The single-celled protozoan Toxoplasma gondii is a fascinating parasite. Replicating only in cat intestines, it is excreted in feces and subsequently spreads to many other organisms, not just felines. Inside these critters, it winds its way to the brain and transforms into numerous cysts, patiently waiting to return to its desired nine-lived host. But, though dormant, it is not entirely inert. T. gondii actually alters its host’s behavior. Mice, for example, grow less fearful of cats, making them easier prey. Just like T. gondii wanted…
Humans are also affected by T. gondii. About one in ten Americans and a third of people globally host the parasite. And yes, it seems to sneakily mess with our minds, too. Studies suggest that infested humans have ever-so-slightly impaired motor skills, undertake additional risks, and get into more automotive accidents. The parasite’s presence is also linked to an elevated risk of schizophrenia.
Curiously, as as new study published in PeerJ finds, T. gondii may also change humans’ physical appearance. An international team turned up a link between a latent infection and facial attractiveness. The researchers recruited 213 healthy college students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, all of whom had previously been tested for T. gondii. Thirty-five subjects (22 men and 13 women) had the parasite, while 178 (86 men and 92 women) did not. The researchers then asked the subjects various questions and took pictures of their faces.
Next, another 205 participants each viewed a random collection of twenty of these pictures, ten of Toxoplasma-positive subjects and ten of Toxoplasma-negative subjects, rating each pictured participant for facial attractiveness and perceived health on a 10-point scale. (Raters were not told of participants’ Toxoplasma status.) Overall, raters judged Toxoplasma-positive subjects to be significantly more attractive and healthy-looking than Toxoplasma-negative subjects.
“T. gondii infection may produce changes in facial symmetry of its hosts through changes in endocrinological variables such as testosterone levels,” the researchers wrote. “These changes, both in the endocrinology system and in facial symmetry, would ultimately benefit the spread of the parasite by increasing the attractiveness of its hosts.”
Indeed, as the researchers measured, participants with T. gondii tended to have more symmetrical faces. Facial symmetry is commonly associated with beauty.
Other parasites are known to affect the physicial characteristics of their animal hosts. Moreover, previous studies showed that men infected with T. gondii have higher testosterone levels. However, a simpler explanation for the association is that attractive people are more likely to contract T. gondii as they might engage in more sexual activity. (T. gondii can be transmitted sexually.) The researchers did find that Toxoplasma-positive subjects reported having more sexual partners.
More research is needed to confirm the study’s intriguing finding, so don’t go seeking out cat feces just yet in the hopes of making your face more alluring.
Source: Borráz-León JI, Rantala MJ, Krams IA, Cerda-Molina AL, Contreras-Garduño J. 2022. Are Toxoplasma-infected subjects more attractive, symmetrical, or healthier than non-infected ones? Evidence from subjective and objective measurements. PeerJ 10:e13122 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.13122
These Are The Most Downloaded Apps In Russia In March
In early February, the most downloaded app from the App Store in Russia was ‘Persona’, a makeup filter app, followed by video conferencing provider Zoom and the online retailer AliExpress (according to a review of app data sources by The Economist).
However, as Statista’s Martin Armstrong details below, since the invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing sanctions, pull outs and censorship, people in the country have been far more focused on finding a VPN or internet privacy app, as shown by this infographic based on analysis by Sensor Tower and Quartz.
On March 15, the internet privacy app 1.1.1.1. was the most downloaded app in Russia when taking into account the numbers from Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.
The top 8 list is dominated by VPN providers, with the encrypted messaging service Telegram making an appearance, too.
Looking for solutions to problems of a far more serious nature, Quartz reports that the most downloaded app in Ukraine on this day was ‘Air Alarm‘, which as described by the developer “generates a loud alert warning of an airstrike, chemical attack, technological catastrophe or other types of civil defence alerts.”
At least 137,500 absentee ballots were cast through unlawful vote trafficking throughout several of Wisconsin’s largest cities in the 2020 election, according to research presented last week to the state Assembly’s Committee on Campaigns and Elections by the public interest organization True the Vote (TTV).
Ballot trafficking is an activity in which absentee ballots and votes are solicited, sometimes in exchange for money or other valuables. They are then collected through a process called “harvesting” and delivered to drop boxes by intermediaries (someone other than the voter), who are often paid a per-ballot fee by partisan actors.
“An organized crime against Americans” is how TTV cyber expert Gregg Phillips described to the committee what happened in Wisconsin and elsewhere during the 2020 election.
Based on his 15-month study of election practices in Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Michigan, Phillips estimates that at least 4.8 million votes were trafficked nationally.
4.8 MILLION ballots trafficked in the 2020 Election
7% of mail-in ballots were trafficked in every Swing State True the Vote has looked in
According to the True the Vote report, 242 intermediaries in metro Atlanta made 5,668 stops at drop boxes during elections in late 2020. In its report, TTV said it obtained 4 million minutes of drop box video surveillance tape that helped to document its Georgia findings.
“Many of the traffickers we spoke with do not recognize what they are doing as being a problem,” TTV spokesperson Catherine Engelbrecht said.
The study found that in Arizona, 202 intermediaries made 4,282 separate visits to ballot boxes in Maricopa County.
Several Arizonans have since been indicted for election law violations, with at least one conviction, according to Phillips.
Phillips told the committee that, in the states studied, TTV purchased from commercial brokers 10 trillion unique cell phone identity signals called “pings.”
Human rights organization First Freedoms funded the time-consuming and costly project.
Using a technique called geospatial mobile device signal analysis, Phillips said researchers are able to reconstruct a four-dimensional “pattern of life” of cell phone holders.
“From these pings, it can be determined where you work, where you sleep, and even what floor you are on within inches,” he said.
The Wisconsin study focused primarily on the Milwaukee County area, with some partial initial data coming from Racine and Green Bay, where the study will soon be further expanded, Phillips said.
In those three areas, TTV’s cell phone ping research found that in the two weeks from Oct. 20 through Nov. 3, 2020, 138 individuals each visited the location of a nongovernmental organization at least five times and made a combined total of 3,588 trips to absentee ballot drop boxes.
“That’s an average of 26 trips per person to drop boxes in the Milwaukee area,” Phillips said.
“Is this evidence of fraud?” committee member Lisa Subeck, a Democrat, asked.
“Vote trafficking is being done through the process. It is illegal,” replied Engelbrecht, who stated that every vote cast illegally cancels the vote of a legitimate voter.
Wisconsin Statute 6.87 (4)(b)1 provides that an absentee ballot envelope, in which the cast absentee ballot is placed, must be “mailed by the elector, or delivered in person, to the municipal clerk issuing the ballot or ballots.” The Circuit Court in Waukesha County in Teigen v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, has agreed, holding that use of drop boxes for absentee voting violates Wisconsin law.
Drop boxes, if unattended by a municipal clerk or in an unauthorized location, are illegal under Wisconsin law. The law is currently being challenged in the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
In her testimony, Engelbrecht stressed that the TTV report was focused on the process and wasn’t attempting to prove the 137,551 votes were illegal votes.
State Rep. Dave Murphy, a Republican member of the committee, stated: “If you vote in an illegal way, it is an illegal vote. If the process is illegal, the vote is illegal.”
Earlier in March, the report of special counsel Michael Gabelman on voter fraud revealed that some personnel of nongovernmental organizations are suspected of coordinating the 2020 ballot harvesting operations in Wisconsin’s five largest heavily Democrat-run cities—Milwaukee, Kenosha, Green Bay, Madison, and Racine.
When asked by Rep. Donna Rozar, a Republican, to name the NGOs in the study that were repeatedly visited by intermediaries, Phillips declined.
A spokesperson for Micah Inc., a leading Milwaukee nonprofit philanthropic organization, told The Epoch Times that Micah does conduct “voter engagement efforts,” but declined to say more.
Phillips and Engelbrecht testified that enormous nonprofits, such as National Vote at Home, are promoting voting from home and favor doing away with in-person voting on Election Day entirely.
