Russell Roberts's Blog, page 295
March 26, 2021
Some Covid Links
Anthony Fauci has been saying that the country needs to vaccinate 70% to 85% of the population to reach herd immunity from Covid-19. But he inexplicably ignores natural immunity. If you account for previous infections, herd immunity is likely close at hand.
Data from the California Department of Public Health, released earlier this month, show that while only 8.7% of the state’s population has ever tested positive for Covid-19, at least 38.5% of the population has antibodies against the novel coronavirus. Those numbers are from Jan. 30 to Feb. 20. Adjusting for cases between now and then, and accounting for the amount of time it takes for the body to make antibodies, we can estimate that as many as half of Californians have natural immunity today.
…..
Undercounting or removing the many Americans with natural immunity from any tally of herd immunity is a scientific error of omission. When people wonder why President Biden talks about limiting Fourth of July gatherings, it’s because his most prominent medical adviser has dismissed the contribution of natural immunity, artificially extending the timeline.
Many physicians believe that vaccinated immunity will prove more durable than natural immunity. I agree, and I think everyone should get vaccinated. But after a year of millions of Covid-19 cases in the U.S., it’s clear that reinfections are rare. Natural immunity is real and shouldn’t be ignored.
Mary Harrington decries how lockdowns have shredding of social connections. A slice:
Lockdown has also gnawed at quality of life for all but the best-resourced and most well-connected elderly people. A massive 80% of respondents to an Alzheimer’s Society survey reported a dramatic decline in faculties as a consequence of isolation. And there are harrowing stories of the impact isolation in a care home has had, on people with advanced dementia deprived even of visits from loving relatives.
We’ve paid steeply to control this virus. The price has not just been in government borrowing but in the tattered warp and weft of our common life.
Laura Dodsworth wonders about the point of vaccine passports. A slice:
The only thing that matters is your own immune status. If you are vaccinated, you are protected. If someone is not vaccinated next to you at the bar, it will not matter because you are vaccinated. If you are sitting next to someone on an aeroplane it doesn’t matter what their immune status is, as long as you know yours.
Also, as [Robert] Dingwall pointed out to me, once the over-50s and vulnerable categories have been vaccinated, 98 per cent of the risk of death and 80 to 85 per cent of the risk of serious illness will have been eliminated. The vaccine programme is already a success for at-risk individuals and for society as a whole.
John Tamny explains how lockdowns have devastated the cruise industry.
Will Jones fact-checks the BBC’s fact-checkers. Here’s his intro:
IN ITS latest ‘reality check’, the BBC attempts to rebut seven of the ‘most frequently-shared false and misleading claims’ about Covid.
It’s written by Jack Goodman, a ‘producer, newsreader and reporter at BBC Radio Derby’, and Flora Carmichael, a ‘journalist and producer with a strong track record of developing media partnerships and managing international projects and teams’.
So you can see why they would be well-qualified to set straight Oxford’s Professor Sunetra Gupta, Harvard’s Professor Martin Kulldorff, Stanford’s Professor Jay Bhattacharya and other eminent sceptics.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 644 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):
Only in ideas can we see the progress of liberty. It is the great form of progress.
DBx: Yes. And note that Acton’s conception of progress is quite the opposite of the ‘progress’ that is pushed by “Progressives.” The latter ‘progress’ is achieved by that most primitive and mindless of means: coercion initiated against peaceful people.
March 25, 2021
A Blessing in Disguise
Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Editor:
Regarding the tanker stuck in the Suez Canal and blocking one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes (“Suez Canal Backlog Grows as Efforts Resume to Free Trapped Tanker”): If the principles of economic nationalism that have swept the globe over the past ten years are sound – principles embraced here in the U.S. by both Republicans and Democrats – this stuck tanker is a blessing in disguise. By obstructing international trade, it protects jobs in each country from being destroyed by foreigners hawking exports while relieving governments of the need to spend resources on costly customs facilities and agents.
