"The mortality rates of covid for younger populations do not justify emergency governance measures; the morbidity rates for middle-aged populations do."
#&^$^*#!
Hay Curtis, here's what you meant to write "In as much as my early writings may have possibly in some small way influenced other San Francisco nerds to advocate new super cool techbro lockdowns, setting off a demented preference cascade that ends with little kids walking around with muzzles, I'm sorry"
See that wasn't hard.
Ironically, one of the biggest problem with bad governance systems is that they don't allow people to admit they made a mistake and just wrap it up before they do any more damage.
Just a lowly RN (who got fired last weekfor not getting vaccinated) weighing in here; you are staggeringly wrong about these scandalously dangerous vaccines. The carnage I witnessed in patient charts terrified me daily and led to my decision not to take the vax when my turn came. Not only that, I can tell you that the climate of absolute denial and refusal to connect the damage/symptoms to the vaccines has the character of a virtual trance-state that has gripped the medical community.
I practically had to force one of my doctors to file a VAERS report on his patient whose catastrophic physical deterioration following vaccination was too blatant for even his near-total trance-state to ignore. This was the only VAERS report I am aware of from out of literally dozens of severe, crippling adverse events I was witness to. The VAERS data are massively underreported. Who knows by what precise factor. All attempts to escalate concerns to management were met with the same trance-like stare and the words “the vaccines are safe” 🤦🏻♀️
Also can personally attest to the absolutely astonishing lockstep conformity among doctors in denying early treatments and refusing to even consider the many highly effective treatment protocols developed by their more courageous and innovative colleagues around the world. Literally refusing to even try anything that hadn’t been given a bureaucratic stamp of approval when the bureaucrats withholding the stamps are heavily funded by the guys making the big bucks from the vax. It’s just a sickening display of institutional corruption and cowardice all around. With treatment, covid plummets in significance to a serious misfortune that need not have perverted the fundamental values and deformed the lives of the citizens of any serious society. Sad!
Your information on Singapore is wildly incorrect. The graph of their case history wouldn't look like the one you provided - it is the complete reverse. Singapore has in fact been the total opposite and seen a significant rise recently in their cases despite vaccinating 95% of the adult population and enforcing some of the strictest measures in the world. Music banned for 20 months! The Ministry Task Force has no road map and is instead a risk averse bunch of cowards who can't do what is needed to keep their dream of a business friendly city state alive because they panic and u-turn every time one hypochondriac 80 year old Hokkien granny has a runny nose. They've flip-flopped more times than the roti pratas sold in their hawker centres. That is not good governance and you're naive at best if you think the rest of the world should follow these same policies for a virus that hospitalises less than 1% of those infected.
I am, obviously, second-to-none in my distaste for our idiotic ruling class and their ineffectiveness at doing, well, anything positive. However, I usually come to Grey Mirror to be ahead of the curve, yet I find you are behind the curve on the virus and the vaccines. I refer you to other popular substack authors to find the uncensored data analysis required to understand that: 1) the vaccines are of limited, marginal effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 infection and death, yet are complete losers when measured in quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) lost, as they kill far more young people than they save aged people. 2) I would not stake my life on the numbers coming out of China. Like most things, the Chinese are much more effective at collecting data than the US is, but reporting the true numbers are not in their interest, so they don't. And, finally, 3) Virus is gonna virus. That's not to say quarantine of incoming travelers is not sometimes justified if done properly, but it's almost impossible in an authoritarian country like China, much less in a country with a culture of sticking-it-to-the-man like the US. One must not ignore the fact that the form of government follows the culture. We have a performative, fake government because we are ruled by Hollywood, the media, and academia, i.e., performative, fake institutions propped up by a culture that values performance and fakery over sincerity and truth. (I refer you to Instagram and Snapchat for proof of this assertion). But underlying all this plasticness (plasticity?) is the original American spirit of "Fuck you! I'm doing what I want!" Thus we are now in a situation where we get the worst of both cultural models.
If there was ever an outbreak of airborne AIDs, people would instinctively protect themselves. People would buy and wear the most effective N99 masks everywhere. People would naturally stay away from crowds and social distance more than 12 feet. Everyone would voluntarily install the most invasive contact tracing spyware on their phone. They would shoot themselves up with the most untested experimental gene therapies. No government action would be required. Any measures taken would be uncontroversial.
