Every day, more stories compete for reporters’ attention than they can cover. Despite the feast of facts available to them, the legacy media cover the same handful of stories that appeal to the newsroom’s Woke, urban, secular demographic — forcing every human interaction into an artificially racialized lens, assailing people who deviate from 2020’s scientific consensus about COVID-19, and hyperventilating that every living Republican embodies a threat to Our Democracy.TM
1. COVID-19 vaccine may cause rare long-COVID symptoms: Study
A growing number of people have reported that they experienced the same symptoms as “long COVID” after receiving COVID-19 vaccination. After reviewing numerous cases, a doctor at the National Institutes of Health asked patients to stop referring other patients with the symptoms of long COVID to him, according to a report in Science magazine.
An unknown percentage of people who catch COVID-19 see some or all of the symptoms linger well after the worst of the infection has passed. One of the selling points of vaccination has been that it wards off infection, then hospitalization, and then “long COVID.”
But some vaccinated people also complained that the vaccine triggered such severe and enduring side effects as heart rate fluctuations, blood pressure fluctuations, deep vein thrombosis (potentially deadly blood clots), “debilitating internal electric shocks,” partial facial paralysis, severe muscle weakness, severe headaches, short-term memory problems, nerve pain, blurred vision, brain fog, and fatigue. The reactions apparently had nothing to do with the manufacturer; Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca vaccinations were all represented.
As victims began to share their experiences online, they turned to Avindra Nath, clinical director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), a part of the NIH. They say Nath offered them treatments or analyzed blood samples for the first few months of 2021, but then “NIH scientists pulled back” from their inquiries. “In December, Nath asked her to stop sending patients his way,” Science.org reports.
Nath said he was not certain whether the vaccination caused the symptoms or if the 34 people he says contacted him merely associated the onset of symptoms with their shot(s). “You have to be very careful” about this kind of investigation, he said, because “you can make the wrong conclusion.”
Scientists are uncertain what causes long COVID symptoms, whether it follows an infection or an injection. The fault could lie in an antibody (anti-idiotype, or “Ab2”) triggered by the novel coronavirus’ spike (S) protein, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Alternately, German neurologist Harald Prüss found that 22% of the anti-COVID antibodies he examined also attacked healthy tissue in mice. A third study associated COVID-19 with high levels of autoantibodies, which effectively attack the body, “perturb immune function and impair virological control.” Still other researchers suspect symptoms like mental fog may stem from microclots in the blood stream harming blood vessels.
Science magazine reports that pinpointing the cause behind this phenomenon “could be crucial for designing even safer and more effective vaccines.” Perhaps the government should have fully vetted the topic before President Joe Biden issued his vaccination mandates, as well.
2. Kids in universal pre-K did worse than children who did not attend: Study
Universal preschool has been one of the Democratic Party’s most stubborn policy demands for more than a decade. Barack Obama raised the issue in a number of his State of the Union addresses. Hillary Clinton cut a 2016 presidential campaign ad presenting universal pre-K as a great Christmas gift she would bestow upon the American people. President Joe Biden’s handlers included universal pre-K in the Build Back Better act and cited the program as one of the ways “the Biden-Harris administration is advancing educational equity.” Rather than emphasizing the benefits of a stable nuclear family, the Biden administration asserted, “Preschool is critical to ensuring that children start kindergarten with the skills and supports that set them up for success in school.”
Democrats so believe in preschool that they want to expand it globally — at the taxpayers expense. The Biden administration’s “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality” called on Americans to help fund “strengthen[ing] the global care infrastructure” by promoting government-funded universal pre-K worldwide.
Before enacting the policy, it behooves the American people to examine its track record, which is one of failure. The most recent proof comes from a study of Tennessee’s state pre-K program published in the January 2022 issue of Developmental Psychology, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Psychological Association. Scholars from Vanderbilt University compared children who attended pre-K with a control group who did not and found:
[T]he children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade. A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention.
Complicating the Democrats’ policy thrust is the fact that there is little demand for their government daycare program. A YouGov poll found that three-times as many parents would prefer to have one or both of the parents raise their own children. Nor can the government replicate the benefits of a stable home environment.
“No public preschool program can provide the environments and the parental love and care of a functioning family and the lifetime benefits that ensue,” said James J. Heckman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist whose studies are frequently cited to support universal pre-K schemes.
If universal pre-K does not improve children’s education and is unwanted by parents, one can only speculate why Democrats want the government to raise kids as young as three in a secular environment.
3. The ‘mass burial sites’ of schoolchildren in Canada’s parochial schools haven’t materialized
Last summer, Canada’s Christian churches faced an onslaught of vandalism and arson — not due to the Black Lives Matter movement this time, but over allegations that church-run schools allowed indigenous children to die decades or perhaps a century ago.
Using ground-penetrating radar, anthropologist Sarah Beaulieu said she found first 215, then 200, soil disturbances at British Columbia’s Kamloops Residential School that could point to shallow graves. Tourists on the grounds had found a child’s rib and a tooth on separate occasions years earlier. But Beaulieu said, “Only forensic investigation with excavation will provide definitive results” about her radar findings.
Canadian media reported the site as a “mass grave,” and vandals targeted Roman Catholic and Anglican churches (the two denominations most associated with indigenous residential schools), sometimes scrawling “215” on the buildings. In time, vandals desecrated churches belonging to Egyptian and Vietnamese immigrants, merely because they were Christian.
But even as Canadian politicians flagellated their nation for engaging in “genocide,” excavations of other sites where ground-penetrating radar discovered “anomalies,” like Edmonton’s Camsell Hospital, found no graves or human remains of any kind.
“Why didn’t [the media and politicians] wait for proof before demoralizing the nation and sending it into a tailspin of anger and anti-Christian violence? Will there be an apology for that? And why, after all this, are there still no plans to excavate in Kamloops?” asked Jane Stannus at The Spectator. “After the dramatic fallout for so many ordinary Canadians and Catholics, doesn’t the whole country deserve some answers?”
And where do Canadian Christians go to get their reputation back?
4. Shocking study: Police reduce crimes
U.S. cities spent 2021 reaping the deadly harvest of a foolish gamble: Cities that defunded their police force experienced such a rampant increase in crime that it led to a “refund the police” movement. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, British authorities have made the groundbreaking discovery that sending police to crime scenes decreases the crime rate. The Daily Mail reports:
Forces in Greater Manchester, Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire all publicly pledged to send an officer to every burglary in a bid to tackle the number of unsolved crimes.
As the forces have confirmed the approach has produced a visible impact on the number of break-ins across their counties, ministers believe the results are evidence a national roll-out of the strategy is justified.
The new enforcement policy helped cut the number of burglaries in Northamptonshire by nearly half in two years. In Bedfordshire, residents suffered 34 fewer burglaries each month.
A government official told the Telegraph that visiting crime scenes is “good policing,” because it increases the chances of finding clues. “Not only do you get to speak to the victims, which is important from a reassurance point of view, but you can also pick up forensics like fingerprints. Most of these people are repeat offenders,” the source told the London-based newspaper.
5. Los Angeles council considers defunding failed homeless bureaucracy
California is home to nearly half of all the nation’s homeless people, according to the Council of Economic Advisers’ 2019 report on “The State of Homelessness in America.” Los Angeles ranks second behind only New York City as the city with the largest number of homeless people: 49,955. Facts on the ground have worn the city’s patience to the breaking point with its well-paid bureaucrats. Soledad Ursúa at City Journal reported:
Who in their right mind would continue to spend $1 billion annually for a failing product? Two Los Angeles city councilmembers—Joe Buscaino and Paul Koretz—asked that question recently while introducing a motion for the city to withdraw from the Los Angeles Homelessness Services Authority. The city pays LAHSA nearly $300 million a year to administer homelessness services on its behalf, yet the agency is unwilling to provide taxpayers or city departments basic information about its activities, such as a line-item scope of services or verifiable data on program outcomes. The agency receives nearly $1 billion in annual funding from federal, state, county, and city sources.
It’s bad enough that Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger nominated Reverend Andy Bales, the president of Skid Row’s Union Rescue Mission, as a LAHSA commissioner. One might be forgiven for saying the commission has become so desperate, it’s turned to the Lord.
Recruiting private charities that have successfully cared for the homeless is a step in the right direction. The Trump administration’s 2019 report listed two other policy reforms that politicians could make to get out of Rev. Bales’ (and the Lord’s) way. Ridding the housing market of cumbersome regulations would cause homelessness to fall by “40 percent in Los Angeles,” the report found.
It also noted that “the extent of policing of street activities may play a role” in the West Coast’s exploding tent cities. In other words, a lack of policing increases homelessness, as well as crime.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.