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On Mon, 28 Feb 2022 19:29:44 -0800, Michael Ejercito
<[email protected]> wrote:

http://reason.com/2022/02/28/two-years-to-slow-the-spread/

Two Years To Slow the Spread
Government can't stop moving the COVID-19 goal posts.
MATT WELCH | FROM THE MARCH 2022 ISSUE

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(Photo: Luis Alvarez/Getty)
On December 6, 2021, in his last major act as mayor of New York City, >Democrat Bill de Blasio announced that, to stop the spread of the
omicron variant of COVID-19, all 184,000 private businesses in the city
would henceforth be commanded to enforce vaccine mandates on their
employees, and all children ages 5 and up (including tourists from
countries that hadn't yet approved pediatric vaccines) would need to
show proof of full immunization before entering most indoor venues.

"Look at a country like Germany right now�shutdowns, restrictions," de
Blasio explained in a follow-up interview. "We cannot let that happen.
So we had to take decisive action."

Five days later, as the Northeast was experiencing a third consecutive
winter surge of coronavirus cases, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul
announced that all businesses in New York would be required to ensure
their employees and customers were either provably vaccinated or masked >indoors at all times; each violation would be subject to a $1,000 fine.
The new rules were applicable through January 15, "after which the State
will re-evaluate based on current conditions."

Hochul's announcement came almost six months to the day after her >predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, had lifted almost all statewide COVID >restrictions, including most indoor masking, on the occasion of New York >meeting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) target of
having 70 percent of adults receive at least one vaccination dose. "We
can now return to life as we know it," Cuomo crowed then. By the time of >Hochul's reversal, the one-shot rate among adult New Yorkers had risen
to 93 percent.

The goal posts on pandemic policy haven't just been shifted, they've
been uprooted, hitched to a helicopter, and transported to a different >county. Joe Biden as president-elect on December 4, 2020, said, "I don't >think [vaccines] should be mandatory." His spokeswoman Jen Psaki on July
23, 2021, added, "That's not the role of the federal government." CDC >Director Rochelle Walensky stated unequivocally on July 31 that "there
will be no federal mandate."

Biden announced a federal vaccine mandate on private employers with 100
or more workers five weeks later.

"I've tried everything in my power to get people vaccinated," the
president maintained. "But even after all those efforts, we still had
more than a quarter of people in the United States who were eligible for >vaccinations but didn't get the shot�.So, while I didn't race to do it
right away, that's why I've had to move toward requirements." Look at
what you made him do.

It was easier to make fun of presidential dissembling about pandemic
policy back when Donald Trump was holding extemporaneous bull sessions
about COVID every day on the White House lawn, or when he infamously
unveiled on March 16, 2020, a bullet-pointed presentation titled "15
Days to Slow the Spread." Even factoring in hindsight bias, that was an >absurdly irresponsible prediction to make about a virus already ripping >through every continent at a time when testing (especially in the U.S.)
was woefully inadequate.

Law & Contemporary Problems Symposium on "Sex in Law" Publishes Disputed >Article
But Trump back then, like his then-lionized, now-disgraced rival Cuomo,
was operating in an environment exponentially more impoverished, in
terms of both knowledge and mitigation strategies, than what public
officials enjoy now. The one-shot vaccination rate for American adults
was not 86 percent (as it is as this magazine goes to press) but 0
percent. We were still being reminded to wash our hands several times a
day for 20 seconds at a time and implored to studiously avoid touching
our faces. And perhaps because the idea of government dictating most
human activity outside the home was then still novel, politicians tended
to tether restrictions to specific metrics. (Cuomo's "flatten the curve" >mantra referred to the trajectory of hospitalizations vs. the hard
number of hospital beds.) Immediate-term discomforts were routinely sold
with visions of long-term relief.

