Russell Roberts's Blog, page 159
March 25, 2022
Some Covid Links
Charley Hooper and David Henderson write in Regulation about ivermectin and statistical significance. Two slices:
One existing medication has received considerable attention recently: ivermectin, an antiparasitic that is widely used in the developing world. Many commentators, including several health officials, have dismissed the drug’s usefulness against COVID. Yet, these dismissals seldom cite empirical evidence, or if they do, they don’t detail the findings.
Ivermectin, which is the generic name for the drug, was discovered in 1975 by William Campbell of the Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research and Satoshi Ōmura of Kitasato University, in work that would win them the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Merck first marketed the drug as a veterinary antiparasitic (today it is best known by the brand name Heartgard), with human applications (and the requisite government approvals, under the brand‐names Stromectol and Mectizan) coming a few years later. In the developing world, the drug has proven so effective at combating parasitic illness that it is on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines. It has been dosed four billion times to patients in Africa and Central and South America.
Ivermectin works through a variety of mechanisms to kill the targeted parasites. Some of those mechanisms have also been found to attack single‐strand RNA viruses like SARS‐CoV‑2, which causes COVID. That led scientists to test the medication in vitro, finding that it does in fact kill the virus in cell cultures.
Because ivermectin has been around for decades, can be taken as an oral pill, is safe, and is now off‐patent and therefore cheap, it would be an ideal drug to give to COVID patients — if it is, in fact, effective in the body and not just in the petri dish. Is it?
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As described above, many medical authorities have claimed the drug does not work against COVID-19. Their reasons for claiming this may have more to do with biases and structural limitations than with the drug itself. Science has taken a back seat to prejudice and process. People are dying because many medical authorities say that therapies such as ivermectin do not work, while the actual clinical results suggest otherwise. These medical authorities should “follow the science” rather than rationalize their reasons not to.
Professional basketball players, like noted vaccine-holdout Kyrie Irving of the Brooklyn Nets, and Broadway stars will no longer be subject to New York City’s private employee vaccine mandate.
But if you’re not famous enough to get people to pay to watch you play or perform—or lucky enough to work alongside them—then, sorry, the mandate still applies.
That’s the absurd and, frankly, unfair result of New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ announcement on Thursday that carves a new loophole in the city’s increasingly nonsensical private employer vaccine mandate. In a press conference at Citi Field, home of the New York Mets, Adams announced a new executive order that will exempt workers at the city’s stadiums, arenas, concert venues, and theaters from the sweeping mandate that required both private and public employees in New York to get vaccinated or lose their jobs, The New York Post reports.
The mayor had been under pressure to lift or alter the vaccine mandate ever since his office lifted the city’s indoor mask and vaccine mandates on March 7. For the past few weeks, unvaccinated fans have been welcomed into New York’s arenas and performing arts venues, but city-based athletes like Irving have been unable to play. (He was allowed to watch his teammates play, though, which really drove home the absurdity of that arrangement).
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If the rules aren’t going to apply to everyone equally, they ought not to apply to anyone. This is a basic tenet of good governance.
New York City’s private employer mandate—like the similar one that the Supreme Court blocked at the federal level—probably never should have been imposed in the first place. It was and is an unjustified intrusion of government power into the private working arrangements made by employers and employees.
Creating new loopholes and granting special privileges does not change any of that. Irving might finally get to play in front of his hometown fans, but many New Yorkers are still subject to overreaching, nonsensical, ineffective vaccine rules.
Also rightly angered by this NYC double-standard is David Marcus. Two slices:
Owing to the latest wave of Mayor Adams’ magic COVID wand, unvaccinated Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving will be allowed to play home games at Atlantic and Flatbush. The ushers at the Barclays Center, on the other hand, and the guy who pours the beer and the ticket taker, they still have to get the jab or get fired.
You have to hand it to Hizzoner. His exemption to the workplace vaccine mandate for super-rich athletes and entertainers at least codifies what we have known all along: COVID rules are for the dirty masses, not important people.
Now that the mayor in his merciful benevolence is allowing pre-K students to learn mask free, the workplace vaccine mandate is the last big COVID restriction to remain in place. But why? New Yorkers are now free to roam inside and out around their millions of neighbors except when they go to work?
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The mayor insists he wants Gotham to swing again, that we are social creatures and New York needs its swagger back. Well, if that is what he wants, a good way to get there is to allow people to actually go to their jobs and to allow employers to stop being the vaccine police.
