Russell Roberts's Blog, page 172

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 26 of the late Fred McChesney’s 1995 essay “In Search of the Public-Interest Model of Antitrust,” which serves as the Introduction to Part One of the 1995 collection edited by Fred S. McChesney and William F. Shughart II, The Causes and Consequences of Antitrust (footnote deleted):

One might well ask how economists have come to conclude that antitrust is a desirable form of government intervention. If economists generally believe in the price system, on what basis did they come to believe that “market failures” involving lack of competition are both widespread and important enough to justify systematic antitrust law enforcement? The answer appears to be: on no scientific basis at all.

DBx: Yes.

But if you doubt McChesney, read Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. (Schumpeter is pictured above.)

Konstantin Kisin Explains Vaccine Hesitancy

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

HT Joakim Book

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 123 of Scott Atlas’s important 2021 book, A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID From Destroying America:

The pandemic had been an ongoing nightmare for eight months before I set foot in DC. In my eyes, the [Trump] administration was in total disarray. They were sending out two contrary messages: the [Covid-19] Task Force was pushing the Birx-Fauci lockdowns, while at the same time, the president was pushing for reopening. This conflict was not only chaotic; it was highlighted by the anti-Trump media. That created fear and uncertainty in the population. And through it all, hundreds of thousands of people were dying, despite the lockdowns. Yes, the elites – including the political class, the media, and professionals able to work from home – were inconvenienced, no doubt. But the bulk of the country, especially the working class and poor families, was being destroyed by the closures and shutdowns.

On top of this gross failure of public health leadership, the media constantly threw gasoline on the fire by highlighting every negative about the pandemic, even when positive news was available. No opportunity to inflame the voters was going to be missed by what I now believe are the most despicable group of unprincipled liars one could ever imagine – the American media.

[image error] [image error] [image error]

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Michael Taube wonders if Canadian democracy will survive strongman Justin Trudeau’s authoritarianism. A slice:

At the same time, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada would be expanded to monitor funds raised by the Freedom Convoy through GoFundMe and cryptocurrency. Banks would also be able to freeze accounts of people suspected of contributing to this protest, without a court order. This has caused both average citizens and business owners embarrassment and potential harm to their livelihoods.

While some Canadians supported Ottawa’s decision out of frustration with the protests and blockades of border crossings like the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, others were furious. Mr. Trudeau was criticized for abandoning civil liberties, free speech and the right to protest. He’s been called a “tyrant,” “totalitarian” and “dictator.” The Canadian Civil Liberties Association took the prime minister and his government to court last week. Left-leaning newspapers like the Toronto Star have condemned him.

Martin Kulldorff tweets:

First the Canadian government threw science and the basic principles of public health out the window.

Now they are throwing democracy and the basic principles of human rights out the window.

Now look at who’s restricting the flow of traffic in and around Ottawa.

The New York Times reports that the CDC so distrusts the public that it admits to withholding data. (HT my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy). A slice:

Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots. And wastewater surveillance across the nation would spot outbreaks and emerging variants early.

Without the booster data for 18- to 49-year-olds, the outside experts whom federal health agencies look to for advice had to rely on numbers from Israel to make their recommendations on the shots.

Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C., said the agency has been slow to release the different streams of data “because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.” She said the agency’s “priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it’s accurate and actionable.”

Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Ms. Nordlund said.

Dr. Joel Zinberg explains that “[i]f there was any benefit to masking kids, it’s long since disappeared.” Two slices:

States around the nation, including Democratic ones such as New York and California, are lifting indoor mask mandates. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention refuses to budge. It continues to recommend indoor masking in communities with substantial or high transmission — essentially the entire country — a stance that is particularly exasperating and harmful in regards to schools. The agency recommends masking all students ages 2 and older.

In congressional testimony, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky insisted that school mask mandates continue. The following day, at a White House briefing, Walensky, after acknowledging rapidly falling COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths, said the agency would reconsider its guidelines, but gave no indication any update would apply to schools.

Two days later, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief White House medical adviser, echoed his overcautious colleague, telling CNN that ending school masking would be “risky.”

From the start, it was clear that COVID-19 posed little threat to children. On a March 10, 2020 — one day before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic — Nancy Messonnier, director of CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, noted that only 2% of COVID-19 cases were in ages 19 and below and that they were not developing serious illness.

