Following Up: The Latest on the Virus and the Border

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Biden border crisis, Border Crisis, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Following Up, hospitalizations, Immigration, migrants, mortality, Open Borders, public health, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wuhan virus

This past Saturday, I upbraided New York Times editorial writers for claiming that the CCP Virus pandemic had eased enough to justify admitting into the country more illegal aliens who may be carriers and therefore spreaders of the disease. The basis for my criticism was data from the Times itself indicating that the pandemic wasn’t easing any more – and strongly suggesting that the paper’s Open Borders-like immigration policy stances had become extreme enough to rationalize worsening already serious dangers to public health.

Five days later, it’s clear that, although the paper still has a lot to answer for publishing this piece (like its insistence that there was never a compelling public health rationale for putting such virus-related immigration restrictions into effect), my use of the word “indicating” to describe the virus’ status was well chosen. For the latest figures paint an oddly contadictory picture of the pandemic threat.

When I wrote the November 13 post, nearly a week’s worth of statistics on virus deaths showed them on the upswing again after the seven-day averages (7DA) had been falling – often by double-digits percent per day – since late-September. But on November 9, they began rising again, and two days later the figure was again approaching double digits: 9.72 percent. By Friday, the 12^th, however, they’d started retreating again, and yesterday were down an encouraging 12.74 percent. So by that metric (which isn’t perfect), the situation is looking reasonably good. (My source, as usual, is The Washington Post‘s very user-friendly virus tracking feature.)

The same, however, can’t be said for virus-related hospitalization rates. These numbers aren’t pefect, either (see here for a good explanation why), but they’re probably the best available for gauging progress against the virus. Moreover, they tend to prefigure death rates (because hospitalized patients don’t die right away). But although they started trending down according to the 7DA numbers starting on September 6, that decline began slowing in late October, and the 7DA for daily new hospitalizations went back into growth territory last Friday. By this metric, therefore, a return of tough virus times may lie ahead. So does the return of winter.

This impressive case for pessimism doesn’t mean that I’ve changed my opposition to indiscriminate anti-CCP Virus policies like current mask and vaccine mandates, let alone sweeping shutdowns and lockdowns. But it also reenforces the case for preventing the situation facing Americans from becoming worse still – including by protecting the country from illegal migrants whose health status will always be at best uncertain (because of weak public health and record-keeping systems in most sending countries). That is, unless, like The New York Times, you think American and their health should come last when making immigration policy.

Im-Politic: More Americans-Last Immigration Tripe from The New York Times

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CCP Virus, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, hospitalizations, Im-Politic, Immigration, public health, The New York Times, Title 42, Wuhan virus

It looks – embarassingly – like New York Times editorial writers don’t bother to look at the newspaper’s comprehensive vaccine tracker feature. Or at least they didn’t bother when preparing today’s editorial calling for an end to a regulation called Title 42, “an emergency public health order that allows the government to turn away migrants at the nation’s borders during a pandemic.”

According to the edit, a big part of the reason is that “the Covid-19 pandemic is receding.”

But flip to the paper’s “Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count” section, and you see that one of the most reliable (though far from perfect) indicators of the pandemic’s virulence – hospitalizations – are no longer declining as steeply as they had been starting in early September. And the daily death count is showing signs of stabilizing after falling rapidly starting in mid-September.

Moreover, the numbers are likely to keep worsening in the coming weeks because winter is coming, and because the CCP Virus in all its variants is seasonal – like many other infectious diseases. In other words, now that the weather is getting colder, some kind of new wave seems sure to arrive.

Incidentally, the edit’s other stated prime rationale for ending Title 42 is just completely bonkers. The Times writes of evidence that’s recently surfaced of an official for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) supposedly making clear that “there was little public health rationale for instituting the policy, since the virus was already spreading in the United States by the time the Title 42 order was signed” in March, 2020 under the Trump administration.

In other words, a then-little known and therefore greatly feared disease was metastasizing among the American population, and it was – xenophobic? racist? choose your own disparaging adjective? – to minimize the odds that infected foreigners would make the problem even worse?

And in fact, this last argument illustrates the most fundamental problem with the editorial – and the paper’s overall position on immigration. Times‘ ownership obviously favors an Open Borders-like policy, which is of course perfectly fine and its inalienable right. What’s neither is its unwillingness to show some intellectual honesty and openly say so.

Im-Politic: Why Delta Looks Like a Wave (in the Best Sense)

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CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Delta variant, health, Im-Politic, lockdowns, pandemic, public health, The New York Times, vaccination, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, vaccines, Washington Post, Wuhan virus

I hate to break up the CCP Virus panic party that’s been held lately due to the surge of the Delta variant in recent weeks.

Actually, as known by RealityChek readers, I don’t hate to break it up, since I’ve been writing that it doesn’t portend the end of days, or anything close – much less a development serious enough to justify a return to economic and behavioral curbs in the United States. But even I was surprised to see how strongly the U.S. data support my confidence that Delta’s a wave in the most encouraging sense: It’s something that’s going to come down about as fast as it went up, both nation-wide and state-wide. Moreover, contrary to the almost universal claims, differences in vaccination rates don’t seem to have much to do with these trends.

These conclusions are based on data showing recent changes in hospitalization rates in states that have seem to have been hardest hit by the overall national increase in recorded virus cases since late June. As I’ve pointed out, case numbers are a deeply flawed measure of the virus’ impact on the nation, largely because so many infections are asymptomatic or very mild. Therefore, such victims typically don’t bother to report them. By the same token, however, their prevalence indicates that the pandemic’s dangers to Americans generally speaking are limited.

Hospitalization rates suffer major flaws, too – mainly because of sloppy definitional practices – but they’re better than case numbers. And what the numbers make clear is that in handful of states widely described as the Delta and overall new wave epicenters (see, e.g., here and here), the hospitalization curve is bending down big time. That is, the weekly numbers of new hospitalizations have slowed dramatically.

Here are the actual figures, with the percentage changes new hospitalizations over the last two weeks shown on the left side (and based on The New York Times‘ interactive CCP Virus tracker) and the percentage changes over the last week shown on the right side (and based on the Washington Post‘s tracker). I needed to use two sources here because I couldn’t find a single source that presented all this information in one place.

