Why does @AlexBerenson continue to spread dangerous and inaccurate information about COVID19?

He seems so invested in his reputation as a contrarian that he’s giving out bad info.

Chasing clout at the expense of innocent people getting sick.

Alex fills his timeline with easy-to-debunk panic posts — there are plenty of inaccurate rumors on both sides of the fear equation to choose from.

By choosing to debunk only ONE side, Alex paints a picture of “~zero risk” (a phrase he uses repeatedly).

Extremely irresponsible.

If you look who replies to and who amplifies @AlexBerenson’s tweets, it’s very clear that he has latched onto a majority fabulist audience.

Playing to the “it’s just the flu” crowd; seldom correcting their unhinged takes.

Makes Alex seem unwilling to alienate his core audience.

Lots to unpack in this @AlexBerenson tweet.

1. Describing fear of a deadly pandemic as a phobia.

2. “~zero risk” - shows no data?

3. 27.4% of American women ages 18-44 are clinically obese, a risk factor for COVID

4. Paternalistic pretend concern about hysterical women.

In case @AlexBerenson’s paternalistic, pretend concern for hysterical women wasn’t clear from his first tweet, he follows it with straight-up misogyny.

Men, especially right-wing men, LOVE this. It’s red meat— makes them feel more masculine, and it feeds their hatred of women.

Let’s talk Infection fatality rate (IFR) estimates by age and sex.

30-39: 0.03% (male) / 0.02% (female)
40-49: 0.07% (male) / 0.04% (female)
50-59: 0.30% (male) / 0.20% (female)

“Estimating the burden of SARS-CoV-2 in France”, Science; 13-May-2020.
DOI: 10.1126/science.abc3517

The infection fatality rate (IFR) for influenza is difficult to estimate precisely (because flu mortality is small-ish and seroprevalence is hard w/ 200k-500k deaths per year).

Best estimate for flu's IFR is ~ 0.04%. More than 10x lower than COVID19. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6815659/

CFR and IFR are NOT the same thing. Don't make the mistake of comparing the flu's CFR to the *IFR* from another disease.

Influenza IFR : ~0.04%
COVID19 IFR: ~1.6% [95% CI 0.6% to 2.1%]
https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00455

The COVID19 IFR's from multiple different serosurveys are all converging on a range.

Remember that a country's IFR is will depend on the shape of its population pyramid. Older countries will have higher IFR's. Here are New York City's IFRs by age. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3590771

Whence flu IFR? Flu annual crude mortality is 5.9 per 100,000 people.

Serosurveys put annual proportion infected by flu at about 15% (varies year to year).

That means that ~40 people die per 100,000 people infected. An infection fatality rate of 0.04%
(h/t @ChristoPhraser)