Russell Roberts's Blog, page 181

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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In this new paper, Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve Hanke review the record of Covid-19 lockdowns. Here’s the abstract:

This systematic review and meta-analysis are designed to determine whether there is empirical evidence to support the belief that “lockdowns” reduce COVID-19 mortality. Lockdowns are defined as the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI). NPIs are any government mandate that directly restrict peoples’ possibilities, such as policies that limit internal movement, close schools and businesses, and ban international travel. This study employed a systematic search and screening procedure in which 18,590 studies are identified that could potentially address the belief posed. After three levels of screening, 34 studies ultimately qualified. Of those 34 eligible studies, 24 qualified for inclusion in the meta-analysis. They were separated into three groups: lockdown stringency index studies, shelter-in-place- order (SIPO) studies, and specific NPI studies. An analysis of each of these three groups support the conclusion that lockdowns have had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality. More specifically, stringency index studies find that lockdowns in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average. SIPOs were also ineffective, only reducing COVID-19 mortality by 2.9% on average. Specific NPI studies also find no broad-based evidence of noticeable effects on COVID-19 mortality.

While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.

Here’s Joakim Book writing on the above-mentioned new paper.

Jacob Sullum asks: “Why can’t the CDC admit there is no solid evidence to support ‘universal masking’ in schools?” A slice:

The usual way to address these problems is by conducting randomized, controlled trials. But no such studies of masking in schools have been conducted—a pretty striking omission for an intervention that affects millions of children across the country. Even for masking in general, there is a dearth of such evidence. While laboratory studies provide compelling evidence that masks—especially N95 respirators—can reduce virus transmission, it remains unclear what impact they have in real-world settings, where masks may not be clean, may not fit properly, and may not be worn correctly

That uncertainty is compounded when mask requirements are imposed on children as young as 2, which may help explain why the purported benefits of school mask mandates have been so hard to verify. A preprint study based on data from Florida for the 2020–21 school year, for example, found no association between mask policies and case rates. Smelkinson et al. cite other data from Tennessee, Florida, North Dakota, and the U.K. that likewise are not consistent with the assumption that school mask mandates reduce virus transmission. [Vinay] Prasad notes that data from Spain also do not support that belief.

Jeffrey Tucker deplores the despicable treatment accorded Martin Kulldorff by LinkedIn.

Raymond March reports on continuing government blunders during omicron.

Vinay Prasad decries the Covid “weathervanes.” Two slices:

You might think Covid-19 policy divides into people you agree with and people you don’t, but often there are persuasive pundits who change your mind, or alternatively people with whom you are in partial agreement.

Instead, I think a key distinction is people who have their own opinions (some are right, and some are wrong) and those who blow in whatever direction the wind is blowing. The weathervanes. I believe that Covid-19 weathervane pundits are a real problem. Without a doubt, people on the wrong side of policy issues— the pro-school closure, pro-masking toddlers, ignore vax-induced myocarditis, pro-lockdown, Zero-Covid zealots—harm other human beings, but weathervanes do too. Weathervanes stifle debate. They prevent dialog and halt progress.

What is a weathervane? You will recognize them— they are frequently on TV news giving updates on the pandemic. These are people in biomedicine, who may even have fancy titles and lofty ranks, and they are good at averaging what people think, and offering that point of view. Their method is simple: read the mainstream news outlets, closely follow academic Twitter, and average the opinion of people they see. Of course, they are averaging the last few days, so they are always a lagging indicator of sentiment among the media and elites.

Weathervanes often have similar characteristics. First, they self-identify as ‘science communicators’ and less often as ‘scientists.’ Some have published papers, but these are often unoriginal and plodding. Rarely, in their scientific work have they held a position or stance against others in their own field or discipline. Almost never has their work taken place on a controversial issue, in the midst of a scientific debate.
…..
Weathervanes fill the nightly news, the talk shows, the op-ed columns. They write op-eds averaging other op-eds. Perhaps less than 4 in 10 op-eds are written by someone who has an original opinion, and 6 in 10 are weathervaning the other 4. It is like a daisy chain of electronics. You have 2 refrigerators, 3 computers, 2 TVs, 15 lights, a drier, and an air conditioner running off 4 daisy-chained surge protectors plugged into an old crusty socket. Is it any wonder the lights keep going off?

Weathervanes are often defensive. Since they don’t operate under principles or reason from data, they fear rigorous questioning. They try to evade or deflect questions. They portray others with original opinions as holding ‘extreme’ views— even if the truth is one extreme or the other. This portrayal helps them preserve their reputation as someone who knows what they are talking about. Confrontation is the last thing they want.

The truth is, weathervanes torpedo real dialogue and debate. It would be better to hear dueling pairs of debaters. Folks with strong, divergent opinions. News outlets are scared to hold these debates. Even universities are scared. Instead, we all want weathervanes. They make us feel better. Fewer angry emails to the sponsor. But the public and other scientists are deprived of a real full-throated debate on the issues.

“Sweden has now stopped recommending covid vaccination for all but high risk children from 5-11 because ‘we don’t see any clear benefit to vaccinating them'” – so reports el gato malo.

Andrew Lawton tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

[Canadian trucker] Convoy critics point to high vaccination rates as evidence the truckers and their supporters are a fringe minority. The fact that 90% of Canadians have been vaccinated and we’re still in lockdown with myriad restrictions is why people – including the vaccinated – are protesting.

And the truck convoy will soon head to Washington, DC.

Martin Kulldorff tweets:

Two weeks to flatten the curve became two years to flatten the working class.

Here’s an unsurprising headline in today’s Telegraph: “[British] Government nudge unit ‘used grossly unethical tactics to scare public into Covid compliance’.” A slice:

The letter added: “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 behaviour they perceive to be deviant.”

The Government’s “nudge unit” was established in the Cabinet Office in 2010 and is designed to apply behavioural science principles to public policy.

It has been used to encourage the public to pay their taxes, turn up in court and donate their organs when they die.

It is officially known as the “behavioural insights team”, but little is known about how it actually operates.

Naomi Firsht explains that “Macron’s divisive Covid strategy has categorically failed.” A slice:

Meanwhile, French parents must be tearing their hair out as current Covid regulations mean that if one schoolchild tests positive for Covid, the entire class is sent home and not allowed to return without a negative test. This has led to queues out the door of pharmacies providing Covid testing. On Tuesday morning, the French education minister said that 4 per cent of French classrooms were shut due to Covid.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 305 of Jonah Goldberg’s excellent 2008 book, Liberal Fascism (footnote deleted):

Most businesses are like beehives. If government doesn’t bother them, they don’t bother government. If government meddles with business, the bees swarm Washington. Yet time and again, the liberal “remedy” for the bee problem is to smack the hive with a bigger stick. There are hundreds of medical industry lobbies, for specific diseases, specialities, and forms of treatment, each of which spends a fortune in direct and indirect lobbying and advertising. Do you know which medical profession spends almost nothing? Veterinary care. Why? Because Congress spends almost no time regulating it. Why do pharmaceutical industries spend so much money lobbying politicians and regulators? Because they are so heavily regulated that they cannot make major decisions without a by-your-leave from Washington.

DBx: Of course, these bees are special. They only appear to hassle and sting Washington insiders. These insiders can point to the swarming bees and declare to the public how very annoying are these insects. But in fact these bees inflict on Washington insiders no harm or pain; these insiders receive from these bees political support in return for crony-nectar that the bees promptly turn into Potomac honey – a sweetener enjoyed only by the bees and the nectar-supplying insiders.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is the opening line of George Will’s latest column – a column titled “Biden proposes saddling an already struggling Federal Reserve with two political activists.

[image error]Today’s Federal Reserve illustrates this axiom: When a government entity cannot, or would rather not, adequately perform its primary function, or when it feels that its primary function is insufficiently grand, the agency will expand its mission, thereby distracting attention from its core inadequacy.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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“The District of Columbia plans to suspend a burger joint’s liquor license because it has been refusing to check its customers’ vaccination papers” – so reports Christian Britschgi.

Jeffrey Tucker writes about tomorrow’s (Saturday’s) huge protest in Canada by truckers against vaccine mandates. A slice:

It’s a massive workers’ strike but not the kind of communist dreams. This is a “working class” movement that stands squarely for freedom against all the impositions of the last two years, which were imposed by an overclass with almost no consultation from legislatures. Canada has had some of the worst, much to the shock of its citizens. The convoy is an enormous show of power concerning who really keeps the country running.

The convoy is being joined by truckers from all over the US too, rising up in solidarity. This is easily the most meaningful and impactful protest to emerge in North America. It is being joined by as many as half a million Canadian citizens, who overwhelmingly support this protest, as one can observe from the cheers on the highway along the way. Indeed, it’s likely to break the record for the largest trucker convoy in history, as well as the most loved.

Here’s another report on the happy news that Denmark is lifting nearly all Covid restrictions. (HT Martin Kulldorff)

Fraser Myers celebrates the retreat of Britain’s Covidocracy. A slice:

So while it is understandable that nothing will quite match the joy – the relief – of the first Freedom Day in July 2021, today’s easing is still worth celebrating. If, before March 2020, a disease as mild as the Omicron variant of Covid had hit a population with as much immunity as Britain’s, you would have been laughed out of town for suggesting even the most mild of social restrictions. Plan B restrictions, like mandatory masking and showing a digital health ID to attend a large gathering, only seem tolerable because we naturally contrast them with what came before. So today’s easing of the rules is at least worth remarking on more than is currently the case.

Partly this is because the government that is returning our freedoms is too mired in scandals of its own making to make hay of it. And when it is not tying itself in knots over partygate, it is busying itself with getting entangled in other countries’ affairs. But in truth, Boris Johnson’s government has consistently struggled to make a virtue out of its rare flashes of liberalism. It has always been far too cautious. Too slow to open up. And, until this winter, too quick to react to SAGE’s prophecies of doom.

The editors of the Telegraph argue for the removal in Britain of all remaining Covid restrictions. A slice:

It is evident that for a significant number of public sector employees, working from home has become the norm; indeed, it appears that for many this state of affairs predates the pandemic. Furthermore, although it is no longer mandatory for children to wear face coverings in class, some schools continue to insist that they should – an imposition on pupils that is no longer justified, if it ever was, and which should end.

The one remaining imposition is mass testing, which is becoming increasingly pointless and harmful given the large numbers with omicron. In particular, the expectation that the oldest and most vulnerable in society living in care homes and hospitals should be locked away for weeks in isolation for no reason or benefit to anyone is the greatest outrage of all.

Brendan O’Neill is rightly disappointed in Neil Young. Four slices:

Just look at Neil Young. The one-time cocaine-stained hero of LA’s alternative scene, singer of angry songs about Vietnam and the Kent State massacre, participant with Crosby, Stills and Nash in the Freedom of Speech Tour of 2006, is now basically pleading with a huge corporation to silence people he doesn’t like. From protest singer to agitator for capitalist censorship? What a fall.

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Young vs Rogan is so 2020s. On one side we have the grizzled rocker angry about having to share a streaming platform with the giant of the podcasting world. In an open letter published (and swiftly unpublished) on his website, Young issued Spotify with an ultimatum: ‘They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.’ His beef? That Rogan ‘[spreads] fake information about vaccines’. That could kill people, he said, depressingly borrowing a belief from the kind of stiffs he once raged against – ie, that words wound, heresies hurt, blasphemies pollute men’s souls and bodies, and thus people with clout must clamp down on them. And on the other side there’s Rogan, not so much a man as a media industry, whose pod gets more than 10million listeners per episode. No wonder Spotify recently snapped it up for a cool $100million, in the process pissing off some of its own woke staff as well as Young and other people who believe, quite remarkably, that they have the right to glide through life without ever encountering an utterance they disapprove of.

…..

Some observers have deluded themselves into thinking that Young’s punch-up with Spotify is a continuation of his 60s and 70s rebellious streak, proof that the old dog still bristles at ‘established authority’. Come off it. Young is not challenging corporate power – he’s demanding a keener, more ruthless exercising of corporate power. He’s not calling for shackles to be put on a marauding big business – he’s insisting that a big business shackle a man whose views he considers to be dangerous. The Rogan-loathers of the liberal media can kid themselves all they like that one of the great hippies has risen up to confront the new capitalism and one of its allegedly most reckless cultural outputs, but in truth Young is laying waste to his own free-wheelin’, speech-defendin’ counter-authoritarian personal history by demanding the expulsion of Rogan from Spotify in the same way horrified pink-rinsed ladies once demanded the censorship of hippy revolt. (‘Ohio’, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s song about Kent State, was banned by numerous radio stations in 1970 for being anti-Nixon.)

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Fast forward to 2022, and the man who battled the censors for the right to mock Nixon, and who stood up to bomb threats over his criticisms of Bush, is running scared from… Joe Rogan? The hippie has become the stiff. The free-speech warrior has morphed into an aspiring censor. The battler against ‘established authority’ has become a supporter of established authority’s right to shut down those who are ‘dangerous’. Most ironically of all, the man who made a whole album of songs containing BS anti-scientific claims about genetically modified organisms – hippies are often idiots – now thinks he has the moral authority to bash Spotify for hosting anti-scientific chat about Covid vaccines. What a mess.

Well, I hope Neil Young will remember, Joe Rogan don’t need him around anyhow.

Rich Lowry rightly criticizes the American left’s mindless addiction to mask-theater for schoolchildren. Two slices:

The supporters of mask mandates are fired by a righteous certainty that if a child comes to school unmasked, his or her school and community are at risk of a devastating outbreak of COVID; that parents who don’t want to mask their kids are selfish and uncaring boobs who need to turn off Fox News; that public officials who block mask mandates, or carve out exemptions for objecting parents, have blood on their hands.

The mask proponents either have no idea that the United States is an international outlier in its school mask mandates (neither the European health authority nor the World Health Organization go as far as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and that there’s next to no evidence for public-health benefits. Or they simply don’t care because they are too attached to the theater of masked-up kids, in some jurisdictions even while they are outside for recess.

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Although there are still some holdouts who believe so-called remote learning was a necessary and costless mitigation strategy, it is now widely acknowledged to have had grievous educational costs with no public-health rationale. Jonathan Chait of New York magazine wrote a retrospective on the schools debate the other day headlined “School Closures Were a Catastrophic Error. Progressives Still Haven’t Reckoned With It.”

Justin Spiro tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

I was at a high school sporting event, and the referee told the athletes to pull their mask away from their face – but not below their nose – if they needed a quick breather while playing.

Apparently if the nose is not visible, we are safe!

COVID Theater is maddening.

Writing from his home near Auckland, David Seymour decries the harm that “lockdown-loving lefties” have inflicted, and continue to inflict, throughout New Zealand. Three slices:

But here in our far-flung corner of the Southern Hemisphere, isolated behind our still-sealed border, we endlessly push around a hamster wheel of ever more wearying rules and restrictions.

Among them is a staggering isolation period of up to 24 days for those in households where someone has tested positive, a mandatory cap of 100 vaccinated people at public events — a devastating imposition on the entertainment industry in this, our peak summer season — and compulsory mask wearing almost everywhere, including for school pupils aged eight and up.

You might think that only a devastating upward spiral of deaths and serious illness could justify continuing such measures, not to mention introducing new ones.

Alas not. They were introduced last week after confirmation of just nine new cases of Omicron, largely centred on a family who contracted the virus on a trip to Auckland for a wedding from their home in the South Island.

Nine new cases in a country where 93 per cent of the population is now double vaccinated — but nine cases too many for our Left-wing Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, committed as she apparently is to a policy of ‘Zero Covid’ at any cost.

To coin the phrase of one of her predecessors, Sir John Key, her policies are turning us into a ‘hermit kingdom’.

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It is desperately sad to watch the confident, free society I have always loved give way to this closeted, insular one, bound by what feels like ever-more authoritarian measures with no end in sight.

To add insult to injury, we are effectively banned from testing ourselves for Covid, as happens all over the world.

Only a ‘trained tester’ such as a medic or a pharmacist is allowed to do the job, and anyone who imports rapid antigen tests for home use could face up to six months in jail.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 2 of my colleague Bryan Caplan’s brilliant 2007 book, The Myth of the Rational Voter:

Economists have long argued that voter ignorance is a predictable response to the fact that one vote doesn’t matter. Why study the issues if you can’t change the outcome? I generalize this insight: Why control your knee-jerk emotional and ideological reactions if you can’t change the outcome?

More on the Late, Great Walter Williams

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a further contribution of mine to this month’s Liberty Matters discussion of my late, great colleague Walter Williams – a discussion both of the man and his work. Here’s my conclusion:

That these interventions today are often supported by people whose motives are emphatically not racist does not render these interventions immune from the charge of being systematically racist. If these interventions’ ill-consequences have – as they do – a distinctly racist profile, then the term “systemic racism” is appropriate.

An important difference between Walter and Progressives on this front is that Walter rightly rejected Progressives’ childish belief that racist intentions are both sufficient and necessary for racist outcomes. It is this naïve understanding of systemic racism that Walter spurned. And while he might, to avoid verbal confusion, also have spurned the term “systemic racism,” he certainly understood that the economic, the political, and the legal system each can be perverted by policies that inflict disproportionate harm on blacks and other minority groups. Very much of Walter’s life work was aimed at exposing such consequences.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from an e-mail that my friend Jon Fortier, during a discussion yesterday of omicron, sent to a listserve to which he and I contribute; I share this line with Jon’s kind permission:

Remember when we used to fight the flu with cups of tea and rest instead of communism?

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor Marty Makary explains the danger of disparaging natural immunity. A slice:

The CDC study and ours confirm what more than 100 other studies on natural immunity have found: The immune system works. The largest of these studies, from Israel, found that natural immunity was 27 times as effective as vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic illness.

None of this should surprise us. For years, studies have shown that infection with the other coronaviruses that cause severe illness, SARS and MERS, confers lasting immunity. In a study published in May 2020, Covid-recovered monkeys that were rechallenged with the virus didn’t get sick.

Public-health officials have a lot of explaining to do. They used the wrong starting hypothesis, ignored contrary preliminary data, and dug in as more evidence emerged that called their position into question. Many, including Rochelle Walensky, now the CDC’s director, signed the John Snow memorandum in October 2020, which declared that “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection.”

Many clinicians who talk to other physicians nationwide had have long observed that we don’t see reinfected patients end up on a ventilator or die from Covid, with rare exceptions who almost always have immune disorders. Meanwhile, public-health officials recklessly destroyed the careers of everyday Americans, rallying to fire pilots, truck drivers and others in the supply-chain workforce who didn’t get vaccinated. And in the early months of the vaccine rollout, when supplies were limited, we could have saved many more lives by giving priority to those who didn’t have recorded natural immunity.

The failure to recognize the data on natural immunity is hurting U.S. hospitals, especially in rural areas.

Michael Tracey is rightly critical of “bureaucrats riding the Omicron wave.” A slice:

Still, there are a multitude of contexts in which publicly objecting to various aspects Omicron-mania, no matter how narrowly-tailored those objections may be, could automatically place you under a cloud of suspicion — whereby you’re tarnished as “anti-vax” (regardless of whether you are personally vaccinated.) And of course, being “anti-vax” is widely viewed as interchangeable with being dangerously right-wing, which would also make you presumably sympathetic to “insurrectionists” — or perhaps even an “insurrectionist” yourself. Should we get the FBI on the phone, sir? The “MAGA” connotation here is especially odd, given that Donald Trump could not be more resolute in staking out an unwaveringly pro-vaccine stance, but the logical progression doesn’t have to make sense. This is more or less the school of thought that still, yes, today, dictates the social expectations at a wide variety of institutions, leading to absurdities of the kind that I’m about to list here. Someone’s gotta collect these, I guess, for posterity. Notwithstanding how very tedious it is. So, that’s what I’m doing.

Here’s a wild one I was told about recently: Oberlin College. Are you familiar with it? Depending on your level of familiarity, it may or may not surprise you that the dramatic “return to campus” earlier this month was accompanied by a host of hyper-scrupulous measures to ensure maximum Safety for the Community™. Professors — yes, fully accredited professors — were enlisted as emergency food delivery attendants for students consigned to “isolation.” This process entailed intensive “training” sessions, including instruction on the “Knock, Drop, Depart” rule, as well as how to accommodate students’ special dietary needs. (By the way, Oberlin recently laid off a huge percentage of its actual food service staff.)

Did you think “travel bans” were a thing of the past? Not at Princeton University, where students have been prohibited from traveling outside of Mercer County, NJ. (Mercifully, they’re also allowed to go to Plainsboro Township, in adjoining Middlesex County.) Anyone brazen enough to seek an exemption must undergo an unspecified “vetting process,” according to Dean Jill Dolan, who I hope it’s not rude to note is a Theater professor moonlighting as the university’s chief epidemiologist and emergency behavioral scientist. She previously ran the Gender and Sexuality Studies program.

Well, who’d a-thunk that what is documented here by my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy would actually have come to pass: Government officials riding Covid hysteria to spend other people’s money lavishly?

Jacob Sullum’s latest essay is titled “Japan’s COVID-19 Strategy, Focused on Warnings Rather Than Mandates, Points the Way Forward.” A slice:

But contrary to the conventional wisdom in most other developed countries, [Japanese virologist Hitoshi] Oshitani says, “drastic measures, such as lockdowns, were never taken because the goal was always to find ways to live with Covid-19.” He adds that Japanese law “does not allow for lockdowns, so the country could not have declared them even if we had thought them necessary.”

How did that work out? “Broadly speaking,” Oshitani says, “Japan has weathered Covid-19 well.” If anything, that is an understatement. According to Worldometer’s numbers, Japan has seen 147 COVID-19 deaths per 1 million people. The rate for the United States is 18 times as high. The U.S. currently ranks 19th on Worldometer’s list of countries by COVID-19 fatality rates, while Japan is 154th. Even U.S. states that imposed lockdowns early and often, such as California and New York, have much higher fatality rates (about 2,000 and 3,300 per million, respectively) than Japan.

In the once-free country of Australia, Sarah Mclellan is angry. A slice:

It has been a hard time and what’s looming now is far worse. They are coming for the kids, and they are relentless. If we do not act now, the government will place further restrictions on the children by not allowing them to participate in certain social activities if not double, triple, and quadrupled jabbed. The mandates are not scientifically backed but, like almost every other ‘health orders’, they are politically motivated.

We are still waiting to see the health advise that led to the lockdowns, the closure of the playgrounds, the curfews etc… And should I even mention the Novak debacle? What an embarrassment. The evidence to support the orders is never shown by the government because there is no evidence. None of substance anyway. And now they want our kids injected – for what? A virus that is so minuscule in its impact on them that it’s negligible? But, I’ll volunteer my child to roll up her sleeve so you can drug her with a substance that has known serious side effects, known deaths and unknown long-term effects. Certainly, I see the benefits of injecting my child. She will protect others and herself. Oh wait, no that cannot be right. It does not limit the spread and it doesn’t stop her from getting Covid. Um hang on…

Great news from Denmark: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

JUST IN – Denmark no longer classifies COVID-19 as a “socially critical disease,” all restrictions will be lifted from February 1 – PM Mette Frederiksen

el gato malo notes the massive size of the anti-Covidocracy protest in Ottawa.

el gato malo also notes the intransitivity of the Covidocracy’s ‘science.’

Jacob Sullum isn’t buying OSHA’s promise threat to impose Biden’s abominable vaccine mandate through the regular channels of making administrative law diktats. A slice:

Today the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) officially withdrew its “emergency” vaccinate-or-test mandate for private employers, acknowledging that the Supreme Court’s January 13 stay blocking the rule’s enforcement means it has no realistic chance of surviving judicial review. At the same time, OSHA said it may yet seek to impose a similar mandate through the usual rule-making process.

That is quite unlikely to happen, both because of the time that process requires and because of the Supreme Court’s reasoning in granting the stay. Given these realities, any talk of turning the rescinded “emergency temporary standard” (ETS) into a permanent rule should be viewed as little more than a bureaucratic face-saving gesture.

Aaron Kheriaty understandably wonders what Pfizer might be hiding:

Pfizer has intervened in our FOIA request to the FDA for release of their vaccine safety/efficacy data, which the judge ordered to be released in 8 mos. DOJ lawyers for the FDA agreed that they want Pfizer’s help in redacting the documents before release.

Tory MP Bob Seely, writing in the Daily Mail about Neil Ferguson and other reckless Covid ‘modelers,’ says that “never before has so much harm been done to so many by so few, based on so little, potentially flawed data. It is a national scandal.” Here are two more slices:

This is not just the fault of the modellers. It is how their work was interpreted by public health officials, by the media and, yes, by politicians and by government, too.

Modelling and forecasts were the ammunition that drove lockdown and created a climate of manipulated fear which was despicable and unforgivable.

I don’t doubt that modelling is important, or that there has been some good modelling. But, too often, it has been drowned out by hysterical forecasts.

I do not have, as Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London has implied, ‘an axe to grind’. I do, however, care about truth.

If you influence policy as the modellers have done, you should be rigorously questioned. Frankly, they have not been questioned enough.

…..

So I’ve got a question for Professor Ferguson and the doomsday modellers: Why are so many of your fellow academics disputing your work and your findings?

To the BBC: why did you so rarely challenge Ferguson, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) or independent SAGE? Why did you allow yourself to become the propaganda arm of the lockdown state?

To government: how could we have been so blinkered to think that following the science meant shutting down scientific debate?

Why did we never use other data sets in context with the British people? Why did we think it was in our nation’s interest to create a grotesque sense of fear to manipulate behaviour?

Twice in 20 years we have made errors of judgment using modelling. Never again should government rely on this glorified guesswork.

(DBx: Yes, but the scandal isn’t confined to Britain. It’s international. Neil Ferguson and his ilk, with their reckless modeling, fueled worldwide fear of Covid far in excess of the disease’s actual dangers. Some of these ‘modelers’ cheered, while others remained silent, as governments the world over imposed draconian restrictions destined to have ill-consequences far worse than any resulting benefits. Politicians, pundits, professors, and intellectuals across the globe swallowed these imprudent predictions, heaping unwarranted praise on their promulgators while ridiculing – and sometimes calling for the silencing – of scientists who dared to dissent. Appalling.)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 147 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 from which the quotation below is drawn originally appeared in National Review on September 3rd, 2015):

It has been a protracted, serpentine path from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and “separate but equal” to today’s racial preferences. The nation still is stained by the sordid business of assigning group identities and rights. This is discordant with the inherent individualism of the nation’s foundational natural rights tradition….

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 37 of the original, 1982 edition of Dominick Armentano’s excellent but regrettably neglected volume Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure (original emphasis):

It is only because consumers find resources satisfactorily allocated that potential competitors find entry difficult or impossible. Product differentiation, especially a differentiation that increases prices, can act as a barrier to entry only if consumers prefer that differentiation, and are willing to pay the presumably higher prices associated with, say, new annual auto style changes.