Tweet [1]
Dr. Martin Kulldorff talks about “vaccine Passports, the Delta Variant, and the COVID ‘Public Health Fiasco’.” [2] (HT Betsy Albaugh)
“Speaking to Anderson Cooper on CNN [3] Monday night, Andrew Sullivan said it was time to lift lockdown [4] measures, encourage people to take vaccines, and stop letting federal and state governments continue to impose lockdown rules on Americans’ lives” – so reports the Daily Mail [5].
YouTube removes a video of Sen. Rand Paul [6].
Reason‘s Jacob Sullum reports on the failure of the Covid-deranged maskophiles to rationally evaluate reality [7]. Here’s his conclusion:
The costs, meanwhile, are more substantial than mandate supporters typically acknowledge. The inconvenience and discomfort caused by mask requirements aggravate the unpleasantness of environments that were stressful, boring, and restrictive long before anyone had heard of COVID-19. Masks interfere with communication, learning, and social interaction. And they unfairly burden [8] children with the responsibility of preventing infections that primarily threaten adults, who can better protect themselves by getting vaccinated. To justify those costs would require more evidence than mandate advocates have been able to muster.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.) [9] (But because these people will suffer or die from something other than Covid-19, it’s okay.)
The straw man is again stomping through Hawaii [10]. A slice:
Hawaii is bringing back a whole swath of pandemic restrictions on social gatherings and businesses in response to rising COVID-19 cases on the island.
On Tuesday, Hawaii Gov. David Ige, a Democrat, issued an executive order [11] limiting indoor social gatherings to 10 people, and outdoor gatherings to 25 people. Restaurants, bars, and other “social establishments”—in addition to abiding by those gathering limits—must also require patrons to be seated and masked when not actively drinking or eating. Mingling between parties is expressly prohibited.
Phil Magness and Ethan Yang ask “Who fact-checks the fact checkers”? [12] A slice:
Even more problematic was NewsGuard’s portrayal of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) [13], signed at AIER in October 2020. [John] Gregory’s synopsis of the GBD contained numerous false and misleading claims that were brought to the attention of his company almost immediately after their publication.
Repeating a charge from another website, Gregory wrote that “none of the three [GBD authors] had published peer-reviewed research about the COVID-19 pandemic at the time they authored the declaration.” This claim is false. GBD co-author Jay Bhattacharya was part of a team of scientists from Stanford University that conducted one of the first wide-scale seroprevalence studies of Covid-19 at the outset of the pandemic. Their results appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association in May 2020 [14]. When contacted by AIER about this error in his article, Gregory conceded that the claim “will require a correction on our part,” though he appended it with a snide denigration of Bhattacharya for being “listed as the seventh author” on the study (Bhattacharya was in fact a principal co-author but was listed last, as per a convention with how some medical journal articles identify senior ranked investigators. Bhattacharya was also a primary media contact [15] about his study’s findings at the time of its release).
NewsGuard’s depiction of the GBD contained other clear misrepresentations of its contents and positions. For example, Gregory wrote that the GBD “argued that restrictions meant to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus, such as face masks…should be eliminated for people considered to be at lower risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19.” The text of the GBD makes no mention of face mask policy though – only lockdowns and similar restrictions on schools and businesses. NewsGuard did not respond to multiple requests from AIER to correct this erroneous characterization.
Robert Freudenthal highlights three tragic assumptions behind the ‘strategy’ of lockdowns [16].
The CDC now admits that it did indeed over-count Covid cases in Florida [17].