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Some Covid Links

Writing at UnHerd, Toby Green warns against letting lockdown hawks re-write history. Here’s his conclusion:

This is why the strongest advocates of lockdowns such as [Devi] Sridhar and [Kit] Yates cannot be allowed to set the tone of the debate as we move away from the pandemic. Strong lockdowns promoted policies that were utterly uncaring of the young, the elderly in care homes, women in abusive situations, the poor whose work disappeared, let alone the hundreds of millions of people whose livelihoods have been destroyed in the Global South.

Meanwhile, 40% of Covid deaths in the West took place in care homes. Far from protecting the vulnerable, lockdown policies did not even protect the most vulnerable. Meanwhile, they have rendered hundreds of millions of people newly vulnerable. That is their legacy, and those who advocated hardest for them must not be allowed to escape it.

Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel explains why we Americans are “Covid broke.” Two slices:

We are, somehow, Covid broke. How? Didn’t Washington, under the cry of “emergency,” spend $6.6 trillion in fiscal 2020 and $6.8 trillion more in 2021? Both years equaled at least 50% more in spending than in 2019—and all for “Covid.” Only a year ago, Democrats waved through a sixth Covid relief bill, President Biden’s massive $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan—enough money to buy every Covid vaccine, ventilator, and hospital chain on the planet. Only this week, the White House put out a $5.8 trillion 2023 budget proposal. Yet the administration insists that without $22.5 billion in emergency dollars now, we again face Covid apocalypse.

Where did all the money go? Everywhere but to Covid. The Rescue Plan handed $350 billion in “relief” money to the states, and the Associated Press recently described its uses. Some $140 million is going to a high-end hotel in Broward County, Fla. Colorado Springs, Colo., is dumping $6.6 million into golf-course irrigation systems. An Iowa county is using $2 million to purchase a privately owned ski area. Massachusetts is ladling $5 million to cover the debts of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate.

…..

Americans are increasingly realizing that Congress is barely capable of anything but spending money—and that only via shadowy back-room deals and last-minute votes. In recent years it’s proved unable to pass policing reform, any trade bills, or desperately needed changes to immigration policy, to name a few failures. But dangle in front of lawmakers a juicy infrastructure blowout, or an omnibus plumped with earmarks, or a payoff to states and the education lobby disguised as a Covid “relief” bill—and they’re all over it.

The mismanagement of Covid funds highlights the absurdity of the White House’s new demand for more, not to mention Mr. Biden’s $5.8 trillion budget. If Republicans can’t make spending discipline central to their midterm message, they risk alienating a voter base that is disgusted with Washington largesse.

Reason‘s Robby Soave reports that Covid Derangement Syndrome continues to afflict administrators of many colleges. Two slices:

Across the country, government-mandated masking is mostly over, with air travel being a notable exception. But that doesn’t mean mask mandates are dead and gone. Indeed, many college campuses still have mask mandates in place, even though their student populations are almost entirely vaccinated and at low risk of negative COVID-19 health outcomes.

George Washington University (GWU), for instance—located in Washington, D.C.—still has a universal indoor mask mandate in place and has no plans as of yet to get rid of it. This, despite the fact that the university requires students to be vaccinated and boosted, and tests them every other week.

…..

Every college that still clings, desperately, to mask mandates must ask itself one simple question: If not now, when? Students are as safe as they can be, but the policies at GWU and other places treat them like the most uniquely fragile population on the earth.

And see here. (HT Martin Kulldorff)

Leading Covid authority Imperial College London BANS parents from attending children’s graduations because of ‘safety first’ social distancing – despite all restrictions being scrapped.” (DBx: Perhaps no faculty at any institution of higher learning, so called, have inflicted more harm on humanity as have some of the faculty – not least the reckless modeler and hypocrite Neil Ferguson – of Imperial College over these past two years.)

Aaron Kheriaty warns of the dangers of what Christopher Snowdon calls “public health paternalists.” Here’s his conclusion:

Fast forward to 2020. In the face of the novel coronavirus, and the fears generated by media propaganda, the principle of free and informed consent was once again abandoned. The most egregious, but by no means the only, example was vaccine mandates enacted while the vaccines were still under emergency-use authorization, and, thus, by our federal government’s own definition, “experimental.”

How and why was the bulwark of 20th-century medical ethics abandoned so quickly, and with so little opposition from the medical and scientific establishment? What were the immediate effects? What will be the long-term, consequences of the shift back to a crass utilitarian ethic governing science, medicine, and public health during a pandemic?

Jeffrey Tucker talks with Adam Creighton – an Australian journalist who has been outspoken against lockdowns.

Covidocrats are addicted to fear-mongering.

In China’s ‘zero-Covid’ lockdowns, patients with other diseases are struggling to survive.” A slice:

In another part of the city, Li Chenxi was also in a panic, unable to access care for her mother, who has endometrial cancer. For more than two weeks, her mother had received no treatment after the industrial city of 8.5 million went into lockdown on March 11. Their local hospital wasn’t accepting patients during the outbreak, Li said, and she hadn’t found another opening.

“The only thing we can do is wait. But the tumor won’t wait for us. The tumor is growing every day,” Li said.

“There are so many diseases that are more serious than Covid … My mom has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and I just want to get the medicine as soon as possible so I can keep her alive,” Li said through tears.

For Li and Chang, their loved ones’ individual health crises are inexorably caught up in China’s larger one, as the country grapples with its first major outbreak of Covid-19 in more than two years. Now multiple cities — including the financial hub of Shanghai and several cities in the country’s northern “rust belt” — have been placed under government mandated lockdown, part of China’s uncompromising “zero-Covid” strategy.

For two years, that approach — to attempt to stamp out all infections through stringent isolation measures, mass testing and tracing, and blunt lockdowns — has been hailed by the ruling Communist Party as a success.

But now, as the country struggles to get a handle on a weeks-long outbreak of the highly infectious Omicron BA.2 variant, horror stories like Chang’s and Li’s are, too, becoming part of what “zero-Covid” means for China.

(DBx: Well, you see, all that matters is that people be protected from exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Any other fate – including death from injury or a non-Covid illness – is less worrisome than is even mere exposure to the dreaded Covid monster. Or so goes the elite narrative.)

Zero Covid has been a disaster.” (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Chasing scientific renown, grant dollars, and approval from Dr. Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak transformed the environmental nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance into a government-funded sponsor of risky, cutting-edge virus research in both the U.S. and Wuhan, China. Drawing on more than 100,000 leaked documents, a V.F. investigation shows how an organization dedicated to preventing the next pandemic found itself suspected of helping start one.” (HT Phil Magness)