Radical Uncertainty

I am reading a book right now titled "Radical Uncertainty" by John Kay and Mervyn King.

Kay and King are both economists and the book is generally focused on the uncertainty there is in most financial decisions whether personal or business.

For example, trying to answer the question of whether you are going to have enough money to retire?

You can model a lot of scenarios but there are so many uncertainties in answering that question.

How long will you live?

How long will your spouse live?

How much you will be able to save during your working years?

How long will you be able to continue working?

What investment returns can you expect?

What medical care will you need?

What will future inflation be?

The answers to almost all of these questions are unknowable. You can make assumptions in your planning but the reality may turn out to be completely different.

The fact is that there are many situations and questions in life where there is radical uncertainty and the only logical answer is "I DON'T KNOW".

Unfortunately, as Kay and King point out in the book,  there are relatively few (especially experts) that will ever state that they don't know.

And it is exceedingly difficult to make good decisions "by professing knowledge we do not have and cannot have".

When reading this book it is hard not to think about the Covid-19 pandemic. If there is anything that involves RADICAL UNCERTAINTY it is that.

I found it interesting that the book was published on March 17, 2020. Coincidentally, the "15 Days to Slow the Spread Campaign" was announced on March 16, 2020. It seems to another example of God  having a great sense of timing.

Of course, if we look back over the last 18 months dealing with such massive Radical Uncertainty, how many times have any of our public health or political leaders told us "I DON"T KNOW"?

We have lived through all of the pronouncements where the experts told us they had the answer.

15 Days To Slow The Spread

Lockdowns

Social Distancing

School Closings

Remote Work

Plexiglass Barriers

Hand Sanitizer

Mask Mandates

We even heard the CDC Director state that masks were more effective than the coming vaccines. Dr. Robert Redfield also said this almost exactly one year ago today.

Redfield said if Americans wore face masks for several weeks, "we would bring this pandemic under control," because there is scientific evidence they work and they are our "best defense."

Vaccines

If you follow a chronology from Dr. Anthony Fauci (the CHIEF KNOW IT ALL) on the vaccines you begin to see how totally wrong this guy has been on almost everything. 

(Hat tip to Alex Berenson for putting this chronology together.)

Last November Fauci said the end of the pandemic was in sight due to the coming vaccines.

Source: Bloomberg

In December, 2020 Fauci stated that we could see signs of herd immunity in March or early April, 2021.

Source: NPR

However, when March arrived Fauci changed the timeline and said we would see a big difference by summer or early fall.

 

In May, in an interview with The Washington Post Fauci was asked whether we needed to be concerned about how long the vaccines would be effective and whether we should be concerned about another surge in the Fall. ( I guess he should have been asked about a summer surge!)

Here was Fauci's answer.

It seems he missed pretty badly on that prediction.

By August Fauci had changed the timetable to Spring, 2022 at the earliest!

Source: Seattle Times

I still don't know how Fauci could be as wrong as he has on so many things and still have his job?

We are now on to vaccine mandates, boosters and efforts to vaccinate children as young as 5 by November.

We also may be on the verge of completely crashing our health care system on the issue of vaccine mandates.

Hospitals and nursing homes are already living on the edge in keeping their facilities full-staffed.

Are we about to see a string of stories like this?

Source: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/571895-hospital-says-it-will-stop-delivering-babies-after-maternity-ward

Source: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/texas-hospital-faces-closure-over-vaccine-mandate-ceo-says.html

Brownfield (Texas) Regional Medical Center, a rural hospital, will lose up to 25 percent of its employees if the vaccine mandate is enforced, CEO Jerry Jasper told KCBD. Losing those workers would probably shut down the hospital because some nurses have already quit to take jobs with nursing agencies that offer higher pay, according to the report. 

Not complying with the vaccine mandate and losing Medicare and Medicaid funding isn't an option for Brownfield Regional Medical Center. About 80 percent of the hospital's funding comes from Medicare and Medicaid, Mr. Jasper told KCBD. 

The authors of the book make one other observation on what we should see more of in situations of RADICAL UNCERTAINTY beyond simply admitting that  "I DON"T KNOW".

They suggest asking the question "WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?".

Kay and King explain.

The question 'What is going on here?' sounds banal, but it is not. In our careers we have seen repeatedly how people immersed in technicalities, engaged in day-to-day preoccupations, have failed to step back and ask, 'What is going on here?' We have made the mistake ourselves.

Indeed.

What is going on here?

I have not written about what is going on in Vietnam with Covid previously but it is a good place to ask "What is going on here"?

Vietnam was hailed for most of the last year as having almost no cases of Covid.

Six months ago a global think tank ranked Vietnam as #2 in the world for controlling Covid.

It had only 35 deaths from Covid in a nation of 97 million people.

It began a mass vaccination program in the middle of June.

What do cases look like in Vietnam now?

Is it a coincidence that cases starting rising in Vietnam at almost exactly the same time that mass vaccinations began?

What is going on here?

What is going on in Israel six weeks after they initiated their Booster shots?

What is going on here?

What is going on in the United States as we are introducing vaccine mandates and boosters?

No one was vaccinated at this time last year. We are nowhere close to where Dr. Fauci said we would be with the vaccines in place.

