The COVID vaccines are a fantastic technology that, if used properly, can end the epidemic around the world. Among all medical inventions, vaccines have saved more lives than any other – except perhaps basic hygiene measures like proper sewage systems and clean drinking water. Vaccines themselves do not protect us; it is our immune system’s reaction to the vaccine that protects us. The beauty of vaccines is that we can activate our immune system against serious diseases without becoming seriously ill.
Natural infection typically confers better and broader protection, but this comes at a cost to those who are vulnerable to severe illness and death. For those in the vulnerable group, including the elderly and those with chronic disease, it is safer to acquire future protection against the disease via vaccination than by recovering from the disease. At the same time, it makes little sense to ignore the scientific fact that infection does confer long-lasting future protection for the millions of people who have had COVID.
Paul Dolan and Sunetra Gupta argue that lockdowns are based on “faith, not evidence.” Here’s their conclusion:
The uncertainty surrounding Covid means that many of us will be shown to be wrong about many things. For our part, we’re quite happy to be wrong, if it then leads us in the right direction. Sadly, we suspect that we are going to be proved right that the cure of lockdown has been much more harmful than the disease of Covid.
Here’s wisdom from John Tamny about freedom.
Scott McKay is correct: “Our Politicians And Bureaucrats Are Failing At Virology.” A slice:
Smallpox and polio are not coronaviruses. Thus they can be eradicated with vaccination.
This matters, because if we’re ever going to return to normal it’s going to have to be with the understanding that it’s not possible to have zero COVID cases. There will be COVID cases among the people who don’t have immunity, and it’s quite likely that as the virus continues to mutate its variants might continue to produce symptoms among people who have been vaccinated. We’re seeing a bit of that with the Delta variant, though it’s true that more than 90 percent of those currently hospitalized with COVID are unvaccinated.
Returning to normal is going to mean that future strains of COVID, which are overwhelmingly likely to be infectious but less serious or deadly, will infect people regularly like colds or influenza do.
Jeffrey Tucker tells the tale of two Americas. A slice:
Covid unleashed a version of tyranny in the United States. Through a surreptitious and circuitous route, many public officials somehow managed to gain enormous power for themselves and demonstrate that all our vaunted limits on government are easily transgressed under the right conditions. Now they want to use that power to enact permanent change in this country. Right now, people, capital, and institutions are fleeing from them to safe and freer places, which only drives the people in power to madness. They are right now plotting to shut down the free states through any means possible.
A good example is this vaccine mandate. The Biden administration is scouring around for every means to force them on resisting states by denying federal subsidies. Citizens are caught in the middle, with those who resist the mandates feeling increasingly exhausted and demoralized. Meanwhile, the political class is also in upheaval, with the Republican Party now divided between an increasingly radical branch of anti-lockdowners and a more establishment sector that is willing to go along to get along, while fearing the anger of voters.
James Newburrie writes from the once-free country of Australia. Two slices:
Public health experts saw COVID-19 and convinced our politicians to close the borders and lock down. They ignored cancer, depression, heart disease, domestic violence, the impact of excessive alcohol (the assimilated, routine risks in our society) and focused exclusively on COVID-19.
The Australian Standard for Risk Management obliged our governments to consider the impact of intervention. Our leaders refuse to release any evidence that they did this. In the first four months of 2021 we enjoyed a “COVID normal” life. Not one Australian died of COVID-19. But according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) death in Australia has increased 5.6 percent over our pre-pandemic, seasonally adjusted average.
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And what about the elderly? The people we’re told we’re protecting. We’ve denied them the comfort of their loved ones as they lie dying. We insist that only a handful of their loved ones maintain a distance of 1.5 meters, wrapped in a head-to-toe encounter suit, covered in a mask so that they can’t see each other’s faces. That is assuming we let their loved ones into their presence at all. Can’t be too careful—we might give that old man with late-stage organ failure and hours to live COVID-19 and we wouldn’t want that.
Also writing about the cruel tyranny now in full force in Australia is Shahar Hameiri. A slice:
[Elites] have become lockdown’s biggest cheerleaders and portray their own compliance with lockdown rules as an expression of individual moral superiority, conveniently forgetting that the privileges afforded by their income and lifestyle are not shared by all. They have dismissed resistance to lockdowns as extremism, although evidence from recent rallies in Australia suggests that a number of participants were not fringe-dwelling conspiracists, but ordinary people struggling with long lockdowns.
