Will Americans use their free at-home test kits to ensure negative official test results as needed?

by philg

In a triumph of central planning, the test kits that nobody can buy will now be free. “Insurers Will Have to Cover 8 At-Home Virus Tests Per Month” (New York Times, 1/10):

The Biden administration announced the new guidelines as it continued to work to get coronavirus tests to people regardless of their insurance status.

Private insurers will soon have to cover the cost of eight at-home coronavirus tests per member per month, the Biden administration said Monday.

“Today’s action further removes financial barriers and expands access to Covid-19 tests for millions of people,” Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the Biden administration’s Medicare and Medicaid chief, said in a statement about the new guidelines.

From the CVS around the corner from our apartment, also on January 10:

(It’s Florida, so, even in Palm Beach County, apparently there is no demand for a “please wear a mask” sign on the front door.)

A family of four would be entitled to 384 kits per year, which happens to be exactly 384 more kits than are available at all of the CVS stores within 20 miles right now. Joe Biden’s campaign site, November 2, 2020:

As President Biden is not a liar like the previous dictator, presumably Uncle Joe will make good on this campaign promise and when that glorious day arrives, someone can actually get 384 kits. What could he/she/ze/they possibly do with them?

One use scenario comes from the comments on Protected by masks on a 100-percent full flight in which SK describes a family that was excluded from returning from Cancun to Seattle by air due to having tested positive while on vacation. They legally took a domestic flight to Tijuana, legally crossed the land border (no test required, whether one is a current or future U.S. citizen!), and then another domestic flight from San Diego to Seattle.

Suppose this family wanted to be sure of catching their flight home to Seattle and they had all of the reagent fluid from their 384 kits. What would stop them from, before taking the official test, using this fluid as a nasal spray to bind to whatever antibodies the official test’s reagent is going to bind to? Then they flush their noses with saline and/or alcohol spray. Five minutes later, they take their official tests. At that point, isn’t it likely that there wouldn’t be enough test-triggering stuff left in their noses to result in positive tests?

(And, actually, this makes me wonder how big families can travel internationally right now. Isn’t it virtually certain that at least one child, for example, will test positive? At that point, though, the entire family will be stuck in quarantine prison for 10 days. Who would willingly take this risk?)

A recent Facebook post:

In other words, the trip to Jamaica turned into a prison experience, albeit a prison with a view.

Related:

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The Federal Reserve Bank president who said not to print money

by philg

Happy Lucky 13 day! Given the recent headlines, e.g., “Inflation rises 7% over the past year, highest since 1982” (CNBC), let’s look at “The Fed’s Doomsday Prophet Has a Dire Warning About Where We’re Headed” (Politico).

In 2010, Hoenig was president of the Federal Reserve regional bank in Kansas City. As part of his job, Hoenig had a seat on the Fed’s most powerful policy committee, and that’s where he lodged one of the longest-running string of “no” votes in the bank’s history.

Between 2008 and 2014, the Federal Reserve printed more than $3.5 trillion in new bills. To put that in perspective, it’s roughly triple the amount of money that the Fed created in its first 95 years of existence. Three centuries’ worth of growth in the money supply was crammed into a few short years. The money poured through the veins of the financial system and stoked demand for assets like stocks, corporate debt and commercial real estate bonds, driving up prices across markets. Hoenig was the one Fed leader who voted consistently against this course of action, starting in 2010. In doing so, he pitted himself against the Fed’s powerful chair at the time, Ben Bernanke, who was widely regarded as a hero for the ambitious rescue plans he designed and oversaw.

Hoenig lost his fight. Throughout 2010, the FOMC votes were routinely 11 against one, with Hoenig being the one. He retired from the Fed in late 2011, and after that, a reputation hardened around Hoenig as the man who got it wrong. He is remembered as something like a cranky Old Testament prophet who warned incessantly, and incorrectly, about one thing: the threat of coming inflation.

So… he predicted inflation but was off by about 12 years as to when it would arrive? How is that different or better than predicting a big stock market crash at some point in the future?

But this version of history isn’t true. While Hoenig was concerned about inflation, that isn’t what solely what drove him to lodge his string of dissents. The historical record shows that Hoenig was worried primarily that the Fed was taking a risky path that would deepen income inequality, stoke dangerous asset bubbles and enrich the biggest banks over everyone else. He also warned that it would suck the Fed into a money-printing quagmire that the central bank would not be able to escape without destabilizing the entire financial system.

The Fed is now in a vise. Inflation is rising faster than the Fed believed it would even a few months ago, with higher prices for gas, goods and automobiles being fueled by the Fed’s unprecedented money printing programs. This comes after years of the Fed steadily pumping up the price of assets like stocks and bonds through its zero-percent interest rates and quantitative easing during and after Hoenig’s time on the FOMC. To respond to rising inflation, the Fed has signaled that it will start hiking interest rates next year. But if that happens, there is every reason to expect that it will cause stock and bond markets to fall, perhaps precipitously, or even cause a recession.

How does centrally-planned inflation work?

When the Fed kept interest rates low during the 1970s, it encouraged farmers around Kansas City to take on more cheap debt and buy more land. As cheap loans boosted demand for land, it pushed up land prices — something that might be expected to cool off demand.

But the logic of asset bubbles has the opposite effect. Rising land prices actually enticed more people to borrow money and buy yet more land because the borrowers expected the land value to only increase, producing a handsome payoff down the road. Higher prices led to more borrowing, which led to higher prices and more borrowing still. The wheel continued to spin as long as debt was cheap compared to the expected payoff of rising asset prices.

The bankers’ logic followed a similar path. The bankers saw farmland as collateral on the loans, and they believed the collateral would only rise in value. This gave bankers the confidence to keep extending loans because they believed the farmers would be able to repay them as land prices increased. This is how asset bubbles escalate in a loop that intensifies with each rotation, with the reality of today’s higher asset prices driving the value of tomorrow’s asset prices ever higher, increasing the momentum even further.

And the central planners, back in the 1980s messed up the flip side of this too, causing bank failures when farmland prices fell only 27 percent.

I recommend the article for its historical perspective. Don’t complain if you don’t find a solution to our current situation (high inflation; mediocre economic growth once adjusted for population growth). Part of this banker’s point was that there is no good way to stop printing money.

What did cars look like the last time inflation was this high? Here’s an example from a classic car gathering in our neighborhood:

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Non-white people considered high-risk when it is time to get COVID-19 medicine, but low-risk when gathering

by philg

Welcome to Covidcratic Logic Lesson #731.

From the Followers of Science in California, Order of the Health Officer of the County Of Sonoma C19-35:

To slow the spread of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (“COVID-19”), this Order prohibits large gatherings, as defined, as well as gatherings of 12 or more individuals of any age who are at higher risk for severe illness from COVID-19, for the duration of this Order.

For the purpose of this Order, “individuals of any age higher risk for severe illness from COVID-19” means Persons with Certain Medical Conditions as defined by the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/people-with-medical-conditions.html.

If we follow the CDC link we learn that having HIV (a disease not in any way associated with the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community) or being obese (a disease not in any way associated with having been locked down next to the fridge for two years) puts a person at higher risk, and therefore unable to gather legally (not in any way guaranteed by the First Amendment). Being non-white, however, does not prevent a person from gathering legally up to the 50-person limit that the Sonoma Covidcrats have established for the low-risk.

Both Federal and state Covidcrats, on the other hand, say that, when it is time to hand out the life-saving new COVID-19 treatment pills, skin color is important. “FDA wants race, ethnicity factored in administering COVID drugs” links to New York State and Utah policies. The Utah one is more precise:

If a person ages from 51 years old to 100 years old during 14 days to flatten the curve, his/her/zir/their point score goes up by 2 (from 3 to 5). If a person, on the other hand, embraces a non-white racial identity (like Rachel Dolezal or Justin Trudeau or any Virginia Democrat), he/she/ze/they gets the same 2-point boost. According to the table above, a white-identifying 51-year-old, in other words, has the same risk of being killed by SARS-CoV-2 as a 100-year-old who identifies as non-white and/or as white+Latinx. But this risk equivalence is to be used only for purposes of allocating scarce medical treatment and never for purposes of restricting the freedom to assemble.

