Russell Roberts's Blog, page 206

Focused Protection As Compared to Lockdowns

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a note to a commenter at EconLog:

Steve:

First you assert that Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff – authors of the Great Barrington Declaration – merely “assumed that we know how to protect those most at risk” with what they called “Focused Protection,” as opposed to with lockdowns. Then when you’re shown a detailed description by these authors of what Focused Protection entails, you dismiss this description by ignoring a key problem that Focused Protection is designed to avoid.

That key problem is resource scarcity. By using general lockdowns, and by treating everyone – including school children – as being equally at risk of suffering from Covid, governments caused resources, attention, and mitigation efforts to be spread too thinly. Far too many resources, attention, and mitigation efforts were spent where they had much smaller impacts than they would have had were they instead focused on protecting the most vulnerable.

Curiously, your own follow-up dismissal of the practicality of Focused Protection (unintentionally) admits this truth. You write:

Everyone said we should protect nursing home residents. There were a few nursing homes that made heroic efforts and had really good results, but we are talking about very low wage workers and most nursing homes run tight on staff. To save money most have a lot of per diem staff or use agency people. A lot of nursing  home staff are themselves older and lot have significant morbidities. You really can’t just wave a wand and say you will reduce staff rotations. Where are the staff going to come from? Exactly how do you reduce staff rotations?

You here describe a world racked with lockdowns and, now, vaccine mandates – that is, the world that we actually got instead of a world with Focused Protection – and conclude from this description that Focused Protection is “magic.” But your conclusion is illegitimate. It is precisely because of general lockdowns and mandates that too few resources were focused on protecting those persons who are especially vulnerable.

Also, it is no good objection to Focused Protection to point out that it would not be 100 percent effective, or to identify difficulties – perhaps even serious ones – with its implementation. No process short of 7.5 million suicides for reducing the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus would be 100 percent effective. No process could escape difficulties in its design and implementation. No process for dealing with Covid would be free of challenges, both real and merely imaginable.

The Great Barrington Declaration’s authors proposed Focused Protection not as a means of eliminating all harm from Covid-19. Nor did they deny challenges in its implementation. Instead, they proposed Focused Protection as an alternative to subjecting the general population to unprecedented lockdowns and mandates. Focused Protection is to be judged not against some unobtainable and imaginary ideal but, rather, against the reality of lockdowns and mandates. And by this comparison, it seems to me to be impossible to deny that the results of Focused Protection would have been far better along every dimension (save that of concentrating immense discretionary power in the hands of arrogant government officials).

The devotees of magical thinking are not those persons who advocate Focused Protection but, instead, those who believe that salvation is to be found only by spreading hysteria and trusting government officials with the power to pummel human society with unprecedented restrictions on commercial, social, and familial engagements.

Sincerely,
Don

Don’t Forget Sweden

(Don Boudreaux)

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Too few will pay attention to this reality, but with a new wave of Covid hysteria about to slam into humanity – bringing with it demands for the continuation of existing, the reimposition of past, and the creation of new Covid prohibitions and mandates, it’s useful to look at these screenshots, taken on the morning of November 26th, 2021, of data from Sweden:

Under Strain

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here we go again. A new strain, out of southern Africa, of the Covid-19 virus is being reported (as if new strains of such viruses are unexpected).

Already in place are new restrictions on travel. More are sure to come.

Dow futures – up as recently as yesterday afternoon – are now down 763.

Further, as cold weather descends on the northern hemisphere, Covid “cases” are increasing. The media and government “leaders” – relying upon each other symbiotically – will stir these new developments into renewed hysteria. (Actually, the future tense should be replaced by the present tense.) Far too many people will continue to believe – falsely – that, regardless of their age or health, they are at grave risk from the Covid Monster and that the only hope of protection from utter catastrophe is blind obedience to the likes of Anthony Fauci, who will ‘recommend’ that governments impose further lockdowns, mask mandates, and, likely, that governments also make booster shots mandatory. Support will swell for vaccine mandates.

Schools now open might very well again close. The absurd restrictions on college campuses will continue.

I’d not be surprised if it’s soon the case that new-born infants will be vaccinated against Covid, and then be well and truly masked, even before they are detached from their mothers’ umbilical cords.

Dissenting voices – including those of serious scientists – will be shut down and accused of being both anti-social and anti-science.

Human society will again be pummeled by ham-fisted and ill-advised diktats, both directly and by the never-ending threat that any easing of these burdens can, at any time and at a split-moment’s notice, be reversed. Yet more acid will poured onto the global supply web, further severing links that are indispensable fibers of modern civilization. We will become more isolated. Everyone but members of the Zoomeoisie will grow poorer, with a disproportionately large share of this suffering falling on the world’s poorest people.

I hope – omigosh, do I hope – that I’m mistaken. But I fear that we have years left to live with Covid-19 hysteria. Worse, after this disease can no longer credibly be used to frighten even the most credulous, some other pathogen will be identified as posing yet another existential threat to humanity and, thus, justifying not only the continuation but the strengthening of the bio-security state – what David Hart calls “hygiene socialism.”

I’ve some friends whose judgments I trust who are less pessimistic than I am, but I have some other friends, also with judgments that I trust, who share my pessimism – and, indeed, some other friends who are even more pessimistic about the future than I am.

Happy holidays, everyone.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 44 of John Dos Passos’s 1958 paper “A Question of Elbow Room,” which is Essay 1 in Essays on Individuality, Felix Morley, ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1977 [1958]):

Somewhere along the way we lost our conviction that the best government was self-government. In our enthusiasm for turning over every social problem to the administrative bureaucracy for solution, we forgot that democracy is based on the maxim that the solution of the problem of social life is the business of the people themselves. Neither [Thomas Babington] Macaulay nor Jefferson, when they scanned the horizon for dangers threatening American democracy, foresaw this prodigious growth of a bureaucracy armed with police powers, a bureaucracy which bids fair to become a vested interest in its own right.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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A Missouri court deals a just blow to that state’s Covidocracy. (HT Todd Zywicki)

Barry Brownstein explains why each of us has a civil and moral duty to oppose tyrannical bureaucracies. A slice:

Applying this lesson today, you don’t have to be a physician or epidemiologist to become conversant with basic Covid issues. Official propaganda might claim this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated, that natural immunity doesn’t exist, and your 5-year-old child urgently needs a Covid vaccination, but you can look at the evidence for yourself.

Writing in the Telegraph, Sunetra Gupta – a co-author of the great Great Barrington Declaration – explains why vaccination cannot pave a route to the complete elimination of Covid. Here’s her conclusion:

Based on these principles, a shift in focus towards vaccines which prevent death but not necessarily infection is long overdue. Before vaccines, the only viable solution was to protect the vulnerable population through state-sanctioned shielding. The vaccines should have changed that, but instead we find ourselves trapped by the superannuated conviction that vaccines must block infection as well as disease.

The evidence continues to accumulate that, while vaccines are quite effective at preventing serious consequences from Covid, they do little or nothing to prevent the vaccinated from becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 and spreading it.

Here’s some wise advice, shared at Facebook, from Phil Magness:

Since I have a strong and empirically confirmed antibody response that has shown no sign of waning, I have no intention of getting a booster. If you are thinking of getting one for yourself, spend $10 at labcorp first for an antibody test to see if it is actually needed. Otherwise you are indulging in superstition.

Paris Williams writes insightfully about humanity’s reaction to Covid-19. A slice:

In early 2020, a frightening narrative emerged of a novel coronavirus that appeared to be much more harmful than a typical flu, with significantly larger rates of death, disability and transmission, and for which we had no known treatment. In other words, the world faced the prospect of a serious threat combined with powerlessness—i.e., a global traumatic event.

