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RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
June 25 to July 1, 2023 In RealClearInvestigations, Christian Britschgi reports that the federal program to compensate people suffering from adverse reactions to COVID jabs is adding seething frustration atop lasting injury to thousands -- a little-reported aftermath to the government’s much-criticized performance on the vaccines: -
Adele Fox of New Hampshire filed her claim two years ago for her chronic small-fiber neuropathy, pain and fatigue ‒ confirmed as a result of her Johnson & Johnson shot. She’s nevertheless one of the 10,887 people still hanging fire on compensation. -
“You’re not even hearing anything from the organization that’s supposed be helping you,” she says. “The phone keeps ringing, no one is emailing, nobody is doing anything.” -
As Fox learned the hard way, the government has two starkly different vaccine injury programs, which assume responsibility for compensation to shield drug makers from liability. -
One operates like a civil court with a neutral judge and has approved about 75 percent of claims, paying out hundreds of millions of dollars per year. -
But the program for COVID vaccine compensation, housed in an agency that had a role in approving the vaccines, has rejected almost every claim brought to it, awarding less than $10,000 since the pandemic.
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The federal Health Resources and Services Administration says the program is working to ramp up staffing to deal with its unanticipated high caseload. -
The feds' checkered past on COVID vaccines ranges from erratic booster advice to broad-brush mandates that cost vaccine resisters their jobs.
In RealClearInvestigations, Ben Weingarten examines a little-scrutinized feature of union collective-bargaining agreements: “official time” or “release time” provisions ‒ clauses that allow employees, including government workers paid by taxpayers, to engage in union-related activities full- or part-time during their working hours: -
Across the federal government, official time diverts more than $100 million in public funds toward union work annually. -
Combining the cost of release time at the state and local levels, one estimate puts the total bill for public-sector union activities at as high as $1 billion. -
Exhibit A is Randi Weingarten, 65, the teacher’s union leader who’s been on leave from Brooklyn’s Clara Barton High School for a quarter century. She stands to take an educators’ pension of $230,000 over her first 15 years of retirement ‒ on top of the more than $500,000 in annual salary and benefits she earns as a labor executive. -
The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest public-sector union, argues that official time “reduces employee turnover, improves customer service, [and] prevents costly litigation,” adding to “quality, productivity, and efficiency.”
Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Biden, Trump and the Beltway Other Noteworthy Articles and Series More confusing news about COVID-19. A report from the Director of National Intelligence concludes that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) “collaborated” with the Chinese military on coronavirus experiments in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the DNI also determined that the coronaviruses WIV researchers and People’s Liberation Army (PLA)-associated scientists worked on were unlikely to have been the cause of the pandemic. But given limited access to the lab, it is hard to know why the DNI is so certain that the “collaboration” between WIV researchers and PLA personnel focused “on biosafety and biosecurity projects” and the development of “therapeutics” relevant to the viruses. The DNI also challenges the widely reported claim – which suggests COVID-19 spread from a lab leak, not nature – that the first three patients to become ill with COVID-19 were lab researchers at the Wuhan Institute, according to other government officials interviewed by journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag and the Wall Street Journal. This article reports: The DNI report appears to contradict the journalists’ findings, stating that although “several WIV researchers were ill in Fall 2019 with symptoms; some of their symptoms were consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19,” adding their “symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases.” Given its desert location, it’s no surprise that Las Vegas already has more solar panels per capita than any other major U.S. metro outside Hawaii. And the city is bursting with single-family homes, warehouses and parking lots untouched by solar. Rooftop solar panels will not be enough to power the Sin City, so plans are already underway to carpet the surrounding desert with dozens of giant solar fields — some of them designed to supply power to California. This article reports that green energy providers are now encountering many of the arguments that fossil fuel producers have faced from green activists, including complaints that “those energy generators could imperil rare plants and slow-footed tortoises already threatened by rising temperatures.” After the killing of George Floyd in 2020, Denver became one