CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told the Washington Post on Tuesday that the agency revised its guidelines because there “were starting to be limitations in society” due to the extended worker quarantines. She added: “This guidance is only as good as society’s willingness to follow it.”
Translation: CDC’s previous guidelines were becoming unsustainable, like government lockdowns. Americans are ignoring them because they’re too onerous.
This has upset some of the usual public-health sages whose default is always government coercion. One told the Washington Post that the new CDC guidelines do “not seem to be based on science and data and what’s best for the public unless they’re accounting for the complete breakdown of society.” If government did what these experts want, society and the economy would break down.
Robby Soave reports on how teachers unions continue seek to avoid work by milking fears of Covid. A slice:
Last year, CTU [Chicago Teachers Union] fought tooth and nail to keep schools closed as long as possible. Today, given widespread vaccination, the evidence is clear that schools can and should remain open, and that in-person instruction can continue with minimal safety risks. Teachers unions that keep struggling against this urgent need to give kids the educational experience they need and deserve are only undermining their own credibility.
(DBx: I again give thanks that many of these ‘teachers’ are so very unintelligent that they continue to overplay the hand dealt to them by Covid. To the extent that Covid hysteria has exposed the true appalling nature of government schooling and, thus, helps to undermine it, Covid hysteria will not have been all for the bad.)
Writing in Newsweek, Laura Rosen Cohen decries how what I call Covid Derangement Syndrome is especially perilous to the lives of the disadvantaged. (HT Martin Kulldorff) Three slices:
Zoom school for cognitively impaired children was just a heartless throwaway “solution”—almost an outright joke among school officials. What are children who need in person physical and speech therapy going to do with a Zoom session?
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As the weeks and months and now years of “two weeks to flatten the curve” drag out endlessly, it’s clear that disabled children, youth and adults have been treated with a special level of contempt and heartlessness that has been breathtaking and sadistic. They are looked at as disposable humans, with a callousness that is absolutely chilling and inexcusable.
In the name of “safety,” people with disabilities have been denied access to their loved ones, and essentially treated like human garbage in group homes throughout America, resulting in higher rates of death and hospitalization from the coronavirus compared to non-disabled persons within the same communities.
The rules are capricious and bereft of common sense. We, living in our allegedly civilized societies, have a gaping compassion deficit when it comes to the most vulnerable among us.
And the pandemic public health rules made it much, much worse.
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We need to come together and say no the never ending restrictions.
Your hysterical need to feel absolutely safe beyond measure is coming at someone’s expense—someone much more vulnerable than you. Can you live with that?
One place that Covid hysteria continues unabated is collegiate campuses.
Writing in the New York Post, James Bovard explains why an air-travel vax mandate is a bad idea. Two slices:
The feds previously claimed that masking on flights was sufficient to protect travelers, but the Zoom class is terrified and demanding a comforting placebo. Effectively adding tens of millions of names to the No Fly List would also satisfy the blue-state lust to punish Americans who have failed to comply with the latest commands from Washington.
Imposing a vax mandate for air travel could be the opening step for far greater restrictions on Americans’ freedom of movement. The Associated Press reported in August that the Biden administration is considering “mandating vaccines for interstate travel” but is delaying any such decree until Americans are “ready for the strong-arming from the federal government.”
Restricting interstate travel across the board would be among the most intrusive federal policies since payroll-tax withholding. Enforcing such a policy would require the creation of COVID patrols, akin to pre-Civil War slave patrols, waiting to chase down anyone who crosses state lines without proper papers.
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According to diehard COVID warriors and Biden supporters, the latest surge of COVID cases proves that the president needs more power. Effectively banning tens of millions of Americans from air travel would endear the president to his triple-vaxxed supporters. But another demolition of freedom will do nothing to end the most politically exploited pandemic in American history.
In response to Biden expressing his openness to domestic travel vaccine requirements, Jay Bhattacharya tweets:
This anti-scientific, discriminatory vaccine segregation policy is not actually the worst part of this bit of news. It is that Pres. Biden conditions his support for it on his “medical team” led by experts like Dr. Fauci, who are blind to lockdown harms.
Throughout the pandemic, the ‘expert’ class has successfully pushed the idea that in order to avoid future lockdowns, we must lock down. How well has that worked out?
David McGrogan makes an interesting point about the role of those of us in the anti-lockdown camp. A slice:
Since it’s mostly just about feelings, does this mean that the efforts of Toby [Young], Lord Sumption, Peter Hitchens, Neil Oliver, Brendan O’Neill and the like have had no effect at all? Would the madness all have ended in the fullness of time anyway?
I’m not so sure. Milton Friedman once said that he thought his basic function was to “develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” In other words, yes, public opinion is led by emotion, but this makes it fickle. It can shift, and shift quickly. The trick is to make sure that, when this happens, it is your ideas that are the ones “lying around” (to use Milton’s phrase) for them to seize up.
People in other words, will increasingly start to feel that this lockdown nonsense has to stop. As they do, they will start to look for evidence and arguments to support that view. Thanks to the efforts of Toby and those like him, they will find a huge wealth of this in the public domain. Lockdown sceptics, in other words, probably haven’t been very persuasive or influential when it comes to the broad swathe of the population. But that hasn’t been the point. We’ve been keeping the alternative view alive, so that when eventually public opinion shifts, it is our ideas that they will pick up, and which will increasingly therefore begin to drive the agenda.
Charlotte Lytton is not among those who are optimistic that humanity will return to normal. A slice:
From mindsets to material things, the virus is now the core around which the rest of life is bent to fit. There is nothing wrong with reconfiguring the status quo when it no longer meets our needs. But it is our duty to challenge what those ‘needs’ are – particularly when they now so often seem to involve once-enjoyable parts of life being diminished with little reason.
Early on in the pandemic, comparisons were naturally drawn between Covid and Spanish Flu, the 1918 pandemic lasting a year or two before wiping itself – and the 50-100 million it killed – out. It is a seismic event devoid of monuments in London or most other major worldwide cities, for that matter; a subject largely untouched by the writers of the age too, in spite of the disease having infected one in three people on the planet.
The idea of this virus similarly exiting our lives with the gusto it arrived now looks either unlikely or impossible. Just as 9/11 changed airport security forever, the Covid imprint has spread too far, to too many things, to turn each of them back – and the scant bits that remain unchanged only serve to highlight the altered state we’re still in. This new normal has created a divide between us: between those willing to muddle through the added layers of complications heaped on previously simple things in an attempt to simulate the old normal, and those who prefer to cut such elements out entirely. Is this really the post-pandemic ‘recovery’ we were promised?
There is a growing Covid industry of companies selling security interventions. Some vaccine manufacturers are enthusiastically promoting repeated boosters. The private gains from PPE sales are so notorious that the [U.K.’s] Treasury should be considering a war profits tax. There is a burgeoning trade in ventilation and air-filtration equipment. Behind the push for vaccine passports are software companies with digital ID packages in search of customers.
There are, however, less obvious interests. People outside universities may be surprised by the degree to which scientific research depends on competitive grant and contract funding. Team leaders must behave much like small-business owners to maintain the staffing, equipment and materials for their labs. Covid research funding is an opportunity to secure that base. No academic is entirely disinterested, though some of us reflect on that more than others.
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Some, however, would have us remodel our approach to health and illness to reflect more closely American thinking, where it is far more accepted to throw anything and everything at health risks. This raises big policy questions that need to be debated seriously, outside the heat of a pandemic. Do we really want to try to prevent every infection in all young children or infants by a medical intervention? Do we want to prolong the life of every frail person by aggressive interventions, regardless of the suffering or indignity we may be inflicting?
Covidocratic tyranny in China. (DBx: Such authoritarianism is along the inevitable road paved by the embrace of zero Covid.)
