Tweet [1]
The editors of the Wall Street Journal rightly praise the Great Barrington Declaration [2]. A slice:
The virus isn’t going away even if Joe Biden wins the election and perhaps not even with a vaccine. Better treatments and protocols have improved outcomes enormously for high-risk individuals—of which Mr. Trump may turn out to be a textbook case.
The shame is that Covid has become so politicized that the calm reasoning of the Great Barrington scientists is drowned out by the fear and loathing of those who want to blame Donald Trump for every new infection. But it is the best advice for how we should cope with Covid.
Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins continues to be one of the relatively few sane voices amidst the Covid hysteria [3]. A slice:
If we are missing 90% of cases in the U.S. and 95% in the world, this has obvious implications for the death risk from Covid—it is flu-like. And yet responsible news organizations and institutions like Johns Hopkins continue to invite their audiences to compare Covid’s death tally against a “confirmed” case count devoid of systematic meaning. This is the statistical equivalent of sampling subjects at the morgue and in kindergartens to estimate the fatality rate of people involved in car accidents. You will certainly find individuals who survived and didn’t survive car accidents, but your computed rate will be nonsense. I have news for Americans: All of our data about the prevalence and deadliness of the flu are estimates, except for pediatric deaths, which are actually counted. If, as we do with Covid, we relied on “confirmed” flu tests for how many are infected and what percentage die, we would be wildly and catastrophically misinformed about the flu’s real prevalence and its real deadliness.
“The remedy for this self-imposed economic harakiri, this desperate and destructive attempt at self-harm that is governments’ pandemic response, is exactly that: end it. Abolish. Abandon. Cease and desist. Have governments get out of the way and individuals make choices of their own, choices adjusted to their own risks and risk tolerance [4] – not a mindless one-size-fits-all [5] solution [6] that takes very little account of real people [7]’s lives.” – so writes Joakim Book [8].
Trump is so ironic [10].
Arnold Kling reviews Helen Pluckrose’s and James A. Lindsay’s Cynical Theories [11].
Scott Lincicome continues to bust myths about the economic plight of ordinary Americans [12].