The Biden administration, siding with some world leaders over the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, came out in favor of waiving intellectual property protections for coronavirus vaccines.
The United States had been a major holdout at the World Trade Organization over a proposal to suspend some of the world economic body’s intellectual property protections, which could allow drugmakers across the globe access to the closely guarded trade secrets of how the viable vaccines have been made. But President Biden had come under increasing pressure to throw his support behind the proposal, drafted by India and South Africa and backed by many congressional Democrats.
If we’re comfortable with borrowing and spending $trillions (i.e., printing money) every few months during coronapanic, why not print a little more money and buy, rather than steal, the rights to the vaccines that we think should be free and open-source? Surely there is some price at which at least one of the vaccine makers would sell voluntarily. Pick the one that is easiest to manufacture, buy the formula, put it on a web site, and pay the inventors additional $$ to help anyone who wants to make it.
From earlier today, “Federal judge vacates CDC’s eviction moratorium” (The Hill): A federal judge on Wednesday vacated a nationwide freeze on evictions that was put in place by federal health officials to help cash-strapped renters remain in their homes during the pandemic. … “The question for the Court is a narrow one: Does the Public Health Service Act grant the CDC the legal authority to impose a nationwide eviction moratorium? It does not,” Friedrich wrote [full text].
Same question for that one. Why did the government, which can print as much money as it wants to (and where such printing has no cost, according to an MIT economist), need to steal from individual landlords? If the CDC wanted everyone to have a rent holiday, why didn’t the CDC pay the rent with borrowed/printed money?
I was chatting with a friend last night. His son is a high school student in the New York City public school system. What’s the experience, 14 months into coronapanic and four months after teachers became eligible for vaccines? “It’s two days per week, two hours per day,” he explained. “But there is no teaching. It’s like a study hall. We just talk to our friends.” What about the rest of the week? “We are online for two hours per day.”
Separately, though the son may not have learned much academic content since March 2020, he is fully educated on Mask and Shutdown Karenhood. He is a big believer in the efficacy of masks for the general public (#Science proves they work; practical trials in the Czech Republic cannot contradict #Science) and is happy to follow the dictates of Governor Cuomo and Dr. Fauci. What’s his personal experience with COVID? After a year of cowering and being masked any time he was outside of the family apartment-bunker… he got COVID. He, his sister, and his mom all had slight cold symptoms (the father had been vaccinated at this point).
Here are some photos from a May 1, 2021 COVID-safe fly-by, up the Hudson River at 1500′ in a friend’s Cirrus SR22T (with A/C!):
An Explanation of Benefits (EOB) has been posted to your *** Plan online member portal. To log into your account and review your explanation of benefits (EOB):
Go to https://****.com/login
Enter your Username (email address) and Password
Click on the Claims tab at the top of the page, choose claims. Member claims are listed by date, with the most recent claim appearing at the top of the list. To view an EOB, click on the claim you want to view, then click on the pdf icon under View EOB.
(name hidden to protect the guilty)
So an Explanation of Benefits is available from my vaccine shot? Let’s actually log in…
Even if the promised Explanation of Benefits did not exist, there was a page devoted to my Moderna shot. Two claims hit the insurer’s computer systems, one for $0 (the vaccine itself? Which Donald Trump arranged for the government to pay for?) and one for administering the vaccine:
The actual price is $33.50 to deal with me? But why bill $67? This is one of those rare situations in which there is no way to cheat the uninsured by hitting them with 2X or 5X the “negotiated” price that 98% of customers pay.
(Separately, I’m not sure how $33.50 makes this profitable for the clinic. They paid someone to build a web site where I could register and schedule, paid for a receptionist to check me in, paid an RN to ask me some medical questions, paid for a place where I could sit for 15 minutes after the vaccine, paid for people and systems to send this $67 bill to the insurance company, etc. Unless the Feds are giving them additional money for each shot, why do they want to be in this business?)
