The Latest from Cafe Hayek

(Don Boudreaux)

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Mike Munger writes with good sense, in the Wall Street Journal, about inflation and Biden’s Build Back Better beast.

Whatever you think of Congress’s bipartisan infrastructure initiative, its timing is unfortunate. It will be sharply expansionary on the fiscal front, with new demands on labor markets straining to find workers. All that cash from Fed monetary expansion is out there ready to be spent. Mr. Biden’s Build Back Better plan would make these problems worse by injecting trillions into the economy.

Things aren’t yet so bad that a plan can’t make them worse. In a recent paper for the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University, I evaluated one policy for managing prices—a top-down approach directed from Washington. I found that such plans are thwarted by information problems (officials don’t know enough to direct resources or decide prices) and incentive problems (the power to decide which prices will be allowed to increase, and which will be held down, will be corrupted by politics).

We’re already stuck with supply-chain bottlenecks and too much cash. A government price plan can only make things worse. Ain’t that a punch in the mouth?

Also writing on Build Back Better is George Will. Two slices:

It is a sow’s ear made from the silk purse of his election, which was the nation’s plea for temperateness. The everything-including-the-kitchen-sink process that has produced BBB has completed the collapse of Biden’s credibility, and his party’s. The process has resembled Winston Churchill’s description of an intragovernmental negotiation: Britain’s Admiralty favored building six battleships, and the economists favored four, so they compromised on eight.

BBB treats all Democratic constituencies like baby birds with their beaks wide open. Including journalists: There is a $1.7 billion payroll tax credit of up to $25,000 for each local journalist an organization employs in the first year and $15,000 for the next four — with the usual make-believe that this dependency of media on government will then end. The media will always proclaim their independence, but progressives’ politics is always about multiplying dependent constituencies.

The promise of no tax increase for the 98.2 percent of Americans earning less than $400,000 came with an unarticulated caveat and an invisible asterisk. It meant no “direct” increases: Employees, shareholders and customers of corporations will pay all corporate tax increases.

Congressional Democrats’ bookkeeping trickery — pretending to assume the quick expiration of entitlement programs that they say are moral imperatives forever — misstates by almost $3 trillion what Democrats actually hope to make BBB cost over a decade. BBB would add entitlements to Medicare while the 2021 Medicare Trustees Report announces that the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will be insolvent by 2026.
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Biden’s banal response to rising gasoline prices has included directing the Federal Trade Commission to investigate “anti-consumer behavior” by oil companies and ordering 50 million barrels — less than Americans use every three days — released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. His indifference to his cognitive dissonance is hilarious: He says fossil fuels are an “existential” threat to the planet, and please, OPEC, pump more, quickly, because cranky U.S. drivers are an existential threat to something even more important than the planet: Democratic control of Congress.

“4 Years After the FCC Repealed Net Neutrality, the Internet Is Better Than Ever” – so reads a headline on a new report by Robby Soave.

James Pethokoukis reports on interesting research into America’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Inu Manak and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon report some good news: 67 “WTO members agree to cut red tape in global services trade.” A slice:

The benefits of this agreement could be significant. A recent joint study by the Organisation for Economic Co‐​operation and Development (OECD) and the WTO estimates that the annual savings in costs to services trade would be approximately $150 billion USD. Breaking this down between participants and non‐​participants shows that the potential cost savings to the deal’s signatories would be around $135 billion, while non‐​signatories would still see a $17 billion reduction in costs. The study goes on to say that “Substantial benefits accrue in a number of sectors, including financial services sector with USD 47 billion, business services with USD 36 billion, as well as communications and transport services, with both around USD 20 billion.” This is a win‐​win.

Several scholars assess Randy Barnett’s and Evan Bernick’s new book, The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.

An Austrian Crown Prince once got advice from Carl Menger. A slice:

What Menger conveyed to Rudolf was both the place and the limits of the state within the society over which he would one day rule. That is, Menger emphasized the broad institutional order in the context of which the ruler’s subjects were to be allowed to act on their own behalves, respectively, out of which general economic and social improvement becomes possible. As Menger said, “Given the complexities of the social circumstances, only the individual’s (sic) themselves can judge correctly the relative importance of their needs.” The government could never know what was good for the individual better than the individual himself.

