There is no conflict between humanitarian and economic concerns. A poorer country will be a much less healthy country, one more vulnerable to illness and disease. Technology, modern medicine, and market signals can address a virus, and already we see entrepreneurs producing cheaper ventilators and doctors using inexpensive generic drugs with excellent results.
Government cannot stimulate an economy it has simultaneously shutdown.
I repeat: Government cannot, cannot, cannot stimulate an economy it has simultaneously shut down.
In 1850, the French economist Frédéric Bastiat aided the world in understanding the seen and unseen costs of authoritarian policies. It is simple to see how the state giving someone a five-thousand-dollar check will buy that person groceries and pay her rent. It is not so simple — and yet even more critical — to see the costs and harms of where that money came from: the trillions in pointless spending that accumulate, the unprecedented amounts of new money created by the Federal Reserve, and the countless other destructive legal precedents set.
Millions of small businesses shuttered, just as many large employers have as well. Millions of service workers unemployed already, but many more jobs will be lost. The effects cascade.
Government cannot stimulate an economy it has simultaneously shutdown.
Purportedly intelligent people howling for the nationalization of industry, the socialization of production, the imprisonment in our homes — I promise you they don’t know what they’re howling for.
It is not possible to stop and start an economy — just as it is not possible to distinguish between essential and nonessential businesses — because the plexus of industry is an incomprehensibly vast web in which everyone and everything is connected.
It’s naïve to think that people won’t adapt to the perceived threat. It’s equally naive to think businesses won’t either — just as businesses deemed “essential” have. Restaurants can seat patrons several meters apart. Bartenders, servers, chefs, can wear masks and gloves. But most important of all, people with freedom can choose to patronize the business or not. Precisely as people have with businesses deemed essential. There are virtually limitless innovative ways free people can and will adjust to crisis, including the crisis of Covid-19. The fact that some politician cannot imagine a voluntary solution does not mean that one does not exist. South Korea is an example to emulate. Instead of an authoritarian lockdown of its people, it took a much freer approach — allowed the free flows of information and knowledge and testing — and it worked. We MUST move away from this destructive bunker mentality and consider the numerous less disastrous alternatives.
Why is there nowhere the equal concern and passion for these dying and innocent humans? Is it that the headline is not over-the-top enough? Not sensational enough?
“Whether one likes it or not, it is a fact that the main issues of present day politics are purely economic and cannot be understood without a grasp of economic theory,” wrote Ludwig von Mises, who was a thinker of the highest magnitude — truly on par with the brightest and smartest people in all of human history. I’ve quoted the above passage before and quote it again now because it is undeniable — it’s called the seen and the unseen — and the ramifications of the panic-driven policies and controls enacted by bumbling bureaucrats will dwarf the ramifications of the disease, the damage and destruction far longer lasting, unless those policies and controls are lifted.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now “actively looking into” results from universal COVID-19 testing at Pine Street Inn homeless shelter. The broad-scale testing took place at the shelter in Boston’s South End a week and a half ago because of a small cluster of cases there.
Of the 397 people tested, 146 people tested positive — not a single one of whom had any symptoms.
“It was like a double knockout punch. The number of positives was shocking, but the fact that 100 percent of the positives had no symptoms was equally shocking,” said Dr. Jim O’Connell, president of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, which provides medical care at the city’s shelters.
“All the screening we were doing before this was based on whether you had a fever above 100.4 and whether you had symptoms,” said O’Connell. “How much of the COVID virus is being passed by people who don’t even know they have it?”
The 146 people who tested positive were immediately moved to two different temporary isolation facilities in Boston. According to O’Connell, only one of those patients needed hospital care, and many continue to show no symptoms.
“If we did universal testing among the general population, would these numbers be similar?” said Lyndia Downie, president and executive director at the Pine Street Inn.
“Stanford released its initial Santa Clara antibody seroprevalence results. Implied infection fatality rate is less than 0.2% in Santa Clara county, with 50-85X more cases than current measured.”
This is good news, big news, and exciting news, but Stanford also issued this wise caveat (click the fine print to make it larger):
This study is early, but it’s unquestionably encouraging — especially in combination with the test-results from the Boston homeless shelter. The suffering has been real yet regional in scope, and the “mitigation” measures taken were driven by pure panic and propaganda — horrid, disastrous policies that were equivalent to trying to put out fire with rivers of gasoline.
Whether the controls will be fully lifted remains to be seen.
It will provide you with a profound insight into something very significant. Thisarticle was published just yesterday:
The Psychological Reason Why Some People Aren’t Following COVID-19 Quarantine Orders
How to handle the people who aren’t convinced by facts
Despite the repeated consensus that adhering to social distancing guidelines is the most effective way to diffuse the novel coronavirus pandemic, some people were slow to cancel their plans; some are still engaging in get-togethers.
It’s frustrating if this is one of your friends, endangering if it’s one of your immediate family members, and a tricky situation if it’s one of your colleagues, or someone who reports to you.
How do you handle someone who is blatantly ignoring social distancing guidelines? How do you reason with someone who is, essentially, a COVID-19 denier?
I urge you to please take special note of the opening words: “people who aren’t convinced by facts” and “Despite the repeated consensus …”
This isn’t merely sloppy reasoning — although it’s certainly that as well — but something far more insidious: it is a method of manipulation, a tactic universally employed and which works with great effectiveness on unsuspecting readers.
Please be aware that, despite using the word “facts” in the subtitle, no facts are actually given.
Also, just for the record, I could right now provide you with the names of 800 medical specialists who disagree about the “repeated consensus” purported by the writer — as I can cite the brilliant Stanford epidemiologist Dr. John P. A. Ioannidis and his recent paper: “Coronavirus disease: The harms of exaggerated information and non-evidence-based measures,” as I can cite the equally brilliant Harvard Medical School professor and immunologist Dr. Michael Mina, as I can also cite Johns Hopkins infectious disease specialist Dr. Amesh Adalja, and plenty of others — but even this is not the primary point here.
The primary point is to observe the passive-aggressive form of intellectual bullying (or “shaming,” as everyone likes to say it these days) being employed: observe that it is fully and yet obliquely implied (and the obliqueness is part of the manipulation-tactic) without regard or reference to any actual data or factual information, that anyone who does not know this or “adhere” to the official “guidelines” is wrongheaded and out-of-touch. This premise is assumed in the very language of that first sentence — something presupposed, not even to be questioned.
That is how unsuspecting readers are manipulated into convictions which they very often never realize they’ve formed.
That is the process by which you end up with a 16-year-old Swedish girl lecturing the world on a topic she knows nothing substantive about, and the world simply nods in total acquiescence and deference.
That is the process whereby dogmas, with all their buzz-words and jargon, are formed, and over which people will fight you to the death, even less than a month after the dogma was created.
Dogmas spare people the responsibility and effort of reasoning, which requires time and work and is a continual process. It’s also an individual act of volition each time it’s activated — reason is choice — and it’s not easy. Yet it’s how humans live because it’s how the conceptual apparatus functions.
The key phrase in the cited passage above is “repeated consensus,” which is here used as a way to bypass any need for rigorous reasoning — saying, in essence: “This is a fact and everyone knows it. The debate, if there ever was one (and there wasn’t), is over.”
Notice as well that there is no attempt whatsoever to back-up that so-named “repeated consensus” — which is also not just another sloppy form of reasoning, insofar as it seeks to deepen the psychological manipulation in the very circumventing of any factual data to back it up: specifically, by implying that it’s taken-for-granted, a given, so that if you don’t know about or believe in this “repeated consensus,” you are out-of-touch.
This is a specific type of logical fallacy, usually known as the Argument from Authority or, less commonly, ipse dixit. But this writer isn’t necessarily committing an honest error of reasoning — though I will leave it to each reader to decide how consciously manipulative the writer is here being.
The fallacy culminates in the final words of the passage cited above: reason with and denier.
That last word — popularized, as you know, the past decade by catastrophic climate-change activists — has deep holocaust connotations and largely for this reason is a type of ridicule. But ridicule, like ipse dixit and like bullying, are lazy forms of argumentation and cannot substitute real reasoning, nor survive under the light of logic.
There is a fatal flaw built into this type of polemic, and that fatal flaw is this: the process of conceptualization and comprehension does not happen merely by consensus, whether the consensus is alleged or actual.
