90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, February 28, 2022

Visage à trois #83

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

La petite mort bonus video:

The one country that mostly rejected lockdowns.

What if two years ago, when COVID-19 first hit these shores, our politicians hadn't panicked?

What if the government did what it has done every time we were confronted with a deadly virus, such as the Spanish flu or polio? Instead of locking down our schools, churches and businesses, the government could have simply informed citizens of the risks of getting sick and urged people to be extra careful about hygiene, stay out of crowded places and protect the vulnerable.

It turns out there was one country that mostly rejected lockdowns and let life go on as normal as possible under dire circumstances. That country was Sweden.

There were some restrictions and temporary lockdowns, but they were minimal.

The hero of this story is Anders Tegnell, Sweden's chief epidemiologist. He was Sweden's Anthony Fauci, but unlike the now-widely discredited Fauci, Tegnell eschewed lockdowns. The international media pilloried him for not following "the science." At first, it seemed the Swedish live-and-let-live strategy was a miserable failure. Death rates soared higher than in other European nations.

But to their credit, the Swedes ignored the "mad modelers" such as Britain's Imperial College team, which predicted multiple times that the number of deaths around the world would be more than actually occurred.

Sweden made some mistakes at the beginning. Like many states in the United States, the Swedes failed to protect elderly nursing home residents adequately, which was a significant reason that deaths in Sweden were higher than in neighboring Norway or Denmark. But Tegnell argued that the collateral damage of lockdowns would outweigh what good they do on a societywide basis. He was proven right.

Two years later, Sweden's COVID-19 death rate is 1,614 per million people — much lower than Britain (2,335) or the U.S. (2,836), which both had much more stringent lockdowns.

Sweden appears to have achieved herd immunity much more swiftly and thoroughly than other nations. Deaths were higher at the start of the pandemic but fell much lower than other lockdown nations in succeeding months.

What is clear today is that the Swedes saved their economy. This year, it's projected to be 5% larger than before the pandemic, compared to a 2% gain for Germany and a 1% gain for Britain. Moreover, the extra debt Sweden has had to take on is a fraction of that of lockdown countries. So it will not have to spend decades paying for the costs of lockdowns.

Swedish schools stayed open with no face masks. Test scores are up, and there is no talk in Sweden about "lost" years of education.

What is sadly ironic about the Sweden story is this should have been the...

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #263

How Biden’s Fed Nominee Could Transform Central Banking To Fit the Left’s Climate Agenda

Joe Biden’s nominee for the nation’s top banking regulator could dramatically change the Federal Reserve’s responsibilities to include harshly punishing any financial institution or company that does business with fossil fuel companies.

Sarah Bloom Raskin, the wife of outspoken climate change hawk Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.), is up for the role of vice chair for supervision at the Fed, a position created in the aftermath of the Great Recession as part of the Dodd-Frank Act. Raskin’s past work indicates she believes fighting climate change should be in the purview of the Fed. Her confirmation would potentially provide opportunities for the Fed to circumvent Congress and force financial institutions to implement sweeping climate change-related reforms.

For years, the left has increasingly focused on central banks as a tool to implement policies they believe will avert doomsday scenarios brought on by climate change. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), for example, voted against Jerome Powell’s renomination to lead the central bank after labeling him "dangerous" and criticizing his unwillingness to put more regulations on banks that do business with polluters.

Raskin expressed support for using the financial regulation agency as a tool to fight climate change in a 2020 report she co-authored for the environmentalist think tank Ceres. The report, titled "Addressing Climate as a Systemic Risk: A call to action for U.S. financial regulators," provides more than "50 recommendations for key financial regulators to adopt."

"If we want to create a sustainable climate, we need to transition to a net-zero carbon economy. This transition is not going to happen without guidance," Raskin wrote in the report’s forward. "Financial markets, themselves, are not going to be the first responders to keep us from the threats posed by a climate emergency."

Some Political Analysts interpreted Raskin's nomination as a way to appease members of the Democratic Party's far-left after Biden's decision to renominate Powell. Warren, for example, has called combating climate change an "obligation of the Fed."

"Raskin troubles me the most of all [Biden’s] picks," said Allison Schrager, an economist and expert on monetary policy. "It’s a big leap to go from financial stability to regulating climate change."

Policies recommended in the Ceres report authored by Raskin include rewarding financial institutions that divest from fossil fuels, and punishing companies deemed to be heavy polluters. Members of the European Central Bank, for example, have called for "reassessing the benchmark allocation of our private asset purchase programmes."

That could mean, according to economist John Cochrane, simply telling "banks to stop lending to the evil fossil fuel companies, and print money and hand it out to worthy green projects." The idea has gained currency among left-wing green energy advocates in the United States, such as proponents of the "Green New Deal."

The Ceres report calls for the Fed to account for "climate exposure" when engaging in asset purchases and criticizes the central bank’s decision to provide loans to oil companies as part of its Main Street Lending Program. In the future, the report argues, emergency support for companies "should be underpinned by conditions relating to improved...

The CDC has admitted it is withholding large portions of COVID-19 data -- including on vaccine boosters -- from the public because it fears the information could be misinterpreted.

People say the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a messaging problem. But the CDC’s problem is not messaging — it’s issuing flawed guidance while covering up the data.

Case in point: pushing boosters for young people.

After the Food and Drug Administration inexplicably bypassed its expert advisory committee to authorize boosters for all young people, the CDC director overruled her own experts’ downvote of the boosters-for-all proposal. That’s the magic of a call from the White House. Two top FDA officials, including the agency’s vaccine-center head, quit over White House pressure to authorize boosters for the young.

But after the FDA and CDC rammed through the recommendation, they made sure the public wouldn’t see the real-world data. Despite repeated pleas to release all its data, the CDC only posted stats on boosters in people over age 50.

What have they been hiding? As a proxy, let’s take a look at what the CDC just published on people 50 to 65: For the fully vaccinated, the booster reduces the risk of COVID death from four per million to one per million. Who are those three helped by a booster? They’re not healthy people. One study of breakthrough hospitalizations found 75% had at least four comorbidities.

So the three people age 50 to 65 per million saved by a booster are almost certainly immunosuppressed individuals, a subgroup for whom boosters have long been recommended. Of course, the CDC doesn’t disclose what medical conditions those few who died had — it only has 21,000 employees to collect that information.

The CDC said the reason for the slow release of data is because there is always a chance it is not completely accurate.REUTERS

We once again have to look overseas for reliable data. An Israeli population study in the New England Journal of Medicine compared boosted vs. nonboosted people with the primary vaccine series. The risk of COVID death among nonboosted people under age 30 was zero — the same as it was among boosted.

A note for college administrators enforcing booster mandates: You can’t reduce a mortality risk of zero any lower with a booster.

The CDC claims it didn’t release booster data because it feared the information would be misinterpreted. No, it’s because the stats don’t support its agenda. Yet public-health officials continue to beclown themselves by demanding all Americans over age 12 get boosted.

A study found that boosters for young people did not do much to prevent against COVID-19.Christopher Sadowski
On the bandwagon

Most of the media have fallen for it. Throughout the pandemic, The New York Times and other outlets have only sourced doctors on the establishment groupthink bandwagon, dangled fear to young people and blindly amplified every edict government doctors fed without asking questions, just as the press did with weapons of...