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Russell Roberts's Blog, page 212
November 12, 2021
Some Covid Links
Reason‘s Jacob Sullum explains a duel of definitions at the heart of the legal effort to abolish Biden’s abominable vaccination mandate. Here’s his conclusion:
Although the Occupational Safety and Health Act “is not a catchall to be leveraged when Congress has not otherwise authorized federal action,” the plaintiffs say, “that is precisely how it is being used here.” The White House presented the ETS as part of a broader effort to boost the nationwide vaccination rate. The aim, it said, is to “reduce the number of unvaccinated Americans by using regulatory powers and other actions to substantially increase the number of Americans covered by vaccination requirements.”
But the federal government has no general authority to protect public health, control communicable diseases, or require vaccination, all of which are primarily state responsibilities. That is why the administration decided to couch the vaccine mandate as a workplace safety measure. We’ll see whether the courts think that description fits.
Debate #3: Should healthy health care workers (particularly young ones <40) be mandated to receive boosters? I would argue no; evidence that this strategy will protect their patients is absent, and moreover current rates of nosocomial transmission are already so low it will be hard to improve on. The argument it is needed to ensure a work force in the winter season is undermined by mandates which result in some people being fired (i.e. further lowering work force)
Debate #4: Should the AAP and CDC continue to recommend we mask 2-year olds against the World Health Organization advice? Uh… no. We have to finally admit we never had evidence for this policy.
Debate #5: Should schools continue to have masking mandates? The CDC should have tested this policy with cluster RCT, but already the day to sunset it has come. It should end promptly.
Much of the media dealt with the upturn in Britain’s fortunes in a much simpler way. They ignored it. In more than a few instances, they explicitly claimed that cases were still rising. Interviewing Boris Johnson on 2 November, two weeks after cases peaked, CNN’s lead anchor, Christiane Amanpour, asserted that ‘there’s a big spike in Covid in this country and the record here is worse than it is elsewhere in Europe’. The following day, deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam was asked in a BBC interview: ‘Why are schools not putting masks in place, with cases rising in school-age children?’ And Sky News tweeted: ‘With the UK’s coronavirus epidemic escalating by the day, it’s no longer a case of if Plan B will be triggered but when, say experts.’
Everyone knows the media prefer bad news to good news, but there was something almost pathological about this refusal to look the facts in the face. Could it be sheer ignorance?
On 9 November, the Evening Standard reported: ‘UK Covid deaths soar to 262.’ And the Sun ran the headline: ‘UK daily Covid deaths hit 262 in highest rise in a WEEK.’ It was a Tuesday. Anyone with even a passing interest in the statistics knows that the NHS always reports fewer deaths over the weekend and then catches up with the backlog on Tuesday. It is therefore almost inevitable that the ‘highest rise in a week’ will be seen on a Tuesday and that the figure will appear to ‘soar’ if you compare it to a Monday (which is what the Evening Standard did). When compared to the previous Tuesday, however, the number of deaths had actually fallen.
…..
Senior officials in the health service made matters worse by making outlandish claims which veered into anti-vax territory. The Health Service Journal quoted ‘one of the most respected chief executives in the NHS’ saying: ‘This is far worse than January – the vaccine hasn’t saved us this time.’ On the same day, the chief executive of NHS England, Amanda Pritchard, beclowned herself by telling the preposterous lie that we ‘have had 14 times the number of people in hospital with Covid-19 than we saw this time last year’. When it was pointed out that there are actually 30 per cent fewer people in hospital with Covid than this time last year, she ‘clarified’ that she was comparing August 2021 to August 2020 and added the frankly unbelievable claim that she didn’t have more recent figures.
Pritchard told the original fib while calling on the public to get their booster shots. Perhaps she thought that by massaging the figures she could turbo-charge national paranoia and put a rocket under the vaccination campaign. If so, she may have been mistaken. Her words were nectar to the smiley-faced ‘sceptics’ since they appeared to prove that the vaccines were not only useless but that the hospitals were virtually empty last November, as they had claimed at the time.