COVID-19, she said, is, “a disease that affects adults. And most seriously older adults. Starting at age 60, there is an increasing risk of disease and the risk increases with age. The highest risk of serious illness and death is in people older than 80 years. People with serious underlying health conditions also are more likely to develop serious outcomes including death.”

Nothing has changed since then. Less than two-tenths of 1% of COVID-19 deaths have been in people 17 and younger. School-age kids (ages 5-17) are currently just 2.7% of COVID hospitalizations.

Yet, whatever rationales were previously advanced to justify school mask mandates have long since disappeared and the benefit of masking children is outweighed by the cost.

…..

Walensky has repeatedly cited an Arizona study that found schools without mask mandates were 3.5 times more likely to have COVID outbreaks than schools that required masks. Yet, as David Zweig showed in the Atlantic, multiple experts agree the study was so rife with methodological problems that its conclusions are worthless.

Peter Suderman is correct: “Like the war on drugs and the war on terror before it, the war on COVID is a futile, deeply destructive campaign, and Americans want out.” Another slice:

I use the phrase war on COVID on purpose, for there are clear echoes of both the war on drugs and the war on terror: long-running government campaigns championed by the political class and predicated on preserving public health and safety, which eventually proved futile at best, and deeply destructive and counterproductive at worst. Both involved a mix of largely symbolic acts, intended mostly to visibly demonstrate that something was being donem and more punitive initiatives that produced damaging effects that tended to fall heaviest on out groups with little political influence.

Those campaigns became permanent parts of the American political landscape in part because they offered ambitious bureaucrats and politicians paths to consolidate power, and in part because of the uneven distribution of their consequences. The first is obviously true for many COVID hawks, especially for public health authorities. But while the negative effects of COVID restrictions have certainly hit some groups harder than others (children, and children with learning disabilities in particular), the overall impact has been more widespread: Over the past two years, almost everyone in America has, at the very least, been inconvenienced or frustrated, if not worse, and for many, those inconveniences and frustrations have become fixtures of daily life.

Aaron Kheriaty explains why it’s ethical to resist hygiene socialism and the Covidian tyrants who attempt to impose it. A slice:

Our public health authorities over-promised and under-delivered with the vaccines, squandering public trust in the process. This came on the wake of other failed pandemic policies of 2020, including the failure of masks, social distancing, disinfecting surfaces, and most disastrously, harmful lockdown policies, to stop the spread of the virus. Despite all these aggressive mitigation measures, estimates suggest that more than 70% of all Americans—vaccinated and unvaccinated included—have nevertheless been infected with Covid. As I have been arguing for some time now, natural immunity remains our primary way out of the pandemic. Yet our public health authorities continue to deploy the dubious “vaccinated vs. unvaccinated” distinction, rather than the more empirically defensible “more immune vs. less immune” distinction.

Raymond March exposes what is likely vaccine cronyism.

Pierre Lemieux writes insightfully about vaccine cost-benefit calculations. Here’s his conclusion:

It is true that in most Western countries, there was no legal obligation, sanctioned by legal punishments, to be vaccinated against Covid-19. The coercion, though, was more subtle and worked through several prohibitions and daily hurdles for unvaccinated individuals. We are quite far from benevolent advice or motherly nudging from disinterested politicians and wise bureaucrats; but that’s how Leviathan works.

David Henderson relates a disturbing instance reflecting the dangers of masking children.

Writing in the Telegraph, Robert Dingwall rightly insists that “[n]ever again must we repeat the errors of the Covid lockdowns.” A slice:

At times, however, policy-makers did not put Covid-19 into context. Nor did they ask what responses would be possible, effective and proportionate. Indeed, we must recognise that too many interventions were ineffective, poorly evaluated and damaged important institutions. We must learn the right lessons for next time – and the time after, and the time after that.

When I contributed to UK pandemic planning around 2005-06, our work was admired throughout Europe because we approached it as a “whole of society” problem, not solely a public health one. We assigned leadership to the emergency planning team in the Cabinet Office, with its responsibility to engage every government department. Most other countries gave the lead to their health ministry. The UK thought this would focus the response narrowly on medical interests without regard to the wider impact on economy and society. The management of the Covid-19 pandemic throughout the UK has demonstrated that we were correct.

