Russell Roberts's Blog, page 199

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 365 of my late, great GMU colleague Gordon Tullock’s 1983 book, Economics of Income Redistribution,” as this book is reprinted in The Economics and Politics of Wealth Redistribution (volume 7 of The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock, Charles K. Rowley, ed. [2005]):

I have already expressed my views that [government aid to] higher education is a highly regressive scheme for transferring funds from the people who are less well-off to those who are well-off. The only advantage I can think of this from a social standpoint is that it pays my salary. I doubt, however, that anything will be done about it, since the beneficiaries are, politically, extremely influential and, in fact, control all the communication channels, so the people who are injured by it will probably never find out they are injured.

More Panic Porn Reporting

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Here’s a letter to the Los Angeles Times:

Editor:

You should be ashamed of this utterly misleading headline: “Young Latinos are dying of COVID at an alarming rate – the effects could be felt for generations” (Dec. 9). And you should be embarrassed by the accompanying “report.”

Given this headline, we readers expect to encounter information on just what this “alarming rate” is. Yet reading your report dashes this expectation. We do learn that in California “Latinos ages 20 to 54 have died from COVID-19 at a rate more than eight times higher than white people in the same age group,” but this fact tells us nothing about the actual rate at which “young Latinos” – curiously, by the way, defined to include people in their mid-50s – are dying from Covid.

Had reporter Alejandra Reyes-Velarde read the paper to which she links as the source of her information, she would have learned that the total number of all Californians ages 20 to 54 who died of Covid during the time studied by the paper’s authors – February 1, 2020, through July 31, 2020 – is 1,131 (which is 11.1 percent of all Covid deaths in CA during that time period). She’d have learned also that Hispanics accounted for 48.2 percent of all Covid deaths in that state. Assuming that this same death rate holds for the age group 20-54, the number of Hispanics of this age who died of Covid in CA is 545.

There are approximately 20 million Californians aged 20-54. With California’s population being 32.2 percent Hispanic, there are thus approximately 6,440,000 Hispanics of this age in California. Covid therefore killed in California, during the time period reported on by Ms. Reyes-Velarde, 545 out of the 6,440,000 Hispanics aged 20-54 – or 0.0085 percent of this group.

And so while in reality this death rate isn’t remotely “alarming,” the poor quality of your reporting certainly is.

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

(For alerting me to the LA Times “report” I thank Tim Townsend.)

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

David Henderson shares good sense expressed by Colorado’s governor about Covid restrictions.

Also reporting on Gov. Jared Polis’s sensible remarks is Reason‘s Eric Boehm. A slice:

In a lengthy interview with Colorado Public Radio, the Democratic governor says the “medical emergency” phase of the COVID-19 pandemic has passed. With vaccines readily available to anyone who wants one, Polis says it is time for public health officials to step aside and let individuals make their own decisions about masks. Even with the emergence of the new omicron variant, Polis is refusing to reimplement a statewide mask mandate.

“The emergency is over. You know, public health [officials] don’t get to tell people what to wear; that’s just not their job,” Polis said. “You don’t tell people what to wear. You don’t tell people to wear a jacket when they go out in winter and force them to [wear it]. If they get frostbite, it’s their own darn fault.”

When vaccines were not readily available to anyone who wanted one, Polis argued, mask mandates made sense as an alternative. But following the science means adjusting to changing circumstances, and vaccines are far more effective at mitigating COVID hospitalizations and deaths.

“At this point, if you haven’t been vaccinated, it’s really your own darn fault,” Polis said.

(DBx: I’ve gotten several hostile responses to my letter to operators of venues that require that their patrons show proof of vaccination and wear masks – a letter motivated by much the same reasoning as appears to motivate Gov. Polis.)

“As Other Big Cities Tighten Mask and Vaccine Mandates, D.C. Becomes a Surprising Island of Relative Sanity” – so reads the headline of this report by Christian Britschgi.

