Source: Mises Institute.

“If one were to go only on what one reads or sees in the media, one would think it’s the spring of 2020 all over again. The headlines are filled with stories of overcrowded hospitals, overwhelmed medical personnel, and predictions of people dying in parking lots waiting for medical care. The news articles generally quote a staffer of some kind at various hospitals and then leave it at that.

“It’s difficult to know what to make of these stories.”

Source: Local 10 News in South Florida.

This story makes perfect sense. Assuming there is evidence that recent variants of the Covid virus (Delta, Delta Plus, Lambda) are evading acquired immunity, pushing therapeutics is the right public-health response.

I’m pretty sure most Americans thought the Covid vaccines would eradicate the virus. Introducing non-vaccine pharmaceuticals to combat Covid might seem like a signal of vaccine failure, but I think it should have been part of public-health policy from the beginning.

Source: ZeroHedge.

Vaccines get all the attention, but therapeutics are certain to become a larger part of the public-health policy response to Covid-19. The reason is simple. Covid-19 cannot be eradicated by vaccination alone the way polio, smallpox and measles can be. It is therefore inevitable that therapeutics will grow in importance.

Source: NASA.

This item surprised me when I came across it.

You sometimes hear people say that government R&D spending is beneficial for the economy because of the innovative goods that derive from it. You should also wonder, of course, about the innovative goods private R&D spending might have produced had it not been diverted into taxation.

Source: Mises Institute.

I have often made the point that supply and demand do not drive an economy. They are not like hydraulic forces that cause an engine to spin.

Continue reading “Savings Are the Foundation of Economic Growth” →

Source: WGME (CBS News).

New meaning for the proverb, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

Source: Verywell.

I never heard the term sterilizing immunity until just the other day, but the concept was deeply embedded in my own assumptions. I assumed that all immunity is “sterilizing,” meaning that disease and infection are both prevented. It turns out that immunity can also be “non-sterilizing,” meaning that while disease is prevented infection is not.

I find the distinction useful for making sense of media reports on Covid-19 vaccines. For example, when a journalist talks about the “efficacy” of a vaccine you can usually interpret that as referring to its sterilizing effect. In fact, effective immunity — also called practical immunity — is synonymous with non-sterilizing immunity.

The Covid-19 vaccines confer non-sterilizing immunity. That’s much simpler to understand than the idea that no vaccine is perfect.

Public health officials around the world are acknowledging that variants of SARS-COV-2 are infecting fully vaccinated populations. They say not to worry.

Continue reading “Will Covid Vaccines Protect the Virus?” →

I have suspected from the very beginning of the pandemic that SARS-COV-2 is a biological weapon. Can’t prove it, don’t know it, and won’t say it, but the suspicion stays with me.

Continue reading “Random Thoughts on Covid-19” →

Source: USA Today.

I take this story to be a sign that the risk of Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) of SARS-COV-2 infection is now officially recognized.

ADE is a phenomenon in which vaccinated people become more prone to harmful effects of new virus variants such that they are more likely to be harmed than unvaccinated people. ADE was not found to occur in the clinical trials for the current Covid vaccines prior to their public rollout, but the potential was well established.

If public health officials have solid evidence of ADE, how would they message it? Surely not by telling the vaccinated they face new Covid dangers they did not expect.