OF NOTE: New podcast episode!

This time, your correspondent interviews Charles Fain Lehman, Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and, in our considered view, the best expert in America on all things related to crime, vice, and disorder (and we mean that in the best possible way). We thought it was a really good interview where we covered a lot of ground. Here is a link to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

You should, of course, subscribe to the Sphere Podcast wherever you get your podcasts (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube).

The Covid Commission Report

The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has released its final report, and it's a doozy. Here's the full thing, all 557 pages of it.

The headline findings likely will not surprise you, namely (numbered items quoted directly from the Chairman's Letter):

1. The U.S. National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

2. The Chinese government, agencies within the U.S. Government, and some members of the international scientific community sought to cover-up facts concerning the origins of the pandemic.

3. Operation Warp Speed was a tremendous success and a model to build upon in the future. The vaccines, which are now probably better characterized as therapeutics, undoubtedly saved millions of lives by diminishing likelihood of severe disease and death.

4. Rampant fraud, waste, and abuse plagued the COVID-19 pandemic response.

5. Pandemic-era school closures will have enduring impact on generations of America’s children and these closures were enabled by groups meant to serve those children.

6. The Constitution cannot be suspended in times of crisis and restrictions on freedoms sow distrust in public health.

7. The prescription cannot be worse than the disease, such as strict and overly broad lockdowns that led to predictable anguish and avoidable consequences.

According to the report, fraud and abuse related to the pandemic adds up to at least $255 billion: $64 billion from PPP, the Paycheck Protection Program, $191 billion from fraudulent unemployment insurance claims, and $200 million (that seems low) from Covid-related SBA programs. It should be noted that at the time the thought was that we needed to "shovel money out the door" as quickly and as widely as possible to stabilize the economic situation, and it was implicitly accepted that the tradeoff would be fraud. Still, it's important to account for these after the fact and, hopefully, prosecute those who took advantage of a national emergency to profiteer.

The table of contents reads from a very long list of vindication of everything that skeptics and freethinkers were saying at the time, from "The Six-Foot Social Distancing Requirement Was Not Supported by Science" to "The World Health Organization Failed to Uphold Its Mission and Caved to Chinese Communist Party Pressure." Go down the list and pick whatever was the biggest bugbear for you, and you will find vindication.

To us, the biggest missed opportunity, politically, from the pandemic, was related to the vaccines. The report admits that the vaccines saved millions of lives, and specifically that Operation Warp Speed saved millions of lives by speeding up vaccine development and approval. Republicans should trumpet the success of the Trump Vaccine! Don't we all love the Trump vaccine, folks? Many people are saying it's the best vaccine, the greatest vaccine.

Operation Warp Speed seemed to vindicate everything that conservatives had been saying for decades: breakthrough science and technology are the answers to great national challenges; the FDA is far too timorous when it comes to approving new treatments, with life-destroying consequences.

The fact that so many conservatives, in part out of justified distrust of public health authorities and their deplorable messaging, and in part just out of sheer contrarianism and orneriness, turned against the vaccine is, apart from the merits, one of the biggest missed opportunities in recent American politics, one which will be with us for many years.

It has also caused a veil of silence to be passed over what must be the worst scandal of the pandemic: the fact that, if public reports are to be trusted, Pfizer froze its vaccine trials to ensure Trump would not get the credit for the vaccine and Operation Warp Speed. This is comicbook-tier villainy: to delay the release of a life-saving vaccine during a pandemic, to affect the outcome of an election. By pushing back the entire timeline of vaccine release, this surely led to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of innocent people. But, because Democrats now love Big Pharma, and Republicans now can't say vaccines are good, there is no scandal, and therefore there will be no accountability.

Policy News You Need To Know

#LittlePlatoons — Did you know? Today is the National Day of Giving. One of the things that makes America unique, of course, is its thriving civil society and charitable sector, which relies, first and foremost, on the generosity of ordinary Americans, but also on public policy that favors private and civil society initiatives over the state.

#FamilyPolicy — Did you know marriage is good for you? The great people over at the Institute for Family Studies highlight a new study showing that marriage protects against deaths of despair. "There is an increasing divide in deaths of despair between the married and the unmarried, and not only because the married are more likely to be educated," the authors write. What's more, "not only does marriage protect against deaths of despair, but the positive effect of marriage has been increasing over the last 20 years."

#Ed — AEI's Frederick Hess, whose education stuff we always enjoy reading, has a list of ideas for the Trump Administration on how to make Ed work, "if he can't abolish it."

#MAHA — Raw milk is quite safe, delicious, and arguably better for your health. Raw milk fans, or simply liberty-loving Americans, should welcome the push for raw milk, which comes with a great advocate in the person of RFK, Jr. Reason magazine goes over the case in favor.

#ESG — Heritage's David R. Burton calls our attention to a little-noticed but significant issue: a new Labor rule by the Biden-Harris Administration allows ERISA fund managers to vote their shares based not just on the fiduciary interest of the plan beneficiary, as should be the case under the law, but also based on political goals.

#Trade — The opposition has the floor: AEI's Michael R. Strain has a new paper out for the Aspen Economic Strategy Group arguing that Trump 1.0's trade war with China failed: it raised prices and reduced manufacturing employment in the US, he argues.

#K12 — Very interesting: Jeremy Wayne Tate, cofounder and president of the Classic Learning Test, an alternative to the SAT, has a paper over at AEI arguing for more choice, not just in schools, but in assessment methods. "The benefits of school choice are constrained by narrow standardized testing options, which influence curriculum and teaching approaches," he argues.

#Liberty — A niche issue? Perhaps, perhaps not. Right to repair is as American as it gets, it's not just about consumer rights, it's about agency, David Dunmoyer argues at The Federalist.

#TheEconomy #MAGA — In the wake of Trump's election, small business confidence has reached its highest levels since 2018.

#Immigration — California Democratic Sen. Padilla says state won't cooperate with Trump mass deportation operation, reports Nicholas Ballasy at Just The News. The pieces are being set on the board, the game shall soon begin…