U.S.:                      +90 percent            +34 percent

Florida:                +111 percent            +17 percent

Texas:                  +102 percent            +19 percent

Lousiana:             +136 percent            +32 percent

Arkansas:               +45 percent              +4 percent

Missouri:                +27 percent              +5 percent

Mississippi:          +166 percent            +26 percent

In addition, as well known by now, the full vaccination rates in all of these states have lagged the national average of about 50 percent as of today.

Florida:      49.6 percent

Texas:        44.5 percent

Lousiana:   37.6 percent

Arkansas:   37.6 percent

Missouri:    42.1 percent

More evidence of the relatively modest role played by the vaccines in slowing hospitalization rates can be seen in the below table presenting, as above, the changes in weekly hospitalizations over the last two weeks and over the last week for the ten states with the highest full vaccination rates (shown in parentheses).

                                   over the last two weeks            over last week

US (50.1 percent):              +90 percent                       +34 percent

Vermont (67.9 percent):    +577 percent                     +260 percent

Mass. (64.4 percent):          +78 percent                       +25 percent

Maine (64.2 percent):         +29 percent                          -8 percent

Connect. (63.9 percent):     +90 percent                       +14 percent

R.I. (62.1 percent):               -29 percent                      +89 percent

Maryland (59.5 percent):     +77 percent                      +23 percent

N.J. (59.0 percent):              +60 percent                      +14 percent

N.H. (58.6 percent):             +45 percent                     +13 percent

Wash. (58.6 percent):           +60 percent                     +21 percent

N.M. (57.8 percent):            +89 percent                     +23 percent

The first observation to be made is that nation-wide, the increase in hospitalizations has slowed significantly – for which everyone should be thankful. The second point worth noting is that the two week changes for the high- and low-vax states don’t differ to any great extent, though both display significant variation. And the third point I’d emphasize is that the slowdowns mostly have been much faster in the low-vax states. So since we’re examining all these states during the same timeframes, it’s difficult to understand the insistence that vaccination is so vital to stopping the spread. (Incidentally, I’d ignore the Vermont data, since the absolute numbers are so small.)

The only other explanation I can think of is that the high-vax states tend to be states that are densely populated, whereas the low-vax states are much less so. But logically, that would seem to argue most strongly for more energetic vaccine efforts to be made where people are most crowded together, not for villifying the vaccination laggard states (especially when, as in the cases of Florida and Texas, they’re not trailing by that much).

And nothing apparent about the Delta variant so far changes what’s been the most sensible formula for contending with the CCP Virus since the pandemic’s first (understandably) panicky months of 2020:  Don’t treat it like the nation’s only health problem, much less its only problem; don’t ignore its wave-like dynamics or its highly differentiated health effects; therefore keep social and economic life as normal as possible, and focus protective efforts (including vaccines) on the highly vulnerable.      

Im-Politic: The Latest Off-Base CCP Virus Narrative

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Biden, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Delta variant, Im-Politic, The New York Times, vaccines, Washington Post, Wuhan virus

There’s no doubt that a new CCP Virus narrative is quickly becoming established in the United States, and it was succinctly expressed by Predident Biden last month:

“[T]he data is clear: If you are unvaccinated, you’re at risk of getting seriously ill or dying or spreading it. People getting seriously ill and being hospitalized due to COVID-19 are those who have not been fully vaccinated. The new variant will leave unvaccinated people even more vulnerable than they are a month ago — over a month ago.

“This is a serious concern, especially because of what experts are calling the…the ‘Delta’ variant. It’s a variant that is more easily transmissible, potentially deadlier, and particularly dangerous for young people.

“But the good news is, we have the solution.The science and the data are clear: The best way to protect yourself against these variants are to get fully vaccinated.”

And earlier this week, the nation’s supposed newspaper of record, The New York Times, dutifully presented this analysis as the kind of information that’s factual and uncontroversial enough (among anyone but fanatics and troglodytes) to be used as routine background material:

“While nationwide cases and hospitalization numbers remain relatively low, more local hot spots are emerging and the national trends are moving in the wrong direction, fueled by the spread of the more contagious Delta variant. Vaccines are effective against the variant. Counties that voted for Mr. Biden average higher vaccination levels than those that voted for former President Donald J. Trump. Conservatives tend to decline vaccination far more often than Democrats.”

And practically in lock step, today’s Washington Post tells us, “Federal health officials sounded an alarm Friday about a surge in U.S. coronavirus infections fueled by the twin threats posed by the highly transmissible delta variant and a stagnation in efforts to vaccinate as many Americans as possible.”

It’s now nearly a month after the Biden remarks, though, and the only reasonable conclusion to reach is “Not so fast.” It is indeed clear so far that the vaccines available to Americans work against Delta. It’s also clear that the new variant is extremely contagious. It’s anything but clear, though, that its rapid spread justifies even a doubling down on lagging national vaccination efforts, much less the kind of shaming campaign against vaccine hesitancy and related “misinformation” behind which the Biden administration is marshaling the power of the federal government.

The main reasons? First, contrary to the Biden claims about Delta’s dangers, the U.S. numbers show no sign of unusual lethality or other forms of severity. Second, although Delta has quickly become the dominant form of new infection, the relationship between its appearance and vaccination rates looks awfully weak.

Regarding Delta’s characteristics, evidence of its high transmissibility can be seen in the rising numbers of U.S. virus cases. Since the President spoke out last month, the seven-day average of reported infections is up by just over 139 percent as of yesterday. (I’m using the Washington Post’s virus tracking feature as my source unless otherwise indicated.)

But not to minimize the risks to certain segments of the population (the elderly, the obese, those with other underlying health problems), when it comes to healthy non-senior Americans generally, this statistic per se means almost nothing.

After all, it’s long been known that one of the most vexing properties of the virus is its asymptomatic spread. That is, huge numbers of Americans have been infected and simply didn’t know it because they never detected any effects. Many others doubtless had symptoms so mild that they didn’t bother reporting them.

In this vein, it’s more than a little interesting that former U.S. Food and Drug Administration chief Dr. Scott Gottlieb (no virus minimizer or vaccine skeptic) just told CNBC that “he believes the U.S. is significantly undercounting the number of Covid delta infections, making it difficult to know whether the highly transmissible strain is causing higher-than-expected hospitalization and death rates.”

