☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Monday, March 21, 2022 ☙ WRONG AGAIN 🦠

The Times wants to keep some pandemic rituals; Hong Kong rolls back restrictions in the middle of its biggest surge; the WSJ backs Florida; and a new book by a British Covid expert confesses mistakes.

I couldn’t leave you guys empty-handed, so here’s a quick roundup for you today: the pandemic might be over, but the NYT plans to keep the trappings; U.S. House is ON IT and is keeping its priorities straight; Hong Kong starts rolling back restrictions, but why?; the WSJ supports Florida — not the CDC — in an op-ed; experts were wrong about closing schools; a UK expert tells all in a new book explaining that, don’t be too shocked, the experts were wrong.

Also — our hardworking C&C volunteers listened to your feedback and have added new items to the C&C shop, including women’s styles, a new “Science! Shut up” design, long-sleeves, tumblers, and a bigger coffee mug. You can find the new items here: https://shopcoffeeandcovid.com/collections/new. Let us know what you think.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🔥 On Friday, the New York Times published a column headlined, “6 Things We’ll Keep From Pandemic Life.” I was instantly suspicious, just reading the headline. It got worse.

In sum, the Times’ columnist claims these six pandemic innovations are so fantastically wonderful that they are here to stay:

— Masks. They might not stop Covid but they have so many uses! They’re especially helpful to keep men from telling women to smile. You can frown all you want under the mask and nobody cares. Problem solved! I’m not sure where all these men ordering angry feminists to smile are, but I guess it’s a thing now.

— Remote work! You can work in your underwear and never shave anything. And you can do home chores like laundry while you’re supposed to be in a meeting. It’s great.

— Biking! I don’t know what this has to do with the pandemic. But apparently New York added lots of shared bikes during the pandemic to stop global warming or something. And this columnist thinks people love it.

— The Urban Wild! In other words, eating outside. The tent restaurants, in which unfortunate restaurants were forced by wacky ineffective Covid regulations to build new mini-restaurants right outside their old restaurants, in the street. Maybe that’s why they needed more bikes so much, they were using the streets for outdoor dining in the Urban Wild instead of vehicle traffic.

— Workers’ rights. Again, I’m not sure what this category has to do with the pandemic, which resulted in tons of people being laid off, which doesn’t seem like a huge development for workers’ rights to me. But the columnist mentioned something about how food delivery workers can now use customer bathrooms. I didn’t know that was a problem, but thank goodness it’s been solved. Hurray workers!

— New York City! The columnist seems to think now that the pandemic’s over, people will stop fleeing the City and will re-discover their appreciation for all its museums, shows, restaurants, night clubs, and cool happening things to do. In other words, she thinks people will stop leaving now. No evidence, of course, but who needs evidence when you have magical thinking?

I don’t know about you, but I could live very happily without masks, remote work, tent restaurants, free bikes, and New York City, at least, in its current condition. Thanks but no thanks. I LIKE smiles, and if I ever meet this columnist, I will be sure to encourage her to smile, too. Should I add, “babe?”

🔥 In the midst of a waning late pandemic and on the brink of nuclear world war, the U.S. House of Representatives took time last Friday to pass the so-called “CROWN Act.” It passed 235 to 189 on a largely party-line vote. It’s a new law so important they gave it one of those clever acronym names: “Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair,” or CROWN. Get it? Your hair is on the top of your head. A crown. I guess it’s not really that clever.

So, they’ve finally gotten this critical piece of civil rights legislation done. Thank goodness! The era of racial discrimination against HAIR is coming to an end at last. No more unreasonable prejudice against sick dreads or even 1970’s-style afros. Employers are going to have to suck it up and let beautiful hairstyles have their full expression, and not be all tied up in a binding hairsack where they can’t breathe and stuff.

The dumb Republicans objected to the bill, arguing that federal law already covers this kind of discrimination and that Democrats should be focusing on other issues, like inflation and high gas prices. But we have to have priorities! Hair has been far waiting too long for justice. Free the hair.

🔥 Bizarrely, even though Hong Kong is in the midst of a wild record-setting Covid surge and is also busy setting the record for the highest rate of deaths in the world, it is nevertheless easing its Covid restrictions, for some reason. The “Covid-zero” city announced last week that its bans on flights from most countries will soon be lifted, and the mandatory traveler quarantine period halved. Social distancing and business restrictions will also be rolled back, slowly, beginning April 21st.

They’re not setting the world on fire with their slow-motion rollbacks or anything, and I wouldn’t have bothered reporting on it except for one thing. The interesting thing is that the announcement of rollbacks is completely disconnected from what is happening in that country. When Covid cases were flat, they imposed draconian restrictions. Now that cases are skyrocketing, they are rolling the restrictions back. How does that make sense?

It’s almost like the rollbacks are happening just because. Because somebody said so.

🔥 The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed over the weekend supporting Florida’s new position as the only state opposing Covid vaccination for healthy kids, which was headlined “Healthy Children Don’t Need Covid Vaccines.” The article’s subhead explains “Florida is right. Especially for kids under 12, the risks are trivial. And most have natural antibodies.”

What’s most amazing is this is a controversial position at all.

Florida’s recent announcement instantly triggered a lot of unthinking CDC-followers. The American Academy of Pediatrics called the Sunshine State’s recommendation “irresponsible.” The Infectious Diseases Society of America accused Dr. Ladapo of putting “politics over the health and safety of children.” Jen Psaki whined, “It’s deeply disturbing that there are politicians peddling conspiracy theories out there and casting doubt on vaccinations.”

Casting doubt! How could they.

The article points out the extremely difficult fact that “vaccine efficacy turned negative during the Omicron surge a month after kids were inoculated (-10%) and declined even more after six weeks (-41%). This means vaccinated children were significantly MORE likely to catch Covid than the unvaccinated.” Whoops.

Of course, we all know about these facts. But again, the most curious feature of the op-ed is its existence at all: apparently, the corporate media now has a green light to publish articles critical of the jabs. Is the Trusted News Initiative over? What gives?

🔥 The UK Express ran a much-appreciated but belated story this weekend headlined, “Banning Children From School in Pandemic Was a Mistake, Says [UK Education Secretary] Zahawi.”

Britain’s Secretary of Education Nadhim Zahawi told reporters “I suspect one thing we won’t need an inquiry to tell us is it was a mistake to go to home learning.” You don’t say. The Express noted that “the full impact of the disruption may not be apparent for years but experts are convinced it will be significant.”

My gosh! This must be so bitter for parents in Great Britain who’ve been screaming about this for two years now, and whose children will never ever recover all that lost development time. Once again, thanks experts! What would we do without your mistakes?

🔥 SAGE is the scientific advisory group that guided the British government’s response to the pandemic. British SAGE Member Mark Woolhouse just published his new book, “The Year the World Went Mad,” which refreshingly admits that more or less everything Woolhouse and his colleagues suggested and the British government did was WRONG. Of course. Woolhouse gives his “insider’s view” describing how the pandemic-response train so quickly skewed off the tracks, rolled over, caught fire, and exploded.

Now, I’ve been warning against these “experts” since early in the pandemic, and I have the receipts, because it’s all there in my daily blogs. Folks, we’re just getting started with these confessions. A lot of deluded academics are starting to wake up and are going to be writing about it, to try to claw back their respectability and purge their guilty consciences. Just wait. You thought “expertise” was already dead? It’s only comatose. There’s a LOT of dying left to do.

Have a marvelous Monday. I’ll be back tomorrow with another vacation update.

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