Russell Roberts's Blog, page 285

Neil Ferguson and the Imperial College ‘Modelers’ are Incompetent Scientists and Shameful Liars

(Don Boudreaux)

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Phil Magness is a national – nay, a global – treasure. Here’s a post from his Facebook page, in which he further exposes both the gross incompetence of Neil Ferguson and the Imperial College ‘modelers,’ as well as Ferguson & Co.’s downright dishonesty. Here it is:

Huge discovery this morning showing data malfeasance involving Imperial College and Neil Ferguson.

Almost exactly 1 year ago I wrote an article on how a team of researchers at Uppsala University had adapted Ferguson’s UK model to Sweden, and yielded preposterous results – e.g. a prediction of over 90K dead if they did not go into lockdowns. My article made waves over in the UK, and Ferguson himself was grilled about it in testimony before the House of Lords. This caused Imperial College to fire off a bunch of tweets and statements disavowing any connection to the Uppsala adaptation of their model. It wasn’t their product, they insisted, and Imperial itself had never claimed between 40-100K deaths would result in Sweden

Well guess what. On March 26, 2020 the Imperial team released an update to its Covid model labeled as “Report 12” on its website. Buried deep in a spreadsheet appendix file, they included the results of their own runs of their same model for dozens of other countries…including Sweden. I reproduce a screenshot of it below from the spreadsheet. Their results were almost identical to what the Uppsala team got, including a top-end projection of 90,157 deaths if Sweden did not go into lockdown.

DBx: Why does anyone pay attention – why did anyone ever pay attention – to Ferguson and his fellow Imperial College clowns?

If You’re Immune, Act Immune

(Don Boudreaux)

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Without mentioning Fauci by name, Florida governor Ron DeSantis nevertheless appropriately slaps him down. (For proof of the reality and severity of Covid Derangement Syndrome, you need look no further than Fauci’s insistence that fully vaccinated people continue to avoid normal living. That the media continue to treat Fauci as if he deserves to be taken seriously only strengthens that proof.)

A Good Question

(Don Boudreaux)

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Steve Hardy, a friend from Nevada, sent to me an e-mail that I share here with his kind permission:

Friday’s Wall Street Journal reports that approximately 5800 people who have been vaccinated have gotten Covid out of 66 million people vaccinated.  This is .0008%. And ALL of these cases have been mild and haven’t required hospitalization.  The stupid part of the article says that officials say that even vaccinated people are at risk and should continue to wear masks and practice social distancing.  To put this in perspective about 3 to 11% of all people get the flu each year in the US.

The CDC estimates that between 12,000 and 61,000 people die each year from the flu.  So why haven’t we all been wearing masks and socially distancing all of our lives?

DBx: Great question. The answer, I think, is that people have been frightened into believing not only that that Covid-19’s dangers are greater than those dangers really are, but that Covid-19 is a pathogen that differs categorically from influenza viruses.

While Covid-19 is indeed an unusually dangerous pathogen, nearly all of its differential danger is reserved for the elderly. Quite simply, Covid-19 is not the categorically different threat to humanity that it is believed so widely to be. What is categorically different is humanity’s response to Covid. This response bears absolutely no proportion to Covid’s dangers.

What in the end will be, by far, the greatest harm that Covid inflicted on humanity is its capacity to have allowed political and media elites to instill in the general public a deranged level of fear – and, hence, a deranged tolerance for deranged and draconian measures to combat Covid. Over time we will be made poorer and, hence, exposed to higher risks of injury, disease, and death. We will also be far less free. The biosecurity state – or as David Hart calls it, hygiene socialism – will oppress us all in the name of protecting us all.

Chances are high – indeed, I think it to be nearly certain – that life will never return to any condition close to normal (that is, as life was as recently as 2019). Freedom of commerce, freedom to travel, freedom of religion, freedom to speak and to write, freedom to engage in scientific inquiry, and even freedom to be with family, friends, and lovers are all under threat of being permanently squelched, and squelched hard.

As it has survived over the millennia countless nasty pathogens, humanity will certainly survive Covid-19. I have serious doubts, however, that liberal civilization will survive Covid Derangement Syndrome.

