What Happened Today: May 31, 2023

A packed GOP primary; Mossad agent dies in Italy; Florida's affordable housing act; Introducing The Illusion of Consensus

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The Big Story

Chris Christie, former New Jersey governor and long-ago ally of former president Donald Trump, is set to announce his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination on Tuesday in New Hampshire, making him the ninth Republican candidate in yet another packed primary. Now fully established in his role as a fierce Trump critic, Christie told a New Hampshire town hall in April that “Donald Trump is a TV star, nothing more, nothing less. … Putting him back in the White House, the reruns will be worse than the original show.” The sharp attacks on the former president haven’t exactly improved Christie’s standing among his Republican colleagues, however, as only 21% of his party views him positively. That recent polling stands in stark contrast to both Trump, who drew a 77% favorability rating, and Trump’s primary challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who garnered a 73% favorability rating in the same recent Monmouth survey. 

After his botched campaign announcement alongside Elon Musk on Twitter was riddled with technical errors last week, DeSantis has tried to regain his earlier momentum by visiting Iowa, where he made his first appearance as an official candidate on Tuesday at the evangelical Eternity Church in the town of Clive. Speaking to the crowd, DeSantis played up his differences with Trump, including his promise to secure the southern border after “listening to these politicians talk about securing the border for years and years and years.” Locals on the ground who spoke with The Des Moines Register said they prefer DeSantis because he’s “very presidential” and because of “what happened with COVID-19 and the vaccine” under Trump. 

While DeSantis has lost some ground to Trump in recent months, David Kochel, an Iowa-based Republican strategist, told Politico that “it’s not a done deal.” Both Trump and DeSantis are far ahead of their challengers, including Christie, former vice president Mike Pence, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, and Sen. Tim Scott. 

Read More: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/30/desantis-iowa-presidential-campaign-speech-00099371

In The Back Pages: The Dangerous Illusion of Scientific Consensus

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The Rest

→ Quote of the Day:

Does the mayor have a date when he thinks poverty will vanish, the ‘trauma’ will ease, and the shootings stop? Is the July 4 weekend too soon, or will it be Labor Day?

These are the questions posed by the Wall Street Journal editorial board to the new Chicago mayor, Brandon Johnson, after another gruesome Memorial Day weekend in Chicago. Carnage this past weekend tied the all-time record for deaths on Memorial Day weekend, with 12 people killed and 53 total shot. In a stark contrast to the promises from other big-city mayors to restore public order through effective policing, Johnson blamed the weekend’s violence, which he called “intolerable,” on the “trauma” of poverty rather than the actions of violent criminals. As the WSJ notes, Chicago voted for Johnson’s more “holistic” approach to fighting crime, but after the bloodshed over the weekend, the editors ask readers, “How do you like it?”

→ San Francisco doth protest too much. A new San Francisco Chronicle article summarizes a recently released package of IRS data that gives granular detail about how many Americans moved in 2020-21 and how much money they brought with them. The city of San Francisco lost 32,111 people over that period and $8 billion in net income. New York County (Manhattan) lost $16.5 billion and Los Angeles $8.7 billion, along with large segments of their population. While the Chronicle piece is framed to point out that it wasn’t only the City by the Bay losing citizens and wealth, it’s a blistering indictment of California’s two largest cities, which together lost more than 170,000 citizens in two years. More than 700 San Franciscans moved to Miami and Palm Beach, Florida, during the time reviewed, and those two counties also had the greatest total net inflows of income from new residents, at $6.5 and $7 billion, respectively. 

Read More: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/maps-migration

→ A party boat overturned in a “whirlwind” on Lake Maggiore in Northern Italy on Sunday, leaving four of the 23 passengers dead, including one Israeli. Well it turns out that the deceased Israeli, 50-year-old “Erez Shimoni,” was a “retired member of the security services” and that the two dead Italians worked for Italy’s “intelligence department.” Italian media is now reporting that 19 of the 23 passengers worked for Italian or Israeli intelligence and that the boat gathering was not merely a “birthday party,” as originally reported, but rather a meeting for covert information exchange. The 10 surviving Israelis were reportedly whisked out of the country on a private jet, along with “Shimoni,” likely not his real name, who was laid to rest at a military cemetery in Ashkelon on Wednesday. Mossad Chief David Barnea said at the funeral, “The Mossad lost a dear friend, a devoted and professional worker who for decades dedicated his life to the security of the State of Israel, even after his retirement.”

→ The one reactor to rule them all is inching closer, as new investments are made in German and Japanese fusion projects. Germany’s Proxima Fusion, a spin-off of the prestigious Max Planck Institute, just received $7.5 million to build a “stellarator,” a device first imagined by American physicist Lyman Spitzer in 1951 that can create stable fusion reactions that scientists can then study to get us closer to a useable fusion energy source. Ian Hogarth, co-founder of Plural Platform, a venture capital firm leading the investment for Proxima, said of the start-up’s work, “They’ve basically done the impossible. … With 1990s computing resources, they successfully designed a stellarator … and now it’s setting records that basically are defining the whole field of magnetic confinement fusion.”

→ In March, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the Live Local Act into law, assigning $711 million worth of funds and tax incentives to support the development of affordable housing projects across the state. Now Miami development firm Resia is one of the first to use the law, which allows developers to seek direct approval from a county without getting public approval, provided the project meets certain criteria. For example, 40% of units must be reserved for residents making no more than 120% of the median income in the area; for Miami, that number is $81,960.

→ Graph of the Day:

The Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch says that the American national conservative movement made a mistake holding its recent conference in London, because British conservatives are simply not made of the same stuff—particularly regarding social issues. The above graph illustrates this on a series of points, including abortion, religiosity, and overall openness to change. 

Read More: https://www.ft.com/content/a2050877-124a-472d-925a-fc794737d814

→ Dave Burt—CEO of investment research company DeltaTerra Capital and one of the characters famously profiled in The Big Short, Michael Lewis’ book about the guys who made a killing on the 2008 subprime lending crisis—says another huge liability lurks beneath our homes, especially in flood-prone areas. Burt says that 20% of U.S. homes may be overvalued due to underconsideration of their flood risk, potentially to the tune of about $800 billion. He predicts another 2008-style real estate crash unless banks start factoring in the possibility that their lendees won’t be able to pay them back in the event of major flooding events.

→ France’s finance minister, and likely future presidential candidate, Bruno Le Maire is also a man of letters, and as his newest novel Fugue Américaine shows, he’s also not afraid of a little nudity. Then again, is any Frenchman? Several passages describing sex have caught the imagination of the French public, including fellow lawmakers, who have poked fun at Le Maire in the parliament, referencing his use of the word dilatory in one scene, to laughs from other parliamentarians.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Forgotten Summer Camps by Rokhl Kafrissen

A new book shines a light on Yiddish-oriented programs

The Skeptic by Julia Stone

The brilliant Jewish Arabist Hedwig Klein helped the Germans compile the definitive modern Arabic dictionary before being murdered in the camps

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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As our readers know, the last three years have been nothing if not an acute test of our ability to think critically. Throughout, and at great risk to their own careers, a small group of scientists and journalists has challenged the shibboleths of the day, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and journalist Rav Arora included. The Scroll is happy to welcome them both to the Substack fold, reprinting the introduction to their newly launched newsletter, The Illusion of Consensus. 

The Dangerous Illusion of Scientific Consensus

Join Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Rav Arora in their new independent media project

By Jay Bhattacharya and Rav Arora

Science is the process by which we learn about the workings of material reality. Though modern innovations – built on the fruits of science – would look like magic to people living only decades ago, they result from the time-tested scientific method. Contrary perhaps to media portrayals of science, the scientific method depends not on the existence of a mythical consensus but rather on structured scientific debates. If there is a consensus, science challenges it with new hypotheses, experiments, logic, and critical thinking. Ironically, science advances because it believes it has never arrived; consensus is the hallmark of dead science.

One of us is a college student with an unpremeditated career in alternative indie journalism. The other is a professor of health policy at Stanford University School of Medicine with an MD, a Ph.D. in economics, and decades of experience writing on infectious disease epidemiology. Despite the wealth of differences in our backgrounds and experiences, we converge on foundational scientific and ethical principles that public health authorities abandoned during the Covid pandemic. Principles like evidence-based medicine, informed consent, and the necessity of scientific debate serve as the bedrock on which the public can have confidence that science and public health work for the benefit of the people rather than regardless of it.

The illusion of scientific consensus throughout the COVID-19 pandemic led to disastrous policies, with lockdowns the primary example. It was clear even on the eve of the lockdowns in 2020 that the economic dislocation caused by them would throw tens of millions worldwide into food insecurity and deep poverty, which has indeed come to pass. It was clear that school closures – in some places lasting two years or longer – would devastate children's life opportunities and future health and well-being wherever they were implemented. The emerging picture of catastrophic learning loss, especially among poor and minority children (with fewer resources available to replace lost schooling), means that lockdowns will fuel generational poverty and inequality in the coming decades. And the empirical evidence from places like Sweden, which did not impose draconian lockdowns or close schools and which have among the lowest rate of all-cause excess death in Europe, suggests that lockdowns failed even narrowly to protect population health during the pandemic.