Bryan Caplan shares penetrating insights from the philosopher Christoper Freiman.

AIER’s new president is Will Ruger. Congrats Will – and AIER!

(Don Boudreaux)

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My latest column for AIER is the second of a two-part series on F.A. Hayek’s insightful 1964 New Individualist Review paper, “Kinds of Order in Society.” A slice from my column:

But the distinguishing feature of an organization is not found in the kinds of goals (such as profit) that it is consciously established to pursue. Rather, the distinguishing feature of an organization is simply that it is consciously designed and established to pursue some particular goal or goals, whatever it or these might be. And so the actions of every person in an organization can and will be judged by how well those actions contribute to the achievement of the organization’s goals.

Spontaneous Orders

Spontaneous orders differ categorically from organizations. Spontaneous orders, like organizations, are highly useful to individuals. But unlike organizations, spontaneous orders are not designed and created. They emerge as unintended consequences of the actions of persons, each of whom is pursuing his or her own individual goals with no awareness that those actions will give rise to a larger order. While a spontaneous order assists each individual in the pursuit of his or her goals, such an order, unlike an organization, itself has no goal towards which it aims. And because a spontaneous order as such has no goals, the actions of the individuals whose choices give rise to the spontaneous order cannot be judged by how well or poorly they promote the goal of the spontaneous order – for, again, the spontaneous order has no goals.

The most obvious example of a useful spontaneous order is language. Language is clearly (to use a phrase much-favored by Hayek) the result of human action but not of human design. Languages emerged from human beings attempting to communicate with each other. Yet no one consciously decided what specific words and sounds refer to, or mean, in any language. The word “chair” emerged over time to mean the particular thing that it today means to those who speak English.

Being undesigned, it follows that language was not designed to serve any purpose or to achieve some particular goal. It would be silly to talk about the goal of the English language or of the Korean language. And yet language does indeed enable each of us as individuals to better pursue our own goals. The shopper uses language to explain to the store clerk just what items he wishes to buy, and the store clerk, at the end of her work day, uses language to inform the cab driver of her destination. But the shopper and the store clerk, by using the same language, are not together acting to achieve some higher goal. Further, it would be mistaken to describe language as having among its goals the service of the shopper and of the store clerk.

Another example of a spontaneous order is the global market. No one designed today’s division of labor – with some of us working as plumbers, others of us as web designers, yet others of us as butchers, brewers, bakers, or baseball players. And no one designed the indescribably complex pattern of exchange relationships that enables each of us to enjoy the fabulous prosperity that each of us enjoys. And yet these phenomena are real. They are the result of human action but not of human design. The market, like language, provides enormous assistance to each of us as we each pursue our own individual goals. But the market, also like language, has no overarching goal toward which it aims.

(Don Boudreaux)

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Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins continues to be dismayed by how poorly informed many people are about Covid-19. Two slices:

Unfortunately, the picture sold to the public continues to be badly distorted, with consequences that someday will have to be honestly assessed. While the U.S. government now quietly estimates that 146 million Americans had been infected with Covid as of Oct. 2, media outlets are currently trumpeting America’s 50 millionth “confirmed” case as the latest milestone. This cockamamie measure can only appeal to editors because it makes it sound like the virus can still be stopped before it reaches most people.

Its bastard offspring, the case fatality rate, also continues to pop up in the media, with Bloomberg News last week bizarrely trying to outdo China’s Covid chief by forcing on its readers a claim that “the global death rate stands at over 1.9%.”

This needlessly terrorizing estimate is biased twice over, because it ignores infected people who aren’t tested, and because those who seek testing tend to be the sickest and oldest. Oxford University’s Our World in Data, perhaps because its website is frequently consulted by media types, takes pains for the especially thick of head: “There is a straightforward question that most people would like answered. If someone is infected with COVID-19, how likely is that person to die? The key point is that the case fatality rate (CFR)—the most commonly discussed measure—is not the answer to the question.”

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What also remains discouraging is the public sector’s perhaps unavoidable but never-ending policy chaos. From the virus’s arrival on our shores, politicians decided it wouldn’t be good for their careers to be seen conceding that it would eventually infect most of the population, even though all understood perfectly well (don’t kid yourself about Dr. Fauci and company) that it was almost inevitable.

A large and continuing exercise in hand waving has been needed to pretend that we were striving to suppress case numbers indiscriminately, though no evidence has suggested that such suppression is achievable except in the very short term at an unsustainable cost.

Vinay Prasad: “I think it is clear: many pandemic experts hurt children.” A slice:

The experts in the USA pushed this issue further. Against the advice of the World Health Organization and UNICEF, our expert bodies (AAP & CDC) advocated for cloth masking (an ineffective mask per Bangladesh RCT) in kids as young as 2. This decision defied all pre-pandemic guidance, all available evidence, and basic common sense. To date, this recommendation continues, and this policy has led to mandatory masking of toddlers in many daycare settings for hours on end.

Reason‘s Robby Soave pleads with government schools to “stop threatening unvaccinated kids.” Two slices:

But the mere fact that punishing thousands of teenagers for not being vaccinated was even on the table is disconcerting. Indeed, throughout the pandemic, the enforcers of COVID-19 restrictions have had few qualms about making children miserable—even though the under-18 crowd has little to fear from the disease. Young people are the cohort safest from COVID-19, whether or not they are vaccinated; vaccinated seniors are at significantly greater risk than unvaccinated teenagers. Despite this reality, children and teenagers in the U.S. face the most stringent and brutally uncompromising pandemic prevention policies of all, especially at public schools.

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It’s one thing to encourage teenagers to get vaccinated: It’s quite another to threaten them with further setbacks to their social lives and educational careers if they do not comply. Healthy young people have very little to fear from COVID-19, but two years of social isolation, school closures, and virtual learning are undoubtedly having a profoundly negative effect. Elementary and middle school test scores—particularly among minority students—are plummeting; and according to the surgeon general, more young people are experiencing depressive episodes than ever before.

Also from Robby Soave:

Despite no new public information that would suggest there is anything novel to fear from the omicron variant of COVID-19—which seems to be producing mild cases in vaccinated individuals—many municipalities are regressing into full-blown panic and reimposing mitigation measures. Case in point: Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom reinstated California’s mask mandate, beginning December 15 and lasting until January 15.

Jon Sanders decries Covidocratic tyranny. Two slices:

Government leaders have tipped their hands. Covid-19 has given them access to powers that they are loath to lose. Alarmingly, people in the world’s freest societies (using the prepandemic 2019 “Freedom in the World” report by Freedom House) — notably in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand — have allowed totalitarian restrictions so long as they were euphemized as safety measures. Without the gloss, they include house arrest, dehumanizing dress codes, movement papers for work, shopping, and travel, and apartheid.

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Just the knowledge of the Omicron variant prompted the European Commission to urge for the European Union to impose mandatory vaccination. Many European nations have announced new crackdowns on the unvaccinated, from lockdowns to fines, excused by fears of the Omicron variant.

The free press, a quaint term in the U.S. that now applies to organizations openly promoting a police state, welcomes these developments. A recent CNN headline declared “Making Covid-19 vaccines mandatory was once unthinkable. But European countries are showing it can work.” Which is like saying China is showing that making human-rights activists “disappear” can work to bring about near-universal acclamation for communism. It’s amazing what “can work” when a government can erase your livelihood if you don’t comply.

Alexander Adams will resist Covidocratic tyranny.

Aaron Kheriaty applauds Japan’s humane policy on Covid vaccination – and he criticizes the inhumane policies of other governments, including many of those in the United States.

el gato malo is appalled that some people are now urging the continued wearing of masks and practicing of “social distancing” as means of ensuring the effectiveness of vaccines.

Jon Miltimore reports on more studies that find that lockdowns do little or nothing to save lives.

Here’s insight from the Telegraph‘s Kate Andrews. A slice:

Plan B supporters will be quick to say that the Government didn’t have a week to wait it out. With the Omicron variant estimated to be doubling every two to three days, action needed to be taken immediately. These are clashes that are bound to arise but made more difficult to weigh up when no formal assessment has been done.

Made more difficult, too, by Johnson’s decision to usher in rules such as vaccine passports that have no proven track-record of success. Scotland’s experiment with showing your health status to access parts of public life didn’t stop the spread of the virus. It did, however, create more burdens on business and rules for consumers.

The return of restrictions – and Johnson’s refusal to rule out more – does not bode well for future economic recovery. But treating the economy as an after-thought is making the situation far worse.

And the Telegraph‘s Allison Pearson applauds those Tory MPs who voted against vaccine passports. Two slices:

Please don’t call the MPs who voted against vaccine passports ‘Tory rebels’. In my book, those upstanding men and women are the true Conservatives. Rather, it is those who pushed through this repellently un-British measure, with the help of the Labour Party, who are the traitors to our philosophy.

That stirring creed of liberty that trusts grown-ups to make the best decisions for their own families and does not seek to ostracise people for refusing to provide proof of a medical treatment to go to the theatre or the footie. All I can say is, thank God there are people in Parliament who are prepared to take arms against this sea of senselessness, this tsunami of pseudo-scientific scaremongering.

From head boy of the old school, Sir Graham Brady, to 28-year-old blonde bombshell of the Red Wall Dehenna Davison, via former Royal Air Force engineer Steve Baker (more sense than the entire Cabinet combined) through that lioness Esther McVey, keenly compassionate Sir Charles Walker and Miriam Cates (both rightly devastated by the collateral damage of lockdown) to fearless, principled Nus Ghani and the swashbuckling Sir Desmond Swayne… These are my heroes – and all the rest who dug in their heels on the slippery slope to authoritarianism.

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Last night, I went to London for dinner. Was I worried about omicron swarming through the capital? No, I was worried about the freedom to make my own risk assessment being taken away. I was worried that my children’s hopeful young adult lives are about to be blighted again after a reader, friendly with the wife of a boffin who sits on Sage, emailed to warn me that lockdown is “pencilled in for January 5”, once we get through “this politically sensitive period”. (How unbearably grim if so.)

I was fretting that yet more children would be murdered or abused in their homes during the Work From Home order. I have been heart-flutteringly, not-sleeping anxious that we would see a repeat of this time last year, with that deadening sadness millions of us experienced when we knew for sure that we would not be reunited with mothers, fathers, grandparents, children and siblings. The season of Ho! Ho! Ho! turns into Oh No! NO!, should hospitals happen to run short of beds. Is this perpetual, sickening uncertainty really how it’s going to be every winter – the Ghost of Christmas Lost rattling its lonely chains?

“The pandemicists must be stopped.” A slice:

No realistic public health goal underpins this diagnostic mania, of course. People who test positive for Corona are sent home to suffer in untreated silence by themselves. Endlessly testing, tracing, sequencing, panicking and closing is, however, a goal in itself for people like Emily Gurley and all the other pandemicists [Emily] Anthes gleefully quotes, from Eric Topol to Trevor Bedford to Ezekiel J. Emanuel. All of them want the Corona Circus to play on, and after it ends they hope for a sequel sometime soon. Never before have they enjoyed such personal and professional prominence.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

Depression has many causes. The lockdowns, by promoting loneliness, isolation, and fear, have intensified those causes, harming the lives of so many.

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 365 of my late, great GMU colleague Gordon Tullock’s 1983 book, Economics of Income Redistribution,” as this book is reprinted in The Economics and Politics of Wealth Redistribution (volume 7 of The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock, Charles K. Rowley, ed. [2005]):

I have already expressed my views that [government aid to] higher education is a highly regressive scheme for transferring funds from the people who are less well-off to those who are well-off. The only advantage I can think of this from a social standpoint is that it pays my salary. I doubt, however, that anything will be done about it, since the beneficiaries are, politically, extremely influential and, in fact, control all the communication channels, so the people who are injured by it will probably never find out they are injured.

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Los Angeles Times:

Editor:

You should be ashamed of this utterly misleading headline: “Young Latinos are dying of COVID at an alarming rate – the effects could be felt for generations” (Dec. 9). And you should be embarrassed by the accompanying “report.”

Given this headline, we readers expect to encounter information on just what this “alarming rate” is. Yet reading your report dashes this expectation. We do learn that in California “Latinos ages 20 to 54 have died from COVID-19 at a rate more than eight times higher than white people in the same age group,” but this fact tells us nothing about the actual rate at which “young Latinos” – curiously, by the way, defined to include people in their mid-50s – are dying from Covid.