Technically, I suppose, this exemption should apply to our city’s political leadership, since clowns are entertainers, but people with actual jobs, who make the city run and rattle deserve to be out from under the yoke of vaccine mandates, as well. It’s over, Mayor Adams. New Yorkers want our lives back, it’s what we elected you to do.
While Mayor Eric Adams undergoes deserved scrutiny over his every act and pronouncement, he deserves only praise for something he actually doesn’t do — namely, he holds none of his predecessor’s tedious, morale-sapping and fear-stoking daily COVID briefings before TV cameras.
This is an unheralded, momentous stroke. Even when Mayor Bill de Blasio was forced by the facts to share upbeat news, the mere act of making coronavirus the No. 1 item on the daily news agenda conferred on the data an urgency out of all proportion to need or reality.
There’s plenty to criticize in Adams’ continued imposition of the private-employer vaccine mandate while dropping it for athletes and entertainers. But his big-picture strategy to demote COVID to just one challenge among many comes in the nick of time.
What a relief not to be lectured every morning by our mayor, flanked by health officials and bearing scary charts, warning, “It’s not over yet,” long after most enlightened citizens had gotten on with their lives despite being aware of (ever-declining) risk. Adams lets us wake up to a city once again full of promise rather than cursed by biological fate.
If de Blasio still controlled the mic, we’d hear only of the Omicron subvariant and its (dubious) potential to fill emergency rooms and deplete our supply of ventilators.
When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s, polio — then the most-feared viral disease in the United States and particularly dangerous to children — paralyzed tens of thousands of kids every year in a nation with less than half today’s population.
Can you imagine how different it might have been had elected officials held daily radio or TV briefings, replete with warnings about “not letting down our guard?”
The New York Post‘s Editorial Board sensibly calls for an immediate end to airline mask mandates. A slice:
Mandating masks on airplanes stopped making any sense long ago; let’s hope the airline CEOs hit the right altitude Wednesday in asking President Joe Biden to end the policy.
The chiefs of American, Delta, United Airlines and several others wrote, “Now is the time for the administration to sunset federal transportation travel restrictions.” Amen.
The federal mask mandate for public transportation is set to expire April 18 after Team Biden extended it another 30 days last month — for no good reason. COVID transmission has always been miniscule on commercial planes, whose ventilation systems mix outdoor air with air recycled through HEPA filters and limit airflow between rows.
This was clear by October 2020, when an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted: “The risk of contracting COVID-19 during air travel is low. Despite substantial numbers of travelers, the number of suspected and confirmed cases of in-flight COVID-19 transmission between passengers around the world appears small.”
Economist John Gibson reports on New Zealanders’ government-induced confusion about Covid vaccines.
In response to this new interview, Jay Bhattacharya tweets:
This is an explosive interview between @danwootton and Sky News & ITV former executive Mark Sherman, who admits that the UK government effectively ordered the media to propagandize the public about lockdowns, to promote covid panic, & deplatform dissenting voices.
Sue Juliens tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
It’s hard not to think that the choice to use fear to gain compliance with covid restrictions has caused more iatrogenic harm than it has limited spread. By many, many factors more.
When COVID-19 emerged as a significant new human disease, it was inevitable that lots of people would get ill and that some, unfortunately, would die. Chris Whitty [in Britain] said as much at the beginning. Given these facts, what should have been the public health response? Simply put, it should have been to minimise the impact of COVID-19 on the health and wellbeing of the population. An aim that while recognising the seriousness of COVID-19, doesn’t make it a special case but instead something to be managed within the broader context of overall public health. By considering this broader context and recognising that there are other health needs within the population, attention would focus on achieving the ‘biggest bang for the buck’ and in protecting those most vulnerable. We’d anticipate beefing up of necessary medical support and, for the longer-term, investing in the development of new treatments, including vaccinations. There would be advice and guidance, but government would most likely be promoting a ‘keep calm and carry on’ approach, especially once it became clear that the disease was not significant to a large segment of the population. As we learned more about COVID-19, so our approaches would evolve and become more refined.
Broadly speaking, this sort of thinking is what sits behind proposals like the Great Barrington Declaration and other focused protection initiatives. Ironically, such approaches have been criticised for being ‘discriminatory’ because they would have resulted in vulnerable people shouldering the burden of restrictions. But judging by the discussions about care homes I heard, it’s difficult to see how much more burdensome they could have been. But this is an aside.
