Russell Roberts's Blog, page 196
December 22, 2021
Some Covid Links
In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science.” In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research.
The tale unfolded in October 2020 after the launch of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement by Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya against blanket pandemic lockdowns. They favored a policy of what they called “focused protection” of high-risk populations such as the elderly or those with medical conditions. Thousands of scientists signed the declaration—if they were able to learn about it. We tried to give it some elevation on these pages.
That didn’t please the lockdown consensus enforced by public-health officials and the press. Dr. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health until Sunday, sent an email on Oct. 8, 2020, to Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Dr. Collins wrote. “Is it underway?”
These researchers weren’t fringe and neither was their opposition to quarantining society. But in the panic over the virus, these two voices of science used their authority to stigmatize dissenters and crush debate. A week after his email, Dr. Collins spoke to the Washington Post about the Great Barrington Declaration. “This is a fringe component of epidemiology,” he said. “This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous.” His message spread and the alternative strategy was dismissed in most precincts.
Dr. Fauci replied to Dr. Collins that the takedown was underway.
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Focused protection of nursing homes and other high-risk populations remains the policy road not taken during the pandemic. Perhaps this strategy wouldn’t have prevailed if a debate had been allowed. But it isn’t enough to repeat, as Dr. Collins did on Fox News Sunday, that advocates are “fringe epidemiologists who really did not have the credentials,” and that “hundreds of thousands of people would have died if we had followed that strategy.”
More than 800,000 Americans have died as much of the country followed the strategy of Drs. Collins and Fauci, and that’s not counting the other costs in lost livelihoods, shuttered businesses, untreated illnesses, mental illness from isolation, and the incalculable anguish of seeing loved ones die alone without the chance for a family to say good-bye.
Rather than try to manipulate public opinion, the job of health officials is to offer their best scientific advice. They shouldn’t act like politicians or censors, and when they do, they squander the public’s trust.
CHAFFETZ: Matt, thank you very much. All right. My next guest was one of the targets of Fauci and Collins smear campaign. Joining me now is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford School of Medicine Professor and original signer of the Great Barrington Declaration. Thank you so much.
You got your medical degree from Stanford, you’ve been with Stanford for more than 20 years. I’d hardly call you somebody on the fringe. But I heard what Dr. Collins tried to characterize what this declaration said and it seemed to be he got it entirely wrong.
DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA, STANFORD SCHOOL OF MEDICINE: No, he straight up lied. He basically said that we wanted the virus to spread – rip through the population. And Dr. Fauci said the same thing, we – it was a let it rip strategy.
Anyone that reads the Great Barrington Declaration, you can go look online, there’s not – that phrase does not appear in it. Because the central idea of the Great Barrington Declaration is focused protection of the vulnerable. There’s thousand fold difference in the risk of severe outcomes.
We know the elderly and old people and certain people with chronic diseases have high risk of that outcomes if they infected. So the Great Barrington Declaration said let’s focus our attention on protecting those people.
At the same time, the lockdowns were harming so many other people, especially kids, who were locked out of school, especially poor kids. And so we argued for opening up society for the rest of us while protecting the vulnerable. What I was expecting was an honest discussion. Instead, what we got was lies from the head of the NIH. It was absolutely shocking.
CHAFFETZ: Did you ever think that they would actually target you? I mean, they wanted a quote unquote, “devastating response” and takedown of what you were advocating. And it wasn’t just you, there’s scientists from all over the world that were signing on to this.
BHATTACHARYA: Yes, tens of thousands of scientists and doctors signed on to this. You know, the problem here is that of Dr. Collins sits on top of over $40 billion worth of money that go to other scientists to fund research.
When he says he wants a devastating takedown, well, he has the resources to go find people to do that. And you can see from the strategy that they use, they essentially went to friendly press, spread their propaganda and lies about the Great Barrington Declaration in order to not engage with the ideas in it.
They didn’t actually take down its premises. If they thought that it was impossible to protect the vulnerable, well they should have said that. What they actually had – the major problem was that it – the Great Barrington Declaration correctly pointed out the enormous collateral harms from the lockdown policies we followed.
Every single person listening to this knows those harms intimately – isolation, people who lost their businesses, people lost their – going to the doctor for cancer screening. In poor countries tens of millions of people are starving as a consequence of lockdown. They didn’t want to address those harms. And so instead they engaged a propaganda campaign.
