SpaceX Chief Engineer Elon Musk answers a question from the press in front of the Crew Dragon that is being prepared for the Demo-2 mission, at SpaceX Headquarters, Thursday, Oct. 10, 2019 in Hawthorne, CA. Photo credit: (NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)
From an MIT Group:
Taking on coronavirus: The desired benefits in terms of hospitals and the elderly could have been achieved far more cheaply by isolating the vulnerable rather than everybody, and with far less damage to civil liberties.
You will be hard-pressed to find a scientist anywhere who maintains we don’t need to learn to live with the virus,” writes Holman Jenkins in the WSJ.
Our incoherent lockdowns plainly lacked a scientific rationale for how to reopen when most of the public remains uninfected.
An unusually sensible writer in the New York Times points out that pandemics in the past have ended not with the virus going away—the 1918, 1957 and 1968 strains are still with us. They ended when people decided to accept and adapt to the virus’s existence.
For some families, sheltering in place now appears to have increased their risk rather than reduced it. For most individuals, the danger was flu-like, which never before led to them being stripped of basic rights. Banning outdoor activities appears to have been absurd overkill. The notion that a vast testing and contact-tracing scheme is plausible and could halt the epidemic, much less is a requisite condition to resume most of our economic freedoms, would likely fall to sixth-grade math.
Start with the challenge of identifying millions of asymptomatic carriers among millions of others whose symptoms are due to the common cold or flu.
Elon Musk Protecting His Company
Which brings us to Elon Musk and his resistance to the coronavirus pandemic shutdown in California. Every CEO has an obligation to his company to not let anybody take anything of value from the company that the taker has no right to take.
Musk’s fear that “his company cannot survive if it doesn’t continue pulling in cash from delivering cars merely gives him a material and compelling justification for his defiance,” continues Mr. Jenkins.
(Elon Musk) should protect his company’s right to do business and survive against what he considers unlawful and unjustified prohibitions.
He would be derelict not to do so.
Grandiose Musk, Patrick Henry-Like
(Musk) is not the only business operator, but perhaps the only one running a public company, who has decided to resist his livelihood being destroyed by infringements on the most basic rights of U.S. citizens: to leave their homes, to engage in trade, to work and receive pay.
That politicians took steps out of panic is understandable. That these steps were unjustified by the science that existed then much less now doesn’t mean their motives were bad.
Our country and our Constitution are finished, however, if the most sweeping, authoritarian and undemocratic restrictions on individual liberty ever contemplated are not subjected to legal challenge and accountability.
