The Fact-Free Lockdown Hysteria | Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

i don't need any of this technological stuff that's up here i am just going to talk to you all right well some of the things i say might be a little bit different from what you hear in in the news media so you may want references some people watching on youtube may say i don't believe that guy why should i believe that schmuck where are his source so i'm going to have a page on my website with the sources for some of the things that i say where that you might want some source backing up so that page is not done yet but by the time the video appears on youtube clay makes sure and delay this appropriately i'll have that page up i just started working on it today and then then it turns out pete quinones is visiting us from the free man beyond the wall podcast back there and how am i supposed to get any work done when pete's you know talking my ear off so that will be done by the time but it will be tomwoods.com lockdown and that's where you'll be able to find the resources now if you try to go to that page now before it's been set up you'll get my 404 error page and the 404 error page at tomwoods.com if you type in tomwoods.com you know some gibberish takes you to the 404 error page where it says i'm sorry you reached this this uh page where there's nothing here and to make you feel better here's a free e-book i actually give away a free ebook on the 404 error page speaking of free e-books i have an e-book on the lockdowns and it's called your facebook friends are wrong about the lockdown so you can get that at in two ways wrongaboutlockdown.com and if you're in the us you can text the word lockdown to three three four four four you get a whole ebook on this uh cost you nothing okay now that we've done that we'll we'll jump right in this is a topic that's very personal for all of us it's hard to look at it dispassionately and scientifically we've all lived through it and we all know people who have been affected by it in one way or another either by the virus itself or in in many more cases by the the lockdowns themselves everybody has had something disrupted by this i remember as recently as march 7th of 2020 which is like a lifetime ago having lunch in new york city with our old friend jean epstein and jean just turned 75 at the end of 2019 he's retired book review and economics editor at barons and we were having a nice lunch together in new york talking about upcoming travels and saying well i don't know with this virus i don't know what's going to happen with the travels and should we still go on them or not and his view was you got to live your life man you know you got to just live i mean yeah the the world's a riskier place now but you've got to live your life and here he was you know he didn't shake our hands he did the japanese bow he had he's married to a japanese woman they gave us the japanese bow which we were quite delighted to return but his view was that you know look you go live your life and maybe i'll stay in my apartment but you should go live why shouldn't you go live and we all kind of felt like yeah you know that's about the right approach it never dawned on us at that point that these decisions would be taken out of our hands entirely we really thought that we were going to assess the pros and cons and make a decision it just never occurred to us that that this would happen the world would be closed down that one minute they'd be telling you globalism is the best thing since sliced bread and if you think otherwise you're a xenophobe but then the very next minute if you say you want to see the world you're a grandma murderer it just was very sudden how this happened but what also changed quickly were the rationales that were given for some of the measures that were taken rather draconian measures now obviously i live in the united states i can speak most confidently about here so first we all recall right we've all been through this before uh we were told we had to so-called flatten the curve right remember that expression now there's a phenomenon that michael malus talks about a lot it's the phenomenon of the midwit now the midwit is not a complete idiot you know like with an iq of 65 but you know he's not exactly curing cancer either you know so the midwit has just enough intelligence to be irritating and so you would get all over social media midwitz explaining to you even a month after we had all heard what flattening the curve was all about we'd heard this from every official source over and over and over and over and then you would you would make some mild remark slightly dissenting from one point some official made and you would get a solemn lecture as if you had never heard the idea of flattening the curve before what we need to do is flatten the curve because this way we spread out the infections so we don't you think i haven't blankly blank heard this already but if we cleared out the midwitz there'd almost be nobody left to talk about this topic all right now it's true there were some people who advocated flattening the curve because not only did they think it would help the hospital system cope better but they also thought that that would reduce the overall number of deaths now there were other people who said we're not going to reduce the overall number of deaths we're just going to spread them out there were some flatten the curvers who said it will actually lead to fewer deaths but this was not really coming through from a lot of the official sources let's say and so then all right so then they confine us what are we on the 127th day of 15 days to flatten the curve i think that's where we are so we've been confined to our homes for a few weeks and then suddenly it wasn't flat in the curve it flattened the curve was like uh bell-bottom jeans at that point or or the rubik's cube or something like if you were to bring it up people would find it an interesting novelty but it was like they had sort of forgotten all about that at that point uh instead no no it became according to andrew cuomo if it saves only one life that was the new metric if it saves only one life if we save even one life with all these draconian measures they will have been worthwhile now that's particularly gruesome and grotesque coming from andrew cuomo it is rather an upside down world that the guy who by far has the worst record on this by far is considered to be the great model and savior