Russell Roberts's Blog, page 73

There Is On Earth No ‘Natural Carrying Capacity’ for Humans

(Don Boudreaux)

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My latest column for AIER is inspired by the work of the late, great Julian Simon. In this column I summarize Simon’s reasons for rejecting the claim that the earth’s natural environment confronts humans with a maximum “carrying capacity.” Two slices:

Simon argued that humans, at least those of us who live in free societies, are a categorically different sort of species. He observed that to the extent to which we, members of the human species, inhabit a social environment characterized by free and innovative markets, our species does not inhabit a natural environment with a finite carrying capacity. Simon’s argument starts with the fact that we humans are uniquely enterprising and innovative. When this fact combines with the further reality that market prices are signals about which specific resources are becoming more scarce relative to other resources, human entrepreneurship and creativity are incited to discover ways both to make currently known stocks of scarce resources go further and, more importantly, to discover either new sources of those resources or more abundant substitutes. When we succeed in these endeavors, as we now normally do, we literally produce more resources.

Simon’s explanation is revolutionary. Contrary to what most people seem to believe, we don’t obtain resources from an existing stock created for us by nature, leaving fewer resources available for use tomorrow each time we withdraw some amount for our use today. Instead, resources are ultimately fruits of the human mind and effort. And so we produce more petroleum, more tungsten, more copper, more bauxite in the same way that, when our demand for apple pies or Apple laptops increases, we produce more apple pies and Apple laptops.

For humans in market economies, therefore, the environment has no natural ‘carrying capacity.’

As Simon tirelessly documented, his account of humans’ relationship with the natural environment is amply confirmed by history, especially by modern history. Over the past few centuries the human population has grown remarkably – earlier this month it hit eight billion. At the same time there’s also been astounding growth in humans’ standard of living. Were there a natural carrying capacity on earth for the human population, history offers no evidence of it. Quite the contrary.

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Julian Simon died almost twenty-five years ago, just shy of his 66th birthday. Were he still alive today, he would surely celebrate our population of eight billion and remind anyone who would listen that, far from pushing humans closer to the earth’s carrying capacity, the creative potential of those eight billion human minds will further expand our access to resources. We need only to allow this creativity to operate freely.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 622 of H.L. Mencken’s indispensable 1949 collection, A Mencken Chrestomathy:

A demagogue’s mind is a beautiful mechanism. It can think anything he asks it to think.

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(Don Boudreaux)

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Phil Magness summarizes his and Michael Makovi’s finding that Karl Marx’s fame owes much to Lenin’s ‘successful’ Bolshevik revolution. A slice:

In the paper, we use Google Ngram and a separate newspaper database to track textual mentions of Karl Marx’s name over time. Our major finding is that the Soviet revolution of 1917 essentially revitalized Marx’s reputation by turning him into a household name.

By comparison to his post-1917 citations, Marx was a relatively obscure figure at the time of his death in 1883. In the decades that followed, Marx was primarily known among other radical socialist activists (usually as the leader of one of many contesting factions in the socialist world) or for when the mainstream of the economics profession rebutted his arguments about the Labor Theory of Value. For example, Philip Wicksteed, Alfred Marshall, and Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk penned marginalist critiques of Marx’s system in the late 19th century. Their dissections of his system struck a devastating blow, effectively rendering Marxian economics obsolete by the turn of the century.

Ilya Somin, from over in GMU’s Scalia School of Law, explains that “nationalism, not hostility towards elites, is the main divide between libertarians and the ‘New Right.'” A slice:

For that matter, I think [Tyler] Cowen understates the extent of libertarian/classical liberal hostility to various elites. It’s true that most libertarians don’t regard political elites as “totally hopeless” and believe those elites might have some useful function. But most of us also believe that elite power should be much more tightly constrained than is presently the case, which is one reason why we favor radical reductions in the power of government. In one sense, libertarians are actually more anti-elitist than New Rightists. Instead of seeking to replace one set of overmighty elites with another, we advocate severe restrictions on the power of government, regardless of which elites happen to be in power at the time.

Doug Irwin speaks this afternoon at the University of Rochester.

Here’s more from Bryan Caplan on the important work being done by Alex Epstein.

Jonathan Bydlak explains that “Biden’s spending spree is unprecedented.”

Pierre Lemieux writes wisely about totalitarian regimes – and western responses to them. A slice:

Incidentally, it is somewhat misleading to describe China as “the world’s second-largest” economy, as the Wall Street Journal and many others do. This is true only as far as total GDP is concerned because there are so many individuals living in China. But each of them has a relatively low productivity, so that GDP per capita or standard of living is low. On the basis of GDP per capita in purchasing power parity (IMF data), China comes at the 90th rank of 220 countries, between Belarus and Thailand.

It is true that leviathans like the Russian, Chinese, or North Korean states finance themselves out of the total production of all their subjects. Especially with nuclear weapons, they represent a security risk for other individuals in the world; I think that they would even be dangerously to an anarchic society if such a society ever exists. But trying to become like “them” in order to protect us against them provides only an illusion of security.

Protectionism is one big step in this fool’s errand, at least when an actual war is not raging.

Sam Staley loves Stephen Spielberg’s The Fabelmans.

Martin Gurri waves goodbye to CNN.

Writing at UnHerd, Thomas Fazi warns of the “biostate.” A slice:

What’s worse, it is now clear that Covid vaccines have a limited impact on transmission, which means that the original rationale for vaccine passports — that of creating “Covid-free spaces” and reducing the spread of the virus — was largely unfounded. It’s hard to see how the G20 leaders could describe this as a “success”, unless vaccine passports were not just a means to an end — mass vaccination — but also, and perhaps even more importantly, an end in and of themselves. It’s no secret that tech companies saw Covid passports as the gateway to all-encompassing digital IDs.

“China’s lockdown strategy was aimed at helping a new Mao consolidate power” – so writes Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins. A slice:

Mr. Xi, since Wuhan, has known such a moment of truth was coming. The Chinese see millions elsewhere shaking off Covid like it’s no worse than the flu or a cold. They see foreign hospitals able to provide attentive care to the relative few who need it. On their TVs, they see joyous fans from every corner of the world mingling at the World Cup without masks or paralyzing fear of a virus.

To understand what’s going on, finally put aside the image of Chinese regime supercompetence in which pundits have long indulged. China scholar Perry Link should have buried this delusion with a sentence 13 years ago: “The Communist Party credits itself with ‘lifting millions from poverty,’ but it is more accurate to say that the millions have lifted the Party.”

A dictatorial, power-monopolizing regime benefited immensely from the productive and entrepreneurial energy of the Chinese people after removing its foot from their neck. But Mr. Xi’s program now is to stop any more progress if that’s what it takes to the keep the Communist Party in control and him at the top.

He never believed he was saving China from Covid, which he knew was an unrealistic goal. He was using zero-Covid to delay the virus’s passage through Chinese society until he could insulate himself behind a Mao-like position of dominance.

(DBx: The world should never forget that the mad, reckless, and hypocritical ‘scientist’ Neil Ferguson admitted being inspired by China’s covidian tyranny.)

David Stockman calls for the investigation of, and shaming of, powerful covidians. Two slices:

And that starts with the Donald. Had he had even a minimal regard for constitutional liberties and free market principles he would never have empowered the Virus Patrol and the resulting tyranny they erected virtually overnight. Indeed, his embrace of “two weeks to flatten the curve” was the original evil in the entire ordeal. It alone should disqualify him for the GOP nomination in 2024, even as it elevates the courageous governor of Florida to the top of what surely will be a large heap of candidates.

In this context, the one thing we learned during our days in the vicinity of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is that any president, at any moment in time, and with respect to any issue of public import, has call on the best experts in the nation, including those who might disagree with each other vehemently. Yet the record makes clear that in the early days of the pandemic—when the Virus Patrol’s terrible regime was being launched—that the Donald was entirely passive, making no effort at all to consult experts outside of the narrow circle of power-hungry government apparatchiks ( Fauci, Birx, Collins, Adams) who were paraded into the Oval Office by his meretricious son-in-law.

