Russell Roberts's Blog, page 189
January 10, 2022
A Frustrated Parent
A close friend of mine, who wishes to remain anonymous, sent this e-mail to a listserve of which I am a member. I thank my friend for kindly permitting me to share the e-mail here in full, save for the removal of all identifying information.
[Joe] Rogan has also not been shy about pointing out the relationship between comorbidities and Covid risk… and the extent to which most of those comorbidities are related to personal behavior.
To make a highly impolite, Rogan-esque observation–Justice Sotomayor is a 67 year old overweight diabetic who participated in oral argument on Friday by phone because she was too afraid to come to court to hear the arguments in person. And her response to this is that every American–including our kids–should be compelled to get vaccinated to protect people like her. Well as far as I’m concerned, she can go… jump in a lake if she thinks that’s the way to deal with this pandemic. After all, she is at not only greater risk of contracting Covid than my healthy 16 year old daughter, once infected an overweight older person exhales virus at a rate that is equivalent to many health children (I can’t find the reference now, but I saw one study that said that one obese person exhales as much virus as 3 dozen healthy kids when they are sick). https://www.pnas.org/content/118/8/e2...
So yeah, I’m getting more than a little frustrated with this idea that people who are unwilling to control their own health, even to the extent of endangering the rest of us, are now claiming its my daughter’s responsibility to risk her health for them. She has to stay out of school for a year because of people like Sonia Sotomayor? She is now in therapy and on anti-anxiety medication that makes her ill because school closures, masks, and paranoia spread by fat people like Sonia Sotomayor imply its my daughter’s job to risk her mental and physical health because some 67 year old Supreme Court Justice can’t put down her Krispy Kremes. And Sotomayor and people like her instead imply it is healthy, young unvaccinated people who are supposedly the reason why Covid has been so bad.
Enough is enough. And I say “God bless Joe Rogan” for pointing out how much of this problem is one of personal responsibility and behavior, not “the virus” as if it operates as some sort of exogenous force over which we have no control at all. Yeah, the virus is gonna virus and we can’t do anything about that–but beyond the catastrophic and counterproductive public policy choices there are some real personal choices at the bottom of this.
Sorry for the rant but [John Doe] really hit a trigger point with me because [my daughter]’s school district just recently redefined “fully vaccinated” as requiring a booster shot and I’m trying to process that.
Some Covid Links
Many universities have announced a pivot to remote learning for at least part of January, among them UCLA, Columbia, Duke, Yale, Stanford, and Michigan State. The list goes on.
This move—in response to the rapid spread of the Omicron variant—feels like a return to March 2020, when virtually all U.S. universities closed for in-person learning, sending students home for spring break and telling them not to come back. At that point, keeping students away from campus was reasonable. Now, however, this decision is a mistake. It reflects an outmoded level of caution. And it represents a failure of universities to protect their students’ interests.
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Moving to remote schooling when the conditions on the ground have changed so dramatically is an abdication of universities’ responsibility to educate students and protect all aspects of their health.
College students are in the midst of a mental-health crisis. Surveys show rising anxiety and depression in this population, including suicidal thoughts. One survey reported that 95 percent of college students have experienced at least one mental-health issue during the pandemic. Not all of these problems are driven by remote schooling, of course, but the top issue cited in that survey was loneliness and isolation, and it’s difficult not to make the connection.
Measuring learning losses at the college level is more difficult than at the K–12 level, where they have been substantial. But if you ask virtually any faculty member, they will tell you that while some students do fine and some courses port well to an online format, many do not. Getting through to 50 screens on Zoom is far more challenging than to 50 people sitting in front of you. Students may struggle to focus on even the best lecture in the world if that lecture is on their computer.
“Now that we have vaccines, campus restrictions have taken on an increasingly absurd character — ruining the college experience in a (failed) attempt to control a virus that poses minimal risk to students,” writes Cornell student Matthew Samilow at National Review. “The claim that these restrictions work is designed to be unfalsifiable: If cases are low, the administration says it’s because the restrictions are working; if cases are high, they say it’s because students aren’t following the restrictions enough. Either way, the question of whether the restrictions actually work is never answered.”
Other students share Samilow’s frustrations. Roy Matthews, who graduated from Maine’s Bates College a few months ago, tells Reason, “I was so ready to leave,” calling the required daily nasal-swab tests a “riveting good time.” (If you missed three in a row, he says, you’d be swiftly kicked off campus.)
