17 Comments

Hypothesis:

Government ruins everything that it touches.

Discuss?

Expand full comment

I agree. From el gato, "i struggle to find any regulatory body whatsoever in the US that seems to be doing more good than harm at the moment and that has not descended into late stage political capture in service of legal plunder and fief building."

Expand full comment

Oh man. That is the juiciest summation that I’ve seen. Thanks.

Expand full comment

OK but corporations aren't exactly shrinking violets themselves. I don't think targeting just one side of this corrupt coin would do any good.

Expand full comment

I agree, but the reason we have regulatory bodies is in part to regulate the corporations, and they are not regulating them, they are in bed with them. And the politicians who appoint the regulators are in bed with them too. It's a very cozy bed!! Check out how many Senators or members of Congress have taken the "Patients Over Profits" pledge. Or look at the Stat article that details how much each politician has accepted from various companies. That's just the tip of the iceberg looking at one industry.

Expand full comment

“Regulatory Capture”

Perhaps, the most insidious scourge of our time?

Expand full comment

I'm worried that Dr. Jha (rhymes with "blah" --- as in blah-blah-blah) may have wandered off the trail. At first, I was just tickled that he got the White House gig. He's a nice guy whose compelling presentation of self says, "Calm down folks, let me explain things". In that regard, one almost recalls Lyndon Johnson's habit of frequently citing Isaiah 1:18 ("Come now, let us reason together"). However, the Grease & Grin Syndrome unfortunately became an obvious diagnosis after observing Jah's tactics as he settled into his new public role. What a shame: A presumably rigorous epidemiology maven with a great CV (and a DEAN from a major academic center) resorting now and then to using cute jingles, syrupy jargon, gub-ment doublespeak, evasions via application of semantic Kung Fu, and even a few dollops here and there of plain bullshit. There has to be something about hanging around at the White House, shooting the breeze with Secret Service people, and standing at a podium on national television over and over that will invariably (a) Short-circuit intracranial wiring involved in scientific thought and (b) Activate the odious self-promotion afterburner. I think the latter is surely not being consciously practiced by Jha -- it's just a reflexive, rather common human imperfection that nobody ameliorates without making solid efforts to quench egocentricity with precision, shut it down, and put it back in its cage. He could really benefit from watching some video replays of his various performances to date.

Expand full comment

It’s a phenomenon best elucidated from the evolutionary sociology perspective. Human reasoning is not in the first instance aimed at truth; it’s a social competence aimed at solidifying our reputation in our group. Once a scientist gets on the bureaucracy team, their statements more likely represent a group-level coalitional signal than the more noble but less natural aspiration to ‘tell the truth at any cost.’

Expand full comment

It must feel to people like you (and myself) that you wake up every day and bang your head against the same wall and NOTHING changes. I am so thankful that you keep banging, and I still hold out hope that the long lens of history correctly shows us all to be the more enlightened bunch, because the dial is still not budging away from the main stream narrative. I read this quote recently from Farnam Street, "Consistency isn't simply willpower, which comes and goes. Consistency is doing it when you don't feel like doing it. If you want advantageous divergence, you have to do the things that matter on your best day and your worst day." Thank you for your consistency!

Expand full comment

Also this is probably RELATIVE risk reduction

If my risk Of hospitalization and death is only 0.1, Then a 95% relative Reduction only gives me an absolute risk reduction of less than 1%. So clearly it makes no sense for me to take an experimental drug for an absolute risk reduction effect of less than one percent

Expand full comment

That's what I've been saying all along!

In my demographic (30-39 yrs) my risk level is already low. Factor in my good health, that risk is even lower (perhaps less than 0.2%). So what practical good is there is in getting a shot to decrease that by ... say 50%? Older people and vulnerable people, please get the shot and boosters.

People at minuscule risk (young and healthy), there's really no sense of urgency to rush out and get a shot, especially one based on a variant from two years ago.

So the question is why are certain people pushing so hard for EVERYONE to get vaccinated?

Expand full comment

A lot of people have these ideas that the motivation behind requiring the shot is because there’s some evil cabal bent on depopulation. But the answer is probably far more banal.

