Russell Roberts's Blog, page 205
November 28, 2021
And Here I Spread More “Terrible Misinformation”
Here’s a letter to a medical doctor who accuses me of spreading, on my blog, “terrible misinformation.”
Dr. M__:
You assert two “facts that discredit” my endorsement of the Great Barrington Declaration’s counsel to reject lockdowns and use instead Focused Protection. The first fact is that, unlike you, I “have no medical expertise.” The second is that I allegedly “ignore that focused protection unfairly loads the cost of covid protection to a subset of society when justice demands everybody share it.”
You’re correct that I have no medical expertise. But this fact carries little weight given that (1) two of the GBD’s three co-authors (Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff) are on the faculties of prestigious medical schools (Stanford and Harvard), while the third co-author (Sunetra Gupta) is a world-renowned epidemiologist on the faculty of the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford – each, in short, is a prominent and highly credentialed public-health expert; (2) the GBD is endorsed by many other persons who do have medical expertise; (3) just as I have no medical expertise, the same is true of many of the GBD’s detractors – including most of the government officials who reject this document; and (4) also relevant when evaluating the wisdom of the GBD’s counsel to use Focused Protection rather than lockdowns are political and economic consequences – about which (to play your game of ‘expertise trumps’) I have more expertise than you.
Your second claim that “justice demands everybody share” the cost of dealing with Covid features at least three flaws. The first is that it overlooks the fact that the key advantage of Focused Protection is that it would save more lives, and at a lower cost, than was achieved by lockdowns. Surely you’d not prefer what you call “equitable cost sharing” if among the consequences of achieving this ‘equity’ are more death and suffering.
The second flaw in your claim is that, contrary to your supposition, sharing the cost of dealing with Covid doesn’t require that everyone endure the same physical restrictions and mandates. For example, to acquire more resources for Covid mitigation, taxes can be raised on everyone without forcing the majority of persons – for whom Covid’s risks are small – to undergo whatever amount of quarantining, masking, and medicating are advisable for vulnerable groups.
The third flaw in your claim is revealed when it’s generalized. For example, according to your logic for rejecting Focused Protection, because it’s advisable to deal with dementia or extreme frailty by putting afflicted elderly people into nursing homes, we must not focus protection on members of this vulnerable group, but instead – to ensure that “everybody share” this cost – we must also put into nursing homes not only all elderly people, regardless of health, but everyone, including young adults and children. Clearly, such a policy would be madness.
Although we don’t name it such, we use various forms of Focused Protection, in lieu of general lockdowns and mandates, to treat all other diseases, including contagious ones such as flu, norovirus, meningitis, tuberculosis, and HIV. I see no good reason why this wisdom of the ages – which was, until early last year, reflected in the consensus among public-health experts – should be abandoned for Covid-19.
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
Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins continues to write wisely about Covid-19. A slice:
All of us, including the vaccinated and previously infected, will also have to realize we’re playing a role in circulation even if the unvaccinated dominate hospital admissions. A rational vaccine strategy, it will be more obvious than ever, would prioritize the vulnerable rather than the Biden approach of prioritizing anyone who works in a company of 100 employees regardless of infection history.
But then, as the White House prolifically leaked at the time, its vaccine mandate was always more about protecting the Biden presidency from the vicissitudes of Covid than protecting anyone from disease.
First, where we are: The administration’s leakers didn’t go deeply into the political calculation but I will. Older voters, understandably, have been terrified of Covid and also unstinting in their willingness to impose costs on young people for steps that lack any real benefit. As wonderful as the jabs are, these same voters have been inundated with unrealistic expectations about what universal vaccination can accomplish. A case in point is the Aaron Rodgers hysteria. Whatever the Green Bay quarterback was thinking, he could expect to be infected eventually and expect a good outcome without his vaccination status mattering a great deal to him or anyone else. Sure enough, he’s back playing alongside numerous NFLers who recovered from Covid whether or not they were vaccinated.