From the very beginning of the pandemic, in fact, there were legions of pedigreed epidemiologists and other scientists—many of whom later signed the Great Barrington Declaration—who correctly held that viruses cannot be extinguished via draconian quarantines and other clumsy one-size-fits-all public health interventions; and that when it came to coronaviruses in particular, it was doubtful whether even vaccines—which had never been successful with coronaviruses—could defeat the latter’s natural propensity to mutate and spread.

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Compared to the pre-Covid norm recorded in 2019, the age-adjusted risk of death in America during 2020 went up from 0.71% to 0.84%. In humanitarian terms, that’s unfortunate but it does not even remotely bespeak a mortal threat to societal function and survival and therefore a justification for the sweeping control measures and suspensions of both liberty and common sense that actually happened.

This fundamental mortality fact—the “science” in bolded letters if there is such a thing—totally invalidates the core notion behind the Fauci policy that was sprung upon our deer-in-the-headlights president stumbling around the Oval Office in early March 2020.

Martin Kulldorff tweets:

By violating basic principles of public health, university and science leaders messed up so bad during the pandemic that they need to step down and let others come in and clean up the mess they created. Only way to restore integrity of the scientific community.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 124 of the original 1960 Harvard University Press edition of Frank Knight’s collection of lectures, delivered in 1958 at the University of Virginia, titled Intelligence and Democratic Action:

Freedom in society means, in short free (that is, voluntary) association, on terms freely agreed upon by the parties involved, in contrast with dictation by any prescriptive authority or law.

No Retaliatory Tariffs

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to a new correspondent:

Mr. C__:

Thanks for your e-mail and please forgive the tardiness of my reply.

About my recent Wall Street Journal letter opposing protectionism, you ask if I “make an exception for government to raise tariffs to respond when another country artificially restricts its imports from us.”

No. I make no such exception, and my reasons are many – both economic and ethical. Here’s just one of the economic reasons.

It’s true that, as was pointed out by Adam Smith, in principle our government’s occasional use of ‘retaliatory’ tariffs might benefit us by prodding our trading partners to trade more freely. But in practice this exception to a policy of free trade is destined to be abused. This is so because almost any foreign-government policy – not just overt protective tariffs and subsidies – can easily be portrayed as creating ‘unfair’ advantages for foreign firms that compete against ‘our’ producers.

Are a foreign-government’s environmental regulations less onerous than ours? “Yes! Unfair subsidies!” scream producers in our country. Is a foreign government perhaps less solicitous of labor unions than is our government? “Yes! Unfair subsidies!” Are employers abroad saddled with fewer workplace-safety regulations than are employers here at home? “Yes! Unfair subsidies!” Is a foreign government’s corporate-tax structure less progressive than is ours? “Yes! Unfair subsidies!” Does a foreign government spend fewer resources than are spent by our government to protect intellectual property rights? “Yes! Unfair subsidies!”

And the temptation for such abuse is as irresistible as it is abundant. This reality is made all the more certain by the unfortunate popular habit of presuming that whatever gains we Americans reap from international trade are measured by our exports, while our imports are treated as costs that we must unfortunately incur for the privilege of exporting.

Three conditions would simultaneously have to hold in order for me even to consider endorsing the occasional retaliatory tariff. These three conditions are (1) government officials are apolitical angels; (2) government officials possess reliable knowledge of just when retaliatory tariffs would ‘work’ and when these tariffs would instead be interpreted by foreign governments as belligerent shots fired in a trade war; and (3) the popular mind finally breaks free of the ages-old fallacy that we import in order to export (rather than, as is in fact the case, we export in order to import). Because I foresee not even one, and much less all three, of these conditions coming to hold, there is no practically sound case for trusting government with the power to use retaliatory tariffs.

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

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(Don Boudreaux)

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GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino, writing at National Review, corrects an error in Sen. Marco Rubio’s latest call for protectionism. Two slices:

An op-ed from Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) says, “Amoxicillin Shortage Shows the Need for Domestic Drug Production.”

It does not, in fact, show that.

