Testing

"After 8 billion doses (yes 8 BILLION, not a typo) Covid vaccines are at this point one of the most tested medical interventions in history and one of the safest ever."

~ Dr Neil Stone

"Increased opposition to vaccines is a partial measure of how high a percentage this is."

"I’m going to have to write something in the near future about the big paradox of the pandemic years, which is that we produced a vaccine in record time that saved many millions of lives—the biggest demonstration in decades of the value of vaccines. Yet the result is that anti-vaccine sentiment has increased.
    "I think it’s a combination of three things. First, we are more culturally primed for anti-technology sentiment than we were when the polio vaccine was introduced in the 1950s. Second, thanks to vaccines, we are more culturally removed from the point at which infectious disease was a leading cause of death and a threat that continually loomed over human life, so we no longer appreciate what vaccines have saved us from. Third, a long period between major pandemics meant that nobody had to think about vaccines. They accepted them as a matter of course. But the pandemic suddenly required people to form an opinion about a new vaccine, and when people are required to think, a certain percentage of them will quite frankly be bad at it. Increased opposition to vaccines is a partial measure of how high a percentage this is.
    "At any rate, misplaced skepticism about vaccines has centred especially around the new technology of mRNA vaccines. But again, the paradox is that this targets a new technology that works. Specifically, mRNA vaccines offer tremendous speed and flexibility in creating new vaccines that shows enormous promise for treating things that could never be treated before.
    "In this case, it’s a vaccine for brain cancer...."

~ Robert Tracinski, from his post 'A Roundup of Good News: The Paradox of mRNA'

"I find the virtual hostility to Zelenskyy incredibly disturbing. It is most pronounced among what we might refer to as the post-Covid right"

Pic by Getty

"Then there’s the other side in the memeification of Zelenskyy. His haters. And man, do they hate him. I find the virtual hostility to Zelenskyy incredibly disturbing. It is most pronounced among what we might refer to as the post-Covid right – that corner of the world wide web where the understandable agitation with lockdown has morphed over time into anti-vax conspiracism, an unhealthy obsession with the World Economic Forum, a distrust of everything and everyone, and a cast-iron conviction that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a puppet of the globalist elites determined to drag us all into World War 3.
    "It’s like a mirror image of the liberal-elite fawning: where that lot dreams Zelenskyy will help to bring about the ‘rebirth of the liberal world order’, the Ukraine cynics think he is the liberal world order. The new world order. A mouthpiece of globalism. Zelensky is ‘working with globalists against the interests of his own people’, says Candace Owens. He’s a ‘globalist puppet for Soros and the Clintons’, said Arizona State senator Wendy Rogers. Apparently he’s aligned with those ‘global bankers’ who are ‘shoving godlessness and degeneracy in our face.’ Donald Trump Jnr reckons he’s an ‘international welfare queen’. You don’t have to be a fan of the West’s sending of ever-more weaponry to Ukraine to recognise how infantile it is to describe an invaded nation’s plea for arms as welfare queenery. Talk about globalising the culture war....
    "There’s a very important debate to be had about Russia, Ukraine, the West and war in the modern era. But what we’ve mostly had over the past year is the cheap exploitation of a serious global conflict to score points in petty wars at home. Chaise-longue Churchills on one side, armchair Chamberlains on the other. And they’re all really talking about themselves, not Ukraine. Let’s change the record. Maybe Zelenskyy is neither saint nor sinner. Neither the world’s saviour nor its destroyer. Maybe he’s just a man doing what he thinks is best in the most horrifying and existential of circumstances. Call me a brainless dupe of Davos propaganda, but that’s what I’m going with."

~ Brendan O'Neill, from his op-ed 'The Two Zelenskyys'

Who *not* to listen to on energy policy

"On energy policy, listening to environmentalists who value less human impact on earth is as bad as listening to anti-vaxxers & taking seriously a 'vaccine-neutral' vision on health policy."
          ~ Nikos Sotirakopoulos

"...how counterproductive to define one's beliefs in opposition to a hated other group"

"For the record: Both 'sides' of the media divide offer varying amounts of actual information laced with propaganda. Anyone who accepts any of it uncritically -- or reflexively rejects any of it -- is not really getting news.
    "Consider how many conservatives out there have joined the hippies in becoming anti-vaxxers or buy into stupid arguments against masks.
    "Often, there is little evidence that they support (or at least think people should be free to take) either measure -- but oppose the government forcing people to do so; there's just blind opposition based on blanket (although understandable) suspicion of traditional media and, perhaps a conspiracy theory or two... [demonstrating once again] how counterproductive defining one's beliefs in opposition to a hated other group can be."

~ Gus Van Horn, from his post ''Fake News,' 'Faux News;' To-may-to, To-mah-to.'

