Russell Roberts's Blog, page 287
April 13, 2021
Beware of Vaccine-Passport Peddlers
Thus I lost sleep. I lay awake wondering if I’m losing my grip on reality. I asked myself if my priors are so strong that they blind me to what should be obvious, and create in my mind mirages that, to a less-biased brain, are obviously of things unreal.
Even if I were assured beyond doubt that my interpretation of reality is the ‘right’ one, sleep remains elusive. After all, if my reading of today’s world is at all accurate, then a distressingly large number of other people are delusional. Where I see Covid as posing to humanity no categorically different threat than is posed by many other pathogens, other people do see a categorically different threat. Where I see the reaction to Covid as being disproportionate to Covid’s risks by many orders of magnitude, other people see the reaction as appropriate, or even in some cases inadequate. Where I see the combination of craziness and danger of each person treating other persons as emitters of lethal poisons, other people see the good sense and prudence of each person avoiding death.
Where I see media personalities and government officials working hard to sensationalize and exaggerate Covid’s dangers, other people see trustworthy and intrepid reporting of, and dedication to, “the facts” and “the science.” Where I see many of these same media personalities and government officials doing and saying things that clearly reveal their wish to keep Covid hysteria high and going for as long as possible, other people see nothing of the sort.
Where I see an utterly unjustified and permanent expansion of government power to superintend and obstruct private behaviors in ways that a mere 14 months ago was unthinkable, other people see government responding humanely to society’s needs, and government’s willingness to abandon those powers when this pandemic is past.
Where I see liberal civilization being brutally transformed by a Covidocracy into what David Hart calls a “hygiene socialist” society, other people see civilization being compassionately reset into a safer and more humane arrangement in which, presumably, no one ever again will be killed or even discomforted by pathogens.
From the Comments…
… on my open letter to Tyler Cowen is this gem from my and Tyler’s great Nobel-laureate emeritus colleague Vernon Smith (who is 94 years old):
I am in the vulnerable older group. For over a year, when I go out I wear a double mask and stay away from others. If anyone feels vulnerable, or is simply very fearful, justified or not, they should take similar precautions. I am now vaccinated but still wear a mask, get a message twice a week (attendant is masked).
But why impose your situation and fear on everyone else? What justifies that directive? Obviously, the GDB authors incurred great persoanl jugemnental risk by taking a stand. Much better personally for them is to say nothing. They are indeed heroic in the midst of the “Chicken Littles.” It is the social science enlightening event of the new century to learn that the great pandemic contagion is fear, not a virus.
A Panel With the Co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration
Organized by Dr. Kulvinder Karr Gill and hosted by Dr. Richard Schabas, this recent discussion with Profs. Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff – the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration – is excellent. (A full transcript of this discussion is available here.)
Some Covid Links
Unfortunately, in Canada the Covidocracy is less constrained in battering religious freedoms.
Britain is no longer a free country:
Pubs and bars face fines or the removal of their licences over queues on the street after officials threatened to crack down on the most popular venues as they reopened on Monday.
Scores of people queued outside pubs around the country as they reopened for business in line with the second step of lockdown easing.
The Oxford study looked at test results in eight to 11-year-olds in 15 per cent of Dutch primary schools and compared the change in performance between February and June with what it had been in previous years. It found that 10-year-olds were, by a small margin, the age group most affected. Reading skills were most affected, followed by maths and spelling. The drop-off in performance was most acute among those who, prior to lockdown, had been in the middle of the ability range. Those at the top fared a little less badly, perhaps because they had more motivation to work during lockdown. Those at the bottom also fared a little less badly, possibly because their performance had less far to fall. Girls’ performance lapsed a little more than that of boys.
Brendan O’Neill talks with Jonathan Sumption about “the madness of never-ending lockdown.” A slice:
The science on lockdowns is not monolithic. There are many scientists who disagree strongly with what has been happening.