On Covid, David Henderson is more in agreement with Bryan Caplan than with Scott Sumner. A slice:
One big difference between Scott, on the one hand, and Bryan and me, on the other, is over how hard it is to be masked. Scott writes:
Wearing a mask is a pain? All I can say is if you think that’s a major problem, I wish I could have your life!!
But that’s not analysis; that’s just Scott telling us his own subjective valuation. As I noted above, Scott rightly is skeptical of Bryan’s use of survey data to measure people’s attitudes to life under Covid. But at least Bryan had a sample size of 476. That’s 475 more than Scott’s sample size. In a comment responding to “DeservingPorcupine,” Scott says, “And when people talk about the awful suffering involved in wearing a mask, all I can do is roll my eyes.” In other words, Scott admits that he really doesn’t take seriously people’s thoughts and feelings about wearing masks. What matters is his subjective valuation.
“The end of the pandemic will not be televised,” write Princeton historian David Robertson and University of Maryland pharmacy professor Peter Doshi in the health care journal BMJ. “There is no universal definition of the epidemiological parameters of the end of a pandemic,” they point out. “By what metric, then, will we know that it is actually over?”
After reviewing the history of three 20th century influenza pandemics, including the Spanish Flu pandemic that killed an estimated 675,000 Americans, Robertson and Doshi find that there will be no dramatic “end.” Instead, the pandemic will “gradually fade as society adjusts to living with the new disease agent and social life returns to normal.”
Robertson and Doshi point out that the tolls of previous pandemics were not recorded with daily updates on digital dashboards that anyone can easily access through the internet. “Pandemic dashboards provide endless fuel, ensuring the constant newsworthiness of the covid-19 pandemic, even when the threat is low,” they argue. “In doing so, [pandemic dashboards] might prolong the pandemic by curtailing a sense of closure or a return to pre-pandemic life.” Their advice? “Deactivating or disconnecting ourselves from the dashboards may be the single most powerful action towards ending the pandemic.”
I was of the opinion that Trump should have fired Fauci in April 2020. It would have given him a couple weeks of awful press, but Fauci would have been forgotten by mid-summer and – more importantly – out of power.
Noah Carl explains that lockdowns are supported by all manner of authoritarians. Two slices:
There are several factors behind the left’s enthusiasm for lockdowns: skewed risk perceptions; the ideology of safetyism; a preference for prioritising health over the economy (including ‘our NHS’). However, one reason that hasn’t received much attention is the growing strain of left-wing authoritarianism.
In a paper published last December, Joseph Manson explored the influence of left and right-wing authoritarianism on people’s attitudes to lockdowns and other restrictions. ‘Right-wing authoritarianism’ is a well-known construct in psychology, but ‘left-wing authoritarianism’ is relatively new.
The latter phenomenon had not received much attention in psychology until recently, most likely because of the discipline’s left-wing skew.
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Those who scored high on left-wing authoritarianism were particularly likely to say that governments should have the power to prohibit misinformation, and that politicians should be able to introduce new restrictions without consulting legislative bodies.
There were also areas of agreement. As Manson notes, both right and left-wing authoritarians favoured “restrictions on the right to protest, punishment without the right to trial by jury, and surveillance via a mandatory tracking app”.
Regardless of one’s view on the pandemic restrictions, there can be no doubt that many of them have an authoritarian character. And even if their impact in the short run was positive (something of which I am doubtful), the possibility that they will be misused by governments in the future remains troubling.
We may not fear omicron (I certainly don’t, it seems to bear a remarkable resemblance to the condition formerly known as “a cold”), but we dare not catch it and risk being told to isolate for 10 days or giving it to elderly relatives.
My young adult children, who both live in London, have foregone parties and trips to the pub with their mates because Covid is rife in the capital and their greatest dread is bringing the virus home to Grandma. Astonishingly, my 80-something mother has overcome enormous fears, stoked nightly by BBC news, and escaped from South Wales (tunneling out of Colditz was a doddle by comparison) to be with us. On Wednesday morning, my sister and brother-in-law should land at Heathrow after an even more heroic escape from Australia. I am holding my breath until I actually see them. A family reunion will never have felt more miraculous.
It shouldn’t be like this, it really shouldn’t. The number of hospitalisations and deaths did not justify the introduction of Plan B, let alone Plan C for which Sage lockdown zealots continue to agitate.
