Russell Roberts's Blog, page 197
December 19, 2021
Some Non-Covid Links
George Will eviscerates what he accurately calls the “malicious, historically illiterate 1619 Project.” Two slices:
The [New York] Times’s original splashy assertion – slightly fudged after the splash garnered a Pulitzer Prize – was that the American Revolution, the most important event in our history, was shameful because a primary reason it was fought was to preserve slavery. The war was supposedly ignited by a November 1775 British offer of freedom to Blacks who fled slavery and joined British forces. Well.
That offer came after increasingly volcanic American reactions to various British provocations: After the 1765 Stamp Act. After the 1770 Boston Massacre. After the 1773 Boston Tea Party. After the 1774 Coercive Acts (including closure of Boston’s port) and other events of “The Long Year of Revolution” (the subtitle of Mary Beth Norton’s “1774”). And after, in 1775, the April 19 battles of Lexington and Concord, the June 17 battle of Bunker Hill and George Washington on July 3 assuming command of the Continental Army.
Writing history is not like doing physics. But event A cannot have caused event B if B began before A.
…..
The Times says “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional” flows from “slavery and the anti-black racism it required.” So, the 1619 Project’s historical illiteracy is not innocent ignorance. Rather, it is maliciousness in the service of progressivism’s agenda, which is to construct a thoroughly different nation on the deconstructed rubble of what progressives hope will be the nation’s thoroughly discredited past.
Arnold Kling is wise. A slice:
Liberal values were hardly a priority for Mr. Trump, and some of his would-be successors at the National Conservatism conference were openly disdainful of liberal values. When I listened to recordings of speeches there, I thought I caught a strong whiff of demagoguery.
I think that middle America benefits from liberal values, probably more than people realize. For the economy, I think that neoliberalism is better for middle America than populism. I think that Mr. Trump’s supporters make the Republican Party more receptive to illiberalism on the right than it would be otherwise.
But unlike, say, Jonathan Rauch, I don’t see the illiberal right as an existential threat to our society. I think that the social justice movement does pose an existential threat. As institutions start to play by social-justice rules, they raise the status of the wrong people.
Most of the work to keep our society from being ruined by the social justice activists has to be done by those of us who see their game for what it is. We need to keep liberal values from being obliterated by the social justice movement.
Doug Bandow writes on the 30th anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union.
Hans Bader decries Biden’s politicization of medicine.
“Global freedom is on the decline” – so reports Eric Boehm.
Tunku Varadarajan talks with Phil Levy about today’s supply-chain web woes. A slice:
Ninety percent of all exported goods move over the ocean. These include not only finished goods but also parts. “So even if you’re manufacturing in the U.S.,” Mr. Levy says, “the odds are you’re using some imported parts.”
Ports are built “so you can just meet peak demand.” It’s too expensive to build at excess capacity, “because then most of the time you’d have lots of extra stuff sitting around.” The peak season is August through November, “when it’s, ‘How do you stock store shelves for the holidays?’ ” The problem is that a system that can “barely handle” a normal peak season has seen “above peak demand for about an entire year and a half,” placing it under “a cumulative strain it wasn’t really built for.”
Some Covid Links
Phil Magness, that irrepressible foe of statism, managed to obtain emails between White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci and NIH director Francis Collins in which they hatch an attack on the Great Barrington Declaration. (The GBD was authored by three well-known epidemiologists, arguing that the best approach to COVID was not locking down, but targeted protection for the truly vulnerable.)
Dissent from the federal government’s chosen strategy was quite unwelcome. “There needs to be a quick and devastating takedown of its premises,” Collins wrote in reference to the GBD. Real scientists would investigate the premises first, then decide if the declaration should be subject to a “takedown,” but no such thing ever happened. The authors were disparaged, their motives impugned, their conclusions ridiculed, but one looks in vain for anything like a scientific counter-argument.
Phil Magness shares, in a Twitter thread, many of these e-mails. Three slices:
The Fauci-endorsed Wired article is noteworthy for having one of the single worst hot-takes of the entire pandemic. It declared in October 2020 that the GBD should be ignored, because lockdowns were a thing of the past and would not be returning!
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Far from a scientific study refuting the GBD, [Gregg] Gonsalves’s article is a political op-ed attacking @Jacobin magazine for breaking “solidarity” with other far-left media outlets on lockdowns. Why? Because Jacobin ran an interview with @MartinKulldorff on how lockdowns hurt the poor.
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In the meantime, Gonsalves also gets in contact with Collins to volunteer his services (along with future @CDCDirector Rochelle Walensky) to attack the GBD in the media.
Collins approves, and forwards it to Fauci and a bunch of NIH underlings.
Also writing about these e-mails, in the Daily Mail, is Stephen Lepore. A slice:
Dr. Anthony Fauci and the head of the National Institute of Health (NIH) colluded on a way to discredit an alternative plan to deal with COVID from a group of experts, released emails reveal.
The emails, some of which were tweeted out on Saturday by Phil Magness, senior research faculty and interim research and education director at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), show Fauci and Francis Collins attempting to coordinate a ‘devastating takedown’ of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Jordan Schachtel tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Fauci has never participated in a public debate about COVID-19. Neither has Francis Collins. Nor has Deborah Birx. Same with Rochelle Walensky. And the list goes on. The weight of their premises has never been challenged in a non-scripted environment. This speaks volumes.
Speaking of debates, here’s one, on vaccine mandates, between Angela McArdle and GMU Law’s Ilya Somin. (DBx: I seldom disagree with Ilya, but I do not find his support for vaccine mandates persuasive.)
Aaron Kheriaty tweets: (HT Martin Kulldorff)
Collins and Fauci don’t realize when they are in the presence of three giants, and lack the scientific confidence to meet these three with reasoned, evidence-based debates. Instead, they resort to orchestrating smear campaigns and defamation. Disgraceful and embarrassing.
Bureaucrats who fund the careers of scientists should play no role whatsoever in setting pandemic policy. The conflict of interest created by this dual role has forced countless scientists to stay silent or risk losing their careers.
The dissenting vote in this vaccine-mandate case was cast by my friend Judge Joan Larsen. You can read Judge Larsen’s dissenting opinion, starting on page 39, here. Three slices:
The majority’s theme is that questions of health science and policy lie beyond the judicial ken. I agree. But this case asks a legal question: whether Congress authorized the action the agency took. That question is the bread and butter of federal courts. And this case can be resolved using ordinary tools of statutory interpretation and bedrock principles of administrative law. These tell us that petitioners are likely to succeed on the merits, so I would stay OSHA’s emergency rule pending final review.
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One more background point: The purpose of the mandate is to protect unvaccinated people. Id. at 61,419. The rule’s premise is that vaccines work. Id. And so, OSHA has explained that the rule is not about protecting the vaccinated; they do not face “grave danger” from working with those who are not vaccinated. Id. at 61,434.
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And it is easy to envision more tailored solutions OSHA could have explored. It might, for example, have considered a standard aimed at the most vulnerable workers; or an exemption for the least. The government’s own data show that unvaccinated workers between the ages of 18 and 29 bear a risk roughly equivalent to vaccinated persons between 50 and 64. See Ctr. for Disease Control, Rates of COVID-19 Cases and Deaths by Vaccination Status (last visited Dec. 16, 2021), https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-trac... https://perma.cc/8SU2-SVLZ. Or it might have considered a standard aimed at specific industries or types of workplaces with the greatest risk of COVID-19 exposure. Congress told the Secretary to “give due regard” to the need for standards “for particular industries” and types of “workplaces or work environments.” 29 U.S.C. § 655(g). And OSHA acknowledges that death rates are higher in “[c]ertain occupational sectors,” 86 Fed. Reg. at 61,415; yet its rule never considers what results would obtain from targeting those sectors alone. Would these, or other alternatives, have achieved similar results? We do not know because OSHA did not ask.
