Russell Roberts's Blog, page 207

The Only Escape from Risk Is Death

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to a long-time Café Hayek reader:

Mr. Q__:

Thanks for your e-mail in response to my sharing, at Café Hayek, this photo – and my agreeing with the sentiment there expressed by Michelle Obama: “You can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen.”

While I can’t speak for Ms. Obama, I assure you that my favorable posting of her remark was not, contrary to your interpretation, a “rash call to ignore risks.” Of course risks must be accounted for. And also of course, the higher the risk of harm from any particular source, the greater should be the amount of precaution taken against that source.

But this reality – this counsel of prudence – doesn’t mean that it’s acceptable to overreact to any one risk. After all, it’s typically the case that the greater the precaution you take against risk X, the greater becomes your exposure to risks Y and Z. And so if you focus exclusively on risk X you ignore these other risks. Therefore, while you might succeed in your narrow effort to reduce as much as possible your exposure to risk X, you’ll be unaware of your resulting higher – and likely excessive – exposure to other risks.

I posted that photo at my blog as evidence that in a more-sane era – namely, before March 2020 – there was popular understanding that an action is not inadvisable merely because that action entails some risk. Yet too many people today ignore this truth on all matters related to Covid. Too many people today assume that no amount of risk, regardless of how small, of encountering Covid-19 is acceptable – and, therefore, that no price is too high to pay for even the minutest increment of reduction in the risks of encountering Covid.

This attitude is what I call Covid Derangement Syndrome. I’m convinced that this syndrome poses to society a far larger risk than does Covid itself. Against the latter we have vaccines (and, if we only had the good sense to use it, the option of Focused Protection); against the former we have too few defenses.

Sincerely,
Don

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “‘Log rolling’ good & bad”

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my column for the June 29th, 2011, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I wrote about logrolling. You can read my column beneath the fold.

(more…)

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Neal McCluskey writes that things are looking up for private-school enrollment. A slice:

What’s driving the increase? Consistent with previous findings on school responses to the pandemic, The Economist writes that Catholic schools, like private schools broadly, tended to re‐​open to in‐​person instruction more quickly than public schools. “Last autumn many public‐​school systems delayed reopening and did not offer full‐​time in‐​class learning,” says the article. “When Catholic schools reopened, most provided in‐​person learning. This appealed to families who struggled with remote learning.”

Richard Gunderman explains why he believes that “[i]t is hard to imagine a stauncher and more influential defender of liberty than Maria Montessori.”

My GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein writes wisely about the recovery of liberty.

Alberto Mingardi asks if the future of conservatism is “national.” A slice:

“National conservatives”, on the other hand, are extremely vocal on the issues of the day, beginning with left wing hegemony in education and race and crime. They are certainly growing in visibility. Yet one can still wonder, as [Nate] Hochmann and [Arnold] Kling do, what they stand for. Arnold proposes to consider national conservatism as “20th century conservatism minus fiscal responsibility plus class warfare rhetoric”.

There are a couple of things that crossed my mind in this regard. The movement was christened by the publication of Yoram Hazony’s The Virtues of Nationalism. I found that to be not a persuasive book, to say the least. But I think it was a clever book, as it proposed to conservatives, who were kind of shocked after Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican party, something that seemed to offer an ideological outlook. Lots of pieces are missing: why, for example, Hazony’s insistence on the biblical roots of modern nation states, or his notion that *true* (good?) nationalism is actually hard wired in the Anglo Saxon political culture, why, indeed, all this should lead to fiscal profligacy is not clear to me. That attitude toward a bigger spending conservatism was actually rooted in support for Trumpism. National conservatives fashion themselves as the intellectuals who take Trump seriously and endeavoured to weave a coherent approach out of his many idiosyncratic policies.

Thomas Berry and Nicole Saad Bembridge argue, quite correctly, that “the First Amendment protects everyone, even Facebook and Twitter.” Here’s their conclusion:

When he signed 7072, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis likened social media platforms’ content moderation to the “tyrannical behavior” of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. If DeSantis is really concerned about free speech and authoritarianism, he should think twice before giving the government more control over private communications platforms.

Tim Worstall longs for the good ol’ days when Barack Obama lived in the White House.

