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How Much Does Dr. Fauci Really Care?
Dennis Prager spoke the hard truth Monday morning: Dr. Fauci is a lifelong government employee with a salary and benefits package perfectly insulated from the economic consequences of his words. He has absolutely no skin in the game. If Dr. Fauci truly believes it is necessary to put hourly workers, waiters, bartenders, and small businesses out of work, destroying them economically, then let him and the head of the CDC ante up.
Dr. Fauci’s easiest path is completely shutdown of our economy, doing maximum damage to people who were just starting to see real success and a brighter future. He can claim noble motives, even as he seeks to avoid blame for early failures. Words of concern and supposed sympathy tripping off a career bureaucrat’s lips ring hollow and are bitter to those he ruins.
So, President Trump needs to put this to the coronavirus crew immediately, giving them the chance to volunteer giving up their salaries until the federal guidelines no longer limit American jobs. Then, if they push back, he needs to drop it on them in front of the cameras. Let’s all see their real faces and real positions when they are made to live with the real consequences of their words.
We have already seen Dr. Fauci tripped up on his own words today. He pushed for schools to be closed, but then stumbled over himself as a real reporter asked why daycare centers would be open, since the reason for shutting schools applies to daycare. He finally acknowledged the obvious and left the microphone with “we’ll look at that again.”
President Trump can do this in the context of virtuous examples from professional sports, where team owners are promising to keep paying people who work their home venues, to protect them from the consequences of stopping games. This is the way Americans respond to hard times. Rudy Gobert has already pledged over $500,000 to his home arena workers and others. He is the NBA player who was the unlucky first to be found infected. Here in Arizona, one of the two major utility companies just announced they will not shut off anyone’s power or charge interest until this government made economic catastrophe ends. Time for Fauci to put his paycheck where his mouth is.
If Dr. Fauci and the rest of the crew face real economic pain right now, and suddenly have to worry about paying bills in the months ahead, then they will be motivated to truly act in the real public interest. This may not change their recommendations, but it will certainly go a long way towards buying them credibility with a public they lecture and chide about being serious. This is of a piece with governors ordering restaurants and bars closed, while keeping their party’s primary election on schedule for this week. Everyone can see the obvious contradictions. Those governors should lead by example.* Their salaries, along with Dr. Fauci’s should all go to direct economic relief for the smallest businesses and most economically vulnerable workers.
* President Trump was too sharp to fall for a White House press-member asking him to call on governors to postpone elections. This would immediately turn into claims of dictatorship and plans to cancel the November election, when the latest coronavirus might be back.
Published in General
I think there is something to the idea of “virtual slavery”. And I think one definition of slavery is one person ‘owning’ another, whereas the other is having the fruits of your labor being appropriated to others. In fact, there doesn’t need to be actual chains and whips, just the threat of them.
Most slaves in various cultures were not whipped or chained. Hey, they got free food, free housing and free medical care! Our socialist friends are actually advocating for their own enslavement.
Before the American Revolution, some of our founders were making noises about how the Brits intended to make slaves of them with their policies of centralization and rationalization. The Brits were indeed intending to rule America more like they already ruled in Ireland. But slavery? Maybe it was hyperbole, but they certainly intended to make the Americans a lot less free to govern themselves than they had been.
It’s not pseudoscience. It’s meta analysis. It’s a recognized method of aggregating data, with known down-sides and, for now, it’s all we have. It can also be instructive when the samples are large enough to stratify across like variables. Here’s a nicely presented pair of blog entries on a solid statistics site on the risks and benefits of meta-analysis.
Those are good articles, because they agree with my suspicions about the use of meta-analysis in ecology. But I’m now so far removed from that field of research that I’ve never bothered to get into the weeds to see if my suspicions were justified in any cases.
Without getting too picky, including outliers as cited above in bold and incorporating them into a relatively small sample, then calling it “meta analysis” is bordering on fraud. Certainly it’s misleading.
I appreciated Dr. Birx’s response on numbers and models: