Tag Archives: Border Control

Herd Immunity To Public Health Bullshitters and To COVID

16 Monday Aug 2021

Posted by in Coronavirus, Herd Immunity, Uncategorized

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My last post had a simple message about the meaning of immunity: you won’t get very sick or die from an infection to which you are immune, including COVID-19. Like any other airborne virus, that does NOT mean you won’t get it lodged in your eyeballs, sinuses, throat, or lungs. If you do, you are likely to test positive, though your immunity means the “case” is likely to be inconsequential.

As noted in that last post, we’ve seen increasing COVID case counts with the so-called Delta variant, which is more highly transmissible than earlier variants. (This has been abetted by an uncontrolled southern border as well.) However, as we’d expect with a higher level of immunity in the population, the average severity of these cases is low relative to last year’s COVID waves. But then I saw this article in ScienceAlert quoting Sir Andrew Pollard, a scientist affiliated AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford. He says with Delta, herd immunity “is not a possibility” — everyone will get it.

Maybe everyone will, but that doesn’t mean everyone will get sick. His statement raises an obvious question about the meaning of herd immunity. If our working definition of the term is that the virus simply disappears, then Pollard is correct: we know that COVID is endemic. But the only virus that we’ve ever completely eradicated is polio. Would Pollard say we’ve failed to achieve herd immunity against all other viruses? I doubt it. Endemicity and herd immunity are not mutually exclusive. The key to herd immunity is whether a virus does or does not remain a threat to the health of the population generally.

Active COVID infections will be relatively short-lived in individuals with “immunity”. Moreover, viral loads tend to be lower in immune individuals who happen to get infected. Therefore, the “infected immune” have less time and less virus with which to infect others. That creates resistance to further contagion and contributes to what we know as herd immunity. While immune individuals can “catch” the virus, they won’t get sick. Likewise, a large proportion of the herd can be immune and still catch the virus without getting sick. That is herd immunity.

One open and controversial question is whether uninfected individuals will require frequent revaccination to maintain their immunity. A further qualification has to do with asymptomatic breakthrough infections. Those individuals won’t see any reason to quarantine, and they may unwittingly transmit the virus.

I also acknowledge that the concept of herd immunity is often discussed strictly in terms of transmission, or rather its failure. The more contagious a new virus, like the Delta variant, the more difficult it is to achieve herd immunity. Models predicting low herd immunity thresholds due to heterogeneity in the population are predicated on a given level of transmissibility. Those thresholds would be correspondingly higher given greater transmissibility.

A prominent scientist quoted in this article is Paul Hunter of the University of East Anglia. After backing-up Pollard’s dubious take on herd immunity, Hunter drops this bit of real wisdom:

“We need to move away from reporting infections to actually reporting the number of people who are ill. Otherwise we are going to be frightening ourselves with very high numbers that don’t translate into disease burden.”

Here, here! Ultimately, immunity has to do with the ability of our immune systems to fight infections. Vaccinations, acquired immunity from infections, and pre-existing immunity all reduce the severity of later infections. They are associated with reductions in transmission, but those immune responses are more basic to herd immunity than transmissability alone. Herd immunity does not mean that severe cases will never occur. In fact, more muted seasonal waves will come and go, inflicting illness on a limited number of vulnerables, but most people can live their lives normally while viral reproduction is contained. Herd immunity!

Sadly, we’re getting accustomed to hearing misstatements and bad information from public health officials on everything from mask mandates, lockdowns, and school closings to hospital capacity and vaccine hesitancy. Dr. Pollard’s latest musing is not unique in that respect. It’s almost as if these “experts” have become victims of their own flawed risk assessments insofar as their waning appeal to “the herd” is concerned. Professor Hunter’s follow-up is refreshing, however. Public health agencies should quit reporting case counts and instead report only patients who present serious symptoms, COVID ER visits, or hospitalizations.

Human Potential Exceeds the Human Burden

30 Friday Nov 2018

Posted by in Abortion, Mobility, Redistribution

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Are human beings a burden, and in what way? Between two camps of opinion on this question are many shades of thought, and some inconsistencies. But whether the discussion is centered on the macro-societal level or the family level, the view of people and population growth as burdensome promotes centralized social control and authoritarian rule, with an attendant imposition of burdens on human freedom and productive effort.

Naysaying Greens

The environmental Left views people as a net burden on resources while failing to recognize their resource value, without which our world would yield little in the way of food and other comforts. It is mankind’s ability to process and transform raw materials that makes the planet so hospitable.

The world’s human population has increased by a factor of 18 times in the last 400 years, but food supplies have grown even faster. Each person has potential as a resource capable of a net positive contribution to societal and global well being. If we wrongly conclude that people are burdensome, however, it offers a rationale to statists for regulating the lives of individuals, preventing them from producing and consuming as they would otherwise choose.

Sirens of Dependency

There will always be individuals who cannot provide for themselves, sometimes due to temporary circumstances and sometimes as a permanent condition. If the latter, these individuals find themselves in the lower tail of the distribution of human productive capacity. The undeniable burden of this lower tail for humanity can be dealt with through various social support structures, including family, religious organizations, private social organizations, and the public safety net.

