RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week 
November 20 to November 26, 2022 

Featured Investigation 
An American Tradition:
Chronic Anti-Poverty Waste
Via the Federal-to-Local Distribution Pipeline 

In RealClearInvestigations, Steve Miller offers a holiday helping of abused compassion for the poor: The largescale theft and squandering of federal poverty relief across decades, distributed nationwide through foot soldiers of local “community action agencies.”  

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series 

... includes not only information like names and email addresses but often even more detailed information, including data on users’ income, filing status, refund amounts, and dependents’ college scholarship amounts. The information sent to Facebook can be used by the company to power its advertising algorithms and is gathered regardless of whether the person using the tax filing service has an account on Facebook or other platforms operated by its owner Meta.  

The widely used filing service TaxSlayer, for example, sent personal information to Facebook as part of the social media company’s “advanced matching” system, which gathers information on web visitors in an attempt to link them to Facebook accounts. The information included phone numbers, the name of the user filling out the form, and the names of any dependents added to the return. H&R Block gathered information on filers’ health savings account usage and dependents’ college tuition grants and expenses.  

A Risky Wager:
NYT's Investigation
of Sports Betting (Parts 1-4)  
New York Times 

Hospitals across the United States are overwhelmed. The combination of a swarm of respiratory illnesses (RSV, coronavirus, flu), staffing shortages and nursing home closures has sparked the state of distress visited upon the already overburdened health-care system. And, this article reports, experts believe the problem will deteriorate further in coming months. Along with a shortage of beds, many hospital systems are extremely short-staffed. The  fast-paced and anxiety-inducing environment of an emergency room  is a deterrent for many health-care workers and the staffing shortages extend beyond physicians and nurses to include technicians, respiratory therapists and other hard-to-fill jobs. Quote:

More than  half a million people in the health care  and social services sectors quit their positions in September — evidence, in part, of burnout associated with the coronavirus pandemic — and the American Medical Association says  1 in 5 doctors plan  on leaving the field within two years. 

In a separate article, the Washington Free Beacon reports on a new Association of American Medical Colleges study that found medical schools are devoting more time and resources to woke ideology:

Forty-four percent of medical schools have tenure and promotion policies that reward scholarship on "diversity, inclusion, and equity." Seventy percent make students take a course on "diversity, inclusion, or cultural competence." And 79 percent require that all hiring committees receive "unconscious bias" training or include "equity advisors" – people whose job it is to ensure diversity among the faculty. 

In a separate article, the Daily Mail reports on a study in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology that found that about 90 percent of the mannequins in CPR social media posts were white: “Researchers want to ditch the reliance on default 'lean white male' models. Doing so" -- they claim without evidence -- "will help overcome 'bias' among bystanders and help improve the survival of other groups.” The article also notes that there is no specific CPR guidance for black or Asian people as the techniques used are exactly the same for all adults. 

Coronavirus Investigations 

The antiviral Paxlovid has been touted by government leaders and many in the medical profession as an effective tool for reducing mortality from COVID. But since it became widely available this spring, death rates  have hardly budged as many Americans hesitate to use it. A recent CDC report found that from April to July, fewer than one-third of America’s 80-plus-year-olds with COVID ended up taking Paxlovid, even though they had the most to gain from doing so. This article reports that the reluctance of many Americans to take the advice of experts – which usually involves concerns about the treatment side effects and rebound infections of the virus – is not unfounded. 

The link between the drug and a return of symptoms after an initial recovery has been the subject of much concern and debate since the spring; just last week, researchers reported in a study that has not yet been peer-reviewed that symptom rebound is more than  twice as common among Paxlovid takers  than among those who decline it. The fact that so many prominent figures in the federal government – including President Joe Biden, First Lady Jill Biden, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and White House Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci—have now had rebound certainly doesn’t help inspire confidence.  … Drug interactions are another source of worry for the anti-Paxxers. Official COVID-treatment guidelines warn that the antiviral may have ill effects when combined with any of  more than 100 other medications.   

Other Coronavirus Investigations 

COVID Is No Longer Mainly a Pandemic of Unvaccinated  Washington Post 
RCI Flashback, March '22: It's Deadly Pandemic of Vaccinated Too  RCI