Three Years Later: Revisiting Evidence Over Hysteria — COVID-19

28 min readApr 18, 2023

I will be moving my writing to Substack. I will have regular posts for my paid subscribers and a monthly post for free subscribers. My topics will be various, from politics to technology to religion to family, but all with a perspective of clarifying hot topics and correcting narratives with data and philosophy. You should know what you believe, and those beliefs should be based on free choice and reality. Know the zeitlichkeit and stop deathworks — https://aginn.substack.com/

COVID-19 and the resulting Fauci Apocalypse turned our world upside down three years ago. Our world went from familiar to an unimaginable dystopian horror film. Every one of our lives changed in ways we never thought possible. Even as we leave the pain of the past three years, we are left with the echoes of failed policies and massive irresponsibility by our elected leaders. Nearly every major crisis we face today can be traced back to 2020, caused by insufficient data, a zealous expert class, an antagonistic media, and dreadful policy decision-making.

In light of our three-year “hysteria-adversary”, I wanted to revisit my article “Evidence over Hysteria — COVID-19” which changed policy, public debate, and my life. An article that originally was just a stream of research for only my friends turned into a viral sensation that generated millions of views in less than 24 hours until I was censored, canceled, and de-platformed for saying what ended up being true. Despite the efforts of elitist censors, my article was copied and shared widely. “Evidence over Hysteria: COVID-19” was the most-read story on ZeroHedge in all of 2020. I republished my original article on my substack and as far as I know, it is the only complete version on the internet. My experience also led me to start a new company focused on building a new type of infrastructure for the free and open web called Hydra Host.

Today, I’m rolling up my sleeves to revisit my analysis and reflect on the lessons learned. I hope it encourages you to never surrender to censorship and that courage requires you to be disliked.

A life living in fear is not a life worth living.

(If this post also gets censored, it will be republished elsewhere)

Canceled

Here is the background of how I got to this point. I started collecting data and analyzing COVID-19 in January 2020. I initially was only sending my gathered research to my close friends every week, and that email list started to grow organically. Then, I moved my research to a running doc as the data set became too large to share via email. Several readers encouraged me to publish the running doc for others to see so they can easily share it. I had a Medium account, so I posted it there for others to see.

To my surprise, my research and honest exploration of what was happening with COVID took off in good and bad ways. My article went worldwide, and I got praise from news outlets for challenging the hysterical, suffocating orthodoxy. My article reached the desk of politicians of both parties and was even read in the White House.

I also receive delirious hit pieces from CNN to NYT, death threats, friends publicly ridiculing me, hundreds of prank calls from strangers, and voicemails threatening my life and my family. Medium took down my post and Google removed it from my drive after pressure from angry EPIs and blue checks (when Twitter-verse said only autocratic epidemiologists could speak). After three years of being vindicated, my article is still censored and “under review” with Medium, breaking the world record for the most extended censor review. This is one of many reasons I started Hydra Host.

This led the WSJ Editorial Board to defend free speech, free inquiry, and our right for all of us to ask questions about COVID lockdowns. This was the beginning of the shift in public conversation. More and more scientists, utilizing open-door from the public debate around my article, began to speak up. Privately, scientists and journalists worldwide started to email me thanking me for my contribution and lamenting how they cannot speak up for fear of losing their livelihood.

At this moment, I realized how those bullies and wannabe tyrants in favor of censorship only have a veneer of support. It was a minority with a big scary media stick. They must keep up the front and force others to keep believing in their perceived power, but even those close to them will privately disagree. Their power was a shadow of fear. I just needed to wait it out, as the foundation of COVID hysteria was shaky. The evidence (aka reality) will lead people to see the error, so I kept going. I didn’t fear reprisal and helped change our country’s course out of lockdowns..

When those in power seek to first silence and slander rather than address your arguments, be confident that you are onto something. Courage is not something you need or experience when you are favored and worshiped; courage appears when you are at your darkest hour and persevere despite what the narrative says.

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” — Nelson Mandela

So let’s dig in.

Since I was updating my article several times a day before it was taken down, I’m pulling from a locally saved version I have not edited since 2020. My original paper had hundreds of citations and over 60 pages of charts and graphs. I will roll up my article into a handful of summarized meta-claims. Each header below summarizes an original meta-claim from March 2020 with its associated accuracy based on what we know today. Then, there is a quote that epitomizes the narrative of 2020. Below the selection is a short explanation with direct links to evidence and further reading.

