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  • Two New Medical Studies Show How Mask Mandates Failed—and May Have Harmed Countless People

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    I have a friend, a very smart fellow, who early in the pandemic began masking. At the time, masks were not being recommended by health authorities, let alone mandated.

    I didn’t think much about his decision. It didn’t affect me. I was what you might call a mask agnostic. Perhaps masks were beneficial, perhaps not.

    As the pandemic continued, however, I found myself more and more in the “anti-mask camp.” I didn’t suddenly begrudge my friend or think he was a fool for masking, but I was bothered that personal decisions had become public decisions.

    To make matters worse, a kind of mask dogma had taken hold. To publicly question the benefits of masking or point out possible adverse effects was verboten, a crime punishable by social media bans or blacklisting from fact-checkers. (This didn’t stop me from writing about masks—see here, here, and here—but I was very, very careful when doing so.)

    Like most people, I didn’t know how effective masks were in preventing the spread of Covid. I did have doubts, however, doubts that were supported by an abundance of scientific research and public health experts.

    Just as importantly, as a student of economics, I understood that all actions come with tradeoffs. (Some public health experts learned this lesson the hard way.) What were those tradeoffs? And who could determine if the public health benefit of masks outweighed the adverse consequences?

    We didn’t have much time for those questions in 2020, in large part because few people wanted to consider them. The public health bureaucracy certainly didn’t. It had its plan, and it wasn’t interested in exploring science that might undermine their directives. Three years later, however, research has emerged that helps answer these questions.

    A study published earlier this month in Frontiers in Public Health conducted a systematic review of more than 2,000 studies on the adverse effects of masking, finding “significant effects in both medical surgical and N95 masks.”

    As one might expect, covering the breathing orifices of humans for long periods of time carries health consequences, among them decreased oxygen saturation and increases in heart rate, blood pressure, blood-CO2 levels, and skin temperature, as well as dizziness, speech impediments, headaches, and dyspnea (labored breathing).

    Study authors said it was imperative that these findings are considered in future public health policies.

    “Face mask side-effects must be assessed (risk-benefit) against the available evidence of their effectiveness against viral transmissions,” the authors concluded. “In the absence of strong empirical evidence of effectiveness, mask wearing should not be mandated let alone enforced by law.”

    We now know some of the negative consequences of masking (and mask mandates). But what about their effectiveness in reducing the spread of Covid?

    As it happens, a massive study conducted in the UK, which examined one of London’s largest hospitals for 10 months during the highly contagious Omicron variant, sheds new light on this question.

    Though the full research has yet to be published (it will be presented at the 2023 European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases in April, officials say) study authors make it clear that the hospital’s masking requirement made “no discernible difference.”

    “Our study found no evidence that mandatory masking of staff impacts the rate of hospital SARS-CoV-2 infection with the Omicron variant,” said lead author Dr. Ben Patterson of St. George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, London.

    “The bottom line is that lifting the hospital mask mandate did not lead to a measurable increase in hospital-acquired COVID infections,” Jeanne Noble, associate professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told Healthline, adding that the research was more robust than previous observational trials.

    In other words, the two most recent studies on masking suggest masks were terribly ineffective in reducing the spread of Covid, but came with clear health harms. Yet countries across the world and states across the US were mandating their use for months if not years.

    How does something like this happen? Economics holds a clue.

    In his 1974 Nobel Prize speech, F.A. Hayek talked about the dangers of acting with “the pretense of knowledge.” In some ways, this knowledge was worse than no knowledge at all, because it stood to lead government officials and experts to believe they possessed sufficient knowledge to engineer society successfully.

    As many have noted, history has shown that Hayek was right to be worried. And for decades historians and economists have highlighted Hayek’s warning about this “fatal conceit” rooted in the pretense of knowledge, stressing the importance of demonstrating “to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

    Fewer, however, have noted a separate paragraph from Hayek’s speech, in which he notes what drives public officials to act with insufficient knowledge.