Here’s a brief report on my opposition to George Mason University’s Covid restrictions.
Mikko Packalen decries Canada’s “accidental biosecurity state.” A slice:
The government and media constantly exhort the people to focus their attention and effort on controlling a single disease. Restrictions, mandates, quarantines, and closures are imposed without regard to the enormous health and economic harms that individuals and society incur. Public health even neglected deadlier diseases like cancer and heart disease to pursue zero-Covid.
Covid policies are invented on the fly and change regularly. Testing, quarantine and isolation rules, for example, often change on short notice with little justification offered to support them. The boot of Covid policies is on citizens’ necks at all times and authorities keep moving it.
Covid policies are also opaque despite their all-encompassing and encroaching nature and the draconian fines and penalties that accompany them. The lack of transparency is understandable; the authorities too know how embarrassing many of the rules are. Yet, the policies come with no practical ways to challenge them.
The ad hoc nature of Covid restrictions has also meant that even the measures’ benefits remain uncertain today, almost two years after the pandemic began. Politicians and public health officials justify their policies with data on Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths but neglect the data on the harms of those policies.
It would be irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen they target. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening here.
Both mandates—from the Health and Human Services Department for healthcare workers and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for large employers in many other industries—were issued Nov. 5. At that time, the Delta variant represented almost all U.S. Covid-19 cases, and both agencies appropriately considered Delta at length and in detail, finding that the vaccines remained effective against it.
Those findings are now obsolete. As of Jan. 1, Omicron represented more than 95% of U.S. Covid cases, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because some of Omicron’s 50 mutations are known to evade antibody protection, because more than 30 of those mutations are to the spike protein used as an immunogen by the existing vaccines, and because there have been mass Omicron outbreaks in heavily vaccinated populations, scientists are highly uncertain the existing vaccines can stop it from spreading. As the CDC put it on Dec. 20, “we don’t yet know . . . how well available vaccines and medications work against it.”
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Meantime, it has long been known that vaccinated people with breakthrough infections are highly contagious, and preliminary data from all over the world indicate that this is true of Omicron as well. As CDC Director Rochelle Walensky put it last summer, the viral load in the noses and throats of vaccinated people infected with Delta is “indistinguishable” from that of unvaccinated people, and “what [the vaccines] can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.”
There is some early evidence that boosters may reduce Omicron infections, but the effect appears to wane quickly, and we don’t know if repeated boosters would be an effective response to the surge of Omicron.
Let’s hope that what is observed by the editors of the New York Post continues.
Vinay Prasad writes wisely about testing for Covid-19. A slice:
Testing creates anxiety and anchors our mind. Every day we see a counter of the number of new cases in the United States. There is no counter on the masthead of the New York Times that shows the number of kids who are out of school, missing a hot meal, the victim of child abuse. No counter shows the rates of high school drop outs, the victims of suicide or gun violence. Testing and counting one thing, but not others, creates a salience to one malady in society, and leads us to downplay of others.
It’s a fact that el gato malo isn’t impressed with today’s so-called “fact checkers.”
Prompted by this report, Scott Moore tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
There was a great observation done in Florida at the end of their summer wave where some schools broke rank & enacted mask mandates while most didnt. There was no difference in case rates between the counties w/ masking schools and the “wild west” schools.
Prompted by this report that Connecticut’s government – in 2022! – is asking nursing homes to accept Covid-positive admissions from hospitals, Phil Magness writes on Facebook:
This is an actual policy decision made earlier this week by the Governor of Connecticut.
He made it after 2 years of direct knowledge about the disasters caused by that same policy the last time it was tried.
His pretext for the order is also identical to the last time – he wants nursing homes to be used as spillover capacity for patients to convalesce, because he thinks there’s an imminent hospital system collapse that never seems to happen.
This is why you should not trust a single thing that lockdowner politicians and their public health advisors tell you about this disease. They are not only adrift themselves – they are actively choosing policies that inflict harm and make the pandemic worse.
From a new paper by Cathrine Axfors and John Ioannidis:
Results Twenty-five seroprevalence surveys representing 14 countries were included. Across all countries, the median IFR in community-dwelling elderly and elderly overall was 2.9% (range 0.2%-6.9%) and 4.9% (range 0.2%-16.8%) without accounting for seroreversion (2.4% and 4.0%, respectively, accounting for 5% monthly seroreversion). Multiple sensitivity analyses yielded similar results. IFR was higher with larger proportions of people >85 years. Younger age strata had low IFR values (median 0.0013%, 0.0088%, 0.021%, 0.042%, 0.14%, and 0.65%, at 0-19, 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, and 60-69 years even without accounting for seroreversion).