“Most countries around the world vote in person on election day, including Ukraine,” Phillips said.
Engelbrecht argued that some countries have perfected secure blockchain electronic voting and said she thinks U.S. technology is advanced enough to at least ensure accurate election data.
She said that some U.S. election jurisdictions view inaccurate voting rolls as a “feature rather than a bug.”
“Our rolls are abysmal. Bad records are the gateway to fraud,” Engelbrecht said.
“If you can’t verify identity, you can’t do anything else,” Phillips said.
Rep. Ron Tusler, a Republican, asked if TTV could identify the 138 alleged ballot harvesters (also known as “mules”).
“We know the names but are not disclosing them,” Phillips said. “Anyone can buy them commercially. However, law enforcement would need a warrant.”
In the other states studied, government-made video surveillance tapes of ballot drop boxes obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests were used as part of the process of estimating how many ballots were trafficked, along with personal interviews with intermediaries and other tipsters and cell phone ping data.
Engelbrecht told the committee that in Wisconsin, in September of 2020, her organization set up a hotline to receive tips from informants.
Unlike other states where video surveillance footage of the drop boxes was made available to TTV investigators, Engelbrecht said that only one of the 17 Wisconsin localities studied provided TTV with video.
Engelbrecht stated that in the summer of 2020, the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) announced it approved of video surveillance of the state’s drop boxes, as recommended by the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
“WEC did not follow through,” she said.
Neither did WEC provide to localities written guidelines based on CISA’s recommendations for the locations where the drop boxes were to be placed, according to Engelbrecht.
She testified that across the country, the majority of the ballot drops surveilled typically happened between 8 p.m. and 5 a.m.
She told the committee that the removal of 234,000 problem names from Wisconsin’s registered voter rolls, as recommended by the Electronic Registration Information Center, was stopped by a lawsuit.
Forty-nine-year veteran elections attorney James Bopp Jr. came before the committee to provide a legal perspective to the facts presented in the TTV report.
Bopp has litigated 200 election lawsuits and is currently legal counsel to TTV. He is also representing special counsel Gabelman in several lawsuits against him stemming from his investigation.
Bopp testified that filing an avalanche of lawsuits was part of a years-long effort by Democrats “to make the whole system more susceptible to fraud and abuse.”
He said 425 lawsuits were filed across America by Democratic Party operatives or front organizations in the runup to the 2020 election.
Bopp asserted the suits were designed to ensure ineligible people were maintained on voting rolls; to expand voting to every voter on the rolls, whether active or inactive; and “to tear down every other anti-fraud protection, such as prohibiting signature verification and striking down witness requirements for absentee voting.”
Turning to Wisconsin, Bopp pointed the committee to what he called “the corrupt and illegal activity and administration of election laws for partisan ends engaged in by your Wisconsin state government and municipalities designed to maximize the number of Democrat votes.”
Addressing the alleged embedding of partisan get-out-the-vote efforts within local governments in Wisconsin’s largest cities, Bopp said the practice evades federal and state campaign contribution limits of just a few thousand dollars, and gives real-time, hour-by-hour, cost-free access to voter rolls to partisan actors.
Bopp said the practice disguises its partisan nature, disguises the identity of out-of-state billionaire donors contributing millions, thereby violating the principle of transparency and exceeding contribution limits.
“Despite clear and unequivocal state law, drop boxes created the infrastructure to accomplish all of this,” he said. “Drop boxes left unstaffed and located anywhere clearly violated state statutes.”
He criticized what he said was the “grossly partisan, corruptly political, and blatantly illegal” actions of the people administering Wisconsin election laws.
Bopp asserted that the actions in Wisconsin gave significant partisan political advantage to Democrats, exactly the people the plan was designed to help.
“Ruthlessly exploited by large-scale organized and illegal ballot harvesting operations, involving not-for-profits and the people working with them, (the scheme) could very well have influenced the outcome of the 2020 election,” he said.
“What has been disclosed—and, in my view, proven—is that there were sufficient irregularities in the 2020 election that a court, at the time, could have reached the conclusion that the true result cannot be determined. But that time has passed.
“It’s not about overturning the 2020 election. It’s about the future. The situation is crying for reform.”
Rozar reminded the audience that numerous election reforms passed by the legislature have been vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.
Neither Evers nor state Attorney General Josh Kaul, also a Democrat, responded by press time to requests for comment.
“My Democrat colleagues started their testimony talking about situations in which votes were cast illegally…[and] tried to [say] if a vote came from a voter that was registered…somehow that makes it all right.
Miami Beach Mayor Says No Curfew This Weekend As Spring Break Chaos Subsides
As Spring Break winds down, Miami Beach has decided not to implement a curfew this weekend following last week’s chaos, according to NBC Miami.
Mayor Dan Gelber said, “It won’t happen this weekend unless there’s some metric or something happens that changes our mind. We’re not viewing it as the first resort, I think we had this as the last resort.”
“Hopefully it will be tamer, there are fewer colleges on break, typically April is better than March,” Gelber added.
“I know from a PR point of view it’s not terrific to have an emergency declaration but honestly, if there was another route, we would have taken it but I just don’t know that there was one.
“I’m never happy with Spring Break because it just doesn’t seem to flow easily, and I don’t like having to worry every evening when I fall to sleep and I’m wondering who’s gonna wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me about something that happened,” Gelber said.
Here are some of the chaotic scenes from last week.
Things got HEATED on the streets of Miami Beach as spring breakers caused chaos, leading to injuries and the implementation of a curfew.
It is a tricky business to maintain the hot nightlife of Miami Beach mixed with the explosiveness of chaotic college students.
“We have wrangled with spring break for a long time, other cities have wrangled with spring break. I think the challenge is always gonna be when your city is a venue for a rite of passage for young people you get conduct that is very hard and inconsistent with a residential community,” Gelber said.
The curfew left a sour taste in everyone’s mouths. Tourists complained they couldn’t party on national television, and businesses reported steep weekly financial losses as they shuttered operations for several nights.
Again, the mayor is on a tightrope to ensure law and order but not discourage tourists.
On Wednesday the same judge, William P. Mahon in the Chester County Court of Common Pleas, vacated Tuesday’s order and scheduled an argument for Friday.
It is all in response to a February petition filed by West Chester Area School District parent Beth Ann Rosica. In the petition, Rosica calls for the removal of five school board members, Sue Tiernan, Joyce Chester, Karen Herman, Kate Shaw, and Daryl Durnell.
Students returning to in-person classes after two years of remote learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic were required to wear masks over their mouth and nose. When Pennsylvania ended mandatory school masking, the West Chester Area School District was among a handful of schools that kept masking in place.
“When that was lifted, all of us parents started emailing, calling, showing up at school board meetings, asking our school board to amend their health and safety plan and allow for optional masking,” Rosica told The Epoch Times.
“They didn’t lift it for the West Chester School District, so we began to work on a petition to remove school board members because we believed that their actions were illegal and unconstitutional.”
Eventually, the district did lift the mask mandate, but the petition request remained relevant because, in August, the board passed a new health and safety plan which allows the board to impose future mandatory masking at various levels of COVID-19 transmission.
“For high levels of transmission, our current approved health and safety plan still requires masking, and we believe that that is illegal. We want this answered because we don’t want them to impose it come next fall, or any point in time when cases start growing up again,” Rosica said.
The petition was based on a seldom-used Pennsylvania education statute that allows for the removal of school directors for “failure to organize or neglect of duty.”
The statute says any ten resident taxpayers in the district may present a petition to the court to have them removed. But that argument was not addressed in Tuesday’s decision.
The court favored for Rosica, citing West Chester Area School District’s failure to respond. It also ordered Rosica and the four remaining board members to each submit a list of five proposed replacements for the board, to be appointed by the court to fill out the exiting board members’ terms.