Writing in The Atlantic, Matthew Walther describes the happy condition – the condition of largely ignoring Covid and being free of Covidocratic tyranny – enjoyed by at least some Americans living outside of major metropolitan areas. (HT Ian Fillmore) A slice:

I am old enough to remember the good old days when holiday-advice pieces were all variations on “How to Talk to Your Tea Party Uncle About Obamacare.” As Christmas approaches, we can look forward to more of this sort of thing, with the meta-ethical speculation advanced to an impossibly baroque stage of development. Is it okay for our 2-year-old son to hug Grandma at a Christmas party if she received her booster only a few days ago? Should the toddler wear a mask except when he is slopping mashed potatoes all over his booster seat? Our oldest finally attended her first (masked) sleepover with other fully vaccinated 10-year-olds, but one of them had a sibling test positive at day care. Should she stay home or wear a face shield? What about Omicron?

I don’t know how to put this in a way that will not make me sound flippant: 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.

In my part of rural southwest Michigan, and in similar communities throughout the country, this is true not despite but without any noticeable regard for cases; hospitalization statistics, which are always high this time of year without attracting much notice; or death reports. I don’t mean to deny COVID’s continuing presence. (For the purposes of this piece, I looked up the COVID data for my county and found that the seven-day average for positive tests is as high as it has ever been, and that 136 deaths have been attributed to the virus since June 2020.) What I wish to convey is that the virus simply does not factor into my calculations or those of my neighbors, who have been forgoing masks, tests (unless work imposes them, in which case they are shrugged off as the usual BS from human resources), and other tangible markers of COVID-19’s existence for months—perhaps even longer.

(DBx: Reading Walther’s essay buoys my spirits. I live in the DC metro area. Yesterday I saw at a northern Virginia Whole Foods market such a frightful sight of Covid overreaction that I will not describe because to do so would cast doubt on my honesty. Clearly, the experience of living in a major metropolitan area – especially one swarming with the officious – is very different from the experience of living outside of such areas.)

MP Miriam Cates explains why she’s voting against renewed Covid restrictions in Britain. A slice:

Though it may be futile in the face of Opposition support (I use the term ‘opposition’ loosely), I will vote against the regulations tomorrow for three reasons.

Firstly, the collateral damage to wider society will be high. Many people have written at length about the appalling costs of lockdowns and restrictions and evidence of permanent damage continues to emerge.

Secondly, there will be a further undermining of confidence in the rule of law. Good laws are clear and based on consensus; they should not be difficult to interpret or adhere to or make criminals out of ordinary people. Far from uniting us, these regulations will invite conflict, judgement and segregation.

But perhaps most significantly, the new measures threaten to cement a permanent shift in the balance of power between the Government and the British people that has been brought about by two years of ‘hokey cokey’ restrictions on our freedom. This is a shift that is no doubt being celebrated by those on the Left, but it should chill Conservatives to the core.

Do we want to live in a society where Ministers can — at no notice — impose serious, damaging restrictions on individuals instead of trusting us to behave responsibly? Do we want a society where people are judged and discriminated against by their health status? Or where the state, far from being a stabilising force, becomes an unpredictable and overbearing menace, perpetuating a climate of fear?

I don’t believe that the Government has deliberately set out on a road to authoritarianism, but we must acknowledge that this is the path we now tread.

Telegraph columnist Sherelle Jacobs decries the looming renewed visit to Britain of the straw man. Three slices:

Amid this fresh uncertainty, one thing is clear: we cannot go on living like this. As a majority-vaccinated country, we cannot go on suffering the permanent threat of lockdown restrictions, for fear the health service could be overwhelmed. We cannot go on being plunged into panic by pessimistic modelling that has consistently been proved wrong in the past. We cannot go on pursuing Covid Plan Bs, Cs and Ds without a sensible cost-benefit analysis that weighs the harms and uncertainties of the virus against those of the restrictions. We cannot go on with a superficially populist Tory Government that will entertain the drastic action of lockdowns but not radical NHS reform.

…..

