Links 2023-11-26 - COVID

We are a long way from 2020, but we still have a ways to go.

The COVID pandemic will be for decades to come a critical source of learning and research rivaling any other major topic or event. These links all touch upon ways we have a lot to learn and update regarding that tragic time.

Eric Boehm writing at Reason reveals the ugly truth about the financial fraud associated with the government’s COVID relief efforts. These numbers are both stunning and unsurprising as they are huge in their own right but to be expected when the government administers any program—especially an emergency one. And most of it will never be fully accounted for much less recovered.

As Reason has previously reported, auditors believe that about $200 billion was fraudulently disbursed from two programs run by the Small Business Administration (SBA) during the pandemic. That's about one-sixth of all spending run through the SBA's Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program. Additionally, the GAO believes that between $100 billion and $135 billion in federal unemployment funds—provided to states on a temporary basis during the pandemic—were lost to fraud.

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The GAO does not have a running total of how much has been recovered in the form of restitution payments as a result of successful prosecutions, a spokeswoman for the office tells Reason. That's due in part to the fact that the amount of restitution ordered by the courts and what is actually repaid to the government are often different amounts.

What has been reported, however, leaves a wide gap. For example, the GAO reported in May that states had identified about $55.8 billion in fraudulent and nonfraudulent unemployment overpayments that occurred between March 2020 and March 2023. Of that, about $6.8 billion had been recovered.

Epidemiology Professor Vinay Prasad, MD explains why quite rationally nobody wants the new COVID-19 booster. It is unproven and untested for risk. Unfortunately, that isn’t stopping experts from strongly recommending it. At the end of his brief post he writes:

Ultimately it's disappointing to see anyone who recommends a medical product to hundreds of millions of people without evidence. We have learned the painful lesson, those of us who actually prescribe medications, that a lot of things you assume may be wrong. And randomized trials are necessary to learn the true net effects. Just because the Biden administration is working, hand in hand with Pfizer doesn't mean we have to accept it. Boycotting an unproven medical product is the only way to get them to runs trials in the future. Thankfully Americans are doing that.

Johan Norberg gives a full account of why the conventional narrative including that of President Trump was/is wrong on Sweden during the pandemic. (HT: David Henderson with the short version). From Norberg’s conclusion:

Now we know more. It seems likely that Sweden did much better than other countries in terms of the economy, education, mental health, and domestic abuse, and still came away from the pandemic with fewer excess deaths than in almost any other European country, and less than half that of the United States—the country where both the president and major newspapers repeatedly used Sweden as a cautionary tale. The conclusion is uncomfortable for other governments. It was not Sweden that engaged in a reckless, unprecedented pandemic experiment, but the rest of the world. This experiment did not turn out well compared to the one country that did not throw out the manual. Millions of people were deprived of their freedoms without a discernible benefit to public health.

Gurwinder digs into how there is a pathologization of the pandemic. Looking beyond the superficial in terms of long COVID et al. he writes:

But why would Leftism be associated with worse mental health? An analysis of data from 86,138 adolescents found, in line with the Pew survey, that between 2005 and 2018 the self-reported mental health of liberals had deteriorated more than conservatives’, and that this deterioration was worst for girls. The researchers blamed this on “alienation within a growing conservative political climate”. However, the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg debunked this explanation by pointing out that liberals’ mental health woes began while Obama was in power and as the Supreme Court voted to extend gay marriage rights — hardly a conservative political climate.

A more robust explanation lies in the difference in outlook between liberals and conservatives. Central to Leftism is equality, which is best justified by the idea that people’s fortunes and misfortunes are not their own doing, and therefore undeserved. As such, Leftism de-emphasizes the role of human agency in social outcomes, while overemphasizing the role of environmental circumstances. As the West has shifted culturally Leftward — due to most writers and artists leaning Left — the depiction of people as puppets of their environment has become dominant.

Today’s Left-liberal culture teaches young people that their troubles are not their own fault, but the product of various problems beyond their control. These problems may be sociological — late capitalism, systemic racism, the patriarchy — but increasingly they are medical. A common example is “trauma,” a psychiatric term that’s become a knee-jerk justification for everything from street crime to silencing opposing views on campus. It’s a word so overused even clinicians fear it’s lost its meaning.