A healthy BIPOC-identifying or Latinx-identifying resident of the U.S., in other words, is low risk for the purposes of Covidcratic centrally planned gathering restrictions and high risk for the purpose of Covidcratic centrally planned medicine allocation.

(Fans of chivalry will note that identifying as “male” (however that term is currently understood) adds 1 point on the Utah scale. How can this be applied if a COVID-19 patient shows up unconscious and is not able to explain his/her/zir/their current gender ID and preferred pronouns?)

Expert analysis of the advantages of being white:

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Checking in on the wicked Swedes

by philg

One country we haven’t heard much about during the Ominous Omicron Oscillation is Sweden. As noted in Coronascientists are the modern Aristotles? for those who Follow the Science the original comparison countries to Sweden were Ireland, Britain, and France (NYT, April 28, 2020, “How Sweden Has Faced the Virus Without a Lockdown”).

The wicked Swedes followed the WHO pandemic guidebook in what we characterize as an “experiment.” (Closing schools, using bandanas as PPE, keeping marijuana shops open as “essential”, and giving non-FDA approved drugs to 5-year-olds is, by contrast, decidedly not an experiment.) Why isn’t Sweden featured in our media lately? Don’t the righteous among us want the satisfaction of seeing how badly the wicked are being punished by a just CoronaGod?

How about let’s look at cumulative deaths tagged to COVID-19 compared to the NYT’s originally chosen comparison set of nations. (I added the U.S. as well so that we can see the effect of Joe and Kamala’s Plan to Beat COVID-19.)

Maybe the flat line is because Omicron hasn’t hit Sweden? The answer seems to be “no”; cases are rising exponentially there, more or less as they are everywhere else.

What about vaccination rates? Perhaps these can explain any country-to-country variation in death rates. From the New York Times, January 6:

  • Ireland: 79% at least one dose; 45% turboboosted
  • France: 79% at least one dose; 35% turboboosted
  • United Kingdom: 78% at least one dose; 52% turboboosted
  • Sweden: 75% at least one dose; 25% turboboosted
  • United States: 74% at least one dose; 22% turboboosted

There doesn’t seem to be anything remarkable about Sweden in terms of attempts to induce artificial immunity via vaccination.

Heretical thought: Should we suspect that the country’s decision to allow young people to get infected in the spring of 2020 (while sheltering the elderly/vulnerable) built powerful natural immunity, even against the yet-to-develop Omicron variant?

Also, we can look at all of 2021 (source):

Related:

  • From August 16, 2020… “‘History will judge the hysteria'” (Israel National News): Prof. Udi Qimron will soon head the Department of Clinical Microbiology and Immunology at Tel Aviv University. In an interview with Yediot Ahronot, Qimron shed further light on the coronavirus. “There is a very great interest for anyone who has supported the draconian measures taken around the world to say that Sweden’s policy has failed. Because if it succeeded, and trillions went down the drain for no reason, someone will have to answer for it.” (I’m willing to bet that Professor Qimron is dead wrong on that last point!)
  • Also from Professor Qimron, from January 6, 2022: “Ministry of Health, it’s time to admit failure”. The best English summary from the original Hebrew: “I never want to get another government grant”, but it also contains some choice sentences, e.g., “Two years late, you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail. You do not admit it, because you have admitted almost no mistake in the last two years, but in retrospect it is clear that you have failed miserably in almost all of your actions, and even the media is already having a hard time covering your shame. … There is currently no medical emergency, but you have been cultivating such a condition for two years now because of lust for power, budgets and control.”
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Is it better to get food poisoning at a women-owned restaurant?

by philg

Because I refused to pollute the sacred temple that is my body with a 947th slice of pizza in one month, while the kids and Senior Management had a strip mall pizza on the way to the Tampa Zoo, I went next door to a “bowl” restaurant. Here’s my Google Maps review:

The good news is that I now know why Chipotle meals always come out too hot to eat. On 12/22 around 5 pm I ordered a Mediterranean Meze bowl. The chicken was not too hot to eat. By 1:30 am I was camped out in the bathroom. The vomiting began at 2:30 am and I was afraid that I was going to die. By 9:00 am, having been up all night in and out of the bathroom, I was afraid that I wasn’t going to die. It has been 48 hours and I’m still dizzy and lightheaded. I’m guessing Clostridium perfringens is the culprit, based on the Mayo Clinic web site: “Commonly spread when serving dishes don’t keep food hot enough or food is chilled too slowly.”

