Soldiers rush after alighting from an assault amphibious vehicle during a military drill in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, Jan. 12.
Photo:
Daniel Ceng/Associated Press
Honesty is not the default policy in Washington these days, so the political and media classes were jolted this weekend by the leak of a private warning by a U.S. general telling his troops to prepare for a possible war with China over Taiwan in two years. Imagine: A warrior telling his troops to be ready for war.
In an internal memo leaked to NBC News, Gen. Michael Minihan told his troops: “I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.” The general runs the Air Mobility Command, the Air Force’s tank-refueling operation, and he says in his memo that he wants his force to be “ready to fight and win in the first island chain” off the eastern coast of continental Asia. He called for taking more calculated risks in training.
The general’s document won’t be remembered for subtlety. One of his suggestions is that airmen with weapons qualifications start doing target practice with “unrepentant lethality.” Another tells airmen to get their affairs in order. This candor seems to have alarmed higher-ups at the Pentagon, and NBC quoted an unidentified Defense official as saying the general’s “comments are not representative of the department’s view on China.”
But while Gen. Minihan’s words may be blunt, his concern is broadly shared, or ought to be. U.S. Navy Adm.
Phil Davidson
told Congress in 2021 that he worried China was “accelerating their ambitions to supplant the United States,” and could strike Taiwan before 2027. Gen. Minihan came to his post after a tour as deputy of Indo-Pacific Command. He like many others suggested that 2025 may be a ripe moment for Chinese President
Xi Jinping
to move. Taiwan and the U.S. both have presidential elections in 2024 that China may see as moments of weakness.
No less than Secretary of State
Antony Blinken
said last year that Beijing was “determined to pursue reunification” with Taiwan “on a much faster timeline” than it had previously contemplated. Are war-fighters supposed to ignore that message as they prepare for their risky missions?
Gen. Minihan is doing his troops a favor by speaking directly about a war they might have to fight. A recent war game conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies warned that, in a conflict over Taiwan, “the scale of casualties” would “stagger a U.S. military that has dominated battlefields for a generation.” Gen. Minihan’s boom operators are accustomed to working in skies the U.S. controls. Tankers would be essential in a fight for Taiwan given the vast distance over the Pacific—and would be vulnerable to heavy losses.
Former naval officer
Seth Cropsey
explained on these pages last week that America isn’t investing in the ships and weapons stockpiles that would be required to support a long war in the Western Pacific. Such yawning gaps in U.S. preparedness make a decision by Beijing to invade or blockade the democratic island more likely. Preventing a war for Taiwan requires showing Beijing that the U.S. has the means and the will to fight and repel an invasion.
Whatever his rhetorical flourishes, Gen. Minihan seems to understand this, and what Americans should really worry about is that some of his political and military superiors don’t.
Journal Editorial Report: Paul Gigot interviews General Jack Keane. Images: Zuma Press/Polish Defense Ministry via AP Composite: Mark Kelly
You would think Canadians had learned by now not to tell
Jordan Peterson
what to say. The psychology professor became an internet sensation in 2016 after arguing that Canadian legislation amounted to “compelled speech” on gender pronouns. Now the College of Psychologists of Ontario is demanding that Mr. Peterson acknowledge he “lacked professionalism” in public statements and undergo a “coaching program” of remedial education.
Maybe the new commissars missed Mr. Peterson’s videos praising Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the man who said: “Live not by lies.” Mr. Peterson won’t comply, and he says he’ll now face a disciplinary committee that could revoke his license to practice.
The College of Psychologists, the profession’s governing body in Ontario, appointed an investigator in March to examine complaints about Mr. Peterson’s comments on Twitter and the popular Joe Rogan podcast. On Nov. 22, the College’s panel released a decision. Per images provided by Mr. Peterson, the panel ruled: “The comments at issue appear to undermine the public trust in the profession as a whole, and raise questions about your ability to carry out your responsibilities as a psychologist.”
What are these comments? Calling Elliot Page, the transgender actor, by her former name, “Ellen,” and the pronoun “her,” on Twitter. Calling an adviser to Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau
a “prik.” A sarcastic crack at antigrowth environmentalists for not caring that their energy policies lead to more deaths of poor Third World children.
