The White House – impressed by the apparently shocking new discovery that pathogens mutate – is talking about imposing restrictions on domestic travel within the United States…. Phil Magness accurately identifies such talk as an impeachable offense. (Why are so few people speaking out against this madness and tyranny?!)
… and you might want to listen to this short interview with British MP Charles Walker.
Guy de la Bédoyère weighs in. A slice:
I freely admit that of late I have tried to adopt a more conciliatory tone, frustrated by the polarisation of the debate about how to get out of this crisis and the apparent inability of people to listen to each other. But with the news getting worse every day, vaccines gradually diminishing as an escape as scientists reel back at the earth-shattering discovery that viruses mutate, and lockdowns turning into a permanent policy in the fantasy world of Zero Covid (now they are necessary to help the fight against mutations), I am close to the point of giving up.
Living in Britain in 2021 is like cowering in a submarine while enemy depth charges explode all around you. You daren’t rise to the surface and instead just sink lower and lower. The only difference is it’s our own Government dropping them.
Back in November, Matt Kibbe spoke with Ivor Cummins.
Here’s the video of Phil Magness’s and Jeremy Horpedahl’s recent debate over lockdowns. (HT Matt Zwolinski) (And here are some of David Henderson’s thoughts on that debate.)
Phil Kerpen isn’t impressed with the evidence trotted out to support double-masking. (HT Iain Murray)
Here’s the abstract from a new paper by Pinar Jenkins, Karol Sikora, and Paul Dolan:
Every policy has direct and indirect effects of intended and unintended consequences. Policies that require people to stay at home to reduce the morbidity and mortality from Covid-19 will have effects beyond the virus. For example, they will adversely affect mental health and economic prospects for many. They will also affect people’s willingness and ability to access health and social services. This is likely to result in increases in morbidity and mortality from otherwise curable diseases, such as cancer, acute myocardial infarction and stroke. A comparison between Covid-19 deaths prevented and excess cancer deaths caused shows it is possible that preventing Covid-19 deaths through lockdowns might result in more life-years being lost than saved.
Alex Berezow rightly wonders why the CDC’s own new estimate of the number of Covid infections in the U.S. isn’t more widely spoken and written about. Here are his first few paragraphs (original emphasis):
As of now, the official number of COVID cases in the United States stands at roughly 27.1 million. However, the CDC just released its own estimate of the actual number of infections: 83.1 million, more than three times the official count.
If this number is anywhere near accurate, it changes just about everything. Here are some of them:
1) The lockdowns didn’t work as intended. It may be too early to say that lockdowns were an abject failure, but if there really are 83 million infected Americans, we can safely say that the lockdowns didn’t work as intended.
To be fair, it’s far easier to make this statement in retrospect. In the middle of a pandemic, when people are dying left and right, a lockdown looks quite reasonable. In fact, lockdowns may be necessary to prevent overwhelming the healthcare system. So, instead of concluding that we shouldn’t have done any lockdown, the better conclusion is that the lockdown should have been smarter. For instance, perhaps only those who are 65 and older should have been given “stay at home” orders rather than the entire community.
