The EPA issues an extraordinary number of regulations, which affect every area of the economy and constrict everyday freedoms. Extensive regulatory schemes can amount to a competitive advantage for large companies over small ones. Large companies have greater capacity to comply with an extensive regulatory framework. Furthermore, regulatory costs are ultimately borne by American consumers. These costs can also have negative health implications, such as those that follow from increased unemployment—e.g., depression, substance abuse, domestic violence.
GOODER AND HARDER: ‘Out of Control’ Shoplifting in Democrat-Run San Francisco Closes 17 Walgreens. “By a margin of 60 to 40 percent, the idiots of California basically legalized shoplifting. Proposition 47, which passed in 2014, no longer made it a felony to steal if the value of what you steal doesn’t exceed $950. It’s also no longer a felony to receive stolen property valued at less than $950. And so…Instead of being punished as a felon, you are hit with a misdemeanor, and in many cases not even that. As you can imagine, this has turned into a free-for-all for shoplifters and a stone cold nightmare for retailers.”
Modern science suffers from an irreproducibility crisis in a wide range of disciplines—from medicine to social psychology. Far too often scientists cannot reproduce claims made in research. John Ioannidis says bias is rife in research and he estimates that a large portion of research findings that physicians rely on – as much as 90 percent – may be flawed and simply false positives.
We should be concerned about the current state of Covid-19 science. By the end of December 2020, more than 81,000 publications on the topic existed. How much of this is false and, more importantly, how much of it has been fed into the Centers for Disease Control coronavirus policy?
How skewed science afflicts government regulation can be revealed by looking at how research is used by the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate outdoor air quality. A topic not without major controversy is particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5). Research done by epidemiologists claims that PM2.5 is harmful to humans in many ways. This has led the EPA to impose onerous regulations with considerable economic impact, mostly based on skewed science.
This skew is evident because the EPA depends on statistical associations between PM2.5 and health outcomes, not on direct causal biological mechanisms. However, the way epidemiologists make statistical associations for PM2.5 and several health outcomes—death, heart attacks and asthma—does not pass independent statistical smell tests. It favors producing false findings that would not reproduce if done properly. Here is part of the problem: epidemiologists conduct large numbers of statistical tests in a study (called multiple testing).
A close look at 70 epidemiology studies making claims that PM2.5 is harmful to humans shows that epidemiologists can often conduct over 13,000 statistical tests in a single study. For any given number of statistical tests performed on the same set of data, 5 percent are expected to yield a false result. A study with 13,000 statistical tests could have as many as 0.05 x 13,000 = 650 false results!
Epidemiologists use advanced statistical software, and they can easily perform this many or more tests in a study. They can cherry pick 10 or 20 of their most interesting (surprising) findings that PM2.5 is harmful. Then can they write up and publish a nice, tight research paper that easily fools editors and peer reviewers—which are mostly false, irreproducible findings. The other possibility is publication bias—editors and peer reviewers give these papers a pass and reject other papers that do not show surprising results to support a paradigm that PM2.5 is harmful.
Mainstream media and the public have not a clue about and appear uninterested in glaring biases in epidemiology research that cause false findings—multiple testing and other forms of analysis manipulation, cherry picking results, selective reporting, and broken peer review.
The process further derails with government involvement. Bureaucrats in government who fund this type of research depend on regulations to support their existence. Over the past 40 years the EPA has slowly imposed increasingly restrictive regulation of PM2.5. However, it is apparent that bureaucrats lack an understanding of, or willfully ignore, skewed science and other biases in research used for PM2.5 regulation. They, along with environmentalists, continuously push for tighter air quality regulation based on false findings.
There is a burden to society that lurks behind the intentions of epidemiologists and government bureaucrats. They collectively skew results towards justifying regulation of PM2.5, while almost always keeping their data sets private. The costs of insufficiently substantiated environmental regulation can become exorbitant.
A perfect example is estimated costs requiring ships to use “cleaner fuel” with less sulfur to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions. The EPA argued that the move to low-sulfur ship fuel could prevent 14,000 deaths each year by 2020. The inferred health-related benefits are estimated to be more than $104 billion per year in 2020. Yet a growing body of research fails to support the EPA’s argument. This research provides evidence that sulfur dioxide in outdoor air is not associated with death, heart attacks, asthma or lung cancer.
