Just a few minutes of digging showed exactly how bad Wendy Bell is at
research. She's putting the health of the general population at risk.
Take a look at yesterday's BS board:
Lotsa numbers and so on. But we want to begin the dig in the upper right hand corner:
Sounds kinda official, right? Some NGO that produces non-partisan economic
data, right?
Wrong on both parts.
According to the Media Bias/Fact Check:
Overall, we rate The American Institute for Economic Research Right-Center biased based on Libertarian-leaning economic policy and Mixed for factual reporting due to the publication of misinformation related to Coronavirus.
Misinformation related to Coronavirus, you say. Interesting.
Misinformation like this from the
London School of Economics:
The AIER has spread unreliable information about COVID-19 throughout the pandemic. In September, it published a bizarre rant by its ‘Senior Resident Fellow’, George Gilder, who declared that the “Covid-19 crisis was already essentially over” by late April, based on a clearly inaccurate article that suggested “the spread of the coronavirus declines to almost zero after 70 days—no matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose to try to thwart it”.
This might be where Wendy Bell got her "information" declaring Covid over last year.
The AIER also got into trouble with something called the Great Barrington
Declaration. The Declaration proposed a plan towards Covid herd-immunity
basically by protecting those most-vulnerable and removing any governmental
lockdowns thus allowing it to spread through the rest of the population.
Hmm.
Wendy's advocated for this, too. I am guessing she's a BIG fan of the AIER.
Anyway,
here's
a response
from an actual scientist:
A high-profile proposal to avoid lockdown by letting the coronavirus run wild in the young and healthy while shielding the most vulnerable is dangerously flawed and operationally impractical, according to England’s chief medical officer.
Prof Chris Whitty told MPs on the science and technology committee that the Great Barrington declaration, put forward by three scientists at Oxford, Harvard and Stanford universities, would lead to a very large number of deaths and was unlikely to achieve such widespread immunity that the epidemic would fizzle out naturally.
But that's not Wendy Bell's only research sin.
Take a look at the
very specific numbers she uses. It makes it so so easy for someone to find
what she referenced at AIER.
It's
this page. Take a look at what's pasted across the top of the page:
Editor’s note: the article and video discussed below have been pulled by Johns Hopkins Newsletter. You can read the announcement here. An additional explanation is here. The claims made by the economics professor will clearly require more investigation, as the announcement says. That said, AIER is publishing this in the interest of objective science and open discussion.
So the research from AIER was actually from Johns Hopkins Newsletter. The Newsletter says of the research:
Editor’s Note: After The News-Letter published this article on Nov. 22, it was brought to our attention that our coverage of Genevieve Briand’s presentation “COVID-19 Deaths: A Look at U.S. Data” has been used to support dangerous inaccuracies that minimize the impact of the pandemic.
We decided on Nov. 26 to retract this article to stop the spread of misinformation, as we noted on social media.
This is the "research" that Wendy Bell used on her BS board yesterday.
In fact this is Wendy Bell's second bite at the Briand bad apple. The first was last December.
Shame on Wendy Bell for spreading COVID misinformation. More people will get sick and some may even die because of her bad research.
And shame on the St. Barnabas Health System for giving her a platform to spread that misinformation.
