Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Covidocratic authoritarianism is real: Scott Shackford reports on the unfortunate but unsurprising fact that California strongman Gavin Newsom refuses to surrender his emergency powers. A slice:

“We’re still in a state of emergency,” Newsom said Friday. “This disease has not been extinguished. It’s not vanished. It’s not taking the summer months off.”

Many diseases have not been extinguished or vanished, but it would be absurd for a governor to take near-complete control to respond to all of them. New COVID-19 cases and deaths in California have plunged to levels that can be managed without the governor’s intrusive involvement.

Covidocratic authoritarianism is real: The straw man that has so horribly stomped all over Great Britain looks increasingly as if he’s going to extend his stay there.

Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker decries Covid groupthink. A slice:

Last year, many scientists beclowned themselves by bowing to the prevailing political pieties with their absurd assertion that taking part in protests on behalf of Black Lives Matter was literally salubrious, whereas taking part in protests against lockdowns was lethally reckless.

“To avert global disaster the West must end its ‘forever’ war against Covid” – so writes Sherelle Jacobs. A slice:

The only solace for Britain is that few countries in the West have done much better. The “free” world’s approach to Covid has proved as decadently insular as it has radically draconian, from Australia’s fortress mentality and Europe’s reckless vaccine nationalism to Ireland’s lockdown, ranked almost as tough as Eritrea’s.

Jay Bhattacharya talks with Michael Smerconish.