Had reporter Alejandra Reyes-Velarde read the paper to which she links as the source of her information, she would have learned that the total number of all Californians ages 20 to 54 who died of Covid during the time studied by the paper’s authors – February 1, 2020, through July 31, 2020 – is 1,131 (which is 11.1 percent of all Covid deaths in CA during that time period). She’d have learned also that Hispanics accounted for 48.2 percent of all Covid deaths in that state. Assuming that this same death rate holds for the age group 20-54, the number of Hispanics of this age who died of Covid in CA is 545.

There are approximately 20 million Californians aged 20-54. With California’s population being 32.2 percent Hispanic, there are thus approximately 6,440,000 Hispanics of this age in California. Covid therefore killed in California, during the time period reported on by Ms. Reyes-Velarde, 545 out of the 6,440,000 Hispanics aged 20-54 – or 0.0085 percent of this group.

And so while in reality this death rate isn’t remotely “alarming,” the poor quality of your reporting certainly is.

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

(For alerting me to the LA Times “report” I thank Tim Townsend.)

(Don Boudreaux)

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David Henderson shares good sense expressed by Colorado’s governor about Covid restrictions.

Also reporting on Gov. Jared Polis’s sensible remarks is Reason‘s Eric Boehm. A slice:

In a lengthy interview with Colorado Public Radio, the Democratic governor says the “medical emergency” phase of the COVID-19 pandemic has passed. With vaccines readily available to anyone who wants one, Polis says it is time for public health officials to step aside and let individuals make their own decisions about masks. Even with the emergence of the new omicron variant, Polis is refusing to reimplement a statewide mask mandate.

“The emergency is over. You know, public health [officials] don’t get to tell people what to wear; that’s just not their job,” Polis said. “You don’t tell people what to wear. You don’t tell people to wear a jacket when they go out in winter and force them to [wear it]. If they get frostbite, it’s their own darn fault.”

When vaccines were not readily available to anyone who wanted one, Polis argued, mask mandates made sense as an alternative. But following the science means adjusting to changing circumstances, and vaccines are far more effective at mitigating COVID hospitalizations and deaths.

“At this point, if you haven’t been vaccinated, it’s really your own darn fault,” Polis said.

(DBx: I’ve gotten several hostile responses to my letter to operators of venues that require that their patrons show proof of vaccination and wear masks – a letter motivated by much the same reasoning as appears to motivate Gov. Polis.)

“As Other Big Cities Tighten Mask and Vaccine Mandates, D.C. Becomes a Surprising Island of Relative Sanity” – so reads the headline of this report by Christian Britschgi.

Writing in The Atlantic, Matthew Walther describes the happy condition – the condition of largely ignoring Covid and being free of Covidocratic tyranny – enjoyed by at least some Americans living outside of major metropolitan areas. (HT Ian Fillmore) A slice:

I am old enough to remember the good old days when holiday-advice pieces were all variations on “How to Talk to Your Tea Party Uncle About Obamacare.” As Christmas approaches, we can look forward to more of this sort of thing, with the meta-ethical speculation advanced to an impossibly baroque stage of development. Is it okay for our 2-year-old son to hug Grandma at a Christmas party if she received her booster only a few days ago? Should the toddler wear a mask except when he is slopping mashed potatoes all over his booster seat? Our oldest finally attended her first (masked) sleepover with other fully vaccinated 10-year-olds, but one of them had a sibling test positive at day care. Should she stay home or wear a face shield? What about Omicron?

I don’t know how to put this in a way that will not make me sound flippant: No one cares. Literally speaking, I know that isn’t true, because if it were, the articles wouldn’t be commissioned. But outside the world inhabited by the professional and managerial classes in a handful of major metropolitan areas, many, if not most, Americans are leading their lives as if COVID is over, and they have been for a long while.

In my part of rural southwest Michigan, and in similar communities throughout the country, this is true not despite but without any noticeable regard for cases; hospitalization statistics, which are always high this time of year without attracting much notice; or death reports. I don’t mean to deny COVID’s continuing presence. (For the purposes of this piece, I looked up the COVID data for my county and found that the seven-day average for positive tests is as high as it has ever been, and that 136 deaths have been attributed to the virus since June 2020.) What I wish to convey is that the virus simply does not factor into my calculations or those of my neighbors, who have been forgoing masks, tests (unless work imposes them, in which case they are shrugged off as the usual BS from human resources), and other tangible markers of COVID-19’s existence for months—perhaps even longer.