OSHA counters that given the COVID-19 emergency, rough-cut mandates are the best it can do. I see two problems with OSHA’s assertion. First, even an emergency standard must consider “obvious distinctions” among those it regulates. Dry Color, 486 F.2d at 105. Here, there are many, none reflected in the emergency rule. Second, the agency’s claim of emergency rings hollow. It waited nearly two years since the beginning of the pandemic and nearly one year since vaccines became available to the public to issue its vaccinate-or-test mandate. The agency does not explain why, in that time, it could not have explored more finely tuned approaches.
The majority opinion contends that to require more of OSHA would contradict the point of an emergency standard. But it offers no support for this proposition. It cannot be found in the text of § 655 itself. Indeed, as discussed, the only distinction apparent from the statutory text is that emergency standards should be more tailored to the problem, not less.
The straw man might return to the Netherlands.
Jeffrey Tucker wonders what happened to “liberty and justice for all.”
Covidocratic tyranny intensifies in Ontario.
If we shut everything down because of Omicron, then we have learned absolutely nothing in the last two years.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 152 of Thomas Sowell’s January 23rd, 2007, National Review essay titled “The ‘Greed’ Fallacy” as this essay is reprinted in Sowell’s 2010 collection, Dismantling America (emphasis added):
If people who are capable of being outstanding executives were a dime a dozen, nobody would pay eleven cents a dozen for them.
Many observers who say that they cannot understand how anyone can be worth $100 million a year do not realize that it is not necessary that they understand it, since it is not their money.
All of us have thousands of things happening around us that we do not understand. We use computers all the time but most of us could not build a computer if our life depended on it – and those few individuals who could probably couldn’t grow orchids or train horses.
In short, we all have grossly inadequate knowledge in other people’s specialties.
December 18, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
The narrow, poorly thought out, unscientific lockdown policy advocated by the president’s leading experts stunned me. Ignoring the enormous harms of lockdowns, I thought, was profoundly immoral behavior on the part of those in charge of the nation’s health policy. The fundamental obligation of anyone in public health leadership included considering all the potential harms of a policy, not simply trying to stop an infection regardless of other social costs.
DBx: Yes. It is terribly unwise, but not unethical, for an individual – using his or her own resources, and with consequences that are borne exclusively by that person – to pursue one goal obsessively to the exclusion of all others. But it is highly unethical for an individual – using resources belonging to other people, and with consequences borne by others – to demand that everyone pursue one goal obsessively to the exclusion of all others.
This reality applies to any and all goals, even those that would unambiguously and universally be regarded as good if the pursuit of those goals were free. But pursuit of even the finest and most widely accepted goal is not free. And the more intense the pursuit – and the greater the amount of the goal attained – the more costly does further pursuit of that goal become.
Pick any uncontroversially good goal – say, automobile safety. Despite its desirability, there will nevertheless come a point at which a further increasing such safety becomes unwise. There will come a point that, if Jones compels Smith to acquire more automobile safety, Jones acts immorally toward Smith even if this additional safety is both real and is experienced by Smith.
If Jones shows up at neighbor Smith’s door with a gun and forces Smith to buy a brand new top-of-the-line Mercedes, Jones does not escape being criminally liable – or even being justly criticized – if he points out, correctly, that Smith’s chances of being killed or injured while driving the new top-of-the-line Mercedes are lower than are Smith’s chances of being killed or injured if Smith continues instead to drive his 2017 Cooper Mini.
Some Covid Links
Phil Magness just got hold of some e-mails from and to U.S. government officials:
New email dump showing Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins coordinating a propaganda campaign to attack the Great Barrington declaration last October. More coming soon so here’s a teaser…
(DBx: Was Collins so ignorant of health sciences that he called Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff “fringe epidemiologists,” or was he lying? There’s no good third alternative, and neither of these two alternatives is reassuring.)
In October 2020, I wrote the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) along with Prof. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Prof. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University.
The centerpiece of the declaration is a call for increased focused protection of the vulnerable older population, who are more than a thousand times more likely to die from COVID infection than the young.
