If the story Brian Amaral wanted to frame with his apocalyptic Boston Globe article about COVID in Kent Hospital in Warwick is that hospital employees are struggling because the state has mismanaged their industry and because it’s disappointing to watch unvaccinated patients die with COVID, he overshot by a long way. The message from his piece is clearly that unvaccinated people are causing the system to collapse, and Rhode Island hospitals might not survive their reluctance to submit.
Whatever the wisdom of such folks’ decisions, the reality is that hospitals are desperate for masking and vaccination, because they need lighter-than-usual traffic to make things work. Consider this sentence tucked into the article way down past talk of the apocalypse, comparison with refugee camps, warnings that young people are dying now, and a note that the morgue was full:
Even though COVID hospitalizations in Rhode Island are roughly half their peak from last year thanks to widely available vaccines, the hospitals are not able to handle what might have previously been just an ordinary pre-pandemic day of flus and ankle sprains.
According to state data, 171 people died while hospitalized and testing positive during the first 22 days of December 2020, with a daily average of 480 patients in the hospital. This year, it was 70 cumulative deaths and 260 daily average hospitalization.
Whatever’s causing the hospital collapse, it’s not a lack of vaccination. Maybe journalists should look into it.
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Headlines are proclaiming the difficulty of finding at-home rapid COVID tests. Some folks might not get what the big deal is, considering that, in the government’s eyes, rapid tests don’t count for anything.
My personal research prior to Thanksgiving led me to conclude that rapid tests probably won’t catch every trace of the disease, as do the overly sensitive tests that keep mounting up “cases” to justify continued government control. Where they are accurate, however, is in telling whether symptoms that you have are COVID or not. Testing people with no symptoms is probably a waste of tests.
Yet, that’s what public health authorities have been insisting throughout this pandemic: test everyone, all the time! That may generate lots of fun data, but it’s damaging to our society even as it’s of minimal value to public health.
These blanket rules have been at the core of growing skepticism about experts. We know that reasonable diagnosis is a function of several factors’ producing a “most likely” conclusion. We are capable of understanding that we should consider both symptoms and test results when figuring out how to go about our days and manage risk. But public health authorities don’t trust us to make such decisions, so increasing numbers of us don’t trust public health authorities.
One of the ways in which the testing message is damaging to society is by making it impossible for people who could really use rapid tests to find them. Thousands of people are out there buying up tests to swab house guests who aren’t likely to test positive even if a lab-based PCR test would find the virus (which is fine because they’re probably not contagious, anyway). We’re trying to squeeze every percentage of risk out of the equations of our lives, when really the risk is already tolerable for anybody who is vaccinated, recovered, or young.
As for the panic, that’s a function of the headlines. The same exact thing happened before Thanksgiving. I drove around to several pharmacies whose websites said the tests were in stock only to find that they weren’t. (I found them at a store that had so many I wondered if there was a distribution error on the chain’s part.) The scarcity just felt kind of normal, like an “oh well, guess I should have gone out sooner” part of life. If I hadn’t found some tests, I’d have taken additional precautions. This is how human beings have been living for thousands of years — making decisions and managing risk. Somehow, we haven’t gone extinct despite lacking access to 24-hour headlines.
Featured image by Guido Hofmann on Unsplash.
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The threads are multiple and not worth finding and consolidating, but there’s been some social media chatter hereabouts around a dustup between progressive podcaster Bill Bartholomew and freelance COVID commentator Andrew Bostom.
Bartholomew was guest-hosting for WPRO, and Bostom called in to argue about COVID-related mandates and then posted audio bragging of having “eviscerated” the host (or some similar verb). On Twitter, their mutual spat blossomed, and multiple media and activist figures took note and chimed in debating matters of credibility and public dialogue — not, notably, matters of mandates.
This may be one of the few topics of local interest that finds me on the same side as Bartholomew. Bostom is toxic to local debate. Indeed, he blocked me back in April or May as I tried to point out an error in his interpretation of a vaccine-related study, calling me too stupid to assess his work as he closed the door. Having argued the conservative point of view in Rhode Island for about 20 years, now, I’m plenty used to being insulted, blocked, and worse, so I harbor no personal animosity toward the guy. But he’s dangerous to the point of view that I think is the correct one on COVID, and we’re on the same side.
If we’re going to present the public with a point of view that all of the supposed authorities in government, public health, and the media are pushing, the truth we offer has to be careful and reliable. We have to open a path that gets people to think, and few things close that path more quickly than when a self-identifying expert and medical researcher runs around calling people names and blocking them on social media when they disagree.
