Krugman: Covid Deaths Are DeSantis’s Fault

From the Tom Woods Letter:

Paul Krugman of the New York Times just wrote that we need to remember the 20,000 people who died in Florida from Covid, and that these deaths were the fault of Governor Ron DeSantis.

It’s astonishing that at this late stage, when the whole world has seen people who followed all the so-called precautions getting sick anyway, someone would portray the situation as cartoonishly as Krugman has.

A physician on Twitter responded by plotting the results of lockdowns through the case nadir of June 2021 (and says he’ll post the data for June 2021 to the present, though of course it tells a similar story).

Note that there is no correlation between lockdown stringency and health outcomes:

If there were a correlation between lockdown stringency and health outcomes, then all the heavy lockdown states should be in the lower right, and all the milder lockdown states should be in the upper left. Instead, as you can see, the distribution is completely random.

Not to mention: when we correct populations for obesity and age, differences in results among the states essentially disappear.

While we’re on the subject of health, you’ll recall that it was only the surgeon general of Florida who, during the height of the Covid panic, noted that exercise, weight loss, and Vitamin D might be worth considering.

(DeSantis has announced that he’ll be sticking with the same surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, in his second term.)

We might also give some thought to the food we eat, a subject I frankly didn’t give all that much thought to until relatively recently.

A recent Tom Woods Show guest, a rancher who goes by the name Texas Slim, is putting on a one-day Food Resiliency Town Hall.

Instead of all the weird fake meat products and all the hideous ingredients going into our food (and indeed into the animals being raised for us to eat), Texas Slim offers a simple plan:

  • Decentralize the food supply.
  • Localize everything.
  • Build relationships between consumers and farmers and ranchers.
  • Create a “parallel economy” in the food industry.

And, he says, return to “a simple life of connecting with our land, the food that comes from it, and the people that raise it.”

We’re all about parallel economies around this here newsletter, so I thought you’d like to know about this event.

It’s free to attend online; if you’d like to attend in person (just outside of Austin, Texas) there’s a small fee.

Check it out:

http://www.tomwoods.com/goodfood