The trouble is that strategies which focus on minimising the impacts of COVID-19 are balanced and mean accepting that some people will inevitably die of COVID-19. It is this point that makes them politically extremely challenging. Something I suspect that the newly minted public health experts at No.10 armed with a whiteboard and a few marker pens probably realised fairly soon into the pandemic. And so, whipped on by a generally scientifically illiterate media crying ‘for something to be done’, an opposition poised to jump on any misstep and supported by dubious computer modelling and highly vocal computer modellers predicting corpses piling up in the street, the Government altered the original public health aim from ‘trying to minimise the impact of COVID-19’ to ‘trying to minimise the impact of COVID-19′. A goal that is politically much easier to state and build policy around.
Although superficially similar (and of course one way of minimising the impact of COVID-19 is to minimise the amount of the disease), these two aims are profoundly different because by making the goal the minimisation of COVID-19 elevates COVID-19 to a unique position amongst diseases and disorders. It places COVID-19 and its reduction/elimination above everything else. In effect we turn a new coronavirus infection into Space Plague; a disease unknown to man against which any measures are justified as long as they might reduce the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths. Almost everything that has happened during the pandemic flows from this apparently simple change in public health focus.
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Lockdowns, masks, screening, social distancing, self-isolation, school and business closures, travel restrictions, vaccinations of healthy youngsters etc., etc. – all are valid whatever the cost or collateral damage as long as they might reduce COVID-19. It’s this COVID-19 monomania that also justifies the use of dubious psychological fear tactics to ensure compliance and is why we came to obsess over COVID-19 screening results and deaths in isolation from all other diseases or causes of injury and death. It’s how we ended up with a disease whose only symptom might be two lines on a testing stick, but which then demands that healthy people suffer days of self-imposed, isolated existence.
All medicine is about the balance of benefit and risk. There’s a good reason why ‘first do no harm’ is part of the medical mantra as it recognises that medical intervention has the real potential to make things worse rather than better. Non-pharmaceutical interventions shouldn’t be immune from this kind of thinking – why should they be? Why shouldn’t we look at the mental, physical, and financial misery caused by things like lockdown and weigh these up against the perceived COVID-19 benefits? This isn’t putting money over lives, it’s recognising that non-COVID-19 suffering is as equally important as COVID-19 suffering.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 215 of the 2009 Revised Edition of Thomas Sowell’s Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One (original emphasis):
It is not only theoretically possible to have more discrimination where there is less bias or prejudice, and less discrimination where there is more bias and prejudice, this has in fact happened in more than one country. The degree to which subjective attitudes are translated into overt acts of discrimination depends on the costs of doing so. Where those costs are very high, even very prejudiced or biased people may in engage in little or no discrimination.
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March 24, 2022
Rein In the Administrative State
Charles I would disagree.
Editor:
Karl Rove predicts that the courts and American voters will react negatively if the Biden administration follows the advice of progressive Democrats to rule even more by administrative (“executive”) diktat (“2022 Midterm Strategy Pulls Democrats Apart,” March 24). I hope Mr. Rove is correct.
Refined by the Tudors and Stuarts to circumvent common law and Parliament, such prerogative-court-like measures have no place in a liberal democratic republic. They are incompatible with the rule of law generally, and with the U.S. Constitution specifically. As Columbia University law professor Philip Hamburger summarizes, “Being not law but a mode of evasion, which flows around law and law-like things, administrative power has flowed around the Constitution’s pathways of power and even around formal administrative pathways, thus creating a cascade of evasions.”*
It’s long past time for the president and Congress to stop these unlawful evasions – to stop harassing the American people with diktats issued in violation of constitutionally prescribed procedures. And it’s long past time, too, for the courts to rein in this grotesque abuse of power.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
* Philip Hambuger, The Administrative Threat (New York: Encounter Books, 2020), pages 16-17.
Dissenting from Oren Cass’s Take on Adam Smith on Trade
Pardon the length of this letter, but given that it’s mostly quotations from Adam Smith, it should be a joy to read.
Mr. W__:
Persuaded that Oren Cass is correct to argue that, as you put it, “Adam Smith[] was not a knee jerk free trade promoter,” you seek my reaction to Oren’s argument.
No serious scholar ever accused Adam Smith’s knee of jerking in advocacy of any policy. Smith developed his case for a policy of unilateral free trade with great care, knowledge, reflection, and wisdom. Further, he explicitly offered exceptions to his case for free trade. (I write about these exceptions here.) But it’s wrong to conclude that the exceptions Smith mentioned overwhelm his underlying case for free trade. Anyone who reads The Wealth of Nations in its entirety understands that Smith was deeply suspicious of economic nationalism generally, and of protectionism specifically. This reader therefore understands that Smith would look with immense disfavor upon Oren’s case for a policy of a “bounded market.”
And so I suspect that Oren hasn’t read The Wealth of Nations in its entirety. Were he to do so, he’d realize the error of his assertion that Smith favored free trade only “only so long as a nation’s capitalists invested within its own borders.” Oren’s claim here is simply and fully mistaken. (My colleague Dan Klein is working on an essay that further exposes this error.)
My student Jon Murphy correctly notes that danger lurks in reading only quotations from Adam Smith; Smith’s entire corpus should be read. Nevertheless, The Wealth of Nations alone does contain more than enough quotable passages to reveal that Oren errs in suggesting that Smith (1) supported free trade only insofar as capitalists invest domestically, (2) believed that free trade is desirable only if it doesn’t result in trade ‘imbalances,’ and (3) would have supported industrial policy. Here are some of those passages:
The balance of produce and consumption may be constantly in favour of a nation, though what is called the balance of trade be generally against it. A nation may import to a greater value than it exports for half a century, perhaps, together; the gold and silver which comes into it during an this time may be all immediately sent out of it; its circulating coin may gradually decay, different sorts of paper money being substituted in its place, and even the debts, too, which it contracts in the principal nations with whom it deals, may be gradually increasing; and yet its real wealth, the exchangeable value of the annual produce of its lands and labour, may, during the same period, have been increasing in a much greater proportion. The state of our North American colonies, and of the trade which they carried on with Great Britain, before the commencement of the present disturbances, may serve as a proof that this is by no means an impossible supposition.[Book IV, Chapter 3]
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Nothing, however, can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade. [Book IV, Chapter 3]
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All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society. [Book IV, Chapter 9]
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Were all nations to follow the liberal system of free exportation and free importation, the different states into which a great continent was divided would so far resemble the different provinces of a great empire. As among the different provinces of a great empire the freedom of the inland trade appears, both from reason and experience, not only the best palliative of a dearth, but the most effectual preventative of a famine; so would the freedom of the exportation and importation trade be among the different states into which a great continent was divided. The larger the continent, the easier the communication through all the different parts of it, both by land and by water, the less would any one particular part of it ever be exposed to either of these calamities, the scarcity of any one country being more likely to be relieved by the plenty of some other. [Book IV, Chapter 5]
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The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it. [Book IV, Chapter 2]
There’s more – much more – from Adam Smith along these lines. But the above quotations are sufficient to prove that this great Scot would have looked with scorn upon attempts by government to engineer a “bounded market.”
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
Some Non-Covid Links
The true nature of Cass’s displeasure is thus not that the U.S. isn’t a bounded market — it most certainly is. It’s that he wishes the market were bounded differently than it has, in fact, been bound.
But here’s the thing about government-bound markets: They will always be subject to special-interest pressure. This is especially true in the United States, where forming associations and petitioning the government for a redress of grievances are constitutionally protected rights. Trade groups and lobbying firms have every right to make demands in Washington that they believe will protect their members and clients. Other trade groups and lobbying firms have every right to disagree.
Every duty and every exception in the Harmonized Tariff Schedule has a backstory. These policies are not made by wise philosopher-kings seeking to create a flourishing and virtuous economy. They’re made by bureaucrats and members of Congress and presidential appointees, with input from the Chamber of Commerce and the American Association of Widget Makers of America.
In a representative republic with strong civil liberties, which is what the United States is, the moment you give the government power to set a boundary in the market is the same moment that interest groups you hadn’t even heard of before will be lining up to tell you where to draw it. Some of them are corrupt sleazes, but most of them are just exercising their First Amendment rights. And elected politicians chasing votes and campaign donations are going to listen to some of them.
If a bounded market is what you want, all you need do is look around. And the federal government’s track record on establishing market boundaries is not inspiring.
