Russell Roberts's Blog, page 167
March 6, 2022
Some Covid Links
Scientists abandoned their objectivity, “misled” with alarming models and failed to appreciate the damage lockdown would cause, a government adviser has claimed in a damning indictment of Britain’s pandemic response.
Prof Mark Woolhouse, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M), said that the Government’s advisory system was dominated by clinicians and public health specialists who “weren’t looking at the bigger picture”.
In his memoir, The Year The World Went Mad, Prof Woolhouse claimed that lockdowns “had surprisingly little effect” and just “deferred the problem to another day, at great cost”.
He argued that Spi-M was set up to tackle the wrong disease, influenza, and that early models were based on flu dynamics, and so mistakenly thought schools were a major driver while underrepresenting the impact of shielding.
Prof Woolhouse says he was “extremely sceptical” about the Imperial College report from March 16 2020 that claimed more than 500,000 people could die without intervention, but The Telegraph revealed last week that, at the time, modellers were still “uncertain” of case numbers “due to data limitations”.
The figures, published a week before lockdown was announced, led to an about-turn from the Government.
…..
Prof Woolhouse also said it was an “awkward” truth that the people who benefited most from suppression of the virus, such as the elderly and vulnerable, were not the group that suffered most from the impact of lockdown: young people and low-income workers.
Thank goodness for this: “Justin Trudeau’s approval ratings slump over Covid trucker protests crackdown.”
Laura Dodsworth decries the “moral cruelty of the pandemic response.” Four slices:
When we angrily refused the idea of herd immunity, we offered ourselves up on the altar of behavioural science to herd psychology. Unable to face one fact of nature, we made ourselves blind to the exploitation of our own nature.
The [British] government was nervous that the population would not follow the draconian lockdown rules and posed a question to the SPI-B advisors: “What are the options for increasing adherence to the social distancing measures?” And this is when SPI-B famously recommended that
“the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.”
…..
When the pandemic is done, some will brush off the harms inflicted during the response to Covid with an embarrassed laugh. They might pretend that they were never part of it. New high ground will be sought in hindsight. The danger that follows is in conveniently relapsing into a woolly-headed collective amnesia. But evil deeds do not belong in the past, they are our present and our future, and this is why it is essential to consider why it is in our nature to perpetuate cycles of foolishness and cruelty.
…..
Fortunately during Covid we have not endured the depth and scale of the horrors inflicted by Stalin, Mao Zedong or Hitler. Countries battled through a virus as best they could, but there were penalties, cruelties and mistakes. Remarkably, we traded liberty for a sense of security (the transactional value was never guaranteed) and criminalised activities which should be far beyond the interest of the law or government. Children were deprived of education. Women birthed alone. People died alone. Jobs and businesses were lost. Much of this was not necessary, and was not included in previous pandemic plans for good reason. Bodily autonomy and freedom of medical choice were nearly forsaken. In the developing world the consequences were devastating and even more out of scale with the threat.
…..
The question of human relationships and the cohesion of society is an urgent one. Not everyone will agree we have experienced mass hysteria on an almost global scale, but most will accept we are acutely divided on political and social fault lines. Human isolation renders us vulnerable to mass hysteria but also to the mass State which feeds upon atomised social units. To counter the danger we need to give thought to the human relationship from a psychological perspective. Not the cold, calculated view of the behavioural psychologist that predicts, anticipates and shapes behaviour, but the bonds of affection and genuine meaning that arise in a free society. Where love stops, power, violence and terror begin.
Do you still doubt that Covid hysteria has unleashed both tyranny and a dystopian battering of science? If so, read this:
Six U.S. doctors have had their licenses suspended and 18 more threatened as they are accused of spreading misinformation about COVID-19. The action comes amidst concern that their claims are generating mistrust in officially sanctioned health measures used to combat the pandemic.
By the end of 2021, TrialSite reported that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advised the Federation of State Medical Boards to monitor doctors behavior more closely regarding their prescriptions of early off-label treatments for COVID.
Before the December FDA to Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) communication, by August 2021, the FSMB issued a statement indicating that they would suspend or revoke the licenses of physicians who spread misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.