Ever-more evidence emerges of the Covidocracy’s hypocrisy.
Mikko Packalen tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Lockdowns -> use resources to protect the laptop class.
Focused protection -> use resources to protect the most vulnerable (elderly).
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 83 of the 1997 Johns Hopkins University Press edition of H.L. Mencken’s indispensable 1956 collection, Minority Report:
We have long been taught that democracy and liberty are indistinguishable, but experience proves this is not true. The two have been confused by the jabbering of mountebanks.
December 21, 2021
Compared to Lockdowns
Here’s a note to EconLog commenter “Steve”:
Steve:
In opposition to the Focused Protection advocated in the Great Barrington Declaration – and, presumably, endorsed also by David Henderson – you again insist that “We did not know then [October 2020] and largely still don’t know how to protect older people, the immunocompromised, etc.”
And so I again remind you that the Declaration’s three eminent co-authors – Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard – did indeed offer details on what Focused Protection would look like. The fact that these measures would not have worked perfectly and with 100 percent certainty is true. It’s also irrelevant because no measures to achieve any desirable outcome work perfectly and with 100 percent certainty.
But allow me to offer my own proposal – one that I believe would work quite well – for how we might carry out Focused Protection: Give all vulnerable people hazmat suits to wear, and require negative Covid tests of any and all persons who might come near vulnerable people during those times when the hazmat suits aren’t being worn.
“Outlandish! Ridiculous! Absurd!” you’ll cry. “That’s not only impractical; it’s also dehumanizing!”
Really? Compared to what? Compared to lockdowns and school closures – compared to the terrible consequences of indefinitely severing countless, complex webs of commercial, familial, and social relationships – my hazmat-suit proposal is downright mundane and highly doable.
The relevant comparison for any Focused Protection measures (including my hazmat-suit proposal) is not to life as it was up through 2019. Instead, it’s to a world indefinitely locked down or under the threat of lockdown; it’s to a bizarro world filled with deep distress, depressing isolation, unprecedented uncertainty, and terrible tyranny. I submit that by this comparison, Focused Protection (again, even including a measure as extreme and disagreeable as my hypothetical hazmat-suit proposal) is far more practical and acceptable – and far more humane – than are the cruel measures, as ludicrous as they are odious, that most of humanity has suffered since early 2020.
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
Phil Magness on Collins’s and Fauci’s Assault on Science
In this video, Phil Magness discusses, with Kate Wand, the recently exposed scurrilous attempt by Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration and the its three eminent co-authors, Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff.
Some Covid Links
Last week, the CEOs of American Airlines and Southwest Airlines told Congress that they do not think mask requirements make much sense on airplanes, where the air filtration systems are superior to what is typically found in an intensive care unit.
“I think the case is very strong that masks don’t add much, if anything, in the air cabin environment,” said Gary Kelly, CEO of Southwest. “It is very safe and very high quality compared to any other indoor setting.”
Unwilling to let anyone undermine the case for keeping a government mandate in place, White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Fauci threw cold water on the idea.
“You have to be wearing a mask on a plane,” he said bluntly on television Sunday.
When ABC News’ Jon Karl asked Fauci specifically if he thought we would ever reach the point where we did not need to wear masks on planes, he responded: “I don’t think so. I think when you’re dealing with a closed space, even though the filtration is good, that you want to go that extra step when you have people—you know, you get a flight from Washington to San Francisco, it’s well over a five-hour flight. Even though you have a good filtration system, I still believe that masks are a prudent thing to do, and we should be doing it.”
This is Faucism distilled down to its very essence. For the government health bureaucrats who have given themselves sole authority over vast sectors of American life—from travel to education to entertainment to housing—it doesn’t matter what the CEOs of these companies think. It doesn’t matter what their customers want. It doesn’t matter if maskless air travel is, for the most part, quite safe (especially for the vaccinated). It doesn’t matter if the mask mandate makes air travel impossible for families with young children. All that matters is the calculus of the most risk-averse people: unelected public health experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Like Fauci, NIH Director Frances Collins said this past weekend that air passengers should be masked—and should think twice about large gatherings, and even about going anywhere at all.
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Yet the Faucists talk about COVID-19 as if the pandemic is still some kind of we’re-all-in-this-together civilizational struggle that justifies and necessitates the suspension of civil liberties, whole industries, and school time. In his ABC interview, Fauci told Karl that he’s never walking away from his position of authority until COVID-19 is defeated.
“You know, we’re in a war, Jon,” he said. “It’s kind of like we’re halfway through World War II, and you decide, well, I think I’ve had enough of this. I’m walking away. You can’t do that. You’ve got to finish it—and we’re going to finish this and get back to normal.”
But the U.S. government is unlikely to ever defeat COVID-19 in the same sense that it defeated Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. In the meantime, the government is claiming more and more power for itself; this power is being wielded by the agencies least accountable to the democratic process, and it is being used to enact harmful restrictions on people’s lives that will apparently last for years, for decades, or forever. Americans still remove their shoes and belts in order to board air planes, even though the event that inspired this policy happened more than 20 years ago—and even though the evidence against this policy is overwhelming.
The Faucists clearly want to make masks just as permanent as the TSA: Indeed, they have said so explicitly, as Fauci just did. At every stage of the pandemic, public health bureaucrats have uttered some version of the sentence Now is not the time to ease up. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Not as long as they are in charge.
Here’s Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman on Fauci:
The pre-eminent U.S. commander in the futile war to eliminate all risk of covid—while ignoring and exacerbating other risks—is Dr. Anthony Fauci, who over the weekend declared a new infinity war. The federal disease doctor now says that, just like Spider-Man, people on airplanes should remain forever masked. “What started as ‘15 days to slow the spread’ has now descended into permanent Faucism,” cracks Gov. Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.) in a Monday email to supporters.
D.C. reimposes indoor mask mandates.
Elizabeth Bennett tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Had another crazy thought. Instead of closing schools and businesses, why not acknowledge that natural immunity counts, so we can stop firing doctors and nurses. There are lots of empty hospital rooms with no one to staff them.
Larsen also suggests that [Judge] Stranch has pulled a bait and switch. “The majority opinion initially agrees…that an emergency standard must be more than ‘reasonably necessary’; it must be ‘essential,'” she writes. “But then that word, and the concept, disappear from the analysis. What starts as a demand for an ‘essential’ solution quickly turns into acceptance of any ‘effective’ or ‘meaningful’ remedy; and later, acquiescence to a solution with a mere ‘reasonable’ ‘relationship’ to the problem. The majority opinion never explains why ‘necessary’ undergoes such a metamorphosis.”
As Larsen sees it, OSHA “has not made the appropriate finding of necessity.” She notes that “OSHA’s mandate applies, in undifferentiated fashion, to a vast swath of Americans: 84 million workers, 26 million unvaccinated, with varying levels of exposure and risk.” OSHA has the burden of explaining “why the rule should apply to a large and diverse class,” she says, but the agency “does not do so.”
But the question the judges are asked to decide isn’t whether Covid is a grave danger, as Judge Joan Larsen explains in her potent dissent. The question is whether OSHA acted within the law as written by Congress. It certainly didn’t as we read the law.
For starters, the Labor Secretary must show that an emergency temporary standard is “necessary” to protect workers from a grave danger—not merely “reasonably necessary or appropriate.” OSHA argues its mandate is effective and useful, but this is irrelevant.
OSHA waited nearly a year after vaccines became available to issue its sweeping rule. The agency also didn’t attempt to calculate the number of Americans who have contracted Covid at work or identify a particular risk of workplace exposure. OSHA claims workplaces in general are risky and unvaccinated workers in general are at high risk. But some workers at some workplaces have a higher risk of contracting the virus and getting severely ill.
“The government’s own data reveal that the death rate for unvaccinated people between the ages of 18 and 29 is roughly equivalent to that of vaccinated persons between 50 and 64,” Judge Larsen notes. OSHA is obligated by administrative law to consider more tailored alternatives, and it did not.
The Supreme Court’s major questions doctrine says Congress must “speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’” Congress also cannot delegate sweeping legislative power to regulators.
The agency has only issued 10 emergency temporary standards in 50 years—six were challenged in court and five were struck down—but all involved discrete illnesses in particular industries. “This emergency rule remains a massive expansion of the scope of its authority,” Judge Larsen writes, comparing it to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium that the Supreme Court struck down.
