Category: Covid-19

Covid Loan Programs Passed by Congress Were “Comically Easy to Scam”

In a WSJ op-ed, I tell how a fraudster received a $42,200 Covid-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan in my name for an alleged “Arthur M.D. Potato Farm.” As discussed in the NYT passages quoted below, there was also massive fraud in other related Congress-funded Small Business Administration Covid boondoggle programs. The NYT article blames the Trump Administration, but in my struggle to clear up the potato farm fraud case, a S.B.A. official told me that the Congress in 2020 put enormous pressure on the S.B.A. to get the money out the door as quickly as possible. The House of Representatives, which takes the lead in spending legislation, was controlled by the Democratic Party.

In the passages quoted below, “P.P.P.” means “Paycheck Protection Program” and “E.I.D.L.” means “Economic Injury Disaster Loan.”

(p. B4) An emergency relief program hastily rolled out in the early days of the pandemic had such poor fraud protections that it improperly doled out nearly $4.5 billion to self-employed people who said they had additional workers — even those who made wildly implausible claims, like having one million employees.

The $20 billion program, called the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Advance, offered small businesses immediate grants of up to $10,000 in the months after the pandemic shuttered much of the economy. But hundreds of thousands of the grants it made were inflated because there was no system to catch applications with “flawed or illogical information,” Hannibal Ware, the Small Business Administration’s inspector general, wrote in a report released on Thursday [Oct. 7, 2021].

. . .

. . . the S.B.A. skipped an obvious safeguard: It did not require sole proprietors claiming to have employees to enter their Employer Identification Number, instead allowing them to use their Social Security numbers.

. . .

Some of the claims were outright absurd. Hundreds of applicants received the maximum grants after saying that they employed more than 500 workers, a number that would generally make them ineligible for the small business program. Fifteen said they had one million employees — a figure that would put them in league with Amazon and Walmart.

The Small Business Administration “never requested additional information from these sole proprietors to verify the number of employees cited on their grant applications before approving and disbursing the grants,” Mr. Ware said in his report.

. . .

. . . a Bloomberg article last year described how almost comically easy it was to scam the system. It cited how-to videos that circulated on YouTube with titles like “$10k SBA Loans & GRANTS Got The STREETS Going CRAZY!”

. . .

The Justice Department has already prosecuted hundreds of cases involving fraudulent claims across the government’s $1 trillion small business pandemic relief programs, reclaiming more than $600 million.

But that is only a sliver of the amount lost to bogus claims. A March memo by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis identified an estimated $84 billion in suspected fraud in the P.P.P. and E.I.D.L. programs after the Trump administration “refused to implement basic controls.”

Mr. Ware told a House committee in April [2021] that his office had opened more than 400 cases involving the agency’s assorted relief programs.

“Fraud investigations will be a decades-long effort,” he said.

For the full story see:

Stacy Cowley. “S.B.A. Paid $4.5 Billion on Bogus Grant Claims.” The New York Times (Friday, October 8, 2021 [sic]): B4.

(Note: ellipses, bracketed date, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 7, 2021 [sic], and has the title “S.B.A. Overpaid $4.5 Billion on ‘Illogical’ Small Business Grant Claims.”)

Trust Ventures Engages in “Trench Warfare” Against Regulations Binding the Firms It Finances

(p. A15) Another “Ghostbusters” movie is in theaters, but what we need are regulation busters. I spoke with Salen Churi and Brooke Fallon from Trust Ventures, a $500 million Texas-based venture-capital firm. It’s almost as if they are wearing plasma proton packs.

. . .

Trust Ventures came together, Mr. Churi said, because no one thinks “ ‘I hate innovation,’ except perhaps for incumbents. We have crises in the most human of industries—energy, healthcare, housing. Everyone thought I was nuts. They’re like, ‘Why would you invest in companies with regulatory problems?’ ” Good question.

Most venture capitalists invest and help startups with new strategies and hiring a team. Mr. Churi describes what he does as “trench warfare,” fighting with regulators and incumbents deal by deal.

. . .

Mr. Churi explains that “when you get a great new technology that’s fundamentally different, regulators just want to shove you in the old box, right? Our challenge is to say, ‘Well, actually, this needs a new box.’ Otherwise, it’s going to sit on the shelf.”

