"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Mark Twain, Chapter from My Autobiography
The above quote did not originate with Twain, and I have no idea who first said it. My point in explaining that I have no blessed or damned origin for it is to impress upon you that admitting "I don't know" is not radioactive. "I don't know" does not exclude you from human company or heaven's pearly gates.
Ah, but these statistics. One of the themes of "Propaganda Files" is that purposeful omission is a form of propaganda. Carefully arranging and sequencing information to create specific interpretations while masking other information to prevent alternative interpretations is also propaganda.
This entry is devoted to "Follow the math and free yourself from COVID-19" by Damon Linker. Linker's piece was published February 11 by The Week. The sub-heading reads, "The vaccines have passed the test. They work. The time to return to normal is now."
Linker is a fine writer. This is an opinion piece. As I usually do, I'll lay a good deal of the propaganda responsibility on editors at The Week. The questions not asked, the information not presented, should be obvious to any editor.
Examining "The Math"
Linker makes the case that life in the United States should return to normal, and he makes this case by employing certain specific statistics.
Linker says, "Yet they (vaccines) do in most cases protect a vaccinated and boosted individual from getting seriously ill and dying. We can see this from CDC data showing that the incidence of death last October and November from COVID-19 for someone vaxxed and boosted was about 0.1 per 100,000 infections -- or about 1 out of a million."
Linker then goes on to put that figure in context. He quotes some actuarial table odds. Americans have a 1 in 107 chance of dying in an auto accident in their lifetime. Also a 1 in 2,535 of dying via choking on food. And a 1 in 86,781 chance of being killed by a dog or a 1 in 138,849 chance of being killed by lightning.
The timescales for these events, of course, are radically different. The Covid data was for two months, and the other stats are for a lifetime. In an edited update, Linker mentions the timescale differences, but doesn't rewrite his argument.
Linker continues, "Which means, all else being equal, you're roughly seven times more likely to die from being struck by lightning over the course of your lifetime than you were to die from catching COVID-19 (in its current variants) if you were fully vaxxed and boosted in those weeks this past fall."
Debunking Linker
I worry when writers who should know better splash statistics around in a filtered way designed to garner a specific audience reaction. In this piece, Linker has written some eye-catching, fun lines, but the truth is, he should not be presenting the information in the way he did. Why not? Because two months does not correspond to a lifetime. The average American lives to more than 75 years of age. Seventy-five years features 450 of those two-month spans. Thus, the responsible, accurate statement to make is not that you're seven times more likely to die by lightning than Covid. The accurate statement would be that if you're vaxxed and boosted, you are at least 60 times more likely to die of Covid than a lightning strike. Still a long shot, granted, but not a great line for the purposes of this piece. Not a snappy stat to share to make a "get back to normal" statement.
Linker manipulated the statistics to write a rollicking, upbeat narrative. What he should have done was use accurate statistics to tell the truth, or he should have simply admitted that these stat comparisons have little relevance. Then, however, there is no rollicking narrative.
Putting these previous stats aside, however, Linker failed to be honest with readers in a more blatant way. Let's explore how he manipulated them.
Propaganda
Linker states, "But who is dying of the virus? Overwhelmingly, adults who choose to be unvaccinated." He then goes on to discuss the risk assessments of the unvaccinated.
The author is doing something fundamentally manipulative here. He provided actual odds early in the piece, comparing vaccinated and boosted risks to odds for other fatal events. He placed the odds against dying from Covid (if vaccinated) in an overall statistical context, comparing those odds to dying in car accidents and lightning strikes. In this segment, however, he chooses to mention that the people dying of Covid are unvaccinated, but he purposefully avoids putting them in an overall statistical context.
For example, if it's true that (as Linker argues) just one in a million fully vaxxed and boosted died of Covid in October/November, then what is the percentage of unvaccinated who died? If unvaccinated die at 10 times the rate of vaccinated, that is just 1 in 100,000. If the unvaccinated die at a rate of a hundred times that of vaccinated, it still means just 1 in 10,000 unvaccinated died of Covid. So the chances of having died of Covid in Oct/Nov are very small, whether vaccinated or unvaccinated.
Somehow, Linker evades stating this. He leaves the statistics unstated because he is trying to influence readers without laying out all of the contextual numbers. He could have mentioned how long the odds were against unvaccinated dying, but he chose to keep those numbers to himself. This is manipulative. This is omitting what should clearly be stated. This is propaganda.
Not only does Linker not spell this out, but he also fails to write a single line about vaccine risks. Let me repeat that. In a story about vaccine math, he fails to devote a single line to vaccine adverse effects and deaths. While these events are uncommon, if this opinion piece is all about the math, certainly they should be mentioned. A recent JAMA paper indicates that myocarditis risks increase a hundred-fold after the second vaccine shot. While myocarditis is rarely fatal, the majority of people were hospitalized. Surely that paper and statistic should have at least been mentioned.
Not putting unvaccinated Covid death risks in the same overall odds context as vaccinated risks is dishonest. Similarly, skipping any mention of vaccination risk is in service of a particular filtered narrative.
Alternative View
Imagine, if you will, if Linker had led off his odds facts with, "In Oct/Nov, just 1 in 50,000 unvaccinated died of Covid." Imagine, if he led with that, and then later in the piece, he mentioned, "and the odds for those fully vaccinated dropped to 1 in a million."
Had he sequenced facts that way, the purposeful effect of this piece on readers would be completely, utterly different (despite stats being the same). Linker didn't want that, so he left out the stats he didn't want to clearly state. He featured overall statistical context for the vaccinated, and he omitted the same context when discussing the unvaccinated. This kind of writing is the very essence of propaganda.
Postscript: I just wanted to mention two things. First, one of the problems with these opinion pieces is that we seem to be dealing with an almost interlocking directorate of writers and editors. Linker has been a senior editor at Newsweek and Daily Beast. The homogeneous spin evident in most media Covid pieces may have large roots in the heavy personal history overlap of many writers and editors of these publications.
Second, I have walked in Linker's writing shoes a bit with this article. About 10 years ago, I was in a national handicapping competition and won 17 consecutive against-the-spread games. When I got to 13 in a row, I wrote a couple of articles about the streak. My angle was to dig up actuarial table numbers and feature those odds in the articles. My goal, as I wrote, was to get to 17 in a row, as the odds against that were the same as "death by reptile." Incorporating actuarial table numbers in writing is easy and eye-catching.
Bob Dietz
February 15, 2022