Conclusions The IFR of COVID-19 in community-dwelling elderly people is lower than previously reported. Very low IFRs were confirmed in the youngest populations.
(DBx: Given this reality, it is a crime against humanity that many governments continue to keep their populations under lockdown and other restraints – or under the constant threat of such – and that most of the major media continue to fuel Covid hysteria.)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 19 of Chandran Kukathas’s excellent 2021 book, Immigration and Freedom:
Immigration control is not just about policing boundary crossing; it is in fact about managing, along with population movement, the rights, the status, and even identities of people within as well as outside the borders of the state.
DBx: Indeed so.
All who embrace firmly and fondly the sentiment “Don’t tread on me” must, to be principled, also object to – or at least be deeply skeptical of – restrictions on immigration and on the peaceful activities that immigrants are allowed to engage in.
January 9, 2022
Competition Should Be Judged By How Well Consumers – Not Producers and Sellers – Are Being Served
Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Editor:
Chris Jones attempts to justify antitrust actions against large retailers by complaining that small retailers during the pandemic faced “higher wholesale prices than competitors and less access to critical goods such as paper products, cleaning supplies and grocery staples” (Letters, Jan. 10).
Let’s describe the same situation more informatively: large retailers secured lower wholesale prices than competitors and more access to critical goods such as paper products, cleaning supplies and grocery staples.
The very size of large retailers often enables them to acquire more and better inventory, and at lower costs, than can small retailers. And we know that these efficiencies are shared with consumers, for otherwise small retailers wouldn’t complain about their larger rivals. Also, retailers that manage in the market to secure more-reliable and lower-cost access to inventories tend to grow relative to retailers that don’t.
To punish large retailers with antitrust actions would be to punish these firms for excelling at serving consumers.
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
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There’s no question that lockdowns and other Covid restrictions created situations that were better able to be exploited by large retailers at the expense of smaller competitors. But the culprits here are the lockdowns and restrictions, not Amazon and other large retailers.
Some Non-Covid Links
Reason‘s Ron Bailey reports that “weather and climate disasters are declining globally.”
Simon Cottee is rightly critical of Progressives’ exaggerations of the events of January 6th, 2021. Two slices:
It is hard to exaggerate the feverish excitement with which many progressives responded to the Capitol riot. While the spectacle of hundreds of Trump supporters smashing their way into one of the sacrosanct sites of American democracy generated widespread condemnation, for many progressives the dominant emotional register was one of apocalyptic disgust — and arousal.
Here, finally, was irrefutable proof that they had been right all along: that Trump’s hateful rhetoric would finally become a hateful reality. Here, finally, was a war that could give their lives meaning. There were now Right-wing insurrectionists among them, and they would need to be fought. It was almost as if, on some deep level, they had wanted the Capitol siege to happen.
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Today’s liberals are similarly flushed with ideological fervour, believing that they are in a cosmic struggle of Manichean proportions: they are the elect, the chosen ones, and they believe that their responsibility to purge all traces of white supremacy and hateful extremism is a grave one. Indeed, such is their keenness to root out white supremacy that they are apt to find it everywhere, even where it patently doesn’t exist. They are equally apt to inflate its threat where it does exist, like comparing the storming of the Capitol on January 6 to the terror attacks of 9/11.
David Henderson explores today’s threats to democracy.
Many of the stories that Wapshott tells are fascinating, but he does not understand economics well enough to explain Friedman’s views. Wapshott seems to be an unreconstructed Keynesian and so explaining Samuelson’s views comes relatively easily to him. But he never shows a solid grasp of Friedman’s monetarism and so, in explicating Friedman’s thinking, tries to do the analysis within a Keynesian framework. My criticism is not that Wapshott doesn’t agree with monetarism, although he doesn’t appear to; it’s that he doesn’t seem to understand this school of thought.
One of Friedman’s biggest contributions to economics was his 1963 book with Anna J. Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. In it, they showed that one of the important contributors to the Great Depression was the 30% reduction in the money supply that the Federal Reserve allowed to occur between 1929 and 1933. Yet, here’s how Wapshott explains their finding: “Had the Federal Reserve eased interest rates earlier, many of the businesses which had gone bust could have borrowed to remain open.” But Friedman and Schwartz said little about interest rates; their focus was on the money supply. Indeed, interest rates during the Great Depression were quite low and Federal Reserve officials mistakenly saw them as an indicator of a loose monetary policy.