Tyler Cowen correctly concludes that Milton Friedman’s legacy remains strong – as it should.

Claude Barfield reports the unfortunate news that “[o]n steel and aluminum trade, Trumpism still rules.” A slice:

On Fareed Zakaria’s CNN Sunday show, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan recently touted “profound” differences between the administrations of President Biden and former President Trump. On some issues, Sullivan has a case to make — but not on extending the bogus national security rationale for imposing steel and aluminum import restrictions on U.S. allies.

To recount, in 2018, the Trump administration, in a flagrant misuse of legal statutes, placed steel and aluminum tariffs — 25 percent and 10 percent, respectively — on imports from a number of U.S. allies and trading partners, invoking the national security exceptions in Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act. In response, the European Union (EU) levied 25 percent tariffs on a number of U.S. products — and planned to increase these taxes substantially on Dec. 1.

Though strongly critical of Donald Trump’s trade policies, the Biden administration has chosen to “maintain but modify” the Section 232 tariffs. U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai has stoutly defended tariffs as a legitimate trade policy tool, while also stating that tariffs can provide the United States with negotiating leverage. She also has defended the use of the “unfair trade practices” provision, Section 301 of the 1974 U.S. Trade Act, as a legitimate tool for unilateral retaliation against such practices — namely $370 billion worth of tariffs on Chinese goods.

My Mercatus Center colleagues Alden Abbott and Adam Thierer explain that spin-offs are neither new nor troubesome. A slice:

More generally, recent legislative proposals and antitrust enforcement actions aimed at arbitrarily discouraging mergers threaten to undermine market forces that generate economic welfare by reorganizing corporate assets. These initiatives stem from the mantra that the American economy has become more concentrated and less competitive due to lax antitrust enforcement—claims that have been debunked by economic research.

Real-world evidence demonstrates that rather than being stagnant and uncompetitive in recent decades, the American economy has been dynamic and free from supposed monopoly control. The media sector provides perhaps the most remarkable examples of the constant churn that occurs in dynamic markets.

A couple decades ago, critics were lambasting the mega-merger of AOL and Time Warner, fearing that the deal represented “the end of the independent press,” and was a harbinger of a “new totalitarianism.” But just two years after the merger took place, the firm reported a $54 billion loss, which grew to $99 billion by January of 2003. By September 2003, Time Warner decided to drop AOL from its name, and the marriage finally ended miserably in 2008 with AOL being spun-off entirely.

AOL’s decline continued, and not even its brief ownership by Verizon helped much. In May, Verizon sold both AOL and Yahoo!, another once-mighty tech company that was formerly considered the king of search. In the divestiture, Verizon lost about half what it paid acquiring both firms.

How Times Have Changed

(Don Boudreaux)

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An economist friend of mine sent to me this photo of a poster that still hangs in the entry way to his children’s elementary school.

My friend, who prefers to remain anonymous, writes:

But it is striking how, two years ago, the sentiment Michelle Obama expressed would have been a cliche. Now it sounds radical.

An Inconsistency

(Don Boudreaux)

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My oh my, doesn’t government-run health care – in this case, Britain’s sainted National Health Service – work splendidly?! Here’s the headline in the Times of London:

NHS waiting list hits record 6m… and it’s only going to get worse

Hmmm.

Imagine, for the purpose of this post, that Covid-19 is a disease that would have overwhelmed any health-care system that is humanly possible. Imagine also an alternative universe in which Britain had no NHS but, instead, relied for its citizens’ health-care provision exclusively on free-market forces. What would the reaction of intellectuals be to reports of this free-market health-care system encountering the problems that are now, in reality, being encountered by the NHS? Is there any doubt that these problems would be trumpeted as indisputable evidence that free-market health care is unworkable – a failure – a curse and danger to humanity – conclusive proof that governments should nationalize health-care provision, or at least play a much more active role in this provision?

So why are the problems now, in reality, confronting the NHS not taken as strong evidence – or at least as offering a plausible case – that government-supplied health-care is a curse and danger to humanity, and in particular that the NHS should be abolished and market forces allowed to play a much greater role in the provision of health-care?

