Russell Roberts's Blog, page 185
January 19, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley explains Progressives’ need to ignore racial progress. A slice:
With the White House struggling to advance its economic agenda, the president’s job-approval rating stuck in the mud, and midterm elections looming, it’s no great shock that Mr. Biden is resorting to racial demagoguery. The Democratic Party has long depended on keeping black people scared and paranoid to maintain their support. That’s how its activists raise money and how its candidates typically turn out the base. For many on the political left, racial progress is something to be played down or ignored altogether, and nothing seems to inconvenience them more than the incredible strides America has made in recent decades on voting rights.
You would never know it from listening to Mr. Biden’s nasty tirade in Atlanta, but black voter turnout has been rising since the mid-1990s even as more states have passed voting requirements that the president and his backers insist are “Jim Crow 2.0.” Nationally, the black voter-turnout rate exceeded white turnout for the first time in 2008, when President Obama was elected. It happened again when Mr. Obama was re-elected in 2012, prompting the Census Bureau to note that the “increase in voting among blacks continues what has been a long-term trend.” True, black turnout dipped in 2016, but only to the pre-Obama level. And the decline almost certainly reflected apathy toward Hillary Clinton more than any efforts to disenfranchise blacks. Two years later, “all major racial and ethnic groups saw historic jumps in voter turnout,” according to a Pew Research Center analysis.
Increased life expectancy, increased medical competence, increased secularism, and increased insistence on privacy and autonomy are producing increased support for legal regimes that respect the right of mentally capable and terminally ill individuals to protect themselves from lingering intense pain and mental decrepitude. A November survey by Susquehanna Polling and Research found that 68 percent of likely voters believe that a mentally sound person with no more than six months to live should have access to a prescription medication that will produce a peaceful death while asleep. Ten states and the District of Columbia, with a combined 22 percent of the U.S. population, have comparable laws.
Compassion & Choices, which advocates for medical aid in dying, sensibly insists that this terminology, not “assisted suicide,” is proper. Suicide connotes despair and perhaps derangement. Dying is a facet of every life. An anticipated death, in the presence of loved ones, a death chosen after reflection about predictable, unavoidable pain, should not be proscribed by society’s laws or condemned by its mores.
George Leef introduces us to York College professor Erec Smith. A slice:
America’s colleges and universities are loaded with professors who insist on teaching students various theories that amount to nothing but fringe opinions and who don’t engage intellectually with those who disagree, but merely try to “cancel” them.
There are, however, still some professors who won’t play those games.
One of them is Erec Smith, who teaches rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania. He recently wrote an article for Newsweek, “Black People Who Oppose Critical Race Theory Are Being Erased.” In it, he attacks the methods that are used to ignore and silence blacks (and others) who don’t accept the mainstream narrative about black victimization.
Smith writes, “We hear endlessly about systemic racism, white supremacy, the black/white income gap, and police brutality. So powerful an ideology has this narrative become that those of us who pose a credible counter-narrative—black anti-woke writers, for example—frequently find our words being misconstrued in an effort to stanch their impact.”
He proceeds to explain how intellectuals who feel the need to uphold that narrative employ an “erase and replace” tactic to brush aside blacks who argue against them. They combine a pair of well-known logical fallacies, the strawman and ad hominem. They target the character of the opponent rather than his actual argument.
My own university, Cambridge, wants academic staff to undergo “race awareness” training. This advises you to “assume racism is everywhere”. Attendees are also reminded that “this is not a space for intellectualising the topic”. You might have thought “intellectualising” — ie thinking about — it is the kind of thing Cambridge academics should do. But don’t feel bad about getting that wrong; or at least, don’t feel bad about feeling bad: we are also told that these sessions aim at “working through” the feelings of shame and guilt that you might have on your journey in “developing an antiracist identity”.
It isn’t just Cambridge and St Andrews. There is anti-racism or “unconscious bias” training being offered to, or more likely thrust upon, staff and/or students at Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Goldsmiths, KCL, Liverpool, Oxford Medical School, Sheffield, Solent, Sussex and doubtless hundreds of other universities and departments across the country.
It isn’t just training either. The very purpose of a university is being redefined. You might think they exist to conduct teaching and research. That would be naïve. Most universities now routinely call themselves anti-racist institutions, where this means: actively campaigning for a political end.
The authors note that many Chinese firms “respond to R&D subsidies by relabelling non-R&D expenditures as R&D expenses.” And innovation is about more than just R&D. “Economic reforms improving investor protection and the independence of the judiciary system are preconditions for nurturing the type of grassroots innovation culture which flourished earlier on in some Western nations.” But there is a deeper issue with top-down planning, and it gets at an inherent problem with national industrial strategies:
Another reason for R&D expenditures to be potentially inefficient is misallocation. The investments could be carried out by the wrong firms and in an ineffective way. China’s economic policy biases resource allocation in favour of state-owned firms and private firms that are connected to the state (e.g. Song et al. 2011, Hsieh and Song 2015, and Bai et al. 2020). . . . Altogether, our analysis indicates that already in 2007–12 R&D was an important determinant of aggregate productivity growth in China, despite large distortions attenuating its benefits. The result is robust to introducing international knowledge spillover in the theory. In a counterfactual policy experiment, we find that a moderate increase of R&D subsidies across the board could enhance TFP growth, although an overly generous subsidy policy would backfire and reduce growth by hindering technology diffusion. Reducing misallocation (e.g. state support to politically linked firms) would also have a powerful (and potentially less expensive) growth-enhancing effect.
And why didn’t the Industrial Revolution start 2000 years ago? One important reason: Those pre-industrial societies intentionally extinguished the sparks of progress. For millennia, stasis had powerful defenders. The Roman Emperor Tiberius executed rather than rewarded a man who had invented unbreakable glass. Queen Elizabeth I declined to grant a patent to the inventor of the stocking-frame knitting machine, worrying that the invention would deprive textile workers of their employment. The guilds of preindustrial Europe played a key role in making sure Europe stayed preindustrial by blocking new technologies.
Ron Bailey writes on research into making kidney transplants, into humans, from pigs a reality.
Alex Nowrasteh documents the unfortunate decline in legal immigration.
Bruce Yandle is correct: The monetary chickens have indeed come home to roost.
Some Covid Links
But over the past month or so, it has become inescapable that sheer incompetence and ignorance can no longer be the sole explanation for two years of bungled policies. Rather, the craven mindset of many of our leaders in both parties (albeit primarily Democrats) is manifest. They are using our bodies to score cheap political points, impervious to the injury they are inflicting upon us.
Worst of all are the vaccine mandates, which come in countless forms. Universities, including public ones, are requiring faculty, staff, and students to vaccinate against COVID-19 in order to remain employed or enrolled. Many, for example Washington and Lee University in Virginia, Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and the CUNY and SUNY state schools in New York, are now requiring boosters.
As an attorney who has filed a number of lawsuits challenging vaccine mandates coming from both public university employers and the federal government, I am contacted every day by myriad students, faculty and employees at these universities. Many now are double-vaccinated and COVID-19 recovered. A significant portion had recent bouts with COVID-19, which is unsurprising given that Omicron swept across much of the nation in a very brief time period. Yet, for students to continue their education at the universities they may have invested significant time, emotional energy and resources into attending, they are being coerced into getting a useless medical procedure that many legitimately fear could harm them.
Surveying the long-term consequences of Covid restrictions reveals a bleak picture of collateral damage. The toll from borrowing mountains of debt, closing schools, disrupting social interaction, shutting hospitality, skipping cancer screenings, and reducing access to preventative medicine will hurt us for generations.
A fierce debate over whether the UK response was executed effectively or proportionately will rage, perhaps for decades to come, but one thing should be obvious to everyone. In 2021 – our fightback year – circumstances changed dramatically enough to warrant a total change of direction.
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From a policy perspective, it should mean an end to all legal restrictions on social and economic interactions, and rebalancing medical services back towards the many other causes of suffering and death. The Coronavirus Act 2020 should expire. The Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 which was the enabling act for lockdowns should be revisited, allowing for emergency mechanisms in future pandemics but with greater parliamentary scrutiny.
It is also vital that SAGE and other modellers conduct a post mortem to evaluate their performance. This would enable lessons to be learnt and inform a revamp, including more focus on forecasts (not just pessimistic scenarios), diversity of experts, and “red teaming” to peer review major analysis.
