The central role played by the governor’s top aides reflected the lengths to which Mr. Cuomo has gone in the middle of a deadly pandemic to control data, brush aside public health expertise and bolster his position as a national leader in the fight against the coronavirus.
As the nursing home report was being written, the New York State Health Department’s data — contained in a chart reviewed by The Times that was included in a draft — put the death toll roughly 50 percent higher than the figure then being cited publicly by the Cuomo administration.
The United States will have COVID-19 vaccine doses for every adult in America by late May, President Joe Biden announced Tuesday, moving the timeline up by a glorious two months. It may take some time after that landmark moment to get all those shots into arms, but availability by Memorial Day means we can justifiably hope for normalcy by Independence Day. The end of the pandemic is really, truly nigh.
But you might not know it from the baleful tone of many recent public health recommendations. Even after vaccination, so much of the present messaging says, you must keep wearing a mask. Keep social distancing. Keep not seeing your loved ones. Keep living your strange and difficult half-life.
Ghent University professor Mattias Desmet warns of the emerging totalitarian dystopia. A slice:
Well, sickness and suffering are always bad, but the deleterious effects of the government response are disproportionate to the health risk of the virus. Professionally, I am involved in two research projects on corona. As a result, I have been working fairly intensively with the data. Clearly, the virus mortality rate is quite low. The numbers that the media are announcing are based on, let‘s say, an overly enthusiastic count. Regardless of any pre-existing medical problems, just about every elderly person who died was added to the list of corona deaths. I personally only know one person who was registered as a corona death. He was a terminal cancer patient who died with rather than from corona. Adding these sorts of deaths to corona deaths increases the numbers and increases anxiety in the population.
Several emergency doctors called me during the second wave. Some told me that their ward was absolutely not overrun with corona patients. Others told me that more than half of the patients in the ICU did not have corona or showed such mild symptoms that they would have been sent home to recover, were they diagnosed with influenza. But given the prevailing panic, this turned out to be impossible. Unfortunately, these doctors wished to remain anonymous, so their message did not reach the media and public opinion. Some of them later also told their story to a journalist from the VRT news network, but unfortunately nothing has come of this to date. And I want to mention that there were other doctors who interpreted the apparent facts in a completely different fashion than portrayed in the conventional narrative.
“COVID-19 has taken a disturbing toll on teens’ mental health.” (HT my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy.)
Molly Kingsley rightly decries the madness of masking school children. A slice:
We are apparently flying blind; and we are doing so in the face of what looks to be potentially serious harm to our children. In Germany a study of over 25,000 children wearing masks throughout the school day reports headaches (53%), difficulty concentrating (50%), malaise (42%), impaired learning (38%) and drowsiness or fatigue (37%); in France social media is awash with reports of parents measuring children’s oxygen levels at the end of the school day and finding them to be dangerously low.
There are lists of studies, many now peer reviewed, identifying other proven harms which are extensive and serious – communication issues, eye issues and difficulty breathing. If these aren’t clear red flags, what are?
(DBx: I agree. This semester I’m teaching my regular seminar at George Mason University on The Wealth of Nations. It’s in-person, but masks and “social distancing” are required. The experience is surreal. I and my eleven students sit, not in a proper seminar room, but in a large classroom distantly from each other. Everyone is masked. I often cannot hear what the students are saying, and I’m sure that they often miss my remarks. Breathing is noticeably less easy, at least for me. The mask causes my reading glasses to fog up when I look down at the book to find a passage. The derangement is palpable.)
If you doubt the reality of Covid Derangement Syndrome, here’s another photo for you to contemplate; it’s of British schoolchildren.
This photo is taken from this essay by Emma Hine. A slice:
So, children, whose age specific IFR (infection fatality rate) has been calculated at 0.002% for under-tens, rising to only 0.01% up to 25 years of age, who have already done so much against their basic human needs, in the interest of “saving granny”, are now being asked to wear a mask for six hours a day (up to eight for many travelling by public transport). For what? To protect the adults teaching them? Their parents? Let’s not forget that the most vulnerable of those will have already earned a degree of protection from their vaccine. Yet certainly, it is not to protect each other, as we have already seen from the incredibly low IFR among this age group.
John Hayward bemoans what he calls “the Church of Covid.” A slice:
Some aren’t even hoping they can assert control over a crisis by converting to its religion. They’ll settle for just having some MEANING, some simplicity, a sense that the righteous will fare better than the unbelievers, that virtue will be rewarded while sin is punished.
That’s a very common impulse with the Church of Covid, since the Beautiful Theories were so very obviously wrong. There isn’t much left of the faith except the visceral communal satisfaction of hoping unbelievers will be punished for their blasphemies with sickness and death.
That sort of thing happens with all of the crisis religions, although not usually as quickly and obviously as with the Church of Covid. Look at the endless stream of movies about how the world became an apocalyptic hellscape because people didn’t believe in global warming.
The last resort of every crisis religion, the last thing that puts asses in the pews, is that addiction to misery porn, the collective hope that unbelievers will suffer someday, and everyone will admit the True Faith was right all along as Judgement Day crashes down upon them.
Julian Tang explains why worry over Covid variants is unwarranted.
