Russell Roberts's Blog, page 193
December 30, 2021
Some Non-Covid Links
George Will calls 2021 the “year of weird speaking.” Three slices:
At the end of 2021, a year of weird speaking, Americans learned from Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) that “student debt is policy violence.” Previously, Americans were lectured that “silence is violence” — that not voicing support for this or that supposedly oppressed group is violence against it. The proliferation of new forms of violence raises a question: Are old forms — say, a flash mob looting a Louis Vuitton store — still violence? Or is this just the vigorous articulation of intersectional consciousness against consumer culture’s commodification of everything, including commodities?
Normal people, who might want to toss anvils to progressives drowning in their jargon, should modify George Orwell’s axiom that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” Today, the enemy of clarity is the scary sincerity of progressives who are politically inflamed about everything.
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Colorado’s constitution forbids “any distinction or classification of pupils … on account of race or color,” a provision adopted in 1974, during the national recoil against segregation. Now, however, a Denver school is planning, when covid-19 permits, a “families of color playground night,” a project overseen by something not all elementary schools have: the school’s “dean of culture.”
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Actor Jussie Smollett had said that when he went out for a sandwich … at 2 a.m. … in a subzero Chicago January … he encountered — such rotten luck! — two political activists shouting “this is MAGA country” … who, amazingly, on their ramble just happened to be carrying a noose … and bleach … that they doused him with … and ….
A 2021 jury of Chicagoans said: Puh-lease. We think this tale belongs on the growing list (e.g., the 2006 Duke lacrosse rape, the 2012 University of Virginia fraternity rape) of American horrors that never happened.
My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy has a wish for 2022. A slice:
At the eve of a new year, it’s traditional to make a resolution or two. I have no such list for myself or others, but I do have a wish. For 2022 and beyond, I wish that all of us who still cherish liberal values will band together to oppose the worrisome rise of authoritarianism around the world.
For decades, those inclined toward free markets have focused on authoritarianism coming from the political left. We have spared no energy denouncing and opposing it. We’ve rightfully been concerned about the push to centralize more power in the hands of federal governments and to increase the scope and size of all government. We have warned that these policies, pursued consistently, pave what the great F.A. Hayek called “the road to serfdom.”
This fight should continue. However, it’s time to be equally harsh toward those on the Right who want to use state power to control individuals’ choices and destroy those with whom they disagree. In America, this illiberalism was visible in many of the policies pushed by former President Donald Trump, including industrial policies riddled with favoritism and hostility to foreign workers and immigrants. It peaked during the last months of his presidency with claims of stolen elections and other conspiracy theories.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board decries Beijing’s continuing tyranny over Hong Kong. A slice:
China’s shredding of Hong Kong’s autonomy is reaching new levels of nastiness. This week authorities forced the closure of the online publication Stand News and levied new charges against Apple Daily executives.
On Wednesday authorities arrested seven people linked to Stand News for “conspiracy to publish seditious publication,” according to the Hong Kong police. They include top editor Patrick Lam, as well as pop singing star Denise Ho and former lawmaker Margaret Ng, both former board members.
Police also arrested former top editor Chung Pui-kuen, whose wife—former Apple Daily associate publisher Chan Pui-man—has been in jail since July. In these days of Beijing control in Hong Kong, families that dissent together end up separated behind bars.
Citing the city’s new national security law, more than 200 police descended on the Stand News office, seized computers and documents, and froze some $7.8 million in assets without due process. Police said “further arrests may be made,” even as Stand News announced its immediate closure.
Trevor Burrus reports on a new amicus brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court by the Cato Institute.
Jim Dorn reflects on Alan Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance” speech of 25 years ago.
[UMass economics professor Isabella] Weber gets the causation backward right from the start. She writes that “a critical factor that is driving up prices remains largely overlooked: an explosion in profits.” It makes no sense to say that profits drive up prices in competitive markets. Profit is defined as revenue minus costs. For profits to go up, something has to change about revenue and costs. The equilibrium price of a good is not in any way dependent on profit.