Only Protected Producers Can Operate So Inefficiently

(Don Boudreaux)

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After I posted my praise of Juliette Sellgren’s recent podcast on the Jones Act with Colin Grabow – a post in which I mention my long-ago summer job at Avondale Shipyards – Colin alerted me to this November 2008 paper by William Gray in the Journal of Ship Production. (Who knew such a publication existed?!) Here’s part of the abstract:

Since WW II, major US shipbuilders have been unable to compete in price with shipyards in other parts of the world, and often the quality from US yards has been inferior to world standards. Furthermore, the mistaken US government assumption that shipyards and ship owners have a common interest has led to laws to protect American yards from competition. It has also caused commercial shipping to lose out to alternative forms of transportation such as trains, trucks, pipelines, and tug/barge rigs from more efficient smaller yards and crews. The “US built” requirement of the 1920 Jones Act for domestic cargo has been a prime reason for this modal shift. Tragically for coastal shipping, most large US shipyards have failed to adopt the efficient manufacturing lessons of pioneers such as Admiral “Jerry” Land and Henry Kaiser that led to the “WW II shipbuilding miracle,” that built nearly 6,000 merchant ships in 5 years, a feat that Winston Churchill said “saved Europe.” After WW II, while foreign yards adopted these efficiency measures, that did not happen here, and our yards suffered from few repeat orders because of their high prices.

Colin highlighted this passage on page 209 of the paper:

Avondale shipyard in New Orleans, LA, also used IHI in some of its projects in late 1970s into the 1980s. Interestingly, this yard was then, and still is, interspersing Navy and commercial work. For the Navy, they have usually built fleet oilers or auxiliaries apparently successfully. Avondale also built at that time three LNG tankers for El Paso Gas, probably with a cargo membrane containment system provided by one of two French companies Gaz de France or Technigaz, or the British Conch system of independent prismatic aluminum tanks. In any case, all three completed ships failed their gas trials and were declared constructive total losses at delivery because of insulation failure, a catastrophe technically and financially. Two were eventually converted in Asia to coal-burning main engine and bulk carriers for cargo, but hardly ever traded. The third one broke its tow at sea and became an actual total loss off Nova Scotia, a sad chapter.

I was unaware of the fate of those LNG tankers that were built by Avondale in the 1970s, but I’m not surprised to learn that it was unhappy. Even as a teenager working during the summers in that shipyard, I was struck by how haphazard were the operations that I observed from my small perch.

I worked in the “Steel Storage” office. As parts of the ships were prefabricated, they had to be stored until the time came to weld or bolt them onto the final product. There was no systematic method of storage. Each piece was simply deposited into any space that would accommodate it. Prefabricated ship parts were literally scattered all across the shipyard, which was quite a large place.

Workers called “expediters” would make hand-written notes of where each of the particular pieces was stored. These notes were brought to the office where I worked and then I and a few other clerks would record this information, by hand, into “log books.” The log books were then consulted weeks or even months later when the time came to locate the pieces to be welded onto the ship.

But the information proved, with surprising frequency, to be faulty. During my final two summers working at Avondale, being over 18, I was often sent out on a mo-ped to physically search for missing pieces. (It was during one of these search-for-missing-steel expeditions that I ran into my father and saw, for the first time, just how incredibly hard he worked.)

Sometimes I never found what I was looking for, and so replacements had to be constructed. And when I did find what I was looking for, the pieces were often nowhere near where our official records said they would be.

It was a mess that only a protected producer could afford to get away with.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Those of you who dismissed – and who continue to dismiss – those of us who warn that the Covidocracy will not willingly relinquish its power might wish to consult this report from Jarrett Skorup; it’s titled “Michigan Moving To Make ‘Emergency’ COVID-19 Mandates Permanent.” A slice:

State bureaucrats are moving to impose permanent regulations that would mandate the following and more on all Michigan businesses: mask wearing whenever employees are within six feet of someone else, daily health screenings, extensive record keeping, and keeping a “COVID-19 safety coordinator” on-site. Retail stores, personal care services, and other businesses open to the public would have to become the mask police: They would be required to make all customers wear masks, vaccinated or not.

Many of these rules are based on mandates put in place last spring by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. As such, many are based on outdated scientific knowledge about how COVID-19 spreads. For instance, employers must “increase facility cleaning and disinfection” and “prohibit workers from using other workers’ phones, desks, offices or other work tools and equipment.” These rules were dreamed up when public health experts thought the virus could easily spread via surface contact. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently said there’s a one in 10,000 chance of getting infected from touching a contaminated surface.

The rules make no accommodations for vaccinations. The word vaccine doesn’t even appear in the rules. This means that even if a movie theater or bowling alley has fully vaccinated its entire staff and is in a community with no cases, masks are mandated at all times.

Other mandates in the proposed rules may be impossible for businesses to comply with. Sports stadiums must, for instance, “establish safe exit procedures for patrons,” such as dismissing attendees by section. Would the Detroit Lions need to prevent people from individually leaving Ford Field early during a blowout loss (a common occurrence)? That may be illegal.