    “The conflict between what in its present mood the public expects science to achieve in satisfaction of popular hopes and what is really in its power is a serious matter because, even if the true scientists should all recognize the limitations of what they can do in the field of human affairs, so long as the public expects more there will always be some who will pretend, and perhaps honestly believe, that they can do more to meet popular demands than is really in their power.”

    This paragraph perfectly describes the phenomenon witnessed during the pandemic.

    Public officials clearly did not have enough knowledge to make rational decisions for hundreds of millions of Americans. But they had to pretend they did (and perhaps some actually believed they did, as Hayek suggests) because that was the popular demand. Influential conservatives and progressives both largely bought into the fiction that public health officials could rationally plan society—through mask mandates, lockdowns, and social distancing—to protect humans from the coronavirus.

    The pandemic was not just a failure of science. It was also clear evidence that government, freed from its constitutional and rational limitations, has grown far too large, as have our expectations of it.


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. (Follow him on Substack.)

    His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Is ‘Wokeism’ to Blame for Silicon Valley Bank’s Demise? No and Yes

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Within days of Silicon Valley Bank’s swift and shocking collapse, a narrative formed that “wokeism” lay at the heart of the California bank’s sudden demise. It began with a Fox News appearance by Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus.

    “I feel bad for all of these people that lost all their money in this woke bank,” Marcus told host Neil Cavuto. “You know, it was more distressing to hear that the bank officials sold off their stock before this happened.”

    Similar criticism followed from rank-and-files members of the GOP, including House Oversight chairman James Comer, who decried SVB’s “ESG-type policy and investing.”

    The charges prompted an avalanche of media responses attempting to debunk claims that “wokeness” had anything to do with the collapse of SVB or the distress of other financial institutions, such as Signature Bank.

    “There’s no evidence that SVB’s sustainable investing or diversity initiatives contributed to its collapse,” Washington Post business and tech reporter Julian Mark wrote.

    “No, diversity did not cause Silicon Valley Bank’s Collapse,” the New York Times assured readers in a headline.

    What Is ‘Woke’?

    Woke is a surprisingly tricky term to define—just ask Bethany Mandel who recently went viral

    when she froze on TV after being asked to define it—in part because it means different things to different people.

    What’s clear is that “wokeness” is intertwined with the concept of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), an idea broadly defined as a “framework that seeks to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, especially in the workplace, including populations who have historically been under-represented or subject to discrimination.”

    Treating all people fairly isn’t a particularly controversial or revolutionary idea, but critics of “wokeness” complain that DEI initiatives go beyond the fair and equal treatment of individuals, giving preferred treatment to historically marginalized groups. Moreover, there’s a concern that corporate DEI initiatives are emphasizing social causes over sound business practices and maximizing shareholder value.

    For example, SVB famously pledged to provide at least $5 billion “in sustainable finance and carbon neutral operations to support a healthier planet.” The bank—which is currently in bankruptcy proceedings—also donated $73 million to Black Lives Matter and similar social justice causes.

    Meanwhile, video has emerged of Signature Bank Chairman Scott Shay, whose bank was recently shut down by regulators, offering a lengthy tutorial on the proper usage of gender-neutral pronouns.

    Even proponents of DEI initiatives would likely concede these are “woke” practices. But did the “woke” lectures and programs have anything to do with the collapse of SVB and Signature Bank, both of which unfairly (and dangerously) received bailouts from the federal government?

    Many astute financial experts brush off claims that “wokeism” caused the reckoning facing SVB, rightly pointing out that macroeconomic factors triggered financial chaos across the world. (The Swiss bank Credit Suisse also had to be rescued, and there’s little evidence its collapse was related to wokeism.)

    In the United States, rising interest rates resulted in far less borrowing, particularly for tech startups, which are the primary clients of banks like SVB. Meanwhile, SVB had loaded up on (seemingly low risk) Treasury bonds, which saw their value plummet when the Federal Reserve began sharply raising interest rates to combat rampant inflation. Barron’s reports that more than half of SVB’s $211 billion in financial assets were composed of these struggling securities at the end of 2022.