And here’s Dom’s response to Cass’s reaction to Dom’s earlier essay. A slice:
The reason to avoid this trap is not some utopian sense of global fairness. If all the costs to such intervention were borne by foreigners, there might be a case for taking them. But the costs of government-granted privileges for corporations are ultimately borne by American consumers, through higher prices, fewer options, and yes, less freedom to spend their hard-earned money as they see fit. If we want to see a flourishing American economy, a goal Cass and I share, we should take pride in our place as a hub in the global marketplace and remove the government regulations and taxes that unreasonably hold our people back from participating in it.
J.D. Tuccille explains that no crisis justifies a dictatorship. A slice:
So, environmental advocates aren’t the only people impatient with debate and persuasion. But they are on the leading edge of the illiberal impulse at the same time that they embody the dangers inherent in trying to achieve policy goals through authoritarian means—because authoritarian regimes have a terrible record on environmental issues.
“During the ‘environmental decade’ of the 1960s and 1970s scholars first wondered whether communist states might have developed in an environmentally more sensitive way than capitalist ones,” wrote Douglas R. Weiner in The Cambridge History of Communism, published in 2017. “Most concluded that not only did communist regimes fail to realize the theoretical advantages of a dirigiste system, their careless practices brought about, in the words of Murray Feshbach and Fred Friendly, Jr., an ‘ecocide.'”
Eric Boehm decries the Biden administration’s apparent cluelessness of economics.
Also decrying Biden’s economic cluelessness – and his penchant for cronyism – is my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy. Here’s her conclusion:
So here you have it: Once again, Washington is giving us every reason to believe it’s selling favors to cronies even if it means worker safety, railroad efficiency, supply chains and the environment lose in the process.
As this editorial in the Wall Street Journal makes clear, politicians are self-spoofing. A slice:
A trio of House Democrats—Mike Thompson (Calif.), John Larson (Conn.), and Lauren Underwood (Illinois)—have introduced the Gas Rebate Act of 2022 to send Americans a $100 check in any month this year when the national average gas price exceeds $4 a gallon. Dependents will get another $100, so the family of four can fill up that SUV on Uncle Sam’s dime. The national average price has exceeded $4 in recent weeks.
The word “rebate” is a misnomer because this isn’t rebated from any payment to the federal government. It’s a government check to pay for higher gas prices caused in large part by government. Voters are blaming Democratic policies for inflation and for making it harder to produce American oil and gas. With an election coming, and their majority in peril, Democrats are resorting to what they do best: Spending more of your money.
The non-rebate rebate is even worse policy than the gas tax holiday that some states are proposing. Neither addresses the real problem, but at least the tax holiday lets people keep their own money. The rebate idea deserves to die in the crib, but the spectacle of climate-change warriors suddenly trying to subsidize fossil-fuel consumption is almost worth it.
John O. McGinnis reviews Steven Pinker’s new book, Rationality. A slice:
Third, determining the truth in social affairs is harder than in natural science. We cannot run the social conditions of the world over again, changing its conditions to isolate the causes of a social phenomenon. Causation is ultimately about counterfactuals. If A causes B, it follows that if A does not happen, neither will B given otherwise exactly similar initial conditions. But precisely defined counterfactual social worlds live only in our imagination. Thus, motivated reasoning inevitably dominates social science more than natural science. Not only are the real-world stakes in social disputes generally more immediate and personal (what will be the effect of higher taxes on me) than in purely scientific ones (does this gene cause this disease), but the effects of policy are genuinely hard to pin down.
Here’s part 17 of George Selgin’s marvelous series on the New Deal.
Some Covid Links
Stay-at-home orders weren’t part of the script in pre-Covid federal pandemic plans. The idea of “flattening the curve” through what are known as “layered non-pharmaceutical interventions” can be traced to an influential 2007 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance paper, updated in 2017. Contemplating a severe pandemic with a 2% case fatality rate, the CDC recommended now-familiar strategies, such as masking, surface disinfection and temporary school closings.
Yet aside from suggesting limits on mass gatherings, the CDC paper makes no mention of closing workplaces. Instead, it concludes that such a severe pandemic could warrant recommending that employers “offer telecommuting and replace in-person meetings in the workplace with video or telephone conferences.” The closest it comes to lockdowns is recommending “voluntary home quarantine” for people with an infected family member.
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The Chinese Communist Party aimed to eradicate Covid cases completely, regardless of the human cost. China’s zero-Covid policy continues. A handful of cases can put a city under strict lockdown, devastating normal life. Xi’an, a city of 13 million people suddenly went into lockdown in December. An eight-month-pregnant woman lost her baby after being denied medical attention for hours, causing national outrage. This month, a 4-year-old girl in Changchun died while waiting for a negative Covid test before being admitted to a hospital for acute laryngitis.