Knowledge, scientific and otherwise, isn’t determined by numbers of people.
True knowledge, which is an act of integrating new information into your existing context-of-knowledge, is determined by data. It’s determined by facts, no matter how many people understand them or not. That billions believe does not make anything so. Concerning Covid, because of the paucity in testing, there is simply no way yet to know the true infection rate. And just as you cannot calculate an accurate death-rate without first knowing the infection rate, so you cannot calculate the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of any “guidelines” without knowing what the infection rate is. It’s a baseless arbitrary claim without complete evidence — especially considering that many infected people, according to the Iceland study, are symptomless or with symptoms so mild that they don’t connect it with Covid-19. And more: there is strong evidence to suggest that forcing people to stay inside, in close quarters with one another, as the official “social distancing guidelines” recommend, increases the number of infections.
Think again if you believe draconian controls recommended by a few (but far from all) medical experts are saving many lives from COVID-19. Facts reported by mathematician Yitzhak Ben Israel of Tel Aviv University don’t support such beliefs.
Professor Israel found that no matter how much or little politicians quarantined the population, “coronavirus peaked and subsided in the exact same way.” Whether the country relied on politicians shutting the country down (the US and UK, for example) or private voluntary actions (Sweden), Prof. Israel’s work shows that “all countries experienced seemingly identical coronavirus infection patterns, with the number of infected peaking in the sixth week and rapidly subsiding by the eighth week.”
In short, coercive measures imposed to protect the public from COVID-19 are as effective as throwing magical “tiger dust” in Central Park to keep tigers at bay in Manhattan.
Why are we so enamored with experts and their tiger dust? Simply, we don’t understand the inherent fallibility of human beings. Well-meaning experts can be as destructive as authoritarian politicians.
Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman is a behavioral economist and psychologist. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he writes, “Every policy question involves assumptions about human nature, in particular about the choices that people may make and the consequences of their choices for themselves and for society.” Mistaken or unexamined assumptions corrupt decision-making.
Experts Have Cognitive Biases
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman catalogs the many cognitive biases impairing human beings. Kahneman and his late research partner Amos Tversky “documented systematic errors in the thinking of normal people, and [they] traced these errors to the design of the machinery of cognition rather than to the corruption of thought by emotion.” In short, “severe and systematic errors” in cognition prevent us from being the rational thinkers we’d like to think we are.
Reporting on the work of psychologist Paul Slovic, Kahneman writes, “[Slovic] probably knows more about the peculiarities of human judgment of risk than any other individual.”
If you’re thinking, that’s why we need to entrust these decisions to experts, you would be wrong: Experts have the same cognitive biases as the rest of us.
Because of expert bias, Slovic “strongly resists the view that the experts should rule” and dissuades us from believing “their opinions should be accepted without question when they conflict with the opinions and wishes of other citizens.”
Please note the following and remember it (it’s new):
And so now this:
REVISED!
The only real way that knowledge and human progress can be derailed is by the systematic rejection of inductive reasoning, which forms the underpinnings not just of all science and the scientific-method, but of the entirety of human apprehension.
No scientist — whether researcher or practitioner or both, whether biologist, chemist, physicist, geologist, climate scientist, or any other — none can pursue knowledge without first having a view of what knowledge is and how that knowledge is acquired.
All scientists, therefore, whether they know it explicitly or not, need a theory of knowledge.
The science of knowledge specifically belongs to that branch of philosophy called epistemology.
Epistemology — from the Greek word episteme, which means “knowledge”— is an extraordinarily complicated discipline that begins with three simple words: consciousness is awareness.
All scientists, I repeat, need a theory of knowledge, and this theory of knowledge subsequently affects every aspect of a scientist’s approach to her research — from the questions she asks, to the answers she finds, to the hypothesis and theories then developed and built-upon.
Very rare geniuses like Galileo and Newton and perhaps even Kepler (who, for all his mathematical brilliance and tireless work, held to a metaphysical viewpoint deeply flawed) were ferociously innovative in epistemology as well as physics —specifically, in systematizing and codifying the core principles of the inductive-method, which they all three came to through their scrupulous use of scientific experiment.