More insidious is how the media’s Covid ideology is influencing decisions made for children, where the risk-benefit trade-offs are an even narrower squeak. Only muddle exists concerning the perhaps half of kids who’ve already acquired some natural immunity. In their agonizing decision to recommend shots for the 5-to-11s, federal officials also had to run a gauntlet of subtle pressure to weigh the benefit to third parties—teachers, grandparents, the economy, the Biden administration—against the risks to children.
The same is true of masking in elementary schools: unlikely to be effective, possibly deleterious socially and developmentally. It’s done mostly to placate older people. Even if successful, there’s a question of whether you do kids any favor by delaying their inevitable first encounter with Covid when their young immune systems are best primed to cope with it.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board opines sensibly on the omicron variant. Two slices:
Markets sold off worldwide on Friday after South Africa raised alarm about the new “variant of concern” that the World Health Organization named Omicron. The panic may be driven more by the fear of new government lockdowns and social distancing than by the variant itself.
…..
Americans and the rest of the world need to learn to live with an ever-mutating virus. So do our politicians.
Here’s el gato malo on news of the emergence of the omicron variant. Two slices:
this is not history rhyming.
this is maybe even past history just repeating.
i’m starting to worry that we’re caught in some kind of groundhog day time loop.
just in time for the holidays and the real start of seasonal covid expression, here’s the same exact pollyannas prophesying the same exact doom using the same exact tactics of “super scary new variant.”
as it so often seems to, our new chapter starts once more at imperial university, the proud pants wetting capital of britain whose hopelessly inept and inapt prognostications and models have been wreaking havoc upon that sceptered isle and the rest of the world alike since early 2020.
and once more, a gleeful UK press is ready and willing to play up the terrors.
…..
we’re not being threatened by a new plague of virus, just the same old plague of incompetent hysterics determined once more to drive the world into a ditch because it gets them power and grant money.
the world has had enough of these clowns.
it is LONG past time we shut this circus down.
We truly do not know if the actions taken in Austria, the Netherlands, Portugal etc. will result in a long term net health benefit to the community. The lockdown critics have been unfairly silenced and demonized. As we keep re-instituting these draconian measures some better evidence is needed, or we must abandon these as tools. A politician looks strong when they use these tools, but do they merely bring more misery on the citizenry?….
We have become de-sensitized to these interventions (Lockdown & travel bans), and accordingly we use them more and more.
If Covid hysteria didn’t impose enormous negative externalities on non-consenting third parties, the peddlers of this hysteria would be comical. Here’s Phil Magness, at Facebook, on one such peddler:
Would you believe that the lead author of one of the most heavily cited pro-mask articles in a top tier medical journal also sticks panty liners on the inside of her own mask to create an additional “filter” for stray covid particles?
UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers writes wisely in Britain about responding to the omicron variant. A slice:
By contrast, the decision to reimpose mandatory facemasks in shops is effective immediately. Is there a single scientist that believes upgrading the advice on reusable cloth facemasks in shops from recommended to mandatory for the entire population is a meaningful response to two new cases of a new variant on our shores? As Boris Johnson himself said, the protocols we had in place already were adequate for the previous variants, so any new strategy for the “Omicron” variant is, in theory, all about containment.
But what percentage of Covid transmission events have ever happened in shops? What percentage of those would be cases of the “Omicron” variant? And what percentage of those would be prevented by the return of mandatory advice? We are into a very small fraction of 1 percent at this point.
Meanwhile, masks are not mandatory in hospitality settings, or public events — or, obviously, homes and workplaces, where most transmission actually occurs after prolonged exposure.
So it’s utterly tokenistic. But worse, it suggests the return of restrictions as a form of gesture politics. In exchange for a theoretical gain so marginal as to be entirely irrelevant, the Government is choosing to impose a daily inconvenience that is a notorious source of division on its entire population. This is a bad bargain, and a continuation of a blinkered policy mindset that has bedevilled this pandemic.
