We are still struggling to get back what we lost in this dreadful year, and the party in power now looks back not with horror at the results of political panic but rather with a sense of opportunity for all that might be possible in the years ahead.
An Inside Look at the Lockdown Orders from March 2020 Continue Reading
The ideal of the common good, inseparable from the ideal of freedom, has a noble heritage. It is worth recapturing before we find ourselves in endless cycles of tribal warfare, now even in the name of public health.
Whatever Happened to the Ideal of the Common Good? Continue Reading
The single most important fact about the COVID pandemic—in terms of deciding how to respond to it on both an individual and a governmental basis—is that it is not equally dangerous for everybody. This became clear very early on, but for some reason our public health messaging failed to get this fact out to the public.
A Sensible and Compassionate Anti-Covid Strategy Continue Reading
For the health of science and the country, we need an honest and thorough evaluation of Covid policies, not one that can be dismissed as a whitewash like the World Health Organization’s efforts.
SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL“Endemicity” is not a word that rolls off the vernacular tongue. Still, its new prominence in the halls of governments around the world is a huge ray of hope. It means that governments have at long last begun to regard the pathogen as potentially a manageable part
The Astonishing Failure of Government Virus Control Continue Reading
We don’t really need JAMA to tell us that plugging up a child’s ability to breathe freely is a bad idea. You only need good sense and a slight capacity for empathetic compassion, a trait in short supply among policy makers these days.
A system that would severely damage human psychological health and thus, morality would be one that dramatically uproots every freedom that people had previously taken for granted. The phrase “unleash hell” comes to mind; that is literally what lockdowns did to this country. We see it in surveys of mental health and it manifests itself in crime and the general collapse of public morals.
Due to public opposition, there is no vaccine passport in the US and one is not likely anytime soon. Good. That represents a big failure on the part of the disease planners. They wanted it otherwise.
The biggest problem was an intellectual failing, and it was one shared by media elites and high-end intellectuals. They had not come to terms with the core truth that pathogens are part of the world around us and always have been. New viruses come along and their trajectory follows certain patterns. In humanity’s delicate dance with them, we need intelligence, rationality, and clarity in order to avoid the illusion of control – none of which are strengths of government.
Not only economists but also medical professionals and especially politicians need to step up and admit where they were wrong and work to make sure nothing like this is repeated again. If it does happen again, it should not happen with the blessing of economists, even if they have high-end positions at Ivy League universities.
“As an infectious-disease epidemiologist, I had no choice. I had to speak up. If not, why be a scientist? Many others who bravely spoke could comfortably have stayed silent. If they had, more schools would still be closed, and the collateral public-health damage would have been greater.” ~ Martin Kulldorff
It’s long past time for the pandemic central planners to level with the American people about what they were attempting and why. They did not explain then, and they have yet to explain to this day.
The Purpose of Social Distancing Was Not to Wait for a Vaccine Continue Reading
