The End of North America
by Paul Krugman, Paul Krugman Substack, January 31, 2025.
Excerpt:
As I wrote the other day, in the three decades since NAFTA went into effect, North American manufacturing has evolved into a highly integrated system whose products — autos in particular, but manufactured goods more broadly — typically contain components from all three members of the pact, which may be shipped across the borders multiple times. Manufacturers developed this system not just because tariffs were low or zero, but because they thought they had a guarantee that tariffs would stay low.
One way of saying this is that until just the other day there was really no such thing as U.S. manufacturing, Canadian manufacturing or Mexican manufacturing, just North American manufacturing — a highly efficient, mutually beneficial system that sprawled across the three nations’ borders.
But now we have a U.S. president saying that a duly negotiated and signed trade pact isn’t worth the paper it was printed on — that he can impose high tariffs on the other signatories whenever he feels like it. And even if the tariffs go away, the private sector will know that they can always come back; the credibility of this trade agreement, or any future trade agreement, will be lost. So North American manufacturing will disintegrate — that is, dis-integrate — reverting to inefficient, fragmented national industries.
DRH comment: Trump often talks about the beautiful taxes called tariffs. The tariffs are not beautiful. Quite the opposite: they will, as Krugman, says help dis-integrate a beautifully integrated manufacturing system.
Modern China, the Old USSR, and American Attitudes about Trade
by Timothy Taylor, Conversable Economist, January 31, 2025.
The GATT, formally known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade but informally known as the Gentleman’s Agreement to Talk and Talk, was first signed by 23 countries back in 1947. Over the decades, all that talking led to a substantial decrease in tariffs all around the world. By 1994, the GATT morphed into the World Trade Organization. At that time, it has [sic] about 125 countries, accounting for about 90% of world trade. From a free trade perspective, it was a considerable success.
Here’s my hypothetical question: Would the GATT have been able to expand the parameters of free trade around most of the world if it had also included the USSR?
Why RFK Jr. Is Dangerous to Public Health
by Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2025.
Excerpt:
Congress established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in 1986 for children’s vaccines because an avalanche of litigation was driving manufacturers from the market. The program allows patients who believe they’ve been harmed by vaccines to file claims with the government for compensation, which are adjudicated in special vaccine courts.
Why do vaccines receive more liability protection than medicines? For one, the population of potential plaintiffs is much larger for children’s vaccines than for any other medical product. Juries are especially sympathetic when it comes to children, so the payouts and potential liability are also much larger.
If patients don’t like the vaccine court judgment, they can still sue manufacturers in federal court. But they rarely do since the standard for proving claims is higher in federal court. But as HHS Secretary, Mr. Kennedy could take action to assist his trial-lawyer pals.
The HHS Secretary can add or remove vaccines from the compensation program, as well as specify injuries eligible for compensation. Removing vaccines from the program would open up manufacturers to mass torts based on weak evidence, including animal studies and scattered human cases that purport to link injuries to the shots.
DRH comment: It’s nice to see the Journal editors not be swayed by the MAHA [Make America Healthy Again] push for Bobby’s confirmation. I’ve had a number of friends, who I thought agreed with me, tell me that we need the government to regulate, more than it does, what goes in our food. They often use the same arguments that I, and, I thought, they have been arguing against for years, namely, how little power individuals have to choose their foods.
I also found Caroline Kennedy’s statement against her cousin interesting. It amounts to “Bobby is a Kennedy.” I was flabbergasted, but shouldn’t have been, by her statement that if Bobby is confirmed at secretary of HHS, he will be in charge of our nation’s health. Who knew?
My Conversation with an Ivermectin Prescriber
by Charles L. Hooper, Incidental Insights, February 1, 2025.
Excerpt:
After finding a few nearby pharmacies that agreed to fill the prescriptions he [Dr. Stephen Banister] wrote—the pharmacists had studied the same information and saw the potential—he started treating patients. Patients who went to other pharmacies were told that ivermectin wasn’t approved by the FDA for COVID-19 and were sent away empty-handed. He redirected them to his preferred pharmacies.
For every patient he treated, he instructed them to report back every day. If the patient was getting worse, Banister needed to know. That was never the case. Patients would report the next day that they felt a little or a lot better. The following day they would feel even better. He treated 100 to 200 patients and, while some got better quickly and others got better slowly, they all improved and not a single patient needed to be hospitalized.
Charley also references a number of pieces that we co-authored on ivermectin.
READER COMMENTS
Richard W. Fulmer
Feb 2 2025 at 1:50pm
Ivermectin either helps at least some COVID patients or it doesn’t. Whether an unpopular president said nice things about it should have no influence on medical decisions. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in.
TMC
Feb 2 2025 at 3:13pm
I have no reason to be in favor or against Ivermectin for covid treatment, but it always concerned me that the studies of Ivermectin always were on people with advanced symptoms, while the proponents of Ivermectin said it only worked if you got treatment early on. It’s like claiming drinking 50 shots of whisky is bad for you to counter a claim that a glass of wine is good for you. This type of ingenuousness made me suspicious.
