Author: victorhanson
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.
‘It’s a Free Country, Brother’
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
In this current crisis, the longest if not the first complete shutdown in U.S. history, the freedoms of American democracy are being tested in ways we scarcely ever imagined. Out of nowhere little Napoleonic governors arise to enact decrees prohibiting gardening or strolling on an empty beach — decrees that seem to have little purpose other than to reflect that they can do so. Snitches volunteer to out felonious social deviants who are seen cooking in the backyard with a neighbor. A little horned-devil virus seems to be trying to do what those Russkies never could.
Experts with all sorts of Ph.D.s, M.D.s, and J.D.s after their names lecture from authority about what we must right now do — or else! — on the principle that they have a scientific or technocratic prerogative to impress critics of their modeling or their demand that we shut down a $22-trillion economy for “18 months,” if need be.
A supposedly disinterested media — found by media watchdogs to be 93 percent negative in its presidential reportage before the virus crisis — envision their coverage of the Trump demon as an endless zero-sum game in which any morsel of good news for him is instantly bad for them.
In short, if American democracy were to fail to sustain itself under myriad pressures, then this would be the moment. For some, the Sixties can at last be made manifest — especially given that its aging children just impeached an American president on articles nowhere found in the Constitution, after weaponizing the FBI, CIA, and DOJ in an attempt to abort a presidential campaign and then presidency.
How fortunate, then, that in this current crisis, when one questions the logic of using a misleading denominator to ascertain viral lethality, and thus the logic of basing existential public policies on resulting case-to-fatality rates that admittedly cannot be true, one can (at least for now) keep raising skepticism without being sent to a Chinese-like reeducation camp.
An Informed Public Will Always Decide on the Virus
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
A number of NRO writers have offered today some valuable cautionary data about antibody testing and herd immunity.
Certainly, one cannot yet anticipate what ongoing and planned antibody testing in particular areas might reveal. Perhaps based on anecdotal new reports and a few samplings from abroad, we might expect anything: that from 0-3 percent of the population has been previously infected, to even 15 percent.
I don’t think anyone believes that the results will reveal absolute herd immunity, which can be defined by varying high percentages, according to the infectiousness and viability of particular viruses, is now on the immediate horizon.
At least from their op-eds, interviews, and essays, many researchers who doubt the methodologies of pessimistic modeling believe that antibody testing could both correct flawed assumptions and offer some optimism — quite apart from the unlikely notion that a herd immunity of, say, 60-70 percent already exists, suggesting that the virus is just about kaput, at least for this year.
A modern bad flu peters out often, due to the combination of 30-60 million getting infected, a few million on their own social distancing, another 150-170 million being vaccinated and thus, depending on the quality of the vaccination, perhaps resulting in some of them becoming immune or better equipped to endure the infection, some with existing immunity from dozens of past flu exposures, and with some help from warming weather and more people outdoors.
A Little More Light in a Vast Sea of Viral Darkness?
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
Almost every day, more studies, strange data, anecdotal reporting, and theories emerge about the virus, many of which could change existing conventional wisdom. In discussions about the nature of any existing seroprevalence in California, and about how even apparently small percentages of those already infected in the population could radically alter rates of epidemic and mortality modeling, this early abstract of a recent study could be of interest. It was co-reported by a rather large team of 16 distinguished researchers conducting an early assessment of their recent antibody testing in Santa Clara County.66
They and their publisher cite customary caution due to the preliminary nature of the “unrefereed preprint” of their findings. e.g., “This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review.” (What does this mean?) “It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.” But the concluding paragraph of the abstract could become of interest in its implications for both state and federal policy, especially when the data of such research are finished being peer reviewed and, if substantiated, and the findings possibly replicated in future such studies:
These prevalence estimates represent a range between 48,000 and 81,000 people infected in Santa Clara County by early April, 50-85-fold more than the number of confirmed cases. Conclusions: The population prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Santa Clara County implies that the infection is much more widespread than indicated by the number of confirmed cases. Population prevalence estimates can now be used to calibrate epidemic and mortality projections. (Emphasis added.)
If one were to use these parameters of cases to recalibrate with the known deaths in Santa Clara County from the SARS-CoV-2 virus (increased to 69 as of yesterday), or if their percentages represented the epidemic in the state at large, then the results in a variety of ways could shed some light on, and context about, the ongoing mystery of California’s supposed number of cases and apparent fatalities to the virus (28,000 cases and 973 deaths in a state of 40 million), while suggesting that perhaps many more coastal Californians, or Californians in general, or perhaps even Americans, have previously been infected by the virus than we had heretofore imagined (with many either unaware or not overly concerned by that fact).
