Two professors (one in the field of medicine and the other in the field of economics) explain why we will never eradicate the COVID virus. Although this should be obvious, they felt the need to write an essay to explain this and show the fallacy of many government policies.

Let’s first look at some of the countries that had the most extensive lockdowns. China had the most severe, even locking people into their homes and imposing a 40-day quarantine at gunpoint. New Zealand also had a very extensive lockdown with sharp restrictions on international travel, business closures, and even a prohibition about going outside. Australia banned international travel, closed schools, and engaged in a brutal suppression of protests. They had limited success, but the virus came back. So did the lockdowns.

The medical issue is easy to explain. We won’t be able to eradicate the COVID virus or any other coronavirus. “The lone human infectious disease we’ve deliberately eradicated is smallpox. The bacterium responsible for the Black Death, the 14th-century outbreak of bubonic plague, is still with us, causing infections even in the US.”

On radio, I’ve tried to explain why we were able to eradicate smallpox but why we won’t be able to eradicate this virus. This coronavirus is also carried by animals. To eliminate it, we would have to rid ourselves of dogs, cats, bats, and other animals. And I might add that only 15 percent of the world’s population have received the vaccine.

We may not like hearing that we will have to live with the virus, but that is the reality, and our public policy needs to be based on that reality. A focused protection policy can help deal with the risks. But it is time to face the fact that a zero-COVID policy cannot be achieved.

No doubt you have heard the phrase, “crime doesn’t pay.” Unfortunately, as I explain in my booklet, A Biblical View on Criminal Justice, crime has historically paid only too well. Expected punishment can be calculated by multiplying four probabilities: the probability of being arrested, of being prosecuted, of being convicted, and going to prison.

Those probabilities have dropped significantly in cities where the slogan “defund the police” has changed the equation. You can find videos of criminals shoplifting and casually walking out of stores in broad daylight. Some commentators have come up with a term for this action: low-speed looting.

Last year we saw lots of examples on television of looting and rioting in major cities. Leftist politicians and even the media referred to such wanton behavior as “peaceful protests.” Once these criminal acts were redefined, it shouldn’t be surprising that we got more of them. The best way to make crime pay is through deterrence. The best way to increase crime is to make excuses for criminal behavior while also reducing police budgets.

J.T. Young served as a congressional staff member and in the Department of the Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget. He points to cities like Chicago, Baltimore, Portland, and Washington, DC where so many crimes occur that it is nearly impossible to keep track of all of them.

He points to one other reason for the crime spike: critical race theory. Any attempt to enforce society’s laws is labelled a “manifestation of oppression.” We see this in the recent calls to “defund the police” and the previous calls for the “abolition of ICE.” Rampant crime and an open border are the next result.

If we want to lower the crime spike, we need deterrence and a focus on law and order.

There’s a scene in The Blues Brother movie where Elwood asks the waitress at Bob’s Country Bunker, “What kind of music do you got here?” She answers, “Oh, we got both kinds, country and western.”

Professor Tim Groseclose says in his book, Left Turn, that if the waitress were to describe a newsroom, she might say, “Oh, we got both kinds of political views: liberal and progressive.” You may have noticed that the Washington press corps covers the Biden administration differently than they covered the Trump administration.

Donald Trump may have made himself an easy target of the press corps because he constantly accused them of disseminating “fake news.” But this animosity to Republicans goes back decades. Consider that only 7 percent of all Washington correspondents voted for George H.W. Bush in 1992. Go back even further to 1972 when Richard Nixon won nearly every state in the Electoral College. A writer for the New Yorker proclaimed, “I can’t believe it. I don’t know a single person who voted for him.”

When he was at UCLA, Professor Groseclose documented in his research articles and book the liberal bias of the media. He constructed a measure of media bias known as the “Political Quotient” often called PQ for short. That allowed him to measure the political perspective of reporters. In one of his papers in the Quarterly Journal of Economics he comes to this surprising conclusion.

“Washington correspondents, as a group, are more liberal than almost any congressional district in the country.” If you look at their vote for president, these reporters are more liberal than the citizens in the ninth California district (which includes Berkeley) and even more liberal than the citizens in the eighth Massachusetts district (which includes Cambridge).