Why did the U.S.-Canada land border remain closed for so long?
The straw man is stomping again on the western European continent.
A manifestation of Covidocratic tyranny in New Zealand.
The vaccine mandates are a prime example of a short-sighted health policy. For example, firing nurses will put health care systems at risk of being overwhelmed, harming the sick and vulnerable.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 22 of Michael Porter’s 2000 essay “Attitudes, Values, Beliefs, and the Microeconomics of Prosperity,” which is chapter 2 in Culture Matters, Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, eds. (2000):
A big part of the task in economic development, then, is educational because many citizens and even their leaders lack a framework for understanding the modern economy, seeing their role in it, or perceiving their stake in the behavior of other groups in society. Lack of understanding often allows special interests to block change that will widely benefit the nation’s prosperity.
November 11, 2021
Some Non-Covid Links
Virginia’s Loudoun County Public Schools, which were ground zero in the debate over the role of parents in their kids’ education, paid $314,000 for critical race theory coaching for its teachers from the Equity Collaborative — a consulting firm that turns critical race theory into practices for “building more equitable learning environments.” In its presentation “Introduction to Critical Race Theory” the Equity Collaborative instructs teachers that racism is “an inherent part of American civilization” and attacks “ideas of colorblindness, the neutrality of the law, incremental change, and equal opportunity for all” for maintaining “whites’ power and strongholds within society.” It also questions “the idea of meritocracy” which “allows the empowered … to feel ‘good’ and have a clear conscience” and concludes with a breakout session for teachers to discuss “How might you use CRT to identify and address systemic oppression in your school, district or organization?”
One Loudoun country parent filed the public record request to find out what took place in these sessions and obtained a set of talking points used by the Equity Collaborative to train Virginia teachers. They were encouraged not to “profess color blindness,” but rather to admit their own “racist, sexist, heterosexist, or other detrimental attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and feelings” and acknowledge that “addressing one’s Whiteness (e.g., white privilege) is crucial for effective teaching.”
Thomas C. Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era is a revelation (I review the book here). It turns out that a lot of the unintended and lamented consequences of things like price controls and workplace safety regulations were actually intended and celebrated consequences in the eyes of Progressive Era social scientists. These rules weren’t there to protect women, children, and the very low-skilled from rapacious, exploiting employers. They were there largely to protect white men from their competition. Leonard quotes Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who said that the unemployment intervention created was “not a mark of social disease, but actually of social health.”
Bryan Caplan wins another bet.
The same hasty commentary exists in the dozens of articles published daily about why we allegedly “need” a federal paid-leave policy. For instance, Eric Levitz of New York magazine recently opined that “Today, virtually every developed country boasts a paid-family-leave program that exceeds the 1919 standard — except for the United States, which still has no national paid-leave policy whatsoever.”
He implies that not having a national government program means workers’ benefits are stuck at 1919 levels. Also implied in pieces like this is that if Democrats succeed in passing the Build Back Better paid leave legislation, everyone without paid leave would get it. This logic is both sloppy and uninformed.
Commenting on new survey results published by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago for the American Enterprise Institute, Angela Rachidi writes, “Our newest findings contradict a central argument for the Democrat’s proposed government takeover of paid leave: that most workers cannot access paid leave when they need it.” For instance, the survey reveals that throughout the pandemic most workers had access to paid leave from their employers. Rachidi also notes that “most workers were paid during their time away, and this was consistent across types of leave.”
The U.N. estimates that even if no country does anything to slow global warming, the annual damage by 2100 will be equivalent to a 2.6% cut in global gross domestic product. Given that the U.N. also expects the average person to be 450% as rich in 2100 as today, that figure falls only to 434% if the temperature rises unimpeded. This is a problem, but not the end of the world.
That means we don’t have to panic but instead can decide policy rationally. Economist William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize in 2018 for his work on effective climate solutions, and the chart nearby shows the outcome of his model to find the optimal climate policy. His crucial point is that the damage global warming inflicts aren’t the only costly part of climate change; climate policies also create significant economic harm.
