Stating what was obvious about mask and mask studies …

 Masks served the political need to “do something”, and they ended up being a way for us to wear our fear on our faces - implied shared suffering.  A symbol of our grief at the change COVID gave us. But there was never a reason to think they would help stop an virus that spread via aerosol.  

As others have observed, the real injury will be when the CDC that has proven to be a political toy has to try to intervene if we see something even more nasty than COVID. 

It wasn’t only Dr. Fauci. Miller subjects the CDC and its claims about masking to strict scrutiny and finds them wanting. The amount of cherry-picked data and flawed methodologies embraced in CDC studies of masking is astounding. None of the 15 studies the CDC used to justify its claims that masks work are randomized controlled studies, considered the standard for such research. Worse, when randomized controlled studies that were conducted during the pandemic did not bolster the CDC’s masking message, they were downplayed or ignored.

https://freebeacon.com/coronavirus/hubris-exposed/

No Mandate, No Factor

They discuss conjectures about why lifting the mandate did not result in the catastrophe that the mask manic predicted. My speculation is that no one changed their behavior, which is to say, the mandate didn’t result in the mass masking everyone pretended would happen based on government edict.  The 2nd reason is that, excepting N95/KN95 masks, the aerosol spread of COVID isn’t hindered by masks. 

See/listen here for more on that: https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/

From the Atlantic:
“In early march, Texas became the first state to abolish its mask mandate and lift capacity constraints for all businesses. Conservatives hailed Governor Greg Abbott’s decision, while liberals predicted doom and death and President Joe Biden disparaged it as “Neanderthal thinking.”

“Nine weeks later, the result seems to be less than catastrophic. In fact, in anew paper, economists at Bentley University and San Diego State University found that Abbott’s order had practically no effect on COVID-19 cases. “The predictions of reopening advocates and opponents failed to materialize,” the authors concluded.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/texas-mask-mandate-no-effect/618942/?utm_source=msn

Perspective on Masking, Mandates

 

Cloth and surgical masks don’t help to stop aerosol transmission - N95 and KN95s might if they’re worn properly.  So, it’s time to let go of the “mask to save someone from your breathing” peer pressure. Wear the right mask if you think you need it.  

And … there are several angles on why these articles can be published now, when the information has been around for months.  One is the political party that made hay via mask mania tribalism realizes the fun is over, folks have had enough of the religion of masking to save your mortal soul. So they have to find a graceful way to step back from their past mask madness. 

https://www.bloombergquint.com/gadfly/did-mask-mandates-work-the-data-is-in-and-the-answer-is-no

Effective Propaganda

 https://tv.gab.com/media/6168180dec0359aa6add4560?viewKey=8d83b2a2-2d72-4a1b-9f55-e418ecbb58af&r=1080p

Fantastic slide show!  Effective indeed. 

He Was Right about China

Denounced by Democrats and the media as a racist for blaming China for COVID-19, Trump feels vindicated as evidence emerges suggesting that the virus might have leaked from a Chinese virology lab in Wuhan. But he believes it was unintentional, likely a product of “gross incompetence.” What was intentional, in Trump’s mind, was the decision by Chinese leaders to allow its citizens to travel globally, which spread the pandemic. Trump has called for countries to cancel their debts to China as part of a down payment on a future reparations plan that he suggests ought to total some $10 trillion.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/06/17/investigative_issues_an_interview_with_donald_trump_unbowed_781711.html

A Stinking Pile of Silly BS

President Biden has not backed down from his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 spending proposal, and House Democrats are pushing full steam ahead on making his vision a legislative reality. But a top budget watchdog just warned that the budget-busting legislation, which costs roughly $13,260 per federal taxpayer, is full of spending that has nothing to do with the pandemic.

“Only about 1 percent of the entire package goes toward COVID vaccines, and 5 percent is truly focused on public health needs surrounding the pandemic,” the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) warned on Wednesday.

“Meanwhile, nearly half of the package will be spent on poorly targeted rebate checks and state and local government aid, including to households and governments that have experienced little or no financial loss during this crisis,” the report continues.

https://fee.org/articles/new-covid-legislation-contains-300-billion-in-unrelated-spending-budget-watchdog-warns/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2020_FEEWeekly

What if you held a pandemic and no body came?

 That was stolen from an old anti-war quote, supposed penned by Leslie Parish: "what if they held a war and no one attended?"

That's Tamny's question. He's more sure of the answer than I am. However, I hope that some of us will remember how much extra damage was done by political over-reaction.

It is also fascinating to consider, following the yin yang that is inescapable in seemingly all things, that were we poorer and therefore dying younger, as people in this nation were 100 years ago, it is likely that no one would have noticed the virus. 