Very large numbers of the human population developed a threat response, which quickly spread around the world with a degree of contagion that was possibly even greater than the virus itself. And given what we understand about the human threat response (as defined above), what unfolded was not particularly surprising. Collectively, we witnessed runaway polarisation (‘us vs. them,’); scapegoating (‘find the bad guy’); dehumanising and a general loss of empathy for anyone identified as ‘other’; a breakdown in our capacity for critical thinking and sensemaking; and an increase in our tendency to succumb to groupthink (blindly following the consensus of our identified group with little critical thinking).

Reason‘s Robby Soave reports on CDC Director Rochelle Walensky’s praise for the Chinese government’s “really strict” lockdowns. A slice:

Whether China’s “really strict” lockdowns can truly be deemed a success largely depends on whether that government’s reported COVID-19 cases and death totals are accurate—an important question, given how much the Chinese Communist Party has already lied about the pandemic—and whether it will ever be possible to relax them. More than a year after Walensky sounded an admiring note, China’s pandemic authoritarianism is still in full-swing; despite sporadic shutdowns of entire cities, the country has not completely stamped out of the coronavirus. Dozens of new cases are reported everyday, and again, it’s difficult to say if those numbers represent undercounts. At every stage of the pandemic, Chinese government officials have misled their own citizens, and indeed, the rest of the planet, about the virus.

But even if China does have COVID-19 under control, harsh pandemic mitigation measures exact a steep price in return. One Chinese town bordering Myanmar was recently locked down by the government, and what followed was brutally repressive:

Residents left starving inside makeshift quarantine centers fashioned out of shipping containers. Businesses forbidden from selling goods – even online. A baby reportedly tested for COVID 74 times.

Earlier this year, his wife went to work one morning, only to be forced to find somewhere else to stay for a 45-day quarantine after the city district was sealed off because of a handful of cases discovered nearby. She was rounded up and told to shelter in place, with no date of release and no regular supply of food. Wang says he was finally able to get her out by asking a well-connected friend to bring her to a hospital on medical grounds, after which she did another two week hotel quarantine before being allowed to return home.

Yet despite the anger in Ruili, most people in China support the country’s strict pandemic prevention policies, despite their huge economic cost and the risk of being suddenly quarantined or tested during frequent contact-tracing investigations. Local governments are under enormous pressure to ensure no infections crop up; officials who fail are often publicly shamed and fired.

People unlucky enough to test positive or — more commonly — cross paths with a close contact can find themselves ensnared in successive and expensive quarantines. Others have found themselves stuck in limbo, unable to leave cities under lockdown, including Ruili, and also banned from returning to their hometowns.

I applaud actor Steve Burton for sticking to his principles when doing so inflicts on him significant personal cost.

Covidocratic tyranny continues unabated in Australia.

Covidocratic tyranny tightens in Italy.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

It is odd that public health grandees think supporting vaccines while opposing mandates is paradoxical, though @BallouxFrancois is right that many feel that way. The reason? The COVID era has revealed previously suppressed authoritarian impulses of many in public health.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from David Ames Wells’s “Free Trade,” an entry in the 1899 edition of John J. Lalor’s massive Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and of the Political History of the United States:

But does anybody know of any one who is not in favor of good roads and bridges, of swift and safe lines of railroads and steamships, of telegraphs and newspapers? But roads and bridges, and steamships and railroads, and telegraphs and newspapers, are merely agencies for effecting and facilitating the interchange of ideas and commodities; and it amounts to precisely the same general result, whether we make the interchange of commodities costly and difficult by interposing deserts, swamps, unbridged streams, bad roads or bands of robbers between producers and consumers, or whether, for the benefit of some private interest that has done nothing to merit it, we impose a toll on the commodities transported, and call it a tariff. A 20 per cent. duty may fairly be considered as the representative equivalent of a bad road; a 50 per cent., of a broad, deep and rapid river, without any proper facilities for crossing; a 75 per cent., a swamp flanking such a river on both sides….

More On the Age Distribution of Covid’s Victims

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a slightly modified version of a comment that I left at EconLog on this post by Thomas Firey – a post in which Firey argues that official Covid death counts are likely not overestimated.

Tom:

Your analysis here is solid and important. Thanks for doing it. (While I still have some lingering worry about possible distortions introduced into the data by the point raised by commenter DeservingPorcupine, your analysis significantly weakens my suspicion that the premium paid to hospitals for each Medicare patient listed as having Covid creates a serious overcounting of Covid deaths.)

But I want to warn against a possible, although unintentional, misimpression created when you write that

though COVID’s dead were predominantly aged, it doesn’t appear that much of that death toll can be dismissed as simply depriving a few weeks of life from already-deteriorating victims. Again, half-a-million-plus more people died in 2020 than 2019.

“Predominantly” is an understatement. A more-accurate descriptor is “overwhelmingly.” According the latest CDC data, more than half – 52 percent – of Covid deaths in the U.S. are of people 75 years old and older, with 27 percent of Covid deaths being of people 85 years old and older.

Seventy-five percent of Covid deaths in America are of people retirement age (65) and older.

On the other side, only 7 percent of Covid deaths are of people below the age of 50.

Also, the argument made by those of us who insist on the relevance of the undeniable and very steep age gradient of Covid’s serious health consequences does not rest on any claim that most Covid deaths are of people whose remaining life expectancies were only a few weeks. For example, the typical 85-year-old in the U.S. can expect to live about another six or seven years. And so while Covid is more likely to kill an 85-year-old who is unusually ill for his or her age (than to kill a healthier 85-year-old), it’s still unlikely that the typical elderly person killed by Covid had only a few weeks of life remaining. That person likely had several months or even a few years of life remaining.

Covid is real and it really kills. And such a loss of life is, of course, unfortunate. No serious person ignores these deaths or wants them to be “dismissed” as unimportant. Yet two related realities loom that too many people ignored since early 2020.

The first of these realities is that a disease that overwhelmingly reserves most of its dangers for the elderly should be recognized as such, especially by policymakers and people in the media. But this reality was played down and even ignored, while others who acknowledged this reality denied its relevance. Even now many people act – and seem to believe – that Covid’s risks are general. The mania for closing schools, masking children, and mandating vaccination very much reflect, I think, the public’s continuing failure to understand that Covid poses little risk to the bulk of the population, and virtually no risk at all to children and young adults.

The fact that the typical elderly person killed by Covid had, at the time of his or her death, an expected life span of more than a few weeks is true enough, but it doesn’t begin to nullify the relevance of the reality that the great bulk of Covid’s dangers are reserved for the elderly.

The second of these realities is that the failure to recognize and act on the distinct age profile of Covid’s effects means that the response to Covid was not only disproportionate to the danger posed by the SARS-Cov-2 pathogen to the general population, but likely harmful to the vulnerable population.

Resources are scarce. By spending these resources indiscriminately across the entire population, these resources were not concentrated – “Focused” (as the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration wisely recommended) – on where they would have the greatest positive benefits.

The following analogy (like any other analogy) isn’t perfect, but it conveys an important truth. Suppose that category 5 hurricane Mortimer devastates New Orleans. If so, the appropriate response is to concentrate emergency supplies on that city. A wholly inappropriate response would be to declare as a disaster area the entire United States and send emergency supplies indiscriminately across the country. If the latter course were taken, the toll of death and destruction from Mortimer in New Orleans would wind up being worse than if the emergency response and supplies were focused on that city.

Also scarce are human attention and fellow-feeling. And so just as calamitously as the failure to focus material resources on the vulnerable, by treating Covid as if everyone is at equal risk of suffering from it, human attention and fellow-feeling were spread too thinly. A mother who believes that her fifteen-year-old son and her 45-year-old husband – and she herself – are as likely to die from Covid as are her 75-year-old parents will not concentrate as much of her loving attention and concern on her parents as she would were she aware that she, her husband, and her son are at much less risk of suffering from Covid than are her parents.

