelf life and is not considered or guaranteed to be effective after its expiration date. For this reason, South Carolina dumped 650,000 expired masks. “Wisconsin tossed nearly 1.7 million masks and almost 1 million gowns,” the report noted. FEMA sets the value of expired supplies at zero dollars, the AP wrote.

Over time the materials used in PPE can degrade, weakening their effectiveness. As such, manufacturers have “best by” dates or accepted shelf-lives for their masks and other gear to ensure quality. Except several studies suggest that the stated expiration dates of masks and gowns are largely false.

A study conducted between April and June 2020, and published in August 2020, in JAMA Internal Medicine, tested the effectiveness of expired masks and compared them to new masks. N95 respirators that had expired in 2009 and 2011—roughly a decade before the study period—had unchanged effectiveness. Both batches of expired N95s exceeded the benchmark of 95% fitted filtration efficiencies.

Moreover, the masks were tested in a highly controlled environment, and measuring their effectiveness at blocking particles was limited to just over 4 minutes.

As I’ve written about before, evidence has shown mask mandates to not be meaningfully effective, in part, because interventions do not often operate in the real world the same as they do in a lab. Kids wearing masks in schools and workers wearing them in offices do so for hours each day, not for four minutes. Obviously, the ability for someone to keep a respirator tightly sealed to their face diminishes over time and will lead to lower effectiveness than what a lab test shows. Outside the “perfect” environment of the laboratory, as the frailties of human behavior increasingly diminish the effect of an intervention, any theoretical difference between expired masks and new ones likely vanishes anyway.

Back in February 2020, the CDC also had conducted a test of old masks, which had been manufactured between 7 and 17 years earlier. The study indicated that many were beyond the manufacturer-designated shelf life. There were 11 models taken from 10 different storage facilities around the US. The CDC found that “the majority of respirator models tested continued to meet performance standards.”

Gowns used by healthcare professionals need to meet certain standards for liquid resistance, and, like masks, the materials can degrade over time. So gowns, too, have shelf life dates. Yet gowns beyond the expected shelf life of five years also performed well in a test by the CDC in 2018. In fact, the old gowns outperformed newer gowns that were still within the acceptable time period.

None of these studies provides a definitive assessment of the quality of all supposedly outdated PPE. Yet they certainly suggest that, at minimum, the states should not have been so rash in junking millions of dollars worth of masks and gowns based on the false notion that they were no longer effective.

Why not run a test once a year on a sample batch from the stockpiles to test their effectiveness, and if the results are good, continue to retain the equipment? While there are some costs associated with storage, surely maintaining a few warehouses to hold stockpiled PPE is cheaper and wiser than dumping the supplies and, inevitably, scrambling to purchase new products at the onset of the next emergency.

The AP investigation revealed important data about wasted PPE. Unfortunately, though, the report—which was covered by news outlets all over the country—did not assess the imprudence of the states’ actions. None of the journalists bothered to look at what the evidence actually shows regarding shelf lives of PPE.

Worse still, state public health officials around the US did not advise the decision makers to hold on to their stockpiles. They, too, seem to just assume the shelf lives stated by manufacturers, and approved by government agencies, were accurate. (Did it occur to anyone that it’s in the manufacturers’ self interest for their products to have shortened stated shelf lives?)

With just a small amount of research I found studies, published by the CDC and in a prestigious medical journal, that showed the expiration narrative was false. This debacle is a case study of yet more public health policy decisions being made without officials actually looking at the evidence. And—following unsupported claims about the benefit of mask mandates, six feet of distancing, and school closures that lasted more than a year, among other errors— it’s yet another mark against the authorities’ trustworthiness.

Unlike many other vaccines, given that someone’s Covid vaccination status was uninformative about whether they were infected or not, these mandates not were only an imposition on civil liberties, but also epidemiologically unsound.

Court documents from more than a half-dozen Covid vaccine fraud cases around the country shed new light on this fraught time in our history, and expose some inconvenient truths.

First, the cases suggest that media narratives around “anti-vaxxers” as an only-right-wing phenomenon were misleading.

In January 2022, Time magazine ran a story titled, “How the Anti-Vax Movement Is Taking Over the Right.” The piece detailed how the movement against vaccine mandates “was a window into a growing political cause that is beginning to unite a host of groups across the right.” And the article asserted that anti-mandate rallies “seemed to be driven by the same narratives that pulled thousands of Americans into the QAnon conspiracy.” NPR ran a piece on the “growing alliance between anti-vaccine activists and pro-Trump Republicans.” The widely covered Canadian trucker convoy—which began as a protest against vaccine mandates—was similarly portrayed as a coalescence of right-wing views. Beyond the media, the academy pushed this idea as well, for example a scholarly paper tying “anti-gender and anti-vaccine” positions together as part of “right-wing discourses.”

It is true that Republicans were vaccinated against Covid at a lower rate than Democrats. (Though, since people often answer polls and surveys with what they think is an acceptable response, rather than the truth, survey data can be notoriously unreliable.) Still, among the half-dozen or so vaccine fraud cases I reviewed, a number of the perpetrators were almost certainly on the left politically.

A midwifery in upstate New York called Sage-Femme, like many of the schemers, used its status as a medical center to order vaccine doses and receive genuine vaccine cards from the government. But instead of vaccinating patients the center destroyed the doses and filled out cards for patients erroneously saying they had been vaccinated. Sage-Femme racked up two separate indictments against different staff members.

Data suggest that midwives are almost universally left-wing, and inclined to be liberal and democrats. For good measure, midwives, by and large, are staunchly pro-choice, not a position associated with the political right.

Another fraud case is against Juli Mazi, a naturopath in California. Mazi allegedly gave patients “COVID-19 homeoprophylaxis immunization pellets,” but filled out official cards saying they had received the vaccine. Naturopaths almost definitionally exist as an alternative to the medical establishment, and their approach is aligned with a “holistic” or nature-based worldview typically associated with the far left, or, at the least, simply outside our traditional political alignments. It’s hard to view Mazi, who has Facebook posts that say “Hug trees, clean the seas, save the bees,” as right wing.

Julie DeVuono, a nurse practitioner, who worked at Wild Child Pediatric Healthcare, in Long Island, New York, was indicted for selling forged vaccination cards and making false entries into the state’s vaccination database. DeVuono is a “natural medicine oriented pediatric nurse,” who has advocated for cupping treatment while at an acupuncturist’s office—again, not exactly the profile of a typical right-winger.

This of course is not a systematic review of all vaccine fraud cases. But in the random sampling of court cases I reviewed it’s hard to argue that “anti-vax” sentiment—erroneously defined by the media as being against Covid vaccines or simply Covid vaccine mandates—was exclusive to the right, as much of the media narrative portrayed it to be.

Beyond the horseshoe theory of politics, many who opposed vaccine mandates, in particular for children, were neither far left nor far right, but independent from the American political binary—this would include plenty of European governments.

Second, beyond dispelling media narratives, the legal documents from some of the vaccine fraud cases reveal a troubling allocation of law enforcement resources. A vaccine fraud case in Utah involving a plastic surgery center hinged on the involvement of multiple undercover agents.

According to the indictment, the government’s cost of doses that the center received was $28,028. Some might wonder whether these financial stakes are worthy of the federal government devoting the resources of undercover agents and an extensive legal battle.

Another case, against a defendant who resides in Colorado, also involved undercover agents.

Undercover operations, involving recorded calls, were used in the Juli Mazi case as well.

This isn’t to say the government does not have an obligation to prosecute fraud. Only that the resources for these sting operations and legal battles against the Covid vaccine card schemes could have been used for any number of other healthcare crimes of far greater magnitude. For example, medicare and medicaid fraud is estimated to cost in the billions-of-dollars each year; there is more than $1 billion in telemedicine fraud annually; and phantom billing, upcoding of services, duplicate claims and so on all cost in the billions.

Julie DeVuono, the Long Island nurse, and one of the more successful vaccine fraudsters, allegedly made $1.5 million from her illegal activity. But relative to the big players in healthcare grift, for the feds to focus on DeVuono is the equivalent of using undercover agents and aggressive prosecution for a street corner pot dealer instead of a drug kingpin.

One may argue that the prosecutions of the vaccine card frauds happened not solely or specifically because of the financial stakes, but rather that the harms from the crimes here are societal, in the form of making fellow citizens less safe. Indeed, this assertion was made in many indictments. But a look at the dates of some of these cases immediately disproves that line of argument. The plastic surgery case, the Van Camp case, and other cases cited actions as late as spring 2022. This was long after it was widely known that the vaccines did not stop infection or transmission, which was the only ethical and logistical justification for mandates.

This raises the third, most important issue: the mandates were so feared and loathed by significant and diverse numbers of citizens that they were willing to become criminals rather than comply. (Even among the distributors only some of them appeared solely motivated by money. Many cited philosophical opposition to the mandates as their motivation.) Just the smattering of cases I reviewed represents thousands of regular citizens who felt compelled to fake their vaccination status.

Perhaps some portion of them had already been infected and knew what many European governments had acknowledged, and what has been a basic truism in immunology over centuries—that for many viruses past infection tends to confer robust protection. The US was fairly unique in not allowing “natural immunity” to substitute for being vaccinated. (A salient side note: many of the state requirements for the pediatric vaccine schedule—for MMR, chickenpox, and so on—specifically make exemptions to the vaccine requirement if the child had prior infection.)

Or some of them did not want their kids vaccinated, knowing the risk of Covid to them was negligible, on par with many other viruses—a fact that many European countries acknowledged in their recommendations against pediatric Covid vaccination. The Utah plastic surgery clinic gave saline shots to children to fool them into thinking they were getting the Covid shot, a sad deception to avoid children bearing the burden of criminality.

In my landmark investigative piece on a church in California that was sued by Santa Clara county for not complying with various Covid-related orders, I detailed how regular, law-abiding citizens felt forced to become criminals because they did not want to follow rules that profoundly infringed on their personal liberties. Rules, it is important to note, that had no evidence of actually making society any safer. The same was manifestly true with the vaccine mandates.

It’s a fascinating comment on America that the fraud was so rampant, and among varied groups of people. Clearly, a large number of citizens, on both the right and the far left, and in between, did not want to get vaccinated and were willing to lie about it.

The prevalence of people with fake cards calls into question the effectiveness of mandates. And it also suggests a lack of wisdom by health professionals to understand the consequences of interventions. Requiring individuals to have a medical product injected into their bodies that they so strenuously did not want that they were willing to commit fraud in order to give the illusion of compliance were bound to cause far more indignance and distrust than officials had planned for.

The podcast episode is available as both an audio-only version (accessible at the top of this message) and as a video available on YouTube. Please, even if you don’t watch all (or any) of the video, go to YouTube and subscribe to the Silent Lunch YouTube channel. It’s free and it’ll help the podcast grow.

I’m still working out some kinks with distributing the audio version to various podcast platforms, including Apple and Spotify, so it’s possible it’s not yet available on your podcast app of choice. But you can listen to the episode now at SilentLunch.net or via the substack app.

If you are not a paid subscriber, now is the time. For just five bucks a month, you will enable interviews like this—along with investigative reporting and commentary— that you are unlikely to find elsewhere, to continue.