But there are other “never again” lessons from Covid-19.

Do not allow lab-based scientists to rip up established hierarchies of evidence in advising on policy interventions – or, worse, to be indifferent to the need to evaluate social and economic interventions. We need real world evidence of effectiveness, not expert beliefs in things like face masks or ventilation.

Do not rely on the blunt instruments of law and fear to bring the population along for a long haul. These will always produce conflict and injustice, weakening trust in government and public health institutions.

Do not undermine parliamentary accountability or pretend that responsible oppositions do not ask hard questions about the evidence and logic behind policies. The UK has already drifted too close to an elective dictatorship. This should be a moment to strengthen the review of government actions.

Do not treat modellers as oracles forecasting the future. Modelling is really important in its place, which is answering what-if questions from policy-makers, not driving policy.

More fundamentally, the modern world has developed unrealistic expectations of control over nature. In other areas of life, we tolerate risks to a certain level and accept that they cannot be wholly eradicated. Our forebears understood that death was unavoidable but we seem to aspire to immortality.

Joanna Williams sensibly asks: “Where is the liberal outrage at Trudeau’s monstrously illiberal behavior?” A slice:

Imagine the uproar if, back in 2020, President Trump had frozen bank accounts belonging to key figures in the Black Lives Matter movement. Or consider the response if Boris Johnson used mounted police and pepper spray to stop Insulate Britain protesters blocking motorways. Yet when it comes to the Canadian truckers, left-wingers, including self-described liberals, have not just sat by and watched as the largest police operation in the country’s history cleared the streets, they cheered on Trudeau and applauded his emergency power grab. How do we explain this?

Many “liberals” fundamentally disagree with the truckers’ cause. What began as a campaign against vaccine mandates and passports rapidly became a protest against all lockdown restrictions. Yet throughout the pandemic, the left has been adamantly pro-lockdown. The only dissent has been to demand harsher restrictions. Of course, lockdown never actually extended to truck drivers. People required to sustain a middle class lifestyle were not only expected to go out to work but to agree that we were all in it together. Protesting lockdown restrictions exposes the lie that everyone was happy to have their freedom curtailed.

The left became suspicious of freedom, and people unleashed from restraints, long before the pandemic. But Covid has provided the perfect opportunity to ensure the general public is masked-up and socially-distanced at all times.

The truckers don’t just represent the wrong cause but they are also the wrong kind of protester. They leave their homes to work and perhaps get dirty in the course of making a living. And let’s be blunt: they are mainly middle-aged white men who are unlikely to be up to speed with the latest woke vocabulary. Gammon, in other words. The Ottawa protesters are neither flogging their own identity nor staking a claim to victimhood but fighting for something bigger than themselves. Today’s activists find this impossible to grasp.

Martin Kulldorff tweets:

With the collateral public health damage obvious, the “scientific” architect of the UK lockdown strategy, @wellcometrust director @JeremyFarrar, is now disavowing lockdowns.

Amy Kosari tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

There is no public health without freedom. Freedom is the defense of the poor and those with less. The rich have their lawyers and lands and for a while, they will be all right, but those who with less have their traditional freedoms as their bulwark and defense.

[image error] [image error] [image error]

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 33 of Joseph Epstein’s 1999 book, Narcissus Leaves the Pool:

He seemed to know the darker side of politics – its tendency to get under people’s skin to affect their fairness, decency, and honor.

JP Sears Ends On a Note of Optimism

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Glenn Greenwald tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

You are required by western propaganda to treat these as fundamentally different [DBx: on one hand, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s freezing of bank accounts linked to opposition politicians, and on the other hand, Canadian strongman Justin Trudeau’s freezing of bank accounts linked to anti-vaccine-mandate protesters]. Indeed, huge numbers of people in the West denounce the former while applauding the latter.

At least some evidence suggests that a growing number of Canadians oppose the authoritarianism of Canadian strongman Justin Trudeau.

The always-wise Barry Brownstein writes wisely about some economic realities that the wise will always keep in mind about vaccines.

