Decades ago, the astronomer Carl Sagan observed that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” These words are particularly salient today, as the world order has been upended by governments’ responses to the coronavirus.
Those who continue to advocate extreme measures, such as lockdowns and forced human separation, are making the extraordinary claim that we must disrupt the functioning of the traditions and institutions that societies have developed over millennia, and are vital to human flourishing, in response to a single problem: a pathogen with an infection fatality rate currently hovering around 0.27 percent, with deaths highly concentrated among those with very low life expectancies.
Never before have governments throughout the world ordered schools to close, businesses to stop operating, travel to cease, and people to refrain from interacting with each other, for an indefinite time period spanning months and possibly even years. As others have noted, this is an experiment of an unprecedented nature on an unprecedented scale, the consequences of which will undoubtedly ripple into subsequent decades and possibly beyond. Read on…
As we learn that England has gone into full lockdown. Until December 1. But what’s the bet it goes in until the new year?
ADDED: Paul Krugman (mentioned in the article) really is a piece of work. He’s a regular columnist at the New York Times and a Nobel laureate. Pretty impressive! You’d think that would give him some credibility. Not a bit of it. He’s a bust. In 1990 he said the internet would be a flash in the pan and no more important than the fax machine. He claims the Right is riddled with “zombie ideas” while failing to see the huge mote in his own eye: socialism as the ultimate zombie idea. When Trump was elected he predicted a crash in the stock market and mass unemployment. The reality was stock market at an all time high and unemployment at a record low. There’s hardly a macro trend Krugman hasn’t got wrong. Yet there he is, churning out his dross, smearing the good common sense of the Great Barrington Declaration.
In his attack on the GBD he tries to link it with the Koch brothers, because, you know, the Kochs are right wing and so…. In fact the Kochs had nothing to do with the GBD, and he’s just attempting a smear by association, something the NYT acolytes will lap up because they love to hate anything that goes against their narrative, here “lockdowns are necessary”. I’ll venture that on this one topic I’m as well read as Krugman and I find for the GBD.
