MISS INFORMATION, Doug Underhill's dangerous misinformation campaign

God dammit Doug Underhill. I really didn’t want to write another post about you, but your campaign of COVID misinformation has forced my hand. For those not from NW Florida, Doug is a county commissioner in Escambia County. There are Doug Underhill’s in local governments all over this country, so it might still be worth the read even if you're not local. I wrote about Underhill’s assertions the economy needed opening and that the virus couldn’t survive the Florida summers in April. He also suggested politicians who were promoting policies to limit the spread of the virus were engaging in Nazi techniques. These comments didn’t age so well as Florida’s deaths from COVID-19 spiked over the summer.

Undeterred Underhill is continuing to give medical advice that directly contradicts the advice from actual infectious disease experts. In fact, what he’s doing now is worse. He’s graduated from ignorance to deliberate deception. There are a lot of boneheads in Escambia spreading the same fake information, but they’re not county commissioners. When you see the number of shares his posts get it becomes apparent he’s a significant source of dangerously false information. When a county commissioner posts something it has a certain weight to it. People who are only vaguely familiar with Commissioner Underhill assume that an elected official wouldn’t deliberately post false information. They are sorely mistaken.

The first recent post was this anti-mask conspiracy fan fiction. This really shows what Underhill thinks of his constituents. It’s obviously meant to show the uselessness of mask ordinances. In reality it shows the problems of allowing in-person dining during a pandemic. Of course, if done properly, in-person dining can be made safer. This includes reducing capacity, using properly worn masks and the liberal use of hand sanitizer and washing hands. Once you get past the obvious bias of the post, you do get to a nugget of truth. Dining in at a restaurant, even under the best circumstances, does have an increased risk of virus transmission. Further, even well-meaning restaurants often fall short of perfect anti-virus protocols. The question for politicians is whether to limit restaurants to carryout, or allow limited dine-in customers and try to mitigate the risk. Doug missed the truth in his own post and concluded the answer is unrestricted dine-in restaurant operations.

This post is where Underhill goes from simply birdbrained to intentionally spreading false information. This meme indicates the World Health Organization is warning people not to wear face masks. The quote is accurate, but also outdated. The WHO updated their position on June 5th, over 4 months ago. The new guidance encourages use of face masks “in public settings, such as grocery stores, at work, social gatherings, mass gatherings [and] closed settings including schools [and] churches” when physical distancing is limited. This was widely reported and very simple to fact check.

Anyone who’s ever interacted with the Commissioner knows he loves mocking people when he determines they’ve made a factual error on some obscure detail. Yet he posted this obviously outdated quote from the WHO’s Director of Health Emergencies. This is a new virus which we’re still trying to understand, that was all the more true in March. Any reasonable person should know that COVID recommendations from March needs checked to make sure it’s still accurate. It’s impossible to conclude anything other than Doug was deliberately spreading information that he knew to be inaccurate. In the process he put people’s lives in danger.

Finally, and perhaps most insidiously, Commissioner Underhill posted the above story, shortly after the false WHO post. The previous post was equally wrong, but could be easily disproved within about 10 seconds with Google. This post requires following a series of links and actually reading the CDC report to debunk the claim. The article purports to give the results of a new CDC study showing that the vast majority of people with COVID-19 always wore a mask. Coupled with his previous WHO post, the clear inference is that the scientific community is in agreement that wearing a mask puts you at increased risk of contracting the virus. This is the opposite of the truth.

This study examined the source of infection for people who contracted the disease. They looked at people who had symptoms and went in for testing. The control group were people who’s test came back negative. The wearing of masks was not the primary focus of the study. For example, the study didn’t ask which type of mask people wore. A simple cloth mask isn’t terribly effective at preventing contracting the virus. However, they do help prevent an infected person who isn’t experiencing symptoms from transmitting the virus to others. It also didn’t address if the subjects wore the mask correctly. All you have to do is go to Walmart to see many people wearing a mask that’s not covering their nose. The study simply wasn’t designed to test the effectiveness of wearing masks.

This study concluded there were two significant risk factors that were at least twice as prevalent in people who tested positive. The first was close contact with someone with who had COVID. In over half of those cases it was a family member, and over 30% was a co-worker or friend. Even people who report always wearing a mask don’t wear them at home. It’s also likely they don’t always wear them around people they are personally close with.

The other risk factor associated with people who caught the virus was eating in restaurants and going to bars. These are two activities in which it’s impossible to wear a mask. The fact that 41% of people who caught COVID reported always wearing a mask in restaurants reveals two things. First, some of the people who reported always wearing a mask in general didn’t include restaurants in their calculation. Second, that the 41% who reported always wearing a mask in restaurants didn’t mean while they were eating. This shows that people who report always wearing a mask are making exceptions that they aren’t accounting for.

Underhill has been doing everything in his power to open up restaurants and bars since the spring. He’s trying to use this study and the outdated guidance from the WHO to back his position. The truth is the evidence he’s citing points to the exact opposite conclusion. Again, if anyone else tried this he’d rip them apart for not doing their homework, but he’s not applying his own standards to himself. All you have to do is look at the source. This article is from “Focus on the Family” which Media Bias/Fact Check labeled extreme right-wing propaganda.

It is simply unconscionable for an elected official to deliberately mislead the public about the risk from a pandemic that has resulted in the death of well over 200,000 Americans. You can make an argument based on facts for the easing of restrictions and increased economic activity. That’s not what Underhill is doing. He’s deliberately lying to the public, and he doesn’t care if his reckless words get people killed.