(2021-09-17) ZviM Covid 9/17 Done Biden His Time Mandates

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 9/17: Done Biden His Time. The question then becomes, what is he gonna do about it, under what authority, and what will happen when he does it?

Today the FDA will be debating booster shots

The FDA is looking for any excuse to screw this up

If they pull it off, a lot of people are going to be checking a box claiming to be immunocompromised. Which is mostly fine with the FDA, so what if everyone is forced to be dishonest all the time in order to get medicine

Executive Summary
Vaccine mandates for everyone.
Acts of congress for no one.
Vaccine mandates for some, somewhat dishonestly acquired booster shots for many of the same people.

The Numbers

We seem to have clearly peaked in the South. It’s less clear we are at or beyond peak in other regions

Vaccinations

Biden’s push has not yet resulted in a surge of vaccinations. We don’t know the counterfactual, so we don’t know to what extent various mandates and potential future mandates are the only thing stopping vaccinations from slowing further

What we can definitively conclude is that the skeptics were correct regarding full FDA approval. It was not (almost) anyone’s true rejection. The impact is going to be in enabling mandates, especially the big push this week by Biden, which would not have been practical without full approval.

Vaccine Effectiveness

Did you know that the CDC is so slow that the FDA thinks it’s a problem?

Well, finally, what do you know, the CDC says vaccines still work

I rapidly discovered this seems to be actual zero news of any kind.

Turns out that was only the first of three studies. Here’s the second one. It’s not more enlightening, and doesn’t show any signs of controlling for anything

Booster shots improve vaccine effectiveness, especially if you have J&J and then get a shot of an mRNA vaccine. So The New York Times is now pointing out not only that this is a good idea, but that all you have to do to get your shot is to lie. Interesting.

Vaccine Mandates

It’s the big one this week. Biden is done playing, and it’s time to pull out the big guns.

What can he actually do though?

It’s clear that Biden wanted to do, which was to impose a full vaccine mandate on all Americans, with or without an intentionally overburdensome testing alternative. If he felt able to issue a full mandate here, I presume he would have.

Here Biden is doing a strange mix of both. He’s exercising his authority in a way that attempts to look as broad and strong as possible, but which is technically forced to hide behind OSHA and end up as a convoluted mess that doesn’t hit all the places it would like to. The strangest part of the new rules is that they didn’t include requirements for interstate travel, which he has clearer authority to issue than the rules he did issue

The federal employee mandate seems fine and good

The requirement on hospitals also seems like a good place to impose a mandate

It’s coercion, it’s an end run, it’s a mockery and all that, and this should be noted whenever it is invoked as such, but those are the rules in practice.

But is the mandate on employers here constitutional? It certainly isn’t obviously constitutional, and the tie to OSHA and large employers is a clear indication that this wouldn’t be constitutional without OSHA.

In practice, SCOTUS will probably (but not definitely, I asked Polymarket to get us some real odds!) uphold this mandate. Which, again, is pretty much bullshit

NPIs Including Mask and Testing Mandates

Think of the Children

Our child’s preschool, like many such places, required a Covid test be taken in the few days before school. My wife’s understanding was that buying a rapid test and administering it herself would not suffice

doctor came in and handed us a piece of paper that affirmed they’d stuck it up his nose so now everyone could be happy they’d generated enough extra Covid-19 exposure from hanging around inside an urgent care center that school could begin

What do you want us to do, open a window? That wouldn’t be safe.

The true cost, if we were to use reasonable rules, of rapid tests ae a small amount of time and a few bucks. That seems way better than all-day mandatory mask usage while trying to learn, and you get a much bigger payoff.

this Washington Post article’s true title is Parents Acting Crazy

whatever happens to be top of mind will drive you crazy.

every bit of that suffering and loss is on the FDA and its pointless demands and delays, and on the CDC and everyone else who sends the message to behave in exactly this way.

Ivermectin

Kelsey Piper, after her recent self-recommending appearance on the podcast Rationally Speaking, wrote to host Julia Galef with this rather strong update

Kelsey isn’t always right but I trust her to be making an intellectually honest effort here, and ‘the hospital the trial says it was conducted at says the trial never happened’ is a pretty big deal,

In Other News

my experience with the FDA. At least they get their facts right. They don’t do the right things with those facts, and they’re way too slow in gathering them, but to the extent that they offer you facts it’s fine to run with them. The CDC I am less confident in on these fronts, especially after Provincetown and the studies listed in an earlier section

This is more than ‘failed utterly.’ Failed utterly implies the goal was success. How would you differentiate what is described here from enemy action?

if you got vaccinated, got Covid and then got Long Covid anyway, this model suggests getting a booster shot might still help you some of the time, and it’s a low risk thing to try, based on my understanding of the plausible mechanisms here.

Covid suggests we don’t pay enough attention to fighting the spread of other infectious diseases, as they may be far more destructive than we realize, and thus far more worth fighting.

Not Covid

I saw this, in an interesting discussion on the future of weight loss (hat tip: MR):

The real lead in weight loss of course lies elsewhere, in that they seem to have finally found a drug that works. (obesity)

The problem is that this new would-be-miracle drug (I haven’t looked into it in detail) works via appetite suppression. That doesn’t help me at all, and if anything takes joy away from my life.

Even more interestingly, the effects aren’t limited to food.