Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Scott Atlas reports that “the nation’s top scientists lied” about Covid.

Writing at Reason, Margery Smelkinson and Leslie Bienen rightly criticize – as being poorly designed and biased – the CDC’s planned review of its Covid performance. A slice:

The list of errors made by the CDC is so lengthy that a one-month process—an entirely arbitrary time period—will all but guarantee that the review is superficial and toothless. CDC guidance is responsible for some of the longest school closures in the world due to myopic policies that were overly focused on cases and transmission. School closures, where students of all ages were instructed to stay home and even avoid the outdoors, led predictably to significant rises in learning loss, mental health issues, obesity, and substance use disorders. The CDC’s shockingly unethical and underreported alliancewith the American Federation for Teachers, the nation’s largest teachers union, also cast doubt on who exactly was steering the CDC ship as they crafted school guidelines.

The CDC also ignored natural immunity when drafting federal-level vaccine mandates and allowing exemptions to testing, policies that were then duplicated on the state level, resulting in the firing of thousands of healthcare workers and public employees. They oversold the benefits of masking post-vaccination, with no randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conducted to show efficacy, and failed to run any RCTs that might have addressed the weakness of data guiding many of their interventions.

elizabeth bennett tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Typical clinic day now includes a 2-year-old who only has 5 words, an 8-year-old with new-onset obesity, and a preschool-age child with no social skills from being home bound. A disastrous avalanche of child health probs of our own making—not “from the pandemic.”

and

It’s from prolonged school closures, prolonged and ongoing forced masking of young children and child care providers, and relentless fear-mongering around kids and COVID, which continues today and in which @CDCgov and @AmerAcadPeds are complicit.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board decries the dystopian Covidian tyranny now ravaging Shanghai. A slice:

Fearing that local officials were letting the virus spiral out of control, Beijing flew Covid fixer Sun Chunlan to China’s business capital this month to impose one of the most drastic lockdowns to date. Some 25 million people have been forced to stay at home with no warning and no time to stockpile food.

The result has been a humanitarian debacle, as residents run short of food and medicine while delivery services fail to keep up. Desperate residents are protesting their imprisonment by shouting from windows.

Also decrying the dystopian Covid tyranny now suffocating the people of Shanghai is David Waugh. A slice:

China’s zero COVID approach is yet another example of the devastating risk introduced when totalitarian regimes implement centrally planned policy via brute force. Under the classical liberal ideal, governments are formed to protect individual rights. Nothing could be further from this in Shanghai. A city of over 25 million people is being dehumanized because of a spike in largely asymptomatic COVID-19 cases.

We were dangerously close in the United States to implementing zero COVID adjacent policies, particularly in our larger cities. Admirers of this approach are still with us in the Western world, even if they are in apparent retreat.

The experience in Shanghai permanently discredits their opinions with respect to COVID-19 policy. The rest of the world should take note and ensure “zero COVID” ideas are placed squarely in the past.

el gato malo describes in disturbing (because true) detail what happens to those who sacrifice liberty for safety. A slice:

over time, that subjugation will change you to the point where you are no longer capable (or even desirous) of freedom.

Robby Soave criticizes Covidocratic elites for their on-going hypocrisy.

Even Washington Post columnist Leana Wen – she who has a history of focusing excessively on Covid and its mitigation – believes that the government of the city of Philadelphia is being overly and unwisely cautious by reinstating an indoor mask mandate.

New York Post columnist Steve Cuozzo cautions against a renewal of Covid hysteria – and mandates – in Gotham. Two slices:

The New York Times might prefer the pandemic to last forever. Nothing ever beat the bug to empower governmental micromanagement of business and the social order, to say nothing of individual lives.

The paper daily warns us of the risk. It dutifully parrots every doomsayer who reminds us, “We may be done with the virus, but the virus isn’t done with us.” The latest mouthpiece was city Comptroller Brad Lander, who tested positive last week.

…..

The city’s Department of Health says Omicron-driven cases were running around 600 a day in early March. They’ve since risen steadily to 1,981 new cases logged April 8.

Yet six weeks since the “wave” began, hospitalizations have actually dropped. Per the DOH, hospital cases that were in the low 40s per day in late February fell, for whatever reason, to the 20s by mid-March — where they have remained in April.

Yes, hospitalizations are a “lagging indicator.” But they don’t lag by two whole months.

Deaths that were mercifully low (below 15 per day) in early March are today mercifully even lower — below five a day over the past week. This in a city of 8.3 million people.

Ross Clark writes that Boris Johnson’s big mistake “wasn’t walking into a room where his wife had prepared him a surprise birthday cake. It was in overriding his liberal instincts and imposing highly prescriptive lockdown rules in the first place.” A slice:

A wise and imaginative leader would already be asking: how could a pandemic be fought in future without resorting to the blunt and inhumane instrument of lockdowns? Lockdowns which after all merely delay, not prevent, infections?