Calling a former client “vindictive.” Objecting to a Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover of a plus-size model: “Sorry. Not Beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.” In Canada even offenses begin with “sorry.”
“The impact risk in this case is significant,” the panel found, because the comments “may cause harm.” It counseled Mr. Peterson that coaching would help “mitigate any risks to the public.” The College of Psychologists declined to comment on the case, citing confidentiality.
Mr. Peterson responded sensibly: “Who exactly was harmed, how, when, to what degree, and how was that harm measured”? He says there have been about a dozen formal complaints since 2017, each one demanding a formal reply. One complainant cited Mr. Peterson’s Twitter response to a critic worried about overpopulation: “You’re free to leave at any point.” Mr. Peterson thinks the investigations aren’t about mitigating harm but preventing free expression, and that “the process is the punishment,” giving online detractors an effective way to badger him.
Professional bodies are supposed to ensure that practitioners are competent, not enforce political orthodoxies or act as language police outside the office. But that’s the trend in Western medical associations and beyond. The Law Society of Ontario had pushed a mandatory diversity pledge for all lawyers until a members’ revolt took over the board and nixed the pledge in 2019. At the time, an Ontario lawyer objected to the “ever-expanding mission to socially engineer the profession.”
Sounds like an issue of id, ego and superego. You could ask a psychologist about it.
The release of the so-called ‘Twitter Files’ continues, with attention now turning to Twitter’s relationship with agencies including the FBI and DHS. Images: AFP/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly
Central banks around the world are raising their key interest rates in the most widespread tightening of monetary policy on record. Some economists fear they may go too far if they don’t take into account their collective impact on global demand.
According to the World Bank, the number of rate increases announced by central banks around the world was the highest in July since records began in the early 1970s. On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve delivered its third 0.75 percentage-point increase in as many meetings. This past week its counterparts in Indonesia, Norway, the Philippines, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and the U.K. also upped rates.
Moreover, the size of those rate rises is larger than usual. On Sept. 20, Sweden’s Riksbank increased its reference rate by a full percentage point. It hadn’t previously raised or lowered rates by more than half a point since adopting its current framework in July 2002.
Those central banks are almost universally responding to high inflation. Inflation across the Group of 20 leading economies was 9.2% in July, double the rate a year earlier, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Higher rates cool demand for goods and services and reassure households and businesses that inflation will be brought down over the coming year.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said he anticipates that interest-rate increases will continue as the Fed fights high inflation. Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
But some worry that central banks are effectively pursuing national responses to what is a global problem of excess demand and high prices. They warn that central banks as a group will thus go too far—and push the world economy into a downturn that is deeper than necessary.
“The present danger…is not so much that current and planned moves will fail eventually to quell inflation,”
Maurice Obstfeld,
formerly chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, wrote earlier this month in a note for the Peterson Institute for International Economics, where he is a senior fellow. “It is that they collectively go too far and drive the world economy into an unnecessarily harsh contraction.”
There are few signs that central banks are going to pause and take stock of the impact of their rate increases to date. The Fed indicated Wednesday it would likely raise rates 1 percentage point to 1.25 percentage points over its next two meetings. Economists at JPMorgan expect central bankers from Canada, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru, the eurozone, Hungary, Israel, Poland, Romania, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, India, Malaysia and Thailand to raise rates in policy meetings scheduled through the end of October.
That is an array of central-bank firepower with few precedents. But do they all need to be doing so much if they are all doing the same thing?
Most economists accept that inflation in any one country isn’t solely due to forces within that country. Global demand also affects the prices of easily traded goods and services. This has long been apparent with commodities such as oil; a boom in China drove up prices in 2008 even as the U.S. slid into recession. It has also been true in recent years of manufactured goods, whose prices were boosted worldwide by disruptions to supply chains, such as at Asian ports, and elevated demand from government stimulus. One Fed study found that U.S. fiscal stimulus raised inflation in Canada and the U.K.
Sweden’s Riksbank, led by Gov. Stefan Ingves, raised its reference rate by a full percentage point this week.
Photo:
Mikael Sjoberg/Bloomberg News
But an individual central bank’s focusing on matching supply and demand at a national level could go too far, because other central banks are already weakening the global demand that is one of the drivers of national inflation. If each central bank does so, the excess tightening globally may be significant.