The problem with COVID is no one actually believes it's airborne AIDs. The government officials mandating masks are frequently seen not wearing them. The revealed preference is that most people aren't afraid. EVEN WITH 24/7 regime propaganda declaring it airborne AIDs. Without the propaganda we wouldn't even notice it.
Yeah, there is a utilitarian argument to be made. Wiping out the flu could increase life expectancy enough to justify the costs. Both sides of that equation are very uncertain. Would anyone have given this much thought before 2020?
Now caring about COVID is a loyalty signal to the regime. Lots of people are literally sacrificing their careers, their social lives, their basic freedoms to take a stand against this. Hence all the pissed off comments.
Which do you prefer now: Curtis Yglesias or Mencius Weyl? $10 a month is awful high for a blue pill subscription when folks can get the generic version free on CNN. If your next substack post is Anna Karenina it would still not counter balance this partial birth abortion of a take.
"Science also did such a great job with its monopoly of the pursuit of knowledge that the inventor of MRNA was hounded out of her career (and now works for Capitalism). And Science’s headlock on the product cycle is strong enough that we only have very leaky, slightly dangerous first-generation vaccines. (Which I still recommend taking.)"
OK then.
Early on during the pandemic of a virus that hospitalizes less than 1% of infected people, Curtis tied his flag to the mast of Pharma, and apparently he still can't admit the mistake. Keep in mind, this is the same Pharma that pays 45% of the FDA's budget, the same Pharma who bought 9 of the last 10 FDA commissioners (after they stepped down from their "Regulatory" post), the same Pharma who put the FDA commissioner on the board of Pfizer 6 months after he "oversaw" the emergency approval process for Pfizer's "vaccine" that now apparently needs to be taken every 3 months, per recent statements from the UK Health Minister.
The actual inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, Dr. Robert Malone, has a more nuanced view that perhaps these "vaccines" are worth it for high risk populations (elderly, morbidly obese, etc) from a risk-benefit analysis.
For everyone else, not only are they likely not worth it, they are in fact applying an explosive evolutionary pressure on a virus that has a high capacity for rapid mutation.
The spike protein induced by the "vaccines" is undoubtedly an endothelial toxin. As far as I can tell, this fact was unknown to the vaccine developers as there were no studies prior to December 2020 (well, there was one from the late 2000's that did show increased inflammatory markers from coronavirus spike, but it wasn't an especially dramatic finding, unlike the more recent research on spike protein.)
The duration of efficacy of the vaccine induced antibodies against the delta variant appears to be, perhaps, 4-5 months. The first month, "vaccinees" actually have a higher risk of covid infection, then they receive a modest degree of protection which falls off rapidly to around 16% by the 6th month, per Israeli data. This phenomena of *increased* susceptibility to Covid infection during the first month after "vaccination" was also found in Israeli booster data.
It's mighty convenient that all covid infections during this enhanced susceptibility window get classed as "nonvaccinated" infections (first 21 days after first dose).
Gee.
And those efficacy numbers given above are predominantly for the Delta variant. Omicron (and the next variant, and the next, etc) is almost certainly more vaccine resistant. However, that hasn't stopped our "Public Health Experts" from telling everyone to get the same old "booster", which is like telling everyone to get the flu vaccine from 3 years ago and expecting it to have efficacy today.
Additionally, it isn't even clear that an updated mRNA vaccine is going to have substantially better efficacy against Omicron and future variants, due to the phenomenon of Original Antigenic Sin, whereby initial imprinting on the immune system tends to channel future immune responses down those initial pathways. BTW, does anyone even remember that when Delta was the big scare way way back last summer (who can remember that long ago, sheesh), Pharma said they were immediately working on developing an updated vaccine for the Delta variant? Gee, I wonder what happened in those trials.
As far as the claim that "the vaccines reduce severe disease and death", interestingly enough Pfizer's own trial data that was presented to the FDA found *higher* all cause mortality in the vaccine group over placebo.
Statistician Matthew Crawford's analysis of UK all cause mortality data has found that it is, also, *higher* in the vaccinated population relative to the unvaccinated.
Some of us are even old enough to remember Merck's drug Vioxx, which has been estimated to have killed 40-50,000 people, for which Merck withheld data which indicated a 200-400% increased mortality rate in the drug group. I believe they settled for $900 million, way back in the 2000's, but who can remember so long ago.
"subjects of China live today with far fewer covid restrictions than citizens of the reddest American red state"
What is this blatant nonsense. Visit the hill country of Texas and the 1984 inspired coastal cities of China and tell me this again with a straight face.
I like your stuff bro but sometimes you come off as the Walter Duranty of the CCP.
I am now quite confused as to who your audience is supposed to be.
I thought these essays supposed to be part of a "mirror for princes": a sort of guidebook on how to use power wisely. In this latest, we see some further explication of what covid policy might be under your rule. If your goal is merely to mog the Western public health bureaucracy by comparing them to governments you view as competent -- the CCP and your own hypothetical -- that's all well and good, but you seem to accept on faith that the Chinese actually eradicated Covid, ignoring the realities of power both within China and within the West. I'm finding it difficult to take you at your word, as you are either being naive or writing in the esoteric mode. Burnham and his Machiavellians would disapprove in either case.
More than that, you've completely missed any real lessons of Covid for any nihilist princes who might be among your readership. There are actually many great lessons to be learned from the virus and the social and political phenomena surrounding it, but one I like is this: power is a partial order. There is no such thing as absolute power. You might be the most powerful man on Earth, but you can no more rule the people of Earth arbitrarily than you can make water run uphill. The wise ruler must therefore act with the knowledge of his own limitations, and not overextend himself, or set himself to impossible tasks and un-winnable battles.
Yet, because you are in fact the most powerful, everyone will look to you for solutions to large problems, including ones you cannot solve. How should you behave when faced with a problem you cannot solve? That after much consideration you realize is actually unsolvable? Your power has limitations, yes, but it is often unwise to reveal those limitations. It might be that you have to lie, and deceive your own people.
Don't these questions lead to much more important lessons for the prince?
You see, eradicating Covid is and always was impossible, even for your image of the competent authoritarian, Xi Jinping.
Xi Jinping "solved" Covid by making a very big show of force, declaring victory, and making sure the victory stayed won by suppressing information and juking the stats. If you are some mid-level party guy who is ordered to keep the Covid numbers down in your region, you know to keep the numbers down. And if people start coming down with respiratory illnesses? This is not the pneumonia you're looking for, it's obviously something else. "You didn't see graphite."
The West "solved" Covid by making a big show of good-old-fashioned American solidarity, and then transmuting it into another profitable forever war. No victory needed or desired. Politicians can claim they are taking every necessary precaution to keep people safe. Pharmaceutical companies of all shapes and sizes can now rake in huge subsidies. That mid-level party guy's counterpart in the West now gets extra budget for covid precautions. Everyone wins.
If you want to make the point that this more centralized, single-party power is incentivized towards BAU instead of forever war and in addition has the coordination to pull off the "mission accomplished" lie, then you could've made it much more clearly. Your analyses on how organizational structures shape incentives were always interesting.
"And for those who value their freedoms™, subjects of China live today with far fewer covid restrictions than citizens of the reddest American red state."
It's not clear what Curtis is talking about. There are millions of red-state Americans who face zero Covid restrictions in their daily lives. Aside from having to wear a mask at work, which most people here don't have to put up with and most Chinese do, I am one of them.
"A border which is perfectly sealed before the virus is seeded on the other side provides perfectly against this preventable evil."
While borders are desirable for other reasons, airborne zoonotic diseases will eventually cross any border not protected by oceans.
"And as for the opposition theater which is the opposite school of governance theater—it is even worse. Its theater makes no sense and could not even be put into practice, at least not as a general policy."
The red policy on Covid is nothing other than common sense. Curtis has trouble understanding it because he is an adult convert to common sense.
Red state legislators are not creating general policies for responding to hypothetical diseases; they don't have the power to create general policies anyway. They are using what power they do have to resist the particular insanities the System is currently trying to impose. If the situation were different, it would be different.
"Surely this was what Foucault called biopower: power over bodies."
Foucault was a sexual degenerate objecting to the laws against child molestation.
"If a virus becomes an emergency, it is the moral equivalent of war."
Hardly. Wars can, in theory, be won.
"Clearly, we are utter fools if we cannot learn from the success of the Chinese regime—despite its clear complicity in covering up the leak in the first place—in suppressing the novel coronavirus."
China (and Australia) remains a biomedical police state nearly two years later. If there was any goal besides becoming one it failed.
"And taking photos. If your proctologist is a pervert, a clown, a thief or a rascal, you need a new proctologist"
Proctologist here being an analogy for government. At present, we don't have another government ready to go, so protecting ourselves, as best we can, against the current one, is the only immediate option.
"It is not a giant human-rights violation for everyone’s morning routine to include a simple covid swab—especially since this is not a permanent imposition, but a wartime measure in a victorious war."
Two paragraphs later he admits that Covid will never go away and that these "emergency" measures will actually be permanent, or at least permanently recurring.
I hate to say it, but there is a lot of research I believe you have missed. Thousands upon thousands of hours of research and data that make any meaningful conversation about this topic wildly unbalanced if only wielded by a single party in the conversation.
I say this as a senior software engineer who works in the realm of big-data risk-analysis.
Here are a few data dumps that might get you started:
I respect you moving a bit on covid and owning it. I don't understand why you just trust China's data.
They had a Corona outbreak in Dec 2019 and tried to put a blanket over it. That didn't work and in January the story got out. Independent experts estimate that they had over 1500 cases by mid Janurary. Then the Chinese celebrated Chinese New Year by traveling across the country to their families. Only after that, on Jan 23rd, was Wuhan, Hubei locked down. There is simply no way that "locking down" a single landlocked province after 2 month of spread contained the virus. It's completely implausible. They are still finding corona in their ice cream, for christ sake (it's true, google it).
It's much more plausible that the CCP decided to turn an embarrassment into a story about how good their system is. It worked so well even you are still saying it, as did Forbes and many others! That would also explain the scary "leaked" videos of normal healthy looking people just keeling over in the streets which has never happened anywhere since.
Sweden's relative age adjusted mortality for 2020 was ... drumroll ... -2%. That's per the UKs ONS, notrious hoard of right wing corona deniers. MINUS two percent.
You have drawn perhaps the most insightful picture of the fundamental principles underlying the incompetence and ongoing degradation of modern Western institutions.
Your acuity in describing the perverse and increasingly misaligned incentives between the elites and the masses is outstanding.
And yet ironically you have become subject to the elite delusion that the modern western Pharmaceutical industry hasn’t fallen into this same well of deep rotting corruption and incompetence as the rest.
I know that you know this somewhere, but I’m going to say it out loud—even *if* Pharma could actually produce a near perfect vaccine against covid that was both highly effective and safe—something that they have struggled greatly to do for decades for a variety of viruses (take a look at the hundreds of Phillipino children killed by the dengue vaccine)— even if they could achieve such a vaccine—they have *zero* incentive to do so.
They receive orders of magnitude greater financial and political rewards from a mediocre to poor “vaccine” that governments mandate multiple times a year— especially when they are shielded from all liability, which was Merck’s chief problem in their Vioxx experience.
And of course, governments are incentivized to play along, because such a shitty “vaccine” plays into their incentives for increased control over their own subjects and over the entire information space.
Win-Win.
I strongly recommend Joomi Kim’s substack on covid, Dr. Robert Malone’s (the real inventor of mRNA vaccine technology- i would be happy to provide evidence to support this claim) substack and twitter, statistician Matthew Crawford’s substack and twitter, and statistician Norman Fenton’s youtube account among others, to gain key data points that appear to be missing from your knowledge base.
The only thing resembling that Singapore chart will be your subscriber metrics after this god-awful post.
Buried in this article you tacitly admit covid eradication is impossible due to animal reservoirs and therefore it will be around forever, so why is the whole thing framed in terms of "emergency measures" and a "war on covid"? You implicitly admit the war cannot be won and the measures must be permanent. Perhaps you should rewrite it with this essential premise front-and-centre, and try being honest with your readers.
"The mortality rates of covid for younger populations do not justify emergency governance measures; the morbidity rates for middle-aged populations do."
#&^$^*#!
Hay Curtis, here's what you meant to write "In as much as my early writings may have possibly in some small way influenced other San Francisco nerds to advocate new super cool techbro lockdowns, setting off a demented preference cascade that ends with little kids walking around with muzzles, I'm sorry"
See that wasn't hard.