Cases are 4x as high as they were at the same time last year.

Deaths are 2x as high as they were last year.

What is going on here?

I would say we are in a period of RADICAL UNCERTAINTY.

Why then do the "experts" and our leaders seem to be so RADICALLY CERTAIN about what they are telling us is necessary?

Kay and King speak to that situation as well in their book.

"When experts claim knowledge they do not and could not have, they invite the response that people have 'had enough of experts'.

We are getting closer to that point every day.

That is not a radical thought. That is a certainty based on what is happening right now.

Target The Rich and Hit Everyone Else

The House Democrats unveiled their tax plan to (partially fund) their $3.5 trillion human infrastructure plan on Monday.

The tax proposal is estimated to raise $2.1 trillion in taxes over the next 10 years.

However, this is before the Democrats gives away $1.2 trillion in tax credits to other taxpayers for housing subsidies, child care, energy and other tax credits. That means the total net revenue gained over the next decade is only $871 billion.

As I predicted might happen a month ago, part of the money is to extend the current expanded refundable child tax credit through 2025 which was scheduled to be in place for only 2021 as a Covid relief measure.

The child tax credit is supposed to revert to a $2,000 annual amount in 2022. Let's see if that happens. It is never easy taking money away from anyone. That is especially true in an election year.

Let's put those tax increase dollars in context.

The Democrats want to increase spending by $3.5 trillion.

The federal government is already facing a $3 trillion budget deficit for the current fiscal year ending September.

This proposed tax increase is the largest in several decades and yet it does not come close to matching the proposed spending increase.

Beyond that, the tax increase only covers less than 10% of the annual current deficit spending of the United States!

Isn't it great to know that we are being guided by government leaders who want to insure we are on a sound financial platform for the future of those children that they claim to care so much about?

The Democrats are saying that their proposal would target rich corporations and individuals for the new revenue.

This would include raising the top individual tax rate to 39.6%. In addition, those with incomes above $5 million would be subjected to an additional surcharge of 3%. Capital gains rates would also increase from 20% to 25%.

CNBC reporter Robert Frank highlights what the top combined federal, state and local tax rates would be in some large population centers if the Democrat proposal becomes law.

I hope the voters in New York, California and New Jersey are not surprised by this. Large majorities in those places voted for Biden and the Democrats. They are getting what they voted for.

% of vote for Biden in 2020.

NYC   76%

CA      64%

NJ      57%

It makes you wonder how many "rich" people will be left in these areas after all is said and done?

The Democrats are also proposing to raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 25% and cut the estate tax exemption in half.

As bad as this may seem, the tax proposal is actually much less severe than Joe Biden's proposal.

The Wall Street Journal put this simplified chart together to compare current law, Biden's proposal and the House Democrat proposal.

Source; The Wall Street Journal

It is important to remember, that unlike most other countries, corporations in the United States also typically bear corporate state taxes as well.

Adding in the average state taxes brings the current U.S. tax rate to 25.7%. This means that the Democrat proposal really would raise the corporate levy to 30% when you compare it to other countries around the world.

For perspective, below are the 2021 corporate tax rates for other countries that the United States competes with economically or strategically.

Ireland                   12.5%

United Kingdom   19%

Russia                     20%

Switzerland            21.2%

Sweden                   22%

China                      25%

Canada                   26.7%

Korea                      27.5%

Japan                      29.7%

Germany                29.9%

In effect, the Democrat proposal would take the United States from about the middle of the pack in corporate taxes to again having one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world.

I understand that it is popular to dump on the rich. It is easy to argue that they should pay more. 

Of course, it doesn't seem to matter how much the "rich" pay. It is never enough as far as the liberals are concerned. There never seems to be an amount that is considered "fair".

Liberals also never seem to make the connection that the "rich" they demonize are the ones who risk their money and capital in creating jobs and opportunities for everyone else. Nothing happens in a free market economy unless those "rich" have the incentive to part with their money.

I am old enough to remember previous plans to "tax the rich."

In the 1990's, an excise tax was placed on luxury items such as expensive cars, private planes, yachts, jewelry and furs. It was intended to "tax the rich".

However, within a year of enactment, yacht sales had fallen by 86%.  An estimated 25,000 workers in boat building lost their jobs.  Sales of planes, jewelry, furs and luxury cars also suffered. Revenues from the tax came nowhere close to matching what was  projected.

The law was repealed less than three years later as thousands of workers lost their jobs in these industries. What happened? Instead of paying the tax the rich just stopped buying expensive cars, boats, aircraft, furs and jewelry. The tax did not hurt the rich. It did result in thousands of workers losing their jobs who made and sold these things to the rich.

The little revenue that was raised was more than offset by the taxes that disappeared as a result of the lost wages and the unemployment benefits that had to be paid to the workers who paid the price with their jobs.

It is the "rich" who also fund most of the philanthropic causes in the country. 55% of the charitable deductions claimed on 2018 tax returns were from those earning more than $1 million. according the IRS Statistics on Income. (2018 is the most recent year that data is available).

For example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City had its annual Met Gala fundraiser last night.