The World Bank shares Mr. Obstfeld’s worries, warning in a report that “the cumulative effects of international spillovers from the highly synchronous tightening of monetary and fiscal policies could cause more damage to growth than would be expected from a simple summing of the effects of the policy actions of individual countries.”
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WSJ Chief Economics Correspondent Nick Timiraos sits down with former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, to discuss the steps the Fed is taking to battle inflation.
That risk could be reduced through coordination between central banks—for example, when they cut key interest rates together during the global financial crisis. Likewise, in 1985 when advanced economies acted together to bring down the dollar and then again in 1987, when they acted together to support it.
Fed Chairman
Jerome Powell
noted Wednesday that central banks have coordinated interest-rate actions in the past, but that it wasn’t appropriate now when “we’re in very different situations.” He added that contact among global central banks is more or less ongoing. “And it’s not coordination, but there is a lot of information-sharing,” he said.
If coordination isn’t feasible, a more attainable goal may be, as the World Bank advised, for national policy makers to “take into account the potential spillovers of globally synchronous domestic policies.”
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said it wasn’t appropriate for central banks to coordinate interest-rate actions at the moment.
Photo:
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Mr. Powell suggested that already happens. The Fed’s forecasts always take account of “policy decisions—monetary policy and otherwise [and] the economic developments that are taking place in major economies that can have an effect on the U.S. economy,” he told reporters.
Many central banks are worried about raising rates too little in the face of stiff inflation. “In this environment, central banks need to act forcefully,” said
Isabel Schnabel,
a policy maker at the European Central Bank, in a late August speech. “Regaining and preserving trust requires us to bring inflation back to target quickly.”
“Informal coordination would be beneficial,” said
Philipp Heimberger,
an economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies. “Systematic thinking on the impact of interest-rate hikes would need to take into account what other central banks are doing simultaneously. This would be a game changer.”
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Mr. Heimberger said that the Fed has a key role as the prime mover behind the rise in global interest rates and that it should “seriously consider the implications of its interest-rate hiking cycle for other parts of the world.”
Gilles Moëc,
chief economist at insurer
AXA SA,
is doubtful that effective coordination is achievable and argues that in its absence, central banks should tread more carefully as they contemplate further rate rises.
“Once monetary policy is in restrictive territory, I think it becomes dangerous to hike mechanically at every policy meeting without taking the time to assess how the economy is responding,” Mr. Moëc said. “The quantity of new info between two meetings can be too small and the risk of overreaction rises.”
President Joe Biden announces a federal student loan relief plan that includes forgiving up to $20,000 for some borrowers and extending the payment freeze at the White House on Aug. 24.
Photo:
Bonnie Cash – Pool via CNP/Zuma Press
Well, he did it. Waving his baronial wand, President Biden on Wednesday canceled student debt for some 40 million borrowers on no authority but his own. This is easily the worst domestic decision of his Presidency and makes chumps of Congress and every American who repaid loans or didn’t go to college.
The President who never says no to the left did their bidding again with this act of executive law-making, er, breaking. The government will cancel $10,000 for borrowers making less than $125,000 a year and $20,000 for those who received Pell grants. The Administration estimates that about 27 million will be eligible for up to $20,000 in forgiveness, and some 20 million will see their balances erased.
But there’s much more. Mr. Biden is also extending loan forbearance for another four months even as unemployment among college grads is at a near record low 2%. Congress’s Cares Act deferred payments and waived interest through September 2020, but
Donald Trump
and Joe Biden have extended the pause for what will now be nearly three years.
The Administration is claiming, again, that this will be the last extension and is needed to help borrowers prepare to resume payments. But even if the Administration lets the forbearance end in December, about half of borrowers won’t have to make payments since their debt will be canceled.
Most of the rest will only make de minimis payments because Mr. Biden is also sweetening the income-based repayment plans that Barack
Obama
expanded by fiat. Borrowers currently pay only up to 10% of discretionary income each month and can discharge their remaining debt after 20 years (10 if they work in “public service”).
Democrats said these plans would reduce defaults. They haven’t. Federal student debt has ballooned because many borrowers don’t make enough to cover interest and principal payments, so their balances expand. Student debt has nearly doubled since 2011 to $1.6 trillion, though the number of borrowers has increased by only 18%.