Vaccine passports should not be countenanced further, as they amount to state-sanctioned discrimination and undermine the basic medical principle of informed consent. The unvaccinated should no longer be treated as an underclass, subject to disproportionate punishments such as their 10-day isolation period for travelling, while recently-infected people are only required to isolate for half that time.
The continuous and often arbitrary regulatory tinkering during the pandemic must end, allowing businesses to make investments confidently, without sudden changes. Our overall virus response should change from law to guidance – no compulsion to isolate, wear masks, or the “rule of six” – but trusting in ordinary Britons to do what is right and take sensible precautions.
In the recent Adam Smith Institute paper, ‘Life with Covid’, we outlined how to develop society’s defence against the ongoing threat of variants (and other diseases) while still protecting liberty. Key recommendations include reviewing regulatory processes to accelerate the generation and distribution of new vaccines. Expanding human challenge trials would also help speed things up.
John Stossel will eagerly vacation in “evil Florida.” A slice:
Gov. Ron DeSantis ended pandemic restrictions last spring and refuses to impose new ones. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result,” he said. Lockdown states let “hysteria drive them to do really damaging things.”
The media hate him for saying things like that.
“Some governors are putting their own political gain ahead of children’s lives,” said CNN anchor Don Lemon.
If you watch most TV news, you’d think the rules, bans and shutdowns really save lives. Florida killed people because Florida didn’t impose tougher rules, we’re told.
“Florida leads the nation in new COVID cases,” says Action News in Tampa.
“Florida has the worst rate of coronavirus anywhere in the country!” rants “The Young Turks” host Cenk Uygur.
But it’s not true.
Florida has had fewer deaths than 16 other states.
Mississippi, Arizona, Alabama and New Jersey had the most deaths per capita. New York, where most TV anchors and I live, had the sixth most deaths.
Florida did better even though Florida has more high-risk old people.
What’s going on?
The media rarely just lie. Most simply cite Florida when deaths are high and ignore the state when deaths fall. They deceive by omission. Florida’s good numbers just don’t fit the reporters’ biases.
“Pfizer’s New Covid-19 Pill Works Against Omicron in Lab” – so reports the Wall Street Journal. (DBx: I wonder how much this development, and similar ones, will temper the Covidocracy’s mania for vaccine mandates. I predict not by much – a prediction that I intensely hope turns out to be incorrect.)
Jon Miltimore applauds Elon Musk for being largely correct about Covid from early on. Two slices:
None of this is to say that COVID-19 is not very real or very deadly. It clearly is.
The point is, the data we’re collecting are giving us a distorted representation of COVID-19 realities. From the beginning of the pandemic, some epidemiologists sounded the alarm on this issue.
In a March 17 STAT article, Dr. John Ioannidis, the C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention at Stanford University, warned that COVID-19 could turn into a “once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.” Ioannidis worried central planners were making sweeping and reflexive changes while relying on data that was flawed or insufficient.
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There also appears to be signs the CDC is finally acknowledging the deficiencies in its own reporting.
“Do you know how many of the 836,000 deaths in the U.S. linked to COVID are from COVID or how many are with COVID, but they had other comorbidities? Do you have that breakdown?” Bret Baier asked Walensky on “Fox News Sunday.”
Walensky did not, but after some hemming and hawing she offered a notable response.
“Those data will be forthcoming,” she told Baier.
This is good news. The only question is, why didn’t public officials listen to Elon Musk two years ago?
“WHO Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan said Tuesday ‘there’s no evidence right now” that suggests healthy children and adolescents need booster shots to supplement their Covid-19 vaccinations.'” (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Toby Green tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Moral certainty was very appealing – it always is. So many times in history, moral certainty produced immoral outcomes.
Few experts see Covid/lockdown as a morality play – but it has been that.
We can’t just “follow the science” – we must consider philosophy, history, ethics…
(DBx: The only thing about which I am reasonably morally certain is that it is nearly always immoral to initiate coercion against anyone – an offense made worse by using your moral certainties in an attempt to justify such coercion.)
Clifton Duncan interviews Martin Kulldorff.
Take a look at what is becoming of science in our age of Covid hysteria: The editor-in-chief of Science Magazine, Holden Thorp, tweets out this speculation…
… in response to which Jay Bhattacharya quite reasonably asks…
Is the editor-in-chief of @ScienceMagazine (@hholdenthorp) conducting séances to divine MLK’s thoughts on the @gbdeclaration?
