Australian  Economics professor argues that Australia would have been 'better off' WITHOUT a lockdown

An economics professor has been slammed as 'cold' and 'heartless' for suggesting  Australia prioritised health over the economy by going into coronavirus lockdown.

University of New South Wales Professor Gigi Foster sparked outrage from fellow panellists and other economic professors while answering questions about the  impacts of shutdown measures on Q&A on Monday.

Professor Foster suggested Australia hadn't properly weighed up the economic consequences of tough restrictions introduced to reduce the death toll, and argued the 'economy is about lives' too.

'What frustrates me is when people talk about the economic costs of the lockdown they often don't think in detail in terms of counting lives,' Professor Foster said.

'Has anyone thought about how would you get a measure of the traded lives when we lock an economy down? What are we sacrificing in terms of lives?

'Economists have tried to do that and we try to do that in currencies like the value of a statistical life.

'If you do that kind of calculus you realise very quickly that even with a very, very extreme epidemic, in Australia, we are still potentially better off not having an economic lockdown in the first place because of the incredible effects that you see.  'Not just in a short-run way but in many years to come.'

Her views prompted a shocked response from fellow panellists on the ABC program. 'How can you say that?' ACTU secretary Sally McManus fired back. 

'We're avoiding what's happened in the UK, what's happening in the US, the idea of having our ICUs overrun, our healthcare workers dying as well is just the most horrible thought.'

'It's horrible either way,' Professor Foster replied. 'The coronavirus has made the world awful. There's absolutely no doubt about that.

'In order to have a proper discussion about trade-offs, you need to think in terms of lives you're giving up.

'I know it's invisible lives and difficult to imagine when we aggregate, for example, all of the health effects and the mental health effects and the effects of people right now who have illnesses other than COVID-19.' 

Earlier in the program, Professor Foster said human welfare costs should be considered more broadly. 'I reject the idea it's lives versus the economy. It's lives versus lives. The economy is about lives,' Professor Foster said. 'It's about protection of lives and human welfare and livelihood.'

Simon Longstaff, executive director of The Ethics Centre disagreed with Professor Foster's argument.

'There's so many things we can do to address the economic consequences on people's lives. It's not just the economy. Incidents of mental health. There's many things which are human fact beyond those,' he said.

Professor Foster later proposed Australia could implement a herd immunity strategy until a coronavirus vaccine was found.

Her comments on the program sparked division on social media, with some accusing her of being 'harmful and arrogant' and others praising her for her 'rational' response.

'She lacks capacity to appreciate that a mass outbreak would lead to same shutdown within a short time frame. A broad and orderly controlled shutdown is preferable to chaos of humans and companies dropping like flies,' one viewer tweeted.

Another added: 'Has Gigi considered the economic cost of post traumatic stress on a population like Italy? Is there a model for the way the economy and people behave after that?'

'What a disgraceful and cold thought process this woman has,' a third said. 'Has no respect for humanity, is all about the economy and the money.' 

Professor Foster was also criticised by some in her own profession. 'Hundreds of us warned today against the views like Gigi Foster's,' University of Melbourne economics Professor Chris Edmond tweeted.

'I’m an economics professor, and Gigi does not speak for me,' Steven Hamilton, a U.S-based professor tweeted.   

But not everyone was critical. 'Gigi Foster makes some excellent points and should not be trolled,' one supporter tweeted. 

'Gigi Foster is very much sharing a holistic rational view on coronavirus, not an emotional one that clearly doesn’t appeal to the everyday Australian,' added another.

SOURCE 

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Study will test if common anti-inflammatory drug can prevent serious COVID-19 complications

Study participants will receive the drug by mail within 48 hours of diagnosis.

An international study will test whether a common anti-inflammatory drug can ward off serious complications from COVID-19 and possibly prevent patients from ending up in the hospital.

The study, which would involve 6,000 participants in the U.S., Canada and Europe, is designed to be "contactless" — participants will receive the drug, called colchicine, by mail, and will be monitored by phone or video visits. Participants will receive the drug within 48 hours of a COVID-19 diagnosis.

"This is one of the very few COVID-19 trials designed specifically for patients who have not yet been hospitalized," Dr. Priscilla Hsue, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and principal investigator for one of the sites involved in the trial, said in a statement. "We suspect that early treatment, before the onset of severe symptoms requiring hospitalization, may provide the best chance to improve outcomes. By the time extensive lung damage has developed, it may be too late to intervene successfully."

Colchicine is a widely available drug used to treat gout, a type of arthritis that causes pain and swelling in the joints, particularly the big toe, according to the National Institutes of Health. The drug works by reducing joint pain, inflammation and swelling.

SOURCE 

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The Canadian Way of Dealing with a Pandemic: Ineffective, Clueless, and Dishonest

The only thing certain about the etiology of the COVID-19 pandemic is that it originated in and spread from China. Whether the local origin of the disease was a wet market in Wuhan specializing in bat soup or a Chinese lab with inadequate safety protocols is immaterial. The culprit in the lethal melodrama that is being played out around the globe is China.

Yet, if we are to believe many of our politicians and journalists, the good guy working to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 is—you guessed it—China. Some self-serving politicians in the U.S. would like to refer President Trump to the International Court of Justice in the Hague for crimes against humanity for his handling of the crisis—Ohio State Representative Tavia Galonski apparently can’t stomach Trump’s promotion of hydroxychloroquine, which ironically has already saved the life of fellow Democrat Karen Whitsett. A reporter for Phoenix TV tried to put Trump in a bad light by asking whether he was cooperating with China, in her estimation obviously the heroic partner in the struggle. It turns out that Phoenix TV has intimate ties to Communist China and is linked with the PRC’s Ministry of State Security.

Joe Biden is a big fan of Communist China and has profited from his family’s business relations with the regime. Trump is beset by those who would like to see him fail in his ongoing effort to find a way between averting economic collapse and maintaining public health. Nonetheless, Americans can remain confident that a responsible president, for all the trials and confusions he must contend with, has their wellbeing at heart and labors tirelessly to provide a solution to the current disaster.

Canada, not so much. The country’s dilettante leader, who has no viable answer to the crisis, is not so embattled. The lying press, luxuriating in the prime minister’s $600-million bribe, is almost universally on his side, and his inept and intellectually challenged ministers are ritually lionized. 600 mil clearly helps you get your priorities straight. The sheer amateurism of this government is evident in its policy initiatives.

Some of these decisions defy belief. Shades of the famous Tennessee Ernie Ford song, Canada sent sixteen tons of PPE (personal protective equipment) to China while undergoing shortages of much-needed supplies, such as masks, goggles, gloves, and appropriate clothing, in the fight against the virus. University of Ottawa epidemiologist Amir Attaran was surprised to learn of this supernumerary gift. “It was absolutely certain in early February that we would need this equipment,” he said. “This decision went beyond altruism into high negligence and incompetence because Canada did not, and does not, have surplus equipment to spare.” Canada, as was to be expected, has no emergency management agency in place and no way of dealing with the export restrictions of needed medical supplies adopted by countries around the world.

Justin Trudeau: Canada’s National Disaster

Theresa Tam is Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, appointed to the office by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on June 26, 2017. According to her resumé, she is “a physician with expertise in immunization, infectious disease, emergency preparedness and global health security,” and is chiefly responsible for the coast-to-coast lockdown of the country. A daily presence on national TV, Tam has become the face of the anti-COVID task force and the regulations intended to check the spread of the disease. But she remains something of an enigma.

Writing in The Council of European Canadians newsletter, an online site which has reaped the displeasure and vicious slander of Canada’s progressivist “social justice” warriors and multiculti vigilantes, Kidist Paulos Asrat asks, “Who is this woman now in charge of providing the ‘chief’ medical information concerning Canada's lockdown? Where did she come from?” His research has produced little information of value. “There is very little available on her biography,” he continues, “very little personal (and even professional) information on Tam,” including her date of birth, place of birth (other than ‘raised in Hong Kong’) and the dates of her degrees. Indeed, the listings of her theses, dissertation, and alumni profiles seem to be missing, though Asrat has searched the University of British Columbia and the University of Alberta websites where such data should be available.

What do we know about Tam? We know that Tam is a feminist who attended the 2019 Women Deliver conference in Vancouver, whose mandate is promoting “gender equality and the health, rights and wellbeing of girls and women.” As for the health, rights, and wellbeing of men and boys, nary a hint, which is why she seems to have expressed no interest in the fact that men are more likely to be infected by COVID-19 and twice as likely to die from it. We know that she is intimately associated with the World Health Organization, significantly funded by China, that initially downplayed the scope of the disease, and whose Director-General Tedros Adhanon Ghebreyesus is a Marxist and a loyal defender of China, “uncritically repeating information from the Chinese authorities.” A petition is now circulating calling for his resignation.

Tam has warned against stigmatizing Chinese people, though it is far from clear that such a warning was necessary. Canada’s largest Chinese population is located in Vancouver, where I make my home, and I have not seen the slightest instance, whether in the media or the public, of prejudice or opprobrium. “Racism, discrimination and stigmatizing language,” she stated, “are unacceptable and very hurtful. These actions create a divide of Us Vs Them. Canada is a country built on the deep-rooted values of respect, diversity and inclusion.”

SPLC Blames Trump's 'Racist, Anti-Asian Epithets' for Coronavirus-Related Anti-Asian Harassment
This is merely more of the usual virtue-signaling and self-promoting boilerplate beloved of career politicians of the woke variety. The last thing we need during a health crisis is a lecture on race relations and feel-good multiculti.