True, it is a game of chance: the virus is statistically just as likely to mutate against vaccines in a way that makes it more lethal, and it is simply too early to say anything conclusive about the new strain. But the threat posed by omicron is not the only unknown risk in play. The other is the effect of further restrictions. Like the variant, the fallout of another lockdown could be milder than some of us fear, or it could be catastrophic beyond comprehension.

Unlike omicron, though, this risk gets no air time. In particular, there is little sign that No 10 has done a proper cost-benefit analysis, weighing the risks of omicron against the potential damage of new measures.

…..

Worse are the gratuitous vaccine passports, which are unlikely to stem omicron, given its spread among the double-jabbed. That No 10 would cross the Rubicon with such an authoritarian measure in a cheap attempt to divert political heat in the direction of the unvaccinated is terrifying. So too its contempt for the entertainment venues that could see their profits slashed.

“Norway bans serving of alcohol in bid to halt Omicron outbreak.” (HT Phil Magness)

Bill Rice writes wisely about Covid and the overreaction to it. Here’s his conclusion:

The leaders of our country are going to continue to take away civil liberties in the name of “protecting” the public. But these people and organizations are actually harming the public.

If they had done nothing to “flatten the curve” or “slow” or “stop” the spread of the virus, the virus would have still spread, and people would have still died from COVID. (Really, “the road less travelled” by the nation of Sweden was the safest road to travel).

If America’s leaders had not overreacted, many people gone today would still be here today… and more people would be alive a year from now. The future of every inhabitant in the world would not be as bleak as it is today.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

Nature article:
By 2022, an additional
✴️9.3 million wasted kids
✴️2.6 million stunted kids
✴️168k child deaths
✴️2.1 million maternal anemia cases
✴️$29.7 billion in future productivity losses

Lockdown ➡️ worst public health catastrophe in history

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 225 of the 5th edition (2015) of Thomas Sowell’s excellent volume, Basic Economics (footnote deleted):

Even though most studies show that unemployment tends to increase as minimum wages are imposed or increased, those few studies that seem to indicate otherwise have been hailed in some quarters as having “refuted” this “myth.” However, one common problem with some research on the employment effects of minimum wage laws is that surveys of employers before and after a minimum wage increase can survey only those particular businesses which survived in both periods. Given the high rates of business failures in many industries, the results for the surviving businesses may be completely different from the results for the industry as a whole. Using such research methods, you could survey people who have played Russian roulette and “prove” from their experiences that it is a harmless activity, since those for whom it was not harmless are unlikely to be around to be surveyed. Thus you would have “refuted” the “myth” that Russian roulette is dangerous.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Phil Magness continues brilliantly – and thoroughly – to expose the unconscionably poor ‘scholarship’ that calls itself the 1619 Project. Here’s his conclusion:

But as a broader matter of principle, Hannah-Jones’s behavior illustrates the absence of basic scholarly integrity from her approach to writing history. Rather than following the evidence where it leads, Hannah-Jones picks and chooses bits and pieces of her arguments from a secondary literature based on whether it conforms to her preconceived political narrative. She approaches citations as a tool by which she can reward other scholars who affirm that narrative. And if a previously-cited scholar runs afoul of Hannah-Jones, she is perfectly willing to alter the “history” presented in the 1619 Project in ways that excise the offending work and replace it with a completely different narrative – provided that its author flatters Hannah-Jones’s own personal politics and ambitions in the process.

Reason‘s J.D. Tuccille argues that the “Julian Assange extradition decision [is] the latest blow to freedom of the press.” A slice:

But as Reason‘s Jacob Sullum pointed out last month, journalists tend to get unreasonably sniffy about their profession, insisting that it’s an elevated status rather than an activity that anybody can do.

“As UCLA law professor and First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh has shown, the idea that freedom of the press is a privilege enjoyed only by bona fide journalists, however that category is defined, is ahistorical and fundamentally mistaken,” Sullum wrote. “It is clear from the historical record that ‘freedom of the press’ refers to a technology of mass communication, not to a particular profession.”

