More Covidocratic tyranny might well be on its way to the U.S. as CDC Director Rochelle Walensky says that vaccine passports “may very well be the path forward” – “forward,” that is, into what David Hart calls “hygiene socialism.”
It now leaves us in the dark at a crucial moment, with various TV epidemiologists making opposite guesses: Either there’s lots of unseen spread of Delta among the vaccinated or hardly any.
Suddenly this is an important question on our bumpy road to Covid becoming a low-risk, nuisance virus. And my only explanation for the media’s insistence on the “confirmed cases” misdirection is that it makes Covid seem both more deadly and more controllable than it is. It loads the dice for the wrong choice we’ve made over and over, as should be clear by 600,000 deaths almost entirely concentrated among the elderly, obese and sickly. We’ve spent too much effort trying to regulate everybody’s behavior as if this were the best way to protect those who most needed protecting.
Want an example? The U.S. might have saved itself trillions of dollars and perhaps 200,000 deaths if it just did what one Connecticut nursing home did, setting up temporary housing for its caregivers so they wouldn’t be carrying Covid to their clients.
The delta trendline among the vaccinated is getting worse, but the baseline from which it has ticked up is borderline miraculous. Let’s put the above odds in context. You have a one in 2,535 chance of choking to death on food. If you drive more than 1,000 miles a year, you have a one in 366 chance of getting into an automobile accident. The odds of you dying from a lightning strike are higher than the ratio of vaccinated people who have perished while infected with COVID.
Also writing on the CDC’s utterly unscientific new masking ‘guidance’ is Elizabeth Nolan Brown. A slice:
That’s where the CDC guidance truly fails.
“CDC messaging is astonishingly bad here,” suggests cardiologist and CNN medical analyst Jonathan Reiner. Instead of clearly articulating the problem which is 80 million adults have chosen not to get vaccinated and they are largely also unmasked, CDC suggests that the problem is rare transmission from vaxed to unvaxed people. This is so wrong.”
Adam Creighton reveals some of the derangement of “zero Covid.” A slice:
Covid-19 was never an existential threat. After 18 months about four million people have died from or with Covid – most of advanced age apart for some tragic exceptions – in a world with a rapidly growing population of almost eight billion people. Sixty million people die every year.
But we have behaved like it was, racking up trillions in extra debt and trashing norms of liberal democracy that might not quickly, if ever, return. The idea that Sydney would be locked down in September 2021 or that American pediatricians would insist anyone over two years old wear a mask outside, to anyone living in February last year would have seemed ridiculous. Yet both, seemingly, are true. On this trend, silencing different scientific opinions or mandating individual tracking devices, all in the name of “saving lives”, may no longer be considered far-fetched.
Nate Silver criticizes the ‘scientist’ Neil Ferguson for being “overconfident” in his predictions.
Here’s a spot-on letter in The Telegraph:
SIR – At the start of the pandemic, Professor Neil Ferguson and Sage predicted 500,000 deaths. They have recently predicted 100,000 new daily infections and that rate doubling every nine days. Why? Because their modelling says so. Whatever happened to scientific evidence?
From the start, professors Karol Sikora, Carl Heneghan and Sunetra Gupta have been beacons of common sense, but their advice has sadly been ignored in favour of Sage’s radical proposals, which have undermined the Government. Why do Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, still give it credence?
Peter Yarnall
Milnrow, Lancashire
Kathy Gyngell interviews A State of Fear author Laura Dodsworth. A slice:
KG: There is no doubt as to your conclusion, that the Government’s exploitation of fear was not ethical – you interviewed people who were almost pathologically terrorised by it. What do you believe to have been the worst of the intended and unintended consequences of it at an individual and societal level?
LD: Some of the collateral damage is obvious. Being frightened is bad enough in itself, and there is evidence that fear and stress correlate with lowered physical health. If the behavioural scientists who weaponised these tactics had been operating in a lab they would have been constrained by ethical frameworks and would have needed our consent to participate. We have not signed consent forms.