Even 'pretty inept' looks good compared to 'not at all' [updated]

"I wonder if even sensible regulation skeptics like Tyler Cowen realise just how bad things are. In a recent post, he suggests we should praise the UK’s efforts in distribution the vaccine. But the UK has done a horrendous job of distributing the vaccine; indeed Israel is doing the job 5 times faster.
    "So why does Tyler praise the UK? Because almost every country in the world is screwing up even worse than the UK. Regulation has made things so bad that even 'pretty inept' starts to look good on a comparative scale."

          ~ Scott Sumner from his post 'Regulation: It's Worse Than You Think'

UPDATE: As late as last November, Covid-Response Minister Chris Hipkins told TVNZ that New Zealand was "very well placed" to get its hands on successful vaccines for the virus. "Without going into detail I think we're in a very good place to ensure that as vaccines start to come to market New Zealand will be at the front of the queue to be getting vaccines," he said.

Front of the queue.

Yet now,  the New Zealand government officially only  plans to begin vaccination here in "the second quarter of 2021," beginning with border workers -- and then, all going well, vaccination of the general public is only planned to begin in "the second half of the year"...

[Hat tip HomePaddock]

'Lockdown sceptics should support this lockdown'

"[Britain's] Lockdown Three, I’m sorry to say (and I can hear the howls from sceptics as I write this), is justifiable, practically and ethically. Given the rollout of the vaccine, the emergence of the new variant and the plausible risk of the [UK's] healthcare system falling over, there is probably now no realistic alternative. Whatever one’s objections to the first two lockdowns, on both cost-benefit and libertarian grounds, it is at least a defensible position to acknowledge the merit of a brief lockdown during a maximum-speed vaccination campaign to minimise morbidity and mortality along the way.
    "The calculation is entirely different now from that of the previous two lockdowns. Given the vaccine, the variant and the healthcare situation, the current restriction can be supported (regretfully) without cognitive dissonance by those who opposed the previous lockdowns vehemently and vocally. It is either bad logic, bad faith or fundamentalism to argue otherwise."

        ~ Alastair Hames, from his op-ed 'Lockdown sceptics should support this lockdown'

. 

"From testing, to cures, to developing a vaccine, to creative and practical methods of physical distancing, the solution to the current crises is more innovation, not less. That means more freedom, not less." #QotD

"The penny has finally dropped that there is an effectively infinite number of ways to rearrange the atoms and bits in the world into useful combinations, and that returns can increase forever. At the same time, people have spotted that the societies that do the most innovating are the ones with the most freedom for people to exchange ideas...
    "In a year marred by economic collapse and the worst pandemic in a century, it is more important than ever that we remember this lesson. Top-down, state organisations from the Chinese Communist Party to the World Health Organization to the Food and Drug Administration to Public Health England have repeatedly misled the public and strangled the experimentation and technological innovation needed to react to the COVID-19 outbreak, or to address the economic consequences of the pandemic.
    "From testing, to cures, to developing a vaccine, to creative and practical methods of physical distancing, the solution to the current crises is more innovation, not less.
"That means more freedom, not less."
          ~ Matt Ridley, from his post 'The solution to the current crises'
,

Q: How would a truly capitalist society have handled this pandemic?

Since we don't live in one, folk have been asking how, in a truly capitalist society, the market would have responded to this pandemic here's an answer based on Yaron Brook's thread a month ago.

Even a truly capitalist society can never remove the threat of such a cataclysm. But being more nimble and much better prepared to face any event likely or unlikely makes dealing with such a threat far more peaceful. And without a state central bank having so destroyed the means of exchange that we were already confronting the bursting of an historically high asset bubble (the "everything bubble") at the very same time as this pandemic arrived, businesses and employed folks and families may have arrived at the start line with more savings and liquid assets with which to see the pandemic through ...

So, in a truly capitalist society, here is how the market likely responds: 

