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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Rebecca Howard criticizes Dave Seminara’s praise of Florida governor Ron DeSantis for rejecting harsh Covid restrictions (Letters, Nov. 4). In Ms. Howard’s opinion, evidence for why the “trade-off” of more freedom for lives was not “worth it” is the fact that “Florida has the seventh-most deaths per 100,000 residents, whereas California ranks 35th among the states.”

Well.

First, the acceptability of unprecedented restrictions on freedom is not established by such a fact. By Ms. Howard’s logic, if government could substantially reduce annual deaths in the U.S., say by 1 million, by forcing each of us to live forever alone in an antiseptic bubble, such a mandate is appropriate. But surely even Ms. Howard would reject her logic long before it leads her to embrace this monstrous conclusion.

Second, because the influences on Covid death rates are numerous and complex, Ms. Howard’s simple fact is misleading, as is made clear by merely adjusting for age. On an age-adjusted basis, Florida’s Covid death toll is 22^nd in the country – a death toll far lower than that of New Jersey, New York, DC, and other jurisdictions whose citizens suffered harsher lockdowns. On this same age-adjusted basis, California’s Covid death toll ranks 28^th – that is, along with Florida, in the middle of the pack.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

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… is from page 109 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a collection of many of Will’s columns over these years; (the column from which the quotation below is drawn originally appeared at National Review on March 16th, 2017):

Government breeds advocacy groups that lobby it to do what it wants to do anyway – expand what it is doing.

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Martin Kulldorff reviews two studies on Covid immunity. Here’s his opening:

How effective is immunity after Covid recovery relative to vaccination? An Israeli study by Gazit et al. found that the vaccinated have a 27 times higher risk of symptomatic infection than the Covid recovered. At the same time, the vaccinated were nine times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid. In contrast, a CDC study by Bozio et al. claims that the Covid recovered are five times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid than the vaccinated. Both studies cannot be right.

I have worked on vaccine epidemiology since I joined the Harvard faculty almost two decades ago as a biostatistician. I have never before seen such a large discrepancy between studies that are supposed to answer the same question. In this article, I carefully dissect both studies, describe how the analyses differ, and explain why the Israeli study is more reliable.

Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller explains why he and his family recently moved from California to Florida. A slice:

The city’s cultural and culinary life nearly died as we sheltered in place. It’s coming back—in its own socially distanced, masked, and mandatory vaccine-verified way—but for many small businesses there will be no second life. Shutting down outdoor dining without any grounding in “science, evidence, or logic,” (as one judge ruling against the forced closures put it) ended the California dream for many restaurateurs.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Michael Segal explains that “Covid-19 boosters aren’t for everyone.” A slice:

Personalized recommendations are particularly important for the more than 100 million Americans who have already recovered from Covid. Their immunity and risk of inflammation from vaccines is variable. But when health officials refuse to take account of natural immunity, they neglect the needs and concerns of a large segment of the population and give the public a reason to think experts are not conveying the whole truth.

Covidocratic tyranny in Switzerland.

This essay by Ann Bauer is very moving. (HT Jay Bhattacharya) Three slices:

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… is from page 19 of the 2009 Revised Edition of Thomas Sowell’s Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One:

The real question is not which policy or system would work best ideally, but which has in fact produced better results with far from ideal human beings. Even with the more modest task of evaluating different policies within a given system, the real question is not which policy sounds more plausible, or which would work best if people behaved ideally, but which policy in fact turns out to produce better results with actual people, behaving as they actually do.

DBx: As stated, the above proposition would be explicitly disputed by no one old enough to have graduated from kindergarten. In practice, however, many people – including countless individuals who boast graduate degrees – talk about policy in complete ignorance of the wisdom conveyed by Sowell in the above proposition.

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I thank my Canadian friend Jonathan Fortier for alerting me to this excellent 18-minute-long speech by Julie Ponesse.

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… is from page 636 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality; specifically, it’s a note drawn from Acton’s extensive papers at Cambridge University; (I can find no date for this passage):

Progress, if not organic, is nothing but change.

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Here’s the abstract of Washington University economist Ian Fillmore’s new paper on the minimum wage:

How informative is historical experience with the minimum wage about the consequences of raising the federal minimum to $15? This paper compares a hypothetical $15 federal minimum to the most recent federal minimum wage increase, in 2007, from $5.15 to $7.25. I describe a straightforward method for using publicly available data from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program to assess whether a proposed minimum wage increase is within historical experience. I illustrate the method by comparing the occupations and industries most directly affected by the 2007 increase with those that would be affected by a $15 minimum wage. By any measure, a $15 minimum wage is far outside historical experience—in both its size and the breadth of occupations and industries it would affect—and the frontier of historical experience is a minimum wage between $9 and $11 per hour. I recommend that future minimum wage proposals, both federal and local, include a similar analysis to assess whether the proposal is within historical experience. Finally, I argue for future research to take advantage of several scheduled state-level minimum wage hikes to estimate heterogeneous employment effects by occupation and industry.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan explains that the so-called “Build Back Better” spending bill “is an attack on work and marriage.” A slice:

The new child-care program and various additions to major safety-net programs such as Medicaid and “affordable housing” also discourage work. As one’s income from working increases, the amount offered by these benefit programs decreases. The marginal tax rate on working an extra hour, day or week, or improving your skills, can be extremely high.

