Tweet [1]
Robby Soave reports that Fauci is among the hordes of hypocritical covidocrats [2]. A slice:
Fauci is certainly free to make whatever decision he thinks is best for him: In the post-vaccination landscape, as COVID-19 becomes a milder and milder illness for the overwhelming majority of healthy, vaccinated people who catch it, risk assessment absolutely rests with the individual. Much of the public frustration with Fauci and government health officials like him is that for far too long, they insisted risk assessment be calculated by federal health bureaucrats. Disastrously, these bureaucrats were often far less willing [3] than the general public to countenance any risk whatsoever. They also evinced misplaced priorities: Mask requirements for school children remained [4] in place even as governments relaxed most other restrictions, despite COVID-19 posing less risk to kids and teenagers than any other cohort.
Writing at UnHerd, Vinay Prasad counsels against panicking about unvaccinated children [5]. A slice:
As Covid restrictions and mandates have been dropped across the America and the Western world, unvaccinated kids have become a rallying cause for Americans unable or unwilling to leave the pandemic behind. But the truth is that children under five don’t need to wear masks and don’t need to have their lives put on hold pending vaccination. Hysteria about the risk to them is not just unhelpful but harmful. It deprives them of a normal childhood without any countervailing justification.
When will New York City’s insane COVID alarmism end?
According to health czar Ashwin Vasan, the city has now reached “medium” risk, per the Centers for Disease Control’s “community levels” metric. So he wants New Yorkers to exercise “greater caution” in the name of “slowing the spread” — and start wearing masks again indoors in public even if vaccinated.
Utter nonsense.
COVID deaths in the city are about as low as they’ve ever been, averaging four per day for the past four weeks, while hospitalizations average 46 a day. And both, per the data gathered by the city health authorities, are trending even lower.
Cases are ticking up slightly [7], but nowhere near the recent peak we saw with the first Omicron wave [8].
Also, the whole selling point of the CDC’s new metric was that it supposedly pays more attention to actual bad COVID outcomes than raw case numbers. So why all this concern over a modest rise in infections when ultra-low deaths and hospitalizations show the opposite?
Here’s Dan McLaughlin on what remains of the absurd mania for masking [9]. Here’s his conclusion:
I was able to ride the LIRR and walk through Penn yesterday without a mask and was stopped by nobody, so the will to enforce any of this seems to have dissipated on the ground. Hochul is under fire from both parties in the state for this nonsense [10] and is trying frantically to distinguish herself from Andrew Cuomo’s heavier-handed lockdowns. It is past time for Democratic politicians to end the pretense entirely.
Michael Senger applauds the great unmasking [11].
Jeffrey Tucker wisely warns us never to forget the dystopian authoritarianism under which most Americans were living two years ago [12]. Here’s his conclusion:
Let us not forget those months when the haircut was illegal. When governments finally allowed them, it didn’t allow blow dryers and made customers follow arrows on the floor and use only “touchless” payment methods.
That’s pandemic control in a nutshell. What a disgrace this entire period was to science, rationality, human rights, and freedom.
Jim Geraghty is correct [13]:
Big cities like Washington, Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, and Newark have no shortage of problems. But a sluggish, plodding, foot-dragging lifting of pandemic measures and restrictions didn’t help. Until Valentine’s Day, you had to show proof of vaccination to enter a Washington business or restaurant [14]. And a few of the measures are still in place; in Washington, D.C., you must still wear a mask while using a ride-sharing service like Uber and Lyft [15], while the movers and shakers party maskless at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Maybe Washington has the advantage of all of that federal spending and federal jobs, but it has the disadvantage of terrible leadership and local policies.
eugyppius [16]:
Respiratory viruses are extremely pervasive; they’re everywhere and this is totally normal. What isn’t pervasive, is virus testing. We’ve only ever tested widely for a single virus. So much of Corona mythology depends upon presenting data in isolation from what we know about the behaviour of all the other pathogens we’ve lived with for centuries. Our governments have spent two years hyperventilating about incidences of infection that turn out to be minuscule, or at worst normal, when compared to the other pathogens that infect us. This should also make you very, very sceptical of uncontrolled studies cataloguing alleged Long-Covid symptoms. If we tested this widely for rhinovirus, imagine all the totally unrelated symptoms we’d find in our vast pool of positive results.
Joseph Cox reports this alarming news: “CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders.” [17] (HT Iain Murray) A slice:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States to perform analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation, according to CDC documents obtained by Motherboard. The documents also show that although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to the data more quickly, it intended to use it for more general CDC purposes.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid) [18].
NYC Angry Mom tweets [19]: (HT Jay Bhattacharya [20])
They are all backing away from school closures. Yet what is so frustrating is that the data was there, in APRIL 2020. We knew that European countries were already working on their reopening plans, and some never closed. We knew about the age stratification in FEB 2020.