Russell Roberts's Blog, page 231

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from George Will’s latest column, titled by the Washington Post “Presidential impatience with covid doesn’t excuse wielding extra-constitutional power“; this passage from Will is prompted in part by a remark made recently on CNN by the authoritarian, and appallingly uninformed, Leana Wen:

The word “travel” is not in the Constitution. Neither is the word “bacon,” but we have a right to have bacon for breakfast, and to raise our children. This puzzles people who think rights are privileges — spaces of autonomy — granted by, and revocable by, government. Such thinking paves the road to what some seem to want: a permission society, where what is not explicitly permitted is implicitly forbidden, or at least contingent on the grace of government.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Jay Bhattacharya talks with Megyn Kelly about Covid vaccines, natural immunity, and the incentives facing hospitals to diagnose Covid.

Martin Kulldorff debates Paul Offit on vaccine mandates.

Carl Heneghan and Martin Kulldorff defend Jay Bhattacharya from efforts by Bhattacharya’s Stanford University colleagues to silence his voice in scientific debate. Two slices:

Last week, anonymous posters with the portrait of Stanford University Professor of Medicine Dr. Jay Bhattacharya were plastered on kiosks around the Stanford campus, linking him to COVID deaths in Florida. Even though cumulative age-adjusted COVID mortality is lower in Florida than in most other large states, these smears appeared.

Taking it one step further, the chair of Stanford’s epidemiology department, Professor Melissa Bondy, circulated a petition among faculty members demanding that the university president exercise his obligation “to clarify for the faculty the limits of public pronouncements when proclaiming on public health policy.”

The petitioners are upset that “several Stanford faculty members have publicly advocated for policies for others that are contrary to those the university has adopted” and that “these recommendations are disturbing and contrary to public health standards; they foster uncertainty and anxiety and put lives at risk.”

While insidiously not naming anyone, the petition explicitly targets Bhattacharya by quoting his answer to a question from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis about masks on children. He responded that “there is no high-quality evidence to support the assertion that masks stop the disease from spreading.” To deserve trust, scientists must be honest about what is and what is not known, and we agree with Bhattacharya.

Randomized trials provide the best available research evidence to inform health-care decisions and are considered the gold standard for determining intervention effects. But no randomized studies have shown that masks in children are effective. Instead, there are observational studies of uneven quality that reach conflicting conclusions.

…..

Stanford University’s striking motto is “The Winds of Freedom Blow.” It is tragic that other stronger winds are now passing through the Stanford campus that are destructive for science and the global scientific community.

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins continues to write wisely about Covid. Two slices:

For most people in most circumstances, the vaccine is a good bet and a no brainer for those whose risk from Covid is much greater than any risk the vaccine might pose. But the net benefit declines quickly as you go down the age table. A shot for a 75-to-84 year-old is 22,000% more likely to save a life than a shot for an 18-to-29.

…..

But starting with Mike Pence on CNBC on March 27, 2020, most politicians decided it was career suicide to speak realistically about the expected course of the pandemic. The virus instead had to be vaguely discussed as if it were an invading team of enemy frogmen that might be tracked down and eliminated.

In a story on Monday acknowledging that Covid won’t be eliminated, it will likely become endemic like the flu, this newspaper generously added that Covid was a disease “that many public-health authorities once believed they could conquer.”

This is not quite right. It was only in the miasma of their rhetoric that they seemed to believe this. Multiple strains of flu and cold-causing coronaviruses once emerged as novel pathogens and now circulate routinely. Any epidemiologist would have told you to expect the same of Covid, at least until they fell insensibly in line with the rhetoric demanded by the career imperatives of active politicians facing the prospect of re-election.

Robert Dingwall laments the fact that the British government can’t quite quit the impossible quest for zero Covid. A slice:

The core problem here is the Prime Minister’s reluctance to stand up and say “this is as good as it gets”. I have previously mentioned Jonathan Van Tam’s dictum that you should never start a medical or public health intervention without being clear when you are going to stop it. While the Government may have seen off the Zero Covid lobby, it is still behaving as if elimination were the goal.

