Many states, cities and counties are about to, suddenly, run out of money. Wages won’t be paid. Services won’t be delivered. Institutions will shut down abruptly. Many state colleges may fold. And yet most state and local political and administrative leaders just sit and watch. Voters will not be pleased.
Millions of American workers filed for unemployment insurance during the past two weeks. That is a record and represents a collapse of our local economies. Across the country, in every state, county and city, businesses have been shut down, and many will not return after the coronavirus crisis is over. Tens of millions have lost jobs, homes, savings and retirement incomes that will never return. Owners of rental property will go under when their loan payments come due and renters can’t pay. Across the country, state and local economies are being badly damaged — many of them permanently.
The result is that state and local tax revenues will plummet. States and localities will burn through any reserves they’ve maintained like wildfire. Since most of our politicians and government managers have been raised during a decade of expanding economies, their first instinct will be to wait and then panic and then raise taxes to cover shortfalls — perhaps a special “coronavirus surtax.” Taxpayers across the country have tolerated various forms of high state and local taxes; the politicians would naturally ask, “Why should now be any different?”
But it is different. The resulting increased tax burden would be a disaster. Businesses that were barely hanging on would go under. Workers and homeowners who were barely surviving would go under. State and local tax bases would collapse even faster. There would be social unrest, possibly requiring martial law. People would migrate from high-tax states toward new jobs, accelerating a downward spiral. These large migrations would make the 2020 census results nonsense.
The only answer for the states, counties and cities that want to survive is to slash budgets now — probably 30 to 50 percent — eliminate all nonessential spending and reduce taxes today. Business leaders know that, in these types of situations, the only way to save a company is to cut costs immediately. There is no other answer, and those who act first and most aggressively are the most successful in saving the company and the greatest number of its employees. In short, “fiscal distancing” — that is, separating politicians from taxpayers’ money by cutting budgets and taxes now — is literally the only useful thing that state and local governments can do to prevent further economic and social catastrophe.
There is actually no other significant role that states and local governments can play in saving their economies, tax bases and quality of life. Only the federal government can provide truly useful, significant financial help to businesses and individuals during this historic disaster because only the federal government can print money in a crisis. Cutting taxes is the only state and local option to help their economies. Spending extra money now is throwing rocks into their own lifeboats.
I’ve talked to and written to many state and local officials over the past couple of weeks. Their recorded messages say they are all “working nonstop on coronavirus task forces.” Not to be rude, but most of that is a complete waste of time and public resources. With few exceptions, little or nothing useful will come of that. Only private businesses, individuals and the federal government are able to address this problem. For the most part, state and local governments will be in the way, except for critical, essential services such as police forces, fire departments and health care. Nearly everything else must go, now.
Of course, I’m not optimistic that many officials or politicians at the state or local levels will take massive budget cuts or slashing taxes seriously — yet. They were raised in a different world of explosive economic growth. Most would prefer to promote vanity and virtue-signaling projects from their towering sandcastles they’ve built with taxpayer money over the past couple of decades, even as their castles crumble around them. They could never grasp that cutting taxes is the only tool they have to preserve their states, counties and cities. The concept is far beyond their political vocabulary — none of them could grasp the public finance, let alone the Darwinian game theory, aspects of the enormous challenge in front of them.
States are now furiously competing for ventilators. Tomorrow they will be fighting for taxpayers. Their primary (only) goal today should be to support and save their local economies — businesses, homeowners and other taxpayers — so that they have a foundation left on which to build later. If they kill off their tax base or drive businesses and taxpayers out of their states or localities, they will have poured salt on their fields and they will starve in the future. Their political careers will be over.
And so, as the coronavirus preys on the weakest human bodies, it also preys on the weakest state and local politicians. We can only hope that the fiscal mortality rate among those will be lower than the models suggest. In the end, though, the ruthless force of American politics probably will claim a new crop of unexpecting victims.
On March 24 Bill Gates gave a highly revelatory 50-minute interview to Chris Anderson. Anderson is the Curator of TED, the non-profit that runs the TED Talks. The Gates interview is the second in a new series of daily ‘Ted Connects’ interviews focused on COVID-19. The series’s website says that: TED Connects: Community and Hope is a free, live, daily conversation series featuring experts whose ideas can help us reflect and work through this uncertain time with a sense of responsibility, compassion and wisdom.”
Anderson asked Gates at 3:49 in the video of the interview – which well over three million views now – about a ‘Perspective’ article by Gates that was published February 28 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“You wrote that this could be the once-in-a-century pandemic that people have been fearing. Is that how you think of it, still?” queried Anderson.
“Well, it’s awful to say this but, we could have a respiratory virus whose case fatality rate was even higher. If this was something like smallpox, that kills 30 percent of people. So this is horrific,” responded Gates.
“But, in fact, most people even who get the COVID disease are able to survive. So in that, it’s quite infectious – way more infectious than MERS [Middle East Respiratory Syndrome] or SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome] were. [But] it’s not as fatal as they were. And yet the disruption we’re seeing in order to knock it down is really completely unprecedented.”
Gates reiterates the dire consequences for the global economy later in the interview.
“We need a clear message about that,” Gates said starting at 26:52.
“It is really tragic that the economic effects of this are very dramatic. I mean, nothing like this has ever happened to the economy in our lifetimes. But … bringing the economy back and doing [sic] money, that’s more of a reversible thing than bringing people back to life. So we’re going to take the pain in the economic dimension, huge pain, in order to minimize the pain in disease and death dimension.”
However, this goes directly against the imperative to balance the benefits and costs of the screening, testing and treatment measures for each ailment – as successfully promulgated for years by, for example, the Choosing Wisely campaign – to provide the maximum benefit to individual patients and society as a whole.
As noted in an April 1 article in OffGuardian, there may be dramatically more deaths from the economic breakdown than from COVID-19 itself.
“By all accounts, the impact of the response will be great, far-reaching, and long-lasting,”
Kevin Ryan wrote in the article. Ryan estimated that well over two million people will likely die from the sequelae of the lock-downs and other drastic measures to enforce ‘social distancing.’
Millions could potentially die from suicide, drug abuse, lack of medical coverage or treatment, poverty and lack of food access, on top of other predictable social, medical and public-health problems stemming from the response to COVID-19.
Gates and Anderson did not touch on any of those sequelae. Instead, they focused on rapidly ramping up testing and medical interventions for COVID-19.
Gates said at 30:29 in the interview that he and a large team are moving fast to test anti-virals, vaccines and other therapeutics and to bring them to market as quickly as possible.
The Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust with support from Mastercard and now others, created this therapeutic accelerator to really triage out [candidate therapeutics]…
You have hundreds of people showing up and saying, ‘Try this, try that.’ So we look at lab assays, animal models, and so we understand which things should be prioritized for these very quick human trials that need to be done all over the world.”
The accelerator was launched March 10 with approximately $125 million in seed funding. Three days later Gates left Microsoft.
Not long before that, on January 23, Gates’s organization the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced it will fund three programs to develop COVID-19 vaccines. These are the advancing of DNA-vaccine candidates against MERS and Lassa fever, the development of a “‘molecular clamp’ platform” that “enables targeted and rapid vaccine production against multiple viral pathogens,” and the manufacture and Phase 1 clinical study of an mRNA vaccine against COVID.
“The programs will leverage rapid response platforms already supported by CEPI as well as a new partnership. The aim is to advance nCoV-2019 vaccine candidates into clinical testing as quickly as possible,” according to a news release.
Then at 32:50 in the video, Anderson asked whether the blood serum from people who have recovered from a COVID infection can be used to treat others.
“I heard you mention that one possibility might be treatments from the serum, the blood serum of people who had had the disease and then recovered. So I guess they’re carrying antibodies,” said Anderson.
“Talk a bit about that and how that could work and what it would take to accelerate that.”
[Note that Anderson did not ask Gates about, instead, just letting most of the population – aside from people most vulnerable to serious illness from the infection, who should be quarantined — be exposed to COVID-19 and as a result very likely recover and develop life-long immunity. As at least one expert has observed, “as much as ninety-nine percent of active cases [of COVID-19] in the general population are ‘mild’ and do not require specific medical treatment” to recover.]
