Before I was pulled back into political disinformation, I was worked on combating COVID disinformation. While I feel we have mostly transitioned to an endemic, the Republican killing machine weaponizing masks, vaccines and safety into a political issue, is still going to see a lot of deaths and long term health concerns. Take Matt Shapiro’s Political Math account and this patently dishonest tweet.
The charting is ghoulishly accurate.
Flu is seasonal and does result in many deaths, somewhere between 17,000-35,000 per year with pediatric fatalities just north of one-hundred per year. Most of those deaths occur during winter, whereas COVID burns through exposed populations year round. COVID during its worst surge exceeded total yearly deaths for traditional flu in a single week, led mostly by the die-offs in red states with the highest concentrations of unvaccinated people.
“We don’t always test for the flu in pediatric deaths.”
Kids rarely die of anything which is why the CDC requires reporting for all deaths under eighteen. While the Feds don’t have that data, most, if not likely all the states do gather and publicly report pediatric cause of death data on their own state websites.
Forty-six states did keep and post data on pediatric COVID deaths, which indicates that we probably have a much more severe undercount of those than we would for regular flu. COVID is simply more devastating than Influenza, yet we still have these myths that it is not, especially for children.
Considering that the above headline was at roughly the 22nd month into the US part of the pandemic, that schools were mostly closed during the 2020 winter term, COVID pediatric deaths were absolutely catastrophic. Here is Matt’s recent take:
Dismissing COVID is a Republican political strategy that might work so long as not too many of your most loyal voters die.
I mentioned in the message boards earlier I had played a small role in correcting an error early in the pandemic. It was mid-March and my brother-in-law who is a public health officer in the military had an unusual disagreement regarding mortality. He told me that according to his data, the flu was more lethal than COVID was. I asked him to show me.
He opened up his government laptop, opened the Army medical dashboard and showed me. Influenza had a 14.257% fatality rate instead of the correct 0.143% as a spreadsheet was set up incorrectly failing to convert the decimal value to percentage properly. After he looked up several pieces of data I suggested and saw I was correct, he ran in and made phone calls. The board was corrected within days.
What are the odds that Trump if given a briefing on COVID being told that the military data said flu was more deadly than COVID would be told later that an error had been made?
ZERO. This was the Trump White House where they rarely told Trump stuff he wasn’t willing to hear. Certain stuff was even forbidden, lest he have a meltdown.
Here is what Trump said October 2020:
Trump, as I have explained in my book and articles, has an undiagnosed social and communication disorder that marks him as extremely rigid and literal in his thinking. Once he has learned something, even if it is wholly wrong, he will doggedly hold on to that as an “alternative truth.” If he was indeed told by his military leaders the flu was more dangerous, he would fight like hell to make others believe it too. He certainly behaved that way.
Back to Matt Shapiro.
So why am I adding this guy to my series?
His high pay work appears to intersect with that of Max Nordau and Christina Pushaw, not just with the push to open Florida during the deadliest stage of COVID infections, but to target Rebekah Jones.
Here he is launching an ableist attack, citing feigned mental illness, a common trait amongst most of the paid social influencer operators we have looked at, in response to a Pushaw retweet of Max Nordau.
Matt Shapiro, who lives in Seattle has written for multiple publications, American Spectator, National Review, the Federalist (the Paradox), as well as having two of his own blogs and a YouTube channel. (As an aside, there are TWO different data analysts/authors named Matt Shapiro’s living in Seattle)
Here is his National Review hit piece on Jones coinciding with the team effort of Susan, Remi Barrette and Christina Pushaw to remove Jones from Twitter to hamper her political campaign unseating Matt Gaetz.
And this one on his Substack blog.
He has been a harsh abuser, and not in the least honest about things.
Personally, I was appalled that this mom did this, mislead by her influence circle, political leaders and church resulting in her daughter’s death. Matt Shapiro lied about “no evidence” as the story was a tragic national headline.
Then we have the typical smears, throwing labels around, when the cause of the firing was retaliatory and political. Such attacks are like the arsonist blaming the victim for losing their house.
And this claim of Rebekah “hacking” people was ludicrous.
Curious that Matt uses a cartoon huckster to say this.
And here from last week, the most telling thing he says of all.
The reason Twitter or PolitiFact didn’t block or discredit is because Rebekah Jones unlike Matt Shapiro, Marc Caputo or Max Nordau, gave accurate Information regarding Florida’s COVID response.
Where’s the Chirpty? You’re really cheating your audience now, Steven.