Why the undercount? Because “people who are vaccinated, who might develop some mild symptoms or might develop a breakthrough case, by and large are not going out and getting tested. If you’ve been vaccinated and you develop a mild cold right now, you don’t think you have Covid.” Wouldn’t the same hold for the un-vaccinated, whether they have natural immunity or not?

That’s surely why even though since the Biden remarks, while total CCP Virus infections have more than doubled, reported virus-related deaths are actually down (by nearly six percent according to that seven-day average measure). Deaths are indeed a lagging indicator (because the disease doesn’t reach mortality level right away), and there’s evidence that in “some cases,” “Long-Haul COVID” can kill (and sicken) for months after the initial infection.

But if the Delta variant was nearly as lethal as it is virulent, since it’s accounted for a skyrocketing – and now the biggest – share of total national infections, you wouldn’t expect the national death rate to be falling for the past month.

Nor do the national rates of hospitalization and intensive-care unit (ICU) bed use  signal that Delta will overwhelm the healthcare system (the fear that originally spurred the lockdown-/shutdown-/social distancing-/mask-heavy CCP Virus response throughout the country) unless vaccination rates surge. Indeed, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between the week of the Biden remarks and the week ending July 10, hospitalizations, new weekly hospitalizations fell, too – from 597 to 523.

Meanwhile, the feebleness of the link between vaccination rates and the Delta variant’s proliferation comes through from an examination of state-specific data.

Below is a list of the states whose hospitalization rate increases over the last week (in descending order, through yesterday) are above that national average of 25 percent, with their specific rates on the left and their (full) vaccination rates on the right:

Alaska:                 +114%            44.7%

Kansas:                   +61%           42.8%

Mississippi:            +50%            33.6%

Louisiana:               +50%            36.0%

Idaho:                      +48%           36.8%

Connecticut:            +47%           62.0%

Arkansas:                +44%           35.1%

Oklahoma:              +42%           39.3%

Florida:                   +42%           47.3%

Texas:                     +39%           42.6%

Nebraska:               +38%           48.5%

Alabama:                +35%           33.6%

Georgia:                  +32%          37.5%

California:              +30%           51.4%

Arizona:                 +30%           44.3%

Tennessee:             +27%            38.2%

Nevada:                 +25%             43.1%

Now keep in mind that the national average full vaccination rate for the country was 48.3 percent, and several big anomalies should stick out immediately, beginning with Alaska. Its hospitalizations apparently soared, yet its vaccination rate was pretty close to the national average. How can that be, if vaccination is so crucial to slowing or stopping the spread of any of the variants?

Of course, with Alaska, the absolute numbers are very small, so any time they change, big percentage changes tend to result. But a very similar pattern also holds for much more populous states like Kansas, Florida, Texas, and Arizona, and a slightly less similar pattern holds for Nevada. As for Florida, moreover, its infections have been growing at the same rate as Oklahoma’s, but its vaccination rate is a good deal higher.

And then there’s Nebraska. Its hospitalization has risen strongly, but its vaccination rates is actually above the national average. Conversely, Connecticut’s vaccination rate is way above the national average, but hospitalizations are increasing robustly anyway.

So that’s eight states out of the sixteen with above-average infection growth (eight if you count Oklahoma) where the narrative doesn’t hold up well.

But maybe the narrative’s relationship between infection growth and vaccination rates is stronger for states where virus spread has been relatively slow – i.e., below the national average? Here are the states with the best infection numbers, from the gold standard to the merely good. Again, infection change rates are on the left and vaccination rates on the right:

North Dakota:            -18%        39.5%

Rhode Island:             -15%        60.2%

Minnesota:                  -14%       52.9%

Maryland:                   -12%       57.5%

Pennsylvania:             -11%       51.0%

West Virginia:            -11%       38.8%

South Dakota:             -7%        46.2%

Illinois                         -3%        47.4%

Maine:                         -2%        62.7%

Virginia:                      -1%        53.2%

Iowa:                            -1%       48.8%

Ohio:                           +2%       45.6%

Washington:                +2%        56.3%

New Jersey:                +2%        56.7%

Michigan:                   +2%        48.1%

New York:                  +3%        55.7%

Indiana:                      +3%        44.3%

Wisconsin:                 +4%        50.9%

Oregon:                    +11%        54.9%

D.C.:                        +12%         53.7%

Delaware:                +16%         51.4%

Colorado:                 +12%        53.3%

Montana:                 +17%         43.6%

Wyoming:                +18%        35.9%

North Carolina:        +18%        42.8%

New Mexico:           +18%        55.2%

Hawaii:                     +19%       52.8%

Kentucky:                 +21%       44.6%

Missouri:                  +22%        40.0%

Utah:                         +22%       43.6%

New Hampshire:      +22%       57.5%

South Carolina:        +23%        39.7%

Again, as should be obvious, the relationship between virus prevalence and vaccination rates is far from obvious. In fact, here again, the state at the top of the list seems to undermine the narrative most thoroughly. North Dakota’s vaccination rate is one of the country’s worst, yet its infection record is the very best on a percentage basis.

Of course, North Dakota’s population is so small that, as with Alaska, changes in absolute numbers can produce big percentage swings. The same goes for the results for West Virginia and South Dakota. But Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan boast big populations, and despite subpar vaccination rates, have seen CCP Virus case numbers fall a bit and rise a bit, respectively. The situation in somewhat less populous Indiana looks like theirs, too. Maybe there’s something about the Big Ten?

At the other end of this spectrum, New Mexico, Hawaii, and New Hampshire have excellent vaccination rates, but lousy virus spread numbers.

And here are some strange coincidences. South Carolina and North Dakota have nearly identical, and very low, vaccination rates. But in the former, CCP Virus cases are up 23 percent on week whereas they’re down by 18 percent in the latter. Conversely, New Hampshire and Maryland both have very high vaccination rates, but infections are up 22 percent in the former and down 12 percent in the latter over the last week. And although North Carolina and New Mexico have seen weekly cases rise at identical 18 percent rates, their vaccination rates are more than twelve and a half percentage points apart.