Note that my argument here is not that market forces would have handled Covid better than did the NHS (although I have no doubt that they would have indeed done so). Instead, my argument is that there is a double standard: Problems encountered by government agencies are typically accepted by intellectuals as unavoidable realities, while problems encountered by the market are assumed to be avoidable if only the government were in charge.

Put differently, when government agencies and activities encounter problems, Progressives invariably blame the problems either on unavoidable realities or on insufficient government control – which control, of course, they call for more of. Yet when markets encounter problems, Progressives seldom blame the problems on unavoidable realities, and never do Progressives reason that the problems might be caused by too little reliance on the market. Never, in the face of such problems, do Progressives call for greater reliance on the market.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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The Wall Street Journal reports on the growing resistance to Covidocratic tyranny in Austria. A slice:

“This is sheer madness: How long will we have lockdowns despite vaccination and despite all the restrictions we have put up with already?” said Elfi Cohen, a travel guide from Vienna who had to cancel all of her tours in the run-up to Christmas, the most lucrative season for her business.

Ms. Cohen will take her third coronavirus shot this week and so far has supported all measures, but is now losing hope that the pandemic can be managed with renewed restrictions, she said.

About two thirds of Austria’s nearly nine million residents are vaccinated, just under the average figure for the European Union but above the level in the U.S., according to Oxford University’s Our World in Data website. Yet its seven-day rolling average of new cases hit 1,531.7 per million people on Sunday, more than five times the U.S. level. Daily Covid-19-related deaths per million inhabitants hit a seven-day average of 4.88 on Sunday, according to the website, above the U.S., Germany, France and the U.K.

(DBx: To be certain that you don’t miss this last figure, I quote again: “Daily Covid-19-related deaths per million inhabitants hit a seven-day average of 4.88.” As a percentage of one million, 4.88 is 0.000488. The Austrian government is imprisoning that country’s entire population as it also demands that everyone be injected with a particular medicine when the seven-day average of Covid-19-related deaths, as a percentage of the population, is 0.000488. Why aren’t many more people up in arms about this madness?)

Writing in the Telegraph, Jonathan Sumption blasts the new wave of Covid tyranny now crashing over the European continent. Two slices:

Across Europe, basic norms of civilised society are giving way to panic. The unvaccinated are being excluded from an ever-wider range of basic rights. Austria has criminalised them. Italy has stopped them doing their jobs. The Dutch police have fired on anti-lockdown demonstrators, seriously injuring some of them. We are witnessing the ultimate folly of frightened politicians who cannot accept that they are impotent in the face of some natural phenomena.

If lockdowns, forced closures of businesses and other brutal countermeasures work, then why are these countries on their fifth wave of the pandemic and their third or fourth lockdown? How long must this go on before we recognise that these measures simply push infections into the period after they are lifted?

The logic of persisting with them now is that they can never be lifted. What were once justified as temporary measures to hold the position until vaccines were available are in danger of being forced on people as permanent changes to their way of life. Perhaps the ugliest feature of the crisis is the politicians’ habit of blaming others for the bankruptcy of their own policies. Opposition to vaccines is foolish. They are highly effective at preventing serious illness and death. But they are not as effective against infection or transmission as was once thought.

…..

Those who refuse to be vaccinated may be unwise, perhaps selfish. But if they are not even allowed to decide what medical procedures they will undergo and what drugs they receive into their own bodies, then there is not much left of their autonomy as human beings. The way is wide open to despotism and unending social discord.

The rest of us should look on and note how easily liberal democracy can be subverted by fear.

Toby Young reasonably warns that the rising “Covid vendetta will end in imprisonment for the unvaccinated.” A slice:

If vaccinated people can transmit the virus, what is the point of banning the unvaccinated from bars, restaurants and other public places? You might as well ban people with ginger hair for all the good it will do.

Yet across Europe we see the unvaccinated being blamed for rising case numbers, with more and more restrictions being placed on their movements.

Vaccine passports and mask mandates are a great example of what’s become known as the ‘politician’s fallacy’, first identified on Yes Minister: ‘We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.’

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Ted Rall – a man of the left – explains that the left, by supporting Covid mandates, betrays the working class. Two slices:

I’m terrified of Covid-19 and have had four Pfizer shots. I think everyone should get vaccinated. But it’s not the role of government to force people to make good health decisions—especially by threatening their ability to earn a living.

In heavily Democratic areas like New York, coronavirus politics leaves workers who won’t or can’t be vaccinated without advocates. Some labor unions, whose mission is to defend employees, are abandoning their members. Workers and their allies should stand behind workers—period. Solidarity means everyone in your class, regardless of how they vote or what they choose to inject. No one should threaten hardworking people with poverty for their personal medical decisions. And no one who self-identifies as being on the left should tolerate, much less sign on to, such a project.

…..

Registered nurse Donna Schmidt, 52, is on unpaid leave from her job at a Long Island-based healthcare system. She has both religious and scientific objections to Covid-19 vaccinations. “I’m not against vaccinations,” she told me. “Traditionally, the Covid-19 vaccine isn’t a vaccine. The CDC changed their definition of a vaccine. It’s truly gene therapy. The mRNA technology has never been used in human beings before.” A self-identified libertarian conservative, Ms. Schmidt says both major political parties have betrayed people like her.

Some of the mandates have been effective. According to the UFT, 97% of New York schoolteachers have received at least one shot. For many, however, it felt like coercion. “I had to do it for the finances of my family,” Queens elementary-school teacher Roxanne Rizzi, 55, told the Associated Press.

“There is a lot of hypocrisy going on among people of all political persuasions,” Ms. Schmidt says. “They support the vaccine mandate because the government and the media has done a good job of making people think this is the only way out.”

She adds: “Historically, government doesn’t give back power. What’s next?” Leftists used to make that argument.

Well, it’s okay because what killed this man wasn’t Covid – and as we all now know, avoiding suffering and death from Covid is the overarching goal of human existence.

As Jay Bhattacharya says about this reality, these delays in the diagnoses of tumors in children are caused not by Covid-19 but, rather, by the lockdowns in (over)reaction to Covid-19.

Joel Zinberg argues that Biden’s abominable vaccine mandate “represents a dangerously expansive vision of federal power over public health.” Two slices:

The Biden administration initially said that the federal government could not and would not impose a vaccine mandate. Yet when the president declared that his patience with the unvaccinated was “wearing thin,” the administration devised—in the words of chief of staff Ron Klain—a “work-around.” OSHA issued an emergency temporary standard (ETS)—a rarely used rulemaking shortcut available when “necessary” to protect against a “grave danger” in the workplace. The standard required businesses with 100 or more employees to ensure that workers either get vaccinated or undergo weekly testing.

…..

A general mandate seems unnecessary to protect most workers, for whom Covid-19 is generally a mild disease. The infection fatality rate for prime-age workers ranges from 0.01 percent for 25-year-olds to 0.4 percent for 55-year-olds. In fact, the danger of exposure to Covid-19 is far lower now, given the many new vaccines and therapeutics available, than when OSHA rejected the ETS last year. Currently 71 percent of those 18 or older are fully vaccinated. Another 11 percent are partially vaccinated. If the mandate takes full effect on January 4, 2022, as planned, the figures will be even higher.

Alex Gutentag describes school closures as “a moral crime.” (HT Jay Bhattacharya) A slice:

Because the academic and social progress of my students was at stake, I followed the COVID-19 data closely from the beginning. And I found that school closures were irrational and counterproductive. According to the most comprehensive studies to date, COVID’s survival rate among children and adolescents appears to be around 99.995%. The child mortality figures for COVID are similar to the respiratory syncytial virus (about 500 annual pediatric deaths), for which schools have never been closed. One Swedish analysis looked at COVID data from March to June 2020 when Swedish schools were open without masking. The analysis found that not a single child died with COVID during that time period. A study from the American Academy of Pediatrics found that in California hospitals, COVID cases for children between May 2020 and February 2021 had been overcounted by 45%. Several other studies found that children were far less likely than adults to spread the virus, that the effectiveness of closures for containing spread was, at best, highly unclear, and that closing schools had no effect on community transmission. Nor were closed schools linked to lower COVID mortality.

…..