The revised bill also allows even America’s highest-income households to receive subsidized ObamaCare insurance as long as they can’t get coverage at work. Some Americans will retire earlier or spend more time between jobs. Much of the lost wages will be replaced by more-generous ObamaCare subsidies at taxpayer expense.

I estimate that the several implicit employment and income taxes in the revised bill would increase marginal tax rates on work by about five percentage points. I expect that such a change, over five years, would reduce full-time equivalent employment by about 4%, or about five million jobs.

Gary Galles reminds us of the greatness of Booker T. Washington.

Here’s Alberto Mingardi on Jim Dorn and the late, great Peter Bauer.

Richard Epstein decries the “flood of superficial climate reports.” Two slices:

Sadly, instead of asking any hard questions, these reports just take the worst-case scenario for granted and move on. The financial risk report summarizes this basic orientation by wrongly claiming that the report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “concluded with high confidence that the climate crisis is ‘code red for humanity.’” The quoted words were not, however, from the IPCC report but rather from a florid press release by the secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres, which unwisely went well beyond the IPCC report.

One possible response is that a little exaggeration is just what is needed to spur a lethargic nation into action on multiple fronts. That temptation should be stoutly resisted because it can all too easily lead to unsound recommendations by minimizing or ignoring alternative hazards that could easily present greater perils. These errors abound in all these reports, with their constant emphasis on a “climate resilient” economy that is in a position to deal with the anticipated calamities if nothing is done to eliminate them.
…..
In sum, this set of Biden administration reports punts on all serious issues, rallying its troops to the wrong cause. In all cases, the generic problem is that any form of instability has the potential to reduce available resources that will in turn increase the level of conflict around the world. But climate change plays a role at most in a small subset of the world’s earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and floods, most of which are unrelated to climate change. The analytical deficits of these one-sided screeds are too glaring to ignore. The Biden administration should rip them up and start over.

David Henderson sets Heather Cox Richardson straight about Herbert Hoover.

Matt Welch describes the 2021 race for Virginia’s governorship as “an education policy wake-up call that Democrats (and the media) won’t heed.”

“In Biden’s Steel Tariff Deal with Europe, Trump’s Trade Policy Lives On” – so report Inu Manak and Scott Lincicome.

The Institute for Justice continues to do great work.

George Selgin corrects a popular myth about money.

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Writing in Newsweek, Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya explain how Fauci fooled America.” Three slices:

When the pandemic hit, America needed someone to turn to for advice. The media and public naturally looked to Dr. Anthony Fauci—the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an esteemed laboratory immunologist and one of President Donald Trump‘s chosen COVID advisers. Unfortunately, Dr. Fauci got major epidemiology and public health questions wrong. Reality and scientific studies have now caught up with him.

…..

While anyone can get infected, there is more than a thousand-fold difference in mortality risk between the old and the young. After more than 700,000 reported COVID deaths in America, we now know that lockdowns failed to protect high-risk older people. When confronted with the idea of focused protection of the vulnerable, Dr. Fauci admitted he had no idea how to accomplish it, arguing that it would be impossible. That may be understandable for a lab scientist, but public health scientists have presented many concrete suggestions that would have helped, had Fauci and other officials not ignored them.

What can we do now to minimize COVID mortality? Current vaccination efforts should focus on reaching people over 60 who are neither COVID-recovered nor vaccinated, including hard-to-reach, less-affluent people in rural areas and inner cities. Instead, Dr. Fauci has pushed vaccine mandates for children, students and working-age adults who are already immune—all low-risk populations—causing tremendous disruption to labor markets and hampering the operation of many hospitals.

…..

A fundamental public health principle is that health is multidimensional; the control of a single infectious disease is not synonymous with health. As an immunologist, Dr. Fauci failed to properly consider and weigh the disastrous effects lockdowns would have on cancer detection and treatment, cardiovascular disease outcomes, diabetes care, childhood vaccination rates, mental health and opioid overdoses, to name a few. Americans will live with—and die from—this collateral damage for many years to come.

