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.
BD: So talk a little bit about the conflict between what you were hearing from national officials, Fauci included, but others as well; Deborah Birx, of course. There are so many different entities here. The revisionism is that it’s focused on Fauci, but he’s one of many, many people. The narratives that you were hearing nationally, at what point did the data that you were collecting really start to conflict with the things that they were saying about what ought to be done? And was there a point where that became something that either affected the group that you were in or became a point of contention for people who were analyzing the data like you versus people who were supposed to be the experts about this who were giving pretty much sweeping recommendations that were being accepted based on politics a lot of the time by these state and local officials?
MS: I’m going to make a couple of distinctions. One is that in the group I was in, we were mostly doing what I would call Yoman’s data work, which is just about grabbing the data and pulling it in. Those guys were in that capacity, very non-political. I know there were a lot of left-wing guys. I know there were some Right-leaning people. I met some really good people through that thing. But in their work of collecting and analyzing data, they were top-notch people. I wouldn’t say a word against them. The people I have a real beef with were a lot of them high-level academics who weren’t in the data, or they were aware of the data but willing to push it off to push a narrative. And then a lot of public health officials, national public health officials, state public health officials, were really gross in a lot of the things that they were pushing.
And the big thing I noticed was the summer — I’m going to narrow this down to my very specific perspective and then broaden it back out. New York City was a disaster. COVID killed so many people in New York City in April. And Seattle wasn’t because we definitely got it before. We had an outbreak before New York did and we were able to detect it and that’s a whole story, but it didn’t hit us that bad, not nearly as bad. And New York got slammed. And I thought, I don’t think this anymore, but I thought at the time it was because we actually did it. We detected it early. We were more careful. We shut more things down. That’s how we’re going to do this.
But then we got through a month or six weeks of this, and I’m like, “Okay, well, we can’t be shut down forever. So what’s our plan?” And at that time, it was about late April; most of the country shut down, and then Georgia started to open up. And I remember people — somebody — there’s some famous thing like this is an experiment in mass sacrifice or something like that. My opinion at that point was, “We’ve been stuck here in Seattle for six weeks. We should find out what happens when we open up because we can’t do this forever.” And so I watched the data, and nothing happened. I mean, nothing happened in Georgia when they opened up. There was no significant increase at all. And that was my starting point for asking whether these policies we’re putting in place are doing anything. We should be able to see if they’re doing something, right?
BD: What was so infuriating to me about the media narrative surrounding these things was that you would have a narrative that would be established around a decision that was being made typically by a red state governor or local authority. And then you would have this follow-on effect: now that we’ve stuck ourselves in this position of assumption, we need to keep making the case for it with every piece of data that comes in. Even if that data actually doesn’t reflect who we are. And again, this is not a bias against one approach or another. At that stage, I think things were extremely uncertain. I was very opposed to lockdowns. I was very pro-vaccine.
I was in that sort of weird position where I feel like, in retrospect, I was wrong a little bit on both ends. Does that make sense? But the point is that I was very anti-lockdown and pro-vaccine. And I looked at these different data points that these media people were seizing on and basically felt like, wait a minute, you’re not actually looking at the evidence here. It seems so apparent that the evidence for what you’re saying just isn’t there to support the idea that opening up is some horrible thing, or that lockdowns are even working.
MS: Right. Now that was the thing that we were seeing that I was seeing in the data plainly. The rises and falls in COVID were not in any way tied to whether things were being locked down. They weren’t attached to masking. They weren’t attached to movement. They were attached to regional surges up and down. And I think Nate Silver was the guy who pointed out that it looks like you get a surge when there’s a major seasonal change, and people go inside. It gets too hot, and so they go inside to get the air conditioning, and then you get more cases. And that’s actually really normal for the flu, given that we’ve been studying it for decades. And so these seasonal changes, COVID just more or less took over the flu for a while.
And with all the seasonal changes, because nobody had had COVID before, it was worse than the flu, since most people have had the flu. And that was just the pattern that we were seeing. And I saw no benefits out of any of the impacts. And when you start looking at the studies that say there are benefits, they end up being one of two things. Either it’s a model study where they’re not actually studying whether or not it works. They’re just assuming it works and then making up numbers based on that assumption. Or there were a couple of studies, one really infuriating one in Georgia, where they studied schoolchildren. One group was in a school district that required masks, and the other was in a school that didn’t. They studied them for the six-week period. Well, the COVID wave that hit the area hit the northern part of Atlanta first, then moved into the urban center.
But it was about a three-week delay. So what they did was they captured a six-week period when the kids in the northern part of Atlanta, which is a little bit more conservative and a little more free, who weren’t wearing masks, got sick. Then they stopped the study right before that wave hit the inner city Atlanta, where all the kids were masked, and all those kids got sick. So the study was very tightly designed to make sure it didn’t catch the wave hitting the urban kids.