Speaking of climate hysteria, George Will wonders if it has hit its peak with COP26. A slice:
The Hoover Institution’s John H. Cochrane, a.k.a. the Grumpy Economist, notes that even with extreme assumptions about increased global temperature and negligible adaptation measures, it is difficult to postulate a cost larger than 5 percent of global GDP by 2100. Even assuming meager 2 percent growth, U.S. GDP in 2100 will be 400 percent larger than now. At 3 percent compounded growth, there will be 1,000 percent more GDP than now. From 1940 to 2000, Cochrane reminds, there was 3.8 percent compound annual growth, and GDP increased 10-fold.
Phil Magness is no fan of the proposed wealth tax.
We Simply Don’t Know
David Henderson’s recent EconLog post on carbon taxes is excellent.
And here, slightly modified, is a comment that I left on his post:
David:
Excellent post. Coase would nod approvingly!
One alternative – not to say better – way of doing what I take you here to be doing is to ask this question: How do we know that we’re not already taxing carbon optimally, or perhaps even super-optimally? There are currently in place taxes – in the U.S. and elsewhere – on carbon fuels (and on activities that emit carbon). The fact that carbon continues to be emitted, and the fact that these emissions plausibly generate “costs,” does not imply that carbon emissions today are excessive.
The gains from using carbon fuels are real, and it’s practically impossible to calculate the additional costs that would result from any government-engineered further reduction in carbon emissions. The economy is too complex, and human ingenuity is too great, to permit any such calculation that would be remotely accurate. We simply don’t know and cannot know, what we’ll give up by any further hike in carbon taxes.
Likewise, we simply don’t know, and cannot know, what we’ve given up so far as a result of the existing taxes on carbon and carbon-emitting activities.
Finally (and to your very point), we simply don’t know, and cannot know, what processes, devices, or institutions human ingenuity will come up with – or, more generally, what new opportunities will unfold – in the future. It very well might be the case that a lowering of carbon taxes – say, by unleashing a bit more economic development – would do more over time to protect the environment and human health and well-being than would any increase in carbon taxes.
Of course, the opposite might also be true – namely, that a raising of carbon taxes would prompt reactions that generate net human betterment. But this latter possibility is, by nearly all carbon-tax proponents, simply assumed to be true. These proponents do not realize the extreme tenuousness of their assumptions.
UPDATE: In response to this comment by Zeke5123, I added this comment:
Zeke5123:
Negotiation among many people is indeed impractical. But it’s important to keep in mind a feature of Coase’s work that most people overlook – namely, the bilateralness of externalities. The amount of harm that party A ’causes’ to party B is a function not only of party A’s actions (or inactions) but, necessarily, also of party B’s actions (or inactions). Just as it takes two to tango, it takes (at least) two to externality. (I put ’causes’ in scare-quote-marks because, if indeed the low-cost avoider is party B, then the party that is appropriately described as “causing” the harm is not party A but, instead, party B.)
Coase himself, and understandably, complained often that people overlook this most important part of his analysis.
And so the importance of Coase doesn’t disappear or become neutered if negotiations are impractical – that is, if transaction costs are too high to permit the creation and enforcement of property rights and any resulting negotiations among rights holders. Even with unclear property rights and negotiations being impractical, there remains the question: Which of the parties is the lowest-cost avoider of the harm? Maybe it’s the carbon emitters – or maybe it’s some other party. Simply observing that (1) fossil-fuel-burning power sources emit carbon; (2) such emissions contribute to a greenhouse effect; and (3) left unabated and un-adjusted-to, the greenhouse effect will harm humanity, is insufficient to justify imposing carbon taxes or quotas on carbon emissions.
Some Covid Links
A new statute permitting mandates for EUA products would be unconstitutional as well. Children have a right to bodily autonomy and to refuse unnecessary medical treatment, which their parents exercise on their behalf. The government can’t conscript them as guinea pigs or vessels to protect adults. Young children face virtually no risk from Covid-19 and the mandates mainly serve to assuage adult fear. Young children rarely infect adults, who in any event have had access to vaccines for many months. And children pose no threat to anyone if they have natural immunity.
