Gerald Baker’s most recent Wall Street Journal column is an indictment not just of Joe Biden’s presidency but his entire political career. Rather than dwell on that I want to focus on one section of it, starting with a quote from President Biden’s address to the nation on the occasion of the first anniversary of the lockdowns:
“Look, we know what we need to do to beat this virus,†he said: “Tell the truth. Follow the scientists and the science. Work together. Put trust and faith in our government to fulfill its most important function, which is protecting the American people.â€
It was an instructive comment. There it was, every item of the progressive creed, every instinct of the liberal Democratic mind, laid bare:
Hubris: “We know what to do.†The unchallengeable authority of technocratic bureaucracy: “Follow the scientists.†The superior virtue of collectivism over individual enterprise: “Work together.â€
Above all, that unerring belief in the capacity of government, which commands our “trust and faith.â€
which is followed by a recital of the statistics on deaths due to COVID-19 which are hardly a validation of Mr. Biden’s confidence or, indeed, his competence.
The reality is that the pandemic and, I hasten to point out, the responses to the pandemic have shaken our confidence in all institutions, not just the federal government. The “supply chain” snarl that has resulted in long delays in getting all sorts of goods into the hands of consumers is a consequence of the normal workings of the market in a context of a global economy. Nothing beats the market, the actions of private producers and consumers, for producing goods and services at the equilibrium price but that process by its very nature wrings excess capacity out of the system. Consider the strain that the pandemic is placing on hospital beds. Here’s a snapshot of the sharp decrease in hospital beds in the U. S. over the last half century:
when adjusted for population it’s even more dramatic. Obviously, if you want slack capacity, don’t look to the workings of the market. Admittedly, other issues that have produced that result in hospital beds include consolidation, lack of competition, certificates of need, and other constraints on the unfettered workings of the market. There are, literally, thousands of such fetters and I doubt we will be eliminating them soon.
If you can’t depend on the federal, state, or local governments, and you can’t depend on private companies and the workings of the market, and you can’t depend on private benevolent organizations, what can you depend on? My answer is that they all have their roles to play and in Mr. Baker’s characterization, wise humility shows us the limitations of each.
We actually did know what to do to return to normal as quickly as possible but we didnt do it. We had good vaccines quickly. If everyone got vaccinated we wouldn’t be seeing the high death rates and hospitalization rates we still have. We should have cranked out lots of vaccines and sent it around the world. We should have invested more money into therapeutics. Maybe we get paxlovid 6 months earlier.
However, we really didnt know there would be so much opposition to vaccines based upon such a large, well funded disinformation campaign. I dont see anyone around that so dont hold Biden responsible.
I will comment on one part you cite. Lack of competition and CONs have little to do with lack of hospital beds. That comes from several causes. First, an awful lot of what we do no longer requires a long hospital stay. Two examples. After an open gallbladder operation pts used to stay in the hospital for a week. With a lap chole they can go home the same day much of the time. After cataract surgery you used to stay in the hospital for a week. Now you go home 15-30 minutes after the procedure is done. This goes along with the general trend towards outpatient care in general. If you look at the costs of medical care it is outpatient care where costs have grown the most.
The next part is competition. Hospital compete with each other. A hospital that sits with many staffed and unoccupied beds earns less money. They either go under or dont have the capital to improve as needed.
Finally, a lot of those beds just died of old age. A lot of the beds which have disappeared were in the rural areas that have lost population. There wasn’t the money or the population to support hospitals in those areas or not enough to keep the hospital at its full size. They closed or reduced capacity.
Steve
â€Schwartz’s clinical study on ivermectin’s effectiveness in beating COVID showed that on the fourth day, 86% of his patients who took ivermectin recovered. On the sixth day, up to 94% had recovered. This led the Israeli doctor to conclude, “Ivermectin decreased faster the viral load, and also sterilized the culture much better compared to the placebo.”
But despite this, the mainstream media is fighting to keep ivermectin’s successes under wraps. A recently published article on the Scientific American warned, “Fringe Doctors’ Groups Promote Ivermectin for COVID despite a Lack of Evidence” despite having scientific evidence showing otherwise. They have vilified the drug, adding that according to a poll, “56% of people who believe ivermectin is effective against COVID either do not plan to get vaccinated or are unsure about the vaccine.”
https://www.christianitydaily.com/articles/13497/20211005/top-israeli-doctor-says-ivermectin-really-has-antiviral-activities-urges-more-research-as-potential-covid-treatment.htm
The first part of Steve’s post perfectly exemplifies mainstream medical personnel who depict those advocating for repurposed drug interventions, such as HCQ and ivermectin, as either “fringe†opinions or riddled with misinformation. I find such close-mindedness not only discouraging but also damaging to genuine efforts made in giving a better array of COVID therapeutic options other than vaccines – vaccines still operating under EUAs, giving pharmaceuticals cover for any adverse effects caused by them.