Subscribe now

Teaser video clip below:

The document—by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and three other medical organizations—came in the form of a legal brief filed in relation to Missouri v Biden, a free speech case that will be heard by the Supreme Court this spring. The case centers on a suit by three doctors and two other citizens who have thus far successfully argued in lower courts that the federal government coerced social media platforms to censor them, in violation of their first amendment rights, because they attempted to post content that was disfavored by the authorities. In advance of the court date, numerous amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs—among them the one from the medical associations—have been submitted to the court by various groups, advocating for one interest or another relevant to the case, hoping to inform and influence the justices.

If the AAP et al’s position is adopted by the court the implications are profound. It would mean that the government alone will be the ultimate decider about what is true, and should citizens or parties have a differing view it could be considered “misinformation,” and lawfully subject to suppression.

The crux of the brief’s argument is that the government has a “compelling interest” in combating “vaccine misinformation.”

Two paragraphs from the opening of the brief are excerpted below:

The brief goes on to argue, at considerable length, that vaccines reduce mortality, the prevalence of severe illness, and the burden on the medical system. Covid-19 vaccines, specifically, are referred to repeatedly.

The brief then asserts that “misinformation about vaccines meaningfully interferes with their lifesaving role.” And that conspiracy theories that the vaccines contain microchips or that they can magnetize people, among other false claims on social media, lead to “declining vaccination uptake by the public.”

While the brief does not explicitly call for censorship, its argument can only be read through that lens. Deep into the document, after some 40 pages, begins its final section, titled: “Combatting vaccine misinformation after its acceptance is not reliably effective and diverts resources from clinical care.” (Italics added.) Seven pages are devoted to this claim, where it’s noted that “post hoc efforts to mitigate the harm from vaccine misinformation are less effective at preserving public health than reducing the spread of misinformation in the first place.”

Outlandish claims about microchips and so on are easy to sneer at. But whether all of the above assertions are true or not is irrelevant. Though the medical organizations’ and the government’s desire to save lives is noble, that goal does not empower the authorities to be the determiner of what is or is not misinformation, and to usurp citizens’ freedom of speech. This is for good reason.

As we all experienced during the pandemic, numerous claims were made by health authorities and politicians about vaccines and other Covid-related matters that were not true. The brief itself displays a troublesome—and odd—lack of awareness of this fact. It states:

Amici refer to ‘misinformation’ throughout this brief, and mean it to refer to all incorrect information about vaccines.

If that is the definition of misinformation then the government would need to censor itself. In July 2021, President Biden said, “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the IC unit, and you’re not going to die.” He also said in the same Town Hall, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”

In March 2021, then head of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, said, “Our data from CDC today suggest that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.”

In May 2021, Anthony Fauci said when you are vaccinated “you become a dead end to the virus.”

(Beyond vaccines, among numerous other examples of dubious claims by Fauci and other officials was the supposed effectiveness of mask mandates. This led to masks being required in innumerable contexts throughout American life for years, including in schools for millions of children. Yet in April 2023, Fauci conceded that at the population level masks only “work at the margins.”)

There is lawyerly wiggle room in some of the above claims. Still, for all intents and purposes—and in Biden’s case, unequivocally—these were not correct statements.

Moreover, it’s important to note that in many instances authorities in the United States interpreted “The Science” very differently from many of their European peers—from suggesting that masking young children was effective, to vaccine policies that pushed boosters on the entire population.

Lastly, I will not spend time going through all the studies cited in the brief’s text to support its assertions about vaccines. But it is worth highlighting the following claim in the brief because it exemplifies the problem with the government being the decider of what is or is not “misinformation.”

The brief claims that myocarditis risk “is more than seven times higher in people who were infected with SARS-CoV-2” than it is from the Covid vaccine. While this may be true on a population level, (a debatable point outside the scope of this column), this claim does not address the risk to young males, the cohort with far and away the highest incidence of vaccine-related myocarditis. In the literature cited to support the brief’s claim, the median age of people studied was 49—this obscures the significantly less favorable odds for young males. (Indeed, an analysis published in BMJ found that Covid boosters for young adults were a net harm.)

One other claim jumped out at me, and it’s perhaps the most salient for displaying the foolishness of the AAP’s argument. As an example of vaccine misinformation, the brief cited a belief by some patients that the “Covid-19 vaccine will damage testicles.” While I am not aware of evidence to support this belief, a study published in the journal Andrology found “Covid-19 vaccination temporarily impairs semen concentration and total motile count among semen donors.” I only know about this study because I included it in my exposé of censorship at Twitter. As part of my Twitter Files investigation, I showed that Dr. Andrew Bostom, a Rhode Island physician, got his account suspended for tweeting the above peer-reviewed study.

Impaired semen concentration may not be exactly the same as damaged testicles, nor does it indicate permanent sterility, as some may have feared or claimed, but it certainly suggests a gray area beyond the binary certainty of “misinformation.”

The brief’s argument is profoundly misguided, and it is of grave concern that prestigious medical associations, whom much of the public trust, are trying to advance this position. For certain, there has been and will always be an amount of nonsense and conspiracy theories related to public health information. While wanting to protect citizens from false and dangerous medical claims is a worthy mission of the authorities, the avenue for that pursuit should be for the government to present what it believes to be true information, and be candid when there is uncertainty. It should not be to suppress information that the government decides is not allowable. Contrary to what the AAP and AMA argue, the government should never be the final arbiter of “truth.”

For those readers who want to spark a good conversation at Christmas dinner, look no further than “A Colonized Christmas Story,” an article in the academic journal Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology. Written by Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre, a professor of social ethics and Latinx studies at the Iliff School of Theology, this article suggests that popular tellings of Christmas “romanticize the birth of Jesus,” and that we “read the Gospels with privileged eyes.” Instead, De La Torre instructs:

The Jesús narratives can be read as anti-colonial literature about a native resident living under an invading colonial foreign power.

