Russell Roberts's Blog, page 235

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 449 of the 1959 Dover Publications edition of Morris Cohen’s 1931 treatise, Reason and Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Scientific Method:

So the great lesson of humility which science teaches us, that we can never be omnipotent and omniscient, is the same as the lesson of all great religions: man is not and never will be the god before whom we must bow down.

A Simple Truth

(Don Boudreaux)

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The only people who don’t take ‘no’ for an answer are armed robbers, rapists, and government officials.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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I’m eager to read the hot-off-the-press The Great Covid Panic: What Happened, Why, and What To Do Next, by Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster, and Michael Baker. Here’s Martin Kulldorff’s endorsement:

A tour-de-force on how the pandemic response was driven by fear, crowd thinking, big business and a desire for control, rather than by sound public health principles. This is bound to be a classic.

Sunetra Gupta explains that there is no good case for mass booster shots. Two slices:

But should we be vaccinating those who are at negligible risk? Before entering into arguments about the ethical or political dimensions of this question, we should ask ourselves what purpose it serves – because, if it is futile, the discussion should simply end there.

Vaccines typically do not outperform natural immunity, so it should come as no surprise that Covid vaccines do not offer long-term protection against infection. At the same time, we can be confident that they will continue to work well to prevent severe clinical outcomes. The role of these vaccines is to offer protection to the clinically vulnerable; to foist them upon those who are at negligible risk in the hope of augmenting herd immunity is illogical.

Will boosters achieve what two doses could not? For those who are extremely vulnerable and show no evidence of mounting a significant immune response after two doses, it is entirely reasonable to attempt a third dose.

But it can be to no-one else’s individual gain to submit to a third jab, having already reduced the risk of severe disease (which was very small in the first place for most) by receiving two inoculations.

…..

And perhaps next time – whether it be because of an aggressive new variant or an entirely new pathogen – we will hesitate to inflict the same damage through lockdowns while we wait for the vaccines to arrive, and recognise that the combination of natural immunity and vaccine-induced protection of the vulnerable offers the most robust and humane solution to the problem.

Billy Binion is correct: vaccine passports should be neither mandatory nor forbidden. A slice:

It’s true that vaccines offer a great deal of protection from infection, hospitalizations, and deaths. The breakthrough case rate post-vaccination sits below 1 percent, while fatal encounters hover around 0 percent. You are more likely to get struck by lightning than get a fatal case of COVID-19 after receiving the vaccine.

But the efficacy of the drug does not explain why a police-enforced mandate to put a vaccine into everyone’s bodies enhances civil liberties. That’s particularly relevant when considering the refusal to get vaccinated almost always hurts the refuser, save a few tragic cases.

But haven’t we always required vaccinations? “Schools, health care facilities, the U.S. military and many other institutions have long required vaccination for contagious diseases like mumps and measles that pose far less risk than the coronavirus does today,” add Cole and Mach. That’s true: Mandating vaccines for schoolchildren strikes me as sensible, as they don’t have agency, and are forced by law to attend public school with other children who don’t have agency. And employers—including the government—also have the right to mandate vaccinations and to set the terms their employees must abide by. If employees don’t like them, they can find work elsewhere.

Yet government as the employer is different than government as the monopoly on power.

Hannah Betts encourages people to get over their Covid paranoia and return to going about life as normal, including shaking hands. A slice:

In the latest confirmation that we are encountering The End of Days, two-thirds of jobseekers have declared themselves reluctant to shake an interviewer’s hand amid continuing paranoia regarding Covid germage. Recruitment company Randstad argues that the legions of guides as to how to execute a winning grasp may now become redundant.

Julia Hartley-Brewer talks with Carl Heneghan about the media’s on-going scare-mongering over Covid.

Manfred Horst takes a close look at U.S. mortality data for 2020.

The Atlantic‘s Coner Friedersdorf explains, with understatement, that “Australia traded away too much liberty.” Three slices:

Up to now one of Earth’s freest societies, Australia has become a hermit continent. How long can a country maintain emergency restrictions on its citizens’ lives while still calling itself a liberal democracy?

Australia has been testing the limits.