People of true compassion have always helped to fill this need privately and voluntarily, but “compassionate” motives can be a false and corrupting when the public sector becomes the tool of choice. Actual and potential beneficiaries of public largess can vote for their alms at the expense of others, along with those well-meaning partisans who confuse forced redistribution with compassion. And benefits and taxes often create disincentives that undermine a society’s productive dynamic. Under such circumstances, the lower tail and its burden of dependency grows larger than necessary, and society’s ability to carry that burden is diminished.

Burdensome Children

Children are unable to provide for themselves up to varying ages, so they do create an economic burden for their parents. That burden might loom large in the event of an unexpected pregnancy, but most parents find the burden well worth bearing, whether planned or unplanned, ex ante and ex post, and for reasons that often have little to do with material concerns. But many individuals and families in the lower tail simply cannot bear the economic burden on their own; others not in the lower tail might simply find the prospective burden of an unexpected pregnancy a bit too heavy or inconvenient for non-economic reasons.

Solutions are available, of course. They range from sexual abstinence and prophylactics to adoption services, as well as hard sacrifice by new parents. And then there is abortion. The pro-choice Left makes the argument that children are so burdensome as to justify the termination of pregnancies at almost any stage. The ease with which they make that argument and traffic in the imposition of that burden upon the innocent is horrific. Furthermore, regimes dominated by the Left have often instituted formal population control measures, and Western leftists such as the late Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, have advocated strenuously for eugenics.

Burdens at the Border

Are migrants a burden or a blessing? In general, the latter, because mobility allows individuals to exploit economic opportunities, with consequent gains to themselves and to those who demand their services. This is generally true from the perspective of nations; it is the basis of the traditional economic argument in favor of liberalized, legal immigration to which I subscribe. But some partisans on both sides of the immigration debate accept the idea that immigrants impose a burden. That may be correct under some circumstances.

Opponents of immigration reform certainly identify immigrants as a burden to productive citizens and taxpayers. Critics of border control, on the other hand, are motivated by compassion for political refugees or economically disadvantaged immigrants, whether employment opportunities exist for them or not. In fact, would-be immigrants are often attracted by generous public benefits in the receiving country, and so they are likely to add to a country’s lower-tail burden, as I’ve described it. But the no-borders crowd insists that society must shoulder any burden created by the combined effect of an open border with generous public benefits, and even immediate voting rights.

The Burdens of Overbearance

The Left imagines that people create many burdens, but the Left is happy to impose many burdens in pursuit of their “ideal” society: planned by experts, egalitarian, highly regulated, profit-free, and green. They wish to “save the planet” by imposing burdens, regulating and restricting economic growth and sparing no expense to minimize the human “footprint”. They wish to fund redistributive social programs by burdening productive resources with taxes, while crowding-out private efforts to provide charitable relief. They wish to prevent the perceived burden of children by offering, and even funding publicly, the “choice” to impose an ultimate burden on those too weak to register a protest. And they wish to burden taxpayers by availing all potential migrants, without question, of generous public benefits.

Burdens are a fact of life, but people with the freedom to exploit their own effort and ingenuity for gain have increasingly shouldered their own burdens and much more. Over the last few centuries, human ingenuity has expanded the effective quantity of all resources by many orders of magnitude. In so doing, the scale and scope of real poverty have been reduced dramatically. But those who would deign to manage our burdens for us, under the authority of the state, are more threatening to our well being than beneficent.

Exposing Children To Risk at the Border

19 Tuesday Jun 2018

Posted by in Immigration

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Unaccompanied children (UACs) will be housed in temporary quarters at the border even in the wake of President Trump’s new executive order intended to end family separations. That order began the process of reuniting children and parents that were separated under the Administration’s earlier effort to discourage the recent deluge of illegal immigrants claiming asylum. But UACs were the original subject of the so-called Flores Consent Decree in 1997, which limited the length of a minor’s stay in a holding facility to 20 days before placement with a relative, other guardian, or foster shelter. Soon after, the decree was extended to accompanied children by a federal court.

There is no doubt that all of these minors are much safer in holding facilities than during their dangerous attempts to cross the border through rough, arid country, and perhaps over the Rio Grande. That seems rather obvious, and the geography isn’t the worst of it: UAC’s are highly likely to become victims of human trafficking, which runs rampant along the U.S.-Mexican border.

UACs have already separated from their families, deliberately or otherwise, before their journey north. But a family embarking on such an odyssey is likewise exposed to tremendous danger from physical hazards and criminal predation, and the children are more likely to be young. If detained by U.S. border security, they might be about as safe or safer in custody than they’ve ever been, given the lawlessness at many points of departure in Central America.