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2021/02/04/what_if_the_coronavirus_had_spread_without_diagnosis_659087.html

Celebrities Are Superfluous

Meanwhile, it’s the non-famous heroes who resonate: The frontline workers and health-care providers New Yorkers cheered for every night at 7. The wealthy Secret Santa profiled by CBS News who anonymously mailed $1,000 cash to 100 carefully chosen essential workers in need. Nathan Apodaca, the Idaho potato warehouse worker longboarding and lip-syncing to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” while sipping an Ocean Spray, giving us all a lift.

 https://nypost.com/2021/01/02/2020-taught-us-one-good-thing-celebrities-are-meaningless/

Don't Just Do Something, Stand There

Inaction kills, incorrect action kills, there's no easy path. Hind sight shows that government intrusions on liberty were not effective and therefore not justified. 

The government's responses (i.e., the severity index and the containment and health index) are strongly correlated with the second factorial axis (Figures 2, 4). The death rate from Covid-19 is not correlated with this axis. Therefore, the death rate appears not to be linked with the responses of governments.

The third axis shows a relationship between Covid-19 mortality and longitude as well as obesity and sedentarity (Figures 4, 5). American countries have a higher obesity rate and a higher Covid-19 mortality rate; Asian countries have lower obesity rates and lower Covid-19 mortality rates.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.604339/full

Herd Immunity On the Horizon?

Experts estimate that about two-thirds of the population need to have neutralizing antibodies in order to reach herd immunity. Two-thirds of the 325 million people in the United States is about 218 million people. You can get antibodies that neutralize the virus in one of two ways: taking an effective vaccine, which is only being starting to be administered, or having been infected with the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. About 19 million people in the U.S. have had confirmed cases of COVID. But confirmed cases may be the tip of the iceberg. Although estimates vary, the Centers for Disease Control believes that about eight people have been infected for each one person with a documented case. If we multiply the 19 million known cases by 8, it is possible that about 152 million people are already immune. Yet, the proportion of people who have been infected and the rate of new cases varies significantly by state.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/12/30/some_states_may_be_well_on_their_way_to_herd_immunity_144936.html

The author continues on to propose several states where the infection rates exceed 50%, and in which the rate of spread seems to be reduced.

Bearing the Weight of Liberty

It appears we've become security state lap dogs with not appetite for bearing the weight of self government. The home of notsofree and the notreallybrave. Maybe the generation suffering from the current jelly spined responses to government over-reach will grow hungry again for the benefits of individual liberty.

In The Price of Panic, Douglas Axe, William M. Briggs, and Jay W. Richards offer a contemporaneous answer to this question while at the same time exploring alternative ways to deal with the pandemic that are not violations of mere socialnorms, let alone the inalienable rights that are enshrined in the Bill of Rights. There have been violations of the free exercise of religion and the right to peacefully assemble, both enshrined in the First Amendment. The Second Amendment’s guarantee of right to keep and bear arms, which is fundamental to allowing a free people to defend themselves against both criminals and the government has also been restricted; this is particularly important when the government does not protect its people from criminals. The sanctity of private households, the Fourth Amendment, has been disregarded. Presently in most of California, you are not supposed to have any friends or family over to your house. Many governments have disregarded the right of due process and property, which as part of the Fifth Amendment are not to be ignored. The Twenty-First Amendment’s guarantee to drink liquids of one’s choice is in many places functionally returning to the Eighteenth Amendment. While some may quibble at “intoxicating liquors” as an inalienable right, the ability to drink such liquids is certainly part of the natural law tradition.

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/viral-panic/

The Deaths of Despair

A record 621 people died of drug overdoses in San Francisco so far this year, a staggering number that far outpaces the 173 deaths from COVID-19 the city has seen thus far.

The crisis fueled by the powerful painkiller fentanyl could have been far worse if it wasn't for the nearly 3,000 times Narcan was used from January to the beginning of November to save someone from the brink of death, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/overdose-deaths-outpace-covid-19-deaths-san-francisco-74823530

I suppose the drug dealers are not obeying the lock down. They should be ashamed. 

Tamny's Brilliant Summary

"What lends what’s ridiculous a little bit of credibility is that stock markets were correcting at the time of the meeting between top Trump officials and Hoover board members. Except that the correction was unrelated to the virus. Markets had been pricing its arrival with great calm since January. Anyone with a pulse knew this.

"More realistically, in late February Bernie Sanders looked like he might take the Democratic presidential nomination. Markets logically corrected at the time to price at least the possibility of a socialist in the White House. Notable is that they stopped correcting after Joe Biden won the South Carolina primary. In fact, the Monday after Biden’s Saturday win the Dow Jones Industrial Average had its biggest one day point gain in history. This happened after Trump officials who are said to never be right and to never be truthful allegedly told the truth to Hoover types. Get it? The big stock movements were politics related, not virus related.

"No doubt stocks did eventually correct in March. The virus did factor this time. With good reason. Investors hadn’t priced in the horrid possibility that politicians would respond to the coronavirus by forcing an economic contraction."

