Category: reason

A new MIT study of COVID-19 transmission casts doubt on both the adequacy of physical distancing guidelines and the rationale for occupancy limits in large, well-ventilated indoor settings. The study, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlights the danger from tiny respiratory droplets that circulate throughout a room, which cannot be avoided by maintaining a distance of six feet from other people, as long recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The authors—Martin Bazant, a professor of chemical engineering and mathematics, and John Bush, a professor of applied mathematics who specializes in fluid dynamics—note that the six-foot rule assumes “the primary vector of pathogen transmission is the large drops ejected from the most vigorous exhalation events, coughing and sneezing.” The rule makes sense based on that assumption, since “high-speed visualization of such events reveals that [six feet] corresponds roughly to the maximum range of the largest, millimeter-scale drops.”

But “there is now overwhelming evidence that indoor airborne transmission associated with relatively small, micron-scale aerosol droplets plays a dominant role in the spread of COVID-19.” The six-foot rule does not address that risk. In fact, Bazant and Bush say, “one is no safer from airborne pathogens” at 60 feet than at six feet when the air is well-mixed.

“We argue that, in the context of airborne transmission in a well-mixed space, the benefits of the six-foot rule are limited,” Bazant told Fox News. “As everyone in the room is breathing the same air, they share the same risk. Social distancing may thus be giving you a false sense of security. However, we note that the six-foot rule is valuable in limiting transmission by respiratory jets [such as those emitted by coughs and sneezes], which pose a heightened risk when people are not wearing masks.”

Using data from earlier research, including studies of COVID-19 superspreading events, Bazant and Bush developed a model that estimates indoor transmission risk based on factors such as ventilation, the size of the space, the number of people present, the level of activity (e.g., singing, shouting, or exercising vs. quiet speech or resting), the use of face masks, and the amount of time spent in the space. They found that some safeguards can have a dramatic impact on the likelihood that a carrier will spread the virus.

In “a typical American classroom, designed for an occupancy of 19 students and their teacher,” for instance, “the safe time after an infected individual enters the classroom is 1.2 [hours] for natural ventilation and 7.2 [hours] with mechanical ventilation.” That’s assuming “a quiet classroom,” where “resting respiration is the norm.” When masks are added, “these bounds are increased dramatically, to 8 and 80 [hours], respectively.” If students spend six hours a day in the classroom, “a school group wearing masks with adequate ventilation would thus be safe for longer than the recovery time for COVID-19,” and “school transmissions would be rare,” which jibes with what has been observed after schools are reopened.

Bazant and Bush’s estimates are much less reassuring for “elderly homes and long-term care facilities, which account for a large fraction of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths.” Based on New York City’s rules for nursing homes, which allow up to three residents per room and require at least 80 square feet each, and assuming natural ventilation, “the Six-Foot Rule fails after only [three minutes] under quasi-steady conditions, or after 17 [minutes] for the transient response to the arrival of an infected person.” Even with mechanical ventilation, “three occupants could safely remain in the room for no more than 18 [minutes]” in the steady-state scenario.

“This example provides insight into the devastating toll of the COVID-19 pandemic on the elderly,” Bazant and Bush write. “It underscores the need to minimize the sharing of indoor space, maintain adequate, once-through ventilation, and encourage the use of face masks.”

Bazant and Bush’s calculations also suggest that government-imposed occupancy limits, a common response to the pandemic, make sense only in some indoor settings. “Our analysis shows that many spaces may be safe to reopen at full occupancy, while others carry significant risk,” Bazant told Fox News, “depending on the amount of time people spend together, the ventilation rate, whether face masks are worn, and other factors.”

Bazant and Bush have created an online app that calculates the maximum recommended cumulative exposure time (CET) in various settings. The parameters include age group, viral strain, “room specifications” (classroom, living room, church, restaurant, etc.), and “human behavior,” including mask use and activity level. The “advanced mode” of the app includes additional factors, such as infection prevalence and population immunity.

After a person infected by the Wuhan strain enters a church occupied by 100 people who are wearing masks and speaking but not singing, for instance, the basic app says the CET should be no more than 17 hours. Assuming a one-hour service, the app recommends an occupancy limit of 211 people. For a commercial airliner with the same number of people, the maximum CET is 54 hours. The recommended maximum occupancy for an eight-hour flight is 160 passengers. Those estimates assume that a 10 percent risk of airborne transmission is tolerable.