For these and other reasons, whether children should ever be separated from parent(s), or someone claiming to be a parent(s), is not as straightforward as many have suggested. The recent outrage over the treatment of immigrant children at the border is based on a number of misapprehensions. I attempt to address some of these in the points below:

>>Prior to President Trump’s executive order last week ending family separations, 10,000 (more than 80%) of the children housed by the U.S. government at the border were actually UACs, separated from their families before their journeys ever began, not after apprehension at the border. Most but not all of these kids are teenagers delivered into the hands of smugglers, who sometimes collect a premium on their charges via misuse and sexual abuse. Here is part of a statement from Kristjen Nielsen, Secretary of Homeland Security:

“The vast, vast majority of children who are in the care of HHS right now, 10,000 of the 12,000, were sent here alone by their parents. That’s when they were separated. So somehow we’ve conflated everything but there’s two separate issues. 10,000 of those currently in custody were sent by their parents with strangers to undertake a completely dangerous and deadly travel alone.“

>>2,000 (less than 20%) of the children housed by HHS were separated from their parents when the parents claimed asylum after attempting to cross illegally. However, a consequential share of those children were not biologically related to the supposed parents after all; some UACs are used by coyotes to pose as the children of adult immigrants, and vice versa, so that they all gain more favorable treatment if apprehended.

>>The ranks of “asylum seekers” have swollen by attempts to migrate for economic reasons. A preference for an illegal crossing is presumptive evidence that this is the case. Here is more from Nielsen:

“… in the last three months we’ve seen illegal immigration on our southern border exceed 50,000 people each month, multiples over each month last year. Since this time last year, there has been a 325 percent increase in unaccompanied alien children and a 435 percent increase in family units entering the country illegally. …Over the last ten years, there has been a 1700 percent increase in asylum claims, resulting in asylum backlog of 600,000 cases.“

>>Enforcing the Flores Consent Decree makes it almost impossible to meet the goals of 1) properly adjudicating an asylum claim by a parent detained after an illegal crossing, and 2) keeping the family together. As a result, before April of this year, prior to the Trump Administration’s effort to discourage frivolous claims, the reality was that most “credible fear” asylum claims at the border resulted in the immediate release of families.

>>Many of the separated children arrived with single parents, including female children with fathers. In fact, most illegal immigrants are male and mostly unaccompanied by children. Ensuring the safety of children is a challenge in any detention environment. Here is what Human Rights Watch‘s 1999 Report on Children’s Rights had to say on the matter:

“Despite the directive of Article 37(c) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child that “every child deprived of liberty shall be separated from adults unless it is considered in the child’s best interest not to do so,” children continued to be held with adults in many parts of the world. Human Rights Watch opposed the commingling of children and adults in detention because contact with adults was almost never in the children’s best interest. Children in adult facilities rarely received educational and vocational training appropriate to their needs. detention because contact with adults was almost never in the children’s best interest. Children in adult facilities rarely received educational and vocational training appropriate to their needs.”

None of this is easy. It is arguably prudent and in a child’s best interest to keep them housed separately from adults. The unfortunate reality is that the recent surge of illegal entrants cited by HSA Secretary Nielsen has placed a strain on existing facilities. However, assuming that family relationships can be verified, the designation of facilities for families-only would offer an alternative that has been lacking.

>>Ultimately, the border control separated detained “parents” from children at the volition of the parents. The parents were offered the opportunity to take their children back across the border, where they could head to an official port-of-entry to claim asylum. Of course, an asylum claim after an illegal crossing involves a lengthy delay. (And an attempt to re-enter illegally is a felony, which would all but guarantee separation.) Under Trump’s policy, if the parents refused to go back in the first instance, claiming asylum immediately, they were separated from their children until their cases were adjudicated. But after 20 days, the children must be transferred to a foster shelter, relative, or family friend in the U.S.

>>Legitimate asylum-seekers have alternatives to risky illegal crossings. They should go to a port of entry to claim asylum, not expose their children to a long, hazardous slog through the marchland. And many do, as this article makes clear. There are 50 ports-of-entry along the U.S. Mexican border.

>>The claim that UACs and children separated from their apparent guardians were mistreated has been accepted uncritically by the media. The shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are not Auschitz, but you’d ever know it from listening to many news sources. The immigrants are provided with food, medical care and sanitary conditions far better than they may have ever experienced. References to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust are so shockingly off-base as to constitute a denial of the seriousness of the Holocaust.

>>The U.S. government is within its powers to regulate immigration, according to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Chy Lung v. Freeman (1875). That decision turned on the Article 1 Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations. The Court ruled that this applies to immigration, a practical solution to the conflicting and sometimes highly restrictive state regulations on immigration in place at the time.

My position is that U.S. citizens hold the right to freedom of association, which includes the right to exclude. In that sense, citizenship is a “club good”. Yes, such legal exclusions are binding on citizens who disagree, like most other laws, unless they emigrate, but such a policy does not prohibit travel abroad, foreign travelers, and guest workers. Immigration controls should be calibrated such that inflows meet the country’s economic needs and do not place an undue burden on public finances. I also support generous allowances for legitimate asylum seekers, subject to vetting. As for the surge in the number of immigrant families detained by border control, more facilities that are specifically designed to house families may be required. Finally, Congress must find a compromise to the issues of Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA), border security, and eliminating the Flores Decree. There are avenues for a compromise solution, but raw political motives seem to be keeping Democrats away from the table.