Disputing yet another piece of misleading ‘advice’ from the CDC is Jacob Sullum: “Contrary to What the CDC’s New COVID-19 Advice Implies, There Is Strong Evidence That Vaccination Curtails Virus Transmission“.
Will Jones decries the costliness and irrationality of the U.K.’s on-going Covid-19 tyranny.
Here’s an account of yet more victims of Covid tyranny.
Malcolm Kendrick busts more Covid myths.
My colleague Bryan Caplan rightly laments the lack of rationality surrounding Covid-19.
The double face mask is a queer, late-stage coronavirus grotesquerie. Just as America’s trifling, paper-pushing dictators sensed skepticism metastasizing in the peasant flock, they needed to make things a little more frightening. Turns out, the one mask you’ve been wearing for an entire year was never good enough.
In February, the Centers for Disease Control updated coronavirus recommendations to include double masking. Dr Fauci and President Joe Biden enthusiastically got on board. California’s embattled governor, Gavin Newsom, also suggested just last week two masks ought to be worn in public.
Phil Magness asks more intelligent questions:
If the economic downturn is a result of “the pandemic, not the lockdowns!!!” as we’re constantly told, then:
1. Why are there observable spikes in crowds engaging in previously forbidden economic activity whenever a restriction is lifted?
2. Why do the same people who insist it’s “the pandemic, not the lockdowns!!!” tend to come out strongly against lifting those restrictions?
Jeffrey Tucker mourns the loss of trust in public health. A slice:
The loss of trust was triggered by using an egregious and destruction means – lockdowns – in order somehow to achieve the unachievable; that is, the control of a widespread respiratory virus with severe outcomes for the elderly and sick but which is mostly mild for everyone else. It so happened that SARS-CoV-2 was not the universally deadly plague it was presumed to be one year ago, so these measures were wildly disproportionate.
Even if the pandemic had been as grim as the models predicted, there is no evidence in the historical record of lockdowns doing anything about a virus except to disrupt and destroy social and market functioning in a way that makes dealing with severe health outcomes even more difficult.
Consider one huge and unprecedented mitigation measure deployed last year: the stay-at-home order. Most states imposed them and enforced them with police power. It was not that different from near-universal house arrest – right here in the United States.
The claim was that this would slow or stop the spread or somehow cause the virus to be controlled, resulting in fewer severe disease outcomes. The propaganda became outrageous at points, with signs everywhere ordering people to “stay home and save lives,” as if leaving your house would result in lives lost.
People undertook enormous personal sacrifices to comply, at great personal expense. The economic costs were huge but so were the psychological and social costs. The result was an epidemic in loneliness and a rise in deaths of despair.
How did it work? A new study in Nature by four epidemiologists looked at the experience of 87 countries with a variety of policies, some loose and some extreme in strigency. They sought to correlate state-at-home orders with virus control. The results: they were unable to do so. The relationship does not exist, which is to say that it is consistent with randomness. The policy was worse than useless.
