Tag: virus

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Accountability government transparency international affairs

Lab Leak Not Disproved

Wuhan, lab, bats, virus, covid

A Wuhan wet market is ground zero of the pandemic;
COVID-​19 could not have originated in a Wuhan laboratory.

At least, so say many “science reporters” commenting on recent research about the origin of the virus. Former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade begs to differ.

Wade (whom we’ve cited before) says it’s possible that the virus jumped from an animal host or that it originated in a Wuhan lab. Although both can’t be true, “so far, no direct evidence exists for either.”*

He expounds:

  1. The cited research papers, still un-​peer-​reviewed, do not contradict circumstantial evidence of a lab origin.
  2. Nor do they show that the virus originated in the wet market. Even if the earliest known case were of a person attending the market, one can’t know whether he got infected there or brought the infection with him from a lab.
  3. One paper looks only at data from December 2019 and later. Yet the epidemic had been underway for weeks.
  4. The same paper claims that the distribution of cases with no overt connection to the wet market is so similar to that of the market-​related cases that the former cases must also be connected to the market.

But the outside-​the-​market cases selected for study by Chinese authorities — by Xi Jinping himself for all we know — were not randomly selected. One criterion was proximity to the wet market.

So: massive selection bias.

And a pandemic of unscientific reporting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Wade does not consider some of the smoking-​gun type evidence for gain-​of-​function we’ve mentioned in the past, like the Moderna patent.

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bat!

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paternalism too much government

Doom, Still Pending

Walenski, CDC, Covid

Has our ‘wife, mother, and daughter’ betrayed us?

In late March, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the head of the CDC, went off-​script (her words), reflecting on what she called her “recurring feeling” of “impending doom.”

COVID case numbers were up. “We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are and so much reason for hope,” she said. “But right now I’m scared.”

You might think this is no way to lead a country in a crisis — after all, she had just been given the top job at the Centers for Disease Control. 

“I’m speaking today not necessarily as your CDC director,” she pressed on National Public Radio, “not only as your CDC director but as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter to ask you to just please hold on a little while longer.”

Last Monday, Dr. Walensky “first signed off on changing her agency’s mask guidance,” The Washington Post reported, only to continue “to defend the CDC’s sweeping guidance that Americans wear masks in public, including in a Senate hearing Tuesday,” before Thursday’s announcement that the vaccinated don’t need to go about wearing masks, indoors or outdoors, for their own sake or others’.

The policy lurch leaves us in some weird territory. If the vaccinated may go about un-​masked, then the unvaccinated should remain masked — yet it remains illegal (courtesy of HIPAA regulations) for businesses to ask about our medical records. Which implies, for want of enforcement, the controversial (and unwanted) “vaccine passport” idea. 

Further, many who have endured the disease claim immunity. Others who have had COVID, like Dr. Jordan Peterson, took the jab because they were told their immune levels were too low.

But “the science” on that is far from settled.

Thankfully, the CDC is not really in the regulation business. And increasingly Americans on all sides are ignoring Walensky, Fauci and Co.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom too much government

A Tyrant’s License

Covid, virus, epidemic, US Flag, lockdown

The “lockdowns” are not how a free society would handle a contagion.

Free people might advisedly wear masks and physically distance themselves from others when they are especially vulnerable to an airborne disease, or they themselves show some symptoms.*

But free people take risks, too, and accept responsibility for risks taken. And they go about trying to improve their lives generally, in society.

In society, via commerce. 

Furthermore, free people would also change their behavior based on good information freely discussed.

What they would not do is engage in bullying to suppress information, cheer on institutional debate suppression, or mandate abridgments to other’s liberties on the basis of personal or sectarian opinion.

That is, they would not do what we do now.

And, perhaps most importantly, free people would utterly condemn leaders who lied to them, or who took special privileges by flouting their own mandates, enforced on the rest of us.

We’ve sure seen a lot of this latter.

The latest case is that of Austin, Texas, Mayor Steve Adler, who has been caught in one of those grand hypocrisies that show the panic to be mostly political opportunism: he had recorded his early November message to “stay home if you can” after attending his daughter’s wedding with 20 guests and then taking a getaway trip with a party of eight.

“This is not the time to relax,” he warned, however. “We may have to close things down if we’re not careful.”

Recorded in Mexico, I guess that “social distance” allowed him the gumption to deliver a threat: if you don’t self-​quarantine, I will quarantine everybody!

Except, of course, himself.

Freedom is not just something for our rulers. Liberty with an exception clause is spelled “L‑I-​C-​E-​N-​S‑E.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* By wearing masks and gloves these two groups would signal to others to give them some distance. Not virtue-​signaling, but well-​mannered responsibility signals. The healthy people, though, would take the risks of the disease because, after all, we face a million risks every day, from automobile injury to cancer.

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general freedom national politics & policies

For WHO the Toll

flatten the curve, hospitals, Covid, virus, pandemic

When the World Health Organization did an about-​face, last week, advising against the lockdowns that have constituted the most-​touted and most common extreme pandemic response around the world, many wondered: what could the WHO be up to?