Spencer Fernando, whom I regard, along with the redoubtable Rex Murphy, as one of the vanishingly few reliable journalists in this country, pretty much has the goods on Tam. “The facts are undeniable,” he writes. “Tam was late at every step, focused on political correctness and lecturing when the virus could have been stopped, and seemed less informed of the risk than the general public and the MPs who were asking her questions."

"Right now," she said at a critical juncture, "the cases are in China. Very few are exported… the risk is low in Canada." The cases did not stay in China but swept the world, including Canada. Moreover, we were assured that "WHO does not recommend travel bans" and that we need not worry about asymptomatic transmission. Wrong on every count. Her record is deplorable and her sympathies debatable.

Tam is a typical Trudeau appointee: a feminist, a self-aggrandizing special pleader, and a gross incompetent in the office she is expected to manage. There are others like her in the Trudeau cabinet, for example, the lamentable Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland who nearly deep-sixed our NAFTA treaty talks with Donald Trump and has a tendency to tear up at critical moments, though as former NDP Premier Bob Rae tweeted in Freeland’s patronizing defense, “Crying is not a sign of weakness, it is a natural emotional response to a lot of different situations”; and the equally hapless Minister of Health, cultural anthropologist (!) Patti Hajdu with limited experience in medicine, repeatedly said, like Tam, that the risk of infection from the virus “is low,” but now projects that up to 70% of Canadians may be infected. Despite being stroked by a shameless love article in The Globe and Mail, Hajdu’s performance is frankly pathetic. And like both Tam and their boss, she seems to have a soft spot for China, insisting that “there’s no indication that the data that came out of China in terms of their infection rate and their death rate was falsified in any way.” All these gender quota mermaids are swimming fathoms beyond their depth and I suspect their fealty is compromised.

Obviously, we should not be giving away our medical equipment and then hoping to receive apposite supplies from foreign self-interested nations. As Rex Murphy argues in a brilliant column for the National Post, “Take care first of your own citizens, which means limiting the contingencies of external dependence.” Our resources should be reserved for our own security if we are to protect ourselves “against pandemics and other unknown future shocks.” The argument applies across the board to every economic, industrial, agricultural, and medical sector of the country. Murphy points out that it is the salt-of-the-earth Canadians—hard-pressed farmers, unemployed oil workers, cross-country truckers, those who do not tend to vote for a progressivist Liberal Party—who have been hamstrung by their government and forced to pay a crippling carbon tax while struggling to survive a decimating pandemic. They are, unfortunately, outnumbered by the many who have been brainwashed by a compliant media establishment and who elect parasitical governments that fritter away the nation’s resources and mismanage the nation’s business and security needs, including the response to national emergencies.

Meanwhile, at 7 o’clock every evening these brainwashed Canadians step out on their balconies and doorways and bang pots and pans in solidarity with the nurses—though not with the preponderantly male doctors, ambulance drivers, orderlies, and janitors who, being men, are apparently expendable, as good feminist doctrine holds. It is rather sobering to reflect that we have largely become a nation of feminist-inclined pot bangers, as if noisy displays of carefully targeted goodwill were an effective way of dealing with the current pandemic.

You offload 16 tons and what do you get? A nation that owes its soul to the company store.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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Sweden’s unusual approach to fighting the coronavirus pandemic is starting to yield results, according to the country’s top epidemiologist

Anders Tegnell, the architect behind Sweden’s relatively relaxed response to Covid-19, told local media the latest figures on infection rates and fatalities indicate the situation is starting to stabilize. “We’re on a sort of plateau,” Tegnell told Swedish news agency TT.

Sweden has left its schools, gyms, cafes, bars and restaurants open throughout the spread of the pandemic. Instead, the government has urged citizens to act responsibly and follow social distancing guidelines.

The spread of Covid-19 across the globe is triggering different responses across national and even state borders, as authorities struggle to contain an outbreak about which much remains unknown.

It’s unclear which strategy will ultimately prove most effective, and even experts in Sweden warn it’s too early to draw conclusions. But given the huge economic damage caused by strict lockdowns, the Swedish approach has drawn considerable interest around the world.

Part of that approach relies on having access to one of the world’s best-functioning health-care systems. At no stage did Sweden see a real shortage of medical equipment or hospital capacity, and tents set up as emergency care facilities around the country have mostly remained empty.

Death Rates

As of Sunday, Sweden had reported 1,540 deaths tied to Covid-19, an increase of 29 from Saturday. That’s considerably more than in the rest of Scandinavia, but much less than in Italy, Spain and the U.K., both in absolute and relative terms.

Tegnell isn’t the only high-level official in Sweden to claim the country may be over the worst.

“The trend we have seen in recent days, with a more flat curve -- where we have many new cases, but not a daily increase -- is stabilizing,” Karin Tegmark Wisell, head of the microbiology department at Sweden’s Public Health Authority, said on Friday. “We are seeing the same pattern for patients in intensive care.”

Just two weeks ago, the picture was considerably bleaker, and Prime Minister Stefan Lofven suggested the government may need to review its approach amid the prospect of thousands of Swedish deaths. But Lofven’s personal popularity has soared, suggesting Swedes approve of his decisions.

“I have very high confidence in the Swedish authorities that manage this,” Volvo Cars CEO Hakan Samuelsson said in a phone interview. “It’s a hard balance to strike, but I have full confidence in the measures that Sweden has taken.”

Volvo, which was forced to halt production across Europe and furlough about 20,000 Swedish employees, will resume production at its Swedish plants on Monday.

“Our measures are all based on individuals taking responsibility, and that is also an important part of the Swedish model,” Samuelsson said.

The Economy

Sweden’s Covid-19 strategy may ultimately result in a smaller -- albeit historically deep -- economic contraction than the rest of Europe is now facing, according to HSBC Global Research economist James Pomeroy.

“While Sweden’s unwillingness to lock down the country could ultimately prove to be ill-judged, for now, if the infection curve flattens out soon, the economy could be better placed to rebound,” he said.

Pomeroy pointed to some Swedish characteristics that may be helping the country deal with the current crisis. More than half of Swedish households are single-person, making social distancing easier to carry out. More people work from home than anywhere else in Europe, and everyone has access to fast Internet, which helps large chunks of the workforce stay productive away from the office.

And while many other countries have introduced strict laws, including hefty fines if people are caught breaching newly minted social-distancing laws, Swedes appear to be following such guidelines without the need for legislation. Trips from Stockholm to Gotland -- a popular vacation destination -- dropped by 96% over the Easter weekend, according to data from the country’s largest mobile operator, Telia Company. And online service Citymapper’s statistics indicate an almost 75% drop in mobility in the capital.

Sweden also recently pushed back against the notion that there’s little to no social distancing going on.

“We don’t have a radically different view,” Foreign Minister Ann Linde said in an interview with Radio Sweden. “The government has made a series of decisions that affect the whole society. It’s a myth that life goes on as normal in Sweden.”

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Coronavirus Antibody Testing Study Suggests Coronavirus Fatality Rate Could Be Less Than Seasonal Flu

Remember how China originally covered up the coronavirus outbreak? That likely means that it spent weeks spreading around the world before any efforts to contain or mitigate it happened. There have been reports that spikes in pneumonia-like cases in November and December of 2019 may actually have been coronavirus cases. This means that many people contracted the disease, recovered, and have developed antibodies.

On Friday, the results of the first large-scale antibody study in Santa Clara County in California headed by a Stanford University professor, Dr. Eran Bendavid, was released, and based on the results, the actual number of positive coronavirus cases is likely 50-85 times higher than confirmed cases.

This means the fatality rate of the coronavirus may be significantly lower than the World Health Organization's 3.4 percent estimate, or Dr. Fauci's 2.0 percent estimate.

How much? Let's take a look.

3,330 Santa Clara County residents were tested in the study, and those tests found that 2.49% to 4.16% of the subjects had coronavirus antibodies. "These prevalence estimates represent a range between 48,000 and 81,000 people infected in Santa Clara County by early April, 50-85-fold more than the number of confirmed cases." According to the study abstract, "Population prevalence estimates can now be used to calibrate epidemic and mortality projections."

Participants were “recruited using Facebook ads targeting a representative sample of the county by demographic and geographic characteristics,” and the results were adjusted for zip code, sex, and race/ethnicity.

The current death count for Santa Clara County is 69, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. While the death count in early April was likely a bit lower, I'll use that number to extrapolate the mortality rate of the coronavirus per this study.

Assuming the low estimate of infection count of 48,000, that gives us a fatality rate of .14 percent.

Assuming the mid-range estimate of infection count of 65,000, that gives us a fatality rate of .11 percent.

Assuming the high estimate of infection count of 81,000, that gives us a fatality rate of .09 percent.
The fatality rate of the seasonal flu is .1 percent.

An epidemiologist at Boston Children's Hospital told ABC News that the results of the study are not necessarily representative of the U.S. population, but conceded that the study did show that there are far more infections than confirmed cases. "There has been wide recognition that we were undercounting infections because of lack of testing or patients were asymptomatic," he said.

So, if this study is correct, there is a possibility that the actual fatality rate of the coronavirus is comparable, or even lower, than the seasonal flu.

It goes without saying that any deaths from the coronavirus are a tragedy, but our country (and the world) basically shut down over the World Health Organization's original estimates of a 3.4% case fatality ratio. This is why we need to be talking about opening up our country again.

SOURCE 

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Coronavirus Authoritarianism Is Getting Out of Hand
 
It’s reasonable to assume that the vast majority of Americans process news and data, and calculate that self-quarantining, wearing masks and social distancing make sense for themselves, their families and the country. Free people act out of self-preservation, but they shouldn’t be coerced to act through the authoritarian whims of the state. Yet this is exactly what’s happening.

There has been lots of pounding of keyboards over the power grabs of authoritarians in Central and Eastern Europe. Rightly so. Yet right here, politicians act as if a health crisis gives them license to lord over the most private activities of American people in ways that are wholly inconsistent with the spirit and letter of the Constitution.

I’m not even talking about national political and media elites who, after fueling years of hysteria over the coming Republican dictatorship, now demand Donald Trump dominate state actions. I’m talking about local governments.

Under what imperious conception of governance does Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer believe it is within her power to unilaterally ban garden stores from selling fruit or vegetable plants and seeds? What business is it of Vermont or Howard County, Indiana, to dictate that Walmart, Costco or Target stop selling “nonessential” items, such as electronics or clothing? Vermont has 628 cases of coronavirus as of this writing. Is that the magic number authorizing the governor to ban people from buying seeds for their gardens?

Maybe a family needs new pajamas for their young kids because they’re stuck in a new town. Or maybe mom needs a remote hard drive to help her work remotely. Or maybe dad just likes apples. Whatever the case, it’s absolutely none of your mayor’s business.

It makes sense for places like Washington, D.C., Virginia and Maryland to ban large, avoidable gatherings. But it is an astonishing abuse of power to issue stay-at-home orders, enforced by criminal law, empowering police to harass and fine individuals for nothing more than taking a walk.

The criminalization of movement ends with 10 Philly cops dragging a passenger off a bus for not wearing a face mask. It ends with local Brighton, Colorado, cops handcuffing a father in front of his family for playing softball with his daughter in an empty park. It ends with three Massachusetts men being arrested, and facing the possibility of 90 days in jail, for crossing state lines and golfing — a sport built for social distancing — in Rhode Island.

There is no reason to close “public” parks, where Americans can maintain social distance while getting some air or space for their mental and physical well-being — or maybe see a grandchild from afar. In California, surfers, who stay far away from each other, are banned from going in the water. Elsewhere, hikers are banned from roaming the millions of acres in national parks. Millions of lower-income and urban-dwelling Americans don’t have the luxury of backyards, and there is absolutely no reason to inhibit their movement, either.

Two days before Easter, Louisville, Kentucky, Mayor Greg Fischer attempted to unilaterally ban drive-in church services for the most holy day in Christianity. It’s one thing if people are purposely and openly undermining public health. The constitutional right to assemble peacefully and protest or practice your religion, however, is not inoperable in the presence of a viral pandemic.

Would-be petty tyrants, such as Dallas judge Clay Jenkins, who implores residences to rat out neighbors who sell cigarettes for “putting profits over public health,” forgets that we are not ruled by him, and that he is merely our temporary servant.

But it’s important and necessary, say the experts. Great. Convince us. Most polls show that 80-something percent of Americans will stay home for the rest of this month even if lockdowns are lifted.

The question of how many lives would be lost if we didn’t shut down the economy is a vital one, but it is not the only one. There is an array of factors that goes into these decisions. One of them should be preserving our laws and our freedom in times of crisis.

We aren’t at “war.” There are no coronavirus spies and no coronavirus sabotage. Affixing “war” to societal problems — the war on drugs being the most obvious example — is typically a justification for expanding state power. Also, authoritarianism isn’t defined as “strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom except when there is a pandemic.” Your declarative sentences and forceful feelings do not transform the meaning of either authoritarianism or freedom. Though if we dump our principles every time there’s a crisis, they might as well.

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IN BRIEF

Trump's constitutional- and religious-liberty-minded DOJ steps up to defend Christians fined $500 for drive-in church service (PJ Media)

Kentucky GOP lawmakers override veto of voter ID measure, instituting "guardrails in our voting procedures that will help cure vulnerabilities that exist" (AP)

New unsealed documents show Planned Parenthood did profit from aborted baby body parts (The Federalist)

From Michigan to Kentucky to Ohio to Utah to North Carolina to Virginia, protests draw thousands over state stay-at-home orders (USA Today)

Weekly jobless claims hit 5.245 million, raising monthly loss to 22 million (CNBC)

New York and other East Coast states extend shutdown of "nonessential" businesses to May 15 (CNBC)

CA. Gov. Newsom announces $125 million fund to give stimulus checks to illegal immigrants (Fox News)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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Welcome back to the past, America

Americans are, for the first time since the Civil War, facing food supply disruptions. These aren’t war-rationing-style shortages, these are supply disruptions.

We didn’t expect the future to bring meat and toilet paper shortages.

Welcome to the past, America. Civilization has always hung by a thread. The Founders of this country knew that, and that’s why they crafted a constitutional order best suited to nurture domestic tranquility and the general welfare.

It is also why they included a Second Amendment.

Perhaps we are appreciating in concrete terms the value of stable homes, industrious values, and faith. A nation that was abandoning God might reconsider.

Get your kids and grand-kids The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder. They had it worse than your kids do, at least for now. If you think Zoom school is bad, if you are growing weary of beans and rice, try heating your freezing house with twisted wheat and eating grain porridge for every meal.

This was what befell huge tracts of America just 140 years ago where the Twins, Brewers, Cubs, and Tigers should be playing right now.

Welcome to history. We had it so good for a spell. It was a bounty of the superfluous. Sociology degrees and safe spaces. Preferred pronouns and Disney cruises. Hipster brunch and guaranteed futures. It was the land of milk and honey.

Now it’s the land of 33,325 deaths, and climbing.

Many public schools have thrown in the towel for the year. Instead of Alice Cooper’s "School's Out For Summer," it’s more like school's out before the last frost.

Fairfax County schools, purportedly one of the better school systems in Virginia, tried distance learning and it came crashing down with students putting images of bongs on Zoom video classes. Fairfax waited weeks to try distance learning, and when they finally did, people contributed with racial slurs, Hitler salutes and X-rated memes.

I shudder to imagine what the rest of Virginia schools are like if Fairfax County schools are the best in the state.

Speaking of Virginia, Governor Ralph Northam, best known for either wearing blackface or a Klan hood to a college party, has imposed an emergency edict that prevents people from going to church. Ten people cannot gather in church, but the entire Virginia General Assembly will gather next week in a tent to consider budget matters.

It seems northeastern Democrat governors are more comfortable issuing edicts and orders preventing people from earning a living, going to church or kicking a soccer ball around a park. It almost comes naturally. But then again, southern governors like Ralph Northam (D-Dixie Land) also seem perfectly comfortable in his authoritarian skin.

Let see how much patience Americans have with these stay-at home-orders. Already in Michigan, rallies have occurred, with protesters yearning to breathe free.

For now, Americans seem ready to wait a few more weeks. But at some point, and that point is coming soon, the cure is worse than the disease. Economic devastation ruins lives too. Poverty, despair and economic ruin will cost the country a lot more than the coronavirus can. When hungry people reach that point, don’t expect Americans to pay much attention to government edicts.

SOURCE 

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Don’t Let Liberals Federalize Elections

I’m sorry, but you have no constitutional “right” to vote by mail. You have no constitutional “right” to vote six days after an election is over. Nor do you have any “right” to censor information related to an election. Not even during a pandemic.

This week, the Supreme Court ruled that a federal court was not empowered to overwrite Wisconsin’s election laws and force the state to accept ballots without any postmark deadline nearly a week after the election. Likewise, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that Gov. Tony Evers did not have the authority to arbitrarily suspend in-person voting.

If these dictates had been allowed to stand, they would have created insanely destructive precedents, taking elections out of the hands of local legislatures. If we discard legal norms every time there’s a crisis, we no longer have a nation of laws but a country at the mercy of arbitrary decrees, emotional appeals, and pliable courts.

Not that any of this concerned the usual suspects, who began lamenting the alleged anti-democratic nature of Chief Justice John Roberts’ court. When will the conservative wing abandon their partisanship and begin “compromising,” wondered a news piece in The Washington Post.

Liberal pundits, apparently unable to differentiate between partisan policy preferences and the rule of law, launched into their customary hysterics, denouncing the Supreme Court for disenfranchised minorities and putting people’s lives at risk. But the court doesn’t exist to fix your local government’s incompetence or make life safer. It exists to uphold the Constitution.

None of this is to say that the situation in Wisconsin is fair to voters, who had to risk standing in lines during a dangerous pandemic. Many states have contingencies in place for emergencies. Wisconsin—while it had plenty of time to pass new guidelines—does not. That’s a Wisconsin problem, not a Supreme Court problem, not a “democracy” problem, and definitely not a federal problem.

If Wisconsinites don’t like their laws, if they’re disappointed in legislators, if they’re furious at the state’s high court and bothered by the governor’s ineptitude, then there will be plenty of future elections to right those wrongs. In no version of a healthy “democracy,” however, do we override existing laws, passed by previous elected officials, through fiat.

But make no mistake, the Wisconsin case will be used in the broader effort to federalize and centralize elections to create a more direct democracy—even though such efforts are antithetical to American governance.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has already proposed mandating automatic and same-day voter registration, ending ID requirements, compelling states to have 15 days of early voting, and forcing states to adopt voting by mail, among other liberal pet projects.

She wants the federal government to bribe states with billions to adopt these standards. And she wants those changes implemented by November.

She’s not alone. In “Phase 4” of the coronavirus rescue package, Democratic leaders are reportedly including provisions that would compel all states to offer voting by mail. Former Vice President Joe Biden also supports such a mandate, because, he claims, “all the experts” say we should do it.

