Russell Roberts's Blog, page 182
January 26, 2022
Some Covid Links
Peter Attia tweets this graph, and the comment below it: (HT Martin Kulldorff)
If you want perspective on how how people <35 die in the US, relative to COVID, take a look. It would be nice if we placed a proportionate amount of societal energy into preserving life via prevention of MV acc, ODs, homicide, suicide, & drownings (not shown but 12x more for <5)
Also tweeting a telling image, along with appropriate commentary, is Francois Balloux: (HT Martin Kulldorff)
Eric Boehm sensibly asks: “Why are vaccinated Americans still worrying about COVID?” Two slices:
Anxiety over COVID-19 might be an unhappy side effect of getting vaccinated against the disease.
I’m kidding, but you could be forgiven for drawing that tongue-in-cheek conclusion from a new Morning Consult/New York Times poll showing that vaccinated (and boosted) Americans are about twice as likely to say they are “very” or “somewhat” concerned about “getting sick from COVID-19 within the next year.”
That is, of course, the exact opposite of what the actual science tells us. Even during the tremendous surge in COVID cases caused by the omicron variant, vaccinated individuals have had far less to worry about. According to recent studies out of the U.K. and Canada, unvaccinated individuals are five times as likely to end up in the hospital than those who have received the vaccine, and vaccination has reduced the risk of ending up in an intensive care unit (ICU) by more than 93 percent. If you’ve been vaxxed and boosted, you’re roughly 50 times less likely to end up hospitalized with COVID than someone who has not received a single dose, according to an analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
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Regardless, this doesn’t explain away the unwillingness of vaccinated Americans to drop their COVID anxiety—and to stop forcing that anxiety upon children, who are the real victims of the past two years. More COVID-related mandates in deep blue urban areas will not convince rural Republicans to take the disease more seriously, it turns out.
Third, and relatedly, it’s impossible to discount the role that poor policy making is playing here. Places like New York City and Washington, D.C., that have imposed or reimposed mask and/or vaccine mandates in recent months also have high vaccination rates. But the ongoing layering of new rules leaves the impression that residents must escalate their anxiety accordingly—and, no surprise, that anxiety may be captured in polls like this one.
It’s a sneaky sleight of hand. The authorities hide behind the curtain, making the rules (and inflicting punishment on those who don’t follow them). But the face of the restrictions, the one people spit in when they’re angry about the disruption to their lives? That’s your restaurant manager, your flight attendant, your minimum wage cashier.
Not everyone thinks this is a bad thing. Some people—the Brooklyn bouncer who reportedly turned away a patron for being vaccinated with an inferior brand, the flight attendant who’s just a little too stoked about banning two-year olds who don’t wear their masks correctly—are all too happy not just to wield this power but to abuse it. But for those of us who never wanted to play cop, being essentially blackmailed into the role is not just a constant reminder that things are far from normal; it’s an endless source of stress.
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This is the catch-22 of having power during the pandemic. The authorities who impose these mandates are being screamed at every day to do something to combat the spread of a wildly contagious virus that, realistically, they can’t do a lot to contain. So they do something, but they don’t want the blowback if the something doesn’t work. If case rates in my town keep rising despite the mask mandate, nobody will ever admit that the policy was flawed; it’ll just be blamed on the individuals who didn’t comply, and on the service workers and small business owners who didn’t make them comply.
When ordinary people do the dirty work of enforcing the rules, the people who made those rules get to maintain the illusion of clean hands—aided by the narrative that nothing about this is abnormal at all, that there’s nothing to see here, that this is how things have always been.
Early in the pandemic, many rules were devised by Brains-from-Thunderbirds types at the Department of Health and in Whitehall’s “Nudge Unit”. They lacked compassion and basic common sense, but people were threatened and ostracised if they dared challenge them. Yes, there are lots of good, kind nurses, doctors and carers in the system, but they were intimidated and uncertain about what they were “allowed” to offer desperate relatives.
According to the rules, NHS staff must have a first jab by February 3 and be fully vaccinated by April 1 to continue in frontline roles – a move predicted to force tens of thousands out of their current roles or out of the health service altogether.
In light of this, it is worth remembering one of the central reasons why the latest round of restrictions were brought in – not due to high infection or mortality rates, but to their predicted impact on hospital capacity and staffing issues, which – it was feared – would cripple the Service and lead to excess deaths.
Many doctors such as myself, therefore, are asking where the logic is in mandating a policy that will certainly lead to the very result that was feared in the first place: that is, tens of thousands of NHS staff away from the frontline?
Clayton Fox profiles and celebrates some of the courageous scientists who refused to swallow and parrot the official Covid narrative. (HT Dan Klein)
Here are eight minutes of Mark Steyn on Covidocratic tyranny.
