Russell Roberts's Blog, page 191
January 5, 2022
Some Covid Links
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor Marty Makary decries the Covid hysteria now rampant on college campuses. Three slices:
Universities are supposed to be bastions of critical thinking, reason and logic. But the COVID policies they have adopted — which have derailed two years of students’ education and threaten to upend the upcoming spring semester — have exposed them as nonsensical, anti-scientific and often downright cruel.
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Students are the lowest-risk population on planet Earth. Over the last six months, the risk of a person in the broader age group (15-24) dying of COVID or dying with COVID (the CDC does not clearly distinguish) was 0.001%. All or nearly all of those deaths were in a very specific subgroup: unvaccinated people with a medical comorbidity. But despite Georgetown’s strict vaccination, masking, testing and quarantine requirements, the university announced late last month that all events, “including meetings with visitors, will need to be held virtually or outdoors.”
At Princeton University, fully vaccinated students are not allowed to leave the county unless they’re on a sports team. They’re also testing all students twice a week, usurping the scarce testing supply from vulnerable communities for low-risk young people.
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But despite all evidence, fear of Omicron is driving more harmful policies imposed on society’s lowest-risk people.
One knee-jerk reaction to the more mild Omicron virus has been to push boosters on young people, despite no supporting clinical data and serious concerns of myocarditis complications. That’s exactly why FDA’s expert advisers voted against boosting young people by a 16-2 vote on Sept. 17. (Just yesterday, the FDA ignored their recommendation and approved the Pfizer booster for kids as young as 12.)
Current data actually tip the risk to benefit analysis in favor of not boosting young healthy people. A recent Israeli study in the New England Journal of Medicine noted zero COVID deaths among double-vaccinated people 16-29 years old without a booster. You can’t lower a risk of zero any further with a booster. But the risk of myocarditis in young people is quite real.
A new study published last week by Kaiser Permanente Northwest researchers found that as many as 1 in 1,860 men 18-24 years old developed myocarditis after the second shot.
Schools like Emory, Tulane, Wake Forest and Johns Hopkins, my own university, which are requiring boosters in healthy young people, are venturing into uncharted waters. They are risking health complications in young people for the sake of beating back mild and asymptomatic infections.
Covid Derangement Syndrome continues to spark the demonization of some children in Britain.
Dave Seminara got Covid on a cruise and would gladly cruise again. Two slices:
In Belize, our guide, Israel, told us that the country was still paralyzed by fear of the virus. Bars and nightclubs have been closed for nearly two years, and a nationwide 9 p.m. curfew remains in effect. Masks are mandatory, even outdoors or in a car with family members. Police issue $250 tickets for mask violations and social gatherings. Schools nationwide, public and private, are still virtual: “They say they’re hoping to start hybrid instruction in August 2022.”
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Our elder son and I got sick near the end of the cruise, and within a few days of disembarking my wife also tested positive. The least mask-compliant member of the family was the only one to avoid infection. When friends heard we had Covid, many assumed our symptoms were mild because we’d been vaccinated. That was true of my wife and to a lesser extent our son, but not as much for me. I recovered at home, but I suffered from fever and general weakness for two weeks even after a monoclonal-antibody infusion.
So why would I cruise again? For one thing, I know plenty of people who have contracted Covid while barely leaving home. For another, a cruise is a delight. You’re part of a floating slice of Middle America. At sea, I was reminded of our national flaws: obesity, gluttony and ignorance of other countries. But I also saw our appealing attributes: generosity, kindness and openness.
We also had a chance to see that Covid insanity and tyranny aren’t confined to our shores. We were reminded that anyone can catch the virus.
A letter in the Wall Street Journal:
The analysis in Peggy Noonan’s “‘West Side Story’ and the Decline of the Bijou” (Declarations, Dec. 18) and the letters (Dec. 27 and Jan. 3) about movie theaters is astute, but it omits one additional nail in the coffin: mask mandates. Spending several hours wearing a mask isn’t everyone’s idea of leisure, particularly when you can stay home and stream the movie. Some of us vote with our feet.
Julia Weinberg Rafsky
Philadelphia
Covid Derangement Syndrome, and the tyranny that it fuels, haunt Quebec:
Quebec Premier François Legault has imposed a 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew to battle the spread of COVID-19. Legault has also barred gatherings at private homes. Only caregivers and people who live alone will be able to enter other households. He has also banned inside dining at restaurants.
OSHA’s rule, which it published on November 5, demands that companies with 100 or more employees require them to be vaccinated or wear face masks and undergo weekly virus testing. When Biden announced that policy in September, he presented it as part of the administration’s plan for “vaccinating the unvaccinated.”
MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle called OSHA’s mandate “the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations.” White House Chief of Staff Ronald Klain retweeted Ruhle’s comment, reinforcing the impression that the rule aims to reduce the overall impact of COVID-19 by pressuring Americans to get vaccinated.
But OSHA has no such authority. Officially, its rule is an “emergency temporary standard” (ETS) that is “necessary” to protect employees from a “grave danger” in the workplace.
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That is not the only puzzling distinction drawn by OSHA. According to the government’s data, middle-aged workers who are vaccinated face about the same COVID-19 risk as younger workers who are not vaccinated. According to OSHA, however, COVID-19 poses a “grave danger” to the latter group but not to the former.
It certainly looks like the Biden administration is trying to disguise a general vaccine mandate as a workplace safety measure. The Supreme Court will ultimately decide how convincing that disguise is.
Matt Welch exposes more misinformation spread by Biden about vaccination. A slice:
Of particular interest was the president’s insistence on continuing to call it a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” a slogan that was unwise in July, untrue by December, and unbelievable at a time when the positive case rate in a 62 percent fully vaccinated country just reached an all-time high.
“Those who are fully vaccinated, especially those with the booster shots…you can still get COVID, but it’s highly unlikely, it’s very unlikely that you’ll become seriously ill,” Biden said, accurately. But then: “This continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
If the pandemic indeed no longer applies to me, my family, and the vast majority of people I know (about half of whom seem to have contracted COVID over the past month), then I have a couple of follow-up questions, beginning with: Why on earth is my vaccinated 6-year-old, all the vaccinated kids in her class and after-school, and all her vaccinated teachers and supervisory staff, being forced by state law (influenced directly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) to wear masks all day long? Kids, knock on wood, continue to be by far the least COVID-vulnerable demographic; and kids who are vaccinated even more so. Who, precisely, are we protecting with masking requirements in 100 percent vaccinated environments?
Matt Welch also wonders if Democrats can keep schools open during omicron.
Hospitals & EMS in NYC are more strained now than at any point since spring 2020.
One reason: too many people calling 911 or going to ER with only mild covid symptoms, or just wanting a test.
FDNY is pleading again: Do not seek emergency care unless you face a true emergency.
… which prompts this follow-up tweet by Phil Kerpen: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
We should figure out who incited this hysteria and hold him responsible!
What competent epidemiologists knew in March 2020 should now be obvious to all. Covid cannot be suppressed. Lockdowns just postpone infections and prolong the pandemic while causing collateral damage on public health and education.
Macron is using massive state power to “piss off” untouchables.
So, why does such a large percentage of the US population – 41% overall – wrongly believe that vaccines provide more protection than natural immunity?
Well, it’s actually not surprising when you consider how many scientists have denied or downplayed natural immunity to Covid. Recall last year’s John Snow Memorandum, which stated, “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection”. (The Memorandum was co-signed by CDC director Rochelle Walensky.)
People can hardly be expected to have accurate beliefs when scientists aren’t giving them accurate information. At this point, a correction is surely in order: ‘We got it wrong: there is evidence for lasting protective immunity following natural infection’.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid)
Allison Pearson bemoans the Britain’s continuing Covid hysteria. Two slices:
Most children have either had Covid, been vaccinated or both, so they enjoy superb immunity, but the poor kids will still be sent home for a week and lose yet more learning because Hugo in Year 6 snogged someone on Boxing Day. Or a teacher, almost certainly triple-vaccinated, tests positive and goes off sick even though they’re not at risk of serious illness. In fact, they’re perfectly fine. Meanwhile, more than 110,000 NHS staff – nearly one in 10 – were absent on New Year’s Eve, with almost 50,000 of those said to be sick or self-isolating at home because of Covid.
I hate to ask, but how many of them were actually, you know, ill? The people I know who had omicron over Christmas variously reported a scratchy throat, feeling tired, feeling “fed up because I can’t go out”, feeling “roughly how I feel the day after several pints of Guinness”, or no symptoms whatsoever. Yet each one of them had to self-isolate for seven days.
What happens if it is acceptable not to go to work if you are perfectly fit and healthy, have no signs of any illness but test positive? Economic collapse, obviously – but our public health officials seem to think that’s a small price to pay if it means three people called Mike don’t sneeze in the office.
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It’s no surprise to hear reports that some officers in the Covid War are burning their uniforms and fleeing. They were only following orders, you understand. Scientists with an eye on posterity are starting to distance themselves from lockdowns, which will end up killing tens of thousands and blighting many more lives than Covid ever did. “In a year or two, I guarantee there won’t be a single scientist who admits to having supported the closure of schools,” said one.
In his forthcoming book, The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir(Sandstone Press, £16.99), Professor Mark Woolhouse, one of the country’s leading epidemiologists, says that the theory outlined by Michael Gove at a No 10 briefing that “everybody is at risk” from the virus was a dreadful error. The lockdowns which followed were “morally wrong and highly damaging”, says Prof Woolhouse. “We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence… We were mesmerised by the once-in-a-century scale of the emergency and succeeded only in making a crisis even worse. In short, we panicked.”