Tickets to the event were $35,000 each and tables ranged from $200,000-$300,000.

I guess it was just the perfect event for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to make a political statement with her dress for the evening.

A "Tax the Rich" dress at an event that has nothing but rich people attending?

Very classy.

Credit: CNN, Getty Images

 

Of course, AOC wanted to make it clear that she did not attend because she was "rich" She only attended because she was invited as an elected official and is a dedicated PUBLIC SERVANT.

AOC is worried about haters but she shows up with a dress telling everyone there that they need to pay more in taxes? 

Making a political statement at a fundraiser is an example of the civility that we are told is missing in society today?

I guess it would also be fine to have a woman show up in a "Choose Life" dress at a Planned Parenthood fundraiser or in a "Send Them Home" dress at a fundraiser for illegal immigrants. 

If you think this fashion statement is questionable consider what Kim Kardashian West wore to the Met Gala.

Credit: CNN, Getty Images

The theme of the Gala was "In America: A Lexicon of Fashion".

It is unclear to me where in the lexicon of American fashion this fits in?

Is she angling to be the next Bat Woman?

Is she showing solidarity with women now oppressed in Afghanistan by the Taliban?

Is she modeling a new look for personal protective equipment for the next phase of the pandemic?

What we saw at the Met Gala might be evidence that all rich people have cents in their bank account but that does not mean they all have common sense.

The reality is that most people with money got it because they have some sense and they keep their money by not doing something stupid with it. Most are not going to sit back and do nothing if someone wants to take it.

We saw it in the 1990's.

They might decide to buy a lake house and a small board rather than a luxury yacht. 

They might decide their wife does need a diamond necklace or fur for her birthday. Take her to Italy instead.

They might decide they don't need to risk their money on a new business when they will share more than half of the profits with the government.

They might decide they don't need to live in New York City or San Francisco. Miami or Austin will be just fine.

The fact is that when politicians put a target on the rich it is usually everyone else that gets hit.

The great economist Walter E. Williams explained why unintended consequences are so common when the "rich" are targeted in these tax raising schemes such as the luxury tax of the 1990's.

Congress repealed the luxury tax in 1993 after realizing it was a job killer and raised little net revenue. Why did congressional dreams of greater revenues turn into a nightmare? Kennedy, Mitchell and their congressional colleagues simply assumed that the rich would act the same after the imposition of the luxury tax as they did before and that the only difference would be more money in the government's coffers. Like most politicians then and now, they had what economists call a zero-elasticity vision of the world, a fancy way of saying they believed that people do not respond to price changes. People always respond to price changes. The only debatable issue is how much and over what period.

History may not repeat but it surely rhymes.

Is It Constitutional?

Joe Biden has announced that he is ordering the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to develop a rule that will require all employers with 100 or more employees to have all of their workers vaccinated or undergo weekly Covid-19 tests.

The rule would impact over 80 million private sector workers.

Let's take a look at the legal foundation that Biden is attempting to use to support this vaccine mandate in order to assess it legality and constitutionality.

What is OSHA? This article explains.

OSHA is a federal agency that was created with the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 to ensure safe and healthy conditions for workers. The act, signed by President Richard Nixon, aimed to ensure that employers provide workers with an environment that is “free from recognized hazards to safety and health, such as exposure to toxic chemicals, excessive noise levels, mechanical dangers, heat or cold stress, or unsanitary conditions,” according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s site.

Biden has ordered OSHA to act on the vaccine mandate presumably by using its "Emergency Temporary Standards" authority. OSHA lays out what that authority is on its website.

Under certain limited conditions, OSHA is authorized to set emergency temporary standards that take effect immediately and are in effect until superseded by a permanent standard. OSHA must determine that workers are in grave danger due to exposure to toxic substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or to new hazards and that an emergency standard is needed to protect them. Then, OSHA publishes the emergency temporary standard in the Federal Register, where it also serves as a proposed permanent standard. It is then subject to the usual procedure for adopting a permanent standard except that a final ruling should be made within six months. The validity of an emergency temporary standard may be challenged in an appropriate U.S. Court of Appeals.

Note that this provision is only to be used under "certain limited conditions", it must be an "emergency temporary standard" and OSHA must determine that workers are in "grave danger".

Considering we are 18 months into the Covid-19 pandemic it seems that using OSHA here is quite a stretch.

In particular, arguing that workers are in "grave danger" now after living and working with Covid-19 for 18 months (and with vaccines available for over 9 months) seems far fetched.

For context, here is a CDC chart that shows deaths by age from Covid from January 1, 2020 to September 8, 2021 for every age from 20 to 85+.

Covid Deaths by Age, 1/1/20-9/8/21
Source: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-by-Age-in-Years-/3apk-4u4f/data

How many workers are there who are 85 years or older? If they are working, how many are unvaccinated?

For perspective, here is a chart that compares Covid deaths to all deaths for those ages 64+. These are people who are not generally in the workforce and yet Covid deaths are still a mere fraction of deaths from other causes. In most cases, the numbers are not even visible in the chart.

Covid Deaths vs. All Deaths by Age (64-85+), 1/1/20-9/8/21
Source: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-by-Age-in-Years-/3apk-4u4f/data

The reality is that there have been more Covid deaths in those 85 years of age and over than all of the deaths for those 67 years and under since the beginning of the pandemic.

Is this a situation of "grave danger" to workers?

What makes even less sense is arguing that VACCINATED workers are in grave danger because of unvaccinated workers.

If the vaccine is as protective as Biden, Fauci, the FDA and CDC argue why would any worker who is vaccinated be in grave danger of a co-worker who is unvaccinated? 

Take a step back and consider why this is being done.

Is this being done because the vaccines work...or because they don't work...for their intended purpose of preventing disease?

If they were working as intended why would you need to protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated?

How well are the vaccinations working?

No one was vaccinated last year.

74% of the U.S. population eligible for the Covid vaccines has now received at least one dose. 93% of the age 65+ population has received at least one dose.

Almost two-thirds of the eligible population is fully vaccinated as this chart from the CDC shows.

This should have resulted in a massive success in taming the virus based on what we were told.

What has been the actual result?

There are currently 4 times as many cases and two times as many deaths from Covid right now as there were at this time last year.

This is justification for mandating vaccinations for everyone?

Those who argue that the vaccine mandate is constitutional typically point to the U.S. Supreme Court case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts which was decided in 1905.

In this case Massachusetts had passed a law allowing cities to require residents to be vaccinated against smallpox. The city of Cambridge adopted such an ordinance. The ordinance required that all adults over the age of 21 be vaccinated or be fined the sum of five dollars.

Jacobson was a Swedish immigrant who had been vaccinated against smallpox as a child in Sweden and had suffered an adverse reaction. His son also had experienced an adverse reaction when he was vaccinated. This was the basis for the refusal of Jacobson to comply.

Jacobson challenged the Massachusetts law claiming that his 14th Amendment rights had been violated.

There are several distinctions between the Jacobson case and what we see today with the potential Covid vaccine mandates.

First, the Supreme Court was ruling on a state law mandate. Further, that state law only authorized cities to pass a vaccine mandate within that state. That case did not involve a broad national mandate. It was localized and targeted. 

Second, smallpox has a much different risk profile than Covid. Smallpox had a case fatality rate of up to 30%. 

The overall case fatality rate (CFR) for Covid-19 right now in the United States (for all ages) is 1% according to World in Data..

I have seen other estimates that put it as high as 1.5%.

However, that number is heavily tilted upwards due to the mortality risk of those over age 85 where the CFR is over 10%. A large portion of the working age population is well below 1% and a significant number is close to .1%.

As this chart points out, the risk of death from Covid for those under age 40 is less than the risk of dying in an auto accident.

Source: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.09.21255193v1.full

For another perspective, here are California's reported confirmed cases and Covid deaths by age through September 8. This works out to a CFR of 1.5% overall (66,257 deaths/4,322,361 cases).

1.5% is a long way from 30%. 

The CFR for the working age population of .5% is a VERY LONG way from the 30% CFR of smallpox.

Cases and Deaths Associated with Covid-19 by Age Group in California
Source: https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/COVID-19-Cases-by-Age-Group.aspx

Finally, we have the penalty for non-compliance with the mandate.

In Jacobson, the penalty was a one-time fine of $5.

Biden, through the OSHA rule and the federal employee and contractor mandate, is suggesting that employees are being threatened with termination of their jobs and their loss of their livelihood.

Let's put that in context.

A $5 fine in 1905 inflated into 2021 dollars would be equivalent to $155.12 today.

If Jacobson is such persuasive precedent why is there not just a fine rather than threaten someone's job?

Source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1905?amount=5

It doesn't seem that the vaccine mandate penalty proposed by Biden is exactly proportional with what the penalty was in Jacobson.

Of course, it just not the worker who is being threatened in this proposal by Biden but OSHA is threatening all employers with a $14,000 fine for every violation involving each employee in which it does not enforce the mandate.

This employer penalty does not exactly seem proportional with the precedent of Jacobson either.

You can make up your own mind but none of this looks constitutional to me.

That is not to say that there might be times when our government would have the authority to infringe on individual rights for the greater good. It is a question of balance.

However, if this is such a time, and this Covid vaccine mandate is used as precedent for some other mandate or restriction on freedom in the future, I dare say there will not be much left of individual rights in the United States of America. 

If there is any doubt that all of this is a blatant attempt to subvert the U.S. Constitution consider the fact that Ron Klain, Biden's Chief of Staff, approvingly retweeted this tweet on Twitter shortly after the OSHA end-run was announced.

I guess he wanted the world to know how "clever" he was in planning all of this. After all, we know that Joe Biden was not capable of doing this by himself.

The problem is that it is an admission that the White House is trying to subvert the Constitution and individual constitutional protections because that is what they are trying to "work-around".

This may prove problematic when the mandate is challenged in court.

Source: https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/09/10/law-professor-points-out-how-bidens-chief-of-staff-may-have-already-blown-the-vaccine-mandate-n2595688?117

George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley, who also happens to be a Democrat, noticed (the retweet) and is explaining how Klain just created a headache for the administration.

"In the law, it is called an admission against interest or an out-of-court statement by a party that, when uttered, is against the party’s pecuniary, proprietary, or penal interests. In politics, it is called just dumb. White House chief of staff Ronald Klain offered a doozy this week when he admitted that the announced use of the authority of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for a vaccine mandate was a mere 'work around' of the constitutional limit imposed on the federal government," Turley writes on his website. "The problem is that the thing being 'worked around' is the Constitution. Courts will now be asked to ignore the admission and uphold a self-admitted evasion of constitutional protections."

The sad reality is that Biden, Klain and others who are doing this don't care whether what they are doing is constitutional or not.

Their plan is to just use their power to bully employers and Americans to get vaccinated no matter the facts, the data, the science, the law or the Constitution.

They realize they are in so deep with their Covid narrative that there is no return.

They told everyone that if they got vaccinated they could get rid of their masks and return to a normal life. 74% of eligible Americans believed that and did get vaccinated only to see cases quadruple and deaths doubled compared to a year ago.

They are making a bet to see if they can get a few more vaccinated and hope the numbers will come down (which they definitely will at some point with or without the vaccine) so they can claim that their actions made the difference.

They don't care about any harm they cause. Their only objective is to increase the vaccination rate by a few percentage points. 

Here is another Ron Klain tweet from a couple of days ago citing the vaccine mandate at the Veteran's Administration for frontline healthcare workers at VA hospitals that was announced seven weeks ago. 

He is bragging because they moved the fully vaccinated number from 77% to 82% in two months? 

Five points? Really? What exactly is the point?

Is five percentage points worth the disruption, dissension, division and the denigration of constitutional rights that these mandates cause?

Biden, Klain and the Democrats also need something to turn the discussion away from the failure of the Afghanistan withdrawal.

They would rather have their opposition, the media and the news cycle focused on something else.

We ARE in "grave danger".

However, it is not as a result of Covid-19.

It is because of the authoritarian and totalitarian attitudes that have taken control in the country.

Of course, anytime I hear about "grave danger" I cannot help but think of these lines from the movie, "A Few Good Men" starring Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson.

Source: http://www.subzin.com/quotes/M11625f12c/A+Few+Good+Men/Grave+danger%3F

If there is a time that we need a few good men (and women) it is now.

It just seems exceedingly difficult to find them.

Colleges, Israel, Mongolia and Covid

I have written before about the alarming number of confirmed Covid cases on college campuses which have mandated vaccinations for students, faculty and staff.

Duke University mandated the vaccine for all returning students in the Fall. It announced that it would terminate any employee who was not vaccinated by October 1 and that employee would never be allowed to work at Duke in the future.

When school started this Fall 98% of students were vaccinated. 92% of all employees were.

Since classes began students have been required to wear masks indoors and outdoors on campus. There is no indoor dining. Tents have been erected around campus for student meals.

Despite this, Covid cases at Duke are much higher than they were last year when no one was vaccinated.

Through September 6, Duke has had 736 positive cases since August when it started tracking cases for the Fall semester.

Source: https://coronavirus.duke.edu/covid-testing/

For the entire Fall semester last year of August 2-November 20 Duke had 241 cases when no one was vaccinated.

Source: https://coronavirus.duke.edu/covid-testing-old/fall-2020-duke-covid-testing-tracker/

We see a similar situation at Cornell University. 

Cornell has 95% of its students, faculty and staff vaccinated.

Last year between September 1 and September 7 Cornell reported 62 positive cases of Covid.

Source: https://covid.cornell.edu/testing/dashboard/

This year Cornell reported 180 for the same period---three times the number last year when no one was vaccinated.

Source: https://covid.cornell.edu/testing/dashboard/

I thought I would compare these results with three colleges that at this time last year were dealing with huge Covid case surges to see how they are doing this year.

Last year the University of Georgia had 1,417 Covid cases reported in the first week of September.

This year Georgia had 91.

Interestingly, there has been a Covid outbreak among the University of Georgia football team and staff in the last week. All of the cases were among those who had been vaccinated. Head Coach Kirby Smart said this spike in cases was higher than it was anytime in the last year and a half for his team

Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/ncaafb/georgia-football-coach-says-team-has-covid-19-spike-despite-high-vaccination-rate/ar-AAObRGh

During a teleconference with reporters Monday, Smart said three or four players will miss Saturday's game against the University of Alabama-Birmingham due to the coronavirus.

"For us, we're at our highest spike. And people are talking about vaccinations - well, these are people that are vaccinated. We're talking about breakthroughs, and so that concerns you not only for the players on your team that are unvaccinated, that are playing and not playing, because we want everybody to be safe," Smart said.

Last month, Smart said 90 percent of the team's players, staff members and coaches have been vaccinated against the virus, according to ESPN.

The University of Alabama had 2,378 Covid cases in the first three weeks of the Fall Semester in 2020 among students, faculty and staff.

In the first three weeks this year Alabama has had 416.

Alabama has a vaccination rate of 60% among its students.

My undergraduate alma mater, Miami University, had 1,084 Covid cases at this time last year despite the fact they were not even conducting in-person classes. However, many students were living in off campus housing and socializing when not doing online classes.

This year there are 88 cases (77 students and 11 staff) thru September 6, 2021 with in person classes and students living on campus.

