“the average American student is “less than halfway to a full academic recovery” from the effects of the pandemic.”
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“Many factors probably contribute to students’ slow recovery, experts say. Some may have missed “foundational pieces” of reading and math in 2020 and 2021, Lewis said. Learning loss can be like a “compounding debt,” she explained, with skills missed in early grades causing bigger and bigger problems as kids get older. Chronic absenteeism also remains a big obstacle to learning. Twenty-six percent of students were considered chronically absent in 2022-23, up from 13 percent in 2019-2020.
Children who are in kindergarten and first grade today were too young to experience the shift to remote learning in 2020 and 2021. But they were more likely to be isolated from other children and adults, Lake said. And like their older counterparts, many also experienced the trauma of deaths in the family, poverty, and parents out of work, all of which could have affected their social and emotional development.
Some have argued that pandemic learning loss shouldn’t be a concern because all students were affected — maybe, the argument goes, learning is just different now.
But that’s not the case, experts say.
Students from wealthier school districts are already well on their way to recovery, while students in lower-income areas continue to struggle. “Not everybody is in the same boat,” Kane said.”
“Prior to COVID-19, Fauci had long supported funding pandemic research that other scientists found risky, if not downright dangerous.
In 2005, as NIAID director, he praised researchers who’d used a grant from his agency to resurrect the virus that had caused the Spanish flu pandemic. Better understanding that virus would help prevent future diseases, he argued. “The certain benefits to be obtained by a robust and responsible research agenda aimed at developing the means to detect, prevent and treat [future pandemics] far outweigh any theoretical risks,” he said in an October 2005 statement co-authored with then–CDC Director Julie Gerberding.
This wasn’t a universal opinion at the NIAID. The agency’s chief scientist described this approach to pandemic prevention as “looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.”
Fauci would continue to praise and fund this kind of research. In 2011, researchers at the University of Wisconsin and at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands managed to manipulate the virus H5N1 (which had been responsible for a 2004 bird flu epidemic in Asia) to transmit between mammals, a “gain of function” for a virus that had heretofore only been able to pass from infected birds to humans. One of the researchers involved in the work would say the enhanced pathogen they’d created was “very, very bad news” and “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.” Fauci was more sanguine, telling The New York Times that “there is always a risk. But I believe the benefits are greater than the risks.””
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“In 2014, there was a series of embarrassing safety lapses at U.S. government labs, highlighting this risk.
Dozens of CDC employees were potentially exposed to live anthrax samples shipped by mistake to labs not equipped to handle them. At another CDC lab, a less dangerous version of bird flu was accidentally contaminated with deadly H5N1. Vials of smallpox capable of infecting people were stashed in a cabinet at an NIH lab, where they’d apparently been sitting for decades. None of these incidents were direct results of gain-of-function research. But they heightened the concern that researchers working to enhance deadly pathogens might do so in unsafe settings.”
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“In 2021, Fauci said the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” That wasn’t true. What EcoHealth was doing in Wuhan clearly met the widely understood definition of gain-of-function research.
In his June 2024 testimony, Fauci dodged accusations that he lied by saying that while EcoHealth’s work might have met a generic definition of gain-of-function research, it didn’t meet the precise definition established in the P3CO framework.
Fauci said that every time he mentioned gain-of-function research, “the definition that I use is not my personal definition; it is a codified, regulatory and operative definition.” That definition, he said, “had nothing to do with me.”
On the contrary, regulatory definitions had quite a bit to do with Fauci. They were designed with the expectation that he and his fellow public health bureaucrats would use discretion and good judgment when making decisions. The relevant regulatory language included lots of “likelys and highlys and reasonably anticipated,” says Gerald Epstein, a former director at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy who wrote the P3CO policy. “These words are inherently subjective. You can’t not be. You’ve got to be making judgment calls on something that does not yet exist.” Those subjective definitions gave Fauci and his NIAID underlings considerable room to decide what research required additional review.”
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“We probably won’t ever definitively discover the origins of COVID-19.”
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“Chinese officials obstructed any investigation into the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In September 2019, the Associated Press reported, the institute took its database of viruses offline. It also hasn’t made public lab notebooks and other materials that might shed light on exactly what kinds of work it was doing in the lead-up to the pandemic. In late 2019, the Chinese government also exterminated animals and disinfected the Wuhan wet market. If COVID did leap from animal to human in the Wuhan market, as many natural origin proponents argue, that evidence is gone.
What we’re left with is studying the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself and whatever information can be gleaned from the U.S.-funded research that went on at Wuhan leading up to the pandemic.
On both fronts, Fauci, his underlings at the NIAID, and NIAID-funded scientists involved with work at Wuhan have worked to conceal information and discredit notions that COVID might have leaked from a lab.
In late January 2020, Fauci’s aides flagged the NIAID’s support of EcoHealth’s Wuhan research in emails to their boss. A few weeks later, Fauci and Daszak would go on Newt Gingrich’s podcast to dismiss the idea that COVID-19 came from the Wuhan lab, calling such arguments “conspiracy theories.”
Both men also worked to shape the discourse behind the scenes away from any focus on a lab leak. Daszak organized a group letter of scientists in The Lancet, the U.K.’s top medical journal, declaring that they “stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” Daszak did not disclose his relationship to the Wuhan lab when organizing this letter; The Lancet’s editor would eventually concede that this was improper.
In testimony to the House coronavirus subcommittee in May 2024, Daszak would claim the “conspiracy theories” mentioned in the Lancet letter referred only to such wild early pandemic notions that COVID had pieces of HIV or snake DNA inserted into it. He said a word limit prevented him from being more precise.
Fauci, meanwhile, would help corral virologists into publishing the widely cited “proximal origin” paper in early 2020. In the paper, the authors flatly declared that “we do not believe any type of laboratory-leak scenario is plausible.”
Yet troves of private messages and emails released by the House subcommittee’s investigation show that the authors privately expressed far more openness to a lab leak theory.
One of the paper’s authors, Scripps Research evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, privately rated a lab leak as “highly likely.” But Andersen had a pending $8.9 million grant application with the NIAID as the paper was drafted. That grant was later approved. In an email, one of the paper’s authors, Edward Holmes, references “pressure from on high” during the drafting process.
The authors of the proximal origin paper say they merely had their minds changed while drafting the paper. They were just following the scientific method.”
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“Fauci’s best defense is that he ran a sprawling agency that doled out billions of dollars in grants. Even the most detail-obsessed administrator couldn’t possibly keep track of every single program and project. And U.S. officials had limited control over what happened in the distant, opaque Wuhan lab.
But even if that’s true, it’s an admission of administrative negligence, since the oversight protocols weren’t followed. It also implies a dramatic failure of the risky research that Fauci championed for pandemic prevention. As Ridley says, the pandemic “occurred with the very viruses that there was the most attention paid to, in the very area where there was the most research going on, where there was the biggest program looking for potential pandemic pathogens, and yet they failed to see this one coming.” At a minimum, gain-of-function research didn’t protect the public from the pandemic.
Meanwhile, the more direct case against Fauci is strong: Not only was he an ardent supporter of research widely believed to be risky, but he manipulated bureaucratic protocols in order to avoid scrutiny of that research, then responded evasively when called to account for his actions. At least one of the programs born out of Fauci’s risky research crusade was pursuing exactly the type of viral enhancements that were present in COVID-19, and that research was conducted at the Wuhan virology lab in the very same city where the virus originated. Lab leak proponents cite the virus’s transmissibility as evidence for a Wuhan leak: After all, EcoHealth was trying to create pathogens primed to spread rapidly in humans.
The evidence is not fully conclusive. But it seems reasonably likely that Fauci pushed for what his peers repeatedly said was dangerous research, that some of that dangerous research produced a deadly viral pathogen that escaped the lab, and that Fauci helped cover up evidence and arguments for its origins.”