Theo Jordan tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
A tolerance for “noble lies” from the same people censoring “misinformation” is a truly dangerous cocktail.
there is nothing sadder than seeing a free dog begging for the leash.
breaks your heart.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 139 of the 2011 Thomas Sowell Reader:
Nothing so epitomizes contemporary liberalism as unfunded mandates, in which the federal government establishes programs and forces the states to pay for them. The very need to weigh benefits against costs – the essence of economics – is evaded by this irresponsible exercise of arrogance. It is like impulse buying and charging it to somebody else’s credit card.
DBx: Truly so.
(Of course, by “contemporary liberalism” Sowell means, not true liberalism, but Progressivism.)
March 5, 2022
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 242 of the late, great UCLA economists Armen A. Alchian’s and William R. Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.); this volume is an updated version of Alchian’s and Allen’s magnificent and pioneering earlier textbook, University Economics:
Achieving profits is a condition of survival. Consumers leave no alternative for producers. If the products don’t satisfy consumers, producers won’t cover costs and won’t survive. The drive for profits is compelled by consumer preferences for better or more economically produced goods. Over time, competition displaces less satisfactorily performing producers – those who don’t earn profits.
Some Non-Covid Links
But who put the platforms together? Big Tech firms did. Did they take a risk? Absolutely; no one guaranteed that they would succeed. Consider Facebook. It entered the industry when Myspace already had a market position and a market advantage. Now, a serious question that is asked online is “Is Myspace still active?” It is, but it’s a shadow of its former self. Facebook knocked it out of serious competition by innovating.
It seems reasonable that when a company innovates, it should get to keep the rewards of innovating. In a 2004 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Nobel Prize–winning economist William Nordhaus of Yale University found that only 2.2 percent of the total value of innovation goes to the innovator; the rest goes to consumers. It’s hard enough for innovators to capture much of the value of what they create. So we should let them keep what they can.
Does allowing platforms to give preference to their own products hurt potential competitors? Sure, it does. But these platforms don’t usually prevent consumers from buying from the platforms’ competitors. Consumers can typically buy competitors’ products; they simply must search a little harder.
My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy ponders cryptocurrencies and Russia.
Juliette Sellgren talks with GMU Econ alum Abby Hall Blanco about military drones.
So, what is [Holden] Thorp’s argument?
He writes, “Failure to enroll a diverse undergraduate population has already excluded outstanding people from science and limiting affirmative action will only make matters worse.”
Thorp must know that virtually all of the top colleges and universities in America have been going to great lengths to “enroll a diverse undergraduate population” for the last forty years. No one is being excluded from going to college and studying science or anything else. What I believe he means to say is that in the absence of racial preferences, there would be substantially fewer students “of color” admitted to universities such as Harvard and UNC. That is undoubtedly true. If it weren’t for such preferences, those institutions would admit fewer black and Hispanic students, and more students of Asian background.
Wouldn’t that exclude the students Thorp is concerned about? No, because students who don’t get into their top, most prestigious college picks just enroll somewhere else.
Think for a moment about those Asian students who are rejected at Harvard, et al, in order to make room for “diverse” students. They’re excluded from Harvard, but not from going to college. They simply enroll in one of the other schools to which they applied. If the Supreme Court were to rule against the legality of racial preferences, that wouldn’t exclude anyone from Harvard, but would mean that students who didn’t have high enough academic qualifications would have to go to a school where their qualifications were on a par with most of the other students. A black student who wanted to study engineering at Harvard might, for example, go to Purdue instead.
I’m eager to read William B. Allen’s forthcoming book, The State of Black America.
We reported last month that a federal judge slapped down the Biden Administration’s inflated “social cost” estimate for greenhouse gas emissions. The Administration’s estimate captured all of the potential harm from carbon emissions globally over three centuries—yes, centuries. They threw in everything from property damage to health harms and war.
Biden officials were furious at the judge’s decision because they planned to use this grossly inflated social cost estimate to support restrictions on fossil fuels—from stricter fuel-economy rules to methane emissions curbs for oil and gas production. Now they can’t, so dozens of rule-makings are stalled.
But here’s the kicker: The White House budget office says the injunction has caused it to halt permitting work on at least 18 wells on federal oil and gas leases in New Mexico and new lease sales. The White House is blaming the judge for what it was already doing or, rather, not doing.