People who just want to see their perceived enemies punched in the rhetorical nose may cheer, but everybody else will question the credibility of the attacker. And if we don’t persuade people — get them to listen and change the conversation — nothing will change. Sure, we’ll get the satisfaction of remaining the rebel truthsayers, but that thrill wears off quickly when the cost of our community ignoring the truth is so high.
I just said that few things close the path to persuasion more quickly than the pugilistic personality of a supposed expert, but one of those things is easily demonstrated sloppiness in the expert’s work, which has plagued Bostom the whole way. Take, for example, his latest blog post proclaiming the greater benefit of naturally acquired immunity over vaccination, headlined: “[Updated] Over half (52.7%; 29/55) of Rhode Island’s November, 2021 COVID-19 deaths were among the fully vaccinated; Naturally acquired immunity reduced that risk by 20-fold (per 100,000).”
He doesn’t explain in the post, but the reason he labeled it “updated” is that he messed up some math the first time around. Calculating the rates of hospitalizations among vaccinated and unvaccinated people, he reversed the denominators, which made the hospitalization rate twice as high for vaccinated people and half as high for unvaccinated people. He apparently caught the error before the end of the day, but it’s not helpful to make those sorts of errors, especially when the superficial sloppiness joins with deeper sloppiness.
I’ve covered this ground before, so I won’t rehash it at length, but Bostom’s major claims comparing natural immunity with vaccine immunity are not careful or reliable. Yes, his underlying point about natural immunity being stronger is correct, but you’re not going to convince skeptical people when your numbers are obviously multiples away from the truth.
Quickly, there are two major problems with his calculations.
- To calculate the total population of people who’ve had COVID (the denominator in his “prior infection” rate), Bostom uses an academic source that is more than three times higher than the state’s data. As I’ve explained in the past, this is fine (maybe preferable), but his data for people who have been infected again comes from the state. To use this denominator, he’d have to multiply the numerator by more than three, because he’s assuming the state missed a bunch of cases.
- For his comparison of previously infected people with vaccinated people, he simply lumps all of the former together, whether they’ve been vaccinated or not. I’ve pointed out before that this makes the numbers kind of meaningless. In a state where a large majority of people have been vaccinated, especially older folks who are vulnerable, the distinctions blur.
Again, Bostom is correct to be incensed at the cone of silence authorities and the media have enforced around consideration of natural immunity as a real thing, but his sloppiness and attitude make it less likely they’ll lift it. The first step for those of us who want what he wants is to get him to stop or at least to distance our credibility from his.
Featured image by Luis Morera on Unsplash.
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Reading political tea leaves from interviews is an iffy game, but this feels like a bit of a tone change from Democrat Senate President Dominick Ruggerio:
On the Rhode Island Report podcast, state Senate President Dominick J. Ruggerio said he opposes raising the income tax rate for the richest Rhode Islanders, saying he fears they would move elsewhere. …
“I think we need a fairer tax code,” Ruggerio said. “However, I’m not supportive of raising taxes at this point. I think that some of the people in the higher salaries, I don’t want to lose them in this state. That has happened before in the past.”
Perhaps he’s sensing the danger the radicals pose and a high mark for progressive appeal. Or maybe he’s just signaling that they should cool it a bit going into an election year.
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As elite colleges begin the process of peer pressure among institutions to implement mandates for COVID-vaccine booster shots, an op-ed by Johns Hopkins medical professor Dr. Marty Makary is a must-read:
The U.S. government is pushing Covid-19 vaccine boosters for 16- and 17-year-olds without supporting clinical data. A large Israeli population study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this month, found that the risk of Covid death in people under 30 with two vaccine shots was zero.
Booster mandates for healthy young people, which some colleges are imposing, will cause medical harm for the sake of transient reductions in mild and asymptomatic infections. In a study of 438,511 males 16 to 24, 56 developed myocarditis after their second Pfizer dose (or 1 in 7,830, at least seven times the usual rate). True, most cases were mild, but in the broader group of 136 people (including older and female patients) who developed myocarditis after the vaccine, seven had a “complicated course,” and one 22-year-old died. Moderna’s vaccine carries an even higher rate of heart complications, which is why some European countries have restricted it for people under 30. But in the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indiscriminately push for boosters for all young people.
Makary goes on to report that both the FDA and CDC are ignoring the recommendations of their own advisory boards, with some of their experts quitting over the controversy. In the world of politicized public health, dominated by cowardly constituencies, vaccines are ushered right through the process while treatments that would be administered post-infection, not preventatively, are held back.
Forcing more measures for young adults and teens is simply not justified by their experience with COVID. This has been true of the variants we’ve seen thus far, and Omicron is proving to be little more than a cold, especially for the young. Generating panic is therefore doubly unjustified.
