University said it was ‘used to support dangerous inaccuracies’
A report of a senior Johns Hopkins lecturer’s analysis concluding that the coronavirus had no overall effect on the total number of deaths in the United States was retracted by the university on Thursday.
Essentially, Genevieve Briand, a longtime professor of economics and statistics, argued in a recent webinar that the virus is deadly primarily to older people with multiple underlying conditions who already were near death, meaning the overall death count has not been affected.
But an editor’s note posted Friday said an article about her presentation published by the student newsletter has been “used to support dangerous inaccuracies that minimize the impact of the pandemic.”
The article, the Johns Hopkins University News-Letter said, was retracted “to stop the spread of misinformation” but made available as a PDF because it’s “our responsibility as journalists to provide a historical record.”
Her numbers came right off the CDC’s website, so I guess the CDC is lying to us in both directions.
Notice that Johns Hopkins does not dispute the figures (the data came directly from the CDC), nor does Johns Hopkins say one of their top researchers was stupid or did shoddy work. No, Hopkins pulled the article because they don’t like the people who are citing it.
Now that’s real science!