Americans may be paying over $1 trillion per decade to satisfy a regulation with no real scientific foundation or public health benefit! The EPA issues an extraordinary number of regulations, which affect every area of the economy and constrict everyday freedoms. If the long-term cost of one regulation on one industry amounts to $1 trillion, the cost of many regulations on every industry is uncountable trillions.
Extensive regulatory schemes can amount to a competitive advantage for large companies over small ones. Large companies have greater capacity to comply with an extensive regulatory framework. Furthermore, regulatory costs are ultimately borne by American consumers. These costs can have negative health benefits, such as those that follow from increased unemployment.
The practice of epidemiology is largely based on university research. Far too many epidemiologists and government bureaucrats, and a distressingly large amount of the public, believe that university science is superior to industrial science. However, we should treat it with the same skepticism as we would industry research.
Epidemiologists, and government bureaucrats who depend on their work to justify air quality regulation, proceed with too much self-confidence. They have an insufficient sense of the need for awareness of just how much statistics must remain an exercise in measuring uncertainty rather than establishing certainty. This broken process plagues government policy by providing a false level of certainty to a body of research that justifies air quality regulation.
The burden to society will only worsen with the EPA continuing down the slippery slope of using skewed science. Americans need to be aware that current science being used at the EPA for setting air quality regulation is skewed, obviously expensive and of dubious public health benefit.
Hats off to Texas: Over the weekend, it became the third U.S. state, after Utah and Oklahoma, to make reasonable childhood independence the law of the land. Now parents who live there cannot be investigated for neglect simply for giving their kids some old-fashioned freedom.
Amazingly, the bill became law on the 11th anniversary of "Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day," a holiday created by Free-Range Kids and once considered so wacky—so dangerous—that it was splashed across the pages of The New York Daily News. The paper quoted the mother of an eight-year-old, saying: "Never in a million years would I do something that stupid. When the kid turns 18—fine. Until then you watch them." And it spoke to an "expert"—the chief psychologist at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn—who said that "a seven-year-old shouldn't be left alone in a backyard, much less a park."
Too bad for that shrink. When the Texas law goes into effect in September, more than one tenth of all Americans will live under laws passed with the help of Let Grow, the nonprofit that grew out of Free-Range Kids, that insists our kids are smarter and safer than our cowering culture gives them credit for.
HB 567 enjoyed bipartisan support, sailing through the Texas Senate unopposed, and winning the House with a vote of 143 to 5.
The statute enshrining childhood independence is part of a bigger children's services bill ensuring Texans that the state will not intervene and remove kids from their homes unless the danger is so great and so likely that it outweighs the trauma of entering the foster care system.
"Removing a child from his or her family causes immense harm to the child and should only be done when absolutely necessary," said Rep. James Frank, a Republican who was one of the bill's co-authors. This new law—"the product of years of work from stakeholders of all types and legislators of both parties," he said—gives the authorities those marching orders.
It does so because it "changes our definition of neglect," Rep. Gene Wu, a Democrat, told the assembly. From now on, kids will be removed only when "they're actually in danger, and not just the possibility of danger."
This way the bill not only protects parents who want to let their kids play outside, "it also enables parents struggling to make ends meet to make childcare arrangements that make life easier rather than harder," says Diane Redleaf, Let Grow's legal consultant. In other words, it prevents poverty from being mistaken for neglect.
Andrew Brown, distinguished senior fellow for child and family policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, thinks the bill will come as a major relief to working families.
"Say you're a single mom and you have to catch the 7:15 a.m. bus to get to work but your babysitter's running late," says Brown. "If the mom misses that bus, she gets to work late and loses her job. How does that help the child, if now she can't pay her rent? So she leaves her child home alone for 15 minutes." The new law makes sure that such circumstances do not result in neglect charges.
It would have been most welcome in 2015 when Houston mom Laura Browder was arrested for having her kids wait 30 feet away from her in a food court when she had a job interview there and didn't have time to line up child care. The arrest came after she had accepted the new job.
At the same time, the bill also helps folks who choose not to helicopter parent, like Austin mom Kari Anne Roy, whose case made headlines in 2014. Roy was at home while her six-year-old played within view of the house for about ten minutes. A passerby marched him home and called the cops. Police officers paid Roy a visit, and a week later, child services interviewed each of her children separately. They asked the boy, 12, if he had ever done drugs, and the girl, eight, if she had seen movies with people's private parts—something she'd never even heard of. "Thank you, CPS," Roy said.
That kind of thing is in the rearview mirror now, in Texas.
"You had the most right-wing members of the legislature signed on with most left-wing members," said Brown. The bill was so popular "because it's a common sense reform."