Ministers are not publicly acknowledging that Covid-19 is taking its place alongside other endemic respiratory viruses, and is not necessarily the most dangerous or burdensome of them in a largely vaccinated population. The infection fatality ratio, the chance of dying if you get Covid-19, is currently estimated by the MRC Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge to be around 0.26 per cent – and most of this is in the over-75s, where the rate is 3.3 per cent. This is broadly comparable with the rates for influenza and RSV, another common respiratory virus. Both of these represent more of a threat to the very young, as well as having a significant impact on the over-80s. Covid deaths seem to overlap with both so there is little impact on the overall mortality rate in a vaccinated population.

Karol Markowicz – reflecting on the recent Met Gala – calls out the hypocrisy of Covid-restriction-approving elites. A slice:

Today, all teachers in NYC schools, and in cities around the country, must be vaccinated yet are still forced to wear masks. Being vaccinated only makes invincible those with many zeroes in their bank accounts.

‘But look, these celebrities only went maskless outside. They had to wear masks indoors. Everyone knows wearing a mask outside is silly,’ goes the argument. My five-year-old continues to have to wear a mask for recess. Outside, still, today. There is nothing anyone can say to make it make sense. There is no logic or science behind the rule that kids must be masked at all times, inside and out. Study after study has shown that an unvaccinated child has lower risks than a vaccinated adult. The real problem is that the child is not famous.

Also decrying the Covid-hypocrisy of elites is Reason‘s Robby Soave. A slice:

For what it’s worth, the museum’s policy couldn’t be clearer: All visitors ages two years and older are required to wear masks at all times, regardless of vaccination status. They are also expected to maintain six feet of distance from other people at all times. AOC said she was working to keep the museum open to the public, but when the public visits the museum, they are obligated to follow irritating and (in the case of masks for the vaccinated) largely pointless procedures. Yet the city’s elite are exempted from such requirements.

In fact, the law treats non-celebrities like second-class citizens. Hypocrisy is written into New York City’s official COVID-19 policies. The city’s mandate requires vaccination in a wide variety of circumstances: restaurant customers, gym employees, and museum visitors can all be asked to show their vaccination cards. Visiting celebrities, though, are exempt. The law specifically excludes out-of-town athletes, performance artists, and their entourages. (Last year’s quarantine orders similarly exempted the same groups of people.)

Writing at Unherd, Adam King decries the madness of “Covid safetyism.” Here’s his conclusion:

And more recently, in the Age of Lockdown, social media has given the operation of the availability heuristic nuclear capabilities. The “reasonable man” is bombarded with a very particular set of examples of adverse consequences, and so it is these that stand to determine the shape of negligence. Never mind the social benefits of allowing people to judge for themselves what is best for them and their children, or to apply the much-vaunted precautionary principle according to their own tastes: if you don’t get the vaccine, and the booster shots when they arrive, you’re practically a murderer.

There is a clear and enduring downside to recasting the normal business of everyday life as a special privilege reserved for those who will take their medicine as directed by the government of the day. The upside — increasing the proportion of the vaccinated population from 90% to, say, 98% — is nebulous. Let us keep our heads, while all about us others — France, Australia, New Zealand — are losing theirs, and bear in mind the undeniable fact that we are seeking to strike a balance. In the coming weeks, the Government would do well to consider, very carefully, what is really meant by “reasonable”.

“‘COVID-19 Hospitalizations’ Are an Increasingly Misleading Measure of Severe Disease” – so reports Jacob Sullum. A slice:

In other words, incidental or mild cases accounted for a rising share of so-called COVID-19 hospitalizations—nearly half by the end of June. That means it is increasingly problematic to treat that number, which includes COVID-19 patients without life-threatening symptoms as well as COVID-positive patients admitted for other reasons, as an indicator of severe disease. Notably, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which collects data on what are commonly called “COVID-19 hospitalizations,” uses a more ambiguous term: “COVID-19-associated hospitalizations.” But even that description is misleading, since the tally includes many hospital patients who were not admitted for treatment of COVID-19.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 576 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 a note drawn from Acton’s extensive papers at Cambridge University; (I can find no date for this passage):

Behind the man of action, and above him, is the thinker. You must keep to the line where they meet – the history of political ideas.