Now, I don’t know what experts Biden is referencing, but Publius, something of an authority on these matters, once wrote that it was a no-brainer to condemn the suggestion that federal government should regulate state elections as both “an unwarrantable transposition of power, and as a premeditated engine for the destruction of the State Governments.”

As a practical matter, requiring states, all of which have varied systems, technologies, and infrastructures, to figure out how to handle mail-in ballot systems in the midst of a pandemic is absurd. And not merely because of the obvious feasibility problems, but because there is no proper time to debate the issue.

Democrats have spent years weakening the integrity of elections, but voting by mail opens up the process to real-world voter intimidation, disenfranchisement, fraud—and a host of other problems.

Then again, people of goodwill can disagree over the particulars of election policy. It’s far more critical to note that neither the Senate, nor the House, nor the White House, nor federal courts have any business compelling states to adopt uniform standards regarding mail-in ballots or IDs or voting machines, or much of anything else.

A national mail vote is meant to federalize the election, leaving smaller states to vagaries of a national majority. It’s exactly the kind of situation the Constitution wanted us to avoid.

SOURCE 

*********************************

Economic Illiterates Are Running Amok

One particularly terrifying consequence of the Chinese Bat Soup Virus that is not yet getting the attention it deserves is how this situation is making already stupid liberals even dumber, especially when they sound off about economics. In the wake of this pandemic, we’ve been subjected to a series of mind-numbing insights from the pinko blue check brain trust that reaffirms the clichéd but true observation that our elite is anything but elite. Leave it to our liberal betters to take a bad situation and seek to make it exponentially worse.

For example, Sally Kohn – oh, you know where this is going – offered an astonishing observation just as the Democrats were obstructing the vital relief our small businesses desperately need:

“I'm really tired of reading how business owners are "forced" to layoff workers. No one made them do that. They *chose* to do that. Not saying it isn't a hard choice, during a hard time, but to say they were *forced* obscures their agency AND casts owners/CEOs as the victims.”

If that hasn’t plunged your IQ to new depths, consider ever-dumb Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), who tweeted out this brainstorm:

“We need to cancel rent until this crisis is over.”

Wow. Her economics advice is even worse than her relationship advice.

Okay, it seems like you would not have to explain this to allegedly educated people, but apparently there are still some people who need a lesson in Economics 101. Since I actually own a business, perhaps I have a perspective that C Tier social media personalities and commie grifters could find illuminating.

Here goes.

Are you people stupid? What the unholy hell are you thinking? When there is no income, what do you expect a business owner to pay his employees with? IOUs? Monopoly money? Feelings?

Oh, maybe the boss of that local pizza restaurant that the cough police closed down should just go downstairs to the basement vault in his mansion, pop open the door and take out one of those dozens of big sacks with dollar signs on them that are stuffed with $100 bills and use them to meet payroll. And rent. And insurance. And supplies. And maintenance. And so on. And so on. And so on.

Because that whole thing about cash flow? No, it’s not a thing. It’s a myth! It’s just an illusion for those tuxedo n’ top hat-sporting fatcats who run the local pet stores and such use to fool the proles into believing that there’s not some bottomless well o’ cash these tycoons can draw upon forever.

Yeah, these bigwigs are claiming they are running out of money, but Sally sees through their web of deceit! But in a way she is right – it is kind of a choice. Of course, the choice is bankruptcy or layoffs. And either way, those employees are out of a job.

But the real tragedy would be if people might see “owners/CEOs as the victims” even though they are victims too.

You wonder if people can be this dumb and then you go on Twitter and yeah, people can absolutely be that dumb.

Or even dumber, if that’s even possible.

Really, Mrs. Brother? “Cancel rent?” I guess the president would just use that little-known “cancel rent” power buried behind all those penumbras and emanations in the Constitution. But let’s not get all wrapped up in talk of enumerated powers and stuff. Let’s look at this remarkable suggestion on its own feeble terms. “Cancel rent.” Okay, rent is canceled. Gone! No paying rent! Yah!

Wait, where did the lights go? Power’s out. Wait, you mean that miserable miser is not fronting cash for utilities anymore since you’re, you know, not paying rent? Hey, there’s a plumbing leak! You can just call…oh…awkward! Well, then you can just refuse to pay…oh, right. Well, then maybe you’ll sue your landlord for not doing the things landlords should do, though you are not doing things tenants should do. Oops. He’s bankrupt. Hear that? It’s a sad trombone.

But that’s only at the personal level. Our economy is interconnected. You don’t pay rent, so your landlord doesn’t pay his loan and all those people who used to manage the property. All those guys he used to pay, his bank, the gardener, the power company. Now, they can’t pay anyone anymore. And pretty soon no one can pay anyone anymore.

Now, we have focused on how these people are saying stupid things, and the underlying assumption is that they are stupid. But is that why they seem to be rooting for disaster? You’ve already seen progs looking on the bright side – at least this economic carnage will end up owning Drumpf!

Maybe they are simply bad people who want to impoverish you to increase their own power. Have you seen them do anything, anything at all inconsistent with that hypothesis? After all, if they can destroy capitalism by means of knocking out select pillars of the system – like by undermining selected contracts that obligate people to pay their debts – they can get to their desired endstate, and they can blame it on capitalism itself even though a system where you can’t collect rent isn’t capitalism.

Stupid? Evil? A bit of both? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that no matter how much these half-wits pipe up on Twitter, they can never, ever be allowed anything like real power lest we go full Venezuela.

And you should never go full Venezuela.

SOURCE 

********************************

 IN BRIEF

According to The Washington Post, two years ago, "State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses." The Washington Examiner's Eddie Scarry quips, "Now that the Washington Post reported on it, is it finally OK to say out loud that the China-borne coronavirus may have come out of a science lab in Wuhan?"

Meanwhile, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says "weight of evidence" suggests virus arose naturally, but still inconclusive (Hot Air)

WaPo-acquired draft shows the CDC and FEMA have created a plan to reopen America (The Washington Post)

For the record: Dr. Fauci says U.S. "not there yet" on reopening economy, May 1 target a "bit" too optimistic (Fox News)

Hunter Biden still listed as board member of Chinese company he pledged to resign from in October, an apparently unfulfilled decision his father once said "represents the kind of man of integrity he is" (The Daily Caller)

Unprincipled Bloomberg News quashed a 2013 China exposé over concerns the Chinese Communist Party "will probably kick us out of the country" (National Review)

Now that all the other candidates have dropped out, Obama endorses Biden for president, says he's the right person to "guide us through one of our darkest times" (NBC News)

**********************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

**************************

Welcome back to the past, America

Americans are, for the first time since the Civil War, facing food supply disruptions. These aren’t war-rationing-style shortages, these are supply disruptions.

We didn’t expect the future to bring meat and toilet paper shortages.

Welcome to the past, America. Civilization has always hung by a thread. The Founders of this country knew that, and that’s why they crafted a constitutional order best suited to nurture domestic tranquility and the general welfare.

It is also why they included a Second Amendment.

Perhaps we are appreciating in concrete terms the value of stable homes, industrious values, and faith. A nation that was abandoning God might reconsider.

Get your kids and grand-kids The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder. They had it worse than your kids do, at least for now. If you think Zoom school is bad, if you are growing weary of beans and rice, try heating your freezing house with twisted wheat and eating grain porridge for every meal.

This was what befell huge tracts of America just 140 years ago where the Twins, Brewers, Cubs, and Tigers should be playing right now.

Welcome to history. We had it so good for a spell. It was a bounty of the superfluous. Sociology degrees and safe spaces. Preferred pronouns and Disney cruises. Hipster brunch and guaranteed futures. It was the land of milk and honey.

Now it’s the land of 33,325 deaths, and climbing.

Many public schools have thrown in the towel for the year. Instead of Alice Cooper’s "School's Out For Summer," it’s more like school's out before the last frost.

Fairfax County schools, purportedly one of the better school systems in Virginia, tried distance learning and it came crashing down with students putting images of bongs on Zoom video classes. Fairfax waited weeks to try distance learning, and when they finally did, people contributed with racial slurs, Hitler salutes and X-rated memes.

I shudder to imagine what the rest of Virginia schools are like if Fairfax County schools are the best in the state.

Speaking of Virginia, Governor Ralph Northam, best known for either wearing blackface or a Klan hood to a college party, has imposed an emergency edict that prevents people from going to church. Ten people cannot gather in church, but the entire Virginia General Assembly will gather next week in a tent to consider budget matters.

It seems northeastern Democrat governors are more comfortable issuing edicts and orders preventing people from earning a living, going to church or kicking a soccer ball around a park. It almost comes naturally. But then again, southern governors like Ralph Northam (D-Dixie Land) also seem perfectly comfortable in his authoritarian skin.

Let see how much patience Americans have with these stay-at home-orders. Already in Michigan, rallies have occurred, with protesters yearning to breathe free.

For now, Americans seem ready to wait a few more weeks. But at some point, and that point is coming soon, the cure is worse than the disease. Economic devastation ruins lives too. Poverty, despair and economic ruin will cost the country a lot more than the coronavirus can. When hungry people reach that point, don’t expect Americans to pay much attention to government edicts.

SOURCE 

**********************************

Don’t Let Liberals Federalize Elections

I’m sorry, but you have no constitutional “right” to vote by mail. You have no constitutional “right” to vote six days after an election is over. Nor do you have any “right” to censor information related to an election. Not even during a pandemic.

This week, the Supreme Court ruled that a federal court was not empowered to overwrite Wisconsin’s election laws and force the state to accept ballots without any postmark deadline nearly a week after the election. Likewise, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that Gov. Tony Evers did not have the authority to arbitrarily suspend in-person voting.

