The Loss of Truth
In an extraordinary bit of irony, in 1918, the start of the great influenza which claimed 675,000 American lives, US Senator Hiram Warren Johnson is purported to have said: “The first casualty when war comes is truth.” What the truth is in the age of the Covid-19 war is hotly debated on social media.
While the case numbers and death rates seem irrefutable, you don’t need to search long to find comments like, “Only liberals focus on [the] number of cases. More testing = more cases. This is all about the election, nothing else.” Or this beauty, “You poor thing. Stay scared, you Useful Idiot. The left is counting on it. This will magically go away on November 4th.” I didn’t cherry pick these comments from Breitbart or Fox. These statements were responses to an article on Nevada Public Radio.
So while Trump’s true believers require no convincing as to the President’s assertion that Covid-19 will magically go away, his administration is taking control of the information. “The Trump administration ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all COVID-19 patient information to a central database in Washington,” reports USA Today.
If you don’t like the numbers, make them go away. After all, according to “CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield, the agency has agreed to remove the NHSN from the collection process in order to streamline reporting,” write Adrianna Rodriguez and Elizabeth Weise.
“There is conflict right now between the CDC and the White House,” former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher said. “Somehow we’ve got to get past the conflict in the interest of saving lives.”
It’s not like this hasn’t been done before. On November 10, 2005, the Federal Reserve announced the discontinuance of M3. “On March 23, 2006, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System will cease publication of the M3 monetary aggregate,” the Federal Reserve Statistical Release began.
If, in the course of your normal day, you don’t stalk the Fed, the M3 money supply includes “large-denomination time deposits, repurchase agreements (RPs), and Eurodollars” in addition the components of M1 and M2.
The Fed contended at the time, “the Board judged that the costs of collecting the underlying data and publishing M3 outweigh the benefits.” Then Representative Ron Paul tried to keep the M3, saying, “Well, the Fed makes a lot of money on interest, and of course it creates a lot of credit in order to buy Treasuries. So, I think the notion that it’s costly is preposterous. In fact, the Fed probably has most of the numbers right there anyway.”
Thankfully, John Williams continues to calculate M3 and published it on his site Shadowstats.com. By the way, M3 has gone parabolic, increasing 25 percent.
So why would the White House want to have control of the numbers? Irwin Redlener writes in The Daily Beast, “it’s distinctly possible that, five months from now, half of all Americans could have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 [Covid-19], and more than 800,000 Americans may die in this extraordinary outbreak. That is what many of our most prominent public-health experts now expect.”
If the President is keeping score, we may never know.
