THE COVID road show trundles along. Ever eager to show that if someone died of covid it was somebody’s fault, rather than the way it goes for some people when there is a virus on the loose, some more research has been published.
The latest guilt-inducing attempt comes from Stanford University and is reported in the Stanford Report of February 25. The information comes from an article in the hilariously titled journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. For ‘public interest’ read ‘nanny state’ and for ‘psychological science’ read ‘state control’.
The title of the original article is ‘Cultural Defaults in the Time of COVID: Lessons for the Future’. The study reported is into why the US had so many more deaths than Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. According to a graph in the article, the US had 350 deaths per 100,000 population while the countries named had 50.
It is glaringly obvious that the investigators embarked on this research not with open minds. The main text is prefaced with three quotes. One is from Donald Trump who, one imagines, is not their pin-up boy, saying about covid: ‘It’s going to disappear. One day – it’s like a miracle – it will disappear.’ Which, strangely, it did.
Another quote from Francis Collins, former Director of the National Institutes of Health, is disparaging about people ‘holding off of taking advantage of lifesaving vaccines’. These are juxtaposed with a quote from the then Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen saying that citizens were asked to ‘stay tuned for outbreak information provided by the government, and strengthen their personal hygiene routines’. This is supposed to provide some insight into why Taiwan was apparently so successful compared with the US.
It is all down to what the authors refer to as ‘cultural defaults’. The message is ‘Western cultural defaults bad; Eastern cultural defaults good’. While those in the East did what they were told, we in the West ran amok during covid, ignored the regulations and got what we deserved. Except that is demonstrably not what happened.
It is true that Eastern cultures, which are more collectivist and hierarchical, tend to be more obedient to calls for conformity by their governments. We, by comparison, are more individualist, valuing personal freedom above many other things. But it is very unlikely that these ‘cultural defaults’ were responsible for the disparity in deaths between East and West.
The criteria for covid deaths in the US were very broad, including many who died ‘with’ rather than ‘of’ covid. In contrast Taiwan’s covid death classification was more restrictive: they primarily counted deaths where Covid-19 was the direct cause rather than a contributing factor.
The US also imposed stricter lockdowns than any of the three comparison countries included in the study.
These factors are not accounted for in the Stanford study, and both are important. The implications of using a liberal interpretation of covid deaths is obvious. The UK did the same, classifying people as a covid death if they had tested positive using a flawed test, and then been killed in a road accident. We in the West seemed determined to make the maximum drama of the covid situation.
The fact that less-strict lockdowns, which in themselves probably contributed to deaths through disrupted health services, loneliness and isolation were implemented in the Far East is a clear confounder in the situation. It is more than likely that a combination of using a broad definition of covid death plus the implementation of a damaging intervention accounts for the disparity in covid deaths between East and West.
But one suspects, this is not just about covid deaths but about how we can shame people in the West into being more compliant with government regulations generally, and not only about ‘pandemics’. One of the co-authors of the report, Jeannette L Tsai (Tsai is a Taiwanese name) said that she hoped their study would ‘help policymakers and decision-makers learn from what happened during Covid-19 to better deal with current crises and plan for future challenges’.
What they purport to have learned is that our love of freedom and individuality is dangerous and, as lead author Hazel Rose Markus says, ‘did not serve us well during the pandemic’. For future challenges we can probably include such things as climate change as well as the next ‘plandemic’. I get the distinct impression that the authors of the Stanford article consider our ‘cultural defaults’ to be ‘cultural defects’ which need to be corrected. In fact the covid years showed that too few people in the West were sufficiently ‘culturally defective’.