As common sense as taking your kids to the park and leaving them there when you know they're ready—no matter what some passerby or bureaucrat thinks.
In the first political test of voters' attitudes towards pandemic lockdowns, Pennsylvanians voted Tuesday to curtail unilateral executive power over emergency declarations.
By slim margins, voters approved a pair of proposed constitutional amendments that took aim at Gov. Tom Wolf's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which included several broad orders limiting public gatherings and economic activity during the past year. Both amendments will transfer significant power from the executive branch to the state legislature.
The first proposed amendment would allow the state legislature to end a governor's emergency declaration with a simple majority vote—rather than the two-thirds vote currently required. The second would automatically end an emergency declaration after 21 days unless the state legislature votes to extend it. Under current law, an emergency declaration lasts for 90 days and the governor can extend one indefinitely.
With slightly more than 1 million votes counted in both contests as of Wednesday morning, when the Associated Press called the races, both proposed amendments were supported by about 53 percent of voters.
The success of these ballot measures could change how Pennsylvania handles future emergencies, but Tuesday's results are also largely about politics—and could foreshadow similar efforts in other states.
Critics of Wolf's handling of COVID-19 accused him of running an opaque and arbitrary pandemic regime that forced supposedly "non-essential" businesses to close with no input from the legislature even months after the most acute phase of the emergency had passed. Republicans control Pennsylvania's state legislature, but they lacked the necessary two-thirds majority to do anything substantial about Wolf's emergency declaration during the past year. So they put the amendments on the ballot.
Wolf told the Associated Press this week that the ballot questions "undermine our democracy" because they seek to "take away our ability to respond to emergencies."
While they are undoubtedly the result of a partisan grudge match in Harrisburg, the two ballot questions also represented the first time that voters have been asked to weigh in on state-level lockdowns and the unilateral power many governors exercised (to varying degrees in different places) during the pandemic. As America puts COVID-19 behind us, voters and policymakers necessarily must grapple with difficult questions about the powers that officials should have in an emergency. Even if there was conclusive evidence that broad economic lockdowns were a net positive by some all-encompassing metric, the legitimacy of a given policy is ultimately determined by the voters.
In Pennsylvania, which is about as good of a political microcosm for the country as you'll find, voters remain sharply divided about our pandemic-era politics. But skeptics of executive power have scored the first victory in what figures to be a long fight.
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) is proposing to implement new regulations that would force companies in the Denver Metro/North Front Range area with more than 100 employees to create “Employee Transportation Reduction Plans (ETRP).” This is part of the “ambitious” 2019 law that requires a 26% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 and a 90% reduction from 2005 levels by 2050.
CDPHE is a cabinet-level state agency that falls under the purview of Governor Polis. The new regulations would be implemented under the authority of the Colorado Air Quality Control Commission (AQCC), which is controlled by Polis appointees.
“That’s the most alarming part of what they’re trying to do,” Patrick McConnell, Coalitions Director for the Colorado chapter of Americans for Prosperity told Complete Colorado. “Legislating through the rule-making process is not the way to go about this. It needs transparency and accountability. This is something they should put through the people’s elected representatives.”
If Polis is bypassing the people’s elected representatives — Democrats, mostly — it’s because he knows his plan would get them unelected.
ONLY THREE? Three False Narratives Being Used in the IRS Funding Push. “The more government promises increased benefits to a broader segment of the population, the more desperate it becomes to collect money. And as the demand for revenue grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to break thumbs to get it. This attitude is abundantly clear in the messages sent to the public regarding the president’s proposed appropriation. What is not abundantly clear, however, is that the push to provide the IRS with more enforcement resources is driven by at least three false narratives. Let’s evaluate each in turn. . . . The single most important thing Congress can do to have a positive effect on compliance is to radically simplify the tax code.”
Once you realize that this is about power, not revenue, the contradictions vanish.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that warrantless gun confiscation from Americans’ homes is unconstitutional, voting unanimously on the side of a Rhode Island man whose firearms were taken by law enforcement without a warrant after his wife expressed concerns that he might hurt himself.
According to Caniglia v Strom, a lower court had previously determined that police confiscating the guns without a warrant fell under the Fourth Amendment’s “community caretaking” exception, but a 9-0 vote from the nation’s top court struck down that ruling.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the unanimous opinion for the Supreme Court, stating that law enforcement can execute “many civic tasks in modern society,” but there is “not an open-ended license to perform them anywhere.”