These learning losses represent years of life stolen. Literacy and education levels have been linked to longer lifespans. This correlation is not purely economic—better health is also associated with the behavioral and social impacts of education. In addition to academic damage, childhood obesity, which has profound long-term consequences, also increased severely when students were confined to their homes. According to CDC data, adolescent mental health visits to the ER increased by 31% in the United States, and suicidal thoughts and attempts by teenage girls rose by over 50% compared to 2019. So I was eager, as you might imagine, to get back to school in person. When we did return in April 2021, though, I found that the school environment had been transformed.

According to this report in the Daily Mail, humanity’s overreaction to Covid-19 is “causing democracies around the world – including US – to ‘backslide’.“

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 653 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality; specifically, it’s from Acton’s letter of June 1st, 1880, to Mary Gladstone (ellipses and brackets original to J. Rufus Fears):

The great intellectual and moral defect of the present day … [is] the habit of dwelling on appearances, not on realities….

DBx: And so this same intellectual and moral defect continues more than 140 years later.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Eric Boehm exposes the economic illiteracy (and political opportunism) at the heart of Elizabeth Warren’s nonsensical claim that inflation is caused by price gouging. A slice:

Warren is probably right that successful multinational corporations like oil companies do respond to shifts in the economy by finding ways to turn a profit. Because, well, that’s what they have to do to keep being successful multinational companies. There’s hardly anything shadowy or suspicious about that. You can put gas in your car this morning because oil companies are making a profit, whether Warren approves or not.

The price-gouging claim, however, is just wildly off base and smacks of political desperation. For months, Democrats claimed that dumping trillions of dollars into the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic—in the form of direct payments, expanded unemployment benefits, and other spending—would not trigger inflation. Then they claimed inflation was transitory. Months later, it now looks like significant inflation will continue well into next year, so a scapegoat must be found.

But Warren’s claim that oil companies are jacking up prices to turn a bigger profit doesn’t stand up to even the slightest scrutiny.

In this new video, my colleague Dan Klein supplies a splendid introduction to Adam Smith’s 1759 book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Alex Pollock celebrates Frank Knight’s great work, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit – which was published 100 years ago this year. (DBx: Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit played a major role in both my masters thesis and in my dissertation. I read Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit multiple times, and each time carefully. Each time I learned much. The nearby photo is of my dog-eared copy – obtained new in 1979 – of this truly great book.)

Scott Lincicome and Ilana Blumsack wonder what proponents of electric-vehicle tax credits really have up their sleeves.

Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler explains that politicians have well and truly earned our distrust. A slice:

Others are more subtle. Did you ever wonder why former media darling and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sent Covid patients back to nursing homes instead of to the Javits Center or the USNS Comfort hospital ship, which President Trump had sent? The Cuomo re-election campaign received more than $1 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association in 2018. Mr. Cuomo then increased Medicaid fees paid to nursing homes and hospitals. When the pandemic hit, the same hospital association requested that nursing homes be compelled to accept patients who had tested positive for Covid-19. Then, as deaths mounted, the Cuomo administration underreported the number.

In this recent letter in the Wall Street Journal, Cato Institute president emeritus Ed Crane pushes back against Chris DeMuth’s celebration of “national conservatism.” A slice:

Then he informs us “I have been a libertarian since I was a little boy,” albeit taken aback by some of the more extreme conclusions of the philosophy. He is now an “empirical libertarian.”

As one who actually has been a libertarian since I was a little boy, I hardly would want to chase away a thinker as significant as Mr. DeMuth. But his claim, characteristic of national conservatism, that “the president is not only CEO of the executive bureaucracies but also, and primarily, head of state, responsible for the nation’s success and all of its citizens’ welfare” runs counter to both the “empirical” modifier and the libertarian principle.

George Leef summarizes the ugly reality of Nancy MacLean’s so-called “scholarship.” A slice:

Duke University history professor Nancy MacLean has become famous for her ad hominem attacks on economists who advocated limited government. First she went after James Buchanan, and then most recently, Milton Friedman.  Her “scholarship” is not meant to elicit truth but to advance the leftist claim that anyone who argues against their omnipotent government agenda must at heart be an evil person.

The great Bruce Yandle explains why we should certainly not celebrate Biden’s shift from tariffs to quotas.

John Sailer reports on why we should all avoid ever being treated by physicians – “physicians” – now being trained, very much in woke absurdities, at the UNC School of Medicine. (HT George Leef)

Should We Help Workers Who Lose Particular Jobs to Imports?