Jacob Sullum rightly criticizes CDC Director Rochelle Walensky for making baseless, exaggerated claims about masks. Here’s his conclusion:
Given the gap between the study and Walensky’s interpretation of it, she should have avoided the false precision of that “more than 80%” number altogether. You might think a public health official who has repeatedly caught flak for distorting COVID-19 research would have learned to be more careful when presenting scientific findings to the public. Walensky’s mask hyperbole not only further undermines her credibility; it implicitly makes masking look superior to vaccination as a tool for avoiding COVID-19 and preventing its spread, which is hardly a message conducive to public health.
Also worrying about – and warning of – mandated Covid vaccination of children is Richard Koenig.
In a survey of 28 health experts, epidemiologists, immunologists, and virologists, STAT found that a majority were willing to sacrifice in-person social events and activities such as working out in a gym, traveling on public transportation, and even family holiday gatherings to stay home and theoretically avoid the virus.
When asked whether they would be comfortable joining a Thanksgiving gathering with people of all ages and vaccination statuses, 12 of the 28 said they wouldn’t go. Four of the 14 who said they would attend said that the reason someone was unvaccinated would play a role in their decision whether to go. One evolutionary biologist remarked that she was fine with unvaccinated guests who were ineligible for the shot but would not break bread with any eligible parties who opted not to get the jab.
gatito bueno reacts to the above CNBC headline…. and Amy leaves this comment on gatito’s post:
This is a disaster. I live in a Democratic run state and since I am a licensed healthcare provider, an RN, I am mandated to take this medication. A medication I do not want or need. As an RN, working in Emergency Rooms, I have been exposed to not only Covid 19, but the seasonal flu, I worked thru the swine flu epidemic as well as the SARS epidemic. I have started IV’s on HIV positive, Hep B positive, drug addicts unconscious from OD’s etc. I have never felt that my health was in jeopardy and since continued education is mandatory to maintain your RN license, I try and stay up on the most prevalent issues concerning healthcare. I have not had a flu for over 30 years, I am not the picture of health but I don’t smoke or drink. I certainly do not need anyone telling me how to take care of myself, or my family. Yet my ability to support myself and my household hinges on being subjected to having something injected into me that is unnecessary. This is not the America, or world, that I want to be a part of.
“Ten states sue the U.S. over the vaccine mandate for health care workers” – so reads a headline in the New York Times. Here are the opening paragraphs:
Ten states filed a lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to block the Biden administration’s coronavirus vaccine mandate for health care workers, on the heels of a court decision that temporarily halted the broader U.S. requirement that workers of all large employers be vaccinated or undergo weekly testing.
The new suit, filed in U.S. District Court in eastern Missouri, claims that the rule issued last week by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services “threatens with job loss millions of health care workers who risked their lives in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic to care for strangers and friends in their communities.”
The 10 states also argue that the rule “threatens to exacerbate an alarming shortage of health care workers, particularly in rural communities, that has already reached a boiling point.” They say any further losses will endanger patients, causing “devastating adverse effects on health care services.”
Annabel Fenwick Elliott resists Covidocratic tyranny.
But the important thing is that what these children will suffer or die from is not the lone ailment for which it is unacceptable to suffer and die: Covid-19. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Jacob Howland decries what he rightly calls America’s “Covid despots.” Two slices:
I note rather that the logic of 21st-century technocratic despotism was spelled out long ago in Plato’s Republic. In that dialogue, a class of self-styled experts — the philosopher-kings and their academically-trained ministers — considers its exclusive claim to a science of politics as a title to rule. Contemptuous of what they regard as the ignorant many, they treat their fellow citizens as subjects to be manipulated, and for reasons Matthew Crawford suggested in his essay on the new public health despotism.
