The Latest from Cafe Hayek

(Don Boudreaux)

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My Liberty Matters essay on my late, great colleague Walter Williams is now up, and can be found by scrolling down at this link. Two slices:

Walter Williams (1936-2020) catapulted into my consciousness in the late 1970s. One afternoon while flipping through the channels – numbering all of five – on my parents’ television set I happened upon television talk-show host Phil Donohue chatting with a guest who made unusually good sense.

By then I’d already fallen in love with economics; it was my collegiate major, and I was, I think, then in my junior year. The guest’s uncompromising and eloquent defense of free markets pleasantly surprised me. I was even more surprised that he was black. I knew that free-market policies were promoted by white guys such as Milton Friedman and William Simon. But Walter Williams – Donohue’s guest – was the first black person I’d seen doing so.

Donahue peppered Walter with questions – ‘Should we abolish the minimum wage?’ Yes. ‘Don’t you agree that labor unions were key to creating America’s middle class?’ No. ‘Hasn’t the welfare state helped Blacks?’ No. ‘Isn’t affirmative action needed to give minorities a fair chance?’ No. On and on this questioning went until Donohue asked Walter about some arms-control treaty between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Walter paused for a moment, then laughed and said “Unlike you, Mr. Donohue, I don’t pretend to know everything about everything.”

Donohue cut for a commercial break. (Not long before he died, I asked Walter if my recollection of his appearance on Donohue was accurate. He assured me that it was.)

I scribbled the name ‘Walter Williams’ into a notebook. I wanted to know more about this man’s work but in that pre-Internet age found little to read. Nevertheless, I was reassured to know that there was in the world this articulate, charismatic, informed, and principled champion of economic freedom.

The next time I encountered Walter was again on television during his appearance on Friedman’s 1980 Free To Choose program. I enthusiastically soaked it all in. I was a fan-boy.

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A third characteristic was Walter’s unusual facility with basic economic reasoning. An economist’s skill is perhaps best measured by how much complex economic reality he or she can explain using only economic principles. Any mediocre economist can explain a good deal of economic reality by using the whole armament, including the jargon, that comes with PhD-level training. But only the finest economists can explain that same reality – and often explain it more fully and clearly – using only basic economic propositions. Milton Friedman was notable for possessing this rare skill, as is Thomas Sowell. Walter was in their league.

Possession of this skill is key to the ability to communicate profound economic understanding to general audiences. An example is Walter’s explanation of why minimum-wage legislation has a worse impact on Blacks than it has on whites:

What minimum wage laws do is lower the cost of, and hence subsidize, racial preference indulgence. After all, if an employer must pay the same wage no matter whom he hires, the cost of discriminating in favor of the people he prefers is cheaper. This is a general principle. If filet mignon sold for $9 a pound and chuck steak $4, the cost of discriminating in favor of filet mignon is $5 a pound, the price difference. But if a law mandating a minimum price for chuck steak were on the books, say, $7 a pound, it would lower the cost of discrimination against chuck steak.

Within this example is evidence of the fourth of Walter’s notable characteristics – namely, his skillful use of what I call “gentle, humorous shock.” Walter understood that an effective way to grab an audience’s attention is with a bit of shock mixed with humor. Not shock that’s gross or grotesque. Not shock or humor for the sake of themselves. But shock and humor that are just enough to seize a reader’s or listener’s attention and to intellectually stir that person into letting go of prior misconceptions. Comparing low-skilled workers to inferior cuts of meat shocks people, and even offends many. But the comparison works well to convey the economic lesson.

(Don Boudreaux)

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Thomas Fazi and Toby Green, writing at UnHerd, argue that the Great Barrington Declaration has been vindicated. Three slices:

Has the Left finally woken up to the devastating costs of implementing lockdowns? In its first edition of 2022, the Observer carried a surprisingly balanced interview with Professor Mark Woolhouse, a member of Sage whose new book — The Year the World Went Mad — argues that long lockdowns promoted more harm than good and failed to protect the vulnerable. Its favourable reception appears to herald a new direction in the critique of Covid measures and policies on the Left; for the first time, the question of what really represented the collective good in the Covid debate has been put on the table by a mainstream left-liberal publication.

This is certainly a new departure. As we have previously noted on UnHerd, the Left has strongly supported restrictive measures in the fight against the pandemic.

It argued that these restrictions, which clearly infringe on individual freedoms and rights, were nonetheless justified in the name of “the collective good” and “the collective right to life”. This allowed them to pre-empt any criticism of the new Covid consensus: if you’re against any of these measures, you’re against the collective interest. And so thinkers like us, who have always criticised neoliberal individualism and argued in favour of progressive state intervention, suddenly found ourselves accused of being libertarians or outright “Right-wingers”, just for taking a critical stance of governments’ response to the pandemic.