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my latest column for AIER, I ask – and offer an answer to – the question that is the title of this post. A slice:

In addition to the possibility of saving in anticipation of possible job losses – that is, for stretches of those “rainy days” that we’ve been warned of since childhood – most workers today have a range of choices of jobs, with these jobs differing in the prospects they contain for their holders being laid off because of foreign competition. And even if not all workers are aware that, say, jobs in steel mills are more likely to be destroyed by trade than are jobs, say, in aviation maintenance, if only some workers become aware of this fact – or suspect it with sufficient seriousness – the supply of labor for steel mills will fall relative to the supply of labor for aviation maintenance. One result will be a rise in the wages paid to steel workers relative to the wages paid to aviation-maintenance workers. These higher wages for steel workers compensate them for their greater likelihood, compared to that of aviation-maintenance workers, of losing their jobs to imports.

In short, the market has a built-in adjustment mechanism that at least partially compensates workers ahead of time for holding jobs that are at unusually high risk of being destroyed by imports. Because this ‘compensating differential’ operates in labor markets, when the government gives special assistance to workers who are laid off because of imports, one result is that these workers wind up being overcompensated.

But the economic consequences extend further. Such special assistance eventually attracts into these ‘at risk’ jobs more workers than would otherwise be attracted into those jobs. As a consequence, the wages for these ‘at risk’ jobs fall, thus wiping out the compensating differentials in the wages of steel workers relative to the wages of aviation-maintenance workers. The final result is an imposition – an “externalizing” – on taxpayers of part of the cost of owning and operating steel mills. I can see no reason why a high likelihood of facing vigorous competition from imports should entitle a business to government subsidies.

Too much of the discussion about job destruction and worker transition rests on the questionable assumption that all actors in markets, including workers, are either myopic or quite unintelligent (or both).

When analyzed carefully, the case for government assistance to help workers who lose jobs to imports is revealed as being quite weak.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Julie Birky describes the terrible toll that colleges’ and universities’ overreaction to Covid-19 is taking on the mental health of students. A slice:

Some university administrators have echoed this sentiment, manipulating students by telling them to comply is to be altruistic. Leaders’ words and policies have led to shame, isolation, and disconnection which all exacerbate mental illness and suicide. Responsibility for the current mental health crisis on college campuses partially falls on the leaders who made and enforced such serious restrictions.

Threatening emails, door checkers, mandated testing, long quarantines, Plexiglas barriers, increased cleaning supplies, and mobile tracking apps have all been prioritized over the mental health of students. This is akin to building levees and dams in the desert, while ignoring the flooding coastline. Students are facing far more serious risks from mental illness than they are from COVID-19. While the virus may have been new in 2020, mental illness and suicide risks among college students were not.

Gary Sidley asks: “Why is the left so enthusiastic about Covid restrictions, given that the people they harm the most are the poor and vulnerable?” A slice:

Thus, Donald Trump – the U.S. president when Covid first emerged – was highly sceptical towards the idea that the disease posed a once-in-a-lifetime threat that necessitated unprecedented measures (such as lockdowns and masking the healthy) to control it. Trump was detested by those on the left of the political continuum and this antipathy may have led Labour supporters to adopt a diametrically opposed position and to enthusiastically embrace the restrictions. Conversely, the New Zealand leader, Jacinda Arden – the golden girl for many on the political left – has stridently promoted a ‘zero Covid’ approach to the pandemic involving the early and extreme imposition of restrictions. It seems likely that her narrative and associated actions will have powerfully promoted lockdowns and masks as legitimate and necessary measures in the minds of Labour supporters.

The prominent role of the Government’s deployment of covert ‘nudges’ to increase people’s compliance with Covid restrictions has been well documented (see here and here). The mediators underpinning these methods of mass manipulation often rely on constructs that would be expected to resonate with Labour Party supporters. As such, the widespread use of ‘nudging’ may have nurtured greater acceptance of the regulations among those on the political left.

More physicians are warning against vaccinating young children against Covid-19. (DBx: To anticipate reactions, I again declare that I am not anti-vax, although I am deeply opposed to government-imposed vaccine mandates. I myself am fully vaccinated and, judging from what I know about Covid vaccinations and the risks posed by Covid, I believe that Covid vaccinations for older adults who have not had Covid are advisable. Yet because no Covid vaccine is risk-free, and because children are at virtually no risk from Covid, insisting on wholesale vaccination of young children seems to me to be madness. See again John Tierney.)