David Harsanyi decries the demise of freedom of speech – a demise fueled by the Covid-hysterical mainstream media. A slice:

Anonymous speech is as much a part of “democracy” as marching in the streets or writing a newspaper column. And in a healthy liberal media environment, reporters would be demanding answers from those abusing power, not working with them to inhibit political speech.

GMU law student Ethan Yang asks: “Who is served by emergency powers?” A slice:

There is a wide variety of literature exploring the public choice implications of expansive government power. Two recent papers on the political economy of emergency powers by Christian Bjørnskov, and Stefan Voight, illustrate these implications during the pandemic. These studies appeared in the European Journal of Law and Economics (2020) and the journal Public Choice (2021). Studies like these are especially insightful because emergency powers provided the primary framework many governments used to conduct public health policy in response to Covid-19.

The 2020 study compares the use of emergency powers worldwide in response to Covid-19. Historically, emergencies of all kinds have been a pretext for expanding government power, and our experience with Covid-19 shows this tendency. The authors note, “this time was not different.” To that end, they find that many governments worldwide implemented heavy-handed policies that had little relationship to mitigating cases and deaths. Instead, political leaders tended to make power-maximizing decisions based on political constraints inherent to their countries.

For example, in most liberal democracies which maintain substantial checks on power, lockdown policies were limited to temporary business closures, school closures, and stay-at-home orders. On the other hand, countries with fewer restraints on power saw more aggressive lockdowns that extended into the realm of targeting political enemies and forcing infected individuals into quarantine facilities. Across all countries, the deployment of emergency measures followed the ease of their use afforded by institutional and political constraints.

Their 2021 examination examined the use of emergency powers from 1990 to 2011 in 122 countries and concluded that there were no clear benefits from their use. They found that emergency power when controlling for various other factors, such as the severity of the disaster being responded to, did not save more lives. They are however, correlated with human rights abuses, degradation of democratic institutions, and even increased death. Moreover, the authors suggest that these emergency powers are potentially associated with the crowding out of private responses to disaster situations, which could possibly create more effective solutions than ones implemented by public officials.

“Mayor Eric Adams admitted Wednesday that vaccine mandates don’t work — yet he’s still going ahead with firing city workers who refuse to show proof they got their shots” – so laments the Editorial Board of the New York Post.

Martin Kulldorff tweets:

To be a true scientist, one has to seek the truth with an open mind, while ignoring politization, herd thinking and career considerations.

Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley understandably deplores the persistence of masking. A slice:

At this stage in the pandemic, I assume anyone I see wearing a mask is a mugger. Some 85 per cent of over-12s have had at least two jabs, cases and deaths are down – and this week the Government unveils its “living with Covid strategy”, which will end the legal duty to self-isolate if you test positive.

Yet the masks persist. I see people wearing them outdoors, when walking alone, even in a 100mph gale – and two-thirds of Britons want restrictions to stay. So, here’s my question to Boris Johnson: how do you persuade a society that you have terrified and infantilised for two years that it is safe to go back into the water?

Nicholas Farrell reports on the “pointless tyranny of Italy’s Covid pass.” Two slices:

While most European countries, especially Britain, are relaxing their Covid restrictions, Italy which has the toughest of the lot, this week made them tougher still – even though the data shows they are futile.

Perhaps it is because Italy is a country where fortune tellers and faith healers are a multi-billion pound industry that it has the most draconian vaccine passport regime in Europe. Either way, mass psychosis blinds its politicians and people from the truth.
…..

The justification for Italy’s vaccine passport regime – called ‘Il Green Pass’ – when introduced last August was that it would increase vaccine uptake, create safe spaces for the vaccinated, and thereby reduce Covid cases, hospitalisations and deaths. It has done none of these things.

Instead the regime became steadily more draconian. The unvaccinated were soon banned from nearly all public spaces and public transport, and even from work, unless they had had Covid in the last six months – or paid for a €15 Covid test once every 48 hours.

Hailed as a huge success with religious fervour by Italy’s government of national unity, headed by the unelected premier and ex-EU central banker, Mario Draghi, ‘Il Green Pass’ has been in reality nothing but an exercise in pointless tyranny.

Yet despite this, in December, the Draghi government introduced ‘Il Super Green Pass’ which made the regime even more tyrannical with vaccination now compulsory for all on public transport, and in many public spaces such as restaurants and bars – even outside – and hair salons and sports stadiums, unless they have had Covid in the past six months. The right of the unvaccinated to take the 48 hour €15 test to access them was cancelled.

And this week, with the infection rate in free fall, compulsory vaccination was extended to the workplace for the over 50s. Vaccination was already compulsory at work for health and emergency service workers and teachers. But from now on, no unvaccinated person over the age of 50 who has not had Covid in the past six months can go to work. If they do, they and their employer face fines of €600 to €1,500. Previously, they could still go to work if they took the €15 Covid test every two days or if they had Covid in the past six months. There are 500,000 unvaccinated Italians over the age of 50 who work and will now be suspended on no pay – according to Italian press reports – unless they throw in the towel and get jabbed.

Naturally, neither unelected Draghi nor anyone else in his cross-party coalition is ever going to admit that what they trumpet as their proudest achievement is a failure. Nor will Italy’s media which has so supinely toed the government line – nor the Italians themselves – three quarters of whom support ‘Il Green Pass’ in the polls. They all have too much face to lose now.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 126 of Scott Atlas’s important 2021 book, A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID From Destroying America:

Many times, I honestly wondered, who in their right mind would want health policy to be designed solely by someone as narrowly focused as an  epidemiologist or a virologist or any basic scientist for that matter.

Bill Allen

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

The very first Liberty Fund colloquium in which I participated – August 1990 in San Diego – was led by the great William Allen. (This is William B. Allen – not to be confused with the late William R. Allen.) I was honored to spend this past weekend, in Indianapolis, with Bill at a Liberty Fund colloquium on the work of my late, great colleague Walter Williams.

An Exchange at EconLog About Covid Policy

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Scott Sumner – prompted by this EconLog post by David Henderson – argues that “the pessimists were correct about Covid.” Not unfairly interpreting David’s post as describing a “debate” between pessimistic Covid modelers (especially Neil Ferguson) and the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Scott offers his reasons for believing that Ferguson & Co. were correct – and, presumably, for also believing that most of humanity was wise to ignore the Great Barrington Declaration.

David and Phil Magness each, in the comments section, pushed back against some of Scott’s arguments. I chimed in as well, with what’s pasted below (slightly amended). (My second comment below is a response to commenter “Steve” who is displeased with my first comment.)

Comment 1:

Scott misses two important points in his criticism of David’s earlier post. But before I get to these points, I note that I here ignore – until, in passing, at the very end – the debate over the correctness or incorrectness of competing estimates of the SARS-CoV-2’s IFR. I do so because I disagree with Scott’s suggestion that IFR estimates are central to David’s post.

Now to the two points missed by Scott.

First, he misses the core reason David publicly took issue with Ryan Bourne’s Telegraph op-ed. In that op-ed, Ryan favorably mentions Tyler as someone who, by thinking on multiple margins, avoids the trap into which so many Covid ‘experts’ fall. Yet as David points out, early on Tyler himself inexplicably fell into this very trap. In March 2020 Tyler praised Neil Ferguson & Co. not so much because they encouraged individuals to beware of the coronavirus but, instead, because Ferguson’s predictions and advice were instrumental in determining policy responses by governments in the U.K. and the U.S. Those responses (in)famously featured lockdowns.

Contrary to what seems to be Scott’s belief, the chief complaint that I and many others – including, I’m sure, David – have about Ferguson is not that Ferguson’s models incited individuals to avoid the virus with measures taken voluntarily. Instead, this complaint is centered on Ferguson’s support for lockdowns, and on the sad reality that governments took this reckless advice.

The second point that Scott misses is David’s discussion of the Great Barrington Declaration. David is correct that the GBD – unlike lockdowns and many other government-imposed Covid measures – takes seriously the inescapability of trade-offs. The GBD, therefore, is a much better example of thinking on multiple margins than were Ferguson’s pronouncements and the resulting lockdowns.

Most governments ignored the GBD. And many people – including Tyler – publicly criticized this document. Yet if its authors are correct, then Covid’s IFR and death toll would today be lower than they’ve turned out to be. The reason is that scarce effort and resources would have been focused on protecting the most vulnerable rather than spent scattershot.