After a ruling earlier this month by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Biden administration formally withdraws the abominable vaccine mandate to be imposed through OSHA on employees of private companies. A slice from a Wall Street Journal report:
The rule, most of which was set to take effect earlier this month, prompted a lawsuit by business groups. On Jan. 13, the Supreme Court stopped the rule from going into effect while it deliberated over the lawsuit. The rule would have affected roughly 84 million workers.
In an unsigned ruling, the court’s conservative majority said the administration likely didn’t have the power to impose such a requirement on private businesses.
The rule wouldn’t apply to businesses whose employees don’t report to a workplace nor to those who work at home or outdoors.
OSHA said it was “prioritizing its resources to focus on finalizing a permanent Covid-19 healthcare standard.”
The Buckeye Institute, a legal group representing one set of employers, said it would continue to challenge the administration’s effort to impose the rule through the regular rule-making process.
Corey Walker reports that a “New York Supreme Court judge ruled on Monday that Governor Kathy Hochul’s mask mandates for schools and public places are void and cannot be enforced.” (Note that New York’s Supreme Court is not that state’s highest court; this court is actually a trial court. New York State’s highest court is its Court of Appeals.)
FACT: World No 1 tennis player Novak Djokovic is a clear and present danger to Australia. We all learned this, dear reader, when the Australian government cancelled the visa granted to allow him to take part in the Australian Open championship.
What is notable about the visa saga and the decision of the Minister for Immigration is that Djokovic was deported not because he represented a risk in spreading the Covid-19 virus. No, it was his ‘anti-vaccination’ views, and the possibility that by his mere presence in Australia he would give comfort and encouragement to those dreaded antivaxxers, that saw him kicked out. What was even worse was that Djokovic could be seen as an icon ‘of freedom of choice in relation to being vaccinated’. And we can’t have that.
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Djokovic argued that he was not there to foster anti-vaccination sentiment but the court disagreed. That may not have been his intent, but it was the result of his ‘presence’ in the country.
The court: ‘It was open to infer that it was perceived by the public that Mr Djokovic was not in favour of vaccinations. It was known or at least perceived by the public that he had chosen not to be vaccinated. There was material before the Minister and to which he referred in the reasons that anti-vaccination groups had portrayed Mr Djokovic as a hero and an icon of freedom of choice in relation to being vaccinated.’ (My emphasis.)
So there we have it. Djokovic was cancelled because some people might see him as an icon of freedom of choice over medical treatment. Some people might see him as a champion of bodily integrity and free and informed consent to medical treatment. The Australian government believe such ideas – freedom of choice in relation to being vaccinated – are dangerous. These ideas represent a threat to public health and order. They actually argued this openly.
In the past two weeks, parents, students, and some faculty have pushed back. Around the country, thousands of parents, students, and alumni signed open letters to administrators at hundreds of universities and posted petitions on Change.org and Facebook. Twitter groups critical of booster mandates now have thousands of people sharing resources and letters. Students at Princeton, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern published opinion pieces in campus newspapers speaking up for their right to have a normal campus experience.
Will universities listen? Harvard has taken a small step in the right direction, announcing that it will no longer use isolation dorms and will rely on students to contact-trace themselves. But that’s not enough. Harvard is still maintaining two weeks of “grab and go” dining and requiring boosters to start the semester.
With these policies, administrators are imposing the strictest restrictions and harshest mandates on primarily young, healthy people who are least likely to benefit from them. These constraints may even harm their mental health, which has deteriorated during the pandemic, and the booster requirement may cause physical harm to a tiny minority.
Young, healthy men particularly will bear the highest risk of myocarditis—an inflammatory process that affects the heart in response to the vaccine and which can be mild, severe, or even life-threatening in the worst cases—while potentially not substantially lowering their risk of a severe Covid-19 outcome (already vanishingly low). A CDC study recently reported that weekly deaths in people aged 18–29 decreased to zero from one in 5 million previously. A recent analysis from the United Kingdom shows the rate of myocarditis from dose three of a Pfizer vaccine is greater than the risk of myocarditis from a SARS-CoV-2 infection for men younger than 40. White House pressure to authorize boosters without adequate safety data was the reason cited by the deputy director and director of the FDA’s vaccines office when they resigned last fall.