    Many contend that more oversight could have prevented the collapse of SVB and other banks. This claim might have some merit, but it also ignores that regulators themselves were asleep at the switch during SVB’s collapse.

    “Traditional prudential regulation should have caught this,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) during a recent Senate hearing. “Where were the regulators?”

    It’s a fair question, and one members of both parties are asking. Banks are supposed to undergo stress tests and similar oversight to prevent the kind of exposure that wrecked SVB. Why that didn’t happen is a question we’ll likely hear answered during congressional hearings, but it might have something to do with the fact that SVB’s CEO also sat on the board of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, which had regulatory oversight.

    Regulatory failure, however, should not overshadow the bank’s own internal failures, which are obvious even to those without investment banking experience. Why was SVB’s portfolio not more diversified? Why did the bank expose itself to so much risk and hang on to its plummeting Treasury securities so long? Why were so many loans extended to subprime borrowers?

    These are, frankly, rookie mistakes.

    “The combination of a negligent board of directors @SVB with idiot management is the potent cocktail that led to a disastrous outcome,” investor and Shark Tank host Kevin O’Leary observed on Twitter in the wake of SVB’s collapse.

    O’Leary is not wrong, but he didn’t point out why SVB’s board was negligent.

    It turns out that SVB’s board of directors was rather thin on investment banking experience and heavy on political connections. (To be fair, there’s also a sound economic incentive to appoint board members with political clout.) One member of the board—Tom King, who joined the board in September 2022—had extensive experience in the industry, but others have relatively little or none.

    This is one of the dangers of “wokeism” and social justice theory. These value systems are explicitly hostile to concepts like individual merit. Baked into the ideology is the temptation to hire people based on factors—race, gender, ideology, etc.—other than the value they can bring to an organization; to ignore profit and shareholders, and instead serve greater social causes.

    If you doubt this, consider this 2021 interview with SVB board member Elizabeth ‘Busy’ Burr. In the interview, Burr spurns focusing on “numbers.” The words value and shareholder don’t even appear. Her focus is equity, inclusion, and the “tide of racism and white supremacy” in America. Months after the interview, the Carrot CCO joined the SVB board. (Burr, unlike other board members, did actually spend several years in the investment banking space, working for Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston, according to SVB.)

    To be clear, no one denies that macroeconomic factors—particularly the Federal Reserve’s massive money pumping and interest rate schemes—played a central role in the demise of SVB. But don’t discount the impact corporate wokeism had in creating a culture that emphasized DEI initiatives and goals over creating value, earning profit, and providing proper oversight of a company managing billions of dollars.

    We’re constantly being told that capitalism needs to be fixed. That it needs to be more responsible. That it must focus more on “environmental” and “social” concerns. That it must include more external “stakeholders.”

    The collapse of SVB, which was preventable, shows that these efforts to “reform” capitalism may very well be what destroys it. (The fact that federal authorities quickly stepped in to protect parties from the consequences of their decisions shows that to some extent it already has.)

    Moreover, basic economics offers yet another clue.

    Resources, we know, are finite. Each comes with an “opportunity cost,” which means that every single service or resource—including time—comes at the expense of something else.

    It’s worth pointing out that SVB had a DEI executive, but, astonishingly, it had no chief risk officer. This is a big deal.

    Opportunity cost shows us the funds used to hire that diversity executive could have been used instead to hire a risk officer. Indeed, every single dollar the bank spent on diversity and inclusion and other “woke” programs and initiatives could have been spent on other resources, including risk officers and stress tests that could have helped SVB identify solvency problems and limit exposure to the macroeconomic factors that precipitated its collapse.

    “Wokeism” may not have been the primary factor for SVB’s collapse, but basic economics shows it did play a role, big or small.