Thanks are due to Prof Woolhouse for articulating what some of us have known in our hearts for a long time. We panicked back then when we should have protected the vulnerable and let the rest get on with their lives. Shamefully, as the pandemic dwindles away, we are still doing the headless-chicken thing. Crazy testing of healthy people on an industrial scale (would we ever have done that for flu?), masks for schoolchildren in class, vaccinating the young who already have superb natural immunity; none of it will do any good, in fact, it will only drag things out. Which might, I’m afraid, suit certain people rather well.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 209 of Jagdish Bhagwati’s and Arvind Panagariya’s 2013 book, Why Growth Matters:
Removal of poverty as an objective appeals to mankind’s noblest instinct: empathy for the poor. On the other hand, dispossession of the rich reflects mankind’s ignoble instincts: resentment and envy.
January 4, 2022
If Sweden Were a U.S. State
Here’s an e-mail, shared with the author’s kind permission.
Hi Don,
Hope you had a great holiday! Thanks for posting throughout.
According to data from https://www.worldometers.info/, If Sweden were a U.S. state, it would rank: #44 in COVID fatality rate. Yet some still view Sweden’s policy as a disaster…
Have a great day!
David Mohler
DBx: The only U.S. states with lower Covid-fatality rates than Sweden are New Hampshire, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Utah, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont.
Some Covid Links
The first line of Andrew McCarthy’s January 1st, 2022, National Review essay, “The Covid Insanity Has to End,” is “The illogic of the Pandemic Reign of Error is long past the point of too much to bear.” Indeed (although “reign of terror” would not have been too much of an exaggeration). Here’s another slice:
As Covid infections have surged beyond control — breaking through vaccines and boosters — the CDC now says that we have to reduce the number of isolation days for people who test positive for the virus but are basically asymptomatic. Our Phil Klein has elaborated on the arbitrariness of it all. Naturally, leave it to our Janus-faced megalomaniac, Dr. Anthony L’Science C’est Moi Fauci, to supply the risible rationalization du jour: “If you are asymptomatic and you are infected, we want to get people back to the jobs, especially those with essential jobs.”
If we were dealing with a real plague, the insanity of this would be so obvious even the media-Democrat complex would not be able to speak of it without snickering.
With an infectious disease that posed a serious threat of lethality to the average person, a credible positive test would call for isolation until the person was certifiably cleared of infection. Here, by contrast, the government is now saying that the certifiably infected need to get back into the general population faster. This, even though the government (a) insists on treating non-vaccinated people as if they were lepers (including those who have had Covid, even though their natural immunity makes their risk comparable to that of vaccinated people); and (b) has been coercing even people who are “fully” vaccinated (whatever that means from moment to moment) to mask up and take other precautions because being vaccinated and asymptomatic is no guarantee against transmitting the virus.
We’ve lost our minds.
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By nature, liberty entails risks, an enormous number of which are more perilous than Covid. Freedom is America’s foundation, but it necessarily involves no small amount of annoyances and inconveniences, aches and pains, large and small. A risk-free society is stifled and inert. It is no society at all.
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Having finally discovered federalism, perhaps President Biden could take the next step and discover liberty. If he did, he’d accomplish more of what he wants — higher vaccination rates and lower incidence of serious illness and death, fewer disruptions and better economic performance — by trusting Americans to care for themselves. Trying to strong-arm reluctant people into compliance with increasingly irrational protocols is not working on them, and it is strangling all of us.
The U.S. has a severe shortage of nurses, and healthcare workers are suffering from significant burnout, compounded by understaffing. As the Omicron variant spreads, outdated Covid-19 testing and quarantine policies are exacerbating healthcare worker shortages.
For nearly two years hospitals have subjected doctors and nurses to mind-numbing symptom and exposure checklists each day, without any evidence that they reduce hospital-based Covid-19 transmission. Healthcare workers live in fear of possible exposures, stuffy noses or positive tests that will keep them from being able to care for patients.
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Data indicate that Omicron replicates best in the upper airways, not the lungs, making Covid infections in most vaccinated people akin to bronchitis or the common cold, not pneumonia. Despite this knowledge, hospitals are clinging to policies designed to avoid Covid transmission at almost any cost.
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During the past two years, Covid-19 policies have pushed other important health issues to the side. Nonemergency surgeries have been canceled. Clinic visits have occurred virtually, depriving patients of the benefits of in-person observation. Emergency healthcare workers are routinely pulled off duty for low-risk exposures and minimal symptoms out of an abundance of caution—at the cost of longer wait times that can cause sick patients to leave the emergency room without care. The cost of these policies is high, while the benefit, measured in reduced hospital transmission, is small.
