Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Taking away guns from people who work in health care and/or for larger employers

September 15, 2021September 12, 2021 by philg

Dr. Joe Biden, M.D., Ph.D., has read all of the papers and looked at the data and made a science-informed decision to order anyone who wants to keep working in a Medicare/Medicaid-funded health care business (i.e., everyone in American health care) to get vaccinated against the coronavirus version that existed in December 2019. Unless they want to transition to the disability lifestyle (“my long COVID is acting up”), employees at companies with at least 100 employees will also have to get vaccinated against this two-year-old virus under OSHA emergency rules.

Via this order, COVID-19 will be in full retreat. What’s next for this selfless hero of public health? How about bold action against gun ownership? “‘Something has to be done’: After decades of near-silence from the CDC, the agency’s director is speaking up about gun violence” (CNN, August 28, 2021):

For the first time in decades, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the nation’s top public health agency — is speaking out forcefully about gun violence in America, calling it a “serious public health threat.”
“Something has to be done about this,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in an exclusive interview with CNN. “Now is the time — it’s pedal to the metal time.”
This summer alone has seen a spree of gun injuries and deaths, and the weekends have been especially violent, with an average of 200 people killed and 472 injured by guns each weekend in the United States, not including suicides, according to an analysis done by the Gun Violence Archive for CNN. That’s nearly 3.4 people shot every hour every weekend.
In April, President Joe Biden said the country was facing “a gun violence public health epidemic,” but the CDC hasn’t said how it plans to address the epidemic until now.

(I trust and expect that the aforementioned weekend shooters were following all local mask mandates when on their sprees.)

If vaccines can be ordered by the President/Physician-in-Chief as a condition of employment, why not giving up gun ownership? If nobody with a job has a gun, then by definition there can’t be any workplace gun violence (examples: San Bernardino 2015 attack, in which 14 were killed and 22 injured; 2009 Fort Hood shooting, in which 13 were killed and 30 injured).

Just as President Biden’s order on vaccines won’t reach every American (since many of us wisely decided to choose disability or unwisely decided to work for a small company) and therefore won’t end the pandemic overnight, the above-proposed order from President Biden on gun violence won’t end all gun violence, but I hope that everyone can agree that it would be a positive step forward for our nation or, at least, that if President Biden has the authority to end anti-vax violence in the workplace then he has the authority to end gun violence in the workplace.

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Is high school LGBQTIA+-ism regional?

September 15, 2021September 15, 2021 by philg

Messages from a suburban Massachusetts friend to a group chat:

Philip, you were right to move out of here
I just got into my daughter’s phone to read what she and her friends are talking about
Friend: Guess what happened to day. G told me that M is bisexual and went on a date with R. G also said that she thought I was bisexual and had a crush on me in 6th grade
[Daughter]: No way. Not M. Can’t believe it.
Friend: Why is everyone bisexual now? We are literally the only ones left. I want more straight friends.
[Daughter]: Me too. Nothing against LGBTQ people, but they talk about being LGBTQ all the time.

Another participant pointed out that maybe the identification as LGBTQIA+ is helpful/necessary to get into elite colleges. He referenced Harvard Law School, at which 17 percent of students are LGBTQIA+:

(Exercise for readers: See if you can walk around the campus and identify the “47% students of color”!)

“More Harvard, Yale freshmen identify as LGBTQ than as conservative, surveys find” (NBC, 2018):

Approximately 20 percent of first-year students at Harvard and Yale identify as something other than heterosexual.

Unless fully 20 percent of high school students identify as “other than heterosexual,” being non-hetero is advantageous in being admitted to Harvard and Yale.

Back to the heroine of our story… The daughter in the above chat session attends a public high school in a prosperous, but not crazy rich, suburban Boston town.

[How about middle schoolers? A local 8th grader came home and said that she’d been assigned to interview a parent regarding their attitudes toward the rainbow religion. The father, despite being a passionate Trump-hater and reliable voter for Democrats, failed all five questions in the daughter’s estimation. She then reported his attitudes regarding the official government religion to a government employee. I noted that the government had previously used schoolchildren to rat out parents for using drugs (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Abuse_Resistance_Education#Use_of_children_as_informants ). The 8th grade girl’s take-away? “I think they’re trying to convince us to become gay because they’re always talking about how great it is.”]

Readers: Is the prevalence of high school students identifying as LGBTQIA+ a regional variable, as this father supposes? Would a young scholar in a suburb of Tampa, Albuquerque, or Chicago be just as likely to identify as LGBTQIA+ as his/her/zir/their counterpart in the Boston suburbs?

“Outbreak: On Transgender Teens and Psychic Epidemics” (Psychological Perspectives, 2017): … we appear to be experiencing a significant psychic epidemic that is manifesting as children and young people coming to believe that they are the opposite sex, and in some cases taking drastic measures to change their bodies. Of particular concern to the author is the number of teens and tweens suddenly coming out as transgender without a prior history of discomfort with their sex. “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria” is a new presentation of a condition that has not been well studied. Reports online indicate that a young person’s coming out as transgender is often preceded by increased social media use and/or having one or more peers also come out as transgender. These factors suggest that social contagion may be contributing to the significant rise in the number of young people seeking treatment for gender dysphoria.

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California governor recall results: Now we know how many Americans love to be locked down?

September 15, 2021 by philg

When friends who don’t follow #Science (most have MDs and/or PhDs) ask why U.S. state governors (except for the infidels in South Dakota and Florida) have generally ordered lockdowns, masks, and other measures that were considered useless against respiratory viruses through 2019, my standard answer is “They’re politicians so the best answer is that they’re doing what voters want them to do. If governors order people to wrap a saliva-soaked bandana around their mouths as a disease preventive, we can infer that the majority of Americans want governors to order bandanas.” (A European friend: “The sheep demand a shepherd.”)

Is it fair to say that the result of the referendum on keeping lock-down-the-peasants-while-dining-with-friends Gavin Newsom (66 percent in favor) tells us the percentage of Americans who want and/or need governor-directed lockdowns?

“Gavin Newsom used threat of COVID, Larry Elder to defeat recall” (Sacramento Bee): His ads hammered home that Republicans seeking to replace him opposed vaccine requirements he imposed for school staff and health workers. He pointed out that they promised to rescind the mandates.
“Voters supported the California governor’s efforts to mitigate the pandemic, according to exit poll results.” (NBC): “We said yes to science. We said yes to vaccines,” Newsom said in brief remarks at a news conference. “We said yes to ending his pandemic. We said yes to people’s right to vote without fear. We said yes to women’s constitutional right to decide.” But Newsom ended up making his support for mask and vaccine mandates the closing argument of his campaign, warning that a Republican replacement would undo his health restrictions if elected.

To extrapolate these numbers to the U.S., of course, we’d have to adjust for Democrat/Republican percentages. Presidents Biden and Harris won 63.5 percent of Californians’ votes in 2020. So we can presume that, in any given state, the percentage of people who want to be locked down is roughly 3 percentage points more than the percentage who voted for Biden/Harris.

(What have been the effects of California’s 1.5 years of lockdown, school closure, mask orders, etc.? On the leaderboard of states by COVID-19-tagged death rate, California has turned in a middling performance, with about 1,700 deaths per million (170). That’s a worse performance than “do almost nothing because the virus won’t care” Sweden (1,429 per million). Beach-closed schools-closed California has a 25 percent lower unadjusted-for-age death rate than no-mask-order, bars-open, indoor everything open, schools-open Florida, portrayed currently in the media as the Land of Certain COVID-19 Death (12/50 in the state-by-state ranking, with roughly 2,270 deaths per million). That’s success, right, since we’re measuring overall success of a society by a single number (COVID-19 death rate) and 1,700 is less than 2,270? Actually, if we look at the over-65 population that COVID-19 tends to kill, California has a higher death rate than Florida’s. California is one of the youngest states in the country, with just 14 percent of its population over 65. Florida is the second oldest (not in our Abacoa neighborhood though!), with 20.5 percent of the population over 65. But neither the governor nor the media is not going to perform this adjustment (nor adjust for opioid addiction, alcoholism, weight gain in quarantine, reduced life expectancy from reduced education, reduced life expectancy from long-term unemployment, etc.) and therefore Californians will continue to believe that their governor’s suspension of what had been their rights (e.g., to gather, to have children educated, to walk outside without a mask, to go to the beach or the park) “saved lives”.)