As I’ve written previously, when comparing the virus story in different states, it’s important to keep in mind how different population structures and different weather patterns can lead to very different results regardless of the policy choices they’ve made. That’s why, for example, I didn’t call attention to the virtually identical weekly case growth rates of Idaho and Connecticut (48 percent and 47 percent, respectively) and their dramatically different vaccination rates (36.8 percent and 62 percent, respectively). Two less alike states you couldn’t even create out of whole cloth.

Of course I can’t find it in my too-often chaotic personal library, but in David Halberstam’s masterpiece on the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest, I recall the author writing of Walt W. Rostow – one of the hubristic crew of Ivy League academics who became leading architects of this disaster – that he was constantly seeing connections between trends and events where none existed. I strongly suspect that history will judge purveyors of the latest, Delta-centric CCP Virus narrative just as harshly. 

Im-Politic: New York City Shows How Not to Fight Crime

Tags

African Americans, cities, crime, Im-Politic, inner cities, New York City, progressives, The New York Times, urban poverty

I gotta tell ya – nearly a week days later, I’m completely gobsmacked by the following paragraph in a June 30 New York Times article on New York City’s newly approved budget:

“To address a rise in shootings and homicides that have plagued the city since the pandemic, the city will spend $24 million to provide job training and support services to 1,000 people who are most at risk of participating in or being a victim of violence in neighborhoods including Brownsville, Brooklyn; South Jamaica, Queens; and Mott Haven in the Bronx.”

Granted, the spending barely moves the needle in the $98.7 billion plan for municipal outlays. But assuming the description is accurate, it’s difficult to imagine a program so deeply, and indeed tragicomically, weird in so many ways – not to mention one that so strongly reenforces doubt that the kinds of liberals and progressives who run cities like New York have a clue how to deal with crime. If your imagination is failing you on this score, ask yourself:

>The city is going to identify residents “who are most at risk of participating in…violence” in these crime-ridden precincts? Based on what? If the main or a major criterion concerns prior criminal records, including the commission of violent acts, what’s the rationale for putting any of these individuals ahead of anyone who’s “at risk of…being a victim of violence”? Like it’ll be tough to find 1,000 of these?

>If prior records aren’t being used, or prioritized, what other considerations will help decide who’s “most at risk of participating in…violence”? Are city officials going to seek out youngish African American and Hispanic men? That sounds like endorsing harmful racial stereotypes to me. Will they poll these or other residents and ask which ones are considering “participating in…violence”? And if they do, what happens to those respondents who raise their hands but aren’t selected? Do they get profiled by the police? Moreover, doesn’t that clear risk mean that few if any criminals-to-be are likely to come forward to begin with?

>As suggested above, the city is spotlighting these neighborhoods because crime is so widespread. So in principle, all adult residents are seriously at risk of “being a victim of violence.” But common sense indicates that the elderly and/or are likeliest to be targeted by thugs. Make that a double, lots of evidence indicates, for elderly Asian-Americans. Are many of them going to be channeled into job training programs?

>More fundamentally, helping the genuinely disadvantaged deserves applause. But when it comes to reducing violent crime, what’s the point of providing job training to its likely victims? They’re – obviously – not the ones prone to pulling triggers.

Unless maybe the assumption is that the populations of violent criminals and likely victims of violent crime overlap a lot (say, because gang members could easily fall into both categories)? But if so, to a great extent we’re back to the formidable-at-best challenge of reliably identifying likely violent criminals.

The city could have avoided all these questions – and the potentially fatal problems they spotlight – by simply announcing that the $24 million would be spent on creating more jobs and economic opportunity overall, and/or on improving education and other social services in crime-ridden neighborhoods. It could have even added that teenagers and young adults will be the focus – to increase the odds they’ll become success stories – and maybe that they’d be chosen by lottery or some other objective system.

Not that success would be guaranteed. But the outcome would doubtless be better than what New Yorkers evidently can expect (at least according to The Times description): token expenditures guided by nothing more than the most fatuous sort of good intentions.

Im-Politic: A Pandemic of Coverups?

Tags

Anthony S. Fauci, CCP Virus, censorship, coronavirus, COVID 19, EcoHealth Alliance, Facebook, Fauci, Fauci emails, Google, Im-Politic, lab leak, Mark Zuckerberg, National Institutes of Health, NationalPulse.com, natural origin, NIH, Peter Daszak, social media, The New York Times, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Wuhan lab, Wuhan University, Wuhan virus, Zeynep Tufekci

What a June it’s been so far for anyone who’s always been skeptical of claims that anyone linking the CCP Virus’ emergence to virology facilities in Wuhan was trafficking in fringe-y conspiracy theories. Many crucial pieces of the puzzle are still missing. But June’s developments should make it harder than ever to dismiss not only the possibility that a natural or engineered version of the virus escaped from the lab, but that U.S. public health authorities ignored official prohibitions on funding so-called gain-of-function work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that they and other powerful American institutions even acted to suppress news of their Wuhan connections.

After all, it’s already been a month in which no less than Anthony S. Fauci appeared to emphasize that the virus featured characteristics not normally found in the wild. The longtime head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Biden’s chief science advisor told a New York Times interviewer that

“This is an unusual virus because about a third to 40 percent of the people get no symptoms at all. Yet it’s capable of killing 600,000 Americans. We’ve never had a situation like that where a virus that would be benign or almost half the people or 40 percent of the people and yet kill so many people.”

And this after declaring that

“I’m not an evolutionary virologist, but those who are look at the virus, and they say it’s absolutely totally compatible with something that evolved from bat viruses because of the closeness to. But we don’t have that extra link that’s come in, but there’s nothing they see in there that makes you think it was something that came from a lab.”

Clear as mud, right?

It was also a week in which another New York Times contributor made an observation indicating that even if the the Wuhan Institute of Virology whose research Fauci and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) overall helped finance wasn’t engaged in federally prohibited gain-of-function experiments, it still might have created the pathogen in question where none existed before. According to Zeynep Tufekci,

“Just trying to culture bat viruses in the lab can create risks that the scientists may not even be aware of. While trying and failing to cultivate one strain, they might inadvertently culture another one they don’t even know about. It’s even possible, [Stanford University neurobiologist and bioengineer Michael Lin] told me, that viruses can coexist in a single sample and quietly recombine, giving rise to something novel but undetected.”

