“These latest NAEP results looked at achievement for fourth and eighth graders in reading and math. Overall, test scores declined slightly when compared to 2022, the last time students were tested and still remained below pre-pandemic levels. However, the most revealing results came when separating student performance based on percentile. While students performing in the 90th or 75th percentile have mostly rebounded, declines for students performing the worst were much steeper. For example, fourth-grade math scores have returned to pre-pandemic levels for high-achieving students, while the lowest-achieving students have seen an eight-point drop in scores since 2019, declining from 199 to 191 on a 500-point scale.”
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“”If we’re saying that a third of this year’s ninth graders are below NAEP Basic, we’re saying that one-third of these kids likely can’t tell us the main idea of a text,” Julia Rafal-Baer, a National Assessments Governing Board member and former assistant commissioner of the New York State Education Department, told the education-focused news website The 74. “They can’t draw any explicit features from that text. What does that mean for these kids? What’s the plan to re-engage them and improve their outcomes?”
These results show that, while children who were already doing well have managed to rebound from pandemic score declines, the children who are struggling have continued to face further difficulties, even as pandemic lockdowns shift further out of view.”
https://reason.com/2025/01/31/years-after-the-pandemic-the-lowest-performing-students-are-still-significantly-behind/
“In 2019, the average girl scored a 517 on the assessment, which is measured on a 1000-point scale, and boys scored a 514, just a three-point difference. In 2023, boys’ scores had dropped 19 points on average, while girls’ scores dropped an astonishing 36 points on average.
“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,” writes education reporter Matt Barnum. “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.”
Why is this happening? Researchers aren’t sure. One theory is that girls may have taken on more domestic tasks than boys during pandemic lockdowns (for example, taking care of younger siblings) and thus may have missed out on more learning. Another is that girls tend to have fewer behavioral issues, meaning that struggling girls weren’t called to educators’ attention in the same way many boys were.”
https://reason.com/2025/01/09/girls-may-have-been-hit-hardest-by-pandemic-learning-loss/
“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.”
https://reason.com/2024/09/14/faucis-pandemic/
“Of the more than 11,000 federal inmates who were released to home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic, 17 were returned to prison for committing new crimes, according to the Bureau of Prisons (BOP).”
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“of the 17, 10 committed drug crimes, while the rest of the charges included smuggling non-citizens, nonviolent domestic disturbance, theft, aggravated assault, and DUI.”