Tag Archives: World Health Organization

Lockdowns Subvert Public Health and Life Itself

15 Thursday Oct 2020

Posted by in Coronavirus, Lockdowns, Public Health, Uncategorized

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Acceptance of risk is a necessary part of a good life, and extreme efforts to avoid it are your own business. Government has no power to guarantee absolute safety, nor should we presume to have such a right. Ongoing COVID lockdowns are an implicit assertion of exactly that kind of government power, despite the impotence of those efforts, and they constitute a rejection of more fundamental rights.

Lockdowns have had destructive effects on health and economic well being while conferring little if any benefit in mitigating harm from the virus. The lockdowns were originally sold as a way to “flatten the curve”, that is, to avoid a spike in cases and an overburdened health care system. However, this arguably well-qualified rationale later expanded in scope to encompass the mitigation of smaller and much less deadly outbreaks among younger cohorts, and then to the very idea of extinguishing the virus altogether. It’s become painfully obvious that such measures are not capable of achieving those goals.

In the U.S., the ongoing lockdowns have been a cause célèbre largely on the interventionist Left, and they have been prolonged mainly by Democrats at various levels of government. In a way, this is not unlike many other policies championed by the Left, often ostensibly designed to help members of the underclasses: instead, those policies often destroy or wrongly obviate incentives and promote dependency on the state. In this case, the plunge into dependency is a reality the Left would very much like to ignore, or to blame on someone else. You know who.

The lockdowns have been largely unsuccessful in mitigating the spread of the virus. At the same time, they have been used as a pretext to deny constitutional rights such as the free practice of religion, assembly, and a broad range of unenumerated rights under the “penumbra” of the Bill of Rights and the Ninth Amendment. What’s more, the severity of the economic blow caused by lockdowns has been borne disproportionately by the working poor and the small businesses who employ so many of them.

Lockdowns are deadly. It’s not clear that they’ve saved any lives, but they have massively disrupted the operation of the health care system with major consequences for those with chronic and undiagnosed conditions. The lockdowns have also led to spikes in mental health issues, alcoholism, drug abuse, and deaths of despair. A recent study found that over 26% of the excess deaths during the pandemic were non-COVID deaths. Those deaths were avoidable or accelerated, whereas the lockdowns have failed to meaningfully curtail COVID deaths. Don’t tell me about reduced traffic fatalities: that reduction is relatively small relative to the increase in non-COVID excess deaths (see below).

What proof do we have that lockdowns cause excess deaths? See this study in The Lancet on cancer deaths due to lockdown-induced delays in diagnoses. See this study on UK school closures. See this Oxfam International report on lockdown-induced starvation. Other reports from the UK suggests that lockdown deaths are widespread, having taken nearly 2,800 per week early in the pandemic, and many other deaths yet to occur have been made inevitable by lockdowns. Doctors in the U.S. have warned that lockdowns are a “mass casualty incident”, and a German government study warned of the same.

The Ethical Skeptic (TES) on Twitter has been tracking a measure of lockdown deaths for some time now. The following graphic provides a breakdown of excess non-COVID deaths since the start of the pandemic. The total “pie” shows almost 320,000 excess deaths through September 26th (avoiding less complete counts in recent weeks), as reported by the CDC. COVID accounted for 202,000 of those deaths, based on state-level reporting. Of the remaining 117,000 excess deaths, TES uses CDC data to allocate roughly 85,000 to various causes, the largest (more than half) being “Suicide, Addiction, Abandonment, and Abuse”. Other large categories include Cardio/Diabetes, Stroke, premature Alzheimers/Dementia death, and Cancer Access. Nearly 32,000 excess deaths remain as a “backlog”, not yet reported with a cause by states.

Also of interest in the graphic are estimates of life-years lost. The vast bulk of COVID victims are elderly, of course, which means that any estimate of lost years per victim must be relatively low. On the other hand, most non-COVID, lockdown-related deaths are among younger victims, with correspondingly greater life-years lost. TES’s aggregate estimate is that lockdown-related excess deaths involve double the life-years lost of COVID deaths. Of course, that is an estimate, but even granting some latitude for error, the reality is horrifying!

John Tierney in City Journal cites several recent studies concluding that lockdowns have been largely ineffective in Europe and in the U.S. While Tierney doesn’t rule out the possibility that lockdowns have produced some benefits, they have carried excessive costs and risks to public health going forward, such as lingering issues for those having deferred important health care decisions as well as disruption in future economic prospects. Ultimately, lockdowns don’t accomplish anything:

“While the economic and social costs have been enormous, it’s not clear that the lockdowns have brought significant health benefits beyond what was achieved by people’s voluntary social distancing and other actions.”

