| Unleash Prosperity Hotline Issue #36 Written by Stephen Moore 1) “It Needs To End Now” The New York Post took the unusual step of putting an opinion piece on its front page on Thursday.  Writer David Marcus called his effort “a good rant,” and indeed it is with reading. It’s a sledgehammer taken to every wrong call that New York politicians and experts have made over the last two months. “The Big Apple is dying….Cuomo and de Blasio have no plan. There is not a single question about when New York can get back to normal to which they have a straight answer. Not one. They cash their taxpayer paychecks while immiserating the rest of us. “If our elected leaders won’t save the world’s greatest city from a slow death by economic strangulation, then the people of New York must do it themselves. Barbers, tailors, nail salons, sporting goods stores, movie theaters and others should open their doors — while maintaining social distancing, of course — and dare the state to shut them down. “Our politicians serve by our consent; we don’t run our businesses or live our lives by their consent. The suggestion to the contrary is an affront to Americanism.” Amen. https://nypost.com/2020/05/20/end-new-york-citys-lockdown-now/ 2) Stop Fear-Mongering: Kids Are Safer From Covid-19 Than Everyone Else CTUP President Phil Kerpen started writing this item last weekend for the Hotline… but it got way too long. It ended up being a comprehensive explanation of the extremely low risk to children — much lower than seasonal flu — and a refutation of the media’s ridiculous fear-mongering campaign over Kawasaki Disease. The conclusion: “David Spiegelhalter is chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge and is widely considered the world’s top expert in understanding and communicating risk. He told the BBC: ‘There have been based on the data so far extremely low risk to children… It is an unbelievably low risk. This group of kids are staggeringly safe in general. Nobody has ever been safer in the history of humanity than these kids.’ “Don’t let politicians like Cuomo use dozens of kids with a treatable condition tenuously connected to COVID-19 to justify lockdowns and school closures for millions—and to distract from their failure to protect the truly vulnerable, particularly seniors in nursing homes.” Please read and share: https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/21/stop-fear-mongering-kids-are-safer-from-covid-19-than-everyone-else/ 3) Governmental Child Abuse In a stunning act that is both anti-children and anti-science, Fairfax County, Virginia (population: 1 million) has just canceled *all* summer activity camps and classes for school-age kids — who as the article above explains, are at nearly zero risk of getting sick or infecting others. With so many two working parent families relying on schools and camps while they work, this means a large population of Fairfax parents cannot return to work until September, even if they “re-open” — which this irrational decision suggests is in doubt. https://twitter.com/Brian_Riedl/status/1263300586860142592 4) The Evidence Mounts that Lockdowns Don’t Work The University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government crunched the actual, real-world data and found the same thing that so many others who have put down the models and looked at the real numbers have found: “there’s little correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities — a measure that looks at the overall number of deaths compared with normal trends.” But there is one consistent effect of lockdown severity: “As one would expect, the countries with the most intense lockdowns look likely to suffer the most economically.” Surprise! Bloomberg being Bloomberg, they printed these plain facts for the first time but they tagged it “opinion.” https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-opinion-coronavirus-europe-lockdown-excess-deaths-recession/ 5) Quote of the Day Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, and the anti-Neil Ferguson:this “In almost every context we’ve seen the epidemic grow, turn around and die away — almost like clockwork. Different countries have had different lockdown policies, and yet what we’ve observed is almost a uniform pattern of behaviour which is highly consistent with the SIR model. To me that suggests that much of the driving force here was due to the build-up of immunity. I think that’s a more parsimonious explanation than one which requires in every country for lockdown (or various degrees of lockdown, including no lockdown) to have had the same effect.” https://unherd.com/2020/05/oxford-doubles-down-sunetra-gupta-interview/ 6) Terminal Trump derangement? Many liberals have pulled a bait-and-switch from “flatten-the-curve” to “stay locked down until there’s a vaccine,” a recipe for potentially years of catastrophic economic decline wholly unjustified by the relatively rapid decline of the disease all over the world without regard to lockdowns. So we were surprised to learn that an astonishing 36 percent of Americans say they are less likely to take a vaccine recommended by President Trump. The very people insisting we lock down and hide in our homes until there is a vaccine won’t actually take the vaccine because Trump! https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vaccine-poll-exclu/exclusive-a-quarter-of-americans-are-hesitant-about-a-coronavirus-vaccine-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKBN22X19G 7) Lockdowns Are For Little People Jim Geraghty of National Review gives some personal knowledge about just how cavalier some Washington D.C. elites are about the rules that govern normal people.” “I’ll give you a moment to cope with the shock that a Washington-based media executive, a movie producer, a Democratic political operative, a Washington city councilman, and a well-known lobbyist and their spouses believed the rules didn’t apply to them.” Geraghty then goes to describe two dinner parties – totally against lockdown rules – he was recently told about by participants. You might fairly conclude that the people stoking fear and demanding lockdowns have a more reality-based assessment of risk for themselves than for others. https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/quarantine-for-thee-but-not-for-me/ 8) Ohio Calls Time Out On Its Health DirectorDr. Amy Acton, the health director who last week claimed (lied) only 22% of COVID deaths in her state were in nursing homes before her own department’s report put it at 64% (yesterday it rose to 70%), suffered another setback in her crusade to keep the state on lockdown. On Tuesday night, a state judge ruled Ohio’s COVID-19 lockdown illegal, and issued an injunction against portions of it. The state law being used doesn’t allow for a quarantine or isolation period of such length. Judge Eugene Lucci ruled that “The director has quarantined the entire people of the state of Ohio, for much more than 14 days. The director has no statutory authority to close all businesses, including the plaintiffs’ gyms, which she deems non-essential for a period of two months. She has acted in an impermissibly arbitrary, unreasonable, and oppressive manner and without any procedural safeguards.”Question: Why in the world does this incompetent and arrogant woman still have a job? Ohio Governor DeWine should fire her immediately. She is dangerous to the health and well being of the Ohio citizens. https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/continuing-coverage/coronavirus/lake-county-judge-issues-preliminary-injunction-against-ohio-dept-of-health-for-keeping-gyms-closed 9) Washington State Admits Falling for Nigerian Scammers We know liberal states are approving as many unemployment applications as they possibly can but… “Washington state officials have acknowledged losing ‘hundreds of millions of dollars’ to an international fraud scheme that stung the state’s unemployment insurance system. “Suzi LeVine, commissioner of the state Employment Security Department (ESD), disclosed the staggering losses during a news conference Thursday afternoon. LeVine declined to specify how much money was stolen during the scam, which is believed to be orchestrated out of Nigeria.” https://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/washington-adds-more-than-145000-weekly-jobless-claims-as-coronavirus-crisis-lingers/ 10) Just the Facts, Maam Our friend Ethan Meers from Chicago sent us this video of Anne Marie Knott at Olin Business school at Washington University. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTFOsQfDFi8It’s a great tutorial on the myths and reality of Covid-19 and its impact on society. This is a 15 minute presentation with some math involved, but for those who want to know more than anyone else in the room about this disease, we recommend watching. 11) A Time for Patriotism (But Are they Social Distancing?) Happy Memorial Day weekend!  |