By denying individual dignity and freedom, communism leaves no basis for moral judgment other than a brutal utilitarianism. On the Chinese internet at the pandemic’s outset one could read comments to the effect that sacrificing 11 million for the sake of 1.4 billion was a good bargain. A Wuhan resident, in an anonymous March 2020 essay for NPR, saw through this rationale: “When someone says we can accomplish something but we must pay a price, do not rush to applaud. One day you may become the price that is paid.”
When Western nations were confronted with Covid-19, they seemed to believe the Communist Party’s unproven claims about the efficacy of lockdowns. In the end, every other country got some variant of the virus and some variant of China’s official response.
“More Americans 65 and Under Died from Alcohol-Related Causes Than Covid-19 in 2020, Study Finds“…
… in response to which Karol Markowicz tweets:
Our leaders behaved as if the lockdowns were so super easy to do (remember: “stay the fuck home!”) and would have no consequences. They did.
Health care has featured some significant rule waivers. Telehealth has received an enormous boost. Like remote work, the required technology has existed for some time. Legal restrictions were holding telehealth back. The pandemic forced experimentation for patients fearful of catching COVID at a doctor’s office.
Telehealth, though, offers enormous benefit going forward, particularly for residents of underserved rural areas. Safety is also a factor: individuals with health conditions can avoid potentially dangerous drives to doctors’ offices. Patients with rare illnesses or difficult cases can consult more specialists.
State licensure creates barriers for virtual consultation across state lines. State medical boards claim to uphold quality in licensing, but this is only true if other states license unqualified quacks. I read about a Pennsylvania patient again facing a two-hour drive to Johns Hopkins in Maryland with the end of the pandemic exemption. Does the Pennsylvania medical board truly think that doctors at Johns Hopkins – one of the nation’s leading medical schools – are not qualified to treat Pennsylvanians?
Pandemic deregulation waived limits on medical professionals known as scope of practice regulation. For example, physician assistants were allowed to practice to the extent of their training. Scope of practice limits are driven by profits, not safe medicine and simply keep professionals from fully employing their expertise. Researchers will determine if these exemptions increased misdiagnoses; if not, this would demonstrate the limits’ lack of medical purpose.
David Henderson and Charley Hooper make a strong case that “in pandemics, old drugs may save us.” Here’s their opening:
Imagine that a new pandemic hits and, sadly, you test positive. Luckily, we’re better prepared this time and a widely used, safe, convenient pill priced at only $1 is available and can reduce your risk of death by 56%. Would you take it?
Actually, such a drug was available during this pandemic. It has been on the market for decades.
This drug and others like it were available at the start of COVID-19. Yet few of us knew about them or had them easily available as therapeutic choices. Why? These life-saving drugs were purposely and systematically ignored and, when not ignored, denigrated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, making them generally unavailable. If they had been widely available, and encouraged, hundreds of thousands of Americans might not have died unnecessarily.
While newer drugs are often better than older drugs, older drugs have something that newer drugs don’t: they are cheap and widely available today. When a pandemic starts, they are all we have.
Since the pandemic started, some older drugs, vitamins, and minerals have been widely tested for therapeutic activity against COVID-19. Table 1 shows some of the key results. Mortality rates are shown because death is the most serious outcome, and yet these pills also prevent infections, help keep patients off mechanical ventilators, keep them out of the ICU and the hospital altogether, foster faster recoveries, and improve viral clearance. Their utility against this deadly virus has been tested in hundreds of clinical trials involving hundreds of thousands of patients. Moreover, their other attributes are clearly known after decades of use and many millions of doses.
getting hooked on dope is not really different than getting hooked on betting the ponies. anything that you can use to hide from, avoid, or escape something painful in your life can become an addiction. this is why people who carry damage, who were raised in badly dysfunctional families, who were abused as kids, who have been through war, or who have undergone some other massive stressor see their rates of addiction explode: they are the ones with things to avoid and escape.
and this is what made a 2 year fear campaign about a virus in combination with compulsory masking and lockdown a truly nasty form of societal predation.
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this is going to be with us for a long time.
that’s the nature of addiction. when you remove that which has been being used to mitigate pain and the pain returns, addicts will bend reality and anyone around them to get back to the place where it doesn’t hurt.