And so Pres. Biden should send to Egypt a delegation led by former president Trump to demand an immediate end to efforts to dislodge the tanker, and to propose that the flotilla of other tankers now blocked by the stuck vessel each itself be lodged into the Suez mud so that the canal remains permanently closed. Once the Suez Canal is securely shut, the delegation can speed off to Panama to demand similar efforts there.
Think of the benefits! Supply ‘chains’ will be repatriated! Trade deficits will disappear! National security will never again be undermined by reliance on foreigners! All nations will be freed of their economic dependence on other nations. No more will jobs be stolen by other countries’ unfair trade practices! And America will truly be made great again!
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
But we need to keep this latest attack on the principles, practices, and institutions of liberty in some historical perspective. I believe that when we do that our plight will appear to be even worse than we have imagined. I say this because this latest expansion of state power (what I have termed “hygiene socialism” or “lockdown socialism”) comes on top of the eight other major areas of expanded state power which have emerged over the last 20 years, which remain largely unchallenged (intellectually) and still intact (politically). Had we been able to make some headway in reducing these other manifestations of state power and intervention, weakening their intellectual justification, persuading voters to exercise their electoral power to elect politicians to begin dismantling key government programs, then we would be in a much better position to tackle head-on this latest manifestation of state power, but because it comes on top on these existing programs, our task has suddenly become much harder.
My great fear is that in order to continue to impose and expand hygiene socialism the state will seek and get enthusiastic public support to use these other, pre-existing programs to do this. This means that the corrupted system of money and banking will be called upon to “fund” programs to support failed businesses, locked-down workers, and drug manufacturers; the extensive system of surveillance of private citizens will be used to “trace” and “monitor” suspected disease carriers (or “ex-disease” carriers); the trade policy of “protection” for domestic industry will be expanded to make sure that “the nation” will be able to manufacture all of its “own” masks and vaccines and not be “dependent” on foreign manufacturers (especially the dreaded “Chinese”), and so on. The result will be an expanding and increasingly interlocked system of government programs and interventions which will be argued is “necessary” in order to secure the “safety of the people” (salus populi). Of course, this notion of “the safety of people” could be vastly expanded to other risks to life and limb which are even greater than covid 19. Once one has started down this slippery slope of statism there is no stopping once a certain momentum has built up.
Here’s Jim Bovard’s personal retrospective on a year of lockdown tyranny. A slice:
After the Covid-19 pandemic began, politicians tightened tourniquets that would supposedly vanquish the virus by cutting off the economy’s blood supply. Governors in state after state effectively placed hundreds of millions of citizens under house arrest – dictates that former Attorney General Bill Barr aptly compared to “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties” since the end of slavery. The New York Times set the tone for media coverage when it announced that the task for government was to “learn how to frighten [citizens] into acting for the common good.”
The American Institute for Economic Research was in the forefront of denouncing pointless, oppressive restrictions from the start. In May, my old friend AIER editorial director Jeffrey Tucker contacted me and the result was my first AIER piece, “Will the Political Class Be Held Liable For What They’ve Done?” That article lambasted politicians for responding “to Covid-19 by dropping the equivalent of a Reverse Neutron Bomb – something which destroys the economy while supposedly leaving human beings unharmed…. Shutting down entire states, including vast uninfected rural swaths, is the economic equivalent of burning witches or sacrificing virgins to appease angry viral gods.”
It is questionable whether a civilised society should knowingly increase the emotional discomfort of its citizens as a means of gaining their compliance. State scientists deploying fear, shame and scapegoating to change minds is an ethically dubious practice that in some respects resembles the tactics used by totalitarian regimes such as China, where the state inflicts pain on a subset of its population in an attempt to eliminate beliefs and behaviour they perceive to be deviant.
Another ethical issue associated with the methods of covert nudging used in the Covid-19 communications campaign concerns the unintended consequences. Shaming and scapegoating has emboldened some people to harass those unable or unwilling to wear a face covering. More disturbingly, fear inflation has led to many people being too scared to attend hospital with non-Covid illness, while many old people, rendered housebound by fear, will have died prematurely from loneliness. Collateral damage of this sort is likely to be responsible for many of the tens of thousands of excess non-Covid deaths in private homes. In a civilised society, is it morally acceptable to use psychological strategies that are associated with this level of collateral damage?
The public are no longer viewed as rational adults, capable of having the risks and benefits of actions explained to them, and permitted the agency to make their own choices. They are treated like children, to be cajoled and coerced into making the “correct” decisions. This extends not only to the legislation, but to much of the public messaging — fear, shame and guilt abounds.
Little allowance is given for human needs. For those living in house shares, for example, sex with non-cohabiting partners has been legally prohibited for months. And while the onus throughout this period has been on those who break laws, the same consideration has not been given to more positive interventions, such as ensuring people have adequate sick pay, enabling them to quarantine effectively, or in getting sufficient supplies of PPE to reduce infection rates.
Working against the public, and treating human nature as an inconvenience that must be threatened with punishment, is the antithesis of Public Health and modern medicine.
It may be tempting to argue that in this time of crisis, particularly involving a communicable disease, the end justifies the means. But considering that this week marks a year since the first lockdown began — a year in which the minutiae of daily life have been rendered legal or illegal with the sweep of a pen — this cannot continue indefinitely. It is time for the Government to recognise this fact and start collaborating with the public instead of criminalising them.
Jordan Schachtel warns against treating the term “public-health expert” too literally. A slice:
The moment you depart from treating individuals, and attempt to collectivize a population, you’re not so much an expert as you are an authoritarian control freak disguised as an expert.
Fauci is not a public health expert, he’s a power drunk immunologist. Bill Gates is not a public health expert, he’s a maniacal technocrat.
Brendan O’Neill has more from the once-free country of Great Britain. Here’s his opening:
For a year we have been living through one of the most extraordinary events of modern times: the hibernation of democracy. The suspension of public life. The adjournment of politics itself. This has been the most dire consequence of lockdown. We have witnessed the outsourcing of decision-making to non-political actors, the withering away of political opposition and political debate, and the decommissioning of the public itself. Stay at home, watch the news for Covid updates, and don’t breathe on, far less talk to, another human soul. That has been the instruction to the demos for the past year. The impact of all of this on the spirit and practice of democracy is likely to be long-lasting.
Today is the first anniversary of the imposition of lockdown in the UK. It was a year ago today that Boris Johnson, having initially bristled at the idea of enforcing a China- or Italy-style shutdown of society, solemnly addressed the nation and said: ‘Stay at home.’ It would last three or four weeks, we were told. It was just about ‘flattening the curve’ and preventing the NHS from being overwhelmed. We’d be out of it soon and cracking on with life relatively normally. How naive we were to believe that. Today, on this unhappy birthday, we’re in lockdown again – our third – and public-health experts are telling us that some social restrictions could last for years. A three-week shutdown has become a neverending nightmare.
How did this happen? It is not, as some people insist, a conspiracy. Government officials did not plot this severe suspension of our freedoms. They aren’t rubbing their hands with glee at having finally made the masses docile and made themselves all-powerful (although it is certainly the case that bureaucratic opportunists have spied in this crisis a chance to push their pet nanny-state causes, whether it’s on obesity, the evils of boozing in pubs or the ‘annoyance’ of political protests). And nor is lockdown the handiwork of Big Pharma or dastardly corporations desperate to inject their drugs (and microchips?) into the lab rats of humanity. These attempts to uncover the plot behind our predicament can end up confusing the issue and in some cases can stir up conspiratorial thinking.
