Russell Roberts's Blog, page 60

An Open Letter to Henry I. Miller

(Don Boudreaux)

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January 11, 2023

Dr. Henry I. Miller

Dr. Miller:

Before laying out – in “Stanford University’s Fickle Commitment To Science (Part 1)” – your appropriate criticisms of what you call Stanford’s “long-standing, anti-scientific tendencies,” you yourself succumb to an anti-scientific tendency by taking a potshot at Stanford Medical School Professor Jay Bhattacharya. Your criticisms of Prof. Bhattacharya are based, it seems, on a shoddy reading of one lone source – namely, an interview that he did this past September with the Wall Street Journal’s Gerry Baker.

Consider your complaint that Prof. Bhattacharya described covid vaccines as being “oversold.” If you read the interview to which you link, you’ll discover that the interviewer, in the question in which “oversold” first appears, says this to Prof. Bhattacharya (emphasis added):

It then became clear actually, especially with these different variants of COVID-19, that actually meant those vaccines were not effective protection against contracting the virus. But I think the argument still was that and still is, I think the evidence, and you tell me the evidence is still very strong that they’re effective in protecting against serious disease.

Prof. Bhattacharya agrees that vaccines are effective at reducing the risk of severe consequences of covid; he said about vaccination – again, in the very interview to which you link – that “It does protect against severe disease and death, especially against COVID death.” What was “oversold,” in Prof. Bhattacharya’s estimation, is the vaccines’ ability to prevent transmission. And in this matter Prof. Bhattacharya is correct. Even CDC Director Rochelle Walensky acknowledges that the vaccines cannot prevent transmission.

Now consider your accusation that Prof. Bhattacharya “denied the effectiveness of masks.” Here’s part of his reply to a question that Mr. Baker asked about masking – a reply that certainly sounds reasonable and grounded in science:

If you have trained and you’re fit tested in hospital settings, it can be useful for also short periods of time, few hours. But at a population level with people who are not trained to use them, using inadequate devices, cloth masks, surgical masks with gaps, N95s with gaps and waste N95s, dirty reused masks over and over again. There was no chance of it actually succeeding in slowing spread. And then there was a dozen randomized studies from before the pandemic on the face mask and the flu, which found no evidence that it at a population level does anything. It may have even made things worse because older people went into public wearing a cloth mask thinking they were protected when they weren’t. And they may have taken more risk than they ought to have during the height of the pandemic.

A good deal of evidence supports Prof. Bhattacharya’s position on masking.

Your most egregiously mistaken accusation, however, is that Prof. Bhattacharya – presumably because he co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration – is, as you describe, “a vocal, irresponsible proponent of ‘let it rip’ pandemic policies.” This charge is nonsense, as you would know if you were to attentively read even just the interview to which you link. (Even better would be for you also to read the Great Barrington Declaration, as well as many of other pieces – scientific and popular – written over the past three years by Prof. Bhattacharya.) The deceptive description of the policy proposed in the GBD as a “let it rip” strategy was fueled by the purposeful – or perhaps recklessly ignorant – mischaracterization of the GBD by Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci.

Prof. Bhattacharya calls not for letting the virus “rip,” but, instead, for Focused Protection. Focusing resources, attention, and care on those persons who are vulnerable while rejecting the utterly unprecedented practice of locking down whole societies is emphatically not a “let it rip” strategy. Prof. Bhattacharya made this fact perfectly clear in, among many other places, a November 2020 essay that he wrote with his GBD co-authors, Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldorff. There they describe Focused Protection as “the middle ground between lockdowns and ‘let it rip’” – implying that they no more support “let it rip” than they support lockdowns.

In the end, your defense of the scientific method against irrational prejudices, politically convenient fads, virtue signaling, and ignorance of the facts is severely weakened by you yourself falling victim to the vices against which you rightly protest.