David Nabarro, the organization’s special envoy for Covid-​19, explains that lockdowns are useful only to buy time “to reorganize, regroup, rebalance” health care resources, and that we are obviously not in such emergency conditions now.

J.D. Tuccille, writing at Reason, provided us with the most astute news angle from the WHO’s apparent turnabout: “At long last, months into the pandemic, the debates over the proper response to COVID-​19 have begun.”

We can hope so, anyway. Enough with bullying by government edict or inane “follow the science” rhetoric!

But what the WHO’s new clue should highlight is how we got here. The lockdowns were first offered as a way to do precisely what Mr. Nabarro said, buy time to reorganize medical resources so as not to induce chaos — you know, “flatten the curve.”

It did not take long, however, before a very different rationale for harsh “mitigation efforts” became the rule: buy time for a vaccine.

This plan was strenuously argued against by a trio of doctors in their eyebrow-​raising “Great Barrington Declaration.” Continuing the lockdowns until a vaccine emerges “will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”

The lockdown obsession may misdirect our attention from actual treatments for the disease — which President Trump has touted from the beginning. Indeed, Trump’s quick exit from his own bout with the malady may serve as an effective reminder that our options are not limited to (a) quivering in sequestration till vaccinations roll out or (b) mass death.

There is hope.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency national politics & policies

A Glossary for Our Times

Trump Derangement Syndrome, TDS, Covid 19, infection, virus, meme

Reminder: SARS-​CoV‑2 is the name of the virus that is said to cause COVID-19.

Scientists and doctors are still learning about the novel virus and the new disease. Much of the information is uncertain, in part because it has become politicized, making it hard to navigate both medical and political subjects.

Making sense of the data or the arguments is more difficult because people confuse the terminology. The virus is not the disease, the disease is not the virus, though by metonymy, we do swap terms. Don’t let a mere figure of speech fool you.

As awful as COVID-​19 is, in America, more citizens are affected negatively by the virus popularly known as TDS. 

Perhaps we should call it TDS-​2016, since the three letters stand for “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Though the mind-​virus (meme) was rampant from the moment Donald Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, the illness is not the meme itself. The illness, or behavioral syndrome, is how host brains process the meme. And it did not really set in as a disease until Trump got the Republican nomination. That’s when Democrats stopped laughing so hard and began to take Trump seriously.

And drive themselves crazy.

As with COVID-​19, the worst cases depend upon co-​morbidities. In TDS-2016’s case, co-​morbidities include a sense of entitlement (that your side must always win); a denial of culpability in ramping up political polarization (in such things as the corruption-​challenged candidacy of Hillary Clinton); and in flirting with other memes (such as “democratic socialism” and “wokism”).

As we approach Election Day 2020, TDS-​2016 will only grow. The meme itself has proven resilient. We appear not to have reached herd immunity yet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Definitions:

meme n. 1. an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation. 2. a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users.

metonymy n. a figure of speech featuring the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant, for example suit for business executive, or the track for horse racing.

herd immunity n. a key concept in epidemiology where the resistance to the spread of a contagious disease within a population that results when a sufficiently high proportion of individuals become immune to the disease, through exposure by infection or vaccination: the level of vaccination needed to achieve herd immunity varies by disease but ranges from 83 to 94 percent. [Discussions of SARS-​CoV‑2 and COVID-​19 that do not mention herd immunity can only have limited value.] 

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international affairs

Disgraced, Enraged, Belligerent

China, virus, Covid, coronavirus, authoritarianism,

“Over the course of April and throughout May,” writes Timothy McLaughlin in The Atlantic, “Beijing was undertaking aggressive actions across Asia.” These include:

  • The ramming — and sinking — of a Vietnamese vessel in the South China Sea.
  • Intrusive surveying by a Chinese research vessel (plus coast-​guard and other ships) near a Malaysian oil rig, drawing warships from the United States and Australia. 
  • Creating two administrative units on islands in the South China Sea claimed by Vietnam. 
  • Ugly if predictable rage directed towards Taiwan, “whose handling of the pandemic has won plaudits and begun a push for more international recognition.”*

Bursting out of Wuhan, did the coronavirus pandemic, responsible so far for taking more than 350,000 lives worldwide, not make the Chinese rulers look bad enough?**

Now the Butchers of Beijing move against Hong Kong, today considering a so-​called “national security law” to further take away Hongkongers’ civil liberties. The CCP gang is so insecure they cannot stand to hear Hong Kong crowds boo the Chinese national anthem at soccer matches. So the new law will punish the Bronx cheer with three years in prison.

Months ago, former New York Mayor and short-​lived Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg argued that America would “have to deal with China” … “to solve the climate crisis.… because our economies are inextricably linked.”

Yesterday, showing more backbone, the U.S. Congress passed legislation asking the Trump Administration to sanction Chinese officials over the camps imprisoning Uighurs. Meanwhile, responding to China’s Hong Kong clampdown, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared the territory “not autonomous” from China, which could lead to a big change in trade status.

It is getting harder to ignore this menace in Asia.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* For some reason, Mr. McLaughlin left the recent border clashes between China and India, which have left 100 soldiers injured, off his list. 

** They looked especially bad after it came out that the Chinese government had arrested doctors in Wuhan to cover it up.

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