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Some Covid Links

Phil Magness reports on how government officials were duped by a psychic healer into funding research on so-called “Long Covid.” A slice:

So what is Long Covid, and why is it drawing so much attention and funding out of the federal government? As with any respiratory illness, Covid-19 does appear to have long-term sufferers who do not follow the normal recovery pattern and continue to demonstrate symptoms for weeks or months after an infection. At the same time however, the push to make “Long Covid” a distinctive medical classification onto itself appears to be a political phenomenon, wrapped up in clear signs of pseudoscience and linked back to a fringe “alternative wellness” blog that originally coined the term in March 2020.

Here’s Reason‘s Robby Soave on the CDC’s newly announced mask guidelines:

Unsurprisingly, this new recommendation is excessively cautious to the point of absurdity. Note that the vaccines still hold up remarkably well against the delta variant in terms of preventing severe disease and death. They also substantially reduce infection rates and transmissibility. But what the CDC has found is that when rare, breakthrough infections do occur, delta’s viral load is high enough that a vaccinated person could potentially transmit the virus—probably not to another vaccinated person (who is extremely protected, in any case), but to an unvaccinated person.

The government is essentially saying that vaccinated people must resume indoor mask-wearing, not because the delta variant poses any danger to them or their vaccinated friends and family members, but because the minority of the country that stubbornly refuses to get vaccinated is at risk. (Note as well that the most at-risk group, senior citizens, have extremely high vaccination rates; the least vaccinated group, young children, are exceedingly unlikely to suffer death from COVID-19.)

It is hard to see how this new guidance is fair to the vaccinated, who have thus far done everything that was asked of them. Masks and other social distancing requirements were supposed to be temporary measures—remember “two weeks to slow the spread”?—until the vaccines were available. Federal health bureaucrats cannot perpetually deprive people of their rights in the name of public health.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis continues to stand tall and stalwart on the most pressing issue of the day: resisting Covid Derangement Syndrome and its vile spawn, Covidocratic tyranny.

Joakim Book writes on the race to win Covidfinity. Two slices:

Shifting the goalposts is the patented approach of all totalitarians. Snatch away a little bit of freedom – harmless, right? Relax, it’s for a good cause. Temporarily hand some of that freedom back, but never all of it, reminding everyone that we’re still withholding freedoms for a good cause (even if the targets, methods, and reasons have all shifted). Then repeat, forever.
…..
Never mind that we have about zero indication anywhere that hospitals ran out of capacity, or that they have the ability to prioritize even if they did or expand capacity in an emergency should they need to. The military hospital ship that was sent into New York City with grandeur at the height of its outbreak last year mostly remained empty before it was unceremoniously removed. The privately-funded and express-raised field hospital in Milan, Italy, during its worst moments last year, mostly sat unused before it was dismantled. Same in Stockholm, Sweden, and across many U.S. states.

What’s worse, the “full hospital” fear was one of the contributing factors for New York’s infamous killing policy last year – to force nursing homes full of old, susceptible, and highly Covid-vulnerable people to receive those recently discharged, so that we could free up space in hospitals. This mistake spread infections to the worst possible places. That was the fault of trigger-happy and panic-ridden policies, not teenagers who wanted to party on the beach.

But even if the argument did make sense,let me just get this straight: in order to prevent innocent people suffering from ordinary ills – like cancer or diabetes or car accidents – being refused hospital care, we front-run that chimera by cancelling such treatments and dissuading people from coming to hospitals so that we can free up space for potential Covid patients? We guaranteed collateral damage, for very mysterious benefits. The price for this mistake is slowly revealing itself – homicides, overdoses, suicides, delayed surgeries and treatments leading to thousands of additional deaths from cancer alone.

TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)

Remy Chadwick explains why he protested – and will continue to protest – the lockdowns in Sydney. A slice:

Here’s a thought: COVID can crush your body, but it cannot crush your spirit. And another thought: our premiers cannot eliminate COVID-19, but they can eliminate society in the trying. They might even succeed in doing just that before the next election. This is why I feel a great urgency to use whatever few means left to us as citizens to oppose their vision for life under COVID. They , not me and the thousands of others who took to the streets yesterday in state capitals, are the true enemies of the state, enemies of the community, enemies of individuals. They want to protect us from a disease that is out of their control, peddling lies and doling out shame while refusing point blank to release the “expert advice” that tells them their strategy is “working”.

Martin Kulldorff on Twitter:

Vaccine passports/mandates are wrong. It is unscientific to demand people with prior COVID disease to be vaccinated. They already have excellent immunity.

Richard Epstein weighs in on my GMU colleague Todd Zywicki’s heroic resistance to GMU’s Covidocratic irrationality.

David Paton asks why so many experts, including the consistently mistaken Neil Ferguson, were so very wrong about the reopening of Britain. A slice:

Those of us who are sceptical about the use of lockdowns, mask mandates and other restrictions in dealing with Covid-19 have no reason to be afraid of data. We know cases can go up and down, and that these movements may coincide with both the imposition and lifting of restrictions. We can even accept that some restrictions may have a causal impact on cases in some instances.

Our contention, supported by the evidence, is that lockdowns do not have enough of an impact on deaths or hospitalisations that would come close to justifying the huge costs they impose on society.

Proponents of lockdown measures have no such luxury. Unless restrictions have a large impact on hospitalisations and deaths that can be clearly observed in the data, the whole basis for lockdown disappears.

Martin Kulldorff suggests, quite sensibly, that Neil Ferguson is less a serious scientist and more like a silly character from Monty Python.

Tim Stanley is correct: Vaccine passports are indeed a step on the road to hell.

Phil Magness shares a photo of one of the very few benefits that emerged from Covid Derangement Syndrome: