I don't have the article to hand or the time to research it properly, but if that flu IFR from New Zealand in the BMJ is the one I'm thinking of, I remember reading it and thinking it was extremely suspicious: it just doesn't seem compatible with the actual flu death figures for the UK. That and the abstract talking about how people compare covid with the flu and that's a Bad Thing rings alarm bells. It seems pretty clear that covid at least used to be a lot more dangerous than the flu, but I'm pretty sceptical of those numbers.
Do you have any information or thoughts about why China won't clear the Pfizer vaccine for use? I hadn't heard anything about that, and it is making the suspicious part of my brain wonder what is in all those reports Pfizer didn't want released for a century.
Ad "give parents government money instead of government funded daycare". I think that opposition to this comes from a sort of morally conservative perspective - some parents might, and let´s be real, will, use those money on Bad Things (illegal drugs etc).
Regarding the daycare thing, I think it depends on whether the proposal is to create daycares and make them free, or pay for people to use existing daycare.
The latter seems obviously worse than cash transfers to parents, but it’s conceivable to me that extending public education to 3 & 4 yos might be less expensive than creating that much new daycare capacity and if parents are going to use their cash transfer for daycare creating capacity would be important.
I don't have the article to hand or the time to research it properly, but if that flu IFR from New Zealand in the BMJ is the one I'm thinking of, I remember reading it and thinking it was extremely suspicious: it just doesn't seem compatible with the actual flu death figures for the UK. That and the abstract talking about how people compare covid with the flu and that's a Bad Thing rings alarm bells. It seems pretty clear that covid at least used to be a lot more dangerous than the flu, but I'm pretty sceptical of those numbers.
Do you have any information or thoughts about why China won't clear the Pfizer vaccine for use? I hadn't heard anything about that, and it is making the suspicious part of my brain wonder what is in all those reports Pfizer didn't want released for a century.
Ad "give parents government money instead of government funded daycare". I think that opposition to this comes from a sort of morally conservative perspective - some parents might, and let´s be real, will, use those money on Bad Things (illegal drugs etc).
Regarding the daycare thing, I think it depends on whether the proposal is to create daycares and make them free, or pay for people to use existing daycare.
The latter seems obviously worse than cash transfers to parents, but it’s conceivable to me that extending public education to 3 & 4 yos might be less expensive than creating that much new daycare capacity and if parents are going to use their cash transfer for daycare creating capacity would be important.
It’s a lot of ifs though.
You keep on misspelling Bob Wachter's name. I'm not surprised because it took me a few months to notice it wasn't spelled like Uatu's job title.