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And hospitals should abandon perfunctory employee symptom screenings that result in immediate disqualification from work when a single low-risk symptom like nasal congestion is reported. Currently, healthcare workers, even when confident that familiar symptoms are due to allergies, may be taken off duty and forced to await clearance from occupational health officials. In 2022, healthcare workers with minimal symptoms should be eligible for real-time work clearance with on-site rapid antigen testing, repeated daily until symptoms resolve.
Re-evaluation of Covid-19 restrictions in healthcare is long overdue. It is critical that policies undergo rigorous cost-benefit analyses, using updated risks and consequences of infection, with the goal of improved patient safety. By implementing policies commensurate with the actual risks of Covid-19, we can better protect the healthcare workforce and its patients.
Unfortunately, teachers unions and others with a vested interest in the existing system, such as suburbanites who want to keep city schoolchildren out, have fought back against vouchers by characterizing them as a conservative trope only about the marketplace. The teachers unions’ stance isn’t surprising as vouchers threaten to break the monopoly public schools have on students without the means to choose to go elsewhere, as the protracted and calamitous pivot to “remote learning” during the pandemic so painfully revealed.
Newman Nahas tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Let’s not kid ourselves that kids & teachers are any safer with schools closed—they’re not.
Let’s also not kid ourselves that it’s morally permissible to suspend the essential service of school in violation of the rights of kids, simply to scratch the itch of our action bias.
Robby Soave reports that “61% of Teenagers Hospitalized for COVID-19 Had Severe Obesity.” A slice:
It’s important to perform this reality check—the more healthy and active kids are, the less COVID-19 threatens them—given just how much the lives of young people were upended by pandemic mitigation efforts. In the name of slowing COVID-19’s spread, public health authorities closed schools, shuttered extracurricular activities, and instructed young people to remain by themselves, indoors. Even benign activities like playing at the park were discouraged for the first few months of the pandemic. And while many activities have resumed, some college campuses (for instance) would rather their student populations quit sports than dare to do them unmasked.
Those who have rule-making power over young people would be well-advised to consider whether the purported cure is worse than the disease—and whether it actually makes the disease more dangerous for some. Young people need socialization and activity. They need a reason to put down their smartphones and venture out into the world. It is not in the interests of public health to keep them shut up in their bedrooms and dormitories for long periods of time.
For the government disease doctor who once dismissed the economic and societal impact of pandemic lockdowns as merely “inconvenient,” last week’s self-discovery represented a stunning breakthrough. Alas, it appears that the good doctor has since lost some confidence in the validity of his finding, following the discovery of a new strain of public criticism.
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Science is so exciting, with one innovation in Washington consensus-building following another at breakneck speed. Wherever America’s favorite government disease doctor ends up positioning himself in the isolation debate, let’s hope that he is finally beginning to understand that the U.S. economy is the most powerful man-made force in the world for sustaining life.
Dr. Fauci, who has focused for much of the pandemic on one public-health threat to the exclusion of all others, also recently revealed that, believe it or not, sometimes Covid risks to children are even smaller than they appear…. This too is progress for the celebrated doctor, who has generally failed to recognize the importance of non-Covid threats to human health. This recent discovery seems to place Dr. Fauci in good company, because it is echoed even by some doctors who focus on medicine rather than politics.
Also rightly critical of the officious political animal Fauci is el gato malo. A slice:
if you have not yet decided that this man [Fauci] is a complete and total fraud, making up facts and theory as he goes and tossing them out as tawdry tactical tinsel to blind and confuse our societal radar, what would it actually take to convince you he’s a charlatan?
how many reversals, reversions, and flat out inversions would it take? how badly would tony need to tank a prediction, reverse a claim, or disavow a claim he boldly portrayed as “settled science”?
is there anything he could do that would finally make you throw in the towel?
because if there is not, then you are in a cult.
David Stacey ponders The Economist‘s lamentable role in fueling Covid derangement. A slice:
With its data analysts, its unquestionably talented writers and economically literate worldwide readership the Economist was surely well placed to rise above the global Covid hysteria and rigorously pursue its masthead ambition of “taking part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress”.
From the start, however, it has, along with the rest of the legacy media, been consumed by an ostensibly virtuous but myopic fixation on “death with covid” mortality figures to the exclusion of all else. At the same time as Andrew Lewis observed in a letter to the magazine on July 24th 2021, portraying those who oppose lockdowns as “crackpots motivated by conspiracy theories”. Each week the Economist’s pages have been filled with the evidence of the disastrous costs of lockdowns (which it unfailingly refers to as the “cost of covid”) and the economic and social crises they have created, while failing to show that the lockdowns made any material difference to the spread of the virus. The Economist had the opportunity to provide serious, fearless, real-world, data-driven coverage that challenged the official “truth”, shone a light on the unprecedented vested interests and explored other strategies, the economic impact of which might have been less disastrous, not least for developing countries. Countries with whose welfare the magazine has previously aligned itself, where tens of millions have been plunged into poverty.
