Phil Magness Profile picture
Dec 18, 2021 14 tweets 7 min read Read on X
Thread summarizing what we've learned so far of the Fauci/Collins email dump on the Great Barrington Declaration:

It starts on 10/14/20 when Collins instructs Fauci and his staff to "take down" the GBD and the "fringe" scientists behind it. Image
Fauci responds immediately by circulating an article against the GBD from that austere scientific authority, @WiredUK. Image
The Fauci-endorsed Wired article is noteworthy for having one of the single worst hot-takes of the entire pandemic. It declared in October 2020 that the GBD should be ignored, because lockdowns were a thing of the past and would not be returning!

wired.co.uk/article/great-… Image
The next day, Fauci sends Collins an angry rant against the GBD in the @thenation by @gregggonsalves.

Collins approves. Image
Far from a scientific study refuting the GBD, Gonsalves's article is a political op-ed attacking @jacobin magazine for breaking "solidarity" with other far-left media outlets on lockdowns. Why? Because Jacobin ran an interview with @MartinKulldorff on how lockdowns hurt the poor. Image
Over the weekend, Collins launches the smear campaign against the GBD in the Washington Post.

washingtonpost.com/health/covid-h… Image
Collins and Fauci email each other about the WaPo hit, with Fauci quipping that the White House was "too busy with other things to worry about this" - perhaps an election reference? - and therefore would not push back on the anti-GBD campaign. Image
In the meantime, Gonsalves also gets in contact with Collins to volunteer his services (along with future @CDCDirector Rochelle Walensky) to attack the GBD in the media.

Collins approves, and forwards it to Fauci and a bunch of NIH underlings. Image
In the meantime, @gregggonsalves was having a public meltdown against the GBD on twitter.

Image
The emails get murky around 10/14/20, because the NIH redacted a bunch of emails that appear to be between Fauci and Collins.

Surrounding context suggests they were discussing how to trash the GBD if it came up at the WH Covid task force meeting on 10/16. Image
On the morning of the Covid task force meeting, Fauci sends Deborah Birx this email alerting her about the need to oppose the GBD at the meeting. The unredacted part suggests they are preparing to attack @ScottWAtlas, who was perceived as the task force's champion of the GBD. Image
10/16/20 is as far as I've gotten in piecing together the story of what happened. Still more documents to go through, including some more explosive revelations about where Fauci was getting his anti-GBD talking points. So stay tuned!
*typo in the above. The first email about "taking down" the GBD was on 10/8/20 - three days after the GBD broke into the news and went viral.
Here's an update with the next round of emails:

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Phil Magness

Phil Magness Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @PhilWMagness

May 4
🧵Thread on @gabriel_zucman's claim that billionaires pay a lower tax rate than the average American, as published in yesterday's @nytimes.

The short version: Zucman manipulates his data to fit a pro-tax political narrative. You can see this by comparing to his own earlier work.
In 2018 Zucman (along with Piketty and Saez) published an article in the prestigious Quarterly Journal of Economics, estimating the avg effective tax rate on top income groups. They argued that the gap between top and bottom earner tax rates had closed due to payroll taxes. Image
But they also noticed something interesting when you look at the average effective tax rate paid by the wealthiest 1% of earners. It had only slightly decreased between the 1960s and the present! Image
Read 20 tweets
May 3
The NY Times article about billionaire tax rates is engaging in intentional deception.

Graph below shows his original published statistics in blue vs. what he told the NYT in orange. The change came from manipulating how he assigned corp tax incidence.

nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Image
Its author Gabriel Zucman is also engaging in another deception by reclassifying unrealized capital gains as "income."

The problem: that's not what the tax code or the constitution say.

Income is governed by the realization principle, meaning it must be earned to be taxed.
This isn't the first time Zucman has used this same sleight of hand.

5 years ago he got the WaPo to run the billionaire tax rates chart. He contradicted his own published data, and even briefly deleted his data files from his website to hide that fact. I called him out then. Image
Read 5 tweets
Apr 15
This is false.

Zucman's own statistics (before he manipulated them for the New York Times by altering tax incidence to support his narrative) show the top 1%'s average tax rate has barely changed since 1962. #communitynotes Image
Here are Zucman's own stats before he manipulated them to fit his story.

1962 tax rate was 39%. 2014 was 36%. Image
(Note: I omitted PSZ's pre-1960s data because it is basically junk, extrapolated from poorly-rendered income distribution estimates by Piketty and Saez. These data are riddled with accounting errors that render them basically useless)
Read 8 tweets
Mar 23
Top 10% income share in the US using different approaches and sources. As usual, the Piketty-Saez (blue) is the outlier and presents an exaggerated depiction of rising inequality. 1/ Image
Note that there are differences in the series & sources.

Piketty-Saez and Geloso-Magness are from IRS tax data. Geloso-Magness is generally lower because it corrects for accounting and data entry errors in Piketty-Saez, reducing overall inequality. 2/
Auten-Splinter is a more comprehensive measure that includes both income earnings (e.g. IRS) and imputed income from national accounts for non-tax sources.

The Social Security figure is a combo of 2 series using similar methods (Kopczuk-Song through 2007 and EPI's extension) 3/
Read 8 tweets
Mar 12
Today seems like an appropriate time to remind everybody that @Harvard's epidemiology department employs a Marxist activist with no actual medical expertise.

He has a long history of calling for real scientists to be fired for opposing the Covid lockdowns
campusreform.org/article/harvar…
@Harvard Here he is a few weeks ago bragging about how he pushed a communist political screed into a mainstream medical journal. Image
@Harvard His twitter feed is a nonstop stream of openly Marxist activism posing as "epidemiology" - a field in which he has minimal actual training. Image
Read 6 tweets
Mar 11
🧵Since commemorative statues are being reevaluated in light of their connections to atrocities, racism, etc., here's the case for why we need a commission on the Karl Marx monument in London's Highgate Cemetery. Image
First, should Marx be canceled? The arguments:

1. Marx's system has a disastrous and bloody track record, including a 20th century body count of ~100 million

2. Marx endorsed revolutionary violence of the type his followers enacted

3. Marx was a vicious racist & anti-semite
For these reasons, Marx's monument has been a frequent target of vandalism in the recent past...although the people who usually celebrate vandalizing statues were mostly outraged at this particular one.

theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/f…
Read 25 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(