That is, anybody gathering information and releasing it to the public is engaged in journalism, even if others doing the same thing have different ideas about how that information should be acquired and what should be reported. And, while government officials habitually evoke “national security” as a talismanic phrase to ward off scrutiny, there’s no convincing reason why the use of those words by themselves should prevent publication of Manning’s information, the Pentagon Papers, or anything else.

Here’s George Leef on a recent court ruling regarding college admissions.

Unfortunately, civil-asset-forfeiture reforms in Florida have not stopped banana-state-like shakedown in that state.

Privatize archaeology!

Peter Goettler remembers Phil Harvey.

Jonah Goldberg identifies Kamala Harris’s big problem.

My old professor Randy Holcombe wonders why so many people are so relaxed about the prospects of inflation. Here’s his conclusion:

The experience of the 1970s showed that once inflation starts, stopping it is a slow and painful experience. The threat of inflation has been apparent for some time now (here’s what I said about it in May), but those who have the power to do something about it seem to have the attitude that it will go away on its own.

It won’t.

Speaking about America’s growing inflation, here’s Desmond Lachman.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Phil Gramm and Mike Solon predict the coming of Biden’s stagflation. A slice:

Despite strong private investment levels during the Obama era, labor productivity—the mother’s milk of wage gains—averaged less than half the growth of the previous 20 years. The problem was business “investment” was made to meet regulatory requirements, rather than to increase efficiency and expand the productivity of the economy.

During the first days of the Biden administration, the cold dead hand of government regulation reached further than it had during the Obama years. Initial executive orders eviscerated cost-benefit analysis as the basis for regulatory policy by defining benefits to include “social welfare, racial justice, environmental stewardship, human dignity, equity and the interests of future generations.” Executive orders opposed business mergers and acquisitions independent of consumer benefit and targeted the oil and gas industry for extinction.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Vinay Prasad patiently reviews the dangers of imposing vaccine requirements on employees of health-care facilities. A slice:

But far more likely, in the vast majority of cases— short staffed, high numbers retiring, high natural immunity, variants piercing vax, abundant PPE, well ventilated hospitals room with little documented nosocomial spread last year— it is probably far better for patient outcomes to have more hands, even if those are unvaccinated.

Here’s University of Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta on Covid-19 infections. A slice:

One thing we have always known, because there are other coronaviruses circulating, is that we lose our immunity against the infection very rapidly, whether the virus changes or not. So, the ability to block infection, even with the vaccine, is short-lived. We don’t know whether we are looking at a flu-like dynamic where we get different variants coming up because they have mutated and evaded immunity. So we might have Omicron dominate now and a few years later, you might have Alpha come back. We don’t know which way it is. But whichever way it is, you will get reinfections…that is the normal and natural dynamic of influenza and coronaviruses.

Austria further institutionalizes the caste system.

Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson explains that “[i]t’s not fair to blame anti-vaxxers for the sick state of the NHS.” Here’s her opening:

It is disturbing to read that doctors and nurses are blaming the unvaccinated for filling up intensive care units and preventing them from treating “seriously ill patients”?  If large sections of the NHS had not shut up shop during the pandemic, then we wouldn’t have a waiting list of more than 5.8 million people. It is hardly patients’ fault that some criminally inadequate NHS managers chose to become a Covid-only service, a panic-stricken mistake that was not made by other countries.

Chris Lamb decries the grotesque hypocrisy of political ‘leaders’ (so-called) and their advisors. A slice:

The other big issue, of course, is Covid. Throughout the hysteria we’ve been exhorted to lock down, mask up, socially distance. Covid, we were told, posed an existential threat not just to individuals but to the nation and even the human race itself. We weren’t allowed to go to work, to get married, to attend funerals, even to be at the bedside of the dying. Unless you were in the government or one of its advisers, of course, in which case you could drive 250 miles to a tourist attraction to test your eyesight, or have your mistress travel across London to meet you, or kiss your secretary in your office.

I taught my children to look properly before they cross the road.  It wasn’t just a rule which I made for them, it’s a rule I obey myself because I know that it protects me from danger. Despite being a former lorry driver with more than a million miles in artics behind me, a former policeman who has controlled the traffic and a former recovery driver who has walked about in live lanes on the M6, I still obey the rules for crossing the road which I taught my kids. So believing that there was A Horrible Virus on the loose, which unlike an approaching car you can’t even see, why would you meet your mistress when by doing so you could pass on the evil virus and possibly kill her? Why kiss your secretary? Why drive the length of the country? These were rules, so we were told, to protect us and others, but they broke them. Conclusion? They don’t really believe in it.

Andrew Cadman identifies the new “bedwetter” variant.

Eric Claeys – a GMU colleague of mine from over in the Scalia School of Law – writes wisely about Jacobson and its relevance to today’s debate over state-mandated vaccination of the general public. Three slices:

Jacobson has been getting cited a lot in litigation this fall about mandatory vaccination policies issued by state universities or state or municipal governments. Most of those citations read Jacobson as U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts has—deferentially: “Our Constitution principally entrusts ‘[t]he safety and the health of the people’ to the politically accountable officials of the States.” Public-health experts read Jacobson similarly, as a blank check for state policies promoting public health. And many friends of ordered liberty have found Jacobson troubling. In a post on this website, James Stoner argued that Jacobson needs to be reconsidered. Sean Trende recently called Jacobson a “civil liberties nightmare,” and he warned that it is being cited by courts as an “argumentative checkmate.”

I want to take another look at Jacobson in this essay. Today, many assume that the power to regulate is the power to command people to do things subject to penalties sponsored by the government. Jacobson v. Massachusetts assumes and applies a different conception of the power to regulate—the power to coordinate behavior so that everyone is respecting one another’s rights. Just policies “regulate” in the sense that they make rights in positive law “regular” in relation to their natural rights. That understanding gives people a way to reason about civil liberties and the public health at the same time—even during a pandemic.

…..

Most important, this essay says little about what legal rights Jacobson entitles citizens to in contemporary constitutional law. Josh Blackman argues that, in original context, Jacobson does not require courts to defer to legislatures and public health regulators as much as interventionist scholars and deferential judges now claim. I think Blackman is right, and this essay supplies further proof confirming his arguments. Here, however, I study Jacobson less as a lawyer and more as a political theorist. Jacobson assumes and applies a rich but limited understanding of the police power. That understanding seems to have been forgotten. We do need to recover Jacobson‘s meaning in constitutional law. But we need that meaning even more for our political discourse.

…..

For my part, I doubt that COVID-19 is dangerous enough to justify compulsory vaccination. As serious as COVID-19 is, mortality rates for COVID-19 are far lower than 1% for patients younger than 65 and patients not in a few high-risk categories (like being obese). I also doubt that vaccinations are effective enough to justify compulsory vaccination. I find convincing studies showing that people who are vaccinated spread COVID-19 viruses at least as often as people who contract and develop natural immunities to them. (Vaccinations seem to help immune systems fight COVID-19, but they seem not to stop people from spreading viruses through their mouths and noses.) And the most persuasive justifications for vaccinations do not argue that they are outright effective; they argue only that vaccinations help as one of seven or eight complementary strategies to fight COVID-19. Now, reasonable people could marshal other evidence, they could easily criticize the evidence I’ve marshaled here, and we can all argue how to prioritize people’s rights not to be injected forcibly and their rights not to be exposed to COVID-19 viruses. For almost two years, however, political leaders, academics, and journalists have been making recommendations about COVID-19 policy—without a common framework connecting the public health to individual freedom. That is really troubling. Jacobson points the way to a juster public discourse.

Martin Kulldorff tweets:

The vocal pro-lockdown “public health scientists”, with their limited knowledge of infectious disease epidemiology, will be the last to recognize the public health disaster they created.

TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid).