No one will ever be able to say for sure if – and if so, how many – lives were failed to be saved by the indiscriminate, unfocused response to Covid (as opposed to the focused response recommended by the Great Barrington Declaration – and by many public-health experts prior to 2020). But I can’t believe that this number is small.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya – who, along with Sunetra Gupta, wrote the great Great Barrington Declaration – expose lies spread about physicians who are honest about the consequences of lockdowns. Two slices:

Politicians and journalists will sometimes mischaracterize their opponents’ views and then argue against those phantoms rather than real views. It is a cheap but effective political and journalistic trick. Medical news sources have adopted this tactic during the pandemic, with disastrous consequences for public trust in public health and medicine.

The latest example comes from Medpage Today, a medical news site popular among doctors. Many physicians get their pandemic information from Medpage Today.

Once trusted sources that provided the latest medical information from a variety of perspectives, medical news sites like Medpage Today have turned into political mouthpieces for governments that imposed unsuccessful lockdown policies resulting in more than 750,000 U.S. Covid deaths and enormous collateral damage.

A population panicked by public health messaging closed schools and skipped basic medical care resulting in worse cancer, cardiovascular diseases, mental health, and educational outcomes. Universal lockdowns dragged out the pandemic over a longer time period.

Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries implemented more limited restrictions, focusing instead on protecting older, high-risk citizens. The result? Scandinavia has lower Covid mortality than most other European countries and less collateral harm. In the United States, Florida shifted to a similar approach, resulting in a lower age-adjusted Covid mortality than the national average and less collateral harm.

…..

Medpage Today also falsely claims the previous White House “embraced” the Great Barrington Declaration. Public health scientists have an obligation to politicians of all stripes. In late August 2020, we met with President Trump, Vice President Pence, and others at the White House, with no effect.

Vinay Prasad makes the case that Anthony Fauci should resign. A slice:

Second, the moment he lied, it was over. Even Fauci’s most ardent fans will concede that Fauci lied. He lied about masking, per his own admission. Of course, he claims he did so to protect the mask supply for healthcare workers early in the pandemic. Indeed, if true, that would be a noble lie, and we can all understand why some might forgive him. But surely, we can also understand why many Americans would start to distrust him, as well? A leader in a national crisis has to speak to all Americans and lies make that impossible.

An easy solution would be to resign and pass the baton to someone with a fresh reputation. But, that wasn’t when he lied. The meta-lie is the idea that Fauci was initially deceitful about masking, but later told the truth. That is also a lie. The truth is that Fauci was initially honest about masking, and later, and to this date, lied about the evidence. We summarize all lines of evidence for masking in our recent paper.

Telegraph columnist Amanda Pearson decries the continued pursuit by many schools of zero Covid. A slice:

Thanks to the vaccine rollout and natural infection (Covid has gone through schools like a dose of salts) some 92 per cent of adults [in Britain] now have antibodies. And children were never strongly implicated in infection anyway. There is no reason whatsoever to cancel school events or send kids home because one boy in the class sneezes. Indeed, given the appalling mental health crisis among our young people, it is unforgivable to persist in treating them like lepers, denying them the healing pleasure of togetherness.

The most distressing school story I have heard recently came from Jane, whose daughter suffered terribly during lockdown. Jessie being denied access to her playmates was, her mother thought, “cruel and entirely unnecessary”. But, at least, once she started a new term, things would be back to normal. Bizarrely, the previously sensible and pragmatic school, decided to reintroduce mask-wearing “to keep the children and staff safe”.

“I have yet to find any evidence as to why wearing a piece of cloth with gaps at the side all day long is ‘keeping my daughter safe’,” fumed Jane. Furthermore, the decision was taken after the Covid vaccine had been given to all children who wanted it. But it was another email from school containing the following sentence that shocked Jane to the core. “Those pupils who were exempt from wearing a mask last academic year will once again be exempt and should wear a yellow badge to indicate this,” it said.

Take a minute to absorb that. A school is singling out pupils by making them wear a yellow badge. Is the school’s head so astronomically dim that they have never heard of the way Nazi Germany ostracised its Jews? If so, education is in more trouble than we knew.

