Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?
Vaccines clearly saved a lot of lives; lockdowns…it’s not clear they were worth their heavy costs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l0E78e7XnI
Tag: virus
How Many Americans Have Died of COVID-19?
“In addition to tracking deaths attributed to COVID-19, researchers aim to account for those missed by formal diagnoses by calculating excess deaths. Excess deaths are typically defined as the number of deaths during a particular period above the usual, expected number of deaths under normal conditions.”
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“A February 2024 article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calculated excess deaths between March 2020 and August 2022, concluding that around 1.2 million Americans had died of COVID-19. A January 2025 analysis in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Statistics in Society Series A calculated excess pandemic mortality in the United States for 2020 and 2021 at 920,731. Interestingly, Stanford biostatistician John Ioannidis, a skeptic of worst-case COVID-19 pandemic claims, and his colleagues calculated in a December 2023 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article that the U.S. suffered 1,220,295 excess deaths between 2020 and 2023. Notably, they also calculated that the U.S. actually experienced 3,456 fewer than expected deaths of Americans aged 14 and under during that period. Considering that all of these calculations use data from 2023 or earlier, they suggest that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s current count of 1,225,281 American deaths from COVID-19 and related causes is somewhat conservative.”
https://reason.com/2025/03/12/how-many-americans-have-died-of-covid-19/
Do Face Masks Work?
“A June 2024 meta-analysis in the journal Clinical Microbiology Reviews synthesized evidence from more than 100 studies and reviews. It found that masks, “if correctly and consistently worn,” are “effective in reducing transmission of respiratory diseases and show a dose-response effect.” It also found that, N95 and KN95 masks were more effective than surgical or cloth masks. Using data from jurisdictions with mask mandates, the researchers concluded that “mask mandates are, overall, effective in reducing community transmission of respiratory pathogens.” The efficacy of masks alone does not settle the question of mask mandates, which is far more complex.
In their comprehensive 2024 report, Effectiveness of masks and respirators against respiratory infections, researchers associated with the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health reviewed 153 research articles on the effectiveness of mask use against infective agents or airborne droplets and particles. They reported that 128 of the articles they analyzed found masks to be effective. They noted that “systematic reviews of on randomized controlled trial studies in clinical or community settings demonstrated effectiveness in 10 out of 16 studies, and 20 out of 23 studies found mask mandates to be effective.”
https://reason.com/2025/03/10/do-face-masks-work/
Girls May Have Been Hit Hardest by Pandemic Learning Loss
“In 2019, the average girl scored a 517 on the assessment, which is measured on a 1000-point scale, and boys scored a 514, just a three-point difference. In 2023, boys’ scores had dropped 19 points on average, while girls’ scores dropped an astonishing 36 points on average.
“Since 2019, girls’ test scores have dropped sharply, often to the lowest point in decades. Boys’ scores have also fallen during that time, but the decline among girls has been more severe,” writes education reporter Matt Barnum. “Boys now consistently outperform girls in math, after being roughly even or slightly ahead in the years before 2020. Girls still tend to perform better in reading, but their scores have dropped closer to boys.”
Why is this happening? Researchers aren’t sure. One theory is that girls may have taken on more domestic tasks than boys during pandemic lockdowns (for example, taking care of younger siblings) and thus may have missed out on more learning. Another is that girls tend to have fewer behavioral issues, meaning that struggling girls weren’t called to educators’ attention in the same way many boys were.”
https://reason.com/2025/01/09/girls-may-have-been-hit-hardest-by-pandemic-learning-loss/
Sam Harris Reveals Million Dollar Bet w/ Elon That Killed Their Friendship
Elon Musk thought Covid would remain under 100 cases in the United States, and was extremely confident about this belief. Disagreements over this ended his relationship with Sam Harris.
Elon would publicly insult Sam over misleading clips of Sam that misrepresented what Sam said. Sam would email Elon explaining the context, and Elon would tell Sam to fuck off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vzBTpIF_hI
‘He needs to do much more’: RFK Jr.’s measles response under scrutiny
““He could be misinterpreted that vitamin A will save your suffocating suffering child,” Brett Giroir, a first-term Trump health official now advising Kennedy on infectious disease policy, wrote in a post on X. “It will not.”
In Texas, some local officials have grown concerned that Kennedy’s messaging risks diluting their own communication efforts. They warn that his equivocations could undermine their only hope of ending the outbreak: persuading people to get the measles vaccine.
“We don’t want to diminish the primary message,” Phil Huang, director of health and human services in Dallas County, Texas, said in an interview. “It’s the vaccines that are the most important.”
Katherine Wells, director of public health for the city of Lubbock, Texas, echoed that sentiment.
“We need to make sure that we’re all talking about the importance of vaccination, and although there’s some focus on treatment, preventing the disease in the first place is really what public health works on.”
Since President Donald Trump nominated him to run HHS late last year, Kennedy has labored to convince skeptics that he is not anti-vaccine, despite his past as an activist who repeatedly raised doubts about the safety and effectiveness of various immunizations.
As recently as 2021, Kennedy suggested without evidence that measles outbreaks may have been fabricated to “inflict unnecessary and risky vaccines on millions of children.” But now confronted with a high-risk, real-world opportunity to demonstrate whether his views have changed, the HHS secretary has instead appeared to seek a middle ground — calling the measles vaccine protective for individuals and broader communities, yet stopping well short of the full-throated endorsement public health experts say is necessary from the nation’s top health official.