Jeffrey Tucker talks with Leigh Vossen and Brandon Paradoski, who are with Students Against Mandates.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Two whole years have now passed since the first Covid lockdown. None of us will ever forget how awful it was. The park benches taped off. The children’s swings removed. The innocent dog walkers tracked by police drones. The local councils trying to stop shops from selling Easter eggs, because they weren’t deemed to be “essential items”. And, most absurdly of all, the father in Rotherham reprimanded by a police officer for playing with his own children in his own front garden.
It was absolutely suffocating, and often farcical. Believe it or not, though, it could actually have been even worse. Because, crazy though some of our rules were, at least we didn’t adopt the craziest rule of all.
Newly published documents reveal that, in spring 2020, the Scottish government was invited to consider adopting a bizarre lockdown policy from Panama. A paper presented to Scotland’s Covid advisory group listed a wide range of measures that were being tried out in other countries across the globe. And one of them was called “population scheduling”.
This, the paper explained, would mean that on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, only men would be allowed to leave the house. And on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, it would only be women.
The aim, apparently, was to reduce the risk of overcrowding in supermarkets and chemists. In the event, the proposal was rejected. Which is a relief. Because just imagine what it would have been like.
(DBx: The fact that such a proposal was even aired in Scotland testifies to the dangers that Covid Derangement Syndrome poses to liberal civilization.)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 7 of Deirdre McCloskey’s 2021 book, Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science (link added):
Economic logic itself contradicts social engineering in its varied forms. If the social engineers were so smart, as I noted long ago in studying the rhetoric of storytelling in economics, why aren’t they rich? Industrial policy, anyone? It’s a fair question to ask of any expert proposing to run your life with helpful suggestions or with coerced policies based on an alleged ability to predict the future. Supernormal profit … is a strict implication of a supposed ability to predict and control. Yet we can’t predict and control, not profitably, in a creative economy. Name the economist who predicted the internet or containerization or the Green Revolution or the automobile or the modern university or the steam engine.
DBx: This point, as simple as it is profound, continues to be ignored by proponents, left and right, of industrial policy. The reason it is ignored likely is that it is unanswerable. Once this point is grasped and granted, the case for industrial policy is revealed to be as intellectually substantive as dryer lint.
March 23, 2022
A False God
Here’s a letter to UnHerd:
Editor:
Mary Harrington reports that Canadians who support strong Covid restrictions are more willing than are Canadians who are skeptical of such restrictions to risk a shooting war with Russia (“The Covid-cautious are hungriest for war,” March 23). She attributes this pattern of attitudes to tribalism: Persons who embrace the official narrative of Covid restrictions and mandates are especially prone to align without much thought with those who accept the official narrative of Russia vs. Ukraine.
I propose a different explanation for these attitudes. People increasingly believe that the state can work miracles – miracles such as using coercion to control the spread of a highly contagious virus without inflicting serious damage on society. For many who treated the state as an all-powerful savior from Covid, it’s a short step to support policies that increase the likelihood of a shooting war with Russia. After all, if our leaders possess enough intelligence, wisdom, prescience, and trustworthiness to deploy coercion to defeat, at acceptable cost, an enemy called Covid, they surely possess enough intelligence, wisdom, prescience, and trustworthiness to deploy coercion to defeat, at acceptable cost, an enemy called Putin.
Regardless of the correctness or incorrectness of one’s understanding of the dangers of Covid and of Putin, the problem is that too many people, in effect, worship the state as a god. For these people, there’s almost no blessing that this god cannot and will not grant – no prayer that this deity cannot and will not answer – as long as We the People faithfully kowtow to its high priests with fawning deference and reverence.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 8 of Deirdre McCloskey’s 2021 book, Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science:
We humans live in economies the way we live in cities and in language and in art and in cookery and in the natural environment. Attempts at overmastering by central planning usually do not work. We should restrain therefore the impulse for a masterful prediction and control, and impulse theorized in August Comte’s constructivist rubric two centuries ago savior pour pouvoir. As it was put by the philosopher Yogi Berra (and, it turns out, the physicist Niels Bohr), in the face of human creativity, or of quantum mechanics, prediction is difficult, especially about the future. So, therefore, is control.
DBx: Truly so. And so a fundamental problem with advocates of full-on socialism, as well as with advocates of the socialism-lite that’s called “industrial policy,” is that they do not know what they do not know. They erroneously believe that they know more than they can possibly know. They mistake the images in their minds, and the words on their laptops and in their PowerPoint presentations, for reality. They falsely conclude that their ability to easily describe some imagined future implies an ability actually to create that imagined future.