What I Fear Is In Humanity’s Future

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

On a flight home yesterday (Tuesday), on United Airlines, from southern California to northern Virginia I was given this napkin. It depressed me deeply because it describes, in an approving – indeed, encouraging – tone, a future that I fear is likely, yet one that I dread.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 80 of Amor Towles’s wonderful 2016 novel, A Gentleman in Moscow:

Fate would not have the reputation it has if it simply did what it seemed it would do.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Art Carden reminds us of the proper role of experts – and of the different, proper role of each individual. Here’s his conclusion:

Mandates, lockdowns, and control–even when urged by experts who mean nothing but the best–throw away a lot of valuable information. First, there is a lot more to life than whatever the expert is an expert on, and this isn’t to suggest people should throw caution to the wind and do whatever is pleasant and convenient. Second, people adapt to new information. They adopt different policies for their schools, restaurants, and businesses. They say “yes” or “no” to invitations based on new information. They wash their hands with varying degrees of care. The experts, moreover, can get things exactly right but also get things generally wrong. Like experts on energy efficiency don’t know where to set your thermostat, experts on health risks don’t know which bundle of risks and precautions is the right one given your goals and values.

Joel Bowman – a native of Australia – reflects on the speed with which the Covidocracy destroyed freedoms. A slice:

It seems the Great Plague of 2020-21 – through which a “mere” 99.98% of us are expected to survive (including, statistically speaking, practically everyone under 65 without serious underlying health conditions) is here to stay… or at least, the insidious and largely unscientific regulations that grew up around it are…

In perhaps no place on the planet has the incessant mission creep of the petty bureaucrat brigade been more astonishing than in aforementioned Australia.

Stories out of the so-called “Lucky Country” daily trespass on the absurd…

Had you told your average Aussie back in March of last year that he would not be heading on his annual football retreat to his beloved Bali… indeed, that he would not be permitted to leave his island home – indefinitely – he’d have laughed you out of the pub.

“That’s the kind of carry-on they play at in commie nations,” he’d have replied. “This ain’t North Korea, mate!”

Today, there’s a better than average chance that same scoffing larikan is under house arrest… unable to leave his home but for one paltry hour of exercise per day (during which he must carry his “papers” and may reasonably expect to be monitored by police helicopter. No joke.)

If he is a single bloke, living alone and in need of some company, he must register his proposed partner with his state government before requesting permission for an “adult sleepover.” (See rules outlined in the so-called “bonk bubble” for details.)

If one of his out-of-state relatives happens to be sick, or even dying, he must request special dispensation to visit them… and even then, chances are high – very high – that his request will be denied.

For more on just how dystopian Australia has become, read this report by Emilie Dye. Two slices:

The city of Sydney is in week 12 of a harsh lockdown that has seen residents in the worst-affected areas confined to their homes 23 hours a day, with just 60 minutes permitted outside for exercise. When people do venture out, it must be between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m.

…..

The obsession with lockdowns surely saved some lives from COVID-19, but it also meant that COVID-19 became the only disease it was unacceptable for a life to be lost to. There is a human cost in terms of diseases not treated, medical appointments missed, and symptoms ignored. A “shadow pandemic” of domestic violence has emerged. An average of 40 minors a day in New South Wales are hospitalized due to self-harm and suicide attempts—up 47 percent from 2019. Our suicide hotline has hit multiple all-time records. Many are watching their life savings slowly dwindle. The restaurant where my partner and I had our first date, an establishment which has been a part of the community for 30 years, recently closed its doors forever. These businesses often represent a lifetime of effort lost.

Apparently, none of those costs matter.

Charles Oliver reports a small incident in a world of Covid hysteria.

Allison Pearson rightly argues that “vaccinating children is a decision for families, not Government, to make.” A slice:

Just look at that Oxford University study which found that 98.4 per cent of students who were sent home for 10 days under the ludicrous bubble system never went on to develop Covid. It was bubbles and mass testing of children that caused the disruption in education, not the virus.