We can protect the vulnerable without harming the rest of the population.
As I stated above, we do not have any technology that can stop viral spread.
While excellent vaccines protect the vaccinated versus hospitalization or death if infected, they provide only temporary and marginal protection versus infection and disease transmission after the second dose.
The same is likely true for booster shots, which use the same technology as the initial doses.
What about lockdowns?
It is now abundantly clear that they have failed to contain the virus while wreaking enormous collateral damage worldwide.
If you are pro-vaccine, you should be against vaccine mandates.
Also from Martin Kulldorff is this new essay titled “Vaccines Save Lives.” Two slices:
While anyone can get infected, there is more than a thousand-fold difference in mortality risk between the old and the young. In 2020, public health officials and the public discourse focused on lockdowns, such as school closures, business closures, travel restrictions and working from home mandates, while there was very little effort to better protect high-risk older people.
We are now making the same mistake again. Instead of intensifying efforts to vaccinate more of our older citizens, most of whom are retired, the public discourse is focused on vaccinating children and vaccine mandates for students and working age adults, many of whom already have natural immunity after Covid recovery.
Earlier this year, I was censored by Twitter for writing that “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older high-risk people, and their care-takers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children.”
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Vaccine fanatics and vaccine skeptics have one thing in common. Together, they have contributed to a level of vaccine hesitancy never seen before in the United States. What the latter failed to accomplish over several decades, the vaccine fanatics have achieved in less than a year. How? Here are some examples:
We have known about natural immunity since at least the Athenian Plague in 430 BC, and studies show that the Covid recovered have stronger immunity than the vaccinated. People know this, and by mandating vaccines for those that are already immune, public health officials are undermining trust with the result that people are skeptical of other vaccine recommendations.
For older people, who are at high risk of dying from Covid, the benefit of the vaccine greatly outweighs the small risks of a serious adverse event, so it is a no-brainer to be vaccinated.
The same is not true for children. Their Covid mortality risk is miniscule and less than the already low risk from the annual influenza, so the vaccine benefit for healthy children is very small. It will take a few years until we know the Covid vaccine risk profile, and until then, we do not know whether there is more benefit or harm in vaccinating children. When government officials ignore these important issues, trust in vaccines declines among everyone.
el gato malo decries the damage done to children by lockdowns and other Covid restrictions. A slice:
the social pressures and strictures brought to bear around covid have been surreal. they have fallen hardest upon the children. we uprooted their lives, masked and muzzled them all day, prevented basic non-verbal communication, impeded learning, closed their schools, ended their activities, broke up their social networks, and ground their lives to halt.
this alone would have been more than many could bear. but on top of that, we piled guilt, recrimination, and stigma atop it. we made the kids out to be careless killers of grandma and rendered becoming ill with a respiratory virus a grievous moral failing.
we have done staggering emotional damage to them and it’s really starting to show.
and it keeps getting worse. vaccinating kids has become the new flashpoint and the new socialization horror. and no, it’s not “science” is nonsense.
On September 28, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky shared the results of a new study that appeared to confirm the need for mask mandates in schools. The study was conducted in Arizona over the summer, and published by the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: It found that schools in counties without mask mandates had 3.5 times more outbreaks than schools in counties with mask mandates.
The significance of that finding should have raised eyebrows, according to The Atlantic‘s David Zweig. “A number of the experts interviewed for this article said the size of the effect should have caused everyone involved in preparing, publishing, and publicizing the paper to tap the brakes,” he wrote in a new article that explores the study’s significant flaws. “Instead, they hit the gas.”