Before 2020, the idea of Australia all but forbidding its citizens from leaving the country, a restriction associated with Communist regimes, was unthinkable. Today, it is a widely accepted policy. “Australia’s borders are currently closed and international travel from Australia remains strictly controlled to help prevent the spread of COVID-19,” a government website declares. “International travel from Australia is only available if you are exempt or you have been granted an individual exemption.” The rule is enforced despite assurances on another government website, dedicated to setting forth Australia’s human-rights-treaty obligations, that the freedom to leave a country “cannot be made dependent on establishing a purpose or reason for leaving.”
…..
Other states also curtailed their citizens’ liberty in the name of safety. The state of Victoria announced a curfew and suspended its Parliament for key parts of the pandemic. “To put this in context, federal and state parliaments sat during both world wars and the Spanish Flu, and curfews have never been imposed,” the scholar John Lee observed in an article for the Brookings Institution. “In responding to a question about whether he had gone too far with respect to imposing a curfew (avoiding the question of why a curfew was needed when no other state had one), Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews replied: ‘it is not about human rights. It is about human life.’”

In New South Wales, Police Minister David Elliott defended the deployment of the Australian military to enforce lockdowns, telling the BBC that some residents of the state thought “the rules didn’t apply to them.” In Sydney, where more than 5 million people have been in lockdown for more than two months, and Melbourne, the country’s second-biggest city, anti-lockdown protests were banned, and when dissenters gathered anyway, hundreds were arrested and fined, Reuters reported.
…..

Because of its geography, Australia is a neighbor and an observer of authoritarian countries as varied as China and Singapore. But its own fate, too, may turn on whether its people crave the feeling of safety and security that orders from the top confer, or whether they want to be free.

Martin Kulldorff on Twitter:

COVID restrictions have been rigging the game for too long – driving down health care, harming workers, hurting children, and stifling public debate. Time to rein them in.

Some judges in the U.S. are weaponizing Covid vaccines. (DBx: This disturbing development is one of many that should have been, but apparently wasn’t, anticipated by the many people who reported on, or wrote about, Covid’s dangers without putting those dangers into proper context.)

Jay Bhattacharya talks again with David Brody about Covid and lockdowns.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 28 of the 2008 third edition of James W. Ely’s important book The Guardian of Every Other Right: A Constitutional History of Property Rights:

The English insistence on the sovereignty of Parliament clashed with older constitutional notions of natural rights and custom as restraints on arbitrary power. The Americans therefore declared their independence in the belief that they were defending their traditional rights under the English constitution against usurpation by Parliament and the Crown.

DBx: Adams, Franklin, Henry, Jefferson, Madison, Otis, Washington, Wilson, and other of America’s founders did not seek independence from Parliament and the Crown in order to create Congressional sovereignty – or a democracy the powers of which are limited only in a few explicit particulars. These Americans declared their independence as a means of better ensuring protection of their natural rights as human beings. Anyone who doubts this claim is invited to read the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy continues rightly to decry the rampant fiscal imprudence on the Potomac.

Also from Veronique is this criticism of ideologues both left and right. A slice:

Ideologues at both political extremes, like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) on the left and Fox News host Tucker Carlson on the right, have recently pointed to pet foreign countries as exemplars of what America should strive to be. Yet Sanders and Carlson are each misled by a superficial understanding of what these countries are really about.

As a proud, self-described socialist, Sanders thinks Denmark is a socialist paradise. But in reality, it’s far more free-market oriented than most people give it credit for. As a dyed-in-the-tweed conservative, Carlson has let his enchantment with Hungarian President Viktor Orban’s tough talk against “the libs” blind him to that “leader’s” cruel authoritarianism.

My friend Brian Mannix’s recent letter-to-the-editor in the Wall Street Journal is also on Washington’s fiscal shenanigans:

The problem with Alan S. Blinder’s argument for the Gephardt Rule (“A Simple Rule Could End Debt-Ceiling Shenanigans,” op-ed, Aug. 24) is that the budget bills he would rely on are themselves packed with shenanigans. Falsified assumptions and accounting gimmicks are used to conceal the true costs.

Investors who buy U.S. debt are not interested in buying a bundle of fiscal fictions. They want a bond with an actual face value, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. A periodic vote on the debt ceiling is a rare moment of truth, when members of Congress must confront the yawning gap between their promises and the reality of paying for them.