(DBx: Any “economist” who advocates the use of price controls for any purpose, but especially for controlling inflation, deserves the same intense degree of contempt as does any “biologist” who advocates creationism as an explanation for biodiversity and living-creatures’ phenotypes.)
In the world according to Warren, every unwelcome spike in prices is the result of a conspiracy to put the screws to consumers, while every dramatic price reduction is an irrelevancy. In the real world, market forces, not corporate villainy, explain why prices fluctuate. And “market forces” go far beyond decisions made by a handful business leaders in C-suites. They comprise choices made by tens of thousands of producers and vendors, as well as millions of consumers.
Inflation isn’t on the march because, after decades of stable prices, corporate America was suddenly seized by a wave of greed. It’s a ridiculous theory, but it’s the one Warren is sticking to. So she plays the corporate-greed card over and over, like a relative repeating the same dreary party trick at every family gathering. Meanwhile prices keep rising, and voters are less and less amused.
Brian Riedl explains “how higher interest rates could push Washington toward a federal debt crisis.”
Some Covid Links
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told the Washington Post on Tuesday that the agency revised its guidelines because there “were starting to be limitations in society” due to the extended worker quarantines. She added: “This guidance is only as good as society’s willingness to follow it.”
Translation: CDC’s previous guidelines were becoming unsustainable, like government lockdowns. Americans are ignoring them because they’re too onerous.
This has upset some of the usual public-health sages whose default is always government coercion. One told the Washington Post that the new CDC guidelines do “not seem to be based on science and data and what’s best for the public unless they’re accounting for the complete breakdown of society.” If government did what these experts want, society and the economy would break down.
Robby Soave reports on how teachers unions continue seek to avoid work by milking fears of Covid. A slice:
Last year, CTU [Chicago Teachers Union] fought tooth and nail to keep schools closed as long as possible. Today, given widespread vaccination, the evidence is clear that schools can and should remain open, and that in-person instruction can continue with minimal safety risks. Teachers unions that keep struggling against this urgent need to give kids the educational experience they need and deserve are only undermining their own credibility.
(DBx: I again give thanks that many of these ‘teachers’ are so very unintelligent that they continue to overplay the hand dealt to them by Covid. To the extent that Covid hysteria has exposed the true appalling nature of government schooling and, thus, helps to undermine it, Covid hysteria will not have been all for the bad.)
Writing in Newsweek, Laura Rosen Cohen decries how what I call Covid Derangement Syndrome is especially perilous to the lives of the disadvantaged. (HT Martin Kulldorff) Three slices:
Zoom school for cognitively impaired children was just a heartless throwaway “solution”—almost an outright joke among school officials. What are children who need in person physical and speech therapy going to do with a Zoom session?
…..
As the weeks and months and now years of “two weeks to flatten the curve” drag out endlessly, it’s clear that disabled children, youth and adults have been treated with a special level of contempt and heartlessness that has been breathtaking and sadistic. They are looked at as disposable humans, with a callousness that is absolutely chilling and inexcusable.
In the name of “safety,” people with disabilities have been denied access to their loved ones, and essentially treated like human garbage in group homes throughout America, resulting in higher rates of death and hospitalization from the coronavirus compared to non-disabled persons within the same communities.
The rules are capricious and bereft of common sense. We, living in our allegedly civilized societies, have a gaping compassion deficit when it comes to the most vulnerable among us.
And the pandemic public health rules made it much, much worse.
…..
We need to come together and say no the never ending restrictions.
Your hysterical need to feel absolutely safe beyond measure is coming at someone’s expense—someone much more vulnerable than you. Can you live with that?
One place that Covid hysteria continues unabated is collegiate campuses.
Writing in the New York Post, James Bovard explains why an air-travel vax mandate is a bad idea. Two slices:
The feds previously claimed that masking on flights was sufficient to protect travelers, but the Zoom class is terrified and demanding a comforting placebo. Effectively adding tens of millions of names to the No Fly List would also satisfy the blue-state lust to punish Americans who have failed to comply with the latest commands from Washington.
Imposing a vax mandate for air travel could be the opening step for far greater restrictions on Americans’ freedom of movement. The Associated Press reported in August that the Biden administration is considering “mandating vaccines for interstate travel” but is delaying any such decree until Americans are “ready for the strong-arming from the federal government.”