“This has always been discussed as, ‘How could you pull that off?’” replied Gates.
“So people who are recovered, it appears, have very effective antibodies in their blood. So you could go, transfuse them and only take out white cells, the immune cells.” However, Gates continued, he and his colleagues have dismissed that possibility because it’s “fairly complicated – compared to a drug we can make in high volume, you know, the cost of taking it out and putting it back in probably doesn’t scale as well.”
Then a few seconds later, at 33:45, Gates drops another bomb:
We don’t want to have a lot of recovered people…
To be clear, we’re trying – through the shut-down in the United States – to not get to one percent of the population infected. We’re well below that today, but with exponentiation, you could get past that three million [people or approximately one percent of the U.S. population being infected with COVID-19 and the vast majority recovering]. I believe we will be able to avoid that with having this economic pain.”
It appears that rather than let the population be exposed to the virus and most develop antibodies that give them natural, long-lasting immunity to COVID-19, Gates and his colleagues far prefer to create a vast, hugely expensive, new system of manufacturing and selling billions of test kits, and in parallel very quickly developing and selling billions of antivirals and vaccines.
And then, when the virus comes back again a few months later and most of the population is unexposed and therefore vulnerable, again selling billions of test kits and medical interventions.
Right after that, at 34:14, Gates talked about how he sees things rolling out from there.
Eventually what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person…
…Because you don’t want people moving around the world where you’ll have some countries that won’t have it under control, sadly.
You don’t want to completely block off the ability for people to go there and come back and move around.
So eventually there will be this digital immunity proof that will help facilitate the global reopening up.”
[Some time on the afternoon of March 31 the last sentence of this quote was edited out of the official TED video of the interview. Fortunately, recordings of the complete interview are archived elsewhere.]
In the October 2019 Event 201 novel-corona virus-pandemic simulation co-sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and a division of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a poll that was part of the simulation said that 65% of people in the U.S. would be eager to take a vaccine for COVID-19, “even if it’s experimental.”
This will be tremendously lucrative.
Vaccines are very big business: this Feb. 23 CNBC article, for example, describes the vaccine market as six times bigger than it was 20 years ago, at more than $35 billion annually today, and providing a $44 return for every $1 invested in the world’s 94 lowest-income countries.
Notably, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – which has an endowment of $52 billion – has given more than $2.4 billion to the World Health Organization (WHO) since 2000, according to a 2017 Politico article. (While over the same time frame countries have reduced their contributions to the world body, particularly after the 2008-2009 depression, and now account for less than one-quarter of the WHO’s budget.) The WHO is now coordinating approximately 50 groups around the world that are working on candidate vaccines against COVID-19.
The Politico article quotes a Geneva-based NGO representative as saying Gates is “treated liked a head of state, not only at the WHO, but also at the G20,” and that Gates is one of the most influential people in global health.
Meanwhile, officials around the world are doing their part to make sure everyone social distances, self-isolates and/or stay locked down.
For example, here’s Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Eileen DE Villa, at her and Toronto Mayor John Tory’s March 30 press briefing:
“We find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic. We should expect some more people will get sick – and for some, sadly, will die.
This is why it is so important to stay at home to reduce virus spread. And to protect front-line workers, healthcare workers and our essential workers, so they can continue to protect us. People shouldn’t have to die, people shouldn’t have to risk death taking care of us because others won’t practice social distancing or physical distancing.”
Yet look how close Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. David Williams, is sitting to Haley Chazan, Senior Manager, Media Relations, for Christine Elliott, Deputy Premier and Minister of Health of Ontario.
This was on Friday, March 27, just before the start of that day’s daily press conference by Dr. Williams and Ontario’s Associate Medical Officer of Health Dr. Barbara Yaffe:
They were sitting two seats, or just a couple of feet, apart. A short time later Chazan got up and stood even closer to Dr. Williams for a little while:
Dr. Williams and Chazan do not live together. Rather, Dr. Williams very likely knows – just as Gates knows – that there is little any reason to worry about being in close contact with other people unless you or they are vulnerable to developing a severe illness from COVID-19. He surely knows, also, that if you contract COVID-19 and you’re otherwise healthy you’ll very likely have few symptoms, if any, and recover quickly. And that this exposure in fact is beneficial because in the process you will develop antibodies to the virus and have natural, long-lasting immunity to it.