BD: Why do you think it is that after this amount of time and with the intervening period of political change, that there was just this cavalcade — this week of democratic politicians, senators, people who are duly elected by their people and presumably trusted by their voters who were basically saying to Anthony Fauci on Capitol Hill, “You did nothing wrong. Everything you did was great. You’re an American hero, blah, blah, blah.” Just no interest at all in saying, “Maybe we should have some questions about if this happens again, we should maybe do some things differently than our assumption.” Which, by the way, is not a partisan position. That’s not in any way a partisan position. It’s just a fact-based question: should we do things differently if something like this happens again? Which it probably eventually will. Why, with this intervening period of time, is this still a point of just partisan acrimony instead of just trying to figure out what works?
MS: I don’t have a lot of answers to that because it keeps telling me a great deal. I think a lot of people are really locked in, and they’re really embarrassed. They don’t want to admit — they’re invested. It became just a big part of their lives. You can’t just ignore it. It was such a big part of everyone’s lives. You can’t say it never happened. And I think that’s probably the biggest thing. I was shocked. I got dragged into this COVID origins debate again for the first time in, like, two years. And I was genuinely shocked because I was like, “Well, certainly there’s been additional research that’s come out.”
But the thing that I find bizarre is people are like, “No, it definitely didn’t happen. It’s definitely natural in origin.” And I came at that because it’s been a couple of years since I looked at this. I’m thinking, “Oh, maybe there’s new research.” And, “Okay, what’s your evidence for this?” No new evidence. Zero new things that they have found. These people still insist, “Oh, it happened at the wet market.”
BD: Pour one out for that poor pangolin, man.
MS: But there has been no update. There has been no research update. The strategy is simply to call people who believe it loudly conspiracy theorists and idiots. And no actual new evidence has been procured or disseminated. And the only answer I have to that is that they’re invested in this thing. There’s an argument they had four years ago that they remember having, and they remember wanting it in their minds. And so it has to still be true. But the argument, I just find the argument to be incredibly thin. And the thing that drives me the most insane about it is it’s like these people — someone who thinks a lab leak is possible or believes in it — they’re not dumb. They have looked into things and have been convinced by the evidence. Maybe the evidence didn’t convince you, but that doesn’t make them dumb.
And it definitely should be part of the conversation. And when you start yelling at people and saying they’re anti-science and saying that these positions are stupid, that’s not a scientific conversation. It’s a partisan conversation. And I think to go back to your question about the senators, I think a lot of people are just addicted to these partisan conversations. And they can’t admit that maybe we need to revise our thinking because that feels like an admission of defeat.
BD: What makes me so frustrated about this, and I don’t know if you know this about my background, but I worked at Health and Human Services. And I actually met Anthony Fauci when I worked at HHS, during a couple of different outbreaks, including the possibility of Ebola. And there were early on things that I didn’t have an opinion of him one way or the other at the time, but he did seem a little pompous. No offense, short guy syndrome. But the thing is, I care deeply about this. I think vaccines are actually really important. I think that they are an important function of government. From my perspective, it’s a national security and border issue of making sure that you keep your population protected from invasive diseases, et cetera. I’m the opposite of an anti-vax kind of person. At the same time, the way this was enforced, the way it was pushed, and the mandatory treatment of people under policies that seemed to change on a weekly basis. Now you need to do this. And if you don’t do this, that means that it’s a moral violation and you’re killing grandma. And now you need to do this.
I want to tell you for a moment about my COVID experience. I haven’t actually talked about this before, but I just want to tell you about it. I lived in New York. We lived in Hell’s Kitchen. My wife lived in New York, I should say. I spent half my time there and half my time in northern Virginia, the Washington, D.C., area. My wife got pregnant. She was two months into that pregnancy. It’s a very weird thing. I had gone to cover the Hong Kong protests in China for about a week in November — late November. And I had come back home, and I had, when I came back, the worst pneumonia, at least that’s what I was diagnosed with, of my life.
I had already had pneumonia once before. I was like, “This is weird.” And they were like, “Yeah, we think you have pneumonia. Your lungs have fluid in them.” All these different things. I was bedridden for the longest period of my life. And I was thinking, “That’s really weird. I don’t normally get sick like this.” When my wife got pregnant in New York, she was working for The View. And I said, “You have to get out of town. I do not think this is going to be good. I think New York’s going to be bad.” I just had bad energy around all of this. And I said, “Come down to Virginia. Let’s figure out if you can do this remotely or something like that.” And we got in a Black Car. I loaded it up with literally as much of her New York apartment as I possibly could.
And as we were driving down, she got a call from her producer at The View saying that one of their cameramen had died. Oh my gosh. And she freaked out. And she was just like, “Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, I can’t believe that this happened.” And then she said, “Well, thank you. I mean, you’re right.” I argued with her for a week to get her out of town. And the driver, as we were driving down, said, “Yeah, this is the last drive that I have. Our company is shutting down tomorrow because we think everybody’s getting locked down in New York, and we’re a New York company.” And the company actually died, the Black Car company. But to me, that kind of surreal experience of seeing people in denial and then going in the opposite direction makes me understand a little bit why they’re so invested in this false, revisionist narrative about the way things happened.
But you need to understand that we have to learn from this experience in a way you apparently do not want to. And that’s the thing that really bothers me. I don’t actually want Anthony Fauci to go to jail. I’m sure that would be fine to a lot of people, but it’s like, who cares on a certain level? It’s like, what I actually care about is: how do we get a policy change on this? If you were in front of that hearing, that circus of a hearing the other day, and you could say something to those senators about this is the thing you actually need to take away from the COVID experience and apply to America’s health policy, what would you be saying?
MS: Okay. Oh man. And then I actually have an answer.
BD: Thank God, because I know that’s a convoluted question.
MS: This whole thing has driven me into studying how public health came to be what it is today from a historical perspective. One of the really interesting things is that whenever there’s a new vaccine, they hold vaccine events. They’re like eight hours, and they’re live-streamed, and there’s public comment and all that sort of thing. The reason they have that is that when they started doing this — this was in the early 20th century — people were skeptical of the science. People didn’t trust the scientists. They saw the scientists as very haughty people. They saw them as very highfalutin. They said, “Okay, we need to get people to believe and trust the science. This needs to happen in public. People don’t like vaccines being pushed on them. So we need to do all of this in public.” That’s why we have public vaccine discussions.
There needs to be more of that. We need more policy on how we make these decisions. They need to be happening more in public. So much of what we saw, what we’ve seen with the FOIA requests, is top-level scientists and administrators having secret conversations and telling each other to fricking delete their emails about some of the most important things that are happening in the country in terms of health policy. And the discovery of these secret conversations has not been great for the public.
BD: Well, I think it’s explosive. I think it’s horrible. I think it vindicates a lot of the critics’ points, but it’s also going to be used by cranks who can take pieces of it and basically say, “You should never trust these people again.” And it’s like, “Well, actually, if we have an outbreak of something where we do need to trust them, we actually do need to.” There has to be some kind of honesty equation here.
MS: I think making more of that stuff systematically public is essential because then people are going to be able to be a part of the government. They can watch the conversations as they happen. And I think we also need more voices inside of public health that can represent what I might call normal people.
I can’t remember the survey. There’s something about how terrible would you be if X, Y, Z? And if you look at public health professionals, they were way, way, way above any other group, way above Democrats or Republicans or the elderly. They were much more risk-averse than anybody else in the country. We can’t have all of our public health policy run by people who A, believe that there is such a thing as a noble lie, and B, are risk-averse about every single thing in the world.
BD: Here’s the comparison I would make: When you’re a journalist, if you go to the legal department on literally anything that you’re writing, they’re going to tell you, “Don’t write that.” And the truth is, if that was actually the way you approached your job, you would be bad at your job.
If there is a solution here, there are people online who want the Nuremberg trials — but with Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci, and all these other people. I understand that resentment. I understand. What Josh Hawley did to Fauci is exactly what I would’ve tried to do to Fauci; I’m in awe of that. But the fact is, we need to solve these problems and make sure that the next time something like this happens, we don’t treat it the way we did last time. What do you think needs to happen in order to prevent that?
MS: I think there needs to be some sort of — I don’t know if it’s a congressional commission or there needs to be reform. And I think some of that has gone forward already. I think putting Jay Bhattacharya as the head of the National Institutes of Health was a great decision. I think that there needs to be an intentional inclusion of the dissenters. I know some people like Alex Berenson —I don’t like him;I don’t trust him — but there were a lot of good, thoughtful, earnest, honest dissenters during COVID. And I think they have earned their place at the table by telling the truth and saying what they thought, what they saw to be the reality at a time when it was risky to do so. And I think we need fewer of the yes men who go along with whatever the overall public health agreement has come to and more people who are willing to say, “I don’t think that’s true.
And I think we need to reassess and take a step back.” And I think including the dissenters and making more things officially public will be a really big step forward to making good policy. And just as important, helping people feel confident in our public health institutions to do what’s best.
BD: Because I like dark humor, I’m going to ask one last question. When you’re looking back at all the things that come up that you witnessed during this period, what’s the one that’s the most ridiculous? Because you’ve got to have one.
MS: So the one that brings me the most joy is the entire Rebekah Jones scene — the Florida lady who said that DeSantis was hiding positive COVID test results and death data.
Just a couple of days ago, there was some judgment against her because she brought her latest crankpot theory before a judge, and he just slapped her down. It was delightful. But that was the funniest thing because from the very beginning, we knew that she was a crackpot. But because she was anti-DeSantis, she got elevated for months and months and months. And it took a lot of people well over a year or two years to figure out, wait, this person is not just wrong; she’s unhinged. And so I have enjoyed watching her continue to be insane because she is not a well person. I feel bad for that.
BD: Mine is still every video of somebody running away from cops on the beach. I’m sorry, every single time that shows up in my feed, I can’t help but laugh. It’s just so serious.
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