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Phil Magness documents decades of Fauci flip-flops [2]. A slice:
All the more curious, Fauci’s recent exaggerations about Covid-19 reinfection place him in direct conflict with another “expert” assessment of the very same question: his own, at various points over the course of the pandemic in the last year.
On March 28, 2020 – just shy of a year before his recent tangle with Senator Paul – Fauci aggressively contested the likelihood of reinfection [3] in an interview with the Daily Show’s Trevor Noah. “It’s never 100%,” he explained, “but I’d be willing to bet anything that people who recover are really protected against re-infection.”
The NIH administrator’s many credulous enthusiasts in the news media will likely respond to such contradictory assertions by claiming that Fauci is simply updating his assessment in light of new evidence. Yet his track record over the past year suggests a very different story. Far from incorporating the latest scientific findings, Fauci appears to selectively invoke or downplay the specter of reinfection based on whether or not it serves his political objectives of the moment.
Richard Rahn is impressed with John Tamny’s new book on the lockdowns [4]. A slice:
In contrast, Dr. [Rand] Paul has been consistent in recommending we look at the total costs and benefits of each proposed action in dealing with the pandemic. Dr. Fauci says “follow the science.” But when Dr. Paul asks where the science is behind “six feet” of social distancing or the justification for keeping schools closed, when we know that very few children die or have serious effects from the virus — Dr. Fauci has no good answers.
But Dr. Fauci knows (and that’s why he has survived under six presidents) what he needs to say to keep his political masters happy, and that is to recommend actions to give the political class more power.
The mainstream media is happy to laud Dr. Fauci no matter how nonsensical his statements, because it makes their big-government political allies happy.
Robby Soave reports on the CDC’s unscientific war on people enjoying the great outdoors [5]. A slice:
Sadly, the CDC is ideologically disinclined [6] to let people do things that make them happy, even if the risk of harm is low. People will need to get used to ignoring the CDC’s overly cautious guidance (or better yet, realize that they have already spent most of their lives ignoring it).
Lockdown Sceptics creator Toby Young just barely retains faith in his country, Great Britain [7]. (DBx: Mr Young is heroic. Although I’m American and not British, I mourn with him the battering that liberal institutions have taken over the past year at the hands of Boris Johnson’s government in that historically significant nation. American liberties are deeply rooted in the liberal ideas, values, and sensibilities that, during the 17th and 18th centuries, grew more lushly in Great Britain than anywhere else. That America’s great mother nation is now so suffocatingly clamped in the vice-grip of irrationality-fueled tyranny is heartbreaking.)
Ross Clark decries this reality: “Britain’s creeping authoritarianism no longer bears any relation to the risk of Covid. [8]” Two slices:
And yet Covid rules are just about to get even nastier. Draft laws published today and to be voted on this Thursday not only extend emergency Covid legislation for another six months (three months beyond the end of the Prime Minister’s roadmap for ending restrictions), they introduce a new offence of travelling to a port or airport with the intention of leaving the country without reasonable excuse, punishable by a £5,000 fine.
…..
The Prime Minister once said that his hero was the mayor in Jaws because he kept the beaches open. No longer. If this Government faced a shark attack it would not only close the beaches for good, but also the promenade and, indeed, the entire seaside resort just in case a new variant of shark evolved capable of waddling out of the water and gobbling people up some distance inland.
And Gary Oliver reveals just how tyrannical some of today’s U.K. officials are [10].
Will Jones asks if Covid stats have been inflated by wrong use of PCR tests [11]. A slice:
THE Office for National Statistics has admitted that in its Covid infection survey [12] it has been reporting PCR tests as positive when only a single coronavirus gene is detected, despite this being contrary to the instructions of the manufacturer that two or more target genes must be found before a positive result can be declared.
According to a rapid response [13] in the BMJ this week by Dr Martin Neil, a statistics professor at the University of London, targeting only a single gene in this way massively increases the risk of a false positive because of the possibility of cross-reactivity with other coronaviruses as well as prevalent bacteria or other contamination.
Ethan Yang explains that the six-feet ‘social distancing’ rule is rooted in rotten science [14].
What of Professor Ferguson’s claim of 510,000 deaths? This remains the basis for the claim of Lockdown supporters that there would have been hundreds of thousands more deaths had we not locked down. Apart from the fact that the UK is currently fifth on the worldwide deaths per million table having had the third most stringent Lockdown on planet earth, according to the University of Oxford [16], and that countries who did not lock down have fared no worse, is there anything else that we can point to, to show the fallacy of Professor Ferguson’s doomsday prophecy?
Why yes there is, and it is in fact contained within Professor Ferguson’s report itself [17]. He arrived at his figure of 510,000 dead for a “no-restrictions” scenario by estimating that 81% of the population would become infected, and by assuming an Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of Covid-19 at 0.9%. However, in October, arguably the world’s foremost epidemiologist, John Ioannidis, of Stanford University, California, published a definitive study into the IFR of Covid-19. He calculated that the median rate was 0.23%, not 0.9%, as Ferguson had assumed, and his work was accepted and approved by the WHO [18].
This is very important: If Ferguson had used the IFR number of 0.23%, rather than 0.9%, guess what number of deaths he would have arrived at? The answer is around 127,000. Which is mighty interesting, since the total number of “official” deaths from Covid-19, at the time of writing, is 126,172. In other words, if Ferguson had used the correct IFR, the number of deaths he would have predicted in a scenario with no Lockdown would have been the same number of official deaths that we’ve actually had with the 3rd most stringent Lockdown on earth. Of course, I’m well aware that those 126,000 or so deaths were not all from Covid-19, but Lockdown supporters claim they were and so it’s for them to explain how this number is currently the same as Ferguson’s study would have predicted for a non-Lockdown situation, had he used the correct IFR.
That Lockdowns have not saved lives ought to be obvious. The virus was known since early March 2020 to overwhelmingly kill the elderly with comorbidities, and so resources could and should have been targeted to protect such people. Yet the scattergun approach that was taken of quarantining everyone is not — by definition — a targeted approach. And so the irony is that with all the absurd calls for healthy people to change their whole way of life to protect the vulnerable, what actually happened is the healthy had their lives utterly overturned, and the vulnerable were left to die.