Russell Roberts's Blog, page 336
December 22, 2020
Some Covid Links
Globally, Sweden is 22nd in terms of COVID-19 deaths per million; in Europe it is 12th (excluding microstates).
Sweden’s second wave, so far, appears to be much smaller than the first. Total mortality for this year, for the 11 months up to December 1, is lower than 2015, when there was no hysteria, and is only a little higher than in succeeding years.
The average across this year and last (an unusually low year) is on track to be lower than any two years prior.
Across nine months about 7,900 Swedes, or 0.08 per cent, have died from or with COVID-19, a quarter of those in their 90s, and half over 80 — and vastly fewer than the 100,000-odd that catastrophists warned would die without lockdown. Sweden’s intensive care units are not even close to being full.
In short, the so-called ravaging would be news to Swedes, who have been able to go about their lives relatively normally this year.
Without the relentless drumbeat about cases in the media — often induced by mass testing rather than actual illness — few would even know there was a pandemic in Sweden or anywhere else.
A more reasonable conclusion from the data would be that Sweden has had much the same level of death as other countries, without resorting to mask orders and authoritarian lockdowns, whose costs are yet to be assessed.
In this season when respiratory virus illnesses become more common and people move indoors to keep warm, many states are turning to more severe restrictions on businesses and outdoor activities. Yet empirical data from the U.S., Europe and Japan show that lockdowns don’t eliminate the virus and don’t stop the virus from spreading. They do, however, create extremely harmful health and social problems beyond a dramatic drop in learning, including a tripling of reported depression, skyrocketing suicidal ideation, unreported child abuse, skipped visits for cancer and other medical care.
It adds up to a future health disaster. “For younger people, the lockdowns are so harmful, so deadly, there’s really no good justification,” says Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, especially when considering their extremely low risk from Covid-19.
States and cities that keep their economies locked down after highly vulnerable populations have been vaccinated will be doubling down on failed policies that are destroying families and sacrificing children, particularly among the working class and poor.
Last month, Dr. Sunetra Gupta here, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya here, discussed the fallacies behind the lockdown mania and better approaches to dealing with Covid.
Alas, Australia isn’t Covid-free after all.
Here’s the opening paragraph of this essay in Principia Scientific International:
In a statement released on December 14, 2020 the World Health Organization finally owned up to what 100,000’s of doctors and medical professionals have been saying for months: the PCR test used to diagnose COVID-19 is a hit and miss process with way too many false positives.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 512 of the 1982 Liberty Fund issue of the 1978 Oxford University Press edition of Adam Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence:
By hindering people to dispose of their money as they think proper, you discourage these manufacturers by which this money is gained.
DBx: This insight by Smith is deep.
Workers’ real incomes – the amount of satisfaction that they are able to derive for themselves from spending the fruits of their earnings – are reduced by restrictions on their freedom to spend their incomes (as Smith says) “as they think proper.” And because such restrictions on freedom to spend reduce the real returns to laboring and other productive effort, the incentives to work hard and produce creatively are dampened.
December 21, 2020
Actions Speak Louder than Words
Here’s a letter to the New York Post:
So Dr. Deborah Birx – after advising Americans to remain home and not gather during the Thanksgiving holiday – violated her own advice (“Birx went to Delaware with family on Thanksgiving despite her travel warnings,” Dec. 20).
It’s appropriate to criticize Dr. Birx for being hypocritical. But there’s a deeper lesson to be drawn when we recognize that her actions are of a piece with those of the likes of Gavin Newsom, Muriel Bowser, Nancy Pelosi, Bill de Blasio, J.B. Pritzker, and other duplicitous government officials.
This deeper lesson is that these people are lying to us.
If Dr. Birx, Gov. Newsom, and their ilk truly believed that Covid is as dangerous as they publicly assert, they would act accordingly. They would refuse to subject themselves and their families to such terrible risks. Yet they do not so refuse. The conclusion is clear: They do not truly believe that Covid is as dangerous as they publicly assert it to be.
I suggest that we quit paying attention to such people.
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
Covid Hypocrites – and Liars
Dr. Deborah Birx, of course, is one of the now-sainted U.S. public-health “experts” who insist that people ought to sacrifice many of the simple joys of living in order to avoid Covid-19. As has been widely reported, however, the good doctor violated her own advice to not travel during the Thanksgiving holiday. Here’s part of a report from the New York Post:
Dr. Deborah Birx traveled with family out of state over Thanksgiving weekend — disregarding her own advice to stay home and not gather during the holidays, according to a report.
The White House coronavirus response coordinator was joined by three different generations of family at one of her vacation properties on Fenwick Island in Delaware on Nov. 27, just one day after the Thanksgiving holiday, the Associated Press reported.
The group — which included her husband Paige Reffe, a daughter, son-in-law and two young grandchildren — were from two separate households.
Birx — who has a home in Washington, DC, and another in Potomac, Maryland — defended the trip, saying she needed to take care of winterizing the property before a potential sale.
“I did not go to Delaware for the purpose of celebrating Thanksgiving,” Birx said in a statement.
She argued that the members of the trip belong to her “immediate household,” though she acknowledged they live in separate homes.
Birx had urged people in the days leading up to Thanksgiving to keep gatherings to “your immediate household.”
“I don’t like it to be any number,” Birx said on CNN’s “New Day.”
“Because you know, if you say it can be 10, and it’s eight people from four different families, then that’s probably is not the same degree of safe as 10 people from your immediate household.”
Birx said at the time that every American is obligated to make sacrifices to stop the spread of the virus.
