It is wasteful for the government to commandeer resources from the private sector during good times, and it’s even more harmful when the government kicks the economy during a recession.
Robert P. Murphy, Ph.D., Contra Krugman: Smashing the Errors of America’s Most Famous Keynesian (2018), p. 18.
It was not immediately clear what had changed regarding “the science,” when, midweek, Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson lifted the Queen’s government’s mask mandates and other coronavirus restrictions.
The case for and against mask efficacy has been about the same for a very long time. There’s no obvious statistical evidence for mask mandates working. And pre-2020 studies showed ambiguous results for preventing virus transmission by wearing masks — and certainly not for the cloth masks most people wear.
So what changed?
Well, Johnson cited the omicron variant. “Our scientists believe that the omicron wave has now peaked nationally,” he said, adding that hospital admissions had stabilized and that London admissions were falling.
So he lifted mask requirements in schools, too.
This takes some pressure off him. The vast majority of Brits are tired of masks, especially on students.
Predictably, however, some school masters appear to be clinging to the cloth.
Regardless, why the change?
Spokespersons for the beleaguered opposition party, Labour, argue it’s mostly political, since Boris was caught at two bigwig parties where no one was wearing masks. “Can the PM share the evidence,” asked one, “behind his decision and that he’s not just protecting his job?”
And Johnson says that “the scientific evidence is there for everybody to consult” — but, face it, everything these politicians say is half-assessed and untrustworthy.
Still, at least the people of Britain will receive a little let-up from the oppressive “scientific” tyranny of their government.
Not all states to the west of the Atlantic can say the same.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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It wouldn’t surprise me if Tiffany McHugh, former director of the Foothills Christian Church Preschool in San Diego, wishes now that she had been running a preschool in a slack state like Florida.
Florida doesn’t penalize such malefaction.
It doesn’t even prohibit it. Yes, things have gotten pretty bad in states like Florida. They let the two-year-olds breathe: unthinkable! The policymakers in these states apparently labor under the presumption that the COVID-19 pandemic is not Bubonic Plague 2.0 and that, for kids, the risk of serious COVID-19 disease has always been very low.
Well, in California they take these risks seriously!!!!!!!
The Golden State’s Department of Social Services has shut down the preschool McHugh was directing and pulled her license. The problem? She couldn’t get the tykes to stay masked.
“There were a lot of children who were just too young to wear masks,” McHugh confesses,“they pull them off. It’s really difficult.”
This makes it sound as if she didn’t even try handcuffing the kids so that they could not remove their masks. Talk about dereliction of duty.
Other area preschools have not been similarly targeted, and so many suspect selective enforcement. But hold on. When you’re going after flouters of regulations, somebody has to be brought to book first.
Rest assured, all other San Diego and California preschools will be outlawed momentarily.
McHugh’s school has appealed the decision to ban her forlife from working with children. The hearing will be held on February 11.
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On February 11, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci participated in a conference call with about a dozen scientists. The nation’s highest paid government bureaucrat was told that the quickly spreading COVID might have leaked from and even been created in the Wuhan lab, which the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, which Fauci heads) was funding, in part, through EcoHealth Alliance.
What did Fauci do?
He worked mightily to discredit the idea.
That is, he engaged in a cover-up.
Last week, Senator Rand Paul asked Fauci about all this. Indeed, he posed a number of very specific questions, and got — for his trouble — generalities and counter-assertions from Fauci.
The trail of evidence linking Peter Daszak of EcoHealth and Anthony Fauci of NIAID to the gain of function research (along with a Chinese plan to release “novel chimeric spike proteins” into Chinese air with the alleged aim of infecting bats) has been confirmed on the Pentagon end — Senator Paul referenced work by Project Veritas that performed this service.
There’s really little question that gain-of-function was developed in Wuhan at the instigation of the Daszak-Fauci team. And that it was done despite DARPA’s reluctance, despite U.S. law.
Let’s hope that Fauci’s cover-up was merely of a dangerous policy that would end in disaster and death, and the ruination of his reputation, not a genocidal conspiracy worthy of taking to The Hague for prosecution as a crime against humanity.
But everyone knows that cover-ups imply criminality.
