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Some Covid Links

Posted: 06 Jan 2022 03:41 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Its difficult to follow THE science if THE science is so self-contradictory
and confusing.

Pro-lockdown Covidocrats escape to Florida to evade their own absurd
restrictions. (HT Tim Townsend) Two slices:

Speaking at a press conference, [Florida governor Ron] DeSantis quipped
that he would be a pretty doggone wealthy man if he had a dollar for every
lockdown politician who decided to escape to Florida over the last two
years.

..

Unfortunately, DeSantis did not expose the lockdown politicians he said
have been traveling to Florida.

However, one such incident made national headlines in May.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), who enacted intense COVID
restrictions, traveled to Florida in April despite blaming travel to the
Sunshine State for a wave of COVID infections in Michigan. Whitmer claimed
she traveled there to visit her sick father.

First-year GMU Scalia School of Law student Robert Fellner explains why he
organized a petition against GMUs possibly harmful and certainly
irrational requirement that all faculty, staff, and students receive a
Covid booster.

Matt Shapiro writes insightfully about Covid data and motivated-thinking
presentations and misinterpretations of these data. (HT Jan Jekielek) Three
slices:

If I can make one claim proudly, it is that I quickly recognized that COVID
was a disease that was moving and spreading both regionally and seasonally.
The entire reason that I do my monthly data posts in several rough regions
of the United States was to demonstrate this fact. It is, in my opinion,
impossible to understand COVID by looking at voting patterns or mitigation
regimes or by setting two regionally disperse states against each other,
especially if we’re looking at metrics within a narrow time window. We have
to look at this as a sickness that hits region-by-region and is in line
with seasonality changes that drive people indoors.

..

Things that are “impossible to ignore” when [Paul] Krugman decided to use a
single week of data have become incredibly easy for him to ignore when a
different week no longer makes his point. A metric is found that supports a
narrative; in this case, the narrative of “Republicans are the cause of
COVID”. But when that metric doesn’t support the narrative, it is the data
that is abandoned, not the narrative. The narrative lives on and the people
committed to the narrative will find a different context-less metric that
helps them tell the story they were always going to tell regardless of the
data.

..

There was an occasional hint of self-awareness, like when a data journalist
from The Economist asked why Florida was getting hit so hard despite high
vaccine rates.

The answer (which is growing tedious with repetition) is that Florida was
part of a region that was having a severe COVID surge. The really important
question here is “wait, if vaccines rates are as protective at a state
population level as these charts imply, why *is* Florida having such high
COVID rates?”

This was an important question that was largely ignored. So powerful was
the narrative that vaccines would stop all COVID surges in their tracks
that there has sprung up a conspiracy theory that the only possible
explanation for this is that Florida is faking their vaccine reporting
rates. This is nonsense, but it’s evidence of how strongly a narrative
belief guides people’s view of the world.

Daniel Nuccio reports on the efforts of several sensible commercial-air
pilots to fight vaccine mandates and on the Catch-22 irrationalities that
many of these pilots confront.

For those of you who doubt that Covid Derangement Syndrome is real, read
this post by el gato malo decrying such Syndrome and the karentopia that it
encourages. A slice:

there is, simply put, a class of people here who do not want to go back.
this purported crisis has given them meaning and elevated their long
simmering social fears and barely suppressed panic/safety seeking instincts
into what they mistook for virtue.

the fact that others followed them in this mistake allowed it spread and
has given it range and duration previously unimaginable.

all perspective was lost to hobgoblins and we surrendered to the
neurocracy: rule by the most neurotic; and those who have been atop this
newfound karentopia would like to stay there.

Beijing continues its mad, cruel, and lethal pursuit of zero Covid. And
such tyranny is not uniquely Chinese or communistic; its the inevitable
result of this pursuit. A slice:

Basic food supplies and patience are running low in Xi’an after two weeks
of lockdown.

Confined to their homes since December 23, residents in the Chinese city
famous for its Terracotta Army have been reduced to bartering for food with
cigarettes and electronics as they complain on social media over the lack
of essential supplies.

For Chinese president Xi Jinping, who is expected to claim another five
years in an unprecedented bid for a third term later this year, it is a
faltering start to a crucial 2022.

Omicron and China’s inadequate vaccine against the fast-spreading variant
risks pushing the country’s zero-Covid strategy to breaking point, as it
runs out of time to stamp out cases ahead of athletes arriving for the
Winter Olympics next month.

(DBx: Of course, the people who suffer, and will continue to suffer, most
from Beijings totalitarian Covidocracy are the Chinese. But we in the rest
of the world will suffer also as our commercial and cultural contacts with
the Chinese will be severely reduced. National conservatives in America,
along with Progressives in America, will applaud the severing of commercial
contacts with the Chinese as being an alleged source of greater American
prosperity. But they are mistaken just as mistaken as theyd be if they
argued that, say, a severing of the commercial connections between
Americans east of the Rockies with Americans west of the Rockies would
enrich Americans on both sides of the Rockies.)

Novak Djokovic Denied Entry to Australia Ahead of Australian Open.

AJ Stand tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

I live in Africa there is no upside [i]n lockdown only rich people enjoy
their TV in lockdown.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

French Pres. Macron: 5 million fellow unvaccinated citizens are
non-citizens.

Canadian PM Trudeau: the unvaxxed are “misogynistic & racist” extremists

Pres. Biden: the epidemic is a pandemic of the unvaccinated

Does progressive leadership require demonizing the other?

Gavin Mortimer accuses Emmanuel Macron of crossing the line in his war on
the unvaccinated. A slice:

Prime minister Jean Castex called the suspension of the debate
irresponsible but that perhaps was a more apt description of the remarks
made by Macron to a French newspaper that were published last night. In an
interview with Le Parisien, the president explained why he wanted the
vaccine pass bill implemented: Im not trying to make life difficult for the
French, he said. But the anti-vaxxers, I really want to piss them off. And
we will continue to do this – to the end.

This would be achieved by making their lives a misery. I wont send
[unvaccinated people] to prison, said Macron. So we need to tell them, from
15 January, you will no longer be able to go to the restaurant. You will no
longer be able to go for a coffee, you will no longer be able to go to the
theatre. You will no longer be able to go to the cinema.

Jay Bhattacharya talks with Lex Fridman about Covid and Covid
(over)reaction.






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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 06 Jan 2022 01:15 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
 is from page 89 of Scott Atlas’s important 2021 book, A Plague Upon Our
House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID From Destroying
America:

The frenzy about testing everyone, everywhere, at all times, including
low-risk people in low-risk settings, was incorrect, illogical, and harmful.




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Marty Makary Powerfully Protests Covid Derangement Syndrome on Campus

Posted: 05 Jan 2022 06:45 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor Marty Makary, after writing this
excellent piece for the New York Post, protests the derangement over Covid
now fueling utterly calamitous policies on college campuses. (HT Jay
Bhattacharya)






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