How Government Spending Enriches the Wealthy

Covid relief programs and easy Fed policy inflated the value of assets such as stocks and real estate

By Vivek Ramaswamy. Excerpts:

"When Washington floods the economy with borrowed and freshly printed dollars, the money flows first into assets owned by the wealthiest Americans—stocks, bonds, real estate. Six relief laws pushed roughly $4.6 trillion out the door in the bipartisan response to the pandemic. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates to zero and more than doubled its balance sheet, from about $4 trillion to nearly $9 trillion.

Only some of that money reached working-class Americans. Economists at MIT found that about a quarter of the $800 billion from the Paycheck Protection Program went to workers who would have lost their jobs. Three-fourths landed in the top fifth of households by income, at a cost of $170,000 to $257,000 per job-year saved—a regressive windfall. The student-loan payment pause tells the same story: It has cost well over $200 billion and—because higher earners carry the biggest balances—most of that relief went to white-collar professionals.

As big government pumped money into the economy, assets boomed: The stock market has roughly tripled from its March 2020 low. The wealthiest 10% of households own 89% of all stocks, according to 2021 Federal Reserve data. The top 1% gained more than $6.5 trillion in equity wealth during the pandemic, while the bottom 90% added just $1.2 trillion. The wealth share of the top 1% hit a record high in mid-2021, and American billionaires’ fortunes swelled by roughly 70%."

"Consumer prices peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, with inflation growing at its fastest pace since 1981. Groceries rose 12.2% in a single year and gasoline nearly 60%. As paychecks lagged, real wages fell—down 3.6% over the year ending in June 2022"

"a post-pandemic property tax that hit states like Ohio hard. The only meaningful asset most middle-class Ohioans own is their house, and home prices in Ohio rose over 25% between 2020 and 2022. That paper gain was a financial curse for families intending to stay put: While real income remained flat, tax bills went up. Ohio homeowners absorbed, in 2023, the largest reappraisal shock on record. One analysis found the increase was more than seven times the size of the previous cycle’s, averaging nearly 35%." 

Woman at center of sprawling Minnesota fraud gets nearly 42-year prison sentence

By TIM SULLIVAN of AP. 

"A judge on Thursday handed down an extraordinary prison sentence — nearly 42 years — to the former leader of a Minnesota nonprofit who was convicted in a staggering $250 million fraud case that helped ignite an immigration crackdown by the Trump administration.

Aimee Bock ran Feeding Our Future, which had claimed it helped provide millions of meals to needy children during the pandemic. The U.S. Justice Department, however, said she was atop the “single largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the country.”

“I understand I failed. I failed the public, my family, everyone,” Bock, 45, said in federal court.

After the hearing, authorities announced charges against 15 more people accused of fraud in receiving federal payments for a variety of social services administered through Minnesota’s state government. The FBI said one man jumped from a fourth-floor balcony to avoid arrest.

“We will claw back every dollar you have stolen from the American people,” Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald said, noting that the government sent more prosecutors and agents to Minnesota this year.

President Donald Trump used the fraud cases against Bock and many others to initially justify a massive surge of federal agents to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area last winter to target immigrants, leading to repeated confrontations between residents and those officers and the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Fake lists, lavish spending

COVID-19 brought changes to a federal program that typically fed children through schools. Restaurants could participate, and food distribution was extended to sites outside schools.

Investigators said Bock’s nonprofit was at the center of a crime network that included a web of partner organizations, phony distribution sites, kickbacks and fake lists of children. Feeding Our Future recruited people to create sites throughout Minnesota, and claims for reimbursement quickly followed, according to the government. 

“Aimee was a god,” a witness testified at trial.

Bock had long proclaimed her innocence but was convicted of conspiracy, fraud and bribery. Investigators said she and co-conspirators enriched themselves with international travel, real estate, luxury vehicles and other lavish spending.

“This was a vortex of fraud and you were at the epicenter,” U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel told Bock.

A co-defendant was sentenced last August to 28 years in prison. Abdiaziz Farah claimed to be serving meals to thousands of children per day, investigators said, but the sites turned out to be parking lots or empty commercial space.

Bock’s lawyer, Kenneth Udoibok, had argued for no more than three years in prison, saying she had provided key information to investigators. He said Bock, a former teacher, had been unfairly portrayed as the mastermind and insisted that two co-defendants were responsible for running the scams.