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2020/10/16/the_new_york_times_cant_have_it_both_ways_about_trump_and_his_advisers_580977.html

"So Called" Lockdowns Have Little Effect

 Cost benefit, based on the evidence, does not justify lockdowns.

https://www.city-journal.org/lockdowns-must-end

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/stats-hold-a-surprise-lockdowns-may-have-had-little-effect-on-covid-19-spread/

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/case-you-missed-it-standford-professor-talks-about-disaster-covid

Sturgis Was Another Victim of the Fake News

"Not so fast. Let's take a look at what they actually tracked and what's mere speculation.

"According to South Dakota health officials, 124 new cases in the state—including one fatal case—were directly linked to the rally. Overall, COVID-19 cases linked to the Sturgis rally were reported in 11 states as of September 2, to a tune of at least 260 new cases, according to The Washington Post.

"There very well may be more cases that have been linked to the early August event, but so far, that's only 260 confirmed cases—about 0.1 percent of the number the IZA paper offers."

https://reason.com/2020/09/09/no-the-sturgis-motorcycle-rally-didnt-spawn-250000-coronavirus-cases/?itm_source=parsely-api

Do You "Believe" in Corona Virus Religion?

 In many ways this article only points out what we know - humans respond with too much focus on a novel threat and tend to ignore the everyday threats. 

The other gift from the writer is the clarity that human choice is invaluable to fight off the virus. 

"For one, economic growth has long been the biggest enemy of virus and disease precisely because economic growth produces the surplus resources that can be mobilized in pursuit of cures for what ails us. If something threatens us with sickness or even death, no reasonable person would respond with forced economic contraction.

"Second, the greater the presumed lethality of any virus, the more that any laws or rules meant to limit its spread are superfluous. Really, what about the high possibility of sickness or even death requires a law? People don’t need to be told to not hurt or kill themselves. No reasonable person would seek to expand government power over human action during the spread of a virus precisely because wise people would govern themselves.


"To which some who absolutely revel in being told what to do will respond that not everyone is rational when it comes to protecting themselves. So true.

"All of which speaks to the third reason any kind of governmental response to a virus is impractical. It is because accepted wisdom rarely ages well. Think back to AIDS in the 1980s, and the popular view that it could be spread by people merely existing in the same room."

China Virus Isn't Scary for the Young

CDC confirms — again: Youth aren’t at COVID risk

The latest data on COVID-19 cases and fatalities from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirm that young people face a negligible risk of dying from the disease, while people 65 and older face a much higher risk. That latter group accounts for about 16 percent of confirmed cases but four-fifths of deaths. The fatality rates are even lower among minors: 0.04 percent for children 4 or younger and 0.02 percent for 5-to-17-year-olds.

The crude case fatality rate indicated by the CDC’s numbers — deaths divided by confirmed cases — is about 0.25 percent for patients younger than 50 and nearly 16 percent — 63 times higher — for patients older than 64. While the overall crude CFR is 3 percent, the rates among adults range from 0.07 percent for patients in their late teens and 20s to 29 percent for patients 85 or older — more than 400 times higher.

https://nypost.com/2020/09/01/the-numbers-are-clear-covid-is-no-real-threat-to-kids/

Super Computer Number Crunching = Progress Against the Virus

"COVID Supremacists"

I also believe that my willingness to compromise demonstrates an ability to reason effectively. So it has become infuriating, to the point of feeling untenable, that the “lockdown indefinitely” crowd has become so unhinged as to label people like me morons, “deniers” and pro-murder because we find the reaction to this virus outsized and dangerous.

But Kira, you can’t compromise on DEATH! Why do you hate the elderly????

Can’t we? We compromise on death every day, pandemic or not. We calculate the risk to drive our vehicles, attend events, get on airplanes. We use a complicated equation based on what facts we know, our fears and our goals. If this virus had the fatality rate we were promised in the beginning, extended lockdowns might…might…be defensible. But we are looking at a virus with a 99.6% survivability rate.

https://www.redstate.com/kiradavis/2020/08/21/sick-to-death-of-covid-supremacists/

3 for the Wuhan Bug

Examining why some clusters are mostly harmless and some are lethal. 

 https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2020/08/22/learning_our_lessons_from_asymptomatic_covid-19.html

Age 55 and up accounts for 92% of the fatalities, but many people don't realize this fact.

https://global.beyondbullsandbears.com/2020/07/29/on-my-mind-they-blinded-us-from-science/?fbclid=IwAR0DL755nrM1rZANS88ijj6GnCIyPGOeG-85rjRPq1-PCw99rnLgT9cpGRA

A brit visits Sweden and discusses the impacts in both places.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8652523/amp/No-lockdown-no-hysteria-DOMINIC-SANDBROOK-asks-Sweden-proof-got-terribly-wrong.html?__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR0MiJMnCISbvq1EDnGykdJ1hWvV5Kfloyk-NOdPhRWWbp3viMMv872lPh4