• Health insurance companies have been continually monitoring for health risks (because they have a strong economic interest in maintaining their customers' health). 
• Having detected a possible outbreak, they warn early -- to minimise their later costs -- implementing plans with hospitals, that have been developed well in advance.
• Demand from hospitals for extra equipment causes prices to go up quickly. 
• Market responds by bringing on new capacity quickly -- and by researching the possibilities of new and better equipment. 
• Prices at supermarkets and shops rise on all goods in high demand, thus reducing "hoarding" and assuring continued supply. (Suppliers are encouraged to move resources to produce more of what's demanded.) 
• Hospitals (all private, and in a completely private market) activate their emergency plans (for which they have a strong profit-motive) for additional beds (in mothballed buildings, local hotels, or other facilities).  
• Private pharmaceutical companies and labs rapidly develop tests at the request of hospitals and clinics (motivated by the highest profits going to those developing and supplying the earliest and most reliable testing). 
• Private clinics start testing en masse.
• Goverment's job -- being to protect individual rights -- is to make sure those who are a threat or potential threat to others are isolated.
• Private media and health experts provide objective (non-party political) advice to individuals and companies on how to deal with the pandemic in the context of their own lives, instead of all advice and commentary being poisoned by partisal political interests, and how it might affect their favourite leader's poll ratings. (And they also take time to explain the reasons for the emergency pricing in supermarkets etc.)
• Testing provides individuals and companies with the kind of information crucial to making rational decisions. 
• Private labs and pharmaceutical companies rush to innovate treatments and vaccines (motivated by the highest profits going to those developing and supplying the earliest and most reliable test kits, treatments and vaccines).
• Private testing and certification organisations ("FDA" replacements) ramp up to approve test kits, treatments and vaccines (motivated by the highest profits going to those approving the most most reliable test kits, treatments and vaccines).
• Businesses adjust to peoples' preferences for safety, installing the necessary protections and conveniences (encouraged also by their own insurance providers, who are motivated to provide and issue objective guidelines). Businesses unable to stay open, or only in a limited fashion, rely on norm loss-of-business insurance and koha. Voluntary friendly societies pick up the slack.
• People who don't follow the reasonable guidelines suffer social ostracism, and are left to suffer the consequences.
• Personal, loss-of-business, and life insurance contracts could all be written in ways that say "if you want to be covered, behave."

In short, a truly capitalist society would have acted more swiftly, more effectively, with fewer police checkpoints and fewer blowhards in the press. (And the press would not have been banned from operating.)

Even this epidemic as it has already panned out has frankly revealed that almost any business has an economic interest in monitoring and developing plans for emerging viruses ... unless they figure it’s cheaper to be bailed out.

So why didn't it happen this way, even in the semi-capitalist United States?

• because even private hospitals in the U.S. are driven by CDC and FDA policy, and by their guidelines on "best practice"
• because health insurance companies and health providers enjoy near-monopoly protection through regulation and licensing, discouraging genuine competition to motive improvements
• because no amount of forward planning will be rewarded when govt steps in to change the rules of the game. Or to announce bail-outs all round. Even to abject failures.

And the government's job? The job of government in a truly capitalist society remains the same either in our out of a pandemic: to protect individual rights. So how specifically can government go about that in a pandemic?

• ensure objective rules and transparent due process in isolating or distancing individuals
• ensure insurance companies honour all their contracts; and
• provide incentives -- such as making profits tax-free for whoever finds the cure first.

.

Yes folks, it's real. And unless things on the ground do change, no amount of house arrest will have improved the outcome of the epidemic, it will only have delayed its terrible effects.

Source: New York Times

In recent days, I'm seeing an increase in folk on this freedom side of the aisle who want to avoid acknowledging the reality of this pandemic. They argue about the need (or not) to extend house arrest for those few more days. They argue that the virus is no worse than the seasonal flu. Sadly, however, for all of us -- and that includes all of us who need to get our businesses back up and running -- this is very real. We're lucky to have escaped (so far) so easily) -- but this virus hasn't gone away yet, and it won't go away by pretending that it isn't serious. The reality is, whether or not house arrest extends past Anzac Day or not is trivial in the long run of this virus. Because we are only on the very first leg of a very long and tragic treble, of a virus which as overseas experience is showing is already far, far worse than just another seasonal flu.

"[A] review of mortality data in 11 countries shows ... a clearer, if still incomplete, picture of the toll of the crisis.
    "In the last month, far more people died in these countries than in previous years, The New York Times found. The totals include deaths from Covid-19 as well as those from other causes, likely including people who could not be treated as hospitals became overwhelmed. These numbers undermine the notion that many people who have died from the virus may soon have died anyway...
    "[T]he total death numbers offer a more complete portrait of the pandemic, experts say, especially because most countries report only those Covid-19 deaths that occur in hospitals.
    “'Whatever number is reported on a given day is going to be a gross underestimate,' said Tim Riffe, a demographer at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany. 'In a lot of places the pandemic has been going on for long enough that there has been sufficient time for late death registrations to come in, giving us a more accurate picture of what the mortality really was.' In Paris, more than twice the usual number of people have died each day, far more than the peak of a bad flu season. In New York City, the number is now four times the normal amount...
    "The differences are particularly stark in countries that have been slow to acknowledge the scope of the problem. Istanbul, for example, recorded about 2,100 more deaths than expected from March 9 through April 12...

 

    "In March, the Indonesian government attributed 84 deaths to the coronavirus in Jakarta. But over 1,000 people more than normal were buried in Jakarta cemeteries that month, according to data from the city’s Department of Parks and Cemeteries...

 

    "In many European countries, recent data show 20 to 30 percent more people have been dying than normal. That translates to tens of thousands of more deaths...
Even taking into account the new numbers, experts say the death toll to date could have been much worse.