Los Angeles, end of February 2020, almost the last day when Californians were free to walk outside their apartments, unmasked, and go to school or work without checking to see what the governor might have ordered. This homeless encampment is across from the lavish new Federal courthouse. The prediction on February 28, 2020? “Good Things Are Coming!” (schools for city children closed on March 16, 2020 and didn’t full reopen until August 16, 2021).

And let’s not forget, in the Land of Big Hearts (TM), the homeless encampment across the street from the homeless encampment:

Readers: Can we agree that a vote for Newsom was a vote for lockdown?

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Disability lifestyle getting more attractive under Biden?

September 14, 2021September 10, 2021 by philg

I’m wondering if we should expect a massive increase in the number of Americans who transition to the disability lifestyle during the Biden administration.

Let’s consider today’s world of work. Unless remote, the worker will be exposed to variant coronavirus that laughs at our feeble vaccines. The worker may need to wear a mask for 8 hours per day. The worker will be forced to accept whatever injections Dr. Joe Biden, M.D., Ph.D. orders, according to “Sweeping new vaccine mandates for 100 million Americans” (AP):

In his most forceful pandemic actions and words, President Joe Biden on Thursday ordered sweeping new federal vaccine requirements for as many as 100 million Americans — private-sector employees as well as health care workers and federal contractors — in an all-out effort to curb the surging COVID-19 delta variant.
Speaking at the White House, Biden sharply criticized the tens of millions of Americans who are not yet vaccinated, despite months of availability and incentives.
“We’ve been patient. But our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us,” he said, all but biting off his words. The unvaccinated minority “can cause a lot of damage, and they are.”
The expansive rules mandate that all employers with more than 100 workers require them to be vaccinated or test for the virus weekly, affecting about 80 million Americans. And the roughly 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid also will have to be fully vaccinated.
Biden is also requiring vaccination for employees of the executive branch and contractors who do business with the federal government — with no option to test out. That covers several million more workers.
Biden announced the new requirements in a Thursday afternoon address from the White House as part of a new “action plan” to address the latest rise in coronavirus cases and the stagnating pace of COVID-19 shots.

LCD or e-ink screen instead of grille for the front of electric cars?

September 14, 2021September 14, 2021 by philg

Electric cars don’t need a cooling airflow from the front, thus rendering grilles superfluous. The Tesla 3 has a flat nose and a slab where you’d expect the grille:

Some competitors have figured out more aesthetic solutions. The Kia EV6 replaces the traditional gasoline-car grille with… multiple grilles:

Here’s a Mercedes concept, suitable for Burning Man:

Could we find a more interesting use of this space? With an LCD or e-ink screen, the car could have different personalities at different times of day or for different drivers. The e-ink approach would consume much less battery power, of course.

A Maskachusetts driver could, for example, mirror the state-run highway signs that urge motorists to get vaccinated (but there are no vaccine clinics at the state-run highway rest stops). Alternatively, he/she/ze/they could turn the car nose into an extension of his/her/zir/their lawn. The nose display could read “Black Lives Matter” and then change automatically to “#StopAsianHate” if a gold Lexus were approaching. A Floridian, unable to choose among the 100+ specialty plates available, could rotate among the designs (no front license plate is actually required in Florida, but many of these are fun designs, especially if the mournful “save the…” messages were removed):

(Why do people want to concentrate on the negative? Wouldn’t it be just as effective to say “Celebrate Our Seas” as “Save Our Seas”? To say “Manatee Friends” rather than “Save the Manatee”? Why does the sea turtle plate need a written message at all? People who see the plate will be reminded that Florida is home to sea turtles and to respect their nesting sites.)

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Can the Taliban get Western do-gooders to fund their entire government?

September 14, 2021 by philg

“UN Afghanistan donor conference raises $1 billion with crisis looming” (DW):

The UN says humanitarian aid money would go to maintain medical services, the water supply and sanitation for millions of Afghans. Additionally, funding would support women and children and set up educational projects.

Forty government ministers, including German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer, as well as dozens of government representatives are attending both in person and virtually.
The German foreign minister said it was up to the international community to “take responsibility” for the people in Afghanistan.

In other words, so long as the Talibans don’t make the mistake of allocating money to health care, clean water, sewage, education, or “women and children,” Westerners will fund all of these functions of the modern welfare state. The Taliban can spend 100 percent of tax revenue on their military, police, and other tools for remaining in power.

The population of Afghanistan doubled from 20 to 40 million while the country was getting U.S. cash infusions. Over the next 20 years, therefore, so long as the steady flow of German money continues, it seems reasonable to expect that the population will double again, to 80 million (current total fertility rate is 4.72 children per woman; compare to 1.84 in the U.S. (our population still grows steadily, however, due to low-skill immigration)). Afghanistan would then have about the same population as Germany and, essentially, every German would have a corresponding Afghan dependent. Assuming the German-funded schools for Afghanistan result in mass literacy, will it be time to set up a penpal program? (After 20 years of U.S. rule, the adult literacy rate in Afghanistan is 43 percent (CIA).)

Even if the Germans send all of their money to the Taliban, they’ll still have a beautiful beach to enjoy…. fleece jacket weather in August 2016, Warnemünde:

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Best way to invest in Sweden?

September 13, 2021September 13, 2021 by philg

As readers may have noticed, I’m a contrarian when it comes to COVID-19 (along with the 60,000 physicians and PhDs who’ve signed the Great Barrington Declaration). To me, the untested “experiment” is locking a country down and closing schools in hopes of winning a war against a respiratory virus. It is not an “experiment” to stay open, as Sweden did (and as the W.H.O. recommended through 2019), and continue to educate children, continue to go to work, continue to hit the gym, continue to socialize with friends and family, etc. I don’t think the U.S., for example, will be better off as a result of shutting down, closing schools, buying and wearing cloth masks that have been shown to be worthless, etc. I do think the Swedes will prosper in the long run due to superior mental health, a focus on something other than COVID-19, their kids having an extra year of in-person school compared to kids in U.S. cities, etc. I want to invest in Sweden with a 10-20-year horizon.

(Based on our devotion to the Vietnam and Afghanistan wars, we could still be fighting the COVID-19 war 10-20 years from now! Even if we aren’t, the misallocation of $trillions from the past 1.5 years, e.g., paying people to stay home for 1.5 years ($800 billion just from federal tax dollars), giving $3,600/year extra per child to successful child support plaintiffs, funding highway repairs in the least efficient states (the new “infrastructure” bill, which builds infrastructure everywhere other than in the states that actually need it due to growing population?), etc., will be a comparative drag on the U.S. economy.)

What’s the best way to invest in Sweden? My usual preference is for common stocks, but apparently a lot of these can’t be purchased in the U.S. There is an ETF that tracks the Swedish market: EWD from iShares. The dividend yield is medium (just under 3%), which I hope means that capital appreciation is expected. Somehow, 77 percent of the yield is classified as “qualified” (I’d thought that this was for U.S. stocks) and therefore subject to a lower federal tax rate (if the Democrats are successful with their latest federal tax increase, the result will be a dividend tax rate of about 50 percent for Californians (fed+state) and this will be on top of higher corporate taxes (i.e., something like 75% of a company’s profits that would have belonged to shareholders will instead go to pay taxes); things are a little less grim for residents of Florida).

The big negative of this iShares fund is a 0.51 percent management fee. They’re just trying to track the index, so it is unclear what you’re paying them for (how hard is it to buy and hold 53 stocks?). The fee for the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF is 0.03 percent, which is also the fee for the corresponding iShares S&P 500 ETF.

