Russell Roberts's Blog, page 190

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from David Gelernter’s December 28th, 2021, essay, “Fauci is Just a Bureaucrat“:

Bureaucracy is a permanent decoupling of activity from morality. A bureaucrat isn’t paid to understand the rules he enforces or the forms he is required to have you fill out. There is no “why” involved in his life, and so he allows no common sense or flexibility to inform his actions. Bureaucracy is there for its own sake; it is its own justification. Bureaucrats are often called civil servants, but in reality they provide no service at all: It is you, the individual citizen, who must come to serve them, to follow their instructions, to bend the knee and do exactly what they say, as a token of submission to the powers that be. Otherwise no license, no permit, no job.

The Covid Curtain

(Don Boudreaux)

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Yesterday I received this e-mail, that I share below in full with the author’s kind permission. And below that, I share Mr. Maywell’s response to my request to be able to share his first e-mail.

Greetings,

First of all I would like to thank you for all your work over the last few years highlighting the worldwide Covid derangement syndrome , a syndrome that is still after nearly 2 years, running wild in many countries.

Thank you for being a voice of reason and sanity in the face of overwhelming disproportionate responses and illogical decisions by politicians and bureaucrats.

I am from New Zealand, and this morning I have s been thinking of you and what you have been writing during the pandemic.

Why this morning? Well, I have spent the morning attempting to secure a place online , in what has been dubbed by opposition politicians here ‘the human misery lottery’ you see here in New Zealand no one is permitted to enter the country freely, regardless of vaccination status or negative COVID tests.

Before you book a flight, you first have to secure a place in a managed isolation and quarantine facility (MIQ), these are converted hotels run by the state.

Everyone who enters NZ must spend at least 10 days in these facilities before they are let out into the community in New Zealand .
Of course politicians and celebrities have no issues securing a place when they want.

My family and I were locked into one of these last year when we returned to live in New Zealand for family reasons, after living in Chile for 9 years.

Over the next few months I need to return to Chile for a few months for business reasons, but I want to have a return date secured as I don’t want to be separated indefinitely from my wife and kids, that is why I was trying to book a room.

Today the government released 1250 rooms for March and April, the process involves one registering on the website in the hour before the lottery, the bureaucrats normally only announce a batch of places to be released 24 hours before the lottery.

I missed out today and was told I was number 3450 in the queue and to try and book a place at a later date, when they decide to release more rooms.

So , if I leave New Zealand I have no certainty of getting back in, but at least my loses are only financial.

There are currently thousands of New Zealanders stranded overseas, and have been for many many months, because there is no way back home, many of these people have run out of funds, their visas have expired in the countries where they currently are.

If New Zealanders can’t secure a place in the state quarantine prisons , they can’t travel here, the stress and toll this is taking on New Zealanders overseas is horrendous.

My best friend’s father is currently dying of lung cancer here , and my friend is in Australia with no way to get home to visit his dying father.

This morning’s lottery for a place in MIQ excluded New Zealanders currently in Australia , for logistical reasons apparently, with no indication of when more spots maybe released.

The system was supposed to be phased out over the next few months, but this has now been pushed back and nobody from our government can say for sure now when New Zealanders stuck overseas will be able to travel freely back to their home country .

Anyway, I realise this rail is getting a bit long .

I just wanted to let you know what is happening down here and that CDS is running wild amongst our political leaders, bureaucrats and ‘experts’ .

Meanwhile, the rest of the issues affecting our country are ignored and kicked down the road by our socialist government, it is a very sad state of affairs.

We have become a hermit kingdom where fear and paranoia have paralysed us.

Keep up the very important work, I always enjoy reading Cafe Hayek.

Kind Regards

Matthew Saywell
Geraldine
New Zealand.

Today’s story about the lottery.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-1...

Here’s Mr. Maywell’s second e-mail:

Mr Don Boudreaux.

Thank you for your reply.

Yes, by all means feel free to share any or all of my e-mail on cafe Hayek, I don’t mind if you use my name.

I have attached another link to this mornings New Zealand herald article about yesterday’s misery lottery.

Over 15000 people applied for a room, only 12 % were successful.

Hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders , mostly in Australia, are stuck offshore and are affected by this bureaucratic bungling. New Zealanders offshore have had their right to return home removed, until the state here decides go let them back and the politicians can’t say when that will happen.

Once again, thank you for providing a logical perspective, reason and balance these last couple of years, and for shining a light into the darkness and for highlighting the misery that has been created by tyrannical politicians around the world.

Kind Regards,

Matthew Saywell.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-1...

Testing, Testing

(Don Boudreaux)

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People continue to wait in long lines to be tested for the Covid virus. I’ve seen – as I’m sure you, too, have seen – snaking queues of automobiles, each vehicle waiting its turn to drive into a testing site.

This continuing mania for testing is evidence of the reality of Covid Derangement Syndrome. The vast majority of people seeking tests are at virtually no risk of suffering serious consequences from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Yet testing is often required and, even when not required, eagerly and anxiously sought.

I’ve a confession: I’ve taken only one Covid test. Just one. That was in March 2021. I took this test – it was self-administered at home – only in order to be cleared to lecture for a GMU Law & Economics Center event (held, ironically, in gloriously sane Florida).

The previous paragraph, I realize, doesn’t technically feature a confession, as I have absolutely no qualms, shame, or regrets about not subjecting myself repeatedly to Covid testing.

I’d not bet my pension that I’ll never have a another test for Covid. Perhaps some situation will present itself that makes the benefits to me of being tested – say, to board an international flight – worth the cost. But unless I experience symptoms that present a good-enough prospect that I have a serious case of Covid, I certainly will never on my own seek to be tested for the dread virus.

Reality Isn’t Optional, Exhibit No. …. (I’ve Lost Count)

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Crozet Gazette:

Editor:

J. Dirk Nies rightly decries attempts by top U.S. government scientists Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci to stifle debate over the Great Barrington Declaration and to viciously slander the Declaration’s three prominent co-authors, Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff (“Insights for Flourishing: Recent Assaults on Scientific Integrity,” Jan. 6).

Alas, such anti-scientific conduct grows ever more likely the more science – and the careers of scientists – become wedded to government. Politicians, after all, ultimately pursue votes and power, not truth and understanding. As George Will summarizes, “science usually is the subservient partner in a marriage between science and the modern state.”* Indeed so.

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

* George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility (New York: Hachette Books, 2019), page 422.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board writes wisely about some of Biden’s abominable vaccine mandates – arguments over which will be heard today by the U.S. Supreme Court. Two slices:

The Supreme Court takes up President Biden’s vaccine mandate on Friday, and the stakes are larger than pandemic policy. This is a crucial test of how far the administrative state can go in stretching ambiguous statutes for its own political ends.

The Justices are hearing challenges to worker vaccine mandates by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The Fifth and Sixth Circuit Courts of Appeal handed down conflicted rulings on the OSHA mandate, while three federal judges have enjoined CMS in 25 states.

The Administration wants the Justices to defer to regulators and uphold the mandates as necessary to protect Americans during an emergency. But emergency or not, federal agencies can’t exercise powers not granted by Congress, especially when they ignore proper administrative process.
…..
The Court’s ruling in this case will echo into the future about how far the executive branch can go in rewriting statutes. Some Justices will be tempted to defer to the executive given the pandemic emergency. But Presidents have been increasingly eager to find emergencies whenever they are politically convenient.

President Trump declared an emergency to repurpose funds that Congress appropriated for defense to build his border wall, and Mr. Biden will do the same as he finds his legislative agenda stymied on Capitol Hill. Don’t be surprised if he finds emergencies to declare on climate change and student loans.

Over too many decades the Supreme Court has become lax in its oversight of administrative agencies, even as they have grown ever bolder in their assertion of federal power. The vaccine mandate is an ideal opportunity to rein them in.