No wonder we see media bias in the press coverage.

The administration wants to get 328 million Americans vaccinated as soon as possible, but there are some obvious roadblocks. Victor Davis Hanson reminds us of the challenge when we are talking about an untried vaccine in a multi-ethnic nation.

Some minorities are understandably distrustful because of prior government vaccination programs. Nearly 40 million foreign residents in this country come from countries where corrupt governments lost the trust of the population. You could also add rural and inner-city poor who are not so easily reached, much less persuaded.

But if this administration wants to understand why some Americans are vaccine hesitant, Hanson says they need merely look in the mirror. Presidential candidate Joe Biden and vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris both expressed doubts about the “Trump vaccine” and a mashup of those videos is readily available on the Internet. Dr. Anthony Fauci last year dismissed the idea of any viable vaccination in the election year.

Pfizer promised a breakthrough vaccination announcement in late October, but then went mysteriously silent until a few days after the election. And President Biden declared on CNN that there had been no vaccinations given until he entered office. Yet we have the video of him being vaccinated on December 21.

The establishment media haven’t exactly given Americans much confidence. For example, a recent breakout of COVID cases in Provincetown, Massachusetts was reported, but a key fact was omitted. These cases were “attributable to the annual gay pride celebrations where some thousands of partiers swarmed bars, clubs, restaurants, and hotels.”

One reason Americans are hesitant is due to the fact they don’t trust the media, drug companies, or the current administration.

Both liberals and conservatives believe in free speech. The radical left used to pretend to value free speech, but no longer. One example is a bill proposed by two Democratic senators that would allow the federal government to punish Big Tech companies for not censoring more views. If you already think Big Tech censors too much, imagine what would happen if this bill became law.

The argument rests on the idea that too much “misinformation” is being spread on the Internet. The bill would establish what sounds like a “Ministry of Truth” described in George Orwell’s book, 1984. It would determine what is approved medical science, and what is not.

Mario Loyola reminds us that in the past, public safety has been used as a justification for persecuting political opponents. Often the “misinformation” label is “a rhetorical trick, employed for its value as a political weapon rather than a signifier.” It can be used “to proclaim obvious falsehoods while suppressing their political adversaries’ right to speak obvious truths.”

Over this last year we have discovered that truth isn’t as settled as experts would like for us to think that it is. We’ve had conflicting statements about the effectiveness of masks, questions about the safety of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, along with dogmatic statements that the virus surely did NOT come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Once you allow government officials to censor information about medicine and public health, it is merely a small step to allow those same officials to censor opinions and information on topics like sexual orientation and critical race theory.

At a time when most of us believe Big Tech is censoring too much, there are those on the left who believe they must censor even more.

When the Supreme Court reconvenes, the justices will consider another case involving the Second Amendment. As you might expect, legal briefs are being filed and various groups advocating for gun rights and gun control are promoting their views. Therefore, it shouldn’t be too surprising that someone is trying to argue that the Second Amendment is racist.

What is surprising is the fact that this proponent is associated with the ACLU. I may have many disagreements with the policy positions of the ACLU, but I would expect the members would at least understand basic US history. As Charles Cooke explains in a recent commentary, “is not gun rights that have been historically associated with racism, but gun control �” and to the extent that, up until about 1970, the two ideas were utterly inextricable in American life.”

But don’t take his word for it. Just look at the few of the legal briefs that have been filed with the court in this case. For example, a brief filed by the National African American Gun Association reminds the court of US history.

“During the colonial, founding, and early republic periods, slaves and even free blacks, particularly in the southern states, were either barred from carrying a firearm at all or were required to obtain a license to do so, which was subject to the discretion of a government official.” The brief then goes on to document how black Americans were systematically denied the right to own a gun.

Charles Cooke also quotes another legal brief, which was filed by a progressive group that probably isn’t much of a supporter of the Second Amendment but nevertheless was alarmed by the real-life consequences of this case the Supreme Court is considering.