Tierney also discusses the costs and benefits of lockdowns in terms of life years: quality-adjusted life-years (QALY), which is a widely-used measure for evaluating of the use of health care resources:

“By the QALY measure, the lockdowns must be the most costly—and cost-ineffective—medical intervention in history because most of the beneficiaries are so near the end of life. Covid-19 disproportionately affects people over 65, who have accounted for nearly 80 percent of the deaths in the United States. The vast majority suffered from other ailments, and more than 40 percent of the victims were living in nursing homes, where the median life expectancy after admission is just five months. In Britain, a study led by the Imperial College economist David Miles concluded that even if you gave the lockdown full credit for averting the most unrealistic worst-case scenario (the projection of 500,000 British deaths, more than ten times the current toll), it would still flunk even the most lenient QALY cost-benefit test.”

We can now count the World Health Organization among the detractors of lockdowns. According to WHO’s Dr. David Nabarro:

“Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer…. Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world. … Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.”

In another condemnation of the public health consequences of lockdowns, number of distinguished epidemiologists have signed off on a statement known as The Great Barrington Declaration. The declaration advocates a focused approach of protecting the most vulnerable from the virus, while allowing those at low risk to proceed with their lives in whatever way they deem acceptable. Those at low risk of severe disease can acquire immunity, which ultimately inures to the benefit of the most vulnerable. With few, brief, and local exceptions, this is how we have always dealt with pandemics in the past. That’s real life!

COVID, Trump, and Tyrants

11 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by in Pandemic, Public Health, Trump Administration

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I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: allegations of the White House’s “poor leadership” and preparedness for COVID-19 (C19) are a matter of selective memory. At the link above, I “graded” Trump’s pandemic job performance through May. Among other things, I said:

“Many have criticized the Trump Administration for not being ‘ready’ for a pandemic. I assign no grade on that basis because absolutely no one was ready, at least not in the West, so there is no sound premise for judgement. I also view the very general charge that Trump did not provide “leadership” as code for either ‘I don’t like him’, or ‘he refused to impose more authoritarian measures’, like a full-scale nationwide lockdown. Such is the over-prescriptive instinct of the Left.”

The President of the United States does not have the constitutional authority to impose a national lockdown, though Trump himself seemed confused at times as to whether he had that power. However, on this basis at least, the ad nauseam denigration of his “leadership” is vapid. At this point, the course of the pandemic in the U.S. is less severe than in several other industrialized countries who didn’t even have Andrew Cuomo around to exacerbate the toll, and it’s still not as deadly in per capita terms as the Asian Flu of 1957-58.

Who exactly was “ready” for C19? Perhaps critics are thinking of South Korea, or parts of South Asia. Those countries might have been “ready” to the extent that they had significant prior exposure to SARS viruses. There was already some degree of immunological protection. Those countries also were exposed to an earlier genetic variant of C19 that was much less severe than the strain that hit most of the western world. These are hardly reasons to blame Trump for a lack of “readiness”.

A related charge I hear all the time is that Trump “ignored the advice of medical experts“, or that he “ignored the science“. Presumably, those “experts” include the darling of the Prescriptive Class, Dr. Anthony Fauci. On February 28, Dr Fauci said:

“Right now, at this moment, there’s no need to change anything you’re doing on a day by day basis.“

All-righty then! So this was the advice Trump “should” have followed. Oh, wait… he did! And Fauci, on March 9, said there was no reason for young, healthy people to avoid cruise ships.

Likewise, Dr. Robert Redfield, Director of the Centers for Disease Control, said the following on February 27:

“The risk to the American public is low. We have an aggressive containment strategy that really has worked up to this time, 15 cases in the United States. Until the last case that we just had in Sacramento we hadn’t had a new case in two weeks.”

Then there is the World Health Organization, which downplayed the virus in January and February, and giving a convincing impression that it servied as a mouthpiece for the CCP.

In fact, the American people were badly harmed by wrongheaded decisions made by the “experts” at the CDC in January and February, when the agency insisted that testing could not proceed until a test of their own design was ready. Then, the first version it approved was discovered to be flawed! This set the testing effort back by well over a month, a delay that proved critical. It’s no exaggeration to say this bureaucratic overreach denied the whole country, and Trump, the information needed to properly assess the spread of the virus.