Experiment is induction.
Benjamin Franklin testing a notion he had about electricity by flying a kite into a lightning storm, a metal key tied to the kite string, is an example of the inductive method at work.
Induction more than anything else — including deduction — is the method of reason and the engine of human progress.
A proper epistemology teaches a scientist, as it teaches everyone else concerned with comprehension and actual learning, how to exercise the full power of the human mind — which is to say, how to reach the widest abstractions while not losing sight of the specifics or, it you prefer, the concretes.
A proper epistemolgy teaches how to integrate sensory data into a step-by-step pyramid of knowledge, culminating in the grasp of fundamental truths whose context applies to the whole universe. Galileo’s laws of motion and Newton’s laws of optics, as well as his laws of gravity, are examples of this. If humans were to one day transport to a sector of the universe where these laws did not hold true, it still wouldn’t invalidate them here. The context here remains. In this way, knowledge expands as context grows. The fact that all truths are by definition contextual does not invalidate absolute truth and knowledge thereby, but just the opposite: context is the means by which we measure and validate absolute truth.
Terms like “broad consensus,” “repeated consensus,” “guidelines,” “climate change,” they’re so vague and imprecise as to be virtually meaningless.
Individuals possess rights because of which there are things that no person and no group or institution may rightfully do — not without being in violation of those rights — which is to say, without being in the wrong. It is no accident that “wrong” is the opposite of “right” in this context as well.
The proof of rights is found in the fact that the only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission. Now please ask yourself: whose permission? And who gives permission to the one whose permission you’re acting under and to the one above this one and then to the one above her and so on? And why?
If, for instance, the government says that one business can be open — let’s say a coffeeshop or a liquor store — but not another (a restaurant, for example, or a bar), these businesses and the individuals who own and operate them are all acting and operating not by right but purely by governmental permission.
Rights by definition can only belong to individuals — not groups — since it is only individuals who compose any group or so-called collective. Rights legally guarantee your freedom and independence as an individual human being.
Independence is autonomy. It is the freedom to govern yourself and to rely upon your own independent judgment.
Independence is the freedom to express your own individuality.
When humans are left free, they invent, they innovate, they create, they exchange — they freely associate, which in turns creates more innovation, more invention, more idea generation, more creation. In this precise way, freedom — the freedom to live and to produce and to keep the fruits of what you produce — creates prosperity and goodwill among human beings.
An adversary ethic and epistemology — i.e. a government governing not by consent but by consensus; knowledge gained not by processing all the relevant data and its context, nor by the hierarchy of facts, but by consensus — they negate the prosperity and goodwill among humans that freedom brings.
But what in the final analysis is freedom?
Freedom, in its most fundamental form, has only one meaning: it is the omission of force.
Freedom is the absence of coercion.
It simply means that you are left alone.
It means that every individual — regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, color, class, creed, gender, brawn, beauty or any other non-essential characteristic — every individual possesses the absolute right to her own life, and only her own life.
The thing that distinguishes the free person from the unfree person is voluntary action versus action that is compelled.
Freedom, like rights, is one of these things that virtually everyone believes in — that is, until everyone finds out what it actually means. And then almost no one believes in it.
The difficult thing for many people to accept or grasp about freedom is that it doesn’t actually guarantee much of anything. It doesn’t guarantee success or happiness, or shelter, or a certain income, or food, or healthcare, or a “level playing field,” or a level training field, or anything else that must ultimately derive from the production or labor of others. Freedom means only that you are free to pursue these things and that if you achieve them, they are yours unalienably, which in turns means: they cannot be taken, transferred, revoked, or made alien.
It is, for example, a simple-to-say and almost obscenely common platitude that you have the right to a job, or the right to healthcare, or the right to free housing. It is much more difficult to say what this implies: namely, that you have the right to the knowledge and labor and life of another human being. Because you do not. Nobody does.
The IHME is meanwhile suddenly realizing that Farr’s Law won’t be subverted — not even by Covid-19 or the panic it created — and that the virus is fading fast. And yet they nevertheless need to find a way to declare victory. But please don’t be fooled, not for a moment: the idea that social distancing by itself can kill off a virus is one-hundred percent pseudoscience. The IHME has realized that Covid-19 is somewhat seasonal and not nearly a big enough deal to justify the immense destruction that’s been wrought.