and then all these hapless governors in other states where things have been at least manageable are viewed as like the devil but cuomo sends infected people into nursing homes says that's not his fault and everybody goes well you know he's got a pretty good point and that it's just accepted this is not normal like we're surrounded by crazy people we can't even have a conversation because if you try to have a conversation about this you just want people to die you know so if you disagree with it's this is typical by the way of course all the time we have to deal with if you have a different opinion on what the welfare policy should be that's because you hate the poor or if you think well you know private property might solve this problem a little bit better that's because you hate the environment you can never have an honorable disagreement with the hysterics never it's always because you secretly hate something and that strikes me as the classic case of projection i mean if their first instinct is this must be motivated by hatred maybe they intimately are familiar with that emotion or something you know that they would constantly be consumed by attributing it to everybody all right but there are perfectly good reasons to doubt this first of all this criterion of well if we save only one life i mean come on now i realize that in this room people are not so unscientifically sentimental that they think there's any sense to that but you know from interacting with people out in the giant insane asylum that is the world there are people who think this way but if that were honestly believed we would have to modify all kinds of behaviors we'd have to restrict the sale of all kinds of items we'd have to ban dangerous pastimes all kinds of things like that and if you if you make this argument they say oh you stupid unsophisticated rube the difference here is yeah of course skiing can be dangerous but you don't have to ban skiing because skiing is not contagious skiing accidents are not contagious this thing is contagious that's the difference but if the standard is saving only one life then it doesn't matter if it's contagious or not and the thing is nobody lives according to the if we could save only one life thing uh no nobody does if somebody dies in an automobile accident we don't blame the institution of driving it's part of it it's an unfortunate part of life we don't ban things that give people pleasure even if they can cause death because not just because we value liberty but because these are things that make life worth living in the first place and as i'll explain later there is more to human life than mere biological existence now it's true that what i'm saying in my presentation here at mises you this year okay it's not really about austrian economics i'm gonna admit that normally i like to be on on that topic but because that is what we're talking about here after all but good heavens i can't not talk about this you remember the judge telling us about bajewski's book what we can't not know this is what i can't not talk about is the lockdowns so for example let's let's take people who say to you if you don't favor locking people in their homes then you just enjoy watching people die okay i've had that said to me i want people to die and then conversely i've had people tell me that they hope i die because i'm encouraging things that are going to make other people die there's a lot of death wish around in society these days apparently but what they don't factor in are things like this now again these are the sorts of things that i have uh in the e-book and or on that page in particular that i'll have ready soon for example over in the uk on several occasions in major newspapers so not like my friend's underground newsletter that you know doesn't have an italic font so he has to underline the words with a ruler and a pencil i'm talking about a real real newspapers that we're supposed to listen to and they're always telling us the truth even they have been saying that it's quite possible that we will wind up with more preventable cancer deaths than covid deaths in the uk because of an irrational diversion of resources into a surge that didn't really materialize the way we were told it would what about those lives and see that's another thing a lot of times the other side is driven by anecdote i knew a guy who died if you knew a guy then you would take this more seriously all right what if i know somebody who died of a preventable cancer wouldn't that make me be more against the lockdowns so what does knowing a person do i mean yes it can it can encourage us in empathy but it is extremely unscientific to say well i know a guy and therefore i favor the lockdowns the lockdowns cause other deaths and those deaths are just as important even if you didn't know those people if you're really empathetic you can go beyond just your immediate circle and understand that other people's lives matter too okay in april the united nations warned of hundreds of thousands of child deaths and the reduction of somewhere between 42 and 66 million children to extreme poverty as a result of the complications emerging from the lockdowns do those people's lives not matter the something called the well-being trust in oakland california produced a study trying to find out how many deaths of despair would come about as a result of not just the lockdowns to be honest also just worry about the virus itself but also the effects of the lockdowns how many deaths of despair would there be now by deaths of despair we are referring to things like suicides as well as alcohol and drug overdoses and they came up with a high figure and a low figure and they just averaged the figures out to about 75 000 excess deaths of despair now i don't know about the the method behind some of these studies but nobody seems to care about the method behind studies saying that everyone's going to die next wednesday so i'm i'm not particularly worried about that objection and we're told by the vice chairman of the american psychiatric association's council on addiction psychiatry i've been seeing this in my prac in practices and my colleagues have been talking about it too people uh suffering because of social isolation and that addiction patients are relapsing and a lot of patients who don't have drug use or alcohol problems are drinking more now sometimes every day from four or five pm and they don't stop until they sleep then unicef