After submitting this, I noticed the following:

How should learning “identifies as women-owned” change how I feel about the worst food poisoning that I can remember despite having traveled to some moderately out-of-the-way places?

In the same strip mall:

When else in a person’s life would it have been healthier to eat at “Fried Rice King”?

(The food poisoning kept me in the hotel room for about 12 hours, then at home for a day, and I was 90 percent better by Day 3. Fortunately, we had so many stops on the Tampa trip that we’d decided to drive rather than fly the Cirrus. Therefore I was able to travel back to Florida’s east coast as inert cargo in the minivan while at least one kid demanded a bathroom or food break every 45 minutes.)

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Population-wide COVID-19 vaccines a failure measured by death toll?

by philg

The mRNA vaccines invented in 1987 by Robert Malone and perfected to build immunity against COVID-19 in 2020 have been hailed by many as a great public health success. CNN, 5/26/2021: “The speed at which vaccines for Covid-19 have been developed and their effectiveness at stemming the pandemic are nothing short of a modern miracle. … society will marvel at the science behind these vaccines for years to come …”

Certainly the clinical trials suggested that these work far better than my June 2020 proposal: U.S. should approve a saline injection as a Covid-19 vaccine?

The most vulnerable Americans, i.e., the elderly living in retirement and nursing homes, were vaccinated beginning in December 2020. The vaccine rolled out quickly to the rest of Americans 65 and older and, by November 2021, 98.5 percent of seniors had been vaccinated (Forbes).

Even without a vaccine, we might have expected the 2021 death toll from COVID-19 to be lower than the 2020 statistic. A virus usually kills the most vulnerable people first. The nursing home residents who died in 2020, e.g., in Cuomo’s technocratically managed New York State, couldn’t be killed a second time in 2021.

What actually happened?

  • “The COVID-19 pandemic caused approximately 375,000 deaths in the United States during 2020.” (CDC)
  • roughly 425,000 COVID-19-tagged deaths in the United States in 2021 (CDC says about 800,000 deaths through end of 2021 and subtract the 2020 deaths from that total)

Is it obvious from the above numbers that the vaccination effort was a huge public health success?

One explanation for the apparent failure of vaccines as a public health measure is that the clinical trials did not include the kinds of people who are typically killed by COVID-19. I raised this point in December 2020: If COVID-19 vaccines weren’t tested on likely COVID-19 victims, how do we know that they will reduce COVID-19 deaths?

Deplorable Canadian MDs in a slide deck regarding Pfizer make a similar point:

The vaccines were tested on the healthy, and then immediately given to the frailest members of the society – the elderly with multiple health conditions. This is unscientific and unethical.

The Canadian docs make some good points about the terrible quality of the research that has been done, but I’m inclined to think that they’re at least partly wrong. This is not because their dangerous anti-science message has been banned by Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the Internet righteous, but because of my love of influenza analogies. Flu vaccines are somewhere between 10 percent and 50 percent effective and therefore my best long-term estimate of COVID-19 vaccines is in this range as well.

“Benefit of COVID-19 vaccination accounting for potential risk compensation” (Nature, by Stanford Medical School professor John P. A. Ioannidis, a.k.a., the one honest person in medical research) points out that a vaccine that is less than 60 percent effective might be worse than no vaccine if humans who are vaccinated change their behavior as a result of having been vaccinated.

What have we seen? Karen goes to Universal during Christmas week. Karen gets on 100-percent full flights to attend a wedding. Karen clogs airline flights and hotels for leisure trips. The formerly bunkered Karens in our old neighborhood changed their behavior 180 degrees after getting their children vaccinated against a virus that has primarily killed 82-year-olds in Maskachusetts. Prior to the Sacrament of Fauci, their children were forbidden to meet other kids in outdoor playgrounds. After the Sacrament, they were literally hosting sleepovers. Their behavior could be explained as rational only by inferring that they considered the vaccines to be 100 percent effective.

