Hunter Biden’s problems won’t go away
Hunter Biden’s lurid and lewd videos have spilled out onto the internet over the last month, along with reports that he could soon face federal charges. Multiple news organizations are reporting that the
U.S. Justice Department’s criminal investigation of the president’s son has reached
“a critical stage.”
Shortly after the 2020 election, Hunter acknowledged that he was under investigation by the federal government and had been since 2018. He has since paid about $2 million to the Internal Revenue Service, but it doesn’t appear that the payment ended the matter.
There’s speculation that the charges could involve violations of tax laws as well as laws regulating foreign lobbying. There may also be a charge of making a false statement in connection with the purchase of a firearm. Or there could be what one expert called “a generous plea deal.”
Meanwhile, Hunter’s penchant for vivid electronic recordkeeping continues to produce new information. For example, the New York Post recently reported that the personal calendar on his abandoned laptop computer shows that between 2008 and 2016, “Hunter Biden met with his father at least 30 times at the White House or the vice president’s residence, often just days after he returned home from overseas business jaunts.” Eric Schwerin, the president of Hunter’s investment company, Rosemont Seneca Partners, was invited to 21 of those meetings, according to the calendar entries.
President Biden has said repeatedly that he had no involvement in his son’s overseas business dealings, but if his son is under scrutiny for allegedly violating foreign lobbying laws, and there’s a record of business meetings between them in close proximity to foreign trips, and a lot of money is changing hands through questionable business partnerships, it raises obvious questions about influence peddling.
“Hardly a day goes by without another revelation about how intimately involved Joe Biden was with his son Hunter Biden’s corrupt foreign business dealings,” House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik told the New
York Post. Another lawmaker who plans to investigate is Rep. James Comer, R-Kentucky. “We have evidence, emails, voice mails, damning evidence on Hunter Biden,” he said in an interview.
Over on the Senate side, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin,
Barbara Ferrer, L.A. County’s director of public health is wrong to push for a return of empirically questionable mask mandates. sent people coming to the hospital for unrelated reasons who just happen to test positive at the time. We know this from Public Health’s own data, which reports that since March only 40% of COVID-positive hospitalizations in the county have actually been caused by COVID. If only true COVID hospitalizations are counted to accurately reflect the virus’s impact, the county easily drops out of the “High” tier.
According to Los Angeles County Department of Health Services hospital officials, even the 40% number is a large overestimate. In a remarkable video from the day of Dr. Ferrer’s mandate announcement, the hospitals’ Chief Medical Officer Dr. Brad Spellberg said of their COVID admissions, “90% of the time it is not due to COVID. Only 10% of our COVID-positive admissions are due to COVID. Virtually none of them go to the ICU, and when they do go to the
ICU it is not for pneumonia. They are not intubated ... we haven’t seen one of those since February.” Health Services confirmed these facts in a statement: “We currently have 30 COVID-positive patients in the hospital, of whom three were admitted for COVID, none of whom are in the ICU.”
Hospital epidemiologist Dr. Paul Holtom summarized the situation this way: “As of this morning, we have no one in the hospital who had pulmonary disease due to COVID ... Certainly, there’s no reason from a hospitalization-dueto-COVID perspective to
In a remarkable video from the day of Dr. Ferrer’s mandate announcement, the hospitals’ Chief
Medical Officer Dr. Brad Spellberg said of their COVID admissions, “90% of the time it is not due to COVID. Only 10% of our COVID-positive admissions are due to COVID. Virtually none of them go to the ICU, and when they do go to the ICU it is not for pneumonia.”
be worried at this point.”
The problem is not limited to just L.A. County: San Diego Unified School District is re-instituting restrictions based on the same flawed Community Levels metric. In contrast, other counties that are also technically in the “High” tier understand the data and are not even considering mandates. Marin County, for example, separates COVID-positive hospitalizations by cause to avoid confusion.
The case for new mandates is further undermined by the growing scientific literature showing mask mandates to be ineffective. In the pandemic turmoil of 2020, most studies didn’t have the ability to compare COVID rates with and without masks in groups that were otherwise carefully matched. Claims of mask efficacy were thus based on studies with no or improper control groups. Other studies have relied on phone surveys or mathematical models rather than direct measurements of infection or transmission, or used contact tracing protocols that excluded counting masked transmission.
Now in mid-2022 we have much better data. Exhaustive tracking of inschool COVID spread was indistinguishable with and without student mask use in studies in Spain, a conclusion repeated in two separate COVID waves. Studies of student masking with control groups in Georgia, North Dakota, Finland and the UK have all found the same lack of any clear benefit. One randomized controlled trial showed no significant benefit to the mask wearer, and a second randomized trial found a slight benefit (and only in older adults) that was not reproduced with a different analysis of the same data.
When researchers repeated a CDC study showing a mask benefit using identical methods but a larger and better dataset, the benefit of masking disappeared.
Influenza transmits by the same aerosol route as COVID, so we must add the results of 10 randomized controlled trials on masking and influenza, which the CDC reviewed and “found no significant effect of face masks on transmission.”
All of this explains why White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha found no difference in Omicron infection rates between mask-mandated California and maskmandate-free Florida, or why Alameda County’s recent mask mandate produced no difference in COVID rates versus neighboring counties.
This is terrible policymaking for public health: using data that doctors and scientists agree are not accurate to justify a mandate that isn’t effective.
Public health mandates aren’t harmless, especially for children, students, parents, and families, who should not have to enter a fourth school year with restrictions based on erroneous science.
Jeffrey Klausner, MD, MPH is clinical professor of Medicine, Infectious Diseases, Population and Public Health, Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. Dr. Klausner is a former CDC medical officer and former San Francisco city and county deputy health officer.
Neeraj Sood, Ph.D is a professor of health policy at Price School of Public Policy and director of the COVID Initiative at Schaeffer Center at the University of Southern California.