But let’s think about actual policy once it became clear that the virus was getting to be a serious matter in parts of the U.S. Here’s another excerpt from my post in May:

“Trump cannot be accused of ignoring expert advice through the episode. He was obviously on-board with Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx, Dr. Robert Redfield, and other health care advisors on the ‘15 Days to Slow the Spread‘ guidelines issued on March 16. His messaging wavered during those 15 days, expressing a desire to fully reopen the nation by Easter, which Vice President Michael Pence later described as “aspirational”. Before the end of March, however, Trump went along with a 30-day extension of the guidelines. Finally, by mid-April, the White House released guidelines for ‘Opening Up America Again‘, which was a collaboration between Trump’s health care experts and the economic team. Trump agreed that the timeline for reopening should be governed by ‘the data’.” 

We should give Trump credit for shutting down flights into the U.S. from China, where the virus originated, late in January. That was an undeniably prescient move. Let’s also not forget that the original intent of the “15 Days” was to prevent hospitals and other medical resources from being overwhelmed. Today, the data show a strong seasonal tendency to the spread of the virus, but medical resources are not close to being overwhelmed, our ability to treat the virus has vastly improved, and its consequences are much less deadly than in the spring. That’s good progress, whatever the President’s detractors may say.

More than anything else, what Trump’s COVID critics fail to understand is that the executive leader of a republic is not possessed of monarchical powers. And in the U.S., the Constitution provides an additional layer of sovereignty for member states of the Union, a manifestation of the federalist principals without which the Union would not have been possible. The 15-day guidelines produced by the White House, and the guidelines for reopening, were consistent with this framework. The states have adapted their own policies to actual conditions and, if their leaders haven’t worn out their goodwill among voters, internal political realities. Those adaptations were often bad from my perspective, or even tyrannical, but sometimes good. That is exactly how our federalist system was designed to work.

Unfortunate COVID Follies

08 Wednesday Jul 2020

Posted by in Government Failure, Pandemic

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This post is devoted to a few coronavirus policies and positions that trouble me. 

Counting Deaths: People have the general impression that counting COVID-19 cases and deaths is straightforward. The facts are more reminiscent of the following exchange in the film Arsenic and Old Lace, when Jonathan Brewster angrily insists he has offed more souls than his sweet little aunties have poisoned with elderberry wine:

Dr. Einstein: You cannot count the one in South Bend. He died of pneumonia!
Jonathan Brewster: He wouldn’t have died of pneumonia if I hadn’t shot him! 

Here, Dr. Einstein wears the shoes of public health authorities who claim that C19 deaths are undercounted. But lives counted as lost from C19, in many cases, are individuals who also had the flu, pneumonia, stroke, kidney failure, and a variety of other co-morbidities. Yes, other causes of death might be induced by the coronavirus, but like Johnny’s victim in South Bend, many would not have died from C19 if they hadn’t had a prior health event. In addition, otherwise unexplained deaths are often attributed to C19 with little justification.

In fact, the C19 death toll has been distorted by a perverse federal hospital reimbursement policy that rewards hospitals for COVID patients. Death certificates seem to list C19 as the cause for almost anyone who dies in or out of a hospital during the pandemic, whether they’ve been tested or not. In fact, deaths have been attributed to C19 despite negative test results when officials decided, for one reason or another, that the test must have been unreliable!

Lockdowns: almost all of the “curve flattening” in late March and April was accomplished by voluntary action, which I’ve covered before here. The lockdowns imposed by state and local governments were highly arbitrary and tragic for many workers and business owners who could have continued to operate as safely as many so-called “essential” businesses. Lockdowns in certain areas were also blatant violations of religious rights. There is little to no evidence that lockdowns themselves led to any actual abatement of the virus. And of course, people are fed up! 

The Beach: Right now I’m at a wonderful beach condo in Florida for a week. There are other people on the beach, mostly families and a few groups of friends, but there is plenty of open space. You will not catch the coronavirus on a beach like this. And there is almost zero chance you’ll catch it on any beach. In fact, the chance you’ll catch it anywhere outside is minuscule unless you’re jammed so tightly among hundreds of protesters that you can’t even turn around. Yet government officials have closed beaches in many parts of the country while allowing the protests to go on. Oh sure, they think people will CROWD onto beaches as if they’re at a BLM protest… except they’re not. Ah, then it must be banned! That takes a special kind of dumbass.     

Waiting for Results: How could we have spent trillions of dollars as a nation on economic stimulus, much of it skimmed off by grifters, but we can’t seem to get sufficient resources to make calls to those awaiting test results? This is a case of misplaced priorities. Even now, people are waiting more than a week for their results, and many are wandering around in the community without knowing their status. Wouldn’t you think we’d get that done? We can conduct well over a half million tests a day, but can’t we find a few bucks to deliver results via phone, email, or text within 24 hours of processing results. This is truly absurd. 