Suppression of Expression Obscures the Truth About the Virus
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
Americans are acquainted with predictable but ultimately failed progressive efforts to suppress free expression by preemptive invective and politically correct finger-pointing.
To believe that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers revealed too many contradictions, too many lacunae, too many episodes of timely amnesia, and too many unsubstantiated accusations in their testimonies was chauvinistically to attack/smear/silence all women’s voices—at least until the same sort of memory-repressed accusations focused on handsy Joe Biden.
To express skepticism that current global temperatures are uniformly rising almost entirely due to human carbon emissions, that this state of affairs poses catastrophic dangers that may end civilization as we know it, and that this emergency can only be addressed by the radical restructuring of global economies is to be rendered a denialist, a crank, a fool.
But these parameters of censorship have a logic and predictability, given their race/class/gender/environmental orthodoxy.
Shifting Pandemic Orthodoxy
What explains the current taboo on topics regarding the coronavirus?
Angry Reader 04-20-2020
From An Angry Reader:
Professor Hanson,
I am not really angry. I apologize for the subject line but I guessed that it would get my email read.
My primary complaint…..
Your last “angry reader” entry is 2/28/20.
I know you are busy, but some of us would love it (and buy it) if you had a book form of telling us about your responses to the people who didn’t think very much before they wrote to complain at you (or, just put more responses up regularly). I actually printed years of your responses to share.
My father (US Army in the Philippines) and my father-in-law served in WW2. Melinda’s (my wife’s) father earned a Silver Star and a Purple Heart for his service (Ken was on the USS Trout before it was sunk). Your book, which I have passed on to another, explained the magnitude and importance of the service they gave and amplified the meaning of their service for us. Thank you so much for that.
As an average American, living all my life in the Bay Area, I truly wish there were people like you, with their brain on fire, who would give their time to guide the masses through their mazes (which is what I perceive that you do anyway), as “politicians” dedicated to improving the lives of the people who pay their wages. What our country needs is intelligent leadership. And now, it seems, that even Birx, Fauci, and certainly Trump, read your columns or pieces and respond as if they thought what you said. You have to appreciate that! And they all know where the thinking came from.
Please help them and us all in the process. Your columns are absolutely great but you should have a cabinet post or advisory position where they could absorb reality more frequently, I think. I bet that Trump is smart enough to do that (if he hasn’t already).
Chris Almeida
Newark, CA
p.s. While looking at stuff to write this and not sound too stupid, I found that I could take online classes at Hillsdale and I will do that.
Thanks again!
————————————————————————————————————
Dear Not at All Angry Reader,
Thank you for your kind words and the service of your family in the country’s defense. One must discover where one’s talents can help and where they would not. In my small case, I accept I would be a poor politician and a worse public official, but, in terms of commentary rather than historical work, had some role to play as a skeptic of the current progressive agenda.
It took about 6 days to weaponize the entire virus disaster to the point where Trump is now veritably running against the virus and presented with a political paradox that if he lockdowns the country much longer, he becomes Herbert Hoover who intentionally destroyed the economy; and yet if he opens it up, he is a murderer with blood on his hands. Stranger still, such politicization of the epidemic is so hotly denied by those who did it in order to project their culpability on others who call them out.
In the old days, conservatism and liberalism were sort of bookends; the former reflecting human nature, the latter a naive confidence that with enough money and kindness we could change human nature. Not now. Liberalism is dead, progressivism killed it and the hard left of the 1960s is in control. It is intolerant and has nursed an entire new generation on the campuses who are abjectly ignorant but strangely arrogant in such vacuity.
The epidemic brought this out, both the left’s intolerance of debate and dissent, and its inability to accept that science is a constantly changing and evolving discipline as more data correct, modify, adapt, prove, and reject prior theories, and is not a tool of supposedly sophisticated and university credentialed elite.
We should believe PhDs and MDs much of the time, but when they tell us that anti-viral masks are superfluous and drain resources from the medical professionals, then the masks are sort of helpful, and then that they should be worn by all, we can legitimately conclude that their certainty about the virus is misplaced.
Sincerely, Victor Hanson
Selma, CA
Our New Post-Virus Lexicon
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
Antibody badges = surely a German import
Antibody tests = It seems that nobody tests.
AOC = See, emissions went down during shelter in place.
Best and Brightest = being wrong on modeling, human infectiousness, test-kit availability, travel bans, masks, and anti-malarial drugs, without ever having to say your’re sorry
Joe Biden = Beware of Ezekiel Emanuel!
Big Pharma = Leave! Come Home!
Bioweapon = the next Chinese summit
Boomers = Hey man, so, so sorry about the debt.