However, Steve’s comments about the changes in the length of hospitalization stays, coupled with the increased usage of out patient care, is spot on in it’s relevance to the overall decrease of hospital bed count in the country.
Like nearly everything you cite you dont link to the actual study, just someone else talking about the study. I cant find for certainty the study being talked about but I suspect it was the continuation of the pre print he put out in May. At that time he only had 89 pts, far too few to draw any conclusions, but he had also changed his exclusion criteria. If he had adhered to the original exclusion he said they would in the study then his results are not significant in the May pre print. This sounds very much like he engaged in what is called “peeking”, ie someone looked into the blinded study and found what needed to be changed to make the results significant. Hopefully, if the full results are released somewhere, that has been addressed.
Regardless, the pre print study is looking mostly at viral loads. The rate of recovery does not sound clinically different than what we see for most people anyway. Seems like it would have been pretty easy to follow the study out to hospitalization rates, death and other poor outcomes which is really what we want.
https://www.newsweek.com/ivermectin-covid-treatment-study-flawed-scientists-1627109
Steve
“If everyone got vaccinated we wouldn’t be seeing the high death rates and hospitalization rates we still have.”
Spare us the lightweight analysis, steve. If everyone had a great work ethic, studied hard, was free of addictive or mental issues etc…….we wouldn’t need but a tiny fraction of the economic support systems in this country.
A strategy based upon faulty assumptions and unachievable goals is no strategy at all. The sum of all our public policy initiatives have resulted in only a small dent in the morbidity and mortality of this disease. And it is almost inconceivable that the benefits have outweighed the costs.
This is a situation based not in science or public health or even generic rational analysis, but politics. Its in its own way, a canary in the coal mine for our society.
The paucity of commentary on the current state of covid management is interesting.
Despite 95%+ vaccination rates in the currently active major sports leagues (NBA, NFL, NHL) we have rampant covid, and game cancellations. If that god damned Trump…oh, wait………. Our approach has been misguided from day one. I’m not a doctor, virologist etc…….. But I have a brain. And from almost day 1 I have observed:
1. Recognize that these type of events are unpredictable and take unexpected turns.
2. Public policy prescriptions will soon morph from (perhaps) well intended to self interested.
3. The experts are not experts. Especially those with dull political axes to grind.
4. Cost benefit is not some free market economic evil. Its the way the world works. As such, any outside influence other than pure market should at least attempt to focus policy on the most vulnerable. Policy potency.
We have done none of this. IMHO this blog, and the US and local Governments have failed miserably in this. A serious public health issue has devolved into a political opportunity and debate.
We basically know only one thing with a reasonable degree of certainty. Vaccination, as a risk reward proposition, is appropriate for a certain segment of the population. We know who those are. And its not the kiddies. But its probably everyone who comments on this blog. I, for example, am vaccinated ad boosted. Its the rational decision for my circumstances. It is not riskless. But hell, I’m in the risk business.
One would hope that we also recognize that other populations’ risk reward calculations may differ from mine, or ours. For very legitimate reasons. Unfortunately, the authoritarian left sees it otherwise.
The WSJ editorial page had a less than fawning take on the strong-armed contributions of the Fauci/Collins team.
â€In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science.†In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research.
The tale unfolded in October 2020 after the launch of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement by Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya against blanket pandemic lockdowns. They favored a policy of what they called “focused protection†of high-risk populations such as the elderly or those with medial conditions. Thousands of scientists signed the declaration—if they were able to learn about it.
We tried to give it some elevation on these pages. That didn’t please the lockdown consensus enforced by public-health officials and the press. Dr. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health until Sunday, sent an email on Oct. 8, 2020, to Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,†Dr. Collins wrote. “Is it underway?â€
These researchers weren’t fringe and neither was their opposition to quarantining society. But in the panic over the virus, these two voices of science used their authority to stigmatize dissenters and crush debate. A week after his email, Dr. Collins spoke to the Washington Post about the Great Barrington Declaration. “This is a fringe component of epidemiology,†he said. “This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous.†His message spread and the alternative strategy was dismissed in most precincts.
Dr. Fauci replied to Dr. Collins that the takedown was underway. An article in Wired, a tech-news site, denied there was any scientific divide and argued lockdowns were a straw man—they weren’t coming back. If only it were true. The next month cases rose and restrictions returned.â€
https://archive.fo/2021.12.22-001344/https://www.wsj.com/articles/fauci-collins-emails-great-barrington-declaration-covid-pandemic-lockdown-11640129116
The comment by Collins,â€This is not mainstream science,â€when referring to the Great Barrington Declaration, reminds me of Steve’s denunciation of not only this declaration but any oppositional debate over COVID remediation other than the vaccines – citing the advocacy of alternative viral protocols or practices as “misinformation.â€
Ahh, but jan I read what they write. Oppositional debate is good. However, the evidence you cite, and I read way more than what you post here, is poor. I even read the papers you cite but dont read. I read the Barrington Declaration. I pointed out that it was based upon magic. We did not know how to protect at risk groups. No one had ever done it. No one has done it and published it even now, other than some heroic attempts at nursing homes. You could make the case that maybe we now know how but we just arent willing to do it but even then you ought to have some model. The only thing that has helped is vaccinations. So you want to call it stigmatizing but what happened was that their empty argument was exposed.
Drew, you are just awful sometimes. It isn’t just about deaths, there are also hospitalizations and morbidities too. I know you took some math and science classes unlike some people here. It is not just about trying to protect at risk individuals by vaccinating them, it is also vaccinating everyone else so the disease does not spread. Unless you want lock up everyone over 50, everyone who is obese, everyone who is immunocompromised, etc in as big bubble, that is the only way to get there.
You keep talking about politics. That is mostly on your team. Vaccinations, mitigation including quarantines and masks are standard for handling respiratory illnesses. It is almost all because of your slavish devotion to your tribe that you and others have become opposed. Yes, it is trite to say if we just got vaccinated this would largely go away. It is also true.
Steve
I think the evidence that we can “get there” through vaccination and testing is pretty darned weak. Too fast a mutation rate, too transmissible, asymptomatic spread.
I also think you should be criticizing the FUD strategy that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took in 2020.
All they needed to do was get 2 shots Drew. Nothing like developing a work ethic, studying hard, etc. Just 2 shots and we are good. I will agree with you that it is all politics. The politics of the right that lead them to not do something so simple.
BTW, didnt get a lot of coverage but UK published their data on effects of the booster. 99% effective against hospitalization. Of course that was Delta.
https://khub.net/documents/135939561/338928724/Effectiveness+of+BNT162b2+COVID-19+booster+vaccine.pdf/330374ad-970c-42bb-8461-7c1ec57c403b?t=1639651397520
Steve
Biden and Harris both got publicly vaccinated and have strongly supported vaccinating ever since the vaccines were released. They should have supported rapid tests much sooner. They should be pushing to send more money on therapeutics. They should be pushing boosters to everyone.
“I think the evidence that we can “get there†through vaccination and testing is pretty darned weak. ”
The huge majority of those getting hospitalized and dying are the unvaccinated. If all of those people were vaccinated and getting sick at the same rate as the vaccinated we dot have hospitals getting overwhelmed again and by my very back of the envelope numbers this is the same as a flu season.
Steve
â€you want to call it stigmatizing but what happened was that their empty argument was exposed.â€
The only thing being exposed is how duped the medical establishment has become, regarding the ways this virus has become politically managed rather than guided by rational medical treatments and protocols. Unfortunately, the end goals of the Fauci/media-driven fear-mongering are on tract to undermine traditional, free society, replacing it with a controlled dystopian one.
Furthermore, the list is long of scientists, physicians, epidemiologists who have risked their careers and reputations by challenging the benefits of extended lockdowns, asymptomatic people being forced to wear masks, universally imposed vaccinations on every age, dividing people into the extolled vexed and shunned unvaxed. I still find it difficult to comprehend how quickly people have succumbed to becoming an unquestioning vessel of whatever the government imposes on them for their “safety,†at the expense of relinquishing their personal freedoms and way of life.
steve, it’s a matter of public record that both Biden and Harris cast doubt on the vaccine as a component of their campaign. The doubts they helped create continue to have real world impact. Your defense of them is that they’re hypocrites because they got vaccinated themselves after criticizing the vaccine?