This anxiety is bound to continue. The administration prefers blaming the surge in prices on corporations, especially in the oil industry, rather than on its own policies—like the unnecessarily extravagant $2 trillion COVID-19 relief bill that passed in January 2021 and flooded the economy with fresh cash. More spending and taxes will inevitably follow such a large government expansion, and like most other Americans, 88 percent of Biden voters think these are both important issues.
During a recent address to the country, Biden noted that there is no federal solution to this pandemic, yet he declared his administration’s commitment to a legally dubious vaccine mandate for private employers. This could be explained by the fact that while Americans are equally divided on requirements by private employers to ask for proof of vaccination, 83 percent of his voters approve.
Joel Kotkin asks: “Is this the end of progressive America?” A slice:
Likewise, only one in three Americans have confidence in their public schools, where the education establishment’s goal seems to be to obliterate merit. In my adopted home state of California, this “post-colonial” approach includes deemphasising the importance of tests, excusing bad behaviour, and imposing ideology on often ill-educated students. The San Diego Unified School District, meanwhile, is busily getting rid of mandates for such things as knowing course material, taking tests, handing in work on time, or even showing up; all these, the district insists, are inherently “racist”. This in a state that ranked 49th in the performance of poor, largely minority students. (Still, the situation could be worse: neighbouring Oregon no longer requires any demonstrable proof of competence to graduate.)
What passes for serious economic analysis by political ‘leaders’ would solidly fail any ECON 101 student; too much of such ‘analysis’ is the economic equivalent of an adult explaining the unexpected opening of a door by confidently asserting that the deed was done by a ghost. Here’s more from the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal. A slice:
Inflation keeps rising, and maybe the place where Americans have noticed it most is the grocery store. Prices have climbed 16% at the meat counter in the last year, and so President Biden is rounding up the usual scapegoats: Big meat producers.
“While their profits go up, the prices you see at the grocery stores go up commensurate and the prices farmers receive for the products they are bringing to market go down,” Mr. Biden said Monday. “This reflects the market being distorted by a lack of competition,” adding that “capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation.”
Thanks for the lecture, but back to Econ 101, Mr. President. Meat prices fell in the five years before the pandemic, and markets didn’t suddenly become less competitive. Like so much else in the Biden era, meat prices have soared amid surging demand, rising production costs and constrained supply.
Perhaps It IS Better That Children Not Be Allowed Contact with Such ‘Teachers’
A parent in Arlington, Virginia, corrected the grammar in a letter recently sent by the President of the comically misnamed Arlington Education Association to the Superintendent of Arlington Public Schools. Below are screen shots of the corrected letter.
Let us hope that the “teachers” unions have so overplayed their hand in response to Covid that government-supplied K-12 education begins to disappear. (For the record, although I’m an employee of a public university, I favor elimination also of all government-run institutions of so-called “higher learning.”)
Some Covid Links
The raw transcript fails to capture the scorn dripping from Breyer’s voice when he said “unvaccinated others.” It is certainly a turn of sorts for the Court’s liberals to argue that it’s acceptable for workplace laws to drive out employees because other people might quit rather than work with them. Just imagine the response if this had been said by a justice about, say, people with HIV. In 1987, Justice William Brennan was sticking up for a teacher with tuberculosis. How liberal attitudes have changed.
The irony, of course, is that the entire conceptual framework of unvaccinated people being a risk to the vaccinated is obsolete with the Omicron variant, which spreads with as much ease between vaccinated people as unvaccinated. That does not make vaccination irrelevant; the greater ease of spread means that you are taking a greater personal risk to yourself by remaining unvaccinated, because it’s harder to avoid the disease, so it’s all the more urgent to build your immunity to serious illness. But it does mean that this sort of rhetoric about the unvaccinated as toxic subhuman presences in the workplace is already outdated in 2022.
Perhaps more disturbingly, Sotomayor said at another point in the argument that “I’m not sure I understand the distinction why the states would have the power” to institute a rule like the one being pursued by the Biden administration, “but the federal government wouldn’t.”