“The very core of the Fourth Amendment,” Thomas wrote, is the “right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable search and seizure.”
“Community caretaking.” The full opinion is here. It’s very short and to the point.
HE ALSO GOT THOUSANDS OF ELDERLY PEOPLE NEEDLESSLY INFECTED AND KILLED: Governor Cuomo exempts faculty and staff from COVID vaccine mandate on public campuses. “College students at the State University of New York system and the City University of New York system will be required to receive a COVID vaccine in order to learn on campus, under a new directive from Governor Andrew Cuomo. However, the Democratic governor did not mandate the vaccine for faculty and staff, even though older people are more likely to die and suffer severe cases of COVID than generally younger college students.”
I wonder if this was allowed to happen to jumpstart a new state centered war against crypto. Also, can't crypto transactions be tracked? That seems counterintuitive to me. Everything is recorded in the blockchain, no?
EVERYBODY BUT FACEBOOK LIVES HAPPILY EVER AFTER? Nobody’s Allowing Facebook To Track Them. So What Now? “Facebook was right to be afraid of iOS 14.5. Apple’s new privacy tracking opt-out is proving even more popular than expected: About 85% of users worldwide have opted out of ad-tracking when prompted, Flurry Analytics found, and that number leaps to around 94% for U.S. users.”
While on tour in Australia in 2010, my friend, David Archibald said to me “Ocean Acidification is the last refuge of the climate scoundrels”. It appears he may be right.…
Dr. Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul had a contentious exchange at a Senate hearing yesterday. The gist – Se. Paul said the NIH funded ‘gain of function’ research (say, what!) at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and Dr. Fauci emphatically denied it.
PolitiFact then ran a non-fact check interview with Dr. Fauci in which he denied it again.
But – awkward moment – in a Feb 2021 Fact Check, PolitiFact noted as an aside that, per MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt, the NIH had funded gain of function research at the WIV. In that article they exonerated Dr. Fauci of a broader claim, that he had funded research that directly led to the COVID-19 virus.
The Team Fauci spinners will be earning their paychecks today. Let’s dive in. . . . Here is the paper in question, which acknowledges funding from the NIH. The bit on recombining genes and testing the lab creations for infectivity is excerpted below.
Does Team Fauci wants to insist this is not gain of function research?
Plus: “And do note: Nicholas Wade, formerly of the NY Times, Science and Nature points an accusing finger at Dr. Fauci and the NIH funding process. As does Nicholson Baker in NY Magazine.”
When deputies in Pasquotank County, Tennessee, shot and killed Andrew Brown Jr. while attempting to serve a drug warrant, the whole event was captured on body camera footage.
So we should be able to see it and judge whether the deputies were in danger when they opened fire on Brown, who was behind the wheel of his car at the time of the April shooting. But thanks to North Carolina's extremely restrictive body camera laws, a judge is refusing to release the footage to the public and is even restricting how much Brown's family can see.
Brown, 42, a father of seven, was killed on the morning of April 21. Police say they went to his house with a search warrant looking for crack cocaine, based on information from confidential informants—circumstances that should at this point raise any number of red flags with the public.
Brown apparently attempted to leave the scene in his car. What happened next is not clear. The authorities say Brown's vehicle made contact with law enforcement officers twice as they tried to get him to exit his car, and then they opened fire. Seven deputies were involved, and Brown was shot five times, once in the back of the head, according to an independent autopsy. The deputies are now on administrative leave during the investigation.
So far, Brown's family has seen only a 20-second clip of the body camera footage. They claim it shows an "execution" and that both of Brown's hands were on the steering wheel when he was shot. They say the evidence shows he was trying to leave the scene, not strike the deputies.
The public has seen absolutely none of the footage, even though Pasquotank County Sheriff Tommy Wooten has publicly called for it to be released.
But it's not his call, nor is it Brown's family's. That's because in 2016, North Carolina passed a terrible law that exempted police body camera footage from the state's public records laws. Instead it gave judges the power to decide when and how much body camera footage may be released.
At the end of April, a judge ruled that the footage of Brown's shooting would not be made public as yet, despite the wishes of both the family and the sheriff's department. On Tuesday, the family will be allowed to see more footage of the shooting, but the judge has ordered that the faces of deputies involved be blurred so they cannot be identified.
When the law was originally passed, Reasonwarned that North Carolina's law would not serve justice. This isn't the only time that forecast has been borne out. In 2017, a judge blocked release of the footage of a teen's violent encounter with the police despite the wishes of the family and the City Council of Greensboro, where the incident took place.
