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The Goodman Institute Health Blog

Category: COVID-19 and Public Health

Thursday Links

Posted on March 9, 2023 by John C. Goodman
  • Scott Atlas: How the experts got Covid science wrong.
  • At least 2 in 5 U.S. adults said they are not willing to pay for 11 of the 12 preventive services currently required to be provided gratis by health insurance regulations. Since none of these services are cost effective for healthy people, that shows people are smarter than the politicians who imposed the regulation.
  • The operational cleavage between the US public health and medical care systems inhibited our ability to contain the spread of COVID-19.
  • A defense of Sharing health plans.
  • On Biden’s plan to increase the Medicare net investment income tax from 3.8 to 5 percent for people earning over $400,000: A tax on capital is a tax on labor, including people who make a lot less than $400,000.
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Tuesday Links

Posted on March 7, 2023March 7, 2023 by John C. Goodman
  • Does lead in the air affect learning in school?
  • Stephen Pinker: The development of artificial general intelligence is incoherent and not achievable.
  • Increased access to physicians results in better health – at least in Nigeria.
  • If the estimates from Statista Consumer Marketing Research are accurate, from 2020 to 2022 the world bought 928 billion masks at a cost of $389 billion — most of them made of plastic. I wonder how much of the plastic ended up in the ocean?
  • Oops. The Inflation Reduction Act will increase taxes on millions of Americans earning less than $400,000, despite the president’s repeated promises not to do that. And that’s only for starters.
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“Escape >From the Lab” is Not Just Theory

Posted on March 6, 2023 by John C. Goodman

“What this means, in non-technical language, is that Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes (“reverse genetics” and “infectious clone technology”), creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures (“in vitro”) and humanized mice (“in vivo”). And this information would help predict the likelihood of “spillover,” the jump of a coronavirus from bats to people.

“The methodical approach was designed to find the best combination of coronavirus backbone and spike protein for infecting human cells. The approach could have generated SARS2-like viruses, and indeed may have created the SARS2 virus itself with the right combination of virus backbone and spike protein.

“It cannot yet be stated that Shi did or did not generate SARS2 in her lab because her records have been sealed, but it seems she was certainly on the right track to have done so. “It is clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was systematically constructing novel chimeric coronaviruses and was assessing their ability to infect human cells and human-ACE2-expressing mice,” says Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and leading expert on biosafety.

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Friday Links

Posted on March 3, 2023 by John C. Goodman
  • Scott Atlas reviews our experience with Covid: mortality rates, natural immunity, vaccines, lockdowns, and more.
  • Can Chat GPT replace doctors?
  • More than 8 million Americans with diabetes rely on insulin; yet surveys find that one in six people who use insulin say they ration the drug because of the cost.
  • Elizabeth Warren report finds that medigap insurers do what every other insurer does: reward agents for sales of its policies. Of course, seniors in Medicare Advantage plans don’t need medigap policies.
  • Eli Lilly’s announcement that it will cap at $35 a month what patients pay out of their own pockets for the company’s insulin has two problems: (1) the company already had such a policy in place, and (2) the company says  the cap will not have much, if any, effect on what many people are actually paying.
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For many years, our health care blog was the only free enterprise health policy blog on the internet. Then, when the NCPA closed its doors, the health blog stopped as well.

During this five-year hiatus no one else has come forward to claim the space. So, my colleagues and I have decided to restart the blog in connection with the Goodman Institute. We invite you and others to use this forum to share your views.

John C. Goodman,

Visit www.goodmaninstitute.org

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