Today’s links begin with pessimism from Australia. Here’s some optimism, at least on one front, from Australia – specifically from Ramesh Thakur. Here’s his opening:
The enormous gulf between observational data and the unshakeable cult-like belief system of the scientific-political elite on lockdowns is baffling. Curves for Covid cases, hospitalisations and deaths give no clue about when countries and US states locked down, how hard and for how long. Hundreds of millions have suffered between the callousness of the modelling dogmatists, panic-fuelling media, authoritarian instincts of social engineers and cowardice of science-challenged politicians. Children and the elderly were both badly betrayed by the pandemic lockdowns. We’ve endured extraordinarily widespread human suffering, long-term economic devastation and reckless government spending for a year. ‘Experts’ are also perplexed by low mortality rates in countries like India and Nepal where hard lockdowns proved unsustainable. Are the modelling epidemiologists depraved, demented or just criminally incompetent?
The dam of scepticism may be about to burst as growing numbers abandon the Covid tyranny.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 36 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s excellent and hot-off-the-Cambridge-University-Press book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins (2021) (original emphasis):
The story of increasing worldwide wealth over the last two centuries has resulted from allowing ever more people to engage in mutually voluntary and mutually beneficial transactions without third-party interposition.
March 24, 2021
Some Non-Covid Links
Vincent Geloso explains that bigger can be better as long as government stays out of the way.
David Henderson reminds us of an important point about welfare economics.
Matt Welch reports on the insufferable rent-seeker for many unionized “teachers,” Randi Weingarten. A slice:
“We are not convinced that the evidence supports changing physical distancing requirements at this time,” American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten declared in a letter Tuesday to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky, in response to the CDC last Friday revising its school-distancing guidelines from 6 feet to 3.
Among the institutions that do not share Weingarten’s lack of conviction: The American Academy of Pediatrics, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, Walensky herself (prior to joining the Biden administration), most of the 50 states, the vast majority of school districts in the industrialized world, plus one of the research teams whose work the CDC had erroneously sourced when formulating guidance for the agency’s controversial February 12 recommendation to keep the 6-foot rule intact. Opined those latter scientists at the time: “No science supports mandating 6 feet of distance with children wearing masks. A 6-foot distance between students creates space constraints for schools to open in entirety. There is data supporting at least 3-foot distancing.”
Phil Gramm and John Early, writing in the Wall Street Journal, report on America’s “incredible shrinking income inequality.” Here’s their conclusion:
The raging debate over income inequality in America calls to mind the old Will Rogers adage: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It is what you do know that ain’t so.” We are debating the alleged injustice of a supposedly growing social problem when—for all the reasons outlined above—that problem isn’t growing, it’s shrinking. Those who want to transform the greatest economic system in the history of the world ought to get their facts straight first.
Pierre Lemieux has written a new primer, this one on public health.
My colleague Bryan Caplan has “already seen enough stifling left-wing dogma to last a lifetime.”
Eric Boehm reports on Joe Biden’s appalling fiscal irresponsibility. (DBx: This will not end well.)
James Pethokoukis talks with my former student, the great scholar of immigration Alex Nowrasteh.
Here’s Ryan Bourne on anti-price-‘gouging’ legislation.
Mark Jamison passes along to Joe Biden some advice from Adam Smith.
Man-of-System Madness!
Every Spring in the U.S., many Americans are tuned in to what is called “March Madness.” (This madness usually occurs in early April, but because of Covid-19, it actually is occurring in 2021 in March. In 2020 it was cancelled by Covid Craziness.)
Sixty-four – well, now more, but traditionally 64 – college basketball teams are invited to participate in the NCAA Division I basketball tournament. The sixty-four teams are then equally divided into four regions: South, East, West, and Midwest. Each of these teams is then “seeded” (which I think derives from seated – as in “placed”) in its region. The seeds in each region range from 1 to 16, with the number 1 seed in each region being the team considered to be the best in that region and the number 16 seed considered the team to be the worst in that region.
Games are then played in each region. In round one, the #1 seed plays the #16 seed, the #2 seed plays the #15 seed, and so on. The losers goes home and the winners advance to the next round. So, for example, if (as nearly always happens) the #1 seed wins in the first round, that team advances to the second round to play the winner of the first-round match of the #8 versus the #9 seeds. This elimination process continues until the winners of each of the four regions meet in the “Final Four.” The losers of the first two games of the Final Four go home while the winners meet each other in the National Championship game. The team that wins the championship game is the NCAA champion.