Now Mr. Biden is cutting undergrad payments to a mere 5% of discretionary income. The government will also cover unpaid monthly interest for borrowers so their balances won’t grow even if they aren’t paying a penny. This will mask the cost to taxpayers of the Administration’s rolling loan write-off. Student-loan debt won’t appear to swell even as it does. What a fabulous accounting trick.
The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates that canceling $10,000 for borrowers earning up to $125,000 will cost about $300 billion. The Pell grant addition could increase this by as much as $270 billion. The four-month freeze on payments will cost $20 billion on top of the roughly $115 billion it already has.
The payment plan revisions could eventually add hundreds of billions of dollars more. An analysis commissioned by the Trump Education Department estimated that taxpayers would lose $435 billion on federal student loans, largely because borrowers in these payment plans on average were expected to repay only half of their balances. Now they will repay even less.
Worse than the cost is the moral hazard and awful precedent this sets. Those who will pay for this write-off are the tens of millions of Americans who didn’t go to college, or repaid their debt, or skimped and saved to pay for college, or chose lower-cost schools to avoid a debt trap. This is a college graduate bailout paid for by plumbers and
FedEx
drivers.
Colleges will also capitalize by raising tuition to capture the write-off windfall. A White House fact sheet hilariously says that colleges will “have an obligation to keep prices reasonable and ensure borrowers get value for their investments, not debt they cannot afford.” Only a fool could believe colleges will do this.
***
It’s important to appreciate that there has never been an executive action of this costly magnitude in peacetime. Not Mr. Obama’s immigration amnesties, not his Clean Power Plan, not Mr. Trump’s border-wall fund diversion. Nothing comes close to this half-trillion-dollar or more executive coup.
Congress authorized none of Mr. Biden’s loan relief and appropriated no funds for it. Progressives say the Higher Education Act of 1965 lets the Education Secretary “compromise” (i.e., modify) student debt. But the Federal Claims Collection Act of 1966 sets very limited terms and strict procedures for such “compromise.”
Even Mr. Biden said in December 2020 it was “pretty questionable” whether he had authority to cancel debt this way. The Supreme Court recently underscored in West Virginia v. EPAthat Congress must provide clear authorization to agencies taking action on major questions. Canceling so much debt is beyond major to a mega-ultra-super question.
With the cancellation precedent, progressives will return to this vote-buying exercise every election year. The only antidote will be if Democrats conclude this gambit boomeranged politically by mobilizing an opposition coalition of Americans who are tired of being played for saps by progressives. The test arrives in November.
Journal Editorial Report: It insults the millions who paid their loans back (05/01/22). Images: Getty Images for We The 45 Million Composite: Mark Kelly
The race to the midterm elections will accelerate after Labor Day—and if past is prologue, Democrats are likely to lose control of at least one legislative chamber. But current facts are more ambiguous than the historical record.
Midterm elections are usually referendums on the incumbent president and his party. Although President Biden’s job approval remains low (as it has been for the past year), it appears to have improved by 2 to 3 percentage points in recent weeks. If this trend continues, the president will be less of a drag on his party’s candidates than he was at his nadir.
Surprisingly, Democrats remain tied with Republicans in the generic congressional ballot, which reflects national preferences for the parties’ House candidates. If this is still true on Election Day, Republican gains will be much smaller than they were in 1994 and 2010. Other factors—including the record low number of truly competitive House districts—point in the same direction.
In Senate races, candidate quality matters more. As has happened repeatedly in recent cycles, Republicans appear to have damaged their prospects during primary contests by choosing nominees who have more appeal with their party’s base than with statewide electorates. In Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona, nominees backed by
Donald Trump
trail their Democratic opponents, several by wide margins.
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In the race to succeed
Pat Toomey,
the two-term Republican senator from Pennsylvania, Democrat Lt. Gov.
John Fetterman
leads TV personality
Mehmet Oz
by double digits. In Ohio—which Mr. Trump carried by wide margins in 2016 and 2020—Democratic Rep.