Ironically, one of the biggest problem with bad governance systems is that they don't allow people to admit they made a mistake and just wrap it up before they do any more damage.
Just a lowly RN (who got fired last weekfor not getting vaccinated) weighing in here; you are staggeringly wrong about these scandalously dangerous vaccines. The carnage I witnessed in patient charts terrified me daily and led to my decision not to take the vax when my turn came. Not only that, I can tell you that the climate of absolute denial and refusal to connect the damage/symptoms to the vaccines has the character of a virtual trance-state that has gripped the medical community.
I practically had to force one of my doctors to file a VAERS report on his patient whose catastrophic physical deterioration following vaccination was too blatant for even his near-total trance-state to ignore. This was the only VAERS report I am aware of from out of literally dozens of severe, crippling adverse events I was witness to. The VAERS data are massively underreported. Who knows by what precise factor. All attempts to escalate concerns to management were met with the same trance-like stare and the words “the vaccines are safe” 🤦🏻♀️
Also can personally attest to the absolutely astonishing lockstep conformity among doctors in denying early treatments and refusing to even consider the many highly effective treatment protocols developed by their more courageous and innovative colleagues around the world. Literally refusing to even try anything that hadn’t been given a bureaucratic stamp of approval when the bureaucrats withholding the stamps are heavily funded by the guys making the big bucks from the vax. It’s just a sickening display of institutional corruption and cowardice all around. With treatment, covid plummets in significance to a serious misfortune that need not have perverted the fundamental values and deformed the lives of the citizens of any serious society. Sad!
Your information on Singapore is wildly incorrect. The graph of their case history wouldn't look like the one you provided - it is the complete reverse. Singapore has in fact been the total opposite and seen a significant rise recently in their cases despite vaccinating 95% of the adult population and enforcing some of the strictest measures in the world. Music banned for 20 months! The Ministry Task Force has no road map and is instead a risk averse bunch of cowards who can't do what is needed to keep their dream of a business friendly city state alive because they panic and u-turn every time one hypochondriac 80 year old Hokkien granny has a runny nose. They've flip-flopped more times than the roti pratas sold in their hawker centres. That is not good governance and you're naive at best if you think the rest of the world should follow these same policies for a virus that hospitalises less than 1% of those infected.
I am, obviously, second-to-none in my distaste for our idiotic ruling class and their ineffectiveness at doing, well, anything positive. However, I usually come to Grey Mirror to be ahead of the curve, yet I find you are behind the curve on the virus and the vaccines. I refer you to other popular substack authors to find the uncensored data analysis required to understand that: 1) the vaccines are of limited, marginal effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 infection and death, yet are complete losers when measured in quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) lost, as they kill far more young people than they save aged people. 2) I would not stake my life on the numbers coming out of China. Like most things, the Chinese are much more effective at collecting data than the US is, but reporting the true numbers are not in their interest, so they don't. And, finally, 3) Virus is gonna virus. That's not to say quarantine of incoming travelers is not sometimes justified if done properly, but it's almost impossible in an authoritarian country like China, much less in a country with a culture of sticking-it-to-the-man like the US. One must not ignore the fact that the form of government follows the culture. We have a performative, fake government because we are ruled by Hollywood, the media, and academia, i.e., performative, fake institutions propped up by a culture that values performance and fakery over sincerity and truth. (I refer you to Instagram and Snapchat for proof of this assertion). But underlying all this plasticness (plasticity?) is the original American spirit of "Fuck you! I'm doing what I want!" Thus we are now in a situation where we get the worst of both cultural models.
If there was ever an outbreak of airborne AIDs, people would instinctively protect themselves. People would buy and wear the most effective N99 masks everywhere. People would naturally stay away from crowds and social distance more than 12 feet. Everyone would voluntarily install the most invasive contact tracing spyware on their phone. They would shoot themselves up with the most untested experimental gene therapies. No government action would be required. Any measures taken would be uncontroversial.
The problem with COVID is no one actually believes it's airborne AIDs. The government officials mandating masks are frequently seen not wearing them. The revealed preference is that most people aren't afraid. EVEN WITH 24/7 regime propaganda declaring it airborne AIDs. Without the propaganda we wouldn't even notice it.