But this isn’t just a scientific question. It’s an economic question. It’s an educational question. It’s a moral question. You have to ask whether it is worth wrecking our economy, our children’s education and our social fabric in order to prevent deaths. That is a fundamentally political issue. Scientists can tell us that they think that the consequences of this or that policy will be X number of deaths, Y number of infections, Z number of hospitalisations. But they can’t say that we ought to have a lockdown – unless they are prepared to devote an equal amount of study to the collateral consequences of it.
Madhukar Pai explains how vaccine passports will negatively impact global health.
Christina Herrin rightly worries about the dystopian consequences of mandated vaccine passports. A slice:
Thankfully, a handful of politicians are speaking out against the madness. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said it best: “I say enough. I urge everyone to get the vaccine if you think you need or want it. And then I urge everyone in America to throw away their masks, demand their schools be open, and live your lives free of more government mandates and interference. Burn your vaccine passport if they try to give it to you and vote out any politician who won’t do the same.”
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 311 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s 2015 book, American Contempt for Liberty, which is a collection of many of Walter’s columns and essays; this quotation specifically is from Walter’s October 16th, 2010, syndicated column, “Invisible Victims”:
FDA officials have a bias toward erring on the side of over-caution. If FDA officials err on the side of under-caution, approving an unsafe drug, they are attacked by the media, patient groups and investigated by Congress. Their victims, sick and dead people, are highly visible. If FDA officials err on the side of over caution, keeping a safe and effective drug off the market, who’s to know? The victims are invisible.
April 12, 2021
Dan Klein’s Open Letter to Tyler Cowen
My colleague Dan Klein wrote this open letter to our mutual colleague Tyler Cowen. I share it here:
Dear Tyler,
Like Don, I am distressed by your recent blog post disparaging the Great Barrington Declaration. Don quotes the 509 fine words authored by Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff. They bear presenting once again, with boldface applied to the Declaration’s essence:
As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.
Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.
Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.
Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing. We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.
As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.
Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.
The GBD is a declaration. As Don said, it is the expressing of a judgment. That judgment is one against heavy-handed widescale coercions and other closures (lockdowns), and in favor of focused protection.
The considerations behind that judgment are manifold, in terms of specific comparative merits and demerits of each counterfactual course of action and in terms of the moral, political, constitutional, cultural, psychological, economic, and health factors considered.
It would seem that you disagree with the GBD’s judgment. Is it the opposition to heavy-handed widescale coercions that you disagree with? Is it the call for focused protection? What is it that you disagree with? The parts in boldface above are the essence: Is it those parts you disagree with?
As Don pointed out, nowhere do you tell us what is it that you disagree with. In your new post, not once is the GBD quoted, even when you say “Going back to the GBD proper”—a remark that is doubly false in that you had not previously quoted the GBD. In the post you elide the lockdown issue entirely, which is what the GBD is about.
In the GBD, the judgments are expressed in 509 words. The reasoning, hypothesizing, and argumentation behind the judgment may run to a thousand times that. To scour that paper trail, made during the unfolding process of learning and the candid discoursing of the authors—like soldiers on the battlefield arguing with one another over how best to fight the battle—, and to snipe at a few instances that might, in hindsight, arguably be deemed mistaken exemplifies the unethical practices that now plague the blogosphere.
Also, you dive deeply into guilt by association, smearing the GBD and its authors by associating them with wicked witches and warlocks who have had connection with AIER, etc. Unjust practices are seen as such when one faces up to an impartial application. Has any of the individuals you’ve associated with, such as guests on Conversations with Tyler, ever said something regrettable? Has any Fast Grants recipient made predictions or assessments that turned out to be not quite right? Has there ever been a sinner among those you have broken bread with? Are you responsible for all statements of all such people?
Unethical practices instill chilliness and caution in what would otherwise be franker and more candid discourse and association. Now prudently mistrustful, we become isolated and atomized, afraid that associating with someone may lead someone else to slime us. The resulting isolation prevents people from correcting others who stand in need of correcting. A sage said “frankness and openness conciliate confidence;” frankness and openness improve science, as well, I think. You join in in unethical practices when you should be admonishing people away from them and setting an example worthy of emulation.
