Stromata Blog

A Scandal in Minnesota

Power Line has been covering a massive diversion of federal funds intended for Covid-19 relief into the hungry maw of an outfit called “Feeding Our Future”. The story has gotten little notice outside of Minnesota, but, even in this jaded era of trillion dollar spending programs, the numbers deserve attention. A preçis:

Briefly, Feeding Our Future (“FOF”) was a fraudulent nonprofit that accessed an astonishing $240 million in federal money, ostensibly to feed needy children in Minnesota. Under the supervision of Minnesota’s Department of Education, FOF distributed that money to a network of Minnesota nonprofits who allegedly delivered the actual meals to children. But it turns out that the money mostly went to luxury purchases, fancy cars, overseas vacations, gold and jewels, new houses, and property in places like Kenya and Turkey. FOF kept a slice of the $240 million and added to it by charging kickbacks. The entire fraud has now unraveled in a series of 48 or more indictments announced last week by the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota. [Link added]

The latest development changes this from another tale of graft into something worse.

Throughout, the public officials on whose watch this massive fraud occurred have relied mostly on a single defense: in 2021, the Department of Education, having become suspicious, tried to cut off funding to some of FOF’s clients. But a state court judge rejected MDE’s arguments and ordered the Department to resume funding what turned out to be one of the biggest frauds on record. That was the story.

Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, up for reelection this year, cited that decision after the FOF indictments were announced.

“I would hope there would be an investigation into that,” Walz told reporters Thursday. “I was speechless, unbelievable that this ruling could come down. (I) did not really know what to say. Obviously, we had to honor it but at that point I said, we have got to continue to push the federal government and the FBI to do the investigation.”

Today the Minnesota Judicial Branch took the unusual step of releasing an official statement about the case. After recounting the history of the litigation, the statement concludes:

On February 26, 2022, the Star Tribune reported on a federal investigation of FOF. The article included the following false statement: “In April 2021, Ramsey County District Judge John Guthmann told the department it didn't have the authority to stop payments and ordered the department to resume payments.” Since February, that Star Tribune quote has been repeated or paraphrased on many occasions by many other media outlets. The same media sources reported that, in her April 4, 2022, testimony to the Minnesota Senate, the Commissioner of the Education stated that the MN Department of Education tried to stop payments to FOF, only to be ordered by Judge Guthmann to resume payments. That is false. Then, when federal indictments were announced this week, many new reports were published. On September 22, 2022, Governor Tim Walz told the media that the Minnesota Department of Education attempted to end payments to FOF because of possible fraud, but that Judge Guthmann ordered payments to continue in April 2021. That is also false.

As the public court record and Judge Guthmann’s orders make plain, Judge Guthmann never issued an order requiring the MN Department of Education to resume food reimbursement payments to FOF. The Department of Education voluntarily resumed payments and informed the court that FOF resolved the “serious deficiencies” that prompted it to suspend payments temporarily. All of the MN Department of Education food reimbursement payments to FOF were made voluntarily, without any court order.

It should be noted that the local news report quoted above (by a FOX affiliate, no less) disputes the Judiciary’s account, asserting that the judge “ruled that Minnesota education officials lacked the legal authority to stop payments” and “held the Education Department in contempt of court for failing to process 143 applications from Feeding Our Future for new meal sites”. I imagine that we’ll soon learn soon enough where the truth lies. I doubt that the judges misrepresented the record.

One clear point is that the state’s Department of Education did sniff something rotten in FOF’s activities as early as two years ago. Another is that the DOE didn’t regard stopping the fraud as very urgent. Its excuses for forgoing an appeal of the judge’s purported decision, recited in the FOX article, are feeble: An appeal would have run up more legal fees. If the DOE had lost on appeal, more sanctions might have been imposed. Those are good reasons only if the department had little confidence in its position. It is obvious now that FOF’s activities were highly suspicious. The failure to appeal gave a massive benefit of the doubt to the organization, a benefit that it patently didn’t deserve and one that diligent protectors of the public purse would never have entertained.

Covid, Masks and Posies

While one may not think of science fiction fans as an especially stodgy, risk-averse cohort, SF conventions tend to conflate Covid-19 with bubonic plague. This year’s World Science Fiction Convention (Chicon 8), held in Chicago from September 1st through 5th, required all attendees to present proof of full vaccination and to wear masks “in all convention spaces, during move-in, the convention, and move-out, except when actively eating or drinking in designated areas”. I’m told that compliance with the masking policy was extremely high. Certainly, I saw plenty of masked convention goers from my vantage point on the outskirts of the event.

Did these precautions achieve their objective? The current rate of new Covid cases in Illinois is 164 per week per 100,000 inhabitants. Chicon has been sending its members (of whom I am one, though I never picked up my badge or entered any “convention spaces”) regular e-mails reporting the number of Covid cases among those in attendance. Today’s update says that there have been 42 confirmed cases among the 3,574 attending members.

The infection rate thus was just under 1.18 percent, 1,175 per 100,000. If it had matched the Illinois average, there would have been (taking into account the fact that Chicon lasted five days rather than a full week) about four cases rather than 42.

No matter what adjustments one makes for the differences between Illinois as a whole and the corner of it that Chicon occupied for a few days, it’s absurd to argue that the vaccination and mask mandates had any beneficial impact. Of course, the convention venue was more crowded than downtown Springfield, and one would expect an airborne virus to spread more widely there than the state average, but can one truly believe that a tenfold increase is evidence that masks were effective?

This is a micro-datum among the many that disprove the superstition that wearing a mask will ward off Covid-19 any better than a pocket full of posies protected against the Black Death.

The “Gray Lady” Would Like to Eviscerate Ron DeSantis, But. . . .

The New York Times devotes today’s “Morning” newsletter to “Ron DeSantis’s Florida”. The writer and the Miami-based Times reporter who responds to his questions want to portray Florida as the fascist dystopia of Charlie Crist’s fantasies, but they have trouble finding much negative to say. The reporter’s first comment has a strange echo:

He [DeSantis] was elected by just 32,000 votes or so but has governed as if he had a mandate to reshape the state into a laboratory for right-wing policies.

Hmm, can you think of someone else, someone in the good graces of the Times, who was elected by a small margin but thought that he had a mandate for sweeping change? There is one difference between that guy and Ron DeSantis: That guy’s party had historically narrow legislative majorities. In the election that brought DeSantis to the governorship, Republicans won the State Senate and House by margins of 25-15 and 73-47, respectively. In any case, the reporter contradicts her own thesis by later stating, “But he governed his first year by trying to lie low.” According to her account, the “laboratory for right-wing policies” was created by circumstances, not some pre-plotted rightist agenda:

Then came the pandemic. He tried to keep the state open, and he seemed to take criticisms of his looser pandemic policies personally. He started to score political points by portraying himself as a foe of the “corporate media” that conveyed virus restrictions endorsed by public health experts.

You can talk to independents, even Democrats, who may not necessarily vote for him, but they remember the lasting impact DeSantis’s policies had on their children, that they could go to school. They are happy they were able to keep their businesses open. [emphasis added]

Faced with a major crisis, a governor chooses the course that minimizes painful consequences for his constituents. What an insidious ultra-MAGA plot! Virtuous chief executives like Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer and Jay Inslee and Kathy Hochul showed their citizens the path to redemptive suffering. The villainous DeSantis just made it possible for them to live normal lives.

The Last War’s Failed Weapons

The French generals who made plans for fighting the war that came after the Great War are routinely mocked for having assumed that what worked in 1918 would lead to success in the next conflict. In that belief, they endorsed devoting vast resources to the construction of the Maginot Line and downplayed the usefulness of tanks.

That is one of the many instances of “preparing to fight the last war”, a phenomenon hardly confined to French military men of the 1930’s. But what would one say if, instead of trusting to concrete-reinforced trenches, the generals had put their faith in massed cavalry charges? To think that static fortifications could stop whatever attack Germany might launch wasn’t delusional. If armor and air forces hadn’t advanced as far as they did between 1918 and 1939, the Maginot Line would very likely have been a shining success, an impenetrable shield that would have allowed the French army to concentrate forces on its left flank and repel any German repetition of the 1914 offensive.

Cavalry charges, on the other hand, had been almost uniformly disastrous. Even soldiers who very much liked horses and felt nostalgia for their military role, figured out as much (one such was George S. Patton) and turned to other means of waging war.

Imagining Anthony Fauxi and Rochelle Walensky in 1938, you can hear their ringing endorsements of the war horse and the winged hussar. As John Tierney relates in the Wall Street Journal (behind a pay wall, but you can read generous excerpts from it and other pertinent commentary here) –

Lockdowns and mask mandates were the most radical experiment in the history of public health, but Dr. Walensky isn’t alone in thinking they failed because they didn’t go far enough. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president, recently said there should have been “much, much more stringent restrictions” early in the pandemic. The World Health Organization is revising its official guidance to call for stricter lockdown measures in the next pandemic, and it is even seeking a new treaty that would compel nations to adopt them. The World Economic Forum hails the Covid lockdowns as the model for a “Great Reset” empowering technocrats to dictate policies world-wide.

There is certainly room for debate about whether shutting down much of the world’s economy, keeping children out of school and turning masks into a symbol of civic virtue did more good than harm. What is beyond rational dispute is that, if the balance favored the good, it was a very small increment of good, even if one takes no account of the health effects of lowered standards of living, interruptions of children’s education, postponement of non-Covid medical care and drastic disruptions of daily life.