Restricting interstate travel across the board would be among the most intrusive federal policies since payroll-tax withholding. Enforcing such a policy would require the creation of COVID patrols, akin to pre-Civil War slave patrols, waiting to chase down anyone who crosses state lines without proper papers.
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According to diehard COVID warriors and Biden supporters, the latest surge of COVID cases proves that the president needs more power. Effectively banning tens of millions of Americans from air travel would endear the president to his triple-vaxxed supporters. But another demolition of freedom will do nothing to end the most politically exploited pandemic in American history.
In response to Biden expressing his openness to domestic travel vaccine requirements, Jay Bhattacharya tweets:
This anti-scientific, discriminatory vaccine segregation policy is not actually the worst part of this bit of news. It is that Pres. Biden conditions his support for it on his “medical team” led by experts like Dr. Fauci, who are blind to lockdown harms.
Throughout the pandemic, the ‘expert’ class has successfully pushed the idea that in order to avoid future lockdowns, we must lock down. How well has that worked out?
David McGrogan makes an interesting point about the role of those of us in the anti-lockdown camp. A slice:
Since it’s mostly just about feelings, does this mean that the efforts of Toby [Young], Lord Sumption, Peter Hitchens, Neil Oliver, Brendan O’Neill and the like have had no effect at all? Would the madness all have ended in the fullness of time anyway?
I’m not so sure. Milton Friedman once said that he thought his basic function was to “develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” In other words, yes, public opinion is led by emotion, but this makes it fickle. It can shift, and shift quickly. The trick is to make sure that, when this happens, it is your ideas that are the ones “lying around” (to use Milton’s phrase) for them to seize up.
People in other words, will increasingly start to feel that this lockdown nonsense has to stop. As they do, they will start to look for evidence and arguments to support that view. Thanks to the efforts of Toby and those like him, they will find a huge wealth of this in the public domain. Lockdown sceptics, in other words, probably haven’t been very persuasive or influential when it comes to the broad swathe of the population. But that hasn’t been the point. We’ve been keeping the alternative view alive, so that when eventually public opinion shifts, it is our ideas that they will pick up, and which will increasingly therefore begin to drive the agenda.
Charlotte Lytton is not among those who are optimistic that humanity will return to normal. A slice:
From mindsets to material things, the virus is now the core around which the rest of life is bent to fit. There is nothing wrong with reconfiguring the status quo when it no longer meets our needs. But it is our duty to challenge what those ‘needs’ are – particularly when they now so often seem to involve once-enjoyable parts of life being diminished with little reason.
Early on in the pandemic, comparisons were naturally drawn between Covid and Spanish Flu, the 1918 pandemic lasting a year or two before wiping itself – and the 50-100 million it killed – out. It is a seismic event devoid of monuments in London or most other major worldwide cities, for that matter; a subject largely untouched by the writers of the age too, in spite of the disease having infected one in three people on the planet.
The idea of this virus similarly exiting our lives with the gusto it arrived now looks either unlikely or impossible. Just as 9/11 changed airport security forever, the Covid imprint has spread too far, to too many things, to turn each of them back – and the scant bits that remain unchanged only serve to highlight the altered state we’re still in. This new normal has created a divide between us: between those willing to muddle through the added layers of complications heaped on previously simple things in an attempt to simulate the old normal, and those who prefer to cut such elements out entirely. Is this really the post-pandemic ‘recovery’ we were promised?
There is a growing Covid industry of companies selling security interventions. Some vaccine manufacturers are enthusiastically promoting repeated boosters. The private gains from PPE sales are so notorious that the [U.K.’s] Treasury should be considering a war profits tax. There is a burgeoning trade in ventilation and air-filtration equipment. Behind the push for vaccine passports are software companies with digital ID packages in search of customers.
There are, however, less obvious interests. People outside universities may be surprised by the degree to which scientific research depends on competitive grant and contract funding. Team leaders must behave much like small-business owners to maintain the staffing, equipment and materials for their labs. Covid research funding is an opportunity to secure that base. No academic is entirely disinterested, though some of us reflect on that more than others.