Yet in the March 27 press conference, just like all the others he has participated in during the COVID-19 crisis, Dr. Williams lectured the public about maintaining social distancing. He told people not to go outside on the coming weekend to enjoy the nice weather because, otherwise, they might walk past someone and not be two metres apart.
Dr. Williams is among the large cadre of powerful officials who’ve crashed the global economy by forcing tens of millions of small- and medium-sized businesses to close in the name of the need for forced, severe, social distancing and lock-downs.
They’ve shattered society, suspended most civil liberties and prohibited most activities and connections that kept people mentally and physically healthy. At the same time the officials have prioritized COVID-19 care over everything else and, as a result, severely limited billions of people’s access to life-saving healthcare services ranging from acquiring medication and blood transfusions to having organ transplants and cancer surgeries.
* * *
Rosemary Frei has an MSc in molecular biology from a faculty of medicine and was a freelance medical journalist for 22 years. She is now an independent investigative journalist in Canada. You can find her recent detailed investigative analysis of COVID here and follow her on Twitter.
The Coronavirus is reminding everyone that you cannot rely on government and that ultimately it is the private sector that will provide the solutions. Many non-medical government officials and members of the media are predicting massive cases of COVID-19 and death, when in fact no one can predict the outcome. What we do know is that government has created a full-blown national panic, when at this point the normal flu season is far more deadly.
Decentralization is critical to a functioning society but often precluded by federal regulations.
The Washington Postreported the following about the Centers for Disease Control:
The problems started in early February, at a CDC laboratory in Atlanta.
A technical manufacturing problem, along with an initial decision to test only a narrow set of people and delays in expanding testing to other labs, gave the virus a head start to spread undetected — and helped perpetuate a false sense of security that leaves the United States dangerously behind.
Tests begin with the CDC to ensure quality, which is exactly the wrong approach. It assumes the government can outperform the best medical industry in the world. Even at this hour the CDC has failed, shipping test kits that are defective.
The CDC does not have a solution, but it also becomes the classic blocker to progress. Labs cannot act without a lengthy approval process from CDC and the FDA. These government controls violate the principle of subsidiarity (problems should be solved at the lowest level possible). Ultimately care is provided by local hospitals, care facilities, and labs.
South Korea’s rapid testing allowed for early treatment and containment of the virus. These test kits were created in three weeks. Many labs in the U.S. could have solved the test kit problem but were restrained by the FDA and CDC. The South Koreans offered to help us, but was the CDC listening? Evidently not.
At the president’s request on Friday, America’s robust private sector, including Walmart, Walgreens, CVS, Roche Laboratories, and LabCorp, came up with a solution for mass testing. Roche has received fast-track FDA approval for its COVID-19 diagnostic test. This testing will be done on a drive-thru basis in parking lots. This minimizes contact and allows for mass testing of thousands across the country. The more Americans are tested, resulting in a lower death rate percentage, the more the testing will have a calming effect on our citizens.
Americans consider regulators and government to be sacrosanct, but in fact government agencies are slow and often fail us. Think of the FAA, which allowed Boeing engineers to bypass basic engineering standards, resulting in the crash of two Boeing 737 Max airliners and the grounding of 900 planes around the world.
We all know that anytime we expect service from the government, it will be slow and painful vs. the private sector, which is mostly fast and courteous. In spite of some minor shortages, due to hoarding, the private sector is supplying us with gas, food, prepared meals, medical supplies, and health care.
The Coronavirus crisis must cause us to rethink government. The Trump administration has restricted new regulation and reduced arcane strictures, which has resulted in a booming economy. It is absolutely true that most private industry can be trusted because the alternative for poor or unscrupulous providers is failure. Private industry can be sued and suffer financial decline, unlike government, which simply demands more money for poor performance. Business or individuals that commit fraud are subject to civil and criminal penalties.
The federal government spends 21 percent of our national GDP. All federal spending comes from business and citizens, which restricts their ability to allocate those funds to their families and to spur economic growth. American entrepreneurs are excellent capital allocators, creating the jobs and technologies that keep us safe and allow a very high standard of living for most citizens.
In spite of enormous federal deficits, every protected class of workers and business expects the government to bail it out during a crisis, from airlines and cruise ships to government workers. We will now witness a litany of spending beginning with $8 billion for the Coronavirus, moving to a $50 billion pork-laden House bill, and a third spending bill coming from Treasury.
This system is grossly unfair, as working class individuals and small businesses do not get paid when businesses shut down.
It’s time we heed the advice of President Ronald Reagan: government is the problem, not the solution.
The Welfare-Warfare state is not only consuming a large portion of our national income, but worse it is also spending far beyond its means, creating debt now surpassing $23 trillion vs. under $6 trillion in the year 2000.
The solution is to reduce federal spending to 18 percent of GDP, which will downsize or eliminate many counterproductive agencies and allow American business and individuals to perform and innovate.
If you are unconvinced, think of Walmart now offering ultra-low cost medical services, along with a host of competitors including CVS and Walgreens. Gas is very cheap because of our fracking industry. An abundance of high quality food is available from thousands of grocery stores, restaurants, and now home delivery from many sources.
Americans are hard-working, resilient, and innovative. The time has come to unleash this talent to create a higher living standard and solutions to the most perplexing national challenges.
Bob Luddy is President and Founder of CaptiveAire. This article appeared in The American Spectator. Reprinted with the author’s permission.
CNN Business calls it “a pandemic unprecedented in modern times.” That would probably include the so-called “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918-19 that killed more than 500,000 Americans, and perhaps 20 million to 50 million worldwide. Coronavirus so far has killed fewer than 75 Americans, fewer than 7,000 people worldwide, and its growth internationally already is clearly slowing. But economic growth is another matter: We’re now in a bear market, with worldwide recession a serious possibility. For hysteria has now become the “conventional wisdom.”
Invoking the “Black Death,” which probably wiped out a third of Europe, both CNN and the Washington Post have reported that Iran is digging (per the Post) “Coronavirus Burial Pits So Vast They’re Visible From Space.” Never mind that Google can read your license plate from space, nor that on average more than 1,200 Iranians die daily and the country has reported less than 80 COVID-19 deaths since virus was detected there a month ago. For those without enough fingers, that’s a 0.2% increase in deaths per day. The cemeteries can handle it.
Then there’s that Peggy Noonan op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that unabashedly declared: “‘Don’t Panic’ Is Bad Advice.”
Ahem. Don’t panic.
Another Epidemic Of Hysteria
COVID-19 is just the latest, albeit the most extreme, in a long series of epidemic hysterias I have covered going back to the “heterosexual AIDS explosion” (“Now No One is Safe from AIDS”) of the 1980s, avian flu, Ebola I and Ebola II, the Zika virus and others. They are known scientifically as “mass psychogenic illness,” and even more specifically as “moral panic” – the same type of hysteria that led to centuries of witch hunts.
Thus I was writing such articles as “Hysteria, Thy Name Is SARS” in 2003 while highly respected journals such as the New Scientist were screaming “SARS Could Eventually Kill Millions.” It ultimately killed only 774, and zero Americans, before simply disappearing in a hot July.
Seven years later, in reaction to routine invocations of the 1918-19 flu, I published “No More Crying ‘Spanish Flu,’” noting that there have been a few medical advances in the last century including antivirals, pneumonia vaccines, and antibiotics to treat secondary infections that the viral infections permit to take hold.
Heck, use of IV tubes to deliver lifesaving saline solution, drugs, and nutrients didn’t even become common in the U.S. until the 1960s.
Those who say the U.S. is somehow particularly ill-equipped to deal with extra hospitalizations are wrong. As Forbes recently noted, U.S. hospitals have vastly more critical care beds than Italy, which in turn has more than South Korea. And you don’t even want to hear about China.
That said, a tsunami of hysterical “worried well” can threaten any health care system. So you see, Miss Noonan, there are serious problems with “erring on the side of caution.” They don’t call it “erring” for nothing.
What’s Missing: Perspective And Data
What’s always lost in epidemic hysterias are two things: perspective and data that’s readily available but ignored because it doesn’t serve the agenda of the budget-hungry health organizations and headline-happy media – with their “experts” who are often designated as such by the direness of their predictions.
For perspective, at least 22,000, and perhaps more than 50,000, Americans have died from this season’s flu so far, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a recent year, it estimated there were 80,000 flu deaths. Worldwide, flu grimly reaps about 291,000 to 646,000 annually. As in all past hysterias, you hear about exceptional cases such as Tom Hanks and wife. But how many famous actors have gotten the flu? Who knows? Nobody cares.
Alarmists will say the comparison isn’t fair in that we have some natural immunity to the flu, plus a flu vaccine. Yet, the opposite case can be made: These people are getting the flu and dying of it even though many of us have some natural immunity to it and there’s a readily available vaccine.
Further, the direct economic impact of COVID-19 (again as opposed to that caused by hysteria havoc) is muted in that even more so than the flu it’s a disease of the old and infirm. An analysis by China’s Center for Disease Control & Prevention found that most deaths occurred in those age 80 and over, which is rather startling given the relatively small number of Chinese that old. Nobody younger than 10 died. Further, almost all those elderly dead had “comorbid” conditions of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or hypertension. (Interestingly, because of the overlap in potential victims we can expect fewer flu deaths this year.)
For all the talk about the alleged lethality of coronavirus, that’s not what those figures just provided show. It’s definitely worse than “a bad cold,” but whether or how much worse than the flu we don’t know. We do know that it very much depends on the individual and the country. The media’s repeated and continued invocation of Chinese death rates is simply pathetic.
Understanding Farr’s Law
In terms of contagiousness, even the alarmist WHO doesn’t pretend it’s as infectious as flu. That’s why you’ve never heard of a “flu quarantine,” or “social distancing” for flu. It would be useless. Yet the media are lapping up “expert” predictions of as many as 214 million U.S. cases. The higher your figure, the more likely you are to make the papers.
Regarding those dire predictions of future cases, as with all those aforementioned panics it’s sheer nonsense. Far from an exponential explosion, COVID-19 cases are following the normal pattern of “Farr’s Law.” First promulgated back in 1840 and taught in Epidemiology 101, it states that all epidemics tend to rise and fall in a roughly symmetrical pattern or bell-shaped curve. AIDS, SARS, Ebola, Zika – all followed that pattern. So does seasonal flu each year. In America, it usually appears in September-October, and is completely gone by April-May.
Importantly, Farr’s Law has nothing to do with human interventions and predates public health organizations. It occurs because communicable diseases nab the “low-hanging fruit” first (in this case the elderly with comorbid conditions) but then find the fruit harder and harder to reach.
Therefore, coronavirus will, and indeed is following Farr’s Law, too. But rest assured, wherever it does health authorities will take credit instead of saying the disease followed its natural course.
In China, where the disease hit first and hardest, the epidemic apparently peaked more than a month ago at 5,000 cases in one day, but now almost no new cases are being reported. In South Korea, its epidemic appears to have peaked a week ago. Whether public health measures had any impact, we don’t yet know. But as these countries have gone, so must the epidemic worldwide.
Serious And Critical Cases Decline
Yes, identified cases are still going up (albeit at a slower rate than before, per Farr’s Law), but that may just be an artifact. Indeed, it’s possible the epidemic is coming close to a worldwide plateau – in real terms, at least. The hint is in the category of “serious and critical cases.” It peaked in late February, with a steady decline to less than half that number. This in and of itself good news, of course. But why?
Certainly part of it is that progressively more cases are in countries with good health care as opposed to China’s. But more intriguing is that without a doubt part of the increase in “cases” now is actually reported cases.
Early on there was no test at all and even now there is a shortage of test kits, including in the U.S. Thank the hysteria for that, as well as the toilet paper shortage. But as kits become more available more people get tested and ipso factomore will be found positive. That is, they will have antibodies to the virus. Many will have already shrugged off the disease without even knowing it. But they will be labeled “new cases” nonetheless.
Still, these increased diagnoses have little impact on the category of serious and critical cases, which just keep declining
Yet so far little of this information has had any impact – in no small part because you’re probably reading it here first.
Economic Costs Of Panic
Thus, individuals, companies, and governments continue to act like the horses that run into the flame during a barn fire. The OECD predicts global GDP growth could plummet this year to as little as 1.5%, almost half the 2.9% rate it had earlier forecast. Hysteria begets hysteria, and while it too probably has a Farr’s Law, we don’t know when it will peak or how vast the damage before it does.
Given the demand to do something, anything, that’s what we’re seeing. Most efforts are merely talismanic or self-serving. In countries that already have internal transmission, banning foreigners does no good.
My gym chain has gone from 24 hours to closing at 8. So let’s see, will packing more people in during less time be conducive to “social distancing” – or just save money? Likewise for the malls near me closing earlier.
Personally, I’m going to start selling rabbits’ feet on eBay, with a free surgical mask for the first 1,000 buyers. And if this keeps up we’re going to have to start identifying and burning the witches that brought this plague upon us.
Meanwhile, you hear about the large businesses impacted, but small business are being wiped out. Which in turn impacts large businesses and wipes out other smaller ones. And while your odds of contracting the virus are slim, the Washington Post, so instrumental in spreading fear, can now report: “American Life Is Shutting Down Due to Coronavirus …”
Well, take a bow!
Michael Fumento is an attorney, journalist, and author who has been documenting epidemic hysterias for 35 years. This article first appeared at issuesinsights.com
The deliberate panic created over the coronavirus is not victimless. Far from it.
When the radioactive dust settles from this orchestrated panic-strategy, potentially hundreds of billions will have been lost, thousands of businesses closed, and millions of employees fired. On Wednesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged by almost 1,500 points.
When the coronavirus first reared its ugly head, many in the media instantly saw it as a cheap and easy way to increase clicks, newspaper sales, viewers, listeners, and most especially ad revenue.
In the guise of “informing the public,” they intended to run scare headlines and stories to spike attention to their sites. And run them, they did.
One of the oldest axioms in the news business being: “If it bleeds, it leads.” The coronavirus was tailor-made for that requirement.
Except, now even the media executives pushing the scare tactics for hoped-for increased ad revenue have realized they went way too far and opened a Pandora’s Box they are unable to close.
The economic devastation ignited by the deliberate panic strategy is spreading like an unchecked wildfire.
In addition to the massive financial loss to our nation and the world is the haunting psychological trauma inflicted on untold millions now terrorized by the prospect of getting the virus.
Naturally, once it was clear that the panic was not only taking hold but spreading, craven politicians predictably jumped into the echo chamber to scream “The Sky is Falling” for partisan or self-serving reasons.
Well, how do you like what you’ve all done now?
The CDC reports that during the six-month run of SARS in 2003, (which was also a coronavirus) it cost the world an estimated $40 billion.
But, that $40 billion should not be viewed as some cold statistic. Rather it should and must be seen as the devastation inflicted upon real business, real jobs, and real lives. Don’t see numbers. Instead, visualize the faces of the thousands to hundreds of thousands of human beings who lost their jobs as their companies were either forced to cut back or go out of business altogether.
The panic created over this current coronavirus already far exceeds that of the SARS pandemic of 2003. Seemingly exponentially so.
That being the case, it’s safe to assume that when it’s all said and done and this strain of the coronavirus has run its course – as it will with a far smaller infection and fatality rate than the yearly flu — the financial punishment to businesses and the living and breathing human beings they employ will not only be far greater than the $40 billion in 2003, but truly catastrophic.
In 1987, when Raymond Donovan, former secretary of Labor under President Ronald Reagan, was rightfully acquitted of a smear-campaign and criminal charge, he famously asked: “Which office do I go to get my reputation back?”
Now, with potentially thousands of businesses about to close and collectively millions of people about to be (or already) fired from their jobs, where do those business owners and their employees go to get their livelihoods back?
Can they — and should they — be allowed to enter into a class-action lawsuit against those who willingly created a panic for ratings, ad revenue and political advantage.
I submit it’s a very legitimate question.
Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official. This article first appeared at issuesinsights.com.
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