Michael Bloomberg = oddly melted down and exited the national stage before the Chinese virus struck
Border security = yesterday’s Neanderthalism; today’s prescience
The CDC = Wearing masks is bad; masks for some are better than for others; all masks are good.
China = yesterday’s inevitable new hegemon; today’s global pariah, tomorrow’s 1.4-billion-person infectious nightmare
Yes, California Remains Mysterious — Despite the Weaponization of the Debate
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
California is touchy, and yet still remains confused, about incomplete data showing that the 40-million-person state, as of Sunday, April 12, reportedly had 23,777 cases of residents who have tested posted for the COVID-19 illness. The number of infected by the 12th includes 674 deaths, resulting in a fatality rate of about 17 deaths per million of population. That is among the lowest rates of the larger American states (Texas has 10 deaths per million), and lower than almost all major European countries, (about half of Germany’s 36 deaths per million).
No doubt there are lots of questionable data in all such metrics. As a large state California has not been especially impressive in a per capita sense in testing its population (about 200,000 tests so far). Few of course believe that the denominator of cases based on test results represent the real number of those who have been or are infected.
There is the now another old debate over exactly how the U.S. defines death by the virus versus death because of the contributing factors of the virus to existing medical issues. Certainly, the methodology of coronavirus modeling is quite different from that of, say, the flu. The denominator of flu cases is almost always a modeled approximation, not a misleadingly precise number taken from only those who go to their doctors or emergency rooms and test positive for an influenza strain. And the numerator of deaths from the flu may be calibrated somewhat more conservatively than those currently listed as deaths from the coronavirus.
Nonetheless, the state’s population is fairly certain. And for now, the number of deaths by the virus is the least controversial of many of these data, suggesting that deaths per million of population might be a useful comparative number.
As I wrote in a recent NRO piece, the state on the eve of the epidemic seemed especially vulnerable given the large influx of visitors from China on direct flights to its major airports all fall and early winter until the January 31 ban (and sometime after). It ranks rather low in state comparisons of hospital beds, physicians, and nurses per capita. It suffers high rates of poverty, wide prevalence of state assistance, and medical challenges such as widespread diabetes.
We Are Approaching COVID-19 Gut-Check Time
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
We are a few days away from a rendezvous with some tough conclusions about COVID-19.
A number of concurrent developments are coming to a head. Most will bring light where so far there was only heat.
Greater information about the virus might cause as much acrimony as conciliation. Some experts will be discredited, others reaffirmed.
Antibody testing is expected to get under way shortly. Soon, several representative studies will give the country an accurate idea of how many Americans have been infected in the past few months.
With a more trustworthy denominator to compare against known deaths, we will finally learn just how lethal the virus is and whether comparisons to a severe annual flu are legitimate or still inapplicable.
Likewise, there will be greater precision in distinguishing those whose deaths were exclusively virus-related from those who were afflicted by serious chronic illnesses along with the virus. That will also help provide better data about the actual toxicity of the virus.
The Power of Media Ignorance
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
Almost two weeks ago I offered at NRO a few synopses of various theories about why California — which, for a variety of reasons, had seemed so ripe for a New York–style epidemic — had nonetheless strangely been exempt at least for a while from the virus’s spread. I included the pedestrian possibility of some previously acquired “herd immunity,” given the state’s singular exposure from November to January 31 to direct flights from China, including those from Wuhan, and initial CDC and media reports last year of an unusually early and severe assumed flu hitting the state.
Within a few days, I was hit by media inquiries and private calls asking about my ongoing “coronavirus antibody testing studies.”
Despite ad nauseam corrections that I had never claimed in the NRO article or elsewhere to be a doctor, much less an epidemiologist or a conductor of any such study, and that the Hoover Institution is not a medical school, the fake news still spread.
I got dozens more calls and emails from private citizens who thought they had the virus and wanted confirmation of that supposed fact, in order to venture out and help others with antibodies. Some said they wanted “in” immediately.
Others called saying they were scared that they had an unknown illness and wanted confirmation of what it had been.
And some were from Chinese media sources wanting such “lab” confirmation that earlier herd immunity developing in California pre-2020 was the final proof needed of an American origin, rather than a later Chinese genesis of the virus. (Oddly they apparently assumed that if any such future study were to show some sizable herd immunity in California, and thereby suggest an earlier outbreak than what was assumed in late January 2020, it would not mean the Chinese were lying about the first dates of the infection. Would the Chinese media wish to explain why flights from Wuhan to the U.S. were open throughout January when, for mysterious reasons, the Chinese themselves had blocked travel earlier than the ban from Wuhan to other parts of China?)