From what might amount to more than one million words of discourse from Drs. Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff, delivered bravely in times of crisis and controversy, you come up with the following supposed zingers:
Dr. Gupta: “What we’ve seen is that in normal, healthy people, who are not elderly or frail or don’t have comorbidities, this virus is not something to worry about no more than how we worry about flu”.
Dr. Gupta: “‘Why would you arrest transmission?’ she asks. ‘To wait for a vaccine? You cannot get rid of it.’”
Dr. Gupta in May 2020: “Covid-19 is on the way out.”
Drs. Kulldorff and Bhattacharya: “The idea that everybody needs to be vaccinated is as scientifically baseless as the idea that nobody does. Covid vaccines are essential for older, high-risk people and their caretakers and advisable for many others.”
Dr. Kulldorff: “Those with prior natural infection do not need it [Covid vaccines]. Nor children.”
Those five bits are all of the ammo you fire, in terms of their quoted words—none from the GBD. Your effort, given the myriad words by them, points to a conclusion different than you wish readers to draw.
Even if one where to embrace your own interpretations on the matters touched upon in the five snippets, would the soundness of the judgment of the GBD collapse? If Kulldorff is wrong to say that someone with antibodies does not need a vaccine, would that undo the soundness of GBD’s judgment against heavy-handed widescale coercions? If GBD’s judgment remains sound even were the dust settled to your fancy, where is the justness in your disparagement?
I thank Don for posting this open letter at Café Hayek. Here is a link to The Other Me. I much admire and feel gratitude to many of the people your lesser you has treated in unbecoming fashion—not just the GBD authors and people at AIER but others such as Ivor Cummins, who has generated perhaps a million words, in my estimation very much to the betterment of humankind.
I close by repeating Don’s closing words: “You’re better than that, Tyler.”
/Dan
An Open Letter to Tyler Cowen on The Great Barrington Declaration
Tyler,
When I caught notice of your most-recent effort to explain your disparagement of the Great Barrington Declaration I was prepared to find myself in respectful disagreement with the substance of at least some of your objections. But what I found instead is a surprising and disappointing absence of any substantive criticism of the GBD.
Authored by Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff, the Great Barrington Declaration text is 509 words. So that everyone can see this document plainly, I paste it here in full:
The Great Barrington Declaration
As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.
Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.
Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.
Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing. We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.
As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.
Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.
The GBD is an expression of judgment against heavy-handed widescale coercions and other closures (lockdowns), and in favor of what the authors call “Focused Protection.”
Yet every argument that you offer against the GBD is ad hominem. Nowhere do you tell us what it is that you find objectionable about the substance of the Declaration.
You tell us your reasons for disliking AIER (the GBD’s sponsor). But no employee, columnist, intern, or Fellow of AIER wrote the GBD. Not Jeffrey Tucker. Not Ed Stringham. Not Naomi Wolf (who, I’m pretty sure, in October, when the document was written and published, had no affiliation with AIER).
And then you share several statements and predictions from the GBD’s co-authors. You regard these statements as questionable and these predictions as mistaken. Your goal in listing these statements and predictions is to discredit the GBD by associating it with scientists whose professional merit, you suggest, at least with respect to pandemic management, is sufficiently questionable that we should look with great skepticism upon what they wrote in the GBD. But none of these statements and predictions that you quote appear in that document. If the GBD is as bad as you believe it to be, surely it contains at least one statement toward which substantive criticism can be aimed.
I don’t doubt that each of the GBD’s distinguished co-authors have, during their careers, made statements that they later wish they could retract, and offered predictions that did not pan out. Can you name any scientist worth his or her salt whose track record is perfect?
Even excellent scientists get things wrong from time to time. But throughout all follow the scientific method. This method rejects ad hominem argumentation. Your disparagement of the GBD is thus ironic. By relying exclusively on ad hominem argumentation to cast doubt on the scientific merits of the GBD you act unscientifically – an action worse than any of the errors that you allege to uncover in your list of non-GBD statements and predictions made by the document’s authors.