They do so first, because persuasion takes time and effort and is less efficient than other available methods for achieving the desired results. In a democratic republic, this is a fundamental corruption of power. Second, because the notion that governance is an applied science or techne encourages the idea that human beings are basically raw materials to be shaped and stamped, like blanks at the Denver mint. Left unchecked, the state’s fundamentally idolatrous desire to coin young souls exclusively in its own image leads to the destruction of the family. The Attorney General’s attempt effectively to criminalise parental veto over public school curricula is a step in this direction. And third, because technocratic elites are inclined to regard the unsophisticated many as cognitively impaired. In the Beautiful City of the Republic, the rulers’ medicinal lies are justified on the ground that one wouldn’t give weapons to madmen. Just so, Dr Fauci’s supposedly noble lies about Covid presuppose that Americans are too sick to be entrusted with the truth.
It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which the therapeutic idiom of bureaucracies has taken hold in United States.
…..
This question of risk goes to the heart of the problem Crawford raised. Failure to comply with Covid regulations is presumed to be irrational because it exposes the populace to unnecessary dangers. But risk is always relative to possible outcomes, which today are seen darkly through a glass of psychological and physical safetyism. To take a real example, does the possibility that a student might suffer psychic injury from a book spine justify removing a volume entitled American Negro Poetry from a high school library? But what sort of injury are we talking about? And how does it compare to the possibility that a student will never hear Langston Hughes sing America or speak of rivers, or dream a world “where every man is free”? And above all, who has the right to decide these matters?
Our technocratic mandarins dislike such questions and recoil from the political uncertainties of democratic debate. Whatever its psychological causes, their longing for certainty in practice leads them to insist on it in theory, and so to end debate by any means necessary. This is an engine of comprehensive despotism because it can be satisfied only with the advent of univocal global answers.
Tonia Buxton calls Australia’s and New Zealand’s Covid restrictions “horrific.”
Prompted by this report in The Straits Times, Phil Magness (on Facebook) comments:
The Chinese government still thinks that Covid can be spread by the mail.
These are the same people that the ZeroCovid kooks and self-described “lockdown fascist” Sam Bowman have been praising for their Covid response.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 451 of the late University of Washington economist Paul Heyne‘s profound 1993 article “Economics, Ethics, and Ecology,” as this article is reprinted in the 2008 collection of Heyne’s writings, “Are Economists Basically Immoral?” and Other Essays on Economics, Ethics, and Religion (Geoffrey Brennan and A.M.C. Waterman, eds.) (original emphasis):
What would happen if economists abandoned their preoccupation with efficiency and talked openly about justice? Since judgments about efficiency presuppose judgments as to who shall have which rights, economists who employ efficiency criteria are implicitly making use of a theory of rights. Does economics have anything useful to say about the rights that people ought to have?
November 10, 2021
Covid Is Indeed Far More Dangerous To the Old Than To the Young
Here’s a letter to someone who says that he graduated in 1980 with a degree in mathematics from George Mason U.
Mr. S__:
Thanks for your e-mail. It’s especially nice to hear from a GMU alum.
In response to my letter in today’s Wall Street Journal – in which I note that Florida’s age-adjusted Covid death toll isn’t terribly worse than California’s – you write that “age-related rankings [are] actually irrelevant in this case because Covid itself is indiscriminate with respect to age.”
With respect, your claim is incorrect. Covid is highly discriminate with respect to age. According to the latest figures from the CDC, in the U.S. 75 percent of “deaths involving COVID-19” are of people 65 years old and older, with people 85 years old and older accounting for a whopping 27 percent of all Covid deaths. The percentage of Covid deaths of people below the age of 50 is a mere six. The risk posed by Covid to the very young is minuscule.
As summarized on Twitter by Stanford medical professor Jay Bhattacharya, “Mortality from #COVID19 differs more than a thousand-fold between the old and young.”
Inexplicably to me, many people believe that this steep age-gradient of Covid fatalities is irrelevant. But irrelevant or not, no one can deny that this steep age-gradient is real and that it was known early on (as evidenced, for example, by this March 20th, 2020, op-ed in the New York Times).
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
el gato malo understands the media bias that distorts reporting on Covid.
Also from el gato malo is this report on so-called “Long Covid.” A slice:
surprising basically no one who has actually been paying attention, this french study seems to demonstrate that “long covid” is not, in fact, predominantly caused by covid.
