Thread by @kevinnbass

The @nytimes's @fstonenyc has responded to our letter of the editor about @zeynep's recent op-ed about @DrJBhattacharya's NIH Director nomination.

Let's break it down.

Word for word.

A🧵. Instructing @zeynep and @fstonenyc how to read basic sentences in the English language.

@MartinKulldorff @Bryce_Nickels @anish_koka

@fstonenyc opens his response by claiming that, in fact:

"The March 24, 2020 essay in the Wall Street Journal, co-written by Dr. Bhattacharya, never describes 2 million as the high range of potential death estimates."

Oh really?

Let's take a look at the article, then, shall we?

Bhattacharya:

"The degree of bias is uncertain because available data are limited. But it could make the difference between an epidemic that kills 20,000 and one that kills two million."

What's that? "Two million"? Exactly what @fstonenyc says @DrJBhattacharya did not say?

"The March 24, 2020 essay in the Wall Street Journal, co-written by Dr. Bhattacharya, never describes 2 million as the high range of potential death estimates."

What's going on here???

Is English so hard that even the Deputy Editor of the New York Times @fstonenyc is struggling to read it?

Completely understandable, actually. English is so very hard.

Let's consider this a remedial lesson reading English.

So let's really break it all down.

Bhattacharya states:

"The degree of bias is uncertain because available data are limited."

That is, how biased the estimates being provided by the World Health Organization and the popular media were uncertain, and uncertain to degree that is not known.

It could be a high degree of bias, or a low degree of bias. But the degree of bias is uncertain.

"The degree of bias is uncertain because available data are limited."

Degree of bias. Uncertain. OK?

Get it?

Very good.

Because then Bhattacharya writes:

"But it could make the difference between an epidemic that kills 20,000 and one that kills two million."

Let's parse that.

Because this is a thread teaching @zeynep and @fstonenyc how to read sentences in the English language, so we have to go slow.

Students, listen up!

The sentence starts:

"But it could make the difference between an epidemic that kills..."

The operative word here is "could", which is "to be" in the subjunctive tense in the English language.

What exactly does that mean?

Well, let's consult wikipedia to help us here.

Because as well all know, learning to read is hard, so sometimes we need outside resources to help.

Students! No laughing. We all learn at different rates.

Here:

The subjunctive of "to be", "could", in other words, refers to states of possibility or those of a hypothetical nature.

Bhattacharya is tentatively putting forward a hypothesis.

First he says that the degree of bias is uncertain.

Then he provides two hypothetical numbers.

One of which is 20,000, at the low end, and one of which is two million, at the high end.

And he's saying it's uncertain. It's uncertain because of the degree of bias is uncertain.

I had my 9-yo daughter read these sentences without prompting and provide me with her interpretation.

She got it on the first pass.

A 9-year-old understands what Bhattacharya wrote! Wow! She must be a super genius!

But wait a second.

Why are @fstonenyc and @zeynep still struggling with it?

A New York Times Editor and a Princeton professor--why are they struggling with what a 9-year-old comprehends?

Should my daughter be a professor at Princeton? Or get a job at the New York Times?

Yet @fstonenyc only addressed the "two million" point. Which he is demonstrably wrong about, as I have shown.

But he did not even respond to our point that @zeynep claimed that @DrJBhattacharya "predicted" a death rate of 20,000, which is just plain wrong.

He ignored it!

But I just showed that this was wrong, too. He didn't. Bhattacharya provided a hypothetical range, stated in the subjunctive, after expressing uncertainty, with two million at the top of the range.

Now, context will illustrate why this is so important.

Bhattacharya wrote:

"Fear of Covid-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate—2% to 4% of people with confirmed Covid-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others. So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, two million to four million could die."

Bhattacharya was providing a lower range than the one being bandied about by WHO at the time--and it just so happens that the total number of people killed during the pandemic in America was right in the middle of the range Bhattacharya provided.

Now, to @fstonenyc's point, it is true that much of the article is dedicated to an exploration of the possibility that we were getting things radically wrong--not just slightly wrong.

But Bhattacharya was careful to handle this discussion in the hypothetical, as a scientist should. Read the article.

Furthermore, this is a valid discussion to have, because interventions have costs. This includes lives. And because the mortality rate peddled by the WHO really was radically wrong. And we knew that with data at the time Bhattacharya was writing--just not by how much, AS HE SAID.

Now @zeynep says she objects to the rewriting of history, but as I have shown, is she not participating in the very rewriting of history that she is accusing @DrJBhattacharya of?

It's time to admit errors. Bhattacharya might have made some, but this article's are @zeynep's.

We demand an escalation of this matter to a more senior editor at @nytimes, because clearly this is being mishandled, and that reflects poorly on the newspaper.

And that's only the first point of five.

To be continued.