Yeah, there is a utilitarian argument to be made. Wiping out the flu could increase life expectancy enough to justify the costs. Both sides of that equation are very uncertain. Would anyone have given this much thought before 2020?
Now caring about COVID is a loyalty signal to the regime. Lots of people are literally sacrificing their careers, their social lives, their basic freedoms to take a stand against this. Hence all the pissed off comments.
Which do you prefer now: Curtis Yglesias or Mencius Weyl? $10 a month is awful high for a blue pill subscription when folks can get the generic version free on CNN. If your next substack post is Anna Karenina it would still not counter balance this partial birth abortion of a take.
"Science also did such a great job with its monopoly of the pursuit of knowledge that the inventor of MRNA was hounded out of her career (and now works for Capitalism). And Science’s headlock on the product cycle is strong enough that we only have very leaky, slightly dangerous first-generation vaccines. (Which I still recommend taking.)"
OK then.
Early on during the pandemic of a virus that hospitalizes less than 1% of infected people, Curtis tied his flag to the mast of Pharma, and apparently he still can't admit the mistake. Keep in mind, this is the same Pharma that pays 45% of the FDA's budget, the same Pharma who bought 9 of the last 10 FDA commissioners (after they stepped down from their "Regulatory" post), the same Pharma who put the FDA commissioner on the board of Pfizer 6 months after he "oversaw" the emergency approval process for Pfizer's "vaccine" that now apparently needs to be taken every 3 months, per recent statements from the UK Health Minister.
The actual inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, Dr. Robert Malone, has a more nuanced view that perhaps these "vaccines" are worth it for high risk populations (elderly, morbidly obese, etc) from a risk-benefit analysis.
For everyone else, not only are they likely not worth it, they are in fact applying an explosive evolutionary pressure on a virus that has a high capacity for rapid mutation.
The spike protein induced by the "vaccines" is undoubtedly an endothelial toxin. As far as I can tell, this fact was unknown to the vaccine developers as there were no studies prior to December 2020 (well, there was one from the late 2000's that did show increased inflammatory markers from coronavirus spike, but it wasn't an especially dramatic finding, unlike the more recent research on spike protein.)
https://joomi.substack.com/p/coming-soon
The duration of efficacy of the vaccine induced antibodies against the delta variant appears to be, perhaps, 4-5 months. The first month, "vaccinees" actually have a higher risk of covid infection, then they receive a modest degree of protection which falls off rapidly to around 16% by the 6th month, per Israeli data. This phenomena of *increased* susceptibility to Covid infection during the first month after "vaccination" was also found in Israeli booster data.
https://pecc-il.org/pdf-doc/green-pass-and-covid-19-vaccine-booster-shots-in-israel-a-more-realistic-empirical-assessment-analyzing-the-airport-data/
It's mighty convenient that all covid infections during this enhanced susceptibility window get classed as "nonvaccinated" infections (first 21 days after first dose).
Gee.
And those efficacy numbers given above are predominantly for the Delta variant. Omicron (and the next variant, and the next, etc) is almost certainly more vaccine resistant. However, that hasn't stopped our "Public Health Experts" from telling everyone to get the same old "booster", which is like telling everyone to get the flu vaccine from 3 years ago and expecting it to have efficacy today.
Additionally, it isn't even clear that an updated mRNA vaccine is going to have substantially better efficacy against Omicron and future variants, due to the phenomenon of Original Antigenic Sin, whereby initial imprinting on the immune system tends to channel future immune responses down those initial pathways. BTW, does anyone even remember that when Delta was the big scare way way back last summer (who can remember that long ago, sheesh), Pharma said they were immediately working on developing an updated vaccine for the Delta variant? Gee, I wonder what happened in those trials.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/08/pfizer-says-it-is-developing-a-covid-booster-shot-to-target-the-highly-transmissible-delta-variant.html
As far as the claim that "the vaccines reduce severe disease and death", interestingly enough Pfizer's own trial data that was presented to the FDA found *higher* all cause mortality in the vaccine group over placebo.
Statistician Matthew Crawford's analysis of UK all cause mortality data has found that it is, also, *higher* in the vaccinated population relative to the unvaccinated.
Some of us are even old enough to remember Merck's drug Vioxx, which has been estimated to have killed 40-50,000 people, for which Merck withheld data which indicated a 200-400% increased mortality rate in the drug group. I believe they settled for $900 million, way back in the 2000's, but who can remember so long ago.