 

    “'Today’s rise in all-cause mortality takes place under conditions of extraordinary measures, such as social distancing, lockdowns, closed borders and increased medical care, at least some which have positive impacts,' said Vladimir Shkolnikov, a demographer at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. 'It is likely that without these measures, the current death toll would be even higher.'”

Note: that's only the current death toll that Mr Shkolnikov is talking about . . .

But if there's anything that even we non-epidemiologists should be able to work out, it's that we are only in the first few miles of a very long marathon, and getting released from lock-up on Tuesday is not the end, but only a beginning. Because no amount of "social distancing" on its own will kill off this virus. In reality, these kinds of mitigation measures are only a delaying tactic. Because . . .

"For two months of containment to be better than two weeks of containment, the situation on the ground has to change.
"There is a simple truth [here] ... The duration of containment efforts does not matter, if transmission rates return to normal when they end, and mortality rates have not improved. This is simply because as long as a large majority of the population remains uninfected, lifting containment measures will lead to an epidemic almost as large as would happen without having mitigations in place at all.

"Unless things on the ground do change, no amount of house arrest will have improved the outcome of the epidemic, it will only have delayed its terrible effects." Source: 'A call to honesty in pandemic modelling'

    "This is not to say that there are not good reasons to use mitigations as a delay tactic. For example, we may hope to use the months we buy with containment measures to improve hospital capacity, in the hopes of achieving a reduction in the mortality rate. We might even wish to use these months just to consider our options as a society and formulate a strategy. But mitigations themselves are not saving lives in these scenarios; instead, it is what we do with the time that gives us an opportunity to improve the outcome of the epidemic...

That's crucial. That's where reasoned opposition should be focussed. Understand that this is an emergency; that government does have a legitimate role; that if handled properly it will be temporary; and focus on due process and getting things right: Talk about how people can do business safely in this pandemic. (Talk about the need for objective rules, and for due process in introducing regulations and police powers). 

Focus on increasing PPE and hospital capacity, on increasing staff capacity by (say) relaxing occupational licensing restrictions on immigrants with medical training.  

On studying, properly, the effects of herd immunity. 

On removing whatever regulatory restrictions exist on releasing a vaccine -- including anything restricting people taking a proposed vaccine voluntarily in a trial... 

All these things are samples are the kinds of things that need to happen on the ground while mitigation measures are happening. Because mitigation only reduces the emergency's impact; there must at the same time be a focus on ways for the emergency and the mitigation to end. 

Because unless things on the ground do change, no amount of house arrest will have "improved the outcome of the epidemic in this model, it will only have delayed its terrible effects."

"Where we are now
"Nations around the world are staring down a host of terrible options. Business-as-usual means overrun hospitals, and large numbers of preventable deaths. One or two years of suppression measures in wait for a vaccine means a global shutdown whose full ramifications will require input from experts across multiple domains to fully understand. The viability of middle roads, which might attempt to replace suppression efforts with contact tracing while allowing normal social and economic activity, is still debated by experts.
    "What should be absolutely clear is that hard decisions lie ahead, and that there are no easy answers."

But the hard questions don't go away by pretending that this isn't a real problem.  Better to confront those hard questions than to pretend they're not there.
.

"The war on vaccines does not stem from a dispute over facts, but from a disdain for facts, truth, and reason. The anti-vaccine movement is itself a danger." #QotD

"The war on vaccines does not stem from a dispute over facts, but from a disdain for facts, truth, and reason. The anti-vaccine movement is itself a danger."

~ Dr. Amesh Adalja, from 'The War on Vaccines: An Interview with Dr. Amesh Adalja'
.

5 chemistry facts to know before opening your mouth

 

In our ongoing efforts here at NOT PC to help you avoid looking like an idiot out in public, here are five things you need to know before holding forth on the self-congratulatory Hippy Issue of the Day – “five rudimentary facts about chemistry that you must grasp before you are even remotely qualified to make an informed decision about medicines, vaccines, food, etc.”:

1). Everything is made of chemicals
[Hence :] A “chemical-free lifestyle” is totally impossible…
It’s also worth noting that the length of a chemical’s name does not indicate how toxic it is…

2). The dose makes the poison
No chemical is inherently safe or inherently dangerous…essentially all chemicals are safe at a low enough dose, and essentially all chemicals are toxic at a high enough dose. This is a fundamental fact that people in the anti-science movement routinely ignore…

3). There is no difference between “natural” and “synthetic” versions of a chemical
[So]…as long as the chemical structure is the same, it doesn’t matter if the chemical was extracted from a plant or synthesised in a lab.

4). “Natural” chemicals are not automatically good and “artificial” chemicals are not automatically bad
…this claim is nothing more than an appeal to nature fallacy. Nature is full of chemicals such as cyanide and arsenic that are dangerous at anything but a very low dose, so there is no reason to think that the “naturalness” of a chemical is an indicator of its healthiness…
Further, remember that chemicals are nothing more than arrangements of elements. There is absolutely no reason to think that nature has produced all of the best arrangements or that we are incapable of making an arrangement that is safe or even better than what nature produced….