Meta-claim scoreboard:

COVID claims — 10 out of 11 were accurate
Solution claims — 5 out of 6 were accurate

Let’s start with the most central claim of my article: was COVID-19 a hysteria or not?

COVID was a hysteria — Correct

America is losing its collective mind over coronavirus, and nobody really knows whether it’s justified or not. The U.S. economy is experiencing one of those extraordinary, mind-bending events, fueled by a form of kryptonite that can simultaneously knock down consumers, businesses and investors: fear and uncertainty. — Politico, May 2020

What started as a valid concern escalated into a comprehensive and uncontrolled hysteria that politically pushed us into destructive and harmful policies. Looking back, we are all embarrassed at how much we submitted ourselves to the insanity, from social distancing in grocery stores to mask-wearing to destroying long-held relationships over misguided public health guidance. We all remember the asinine and childish arrows on the ground as if floor graphics were going to protect us from COVID. The only exception is the religious COVID-idians who still mask their kids and post on social media when they test positive. History will judge the past three years harshly, just like other mass hysteria events. We will tell personal horror stories to the next generation and they will wonder why we tolerated lockdowns. Every major historical event has villains, heroes, and non-playable characters (“NPCs”). On the next one, don’t be an NPC.

“Total cases was the wrong metric” — Correct

“New cases of the virus have begun emerging in North and South America in recent days. Canada now has 24 cases, spread across Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec. The United States has 89 confirmed cases — including 44 evacuated passengers from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, three repatriated from Wuhan, 38 cases that were detected and tested on US soil and four cases “presumed positive.” — CNN, March 2020

Every news website and television news showed maps of “doom” or counters that could only go up. Case counts and deaths only have one trajectory and cannot tell you what to do. They were “vanity metrics” designed to promote fear and the assumptions behind these metrics were never disclosed until much later in the hysteria. Once the measurement bias was shown, we saw the media game and started distrusting any institution pushing these numbers as truth. We saw supposed “scientific” authorities as religious bodies promoting a tyrannical creed.

COVID was presented in a manner to scare the public into submission. — Correct

“Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice. The state is about to find out how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.” — The Atlantic, April 2020

By constantly labeling the pandemic as “unprecedented” (which it wasn’t) and story after story promoting viral armageddon, it drove the free public to submit to whatever the experts recommended. They justified their behavior by believing it was an emergency — the classic argument for all authoritarian moves against a free people. A year before in 2019, the same media promoting the intoxicating fear of COVID criticized President Trump for using fake emergencies and fear to gain power. Consistently compared to other countries, the US media was baselessly hostile on COVID and ignored the data and evidence for political reasons. In the UK, the government intentionally misled the public to drive action because they deemed it an “emergency”. Interestingly, any decision to gain more power can be justified because it is an emergency.

There is no strong correlation between lockdowns and outcomes — Correct

“Why lockdowns can halt the spread of COVID-19” — World Economic Forum, March 2020

Lockdowns implemented across the world were first introduced by China. Before this, the concept of lockdowns was not present in the Western academic or medical lexicon. The West copied a pandemic strategy invented by an authoritarian power that seeks to unseat the West as the global leader. In 2020, it was repeatedly argued (with moral smugness) that lockdowns were necessary; however, they were wrong. Cross-country analysis demonstrates that these devastating and restrictive policies had minimal impact on the course of the pandemic while simultaneously affecting everything else seriously and destroying decades of progress toward a more free world. Sweden revealed that existing approaches were more than adequate to manage the pandemic and embracing public health authoritarianism demonstrated no measurable benefit. The more time passes, the more we see lockdowns do more harm than good.

COVID will come and go in waves demonstrating seasonal patterns — Correct

“COVID-19 may not go away in warmer weather as do colds .” — Harvard, April 2020

The push for lockdowns was framed as means to “preserve healthcare capacity” due to the “uncontrolled exponential growth” of COVID. In reality, some healthcare systems were stressed, but the vast majority were not. The extra healthcare capacity gloriously shown on cable TV was barely used and was just for show. Healthcare workers WERE busy making countless TikTok videos and dancing to their favorite tunes. The theorized never-ending exponential growth never came to pass. Instead, COVID came and went in waves demonstrating seasonality.

Transmissibility was greatly exaggerated — Correct

“If you think you’re safe from the coronavirus just because you’re outdoors, think again.” — The Conversation, October 2020

The media reported and public health officials advised that any contact with someone infected should be considered an instant infection, like COVID was laser destined to hit its target 100% of the time. They advised us that symptoms meant nothing and to always assume you are sick. Every disease has beneficial transmission vectors and naturally built-in mitigations. COVID is no different. The media and paranoid public health officials jumped the shark on “unprecedented”. They ignored decades and decades of historical knowledge about viruses to force-fit their biases into the data. They saw what they already believed. Arguing that everyone and every opportunity presented a nearly equal chance of infection was wrong.

