Category: Coronapanic

From exactly four years ago:

What’s on the mind of New Yorkers today who were passionate maskers in 2021? Wearing masks:

Also, of course, the suffering of the world’s most peaceful and noble humans (link):

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Me, July 2020: Build downdraft paint booths for K-12 schools?

Why not a system for schools in which (a) each classroom has its own HVAC system, (b) there are 8-12 outlets in the ceiling, and (c) there are 8-12 exhaust outlets in the floor? For maximum safety, the system would have no recirculation.

Hollywood (and Racism League Yale) meets the United Nations, this month: “Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s daughter Violet calls for post-COVID mask mandate in impassioned UN speech” (Page Six):

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s daughter Violet made an impassioned speech at the United Nations on Tuesday.

The 19-year-old called for post-COVID mask mandates — while wearing one of her own — to combat “unmitigated infection and reinfection.”

The teen also advocated for “clean air infrastructure that is so ubiquitous and so obviously necessary … that tomorrow’s children don’t even know why we need it.”

The Yale University student wishes to “recognize filtered air as a human right, as intuitively as we do filtered water.”

She continued, “It is a neglect of the highest order to look children in the eyes and say, ‘We knew how to protect you and we didn’t do it. We have access to a technology to prevent airborne disease … and we refuse to use it.”

It’s never too late to be proved right!

Related:

• Train Americans to use masks the way that surgeons do or restructure the physical environment? (May 28, 2020: “Take out half the shelves in a Target for example, so that people are naturally farther apart. With so many other retailers shutting down, there is plenty of mall space. … switch small retail to more like it was in the 18th century. Customer enters spacious front part of shop and asks for item. Shopkeeper goes into jammed back part shelves to retrieve requested item.”)

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A Trump-hating professor at the University of California recently posted “Got my flu and new covid vaccines at CVS this morning”:

His friends (nearly all Trump-hating academics) were thrilled. Here are some of the 27 comments:

• Sounds good. For the theorists amongst us …. Yale researchers last year used, simple parsimonious 😃 models (see screenshot) to compute the optimal time of year for a Covid vax. For NYC, it’s Sept. 15th.
• Where? There appear to be none available (yet) in San Diego. Using their scheduling tool, I could only get it to declare me eligible if I clicked the “I have an underlying condition that makes me susceptible to severe outcomes from the COVID-19 virus”. Is that what you did? (Response: CVS in La Jolla Village Square. I went to pick up a prescription and the pharmacist asked if I would like to receive the flu and/or covid vaccine.)
• Good on you. I have been told to wait until next month. Wearing my mask on the MTA until then.
• Mazel tov. I had Covid a few weeks ago so I will have to wait a few months. (This is my favorite; she got 7 previous shots and then got the disease and her confidence in the value of Shot #8 is not diminished.)

Readers: I hope that all of you posted on Facebook after receiving a vaccine!

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“Global Estimates of Lives and Life-Years Saved by COVID-19 Vaccination During 2020-2024” (JAMA Health):

Roughly 70 million humans die every year worldwide. Via a tortured statistical analysis, the nerds now say that it would have been 70.5 million per year for 2020-2024 but for the life-saving miracle of COVID-19 vaccination. Roughly 1.2 million people die every year in traffic accidents (WHO) and they’re typically much younger and healthier than a COVID-19 victim. If we’d ignored SARS-CoV-2 and implemented my Save lives by limiting cars to 35 mph? and Reintroduce Prohibition for the U.S.? ideas, in other words, we would have saved far more lives, and vastly more life-years, than we did by forcing people to accept experimental injections.

(A skeptic might say that the difference between 70 million people dying and 70.5 million people dying is too small to be noticed reliably and that, therefore, it is just as likely that the COVID-19 vaccines didn’t save any lives or actually resulted in a higher death rate by encouraging people to take risks after they were vaccinated, e.g., attending a crowded Taylor Swift concert (note also that the best way for a progressive Democrat who expresses concern regarding inequality to redress social injustice is to spend $10,000 on a Taylor Swift weekend rather than giving the $10,000 to the poor).)