A New Year’s card from a friend who has a Ph.D. in public health:

We are grateful for 2021’s vaccines that allowed travel to [foreign country 10+ hours of flight time away] and [far-away state], kids returned to school, [PhD in public health] resumed in-person teaching… Here’s to lots of joy, health, and as the kids say “more playdates and sleepovers.”

Paging Dr. Ioannidis!

Risk compensation is well-known phenomenon (Wikipedia isn’t a bad place to start). Anyone who claims expertise in public health certainly could and should have expected dramatic changes following the release of wildly optimistic clinical trial results.

Given the above simple arithmetic (deaths in vaccinated 2021 exceeded deaths during unvaccinated 2020) combined with the American belief that “success” is measured by COVID-19 body count (shades of the Vietnam War) has it been scientifically proven that the COVID-19 vaccines are a public health success?

Related:

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Waiting for marriage to have sex

by philg

On a group chat, a young friend talked about dating a 24-year-old “Nazi”. On what basis did she merit being lumped in with Donald Trump? “She said that she’d moved to [Mountain West state] because ‘it isn’t very diverse and I like that.'”

The young “Nazi” was a traditionalist, who wanted the man to pay for everything when on a date and also wanted the man to choose the restaurants and activities. She also said that she wouldn’t have sex prior to marriage.

An older participant in the chat noted “Sex is a statistically rare event after marriage, so what she’s really saying is that she doesn’t want to have sex ever.”

Another member of the younger subgroup within the chat mentioned his engagement. This prompted a reminder that “Jeff Bezos would be the richest person in the world right now if he hadn’t married the secretary.”

Speaking of dating, those wanting to make a strong first impression might consider this interior color choice:

The Aston Martin above, the epitome of British understatement, was parked at the “International Polo Club Palm Beach” (which is, of course, not in Palm Beach). One of the songs played for Rolls-Royce-driving spectators was Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman”, in which she sings about preferring beer to Champagne. At halftime, nonetheless, spectators who ventured out onto the field to stomp divots were served free Champagne and no beer was available.

After expressing sympathy to the father above that his babe-in-arms was too young to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, I gave the guys below a lecture on the risks that they were taking by participating in this game. Even after I pointed out the increased transmissibility of Omicron, however, they rejected my offer of a stack of surgical masks from the minivan. I was, fortunately, able to deliver pamphlets on the dangers of second-hand ivermectin that are inherent in equestrian sports.

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Revisiting my coronaplague prediction from July

by philg

On July 28, 2021, while we were at Oshkosh, a friend (who is a pre-2020 “scientist” in that he formulates hypotheses and tests them rather than constructing retrospective explanations) sent me a chart showing that Massachusetts, which was earning Silver in the Vaccination Olympics, was suffering only minimally from coronaplague.

I wrote back “The peak of Covid in MA always seems to be winter… I am going to guess that MA will have a renewed plague starting November and peaking in January” and marked my calendar for today to see if this prediction turned out to be correct.

From state-sponsored NPR, 12/27/201, “Mass. hospitals welcome National Guard members, cancel non-urgent procedures as cases rise” (WBUR):

State health data show the seven-day average of hospitalizations due to the virus was nearly 1,600 patients statewide. That figure has more than doubled in the last month.

“Mass. on Pace to Hit 1M Confirmed COVID Cases This Week” (NBC, also 12/27):

Regardless of when Massachusetts reaches 1 million COVID cases, it’s likely that the number of infections will continue to rise for the foreseeable future. Wastewater data for the Boston area shows that the level of virus in local sewage has continued to rise since the start of December, reaching new heights since the start of the pandemic.

And the total number of confirmed COVID deaths stands at 19,604, meaning Massachusetts is approaching another sobering milestone: a confirmed death toll of 20,000.

Whether private or state-sponsored, American media never likes to provide comparisons. How does 20,000 compare to the population of 7 million? 1 out of every 350 residents of Maskachusetts has died with a COVID-19 tag. In Sweden, by contrast, roughly 15,300 people have died out of 10.2 million, 1 death for every 667 residents. In other words, those who followed the science, wore masks, closed schools, smoked plenty of healing marijuana from the always-open “essential” cannabis dispensaries, and otherwise did everything right ended up with 2X the death rate of a country that gave the finger to the virus.

January 10 NYT data show near-complete success with vaccination (injections if not efficacy) while cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are all increasing exponentially:

How are the Followers of Science following Science right now? Checking Facebook I found that a friend had attended a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert over the weekend. He wore a surgical mask over an N95 mask while his family members wore N95 masks. The players themselves were wearing cloth masks that have failed randomized controlled trials even against less contagious variants of SARS-CoV-2. As with Karen visits a Florida theme park and If at least 50 percent of us are Covid-righteous, how did hotels and flights fill up with leisure travelers? I wondered why he hadn’t stayed home. He considered the environment dangerous enough to warrant surgical mask+N95 mask. Why wasn’t it dangerous enough to avoid altogether? Why not stay home and listen to a recording?

An OR nurse from our old neighborhood had followed AOC down to Florida. A Chinese-American from Belmont, MA proudly posted photos of her teenagers getting “Boosted at the Third Base Concourse. Thank you, Red Sox!” (37% effective, say the Canadians) This echoes a New Year’s card that we got from someone who lives in a $5 million house in the Portland, Oregon suburbs. Three children were pictured with masks. Each had a Band-Aid on his/her/zir/their upper arm. A mom from Lincoln, MA who previously celebrated lockdowns and mask orders and demanded that the unvaccinated accept the Sacrament of Fauci (from December 21: “Please, hose your toughy-selves down and get vaccinated. If my 1st grader can do it, you can too”) posted pictures from an entire weekend spent in a public indoor setting (gymnastics meet, with participants and parents in cloth masks).

Related:

Only loosely related… literal “bad news” from Oshkosh:

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Measles as a best-case study of how humans stack up to respiratory viruses?

by philg

Nearly two years ago, when public health officials first began talking about “science” in the context of the measures they were taking that would eradicate SARS-CoV-2, the medical school professors whom I know would point out that humans had never beaten a respiratory virus and therefore there was no possible scientific basis for a confident belief that a proposed intervention would be effective.

Influenza is a familiar example of respiratory virus that has laughed at our science and medicine. The common cold viruses are another class that are apparently smarter than us. Measles is a unique case. It has a bizarre-for-an-organism inability to mutate. “Why you need one vaccine for measles and many for the flu” (ScienceDaily, 2015):

The surface proteins that the measles virus uses to enter cells are ineffective if they suffer any mutation, meaning that any changes to the virus come at a major cost.

It’s only possible to speculate why the measles virus would find an evolutionary advantage to being so rigid, but one hypothesis is that measles uses a more complex strategy to get into human cells than influenza. Influenza, for instance, simply requires the binding of one of the sugars that decorate the outside of cells as a means of getting inside. In contrast, measles requires binding to specific cellular protein receptors as its doorway.

Since measles can’t mutate, we have great drugs for treating it and near-100 percent vaccine coverage all over the world, right? Wrong. In fact, measles kills roughly 200,000 people per year (WHO). They’re mostly under the age of 5 so they would have lived at least 50 more years, even in the poorest countries. That’s 10 million life-years lost every year to measles.

How does losing 10 million life-years compared to the killing done by COVID-19? WHO says that 1.8 million humans were killed by COVID-19 in 2020. Unless each one had another 5.6 years to live, which seems unlikely given that the typical victim in Massachusetts was 82 with comorbidities, measles actually took away more life-years than COVID-19. And if we use the British technocrats’ quality-adjusted life year, measles was far more destructive than COVID-19. Measles prevents people from enjoying their healthiest and most vigorous years while COVID-19 chops off the years during which electric scooters are required for mobility.

(The above paragraph raises the obvious question of why hardly anyone in the EU or US cared about measles deaths prior to 2020 or, even now. Nobody would have been willing to spent $10 trillion to save 10 million high quality life-years destroyed by measles.)

Because it is free to mutate, SARS-CoV-2 is a much more elusive enemy than Measles morbillivirus, yet I think our definition of success against COVID-19 is much more stringent than the standard we’ve applied to ourselves when fighting measles. Unless humans have become vastly more capable in just the past year or two, aren’t we setting ourselves up for disappointment?