His article demonstrates quite convincingly that the study’s results are suspect:
But the Arizona study at the center of the CDC’s back-to-school blitz turns out to have been profoundly misleading. “You can’t learn anything about the effects of school mask mandates from this study,” Jonathan Ketcham, a public-health economist at Arizona State University, told me. His view echoed the assessment of eight other experts who reviewed the research, and with whom I spoke for this article. Masks may well help prevent the spread of COVID, some of these experts told me, and there may well be contexts in which they should be required in schools. But the data being touted by the CDC—which showed a dramatic more-than-tripling of risk for unmasked students—ought to be excluded from this debate. The Arizona study’s lead authors stand by their work, and so does the CDC. But the critics were forthright in their harsh assessments. Noah Haber, an interdisciplinary scientist and a co-author of a systematic review of COVID-19 mitigation policies, called the research “so unreliable that it probably should not have been entered into the public discourse.”
It turns out that there were numerous problems with the study. Many of the schools that comprise its data set weren’t even open at the time the study was completed; it counted outbreaks instead of cases; it did not control for vaccination status; it included schools that didn’t fit the criteria. For these and other reasons, Zweig argues that the study ought to be ignored entirely: Masking in schools may or may not be a good idea, but this study doesn’t help answer the question. Any public official—including and especially Walensky—who purports to follow the science should toss this one in the trash.
Indiana School of Medicine professor Steve Templeton offers a manual for post-pandemic germophobia therapy. Two slices:
Back in March of 2020, I was completely dismayed by the tsunami of mass panic and irrational behavior in my community and around the world, triggered by the looming pandemic threat. I spent a lot of time engaging with others on social media, trying to calm the irrational terror that would ultimately lead to prolonged, disastrous and ineffective shutdowns and the end of life as everyone knew it.
Yes, the news was bad, and the predictions worse, but already it seemed there was no way the virus could be stopped in the wider population, and that draconian measures had the potential to cause tremendous collateral damage without clear benefits. Schools were closing, even with early reports that children were not susceptible to severe disease. Community groups were shutting their doors at a time they were most needed. People were avoiding their relatives, especially the elderly.
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There isn’t one single person or even a small group of people that can be blamed for the disastrous pandemic response. Politicians aren’t powerful enough and government agencies aren’t competent enough to operate as cabals of sophisticated supervillains, even if their ham-handed tyranny seems orchestrated and purposeful to some.
Instead, the root problem behind the disastrous pandemic response in many developed countries is a cultural one, a culture that places safety as one of its highest virtues, and risk as its lowest vice. Certainly, there are a large number of opportunists that have taken advantage of the pandemic to position themselves as heroes of their own movie, to gain political power, or just to make a buck. But those people aren’t the cause of the disease, merely a symptom of its severity. Our safety culture fully enabled their destructive behavior, and that’s where the real problem lies.
In their landmark book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff coined the term “safetyism”, to describe a cultural shift that has placed the avoidance of cognitive dissonance above the pursuit of truth, a shift that has been painfully evident in American universities in the last two decades. In their book, they layer anecdotes with studies detailing how this shift has poisoned the well of academic discovery, and has left universities and college graduates completely incapable of functioning in a pluralistic world full of nuance and uncertainty.
The reckless Neil Ferguson is again – now, of course, because of omicron – predicting calamity unless Brits are once more locked down. (DBx: Why does anyone take this guy seriously? Why has anyone ever taken this guy seriously?)
Noah Carl calmly responds to someone still advocating the absurd goal of zero Covid. Two slices:
I am not aware of any evidence that a “substantial percentage” of middled-aged people experience “serious” health damage. Some surely do, and that is regrettable, but the numbers certainly don’t justify “emergency governance measures”, particularly since such measures have proven to have at best only a small impact on the epidemic’s trajectory. (I will get to China’s “successful” lockdown later.) Moreover, “emergency governance measures” themselves can lead to morbidity further down the line by causing social isolation or by disrupting healthcare provision.
If [Curtis] Yarvin is referring to “long Covid” in the quotation above, the latest evidence suggests that its frequency has been massively exaggerated. It was initially believed to affect about one in every ten people who catch the virus. Yet a recent analysis by the UK’s Office for National Statistics, based on a large random sample, found that only 2.5% of people still report symptoms after 12 weeks. However, even that number may be an overestimate, since it assumes that every participant reported their symptoms accurately.
