University of Auckland Professor of Experimental Economics, Ananish Chaudhuri, is interviewed about his new book, Nudged Into Lockdown? Behavioural economics, uncertainty and Covid-19. Two slices:
Behavioural economics explains the failure to incorporate human response factors into the epidemiological models on which the lockdowns were based. Humans tend to focus on losses that are immediately in front of them rather than those that are more diffuse and dispersed in the background, even when they are larger.
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It was easier to justify lockdowns based on “saving lives” when faced with statistically high but overstated death projections. It was said no cost was too much in doing this, though calculations on the costs of lives are common for purposes such as insurance or building roads.
Chaudhuri argues public opinion demands moderation when costs vastly outweigh benefits. The Government did not act moderately until Omicron was endemic in the community, finally forcing the vast bureaucracy of the MIQ system to be dismantled without any effect on the fatality rate or hospital overload.
Another contentious claim is that the lockdown proponents started from the viewpoint that people couldn’t be trusted and should be coerced en masse into quarantine or managed isolation under threat of punishment. The regulations prioritised some lives over others, while opponents were accused of being guilty of the same thing.
The plight of bankrupted family-owned businesses, farmers who couldn’t harvest their crops and migrant workers left in limbo were just some examples of human rights and freedoms being trashed.
K. Lloyd Billingsley reports on conflicts of interest at the National Institutes of Health. A slice:
As [Adam] Andrzejewski explains, the NIH doles out $32 billion in grants to some 56,000 grantees, and over 11 years, approximately $350 million is “flowing back to NIH scientists and leadership.” With the NIH blocking requests for information, the payments are receiving no scrutiny, “on its face a conflict of interest.” Taxpayers and unwitting participants in medical trials might dial back to Dr. Fauci’s first “treatment” for AIDS.
auci promoted trials of AZT (azidothymidine), marketed as Zidovudine, a DNA chain terminator rejected for cancer treatment because of cytotoxicity, and lethality to cells. In 1987 the FDA approved AZT at lightning speed, which disturbed molecular biologist Dr. Harvey Bialy, who was the scientific editor of Biotechnology.
“I can’t see how this drug could be doing anything other than making people very sick,” said Dr. Bialy, but at the time, AZT was making some people very rich. After FDA approval, Burroughs Wellcome stock went through the roof. At $8,000 per year per patient, AZT was the most expensive drug ever marketed. As the BBC showed in “Guinea Pig Kids,” Fauci also conducted trials of AZT and other dangerous drugs on black and Hispanic foster children in New York City.
In her 1995 book, The Search for an AIDS Vaccine, Fauci’s wife Christine Grady said children and pregnant women were suitable subjects for drug trials and touted “the availability and effectiveness of AZT.” As the couple had to know, it was anything but.
el gato malo is correct:
if you learn one thing from the last two years, learn this:
the road to perdition is paved in apathy.
this was done to you, not for you.
and it will not change until we change.
In China, covid tyranny continues – as do protests against it.
Here’s Jay Bhattacharya, on Twitter, decrying the goings-on in today’s dystopian Shanghai:
Read this thread about one night in the Shanghai lockdown. The authorities killed pet cats and dogs of people who tested positive. Some owners released their pets into the city to save them. Now feral, they attack each other, howling in hunger every night.
“Covid lockdowns left toddlers unable to speak or play properly.”
Future generations will look back upon covid hysteria and shake their heads in a combination of amazement and despair at the realization that humans can be so very irrational and cruel. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
To say that some employers are mistaken in their criteria [of which workers to employ] is to say that other employers have special profit opportunities by hiring those workers passed over – and in a competitive market, that means that mistakes are likely to be corrected. It does not mean, however, that every difference in “representation” is a mistake, or that race, sex, or other group designations were used as criteria. Third-generation Mexican Americans earn 20 percent higher incomes than first-generation Mexican Americans of the same age, though it is doubtful if most employers seek the genealogical information necessary to make such a distinction.
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On the market of a capitalistic society the common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Those shops and plants which cater exclusively or predominantly to the wealthier citizens’ demand for refined luxuries play merely a subordinate role in the economic setting of the market economy. They never attain the size of big business. Big business always serves – directly or indirectly – the masses.
Parochialism kills progress by forcing attention in-group, rather than allowing, let alone enabling, individuals in their quest to seek new ways to learn and benefit from others. Turning inward means turning away from pursuing productive specialisation and peaceful social cooperation in the global marketplace.
The discussions of every age are filled with the issues on which its leading schools of thought differ. But the general intellectual atmosphere of the time is always determined by the views on which the opposing schools agree. They become the unspoken pre-suppositions of all thought, and common and unquestioningly accepted foundations on which all discussion proceeds.