If these dictates had been allowed to stand, they would have created insanely destructive precedents, taking elections out of the hands of local legislatures. If we discard legal norms every time there’s a crisis, we no longer have a nation of laws but a country at the mercy of arbitrary decrees, emotional appeals, and pliable courts.

Not that any of this concerned the usual suspects, who began lamenting the alleged anti-democratic nature of Chief Justice John Roberts’ court. When will the conservative wing abandon their partisanship and begin “compromising,” wondered a news piece in The Washington Post.

Liberal pundits, apparently unable to differentiate between partisan policy preferences and the rule of law, launched into their customary hysterics, denouncing the Supreme Court for disenfranchised minorities and putting people’s lives at risk. But the court doesn’t exist to fix your local government’s incompetence or make life safer. It exists to uphold the Constitution.

None of this is to say that the situation in Wisconsin is fair to voters, who had to risk standing in lines during a dangerous pandemic. Many states have contingencies in place for emergencies. Wisconsin—while it had plenty of time to pass new guidelines—does not. That’s a Wisconsin problem, not a Supreme Court problem, not a “democracy” problem, and definitely not a federal problem.

If Wisconsinites don’t like their laws, if they’re disappointed in legislators, if they’re furious at the state’s high court and bothered by the governor’s ineptitude, then there will be plenty of future elections to right those wrongs. In no version of a healthy “democracy,” however, do we override existing laws, passed by previous elected officials, through fiat.

But make no mistake, the Wisconsin case will be used in the broader effort to federalize and centralize elections to create a more direct democracy—even though such efforts are antithetical to American governance.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has already proposed mandating automatic and same-day voter registration, ending ID requirements, compelling states to have 15 days of early voting, and forcing states to adopt voting by mail, among other liberal pet projects.

She wants the federal government to bribe states with billions to adopt these standards. And she wants those changes implemented by November.

She’s not alone. In “Phase 4” of the coronavirus rescue package, Democratic leaders are reportedly including provisions that would compel all states to offer voting by mail. Former Vice President Joe Biden also supports such a mandate, because, he claims, “all the experts” say we should do it.

Now, I don’t know what experts Biden is referencing, but Publius, something of an authority on these matters, once wrote that it was a no-brainer to condemn the suggestion that federal government should regulate state elections as both “an unwarrantable transposition of power, and as a premeditated engine for the destruction of the State Governments.”

As a practical matter, requiring states, all of which have varied systems, technologies, and infrastructures, to figure out how to handle mail-in ballot systems in the midst of a pandemic is absurd. And not merely because of the obvious feasibility problems, but because there is no proper time to debate the issue.

Democrats have spent years weakening the integrity of elections, but voting by mail opens up the process to real-world voter intimidation, disenfranchisement, fraud—and a host of other problems.

Then again, people of goodwill can disagree over the particulars of election policy. It’s far more critical to note that neither the Senate, nor the House, nor the White House, nor federal courts have any business compelling states to adopt uniform standards regarding mail-in ballots or IDs or voting machines, or much of anything else.

A national mail vote is meant to federalize the election, leaving smaller states to vagaries of a national majority. It’s exactly the kind of situation the Constitution wanted us to avoid.

SOURCE 

*********************************

Economic Illiterates Are Running Amok

One particularly terrifying consequence of the Chinese Bat Soup Virus that is not yet getting the attention it deserves is how this situation is making already stupid liberals even dumber, especially when they sound off about economics. In the wake of this pandemic, we’ve been subjected to a series of mind-numbing insights from the pinko blue check brain trust that reaffirms the clichéd but true observation that our elite is anything but elite. Leave it to our liberal betters to take a bad situation and seek to make it exponentially worse.

For example, Sally Kohn – oh, you know where this is going – offered an astonishing observation just as the Democrats were obstructing the vital relief our small businesses desperately need:

“I'm really tired of reading how business owners are "forced" to layoff workers. No one made them do that. They *chose* to do that. Not saying it isn't a hard choice, during a hard time, but to say they were *forced* obscures their agency AND casts owners/CEOs as the victims.”

If that hasn’t plunged your IQ to new depths, consider ever-dumb Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), who tweeted out this brainstorm:

“We need to cancel rent until this crisis is over.”

Wow. Her economics advice is even worse than her relationship advice.

Okay, it seems like you would not have to explain this to allegedly educated people, but apparently there are still some people who need a lesson in Economics 101. Since I actually own a business, perhaps I have a perspective that C Tier social media personalities and commie grifters could find illuminating.

Here goes.

Are you people stupid? What the unholy hell are you thinking? When there is no income, what do you expect a business owner to pay his employees with? IOUs? Monopoly money? Feelings?

Oh, maybe the boss of that local pizza restaurant that the cough police closed down should just go downstairs to the basement vault in his mansion, pop open the door and take out one of those dozens of big sacks with dollar signs on them that are stuffed with $100 bills and use them to meet payroll. And rent. And insurance. And supplies. And maintenance. And so on. And so on. And so on.

Because that whole thing about cash flow? No, it’s not a thing. It’s a myth! It’s just an illusion for those tuxedo n’ top hat-sporting fatcats who run the local pet stores and such use to fool the proles into believing that there’s not some bottomless well o’ cash these tycoons can draw upon forever.

Yeah, these bigwigs are claiming they are running out of money, but Sally sees through their web of deceit! But in a way she is right – it is kind of a choice. Of course, the choice is bankruptcy or layoffs. And either way, those employees are out of a job.

But the real tragedy would be if people might see “owners/CEOs as the victims” even though they are victims too.

You wonder if people can be this dumb and then you go on Twitter and yeah, people can absolutely be that dumb.

Or even dumber, if that’s even possible.

Really, Mrs. Brother? “Cancel rent?” I guess the president would just use that little-known “cancel rent” power buried behind all those penumbras and emanations in the Constitution. But let’s not get all wrapped up in talk of enumerated powers and stuff. Let’s look at this remarkable suggestion on its own feeble terms. “Cancel rent.” Okay, rent is canceled. Gone! No paying rent! Yah!

Wait, where did the lights go? Power’s out. Wait, you mean that miserable miser is not fronting cash for utilities anymore since you’re, you know, not paying rent? Hey, there’s a plumbing leak! You can just call…oh…awkward! Well, then you can just refuse to pay…oh, right. Well, then maybe you’ll sue your landlord for not doing the things landlords should do, though you are not doing things tenants should do. Oops. He’s bankrupt. Hear that? It’s a sad trombone.

But that’s only at the personal level. Our economy is interconnected. You don’t pay rent, so your landlord doesn’t pay his loan and all those people who used to manage the property. All those guys he used to pay, his bank, the gardener, the power company. Now, they can’t pay anyone anymore. And pretty soon no one can pay anyone anymore.

Now, we have focused on how these people are saying stupid things, and the underlying assumption is that they are stupid. But is that why they seem to be rooting for disaster? You’ve already seen progs looking on the bright side – at least this economic carnage will end up owning Drumpf!

Maybe they are simply bad people who want to impoverish you to increase their own power. Have you seen them do anything, anything at all inconsistent with that hypothesis? After all, if they can destroy capitalism by means of knocking out select pillars of the system – like by undermining selected contracts that obligate people to pay their debts – they can get to their desired endstate, and they can blame it on capitalism itself even though a system where you can’t collect rent isn’t capitalism.

Stupid? Evil? A bit of both? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that no matter how much these half-wits pipe up on Twitter, they can never, ever be allowed anything like real power lest we go full Venezuela.

And you should never go full Venezuela.

SOURCE 

********************************

 IN BRIEF

According to The Washington Post, two years ago, "State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses." The Washington Examiner's Eddie Scarry quips, "Now that the Washington Post reported on it, is it finally OK to say out loud that the China-borne coronavirus may have come out of a science lab in Wuhan?"

Meanwhile, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says "weight of evidence" suggests virus arose naturally, but still inconclusive (Hot Air)

WaPo-acquired draft shows the CDC and FEMA have created a plan to reopen America (The Washington Post)

For the record: Dr. Fauci says U.S. "not there yet" on reopening economy, May 1 target a "bit" too optimistic (Fox News)

Hunter Biden still listed as board member of Chinese company he pledged to resign from in October, an apparently unfulfilled decision his father once said "represents the kind of man of integrity he is" (The Daily Caller)

Unprincipled Bloomberg News quashed a 2013 China exposé over concerns the Chinese Communist Party "will probably kick us out of the country" (National Review)

Now that all the other candidates have dropped out, Obama endorses Biden for president, says he's the right person to "guide us through one of our darkest times" (NBC News)

**********************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

**************************

Bernie Sanders is done, but his ideas live on in an ideologically bankrupt party



Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign may have just ended, but his movement lives on. The Democratic National Committee should be worried.

Even in Joe Biden’s hastily made basement command center, Sanders’s ideas are still winning. Nearly all of today’s Democratic Party’s new proposals have their roots in the Sanders camp. "Medicare for all," free college, free childcare, higher taxes, some incarnation of a "Green New Deal" — all have pushed the Democratic Party to the far left. The Democratic agenda is essentially Sanders-lite, and even the DNC’s heir apparent, Biden, has tailored his message to emphasize the expansion of the failure that is Obamacare and a ban on fossil fuels.

Compare this with what Biden ran on during his first failed attempt at the presidency in 1988. For years, Biden was known as a deficit hawk and even proposed caps on entitlement spending. Yet his 2020 campaign website includes nothing on our burgeoning national debt. Even Sanders understands that his proposals are expensive, but Biden, the former deficit hawk, does not even pay lip service to the looming fiscal crisis.