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Yarvin’s right that restricting the powers of government doesn’t necessarily produce better governance. But it’s going to take a lot more than that to convince me that handing governments the power to track our movements is a good idea. Even if it could have helped during the pandemic (which I doubt), there’s the real possibility it would be misused in the future. As economic historian Robert Higgs has noted, government powers seem to accrue via a “ratchet effect” whereby they’re very hard to get rid of once you’ve got them.
The Telegraph‘s Camilla Tominey decries “middle class lockdown zealots.” A slice:
The hypocrisy of middle class lockdown zealots has always known no bounds – but the latest variant has once again brought out the worst in this already smug bunch. For a sizeable chunk of the privileged population, omicron has given them the chance to do what they wanted anyway: have an extended Christmas break.
Now they’re “working” from the moral high ground of their spacious homes, merrily cancelling pub and restaurant bookings, while preparing for a Christmas of comfort and joy with their families.
And all the while, they’re convincing themselves that they’re doing the “right” thing and that it’s the rest of the country who are the irresponsible and selfish ones.
Britain’s SAGE is inviting the straw man to return to that country.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 47-48 of H.L. Mencken’s May 12th, 1940, Baltimore Evening Sun essay titled “The Suicide of Democracy,” as this essay is reprinted in A Second Mencken Chrestomathy (1995):
No one can deny what is spread upon the minutes so copiously. The New Deal, only too plainly, is extending democracy to very remote places of decimals. Reaching out constantly for fresh fields and pastures new, it gradually takes over the entire business of living, including birth and death. It undertakes not only to carry on all the customary enterprises of government, with constant embellishment; it also horns into such highly non-political matters as the planting and harvesting of crops, the pulling of teeth, and the propagation of the species. In particular, it undertakes to succor every one who feels that he is suffering from injustice, whether at the hands of his fellowmen or of his own chromosomes. If there is something you want but can’t get, it will get that something for you. And, contrariwise, if there is something you want and have got, it will take it away.
December 17, 2021
On Minimum-Wage Legislation
I’m honored to have been a guest of Danielle Smith, on Fraser Forum, to discuss minimum wages.
Exploring EconTalk: James Heckman (2021)
I continue to catch up on listening to the vast library of EconTalk podcasts. The next one that I recommend is this one from July 2021 with Nobel laureate James Heckman.
A warning to those of you who are fans of Raj Chetty’s work on intergenerational economic mobility: Heckman is emphatically not one of you.
Some Covid Links
these smears on [Florida governor Ron] desantis are wild. the need to attack the control group for succeeding and revealing the blue bastion’s mitigations and prevarications for the pseudoscience and fraud that they are is an unforgivable sin to this mind and social set.
that their arguments have been reduced to this sort of hallucinatory hand waving is, in and of itself, extremely telling with regard to both the strength of their case and the weakness of their morals.
i hope they keep it up. it can only discredit them further in the eyes of the center. there is always room for reasonable people to disagree on complex issues, but nobody trusts a liar.
the more soviet our media goes, the less credibility it will carry.
more potent still is the obvious and inescapable fact that anyone who would lie to you like this cannot possibly have any respect for you.
Prompted by this accurate statement in the New York Times…
Omicron — like earlier variants — presents only a very small risk of serious illness to most vaccinated people. It is the kind of risk that people accept every day without reordering their lives, not so different from the chances of hospitalization or death from the flu or a car crash.
if people who are vaccinated face only a tiny risk from omicron, then how can these same people face such a huge risk from the unvaccinated?
because it seems like maybe they wouldn’t.
well, i guess unless the unvaxxed people were sneaking up behind them and bopping them on the head like little bunny foo foo or something…
but it seems like that’s probably not a real thing, is it?
Other than putting on masks in places where doing so was legally mandated (e.g. airplanes), I haven’t really obeyed any NPIs since ca. March 2020.
During that time I’ve been to over 20 states, driven long cross-country distances several times, taken about 100 flights, and regularly dined out whenever I was able to do so.