The illusion of consensus around the proper use of the Covid vaccines was another major public health disaster. Public health officials everywhere touted the randomized trials on the Covid vaccines as providing complete protection against getting and spreading covid. However, the trials themselves did not have the prevention of infection or transmission as a measured endpoint. Rather, the trials measured protection against symptomatic disease for two months after a two-dose vaccination sequence. Prevention of symptomatic infection is obviously a distinct clinical endpoint from prevention of infection or transmission for a virus that can spread asymptomatically. In the fall of 2020, Moderna chief medical officer Tal Zaks told The BMJ, "Our trial will not demonstrate prevention of transmission…because in order to do that, you have to swab people twice a week for very long periods, and that becomes operationally untenable."

Despite these facts, public health officials botched the public health messaging surrounding the covid vaccines. Based on an illusion of scientific consensus, public health authorities, politicians, and the media pushed vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, and vaccine discrimination. Prominent officials, including Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, told the public that science had established that covid vaccines stop transmission. CNN anchor Don Lemon advocated for “shaming” and “leaving behind” unvaccinated citizens from society. Countries such as Italy, Greece, and Austria sought to punish their unvaccinated citizens with heavy financial penalties of up to $4,108. In Canada, the government stripped unvaccinated citizens of their rights to travel anywhere via plane or train and their ability to work at banks, law firms, hospitals, and all federally regulated industries.

The premise was that only the unvaccinated are at risk of spreading covid. An illusion of consensus emerged that getting the shots was a required civic duty. Phrases such as "It's not about you, it's to protect my grandparents" became widely popularized. Ultimately, as people observed many vaccinated people around them contract and spread covid, the public trust in these authorities collapsed. Early last month, the Biden administration extended its foreign traveler mRNA vaccine requirement to May 11th (which is now coming to an end) after the restriction was set to expire on April 11th. None of these policies ever had any scientific or public health rationale or epidemiological "consensus" to support them— and they certainly do not in 2023. 

Related errors are overstating the necessity of the Covid vaccine for the young and healthy and downplaying the possibility of severe side effects, such as myocarditis which has been found mainly in young men taking the vaccine. The primary benefit of the Covid vaccine is to reduce the risk of hospitalization or death upon covid infection. There is more than a thousand-fold difference in the mortality risk from covid infection, with children and young & healthy people facing an extremely low risk relative to other risks in their lives. On the other hand, the mortality risk for older people from infection is considerably higher. So the maximum theoretical benefit of the vaccine is meager for young, healthy people and children, while it is potentially higher for elderly people with multiple comorbid conditions.

Institutional public health and medicine ignored these facts in the push to vaccinate the entire population, regardless of the balance of benefits and harms from the vaccine. Public health should have cautioned young and/or healthy people regarding the uncertainty regarding vaccine safety for a novel vaccine. For the young and healthy, the small potential benefit does not outweigh the risk, which – with the early myocarditis signals – turned out not to be theoretical in nature. A rigorous independent analysis of Pfizer and Moderna's safety data shows that mRNA covid vaccines are associated with a 1 in 800 adverse event rate — substantially higher than other vaccines on the market (typically in the ballpark of 1 in a million adverse event rates).

To maintain an illusion of consensus, public health authorities and media thought it necessary to suppress these facts. In June 2021, for instance, Joe Rogan stated healthy 21-year-olds do not need the vaccine. Despite his correct medical judgment which has indisputably stood the test of time, all sectors of the corporate media and social media platforms unanimously pilloried him for spreading “dangerous misinformation.”

Worse, many people who suffered from legitimate vaccine injuries were gaslighted by the media and medical personnel about the cause of their condition. One of us has devoted the past several months interviewing victims of the illusory scientific consensus that covid vaccines are on net beneficial for every group. For example, there is a 38-year-old law enforcement officer in British Columbia who was coerced into vaccination against his conscience to keep his job. Nearly two years later, he remains disabled from vaccine-induced myocarditis and has been unable to serve his community. National data from countries in France, Sweden, Germany, Israel, and the United States shows a substantial rise in cardiac conditions among younger populations after the distribution of the Covid vaccine.

 The illusion of consensus surrounding Covid vaccination — wrongly viewed in the same light as hand-washing, driving within speed limits, or staying hydrated — has led to greater political divisions and discriminatory rhetoric. The failure of the traditionally well-regarded public health agencies like the FDA and CDC – with perverse influences from pharmaceutical companies in tandem with the powerful forces of censorship on social media — has destroyed trust in public health institutions. Disillusioned with the "illusion" of consensus, a growing number of Americans and Canadians are distrustful of scientific consensus and are beginning to question all things.

The project of science calls for rigor, humility, and open discussion. The pandemic has revealed the stunning magnitude of the political and institutional capture of science. For this reason, both of us — Rav and Jay — are launching a podcast devoted to investigating the concoction of pseudo-consensus in science and its ramifications for our society. To start — and for quite some time — they will be examining the illusory consensus during COVID. However they will soon branch out into issues pertaining to transgender care, mental health, psychiatry, and nutrition — topics that have been wholly corrupted with one monolithic consensus that has proven to bear many costs on our society.

You can follow their newsletter here: