Scientific Illiteracy at the CDC and White House

Nancy Pelosi kissed the Pretender in Chief Biden on his cheek before she was known to have Covid-19.  But no worry.  The White House says she was not within 6 feet of him for 15 minutes, so according to the CDC criteria for close contact for Covid-19, she was under the time limit.  No worry.

Most people have enough sense to understand that how close they were matters.  They were not 6 feet apart, they were an inch apart.  Common sense proves here to be vastly superior to the "science" of the CDC and the regulatory sense of the White House.

Let us see if we can explain this to the scientifically illiterate of the CDC and the White House.  A simple model of the dispersion of the virus as it spreads out over distance is that it is diluted as the cubic power of the distance between the people involved.  The density of the virus in the air is approximately proportional to the volume of a sphere centered on the point of emission.  Now the distance between Nancy and Joe was about 1 inch and its cube is 1 cubic inch.  6 feet in inches is 72 inches, whose cube is 373,248 cubic inches.  So the dose rate of virus someone 6 feet away from Nancy is about 1/373,248 times that which Joe experienced.  This number is 2.68 millionths.

The threshold viral dose for close contact is this viral density times the time of exposure.  The CDC critical time is 15 minutes, so the critical time when the dose rate is 373,248 times greater than it is at 6 feet is 15 minutes/373,248 = 0.000040 minutes or 0.0024 seconds.

Nancy must be the fastest kisser ever if she managed to smack the Great Pretender in less than 0.0024 seconds.  Not to mention that she had to have spent some additional time within that 6 foot distance.

Science and good old American common sense agree that the CDC and the White House are wacko!

You know, if Nancy can move so fast that her bussing the Great Pretender on the cheek was really no cause of Covid-19 concern, then her propulsion system is so good, we should send her on the first human mission to Alpha Centauri.  She can traverse that 4 light years distance in no time at all.  Nancy, it is your patriotic duty to take on this mission to Alpha Centauri!  Do it right now.

As for the CDC, that distance within 6 feet matters hugely and cannot be ignored in any scientific criterion for close contact.

Remote Learning By Ethnic Classification

The New York Times reports that: 

In March, half of Black and Hispanic children, and two-thirds of Asian-American children, were enrolled in remote school, compared with 20 percent of white students, according to the latest federal data.

There are numerous factors behind this.  Among them are: 

• The Black and Hispanic populations are often large in major cities and such cities due to Democrat Party control and high density populations have been more likely to have schools closed or to require greater social distancing.  The increased social distancing necessitates having fewer students in school classrooms.
• Black, Hispanic, and Asian American parents appear to be more fearful of the Covid-19 disease.  They do have higher morbidity rates.
• Black and Hispanic households tend to have lower incomes than white families do.  This encourages their older children to take on jobs to help their families out, since they are out of school anyway.  In other cases, the older children are impressed into babysitting duties for younger children as the parent(s) work.
• Black and Hispanic parents are more likely to have lost jobs or to have down-graded jobs due to business closures and reduced business operating hours during the pandemic.  This has put more pressure on older children to take on jobs to help support their families.
• When older children take on jobs to help support their families, it is harder to get them to graduate from high school.
• Fewer Black and Hispanic children have high-grade computer capabilities at home for remote learning purposes.  Their parents are less likely to be able to help them with computer issues.
• A child on remote learning has greater needs for parental educational support.
• Fewer Black and Hispanic children are in private schools.  A higher percentage are in government-run schools, which are run by a coalition of Democrat Socialist politicians and the socialist teachers unions.  Such government schools are more likely to be shutdown or operating in very reduced modes, thanks to fear of Covid-19.

Most American children have suffered horribly in their educations as a result of an inadequate primarily government-run education system in the first place.  The Covid-19 pandemic and the over-reaction to it has caused massive further harm to our children across the board.  We already had an education system in which our so-called Black and Hispanic children were operating at lower skill levels than our so-called White and Asian children.  The pandemic-induced harm has further exacerbated the differential lag of our Black and Hispanic children.

A substantial portion of the pandemic harm was the result of bad political and bad educational choices.  Fewer bad choices would have been made had the media, academia, and government health organizations encouraged, rather than discouraged, an honest and scientific discussion of Covid-19.  The suppression of that discussion suppressed the formation of non-vaccine weapons against the disease.  It fostered a suspicion among many that the Covid-19 government policies were often based on lies and cared little for their welfare.  Realizing this was the case, many developed unreasonable fears that their children were in much greater danger from Covid-19 than they were being told they were.  Even Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor believed that 100,000 American children had been made seriously ill by the disease.  What can we expect that many Black and Hispanic parents believed about the danger to their children?

Some of the short-comings of our mostly government-run school education system have been bared by the Covid-19 pandemic.  More Americans will address those short-comings by opting for more school choice, with tax money following children into private schools.  There has been an increase in home-schooling and that will remain a more popular option than it had been prior to the pandemic.  We have also been exposed to the naked lust for teacher union power pushing for excessive school closings, mask mandates, and excess distancing requirements.  We have seen how feckless Democrat politicians have been in counteracting the teachers unions excessive power, because those same Democrats are highly dependent upon teacher union support for their election to office.

I will write in the future about government employee unions and why they should be outlawed.  Until they are outlawed, they should at least not be allowed to participate in elections for political offices.

On Covid-19 Spending from letter from Craig Rucker of CFACT

Adjusted for today’s dollars the Second World War cost $4.1 trillion. 

The United States just committed to spend an additional $1.9 trillion, boosting total taxpayer pandemic spending to over $6 trillion.

This is half again what it cost to liberate the world from fascism. 

We posted policy details and an extensive financial breakdown to CFACT.org.

The U.S. has not yet finished spending the funds from the last rounds of COVID relief.

Sadly, combating the virus and its economic impact is merely the tip of this latest $1.9 trillion fiscal iceberg.  The bulk of the spending in the "American Rescue Plan Act of 2021" goes to a colossal left-wing wish list and a cornucopia of good old-fashioned government waste, albeit on a 21st century scale.

The Foundation for Economic Education calculated that total federal COVID spending just hit $41,870 per taxpayer.

Less than one percent of the latest spending goes to vaccines.  Only ten percent is directly related to the virus. 

Here's a sampling of where the rest will go:

• $350 billion to cities, states and Indian tribes, including those running fiscal surpluses.  The methodology was changed to favor states that voted for Biden.  Enjoy your $26 billion windfall, California!
• $169 billion to schools and colleges, including those that refuse to open.  Where's the party teachers' unions?
• $422 billion in $1,400 per-person stimulus checks, including to those who never missed a paycheck and even federal prisoners.
• $58 billion to bail out union pension plans.
• $25 billion in increased Obamacare subsidies.
• $30 billion to AMTRAK and transit agencies.
• Expansion of the child tax credit from $2,000 to $3,600, extending the credit to people who don't work for the first time, effectively ending the Clinton-era work-based welfare reforms.
• $1 billion in loan forgiveness for farmers based on "racial justice."  Didn't the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbid discrimination based on race?  The Left is calling this the start of "reparations."
• $50 million in environmental justice grants.  Whom do you think will receive those?

America's national debt is approaching $30 trillion.  What if (heaven forbid) we had to fight an actual world war?

Craig Rucker is President of CFACT.

Charles' Comments:

The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly highlighted the many harms promulgated by our governments.  The NIH and Dr. Fauci provided funding for gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in a Wuhan biological laboratory known to have inadequate safety procedures and whose employees were the first known to suffer the Covid-19 disease.  Then the federal, most state, and many local governments over-reacted with shutdown orders to large portions of the private sector economy.  Most schools were shutdown, forever depriving American children of about a year of much needed education.  Now, many state and local governments are inhibiting the distribution of the vaccines.  The Craig Rucker letter above directs our attention to still more of the harm our federal government has done to us.

Those who rule in America are incompetent to perform the excessive scope of function they have taken upon themselves in their quest for power.  Those who desire power over others are generally people of low moral character as well.  When they are not intending to do harm, they are sufficiently unthinking that they simply do not understand the harm they are doing.  Craig Rucker ends his letter with that classic Ronald Reagan quote:

"Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."