The big negative of Sweden as an investment, if you’ve been reading this blog, is that I don’t believe the prevailing American dogma that low-skill migrants make a country richer (if they did, Canada and European nations would be vying for and paying for the opportunity to fly low-skill migrants from our southern border to their respective countries). At 25 percent, Sweden has, I think, the highest percentage of immigrants or children of two immigrant parents, of any country in Europe. If these folks prefer not to work, that could be a drag on the Swedish economy (via welfare costs) for the next 100 years. See “‘New Swedes’ left out as economy powers through pandemic” (Reuters, March 17, 2021):

Sweden has powered through the COVID-19 crisis with an economy set to regain its pre-pandemic size by late-2021, but a surge in unemployment among its foreign-born citizens risks exacerbating social divisions for years to come.
Ajlan came to Sweden as a 17-year-old from Baghdad in 1993. Despite graduating with a degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Lund University – one of the country’s best schools – he only found work as a taxi driver.
A rigid labour market and a lack of low-skilled jobs means Sweden has been poor at integrating waves of immigrants, or “new Swedes”, since the 1970s – a social and economic divide that has been widened further.
Unemployment among foreign-born workers stood at 18% in the fourth quarter of last year, up 3.5 percentage points from a year earlier, according to Statistics Office data. For people born in Sweden, it was 4.1%, up just 1 percentage point.
Immigration has been running at high levels for the past two decades in Sweden, with a record 163,000 asylum seekers arriving in the country of 10 million in 2015.
The government has launched a raft of measures – some of which predate the pandemic – aimed at getting people into work, including subsidized employment, tax breaks for employers, on-the-job training schemes and its “knowledge-lift” programme that offers study opportunities for the unemployed.

In other words, the Swedes don’t have any better idea of what to do with low-skill migrants than we do. They’re on the same “provide free housing, free health care, free food, and then ask people nicely if they would like to work” plan (maybe the Swedes don’t offer an Obamaphone, but mobile phone service in Europe is much cheaper than in what we call our competitive market).

On the third hand, the U.S. and all of Europe are going to be packed with low-skill migrants for the foreseeable future. The only way to short the idea of a migrant-packed welfare state is to invest in Asian countries that are closed to low-skill immigration and that, in any case, don’t offer the multiple generations of free housing, health care, and food that the U.S. offers and that some European countries offer (albeit at a less generous level; see Hartz IV in Germany, of which 55 percent of the recipients are migrants or children of migrants: “According to the Federal Employment Agency … this was due to the migrants lacking either employable skills or knowledge of the language”).

Vaguely related… the Volvo-driving migrants arrive in Stockholm on the ferry from Finland (2016):

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Good news for dogs: Tesla 3 dominates Hyundai, Audi, and Polestar

September 13, 2021September 13, 2021 by philg

“Hyundai Ioniq 5 vs Q4 e-Tron vs Polestar 2 vs Model 3 group test (2021) review” (Car, an English magazine) says that the Hyundai is huge and maybe better for carrying adults in the back seat. Also, the Hyundai has tremendous style and cleverness. But the suspension isn’t adequate for the massive weight and the (“Long Range”) Tesla has better range than any of the competitors. What did more than 100 years of history do for Audi? Got them into last place! The Chinese/Swedish Polestar was “let down by ride, packaging, range”.

The Tesla 3 turned out to be the best all-around car, though they didn’t have the Mustang Mach-E to compare to. This is Car and Driver‘s favorite, but it lacks dog mode so I think a Tesla 3 would be way better for Florida, even if you don’t have a dog.

How is it possible that the experienced car manufacturers cannot knock Tesla out of first place when it comes to building a car? I’m amazed by this every day! (For haters who say that electric cars are bad, I guess the argument is that the Honda Accord is still a way better car than the Tesla 3 and therefore Tesla is not in first place.)

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Coronalogic in Palm Beach County

September 13, 2021September 13, 2021 by philg

Mostly-Democrat Palm Beach County was one of the local governments ready to fight the governor’s “no mask orders in schools” order (a.k.a. “parental choice order”) with every last dollar of residents’ money. See “Palm Beach County public schools set to hire elite law firm to defend mask mandate” (Palm Beach Post, August 31, 2021), for example:

With the legal battle over masks in schools heating up, Palm Beach County public schools are hiring a high-profile law firm to advise them on their mask mandate and, if needed, defend it in court.
School board members are expected Wednesday to approve spending up to $50,000 for advice and legal representation from the national law firm Boies Schiller Flexner.
The vote comes five days a Tallahassee judge ruled Gov. Ron DeSantis exceeded his authority by ordering school boards last month not to impose mask mandates on campus. DeSantis said he will appeal the decision.