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Flashback to 2020, an email that I received with a subject line of “American to require customers to wear a face covering starting May 11”. #Science said that 250 humans could share an aluminum tube without exchanging any respiratory viruses so long as those humans wore cloth face rags.

The “food donations” line is confusing. Except for trips to “essential” marijuana stores, Americans mostly sat at home. Why did they need more calories if they didn’t get off their sofas?

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Tomorrow is the five-year anniversary of my blog post If coronashutdown is to protect the old, why do young people have to pay for it?

The average age of a Covid-19-tagged death here in Massachusetts is 82. Thus, presumably to the extent that any lives are saved from Covid-19 by our educational, social, and economic shutdown, they will be roughly 82-year-old lives.

A friend in Berkeley, California who was an early and enthusiastic adopter of Faucism (cloth masks, double masks, N95 double masks, experimental vaccinations, double and triple boosters, Paxlovid for the inevitable encounters with SARS-CoV-2, school closures, lockdowns, etc.) recently set me an April 16, 2025 paper, “Pandemic preparation without romance: insights from public choice”, by Alex Tabarrok, a tenured economic professor at George Mason University (i.e., a state government employee who can’t be fired). My friend loves this paper and believes that it covers purported “missteps” in the elite Covidcrat response to SARS-CoV-2.

I pointed out that the professor starts from the assumption that humans are in charge of viruses (therefore, preparedness could possible reduce deaths to zero) and then promulgates a narrative that keeps those who spent 2-3 years deep in coronapanic feeling fully justified:

In its size and scope the COVID disaster was unique. COVID killed more Americans than World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War combined.

The professor even has data:

Of course, the body count method is fundamentally flawed when talking about a virus that kills people at a median age of 82 and that targets those with multiple comorbidities. If SARS-CoV-2 had actually killed a lot of American seniors who had 10+ years to live, we would have seen the following:

• huge improvement in Social Security finances (nearly a million beneficiaries eliminated; 80 percent of COVID-tagged deaths in the U.S. were among those 65+)
• huge improvement in Medicare finances (nearly a million beneficiaries eliminated)
• impaired financials for life insurance companies
• dramatic change in life insurance rates (see COVID-19 is sure to kill you, but life insurance rates haven’t changed)

Since we didn’t see any of these things happening, we are forced to conclude that COVID-19 did not have as dramatic effort on American demographics as wars that killed healthy men at age 18 (remember, though, that “Women have always been the primary victims of war” — Hillary Clinton). Nor did Americans suffer as many lost life-years from COVID-19 as we did from the regular relentless toll of car accidents.

This preface is a far more interesting window into the psychology of American elites than anything in the rest of the paper. It confirms my often-expressed statement that almost nobody who advocated for school closures, lockdowns, forced masking, and forced vaccinations will ever come to see him/her/zir/themself as having been wrong (much less apologize!). These folks either deny that school closures and lockdowns ever occurred (a popular strategy for Californians, New Yorkers, and the righteous of Maskachusetts) or they say that all measures were based on the best available Science at the time and that what’s wonderful about Science is how it evolves from week to week. Mostly, though, these folks simply don’t look at data that contradicts their faith in themselves. A Maskachusetts lockdowner who said that COVID-19-tagged death rate is a measure of a state’s collective intelligence will never get curious about how “do almost nothing” Sweden ended up with a lower COVID-19-tagged death rate than “do absolutely everything” Maskachusetts (or how Maskachusetts ended up with roughly the same age-adjusted COVID-19-tagged death rate as “do almost nothing after a couple of months of panic” states derided as being full of stupid people).

Related:

• Norwegian government admits that lockdown was a mistake (May 29, 2020!)
• Coronaplague is a primarily sexually transmitted disease in Massachusetts? (May 26, 2020): Here we are in Massachusetts in our third month of shutdown with 2.3X the death rate of never-shut Sweden … Judging by the shape of the curve of deaths per day, the virus is spreading here at roughly the same rate as it has been spreading in Sweden.
• The government can’t find the 22 million undocumented, but it will find and track every coronafected human inside the U.S.? (May 19, 2020), regarding the Big Dreams of the Covidcrats
• Use testing and tracing infrastructure to enforce alcohol Prohibition? (May 15, 2020), my own Big Idea for Bigger Government

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