U.S. states with more-restrictive policies fared no better, on average, than states with less-restrictive policies. There’s still no convincing evidence that masks provided any significant benefits. When case rates throughout the pandemic are plotted on a graph, the trajectory in states with mask mandates is virtually identical to the trajectory in states without mandates. (The states without mandates actually had slightly fewer Covid deaths per capita.) International comparisons yield similar results. A Johns Hopkins University meta-analysis of studies around the world concluded that lockdown and mask restrictions have had “little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.”

Florida and Sweden were accused of deadly folly for keeping schools and businesses open without masks, but their policies have been vindicated. In Florida the cumulative age-adjusted rate of Covid mortality is below the national average, and the rate of excess mortality is lower than in California, which endured one of the nation’s strictest lockdowns and worst spikes in unemployment. Sweden’s cumulative rate of excess mortality is one of the lowest in the world, and there’s one particularly dismal difference between it and the rest of Europe as well as America: the number of younger adults who died not from Covid but from the effects of lockdowns.

So the positive effects of the Covid mitigation strategy are hard to discern. The negative effects are starkly visible:

Even in 2020, Sweden’s worst year of the pandemic, the mortality rate remained normal among Swedes under 70. Meanwhile, the death rate surged among younger adults in the U.S., and a majority of them died from causes other than Covid. In Sweden, there have been no excess deaths from non-Covid causes during the pandemic, but in the U.S. there have been more than 170,000 of these excess deaths.

No one knows exactly how many of those deaths were caused by lockdowns, but the social disruptions, isolation, inactivity and economic havoc clearly exacted a toll. Medical treatments and screenings were delayed, and there were sharp increases in the rates of depression, anxiety, obesity, diabetes, fatal strokes and heart disease, and fatal abuse of alcohol and drugs.

As Mr. Tierney also recounts, the futility of the Fauxi-Walensky strategy was foreseen. A pre-Covid study by one of the world’s premier epidemiologists and his colleagues “considered an array of proposed measures to deal with a virus as deadly as the 1918 Spanish flu” and concluded “that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted”.

This advice was subsequently heeded in the pre-Covid pandemic plans prepared by the CDC and other public-health agencies. The WHO’s review of the scientific literature concluded that there was “no evidence” that universal masking “is effective in reducing transmission.” The CDC’s pre-2020 planning scenarios didn’t recommend universal masking or extended school and business closures even during a pandemic as severe as the 1918 Spanish flu. Neither did the U.K.’s 2011 plan, which urged “those who are well to carry on with their normal daily lives” and flatly declared, “It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic influenza virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.”

But when the moment of decision came in March 2020, the plans were thrown out the window. Panicked by computer models “that proved to be absurdly wrong”, the “experts” chose the tactics that had failed before. Deployed against Covid, they failed again. And therefore the experts look forward to giving them another try the next time that a virus races out of control.

“When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”

Addendum: Belatedly, I see that Mr. Tierney has covered much of this ground in a non-paywalled City Journal essay. 

Sri Lanka: The Times Keeps Its Eye Off the Ball

Today’s “Morning” newsletter from the New York Times talks about one of the greatest, least noticed disasters unfolding around us: the destruction of economy of Sri Lanka (Ceylon). Two weeks ago, on July 9th, mobs seized the offices of the country’s president and prime minister and burned down the prime minister’s home. Both men resigned their posts. The president fled into exile. The Times tells us this about “What led to the recent protests”:

Sri Lanka’s recent upheaval offers an extreme example of the world’s recent problems. Covid disrupted the country’s major industries, particularly tourism, and then leaders failed to adapt – setting off a chain of economic calamities, including food and fuel shortages. The crisis prompted protests, culminating in the president’s resignation and the installation of a new president on Wednesday.

So the “shortages” – “It’s not just that [fuel] was expensive; it was impossible to find” – were another Covid side effect, aggravated, we’re later informed, by the wishful thinking of a government controlled by a single family.

Until several months in, there was really no government recognition of the crisis. The dynast Gotabaya Rajapaksa was leading the administration at the time, and he had appointed his brothers and his nephew to his cabinet. He didn’t take a lot of counsel from outside his family.

There was a lot of denialism among them. They were told repeatedly that the economy was deteriorating. But they were certain tourism would continue to increase after Covid and that would be enough to shore up finances. But that didn’t happen; tourism was starting to come back, but it wasn’t enough.

But in the end, so the Times assures us, things aren’t so bad. “Gleefulness” was the hallmark of the protests (no mention of the accompanying arson). Admittedly, the erstwhile protesters “are not happy” that the deposed PM managed to get himself elected president. Still and all –

In the short term, we probably will see continued turmoil. But people are invested in ensuring Sri Lanka doesn’t fall again into this situation where it’s teetering on autocracy, where there’s little transparency and where the will of the people is ignored. So it’s mostly a positive story.

That “positive story” leaves out just a few bits of information.

The immediate cause of the country’s food shortage was the government’s enactment of a ban on chemical fertilizers. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa had become a convert to organic farming and a “Green Sri Lanka”.

Milton Friedman said that if you put the government in charge of the Sahara Desert, there would be a sand shortage. What the Sri Lankan government has done is almost as unbelievable. There are few better places in the world for agriculture. Sri Lanka is a warm, tropical island with plenty of annual rainfall, perfect for growing rice, tea, cocoa, and spices, and located along numerous ocean-trade routes for easy market access.

With the addition of modern fertilizers and farming techniques, the country went from subsistence farming to commercial farming. Sri Lanka had been self-sufficient in rice production since 2005. A 20-year-old Sri Lankan has seen the country’s GDP per capita roughly double over his lifetime. In 1990, Sri Lanka’s GDP per capita was about $2,000 greater than in nearby India. By 2020, it was more than $6,000 greater.

But after the fertilizer ban went into effect, rice production fell by 20 percent in only six months. The country had to import $450 million worth of rice to make up the difference, and rice prices still went up by 50 percent. Tea exports plummeted, costing the economy $425 million. The government reversed parts of the policy in November 2021, but the damage was already done.

The fertilizer ban was only the latest marcher in a parade of economic follies. Here is a summary written last April:

This slow-motion train wreck first began in November 2019 when Gotabaya Rajapaksa won a decisive victory in the country’s presidential elections. He immediately placed family members into key government positions and suspended Parliament. Then in August 2020, his Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna party – the Sri Lanka People’s Front – posted a landslide victory. The win gave Rajapaksa the ability to amend the country’s constitution, which he quickly availed himself of. In total control, President Rajapaksa and his brother Mahinda, the prime minister [whom protests forced to resign in May], went on a spending spree that was financed in part by Sri Lanka’s central bank. The results have been economic devastation. The rupee has lost 44 percent of its value since President Rajapaksa took the reins, and inflation, according to my measure, is running at a stunning 74.5 percent per year. Last week, Sri Lanka announced that it was unilaterally suspending payments on its external debt. These economic developments have led to Sri Lankans protesting in the streets and a government in disarray.

The “spending spree” included “an international airport, a seaport, numerous unnecessary roads and bridges, and a cricket stadium”, in other words, “infrastructure”, in other other words, “jobs for the boys and shovel-ready graft”.

Covid certainly didn’t help Sri Lanka, but it’s doubtful that conditions there would be a lot better today even if Dr. Fauxi’s Chicom friends had maintained proper safety measures at their Wuhan biological laboratory. I wonder why the Times leaves out so much of the story.

No, actually I don’t wonder.

A Pandemic of Sanity

I’m now abroad (and anyone who even thinks of the obvious punch line risks expulsion from the Internet or at least from the Washington Post) and therefore may be less timely in posting until I return. But I did want to note a hopeful sign of the waning of the panicdemic.

Italy hasn’t yet revoked its mask mandate for airline passengers arriving in or departing from the country despite a European Union determination that it no longer serves any purpose (assuming arguendo that it ever did). Given that the raison d’être of the Draghi government is keeping Italy in line with EU dictates, it’s ironic that it stands up to Brussels on a rare occasion when Brussels is right.

My airline states that, while it no longer demands masks on domestic flights, it complies with the laws of foreign countries. Annoyed but not annoyed enough to cancel the trip, I took care to add a mask to my carry-on.

And what happened? The airline personnel at the departure gate said nary a word about masks. Hardly any passengers wore them, nor did most of the flight crew. At the airport in Rome, masks were no more common.

This bit of Roman silliness is scheduled to expire officially on June 15th. It appears to have wasted away already.

Demasking the Gray Lady

Yesterday the New York Times posted a non-paywalled column admitting that “mask mandates have not done much to reduce Covid caseloads over the past two years” and conceding, albeit reluctantly, that there are far more effective ways to reduce the residual risks posed by the disease.

The writer finds it paradoxical that “masks work and mask mandates do not work”. By “masks work”, he means –

Masks reduce the spread of the Covid virus by preventing virus particles from traveling from one person’s nose or mouth into the air and infecting another person. Laboratory studies have repeatedly demonstrated the effect.

In fact, as others have pointed out, real-world studies, including many that were available when Covid broke out, have demonstrated that the sort of masks that people actually wear are marginally effective at best.

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on mask use, generally more reliable than observational studies, though not infallible, typically show that cloth and surgical masks offer little protection. A few RCTs suggest that perfect adherence to an exacting mask protocol may guard against influenza, but meta-analyses find little on the whole to suggest that masks offer meaningful protection. WHO guidelines from 2019 on influenza say that despite “mechanistic plausibility for the potential effectiveness” of masks, studies showed a benefit too small to be established with any certainty. Another literature review by researchers from the University of Hong Kong agrees. Its best estimate for the protective effect of surgical masks against influenza, based on ten RCTs published through 2018, was just 22 percent, and it could not rule out zero effect.