predicted 1.2 million child deaths as a result of the lockdowns so it's not just either or well either we have the lockdowns and people live or we don't have them and everybody dies the world is much less comic bookish than that it turns out but nobody who implies that you're a terrible person is ever required to answer for these other four things hence this presentation today now this these items go to show that if you shut down the world and you tell us that we all have to live like vegetables and that's the new normal this has consequences uh and it also reveals to us how barren it is to say you should shut up and listen to the experts now obviously there are many situations in our lives when we do simply shut up and listen to the experts when my car breaks down i take it to a mechanic and i pretend to understand what the hell he's talking about and i pay him and i drive it away i i don't go up to him with a conspiracy theory i don't i don't say you know i know bill gates wants to have some other kind of car and he's discouraging me in the car i have by having it break down i i don't do anything like that i don't need to i just get the car fixed but the thing is there is and i think you can see a bit of hayek's concern about scientism in all this there is a a superstitious reverence for so-called experts that manifests itself in the expectation that they can answer all questions not simply the questions they're trained to answer but they they have a holistic view of the world and they can really answer all questions so let's take for example why don't we pick somebody at random okay let's just pick a random expert dr anthony fauci i just picked him at rand now people say he's an infectious disease expert and he knows all you know he's been around a long time and he has a lot of experience with this and we should listen to what he says because he's the expert okay it is true that he has a lot of knowledge about a lot of things but if he says the most important thing you should value is flattening this curve the most important thing you should value is minimizing deaths from this virus that may well be the best judgment somebody could make but that is a judgment call because as we've seen there are competing health concerns in the world so we need to be able to make our own judgments here moreover he was asked at one point are you factoring in trade-offs here that yeah obviously duh if we take all of society's resources we direct them at one goal okay maybe we make some progress against that goal but what about all this unseen wreckage we're leaving everywhere his answer was no he hadn't thought that through and and that's this is the point there's no class that a doctor takes in school that teaches him how to balance all the different competing concerns in a situation like this he doesn't take a class teaching him how you factor in to your public policy recommendations that there are going to be unintended consequences of this that and the other thing and gee how do we balance the 1.2 million dead children against this policy over here they're not taught that these are judgments we have to make as as informed people so epidemiologists are not taking a class that teaches them what the answer is in this situation and then we're told listen to the science okay now in general i don't have any objection to that science is a glorious thing it's one of the great it's i mean i know people don't like to talk like this anymore but it is one of the great creations of western civilization is is uh the scientific method and all that absolutely agreed but we have to understand what is science science is not a series of infallible statements that that that is absolutely not what we're dealing with it's an ongoing search for the truth so the science has been all over the place in this crisis they're you know presumably trying to get a handle on what's going on so simply to say to me listen to the science well okay if i listen to the science i'm constantly getting different answers to how does the virus spread how does it not spread what is the role of children do children get it do they spread it do they not spread it do asymptomatic people spread it do they not spread it what about pre-symptomatic people is sweden's approach a good idea we were told no it's terrible everybody's going to be dead in sweden and then then we were told by the head of the health emergencies program of the world health organization sweden sweden's avoidance of a lockdown was a model we were told by the science why are some countries doing so much better than others so the science told us that japan should be a giant graveyard and the ghouls were practically uh rubbing their hands together in anticipation of the japanese getting what they deserved because they didn't listen to the science it's it's almost like there's something more than just science motivating these people and none of that ever happened japan did fine and then later they said well it's because japan wore masks they knew japan wore mask when they were predicting were all going to be dead so nice try bozo to bring that one up at the end or whether lockdowns work i mean well show me so i'm supposed to listen to that i mean i'll do my best to be informed but it's not like there's some infallible answer that we can all be listening to at a time like this and then okay then we get told well why don't you talk to health care professionals they'll set you straight they'll tell you how to shut up and listen to dr fauci but even they have differences of opinion because believe it or not even health care professionals have political ideologies it turns out they're not actually sitting on platonic mountaintops abstractly contemplating the eternal forms all of them so if if we're going with uh anecdotes like hey my friend's a nurse and my nurse friend said such and such well there are plenty of health care professionals willing to say this has been a fiasco and a lot of them have written to me i have patients not coming in because they've been terrified into not coming in and they're winding up having all kinds of problems it turns out that i think a cardiac arrest is down by like 40 percent of where it would normally be now either the virus is a magical cure of cardiac arrest or people who need to go to the doctor are not going so now i like this statement this came from the from dr stephen shapiro he is the chief medical and scientific officer at the university of