Government doesn’t “need a plan” to “end the shutdown.” Government needs to end the shutdown. Immediately.
To support forced shutdowns for an unspecified and indefinite time-span means to rely upon the same government that spent weeks sending contradictory messages, blocking testing, and being entirely unprepared to provide actual leadership. To end the forced lockdowns is to allow people to live their lives freely. Approximately 17 million people going to work will once more feel productive and useful. They will begin earning their own money again. Most importantly of all: the deadly and horrifyingly seductive and lulling lethargy, the indolence that comes from any and all forms of socialism — the process of entrenchment taking hold with such astonishing swiftness, like a gentle hand gripping your throat and squeezing until, before you’re even aware of it, you drift away into a brain-damaged stupor, irreparable (and you can already see this happening here, this new lifestyle so lulling and appealing to so many) — it will be mercifully abolished.
Israel is in complete lockdown, and their unemployment numbers (>25%) continue to skyrocket. They have one of the most sophisticated and invasive tracking programs available. They’ve logged just over 100 deaths, the overwhelming majority of whom are people with preexisting conditions and the elderly. The professor quoted in this article is a world renowned mathematician, recognized for having built weapons systems that rely on extremely precise math models. Modeling for him is a life or death matter.This last thing, by the erudite lawyer Robert Barnes, is absolutely true. In the coming days and weeks and months and years, you can expect much, much, much more of the same sort of equivocation as Erick Erickson’s above.
“Emergencies have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.” — Friedrich Hayek
When the shutdown happened, it was a panicked, random, sweeping irrational decision made by scared politicians responding to howling media freaks. Regular people were horrified. All these three weeks later, you can see people coming around and thinking oh-oh-oh we can’t possibly open up until the virus goes away, which is a preposterous outlook because viruses of one sort or another have always been with us and somehow civilization managed to cobble together the idea of human rights in spite of this. In any case, right now I’m shocked at the dearth of public voices calling for an immediate opening. And think about it: if you are not for an immediate shift from government controls back to freedom of association right now, you are de facto for shutdown. Consider that. Now think about the writers, pundits, intellectuals and other big shot voices out there who could make a difference for freedom RIGHT NOW but are declining to do so for fear of the social-media mobs or whatever. Moral courage is among the world’s rarest and most precious qualities.— Jefferey Tucker
“If you’re angered by citations for being in park with your nuclear family, or in your car or running on the beach — or, for that matter, if you’re angered by the “non-essential” goods roped off in stores — understand that these things have nothing to do with fighting the virus and everything to do with power-hungry politicians and law enforcement” — Ilya Shapiro, economist and lawyer.
“Distrust all in whom the desire to punish is powerful.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
Also, here’s another data study shows “virtually zero correlation between speed of shut down and expected death rates.”
The evidence is overwhelming: poverty creates disease and death. It sickens and kills over the short and long term, and brings higher rates of morbidity and mortality. Things crucial to our day-to-day lives (medical and otherwise) come from healthy inventive economies – or they don’t come at all, as many people are only now discovering. Ask yourself: who makes, uses, and replenishes these things?
I’ll give you a hint: it is not government bureaus — not faceless, inanimate “factors of production” (per economists’ jargon) but real, live, self-interested, ingenious, productive people: entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers, lab technicians, doctors, nurses, medical specialists, EMT crews, hospitals, health insurers, and pharmaceutical companies.
Claims about the “net benefits” of mandatory lockdowns and shutdowns are farcical and horrifying — because they’re woefully unequipped and dangerous, especially when used to justify destructive policymaking. In the words of economist Richard Salsman:
“An economy is an intricate, delicate system, a stupendous, comprehensive latticework of interconnected contracts, of plans and sub-plans, markets and sub-markets, calibrations and expectations, retail chains and supply chains, prices and profits – a mosaic of real lives and livelihoods.”
As of 4:00pm yesterday (April 8th, 2020), a total of 14,696 U.S. residents have died from Covid-19, and death is never something to be treated lightly or disrespectfully — and I know people who do both.