State auditors found that the Minnesota Department of Education received numerous complaints about Feeding Our Future, but often told the group to police itself. In January, Democratic Gov. Tim Walz said he would not run for reelection after being pounded by Trump about theft in programs that rely on federal cash.

Trump, who has long derided Somalis, last year blasted Minnesota as “a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.”

“Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing. Send them back to where they came from,” Trump wrote on social media.

Bock is white, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office says the overwhelming majority of defendants in the cases are of Somali descent. Most are U.S. citizens.

At least 65 people have been convicted in a series of overlapping food fraud cases. Investigations began during the Biden administration.

“This case has changed our state forever,” Joe Thompson, formerly the lead prosecutor in the case, said outside the courtroom. “Aimee Bock did everything she could to earn this long sentence.”

Fraud cases grow

In a fresh batch of criminal cases filed this week in Minnesota, the government said alleged fraud involved $90 million across seven state-managed Medicaid programs.

The defendants include Fahima Mahamud, who was CEO of Future Leaders Early Learning Center, a childcare center in Minneapolis. Over three years, Mahamud’s organization was reimbursed approximately $4.6 million for services on behalf of people who didn’t make a required copayment, prosecutors allege.

A message seeking comment from her lawyer was not immediately returned Thursday. Mahamud earlier this year pleaded not guilty to fraud related to meals.

Two other people were charged with conspiring to get $975,000 in Medicaid subsidies for housing services that were not provided.

Two additional people were accused of receiving $21.1 million by billing Medicaid for autism therapy that was either unnecessary or not provided. Investigators said the two paid families as much as $1,500 per child per month to add their names to the program and get reimbursement. 

Minnesota’s Department of Human Services said it helped build the cases. Inspector General James Clark said payments to more than 600 providers have been halted since 2025 because of fraud allegations."

Charges of a Covid Coverup

The Morens indictment reveals an effort to hide facts about the U.S. role

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"the facts in the indictment, which say he [David Morens] intentionally sought to obfuscate the NIH role in funding the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which may have contributed to the virus leaking from a Chinese lab."

"The NIH last decade provided some $8 million in grants to EcoHealth, some of which funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function virus experiments."

"Between February and March 2020, Dr. Morens and a co-conspirator—whom press reports say is Mr. Daszak—co-authored articles arguing that the virus most likely emerged from the wild."

"On June 17, 2021, the indictment says, he warned Mr. Daszak and “others” that he had received a document production request by five Senators investigating the virus’s origins. Dr. Morens assured his correspondents that he had “retained very few documents on these matters.” Public officials are required by federal law and instructed to retain all such documents." 

The Long Shadow of COVID School Closures

By Jeffery L. Degner of AIER. Excerpts:

"Early studies on the impacts of the lockdown were published by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) just months after schools shut down. Students from low-income households suffered the greatest learning losses, similar to those seen after “shutdowns owing to hurricanes and other natural disasters.”

Two years after the lockdowns took effect, further data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported in an understated way, “the pandemic has potentially impacted achievement and opportunities to learn.”

As was expected, access to the appropriate tools was one of the key drivers for worsening academic outcomes for poor children. The “digital divide” became common parlance among educators who recognized the importance of the issue. This was a critical issue, since at the outset of the lockdowns, 77 percent of public elementary and secondary schools moved online, and 84 percent of college students reported that “some or all classes moved to online-only instruction.” 

Low-income households either lacked internet access at home or the hardware necessary for younger students to join class meetings or effectively participate in online learning. In fact, among households below the poverty line, nearly two-thirds lacked either a computer or adequate broadband speed for children to participate in class or finish homework.

Studies conducted by the Brookings Institution provided some of the most stark statistics in terms of poorer students falling farther behind their wealthier peers. For example, elementary schools with higher rates of poverty saw test score gaps compared to wealthier districts increase by 20 percent in math and 15 percent in reading in the 2020-21 academic year. In other words, performance fell further behind and persisted for at least 18 months. 

In the broader statistics, elementary scores on standardized tests saw their worst outcomes in 2023, and except for 4th-grade math scores, only 2022 was worse." 

"High school upperclassmen who were gearing up for college entrance exams became ill-prepared. In a tremendous irony, test scores moved in the opposite direction of their high school GPAs. For educators on the ground, the explanation was obvious. With many districts mandating that teachers pass their students on through “no fail” policies that were either explicit or implied, regardless of their actual performance, their grades were naturally higher than would have otherwise been the case. Couple that with weaker learning, and the College Board’s report makes complete sense. Grade inflation in the classroom and a dropoff in actual learning was the predictable result."