pittsburgh medical center now i took him as being frankly a little ticked off when he first made his statement uh ticked off by the exaggerated accounts of what was surely going to happen in his area and then nothing approaching it happened even though they prepared everything for it to happen they're they're they're sending other patients away they got everything ready not even a tiny fraction of it occurred yeah we're opening back up to to let sick people come back in so this is steven shapiro these are some excerpts we indeed saw a steady stream of patience but never quote surged at peak in mid-april covet 19 patients occupied 2 of our 5 500 hospital beds and 48 of our 750 ventilators subsequently admissions have been decreasing with very few patients now coming from the community almost all now being from nursing homes of note in the 36 upmc owned senior facilities we have had zero positive cases our outcomes are similar to the state of pennsylvania in general where the median age of death from covet 19 is 84 years old i might add by the way that the general statistic for the united states is that the life expectancy is about 78 and the median age of covet 19 victim is 81. he says the few younger patients who died all had significant pre-existing conditions very few children were infected and none died minorities in our communities fared equally as well as others but we know that this is not the case nationally in some this is a disease of the elderly sick and poor we are now actively bringing back our patients for essential care following cms guidelines to assure a safe environment we use adequate ppe and test all even asymptomatic pre-operative patients for active viral infection with pcr to date zero out of a thousand tested positive in western pennsylvania new york and maryland three of 500 are positive in central pennsylvania our community prevalence is low which we will soon confirm with antibody testing and now here's what i like the most some humility despite rapid progress there are critical gaps in our knowledge as well as selective use of what we know for example we don't know why many who are infected never develop symptoms while other seemingly similar patients get very sick crowded indoor conditions can be devastating in nursing homes while on the uss theodore roosevelt 1102 sailors were infected but only seven required hospitalization with one death this contrast has significant implications that we have not embraced epidemiologic prediction models have performed poorly often neglecting critical variables seasonality is rarely considered yet we know that coronaviruses are seasonal hope is not a plan but it is quite possible the virus is not very healthy in the u.s right now the question before us is what will happen as we reopen society and how should we manage it for new york and a handful of other cities with high case rates as a result of density travel and socioeconomic issues they must open up in a measured stepwise manner with extensive testing tracing and treatment but for the rest of the country as people come out of their homes cautiously and safely if we protect our vulnerable seniors particularly those in nursing homes we should be able to keep case rates low buying time for potential resurgence as we bolster our supply chain and find effective intervention covet 19 is a disease that ravages those with pre-existing conditions whether it be immuno senescence or of aging or the social determinants of health we can manage society in the presence of this pathogen if we focus on these pre-existing conditions and now here it comes the health consequences of lockdown what we cannot do is extended social isolation humans are social beings and we are already seeing the adverse mental health consequences of loneliness and that is before the much greater effects of economic devastation take hold on the human condition in this particular case the problem we're not going to be able to fix in the short term is the complete eradication of the virus the problem we can fix is to serve and protect our seniors especially those in nursing homes now again when you try to raise points like this you get told by people well i know somebody who died who was only 37 and that's true i believe that the statistic below age 50 in the u.s deaths is something like 9 000 have died so it's nothing to shake a stick at but comparable to suicides accidents uh and whatever in that in that age group i remember distinctly the new york post ran a story about a 20 year old who was given the all clear they said and then he died of the virus of a bigger part of covet 19. and they said um you know what a tragedy this was paragraph 10 tells you by the way he had leukemia and but yet every people walk around with you know i knew a guy and these are the pro science people right we're the pro science people and we're going to argue from anecdote i know i heard there was a 20 year old guy this is like saying men are generally taller than women and coming back with what are you talking about my wife is six foot one like what is that what like you're not even entitled to to get into like you need the prerequisites for science 101 if you're if you're at that level more people over age 100 than under age 30 have died which is which is quite interesting and even neil ferguson who was responsible for the models the major uk model of the virus predicted that somewhere between 50 percent and two-thirds of all people who would go on to die from it would have died in 2020 that that's how sick that's how sick they were so let's say a little just a few few little statistics here because why not i mean we have to have them in new york city that was the hardest hit part of the united states and we can speculate as to why it could hit so hard obviously that horrible nursing home policy is a big part of it i think early on they weren't really sure about the right treatments and i remember seeing a youtube video of a doctor saying the ventilators are making things worse and people saying oh this is some crank doctor you know listen to the science everybody listen to the science and it turned out oh yeah yeah the ventilators are really a problem and so no andrew cuomo did not need 40 000 ventilators which is if i don't get 40 000 ventilators it's going to be a giant graveyard over here they they got a small number of ventilators they wound up giving some of them away to other states it turns out so it turned out that