Eye exams are a great example of an old box. The American Optometric Association is powerful, and many states banned online vision tests. “Regulators don’t care about all those single mothers who have to pay three times as much or that people in Central Illinois have to drive three hours,” Mr. Churi says.

The pandemic loosened telehealth rules, providing an opening to test your eyes with your own smartphone. As lockdowns ended, Trust Ventures worked with the startup Visibly in several states to legalize online eye exams permanently. They got help from their investors network—some of their limited partners “are great American families,” Mr. Churi says. Visibly’s Food and Drug Administration-approved online eye tests, now in 36 states, cost as little as $35 instead of three times as much at LensCrafters or box-store-located optometrists.

For the full commentary see:

Andy Kessler. “Inside View; America’s New Regulation Busters.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, April 15, 2024): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 14, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)

Prepare for Next Unexpected Disaster By Unbinding Nimble Entrepreneurs Who Can Pivot and Improvise

Governments have trouble preparing for uncertain and rare disasters, such as pandemics. So they “fight the last war,” expecting that the next disaster will look like the last disaster. Before WWII, France built the Maginot line, which they thought would have protected them against the kind of attack they had faced in WWI. The U.S. was more prepared for an Ebola pandemic than for a Covid pandemic. In an uncertain world, the best way to prepare for rare disasters is to allow and encourage nimble entrepreneurs who can resiliently pivot and improvise to counter whatever disaster arrives.

(p. A8) Britain’s government “failed” the country’s citizens in its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, a damning report from an official public inquiry said on Thursday [July 18, 2024], partly because officials had prepared for “the wrong pandemic.”

The arrival of Covid-19 in 2020 exposed flaws in Britain’s public health system and its pandemic preparedness that had been ignored for years, the report said. During the early waves of infections, Britain’s per capita death rate was among the highest in Europe, eventually leading to more than 225,000 deaths in total, according to official data.

“Had the U.K. been better prepared for and more resilient to the pandemic, some of that financial and human cost may have been avoided,” the report said.

. . .

Britain had a plan, but it was “outdated and lacked adaptability,” the report said.

It was also too focused on the possibility of a flu pandemic. “Although it was understandable for the U.K. to prioritize pandemic influenza, this should not have been to the effective exclusion of other potential pathogen outbreaks,” the report said.

. . .

Ministers, who are political appointees, did not have access to a broad enough range of scientific research and opinions that would have informed their policies, and advisers did not feel confident about expressing dissenting views.

“The advice offered to ministers and international bodies may well have been affected by a degree of ‘groupthink’,” the report said.

For the full story see:

Lynsey Chutel. “Before Covid, U.K. Prepared for ‘the Wrong Pandemic,’ Inquiry Finds.” The New York Times (Monday, July 22, 2024): A8.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 18, 2024, and has the title “U.K. Failed in Handling of Covid Pandemic, Inquiry Finds.”)

The “damning report” mentioned above, is:

Hallett, Baroness. “Uk Covid-19 Inquiry; Module 1: The Resilience and Preparedness of the United Kingdom.” July 18, 2024.

Mitochondria and Chloroplasts Arose Through the Horizontal Evolution of Endosymbiosis

(p. A13) Mr. Mindell, a senior researcher at UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, offers an account of “horizontal” evolutionary processes that are not an alternative to the established view but a tweak and an addition.

. . .

The book . . . offers an updated, more sophisticated appreciation of how some living things, some of the time, exchange genes with members of the same generation.

. . .

Introgression—the mixing of genes between species—has been revealed in human ancestry by the presence, in modern populations, of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA. Mr. Mindell points to other cases of introgression, including between coyotes and gray wolves and between brown and polar bears. “All hybridization phenomena, including introgression,” he writes, “qualify as horizontal evolution, because genetic material is exchanged between different species, rather than between parents and offspring, the path of vertical evolution. They denote networking rather than branching.”

. . .  . . . inter-species hybridization still has a vertical component. A notable exception is recombination, a process that is widespread in bacteria, archaea and certain viruses. Among these populations, individuals will occasionally connect, exchange genetic material and then go their separate ways: the equivalent of a one-night stand, with important consequences for human health. It is in part because of their penchant for such networking that the viruses that cause AIDS, influenza and Covid-19 are so quick to evolve and thus so difficult to combat.

As “The Network of Life” ably demonstrates, horizontal evolution has shaped ancient processes that have set the stage for life as we know it. Mr. Mindell pays special attention to endosymbiosis, in which one tiny organism comes to reside inside another, sometimes creating a merger. “Some of the most consequential innovations in life’s 3.8-billion-year history,” he writes, “stem from a joining of previously distinct lineages by endosymbiosis.” The process gave rise to mitochondria, the “energy powerhouses” of our cells, and to chloroplasts, the intracellular denizens that enable plants to conduct photosynthesis.

For the full review see:

David P. Barash. “BOOKSHELF; Natural Mixer.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, June 28, 2024): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 27, 2024, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘The Network of Life’ Review: Natural Mixer.”)

The book under review is:

Mindell, David P. The Network of Life: A New View of Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024.

Sweden’s Restraint in Mandating Covid Lockdowns Resulted in Much Lower Excess Mortality Than the U.S. Suffered

(p. A17) The best measure of health performance during the pandemic is all-cause excess mortality, which captures the overall number of deaths relative to the expected level, encompassing Covid and lockdown-related deaths. On this measure Sweden—which kept most schools open and avoided strict lockdown orders—outperformed nearly every country in the world.

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the U.S. “would have had 1.60 million fewer deaths if it had the performance of Sweden, 1.07 million fewer deaths if it had the performance of Finland, and 0.91 million fewer deaths if it had the performance of France.” In America, states that imposed prolonged lockdowns had no better health outcomes when measured by all-cause excess mortality than those that stayed open. While no quantifiable relationship between lockdown severity and a reduction in Covid health harms has been found, states with severe lockdowns suffered significantly worse economic outcomes.

. . .

The economic costs of lockdowns were also staggering. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as many as 49 million Americans were out of work in May 2020. This shock had health consequences. A National Bureau of Economic Research study found that the lockdown unemployment shock is projected to result in 840,000 to 1.22 million excess deaths over the next 15 to 20 years, disproportionately killing women and minorities.

For the full commentary see:

Scott W. Atlas and Steve H. Hanke. “Covid Lessons Learned, Four Years Later.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, March 19, 2024): A17.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 18, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)

The “recent study” mentioned above is:

Ioannidis, John P. A., Francesco Zonta, and Michael Levitt. “Variability in Excess Deaths across Countries with Different Vulnerability During 2020–2023.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 49 (Dec. 5, 2023): e2309557120.

The published version of the National Bureau of Economic Research study mentioned above is:

Bianchi, Francesco, Giada Bianchi, and Dongho Song. “The Long-Term Impact of the Covid-19 Unemployment Shock on Life Expectancy and Mortality Rates.” Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 146 (Jan. 2023): 104581.

Older Americans, Most at Risk from Covid-19, Were Often Excluded from Mandated Clinical Trials of Therapies and Vaccines

Mandating randomized double-blind clinical trials for Covid-19 candidate therapies or vaccines slowed down the ability of citizens to choose those therapies or vaccines in 2020. Arguably those most hurt by the delay were older Americans age 65 and older, who had the greatest risk of death from Covid-19. The mandated trials slowed availability, but did they at least provide older Americans more and better information about the safety and efficacy of the therapies and vaccines? Not as much as you might suppose. The clinical trials often excluded older Americans because their participation would make the trials more expensive, slower, and less likely to prove safety and efficacy at levels that would result in FDA approval.

(p. D3) “Ideally, the patients enrolled in a randomized clinical trial reflect the demographics of the disease,” said Dr. Mark Sloan, a hematologist leading a Covid-19 drug study at Boston Medical Center, in an email. “Unfortunately, this is seldom the case.”

Now, Dr. Sharon K. Inouye, a geriatrician at Harvard Medical School and Hebrew SeniorLife, is sounding an alarm. She points out that in the race to find drugs and vaccines to fight the pandemic — in which 80 percent of American deaths have occurred in people over age 65 — a substantial proportion of studies may be excluding older subjects, purposely or inadvertently.

“A year from now, when these trials are published, I don’t want to see that there’s no one in them over 75,” she said. “If they create a drug that works really well in healthy 50- and 60-year-olds, they’ve missed the boat.”

She and her team have reviewed 241 interventional Covid-19 studies undertaken in the United States and listed on clinicaltrials.gov, a site maintained by a division of the National Institutes of Health.