J.D. Tuccille is understandably unimpressed by Biden’s agenda. A slice:
“My plan to fight inflation will lower your costs and lower the deficit,” the president asserted. Then he proposed to let the federal government set drug prices, subsidize home-weatherization along with solar and wind power, and underwrite part of the cost of purchasing electric cars as well as build 500,000 charging stations for those vehicles. Biden also wants the government to pay for childcare, subsidize long-term care, and pick up the cost of pre-kindergarten. All of this will come, he promises, without raising taxes on anybody making less than $400,000 per year. That’ll be quite a trick with national debt soaring above $30 trillion without such an ambitious agenda.
Biden also wants more government oversight of nursing homes, a higher minimum wage, and increased government subsidies for college education, among other federal schemes too numerous to mention, most drawn from the stalled Build Back Better monstrosity of a spending bill. None of this sounds like a plan for reducing costs, though it hides some by shifting them to taxpayers. The same can be said of Biden’s vow: “When we use taxpayers’ dollars to rebuild America, we are going to do it by buying American: buy American products, support American jobs.” That’s guaranteed to increase expenses by eliminating consideration of overseas sources and the competition they offer.
Global warming, Matt Ridley has recently explained, also improves forest, grassland, and tree leaf growth and raises agricultural yields.The facts regarding natural disasters also are positive. A 2021 EPA report admits that as the earth has warmed since the late 19th century, the number of hurricanes per year has not increased. An August 5, 2021 article by Bjørn Lomborg similarly details that the area burned by fires annually has decreased and most rivers flood less.
The most important fact regarding natural disasters, however, is that while the planet’s average temperature has risen by 1.12 degrees and its population has quadrupled from less than two billion to almost eight billion since 1920, the number of people killed each year by natural disasters has declined by about 90 percent.
Some Covid Links
David Harsanyi rightly applauds Ron DeSantis for “closing the curtain on COVID theater.” Two slices:
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently told a group of college students participating in an event at the University of South Florida, “You do not have to wear those masks. Please take them off. Honestly, it’s not doing anything. We’ve gotta stop with this COVID theater. So, if you wanna wear it, fine, but this is ridiculous.”
Another ginned-up cycle of media hyperventilation ensued, as it does. And many of the same pundits who supported state mandates compelling prepubescent kids to strap useless masks over their faces were suddenly aghast at the sight of such egregious harassment.
“If Florida is so ‘free,’” asked Joy Reid, “why does DeSantis think he has the right to bully and give orders to other peoples’ kids?”
“Incredible predictable how conservative ideology goes from ‘hey it should be my choice; dont tell me what to do!’ to ‘we are abolutely gonna tell you what to do once we have the power to do it,’” tweeted Chris Hayes to his 2.4 million followers.
Setting aside the fact that neither Hayes nor Reid seem to understand what the words “if you wanna wear it, fine” mean, there is an extraordinary concession in all these hysterics.
Progressives believe that it’s bullying to ask kids not to wear masks, but it’s not bullying for the state to coerce them to do it. Either they can’t comprehend the distinction between compelling someone and offering them an option — which would explain a lot about their political philosophy — or they dishonestly conflate the two.
…..
Then, of course, there’s the small issue of DeSantis being objectively and morally correct about mask wearing. In January, when Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued an executive order that freed parents to choose whether their kids wore masks, the entire left-wing punditsphere accused him of infanticide.
The White House’s favorite columnist, Jennifer Rubin, remarked that Youngkin had “brought DeSantis anti-mask nuttery to VA.” Within a couple of months, the CDC changed its super-scientific mask guidelines just in time for Biden to announce them in the State of the Union speech.
By this time, nearly every state had followed Youngkin’s lead. No explanation yet from Rubin, or any other Democrat, on why Biden has engaged in this nuttery as well.
We still don’t know the full extent of the damage COVID theater has had on children. The state restrictions, interventions and mandates implemented in the second half of 2020 — when we already knew better — were never grounded in rigorous science.
It was more like a rite of leftist COVID theology. DeSantis merely told some kids to stop living in fear. That’s a healthy, patriotic and scientifically sound thing to do.
Pandering to rank ignorance, Mayor Eric Adams is leaving the school-mask mandate in place for children under 5 — who face utterly trivial risk from COVID, and significant risk of learning failure from masking.
In the entire rest of the world, next to no one ever made toddlers mask at all — and the kids were fine.
In the 46 states in the American Academy of Pediatrics database, from zero to 0.01% (that’s one in 10,000) of allchild COVID cases resulted in death, and those few overwhelmingly involved serious complicating factors.
The total US death toll for all under-18s in nearly two full years of the pandemic is below 800.
Yes, the CDC still advises school masking for the un-jabbed, and kids 5 and under can’t get vaxxed. But the CDC is plainly being anti-science here: The World Health Organization was never this hyper-cautious, nor (again) was the rest of the world.
And facial signals are crucial to small children’s development.
Chris Batemen rejects some economists’ “externalities”-based argument in support of vaccine mandates.
GMU Econ grad student Jon Murphy finds reasons for true liberals to take hope.
The lockdown policies like school closures were a choice made by powerful people, not an obvious, logical consequence of the virus itself.
In the coming months, we the people can choose whether we want to continue to let those powerful people continue to make choices for us.
Prof Carl Heneghan, the director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, said: “The standing down of Sage signifies the end of the pandemic in the UK.
“This is a remarkable turnabout of events given that just before Christmas, Sage advisers were warning infections could hit two million per day and were pushing for further restrictions.
“The Government will need to review whether Sage is fit for purpose when it comes to pandemics, particularly given its lack of clinical input and its overreliance on modelling – which we now know is no more than ‘guesswork’ – and its tendency to fixate on a particular set of assumptions.”
Steve Waterson busts the myth that Australia’s response to Covid-19 was praiseworthy. A slice:
It’s barely two years since the Covid lunacy first infected us, but already its history is being rewritten. In newspaper columns and on television, opinion-laden pundits are patting the enforcers and the obedient on the back, reassuring themselves with this dazzling myth that we managed our pandemic with admirable wisdom and efficiency.
Lacklustre politicians are understandably keen to embrace and promote this view, starting with the Prime Minister’s mantra that we “saved 30,000 lives”. Did we, though? Figures emerging from the few places that didn’t impose life-changing restrictions on their populations suggest they made next to no difference.
At best we tacked an extra couple of months on to the lives of some very old people in nursing homes, then immediately cancelled whatever benefit that afforded them by turning their last weeks into a lonely, bewildering, miserable slide towards the grave when they were forbidden to see family and friends and were attended by carers dressed like astronauts. They’re mostly dead by now, but I trust they slipped away with a message of gratitude on their lips.
Have we forgotten what we went through? Is there a societal equivalent of the mechanism by which we suppress the memory of acute pain?
Before the narrative is embedded too deeply to remove, thereby permitting the same ludicrous weapons to be deployed when the next crisis occurs, perhaps we should remind ourselves of some of the highlights of our exemplary Covid performance.
Oh yes indeed, we got through the pandemic better than anyone else, as long as you’re prepared to ignore the curfews. The house arrest. No visitors. Toilet paper battles. Five-kilometre limits. An hour a day of exercise. Closed borders, internationally and internally. Closed pubs, restaurants, shops, parks, gyms, beaches, golf courses.
What else? No hospital or home visits to dying parents or children. No funerals or weddings. No holidays, reunions, gap years. No school or university. No jobs. Small businesses destroyed. A mental-health crisis. Surgeries and medical screenings suspended.
Then the impositions: carrying ID papers outside your home. QR codes. Contact tracing. Masks. Vaccine passports and mandates. Quarantine. Isolation. Protests forbidden. Monstrous fines. The thin blue line of pepper spray and truncheons.
Thomas P Seager tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
I never realized how much censorship was required to “defend democracy.”
I guess I’ve been naive all this time.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 7-8 of Chandran Kukathas’s excellent 2021 book, Immigration and Freedom:
Learning to be free means learning to live with others as equals, for without equality, freedom is nothing more than an advantage of power.
March 4, 2022
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “In praise of petroleum”
Fortunately for most of today’s self-described environmentalists, they don’t read Cafe Hayek. If they did, my posting here my column from the March 13th, 2012, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review would likely raise their blood pressure to dangerous levels. You can read my praise of petroleum beneath the fold.