The article seeks to see “the familiar story through the eyes of marginalized Latinxs (Latinos/as), who live under the consequences of colonization.”

The article begins:

Read more

One suspicious claim in particular, however, stuck out at me. And after some digging the story became much stranger than I expected. As a case study it exemplifies much that is wrong with journalistic practices, dovetailing with similar problems about sourcing and a lack of transparency that I exposed in an investigation of news coverage of the Gaza hospital explosion.

In the debate, DeSantis had said that “California had higher excess mortality than Florida,” which the Times authors declared was “misleading.”

The Times authors went on to explain:

During the two-year period of 2020 and 2021, Florida saw 183 excess deaths per 100,000 people while California saw 142 excess deaths per 100,000 people, according to an analysis by Andrew Stokes, a Boston University demographer, and Yea-Hung Chen, a University of California, San Francisco epidemiologist.

These numbers certainly would suggest that DeSantis was wrong. But how did the researchers that the Times cited arrive at this conclusion? No link was provided to this analysis so in an immediate sense it was impossible to know. I dug around and couldn’t find the presumed cited paper or report from these researchers, so I emailed both of the Times authors and the two researchers asking for information on this analysis. At the time of my post no one had replied to me. But a few day later I got an email from Yea-Hung Chen, one of the two researchers. That’s when things got weird.

Chen, an epidemiologist at University of California, San Francisco, said “the work is currently unpublished and unposted,” but that “related work” was going to be published in a month or so.

I wrote back asking that if the work was unpublished and unposted, how did the NYT reporters see the analysis? And I asked a second time to see the analysis. Chen didn’t respond so I sent a follow up where I summarized for him what seemed to be a bizarre scenario: a scientist at a public university conducted research, allowed only certain journalists to see it and then refer to it in print, and did not to allow anyone else to see it.

In what world was it appropriate for no one to be able to see Chen’s methodology, dataset, or any other details, but for the Times to refer to the conclusions of his analysis?

Chen replied that he didn’t think his analysis was unique and that the Times reporters hadn’t seen the underlying data either. Moreover, he said:

“I never ever viewed such comparisons as being super meaningful relative to the discussions people are having.” And that “the comparison of excess mortality between the two states is an interesting starting place, but. . . if somebody wants to seriously evaluate whether specific pandemic responses were effective, then I would suggest a different type of analysis.” 

He ended by saying “you are not being singled out. I told a journalist from a large newspaper that I would not like to discuss the matter at this point in time. He respected my request, and I hope you will do the same.”

To recap: The Times cited an analysis to back up their claim that DeSantis was wrong for saying California had a higher excess mortality than Florida. The NYT reporters ignored my emails asking about the analysis. The researcher they cited acknowledged he shared the findings with the NYT of what is, essentially, a confidential analysis that he, nevertheless, believes is not meaningful or appropriate. And the researcher refuses to provide the analysis to, or discuss it with anyone else.

It’s hard to envision a more ridiculous case of opaque evidence used in a news article, let alone a “fact checking” piece that purported to refute a politician’s claim. It’s reminiscent of the Gaza hospital fiasco, insofar as none of the journalists—either time—would reply with evidence to queries about their sourcing. But this story goes a step further, in that when I reached the source, he, too, refused to share his evidence.

Chen and his partner’s analysis very well may be excellent, and methodologically well grounded. We have no way of knowing. But here’s what we do know:

An analysis published by the White House came to the opposite conclusion of Chen’s secret paper. The graph below, from the White House, depicts excess mortality rates, by state, for a span of two years, from March 2020 to March 2022.

Forget about the X axis. For our purposes we’re not interested in percent uninsured. Looking just at the Y axis, it’s clear that California had a higher excess death rate for the first two years of the pandemic.

It’s easy to see on the map as well that California had a higher excess death rate than Florida.

Florida having a more favorable overall outcome from the pandemic than California is deeply inconvenient for a news outlet that lauded California’s more restrictive approach and demonized Florida as a “cautionary tale” of what happens when masks aren’t mandated and people go “barhopping.” But the evidence suggests otherwise. And journalists citing an unpublished analysis as a supposed rebuttal, that even the researchers refuse to share, needless to say, is not exactly persuasive.

Here’s Walter:

The Battleground Thanksgiving articles share certain familiar tropes and themes. They have a ritual villain, for example. It’s typically a cranky older relative hailing from a roughhewn heartland city who crudely dismays his more enlightened relatives with his blunt views on race or Trump or Covid.

Beyond the baked-in smugness, these articles are based on a more pernicious idea, that people need advice on how to perform basic social functions. Many of the articles feature interviews with psychologists. USA Today upped the ante by including not just a couple of psychologists but also a DEI consultant.

The notion that we need to professionalize conversation, generally with an eye toward avoiding “conflict,” is, I think, unhelpful. Yes, people should be respectful. Yes, they should be open to hearing different views. (And I’m doubtful that simply telling anyone that will alter their behavior and mindset.) But conflict, argument, debate—this is what makes for real relationships.

Sure, sometimes it’s best just to watch football and not get into it. But, generally, I wish people were less hesitant for genuine engagement. Journalistically, that’s what I’ve tried to do. During the pandemic I found my reporting—and myself—estranged from the narratives the legacy media was intent on enforcing. I occupied a rare lane, where I continued to write for establishment outlets, but generally did so as a lone contrarian voice.

I’ve often been asked how I got controversial pieces—on masks, vaccines, schools—published in New York magazine, the Atlantic, and other outlets. The answer is: it was often hard! I’m very grateful that I worked with editors who I respect, and who respected me and my work, and who had enough influence internally to green light my pieces. I’d be delighted to work with many of them again, should the circumstance feel right.

But in the past year, as I’ve devoted my work almost exclusively to this newsletter, the sense of purpose, autonomy, and community I feel is unrivaled. I’ve written around 40 pieces for Silent Lunch, from in-depth features running thousands of words to brief commentaries. I could never be this prolific writing for other outlets.

I am grateful to my informal staff of editors—including physicians, lawyers, and my long-suffering spouse—who I often lean on to help ensure the work I bring you is polished. But, unlike writing for someone else, these editors are not gatekeepers. I am free to pursue what is of interest to me, and what I think will be of interest to you, my readers. The formula seems to be working.

In a short amount of time, without any outside investment, sensationalist clickbait, or promotion beyond my Twitter account and word of mouth, Silent Lunch has grown to nearly 10,000 subscribers, with an ever-increasing number of them signing up as paid subscribers.

I am incredibly thankful for your support and honored to work for you. My goal is to bring you something excellent. Be it thoughtful essays or deeply researched investigative pieces, Silent Lunch is about covering topics no one else is covering, or bringing new perspectives to major stories you’re not seeing in the legacy media. I can’t wait to take this mission to the next level!

Over the next few weeks posting may be a little light, as I desperately try to finish a round of edits on my forthcoming book, An Abundance of Caution, for MIT Press, about American schools during the pandemic. (Alas, the book will not be out for over a year from now. The gears of book publishing grind very slowly, especially at an academic press. But the text gets locked far in advance.)

In the new year Silent Lunch is going into hyperdrive. What you will receive is going to expand considerably. Aside from multiple, large investigative pieces that are in the works right now, there will be some major new features. Specifically, a few extremely smart and talented guest writers are going to join Silent Lunch, penning occasional pieces. And, most significantly, a kick-ass podcast is under development.

I wish you all a restful, tryptophan-induced evening. (That includes vegetarians—lots of foods contain tryptophan, not just turkey!)

With thanks, again,

Dave

Subscribe now

Last week, HonestReporting, a media watchdog group that seeks to “combat ideological prejudice in journalism as it impacts Israel,” published an explosive report. The Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, and the New York Times, had worked with Gaza-based freelance photojournalists who sold photos they had taken during the Hamas invasion of Israel—including shots of Hamas terrorists inside a kibbutz in Israel, a house in a kibbutz on fire, and kidnapped Israeli hostages being taken back to Gaza. The report asked how the photographers arrived on the scene so quickly, and if this suggested coordination with Hamas ahead of time. It also questioned the ethics of prestigious news services paying for photos that were taken by people who breached Israel’s border and shadowed terrorists.

The report included tweets by photographer Hassan Eslaiah that showed him on October 7 in front of a burning Israeli tank while not wearing a PRESS vest or helmet, which reporters and photojournalists typically wear in conflict zones. The report also included a selfie Eslaiah took while being kissed by Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar.

Additional footage surfaced of what appeared to be Eslaiah on the back of a motorbike speeding toward kibbutzim with someone on the bike holding a grenade. Lastly, in footage that I discovered on his Facebook page, Eslaiah is seen illegally entering Israel at 8:27am on October 7.

The AP and CNN have since severed ties with Eslaiah. And in response to HonestReporting’s article each of the news outlets released statements immediately asserting that they had no prior knowledge of the October 7 attack, even though HonestReporting never specifically made that allegation.

Much of the talk about this controversy was framed around whether the photographers knew about the attacks ahead of time. While this is an important point, it’s the way that it was addressed by the AP that I want to focus on.

In its write up on the controversy, the AP devoted much of its article toward suggesting that the photographers did not know about the attacks in advance. But then, near the bottom of the piece, it included a passage that said, essentially, even if the photojournalists did know that would be fine anyway:

For journalists to have known about the Hamas plans in advance presents a complicated ethical question. Journalists have often been embedded with military forces in the past, and keep potential plans secret, said Nina Berman, a professor and expert in photojournalism ethics at Columbia University.

As I will explain below, this is a disturbing passage from the AP, and it is emblematic of a problem in how the media, and much of society, tends to default to “experts,” rather than to evidence or acknowledging uncertainty, when adjudicating complex issues—including those that involve ethics.

The Ethics of Documenting Horrors

First, Nina Berman’s attempt at providing historical context should give pause. She said it is common for reporters to be embedded with military units and to have knowledge of confidential plans. So Berman and the AP—at the least, implicitly—are suggesting that a reporter embedded with a military unit is morally analogous to a photojournalist being told in advance about a terrorist attack specifically targeted at civilians. Are these really comparable circumstances?

Let’s consider two hypotheticals: would it be ethical for a reporter or photographer to tag along with Ted Bundy if he told them he was going to rape and murder a young woman? Is that substantively different from Hamas raping women, lighting people on fire, and massacring attendees of a music festival? What if a reporter was told of the plans for 9/11 in advance, and took photos of the hijackers boarding their planes? (I am not saying the photographers knew of Hamas’s plans ahead of time. I am addressing the point made in the AP article.)

More broadly, Berman’s—and by extension the AP’s—insinuation that there is a moral foundation that supports reporters taking a neutral posture while documenting horrors is not as certain as they suggest. A gray area pervades the ethics of documenting crimes and ghastly events. There is a tension between when the reporter or photographer’s own humanity should supersede their obligation—or in the case of regular citizens recording atrocities on their phones, the mere inclination—to observe and record.

In 1993, the New York Times published a photo often referred to as “The Vulture and the Little Girl,” by South African photojournalist Kevin Carter. It featured an emaciated child with a vulture perched ominously nearby.

Carter’s image was a sensation. Its raw horror galvanized awareness for millions of people of a Sudanese famine in a way that prior news coverage had failed to achieve. It also brought Carter condemnation from many quarters. “The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene,” wrote one critic. Carter won a Pulitzer Prize for the photograph and then, shortly after, committed suicide.