The lack of transparency in Brown's case has led to protest marches, as well it should. Body cameras as a police transparency tool don't work if the footage is kept secret. The fact that George Floyd's death was captured on video, including body camera footage, played a major role in former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin's subsequent murder conviction.
Not everybody who watched the footage came away believing Chauvin was guilty. But at least that was an informed conclusion. Something similar may happen with Brown. People may watch it and some may agree with the family that shooting the man was completely unnecessary. Others may decide that the danger to deputies presented by the car was actually real and therefore the shooting is justified. The point is transparency. The more the public is able to witness police behavior, the more the public is able to decide what police behavior is acceptable.
MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is substantially more effective than psychotherapy alone, according to a study reported today in Nature Medicine. The results of the Phase 3 clinical trial, which are consistent with earlier research, mean that MDMA, which was banned in 1985, is on track to be approved as a prescription drug by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as soon as 2023.
"These data indicate that, compared with manualized therapy with inactive placebo, MDMA-assisted therapy is highly efficacious in individuals with severe PTSD, and treatment is safe and well-tolerated, even in those with comorbidities," say University of California, San Francisco, neuroscientist Jennifer Mitchell and her co-authors. "We conclude that MDMA-assisted therapy represents a potential breakthrough treatment that merits expedited clinical evaluation."
The FDA officially recognized MDMA as a "breakthrough therapy" in 2017, meaning it "may demonstrate substantial improvement over existing therapies on one or more clinically significant endpoints." That designation signaled that the FDA would expedite development and approval of MDMA.
The double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, which was sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), confirms MDMA's potential. The study included 90 subjects with "severe" PTSD who were randomly assigned to receive either MDMA or a placebo on three occasions. All of them participated in three preparatory sessions and nine "integrative therapy sessions."
In the MDMA group, scores on the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale for DSM-5 had fallen by an average of 24.4 points 18 weeks after the study began, compared to 13.9 points in the placebo group. "Functional impairment" based on the Sheehan Disability Scale fell by an average of more than three points in the MDMA group and two points in the placebo group. The subjects who received MDMA also showed bigger improvements in mood as measured by the Beck Depression Inventory II. Their scores dropped by an average of nearly 20 points, compared to about 11 points in the placebo group.
"Three doses of MDMA given in conjunction with manualized therapy over the course of 18 weeks results in a significant and robust attenuation of PTSD symptoms and functional impairment," Mitchell et al. note. "MDMA also significantly mitigated depressive symptoms."
These results are striking but not surprising; psychotherapists have long observed similar effects. As the authors of an earlier MAPS-sponsored study put it, MDMA-assisted therapy is "aimed at allowing participants to revisit traumatic experiences while staying emotionally engaged even during intense feelings of anxiety, pain, or grief without feeling overwhelmed."
Mitchell et al. suggest that "MDMA may exert its therapeutic effects through a well-conserved mechanism of amygdalar serotonergic function that regulates fear-based behaviors and contributes to the maintenance of PTSD." They say MDMA "may facilitate the processing and release of particularly intractable, potentially developmental, fear-related memories," perhaps "by reopening an oxytocin-dependent critical period of neuroplasticity that typically closes after adolescence."
The researchers hypothesize that "the pharmacological properties of MDMA, when combined with therapy, may produce a 'window of tolerance,' in which participants are able to revisit and process traumatic content without becoming overwhelmed or encumbered by hyperarousal and dissociative symptoms." The aim is to "facilitate recall of negative or threatening memories with greater self-compassion and less PTSD-related shame and anger." That process seems to be enhanced by "the acute prosocial and interpersonal effects of MDMA," which "may support the quality of the therapeutic alliance, a potentially important factor relating to PTSD treatment adherence and outcome."
Last year Reason's Nick Gillespie interviewed MAPS founder Rick Doblin, a co-author of the new study. "Although MAPS is doing everything by the book in seeking approval of MDMA as a prescription drug, Doblin's vision goes beyond such doctor-approved uses," Gillespie noted. "He aspires to a world in which people can use psychedelics responsibly without permission from physicians or priests."
Doblin does not accept the idea that psychoactive substances are inherently good or bad. "Psychedelics are tools," he said. "They're not good or bad in and of themselves. It's how they are used. It's the relationship you have with them." He argued that "people should have the fundamental human right to change their consciousness."