The media dub Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general awaiting confirmation, a “firebrand” who’s “controversial.” He opposes mask and vaccine mandates — and so is erroneously called “anti-vax” by his foes.
But Ladapo came off as none of these things when I spoke to him for an exclusive interview last week. Calm and poised, Ladapo became a national figure after a clip of him saying the obvious — “The data do not support any clinical benefit for children in schools with mask mandates” — went viral.
In so many ways, the Nigerian-born Ladapo is the anti-Fauci. While the oft-criticized Ladapo has stayed consistent, frequent television guest Fauci has reversed himself many times on many details of pandemic policy without showing any data to support those reversals.
Florida’s coronavirus case rate has dropped to among the lowest in the country as the state’s Republican leaders continue to fight vaccine mandates and other measures to combat the pandemic.
The state currently has the lowest count of cases per capita, jointly tied with Georgia and Hawaii at 7 cases per 100,000 people, according to data from The New York Times.
In contrast, California—a state that has enforced some of the strictest mandates in the country, has seen infections on the rise. Experts have explained that states that saw large outbreaks driven by the Delta variant over the summer now see fewer avenues for the virus to spread, thanks to greater numbers of people acquiring immunity after recovering from infections plus those who are vaccinated.
(Please excuse my vanity, but I’m pleased that in today’s Wall Street Journal is this letter of mine on Covid death tolls in Florida and in California.)
Jeffrey Tucker reflects on the past 21 months. A slice:
Thus are we transitioning from the Covid kabuki dance to a system of overt segregation of the clean vs the unclean, a situation we’ve encountered before during the most morally egregious episodes in modern history. While the clean are granted freedom, the unclean cannot travel, cannot participate in public life, and sometimes cannot shop or get medical care.
Jay Bhattacharya recommends Toby Green’s new book, The COVID Consensus. In his tweet to recommend Green’s book, Jay writes (emphasis added):
The COVID Consensus by @toby00green is essential reading to understand what lockdown really means for the poor worldwide.
The architects of lockdown, narrow experts blind to the devastating collateral harms they caused, would do well to heed Toby.
Michael Brendan Dougherty wonders why Democrats refuse to end their love affair with masks.
I have to say what really annoys me, and my lovely editor, Victoria, is that we are held to the highest standards of accuracy. If we tried an Amanda Pritchard and published arrant nonsense about Covid on these pages we would soon be explaining ourselves to IPSO, the independent press standards organisation. Before you could say misleading information, Queen Vic and I would be sitting on a pavement outside Telegraph Towers with a dog on a rope, caterwauling the greatest hits of George Michael, dependent on a few spare coppers dropped into a hat by passing strangers. That’s what happens to journalists who make it up as they go along.
“And what about McAuliffe’s Oct. 7 comment that 1,142 children were in ICU beds?” Kessler asks. “That number seemed totally off-kilter. (For the week ended Oct. 2, the number of children in hospitals, not necessarily in intensive care, was just 35.) [On October 21] there were only 334 people (of all ages) in ICU beds in Virginia, according to the state health department data.”
Still, can we really conclude that this is a lie rather than an honest mistake? The Post’s fact-checkers actually reached out to the McAuliffe campaign questioning these false figures yet the gubernatorial candidate continued to use them.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Private entrepreneurs and their employees go to the mat to boost Covid vaccinations!
Quotation of the Day…
… is from a 19th-century U.S. Secretary of the Interior and U.S. Senator from Missouri, Carl Schurz (1829-1906), an immigrant from Germany to America, as quoted on page 582 of the late Yale Brozen‘s superb 1965 essay “The Revival of Traditional Liberalism” (available without charge on-line here) as it appears in Liberty Fund’s 1981 single-volume collection of New Individualist Review (ellipses original to Brozen):
Here in America you can see how slightly a people needs to be governed….. Here are governments, but no rulers – governors, but they are clerks. All the great educational establishments, the churches, the great means of transportation, etc., that are being organized here – almost all of these things owe their existence not to official authority, but to the spontaneous cooperation of private individuals. It is only here that you realize how superfluous governments are in many affairs in which, in Europe, they are considered entirely indispensable, and how the opportunity of doing something inspires a desire to do it.
November 9, 2021
Some Covid Links
Martin Kulldorff continues to write courageously, sensibly, and humanely about Covid and lockdowns. Two slices:
During his short four-month stint at the White House, Dr. Scott Atlas worked to better protect older Americans while urging the return of children to school. While he succeeded in implementing more frequent Covid testing in nursing homes, he was unable to turn the White House Covid Task Force away from the ineffective but damaging lockdowns to traditional and more effective measures to protect the vulnerable.
Seeking to evade blame during congressional hearings, Dr. Deborah Birx, the former task force coordinator, is now accusing Atlas for the consequences of the lockdown policies that she urged and implemented during her one-year tenure, falsely claiming that he wanted to “let the infection spread widely without mitigation.”
…..
An article in the British Medical Journal falsely claimed that Bhattacharya, Gupta, and I have “expressed opposition to mass vaccination.” The opposite is true. I was even removed from a CDC working group for being too pro-vaccine, after arguing against the CDC pause on the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. By publishing erroneous claims that there are prominent professors at Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford who are against the Covid vaccines, the British Medical Journal gave the anti-vaccine movement a boost.
The central fallacies in pro-lockdown thinking are that more restrictions automatically lead to fewer Covid deaths, that focused protection is impossible, and that collateral lockdown damage is insignificant. To his credit, [Ryan] Grim acknowledged that school closures were a disastrous mistake. He even moved out of Washington, DC so his own children could go to school.
There’s an important exception, though: If a child already had Covid, there’s no scientific basis for vaccination. Deep within the 80-page Pfizer report is this crucial line: “No cases of COVID-19 were observed in either the vaccine group or the placebo group in participants with evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection.” That’s consistent with the largest population-based study on the topic, which found that natural immunity was 27 times as effective as vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic Covid. Natural immunity is likely even more robust in children, given their stronger immune systems. An indiscriminate Covid vaccine mandate may result in unintended harm among children with natural immunity.
Few now remember that for most of 2020, the word “experiment” had negative connotations. That was what Swedes were accused of conducting when we — unlike the rest of the world — maintained some semblance of normality. The citizens of this country generally didn’t have to wear face masks; young children continued going to school; leisure activities were largely allowed to continue unhindered.
This experiment was judged early on as “a disaster” (Time magazine), a “the world’s cautionary tale” (New York Times), “deadly folly” (the Guardian). In Germany, Focus magazine described the policy as “sloppiness”; Italy’s La Repubblica concluded that the “Nordic model country” had made a dangerous mistake. But these countries — all countries — were also conducting an experiment, in that they were testing unprecedented measures to prevent the spread of a virus. Sweden simply chose one path, the rest of Europe another.
…..
At this stage, it was not unreasonable to conclude that Sweden would pay a high price for its freedom. Throughout the spring of 2020, Sweden’s death toll per capita was higher than most other countries.
But the experiment didn’t end there. During the year that followed, the virus continued to ravage the world and, one by one, the death tolls in countries that had locked down began to surpass Sweden’s. Britain, the US, France, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, Argentina, Belgium — countries that had variously shut down playgrounds, forced their children to wear facemasks, closed schools, fined citizens for hanging out on the beach and guarded parks with drones — have all been hit worse than Sweden. At the time of writing, more than 50 countries have a higher death rate. If you measure excess mortality for the whole of 2020, Sweden (according to Eurostat) will end up in 21st place out of 31 European countries. If Sweden was a part of the US, its death rate would rank number 43 of the 50 states.
