If You Lean Left
JUDAS PRIESTS: Expertise, Trust, and Partisanship (Suhan Kacholia, Areo, 25 min.)
Trust is a two-way street: if experts do not believe they can trust the public with accurate information, the public has every reason not to trust them.
When science appears broken, subject to bias, fraud, and the influence of special interests—when its practitioners are revealed as duplicitous, self-serving, or cynical—trust will collapse under the weight of cumulative betrayals.
We should subject every scientific claim to rigorous inquiry and efforts to falsify it, even when most scientists consider it to be correct.
HEY! TEACHER: The Science of Masking Kids at School Remains Uncertain (David Zweig, New York Magazine, 25 min.)
Some extended passages from the article describe how trust collapses:
At the end of May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a notable, yet mostly ignored, large-scale study of COVID transmission in American schools. A few major news outlets covered its release by briefly reiterating the study’s summary: that masking then-unvaccinated teachers and improving ventilation with more fresh air were associated with a lower incidence of the virus in schools. Those are common-sense measures, and the fact that they seem to work is reassuring but not surprising. Other findings of equal importance in the study, however, were absent from the summary and not widely reported. These findings cast doubt on the impact of many of the most common mitigation measures in American schools. Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective.
In the realm of science and public-health policy outside the U.S., the implications of these particular findings are not exactly controversial. Many of America’s peer nations around the world — including the U.K., Ireland, all of Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy — have exempted kids, with varying age cutoffs, from wearing masks in classrooms. Conspicuously, there’s no evidence of more outbreaks in schools in those countries relative to schools in the U.S., where the solid majority of kids wore masks for an entire academic year and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. These countries, along with the World Health Organization, whose child-masking guidance differs substantially from the CDC’s recommendations, have explicitly recognized that the decision to mask students carries with it potential academic and social harms for children and may lack a clear benefit.
The article continues with a scathing indictment of the ethical integrity at the CDC:
The study published by the CDC was both ambitious and groundbreaking. It covered more than 90,000 elementary-school students in 169 Georgia schools from November 16 to December 11 and was, according to the CDC, the first of its kind to compare COVID-19 incidence in schools with certain mitigation measures in place to other schools without those measures. Scientists I spoke with believe that the decision not to include the null effects of a student masking requirement (and distancing, hybrid models, etc.) in the summary amounted to “file drawering” these findings, a term researchers use for the practice of burying studies that don’t produce statistically significant results. “That a masking requirement of students failed to show independent benefit is a finding of consequence and great interest,” says Vinay Prasad, an associate professor in University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. “It should have been included in the summary.” “The summary gives the impression that only masking of staff was studied,” says Tracy Hoeg, an epidemiologist and the senior author of a separate CDC study on COVID-19 transmission in schools, “when in reality there was this additional important detection about a student-masking requirement not having a statistical impact.”
THE CURVE: Keeping Fear Alive: Will Policymakers Let the Covid Crisis End? (John Tierney, City Journal, 12 min.)
What once seemed an unprecedented danger is now just one of many pathogens that we know how to live with.
Why do officials obsess on compelling universal obedience, even for those who are not particularly vulnerable?
With vaccines now readily available, why must children and vaccinated adults bear the burden of those who have chosen not to protect themselves?
DIGGING IN: The Bizarre Refusal to Apply Cost-Benefit Analysis to COVID Debates (Glenn Greenwald, 15 min.)
It has become pervasive and deeply misguided to censor discussion of any harm costs to the anti-COVID policies themselves.
We should examine both sides of the ledger when making public policy decisions, considering both the harm they prevent and the harm they induce.
LASHING OUT: You Staying at Home is the Future Unvaccinated-Punishers Want (Matt Welch, Reason, 10 min.)
Vaccine passports went into effect in New Orleans, New York City, and San Francisco; and in California for any public event larger than 1,000 attendees.
Vax requirements disproportionately impact minority populations.
JUST NOT RIGHT: Why the Left Doesn’t Like the Lab Leak Theory (Noah Carl, 12 min.)
Suppose Trump had come out and said: “Folks, this virus came from a wet market in China. This happened before, folks. It’s tremendously sad. I warned you about China. Didn’t I warn you about China?”
The lab leak theory came to be associated with the political right. Polls consistently show that Republicans are more likely to believe it than Democrats.