In one of the few places in your post in which you mention substance bearing some relation to the GBD, you write:
here is co-author Sunetra Gupta:
“What we’ve seen is that in normal, healthy people, who are not elderly or frail or don’t have comorbidities, this virus is not something to worry about no more than how we worry about flu,” professor Gupta told HT.
Nope, almost 600,000 U.S. deaths later.
I’m genuinely baffled. What is objectionable about this statement by Prof. Gupta? It strikes me as being quite accurate. Yet you dismiss it by declaring, “Nope, almost 600,000 U.S. deaths later.” (Not that it matters much, but the latest CDC data, as of April 7th, report the number of U.S. deaths – “All Deaths involving COVID-19” – as being 539,793.) I’m aware that, at least for policy purposes, you believe Covid’s steep age-gradient to be irrelevant, but this steep age-gradient is central to Prof. Gupta’s claim.
As a reminder, 31 percent of Covid deaths in the U.S. are of people 85 and older; 58 percent are of people 75 and older; and 80 percent are of people 65 and older. And almost all persons who have died of Covid have had comorbidities. This reality – shown in CDC data – not only seems quite strongly to confirm Prof. Gupta’s statement, it also speaks to the good sense of the GBD’s recommendation of Focused Protection.
Let’s not forget that the great majority of Covid deaths occurred in policy regimes that reject the GBD’s advice to focus resources and attention on protecting the vulnerable. These deaths occurred in policy regimes that instead followed, to one degree or another, the lockdown recommendations of Neil Ferguson and the Imperial College. All resources being scarce, those resources that are devoted to protecting the non-vulnerable are not available for protecting the vulnerable. And so we have an empirical question: How many of these Covid deaths would have been avoided had, contrary to fact, the GBD’s recommendations been followed and the Imperial College’s recommendations been rejected?
I close by returning to my root disappointment. While seeming to promise in your recent post an explanation of what you believe to be substantively mistaken in the Great Barrington Declaration, you offer little beyond ad hominem. You’re better than that, Tyler.
Don
Some Non-Covid Links
Danusha Goska eloquently exposes the illogic, hypocrisy, and evil of wokism. (HT Tim Townsend) A slice:
Woke condemns being “nice” and “polite.” Niceness and politeness were invented by white men to support patriarchy and white supremacy. Robin DiAngelo points out that “niceness” is merely a façade white supremacists have developed to camouflage their evil. To be “nice” is actually to be “violent” and white supremacist, reports the group “Women of Color and Allies.” Women “need to embrace the discomfort, the edges and the messiness of overturning that which has kept us in the number two slot of the power and privilege pyramid for over 500 years … niceness destroys people of color.” Niceness and politeness belong in the same museum with whips and chains.
In reality, of course, it is not oppressed women who can forgo niceness and politeness. When I was cleaning houses, and when my mother before me was cleaning houses, for rich, liberal women, neither my mother before me nor I ever dared to be anything but deferential to these women.
Only the truly privileged can appropriate the victim costume, forgo niceness and politeness, and rage at, and destroy, their alleged “oppressors.” At Smith College the annual cost for students is $78,000. In July, 2018, Student Oumou Kanoute falsely accused low-wage Smith workers of racism. She doxed the accused on social media. One cafeteria worker was so stressed she had to be hospitalized.
Mary Anastasia O’Grady exposes the hypocrisy of woke-infected Major League Baseball. Here’s her opening:
Major League Baseball says “values” compelled it to move this summer’s All-Star Game out of Georgia. But this piety doesn’t square with its long record of collaboration with Cuba’s military dictatorship, one of the world’s most notorious human-rights violators.
George Leef decries wokism on campus.
David Henderson notes that it’s a win-win for Amazon’s workers and Amazon’s shareholders.
Arnold Kling writes wisely about social conventions.
J.D. Tuccille exposes Joe Biden’s insincerity.
Dan Mitchell reports on New York’s fiscal suicide.
Bob Poole offers an excellent proposal.
