Good news! There are just thirty active cases of Covid-19 in Melbourne, where cases have been plunging for the past month. There have been no deaths since the start of June.
That’s Melbourne, Florida, by the way. Not Dan Andrews’ Melbourne, where the city’s third wave shows little sign of slowing down. Today, Melbourne, Australia recorded 1,069 new cases and ten deaths.
If lockdowns and mask mandates really worked, then Melbourne, Australia should have Melbourne, Florida knocked for six. “Dictator Dan”’s Melbourne is, notoriously, the most locked-down city in the world, with rigorously-enforced mask mandates.
Melbourne, Florida, on the other hand, is like a pre-pandemic time capsule.
A world without Covid-19 and the vast enforcement apparatus it has created. There, the pandemic ends at the airport, a beachhead of the Biden administration’s rules requiring the social distancing and masking that have become par for the course in most developed countries.
A smattering of masks here and there – all optional – was the only sign of the pandemic in Miami […]
After a 30-day statewide lockdown in April last year, the sunshine state has had practically no restrictions, making it an extreme outlier in the US.
By the arguments of the “experts”, Florida ought to be the covid basket-case of the US. “Experts” like Paul Krugman dubbed the state a “public health catastrophe”. But for most of the pandemic, Florida’s numbers were about average for the US. The fourth wave in September hit hard, then vanished almost overnight, without government intervention.
Yet, Florida, the third most populous state in the union, with a notably older population, has still performed better with no restrictions than states which have vigorously prosecuted “expert advice” on lockdowns and masks, such as New York and California. Today, Florida sits at the opposite end of the covid league table from New York and California — states continually praised by the media as covid leaders. Which, in a grim sense, they are.
Marriages, funerals, parties and schooling have proceeded as normal in Florida for more than a year. The hospitals, while busier than usual, were never overwhelmed. Only 7 per cent of the total deaths were in people aged under 55. The state’s economy grew three times as fast as the rest of the US in the third quarter of the year – even during the peak of the fourth wave – obliterating the facile argument trotted out in Australia that only through tough restrictions is a return to economic growth possible.
Without any mandates, more than 90 per cent of the state’s residents over 65 have been vaccinated and about 60 per cent of the whole population. DeSantis, who has mounted a legal challenge to the Biden administration’s nationwide vaccine mandate, last week offered sacked police officers around the country $US5000 ($6700) to move to his state.
The Australian
Governor Ron DeSantis is far more popular in Florida than President Joe Biden is across the country. DeSantis is heavily mooted as a 2024 presidential challenger.
But, more than anything, Florida stands as a glaring, real-life counterfactual to the “expert advice” on covid. “Experts” can wave around scary “models” all they like, but as the great Richard Feynman said, if the theory disagrees with the evidence, then it’s wrong.
The experts have been, and are wrong — ruinously wrong — about covid and the way to tackle it. The media who have cheered them on, and lied to us all (still, ludicrously, trying to paint Florida as a “disaster”), might perhaps be excused by dint of being too stupid to know any better. The same could be said for politicians.
None of them deserve an ounce of our respect — and certainly not a cent more of our taxes.
The only bigger fools will be us if we continue to listen to any of them.
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