Here are some other figures for context:
roughly 12,469 people in the U.S. died from the swine flu from April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010. Unlike Covid-19, which mainly kills older people with preexisting health problems, 87% of people killed by the swine flu were under the age of 65.
Deaths from Covid-19 are right now7.1% of the annual fatalities from the flu and accidents.
The main reason the flu takes tens of thousands of lives every year is that the these particular viruses — as opposed to Covid-19 coronavirus — mutate in ways that prevent people from becoming immune to them. Quoting the Journal of Infectious Diseases:
“All viruses mutate, but influenza remains highly unusual among infectious diseases [because it mutates very rapidly]…. New vaccines are [therefore] needed every year to protect against it.”
Much is still unknown about the mutations of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, but there are the indications that it doesn’t quickly mutate. This means it’s less likely to be an ongoing problem. From a March 2020 paper in a molecular biology journal called Embo, Michael Farzan, co-chair of the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research, wrote that once a vaccine for Covid-19 is developed, it “would not need regular updates, unlike seasonal influenza vaccines because the part of the virus that the vaccine targets is protected against mutation by a feature of its genetic material, or RNA.” The same point applies to naturally acquired immunity.
The Atlantic, Vox, and even Forbes promptly turned the truth of this matter on its head by confusing the general nature of coronaviruses with that of Covid-19. There are different types of coronaviruses, of which Covid-19 is caused by just one.
“Coronaviruses are a family of RNA viruses that includes some common cold viruses. These viruses tend to mutate rapidly, but Covid-19 does not share that trait. [It] does not mutate rapidly for an RNA virus because, unusually for this category, it has a proof-reading function in its genetics” (ibid).
This is from the Chicago City Wire and it’s significant because, as it says in the article, it indicates that “the spread of the virus may have been underway in the Roseland community — and the state and country as a whole — prior to the issuance of stay at home orders and widespread business closures in mid-March which have crippled the national economy.”
Sumaya Owaynat, a phlebotomy technician, said she tests between 400 and 600 patients on an average day in the parking lot at Roseland Community Hospital. Drive-thru testing is from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 4 p.m. each day. However, the hospital has a limited number of tests they can give per day.
Owaynat said the number of patients coming through the testing center who appear to have already had coronavirus and gotten over it is far greater than those who currently have the disease.
“A lot of people have high antibodies, which means they had the coronavirus but they don’t have it anymore and their bodies built the antibodies,” Owaynat told Chicago City Wire.
Antibodies in the bloodstream reveal that a person has already had the coronavirus and may be immune to contracting the virus again.
If accurate, this means the spread of the virus may have been underway in the Roseland community – and the state and country as a whole – prior to the issuance of stay at home orders and widespread business closures in mid-March which have crippled the national economy.
In addition, those who show signs of already having had the illness should be able to re-enter society — albeit with some modified social distancing measures in place — rather than sheltering at home as they are no longer in danger. Of those who contract the coronavirus, around 25 percent may be asymptomatic.
It’s sometimes called Farr’s Law, named after William Farr (1807 – 1883), and it states that all epidemics — all of them — follow an epidemiological curve (also known as an epi-curve or S-curve).
These curves start out with an alarmingly steep incline. But over time, in natural progression, they slope downward and eventually flatten.
This will perhaps seem obvious, even to those who don’t know about Farr’s law, but it is clearly not obvious — because with each new epidemic, we hear the exact same thing:
“If the virus continues to spread at the current rate … ”
Reader, hear this: viruses — and this includes Covid-19, which is another SARS virus — never continue to spread at the current rate. Never.
Do you doubt it? I have good news: it’s already happened in China and South Korea, and it is continuing to happen, and it will continue to happen.
In every epidemiological curve — or epi-curve or S-curve — it IS initially like an exponential curve, before it stagnates and levels off. And this time around (almost certainly because of the internet) that was the point at which the world went berserk and is still going berserk. Yet nothing is fundamentally different.
Catastrophizing is something you should always be suspicious of. Always. There is inevitably a great deal of suffering and hardship in any epidemic or pandemic, and it’s something that should never be treated lightly — never — and we haven’t leveled out yet. But fear-mongering and catastrophizing only compounds the problem.