guy that doctor on the youtube video was telling us the truth so between the ages of 18 and 44 we've seen a rate of 11 deaths per 100 000 in new york city for people 75 and older the rate was 80 times that and for people under age 18 their death rate per 100 000 was zero but this 18 to 44 group and by the way i know this will come as a surprise to you but i don't belong to that group that 18 to 44. uh they the policy is apparently to deprive them indefinitely of all the wonderful things we old oldsters enjoyed uh as as as we grew up even though they're at essentially no risk and and yet they did a study recently where you they asked people like in their 20s what you know how scared are you or like of of a thousand of your friends how many do you think will die of the virus and they had wildly uh out of scale predictions i mean it's it's the answer is like almost zero and you know they thought it was going to be dozens of their of their friends would be dead i i mean who can blame them i mean what they're probably watching i don't know why or what what generation is that z maybe no why would they be watching the news but some of them i guess are i mean why would they have this view so they it's not just that they're worried about their old relatives a lot of them are really terrified of the likelihood of of dying when they according to everything we know they have essentially no chance all right let's let's go to um my own personal observations i've visited a number of these opening states right because right now i have to balance something here in a talk like this if i focus my talk entirely on the statistics of right this minute the on this date in july 2020 then it becomes stale in a week so i don't want to do that even though i want to say a little something about that i want to focus primarily on these big picture questions i had a chance to visit let's say i visited georgia as soon as it opened up and then texas and then massachusetts massachusetts where when i went to a restaurant i had to wear the mask before we were served and then you can take the mask off because you cannot spread the virus while you're eating thank god that's such a relief and then put it back on and leave but i had to i had to write my name and address down like it was it was humiliating but you know when you're hungry you're hungry right i'm not gonna judge my my status as a libertarian on the basis of how i act when i'm famished so i've visited a bunch of these states and let me tell you something they were opening very very slowly if people have the idea they just opened everything up and then look what happened no you couldn't get i mean most things were just were shut down uh in dallas um almost almost every restaurant was shut down so it's not the case they just and by the way for a couple of solid months there were the the case rate was still flat uh even though they were to some degree open i'll never forget going to waffle house at three in the morning that's why you go to waffle house it's three in the morning where else you're gonna go and it was you had to stand outside until you till your food was ready then you could come in and sit at one of the socially distanced tables and when you're standing outside a waffle house at dallas at three in the morning you run into some interesting characters i'll put it that way so so the the good thing is it was kind of enriching but i i remember sitting there and and getting to discover what life is like at a waffle house at three in the morning because i i heard the the the the waitress at the register say to a customer um sir you're bleeding i don't even know what's going on here but so the the openings were extremely modest and yet and yet when georgia opened the headlines were unbelievable um the the uh the atlantic said it was georgia was attempting an experiment in human sacrifice uh washington post said that georgia is striving to become the number one death destination in america it makes you just want to get one of those big foam gloves with the number one skull and crossbones on it and it turns i just checked the numbers in the past week they had under 200 deaths from it in georgia which is fewer than they had the week before they opened so the giant georgia-shaped graveyard has not materialized but no word from anybody well you know maybe we exaggerated when we accused the governor of trying to sacrifice human beings to some sun god or whatever i mean maybe we shouldn't have said that uh we get one thing i observed by the way when i was in these these states and particularly in georgia it seems to me that it was the older people who more wanted to resume their lives than the younger ones like they were the ones who wanted to go out i don't want to see my grandkids on zoom anymore you know i'm willing to take the chance you know i i have to be human at some level i have to just go back to human life and take my chances and and an acquaintance of mine put it this way i relinquish any claim on the lives of the young as an oldster who is presumed to be peculiarly susceptible to the ravages of covet 19 i will not ask anyone to sacrifice days weeks or months of their time love life and livelihood on my behalf it is grotesque for the old to ask the young to sacrifice for them go live your lives enjoy the beautiful spring weather i have no claim on you for my welfare who among my fellow ulsters will release any claims on the lives of young people interesting way to put it i i suggested that there should be a group called grandmas against lockdown nobody took me up on that but it's a suggestion so one gimmick that we got from people i call the dumers was the old jelly bean example they would say if you had a bowl of 100 jelly beans and you knew three of them were poisoned would you take a handful of them now there isn't a three percent death it's extremely way lower than that but the idea was supposed to be you see how stupid it is to risk resuming your life when there's this chance of you know so so the idea was the only rational response is not to take any jelly beans and then in terms of the virus is just cowering in your house so leave aside the gross exaggeration involved the question really being asked is would you reach in and take something if there was a chance it contained poison but what they're leaving out is the real question is what would i suffer if i didn't reach in what if i just stand there and do nothing because they're suggesting