In other words, creating the specific SARS-CoV-2 virus that has swept over the world might not have been the goal of the Chinese scientists in question. But this virus might have resulted from their efforts to simulate natural processes. If you or loved ones have suffered from the virus medically, or from the economic and other public health damage it’s caused, this is likely to look like a distinction without a difference. It’s also likely to raise further questions about why U.S. public health agencies funded clearly risky research in a facility they’ve acknowledged they couldn’t monitor adequately.

It’s also been a month in which, thanks in part to that New York Times Fauci interview, more reasons emerged to wonder whether Fauci and social media giants Facebook and Google conspired (yes, the word would be justified in these instances) to suppress reporting on the lab leak theory – in Google’s case because it, too, had helped pay for the Wuhan lab’s work at various times recently.

In January, 2020 – when the CCP Virus was declared a public health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO) – Facebook began a campaign to “keep harmful misinformation about COVID-19 from spreading on our apps” and direct customers “to resources from the WHO and other health authorities through our COVID-19 Information Center and pop-ups on Facebook and Instagram with over 350 million people clicking through to learn more.” Throughout the pandemic period, WHO of course has been a major actor trying to debunk any version of the lab leak theory.

Given Fauci’s own clear interest in drawing public attention away from the possibility that his agency helped create the virus, it’s more than a little interesting that in March of that year, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent Fauci an email that the recipient told Times interviewer Kara Swisher, who covers Big Tech, “hey, is there anything that we can do to help out to get the messages out, the right public health messages? I have a very important medium here in Facebook. Can I help? And as a matter of fact, if you guys don’t have enough resources and money to do some of the things you want, just let us know.”

Fauci took Zuckerberg up on his offer but nothing is known about the details of this arrangement because although this email exchange has been made public (with redactions that are odd to say the least since it’s hard to imagine any national security secrets changed hands), the content of follow-up communications (which surely included not only emails but phone conversations) remain under wraps.

Can we all agree that all of this material should be released ASAP, so that we won’t have to accept Fauci’s word that “any thought” that his dealings with Zuckerberg had to do with censoring inconvenient virus-related truths “is total conspiracy theory and total flight of fantasy”? Especially since Facebook didn’t announce until May 26 of this year that “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.” (The company has said nothing about the possibility that the virus escaped a Chinese lab in natural form.)

As for Google, news of its own dodgy CCP Virus-related practices came out on June 9. Shortly thereafter, the company’s own virus and China connection was revealed. A website called TheNationalpulse.com produced proof that Google “funded research conducted by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance – a controversial group which has openly collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology” on that controversial bat virus research.

Google insists that “The one-off philanthropic grants referenced are years old and had nothing to do with COVID,” and that ‘We have engaged precisely zero times with this organization on any work related to COVID or the Wuhan lab.” But as the National Pulse post showed, one of the studies co-sponsored by Google – from 2018 – described itself “conducted in Guangdong Province, China, to characterize behaviors and perceptions associated with transmission of pathogens with pandemic potential in highly exposed human populations at the animal-human interface….” So it’s easy to conclude that Google also wanted to draw attention away from and discredit the idea that the Institute had anything to do with the pandemic’s outbreak.

Finally, June has been a month when the news came out that in June, 2020, a group of Wuhan University scientists asked the NIH to delete from a key medical genomics database data CCP Virus genome sequences they gathered from patients in that city in January and February.

The scientists claimed their reasons for the request were technical, and no evidence of deceitful intent has appeared. For its part, the NIH says that it receives such requests all the time, and typically complies. Fair enough. But given the importance of such very early pandemic stage information in determining the virus’ origins, and given China’s extensive efforts to keep data from this crucial early pandemic period secret, why on earth didn’t the NIH at least report the request and its response right away? Could it be because of its own funding of virus research in Wuhan?

As I said above, many major pieces of these puzzles remain missing.  But many are now in place also, and if ever there was a subject that screamed out for a comprehensive official investigation of the relevant actions and relationships at least of the U.S. players, with broad subpoena power, you’d think a pandemic that’s killed more than 600,000 Americans and sickened and disrupted or flat-out ruined the lives of tens of millions more amply fits the bill.  

 

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Can the U.S. Really Eliminate All Its Lousy Jobs?

Tags

automation, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Daniel Alpert, elder care, Ezra Klein, hospitality, hotels, Jobs, low-wage jobs, productivity, restaurants, seniors, technology, The New York Times, wages, workers, Wuhan virus, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Over the last month, two noted and anything-but-radical economics commentators have voiced an idea that’s really radical. How radical? It could produce much more fundamental change in the U.S. economy than any actual or even potential effects of the CCP Virus if its policy implications (which they may not be fully aware of) are acted on.

The idea is that the pre-virus economy (they didn’t specify for how long, but there’s no reason to believe the development began recently) was highly dependent on creating huge numbers of crappy, dead end, low-wage jobs, and that a combination of labor cost-boosting factors – like worker shortages created largely by sudden economic reopening, higher minimum wage requirements, and mandates for businesses to adopt more family-friendly practices – is bringing that era to an end.

The implications: Enormous numbers of the companies and even critical masses of entire industries relying on such jobs may go under, and that nothing should be done to restore the previous status quo because in economic terms (which are also reflecting the public’s non-economic preferences) those exploitative business models are simply becoming thoroughly uncompetitive.

In other words, especially in sectors like restaurants, retail, hospitality, and elder care, where the quality of personal service is valued by customers (not that they always get the quality they want), many and even most employers simply may find significantly higher labor costs unaffordable. And many may not be able to persuade enough customers to pay the higher prices they’d need to charge to stay afloat. So they wouldn’t – and good riddance.

The analyst who first led me to these thoughts was Daniel Alpert, a Cornell University Law School fellow, economist, and Wall Street investor. In a June 1 New York Times op-ed article, he argued that:

“The chronic problem we face as we put Covid-19 in the rearview mirror is that the U.S. economy before the pandemic was incredibly dependent on an abundance of low-wage, low-hours jobs. It was a combo that yielded low prices for comfortably middle-class and wealthier customers and low labor costs for bosses, but spectacularly low incomes for tens of millions of others.”