They found that 37 of these trials — testing drugs, vaccines and devices — set specific age limits and would not enroll participants older than 75, 80 or 85. A few even excluded those over 65.

. . .

Overall, when Dr. Inouye compiled preliminary results, which have not yet been published, she found that about one-quarter of interventional trials in the United States could exclude or underrepresent older adults.

“To have them be this gravely impacted and not include them is immoral,” said Dr. Louise Aronson, the author of the best-selling book “Elderhood” and a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco. “It seems crazy.”

. . .

In clinical trials, “you want to control as many factors as possible,” Dr. Aronson said. Most older adults have other illnesses and take multiple medications, so-called confounding variables that make it difficult to distinguish the effects of the drug or vaccine being studied.

Older people also suffer more side effects. “Nearly all drugs are less toxic when given to younger, healthier people,” Dr. Sloan said in an email. Focusing on them produces fewer adverse effects that must be reported, “and thereby improves chances for F.D.A. approval.”

Physical disabilities, which make it harder for seniors to reach study sites, or hearing and vision impairments requiring large-print forms or audio amplification, can further decrease participation. Investigators may need to take the extra step of obtaining family consent if a patient is incapacitated.

For the full story see:

Paula Span. “The New Old Age; Older Adults May Be Left Out of Some Covid-19 Trials.” The New York Times (Tuesday, June 23, 2020 [sic]): D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 19, 2020 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)

After the publication of the NYT article quoted above, Dr. Inouye’s results were published in:

Helfand, Benjamin K. I., Margaret Webb, Sarah L. Gartaganis, Lily Fuller, Churl-Su Kwon, and Sharon K. Inouye. “The Exclusion of Older Persons from Vaccine and Treatment Trials for Coronavirus Disease 2019—Missing the Target.” JAMA Internal Medicine 180, no. 11 (Nov. 2020): 1546-49.

Governments Often Deliver “Horrible Ideas Executed Terribly”

(p. A15) After the $320 million floating fiasco ran aground, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance tweeted: “The Gaza pier is a symbol of the Biden administration. A horrible idea executed terribly.”

. . .

Government is bad for your health. Whose idea was it to pay for gain-of-function research in Wuhan? Remember when the Food and Drug Administration delayed the rollout of Covid tests by, among other things, requiring applications on CD-ROMs? In 2020! The FDA interference, according to a Yale Law Journal 2020 Forum, was “possibly the deadliest regulatory overreach in U.S. history.”

. . .

Between the Covid-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan, the Paycheck Protection Program and the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation program, the FBI reports almost $300 billion in fraud. It was so easy, tens of thousands reportedly filed applications from jail.

. . .

Why are governments so bad at execution? Accountability and incentives. There are no prices or profits, just elusive cost benefits estimated in simple spreadsheets any first-year investment banker could fudge.

But these public-works projects are well intentioned, right? Hardly. Good luck finding all the hidden agendas, political back scratching and paid-off donors. Or, in the case of student loans, bribes to voters. Getting re-elected is how politicians measure the success of government work vs. private-sector profits.

Those profits from each private-sector project or product provide capital that pays for the next important project. In perpetuity. Profits also provide guidance to markets that fund great ideas and kill off bad ones. It’s Darwinism vs. kleptocracy. Sadly, politicians and industrial policy will always fund dumb things like electric-vehicle chargers, high-speed rail and Neom—horrible ideas executed terribly.

For the full commentary see:

Andy Kessler. “Your Government at Work.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, June 10, 2024): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 9, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)

In “An Entrenched Echo Chamber” the Highly Credentialed Slow Progress Toward an Alzheimer’s Cure

Centralized research funding (often centralized by government agencies) reduces the pluralism of ideas and methods that often lead to breakthrough innovations. The story of Alzheimer’s research, quoted below, is a dramatic case-in-point.

A secondary related lesson from the story quoted below is that Dr. Thambisetty, one of the outsiders struggling to make a difference, is trying to evade the enormous costs of mandated phase 3 clinical trials, by only investigating drugs that already have been approved by the FDA for use against other conditions. With his severely limited funding, and the huge costs of mandated phase 3 clinical trials, this may be a shrewd strategy for Thambisetty, but notice that by following it, he will never explore all the as-yet-unapproved chemicals that might include the best magic bullet against Alzheimer’s.)