I wonder if the goal of the American health insurance system is to make our federal tax system seem logical, clear, and simple. Happy Tax Freedom Day to everyone! (filing is extended this year to May 17 #BecauseCoronapanic)
Note that Tax Freedom Day, on which you stop working for the government (pay all of those government workers who sat home for the past year!) and begin to work for yourself varies from state to state. It is May 3 in New York, April 23 in Maskachusetts, and April 20 in California. It was April 5 in Texas and April 4 in Florida. Before World War I, Tax Freedom Day was in January:
As best historians can tell, the American colonists-turned-rebels-and-traitors were paying roughly 2 percent of their total income for all taxes. So they achieved Tax Freedom about one week into January while complaining that being British subjects was oppressive (the Brits, meanwhile, were shelling out huge $$ to fight with “Indians” on all of the borders).
How about going forward? If Presidents Biden and Harris spend $1.9 trillion every few months on coronapanic Band-Aids, would the “deficit inclusive Tax Freedom Day” move to mid-summer, or, for those here in MA, into foliage season?
Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives.
Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.
Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.
This is exactly what the Swedish MD/PhDs said 15 months ago, i.e., that coronavirus would be with us forever so it wouldn’t make sense to do anything that you wouldn’t be willing to do forever (e.g., close schools).
Let’s look at Sweden versus the eager mask-and-lockdown adopters such as the Czech Republic and the U.S. (varies by state):
Note that New Jersey, if it were its own country, would be #1 worldwide in COVID-19 death rate. New York and Maskachusetts are just behind NJ (chart). The front page of the NYT reminds me, based on IP geolocation, that right now is a great time to panic:
Everyone old/vulnerable is vaccinated and yet there is a “very high risk”?
Related:
April 17, 2020 interview with Johan Giesecke, former chief scientist of the European CDC. (summary: there will be convergence in death rates among countries with different policies; don’t lockdown unless you want to lockdown permanently; his advice was based on the assumption that Americans and other non-Swedes would object to denying children a full year of school)
a follow-up with the Swedish MD/PhD, April 16, 2021 (he admits that he was wrong about how eager Americans and others would be to surrender their liberties and also that he thought COVID-19 would spread faster; he also admits that Dr. Donald Trump, M.D., Ph.D., was better at predicting vaccine availability)
A month ago a friend bet me that, due to vaccines, Maskachusetts would be “back to normal” today and that the governor repealing his mask order (from among at least 66 total orders issued under a state of emergency) would be the determinant of normality and who would buy lunch at his favorite COVID-unsafe indoor Thai restaurant.
In taking the “this is normal going forward” side of the bet, I pointed out that a mutual friend had said the same thing back in March, i.e., that the vaccine would get us back to normal soon. He’d been hiding in his suburban bunker for over a year when he said that. I said “You believed them when they told you it would be 14 days to flatten the curve and then you could go back to normal. You believed them when they said if people would wear masks for a couple of months that would end coronaplague. You believed them when they told you we just needed one more shutdown. Now you believe them when they say that the restrictions will end once everyone is vaccinated?”
My primary evidence against residents of Massachusetts wanting to be unlocked is observing rich suburbanites, i.e., the folks who have enough money to support politicians with donations. They’d been fully vaccinated weeks earlier and were still wearing masks when walking outside at least 100′ from the nearest human. When queried (at a masked distance) they expressed a personal fear of contracting COVID-19, since they’d heard that the vaccines are not 100 percent effective. I ran into a (masked) mom who was walking her dog. She’s been a Shutdown and Mask Karen from Day 1, but complained that her son, enrolled in an elite private high school, wasn’t allowed to participate in crew because he is also in drama and the drama teacher did not want him exposed to additional COVID risk.
Maybe young people living in crummy apartments in poor neighborhoods wanted to be unlocked, I argued, but they have no political voice.
Meanwhile, the local economy is plainly very different from what it was. A lot of small businesses remain closed (as of October 2020, 33% of Boston’s small businesses were shut, 42% of those in hospitality; overall number of people employed is down about 15 percent in Boston versus 0 percent in Miami and actually up in Tampa (click on “Metros”)). The ones that are left are usually too short-handed to serve customers in what we would have considered a proper manner. There are no Ubers, something I also noticed in other cities, but only higher-cost Uber XLs. When queried, an Uber XL driver said “a lot of people can make more on unemployment so it isn’t worth driving regular Uber anymore.”