Well, thank goodness that this young woman’s death wasn’t caused by Covid.

Phil Magness on Facebook:

This is quite something.

The BMJ published a new editorial by lockdowner doctors Gavin Yamey and David Gorski, accusing the Great Barrington Declaration and AIER of being “Koch funded.” To support that claim, they linked to an October 2020 article on the website MedPageToday (along with a conspiracy blog by 9/11 Truther Nafeez Ahmed).

The problem: MedPageToday issued a correction to its original article some point over the last year, deleting the erroneous claim about Koch funding. Yamey and Gorski used and cited the uncorrected claim anyway.

Jay Bhattacharya on Twitter:

That obesity is an important only risk factor for poor COVID outcomes was known early in the epidemic. Nevertheless, we adopted lockdowns which caused more obesity. The worse COVID results in turn increased demand for lockdown…

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 199 of George Will’s excellent 2019 book, The Conservative Sensibility:

Because there is more to American political morality than sweeping aside impediments to unmediated majorities, courts matter in America more than in any other democracy.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Johns Hopkins medical professor Marty Makary criticizes the CDC’s continuing insistence on ignoring important data on Covid. A slice:

Sound data from the CDC has been especially lacking on natural immunity from prior Covid infection. On Aug. 25, Israel published the most powerful and scientifically rigorous study on the subject to date. In a sample of more than 700,000 people, natural immunity was 27 times more effective than vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic infections.

Despite this evidence, U.S. public health officials continue to dismiss natural immunity, insisting that those who have recovered from Covid must still get the vaccine. Policy makers and public health leaders, and the media voices that parrot them, are inexplicably sticking to their original hypothesis that natural immunity is fleeting, even as at least 15 studies show it lasts.

Meanwhile, employers fire workers with natural immunity who won’t get vaccinated. Schools disenroll students who won’t comply.

The CDC did put out a study on natural immunity last month, forcefully concluding that vaccinated immunity was 2.3 times better than natural immunity. The CDC used these results to justify telling those with natural immunity to get vaccinated.

But the rate of infection in each group was less than 0.01%, meaning infections were exceedingly rare in the short two-month time period the agency chose to study. This is odd, given there are more than a year of data available. Moreover, despite having data on all 50 states, the CDC only reported data from Kentucky. Was Kentucky the only state that produced the desired result? Why else exclude the same data from the other 49 states?

Some public health officials are afraid to acknowledge natural immunity because they fear some will choose infection over vaccination. But leaders can encourage all Americans who aren’t immune to get vaccinated and be transparent with the data at the same time.

The CDC shouldn’t fish for data to support outdated hypotheses. Heeding the robust Israeli data on natural immunity could help restore the agency’s credibility and even help vaccination efforts.

Writing in The Atlantic, David Zweig warns us to beware of fishy Covid-19 data. (HT Lyle Albaugh) Three slices:

If you want to make sense of the number of COVID hospitalizations at any given time, you need to know how sick each patient actually is. Until now, that’s been almost impossible to suss out. The federal government requires hospitals to report every patient who tests positive for COVID, yet the overall tallies of COVID hospitalizations, made available on various state and federal dashboards and widely reported on by the media, do not differentiate based on severity of illness. Some patients need extensive medical intervention, such as getting intubated. Others require supplemental oxygen or administration of the steroid dexamethasone. But there are many COVID patients in the hospital with fairly mild symptoms, too, who have been admitted for further observation on account of their comorbidities, or because they reported feeling short of breath. Another portion of the patients in this tally are in the hospital for something unrelated to COVID, and discovered that they were infected only because they were tested upon admission.

…..

The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.

…..

But the study also demonstrates that hospitalization rates for COVID, as cited by journalists and policy makers, can be misleading, if not considered carefully. Clearly many patients right now are seriously ill. We also know that overcrowding of hospitals by COVID patients with even mild illness can have negative implications for patients in need of other care. At the same time, this study suggests that COVID hospitalization tallies can’t be taken as a simple measure of the prevalence of severe or even moderate disease, because they might inflate the true numbers by a factor of two. “As we look to shift from cases to hospitalizations as a metric to drive policy and assess level of risk to a community or state or country,” [Shira] Doron told me, referring to decisions about school closures, business restrictions, mask requirements, and so on, “we should refine the definition of hospitalization. Those patients who are there with rather than from COVID don’t belong in the metric.”

