Jacob Sullum decries the Covid-19-fueled expansion of the CDC’s authoritarian powers. A slice:
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans have argued about the merits of guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which have been described as both too strict and too lax, too rigid and too changeable. Imagine how bitter an already rancorous debate would have been if the CDC had the power to command as well as recommend the best methods for reducing virus transmission.
Except according to the CDC, it does have that power. The agency’s legal defense of its nationwide eviction moratorium, which it recently extended for another month, implies that the CDC has boundless authority to control how Americans behave and interact with each other, as long as it thinks the edicts are “reasonably necessary” to prevent the interstate spread of “any” communicable disease.
As George Mason law professor Ilya Somin noted in September, when the CDC first ordered landlords to continue housing tenants who fail to pay their rent, this purported power is not confined to diseases as dangerous as COVID-19. Even the threat posed by the seasonal flu or the common cold theoretically could justify invoking it.
Sarah Knapton explains how “mass testing provides a skewed picture of the pandemic’s scale.” A slice:
Mass testing is giving a skewed picture of the Covid pandemic, with community prevalence currently five times lower than when the country had similar case numbers last year, analysis by The Telegraph shows.
On Tuesday, Downing Street said it would continue to publish daily virus figures even after restrictions are lifted, claiming they “provide an important level of transparency”.
Yet critics have previously called for the daily cases data to be scrapped, with the focus shifted to hospital admissions and deaths, because vaccinations have broken the link between infections and healthcare needs.
On Tuesday, Britain recorded 20,479 cases, with the seven-day total increasing by 72 per cent. Looking at the daily case data, it might be assumed that the country is now in a similar predicament to mid-December, when around 20,000 daily infections were reported.
Yet on December 13, when cases hit 20,263, an average of 340,285 tests were being carried out each day compared to the current seven-day rolling rates of 922,622.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya describe some criteria that would characterize a trustworthy Covid commission. Here’s their conclusion:
For the health of science and the country, we need an honest and thorough evaluation of Covid policies, not one that can be dismissed as a whitewash like the World Health Organization’s efforts. The vaccines are a success story, but science has lost much luster during the pandemic. Science will fail in its important mission without the trust of every part of society.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Wow! Covid modellers are mistaken again! Who’d a-thunk it possible?!
But if a law is to be obeyed then the way it is promulgated is of paramount importance. A democratic state cannot arrogate to itself powers it does not possess and then insist everyone does as they are told, and yet that has happened here. Apart from Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court judge, hardly anyone has questioned the legitimacy of these laws – the questionable use of the Public Health Act to circumscribe the activities of perfectly healthy people, for instance.
Prof Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London, disclosed that behavioural scientists initially thought that they “couldn’t get away” with what China did in locking down Wuhan. “And then Italy did it. And we realised we could,” he added. There is something telling in that “couldn’t get away with it”, an acknowledgement that it was slightly nefarious.
Issuing a similar lament is David McGrogan.
The Covidocracy continues to tyrannize Albertans.
What is going on here is not the fight of our lives against a fearsome pestilence. It is politicians willingly sacrificing their people’s welfare, hoping the people see their actions as a sufficient offering. It’s the modern analogue of killing virgins in the hope of getting a good harvest.
We need to stop this madness. Right now, we need to focus our attention and protection on the people in our population who are actually vulnerable to serious effects of this virus. We need to buy medicines and establish treatment protocols that work to reduce the severity of COVID symptoms, while offering vaccinations to anyone in vulnerable groups who wants them – with no compulsion, and no tethering of population vaccination rates to border openings.