Some people see trade across borders as negative. They believe that when you buy something from foreigners, you lose. They should thus be happy when goods are blocked from entering their country. Former president Donald Trump famously stated, “China has been taking out 500 billion dollars a year out of our country and rebuilding China.” In his view, that wealth left the U.S. and went to China, a view that oddly overlooks all the things that producers in China send to Americans, including computers, furniture, integrated circuits, sports equipment, electrical machines and, yes, tea. And it leaves out all the things American producers send to China, from aircraft to soybeans, cars and trucks to optical and medical instruments. The protectionist thinks that if you send money abroad, you’re losing. By the same logic, when I send money to my local grocery store, wealth is leaving my house in order to build someone else’s. I “lose” every time I buy food from the grocery, or electricity from the power company, or medicine from the pharmacy. That view is known as the “balance of trade.”
Adam Smith in his 1776 masterpiece, noted that “Nothing … can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade, upon which, not only these restraints, but almost all the other regulations of commerce are founded. When two places trade with one another, this [absurd] doctrine supposes that, if the balance be even, neither of them either loses or gains; but if it leans in any degree to one side, that one of them loses and the other gains in proportion to its declension from the exact equilibrium.”
Some Covid Links
So why, of all the places in London, on all the days of the year, was this one targeted on Good Friday?
I don’t think much thought went into it. I think deep down in the brain of the state is an idea that religious people, especially Christians, shouldn’t think they have any special position in Britain any more.
Worship the new Health and Safety State first, and when you’ve done that we might allow to you worship God, not in the way you want to, but in the way we let you.
If they’d come in with clubs swinging and Communist emblems on their cap-badges, I suspect the Poles of Balham would have thrown them out. But, like so many of us, they still treasure the illusion that this is a free country.
And so they submit to things they’d never take from an invader or a more obvious oppressor. It turns out that free countries are incredibly easy to turn into despotisms, because nobody can believe what is happening.
Life under what The Times calls, quite accurately, “the plandemic”. (DBx: Most Americans have not been subjected to the extraordinarily high degree of Covid tyranny still crushing down the British people. But capacity limits in many of these United States nevertheless make dining out or going to a bar for a drink much more difficult than before the plague of Covid Derangement Syndrome.)
Britain is no longer a free country. A slice:
Under severe restrictions on our freedoms, government told us that locking us down was the only way to save the NHS and save lives from the virus. The lockdowns have clearly not worked in the unrealistic aim of eradicating the virus, nor in coping with the virus, and the NHS hospitals, while coping heroically with the winter surge of cases, also acted as major spreaders of Covid. Florence Nightingale knew about isolation hospitals for highly transmissible diseases but our health bureaucrats ignored her wisdom and did not use the Nightingale Hospitals for this purpose, nor did they deploy the reservoir of student nurses – and for the next winter surge we will have no isolation hospitals and no accessible pool of extra emergency nursing staff. Nothing has changed. The fact is that if we do get a surge in the winter, when respiratory cases rise, the government is keeping the lockdown hammer as its one instrument of response. We were told ‘test and trace’ would turn the tide and control the epidemic, but that has been described as a ‘mess’ and even counter-productive.
We were told that the first lockdown was a gain in the battle, then another surge brought another lockdown. Then we were told a vaccine was to be our salvation, then despite a surprisingly efficient vaccination programme, and ‘the data’ showing that we are on the way out of the epidemic, it was announced that the lockdown restrictions can only be very slowly lifted, with small businesses and pubs being sacrificed as we speak. And these restrictions of social distancing and mask wearing will be kept after the ‘end’ of lockdown. We are not going to be free for a long time; we are being dragged back as we are told we are free.
And we are told that we will have to have vaccination passports, and will need to test ourselves twice a week, despite being fully healthy! It seems that our government is now addicted to micromanaging our lives in totalitarian, bureaucratic fashion. Just as with our semi-escape from Brussels technocracy, so with our semi-escape from uniquely repressive restrictions on our lives in all aspects, this is a fake and we will be stuck with loss of freedoms for an unspecified time. The depth and width of the freedoms lost include those of religious practice, social life, family life, freedom of speech to criticise the restrictive laws, travel within and out of the country, stopping basic schooling, the misuse of the police in enforcing these restrictions. The public has been psychologically coerced and scared into accepting all this with little complaint. The MSM has acted as government loud-hailer with little criticism, despite what is now a tsunami of high-quality scientific evidence against lockdown and devastating criticism of the ‘modelling’ that lies behind the harsh totalitarian regulation of life. We have been manipulated into compliance in an abusive fashion.
Karol Markowicz reasonably wonders if Covid-19 hysterics will ever let children lead normal lives. Two slices:
The end of the pandemic is nigh. Americans continue to get vaccinated at a rapid clip. Life will be moving on. Except, it seems, for children. For more than a year, they have suffered from irrational, unscientific and downright superstitious policies inflicted upon them by adults — and there is no end in sight.
…..
In November, Maria van Kerkhove, head of the World Health Organization’s emerging-diseases unit, clarified that “for children under 6 years old, we don’t recommend the use of masks.” This, she said, was “for many reasons — because of the way children are developing” and because enforcing adherence is a fool’s errand. She added: “Between 6 [and] 11, we recommend taking a risk-based approach depending on where the children are, the types of activities they are doing.”
Yet last week, YouTube removed a video of scientists from places like Stanford saying much the same to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The Google-owned video service called it “medical misinformation.” This, even though last April, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcocki said her site would interdict “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations.” In this case, it’s YouTube itself that was contradicting WHO.
As Phil Magness would say, the straw man continues to romp.
Vaccine passports: What price in terms of freedom? A slice:
According to The Ada Lovelace Institute report “What place should COVID-19 vaccine passports have in society?”: “The expert group came to the view that at present vaccination status does not offer clear or conclusive evidence about any individual’s risk to others via transmission. Without that it cannot be a robust basis for risk-based decision making, and therefore any roll out of a digital passport is not currently justified.” They concur with the European Data Protection Board which points out the dangers of unintended secondary uses resulting in widespread discrimination and inequality.
But who cares about all that when you could be launching an app? When we look at death tallies and population level vaccination rates one has to question the motivation of the rush to implement this kind of technology. Take Brunei with a grand total of three COVID-19 deaths. It already has its app, BruHealth, which is used to restrict access to business premises and shows the “activity trace” of any nearby confirmed cases. They even used it for a while to control access to Friday prayers. Finland, with 868 deaths and 2% of its population fully vaccinated, has joined with Estonia (1,006 deaths, 5% vaccinated) to be one of the first to pilot a WHO scheme involving showing your immunity status to your employer. What could possibly go wrong? Australia, with 909 deaths and only 4% of its population vaccinated, is working with unions to determine domestic restrictions based on its Medicare Express Plus app which can access the national Australian Immunisation Register. The data suggests these countries do not have a problem that merits deploying technology to restrict the lives of 95% of their citizens for an indefinite period.
Those of you who doubt that Covid Derangement Syndrome is real and that much of humanity is now insane, ponder this fact: “Boris Johnson has decreed that vaccinated people must not meet indoors because jabs ‘are not giving 100% protection’.” And remember, the fully vaccinated Fauci remains so frightened of Covid that he’ll not resume a normal life.
Here’s a letter from Lisa Dickmann in today’s Wall Street Journal:
If I’m fully vaccinated, why should I care whether the guy sitting next to me is? Once everyone who wants a vaccine has had the chance to get it, the risk to the unvaccinated isn’t society’s problem, and all pandemic-instituted restrictions should end.
Let’s hope Americans will see vaccine passports for what they are: the government’s attempt to cling to power granted by us to battle a threat that, very soon, will no longer be much of a threat.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 646 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):
Government rules the present. Literature rules the future.
DBx: The course of human events is determined overwhelmingly, and at root, by ideas. We must – if as a species we are to thrive rather than merely survive – get our ideas right. If we don’t, we’ll still lord it over the likes of dogs, donkeys, and deer – but we will live little better than any other of our great-ape relatives.
Russell Roberts's Blog
- Russell Roberts's profile
- 39 followers