Andrew Lilico decries Boris Johnson’s new mask mandate. A slice (link added):
Absent any emergency justification, the imposition on the public is simple tyranny. If the government had suddenly declared, in mid-2018, that it was making masks mandatory in all shops for no better reason than this might cut down on respiratory illness a bit, would you have complied? Of course not!
It is not legitimate to restrict our liberties in this way ‘just in case’In Britain it has long been understood that there is a basic threshold of natural justice or necessity for something to be a law. There can be good laws and bad laws, but if a purported law does not meet a required threshold of justice or necessity, it is not truly a law at all.
A key reason Britain has not fallen victim to the tyrannical governments seen in other countries is that Britons have refused to accept laws that lacked sufficient natural justice or necessity. By refusing to comply with them, and being backed in that to a greater or lesser degree by the courts, they have forced the government to back down.
A famous example of that is the case of Clarence Harry Willcock – the last man the government attempted to prosecute for refusing to carry an ID card. Mr Willcock said he did not believe in such things. The judges heavily criticised the government for maintaining ID cards long after their initial justification (the second world war) had ended. And the government backed down and abolished them.
Jeffrey Tucker praises the new book by Scott Atlas. A slice:
Atlas’s book has exposed a scandal for the ages. It is enormously valuable because it fully blows up what seems to be an emerging fake story involving a supposedly Covid-denying president who did nothing vs. heroic scientists in the White House who urged compulsory mitigating measures consistent with prevailing scientific opinion. Not one word of that is true. Atlas’s book, I hope, makes it impossible to tell such tall tales without embarrassment.
Anyone who tells you this fictional story (including Deborah Birx)deserves to have this highly credible treatise tossed in his direction. The book is about the war between real science (and genuine public health), with Atlas as the voice for reason both before and during his time in the White House, vs. the enactment of brutal policies that never stood any chance of controlling the virus while causing tremendous damage to the people, to human liberty, to children in particular, but also to billions of people around the world.
…..
Throughout the book, Atlas points to the enormous cost of the machinery of lockdowns, the preferred method of Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx: missed cancer screenings, missed surgeries, nearly two years of educational losses, bankrupted small business, depression and drug overdoses, overall citizen demoralization, violations of religious freedom, all while public health massively neglected the actual at-risk population in long-term care facilities. Essentially, they were willing to dismantle everything we called civilization in the name of bludgeoning one pathogen without regard to the consequences.
The fake science of population-wide “models” drove policy instead of following the known information about risk profiles. “The one unusual feature of this virus was the fact that children had an extraordinarily low risk,” writes Atlas. “Yet this positive and reassuring news was never emphasized. Instead, with total disregard of the evidence of selective risk consistent with other respiratory viruses, public health officials recommended draconian isolation of everyone.”
“Restrictions on liberty were also destructive by inflaming class distinctions with their differential impact,” he writes, “exposing essential workers, sacrificing low-income families and kids, destroying single-parent homes, and eviscerating small businesses, while at the same time large companies were bailed out, elites worked from home with barely an interruption, and the ultra-rich got richer, leveraging their bully pulpit to demonize and cancel those who challenged their preferred policy options.”
…..
We all owe Atlas an enormous debt of gratitude, for it was he who persuaded the Florida governor to choose the path of focused protection as advocated by the Great Barrington Declaration, which Atlas cites as the “single document that will go down as one of the most important publications in the pandemic, as it lent undeniable credibility to focused protection and provided courage to thousands of additional medical scientists and public health leaders to come forward.”
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 98 of Arthur Diamond, Jr.’s, excellent 2019 book, Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism (footnotes deleted; links added):
An exciting development from the computer revolution, the iPod innovation, created low-paid manufacturing jobs, mostly abroad, and “high-paid professional and engineering jobs,” mainly in the United States. Over two-thirds of the total value of wages paid to create an iPod were paid to workers within the United States.
