Tweet [1]
Jim Geraghty dares Democrats to push legislation that explicitly empowers OHSA to impose Biden’s abominable vaccine mandates [2]. A slice:
Go for it, Democrats. Go try to pass a law requiring all Americans to either get vaccinated (and boosted!), or lose their jobs. This is [3]a 50-50 [4] issue [5] at best [6]. (Interestingly, more than half of federal workers in one survey said they opposed the Biden administration’s vaccine requirement for federal workers [7].) A decent percentage of people who are vaccinated and pro-vaccination do not support firing employees who refuse to get vaccinated. But go ahead, Democrats. Give Republican challengers in this November’s House and Senate elections one more issue to bring up in attack ads.
Jeffrey Tucker looks back on the earliest days of Covid and wonders what might have been [8]. A slice:
It’s not too much of a stretch, and nor does it take a great deal of topical specialization, to imagine the outlines of a good public health response. Inform the public of what is coming or what is already here. Alert vulnerable populations to stay away from environments where infection is likely to occur. Calm down young people and keep their lives functioning as normal. Get to work examining the best possible therapeutics for dealing with the sick, among which would surely include repurposed drugs that have had success in the past in dealing with such infections.
Otherwise, we could have done exactly what Fauci said we should do on February 25: “Do not let the fear of the unknown…distort your evaluation of the risk of the pandemic to you relative to the risks that you face every day…do not yield to unreasonable fear.”
Protect the old. Let the young live their lives. Research on the best means of treatment. Minimizing fatalities on the road to endemicity. In other words, the Great Barrington Declaration [9].
It’s not rocket science. Nor is it the clarity that only hindsight provides. This kind of response is precisely what prevailing information would have dictated to anyone.
Instead, all hell broke loose with wild and experimental lockdowns that seemed designed for the whole population to avoid the virus – well, not the whole population but the professional Zoom class in particular while “essential workers” exposed themselves to the disease. Other outrages included especially exposing elderly people rather than protecting them. Schools were closed. The medical system locked down. In other words, the policy response was the opposite of what public health would have recommended.
Inspired by this tweet from Amy… [10]
So:
-someone with prior infection has 44% “effectiveness” against omicron
-someone with 2 vaccinations (the requirement for the NHS mandate) has only 32% vaccine effectiveness against omicron
The first gets sacked. The second doesn’t.
We are losing 70,000 staff over this
… Jay Bhattacharya tweets [11]:
Covid vax hesitancy is the fruit of arrogant public health grandees resorting to coercion rather than reason, persuasion, and informed consent. No one should be surprised as vax hesitancy extends to essential, non covid vaccines. And public health will only have itself to blame.
Jay Bhattacharya also tweets [12]:
If one were to go about trying to design a policy aimed at protecting the laptop class at the expense of the children, the vulnerable, the old, the poor, and the working class, one could not have done better than the lockdowns. We are all essential, no matter what covidians say.
Freddie Sayers tweets [13]:
The best way for Boris to turn his polls around is to make a big ‘time of living in fear is over’ speech, immediately end remaining Covid restrictions, require every covid related sign to be removed and announce that England is open for business and back to life.
Martin Kulldorff tweets [14]:
Unlike focused protection, the lockdown strategy ensured that most vulnerable people would eventually get infected. We should always protect the weakest among us. CDC, NIH and Fauci let them down.
But they swear! This is just for now! Nobody wants this! Let’s just try to be a little more sensitive!
It has long been obvious that all of that is a lie. This isn’t just “for now,” a period of time that has stretched on for nearly two years and counting. They do want this, as they’ve admitted time and time again, because it means they get to micromanage everything you do. And it has nothing to do with being “sensitive” — it’s about being compliant.
For people like Poniewozik, moving on from the pandemic is “unsettling.” For the rest of us, staying there with him and his friends is even worse.
So here is one of the predictable bitter fruits of Covid Derangement Syndrome: “California closes Christian pre-school and bans its director from EVER working with children again after she was unable to get kids aged two to keep masks on in class.” [16] (HT David Henderson) (DBx: I know that I repeat myself, but I repeat: If humanity escapes Covid derangement – if liberalism survives – future generations will look back in horror and disbelief at the wild irrationality and cruelty of humanity in the early 2020s. Our Covid certainties and dogmas will be correctly understood by future generations to be as lunatic as the certainties and dogmas of the Spanish Inquisition are understood by us today. And the Covidocracy’s cruel treatment of dissenters from its religious creed will be regarded by future generations with the same disgust that swells in us when we read of the fate of centuries-ago religious heretics.)
