Sen. Murphy said a lot of stuff he has no right saying, meaning he irresponsibly made excessive charges based on false statements that he should have checked up on. He leapt before he looked.
He said “The president has lost patience…And he’s about to lead this country down a potential path of slaughter.” He relied upon an incomplete simulation (work-in-progress) by epidemiologist Justin Lessler, who is a Ph.D. and Associate Professor. His work was leaked to the New York Times.
Murphy said ““You have this new estimate suggesting that because of these early re-openings without enough testing capacity, we’re going to get to a point in the early summer where 3,000 people will be dying every single day.”
But the fact is that there is no such “new estimate”. There is certainly no such official estimate. Lessler explains clearly that he is in the midst of running a lot of simulations based upon different assumptions. Then another step involves weighting the results statistically. Extracting part of this process to publish or for Murphy to treat as a viable “new estimate” is entirely premature and illegitimate, scientifically and politically. And this proviso doesn’t even raise the questions and reservations that beset all these models that are being used by epidemiologists.
This incomplete work of Lessler does not even fit the deaths to date. It is not asking too much of a predictive model that it accurately matches, with some acceptable degree of error, the process whose outcomes are already known.
Trump quickly and curtly disavowed the article and estimate, saying it didn’t take mitigation into account.
But this doesn’t change the fact that someone apparently stole and leaked Lessler’s work. The New York Times irresponsibly published it. Then Senator Murphy irresponsibly accepted and endorsed it. He then joined the Democratic chorus that Trump intends to kill people at the altar of the economy.
Why not go all the way? If it has not already been said, and it probably has been said, why not accuse Trump of causing the genocide of black Americans? If he’s a racist, this is his golden opportunity, isn’t it?
1:26 pm on May 6, 2020
