RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/27/scared-stupid-and-easily-manipulated-what-covid-has-revealed-about-the-nations-young/

The saying goes that crises reveal your true nature. If that’s the case, we are in big trouble, because what COVID has revealed about young people in America is not good.

A new Morning Consult poll out this week finds that young people are the most worried about getting COVID of any age group — even though their risk from the disease is negligible.

At the other end of the spectrum, the elderly are much less worried, even though they are at the highest risk of death.

The poll found that 23% of those between ages 18-34 are “very worried about getting sick from COVID-19 within the next year.” That’s the highest of any of the age groups broken out by the survey. Another 35% are “somewhat” worried. Just 38% say they aren’t worried.

Among those 65 and older, in contrast, only 17% are “very worried,” while 39% aren’t worried.

Why in the world are young people so terrified of COVID?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2022/01/26/cdc-covid-messaging-problems-fauci-rochelle-walensky/6563468001/?gnt-cfr=1

CDC chief Rochelle Walensky seeks professional coaching, but public needs more than sleek image. Not hyping threats or demonizing skeptics is a start

Americans don’t trust their public health experts, a serious problem in the best of times but downright dangerous amid a pandemic. Just 44% of Americans trust in the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, while only 40% trust Dr. Anthony Fauci (the nation’s point man on all things COVID) according to an NBC News survey conducted this month. Trust in politicians is even lower.

It’s perfectly understandable why Americans feel this way. At all levels, our public health agencies have been using contradicting claims and supposition masquerading as fact. And it’s not hard to diagnose the root of the problem. To quote the Captain’s speech in “Cool Hand Luke,” “what we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

Trust and public health

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-college-couldnt-get-away-bidens-high-court-criteria-supreme-court-racial-preferences-justice-breyer-11643236096?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The announcement of Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement has whistled the start of that Washington blood sport known as a Supreme Court confirmation. While the filibuster-free process guarantees President Joe Biden that he has the votes to pick anyone acceptable to all Senate Democrats, this fight is different from any in history in one respect. As a candidate, Mr. Biden pledged to select the next justice first and foremost on race and sex.

“I’m looking forward to making sure there’s a black woman on the Supreme Court, to make sure we, in fact, get every representation,” he said in a South Carolina debate. This reportedly helped win him the key endorsement of Rep. Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip.

With the court set to rule on racial preferences in college admissions, it raises the question of whether it is appropriate for a politician to use a criterion that the court itself has found unconstitutional for public educational institutions and unlawful for businesses.

It also means Mr. Biden’s short list will be much shorter than usual. The three leading candidates are Justice Leondra Krueger of the California Supreme Court, U.S. Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and U.S. District Judge Michelle Childs. These are all worthy candidates who could have been considered for any vacancy without declaring that they were qualified by virtue of filling a quota—an unfortunate implication for the ultimate nominee.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-high-cost-of-disparaging-natural-immunity-to-covid-vaccine-mandates-protests-fire-rehire-employment-11643214336?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Public-health officials ruined many lives by insisting that workers with natural immunity to Covid-19 be fired if they weren’t fully vaccinated. But after two years of accruing data, the superiority of natural immunity over vaccinated immunity is clear. By firing staff with natural immunity, employers got rid of those least likely to infect others. It’s time to reinstate those employees with an apology.

For most of last year, many of us called for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its data on reinfection rates, but the agency refused. Finally last week, the CDC released data from New York and California, which demonstrated natural immunity was 2.8 times as effective in preventing hospitalization and 3.3 to 4.7 times as effective in preventing Covid infection compared with vaccination.

Yet the CDC spun the report to fit its narrative, bannering the conclusion “vaccination remains the safest strategy.” It based this conclusion on the finding that hybrid immunity—the combination of prior infection and vaccination—was associated with a slightly lower risk of testing positive for Covid. But those with hybrid immunity had a similar low rate of hospitalization (3 per 10,000) to those with natural immunity alone. In other words, vaccinating people who had already had Covid didn’t significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization.

Similarly, the National Institutes of Health repeatedly has dismissed natural immunity by arguing that its duration is unknown—then failing to conduct studies to answer the question. Because of the NIH’s inaction, my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I conducted the study. We found that among 295 unvaccinated people who previously had Covid, antibodies were present in 99% of them up to nearly two years after infection. We also found that natural immunity developed from prior variants reduced the risk of infection with the Omicron variant. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of the two-dose Moderna vaccine against infection (not severe disease) declines to 61% against Delta and 16% against Omicron at six months, according to a recent Kaiser Southern California study. In general, Pfizer’s Covid vaccines have been less effective than Moderna’s.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-problem-with-holocaust-trivialization

“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could … cross the Alps into Switzerland,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a Washington rally this week to protest vaccine mandates. “You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did.”

Kennedy’s suggestion that people suffer more from vaccine mandates than the victims of Adolf Hitler’s reign is particularly disturbing. Holocaust “trivialization,” comparing other events to the Holocaust and thereby minimizing its significance, is not just morally reprehensible — it also complicates U.S. efforts to confront such global challenges as making peace, promoting human rights, and eradicating a pandemic.

Holocaust trivialization is inherently polarizing. Once one side of an issue accuses its opponents of a Holocaust-like action, the two sides retreat to their corners, far more inclined to fight than seek common ground. When protesters in London, Paris, and elsewhere last May compared Israel to Nazi Germany and suggested that it was conducting a Holocaust against the Palestinians, that further complicated efforts to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Over-the-top disparagement of the Jewish state also diverts global attention from the truly despicable human rights abuses by, for instance, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, which holds hundreds of thousands of people in internment camps; Xi Jinping’s China, which holds more than a million Muslim Uyghurs in prisons and “reeducation” camps; Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which stamps out any serious political or grassroots challenge to his rule; and Ali Khamenei’s Iran, which imprisons dissidents and treats women and minorities as second-class citizens.