As I’ve warned many times, “Always assume that “fact-checkers” are trying to bullshit you”. I’ve also complained many times about the dire state of so-called “science journalism”. The “Explainer” column of the Sydney Morning Herald, penned by an award-winning “science journalist” no less, is a perfect case-in-point for both arguments.
Especially its recent column “explaining” covid deaths.
An Australian website has offered $1 million on Facebook for someone to prove – on autopsy – that COVID-19 is real.
Conspiracy theorists claim doctors are inflating the pandemic’s death toll by putting COVID-19 on the death certificate of everyone who died with the virus. But – the theory goes – they didn’t die from COVID, they died with COVID.
Note, though, that those two claims are not the same. Certainly, a hardcore fringe of conspiracy theorists ludicrously deny that Covid-19 or the SARS-CoV-2 virus are real. But it is perfectly possible to fully acknowledge their reality and suspect that the pandemic’s death toll has been exaggerated.
Indeed, the latter is not even a “conspiracy theory”, it’s a demonstrable fact. For instance, health authorities in many countries, notably Britain, the US, Germany and others, openly acknowledged that they counted as “covid deaths”, anyone who died within 14 days of a positive covid test. “[Public Health England]’s definition of the daily death figures means that everyone who has ever had COVID at any time must die with COVID too,” wrote two professors of medicine.
As is most common with “fact-checkers”, what is “checked” is not the actual argument that has been made, but a completely different claim (albeit one that sounds superficially similar). This is what is called, in logic, a straw-man fallacy: “in which an opponent’s argument is overstated or misrepresented in order to be more easily attacked or refuted”.
But the head of pathology at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine has autopsied dozens of patients with COVID-19.
And on her table, she says, the signs of the virus are clear.
“Absolutely, it is very obvious. The post-mortem CT [scan] changes are striking. The appearances of their lungs in the autopsy rooms are striking” […]
In hospitals, it is easy to work out if a person has died from COVID-19 – they wouldn’t be in an ICU ward on a ventilator otherwise. The Institute of Forensic Medicine handles harder cases: people who died suddenly in the community while they had COVID-19 […]
On a CT scan, the lungs are typically a dark black void – the scanner’s representation of space filled with oxygen.
In people who die of COVID-19, “that air is completely replaced by inflammatory tissue that fills up the air sacs and stops the exchange of oxygen,” says Dr O’Donnell.
Well, okay — but that’s not the argument they claim to be refuting. Even the “conspiracy theorists” would agree that these patients died of covid. Yet, that is what the SMH’s “fact-check” spends over 500 words “explaining”.
What the argument is, is whether or not people are being incorrectly listed as having died of covid, when they actually died of anything else, while they also happened to test positive to the virus.
Including for instance, a man who was listed as a covid death after dying in a motorcycle accident (that one, at least, was later scrubbed from the list). Or the man who was shot by police and “died from the coronavirus”. Other people who were listed as “covid deaths” included a 60-year-old shot in the head, a 90-year-old who died from complications from a hip fracture, and a 77-year-old Parkinson’s victim.
So, the “conspiracy theorist’s” argument of exaggerated deaths has at least some merit.
Not once does the “fact-check” do anything to refute it.
Just to drive the point about “fact-checkers” home further, multiple “fact-checkers” loudly rubbished the claim that Italy had revised its Covid death toll. “Not true!” they all chorused. Yet, even their own “fact checks” supported the “conspiracy theory” that most people died with Covid, not of it:
The 2.9 percent figure represents patients with Covid-19 listed as the only cause of death, but the remaining deaths simply listed additional conditions, pre-existing illnesses, or complications, along with Covid-19.
Sydney Morning Herald
Which sounds pretty close to what the “conspiracy theorists” are saying.
But I’m sure that’s just a conspiracy theory.
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