Category: reason

Carlsbad City Council member Cori Schumacher got a temporary civil harassment restraining order against Carlsbad resident Tony Bona and former resident Noel Breen over their speech, essentially claiming their speech about her was threatening; they moved to dismiss under the California anti-SLAPP statute, and on Thursday, Superior Court Judge Cynthia Freeland granted the defendants’ motion (filed by lawyer Erik Jenkins). A bit of factual background, from The Coast News (Steve Puterski):

Court documents show Bona’s posts centered on rumors Schumacher didn’t actually live in the district she represented and should be disqualified from holding public office.

In relation to the rumor, Bona shared an image of a cartoon character from the children’s book “Where’s Waldo,” writing that instead of finding Waldo, residents should join him in playing a game of “Where’s Cori?”  The rumors about Schumacher’s residence have since been debunked….

Schumacher also claimed a YouTube video on Bona’s channel “Regular Guy in Carlsbad” constituted harassment. The video in question featured a clown face superimposed over Schumacher’s head during a Carlsbad City Council meeting and later exploded from “apparent confusion,” per Freeland’s ruling.

Here’s an excerpt from the tentative order, which Judge Freeland adopted as her final order:

[T]o obtain a CHRO [civil harassment restraining order], Schumacher must prove through clear and convincing evidence that she suffered … “unlawful violence, a credible threat of violence, or a knowing and willful course of conduct directed at a specific person that seriously annoys, or harasses the person, and that serves no legitimate purpose.” A “credible threat of violence” is a “knowing and willful statement or course of conduct that would place a reasonable person in fear for the person’s safety or the safety of the person’s immediate family, and that serves no legitimate purpose.” “Constitutionally protected activity is not included within the meaning of ‘course of conduct.”‘ …

{Schumacher [argues] that the request for a civil harassment restraining order “only arises from specific threats that were made to (a) force Petitioner to move out of her home, (b) surveil and stalk Petitioner using ‘high tech surveillance,’ and (c) threatening to blow Petitioner up with a bomb by posting a video of an explosion superimposed over her speaking.”} [But the speech here is not punishable threats.] Bona commented on a Facebook post about a council meeting after previously asking Schumacher to step down that she should get ready to “move” out of the city…. Bona posted about neighbors surveilling her [apparently in relation to the rumors that she didn’t actually live in the city -EV] alongside a picture of Waldo and the words “Where’s Cory?” … Bona added a brief animated explosion similar to a comic book (along with various other animations added to the video) over Schumacher’s face in the middle of a council meeting that appears to reference Schumacher’s head exploding from confusion.

Neither Bona’s “non-neighborly” comments on Nextdoor, his [California Public Records Act] request, nor his threat to sue over unanswered questions about COVID during a Facebook Live event provide context that would lead a reasonable person to believe that he intended to physically force Schumacher from her home, join forces with the neighborhood to unlawfully stalk her through high tech surveillance at the expense of her safety, or build a bomb. Simply calling these posts threats is not enough; some modicum of clear and convincing evidence is required to establish a prima facie case….

The result is the same as to Breen. Merely comparing Schumacher’s leadership to that of East Germany is not a threat to her safety, but rather pure political criticism. Although many people may disagree, or find such a comparison to be crude and offensive method of stating his opposition, even unpopular opinions are entitled to protection. Nothing in the August 9, 2020 blog post Schumacher submitted can reasonably be construed as a threat to her safety or other unconstitutional activity.

The same is true of the September 7, 2020 blog post Schumacher submits that repeatedly includes the term “GTFO.” … [T]he blog post itself notes it is “borrow[ing] a line from the Councilwoman” that she had put “squarely in the public domain”—an apparent reference to Schumacher’s August 21, 2020 Twitter post telling [Tony Krvaric (chairman of the San Diego Republican Party)] to take his “brand of white nationalist, regressive, traditionalist/authoritarian toxic & destructive politics” and “GTFO of North County.” Breen’s blog post thereafter uses GTFO not as a threat to Schumacher, but as a mantra with phrases like “Never again will ‘guilt by association’ carry the day GTFO” and “Never again will you be bullied into silence GTFO.”

[T]he Court does not consider whether Breen’s unpled conduct cornering Schumacher and monopolizing her time at political events in years past would independently entitle her to a CHRO. But even if the Court considers the evidence for the purpose of putting the pleaded allegations (Breen’s blog) in context, this evidence simply does not color these posts from a year later as threats that Breen would physically force Schumacher from her home or otherwise put her in physical danger. The only reasonable interpretation of these posts is political commentary, not personal threats….

A hearing is scheduled for next month on Bona’s and Breen’s motions seeking attorneys’ fees (which are allowed to defendants who are sued based on their speech and then prevail on an anti-SLAPP motion).

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3/8/1841: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s birthday.

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The COVID-19 vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech were developed and brought to market at a blistering pace, but their distribution has been hobbled by poor organization and rigid eligibility rules. The planned rollouts didn’t give local officials and health care workers enough flexibility to adjust to the realities on the ground—or to make tradeoffs between treating as many people as possible and strictly adhering to the guidelines.

Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University who blogs at Marginal Revolution, has been promoting an idea called “First Doses First,” which the United Kingdom recently adopted. This approach would allocate all available vaccines to be used as first doses, while pushing off second doses for weeks (or even months) until production can catch up. While U.S. regulators have so far resisted the strategy, they recently eased up on strict rules about the timing between doses.

Reason‘s Isaac Reese spoke to Tabarrok in January about the vaccine situation.

Q: You argued that the world’s governments should collectively spend about $100 billion on vaccines. Where does that number come from?

A: The economics of this is actually incredibly simple: The world economy is losing $500 billion to $1 trillion a month. A month. So it’s billions of dollars, invested in vaccines, to save trillions of dollars by accelerating the recovery.

Q: You consulted for the Trump administration, the World Bank, and other foreign governments about how to spur vaccine development. Can you talk about the advice you offered?

A: We initially approached it by thinking about an advanced market commitment, which is what [economist and Nobel laureate Michael] Kremer had used to increase the incentive to produce a pneumococcus vaccine. You set a high price, and then you just wait for firms to jump into the market to try and achieve, like a prize.

We quickly discovered that that might not be optimal in the current situation. The economic costs [of COVID-19] were so high that you wanted a lot of shots on goal, and you even wanted to take some shots with a low probability of success. But if you have a firm with an extremely low probability of success, to pull them into the market requires a very high prize at the end. If you can’t tell which firm is which, that means you need a really big prize for all of the firms, whether they have a high probability of success or a low probability of success.

Q: You’ve been pushing an idea called “First Doses First.” What does that mean?

A: “First Doses First” is pretty simple. The way the clinical trials were designed was that the first dose of the vaccine is given, and then 21 or 28 days later, depending upon whether it’s the Pfizer or the Moderna vaccine, you get the second dose.

It takes the body’s immune system some time to respond to the vaccine and to build up its strength. However, after the first 10 days, but before the second dose was given, what we saw is that the vaccine looks extremely effective. It looks to be 80–90 percent effective [after the first dose]. It’s about 95 percent effective after the second dose.

That means you can give twice as many first doses if, instead of giving a second dose, you give a first dose to somebody else. You can have two people who are protected at an 80 percent efficacy rate, as opposed to one person who’s protected at a 95 percent efficacy rate.

When you push out the first doses faster, you get to herd immunity faster. So the more you spread out the first doses, the slower the transmission rate of the virus is, because now fewer people are getting the disease, and it looks then that fewer people will be transmitting the disease.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity. For a video version, visit reason.com.

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection wants to put video surveillance towers along the Canadian border in rural Vermont and New York. Some elected officials in communities that would be affected say the CBP hasn’t given them much information on the towers or why it thinks they are needed.

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The Chinese government has not been forthright about the origins of the novel coronavirus that sparked the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic. On January 5, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued an emergency preparedness notification reporting that Chinese officials had alerted the agency to an outbreak of pneumonia of unknown cause in the city of Wuhan. The alert noted that “some patients were operating dealers or vendors in the Huanan Seafood market.” The dominant narrative was that the virus most likely jumped from bats to humans (possibly via an intermediary species) at a wet market in Wuhan.

Doubts about the market being the initial source of the outbreak soon surfaced. Some articles in late January 2020 cited the possibility that the virus might have escaped by infecting a worker associated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a laboratory known to conduct research on coronaviruses. In April, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a statement declaring that “the Intelligence Community (IC) also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.” However, in January 2021, the U.S. Department of State released a fact sheet that suggested, among other things, that the outbreak could have been “the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.”

The fact sheet specifically noted that beginning in 2016, “WIV researchers conducted experiments involving RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as its closest sample to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar).” The fact sheet added that “the U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”

It is notable that on September 12, 2019, the main database of samples and viral sequences of the WIV was taken offline. In the meantime, Chinese officials were spreading the rumor that the virus may have actually been introduced into their country by the United States Army.

It isn’t uncommon for pathogens to jump from animals to humans. For example, flu viruses have frequently crossed over from pigs and birds into humans. The Ebola virus leaped from bats into people. And earlier in this century, SARS and MERS—both caused by coronaviruses—were passed on to people by bats and camels. Nevertheless, the Chinese government’s resistance to investigating the origins of the COVID-19 virus raised eyebrows.

As the pandemic spread across the globe, the Chinese government stymied the attempts of outside investigators to come to Wuhan to sift through relevant data. Finally, a team of WHO investigators was allowed to go to Wuhan in January and February, but their activities and access to data were considerably constrained. Nevertheless, at a February 9 press conference in Wuhan, the WHO team called the lab leak hypothesis “unlikely.”

Unsatisfied with the WHO investigation, a group of researchers issued an open letter on March 4 calling for a full and unrestricted international forensic investigation into the origins of COVID-19. The WHO team, in their view, simply did not have adequate access to information to determine whether the outbreak was due to a natural spillover from an animal species or a laboratory/research-related incident.

Among the defects in the WHO investigation is that most of the fieldwork had to be conducted by the Chinese members of the team, with the results simply being communicated to the international members for review and discussion. Another is that reports had to be approved by consensus, meaning that the 17 members appointed by the Chinese government who comprised half of the WHO team have effective veto power over what will be ultimately reported. Further, the WHO investigators did not have access to lab records, data, and personnel that would have enabled them to confidently evaluate various hypotheses.

“Although the joint team investigation was a significant opportunity for the international community to gain some limited and highly curated information, it has unfortunately proven opaque and restrictive, greatly compromising the scientific validity of the investigation,” notes the open letter.

The letter’s signatories urge that a new investigation be launched involving a team that includes epidemiologists, virologists, wildlife experts, public health specialists, forensic investigators, and biosafety and biosecurity experts. The investigation should also grant the team full or significant access to all sites, records, samples, and personnel of interest.

Of course, the Chinese government has had many opportunities to permit such a full and unrestricted investigation. It is highly unlikely that the probe the signatories have called for will take place.

If the Chinese government won’t come clean, then perhaps ours should, argued the Washington Post editorial board in a February op-ed. The op-ed notes, “The truth matters, and the United States should not hide any relevant evidence.” That’s entirely correct.

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