By as early as April (or even March) 2020 it was very clear that it was the very old and those with underlying health problems, including obesity, that were most at risk of hospitalisation and death. By May 2020 it was equally clear that Professor Ferguson’s dire predictions that shaped the government response were not going to materialise. It was surely time to take stock and review strategy. The Great Barrington Declaration of October 2020 was a beacon for those who wanted a debate. It should have been a catalyst to scrutinise the effectiveness of lockdowns, to calculate the cost of their economic, social and political consequences and to discuss whether the benefits outweighed those costs. It was a tailor-made opportunity for the Economist to support a constructive analysis of this important attempt to find less damaging strategies (and they had the heft to stand up to the orchestrated campaign led by Fauci and Cummings to shut down discussion by discrediting the Great Barrington Declaration and its authors). A saving of even £100 billion of the total UK Covid borrowing requirement of £400 billion (and rising) would, after all, pay for a lot of public services. And surely avoiding damage to a generation of school children merited serious editorial attention.
In [Zanny] Minton Beddoes, daughter of a Shropshire farmer (albeit a posh one), you would expect to find an editor equipped with the unsentimental attributes needed to lead the Economist’s editorial team in a pandemic. Given the publication’s title, you might also have expected the economy to be at the heart of the magazine’s coverage and yet it was not. The Economist failed to acknowledge the significance of Sweden’s approach to the pandemic. Its instinctive distaste for policies that had the fingerprints of Trump or Trump supporting Republican states such as Texas, South Dakota and particularly Florida (where Governor de Santis did pursue a policy of focused protection) meant that the magazine has failed to fully acknowledge the economic and social gains made by Sweden without driving up Covid mortality rates.
Alex Story decries the authoritarian mania for vaccine mandates. A slice:
The intellectual virus of vaccine compulsion hasn’t only manifested in Europe – it is now spreading through the United States. While Joe Biden recently stated that the virus would have to be “solved” at a state level and talked of reduced quarantine times, America’s most recognised infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci suggested vaccine mandates should be considered for air travel. Among other restrictions on their freedom, the unvaxxed are to be grounded.
Certain States seem poised to go much further. The New York State Senate is currently discussing laws that would have raised eyebrows only a couple of years ago. These include forced vaccination to attend school, university and day care and, tellingly, the removal of parental consent when a child reaches 14 years of age (respectively New York Senate Bills: A8378; A7829/S6495; A2240/S45; A3091/S3041).
Perhaps the most surprising is Bill A416. It was sponsored by Senator Nick Perry and “relates to the removal of cases, contacts and carriers of communicable diseases that are potentially dangerous to the public health”. In another words, it grants authorities the power to “remove” people deemed a health threat.
“UAE bans foreign travel for citizens without booster jab.”
The editors of the Toronto Sun sensibly ask “What’s the end point to all of this?” Two slices:
We know that the Omicron variant is fast spreading, but everyone now agrees it’s much milder. The risk we’re facing as individuals from COVID-19 has gone down. So why on earth are we in lockdown?
The answer, according to officials, is due to concerns around hospital capacity. Guess what? That’s not the problem of regular folks. They pay a whole lot of tax dollars for what should be a world-class healthcare system.
It’s rather scary to see this happen for the third year in a row now. It doesn’t bode well for next year and the year after that.
COVID-19 is not going away anytime soon. It’s anticipated to always surge during traditional virus season.
Do we lockdown every winter? That’s a serious question. Because the way officials are talking, they don’t seem to have a plan.
They said vaccines were the ticket out of this thing, but that’s clearly false.
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Enough is enough. This can’t go on and people are within their right to say no.
Prompted by the above Toronto Sun editorial, Newman Nehas tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
There is no ulterior end point. Mitigation measures are their own end points. They are not a tunnel to somewhere, but a cave with no way out. So, just get in there and enjoy!
Quotation of the Day…
… is from Aaron Wildavsky’s and Adam Wildavsky’s 2007 essay, “Risk and Safety,” for the 2007 Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (edited by David R. Henderson):
The precautionary principle is a marvelous piece of rhetoric. It places the speaker on the side of the citizen – I am acting for your health – and portrays the opponents of the contemplated ban or regulation as indifferent or hostile to the public’s health. The rhetoric works in partbecause it assumes what actually should be proved, namely that the health effects of the regulation will be superior to the alternative. This comparison is made possible in the only possible way – by assuming that there are no health detriments from the proposed regulation.
January 3, 2022
A Memo to GMU President Gregory Washington
I sent the memo below to GMU’s president not with any hope that it will prompt a change in policy. I know that it hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of doing so. I sent this memo to Pres. Washington in order simply to have a clear conscience that I spoke up against the continuing Covid hysteria – hysteria that today is nowhere as rampant as it is on college campuses.
