A university president makes a case against cowardice

Are you referring to the most studied medicine in human history or the one that saved more lives than any other medicine in human history?

I'm referring to the medicine deployed against a pandemic whose death count is still entirely unknown.

How many people died because of COVID?

You don't know. No one knows.

Meanwhile, everyone who knows better pretends that the most fundamental data about the subject, on top of which all other data and decsions were built ... is garbage.

This is what statistics is for? We rarely ever “know” (in the sense of your restrictive epistemology) the precise value of ANY demographic measure.

We don’t know how many people live in the United States at any particular moment, but the Census is still useful.

It's useful when done in good faith. During COVID there were numerous decisions that even if not intended to inflate mortality figures, then they did so inadvertently. In particular the CDC gave extremely broad guidance on what to classify as a death "of" COVID, and the government was giving hospitals additional funding per COVID death. So for the most ridiculous example of what this led to, in Florida some guy died in a motorbike crash and ended up getting counted as a COVID death because he also had COVID at the time. [1] He was eventually removed from their death count, but only because that case went viral.

Even in more arguable cases, preexisting conditions and extreme senescence are ubiquitous in deaths "of" COVID, and at this point there's probably no real chance of ever untangling the mess we created and figuring out what happened. For instance Colin Powell died at 84 with terminal cancer, Parkinson's, and a whole host of other health issues. His eventual death was flagged as 'caused by complications of COVID.' I mean maybe it really was, but I think the asterisk you'd put there is quite important when looking at these stats.

[1] - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/florida-motorcyclist-covid...