As for tariffs, the only benefit we’ll get out of this is finally identifying one type of tax the left doesn’t like.
David Henderson
Feb 2 2025 at 4:30pm
You write:
Well said.
You write:
You’re an optimist. Many of us thought that, whatever his other problems, Joe Biden would get rid of a fair number of Trump’s tariffs. He didn’t. So we’ll see how the left does on this.
steve
Feb 2 2025 at 6:24pm
100 or 200 patients? Are you serious? I told you that my institution used it on many more than that without being positive results and you discounted that. AFAICT you and Hooper are perseverating over prescribing early but as I also noted what we did was give pts the drugs as soon as they showed up. There was no way to give the drug earlier. Its actually pretty difficult to know where in the course of the illness a person is as the symptoms are mostly non-specific, but what was done during the active pandemic stage was that people had meds prescribed upon initial presentation. Anyway, the way you “prove” stuff in medicine is having 100 or 200 patients by anecdote when you have an illness that affected billions. Our primary care people gave out the drug to thousands of people and we still saw those people get sicker and get admitted.
I should also note that doing spreadsheets as Hooper described with this guy is not the rare event he claims. Many people did that and lots of people published the results. There were a lot fo studies with outright fraud and a lot fo the small studies that have no real statistical power. Of the studies that showed positive for Ivermectin they were largely in the 3rd world, in areas with parasitic infections. There just weren’t good studies in first world countries.
Steve
David Henderson
Feb 2 2025 at 8:11pm
You write:
Yes.
You write:
Charley never claimed that it was anything other than an anecdote, or, more exactly, 100 to 200 anecdotes.
I don’t know why you bring billions into it. No one was advocating that we test a drug by giving it to say 1 billion people and withholding it from another billion people.
Also, Charley cites our other work where we did look at studies that found there was a probability of more than 90% that ivermectin had a good effect.
Charley Hooper
Feb 2 2025 at 11:45pm
I’m sorry your patients had those outcomes. Did you ever publish these results?
There have been 105 clinical trials on ivermectin for SARS-CoV-2 infections. Those studies have included 220,423 patients, involved 1,206 scientists, and were conducted in 30 countries.
Treatment with ivermectin reduced mortality by 47%, hospitalization by 34%, and cases by 81%. In the 52 randomized controlled trials, ivermectin reduced the risk of major problems by 52%. It should be given as early as possible, as you note. The reduction in risk when given for prophylaxis was 85%, 61% when given early, and 40% when given late.
Even after excluding questionable studies, the results still hold up. If the results are pooled, as they are above, the p-values are very, very low.
The results described above generally agree with those of Dr. Stephen Banister. I never said that his experience proved anything. I described his experiences because it’s important to understand how individual people behaved during the pandemic.
I talked to him at length, which gave me a good idea of who he is, what he did, and why. Could I interview you about your experience with ivermectin?
steve
Feb 4 2025 at 12:42pm
The reason I mention billions is that one of the way to find bad studies in medicine is when people publish studies involving a small number of patients when it is a disease that affects lots of people. Say someone publishes a paper claiming that a drug is good at treating high blood pressure but it only has 50 people in it. We have millions of people with HTN. Why did they do such a small study when pts are easy to find? Now there may be a good reason for that but frequently there are bad reasons and ultimately its so underpowered it’s not a useful paper.
Not interested in an interview for a couple of reasons. First, I do value my anonymity for a number of reasons. Maybe more relevant is that I noted when we discussed this before I noted that I was a hospital based physician and was heavily involved in admin as a dept chair. As I said before we had initially included Ivermectin, along with HCQ, zinc, etc in our inpatient care starting them on the day of admission. It was our primary care docs, mostly Family Practice that was giving out Ivermectin to outpatients so I never directly participated in that. However I talked with the chair of FP and early on they let their guys try whatever they wanted including the vitamins that were being pushed, viagra and some other stuff. We have a couple of hundred PCPs and especially those in rural areas, per their chair, used it quite a bit.
They did not do a study since they opted to put their study efforts elsewhere. It’s a small university. Anyway, as I said they didnt see any difference in outcomes. This means that they could have easily missed a small positive effect. However it’s just not likely that we would miss the very large effects you claim. We noticed the effects of steroids and the advanced non-invasive O2 delivery well before it was published and those effects are smaller than you claim for Ivermectin.
Steve
Charley Hooper
Feb 4 2025 at 6:23pm
I understand that you never directly participated. However, you mention talking to the chair of family practice. Would you be okay with me contacting him/her to ask about the group’s experiences with ivermectin? Thanks.
Charley
Bill Conerly
Feb 2 2025 at 11:01pm
Krugman’s observation is excellent.
It applies to manufactured goods and their components. A good bit of international trade is agricultural, forest products, etc., but our exports to Canada and Mexico are primarily either manufactured end goods or components destined for manufactured goods.
Comments are closed.