Despite this, Miami is going to mandate vaccinations for the Second Semester  for all students, faculty and staff. Employees who are not vaccinated will be terminated. Students will not be allowed to enroll for the Winter Semester.

Is anyone else curious about what we are seeing in the data?

The colleges with low cases last year and vaccine mandates this year are seeing an explosion of cases right now.

The colleges with high cases last year and no vaccine mandates this year are seeing only a fraction of the cases they saw last year.

What is going on?

Could it be that natural infection has conveyed a much higher degree of immunity and protection against transmission to the community than the vaccines have?

Is this not similar to what we are seeing in comparing the experience of Sweden and Israel?

Sweden did no hard lockdowns, did not employ strict mask mandates and kept their schools open. They focused their efforts on protecting the most vulnerable. Israel did the opposite.

Israel also was a world leader in vaccinating its population. It is already well into distributing booster shots to its population.

Sweden was slower in rolling out vaccines but is now very close to Israel's numbers without considering the boosters.

Sweden was hit pretty hard in two separate earlier waves. However, Sweden has almost no cases of Covid right now while Israel is rising.

More importantly, Sweden has had almost no Covid deaths for the last two months while Israel has seen a sharp increase over the same time period.

Sweden may just be lucky right now and will soon see a seasonality surge as the weather turns colder in that country.

Israel may find its cases going the other way due to more seasonable temperatures in that country.

However, could it be possible that higher natural immunity in the colleges that bore the greatest brunt of the pandemic last year is keeping cases down this year much better than the vaccines are doing?

That may also be the reason that Sweden is faring better than Israel right now.

If you want one more mystery consider this one.

Mongolia was one of the few countries on the face of the earth that had almost no Covid cases for a year into the pandemic.

This chart shows cumulative cases from January 22, 2020 to February 1, 2021.

You can barely see Mongolia at the bottom of the graph.

In February, 2021 Mongolia started vaccinating its population. It has now vaccinated more people than most countries in the world.

Since then, Mongolia has gone from among the nations with the lowest incidence of Covid in the world to where it is now seeing more Covid cases than anywhere else in the world.

Almost all of these cases have arisen after they started the mass vaccination of their population.

There is only one country that is having an almost identical experience right now.

Israel.

What is going on?

How could any of this occur if the vaccines were truly preventing disease and the transmission of the virus?

After seeing this data how do we know that the vaccines are not somehow facilitating the spread of the virus and the development of new variants?

Now consider that the President of the United States wants to mandate that almost every American must be vaccinated and he is going to put the POWER of the federal government (and the dollars it controls) to make sure it happens. 

Where in any of the data above does it suggest that this strategy is the best move now to curb the pandemic?

If this is supported by the SCIENCE why does the DATA not support the science?

If we only had someone who could answer the questions I pose in these pages!

What Is The Truth About Ivermectin?

I first heard about the drug Ivermectin a little over a year ago in my research and reading about Covid.

It was a story out of Australia about a doctor in that country who stated that his work indicated that a triple therapy of Ivermectin, zinc and Doxycycline were all approved, available and cost-effective therapeutics that could be used to treat Covid effectively.

This is what Dr. Thomas Borody said about the use of Ivermectin and the other drugs in August of last year.

 "We have a therapy that can fight COVID-19. The medications have been around for 50 years, they are cheap, FDA and TGA approved and have an outstanding safety profile. Why are we just waiting around for a vaccine? To save lives we should be using whatever is safe and available right now. We could lead the world in this fight.

"Australia has some of the best medical and science people in the world -indeed the Ivermectin connection was first discovered by Dr. Kylie Wagstaff's team at Monash University in April. How long do we need to wait before Australian politicians get behind Australian medical science and use 'war room' tactics with safe and approved medications.

Bear in mind that Borody is no ordinary physician and researcher. He is famous for developing the cure for peptic ulcers using a triple antibiotic therapy that is used the world over and has been estimated to save countless lives and millions of dollars in health care costs.

I filed the name Ivermectin away as I had not seen it mentioned in any reports from U.S. doctors at the time.

In my research I found that Ivermectin is a drug typically used to treat parasitic tropical infections such as river blindness. There is also an animal version that is typically prescribed for the treatment of worms in animals.

The drug has been so successful in humans that the discoverers of the drug received the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 2015. It was the first time in over six decades the award was given for the treatment of an infectious disease.

Over the succeeding months I began to see more mentions of Ivermectin being used successfully by U.S. physicians. It did not get the publicity that Hydroxychloroquine received but it was steadily  gaining adherents based on my reading and research.

Ivermectin started to get a lot of attention when Dr. Pierre Kory testified before a U.S. Senate committee last December where he made this statement.

"Mountains of data have emerged from many centers and countries around the world showing the miraculous effectiveness of ivermectin, it basically obliterates transmission of this virus. If you take it, you will not get sick."

Kory is not some doctor on the fringes of the medical community either. From 2015-2020 he was an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin and Critical Care Service Chief, Medical Director, Trauma and Life Support Center at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, Madison, WI. Since the Covid pandemic struck he has dedicated himself to treating critically ill Covid patients in New York City, Greenville, SC and Milwaukee, WI. 

A week after Kory testified to the Senate Committee the U.S. FDA (coincidentally?)  issued a statement that people should not take Ivermectin to prevent or treat Covid. The FDA stated that some lab studies had been conducted with the drug but additional testing was necessary to determine whether it was appropriate to use against Covid.

I might note that this statement was made almost nine months ago and there is no word on that additional testing. Why?

The Covid vaccines were conceived, developed, tested and fully deployed in less time.

Ivermectin has been on pharmacy shelves for decades. Almost 4 billion doses have been administered in that time around the world. It is generally considered one of the safest drugs in use today. 

The FDA can approve a completely new and unique vaccine and attest to its safety and efficacy in "preventing" Covid in under nine months but it can't perform tests on Ivermectin in treating Covid in over nine months?

I don't know if Ivermectin is as effective as Drs. Kory, Borody and hundreds of other doctors around the world claim it is.

It just seems that we are owed some truth and honesty about it rather than dismissing it out of hand with no real effort to study it comprehensively.

If you have been paying attention there is a full-fledged effort recently underway to completely discredit and damage Ivermectin and the doctors who have spoken out in favor of its usage.

If you don't believe that, consider this tweet that was actually published by the FDA.

Apparently the FDA has forgotten that it approved the use of Ivermectin for human use back in 1996.

The CDC also recommends that all refugees from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean should take Ivermectin as presumptive therapy for intestinal parasites after they arrive in the United States.

This sounds like it would apply to all of the Afghan refugees coming into the country as well as all of the illegal immigrants flooding our Southern border right now.

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/immigrantrefugeehealth/guidelines/overseas-guidelines.html

 

Ivermectin is safe for refugees but not for anyone else?

We also had someone who claimed he was an emergency room physician in Oklahoma who said that gunshot victims could not get treated at the hospitals he served at because there were too many cases of people overdosing on Ivermectin.

This story went viral and was covered by hundreds of media outlets including Rachel Maddow and Rolling Stone.

The only problem was the main hospital which the doctor referenced stated that they had no cases of Ivermectin overdoses and no one was being denied care. The doctor who made the claim also had not worked at the hospital in over two months.

Source: https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/rolling-stone-horse-dewormer-hit-piece-debunked-after-hospital-says-no-ivermectin?fbclid=IwAR2I6iQ3ExaC4NBiDDk9I3uEITkc4BKiqdOnYQYrXAiBHxlDbpiiuJ3QAi8

The AP also published a story claiming that 70% of the calls to the Mississippi Poison Control hotline were from people who had ingested Ivermectin. It turns out the actual number was 2%,

For context, consider that there are over 100,000 calls each year to Poison Control centers in the United States with concerns regarding Tylenol that results in 56,000 annual ER visits and 500 deaths. When has that ever been reported in a breathless AP story?

It makes you wonder if something else is at play?

Do stories like this just get published by coincidence?

If you want an excellent read about the doctors who believe in the efficacy and safety of Ivermectin in treating Covid I highly recommend reading this article by Michael Capuzzo.

The article appeared in Mountain Home which is a magazine that Capuzzo and his wife own. Don't let the fact that this article appeared in a relatively unknown regional magazine fool you. Capuzzo is a 4-time Pulitzer prize-nominated reporter with the Philadelphia Inquirer who is a graduate of Northwestern University. The article is well-written and well researched. Warning-it is long---about 10,000 words.

Source: https://www.mountainhomemag.com/2021/05/01/356270/the-drug-that-cracked-covid

If Capuzzo and the doctors he profiles in the article are correct, why isn't Ivermectin our first line of defense against Covid?

For those who don't want to read the entire article let me provide you with a few quotes.

Dr. Paul Marik an endowed professor at the Eastern Virginia Medical School and a world-renowned clinician-researcher who is the second most published critical care doctor in history with more than 500 peer-reviewed papers. 

Marik, along with Kory, have been the leading advocates for Ivermectin use in the United States.

An over-the-counter medicine in France, Ivermectin is safer than Tylenol and “one of the safest drugs ever given to humanity,” Dr. Marik said, with “3.7 billion doses administered in forty years, that’s B for billion, and only extremely rare serious side effects.

An earlier Australian study, reported in the journal Antiviral Research, showed that Ivermectin, which blocked other RNA viruses like Dengue virus, yellow fever virus, Zika virus, West Nile virus, influenza, the Avian flu, and HIV1/AIDS in vitro, decimated the coronavirus in vitro, wiping out “essentially all viral material by 48 hours.” But more research was needed in human beings.

Marik conducted that research in university trials. No, they were not the gold standard randomized clinical trials that usually can only be done by Big Pharma because of the costs. However, the efficacy and safety of Penicillin wasn't confirmed by RCT trials either when it was introduced. Doctors just observed that it worked.

But by October Marik’s concerns were answered. The studies were well-designed university trials that showed amazing anti-COVID-19 activity at the normal doses used to treat parasites. Though small and endlessly diverse by large, Western big pharma “one-size-fits all” random control trials, the Ivermectin studies were a mosaic of hundreds of scientists and many thousands of patients in trials all over the world, all showing the same remarkable efficacy against all phases of COVID-19 no matter what dose or age or severity of the patient. “Penicillin never was randomized,” Marik says. “It just obviously worked. Ivermectin obviously works.”