Indeed, it would appear that for many on the Left today, anything can be justified in the name of the “collective good”. It’s easy to see why Right-wing critics view this uncritical invoking of collective benefits as proof of the Left’s inclination towards authoritarian or “Stalinist” control. While such caricatural definitions are easy to laugh off, as leftists we can’t deny that there is something disturbing about the lack of critical commentary from the Left on how to reconcile the need for collective action with the importance of individual rights and freedoms in the response to Covid.
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The grotesquery of the global responses becomes even more apparent when we take into account the fact that while governments went out of their way to keep healthy people locked in, chasing runners down solitary beaches or checking shopping trolleys to make sure people were only buying essentials, they all but abandoned those most vulnerable: nursing home residents. According to a recent Collateral Global study, Covid deaths in nursing homes amount on average to a staggering 40% of all Covid deaths in Western countries, despite representing less than 1% of the population. In some countries (Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US), more than 5% of all care home residents were killed.

In view of this, it seems obvious that the focused protection approach championed by the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) — based on “allow[ing] those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk” — was the right course of action. It would have avoided inflicting needless pain on workers, women and children through repeated lockdowns, while arguably saving countless lives, by focusing first and foremost on the elderly and especially on nursing homes.
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It is time for the Left to look reality in the face and take stock of the fact that the prevailing Covid response of most Western governments has been an abysmal failure on all fronts —not least that of “saving lives”. An alternative approach is desperately needed. Fortunately, and tragically, it’s been hiding in plain sight all this time.

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Jay Bhattacharya and Tom Nicholson unmask a deceptive Covid study out of Duke University. A slice:

But the researchers peppered their report with rhetorical sleights of hand aimed at misleading readers into other, less well-founded conclusions that were mostly inevitable products of their own study design. One of their primary conclusions is that “in schools with universal masking, test-to-stay is an effective strategy.” That invites readers to assume that test-to-stay doesn’t work without forced masking. But since they studied no unmasked schools, this conclusion is baseless. An honest report would either have said so or not mentioned masking at all.

Duke’s Press office amplified the unfounded conclusion in its Jan. 4 summary of the study: “Children and staff who repeatedly test negative for COVID-19 after contact with someone who has the illness can safely remain in school if universal masking programs are in place.” The media took this press release and added a further layer of falsehood. Raleigh’s WRAL characterized the study as a defense of forced masking while pitching the study as documenting the danger of youth sports: “Athletics were the source of 50% of all COVID-19 school transmission found in the study.”

True, the ABC researchers found a higher rate of transmission during sports. But that was entirely a product of how the researchers defined Covid “exposure.” Students were counted as exposed only if they were unmasked during the interaction with an infected person. In mask-mandatory schools, that happened only during lunch and sports. If a transmission occurred in a masked classroom, the definition didn’t count it as a close contact. And the study found only three sports-related positives out of 352 tests. When combined with the three lunch-related positives, the six total positives resulted in a mere 1.7% of maskless exposures ending up with a Covid-19-positive contact.

An honest summary of the study might have said: “There is a low transmission rate of the virus among students, even when unmasked at lunch or during sports.” But a summary like that wouldn’t have reinforced the politically acceptable message of public-health authorities today, and so unfounded points had to be fashioned to fit the narrative.

Also in today’s Wall Street Journal is a collection of very short pieces by five college students, each decrying the continuing – alas, intensifying – Covid hysteria on college campuses. A slice:

The evidence about the Omicron variant should be a rebuke to busybody bureaucrats determined to lock down the nation. It is easy to spur hysteria by counting cases, and Omicron seems highly infectious. More important, however, is case severity. The metrics that epidemiologists should really care about, such as fatality rates, are similar for Omicron as they are for seasonal flu. Coercive and damaging tactics like lockdowns and employer vaccine mandates are draconian overreach and a massive overreaction. Lockdowns were disastrous, and we don’t need to repeat that mistake.

Nearly two years into the pandemic, vulnerable or concerned people already know how to protect themselves. Although President Biden prophesied a “winter of severe illness and death” for those unvaccinated, he has since wavered, stating there is “no federal solution” and that Covid ought to be solved at the state level. A transition to personal responsibility and local control is long overdue. The latest evidence about Omicron should hasten that realization, and hopefully we will soon learn to live with endemic Covid.

—Sarah Montalbano, Montana State University, computer science

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins – in response to Friday’s oral arguments over Biden’s abominable vaccine mandates – describes U.S. Supreme Court associate justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor as “dizzy as the rest of us from the political spin.” A slice:

But the discussion was bad enough, confused by 24 months of incoherent government messaging about Covid. Justice Breyer declared it “unbelievable that it could be in the public interest to suddenly stop these vaccinations,” as if he imagined the Biden mandate had already taken effect and was playing an important role in the vaccinating of America. Not true. A large majority of the U.S. population has already been vaccinated; the mandate targets only 25% of the population, the private workforce, most of whom have already received the shot voluntarily or at their employer’s behest. At least half have also likely been infected and acquired natural immunity. And given an average age of 42, this sub-population hardly represents a bullseye on the lingering unvaccinated older cohort most likely to end up in the hospital.

In other words, the Biden workplace mandate, even if approved, is destined to have a negligible, almost invisible, impact on either vaccination rates or the unfolding of the pandemic.

On the latter point, the well-advertised blunder of Justice Kagan, her statement that vaccination was the “best way to prevent spread,” suggested she hadn’t heard of Delta or Omicron, both of which the vaccinated can transmit. This alone guts the incoherent argument for requiring workers in private workplaces to be vaccinated so private workplaces can be safe for unvaccinated workers.

The worst moment was Justice Sotomayor’s claim that Omicron was filling up the hospitals with kids, “many on ventilators.” The Washington Post awarded her four Pinocchios, adding censoriously, “It’s important for Supreme Court justices to make rulings based on correct data.”

The last bit was perhaps unfair. Ms. Sotomayor wasn’t offering legal reasoning but a “think of the children” soundbite to comfort liberals even as the administration’s workplace mandate likely doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance when the Court eventually rules.

SUNY-Cortland history professor Jared McBrady warns of the totalitarianism lurking in the ‘othering’ of the unvaccinated. A slice:

Now, some politicians are othering the “unvaccinated.” These politicians attempt to scapegoat and marginalize this minority group, despite knowing that vaccinated and unvaccinated persons alike can contract and spread COVID-19. Below, I provide the words of three politicians as examples of othering language. I also encourage you to read their words in context.

In the United States, President Joe Biden’s September 9 press conference announced sweeping vaccine mandates. He expressed that “many of us are frustrated” with unvaccinated persons. He laid blame on them for the continued pandemic; Biden claimed that this “pandemic of the unvaccinated” was “caused by … nearly 80 million Americans who have failed to get the shot.” He faulted “a distinct minority of Americans” for “keeping us from turning the corner.” And he promised “We cannot allow these actions to stand in the way of protecting the large majority of Americans who have done their part and want to get back to life as normal.”

In a September 17 interview on the Quebec talk show La semaine des 4 Julie, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau labeled those opposed to vaccination “misogynists” and “racists.” Then, he exclaimed that Canada needed to make a choice: “Do we tolerate these people?”

In France, President Emmanuel Macron gave an interview with Le Parisien on January 4. In this interview, he categorized the unvaccinated as non-citizens, referred to their “lies and stupidity” as the “worst enemies” of democracy, and proclaimed “I really want to piss [the unvaccinated] off.” Macron argued these unvaccinated persons to be only “a very small minority who are resisting,” and asked a chilling question: “How do we reduce that minority?”

Here’s more insight from Vinay Prasad. A slice:

Omicron has three characteristics different than prior variants. First, it spreads very fast. Second, it is less lethal, and, third, vaccines do less to stop symptomatic infection. These three features mean that in this wave, or in a series of subsequent waves, the virus will eventually reach all people.  You cannot avoid it forever. There are five key policy lessons from all this.

First, mask mandates make no sense. Almost all community wide mask mandates this entire pandemic asked people to wear any mask, and most people chose a cloth one. Cloth masks never worked to slow the spread of the virus.  We analyzed all relevant studies months ago, and found no benefit, and a cluster randomized trial in Bangladesh found that cloth masks failed. Recently, CNN admitted as much.

Now, some argue that we need to wear higher grade masks, such as n95s or equivalent. Anyone who wishes should be free to do so, but they should not be mandated.  We have no evidence such population wide mandates will help, and the truth is, even if worn perfectly, the mask might only delay the time until you are eventually infected, and not avert it. Worse, along the way you will suffer the discomfort and inconvenience of the mask.

Second, schools should not close.  Closing schools was always a fool’s errand. High quality studies show school closure does not even slow spread in communities. Kids, working moms and society suffer significantly when schools close.  Kids have bigger worries in life than COVID19. Outcomes for healthy kids are excellent and on par with seasonal flu. School closure in the USA was disproportionately an indulgence of liberal cities with strong teacher’s unions.

Third, we cannot keep the brakes on society. People are voting with their feet, and outside of urban liberal enclaves, people are enjoying restaurants, bars, and vacations. In many regions, you would not know a pandemic is going on. This reflects a fundamental exhaustion of the public.  Given that so much of the public is done with restrictions, placing extremely harsh ones on college campuses, for instance, makes no sense. Colleges are full of the healthiest members of society. Asking these kids to be imprisioned in their rooms or dorms or on campus neither helps them or broader society.

Fourth, we have to focus on the most vulnerable people in society, as we always should have. The CDC director has now admitted this, in a remarkable turn. Nursing homes should get booster shots right now. We should think about improving staffing and infection control at these settings.

Fifth, hospitals should improve their capacities. Some health care workers were fired or forced out because of not receiving the vaccine. Some of these people had already had COVID19. These people should be permitted to return to work, with appropriate precautions, because at this juncture we need them far more than any risk they pose.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Vivek Ramaswamy and Apoorva Ramaswamy warn of the danger posed by slowing omicron’s spread. A slice:

Meanwhile, mask mandates and social-distancing measures will have created fertile ground for new variants that evade vaccination even more effectively. Significant antigenic shifts may create new strains that are increasingly difficult to target with vaccines at all. There are no vaccines for many viruses, despite decades of effort to develop them.

Will relaxing restrictions come at the cost of more hospitalizations and deaths as the next variant starts to spread? Perhaps, but it would reduce the risk of a worst-case scenario and greater loss of life in the long run.

Allison Pearson is correct: “It’s not ‘anti-vaxx’ to say people like Novak Djokovic don’t need to be jabbed.” A slice:

Why would Djokovic, one of the fittest people on the planet and still in his mid-30s, want to get vaccinated against a virus which, as multiple studies have shows, can do him little harm? At his age and with no pre-existing health problems, Djokovic is reportedly at greater risk of drowning than of ending up in ICU with Covid. Also, as athletes’ hearts are different to our sedentary human hearts and myocarditis is a known, if extremely rare, side-effect of the jab in slim younger men, the jab might even pose a tiny risk to him.

As it happens, Djokovic says he has had Covid twice, most recently on December 16, which means that, when he flew to Australia to defend his Open title, he was still teeming with antibodies. (Remember, the UK guidance says you should not receive the vaccine for 28 days after your Covid symptoms started.) I completely sympathise with Australians who objected to the idea that this arrogant tennis overlord had played a fast one, bypassing strict rules which prevented their fellow countrymen from returning home for 18 months, even to see dying loved ones. That applies doubly to the stoical people of Melbourne who endured 262 days of lockdown – the longest of any city in the world.

The fact remains, however, that although the state of Victoria now has a 90 per cent vaccination rate, it is currently recording over 30,000 Covid cases a day. Vaccines are a fantastic protection against severe illness and death – thank God and Dame Sarah Gilbert for that – but they are pretty powerless against omicron, which shimmies past their defensive net like a Djokovic dropshot. The latest research suggests that an unvaccinated Novak, who has terrific natural immunity from two bouts of the virus, poses no greater threat of infecting your average Melburnian than a non-sports superstar with two jabs and a booster.

Look, I never liked Novak Djokovic very much. What a cold, calculating machine he always seemed, compared to the easy grace and smiley magnanimity of Roger Federer. The events of the past few days have changed my view.

The treatment Djokovic received at the hands of Melbourne airport border guards, after he had been granted a visa, was extremely unjust. It seems clear that the Australian government, led by Scott Morrison, acting more like a Witchfinder General than a prime minister, wanted to make an example of this “anti-vaxxer” and the unlovable Serb was an easy target. (Some less famous players entered the former “No worries, mate” capital of the world without fuss under exactly the same exemptions.)

Covidocratic authoritarianism, dystopianism, and irrationality intensify in Scotland. (DBx: I wonder what bagpipes sound like when used to play “Scotland the Cowardly.”)

And the straw man continues his tyranny of the Chinese.

Sinéad Murphy defends children against the Covidocracy – and against ‘journalists’ who carry the Covidocracy’s water. A slice:

This spiral into abstraction by the Left is, quite literally, demoralising. Nothing matters when nothing is what it really is. We’re not serious, for all our deep tones and hushed voices and pained expressions. We’re just playing around. Just moving the counters about the board and admiring the configurations that result.

Here’s an interview with Monica Smit, an heroic warrior against Australia’s tyrannical Covidocracy, which – in response Ms. Smit’s refusal to take a PCR test – confined her for 22 days to solitary confinement. (HT Dan Klein)

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) deserves loud applause for challenging the arrogant, authoritarian, and medieval Anthony Fauci.

Inspired by this report, UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers tweets:

Remember all those reasons why South Africa’s mild Omicron experience wasn’t relevant to the UK?

Turns out the real-world data from Gauteng was a better predictor of the London wave than the models produced by SAGE

“Time to live with Covid and treat virus like the common cold, says Wellcome” – so reports the Telegraph.

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 154 of F.A. Hayek’s profound 1952 book The Counter-Revolution of Science, as this book appears as part of volume 13 (Studies on the Abuse & Decline of Reason, Bruce Caldwell, ed. [2010]) of the Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:

It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least important task for human reason to comprehend its own limitations.

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 138 of Thomas Sowell’s 2013 book, Intellectuals and Race:

Many people who advocate what they think of as equality promote what is in fact make-believe “equality.” In economic terms, taking what others have produced and giving it to those who have not produced as much (or at all, in some cases) is make-believe equality – as contrasted with real equality, which would be enabling the less productive to become more productive, so that they could create for themselves what they are trying to take from others.

DBx: Yes.

Government policies that hinder the achievement of real equality include minimum-wage legislation (which reduce employment opportunities for the least-skilled in society) and occupational-licensing restrictions (which both reduce employment and entrepreneurship options for the politically unconnected, and artificially raise the prices that consumers must pay for certain goods and services). Another enemy of real equality is government-supplied education, especially at the K-12 levels, where the monopoly privileges of the “schools” and “teachers” (so called) are especially numerous.

(Don Boudreaux)

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This month’s Liberty Matters episode is devoted to the work and legacy of my late, great colleague and dear friend Walter Williams. The first essay is by Professor Harold Black. Other essays, including one by me, will appear within the next few days.

Here’s a slice from Professor Black’s essay (footnotes deleted):

Williams was a fierce advocate of limited government and opponent of forced income redistribution. He famously stated, “Let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well you tell me what I earn belongs to you – and why?” He also stated “No matter how worthy the cause, it is robbery, theft and injustice to confiscate the property of one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong.” As such, Williams added to the debate of reparations and paying one’s “fair share” and did it in a manner that was intentionally provocative. Williams’ prescription for lessening poverty was simple: “complete high school; get a job, any kind of job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.” A controversial statement in today’s “woke” climate but again one that cannot be proven wrong.

Although Williams was labeled as a “conservative”, he was even handed when it came to criticizing both liberals and conservatives in government. Both liberals and conservatives advocate the confiscation of one person’s property to give it to another. The difference was in who was to get the spoils. In essence,ntaxation was theft, and since the government is essentially nonproductive, it has to seize the property of others to function and to reward its friends and not its enemies (which change with each election). To quote Williams, “The compelling issue for both conservatives and liberals is not whether it is legitimate for government to confiscate one’s property to give it to another, the debate is over the disposition of the pillage.”

(DBx: By “liberals,” Walter of course meant “Progressives.”)

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to The Atlantic:

Editor:

Angie Schmitt deserves applause for realizing that her political tribe – Progressives – have throughout the pandemic been both unreasonable and untrue to their stated principles (“Why I Soured on the Democrats,” Jan. 7). Progressives’ exaggeration of the dangers of Covid – especially their refusal to recognize that Covid poses little risk to young people and to the healthy – and their dogmatic devotion to school closures and the masking of children have resulted in policies that are irrational and, hence, excessively costly, especially to those persons not fortunate enough to belong to the Zoomgeoisie.

Ms. Schmitt reached her realization because she’s a mother obliged by lockdowns to stay home with her school-age children. She thus personally witnessed and suffered government-interventions’ downsides that are typically invisible to those who endorse and implement such interventions.

This experience should prompt Ms. Schmitt to question more extensively the Progressive creed. Many long-popular Progressive policies, appearing lovely to those who are unaffected by them, inflict very real damage to flesh-and-blood persons who remain unseen, save as abstractions, to Progressives. An example is minimum-wage legislation. Well-educated professionals such as Ms. Schmitt are never thrown out of work by such legislation. Nor does such legislation ever deny entry-level jobs to these professionals’ children. But poorly educated, especially inner-city, minorities are adversely affected by minimumwages, which does indeed prevent many of them from being gainfully employed in the above-ground economy.

I doubt that Ms. Schmitt would continue to support the larger Progressive agenda if more of the people who suffer the ill-consequences of minimum wages and other such interventions could describe their experiences by writing essays for the Atlantic. And I’m certain that Ms. Schmitt would reject all of Progressivism, rather than just its Covid policies, if she were personally to experience the full range of the damage that it inflicts on the poor and the powerless – damage to which Progressives are blind.

