The Data Cruncher That Showed Fauci's Fraud
Plus Iran,
My two latest interviews at The Daily Wire are on Covid and Iran. First up — Matthias Shapiro on Covid:
In the very early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, panic, confusion, and lack of concrete information sent Americans into the realm of the unknown. In many ways, we have been left with loss, anger, and a deep distrust of public health officials – epitomized by the recent hearings held by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs. Anthony Fauci would finally be held to account for what many felt was a deep betrayal of trust in the name of ego and power. But his refusal to answer questions offers an opportunity to remember that what we need isn’t necessarily a reckoning, but a time to examine exactly what went wrong to prevent this failure from recurring. Matthias Shapiro was at the fore examining data at the COVID Tracking Project, and he talks with The Daily Wire about his experience during that time, what public health officials and the media got wrong, and the debate about COVID’s origins. He can be found on X @politicalmath and his Substack, “Marginally Compelling.”
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Ben Domenech: Can you walk people through your background and what brought you to pay as much attention, I think in a very detailed way, to the crisis that surrounded COVID beyond, I would say, the layperson?
Matthias Shapiro: Yes, sure. So when COVID started, I was living outside of Seattle, and the first detected COVID case was actually in Seattle. And then the first recorded death was about a mile and a half from my house.
BD: I did not know that about you. That’s kind of crazy. You didn’t happen to know the person, I assume?
MS: No, no, no, no. It was an old folks’ home. But it was shocking because it was maybe four or six weeks after the first detected case, and we thought that nothing had happened.
BD: What timing was this? What was the date or the rough date?
MS: February — late February, early March 2020. I saw the first, second case and then nothing for weeks. And then, oh, suddenly there’s this huge outbreak in this place that’s just down the street. And I thought to myself, “Okay, so we’re not actually tracking this. We don’t actually know what’s going on.” And Seattle had some of the earliest shutdown stuff in the country. I think my kids — one day we just got a notice that school was off for the rest of the year, no more school. And so we had pretty harsh lockdowns. People were not going outdoors. There were many small community efforts to help, but much of it was locked down. I knew doctor friends, and the hospitals were all — they canceled everything — but my doctor friends were talking to me and saying, “There’s nobody here.” It was a very weird firsthand experience of what everybody was going to experience for the next 18 months.
But I’m also way into software and data. And so I heard about this data initiative to get COVID data out to people because the CDC had completely fallen on its face.
BD: Can I ask you about that? There are so many things about the early stages of COVID that are totally lost to either revisionism or a lack of memory. And one of the things that was very apparent, and it’s one of the points where I had already been following you and paying attention to you obviously for years, but one of the things that really stuck out to me is that very early on, you were part of the group of people online who were data focused, with questions like, “Why are we not getting actual information out of the knowledge that we already are clearly collecting, but it’s not getting put out to people?” The project that you started interfacing with, even if it’s ad hoc.
MS: It was called the COVID Tracking Project, and Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic was the one who started it because he was like, “I’m trying to get information about this. Why isn’t the CDC doing anything?” And I mean, the real answer is the CDC doesn’t do daily data. They do weekly data or monthly data. And usually it’s that stuff is delayed by weeks. But given how fast COVID was spreading, weeks were not going to cut it for people. They wanted better information right now. And so, for this project, we just had a pile of volunteers, and we went literally state by state, checking every single state’s COVID numbers at the health department. And there were actually a couple of weeks where I was in charge of Washington state because the state dashboard went down. So I went county by county and counted all the COVID cases.
It was a really crazy time. But because of that, I was just surrounded by the actual numbers — the actual COVID numbers — all the time. And so I started noticing really annoying things. Most data people notice annoying things, like when the news says, “Oh, there’s a 300% increase.” Well, okay, yeah. So now, instead of 20 cases, there are 60 cases. Well, that’s not the biggest deal in the world.
BD: For at least a decade of doing television and things like that, I’m always paranoid when I hear somebody cite the percentages. When they’re saying the percentages — the percentage increase in this and the percentage increase in that. And it’s like, okay, well, but what’s the number? Because you’re telling me what this looks like, but I don’t know what either end of this actually looks like. And I feel like you were very early to start paying attention to the fact that a lot of this was — I don’t want to say that it was fear mongering, but it was taking the worst possible number — not the actual number — the worst possible percentage, et cetera, so that I can make a headline that will get more people to click it.
MS: There were a lot of headlines and a lot of really shady data practices several times. And it got really embarrassing to watch from a data perspective. Several times, it was reported that there was a 100% COVID positivity rate. And after the first three times, you’re like, well, obviously what happened is they didn’t report the negatives. The only way you get 100% positivity is to forget to report the negatives. But it would just show up in a headline, and you’re like, stop it. Anyway, that was sort of my introduction. And that quickly escalated for me because one of the frustrating things that I had while I was doing this is that I’m in this data group; it’s a private group. We’re all talking, we’re all gathering data.
The group leans to the Left, but that’s not really a big deal because everybody is focused on the data, not the politics. But after a little while, you notice that, okay, everybody does know what the data is talking about, but they’re not talking about it out in public. And that becomes increasingly frustrating because you’re like, people want not just the data, but somebody who’s familiar with it to get a decent interpretation of it. And there were a lot of instances when I felt like it wasn’t happening. So I ended up pulling that data and doing it. Once a month, I would just do an overview of every region in the United States. Because if you group the states by region — if you don’t just go state by state — you’re like, oh, it’s not that Florida is having a bad COVID spike; it’s that the whole region of the South, the East, is having this happen.