There have been some shortages of amoxicillin this fall due to a surge in prescriptions for antibiotics. According to the Washington Post article that the press release cites, “The shortage isn’t at a crisis level and may be short-term, lasting as long as the season of illness does. . . . Still, for now, some may run into snags getting their prescriptions filled.”

That’s a problem, but the relevant question to evaluate Rubio’s proposal is: Would more domestic production make it less of a problem?

We know from the experience of the baby-formula shortage that domestic production does not ensure stable supply. Nearly all baby formula sold in the United States is produced in the United States, and that shortage was far more widespread than this one for amoxicillin is.

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Rubio provides no evidence in his op-ed that the present shortages in amoxicillin would be ameliorated by domestic production. What we know about domestic production from the baby-formula shortage indicates it could make things worse. Either way, the causes of the current shortages are demand-side, and Rubio’s supply-chain proposal is not germane.

Scott Sumner is correct: “The only consistency in the protectionist position is that they always favor the policy that makes society as a whole worse off.”

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Scott Hodge accounts the child tax credit as a failure. A slice:

A new study by Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation assesses both the budgetary and economic impact of expanding the child tax credit. First, JCT determined that it would be a budget-buster, reducing revenue by more than $1.3 trillion over the next decade. By contrast, all provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act combined reduced revenues by roughly $1.5 trillion over a decade.

The child tax credit is a drain not only on the federal budget but on the nation’s economy. JCT’s economic models predict that over a decade the policy would reduce the labor supply by 0.2% and reduce the amount of capital by 0.4%. As a result of the reduced supply of labor and capital investment, gross domestic product would shrink by 0.2%.

Aside from the effect on redistribution, nonpayers and the economy, the policy did something worse to the way we think about taxes—it conditioned conservative and liberal lawmakers alike to use the tax code for all manner of social policy.

In the 25 years since the child tax credit was enacted, the number of tax credits has proliferated. There are now tax credits for adoption, daycare expenses, college costs, electric vehicles, solar panels, housing and energy-efficient refrigerators. The Inflation Reduction Act alone created or renewed 26 credits for climate and energy industries. No wonder the IRS is dysfunctional—it’s not equipped to be a social-service agency.

Brendan O’Neill talks with Michael Shellenberger. A slice:

O’Neill: The apocalyptic outlook of climate activists has created a sense of contempt for other people and a desire to punish the masses for going about their daily business. Would you say these protests reflect the fact that they have become a very elitist, cultish movement?

Shellenberger: There’s definitely a cult aspect. You see it in everything they’re demanding. They’re putting people down for driving, for enjoying works of art, for wanting to go to the grocery store and buy milk. The interesting thing, though, is that the whole mainstream news media and the global elites are basically part of this cult. The idea that the world is coming to an end is mainstream among journalists. In global surveys, somewhere between a third and half of people on Earth think that climate change threatens human extinction. That’s not something that’s in any United Nations scientific report. It might be stated at United Nations press conferences, but there’s no science for that.

In some ways, the radicalisation of the climate movement is bizarre. Because it’s won, it’s taken control of all these elite institutions. The movement’s ideology is the official religion of the British government, including the British Conservative Party. It’s the official religion of the United Nations. It’s the official religion of the World Economic Forum. Climate activists have made the great reset, which is fundamentally about a transition to renewables for climate change, the dominant ideology of the global elites. What more do you want?

Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker is on to Trump. A slice:

But a significant part of it, I suspect, is simply Mr. Trump’s eagerness to push the boundaries of acceptable political behavior. It is central to the man’s unique appeal. He has been doing it since he first announced for president more than seven years ago, saying a succession of unsayable things about Mexicans, John McCain and virtually the entire Republican Party.

On a vast ocean of falsehoods, Mr. Trump has floated one indestructible truth—his line about being able to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not losing any voters. We are about to discover whether that essential verity still holds, or whether, perhaps, finally people are just starting to tire of the whole unending, enervating circus.

Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes about the courageous Chinese people protesting Beijing’s covidian tyranny.

Also discussing the protests in China against covidian tyranny are members of the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial staff.

TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection from Covid.)

Michael Senger correctly observes that the covidian tyranny now haunting China is the same sort of tyranny that covidians throughout the world called for in their own countries.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 405 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s splendid volume Wealth, Poverty and Politics:

Something similar sometimes happened in medieval Europe, when epidemics struck. When the rate of infection and death was noticeably lower among Jews than among Gentiles, demagogues were able to convince some people that Jews must somehow be behind the epidemic and were sparing themselves. Where enough people believed this story, it could lead to mass violence against Jews. What no one knew at the time was that unseen microorganisms were the cause of these epidemics. Because Jewish religious practices required them to pray before every meal and, since they could not go before God with dirty hands, they also had to wash their hands before every meal. Neither Jews nor Gentiles knew about germs at this point but their cultural differences had serious consequences in their susceptibility to communicable diseases.

These were neither the first nor the last times when statistical disparities led people to conclusions about villainy being the cause. False assumptions as to causation are more than intellectual errors, and their consequences go far beyond economic losses.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 152 of my colleague Peter Boettke’s April 2017 talk “Don’t Be a ‘Jibbering idiot’: Economic Principles and the Properly Trained Economist,” as this essay appears as Chapter 8 of Pete’s excellent 2021 book, The Struggle for a Better World:

Fancy techniques are fine, and sophisticated tools are important, but not if they are acquired at the expense of basic principles. In that case, they are likely little more than activity without accomplishment, something that any serious and self-respecting economic scientist should avoid.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Beware the pretense of science”

(Don Boudreaux)

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I used my column for the June 18th, 2013, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review to warn against the misuse of science. You can read my column in full beneath the fold.

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(Don Boudreaux)

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Peter Wallison is critical of the media bias that fuels climate hysteria. A slice:

Recently, two books by climate experts have pointed out that climate science does not support either the president’s urgency or the media’s catastrophism. Michael Shellenberger’s book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, and Steven Koonin’s Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters, both cast doubt on what the media and the politicians-with-agendas have been telling us for years.

Shellenberger, a long-time and well-known environmentalist, has written a bit of a confessional, in which he admits he was wrong about his apocalyptic visions in the past. Today, he sees many ways that climate change can be sensibly managed: “Apocalypse Never explores how and why so many of us came to see important but manageable environmental problems as the end of the world, and why the people who are most apocalyptic about environmental problems tend to oppose the most obvious solutions to solving them.” His emphasis, as his book’s title suggests, is on calming the unreasoning fears provoked by the alarmism of media figures such as Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Greta Thunberg, and AOC. “The news media,” he says, “also deserves blame for having misrepresented climate change and other environmental problems as apocalyptic, and for having failed to put them in their global, historical, and economic context.”

The book is particularly strong in showing that renewables like wind and solar are a false god, popular with elites but infeasible by nature for meeting the needs of a modern industrial society. The problem, he points out, is the low energy density of renewables. “Power-dense factories and cities require energy-dense fuels because they are easier to transport and store.” He writes: “Despite the hype, the shares of global primary energy from solar and wind in 2018 was just 3 percent… One of the largest lithium battery storage centers in the world is in Escondido, California. But it can only store enough power for twenty-four thousand American homes for four hours. There are about 134 million households in the United States.”

Koonin, a physicist who was Undersecretary for Science in the Obama Energy Department, is an experienced climate scientist who has participated in many international climate studies. More numbers-oriented than Shellenberger, he cites data to show that there is little evidence for the view that floods, fires, droughts, or hurricanes have been increasing since 1900. “The bottom line,” he writes, “is that the science says most extreme weather events show no long-term trends that can be attributed to human influence on the climate.” That statement alone deserves extensive coverage in a media that should be informing the American people rather than using unusual weather events as further support for alleged dangers of climate change theory.

Jorge Velasco explains that “subsidies won’t fix the energy industry.”

J.D. Tuccille applauds Congressional gridlock.

Let’s hope that Steven Greenhut is correct.

My former Mercatus Center colleague Bob Graboyes has assembled 44 excellent quotations. A slice:

Unknown wants: Our whole role in life is to give you something you didn’t know you wanted. And then once you get it, you can’t imagine your life without it. ― Tim CookQuantitative perceptions: “Mathematically equivalent information formats need not be psychologically equivalent.” ― Richard FeynmanOther people’s money: “Nobody spends someone else’s money as carefully as they spend their own.” ― attributed to Milton Friedman

Chris Edwards explains that property taxes can further reduce the supply of housing.

Here are John Cochrane’s opening remarks to the conference on academic freedom held earlier this month at Stanford.

For those of you who continue to doubt the reality of – and the utter derangement that drives – covid tyranny, take a look at this report. (DBx: This is one nasty and vicious straw man.) (HT: Felix Finch)

Fortunately, as the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal reports, many Chinese people continue courageously to protest this straw-man’s tyranny. Two slices:

Covid poses a particular threat in China because the regime has advertised zero-Covid as an example of the superiority of its Communist system over messy Western democracy. The policy has kept the number of Covid deaths low compared to the West, if you trust China’s official statistics.

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Authoritarian regimes often conceal simmering discontent until it suddenly breaks out. China’s leaders fear public protests in the calmest of times, and Covid will heighten their anxiety. Lockdowns have caused economic growth to slow to less than 3% this year, and the real-estate bust is shrinking the net worth of tens of millions of middle-class Chinese.

Mr. Xi and the Party will be ruthless in putting down protests if they continue. Police broke up peaceful demonstrations in Shanghai and other cities on Saturday and Sunday, and videos recorded on iPhones show arrests being made. The Party’s security apparatus will use its monitoring ability and facial recognition to identify the participants, and many if not all of the demonstrators will be arrested in the days ahead. Many will simply disappear.

But it is important to watch if the regime begins to ease zero-Covid, even if it doesn’t admit this as a response to the protests. Look to see, too, if signs of dissent appear among Party elites. Despite his recent elevation to Mao-like status, Mr. Xi’s control may not be as total as Party propagandists suggest.

Amazingly – or, rather, sadly not – some westerners approve of the covidian tyranny now raging through China. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Writing at City Journal, Dr. Joel Zinberg calls for an end to covid-vaccine mandates. Two slices:

The rationale for imposing the mandate was that vaccines would protect medical workers from becoming infected and that, even if they were infected, vaccines would make them less likely to transmit the virus to residents and patients at medical facilities. But the initial vaccine trials were primarily focused on determining whether the vaccines protected against symptomatic Covid-19 infection, not against all transmission. They did not account for post-vaccination, mild, or asymptomatic infections, nor did they study secondary transmission.

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The time has come for HHS and the Biden administration to follow the science and retract all vaccine mandates still being adjudicated in various federal courts. The federal government’s legal authority to impose any of them has always been dubious, and now there is no longer any scientific or medical justification for such autocratic and potentially counterproductive measures.

Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley decries the destruction wrought by Fauci. A slice:

So Dr. Fauci recommended double masking, for which there was scant evidence. “If you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on—it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective,” he told NBC News’s TODAY.

Yet common sense also suggested lockdowns wouldn’t work. When China locked down its Wuhan region in January 2020, Dr. Fauci expressed doubts in an interview with CNN: “Historically, when you shut things down, it doesn’t have a major effect.”

Here, too, Dr. Fauci swiftly reversed his position. The initial call by Trump public-health officials for “15 days to slow the spread” in March 2020 stretched into two years as Dr. Fauci invoked one virus flare-up after another to argue for keeping public restrictions.

Some scientists in fall 2020 offered an alternative strategy of “focused protection” for the elderly and high-risk patients in a document called the Great Barrington Declaration. “Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19,” it read. “Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal.”

Dr. Fauci worked with then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins to “take down” the declaration. “This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention—and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavittat Stanford,” Dr. Collins wrote to Dr. Fauci in an email. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” he continued. The two subsequently did multiple media interviews denouncing the strategy in an effort to chill debate. “It’s nonsense,” Dr. Fauci told ABC.

Jane Stannus isn’t impressed with Canadian strongman Justin Trudeau’s defense of his crackdown on protests against covid tyranny.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

If lockdown supporters are now deleting evidence of their past support for authoritarian public health, that is good news in a sense. People are now ashamed of ever having supported such a damaging, immoral idea.