Fact Check: Bill Maher, Bari Weiss, and the Covid Neo-Nihilists are Deadly Wrong.
Yes, mitigation works. But a 6-minute clip from Real Time with Bill Maher included out-of-date, out-of-context data, and at precisely the wrong moment.
Everyone is tired of Covid-19. Last week, on Real Time with Bill Maher, writer Bari Weiss announced where she stands. “I’m done. I’m done with Covid.”
She had a sympathetic audience in Maher, who also put his cards out. He’s been wanting a “reset” on Covid for months, he said, adding we should start treating Covid-19 like the flu.
Maher and Weiss represent what you might call the Covid Neo-Nihilist movement. These are people who previously took the pandemic seriously but are now giving up on doing anything at all about Covid, not because the crisis is over, but because they’re able to ignore what’s happening in hospitals and other hotspots. With nearly 3,000 Americans dying of Covid-19 daily (whether directly or indirectly), and the healthcare system bursting at the seams from Covid and non-Covid care alike, Covid Neo-Nihilists are failing what amounts to (hopefully) a fourth quarter marshmallow test.
Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY, left), Bari Weiss, and Bill Maher on Real Time.
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First, let’s acknowledge that there is a fact pattern that would support the Covid Neo-Nihilism viewpoint. When all ages are eligible for vaccination, and hospitals are not dangerously full, extreme measures to stop Covid-19 will have reached the point of diminishing returns.
Do current conditions reflect such a reality?
No. As I write, children under age 5 remain at risk (albeit small), while the nation’s hospitals remain historically stretched, with hundreds of US counties nearing or exceeding their safe capacity. Care is being compromised, and lives will be lost as a result of these capacity issues. It’s worth remembering that this exact consequence was what “flattening the curve” was all about.
So, yes, Maher, Weiss, and the Covid Neo-Nihilists will have a point, and ideally soon. But they’ve arrived there early. That’s dangerous and lazy, especially when what’s being asked of the public is far less cumbersome than earlier in the pandemic; now that we can track the virus, we can limit most mitigation measures to places having enormous outbreaks and where hospital capacity is threatened.
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I’m not here to dunk on Maher and Weiss, though. I’m here to fact check them. Here’s the rub: most of the facts they presented were nearly correct and woefully inadequate. Robbing the facts of their context—and omitting stronger contradictory data—changes their meanings. These distinctions matter, if we want to be governed by reason, not emotion.
The over-arching question in the segment was, should we keep doing anything about Covid? No, said Maher and Weiss, because, in their view, mitigation measures have caused more harm than good, and they failed to work anyway.
“If you believe the science,” Weiss offered, “you will look at the data that we did not have two years ago.” Indeed, she presented her views as data-driven. The problem is that she (and Maher) slyly curated their facts, reciting a series of cherry-picked statistics, all taken out of context.
Let’s look closely.
Weiss main assertion was that our excessive response to Covid will be remembered as a “catastrophic moral crime” because, she contended, it is causing teens to kill themselves. In support of this, she mentioned Flint, Michigan’s recent decision to return to virtual schooling. (For what it’s worth, I’ve written extensively on how closing schools can and should be avoided in many instances.) However, she incorrectly cited a 51% increase in self harm among teen girls during the pandemic as proof of the moral crime of school closures. It’s true that the CDC reported a 50.6% increase in suspected suicide attempts among teen girls from February 2021 to March of 2021. But Weiss conveniently omitted that this increase corresponded to a time when most schools had re-opened. In fact, as we’ve shown in Inside Medicine, suspected suicide attempts in teen girls dropped dramatically during the initial stay-at-home period in early and mid-2020 when schools were closed, returned to normal levels when some schools re-opened in the fall, and reached new highs when a majority schools had finally opened. This comports with decades of data showing that teen suicides increase when school is in session, a troubling pattern.
Weiss ended the rant saying that “people are killing themselves.” This, frankly, is bullshit. Sadly, people are dying from suicide, just as they always do; but as my colleagues and I reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, US suicide deaths were lower than usual in 2020, and the most recent available data for 2021 suggest no increase, including among children. In sum, Weiss’s attempt to weaponize suicide as evidence of a moral catastrophe around school closures was both misguided and inaccurate on the merits.
“People are depressed, they are lonely,” Weiss said. Yes, this pandemic is terrible. Some people are lonely because they can’t go to the Comedy Cellar without a mask. Others are lonely because their parents and siblings are dead. I’m troubled that Weiss seems more concerned with some injustices than others.
At this point, Maher’s other guest, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), chimed in to remind everyone that over 850,000 Americans have died of Covid-19. Weiss countered to minimize, saying that only 803 children have died.
First off, the correct figure is 1,150 dead children. Let’s get it right because the real number is 143% of the one Weiss offered. Second, Weiss implied this to be no big deal. Is pediatric Covid-19 merely the flu (a frequent talking point)? No. According to CDC figures, over the last 20 years (excluding 2021, when we virtually eliminated flu while wearing, as you’ll recall, cloth masks, which Weiss had already bemoaned earlier in the segment), an average of 97 children per year died of influenza. In the first 22 months of the pandemic, Covid-19 killed around 6.5 times as many children as flu would be expected to kill in a similar period, and that’s with the mitigation Weiss wants us to abandon.