that my only possible concern in my life is the virus but i have other concerns too one of them is not spending months and possibly years living like a vegetable and that's what happens if i don't reach in in the analogy my reaching into the bowl is the equivalent of returning to normal life and thereby taking a risk and yes i'm prepared to take that risk because i want to live a life that's worth living if the jelly beans represent everything i've worked for my whole life if they represent financial solvency if they represent all my hopes dreams and aspirations you better believe i'd grab that handful and eat them without the slightest hesitation now meanwhile the virus has refused to behave the way the doomers have assured us it must so my favorite example because i was lectured repeatedly about it on social media in mid-march it looked like you know hong kong has really got a handle on the virus and the headline read hong kong thought it had a handle on the virus but now it's in big trouble they were reporting a doubling of confirmed cases in a week and oh my gosh in the media and all over social media it was just wait two weeks it's going to be piles of corpses in hong kong and it wasn't even like how tragic that it'll be it was almost like a a perverse cheering like it's the same perversity that with which these people reject all good news hey here's some good news about the virus as time goes on a lower and lower percentage of people getting uh getting it need to be hospitalized like they they don't even want it's like they freeze up when they hear good news it's the most bizarre phenomenon i've ever seen in my years on on this earth so anyway to wait two weeks right after hong kong there's gonna be corpses everywhere two weeks went by no additional deaths four weeks nothing eight weeks nothing now at this point that doubling of confirmed cases has clearly led to zero deaths i will tell you that 13 weeks later there was one death but unrelated to that doubling of confirmed cases so why didn't that happen can't we have the humility to say we don't entirely know what's going on not everything about this virus has a glib tweet response not everything masks will solve all our problems why is california having a spike they've been wearing masks it seems like somehow they got a time machine they've been wearing it for two years or something i don't i don't even know the science behind masks maybe they do work who even knows but but the point is the connecticut governor is saying well the reason we flattened our curve is because of masks i'm pretty sure the science doesn't say masks work in california bass work in connecticut but they're a big stinking failure in california i mean obviously there's something less cartoonish going on that we haven't fully got a handle on or i mentioned japan before why didn't that giant pile of deaths materialize in japan now this is a this is a fascinating case study because despite plenty of contact with china and taking fairly modest coercive measures compared to a lot of other countries japan had very few coveted deaths and the answer initially coming from the doomer side was that's because they don't want to jeopardize the olympics they're suppressing the real numbers and they're afraid that if they reveal yeah you know half of us died no one's gonna want to come to the olympics okay so then they postponed the olympics no reason to cover up now no deaths emerged that were had been covered so they just ignored that oh sorry we accused you all of being liars no apology never an apology apology never never apparently the virus really latches on to apologies so they're never never gonna issue an apology so no apology so then in early april the japanese government asked for voluntary compliance with further social distancing policies and the press oh my gosh the media was overwhelmed with too little too late it was almost like yeah we can't wait to see what happens to you people it was good and grim warnings of the hospitals are going to be overwhelmed in tokyo japan's going to pay for being so lack they're licking their chops two weeks go by three weeks go by four weeks go by the daily death toll continues to fall how do they account for that so then they say well the japanese are very clean people they're concerned about hygiene did you just find this out in the past four weeks you knew that when you predicted they were all going to die so you can't now use that that doesn't work that way but a professor at wasita university mikihito tanaka had the guts to say when asked why has japan done so well the answer was even experts don't know the reason how about that now on twitter they all know the reason it was masks they all know the reason on twitter or if you post this on facebook all your facebook friends they all know the reason the experts are stumped but they really should get on twitter more because then they would know what was causing it if it had been such a cartoonish pedestrian answer as masks you don't think the experts would have thought of that or other questions like why was iran hit so hard and iraq not as much isn't that the opposite of what you would have predicted i mean iraq's been bombed and had had civil unrest and disorder for years and years wouldn't that seem like they're more ripe for this i mean just simple basic questions we can't get the answer and there's like no curiosity about it either like every country is the same everybody's going to be italy the u.s is going to be italy whatever i just don't see what's so hard about admitting we don't entirely know what's going on let's just be honest we don't entirely know what's going on but there are people who think they know they think that if if students return to school this is going to lead to piles of corpses now i realize that i have i'm of two minds on this having helped to devise a homeschool curriculum i'm not particularly eager to send people back to the schools i grant that but leaving that aside i'm just talking about the arguments here in germany saxony was the first to reopen schools after the lockdown the result was no hot spot whatsoever and after the summer break they're even going to drop the mask requirement so we actually this has actually been tried how about the lockdowns themselves and there's some interesting food for thought at least on the lockdowns so in the wall street journal we read this from tj rogers who says we ran a simple one variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shut down which ranged from -10 days because some states shut down before any sign of covet 19 to 35 days for south dakota one of seven states with limited or no shutdown the correlation coefficient was 5.5 so low that the engineers i used to employ would have summarized it as no correlation and moved on to find the real cause of the problem i'll have on my page um some some charts that you can look at on this because we do have google mobility data like we actually you know i know we don't like being traced but here's a silver lining of it um we know that people have been moving around since some of the social distancing requirements have been lifted and even before they were lifted some people after a month just got tired of doing it and they started moving around so you think the more they move around the more that virus is going to spread the more deaths so you could plot these numbers so there's a researcher who calls this social contact score like you know how many people you come into contact with and how much traveling you're doing how much mobility do you have and they were looking at mobility versus deaths per million in the chart looking at all the different states and there's there's no correlation how about staying at home how about the shelter-in-place policy if anything the results show the opposite of what you would expect now obviously correlation doesn't prove causation but i think it's reasonable to ask could you really have causation without any correlation i mean what's go what is happening here again that shouldn't be right that should not be why would that be and and even i don't quite see why that means it seems to make sense you stay home and things should and yet the numbers don't even bear that out you know what what's happening here now you say oh but maybe it's that in the places that were hit the hardest because they were hit the hardest they imposed the heaviest lockdowns and stuff like that but they've played with those numbers too it doesn't it doesn't work out that way so for example you could look at this there were seven states that had minimal to no lockdowns and you look at what are the expected number of deaths that you would expect to have in these states by this time of the year and every one of those seven is way below or is at least significantly below or somewhat below the expected number of deaths then we look at the seven most heavily locked down states and five of those are above the expected number of deaths and several of them way above the expected number of deaths so again now there could be other factors at work here but it's not just a glib response that on twitter you could give in 280 characters there's something something we're not quite fully getting about this and it's not entirely just population density either um stockholm did did better than than new york city uh then it even did better than all of new york state despite being 2.6 times more dense all right i don't want to talk anymore about georgia because i did that so i will say a little something about sweden before we start uh start wrapping up sweden of course is the country everyone used to love everybody loved sweden whatever it was ikea is from sweden or something and then they loved they loved the social democracy and all that and then that just stopped that's you know they don't like sweden at all so okay so they say sweden didn't do as well as other scandinavian countries and yes its nursing homes were hit very hard but what's one thing that is interesting to note about sweden is it's a country of 10 million people how many people under age 50 died from the virus in sweden under age 50 70. that's an astonishing number so now and incidentally it's not enough to say well denmark and finland did better than you know if the virus justified this mad irrational destruction of the past fewer months past four months and who knows how many more months sweden should be a thousand times worse than everybody else not comparable to the uk it should be a thousand times worse there shouldn't be anybody left ferguson's model said there would be 96 000 deaths by june in sweden if they didn't have full suppression by that date they had about 4 000 deaths so they beat that by a factor of 24. so that's worth no there's other things we can say about sweden i mean we also know the swedes kept sending kids to school the fin finland they didn't and then it turns out there's no difference in the health outcomes whatsoever none whatsoever all right um there it's true that people want to talk about what's going on in these in some of these states that have reopened because yeah i can find a state like georgia where everything's pretty stable but there are a few states where the the cases have spiked and even the deaths have slightly spiked now obviously the case spike is partly because of additional testing not entirely that but partly that and part of the reason behind additional testing is that in a lot of places to return to work you have to prove that you don't have the virus you got to go get tested and in florida i believe it was florida they were honest enough to admit that they're not catching all the duplicates so if you go and get tested five times trying to get back to work there have been times when that's been counted as five cases you're actually only one person you know so that's that's important to remember um so i will talk a little bit privately about that because if i get bogged down in that then it makes the makes this not as evergreen a youtube presentation but the the long and the short of it is none of these places are or or will be uh new york all right so the last bit and then i'll i i know i'm going over a little bit but i feel like if i don't look at joe salerno i can just keep going if i can't see him signaling to me i can just i can just keep going now obviously it makes sense to take precautions and particularly people who are vulnerable especially vulnerable there are precautions you can take they're increasing uh improving treatments all the time these are all things to be welcomed but the the issue is if we if we just simply say let's just try to uh have a blanket protection of absolutely everybody this is not the best it seems to me use of resources it'd be better to con to to focus the resources on the most vulnerable people and let the other folks try to live their lives the best they can at the very least to