And not only do these people not know about the present and the future what they think they know, they don’t know enough even of what is knowable about the past – about economic history and the many failures of socialism and of “industrial policy.”
These people do not know that they write, talk, and propose policies as if they are gods. But sensible individuals know that these people are not gods. Sensible individuals know also to beware of the ignorance-fueled hubris of people whose policy proposals would make sense only if and when such proposals are issued by genuine gods.
Some Covid Links
Two years ago today Britain locked down. Will Jones reflects.
Also reflecting on Britain’s lockdown is David McGrogan. A slice:
“Après nous, le déluge” should have been the motto of the past two years. As long as one was “safe” and able to enjoy one’s splendid isolation with one’s gin, one’s tonic, one’s Netflix, one’s Amazon Prime account and one’s lockdown puppy, what consequence was it that government debt was skyrocketing to 103.7% of GDP? What consequence was it that quantitative easing would inevitably lead to eye-watering levels of inflation? What consequence was it that a generation of children were not just being denied schooling, but were being inducted into a world of addiction and vice by being babysat by screens for days at a time? What consequence was it that our young people, and their children, and their children’s children, would likely have to deal with the fallout from all of this for their entire lives?
The blitheness with which these issues have been treated over the past two years puts one in mind of Edmund Burke’s famous warning, that the “possessors” of a “commonwealth”, “unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity”, might “commit waste on the inheritance” of the young. Apart from being bad in itself (passing on society’s wealth to the young is one of the most important duties of adults), this would have the even worse effect of teaching the younger generations the same bad habits, to the ultimate ruination of the “commonwealth” itself. Burke’s warning has been ignored for decades, but the experience of lockdown confirmed its horrible predictive power – it is bad enough that we spend £60 billion a year (that could be spent, for example, on education) merely on servicing debt, and that inflation will soon approach 10% (meaning that savers will lose a tenth of the value of their children’s inheritance in a single year). But what is truly terrifying is that most of the adult population of the country do not seem to care, and certainly have no interest in teaching to children the message that the nation’s wealth is a valuable inheritance that they are to steward, and pass on to their own children in turn. And that’s just the economic side of life: what can one say about a society which sees nothing wrong in forcing children to stay at home for months, without meeting or playing with other children, and inflicting great mental harm as a result – merely to make adults feel safe? It is a society shorn of loyalty to anything larger or longer-lasting than the immediate physical existence of its members; a society comprised of individuals in the truest sense, thinking only of their own health and in signalling their own virtue in purportedly “protecting others”.
The straw man continues to romp through China.
The Biden Administration has announced a new pandemic roadmap and with it, a new response coordinator. Although the new plan claims to “Prevent Economic and Educational Shutdowns” by providing schools and businesses the supplies and guidance they need to remain open, its incoming response coordinator has been a proponent of lockdowns, school closures, masking kids, vaccine passports, businesses mandating vaccines on their employees and not communicating the science on natural immunity (calling for previously infected to get vaccinated). Due to his visibility in the press during the COVID response, Dr. Jha has appeared to be a Fauci in waiting.
The Great Barrington Declaration has been both a bellwether and teaching point during, and now after, the flawed government pandemic response is subsiding.
The Declaration’s three highly credentialed signatories promoted a policy called “focused protection” of high-risk populations. Its authors strongly cautioned to avoid lockdowns. They predicted it would lead to known, heavy burdens on the working class and younger members of society, bringing irreparable damage and disproportionate harm to society’s underprivileged.
Tragically, time has shown these authors were right.
Yet, Dr. Jha didn’t seem to understand the public health debate he was a part of. Which was fine as many health professionals fell for the fear play and became cheerleaders of lockdowns – only later to apologize for their errors.
Dr. Jha told lawmakers discussing the COVID response to ‘Stop talking about things they don’t know much about’ yet perhaps it was he who should have heeded such advice.
On October 15, 2020, less than two weeks after The Declaration was released publicly, Dr. Jha bashed the document calling it ‘junk science.’
Your Ontario Doctors tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
“2yrs ago we uncritically accepted unreliable mathematical models that predicted this microbiological apocalypse.. Now enormous sunk costs of reputation/politics make it hard for ppl to admit they were wrong”
—Dr Schabas
Former ON CMOH [Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health]
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