“A few years out from the start of the pandemic, it does appear that the rise in homicides in the United States was unique. According to multiple studies and a systematic review of crime data for 2020, in most countries crime fell following Covid-19 lockdowns, then gradually returned to their pre-pandemic levels once the lockdown measures lifted. Homicide was the exception to the rule — but not the way it was in the United States.
Homicides around the world, according to the 46 studies the authors reviewed, didn’t change significantly due to the pandemic. “Most studies reported no relationship between Covid-19 and homicides,” the authors of the study wrote. A majority of the studies, they noted, found no relationship between the implementation or easing of lockdown measures and killings.
The Small Arms Survey, which gathers and analyzes data about firearms ownership and violence across the world, also found that the global rate of violent deaths decreased worldwide in 2020.
What was different in the United States?
“There was no other country that experienced this kind of sudden increase in gun violence,” says Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton University who studies the intersections of urban segregation, economic inequality, and violence. It was gun violence, specifically, that sent violent crime soaring. Americans bought guns in record numbers during the pandemic, and according to an analysis by Rob Arthur and Asher for Vox, there’s evidence that more people were carrying guns in 2020 — even before crime soared that summer. “Guns don’t necessarily create violence on their own, but they make violence more lethal,” Sharkey says.
While experts caution that it’s difficult to definitively prove what caused the rise in violent crime, there are a few other factors that likely contributed to it.
One was the killing of George Floyd by police and the unrest surrounding it, accompanied by a withdrawal in policing that followed. Previous research has shown that high-profile incidents of police violence correspond with a pullback by police and a rise in crime — specifically, robberies and murders. Data following the unrest after Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis and elsewhere shows a marked decline in policing and arrests that summer.”
“You can add the Internal Revenue Service to the ranks of federal agencies conceding that raining taxpayer money on all and sundry to offset the negative effects of pandemic-era closures didn’t go as well as intended. Not only was a program meant to offset the cost of paying workers during lockdowns and voluntary social-distancing prone to being gamed, but the “vast majority” of claims submitted to the program show evidence of being fraudulent.”
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“In the course of a detailed review of the Employee Retention Credit, “the IRS identified between 10% and 20% of claims fall into what the agency has determined to be the highest-risk group, which show clear signs of being erroneous claims for the pandemic-era credit,” the IRS announced June 20. “In addition to this highest risk group, the IRS analysis also estimates between 60% and 70% of the claims show an unacceptable level of risk.”
The Employee Retention Credit was offered to businesses that were shut down by government COVID-19 orders in 2020 or the first three quarters of 2021, experienced a required decline in gross receipts during that period, or qualified as a recovery startup business at the end of 2021. But it was clear early on that scammers were taking advantage of giveaways of taxpayer money, either to claim it for themselves or to pose as middlemen helping unwitting business owners file claims.
In March of 2023, the tax agency warned of “blatant attempts by promoters to con ineligible people to claim the credit.” In September of that year, it stopped processing claims amidst growing evidence that vast numbers of applications were “improper,” as the IRS delicately puts it. In March 2024, the agency announced that its Voluntary Disclosure Program had recovered $1 billion (since raised to over $2 billion) in improper payouts from participants who got to keep 20 percent of the take.
Ultimately, only “between 10% and 20% of the ERC claims show a low risk” for fraud, even by generous federal standards for throwing other people’s money at problems largely of government creation.”
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“”The total amount of fraud across all UI [unemployment insurance] programs (including the new emergency programs) during the COVID-19 pandemic was likely between $100 billion and $135 billion—or 11% to 15% of the total UI benefits paid out during the pandemic,” the Government Accountability Office warned last September.
Earlier, the Small Business Administration’s Inspector General found more than $200 billion stolen from the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). “This means at least 17 percent of all COVID-19 EIDL and PPP funds were disbursed to potentially fraudulent actors,” noted the report.
With between 70 percent and 90 percent of claims for the Employee Retention Credit identified as likely scams, either the IRS is a stand-out magnet for grifters or other agencies need to return to their own investigations with a somewhat more skeptical eye.”