Russell Roberts's Blog, page 169
March 2, 2022
Some Covid Links
When members of Congress, the Cabinet, and the Supreme Court entered the U.S. House Chamber for President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night, they were almost entirely unmasked. Cursory attempts at social distancing were quickly abandoned—and after Biden finished his speech, the country’s highest elected officials shook hands and hugged and breathed in each other’s faces like it was 2019.
In the remarks themselves, Biden heralded an end to the era of COVID-19.
“Thanks to the progress we have made this past year, COVID-19 need no longer control our lives,” said Biden.
It’s fascinating that the president would even make this concession; as recently as one month ago, many Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media assailed Republican-controlled municipalities for easing up on pandemic restrictions. But then some focus group polling convinced Democratic strategists that the American people were losing patience, and the party abruptly changed course. (The fact that the vaccines held up well against the omicron surge, at least in terms of severe cases, also helped.)
But it’s worth repeating that even now—with the Biden administration heralding a nearly universal return to normal, and Democratic officials celebrating with few masks in sight—there remains a key U.S. demographic languishing under strict mask mandates: school children in some cities controlled by Democrats.
Indeed, in Washington D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser announced on Tuesday that students would no longer be required to wear masks while outside. This means, of course, that masks are still required inside the schools.
There are things we can do, we are told, to keep ourselves and our families safe. But first, we are warned, “A nuclear explosion may occur with or without a few minutes warning.” After this pearl of wisdom we are advised to get inside, and stay inside.
And once we are inside?
Stay inside for 24 hours unless local authorities provide other instructions. Continue to practice social distancing by wearing a mask and by keeping a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who not (sic) part of your household.
So yes. If you happen to be among the lucky few not vaporized in a nuclear strike launched by unknown perpetrators, you should immediately reestablish your fear of Covid-19….
Aware that a frightened population is a compliant one, a strategic decision was made to inflate the fear levels of all the UK people. The minutes of the SPI-B meeting dated the 22nd of March 2020 stated, ‘The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent’ by ‘using hard-hitting emotional messaging.’ Subsequently, in tandem with the UK’s subservient mainstream media, the collective efforts of the BIT and the SPI-B have inflicted a prolonged and concerted scare campaign upon the UK public. The methods used have included:
– Daily statistics displayed without context: the macabre mono focus on showing the number of Covid-19 deaths without mention of mortality from other causes or the fact that, under normal circumstances, around 1,600 people die each day in the UK.
– Recurrent footage of dying patients: images of the acutely unwell in Intensive Care Units.
– Scary slogans: for example, ‘IF YOU GO OUT YOU CAN SPREAD IT, PEOPLE WILL DIE,’ typically accompanied by frightening images of emergency personnel in masks and visors.
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Compared to a government’s typical tools of persuasion, the covert psychological strategies outlined above differ in both their nature and subconscious mode of action. Consequently, there are three main areas of ethical concern associated with their use: problems with the methods per se; problems with the lack of consent; and problems with the goals to which they are applied.
First, it is highly questionable whether a civilised society should knowingly increase the emotional discomfort of its citizens as a means of gaining their compliance. Government scientists deploying fear, shame, and scapegoating to change minds is an ethically dubious practice that in some respects resembles the tactics used by totalitarian regimes such as China, where the state inflicts pain on a subset of its population in an attempt to eliminate beliefs and behavior they perceive to be deviant.
Another ethical issue associated with these covert psychological techniques relates to their unintended consequences. Shaming and scapegoating have emboldened some people to harass those unable or unwilling to wear a face covering. More disturbingly, the inflated fear levels will have significantly contributed to the many thousands of excess non-Covid deaths that have occurred in people’s homes, the strategically-increased anxieties discouraging many from seeking help for other illnesses.
Furthermore, a lot of older people, rendered housebound by fear, may have died prematurely from loneliness. Those already suffering with obsessive-compulsive problems about contamination, and patients with severe health anxieties, will have had their anguish exacerbated by the campaign of fear. Even now, after all the vulnerable groups in the UK have been offered vaccination, many of our citizens remain tormented by ‘COVID-19 Anxiety Syndrome’), characterised by a disabling combination of fear and maladaptive coping strategies.
In an interview, he now claims that the office affair with his married lover did not break the law but started “quite quickly” after Covid rules were lifted. Talking to Steve Bartlett on the Diary of a CEO podcast, Hancock, dressed like the Milk Tray man, said he “fell in love” and “it all happened quite quickly. It actually happened… after the rules were lifted, but the guidance was still in place… I resigned because I broke the social distancing guidelines. By then, they weren’t actually rules. They weren’t the law. But that’s not the point. The point is they were the guidelines that I’d been proposing. And that happened because I fell in love with somebody.”
Let us pause for a moment to unpick that knotty thicket of delusion and self-justification. Hancock clearly knew full well that what he was telling the British people they must do after a certain date was just guidance not regulation. As Lord Sumption has observed: “I think the Government knew people did not understand the difference and exploited their confusion.”
Now, Hancock has the brass neck to exploit that confusion to his own advantage. Hey, it was fine to be canoodling in his office because no law said that he couldn’t, even though lesser mortals stayed well away from their best beloved for a year in case they got caught.
Unfortunately, such a realisation would require a degree of self-knowledge to which Hancock is a stranger. He is certainly in love – with himself mostly – and that fierce self-love leads him to think that, if he keeps bouncing up with a leery Space Hopper grin, then the public will forgive and forget.
Putin has Covid Derangement Syndrome. A slice:
According to a report in a Sunday newspaper, fear of Covid has turned Putin into a paranoid near-recluse. “Ultra-strict measures to protect Putin from coronavirus,” we read, “mean that the majority of his meetings take place either across absurdly long tables or by video link.” As if that didn’t seem neurotic enough, “Many of those who meet him face to face have to spend two weeks in self-isolation beforehand.” And, most bemusingly of all, “Moscow officials are obliged to provide faecal samples several times a week to ensure they do not infect Putin.”
James Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson do not, in my opinion, get everything right in this essay, but they get right much that is quite important. (HT Vinay Prasad) Four slices:
From the beginning of the pandemic, technocratic elites have offered us a dubious bill of goods. Aided and abetted by the media and by many academics, politicians proffered—indeed, likely believed—the idea that the pandemic would go away if everyone just did as they were told. “If everyone wore a mask for two weeks …” became a telltale refrain, a claim that was neither true nor possible. Pundits celebrated President Joe Biden’s ill-fated “hundred days of masking,” which promised “just 100 days to mask, not forever.” This habit of exaggeration and blind optimism among elites helps explain gaffes like Biden’s bizarre claim during his campaign that every single pandemic death could have been averted by better leadership.
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Indeed, toddlers and small children have borne the brunt of our illogic, while mask-mandating politicians go maskless and crowds gather around bars. The covering of toddlers’ faces—a policy that has always made the United States an international outlier, and in outright defiance of WHO guidance—stands in stark contrast to the lives of many elites who never stopped partying anyway. Perhaps nothing illustrates the absurdity of lockdown culture more than the performative spectacle of diners donning masks as they enter a restaurant, only to remove them at their table as they sit for several hours shoulder to shoulder with other patrons.
Mask mandates are just one of many pandemic policies; a similar disregard for curiosity and open debate have pervaded other areas, like lockdowns and booster policy. But they offer an object lesson in how overconfident, unnuanced messaging conditioned us to assume that all dissenting opinions are misinformation rather than reflections of good faith disagreement or differing priorities. In doing so, elites drove out scientific research that might have separated valuable interventions from the less valuable, and corroded much needed public trust.
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Beyond potential downsides to children, the no-downsides rhetoric failed to account for the social impact of masks. For many, seeing faces was important, and the normalization of a forever masking regime was, in fact, a real cost. For others, seeing faces was essential, and insisting otherwise was magical thinking. Or, it was the product of the same kind of technocratic mind that conceives of children as “mosquitos” who should “circulate less or will become vectors,” in one telling analogy adopted by a top Biden COVID adviser.
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Many liberal elites can cite examples of misbehavior by anti-mask protesters, but fail to recognize similar hubris on their side. This is not just in extreme examples like the local politician who used her “Masks Save Lives” sign to hit a woman on the head. It was also seen in the pervasive—and untrue—sentiment held by many that if only more people wore masks we would reach zero COVID. This led to moral panic and demonization—perhaps part of the same rising tide of illiberalism that apparently led more than a quarter of Democrats in a recent Rasmussen poll to support temporarily removing parents’ custody of their children if parents refuse to take the vaccine.
In what may be the longest-lasting ramification of our flawed national discussion about masks, the opportunity to do good science was lost. Indeed, Stanford scientist and Tablet contributor John Ioannidis’ much-misrepresented warning that our response to COVID might be a fiasco because of insufficient data may prove one of the few accurate predictions of the pandemic. There was no appetite to do randomized control trials of masking, the gold standard for evidence and which were badly needed to evaluate when and how masks should be used. Unfortunately, proponents of masking proclaimed almost immediately that masks were so obviously useful that it would be unethical to study masking. Even if it were ethical, there was no room in academia for discussions. Who, after all, would study something that was known to be a panacea—and who would want to come to a “pro-Trump” finding? As a consequence, we have learned very little about when, how, or which masking policies are beneficial to help us respond to a future respiratory disease outbreak.
Some say it is unfair to criticize public health for messaging flip-flops—whether about cloth masks, herd immunity, natural immunity, or the vaccines’ effects on transmissibility—because they were just “following the science” as it changed. But in many cases, what evolved was politics, not science. The critics of public health messaging do not begrudge scientific progress—indeed, most of them want more research. Rather, people are upset by unjustified dogmatic certainty in one direction, followed by an immediate swoop to utter confidence in the opposite course of action. The pandemic produced a headfirst leap into a series of unprecedented interventions, from masks to lockdowns to school closures. In the first weeks of the pandemic, speed was necessary, and mistakes were inevitable. What was not necessary or inevitable was the suppression of healthy skepticism and discussion.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, when doctors Vinay Prasad and Jeff Flier presciently warned about the toxic climate within the scientific community, debate, nuance, open-mindedness, and curiosity have been driven underground. Now, the same ham-fisted responses that badly damaged our ability to respond intelligently to the pandemic hamper our return to normal. Elites—even those who now want to convince us to “live with” COVID—now find themselves stuck. They inspire little trust. They’ve locked some into a “forever pandemic,” others into conspiratorial thinking, with the sensible middle in a place of frustration and distrust.
“Vaccine mandate for Navy SEALs to remain blocked, U.S. Court of Appeals rules.” (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 244 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a collection of many of Will’s columns over these years; (the essay – “The ‘1619 Project’ is filled with slovenliness and ideological ax-grinding” – from which the quotation below is drawn originally appeared in the Washington Post on May 7th, 2020):
The phenomenon of slavery was millennia old in 1776, but as Gordon Wood says, “It’s the American Revolution that makes [slavery] a problem for the world.” Sean Wilentz (see his 2018 book “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding”) correctly insists that what “originated in America” was “organized anti-slavery politics,” and it did so because of those Enlightenment precepts in the Declaration’s first two paragraphs.
March 1, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
Sam Gregg reinforces the case against industrial policy. A slice:
One of the most significant economic achievements of the past fifty years has been the radical diminishment of extreme poverty. Between 1990 and 2018 alone, those in extreme poverty (defined as someone living on less than 1.90 international dollars a day) fell from 1.9 billion (36% of the world’s population) to 650 million (about 7%). The pace and scale of this decline is unparalleled in human history. Granted, there are outliers to this trend—most notably, sub-Saharan Africa—but the reduction goes beyond China’s borders. Significant players like Indonesia and India have also realized major successes.
These changes were not achieved through massive wealth transfers from developed nations to the developing world of the type advocated by many development economists after 1945. Nor did it have much to do with foreign aid or industrial policy, likewise promoted by the same experts. It was accomplished through economic growth. And that growth was primarily driven by nations shifting their economies from the late-1960s onwards towards competition and trade openness. They did so by liberalizing imports and foreign investment rules, steadily removing export controls, and broadening the scope for individuals and businesses to pursue their comparative advantage in domestic and foreign markets.
Such policies were the precise opposite of those recommended by Latin American dependency theory economists like Argentine Raúl Prebisch in the 1950s. They insisted that developing nations should reduce their reliance on raw minerals and agricultural exports and make aggressive use of industrial policy to stimulate the emergence of new domestic economic sectors.
Markets, it turned out, were far more effective at reducing poverty than any of these measures. Beginning in the early-1990s, however, many development economists changed their tune. While acknowledging economic freedom’s role in driving the growth that reduces poverty, they maintained that insufficient attention was given to how growth was impacting inequality and unemployment levels. The effects of growth, they held, had been very uneven, with some groups benefiting more than others. Phrases like “inclusive growth” and “broad-based growth” consequently entered the development economics lexicon to describe growth that, to use the World Bank’s definition, is “broad-based across sectors, and inclusive of the large part of the country’s labor force.” Sectoral outcomes were now to be considered as important as overall poverty reduction.
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These transitions reflect what it means to live in an economy orientated towards the generation of growth. If an economy is to continue growing and competing with the rest of the world, then people and material resources must continuously shift to higher value-added sectors, and, within specific sectors, to the more efficient firms.
That, however, doesn’t mean that entire economic sectors disappear or become less productive. While the percentage of Americans who work in agriculture today is far smaller than what it was 100 years ago, U.S. agricultural productivity has never been higher. Technological developments ranging from tractors in the early twentieth century to high-tech vertical farming in more recent years may have reduced agricultural employment as a percentage of America’s workforce, but they also have magnified agriculture’s output many times over. The same technological transformations have changed the profile of agricultural employment. Agronomists and agricultural scientists, for example, are more needed today than unskilled labor.
A similar story may be told about American manufacturing. Although the number of Americans employed in manufacturing has dropped since the 1970s, real manufacturing production grew by 180 percent between 1972 and 2007. By 2019, it had rebounded to pre-Great Recession levels. Today, America continues to rank high among the world’s manufacturing nations and is a major global locus for manufacturing investment.
Thus, while American manufacturing constitutes a smaller slice of the U.S. economy than the services sector, it is more sophisticated and productive than it was 50 years ago. The oft-repeated mantra of economic nationalists that America is de-industrializing is simply false. The service sector may have grown faster and bigger, but that doesn’t imply that the manufacturing sector’s output has shrunk. It simply means that manufacturing’s overall share of the U.S. economy was many times bigger 50 years ago.
In reality, Mr. Putin’s latest war of aggression is motivated by a toxic mix of nostalgia and fantasy that seems likely to prove self-destructive. Mr. Putin has so far behaved like a man blind to the true stakes and probable consequences of this conflict. And the U.S., which is currently recovering from its own bout of military overreach, has the opportunity to revive a spirit of clear-eyed pragmatism that has been absent from major national security decisions in recent decades. If Mr. Putin’s actions are driven by an exaggerated view of his country’s power—and its insecurity—President Biden’s response must continue to be informed by a realistic appraisal of the ways the U.S. can (and can’t) defend its security interests and help the Ukrainian people.
This might seem like common sense, but not everyone sees it that way. Hillary Clinton recently called the war in Ukraine a “flash point in a larger global struggle between democracy and autocracy.” It is tempting to frame conflicts like these as existential struggles between competing political philosophies. Americans will—and should—always root for democracy. But reducing complex, distant conflicts to simplistic binaries obscures the actual grievances and motivations of hostile actors.
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The Biden administration should see this conflict for what it is: a big Russian mistake. Mr. Putin is a revanchist leader, seemingly driven more by resentment than reality, who is reaching beyond his grasp. He can’t stamp out Ukrainians’ persistent desire for independence or inspire allegiance to Moscow on the strength of his military might alone. Hearts and minds aren’t won with bombs and bullets. The best he can hope for is the installation of unpopular pro-Russian political leaders propped up by a costly occupation. All the while, crippling U.S. and European sanctions will jeopardize his support among wealthy elites, and Russian military casualties will jeopardize his popularity with the Russian public. Polling last spring by my organization, the Eurasia Group Foundation, found that ordinary Russians are concerned by U.S. foreign policy, and Mr. Putin exploits these concerns to gain popular support. An unprovoked invasion of a neighboring country where many Russians have familial and cultural ties will only weaken Mr. Putin’s self-styled image as a bulwark against Western aggression.
Kyle Smith reports on the strange left-right alliance making excuses for Putin. A slice:
Meanwhile, J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” guy who is running for Senate in Ohio on a MAGA platform, was outraged by the idea that the Biden administration is backing Ukraine: “We did not serve in the Marine Corps to go and fight Vladimir Putin because he didn’t believe in transgender rights, which is what the US State Department is saying is a major problem with Russia.”
Hang on, Hillbilly, there are a lot of countries that don’t have much in the way of transgender rights, but only Russia is killing little Ukrainian girls in pink unicorn pajamas by bombarding their homes. Vance is following up on Pat Buchanan, who said a few years ago that he thought Putin was “standing up for traditional values against Western cultural elites.”