"If everyone makes�these critical changes and sacrifices now," Trump
said on "Slow the Spread" day, as a phalanx of top public health
officials looked on, "we will rally together as one nation, and we will >defeat the virus, and we're going to have a big celebration all
together. With several weeks of focused action, we can turn the corner
and turn it quickly."

As the families of 800,000 dead Americans can grimly attest, no such
corners were ever turned. Yet what has replaced those naive and
prematurely optimistic projections is something no less cruel.

Benchmarks for lifting restrictions have been serially rewritten or
quietly dropped, often with little explanation. Major policy promises
have been made and broken within the same week. And you can't just blame
the capriciousness on the shifting viral facts on the ground�bureaucrats
have been agonizingly slow to recognize advances in knowledge that
support policy loosening yet lightning-fast when reacting to any new
source of fear. It took the Biden administration and his fellow
Democrats in New York no time at all to put the clampdown on the omicron >variant, but it took the CDC and most coastal state governments more
than a year to internalize that people are not catching COVID-19 outdoors.

By making a zig-zagging series of arbitrary and far-reaching edicts, >officials have squandered public trust in allegedly neutral scientific >institutions and effectively abandoned persuasion for coercion. Instead
of a light at the end of the tunnel�or even endemic coping at the end of >pandemic panic�we're being offered a future of politicians reluctantly >handing out a carrot or two before reaching once again for the stick.

The 1-2 Punch in the Mouth
"Everybody has a plan," former heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson famously
said, "until they get punched in the mouth." Not only did COVID-19 punch >millions of people in the mouth, but government reaction to the virus
proved a second blow from which scores of millions of businesses and
families have been painfully slow to recover.

In December 2020, Gavin Newsom, California's Democratic governor, banned >outdoor dining in regions where available hospital ICU capacity was
below 15 percent. A judge opined (accurately) within a week that the
policy was "not grounded in science, evidence, or logic." Newsom then >rescinded the order seven weeks later without the threshold having been
met in most of the state.

De Blasio shut down New York City public schools in November 2020
because the rate of positive tests among all New Yorkers had risen above
3 percent, even though that community spread threshold was far below
those recommended by international health authorities, and weekly tests >inside school buildings were showing a miniscule positivity rate of 0.18 >percent. The mayor removed that consideration for elementary schools 10
days later and for middle schools and high schools four months later. >Science!

Imagine being a landlord during the past two years. First, COVID
suddenly increases the chances that your tenants will be unable to pay
their rent and prompts millions of renegotiated leases. Then, six months >later, the Trump administration makes the absurd and facially >unconstitutional decision to put the CDC in charge of enforcing a
federal moratorium on evictions. Set aside for a moment that gross
violation of property rights, and visualize instead what it must have
been like to try to make any plan at all about residential real estate.

On June 24, 2021, the CDC made what it described as "the final extension
of the moratorium," pushing it out to July 31. At an August 2 White
House press briefing, Psaki announced that "CDC Director Rochelle
Walensky and her team have been unable to find legal authority for a
new, targeted eviction moratorium." Literally the next day, the CDC
announced a new, targeted eviction moratorium covering 90 percent of the >country. (The Supreme Court would at the end of month swat that reversal >down.)

With the exception of the occasional court ruling, governmental bodies
have largely given up on the idea that there is any limiting principle
to their vast new pandemic powers. Relatedly, they no longer sell
today's restrictions as a ticket to tomorrow's freedoms. Whenever a new
wave forms, politicians brace constituents for a quick slap now to put
off yet another mouth-punch later.

Hochul portrayed her December mask-and-vaccine crackdown as a way to
"prevent business disruption"; de Blasio sold his new mandates by
saying, "We cannot let those restrictions come back. We cannot have
shutdowns here in New York City. We've got to keep moving forward."