The Southeast would get it and then it would move north and then the Northeast would get it. And then it moved predictably, repeatedly. But that was not a very popular narrative because once you start working with regions, you’ve got blue states and red states doing the same thing. That’s not the narrative anyone wants to spin. They want to spin a narrative of red state versus blue state. So that’s sort of how I got into it. It started with just plain old data, data digging and trying to give people raw data, and it sort of moved into this mostly counter-narrative. I tried to give people a clear sense of what was happening in their regions, and they made their own determinations about how to live and how careful they wanted to be.
And that was my positive contribution, but I spent a lot of time just trying to shoot down bad narratives.
Winning Is The Only Way Out
Rebeccah Heinrichs on the war in Iran:
In “Men at War,” Ernest Hemingway writes, “Once we have war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.” The war with Iran has been a point of conflict for those within and without President Trump’s administration and circle. It has not been without rumors and chatter from the usual corners of the foreign policy ecosystem, long accustomed to the confines of “traditional” diplomacy, statecraft, and war. But is that the best path forward today for the president, the region, and for America? Rebeccah Heinrichs is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and the director of its Keystone Defense Initiative. She specializes in U.S. national defense policy, with a focus on strategic deterrence, and sits down for an extended interview with The Daily Wire about where America stands and what it stands for in order to win this war.
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Ben Domenech: Here we are after an inordinate amount of time dealing with the ramifications of an administration that simply does not seem to know what it wants, from my perspective, when it comes to achieving an end to this conflict with Iran. You have been all over this from the beginning. You’ve been saying what we ought to be doing. What should the president be doing right now?
Rebeccah Heinrichs: First of all, I don’t downplay the risks. So I think that individuals who really want the president’s efforts on diplomacy with the Iranians to work will often accuse those of us who think diplomacy is not going to work of not fully appreciating the risks of resuming military operations. But I want to be very clear that there are risks in all of the options before us.
BD: Just in terms of the president’s immediate decision, he has talked about doing all sorts of terrible things that we can’t say on FCC-moderated radio to the Iranians in response to their killing of American personnel and other steps that they’ve taken. What do you think the actual menu is in front of him, and what is the thing that he should pick?
RH: One of the things that is in front of him would be increasing the scope of our targets in a military operation that is much more robust than anything we even saw in Epic Fury. And what I mean by that is increasing the target list to the main infrastructure in Iran that the IRGC relies on to survive. That includes some bridges, that includes key energy infrastructure. It certainly includes the IRGC itself. So yes, it’s leadership, but it’s also just the rank-and-file members of the Revolutionary Guard. So far, even in Epic Fury, when the United States was flying wing-to-wing with the Israelis, so much of the elimination of the IRGC leadership in Iran was left to the Israelis. But the United States has really been focused on particular military weapons targets. But I think the United States should expand the number of things on our target list, especially considering the Iranians continue to intentionally try to kill Americans throughout the Middle East.
BD: The situation right now seems to be a lack of understanding around Iran’s strategic response to our campaign, that they have been doing things that we didn’t expect. They’ve been neutralizing our strength. They’ve been making it impossible to decapitate. They’ve been making it too expensive to achieve our objectives. They have been basically using the material that they have to eat our resources and our munitions. How does that change?
RH: First of all, on the munitions point, the munitions that we’re really running low on that are serious — this is very serious — are the more exquisite longer-range strike systems like Tomahawk and interceptors for our defenses. Tactical interceptors and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, the THAAD interceptors. What we are not running low on, and we are plentiful on, are the short-range systems that we would primarily use for the rest of this campaign.
I do think some people are focusing on what we’re running low on to convince the president that we can no longer move forward on this. But one of my responses to that is if the United States can’t finish this military campaign on Iran, there is no way we are going to husband these particular resources in the hopes of winning a war with China, for instance. And that’s absurd on its face. That’s absurd.
So we’re in this war now, and we’ve got to finish it. So what the Iranians have been successful in is because so many of these IRGC leaders have been left alive, including the head of the IRGC now, Ahmad Vahidi; they’ve been essentially able to just use drones, these sort of low-flying drones, to just terrorize the strait along their coast. And that is what I think this administration did not fully appreciate going into this war, that they would be able to do that. And then, of course, they laid mines along the middle corridor in the Strait of Hormuz. I think in hindsight, it would’ve been a lot more prudent, if not difficult, if we had already had an international coalition in place to prevent the Iranians from closing the strait. You prevent them from closing the strait; that’s a lot easier than trying to reopen it once they’re terrorizing it through drones.
But here we are. And so I think that the way forward is you really do have to bring the IRGC to heel. And you’re not going to do that by leaving so much of the IRGC intact while trying to claim that folks like Mohammed Ghalibaf dictate terms that Vahidi is just simply not ever going to agree to anyway. And it seems to me that the negotiators letting the IRGC go unpunished, if they’re supposedly operating independently, tells me they’re not. They’re actually operating together.