"Mental health was severely damaged by school closures. A study released in 2023 showed that alongside significant educational losses, there was a rapid increase in anxiety and depression, especially among middle and high school students."

Hold Harmless for Whom? The Impact of COVID Era Policies on School Funding, Teachers, and Students

Michah W. Rothbart, Samantha Cervantes, and Amy Ellen Schwartz of Syracuse University.

"Abstract 

This study evaluates the fiscal and academic consequences of New York City’s hold harmless policy during COVID-19, which aimed to stabilize school expenditures amid unexpected enrollment declines by restoring schools’ funding up to initial levels. We examine how school racial composition predicts whether or when schools receive hold harmless “treatment” and assess the impact of hold harmless on financial resources, staffing, and student outcomes, exploring heterogeneity by timing of policy announcement. Although schools with higher White student shares were no more likely than those with higher Hispanic or Black shares to receive hold harmless funds, schools with higher Black shares that did receive them saw larger per-pupil allocations due to deeper enrollment losses. Overall, hold harmless schools experienced significant increases in per-pupil spending, and reduced pupil-teacher ratio and class size, while maintaining the size of the teaching workforce. We find hold harmless had no effect on attendance or chronic absenteeism in 2021 or 2022, but improved both in 2023, when it was announced earlier. Although funds often rolled over to later years, we find no corresponding gains in student outcomes. Overall, the policy effectively preserved school-level spending and staffing – as intended – with some improvements in student outcomes when announced early."

The Price of the Lockdown

How the COVID era fettered science and liberty.

By K. Lloyd Billingsley of The Independent Institute. 

"“The COVID era, to me, represented a fundamental break in my understanding of how science and public health operated.” That was Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, in a recent interview with Ross Douthat of the New York Times. With memories of that same era, the people have good reason to hear him out. 

“I thought public health had the best interest of the working class, the poor, in mind,” the NIH director explained. “And the COVID era shattered my illusions on all of those fronts. In particular, what happened in March of 2020 represented a fundamental break that public health authorities had with the public.” In the face of deep uncertainty, “something had to be done to guide people,” but the effort went wrong. 

“What you’re not allowed to do is assume that the thing you’re doing is going to work,” the NIH director explained. “You’re also not allowed to assume that the thing that you’re doing will have no harms. So you close the schools. You know for certain that you’re going to harm a generation of children. That’s a certainty.” 

Dr. Bhattacharya saw the need for “honest calculations” and “you could see the relative risk really easily in the data. It was really older people that were at high risk of dying from the disease. So that key epidemiological fact was known, I’d say, by January 2020.” The infection fatality rate on average for the whole population was “much lower than we thought.” Dr. Bhattacharya assumed that would change the approach but “instead, I faced, essentially, attacks on my character, an attempt to destroy my career, questions about the integrity of my work that were completely spurious.”

Targeting the Dissenters

In an email to Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), former NIH director Francis Collins called Dr. Bhattacharya a “fringe epidemiologist”. It tasked Fauci to attack the Great Barrington Declaration. Bhattacharya co-authored that declaration with other medical scientists, most, if not all, more qualified epidemiologists than Fauci and Collins. 

Dr. Bhattacharya called for “a scientific debate and discussion,” but instead, “the ethos of public health was that just having the debate at all was a dangerous thing.” And that was bad news for the people. 

“If all of the basic promises that we have about our civil liberties are premised on there not being uncertainty over the spread of an infectious disease,” the NIH director said, “then you just don’t have a free country.” That is Dr. Bhattacharya’s description of white coat supremacy, rule by medical bureaucrats who never face the voters and are seldom, if ever, held accountable. In the current era, the politician most dedicated to rigid bureaucratic rule is California Gov. Gavin Newsom. 

In 2020, Gov. Newsom imposed the most draconian COVID-19 regime, with shelter-at-home orders, school lockdowns, and rigid rules for family gatherings. “Don’t forget to keep your mask on in between bites,” said the governor, who partied sans mask with lobbyists at the upscale French Laundry.  

In a June 2020 appearance with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Gov. Newsom said, “If you can’t practice physical distancing, are you practicing love?” During the COVID era, by all appearances, Gov. Newsom never contacted Dr. Bhattacharya, then a professor of medicine at Stanford University, and never endorsed the Great Barrington Declaration. In the current era, the governor’s stance has not changed. 

