Jay Bhattacharya’s conversation with Jonathan Sumption is filled with insight and wisdom.
Why did so many go so wrong for so long? The elite panic was due to two preexisting pathologies. The first is what I have called the Crisis Crisis, the incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians. To keep audiences frightened around the clock, journalists seek out Cassandras with their own incentives for fearmongering: politicians, bureaucrats, activists, academics and assorted experts who gain publicity, prestige, funding and power during a crisis.
The second pathology underlying the elite’s COVID panic is the politicization of research — what I have termed the left’s war on science, another long-standing problem that has gotten much worse. Just as the progressives a century ago yearned for a nation directed by “expert social engineers,” today’s progressives want sweeping new powers for politicians and bureaucrats who “believe in science,” meaning that they use the left’s version of science to justify their edicts.
Allister Heath decries the “new era of permanent Covid terror.” A slice:
The reality is that thanks to the vaccines, Covid, including in its delta variant, has been downgraded and is on the verge of becoming normalised. It will now surely become endemic like influenza, which kills some 17,000 in England in an average year and often a lot fewer. Covid’s ongoing toll is likely to be roughly similar; a mature, embedded virus would not require contact tracing and endlessly pinging apps, but the adult population would need to remain up to date with vaccinations, including jabs configured to protect against the latest variants.
Why, then, the continued panic? Why are so many still behaving as if we were in March 2020, when we looked on aghast at pictures of collapsing Italian hospitals, realising that our complacent world was about to be upended? The lure of turning back the clock, of the risk-free zero-Covid society, an impossibility even if every human being in the word were double-jabbed, looms large over our public consciousness.
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For such a rational, amazing species, we are singularly unable to assess risk correctly. This is at once a blessing and a debilitating pathology. We need mad gamblers: if Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk hadn’t believed, against all the odds, that they could be successful, the tech revolution would never have materialised, and neither would the age of private space travel. But errors work both ways: we can be too pessimistic as well as too optimistic. We were too relaxed about the risks of pandemics prior to 2020, and now many people are too scared about the threat of Covid today.
“No, this isn’t satire; this isn’t from a horror movie. This is Australia.” (DBx: Covid Derangement Syndrome is indeed real.)
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Insight from Martin Kulldorff:
If you favor university vaccine mandates for low-risk American and European students, when there is not enough vaccines for older high-risk people in Asia, Africa and Latin America, please remove your #BLM tags from your Twitter/Facebook profiles.
