| Unleash Prosperity Hotline – Weekend Edition Issue #338 07/30/2021, 07/31/2021, 08/01/2021 |
| 1) Your Tax Dollars Hard at Work As Congress continues to spend and borrow trillions upon trillions of dollars like they are M&Ms, this headline from Maryland’s investigative journalism source “Center” caught our attention:  According to the story: “Maryland state Comptroller Peter Franchot on Wednesday estimated that about $2 billion in federal and state unemployment funds distributed during the pandemic were fraudulently obtained.” We remember a time when that used to be considered a lot of money. Guess how many fraudsters there were in Maryland? 500,000!! This report comes a month or so after we learned that California auditors found $30 billion in paid-out claims were later determined to be fraudulent. We’re eagerly awaiting the fraud totals from the other 48 states, but we won’t hold our breath because the pols are too busy finding ways to waste the $500 billion the feds flooded into state coffers. |
| 2) The CDC Remask Guidance Is Based on the Worst Model We Have Ever Seen That’s quite an accomplishment because COVID models have been wildly wrong from the beginning. But this one. Just wow. Every single assumption is not just unjustified, but wildly contrary to observed reality. No wonder they kept this slide deck secret — and we question the wisdom of publicly leaking it now.  Masks are assumed to be 40% to 60% effective at source control and 20% to 30% protective for the wearer. If these assumptions were even close to true this pandemic would have ended within weeks of masks being adopted — there is zero citation for these outlandish assumptions in the deck. Natural immunity is assumed to be just 5% in their preferred scenario and 35% in their alternative scenario. The CDC’s own national blood donor survey showed 49% of the adult population with detectable antibodies in March. The latest burden estimates from CDC — posted yesterday! — show 37% of the total population had been infected by May. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html And the R0 of Delta is assumed to be 5 — even though the latest UK data shows a household secondary attack rate just 7.5% higher for Delta than for Alpha, and outside of testing ramp up we’ve almost never seen R>2 anywhere. The original Imperial College doomsday model had R0 = 2.4. No wonder they were too embarrassed to publish this slide deck. Garbage in, garbage out. |
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