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. (Follow him on Substack.)

    His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Congress’s 4,155-Page Omnibus Bill Is a Symbol of American Decadence

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    On December 20th a handful of Republican senators shuffled before an audience of reporters prepared to issue fiery polemics on the year-end omnibus bill which sat, heavy and ponderous in all its eight-ream absurdity on a wheeled cart before the five-senator assemblage.

    “DANGER: $1.7 trillion of hazardous debt” read one of the mock-hazard signs decking the cart. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul declared the bill an “abomination,” while Utah Senator Mike Lee skewered the unseemly pressures to freeze it into law by proclaiming the process “legislative barbarism.”

    Every year it happens with textbook repetition: Washington politicians procrastinate in releasing a colossal expense prospectus for the following year which unfailingly runs thousands of pages, requests billions of dollars, and is granted mere hours of scrutiny before being thrust to a congressional vote. The process is riddled with partisan intimidations and shrewd slandering. Democratic politicians trot out folksy pleas about supporting struggling Americans, to which, naturally, passing the bill is postured to achieve. Most Republicans cave to its smothering inevitability; a minority bitterly protest.

    The omnibus bill earns its name from its practice of absorbing a collection of smaller bills into one vote. You might be tempted to call this government efficiency, but think again. In reality, it’s the gateway of legislative sloppiness and profligacy. And you might be tempted to believe Washington’s Christmas tradition is paternal benevolence for the common man but this too is a smokescreen. If our political overlords actually cared for our future in the manner of responsible stewards they would not bankrupt the nation. They would not smuggle dozens of silly congressional pet projects into our legislative initiatives. They would not make a mockery of the political process by demanding decisions on bills scarcely proffered hours of review. They would not egregiously spend money we did not have. They would not thoughtlessly shovel funds to any hungry bureaucratic mouth in the country. They would not insult American taxpayers by destroying our currency, snowballing our debt, and wrapping it all in a veneer of charity and Progress. Grim and apocalyptic though this indictment may be, it is nevertheless the bitter truth.

    As Americans, we have become numb to the money-gobbling maneuvers of the bureaucratic machine. We hardly flinch at billion-dollar price tags, not because we do not cognitively register such a number as large but because we feel detached from its significance. We do not feel connected to its consequences. We don’t even feel particularly sure about what the spending figures should be, so bewildered by the dizzying complexity of contemporary American politics are we. We put our fingers to the glass and watch but we cannot seem to stretch our fingers out and really touch the harrowing reality of a $1.7 trillion bill or a $31 trillion in national debt. Such numbers fail to disquiet our consciences. Why?

    Here are a few potential reasons.

    1. Nobody talks about fiscal conservatism anymore. Republicans love to rhapsodize about this fixture of their intellectual tradition but few are those who actually extend this principle from token rhetoric to the necessary scolding and refashioning efforts of current regimes. No matter whether they claim democratic or republican status, administrations do a sordid job of expenditure restraint. This equivalence between the parties is sobering indeed, indicating that the majority of republicans do not know how to defend small-government and balanced budgets with any authentic confidence. You might hear “fiscal conservatism” sprinkled throughout the campaign trail for its old-fashioned appeal and knack for attracting votes, but it is no longer practiced by those in Washington. Longtime champion of fiscal restraint Sen. Rand Paul has made entreaties for years that are drowned out by the opportunism and apathy swarming the Capitol.
    2. Nobody is sure why fiscal conservatism even matters: Government money has been lamentably scrubbed of morality. It bears no qualms about tempering its quantity or maintaining its quality due to an ethical contract with the people. Money has no scruples attached to it anymore. The modern conscience conceives of it as a hollow instrument; a neutral tool to get from A to B. But what is money really made of? Where does it get its value? In what ways can it be a wonderful thing and in what ways can it equally be a dangerous thing? Few care to mull these questions.
    3. Nobody quite feels the consequences of reckless spending yet: Because we raise debt ceilings with impunity and have thrown that old burden of balancing budgets out the window, we stay disconnected from the ramifications of fiscal hedonism. It is hard enough for politicians to make difficult choices that affect life beyond their term limits, because where’s the motivation in that? And so, money becomes this distant, untouchable relic that no one wants to poke at.

