COVID journal: Why Vaccinate All Kids?
“Most of the world’s major nations have concluded that healthy children do not need Covid-19 vaccinations,” observes Joel Zinberg at City Journal. With good reason: Children aged five to 17 accounted “for less than one-tenth of 1 percent” of US COVID deaths. And vaccines risk heart issues “most frequently seen in adolescent and young adult males.” Yet officials recommended vaccines for all schoolchildren, not the smaller population with “certain chronic medical conditions” like “Type 1 diabetes, obesity, and cardiac and circulatory congenital anomalies” who really need protection. “The time has come for the United States to change its recommendation that all schoolkids be vaccinated.” It “does little to protect them, exposes them to unnecessary risk, and further erodes trust in our public-health authorities.”
Education take: Standardized Tests Return
“We’ve been told for years that standardized tests like the ones used traditionally for college entrance exams are racist, inequitable and unfair,” notes USA Today’s Ingrid Jacques. Yet Dartmouth just reinstated testing requirements after a study showed “low-income students are actually harmed when SAT or ACT scores aren’t considered in their admissions application.” “Economically disadvantaged students had withheld their test scores when it was optional, mistakenly believing they were too low.” In fact, a slew of progressive policies — scrapping “selective-enrollment schools” in Chicago or “honors classes for ninth- and 10th-grade students” in Los Angeles — “will ensure low-income and minority students” are inadequately prepared. Let’s hope “Dartmouth’s reinstatement of the standardized test requirement compels more DEI warriors to rethink some seriously misguided ideas.”
Culture critic: Politics Is All Media-Bashing
“The only thing everyone in American politics seems to agree on is that ‘the media’ is not being fair, balanced, and sufficiently appreciative of their views or preferred candidates,” concludes The Liberal Patriot’s John Halpin. Indeed, today, “most online scuttlebutt and activity” involves “dissecting how the media covers certain people or issues” and “getting mad about language use and ‘implicit bias.’ ” This is meant to make people “aggrieved about being disrespected.” In the past, “the primary goal of politics was to inform and prepare citizens to take action to achieve specific outcomes.” Yes, “the mainstream media” makes errors, but they also “get a lot of things right.” Their “missteps and coverage choices don’t warrant constant fulmination by everyone in partisan politics or anyone with a social media account.”
From the left: Suozzi Race Shows Dems’ Woes
“The temptation to nationalize the outcome” of Democrat Tom Suozzi’s congressional win is “misleading,” warns Alexander Sammond at Slate. In fact, the race showed “how much money and effort will be necessary to win toss-up districts in 2024” and “how far national Democrats are going to have to go to make up for the ineptitude of New York’s” Democratic Party. The party’s “poor showing in a blue state during the 2022 midterms cost the House a national Democratic majority.” Last week’s race, to replace scandal-tarred George Santos, “should have been a slam-dunk.” New York could be a “problem” for President Biden’s reelection hopes, too. As one progressive group leader put it: The Suozzi race “makes me very nervous for November.”
Economics beat: Milton Friedman Was Right
“For a generation after the inflation of the 1970s,” Milton Friedman was the “spokesman for, and symbol of, the idea that free markets and free societies were basically the same thing,” writes Christopher Caldwell in First Things, reviewing Jennifer Burns’ new book, “Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative.” “Many Americans knew Friedman simply as a wisecracking economic pundit,” but “over time” his ideas “would come to sound like common sense: a volunteer army, for instance, or privatized package delivery.” And “he argued — in the teeth not just of contradiction but of outright mockery — that the United States was hurtling toward a never-before-seen combination of high inflation and high unemployment that might wreck the economy as we knew it. His vindication was swift and almost total.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
