Spectator A.M. #2102

Dear Diary

Dr. Anthony Fauci privately acknowledged a Covid fatality rate far lower than the one he publicly touted. From his diary entries publicized by Senator Rand Paul, Fauci described Covid as “acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility and that the denominator is much greater than 34,867 (above) making the case fatality rate (CFR) more like 0.2-0.3 % rather than 2.0%.” From the jump, I criticized Fauci for presenting speculation as science in terms of stated fatality rates. Months into the pandemic, he knew the numerator (deaths) but he could not possibly know the denominator (cases). We did not need this diary entry to know that he presented fudged figures as facts. It does, however, act as a smoking gun for anyone who did not figure out that he could not have known the fatality rates that he touted for scary effect in the first months of the pandemic. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now advances a ‘best estimate’ of a fatality rate not much greater than the flu’s,” I wrote, for instance, in May of 2020. “Several other studies that actually tested random individuals rather than rely on the cases gleaned from people who sought out a test indicate a mortality rate closer to the CDC’s more-educated guess. The main problem with the earlier proclamations stemmed from the fact that although Fauci and [World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom] Ghebreyesus knew the numerator (deaths), neither knew, or could know, the denominator (cases). They knew that they could not know the denominator, yet made estimates as though they did. They reckoned. They did not know.” The Rand Paul-Tony Fauci faceoff on Wednesday increasingly looks like appointment viewing.

Carolina on My Mind

Democrats approved of South Carolina as its first presidential primary for 2028. The Joe Biden-controlled party ditched New Hampshire as the first-in-the-nation primary in 2024 after he performed poorly there, in the Iowa caucuses, and in the Nevada primary four years earlier (before launching a comeback in South Carolina). Despite, or maybe because of, the minority-majority makeup of the state’s Democratic electorate, progressives complain about South Carolina votes coming first. The Bernie-AOC-Mamdani socialist wing of the party, after all, performs best among wealthy, over-educated, urban whites. That’s not South Carolina.

First, Do No Harm

“The young girl tugged on her mother’s hand as they pressed through the doors of the hospital in Shanghai,” begins an article @ Science. “She was 6 years old, bouncing along in a pink jacket and blue pants decorated with cartoon bears. Behind them, her father rolled a large suitcase with everything the child needed for the weeklong stay: stuffed animals, Play-Doh, an iPad loaded with episodes of Peppa Pig.” But the weeklong stay at the hospital turned into a weeklong stay on our temporal plane. “Seven days after the girl’s medical team infused trillions of viruses carrying the recipe for the base editor into her spinal fluid,” Science reveals, “she died of a severe immune reaction linked to the therapy.” The girl was slow in school, not dying of cancer. Why the need for risky procedures? Her death came after her parents paid $860,000 for the experimental gene therapy. Read the rest of the story here.

Maybe Use Hand Signals

The college football season starts in 30 days. It soon gets loud. How loud? The crowd noise in the loudest stadium exceeds almost all rock concerts and most military jet engines at 50 feet away. On3 reveals the loudest collegiate stadiums in the land:

 5. Tiger Stadium, 130 decibels (LSU, capacity 102,321)

4. Memorial Stadium, 132.8 decibels (Clemson, capacity 81,500)

3. Williams-Brice Stadium, 133.6 decibels (South Carolina, capacity 77,559)

2. Husky Stadium, 133.6 decibels (University of Washington, capacity 70,083)

1. Neyland Stadium, 137 decibels (University of Tennessee, capacity 101,914)

Somehow the compilers of this list overlooked Brown Stadium.

 Letter: Does the Gum Appreciate in Value, Too?

 Dan,

In the ’60s, our baseball cards also came with a good-sized stick of bubble gum (’80s? If so, guess it was incidental). It gave me much joy as a kid to collect the cards—hoping for Phillies players (like Clay Dalrymple!), comparing stats with friends, and doing no favors to my teeth by chewing wads and wads of gum. Collecting in the ’60s before it became professionalized was, I suppose, an idyllic time for kids and cards.  

Mark Loncar

Yorktown, Virginia

Letter: Hotel Florida > Hotel California 

Dan,

For those seeking more understanding of the Spanish Civil War, and for an enjoyable read, I enthusiastically recommend Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War by Amanda Vaill.

Best regards,

Jim Gorman
Mill Creek, Washington