of more than three dozen school districts across the country to remove police officers from its public schools. The cops may be coming back, following a sharp rise in violence after students returned from COVID-19 lockdowns. Now tensions are flaring outside the schools, this article reports, as some parents and leaders support the move, which others oppose: [Some] parents organized a 1,200-member Facebook group and began holding weekly news conferences to push for stronger safety measures. They brought in a metal detector to display and invited security experts to speak. … Board member Michelle Quattlebaum dismissed school district data showing overwhelming support among students and staff at high schools for campus police. She said she heard from Black students who had bad experiences with police and said they were afraid to share their opinion. “This topic is too important,” Quattlebaum shouted, after board President Xóchitl Gaytán cut off her microphone for speaking out of order. “I will continue to press back on systems and structures of oppression.” In a separate 2022 article for RCI, Vince Bielski reported on the tension in Denver and other school districts around the country that were embracing an alternative method of discipline, called “restorative practices,” even as school violence was rising sharply. Long pushed by racial justice groups, the method aims to curb suspensions and arrests that disproportionately affect students of color by replacing punishment with discussions about the causes and harmful impact of misbehavior. From the article: Denver, which pioneered restorative practices more than a decade ago and inspired districts to follow its lead, seems a good place to ask: Is the kinder approach working? Yes and no, and often the answer depends on the eye of the beholder. Suspensions have fallen significantly, in keeping with the intent of the changed discipline policy. But fighting and other serious incidents have not meaningfully declined, the district says. Other cities have reported similar outcomes, according to evaluations and school leaders. Is Bill Gates a creep or just very cautious? This article reports that the tech billionaire, whose past includes multiple extramarital affairs and meetings with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, put female job applicants at his private office through an extensive screening process that included very personal questions: Some female job candidates were asked whether they ever had extramarital affairs, what kind of pornography they preferred or if they had nude photographs of themselves on their phones, according to the candidates and people familiar with the hiring process. While it couldn’t be determined whether any men were asked such questions, none who spoke to The Wall Street Journal said they had. Female candidates sometimes were asked whether they had ever “danced for dollars,” some of the people said. One of the candidates was asked whether she had ever contracted a sexually transmitted disease, according to the candidate. Employment lawyers and security consultants said the process these people described could run afoul of state and federal employment discrimination laws. For certain high-security government roles ‒ where blackmail could be an issue ‒ such questions may be more acceptable, they said. Gates denied any knowledge of the screening process. Cryptocurrency scams have exploded since the pandemic, with losses increasing by 900% since 2020, according to the Federal Trade Commission. And that is just the number of incidents reported to authorities. This article tells the story of several victims, including 74-year-old Naum Lantsman, who turned to crypto after the pandemic upended his restaurant supply business in the Los Angeles area: Lantsman had initially transferred $500 into his SpireBit account. It seemed promising: When he signed in to his account, it appeared as if that investment had nearly doubled in a matter of weeks. Over several months, [the scammer he was corresponding with] goaded him to invest more and more of his money. Eventually, Lantsman poured his entire life savings, totaling more than $340,000 … . "When he logged on to SpireBit, he saw a very compelling fake platform that looked like money was being deposited, and that money was growing," said his son, Daniel Lantsman. But it wasn't growing at all. The charts on his SpireBit account depicting earnings growth were fake. The article reports that Lantsman's bank, JPMorgan Chase, said that since he authorized the transfers, there was nothing it could do. Figuring out who exactly is behind SpireBit and trying to recover the stolen money may be a lost cause, the family admits. |
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| February 03, 2023 Included in the $1.7 trillion omnibus package supported by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) was a provision to give $200 million to the Appalachian Regional Commission, an agency headed by Manchin’s wife, Gayle. The... |
| February 02, 2023 In 1986, the U.S. Air Force spent $600,000 — over $1.6 million in 2023 dollars — to operate a luxurious private jet exclusively for top generals in the Strategic Air Command. Sen. William Proxmire, a... |
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