Bari Weiss has had it with Covid [18]. A slice:
But I’m out of step with my city. When I am asked to show my vaccine card at a bar—even though that says nothing about whether or not I’m actively transmitting Covid—I want to laugh. When I eat at a restaurant where the diners are unmasked but the staff are forced to don stormtrooper headgear and gloves, I wonder if people realize what this looks like. Or when friends ask me to swab my nose so we can hang out, well, I’ll do it only because I try to be polite.
Those of you reading this in states like Florida and Texas are probably patting yourself on the backs for your wise life choices. Which, fair enough. But for many of us in America, our lives are still being controlled by the pandemic. And the irrationality of the policies and conversations around Covid—irrationality that comes from our public health authorities, from our schools and our workplaces, from our local governments and our media—is making skeptics out of even the most compliant. [19]
The medical establishment remains singularly focused on this virus, even as life-saving vaccines have been available to every adult in America who wants them for almost a year now. Meanwhile, other problems go ignored. Overdose deaths have soared. People have failed to get timely treatment for cancer. There is a growing mental health crisis, especially among young people. Kids have fallen behind in school. And this is to say nothing of lost time. Two years is not insignificant. Our priorities right now feel off.
Noah Carl reports that [20]:
Mounting evidence suggests that long Covid is not the great danger it was initially claimed to be. Research by the ONS indicates [21] that, 12 weeks after infection, the percentage of people still reporting symptoms is only 2.5 points higher than the background rate.
Michael Simmons examines the record of Covid modelers in Britain. It ain’t pretty; they ain’t sages [22].
Second, many restrictions defied common sense at the time, and anyone with a brain in their head, let alone a first in PPE from Oxford, could see it. Why did the police ask people to stop swimming in the sea?!
Third, we now realise that policymakers themselves weren’t obeying all the measures they set for us, despite insisting that the situation was deadly serious. More than that: they slapped down anyone who suggested the rules were illogical, or who argued in favour of a focused protection strategy (the Great Barrington Declaration [24]) or pointed to countries that relied on voluntarism rather than solely edicts (Sweden, which emerged from 2020 with a smaller increase in its overall mortality rate than most European countries).
The paranoid style of the lockdown, with its demonisation of dissent and fear of “fake news”, fuels my suspicion that this was the establishment’s sub-conscious version of Take Back Control.
But the truth is that the state governments scared the public witless. There was Australia, the free-spirited land of the rugged individualist ready to take on all the world throws at it, reduced to quivering in fear behind closed borders. The State Premiers talked up the risks of Covid to such an extent that the public came to believe that it was as dangerous as the Black Death.
A year or so ago, an opinion poll showed that Australians on average thought they had a 33 per cent chance of dying from Covid if they contracted it. No effort was made to put this into perspective and explain that the majority who lost their lives typically had comorbidities or were the frail elderly.
So frightened were the public that they demanded increasingly severe measures. The state governments started off by introducing mandatory mask wearing and social distancing. But then they decided to go further; closing borders between the states and whenever one or two cases of Covid appeared, the whole state was then locked down.
Despite this, from the outside it seemed to many that life here was continuing as normal. But the reality was very different.
Schools were shut for the best part of a year: it varied from state to state, but my grandchildren were away from their classrooms for over 200 days. All shops, except those which sold essential goods, were shuttered. Pubs, restaurants and other community outlets were closed. Curfews were introduced and police patrolled the streets to make sure a cowered public were sticking to the rules.
Then there were the quarantine hotels. This time last year, even Australian citizens who wished to return to their own country had to spend 14 days in quarantine after their arrival. For the privilege, they had to pay $3,000 (£1,590). In fact, when Djokovic came to Australia to play in the 2021 Open – which he eventually won – he had to endure the same two-week wait.
I can speak from my own experience. After travelling from London to Perth in December, I was obliged to book into the Pan-Pacific hotel in Perth. My crime? To return for Christmas to my own country.
There was no escape. You couldn’t stretch your legs in the corridor, let alone go outside. My hotel didn’t have windows that opened, so I lived in air-conditioned isolation accompanied only by my laptop, books and a television set for a fortnight. I had plenty of time on my hands so looked up the Western Australian regulations for prisoners in solitary confinement. They must be given, by law, one hour of exercise outside their cell every day.