To The Reader’s Forum:

On March 3, 2020, the pandemic-addled Democrat majority in Albany gave virtual dictatorial powers to Gov. Cuomo, for a year. One of the governor’s first dictates was to use the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) for its Covid-19 protocol. Gov. Cuomo might be excused for going with IHME. After all, as the governor said, the White House relied on the pandemic protocol, and IHME was ready. But in early May, President Trump balked at using IHME for federal government’s ‘pandemic’ protocol, saying, “Look, models have been very inaccurate. I’ve seen models that are very in accurate.” Shortly after that, Coronavirus Task Force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx also publicly questioned IHME, apparently shelving reliance on the computer-generated Plan. But Cuomo continued on, touting Gates statisticians’ exacting predictions.

So what is the IHME, what’s their protocol, and what’s the problem? The IHME is an aggregate of mathematicians, statisticians and computer modelers based at the University of Washington (my alma mater) in Seattle. Their approach does away with epidemiology altogether in favor of mathematical models. IHME’s fluid projections dictate what sort of lockdown should be imposed to limit the number of deaths. Apparently, the attractiveness of the model (paid for by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) is that it predicts sure-thing results if certain behaviors can be controlled. When their predictions are wrong, IHME can respond, ‘You just didn’t control your people.’ Or subjects, in Cuomo’s case.

The problem with IHME is revealed by the Boston Globe’s medical news service, STAT, in an article titled “Influential Covid-19 model uses flawed methods and should not guide U.S. policies.” The author, Sharon Begley, quotes epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard School of Public Health: “IHME is not a model that most of us in the infectious disease epidemiology field think is well suited to projecting Covid-19 deaths.” Begley also quotes epidemiologist Ruth Etzioni of the Hutchinson Cancer Center: IHME “is being used for policy decisions and its results interpreted wrongly is a travesty before our eyes.” The British Annals of Internal Medicine says IHME projections “are based on a statistical model with no epidemiological basis.”

The standard approach used by epidemiologists is called SEIR: Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, Recovered. This method of tracking a disease’s infectiousness has long provided policymakers a way to curb an outbreak without drastic economic shut down. The Wall Street Journal (Oct. 25) featured epidemiologists’ important alternative to the computer-model driven lockdown protocols called the ‘Great Barrington Declaration’. Basically it advises returning to traditional, holistic public-health practices.

As a major pharmaceutical industry owner, a serious conflict of interest arises when Gates’ personal fortune has by $10 billion during the pandemic so far, according to Forbes. A lead-story in The Nation (Oct.5) entitled, “While the Poor Get Sick, Bill Gates Just Gets Richer,” acknowledges that Bill Gates, who is known for his lockdown-until-a-vaccine-is-ready mentality, “is essentially leading the global pandemic response” and is heavily invested in whatever vaccine or vaccines finally selected for mass distribution.

Roy Harvey

Mayville