A key finding from public opinion research is the emergence of “negative partisanship”: disliking the other side even more than you like your own side.
YOUR HONOR: How Do Different Prosecutors React to the Same Case? (Robert VerBruggen, City Journal, 10 min.)
In a new study, hundreds of prosecutors reviewed fictional police reports, statutes, and sentencing guidelines and then explained how they’d charge the case, what punishment they’d recommend, and why they’d take that approach.
The study shows how the sheer extent of prosecutorial discretion allows for dramatic differences in how prosecutors treat the same case.
GRIEVANCE THEATER: The Performative Antiracism of Black Students at the U. of Wisconsin (John McWhorter, New York Times, 12 min.)
To pretend Black people can never be wrong is not to reckon but to dehumanize. Neither slavery nor Jim Crow nor redlining renders a people’s judgment of where racism has reared its head infallible.
Treating people with dignity requires not only listening closely and sympathetically to their grievances but being able to take a deep breath and call them out on aspects of those grievances that don’t make sense.
If You Lean Right
UNITED FRONT: The Corners-to-Prison Pipeline (Stephen J.K. Walters, City Journal, 8 min.)
Conservatives, understandably reluctant to throw money at problems, tend to overlook the fact that some programs do reduce delinquency.
One Department of Justice study found that very young offenders—often with “first referrals” before age ten—have a much higher probability of moving on to serious, violent, and chronic careers than older-onset delinquents.
A Rand Corporation study reported high returns (in crimes averted) from interventions such as parent training and incentives for completing high school.
Data from the Chicago Longitudinal Study show that “comprehensive educational and family support services from ages 3 to 9” were cost-effective, generating improvements in academic achievement and reductions in juvenile crime that yielded social benefits many times their cost.
CLEAR PATTERNS: Vaccines Remain the Way Out (Jeffrey E. Harris, City Journal, 8 min.)
A recent, non-peer-reviewed study of the 112 largest counties in the U.S., encompassing 147 million people, provides strong evidence that vaccines prevent severe disease.
Employers have imposed mandates because they share a common economic incentive: they want to head off a potentially disastrous Delta outbreak.
Breakthrough infections notwithstanding, it’s very clear that vaccines keep people out of the hospital and alive.
FREE, SAFE: Natural and Vaccine Immunity Against the SARS-CoV-2 Endemic Virus (Ian Martiszus, Human Events, 20 min.)
The speed of vaccines getting to the public is a testament to human innovation and what the biotech industry can achieve when regulatory reins are loosened.
Data from an ongoing study shows that either of the mRNA vaccines appears to push antibody levels even higher than natural infection.
Despite breakthrough infections, the vaccine does reduce infection severity, making vaccination very important for high-risk groups, such as the elderly, and those with obesity, diabetes, or cardiovascular disease.
TOO FAST TOO SLOW: Fox News Reacts to FDA’s Pfizer Vaccine Approval By Questioning If It Was Rushed (Newsweek, 5 min.)
Before the guest could even finish his sentence, host Bill Hemmer immediately jumped in to ask, "Yeah, what took so long?"
A LOAN AT LAST: The Secret Bias Hidden in Mortgage-Approval Algorithms (Emmanuel Martinez and Lauren Kirchner, The Markup, 40 min.)
Nationally, Whites were 40%–80% less likely to be denied than their non-White counterparts. In some metro areas, the disparity was greater than 250%.
Even accounting for factors lenders said would explain disparities, people of color were denied mortgages at significantly higher rates than White people.
Lenders gave fewer loans to Black applicants than White applicants even when their incomes were both $100,000 a year or more and debt ratios were the same.
In fact, high-earning Black applicants with less debt were rejected more often than high-earning White applicants with more debt.
OPPORTUNISM 101: The GOP’s Phony Complaints About Afghanistan (William Saletan, Slate, 10 min.)
Some Republicans now decry the very things they defended last year when the president who engineered those concessions was Donald Trump.
McCarthy says he knows “for a fact” that Trump wouldn’t have let the Taliban advance from “city to city,” even though Trump allowed just that.
McCarthy expresses indignation that Biden “allow[ed] the Taliban to dictate to America when we depart.” But Trump’s 2020 agreement did the same thing.