Especially the first half of this long essay, from December 2020, by David Cayley is quite incisive. (HT Geoff Graham) Two slices:
From the very beginning of the pandemic, there has been a steady drumbeat of scientific criticism of the policy of total quarantine – the name I will give to the attempt to keep SARS COV-2 at bay until a vaccine can be administered to all. The first instance to come to my attention was a paper by epidemiologist John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford, particularly expert in bio-medical statistics. He warned of the “fiasco” that would result from introducing drastic measure in the absence of even the most elementary data, such as the infection mortality rate of the disease and the costs of immobilizing entire populations. What some of these costs might be was spelled out in a May 16th article in the British journal The Spectator by Ioannidis’s colleague, Jayanta Bhattacharya, writing with economist Mikko Packalen of Ontario’s Waterloo University. Entitled “Lives v. Lives” it argued that the deaths that would be caused by lockdowns were likely to far outnumber the deaths averted. They projected, for example, a massive increase in child mortality due to loss of livelihood – an increase completely out of scale with the effects of the pandemic. They also pointed out that lockdowns protect those already most able to protect themselves – those in comfortable situations for whom “working from home” is no more than a temporary inconvenience – and endanger those least able to protect themselves – the young, the poor and the economically marginal. By summer a stellar group of Canadian health professionals had recognized the same dangers as Bhattacharya and Packalen. In their open letter to Canada’s political leaders, they pleaded for “a balanced response” to the pandemic, arguing that the “current approach” posed serious threats to both “population health” and “equity.” This group included two former Chief Public Health Officers for Canada, two former provincial public health chiefs, three former deputy ministers of health, three present or former deans of medicine at Canadian universities and various other academic luminaries – a virtual Who’s Who of public health in Canada. Nevertheless, their statement created barely a ripple in the media mainstream – an astonishing fact which I’ll return to presently.
This pattern has continued – most recently with the Great Barrington Declaration. This was a statement, issued on Oct. 6 by Martin Kulldorf, a professor of medicine at Harvard, Sunetra Gupta, a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford, and Jay Bhattacharya of Sanford, whom I introduced a moment ago. Their statement deplored “the devastating effects on … public health” of the present policy and advocated “focused protection” – a policy of protecting those at risk from COVID while allowing everyone else to go about their business. In this way, they reasoned, immunity could gradually build up in the healthy population, without endangering those who are particularly vulnerable to the disease.
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This brings up the third and decisive point: the definition of public health. Can this definition be confined to the prevention of a single disease, however much of a challenge it poses, or must it be conceived as taking in all the various determinants of health? If the second definition be accepted, then I think a case can be made that the policy of total mobilization against COVID has been a catastrophe. Consider just a preliminary sketch of the consequences. There has been widespread and potentially fatal loss of livelihood throughout the world, especially amongst economically marginal groups. Businesses that have taken years to build have been destroyed. Suicide, depression, addiction and domestic violence have all increased. Public debt has swelled to potentially crippling proportions. The performing arts have been devastated. Precious “third places” that sustain conviviality have closed. Fear has been sown between people. Homelessness has grown to the point where some downtown Toronto parks have begun to resemble the hobo camps of the 1930’s. There have been surges in other diseases that have gone untreated due to COVID preoccupation. Many formerly face-to-face interactions have been virtualized, and this change threatens, in many cases, to become permanent – it seems, for example, that “leading universities” like Harvard and U.C. Berkeley have enthusiastically adopted on-line teaching in the hopes of franchising their expertise in future. The list goes on. Is this a worthwhile price to pay to avert illness amongst healthy people who could for the most part have sustained the illness? The question, by and large, has not even been asked. We don’t even know how much illness has been averted by our draconian policies, and we probably never will, since the experiment of comparing a locked down population to a freely circulating one would be impossible to conduct. In the absence of such an experiment most discussion will founder on the elementary distinction between correlation and cause – that a lockdown was introduced and the disease abated does not prove that the lockdown was the cause of the abatement.
George Leef applauds Novak Djokovic for resisting the Covidocracy.
The authors would then use the fear generated to force massive investments in public health infrastructure and increased bureaucracies. The end result would be health technocracy without end.
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No one opposes the keeping of statistics, proper monitoring of diseases, development of new vaccines and therapeutics, improving ventilation at schools and workplaces, and creating greater access to testing and effective masks for those who want them.
But these authors are after much bigger game than that. They are paving the way for imposing a public-health technocracy on society that would use continual emergency declarations — based on aggregate peak week respiratory illness statistics — to constrain personal freedom in the name of preventing illness.