“What he should be saying is that these kinds of outbreaks are fully preventable and unacceptable, and that as secretary he will do everything in his power to ensure the public that it never happens again,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. “It’s the first major public health crisis that he’s had to face, and he hasn’t reassured doubters about his ability to get on top of it.””
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“Most importantly, health experts said, Kennedy could simply hit the bar already set by health officials in Texas: Declaring unequivocally that vaccination is the central way to contain the outbreak.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/05/rfk-measles-scrutiny-00214952
So Much For RFK, Jr.’s Promise of ‘Radical Transparency’ at HHS
“The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) upcoming Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee meeting on March 13 was abruptly canceled via email on Wednesday. The committee was to consider the selection of strains to be included in the influenza virus vaccines for the 2025–2026 flu season. This is the second vaccine-related advisory meeting canceled since Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. took over at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
No reason for the cancellation was given, and the committee members were warned against forwarding the email. It suggested that members decline to answer questions from media.
So much for Kennedy’s pledge earlier this month of “radical transparency.” He added, “We will make our data and our policy process so transparent that people won’t even have to file a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request.”
In addition to suggesting members of the FDA’s vaccine committee stifle themselves, the HHS will publish a notice next week in the Federal Register to eliminate public comment on that agency’s plans and decisions. While past meetings have been open to public scrutiny and participation, it is not clear if the new limits will apply to future meetings of the committee.”
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“Noting that the U.S. is currently experiencing one of the worst flu seasons in a decade, Infectious Diseases Society of America president Tina Tan warns that “cancelling a critically important Food and Drug Administration meeting that is vital to the development of effective flu vaccines for next flu season is irresponsible.” She adds, “Cancelling this meeting means vaccine makers may not have the vital information and time they need to produce and distribute targeted vaccines before the next flu season. If the FDA meeting is not immediately rescheduled, many lives that could be saved by vaccination will be lost.”
RFK, Jr.’s HHS promises that the FDA “will make public its recommendations to manufacturers in time for updated vaccines to be available for the 2025-2026 influenza season.”
We’ll see.”
https://reason.com/2025/02/28/so-much-for-rfk-jr-s-promise-of-radical-transparency-at-hhs/
First death reported in Texas measles outbreak
“The first death has been reported in the ongoing measles outbreak in West Texas, according to a press release sent out by the Texas Department of State Health Services Wednesday.
The victim was an unvaccinated child who was hospitalized in Lubbock last week.
The outbreak, starting in late January, has 124 confirmed cases, the majority of which are either children, unvaccinated people, or both. Eighteen people have been hospitalized, the state health department said.”
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“According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the last measles death in the United States was reported a decade ago in 2015. Measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, which the CDC attributes to its vaccination program.
Vaccination rates for the MMR vaccine in Texas have dropped slightly in recent years following the Covid-19 pandemic.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/26/texas-measles-outbreak-rfk-jr-00002698
One More Damned Time: Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism
“Lutnick is right that autism diagnoses have risen substantially. If not childhood vaccinations, what accounts for this increase? First, greater awareness means that many people with autism spectrum disorder who in the past would have been missed by clinicians are now being identified. However, a 2020 review article in Molecular Psychiatry reports that changes in diagnostic criteria “has been accompanied by a 20-fold increase in the reported prevalence of ASD over the last 30 years, reaching a current prevalence of more than 2% in the United States.” This contributes to the likelihood of over-diagnosis and a shift toward autism diagnoses in place of other mental health conditions.”
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“the liability system was unable to properly balance the public benefits of vaccines against their private harms. The result of this imbalance was killing off vaccine innovation and production. So Congress a year later chose to change the liability system with respect to vaccines in 1986 with the adoption of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which provides compensation to people who are injured by certain vaccines.
And the benefits of vaccines are enormous. A 2024 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention review finds that “among children born during 1994–2023, routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations, and 1,129,000 deaths, resulting in direct savings of $540 billion and societal savings of $2.7 trillion.””
https://reason.com/2024/11/01/one-more-damned-time-vaccines-do-not-cause-autism/
Zika is still spreading. Why don’t we have a vaccine yet?
“Despite the decline in attention, Zika is still spreading in many countries. In the first half of 2023, health officials recorded about 27,000 Zika infections in the Americas, with Brazil the most affected country with more than 2,700 cases. Thousands of babies are still being born with preventable disabilities.
“With a safe and effective Zika vaccine, we could eliminate the possibility of congenital Zika syndrome, and I think that would have a huge impact,” said Anna Durbin, a professor of international health and global disease epidemiology and control at Johns Hopkins University. “Even if there are few cases of congenital Zika syndrome, just the emotional, financial effect of that is huge.”
Scientists and global health experts warn that Zika, alongside other mosquito-borne infectious diseases, could make a broader resurgence. The first step to defeating pandemics is, of course, prevention, and a Zika vaccine is vital to that goal.
But major hurdles stand in the way. Private pharmaceutical companies aren’t willing to invest in vaccine development because so few people are getting infected now — and those who are getting infected largely live in relatively poor countries. Researchers say governments aren’t investing sufficient public funds in vaccine development. And it is almost impossible to run a traditional clinical trial for the few vaccines hastily developed during the 2015 outbreak.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/379740/zika-virus-vaccine-mosquitoes-climate-change