The dilemma over intervention versus documentation was debated in a fascinating exchange during an episode of an exceptional TV series called “Ethics in America,” that aired in 1988 and 1989. In the exchange, Peter Jennings, the ABC News anchor, was asked a hypothetical: if he was embedded with an enemy military unit and gained knowledge that they were going to ambush American soldiers would he continue on with his camera crew and film American soldiers getting killed, or would he intervene.

After a very long pause (the kind of silence that is virtually nonexistent on TV today), Jennings says, “I am going to tell you now what I am feeling… If I were with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think that I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans.” Even if it meant not getting the shot?, the moderator asked. Jennings said yes, even though it would likely mean losing his life.

Mike Wallace, the famous “60 Minutes” correspondent, jumped in. “I’m astonished to hear Peter say that. You’re a reporter,” Wallace said. Some reporters would simply regard it as another story to cover, he said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Why would a reporter say, ‘I am not going to cover that because I am unhappy about what’s happening?’” Wallace then was pressed by the surprised moderator, who asked him if he had a higher duty as an American citizen to do what he could to save the lives of American soldiers, rather than an ethic of reporting. “No, you don’t have the higher duty,” Wallace replied. “Your job is to cover what is happening in the war.”

Colonel George Connell of the Marines, who was among the participants in the discussion, said, “I feel utter contempt. Two days later they’re both walking off my hilltop, and they get ambushed and they are lying there wounded and they are going to expect that I’m going to send marines to go get them. They’re just journalists, they’re not Americans. Is that a fair reaction? You can’t have it both ways.”

Two of the most famous TV journalists in America arrived not only at diametric conclusions about the ethical thing to do, but, watching the clip, the difference in their demeanors was also remarkable. Jennings appeared uneasy and hesitant about his human impulse. Wallace was frank and even indignant about his priority of getting the story.

Yet in the AP article, the inclusion of Berman’s reference to reporters being embedded with military units in the past, without any other perspective offered, hand waved away the ethical ambiguity of the issue. And by including Berman’s statement on its own, the AP writer implied an exoneration of the photojournalists if they had known about the impending massacre.

Are Domain Experts Also Experts On Morality, or Even Worthy of Reverence at All?

Berman was presented as an expert to validate a certain position favored by the AP. This same tactic was employed throughout the pandemic, by the media, officials, and regular people. Frequently, when a person who was deemed to lack expertise on a Covid-related issue—including myself as a journalist, after I had spent tremendous time researching the evidence—got into a debate with a doctor or epidemiologist, we were told by them, essentially, I am an expert, I know more than you. In social media arguments, “Sorry, but I’m going listen to a doctor, not to you,” was often trotted out against me or anyone who disagreed with the accepted narrative. This line of reasoning was argued regardless of what the evidence showed, and regardless of whether the debate was over personal values, as opposed to facts (for example, who annointed “experts” to decide that an old lady needed to prioritize being alone on a holiday in order to lower her exposure risk over prioritizing seeing her family?).

Throughout the pandemic the American public was told by the media and health officials that “The Science” said that if you didn’t wear a mask and, later, get vaccinated you were selfish. Nevermind that countries throughout Europe didn’t require masks on children, and that systematic reviews found no evidence of benefit of community masking. Nevermind that a number of those countries acknowledged that prior infection conferred sufficient (or superior) protection in lieu of vaccination, and that many of those countries, based on a cost benefit analysis, did not recommend the vaccine for healthy kids.

In America, if you didn’t follow the experts’ orders—some of which had nothing to do with expertise, but were instead based on their personal morals and priorities—you were not only wrong, but a bad person. Nevertheless, countless news stories in the Times and other legacy media continued to quote random physicians in support of masking toddlers, for example, or used the phrase “experts say” to defend various policies like closed schools.

The utter foolishness of this approach was evident last week at the November 2023 gathering of Physicians for a National Health Program. Here, a group of doctors—the “experts” we were told to listen to—can be seen at a buffet, nearly all of them in masks.

Do these doctors actually believe that wearing a mask while scooping food out of a tin, and wearing it while walking to their table, only to remove it moments later while eating with colleagues confers any benefit whatsoever?

And beyond the dubious benefit, is their preference for masking—in 2023—a value judgement that most Americans would share? Why were we told repeatedly to listen to experts who not only have been ignorant of the evidence, but who felt comfortable positioning themselves as authorities on values, which is different from being an authority on science?

But Are Experts Smarter?

Still, on many issues a lot of people default toward siding with those who have the most impressive credentials. Surely, advanced degrees signify that they are smarter than the rest of us.

A post on Twitter last week “Smug woman with a PhD gets put in her place by IQ test results,” went massively viral. The clip was edited from a longer YouTube video that first was posted in 2021, and has 7.6 million views.

It’s easy to see why the clip, and longer video, were so popular.

In the video a diverse group of young adults rank each other on their perceived intelligence, based on their education level, jobs, and how they carried themselves. A self-assured woman with a PhD confidently placed Tyler, a young man in the military, who only had a high school diploma, dead last, and herself second to the top, just after a Harvard graduate. Explaining her number two slot she said, “Me? PhD cancer biology, scientist,” while she did a little dance. She then received a few oohs and ahhs when she announced that she worked for a biotech company that makes Covid tests. All the other participants, except for one, also ranked the military guy last.

Without advance notice, everyone was then asked to take an IQ test. Lo and behold, the PhD scientist got the lowest score. Tyler was third from the top, just above a Yale graduate, who had told him that she didn’t “place a lot of value on the military,” drawing snickers from the others.

The video went viral for obvious reasons. It’s immensely satisfying, of course, to see someone with fancy degrees and employment titles, who is very impressed with themself, get shown up by an everyman. And it’s suggestive of something larger that many people have felt—the experts often don’t know what they are talking about, they’re not necessarily smarter than the rest of us, and they certainly don’t have an authority on ethics.

In 2009, Matthew Crawford, a scholar with a PhD in philosophy, published Shop Class as Soulcraft, a book extolling the virtues of working with one’s hands, where he explained that really good mechanics and other tradespeople—who, every day, were forced to solve problems in the physical world—were generally smarter, and often wiser than his think tank colleagues and other desk jockeys.

This isn’t to say that as a society, and as individuals, we shouldn’t rely on the expertise of others. We want a surgeon with years of training, we want a veteran engineer with great experience to design a bridge. But blind reverence for experts is too often utilized as a convenient defense for a certain position—be it the CDC’s promotion of masks or the AP’s blithe absolution of working with photojournalists who trail terrorists—instead of acknowledging uncertainty and ambiguity. Complex issues demand evidence, and ethical dilemmas demand debate. Neither are settled by the opinion of an “expert.”

As reported by Alex Gutentag and Andrew Lowenthal for Public, “Stanford lied about the scope of the Virality Project and that its censorship efforts were undertaken on behalf of the US government.”

It’s a lengthy investigation, and I won’t summarize it here. Please consider subscribing to Public to read their report. But one piece of the article caught my eye:

Read more

On October 17, shortly after an explosion at a hospital in Gaza, headlines around the world declared that the Gaza Health Ministry said the blast had killed at least 500 people. This was reported by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CNN, NPR, PBS, the Associated Press, the Guardian, and Al Jazeera.

It was an alarming statistic, and its blanket coverage in the news gave a concrete anchor to the rage expressed by many around the world against Israel.

Except—after an extensive investigation, and a total lack of transparency by many of our most prestigious media outlets—I have found zero evidence that the Health Ministry spokesperson ever said that more than 500 people had died.

Going back to the beginning of the Gaza hospital controversy, much attention, rightfully, has focused on the New York Times and other outlets’ botched coverage. They initially reported, per Hamas, that the explosion was the result of an Israeli airstrike, only to recast headlines as news materialized that the blast may have been from a failed Palestinian rocket. I reported on this and the Times’s use of a bombed-out building from southern Gaza—i.e. not the hospital—under its banner headline about the hospital, which remained largely intact.

Beyond the evidentiary particulars in the debate over the origin of the blast is the question of whether news outlets should uncritically report claims from Hamas, including, or perhaps especially, when it provides statistics. For his part, President Biden recently said that he had “no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.” Among others, Yascha Mounk, in the Atlantic, wrote a critique about prestigious media outlets credulously reporting Hamas’s claims.

Yet assessing whether or not Hamas’s claims are credible is a step beyond the most basic consideration: Did the media accurately report what a Hamas spokesperson said?

When I first read the claim that “at least 500” people had died it struck me as being strangely precise. Setting aside whether Hamas should be trusted, the timing of the statement, which happened within a couple hours after the incident, made its veracity unlikely. How did health authorities, in the midst of the chaos of a war zone, in a hospital at night that suffered an explosion, tally the number of dead so quickly?

Something, literally, wasn’t adding up. Since this statistical claim had rocketed around the world, I wanted to hear or see the actual statement itself, rather than references to it. Not that I assumed if I heard the actual statement that that would mean it was correct. But at least it would satisfy my curiosity. 

Except there was a problem. In all of the news reports I saw—from the Times on down—none of them linked to the original source of the more than 500 dead claim. It was simply attributed, variously, to either the Gaza Health Ministry, a “Ministry spokesperson,” “Palestinian authorities,” or Hamas.

I reached out to two different Times reporters, twice each, who had published articles with the claim, asking for the original source of the statement—was it from a video? a press release? an interview? I did not get a reply from either of them. I then emailed four different contacts at the Associated Press, which had made the same claim. And so on. In all, I contacted a dozen reporters or communications departments at news outlets, including the Times, the AP, the Wall Street Journal, ABC News, the Guardian, and Al Jazeera. 

The Times, after I had escalated my queries to a standards editor there, was the only outlet to reply to me. The response came in the form of a brief note from a communications staffer that linked to the paper’s mea culpa over its reporting on the blast, and said no additional information would be provided.

It’s worth pausing here for a moment to highlight that not one reporter from any of these outlets replied to my queries. This was their reporting, on perhaps the most contentious news story in the world at the moment. And none of them would respond with the source behind what they had written. It seemed easy enough to simply send a link to the original statement, whether it was a press release, a video, or something else. Why did no one want to do so? 

Beyond reporters, it also should be noted that I reached out to the Director of Media Relations and to the Media Relations Manager at the Associated Press. Communicating with the media is literally their job. Yet neither of them replied to my queries asking for the source of this claim in their organization’s reporting. 

Perhaps the journalists I contacted felt embarrassed for reporting the original claim, since by this time the official numbers claimed by Hamas had been revised downward from what was reported at first, and the US and other sources were suggesting the number of those who died was far lower still. Even so, this was the initial claim by Hamas, and they reported it. Or, I began to wonder, was it possible none of these journalists had actually seen or heard the original statement? Maybe one outlet reported it, and then everyone copied them, so the journalists didn’t know the original source.

I called my friend Kelley Krohnert, investigator, fact-checker extraordinaire, to run this all by her. We began a deep dive into Google and hyper-specific searches on Twitter, by date and keywords.

Finally, we found what appeared to be the source. At 1:50pm ET on October 17, Al Jazeera’s Arabic Twitter account posted a video clip (presumably of an interview that aired on its TV network) of an interview with Ashraf Al-Qidra, the Ministry of Health spokesperson.