Writing in the Telegraph, Matt Ridley makes the case for getting to the bottom of the origins of SARS-CoV-2. A slice:

If this pandemic began with the food trade, changes must be made there to prevent another. If it began with products used in traditional Chinese medicine, a set of practices endorsed by the World Health Organisation in 2019 at the urging of Xi Jinping, that needs revisiting. And if the pandemic began as a result of risky virology research, that category of work needs to be made safer. Wuhan is the site of the world’s most active research programme on Sars-like viruses, and viruses have escaped from labs many times.

I hope that someone creates an app such as this for the United States.

Australians remain in the soul-suffocating grip of Covid Derangement Syndrome. A slice:

If you’re screening and excluding family members from Christmas lunch according to their vaccination status, you’re doing Christmas all wrong.

But Australia’s top rating breakfast television program suggested on Friday that you do just that.

Channel Seven’s Sunrise program featured a segment on “how to handle unvaccinated loved ones over the festive season”, insisting that unvaccinated family members will place everyone else in “a unique predicament” on Christmas Day.

Did mainstream media really need to go there? As if the last two years have not been divisive enough without using Christmas Day to promote fear and segregation.

Program host David Koch told viewers: “As Christmas approaches many of us will be faced with a new dilemma – how to handle unvaccinated loved ones and whether you should spend time with them over the festive season or sit next to them at Christmas dinner.”

Aldus Huxley, who said “the propogandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human”, would have been impressed.

Personally, I can’t imagine refusing to sit next to a family member – on Christmas Day no less – because they haven’t been jabbed. But that’s because I’m not a jerk. Clearly, the Sunrise producers have a different view of their audience.

But the important fact that we are now instructed to hold as gospel scientific truth is that the source of suffering and death that counts above all is Covid-19! Why, it’s almost a blessing to suffer and die from anything else!

Julie L Bach tweets (emphasis added) (HT Jay Bhattacharya):

This is why our pandemic playbooks told us not to close down society. You don’t just turn this level of fear off like a switch. I hope we can all work towards never shutting down society like this again. Ever.

In this short piece in the Lancet, Günter Kampf argues that stigmatizing the unvaccinated is unjustified:

In the USA and Germany, high-level officials have used the term pandemic of the unvaccinated, suggesting that people who have been vaccinated are not relevant in the epidemiology of COVID-19. Officials’ use of this phrase might have encouraged one scientist to claim that “the unvaccinated threaten the vaccinated for COVID-19”. But this view is far too simple.

There is increasing evidence that vaccinated individuals continue to have a relevant role in transmission. In Massachusetts, USA, a total of 469 new COVID-19 cases were detected during various events in July, 2021, and 346 (74%) of these cases were in people who were fully or partly vaccinated, 274 (79%) of whom were symptomatic. Cycle threshold values were similarly low between people who were fully vaccinated (median 22·8) and people who were unvaccinated, not fully vaccinated, or whose vaccination status was unknown (median 21·5), indicating a high viral load even among people who were fully vaccinated. In the USA, a total of 10 262 COVID-19 cases were reported in vaccinated people by April 30, 2021, of whom 2725 (26·6%) were asymptomatic, 995 (9·7%) were hospitalised, and 160 (1·6%) died. In Germany, 55·4% of symptomatic COVID-19 cases in patients aged 60 years or older were in fully vaccinated individuals, and this proportion is increasing each week. In Münster, Germany, new cases of COVID-19 occurred in at least 85 (22%) of 380 people who were fully vaccinated or who had recovered from COVID-19 and who attended a nightclub. People who are vaccinated have a lower risk of severe disease but are still a relevant part of the pandemic. It is therefore wrong and dangerous to speak of a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Historically, both the USA and Germany have engendered negative experiences by stigmatising parts of the population for their skin colour or religion. I call on high-level officials and scientists to stop the inappropriate stigmatisation of unvaccinated people, who include our patients, colleagues, and other fellow citizens, and to put extra effort into bringing society together.