Public Health Articles at Brownstone feature opinion and analysis of global public health policy including impacts on economics, public dialog, and social life. Public Health articles are translated into multiple languages.
SHARE | PRINT | EMAILWhat a way to top off a year-and-a-half-long collapse of public confidence in once-respected institutions! The Pulitzer Prize committee has given its award for “public service” to the New York Times for its team of reporters working on COVID-19. Stunning. As much as I’ve doubted the credibility of the …
Thoughts on the Pulitzer Prize for Covid Coverage Read More »
The letter was sent March 14, 2020, a Saturday, and the day after the HHS privately released what amounted to a lockdown order from the federal government. The Trump administration had already been talked into shutting down as much as it could and urging states to do the same. In some sense, then, the latter came too late. Regardless, Fauci ignored it (“Thank you for your note”) .
“There’s nothing particularly wrong per se in the impulse for pathogen avoidance, unless it becomes baked into the social system and becomes an excuse for segregation and for undemocratic forms of political management. Here is where problems begin. Society becomes divided by touchable and untouchable, clean and unclean.” ~ Jeffrey Tucker
“I had hoped that the fires of liberty, burning within the hearts of the American public, would have been strong enough to stop this kind of tyranny from being visited upon us. I would have predicted massive pushback, but it did not happen for a good part of the year. People were mired in fear and confusion. It felt like wartime, with a population traumatized by shock and awe.” ~ Jeffrey Tucker
The best testimony to the success of these mutual learning processes is not only the amazing story of Taiwan. It is our very presence on the planet today, some 8 billion learning systems strong, distributed as widely as human minds and interacting everywhere to ensure the survival of learning and growth.
As tucker shows, this virus like all previous viral flus will give way only to herd immunity and to the natural immunity of most human beings to the worst effects. Whether through natural propagation of an extremely infectious pathogen, or through the success of one of the hundreds of vaccine projects, or through the mutation of the virus to ubiquitous predictability like the common cold, the virus will become a trivial event.
“The question is not whether to aim for herd immunity as a strategy, because we will all eventually get there. The question is how to minimise casualties until we get there. Since Covid-19 mortality varies greatly by age, this can only be accomplished through age-specific countermeasures.” ~ Martin Kulldorff