Transmission was via large droplets — Incorrect

“Transmission by fine aerosols in the air over long distances is not one of the main causes of spread.” — WHO, February 2020

When I wrote my article, I was not confident in the most common transmission vehicle as the evidence needed to be more explicit, so I presented what was reported at the time. The initial data showed an unequal transmission pattern and significant super spreader events, which is unexpected for airborne illness. Instead, the transmission patterns were highly dense, suggesting a heavier viral payload. In 2020, it was thought that COVID was spreading from some combination of fomites or large short-range airborne droplets. In reality, COVID does not transmit via surfaces but through fine air particles (which makes social distancing nonsensical advice). Other environmental factors also somewhat impact transmission, which is shared with other respiratory viruses. Both of these explain COVID transmission patterns the best.

“Children and teens are at low risk.” — Correct

“Myth #1: COVID-19 only affects old people, so I’m not at risk. The COVID-19 pandemic concerns everyone, because people of any age can be infected with the virus that causes it.” — MD Anderson October, 2020

The hard reality is scared adults tortured children for two years straight. We treated children as only dirty vectors of disease. We locked them away and prevented them from living a carefree life. We destroyed precious time and we will be living with consequences for decades. Children were never a severe transmission threat and had absolutely zero chance of threatening healthcare capacity. One of the biggest lies of COVID was a homogenous risk across the population, and this lie was used to justify lockdowns and destroy the lives of the next generation. We knew the heterogeneous risk very early on and the media, public health, and politicians ignored the data.

Asymptomatic transmission was greatly, greatly exaggerated. — Correct

“Most coronavirus cases are spread by people without symptoms, CDC now says” — CNN, November 2020

Another justification for universal mask-wearing and lockdowns was the belief that transmission was likely even without symptoms. The push for continued masking was based on the fear of “silent spreaders”. This terrified everyone into believing they could be sick and not know it (or worry themselves into feeling ill). This risk ended up being greatly exaggerated. The media and politicians regularly confuse “pre” and “asymptomatic”. Then, there was a messy obsession with viral loads, but the viral load is not necessarily correlated with infectiousness. As simple wisdom would prove, symptomatic infections are the source of most COVID transmission. The general assumption that “you could spread it and not know” was egregiously exaggerated to justify harmful policies and sowed distrust in public health institutions.

“The testing regime for COVID was poorly designed and fraught with errors.” — Correct

“Don’t get a false sense of security with Covid-19 testing. Here’s why you can test negative but still be infected and contagious.” — CNN, November 2020

The reliability of COVID tests and overall public policy on testing was broken. COVID tests were being misused and misunderstood to feed a primary therapeutic need and a secondary medical need. COVID tests baffled the public, created a vast medical bureaucracy, and caused additional societal mental distress. Healthy people were testing positive, but the unclear advice was to view yourself as sick or potentially sick. Even if you test negative, the recommendation was to assume you could be positive. Testing should be utilized to de-risk the concern, not add another layer of confusion. Medical testing was never used at such scale with such enthusiasm with such speed. A naive, overconfident expert class thought they could force the world into a test tube. History continually laughs at the periodic generational confidence in humanity’s power to control, alter, and model our world. We spent billions of dollars feeding people’s paranoia and psychosis, which only perpetuated the pain of the pandemic.

Declining IFR and CFR to 1% or lower — Correct

“WHO says coronavirus death rate is 3.4% globally, higher than previously thought” — CNBC, March 2020

In 2020, experts and the media predicted a 1918 Spanish flu-level mortality rate. One viral post from another tech “autodidactic” on Medium grossly overestimated/underestimated the death toll by 98%+ (his article is still viewable on Medium and was never censored). This didn’t even come close to happening. The initial measurement of any new virus is always heavily biased towards the most severe cases because new viruses first appear in the hospital. Initial predictions only saw the tip of the iceberg and made grand doomsday predictions. As testing, awareness, and broader surveillance expanded, we would see multiple more moderate to mild cases. This was simple to see in the data, but it didn’t matter to the soothsayers. Like any failed prophet, it was a self-fulling “failing forward” prediction. By issuing the warning, people took some spurious irreducible actions that prevented the doomsday prediction while ignoring the confounding natural mechanics. The cognitive dissonance is dismissed, “see people listened to me, which is why the bad thing didn’t happen”.