Mr. Blinder’s proposal might be more palatable if it were amended so that the cost estimates in the budget resolutions were binding—authorizing the Treasury to borrow no more than Congress said it would all cost, rather than borrow whatever it takes to fund the enacted programs. If that turned out not to suffice, Congress could always confess error and authorize more debt. But we are doomed if we permit Congress to “err” without ever confessing, and to spend without ever being held to account.

Brian Mannix
Gainesville, Va.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board understandably wonders why Pres. Biden isn’t removing Trump’s punitive tariffs on aluminum imports Americans who buy aluminum. A slice:

One result is that China is now a net importer of aluminum, and Chinese manufacturers are competing with those in the U.S. and elsewhere for supply. The 10% U.S. tariff, which President Biden has maintained, is further complicating supply chains. So is the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement’s new requirement that 70% of autos’ steel and aluminum content be made in the three countries.

“There’s just not enough metal inside of North America,” Alcoa CEO Roy Harvey recently noted. Mr. Biden won’t fix all supply-chain problems by lifting the tariff, but he could at least give U.S. businesses and consumers some much-needed price relief.

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Russ Roberts’s latest EconTalk podcast; it’s a discussion with historian Bret Devereaux on ancient Greece and Rome.

Chris Lingle writes wisely about climate science.

David Henderson highlights two great passages from Milton and Rose Friedman’s 1980 book, Free to Choose.

George Will is indisputably correct: Biden and his people need significant doses of humility. A slice:

Domestically, the Biden administration speaks breezily about “transforming” the financial and energy components of the nation’s almost $23 trillion economy, oblivious about possible unintended consequences. In foreign policy, a chastened administration needs to tailor its objectives to fit its ability to know what it does not know.

On Milton Friedman’s Economics and Motives

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to a high-school senior in Virginia:

Mr. H__:

Thanks for your e-mail, and for reading Cafe Hayek.

As you predict, I join you in rejecting your economics teacher’s belief that “Milton Friedman’s teachings privileged the powerful … and oppressed workers and the disenfranchised.” But it’s not my place to instruct you on how to respond.

You are, you say, familiar with some of Friedman’s writings. Re-read these writings, as well as others by Friedman – many of which are available free-of-charge here. As you do so, ask yourself which groups are identified by Friedman as suffering the most from government interventions and, hence, which groups are believed by Friedman to gain the most from a reduction in government intervention into the economy. Importantly, challenge yourself to read Friedman as your teacher and other of his critics read him. Try – really try – to understand just why these critics reach the conclusion they do.

If you take my advice, it’s possible that you’ll come to share your teacher’s critical view of Friedman. Leave yourself open to that possibility, for even if in the end you aren’t persuaded to that critical view, you’ll come to have a deeper understanding both of Friedman and of his critics.

I close with one substantive point: Your teacher is mistaken to describe Friedman as having been “a paid apologist for the privileged.” Even if you and I are incorrect, and your teacher is correct, about the consequences of Friedman’s policies, your teacher has no evidence that Friedman’s public-policy advocacy was fueled by any motive other than a sincere belief that those policies are the most humane and likely to improve the lives of ordinary people.

One of the substantive economic principles taught not only by Friedman, but also by Adam Smith and countless other economists, famous and obscure, is that (in the phrasing of David Henderson) “intentions are not results.” It follows that results do not necessarily reflect intentions. The very least your teacher should do with respect to Friedman is what I sincerely advise you to do with respect to your teacher: Take his arguments seriously and do not assume that disagreement with the conclusions implies that he had evil motives.

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

(Don Boudreaux)

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John Stossel’s latest video – on Covid vaccines and mandates of such – is (unsurprisingly) quite thoughtful.

Reason‘s J.D. Tuccille is spot-on: Crises bring out the childishness of our so-called “leaders.” A slice:

Undoubtedly, people who go into government have always chafed at any effort to make them live within legal and constitutional constraints. Government, after all, is defined by the use of coercive power. That the power is supposed to be exercised only within limits must be frustrating to people who were attracted by the opportunity to coerce others for reasons that they always argue are the very best.

Michael Senger decries what he calls “the masked ball of cowardice.” Two slices:

One after another, world leaders tipped over like dominoes, their national bureaucracies falling in line to cease all social and economic activity for the first time in history. In March 2020, the Dutch government commissioned a cost-benefit analysis concluding that the health damage from lockdown would be six times greater than the benefit. The government then ignored it, claiming “society would not accept” the optics of an elderly person unable to get an ICU bed. The Dutch government knowingly took a course of action that would cause health damage — let alone economic damage — six times worse for the Dutch people, out of a concern for optics.