… and also in response to which Martin Kulldorff tweets:
Does @hholdenthorp think he is the editor-in-chief of Séance Magazine, not @ScienceMagazine?
For evidence of just how incapable many people have become of thinking straight, check out this tweet from a clueless parent in Arlington County, Virginia… (HT my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy)
Governor Youngkin talks about parental involvement in schools. The overwhelmingly majority of Arlington parents want masks worn in schools. Does parental involvement only matter if the Governor agrees?
… to which another parent, one with a still-functioning intellect, accurately and sensibly responds:
You can still make your kid wear a useless mask. But the school can’t force me to mask my kids. Why is this hard?
OSHA’s indiscriminate approach failed to account for this crucial distinction – between occupational risk and risk more generally – and accordingly the mandate takes on the character of a general public health measure, rather than an ‘occupational safety or health standard’. As such the mandate failed.
This is a significant victory for bodily integrity and medical freedom and privacy. However, it was disappointing to see that the narrower vaccine mandate for healthcare workers was left in place. In a 5-4 decision the Supreme Court maintained the ‘healthcare worker rule’ which requires vaccination for about 10.3million workers at 76,000 healthcare facilities. Those healthcare workers who do not want to be vaccinated, having worked throughout the pandemic, now face forced jabs or unemployment.
This is also a huge victory for our friends at the Daily Wire, who were among the first to challenge this outrageous tyrannical law. While some so called centre-Right commentators here in the UK, no, I mean the South of France, sought to ‘punish five million vaccine refuseniks’, those with decency sought to stand up to the Covid tyranny. Ben Shapiro, who once came off the loser in debate with Andrew Neil, certainly is the winner when it comes to what matters: fighting for freedom, limited government and what kind of society we want to leave to our children. Shapiro, leading the Daily Wire, put his money where his mouth is in challenging this law. And won. It was also, as Shapiro pointed out, a huge victory for the Trump-appointed justices who handed down this decision.
At the end of the Second World War, Gaullists and Communists insisted that the majority of the French people had played a part in the Resistance. Actual figures for those who actively opposed the Nazis vary between 400,000 and 75,000. Something not entirely dissimilar is happening now as the Government prepares to lift Plan B restrictions next week, and fervent advocates of lockdown try to distance themselves from its dire consequences. Scientists whose mathematical models persuaded anxious ministers to impose drastic restrictions on human freedom not even seen during the Blitz are suddenly keen to emphasise that these were merely worst-case “scenarios”, not something on which you’d want to base actual policy.
Did they mention that at the time, I wonder? Or has the Eddie-the-Eagle reliability of their predictions given rise to a certain hasty revisionism? Sorry, that’s unfair. Eddie the Eagle never predicted up to 6,000 Covid deaths a day this winter (actual number: 250).
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For those who were part of the lockdown Resistance, it is gratifying, but also oddly unbearable, to see the people who attacked us admitting that the “misinformation” we were accused of spreading 18 months ago turns out to be remarkably close to the truth. I am not a particularly rebellious person, and certainly not a brave one, but if I encounter any kind of injustice, my inner Welsh dragon starts breathing fire. I can’t help it. During the lockdowns, Idris the Pearson dragon seldom stopped fuming at the thousands of harrowing stories which readers shared with me. Like the lecturer who emailed about one of his students, a glorious young man, who fell to his death after hiding on the roof when police raided his house because a small party there breached lockdown regulations and the lad didn’t want to get into trouble. He paid with his young life for the stupid rules that were made – and repeatedly broken, as we now know – by middle-aged men in Westminster.
When the Resistance dared to suggest that some lockdown measures were disproportionate, crazy and unsupported by science, let alone common sense, we were reviled. That is no exaggeration. I regret to say your columnist was called, in no particular order, a Covid denier (I nursed my entire family through the virus), a granny killer (I didn’t see my own mother for 18 months) and a spreader of disinformation. When I protested on social media that putting padlocks on the gates of playgrounds was a terrible idea, back came a fusillade of vicious accusations: “You want people to die!”
To question the official narrative that nothing mattered except keeping people safe from Covid was heresy. Witches like me had to be burnt at the stake before we could spread our subversive ideas to all Sage-fearing people. Funny how things turn out, isn’t it? It is now widely acknowledged that the NHS was never overwhelmed (that’s why the Nightingales were shut without being used). And even those prophets of doom at the BBC finally acknowledged this week that half of “Covid deaths” since Christmas are not actually “from” Covid but “with” Covid.
On top of vaccine and booster mandates on health-care workers and SUNY students, Hochul threatens to impose one on K-12 students, even as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admits that the vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission. They do reduce severity of illness. But simply put: Your vaccination status affects only you and your health, which is why I and many others support COVID vaccines as a matter of personal choice.
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I agree. And on Day One as governor, I will lift all mandates because I’d deal with COVID using data-driven and common-sense strategies.
I would bolster hospital capacity by rehiring the nearly 34,000 health-care workers forced out by Hochul’s mandate. I would also ensure that doctors have the discretion to treat patients and prescribe medicine they deem necessary, not handcuffed by politics.
We would shift to a focused strategy aimed at reducing COVID mortality by better protecting high-risk populations such as the elderly. We would make available the vaccines and boosters, but no one would be coerced into getting them to work, attend school or participate in our free society. We would target outreach at people over 65 who are neither vaccinated nor COVID-recovered, especially those harder-to-reach lower-income seniors in rural areas and inner cities. And available treatments will be based on need, not skin color, as it is with Hochul’s team.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 164 of the 2012 revised and updated edition of Steven Landsburg’s excellent The Armchair Economist; it appears in a chapter in which Landsburg discusses a file that he keeps of mistaken economic commentary:
A few years ago a Florida frost caused the price of oranges to rise so high that growers earned more income than usual. One commentator earned a place in the Sound and Fury file by suggesting that the enormous price increase reveals the growers’ ability to act as a monopoly. In fact it reveals just the opposite: The incident establishes that growers can raise their incomes by killing oranges. If they were able to act in concert, they wouldn’t have waited for a frost.
January 18, 2022
What Is The World Coming To?
This letter is to the editor of the Salt Lake Tribune:
Editor:
Do you not hear yourself? Are you deaf to the horrifying authoritarianism blaring from your call for Utah’s governor “to deploy the National Guard to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere” (“Utah leaders have surrendered to COVID pandemic,” Jan. 15)?
Would you propose that the National Guard be deployed to subject to house arrest homosexuals or trans people or communists or the Japanese, or Jews, Muslims, or Mormons? Of course not. Yet each of these groups has been demonized and accused of poisoning the body politic. Fortunately today, members of these groups are protected both by civilized norms and formal laws from the sort of state-sponsored terrorism that you openly propose be unleashed on the unvaccinated.
You’ll insist that, unlike the groups mentioned above, the unvaccinated truly do poison the body politic. But pause, please. Consider it possible that the same sorts of irrational fears, biases, and hatreds that motivated those who in the past endorsed persecutions of people with different beliefs, appearances, or peaceful preferences have taken hold of you. After all, those who in the past endorsed such persecutions were as sincerely convinced of the righteousness of their causes as you are convinced of the righteousness of yours.
Even if the evidence did not, contrary to fact (and as admitted by the Director of the CDC), show that vaccination does little to prevent those who are vaccinated from spreading the virus – and even if the evidence did not, contrary to fact, show that vaccinations work to protect the vaccinated from serious consequences even when infected with the virus – and even if the evidence did not, contrary to fact, show that children are at virtually no risk from Covid and that previously infected persons have substantial natural immunity – even if all this, I must ask: How can you not be agonizingly ashamed of yourself for fueling such hatred against the unvaccinated and for calling for them to be summarily imprisoned under house arrest? How can you not see that future generations will regard your attitude with the same mix of disbelief and disgust that swell in us today when we encounter the history of witch trials and of mad pogroms against religious heretics?
How can you not see that the mass hysteria that you stoke cannot possibly end well?
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
“UChicago Must End Its Booster Mandate—We Are Not Lab Rats” – so argue some University of Chicago students. (HT Jim Bennett) A slice:
Mandates for the COVID vaccine and booster are unnecessary to protect the health of the UChicago community.
COVID has a survival rate of over 99.87% for individuals under the age of 65.
According to the CDC, only 5% of “COVID deaths” are solely attributable to COVID as the cause. The other 95% of “COVID deaths” involve, on average, almost 4 additional conditions (comorbidities) or causes per death.
We will not play pretend by accepting our university’s gross exaggerations of the public health risks of catching and transmitting COVID. We will not live in fear.
National Review‘s Jack Butler is rightly appalled by a recent editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune in which the editors endorse the use of the national guard to prevent all persons who are unvaccinated against Covid from going “anywhere.” (DBx: Just when I begin to think that humanity might escape and survive Covid hysteria, there comes along something like this Salt Lake Tribune editorial to reveal just how very thin a veneer is enlightenment and liberalism, and how readily human beings made panicky will embrace cruelty.) Butler appropriately concludes:
Instead of complaining about their state government, the editors of the Salt Lake Tribune should thank it for declining to indulge their fantasies of biomedical tyranny.
Michael Brendan Dougherty reports that one Australian official disparaged Novak Djokovic as being an “icon of free choice.” (See also el gato malo.)
Simon Evans unpacks the deplorable scapegoating of Djokovic. Two slices:
The grumbling nature of the final verdict – that the ban was upheld on ‘health and good order’ grounds – might however linger, unpleasantly, in the air. It suggests that Djokovic was being refused a visa at least partly on similar grounds as might a David Icke or a Tommy Robinson – because there was a whiff of the troublemaker about him. Because he was a threat to the moral purity of the people, rather than their respiratory systems, and to the placidity of the public square. He was thought by Hawke to be capable of fanning ‘anti-vaccination sentiment’. This, despite Djokovic never having uttered anything approaching ‘anti-vax’ sentiment, beyond admitting his own preference for remaining unjabbed, and his rather quaint adherence to some homoeopathy-adjacent eye-wash generally more popular in the Brighton Lanes than on the Pro-Circuit.
As Twitter might put it:
‘Djokovic: Remains unvaccinated, catches Covid, fails to die.
Australian government: “Oh my God, will this anti-vaccine sentiment never end?!”’
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Around the world, governments have supposedly been ‘following the science’. Yet their citizens and subjects have rarely found that this plays out the same from one county to the next, let alone across state lines and international borders. And nowhere has that conflict been more obvious than in Australia. [Scott] Morrison can say that the Australian people ‘have made many sacrifices during this pandemic’ as if to suggest consensus, but that cannot conceal the brutal imposition of the will of the state – and the chafing many have felt.
Infection also strengthens the T-cell response. T-cells from vaccinated people have been found to retain 70% to 80% of their efficacy against the Omicron variant spike protein. This has helped prevent more severe illness, even though vaccine antibodies are less effective against Omicron.
But infection trains T-cells to recognize virus proteins that also are less likely to mutate than the spike. Some of these proteins share similarities with the original SARS virus as well as four coronaviruses that can cause the common cold. SARS survivors have been found to have memory T-cells 17 years after infection that also recognized parts of the Covid-19 virus. A new study from the U.K.’s Imperial College found that people with pre-existing T-cells to non-spike proteins in common-cold coronaviruses were less likely to get infected with Covid-19.
All of this suggests that infection with Omicron is likely to stimulate potent and durable protection against Covid-19—and potentially other coronaviruses—even if it mutates to become more virulent. As Omicron rapidly spreads, people who have been vaccinated or previously infected will develop superimmunity. Covid-19 will become a virus that causes cold- and sometimes flulike symptoms—annoying but rarely deadly or disruptive.
What can Biden do? He can start by leveling with people. One of the reasons people are in such a sour mood right now is that the vaccines were oversold – specifically, they clearly don’t stop 95 percent of infections. The good news is that the vaccines reduce serious illness, hospitalization and death — and that’s really important! But the vaccines don’t prevent you from catching the virus, and they can’t guarantee you will not get sick, particularly against Omicron.
The approval processes at the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have mostly been a black box – unless you’re looking for the arguments, you won’t find them. In September, Biden said all Americans would need boosters, but until November 18, the FDA recommended that only the elderly or those with comorbidities should get boosters; the next day, they said all adults should get one. Biden should acknowledge that not all scientists, doctors, and medical experts agree, and stop arguing as if “THE SCIENCE!” speaks with one clear voice. A little humility, and respectful acknowledgment of dissenting voices, would go a long way.
Biden needs to avoid the Lucy-and-the-football dynamic that has characterized policies during this pandemic – the sense that you, the citizen, have never done enough to prevent the spread. Israel has conducted a study on a fourth shot, and the results seem pretty underwhelming. Three shots is probably going to be fine for most Americans; there isn’t much point in starting up a new argument in a few months about whether Americans with “only” three shots should count as “fully vaccinated.”
Biden could acknowledge that wearing masks has not proven effective against the highly contagious omicron variant so far. Biden’s mask rhetoric hasn’t changed — “please wear a mask. If you’re in a — you know, I think it is part of your patriotic duty” — even as the cities with the strictest masking rules see the same Omicron spike as everywhere else.
There are other dumb rules that Biden never seems to get around to criticizing. Sonoma County wants to restrict the spectators to youth sports to 20 percent of capacity – while in nearby San Francisco, the Golden State Warriors play to sellout crowds. The editorial board of the Salt Lake City Tribune wants to “deploy the National Guard to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.” Minneapolis enacted, and then rescinded, a proposal requiring kids 2 to 4 to show proof of a negative test to enter a restaurant.
Glenn Youngkin promised to be on the side of parents as Virginia governor, and on his first day in office, he delivered.
The Republican issued an executive order allowing parents to decide whether their kids will wear masks in school and met an instant wall of resistance from Democratic-controlled counties and criticism from the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki. A Washington Post headline said that Youngkin is “terrifying” people.
The flak notwithstanding, his order is a sign of a growing backlash against COVID restrictions that will likely only gain force as the pandemic drags on and former articles of faith, including on masking, get increasingly called into doubt.
A further piece of evidence in support of the idea that face coverings act as a compliance device is provided in Laura Dodsworth’s book, A State of Fear. Dodsworth interviewed Gavin Morgan — an educational psychologist and member of the SPI-B (the behavioural science subgroup of SAGE) — who told her that his antipathy to masks had been nullified by some colleagues in the group who believed they were useful in promoting a sense of “solidarity“, strengthening people’s feelings of cohesion in the collective fight against the virus.
If I lived in Oxfordshire, I’d patronize this pub.
Kate Clanchy explains what lockdowns took from her parents. A slice:
But under pressure, first austerity and now lockdown, they had seen it drift into an ever more attenuated, disparate, emergency-orientated system. With Covid, the imperative to save lives, through high-tech medical measures, especially the lives of elderly frail people like them, intensified, while the means of delivering simple, limited medical care, such as podiatry and physiotherapy, withered away. This, though, was the reverse of my parents wishes. They had each had more than their fill of hospitals. They had sore backs and feet. They wanted no more drastic interventions. If their conditions couldn’t be humanely managed, they wanted to die at home.
Over lockdown, my father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, entirely over the phone. He never met a nurse or received physiotherapy. In order to change his drug regime he had to come off his antidepressants: a terrifying step when the Parkinson’s locked his mood, made his depression unshiftable. But no new prescription was forthcoming. Each day, after I’d reached something down from a shelf or photographed a wound, we would supplicate another doctor. Eventually, we were told the consultant had gone on holiday and forgotten the prescription. I walked my shaking father round the water meadow and he remembered his father.
Bill Muehlenberg decries what he accurately calls “health fascism.” Two slices:
The stuff of shocking dystopian novels and films is now fully upon us. Consider this – a good friend in WA [Western Australia] just told me: ‘My dad is scheduled for surgery for cancer in a few weeks. The surgery has now rung my parents and said that he cannot have the surgery unless he has a first dose of the vaccine. Wow. They would just leave him to die of cancer instead.’
Wow indeed. Talk about heartless bastards and health fascists. The fundamental rule of medicine for millennia has always been, ‘First, do no harm.’ Refusing to treat patients because they are making informed health choices is wrong. Making them the subject of unjust discrimination is the height of cruelty and inhumanity.
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Our governments – drunk on power and control – are fully involved in the creation of a two-tiered society where grossly immoral and unjust discrimination takes place at the most crucial of levels: in the access to basic goods and service, to travel, to education, and even to healthcare.
Our leaders are effectively saying, ‘You get the jab or else. Do as we demand or you can just die.’ Never mind the legitimate concerns so many have about the efficacy and safety of Covid vaccines. Never mind the human rights declarations that speak of the vital need for there to be no compulsion in medicine, and the need for full voluntary informed consent.
