Cancel my order for 200 million COVID-19 vaccine booster shots?

by philg

“Are We Jumping the Gun on COVID Boosters?” (MedPage Today, August 24, 2021):

Diminishing vaccine effectiveness supposedly makes the case for boosters. But there are two big questions here: First, what is current vaccine effectiveness? And second, what justifies boosters? Let’s consider these in turn.

We have to be honest, many vaccine effectiveness studies are poorly done. All studies compare the rate of getting a breakthrough infection among vaccinated people against the rate of infection in unvaccinated people. But there are some issues with this approach. First, as time goes on, more unvaccinated people have had and recovered from COVID-19 (and these individuals may be less likely to go on to get a shot). This means that their risk of getting COVID-19 a second time is far less than the typical unvaccinated person who has never been sick. Even if vaccines “work” as well as before, this factor alone will result in the appearance of diminishing vaccine effectiveness.

Second, the order of vaccination in all nations is non-random. The folks who got vaccinated first are often the oldest and most vulnerable people with frailty and senescent immune systems. Vaccine effectiveness after 6 months, 8 months, and 12 months increasingly compares older, frailer people who got vaccinated first against unvaccinated people. These older people may always have a slightly higher risk of breakthrough infections. This bias will also give the false appearance of diminishing vaccine effectiveness.

Humans are terrible at reasoning from statistics. Will our booster shot mania prove to be another example of this phenomenon?

Separately, I do wish someone would explain to me the mania for trying to coerce all of the unvaccinated into #AcceptingScience. We know that the vaccines we have don’t prevent infection or transmission. Our hospitals have plenty of capacity if we’re willing to do a little geographic load-balancing. Maybe an individual should care whether he/she/ze/they gets vaccinated. But why do his/her/zir/their neighbors care if he/she/ze/they gets vaccinated? We now know that the pandemic would not end even if 100 percent of humans were vaccinated.

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Not everyone in Florida is a Deplorable Neanderthal (children’s section of a Palm Beach County library)

by philg

Folks in Maskachusetts tend to be scornful of Florida, dismissing it as a “Red state” with “stupid” residents. But you won’t see a big difference at our local public library (the Jupiter branch of the Palm Beach County system).

Government workers won’t have their pay cut or jobs eliminated no matter how unpleasant they make the customer experience. Thus, in a generally mask-optional state, the librarians don’t have a problem demanding that customers wear the hijab (so both librarians and patrons can catch coronavirus 15 minutes after leaving when they walk into a mostly-unmasked store or restaurant?):

The librarians also sit behind Plexi screens that the New York Times says #Science now disclaims.

How about the featured books in the children’s section?

What if a child wants to read about a white heterosexual cisgender male? He/she/ze/they will have to dig into the stacks! (Keith Haring, above, may have identified as “white,” but was a member of the LGBTQIA+ community until HIV killed him at age 31.)

Children can learn about the female roots of aeronautical engineering:

(Maybe a book about Kitty Hawk could be featured if titled “The Wright Brothers, Sisters, and Binary-resisters”?)

A featured book in the adult section:

(Another way that Maskachusetts residents insult the idea of Florida is by talking about how old everyone in Florida is. (If the Northern Righteous have such contempt for the elderly, why do they put masks on 7-year-olds in hopes of reducing plague deaths among the 82-year-olds?) In fact, our new neighborhood is about 30 years younger than our old neighborhood. Still, it is tough not to love the fact that the librarians expect their elderly customers to still be running Windows 7 (released in 2009). There were no corresponding books about Windows 10 or 11 available. Speaking of Windows 11, will the main reason to upgrade be the ability to point to our PC and say “this one goes to 11”?)

Related:

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Back-to-school anti-racism

by philg

Today it’s back to school for students in Lincoln, Maskachusetts. They’ll be fully masked, of course, by local order (from June 2: “We will follow state guidelines in the fall, which indicate that we will not require distancing between students but will maintain all individuals wearing masks while indoors.”), and sitting in trailers because the nation’s most expensive school building (per-student) isn’t ready.

A friend’s son attends private school. Here’s an excerpt from his course list:

  • English I-Honors
  • World History I -Honors
  • Anti-Racism
  • Algebra II-Honors

While, of course, it is great to see that the academic discipline of Anti-Racism gets equal status with Algebra II, I wonder what fills an entire semester (or year?). A search for “anti-racism high school textbook” does not yield an obvious result. Perhaps there is a lucrative market for a textbook? What collection of school administrators will stand up and say “We don’t need a class on this subject”?

The Lincoln public school’s June 2 email, which announced the “masks now, masks tomorrow, masks forever” policy, devoted a single line (out of three pages) to academics:

  • Continued focus on AIDE (antiracism, inclusion, diversity, and equity) and deeper learning for all grade levels.

So there should be demand for anti-racism textbooks at all grade levels!

(Separately, private schools in Maskachusetts usually have at least a handful of non-white students, e.g., Asians. Why are they sentenced to take this class? Surely a non-white student does not need to learn from a (white) teacher how to be anti-racist.)

Related:

  • Florida first impressions (white kids in our neighborhood learn about Black people from talking to their Black neighbors, not from a white teacher delivering an anti-racism lesson)
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Florida first impressions

by philg

We’ve been Florida residents since mid-August. Here are a few first impressions…

One of the most important issues to folks in Maskachusetts, at least to judge by lawn signs, emails from school administrators, teacher email signatures, and sincere expressions from politicians and government workers, is Black Lives Matter. After driving all the way from the border with Georgia to South Florida, and driving around neighborhoods (including some mostly-Black ones in North/West Palm Beach), I haven’t seen a single BLM sign. In what folks in Maskachusetts would regard as a poor substitute for putting up a sign, what I have done is interacted with Black people. During our first weekend in Jupiter (Abacoa), I interacted with more Black people than I talked to during the preceding year in Massachusetts. A manager at our apartment complex happens to be Black, some of the neighbors, a woman in front of us on the mini golf course who helped putt back some of the wilder shots by our 6-year-old, a cable/Internet installer from AT&T, cashiers helping me check out at Walmart, Costco, and Target, etc. In our former home, a rich suburb of Boston, Black people are generally objects of pity and charity. A rich friend’s wife is Black and the righteous moms of Lincoln, MA, seeing her at the local school, always started from the assumption that she was a “METCO parent” whose children were being bused out from Boston in a government-run program based on skin color.

It won’t help our kids get jobs in the victimhood industry, but I’m happy that our kids will learn about Black Americans from talking to the Black residents in our apartment complex, rather than from seeing BLM signs, receiving anti-racism training from white teachers, etc. There are no subsidized units in our building, so when the kids meet someone who is Black they are talking to someone who has equal status with the landlord, pays the same rent as us, presumably has a reasonably well-paid job, etc.

A lot of Floridians, including some here in Jupiter, have built elaborate screen structures over their swimming pools and backyards. I was told that summer is the bug season, but we haven’t seen or felt a single mosquito. We’re right next to a golf course with a variety of water features. The no-mosquito situation was the same in a swampy nature trail area near the F45 airport (miles inland). The bug situation is far more annoying in New England.

Driving is much more challenging than in Boston, despite Boston’s reputation for having aggressive, incompetent, and rule-flouting drivers. In Boston, roads are usually either so jammed that traffic is moving at only 10 mph or they are not too busy. If the speed limit is higher than 35 mph, the road is almost surely a limited access one. South Florida is densely populated, packed with commercial strip malls that generate mid-block entries and exits, and wide fast-moving main arteries. Since traffic is moving at 45 mph (the speed limit) on these 6-lane suburban thoroughfares, one needs to be alert. After only about two hours in the state, I was eating barbecue at an intersection near St. Augustine and witnessed a terrifying-sounding crash between a pickup truck and a car (fortunately, nobody seemed to have been hurt).

At least in the summer, car navigation systems should pull in NEXRAD weather radar data. There are quite a few small-ish rain cells in Florida that are dangerous to drive through due to reduced visibility. It would be a huge safety enhancement if Google Maps were smart enough to say “Pull over at the next exit and chill out at McDonald’s for 20 minutes because that way you’ll skip extreme precipitation.”

Speaking of driving, I would expect almost everyone in Florida to drive a Tesla solely due to Dog Mode (my dream from 2003). A parked car heats up very quickly indeed. A golden retriever on the beach heats up and times out sooner than the kids in the water and needs to be put into an air-conditioned environment. Even for those without dogs, it would be a lot more comfortable on a day spent running errands to leave the car’s climate system going during all of the stops.

Mask usage among adults was actually higher among Floridians in August than it had been back in the Boston area, perhaps due to summer being a peak COVID-19 time in Florida and a COVID-19 lull for New England (at least in 2020 and most of summer 2021). There is a lot less anxiety around COVID-19, however, especially among children. The Florida children we’ve met are not afraid to approach other children, adults, etc., and don’t hurry to put on masks. Back in Maskachusetts, my friend’s kids are literally terrified to go into another family’s house, will rush to yank their chin diapers up over their nose and mouth when a non-family member approaches, etc. (This is true even after everyone eligible has been vaccinated.) Children aged 3-5 in our old town display what would have been called a panic response (back in 2019) if you ride a bike within 15-20′ of them (i.e., ride by on the street while they’re in the driveway). By the standards that prevailed in 2019, children in Florida enjoy much better mental health than children in Massachusetts.

In Cambridge, MA, a Comcast Xfinity coax cable delivers, depending on what the neighbors are doing, 200 mbps down and 5 mbps up, plus TV, for $200/month. In Jupiter, AT&T fiber delivers 1 Gbps up and down, plus TV, for $60/month (i.e., 200X faster upload for one third the price, though I think we may be getting a small discount for being part of this apartment complex).

People are far friendlier than in Massachusetts. Nobody says what they rationally should say: “go back to where you came from so that you don’t bid up rents and real estate prices and clog up the highway with your minivan and that Tesla that might show up in 2023 if you order it now.” Instead, the locals say “welcome” and try to help us enjoy everything that they’re enjoying about the area.

I’m not 100% sure that we made the right decision with Abacoa. It’s great if you want to walk to work at Max Planck Institute, Scripps, or the Florida Atlantic University campus here. There are a lot of people to meet, restaurants to visit, etc. It is not super expensive ($2000 to $3000/month for an apartment) and therefore there are a lot of young people, even before factoring in the 200 who live in the FAU dorms. The landscaping and architecture are appealing when walking around. But this neighborhood is a 15-minute drive to the beach and maybe it would be better to live a car-dependent lifestyle in a house that is only a few minutes walk from a dogs-welcome beach. Not so great when the hurricane and storm surge hits, of course!

My quintessential Florida experience thus far has been hearing Mindy the Crippler drinking from her water bowl in the kitchen of our apartment in a massive concrete building while simultaneously seeing her sleeping in the living room. It turned out that a lizard had entered the apartment and taken up residence in the golden retriever’s water bowl:

(I covered the bowl with a Chinet plate, carried the combined system out the front door, and dumped water+lizard into the bushes.)

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Following the science in Australia

by philg

Department of “Surely coronavirus won’t be waiting for us after we emerge from our bunkers”. From Twitter:

Best headline: “Australia Almost Eliminated the Coronavirus by Putting Faith in Science” (Washington Post, November 5, 2020). From that article:

… unlike the Trump administration, which has criticized its primary infectious-disease adviser, Anthony S. Fauci, Hunt relied heavily on health experts from the start.

And for a time, it appeared Australia’s early success was imperiled, after lax security at hotels in Melbourne that were housing returned travelers led to a second outbreak in July. By August, more than 700 cases a day were diagnosed. It looked like Australia could lose control of the virus.

Almost all public life in Melbourne ended. After 111 days of lockdown, the number of average daily cases fell below five. On Oct. 28, state officials allowed residents to leave their homes for any reason.

Australia currently bans its citizens and residents from overseas travel, a decision that has been particularly tough on its 7.5 million immigrants.

Note that prevailing pandemic scientific wisdom prior to 2020 actually did support the idea that an isolated island with tight border controls might be able to delay or prevent infections via closing borders. See WHO guidance on pandemics then and now.

Readers: Will Australia and New Zealand be interesting case studies of what happens to countries where the plague arrives after nearly all of the old/vulnerable people are vaccinated?

Related:

  • “Covid in Sydney: Military deployed to help enforce lockdown” (BBC, July 30): “The lockdown – in place until at least 28 August – bars people from leaving their home except for essential exercise, shopping, caregiving and other reasons. Despite five weeks of lockdown, infections in the nation’s largest city continue to spread. Officials recorded 170 new cases on Friday.”
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Should Toyota bring back the Corona?

by philg

From the Henry Ford Museum:

“Toyota Corona” was a good name in 1966. Could it be considered a great name for the 2022 model year? The trim levels can be “Wild type” (or “Not Chinese”?), “Delta”, and “Lambda”.

Too morbid? Consider that the car in which JFK was assassinated was patched up and used by succeeding presidents for another 14 years.

The biggest tragedy for light aircraft is that Chrysler gave up on mass-producing turbine engines:

In 1930, Americans were sufficiently fond of each other that a family could live together in a 1,017-square-foot house:

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What’s the correct level of panic regarding Hurricane Ida?

by philg

The front page of cnn.com makes the situations caused by Hurricane Ida sound pretty bad:

Given that U.S. media adopts a hysterical tone almost every day, should we be skeptical of the forecast doom? Or should we expect a lot of tragic consequences from the 115 mph winds of what is currently a category 3 hurricane?

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Forced vaccination in the Land of Liberty (TM)

by philg

“Should the Government Impose a National Vaccination Mandate?” (New Yorker, by Jeannie Suk Gersen (quoted in the Domestic Violence chapter of Real World Divorce) provides a good window into the thinking of the elites:

Despite claims to the contrary, there are many routes to legally requiring COVID inoculation.

The pre-covid legal landscape, in other words, was quite clear: a state could require vaccinations to protect public health, even imposing criminal penalties for noncompliance. And vaccination as a condition of attending school or of government employment has been widely, if not universally, accepted.

There has been a plethora of legal challenges to covid-vaccine mandates imposed by public and private institutions, but courts have been quick to dismiss them.

No city or state has yet issued a straight-up requirement that all private citizens be vaccinated against covid-19, along the lines of the Massachusetts smallpox-vaccination law upheld in Jacobson, but some have edged toward it. The closest so far is New York City’s requirement of proof of having received at least one dose for access to certain activities, including indoor dining, gyms, and performances. Various states have also ordered certain subsets of their populations, including health-care and nursing-home workers, school teachers, and state employees, to be vaccinated or face regular testing. The F.D.A.’s full approval of the vaccine this week makes it more likely that cities and states will impose general mandates on residents. If they do, they can feel confident that such requirements will be upheld by the courts, so long as they include medical and religious exemptions.

The only real question is whether it is a state governor’s job or Presidents Biden and Harris’s to order residents to be injected:

And, in fact, the government has never issued a national vaccination mandate—perhaps because, in the past, leaving that role to states and localities has sufficiently contained epidemics. If any federal statute currently provides authorization for a national covid-vaccination mandate, however, it would be the Public Health Service Act, which gives several agencies the authority “to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases” from foreign countries or between states. The government can use this law to pursue quarantine policies, and the statute, broadly construed, may also allow the government to mandate vaccinations to prevent interstate spread of covid-19.

After the tens of $trillions spent on defending liberty from foreign bogeymen (our military is our #3 federal expense, after Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid), will it ultimately turn out that foreigners enjoy more freedom to choose which medical interventions to accept?

Separately, most of the above examples of forced vaccination wouldn’t apply to someone who stays home playing Xbox in public housing while shopping for food via EBT. Instead of emigrating to Sweden or a similar foreign haven, perhaps an American who loves freedom could simply transition to disability/welfare.

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Hidden car price increase: destination charge inflation

by philg

My mid-life crisis order from General Motors was pushed from the 2021 model year to the 2022 model year. There have been two price increases since the order was placed in January, but there is also a hidden price increase. The “destination charge” for getting the vehicle from the factory in Kentucky to the dealership has gone from $1,095 to $1,295, i.e., reflecting 18 percent inflation.

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Olympic moving sport?

by philg

After observing some guys pack our stuff into three containers on the last day of Tokyo 2020, an idea for future Olympics: See who can pack stuff, with a range of fragility, into boxes and furniture blankets, move items into 16’ container, and then pull everything back out the fastest. Containers get shaken in the middle and points are deducted for anything broken. A team sport with 5 team members that combines a mental and a physical challenge.

Readers: would you prefer to watch this compared to a running race, for example?

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