“Often times the space is large enough, the ventilation is good enough, and the amount of time people spend together is such that those spaces can be safely operated even at full capacity, and the scientific support for reduced capacity in those spaces is really not very good,” Bazant told CNBC, mentioning large university classrooms as an example. “I think if you run the numbers, even right now, for many types of spaces, you’d find that there is not a need for occupancy restrictions.”

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In 1924, Ohioan Lloyd “Spud” Hughes filed a patent application for his original technique of treating tobacco with menthol, creating a cigarette that was “cooling and soothing to irritated membranes” while being allegedly “absolutely non-injurious” and “pleasant to the taste.” A century later, his invention having become immensely popular among African American smokers, the menthol cigarette is on the verge of being completely prohibited throughout the United States.

Advocacy groups are applying renewed pressure on the Biden administration to institute a nationwide ban. “The predatory marketing of menthol cigarettes and other flavored tobacco products must be stopped and we should all recognize this as a social justice issue, and one that disproportionately impacts youth and communities of color,” reads a letter signed by groups including the NAACP and the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has until April 29 to respond to a lawsuit seeking a menthol ban.

It’s not surprising that health groups want menthol cigarettes taken off the market. The more interesting subject is how the public health case against menthol collides with concerns about the policing of black communities, placing progressives in the uncomfortable position of endorsing a new form of drug prohibition. Is the cause of social justice truly served by outlawing a product precisely because of its popularity with African Americans?

The question has divided civil liberties and civil rights groups, with organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, Law Enforcement Action Partnership, and Al Sharpton’s National Action Network voicing opposition to menthol bans. “Any prohibition on menthol and flavored tobacco products promises continued over-criminalization and mass incarceration of people of color,” they warned in a letter to Congress last year.

Ban advocates gloss over these concerns by emphasizing that the law would be enforced against sellers, not consumers, of menthol cigarettes. But big tobacco companies have too much on the line to defy the FDA; illicit markets for menthol cigarettes would most likely be run by people within the communities the ban is intended to protect.

If a ban is implemented, illicit market entrepreneurs would still have ready access to both cigarettes and menthol flavoring. No offense to “Spud” Hughes, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how to combine the two. His patent application spelled out the process in just a few sentences. Unless the federal government attempts to turn menthol itself into a controlled substance, there will surely be many small-time sellers of menthol cigarettes meeting the demand of the millions of Americans who smoke them, including at least 77 percent of black smokers, but possibly as high as 88 percent (and around a quarter of white smokers).

As Jonathan Haggerty and Arthur Rizer, previously of the R Street Institute, noted in 2019, this presents a dilemma. “Enforcing a menthol ban—even just against dealers—would increase black communities’ exposure to police. The alternative is to implement a ban and hope for lax enforcement, which amounts to little more than signaling.”

This is no idle worry. Recall that Eric Garner’s fatal encounter with police began with an arrest for the petty crime of selling loose cigarettes and ended with him being choked to death by a New York City cop. (Garner’s mother, Gwendolyn Carr, became a vocal opponent of a proposal to ban menthol cigarettes in New York City.) And in Massachusetts, which banned menthol cigarettes in 2020, at least one illicit seller is facing prosecution amid a reportedly thriving black market. Executives at big tobacco companies might lament the loss in sales of menthol cigarettes, but the brunt of enforcement is more likely to be borne by people such as Garner, especially if a federal ban is backed by state and local measures.

Most professionals in the field of tobacco control have decided that the potential health benefits of banning menthol are nonetheless worth the risks of creating illicit markets. Research from the University of Michigan, along with other sources, suggests that menthol has played a significant role in the perpetuation of smoking. It’s not far-fetched to conclude that a federal ban would have salutary health effects, but resorting to such an extreme measure does betray a lack of imagination. There are many options for reducing the harms of smoking that are much less coercive than prohibition.