…..
Well now.
It’s easy – and appropriate – to criticize Birx and her ilk for their hypocrisy. So let these criticisms pour forth.
But there’s a deeper lesson to be drawn from the many tales of our “leaders'” habit of regularly violating the oh-so-serious advice that they dispense to us little folk – namely, our “leaders” don’t really believe what they tell us about Covid’s alleged dangers. That is, they’re lying to us. If they believed what they say, they would all remain home, cowering in fear of coming into contact with the super-lethal, to-be-avoided-at-all-cost, monstrous, it’s-gonna-kill-ya-if-it-gits-ya coronavirus.
And yet Dr. Birx reveals by her own actions that the value to her of winterizing her property is greater than is risk that she believes Covid poses to her and her family members.
My very dear friend Yevdokiya Zagumenova (who spent her early childhood in the Soviet Union) texted me, in response to news of Dr. Birx’s house-winterization trip:
This is Soviet hypocrisy, Don. Exactly what happened in the USSR. Clearly, the virus is not that dangerous and the actions of Fauci and Birx, not to mention politicians, confirm that this is so. Yet we have millions of KGB Karens ratting out their neighbours.
When, oh when, will this derangement end?
Twelve Principles of Public Health
Dr. Martin Kulldorff – a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration – offers twelve succinct principles of public health. Each, of course, is important. Yet each was, and continues to be, ignored to one degree or another by many public-health “experts,” by most people in the media, and by far too many politicians.
Here’s the first principle:
Public health is about all health outcomes, not just a single disease like Covid-19. It is important to also consider harms from public health measures.
And here’s principle number 12:
It is important for public health scientists and officials to listen to the public, who are living the public health consequences. This pandemic has proved that many non-epidemiologists understand public health better than some epidemiologists.
Do read the Dr. Kulldorff’s full list. Although chock-full of wisdom, it’s very short.
A Pandemic of Covid Myths
For reporting on an example of just how pathetically sloppy are not only the media but also scientists themselves when it comes to Covid-19, see this Facebook post by Phil Magness. Here’s the text that Phil has in his post (but do click on the link to see the entire post, which features the killer sentence from the JAMA paper):
On Dec. 16 the Journal of the American Medical Association published a headline-grabbing article that claimed COVID deaths among people under age 45 were severely underreported, and could be determined by comparing this year’s excess death totals to the same age group in 2018, using the latter as a baseline to exclude opioid deaths. The NY Times & dozens of other media outlets ran with stories about how COVID was a grave danger to young people, contrary to what we’re seeing in the actual fatality statistics.
Although it was barely noticed, JAMA article contained a startling concession in a single line at the end: it was possible that opioid deaths were also up for reasons related to COVID (e.g. depression caused by the lockdowns), in which case the main claim of the article fell apart. The authors did not investigate this possibility any further, nor did the JAMA make them address what appears to be a highly consequential complication to their study.
Two days later the CDC released a report on opioid and other substance abuse deaths, the main chart of which is reproduced below. Guess what shot way up during COVID: opioid and other substance abuse deaths, thereby negating the headline-grabbing JAMA article.
What If Safetyism Is Applied to Everything?!
Here’s another short video in which J.P. Sears uses excellent humor to make a profoundly serious point.
Some Covid Links
Today’s most vocal admonishers condone political-bureaucratic micromanaging and controls; they seem to love shaming innocent people into obeying draconian, life-stifling edicts. If millions must sacrifice and suffer, so what? Most religions (secular and otherwise) say that this signifies “virtue.” Covid-19 bullies use science language to shield themselves from criticism and cloak their nefarious designs; they seem to sense that most Americans still respect science (not despotism).
What’s the evidence on 2020’s lockdowns’ effect at controlling the spread of the coronavirus?
Christian Britschgi reports on just how absurd lockdown mandates can be.
Hmm…. I wonder where the flu has gone in 2020.
Russ Roberts converses, at EconTalk, with economist Emily Oster about Covid-inspired school closings.
Matthew Crawford warns of the dangers of safetyism. A slice:
I suspect the ease with which we have lately accepted the authority of health experts to reshape the contours of our common life is due to the fact that safetyism has largely displaced other moral sensibilities that might offer some resistance. At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears. At the level of bureaucratic grasping, we can note that emergency powers are seldom relinquished once the emergency has passed. Together, these dynamics make up a kind of ratchet mechanism that moves in only one direction, tightening against the human spirit.
Acquiescence in this appears to be most prevalent among the meritocrats who staff the managerial layer of society. Deferring to expert authority is a habit inculcated in the “knowledge economy”, naturally enough; the basic currency of this economy is epistemic prestige.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 151 of University of Glasgow Senior Lecturer Craig Smith’s superb 2020 book, Adam Smith:
The mortgaging of future tax revenues and other such financial instruments were a genuine worry for [Adam] Smith. Government financial innovation was likely to be managed by spendthrifts or ‘projectors’ like John Law, Smith’s fellow Scotsman, whose speculation led to the near ruin of the French state. In addition to the possibility of corruption and mismanagement, such schemes had another fatal consequence: capital that might be lent to productive enterprises from the economy and passed into the unproductive hands of the state.
DBx: That government might be able to borrow at zero percent interest does not make government borrowing costless. The real resources used in the thus-funded government projects could have been used otherwise. Even if you have good reason to suppose that government will generally use these resources to better effect for the people as a whole than will private enterprises, you have no business asserting that government borrowing at low or even zero interest rates is “costless.”
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