Marik was astonished. “If you were to say, tell me the characteristics of a perfect drug to treat COVID-19, what would you ask for?” he said. “I think you would ask firstly for something that’s safe, that’s cheap, that’s readily available, and has anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties. People would say, “That’s ridiculous. There could not possibly be a drug that has all of those characteristics. That’s just unreasonable. But we do have such a drug. The drug is called Ivermectin.”

If it was universally distributed at a dose that costs ten American cents in India and about the cost of a Big Mac in the United States, he said, Ivermectin would save countless lives, crush variants, eliminate the need for endless big pharma booster shots, and end the pandemic all over the world.

There were no effective, lifesaving, approved COVID-19 treatments that doctors had used to slow down or stop the coronavirus in the history of the pandemic, in any phase of the disease, except the one, corticosteroids, that Marik and company had discovered.

Now they had discovered another treatment, even more powerful, that could save the world.

The only problem was Drs. Marik, Kory and their compatriots could not get anyone to listen.

Why is Ivermectin under such attack by the medical and pharmaceutical establishment?

It is difficult to understand using standard reasoning particularly as there apparently are no early treatments that Dr. Fauci and the medical establishment endorsed well over a year into the pandemic.

And if there is one thing that is important in treating Covid it is to get EARLY TREATMENT. Too many are told to stay home, rest and go to the ER if they have breathing issues. If you are going to the hospital under those circumstances you are already behind the curve.

On November 11, 2020, Dr. Fauci co-authored a paper for JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Therapy for Early COVID-19, A Critical Need,” explaining that early treatments “to prevent disease progression and longer-term complications are urgently needed.”

It might be argued that Fauci has now endorsed monoclonal antibody treatments but this curiously was only done after the FDA approval of the Pfizer vaccine a few weeks ago.

One of the international Covid doctors who supports the use of Ivermectin may have explained it better than anyone. 

The doctors promoting Ivermectin are too close to affecting the most sensitive organ on humans--the wallet.

In Argentina, Professor and doctor Hector Carvallo, whose prophylactic studies are renowned by other researchers, says all his scientific documentation for Ivermectin is quickly scrubbed from the Internet. “I am afraid,” he wrote to Marik and his colleagues, “we have affected the most sensitive organ on humans: the wallet...”

What is the truth about Ivermectin?

Is it useless as a treatment for Covid? That is why my doctor told me.

Is it dangerous? My doctor told me he would not prescribe it because if I died after using it he could get sued.

Or is it just a threat to someone's wallet? 

If Ivermectin works would there be as much demand for the vaccines? For the boosters?  

It almost assuredly would change the entire risk/benefit profile in taking the vaccine for millions of people.

It most definitely would decimate the argument for vaccine mandates.

This is the way some look at the truth about Ivermectin on Twitter.

Is it just a coincidence as well that Merck and Pfizer are both working on anti-viral drugs that are very similar to the formulation of Ivermectin but would probably cost about $3,000 per dose compared to the $2 cost for Ivermectin which is a generic medicine not under patent.

Is Ivermectin getting too close to that most sensitive of all organs?

What do we make of the fact that in Africa there is a sharp division in countries that use Ivermectin regularly to treat parasitic infections versus those that don't?

Is this just a coincidence?

What about this?

Here are the results of two states in India that implemented a mass Ivermectin home program.

Source: https://covid19criticalcare.com/ivermectin-in-covid-19/epidemiologic-analyses-on-covid19-and-ivermectin/

 

Source: https://covid19criticalcare.com/ivermectin-in-covid-19/epidemiologic-analyses-on-covid19-and-ivermectin/

And this?

This chart shows the experience in Peru which was using Ivermectin treatment aggressively until a new President came into office and put restrictions on its use.

Source: https://covid19criticalcare.com/ivermectin-in-covid-19/epidemiologic-analyses-on-covid19-and-ivermectin/

They may all be mere coincidences.

Ivermectin may have nothing to do with the results since there are a lot of factors in the rise and fall of cases and deaths with Covid.

It also might be a coincidence when we hear about the success patients have had after being treated with Ivermectin. The argument is made that they might have gotten better anyway. There are too many confounding factors to make a definitive statement. That very well could be true.

However, the same could be true of all the testimonials I am hearing these days about people who have contracted Covid after being vaccinated. How often do I hear "thankfully they were vaccinated or it would have been much worse"? How do we really know that? Who is to say they would not have a mild case or recovered without the vaccine? Millions did in the year before vaccines were available.

Like many things about Covid, I don't know.

Unfortunately, too many others think they know, when they don't, but they persist in telling us they KNOW ALL.

With Ivermectin, as with many other things involving Covid, most of us are left not knowing what to believe.

I saw a recent quote from Friedrich Von Hayek which summarizes my thoughts pretty well on Ivermectin and a lot of other things right now.

I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much undetermined and unpredictable, to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.

                                                  -Friedrich Von Hayek, Nobel Prize lecture, 1974

May truth (whatever it may be) prevail in the end.