Most of the “experts” quoted by the New York Times and similar have been spectacularly wrong regarding COVID-19. But we make no claim to expert credentials and it is fun to try prophecy. What are folks’ predictions regarding state shutdown and mask levels over the coming 12 months?
I’ll go first: My best guess regarding the future is that it looks like the past. So the states that are masked and shut now will be masked and shut going forward while the states that are unmasked and open now will be unmasked and open going forward. Due to the fact that coronavirus is seasonal (and a med school professor friend reminds me that we don’t know why flu is seasonal so we probably won’t figure out why COVID comes in waves either), I expect variations around this theme. Summer 2020 was a quiet time here in MA (see NYT chart below) so I would expect the virus and restrictions to relax in summer 2021 and both to come back in the late fall.
Masks are advertised as a cost-free intervention, so I’m thinking that Maskachusetts, for example, might have a “mask mandate” (it’s been a year and the Legislature cannot get organized to pass a “law”?) through at least 2022, though the previous statewide unconditional outdoor mask requirement has just recently been relaxed to “when you’re not able to maintain a 6′ distance”. Masks will be sold as a cost-free way to prevent the virus from returning. When the virus actually does return, the Mask Believers will say that the masks delayed the return and/or reduced the peak of the return.
(From a physician friend: “The flu is gone because everyone is sticking to the rules but COVID is rising because no one is sticking to the rules.”)
Let’s put our predictions here and check them at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months from now! Bragging rights for whoever gets closest!
Update: At a Bat Mitzvah today (about 15 people in a room designed to hold 100+), a photographer wanted to get a picture of four 13-year-old healthy slender girls. They refused to take off their masks for an indoor photo. He managed to get them outside. They refused to take off their masks for an outdoor photo.
Related:
A Silicon Valley friend: “I am so Woke that I want to change my pronouns to Karen/Karen.”
Earlier this month I saw a father and daughter flying a kite on the Cambridge Common. It was about 5 pm, windy enough to fly a kite, and nobody was within 100′. Both were wearing masks. A little later I went to a friend’s backyard for dinner around a propane fire pit. Except for me, everyone there was vigilant about being masked, including for kids down to age 5 or so. They were concerned about COVID-19, but as with airline travel, the mask protocol made them feel safe enough to leave their bunkers and gather closer than 6′.
But then some people took off masks in order to eat and/or drink. And some people took off masks in order to hear or be heard better. By the end of the evening, nearly every pair of guests had spent a fair amount of face-to-face unmasked time. If they hadn’t had faith in masks, I think they would either have refused the invitation and/or been more careful about staying farther apart.
Speaking of the virus thriving… I know a married couple who spend nearly 24/7 at home together. The husband caught what seemed like a bad cold, got tested for coronavirus, and tested positive. The wife also felt sick, got tested (two-day delay to schedule then three-day delay for result; cost $105 at Emerson Hospital even though testing is supposed to be free due to some fine print (she didn’t have a primary care doc’s referral)). Her test came back negative. She got another test a few days after that, this time from Regional Express, which actually was free. The free test came back within 24 hours… negative. Neither lost taste or smell. Do we guess false positive for the husband? False negatives for the wife due to not enough virus camping out in her nose? They both caught respiratory infections at the same time, but they were different infections?
(I tried to reach the wife every day during this ordeal, offering encouragement such as “We dug a grave for you in th backyard in case you need it.” Most of the time she wasn’t available. I asked, “If you’ve got COVID [presumptively from the husband’s test] and you’re stuck at home, how can you be unavailable?” She responded that she had been in Zoom meetings. “You have COVID and aren’t taking a sick day?” She replied, “Sick days are for wimps.”)
In case you object that it doesn’t make sense for laypeople to diagnose other laypeople via FaceTime, here’s what Herodotus had to say….
The following custom seems to me the wisest of their institutions next to the one lately praised. [The Babylonians] have no physicians, but when a man is ill, they lay him in the public square, and the passers-by come up to him, and if they have ever had his disease themselves or have known any one who has suffered from it, they give him advice, recommending him to do whatever they found good in their own case, or in the case known to them; and no one is allowed to pass the sick man in silence without asking him what his ailment is.
It worked 2,400 years ago, so it should work today!
I know a remarkable number of young people who are major Mask and Shutdown Karens and who are generally afraid to leave their apartments due to expressed personal fears of contracting coronavirus. I always ask these folks “Do you personally know anyone who has been hospitalized for COVID-19?” and the answer is almost always “no.” Nor do they know anyone who claims to be suffering from “Long COVID”. In other words, if they weren’t exposed to government and media stories about COVID they wouldn’t know that it existed or was hazardous to anyone their age.
Before people here in Maskachusetts were going to hear the news that public schools would remain shut, the state removed fatality-by-age-group data from the Covid dashboard. Thus, the general public was unable to learn that nobody under age 20 in MA had ever died from COVID-19. I’m wondering if there will now be a ramp-up of stories about children testing positive, being harmed, etc. Here’s a recent Boston Globe story:
Most people wouldn’t read beyond the headline to see a hint as to what might be behind the increase in “cases” (positive PCR tests), i.e., that many Massachusetts schools recently initiated a pooled testing program (test a pool every week, wait for result, then start testing individuals if the result for the pool is positive; due to the days of lag time, “useless” was the rating from a friend who is an expert in public health informatics).
There’s an alarming spike in COVID-19 cases among children in Michigan.
Dr. Bishara Freij is chief of pediatric infectious disease at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., which is just north of Detroit, and he joins us now.
FREIJ: Children do much better than adults in terms of infection. So their infections are much less severe, and far fewer of them get hospitalized. And certainly, death is pretty uncommon.
FREIJ: … The problem is it’s not predictable who’s going to do OK and who won’t. So I can tell you that most of the kids that have been really sick that we’ve taken care of had been previously well children. You know, they were not the chronically ill patients who happened to get COVID on top of their other problems. And so when we look at them, there’s no way to predict which child is going to have a bad disease. The odds are low, but you cannot say, my child is going to escape because that child is healthy.
Protecting children against SARS-CoV-2 infection is both an ethical obligation and a practical necessity. We need data from pediatric trials to reassure parents about the safety and wisdom of this approach. We must prepare for disinformation campaigns that prey on parental fears and target communities made vulnerable through histories of medical neglect, health disparities, and racism. … Dare we imagine a campaign that would actually thank children and parents for helping to protect others, as the rubella campaign did, perhaps suggesting that they proudly display their SARS Stars or Corona Diplomas?
I’m wondering if it is time to make a $5 coin suitable for tipping essential workers. The U.S. has a history going back to 1795 with $5 coins; just over 100 years ago, a $5 coin had a quarter ounce of gold in it, which today would be worth $430. The $5 coin wouldn’t blow away if left on the outdoor restaurant tables that are now mandatory. It could also be left on a front step for an Amazon delivery contractor.
The U.S. government says the Tuskegee Airmen “fought two wars” (one of which was against racism). (This is the opposite of what Charles McGee said at Oshkosh back in 2019; asked “What was it like to be black in 1940 when segregation prevailed?” he answered “I went to high school in the North and we didn’t have segregation.”)
How about a series with scenes of a modern-day hero? The double-masked soldier for social justice sits at a desk eating Doritos. After looking both ways to make sure nobody is within 100′, the N95-masked hero takes a break from Zoom to add a #StopAsianHate sign in among the rainbow flag, BLM banner, and “In this house we believe…” sign in his/her/zir/their yard. The concerned citizen updates his/her/zir/their Facebook profile picture from #StopAsianHate (a week for this cause is enough) back to #StayHomeSaveLives. He/she/ze/they rolls up his/her/zir/their sleeve to accept the sacrament of investigational non-FDA approved vaccine. As in A Rake’s Progress, the story ends in tragedy. Our Mask and Shutdown Karen, now fully vaccinated, decides to attend a rally demanding justice for the BIPOC and stands closer than 6′ from his/her/zir/their brothers/sisters/binary-resisters in arms. The final scene for the reverse shows the felled-by-a-variant social justice warrior dying in the ICU, attended by a BIPOC physician and BIPOC nurse, an immigrant via the DREAM Act.
Separately, another potential advantage for the $5 coin is that if the $trillions of additional government spending generate inflation, it will be the right denomination for purchasing a drink from a vending machine (already at $3 at the Atlanta Zoo, April 2021; see photo below).
A European eyeglass retailer published a screen time index based on data gathered in mid-October 2020 (i.e., during coronapanic).
Americans were champions at watching TV, dominating all other nations (175 minutes/day compared to 119 minutes in Ireland and 113 in Switzerland). Colombia and Mexico were the only other nations that came close to matching our couch potato achievement.
And, before we wisely decided, in response to a virus that attacks the obese, to lock ourselves into our apartments and park next to the fridge, how were we doing with obesity? Our government loves to sort us by race:
If you’re a white guy whom United Airlines doesn’t want to hire, there is a 75 percent chance you’re “overweight” (i.e., fat). If you’re a Black woman whom United Airlines does want to hire, there is an 80 percent chance you’re “overweight”. Maybe after a few of these quota-arranged training classes graduate it will be time to un-mothball the Airbus A380s (1,265,000 lbs. max gross weight)!
[My recollection is that taking an average within the NHANES data reveals that American “women” (whatever that term might mean) actually have a higher BMI than American “men”. That’s not necessarily inconsistent with the above tables, which look only at those who’ve exceeded a threshold, but maybe it is worth exploring.]
Aircraft can hold large numbers of persons in close proximity for long periods, which can increase the risk for transmission of infectious disease.* Current CDC guidelines recommend against travel for persons who have not been vaccinated against COVID-19, and a January 2021 CDC order requires masking for all persons while on airplanes.†,§ Research suggests that seating proximity on aircraft is associated with increased risk for infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 (1,2). However, studies quantifying the benefit of specific distancing strategies to prevent transmission, such as keeping aircraft cabin middle seats vacant, are limited. Using bacteriophage MS2 virus as a surrogate for airborne SARS-CoV-2, CDC and Kansas State University (KSU) modeled the relationship between SARS-CoV-2 exposure and aircraft seating proximity, including full occupancy and vacant middle seat occupancy scenarios. Compared with exposures in full occupancy scenarios, relative exposure in vacant middle seat scenarios was reduced by 23% to 57% depending upon the modeling approach. A 23% exposure reduction was observed for a single passenger who was in the same row and two seats away from the SARS-COV-2 source, rather than in an adjacent middle seat. When quantifying exposure reduction to a full 120-passenger cabin rather than to a single person, exposure reductions ranging from 35.0% to 39.4% were predicted. A 57% exposure reduction was observed under the vacant middle seat condition in a scenario involving a three-row section that contained a mix of SARS-CoV-2 sources and other passengers. Based on this laboratory model, a vacant middle seat reduces risk for exposure to SARS-CoV-2 from nearby passengers. These data suggest that increasing physical distance between passengers and lowering passenger density could help reduce potential COVID-19 exposures during air travel. Physical distancing of airplane passengers, including through policies such as middle seat vacancy, could provide additional reductions in SARS-CoV-2 exposure risk.
For a whole year I have wondered how it can possibly be legal for airlines to pack cramped aluminum tubes 100 percent full with potentially plagued people (see below). The government has used its awesome power to shut down outdoor tennis doubles, for example, and beaches.
Now I’m beginning to wonder at the disparate treatment accorded to airlines and cruise ships. It is legal for an airliner to depart 100 percent full with no testing of anyone before or after. It is not legal for a cruise ship to depart 30 percent full with vaccinated and tested passengers who can easily be tested prior to disembarking. The exposure on a cruise ship is for a longer period of time, of course, but the airlines cumulatively pack a ton of people together for 16 hours per day (and those people are packed closer together in airports than they would be on a cruise ship). Could we be seeing a disparity in lobbying power? From a December 2018 trip to Cuba on Royal Caribbean, two sitting ducks for any virus:
