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Some Covid Links

Posted: 20 Feb 2022 09:02 AM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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One Taylor Dysart recently opined in the Washington Post about the Canadian
truckers protest. In her poorly written gusher of much goofiness
she favorably shared a notion from one Tyler Stovall: The notion of freedom
was historically and remains intertwined with Whiteness, as historian Tyler
Stovall has argued. The belief that one’s entitlement to freedom is a key
component of White supremacy. In response to this nonsense, el gato malo
asks:

if “a belief in one’s entitlement to freedom is a key component of white
supremacy” then why did all the people who were slaves want freedom so much?

because unless our textbook is super wrong, i’m pretty sure they were not
white supremacists!

(DBx: The far left has perfected the art of self-parody.)

In response to this report of some of the handiwork of Canadian strongman
Justin Trudeau, Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

Drawn straight from the playbook of modern public health, asset seizures
are a tactic guaranteed to gain the confidence and trust of the whole
public.

Brilliance from the Babylon Bee.

Steve Cuozzo reports on the wokes addiction to public hysteria. A slice:

Propelled by propaganda about infrequent, short-lived instances of
“overwhelmed hospitals,” the fear factor gave cover for every woke
pipedream. Normally sane people were so scared, they put up with
locked-down stores, offices, restaurants, schools and still off-limits
subway toilets. The government, without resistance, seized control over
business, our social lives and even the number of inches between masked-up
school kids.

Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo went so far as to limit movie theater capacity to
exactly 33% even though he sent thousands of elderly COVID victims to
certain deaths in nursing homes. This wasn’t “following the science.” Cuomo
was, like his fellow power-hungry Democrats, high on public paranoia,
issuing edicts based on whims. Biden even embarked on a $3 trillion
remaking of American society — all in the name of a Covid “emergency,” of
course.

Harry de Quetteville reports, in the Telegraph, on a new book by British
epidemiologist Mark Woolhouse. Four slices:

Whatever happens, one thing is certain: we will be told that lessons will
be learnt. But which lessons? In politics, wise old hands talk about the
importance of learning from mistakes, of knowing history and acting
accordingly. But the wrong lessons, as epidemiologist Prof Mark Woolhouse
shows in a devastating new assessment of Covid lockdowns, can also lead us
terribly astray.

British scientists and politicians were primed to respond disastrously to
Covid-19 long before the virus was even heard of, he argues in his book The
Year the World Went Mad – and precisely because of their experience with
previously known diseases.

First of these was influenza, on which our pandemic preparation was based.
That was why Covid models included schools, which are key drivers of flu
transmission, but not care homes – with catastrophic consequences.

The second diversion was a specific outbreak of flu – the swine flu
epidemic of 2009-10, largely forgotten because it killed fewer than 500
people. Those who do remember it are sure to include the parents of around
70 British children who died. “Many more [children],” as Woolhouse, 63, a
father of one daughter, points out, “than died from novel coronavirus
infection in 2020.”

Yet schools stayed open then. “It seems that our collective assessment of
the balance of harms changed dramatically over the intervening 10 years.”

..

Lockdowns, Woolhouse says, emerged from the idea that Covid could be
eradicated. And the idea that Covid could be eradicated emerged from a
third misleading encounter with disease – that other coronavirus, Sars,
which in 2002 was confined and ultimately crushed in one of the great
triumphs of modern medicine. The problem is that there was a critical
difference with Sars. It was almost exclusively transmitted by patients who
were obviously sick. “Isolating symptomatic cases stopped most of the
spread,” says Woolhouse. But Covid spreads asymptomatically, too, making
eradication effectively impossible. Yet convincing those in power to give
up on the dream of killing off Covid proved impossible.

“We knew from February [2020], never mind March, that the lockdown would
not solve the problem. It would simply delay it,” Woolhouse says, a note of
enduring disbelief in his voice. And yet in government, “there was no
attention paid to that rather obvious drawback of the strategy”.

Instead, lockdowns – which “only made sense in the context of eradication”
– became the tool of choice to control Covid.

..

“The first good data on this started to emerge in late February 2020,” he
says. And as Britain endured the first Covid wave, this data was borne out
in the facts. Those over 70 had at least 10,000 times the risk of dying as
those under 15 years old. “This is a highly discriminatory virus,”
Woolhouse says, still exasperated today. “It’s ageist, it’s sexist, it’s
racist. And we certainly knew [that] before we went into lockdown.”

Yet the Government decided that telling half the population that they were
at extremely low risk would dilute adherence to the harsh rules it was
imposing, and instead ramped up the threat warnings. “We are all at risk,”
noted Michael Gove in March 2020. “The virus does not discriminate.” But it
did then, and it does now.

“I heard [the official] argument caricatured as: everyone died, but at
least no one was saved unfairly,” notes Woolhouse. Policy became a form of
epidemiological communism, with imposed equality, even if it was equality
of misery. “BBC News backed up this misperception by regularly reporting
rare tragedies involving low-risk individuals as if they were the norm,”
notes Woolhouse.

..

The result was the worst of all worlds – a reaction that failed
sufficiently to protect those who were at risk while imposing hugely
damaging lockdowns on those who were not.

Laura Dodsworth tweets:

“Sadly, the virus itself particularly the variant Omicron is a type of
vaccine. That is, it creates both B cell and T cell immunity. And it’s done
a better job of getting out to the world population than we have with
vaccines.” Bill Gates

Sadly?




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