For a more comprehensive summary of the evidence, see Jeffrey H. Anderson, “Do Masks Work?: A Review of the Evidence”.

In the early days of the epidemic, medical authorities like Anthony Fauxi discouraged the public from buying and wearing protective masks. Dr. Fauxi now insists that he was lying. It seems to me more plausible that he was “following the science” back then, only to dismiss it later, when mask wearing became an emblem of good citizenship. Mask mandates weren’t based on any scientific consensus but on the old, familiar syllogism:

Something must be done!
This is something.
Therefore. . . .

Fighting an epidemic with masks is like fighting flood waters with a levee that has gaps. The masking gaps are glaringly obvious:

Airplane passengers remove their masks to have a drink. Restaurant patrons go maskless as soon as they walk in the door. Schoolchildren let their masks slide down their faces. So do adults: Research by the University of Minnesota suggests that between 25 percent and 30 percent of Americans consistently wear their masks below their nose.

And the outcome is just what one would predict – and that many troglodytes did predict:

In U.S. cities where mask use has been more common, Covid has spread at a similar rate as in mask-resistant cities. Mask mandates in schools also seem to have done little to reduce the spread. Hong Kong, despite almost universal mask-wearing, recently endured one of the world’s worst Covid outbreaks.

Advocates of mandates sometimes argue that they do have a big effect even if it is not evident in population-wide data, because of how many other factors are at play. But this argument seems unpersuasive.

After all, the effect of vaccines on severe illness is blazingly obvious in the geographic data: Places with higher vaccination rates have suffered many fewer Covid deaths. The patterns are clear even though the world is a messy place, with many factors other than vaccines influencing Covid death rates.

Yet when you look at the data on mask-wearing – both before vaccines were available and after, as well as both in the U.S. and abroad – you struggle to see any patterns.

And so the writer gives in.

If the mandate has even a modest benefit, it can be worth it.

But this approach is not sustainable for years on end. Masks hinder communication, fog glasses and can be uncomfortable. There is a reason that children and airline passengers have broken out in applause when told they can take off their masks.

In the current stage of the pandemic, there are less divisive measures that are more effective than mask mandates. Booster shots are widely available. A drug that can further protect the immunocompromised, known as Evusheld, is increasingly available. So are post-infection treatments, like Paxlovid, that make Covid less severe.

Will any of this commentary persuade hard core, progressive Times readers? Not immediately, I’m sure, but perhaps, as evidence and experience peck away at their preconceptions, Mad Mask Mountain will be worn down.

Further reading: Not long after I posted this entry, I saw the Foundation for Economic Education’s reaction to the same Times column: “The New York Times Explains Why Mask Mandates Don’t Work”.

Also worth your notice is a paper published in The Lancet under the formidable title, “Revisiting Pediatric COVID-19 Cases in Counties With and Without School Mask Requirements – United States, July 1-October 20 2021” (caveat: not yet peer-reviewed). It revisits and enlarges a study of school mask mandates that the Centers for Disease Control has cited in support of swaddling schoolchildren. The new study reaches the opposite conclusion. Those who don’t want to read the whole thing will find a summary here.

Covid and Punishment

Until a few days ago, when I began making plans for a trip to Europe, I was blissfully unaware that anyone who boards an airline flight from a foreign country to the United States is required to present a negative Covid-19 test “conducted on a specimen collected no more than 1 day before the flight’s departure” or proof of having recovered from the disease within the past 90 days. So the Centers for Disease Control decreed in a 30-page ukase issued on December 2, 2021.

The December order superseded an earlier one that required tests but allowed a three-day window for performing them. The rationale for shortening the period was the appearance of the omigod omicron variant, which at that time was brand new and a topic of much fearful speculation, notwithstanding that all indications were that it was milder than earlier Covid strains. Nearly six months have passed since then. Omicron hasn’t proven to be an omega, and it now accounts for almost all cases in the U.S. The incremental risk posed by returning travelers is indistinguishable from nil.

Yet the CDC order remains in place, inconveniencing Americans on their way home and worse than inconveniencing the small number who test positive and are then trapped abroad until they recover. Even though the government is purportedly preventing their return “for the public good”, it will do nothing to ease their burden. The Administration that sends crack pipes “safe smoking kits” to drug addicts free of charge has no sympathy for citizens who may run up thousands of dollars of costs while mandatorily stranded in other countries.

What is the motive for this measure? It does nothing to protect public health, and the high priests of CDC can’t reasonably believe that it does. It would have had little chance of keeping omicron out of the U.S. if it had been issued while the strain was confined to South Africa. It is now as pointless as plugging a leak in the dike after the water has overflowed it. No other country, so far as I can tell, imposes a reciprocal requirement on travelers entering from the U.S. Does the virus act differently in Europe than in North America?

Is the CDC indifferent to the hardships that its policies entail? Or does it see Covid sufferers as sinners who deserve punishment? Or do its leaders just enjoy the exercise of arbitrary power? Whatever the answer, this episode is enough to demonstrate that the organization needs a thorough top-to-bottom overhaul, lest in the future it inflict yet graver damage on the health, safety and prosperity of the Republic.

Update (June 11, 2022): With obvious reluctance, the CDC has rescinded the Covid test requirement for entering the United States by air, effective at a minute after midnight Eastern Daylight Time on June 12th. The order rescinding the previous ukase concedes, perhaps with regret, “that the now-dominant Omicron variant, though more transmissible than prior variants, has generally caused less severe disease among those who are infected”. There’s no admission that it was irrational to try to keep out of the country a virus that is already freely circulating within it.

An Incident in the Cloisters of the Woke

Have you ever dreamed of belonging to the woke nomenklatura, of being free to harass and bully the deplorables to your heart’s content? It sounds like a wonderful life, and many of your contemporaries have chosen it. But before you join them, listen to this true tale. (Caveat: You may or may not be able to worm your way into the web site. If you can’t, the following summary furnishes all the pertinent facts.)

Facebook hosts a private group called “Law Mamas”. Its members are female lawyers with children, and it reportedly has 13,000 members, though it is now closed to new entrants. Krista joined in 2016, shortly before the birth of the first of her three children. The group was then accepting members, but, quite appropriately, Krista had to wait nine months before she was admitted.

Krista describes herself as a “liberal Democrat”, but she had a dark secret. One of her children went into anaphylactic shock some years ago after being vaccinated (not for Covid). That didn’t turn her into an anti-vaxxer but did lead her to weigh benefits versus risks. When the topic of Covid vaccines for very young children arose on Law Mamas, she offered her opinion:

I’m obviously in the minority here. But I’m not even remotely interested in my 2/4/5 year olds getting a covid vaccine. The relative/absolute risk is so low for this group I couldn’t justify it. I’m pretty crunchy generally, but especially with stuff like this. Totally respect everyone’s choice and Glad it’s our choice to make. It’s all so hard.

Note the defensive tone. Perhaps she had already gained some insight into what a Law Mama is really like.

The backlash came quickly. One of the group’s moderators replied: “This was unnecessary and triggering. You know you are in the vast minority in this group and it’s not a hard decision for most of us. … This is not the group to provide your opinion on this much more deny the statistics.

What “statistics” was Krista denying? According to 2020 World Health Organization data for the world as a whole, children under five years old accounted for about two million Covid-19 cases and fewer than 2,000 Covid deaths. Put another way, if young children contract the disease, their chance of death is on the order of one in a thousand. Other data indicate that their risk of hospitalization is likewise vanishingly low. But woke facts are whatever the wokerati assert. Statistical analysis is just another form of white supremacy.

Within a few minutes after she posted her heresy, Krista was expelled from Law Mamas. Another member then complained, “Hey, I don’t love that we all just kicked out this girl from our group for making the statement.” She was expelled, too.

After that, one presumes, the Law Mamas returned to denouncing the intolerant ways of Republicans and trembling at the descent of fascism on America.

The Times Takes a Baby Step Toward Covid Sanity

The New York Times daily newsletter “The Morning” (distributed to a list that includes a seemingly random collection of non-subscribers like me) has long been a haven for Covid panicdemic thinking, albeit not as strident in tone as some of its ideological colleagues. For instance, it regularly highlights data that supposedly show that radical right “Red States” have higher incidences of the disease than virtuously progressive “Blue States”, a comparison that seems to me of no value even if accurate. (The same is true of mirror-image conservative cherry picking. Not only are the data fuzzy and full of confounding factors, but absolute proof that states of one color had lower rates of infection and death than those of the other would prove only that one side’s political instincts led to a better response to this particular idiosyncratic emergency. Generalizing from that is audacious if not preposterous.)

Last Friday’s “The Morning” carried the subheading, “What might a more effective mask mandate look like?” It was prompted, naturally, by the federal court decision invalidating the ukase ordering all peasants who venture onto airplanes, trains and public transit to cover their noses and mouths with symbols of their inferior status. I anticipated a rousing defense of that decree and of the decision of the Centers for Disease Control to issue it. Instead came what reads like a tiny, reluctant step in the direction of the uncomfortable (to the Times) realization that, whatever masking’s theoretical merits as a coronavirus preventative (arguable, if dubious), mask mandates are about as effective in practice as commanding people to exercise and eat healthier diets.

The newsletter writer has discovered a nugget of common sense that he seems to think is an insight derived from advanced expertise:

A central lesson of public health is that people have a limited capacity to change their routine. They’re not machines. For that reason, the best responses to health crises depend on triage, with political leaders prioritizing the most valuable steps that people can take.