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

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 29 of Phil Magness’s marvelous 2020 book, The 1619 Project: A Critique (footnote deleted; link added):

In eschewing factual analysis for political narratives, the scholars and journalists involved in the 1619 project appear to be far more interested in weaponizing the history of slavery with biased and even fabricated claims for the purpose of discrediting capitalism and free markets in the present day. They neglect the historical antagonism that existed between slave owners and free market capitalism, including a leading slavery defender [George Fitzhugh] who declared that capitalism was “at war with all kinds of slavery.”

Daniel Hannan on Free Trade

(Don Boudreaux)

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In this speech in Britain’s House of Lords – during debate over pending free-trade agreements with Australia and New Zealand – Daniel Hannan makes a rousing case for free trade and against locovorism. It really gets going around the five-minute mark.  (HT Iain Murray)

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Jenin Younes and Aaron Kheriaty expose “the White House covid censorship machine.” Two slices:

Newly released documents show that the White House has played a major role in censoring Americans on social media. Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, and social-media executives prove the companies put Covid censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House—not voluntarily. The emails emerged Jan. 6 in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private plaintiffs represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

…..

Defenders of the government have fallen back on the claim that cooperation by the tech companies was voluntary, from which they conclude that the First Amendment isn’t implicated. The reasoning is dubious, but even if it were valid, the premise has now been proved false.

The Flaherty emails demonstrate that the federal government unlawfully coerced the companies in an effort to ensure that Americans would be exposed only to state-approved information about Covid-19. As a result of that unconstitutional state action, Americans were given the false impression of a scientific “consensus” on critically important issues around Covid-19. A reckoning for the government’s unlawful, deceptive and dangerous conduct is under way in court.

Writing at Bari Weiss’s Free Press, Vinay Prasad explains that “we have a tripledemic. Not of Disease, but of fear.” Two slices:

For the last few weeks, the media has been filled with stories about what The New York Times has described as our latest “viral onslaught.” It’s been dubbed a “tripledemic”—a combination of Covid-19, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which is being blamed for high rates of illness and an excess of hospitalizations, especially among children.

The message is clear: fear winter respiratory viruses, and take every possible precaution you can. It’s time to slap on those N95s once more, avoid crowds, and socialize outdoors if possible.

But the best available evidence contradicts the narrative from the media and many public health officials. The precautions being recommended are essentially unproven—akin to burning an incense stick, or wearing garlic to ward off vampires.

The way to think of the tripledemic is that it’s just another example of what we used to call normal life. And the insistence on never-ending precautions in the face of inevitable exposure to germs is not only medically misguided, it also threatens to stigmatize the most mundane human interactions.

…..

Second, there is no avoiding respiratory viruses. With extreme, draconian measures, exposure to respiratory viruses can be delayed, but can never be averted. This is in contrast with, say, our ability to avoid contaminated drinking water or sexually transmitted diseases. The difference is that human beings have to breathe every minute of every day. And, as humans are social creatures, most of that breathing will naturally be very close to other human beings.

“The piper must be paid at some point in nature; kids will get sick, and it has nothing to do with a more compromised immune system,” says Dr. Danuta Skowronski from the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control.

This point must be emphasized. It is natural, healthy, and necessary for young children to be exposed to many viruses. In order for children to build immunity to common pathogens—in order for them to develop a normally functioning immune system—theymust have such exposure, which will sometimes make them sick.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board rightly decries government-erected obstacles to the development of covid treatments. A slice:

NIH’s resistance to convalescent plasma has perplexed some of the country’s top immunologists, who wrote to the agency last month pointing out its “logically inconsistent” position since it has recommended monoclonal antibodies based on much less evidence. Convalescent plasma “has virtually no contraindications,” “neutralizes the latest variants, adapts to the rapidly-evolving virus, and is desperately needed for immunocompromised patients,” the letter noted.