Less than two weeks later, The Times published another article, by columnist Ezra Klein, that similarly contended:

“The American economy runs on poverty, or at least the constant threat of it. Americans like their goods cheap and their services plentiful and the two of them, together, require a sprawling labor force willing to work tough jobs at crummy wages….We discuss the poor as a pity or a blight, but we rarely admit that America’s high rate of poverty is a policy choice, and there are reasons we choose it over and over again.”

Klein also wrote about some of the likely tradeoffs of mandates that created higher labor costs: “[S]ome small businesses would shutter if they had to pay their workers more. There are services many of us enjoy now that would become rarer or costlier if workers had more bargaining power.” But this prediction seems greatly to low ball the downsides and the collateral damage.

For example, according to this normally reliable source, the number of restaurants in the United States numbered about 660,000 in 2018. That’s more than 18 percent of all the 3,618,550 businesses with more than five employees that the Census Bureau says existed in the United States as of 2019 (the last pre-pandemic year). Since some dining establishments are very small and employ between one and five staff, the percentage of all U.S. businesses that are restaurants is probably somewhat lower. And surely not all of these would close their doors if labor costs rose meaningfully. But it should be obvious that lots of nationwide economic disruption would surely result.

As I’ve repeatedly written, (e.g., here) there’s an alternative to employers offsetting these higher labor costs. Rather than raise their prices significantly (a tactic that may not accomplish all or most of is goal), they could increase productivity. After all, many of these labor-intensive industries are labor-intensive because they’ve been such laggards on the productivity front. For example, between 1987 (the first year such data are available) and 2019 (the last pre-pandemic year), overall labor productivity in U.S. businesses outside the financial sector grew by 71.74 percent, in non-casino hotels and motels by just 51.33 percent, and in restaurants and other eating places, a mere 18.34 percent. And as known by RealityChek regulars, this period hasn’t exactly been a bang-up time for U.S. productivity growth.

There’s no doubt that more automation in particular would wind up displacing jobs – which certainly wouldn’t leave many workers better off on net. It’s entirely possible, though, that even greater net national employment opportunities could be created by these more efficient companies’ greater ability to service more customers affordably, thereby spurring the need to hire to staff expanded operations in other capacities. And in theory, anyway, more automation and use of new technologies could create entire new industries – and impressive employment opportunities. That’s certainly been the case with the internet. But there’s a big rub: Not all the displaced workers might possess the skills or other qualifications to handle any of these new positions.

Moreover, as suggested by my reference to the quality of service, for non-economic reasons, boosting productivity may not be enough to save many of these businesses. For many customers might be turned off by the prospect of dealing with machines rather than courteous and personable human beings, and decide not to patronize these businesses even if automation etc restored affordability.

And in fields such a elder care, it’s doubtful that machines could safely replace humans in quality terms for many years – and that seniors and their family members would find them acceptable on any grounds for many more years. Given America’s aging population, that of course portends a problem transcending economics. One way out: Much greater government subsidies for elder care businesses, or even outright nationalization of this sector. But don’t expect such proposals to uncontroversial.

Another possible way out of this dilemma for business owners generally in low-pay sectors where wages are surging is to accept much lower profits. But any industries that experience such a shift seem doomed to stagnation and even gradual extinction. For how many would want to invest their capital and effort in sectors where the best or even likeliest possible return is scraping by?

The cumulative effect of all these developments on society, as opposed to the economy, wouldn’t be trivial, either. For example, before the CCP Virus’ arrival, dining out and taking out in particular had surged in popularity in the United States for decades. One indication: “In 1955, 25 cents of every $1 spent on food went to restaurants. Today, it’s more than half.” One reason of course is the rise of the two-income household, and the resulting decrease in hours available for food preparation.

In addition, though, as more Americans patronized dine-in restaurants in particular, more surely came to value their particular pleasures. Could they find an adequate substitute if they needed to? And how would such a shift change the rest of their home and work lives? As for society itself, what would the impact be of the disappearance or great scaling back of one major form of communal activity?

The situation is potentially even more dire for the nation’s bars. Between 1987 and 2019, their labor productivity actually plunged by 14.50 percent. Will elevated labor costs spell the end, at least in America, of an institution that’s been around and central to human life for…how many centuries? Millennia? Or will customers get used to robot bar-tenders?

The answers to all the questions posed here are definitely above my pay grade. But something I do know: Despite the pressing need to improve the earnings and lives of low-wage workers, some significant and possibly unprecedented tradeoffs will emerge. And it will be far from easy to make sure that a genuinely New Normal is better on net for these workers and the country at large than the Old.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Progress!

Tags

American Affairs, antitrust, Barack Obama, competition, Financial Times, free trade, Jobs, John Maynard Keynes, Martin Wolf, production, Project Syndicate, Robert Skidelsky, stimulus, stimulus package, tariffs, The New York Times, Trade, trade deficit, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I hope you’ll all forgive me for an exercise in self back-patting that (I hope) you’ll read through the end. But the two instances described here of leading economics commentators expressing support for highly unconventional trade policy positions I’ve taken for years are simply too striking to pass up. Even more eye-opening: They appeared within a week of each other!

In chronological order, the first came courtesy of Martin Wolf, the Financial Times columnist who’s more-than-the-average pundit because he boasts both considerable policymaking experience and serious academic chops. As those two bios make clear, he’s also been a strong (though not completely uncritical) supporter of the standard free trade and globalization policies that decisively shaped the entire world economy, including America’s positions, for decades until the CCP Virus’ breakout. (Or did the turning point come with the financial crisis of 2007-08? Oh, well – no need to settle that question right now.)

That’s why I was so amazed to see in his column this past Tuesday the observation that the United States “gains many of the benefits of trade through internal specialisation” essentially because it’s “a large country with a sophisticated economy and diverse resources….”

Wolf’s point may not sound like much. But it not only contradicts the long-standing conventional wisdom – and rationale for supporting the freest possible global trade flows – that emphasizes (1) the centrality of international specialization for maximizing the prosperity of all individual countries and indeed the entire world, and (2) the imperative of exposing national economic activity to global competition in order to force domestic industries continually to improve quality and lower costs.