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Some, however, would have us remodel our approach to health and illness to reflect more closely American thinking, where it is far more accepted to throw anything and everything at health risks. This raises big policy questions that need to be debated seriously, outside the heat of a pandemic. Do we really want to try to prevent every infection in all young children or infants by a medical intervention? Do we want to prolong the life of every frail person by aggressive interventions, regardless of the suffering or indignity we may be inflicting?
Covidocratic tyranny in China. (DBx: Such authoritarianism is along the inevitable road paved by the embrace of zero Covid.)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 128 of David Friedman’s excellent 1996 book, Hidden Order (original emphasis):
It is sometimes said that middlemen – retailers and wholesalers – merely move things about while absorbing some of the value that other people have produced. But all anyone does is to move things about – to rearrange from less to more useful. The producer rearranges iron ore and other inputs into automobiles; the retailer rearranges automobiles on a lot into automobiles paired up with particular customers. Both increase the value of what they work on and collect their income out of that increase.
December 29, 2021
Evidence Against the ‘Negative Externality’ Justification for the Draconian Covid Restrictions
Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Editor:
You report on people moving during Covid in droves from states (such as California) that relied heavily on lockdowns, school closures, and other draconian restrictions to states (such as Florida) that were much more laissez faire (“The Great Pandemic Migration,” Dec. 29). This pattern of migration is powerful evidence against the applicability of the chief ‘economic’ argument used to justify these draconian policies.
That argument starts by asserting that these restrictive policies are the best means of preventing the “negative externality” of some people inflicting harm on innocent third parties. The argument then further asserts that, while each individual suffers a real cost of being inconvenienced by these policies, nearly everyone judges the resulting benefits to be worth this cost. Thus it is concluded that these restrictive policies serve the public interest.
But the migration that occurred since Covid strongly suggests that a significant number of people do not judge the benefits of draconian restrictions to be worth the costs – a fact that drains the “negative externality” justification for these restrictions of its validity.
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
Much Good Economics Is Little More Than Debunking Man-In-the-Street Fallacies
The result is a division within the economics profession. In the case of trade policy, most economists continue to endorse free trade. But no small number of economists make names for themselves by spinning theoretical justifications for protectionism. This latter group of economists – let’s call them “anti-Smithians” – essentially attempt to explain why the man-in-the-street (and the minister-in-the-royal-court) were correct all along. While the man-in-the-street might not understand why his intuitive hostility to free trade is correct, anti-Smithian economists are there to help him with catalogues of clever theoretical justifications.
Economic reality being complicated, it’s nearly always true that a set of conditions can be imagined under which outcomes that are highly improbable in reality can be shown to be possible. Conditions can be described under which, in reality, it’s possible for protective tariffs or export subsidies to result in greater prosperity in the home country. Yet such conditions are wholly implausible.
Possibility, be aware, is a very weak standard. Almost every outcome that is possible – such as you surviving a fall off of a skyscraper because you luckily land in a huge drift of freshly fallen snow – will never occur. And so just because some outcome is possible doesn’t mean that it’s plausible. Furthermore, just because some outcome is plausible doesn’t mean that it’s probable.
One skill possessed and exercised by competent economists is the ability to distinguish the plausible from the possible, and the probable from the plausible. These economists understand that the best public policy is that which is guided by what is probable. They also understand the danger of any policy imposed in the hope of some improbable possibility coming to pass.
Anti-Smithian economists – those who specialize in finding reasons to assure the man-in-the-street that his untutored economic instincts are correct after all – are at work in areas other than trade policy. Any economic superstition that is popular with the untutored man-in-the-street is sure to have at least a handful of professional economists hard at work explaining why good economists such as Milton Friedman are mistaken to reject this superstition, and why he, the untutored man-in-the-street, is spot-on correct to embrace it.