Some people may not like the concept of gun rights but calling the Second Amendment racist is historical revisionism and propaganda.

Cities and states are considering what they should do in light of increasing COVID cases. Before they set policies, they may want to read about the “Tale of Two Recoveries.” That was the title of a Wall Street Journal editorial. America has a two-track recovery.

Unemployment was lowest in Nebraska, Utah, South Dakota, New Hampshire, Idaho, Vermont, Alabama, Montana, and Oklahoma. All are governed by Republicans, except Vermont, which has a Republican governor and Democratic legislature.

By contrast, the states with the highest unemployment are run by Democrats: Connecticut, New Mexico, Nevada, California, Hawaii, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. The editors don’t think that is a coincidence. Hawaii and Nevada rely on tourism, but that doesn’t explain the other states. The likely explanation is that Democratic governors maintained longer and stricter lockdowns.

The situation in California provides an example. Although 12 percent of the US population lives in the nation’s richest state, it only accounted for 9 percent of employment growth. By contrast, states like Florida and Arizona lifted their business restrictions much earlier and added jobs at two to three times the rate of California.

Add to this the harsh reality that California’s labor force declined by a half million (540,000) workers since February of last year. Similar declines occurred in some of the other states already mentioned. High-tax Democratic states continue to lose population to lower-tax states. That certainly contributed to their shrinking workforces.

There is one other problem. The prolonged lockdowns in these states also results in more small businesses shutting their doors. Small business owners and restaurants just could not survive the economic impact of the lockdowns.

This is the sad tale of two very different recoveries.

In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, Byron Auguste asks an important question. Why do so many employers “require” a college degree? He is a perfect person to ask this question because he is black and extremely well-educated.

Companies all over this country as trying to scramble to find talent and address the perceived “skills gap” and the obvious “labor shortages.” Those companies are prevented from discriminating against applicants based on race, ethnicity, gender, age, or disability. But they do discriminate against the two-thirds of Americans who do not have a bachelor’s degree.

He tells the story of his father who left his job as a factory shipping clerk to study computer programming for six months. He never worked in an office and dropped out of college. But the company allowed him to shadow a colleague on the job, tested his skills, and hired him as a junior programmer. That launched his family into the American middle class.

His father faced discrimination as a black man in 1971. But the lack of a college degree didn’t stand in his way because the company saw his potential and allowed him to succeed. It is unlikely his father would have the same opportunity today.

College degree discrimination today is taken for granted. Obviously, engineers need a college degree and doctors need a medical degree. However, I can think of lots of jobs that don’t really need a college degree, yet “college degree required” is still listed on the job application.

He estimates that more than 70 million workers in America’s workforce do not have a bachelor’s degree but are STARs, which stands for “skilled through alternative routes.” Some are skilled through military service, certificate programs, or on the job training.

It’s time to end degree-based hiring and put skilled Americans to work.

Perhaps the most destructive policy during the pandemic was shutting down the schools. There is now significant research documenting what we already assumed. The experiment of requiring students to be stay home and try to learn by computer has been a disaster. A new report by McKinsey & Co. quantifies the harm that was done.

The research team examined the 2021 spring test results for 1.6 million elementary school students. They discovered that the student shutdowns harmed the educational progress of students. They were (on the average) four months behind in reading and five months behind in mathematics.

These results are likely the best you can say for two reasons. First, this conclusion came from students who took the test. Many students had not returned to school and therefore did not take the test. It is reasonable to assume they would do even worse than the students who did return before the test was administered.

Second, educational performance was worse for children in less affluent neighborhoods. A year ago, I predicted that the students who would do best with online learning would be those who live in a home with a good computer, good Internet connection, and involved parents. Students who lacked one or more of those essential resources would do poorly. That is exactly what this report found.

McKinsey found that children in majority black schools ended the school year a full six months behind in both math and reading. Students in schools where the average household income was below $25,000 were seven months behind in math and six months behind in reading.

If we merely pass these students on to the next grade, they lack some of the key building blocks of knowledge. If we force them to repeat a year, studies show they are less likely to complete high school. The school shutdowns have been a disaster.