Also writing, in the Wall Street Journal, on the legal case against Biden’s abominable vaccine mandates are David Rivkin and Andrew Grossman. Two slices:

Hours after President Biden’s Sept. 9 speech announcing a series of vaccine mandates for private-sector employees, his chief of staff, Ron Klain, retweeted an MSNBC anchor’s quip that wielding workplace-safety regulation to force vaccinations was “the ultimate work-around.” Congress has never enacted a law requiring American civilians to be vaccinated—assuming it even has the constitutional authority to do so, which is doubtful. The Supreme Court hears arguments Friday on two of the mandates, which are likely to meet the same fate as other recent attempts to circumvent Congress that the courts have rejected.

The Constitution vests the power to make laws in Congress and charges the president with the duty to execute them. That’s what many in Washington derisively call the “high school civics class” model of government. It’s slow, it’s cumbersome, it rarely approves measures that don’t enjoy widespread public support, and it forces compromise, moderation and tailoring of policies to address the circumstances of a vast and varied nation. The temptation of avoiding it via executive fiat is obvious.
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Although the mandates are flawed in other ways, their lack of clear congressional authorization is the most striking defect. Excessive judicial deference to agencies’ statutory interpretations is what enabled Mr. Obama’s “I’ve got a pen” agenda and its revival under Mr. Biden. The result has been to distort the entire federal lawmaking apparatus. Members of Congress now lobby the executive branch to make law through regulation rather than legislate themselves. Agencies enact major policies that have the durability of a presidential term before they’re reversed. And the president would sooner blame the courts for legal defeats than admit he lacks the power to do his allies’ bidding.

The courts share blame for this state of affairs, having lost sight of the basic separation-of-powers principles that should guide questions of agencies’ statutory authority. A decision rejecting the vaccination mandates because they weren’t clearly authorized by Congress would serve as a shot across the bow signaling that the work-around era is over.

Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley explains that tennis star Novak Djokovic is paying for “Australia’s unforced Covid errors.” Here’s her conclusion:

Requiring Mr. Djokovic to be vaccinated is doubly pointless. He tested positive for the coronavirus in June 2020, and studies show natural immunity is at least as protective as vaccines. But infections are common with the Omicron variant among both the previously infected and the vaccinated. Ninety percent of Australians over 12 are fully vaccinated, yet cases are surging.

Mr. Morrison has conceded that Australians will have to “live with the virus.” So why can’t they welcome, or at least tolerate, Mr. Djokovic? Perhaps because he’s a reminder that the suffering they’ve endured for nearly two years has been futile.

Kyle Smith right celebrates Florida. Two slices:

The greatest feeling about Florida is the sheer “Gonna ride this hog wherever it takes me” exuberance. I’ve been down there maybe eight or 10 times during the pandemic and arriving in any airport is like crossing the Wall out of East Berlin. Quite a lot of people wear masks in malls and stores, but most don’t. Nobody mask-shames anybody. You don’t need a vaccine card at all, much less have to dig out your Excelsior Pass three times a day.

This is because Florida accepts the basic truth that should have been Washington’s guidance from Day 1: If you’re vaccinated, the COVID-19 emergency is over for you; if you’re not, well, the risk is yours.

Florida schoolchildren have been back in school and unmasked since August 2020. Life is normal for them, except for the amusement value of seeing panicky teachers in masks. New York’s children, like those in many areas where the Democratic Party and its affiliated teachers unions rule, are essentially being used as human shields by educrats committing mass state-sanctioned child abuse until they get good and tired of it. Kids are suffering so badly here that even the New York Times is starting gently to suggest that maybe we should take our hands off our children’s throats — masking them, forbidding them to socialize and exercise and even talk at lunchtime, canceling their extracurriculars, canceling childhood.
…..
Heavy restriction is getting us nowhere. If we’re going to get hammered by the Omicron wave anyway, can we please have some freedom back?

California Rebel Base tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Unbelievable: San Francisco teachers are planning a Chicago-style walk out.

It was never about the kids, was it?

(DBx: Correct. It was never about the kids.)

Joel Zinberg explains that New York City mayor Eric Adams is right to keep that city’s schools open. Two slices:

As new cases of the Omicron variant surge, thousands of schools have delayed a return to in-person learning. Cities including Atlanta, Milwaukee, Cleveland and Detroit have switched to online learning or canceled school altogether. A notable and laudable exception — thanks to new Mayor Eric Adams — is New York City

Policymaking involves trade-offs. Here the decision is easy: the benefit of limiting in-person classes is far outweighed by the damage remote learning inflicts on children. As an editorial in The BMJ (British Medical Journal) concluded a year ago, “Closing schools is not evidence- based and harms children.”