On Human Responsibility
Our overestimation of our abilities is understandable. Every day of our lives we see automobiles whiz by, hear jetliners soar overhead, and enjoy the convenience and cleanliness of indoor plumbing, electrification, and artificial lighting. When we pause to notice, we marvel at antibiotics and other blessings of modern medicine, and rejoice at the abundance available in supermarkets and from online merchants. Literacy rates are very high. Even routine space travel might become a thing within the next decade or two.
What an impressive species we are!
We today are indeed impressive as a species (at least compared to every other species that we know). But what’s impressive isn’t so much our individual intelligence and abilities. What’s impressive is our ability to share knowledge across time and space in ways that leverage the modest and diverse talents of each of us into magnificent outcomes that not even the most intelligent of us could have designed or can now fully comprehend.
From the mundane pencil to the James Webb Space Telescope – from your buying a meal prepared at a local restaurant to your buying an automobile manufactured in Japan – the goods, services, and experiences that distinguish us from our ancestors are products of incredibly complex patterns of human cooperation.
This cooperation ‘works’ in part because it doesn’t require that any one person know more than can be known by the typical human being. Each of us possesses our own unique bits of knowledge that we are prompted to combine with the unique bits of knowledge of other individuals. If the incentives are ‘correct,’ this cooperation builds institutions and material processes that yield the abundance that we moderns take for granted. Someone who knows how to explore for iron ore agrees to cooperate – as an employee, as a business partner, or in some other contractual manner – with someone who knows how to smelt the ore. Someone else then joins the cooperative effort by purchasing the iron and turning it into patio furniture. A retailer then cooperates with both the furniture producer and consumers by increasing the convenience for the producer to sell, and for consumers to purchase, the furniture.
The important details of these opportunities are unknowable to anyone not on the spot.
All along the way there are countless other cooperators – truck drivers, insurance agents, financial intermediaries, accountants, lawyers, and the multitude of individuals whose efforts were required to build the electricity-transmission infrastructure. And on and on and on.
Each individual is led to cooperate productively because each individual receives signals that reliably (although never perfectly) both (1) reveal what are the best uses of that person’s time and resources, and (2) incite that person to seize those particular opportunities. By far the most important of these signals is market prices.
Some Non-Covid Links
Alberto Mingardi remembers the late University of Virginia professor of English Paul Cantor. A slice:
It is customary to lament, at libertarian gatherings, that we are relatively unsuccessful, as a movement, because we do not pay enough attention to pop culture and lack people who could master it. Well, such criticisms may be correct but scholars or political activists cannot turn themselves into novelists or movie makers only because they wish so, as these professions require very different talents. But scholars can take pop culture seriously and seriously analyse it. Paul Cantor did that, and I hope many will follow his example.
Bryan Caplan writes about the “Unforgivable Heuristic.” (DBx: Here’s a challenge to readers more creative than me – which is to say, to nearly all readers: Write lyrics, inspired by Bryan’s post, for a song called “Unforgivable” and sung to the tune of “Unforgettable.”)
It’s National Grammar Day! (DBx: I’m a bit more forgiving than is Mark Perry for mistaking “it’s” for “its.” The reason is that apostrophe s typically is used to signify possession – as in “Carpe Diem is Mark’s blog.” And so when someone incorrectly writes, for example, “Look at it’s tail,” that person deserves a bit of leniency. That said, I agree that a professional writer or scholar should know the difference between “its” and “it’s” and use “it’s” only as the contraction for “it is.”)
Politically, of course, there’s a lot of blame to go around. Politicians of all stripes long ago stopped caring about ballooning spending and growing indebtedness. It was particularly enlightening to see Republicans give up all past pretenses to care the moment former President Donald Trump announced he wouldn’t touch Social Security and Medicare.
Yet even in a turbulent time, we must face the reality that the debt does matter. As the Hoover Institution’s John Cochrane noted recently, big borrowing has to be followed by big consequences like big spending cuts, big tax increases, big inflation, or worse, a big debt crisis. It will also be followed by greater difficulty in responding to emergencies like the one in Ukraine.