The United States has yet to fully embrace tobacco harm reduction by actively promoting products such as electronic cigarettes and snus as safer alternatives to deadly cigarettes. The closest the federal government has come to such an approach was the “comprehensive plan” announced by then-commissioner of the FDA Scott Gottlieb. This two-pronged plan was supposed to redirect smokers to lower-risk products by making cigarettes less appealing (by banning menthol or reducing nicotine content) while encouraging smokers to switch to vaping. Unfortunately, Gottlieb himself was never up to the challenge of the latter, and by 2019 officials at all levels of government had turned to demonizing e-cigarettes.

In practice, sweet talk of nudging smokers toward safer alternatives has consistently turned out to be all stick, no carrot.

This reflects a larger trend of illiberalism within the antismoking movement, which has come to view smokers less as equals with rights to be respected than as deviants or addicts whose behavior must be controlled to win the war against Big Tobacco. This domineering attitude extends to the press, too. While coverage of the proposed menthol ban sometimes addresses its potential unintended consequences, the intended consequence of forbidding menthol smokers from buying the products they prefer is virtually never questioned. As recently noted by Marc Gunther, a journalist who covers the influence of philanthropic groups, “the voices of smokers are noticeably absent from this debate.”

Take, for example, a recent poll by the Truth Initiative, an antismoking group that advocates for a menthol ban. Their research found that although a majority of nonsmokers support banning menthol, only 28.5 percent of current menthol smokers endorse the measure. Rather than taking the hint that the vast majority of menthol smokers prefer to be left alone, the group dismissed this rejection as “revealing an opportunity to further increase support among those who would be most impacted by a ban.”

Banning menthol is now pitched as a social justice issue, but if we take the stated preferences of menthol smokers seriously, the racial politics cut the other way. White smokers would remain free to purchase the unflavored cigarettes that most of them currently consume, while black smokers would be paternalistically forbidden from exercising their own desires and subjected to policing of illicit markets if they try to fulfill them.

“I’d be livid,” ex-smoker Deron Snyder wrote for The Root in 2010, ” [If I] discovered that my Salems were forbidden while those disgusting Marlboros were still on sale….Why would the government ban the cigarettes that I prefer, while the estimated 78 percent of non-Latino, white smokers who prefer non-mentholated cigarettes are allowed to keep on puffing?”

It’s a valid question, albeit one that is unlikely to give pause to advocates within the contemporary antismoking movement. Their discourse portrays smokers, particularly black smokers, as passive victims of predatory tobacco companies lacking agency of their own. To give consideration to their liberties would require acknowledging that people smoke for many reasons, including pleasure, and that smokers deserve to be treated as more than just collateral damage in the war against Big Tobacco. These are truths that public health activists are loath to admit, but they are the starting point for crafting more humane policies toward smokers and other consumers of nicotine.

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On Saturday, April 24, for the first time in 40 years, an American president summoned the courage to use the accurate term to describe a century-old war crime.

“Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring,” President Joe Biden declared, in the White House’s annual message marking the National Day of Remembrance of Man’s Inhumanity to Man.

Previous residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., most brazenly Biden’s former boss Barack Obama, had shied away from using the word genocide to describe the organized Turkish slaughter of more than 1 million Armenians from 1915–1923, despite campaigning piously on the promise to call evil by its proper name. (Donald Trump never made that promise, though George W. Bush did.)

Why the cowardice? Because the subject is considered near taboo in Turkey, due to any whiff of suggestion that the sainted founder of the post-Ottoman country, Kemal Ataturk, might have his fingerprints near a crime scene. Over the years, Ankara has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on increasingly ineffective diplomatic efforts to prevent its fellow NATO members from using the g-word, implicitly threatening to revoke America’s access to the strategically important Incirlik Air Base.

As former U.S. ambassador to Armenia John Marshall Evans—who was encouraged to resign from the State Department after publicly uttering the word “genocide” in conversation with the passionate Armenian-American diaspora—explained to me a decade ago, “Turkey is a hugely important ally, and little landlocked Armenia, population 3 million at best, is never going weigh in those scales in such a way as to even make a showing.” From Washington’s point of view, it was too much potential real-world pain for too little linguistic gain.

So what changed in 2021? Congressional impatience with the increasingly authoritarian Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for one. The House and Senate in late 2019 each overwhelmingly passed, over Trump’s objections, resolutions stating that “it is the policy of the United States to commemorate the Armenian Genocide through official recognition and remembrance.”

Ankara and Washington have been at loggerheads over U.S. support for Syria Kurds (who Turkey regards as terrorist threats); Turkey’s purchase of Russian missiles (which America believes could jeopardize NATO technology secrets), plus Erdoğan’s human rights record, which Biden finds more appalling than his predecessor.

In a December 2019 interview with The New York Times, Biden called Erdoğan an “autocrat” and vowed to take “a very different approach to him now, making it clear that we support opposition leadership,” helping them “to be able to take on and defeat Erdogan. Not by a coup but by the electoral process.”

In a television address this weekend, Erdoğan called Biden’s new wording “groundless and unfair,” adding: “We believe that these comments were included in the declaration following pressure from radical Armenian groups and anti-Turkish circles.” Erdoğan also advised his U.S. counterpart to “look in the mirror,” since “we can also talk about what happened to Native Americans, Blacks and in Vietnam.”

Many libertarians and other skeptics of U.S. military adventurism get tetchy when Washington escalates adjectives to describe faraway slaughter. For decades, “humanitarian interventionists” such as Madeleine Albright and Samantha Power and their neoconservative counterparts on the right have used the g-word, and in Power’s case the Armenian genocide recognition explicitly, as a necessary precursor to the use of force. Obama, with Power’s encouragement, used the spectre of a possible “massacre,” “slaughter,” and “mass graves” in Benghazi to justify his disastrous war of choice in Libya.

But the standard for language should be accuracy, not how words might be leveraged into disagreeable policy. One of the reasons that foreign policy “realism” has gotten such a bad name is that all too often it has been conflated (by practitioners as well as commentators) with realpolitik—with the situational ethics and conscience-straining two-facedness required by maneuvering through a fallen world.

In fact, it is interventionism that requires such grubby compromises, as I have argued when writing about Samantha Power and her ilk. We would care much less about the owners of Incirlik Air Base if we stopped using it so damned much. Using precise language undistorted by political necessities—which, to be fair, does not come naturally to the State Department—need not be a trigger to war. After all, Ronald Reagan, the last sitting U.S. president to use the phrase “Armenian genocide,” was able to issue clear-eyed condemnations of several regimes he had zero intention of bombing.

The Biden administration could—but almost certainly won’t—use America’s long-overdue presidential recognition of the Armenian genocide to more firmly decouple language from interventionism, thus freeing up space for more blunt but less fraught international relations. As Thomas Jefferson said in the famous quote, whose overlooked emphasis is mine: “Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.”

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Police officers in Loveland, Colorado, violently arrested a 73-year-old woman with dementia and allegedly dislocated her shoulder. Then they watched body camera footage of the incident and joked about it, as video released today by the woman’s attorney shows.

Surveillance video from the booking area of the Loveland Police Department shows three officers reviewing the footage of the June 26, 2020, arrest of Karen Garner.

“Ready for the pop?” an officer in the video, identified by Garner’s attorneys as Austin Hopp, says to the other officer as they watch the footage.

“What’d you pop?” another officer asks.

“I think it was her shoulder,” Hopp responds.

Garner filed a lawsuit on April 14 alleging that Hopp fractured her arm and dislocated her shoulder after stopping her for allegedly shoplifting $13.88 worth of items from Walmart.

According to the lawsuit, Garner suffers from dementia and sensory aphasia, which makes it difficult for her to communicate and understand other people. Garner was walking home and picking wildflowers. She didn’t initially respond to Hopp’s commands to stop and appeared not to understand him.

“I don’t think you want to play it this way,” Hopp said as she continued to walk away from him. “Do you need to be arrested right now?”

Body camera footage of the incident, released with the lawsuit, shows Hopp then throwing a disoriented and confused Garner to the ground while twisting her arm behind her. “I’m going home,” Garner yells.

The Loveland Police Department has placed Hopp on administrative leave and reassigned Daria Jalali, another officer named in the lawsuit, to administrative duties while it investigates the incident. 

The local district attorney also announced last week that his office is investigating the incident for possible criminal charges.

“I hate it,” Jalali says as they watch the body camera footage together.

“I love it,” Hopp responds.

“I can’t believe I threw a 73-year-old on the ground,” Hopp says elsewhere in the video.

Garner’s lawsuit alleges she did not receive medical care for more than six hours after her arrest.

Loveland police chief Bob Ticer told the Loveland Reporter-Herald last week that police officials did not learn about Garner’s injuries until the lawsuit was filed.

“These videos cannot be unseen or unheard. I am sorry to have to share them with the public,” Sarah Schielke, Garner’s attorney, said in a statement released with the booking video. “But as it often goes with bad police departments, it seems this is the only way to make them change. They have to be exposed. If I didn’t release this, the Loveland Police’s toxic culture of arrogance and entitlement, along with their horrific abuse of the vulnerable and powerless, would carry on, business as usual.”

The Loveland Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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The Biden administration announced Sunday that it will send assistance to India, a country whose COVID-19 daily case rate has exceeded a record-setting 350,000 cases. Reports from the country are horrifying: Many hospitals’ oxygen supply has all but run out, and they are being forced to turn away dying patients.

“The United States has identified sources of specific raw material urgently required for Indian manufacture of the Covishield vaccine that will immediately be made available for India,” said National Security Council spokesperson Emily Horne in a press release Sunday. “The U.S. Development Finance Corporation (DFC) is funding a substantial expansion of manufacturing capability for BioE, the vaccine manufacturer in India, enabling BioE to ramp up to produce at least 1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines by the end of 2022.”

Now the administration is adding an item to that list. Millions of AstraZeneca doses are currently collecting dust in the U.S. because the regulatory state has refused to approve the vaccine. “The U.S. will begin sharing its entire pipeline of vaccines from AstraZeneca once the COVID-19 vaccine clear federal safety reviews,” the Associated Press reported today after President Joe Biden spoke with Prime Minister Narendra Modi by phone. Up to 60 million doses were expected to head that way.

It’s good to see them finally put to use. But that still raises the question: Why has it taken so long for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve this vaccine, which has already been deployed in over 70 other countries? Indeed, the vaccine still hasn’t been approved here—and India won’t get those shots until it is, even though the majority of the developed world accomplished this months ago.

The United Kingdom and many countries in the European Union rolled out AstraZeneca in December. But the FDA required the company to publish results from a large-scale trial, even though the vaccine had already been shown to be effective around the globe. The company did that on March 24, reporting that the shots are 76 percent effective at stopping symptomatic cases of COVID-19. And yet those life-saving doses have continued to pile up in U.S. warehouses without going into people’s arms, because AstraZeneca has not yet finished jumping through the many hurdles required by the FDA’s application process.

“This is nearly indefensible,” wrote Reason‘s Eric Boehm last month. “On the long list of ways that the government has screwed up the COVID-19 response, hoarding lifesaving vaccines that it won’t allow to be used deserves a place at or near the very top.”

Public perception of the vaccine and its approval received no favors in mid-March, just days before the company released their Phase III trial data, when a group of European countries temporarily barred the use of the vaccine over a rare blood-clotting side effect. Seventeen million people had received the vaccine, and 37 developed the reaction—a 0.0002 percent chance. Regulators realized their error and reversed course, noting that the chance of death from the coronavirus is perhaps a more pressing concern.

That didn’t come without a cost. “Earlier this month, a Harris Poll in France found that just 43 percent of respondents trusted the AZ vaccine,” reported Reason‘s Ron Bailey in March. “A new poll by the Elabe Institute, published Tuesday, shows only 20 percent of the French people trusting the vaccine.”

But people in India are being killed at alarming rates. The country saw more than 2,800 COVID deaths yesterday, an enormous spike from previous levels. They do not have the luxury of being so cautious. Whether they receive the vaccine should be left up to the judgment of each individual, and they should have that choice—now.

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Today, the Court GVR’d South Bay III in light of Tandom v. Newsom. At long last, I think the California COVID cases are over. Keep in mind that this cert petition was filed way back on November 24, 2020–the day before Roman Catholic Diocese v. Cuomo was decided. Over the past five months, there has been a revolution in Free Exercise Clause jurisprudence.

By my count, there is still one COVID case remaining from Maine: Calvary Chapel v. Mills. The state waived the response on April 26. It should come up for conference soon, and be GVR’d. At that point, I think we will finally be done with COVID cases.

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