Wolf has also echoed (unwittingly, no doubt) my own argument that, whatever the validity of these ideas for most countries, there’s no reason for Americans to place any special value on them.

The reason? As I explained in an article in the Summer, 2019 issue of the journal American Affairs, the greatest possible degree of international specialization is advantageous and even crucial for the prosperity of most individual countries because they lack the ability to provide for a critical mass of their essential needs at affordable cost, let alone generate progress.

Any number of reasons or combination of reasons could be responsible. They might lack vital raw materials. Even if they’re wealthy and/or technologically advanced, their domestic market alone might be too small for most forms of economic activity aside from subsistence farming to achieve the scale needed for efficient and therefore relatively low-cost production. Alternatively, this domestic market could be inadequate because most of their people are too poor to be satisfactory customers.

In addition, because they’re so small, inadequate domestic markets have been considered incapable of generating enough competitive pressure needed to force their own producers to keep improving quality, innovating, and to maintain reasonable prices.

Conventional trade thinking has held that these problems could be overcome by individual countries (1) focusing on turning out the goods and services they could provide most efficiently (interestingly, whether in world-leading fashion or not), and (2) selling them where they were in greatest demand (because of other countries’ shortcomings) in exchange for what they themselves required.

Even better, such free trade would continually maximize the efficiency, and therefore the wealth, of all countries, as well as create the conditions for sustainable progress by requiring efforts to enter new, more promising industries to meet global competitive standards.

My own article, however, emphasized that the United States isn’t like most other countries. In fact, it’s uniquely blessed with both the size, the variety of resources, and the economic and social dynamism to supply nearly all its needs and wants from within. In the words of that 1980s inspirational song, in economic term, the United States “is the world.’

As a result, Americans have no inherent need to keep their home markets open, or open them wider, in order to secure adequate supplies of goods and services. And if they’re unhappy with the levels of competition their companies face, because of the country’s gargantuan scale, their best bet for maximizing such competition is resuming the vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws – which, as I documented, had long been largely neglected.

Wolf didn’t accept the policy implications I drew concerning these insights about America’s economic distinctiveness. But since he evidently accepts the basic proposition, it’s legitimate to ask why not.

The second example of a leading economic authority making one of my central points came yesterday on the Project Syndicate website. That in itself is pretty remarkable because, as I’ve previously suggested, Project Syndicate is best described as a digital op-ed page for globalist elites. Just as remarkable, and gratifying, the author of the post in question is Robert Skidelsky, a veteran British politician and venerable academic who’s best known for a highly acclaimed three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20^th century and a scholar whose work still shapes much global economic thought and policy.

According to Skidelsky, one of two major gaps in President Biden’s economic proposals – and especially his stated desire to rebuild manufacturing in America – is its failure to impose tight curbs on imports. Without a plan that Skidelsky (and its originator) calls “compensated free trade,” the author writes that domestic industry won’t be “built back better.”

That’s already nearly identical to arguments I make all the time. But what I found most intriguing was Skidelsky’s principal rationale: America’s still towering trade deficits are bound to permit too many of the job- and production-creating benefits of Mr. Biden’s stimulus spending to drain overseas.

That’s virtually identical to the case that I and a colleague made early during the recovery from the previous U.S. recession. Unfortunately, then President Barack Obama apparently didn’t see our New York Times article, because he ignored the continuing growth of the deficit, and partly as a result, the rebound he presided over was the weakest in American history.

I’m hardly above wishing to have gotten some credit for these ideas.  But progress on the economics of trade (as opposed to the ongoing U.S. policy departures from free trade absolutism bemoaned by Wolf) has been so slow to develop that I’ll take it in whatever form it comes – and of course be keeping an eye out for more.           

Following Up: Welcome Shrinkage of China’s Ties with U.S. News Organizations

Tags

Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, China, China Daily, ChinaWatch, Following Up, Houston Chronicle, journalism, Mainstream Media, news media, propaganda, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Free Beacon, The Washington Post, transparency

Since Memorial Day is – or at least should be – a remembance and tribute to what’s best about America, it seems appropriate to report some good news: Some of the nation’s leading news organizations have cut some not-at-all-trivial ties with China.

These ties concern their decision to stop distributing with their print editions and posting on their websites a Chinese government propaganda vehicle called ChinaWatch. As I wrote more than two years ago, their decision to present ChinaWatch and the form of this presentation created two problems. First, although the Constitution’s First Amendment should authorize giving even possibly genocidal, increasingly hostile dictatorships the right to present their material in the United States, journalistic ethics and (I believe) the law should require the clear labeling of any such material as foreign government products.

I argued that neither the Chinese government nor the news organization’s carrying their material met these obligations.

Second, since ChinaWatch was paid advertising, it became a source of revenue for the news organizations that featured it, and because these news organizations covered the Chinese government, its appearance raised conflict of interest questions that at least should have – but weren’t – have been forthrightly acknowledged. Importantly, some news organizations have received millions of dollars from Beijing – not decisive sums in terms of the overall finances of some of them, but not trivial, either.

Happily, these problems have now been reduced, although not eliminated. The New York Times said about a year after my post that it had stopped accepting such material from all state-run media. According to this Tibetan dissident publication, the same goes for The Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post says it has not run or distributed ChinaWatch specifically since 2019.

Official U.S. government lobbying records show, however, that multi-million dollar relationships still exist between several major U.S. news organizations and Beijing’s propaganda machine. As reported last week by the Washington Free Beacon, over the last six months,

“China Daily [the parent organization of ChinaWatch] paid more than $1.6 million for advertising in Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, and Foreign Policy magazine, according to disclosures filed with the Justice Department. The Beijing-controlled news agency paid another $1 million to American newspapers, including the L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, and Houston Chronicle, to print copies of its own publications.”

And unlike the The New York Times, the Post, and the Journal, the Free Beacon observes,

“Many of the newspapers [still] working with China Daily face severe financial problems. The Los Angeles Times furloughed workers last year as advertising revenue cratered during the coronavirus pandemic. Papers like the Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe have failed to turn a profit for years.”

The nation’s news organizations have more than enough credibility problems these days (see, e.g., here and here). Severing all official ties with Chinese and other foreign government media, or at least making every effort to publicize them to their readers, could only help them regain some of that trust.