keep the engine of prosperity going that allows us to support the vulnerable people in the first place and we should talk about how to best preserve uh biological life but the bigger question that needs to be answered that i hinted at the beginning is whether mere biological life is worth living and no expert can answer that question for you because it's a philosophical question so if people's hopes dreams and aspirations are dashed for an indefinite period of time which purveyors of the current strategy almost flippantly propose oh we'll just stay shut down is that really living they say probably no large gatherings for a long time okay well how long just just give me an estimate and what what are large gatherings oh no big deal just concerts theater lectures church sporting events the arts in general pretty much everything that makes life worth living so yes this kind of life has a pulse but it has no soul now in this large gatherings thing anybody who performs in front of an audience and that's dancers musicians comedians magicians athletes singers actors whatever this present strategy means your hopes and dreams are on indefinite hold and you may never be able to fulfill them your heart will keep beating but you'll never be able to fulfill them people who went before you got to fulfill their dreams but you can't fulfill yours there's an ironically named center for american progress that has as one of its uh spokesman dr zeke emanuel who's the brother of rahm emanuel you know of not letting a crisis go to waste that guy he says we need to be on lockdown for 18 months until there's a vaccine which he assumes there will be and these are his exact words how are people supposed to find work if this goes on in some form for a year and a half is all that economic pain worth trying to stop covet 19 the truth is we have no choice conferences concerts sporting events religious services dinner in a restaurant none of that will resume until we find a vaccine a treatment or a cure we have to be realistic emanuel urges us and accept that we will be giving up cherished things for a long time and and here's what he says things we have to give up things like schooling and income and contact with our friends and extended family things like schooling and income and contact with our friends and extended family this is insanity what it boils down to is this either we're going to live or or we're not and life is riskier in the age of coveted 19. thankfully we know precisely the kinds of people who require special consideration and attention and we would have much better numbers today if we hadn't been acting on the basis of wildly inflated estimates that's supposedly the reason they threw all these old people who were infected back into the nursing homes it was to it was to be ready for for this surge of eight gazillion people there weren't eight gazillion people it was a challenge but there weren't eight gazillion people the way they said and meanwhile all these old folks died start by not doing that we had no right to expect a virus to be this accommodating to us in the sense that we could identify uh dane demographics in danger this should help us as we try to cope with it or you would think instead it seems like doomers want to discontinue those life-giving pleasures that give meaning and fulfillment to otherwise drab existences now was your risk level precisely where you needed it to be down to three significant digits before this virus came along because that'd be an amazing coincidence you were at just the risk profile you could tolerate and then a very slight increase in risk meant you had to shut your life down but you could transmit the virus to someone else they say and that's true this is why people most likely to suffer serious consequences from it should probably isolate themselves but i'm not going to render a judgment on a grandmother who decides she'd rather take her chances embracing her family members than spending her time isolated in a nursing home wasting away physically mentally or emotionally or for heaven's sake spending her final months talking to her grandchildren over zoom if we don't agree to focus our efforts on safeguarding the elderly in particular then life becomes a miserable series of deprivations when will someone say we refuse to live like this we already have some elderly and immuno-compromised people including friends of mine saying look we don't even want you to live like this we're not even asking for this go enjoy the one life you get and we will do the best we can until conditions change we don't want our grandchildren's lives ruined and we don't want to spend our final days staring at a computer screen at least that way we could focus our resources on people who really need it instead of fruitlessly shipping millions of tests all over the place living cannot be mere biological survival because that would mean that eating cans of navy beans inside a windowless room for 75 years would be just as good as a life full of human affection meaningful relationships and exhilarating experiences in the uk lord sumption summed it up what sort of life do we think we are protecting there is more to life than the avoidance of death life is a drink with friends life is a crowded football match or a live concert life is a family celebration with children and grandchildren life is companionship an arm around one's back laughter or tears shared at less than two meters these things are not just optional extras they are life itself they are fundamental to our humanity to our existence as social beings of course death is permanent whereas joy may be temporarily suspended but the force of that point depends on how temporary it really is well right on thank you you

Channel: misesmedia

Views: 857,745

Rating: 4.813693 out of 5

Keywords: Economics, Woods, Tom Woods, COVID-19, Shutdown, state, government, politics, coronovirus, masks, ebook, free, Mises, MisesU, hysteria, facts, honest, Rothbard

Id: 6RDffMCAujg

Length: 52min 49sec (3169 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/FroggyR77]

Tom Woods is the absolute best. His covid related posts have been amazing.

[u/perchesonopazzo]

So great to see a Mises University video here.

[u/BriS314]

Wow that was an absolutely fantastic talk. Guy's pretty funny too!

[u/antiacela]

Why aren't more people boycotting youtube/google?

How about some torrents or Peertube?

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