UPDATE: And as Tony Gill adds (at Facebook): “And if one compares the wages of the overseas workers to their next best opportunity of employment, methinks they would be big winners in the capturing a portion of the gains from trade too.”
November 27, 2021
The Key Is to End the Obsession
Here’s a letter to the Washington Post:
Editor:
Megan McArdle wisely counsels that, in responding to the omicron variant of the Covid virus, we use measures other than lockdowns (“The U.S. must defend itself from the omicron variant – without resorting to lockdowns,” November 27). Yet while many of the measures she does recommend make sense – for example, speedier FDA approval of antiviral treatments – she disappoints by failing to mention the “Focused Protection” recommended in the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). This failure is curious given that the recommendation offered by the three public-health experts who in late 2020 wrote the GBD reflects the public-health consensus that prevailed until early 2020 – when China’s authoritarian government then blazed the terrible trail of locking down large populations.
Heeding the counsel of the GBD would of course free us from the specter of lockdowns. But it would also free us from a flawed mindset, as well as an unnecessary ordeal, that Ms. McArdle mistakenly treats as unavoidable in the Covid age – the mindset being that each of us, regardless of age, health status, or personal circumstances, is at serious risk of suffering from or dangerously spreading Covid, and the ordeal being incessant testing for Covid.
Life cannot return to normal as long as everyone is obsessed with avoiding exposure to this one pathogen – a pathogen that, fortunately, focuses the overwhelming bulk of its dangers on the elderly and very ill. In response, we should in turn follow the advice of the GBD’s authors and focus our efforts on protecting this vulnerable group while encouraging the great bulk of the population to return to life normally, without fear and the debilitating anxiety about Covid that is bound to be fueled by incessant testing.
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
Further Evidence of the Deformity Spawned Since Early 2020
Just to the left here is a screen shot of an actual op-ed in an actual newspaper. The author is serious (I think).
I leave to readers the responsibility of drawing their own conclusions, but here I can speak with first-hand, professional knowledge: Teaching over Zoom is pathetic, deformed, and utterly inadequate relative to teaching in person. Everything in my nearly 40-year-long career of teaching at the collegiate level – and for nearly two years now teaching chiefly over Zoom (well, Blackboard; but same thing essentially) – runs counter to what this op-ed writer reports.
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Not so simple”
In my column for the July 27th, 2011, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, I argued that “[t]he more complex the economy … the more we must rely upon localized individual decision-makers and less on centralized, collective plans to keep it going and growing.” You can read the full column beneath the fold.
Some Covid Links
Stephen Ford, writing in the Wall Street Journal, explains why his church grew during the pandemic.
Now let’s look at the Gray Lady, America’s newspaper of record. On 22nd January 2020, the Times ran an article titled ‘Scale of China’s Wuhan Shutdown Is Believed to Be Without Precedent’.
“China,” the author wrote, “is engaging in a balancing act with a long and complicated history fraught with social, political and ethical concerns.”
The author quoted a legal expert, who said that “the shutdown would almost certainly lead to human rights violations and would be patently unconstitutional in the United States”. This expert said that selective quarantines “could be effective”, but that China’s response “goes much further than that”.
Fast forward to March, and the Times was out in force making the case for a national lockdown. “All Americans need to shelter in place,” the editorial thundered. Like in The Guardian’s pro-lockdown editorials, no mention was made of “human rights”.
However, the paper did find space to write that “the United States still has a chance to apply hard lessons learned by China”.
But at least the illnesses from which these children will suffer won’t be Covid-19!…
… and at least what will kill these people won’t be Covid-19!… and at least what did kill these people wasn’t Covid-19! (TANSTAFPFC)
Matt Ridley writes that the Covid lab-leak theory just got stronger.