Despite numerous citations in my original piece, my use of “infection” versus “case” was confusing. I corrected these issues in later updates; however, my assessment that case fatality and infection fatality would be a magnitude lower than initially predicted was accurate. COVID fatality rates ended in line with recent severe influenza pandemics. If you said that in 2020, you would get quickly canceled and condemned.

Solutions

Most of my writing in 2020 concentrated on analyzing the current situation to provide clarity and focus. I wanted to disprove the hysteria-driven belief that everyone had near-equal risk and that the general population’s threat was significant enough to justify lockdowns. At the end of my piece, I had a smaller section devoted to what we could do next.

I argued that if you removed the public’s hysteria and the media’s innumeracy issues, it was clearer who we should have focused on and who were the innocent victims of gross abuses of power that cost lives and livelihoods. The risk of serious harm from COVID was incredibly heterogeneous, while the risk of serious harm from lockdowns was on the COVID low risk. The majority of the world could have continued to live everyday lives while focusing on specific at-risk populations. We destroyed the entire free world because we failed to understand the risk and the costs of our morally validating hysteria.

I was skeptical that the obsession with masks, social distancing, lockdowns, travel bans, and other novel invasive techniques would meaningfully impact the trajectory pandemic when costs are calculated. To properly factor in costs, it is required to cease being hysterical. The mania for these novel techniques would distract from policies that would work. Our society’s obsession over “the novelty of COVID” drove us to disregard proven public health techniques because such solutions looked too dull for such a “novel” virus.

Novelty reinforcing novelty. From novelty came fear; from fear came power.

“Basic hygiene will do a lot.” — Incorrect

“Amid lockdowns, mask-wearing and social distancing, soap and water have an important part to play in the fight against Covid-19 that is easily forgotten.” — BBC, August 2020

Logically if fomite transmission is weak, then handwashing and basic hygiene are less critical to prevent COVID transmission. This recommendation stemmed from the predominant belief in 2020 that fomites and large droplets contributed to a large portion of COVID transmission. This hypothesis was wrong (as outlined above), so seriously, stop wiping down surfaces and carrying Lysol wipes like a crazy person.

However, don't stop washing your hands. There are far worse things than COVID that can get you if you don’t wash your hands.

“More data and better quality data is needed.” — Correct

“Our model for the US points to April 15 as the peak day for hospital use…This demand on hospital resources could lead to a nationwide shortage of 87,674 total hospital beds and 19,863 ICU beds given current COVID-19 trajectories.” — IHME, April 2020

A central claim of my original March 2020 article was that public policy analysis was based on poor data quality and unknown or unspoken presuppositions. This precarious analysis was treated as absolute truth, the fundamental moral code, and was utilized to justify rash and horrendous policies. The doomsday predictions were based on insufficient instrumentation and measurement bias. These predictions didn’t ever come to pass, yet we all lived under the rule of these failed prophets for three years. We were flying worse than blind. COVID data presented by public officials were misleading, dirty, vanity-oriented, and heavily skewed by instrumentation assumptions. You can easily spot the absurdity and gaming if you read the small print on any COVID study or public reporting from 2020–2022. COVID data shouldn’t have been treated as Gospel. At best, most of it was heresy. At worst, it caused the loss of lives and livelihoods.

“Open Schools.” — Correct

“School is closed for more than half of all children in the U.S. in response to the rapid spread of coronavirus — an unprecedented moment in the nation’s history that’s likely to have major and long-lasting implications for the country’s K-12 education system.” — U.S. News & World Report, March 2020

One of the worst decisions made during the pandemic was to keep schools closed (the top was promoting Chinese-style societal lockdowns). The generational impairment from shutting schools down for a year or more will be felt for decades. Children are insanely low-risk (we keep schools open for riskier diseases) of severe complications or harm, but numerous fake dystopian psychodramas in the media (from MISC to long-COVID) kept schools closed. Our society saw children as just viral transmission vectors and nothing more. In reality, politicians and public health officials lured those who were actually high risk into a false sense of security by placing kids under house arrest on Zoom calls.

“Open public spaces and businesses.” — Correct

“Paddleboarder Arrested In Malibu For Refusing To Exit Water, Scientist Says Beaches Are Dangerous Right Now.” — CBS, April 2020

Do you remember the absurdity of closing beaches, parks, and God’s gift of nature? Or when COVID authoritarians enforced outside social distancing? The truth was much of public life was comparatively safe and free society could have continued on as usual with targeted mitigations.