With knowledge and understanding comes calm.
Here is a little of what you can expect next:
All the horrific lockdown measures, the state-mandated social distancing, the outrageous fear-mongering and then the government’s “swift and decisive action and efficient response” (the destruction of a 30-trillion dollar economy minor collateral damage, understand) — these are the reasons the coronavirus has begun to fade.
In actuality, though, the only thing these horrifying measures did if anything is prolong the pandemic.
“There’s nothing to be scared about. This is the flu epidemic like every other flu epidemic — maybe more severe, but nothing is fundamentally different from the flu we’ve seen every other year.”
– Professor Knut Wittkowski
I made this video after reading the transcripts of a talk given by professor Knut Wittkowski — an epidemiologist who is like me fed up with the politicization of human knowledge which of course includes but is far from limited to science. The politicization of science is the direct and demonstrable result of a totally corrupt epistemology.
Doctor Amesh Adalja also recently said “I suspect coronavirus was here even before the 1st official case was diagnosed in Washington state in mid-January.” That was in response to this New York Times piece:
Finally, the surprise you’ve all been waiting for: the bureaucratic insanity, which by definition and by necessity comes with bloated government, continues lumbering down its predictable course, unabated:
To any and all government-lovers, of whatever stripe, before you break yourself completely at the alter of bureaucracy, I’d be very curious to hear your response to (and your defense of) all this shit. In fact, I demand it.
If the COVID-19 pandemic tails off in a few weeks, months before the alarmists claim it will, they will probably pivot immediately and pat themselves on the back for the brilliant social-distancing controls that they imposed on the world. They will claim that their heroic recommendations averted total calamity. Unfortunately, they will be wrong; and Sweden, which has done almost no mandated [my boldface] social distancing, will probably prove them wrong.
As the state of affairs becomes increasingly polarized in America — degenerating with clockwork predictability into partisan polemics of the most concrete-bound sort (with, however, this bizarre twist, which, if you think about it, follows a certain contorted logic: the left now angry at Donald Trump for not being fascist enough in his refusal (so far) to force state governors on the issue of imposing mandatory police-state lockdowns) — I urge you, throughout all of it, to not lose site of this:
Nor should we lose site of the fact that South Korea achieved this calmly, quietly, and without the heavy-duty draconian measures of America and China.
Some countries are turning COVID-19 away at the door, while others are turning the tide of the pandemic
As you can see in this chart, COVID-19 remains mostly controlled in Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Taiwan is barely visible down there at the bottom, while Singapore actually hasn’t had enough deaths to make it onto the figure yet.
And yet rather than employing the successful methods which South Korea and Singapore have successfully employed, the United States has chosen the path of panic and fear — the precise path chosen by, for instance, mainland China, an authoritarian communist regime with the highest death-toll. The United States chose bureaucracy, botched testing, lockdown, and fearmongering-over-calm-and-clear-thinking.
As infectious disease doctor Amesh Adalja (who has been stellar throughout all this, not diminishing the danger but not overstating it either) recently put it:
“It’s common sense to know your enemy. Instead, we’re all hiding inside our houses as we wait around for a vaccine — that’s not a good global strategy for battling a dangerous virus.”
And, I would add, annihilating in the process a 20trillion-dollar economy, the ramifications of which a large percentage of the American pubic, like American politicians, have no real conception of whatsoever.
Meanwhile, the model used to horrify the world senseless was quietly tossed into the trash, without almost anyone even noticing.
Doctor Michael Mina is an epidemiologist, immunologist, and physician at the Harvard School of Public Health and also a professor at Harvard Medical School. His area of expertise is vaccines, immunity, and infectious diseases. He’s logical and levelheaded — not on any lunatic-fringe — and he’s one of America’s best. Today he wrote this:
In response to which, the previously mentioned infectious disease specialist, Dr. Amesh Adalja, who agrees with Dr. Mina, also pointed out:
Finally, I think sage and sound the following quote, by an economist named Peter Earl:
“It’s possible to believe that Covid-19 is potentially as lethal (or more) than even the highest estimates, contagion rates high or higher than estimates, and social distancing wise, while also believing that current government polices are misguided and tyrannical. They’re not mutually exclusive views.”
