🔒 Why Do Covid Revisionists Need to Fabricate Evidence to Make Their Case?

Yoel Roth, the former head of Trust and Safety at a now very dead website that used to be called Twitter, was recently made aware of something disturbing. He’d been quoted in a recently published, bestselling book, without his knowledge.

 This in itself isn’t a problem—if you’re a public figure, you’ll never know all the places you’ve ever been quoted, as it’s not like they need to tell you—but it was a problem in this case because the book is In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, and the quote is technically what Roth actually said, while at the same time, one hundred percent opposite to what he actually meant.

 Here's what happened: Roth’s father-in-law was reading this book when he stumbled upon a familiar name and urgently texted him about it. Roth doesn’t ever remember saying this and is alarmed because it’s the opposite of the actual truth:

 “Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, states that ‘the FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands,’ including demands involving domestic speech.”

Did Roth actually state that? Did he type that sentence? Did he sit at his keyboard and tap-tap-tap those letters out in the exact sequence that the authors of the book alleges? Well… mmmyhhhhh… yes, kind of.

 The “quote” is drawn from a heading within an article that Roth wrote for the Knight First Amendment Institution at Columbia University, where the substance of the article is specifically to dispute that heading.

The idea that pre-Elon (prelon?) Twitter was subject to substantial moderation interference by the nefarious deep state three letter agencies, under Obama/Democratic control even during Trump’s first term, is a myth propagated by the whole Matt Taibbi debacle (Taibbacle?) of the Twitter Files back in 2022—an accusation so weak that even the entirely Trump-captured Supreme Court still couldn’t make it a thing.

 And yet there is nothing short of a desperation for this to be true. Not just among the conservative grievance movement, who feel that their opinions not being popular enough in the 2010s can only be explained by a conspiracy—a “Censorship Industrial Complex” as coined by the Twitter Files chums—but also by a broader political umbrella of centrists and liberals who are frantic and famished for evidence to prove the Covid-19 pandemic was (and is) no big deal and we are absolutely vindicated in our resentment for all the stuff they made us do, and stopped us from doing.

 To head off any comments pointing this out, I know that we are still in a Covid pandemic, but to be clear, we are still “in” the pandemic in the same sense that we are still “in” the influenza pandemic that began before documented human history. It is with us now until we have some kind of technology capable of completely eliminating viral disease from Earth.

I haven’t read In Covid’s Wake but I’ve listened to Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri’s dissection of it on their podcast If Books Could Kill, and it sounds pretty much how I expected it to be. Hobbes and Shamshiri run through the book, claim by claim, and find litle more than misunderstood and misrepresented statistics all the way through.

 Roth isn’t the only figure to have been misquoted to appear to be making the opposite case to what they were actually making. The authors use a study by Bloomberg Global Health Chair Thomas Bollyky to bolster the idea that non-pharmaceutical measures like masks and social distancing did nothing to help slow the spread of Covid. Bollysky, perplexed, claims his studies showed the opposite. The authors didn’t seem to interview any medical or disease scientists, and the positive reviews come mostly from journalists and academics outside of this field who aren’t equipped to see its flaws, while epidemiologists are mostly baffled by its publication.

 Is this media illiteracy or something more nefarious? How does a book this badly researched get released by a major academic publisher?

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