We’re truly getting to the point that people of good sense, who are immune to the moral panic that so easily grips secular elites no longer capable of processing the reality of risk, will have to put their feet down. The absurdity of having to withdraw from college and suing for reimbursement is approaching, although there is still time for the wave to recede before it overcomes anybody outside of the most-elite and -irrational.
Featured image by the CDC on Unsplash.
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This is an interesting report from Joseph Curl, for the Daily Wire:
Scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research think they have created a new vaccine that is effective against all COVID and SARS variants, according to a new report.
“Within weeks, scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research expect to announce that they have developed a vaccine that is effective against COVID-19 and all its variants, even Omicron, as well as from previous SARS-origin viruses that have killed millions of people worldwide,” Defense One first reported.
It isn’t inconceivable that we could come to the end of virus’s reign in human society. That said, we should be cautious about anything with such huge implications. We don’t know what we don’t know. The operation of viruses in our world might be having positive biological and social effects that we need to supplement, and more generally, there’s an intrinsic benefit to making your body strong independently of artificial intervention.
If socialism destroys our society’s ability to keep producing the miracle drugs, for example, we’ll very much want our immune systems to be well developed, not atrophied.
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In case anybody is still making the claim that there isn’t any critical race theory (CRT) in American public schools, John Murawski has an extensive article on RealClearInvestigations presenting evidence that there is:
These denials, which have been amplified by many news organizations, are at odds with overwhelming evidence – documented by class lessons, school curricula, focus groups, teacher surveys and public statements by educators – that CRT is not only taught in class, but is also heavily promoted by the K-12 education establishment.
Some high schools are already teaching lessons and units on CRT, where students write papers demonstrating their facility with applying the theory, while other schools are introducing CRT concepts, such as systemic racism, white privilege, microaggressions, implicit bias and intersectionality.
Public and private schools are also training teachers, staff, administrators – and even parents – on the elements of critical race theory, which school administrators see as an indispensable tool for dismantling what activists describe as America’s racial caste system.
I think we’ve reached the point in the public debate that the mainstream media will deliberately stop giving the issue any air, hoping the flame will go out.
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I used to think that the people who wrote news articles strove to understand the subject matter in order to provide readers with a fair understanding of the content, with due skepticism about the claims of the interested parties who provided it (politicians, activists, businesspeople, etc.). Boy, was that naive.
Anybody with any familiarity with Rhode Island politics knows that Democrat State Senator Sam Bell is a far-left activist who will say nearly anything to advance his cause. (My favorite is still the time in a public debate he counted both legislation changing the income tax structure and legislation that undid some of that change as “tax cuts for the rich.”)
And yet, Antonia Noori Farzan and her editors at the Providence Journal let him get away with this headline about a report Bell just released with his undergraduate intern, Phoebe Dragseth: “Rhode Island failed to use more than $1 billion for affordable housing, state senator says.” First paragraph:
Rhode Island has failed to take advantage of more than $1.3 billion in federal funding that could have been used to construct affordable housing, according to a new report released by state Sen. Samuel Bell, D-Providence.
We should acknowledge that the 19-page report is an impressive achievement for a college sophomore (assuming it was largely her work). Of course, with a nod to Bell’s fellow progressives, we should recognize the amount of privilege supporting the white Ivy League child of Ivy League and professorial parents.
Even so, when it comes to public policy questions concerning billions of taxpayer dollars, readers don’t (or shouldn’t) expect the state’s major daily newspaper simply to provide PR summaries of the work of undergrads, even if it is handed over under the name of radical activist politicians. Just an ounce of skepticism and curiosity about the claims would change the impression of the story dramatically.
For example, a key reason developers aren’t utilizing the full opportunity of the federal subsidy is that the restrictions don’t make it profitable to do so. In response, Bell and Dragseth conclude that the state should be subsidizing the projects even more, to make them profitable for developers. One’s heart warms to see Bell making a huge ideological concession in acknowledging that people need to make money in order for professional business activities to be worth their while. Nonetheless, this concession detracts from, or even eliminates, his entire claim about “wasted” funds.
Bell and Dragseth estimate that the state would have to subsidize developers with another $89 to $186 million per year. In order to have claimed the seven years of “wasted” federal credits totaling to $1.3 (actually $1.4) billion, Rhode Island taxpayers would have had to pay an additional subsidy of $623 million to $1.3 billion.
This is like complaining that your parents forced you to waste a coupon to your favorite store because they wouldn’t give you the value of the coupon in upfront cash. Sure, you might have to “waste” a 38%-off coupon for a $1,000 gadget if you don’t have the other $620, but don’t blame mom and dad for their unwillingness to give you $380 simply for the sake of capturing the value of the coupon.