…..

Having absorbed disinformation into policy, the formidable machinery of Western institutions has, perversely, helped promulgate a totalitarian hygiene regime around the world, and turned against those standing up for western values that politicians appear too spineless to defend. Police brutality is on the rise as law-enforcement personnel face protesters rightfully angry at the ongoing suspension of human rights through policies rationalized only by the exaggerated fears the policies themselves create, and which therefore have no endpoint. Whether COVID cases go up, down, or sideways, the solution offered by lockdown scientists and public health officials—the WHO being only the worst offender—is always the same: Be more like China. Every policy they’ve imported has been as deeply illiberal as it is ineffective, and many are disturbingly willing to suggest permanent changes to our civilization rather than admit error.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Phil Kerpen exposes the appalling media bias against Florida governor Ron DeSantis. A slice:

But some coverage has been downright deceptive. Particularly dishonest was a Miami Herald article on Aug. 31 with the headline “Florida changed its Covid-19 data, creating an ‘artificial decline’ in recent deaths.” The Herald’s claims were amplified by the national media as smoking-gun evidence that Mr. DeSantis deceived the public on the Covid death toll in Florida. The insinuation is that Mr. DeSantis has become the Andrew Cuomo of the South.

But many top public-health officials support Florida’s switch to the new methodology, which relies on the actual date of death rather than the date a death was recorded. The Herald concedes that point—but not until their article’s 13th paragraph.

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

Toby Young, writing from Britain, is correct: “Vaccine passports are unnecessary, unsupportable and totalitarian.” A slice:

The final reason the Prime Minister should shelve his plans for vaccine passports is that they aren’t necessary. Legions of experts, including the Government’s own scientific advisors, warned Boris that lifting restrictions on July 19 would lead to disaster. Professor Neil Ferguson, whose apocalyptic modelling was partly responsible for the first lockdown, predicted that cases would ‘almost certainly’ rise to 100,000 a day and probably to 200,000.

In fact, they started to decline and, with a couple of hiccups along the way, are declining now. This is in spite of the fact that bars, restaurants and nightclubs have reopened and sports stadiums are packed with supporters.

. A slice:

Around 80 per cent of prosecutions brought under the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) Regulations were correctly charged: it is under this legislation, which includes restrictions on leaving home, social gatherings and the enforcement of mask-wearing, that our Northamptonshire rebels were probably charged.

That a man living in England can be sentenced for leaving his own home is a sign of how far down the path of illiberalism we have strayed: never before in our history have we accepted such perverse rules, a fact made all the more unconscionable by their disproportionality.

What concerns me doubly is that they are enforced with such officiousness and subsequently reported so eagerly by an unquestioning and uncritical press. The Northamptonshire Telegraph says sanctimoniously: ‘The defendants were the latest to be convicted after violating emergency rules – which were designed to slow the spread of coronavirus – between January and April. Many of them were punished after failing to stick to the laws in January or February, at a time when many thousands died as the virus spiraled [sic] out of control.’

In any society which abandons the precepts of freedom, there will be a large group of people who willingly become the enforcers of the new regime. Intoxicated with power, they thrive amid a sea of petty regulations.

Helen Raleigh reports on Scott Atlas’s courageous defense of genuine science against politicized ‘science.‘ A slice:

Lockdowns destroyed people, Atlas said, by “shutting down medical care, stopping people from seeking emergency medical care, increasing drug abuse, increasing death by suicide, more psychological damage, particularly among the younger generation. Hundreds and thousands of child abuse cases went unreported. Teenagers’ self-harm cases have tripled.”

Atlas also noted the increase of other deaths like tuberculosis, caused by the world’s focus on COVID-19. The World Health Organization warned in 2020 of up to an additional 400,000 deaths from tuberculosis because of the diversion of resources to COVID-19. “Mortality data showing that anywhere from a third or half of the deaths during the pandemic were not due to COVID-19,” Atlas said. “They were extra deaths due to the lockdowns.”