In 2025, California’s Department of Public Health maintained that infants and toddlers were “higher-risk” individuals and called for the same vaccine requirements, with no attention to possible side effects. Gov. Newsom set out to, in effect, create a new Centers for Disease Control in an alliance of western states. 

The governor hired public health officials who had been dismissed from the CDC, allegedly “politicized” in the Trump administration. After the administration cut loose from the World Health Organization, Gov. Newsom did his best to keep California attached to the globalist bureaucracy. 

The NIH

Dr. Fauci, a big fan of the WHO, maintained that the COVID-19 virus arose naturally in the wild, a matter of speculation, not science. Others saw the source as a lab leak, and as Dr. Bhattacharya told Ross Douthat, “If you just focus on the scientific evidence alone, I would say it’s certain.” The NIH director will double down on replication, “essentially democratization of who gets to decide what’s true and false in science,” and as such, “a second scientific revolution.”

Dr. Bhattacharya has eliminated a huge conflict of interest by removing Christine Grady, Dr. Fauci’s wife, from her post as chief bioethicist of the NIH Clinical Center. The NIH also cut loose Jeanne Marrazzo, Dr. Fauci’s successor at NIAID. 

On his last day in office, Joe Biden pardoned Anthony Fauci without indicating any crime he had committed. As Dr. Bhattacharya sees it, if our civil liberties depend on unelected bureaucrats who shun debate, force draconian polices on the people, and disregard possible harm, “then you don’t have a free country.” That’s something to remember moving forward."

States with mask mandates had about the same rate of Covid as states without mandates

Tweet from Kevin Bass.

 

Have American elites—influential journalists, powerful policymakers and other cultural arbiters—learned the lessons of 2020-21? Do they want to?

See ‘An Abundance of Caution’ and ‘In Covid’s Wake’: Failing the Pandemic Test by Philip Wallach. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

He reviewed two books: “An Abundance of Caution” by David Zweig and “In Covid’s Wake,” by the Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo.

Excerpts:

"the poor evidentiary basis for the prolonged school closures and attendant follies such as masking requirements and social distancing."

"he dug into the epidemiological modeling papers whose projections seemed decisively to rule out the safety of opening schools, he found “a never-ending matryoshka doll” of citations, resting ultimately on an assumption conceded to be “arbitrary” by its initial author."

"evidence emerged early on—in March 2020—that the virus did not pose a serious threat to children. American public-health professionals remained largely impervious to this fact. Further evidence of children’s relative safety from the virus came to light in Europe and parts of the U.S. where schools reopened early or never closed, but America’s public-health establishment remained largely unmoved. Teachers’ unions, it’s fair to say, promoted hysteria about the alleged dangers of opening schools"

"officials claimed only to be offering nonbinding recommendations."

"elite institutions failed us by giving in to panic."

"consensus plans—none of which would have required extended lockdowns—were thrown out before Americans ever began dying, in part because public-health experts were entranced by China’s harsh restrictions. American policymakers had sound advice ready at hand, but most of them took the view that safety outweighed individual liberties, economic activity and quality of life."

"tendency to paint critics of lockdowns and mask mandates as racists, quacks and conspiracy theorists. Such conduct was especially evident on the question of Covid-19’s origins, as top scientists vilified anyone suggesting the virus may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China."

"By clinging to their favored nonpharmaceutical interventions, well past the point when they should have known such policies offered few benefits and many costs, governments in many urban and wealthy parts of the country trod a path that was uniquely bad"

"before the availability of vaccines, areas imposing the severest restrictions earned no discernible health benefits."

"thanks to lower vaccination rates, red states suffered many more deaths in the pandemic’s second year"

"Ms. Lee and Mr. Macedo make a strong case in favor of Sweden’s approach, which called for voluntary safety measures focused on the elderly but never included enforceable mask requirements or stay-at-home orders, let alone extended cancellations of school and recreational activities. Despite some front-loading of deaths in 2020, Sweden’s excess mortality ended up, the authors show, the lowest in Europe."

"their book is in part a plea to academia to clean its own house and so avoid the more indiscriminate scourges that politics may eventually bring."

Taxpayers Spent Billions Covering the Same Medicaid Patients Twice

When recipients signed up in two states at once, insurers often got paid by both; ‘it definitely is wasteful’

By Christopher Weaver, Anna Wilde Mathews and Tom McGinty of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Health insurers got double-paid by the Medicaid system for the coverage of hundreds of thousands of patients across the country, costing taxpayers billions of dollars in extra payments.

