Lives v. Jobs

Timothy Birdnow

E. Calvin Beisner observes:

A word from Tim:

But it's all about saving lives, right?

When have we ever done anything remotely like this? We didn't do it in the Spanish flu outbreak. We didn't do it during the H2N2 pandemic of 1957, nor the H3N2 pandemic of 1968. I might add the ideas of "shelter in place" and "social distancing" came from a science project from a 14 year old girl back in 2006 . It was widely rejected as a credible response for the very reasons most critics have cited. But the idea was rehabilitated during the Obama years and made part of the movie Contagion. So now we are basically employing a novel idea devised by a teenager to shut down the entire world economy. And to what end? Has this saved any lives? It was never intended to; it was to "flatten the curve" meaning give the medical community some breathing room. It should be pointed out that the most badly infected areas are the ones that had imposed the strictest lockdowns. Coincidence? Or are the things we are doing actually making it worse? That argument can be made. "Hard cases make bad law". So too do hard medical cases make bad public health policy.

It should be furthermore pointed out that most of the deaths from this cluster around people in enclosed spaces - nursing homes in particular, and hits primarily people with pre-existing conditions or advanced age. These people could have been quarantined and the rest of us allowed to live our lives. In that way we would have developed herd immunity sooner. Sweden has done it that way and has no worse infection rates than does any other European nation. And it will probably end in Sweden far sooner, as all we have done here is stretch out the time needed to develop herd immunity. \

Nobody was ever going to "die in the streets". If they were, why haven't we seen huge numbers of deaths of homeless? California and other places with high homeless rates have never rounded up such people, and yet we haven't had any reports of unusual numbers of dead in homeless camps.

You don't abrogate the Constitution (which has been done illegally in any number of instances, such as banning church services) just because you deem something an emergency. There is ALWAYS something you can find to declare a state of emergency. And you don't destroy the world economy on a shaky computer model.

Question; in 2018 1.5 million people died of Tuberculosis. Why are we acting differently now? The computer model put out by Neil Ferguson at the Imperial College was the basis for the panic - and has since been proven wildly wrong. Why are we continuing to act as though this is a planet wide disaster? It IS a planet wide disaster, because we have made it so.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:53 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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