Where else on this blog might you have seen mention of Boies Schiller Flexner? They were the law firm that enabled Elizabeth Holmes to silence potential whistleblowers. From Evaluating trustworthiness; lessons from Theranos (based on reading the fascinating book Bad Blood):

Background: Roger Parloff, legal affairs reporter for Fortune, was intrigued by a story about Theranos hiring David Boies to sue a guy who had a patent that they would have needed to license if the blood testing machines had actually worked. Boies was given a fat slice of Theranos equity and a board seat in exchange for doing the company’s legal bidding. The author describes the lawsuit as entirely meritless, alleging that the inventor had somehow gotten hold of proprietary Theranos info because his son was a partner at the same huge law firm that had filed some patents for Theranos. The inventor spent $2 million on legal defense before caving in. (The big multi-office law firm’s records manager investigated the allegation and couldn’t find anything to suggest that the son/partner had ever accessed any Theranos-related information or even knew at the relevant time that the company was a client.)

So… the county is prepared to lose state funding (but they’ll get it all back from Uncle Joe: “Biden Administration Says Federal Funds Can Cover Florida School Board Salaries If DeSantis Defunds Them Over Mask Mandates” (Forbes); how are Presidents Biden and Harris able to write checks for this without Congressional funding?). And the county will happily hire a law firm that enabled one of of America’s most prominent criminal defendants, with its lead name partner actually serving on her corporate board and the firm hoping to benefit from the fraud by holding shares. All of this to ensure that when children sit together in a classroom, kept separated by however many feet the CDC recommends, they are wearing some sort of mask.

Suppose that the kids in the class decide to go to an after-school basketball program run by a different branch of the same enterprise (Palm Beach County). They will then meet on an indoor court and be close enough to actually touch each other, without any masks on. They’ll be breathing much more forcefully, of course, on the basketball court than in the classroom.

I would expect variation in coronapanic level and faith in masks from state to state and from county to county, but I didn’t expect to find this much variation in coronascience between two departments of the same county government!

(Separately, our neighborhood is packed with kids. As soon as they’re out of school, the masks come off and they play with each other outdoors in direct physical contact with no masks. They are also observed to visit each other’s homes and socialize without masks. So even if the county itself didn’t run mask-free kid gatherings, the young people and their parents would do this. Thus, it is a mystery to me how the masks-in-school plan was supposed to be effective.)

Elizabeth Holmes can redeem herself this week? (regarding her political connections, e.g., Hillary Clinton, in better days)
the cloth masks that students are ordered to wear fail a randomized controlled trial

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Vaccine-resisting idiots

September 12, 2021September 14, 2021 by philg

Before departing from Maskachusetts last month in the Cirrus SR20 (ferry trip to her new home in the Florida Free State), I mentioned to a woman in the old neighborhood that I’d be visiting a family at their oceanfront house as my first stop. “The dad is my friend and he’s the only one who is vaccinated,” I volunteered. “The kids are slender, healthy and in their late 20s so I can understand their point of course, but the wife is around 60 and could perhaps benefit, though she also is slender and fit.”

Neighbor: “They’re idiots.”

Me: “As it happens, they’re Black.”

Neighbor: “Oh, well, ….” (the “idiot” statement was walked back to a discourse regarding why it wouldn’t make sense for Black people to listen to anything that scientists say)

The neighbor’s car (Chevy Bolt with Bernie bumper sticker):

(Bernie wanted her to live in a town where a vacant buildable lot costs $1 million (minimum 2-acre zoning).)

On arrival, I learned that when you have an oceanfront house it seems that you’re going to be quite popular all summer. The unvaccinated kids (late 20s) had about 6 similar-age friends visiting. All of them, as it turned out, were unvaccinated and resented the government’s attempts to coerce them into getting stuck with a medicine that is extremely unlikely to help them unless the mass vaccination campaign breeds a super deadly version of the coronavirus (see Marek’s Disease). I comforted them at dinner (out on the screen porch and following the CDC guidelines that coronavirus cannot spread when unmasked people sit at restaurant tables): “It probably won’t do you more harm than a week of binge drinking.”

