Jimmy Dore Gaslights His Viewers about Lockdowns

The COVID Misinformation Keeps Coming from "Independent" Media

I must confess, I used to be a somewhat regular viewer of The Jimmy Dore Show. He had a nose for bullshit from the political and media establishment, and uncovered it in a frequently entertaining way that made him a fixture among viewers of alternative media. Jimmy’s wasn’t necessarily the deepest of political analysis—it was more the sort of knee-jerk anti-establishment politics that had the right idea most of the time. It served a useful purpose for me, keeping me up to date on the latest outrage from the neoliberal establishment, whether it be the persecution of Julian Assange, Russiagate, the latest disappointing manifestation of weakness and cowardice from the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party, or the numerous US efforts to foment coups far and wide, and Jimmy frequently had on excellent guests—Abby Martin, Aaron Mate, Danny Haiphong, etc.—to provide important insights of their own.

All that is well and good if the corrupt political establishment—i.e., the ruling class—is on the same page, promoting the same myths, whether it be “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction” or “So-and-so is an evil dictator.” But what if they’re not? Is one right and the other wrong? Are they both wrong?

The Pitfalls of Knee-Jerk Anti-Establismentarianism

Knee-jerk anti-establishmentarianism gets you nowhere in such situations. If you cannot discern and analyze the contradictions within the ruling class (e.g., if Big Pharma doesn’t have the same interests as Big Oil), it leaves you rudderless. And that is the situation Jimmy found himself in when the COVID pandemic hit: Although, like their counterparts in most other countries, political leaders in the US from both major parties and their allies in the mass media and corporate spheres royally screwed up in terms of both responses to the pandemic and public messaging, they did not react to it in the same way. From the beginning, Republican politicians and their media and other corporate allies—along with long-time anti-vaxxers such as Robert Kennedy Jr. and Del Bigtree—downplayed the pandemic, playing up the fact that only a minority of infected people died from COVID or got seriously ill, and ignoring the fact that with millions of people getting infected, that minority added up to a lot of people quite quickly. And, as with their strident opposition to any and all gun regulation, the far right and their kooky conspiracy theorist allies also opposed mask mandates (and, later, vaccine mandates), lockdowns, school closures—essentially any measure to control the spread of the potentially deadly SARS-CoV-2 virus—all in the name of “freedom,” the Republican Party’s favorite empty slogan (which of course is mysteriously absent from their rhetoric about abortion rights). (The political slant of a large segment of the COVID-minimizing, public health measure-rejecting crowd is clear from polls showing that Republicans are vastly less likely to be vaccinated or to wear masks in public indoor spaces—back when most people did that—than Democrats or independents.)

But anyone who carefully observed the pandemic from the beginning, as I did, could see that even parts of the country governed by Democratic politicians responded poorly to the pandemic. Although, as my colleague Bob Sinclair and I have shown, Democrat-governed states have fared considerably better on average than Republican-governed ones, even the best-performing US states such as Hawaii and Vermont have COVID infection and death rates many times higher than the best-performing countries, and these differences are not just random accidents, but a product of

conscious policy choices (e.g., early lockdowns and mask mandates) and individual decisions (e.g., high rates of vaccination and mask-wearing). Although definitely better than doing essentially nothing, or even actively undermining local attempts to control COVID’s spread, as Republican governors such as Ron DeSantis have done, the too-little-too-late approach of Democratic politicians hasn’t worked well, either.

Unfortunately, like much of what passes for the left in the US and the Western world generally, who lack both a decent general science background and the humility to listen to what scientists have to say about issues within their area of expertise (infectious diseases and public health in this case), Jimmy Dore chose to largely align himself with the “freedom fighters” of the far right wing of the political establishment on the COVID issue. He has falsely claimed that the Omicron and even Delta variants were “like a cold” despite both of them killing hundreds of thousands of people in the US alone; cherry-picked an incompetently-done study claiming that countries’ COVID vaccination rates had not made any difference in infection rates; cherry-picked a brief moment in time when California had a higher COVID infection rate than Florida as a way of complimenting Governor Ron DeSantis’ “let ‘er rip” COVID policies (even though Florida overall has a far higher infection and death rate); falsely claimed that ivermectin was an effective treatment for COVID and then lied and claimed he hadn’t said that; proudly proclaimed his refusal to wear a mask; fabricated a quote from an article, blatantly misrepresenting its content to make it appear that Singapore’s public health measures hadn’t reduced its COVID rates; expressed strident opposition to vaccine mandates for health care workers and exaggerated the number who would lose their jobs as a result of refusing a COVID vaccination; supported the anti-mask and vaccine mandate (and typically anti-vax) “trucker convoy” protests in Canada and the US and refused to acknowledge the well-documented fact that they, like similar protests and movements elsewhere, were led and funded by the far right; promoted the alleged benefits of “natural immunity” (i.e., getting infected with COVID); and the list goes on.

Cherry-Picking Run Amok

But what I wanted to focus on here is a particular example of Dore’s cherry-picking to suit his preferred COVID-minimizing, public health measure-misrepresenting narrative: His touting a “Johns Hopkins study” as supposedly showing that lockdowns only reduced COVID deaths by 0.2%. Dore starts off a June 23 segment in which he interviewed one of the researchers who conducted the study by saying “Johns Hopkins did a study…” No, Jimmy, Johns Hopkins University did not do a study; universities as a whole do not conduct, nor do they endorse, research; individual researchers do. In this case, one of the three researchers, Steve Hanke, is an economist at Johns Hopkins University, with no connection to its famed medical center or school of public health. Of course, he is not Johns Hopkins University. Here, Dore is using a common propaganda tactic to lend credibility to research by associating it with a prestigious name irrespective of whether it is substantively good research—a faux appeal to authority. (He did the same thing with the aforementioned vaccine study, characterizing it as a “Harvard study” despite the author who is at Harvard being a geographer, not a scientist, and the other being a high school student.)

In any case, the study in question, conducted by economists Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve Hanke, went viral on social media and with far right media outlets such as Fox News, The Blaze, the Wall Street Journal, and Breitbart, despite thus far being unpublished, because its indubitably counterintuitive claim that lockdowns did not work appealed to conservative and conspiracy-minded audiences. But how does such a claim make any sense? Infectious diseases such as COVID that are transmitted in an airborne manner cannot be transmitted unless people are somewhere near each other, preferably (from the virus’s point of view) indoors rather than outdoors. The whole point of what are referred to with the umbrella term “lockdowns”—measures that restrict individuals’ contact with each other such as closures of non-essential businesses and in-person schooling, limiting public indoor gatherings, limiting travel, etc.—is to reduce the amount of contact individuals have with each other, and thereby reduce the possibility of their infecting each other. What do people like Hanke or Dore think is happening if it’s really true that lockdowns have not had much of an effect on COVID infection rates or deaths? That people violate lockdown orders en masse? “Immaculate infection”? Dore, like right-wing pundits such as Sean Hannity and Jordan Peterson, is more interested in the supposed “media blackout” of the study than an honest examination of its claims, which defy logic.

Empirically, it is easy to verify that a competently-implemented suite of public health measures can bring even a highly contagious disease such as COVID under control. Back when New Zealand still took containing COVID seriously, they often went months at a time without a single death, and China, despite being a country of 1.4 billion people, has not had any COVID deaths in over a month, and has more than a million fewer deaths overall than the US. Meanwhile, the US is currently plowing along at about 300 a day, down from a peak of several thousand a day over the winter.

So then how (I’ll leave “why” for later) did Hanke and his colleagues conclude that “lockdowns” only reduced deaths from COVID by 0.2%, and how did Dore happen to pick Hanke to interview out of the dozens of researchers (including yours truly) who have conducted research pertaining to the efficacy of lockdowns and other COVID containment measures—the overwhelming majority of which found that they made a sizable difference? In a word, cherry-picking. As Bruce Lee, a professor of public health, put it in an article in Forbes Magazine:

The authors claimed that they performed a systematic review and meta-analysis. [Note: A meta-analysis is a way of mathematically combining the results of several studies, so that there is more statistical power for finding an effect.] That should mean that they should have considered and included all published peer-reviewed studies relevant to the topic at hand. Yet, this working paper did not include or even acknowledge many such studies that have shown the benefits of NPI’s such as face mask wearing and social distancing without explaining why the three authors excluded such studies.

Of the 34 “studies” included in the review, 12 of them were actually working papers [rather than being published, peer-reviewed studies]. In fact, 14 of the “studies” were actually from economists with only one being from epidemiologists. This is odd since most of the key NPI research studies have been conducted by epidemiologists, medical researchers, and other public health experts.

But that’s not all. First, although it stands to reason that locking down early before there are a lot of cases would be more effective than waiting and locking down later—and considerable research supports this notion—the authors excluded examination of the role of lockdown timing from their analyses, and outright excluded studies that only looked at the role of timing of lockdowns altogether.

In addition, the authors excluded data from outside Europe and the United States, such as this peer-reviewed study of New Zealand’s lockdown, and this peer-reviewed study of Vietnam’s, thus excluding most of the countries that had the strictest lockdowns and thereby stacking the deck against finding a strong effect. In fact, they did not even mention either of these studies.

And the exclusion of studies doesn’t end there. Although they discussed 34 studies, they then go on to say that they excluded a further 10 studies from their meta-analysis, leaving 24. Okay, you may say, 24 is still a decent number of studies on which to base a conclusion, given that we generally give a lot of credence to just one study that finds decent-sized effects and is methodologically sound. But wait, it gets better. The 0.2% figure which both the authors and Fox News, the Daily Mail, Dore, etc. have focused on is only based on seven of those 24 studies! Okay, seven is still better than one, right? Well, not so fast. It turns out that they weighted one of the studies far more heavily in their computations than any of the others—specifically, 92% of the weight was given to that one study, the one which they claim found the smallest effect (the authors dispute Hanke et al.’s interpretation of their results, which ignored the

non-linearity of the relationship between COVID measures and outcomes and ignored the authors’ data from countries outside of Europe and the US). And that, my friends, is how you get an estimate of 0.2% reduction in deaths out of seven studies (not to mention dozens of others) that mostly give far higher figures than that.

In Dore’s interview with Hanke, the two devoted a lot of time to ridiculing the prediction of Imperial College of London epidemiologists that, absent some sort of “lockdown” measures, the UK would have 500,000 COVID deaths and the US 2 million. In a segment aired when Hanke et al.’s study came out in February, Dore called them “morons” for making such a prediction, and for estimating that strict lockdowns could reduce deaths by 98%. But, Dore and Hanke fail to note, the prediction of 500,000 deaths in the UK and 2.2 million in the US was made

in the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behavior.

Obviously, there is no country in the world that did nothing whatsoever to stem the rising tide of infections when COVID hit. Even in Sweden, a country well-known for never having locked down at all and for a low rate of mask-wearing, the government recommended that people work from home if they could, and many Swedes complied.

Mitigation vs. Suppression: “Living With” COVID vs. Mostly Living Without COVID

In their paper that made these predictions, Neil Ferguson and his colleagues distinguished between two general approaches they expected countries to take to controlling COVID outbreaks: 1) mitigation, which is the sort of approach the UK and US took, and 2) suppression, which is the approach that China and until recently New Zealand took. They predicted that if the US or UK had done nothing, deaths would have peaked approximately 3 months after the initiation of the first wave, resulting in infection of 81% of the population (270 million people in the US) before infection-acquired immunity resulted in a substantial decline in cases. Given that there were no vaccines (which have markedly reduced the likelihood of death in comparison to unvaccinated people) at the time, this could very well have resulted in the death figures (2.2 million in the US; 500,000 in the UK) they predicted.

As it was, the two countries’ half-assed lockdowns and poorly-enforced mask policies during the first wave of the pandemic (i.e., the mitigation approach) resulted in deaths peaking approximately 1.5 months into the wave, resulting in “only” 130,000 deaths in the US and 40,000 in the UK. That’s a lot of lives saved compared to what might have been. The ICL researchers published a study in Nature in June 2020 estimating that approximately 3.1 million lives were saved in Europe through the measures that were taken up to that point.

But compare that to the suppression approach taken in some other countries, such as China and New Zealand. By the time the waves in the US and UK had ended, China had a total of 4600 deaths, a rate of only 3 deaths per million people (vs. 600 in the UK and 407 in the US), and New Zealand had 22 deaths, a rate of 4 deaths per million people. Well, gosh, what do you know? China’s and New Zealand’s death rates during that first wave are more than 99% lower than the US’s or UK’s—or than Dore’s and Hanke’s favorite country as far as its handling of the pandemic, Sweden. And although New Zealand abandoned its zero-COVID policies last fall, resulting in more than 1000 deaths since then despite a fairly high rate of vaccination, China has held fast to them and continues to have a death rate hundreds of times lower than the US or the UK, and an economy in far better shape. Mind you, China, and during its zero-COVID days New Zealand, were far from locked down continuously. They often didn’t even have mask mandates, because they used a panoply of tactics (extensive testing and contact tracing, border controls, quarantine of those infected, mask mandates, and closures of public indoor spaces) to get community transmission to very low levels—having never allowed them to reach the high levels government officials in the US or Europe did to begin with—and used the least restrictive of these means to keep them there for extended periods of time. Here are scenes from these two countries less than a year after the COVID pandemic began:

In a country with a high rate of community transmission of COVID, densely-packed large crowds like these would inevitably be superspreader settings, particularly since such gatherings took place before China or New Zealand launched their vaccination campaigns. But because they had suppressed COVID to extraordinarily low levels, citizens of New Zealand and China were able to gather without having any concern about contracting COVID, indoors or out, for most of the pre-vaccine era of the COVID pandemic.

But Why The Cherry-Picking?

One of the authors of the paper to which Hanke et al. gave disproportionate weight in their meta-analysis had this to say about their study:

They already had their hypothesis. They think that lockdown had no effect on mortality, and that’s what they set out to show in their paper.

Indeed, two of the authors publicly expressed anti-lockdown views long before they conducted their skewed meta-analysis. In January 2021, Lars Jonung wrote an editorial entitled: “A Message from Sweden: Mandatory Lockdowns Do More Harm than Good,” editorializing against the more restrictive policies Sweden enacted in late 2020 when its government realized that “let ’er rip” had not gone well for them during the first wave (Sweden at the end of 2020 had a death rate hundreds of times as high as China’s or New Zealand’s). Hanke, for his part, claimed that lockdowns constituted “fascism” (a view that, ironically, many actual fascists, such as members of Germany’s Alternative for Deutschland party, supporters of France’s Marine Le Pen, and members of Canada’s People’s Party and Canada First, agree with) and likened government leaders who supported vaccine mandates to Hitler (who, ironically, opposed them). He also falsely claimed that Vietnam didn’t report COVID data, expressed suspicion of data from countries that had reported few deaths during the pandemic’s first wave, and claimed that

#COVID19 is now being used as the #Left’s #Political weapon against 

@realDonaldTrump. Inciting fear w/ their inflated, unreliable numbers.

He also alleged that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was somehow responsible for “hundreds of thousands of illegal unvaxxed immigrants” supposedly entering the country. Given these sorts of views, it is hardly shocking that in addition to being a professor at Johns Hopkins, Hanke is also a fellow at the right-wing, Charles Koch-funded and founded Cato Institute, a policy expert with the Heartland Institute (a Koch-funded and generally Big Oil-funded climate change denial organization), and an advisor to the American Institute for Economic Research, another Koch-funded right-wing organization.

Like the Heartland Institute, the AIER has been a leading promoter of climate change denial and opponent of government regulation, and over the past couple of years has been perhaps the leading organization opposing public health measures to curb the spread of COVID and minimize the threat it poses. In October 2020, AIER-affiliated professors Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated attempting to achieve “herd immunity” through mass infection of younger and healthier individuals while advocating some unspecified sort of “focused protection” (perhaps the kind that worked so “well” in Sweden?) for the elderly and other vulnerable people, presumably requiring them to indefinitely isolate themselves while everyone else lived a “normal” life of repeatedly getting ill, potentially with a disabling case of long COVID, in a vain attempt to achieve herd immunity. Sounds like “freedom” to 60-year-old, asthmatic me; where do I sign up?