Speaking from the White House on September 9, Biden declared, “As your President, I’m announcing tonight a new plan to require more Americans to be vaccinated.” Biden revealed that he had ordered the Department of Labor, specifically its Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), to develop an emergency rule “to require all employers with 100 or more employees, that together employ over 80 million workers, to ensure their workforces are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week.” Apparently forgetting that America is a nation conceived in liberty, he said, “This is not about freedom or personal choice.”
In truth, Biden’s mandate goes beyond even compulsory vaccination or testing. It is really a combination vaccine/mask mandate, as workers who manage to avoid the vaccine mandate—either because their employers instead opt for frequent testing or because they have received a hard-won medical or religious exemption—are instead subjected to an unprecedented, executive-decreed, federal mask mandate. This even as the best available scientific evidence suggests, as I have detailed in City Journal, that masks do little (if that) to prevent the spread of viruses, and might even be counterproductive. They also do tremendous damage to our quality of life.
While Biden asserts that his mandate is “nothing new,” his own press secretary, Jen Psaki, has admitted that “there isn’t a big historical precedent for this.” A few months earlier, Psaki had gone even further, flatly declaring that vaccine mandates are “not the role of the federal government.” She could have added that such mandates are even less the role of the executive branch of the federal government.
el gato malo writes that much of the Covid narrative “is in tatters.”
Spiked‘s Fraser Myers protests any return to Britain of the straw man. A slice:
On the contrary, the latest demands to shut down the country for the fourth time in two years are based on what we don’t know about the new variant. While SAGE as a whole is clear in favouring harsh measures, The Times reports that chief medical officer Chris Whitty is reluctant to give any unequivocal advice, as ‘until we know how well vaccination protects against hospital admission for Omicron, it is hard to know what to do’. The UK government will apparently not have enough hard data on this, and on the variant’s severity, until after Christmas. (Of course, there is plenty of encouraging data coming out of South Africa, but Whitty claims that this is safe to ignore.) In other words, what we are faced with here is not lockdown as a last resort, but lockdown as a precautionary measure. Just in case. It is Covid safetyism run riot.
Worse still, ministers and officials have hinted that their main concern is not that Omicron will in itself overwhelm the NHS, but that it will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back of our already overburdened health service. The surge in Omicron cases has not yet translated into a surge in hospitalisations, but the NHS is already at over 94 per cent capacity. And so the government is considering reapplying the most extreme restrictions on freedom imaginable, simply to manage pressures on the health service. Our lives will be turned upside down once again to make up for the state’s failure to provide adequate healthcare capacity. To say that the goalposts for lockdown have been moved would be an understatement. The goalposts have been relocated out of the stadium.
Writing at UnHerd, Amy Jones warns that “SAGE’s doomsday predictions are damaging public trust.” A slice:
At this point, the general public could be forgiven for growing cynicism about SAGE’s supposed predictions. After all, when it comes to overshooting the mark, the advisory body has form. As recently as October, SAGE was reported to have predicted 7000 hospital admissions a day, a scenario which didn’t come close to materialising; in fact, admissions barely topped 1000.
So what purpose do these models serve? Why are they always so gloomy? And why does there always seem to be little acknowledgement of how badly wrong they have been in the past? An illuminating Twitter exchange between Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator and Graham Medley, chairman of the SAGE modelling committee, SPI-M, may hold some of the answers. In the exchange, Professor Medley explained that the models produced by SAGE were “not predictions”; rather than models produced for a broad range of eventualities, their remit was far more limited. Policymakers discuss ‘with modellers what they need to inform their policy’ and models are created on the back of such discussions. Therefore, models are produced to ‘support a decision’ made by policymakers, rather than on the likelihood or plausibility of an event.
This chimes with Sage adviser Prof Mark Woolhouse’s extraordinary warning to the Commons science select committee back in August 2020, that modellers are simply “doing what they are asked to do”. Sadly, his suggestion that modelling “has been used to address a very narrow set of questions”, such as the effectiveness of lockdowns and social distancing, while overlooking other possible responses such as shielding the vulnerable, was ignored.