Besides causing health issues, the lockdowns have enormous economic costs, especially for poor people and developing countries. The Bangladesh economy’s shutdown during the pandemic, Atlas noted, was forecast to wipe out about $3 billion and close to 900,000 jobs off the nation’s economy with a devastating effect on the nation’s poor.

From late June: Alberto Giubilini decries massive damage, especially to children, that results from humanity’s excessive and disproportionate focus on Covid. (HT Jay Bhattacharya) A slice:

Children and young people have probably been the primary victims of the collateral damage of pandemic restrictions. They have been used as mere means to protect the elderly when we closed schools and isolated them from their peers. They are now being asked to take a vaccine against COVID-19 from which they benefit very little, and indeed whose risk profile is not well defined. All this, while many of them have been deprived of more important vaccines that could make a difference between life and death, simply because we decided that closing down our society was more important.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 163 of F.A. Hayek’s profound 1952 book The Counter-Revolution of Science, as this book appears as part of volume 13 (Studies on the Abuse & Decline of Reason, Bruce Caldwell, ed. [2010]) of the Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:

The fact that no single mind can know more than a fraction of what is known to all individual minds sets limits to the extent to which conscious direction can improve upon the results of unconscious social processes.

DBx: Yes. Yet this reality is ignored by every advocate of using industrial policy as a means of raising overall living standards in the national economy. Such advocates of industrial policy simply do not understand just how complex is the economic order into which they demand the government intervene. Such advocates of industrial policy – nearly all of whom I believe to be well-meaning – simply have no idea just how important for even minimal economic efficiency is the on-going necessity of using highly localized, detailed, often fleeting knowledge that is available only to individuals on the spot. This knowledge is of a sort that cannot possibly be acquired by government officials charged with carrying out industrial policy; it is of a sort that is necessarily invisible to even the finest econometricians and statisticians; and it is of a sort that is intended to be squelched by the tariffs, subsidies, and other interventions imposed under the name of “industrial policy.”

As I believe Michael Polanyi put it somewhere (I think in The Logic of Liberty), the likelihood of central planners gathering such knowledge, processing it rationally, and applying it effectively is no higher than is the likelihood of a cat swimming across the Atlantic ocean. That the human mind can imagine a cat performing such a fantastic aquatic feat is indisputable. But equally indisputable is the fact that no cat will ever come close in reality to beginning to be able to perform such a feat.

Advocates of industrial policy mistake their ability to describe in words – and perhaps in mathematical formulae – what they think to be the economic equivalent of what a cat must do to swim from Cape Cod to Dunmore Head in Ireland as proof that industrial policy can be successfully implemented to improve the economic performance of the domestic economy. Ignored – mysteriously, to my mind – is the inevitable reality that any cat actually pressed to perform such a feat would, soon after leaving the U.S. shore, meet a terrible end because no cat is constituted to succeed in such an effort.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s the abstract of a paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, by Samuel Director and Christopher Freiman:

In response to the spread of COVID-19, governments across the world have, with very few exceptions, enacted sweeping restrictive lockdown policies that impede citizens’ freedom to move, work, and assemble. This paper critically responds to the central arguments for restrictive lockdown legislation. We build our critique on the following assumption: public policy that enjoys virtually unanimous support worldwide should be justified by uncontroversial moral principles. We argue that that the virtually unanimous support in favor of restrictive lockdowns is not adequately justified by the arguments given in favor of them. Importantly, this is not to say that states ought not impose restrictive lockdown measures, but rather that the extent of the acceptance of these measures is not proportionate to the strength of the arguments for lockdowns. We begin by exploring the case for restrictive lockdowns. We first argue that several of the principles that are used to justify the lockdowns yield unexpectedly revisionary implications for other political problems that many would be unwilling to accept. We then outline what we consider the strongest argument for a lockdown—namely, that its net welfare benefits are great enough to defeat the moral presumption against restricting citizens’ civil liberties to move, work, and assemble. However, we give a number of reasons for doubting that the lockdown’s net welfare benefits are, in fact, sufficiently high to defeat the presumption against it.

I learned of this Director-Freiman paper from Noah Carl, who writes about it:

For example, they entertain economist Bryan Caplan’s argument that the reduction in quality of life alone may have offset any lives saved by lockdowns. (Though of course, there’s not much evidence that lockdowns have saved lives in most of the countries where they’ve been tried.)