Alberto Mingardi writes wisely. A slice:

During the last year, I have asked myself a number of times what [Vilfredo] Pareto would have made of the public debate in the time of Covid19- of our increasing inability to cope with the tragedy of death, the tendency to “medicalize” the public debate, the many attempts (at least, in Italy) to lay the blame for the epidemic on the allegedly reckless behavior of youngsters, the faith in increasingly bestowing public funds on society as a way to mend whatever social ills, including those the pandemic brought about, the need for “magical” solutions which feed the public debate, the new role of scientists in public policy making and the transformation of some of them in “influencers” with star power.

I cannot say what Pareto would have made of all of it, but I suspect it would not have made him more inclined to any optimism about the fate of liberalism.

To describe Anthony Fauci as a menace to humanity is to engage in extreme understatement. And kudos to Rep. Jim Jordan for standing up to this menace. (HT Phil Magness)

Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman also takes on the menace-to-humanity who is Fauci. Two slices:

Dr. Anthony Fauci is the government infectious disease expert who now refuses to provide his expert opinion on infectious disease. It’s a safe bet he won’t stop appearing on television—as long as polite media folk don’t demand too much transparency regarding his Covid advice. But questioned by Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) at a Thursday congressional hearing on Covid-19, Dr. Fauci simply refused to answer an appropriate question about Covid-19.

…..

Dr. Fauci’s refusal to consider the larger societal impact of his Covid advice is an ongoing national tragedy. As politicians were following his advice and locking down last spring, Dr. Fauci described the impact on Americans as “inconvenient.” Millions of lost jobs and more than $4 trillion in federal debt later—amid abundant evidence that lockdowns didn’t work—he’s still urging restrictions on normal life. Last year he also acknowledged that he did no cost-benefit analysis and really had no idea what the consequences were for students: “I don’t have a good explanation, or solution to the problem of what happens when you close schools, and it triggers a cascade of events that could have some harmful circumstances.”

Dr. Fauci’s defenders might argue that he was simply doing his best to apply his expertise on infectious disease and that it’s not his job to notice the economic and non-Covid health problems resulting from his policies.

But there is no excuse for today’s refusal to share his expert opinion on the appropriate Covid measurement to determine when normal life can resume. Dr. Fauci spent several minutes fencing with Rep. Jordan and saying liberty could be restored when the level of infection is “low enough.” But the government doctor repeatedly refused to put a number on it.

It’s impossible to believe that Dr. Fauci hasn’t thought about this question and formed an opinion. He may be able to dodge accountability for all the non-Covid destruction. But he owes the public a straight answer to the most important question at the center of his area of expertise.

How many patients in America would tolerate this behavior from their own physicians?

John Tamny sensibly asks “Where’s Dr. Fauci as another Corona-myth dies?”

Jay Bhattacharya accurately calls Fauci “probably the number one anti-vaxxer in the country.” Here’s the full comment from this courageous co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration:

“Dr. Fauci is probably the number one anti-vaxxer in the country in some sense, because he has modeled behavior that has made people think the vaccine won’t give you back your life, but it will. It’s an incredibly effective vaccine. You know, he was wearing a mask. He has been vaccinated, I don’t really understand what he’s trying to do here.”

“Lockdowns do not suppress the virus, studies show.”

J.D. Tuccille decries the terrible impact of Covid-19 lockdowns and school closures on children. A slice:

Anecdotally, my wife, a pediatrician, has seen a huge surge in depression, anxiety, and self-harm in the months of the pandemic. Deprived of social interaction with classmates, teammates, and friends for a period of time that constitutes a significant percentage of their short lives, kids are falling apart. Too many of them are having suicidal thoughts in a world distorted beyond recognition and acceptability. And there’s no doubt as to the culprit.

“Pandemic life is not conducive to normal developmental events and this is having a significant impact,” comments Mamilda Robinson, a specialty director and clinical instructor of psychiatric mental health at Rutgers School of Nursing.

At least some people in Britain are principled and brave as they steadfastly resist the Covidocracy and its goons.

As Phil Magness would say, the straw man is stomping across Ontario.

Here’s GMU Econ alum Dan Mitchell on vaccine passports.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 104 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s superb, hot-off-the-Cambridge-University-Press book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins (2021):

The problem … is not that there is no such thing as expert knowledge, but rather that the knowledge experts have is general, not particular. It is about averages, aggregations, composites, and macro-level predictions, not about specific individuals and their peculiar situations. That means that their general prescriptions can be fruitfully applied to individual situations only once the particularities of those situations are known – and therein lies the rub.