(DBx: Reading Walther’s essay buoys my spirits. I live in the DC metro area. Yesterday I saw at a northern Virginia Whole Foods market such a frightful sight of Covid overreaction that I will not describe because to do so would cast doubt on my honesty. Clearly, the experience of living in a major metropolitan area – especially one swarming with the officious – is very different from the experience of living outside of such areas.)

MP Miriam Cates explains why she’s voting against renewed Covid restrictions in Britain. A slice:

Though it may be futile in the face of Opposition support (I use the term ‘opposition’ loosely), I will vote against the regulations tomorrow for three reasons.

Firstly, the collateral damage to wider society will be high. Many people have written at length about the appalling costs of lockdowns and restrictions and evidence of permanent damage continues to emerge.

Secondly, there will be a further undermining of confidence in the rule of law. Good laws are clear and based on consensus; they should not be difficult to interpret or adhere to or make criminals out of ordinary people. Far from uniting us, these regulations will invite conflict, judgement and segregation.

But perhaps most significantly, the new measures threaten to cement a permanent shift in the balance of power between the Government and the British people that has been brought about by two years of ‘hokey cokey’ restrictions on our freedom. This is a shift that is no doubt being celebrated by those on the Left, but it should chill Conservatives to the core.

Do we want to live in a society where Ministers can — at no notice — impose serious, damaging restrictions on individuals instead of trusting us to behave responsibly? Do we want a society where people are judged and discriminated against by their health status? Or where the state, far from being a stabilising force, becomes an unpredictable and overbearing menace, perpetuating a climate of fear?

I don’t believe that the Government has deliberately set out on a road to authoritarianism, but we must acknowledge that this is the path we now tread.

Telegraph columnist Sherelle Jacobs decries the looming renewed visit to Britain of the straw man. Three slices:

Amid this fresh uncertainty, one thing is clear: we cannot go on living like this. As a majority-vaccinated country, we cannot go on suffering the permanent threat of lockdown restrictions, for fear the health service could be overwhelmed. We cannot go on being plunged into panic by pessimistic modelling that has consistently been proved wrong in the past. We cannot go on pursuing Covid Plan Bs, Cs and Ds without a sensible cost-benefit analysis that weighs the harms and uncertainties of the virus against those of the restrictions. We cannot go on with a superficially populist Tory Government that will entertain the drastic action of lockdowns but not radical NHS reform.

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True, it is a game of chance: the virus is statistically just as likely to mutate against vaccines in a way that makes it more lethal, and it is simply too early to say anything conclusive about the new strain. But the threat posed by omicron is not the only unknown risk in play. The other is the effect of further restrictions. Like the variant, the fallout of another lockdown could be milder than some of us fear, or it could be catastrophic beyond comprehension.

Unlike omicron, though, this risk gets no air time. In particular, there is little sign that No 10 has done a proper cost-benefit analysis, weighing the risks of omicron against the potential damage of new measures.

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Worse are the gratuitous vaccine passports, which are unlikely to stem omicron, given its spread among the double-jabbed. That No 10 would cross the Rubicon with such an authoritarian measure in a cheap attempt to divert political heat in the direction of the unvaccinated is terrifying. So too its contempt for the entertainment venues that could see their profits slashed.

“Norway bans serving of alcohol in bid to halt Omicron outbreak.” (HT Phil Magness)

Bill Rice writes wisely about Covid and the overreaction to it. Here’s his conclusion:

The leaders of our country are going to continue to take away civil liberties in the name of “protecting” the public. But these people and organizations are actually harming the public.

If they had done nothing to “flatten the curve” or “slow” or “stop” the spread of the virus, the virus would have still spread, and people would have still died from COVID. (Really, “the road less travelled” by the nation of Sweden was the safest road to travel).

If America’s leaders had not overreacted, many people gone today would still be here today… and more people would be alive a year from now. The future of every inhabitant in the world would not be as bleak as it is today.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

Nature article:
By 2022, an additional
✴️9.3 million wasted kids
✴️2.6 million stunted kids
✴️168k child deaths
✴️2.1 million maternal anemia cases
✴️$29.7 billion in future productivity losses

Lockdown ➡️ worst public health catastrophe in history