Gee, you coulda fooled me. I note that when the Great Barrington Declaration proposed exactly that, “Focused Protection”, the Centers for Disease Control launched a smear campaign against its authors. I don’t expect the Times to ask why Dr. Fauxi was oblivious to that “central lesson of public health”.

Anyway, while staunchly insisting that “Rigorous laboratory tests show that masks reduce Covid transmission”, the newsletter concedes that “supporting real-world evidence tends to be much weaker” and attributes the disconnect to the mandate’s concessions to the inability of peons to obey orders:

The transportation mandate had so many exceptions that many Americans understandably questioned its worth. Travelers took off their masks to eat and drink. Some flight attendants removed their masks to make announcements. Some passengers wore their masks on their chins. The mandate also did not require N95 and KN95 masks, which are more effective against the virus than cloth masks or standard medical masks.

The writer then inches further in the direction of declaring mandated masks to be a useless encumbrance:

The reality is that masks are less valuable today than they were a year or two ago. Covid vaccines are universally available in the U.S. for adults and teenagers, and the virus is overwhelmingly mild in children. Treatments for vulnerable people are increasingly available.

And consider this: About half of Americans have recently had the Omicron variant of Covid. They currently have little reason to wear a mask, for anybody’s sake.

Together, vaccines and treatments mean that the risks of severe Covid for boosted people – including the vulnerable – seem to be similar to the risks of severe influenza. The U.S., of course, does not mandate mask wearing every winter to reduce flu cases. No country does.

Another relevant factor is that one-way masking reduces Covid transmission. People who want to wear a mask because of an underlying health condition, a fear of long Covid or any other reason can do so.

If Scott Atlas had written that, the Times would denounce his heresy. The only rational corollary to such reasoning is that the CDC ought to have repealed the mask mandate voluntarily rather than waiting for a judge to declare that it had overstepped its authority.

But, no, a Times writer can’t retreat that far. Instead, he concludes:

Still, if Covid illness begins surging again at some point, there may be situations in which mandates make sense. To be effective, any mandates probably need to be strict, realistic and enforced. Imagine, for example, that a subway system mandated KN95 or N95 masks inside train cars – but not on platforms, which tend to be airy.

Or imagine that the C.D.C. required high-quality masks in the airport and aboard a plane on the runway – but not in flight when people will inevitably eat and when a plane’s air-filtration system is on.

All that this solution (one that awaits a (perhaps hoped-for) hypothetical Covid resurgence) demands is that air travelers and subway riders keep a stock of non-reusable, relatively expensive masks on hand and learn to fit them properly onto their faces and get used to breathing through them and, if they are facially hirsute, trim or shave off their moustaches and beards. They will still, of course, take their masks off to eat or drink at airports (what else is there to do when you have a two-hour layover at O’Hare?), and snacking on subway platforms (not to mention disobedience to regulations) is hardly unknown. The writer has “strict” down pat. “Realistic”? Doubtful. “Enforced”? How many mask police will O’Hare Airport or the Chicago Transit Authority hire?

All in all, I see grounds for hope. If the Times wavers, is there a chance that the CDC will embrace science over “The Science”?

The “Submerged State” and Its Concealed Costs

The New York Times’s “The Morning” newsletter today laments the “Perils of Invisible Government”. The “perils” that worry it are not silent governmental intrusion into every nook and cranny of life but, rather, the failure of so many people to take note of all the wonderful things that the government is doing for them.

More than a decade ago, the political scientist Suzanne Mettler coined the phrase “the submerged state” to describe a core feature of modern American government: Many people don’t realize when they are benefiting from a government program.

“Americans often fail to recognize government’s role in society, even if they have experienced it in their own lives,” Mettler wrote. “That is because so much of what government does today is largely invisible.”

Her main examples were tax breaks, including those that help people buy homes, pay for medical care and save for retirement. The concept also included programs so complex or removed from everyday life that many people did not understand them, like federal subsidies for local governments.

The Times writer’s specific lament is that voters aren’t giving the Biden Administration credit for the so-called “American Rescue Plan”, the $1.9 trillion grab bag of spending (following the Trump Administration’s $2.2 trillion “CARES Act”) that Democrats muscled through Congress in the hope of claiming credit for an economic recovery that would have inevitably followed as the Covid-19 panicdemic subsided. The “program has become a case study in how easily voters can overlook even a lavishly funded government initiative delivering benefits close to home”.

Examples in the American Rescue Plan include community center renovations, housing initiatives and health programs. Collectively, the projects may be valuable. Individually, many may be so modest as to go unnoticed. Americans also may not realize that the projects are connected to a federal law.

A specific example cited is three bus lines in Boston that are now free of charge thanks to federal subventions. “It hardly seems like the kind of program that all of Boston will be talking about.” The not-too-hidden message is that President Biden and his party would regain their popularity if only the public talked more about how much largesse has been showered upon it.

That is, the Times complains, quite different from the good old days of Democratic Party hegemony. “Social Security, Medicare and the G.I. Bill – as well as New Deal parks, roads and bridges, many with signs marking them as federal projects – helped popularize government action because they were so obvious.”

Let’s not discuss for the moment the reality vel non of the “submerged” benefits. (They have certainly been real for fraudsters; the amounts stolen from the various Covid relief programs are staggering.) There is another side of the ledger that is likewise submerged or, more accurately, concealed: how the recipients of “benefits close to home” also bear the costs.

The New Deal and its immediate successors at least made a show of paying visibly for visible benefits. Over two-thirds of American households pay more in Social Security and Medicare taxes than their income tax bills. The American Rescue Plan and its ilk weren’t paid for by raising taxes, a step that would have immediately exposed their very high cost-to-benefit ratio. Instead, the cost was concealed by borrowing.

From the point of view of legislators with two-, four- and six-year time horizons, borrowing is a wonderful expedient, and it was especially attractive in an era of low interest rates. So long as the federal government could borrow at one or two percent, servicing a debt load not seen since World War II didn’t look all that difficult. True, the government’s capacity to borrow in the future would be reduced, but that was a problem for posterity, and, as the Irish politician famously asked, “What has posterity ever done for us?”

Now we are discovering, as we should have known all along, one of the lesson of “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”:

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don't work you die.”

A vast influx of dollars coupled with the enforced idleness of Covid lockdowns had its inescapable consequence: Prices are rising and with them interest rates. Both are costs of that benevolent “submerged state” that the Times touts. Let us by all means talk about free bus rides in Boston, but also about five dollar a gallon gasoline, rising grocery bills and the government’s diminished resources with which to confront whatever crisis comes next. All of those costs, by the bye, fall most heavily and immediately on the least wealthy segment of the population.

“Submerged state” is, one might say, an apt term. The fatal prow of an iceberg is also submerged.

Mask Madness

As I have mentioned before, various left-wing grifters (or perhaps right-wing agents provocateurs) deluge me with a dozen or so e-mails a day peddling progressive hysteria. Here is one that landed this morning. I reproduce it in its full amateur-layout glory:

The guys behind the “Progressive Turnout Project”, whoever they may be, evidently think that their target audience is gullible enough to believe that 50,000 SIGNATURES BY MIDNIGHT will reverse a federal court order that the Biden Administration itself hasn’t sought to stay pending appeal. It’s not even clear that an appeal will be filed. It is clear that, outside of certain twitterati bubbles, the demise of mandatory mask-wearing on airplanes, trains, buses and ride shares has been greeted with enthusiasm. A new City Journal article explains why that reaction is exactly right.

It’s a difficult addiction to overcome, according to the Japanese therapists who specialize in treating it – but a simple remedy might help some maskaholics. It’s a graph that should be required viewing for everyone still wearing a mask and every public official or journalist who still insists that mask mandates “control the spread.”

The graph tracks the results of a natural experiment that occurred nationwide during the pandemic. Eleven states never mandated masks, while the other 39 states enforced mandates. The mandates typically began early in the pandemic in 2020 and remained until at least the summer of 2021, with some extending into 2022. The black line on the graph shows the weekly rate of Covid cases in all the states with mask mandates that week, while the orange line shows the rate in all the states without mandates.

The picture needs no embellishing words.

That masks, especially the porous cloth coverings that most wearers adopt, are useless against airborne viruses was a fact well-established before the Covid-19 outbreak. Anthony Fauxi’s early exhortations against masking weren’t, as he later claimed, a “noble lie” but simply a science-based recommendation that he later repudiated for patently political reasons.

The madness is nearing its end, even if the madmen aren’t yet entirely departed.

Update (4:10 p.m.): Contrary to my optimistic skepticism, the government has announced that it will file a notice of appeal. The Justice Department’s twitter statement and the Wall Street Journal’s report make no mention of a motion to stay the district court’s order. Travelers remain free for at least a little while longer.

An Iota of Good News

No doubt the Eleventh Circuit will stay a Florida district court order vacating the requirement that transportation passengers wear masks, the irrational remnant of two years of irrational panicdemic policies. Still, one may hope. . . .

Update (6:50 p.m.): To my surprise, the Biden Administration didn’t rush to the appeals court to ask for a stay, and the major airlines (and even Amtrak) immediately made masks optional. Some pilots made the announcement in mid-flight. Perhaps there are folks in the Administration who know a losing cause when they see it – unlike many of their most loud-tweeting fans in the media. Scott Johnson of PowerLine has first-impressions commentary on the Judge Mizelle’s decision.

Do Vaccines Cause Covid-19? Not Likely

The estimable John Hinderaker calls attention to an ominous looking chart. It shows the results of Covid-19 tests at Walgreen’s pharmacies. As he notes, “Walgreen’s must run an enormous number of covid tests, nationwide. So their data should be a pretty good sample.”

Your immediate reaction is probably like his: “There are several possible explanations here. The obvious one is that vaccination makes you more likely to catch covid.” But, on further reflection, that isn’t quite so obvious. For that explanation to be correct, Covid, or the vaccines against it, would have to be far different from all other infectious diseases or vaccines. Medical science isn’t infallible, but it has progressed somewhat beyond leeches and the four humours, so we ought to give the data more thought before adopting a theory that assumes medical ignorance. The superficial analysis doesn’t take into account two key points.

First, the results shown on the chart are for last week, over two years after Covid-19 appeared in the United States. The disease is highly infectious, but a large proportion of cases show no or very mild symptoms. Therefore, many people have suffered Covid without knowing it.

Contracting Covid reduces the likelihood of getting it again; it’s a natural vaccine. Walgreen’s isn’t testing two groups, vaccinated and unvaccinated, but three: vaccinated, unvaccinated who have already had Covid, and unvaccinated who haven’t. (Many vaccinated have also had Covid, but they don’t enter into this particular discussion.) Walgreen’s doesn’t report, and surely doesn’t know, the relative proportions of the last two groups. Since Covid is easy to contract, it seems likely that, after the causative virus has been in circulation for at least 25 months, a very high percentage of the unvaccinated have, knowingly or not, been infected and have “natural immunity”. What the Walgreen’s chart suggests, then, is that Covid is the best vaccine against itself. Of course, a symptomatic case is rather less pleasant than a jab in the arm.

Second, Walgreen’s isn’t testing a random sample of the public. There are two principal motives for being tested: Covid-like symptoms and compliance with demands to show a negative test as a condition for coming into the office, traveling or other activities. The unvaccinated are required to present test results more often than anyone else. It follows that they are less likely than the vaccinated to be symptomatic at the time of their tests. Someone with symptoms is, in any conceivable set of circumstances, more likely to have Covid than someone without.

The Walgreen’s data indeed show that the unvaccinated account for a considerably larger percentage of tests than their percentage of the whole population. For instance, according to CDC data, 95 percent of persons age 65 and older have been vaccinated, but 13.4 percent of Walgreen’s test takers in that age group haven’t been. In the 45 to 64 age group, the vaccination rate is around 90 percent and the Walgreen’s test percentage 24 percent.

The combination of these factors makes the chart explicable. Many, plausibly a great majority, of the unvaccinated group are naturally immune, and a significant proportion have no symptoms. The vaccinated group is mostly symptomatic, and it is reasonable to think that the more vaccine doses they’ve had, the less likely they are to be tested in the absence of overt symptoms.

In summary, the strongest inference from the Walgreen’s data is that natural immunity to Covid is widespread and effective. Once one takes into account who are being tested and why, the alternative hypothesis, that Covid vaccines cause the illness through some unknown mechanism, is supported only weakly, if at all.

Take Not Counsel of Your Fears

John Tierney has just posted an article on “Understanding the Covid Odds” describing research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC’s director has been a consistent Covid alarmist, so this study doesn’t emanate from Covid pacifist quarters.

The researchers’ conclusion, based on data from 465 health care facilities around the country:

Among 1,228,664 persons who completed primary vaccination during December 2020–October 2021, severe COVID-19–associated outcomes (0.015%) or death (0.0033%) were rare. Risk factors for severe outcomes included age ≥65 years, immunosuppressed, and six other underlying conditions. All persons with severe outcomes had at least one risk factor; 78% of persons who died had at least four.

Of these 1.2 million vaccinated people, 2,246 (one in 547) contracted Covid and 189 (one in 6,501) had “severe” outcomes (“diagnosis of acute respiratory failure, need for NIV [noninvasive ventilation], ICU [intensive care unit] admission, or death”). Of those, 36 died; 24 survived but needed ICU care. The number of deaths and ICU admissions among those under age 65 with no additional risk factors was zero. The number of deaths among those with fewer than four risk factors (97 percent of the sample, that is, about 1.9 million people) totaled eight.

As Mr. Tierney observes, these numbers demonstrate that Covid is very low on the list of threats to life and health:

Those are roughly the same odds that in the course of a year you will die in a fire, or that you’ll perish by falling down stairs. Going anywhere near automobiles is a bigger risk: you’re three times more likely during a given year to be killed while riding in a car, and also three times more likely to be a pedestrian casualty. The 150,000-to-1 odds of a Covid death are even longer than the odds over your lifetime of dying in an earthquake or being killed by lightning.

The study covered the period before the Omicron variant monopolized Covid infections. That Omicron causes a milder disease than its predecessor isn’t seriously disputed. (The CDC says as much, though it tries hard to keep the panicdemic alive.) Hence, the minuscule risk described by the researchers has declined since they completed their work.

These numbers expose the irrationality of continued vaccine mandates, masking and other extraordinary precautions inspired by Covid phobia. Whatever may have been the right policy one or two years ago, there’s no justification for pretending that Covid is today anything worse than the multitude of other minor risks that we confront in the course of being alive. Vaccination is readily available for everyone who, unvaccinated, would face more than a trivial prospect of a bad Covid outcome. Those who choose to forgo vaccination pose a threat only to themselves and to others who make the same choice, and the prevalence of Omicron, along with the rising number of persons who, vaccinated or not, have immunity stemming from asymptomatic or mild cases, is reducing their risk, too.

At this point, Covid hawks are either ignorant or malicious. For ordinary people, ignorance is the obvious explanation. For political, cultural and social elites, one can’t help suspecting that ignorance is willful and impelled by motives that are far from benign.

Ivy League Panicdemic

A Yale undergraduate organization that, many years ago, I played a part in founding holds an annual banquet. Last year, it had to be canceled, because Yale was barely functioning and students’ lives were subject to severe restrictions. This year, preparations were under weigh for the event. This evening, however, I received an e-mail from the chairman announcing that it will have to be postponed.

[G]iven the the relative lack of restrictions last semester, I didn't foresee any changes in University policy preventing us from following through with the event.

Unfortunately, this afternoon, the University announced a new slate of COVID-19 restrictions effective until, at the earliest, February 7th. Among these restrictions are a prohibition on students visiting any off-campus establishment, which would prevent currently enrolled [students] from attending the Banquet. Between this, and the possibility of further restrictions being imposed, we've determined that we cannot feasibly hold the Banquet at this time.

My alma mater seems determined to seize whatever prize is offered for Overbearing Stupidity. The notion that men and women in their late teens and early twenties must be subjected to a version of in loco parentis that would have been considered excessive in a 19th Century convent can be entertained only by administrators who either lust after the exercise of arbitrary power or have been driven mad by an irrational fear of what is, for persons of undergraduate age, a disease that inflicts, at worst, the same symptoms as a moderately severe cold.

The next step, I foresee, will be the updating of Yale’s motto from Lux et Veritas to Nox et Ignorantia.

If I were still a student, I would obtain a bull horn, take a position in the vicinity of President Salovey’s manse, and recite in a stentorian voice a parable for our times, “How Hamilcar Wilts Prepared For Everything And Got It”.

Boola, boola.

Dissonance in Trumpistan

Last week Donald Trump enthusiastically endorsed “his” coronavirus vaccines, which he can rightly claim in the sense that he committed billions of dollars of government funds to purchasing them before they had been developed, much less approved for widespread use. If that effort had failed, there’s no doubt that Mr. Trump would be widely blamed for wasting the taxpayers’ money, but his gamble paid off, and it’s quite understandable that he – especially he – would want the credit, albeit he was until recently pretty reluctant to do so.

Many of his most fervent followers don’t agree with his pro-vaccination stance. Today the “Daily Trump Report”, whose masthead proclaims, “WE [heart] TRUMP”, tried to answer the question, “Why Is President Trump Pushing The Poison Vaxx?” Spoiler: You won’t learn the answer by reading the article. Instead, you must watch a YouTube video by a guy who “wrote his own computer software that basically analyzed the entire internet and looked for patterns in linguistics that would amazingly start to predict future events”. Hari Sheldon smiles.

Well, I didn’t watch the YouTube, having better things to occupy my time on Boxing Day (such as a quick game of the excellent but sadly orphaned Title Bout Championship Boxing). I shall have to remain in ignorance of the evidence allegedly supporting the writer’s conclusions:

President Trump is not dumb, and he is the master at using his audiences to “take their temperature” on certain topics.

He doesn’t always heed to the masses, but he always has his finger on the pulse of the nation.

So I find it impossible to believe he’s just so randomly out of touch on this one major issue. I highly doubt it.

What I said recently was my hunch is there is much more to this story that we don’t know about and one day (soon I think) it will start to come out.
As always, I believe President Trump is playing 4D chess and playing against multiple parties all at the same time.

While it’s easy for us to Monday-Morning Quarterback and say “vaccines bad!”, President Trump is juggling multiple things all at once and sometimes you have to sacrifice a pawn or even a bishop or a rook to win the game of chess.

If I believed that Donald Trump plays 4D chess in a simultaneous exhibition, I’d say that he deliberately lost in 2020, so that the world would see first hand how incompetent Joe Biden is and how malicious his handlers are. That would be the gambit of a grandmaster.

Thanksgiving Vacation

For Thanksgiving weekend, my wife and I drove to Los Angeles to attend Loscon, a regional SF convention to which we’ve become attached. On Thanksgiving Day itself, we visited Disneyland’s new “Avengers Campus” (ma femme is an enthusiast for Marvel movies), and I was reminded of Yogi Berra’s famous apothegm: “Nobody goes there; it’s too crowded.”