Covidocratic tyranny amplifies in the Netherlands. (HT Phil Magness)
Here’s a first-hand report from the Covid dystopia that is now Austria. A slice:
Throughout the early autumn, senior politicians raised the social temperature by delivering ever more troubling messages. A procession of ‘emergency meetings’ followed by sombre late night press conferences prepared the population for tightened Covid pass regulations. The autocratic Health Minister Wolfgang Muckstein (a medical doctor) announced that once a threshold of 600 intensive care patients had been reached, there would be a “lockdown for the unvaccinated”. ‘They’ would only be allowed to leave their accommodation in exceptional circumstances. This might include a short walk (maintaining a disease defeating distance from passers-by), trips to the supermarket, chemist or work. There has been political musing around the possibility of banning the unvaccinated from the houses of the recovered/vaccinated, forcing ‘them’ to wear masks in all public spaces, declaring non-essential shops off limits and even preventing the use of long distance public transport.
Yet, somehow, we are still in “do something!” mode. At the first sign of trouble, the calls for lockdowns, restrictions and vaccine passports rise to a clamour. Journalists fill press conferences with endless rounds of questions about why we aren’t “doing more”. The question of when exactly we plan to return to a normal level of risk appetite goes unasked, let alone answered.
The forever-lockdown crowd have some points on their side, as they always do. We don’t know much about the latest variant. It has a lot more mutations than prior ones, they say, and might be even more transmissible. We don’t know if it’s deadlier or milder. We don’t know whether it will escape our vaccines more easily or not. It could all be a disaster, the end of the world, the wave to end all waves. Or not.
There are some things we do know, however. We know that new variants are now a permanent fact of life. We know that they will find their way here with or without these pointless “travel bans”. We know that fast-spreading variants will soon, like others before them, become endemic. We know that we have seven vaccines and counting in our arsenal.
…..
Schools are among the most prolific spreaders of Covid safety-ism, when they should be the ones fighting hardest against it for the sake of their students. Bans on shaking hands, masking, cancelled nativity plays, draconian sickness policies: everything must still operate in the shadow of the virus.
A reporter asked me about border closures to address the emergence of the nu variant. I think they will cause unnecessary collateral harm, doing nothing to stop the ultimate spread of the variant.
And here’s Jay’s more-complete response.
It’s problematic when the same person (Fauci) directs both pandemic policy and the largest funder of infectious disease research (NIAID). Scientists must be able to oppose public health policies without fear of losing research funds.
I just pre-ordered Scott Atlas’s new book, A Plague Upon Our House.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 581-582 of Frank Knight’s August 1923 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper, “The Ethics of Competition” (emphasis added):
It is an idea sponsored especially by Dr. Thorstein Veblen and copied by others, that there is some distinction between “pecuniary ” and “industrial” employments and that society ought to take the control of industry out of the hands of ” financiers” and put it into the hands of “technicians.”
This notion rests on the same obvious fallacy, the idea that society has a choice between producing more goods and producing more value, and that it is the part of wisdom to prefer the former. It is difficult to take either part of the proposition seriously. The quantity of goods, if there is more than one kind, must so obviously be measured in value units. The proposal of leaving it to technicians in the respective fields to say how much social productive power shall be expended in each is merely grotesque; military experts would use it all for the army and navy, the medical men could usefully employ it all, and more, for health, and so on. There is no more important function of a first course in economics than to make the student see that the whole problem of social management is a value problem; that mechanical or technical efficiency is a meaningless combination of words.
DBx: Yes. Yet most popular and political commentary today – even in (indeed, especially in) ‘elite’ outlets such as the New York Times – reveals that this function of unsurpassed importance in the instruction of economics has not been carried out successfully.
Part of the problem is that many pundits and politicians simply never take a single course in economics. But the larger part of the problem is that far too many economics courses, even introductory ones, are taught incompetently. Lip service is paid to the fact that individuals’ preferences (including preferences for risk) are subjective. But then almost immediately these preferences are treated as objective facts that government officials can observe, compare, and aggregate in ways that allow these officials – whenever they (or their selfless advisors) conclude that the market is falling down on the job – to impose policies that ‘maximize efficiency.’