Closure advocates assert they are protecting children from becoming infected and, in turn, protecting vulnerable people the kids come into contact with. Neither claim is true.

As I noted nearly a year ago, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report confirmed that K-12 schools are not associated with COVID-19 transmission from students within the schools or out into the community. Transmission in education and child-care settings is rare, especially if mitigation strategies, such as masking, distancing, and keeping students together in cohorts, are employed. As Adams opined, “The safest place for our children is in a school building.”

Even if they are infected, COVID-19 poses little risk to school-age children. They account for a vanishingly small percentage of US COVID-19 deaths. In the two years of the pandemic, just 708 kids between 5 and 17 have died out of 825,000 total COVID-19 deaths. The COVID-19 toll was comparable to the flu which killed 572 children ages 5-17 in 2017-2018 and 2018-19, the last two flu seasons prior to the pandemic.

Severe complications have been uncommon in kids and will be even less likely with the currently prevalent, but less virulent, Omicron variant. Children 5 to 17 currently account for just 0.8% of COVID-19 hospital admissions and as many as 40% of these are incidental COVID admissions — children without COVID symptoms admitted for other medical problems who tested positive on routine admission screening.
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The current spate of school closures is based on fear, not science. Students have endured two years of harmful educational disruption. Enough is enough.

(DBx: While fear – fear far in excess of the underlying danger – is indeed still in play today, also in play is venal exploitation of fear. If teachers in America in 2022 truly are so unaware of the realities of Covid that they sincerely demand, because of fear for their and their students’ health, that they and their students be kept from coming into non-electronic contact with each other, then these men and women should be immediately fired as teachers. Such persons are either too uninformed or too ignorant to be trusted to teach. But I’m pretty sure that what’s actually going on today is the exploitation of fear, and the feigning of fear, by teachers’ unions, all in an effort to enable their members to avoid, for as long as possible, doing their jobs.)

John O. McGinnis argues that “[t]he Chicago Teachers Union–imposed school shutdown is about politics, not the pandemic.” A slice:

Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot rightly notes that closing the schools is unjustified and breaks faith with the children whom teachers have a responsibility to educate. She is also correct in saying that closing schools will only increase the achievement gaps between poorer and wealthier students. The school system has spent $100 million making school facilities safer and improving air-filtration systems. Chicago’s commissioner of public health has also pointed out that the Omicron variant does not pose a substantial danger of serious illness to children or to vaccinated teachers. For these groups, it is more on par with a serious flu outbreak, for which schools are rarely if ever shut down.

True as these observations are, they just show how little facts matter in the world of power politics that the union inhabits. A study has shown that the most important determinant of school closures in a region during the pandemic has not been the severity of illness in the area or various demographic characteristics, but the strength of the teachers’ union, as measured by four factors—whether the state has a right-to-work law, the state ranking of union strength (using the Fordham Institute’s measure), the share of unionized employees at the state level, and the share of unionized employees at the county level. According to the Fordham Institute, the CTU is a Tier One union in terms of power. Illinois has no right-to-work law and Cook County has a high proportion of unionized employees. As a result, the CTU is in a powerful negotiating position. And what it wants in this case is reduction of risk, even if the level of that risk is already reasonable and comparable to what other workers in stores across the city tolerate. Even more importantly, by forcing Chicago Public Schools to back down, even for a short time, the union also wants to make clear to management that anything important in the system must be cleared with it first.

Kate Andrews protests vaccine passports. A slice:

It’s edging towards dystopian — a glimpse into what our future could be — if we continue this experiment with vaccine passports, with virtually no discussion of what’s going wrong. The idea that anyone should be free to move within a country, and free to leave it, is hardly extreme. It’s something protected in Article 13 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. But liberty, once ceded only in an emergency, is hard to win back.