5). A chemical’s properties are determined by the other chemicals that it is bound to
Chemical compounds are made by combining different elements or even molecules, and the final product may not behave the same way as all of its individual parts. Sodium chloride is a classic example of this concept….

Much more simple detail to back up those main points here: '5 simple chemistry facts that everyone should understand before talking about science.'

[Hat tip Bill Evers.]

Here’s Tim Minchin:

.

Inventor(s) of the Day: Two wonderful women and a vaccine

Note to newscasters: not all women want to be or are “victims” in the sense the media make a show of.

Grace Eldering and Pearl Kendrick invented the vaccine against a disease that had been killing up to 6,000 children ever year: Whooping Cough.

Their vaccine now saves around half-a-million lives every year.

Grace Eldering and Pearl Kendrick are heroes. Or heroines, if you prefer.

In any case, I doubt they’d worry about having their hair pulled.

Too busy being fabulous.

[Hat tip The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science]

Measles is dangerous. Vaccines, not.

They’re laughing in Nigeria.

Idiocy leads to illness.*  The anti-vaccine movement is now fuelling a measles epidemic “spreading outward from Disneyland in California,” says bioscientist Steven Salzberg, in what he calls “the worst outbreak in years.”

Atlanta's Center for Disease Control (CDC) reports that in just the past month, 84 people from 14 states contracted measles, a number that is certainly an under-estimate, because the CDC doesn’t record every case. California alone has 59 confirmed cases, most of them linked to an initial exposure in Disneyland. A majority of people who have gotten sick were not vaccinated.
    For years, scientists (including me) have warned that the anti-vaccination movement was going to cause epidemics of disease. Two years ago I wrote that the anti-vaccine movement had caused the worst whooping cough epidemic in 70 years. And now it’s happening with measles.
    Finally, though, the public seems to be pushing back. Parents are starting to wake up to the danger that the anti-vax movement represents to their children and themselves…
    Most of the anti-vax crowd have no scientific training or expertise, which might explain (but doesn’t excuse) their complete ignorance of the science. Over the past 15 years, dozens of studies involving hundreds of thousands of people have shown convincingly that neither vaccines nor any of the ingredients in them are linked to autism. Vaccines are not only safe, but they are perhaps the greatest public health success in the history of civilization.
    Measles, though, is dangerous.

Not least to children whose immune systems aren’t functioning properly like Rhett Krawitt,” a 6-year-old California boy who has gone through 4 years of chemotherapy for childhood leukemia. His leukemia is in remission and he’s back in school, but the treatment wiped out his immunity, and he’s still not ready to get vaccinated. If Rhett gets measles, he might not survive.”

Salzberg reckons parents should “stop listening to nonsense, and choose wisely by getting their children vaccinated against measles.”

Time to repost this fabulous guest post by Linda from the fabulously rational Autism and Oughtisms, written for any parents worried about making a vaccination decision in the face of so many anti-vaccine stories.

In Fear of Vaccines?

Since there’s been much debate and misunderstanding about an alleged link between vaccines and autism, I asked Linda from the fabulously rational Autism and Oughtisms blog to write this Guest Post for any parents worried about making a vaccination decision in the face of so many anti-vaccine stories.

Fear of the unknown drives people to do crazy things. They’ll cling desperately to proposed answers -- however poorly supported those answers are -- merely because they are answers; any explanation is considered better than no explanation at all. Add in the desperation of a parent trying to help their suffering child, and a sense that someone must surely be to blame for the child’s suffering, and you have a recipe for things to go very badly.

Trying to understand why so many parents (mostly mothers) of autistic children won’t let go of the “vaccines cause autism” hypothesis requires some appreciation of what these mothers have gone through. That understanding can’t and won’t excuse them pushing an anti-vaccine agenda in the face of endless scientific proof to the contrary, but I think it helps to get a grip on why these parents just won’t move on from the idea.

How come you’re still alive?

Here is the most important news of the last 150 years: You’re alive when you should be dead!

The most important difference between the world today and 150 years ago isn’t airplane flight or nuclear weapons or the Internet. It’s lifespan. We used to live 35 or 40 years on average …, but now we live almost 80. We used to get one life. Now we get two.

Cool, huh. Which gives you more time to handle all those neat #FirstWorldProblems.

This whole ‘second lifetime’ is a gift from our industrial civilisation. And, given how much our industrial civilisation is so regularly abused and so blithely taken for granted, blessed are the scribes like Slate’s Laura Helmuth who bother to ask the question Why Are You Not Dead Yet?, and then answer it so succinctly.