The insurers, which are paid by state and federal governments to cover low-income Medicaid recipients, collected at least $4.3 billion over three years for patients who were enrolled—and paid for—in other states"

"The biggest Medicaid insurer, Centene, received $620 million in duplicative payments between 2019 and 2021"

"Insurers said it is up to states to verify people’s eligibility, and to disenroll them if necessary."

"The Medicare and Medicaid agency doesn’t screen for the double payments, leaving that to the states. State officials said identifying people who moved is difficult, and that recoveries of improper payments from managed-care companies are limited."

"The federal government’s emergency pandemic rules made it much harder for states to disenroll beneficiaries."

"double payments nationwide increased from $814 million in 2019 to $2.1 billion in 2021."

"When an enrollee leaves one state and signs up in a different one, though, the first state isn’t automatically informed." 

"it is difficult for states to claw back payments from managed-care companies for covering relocated enrollees, largely because it can be unclear exactly when they left."

"taxpayers were wasting about $1 billion a year"

"it can be difficult to verify where people are living" [this reminds me of Hayek saying that the central planners don't have local knowledge so they can't run the economy very well] 

Nobody Wants the Covid Truth

Why Western intel agencies help Putin and Xi keep their darkest secrets

By Holman W. Jenkins. Excerpts:

"Scientists who, in 1978, quickly concluded the previous year’s global flu pandemic originated in a lab leak in China or Russia chose not to advertise their findings."

"“A laboratory release was the most likely origin,” wrote clinical pathologist Martin Furmanski in a 2014 revisitation of the incident"

"five years later, the Central Intelligence Agency finally judges a lab leak the likeliest scenario, albeit with “low confidence”"

"German intelligence apparently concluded as far back as 2020 and with “high confidence” that a lab mishap was responsible."

"Recall what happened when Australia merely sought China’s cooperation in investigating Covid’s origins. Beijing launched a Trump-style trade war aimed at Australia’s key export industries."

Why the vindication of the lab leak theory for Covid's origin is partly good news

By Matt Ridley. Excerpts:

"It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid began with an accident in a laboratory in Wuhan. Nowhere else in the world was there a laboratory doing exactly the right kinds of experiments on exactly the right sequences in exactly the right genes of exactly the right kind of virus at exactly the right time and at exactly the wrong biosafety level. The evidence for a natural spillover has stubbornly refused to appear: no infected animal turned up in any of the 40,000 markets selling live animals in China, let alone the one in Wuhan.

Paradoxically, this is partly good news. It explains why this virus – unlike every zoonotic spillover – was highly infectious from the start and impossible to contain. It was already trained on human genes. Zoonotic spillovers such as SARS, MERS, Ebola, Nipah, Hendra, Hanta and others tend to cause dangerous illness but not be very infectious and are soon controlled by contact tracing and quarantine. Lab leaks, of viruses honed on human receptors, are likely to be much more infectious from the start. And we can stop lab leaks happening. All we have to do is cease doing foolish experiments of dubious value on dangerous pathogens. Full stop.

It is worth reflecting on why so many people have a vested interest in resisting the conclusion that it was a lab leak. Some do not want to upset the Chinese government. They look at the way China retaliated against Australia just for calling for an investigation into the origin of Covid. Some do not want to tarnish the reputation (and funding) of science.

Others had been hoping to turn the pandemic into a fable about humankind’s brutal rape of Gaia. Environmental alarmism is a lucrative business and this was grist to their mill.

Even if ‘wet’ wildlife markets and smuggled pangolins were exonerated in this case, they argued, and the outbreak came from some direct contact with bats, the moral lesson was ecological. Deforestation and climate change had left infected bats stressed and with nowhere to go but towns. Or it had driven desperate people into bat-infested caves in search of food or profit."

"In July 2020, 17 scientists, including Dr Peter Daszak, who collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and was keen to exonerate his friends there, wrote an article in Science magazine insisting that the main lesson of the pandemic was that deforestation must cease: ‘The clear link between deforestation and virus emergence suggests that a major effort to retain intact forest cover would have a large return on investment even if its only benefit was to reduce virus emergence events.’

