Russell Roberts's Blog, page 177
February 9, 2022
Some Covid Links
For those of you who doubt the dystopianism of life under the Covidocracy, check out this headline: “Aussie police spark outrage after barging into church and stopping mass to enforce COVID mask mandate.” (HT Tim Townsend) A slice:
Authorities were said to have arrived at the church after receiving a tip that worshippers were not following mask mandates.
One churchgoer named Matthew said that everyone in the church was “pretty surprised” and that it was “troubling to see the liturgy that you love being stopped by police.”
“It was pretty confronting,” he recalled.
In response to this complaint by Justin Trudeau…
Canada’s PM Trudeau: “Individuals are trying to blockade our economy, our democracy, and our fellow citizens’ daily lives. It has to stop.”
Irony is dead and @JustinTrudeau killed it.
Alan Dowd draws seven lessons from the Covid lockdowns. A slice:
Lesson One: Free nations should never take their cues from tyrant regimes.
Whether through incompetence or intention, the Covid-19 pandemic was born in the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—and so was the playbook for responding to the pandemic.
“It’s a communist one-party state … We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought,” as now-disgraced British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson recalls of the PRC’s response to Covid-19. “And then Italy did it. And we realized we could.”
Ferguson’s computer models terrified governments across the Free World into imitating the PRC and locking down. From Europe to America to Australia, there were different shades and gradations to the lockdowns, but all of them trampled upon individual liberty, human rights and the constitutional rule of law.
The Trump administration’s aforementioned strategy document, for instance, envisioned “social distancing,” “workplace controls,” “aggressive containment,” and “non-pharmaceutical interventions” at the federal, state, local and private-sector level. These would include “home isolation strategies,” “cancellation of almost all sporting events, performances, and public and private meetings,” “school closures,” and “stay-at-home directives for public and private organizations.”
It’s no surprise that tyrant regimes like the PRC pursued a “zero Covid” strategy, ordered lockdowns, ruled by executive decree, and limited freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, and religious, economic and cultural activity—all for what those in power deemed “the greater good.” Dating to the time of Pharaoh, that’s what tyrants do. And that’s the very reason America’s Founders wrote a constitution that limits the power of government—even in times of crisis. President Eisenhower (in 1957-58) and President Johnson (who was stricken during the 1968-69 pandemic) respected those limits during past pandemics, and governors and mayors followed their lead. Sadly, the opposite happened in 2020-21.
C. Travis Webb ponders the meaning of the Covid street art. A slice:
But for the last two years we’ve been under siege from technocratic puritans, prudes who insist on moralizing every appetite, zealots who turn every disagreement into a series of cosmic struggles—science vs ignorance, democracy vs fascism, truth vs lies, everyone vs white-heteronormative men.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Support for continued mask mandates is collapsing among previously mask militant Democrats and public health officials. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is ending the state’s strict indoor mask mandate next week, and New Jersey and Connecticut will no longer require masks in schools. CNN medical analyst Leana Wen, who has flirted with some truly dystopian policies concerning the stigmatization of the unvaccinated, now sounds positively libertarian: This week she heralded the end of mandates as “a needed shift from government-imposed requirement to individual decision.”
Wen claims that “the science has changed.” In reality, little has changed in the last six months—the vaccines continue to be the only significant policy intervention to drastically prevent severe cases of COVID-19—except that many, many more people have caught and recovered from coronavirus. Case numbers fluctuate as more contagious variants run wild through the population—with masks and other measures doing little to deter them—but the vaccinated enjoy robust protection.
Still, Team Blue giving up on mask mandates is a welcomed development.
Not every member of the cautious coalition has jumped ship just yet, however. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten—whose significant influence over the Biden administration makes her the person most responsible for the education system’s failures during the pandemic—is still reluctant to let kids lose their masks. In an interview with MSNBC, she said she was theoretically in favor of a masking “off-ramp,” but only when “the spread [is] low enough so that there’s no dissemination or transmission in schools.”
But COVID-19 is not going away entirely anytime soon: There will always be the possibility of one student transmitting the disease to another.
Suzy Weiss reports on some angry moms who are challenging authoritarian and hypocritical Covidocrats. A slice:
Maud Maron hates the whole you-gotta-show-your-vaccine-passport-to-get-into-a-restaurant thing, and she thinks masking outdoors is atrocious, but this is bright blue New York City, so fine.
It’s just, “when Kathy Hochul” — the governor — “gets on the screen, talking about how she wants to protect us and keep the masks in schools, she doesn’t have a f—ing mask on her face, and I’m so sick of politicians who take the mask off their face to tell me to put the mask on my children — like how dare you?”
Anyway, that’s why she’s running for Congress.
We’re having tea around her kitchen island in her apartment in Soho. It’s big. There’s a ping-pong table, a foosball table, a swing bolted into a wooden beam. A bright red, toddler-sized race car. A tattered copy of “Romeo and Juliet.” Speech-therapy exercises are tacked to the wall. Her husband, who’s Argentinian, runs a private-equity shop. “When you shut down my kids’ schools and impose devastating mental-health effects on them — I don’t forgive anyone who did that,” Maron says.
Geoff Shullenberger decries mandated masking and deplores the absence of any real science to support it. Three slices:
A document published by the World Health Organisation in 2019 framed the results of these studies in no uncertain terms: “there was no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza”. It’s unsurprising, then, that when the CDC briefed reporters on the pandemic in February of 2020, masking was not even mentioned among the NPIs that might be deployed. The UK government, too, stated early in 2020 that there was no evidence to support masking.
After the CDC and other agencies revised their guidance in April 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, by then a staunch advocate of masks, claimed that he and other officials had discouraged the public from obtaining masks to ensure there were adequate supplies for health care workers. Ever since, promoters of masking have cited Fauci’s “noble lie” to account for the abrupt reversal of prior guidance. But as [Ian] Miller notes, it was not just during the early months of the pandemic that officials said masks were ineffective. They had said so for years, and Fauci had advised against masks not just in public statements but in private emails in early 2020.
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The most disastrous failing of the experts has been their lack of curiosity about the actual results of the policies they have staked their reputations on. Mask mandates have been, in Miller’s phrase, “a population-wide experiment”, but few within the US scientific and medical establishment have seemed interested in parsing the resulting data, leaving that task to outsiders like Miller. Astonishingly, there have been just two randomised controlled trials on masking published since the pandemic began. One found no significant effect at all, while the other found a small effect of 11% for surgical masks and no significant effect for cloth ones. The first was largely ignored or dismissed, while the second was optimistically glossed as proving that masks work.
Moreover, even the most bullish case for the technical efficacy of at least some higher-quality masks does not constitute a case for mask mandates, a distinction that most commentary elides. The only way to measure the efficacy of mandates is to look at their actual track record. This is what Miller has done, and the result, he argues, is clear: “mask mandates have demonstrated very little impact, if any, on case curves throughout the United States and in many other international locations.”
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It is not difficult to see why mask mandates proved irresistible to politicians. Masks are the perfect form of hygiene theatre, conveying an intuitive sense of safety regardless of demonstrable efficacy at scale. They also offload responsibility for controlling the pandemic to ordinary people. The overcrowding of ICUs can be blamed on the bad behavior of “anti-maskers”, rather than on the allocation of resources by governments and hospital CEOs. When cases and deaths spike, it is the fault of the citizenry, not the leadership.
The scientific and medical establishment’s uncritical support of masks and other dubious policies is just the latest manifestation of its lack of independence from political imperatives. After several years of finding themselves at the receiving end of rhetorical assaults from rising Right-wing populists, the experts seized on the pandemic as an opportunity to reassert their own status and authority — and that of the liberal-technocratic politicians with whom they are largely aligned.
The straw man is ramping up his battering of the people of Hong Kong. Two slices:
Hong Kong is going into its strictest lockdown since 2020 after daily Covid cases broke records on Monday, despite draconian measures to stop the virus already being in place.
Almost all leisure businesses in the self-governing region are now closed, with hair salons and houses of worship added to the list today. Public gatherings have been limited to two people, while private gatherings are limited to two families.
Hong Kong, like mainland China, is continuing with a draconian zero-Covid strategy even in the face of the more-infectious Omicron variant – imposing harsh restrictions aimed at eliminating the virus even as other countries begin living with it.
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Hospitals in Hong Kong they are already being overwhelmed by the relatively low number of cases, owing to rules that mean anyone who tests positive has to quarantine inside a health facility – even if they have a mild or asymptomatic case.
At least some New Zealanders are protesting that country’s Covidocratic tyranny.
Trucker Gord Magill explains why he proudly took part in the honkening in Ottawa. A slice:
Contrary to the media portrayal that we are all far-Right activists and crypto-Nazis, people from all backgrounds have been in attendance. In fact, many Eastern European immigrants who have escaped authoritarian regimes have been providing the truckers with food and support.
But unfortunately, the media decided to smear us, and focus on photos of two individuals who were carrying a Confederate Flag and a swastika flag. These two people, of whom we have a tiny number of photographs, do not represent an entire movement. There have been accusations from clout-chasing Twitter personalities that we are financed by billionaires, despite the fact that GoFundMe stole $9 million CDN in donations, most of which were donated by regular working people like me in small amounts of $20.
Meanwhile, organisations who represent actual billionaires that own large corporate trucking companies, such as the Canadian Trucking Alliance, fully support Trudeau’s policies and have denounced the Freedom Convoy. It’s all very convenient for the laptop class to engage in these attacks, nice and safe in their offices, while the truckers are out in the streets, enduring a harsh Canadian Winter and sleeping in their rigs. That said, this is what Canadian truckers and workers of all sorts do every winter — get out there into the cold and miserable conditions to keep our society functioning, while media naybobs and politicos stay warm.
Influence and narrative control appear to be of utmost importance to Trudeau, his government, and the compliant Canadian media to whom he has given lavish subsidies. Instead of spreading vicious and untrue rumours about the truckers, why won’t Trudeau’s people simply meet the organisers of The Convoy instead?
To the residents of Ottawa, who would like us to leave, I would submit to you that you ignore the liars and smear merchants in the media, talk to a trucker on your street, and then ask Trudeau to end the mandates. The rest of the world is opening up and choosing life; Canada must do the same.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 67 of former U.S. Solicitor General Charles Fried’s interesting 1991 book, Order and Law: Arguing the Reagan Revolution:
I am also puzzled by the originalist celebration of majority rule as the presumed default source of law, from which one may only depart on the clearest textual warrant in the Constitution, a warrant underwritten by the intent of the framers. The originalists belong to the party of liberty – as do I – so it is odd to see them repair to majority rule, which has not often been seen as a very secure haven of liberty, and certainly was not seen as such by the framers.
February 8, 2022
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 34 of Steve Landsburg’s delightful, insightful, and provocative 1997 book, Fair Play:
I remember my own first grade teacher and how stirring she found the words of John F. Kennedy, as he took the reins of the country and challenged his fellow citizens to – and here I paraphrase only slightly – “Ask not what I can do for you; ask what you can do for me.” Ever since, I’ve been alert to pro-government prejudice among teachers and other opinion leaders.
On Skepticism of Covid Vaccines
In my latest column for AIER, I identify what I believe are a few key reasons why some people are skeptical of Covid-19 vaccines. (Note: I am not a Covid-vaccine skeptic. But as I explain in this essay, I understand why many people who are skeptical of the Covid vaccines reasonably hold the position that they hold.) A slice:
From the start of Covid, the scientists and bureaucrats who were treated as virtually infallible by the media, and by most governments, embarked on a journey featuring some notable U-turns. Anthony Fauci’s 180-degree flipperoo on the advisability of wearing masks is the most famous of these. In light of such reversals, who can blame people for being skeptical of assurances offered about both the effectiveness and safety of vaccines by the likes of Fauci?
A related problem is the record of deceits, dodges, and half-truths practiced by many who are in power. Fauci and Francis Collins clearly were not forthcoming about the role played by the NIH in funding, if only indirectly, research done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Far worse is the effort by Fauci and Collins to orchestrate a scheme to discredit the scientists who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration. Why shouldn’t the general public be wary of proclamations made about vaccines by government officials who are fearful of open scientific debate? Why shouldn’t the public be leery of following the advice of officials who deride as “fringe” scholars who are tenured in scientific departments at Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard – a derision motivated by nothing more than Collins and Fauci’s fear of these prominent scholars’ public objections to the unprecedented use of general lockdowns and other authoritarian measures?
Then there are the too-many-to-count instances of hypocrisy by those who loudly insisted on draconian Covid restrictions. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s now-infamous partygate; Gavin Newsom’s soiree at the French Laundry; Neil Ferguson’s clandestine visit with his mistress; Matt Hancock’s not-socially-distanced passionate embrace in an elevator of his mistress; Muriel Bowser’s trip to Delaware to celebrate Joe Biden’s election; Deborah Birx’s Thanksgiving 2020 visit with her family; Nancy Pelosi’s hair-salon episode; San Francisco mayor London Breed’s maskless partying; New York mayor Bill de Blasio dancing in Times Square with his wife on New Year’s Eve 2020…. This list of high-level politicians’ and government advisors’ refusal to follow their own orders and advice can be extended. In light of such a list, is it any surprise that not a few members of the general public distrust government officials’ and their advisors’ affirmations of the safety and effectiveness of Covid vaccines?
And looming especially large for me are three other telling realities of the past two years.
One is that public-health-experts’ consensus until late 2019 for dealing with pandemics was almost instantly discarded in early 2020. Further, those who publicly continued to endorse this pre-2020 consensus were vilified. How can that which was a consensus view in late 2019 be a dangerous superstition in early 2020? Regardless of which position is correct – the one that prevailed before Covid-19 or the one that has prevailed since – the near-instantaneous reversal of ‘official’ knowledge (and of the resulting policy recommendations) is alone sufficient reason for many people to question today’s official recommendations regarding Covid vaccines.
Second, most governments and prominent advisors push for vaccination as if Covid’s consequences don’t have a very distinct age profile. I can well understand why vaccine hesitancy rises when the public encounters high-profile officials and advisors who press for vaccination as if Covid is as dangerous to fifteen-year-olds as it is to seventy-five year olds. Because this refusal to acknowledge Covid’s distinct age profile is obviously unscientific, why should advice about vaccines issued by people who refuse to acknowledge this age profile be treated as being scientific?
A similar point can be made about the Covidocracy’s continuing disparagement of natural immunity.