Biden also was once a proponent of reforming Social Security to balance the budget. But when pressed by Sanders in a recent debate, he claimed his past comments were “taken out of context.” Biden used to support the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Now he says he’s not sure he’d join it under the current rules. Sanders is a staunch advocate of protectionism and an enemy of free trade.

Clearly, Biden has flip-flopped on his positions, rarely for the better, as is the case with criminal justice reform. But like Biden, the Democratic Party as a whole has moved to embrace the regulatory and administrative state to fix our problems.

It’s often been said these past few years, but the Democratic Party of today is a far cry from John F. Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.'' The Sanders-esque Democratic Party is concerned with handouts, at the price of the free market.

Truth be told, much of Sanders’s base could be described as selfish political actors who maintain a thousand-foot view of how the world ought to work — from their perspective, of course. Sanders’s camp is centered on grievances that they believe a central government must fix. Nevermind that the same government has helped create and inflame such societal divisions as wealth inequality, Sanders’s camp believes that a one-size-fits-all approach will somehow save the world. This view is sophomoric at best and malevolent at worst.

No wonder Sanders is wildly popular with younger voters. But as usual, that level of enthusiasm doesn’t translate into success at the polls. Young people remain one of the least politically active demographics in the country. Unfortunately for Sanders, his younger base seemed more concerned with ranting about the senator’s ideological purity on social media than actually getting folks to turn out at the polls. Nevertheless, Sanders’s brand of socialism has a lock on the next generation of Democratic voters — that is, if they remain with Democrats. I’m confident they will.

After all, parties in our political culture are surprisingly resilient. Both of the major parties have undergone new twists and turns, and I believe we are in the midst of another such realignment right now. The Democratic Party is here to stay, but with socialism’s “red” taking over the blue.

Either way, gone for good are the days of the so-called moderate Democrats, those who understood and respected the value of free enterprise and limited government. Prepare now for a wave of would-be successors to Sanders, each of them striving to take up his mantle by moving further and further to the left. Progressive ideological purity might sound good to the far-left Democratic base, but it is assuredly a death sentence for down-ballot races in tough districts across the country.

Big government socialism has found a new home with the Democratic Party. Even in defeat, Bernie Sanders has helped remake the Democratic Party in his image.

SOURCE 

**********************************

We Have Become A Police State, And None Of Us Should Be Okay With That

On Saturday, police in Kansas City “intervened” to shut down a parade of elementary school teachers. The staff of John Fiske Elementary School decided to organize the parade as a way to boost the morale of their students and encourage them in their new distance learning adventure. All of the teachers and administrators were in their own cars. There was literally no chance whatsoever of any virus being transmitted from car to car. But a spokeswoman for the police later explained, after the elicit gathering was descended upon by law enforcement, that the celebration of learning was not “necessary” or “essential.”

Two days before the Kansas City community was saved from the threat of cheerful elementary school teachers waving to children from their sedans, police in Malibu arrested a man who was caught paddle boarding in the ocean. Two boats and three additional deputies in vehicles were called to the scene of the non-essential joyride. How could a man out by himself in the Pacific possibly contract or spread the coronavirus? Nobody knows. But orders are orders, after all. And so the man was pulled out of the ocean and hauled away in handcuffs.

Not far from this harrowing scene, the San Diego sheriff’s department was giving out citations to people who’d committed the nefarious crime of “watching the sunset” on the beach. At around the same time, over on the east coast, Pennsylvania state police were pulling over and ticketing a woman who, according to the citation, was “going for a drive.” You may think that going for a drive when you’ve been locked in your home for three weeks is indeed a rather essential activity. And you may also think that there is essentially zero risk of contracting or transmitting the virus while you drive along a country road in the rural county of York, Pennsylvania. But none of that matters. The politicians have spoken. You may leave your home only for the reasons they decree.

A woman in Minnesota was recently pulled over and ticketed for two offenses: First, driving with a canceled license, which seems fair. But second, for violating her state’s stay-at-home order. She said she’d gone to Taco Bell and before that had visited her storage unit. Why should one be essential and not the other? Who knows. That is up for the politicians to decide. The point is that you can’t just go out and move around as you please. What do you think this is? A free country?

Officials in other parts of the nation have banned essential retailers from selling non-essential items like mosquito repellent. I suppose the prevention of West Nile and malaria are no longer considered essential. The mayor of Port Isabel, Texas, has decided, for whatever reason, that residents may not travel with more than two people in their vehicles. What if you’re a single parent with two kids? Well, sorry, one of your kids is out of luck. It’s not clear how this rule will be enforced, but some states have made that easier on themselves by setting up checkpoints to stop and question every car that passes through. A driver from New York who gets caught in Florida might face 60 days in jail. I should stop here to remind you that Florida and New York are places in the United States of America, not Soviet Russia.

Meanwhile, protestors outside of abortion clinics in California and North Carolina have been arrested for violating their state’s stay-at-home orders, despite the fact that they were following the protocols of social distancing, not to mention that obscure legal artifact known as the First Amendment. But the First Amendment has officially been neutralized, as the multiple pastors arrested for holding worship services have found out. All of this may seem quite oppressive and gestapo-ish, but a police chief in Colorado put those worries aside by explaining that the act of leaving your house and going outside is not a right but a “privilege” that can be revoked if it is “misused.” A prosecutor in Ohio, exploding in a fit of rage during a radio interview, said that those who defy his state’s stay-at-home order are committing “felonious assault” and if you’re guilty of that, you can “sit your butt in jail, sit there and kill yourself.”

Again, I remind you: this is the United States of America. Or at least it used to be.

Apologists for our newly established police state will tell me that states and localities have the authority to impose restrictions in an emergency. That is true, but the question of how far their authority actually goes is complicated, and in this case made even more complicated by the fact that these stay-at-home orders, in many cases, are based not on a current medical emergency in the respective state, but on models that forecast the possibility of an emergency in the future. For example, Minnesota is under a stay-at-home order despite having only 29 coronavirus deaths among a population of over 5 million. Perhaps the situation will get worse. Perhaps not. The point is that there is no current emergency in Minnesota or many of the other states currently under lockdown. There is, rather, a model that projects an emergency. And if projected emergencies can justify the effective nullification of the Bill of Rights, where is the limit? Haven’t we now granted the government the power to seize near-total control on the basis of any real or phantom threat?

And there are other problems. We don’t know that these lockdowns will actually have the effect of saving lives. It’s possible, as Dr. Fauci has admitted himself, that the virus could come roaring back to life whenever we emerge from our homes. It’s also possible that the illness came to America in November, December, or January, aboard any of the hundreds of thousands of travelers from China who poured into our country during that span. If that’s the case, then the viral horse has long since left the barn, and the lockdowns are obliterating our national economy and driving millions into ruin for minimal preventative gain. So we have, then, a series of indefinite stay-at-home orders based on dubious models, and dubious projections, with a dubious chance of success, and which often outlaw behavior that could not even plausibly put anyone at risk from the disease that may or may not, or maybe already has, become epidemic in the states where these laws have been enacted. Is that good enough to justify treating Americans like subjects in a communist dictatorship?

I would argue that nothing could ever justify such a thing. Indeed, the First and Fourth Amendments — the provisions of the Bill of Rights that seem to be having the worst time of it, recently — serve no purpose and have no reason to exist if they can be canceled or overridden whenever the government might have a specially compelling reason to do so. It is only when the government has a specially compelling reason to violate the amendments that the amendments have any function. After all, we really don’t need them during the times that the government has no interest in infringing on them. It seems that if we toss aside our right to assembly, our right to practice our religion, our right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, etc., whenever the government insists that such protections are hazardous to our health, then we might as well not have the rights in the first place. It’s like locking a criminal in a cell but giving him the key to open it along with a stern warning to only use the key if he has a very good reason. Doesn’t the key make the cell a rather pointless accessory? Sure he might remain in it sometimes, but only when he wants to. And it’s precisely when he wants to be behind bars that you don’t need the bars at all.

I’m not suggesting that state governments should do nothing in response to the coronavirus. I am suggesting that they shouldn’t have the power to do whatever the hell they want, for whatever reason they want, to whatever extent they want, for however long they want, with whatever penalty they want. Which is what is happening now all across the country. Governments can and should act justly and prudently to respond to threats that endanger their citizens lives. But there is little in the way of justice and prudence in these measures.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

"We've got to get our country open": New White House panel to explore path to reopening the economy (AP)

Ten U.S. governors on the east and west coasts banded together on Monday in two regional pacts to coordinate gradual economic reopenings as the coronavirus crisis finally appeared to be ebbing (Reuters)

Trump administration to unveil $15.5 billion in first phase of farm aid (Reuters)

Due to pandemic, a reluctant Supreme Court will allow live audio broadcast for first time (Los Angeles Times)

Democrat-backed candidate Jill Karofsky wins race for Wisconsin Supreme Court, which greenlighted the much-maligned April 7 primary (The Hill)

Leftmedia personified: New York Times editor admits editing article on Biden sexual-assault allegation after campaign complained (The Washington Free Beacon)

Chinese aircraft carrier sails past Taiwan as U.S. Navy struggles with coronavirus and Capt. Brett Crozier's public memo (Fox News)

Expanded early voting, voter ID repeal, and Election Day holiday: Virginia is reborn as a leftist enclave following governor's weekend bill signing (CNSNews.com)

Michigan bans "all public and private gatherings" but still allows lottery sales (Reason)

Meanwhile, petition to recall Michigan Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer passes 150,000 signatures (Bongino.com)

Christian baker Jack Phillips sued again by relentless Rainbow Mafia, this time over transgender cake (The Daily Wire)

Policy: Is higher education COVID-19's next victim? (Issues & Insights)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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The American Left is as authoritarian as ever

The great slogan of the Nazis and most of the early 20th century German Left was "Alles muss anders sein" (Everything must be different).  That attitude lives on the the current American Left.

How can any politically person be unaware of Obama's endorsement of that idea when he said (in 2008) that he wanted to "fundamentally transform" America?

Now in a recent dialog between Sanders and Biden we read that: "Biden concluded by promising that if he beats Donald Trump, he would "transform this nation" as much as Franklin Delano Roosevelt"

And Biden is the presumptive Presidential candidate of the Democratic party.  He speaks for it.

The impertinence of the Leftist program for change is breathtaking.  There's nothing voluntary about it.  They intend to upend many people's lives by sweeping legislation.  The great inert bloc of Congress prevented Obama for doing much but his many regulatory initiatives showed he had no respect for the importance of consent  He had no compunction at all about pushing around large numbers of people.  His policies have their clearest 20th century precursors in the policies of Benito Mussolini, the Italian Fascist dictator.

What gives the Left this authority to make sweeping changes in our society?  They don't even ask that.  If they want to do it, that is enough.  Might is right is their only authority.  What could make them more authoritarian than that?

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White House adviser Peter Navarro says medical experts are 'tone deaf' over coronavirus lockdown and warns extended economic closure could cause 'very significant losses of life'

President Trump's trade adviser has described medical experts as 'tone deaf' for pushing for extending the coronavirus lockdown and warned the economic fallout could cost even more lives.

Peter Navarro accused health advisers of ignoring the potential long-term consequences for the public's health by extending the national shutdown.

Navarro was one of the first of Trump's advisers to warn about the economic cost of efforts to slow the spread of the virus by imposing restrictions on mass gatherings and shuttering non-essential businesses.

He has clashed with Dr Anthony Fauci, the federal government's top infectious disease expert, who has warned against easing the lockdowns too soon and causing a second wave of the virus.

Last week it emerged Navarro privately warned that a pandemic could cost hundreds of thousands of American lives and wipe trillions of dollars off the economy while at the same time telling the public that it had 'nothing to worry about'.

He wrote two memos in late January and late February to his White House colleagues expressing alarm over the prospect of a pandemic.

These memos came at a time when Trump was actively playing down the threat of the coronavirus.

White House economic advisers have clashed in recent weeks with health experts over how to balance containing the virus without crashing the economy.

Navarro has now warned of 'very significant losses of life' if there were extended economic shutdowns.

He told The New York Times on Monday: 'It's disappointing that so many of the medical experts and pundits pontificating in the press appear tone deaf to the very significant losses of life and blows to American families that may result from an extended economic shutdown.

'Instead, they piously preen on their soap boxes speaking only half of the medical truth without reference or regard for the other half of the equation, which is the very real mortal dangers associated with the closure of the economy for an extended period.'

Navarro, who is known to a trade protectionist, made headlines last week when it was revealed by the Times he wrote a memo to the White House warning the coronavirus could become a 'full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans'.

The memo came at a time when Trump was actively playing down the threat of the coronavirus.

The January memo marks the earliest known high-alert to circulate within the West Wing as officials planned their first substantive steps to confront the disease that had already spiraled out of control in China.

The second memo, dated February 23, was much more dire. It warned that up to 2 million Americans could die and trillions of dollars would be lost because of the virus.

Navarro also warned the US economy faced a 'China shock' worse than at the start of the century when the Communist regime joined the World Trade Organization and a link was made between a rise in Chinese exports and decreasing American manufacturing jobs.

He told the Times: 'The unfair China trade shock that hit so many of America's communities in the 2000s not only destroyed over five million manufacturing jobs and 70,000 factories; it killed tens of thousands of Americans.

'As numerous academic studies have documented, economic shocks like China's trade shock can increase mortality rates associated with suicide, drug overdoses, alcohol poisoning, liver disease, lung cancer, poor diet and cigarettes...while destroying families through higher rates of single-parent households, child poverty, and divorce and lower rates of fertility and marriage.'

Many medical experts in the government, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, have cautioned that easing up on social distancing too soon could lead a new wave of the disease that would require shuttering the economy again, with disastrous results.

A team, expected to be formally announced as early as Tuesday, has already begun meeting behind closed doors in the West Wing to tackle how to begin reopening the American economy.

The council, which is not expected to include health officials, could bring to the forefront the push-pull tensions within the White House between economists and public health officials over how quickly to reopen the economy vs. proceeding cautiously to ensure the virus doesn't spike again.

With the country barreling toward a likely recession ahead of November's election, Trump is eager to spur an economic revival, hoping to steady financial markets and restore some of the 16 million jobs already lost due to the pandemic.

He originally hoped to have the country stirring again by Easter but now wants at least a partial reopening by the end of the month.

Governors on both coasts of the US announced on Monday that they would join forces to come up with a coordinated reopening at some point, setting the stage for a potential conflict with Trump, who asserted that he is the ultimate decision-maker for determining how and when to reopen.

In the US, about half of the more than 22,000 deaths reported are in the New York metropolitan area.

Among those expected to be part of the new team: Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and White House economic advisers, past and present, Kevin Hassett and Larry Kudlow. New White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is expected to chair the effort.

SOURCE 

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Trump Derangement Syndrome Becomes a Threat to Public Health

Trump derangement syndrome—a well-documented illness that predominantly afflicts coastal elites and congressional Democrats—has turned into a political pandemic.

It is the reflexive refusal to agree with any position that President Donald Trump takes, regardless of merit. In a time of national emergency, this contagion is particularly dangerous.

Take hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, two drugs that doctors historically have used to treat or prevent malaria. When the president suggested that hydroxychloroquine could be helpful in treating COVID-19, sufferers from TDS immediately set out to prove him wrong.

CNN published an “analysis” titled: “Trump peddles unsubstantiated hope in dark times,” and The Washington Post proclaimed: “Trump is giving people false hope of coronavirus cures. It’s all snake oil.”

But several medical studies have suggested that these drugs have promise.

Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University expert on infectious diseases, cited an independent study from Chinese doctors that discovered a group of moderately ill COVID-19 patients improved when given hydroxychloroquine. The patients who received the drug saw their coughing and fever ease a day or so earlier than did patients in the control group who didn’t receive the drug.

Another study published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents found that a combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin could be especially effective in treating COVID-19.

None of this is conclusive, of course. Trump has acknowledged that although hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine may not “go as planned,” the drugs have tremendous promise if they end up being safe and effective to treat COVID-19.

Most neutral observers would conclude that the president’s invocation of those drugs is a way of demonstrating hope that our medical community will come up with drugs to treat COVID-19.

But TDS sufferers, obsessed with finding ill intent in every one of the president’s actions, chose to pick nits instead of check facts.

A key talking point, repeated endlessly on cable news, is that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are not “FDA-approved” for treating COVID-19. However, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration did issue an emergency use authorization for the drugs March 28, again demonstrating the potential upside of the drugs.

Formal FDA approval takes years to obtain, but the hundreds of thousands of Americans afflicted with COVID-19 don’t have years to wait. In the meantime, it is perfectly legal and appropriate for doctors to prescribe the drugs “off-label” for COVID-19.

Contrary to the TDS narrative, off-label uses often are the standard of care and vital to patients. For example, doctors routinely use off-label drugs to treat cancer. Unfortunately, there’s no cure, off-label or otherwise, for Trump derangement syndrome.

The elite media and liberals also profess alarm that the president is encouraging a run on scarce hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine supplies.

But this isn’t a product that you can buy off the shelf at your local pharmacy. This is a prescription drug, and you can’t get it unless a doctor, in his or her medical judgment, decides you need it.

The president has done nothing to force doctors to prescribe the drug against their own better judgment. Nor did he force Italy and France to give the green light for doctors to prescribe hydroxychloroquine. He didn’t require South Korean and Indian doctors to begin prescribing the drug.

It’s clear, though, that these countries see the same potential benefits of hydroxychloroquine that our president does.

Let’s talk about the facts.

The president and his coronavirus task force have worked around the clock to monitor and prevent the spread of the virus. In January, he proactively enacted travel restrictions on flights from China. In March, he implemented further travel restrictions on parts of Europe.

Trump signed the CARES Act into law, providing sweeping relief to workers and small businesses; declared a national emergency, freeing up states, territories, and tribes to access billions in existing funding; signed legislation securing $8.3 billion for an initial coronavirus response; created a task force; and instructed the FDA to cut red tape that was preventing the rollout of tests.

Despite facing vicious attacks from sufferers of Trump derangement syndrome, the president has done everything he can to protect our country during this once-in-a-century global pandemic. He is going to keep projecting strength and hope during this crisis.

Too bad there’s no hope for the TDS folks, who are left only with their blind hatred of the president.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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What Would Hayek Do? Knowledge and Vaccines

Bloomberg opines the key to a lasting solution to the coronavirus pandemic is a vaccine. The most common projection is that it will take a minimum or one year to accomplish. Cooperation and innovation made possible by  open markets may provide the strongest measures yet to solve COVID-19. Do we have reason to optimistically question the current vaccine timeline assumption?

Perhaps the hesitation in making public projections is the number of unknowns and the fear of being wrong, as I heard from one top tier consulting firm hesitant to go public. But fearlessly making these qualified projections and sharing data is vital in the process of knowledge building. Hayek told us the use of knowledge held by dispersed individuals is essential for progress, now so more than ever. Widespread testing (combined with the right isolating behaviour) and finding a vaccine are widely seen as the key to getting the pandemic under control.