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Dr. Robert Malone researched mRNA technology in the 1980s at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He helped develop mRNA vaccines. He is a founder of Atheric Pharmaceutical. He’s got plenty of credentials.
So you might think social media companies would respect his voice in the area of his expertise.
But no: for disputing official government assurances about the super-safeness of the vaccines, he’s been banned by Twitter (and copycat LinkedIn).
What precisely did he say that triggered the social media giants?
Well, Dr. Malone argues that for many youngsters the risks (like myocarditis) of being vaccinated outweigh the benefits of being vaccinated against what is a very low-risk infection for most younger people.
“I may be one of the very few that has this depth of understanding of the technology that doesn’t have a direct financial conflict of interest,” says Dr. Malone, who is himself vaccinated. “If I’m not allowed to speak about my concerns, whether they’re right or wrong . . . who is a valid person to participate in the dialogue?”
Nobody, doc. It’s because you’re so credible that you finally had to be stomped by the likes of Twitter. You’re too credible.
At the strongholds of official government doctrine, it’s not about figuring out the truth, encouraging independent judgment of risks and alternatives, or logical persuasion. Argue all you want, as rationally or irrationally as you want — just as long as you hew to the protean prescribed dogma.
Unsure what the set-in-stone dogma du jour is, precisely, on matters pandemical and vaccinatory? That’s easy. Just look up the very latest utterances of one Anthony Fauci.
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Recently, a tyke and his mommy were booted from a Big Apple Applebee’s because the little boy lacked a vaccine passport.
That is, the mother possessed no proof that her son had been vaccinated against the disease of the day.
Now, parents have every right to refrain from getting their kids injected — especially given the low risk that kids will become seriously ill from COVID-19 and the non-negligible risk of harm from vaccine side effects.
But such considerations didn’t prevent a gang of police — no students of Mayberry’s Sheriff Andy Taylor — from ordering the expulsion. (There’s video.)
Residents of New York City’s vaccination regime can at least move to another town. People elsewhere, in larger jurisdictions — Austria, Australia, England — face greater difficulties escaping pandemic tyranny. But, like us, they can protest and they can sue.
In England, a group called Big Brother Watch is challenging the COVID Pass Scheme imposed by the government of Boris Johnson. Their lengthy “pre-action letter” argues that no evidence exists that the passes will reduce the spread of the virus and that the scheme is “unnecessary and disproportionate.”
Amidst so much “information” under dispute, we know three things.
One, for all the suffering and death it has inflicted on the most vulnerable, the current pandemic is hardly the Black Death. It isn’t even the Spanish flu.
Two, being “vaccinated” against COVID-19 does not prevent one from becoming infected or from infecting others.
Three, shutting down society also inflicts suffering. Great suffering. As must shutting down whichever segments of society decline Draconian mandates.
Maybe the scourge of tyranny isn’t the best balm for the scourge of COVID-19.
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In a virtual meeting, online, the National Governors Association talked with President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., last week. The biggest issue? COVID.
About COVID tests, “I wish I had thought about ordering a half a billion two months ago,” Mr. Biden confessed.
While serious people are taking this seriously, blah blah, the truth may be that tests do more harm than good. There have always been problems with the tests: too many false positives; they induce panics at mere “case” levels, thus feeding propaganda and unworkable government “solutions” to the “crisis.”
About which Biden now admits he’s got … nothing.
Having run against Donald Trump and his alleged lack of a plan, boasting how the Democrats would conquer COVID, Biden now declares defeat: “Look, there is no federal solution.
“This gets solved at a state level,” acknowledged the president, “. . . and it ultimately gets down to where the rubber meets the road and that’s where the patient is in need of help, or preventing the need for help.”
That last phrase is odd.
“Preventing the need for help” sounds like he might mean patients taking control of their health care and their own immune systems. Could Mr. Biden be alluding to Vitamin D, Vitamin K, zinc, HCQ, Ivermectin, and many other immune system boosters and virus blockers?
Or Biden could merely be fumbling. He’s made much of the Omicron Variant, including at the governors’ meeting. But instead of addressing the actual trend of the latest iteration, politicians and propagandists push the idea that Omicron is deadly, when the evidence is clear: it is much less deadly than previous variants.
The great danger of COVID remains the governmental response.
Including, alas, Biden’s.
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A recent video about vaccination passports brought to mind an old parlor game: “If you could go back in time, would you kill Baby Hitler?”
Most civilized people realize the moral problems of this thought experiment. Sure, Baby Hitler grew up to be Nazi Führer Hitler, a mass-murderer worthy of assassination. But young Adolf wasn’t a monster. Yet.
Moreover, every step on the way to becoming a monster was accompanied by situations in which civilized people could have stopped the coming horrors without murdering a child:
More interesting than Killing Baby Hitler would be a parlor game about who could have stopped each horrific event that went into the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich. What decisions could they have made that would have changed history?
The point of these counterfactual exercises? To learn how to make better policy.
Such as in a pandemic, when governments are expanding their power over citizens with lockdowns and business shutdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. While in America many such mandates are being struck down as unconstitutional, beyond the authority of officials, in Germany and Austria vaccine passports are going into tyrannical effect.
We need to take seriously the warning in the video mentioned at top, This Pivotal Moment. Stop vaccine mandates. Reverse the mandates in effect. Abolish internal passports. Resist this tyrannical notion of a two-tier society.
In Europe, masses of people have taken to the streets in defiance.
Open defiance is also necessary here … in “the land of the free.”
That’s how you stop Baby Hitler.
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“Panicked Americans surrendered a lot of power during the pandemic,” wrote J.D. Tuccille last Friday. “Now they want their country back.”
On the same day, Matt Welch concluded his somewhat more caustic piece, “They Just Keep Closing Schools and Mandating Masks,” with a warning: “If you think Tuesday was a bad day for Democratic busybodies, let them keep trying to squeeze the walls in on this rat cage of an American life.”
The main theme of these two Reason pieces is about right. Americans got snookered into giving up too much; the only silver lining is that we may have learned a few things.
One lesson? People who talk up “follow the science” are least reliable at relaying scientific findings, much less “following” those findings … or sticking to scientific method.
During the pandemic, the Science Pushers lied to us, hid truths, spun us helter skelter, pushed government force willy nilly, and stuck out on limbs with less reason than the hokey pokey.
But, through all the deception, fear-mongering, and downright bullying, one thing became clear: elite pharmaceuticals, bureaucrats, politicians and corporate media shills nurture interests wildly at variance of the American people’s.
For those who have read the economics of Public Choice, X‑efficiency, and old-fashioned “political economy,” this is hardly a shocking lesson. It is as familiar as a well-worn slipper.
Yet this lesson, pretty clear to most sane folks, needs driving home. Repetition will help it really sink in.
It’s too important to forget, for it was liberty that Americans surrendered, power being what was unconstitutionally expanded and exercised — making the limiting of government the proper response.
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“President Biden, the federal government, social media, and the establishment media have conspired to rob Americans of their freedoms in the name of public health,” declares Jeremy Boreing, co-CEO of The Daily Wire. “They have broken faith with the American people through conflicting messaging, false information, and by suppressing data and perspectives with which they disagree.”
Quoted by Alex Swoyer in The Washington Examiner, Boreing is explaining why his company — best known for its platforming (as we say these days) of commentators Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh, but also for its burgeoning news service and mini-entertainment empire — will not comply with “the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for private employers.”
It is “suing in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, the company announced Thursday,” Swoyer reports.
Though we’ve been hearing about these “requirements” for over a month, they were published by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) just yesterday. Folks at The Daily Wire had been talking up their challenge ever since Biden first dropped his bomb, and had their legal response ready.
OSHA’s mandate, Swoyer explains, “directs large companies to require employees to get vaccinated by Jan. 4, or else pay for them to get tested weekly,” and also requires those tested-but-unvaccinated employees “to wear a face mask.”
Note that the tests for the coronavirus are not reliable, tests for antibodies are not even mentioned (and also not reliable), and face mask utility has not been demonstrated to anything approaching certainty, as I’ve discussed.
Grounds for challenge are legion.
Other affected companies should join The Daily Wire with parallel lawsuits, or at least amicus briefs.
The president’s mandate must not stand.
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