Paper suggests 1/3 kids had alpha. Then a lot more got delta.

Think of all the quarantines and school closures that could be avoided if we counted these kids as immune.

We are not doing anyone any favors by continuing to ignore natural immunity.https://t.co/KyAOSdSiCZ

— Margery Smelkinson, Ph.D. (@MSmelkinsonPhD) September 13, 2021

Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff criticize Biden’s blanket criticisms of unvaccinated Americans.

Liz Wolfe reports on Elizabeth Warren’s exploitation of Covid hysteria to insert the state into private decisions.

Charles Oliver reports on a small but telling manifestation, at Rutgers University, of Covid Derangement Syndrome.

Here’s the abstract of a new paper on science in the age of Covid:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments have adopted responses revolving around the open-ended use of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), including “lockdowns”, “stay-at-home” orders, travel restrictions, mask-wearing, and regulated social distancing. Initially these were introduced with the stated goals of “flattening the curve” of hospital demand and/or the eradication of the virus from the country (i.e., “zero covid” policies). Over time, these goals have shifted to maintaining sufficient NPIs in place until such time as population-wide vaccination programmes have achieved an appropriate level of herd immunity to allow lifting of these measures without excessive hospital demand. Supporters of this approach have claimed to be “following the science”, insisting that criticism of any aspects of these measures is non-scientific or even “scientific misinformation”. This idea that only one set of scientifically valid opinions on COVID-19 exists has encouraged the media, social media and even scientific journals to suppress and/or dismiss any differing scientific opinions as “erroneous”, “discredited” or “debunked”, resulting in discouragement of open-minded scientific inquiry or discussion. Accordingly, in the current article we identify two distinct scientific paradigms to analysing COVID-19 adopted within the medical and scientific community. Paradigm 1 is primarily model-driven, while Paradigm 2 is primarily empirically-driven. Using these two paradigms we have analysed the epidemiological data for 30 northern hemisphere countries (with a total population of 882 million). Remarkably, we find using each paradigm leads to diametrically opposite conclusions on many policy-relevant issues. We discuss how these conflicting results might be reconciled and provide recommendations for scientists and policymakers.

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

“Quarantine hotels are useless, morally corrupt and must be scrapped” – so argues Annabel Fenwick Elliott. A slice:

What have these ruthlessly damaging restrictions achieved thus far? According to independent research published this week by the Advantage Travel Partnership, based on readily available data from Public Health England, the number of cases featuring ‘high or very high priority VOCs’ identified since international travel was decriminalised in May is nine, among nearly two million arrivals. Nine. That is not a typo; it represents a risk factor of 0.00045%.

Furthermore, as explained by microbiologist and former Public Health England director Professor David Livermore, a variant that might be capable of evading our vaccines is just as likely to develop ‘in Kew as Kathmandu’.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 460 of F.A. Hayek’s profound and important 1964 article “Kinds of Order in Society” (available without charge on-line here) as it appears in Liberty Fund’s 1981 single-volume collection of New Individualist Review:

In the order created by the market, the participants are constantly induced to respond to events of which they do not directly know, in a way which secures a continuous flow of production, a coordination of the quantities of the different things so that the even flow is not interrupted and everything is produced at least as cheaply as anybody can still provide the last quantities for which others are prepared to pay the costs. That it is an order which consists of the adaptation to the multitudinous circumstances which no single person can know completely is one reason why its existence is not perceived by simple inspection. It is embodied in such relations as those between prices and costs of commodities and the corresponding distribution of resources; and we can confirm that such an order in fact exists only after we have reconstructed its principles in our minds.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Jay Bhattacharya is correct: “Mass asymptomatic testing is lockdown by stealth.”