Vaccinations have helped decouple infections from hospitalization and
death, especially with the more infectious but less lethal omicron
variant. Yet elites kept focusing on case rates instead of serious
illness, sowing panic and clampdowns in the process. "Massachusetts is
the most vaccinated state in the country and yet here we are in a surge
of COVID that is just as bad as where we were last year at this point," >University of Massachusetts Memorial Health Care President Eric Dickson
said in an NBC Nightly News scare story in December. At the time of
Dickson's startling claim, the Bay State's seven-day average of deaths
was 17, compared to 51 the year before.

All of which contributes to the suspicion that governmental
interventions will just stretch out forever. "It is good policy and
practice to establish off-ramps for interventions that aren't meant to
be permanent," Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo wrote in
November 2021. "We should be able to answer what conditions would enable
an end."

But politicians and public health officials, particularly in >Democratic-controlled institutions, are increasingly unable to spell out
any such conditions. For them there is no end in sight.

Ripping the Mask Off
The first vaccine shots for 5- to 11-year-olds were made available
November 3. On November 5 came reports that a new therapeutic from
Pfizer preliminarily demonstrated a remarkable ability to prevent
serious illness and death in people already sick from COVID. That same
day, Walensky chose to release an "Ask the Expert" video replying to the >question, "Why do I still need to wear a mask?"

"The evidence is clear," responded the country's highest-ranking public >health scientist. "Masks can help prevent the spread of COVID-19 by
reducing your chance of infection by more than 80 percent, whether it's
an infection from the flu, from the coronavirus, or even just the common >cold. In combination with other steps, like getting your vaccination,
hand washing, and keeping physical distance, wearing your mask is an >important step you can take to keep us all healthy."

It was a breathtakingly irresponsible remark.

For two years, as the country has engaged in bitterly partisan and
intensely moralistic debates over nonpharmaceutical interventions >(NPIs)�masking, social distancing, business closures�the single greatest >difference maker by far in blunting the lethal impact of the virus has
been vaccination. Unvaccinated Americans were 10 to 20 times more likely
to die from COVID-19 in fall 2021 than those who had received their shots.

Yet here was Walensky, the very week immunization became available to
most elementary school kids, putting vaccination on the same list as the >mostly (and rightfully) forgotten NPIs of hand washing and social
distancing, in order to counteract any possible erosion in support for a
far inferior NPI. By relegating the vaccine to the status of an
afterthought, not only did the CDC director snuff out hope among many
parents that their children's masks will ever come off, but she also >butchered the science.

There does not exist a study showing masks to reduce wearers' COVID >infectiousness by anything close to 80 percent. In fact, most studies >conducted at that time had not even found the vaccines to be 80 percent >effective at stopping transmission in the delta era (although they did
better at stopping symptomatic cases and hospitalizations). Choosing the >arrival of pediatric vaccines as an opportunity to greatly exaggerate
the effectiveness of face coverings sent the implicit message to parents
that no amount of compliance will free their kids from masks.

In a tweet promoting the video, Walensky touted the non-COVID virtues of >wearing face coverings forever. "Masks," she wrote, "also help protect
from other illnesses like common cold and flu." There was a time when
having a smiling government doctor suggest open-ended masking for cold
and flu seasons would have been seen as too implausibly authoritarian.

Yet when the CDC talks, governments in the kinds of places where people
have "In this house, we believe in science" yard signs tend to
rubber-stamp the recommendations. As of mid-December, 15 states had mask >mandates for K-12 schools; all 15 voted for Biden in November 2020. (The
two states with also problematic school-mask-mandate bans both voted for >Trump.) In New York, children 2 and older are required by law to wear
masks all day long in any public or private school or daycare setting, >despite being in the age cohort with the lowest COVID hospitalization
rate, and despite the fact that their teachers must be vaccinated by
law. (The vaccinated Hochul, who at age 63 is much more vulnerable to
COVID than is an unvaccinated 4-year-old, has infuriated her critics by >appearing in countless social media photos indoors, amid crowds, unmasked.)