Nick Comilla decries “the tyranny of the risk averse.” Three slices:
By overreaction, I mean things like ongoing restrictions, lockdowns, curfews, mask mandates, etc. For instance, in Quebec, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the entire world, they are going into a second curfew with restrictions that are more stringent than the first lockdowns. They are the only area in North America to enforce a literal government ‘curfew’ to try and (once again) slow the spread of the virus. People are not allowed to leave their homes after 10pm – not even to walk their dogs. The reasoning for this – which seems to be one of two justifications left for people who are in favour of restrictions – is the idea that we need to resort to restrictions whenever there is a ‘rise in cases’ in order to ‘free up hospital capacity’. The other remaining justification for restrictions is the view that the mitigation of Covid is essentially a social responsibility, and that measures should be in place that impact everyone so that the most vulnerable won’t contract the virus – namely, the elderly and people with pre-existing conditions.
These justifications don’t hold water for various reasons. At best, they’re delusional, at worst – as this essay will argue – they’re hysterical and harmful.
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Once the argument about overall risk collapses, the narrative shifts to ICU capacity. But even before Covid, it was not unusual for ICU’s to run at 80-90% capacity. A more logical approach would be to expand ICU capacity, rather than hold the rest of society hostage as if daily life is beholden to ICU capacity. Even during the initial wave, expanded capacity initiatives like field hospitals and the Comfort ship were sent away early while cautious restrictions remained in place. Part of moving on to an endemic perspective is accepting that expanded capacity will sometimes be needed, and that we ought to adjust to that reality, rather than to the idea that we interrupt normal life whenever cases rise. Putting an entire province on curfew and closing indoor dining and bars, for example, seems disproportionately cruel and nonsensical when nurses are still allowed to work with Covid and we’ve shortened isolation periods because we’re finally recognising human impact. Either we’re in a singular emergency or we’re not: you can’t expect people to suddenly ‘play emergency’ because of rising ICU occupancy.
As for protecting the elderly, aside from the reality that it’s been two years and vaccines are widely available, there is a significant and growing body of evidence that mitigation attempts and the consequences of them result in more life years lost than gained. We can’t afford to press an emergency brake on society every time ICUs near capacity limitations, or every time more people over the age of 80 die, because the consequences of these never-ending mitigation measures on society at large are dire and exponentially worse. Being neurotically hyper-focused on one issue is blinding us to all the adverse consequences of trying to mitigate that issue. Lockdowns and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Wherever you look – increased domestic and child abuse, deteriorating mental health, an increase in drug overdoses – every segment of society is suffering long term damage from the hysteria of the past two years. Children have lost nearly two years of learning and normal educational developmental trajectories. Loss of income and businesses lead to deaths of despair. It isn’t selfish to say we can’t afford to do this. Those concerned with trying to mitigate harm to the elderly need to come up with ways to do so that don’t cause lasting and profound damage to everyone else.
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Who is the one throwing a fit? People who are rightfully angry about every aspect of their lives being disrupted for two years or the people who endlessly clamour for this to continue at every turn? Acknowledging that this was a ‘tough call but the right thing to do’ is a Kafka-trap of a phrase as it doesn’t invite any room for questioning. The sentiment presupposes its own necessity and moral superiority. It doesn’t give others any room to object, to say ‘I don’t consent’ to being overprotected. It acknowledges the difficult part – ‘tough call’ – but only to minimise or downplay it. Other phrases came to mind: for your safety and the safety of others. Out of an abundance of caution…. what occurred to me was that I never asked to be kept safe. In fact, myself and many other people are quite well adapted to certain levels of risk as we were not raised in what Jonathan Haidt refers to as ‘antifragile’ environments. The cancelled concert in question, by the way, required proof of vaccination to enter and if you felt so inclined, you could of course wear a mask while you were there. What’s more, it’s hard to imagine that the average age of attendance was much higher than 35. These cancellations came during the onslaught of the Omicron media-panic and were followed by more cancellations and more restrictions. The concert was going to be, by all measures, as safe as it could possibly be. The alternative to cancelling it was simple enough: if you don’t feel comfortable, as with anything else, don’t attend. Problem solved.
It’s time for the public and public policymakers alike to admit that sometimes ‘an abundance of caution’ is an overabundance of caution.
Kate Andrews observes that “Covid has made America more divided than ever.”
