- GAO: unemployment insurance fraud during the pandemic as high as $135 billion. (That is roughly $1,350 for every household in America.)
- Medicare targets cheap, generic, life saving drug for price “negotiation.” (WSJ)
- Rich countries get quality medicines; the poor sometimes get poison. But, contra NYT, the solution is markets, not regulation.
- Court tells the FDA to stop playing doctor. (WSJ)
- As a percent of income, lower-income people cheat more on their income taxes than higher income people. HT: David Henderson
- Did the eradication of hookworms cause modern allergies?
Category: COVID-19 and Public Health
Why Covid (“Misinformation”) Censorship Didn’t Work
A new study, published this week in Science Advances, argues that Meta’s Covid-19 policies may not have been effective. Though Meta’s decision to remove more content did result in the overall volume of anti-vaccine content on Facebook decreasing, the study found that engagement may have “shifted, rather than decreased” outright.
Source: A.W. Ohlheiser at Slate
Saturday Links
- Did the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) censor a meta study showing that lock downs had no effect on covid?
- A smart pill — the size of a blueberry! — can be used to automatically detect key biological molecules in the gut that suggest problems, and wirelessly transmit the information in real time.
- Robin Hansen: World population will peak in about thirty years, and then will likely fall by half every generation or two.
- How the government sets Medicare prices: it’s “a pattern of combining dated, imprecise cost reports with idiosyncratic and opaque adjustments that were not constructed to guarantee the best outcomes for the dollars spent.”
Thursday Links
- CIA whistle blower: the agency bribed analysts to cover up the covid lab leak.
- Do you know the difference between “bagging” vs “buy and bill”? You may be spending too much for prescription drugs if you don’t.
- Panel: Sudafed doesn’t work. I happen to know it does.
- Opioid penetration map – county by county data. (WP)
- Why did the Surgeon General’s report on loneliness ignore the pen pal remedy?
- A new Human Rights Watch report: “Children in the US can be legally married in 41 states, physically punished by school administrators in 47 states, sentenced to life without parole in 22 states, and work in hazardous agriculture conditions in all 50 states.”
- Generic drugs save consumers $338 billion every year.