While I’ve been loving watching brave Ukrainians take to the streets with guns and make fun of Russian tank drivers, I’m against hurting millions of innocent Russians by taking down Russian banks’ ability to use SWIFT and I’m against the U.S. government getting in another war. The foreign policy analyst I’ve paid most attention to for the last few decades, one reason being that he never gets stampeded or bullied into favoring wars that the U.S. can easily stay out of, is Doug Bandow. He has a great article at antiwar.com today laying out why the U.S. government should stay out of this one.
Now, if I could contribute $1,000 to someone in Ukraine to help fight the Russians, I would. Of course, I would want to make sure it gets to the right cause. But my understanding is that long-standing U.S. law has made this illegal. No way do I want the U.S. government to get into another war in Europe.
Here’s Eric Boehm on private-sector responses to Putin’s vile invasion of Ukraine.
Ali Noorani urges Americans to welcome fleeing Ukranians.
I was very happy to join Butch Browning, Henry Butler, Bryan Caplan, Ken Elzinga, Dan Houser, Dan Klein, Clay La Force, Mike Munger, Vernon Smith, Ben Zycher and 362 others in signing this letter in opposition to the fiasco that is Biden’s Build Back Better. (Note that signing this letter does not imply agreement with any other policy position that is, or might be, taken by the letter’s sponsor.)
Some Covid Links
University of Queensland law professor James Allan, writing at Law & Liberty, powerfully criticizes the Covidocracy. Two slices:
The Chief epidemiologist of Sweden, Anders Tegnell, likes to say that his country’s approach to Covid was shaped by the October 2019 World Health Organization’s and Britain’s then pandemic playbooks, which in turn had been based on almost a century of data from the 1918 Spanish Flu onwards. Don’t lockdown. Don’t shut down the economy. Realise people will change their behavior spontaneously. Trust them. Focus protection on the vulnerable rather than pretend “we’re all equally vulnerable.” That sort of thing. But somehow, in the course of about a month or two at the start of 2020, virtually all countries not rhyming with “Eden,” abandoned that century-old playbook, including the WHO itself.
Little more than a month later, and the Science™ had shifted towards a weld-them-into-their-apartments, Sino-inspired approach. Elected politicians developed a hankering to outsource decision-making to a public-health clerisy and to treat the modelling emanating from Imperial College London (and elsewhere) as Holy Writ. None of these people, of course, had the slightest clue how a modern, twenty-first-century free-market economy worked. Nor did any of them bother to model what the effects of incredibly heavy-handed lockdowns would be on welfare and on deaths from non-Covid causes—to say nothing of public debt, mental health, lost years of schooling, suicides, and domestic violence. There was not even a basic across-the-board cost-benefit analysis. Such factors were neither here nor there as far as the preponderance of our Fourth-Estate legacy journalists was concerned. The masking, lockdown, “fear is in the air” freight train was leaving the station, and they were on board! Heck, when it came to “nudging” the general public into accepting what the retired British Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption called “the worst inroads on our civil liberties in two hundred years,” the media class wanted to drive that train, not just be a passenger.
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Meanwhile, a certain degree of cynicism has crept into the general public, many of whom had been terrified out of any ability to undertake sane risk analysis. I go out on a limb here, you understand, but some of this cynicism might be able to be traced back to the unbelievable hypocrisy of the governing elites. Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Britain is found to have attended boozy parties during the height of his government’s overbearing “you-can’t-go-out” lockdowns. Myriad politicians who ordered all and sundry to wear masks were filmed without ones themselves—the list here being lengthy but including Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, New Orleans’s LaToya Cantrell, or California’s Gavin Newsom. And let’s just take it as read that untold numbers of virtue-signalling Hollywood types were part of the “do as I say, not as I do” club. If, as Antonin Scalia was wont to say, hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue, then the accolades have been anything but thin on the ground in Tinsel Town.
And who can forget Imperial College modeller extraordinaire and advocate of uber hard-line lockdowns, Professor Neil Ferguson, the man whose models again and again overstated the eventual Covid realities by orders of magnitude, getting caught breaking British lockdown when his rule-infringing romps with his mistress became public? Or British Cabinet Minister for Health Matt Hancock, a hardline lockdownista, breaking the rules to see his mistress, ultimately forcing him to resign? I doubt these qualified as essential services.
New York’s Kathy Hochul on Feb. 14 extended the state emergency through March 16. Her declaration asserted that “the rate of new COVID-19 hospital admissions has been increasing over the past month to over 300 new admissions a day.” In fact, state data show that daily new hospital admissions fell to around 300 from 2,100 in early January.
She also justified the extension on the grounds that vaccines are less effective at preventing infection from the Omicron variant. In that case, then why require vaccines for healthcare workers? Thousands of healthcare workers in New York quit or were fired for failing to comply, leaving many hospitals short-staffed during the Omicron surge.
Governors have another incentive to extend states of emergency: The Family First Coronavirus Act, enacted in March 2020, increased food-stamp benefits subject to states of emergency at the state and federal levels. This is one reason average food benefits nationwide have doubled during the pandemic. Democratic lawmakers in Connecticut last month extended the state emergency declaration through June, citing the need to preserve access to an additional $30 million each month in federal food-stamp funds.
Mr. Newsom is right that the virus has become endemic, and Americans are learning to live with it permanently. But he’s trying to have it both ways. “This pandemic won’t have a defined end,” he said on Feb. 16. That makes it the opposite of a emergency.
Reason‘s Matt Welch rightly complains that “[g]overnment can’t stop moving the COVID-19 goal posts.” Four slices:
The goal posts on pandemic policy haven’t just been shifted, they’ve been uprooted, hitched to a helicopter, and transported to a different county. Joe Biden as president-elect on December 4, 2020, said, “I don’t think [vaccines] should be mandatory.” His spokeswoman Jen Psaki on July 23, 2021, added, “That’s not the role of the federal government.” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky stated unequivocally on July 31 that “there will be no federal mandate.”
Biden announced a federal vaccine mandate on private employers with 100 or more workers five weeks later.
“I’ve tried everything in my power to get people vaccinated,” the president maintained. “But even after all those efforts, we still had more than a quarter of people in the United States who were eligible for vaccinations but didn’t get the shot…. So, while I didn’t race to do it right away, that’s why I’ve had to move toward requirements.” Look at what you made him do.
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Benchmarks for lifting restrictions have been serially rewritten or quietly dropped, often with little explanation. Major policy promises have been made and broken within the same week. And you can’t just blame the capriciousness on the shifting viral facts on the ground—bureaucrats have been agonizingly slow to recognize advances in knowledge that support policy loosening yet lightning-fast when reacting to any new source of fear. It took the Biden administration and his fellow Democrats in New York no time at all to put the clampdown on the omicron variant, but it took the CDC and most coastal state governments more than a year to internalize that people are not catching COVID-19 outdoors.
By making a zig-zagging series of arbitrary and far-reaching edicts, officials have squandered public trust in allegedly neutral scientific institutions and effectively abandoned persuasion for coercion. Instead of a light at the end of the tunnel—or even endemic coping at the end of pandemic panic—we’re being offered a future of politicians reluctantly handing out a carrot or two before reaching once again for the stick.
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Vaccinations have helped decouple infections from hospitalization and death, especially with the more infectious but less lethal omicron variant. Yet elites kept focusing on case rates instead of serious illness, sowing panic and clampdowns in the process. “Massachusetts is the most vaccinated state in the country and yet here we are in a surge of COVID that is just as bad as where we were last year at this point,” University of Massachusetts Memorial Health Care President Eric Dickson said in an NBC Nightly News scare story in December. At the time of Dickson’s startling claim, the Bay State’s seven-day average of deaths was 17, compared to 51 the year before.
All of which contributes to the suspicion that governmental interventions will just stretch out forever. “It is good policy and practice to establish off-ramps for interventions that aren’t meant to be permanent,” Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo wrote in November 2021. “We should be able to answer what conditions would enable an end.”
But politicians and public health officials, particularly in Democratic-controlled institutions, are increasingly unable to spell out any such conditions. For them there is no end in sight.
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Colorado, a purple state with a libertarian-leaning Democratic governor, has taken a considerably different approach. “There was a time when there was no vaccine, and masks were all we had, and we needed to wear them,” Democratic Gov. Jared Polis told Colorado Public Radio in December. “The truth is we now have highly effective vaccines that work far better than masks. If you wear a mask, it does decrease your risk of getting COVID, and that’s a good thing to do indoors around others. But if you get COVID and you are still unvaccinated, the case is just as bad as if you were not wearing a mask. Everybody had more than enough opportunity to get vaccinated…. At this point, if you haven’t been vaccinated, it’s really your own darn fault.” Was that so hard?
For the rest of the country, the scenes playing out in restrictionist states look alien, dystopian: kids shivering while eating lunch outside in frigid Portland, Oregon; high schoolers in New York City (where the positive COVID rate among regularly tested unvaccinated kids was less than 0.3 percent this fall) still holding debate tournaments on Zoom; glum TV commercials warning parents that “without the vaccine, when your child’s teammates take the field, they’ll miss out. Or when their friends go off to the movies, a concert, or get a bite to eat, your teen will miss out.”
Asked about some of those images in December, White House spokeswoman Psaki replied, “I will tell you, I have a 3-year-old who goes to school, sits outside for snacks and lunch, wears a mask inside, and it’s no big deal to him….These are steps that schools are taking to keep kids safe.”
Yet the evidence that Psaki’s kid is actually safer because of such precautions has proven damnably difficult for the CDC to produce. America’s school masking guidance is a global outlier—the World Health Organization recommends against masking children aged 5 and younger, and only a handful of countries in the European Union were masking elementary school students in fall 2021. In trying to persuade the public that it’s actually rational and prudent, the country’s public health agency has never once cited a masking study that included a meaningful control group. Officials are operating on intuition, and as a result tens of millions of children are degrading their physical comfort, social development, and language acquisition. All to avoid contracting and spreading a virus they are far less susceptible to than are vaccinated adults.
Misrepresenting science to produce a preferred policy outcome is a terrible way to build trust during a pandemic.
Especially in light of this history, the CDC’s explanation of its dramatic reversal on school mask mandates cannot be taken at face value. “We’ve been reviewing the data on COVID illness in children for two years of a pandemic,” CDC epidemiologist Greta Massetti told reporters on Friday. “And we have seen that although children can get infected and can get sick with COVID, they’re more likely to have asymptomatic or mild infections.”
Massetti was understating what the evidence shows. A year ago, based on data collected before vaccines were available to anyone, the CDC itself estimated that the COVID-19 infection fatality rate for people younger than 18 was 0.002 percent. “A (pre-vaccine!) analysis from Germany shows that if a child is infected with COVID—with or without preexisting conditions—there is an 8 in 100,000 chance of going to the intensive care unit,” University of California, San Francisco, epidemiologist Vinay Prasad notes. “According to the same study, the risk of death is 3 in 1 million, with no deaths reported in the over-5 age group. These risks are astonishingly low.”
More to the point, the CDC has known about these “astonishingly low” risks for a long time. If they are a sound reason to question the wisdom of school mask mandates, that was true when the CDC began recommending that policy more than a year ago, and it has been true every day since.
Immediately after noting that children face little risk from COVID-19, Massetti reverted to the misleading gloss favored by Walensky: “We know that when schools implement layered prevention strategies, that they can prevent…transmission of the virus that causes COVID 19.” We don’t actually know that, especially as it relates specifically to mask requirements. But assuming that it’s true, how is this claim relevant to the CDC’s new position that children need to wear masks only in the redefined “high-risk” counties? After losing the thread of her argument, Massetti reiterated that “schools can be safe places for children” because “children are relatively at lower risk from severe illness”—something the CDC has understood all along.
Brian McGlinchey is correct: “Public health erred on the side of catastrophe.” Two slices:
The masses who’ve chanted “I trust science,” as they praise each government intervention and idolize those who impose them, are likely unaware that, before Covid-19, the well-considered scientific consensus was against lockdowns, broad quarantines and masking outside of hospital settings—particular for a virus like Covid-19 that has a 99% survival rate for most age groups.
For example, a 2006 paper published by the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center—focusing on mitigation measures against another contagious respiratory illness, pandemic influenza—reads like a warning label against many of the policies inflicted on humanity in the face of Covid-19:
“There is no basis for recommending quarantine either of groups or individuals. The problems in implementing such measures are formidable, and secondary effects of absenteeism and community disruption as well as possible adverse consequences…are likely to be considerable.”“Widespread closures [of schools, restaurants, churches, recreations centers, etc] would almost certainly have serious adverse social and economic effects.”“The ordinary surgical mask does little to prevent inhalation of small droplets bearing influenza virus … There are few data available to support the efficacy of N95 or surgical masks outside a healthcare setting. N95 masks need to be fit-tested to be efficacious.”The point of that and other pre-2020 research into pandemic mitigation was to be prepared, in times of crisis, with policies that reflected a well-reasoned and dispassionate weighing of costs and benefits.
However, when the pandemic arrived, panicking public health officials and academics threw out the playbook and took their policy inspiration from the government that was first to confront the virus. Sadly for the world, that was communist China.
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Lockdowns and other mandates weren’t the exclusive driver of many of the various harms I’ve described; general fear of the virus also contributed to some of them. However, it should also be noted that public health officials—and media that overwhelmingly emphasized negative stories—whipped up a level of fear that led people to overstate the level of danger actually posed by the virus.
There’s one more way in which characterizing lockdowns and other mandates as “erring on the side of caution” plays a psychological trick: Since the phrase is embedded with the notion of good intentions, it conditions citizens to be forgiving of the bureaucrats and politicians who imposed them.
Note, however, that in most everyday usage of “erring on the side of caution,” the choice to “err” is made voluntarily by individuals who bear the consequences of their own decisions—or by others, like an airplane pilot or a surgeon, to whom we’ve voluntarily and unmistakably granted control of our well-being.
The grim impacts of lockdowns and other mandates, however, were coercively imposed on society, to say nothing of the fact that so many of the edicts represented gross usurpations of power and violations of human rights.
On top of all that, the edicts were reinforced by Orwellian censorship and ostracism leveled at those who dared raise questions that have now proven valid.
Overreaching public health officials and politicians—and the journalists-in-name-only who served as their mindless, unquestioning megaphones—have fully earned our withering condemnation. Indeed, holding them accountable is essential to sparing ourselves and future generations from repeating this dystopian chapter of human history.
Australian medical student Dray Felen decries lockdowners’ myopia. A slice:
Medical students should never have been removed from hospitals. We could have helped in the chaos of soaring case numbers and a pressured health system. We still can.
Medicine cannot be taught online. As the great Sir William Osler, often quoted as ‘The Father of Modern Medicine’ once said: ‘Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom.’
It is easy to criticise the decisions that were made when one has the benefit of looking down the retrospectoscope. It is very clear that many of our myopic decisions that ‘temporised’ the present situation, often ineffectively, will have long-lasting consequences.
When it comes to investing in and training the future workers of society, there is no substitute for experience. This is not unique to medicine. Children have been ripped out of classrooms and forced to ‘learn’ online, without in-person interaction with their peers for months on end.
What will this do to their socio-cognitive development?
Incoming university students across all disciplines have been relegated to the mysterious and impersonal ether of the ‘online classroom’. Many of them don’t even know what their campus looks like let alone developed new friendships, connections, and a sense of identity.
We want to be part of the solution, not excluded from it. You will need us to be as skilled, curious, and compassionate as possible as we walk into this brave new post-Covid world. Certainly from your future doctors and from the rest of society too.
It’s a big step in the right direction for New Zealand.
A policy of Zero Covid in Hong Kong hasn’t worked very well. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Jason Hughes tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Health care should be in service to humanity, not the other way around.
We could have saved lives and trillions of dollars by focusing on supporting and bolstering capacity of our health care systems instead of forcing the population to sacrifice everything to not overwhelm them.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 70 of Will Durant’s 1939 volume, The Life of Greece; Durant here describes an attitude that ancient Athenians had toward some other peoples:
[A] barbarian was a man content to believe without reason and to live without liberty.
DBx: The human population has never been without large numbers of barbarians. The last two years, however, have revealed to me that the number of barbarians amongst us in the early 21st century is much larger than I thought.
February 28, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
Michael Huemer brilliantly makes a case against Critical Race Theory. (HT Bryan Caplan, who generalizes Huemer’s point.)
Also from Michael Huemer: “Why Are Some Fields More Left Wing?” (HT David Levey)
Gary Galles warns us not to misjudge nudging.
Judge Jackson was also reversed in a case in which she sided with federal-employee unions challenging presidential directives to streamline collective-bargaining terms, limit time spent on union business during work hours, and make it easier to fire employees for misconduct or unacceptable performance. Her decision bends over backward to excuse the unions from the requirement that they bring disputes to the Federal Labor Relations Authority before going to court, and the D.C. Circuit reversed it on that basis. But her take on the merits also raises concerns. In her view, the government’s general duty to bargain and negotiate “in good faith” precludes the government from taking topics off the bargaining table (like the availability of grievance proceedings for outright employee misconduct). She acknowledged that position went well beyond the governing precedent. While that would be a boon to the unions, it would disable presidential control of the federal workforce to account for changing circumstances.
Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady is justly critical of Vladimir Putin. A slice:
Russians aren’t rallying around the flag since the invasion of Ukraine on Thursday morning, as Mr. Putin may have expected them to do. Many are telling pollsters that they reject the military strikes against their neighbor. Some have even gone to the streets shouting, “No to war.”
The crackdown on these protesters is business as usual for Mr. Putin. But repression can’t reverse a growing hatred of the Kremlin boss, whose estimated wealth is at least in the tens of billions of dollars.
Russians know Mr. Putin didn’t come by his wealth honestly. His business model is a combination of knee-capping, extortion, dungeons and murder. His courts are a farce. In the Journal a few days before the invasion, Russia scholar David Satter quoted a former constitutional-court judge who put it this way: “Any official can dictate any decision in any case.” Ask opposition leader Alexei Navalny, last week given a show trial in a Russian penal colony for daring to expose Putin graft.
James Harrigan is rightly critical of State of the Union addresses. A slice:
Frankly, a one-page letter would serve the purpose.
But no. We will be treated to a hodgepodge of lies, half-truths, and nonsense. It would be far better if we insisted on following Thomas Jefferson’s lead. While his predecessors, Washington and Adams, delivered their State of the Union addresses in person every year, Jefferson just sent letters to Congress. This remained the custom until Woodrow Wilson revived in-person delivery in 1913.
David Henderson sings the praises of my GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan.
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from historian Gordon Wood’s December 2019 essay busting the key fallacy that infects the New York Times’s ludicrous 1619 Project:
There is no evidence in 1776 of a rising movement to abolish the Atlantic slave trade, as the 1619 Project erroneously asserts, nor is there any evidence the British government was eager to do so. But even if either were the case, ending the Atlantic slave trade would have been welcomed by the Virginia planters, who already had more slaves than they needed. Indeed, the Virginians in the years following independence took the lead in moving to abolish the despicable international slave trade.
How could slavery be worth preserving for someone like John Adams, who hated slavery and owned no slaves? If anyone in the Continental Congress was responsible for the Declaration of Independence, it was Adams.
Some Covid Links
Scientists did not have accurate Covid case numbers, and were unsure of hospitalisation and death rates when they published models suggesting that more than 500,000 people could die if Britain took no action in the first wave of the pandemic, it has emerged.
On March 16 2020, Imperial College published its “Report 9” paper suggesting that failing to take action could overwhelm the NHS within weeks and result in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Before the paper, the UK coronavirus strategy was to flatten the peak rather than suppress the wave, but after the modelling was made public, the Government made a rapid u-turn, which eventually led to lockdown on March 23.
However SPI-M (Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling) minutes released to the Telegraph under a Freedom of Information request show that by March 16, modellers were still “uncertain” of case numbers “due to data limitations”.
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At the briefing, Prof Ferguson told journalists that the new conclusions had been reached because “the last few days” had provided “refinements” in the estimates of intensive care demand and hospital surge capacity.
But the minutes now show that SPI-M did not believe the data were complete.
Bob Seely, the MP for the Isle of Wight, who has been critical of modelling throughout the pandemic, said: “The arguments for and against lockdown are complex, but what is becoming clear is that the evidence that the Government saw was incomplete and potentially inaccurate.
Prof Carl Heneghan, the director of the centre for evidence based medicine (CEBM) at the University of Oxford, said: “This has always concerned me about the modelling. Throughout the two years there has been systematic error, consistent over-estimation and a tendency to go directly to the media with conclusions, without validation or peer review.
“It’s clear from the SPI-M minutes there were issues with the data, it wasn’t robust. And it shows that they should have been looking for additional outside expertise.
“This is a national scandal. No question about it. The data that petrified politicians was inaccurate.”
Lockdown was an extreme, crude, and untested experiment embarked upon with the minimum of thought, no advance planning and no exit route. The original decision was taken in a moment of panic with no consideration of more sensible alternatives, and no thought for the appalling collateral consequences.
It failed to stop the virus, which is still with us. It inflicted untold misery and economic pain. Its main victims were the young, who were at negligible risk of death, and the poor, for whom confinement was a harsher fate. There is now mounting international evidence that it achieved nothing that could not have been achieved just as well by timely and moderate measures of social distancing and by trusting people to take common-sense steps to protect themselves. We did not need to turn ourselves into a police state.
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How can we stop this kind of thing happening again? For it will happen again if we do nothing. There will be more variants and fresh epidemics, some of them worse than this one. Governments now know that they can get away with anything if they frighten people enough. They will not forget.
Jon Sanders applauds the crumbling of Ozymaskias – but he also worries that it might be rebuilt. Two slices:
In Spring 2020, when public health officials including Dr. Anthony Fauci suddenly did an about-face on wearing masks, many people fell in line. They were led to believe the change of official guidance was indicative of a sudden convergence of scientific certitude. It didn’t occur to them that it bespoke a high degree of uncertainty combined with the prideful folly of needing to appear to be doing something.
This uncertainty is the very reason why mandates are wrong. No rational leader in a free society uses emergency powers to force a behavior on the dice throw that it might work. No one even remotely familiar with the propensity for public policies to harbor unseen, unintended negative consequences in the short and long term could have countenanced such a rash reaction. Bastiat wept.
After all, nothing prevented these same officials from offering people the best information at the time in an unclear environment, providing advice and recommendations on what to do rather than ordering them about — i.e., treating Americans as free-thinking fellow citizens, their co-equals in the eyes of God and the Constitution. When they issued unthinkable mandates (not just masking but also lockdowns, business closings, etc.) and told people and the credulous press that they were merely “following the science,” the question should obviously have been whether the research literature offered a slam-dunk justification for such extreme emergency orders.