January 3, 2022
To: President Gregory Washington, George Mason University
From: Donald J. Boudreaux, Professor of Economics, GMU
In the spirit of open intellectual inquiry, I write with a few questions about the requirement – announced on New Year’s Eve – that all faculty, staff, and students at GMU not only be fully vaccinated, but also be boosted.
If you’re correct that “recent scientific data overwhelmingly supports the effectiveness of booster shots in preventing severe disease and hospitalization,” what’s the point of compelling any adult to be boosted? After all, if Jones is boosted and Smith isn’t, Smith’s choice not to be boosted inflicts no significant risk on Jones. Why not treat GMU’s faculty, staff, and students as the adults which we are? Why not allow each of us to choose whether or not to be boosted, given that this choice, no matter how exercised, imposes no significant harm on anyone else?
The above consideration is a sufficiently strong reason for you to abandon your booster requirement. But three additional realities strengthen the case against requiring boosters.
First, not only is natural immunity real and highly effective, there also is substantial evidence that those persons who receive the vaccine after having been previously infected are at greatly elevated risks – compared to those persons who have not been previously infected – of adverse events, including ones requiring emergency medical treatment or hospitalization. Because by now many members of the GMU community surely have had Covid and recovered from it, a campus-wide booster mandate – even apart from the considerations mentioned above and below – is far too indiscriminate.
Second, faculty, staff, and students go about life off campus much more normally than they now do on campus. There is in Virginia neither a mask mandate nor a general vaccination mandate. Even if – contrary to fact (see below) – GMU’s vaccine-and-booster mandate significantly reduces the risk of spreading the virus on campus, it does so only for a portion of each Patriot’s week. GMU faculty, staff, and students shop at supermarkets, go to restaurants, bars, theaters, and gyms, visit family, friends, and neighbors, and often take public transportation and use ride-shares such as Uber. Each of us is bound to encounter, every day off campus, many members of the general public who haven’t even gotten a single vaccination, much less being boosted.
Currently, more than 20 percent of Virginians haven’t even received a single vaccine dose; and fully one-third of them are not fully vaccinated. In Fairfax County, the percent of people who have received at least one dose is 79, while the percent who are fully vaccinated stands at 70. In Arlington County the numbers are only slightly higher (83.5 and 72.6, respectively).
Again, each and every day, soon after someone leaves GMU’s campus he or she will inevitably come into contact with several persons who are unmasked and wholly unvaccinated. And relatively few even of the non-GMU general public who are masked and fully vaccinated will be boosted.
Third and most importantly, being vaccinated does very little to reduce the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Because Covid vaccines don’t generate mucosal antibodies, the build-up of viral loads in the noses and mouths of the vaccinated occurs just as it does for the unvaccinated. As admitted even by the Director of the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky when the Delta variant emerged, “Our vaccines…continue to work well for Delta, with regard to severe illness and death – they prevent it. But what they can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.” Because Omicron spreads more readily than Delta, Dr. Walensky’s conclusion would seem now to hold even more firmly.
And consider your own actions. You continue to insist on universal indoor masking, and have even announced a push for the wearing of stronger masks, such as N95s. If the degree to which virus spread is reduced by vaccinations and boosters is great enough to justify the unprecedented step of requiring all faculty, staff, and students to receive this medical treatment, what’s the point of masking?
I close by reiterating your own assurance that boosters provide significant protection to those persons who are boosted. Given this fact – and given that you’ve now clearly informed everyone in the GMU community of this fact – there is no reason to require anyone who does not wish to be boosted to undergo that medical procedure.
Because you’re a man of science, and because science stands firm against popular fads and hysterias, I urge you to follow the science and eliminate the booster mandate.
Some Covid Links
Unbeknownst to us, our call [in the Great Barrington Declaration] for a more focused pandemic strategy posed a political problem for Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci. The former is a geneticist who, until last week, was the director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH); the latter is an immunologist who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). They are the biggest funders of medical and infectious disease research worldwide.
Collins and Fauci played critical roles in designing and advocating for the pandemic lockdown strategy adopted by the United States and many other countries. In emails written four days after the Great Barrington Declaration and disclosed recently after a FOIA request, it was revealed that the two conspired to undermine the Declaration. Rather than engaging in scientific discourse, they authorized “a quick and devastating published takedown” of this proposal, which they characterized as by “three fringe epidemiologists” from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford.
Across the pond, they were joined by their close colleague, Dr. Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s biggest non-governmental funders of medical research. He worked with Dominic Cummings, the political strategist of UK prime minister Boris Johnson. Together, they orchestrated “an aggressive press campaign against those behind the Great Barrington Declaration and others opposed to blanket COVID-19 restrictions.”
Ignoring the call for focused protection of the vulnerable, Collins and Fauci purposely mischaracterized the GBDl as a “let-it-rip” “herd immunity strategy,” even though focused protection is the very opposite of a let-it-rip strategy. It is more appropriate to call the lockdown strategy that has been followed a “let-it-rip” strategy. Without focused protection, every age group will eventually be exposed in equal proportion, albeit at a prolonged “let-it-drip” pace compared to a do-nothing strategy.