"subjects of China live today with far fewer covid restrictions than citizens of the reddest American red state"
What is this blatant nonsense. Visit the hill country of Texas and the 1984 inspired coastal cities of China and tell me this again with a straight face.
I like your stuff bro but sometimes you come off as the Walter Duranty of the CCP.
It is simply shocking that you believe that China has “controlled” the virus. An obvious lie.
Curtis,
I am now quite confused as to who your audience is supposed to be.
I thought these essays supposed to be part of a "mirror for princes": a sort of guidebook on how to use power wisely. In this latest, we see some further explication of what covid policy might be under your rule. If your goal is merely to mog the Western public health bureaucracy by comparing them to governments you view as competent -- the CCP and your own hypothetical -- that's all well and good, but you seem to accept on faith that the Chinese actually eradicated Covid, ignoring the realities of power both within China and within the West. I'm finding it difficult to take you at your word, as you are either being naive or writing in the esoteric mode. Burnham and his Machiavellians would disapprove in either case.
More than that, you've completely missed any real lessons of Covid for any nihilist princes who might be among your readership. There are actually many great lessons to be learned from the virus and the social and political phenomena surrounding it, but one I like is this: power is a partial order. There is no such thing as absolute power. You might be the most powerful man on Earth, but you can no more rule the people of Earth arbitrarily than you can make water run uphill. The wise ruler must therefore act with the knowledge of his own limitations, and not overextend himself, or set himself to impossible tasks and un-winnable battles.
Yet, because you are in fact the most powerful, everyone will look to you for solutions to large problems, including ones you cannot solve. How should you behave when faced with a problem you cannot solve? That after much consideration you realize is actually unsolvable? Your power has limitations, yes, but it is often unwise to reveal those limitations. It might be that you have to lie, and deceive your own people.
Don't these questions lead to much more important lessons for the prince?
You see, eradicating Covid is and always was impossible, even for your image of the competent authoritarian, Xi Jinping.
Xi Jinping "solved" Covid by making a very big show of force, declaring victory, and making sure the victory stayed won by suppressing information and juking the stats. If you are some mid-level party guy who is ordered to keep the Covid numbers down in your region, you know to keep the numbers down. And if people start coming down with respiratory illnesses? This is not the pneumonia you're looking for, it's obviously something else. "You didn't see graphite."
The West "solved" Covid by making a big show of good-old-fashioned American solidarity, and then transmuting it into another profitable forever war. No victory needed or desired. Politicians can claim they are taking every necessary precaution to keep people safe. Pharmaceutical companies of all shapes and sizes can now rake in huge subsidies. That mid-level party guy's counterpart in the West now gets extra budget for covid precautions. Everyone wins.
If you want to make the point that this more centralized, single-party power is incentivized towards BAU instead of forever war and in addition has the coordination to pull off the "mission accomplished" lie, then you could've made it much more clearly. Your analyses on how organizational structures shape incentives were always interesting.
I hope you find this worth consideration.
"And for those who value their freedoms™, subjects of China live today with far fewer covid restrictions than citizens of the reddest American red state."
It's not clear what Curtis is talking about. There are millions of red-state Americans who face zero Covid restrictions in their daily lives. Aside from having to wear a mask at work, which most people here don't have to put up with and most Chinese do, I am one of them.
"A border which is perfectly sealed before the virus is seeded on the other side provides perfectly against this preventable evil."
While borders are desirable for other reasons, airborne zoonotic diseases will eventually cross any border not protected by oceans.
"And as for the opposition theater which is the opposite school of governance theater—it is even worse. Its theater makes no sense and could not even be put into practice, at least not as a general policy."
The red policy on Covid is nothing other than common sense. Curtis has trouble understanding it because he is an adult convert to common sense.
Red state legislators are not creating general policies for responding to hypothetical diseases; they don't have the power to create general policies anyway. They are using what power they do have to resist the particular insanities the System is currently trying to impose. If the situation were different, it would be different.
"Surely this was what Foucault called biopower: power over bodies."
Foucault was a sexual degenerate objecting to the laws against child molestation.
"If a virus becomes an emergency, it is the moral equivalent of war."
Hardly. Wars can, in theory, be won.