It took six months and the intervention of a local TV station, but officials in Washington, D.C., finally dismissed $5,000 in speeding tickets and penalties issued to Doug and Nancy Nelson, tickets for violations that were actually committed by the people who carjacked Doug Nelson and stole their vehicle at gunpoint. "I got a police report," said Nancy. "How simple is that to say, 'Oh, these are victims, let us help them.'" Police recovered the vehicle pretty quickly, but the tag was missing, and the city refused to issue a new one until the tickets were paid. That meant the couple has been unable to drive their only vehicle for the past six months.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been largely missing in action when it comes to effectively responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. The agency'schaoticresponses during the Trump administration have now given way to absurdlycautiousapproaches under the Biden administration.
Case in point: On April 27, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky grudgingly acknowledged that fully vaccinated people could gather outdoors and conduct outdoor activities without wearing a mask. She cited increasing data that a person is much more likely to get infected with COVID-19 through close extended contacts indoors. Walensky added, "Less than 10 percent of documented transmission in many studies has occurred outdoors. We also know there's almost a 20-fold increased risk of transmission in the indoor setting rather than the outdoor setting."
As Walensky testified today before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, CDC officials based their highly cautious threshold estimate of an outdoor infection risk of 10 percent on a February meta-analysis in The Journal of Infectious Diseases.
As David Leonhardt over at The New York Timesmakes clear today, Walensky and her agency are wildly overstating the risks of getting infected outdoors. As he explains:
That [10 percent] benchmark "seems to be a huge exaggeration," as Dr. Muge Cevik, a virologist at the University of St. Andrews, said. In truth, the share of transmission that has occurred outdoors seems to be below 1 percent and may be below 0.1 percent, multiple epidemiologists told me. The rare outdoor transmission that has happened almost all seems to have involved crowded places or close conversation.
Saying that less than 10 percent of Covid transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year. (The actual worldwide number is around 150.) It's both true and deceiving.…
These recommendations would be more grounded in science if anywhere close to 10 percent of Covid transmission were occurring outdoors. But it is not. There is not a single documented Covid infection anywhere in the world from casual outdoor interactions, such as walking past someone on a street or eating at a nearby table.
Keep in mind that the data suggesting that the risk of acquiring COVID-19 through outdoor infection is around 0.1 percent (1 in 1,000) were gathered before vaccines became widely available.
So what do the data say about how protective the COVID-19 vaccines are, irrespective of indoor or outdoor exposures? Even the CDC reports that as of April 26, among the 95 million fully vaccinated Americans only 9,245 had experienced breakthrough COVID-19 infections. Therefore, the risk that a fully vaccinated person wandering about in the wild would be diagnosed with COVID-19 after vaccination is 0.001 percent (basically, 1 in 100,000). Admittedly, some of the reduced risk may stem from continued mask wearing on the part of fully vaccinated people, but even so, it is clear that vaccination confers a huge amount of protection against the virus.
As Leonhardt observes, "The scientific evidence points to a conclusion that is much simpler than the C.D.C.'s message: Masks make a huge difference indoors and rarely matter outdoors."
Over at Stat news, Leana Wen, a George Washington University health policy professor, declared, "If [the CDC's] advice is too disconnected from reality, and if they are too slow, then they make themselves irrelevant." That's entirely correct.
Now that COVID-19 vaccines are in surplus, there is no time like the present to protect yourself and your family against this scourge.
Buck is leading this charge while taking thousands and thousands of dollars this year from special interests and lobbyists backing the legislation. In total, in just the past two months, recent Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings show Buck has raked in at least $18,000 from lobbyists, special interest groups, and PACs for organizations that support the legislation he is championing that would fundamentally change the media and technology landscape.
The bill, opposed by both the full Judiciary Committee’s ranking member, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who warned the bill would give establishment media outlets “cartel power,” as well as House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, who called it “the antithesis of conservatism,” is called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA). It would create a special legal exemption in antitrust law for media companies to allow them to band together in a manner that would otherwise be illegal so they could collectively bargain with big tech companies.
The controversial legislation is the brainchild of a special interest group called the News Media Alliance (NMA). NMA, which is technically a 501(c)6 as classified by the IRS, is a membership-based advocacy organization with top establishment media organizations as leading board members.
Plus: “Backers of the legislation believe it may rein in big tech companies by forcing them to pay news organizations for content they use on their platforms, but as Breitbart News has demonstrated, the legislation has a number of flaws and loopholes that would actually end up empowering big tech and big media companies, while still hurting independent and smaller publishers.”
