Free Republic

A Stanford study comparing Covid responses in different countries found “no clear significant beneficial effect” from stay-at-home orders and business closures. The peer-reviewed study, published Jan. 5 in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation, found that lockdown orders early in the Covid pandemic didn’t provide more benefits than other measures such as social distancing and travel reduction. The study investigated measures by England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, the U.S., South Korea and Sweden. The first eight countries imposed stay-at-home orders on residents while South Korea and Sweden took less restrictive steps. The researchers used a mathematical model to...

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the surveillance state has utilized technology derived from Silicon Valley, such as facial recognition algorithms, to enhance society’s control. Authoritarian regimes and unscrupulous corporations are leveraging these technologies to track citizens, stalk criminals, and monitor employees, but what if this technology, rapidly advancing in the last couple of years, can determine a person’s political views? Imagine this; obviously, the Washington Metropolitan Area is lined with surveillance cameras, with some cameras that may already be employing facial recognition algorithms. Hypothetically speaking, what if these cameras could recognize an angry mob and accurately (to some...

Americans have a 1-in-1,000 chance of dying of COVID-19 in the next six months, a Stanford University health expert said Thursday at a Food and Drug Administration hearing. Dr. Steven Goodman, an associate dean at Stanford’s School of Medicine, based that probability off recent statistics showing roughly 285,000 deaths in the country over the last seven months and about 1,000 deaths a day. “A randomly chosen US citizen has an average risk of dying from COVID in the next 6 months, that is by the end of May, of roughly 1 in 1,000 and the risk of hospitalization of roughly...

Lockdown measures, such as closing schools, likely prolonged the epidemic by preventing the virus from naturally moving through low-risk populations and building herd immunity. A recent study published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) found that the closing of schools in response to the novel coronavirus could actually increase overall deaths resulting from the disease. Researchers from the University of Edinburgh reevaluated a model produced by the Imperial College London earlier this year that prompted the extensive government lockdown measures, including the closing of schools, implemented in the U.K., ... school closures and isolation of younger people would increase the...

Stanford University will remove admissions test requirements for the upcoming school year in response to COVID-19... Most notably, Stanford Medicine, one of the top medical schools in the country, will not require the MCAT. ... Stanford’s School of Medicine will not require students to take the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), the standardized test for medical degree candidates. Stanford Medicine said that applications can be submitted without the MCAT through September 30, 2020 “in fairness to all applicants.” ... Stanford's physics department will not have to submit scores for the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) or the GRE subject test in...

Former UN Ambassador Susan Rice opened up about her right-leaning son in an interview Wednesday, saying blood is thicker than politics. “I have a 23-year-old son whom I love dearly, whose politics are very, very different from my own and from the rest of our family,” the former Obama administration cabinet member told NPR. “My son and I will have some robust disagreements over some matters of policy, not all. And yet, at the end of the day, you know, I love him dearly, and he loves me.” Rice, who served as ambassador to the United Nations from 2009 to...

Dr. Scott Atlas said it “feel(s) like I’m living in a Kafka novel” when watching politicians’ “hysteria” against school reopening, in an TV interview Monday with Martha MacCallum. According to the renowned doctor, school closings severely damage children’s’ development and generate next to no gains for public health. “I’m not sure how many times it has to be said, but the risk to children for this disease, for fatalities, is nearly zero. I mean, this is totally antithetical to the data,” he said. Atlas is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a health-care expert, and former professor and chief...

The recent surges in U.S. coronavirus cases can be traced to two key factors -- crowds of protesters and proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border, Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at The Hoover Institution, said Saturday night. Most of the cases in the Southwest -- California, Arizona and Texas -- are occuring in counties closest to the U.S.-Mexico border, Atlas told anchor Jon Scott during an appearance on on "Fox Report Weekend." "When you look in the southern counties of California, Arizona and the bordering counties of Texas -- with the Mexico border -- these are where most of these...

SPIEGEL ONLINE talks to historian and Oxford professor Timothy Garton Ash about the European Union's weak image in the world, the limits to EU expansion and how Europe should tackle Russia and Iran.Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies at St. Antony's College, Oxford, a senior fellow at the Stanford University-based think tank the Hoover Institution and a founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a new European think tank. He has earned renown for a genre of writing he calls the "history of the present." His eight books feature historical analysis of transformations undergone in Europe...

Stanford University's disease prevention chairman slammed using statewide lockdown measures as a response to the coronavirus, saying they were implemented based on bad data and inaccurate modeling. “There are already more than 50 studies that have presented results on how many people in different countries and locations have developed antibodies to the virus,” Dr. John Ioannidis said during a recent interview with Greek Reporter. “Of course, none of these studies are perfect, but cumulatively, they provide useful composite evidence. A very crude estimate might suggest that about 150-300 million or more people have already been infected around the world, far...

In a recent interview, Dr. John Ioannidis had a harsh assessment of modelers who predicted as many as 40 million people would die and the US healthcare system would be overrun because of COVID-19. =========================================================================== Dr. John Ioannidis became a world-leading scientist by exposing bad science. But the COVID-19 pandemic could prove to be his biggest challenge yet. Ioannidis, the C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention at Stanford University, has come under fire in recent months for his opposition to state-ordered lockdowns, which he says could cause social harms well beyond their presumed benefits. But he doesn’t appear to be...

Stanford University Dean of Students Mona Hicks quoted convicted cop-killer Assata Shakur in a memo she sent to students in June. Shakur, who fled the United States in 1979 after a prison break, remains on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list.

The infamous phone call between then-incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, like so many tales of Russian collusion, is not as it first appeared. In light of new evidence, it’s likely there’s no truth to the running narrative about the December 29, 2016 phone call that has been the basis of Flynn’s legal nightmare for more than three years. The case against the three-star general, concocted by Barack Obama’s corrupt FBI, centers on the accusation that Flynn discussed U.S. sanctions with Kislyak and later lied about it to the FBI. And now that we know...

In a few recent posts, I was critical of university endowment practices. Why build up a stock of investment, rather than invest in faculty, research, or other core activities? Why wall that pile of assets from being spent, especially when budgets are cratering in a pandemic? When we see businesses with piles of cash, we infer they don't have any good investment projects, and the piles are ripe for diversion to bad ideas. But universities are non-profits, and one major piece of being a non-profit is that the business is protected from the market for corporate control. If you see...

In the past few weeks, a slew of serological studies estimating the prevalence of infection in the general population has become available. This has allowed Prof John Ioannidis of Stanford University to work out the IFR in 12 different locations.

A new study suggests that the novel coronavirus didn't arrive in the US and sicken people before 2020. Researchers from Stanford University looked at 1,700 throat swabs and did not find any of them to contain traces of the strain SARS-CoV-2. The team says this doesn't mean the virus wasn't circulating in the US in 2019. But it does mean that potential patients weren't seeking care at Stanford.

Over at the Washington Post, Keith Humphreys ended the week on a pessimistic note, opining that no matter how much testing and contact tracing is required to get us fully past this pandemic, America will never do as well as several other countries that seem to be taming the virus more quickly. The reason? Because Americans love their “freedom” too much. (Please note for the record that it was Humphreys who put the word freedom in scare quotes, not me.) He begins by quoting medical professionals who insist that the only path toward the new normal relies on our...

Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, just defied the liberal media to speak out and say that people are “mistaken” if they actually think coronavirus lockdown policies are keeping people safe from COVID-19. Bhattacharya, who recently led the largest COVID-19 antibody study in the U.S., carried out tests on staff members of 27 Major League Baseball teams to figure out how much coronavirus has already spread. Based on the results of this and prior research of his, Bhattacharya has concluded that lockdowns are not a good thing and may even be causing further harm. “I think...

For the third time, Peter Robinson interviews Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford Medical School for Uncommon Knowledge. Dr. Bhattacharya is cogent and articulate, and this conversation, a little under an hour long, is well worth your time. Among other things, he reports on a study he has just completed of COVID-19 in employees of major league baseball. Dr. Bhattacharya brings bad news: 1) Only a small percentage of Americans, less than one percent in his study, maybe two or three percent nationwide, have had COVID-19. Herd immunity requires something like 70 percent or 80 percent to have antibodies. So the...

The new research provides the first quantitative synthesis of faulting across the entire continent, as well as hundreds of measurements of compressive stress directions—the direction from which the greatest pressure occurs in the Earth's crust. The map was produced by compiling new and previously published measurements from boreholes as well as inferences about kinds or "styles" of faults based on earthquakes that have occurred in the past. The three possible styles of faulting include extensional, or normal faulting, in which the crust extends horizontally; strike-slip faulting, in which the Earth slides past itself, like in the San Andreas fault; and...