There were three problems with this argument. First, there is no ‘clear link’ between epidemics and deforestation. Aids, Sars, Mers, Ebola, Nipah, Hendra, Zika — none of these virus outbreaks has been plausibly linked to forest clearance, let alone as the major cause of them. Second, deforestation has not only ceased in southern China but went into rapid reverse a generation ago. There is more forest every year. Third, people encounter bats less, not more, than they did in the past. Urbanisation has drained rural villages of people and given them other ways of making a living than cutting trees or catching bats."

"tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km².’ That’s 7 per cent more forest globally than in 1982."

"Countries like Bangladesh have been rapidly increasing their tree cover. As for China, it is reforesting as fast as anywhere on the planet. ‘China alone accounts for 25 per cent of the global net increase in leaf area with only 6.6 per cent of global vegetated area,’"

"So if going into a cave was all it took to start a coronavirus pandemic, the odds are it would have happened eons ago. There are, however, three new reasons that people go into caves today: tourism, collecting bat guano, and science. The abandoned copper mine in Yunnan where the closest relative of Sars-CoV-2 was found is an unnatural, man-made tunnel, not an example of pristine nature. After guano-shoveling-miners got ill there in 2012, the only visitors to the site, as far as we can tell, were scientists, mostly from the Wuhan Institute of Virology more than 1,000 miles away. They not only went into the mine, disturbing the bats; they also captured them in nets, swabbed their rear ends for viruses and took them back to Wuhan labs. Now that’s encroachment."

Nonprofit’s Leader Convicted of Siphoning Off $240 Million in Federal Food Aid

Aimee Bock was accused of overseeing a scheme that exploited lax pandemic-era controls, and reaped millions with fake invoices for nonexistent meals

By David A. Fahrenthold. From the New York Times. Excerpts:

"The leader of a Minnesota anti-hunger nonprofit was convicted in U.S. District Court on Wednesday of masterminding a brazen scheme that reaped more than $240 million in pandemic relief funds with a network of bogus food kitchens that billed the government for 91 million meals.

The nonprofit’s leader, Aimee Bock, 44, was convicted by a jury of seven counts, including wire fraud and bribery. Another defendant, Salim Said — a 36-year-old who oversaw one of the bogus kitchens — was convicted of 20 counts, also including wire fraud and bribery."

"At least 70 people were charged in the scheme, and more than 40 have already pleaded guilty or been convicted. Last year, another case related to the same scandal made national news, when someone attempted to bribe a juror in a separate trial by leaving about $120,000 in cash at her home in a Hallmark gift bag."

"The fraud scheme targeted two programs meant to feed hungry children, which were funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture but administered by the state of Minnesota. The system relied on nonprofit groups called “sponsors” to be its watchdogs. They were supposed to oversee individual kitchens and feeding sites and make sure they were not inflating the number of children they served." 

"Ms. Bock ran a sponsor nonprofit called Feeding Our Future. Prosecutors said she had conspired with dozens of people to set up 250 nonexistent feeding operations around Minnesota and used her oversight power to hide that network from the government. By law, Ms. Bock’s nonprofit got a cut of the money. Prosecutors said it had eventually totaled $18 million.

Many of the fake operations submitted invoices for implausibly large numbers of children: Mr. Said’s operation, for instance, said it had fed 6,000 a day, more than all the children in its ZIP code."

Long Past the Pandemic, Kids Skip School in New York

The city’s rate of chronic absenteeism shot up from 25% of students before Covid to 34.8% last year

By Jason L. Riley. Excerpts:

"it was New York City that bore the brunt of his overzealous lockdown edicts. In deference to teachers’ unions, he and then-Mayor Bill de Blasio kept New York City schools closed longer than in other parts of the state. Schoolchildren are still suffering the consequences, and many may never recover.

According to a new study from the Manhattan Institute, more kids in New York City public schools are attending class less often. Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10% or more school days in a given academic year, climbed from 25% before the pandemic to 34.8% last year, which is well above the national average."

"a recent decision by New York state to accommodate this trend by minimizing the importance of school attendance. Under a new plan adopted by the state, chronic absenteeism has been eliminated “as a measure of school quality, which means that this will not be one of the measures by which the state evaluates the performance of school districts.”"

"Absenteeism leads to learning losses, which aren’t spread evenly across demographic groups. Children who were already behind pre-Covid have fallen further behind, and those same kids are the ones mostly likely to be regularly missing school."