Britain has never had a tradition of identity cards and this has long been a point of principle and pride. The balance of power between the individual and the state has long been tipped in favour of the former, and until recently the Prime Minister was the most passionate and dedicated critic of the ‘creepy reality’ that comes with forcing proof of identification on the public. When Tony Blair called for ID cards, Boris Johnson, then MP for Henley, declared: ‘I will take that card out of my wallet and physically eat it in the presence of whatever emanation of the state has demanded that I produce it.’ But he’s now in lockstep with Blair, who argues the introduction of vaccine passports is ‘inevitable’. If you can’t beat the system, design it instead. Don’t discuss the tradeoffs between security and liberty: just do it on the quiet, and even deny it.

In December 2020, nine months into the pandemic the then Cabinet Office secretary Michael Gove insisted he ‘certainly [was] not planning to issue any vaccine passports and [didn’t] know anyone else in government who would’. Gove is now one of the leading advocates in cabinet for the scheme.

Douglas Murray insists, quite rightly, that it’s time to get on with our lives. A slice:

It is the same around the world. Over in the Netherlands the government seized the opportunity of Omicron to order their umpteenth national lockdown and curfew. A large demonstration against these measures took place on Sunday and culminated in the Dutch police wielding their batons against the locals and setting police dogs on to them. For their own good. It is a more brutal version of what some Americans are doing to each other.

Mask mandates on planes may not be stopping anyone from getting Omicron (cloth masks now being officially declared useless against this variant), but they are certainly setting passengers against each other on domestic flights. One video that did the rounds this week showed a woman so enraged at a maskless man on her plane that she whipped off her own mask to scream at him for being maskless. The exchange did not disrupt Dorothy Parker’s reputation as the wittiest woman in American history, but it did culminate in the female passenger spitting at the male passenger. Because if there is one thing that is sure to stop the spread of the virus it is people on planes spitting like camels at each other for not taking the necessary precautions to prevent particle transmission

My point is that in country after country, it is becoming clear that none of this is sustainable. That does not mean that it will not go on for some while longer. Things that are unsustainable usually do. But it will soon become clear that there are societies, states and whole countries that are successfully getting on with life, and others that are not. And as people in the countries that want to lock down for the rest of the decade look to those places like Florida which are successfully getting on with things, they will want their own lives to look like that too.

Willy Forsyth reports from zero-Covid Antarctica. A slice:

In the time between my two Antarctic deployments, I received a Master of Public Health degree from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. There, I learned the importance of evidence-based public health interventions, of carefully analyzing health risks, of targeting interventions based on those risks, and of always considering unintended negative consequences.

So, throughout the pandemic, I have been baffled to see many public health professionals and scientific institutions advocate for broad, extreme, and unprecedented measures without supporting evidence.

Let’s hope that Cato’s Ryan Bourne is correct that “[m]ild omicron will bring down the Covid police state.” A slice:

Seeing the virus everywhere, even those most hawkish about it are waking up to the extent to which it is endemic and the futility of attempting to eliminate it. As millions and millions recover from infection, locking them down again for no benefit creates an ever-strengthening political barrier against society-wide lockdowns.

As home tests become the default for most mild cases, two further developments will occur. First, more people who test positive but are asymptomatic will live their lives normally “under the radar”, forcing authorities to shorten isolation periods to encourage compliance. US isolation guidance for this group has already been cut to five days. Expect this to be shortened here [in Britain] in the future.

Fraser Nelson explains that “[w]orld leaders’ outlandish threats against the unvaccinated are no way to tackle this pressing issue.” A slice:

Emmanuel Macron also has an election coming up, and recently found cause to pick a fight with the unvaccinated. They are an easy target: easily caricatured as selfish refuseniks, whose obstinacy is dragging down the whole country. Macron this week promised to “emmerder” (a word best left untranslated) the unjabbed. Such tough language tends to go down well, and we can expect more of it in the coming months. For politicians standing for election, the unvaccinated are a perfect punching bag.

el gato malo reports on an MSNBC podcast host’s encounter with Covid derangement.

