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Only two because the FDA did play an important role in the US Covid 19 testing fiasco. the first cheer is for extreme speed in approving phase 1 trials of candidate vaccines (vaccine in a person within 2 months of publication of the Sars Cov2 sequence) and phase III trials of Remdesivir (results leaking already) and hydroxychloroquine. The second and even louder cheer is for the expanded access to Remdesivir policy. I actually predicted that this...

The action sure isn’t over. The armies are still on the field, but I fear the outcome is no longer in doubt and hydroxychloroquine will lose this battle. There are two good studies which show almost exactly no benefit of hydroxychloroquine. They are reveiewed here. Basically the only benefit detected is as a nonspecific anti-inflamatory. There is essentially no evidence that hydroxychloroquine blocks replication of Sars Cov2 in people as it does in...

Mortality and prevalence of Corona. Iceland tests a lot and has some of the best, most complete and representative, data on Corona infections (graph above, which is consistent with comparable data for Iceland from surveys, h/t Jesse Frederik) and seems to have come to grips with Corona, for the moment. What do these data tell us about the prevalence and mortality rate of Corona? They show that young people (18-, below another definition will be used) seem to be relatively immune to...

March housing, latest weekly jobless claims slightly less apocalyptic than expected If I were President, the one industry in the economy that I would be actively trying to prop up is housing. As I have repeated constantly over the past 10+ years, housing is a long leading indicator. The permit that is issued today means a house that is built over the next 4 to 12 months, means contractors being employed, mortgages being issued, and furnishings,...

Will all those who lost their jobs and their health insurance, be asked to pick up the tab?

from Norbert Häring In January  2018, a pilot project for the surveillance of air travelers, commissioned by the World Economic Forum, was agreed upon in Davos. At the time, I presented the Known Traveller Digital Identity (KTDI) project as a “totalitarian dystopa”. A follow-up report shows that the multinational corporations are successfully involving governments and the EU in their plans. Covid-19 is speeding up implementation tremdendously and Bill Gates inadvertently lets us know...

World Chess Championship Ends The two best chess players in the world faced off this month, undeterred by lockdowns, travel bans or any other restrictions.  They never had to see each other either. It helped that they were both computer programs.  The former champ, Stockfish, is the strongest of the traditional type of program, designed by humans and invested with all the fine points of judgment the best human players can translate into code.  Because...

from Lars Syll Getting it right about the causal structure of a real system in front of us is often a matter of great importance. It is not appropriate to offer the authority of formalism over serious consideration of what are the best assumptions to make about the structure at hand … Where we don’t know, we don’t know. When we have to proceed with little information we should make the best evaluation we can for the case at hand — and hedge our bets heavily; we should not proceed with...

What lessons should we draw about the role of government from the COVID-19 epidemic?  I want to address this question in a few posts.  I’m going to start by examining a blog post by the libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan.  Brennan makes the following claims: Many medical journals published misleading papers based on bad statistical analysis and incomplete data; in particular the case fatality rate may have been overestimated because the total number of...