"Stanford’s Eric Hanushek and Bradley Strauss tally the economic costs of pandemic learning losses. “Based on the available research on the lifetime earnings associated with more skills, the average student in school during the pandemic will lose 5-6% of lifetime earnings,” the authors write. “Because a lower-skilled workforce leads to lower economic growth, the nation will lose some $31 trillion (in present value terms) during the twenty-first century.” To put that figure in context, they note that it dwarfs “the total economic losses from either the slowdown of the economy during the pandemic or the recessionary losses in 2008.”"

America Still Needs a Covid Reckoning

Why does nobody want to talk about the most tragic breakdown of leadership and ethics in our lifetimes?

By Scott W. Atlas. Excerpt:

"The virus didn’t cause lockdowns. Human beings decided to impose lockdowns, which failed to stop the deaths and the spread. Lockdowns inflicted massive damage on children and literally killed people. A review of 34 countries with available data found that through July 2023 “the US alone would have had 1.6 million fewer deaths if it had the performance of Sweden.” A January 2023 paper in the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control estimates that over the next 15 to 20 years, unemployment alone will cause 900,000 to 1.2 million additional American deaths—from the lockdown, not the virus."

Jay Bhattacharya Was Right, and Francis Collins Wrong

By David R. Henderson & Charles L. Hooper.

"In an ironic turn of events, a Stanford University professor whom Francis Collins, the former head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), attacked, has been nominated to head that very agency. While the personal aspects of Jay Bhattacharya’s altercation with Collins matter, it’s more important to understand why Bhattacharya was right and Collins was wrong. Bhattacharya—his Senate confirmation hearing is set for March 5—was right because he, trained as both an M.D. and an economist, reasoned through the challenges of COVID-19 as an epidemiologist and an economist. As an epidemiologist, he got three main things right; as an economist two. Collins struck out on all counts.

Here are the three things he had right as an epidemiologist.

First, for years, researchers have analyzed the effectiveness and appropriateness of the tools available to governments to address and control pandemics caused by respiratory viruses such as influenza. The paper “Disease mitigation measures in the control of pandemic influenza” from 2006 is one example. The paper concluded that while vaccines can top the list of efficacy, masks and handwashing have limited benefit. Except in unusual situations, quarantines and lockdowns should be rejected: “As experience shows, there is no basis for recommending quarantine either of groups or individuals.” Luckily, these conclusions also applied to the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. Bhattacharya understood this point.

Second, early data coming out of Italy suggested that the infection fatality rate was much higher for older people than for younger ones. According to a March 2020 study, “Within Italy, COVID-19 deaths are mainly observed among older, male patients who also have multiple comorbidities.” Subsequent studies confirmed this relationship and showed that the fatality risk for older people was one thousand times that for young children. Bhattacharya understood this point.

Third, in April 2020, Bhattacharya and others conducted a study to measure the prevalence of antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 virus in Santa Clara County, where Stanford is located. The key finding: “The estimated population prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Santa Clara County implies that the infection may be much more widespread than indicated by the number of confirmed cases.” Every virus has an infection fatality rate that is calculated by dividing the number of deaths by the number of infections. If the number of deaths were known and the number of infected people were higher than previously estimated, mathematics dictated that the infection fatality rate was lower, meaning the virus was less deadly and less scary than repeated media messages communicated. Bhattacharya understood this point.

As an economist, Bhattacharya got two things right. He knew that we must consider tradeoffs and that we must compare costs with benefits.

We want our children to be safe from viruses, but we also want them to get good educations, make friends, play outside, and be able to visit family members. There are tradeoffs among the things we want in life. A single-minded goal of preventing viral infections necessarily compromised other goals; getting a little more of this requires giving up some of that.

Stated differently, everything has costs and benefits. The cost/benefit tradeoff of a nine-year-old is different from that of a working parent, which is not the same as that of a retired 80-year-old. The benefit of going about normal life is high for the child while the risk of disease is small. The benefit of being out and about for the typical 80-year-old is low while the risk is high. Simple cost/benefit analysis, therefore, suggests that the young person should not be secluded while the 80-year-old should be. The working parent has high benefits from working and a much lower risk than the 80-year-old and, therefore, should be allowed to work. This is called focused protection.

Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta put all these insights together in the tersely worded Great Barrington Declaration, which was the spark that ignited Collins’ ire. In an email to Anthony Fauci, Collins urged a “quick and devastating published take down of its premises.”