"Clearly, we are utter fools if we cannot learn from the success of the Chinese regime—despite its clear complicity in covering up the leak in the first place—in suppressing the novel coronavirus."
China (and Australia) remains a biomedical police state nearly two years later. If there was any goal besides becoming one it failed.
"And taking photos. If your proctologist is a pervert, a clown, a thief or a rascal, you need a new proctologist"
Proctologist here being an analogy for government. At present, we don't have another government ready to go, so protecting ourselves, as best we can, against the current one, is the only immediate option.
"It is not a giant human-rights violation for everyone’s morning routine to include a simple covid swab—especially since this is not a permanent imposition, but a wartime measure in a victorious war."
Two paragraphs later he admits that Covid will never go away and that these "emergency" measures will actually be permanent, or at least permanently recurring.
I hate to say it, but there is a lot of research I believe you have missed. Thousands upon thousands of hours of research and data that make any meaningful conversation about this topic wildly unbalanced if only wielded by a single party in the conversation.
I say this as a senior software engineer who works in the realm of big-data risk-analysis.
Here are a few data dumps that might get you started:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2YZAnKeGmM
https://pastebin.com/qdLXvGWR
https://www.docdroid.net/rI4T10M/covid-19-source-book-v3-copy-pdf
https://www.skirsch.com/covid/All.pdf
Eugyppius clinically violates your sacred anal honor at https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/against-omicron-and-governance-theater
I respect you moving a bit on covid and owning it. I don't understand why you just trust China's data.
They had a Corona outbreak in Dec 2019 and tried to put a blanket over it. That didn't work and in January the story got out. Independent experts estimate that they had over 1500 cases by mid Janurary. Then the Chinese celebrated Chinese New Year by traveling across the country to their families. Only after that, on Jan 23rd, was Wuhan, Hubei locked down. There is simply no way that "locking down" a single landlocked province after 2 month of spread contained the virus. It's completely implausible. They are still finding corona in their ice cream, for christ sake (it's true, google it).
It's much more plausible that the CCP decided to turn an embarrassment into a story about how good their system is. It worked so well even you are still saying it, as did Forbes and many others! That would also explain the scary "leaked" videos of normal healthy looking people just keeling over in the streets which has never happened anywhere since.
Sweden's relative age adjusted mortality for 2020 was ... drumroll ... -2%. That's per the UKs ONS, notrious hoard of right wing corona deniers. MINUS two percent.
Curtis,
You have drawn perhaps the most insightful picture of the fundamental principles underlying the incompetence and ongoing degradation of modern Western institutions.
Your acuity in describing the perverse and increasingly misaligned incentives between the elites and the masses is outstanding.
And yet ironically you have become subject to the elite delusion that the modern western Pharmaceutical industry hasn’t fallen into this same well of deep rotting corruption and incompetence as the rest.
I know that you know this somewhere, but I’m going to say it out loud—even *if* Pharma could actually produce a near perfect vaccine against covid that was both highly effective and safe—something that they have struggled greatly to do for decades for a variety of viruses (take a look at the hundreds of Phillipino children killed by the dengue vaccine)— even if they could achieve such a vaccine—they have *zero* incentive to do so.
They receive orders of magnitude greater financial and political rewards from a mediocre to poor “vaccine” that governments mandate multiple times a year— especially when they are shielded from all liability, which was Merck’s chief problem in their Vioxx experience.
And of course, governments are incentivized to play along, because such a shitty “vaccine” plays into their incentives for increased control over their own subjects and over the entire information space.
Win-Win.
I strongly recommend Joomi Kim’s substack on covid, Dr. Robert Malone’s (the real inventor of mRNA vaccine technology- i would be happy to provide evidence to support this claim) substack and twitter, statistician Matthew Crawford’s substack and twitter, and statistician Norman Fenton’s youtube account among others, to gain key data points that appear to be missing from your knowledge base.
All the best to you-
A.
The only thing resembling that Singapore chart will be your subscriber metrics after this god-awful post.
Buried in this article you tacitly admit covid eradication is impossible due to animal reservoirs and therefore it will be around forever, so why is the whole thing framed in terms of "emergency measures" and a "war on covid"? You implicitly admit the war cannot be won and the measures must be permanent. Perhaps you should rewrite it with this essential premise front-and-centre, and try being honest with your readers.