Vaccine Candidates: A similar point can be made about vaccine development: We are spending $5 billion on Operation Warp Speed to build capacity in advance for five promising vaccine candidates. These will be identified over the next few months, and it looks as if all five will come from established pharmaceutical majors. There are many more vaccine candidates, however, some being developed by smaller players using inventive new techniques. The OWS expenditure looks pretty meager when you compare it to the trillions in funds the federal government is spending on economic stimulus, especially when finding an effective vaccine would obviate much of the stimulus. 

Treatment: Hydroxycloroquine has been found to lower the death rate from COVID-19 in a large controlled trial. Congratulations, morons, for trashing HCQ as a potential treatment, solely because Trump mentioned it. Way to go, dumbasses, for banning the use of a potential treatment that could have saved many thousands of lives. 

Air Conditioning: I’m shocked that public health experts haven’t been more vocal about the potentially dangerous effects of running air conditioners at high levels in public buildings. The virus is known to thrive in cool, dry environments, which is exactly what AC creates, yet this seems to have been almost completely ignored.   

Vitamin D: Likewise, I think public health experts have been far too reticent about the connection between Vitamin D deficiencies and the severity of C19 (also see here and here). The accumulating evidence about this association offers an explanation for the disturbingly high severity of cases among Black, Asian and Minority Ethnics (BAME), not to mention a possible role in C19 deaths among the generally D-deficient nursing home population. For the love of God, get the word out to the community that Vitamin D supplements might help, and they won’t hurt, and otherwise, tell people to get some sun!

Masks: I’m not in favor of strict mask mandates, but I have trouble understanding the aversion to masks among certain friends. Of course, there’s been way too much mixed messaging on the benefits of masks, and it didn’t all come from politicians! Scientists, the CDC, and the World Health Organization seemingly did everything possible to squander their credibility on this and other issues. However, a consensus now seems to have developed that masks protect others from the wearer and seem to protect the wearer from others as well. It should be obvious that masks offer a middle ground on which the economy can be restarted while mitigating the risks of further contagion. But even if you don’t believe masks protect the wearer, but only protect others from an infected wearer, donning a mask inside buildings, and when social distancing is impossible, still qualifies as a mannerly thing to do.  

 

Anti-Glyphosate Goons and Gullibility

15 Sunday May 2016

Posted by in Agriculture, Regulation, Technology

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See the Postscript below.

A “roundup” of findings on the safety of glyphosate shows that the herbicide is very benign, highly unlikely to pose any real threat to humans, and far less toxic than many common household chemicals and even natural hazards in the environment. However, the debate over glyphosate is heavily politicized, as illustrated by the unsavory details surrounding a report issued last year by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an arm of the World Health Organization (WHO). The IARC reclassified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” based on a few cherry-picked, poorly-designed studies with weak statistical power. That finding is inconsistent with the vast preponderance research, which shows that glyphosate is not a significant threat to human health.

The Farmer’s Daughter provided a good summary of the issues shortly after the IARC’s ruling was announced last year. She offers the following quote from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA):

“The U.S. EPA classified glyphosate as Group E, evidence of non-carcinogenicity in humans. The U.S. EPA does not consider glyphosate to be a human carcinogen based on studies of laboratory animals that did not produce compelling evidence of carcinogenicity.“

European regulators reached similar conclusions and are rather damning in their assessment of the IARC’s findings, though Brussels recently disregarded their findings and decided to ban the sale of glyphosate for gardening. In this post at Biology Fortified, Anastasia Bodnar discusses the low toxicity of glyphosate with links to several recent studies on its safety. And here is the Risk Monger blogs’s list of “ten reasons why glyphosate is the herbicide of the century“:

  1. Controlling invasive weeds leads to better agricultural yields
  2. Better yields = less land in production = more meadows and biodiversity
  3. Extremely low toxicity levels compared to (organic) alternatives
  4. Allows for no or low till farming – better for soil management
  5. Reduces CO2 emissions (compared to organic)
  6. Glyphosate saves lives
  7. It is much more affordable and effective than other options
  8. Glyphosate is off patent so no single company is profiting heavily from it
  9. Glyphosate-resistant crops allow for more ecological weed management practices
  10. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that glyphosate is safe for humans

How, then, did the IARC reach such a negative conclusion? Again from the Risk Monger, David Zaruk, the IARC hired just one external technical advisor, Christopher Portier, an activist previously employed by an NGO, the anti-pesticide Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). Portier has no technical background in toxicology, and the IARC apparently went to pains to avoid references to his affiliation with the EDF. Moreover, the IARC’s conclusion seems to have been preordained:

“The IARC study rejected thousands of documents on glyphosate that had industry involvement and based their decision on carcinogenicity on the basis of eight studies (rejecting a further six because they did not like their conclusions).“

The lead author of the report, Kathryn Guyton, gave a speech in 2014 in which she stated that herbicide studies slated for 2015 showed indications of a link to cancer. Just how did she know, so far ahead of time? And then there’s this revelation:

“According to the observer document, the glyphosate meeting started with the participants being told to rule out the possibility of classifying the substance as non-carcinogenic.“

Zaruk believes there is internal pressure for the IARC study to be retracted. The organization has suffered a great loss of credibility in the scientific community over the report. In addition, WHO has remained neutral thus far, but they are expected to address the issue this month.

Zaruk and Julie Kelly provide a more succinct summary of the issues in “The Facebook Age of Science at The World Health Organization” at National Review. The suggestion made in the title seems to be that WHO’s decision might be swayed by public pressure, measured by Facebook “likes” by the superstitious, such as unknowing David Wolfe devotees, rather than science:

“Environmentalists and organic companies tout phony studies claiming that glyphosate is found in everything from breast milk to bagels. … Meanwhile, farmers who use glyphosate to protect their crops and boost yields are caught in the crossfire. Even if glyphosate is banned, they will need to use another herbicide, probably more toxic, because the romantic notion of hand-weeding millions of acres of crops is promoted only by those who have never done it.“

I’ll keep using Monsanto’s Roundup, thanks! Or a competitive brand of glyphosate. To close, here’s a quote from Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist blog on the embrace of pseudoscience at the IARC and elsewhere (including social media):

“Science, humanity’s greatest intellectual achievement, has always been vulnerable to infection by pseudoscience, which pretends to use the methods of science, but actually subverts them in pursuit of an obsession. Instead of evidence-based policymaking, pseudoscience specialises in policy-based evidence making. Today, this infection is spreading.“

Postscript: On May 16, WHO announced that glyphosate is “unlikely to cause cancer in people via dietary exposure.” Here is a Q&A from WHO regarding its assessment, explaining that it is based on risk as opposed to mere hazard, upon which the earlier IARC report was based. This is good news!

 

OTC Birth Control vs. State Control

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by in Big Government

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Why would the Progressive Left oppose over-the-counter birth control? Let us count the reasons…

Senator Cory Gardner (R-CO) has proposed a bill to eliminate the federal requirement that a doctor’s prescription is needed to obtain birth control. According to Gardner,

“Most other drugs with such a long history of safe and routine use are available for purchase over the counter, and contraception should join them.”

Six other Republicans have signed-on as co-sponsors. The change is sensible on many levels, from improving access to birth control to reducing health care costs, yet the Left and some so-called women’s advocates have reacted with horror. Most of what follows is discussed in two articles, “Why Liberals Oppose Over-the-Counter Birth Control“, by Jillian Kay Melchior, and “Republicans Push For Over-The-Counter Birth Control, Liberals Immediately Oppose The Plan“, from Before It’s News (BIN).

  1. “Free” birth control was offered under Obamacare. The Left claims that the OTC proposal is a conspiracy to eliminate federal funding of birth control and shift the cost burden back to women. Yet the bill does not change the coverage requirement in any way.
  2. The Left claims that the change to OTC will increase the cost of birth control. On one level, this is the same as #1. However, some have argued that the change will actually drive up the cost of contraception, and that’s a whole different level of delusional economics. Filling prescriptions involves much greater use resources than OTC, particularly the time of the physician and staff, the pharmacist, and the buyer. OTC would also remove a barrier to competition in the provision of birth control, which would reduce costs.
  3. Some physicians require an examination and even tests before they’ll write a birth control prescription, which can run into hundreds of dollars. Naturally, many of them would like to retain this flow of business, yet according to Melchior, “…the World Health Organization and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have confirmed that doctors can safely prescribe the pill without a full examination.” Freeing women of the need for a doctor’s blessing would  improve access unambiguously.
  4. Melchior also reports that “Planned Parenthood alone makes around $1.2 billion each year from contraceptive services.” Naturally, Planned Parenthood would like to protect that flow of revenue, but the availability of OTC birth control would expose it to competition.

What nonsense people spout in defense of their political agenda, not to mention their rents! The proposal for OTC birth control should be a slam-dunk liberalization, one that no self-respecting Liberal or Libertarian should oppose. But apparently, for the Progressives, helping women is secondary to preserving state control and the “statist quo”.