In private conversations, most of our scientific colleagues agree with us on these points. While a few have spoken up, why are not more doing so? Well, some tried but failed. Others kept silent when they saw colleagues slandered and smeared in the media or censored by Big Tech. Some are government employees who are barred from contradicting official policy. Many are afraid of losing positions or research grants, aware that Dr. Fauci sits on top of the largest pile of infectious disease research money in the world. Most scientists are not experts on infectious disease outbreaks. Were we, say, oncologists, physicists or botanists, we would probably also have trusted Dr. Fauci.

But at least these children are probably enjoying a lower risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2, which as we now know is a benefit for which no price is too high to pay. (HT Sunetra Gupta)

Tessa Dunlop, writing at UnHerd, describes the cruelty of Britain’s Covidocracy even toward the elderly. (HT Martin Kulldorff) A slice:

Public health concerns over the spread of the virus have seen the human right to safety bulldoze other basic needs. Rectifying this imbalance is crucial as a second Covid-19 winter looms with large sections of the public already demanding increased restrictions. What will they mean for the extreme elderly? The average care home inhabitant is over 85, with a life expectancy of just two-and-a-half years, many won’t live to see the end of the winter. Has anybody asked them what they want? Do we really want to condemn yet more to a lonely death?

When I met her in the summer of 2020 Beryl may well have been the last ATS WWII Physical Training instructor alive and aged 99, with swollen legs in a heat wave and a pandemic, life was hard work. She worried about the modern world — “I think there’s more wrong today. It’s harder for you lot.” Things were certainly harder for Beryl who was struck by the contradictory game of national statistics: “In the Second World War in order to win they didn’t talk about death tolls, but in this current battle it is all we focus on.”

She wasn’t killed by Covid-19, but in February this year Beryl died, and her close friend sent me a message: “She rarely complained and she didn’t give up, but sadly, her last year was more like imprisonment since she was unable to see her friends thanks to coronavirus.” Like so many others, Beryl’s last months were collateral damage in Britain’s war against the pandemic.

Writing in the Telegraph, Sunetra Gupta explains why “waning immunity should not alarm us.” Two slices:

Many of the measures taken to curb the spread of Covid were justified on the basis that we were dealing with a novel pathogen and therefore had no idea about the nature of immunity to SARS-CoV-2 or the clinical consequences of infection.

The truth is, however, that SARS-CoV-2 belongs to a family of coronaviruses with which we already have some acquaintance. Unlike measles and mumps, these viruses do not induce lifelong immunity to further infection. Instead, herd immunity is maintained through continuous re-infection. Fortunately, immunity to severe disease and death does not decay on the same timescale and so repeat infections are rarely dangerous unless the immune system itself has begun to fail due to old age and other factors.

The presentation of the epidemic in waves across much of the world can be readily explained by the waning of natural immunity against infection on a timescale of six months to a year (which is shorter than I expected) within a background of seasonal variation in transmissibility. It is much harder to ascribe these patterns to the imposition and withdrawal of restrictions on mixing, although these interventions will no doubt have had some effect on specific dynamics.

…..

Neither does the waning of immunity against infection warrant the imposition of restrictions which we now can be certain cause extreme harm to the economically vulnerable and to children and young adults throughout the world. Once the vulnerable have been protected, there is no logic to putting any further resources towards preventing the spread of infection.

Augusto Zimmermann asks if Canberra can “be held accountable internationally for human rights abuses from state lockdown laws.” Two slices:

The Western Australia Premier has recently ordered 75 per cent of WA’s workforce to get vaccinated or face job losses or a possible $20,000 fine. Mark McGowan has also decided that he won’t be opening the state borders to unvaccinated people.

A major objective seems to be the preparation of the citizen for a docile surrender of all their fundamental rights, always in the name of an overly protective, benevolent state. In the name of the “health” of the people, politicians can now happily implement the most unthinkable and atrocious perversities.

…..

In the Preamble of the World Health Organisation’s Constitution, the word “health” is conceptualised as a “state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. However, to allegedly defeat an apparently deadly virus, draconian measures have caused millions of people to endure highly stressful and traumatic situations, including home confinement, job losses, financial ruin, and a whole host of mental illnesses and challenges. These measures are unlawful not only in accordance with our system of democratic parliamentary government but also under international law. They unlawfully affect the enjoyment of our fundamental rights and freedoms, including freedom of speech, association, movement, expression, and privacy.

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… is from page 371 of Tom Palmer’s important 2004 monograph, Globalization and Culture: Homogeneity, Diversity, Identity, Liberty, as this monograph is reprinted in Tom’s 2009 book, Realizing Freedom:

I have observed the disappointment of visitors from wealthy cultures when colorful people dressed in brilliant clothes stop, pat themselves down, and take out cell phones in response to insistent ringing sounds. It’s not authentic! It ruins the whole trip! Those people are being robbed of their culture! They’re victims of global capitalism! The arrogance of those who want to keep the poor in their native environments, like lizards in a terrarium, is startling.