You may well be living your second life already. Have you ever had some health problem that could have killed you if you’d been born in an earlier era? Leave aside for a minute the probabilistic ways you would have died in the past—the smallpox that didn’t kill you because it was eradicated by a massive global vaccine drive, the cholera you never contracted because you drink filtered and chemically treated water. Did some specific medical treatment save your life? It’s a fun conversation starter: Why are you not dead yet? It turns out almost everybody has a story, but we rarely hear them; life-saving treatments have become routine. I asked around, and here is a small sample of what would have killed my friends and acquaintances:

• Adrian’s lung spontaneously collapsed when he was 18.
• Becky had an ectopic pregnancy that caused massive internal bleeding.
• Carl had St. Anthony’s Fire, a strep infection of the skin that killed John Stuart Mill.*
• Dahlia would have died delivering a child (twice) or later of a ruptured gall bladder.
• David had an aortic valve replaced.
• Hanna acquired Type 1 diabetes during a pregnancy and would die without insulin.
• Julia had a burst appendix at age 14.
• Katherine was diagnosed with pernicious anemia in her 20s. She treats it with supplements of vitamin B-12, but in the past she would have withered away.
• Laura (that’s me) had scarlet fever when she was 2, which was once a leading cause of death among children but is now easily treatable with antibiotics.
• Mitch was bitten by a cat (filthy animals) and had to have emergency surgery and a month of antibiotics or he would have died of cat scratch fever.

After a while, these not-dead-yet stories start to sound sort of absurd, like a giddy, hooray-for-modernity response to The Gashleycrumb Tinies. Edward Gorey’s delightfully dark poem is an alphabetical list of children (fictional!) who died gruesome deaths: “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs/ B is for Basil assaulted by bears.” Here’s how modern science, medicine, and public health would amend it:

    M is for Maud who was swept out to sea … then brought back to shore by a lifeguard and resuscitated
    by emergency medical technicians.
    O is for Olive run through with an awl … but saved during a four-hour emergency surgery to repair her
    collapsed lung.
    S is for Susan, who perished of fits … or who would have, anyway, if her epilepsy hadn’t been diagnosed
    promptly and treated with powerful anticonvulsant drugs.

Over forty? Then if you’re not dead yet—and from some of the comments that appear here, some NotPC readers must be—you have industrialised medicine, nutrition, housing, water reticulation, wastewater, hygiene, food preservation and living standards to thank for not just giving you that life over forty, but giving you one to enjoy. 

In other words, what you have to thank for your “second life” is our industrial civilisation, unique in human history, on the back of which the human environment has been getting better and better. (Which, really, is the real point of industrial civilisation.)

So you could say that every one of us who survived childbirth, and every one of us over forty today, has a belching smokestack to thank for being alive.

Think of that next time you drive past one.

Read:

• Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in the past 150 years. Here’s why. – Laura Helmuth, SLATE
• Cue Card Libertarianism – Technology – NOT PC
• There's lots to celebrate on World 'Environment' Day – NOT PC

A tax on medical innovation [updated]

All through the ObamaCare debate I’ve been at pains to point out that the ObamaCare debate effects us here in New Zealand too: most directly because the whole world relies on American medical innovation, and if ObamaCare means anything, it is a deadly tax on medical innovation.

Think about it.  Think about “Moore's Law, which states that computing power tends to double roughly every two years.” Think about the growth of personal computing power as a model for how medical progress can and should and did happen -- and as a warning as to what sorts of progress we could lose in the future.  Consider that one of the greatly under-appreciated effects of ObamaCare
will be how it will stifle medical innovation—leading to a rapid reversal of the very medical progress that have been accelerating in recent years.

How serious is this?  Very serious indeed, says doctor Paul Hsieh. “ObamaCare, he says, “could dramatically slow the pace of medical progress, leading to millions of preventable deaths.”

Read Dr Hsieh’s article, The Deadly Tax on Medical Innovation.

UPDATE: Patent attorney Dale Halling makes a similar point:

    “The only way of reducing the long term cost of health care is through innovation.  In the few areas of medicine that are not controlled by the government and insurance, such as vision enhancement procedures [like laser eye surgery], costs have plummeted due to innovation.    Unfortunately, we have put numerous roadblocks in the way of medical innovation.  For instances, it cost $1 billion dollars and twelve years to introduce a new drug to the market due to FDA rules.  Frivolous lawsuits in our health care system not only increase the costs of health care, but result in decreased innovation due to excessive caution.  Frivolous lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers have stopped innovation in this area of medicine.  Vaccines are inexpensive medical solutions of the sort that we should be encouraging.  President Obama has proposed a seven year patent term for drug patents, down from a twenty year term, and this will reduce innovation in the pharmaceutical industry.  Drugs are much less expensive option than medical procedures.
    “If the goal is to increase the quality of medical care and reduce the long term costs, innovation is the only solution.  Nationalizing [US] health care will cause medical innovation to disappear.”