I’m pretty certain that my health outcomes would be no different today if I had stayed put and gone through all the silly theatrics that the lockdowners imposed, but my quality of life would be much lower.
Fauci is an authoritarian. (HT Phil Magness)
In response to panic-porn “reporting” on CNN by Anderson Cooper, Alexander Nazaryan tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
There is a feeling among members of mainstream media that they can fearmonger without any cost, b/c no one will fact check them or call them out.
And Newman Nahas tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Behold, another Covidian koan:
If we don’t lock down indefinitely, we are going to be in lock down for ever.
A lockdown encore in the city will doom the entire state, where unelected Hochul hopes to win election in 2022. More than 40 percent of state income-tax revenue alone comes from New York City.
You’d think that such fiscal truths would deter [Gov. Kathy] Hochul from repeating Cuomo’s blunder.
But Jane Fonda was on to something when she said in October 2020 that the pandemic was “God’s gift to the left.” She meant that the viral toll would focus hatred on then-President Donald Trump, but it applies in a much larger context: that fear of uncontrolled disease spread empowered government at every level to seize control of workplaces, the overall economy and the social order.
Most of the media feed the fear, with 24/7 loops of scare talk from publicity-craving doomsayers and photos of near-death COVID victims suffering alone in lonely, dark rooms.
The whiff of power that came with shutting down an entire state of 20 million people intoxicated privileged-at-birth Cuomo and threatens to consume Hochul as well.
Glenn Reynolds calls for an end to Covid emergency powers. Two slices:
COVID is over. Oh, not with Anthony Fauci. Not with the media. Not with the sour-faced Karens who have enjoyed the sense of meaning — and power — it’s given them. But with normal people, especially outside the big urban areas, it’s over.
The Atlantic scandalized its readers by reporting that this week. In an article titled “Where I Live, No One Cares About COVID,” Matthew Walther wrote: “No one cares. Literally speaking, I know that isn’t true, because if it were, the articles wouldn’t be commissioned. But outside the world inhabited by the professional and managerial classes in a handful of major metropolitan areas, many, if not most, Americans are leading their lives as if COVID is over, and they have been for a long while.”
And with good reason. I confess that in the early days, I was a COVID hawk. With China reporting a 4 to 5 percent mortality rate, there seemed reason. (In fact, I should have reflected more on the untrustworthiness of information from China, especially after the experience of the Diamond Princess cruise ship suggested that COVID was a lot less scary than we were told.)
But science, and rationality in general, is about changing your opinions when you learn new facts. And what we’ve learned is that COVID is somewhat worse than the flu but not nearly bad enough to justify the enormous, expensive and disruptive changes we’ve endured.
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Meanwhile, the powers that be have revealed themselves to be dishonest and inept. Fauci lied about masks at the beginning. Andrew Cuomo sent COVID patients into nursing homes (it made money for his contributors), which caused thousands of elderly people to die. Scarcely a day goes by without some bigshot — California Gov. Gavin Newsom, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Anthony Fauci himself — being found breaking his or her own rules on masking, social distancing, etc.
School kids are forced to eat their lunches outdoors and wear masks while adults gather in bars, restaurants and sporting events. The entire COVID apparatus is collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity.
(DBx: I fervently hope that Reynolds is correct in his observation that “the entire COVID apparatus is collapsing.” But I’d not be surprised to see the straw man come back in full force in many parts of the U.S.)
Nicholas Farrell is no fan of vaccine passports. A slice:
I think we can safely conclude that vaccine passports offer little but a creeping tyranny over people’s lives. They do not persuade that many unvaccinated people to get jabbed, and there is little evidence to suggest that they lead to fewer infections.
Deaths [in Britain] are reported as Covid if they occur within 28 days of a positive test. The January death rate is around 0.09 per cent, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). So on a day of one million infections, we would expect 908 of those people to die naturally over the next month, yet currently all would end up in the Covid data.
Under worst case scenarios from the LSHTM, some 34.2 million would be infected up to April – which could see nearly 30,000 natural deaths wrongly reported in the daily Covid figures during that period.
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