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It seems that university administrators are still overly concerned with keeping down cases—the number of people who test positive for Covid—perhaps to satisfy a small but loud minority of anxious faculty or parents, none of whom has to suffer under these rules. Whatever the motivation, it is not worth the toll these measures take on students’ lives. Case counts are a poor indicator of college students’ health: the vast majority of positive tests in young, healthy, vaccinated adults occur in asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic people. The overweening drive to suppress cases above all else does not create a physically, mentally, or socially healthy campus for anybody.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 146 of Robert Higgs’s Winter 2001 Independent Review article, “Unmitigated Mercantilism,” as it is reprinted and slightly revised in the superb 2004 collection of some of Bob’s essays, Against Leviathan:
As for the job creation that the bank declares to be its very purpose, one need not pause long over the mathematics. U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) is now approximately $10 trillion. Even if all of the workers required to produce the $16.7 billion of bank-subsidized exports were to become permanently unemployed — a highly unlikely outcome, especially in today’s tight labor markets — the resulting increase in the U.S. rate of unemployment would be swallowed up in the rounding error. The repeated claim that the nation needs the Eximbank to create or maintain jobs is not just bad economics — the kind that disregards opportunity cost, among other things — it is also inapt arithmetic.
January 25, 2022
Some Covid Links
Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Daniel Halperin shares a great deal of important information. Three slices:
This coronavirus, especially the Omicron variant, is so fast-moving that mass testing and contact tracing, and probably even isolation and quarantine, can’t slow it down significantly. The U.K. and other countries, unlike the U.S., already had widespread rapid-testing capacity during their recent surges, yet they experienced the same meteoric rise in cases. As with other interventions such as booster shots, testing is most useful for those at high risk of serious complications, who might benefit from early treatment.
As for masking, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently acknowledged that cloth masks do relatively little to prevent spread. Some experts on coronaviruses, including epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, for nearly two years have questioned the efficacy of masks. A recent rigorous review by his University of Minnesota research group concludes: “We are well past the emergency phase of this pandemic, and it should be well-known by now that wearing cloth face coverings or surgical masks, universal or otherwise, has a very minor role to play…. It is time to stop overselling their efficacy and unrealistic expectations about their ability to end the pandemic.”
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And while vaccines and boosters continue to offer strong protection against serious illness and death—and are therefore vitally important to those at high risk—they’re less effective at preventing infection, especially with the Omicron variant. While a new CDC study finds that boosters substantially reduce risk of infection as well as hospitalization from Omicron, countries like the U.K. and Israel that had widespread booster coverage before Omicron struck have also seen unprecedented surges in cases.
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Although reported numbers of “Covid hospitalizations” are up nationally, these figures include patients admitted for other reasons who incidentally test positive. Based on data from several states and the U.K., it appears that roughly half these admissions likely aren’t caused mainly by the virus. Health and Human Services Department data indicate the total number of patients in U.S hospitals has hardly budged over the past six months.
Because the new variant primarily targets the upper airways instead of the lungs, doctors report that few patients are requiring ventilation or even supplemental oxygen. Christopher Murray of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimates in the Lancet that the number of Omicron deaths “seems to be similar in most countries to the level of a bad influenza season in northern hemisphere countries.” In 2017-18, the flu caused some 52,000 deaths in the U.S., probably peaking at more than 1,500 a day.
Here’s a report on how some principled, intrepid, and creative people managed at least temporarily to halt a government-orchestrated ‘voluntary’ vaccine-passport scheme in Orange County, CA. (HT Suzie Danforth)
To the extent that this [January 23rd rally in DC] was a rally against vaccination, it was misguided.
But some of the people who showed up on Sunday were making a narrower point, and one that’s clearly correct: The government should not have the power to force you to make a private medical decision that has little effect on anyone else. Your vaccination status is, by and large, your business. The vaccines are not substantially blocking the spread of COVID-19: We all know countless vaccinated people who’ve caught the disease. This is particularly true of the omicron wave: It’s great to be vaccinated, but the vaccine is not preventing you or your close contacts from contracting COVID-19. The vaccine is a personal health decision. It protects the person who gets it, and thus it’s not really the government’s business.
Yet countless municipalities, including our nation’s capital—the site of this weekend’s protest—are broadly mandating vaccination. In D.C., if you want to enter a restaurant, you have to show not just your vaccine card, but also a photo ID—like a driver’s license—in order to prove that the card is really yours.
Note that D.C.’s COVID-19 mitigation policies have been, at all times, foolish. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser reimposed a mask mandate to deal with delta, even though the mayor herself had been partying maskless the night before. The district’s vaccine mandate took effect last week, ostensibly to deal with omicron, but guess what? Omicron is largely over in D.C. Cases are plummeting.
Senay Boztas takes us “inside the surreal Dutch lockdown.” A slice:
Sitting respectfully in our ‘pews’, we put our hands together… and clap. This is not a service but a comedy night. And Amsterdam’s newest ‘church’ is really a theatre for debate and cultural centre in disguise. Incensed by the illogical nature of the current Dutch coronavirus restrictions, Yoeri Albrecht, director of De Balie, last week changed the statutes of his organisation and registered it with the chamber of commerce as a faith-based movement: overnight, The Philosophical Society; the Community of Reason was born.
It is unlikely to be the last. His example, a group of Dutch mayors predicted wryly in an open letter to the government, is likely to mark the start of “an unprecedented religious revival in the coming weeks”.
From almost the moment the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in the city of Wuhan, the medical-research establishment in Washington and London insisted that the virus had emerged naturally. Only conspiracy theorists, they said, would give credence to the idea that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Now a string of unearthed emails—the most recent being a batch viewed by the House Oversight and Reform Committee and referred to in its January 11, 2022 letter—is making it seem increasingly likely that there was, in fact, a conspiracy, its aim being to suppress the notion that the virus had emerged from research funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Anthony Fauci. The latest emails don’t prove such a conspiracy, but they make it more plausible, for two reasons: because the expert virologists therein present such a strong case for thinking that the virus had lab-made features and because of the wholly political reaction to this bombshell on the part of Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health.
So many good people sacrificed so much to comply with the failed Covid policies. I am grateful to live in a country with so many public-spirited people. It is the architects of lockdowns & the panic-mongers whose thinking needs repudiation so their mistakes are never repeated.
When an evaluation of the failures of Covid policy finally occurs, “fringe” thinkers should play a central role. The designers and intellectual enforcers of the lockdowns will want a whitewash, but the public should not permit it.
Westchester Mom approvingly tweets this photo: (HT Martin Kulldorff)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 186-187 of H.L. Mencken’s essay “On Government,” as this essay is reprinted in the 1996 Johns Hopkins University Press collection of some of Mencken’s best essays, Prejudices: A Selection; in this quotation Mencken refers to the typical civil ‘servant,’ wearing at least the veneer of idealism, who became more prominent after the shrinkage of the spoils system and that system’s overt role in dispensing jobs to cronies:
He doesn’t start off with a bald demand for a job; he starts off with a Message. He has discovered the long-sought sure cure for all the sorrows of the world; he has the infallible scheme for putting down [in]justice, misery, ignorance, suffering, sin; his appeal is not to the rules of a sinister and discreditable game, but to the bursting heart of humanity, the noblest and loftiest sentiments of man. His job is never in the foreground; it is concealed in his Vision.
January 24, 2022
What of the Photo of the Space-helmeted Woman?
Here’s a letter to an e-mail correspondent:
Mr. M__:
You’re one of three people to object to my critical posting earlier today at my blog of a photo of a masked woman at the Charlotte airport wearing a space helmet. You write that “chances are the person suffers from an extreme phobia which makes her an outlier…. The photo is worthless as a piece of information.”
Of course it’s true that very few people go to such extremes as to wear space helmets. But I disagree that the photo, as a piece of information, is worthless. I believe that it reveals the dangerous degree of misinformation now afoot.
Before Covid, almost no such sights were seen. Yet now, it’s common to encounter persons who behave in ways that, while (typically) not as extreme as wearing space helmets, are nevertheless most straightforwardly interpreted as indicating a complete misapprehension of the risks of Covid.
I myself, in November 2020, was on a flight from Washington to Dallas with a young woman dressed in a hazmat suit. Every day, here in my home in northern Virginia, I see individuals driving alone in their automobiles wearing masks. Every day I see people walking outdoors – often alone – while fully masked, and sometimes even with face shields over their masked faces. On many trips to the supermarket I see men and women using sanitizing wipes to cleanse shopping carts of some invisible surface venom. It’s not unusual to see customers in supermarkets and retail stores wearing latex gloves.
About a week ago a mother and her teenage daughter – both masked and likely fully vaccinated and boosted – refused to get into an elevator with me, presumably because I was unmasked. When the door opened and they saw me as they started to enter, they jumped back as if I were Vlad the Impaler. And about a year ago I witnessed a 40-something man walk into a restaurant and, while waiting to fetch his take-out order, slather hand-sanitizer not only on his hands, but also all over his face and neck.
One or a few instances of such behavior would indeed be worthless as information about the state of society. But what is revealing is the frequency of such behavior.
And among the sad realities revealed is the fact that a distressingly large number of people vastly overestimate the actual dangers of Covid. (Before Covid, only vanishingly few people behaved in such ways to avoid the likes of the flu or pneumonia.) Also revealed is the failure to put risks in perspective, given that many of the people who I see driving alone while masked are at greater risk of being killed or injured while in their automobiles than of suffering serious harm from Covid. Revealed, too, is widespread ignorance of the fact that Covid is rarely transmitted in the open air or from surfaces.
The photo of the space-helmeted woman, therefore, is evidence not that a small number of human beings have extreme phobias or mental-health issues. It instead is evidence of the dismaying fact that a significant swathe of humanity – until two years ago normal – has been driven hysterical by the misinformation and panic porn that continue to pour forth from the mainstream media, from many politicians, and from the likes of Anthony Fauci and other so-called ‘public-health experts.
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
Simple
If an historian or archaeologist were to ask you “In what era did humans live lives of the greatest simplicity?”, how would you answer? Your answer would be mistaken if it is anything other than “Today, in the modern industrialized world” – or so I argue in my latest column for AIER. A slice:
Imagine what life was like, say, for a typical New England farm family a mere 200 years ago. Waking up on a frigid winter morning, a fire had to be started in the fireplace. This task was done in an as-yet-unheated home because, well, the fire had yet to be started. The home had no thermostat-controlled HVAC unit. And the person starting the fire had no automatic lighter – or even safety matches – to ease the task of igniting a flame. Nor was there available any easy-to-light artificial logs.
The kitchen stove, too, had to be lit – and, also like the fireplace, kept lit – manually.
Without indoor plumbing, running water, and antibacterial soap, relieving oneself was more onerous, more unpleasant, and less hygienic than is the corresponding routine today. The cows had to be milked – a task, I confidently guess, that was not remotely “simple” during the pre-dawn hours in sub-zero temperatures. And it’s certainly never as simple as going to the supermarket to purchase milk.
Transforming a live animal into meat for the table was also not “simple” back then – at least not compared to the manner in which nearly all of us today get meat for our tables. I’m willing to believe that, were I to slaughter my own cattle, pigs, and chickens, the resulting meats would be tastier than the beef, pork, and chicken that I buy at restaurants and supermarkets. But I’m unwilling to believe that the improvement in taste would be great enough to compensate for the magnitudes-greater difficulty I’d endure to get meat in the old-fashioned way.
What about bathing? Two centuries ago in rural America, bath water had to be heated over an open flame before being poured into a tub. (Forget showering.) Bathing was far less simple back then than it is today.
Want to visit Uncle Josiah who lives 180 miles away in Providence? You can’t travel faster than a horse if you’re going by land, which you likely are. Making that journey back then was, by the standards of today, anything but simple. Nor was it comfortable.
If anthropologists today are in search of that group of human beings who lived the simplest lives in history, they merely need look at themselves and their neighbors.
Most of us today awaken and spend all of our time indoors in homes and facilities kept toasty warm in winter, and pleasantly cool in summer, by automatic-powered HVAC systems or other modern appliances. To get food – from literally around the world – we simply go to the supermarket and to restaurants. Sometimes we go to farmers’ markets – itself made simple by our and the farmers’ use of automobiles, paved roads, and refrigeration, and by the fact that many of the farmers today accept as payment credit cards.
Compared to our ancestors, we today have a much simpler time communicating with people out of earshot. Indeed, for most of our ancestors, such communication in real time was impossible – the polar opposite of “simple.” And it’s much simpler for us today to entertain ourselves, what with television, satellite radio, streaming videos and music, overnight delivery of books and board games to our doorsteps, smartphones, laptops, YouTube, and the Internet.
How much simpler is it today to summon urban or suburban transportation by using Uber or Lyft apps instead of hailing or calling taxicabs? Answer: much.
Or consider the cleaning of clothes. We simply toss our dirty laundry, along with dashes of detergent, into electricity-powered machines that do nearly all the work for us. Easy-peasy.
How about banking? We simply have those payments that are due to us deposited electronically into our accounts, and we then submit what we owe through various electronic means of payment. Bye-bye to the ‘complex’ dance of going to banks physically, and to writing and mailing paper checks.
My 24-year-old son not long ago told me, off-handedly, that he used DoorDash to order a package of paper towels that were delivered within 20 minutes to his doorstep. He saved himself the complex chore of personally driving to a supermarket to fetch and buy the towels. When my son isn’t in the mood to cook, or to leave his apartment, he simply orders pizza to be delivered, piping hot, directly to him.
The advance of modernity can be described very accurately as the march toward ever more simplicity. Compared to the lives of our pre-industrial ancestors – and, in fact, compared even to the lives of our literal grandparents – each of our lives today is simple beyond the imagination of those who lived a few generations or more ago. Compared to in the past, feeding ourselves is much simpler – as is hydrating ourselves, clothing ourselves, housing ourselves, cleansing ourselves, curing ourselves of illnesses and injuries, keeping ourselves comfortable and safe and informed and amused, and transporting ourselves hither and yon.
Can’t Be Too Safe from the Covid Monster
For those of you who doubt the reality of Covid Derangement Syndrome – the syndrome that drives people to believe that every further reduction, no matter how small, in the risk of encountering the SARS-CoV-2 virus is worth whatever the cost of this reduction, no matter how large – take a look at this photo of a traveler at the Charlotte airport. (HT Gary Leff and Todd Zywicki)
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Errant assessments of ‘income inequality'”
In my column for the December 11th, 2011, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I challenged some popular means of assessing economic inequality. You can read my column, in full, beneath the fold.
Some Covid Links
Harvey Risch, Jay Bhattacharya, and Paul Alexander call for an immediate end to the Covid emergency. A slice:
We don’t mean that the virus is gone – omicron is still spreading wildly, and the virus may circulate forever. But with a normal focus on protecting the vulnerable, we can treat the virus as a medical rather than a social matter and manage it in ordinary ways. A declared emergency needs continuous justification, and that is now lacking.
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Even in places with strict lockdown measures, there are hundreds of thousands of newly registered omicron cases daily and countless unregistered positives from home testing. Measures like mandatory masking and distancing have had negligible or at most small effects on transmission. Large-scale population quarantines only delay the inevitable. Vaccination and boosters have not halted omicron disease spread; heavily vaccinated nations like Israel and Australia have more daily cases per capita than any place on earth at the moment. This wave will run its course despite all of the emergency measures.
Until omicron, recovery from Covid provided substantial protection against subsequent infection. While the omicron variant can reinfect patients recovered from infection by previous strains, such reinfection tends to produce mild disease. Future variants, whether evolved from omicron or not, are unlikely to evade the immunity provided by omicron infection for a long while. With the universal spread of omicron worldwide, new strains will likely have more difficulty finding a hospitable environment because of the protection provided to the population by omicron’s widespread natural immunity.
It is true that – despite emergency measures — hospitalization counts and Covid-associated mortality have risen. Since mortality tends to trail symptomatic infection by about 3-4 weeks, we are still seeing the delta strain’s remaining effects and the waning of vaccine immunity against serious outcomes at 6-8 months after vaccination. These cases should decline over time as delta finally says goodbye. It is too late to alter their course with lockdowns (if that were ever possible).
Universal vaccine mandates are irrational in ignoring naturally acquired immunity from infection and recovery, which has come to be referred to as “natural immunity” in public discussion. This single‐minded focus on vaccination as the exclusive means to acquiring immunity is largely novel. Contrary to conventional belief, states typically do not have “vaccine” requirements for children to attend school or any other purpose; they require evidence of immunity to certain viruses, whether through serological testing that evidences the presence of relevant protective antibodies or evidence of prior history “diagnosed or verified by a health care provider.” Virtually all countries in the Western world that impose some form of vaccine passport or mandate recognize natural immunity to Covid as qualifying for at least six months post‐recovery.
If OSHA had reviewed the medical and scientific literature regarding the relative protective efficacy of natural immunity compared to vaccination, it is unlikely that the agency would be successful in establishing a factual basis for forced vaccination of Covid‐recovered individuals. Given the trivial—if any—benefit to either the individual or the public from compelled vaccination of Covid‐recovered individuals, that evidence of elevated adverse effects requires an especially high standard of proof by regulators to overcome.
Peter Attia explains why, on Covid, he’s pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine-mandate. (HT Dan Klein) Two slices:
There are many reasons I have heard put forth for why vaccines should be mandated, but one dominant argument stands out: Mandating vaccines will protect vaccinated people from unvaccinated people. This argument assumes three things:
Vaccines DO NOT provide complete protection to the vaccinated (or else why would we care about what the unvaccinated do),Prior infection DOES NOT confer immunity on par with vaccination, andVaccines DO prevent transmission of the virus (which is why we want the unvaccinated vaccinated, even if we don’t care about their health, per se).Well, we’ve largely addressed the first point in an effort to get our facts straight on vaccine efficacy, and as we’ve seen, the basic assumption fueling this concern is valid at its surface: vaccines do not provide complete protection to the vaccinated. That is, they are not 100% effective at preventing infection, hospitalization, and death. In fact, although vaccines significantly reduce risk of detectable infection in the few months after vaccination, this protection drops precipitously ;once circulating antibodies decline, though protection against severe infections and death persists. Still, the protection isn’t absolute, and some risk of death remains even among those who have been vaccinated. However, the good news is that the risk is very low today. This was not necessarily the case 18 months ago, but three things have evolved over the past year-and-a-half to compound the risk-reduction of vaccines:
Novel therapeutics have been developed specifically to treat COVID, including monoclonal antibodies, paxlovid, and molnupiravir, all of which reduce the risk of hospitalization and death by anywhere from 50% to 90%.At least one existing drug (fluvoxamine) has been repurposed to treat COVID successfully, reducing both hospitalizations and deaths by 66% and 91%, respectively, based on per protocol usage.Far more sophisticated critical care knowledge has evolved, specifically, to address COVID, including the use of dexamethasone and better strategies of ventilation.The net result of these advances, layered on the benefits of vaccination, imply that a vaccinated person infected with COVID today is in a far less risky position than they were a year ago. And this says nothing of the fact that when it comes to the Omicron variant, which today accounts for >99% of document cases in the U.S., the risk goes down much further. Why? Because the data are unambiguously clear that Omicron is much less virulent than Delta and Beta and Alpha.
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It’s true that hospitals are stretched very thin right now with the n-th surge of COVID. But a few things are worth keeping in mind. During a bad flu season in the U.S. (recent examples would be 2017-2018, 2014-2015, and 2012-2013) it is common for 50,000 to 70,000 patients to be hospitalized at any one time across the country. This is not very different from what we see today (which says nothing of the fact that roughly half of the hospitalized COVID patients have incidental infections. That is, they are there for another reason, but also test positive for COVID). The difference, today, is that the hospital workforce is greatly reduced, relative to a bad flu season. Why is that? According to a survey by Morning Consult, approximately 18% of healthcare workers have quit their jobs since February 2020, while another 12% have been fired or laid off.
Furthermore, many people fail to realize that hospitals routinely function at 90% capacity in their ICUs. A reduction in workforce of even 10% is horribly disruptive to a system flying so close to the sun. It’s kind of like what happens when one of the OPEC nations, even if “only” producing 3% of the world’s oil, goes offline. Complete and total breakdown of the world’s energy markets ensues. It’s called a marginal supply problem.
Perhaps there was a rationale to mandate vaccines in healthcare workers 12 months ago, but given how many of them have quit or been fired for not being vaccinated, despite the fact that they undoubtedly have the highest rates of natural immunity of any profession, it seems illogical to continue to keep unvaccinated healthcare workers away because their immunity came from the actual virus, and not a vaccine.
Dan McLaughlin exposes the appalling bias that infects the latest Washington Post hit piece on Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Here’s McLaughlin’s conclusion:
There’s a reason many of us have compared DeSantis’s relationship with the media to the Road Runner constantly escaping Wile E. Coyote while the coyote’s traps explode in his face. Over and over and over, they have pushed stories that not only fail to land, but make the critics look progressively less credible the next time they come around.
U Penn students are organizing to protest the university’s booster mandate. Why have our best universities decided to embrace medical coercion for the covid vaccine, ignore the scientific evidence about benefits and harms, and eschew informed consent?
Jeffrey Tucker writes about yesterday’s protest in Washington, DC, against the Covidocracy. A slice:
The lockdowns gradually mutated into another attack on basic freedoms. The vaccines seemed like they might emancipate us from the panic and tyrannies but the beast of tyranny had already been unleashed. What seemed like a promising way of dealing with a disease revealed itself to be an unprecedented attack on individual choice and biology. People who have not complied have seen their lives utterly upended.
The Covidocracy is also being protested in Brussels – and defended there with brute force.
“To be a free citizen means to be a responsible citizen,” says Macron. “Duties come before rights.” You can only have rights (enter society) once you have done your duty (been vaccinated). The idea that duties come before rights means, at base, that the state comes before the citizen: the citizen only takes his place in society at the behest of the state.
This is not a matter of two shots and you are done. There is an ongoing demand for compliance, whereby your citizenship – and claim to ‘responsibility’ – is continually renewed. France has followed Israel in requiring a booster shot for vaccine passes to remain valid. Currently, you have seven months to get a booster, but this will shorten to four months in February. A French Government guide sets out the exact timetable expected of you: this is a jurisprudence of medically based citizenship. Every injection gives a ‘valid QR card’ that you can use to access social life; if you don’t get the booster in the required window then this QR code will expire. France has also followed Israel with a special offer (available until February 15th) allowing first-time jabbers to “benefit from a valid vaccine pass” after their first dose, so long as they get their second jab within 28 days.
The discounting of natural immunity is very telling. Natural immunity yields a wider spectrum of anti-bodies than vaccination and is likely to confer longer protection against infection and against new variants. And yet natural immunity has no political meaning. It is a strength that your body has gained through its own efforts, without involving the state or wider society. The ‘pass sanitaire’ that had been in operation in France since last summer recognised natural immunity and negative covid tests, alongside vaccination; the new ‘pass vaccinal’ recognises vaccination alone. The French Prime Minister now claims that natural immunity provides “only very little immunity”, while the source of genuine immunity is a “full course of vaccines”. This claim reflects more about the different political value placed upon these two routes to antibodies. One route is deemed “protective”, robust, and the other very weak, as something that “wanes”, only because one has a robust relationship with the state and the other relates to the state “only very little”.
Carole Malone decries Britain’s Covidocratic fear-mongers.
Writing in City Journal, Vinay Prasad mourns the perversion, over these past two years, of public health. Three slices:
Throughout the pandemic, public-health officials have omitted uncomfortable truths, made misleading statements, and advanced demonstrably false assertions. In the information era, where what one says is easily accessible and anyone may read primary literature, these falsehoods will be increasingly recognized and severely damage the field’s credibility. No doubt, officials and organizations promulgating them had a range of motivations—including honorable ones, such as wanting to encourage salutary choices. Yet the subsequent loss of institutional trust may result in harm that far outweighs any short-term policy objectives.
…..
For some reason, the U.S. seems committed to a one-size-fits-all vaccine policy despite abundant evidence to the contrary. This has led us astray in several respects.
First, consider boosters. The case for population-wide boosters, including for young, healthy adults, is tenuous and was contentious even among senior scientists. Marion Gruber and Phil Krause—the director and deputy director of the FDA—reportedly resigned over White House pressure to approve boosters for all. An initial advisory action approved boosters for older and vulnerable populations but was reluctant to grant a blanket approval for adults aged 18 and above. Slowly, booster approval expanded to 18 and up, and now to 12 and up.
But substantial uncertainty persists that boosting a 20-year-old man will redound to his net health benefit. After two doses of mRNA vaccination, he will have a markedly reduced chance of hospitalization or death. He will also face a nonzero risk of myocarditis from a dose three. While a third dose may provide short-term protection against symptomatic disease, his disease would likely be mild anyway. We do not know with confidence that such a person should receive a booster. Recently, in light of these concerns, Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Communication Center of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, advised his own son not to receive a booster. Current policy is built on the claim that we know that it is in the best interest of a young person to receive a booster shot. We don’t.
…..
Falsehoods and half-truths have consequences. Publishing flawed science to raise irrational fear, making false statements about the efficacy of treatments, and extrapolating data from one vaccine to another all constitute bad scientific practice. In normal times, scientists would not tolerate such behavior. Yet, repeatedly, federal agencies and respected organizations push recommendations that are deeply uncertain, rely on fearmongering, or provide hollow reassurances. The right answer would be to acknowledge the massive residual uncertainty surrounding these issues and embark on studies to reduce it.
Many lockdowners have gone silent on Twitter, but a few still don’t comprehend the devastating effects that ineffective lockdowns had on children, the working class and the poor around the world.
“Anatomy of the Bio-Security Police State.” (HT Jay Bhattacharya) Two slices:
The U.S. States of California and New York, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, as well as Israel, France, Italy, Austria and Germany have used the virus as justification to implement coercive and authoritarian policies of social control.
They have transformed themselves into Bio-Security Police States.
The Bio-Security Police State is characterized by repeated and ever more egregious infringements upon civil liberties and individual freedom in the name of ‘Public Health’, including:
Suspension of democratic processes and legislation of emergency police powers under the justification of a ‘State of Emergency’.Coercive and restrictive non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs) including population lockdowns.Heavy-handed police enforcement of Public Health orders such as arrest for failure to wear masks, being further than an arbitrary distance from one’s home and participating in ‘unauthorized’ protests.Restrictions on citizens’ domestic movement, and in some cases, restrictions on outbound international travel.Ubiquitous QR-code check-ins and other methods of non-consensual mass data collection for the purpose of contact tracing.Mass vaccination, either through mandate or industry coercion.Vaccine ‘passports’ that restrict societal participation of the unvaccinated, or ‘incompletely’ vaccinated from society.Quarantine camps for forced interment of COVID positive people, and in some instances, asymptomatic close contacts of COVID cases.…..
The Nations of the West have chosen to exhibit blatant disregard for sacred principles upon which the Western liberal democracy was built.
Principles that have emerged through centuries of hard-won battles against tyranny and oppression.
Principles enshrined in the foundational civilization movement of the Enlightenment and the foundational civilization documents of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Principles that protect the fundamental, inalienable, Natural Rights of the individual.
Principles that formerly separated Western liberal democracies from military dictatorships, communist dictatorships and other forms of authoritarian states.
Principles that are now being discarded, suspended, torn up and ignored in the name of ‘Public Health’, ‘Science’ and ‘Safety’.
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