A Good Question

(Don Boudreaux)

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Steve Hardy, a friend from Nevada, sent to me an e-mail that I share here with his kind permission:

Friday’s Wall Street Journal reports that approximately 5800 people who have been vaccinated have gotten Covid out of 66 million people vaccinated.  This is .0008%. And ALL of these cases have been mild and haven’t required hospitalization   The stupid part of the article says that officials say that even vaccinated people are at risk and should continue to wear masks and practice social distancing.  To put this in perspective about 3 to 11% of all people get the flu each year in the US.

The CDC estimates that between 12,000 and 61,000 people die each year from the flu.  So why haven’t we all been wearing masks and socially distancing all of our lives?

DBx: Great question. The answer, I think, is that people have been frightened into believing not only that that Covid-19’s dangers are greater than those dangers really are, but that Covid-19 is a pathogen categorically different influenza viruses.

While Covid-19 is indeed an unusually dangerous pathogen, nearly all of its differential danger is reserved for the elderly. Quite simply, Covid-19 is not the categorically different threat to humanity that it is believed so widely to be. What is categorically different is humanity’s response to Covid. This response bears absolutely no proportion to Covid’s dangers.

What in the end will be, by far, the greatest harm that Covid inflicted on humanity is its capacity to have allowed political and media elites to instill in the general public a deranged level of fear – and, hence, a deranged tolerance for deranged and draconian measures to combat Covid. Over time we will be made poorer and, hence, exposed to higher risks of injury, disease, and death. We will also be far less free. The biosecurity state – or as David Hart calls it, hygiene socialism – will oppress us all in the name of protecting us all.

Chances are high – indeed, I think it to be nearly certain – that life will never return to any condition close to normal (that is, as life was as recently as 2019). Freedom of commerce, freedom even to be with family and friends, freedom to travel, freedom of religion, freedom to speak and to write, and freedom to engage in scientific inquiry are all under threat of being permanently squelched, and squelched hard.

As it has survived over the millennia countless nasty pathogens, humanity will survive Covid-19. Liberal civilization, however, will not survive Covid Derangement Syndrome.