So, for example, a cursory reading of the coverage of the staffing emergency which has hit hospital and primary healthcare services is simply that it is an inevitable consequence of the omicron variant of Covid which spreads so rapidly that it is now infecting unprecedented numbers of NHS employees.
But that is not really true, is it? It is not omicron which is responsible for all these staff absences since the illness it causes in healthy people generally amounts to no more than a mild cold – when it produces symptoms at all. Many of the huge numbers of staff unable to report for work are not staying away because they are sick but because they have been ordered to isolate if they test positive for Covid, even if they are completely asymptomatic.
In this interview, Jay Bhattacharya discusses the overlooked harms of lockdowns.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 100-101 of my late Nobel-laureate colleague Jim Buchanan’s July 25th, 1982, speech in Blacksburg, VA, “The Dishwater of Orthodoxies,” as the transcript of this speech is published, for the first time, in The Soul of Classical Political Economy: James M. Buchanan from the Archives (2020) (edited by Peter J. Boettke and Alain Marciano) (link added):
The [Public Choice] center’s work, and public choice more inclusively considered, have challenged the orthodoxy of democratic socialist mythology. We are heretics to all those who hold as sacrosanct the efficacy of majoritarian democracy or the necessary efficiency of modern bureaucracy. And despite our very considerable success in shifting ultimate academic and public attitudes, we have been treated as heretics have been treated throughout the ages. We have been excommunicated and reviled. In my own quite recent efforts to present the simple and straightforward case for changes in our fiscal and monetary constitution, for imposing new limits on the excesses of ordinary politics, I have, on more than one occasion, been charged with “intellectual fascism.”
DBx: Jim Buchanan died on this date nine years ago. Had he lived long enough to encounter them, Jim would not have been surprised by the scurrilous lies told about him and his work by a Duke University “historian” (so-called).
January 8, 2022
Some Covid Links
What I would really hope for is that the GMU leadership would have to come out and defend this decision. Washington should debate the merits and demerits of his order with any of the knowledgeable people at GMU who oppose it. I mean a real debate, not a circus like our presidential “debates” — he should have to present evidence that a booster shot will actually have a net positive impact and respond to contrary evidence.
(DBx: I would, without hesitation, agree to publicly debate GMU Pres. Washington on this matter.)
Martin Kulldorff tweets about his tweetment by Twitter:
To avoid suspension, I cannot tweet about vaccine safety, something I have done research on for two decades. For such information, you may instead follow me on @GETTRofficial, @getongab or Speaqs.
In a recent Epoch Times commentary, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff wonder if Collins and Fauci ever read the GBD and why they opted for a “takedown” instead of “vigorous scientific discussion.” The GBD authors recall the harm caused by the lockdowns caused, particularly the school shutdowns that harmed children without affecting disease spread. That damage will take years to reverse but the authors have thoughts on the ways to avoid similar disasters.
The NIH director commands a budget of $42.9 billion and the NIAID $6.1 billion. “If we want scientists to speak freely in the future, we should avoid having the same people in charge of public health policy and medical research funding.” Those same bureaucrats also remain in power for far too long.
Francis Collins was the first appointed NIH director to serve more than one president. Anthony Fauci, 81, earned a medical degree in 1966, was hired on with the NIH in 1968, and has headed NIAID since 1984. The NIAID and NIH directors should work on a contract basis and be shown the door after five years, at the most. Lifetime tenure is bad for public health, and white coat supremacy is no basis for a system of government.
K. Lloyd Billingsley also defends Aaron Rodgers. Here’s Billingsley’s conclusion:
For Dr. Anthony Fauci, it’s pretty much his way or the highway, with mandatory vaccinations and destructive lockdowns. As the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration note, such lockdowns have caused widespread suffering and damage. Dr. Fauci backed the school shutdowns and lied about funding dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, yet he retains his position of power. That marks another contrast with the world of Aaron Rodgers.
Players and coaches often violate the rules of football, but the game does not continue until the penalty has been marked off. On the other hand, government bureaucrats can repeat destructive mistakes, deceive the public, and still keep their position. These powerful bureaucrats demand blind obedience, with no debate about what works best for individuals’ health and safety. For embattled Americans heading into a new year, that makes little sense.
Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan is correct to write the following:
The biggest single thing he could say to convince American parents that he was on their side, being serious and trying to end this pandemic well is to put himself and his party in some jeopardy by finally, late in the game, going forcefully against the most reactionary force in American public life, the teachers unions. The selfish, uncaring attitude they weren’t ashamed to show regarding the closing of schools, their fantasies about how uniquely vulnerable they themselves now are, and their pleasure in flexing political muscle—they covered themselves in shame the past two years. Their relationship with parents won’t recover for a long time, if ever.