My attention has therefore been rather distracted for the past several days, but a few items leaked through.

• The weekend’s big topic, I gather, was the Nu Xi Omicron coronavirus variant, which inspired the stock market to fall out of fear that the panicdemic will intensify, even though the first reports suggest that it probably has less serious effects than previous variants. That is consistent with the commonsensical observation that viruses maximize their reproductive potential by becoming more infectious but less lethal. A virus doesn’t hate humanity. It just tries to survive long enough to spawn offspring, which it can’t do efficiently if it kills its host. There is strong reason to believe that the viruses behind past pandemics remain with us today as causes of the annoying but mostly harmless “common cold”.
• Egregious Xi-aspirant Jack Dorsey has resigned his positions with Twitter. I’m not such an optimist as to think that the platform will improve under his successor, who just last week gave an enlightening interview to Technology Review. What I infer is that Parag Agrawal sees Twitter as a conversational referee whose benign objective to ensure that discussion takes place solely within bounds determined by “credible sources”. Credibility will be determined, naturally, by the wise bureaucrats of Twitter Central.
• Dr. Fauxi leaped over the shark last Sunday. Did Aristotle or Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein ever proclaim, “I represent science”? Even Hyman Rickover had to be eased out eventually. Dr. Fauxi is no Rickover.
• By far the most ominous news report of the weekend was the Wall Street Journal’s “Taliban Covert Operatives Seized Kabul, Other Afghan Cities From Within”, an account of how the Haqqani Network established Fifth Columns throughout Afghanistan’s major metropolitan areas, activated them when Joe Biden announced that America was going to scuttle, and took control of the country with hardly a shot fired. That subversion could proceed undetected and unhindered for so many years is a blacker blot on the U.S. military and intelligence services than the botched withdrawal. If we don’t learn from this massive failure, it will inevitably recur.
• The Daily Telegraph hears “Whispers in Washington [that] suggest Joe Biden's camp has a plan to find a more popular replacement ahead of the 2024 White House battle”. The “plan” is supposedly to shuffle Cackling Kamala off to the Supreme Court when Justice Breyer retires. The whispers are, however, mere tintinnabulation. Should a Court vacancy occur before the 2022 elections, vacating the Vice Presidency would leave the Senate tied 50-50 with no tie breaker, which would spell the end of the Biden agenda. The chance that any Republican Senator will vote to confirm a replacement is about equal to the chance that Donald Trump will endorse Liz Cheney’s reelection bid. After 2022, unless the Democrats gain an actual Senate majority (a fading though not impossible prospect), Kamala will be unconfirmable as a Supreme Court nominee. Her qualifications for the bench aren’t just nil; they’re negative.
• A couple of noteworthy articles: In City Journal, Charles Fain Lehman explores “The Genealogy of Woke Capital”. National Review’s Kevin Williamson asks, “Enjoying Autarky?” and reminds readers of the vices of restrictive trade policies:

Some of you who went shopping on Black Friday may have noticed substantially higher prices, or found that certain products you were looking for were not to be had at any price. Some of you experienced the same thing when shopping for your Thanksgiving dinner. You have heard about “supply-chain disruptions,” which have made it difficult to get the world’s splendid produce to the United States with the ease and plenty to which we have become accustomed. Another way to think of that situation is that COVID-19 managed to do quickly what our anti-trade protectionists have tried to do slowly: deprive American consumers of inexpensive imports.

Finally, let me note that a small tax on unsolicited e-mails sent between the day before Thanksgiving and the following Tuesday would easily raise enough revenue to replace the income tax.

The Maskerade Continues

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control, garnered much attention a couple of weeks ago when she declared, “Masks can help reduce your chance of #COVID19 infection by more than 80%.” That would be remarkable, if true. As one commentator noted, Dr. Walensky evidently believes that wearing masks is more effective than Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine and not vastly less effective than Pfizer’s or Moderna’s. If that’s really the case, is it wise to spend billions of dollars on a mass vaccination program and to threaten those who aren’t vaccinated with the loss of their livelihood? No one has brought forward a scintilla of evidence supporting Dr. Walensky’s statement. She apparently just pulled it out of the air, knowing that the “fact checkers” would nod and go back to scrutinizing satires posted by the Babylon Bee.

Quite a few studies of the efficacy of face masks in protecting against Covid-19 have been published. You can find summaries of their results here and here. A news report summarizes the evidence thus:

Of 16 randomized controlled trials comparing mask effectiveness to controls with no masks, 14 failed to find a statistically significant benefit, the researchers said. And of 16 quantitative meta-analyses, half showed weak evidence of mask effectiveness, while the others “were equivocal or critical as to whether evidence supports a public recommendation of masks,” they said.

“The biggest takeaway is that more than 100 years of attempts to prove that masks are beneficial has produced a large volume of mostly low-quality evidence that has generally failed to demonstrate their value in most settings,” Dr. Jonathan Darrow, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and one of the researchers, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“Officials mulling mask recommendations should turn their attention to interventions with larger and more certain benefits, such as vaccines. Based on the evidence currently available, masks are mostly a distraction from the important work of promoting public health.”

Of particular significance is the absence of any support at all for the notion that cloth masks, overwhelmingly the most frequently seen have any beneficial effect at all:

One study (pdf) that’s widely cited by mask proponents, of rural villages in Bangladesh, found that surgical masks appeared to be marginally effective in reducing symptomatic COVID-19 but that cloth masks weren’t, Darrow and his colleagues noted.

But what most impresses me is that the Food and Drug Administration, which ought to know a bit about public health, disagrees, albeit quietly, with Dr. Walensky on the mask issue. The FDA divides face coverings into four classes in increasing order of protection: face masks, barrier face coverings, surgical masks and N95 respirators.

Face masks (“a product that covers the wearer’s nose and mouth”, without meeting any more rigorous standard) “are for use as source control”, that is, to limit the exhalation of disease-causing organisms by infected persons, not to prevent uninfected persons from breathing them in. That the typical cloth mask serves the latter purpose very poorly is obvious. Look closely at masked people near you (trying not to stare impolitely), and you’ll see that almost all cloth masks are worn in a way that leaves ample access to whatever may be circulating in the atmosphere. Then place your own mask tightly over your mouth and breath in and out. It is barely more difficult than ordinary breathing. Even a surgical mask “does not filter or block very small particles in the air that may be transmitted by coughs, sneezes, or certain medical procedures”. Only properly worn N95 respirators furnish that protection, which, as the FDA notes, comes with the drawback of obstructing normal breathing, thus posing a danger to sufferers from “chronic respiratory, cardiac, or other medical conditions that make breathing difficult”.

If someone has contracted Covid-19, it makes sense for him to wear a face mask in order to reduce the risk of passing the illness along to others. Since, however, only a minute percentage of the population is infected at any particular time, and those who are transmit it with far less than 100 percent efficiency, that isn’t much of an argument for universal masking. There are doubtless circumstances in which masks are a prudent precaution, but “authorities” like Dr. Walensky show no interest in distinguishing those cases from the rest of life. Someday, I suppose, they will propose to reduce falls by compelling everyone to walk with the aid of crutches.

The Concrete Begins to Crack

Perhaps the tiny crevices are appearing through which the grass of freedom can push through and ultimately demolish the concrete layer of panicdemic oppression. In Washington, D.C., whose local government is about as far from libertarian as one can find outside of the Chinese mainland –

Washington’s local mask mandate, one of the strictest in the nation since late July, will relax greatly beginning Monday, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) announced Tuesday.

The District had required residents to wear masks in most indoor settings since the delta variant caused coronavirus case counts to rise over the summer. On Tuesday, though, Bowser said coronavirus vaccinations are working: While case rates remain far above the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommended target of 50 new cases per day for every 100,000 residents, Bowser noted that vaccines are preventing most people who catch the virus from needing hospitalization.

That means it’s time to let residents choose whether to wear masks in their office buildings, retail stores, gyms and many other settings, Bowser said. Businesses can still require masks, but it will not be legally mandated – and some hope the change will help retailers struggling in a downtown that still resembles a ghost town most days.

Perhaps indicative of the motivation for this liberalization is a bracketed note that the online version of this story inserts immediately after the preceding paragraphs: “[Bowser is running for a third term as D.C. mayor]”.

A more ambiguous sign, but I draw hope from it, is the latest pronunciamento by America’s most famous celebrity doctor. As reported in the zealously pro-panic Guardian –

Anthony Fauci, the top infectious diseases public official in the US, said on Tuesday that if America further ramps up vaccination rates and those already immunized take booster shots that it is feasible Covid-19 could be reduced from a pandemic emergency to endemic status next year.

More than 70% of adults in the US are fully vaccinated. Fauci said if a lot more Americans take the vaccines, and if the US makes boosters available for everyone, the country could get control of the virus by spring of 2022.

It sounds to me like Dr. Falsi perceives the unrest among hoi polloi and hopes to appease it by promising liberation – someday.

“To me, if you want to get to endemic, you have got to get the level of infection so low that it does not have an impact on society, on your life, on your economy,” Fauci said.

“People will still get infected. People might still get hospitalized, but the level would be so low that we don’t think about it all the time and it doesn’t influence what we do.”

But at this point most of the “impact on society, on your life, on the economy” stems not from the disease itself but from the restrictions placed on society, lives and the economy in the name of containing it.

Update (December 30, 2021): The concrete gets a new and thicker layer. Mayor Bowser has reverted to full panicdemic mode, complete with vaccine passports, an indoor mask mandate and a transition to “virtual” classrooms.