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

(Don Boudreaux)

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“Children forced to Zoom into school ended up with suboptimal immune systems—the opposite of herd immunity” – so reports Pamela Hobart. A slice:

By May and June 2021, pediatricians noticed an unprecedented, counterseasonal surge in communicable illnesses, particularly RSV. Hand, foot, and mouth disease came right along with it, tearing through schools and day care centers all summer with unmistakable boils. Strep throat got in on the action too. Instead of dodging diseases, this catch-up wave suggested, children had largely just deferred them.

Some alleged COVID-19 mitigation measures, such as more frequent sanitizing of preschool surfaces, would have actually done more to prevent RSV (which does commonly transmit itself via contact with contaminated surfaces) than to prevent COVID-19 (which does not). Yet kids were slammed by RSV anyway. Isolation turned them into dry immunological kindling.

Writing at National Review, Jim Geraghty rightly criticizes CDC Director Rochelle Walensky for failing publicly, when given the opportunity, to correct U.S. Supreme Court associate justice Sonia Sotomayor’s appallingly egregious misapprehension of the realities of Covid. A slice:

When public-health officials denounce misinformation about the pandemic, what they usually mean is misinformation that comes from the powerless people — Aunt Edna sharing absurd theories on Facebook that if everybody in the ICU took some Vitamin C or colloidal silver then they would be up and feeling great in no time. President Joe Biden can say, “How about making sure that you’re vaccinated, so you do not spread the disease to anyone else,” and no public-health official blinks. Rachel Maddow declares, “The virus stops with every vaccinated person. . . . It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to get more people,” and no public-health official objects. If you’re prominent and important enough, and you’re on the correct side of the ideological divide, your false statements about Covid-19 don’t count, apparently.

Speaking of Dr. Walensky, Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman wonders why she is only now coming around to endorse a more Focused Protection approach to Covid. A slice:

Her CDC website notes that close to 95% of death certificates listing Covid as a cause also mention other causes along with Covid and states:

For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death.
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On Sunday Dr. Walensky tweeted:

We must protect people with comorbidities from severe #COVID19. I went into medicine – HIV specifically – and public health to protect our most at-risk. CDC is taking steps to protect those at highest risk, incl. those w/ chronic health conditions, disabilities & older adults.

Fair enough, but this recognition that some face great risk from Covid while others face much lower risk has been obvious from the start. In response, a group of accomplished and wise scientists crafted the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020 to promote a ”focused protection” strategy—taking great care to shield those at high risk while allowing the vast majority who are at low risk to continue working, learning and doing all the things that sustain life. This sensible prioritization sounds very much like what Dr. Walensky is suggesting in her Sunday tweet.

And speaking earlier of Justice Sotomayor, Jacob Sullum adds his voice to those who are, shall we say, rather surprised by the Justice’s (mis)understanding of the applicable constitutional rules. Two slices:

On Friday, when the Supreme Court considered whether it should block enforcement of the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for private employers, most of the discussion focused on whether the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has the statutory authority to issue that rule. But the justices and lawyers also touched on a constitutional argument against the mandate, one that hinges on the distinction between state and federal powers.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor claimed not to understand this distinction.

OSHA’s “emergency temporary standard” (ETS), which it published on November 5, demands that companies with 100 or more employees require them to be vaccinated or wear face masks and submit to weekly virus testing. While arguing that OSHA does not have the power to issue such an order, Ohio Solicitor General Benjamin Flowers said “there may be many states, subject to their own state laws, that could impose this [policy] themselves.” Sotomayor said she found that concession puzzling.

“If it’s within the police power to protect the health and welfare of workers,” she said, “you seem to be saying the states can do it, but you’re saying the federal government can’t, even though it’s facing the same crisis in interstate commerce that states are facing within their own borders. I’m not sure I understand the distinction—why the states would have the power but the federal government wouldn’t.”

Flowers noted that “the federal government has no police power”—the general authority to enact legislation aimed at protecting public health, safety, morals, and welfare. While states retain that broad authority under the Constitution, the federal government is limited to specifically enumerated powers. This principle is reflected in the 10th Amendment, which says “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
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Sotomayor’s reference to a federal “police power” was not quite as striking as her false claims about the omicron variant’s impact on children. But her exchange with Flowers raised some eyebrows.

“Sotomayor professed not to be able to understand the distinction between federal authority and state police powers,” National Review‘s Isaac Schorr wrote. “Sotomayor claims not to understand [the] distinction between state and federal power,” Ilya Shapiro, director of the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, tweeted. “Mind-boggling. Calls OSHA’s regulatory authority…a ‘police power.’ OH SG tries to explain con law 101, eventually Roberts rescues the embarrassing discourse.”