Fingers crossed, tightly. Oh so tightly.
The Chief [Justice, John Roberts] brought up a re-tweet last year by White House chief of staff Ronald Klain hailing the mandate as the “ultimate work-around.” “I mean, this has been referred to the approach as a work-around. And I’m wondering what it is you’re trying to work around?” the Chief asked, adding it is “hard to argue” that Congress has given such “free rein” to OSHA, the agency that promulgated the mandate.
Ouch. Chief Justice Roberts is especially attuned to executive decisions that duck proper legal procedure, as he showed in tossing the Trump Administration’s Census citizenship question.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar responded gamely, arguing that the unprecedented nature of the pandemic allows the government sweeping power to take unprecedented measures. But she couldn’t articulate a limiting principle to OSHA’s emergency power—perhaps because the Administration doesn’t seem to think one exists.
Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor was particularly adamant that the surging omicron variant wave represents a real crisis. In discussing the issue, she significantly exaggerated the threat of COVID-19 to children.
“Omicron is as deadly as delta and causes as much serious disease in the unvaccinated as delta did,” she said. “The numbers—look at the hospitalization rates going up. We have more infected people today than we did a year ago in January. We have hospitals that are almost at full capacity with people severely ill on ventilators. We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition, and many on ventilators.”
If by serious condition, Sotomayor meant hospitalized, then her claim is false. There are not 100,000 children currently hospitalized with COVID-19. In fact, if you tallied up all the children admitted to the hospital for COVID-19 since August 2020, you would still not find 100,000 of them. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), hospitals have admitted about 82,000 COVID-19 patients under the age of 18 in that time period. The current seven-day average for this age group is 766 hospitalizations.
The overwhelming majority of children who contract COVID-19 experience only mild disease. The disease’s age skew is so great that even unvaccinated young people are at less risk than elderly people who are vaccinated. Most kids admitted to the hospital for COVID-19 have underlying health conditions—particularly obesity.
Sotomayor’s behavior suggests she is perhaps the most COVID-cautious judge. She is the only one of the nine who always wears her mask inside the courtroom, and she opted to participate in today’s oral arguments virtually, from her private chambers.
That’s her prerogative, of course. But if she is trying to justify President Joe Biden’s far-reaching and unprecedented vaccine mandate on the grounds that the disease is uniquely dangerous to children, then she should demonstrate a more accurate recitation of the statistics.
A few months ago, Ellen Townsend explained why she joined ranks with those who question the merits of lockdowns. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
I was delighted to accept the invitation to join the Scientific Advisory Board for Collateral Global as I believe it is important to name and account for all the impacts of mandated restrictions in the pandemic. I am particularly interested in accounting for the harms that children and adolescents have suffered in terms of their development, education, health and mental health. What we adults might think of as ‘nice to have’ such as play and socialisation are absolutely to vital development in children and adolescents. It’s not enough to say ‘young people are resilient’ – much of that resilience is scaffolded and supported by the environment and the community. When we take away these supports, we hamper resilience. In closing schools and society, we have conducted a mass experiment with child and adolescent development, which will take many years to unpack and investigate
In response to the graph just below from the Financial Times, Phil Magness writes at Facebook:
In case you missed it, Australia’s per capita case numbers have officially surpassed the US and the EU.
As Daniil Gorbatenko facetiously comments in response to Phil’s post, “But allowing Djokovic to play [in the Australian Open tennis tournament] would make it so much worse.” (DBx: Viruses virus; that’s why they’re called “viruses.” The pursuit of zero Covid is as futile as it is tyrannical.)
Alexander Nazaryan tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
We will get to Zero Covid on the exact same day we get to Zero Influenza.
(DBx: And in addition, I add, we’ll get to Zero Covid also on the exact same day that we get to Zero deaths.)
Quotation of the Day…
It was baffling to me, an incomprehensible error of whoever assembled the [Trump White House Covid-19] Task Force, that there were zero public health policy experts and no experts with medical knowledge who also analyzed economic, social, and other broad public health impacts other than the infection itself. Shockingly, the broad public health perspective was never part of the discussion among the Task Force health advisors other than when I brought it up. Even more bizarre was that no one seemed to notice.
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