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In response to Rep. Torres’ mention of 850,000 lost lives, Maher started to say something that sounded interesting: “Well, that’s a squishy f[act]….”
I so wish Maher had completed the thought because he may’ve been headed somewhere interesting. Have 850,000 Americans really died of Covid-19? Have some died with Covid-19?
It’s a legitimate question and the reason why a large focus of my Covid-19 research has focused on “all-cause excess mortality,” i.e., measuring increases in all deaths, not just ones blamed on Covid-19. Relying on all-cause excess mortality is less biased than Covid-19 death counts because excess deaths don’t depend on who filled out a death certificate. Imagine a patient with advanced cancer and Covid-19. One doctor might list Covid-19 as the “underlying cause” of death, and another might blame the cancer. Either could be right, and the choice might be a subconscious one, maybe in part influenced by politics. However, it turns out the number of all-cause excess deaths since March 2020 is similar to Covid-19 deaths. Any under-counting and over-counting seem to have roughly balanced out, nationally. In fact, relying on Covid-19 deaths instead of all-cause excess deaths tends to exaggerate the pandemic’s effects in areas that have taken the pandemic more seriously (and possibly over-counted Covid deaths), while under-playing them in regions that stayed more open (and possibly under-counted Covid deaths).
Regardless, Maher began his rant in earnest, focused on the assertion that mitigation measures simply had not worked. He rattled off the number of Covid-19 deaths per 100,000 residents in several states, suggesting that those that did less to control Covid-19 hadn’t fared much worse than those that did more.
Mississippi was the worst, he noted. But New Jersey and New York were 4th and 6th worst, respectively. Massachusetts and West Virginia landed at 10th and 11th. “Could there be two states that are more unalike?” Maher asked.
Finally, he came to Florida, “the poster boy for keeping shit open…they’re down at 17. So, New York and New Jersey did worse than Florida.” Even though Florida “basically stayed open,” Maher argued, “they didn’t do a hell of a lot worse, and maybe did better.”
All of this was to imply that mitigation efforts had failed. He was flat out wrong, misled by having chosen the wrong data, and ignoring the right data. Including data from the first wave, which caught everyone by surprise, is misleading, if mitigation is what is on trial.
In fact, after the first wave, Florida and other states that did little to stop Covid-19 fared much worse than New York, New Jersey and other places that maintained mitigation strategies for longer.
What’s more, a highly conspicuous pattern emerged. Through the lens of excess mortality, since July 1, 2020, the 20 states with the most excess mortality per 100,000 people are (starting with the most): Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nevada, Missouri, Florida, Montana, Texas, Kentucky, Georgia, West Virginia, South Carolina, Ohio, and South Dakota.
In contrast, the 10 states with the least excess mortality since July 1, 2020: Washington, Minnesota, New Jersey, Maine, New York, Hawaii, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Vermont. (If you only look at Covid-19 deaths, rather than excess deaths as I've done here, a similar pattern persists, again, provided you look at any period after the initial wave).
Notice anything about the political divide here? Could it be that mitigation made a difference? Of course it did.
During the Delta wave alone, per capita, Florida endured 460% of the excess deaths recorded in New York and 430% recorded in New Jersey. Florida was the 3rd worst state in excess mortality during the Delta wave, surpassed only by Tennessee and Montana. Meanwhile, New York and New Jersey were 2nd and 4th best, respectively. Massachusetts and Connecticut were 1st and 3rd best.
The effect sizes were notable, too, not simply epidemiologic curiosities. From January 2021 through June 2021, the 10 worst states recorded 9-times the excess mortality as the 10 best. If the entire nation performed as well as the best 10 states, the US would have recorded approximately 425,000 fewer excess deaths since July 2020 than it actually has.
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It’s one thing to have opinions based on data. But, so far, Covid Neo-Nihilism appears to be trading on contorted versions of the truth, designed to fit a pre-determined agenda, close enough to reality to sound legitimate, but wrong enough to be harmful.
If you really want to be fact-driven, though, you have to have the right data, and you have to understand what it all means. Given the titles of Maher’s and Weiss’s media products (Real Time, Common Sense, Honestly), I hope that faced with the relevant data in their proper contexts, they might be the types to amend their opinions regarding mitigation, acknowledging the need to use them at certain times, and in certain places. But too often, I find that supposedly rational thinkers are guilty of an old cliché about partisans and bias: They’ve made up their minds. Please don’t confuse them with the facts.
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Thanks to Dr. Chengan Du, Dr. Chenxue Liang, Dr. Shu-Xia Li, Dr. Zhenqiu Lin, and Dr. Harlan Krumholz, who I collaborate with to study excess mortality and whose work made this essay possible. Thanks also to Benjy Renton for data analysis and visualizations, and Dr. John Paul Rollert for editorial suggestions.