Up next we have the Washington Post, which sent Fauci's underlings a request for comment on the Great Barrington Declaration.
The message didn't make it to Fauci in time for the story though, which ran on the 16th. By the time his chief of staff got it on the 18th it was already out.
Keep in mind that Fauci was away for an unspecified reason on 10/16 that was redacted from the emails.
Fauci reemerges on the 18th though to request intel on the task force meeting he missed from Collins.
Collins replies that the GBD did not come up, and Atlas was away too. This prompts Fauci to relay Birx's disdain for Atlas.
Collins chimes in again on 10/20, not so much on the GBD itself but to relay gossip about Sunetra Gupta's ex-husband.
There's another gap in the email chain after 10/20, but in the meantime Fauci appears to have tasked his chief of staff Greg Folkers with assembling a list of talking points against the Great Barrington Declaration.
Folkers replies on 11/2/20 with the list for the task "as discussed."
But it is not a list of scientific papers to counter the GBD group's arguments. Instead, it is a list of even more political op-eds attacking the GBD.
Which op-eds did Fauci use to make his case? I have the answer and will reveal in the coming days.
But most are not even from credentialed scientists, and the few that are come from ideological lockdowners who all happened to agree w Fauci before the GBD.
Stay tuned for more!
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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.
Fauci responds immediately by circulating an article against the GBD from that austere scientific authority, @WiredUK.
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!
There's something really fishy about US historical inequality data in the new Piketty et al "World Inequality Report," especially pre-WWII.
Dashed red line was his old series, solid line is new one.
Yet corrections to his pre-WWII (dashed blue) should have *lowered* inequality.
Here's the reason. Piketty's report is trying to make a strong causal claim that progressive taxation & spending policies made inequality decline after WWII.
This is not accurate though.
In reality, the Piketty series' depicted WWII drop (1941-45) is almost entirely a statistical relic of unaccounted for changes in IRS data reporting + Piketty's failure to reconcile his denominator to IRS accounting.
Most of the decline happened pre-WWII bc of the Depression.
Considering that the 1619 Project book dropped the two lines of text from Matthew Desmond's essay that led me to request a correction from the NYT in November 2019 (they refused at the time), I think it's fair to request an apology in print from @nhannahjones and @jakesilverstein
Specifically, Desmond dropped the false "calibrated torture" thesis of Ed Baptist, which was based on Baptist's misrepresentation of cotton production statistics from Olmstead and Rhode.
When I brought this to the NYT's attention, they ignored it. Now they cite Olmstead & Rhode.
Next I asked the NYT to retract Desmond's claim that Microsoft excel descended from plantation accounting books. Desmond inverted his own source, who wrote that excel did NOT come from the plantations.
Jake Silverstein specifically refused to make this correction in Feb 2020.
Oh my. Ed Baptist appears to have been sent down the 1619 Project's memory hole in the new book edition.
In Baptist's place, Matthew Desmond now cites Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, who made a devastating critique of Baptist...
...and yet strangely he still retains Baptist's false 'calibrated torture' thesis, asserting that it "surely played [a] part as well."
The book's removal of Baptist is fascinating, because I pointed the problems with his thesis out to the NY Times very early on after the 1619 Project came out.
@nhannahjones and @jakesilverstein had ZERO interest in correcting Baptist's misrepresentations of Olmstead & Rhode.
It's starting to look as if a 1619 Project contributor plagiarized another author by cribbing her article and making cosmetic modifications to its text.