The United States post office is this huge multi billion dollar sprawling bureaucracy and they cannot deliver the mail without losing money. Medicare is a giant federal program that is completely overextended and bankrupt. Social Security is bankrupt. The American military just lost a 20 year long war in Afghanistan. Amtrak is bankrupt. The Supreme Court of the United States for the last 50 years has rubberstamp every boondoggle immoral unconstitutional program including most recently The affordable care act and then the vaccine mandates for for healthcare workers

The CDC and the NIH are just government bureaucracies. Why do people expect that these agencies are going to be any less failed and incompetent? Just because they’re filled with scientists and doctors? It makes no difference. These are political organizations. They are complete failures.

Expand full comment

LA County DPH data shows the risk of an unvaccinated person dying from/with COVID compared with a boosted person is 6 times. They do not separate out one or two boosts. That was data for the month of June and that is not IFR. The difference has been decreasing steadily since January.

Expand full comment

No. It doesn’t.

Expand full comment

Dr Jha is pushing a lot of questionable data and making statements that are just not true. Most recently he has tweeted that getting boosted will keep our healthcare system functional during a surge. But he has no data to support that. Nationwide the HHS hospital capacity data as of August 3 is <11% of hospital beds are for confirmed CV19 patients (assuming this is with and from). The hospital bed occupancy is another matter (70-85%) and reflects the operational margin hospitals function under to keep their profits healthy. It is modeled after the hotel business. Staffing shortages can certainly be a problem but getting a booster won't fix that or bed occupancy any because these are due to deep flaws in our current healthcare system.

I don't want to speak badly of anyone but Dr Jha is behaving like a bot cheerleader and that will further discredit faith in our public health system.

Expand full comment

Much of the "science" world is busy trying to prove the earth is flat (again). That was popular and doctrine for centuries with deadly consequences for those who argued otherwise, and with good observational data.

We have entered a new "dark ages", and I think we can expect mass manipulation, mass lies, repressive government, violent reactions and suppression, and of course, ongoing arguments from actual science and data. Ashish Ja is only a dedicated servant of untruth. An elaborated dupe. I don't like him or his politics, and he is complicit in mass homicide. Full Stop. I think people in increasing numbers have to ask "would I trust this person with my life and the life of my children?" I know in his case, he has proven himself to not give a crap, or he and others would stop pointing to the moon and calling it cheese.

Expand full comment

We have arrived in a very strange place for science and to a degree politics. A pandemic arrives just in time as Event 201 winds down where the simulation supports some rather extreme methods for an expected pandemic anticipated to be horribly infectious and deadly. (https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/exercises/event201/recommendations.html). The pandemic that actually arrived was not the one anticipated, instead if was infectious but had a quite skewed death profile with 1000:1 difference between old and young. Regardless of the the skew we adopted the severe tools of the anticipated pandemic.

Then a miraculous vaccine was developed in record time by extraordinary government attention that was to be our way out of the awful tools for the severe pandemic that never happened. As Dr Atlas noted science fell by the wayside as science-bureaucrats Drs Fauci & Brix were in their best form on a national stage, "doing their best".

Time moves along and the virus adapts making the vaccine less and less effective, yet we are stuck. Our science-bureaucrats within the NIH can admit no error. The failures of the mitigation control measures cannot be recognized. Worse, the lauded vaccines that now prove ineffective, some say even have negative effectiveness cannot be acknowledged to have become ineffective. The bureaucratic machine has huge inertia now and lower levels blindly continue the mantra "safe and effective" except times have changed and they can't.

It will take time for reality to set in and the scope of the blunders to be assessed. Eventually something like The Swine Flu Affair (https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/12660/the-swine-flu-affair-decision-making-on-a-slippery-disease) will be written. Not sure if we will get a 60 minutes episode (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydx_ok6gyiY) to remind us. But all that was in the past and we choose not to study history anymore. The NIH is not likely to ever admit error, politicians never do; note scientists do admit error which says a lot by itself. A few retirements and resignations might help right the NIH for the future.

Many in the public who have been quite harmed by the policies are never likely to be compensated because compared to the 1976 debacle, the 2019 pandemic was fueled by modern technology. Many measures adopted for 2019 were not possible in 1976 including the ability to rapidly exploit a new vaccine platform. The errors are so huge we will pay a price for a very long time.

Expand full comment