Tim Ryan
has moved out to a 4.5-point lead over political neophyte J.D. Vance. If Democrats can pick up this seat, which Republicans have held since 1999, the GOP’s chances of retaking the Senate will be dealt a possibly fatal blow, even if
Herschel Walker
and
Blake Masters
manage to eke out victories over Democratic incumbents in Georgia and Arizona.
Inflation will do more than any other issue to shape this year’s midterms, and broad-based price increases have tilted polls toward the Republicans since last fall. But even on this issue recent trends have been favorable for Democrats. According to the AAA’s daily survey, gasoline prices have fallen to $3.95 a gallon from a peak of $5.02 two months ago. Lower shipping prices and a strengthening dollar should hold down the prices of imported goods, and bloated inventories will force retailers to give consumers some relief. Although July’s more positive inflation report—which showed a modest reduction in year-over-year inflation, to 8.5% from 9.1%—doesn’t necessarily signal a trend, a sustained decline between now and November could persuade some voters that the worst is behind them.
In midterm elections, turnout is variable—and crucial. When Democratic interest in the 2014 cycle was muted, Republicans added 13 House seats to their already substantial majority. In 2018, by contrast, Democrats surged to the polls to express their opposition to President Trump and gained 41 seats, retaking the majority after eight years in opposition.
Democrats’ enthusiasm about going to the polls this fall had substantially trailed Republicans’—but recent events have narrowed the gap. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Democratic interest in the midterms surged. The passage of the major energy-and-climate bill that many Democrats had given up for dead further lifted their spirits.
The abortion issue could prove a game-changer. As the results of Kansas’ Aug. 2 referendum indicate, the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization isn’t popular, and severe restrictions on abortion are even less so. Eighty-five percent of Americans favor allowing abortions in cases of rape, incest and risks to the mother’s life, and a strong majority believe that the procedure should be widely available during the first trimester of pregnancy. While only 3 in 10 Americans favor abortion on demand, less than 1 in 10 support an outright ban. Most voters accept abortion in some circumstances but not others, and candidates who appear dogmatic or extreme will pay a price at the polls. By a margin of 25 points, voters favor protections for abortion in their state constitutions—a position backed by most demographic groups and even by one-third of Republicans.
Women care about this issue, which now trails only inflation in their list of top concerns. The pain of loss typically outweighs the satisfaction of gain, and tens of millions of pro-choice women have suffered a loss that until recently seemed unimaginable. If Democrats do better than expected this November, the justices who voted to overturn Roe will be a big piece of the explanation.
White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha speaks at a press briefing in Washington, June 2.
Photo:
Yuri Gripas/Zuma Press
“I’ve been a huge advocate of keeping schools fully open to in person education since October of 2020,” Ashish Jha, the White House’s Covid response coordinator, tweeted last week. “Still am.” So why is Dr. Jha engaged in scare-mongering about the danger of Covid to children?
In a May 30 tweet, Dr. Jha asserted that Covid is “a far greater threat to kids than the flu is.” He linked to an article by Harvard Medical School instructor
Jeremy Faust,
which claims that Covid killed more than 600 children in 2021, whereas the flu kills “an average” of only 120 children annually. But Dr. Faust’s data are severely skewed, for three reasons.
First, while flu is seldom tested, everyone admitted to a hospital for any reason gets a Covid test. Between October 2018 and September 2019, 1.4 million flu tests were reported to public-health and clinical labs. As of May 31, 2022, there had been 897 million PCR tests for Covid.
Second, evidence from audits of death certificates found that 35% of all pediatric deaths in 2020 “had co-occurring diagnosis codes that could not be plausibly categorized as either a chain-of-event or significant contributing condition,” according to a study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Put another way, in at least 35% of pediatric “Covid deaths,” Covid couldn’t have been the cause.
Third, Dr. Faust relies on a figure for confirmed flu deaths that is well-known to underestimate actual flu deaths by an order of magnitude. Correcting for the lack of flu testing, the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases estimated 1,161 pediatric flu deaths in the 2012-13 season rather than the 142 that Dr. Faust reported.
For the White House to amplify a false message of high Covid risk for children undermines public health and erodes public confidence. It foments an erroneous assessment of risk and is the kind of misinformation that leads to more school closings as well as burdensome mask and quarantine mandates.
There are far greater risks to children than Covid. Since March 2020, more than 1,000 kids have died with Covid (an average of around 38 a month), according to the CDC. In the same period more than 1,400 children died from drug- and alcohol-related causes.
The biggest risk to children comes from disruptions in their schooling. We will be cleaning up the school-closing mess for years, and fomenting baseless fear only makes the task harder.
Dr. Bhattacharya is a professor of health policy at Stanford and a founding fellow at the Academy for Science and Freedom.
Correction An earlier version misstated the estimate for 2012-13 flu deaths.
Journal Editorial Report: The week’s best and worst from Kim Strassel, Kate Bachelder, Mene Ukueberuwa and Dan Henninger. Images: Paramount Pictures/Zuma Press/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly
One media narrative congealing after this week’s Supreme Court leak is that President Trump’s nominees lied to Congress by claiming they wouldn’t overturn the abortion precedent of Roe v. Wade. So allow us to check the tape—and explain why respecting past decisions doesn’t bind the Court to stand by serious constitutional errors.
Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer accused “several” of the “conservative Justices” of having “lied to the U.S. Senate, ripped up the Constitution and defiled both precedent and the Supreme Court’s reputation,” among other modest claims in a statement after Politicopublished a draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito. The insinuation is that Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett promised Congress they wouldn’t touch Roe.
Shortly after America’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan,
Pope Francis
quoted former German Chancellor
Angela Merkel
while criticizing the 20-year war: “It is necessary to put an end to the irresponsible policy of intervening from outside and building democracy in other countries, ignoring the traditions of the peoples.”
The problem is that the Pope was quoting
Vladimir Putin,
not Mrs. Merkel. That gaffe came to mind when an Italian newspaper published an interview with the Pope Tuesday.
Francis suggested that perhaps “NATO barking at Russia’s gate” had caused Mr. Putin to invade his neighbor, which doesn’t belong to the alliance. “I have no way of telling whether his rage has been provoked,” he continued. “but I suspect it was maybe facilitated by the West’s attitude.” Asked whether it was right to send weapons so Ukraine can defend itself, the Pope said, “I don’t know,” before criticizing the global arms trade.
Since the invasion, Francis has called for an end to the war and criticized the violence, but he hasn’t directly called out Russia for starting the conflict. Now that he finally speaks, he blames NATO for accepting members that want to avoid being invaded by Russia. What a terrible moral signal to send to dictators.
The Pope said he has requested an audience with Mr. Putin but hasn’t heard back. Asked whether he’d visit Kyiv, he said he must go to Moscow first: “If Putin decided to leave the door open . . . ” This is a pattern. Recall that the Pope declined to meet with U.S. Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo
in 2020, at least partly because of America’s opposition to the Vatican’s egregious deal-making with the Chinese Communist Party.
This isn’t about whether the Vatican aligns perfectly with the West or the U.S. Pope
John Paul II
was a vociferous critic of the 2003 Iraq War but kept the respect of those who remembered his opposition to Soviet imperialism. Consistency matters.
The Pope is the spiritual leader of more than one billion Catholics, but the moral authority behind the papacy—damaged as it is—can still transcend religion from time to time. This makes Francis’s equivocating on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine all the more frustrating for those who recall how powerful a force for good a Pope can be.
Main Street (12/07/20): Hong Kong’s Jimmy Lai goes to jail—and Pope Francis says nothing. Images: Reuters/Zuma Press Composite: Mark Kelly
Public-health officials ruined many lives by insisting that workers with natural immunity to Covid-19 be fired if they weren’t fully vaccinated. But after two years of accruing data, the superiority of natural immunity over vaccinated immunity is clear. By firing staff with natural immunity, employers got rid of those least likely to infect others. It’s time to reinstate those employees with an apology.
For most of last year, many of us called for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its data on reinfection rates, but the agency refused. Finally last week, the CDC released data from New York and California, which demonstrated natural immunity was 2.8 times as effective in preventing hospitalization and 3.3 to 4.7 times as effective in preventing Covid infection compared with vaccination.
Yet the CDC spun the report to fit its narrative, bannering the conclusion “vaccination remains the safest strategy.” It based this conclusion on the finding that hybrid immunity—the combination of prior infection and vaccination—was associated with a slightly lower risk of testing positive for Covid. But those with hybrid immunity had a similar low rate of hospitalization (3 per 10,000) to those with natural immunity alone. In other words, vaccinating people who had already had Covid didn’t significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization.
Similarly, the National Institutes of Health repeatedly has dismissed natural immunity by arguing that its duration is unknown—then failing to conduct studies to answer the question. Because of the NIH’s inaction, my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I conducted the study. We found that among 295 unvaccinated people who previously had Covid, antibodies were present in 99% of them up to nearly two years after infection. We also found that natural immunity developed from prior variants reduced the risk of infection with the Omicron variant. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of the two-dose Moderna vaccine against infection (not severe disease) declines to 61% against Delta and 16% against Omicron at six months, according to a recent Kaiser Southern California study. In general,
Pfizer’s
Covid vaccines have been less effective than Moderna’s.
The CDC study and ours confirm what more than 100 other studies on natural immunity have found: The immune system works. The largest of these studies, from Israel, found that natural immunity was 27 times as effective as vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic illness.
None of this should surprise us. For years, studies have shown that infection with the other coronaviruses that cause severe illness, SARS and MERS, confers lasting immunity. In a study published in May 2020, Covid-recovered monkeys that were rechallenged with the virus didn’t get sick.
Public-health officials have a lot of explaining to do. They used the wrong starting hypothesis, ignored contrary preliminary data, and dug in as more evidence emerged that called their position into question. Many, including
Rochelle Walensky,
now the CDC’s director, signed the John Snow memorandum in October 2020, which declared that “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection.”
Many clinicians who talk to other physicians nationwide had have long observed that we don’t see reinfected patients end up on a ventilator or die from Covid, with rare exceptions who almost always have immune disorders. Meanwhile, public-health officials recklessly destroyed the careers of everyday Americans, rallying to fire pilots, truck drivers and others in the supply-chain workforce who didn’t get vaccinated. And in the early months of the vaccine rollout, when supplies were limited, we could have saved many more lives by giving priority to those who didn’t have recorded natural immunity.
The failure to recognize the data on natural immunity is hurting U.S. hospitals, especially in rural areas. MultiCare, a hospital system in Washington state, fired 55 staff members on Oct. 18 for being out of compliance with
Gov. Jay Inslee’s
vaccine mandate—and that was in addition to an undisclosed number of staffers who quit ahead of the vaccination deadline. The loss of workers contributed to a full-blown staffing crisis.
It got so bad that the hospital summoned staff who were Covid-positive to return to work even if they were sick, according to an internal memo obtained by
Jason Rantz
of KTTH radio. The memo stated that “positive staff with mild to moderate illness” could work, so long as they wear appropriate personal protective equipment, don’t take breaks with others, and agree to stay home “if symptoms worsen.” Managers were recommended to assign Covid-positive staff to Covid-positive patients and vaccinated patients, but not immunosuppressed patients.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services took the hospital mandate national by decreeing that all medical facilities under its jurisdiction require vaccination for employees, including those with natural immunity. The Supreme Court upheld the rule on Jan. 13, the same day it issued a stay against a similar mandate from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which OSHA formally withdrew Tuesday.
Connecticut has suspended its vaccine mandate for state employees, and
Starbucks
is rehiring employers fired for being unvaccinated. Other states and businesses should follow their lead. Politicians and public-health officials owe an apology to Americans who lost their jobs on the false premises that only unvaccinated people could spread the virus and only vaccination could prevent its spread. Soldiers who have been dishonorably discharged should be restored their rank. Teachers, first responders, and others who have been denied their livelihood should be reinstated. Everyone is essential.
Dr. Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and author of “The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care and How to Fix It.”
Wonder Land: The weaponization of ‘science’ began with climate policy and accelerated with Covid-19. Now many think it’s all misinformation. Images: AFP/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly
To exercise with Covid or not—that’s the question some fitness buffs are asking. The American College of Sports Medicine has suggested people under 50 who experience mild or no symptoms to rest for at least seven to 10 days after testing positive. Their recommendation appears to be motivated by the concern that even a mild Covid-19 infection may damage the heart and potentially cause sudden death during physical exertion.
There’s little evidence to support this recommendation. Because exercise boosts the immune system, it may even help people bounce back faster from Covid.
Viral infections, including those that cause the flu and the common cold, are a major cause of myocarditis, the inflammation of the heart muscle. The condition can cause chest pain and irregular heartbeat, though it is often asymptomatic. This makes its prevalence hard to measure. According to some estimates, 1% to 5% of all people with acute viral infections may develop myocarditis.
Yet sudden death from myocarditis during physical activity appears to be rare. A study from 1980 to 2006 documented 41 sudden deaths in young athletes (under 40) linked to myocarditis—one-tenth as many as from blunt trauma.
Some experts feared Covid-19 would increase cardiac risk in otherwise young and healthy people. A study early in the pandemic from Germany reported signs of myocarditis in 60% of Covid-19 patients, including some with relatively mild illness. But criticisms of the study’s design and data errors prompted more investigation, and recent studies have been mostly reassuring.
In one study, cardiac tests were performed on 789 professional athletes (soccer, baseball, basketball, football and hockey) with prior infections, most of whom had mild or no Covid symptoms. Only five (0.6%) had inflammation on cardiac imaging—in line with estimates for other viral infections—and all of them had symptoms that the researchers said “exceeded empirical definitions of mild COVID-19 illness” such as cough, fatigue or loss of taste.
In another study, only 0.7% of 3,018 college athletes who tested positive for Covid had abnormal cardiac test results that researchers believed were definitely, probably or possibly linked to the virus. (Extremely fit athletes are known to have “remodeled” hearts that can cause abnormal findings on cardiac tests. That makes it hard for cardiologists to tell if the abnormalities result from the virus.)
A third study, involving 3,597 college athletes who had tested positive with symptoms ranging from none to chest pain and shortness of breadth, found that only 1.2% experienced symptoms that persisted for more than three weeks. Only 4% experienced heart- or lung-related symptoms when they returned to exercise. Yet the vast majority of those who underwent more testing didn’t show evidence of cardiac damage from Covid-19, and it’s normal to experience fatigue or shortness of breath when returning to exercise after a flulike illness.
Studies on young competitive athletes are easier to perform than on the general population, and they may not be 100% applicable to recreational athletes. Still, they show that otherwise healthy and fit people who catch Covid are unlikely to suffer cardiac complications.
A recent study of U.K. healthcare workers found those who had mild or no Covid symptoms were no more likely to have cardiac abnormalities on tests six months after infection than those who hadn’t been infected. “This study demonstrates that in healthy people, measured cardiovascular abnormalities are common, but no more common in those who had had mild SARS-CoV-2 6 months previously compared with those who had not,” the researchers found.
The seven- to 10-day rest recommendation appears to be as arbitrary as the six-foot social distancing from early in the pandemic. Most people who don’t know they have Covid won’t follow it anyway.
“There is very little good quality data on exercise resumption post-Covid,”
Gabriel Vorobiof,
a cardiologist at UCLA, says in an email. “At one point there was a big controversy when a few cardiac MRI papers showed some potentially concerning cardiac findings post-Covid.” But since the studies didn’t include a control group for comparison—such as athletes or young people without Covid who get an MRI—he says the “findings were later dismissed as associations, not necessarily causative links.”
He adds: “I’ve seen quite a few young athletes requiring ‘cardiac clearance’ by their sporting club after having uncomplicated Covid prior to re-engaging in their respective sports, many of which were noncompetitive. The need to clear a young person following an asymptomatic viral illness, like many things during this pandemic, seems to be an overreaction based on little if any science.”
Doctors generally advise people with head colds that they may exercise, but should listen to their bodies. This seems like sensible advice for otherwise healthy people with mild Covid. “However, if symptoms of chest pain or discomfort, lightheadedness or palpitations arise, one should stop and seek medical attention,” Dr. Vorobiof says.
Exercise has been found to protect people from other viral infections, including flu, herpes, Epstein-Barr and the common cold, and improve the immune response to vaccinations. Each workout mobilizes billions of immune cells, especially the T-cells that circulate, identify and kill virus-infected cells. Exercise also reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which impairs white blood cells and increases inflammation.
As people learn to live with Covid, there’s no reason they shouldn’t work out with it too.
Ms. Finley is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
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