    And so, not only have we lost a certain emotional reaction to government spending (i.e. an instinctual discernment of when it hits a threshold of moral questionability) but we have also lost an intellectual grasp of it (i.e. an understanding of why extravagance cannot persist in perpetuity.) All of this adds up to a mass desensitization that leaves us dangerously acclimated to an environment that pretends money is a plaything and not actually the beating heart a civilization.

    Here are some of the ways in which this unlucky acclimatization has occurred:

    1. Money added is rarely scaled back: In government, addition is the path of least resistance. Subtraction has poor incentives, can be politically painful, and sounds mean and parsimonious to us Americans who see government as our rightful pursestrings and sympathetic caretaker.
    2. Added bureaucracy is rarely reviewed or pruned: More money inevitably feeds more bureaucratic cubicles. Bureaucracy is a curious animal: one that has a considerable appetite for more money and workers and administrative projects, but one that also has a deadening effect and leaves decay in its wake. In this way, bureaucracy has always bizarrely appeared to me as a life/death personification. If one thing is for sure, it will seek to justify its existence and once breathed form by taxpayer dollars, will lunge for more funds to legitimize its continuance.
    3. Law becomes more complex and disorienting: As sentences rain from keyboards and paper churns from the printer and more thousand-page legal monstrosities are produced, we end up building on a (new-ish) toxic American tradition of unintelligible, byzantine law. The less lucid and graspable the law is to the public, the less accountable government becomes—and the more fuzzy the political vision of the masses grows. After all, do we even know what laws were passed in the year-end omnibus bill? More worryingly still, do our politicians even know? Is this state of affairs normal? Would we call it a natural progression? I would warn against this particular temptation: the temptation to believe that increasing complexity is a sign of sophisticated progress, of governmental fine-tuning. It is not. It tangles with its serpentine requests and chokes with its punishing demands. And it throws a veneer of precision and compassion (owing to its seeming charity) over it all. As a general rule of thumb, when edicts becomes more profuse and complex and fail to remain concise and coherent to the public, they are unequivocally not serving the masses. (They are probably serving the elites.)

    What does one see when they gaze upon a 4,155-page bill? A symbol of American decadence. A pile of legal jargon so exhaustive its efforts look undeniably frantic. This utter excess inspires notions of blind mania. What are we doing and why? Is there any principle behind governmental motion? Are there any scraps of real thought or prudence? Or is the impetus merely zombie-like bureaucratic appetite? No matter how comprehensive and caring we would like our present government to appear, the rot cannot be fully concealed. An eight-ream bill is no sign of legislative nobility. It is an insult to the common people. It makes for a ridiculous picture of thoughtless excess. It just looks stupid at first glance. This intuitive, gut-level reaction is important. It’s the embarrassing truth of our attempts at managerial sophistry laid bare. It’s worth mentioning that empire decline is marked by an apathetic watering-down of principle, by money deterioration, and by administrative overextension. Check, check, check.

    The larger government grows, the more money it absorbs; sure. But the less functional it becomes too. It ossifies, and its vibrant principles start to decay under the dead weight.

    Once a certain threshold in size is reached (and who’s to say exactly where that is) organization lapses into oppression. Vibrancy lapses into atrophy. And decent functionality lapses into chaotic disarray. The lesson?

    Overreach and you snuff out life. Congress’ proud 4,155-page creation is a post-empire emblem if there ever was one. Do not be fooled by the legislation’s size: it represents a floundering American system, not a vibrant one.


    Lauren Reiff

    Lauren is a writer of economics, psychology, and lots in between. To read more of her work, follow her on Medium.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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