An Unexpected Call for Ending the Panicdemic

David Leonhardt writes a New York Times newsletter called “The Morning” that generally retails a conventional progressive line, yet he seems, judging by his column last Friday, to be weary of the way in which CCP Flu has come to dominate Americans’ lives. He asks, “Is it time to start moving back to normalcy?” and answers in pretty much the affirmative.

He reports the views of “one of the more cautious” of “the Covid experts I regularly talk with”, Dr. Robert Wachter, chairman of the medicine department at the University of California San Francisco. “He worries about ‘long Covid,’ and he believes that many people should receive booster shots. He says that he may wear a mask in supermarkets and on airplanes for the rest of his life.” Obviously not a right-wing Covid denier. Nonetheless, he –

also worries about the downsides of organizing our lives around Covid. In recent weeks, he has begun to think about when most of life’s rhythms should start returning to normal. Increasingly, he believes the answer is: Now.

This belief stems from the fact that the virus is unlikely to go away, ever. Like most viruses, it will probably keep circulating, with cases rising sometimes and falling other times. But we have the tools – vaccines, along with an emerging group of treatments – to turn it into a manageable virus, similar to the seasonal flu.

Given this reality, Wachter, who’s 64, has decided to resume more of his old activities and accept the additional risk that comes with them, much as we accept the risk of crashes when riding in vehicles.

After citing data indicating that “Covid now presents the sort of risk to most vaccinated people that we unthinkingly accept in other parts of life”, the author reaches a sane conclusion:

When The Washington Post recently asked Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, when the pandemic would end, she replied: “It doesn’t end. We just stop caring. Or we care a lot less.” She added, “I think for most people, it just fades into the background of their lives.”

I realize that answer may sound jarring, but the alternative – a society permanently dominated by Covid – is jarring, too. Eventually, the costs of organizing our lives around the virus will exceed the benefits. In some cases, we may have already reached that point.

The column links to an interesting page of graphs and tables, including a map showing, for every county in the United States, the average daily new CCP Flu cases per 100,000 people. The Centers for Disease Control has decided that a rate over 10 per 100,000 is dangerous enough to demand special precautions, and most of the country outside the Southeast is above that level. In my home county (Pierce County, Washington), it’s 30 per 100,000 as a I write. (The figures are moving seven-day averages and change daily.) If the disease were to move steadily through the county at that rate, each inhabitant could expect to fall ill at some point in the next nine years. That hardly conjures up images of the Black Death and makes one wonder why the CDC thinks the rate must be a third of that to be tolerable.

According to another of the site’s maps, one in nine people in Pierce County has so far suffered from CCP Flu; one in 988 has died of it. Bear in mind that the number of cases is most likely understated (because those who are infected by the virus but have no symptoms are counted only by happenstance) while the risk of death may be overstated. (As Mr. Leonhardt notes, “The aggregate statistics on Covid deaths and hospitalizations exaggerate the risk to most Americans, because a disproportionate share of severe illness occurs among people with specific medical vulnerabilities.” The Italian Institute of Health has found that only three percent of patients in that country who were suffering from CCP Flu at the time of death were free from other morbid conditions.)

Many Covidophobes have, I suspect, developed an addiction to the illusion of deadly peril. Just this weekend, I heard about a writer at a science fiction convention who complained vehemently to the organizers when a single unmasked individual appeared in the audience at one of her panels. The incremental risk that she faced as a result was undoubtedly too slight to be measured, yet it threw her into a simulacrum of fear.

I wish that everybody could remember that the world isn’t perfectly safe and never will be. It is much safer today than it was fifty, or even twenty, years ago. It is a minute fraction less safe than it was in December 2019. I’ll conclude with an observation by the author of an op-ed declaring that it is “Time to face hard truths and get on with life – virus and all”. In response to hostile comments, he wrote:

What really strikes me is how wedded many people are to having the epidemic and its restrictions last forever. What kind of mental illness is this? But I have made the point many times before that I have no intention of trying to change these people’s minds. This is belief and religion on their part, not data or science or logical analysis. I don’t even want to engage with these people. And they are a serious impediment to trying to get our society back to some kind of rational policy on the epidemic. Because they apparently have lots of time to spend writing idiotic and inane comments.

Thank God for 1776!

My direct paternal ancestor at the time of the American rebellion against Britain was a Virginia gentleman named George Veal. Unusually for his class, he was a loyalist. His neighbors seized his property, placed him under arrest and confined him to a jail, where he died. If he had foreseen the state of affairs recounted by Lionel Shriver in “The Most Frightened Nation”, he would, I am confident, have changed his mind about independence.

According to an Ipsos MORI poll conducted in July, an impressive 27 percent of Britons want to impose a government-mandated nationwide curfew of 10 PM – not then in force – “until the pandemic was under control worldwide,” which might be years from now. A not-inconsiderable 19 percent would impose such a curfew “permanently, regardless of the risk from Covid-19.” Presumably, these are people who don’t get out much. While 64 percent want Britain’s mask mandate in shops and on public transport to remain a legal requirement for the duration of the global pandemic, an astounding 51 percent want to be masked by law, forever.

There’s more: some 35 percent want to confine any Briton who returns from a foreign country, vaccinated or not, to a ten-day home quarantine – permanently, Covid or no Covid. A full 46 percent would require a vaccine passport in order to travel abroad – permanently, Covid or no Covid. So young people today would still be flashing that QR code on whatever passes for smartphones in 2095, though they might have trouble displaying the device to a flight attendant while bracing on their walkers. Likewise, the 36 percent who want to be required to check in at pubs and restaurants with a National Health Service contact-tracing app forever. A goodly 34 percent want social distancing in “theatres, pubs and sports grounds,” regardless of any risk of Covid, forever. A truly astonishing 26 percent of Britons would summarily close all casinos and nightclubs forever. Are these just a bunch of fogies who don’t go clubbing anyway? No. In the 16-to-24 age bracket, the proportion of Brits who want to convert Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London’s Soho into a community lending library, even after Covid is a distant memory, soars to a staggering 40 percent.

Far from yearning for their historic liberties as “free-born Englishmen,” eight out of ten of the British, according to a Southbank/Kingston University survey, were “anxious” about lifting any of their benevolent government’s copious pandemic restrictions. I’m not sure that you can call it Stockholm syndrome when captives don’t fall in love with their captors but with the state of captivity itself.

Miss Shriver has much more. To be fair, restrictions in Australia are more authoritarian than in Britain, but a not insubstantial number of Aussies at least protest, even if they haven’t yet stormed Canberra with stakes and torches in hand.

A Parable About Safety

There never was a more careful man than Hamilcar Wilts. Although the only river in his vicinity was two feet wide and looked badly in need of water, Hamilcar kept a rowboat on his roof in case of a flood. In the rowboat there was a raft, in case the boat leaked, and the raft’s equipment included needles for sewing furs, in case Hamilcar was carried to the far north, and an augur for opening coconuts, in case he was carried to the tropics. There wasn’t much against which Hamilcar wasn’t prepared.

Hamilcar banished all poisonous or inflammable materials from his home, and stocked his medicine cabinet with every potion known to man, including an ointment to treat butter slicer’s squint, which is a form of eyestrain affecting the pygmies who cut butter pats for restaurants. He filled his home with fire extinguishers, lightning rods and an elephant gun, and sometimes relaxed by sipping a sterilized glass of boiled beer. Within his fortress, Hamilcar felt safe.

Eight miles away, however, lived a dolt named Boggle. Boggle blew up his house one day while trying to open a can of gasoline with a blowtorch. The explosion threw him seventy feet into a warehouse of pillows, where he landed so gently that it barely knocked the ashes off his cigarette.

When Hamilcar heard the explosion he thought something had damaged one of his trees, so he quickly donned a pair of lineman’s gloves (in case of live wires) and a bee veil, hurried out to the yard . . . and was promptly crushed by Boggle’s plummeting stove.

The moral: The chances of getting eaten by a leopard on Main Street are one in a million, but once is enough.

When I was a boy, I acquired a paperback volume entitled Your Own Book of Funny Stories. My copy disappeared long ago, but “How Hamilcar Wilts Prepared For Everything And Got It” impressed me so much that I copied out the text. The author was Robert M. Yoder (1907-1959), a humorist who once competed with Robert Benchley, Richard Armour, Ogden Nash, Will Cuppy, James Thurber and their ilk. He also was the first to record (or mayhap invent) Willie Sutton’s famous explanation of why he robbed banks. (“That’s where the money is.”) Sic transit gloria mundi. He now has not so much as a Wikipedia entry.

I hope that the Yoder heirs won’t object to my having resurrected his narrative of Hamilcar Wilts’s inordinate quest for safety. It speaks, I think, to our present condition. (If they do object, I’ll gladly disgorge 100 percent of my profit from this republication of their ancestor’s work.)

What brought Hamilcar to mind was a timely article by John Tierney, “Keeping Fear Alive”:

Throughout the pandemic, American political and public-health leaders have been following Rahm Emanuel’s classic dictum for power-seeking officials: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Now they’ve adopted a corollary: you never want a crisis to end.

So they are prolonging the national misery instead of easing it, which could be done with a few simple strategies. Explain to the public that the virus will never disappear but is no longer a mortal threat to the vast majority of Americans. Encourage the minority still at risk to get vaccinated by honestly discussing who is in jeopardy and what scientists have learned about infections. Promote treatments proven to prevent infection and speed recovery while avoiding unproven treatments and mandates that cause collateral damage and generate mistrust. Above all, make it clear to Americans that we finally have reason to celebrate: what once seemed an unprecedented danger is now just one of many pathogens that we know how to live with.

