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| Sam Adams, Father of the American Revolution |
Thomas Paine wrote that “character is better kept than recovered.” The same proposition applies, perhaps even more forcefully, to our essential liberties.
Very few people will see, splashed for days and months on the front page of their newspapers, the results of a recent the Johns Hopkins meta-analysis.
Two years after Coronavirus leapt from China to the United
States, the “science” of the novel -- very likely lab-produced -- virus has
entered its scientific stage, which is to say: We know things now that were not
known two years ago when the “science” of Coronavirus was yet in its infancy
and prone to questionable speculation, much of it political in nature.
To put the matter in political terms, Fauci-science, an odd mixture of politically directed speculation and personal aggrandizement, is now being led to the scaffold.
May it rest in peace.
The John Hopkins study – “A
literature review and meta-analysis of the effects of lockdowns on covid-19
mortality” -- dethrones the notion that business shutdowns were
“scientifically” necessary to control the spread of Coronavirus.
Science is not tiddlywinks, and the Hopkins meta-study – an
examination of many scientific studies involving the relationship of
Coronavirus shutdown policy to the advancement of the public good -- is complex
and suitably nuanced. The authors' field of study is extremely broad. The
authors have reviewed more than 34 separate medical and sociological studies
with a view to examining the central question of their own analysis: Do the
benefits of the prolonged COVID lockdowns outweigh the costs?
“The use of lockdowns,” the meta-study concludes, “is a
unique feature of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns have not been used to such a
large extent during any of the pandemics of the past century. However,
lockdowns during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic have had
devastating effects. They have
contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing
schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and
undermining liberal democracy. These costs to society must be compared to the
benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best. Such
a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of
hand as a pandemic policy instrument.”
A separate University of New Hampshire study
probes the real world economic consequences of the shutdown, state by state.
From February to April of 2020, Connecticut lost 292,400 jobs. The state has
recovered 205,800 jobs – and loads of cash from various sources. If the state’s
private economy has lost money, state government has engorged itself in the post
Coronavirus period.
Connecticut Public Radio reports
gleefully that in the fast approaching post-coronavirus year, “Increasing
income, sales and corporation tax receipts have state finances finishing more
than $2.2 billion in the black this fiscal year — a whopping cushion
approaching 10% of the entire budget.”
The state’s surplus is the amount of money that Connecticut
taxpayers have been overcharged. Not to worry, the Lamont administration is
willing to share a tiny portion of the boodle, $336 million, with a carefully
designated minority of taxpayers in the form of progressive tax credits.
Theoretically, progressive taxation shifts the burden of paying taxes from cossetted
poor to the despised rich – not always the case in fact, as any competent
financial advisor with testify. And there is a real difference between a tax
cut and a tax credit.
Former Governor Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s
income tax, must be crying in his craft beer as he traces his ever disappearing
“flat rate” tax of 1991 and, coincidentally, the precipitous rise in state
spending in the post income tax era -- from $7.5 billion, during last
pre-income tax budget, to $22 billion.
Most of the real scientific data – medical, sociological and
economic – that illuminates objective reality confirms common sense intuitions
that perceptions governing political positions taken in 2020 must be adjusted
in the light of changed circumstances and new data present in 2022.
We have in 2022 new tools in the medical toolbox that can --
if distributed properly to groups most in danger from the Coronavirus and its variants,
i.e. the elderly and patients exhibiting co-morbidity – save lives sacrificed
early on to a medical event about which little was known; research not available
in 2020 has alerted us to the broad effectiveness of natural immunity, labeled
by some doctors “nature’s vaccine”, that multiple studies find is more efficacious
than vaccines currently on the market; masking is a prophylactic mostly, not a Coronavirus
preventative; viruses generally produce strains that are less lethal and more
contagious.
Oddly, many people in Connecticut, relying on their own
perceptions and solid common sense, appear to be aligned with scientific perceptions
that have necessarily changed along with additional data. Science is, after
all, an additive process, and it is not considered shameful in the halls of
science to adjust perceptions as new data becomes available.
Naturally, there always will be in a flow environment people
who perversely will not readjust their policies to changed circumstances. But these
tend to be politicians rather than real scientists. Science breaks down walls,
politics erects them.
Among Connecticut politicians, some – too few - are committed
to advancing small “r” republican government. History, not yet wholly distorted
by cultural anarchists, tells us that the American Constitutional Republic is the
best mode of advancing the common good to a virtuous, thoughtful public, the
real watchmen of our imprescriptible liberties.
These people would like their republic back.
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