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Avoid travel to Australia now that Novak Djokovic is on the loose?

by philg

“Novak Djokovic Can Remain in Australia, Judge Rules” (NYT):

Novak Djokovic, the Serbian tennis star, moved one step closer to competing for his record 21st Grand Slam title after an Australian judge ordered his release from immigration detention on Monday, the latest turn in a five-day saga over his refusal to be vaccinated for Covid-19.

Restoring the visa does not, however, guarantee that Djokovic will be able to vie for his 10th Open title when the tournament begins next Monday. In court, the government’s lawyers warned that the immigration minister could still cancel his visa, which would lead to an automatic three-year ban on his entering the country.

Hosting international sports events now involves navigating ever-evolving public health and border security rules, including the management of vaccine mandates on athletes who see themselves as high priests of their own bodies and their sports.

Australians have rushed to meet vaccine mandates, and endured lockdowns and closed borders. Many have little tolerance for a star who is notorious for preaching junk science and who, in the view of some, gained special treatment by receiving a vaccination exemption in the middle of Australia’s worst bout with the virus.

(Notice that it is not the Covidcrats dispensing the Science-informed rules who are “high priests”. Similarly, the folks who told the general public to wear bandanas as PPE are not guilty of “preaching junk science.”)

I wonder if we should avoid travel to Australia now that Djokovic is free. The country had only 587,971 active cases, according to its government. With Novak Djokovic in the stadium, there is now a real possibility of 587,972 cases.

Also from the NYT, “At an Australian Hotel, Djokovic Is Not the Only Cause of Controversy”:

A separate group of protesters held signs proclaiming “refugees welcome” and “nine years too long.” They were drawing attention to a very different cause: the well-being of about 30 asylum seekers who have been held at the Park Hotel much longer than Mr. Djokovic, the Australian Open champion.

Since December 2020, the Australian Border Force has used the hotel to house refugees who had been held for years on remote Pacific islands, under Australia’s much-criticized offshore detention policy for asylum seekers who try to reach the country by boat. Those at the Park Hotel were brought to Australia for medical treatment, but they cannot leave the hotel for any other reason, and they do not know how long they will be kept there.

Several asylum seekers said the windows of their rooms had been screwed shut, denying them access to fresh air. In October and November, a coronavirus outbreak swept through their ranks. At one point, 22 of the 46 asylum seekers who were then being held at the hotel had Covid.

“We cannot get out of the hotel,” said Mehdi Ali, a 24-year-old Iranian refugee. “We’re surrounded by walls.”

Australia’s offshore detention policy has been criticized at home and abroad for years. According to the Australian government’s statistics, as of September, 117 asylum seekers had been in detention for five years or more, and several for more than 10 years. That number has been declining in recent years, as dozens of refugees moved to the United States after being vetted by the American authorities, under a deal brokered during President Barack Obama’s administration.

This sounds like good news for the U.S. Treasury. If the standard path out of Australian immigration detention is U.S. residence and citizenship, as the NYT informs us, it is only a matter of time before Novak Djokovic abandons his tax-free home in Monte Carlo to become a U.S. taxpayer.

Related:

  • If Djokovic is destined to follow other Australia immigration detainees into U.S. citizenship, perhaps he’ll want to live free of state income tax next to 20 clay courts at the Palm Beach Gardens Tennis Center (owned by the city, but as nice as any country club)
  • mask laws in Victoria (Djokovic was being released into a society where “Wearing a mask is required for everyone aged 8 and above in all indoor settings in Victoria” and “We strongly recommend wearing a mask if you can’t physically distance, even if you are outdoors,…”)
  • Karen wants Novak home… “Australia should send Novak Djokovic Home” (Washington Post, Eugene Karen Robinson, 1/10): I’d remember the repeated lockdowns that were among the strictest and most punishing in the world. … I’d want the government to use all its power to bar him anyway. … I’d refuse to watch him play … Djokovic, however, is well-known as anti-vaccine. … Djokovic’s exemption may be technically correct … but it is morally wrong and contravenes the spirit of Australian law. … Morrison’s government can, and should, still kick him out. … Aussies have more than done their part to fight the pandemic.”

Update: I found a chart that explains everything.

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