the first rule of economics is that resources are scarce and there are never enough goods or services to meet demand.

the first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics.

so, should any of us be surprised that they ignored all the rules of epidemiology as well?

we have allowed 100 years of pandemic guidelines to be thrown out the window and be replaced with scientifically illiterate grandstanding and demagoguery.

we have elevated fools and charlatans to posts of dictatorial power and turned them loose upon an unsuspecting populace.

they mistook reality (on the right) for the bizarre and improbable tenets of their dated, failed models that had been rapidly repurposed to spread fear and push for budgets once more.

read this whole article, it's wonderful. https://lockdownsceptics.org/what-sage-got-wrong/

many of you won't, so here are cliff's notes:

herd immunity is not 70%. it's 15-25%, varies by location, and is a function of both pre existing cross resistance and heterogeneous social graphs.

both reduce HIT dramatically from the 1-(1/r0) asymptote https://twitter.com/boriquagato/status/1288820369441329152?s=20

cross resistance was, is, and will reman widespread.

it's just t-cell mediated (which is harder to test for) and thus all the IgG antibody testing from early on was irrelevant.

this was widely known to be the case. no one tracks an epidemic using IgG. it's a ridiculous idea.

also widely known was "never, ever (and i mean ever) listen to academic epidemiologists with "models" showing you what a disease is going to do."

they are always wrong, always hysterical, and LOVE overpredicting crisis.

this is from march: https://twitter.com/boriquagato/status/1235915091914211331?s=20

note how blindingly obvious this was to those of us who actually know epidemiologists.

their track record from zika to dengue to swine flu and ebola is astonishingly bad.

and it's NEVER too conservative. it is always too hysterical. https://twitter.com/boriquagato/status/1235915095500296193?s=20

this is not to say there are not good epidemiologists.

the brave men and women who suit up and fly to the congo to help fight ebola are serious, competent people worthy of great respect.

but the ones who build models are a different breed and that's the worrying one.

academic epidemiologists suffer from horrific adverse selection.

the truly talented ones like gupta, kulldorf and bhattacharya tend to be quiet and measured.

they speak like scientists and couch their statements in probability and uncertainty.

this is because they seek truth.

but measured & reasoned is not what gets you on TV. calamitous models full of "mathiness" and dire claims of the impending end of the world do.

so third rate clowns like the IHME, imperial, and facui wind up in the limelight. even utter frauds like eric ding make good TV.

and the politicians LOVE this. they do not pick top experts, they pick the people who advocate doing what they wanted to do anyway: grab power and gallop around on a white horse shouting orders and handing out massive piles of emergency money to cronies.

happens every time.

media and money hungry academics are a perfect figleaf for power hungry politicians.

it sets up a self reinforcing cycle.

when you subsidize something, you get more of it.

and politicians LOVE to subsidize bad science if it lets them justify grabbing power.

there are always going to be a certain number of "scientists" that are more interested in money and power than science.

they tend to be the ones that are not good in their field.

they seek to manage rather than do actual research because they are not good at actual research.

this is how you get a guy like fauci atop a huge medical bureaucracy. he's a politician, not a scientist.

this is why gov't science grants are so damaging. once they become the primary source of funds science becomes politicized.

pretty soon, you get this:

what other outcome could occur? grants are given by politicians for political reasons. look what such money flows have been used to do to universities. did you think biosciences and epidemiology and climate science would be different?

whole fields get subverted.

all you have to do is offer subsidies to those who offer to provide the "right" answers for your policy and starve those who oppose you and whole fields of endeavor get twisted out of recognition.

buffoons like ferguson get elevated and true experts like gupta silenced.

politicians pick scientists (often fringe hacks) who justify their policies.

they then represent these bought & paid for charlatans as "the science" as though there is not other view.

they claim "following the science" is not political.

but picking which science to follow is.

it's a logical sleight of hand.

they trot out their hand picked scientific show ponies as "the science" and claim to be above politics and reproach, but hide from view the fact that these scientists were selected for ideological purposes and do not represent consensus.

and so both politics and entire fields of scientific endeavor get twisted around one another into a symbiosis of pseudoscience.

up becomes down and down becomes sideways because that is what is politically expedient and he who pays the piper shall inevitably call the tune.

this is why the idea of "government science" is so incredibly bad.

it destroys every field it comes to dominate. the utter hacks that now sit atop climate science despite having been third rate back benchers and frauds is breathtaking.

but they are "useful."

you cannot have politicians allocating science funding without turning hard science into political science.

these programs always sound great, but the reality is that they are a plague on science and a repudiation of the scientific method.

they need to stop.

food for thought.