The application of knowledge is all too often hindered by regulation: In the instance of testing, Jeffrey Tucker points out the Centers for Disease Control had “previously nationalized all disease testing”. Writing at the American Institute for Economic Research, he says the group had just days earlier  “explained how a private researcher, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was forcibly prevented from producing and distributing a valid test”.

At the President’s request, “by Friday America’s robust private sector, including Walmart, Walgreens,  CVS, Roche Laboratories, and LabCorp, came up with a solution for mass testing, noted Robert Luddy in the American Spectator mere days later. A multitude of sources have concluded “quick, easy testing was the key to South Korea’s success”.

On the timeline for a vaccine, “European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen surprised the world this week, suggesting that the regulatory process for vaccines could be sped up and that a coronavirus shot could be on the market within six months,” reported ABC News Australia. Her comment is at odds with the World Health Organisation (WHO), “which does not expect a fully-tested and approved vaccine to be ready to reach the market before the middle of 2021”.

CureVac, a German biotech company working on a coronavirus vaccine, was the inspiration for her public comments. It is not the only company making swift progress. A range of discoveries and trials in the testing phases are documented, taking place at lightening speed as new standards are set for responding to a pandemic. In the interim, modest improvements in treatment well-underway are poised to make a significant difference. Peter Diamandis is keeping a tally on some of the major milestones already achieved early this month, with a list that is by no means exhaustive.

As of March 21, there are 48 vaccine candidates in pre-clinical evaluation, and two in clinical evaluation, according to the World Health Organization.

Studies are happening at lightning speed which help inform vaccine development, potentially affecting timelines: “The good news is two independent studies by teams of infectious diseases scientists helping Italy’s fight against coronavirus have reported they found the fast-proliferating pathogen to be reasonably stable,” reports Mark Blunden in the UK: “The findings will add to a better understanding of the virus and how it spreads — and raise hopes that a future vaccine could have a higher rate of effectiveness against the strain.”. On currently available prospective treatments, here at EconLog David Henderson argues safe drugs should not be kept of the market today.

William Yeatman, a research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, argues COVID-19 has spurred the suspension of regulations that were never needed in the first places so address the situation: The emergency Declaration under Title 42 gives health agencies greater flexibility to suspend regulations that get in the way of responding, with many suspensions recognising the effectiveness of private supply chains in responding.

The Intercept reports Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases recognizes the speed of delivering the manufacturing of a vaccine will come down to the private sector. “The federal government is not going to be able to make hundreds of millions of doses,” he said.

At the state level and federal level, a number of regulations have been eased or temporarily suspended. A number have been on the wish list for elimination during ordinary times, as pointed out during an interview with Yeatman.

Yeatman draws attention to the now well-known “fiasco in Seattle, where private parties had developed fairly effective tests for COVID and used it in violation of the law and FDA” as an example of rigidity that existed, citing New York Times coverage of the story. By going ahead before the regulatory roll-back, private players “arguably saved a lot of lives”.

Loosening of licensing regulations for nurses is another tangible, where previous measures had precluded a number of well-qualified and well-meaning people from getting behind the response.

Constitutional research fellows and economists don’t carry scientific credentials but may have a key role in crisis: to demonstrate the necessary conditions for the maximum application of scientific knowledge in an enabling environment, one that is conducive to the capital and collaboration necessary to fight COVID-19 or any future pandemic – and come out stronger, even if such a prospect seems distant in these tough times.

Hayek once noted “the range and variety of government action that is, at least in principle, reconcilable with a free system is (…) considerable”. Those actions include rolling back barriers to finding a solution in addition to new measures underway.

SOURCE 

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Could a 100-year-old vaccine protect against COVID-19?

Scientists around the world are racing to find ways out of the new coronavirus pandemic. Some are working to develop new drugs and vaccines, while others are looking to see whether therapies we already have may help against COVID-19.

In the latter category, researchers have dusted off one intriguing compound in our collective medicine cabinet — a century-old vaccine to fight tuberculosis, a bacterial disease that affects the lungs. A couple of early analyses, which have yet to be peer-reviewed, have found that countries that require this vaccine, called Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG), seemed to have been hit less severely, in terms of both number and severity, by the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19.

Could this vaccine be protecting people from COVID-19? The short answer is: We don't know. But several clinical trials around the world are now examining whether this vaccine could protect against this new foe.

"I was originally quite skeptical" that the studies could tease apart all of the other factors that could be causing some countries to be hit harder with COVID-19 than others,” said Paula Cannon, a distinguished professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, who is not a part of any of these studies. Among those factors are the quality of the healthcare system, measures put in place to fight the disease and testing capacity.  Still, it is a "provocative idea" and the "data is tantalizing," Cannon said.

Dozens of countries, including Japan and China, require children — typically newborns — to receive the BCG vaccine as protection against tuberculosis, an infection that is typically more common in lower-income countries. Other countries, such as Spain, France and Switzerland, used to require the vaccine but stopped because the risk of catching the disease in those countries lessened, according to one of the preprint studies published in medRxiv on March 28. Other countries, such as the U.S., Italy and the Netherlands never had such a universal vaccine policy for the BCG vaccine.

But scientists have long known that "almost by lucky accident," the BCG vaccine doesn't just protect against tuberculosis, it also helps fight other viruses, respiratory infections in particular, Cannon said. The vaccine, "in some sort of unexpected and magical way, is like a broad immune booster," she said.

For example, one study conducted in Guinea-Bissau in West Africa found that children who were vaccinated with BCG had about a 50% reduction in overall mortality, largely because the vaccine reduced respiratory infections and sepsis, or blood poisoning, according to the medRxiv study. Other studies, mostly conducted in animals, have found similar broad-spectrum protections from the BCG vaccine.

Weakened, live bacteria vaccine

The BCG vaccine is made up of weakened forms of live Mycobacterium bovis, closely related to the bacteria that causes tuberculosis. It was first developed in the 1920s in Paris and later shipped all over the world.

Now, countries from Japan to Denmark have their own BCG vaccines, made using different formulations of live bacteria — and each one has varying degrees of immune boosting ability, said Dr. Ofer Levy, the director of the precision vaccines program at Boston Children's hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

Typically, live vaccines provide a "strong and long-lasting immune response" and sometimes even "lifelong protection" against the germ, whereas inactivated forms of vaccines, such as those in flu shots don't provide immunity that's "as strong," according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

While most vaccines prompt one arm of the immune system — the adaptive immune system — to create antibodies that target very specific pathogens, the BCG vaccine taps into the other arm, the innate immune system. This system doesn't discriminate against pathogens and releases immune cells rather quickly  to fight any foreign substance. The BCG vaccine thus boosts the body's  production of non-specific immune cells.

The medRxiv study and another preliminary study recently published in Research Gate came to similar conclusions: there seemed to be a correlation between countries that require BCG vaccines and a reduced spread and severity of COVID-19 cases. For example, Portugal — which has required BCG vaccines for infants —  has over 16,000 cases of COVID-19  but only 535 deaths whereas neighboring Spain has over 169,000 cases and over 17,000 deaths.

Similarly, Ireland, with 9,655 cases and only 334 deaths, requires the BCG vaccination, whereas the U.K. with 89,554 cases and 11,346 deaths no longer does. Based on these numbers, Ireland has a fatality rate 3.5% whereas the U.K. has a fatality rate of 12.7%. Of course, there are big population number differences across these countries, along with other variables that could affect death and infection rates.

These preliminary studies are "very flawed," because many factors  such as differences in wealth and testing ability, can affect the outcomes Levy told Live Science. But the authors are "doing the best they can in a very difficult situation."  While there's no direct evidence that BCG vaccines will reduce people's risk of developing COVID-19, "I'm enthusiastic about the hypotheses," Levy said.

It's difficult to draw firm conclusions, but there's enough scientific evidence to prompt clinical trials, and his team is looking into starting one in the U.S, he said. Clinical trials analyzing the protective effects of the vaccine against COVID-19 are already underway in other countries, including Australia and the Netherlands.

Vaccination or revaccination?

"I'm kind of puzzled," by the implication that the BCG vaccine might be able to protect for such a long period of time once someone has received it as a baby, Cannon said. Indeed, it's not clear how long the BCG vaccine effects can last.

The second study, which also has not been peer-reviewed, analyzed how countries with re-vaccination policies — or booster shots — fared in the COVID-19 pandemic. That study found that countries without re-vaccination policies had a 5.2% case fatality rate, versus a0.6% case fatality rate in countries that required re-vaccination.

"The big kind of asterisk, if you like, against all of these studies, is that they are really dealing with massively incomplete information," Cannon said. "We're all guessing what the true infection rates and the case fatality rates are because there isn't widespread uniform testing in every country."

Still, "I applaud the authors for at least, you know, doing what they could with the available data and providing some very provocative hypotheses," she said. "The good news is they're very testable."

In another world, we would be doing animal experiments to test this hypothesis. In this world, amid the coronavirus pandemic, we don't have time for that, she said. But the BCG vaccine has a "very safe track record," and likely can be tried in those who aren't old and who don't have weakened immune systems (since this is a live vaccine, it can potentially cause more side effects for older people or those with weakened immune systems), she added.

The human immune system is like an orchestra, "it's massively interconnected and what the BCG vaccine seems to do is maybe it gives like a little bit of extra control to the conductor," Cannon said. "So in the symphony of immune attack against respiratory viruses, the orchestra is able to go full blast, straightaway, all together, in sync, rather than kind of playing catch up."

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

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