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Frighteningly, the current climate of fear is being driven not just by political cowardice, but intellectual intolerance. Coordinated academic challenge to Covid orthodoxies has fizzled out since the Great Barrington Declaration sparked controversy in October 2020. Still smarting from the backlash against the statement, which called on politicians to consider “focused protection” of the vulnerable as an alternative to restrictions, outspoken “heretics” have changed tack, optimistically talking up the potential for antibody treatments and cycles of reinfection to get us out of the pandemic instead,
Given the ostracism these scientists have faced, their reticence is understandable. When a chilling email surfaced this month from Francis Collins, director of America’s National Institute of Health to Chief Medical Officer Anthony Fauci, in which the former called for a “quick and devastating takedown of [Barrington’s] premises”, it caused barely a ripple of criticism from academics.
And yet now more than ever, we need open and balanced debate about the alternatives to restrictions. It is time to look again at focused protection. Twenty seven per cent of Covid-attributed deaths occurred in care homes as of October 2021. Yet, disgracefully, as we enter an omicron wave, we once again lack a proper shielding plan.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 61 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 (original emphasis):
Meanwhile, the [Trump White House Covid-19] Task Force, particularly Dr. Fauci in his media appearances, kept focusing on what might happen, stressing what we didn’t know with absolute certainty, rather than underscoring what we did know about the virus based on months of evidence, including the most fundamental biology. The Task Force was failing to communicate any clinical medical perspective, never clarifying that rare complications are just that – rare. Even worse, the media was sensationalizing every new piece of information. The panic itself had become another contagion.
December 20, 2021
Some Covid Links
Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Phil Magness and Peter Earle describe the “fickle ‘science’ of lockdowns.” Three slices:
‘Follow the science” has been the battle cry of lockdown supporters since the Covid-19 pandemic began. Yet before March 2020, the mainstream scientific community, including the World Health Organization, strongly opposed lockdowns and similar measures against infectious disease.
That judgment came from historical analysis of pandemics and an awareness that societywide restrictions have severe socioeconomic costs and almost entirely speculative benefits. Our pandemic response, premised on lockdowns and closely related “non-pharmaceutical interventions,” or NPIs, represented an unprecedented and unjustified shift in scientific opinion from where it stood a few months before the discovery of Covid-19.
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What caused the scientific community to abandon its aversion to lockdowns? The empirical evidence didn’t change. Rather, the lockdown strategy originated from the same sources the WHO had heavily deprecated in its 2019 report: speculative and untested epidemiological models.
The most influential model came from Imperial College London. In April 2020, the journal Nature credited the Imperial team led by Neil Ferguson for developing one of the main computer simulations “driving the world’s response to Covid-19.” The New York Times described it as the report that “jarred the U.S. and the U.K. to action.”
After predicting catastrophic casualty rates for an “unmitigated” pandemic, Mr. Ferguson’s model promised to bring Covid-19 under control through increasingly severe NPI policies, leading to event cancellations, school and business closures, and ultimately lockdowns. Mr. Ferguson produced his model by recycling a decades-old influenza model that was noticeably deficient in its scientific assumptions. For one thing, it lacked a means of even estimating viral spread in nursing homes.
The record of Mr. Ferguson’s previous models should have been a warning. In 2001 he predicted that mad cow disease would kill up to 136,000 people in the U.K., and he chastised conservative estimates of up to 10,000. As of 2018 the actual death toll was 178. His other missteps include predicted catastrophes for mad sheep disease, avian flu and swine flu that never panned out.
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So why did public-health authorities abandon their opposition to lockdowns? Why did they rush to embrace the untested claims of flawed epidemiological modeling? One answer appears in the Johns Hopkins study from 2019: “Some NPIs, such as travel restrictions and quarantine, might be pursued for social or political purposes by political leaders, rather than pursued because of public health evidence.”
Some of the emails between Collins and Fauci sent in response to AIER’s FOIA request have been redacted, but surrounding context makes it pretty clear that they were looking for a way to impugn the GBD further if it came up at the White House Covid Task Force meeting on October 16. That morning, Fauci emailed Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator. He pressed the need for her to oppose the GBD, and set the stage for an attack on Scott Atlas, who was the most friendly champion of the GBD on the Task Force.
Fauci, it turns out, had to miss the October 16 task force meeting, though he likely breathed a sigh of relief when Collins emailed him two days later. “Atlas did not take part in the [task force] meeting on Friday,” Collins wrote, “and the Great Barrington Declaration did not come up.” Another partially-redacted email hints that Fauci celebrated this outcome. Atlas’s opposition to the lockdown faction on the task force “is driving Deb [Birx] crazy,” he continued.
Fauci and Collins were not done, though, in their campaign to “take down” the GBD scientists.