It is the old, not the young, who are afflicted by Covid. Society has no business insisting that its youngest members put on masks when they are at no risk. But to make kids who, for whatever reason, can’t cover their face, wear a yellow sign of stigma, well, that goes beyond anything that is acceptable in a decent country.

Reason‘s Matt Welch reports on the assault on education being waged by the Los Angeles United School District – of course in the name of fighting Covid. A slice:

Remote learning, which was imposed upon most California schoolkids from March 2020 to August 2021 despite the Golden State’s famously temperate climate and generous outdoor school space, has been a well-documented educational disaster. A November 14 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper on the pandemic and test scores led by Brown University economist Emily Oster found that (in Oster’s words) “Bottom line: losses are big, and much bigger with less in-person school.”

Yet several California school districts, affecting an estimated 350,000 kids combined, are gearing up to re-sentence their unvaccinated students to remote learning dysfunction. Piedmont’s vax mandate deadline was November 17; Culver City’s was November 19, San Diego students aged 16 and over have until December 20, Oakland kids hear the vax bell ring January 1, and West Contra Costa follows on January 3. Sacramento and Hayward at least will allow unvaccinated students to test their way into staying in class.

Reason‘s Eric Boehm reports on the terrible toll that Covid hysteria is taking on democratic norms. A slice:

A number of democratic countries—the report specifically mentions the United States in this section—have implemented COVID measures “that were disproportionate, illegal, indefinite or unconnected to the nature of the emergency,” according to the IIDEA report. Those include travel restrictions and the use of “emergency powers that sometimes sidelined parliaments.”

The last two years have indeed been littered with examples of previously unheard-of government powers on display in the U.S. That includes everything from statewide lockdowns in which governors decreed which businesses were “essential” to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with the backing of both the Trump and Biden administrations, making it nearly impossible for property owners to evict deadbeat tenants. It took until this month for the U.S. to reopen its border with Canada for supposedly “nonessential” travel, even though there was probably no good justification for closing the border in the first place.

Outside the U.S., places like Austria and Australia continue to rachet up authoritarian restrictions on public interactions and economic behavior—even for people who have been vaccinated. According to the report, 69 countries have made violating COVID restrictions an imprisonable offense, with two-thirds of those countries being ones the group considers to be democracies. Albania and Mexico have the most punitive laws on the books, allowing prison sentences of 15 years and 12 years, respectively, for violating pandemic-related protocols.

More than 20 percent of countries have used their militaries to enforce COVID controls, which the report warns could contribute to “the normalization of increasingly militarized civil life after the pandemic.” Meanwhile, 42 percent of countries have rolled out voluntary or compulsory apps used for contact tracing, which may be effective in curbing the spread of the virus but create concerning new opportunities for government surveillance in a post-pandemic world.

Reason‘s Jacob Sullum reports on the Biden administration’s move to have the courts lift the stay on Biden’s abominable vaccine mandate.

TANSTAFPAC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection Against Covid.)

“the trade of the fear monger is not a respected one. (but it does pay well)” – is the opening line of this recent post by el gato malo.

Yesterday morning Karol Markowicz tweeted this: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

It’s 37 degrees in NYC today and kids at public schools around the city are still eating lunch sitting on the ground outside. Grown-ups who enact these policies should try it!

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Protectionism’s (il)logic”

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my column for the July 13th, 2011, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I abridge Bastiat’s ‘Petition of the Candlemakers.’. You can read my abridgment beneath the fold.

(more…)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 81 of Ronald Inglehart’s 2000 paper “Culture and Democracy,” which is chapter 7 in Culture Matters, Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, eds. (2000):

Economic development seems to bring a gradual shift from survival values to self-expression values, which helps explain why richer societies are more likely to be democracies.

DBx: Makes sense. Yet it appears that when people even as astoundingly rich as are those of use in modern society fear for our immediate survival, survival values regain their dominance. This reality surely is a major reason why democratic norms are being swept aside by Covid hysteria.