(One of the young people had the idea of running a restaurant where students received music lessons and other kinds of education. “If they’re sitting at a table being served food, they don’t need to wear masks, even if the governor orders students in schools to wear masks.”)

My favorite recent Apple News screen, in which a confused grandfather (of a child who yielded $2.5 million tax-free for the smart plaintiff) has lost patience and scapegoats responsible for all of our woes have been identified:

Separately, it seems that the current crop of vaccines may be worthless from a public health point of view (could still be useful for an at-risk individual who stays in his/her/zir/their bunker 99 percent of the time). “Benefit of COVID-19 vaccination accounting for potential risk compensation” (Nature, August 11, 2021):

With very high vaccine efficacy (E = 0.95), substantial benefit is maintained except in situations where there is a very low probability of infection in the population. If the vaccine efficacy decreases to 0.8, the benefit gets eroded easily with modest risk compensation.
Risk compensation needs to be factored carefully when appraising COVID-19 vaccination strategies. The simplified model used here suggests that even negligible risk compensation can eliminate the benefit of a vaccine of low efficacy, and it also takes only 2.5-fold increase in exposures for the benefit of a vaccine of moderate efficacy (E = 0.6) to disappear unless the probability of infection in the population of interest is very high.

(The most familiar example of risk compensation is a person driving 75 mph in a pavement-melting SUV. He/she/ze/they feels invulnerable due to seatbelts, 17 airbags, and 6,000 lbs. of steel. He/she/ze/they would drive only 50 mph, perhaps, in a lighter car without seatbelts or airbags. Since kinetic energy rises as the square of velocity, the risk of death in an accident might end up being roughly the same as if the driver were in a less thoroughly armored vehicle. See “Condoms and seat belts: the parallels and the lessons” (Lancet) for some references.)

In other words, a less-than-perfect vaccine slows down an epidemic only if people don’t change their behavior as a result of being vaccinated. A person who decides that it is okay to travel on commercial airliners once again, for example, is risk compensating. I’ve observed this behavior in New England. The (mostly) vaccinated population ceased wearing masks on the day that the government stopped ordering them to do so (a couple of months later, of course, it was “Simon Says Masks On” and they all complied with that too!). Fauci-following Democrats who refused to meet me outdoors for coffee pre-vaccination would step in for hugs after they’d received the magic elixir.

Let’s combine the above with July 2021 data (i.e., regarding the delta variant) on breakthrough infections. “Resurgence of SARS-CoV-2 Infection in a Highly Vaccinated Health System Workforce” (NEJM), Table 1:

Vaccine effectiveness was only 65 percent in July 2021 and therefore risk compensation by those who’ve been told by Drs. Fauci and Biden that vaccines are valuable will wipe out the benefit of the vaccines.

I was on a Zoom meeting with some folks from grad school. A friend’s wife is a Ph.D. biologist. She has gone back into her bunker, despite being vaccinated. “The reason that people think vaccines are helpful,” she said, “is that they’re combining data from pre-Delta and Delta. With Delta, the infection and fatality rates aren’t that different for the vaccinated and unvaccinated.”

Israel and the Delta variant:

In a country that has vaccinated 80 percent of those eligible, deaths are about 3/4 of where they were in the fall of 2020, when nobody in Israel was vaccinated.

“It may take ‘many, many’ more vaccine mandates to end the Covid-19 pandemic, Fauci says” (CNN, 9/13): “I believe that’s going to turn this around because I don’t think people are going to want to not go to work or not go to college … They’re going to do it,” Fauci told CNN’s Jen Christensen during an interview at the NLGJA, the Association of LGBTQ Journalists, convention Sunday. “You’d like to have them do it on a totally voluntary basis, but if that doesn’t work, you’ve got to go to the alternatives.”
“Fauci says he supports a vaccine mandate for air travel.” (NYT, 9/13): Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor, said … that he would support a vaccine mandate for air travelers. “I would support that if you want to get on a plane and travel with other people, that you should be vaccinated,” Dr. Fauci [said]

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