I clicked the “Translate post” tab, which uses Google Translate, to see what text was in the tweet. This is what it showed:

This is the moment where your eyebrows should arch. Notice that the text refers to more than 500 victims. A victim can mean a death, but it, of course, can also mean someone injured in any capacity. Had the spokesperson not said that more than 500 were killed, but merely said more than 500 were victims?

Obviously, either of these outcomes are horrific. And, as noted earlier, any number cited so early after the incident was suspect. But if a news outlet is going to report a statement by Hamas, the specifics matter a lot when a claim made about deaths, initially attributed to Israel’s actions, was shared with and influenced the reactions of tens or perhaps hundreds-of-millions of people around the world. 

The word “victim” was curious, but it was also text in a tweet, not the actual interview. And it was a translation from Google. How reliable was that? I was skeptical about the tweet text’s veracity.

I didn’t want to fall prey to the same secondhand sourcing error I suspected everyone else had done. So I hired two different Arabic translators to listen to the interview, then translate it and transcribe it into English.

One of the translators seconded the use of the word “victim,” and he made it clear to me that in this context it was different from “killed.” The other translator, in referencing Al-Qidra’s comments, translated the word as “casualties.” I pressed the translator: sometimes words in one language do not have a direct translation into a different language. Was it possible that the word Al-Qidra used could be translated as “deaths”? No, she said. 

Bolstering confidence in the translations is that right before the sentence in question, Al-Qidra had referred to dead bodies and casualties or victims being brought to the hospital by paramedics. He differentiated between the two. The correct translation had to be that he said more than 500 were “victims” or “casualties”—not killed.

***

Is it possible there is a different interview that Al-Qidra gave shortly after the incident—where he said at least 500 were killed? Given that no news outlet linked to their source of this claim, and that they all refused to supply it to me, I think it’s fair to assume, unless proven otherwise, that every single news outlet got this wrong. The onus is on the media to give evidence behind what it reports, not on the audience to simply trust them. 

My working hypothesis was that someone, perhaps a reporter at the AP or whoever reported this first, had quickly glanced at the Al Jazeera Arabic’s tweet translation and, for whatever reason, wrote it as “killed” rather than “victims.” And then every other news outlet simply copied the wrong wording.

But it’s possible what happened is far worse. A short while after seeing the Al Jazeera Arabic tweet I found a tweet from the Al Jazeera English account that had been posted 11 minutes before the Al Jazeera Arabic tweet.

The Al Jazeera English Twitter account wrote “At least 500 Palestinians killed in an Israeli air strike… says health ministry.” It linked to an Al Jazeera post that said, “The Gaza health ministry said at least 500 people died in the hospital blast.” But, like all the other reports, there was no link to the original statement. (Note: one of the authors of this Al Jazeera post was among the reporters I had contacted.) 

It seems most likely that some of the American journalists had been tracking the Al Jazeera English Twitter account—not the Arabic one I had seen and translated—and immediately copied its erroneous reporting. And the rest of them began copying each other from there.

***

This reporting debacle is very bad for several reasons.

First, none of the outlets credited Al Jazeera as the source of the interview. (Given that no one provided evidence of a different interview, we must assume this is the only interview with Al-Qidra regarding the statement.) This is unfair to Al Jazeera. As a simple matter of professional ethics, Al Jazeera should have been given credit. Moreover, the lack of credit prevented readers and viewers from knowing that this bit of information was from Al Jazeera, a news source some Times readers or NBC or CNN or FOX viewers may not trust.

Second, the fact that not one reporter replied to me exemplifies a systemic problem with a lack of transparency in the journalistic process. Journalists or news outlets don’t owe every person a response who contacts them. But if you write an article and don’t provide a link to the original source material, then there is an obligation to provide it if asked. 

After receiving no response, in follow up emails to the AP media officials, I asked: “Is it the AP's official position that, when asked, it refuses to supply sourcing for claims made in its reporting?” Since that query went unanswered as well, it is clear that, alas, the answer is yes.

Which dovetails with point three, which is that, in my view, important quotes or citations should always be linked or sourced. Since reporting always involves some degree of filtering and bias, readers should have the option of easily finding the original material that a journalist reports on so readers can review the source themselves if they so choose.

And, finally, newsrooms composed of dozens or hundreds of staff members, including teams of editors and foreign correspondents, and so on, backed by billion-dollar corporate owners still published a claim that was never fact-checked at its source. In contrast to these thousands of professionals, employed by these major institutions, I am a single, independent journalist. How is it that, unlike those many people, I thought to go to the source—the actual interview in Arabic—and translate it?

Citizens are expected to think that all of these news outlets operate independently from each other. And, in a sense, of course, they do. But in reality, they all seem to follow the same process, and arrive at similar narratives which, at times, are false.

Michelle Goldberg, in an opinion piece for the Times that laments the “epistemological catastrophe” of the news environment today complained that “Elon Musk acquired Twitter and turned it into the cesspool of misinformation, trolling and hysteria.” This is a drum the Times and other legacy outlets continue to bang. She then went on to say:

I went to bed on Tuesday night assuming, as many people did, that an Israeli airstrike had killed at least 500 people in Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza. That’s what the Gaza Health Ministry claimed.

Why did Goldberg and so many people assume that at least 500 people were killed in the blast, even though there is no evidence the Health Ministry ever said this? Because it was written in the New York Times and every other major media outlet. Not because it was on social media.

The difference between “killed” versus “victims” may seem negligible on some level, given that either way this was a terrible tragedy. But the point is there were consequences around the world based on reporting of more inflammatory language that no outlet provided the source for. If the legacy media expects the citizenry to trust its reporting it should start by giving evidence behind it. It’s one thing to question the veracity of statements made by officials. But it’s quite something else if the statements themselves were never made.