When NCAA announces the “brackets” in the days before the start of the tournament, Americans have a terrific time “filling out the brackets” – that is, picking which team will win each game. Monetary bets are frequently placed.
The brackets look like this:
If the outcome of each game is purely random, the chance of getting all bracket predictions correct would be one in 9.22 quintillion – or 1 in 9,220,000,000,000,000,000. To get you within the ballpark – or, well, within the basketball court – of appreciating just how big is 9.22 quintillion (and, hence, how small is 1/9,220,000,000,000,000,000), consider that not until the universe reaches the ripe old age of roughly 291 billion years will it have witnessed the passage of 9.22 quintillion seconds. (Astronomers estimate that the universe is now about 13.8 billion years old – so just another 277 billion years to go!)
But the outcome of each game isn’t random. Each higher-seeded team is more likely to win its game than is its lower-seeded opponent. It’s reported here that “if you know a little something about basketball,” the odds of filling out a perfect bracket rise to 1 in 120.2 billion. So, practically speaking, still zero.
So what? Café Hayek isn’t a sports or betting blog; it’s an economics blog.
Here’s the relevance.
Production involves matching different inputs together in ways that generate outputs that are useful to human beings. And production is ‘better’ the more useful are the outputs produced relative to the value of the inputs used to produce these outputs. If McDonald’s produces one million Big Macs this year using only half of the inputs that it used last year to produce one million Big Macs, there are more resources available this year to produce goods and services that last year were too costly to produce. McDonald’s’ improved efficiency at producing Big Macs increases the wealth not only of McDonald’s shareholders but also of countless people who have nothing at all to do with McDonald’s as owners, workers, or customers.
And so we, simply as denizens of the modern economy, should care how well different inputs are combined with each other to produce outputs. Suppose that $X value of some good can be produced in one of two ways: (1) by combining input A with input B; or (2) by combining input A with inputs C and D.
Which way is better? The answer is easy: the one with the lowest cost. If here using inputs A, C, and D costs less than using inputs A and B, we should all want this good produced with inputs A, C, and D.
Nothing is easier than to write ‘We should produce as efficiently as possible’ – which, in effect, is just what I wrote. The challenge in this complex reality of ours is to actually achieve production that is as efficient as possible.
To the extent that we let government override market decisions and processes, we let government do the equivalent of trying to fill out a perfect NCAA tournament bracket. The actual play of each game determines which team, at least under the particular circumstances – and at the particular times – of the games, is the best team. Likewise, the actual play of market competition determines which particular combination of inputs is the best way of producing some (given) output.
It would be folly to think that we can eliminate the need to actually carry out the competition of tournament games by having some ‘experts’ fill out the brackets in order to determine which teams are best. It would be even greater folly to think that we can eliminate the need to actually carry out market competition by having some ‘experts’ write down ahead of time which is the ‘best’ method of producing some (given) output.
The latter folly would be greater than in the basketball-tournament case for at least two reasons. First, unlike in the basketball-tournament case, in the economy we must also somehow figure out what is the best combination of goods and services to produce. The ‘best’ outcomes in the basketball tournament are simply those outcomes that emerge from the playing of the games fairly. In the economy, though, the relative ranking of ultimate outputs – of consumer goods and services – must be made such that all production effort is geared to producing those goods and services.
Second, there are only 64 teams in the NCAA tournament, with only one eventual ‘winner’ (which can be thought of as a final consumer good). In the economy, there are literally trillions of resources and hundreds of billions of ‘winners’ – that is, final consumer goods and services the production of which justifies using inputs. The complexity of the economy is untold magnitudes greater than is the complexity of the NCAA basketball tournament.
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 22 of the 2009 Revised Edition of Thomas Sowell’s Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One:
Most people in modern industrial societies are called workers or labor. However, people represent not only labor but also capital investments. Schooling, job experience, reading, experience gained tinkering with cars or computers, as well as by absorbing the knowledge and experience of parents and peers, all contribute to the development of the skills, insights, and capabilities on the job that economists call human capital.
DBx: Indeed.
And so, because minimum-wage statutes price some low-skilled workers out of jobs, minimum-wage statutes are a means by which governments obstruct the ability of low-skilled workers, in effect, to become capitalists. Minimum-wage legislation obstructs the ability of low-skilled workers to acquire the human capital that is gotten on the job.
How very ironic, then, is the large overlap between those who support minimum wages and those who complain about income and wealth inequality? The former is among the policies that artificially promote the latter outcome.
Few policies are as anti-poor and anti-minority as are minimum wages. This reality is unaltered by the fact that most people today who support minimum wages are unaware that such legislation results in outcomes quite the opposite of those that the supporters wish. Intentions – it cannot be said too often – are not results.
That many non-economists do not understand the real-world consequences of minimum wages is sad but understandable. But that a not-insignificant number of trained economists today support the minimum wage speaks either to how poorly these economists are trained, or to the power of motivated thinking to enable people to twist themselves into intellectual and ethical knots in order to ‘see’ reality as they wish it to be (or, perhaps, to both).
An economist whose support for minimum wages rests on the belief that such legislation leads to the worsening of employment prospects for no workers is as deficient at thinking as would be a physicist who denies that the law of gravity operates on the dark side of the moon.
Some Covid Links
Phil Magness documents decades of Fauci flip-flops. A slice:
All the more curious, Fauci’s recent exaggerations about Covid-19 reinfection place him in direct conflict with another “expert” assessment of the very same question: his own, at various points over the course of the pandemic in the last year.
On March 28, 2020 – just shy of a year before his recent tangle with Senator Paul – Fauci aggressively contested the likelihood of reinfection in an interview with the Daily Show’s Trevor Noah. “It’s never 100%,” he explained, “but I’d be willing to bet anything that people who recover are really protected against re-infection.”
The NIH administrator’s many credulous enthusiasts in the news media will likely respond to such contradictory assertions by claiming that Fauci is simply updating his assessment in light of new evidence. Yet his track record over the past year suggests a very different story. Far from incorporating the latest scientific findings, Fauci appears to selectively invoke or downplay the specter of reinfection based on whether or not it serves his political objectives of the moment.
Richard Rahn is impressed with John Tamny’s new book on the lockdowns. A slice:
In contrast, Dr. [Rand] Paul has been consistent in recommending we look at the total costs and benefits of each proposed action in dealing with the pandemic. Dr. Fauci says “follow the science.” But when Dr. Paul asks where the science is behind “six feet” of social distancing or the justification for keeping schools closed, when we know that very few children die or have serious effects from the virus — Dr. Fauci has no good answers.
But Dr. Fauci knows (and that’s why he has survived under six presidents) what he needs to say to keep his political masters happy, and that is to recommend actions to give the political class more power.
The mainstream media is happy to laud Dr. Fauci no matter how nonsensical his statements, because it makes their big-government political allies happy.
Robby Soave reports on the CDC’s unscientific war on people enjoying the great outdoors. A slice:
Sadly, the CDC is ideologically disinclined to let people do things that make them happy, even if the risk of harm is low. People will need to get used to ignoring the CDC’s overly cautious guidance (or better yet, realize that they have already spent most of their lives ignoring it).
Lockdown Sceptics creator Toby Young just barely retains faith in his country, Great Britain. (DBx: Mr Young is heroic. Although I’m American and not British, I mourn with him the battering that liberal institutions have taken over the past year at the hands of Boris Johnson’s government in that historically significant nation. American liberties are deeply rooted in the liberal ideas, values, and sensibilities that, during the 17th and 18th centuries, grew more lushly in Great Britain than anywhere else. That America’s great mother nation is now so suffocatingly clamped in the vice-grip of irrationality-fueled tyranny is heartbreaking.)
And yet Covid rules are just about to get even nastier. Draft laws published today and to be voted on this Thursday not only extend emergency Covid legislation for another six months (three months beyond the end of the Prime Minister’s roadmap for ending restrictions), they introduce a new offence of travelling to a port or airport with the intention of leaving the country without reasonable excuse, punishable by a £5,000 fine.
…..
The Prime Minister once said that his hero was the mayor in Jaws because he kept the beaches open. No longer. If this Government faced a shark attack it would not only close the beaches for good, but also the promenade and, indeed, the entire seaside resort just in case a new variant of shark evolved capable of waddling out of the water and gobbling people up some distance inland.
And Gary Oliver reveals just how tyrannical some of today’s U.K. officials are.
Will Jones asks if Covid stats have been inflated by wrong use of PCR tests. A slice:
THE Office for National Statistics has admitted that in its Covid infection survey it has been reporting PCR tests as positive when only a single coronavirus gene is detected, despite this being contrary to the instructions of the manufacturer that two or more target genes must be found before a positive result can be declared.
According to a rapid response in the BMJ this week by Dr Martin Neil, a statistics professor at the University of London, targeting only a single gene in this way massively increases the risk of a false positive because of the possibility of cross-reactivity with other coronaviruses as well as prevalent bacteria or other contamination.
Ethan Yang explains that the six-feet ‘social distancing’ rule is rooted in rotten science.
What of Professor Ferguson’s claim of 510,000 deaths? This remains the basis for the claim of Lockdown supporters that there would have been hundreds of thousands more deaths had we not locked down. Apart from the fact that the UK is currently fifth on the worldwide deaths per million table having had the third most stringent Lockdown on planet earth, according to the University of Oxford, and that countries who did not lock down have fared no worse, is there anything else that we can point to, to show the fallacy of Professor Ferguson’s doomsday prophecy?
Why yes there is, and it is in fact contained within Professor Ferguson’s report itself. He arrived at his figure of 510,000 dead for a “no-restrictions” scenario by estimating that 81% of the population would become infected, and by assuming an Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of Covid-19 at 0.9%. However, in October, arguably the world’s foremost epidemiologist, John Ioannidis, of Stanford University, California, published a definitive study into the IFR of Covid-19. He calculated that the median rate was 0.23%, not 0.9%, as Ferguson had assumed, and his work was accepted and approved by the WHO.
This is very important: If Ferguson had used the IFR number of 0.23%, rather than 0.9%, guess what number of deaths he would have arrived at? The answer is around 127,000. Which is mighty interesting, since the total number of “official” deaths from Covid-19, at the time of writing, is 126,172. In other words, if Ferguson had used the correct IFR, the number of deaths he would have predicted in a scenario with no Lockdown would have been the same number of official deaths that we’ve actually had with the 3rd most stringent Lockdown on earth. Of course, I’m well aware that those 126,000 or so deaths were not all from Covid-19, but Lockdown supporters claim they were and so it’s for them to explain how this number is currently the same as Ferguson’s study would have predicted for a non-Lockdown situation, had he used the correct IFR.
That Lockdowns have not saved lives ought to be obvious. The virus was known since early March 2020 to overwhelmingly kill the elderly with comorbidities, and so resources could and should have been targeted to protect such people. Yet the scattergun approach that was taken of quarantining everyone is not — by definition — a targeted approach. And so the irony is that with all the absurd calls for healthy people to change their whole way of life to protect the vulnerable, what actually happened is the healthy had their lives utterly overturned, and the vulnerable were left to die.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 173 of Thomas Sowell’s brilliant 1987 book, A Conflict of Visions:
Justice thus derived its importance from the need to preserve society – not society its raison d’être from a need to produce justice.
DBx: Yes.
Justice is not a free-floating, abstract, brooding omnipresence in the sky (as Justice Holmes might have put it). Rather, justice is practical. Justice consists of adherence to those rules – informal as well as formal – that best preserve and promote social cooperation.
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