Jacob Sullum warns that the Biden administration’s efforts to turn the CDC’s director into, as Sullum describes it, “the nation’s COVID-19 dictator” threaten to “undermine federalism, the rule of law, and the separation of powers.” A slice:

“It’s massive federal overreaching,” says Hans Bader, a former senior attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who also has worked in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. “The federal government essentially wants to dictate systemic changes to states’ school policies because of speculation [about] how those policies may affect disabled students in particular school districts.”

Also from Jacob Sullum is this report on how the New York Times doesn’t understand the very evidence – here, on masking in schools – about which it reports. A slice:

The U.K. is by no means unique in eschewing “universal masking” in schools. As David Zweig notes New York magazine, “many of America’s peer nations around the world—including the U.K., Ireland, all of Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy—have exempted kids, with varying age cutoffs, from wearing masks in classrooms” without experiencing more school-related COVID-19 outbreaks than the U.S. has seen.

Australian Joel Bowman – fortunately not now a prisoner in that dystopia – writes of his native country. A slice:

Wasn’t Australia “leading the world” in the fight against COVID-19? Didn’t their (admittedly simplistic) “go hard; go early” mantra stave off the virus for the past year, potentially saving thousands (why not millions?) of lives as the rest of the world perished in a fiery inferno?

In a word: no.

As usual, the papers got the story horse-about-cart. While the credulous statist sycophants in the MSM were slobbering over Australia’s draconian curtailments of human rights throughout most of 2020, the once-proud nation was busily surrendering liberties, riding roughshod over the rule of law, trashing individual rights and trampling virtually any freedom worthy of the name.

For shame!

Like the dupe at a poker table, who tips her hand early and eagerly, Australia squandered her geographical dumb luck and, instead of conducting an open, honest, adult conversation about how to best maintain a balance of civil liberties and reasonable, common-sense approaches to “living with the virus,” instead forfeited all her hard-won liberties pursuing a non-starter “zero-COVID” fantasy, virtually ensuring exactly the kind of Huxleyan dystopic nightmare currently visited upon the helplessly disarmed population.

Here’s yet further evidence that Australia is in the grips of Covid Derangement Syndrome.

Phil Magness’s reaction to this New York Times report is understandably this: “New Zealand goes full police state.” Here’s the opening paragraph of the NYT report:

The police in New Zealand are establishing checkpoints south of Auckland, the country’s largest city, to prevent people from moving illegally between regions with different levels of virus restrictions.

Robert Taylor, writing in the Telegraph, decries the Covidocracy’s “freakish impositions.” A slice:

Not one of these measures helps our children learn, grow or develop. Not one supports our children’s future. Each of them is damaging to learning. Normal schooling? You’re having a laugh.

We’re now so accustomed to these freakish impositions, all of which were unthinkable in just February last year, that we forget to ask what it’s all for. Perhaps because there’s no answer.

It’s certainly not for the children, for whom Covid-19 presents little serious threat to life. This is a point so crucial that it is worth constantly repeating – the children are not being forced to do this for their own safety.

Covid is also, thanks to vaccines, of little threat to teachers. A recent Public Health England study shows that 93 per cent of teachers and other school staff have received a vaccine. You can be sure that the other 7 per cent have balanced the risk. Meanwhile, the average age of a teacher is 39. The average age of someone dying with Covid is more than 80.

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

Quoting this report on frightening symptoms of Covid Derangement Syndrome afflicting Duke University, Phil Magness notes:

“All but eight of these individuals were vaccinated, and the vast majority of them are asymptomatic. A small number have minor, cold- and flu-like symptoms, and none have been hospitalized, according to the university.”

In other words, most of them wouldn’t even realize they had covid but for an increasingly pointless testing regime.

Jay Bhattacharya on Twitter:

A reporter asked me about COVID parties for children.

My reply:

They are unethical. Instead, I favor normal life for children. The alternative (lockdown, fear, restrictions), leads to shorter, poorer, and unhealthier lives for kids, which is also unethical.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 137 of H.L. Mencken’s October 1921 Smart Set essay, “Venus at the Domestic Hearth,” as this essay is reprinted in A Second Mencken Chrestomathy (1995):

The most steadily charming of all human beings, male or female, is the one who is tolerant, unprovocative, good-humored, kind.