In Merchants of Doubt, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway explain how the tobacco industry, the weapons industry, and assorted corporate polluters have funded small groups of “hired gun” scientists, as well as conservative think tanks such as those mentioned above, to discredit scientific evidence linking tobacco to cancer, the burning of fossil fuels to climate change and acid rain, etc. Similar marketing campaigns have been devoted to convincing us that the animal products we find in certain grocery stores or the “natural foods” sections of supermarkets were “humanely raised,” or that junk food and massive quantities of meat aren’t really that bad for our health, all in the service of agribusiness’ bottom line. Much the same sort of corporate campaign to sow doubt about public health efforts to slow the spread of and reduce the damage done by COVID, and to minimize the threat that the virus poses to the public’s well-being, has taken shape over the course of the pandemic, and involves many of the same players.

But why? Of course, one part of the answer is that, much as promoting “skepticism” about climate science serves the bottom line of fossil fuel companies and other interests that benefit financially from continuing to center the world economy around fossil fuels, there are also industries—the airline and tourism industries, fossil fuel companies, etc.—that benefit from a “Don’t Look Up” sort of attitude about COVID. Hanke is, as documented above, a willing accomplice in both of these campaigns, a “hired gun” who promotes both climate change and COVID denialism, which serves vested economic interests. (And for that matter, although I can’t say for sure what his motives are, Dore certainly brings in large audiences and large amounts of donations with his “anti-establishment” views about COVID, containment policy, and vaccines.)

But part of it, too, is ideologically driven. As psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky puts it,

The pervasive scientific evidence [that tobacco smoke is bad for you, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is dangerous and its spread needs to be mitigated, and that climate change is driven by the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, etc.] has, however, failed to keep influential political and economic actors from seeking to undermine tobacco control measures, climate-change mitigation policies, and now also public-health measures to control the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost without exception, those actors are adherents of libertarianism and operate within an ecosystem of conservative and free-market “think tanks” and “institutes” that engage in the denial of any science that, if taken seriously, entails the need to infringe on “liberty“ through regulations or policy.

It is this ideology of libertarian individualism that, unfortunately, seems to be shared not only among the many conservative proponents of “freedom” (TM), but also by many on the left, including Jimmy Dore. In our work documenting the relationship between conservative political ideology and resistance to mask-wearing, COVID vaccination, and pandemic control measures such as mask mandates or lockdowns, Bob Sinclair and I noted that these views are far from solely the province of political conservatives:

Our personal observation has been that many on the left in the individualistic countries we live in are also resistant to mask and vaccine mandates and other pandemic control measures, and an underlying factor in such resistance among those on both the political left and the political right appears to be lack of trust in government. Whether it be belief that 9/11 was an “inside job,” belief that climate change science is a hoax, or anti-mask and anti-vaccine views, a common thread in anti-government conspiracist views—which go well beyond reasonable concerns about public policy being warped by powerful vested interests—is a lack of trust in government that goes so deep that even scientifically well-documented perspectives such as that climate change is a real and human-caused problem or that masks and vaccines are effective public health measures are rejected out of hand simply because the government supports them.

Indeed, although largely absent from most collectivist (group-oriented/solidaristic), non-Western cultures, this sort of individualistic and conspiracist mindset is widespread among the Western left. In country after country, the far right and a certain faction of the left have become unlikely bedfellows regarding COVID-related issues, organizing mass demonstrations against lockdowns and mask or vaccine mandates, or agitating against them in legislative bodies, in the name of “freedom,” while the notion of solidarity goes out the window. Typifying this sort of “freedom uber alles” mentality, a leader of the German Left Party and strident anti-vaxxer, Sahra Wagenknecht, stated that “Everyone is responsible for himself” in the course of denouncing vaccine mandates. But we are not only responsible for ourselves. In a civilized society, we must also look out for each other. And if we are to overcome the COVID pandemic, and other threats to our collective well-being such as climate change, we need to educate ourselves about scientific matters as much as we can, and bear in mind that when there’s broad scientific consensus—that COVID is dangerous and dramatically reducing its incidence is both possible and vital to a healthy society, that smoking cigarettes is not a good idea, or that burning fossil fuels and razing forests like there’s no tomorrow threatens the very foundations of modern society—it’s probably because that consensus is based on a great deal of evidence.