Julia Hartley-Brewer recently interviewed British Tory MP Desmond Swayne about omicron and the British government’s response to it:

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 40 of Bruce Caldwell’s excellent Introduction to the 1997 collection of some of F.A. Hayek’s essays and papers (Bruce Caldwell, ed.), Socialism and War (footnote deleted; the internal quotation is from Hayek’s April 1938 Contemporary Review essay, “Freedom and the Economic System”):

Under a system of free markets, each consumer makes his own choices. Under planning, at least some choices must be subject to the ‘general will’. In making these choices, the planners will inevitably impose a code of values on the rest of the populace. Whatever choices are finally made, some members of the society will be made better off and some worse off. Since planners are political appointees who wish to retain power, they will seek ways to justify the choices that they have made. Those who support their choices will be rewarded, and those who oppose them will be sanctioned: “Planning becomes necessarily a planning in favour of some and against others.” In this way authoritarian government tends inevitably to expand beyond the economic and into the political domain. Liberty ends up being sacrificed, even under forms of socialism that may have started out as democratic. Only if democracy is allied with the freedom of choice that inheres in a free market system will it have some hope of survival.

Mindless and Mortifying Covid Theater

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

I was prompted to write the note below – which I’ll send to managers of theaters, museums, concert halls, and other public venues – after attending an event at Strathmore, which requires proof of vaccination and the wearing of masks. To open the event, Strathmore’s (unmasked!) director, smiling broadly on stage, declared that “It’s wonderful to be here among the vaccinated!” I wanted to retch, for to my ears it’s as if he’d said “It’s wonderful to be here among the clean and away from the filthy untouchables.”

………

December 12, 2021

Manager of [Name of venue]

Sir or Madam:

To enter your premises, each of your patrons is required by you both to show proof of vaccination against Covid-19 and at all times to wear a mask.

What’s the point of these requirements?

Vaccination is effective at preventing the vaccinated from suffering serious consequences from Covid. (And children naturally are at virtually no risk from Covid.) Therefore, those of your patrons who choose not to be vaccinated personally bear the costs of their choice without imposing any costs on those of your patrons who are vaccinated. So your requirement of vaccination is pointless.

This conclusion would stand even if we were sure that vaccination appreciably lowers, or even eliminates, the likelihood of vaccinated persons spreading the SARS-CoV-2 virus to other persons. But in fact we have no such assurance. Many prominent public-health researchers read the evidence as showing that being vaccinated against Covid does not prevent the vaccinated – at least not for any significant length of time – from becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 and spreading this virus to others. Even CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admits about the vaccines, after the emergence of the Delta variant, that “what they can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.”

Requiring proof of vaccination would thus be pointless even if it were the case that recovery from Covid provided no natural immunity. But in fact the evidence is powerful that recovery from Covid provides significant natural immunity. Because nearly 50 million Americans have tested positive for Covid and recovered – and even apart from the considerations mentioned above – requiring all patrons to show proof of vaccination is, to put it mildly, excessive.

Similar questions apply to masks. Because vaccination is effective at protecting the vaccinated, why do you require each of your patrons to wear a mask? Again, those of your patrons who choose not to wear a mask – just like your patrons who choose not to be vaccinated – impose costs only on themselves and not on those of your patrons who choose differently.

I urge you, in the name of liberal civilization and the open society, to stop mindlessly giving credence to pronouncements from the likes of Anthony Fauci and other government officials who have a personal stake in stoking Covid hysteria for as long as they can. Please let your patrons enjoy what you have to offer without being accosted by senseless Covid restrictions or required to participate in dystopian hygiene theater.

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

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

In this letter in The Lancet, Alexander Broadbent, Damian Walker, Kalipso Chalkidou, Richard Sullivan, and Amanda Glassman argue that “[l]ockdown is not egalitarian: the costs fall on the global poor.” (HT Jay Bhattacharya) A slice:

It is unhelpful to characterise lockdown scepticism as a neoliberal political stance. Lockdown is demonstrably not egalitarian in either its costs or its benefits.