If hospitals and emergency rooms are not turning away those making irresponsible choices – such as drug addicts and heavy drinkers – it should not be turning away those who in my view are making very responsible choices about things like vaccination.
Paul Collits describes and decries “[t]he strange emergence of the anti-vaxxer bogeyman.” A slice:
To Sir (!) Tony Blair, they are selfish idiots. To Bob Carr, they are simpletons. To the Archbishop of Canterbury (and, no doubt, the Pope), they are immoral. To Justin Trudeau, they are misogynist racists.
Emmanuel Macron wants to ‘p**s them off’. Jacinda Ardern smirks at the suggestion that punishing them ushers in a two-tiered society. Daniel Andrews wants them excluded from the economy. Scott Morrison wants one in particular excluded from Australia and from an iconic tennis tournament.
The LA Times journalist Michael Hiltzik suggests that mocking their deaths from Covid is ‘necessary’. They have been described as a ‘global underclass’. Two academics of very different political hues reckon they should be punished via the tax system, since they are ‘free riders’. They are taking up all the ICU beds. Ergo, killing people. Even Covid ‘Liberals’ like Dominic Perrottet want them excluded from certain classes of public service, including teaching, seemingly unaware that children are close to being at nil risk of catching Covid.
To all of the above, they are a tiny minority (which is actually not true), and so able to be gaslit.
Of course, I speak of the fate of the so-called anti-vaxxer. In the words of British media scholar Michael Wayne, the current vilification of the unjabbed amounts to ‘moral condemnation’. It is condemnation of an enemy by those engaged in a propaganda war worthy of a Dantean circle of hell, (probably).
Defaming anti-vaxxers has become quite the sport, to go along with their exclusion from non-deplorable society and the evisceration of their rights by the Covid State and its allies. The unjabbed are at the coal face of the papers-please society.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 3-4 of Israel Kirzner’s 1974 Hillsdale College lecture “Capital, Competition, and Capitalism” as this lecture is reprinted in Competition, Economic Planning, and the Knowledge Problem (Peter J. Boettke and Frédéric Sautet, eds., 2018), which is a volume in The Collected Works of Israel M. Kirzner:
The theory of the competitive market process teaches that where resources within a society leave opportunities for improvement via exchange, production, or some combination of both, they will appear as opportunities for entrepreneurial profit. The lure of profit will lead entrepreneurs to discover these opportunities and pursue them until, through the competitive entrepreneurial process, resources have been reallocated in an equilibrium that eliminates both the profit opportunities and the misallocation. Freedom of entry is crucial to this process. The process depends heavily on the likelihood that, whenever anyone perceives an opportunity for improvement, he will be motivated by the lure of profit to exploit that opportunity. For this actually to occur it is necessary that no one who has perceived such an opportunity be barred from exploiting it.
January 17, 2022
Summer Institute on the History of Economics
I here share, with enthusiasm and my endorsement, an announcement from Duke University economist Bruce Caldwell:
The Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University will be hosting another Summer Institute on the History of Economics this summer from June 20-29, 2022. The program is designed for students in graduate programs in economics, though students in graduate school in other fields as well as newly minted PhDs will also be considered.
Students will be competitively selected and successful applicants will receive free (double occupancy) housing, a booklet of readings, and stipends for travel and food. The deadline for applying is March 1.
We are very excited about this year’s program, which will focus on giving participants the tools to set up and teach their own undergraduate course in the history of economic thought. There will also be sessions devoted to showing how concepts and ideas from the history of economics might be introduced into other classes. The sessions will be run by Duke faculty members Bruce Caldwell, Steve Medema, and Jason Brent. More information on the Summer Institute is available at our website, http://hope.econ.duke.edu/
Street Art that I Applaud
My Mercatus Center colleague Jack Salmon found this street art in DC’s NoMa neighborhood. I applaud it (assuming that it wasn’t put up in violation of anyone’s property rights). Jack reports that this street art, alas, was quickly torn down by an angry resident who proclaimed it to be “a public-health concern.”
“We’re Playing With Fire”
Simultaneously celebrating the marvelous spontaneous order of the market, Jordan Peterson powerfully and passionately decries Covidocratic tyranny.
JP Sears on the Unraveling Covid Narrative
In his latest video, JP Sears humorously exposes the Covidocracy’s hypocrisy, deceptions, fear-mongering, arrogance, and lies. (HT Dan Klein)
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