History’s most famous economist to make his mark by rejecting sound economics and conjuring rococo theoretical justifications for man-in-the-street superstitions is John Maynard Keynes. The man-in-the-street understands that he’ll be rendered unemployed if consumer demand for his employer’s output falls sufficiently. The man-in-the-street then leaps from this correct understanding to the incorrect conclusion that the root cause of economy-wide unemployment is inadequate consumer demand. Based on this faulty understanding, the man-in-the-street further concludes that an easy cure for economy-wide unemployment is more spending by government. Seems simple.
Economists since Adam Smith worked hard to debunk this false belief. But in the midst of the Great Depression, along came Keynes. Keynes did indeed have genius, but in my opinion it wasn’t as an economist. Keynes’s genius was in spinning highly implausible, but impressive-enough appearing, theoretical justifications for the man-in-the-street belief.
Anti-Smithian economists are also hard at work to reassure the man-in-the-street that he is correct to believe, contrary to the teaching of most economists, that minimum wages benefit all low-wage workers. The man-in-the-street supports minimum-wage legislation because he supposes that the coerced higher wages are simply paid out of excess profits reaped by exploitative employers, or that employers pay these higher wages simply by raising the prices at which they sell their outputs, with no further consequences.
Basic economics is clear that government-imposed minimum wages, by artificially increasing the cost to employers of low-skilled workers, causes some jobs for these workers to be eliminated, and causes other jobs for these workers to become more onerous. In short, minimum wages harm many of the very workers who are meant to be helped.
But minimum wages are popular with the untutored man-in-the-street, as well as with the typical pundit-in-the-opinion-pages. And because markets pluckily supply all demands, the demand for theoretical excuses to support minimum wages is met by a supply of such excuses from anti-Smithian economists.
Every undergraduate econ major learns by her junior year how to draw a graph depicting a minimum wage having only positive, and no negative, effects on low-skilled workers. And if well-taught, this econ major also learns that the conditions under which such a graph describes reality are highly implausible. But no matter. Because the public’s desire to believe in the goodness of minimum wages is so intense, the supply is ample of anti-Smithian economists willing to satisfy this desire – willing to assure the man-in-the-street that his utter ignorance of economics is, in fact, economic brilliance.
Note that I don’t here accuse anti-Smithian economists of being insincere or, worse, mercenary. I don’t think that they are. My accusation instead is that as economists they are sincerely unwise.
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 70 of the late Nobel laureate Ronald Coase’s insightful 1972 paper “Industrial Organization: A Proposal for Research” (link added):
It seems to have been implicitly assumed that the same considerations which led welfare economists to see the need for government action would also motivate those whose active support was required to bring about the political changes necessary to implement these policy recommendations. In this, we are wiser than we were, in large part because of the new “economic theory of politics.” We are beginning to perceive the nature of the forces which bring about changes in the law – and there is no necessary relationship between the strength of forces favoring such changes and the gain from such changes as seen by economists. It suggests that economists interested in promoting particular economic policies should investigate the framework of our political system to discover what modifications in it are required if their economic policies are to be adopted, and should count in the cost of these political changes.
DBx: Ronald Coase was born 111 years ago today. He died in 2013 at the age of 102. His deep insights remain far too under-appreciated – and in some cases simply misunderstood – by the mainstream of the economics profession.
Some Covid Links
Newly identified COVID-19 cases in the United States have “soared to near record levels,” The New York Times reports, adding that the omicron variant “has moved with extraordinary swiftness across the country, from New York to Hawaii, both of which reported more coronavirus cases in the past week than in any other seven-day period of the pandemic.” The Times notes that “Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Puerto Rico have also reported record caseloads.”
While the Times predictably emphasizes the most alarming aspects of the current COVID-19 surge, the story also includes details that suggest the initial fears of omicron were overwrought. “Hospitalizations are up, too, although not as much as cases,” the Times says. That’s a bit of an understatement: By the paper’s count, hospitalizations are “8 percent higher than two weeks ago,” which is much smaller than the 83 percent increase in the seven-day average of daily new cases during the same period. The seven-day average of daily deaths, meanwhile, rose by just 3 percent.
Although hospitalizations and deaths are lagging indicators, it has been a month since daily new cases began a steep climb in the United States. According to Worldometer’s numbers, the seven-day average rose threefold between November 29 and yesterday. Daily deaths, meanwhile, rose by less than 50 percent between November 29 and December 21. There has been a slight falloff since then, probably largely due to holiday-related reporting issues. Hospitalizations, which include cases where patients tested positive after being admitted for other reasons, have risen about 40 percent since late November. While case numbers are indeed “near record levels,” daily deaths and hospitalizations remain far below the peaks seen in mid-January.
The positive health impact of barring the 70 million or so non-fully-vaccinated Americans ages 5 and older from air travel is likely to be closer to marginal than overwhelming. Airplane trips thus far during the pandemic have been almost preternaturally safe from COVID spread. Existing vaccine mandates, meanwhile, have failed to move the needle on vaccination rates.
In fact, as Reason‘s Christian Britschgi pointed out in October, discouraging comparatively safe air travel makes people more likely to use far more dangerous automobiles, a substitution that had measurably negative effects after the post-9/11 security measures adopted by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
“The added hassle the agency’s pre-flight security screenings added to air travel encouraged people to substitute driving for flying, resulting in an estimated additional 500 auto deaths per year after 9/11,” Britschgi wrote. “That almost certainly outweighed whatever terrorism-caused deaths the TSA’s security screenings prevented.”
Such cost-benefit analyses are extremely unlikely to move the types of people who favor strenuous pandemic restrictions. Many (mostly Democratic) politicians, public health officials, and voters have a visceral anger toward the minority of Americans who have yet to avail themselves of the lifesaving vaccines. The punishment of the refuseniks is the point.
“Older Americans are falling victim to fraud, physical violence and neglect as family isolation and staffing shortages erode safeguards” – so reports the Wall Street Journal. (DBx: But, we are to believe, this news is not as bad as it seems – the reason being that the direct cause of these people’s sufferings isn’t Covid-19.)
But the early information ranged from sketchy to biased. In the early days, the number of Covid tests was limited, so physicians only tested those who were sick enough to show up at hospitals. This skewed the early data toward showing Covid as being deadlier than it actually was. With no randomized testing, the actual lethality was impossible to know.
This bias interacted with the media and politicians’ incentives to create a perfect storm of incentives. The media had an incentive to repeat the worst fatality projections and to play down the bias behind the projections because bad news attracts viewers, and viewers attract advertising dollars. Heavy media coverage of the worst Covid projections alarmed voters, and that forced politicians to respond. But the politicians’ incentives were skewed toward a heavy-handed response.
There were two ways politicians could have been caught making mistakes. Politicians might not have imposed lockdowns when lockdowns were needed. If they erred in this way, the error would have become quickly and clearly evidenced in body counts. Angry voters would have looked for someone to blame, and the politicians would have been the clear choice. Conversely, politicians might have imposed lockdowns when lockdowns were not needed. If they erred in this way, the error would have remained mostly hidden. Unemployment and business closures would skyrocket, but politicians could point to the millions of hypothetical deaths that “would have occurred” were it not for the lockdowns.
By late 2020, it became clear that early case fatality rates were overstated, but it was too late for politicians to change course.
“Americans Fled California, New York, and D.C. During COVID” – so reports Reason‘s Eric Boehm. A slice:
But when looked at as a percentage of their overall population, no place took as big of a hit as Washington, D.C, which lost more than 3.4 percent of its prepandemic population in just 12 months.
At the other end of the spectrum, Texas gained about 310,000 residents during that same period, while Florida (211,000), Arizona (98,000), and North Carolina (93,000) also saw significant in-migration.
Migration from high- to low-tax states—especially those in the Sun Belt—has been going on for well over a decade. But the trend picked up during the pandemic, as Democratic states tended to impose the strictest lockdowns and school closures while those governed by Republicans allowed most businesses and schools to stay open after spring 2020.
California’s net outflow surged 75% between July 1, 2020 and July 1, 2021 compared to the same period from 2018 to 2019. New York’s out-migration doubled. On the other hand, Texas’s inflow increased by 40%, and Florida’s swelled by more than half. The flight out of Illinois also accelerated.
(DBx: Well now…. I wonder what these results of voting-with-feet imply about the supposed widespread desire of people to be protected by government from the ‘negative externality’ of other-people’s breathing.)