Some Covid Links
Gabrielle Bauer advices precaution against the precautionary principle. (HT Iain Murray) Two slices:
The phrase “abundance of caution” captures the precautionary principle in a more literary way. It has a lofty sound to it, connoting wisdom and restraint. The locution exploded in popularity in the spring of 2020 and has since become a go-to apology for Covid restrictions. “Out of an abundance of caution,” a Toronto school closed for a week after an itinerant staff member tested positive. “Out of an abundance of caution,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture advised people with Covid to keep distance from their pets. “Out of abundance of caution,” Singapore required quarantine for incoming travelers who had antibodies after recovering from Covid, on the chance they were infected with a new variant. “Out of an abundance of caution,” the Biden administration issued new travel bans in response to the Omicron variant.
It’s far past time we ask ourselves when abundance really means excess, when our precautionary measures against Covid have gone too far, when we have ignored the costs and lost all sense of proportionality.
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Used too liberally, the precautionary principle can keep us stuck in a state of extreme risk-aversion, leading to cumbersome policies that weigh down our lives. To get to the good parts of life, we need to accept some risk. We all seem to understand this in many areas of life. We do not, for instance, set a national speed limit at 30 miles per hour, despite the numerous lives we could save by doing so. Somewhere along the way, our society decided that the benefits of driving at faster speeds — family road trips, manageable commutes, visits to friends who live far away, adventure in remote places — balanced the risks. It’s called proportionality, and it’s how we have always lived our lives.
In ethics, the proportionality principle dictates that “responses should be proportional to the good that can be achieved and the harm that may be caused,” as Kate Jackson-Meyer from Boston College has put it. The principle pushes us to stretch our ethical muscles beyond the impulse to keep everyone as safe as possible this minute.
The Biden administration seems to think it knows better than physicians how to practice medicine. But its haphazard micromanagement of monoclonal antibodies to treat Covid-19 has created supply shortages, spread confusion, probably harmed patients, and undermined future treatment.
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The dizzying turns the Biden administration took on monoclonals shows just how little it trusts physicians and local health officials. Yet local officials and providers are more likely than Washington bureaucrats to be aware of the variants and effective treatments in their region.
New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital system, for example, suspended infusions of the Lilly and Regeneron products on Dec. 19 because of Omicron, without any apparent government instruction and four days before the federal distribution pause.
Regulating the practice of medicine is outside the FDA’s congressionally authorized authority—the statute explicitly prohibits it. The FDA can regulate drugs and devices to ensure they are safe and effective for their intended use, as indicated through labeling requirements. But physicians decide on treatments—including off-label prescribing of FDA-approved drugs and devices for unapproved uses—because they are best able to assess their patients’ circumstances and the evolving state of scientific knowledge. Off-label usage is common and the standard of care in many specialties, including oncology and pediatrics.
At an individual level, knowing your own infection status can be extremely helpful, for example if you are planning to visit a vulnerable relative or friend. However, as we all know, a positive test result can have significant negative impacts, particularly if it entails loss of income and opportunity. If the tests are too sensitive, the problem is even worse.
Furthermore, the truth is that we are permanently crawling with germs. Expecting the individual to bear responsibility for any infection that he or she might pass on risks leaving us all living in a state of permanent guilt. Normally, this guilt is dispersed within the community.
This is not to say that, during a pandemic, we should not exercise care to protect the vulnerable by limiting contact with them while we are infectious (in fact, I would highly recommend this) but it is also important to remember that once a disease has become endemic, there is little else we can do other than not visit granny when we have a fulminant cold.
But to what extent should we self-isolate upon testing positive or being told that we may have been in contact with someone who tested positive? As we have witnessed over the past few months, these actions do little to stop the spread of infection and create enormous problems for the delivery of healthcare and education. Sanctioning the use of tests that suggest people are contagious even when they are not magnifies the problem.
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Continuing with a mass testing, mass isolation strategy in response to a disease that has become endemic is merely piling up the misery. The Government must change course.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Wonderful that so many Twitter users are now opposing misguided, inefficient and unscientific Covid restrictions. You are the light at the end of the tunnel. Thank you.
(DBx: My friend Lyle Albaugh, however, will understandably – and not with a little bit of irritation – ask these Twitter users: What took you so long?)
Since DailyMail.com arrived in Ottawa last week we have seen no indication of violence or vandalism or any extremist political agenda. In fact, the demonstrations have shown the opposite.
Apart from the incessant honking of their horns, all has been peaceful. The truckers seem to have united the people of Canada in a common goal, to get rid of government mandates.
I’ve spent time in Melbourne myself and yes, I too could have happily lived there: benign climate, lots of parks and open spaces, great food, leafy suburbs. But that, according to Field, has been its undoing. Like California, he says, it has attracted so many woke urban professionals that it always votes left, ending up with permanently Labor party politicians who have zero incentive to flirt with a single conservative idea.
Perhaps this helps explains why so relatively few people resisted when state premier Dan Andrews used the ‘pandemic’ as an excuse to turn Victoria into an analogue of communist China. Perhaps the good lefties of Melbourne shared his belief in the transformative powers of the muscular state and agreed that desperate times call for Xi-like measures.
These measures included: a declared ‘state of disaster’ giving police carte blanche to enter your home and carry out spot checks without permission or a warrant; an 8pm to 5am curfew; a ban on leaving home in the day except for food and essentials, care and caregiving, daily exercise or work; exercise to last no longer than an hour and to be conducted within a 5km radius of your home; mandatory masks, even outdoors.
For those who bought into Andrews’s ‘zero Covid’ public health narrative, perhaps this seemed sensible and proportionate. Those few who did try to resist were ruthlessly crushed by the authorities: ‘ringleaders’ who tried to organise protests (including a pregnant woman) were arrested in their homes; police tactics at demos grew increasingly thuggish. On one occasion 500 protesters were ‘kettled’ for hours without water in the heat and arrested one by one; on another, the police fired baton rounds at unarmed demonstrators, causing hideous bruising; finally the authorities sent in hardcore anti-terrorist police to patrol the streets in armoured cars, raising understandable fears that sooner or later a civilian was going to get killed.
Chloe Carmichael worries about the effects of masking children. (HT Jay Bhattacharya) Two slices:
As a clinical psychologist and mother, I’m deeply concerned about masking children. Although I’m speaking from a psychology perspective rather than an infectious disease perspective, it may be a helpful backdrop to know that The New York Times reports that children have a greater risk from car rides than from covid. There are several domains where I’m concerned we’re inadvertently tampering with healthy development by masking children for multiple hours on a daily basis.
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Social cognition and language: It’s no surprise that social development for children includes learning to read and send social signals, including reading facial expressions. We’ll also include things like “reading lips” here as well, since reading lips helps young children tremendously to learn and understand language.
Social skills can be as basic as learning to recognize a smile as a friendly greeting and to offer one in return when you approach a group; or learning to not smile broadly when someone is wearing a sad expression telling a story about how their favorite toy got dumped in the garbage (it may be hard to believe for readers without experience with children, but the “toy in the garbage” story can actually sound quite funny to four-year-old ears).
Social cognition skill acquisition also includes things like learning the power of how cracking a slightly campy, sly, or nervous smile in a tense moment can help to introduce a touch of levity and decrease anxiety– for example, my five year old loves this type of humor in life’s “uh oh” moments like when he suddenly can’t find his special show-and-tell item anywhere at the exact “showtime” moment in class; and his (totally unmasked because I live in Florida) class will often respond to his sheepish smile with giggles that put him and themselves at ease. The same is true for other “faux distress” responses like an exaggerated sense of surprise.
Robby Soave sensibly asks why hypocritical politico Stacey Abrams is unmasked while the children are masked. Two slices:
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams visited an elementary school in Decatur, Georgia, on Friday. In a photo from the visit, Abrams is the only unmasked person; she is surrounded by a sea of masked children.
No one languishes under stricter COVID-19 mitigation measures more than the nation’s young people, even though the disease poses a far lower statistical risk to them. (Abrams, given her age and weight, would theoretically be in a higher risk category. But since she is vaccinated, she has little to fear from COVID-19.) All across the country, adults are permitted to be unmasked in a variety of circumstances, but many schools—particularly public schools in areas controlled by Democrats—remain mask-militant.
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Abrams lashed out at her critics for pouncing on the mask issue. “It is shameful that our opponents are using a Black History Month reading event for Georgia children as the impetus for a false political attack, and it is pitiful and predictable that our opponents continue to look for opportunities to distract from their failed records when it comes to protecting public health during the pandemic,” she wrote on Instagram.
If anyone should feel shame here, it’s those political figures who keep exposing themselves as hypocrites on COVID-19 mitigation efforts.
Here’s Reason‘s Jacob Sullum writing about the CDC’s new, highly defective study on the effectiveness of masks. Two slices:
A new study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) supposedly shows that wearing a face mask in public places dramatically reduces your risk of catching COVID-19. The CDC summed up the results in a widely shared graphic that says wearing a cloth mask “lowered the odds of testing positive” by 56 percent, while the risk reduction was 66 percent for surgical masks and 83 percent for N95 or KN95 respirators.
If you read the tiny footnotes, you will see that the result for cloth masks was not statistically significant. So even on its face, this study, which was published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on Friday, did not validate the protective effect of the most commonly used face coverings—a striking fact that the authors do not mention until the end of the sixth paragraph. And once you delve into the details of the study, it becomes clear that the results for surgical masks and N95s, while statistically significant, do not actually demonstrate a cause-and-effect relationship, contrary to the way the CDC is framing them.
That framing is part of a broader pattern. In 2020, the CDC went from dismissing the value of general mask wearing to describing it as “the most important, powerful public health tool we have.” In September 2020, then–CDC Director Robert Redfield asserted, without any evidence, that masks were more effective at preventing infection than vaccines would prove to be. Even before the spread of the highly contagious omicron variant, Redfield’s successor, Rochelle Walensky, implied the same thing, exaggerating the evidence supporting mask use in a way that made vaccination seem inferior.
The CDC consistently bends over backward to validate its recommendation that everyone, including children as young as 2, wear masks. It is thereby undermining its already damaged credibility by distorting what we actually know. In this case, the CDC is asserting a causal relationship without considering alternative explanations for the results it is touting.
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The CDC’s handling of this study has implications that extend beyond the empirical question of how well masks work. In this case and others, the agency has proven that it cannot be trusted to act as an honest broker of scientific information. The result is that Americans are increasingly skeptical of anything the CDC says, even when it is sensible and well-grounded. While the CDC’s desperate attempts to back up conclusions it has already reached may be aimed at protecting its reputation and credibility, they have the opposite effect.
In addition to controlling landlords, the CDC also ignores research that opposes its position on the robustness of natural immunity. According to famed Johns Hopkins researcher Marty Makary, the results of the latest data on reinfection rates demonstrated that “natural immunity was 2.8 times as effective in preventing hospitalization and 3.3 to 4.7 times as effective in preventing Covid infection compared with vaccination.”
Yet, the CDC spun the truth when reporting on this study. They claimed “vaccination remains the safest strategy for averting future SARS-CoV-2 infections, hospitalizations, long-term sequelae, and death,” based on a comparison between hybrid immunity (combination of prior infection and vaccination) with natural immunity. They did not clarify what the study’s results actually show: that vaccination does not significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization for those with natural immunity.
But why would they? These findings directly dispute the position held by the CDC and the Biden administration. The current CDC Director Rochelle Walensky will not budge on her position either. In October of 2020, she signed the John Snow Memorandum, which still states “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection.”
In almost all of the country, one is allowed to sit maskless for hours drinking in a crowded bar or watching a movie in a theater. If that behavior is allowed, it’s hard to see the reasoning behind stricter masking requirements aboard well-ventilated airplanes where the risk of COVID-19 transmission is low.
The long hours spent aboard planes or in airports, where face coverings are also mandated, make masking requirements all the more annoying and burdensome. That’s probably why masks are the immediate cause of so many in-flight altercations.
That certainly doesn’t excuse any individual passenger’s violent behavior, but it does suggest ending mask mandates would be a pretty straightforward means of preventing it.
(DBx: At least two people have told me over the past year that the requirement that masks be worn while in airports and on board airplanes dissuades them from flying. I’m sure many other people throughout the world are likewise dissuaded. Contrary to the assertions of many people, wearing a mask for hours on end is not a minor inconvenience. If the net effect of the masking requirement is to prompt greater use of automobiles for travel – especially, of course, for middle-distance travel, such as, say, for the 400 miles from Greenville, SC, to Richmond, VA – then, because driving is far more dangerous than flying, at least a few traffic fatalities and injuries must be counted as among the costs of Covid mandates.)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 135-136 of the late, great Wesleyan University economic historian Stanley Lebergott’s insightful 1975 book, Wealth and Want (footnote deleted; link added):
When an economy shifts from underemployment to high employment, incomes will rise. Reported income inequality may rise in consequence. For example, the increase in U.S. incomes from the 1930s to the 1940s led elderly persons to move out of their children’s homes into rooms and apartments of their own. Presumably both the older persons and the families with growing children found that separate establishments provided a real advance in their welfare. Yet the usual income distribution data will report an increase in inequality: the number of “low-income families” – in the form of newly created “families” of older persons who had previously been included with their children – has increased.
Similarly, the stronger the labor market, the earlier young people find work and establish homes of their own. As a result, instead of one family being reported, with a combined income including the incomes of young persons and older persons, two families will be reported – each with a lower income.
February 7, 2022
Once Again, Being Worthwhile to Incur Does Not Turn Costs Into Benefits
Here’s a letter to a reader from Georgia:
Mr. B__:
Thanks for your e-mail.
You don’t understand how I can “back the view that exports are a cost and not a benefit given how many companies are happy to export and how many others want to.”
The answer is straightforward. While you’re correct that many companies happily export, and many more would like to join their ranks, exporting is desirable only because it is a means of acquiring goods and services ultimately for consumption. What makes exporters happy is not the act itself of producing goods and services for delivery to foreigners. Instead, what makes exporters happy are the earnings they receive from their export sales – earnings that are then used to purchase goods and services for use here at home. If exporters were prohibited from spending the money they earn on their sales, they’d no longer be happy to export. They’d immediately stop exporting.
If you’re still unconvinced, consider the following. Suppose you’re given a choice between two options: (A) Work full-time but never be allowed to spend your earnings, or (B) Never have to work, but receive earnings as if you do work – earnings that you’re free to spend. If these are your only two options, the clearly better option is (B). The reason is that working – which is simply you producing goods or services for “export” to persons outside of your household – is a means for you to increase the number of real goods and services that you’re able to “import” into your household.
Producing goods and services for sale to strangers is a means, and a valuable one at that. That’s why people are happy to have jobs and why companies are happy to export to foreign countries. But means should not be confused with ends. And the end of all productive activity – including production for export abroad – is consumption. Exports are costs that we incur to acquire imports; exports are not an end in themselves.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
Some Covid Links
John Tierney puts into proper perspective the odds of vaccinated individuals dying from Covid. Three slices:
The researchers report that none of the healthy people under 65 had a severe case of Covid that required treatment in an intensive-care unit. Not a single one of these nearly 700,000 people died, and the risk was miniscule for most older people, too. Among vaccinated people over 65 without an underlying medical condition, only one person died. In all, there were 36 deaths, mostly among a small minority of older people with a multitude of comorbidities: the 3 percent of the sample that had at least four risk factors. Among everyone else, a group that included elderly people with one or two chronic conditions, there were just eight deaths among more than 1.2 million people, so their risk of dying was about 1 in 150,000.
Those are roughly the same odds that in the course of a year you will die in a fire, or that you’ll perish by falling down stairs. Going anywhere near automobiles is a bigger risk: you’re three times more likely during a given year to be killed while riding in a car, and also three times more likely to be a pedestrian casualty. The 150,000-to-1 odds of a Covid death are even longer than the odds over your lifetime of dying in an earthquake or being killed by lightning.
…..
Of course, the threat of Covid is greater for unvaccinated adults, but why should their personal decision to take that risk arouse so much angst among those who are safely vaccinated? The original argument for vaccine mandates—that they were necessary to stop the spread—is obsolete, now that it’s clear that vaccination doesn’t prevent reinfection and transmission. Even if vaccines might slow the spread, they won’t prevent the virus from eventually reaching everyone. In any case, the risk to the vaccinated is so low that there’s no justification for forcing everyone else to be jabbed.
Nor is there any justification for mandating masks or vaccines for schoolchildren. Even if masks were effective—and the weight of evidence shows that they do little or no good—it would make no sense to require them in classrooms where the risk is so low to everyone (including the vaccinated teachers). Some children with serious health problems could benefit from being vaccinated, but for others the vaccine offers virtually no benefit while risking rare and unforeseen side effects. By analyzing the rates of death and infection in 2020, before the arrival of vaccines, Cathrine Axfors and John Ioannidis of Stanford calculate that the risk of death for children and adolescents who were infected with the virus was 0.001 percent—one in 100,000. The risk today is lower still thanks to better treatments.
The recent scare stories about children hospitalized for Covid are based on inflated statistics. Studies have found that nearly half of the children whom the CDC classified as hospitalized Covid cases are actually being treated for other conditions and just happened to test positive.
…..
If those odds still aren’t enough to assuage your dread of Covid, consider one more statistic, based on Ioannidis’s analysis of data from Covid tests and seroprevalence surveys. He estimates that in the United States, a nation of 331 million people, there have been a total of 250 million to 350 million Covid infections since the pandemic began. While that estimate includes some people who were infected more than once, it seems clear that the vast majority of Americans have already survived an infection and acquired natural immunity, many without being aware of it. Many don’t realize—and a horde of journalists and public officials are working hard to keep them ignorant—that their enemy today is not a virus in the air but the fear in their minds.
when you are the one opposing peaceful people standing up for freedom to choose and basic human agency and bodily integrity, you are not the “tank man.” you are the tank.
John Palmer reflects sensibly on Covid vaccines and vitamin D.
Vinay Prasad is unimpressed with new ‘research’ – published in a CDC journal – on masks. Here’s his conclusion:
But I am more disappointed in smart scientists who share this essay. They are losing their credibility. I am sad to see it.
Ultimately, the CDC and NIH failed us. The agencies should have run a half-dozen masking cluster RCTs under different conditions, and for different ages. We were starving, and we needed this loaf of bread. Instead, the CDC published flawed study after flawed study. It didn’t even give us crumbs; it gave us a fistful of sand. Starving, we swallowed each grain, and begged for more. Medical leaders told us to fill our bowl before it runs out. Science lies on its deathbed.
After seeing a photo of Stacey Abrams smiling maskless amidst a crowd of masked school children (and school staff), the New York Post Editorial Board expresses appropriate criticism of Covid-hypocritical Progressives. Here’s the conclusion:
We’ve all been taken for suckers. The liberal elite is out partying in the Hamptons, at French Laundry and in luxury suites while the rest of us get bullied and condescended to.
Enough! These people aren’t worth listening to, they aren’t worth voting for. This isn’t about science. It’s about control. Want to know why Americans have lost faith in government? Look in the mirror, you feckless jackasses.
Joel Zinberg writes on the lockdown study by Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve Hanke. A slice:
A new study from Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Applied Economics supports what I and others have long maintained: lockdowns do not work, and their economic, social, educational, and psychological costs far outweigh any health benefits they might bring.
Early in the pandemic, epidemiological modelers predicted catastrophic casualties that could be averted only with stringent lockdown measures. In response, nearly every country around the world imposed lockdown measures by the end of March 2020. Yet little evidence existed to support such actions, and the modeling studies were fatally flawed. Now the Hopkins literature review and meta-analysis, by Professors Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve Hanke, finds that lockdowns—“defined as the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI)” such as school and business closures and limitations on movement and travel—“had little to no effect on Covid-19 mortality.”
The authors reviewed thousands of studies and culled 34 that had reliable and sufficiently relevant data to review. The results were mixed: several studies found no statistically significant effect of lockdowns on mortality; other studies found a significant negative relationship between lockdowns and mortality; and others found a significant positive relationship between lockdowns and mortality—i.e., that lockdowns actually increased deaths from Covid-19.
When the authors performed a meta-analysis—a statistical technique that combines the results of multiple studies addressing the same question and uses the pooled data to draw conclusions—they found that lockdowns failed to show a large significant effect on Covid-19 mortality: “the effect is little to none.”
The Hopkins findings echo and confirm the conclusions in an April 2021 review by Canadian economist Douglas Allen that lockdowns had little or no impact on the number of Covid-19 deaths. Allen’s review of studies that distinguished between voluntary and mandated lockdown effects found that voluntary changes in behavior explained most of the changes in cases and deaths. In a January 2021 review, Danish economist Jonas Herby, a coauthor of the Hopkins study, found that voluntary behavioral changes were ten times as important as mandatory measures in limiting the growth of the pandemic.
Matt Ridley decries the WHO’s complicity in maintaining Beijing’s smokescreen. A slice:
During 2020 the WHO took several months to negotiate the terms of a visit to China to investigate the origin of the virus. When that team eventually visited Wuhan in January 2021, they were treated to a strictly controlled tourist itinerary that included a museum and the wrong campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, followed by a risible press conference at which they endorsed a fanciful Chinese theory that the virus might have been imported from frozen food.
During these many months, the British government kept telling me that we should leave it to the WHO to carry out such investigations. So the WHO’s role was to prevent a proper investigation, albeit inadvertently.
Who can forget the constant images during the pandemic warning people to stay indoors to ‘save lives’, students being told that breaking the rules would be ‘killing their granny’, or the ‘Look him in the eyes’ campaign, which showed Covid patients in hospital wearing an oxygen mask, imploring people to never bend the rules and to keep a ‘safe distance’ from others. Even now, as the number of Covid cases continues to fall, we are surrounded by billboards showing black Covid particles hanging in the air like smoke, enveloping people going about their everyday lives.
The consequences of this unprecedented state-sanctioned campaign have been visible everywhere: from the old lady in the street, paralysed with fear of contamination from another human, darting into the road to avoid someone walking the other way, to the neighbour donning a face covering and plastic gloves to wheel the dustbin to the end of her drive. These kinds of incidents are the product of an intensive messaging campaign, designed by the government’s behavioural scientists, to ‘nudge’ us into compliance with the Covid-19 restrictions and the subsequent vaccine rollout.
…..
But three particular interventions during the pandemic raise major ethical concerns: fear inflation, equating compliance with virtue and the encouragement of peer pressure to conform. The use of these covert psychological strategies infringe the basic ethical principles of psychological practice.
It can be argued that a civilised society should not strategically frighten, shame and scapegoat its citizens as a way to increase compliance. This deliberate creation of distress resembles the tactics used by regimes to eliminate beliefs and behaviours that the state thinks is deviant.
And the collateral damage associated with these methods is considerable. It is likely that fear inflation may have significantly contributed to non-Covid excess deaths recorded during the pandemic. Meanwhile, the shaming and scapegoating of the those deemed to be non-compliers has inevitable created minority outgroups (the unvaccinated, for example) that others feel empowered to vilify and verbally abuse.
Here’s excellent satire from The Babylon Bee – satire that is disturbingly believable. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 229-230 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:
We gain from what we get, not from what we give up. We gain from imports embodying foreign resources; exports are a cost, a drain, for our economy, with American production utilized by the rest of the world.
DBx: Indeed so. And so, therefore, that great geyser of cronyism, the U.S. Export-Import Bank, by subsidizing foreigners’ purchases of American exports, uses American taxpayers’ money to fund a net drain of resources from the American economy. The fact that such an agency as the Ex-Im Bank not only survives, but is widely (although not universally!) regarded as beneficial, testifies to the toxic mixture of grotesque cronyism with the general-public’s deep economic ignorance.
February 6, 2022
Putting Kids Last
I wish that I believed in karma, because much of the bad variety is owed to Covidocrats – including those who comprise ‘teachers’ unions and who infest the K-12 government-‘schooling’ establishment. (HT Nate Hochman)
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