But in the Wiltsian world, one never is willing to “live with” any risk, however limited and no matter what the cost of an incremental degree of safety. New Zealand has adopted the strategy of trying to shield itself behind an anti-coronavirus moat while locking down its populace for months on end. That “worked” for a time, but it could continue working only if the country either became a hermit kingdom like pre-Meiji Japan or used its interval of isolation to vaccinate its entire population. It hasn’t done the latter. “Only about 23% of its 5 million people have been fully vaccinated, the lowest rate among the 38 members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).” But even 100 percent vaccination probably won’t satisfy Jacinth Ardern’s quest for perfect safety. In the absence of an unfailingly effective vaccine, Covid-19 won’t disappear, and New Zealand will never reopen.

The Arderns and Faucis of the world think that anyone who isn’t Wilts is Boggle. What they miss is that both extremes are dangerous, just in different ways.

Further reading: Andrew Stuttaford, “Sweden, Lockdowns, and New Zealand’s Maginot Medicine”

Stripping Off the Masks

As I observed a few days ago, masks have become a talisman against Covid-19. Millions believe in their efficacy, even when wearing them in ways that provide ample entry to all passing viruses. I’ve taken lately to looking more closely at other people’s masks. Hardly ever do I see one that fully covers the nose and fits snugly to the cheeks. Almost none have the recommended two layers of protection.

But my observations aren’t compelling evidence. In City Journal, statistician Jeffrey H. Anderson looks closely at randomized control trials that have tested whether mask wearing in fact reduces virus transmission. His bottom line:

In sum, of the 14 RCTs [randomized controlled trials] that have tested the effectiveness of masks in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses, three suggest, but do not provide any statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis, that masks might be useful. The other eleven suggest that masks are either useless – whether compared with no masks or because they appear not to add to good hand hygiene alone – or actually counterproductive. Of the three studies that provided statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis that was not contradicted within the same study, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than hand hygiene alone, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than nothing, and one found that cloth masks were less effective than surgical masks.

In all but one of these studies, it should be noted, the masked participants wore surgical masks, not the cloth masks that are ubiquitous today.

One RCT tested these masks that so many high-profile public-health officials have touted. This “first RCT of cloth masks,” in the trial’s own words (it is apparently still the only one), was a 2015 study by MacIntyre, et al. in Hanoi, Vietnam. A relatively large study, with over 1,100 participants, it tested cloth masks against surgical masks and did not feature a no-mask control group. The trial tested the protection of health-care workers, instructing them to wear a two-layer cloth mask at all times on every shift (“except in the toilet or during tea or lunch breaks”) across four weeks.

The study found that those in the cloth-mask group were 13 times more likely (2.28 percent to 0.17 percent) to develop an influenza-like illness than those in the surgical-mask group – a statistically significant difference. The trial also lab-tested penetration rates and found that while surgical masks were “poor” at preventing the penetration of particles – letting 44 percent through – cloth masks were “extremely poor,” letting 97 percent through. (N95 hospital respirators let 0.1 percent through.)

Evidence from randomized trials has been pretty much ignored by the Centers for Disease Control. It instead touts observational studies, which lack controls, have difficulty filtering out confounding variables and generally “are not only of lower quality than RCTs but also are more likely to be politicized, as they can inject the researcher’s judgment more prominently into the inquiry and lend themselves, far more than RCTs, to finding what one wants to find”.

It’s striking how much the CDC, in marshalling evidence to justify its revised mask guidance, studiously avoids mentioning randomized controlled trials. RCTs are uniformly regarded as the gold standard in medical research, yet the CDC basically ignores them apart from disparaging certain ones that particularly contradict the agency’s position. In a “Science Brief” highlighting studies that “demonstrate that mask wearing reduces new infections” and serving as the main public justification for its mask guidance, the CDC provides a helpful matrix of 15 studies – none RCTs. The CDC instead focuses strictly on observational studies completed after Covid-19 began.

With one exception, the studies that Mr. Anderson cites were conducted before the Covid-19 epidemic began. That, of course, is no reason to reject them. It’s scarcely conceivable that the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 is repelled by masks that are ineffective against other viruses. Moreover, the one post-Covid study is consistent with the earlier ones:

The only RCT to test mask-wearing’s specific effectiveness against Covid-19 was a 2020 study by Bundgaard, et al. in Denmark. This large (4,862 participants) RCT divided people between a mask-wearing group (providing “high-quality” three-layer surgical masks) and a control group. It took place at a time (spring 2020) when Denmark was encouraging social distancing but not mask use, and 93 percent of those in the mask group wore the masks at least “predominately as recommended.” The study found that 1.8 percent of those in the mask group and 2.1 percent of those in the control group became infected with Covid-19 within a month, with this 0.3-point difference not being statistically significant.

It’s now easier to understand why, in the early days of the epidemic, the medical profession, including the Centers for Disease Control, discouraged masks.

“Seriously people – STOP BUYING MASKS!” So tweeted then-surgeon general Jerome Adams on February 29, 2020, adding, “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” Two days later, Adams said, “Folks who don’t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus.” Less than a week earlier, on February 25, public-health authorities in the United Kingdom had published guidance that masks were unnecessary even for those providing community or residential care: “During normal day-to-day activities facemasks do not provide protection from respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and do not need to be worn by staff.” About a month later, on March 30, World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program executive director Mike Ryan said that “there is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any particular benefit.” He added, “In fact there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite” because of the possibility of not “wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly” and of “taking it off and all the other risks that are otherwise associated with that.”

There’s no need to accuse doctors of telling “noble lies” about the proper precautions against Covid. They were following what “the science” said. I’m not even sure that Dr. Fauci is telling the truth when he confesses to having intentionally misled the public. My suspicion is that he said what he sincerely believed at the time and lied later to disguise how seriously his revised advice clashed with the available evidence.

Masks and Magic

In some parts of the world, many people believe that magical charms can stop bullets. In the United States, there is an analogous widespread confidence that cloth masks repel viruses, whence have arisen the “mask mandate wars”.

And not just any old mask will do. Here is National Public Radio’s “health correspondent” telling us what he learned after consulting an expert on the aerosol spread of viruses:

So it can’t fit loosely, you know, leaving gaps on your cheeks or under your chin where the virus could sneak in, and it should pinch tight over your nose. And if you’re wearing a cloth mask, it should have a layer made out of special filter material, not just regular cloth. If you’re not sure, you can hold your mask up to the light to see if you can see pinpricks of light through it. If you can, then it’s probably not good enough. Or, you know, another thing you can do is spray water through it in front of a mirror. If water gets through to the mirror, not good enough. Buy a better mask or buy filters to insert between the cloth layers. And if you really want to protect yourself, you could consider double masking.[emphasis added]

As you look at the mask wearers around you with noses uncovered by the thin strips of cloth that leave roomy entryways for microscopic particles, ask whether this is any more practical than the advice (which I really heard early in the panicdemic) to wash your hands immediately after touching anything.

The handful of people who can and will do as the experts say are already vaccinated. Many of them have probably sneaked in third doses. As for the rest of he population, they might as well be wearing amulets containing the blood of a bat slain at midnight under a New Moon.

An interesting study suggests that a belief in magic to ward off bullets isn’t entirely dysfunctional.

In particular, protection spells cause actors to undertake actions that are not optimal for them as individuals, but are optimal for the society as a whole. This occurs because beliefs in protection spells lower the perceived costs of contributing to a public good (i.e. defending the village from invaders). Decreasing the perceived costs of contributing to a public good is beneficial in settings where the contributions levels would (in equilibrium) otherwise be lower than optimal. Because such false beliefs make the group better off, this offers a plausible explanation for why they persist in environments where intergroup competition is strong, like areas with intense conflict.

I’m at a loss to see any similar virtue to wearing masks as a protection against coronavirus. Mask mandates and mask Karens have, at best, distracted people from the genuine protection afforded by vaccination. At worst, they engender social conflict whose ultimate costs are comparable to, or worse than, a disease that kills a minuscule fraction of its victims.

Further reading: John Tierney, “The Panic Pandemic”

Since We All Must Talk About Either Masks or Simone Biles Today. . .

And I know nothing about Simone Biles. . . .

Being one of the handful of Americans who isn’t an expert epidemiologist, I don’t have much to say about the merits of the Center for Disease Control’s recommendation that everyone, vaccinated or not, in most of the United States (63 percent of counties, including practically all of the most heavily populated) return to wearing masks (which magically ward off coronaviruses, even when worn loosely or without covering the nose). Instead, I leave the commentary to Rochelle Walensky, M.D., the CDC’s director:

Information from several states and other countries indicates that in rare occasions, some vaccinated people infected with the Delta variants after vaccination may be contagious and spread the virus to others. [emphasis added]

Does that sound like a really firm, much less urgent, reason why vaccinated individuals should go back to the uncomfortable, dubiously effective and sometimes unsanitary practice of covering their breathing apparatus with cloth?

Dr. Walensky would have made sense if she had continued, “These tentative findings are an additional reason why people who have put off being vaccinated should delay no longer, but they do not necessitate any change to the CDC’s guidance that those who have been vaccinated may resume their normal lives – unmasked.” It tells you much about our strange time that she didn’t.

Scheduling note: Owing to the press of other work and my aversion to letting chatter about current crises dominate my life, I anticipate posting to this blog on Wednesdays and Sundays. If the mood strikes me, I may say something on other days, but probably not very often.