Good Point

There should be no amnesty, as was called for by the self-serving and perfidious Emily Oster, for medical and other professionals who were directly responsible for the unnecessary deaths of tens of millions of people as a result of the Covid pandemic.

People who advocated for a herd immunity scheme in which they knew that at a minimum hundreds of thousands of people would die, should be shunned, and not made pundits:

I can’t stop thinking about the essay No, Young Adults Should Not Live in Fear from Coronavirus by Drs. John Mandrola and Andrew Foy, two so-called “medical conservatives”. It was written on December 29th, 2020 in response to a research letter titled All-Cause Excess Mortality and COVID-19–Related Mortality Among US Adults Aged 25-44 Years, March-July 2020, which found that 4,535 COVID deaths were recorded among young adults during the pandemic’s first 5-months.

Many people were sad that 4,535 young people had died from COVID in such a short time, especially considering there had been just 4.49 million confirmed cases of COVID by the end of July 2020.

These “medical conservatives”, however, were unperturbed by thousands of dead young people. They castigated those who were concerned, decrying their “fearsome messaging.” “The infection fatality rate for young adults is quite low,” they said reassuringly. They sought to numb their readers by encouraging them to focus on the tens of millions of young adults who hadn’t died of COVID, while ignoring that the vast majority of them had yet to contract it. They wrote:

We offer four reasons why this study and OpEd do not support the claim that young adults should live in fear from the virus…

An excess of 12,000 deaths sounds bad, but Professor Don Boudreaux, from George Mason University, has noted that there are nearly 88 million people in this age group. Thus, the individual risk for a person this age is found by dividing 4,560 (the number dead from COVID19 in this study) by 88 million. This equates to a 0.0052% risk of dying from COVID19.

 

Of course, anything that kills young people can be made to sound trivial by dividing it by 88 million. The individual risk of dying at all is low for young people.

………

However, despite knowing that COVID killed 4,535 young adults in just 5-months and that only a relatively small percentage had been infected, these doctors told them their “fear of death” was misplaced. Moreover, they chose to convey this incautious message at the start of the pandemic’s deadliest wave- COVID killed 95,000 Americans in January 2021- and two months earlier, a CDC report found that infections in young people invariably spill out into the wider community. It found:

Younger adults likely contribute to community transmission of COVID-19. Across the southern United States in June 2020, increases in percentage of positive SARS-CoV-2 test results among adults aged 20–39 years preceded increases among those aged ≥60 years by 4–15 days.

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Of course, all this was reflects what actually happened. There would have been many more such tragedies had hundreds of millions of young people, none of whom were vaccinated in December 2020, lived with zero fear of COVID, as “medical conservatives” instructed them.

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Yet, for some inexplicable reason, these doctors- and there are many like them- feel perfectly entitled to pontificate about risks that fall well short of their own threshold of concern. Incredibly, the same doctor who wrote No, Young Adults Should Not Live in Fear from Coronavirus also wrote an error-filled article titled Vaccine-Induced Myocarditis Concerns Demand Respect, just 6-months later. He wanted his readers to “respect” the thing that wouldn’t kill them, but not to “fear” the thing that might.

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However, it seems to me that once a doctor has minimized literal death for young people, they’ve forfeited their right to be taken seriously when they sanctimoniously demand we “respect” a rare, usually mild vaccine-side effect. Indeed, once a doctor has minimized a disease that killed 45,000 young people and seriously injured many more, they’ve forfeited their right to be taken seriously when they opine on any topic less consequential than this.

They have proven themselves to be unreliable and malicious.

Their opinions on public health should be given no more consideration than those of a rabid dog on quantum mechanics.