(p. A25) What if a preposterous failed treatment for Covid-19 — the arthritis drug hydroxychloroquine — could successfully treat another dreaded disease, Alzheimer’s?

Dr. Madhav Thambisetty, a neurologist at the National Institute on Aging, thinks the drug’s suppression of inflammation, commonly associated with neurodegenerative disorders, might provide surprising benefits for dementia.

It’s an intriguing idea. Unfortunately, we won’t know for quite a while, if ever, whether Dr. Thambisetty is right. That’s because unconventional ideas that do not offer fealty to the dominant approach to study and treat Alzheimer’s — what’s known as the amyloid hypothesis — often find themselves starved for funds and scientific mind share.

Such shortsighted rigidity may have slowed progress toward a cure — a tragedy for a disease projected to affect more than 11 million people in the United States by 2040.

. . .

. . ., in 2006, an animal experiment published in the journal Nature identified a specific type of amyloid protein as the first substance found in brain tissue to directly cause symptoms associated with Alzheimer’s. Top scientists called it a breakthrough that provided a key target for treatments. The paper became one of the most cited in the field, and funds to explore similar proteins skyrocketed.

. . .

In 2022, my investigation in Science showed evidence that the famous 2006 experiment that helped push forward the amyloid hypothesis used falsified data. On June 24 [2024], after most of its authors conceded technical images were doctored, the paper was finally retracted.

. . .

In reporting for my forthcoming book about the disturbing state of play in Alzheimer’s research, I’ve spoken to many scientists pursuing alternatives. Dr. Thambisetty, for example, compares brain tissues from people who died in their 30s or 40s with and without genetic risk factors for Alzheimer’s. He then compares these findings to tissues from deceased Alzheimer’s patients and people who didn’t have the disease. Where changes overlap, drug targets might emerge. Rather than develop new drugs through lab and animal testing, followed by clinical trials that cost vast sums — a process that can take decades — he examines treatments already approved as reasonably safe and effective for other conditions. Patent protections have lapsed for many, making them inexpensive.

Experiments have also begun to test the weight-loss drug semaglutide (sold as Wegovy, among other brands). Researchers hope that results due in 2026 will show that its anti-inflammatory effects — like Dr. Thambisetty’s idea about hydroxychloroquine — slow cognitive decline.

Ruth Itzhaki, a research scientist at the University of Oxford, stirred curiosity in the 1990s when she shared evidence tying Alzheimer’s to herpesvirus — a scourge spread by oral or genital contact and often resulting in painful infections. For years, powerful promoters of the amyloid hypothesis ignored or dismissed the infection hypothesis for Alzheimer’s, effectively rendering it invisible, Dr. Itzhaki said with exasperation. Research suggests that viruses may hide undetected in organs, including the brain, for years, causing symptoms divergent from the original infection.

. . .

Sometimes a disease stems from a single clear-cut origin, such as genetic mutations that cause deadly sickle cell disease. “But very few diseases of aging have just one cause. It’s just not logical,” said Dr. Matthew Schrag, a neurologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Working independently of his university, he discovered the 2006 research image manipulations.

. . .

“There is an entrenched echo chamber that involves a lot of big names,” Dr. Schrag said. “It’s time for the field to move on.”

For the full commentary see:

Charles Piller. “All the Alzheimer’s Research We Didn’t Do.” The New York Times (Friday, July 12, 2024): A25.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 7, 2024, and has the same title as the print version. Where there are a couple of small differences in wording, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

Piller’s paper in Science, mentioned above, is:

Piller, Charles. “Blots on a Field?” Science 377, no. 6604 (July 2022): 358-63.

Piller’s commentary is related to his forthcoming book:

Piller, Charles. Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s. New York: Atria/One Signal Publishers, Forthcoming on February 4, 2025.

Subpoena Emails Between Wuhan Lab and U.S. Partners to Illuminate Origin of Covid

The passages quoted below are a very small part of a much longer essay that took up the space of a full page and a half of the SundayOpinion section of The New York Times.

(p. 6) On Monday [June 3, 2024], Dr. Anthony Fauci returned to the halls of Congress and testified before the House subcommittee investigating the Covid-19 pandemic. He was questioned about several topics related to the government’s handling of Covid-19, including how the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he directed until retiring in 2022, supported risky virus work at a Chinese institute whose research may have caused the pandemic.

