Pandemics

Thursday

Matt Ridley

How dangerous is the cruise ship hantavirus outbreak?

Here we go again, or maybe not. The World Health Organization is reassuring us that the public health risk from hantavirus is low, after the outbreak on a cruise ship. Hantaviruses are a classic zoonosis: caught from animals. You have to inhale dust containing infected rodent droppings or – in the case of this Andean variant, which has shown limited human-to-human transmission before – to have close and prolonged contact with somebody who has already caught the virus. That means being coughed on, not just sharing the same air in a room. Zoonotic agents are often very good at killing people – Ebola, Marburg, Nipah, Hendra, SARS and Hanta have high fatality rates – but are not so good at infecting people Trouble is, of course, WHO said the same about Covid.

hantavirus

Wednesday

Stephen L. Miller

Anthony Fauci’s conveniently foggy memory

Dr. Anthony Fauci sat for a seven-hour deposition last week as part of a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana. The suit claims that the Biden administration colluded with social media platforms to censor information surrounding the origins and circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as information that went against CDC guidelines and mandates around vaccines and efficacy masks. Fauci, the NIAID and chief medical advisor to President Biden (and others), didn’t say much. In fact he used the term “I cannot recall,” or some variation, over 190 times.

anthony fauci

Monday

Roger Kimball

End of the road for malicious lockdowns

Is a modicum of sanity about to reassert itself regarding the Wuhan Flu? Are the people finally exhausted by their panic over the Fauci-altered coronavirus? Remember those little bulletins that Mike Pence carried around, enjoining us all to to take “fifteen days to stop the spread”? I think we’re at about day 750 now. New York restaurants and many cultural emporia demand that you produce your papiers (it sounds better in German) — identification plus an image attesting to your “vaccination status” — in order to enter. Some are even requiring proof that you’ve had a “booster” jab. Pfizer likes that.

Monday

Ross Clark

The US is coming out of COVID no worse than any European country

It has become a received wisdom in recent months that the US has failed where the EU had succeeded. On June 22, for example, CNN viewers were shown a graph of COVID cases in the US, which had seemed to flatten at around 25,000 cases a day, compared with those in the EU which had fallen away from an April peak to fewer than 5,000 cases a day. ‘Look at the EU,’ viewers were told. ‘That’s where we should be.’ Roll on four months, however, and it is looking a little different. While cases in the US fell away, then returned in what is beginning to look like a bit of a third wave, Europe has been consumed in a rapidly-growing second wave.

covid

Wednesday

Jeffrey Polet

Gretchen Whitmer’s white fragility

Let’s face it: under the best of circumstances governing is a tricky and difficult task. This is particularly true in a democracy such as ours with its clashing interests, roiling ideological divisions, partisan passions, and a system of government that often places rank amateurs in charge of career civil servants. This is not a recipe for sound decision-making. Perhaps that explains why Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is mandating implicit bias training for all Michigan healthcare workers in the middle of a pandemic?Even for experienced politicians genuinely motivated by the common good, 2020 has offered up daunting challenges. The arrival of COVID-19, the teetering instability of our economy, and a ratcheting up of racial divisions would cause a seasoned professional many a sleepless night.

gretchen whitmer

Wednesday

John Lee

Could the lockdown have side-effects no one has considered?

‘Nothing makes sense in biology, except in the light of evolution,’ the splendidly named biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in 1973. It’s a good rule of thumb. Despite near-miraculous advances in medical science we remain biological beings, subject to biological laws. None is more central to our understanding of disease than evolution. Yet this theory remains poorly understood and poorly utilized in medicine. And an evolutionary perspective raises important questions about the drastic action we have been taking to confront COVID-19.Most doctors are too busy dealing with the day-to-day deluge of cases to have much time for what they may consider abstruse academic ideas.

effects