And it looks like his blog on intellectual property State of Innovation is worth checking out.  Unlike the various thieves at the Mises Institute who justify theft based on little more than ignorance of the role of the mind in production, Mr Halling understands the role of intellectual property in driving innovation and technological progress—that, as someone said, “Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his mind.”

I’ll be adding his blog to my sidebar forthwith!

Share this post :

Jon Voight is right: NZ’s die-while-you wait health system creates “many deaths”

Protesting what he calls Barack Obama’s “obsession with trying to ram this health bill through to create a socialist America,” actor Jon Voight told thousands of anti-ObamaCare protestors in Washington recently:

    We would be no better off than the European countries and Canada and New Zealand who suffer greatly from a poor healthcare system. Their rationing system creates many deaths."

For my American readers who might think that’s hyperbole, that’s certainly true of New Zealand’s die-while-you-wait health “system.” Here’s some posts from NOT PC that demonstrate the point:

• They died of it
  Three Hawkes Bay people have died waiting for coronary bypass surgery . . .
  
• Cold comfort in die-while-you-wait hospitals
  . . .  figures were released revealing that up to one in eight patients at Wellington's hospitals "is the victim of a medical accident, error or mishap," and up to twenty-three patients of Wellington's Capital Coast Health were either killed or endured serious harm through inattention, incompetence and bungling. . . Capital Coast Health apologists issued the airy dismissal that "these problems occur everywhere" . . .
  
• The "human face" of New Zealand's socialist medical system
  The Herald has three more tales showing the "human face" of New Zealand's socialist medical system . . .
  
• Capital Coast: Not just a die-while-you-wait health system
  Following the death of a one-day old baby after her and her mother were released from Wellington hospital just six hours after giving birth, details have now been released under the Official Information Act showing that up to one in eight patients at Wellington's hospitals "is the victim of a medical accident, error or mishap," and up to twenty-three patients of Wellington's Capital Coast Health were either killed or endured serious harm through inattention, incompetence and bungling.
  Radio NZ story here. Dom Post story here.
  The information describes the standard of care at Capital Coast Health as "a shambles." An independent November audit stated that "crisis management was the normal operating environment at Wellington Hospital." And all while government spending on the government's health system has rocketed. The answer is clearly not more of our money.
  
• The Wellington solution
  "It must be wearing," says Stephen Franks, "to work in a spiritless atmosphere - hating management but being cynical about all solutions." Giving a talk to the Auckland Medico-Legal Association, he was told afterwards that “hospital productivity had probably dropped 20% as many medical professionals had given up going the extra mile to cover for system deficiencies.” And all this while govt spending on the govt's die-while-you-wait health system has rocketed.
  
• New ministers, same old failure
  . . . health spending has doubled in the last ten years while education spending has ballooned by 7% a year every year for the last ten years -- an enormous spending binge -- but with almost nothing to show for the deluge of taxpayer money beyond inflated public sector prices and emptier taxpayer pockets: all major health indicators for example have either held steady or declined as waiting lists have continued to climb, while all literacy studies show either decreases in functional literacy or only negligible improvements.
  
• Rationed health care is hardly health care at all
  The Government won't fund Herceptin, a an early-stage drug for breast cancer that has saved lives overseas. It won't fund Gardasil, a vaccine for cervical cancer that promises to save the lives of hundreds of NZ women every year. Hospital waiting lists get ever longer, and hospital salaries here less and less attractive compared to what can be earned elsewhere.
  Lives are being lost, and the people who are saving lives are not being given the tools to do the job. Such is the result of the rationing of health care, which is precisely how government health care is delivered.
  
• When more patients is a good thing
  . . . When this architect is hired by profit-making businesses to design their emergency rooms, his clients actually want him to attract more people inside. In their view, attracting more customers is a good thing, since more customers equals greater profits, and and increased ability to treat even more patients.
  Such are the incentives in private medicine.
  By contrast, when the government builds emergency rooms, more people are a nuisance. More patients equals an increasing strain on limited resources. More people in the emergency room is a problem.
  Such are the disincentives in state-run medicine.
  
• Lindsay Perigo: Wankers, wowsers, waiting lists and Islamofascists
  Ronald Reagan used to tell the story, though not to Mikhail Gorbachev, of the fellow in the late unlamented Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, who bought a car. He was told by a clerk behind a desk that delivery would be seven years three months and five days away. “Morning or afternoon?” asked the buyer. “Morning or afternoon?” echoed the clerk … what difference does it make when it’s seven years three months and five days away?” “Well,” said the buyer, “it has to be the afternoon. The plumber’s coming in the morning.”
  That’s about what it’s like now in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Aotearoa. No, you don’t have to wait for a plumber. You don’t have to queue for bread. There’s no toilet paper shortage. . .  But here in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Aotearoa, Nanny State runs the health system. What does she give us? Waiting lists. How does she reduce the waiting lists? By tearing them up! You don’t get your surgery but you’re no longer on a waiting list because Nanny says you’re not. She’s sent you back to your GP. Now isn’t that reassuring when you’ve got skin cancer. Fat lot of use your GP is there, but Nanny is saying you have to wait till your tumour is really big, by which time it’s more difficult to remove and will probably have metastasised. Nanny’s die-while-you-wait health system is also currently serving up chronic staff shortages and, of course, strikes. Be very … healthy.
  
