- The US was one of only two among 21 similarly wealthy countries— along with Israel — in which life expectancy continued to decline last year.
- Covid seemed to crowd out the flu for the last two years. Some experts expect a big comeback this fall.
- Not following the science: In one of the few education programs the federal government directly oversees — Head Start preschools and child care centers for low-income families — mandatory masking rules are still on the books for teachers and children as young as 2-years-old.
- David Henderson: School shutdowns will shorten lives.
- DeLong: for at least 300,000 years – up until about 1870 – virtually all of our ancestors lived at the subsistence level.
- Some states spend twice as much per person on health care as other states.
- CVS is spending $8 billion to bring back doctor house calls.
Category: Health Reform
Don’t Trust Your Gut, Use Your Brain (and Data) for Decision-Making
We’ve all met that person whose knee-jerk reactions are based on emotions even if they’re illogical to anyone but them. I’ve also heard people who say, “always go with your first thought, it’s usually the correct decision.” Or I’ve heard others say, “Always trust your intuition, it’s usually right.” Aren’t so-called gut-feelings the same as intuition and emotions?
Should intuition and gut-feelings play a role in logical decision making? Not according to the new book Don’t Trust Your Gut, by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. Stephens-Davidowitz was a philosophy major at Stanford, who later earned a PhD in economics from Harvard. He is a former data scientist for Google. This is what he told Vox in an interview…
Thursday Links
Covid Vaccine Makers Won’t Share Vaccines for Next-Gen Research
In his Wednesday Links, John Goodman points to the question, Why aren’t we developing more nasal vaccines? This from Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution:
Nasal vaccines are more likely to stop infection than vaccines injected into muscle because they stimulate mucosal immunity in the nose and respiratory system, the first line of attack, and they are likely to increase uptake especially among people with trypanophobia. Hence my longstanding call for an Operation Warp Speed for nasal vaccines. We haven’t got OWS 2.0 in the United States but nasal vaccines have recently been approved in China and India.