Im-Politic: Our Dysfunctional Watchdog of Democracy

Tags

Anthony S. Fauci, Barry Meier, Biden, Buzzfeed.com, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, democracy, Donald Trump, facemasks, Im-Politic, journalism, lockdowns, Mainstream Media, masks, Russia, Steele dossier, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Thomas Jefferson, Trump-Russia, Wuhan virus, Yellow journalism

A New York Times article posted this past weekend strongly reinforces a suspicion that I’ve held for some time about the title of most worrisome – because largely neglected – existing threat to American democracy. It’s not demagogues who get elected to high (or even the highest) public office. It’s not white supremacists or Antifa. It’s not voter fraud or voter suppression. It’s not Russian leader Vladimir Putin. It’s not even the kind of disinformation and misinformation and even election interference that he and other foreign dictators (like China’s Xi Jinping) have engaged in.

Instead it’s our own Mainstream Media – including the gargantuan social media platforms that have come to play such a huge role in determining what news Americans see, watch, and hear.

Why are these news organizations so dangerous? For two main reasons. First, their democracy-subverting activities are much more subtle and therefore harder to identify than those of the above culprits. Second, their ever-growing partisanship and arrogance is destroying what has long been relied on as the nation’s fail-safe mechanism – a watchdog press.

To be fair, this idea has always been problematic, even though throughout U.S. history, prominent Americans have made statements like “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost” (Thomas Jefferson) and “Democracy Dies in Darkness” (the Washington Post).

Yes, despite the bedrock Constitutional system of separation of powers, it’s been essential for some influential force outside government to “guard the guardians.” But embedded in the very consequent need for private ownership (to ensure that the press can independently monitor the government) is the danger that these owners will solely or mainly use their power to further their own particular interests, not society’s.

All of which is to say that we’ve long had a national conundrum to deal with. But it doesn’t seem unreasonable to conclude that, once journalism clearly exited its sensationalistic “Yellow” phase and (probably in the years following Wold War II), started acting like a profession that needed to embody and uphold standards of accuracy and objectivity, the major media met its watchdog responsibilities fairly well – over both government and the private sector.

What the author of the Times piece, former journalist Barry Meier, makes clear, is that there’s not only more reason than ever to fear that the commitment to objectivity is rapidly weakening (and these fears have been amply justified lately, as I’ve reported here). There’s also more reason than ever to fear that the kind of commitment to accountability watchdogs must accept – inevitably entailing an acknowledgement of legitimate outside criticism and the imperative of correcting mistakes – seriously is fading as well.

These worries have been triggered by two specific observations made by Meier about the Mainstream Media’s handling of the charges that former President Trump colluded with Russia to ensure victory in the 2016 election. As Meier recounts, these accusations were supercharged by reports that a former British super-spy had uncovered evidence that Trump’s personal misbehavior had exposed him to Russian blackmail, and resulted in his turning into a latterday Manchurian Candidate who would be forced to do Moscow’s bidding.

The infamous “Steele dossier” that supposedly made this case was published by a website called Buzzfeed.com in January, 2017 – shortly before Trump’s inauguration – and although no serious efforts at confirmation or even finding any supporting evidence were made, “countless articles, television shows, books, tweets and blog posts about it appeared.” (The dossier also formed part of the basis of the FBI’s request to a special U.S. court to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016, and Bureau Director James Comey’s March, 2017 disclosure that this investigation was continuing poured additional fuel on the Trump Russia fire.)

By 2019, Meier goes on, the Steele dossier had been exposed as a bogus hatchet job. But by that time, of course, the collusion firestorm had dominated the Trump presidency, along with equally offbase news coverage of his administration, and surely compromised its ability to govern effectively.

Why this prolonged media focus? In large measure, as Meier explains, because “It was easy for many journalists to believe that Mr. Trump would do anything to win, even — given his stance with…Putin — collude with Russia.” Indeed, as the author observes, they picked up this ball and ran with it even though “Steele said that his information needed to be confirmed….”

This flagrant anti-Trump bias was bad enough. Much worse, though was the media’s response once the dossier had been debunked. In Meier’s words:

“[A] few reporters who had written about the dossier had backed away from it. ‘Some people have wanted to maintain that the dossier is checking out when, as far as I can tell, it hasn’t,’ said Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News. He was in the minority. When Erik Wemple of The Washington Post wrote a series of columns about the media infatuation with the dossier, most journalists he contacted either defended their work or ignored his inquiries.”

Even though Meier, Isikoff, and Wemple all work for Mainstream Media organizations themselves, these revelations are more disturbing because they cast doubt on these news organization’s willingness, either individually or collectively, to admit that a major preoccupation of theirs that shaped American politics for years was an utter crock. And in a similar vein, they’re grounds for great skepticism that these same media will produce accurate post-mortems on the actual actions by governments or by individual politicians that conformed with this Get Trump obsession.     

The reason for this reluctance is obvious: Their credibility – their most precious asset, even in this hyperpartisan era – would be devastated. But if these powerful companies won’t self-correct or correct the records of others – and in some systematic, comprehensive way that can make a difference, not in dribs and drabs – especially on a matter of this importance, then their watchdog reputation gets thrown out the window.

And as far as I’m concerned, good riddance. But if the big national media can’t be relied on to play this role responsibly, who or what can? And can a democracy worthy of the name long survive without actors that can credibly set the record straight before the archives are fully open to historians years and even decades from now?

Moreover, we’re getting an example of how such flawed Mainstream Media performance could be a literally fatal flaw – and on mass level.  Specifically,  evidence has appeared throughout the CCP Virus pandemic that sweeping lockdown- and mask-wearing-centric mitigation strategy pursued in most of the country at the behest of the public health establishment was completely and tragically mistaken. (See, e.g., here.)  America’s major national news organizations have obviously bought in to the stay-at-home and mask-up claims, as shown, for example, by their near canonization of leading lockdowns proponent Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s head immunologist and now President Biden’s top medical adviser. 

I’d like to believe that if conclusive evidence emerges invalidating this virus-fighting approach, and supporting measures with potentially greater effectiveness during future pandemics, the news would be trumpeted all over the Mainstream Media even if the federal government tried to hush it up.  But as of now, expressing the hope that the real story might become known looks like nothing so much as practicing quackery.