Anything less, however, and they should have leveled with us and offered their recommendations. As the situation became clearer, they could have then adjusted their recommendations without fearing damage to their credibility. If anything, such honesty and humility would have enhanced public trust. Then we would actually have been “in this together,” rather than antagonized by a blundering bunch of political actors reimagining the fallacy of Oz and now increasingly desperate to keep people from seeing the little old charlatan behind the curtain.
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So Ozymaskias is crumbling. But it’s not enough for mask orders to come down when the politics of coerced masking takes a setback. These horrible, unscientific, illiberal, anti-human mandates must be sunk forever in the desert sands of history along with the rest of their Covid-excused tyrannies.
National Review‘s Nate Hochman reviews the real achievements of the Canadian truckers’ protest. Two slices:
The Freedom Convoy leaves Ottawa with a number of material wins under its belt. Five Canadian provinces — Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec, and Prince Edward Island — opted to drop their vaccine mandates in the midst of the protests. Alberta dropped its school mask requirement. At the federal level, the Canadian government relaxed its border pandemic restrictions — the initial source of the truckers’ ire. Many Covid mandates remain in place, of course, but the eased pandemic rules mark an extraordinary victory for a relatively short-lived movement that was panned as an extremist fringe by both the Trudeau government and the mainstream press.
Some critics of the convoy have dismissed the idea that the truckers were the cause of these dismantled mandates. “Most provinces were already planning to roll back restrictions as the Omicron wave flattened,” University of Calgary professor Matt McManus argued on Twitter. Last week, the Canadian Globe and Mail editorial board wrote that “the reason the provinces are relaxing the rules now is because people got vaccinated, not because a handful of anti-vaxxers are soaking in hot tubs in front of Parliament Hill.” (The trucker convoy wasn’t actually anti-vax — it was anti-mandate — but its members did, in fact, have a hot tub. Considering the frigid weather, that was just good planning.)
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Why does the Ottawa convoy matter? Beyond its political achievements, the movement’s power lay in its simple rejection of the pandemic mindset that has become embedded in many technocratic circles. In an era of lockdowns and nanny-state Fauci-ism, the Freedom Convoy’s defiant joy was an open revolt against the dreary vision of life on offer from an army of experts, bureaucrats who insist that a “return to normal” is impossible. The truckers were relentlessly, unequivocally, unapologetically free. And their protest was an invitation for any who wish to join them.
Johns Hopkins school of medicine professor Marty Makary deplores the CDC’s practice of withholding data. Two slices:
People say the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a messaging problem. But the CDC’s problem is not messaging — it’s issuing flawed guidance while covering up the data.
Case in point: pushing boosters for young people.
After the Food and Drug Administration inexplicably bypassed its expert advisory committee to authorize boosters for all young people, the CDC director overruled her own experts’ downvote of the boosters-for-all proposal. That’s the magic of a call from the White House. Two top FDA officials, including the agency’s vaccine-center head,quit over White House pressure to authorize boosters for the young.
But after the FDA and CDC rammed through the recommendation, they made sure the public wouldn’t see the real-world data. Despite repeated pleas to release all its data, the CDC only posted stats on boosters in people over age 50.
What have they been hiding? As a proxy, let’s take a look at what the CDC just published on people 50 to 65: For the fully vaccinated, the booster reduces the risk of COVID death from four per million to one per million. Who are those three helped by a booster? They’re not healthy people. One study of breakthrough hospitalizations found 75% had at least four comorbidities.
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A note for college administrators enforcing booster mandates: You can’t reduce a mortality risk of zero any lower with a booster.
The CDC claims it didn’t release booster data because it feared the information would be misinterpreted. No, it’s because the stats don’t support its agenda. Yet public-health officials continue to beclown themselves by demanding all Americans over age 12 get boosted.
Most of the media have fallen for it. Throughout the pandemic, The New York Times and other outlets have only sourced doctors on the establishment groupthink bandwagon, dangled fear to young people and blindly amplified every edict government doctors fed without asking questions, just as the press did with weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
We’ve seen medical-bandwagon thinking hurt us before. The dogma that COVID spreads by surface transmission, children must be shut out of school and the barbaric separation of Americans from their dying loved ones. Our public-health leaders continue to make critical mistakes and affirm each other with groupthink while journalists give them a megaphone to broadcast their agenda, unchecked, failing to ask basic questions, like: Where’s the supporting data? What’s the incidence of myocarditis after a booster in young people?
This week, one Times reporter finally picked up on what many of us have been saying about the CDC’s deception.
Imagine if we had focused on actually protecting the vulnerable instead of indulging ourselves in the destructive illusion that we could control the spread of a highly infectious virus.
Phil Kerpen puts into perspective Omicron’s impact on hospital inpatient volume: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 275 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:
Fortune does not hand down information and guidance to discover improved techniques of production and distribution of better products. It’s obtained by investing in risky exploration and experimentation with one’s own wealth. Some experiments, perhaps most, fail. The failures disappear with little publicity.
DBx: This point is either ignored, or severely discounted by, advocates of industrial policy. These advocates simply assume that they or the government officials charged with carrying out industrial policy possess, or can easily come to possess, knowledge of how to better use scarce resources.
It’s child’s play for an intellectual or a politician to identify real ‘imperfections’ in reality; it’s even easier to accuse reality of ‘failing’ when, in fact, reality reflects nothing more than the consequences of unavoidable trade-offs. But it’s impossible – yes, impossible – for anyone, regardless of how intelligent and well-read, to know and act on as many details of reality that are, at every moment, acted on in free markets.
Believing in the promises of advocates of industrial policy is as foolish as is believing in the promises of con men who peddle pills said to enlarge penises or burn off fat while you sleep.
February 27, 2022
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