Phil Magness on Facebook:

It hasn’t always been this way, but the most active iterations of left-libertarianism right now are distinctive for their pairing of (a) hard-left economic and social opinions with (b) a superficial and – in the age of Covid – fickle commitment to the rhetoric of caring about civil liberties.

As long as it persists in holding those priorities, it’s difficult to see what if any value left-libertarianism brings to the table. Or how it is meaningfully different from the run-of-the-mill far left.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Early blogging days”

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my column for the November 9th, 2011, issue of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I looked back on some of Russ Roberts’s and my the early posts at Cafe Hayek. You can read the full column beneath the fold.

(more…)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 4 of my colleagues Peter Boettke’s, Stefanie Haeffele-Balch’s, and Virgil Storr’s “Introduction” to their 2016 edited collection, Mainline Economics: Six Nobel Lectures in the Tradition of Adam Smith:

Arguably, there are at least three propositions regarding the nature of human action and the role of institutions that mainline economics critically adopt and advance: (1) there are limits to the benevolence that individuals can rely on and therefore they face cognitive and epistemic limits as they negotiate the social world, but (2) formal and informal institutions guide and direct human activity, and, so (3) social cooperation is possible without central direction. Stated another way, by relying on the emergent and human-devised rules of conduct, agents possessing both the capacities and the failings of the typical human being can nonetheless work together to achieve their individual and collective goals.

DBx: “Mainline economics” is distinguished from “mainstream economics” by being much less focused than is mainstream economics on merely what is going on within the current academic economics literature (which often gets sidetracked by fads) and more concerned about explaining observed social reality. Mainline economics is economics done in the tradition begun by Adam Smith.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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It’s difficult to follow ‘THE science’ if ‘THE science’ is so self-contradictory and confusing.

Pro-lockdown Covidocrats escape to Florida to evade their own absurd restrictions. (HT Tim Townsend) Two slices:

Speaking at a press conference, [Florida governor Ron] DeSantis quipped that he would be a “pretty doggone wealthy man” if he “had a dollar for every lockdown politician who decided to escape to Florida over the last two years.”
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Unfortunately, DeSantis did not expose the “lockdown politicians” he said have been traveling to Florida.

However, one such incident made national headlines in May.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), who enacted intense COVID restrictions, traveled to Florida in April despite blaming travel to the Sunshine State for a wave of COVID infections in Michigan. Whitmer claimed she traveled there to visit her sick father.

First-year GMU Scalia School of Law student Robert Fellner explains why he organized a petition against GMU’s possibly harmful – and certainly irrational – requirement that all faculty, staff, and students receive a Covid booster.

Matt Shapiro writes insightfully about Covid data and motivated-thinking presentations and misinterpretations of these data. (HT Jan Jekielek) Three slices:

If I can make one claim proudly, it is that I quickly recognized that COVID was a disease that was moving and spreading both regionally and seasonally. The entire reason that I do my monthly data posts in several rough regions of the United States was to demonstrate this fact. It is, in my opinion, impossible to understand COVID by looking at voting patterns or mitigation regimes or by setting two regionally disperse states against each other, especially if we’re looking at metrics within a narrow time window. We have to look at this as a sickness that hits region-by-region and is in line with seasonality changes that drive people indoors.
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Things that are “impossible to ignore” when [Paul] Krugman decided to use a single week of data have become incredibly easy for him to ignore when a different week no longer makes his point. A metric is found that supports a narrative; in this case, the narrative of “Republicans are the cause of COVID”. But when that metric doesn’t support the narrative, it is the data that is abandoned, not the narrative. The narrative lives on and the people committed to the narrative will find a different context-less metric that helps them tell the story they were always going to tell regardless of the data.
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There was an occasional hint of self-awareness, like when a data journalist from The Economist asked why Florida was getting hit so hard despite high vaccine rates.

The answer (which is growing tedious with repetition) is that Florida was part of a region that was having a severe COVID surge. The really important question here is “wait, if vaccines rates are as protective at a state population level as these charts imply, why *is* Florida having such high COVID rates?”

This was an important question that was largely ignored. So powerful was the narrative that vaccines would stop all COVID surges in their tracks that there has sprung up a conspiracy theory that the only possible explanation for this is that Florida is faking their vaccine reporting rates. This is nonsense, but it’s evidence of how strongly a narrative belief guides people’s view of the world.