November 26, 2021
Focused Protection Impractical? Compared to What?
Here’s a follow-up note to a commenter at EconLog.
Steve:
There are two different avenues down which we can and should travel to assess whether or not the Focused Protection advocated in the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) is more practical than is the alternative – namely, lockdowns – against which the authors of that Declaration warned.
The first avenue is the narrow one of asking whether or not Focused Protection is more practical than are lockdowns at protecting against Covid-19. The second avenue is more broad; on it we ask if Focused Protection is more practical or less practical than are lockdowns at protecting society.
The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration wisely travelled down both avenues.
On the first avenue: Precisely because general lockdowns and mandates combat Covid by expending resources and attention indiscriminately, had the GBD’s recommended Focused Protection been followed, these resources and attention would have been marshaled more rationally. They would have been targeted at protecting the vulnerable rather than wasted, scattershot, on ‘protecting’ the great majority of the population from what is to them risks that range from small to minuscule.
You doubt that Focused Protection would have worked better than the alternative – lockdowns – against which it was recommended. For reasons that I explained earlier, I disagree with you that Focused Protection is the worst of the two alternative courses of action for protecting people from Covid.
But even if I’m mistaken on the narrow point – even if lockdowns are the better means of protecting humanity from Covid – the case that Focused Protection is the less practical of the two options is not yet settled. That is, even if lockdowns are the more practical means of protecting people from Covid, as long as humanity attaches any value at all to achievements other than reducing the risk of exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, lockdowns might nevertheless still be impractical as an alternative to Focused Protection.
How practical are prohibitions on factories, trucking lines, restaurants, and other businesses remaining open? How practical are the resulting disruptions of supply-chains – or what I prefer to call “the global supply web”?
How practical are government prohibitions on family gatherings? Prohibitions on people gathering to worship, to mourn their dead, and to celebrate their marriages and graduations? How practical are school closures and the attendant farce of pretending to ‘educate’ six and seven year old children – or even college students – over Zoom? How practical is it to prevent children from socializing and playing with each other? How practical are the prohibitions on travel, with some of these prohibitions even being intra-national? How practical is the quarantining of fellow citizens who are returning from abroad?
How practical is the more than 50 percent increase, in a mere two years, of the annual amount spent by the U.S. government (from $4.448 trillion in 2019 to $6.818 trillion in 2021)? How practical is the more than tripling of the U.S. government’s budget deficit from 2019 to 2020? And the still appallingly high budget deficit for 2021?
How practical is the steep increase in the money supply in 2020-21 – and the now-resulting rising inflation?
How practical was the playing, in 2020, of sporting events in stadiums filled only with cardboard cutouts? How practical was it to delay medical diagnoses and treatments for ailments other than Covid? How practical is it for many governments, including many in the west, to outlaw protests against lockdowns? How practical are the unprecedented vaccine mandates for the general population, and the accompanying treatment of the unvaccinated as untouchables?
How practical is the substantial increase since early 2020 of Covid-fear-fueled authoritarianism?
Even if lockdowns prove over time to save more lives from Covid than would have been saved from Covid by Focused Protection, this fact would not suffice to render lockdowns the more practical strategy than Focused Protection. Account must be taken of lockdowns’ collateral damage.
Compared to lockdowns, perhaps the greatest advantage of Focused Protection is that whatever collateral damage it would have caused would have been an invisible fraction of the collateral damage caused by lockdowns. This damage from lockdowns was caused precisely because the unprecedented pummeling that society has endured over the past 20 months is indescribably imprudent and frighteningly impractical.
It boggles my mind that, compared to the unprecedented and draconian course that most governments took in response to Covid, anyone can regard the alternative course of Focused Protection as impractical.
Don
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