This fact is shockingly underreported. Consider the sheer number of articles and TV segments devoted to Sweden’s foolishly liberal attitude to the pandemic last year — and the daily reference to figures that are forgotten today. Suddenly, it is as if Sweden doesn’t exist. When the Wall Street Journal recently published a report from Portugal, it described how the country “offered a glimpse” of what it would be like to live with the virus. This new normal involved, among other things, vaccine passports and face masks at large events like football matches. Nowhere in the report was it mentioned that in Sweden you can go to football matches without wearing a facemask, or that Sweden — with a smaller proportion of Covid deaths over the course of the pandemic — had ended virtually all restrictions. Sweden has been living with the virus for some time.
The WSJ is far from alone in its selective reporting. The New York Times, Guardian, BBC, The Times, all cheerleaders for lockdowns, can’t fathom casting doubt on their efficacy.
And those who’ve followed Sweden’s example have also come in for a lot of criticism. When the state of Florida — more than a year ago and strongly inspired by Sweden — removed most of its restrictions and allowed schools, restaurant and leisure parks to reopen, the judgement from the American media was swift. The state’s Republican governor was predicted to “lead his state to the morgue” (The New Republic). The media was outraged by images of Floridians swimming and sunbathing at the beach.
Natalie Paris justifiably accuses the United States of having “some of the world’s most restrictive Covid rules when it comes to children.” Here’s her conclusion:
A final, yet important, consideration for families wanting to fly Stateside is that, depending on where they go, unvaccinated British children might soon be banned from restaurants and other indoor public places. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) already recommends that unvaccinated children aged two and above wear masks in public spaces, and it has now given the green light for American children aged five and above to be vaccinated. In response, some jurisdictions – such as San Francisco – are considering expanding their vaccine passport requirements to include children of five or more years.
All in all, the US seems a risky prospect for families with little children right now. As a passenger, I’m not sure I’d want to be on a transatlantic flight bearing toddlers. As a parent, if the only way to avoid having my family removed from a plane is to swap my daughter’s imaginary tea parties for games involving mask wearing, I would rather spare everyone the headache.
These themes have jostled with one another for our ever more petrified attention during the past almost-two years.
Each theme is accompanied by the great motif of ‘Zero’ – Zero Covid, Zero Carbon, Zero Tolerance.
There is something tantalizing about Zero. It has an elegant and satisfying simplicity. That it cannot be realised does not dilute its effect, which is to instill in us a new contempt: for the mechanisms of our bodies, for our impact on the world, and for the building blocks of social interaction.
Bombardment by the themes of Covid, Climate and Critical Theory makes us retreat in disgust from ourselves, one another and our world.
And in this lies the great power of Zero: it implies only retreat, that action taken in its name is only privation – less of what we had or have, not as dirty, not as noisy, not as bawdy, not as hurtful, not as unhealthy.
Will Jones exposes the illogic in former British Health Minister (but current Member of Parliament) Matt Hancock’s recent argument for mandatory vaccination of all NHS staff as well as social-care workers. (Hancock, you might recall, is one of the Covidocracy’s many Covidocrits; he resigned his cabinet office this past summer after being caught violating his own Covid guidelines.)
Vinay Prasad calls for research into an absent denominator.
Listening to Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk today, one could be forgiven for thinking human rights were hers to give, and hers to take away.
The Premier, speaking in Brisbane, described the easing of restrictions on movement and association from December 17 as a “reward” for vaccinated people.
“People who are vaccinated have absolutely stepped up and done the right thing and you deserve to keep your freedoms,” she said, straight-faced.
Wait. What?
These freedoms – that Queenslanders may or may not “deserve” – included the ability to go to the pub, a concert, a sporting event, a Christmas party or to visit family members in hospital.
“A lot of people have gone and got vaccinated and they need to be rewarded for their efforts. They have done everything I have asked them to do,” the Premier said.
It is astonishing to me that Australian politicians can speak in this authoritarian tone and receive, as if their due, nothing but approving nods from the press gallery.
Brisbane? Beijing? What’s the difference these days? Not much evidently.
If vaccinated people “deserve” basic freedoms then, by implication, the 20% of Queenslanders who are not vaccinated, are undeserving.
Think about that. If a perfectly healthy person has decided — for whatever reason – that they don’t want to be vaccinated, they are now deemed undeserving of basic rights we all took for granted less than two years ago.
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