Colorado, a purple state with a libertarian-leaning Democratic governor,
has taken a considerably different approach. "There was a time when
there was no vaccine, and masks were all we had, and we needed to wear
them," Democratic Gov. Jared Polis told Colorado Public Radio in
December. "The truth is we now have highly effective vaccines that work
far better than masks. If you wear a mask, it does decrease your risk of >getting COVID, and that's a good thing to do indoors around others. But
if you get COVID and you are still unvaccinated, the case is just as bad
as if you were not wearing a mask. Everybody had more than enough
opportunity to get vaccinated�.At this point, if you haven't been
vaccinated, it's really your own darn fault." Was that so hard?

For the rest of the country, the scenes playing out in restrictionist
states look alien, dystopian: kids shivering while eating lunch outside
in frigid Portland, Oregon; high schoolers in New York City (where the >positive COVID rate among regularly tested unvaccinated kids was less
than 0.3 percent this fall) still holding debate tournaments on Zoom;
glum TV commercials warning parents that "without the vaccine, when your >child's teammates take the field, they'll miss out. Or when their
friends go off to the movies, a concert, or get a bite to eat, your teen
will miss out."

Asked about some of those images in December, White House spokeswoman
Psaki replied, "I will tell you, I have a 3-year-old who goes to school,
sits outside for snacks and lunch, wears a mask inside, and it's no big
deal to him�.These are steps that schools are taking to keep kids safe."

Yet the evidence that Psaki's kid is actually safer because of such >precautions has proven damnably difficult for the CDC to produce.
America's school masking guidance is a global outlier�the World Health >Organization recommends against masking children aged 5 and younger, and
only a handful of countries in the European Union were masking
elementary school students in fall 2021. In trying to persuade the
public that it's actually rational and prudent, the country's public
health agency has never once cited a masking study that included a
meaningful control group. Officials are operating on intuition, and as a >result tens of millions of children are degrading their physical
comfort, social development, and language acquisition. All to avoid >contracting and spreading a virus they are far less susceptible to than
are vaccinated adults.

Misrepresenting science to produce a preferred policy outcome is a
terrible way to build trust during a pandemic. Adding to that sense of >suspicion is the fact that the CDC at the beginning of the pandemic
actively downplayed the effectiveness of masks, out of worry that scared >consumers would hoard the then-scarce supply of medical-quality
protective equipment needed by doctors and nurses. "Seriously
people�STOP BUYING MASKS!" tweeted then�Surgeon General Jerome Adams on >February 29, 2020. "They are NOT effective in preventing [the] general
public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can't get
them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!"

The Biden administration was supposed to bring more scientific rigor
into the building, yet Walensky has repeatedly massaged research
findings to fit her policy desires for Americans to be swathed in real
and metaphorical prophylactics. The CDC dropped its guidance for outdoor >masking only in April 2021, and even then only among vaccinated people.
The moderately populated state of Washington, with its spectacular
forests, coastline, and mountains, still has an outdoor mask requirement.

As America braced for the omicron wave before Christmas, the blue-state >mandates started to emerge: vaccine passports for Philadelphia,
booster-shot requirements at several elite universities, a renewed
indoor mask mandate in California. "The imperative is to get through
this winter surge," Newsom said. "And to do so in a way where we come
out the other side and we have a chance to reevaluate."

Schools in heavily Democratic districts�Cleveland, Ohio; Newark, New
Jersey; West Chicago, Illinois; Prince George's County,
Maryland�preemptively responded to the omicron surge after Christmas
break by once again shifting to remote-only learning. At the Brooklyn >elementary school that my first-grader is zoned for, teachers staged a >post-break sickout that precipitated a last-minute closure. "We are >demanding," they wrote in a letter to outraged parents, "the city and
our union take�actions to stop the spread."

So just a few more weeks to stop the spread. Or months. Or years.

Gook, you can't help but spreading your butt-cheeks for drinks at the
Queen Mary parking lot.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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