• The culling fund
  ”People got so upset over a cull of a few hundred horses, yet relatively little protests over 35,000 humans being culled from hospital waiting lists last year. It is mind bloggling that Labour can literally throw billions and billions of dollars into this black hole [what you might call the 'Culling Fund'], and not get any significant improvement in terms of elective operations. No wonder so many people have private medical insurance.”
I wonder how many of you have private health insurance? (Yes, I do.) How do you feel about it? And how do you feel about paying twice -- once for your health insurance, and once for a die-while-you-wait health system which is slowly becoming a die-while-you-wait-to-get-on-their-list system.


• Life-saving private cancer unit opens in Auckland
  . . . contract cancer in Eastern Europe or the UK, for example, and your chances of survival are less than half; but contract cancer in the US, and your chances vault up to nearly two-thirds. The reason Brits are more likely to die? "Cancer experts blamed late diagnosis and long waiting lists." Despite this being all too clear, little has been or can be done to speed up diagnosis or cut waiting times in the die-while-you-wait public system NZ shares with the UK. In other words, people have been dying for the sake of a failed ideology.
  
• Death by ideology
  People are dying because of a failed ideology, says MacDoctor - "an attitude that places ideology above patient care" . . .

Rationed health care is hardly health care at all

The Government won't fund Herceptin, a an early-stage drug for breast cancer that has saved lives overseas. It won't fund Gardasil, a vaccine for cervical cancer that promises to save the lives of hundreds of NZ women every year. Hospital waiting lists get ever longer, and hospital salaries here less and less attractive compared to what can be earned elsewhere.

Lives are being lost, and the people who are saving lives are not being given the tools to do the job. Such is the result of the rationing of health care, which is precisely how government health care is delivered.

Without a market there's just no other way of determining who gets what -- and with all of us taxed to hell to pay for the die-while-you-wait health system, there's just no way of getting a real market up and running. In a rationed system, there's only so much to go around, and basic service is all you can expect.

Let's look at Gardasil, the vaccine that promises to guard against cervical cancer. Figures produced by Cathy van Miert suggests the current incidence (new cases per year) of cervical cancer in NZ is 14 per 100,000 women - and one in three will die from the disease. The cost for each course of vaccines is about $600. Looked at as an expense you might consider yourself, as say compared to a holiday in Fiji, or a new iPhone -- or compared to that extra tax you've had to pay this year, or the higher mortage payments due to Alan Bollard's meddling, or what you might pay for insurance -- that doesn't seem an unreasonable investment for yourself or a loved one.

But for the government to save one life would cost $5,217,120! That's the figure a government looks at when deciding what to fund (check out Cathy's figures for the calculation), and for them your life is just another statistic. That's just the way rationed health systems work.

So if you're opposed to the decisions not to fund these drugs, and the next generation of life-saving drugs, then I suggest you rethink your support for a tax-and-spend government-delivered health system. If you don't like the results of rationing, then may I suggest you advocate getting the government out of health care so you can make your own decisions about what you value most. (And those of you who don't like being treated by foreign doctors? I suggest you ask yourself why so many NZ doctors and researchers who've trained here prefer instead to work overseas -- a clue might be that when there's no markets there's no way to determine what someone's services are worth. )

D'you think it might be the same reason that life-saving treatments are rationed? As PJ O'Rourke quipped during the American debate about public-private health care, if you think health care is expensive when it's private, you should see how much it costs when it's "free"! The cost here at home will be paid in women's lives.

UPDATE: But, you say, health care isn't a business - or shouldn't be! Well, says Richard Ralston,

Ultimately all health care is paid for by business activity. Business provides the wages, the return on investment, the insurance, the taxes that pay directly for health care, and the insurance and taxes that fund government programs. When the government manages to provide services at all, it can give you nothing that it does not take from you or others, or from your employer and other employers. The total added value the government creates for your benefit is nothing.

But we can't allow profits into health care, can we? Well, as Richard Ralston explains here, profits lower the cost of health care in the long run.

But we don't want the Americanisation of NZ's health system, do we? Well, consider that America is where many of our NZ-trained doctors and health researchers would either like to end up, or have already ended up. They've already made their choice, and are doing so in larger numbers every year.

Think about it.