Also dismayed by some associate-justices’ deep ignorance of Covid realities is Jonathan Tobin. Here’s his conclusion:

Misinformation has come from those who dwell in the fever swamps of the far right and the far left. But some of the worst of the fallacies about the pandemic have come from public-health officials and their dutiful enablers in the mainstream media.

Bent on scaring people into compliance with arbitrary rules that have changed continuously as they’ve reacted to a crisis for which they were unprepared, the experts have often encouraged the kind of exaggerations and mistakes that the three Supreme Court liberals repeated.

The high-court hearing wasn’t just fodder for a fact check that earned liberal judges scorn. It should be a wake-up call for the rest of us to understand that the real problem here isn’t a disease. It’s the way those who ought to know better have gone along with fearmongering intended to quash opposition to the most heavy-handed COVID regulations regardless of the truth.

Writing in Newsweek, Cato’s Ilya Shapiro predicts that the U.S. Supreme Court will strike down Biden’s abominable vaccine mandate issued through OSHA. Two slices:

Based on Friday’s Supreme Court oral argument, it seems that sanity will prevail and the justices will block the federal private-sector vaccine mandate, an “emergency” standard the Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced in November. Just as the Court blocked the Centers for Disease Control’s eviction moratorium last summer, six justices are now clearly troubled by a claim of sweeping regulatory authority based on flimsy statutory text.
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To put a finer point on it, federal lawmaking powers are constitutionally enumerated—and thus limited to those listed in Article I, Section 8—while states enjoy a broader “police power” to regulate on behalf of public health, safety, welfare and morals. To hold that a state vaccine mandate can be constitutional, as the Supreme Court did in the 1905 case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts, doesn’t begin to answer the question of whether a federal agency has statutory authority to impose one. And to hold that federal regulation of workplace conditions is constitutional doesn’t begin to answer the question of whether and how OSHA can address viral threats that aren’t specific to the workplace.

A former Canadian Mountie writes sensibly about Covid and Covid hysteria. (HT a former Canadian, David Henderson) A slice:

So back to my Covid journey. I was skeptical of the pandemic from the start but decided to wait and see what evidence would surface of this dangerous pandemic. So I sat back and quietly observed. At that time, and still at the time I’m writing this, I was the admin NCO on the watch. I was in the unique position of seeing every file that came through PRIME in the 46 hour window I was at work each week. Naturally, this included all sudden death files. Pay attention now, have another sip of your latte if you have to. Since the pandemic began, until now, I was in a position to see every single sudden death file that came through our detachment area. What did I notice in this position? Nothing. No upwards trend whatsoever. Funny enough, I didn’t see people dropping dead in my neighbourhood either.

This was a very stark contrast to what I saw in media. A non-stop chorus on TV, radio, and internet, of case counts, hospitalizations and deaths. At no time in my life had I seen anything like it. A complete disconnect between my observed reality and that which was portrayed by my government and the government subsidized mainstream media. And they were reporting deaths in care homes. Care homes? When did the media ever report deaths in care homes unless it was some sort of instance of gross negligence? It’s called end of life care for a reason. People go to care homes at the end of their life. Death is the natural consequence, and this fact used to be understood as common sense.

When the statistics started showing that the vast majority of anyone dying from Covid, either had one or more co-morbidities, or was older than the average life expectancy, my skepticism of the pandemic narrative only grew. Then in the summer of 2020, I got Covid. For a few days I was really tired and shivered a lot. Then it was over. I survived the “deadly” disease like the vast majority of anyone else who caught it. To be honest, I’ve had worse Flus, and worse hangovers.

David Henderson looks back, over the past two years, on executive-branch government officials’ lust for power – a lust mixed with dangerous degrees of hubris.

Oxford University’s Sunetra Gupta explains that “[m]asking children is illogical and irrational.” Two slices:

The argument for masking children, or obliging them to be vaccinated against a pathogen that is less likely to kill them than many others in normal circulation, should have stopped at the level of logic rather than continuing into a debate over its ethical and political implications. Neither masks nor vaccines can reliably prevent children from passing Sars-CoV-2 onto others, and I worry for the unvaccinated grandparent in a multi-generational household who believes themselves to be protected because their grandchild is attending school with an unpleasant (and environmentally unfriendly) piece of material on their face. I remain convinced that many people (including my cousins in India) have lost their lives labouring under this misapprehension.