In public policy, the key is that this money has to come from somewhere else, which Bell and Dragseth acknowledge when they suggest shifting funds from other programs for their purpose. However, far from highlighting this important detail for her readers, Noori Farzan studiously avoids it in her article, leaving the impression that spending billions of dollars can be essentially cost free.
To the contrary. Implemented as recommended, the Bell-Dragseth program would do all of the following:
- Put state taxpayers in more debt, while gambling on projects that may never appear
- Reduce funding for other programs, like student loans
- Reduce the level of affordable housing for families whose income is slightly higher, although still relatively low
- Create incentive for Rhode Island institutions to draw the most-poor families into the state
- Reduce the value of new properties in the unsubsidized market
- Further erode Rhode Islanders’ right to develop their communities to suit their own interests and preferences
We can go into detail on how each of these would be predictable outcomes of an effort to fully capture a poorly designed federal subsidy, but as a starting point, it would be nice if professional journalists would offer the service of reporting activists’ studies as if the world is more real than a classroom discussion.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island and Brown University now have several years of data in the compilation of their Rhode Island Life Index, which is basically a survey of how Rhode Islanders perceive various aspects of the Ocean State experience. Subindexes contributing to an overall score of 63 (out of 100) include:
- Quality of Community: 57
- Community Life: 71
- Children (i.e., how residents “rate programs and services for children”): 74
- Older Adults (i.e., how residents “rate the availability of services in their community for older adults”): 67
- Access to Nutritious Food: 73
- Affordable Housing: 40
- Cost of Living: 31
- Job Opportunities: 57
- Healthcare Access: 73
- Racial Equity: 74
- Food Security: 88
- Economic Situation: 64
- Access to Technology: 88
These categories present an interesting lens through which to view statewide politics. If we see government as a collective institution by which we address the biggest challenges of our communities, then one would expect politicians to be stepping forward promising to address areas with low scores. The alignment, however, is mixed at best.
Progressives don’t really want to talk about the lowest-rated category, Cost of Living, because it’s bound up with so many of their economic and environmental policy solutions. On the other hand, we hear a lot about addressing Racial Equity, even though Rhode Islanders don’t seem to be too concerned about it.
This intrinsic bias toward an ideological framing can be seen in the fact that the survey creators thought it most relevant to break the results down by race (“Latinx,” black, and white) and “Core City” versus “Non-Core.”
Of course, I’m falling into the trap of these sorts of studies, which is to draw one into thinking government ought to be actively looking for discomfiting problems to solve. Readers rarely click away from such surveys thinking about how we as individuals or a community distinct from its government can address complaints. It’s almost not a question what we can do, perhaps because part of what we can do is to restructure the way we do government. One suspects blank stares of incomprehension would meet any suggestion that government is the cause of many of our problems.
This point comes home with a wallop in what is not said in Barbara Morse’s WJAR article about the study. Consider:
“Certainly kids have been among the group hardest hit by the pandemic,” said Michele Lederberg, executive vice president for Blue Cross & Blue Shield of RI.
Our government officials must have done something wrong in the handling of the pandemic in order for a disease that doesn’t affect children much to claim them as an acute group of victims. Government did that — Gina Raimondo, Dan McKee, the General Assembly, town and city councils, school committees, and so on.
Only in a system that directs attention in the wrong direction (a misdirection, some would say) would it be possible for Morse’s employer to headline an article by her fellow journalist Ashley Cullinane, “Should school districts go remote after the holidays?”
No. Next question. Somewhat surprisingly, the RI Life Index finds that residents are not very down on services for children. Government officials should stop working to mess that up.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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The current occupant of the White House may have dialed our nation’s capacity to generate sources of energy, but at least our system for handling its shipment and export is moving forward:
The United States is on course to have the world’s biggest exporting capacity of liquified natural gas (LNG) by 2022, surpassing Qatar and Australia, owing to increased domestic production and a soaring demand from international markets, especially China.
Global demand for LNG has grown steadily, hitting annual record highs since 2015. European economies and emerging Asian markets depend on LNG for power production and heating requirements. This demand has been met by American companies who have been exporting LNG since 2016.
I’ve been listening to the Jordan Peterson podcast, recently, on which he has compelling conversations with interesting people. Whenever the idea of human thriving comes up, recently, Peterson puts forward the conclusion that the way to help humanity and the environment, in the long run, is to make the energy cheaper and more-widely available. Period.
It’s mind-blowing that a powerful political faction is so bent on moving in the other direction. It’s as if they want people to suffer.
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