Why I Call COVID a Scam

I’ve previously referred to COVID as a “scam.”  This sets some people on edge.  “Are you denying that the disease even exists?  That it kills people?  How insane are you?”  This is my official response:

I guess it depends on exactly how you define the word "scam."

I acknowledge that COVID is an actual novel disease that seems to have killed, at the very least, hundreds of thousands of people.

That said, I am not at all certain that it's any worse than the "pandemics" we saw in the 50s or 60s, that passed mostly unnoticed, seemingly because of less robust statistical recordkeeping and/or a less hysterical media culture.  "If you turn off the TV, there is no pandemic" still seems largely true to me.  It's still true that nobody I know has died, and that few people I know have even had the disease at all.  I know other people have had different experiences, but at the statistical level, it still seems true that the vast majority of people dying from this disease are either very old, have serious comorbidities, or are quite obese (I pull this out as a separate category from comorbidities because the latest media trend seems to be declaring that some "perfectly healthy" person just died of COVID, but when you look at their picture, they clearly weigh over 400 lbs).

To be blunt, in any other era of human history, most of these people would have already been dead.  Even in the modern era, many of these people would have died soon anyway.  Excess deaths, aside from possibly including lockdown-caused deaths, also have the potential to basically be just clawing forward some likely deaths by a couple years.  Think of it as "cash for clunkers" but with people.  And yes, every human life is valuable, and people should live as long as possible, and all that jazz.  But in the absence of 24/7 reporting on daily case/hospitalization/death counts (all of which we've established have very serious data quality issues), it wouldn't seem all that weird to you that your grandma with dementia died at 85 when you had previously been thinking she'd probably live to 89.  Or that your morbidly obese coworker dropped from the spicy flu at 52 rather than from a stroke at 54.

To use a personal example here - I lost one of my grandparents a couple months ago, in their 90s, due to their third spat with bladder cancer.  Back in March 2020, I was speculating that they were likely to die from COVID - as I believed at the time that it was a very serious disease, and they lived in a county that was among the first in the entire US to detect community spread, and I already knew they were such a social person that they weren't going to stay home and hide from this thing.  But they didn't die in March 2020.  They never got COVID.  They lived another year, which is great, I suppose.  Except that their final year was mostly alone and isolated, and they spent a good portion of it in great pain fighting another horrible round of cancer.  I'm glad I got to talk to them (if not see them) a few more times since March 2020, but I can't shake the feeling that it would not have been some unbelievable tragedy had they died from COVID a year ago instead.  But even if they had, I'm not sure that moving their number from the "cancer" column to the "COVID" column would have made me any more terrified of COVID.

When I say it's a scam, what I mean is that the hype/hysteria/reaction is a scam.  Because it is.  If we decide tomorrow to start treating the common cold as we treat COVID (which currently we treat as we treat leprosy), that would be a scam too.  Not because the common cold doesn't exist - but because every single premise that you hear from the "you must panic!" crowd is based on gross exaggeration, data manipulation, and sometimes outright lies - all in the same direction, all in the service of very specific, almost predictably political ends.  The "satanic panic" was a scam, not because there weren't any actual satanists in this country - but because the whole thing was ideologically motivated in an attempt to achieve certain political ends that could not otherwise be achieved without panicking people about satanists.  The same is true today, about COVID.

I use the word “scam” because I am 100% conflict theorist.  I only delve into the arcana of the mistake when various people of the internet demand I justify myself.  "This fake pandemic is nothing but a scam" is a far more effective rhetorical tool than "Perhaps Andrew Cuomo's social distancing mandates do not properly maximize for the utility of... blah blah blah"

And perhaps my overall mission is less "convince the mistake theory people who are afraid of the pandemic to be less afraid of it" than it is "convince the mistake theory people within the sound of my voice who aren't afraid of the pandemic to join me on the battle lines of conflict theory - where we might actually win."  Do not be afraid to counter lies with exaggerations.  Do not be afraid to counter insane hyperbole with rhetorical exaggeration.  Cast aside your commitment to being seen as reasonable and responsible – and say it with me:  COVID is a scam!