There is now ample observational data to suggest that mask mandates do not work, and the few formal trials that have been conducted show no credible effect. The failure of the modelling exercises conducted by Sage and their satellites in predicting cases and deaths allows us to reject the role of such non-pharmaceutical interventions in driving the dynamics of spread.
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Ultimately, the argument for imposing restrictions upon children should die within the logical core we all share as international participants in the culture of enlightenment (lest anyone see it as a European construct): there is no rational case for them. Banning singing lessons on the basis of the simplistic notion that singing causes the virus to spread further is as much a failure of critical thinking as it is of the moral and socio-political imagination.

Telegraph columnist Sherelle Jacobs argues persuasively that “Omicron has humiliated Britain’s dismal lockdown establishment.” A slice:

Moreover, far from winding down, Project Fear is becoming institutionalised, as Public Health England’s replacement, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), is fashioned into a propaganda arm, pumping out worst-case scenario modelling to complement Sage. The basic elements that need to be in place to live with Covid – like an advanced bulk vaccine manufacturing industry, and a robust variant preparedness plan – are being held back by civil service red tape. Again, the question is: why? The answer: a combination of state incompetence and middle-class vested interests.

Well, she was just following the science! And given that the official high priests of science, the keepers and protectors of its Truths, proclaim the enormous benefits and lack-of-risks of vaccines to any and all persons over five years old – and proclaim also the untold damage that each and every unvaccinated person inflicts on society as a whole – how can this teacher not have taken it upon herself to vaccinate the young man? Not to have done so would have rendered her an enemy of humanity. (HT Charles Oliver)

I don’t recall hearing of Peter Yim until yesterday, so I don’t know what he’s about. But I agree with much in this essay of his, and I agree strongly with its overall theme – which is that the marriage between science and the state, while likely to be very good for the state, poses a serious threat to both science and society. A slice:

Some acknowledge all of the above mendacity of the federal medical authorities and more but do not denounce those same authorities. The lies are defended as noble lies, lies for some greater good. Nonsense. These deceptions are fundamental violations of medical ethics and of the principles of democracy. In democracy, there is no presumption that the state has the best interests of the people at heart. Rather, democracy only functions properly when the people are fully informed. Or, in the words of JFK: “[a] nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

Wisdom from Australian Dr. James Kildare:

There is a final element of informed consent often overlooked, and that is the specific relationship between a treating clinician and a patient. It is a personal relationship based on mutual respect where the deference to the clinician’s knowledge is tempered with respect for the patient’s preference, understanding and priorities.

A reasonable risk for a doctor may be unacceptable for a patient. With diseases such as Covid, where risk profiles differ enormously between population demographics the decision to take any treatment must be made on an individual basis. By removing an individual’s ability to make healthcare decisions for themselves, we are removing that fundamental element of healthcare practice. Sadly, this seems reflective of our society’s present lack of belief in the value of the individual.

Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor Marty Makary explains that the federal government’s booster push shows that “public-health decisions aren’t data-driven.” A slice:

Yet Moderna’s CEO has already suggested annual boosters, with no supporting clinical data. While his shareholders love that news, many experts do not. Dr. Vinay Prasad of the University of California this week nicely summarized the problem with using efficacy as the ultimate metric to evaluate a vaccine. In a recent Kaiser Southern California study, the efficacy of two doses of the mRNA vaccines went to essentially zero at 6 months, despite a lot of data showing that these same vaccines provide strong protection against hospitalization in younger people.

Yet as many of us predicted, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially changed the lexicon from “Did you get a booster?” to “Are you up to date?” COVID vaccines are not software.

Booster recommendations are nuanced and need to be tailored to each person’s age and health situation. They should be medically precise. That’s the art of medicine.

To date, the clinical benefit of boosters has not been reported in younger people or people with natural immunity from prior infection. In fact, young healthy people have a strong immune system and develop strong immunity from the primary vaccine series. A large Israeli population study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the risk of COVID death in a fully vaccinated, non-boosted person under age 30 was zero. A booster cannot lower that risk further. A recent German population study found that no healthy child 5 to 17 years old died of COVID over a 15-month period when the vast majority were unvaccinated.

Many of us have been alarmed by the CDC and Food and Drug Administration pushing boosters for young people, despite zero clinical data to support this recommendation and concerns of unintended harm from myocarditis, which can affect as many as one in 1,860 young men, ages 18 to 24.

Here’s another interview with Jay Bhattacharya:

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 181 of Armen Alchian’s and William Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry Jordan, ed.); this volume is an updated version of Alchian’s and Allen’s magnificent earlier textbook, University Economics:

The line between “innovative leadership” and “disgusting nonconformity” is not bright and clear, but it does exist.