Daniel Nuccio reports on the efforts of several sensible commercial-air pilots to fight vaccine mandates – and on the Catch-22 irrationalities that many of these pilots confront.

For those of you who doubt that Covid Derangement Syndrome is real, read this post by el gato malo decrying such Syndrome and the “karentopia” that it encourages. A slice:

there is, simply put, a class of people here who do not want to go back. this purported crisis has given them meaning and elevated their long simmering social fears and barely suppressed panic/safety seeking instincts into what they mistook for virtue.

the fact that others followed them in this mistake allowed it spread and has given it range and duration previously unimaginable.

all perspective was lost to hobgoblins and we surrendered to the neurocracy: rule by the most neurotic; and those who have been atop this newfound karentopia would like to stay there.

Beijing continues its mad, cruel, and lethal pursuit of zero Covid. And such tyranny is not uniquely Chinese or communistic; it’s the inevitable result of this pursuit. A slice:

Basic food supplies and patience are running low in Xi’an after two weeks of lockdown.

Confined to their homes since December 23, residents in the Chinese city famous for its Terracotta Army have been reduced to bartering for food with cigarettes and electronics as they complain on social media over the lack of essential supplies.

For Chinese president Xi Jinping, who is expected to claim another five years in an unprecedented bid for a third term later this year, it is a faltering start to a crucial 2022.

Omicron and China’s inadequate vaccine against the fast-spreading variant risks pushing the country’s zero-Covid strategy to breaking point, as it runs out of time to stamp out cases ahead of athletes arriving for the Winter Olympics next month.

(DBx: Of course, the people who suffer, and will continue to suffer, most from Beijing’s totalitarian Covidocracy are the Chinese. But we in the rest of the world will suffer also as our commercial and cultural contacts with the Chinese will be severely reduced. National conservatives in America, along with Progressives in America, will applaud the severing of commercial contacts with the Chinese as being an alleged source of greater American prosperity. But they are mistaken – just as mistaken as they’d be if they argued that, say, a severing of the commercial connections between Americans east of the Rockies with Americans west of the Rockies would enrich Americans on both sides of the Rockies.)

“Novak Djokovic Denied Entry to Australia Ahead of Australian Open.”

AJ Stand tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

I live in Africa … there is no upside [i]n lockdown … only rich people enjoy their TV in lockdown.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

French Pres. Macron: 5 million fellow unvaccinated citizens are “non-citizens.”

Canadian PM Trudeau: the unvaxxed are “misogynistic & racist” extremists

Pres. Biden: the epidemic is a pandemic of the unvaccinated

Does progressive leadership require demonizing the other?

Gavin Mortimer accuses Emmanuel Macron of “crossing the line” in his “war on the unvaccinated.” A slice:

Prime minister Jean Castex called the suspension of the debate ‘irresponsible’ but that perhaps was a more apt description of the remarks made by Macron to a French newspaper that were published last night. In an interview with Le Parisien, the president explained why he wanted the vaccine pass bill implemented: ‘I’m not trying to make life difficult for the French,’ he said. ‘But the anti-vaxxers, I really want to piss them off. And we will continue to do this – to the end.’

This would be achieved by making their lives a misery. ‘I won’t send [unvaccinated people] to prison,’ said Macron. ‘So we need to tell them, from 15 January, you will no longer be able to go to the restaurant. You will no longer be able to go for a coffee, you will no longer be able to go to the theatre. You will no longer be able to go to the cinema.’

Jay Bhattacharya talks with Lex Fridman about Covid and Covid (over)reaction.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 89 of Scott Atlas’s important 2021 book, A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID From Destroying America:

The frenzy about testing everyone, everywhere, at all times, including low-risk people in low-risk settings, was incorrect, illogical, and harmful.

Marty Makary Powerfully Protests Covid Derangement Syndrome on Campus

(Don Boudreaux)

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Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor Marty Makary, after writing this excellent piece for the New York Post, protests the derangement over Covid now fueling utterly calamitous policies on college campuses. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)