When journalists started asking us why we wanted to “let the virus rip,” we were puzzled. Those words are not in the GBD, and they are contrary to the central idea of focused protection. It is unclear whether Collins and Fauci ever read the GBD, whether they deliberately mischaracterized it, or whether their understanding of epidemiology and public health is more limited than we had thought. In any case, it was a lie.
We were also puzzled by the mischaracterization of the GBD as a “herd immunity strategy.” Herd immunity is a scientifically proven phenomenon, as fundamental in infectious disease epidemiology as gravity is in physics. Every COVID strategy leads to herd immunity, and the pandemic ends when a sufficient number of people have immunity through either COVID-recovery or a vaccine. It makes as much sense to claim that an epidemiologist is advocating for a “herd immunity strategy” as it does to claim that a pilot is advocating a “gravity strategy” when landing an airplane. The issue is how to land the plane safely, and whatever strategy the pilot uses, gravity ensures that the plane will eventually return to earth.
The fundamental goal of the GBD is to get through this terrible pandemic with the least harm to the public’s health. Health, of course, is broader than just COVID. Any reasonable evaluation of lockdowns should consider their collateral damage to patients with cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, other infectious diseases, as well as mental health, and much else. Based on long-standing principles of public health, the GBD and focused protection of the high-risk population is a middle ground between devastating lockdowns and a do-nothing let-it rip strategy.
Among those applauding Bhattacharya’s and Kulldorff’s essay is Noah Carl. A slice:
Amazingly, Collins refers to the authors of the Declaration as “three fringe epidemiologists”, despite the fact that they held positions at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford respectively. (If even Harvard professors are considered “fringe”, there isn’t much hope for the rest of us…)
The use of “fringe” is particularly egregious when you consider that lockdowns represent a radical departure from the pre-Covid science. As Fauci himself stated on the 24th January last year [2020]: “historically when you shut things down it doesn’t have a major effect”.
David Paton tweets: (HT Sunetra Gupta)
The idea that the GBD [Great Barrington Declaration] letter killed off debate & attempts at consensus is … remarkable.
This is not a case where there were two groups of people of equal good faith. GBD called for constructive debate. The other side just worked to silence any debate & opposition at all.
The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged our understanding of what counts as an emergency and when the special powers it triggers shouldno longer apply. Emergency powers are supposed to give governors the ability to respond quickly to unexpected circumstances. But at some point after the initial crisis has passed, doesn’t an emergency transform into an issue that can be dealt with via the normal channels of government?
“If you were to use medical terminology, you’d say it goes from being an acute issue to a chronic one,” says Meryl Justin Chertoff, executive director of the Project on State and Local Government Policy and Law at Georgetown Law School. “When does it stop being a disaster in the sense that we need decisive executive action, and when does it start becoming something that requires the more deliberative steps of legislative action, or at least consultation between the governor and legislature?”
Many state legislatures grappled with that issue in 2021, as more than 300 measures to limit governors’ unilateral emergency powers were proposed in 45 states. Such measures have been approved in at least a dozen states—including Pennsylvania, where lawmakers and the state’s voters approved a pair of constitutional amendments restricting emergency powers. Those laws, in turn, have sparked opposition from governors’ offices and from the public health community, which overwhelmingly backed 2020’s harsh lockdowns.
…..
That governors have fought legislative attempts to curtail their power is not surprising. But some of the loudest opposition to emergency-power reforms has come from the public health establishment.
In state after state, public health officials have lined up to defend arbitrary and aggressive pandemic rulemaking against the constraints of the democratic process. In doing so, they’ve defended both Democratic and Republican administrations, showing a bias toward unilateral power rather than any particular political party.
John Hinderaker reports on how governments “follow the science” in practice.
Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby warns against taking ‘expert’ predictions too seriously. A slice:
“Schools can become superspreaders and in September, it will happen,” warned former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, insisting that “dramatic action” was necessary to keep the virus out of classrooms, especially in New York City. Many in the media looked to Cuomo as a leader in fighting the pandemic — in 2020, he received an Emmy for his “masterful” briefings — but he was completely wrong. Of nearly 708,000 COVID tests conducted in New York City schools in the fall semester, a mere 5,340 came back positive — a minuscule positivity rate of just three-fourths of 1 percent. (Cuomo was later stripped of his Emmy, though not because his pandemic predictions.)
It wasn’t only in America that COVID crystal balls proved faulty. Health officials in the United Kingdom forecast a dreadful autumn and anticipated 7,000 or more hospital admissions daily by October. It never happened. As the year ended, hospitalization rates remained far below the sages’ doomsday scenarios.
Rob Arnott writes in the Wall Street Journal about omicron. A slice:
Lockdowns also cost lives. This is the underreported collateral damage from Covid. In an October study for the Reason Foundation, my colleagues and I found that in the U.S., excess deaths (fatalities above historical norms) from homicide, suicide, overdose or accident had amounted to some 82,000 between March 2020 and August 2021. During that period, the murder rate roughly doubled, and overdose deaths rose more than 50%. Accidental deaths are also elevated; after all, more fatal accidents happen at home than in the office. Meanwhile, supply-chain disruptions, fear of hospitals, and delayed diagnoses collectively led to an additional 86,000 excess deaths from cancer, heart and lung disease and stroke. In 15 weeks, through Dec. 18, these excess deaths—none from Covid—have risen by another 56,000.
Every death is a tragedy. Yet we all die eventually, so it is sensible to examine death from a cost-benefit perspective. We keep hearing the mantra “follow the science.” True scientific method involves airing opinions and vetting hypotheses, not stifling debate. Beyond the hard sciences, it also involves asking tough cost-benefit questions while anticipating unintended consequences.
Phil Magness offers, on Facebook, this prediction:
As the pool of remaining unvaccinated people who could be convinced to vaccinate dwindles away, expect the Covidian zealots to redirect their persecution onto the much larger group of people who willingly got vaccinated but who – for a variety of perfectly valid reasons – are choosing to decline an endless succession of boosters.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
The Telegraph‘s editors rightly complain about Britain’s Covid policies being “incoherent.” A slice:
From the outset, the younger generation has had to bear a heavy burden for curbing Covid despite being almost entirely immune to its worst effects. Have they not suffered enough to be spared the misery of mask-wearing, even if ministers say it is a temporary measure until January 26? These cut-off dates have the habit of being extended and teaching unions are already demanding “urgent steps’”, though what these might be, short of closing the schools again, is hard to fathom.
Tim Stanley argues that “[m]asks in schools are as pointless as they are cruel.” A slice:
Why? We’ve known for a long time that Covid threatens children the least, so we can’t be that worried about how it affects their health. My suspicion is that the teaching unions have insisted upon this as a novel method of keeping the little blighters quiet. I once worked in a primary school (a mean lot of seven-year-olds, playtime was like Lord of the Flies) and if the government had sanctioned gagging children, I would gladly have done it.
But it is cruel, wickedly – and injurious to mental health. Given the fuss made about teachers wearing niqabs, on the grounds that a hidden face undermines teaching, it’s hypocritical, too.
The mandate is obviously designed to protect teachers and parents (most of whom have now had three jabs), but why wait so late to impose it, when omicron already seems embedded in the population? And why is the requirement scheduled to end on January 26? Perhaps Covid is planning to go skiing.
The justification – always – is that in order to preserve our freedom we must give up a bit more freedom: one last heave! As the restrictions become ever more specific, and sillier, the promise that if we follow them to the letter then one day Covid will be gone entices millions to obey, sometimes even to throw more nonsense into the mix. I witnessed a grown man rise from a table, where he’d eaten maskless with his family, leave the restaurant and then put on a mask to walk about in the open air. By reinforcing hysteria, Covid restrictions only build the case for more Covid restrictions.
The mind is boggled and the soul is suffocated to encounter the magnitude of stupidity that infuses this tweet from one Dr. Jorge Rodriguez – which I share here as evidence of the sort of appalling ignorance that now confronts humanity:
It’s not just that I think schools shouldn’t be open until the end of January, I don’t think *anything* should be open until the end of January. We should be paid to stay home and provided food for three weeks and we should try an *actual* lockdown to combat the #Omicron surge.
In response to this display by this Dr. Rodriguez of such a remarkable piece of idiocy, Josh Barro tweets:
“We should be paid to stay home and provided food” Who will do the providing, Doctor? Can you contextualize that system for us?
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 117 of Armen Alchian’s and William Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry Jordan, ed.); this volume is an updated version of Alchian’s and Allen’s magnificent earlier textbook, University Economics:
When wages of labor are raised – say, by a legislated increase in the minimum wage – the first law of demand indicates that less labor will be demanded. But often the reductions in employment occur only many months later after the producer has been able to substitute equipment that uses less labor. By that time, observers forget that the reduction is a response to higher labor costs. With the passage of time, these changes become more difficult to measure because so many other things change.
DBx: Keep this indisputably accurate observation in mind when you next encounter an empirical study that is claimed to “refute” the ECON 101 proposition that increases in the minimum wage reduce the employment options available to low-skilled workers.
January 2, 2022
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
Reminiscent of stock market frenzies, esoteric technical terms that had formerly been unknown to the public like “contact tracing” now became common parlance. Testing for this virus had turned into a national, indeed, international obsession. And to me, that obsession was not just misguided, it was harmful, creating more fear, more frenzy, more irrational policies.
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