Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

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 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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Sweden hasn’t been in the news lately. Let’s see if the wicked never-masked never-locked-down Swedes are being punished by the mighty and just CoronaG*d. First, “cases” (adjusted for population size):

Case rate can vary tremendously depending on a country’s love for running PCR machines. Let’s look at ICU hospitalization rate:

Why aren’t the Swedes being punished for their sins?

Remember that the typical Swede lives a fairly urban existence, as noted in Analysis of Sweden versus UK COVID-19 outcomes. So it isn’t that Swedes don’t encounter one another.

Maybe it is the miracle of vaccines? It turns out that vaccination rate is almost the same in Sweden compared to the U.S.:

How about hot weather driving people into air-conditioned shared indoor environments as an explanatory factor? The case rate (above) in the UK is higher than in the US, despite the UK being cooler than the US.

How about the choice to let humans co-evolve with what the Swedish MD/PhDs predicted would be a permanent companion virus, similar to influenza? “Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine” (Science, August 26, 2021):

The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a “Don’t try this at home” label. The newly released data show people who once had a SARS-CoV-2 infection were much less likely than vaccinated people to get Delta, develop symptoms from it, or become hospitalized with serious COVID-19.

The new analysis relies on the database of Maccabi Healthcare Services, which enrolls about 2.5 million Israelis. The study, led by Tal Patalon and Sivan Gazit at KSM, the system’s research and innovation arm, found in two analyses that people who were vaccinated in January and February were, in June, July, and the first half of August, six to 13 times more likely to get infected than unvaccinated people who were previously infected with the coronavirus. In one analysis, comparing more than 32,000 people in the health system, the risk of developing symptomatic COVID-19 was 27 times higher among the vaccinated, and the risk of hospitalization eight times higher.

Note that the above data contradict #Science as known to American public health experts. There would be no point in ordering the previously infected to get vaccinated before going to work or school if we didn’t know from #Science that vaccines confer much better protection than infection with the actual virus. (Remember that staying home and playing Xbox doesn’t require any vaccination, masking, or other COVID-19-related compliance!)

Readers: What’s your theory as to why Sweden is not suffering a dramatic plague right now?

Separately, how should science-following journalists characterize a country that gave the finger to the coronavirus and ended up with half the death rate of masked-and-shut Maskachusetts (where the urban kids whose lives purportedly matter lost an entire year of education)? It all depends! Part of a screen from Apple News:

(Note that even the Telegraph folks who are apparently willing to consider the advantages of children being able to leave the house and attend school refer to Sweden following W.H.O. pandemic respiratory virus advice from pre-2020 as an “experiment”. It is not the countries that have tried general public mask orders and year-long school shutdowns that are experimenting.)

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A coffee cup from a McDonald’s in Jupiter, Florida (August 15):

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(Since I am vaccinated and therefore don’t have to worry about COVID-19 attacking me via obesity, I enjoyed this coffee with an apple fritter and two cinnamon rolls. #TrustScience )

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On arrival in Florida, which coincided with a (presumably typical going forward) summer COVID-19 case peak, I noticed that the wearing of face masks was actually more common than in Maskachusetts. This surprised me a little, given that MA has been the land of ordering people to wear masks and FL has been notable for its lack of mask orders. But, of course, given the hysterical media stories about Florida as the worst-afflicted state in the nation (except for all of the other states where the death rate has been much higher (and the COVID Olympics score would be even more in FL’s favor if you adjusted for percentage of population over 65)), it is natural that the more fearful residents and visitors would wish to protect themselves from a raging plague.

What was interesting was how the fearful had chosen to protect themselves. Instead of wearing N95 and P100 masks, as you might expect for people concerned about an aerosol virus, they were wearing simple cloth and paper masks, about as effective as a chain link fence against sand. I wonder if this is partly due to the media and government telling us that bandanas, paper surgical masks, and stylish cloth masks are “protective”. (I am aware that the theory is that if 100 percent of people wear such masks that transmission will be reduced (such that everyone gets COVID a few weeks later than otherwise? What is the point if R0 is not reduced below 1?), but this is seldom explained clearly. Certainly no public health official says, in public, “it is pointless for you to wear a mask if nobody else is.” (though sometimes they say that in private; see “Fauci Said Masks ‘Not Really Effective in Keeping Out Virus,’ Email Reveals” (Newsweek))

Some of the same phenomenon is on display with vaccine propaganda. A guy in his 60s cited Dr. Fauci for his belief that 99 percent of people having problems with COVID-19 are unvaccinated (according to the UK’s far superior medical record system, however, the Delta variant kills without distinction; roughly 60 percent of those hospitalized with COVID-19 in Israel are fully vaccinated). To show his concern regarding COVID-19, he was wearing a cloth mask emblazoned “Combat COVID” …. under his nose.

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