Initially, lockdowns were argued that we had to slow infections for “healthcare capacity”. Steelmanning lockdowns, the idea was to delay infections to the future to prepare but not to prevent infections. Then, lockdowns evolved into a permanent fixture of infection control. The presupposition of lockdowns was that avoiding infections in the general public was critical, but the general public was not at significant risk compared to other common pathologies. The risk of severe outcomes was highly skewed towards a specific and identifiable population. While transmission was possible in public settings (as shown in superspreader events), lockdowns didn’t impact the overall COVID fatality rate notably despite the massive cost. People were already changing their behavior before the lockdown, so it is debatable if it was necessary to drive behavioral change.

As we know, getting sick with COVID sucks, but most infections are mild. No one wants to get sick, but sacrificing the entire free world and the world economy was harmful, arrogant, and evil. If you remove infection prevention as a required presupposition, lockdowns are wholly unnecessary and detrimental. Therefore, reopening businesses and public spaces should have been done much sooner. We should have used a scalpel, not a hammer.

Lockdowns were more harm than good — Correct

“Lockdowns save lives. The evidence is clear around the world.” — Business Insider, May 2020

If you could dream up a social experiment from an elite university professor, lockdowns would be it — base all decisions on modeling, no applicable real-life experience, and an utter disregard for the lower classes. It is a nightmare scenario of being ruled by the intelligentsia and judging life-or-death decisions based on a confounding academic model that looks pretty on paper.

Lockdowns were the worst peacetime policy in modern history. Trillions were set on fire in unprecedented QE. Out-of-control inflation. The destruction of decades of foreign policy overnight. A generation of young adults and kids who missed out on memories and education.

Not only did lockdowns fail to achieve their goal of saving lives in the measurable short term, but lockdowns also galvanized all sides into political extremism, made us more depressed and stressed, and drove deeper societal divisions. Our leaders didn’t bring the country together but divided us to gain more and more power over us. It was a win for politicians and the government and a massive loss for the free world and human rights.

Politicians will go too far and will abuse their power — Correct

“We will continue to be your single source of truth. Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth.” — Prime Minister of New Zealand, July 2022

Rather than standing up to the CCP’s unparalleled abuse of power and overreaction to a new virus, the West embraced Chinese-style “public health” policies. If the West wasn’t already in the habit of political hysteria in the years leading up to COVID, the West would have unanimously condemned lockdowns, mass testing, forced masking, and forced vaccination.

We witness horrible abuses by the police in the Netherlands. Canada was going door-to-door checking papers. New Zealand became a hermit kingdom that resembled North Korea. The top slot goes to Australia, which was completely unrecognizable for the past three years.

As frustrating as our experience as the plebeian class, it won’t matter how wrong elites are; they don’t operate in a metaphysical framework based on truth or data. Our society is suffering from a haze of postmodernism that is much more interested in being wrong in the right direction than being right in the wrong direction. Power and narrative cycles are more important than data, truth, and honesty.

For a culture like ours today, truth and reality are only plebeian concerns, while scientism and humanistic determinism power our elite class’s delusional arrogance. Lockdowns clearly favored the already rich and powerful over anyone else. For some, lockdowns may have come from a genuine concern, but lockdowns clearly favored existing people in power over the marginalized. They will utilize whatever mimetic narrative to justify their actions polemically. It wasn’t really about “saving lives”; that’s just what they say to make you feel better about giving up your freedoms and forcing you on the dole.

From my original Medium piece, March 2020

What a three years it was…

Three years ago, I urged the world to focus on evidence over hysteria as COVID-19 wreaked havoc on our lives. I hope I helped you reflect on the past three years as we navigate the aftermath. By prioritizing data-driven approaches, protecting individual rights, remembering our cultural identity, and fostering societal resilience, we can build a stronger, more prepared society, and defend our way of life from zealous excess elites.

There were several controversies that I didn’t cover in my article due to censorship, like masks, COVID origins, vaccines, and much more. For all of these topics, the same pattern presented itself over and over:

Extreme confidence from the media and expert class.
Introduce burdensome and imprisoning public narrative orthodoxy.
Punish any dissentient and unperson any critic.
Ignore any evidence or data counter to the orthodoxy.
A month or two later, once the narrative shifts, act as if the past didn’t happen and gaslight any critics.

Don’t fool yourself. This type of hysteria will come again. It worked too well for COVID to be lost in our leadership class. Next time, it will be for a different issue and you will be told, “This time is different”. Stay vigilant and diligent; be brave and have courage. This way of life is worth fighting for.

“Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." — Thomas Jefferson