We knew as early as March 2020 that vulnerability to Covid increases steeply with age. We knew also that Covid’s risks rise with co-morbidities. Therefore, identifying the vulnerable was relatively easy. And so it’s fair to ask: What’s so outlandish about a proposal to focus scarce effort and resources on protecting the vulnerable without forcing everyone – the vast majority of whom are at very low risk – to spend effort and resources attempting to avoid the virus? After all, effort and resources used to lock down workplaces and schools are effort and resources rendered unavailable to enhance individualized protection of the vulnerable.

How much more effective would mitigation measures have been had scarce effort and resources been focused on the vulnerable? We’ll never know for sure because the counsel offered by the GBD was rejected in all but a few places.

Of course it’s possible that the lockdowns and other one-size-fits-all coercive measures that most of us actually endured outperformed – on the death-toll front – what would have occurred had the GBD been followed. But this possibility is hardly a certainty. Indeed, I believe it to be highly implausible. Regardless, we’ll never know.

Either way, the death toll that we have today, and that Scott uses to estimate Covid’s IFR, is one that arose under policies – and still-prevalent beliefs about Covid – that were influenced far more by Neil Ferguson than by Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff (the co-authors of the GBD).

Scott defends Ferguson’s unrealized extreme estimates of Covid fatalities by pointing out that these were made for what is now a counterfactual – namely, a world of no measures, voluntary or mandatory, taken in response to the coronavirus. This same mindset should cause Scott and others to be more favorably disposed to the GBD by prompting them to ask: What would the death toll have been in another counterfactual world, namely, a world in which the GBD’s counsel was heeded?

Comment 2 (in response to “Steve”):

Steve:

Who do I misquote? And who do I “smear”? (Note that to express and explain disagreement with someone is not to “smear” someone. This distinction is important.)

As for your claim that I’m mistaken to believe that Neil Ferguson’s modeling played a major role in pushing governments to lockdown, remember that it was Tyler Cowen who credited Ferguson with this effect. I simply take Tyler here at his word – a word that, on this count, I believe to be accurate. (The fact that you and other practicing physicians paid little attention to Ferguson’s predictions is irrelevant to the question of whether or not those predictions played a significant role in prompting governments to lock down.)

Further, you repeat here a mistaken claim that you made earlier about the Great Barrington Declaration – namely, you claim that “no one had ever tried doing what they [the GBD’s co-authors] suggested. No one knew how to do it. To date no one still does.”

I can do no better here than to repeat my response from a few months ago to you on this very point:

In opposition to the Focused Protection advocated in the Great Barrington Declaration – and, presumably, endorsed also by David Henderson – you again insist that “We did not know then [October 2020] and largely still don’t know how to protect older people, the immunocompromised, etc.”

And so I again remind you that the Declaration’s three eminent co-authors – Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard – did indeed offer details on what Focused Protection would look like. The fact that these measures would not have worked perfectly and with 100 percent certainty is true. It’s also irrelevant because no measures to achieve any desirable outcome work perfectly and with 100 percent certainty.

But allow me to offer my own proposal – one that I believe would work quite well – for how we might carry out Focused Protection: Give all vulnerable people hazmat suits to wear, and require negative Covid tests of any and all persons who might come near vulnerable people during those times when the hazmat suits aren’t being worn.

“Outlandish! Ridiculous! Absurd!” you’ll cry. “That’s not only impractical; it’s also dehumanizing!”

Really? Compared to what? Compared to lockdowns and school closures – compared to the terrible consequences of indefinitely severing countless, complex webs of commercial, familial, and social relationships – my hazmat-suit proposal is downright mundane and highly doable.

The relevant comparison for any Focused Protection measures (including my hazmat-suit proposal) is not to life as it was up through 2019. Instead, it’s to a world indefinitely locked down or under the threat of lockdown; it’s to a bizarro world filled with deep distress, depressing isolation, unprecedented uncertainty, and terrible tyranny. I submit that by this comparison, Focused Protection (again, even including a measure as extreme and disagreeable as my hypothetical hazmat-suit proposal) is far more practical and acceptable – and far more humane – than are the cruel measures, as ludicrous as they are odious, that most of humanity has suffered since early 2020.

I submit that humanity had in 2020, and has in 2022, far better knowledge of how to identify the vulnerable and focus protection on them than it had for how to lockdown in a way that possessed even a remote prospect of passing a cost-benefit test.