The Foul Jones Act

(Don Boudreaux)

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Juliette Sellgren’s podcast with the Cato Institute’s Colin Grabow is a gem. It’s on the 1920 Jones Act, a particularly nasty piece of still-existing legislation that protects a very small number of U.S. ship owners, ship builders, and maritime workers at the larger expense of the American public.

Under the Jones Act, each vessel carrying goods by water between U.S. ports must be:

– owned by U.S. companies that are controlled by American citizens with at least 75 percent U.S. percent ownership;
– at least 75 percent crewed by American citizens;
– built (or rebuilt) in the United States;
– registered in the United States.

Anyone searching for an unalloyed real-world example of the realities of cronyism and interest-group politics can do no better than to listen to this podcast. If you listen, you’ll also learn about how government-granted special privileges produce consequences that, while foreseen by economists and other knowledgeable people, are the opposite of the consequences that are publicly promised. Further, you’ll learn about negative consequences that almost no one foresaw.

Among the latter consequences is the Jones Act’s negative impact on the environment. Here’s just one example: Because the Jones Act artificially raises the cost of coastal shipping in the U.S., Puerto Ricans buy no liquified natural gas (LNG) – which they use to generate electricity – from the U.S. mainland, but they do buy much of it from locations much further away, including Russia. (Those who wring their hands over the environmental consequences of cryptocurrencies should take a look at the Jones Act. It would be interesting to compare the amount of energy used by cryptocurrencies to the amount of energy used because of the Jones Act.)

My first job with a firm was in the summer of 1975, just before my senior year of high school. It was with my parents’ employer, Avondale Shipyards near New Orleans. Being not yet even 17, I worked in an office rather than out in the yard itself, which was an unusually dangerous workplace. One of my chief tasks was to record – by hand on paper – the reported storage location of prefabricated parts of ships under construction. That summer, the shipyard – “Avondale,” as we simply called it – was building a few LNG tankers (which I gather from Colin’s podcast with Juliette must have been among the last such tankers built in the U.S.).

One day that summer someone walked into the office in which I worked with a petition to sign. The person explained that the petition is meant to strengthen U.S. shipbuilding by protecting it from foreign competition. Being still 16 and not yet knowing any better, I signed (although, as I think about it now, I doubt that a minor’s signature was permissible on such a document).

I’m sure that both of my parents also signed it. Sounds good. Protect our jobs. Make America strong.

Protectionism is bunk.

Beware of Businesses Pandering

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Daniel Henninger rightly denounces CEOs’ pandering to Progressives – pandering that chews cancerously at the market order that alone makes possible not only the success of these CEOs’ companies, but also the wealth that Progressives rely upon to fund their countless schemes (“When CEOs Zoom for Democrats,” April 15).

Such venal opportunism, alas, is as old as, well, venal opportunism. In the conclusion of his masterful survey of the works of Adam Smith, Craig Smith writes that

he [Adam Smith] did not think that commercial societies were perfect. Indeed many of the imperfections of commercial society were the result of the behaviour of merchants and businessmen. These groups had their own partial interests and were seldom friends of the sort of free markets that Smith advocated.”*

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

* Craig Smith, Adam Smith (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020), page 178.

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Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Joakim Book bemoans the deep and unhinged hostility of so many people to those of us who question Covid-19 lockdowns and the mainstream narrative that supports them.

Toby Young makes the case against vaccine passports. A slice:

The strongest objection to making access to any service or activity contingent on producing evidence that you don’t have an infectious disease is that it’s an inversion of the Common Law principle that everything should be permitted unless the law specifically prohibits it. It’s more in keeping with the Napoleonic Code, i.e., you are only free to do that which the law explicitly permits. As a freeborn Englishman, I prefer the Common Law tradition to the Continental one and that was one of the reasons I supported Brexit.

Incidentally, I think the Common Law principle is consistent with allowing sporting clubs/businesses to decide for themselves what hoops to make customers jump through and if the Government’s position is to leave the matter to them to decide I’ll have no objection. Provided, that is, they don’t penalise them for rejecting a certification scheme.

Also protesting vaccine passports as the immoral documents that they are is British MP Andrew Rosindell. A slice:

What is this dystopian monstrosity? This is a call for a biosecurity state, in which not just the Government, but private businesses large and small take a detailed interest in our personal health choices. It is a grotesque invasion on our personal liberty, after a year in which we have all sacrificed our most basic freedoms to protect others.

It is also demonstrably unnecessary, now that the vulnerable have been almost universally vaccinated. One has to wonder as to the aim of this policy. It surely can’t be to protect the vulnerable, who have nearly all been vaccinated. For those in the vulnerable categories who have refused the vaccine, they have made a deliberate choice to take that risk.