We have no evidence that Collins and Fauci, two of the leading figures in public health during the pandemic, understood the three main epidemiological points presented here. We do, however, know that Collins understood the economic points—afterwards. He admitted that his priority was keeping people alive and said, “You attach a zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered.” That is precisely why we need to make public health decisions that reflect both medical and economic insights. You can’t do a cost/benefit analysis of a policy by considering only the benefits.

Bhattacharya has said that the Great Barrington Declaration was the least original thing he had ever written. Why? Because well before 2020 people in the public health field knew how to fight respiratory virus pandemics. But tragically, in the heat of battle, many people who were consumed by fear, ignorance, or baser motives, discarded clear thinking. We all can be grateful that Bhattacharya took on the difficult and fraught task of thinking clearly and publicly reminding many of us what we already knew or strongly suspected.

The fact that Jay Bhattacharya showed such courage and clear thinking during a difficult period suggests that he would make a fine NIH Director."

Remote instruction adversely impacts parental mental health, less among homeschoolers

By Christos A. Makridis, Clara Piano & Corey DeAngelis.

"Abstract

This study explores the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic-induced shift to remote instruction on parental mental health, using data from the American Enterprise Institute’s Return-to-Learn tracker and the U.S. Census Pulse Survey. We exploit within-state variation in the timing of school closures from August 2020 to June 2021, controlling flexibly for demographic and state-level factors. We find that an increase in the proportion of remote instruction districts correlates with an escalation in parental mental health issues, including heightened anxiety, worry, depression, and a loss of interest in activities. These adverse effects are significantly lessened among parents who choose homeschooling. A one percentage point increase in the share of remote instruction in the state is associated with a 2.2 percentage point rise in homeschooling probability. Our paper contributes to understanding the wider impact of pandemic-induced educational changes, highlighting substantial mental health implications for parents. Taking stock of lessons learned over the Covid-19 pandemic, these findings are pivotal for shaping informed educational policies that consider the well-being of the whole family during crises."

CIA Now Favors Lab Leak Theory on Origins of Covid-19

Agency says it had ‘low confidence’ in its finding, but this is further than it has ever gone in pinpointing the origin of a virus that killed millions worldwide

By Michael R. Gordon and Dustin Volz of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"The Central Intelligence Agency has now concluded that the deadly Covid-19 pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak"

"In doing so, the CIA has now joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Energy Department in identifying a laboratory mishap in Wuhan, China, as the probable source of the Covid virus."

"The agency said in its Saturday statement that “both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic remain plausible.”"

"A former FBI senior scientist told The Wall Street Journal in December that a fresh look at the virus’s origin and the intelligence-community reports on the issue was needed."

"the debate over Covid’s origins has shifted considerably over the past several years. No host animal that might have transmitted the virus has been found, while experts have raised concerns that precautions for containing biological agents at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were inadequate."

"The FBI, which was the first intelligence agency to point to a lab leak as a likely explanation, made its judgment with “moderate confidence,” while the Energy Department and CIA’s views were made with low confidence."

Covid school closures hurt girls more than boys

See Long the Star Pupils, Girls Are Losing Ground to Boys: Girls have suffered greater test-score declines than boys by Matt Barnum of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Girls have lost ground in reading, math and science at a troubling rate, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of student test scores across the country.

Since 2019, girls’ test scores have dropped sharply, often to the lowest point in decades. Boys’ scores have also fallen during that time, but the decline among girls has been more severe. Boys now consistently outperform girls in math, after being roughly even or slightly ahead in the years before 2020. Girls still tend to perform better in reading, but their scores have dropped closer to boys.

The findings suggest that pandemic learning loss hit girls particularly hard in ways that haven’t been addressed by schools. The most recent test scores show that girls haven’t yet recovered. This comes following longstanding gains for girls and women in educational attainment.

Teachers, parents and education researchers aren’t sure what is driving the gender gap in learning loss, but some suspect the rise in behavior problems during the pandemic years prompted teachers to pay more attention to boys, who tend to act out more in class. Another factor may be the caregiving and household responsibilities many girls took on during and after the pandemic, sapping their time and energy for school."

"Shutting down schools might have hurt girls more because they tend to do better in school generally, said David Figlio, a professor of economics and education at the University of Rochester who has studied gender gaps in education. “Girls have a comparative advantage in school and you take schools away, they’ll suffer more,” he added.

Another hypothesis is that girls took on more household duties during the pandemic—including taking care of younger siblings—so were less able to focus on school. 

On some tests, this gender gap in learning loss was larger in later grades and in math, the Journal’s analysis found."