Another letter worth reading is this one in the Telegraph:

SIR – Businesses gone and going to the wall; the middle-aged made redundant probably unable to regain employment at a similar level; deaths from diagnoses not made in time; early mental deterioration of elderly people unable to see friends and family; an increase in domestic abuse (partners and children); missed education; an increase in mental health problems; young adults effectively with their lives on hold – when will there be a calculation of these negative aspects of the draconian measures that have been imposed on society since the start of Covid?

Rowland Aarons
London N3

Graham Brady protests the never-really-ending tyranny of Britain’s Covidocracy. A slice:

So how is that a Conservative government has presided over such a disastrous assault on liberty? Months when people were banned by law from seeing their children or grandchildren. Businesses forced to close; the state not just telling people not to go to work but paying them not to. And yes, nearly half a year in which we went full Eastern Bloc and no one was allowed out.

The government’s behavioural scientists began by thinking that Britons would never, ever slavishly follow the kind of diktat issued in Communist China. Instead, they soon found that as long as they spread enough fear people would kowtow to the state.

A senior NHS neurologist writes to me that he sees the ever-changing rules and restrictions reducing people’s confidence and making them feel uncertain. The inability to make plans or live a normal life is, “breeding health anxiety, I am seeing a lot of this in my clinical practice. Neurology is one of those areas in which health anxiety manifests as clinical symptoms – currently off the scale”.

Peter Hitchens draws a fundamental lesson from Britain’s current furor of the Covidocracy’s hypocrisy. A slice:

The rage against this event is based on two things. The first is that, at the time of these illegal junketings, insane regulations were keeping husbands from wives, and children from their parents, on their deathbeds. The other is that the courts are still imposing appalling fines on private citizens who likewise defied the Christmas party ban a year ago.

The real reason for fury is that these regulations existed at all. Even if you believe that measures of this kind are much help (I don’t), anyone with any sense could see that cruel separation of close relatives at the end of life was not a proportionate response to Covid.

It was a fanatical, inhuman Communist measure that should never have been allowed, like the fearful, heartbreaking limits placed on funerals and the police raids on churches. I keep hearing the word ‘proportionate’ being used about Covid measures now. But it was not so common then. As I said then, we went mad, like a man who burns down his own house to get rid of a wasps’ nest.

What you should be angry about is not that people in Downing Street held Christmas parties, but that everyone else was forbidden to do so. If we lived in China, where the authorities actually welded people into their homes, then I suppose such rules would have been normal. But we do not live in that dreadful police state. As Sweden proved, trusting free people to behave sensibly produced results that were certainly no worse than ours.

This part of a report…

Dr. Anthony Fauci said a booster shot specifically for the Omicron variant of COVID-19 may not be necessary for vaccinated people.

The White House chief medical advisor said that the existing shots could be enough to provide protection against the new variant.

“I’m not so sure that we’re going to have to get a variant-specific boost vaccine to get an adequate protection from Omicron,” Fauci told the health website STAT in an interview published Friday.

“Because if you look at protection against variants, it appears to relate to the level of immunity and the breadth of the immunity that any given vaccine can instill on you.”

… is more surprising than is this part:

Fauci’s optimistic prediction about the variant is not necessarily shared by some of the drug companies that developed the existing vaccines.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla had suggested last week that a fourth shot might be necessary to combat the new variant.

“I think we will need a fourth dose,” Bourla told CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” adding that the variant may speed up the timeline for that shot.

el gato malo argues that “it’s the hysterical parents and ‘experts’ we need to quarantine, not the children.”

Niclas Sandström tweets this cartoon: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 55 of Gigi Foster’s, Paul Frijters’s, and Michael Baker’s 2021 book, The Great Covid Panic:

The desperate need by authorities and their advisors to be seen to have made the right call no matter what course of action they took undermined our ability to learn what was going on and consider appropriate responses. It is very difficult to publicly change your mind and backtrack on something once you make a pretence of certainty in the first instance. Covid politicians felt the need to exude utter and complete confidence in the measures they were taking, thereby making true deliberations impossible at a broader societal level going forward. This made their societies, our societies, slow learners and slow adapters.