For more than four years, reflexive partisan politics have derailed the search for the truth about a catastrophe that has touched us all. It has been estimated that at least 25 million people around the world have died because of Covid-19, with over a million of those deaths in the United States.

Although how the pandemic started has been hotly debated, a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China. If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.

. . .

(p. 7) The pandemic could have been caused by any of hundreds of virus species, at any of tens of thousands of wildlife markets, in any of thousands of cities, and in any year. But it was a SARS-like coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that emerged in Wuhan, less than two years after scientists, sometimes working under inadequate biosafety conditions, proposed collecting and creating viruses of that same design.

While several natural spillover scenarios remain plausible, and we still don’t know enough about the full extent of virus research conducted at the Wuhan institute by Dr. Shi’s team and other researchers, a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.

Given what we now know, investigators should follow their strongest leads and subpoena all exchanges between the Wuhan scientists and their international partners, including unpublished research proposals, manuscripts, data and commercial orders. In particular, exchanges from 2018 and 2019 — the critical two years before the emergence of Covid-19 — are very likely to be illuminating (and require no cooperation from the Chinese government to acquire), yet they remain beyond the public’s view more than four years after the pandemic began.

Whether the pandemic started on a lab bench or in a market stall, it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them.

. . .

A thorough investigation by the U.S. government could unearth more evidence while spurring whistleblowers to find their courage and seek their moment of opportunity. It would also show the world that U.S. leaders and scientists are not afraid of what the truth behind the pandemic may be.

For the full essay see:

Alina Chan. “Why Covid Probably Started in a Lab.” The New York Times, SundayOpinion Section (Sunday, June 9, 2024): 6-7.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date June 3, 2024, and has the title “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points.”)

The essay quoted above summarizes and updates her co-authored book:

Chan, Alina, and Matt Ridley. Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. New York: Harper, 2021.

Many Workers Happily Accept Lower Pay if They Can Work Remotely

(p. A15) The U.S. inflation rate tumbled from June 2022 to June 2023. It was no slide down the Phillips curve of the sort that textbooks attribute to tighter monetary policy. Instead, inflation fell 6 percentage points as unemployment stayed low. It is thus a mistake to credit this episode to the Federal Reserve’s departure from low interest rates.

. . .

Employees initially reaped the benefits of remote work, because their wages reflected pre-pandemic conditions and expectations. Over time, pay adjusted and employers adapted, eventually allowing them to benefit from slower wage growth.

My research quantifies this source of wage-growth moderation. Along with the Atlanta Fed, our team asked hundreds of business executives whether remote work affected their firms’ wages. Thirty-eight percent told us their companies had relied on the work-from-home boom to moderate wage-growth pressures in the previous 12 months. Forty-one percent said their firms planned to use remote work to restrain wage growth in the next 12 months. We found that the boom reduced overall wage growth by 2 percentage points from spring 2021 to spring 2023. In all likelihood, the effects extended beyond this interval, because pay adjusts slowly.

Remote work cuts costs in other ways, too. When employees work on site only two days a week, their companies need less space.

For the full commentary see:

Steven J. Davis. “Working at Home Helped Whip Inflation.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, June 20, 2024): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 19, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)

Davis’s research mentioned above is:

Barrero, Jose Maria, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Brent H. Meyer, and Emil Mihaylov. “The Shift to Remote Work Lessens Wage-Growth Pressures.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper # 30197, July 2022.

“Extended School Closures Did Not Significantly Stop the Spread of Covid, While the Academic Harms for Children Have Been Large and Long-Lasting”

(p. A13) Four years ago this month, schools nationwide began to shut down, igniting one of the most polarizing and partisan debates of the pandemic.

Some schools, often in Republican-led states and rural areas, reopened by fall 2020. Others, typically in large cities and states led by Democrats, would not fully reopen for another year.

A variety of data — about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19 — has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.

For the full story see:

Sarah Mervosh, Claire Cain Miller and Francesca Paris. “Pandemic School Closures Came at a Steep Cost to Students, Data Shows.” The New York Times (Friday, March 29, 2024): A13.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated March 19, 2024, and has the title “What the Data Says About Pandemic School Closures, Four Years Later.”)