Michael Tracey decries campus Covidocrats. Two slices:

Since I published my article Friday about the ongoing, Australia-style “lockdown” experiment being run in a small patch of southeastern Connecticut, messages keep piling up in my inboxes from the exasperated college students who have found themselves the experiment’s unwilling subjects. Uniformly, they are very thankful for the coverage, which is certainly not being provided by their tediously predictable in-house campus newspaper. Last I checked, even as the entire student body was being shoehorned by Administrative edict into mass quarantine, the lead story in that newspaper was a tidy little PR writeup of the College’s noble search for a new “Dean of Institutional Equity and Inclusion.” Talk about “burying the lede”…!

Whatever your pre-existing views regarding the merits of an ungodly expensive private liberal arts education, it’s still easy to sympathize with students who, through no real fault of their own, have been foisted into the comically dystopian position of paying approximately $80K per year to be confined to their dorm rooms, barred from visiting friends, and forced to endure yet another dreary round of ad hoc Zoom lectures.

…..

Do we really suppose that the vested interests which have likewise found such a lucrative market opening with COVID — notably the “endless testing” industry, including the elaborate “surveillance testing” regime that Connecticut College students must submit to — are just going to wind down their operations voluntarily? “Time to call it a day, folks?” Or is the bureaucratic/financial momentum of these initiatives going to assure that they effectively become permanent fixtures of daily life? (I’ve been doing some reporting on the “testing industrial complex,” which is undergoing a post-9/11 style renaissance as we speak, so be on the lookout for that soon.

“Biden’s Vaccine Mandate Is the Latest Sign of the Presidency Becoming a Monarchy” – so reads the headline of the latest from Reason‘s J.D. Tuccille.

Noah Carl – with help from my favorite t.v. program of all time – describes the political ‘(il)logic’ of Covid lockdowns. A slice:

When I asked Philippe Lemoine why lockdowns were implemented with so little regard for costs, he suggested that politicians didn’t want to “leave themselves open to the accusation of not having done anything to curb the epidemic”. They had to do something, even if that something ended up causing more harm than good.

This fallacy was popularised by the much-loved British sitcom Yes, Prime Minister. In the episode‘Power to the People’, Sir Humphrey Appleby is talking to his predecessor Sir Arnold Robinson about the Prime Minister’s plans to reform local government.

Sir Arnold says, “He’s suffering from politician’s logic,” to which Sir Humphrey replies, “Something must be done; this is something; therefore we must do it.” In other words: ‘Something must be done; lockdown is something; therefore we must do it.’

The incentives that gave rise to ‘politician’s logic’ in this case are obvious. While the ‘benefits’ of lockdown are immediate and visible, the costs may take months or even years to materialise. (By ‘benefits’, I mean the reduction in social and economic activity that is believed to reduce viral transmission.)

Furthermore, even if lockdown’s impact on mortality turns out to be marginal, politicians can claim that things would have been far worse if not for their tough and far-sighted decisions.

Lionel Shriver – applauding the (hopefully firm) decision in Britain to scrap vaccine passports – recognizes that “calculation of risk belongs in the hands of the people.” A slice:

I don’t think we’re doomed. But only if we start acting like grown-ups. On masks, it’s past time we de-politicise them and assemble proper real-life — not modelled — evidence for whether they make a damned bit of difference. From the blizzard of studies and charts I’ve examined, they don’t. But if we’re going to keep making ourselves miserable and turning every trip for milk into a wander on to the set of a dystopian sci-fi flick, that sacrifice has to be based on better science than ‘masks might help, so why not?’ I’m willing to change my mind, but only in the face of hard, convincing data I’ve never seen.

“This is not a joke. The Chinese national hockey team just arrived in Sweden. Seriously afraid of coming to Covid Land. Curious to know how they will dress for match in the graveyard of ambition when it comes to handling the pandemic.”

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

Editors of The Telegraph call for an end to all Covid restrictions in Britain.

Martin Kulldorff, on Twitter:

Many Americans self-identify as more rational and scientific than others. With the eventual inevitable realization that Covid could not be squashed and conquered with lockdowns, masks and vaccine induced vs natural immunity, their self-image will chatter. How can we help them?