Starting at the 28-minute mark, Jan Crawford here is excellent. (HT David Henderson)
When President Biden’s public utterances make the news, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether he’s signaling a substantive shift or merely wandering off message. On a call with governors Monday to discuss the Covid-19 pandemic, this is how Mr. Biden started his remarks: “There is no federal solution. This gets solved at the state level.”
Oh? During the 2020 presidential campaign, Mr. Biden pledged “to shut down the virus, not the country.” He also slammed President Trump in a debate, saying: “Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America.” Mr. Biden’s policies have followed that approach, as when his Education Department inserted itself into state and local debates over school mask policies.
The Biden Administration has also issued broad federal rules to require that tens of millions of workers be vaccinated or regularly tested. The mandate from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration applies to private companies nationwide that have 100 or more employees. Next week the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments over whether this is a lawful use of government power after lower courts have split on the question.
In a letter in today’s Wall Street Journal, Clay Travis writes forthrightly about Covid and athletes. A slice:
How is this possible? Athletes, and all of us, were told that if everyone were vaccinated, Covid cases would plunge and we could return to normal life. Yet there were more U.S. Covid cases on Dec. 24, 2021, than there were on Dec. 24, 2020.
The idea of “Covid zero” has failed. Accordingly, the Covid testing policies put in place by pro sports leagues have also failed. After over a year of rigorous testing, we know that pro athletes are not in danger from Covid. Nor are their coaches, trainers and staff. Most of these athletes testing positive are asymptomatic, and, according to Allen Sills, the chief medical officer of the NFL, asymptomatic football players are not spreading the virus.
It’s time for new Covid policies based on new data. Given that Covid isn’t going away, we must learn to live with it, as we have long managed to do with the flu. Earlier this year, a member of the Washington Football Team was initially put on the Covid list, making him ineligible to play. After subsequent testing, it was determined this player didn’t actually have Covid; he had the flu, making him eligible to play. What sense does that make?
Here’s a headline in yesterday’s Telegraph: “Just one-fifth of new Covid hospital patients are true cases.” A slice from the report:
Just one fifth of the weekly rise in Covid inpatients was caused by people admitted to hospital because of the virus, figures suggest.
The most up-to-date NHS data show that on December 21, there were 6,245 beds occupied by coronavirus patients in English hospitals – an increase of 259 from the previous week.
But within that increase, just 45 patients were admitted because of the virus, with the remaining 214 in hospital for other conditions but having also tested positive – so called “incidental Covid” admissions.
Quotation of the Day…
Evident from my first encounter was what appeared to be a functioning troika of “medical experts” composed of Drs. [Deborah] Birx, [Anthony] Fauci, and [Robert] Redfield. They shared thought processes and view to an uncanny level. One depressing commonality was that none of them showed detailed knowledge of ongoing scientific literature on the pandemic….
I also noticed that there was virtually no disagreement among them. It was an amazing consistency, as though there were an agreed-upon complicity – even though some of their statements were so patently simplistic or erroneous that others in the room, even those without medical backgrounds, sometimes felt compelled to make corrections. I found myself grateful to people like Seema Verma, Marc Short, the VP’s chief of staff; and others who occasionally spoke up to challenge their conclusions – grateful, because at some meetings, I felt burned out, simply unable to muster the energy to yet again correct something so unmistakably wrong. That happened most commonly when selective correlations were assumed to be cause and effect, like a non-scientist might conclude (for example, pointing to the correlation of cases with the timing of a mandate in one state but ignoring that comparison in a different state where it did not correlate).
Even on those strikingly unsound conclusions, Drs. Birx, Fauci, and Redfield virtually always agreed, literally never challenging one another.
December 28, 2021
Should School Children be Masked?
This video by Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller on the masking of schoolchildren is excellent. Note the arrogance and lack of responsiveness of the physician who supports the masking of school children. Quite the opposite of that officious woman is Jay Bhattacharya, who sums up well the experience of the past two years: “We essentially reorganized our society around the control of a single infectious disease, when in fact, health is plural.”
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