Jeffrey Tucker reports on Scott Gottlieb’s nefarious role in promoting lockdowns

Laurie Wastell argues that “[t]he demonisation of the unvaccinated tennis star [Novak Djokovic] at last year’s Australian Open was unhinged.” A slice:

It quickly became clear that the treatment of Djokovic had less to do with public health than with his personal beliefs. According to [Alex] Hawke, Djokovic’s decision not to have the vaccine made him a ‘talisman of a community of anti-vaccine sentiment’. In documents filed to the Australian courts, Hawke argued that allowing Djokovic to stay in Australia could ‘lead to an increase in anti-vaccination sentiment’ and even ‘civil unrest’. Notably, the court documents acknowledged that, because of Djokovic’s prior Covid infection, he presented a ‘negligible risk to those around him’.

You did not need to agree with Djokovic’s refusal to get vaccinated – he has strange views on a range of health issues – to see the problem with all this. The response from Australia’s political and media establishment was irrational, authoritarian and completely over the top. At one point, then prime minister Scott Morrison threatened to put Djokovic on ‘the next plane home’. Despite the fact that Djokovic had only made a handful of comments on the Covid vaccine, he was presented in the media as a ringleader of an anti-vax movement. His mere presence on Australian soil was said to be a corrupting influence on the public. Pundits revelled in the shabbiness of the hotel he had been forced to stay in, presenting it as a just punishment for failing to get vaccinated. It was as if Djokovic had become a scapegoat for all the pent-up anger following two years of severe Covid restrictions.

Writing at The Hill a few months ago, Lao-Tzu Allan-Blitz and Jeffrey Klausner explain that “mandatory hospital screenings fuel inaccurate COVID death counts.” (HT Jay Bhattacharya) Two slices:

For the past two and a half years, U.S. hospitals have routinely screened newly admitted patients for SARS-CoV-2 infection. Hospitals report every SARS-CoV-2 positive patient who dies in the hospital as a COVID-19-related death.

In the early phases of the pandemic, that practice made sense. We needed an easy-to-understand measure that was generalizable across all states to monitor the mortality of COVID-19. We strove to avoid undercounting COVID-19 deaths because many individuals who might have died from COVID-19 were never tested for COVID-19 or died at home. But counting every SARS-CoV-2 positive death as a COVID-19-related death no longer provides us meaningful information — and worse — results in several harms.

Death certificates in the United States are notoriously inaccurate, either under or over-reporting the associated mortality of numerous diseases. For diseases such as cancer, a complex system is required to accurately count deaths — a system dependent on state-supported cancer registries and death certificate reviews at the cost of millions of dollars a year. Such a system of verification exists for COVID-19-related deaths only in a few counties across the country. Therefore, it is difficult to determine if the patients who die in the hospital with COVID-19 have died from COVID-19.

Because every newly hospitalized patient is tested for COVID-19 on admission, we can expect that among the total daily deaths, a certain percentage proportional to the level of COVID-19 in the community will be reported as COVID-19-related deaths. If COVID-19 positivity in the community is 5 percent, then at least 5 percent of hospital-based deaths will be counted as COVID-19-related — whether or not COVID-19 contributed to the patient’s illness.

…..

To test our hypothesis that COVID-19 deaths are being over-reported, we looked at Los Angeles County data. Los Angeles provides a unique scenario because the county verifies the cause of death for each COVID-19-related death reported on a death certificate. According to the Los Angeles County data, 7 people on average died of COVID-19 a day over the seven days preceding August 19, while the New York Times and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which report deaths based on hospital data, reported an average of 12 deaths per day during the same period, a value nearly twice as high as Los Angeles County’s.

Therefore, currently reported COVID-19 deaths are an overestimate. When community COVID-19 positivity increases, deaths increase even if new infections are no longer likely to cause those deaths. By routinely testing every newly hospitalized patient without changing how we count COVID-19 deaths, we will never see a reduction in the number of COVID-19 deaths below the expected proportion based on community positivity.

David Henderson reports on Phil Magness catching an executive of the American Economic Association in a flat-out lie about about the recently finished 2023 annual meeting of that organization.

James Woudhuysen rightly decries “Paul Ehrlich and the madness of climate alarmists.”

More on the Difference Between Losses and Costs

(Don Boudreaux)

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The final version of my paper “Should Trade’s ‘Losers’ Be Compensated?: An Exploration of the Welfare Economics of the Losses and Costs of Economic Change” is published in the Journal of Law, Economics & Policy and is available on-line free of charge. Beneath the fold is a slice (footnotes and subheading deleted).

(more…)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 127 of Morgan Reynolds’s 1986 paper “On the Economics of the Colour Bar,” which appears as the final chapter of W.H. Hutt: An Economist for the Long Run (Morgan O. Reynolds, ed., 1986):

Much of the [economics] profession, in any era, is busy creating and propagating error. We have no better example of this than Hutt’s great antagonist, John Maynard Keynes, whose clever yet superficial output was destructive in scientific terms and in its impact on public policy.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “If tomorrow is irrelevant”

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my column for the August 6th, 2013, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I criticized Keynesianism’s – and politicians’ – irresponsibility.

(more…)

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 323 of my late Nobel-laureate colleague James Buchanan’s 1962 essay “Marginal Notes on Reading Political Philosophy,” which is an appendix to Buchanan’s and Gordon Tullock’s seminal 1962 book, The Calculus of Consent; the page number here is from Liberty Fund’s 1999 edition of Calculus: (original emphasis; footnote deleted; link added):

It is in his careful discussion of the logic of State action in those cases of demonstrable externality, however, that [Wilhelm von] Humboldt reveals clearly what was, at base, an economic approach. He recognized that the mere existence of spillover or external effects resulting from private action did not justify State action: the decision must rest on a comparison of the costs, in terms of the greater limitation on individual freedom, and the benefits, in terms of the greater security provided by some collective limitations placed on private behavior.

DBx: Jim Buchanan died on this date ten years ago.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 114 of Julian Simon’s posthumously published 1999 volume, Hoodwinking the Nation:

The environmental prophets of today differ from Biblical prophets in that the prophets of today do not stake their lives or livelihoods on their prophesies. The Biblical prophets raised their hands against their rulers, usually at great risk; today’s crop is part of the establishment.

Such Is Some Modern “Scholarship”

(Don Boudreaux)

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Someone – please forgive me for not remembering who – recently on Facebook provided a link to a 2017 pre-publication version of a paper titled “Epistemic trust and the ethics of science communication: against transparency, openness, sincerity and honesty.” (The paper was formally published in a 2018 number of Social Epistemology.) The paper’s author is Stephen John, who is Professor of Philosophy of Public Health at Cambridge University’s Pembroke College. Here’s the abstract that appears with the pre-publication version:

It is commonly claimed that scientists should hold certain communicative virtues, such as sincerity, openness, honesty and transparency. This paper uses the case of climate science to argue against these claims. Rather, based on a novel account of the range of ways in which non-experts learn from experts (detailed in Section 1), there are reasons to deny that scientists are under any basic obligation to be sincere, honest, open or transparent. Furthermore, not only are these claims analytically confused, they are epistemologically and politically dangerous. Sections 2-4 argue for these claims. The conclusion proposes an alternative standard for ethical communication: that scientists should not engage in “wishful speaking”.

This journal isn’t available through JSTOR, and so I don’t now have easy-enough access to the full, published version of the paper. But if the abstract is any clue, we have here further evidence of the terrible corruption of “higher education,” at least in the humanities and social sciences.

I confess that I’m still not 100 percent convinced that this paper – again, judging from the abstract – isn’t a spoof meant by the author to expose the idiocies and pretenses of too many of today’s academicians. But given how far so many people in the academy have fallen, I suppose we should take at face value Prof. John’s denial that “scientists are under any basic obligation to be sincere, honest, open or transparent” (at least when they are communicating with non-‘experts’).

The publication of papers such as this one is consistent with today’s utterly detached-from-reality ‘histories’ of James Buchanan and of W.H. Hutt.