On Mon, 28 Feb 2022 19:29:44 -0800, Michael Ejercito
<MEjercit@HotMail.com> 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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>featureWelch
>(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.