Please remember that Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins are not just two scientists among hundreds of thousands. As the NIH site says: “The NIH invests about $41.7 billion annually in medical research for the American people.” With that kind of spending power, you can wield a great deal of influence, even to the point of crushing dissent, however rooted in serious science it might be. It might be enough power and influence to achieve the seemingly impossible, such as conducting a despotic experiment without precedent, under the cover of virus control, in overturning law, tradition, rights, and liberties hard won from hundreds of years of human experience.
Charlie Walsham reports on how the BBC lost its way when reporting on Covid-19. (HT Jay Bhattacharya) Two slices:
I have been a BBC journalist for many years, and in that time I have been committed to impartiality and the corporation’s Reithian values to inform and educate. My despair about the BBC’s one-sided coverage of the pandemic though has been steadily growing for some time. And in early December, as I listened to a BBC radio broadcast, I felt the corporation reach a new low.
During a morning phone-in show on 5Live the topic of discussion was Covid jabs and whether they should be mandated, or if punitive action should be taken against those who refuse them, such as imposing lockdowns on the unvaccinated. Setting aside the fact that these authoritarian measures are now considered a matter for breezy debate, I at least expected a balanced discussion.
This was wishful thinking on my part, as ‘Michael from Birmingham’ – a caller – was about to find out. Michael told the host he hadn’t been vaccinated because he didn’t trust ‘the data’ and cited historic incidents of documented corporate malfeasance by pharmaceutical giants to explain why he was concerned. Now you may disagree with Michael, or think him completely deluded, but he was still a person who had genuine fears about the vaccine and its safety. Yet instead of holding a reasoned debate with his concerned caller, the host immediately lost his temper, talked over Michael, implied he was a flat-earther and then muted him entirely.
It was an interaction that goes to the very heart of the dismal failure of BBC News. I have been working at BBC News throughout the Covid era and have witnessed how the insatiable demands of the 24-hour news cycle have exacerbated a serious and protracted crisis. I have also seen how any attempt at balance has been abandoned in favour of supporting and promoting Covid restrictions.
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The BBC insists that it has ‘covered the pandemic with great care and in detail, which is what people expect of the BBC and it is why we have seen record audiences coming to us throughout, both in the UK and around the world.’ But there are signs that the corporation is once again failing in this critical function. The BBC News website now almost constantly features the ‘Live’ number of coronavirus cases. ‘Two vaccine doses don’t stop you catching Omicron’ read a headline last week, as if this was somehow remarkable – totally ignoring the fact that double-jabbed BBC staff had been succumbing to the coronavirus for months, long before Omicron reared its head.
I have come to the depressing conclusion that this pattern will keep on repeating every year and every time we face a new Covid variant.
Lord Frost argues against instituting vaccine passports in Britain.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Not again. Not after all the vaccines, all the precautions, all the privations. Not after all the models that turned out to be so absurdly alarmist. Our freedoms are elemental. They are what make us who we are as a nation. We can’t surrender them on the off-chance that some putative ill might materialise.
The original lockdown was justified on grounds that it was the only way to prevent a meltdown in our healthcare system. In the event, our Nightingale hospitals stood empty, and real-world data (as opposed to modelling) showed that the peak in new infections had passed before the restrictions were imposed.
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Still, it is worth pointing out that, at every stage, the models used by public health agencies exaggerated the numbers of infections and of deaths. Indeed, it may well be that, once again, the lockdown will come into effect only after the peak in new infections has passed. Why do our leaders keep falling for it?
Because, I’m afraid, all the incentives are stacked one way. No politician ever gets into trouble for erring on the side of caution. Nor does any public health adviser. No one has ever been hounded from office for spending too much on test and trace, or for imposing restrictions that had little effect, or for making predictions that were excessively alarmist. Make the slightest slip the other way, though, and you’re finished.
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Had the lockdowns been a clinical trial, they would have been called off on grounds of the damage they were doing to public health. We all now know the effects. The disorientated teenagers, the rise in undiagnosed cancers, the bankruptcies, the mental health problems, the tax rises, the sheer human misery. Are we seriously proposing to go through it all again, at a time when the coronavirus has become endemic, and when, according to the ONS, 95 per cent of us have antibodies? Why inflict such ruin on ourselves and our posterity?