Arnold Kling examines the diplomacy of the Twitter-mob.
David Henderson has another candidate for the first casualty of war.
Some Covid Links
Last July, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory that called for a “whole-of-society” effort to combat the “urgent threat to public health” posed by “health misinformation.” Today Murthy asked tech companies to do their part by turning over data on “COVID-19 misinformation,” including its sources and its propagation through search engines, social media platforms, instant messaging services, and e-commerce sites, by May 2.
While Murthy himself has no power to compel disclosure of that information, the companies have strong incentives to cooperate, since the Biden administration can make life difficult for them by filing lawsuits, writing regulations, and supporting new legislation. President Joe Biden has endorsed the campaign to suppress “misinformation,” going so far as to accuse social media platforms of “killing people” by allowing the spread of anti-vaccine messages. Murthy’s advisory, which defines misinformation to include statements that he deems “misleading” even when they are arguably or verifiably true, says the battle against it might include “appropriate legal and regulatory measures.”
All of this is more than a little creepy in a country where people have a constitutional right to express their opinions, even when they are outlandish and ill-founded. It is especially chilling given the administration’s highly elastic definition of misinformation, which includes criticism of controversial pronouncements by agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC itself has a long track record of misrepresenting scientific evidence and misleading the public.
…..
While lockdowns are thankfully behind us, the debate about them presumably also would have triggered Murthy’s concerns. Stay-at-home orders and mass business closures were, after all, aimed at enforcing “social distancing,” and Murthy says questioning the importance of that precaution is a kind of misinformation. If you expressed skepticism about the empirical basis for such edicts, which were often arbitrary and medically dubious, you could easily have been found guilty of contradicting the “scientific consensus” based on the “best available evidence” at the time.
The notion that dissent from the official line on public health issues should be treated as an “urgent threat” to be addressed by a “whole-of-society” crusade, possibly including “legal and regulatory measures,” is fundamentally illiberal and inconsistent with freedom of speech. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki describes the administration’s demands for suppression of “misinformation” as “asks.” But that characterization is risible given the power that the executive branch wields over the companies whose “cooperation” it is seeking. Censorship by proxy is still censorship.
man, they really do not quit, do they?
if you do not find this deeply chilling, you are made of sterner stuff than i.
since when is this anything resembling the power or purview of the surgeon general? this is truly a jaw-dropping overreach.
As a parent of a first-year college student and co-founder of a national movement to end college Covid-19 vaccine mandates, I have had to manage this landscape, and it has prompted me to investigate how colleges differ in their mitigation efforts and which take a more sane approach.
At a large majority of colleges, students were promised a “return to normalcy” if they complied with Covid-19 protocols. They were forced to wear masks to protect the elderly and vulnerable in their community but that didn’t work because the virus was transmitted in spite of masks.
They were forced to take vaccines and boosters to protect themselves and others from infection but that didn’t work either because a large number of college students caught the virus after being fully vaccinated. At most universities, administrative puppeteers continue to manipulate their every move targeting them through fear tactics and unscientific narratives instead of well-reasoned analysis which I remind you is fully expected of college students each day in their classrooms.
(DBx: Alas, Ms. Sinatra’s last-quoted sentence isn’t quite correct. In far too many college classrooms today what is fully expected of students is emphatically not well-reasoned analysis but, instead, well-rehearsed emoting – emoting about social ills, many of which are largely, or even purely, imaginary.)
The previous regulations set arbitrary and overly cautious thresholds. “Substantial” and “high” transmission—50 to 100 cases per 100,000, or a positivity rate between 8 percent and 10 percent; and 100 or more cases per 100,000 people, or a positivity rate of 10 percent or higher— classified nearly the entire country as high or substantial risk and thus subject to mask mandates. Focusing on transmission also communicated very little about the risk Covid-19 posed to individuals and communities. The likelihood that infection would progress to more severe disease such as hospitalization or death was a function largely of the percentage of vulnerable elderly people and people with underlying medical conditions in an area.
Brendan O’Neill talks with Matt Ridley about the likely origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Thorsteinn Siglaugsson reports on the Faroe Islands.
Ian Miller tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Russell Roberts's Blog
- Russell Roberts's profile
- 39 followers
