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February 2023

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

It’s Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives Kevin Bass

By on February 1st, 2023

https://www.newsweek.com/its-time-scientific-community-admit-we-were-wrong-about-coivd-it-cost-lives-opinion-1776630

As a medical student and researcher, I staunchly supported the efforts of the public health authorities when it came to COVID-19. I believed that the authorities responded to the largest public health crisis of our lives with compassion, diligence, and scientific expertise. I was with them when they called for lockdowns, vaccines, and boosters.

I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.

I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.

But perhaps more important than any individual error was how inherently flawed the overall approach of the scientific community was, and continues to be. It was flawed in a way that undermined its efficacy and resulted in thousands if not millions of preventable deaths.

What we did not properly appreciate is that preferences determine how scientific expertise is used, and that our preferences might be—indeed, our preferences were—very different from many of the people that we serve. We created policy based on our preferences, then justified it using data. And then we portrayed those opposing our efforts as misguided, ignorant, selfish, and evil.

We made science a team sport, and in so doing, we made it no longer science. It became us versus them, and “they” responded the only way anyone might expect them to: by resisting.

We excluded important parts of the population from policy development and castigated critics, which meant that we deployed a monolithic response across an exceptionally diverse nation, forged a society more fractured than ever, and exacerbated longstanding heath and economic disparities.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Classified Documents Everywhere, But Only One Hunter Biden

By on February 1st, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/01/classified-documents-everywhere-but-only-one-hunter-biden/

Leaving Washington with classified documents must be a tradition for outgoing presidents and vice presidents. Sensitive government papers have now been found in the private homes and offices of Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Maybe every president going back for decades has taken documents he shouldn’t have. 

But only one has a crooked son who could have easily accessed those documents and used them to enrich himself and his corrupt family.

The public sure seems to believe that is the case. Six in 10 American voters are convinced it is likely that Biden’s son Hunter used information from the unsecured classified documents found in the current president’s Delaware home to sweeten “his foreign business deals.” Rasmussen Reports head pollster Mark Mitchell says the 60% figure is the “highest number we’ve ever seen implicating Joe Biden in anything.”

Republicans of course are overwhelmingly suspicious of Hunter Biden. But a large majority of independents, 62%, also believe that the president’s son used sensitive government documents to leverage his foreign business interests, according to the Rasmussen poll of 1,000 voters that was finalized over the weekend.

Voters also reckon that the Biden family has been “influence peddling for a decade.” Forty-three percent strongly agree with that statement while another 13% somewhat agree.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The UNC Echo Chamber Fights Back The University of North Carolina faculty is outraged that the school’s trustees favor open academic inquiry.

By on February 1st, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/university-of-north-carolina-school-of-civic-life-and-leadership-daily-tar-heel-board-of-trustees-11675203324?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Our editorial on Friday about the University of North Carolina’s effort to create a new school dedicated to free inquiry and open academic discourse has caused a fuss on campus that illustrates why the new school is needed. It seems that faculty grandees are outraged that the UNC board of trustees thought such a school is necessary and didn’t even seek the faculty’s permission.

The Daily Tar Heel documents the angst in the Chapel Hill faculty lounge in a Jan. 30 story that is unintentionally hilarious in its ivory-tower indignation. The reporter quotes UNC law professor Eric Muller as saying, “I thought: how on Earth? How on Earth could The Wall Street Journal know this.”

Here on Earth, it’s called journalism.

Chair of the Faculty Mimi Chapman told the Tar Heel she is “flabbergasted” at the trustees’ decision and tweeted that UNC alumni are “leading and civically engaged left, right and center” with the hashtag #solutioninsearchofaproblem.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Hulu’s 1619 Project Docuseries Peddles False History The first episode paints an enslaver, plantation master, and Royalist autocrat as a leading and even celebrated agent of emancipation. Phillip W. Magness

By on February 1st, 2023

https://reason.com/2023/01/31/hulus-1619-project-docuseries-peddles-false-history/

The New York Times’ 1619 Project selected Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, as a filming location for its new Hulu docuseries. In doing so, creator Nikole Hannah-Jones sought to bolster her project’s most troublesome claim—the assertion that British overtures toward emancipation impelled the American colonists into revolution, ultimately securing an independent United States.

In the past three years, the Times has grappled with the fallout from Hannah-Jones’ assertion, including the revelation that it ignored its own fact-checker’s warnings against printing the charge. The Times tempered its language to apply to “some of” the colonists, only to see it reasserted by Hannah-Jones in her public commentaries. Later, a related line about the Project’s goal of replacing 1776 with a “true founding” of 1619 disappeared without notice from the Times’ website. The newspaper found itself in a balancing act between its writer’s uncompromising positions and the need to preserve credibility as it made a Pulitzer Prize bid with the series. But Hannah-Jones was not ready to abandon the claim at the center of her lead essay, and the first episode of the Hulu series makes that abundantly clear.

The scene opens in Williamsburg on the grounds of its reconstructed colonial Governor’s Palace, where Hannah-Jones joins University of South Carolina professor Woody Holton—one of a handful of heterodox historians who defended the 1619 Project’s original narrative. As the cameras pan across streets filled with historical re-enactors and tourists in front of restored colonial buildings, the pair take another stab at resurrecting the 1619 Project’s narrative about the American Revolution. The evidence that a British threat to slavery impelled Virginians—or perhaps “the colonists” at large, in Hannah-Jones’ imprecise phrasing—to revolt may be found in the November 1775 decree of John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, Virginia’s last Royalist governor. Facing the collapse of British rule, Dunmore announced that any enslaved male from a household in rebellion would be granted freedom in exchange for military service on the British side.

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