So what about the pandemic? That surely is an indisputable reality. It strikes in terrible numbers and in the process, endangers the public healthcare facilities which have been a great feature of progressive countries. But the alacrity with which democratic governments have seized powers that even modern totalitarian societies never imposed – intervening in personal relations in the most intimate and damaging ways – implies something more than practical urgency. And further, the emergency was considered so alarming that it justified closing down critical debate. Any criticism of the mandated solutions, even when it came from alternative experts, had to be suppressed. All in the name of “following the science”. Except that modern science itself could only emerge and progress in conditions of free thought and disputation. The whole process of scientific enquiry relies on the possibility of argument. A cult of scientific authority which permits no contradiction is a sham.
Sunetra Gupta – one of the three co-authors of the great Great Barrington Declaration – tweets:
Models are wonderful conceptual tools, but should never be used to make predictions in the face of high uncertainty https://nature.com/articles/35088152…
We need strategies – like Focused Protection – that are robust to uncertainty, rather than unreliable predictions.
Over the weekend, the latest Sage document arrived with some blood-curdling figures on what could await us [in Britain] if we fail to lock down. The omicron wave could be the deadliest yet, we’re told, killing up to 6,000 of us in a single day. This would be at least five times more than the peak of previous wave – and this from an omicron variant that South Africans say is far milder! We are a highly vaccinated country whose people are teeming with antibodies. Yet somehow, after all of these jabs we are, once again, sitting ducks.
But dig deeper, and the Sage story changes. The 6,000 is the top of a rather long range of “scenarios”, not predictions. The bottom is 600 deaths a day, which certainly would not pose an existential threat to the National Health Service. Why won’t they tell us how likely (or otherwise) these scenarios are?
el gato malo sensibly asks: What fresh hell is this?
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 152-153 of Albert Jay Nock’s September 1916 essay “Prohibition and Civilization,” as it is printed in Liberty Fund’s 1991 collection of some of Nock’s essays – a collection titled The State of the Union: Essays in Social Criticism (Charles H. Hamilton, ed.):
The ideals and instruments of Puritanism are simply unworthy of a free people, and, being unworthy, are soon found intolerable. Its hatreds, fanaticisms, inaccessibility to ideas; its inflamed and cancerous interest in the personal conduct of others; its hysterical disregard of personal rights; its pure faith in force, and above all, its tyrannical imposition of its own Kultur: these characterize and animate a civilization that the general experience of mankind at once condemns as impossible, and as hateful as it is impossible.
DBx: Indeed so.
Today’s hysteria for population-wide Covid vaccination is an early 2020s’ species of Puritanism. Ditto the demonizing and deplatforming of Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, Martin Kulldorff, and other individuals who point out that the dangers posed to the vast majority of people by SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t begin to come close to justifying lockdowns, school closures, canceled or postponed sporting events, and most other proscriptions and prescriptions imposed in the name of protecting humanity from the demon virus.
Progressivism has much more in common, than its adherents think, with Puritanism. Both ideologies are versions of statism. The ranks of both swarm with people who ridicule and reject liberalism. Each of these statist ideologies worships power as the one and only savior that will usher in its particular version of heaven on earth. Each of these ideologies regards the individual who is unbridled and unmolested by the state, and who refuses to catch whatever causes the current collective fever, as a public enemy deserving neither tolerance nor sympathy.
Progressives suppose that, because they have no qualms about alcohol use or about consensual sex outside of traditional marriage – and because many are not religious in the conventional sense – that they are the opposite of Puritans. But they are mistaken. These differences are superficial. Progressives, like Puritans (and like many Populists), cannot tolerate anyone acting differently from, or even thinking differently than, the particular ways that they have divined is correct.
December 19, 2021
A Christmas Carol
Today – December 19th – is the one-hundred and seventy-eighth anniversary of the publication of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. I cannot recommend highly enough that part of your celebration of the Christmas season include watching the 2017 movie “The Man Who Invented Christmas.”
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 60 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 (ellipses original to Atlas):
Against all common sense, the [Trump White House] Task Force’s focus on stopping the spread of infections at all costs – instead of protecting those known to be at highest risk – was abjectly failing. Whatever happened to the more limited goal of “flattening the curve” and avoiding hospital overcrowding? And since when was it even rational to think it was within our power to stop every … single … case? And beyond that, no one was talking about the enormous damage being done to families and children by the lockdowns.
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