If the aim is to reduce cases, then this is a largely pointless objective now that cases and hospitalisations/deaths have been decoupled. If the aim is to increase state control over the individual, then this is a sign of creeping state control over the individual, which must be opposed by all freedom-loving people.

Charles Oliver shares a snapshot from the Philippines of life – and death – under the Covidocracy.

And here’s another snapshot shared by Charles of life under the Covidocracy:

The British government is allowing pubs to reopen, with one catch. Drinkers will have to present their phones to pub staff to show they have registered on the National Health Services COVID-19 test-and-trace app. The app alerts people if they have been close to someone who tested positive for the disease. Pubs that don’t comply with the requirement may be fined up to £1,000 ($1,370 U.S.).

Even if Long Covid is a thing, we should worry at least as much about Long Lockdown. A slice:

Before the pandemic, psychoanalyst Josh Cohen’s patients might come into his consulting room, lie down on the couch and talk about the traffic or the weather, or the rude person on the tube. Now they appear on his computer screen and tell him about brain fog. They talk with urgency of feeling unable to concentrate in meetings, to read, to follow intricately plotted television programmes. “There’s this sense of debilitation, of losing ordinary facility with everyday life; a forgetfulness and a kind of deskilling,” says Cohen, author of the self-help book How to Live. What to Do. Although restrictions are now easing across the UK, with greater freedom to circulate and socialise, he says lockdown for many of us has been “a contraction of life, and an almost parallel contraction of mental capacity”.

This dulled, useless state of mind – epitomised by the act of going into a room and then forgetting why we are there – is so boring, so lifeless. But researchers believe it is far more interesting than it feels: even that this common experience can be explained by cutting-edge neuroscience theories, and that studying it could further scientific understanding of the brain and how it changes. I ask Jon Simons, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, could it really be something “sciencey”? “Yes, it’s definitely something sciencey – and it’s helpful to understand that this feeling isn’t unusual or weird,” he says. “There isn’t something wrong with us. It’s a completely normal reaction to this quite traumatic experience we’ve collectively had over the last 12 months or so.”

Omar S. Khan reviews 2020’s and early 2021’s freight of fallacies. Two slices (with link added):

Lockdown was a tardy Chinese panic spasm to contain, we take it, the Wuhan outbreak. It is only mildly sane as a short, sharp intervention. It is a penal concept unprecedented in public health prescriptions essentially from the Middle Ages until last year. It suffers from only a “few” quintessential issues.

…..

The relevant measure of lethality is the ‘Infection Fatality Rate’ or IFR. When seroprevalence studies worldwide demonstrated that many more people had been infected than we realized, based on the presence of antibodies and other indicators, then we knew IFR was somewhere between 0.3% to 0.12% (much more likely in the neighborhood of the latter). Possibly even less because we are unsure of how long this has been circulating and how far and wide it has rampaged because most people don’t even know they have been infected (global recovery rate ranges from 99% below 70 years of age, 95% above 70 with preexisting conditions) and the symptoms are, anyway, indistinguishable from other respiratory illnesses.

Fraser Nelson write that “In choosing common sense over lockdown, the country [Sweden] controlled the virus but not at the expense of normal life.”

Also on Sweden, Noah Carl explains that “the case for lockdown collapsed when Sweden’s epidemic began to retreat.” A slice:

Sweden, of course, was the only major Western country that didn’t lock down in 2020. And the argument for lockdowns made a clear prediction concerning what would happen there: since the country hadn’ttaken drastic measures, it would see substantially more deaths (relative to its population) than the countries that had locked down. Using a model “based on work by” Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College, researchers at Uppsala University predicted there would be 96,000 deaths by July 1st.

Fortunately, that isn’t what happened. The number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths by July 1st was only 5,370. And up to week 51, the country saw age-adjusted excess mortality of just 1.7% – below the UK and below the European average.

Now of course, Sweden isn’t identical to the UK. It’s more trusting, less densely populated, and has fewer multi-generational households. However, it isn’t dramatically different from the UK in these respects. So even if one might have expected fewer deaths in Sweden than in the UK, given the same policies, the fact that Sweden didn’t lock down should have massively increased its death toll. But it didn’t.

One reply to the argument I’ve just made is that Sweden did much worse than its neighbours. This reply has been extensively addressed by other commentators, and in any case the point remains that Sweden did not do catastrophically. Both its first and second epidemics retreated long before the herd immunity threshold was reached, and far less than 1% of the population has died.

Jeffrey Tucker recommends three books on the lockdowns and on the wicked politicians who panicked (to steal from the title of John Tamny’s book).

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Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 573 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):

Official truth is not actual truth.

DBx: Pictured here is a dispenser of official truth.