So we must (tongue firmly in cheek) conclude that the end times are arriving: Hinderaker is defending 1974-era Soviet thinking, and — after being wrong by a ten fold factor on the lethality of COVID in the US… he NOW would tell us that easing COVID restrictions is purely politics, and not science. He shows a version of the same blue chart I have at left, but blithely ignores the decline in daily deaths of late.

More tellingly, though — he ignores the NYT data in green altogether, as it would mean he’d have to admit that we’ve saved perhaps 300,000 lives over the pandemic in the US, via these measures.

And, again — he’d have to admit that his July 19, 2020 prediction of only 110,000 deaths in the US was… completely baseless, thus irresponsible… and immediately correctible. But he never did.

It took 900,000 excess deaths in the US alone, before he could admit he had lied to his readers.

Now he lies to his readers — to make easing restrictions look like a wedge issue. It is not.

It is a science issue.

Sit down Hinderaker.