Attorney Kenneth Roos of the Wisler Pearlstine law firm in Bule Bell, Penn. represents the school board. He told The Epoch Times in a phone call that he filed a motion for reconsideration of Tuesday’s decision, late Tuesday night. He had no other comment on behalf of the school board.
The motion disputes the time frame that the school had to respond, arguing it should have had until April 4 to answer. The judge agreed and allowed the board members to stay in place while the petition is argued on Friday.
Rosica is more than a mother of two students in the district. She is executive director of Back to School PA, a political action committee that advocated for reopening schools closed by COVID-19 mitigation measures. It aims to get pro-parent and pro-student candidates elected to school boards.
Bunker Contamination Crisis Hits Singapore As Ships Hit With “Blackouts”
A major bunker fuel contamination has been reported in Singapore, the world’s largest bunkering hub, with dozens of ships receiving tainted high sulfur fuel oil (HSFO) that has led to dangerous power blackouts, according to Bloomberg.
Fuel testing firm Veritas Petroleum Services (VPS) reports 34 vessels were identified to have received HSFO from two unidentified Singapore suppliers between February and March. The marine fuel contained up to 2,000 parts per million (ppm) of chlorinated hydrocarbons.
“These bunker fuel contaminations have affected 14 vessels so far and the impact has been failure of the fuel system to the auxiliary engine resulting in loss of power and propulsion creating a blackout.
“Fuel system failure arose from seizure of the fuel pumps and plunger and barrel corrosion, caused by the bunker fuel contaminants,” VPS said in the statement.
Out of the 34 vessels, almost half experienced power blackouts with the loss of propulsion systems, creating a hazardous situation if the ships were underway.
Such incidents could dent demand for bunker fuel in Singapore which is at the crossroads of a centuries-old trade route that links Asia to Europe and the Middle East to the US.
Maritime news website Splash 247 reported in early March that the contaminated fuel contains “abrasive particles that could cause accelerated wear of diesel engine components.”
This is just another wrench thrown into the snarled global supply chain as one can only imagine the affected ships would need to go down for maintenance and repairs.
For some color on the state of the current global supply chain, Goldman Sachs’ Jordan Alliger notes this week, “we are past peak bottlenecks.” Even though congestion remains elevated, supply chains around the world are normalizing.
As for the vessels affected by contaminated marine fuel, no information was given on what type of ships were affected nor size or maintenance and repair timelines.
The Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Fairfax, Virginia.
Yesterday, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit stayed a trial court ruling against the new admissions policy at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Fairfax, Virginia (known as “TJ”). The new admissions policy was racially neutral on its face. But federal district Judge Claude Hilton ruled that it was unconstitutional because it was adopted for the purpose of promoting “racial balancing” and, in the process, discriminating against Asian Americans. I wrote about the district court decision (which I think was correct) in greater detail here.
Yesterday’s 2-1 ruling by a divided Fourth Circuit panel stays the trial decision, with the result that the new admissions system will go into effect for at least one year. It also signals that the Fourth Circuit might well uphold the policy when they get around to deciding the case on the merits (probably sometime in the next few months, or sooner).
The majority did not issue an official opinion of the court (which is not unusual in rulings on procedural issues, like this one). But Judge Toby Heytens did put out a concurring opinion, which explains his reasoning. Here’s a key excerpt:
I… am skeptical of the district court’s conclusion that there is no genuine issue of material factimplicated by its conclusionthat the Board adopted the current admissions policy for a constitutionally impermissible purpose…. The centerpiece of the district court’s analysis on this point is its statement that “the Board’s policy was designed to increase Black and Hispanic enrollment, which would, by necessity, decrease the representation of Asian-Americans at TJ.”…. (emphasis added).
That approach seems flatly inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s decision in Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979). Feeney involved a constitutional challenge to a Massachusetts statute mandating a categorical employment preference for qualified veterans over qualified non-veterans. 442 U.S. at 259. Even though “over 98% of the veterans in Massachusetts were male,” id. at 270—and even though no one claimed that those who crafted and decided to maintain the law were unaware of that fact—the Supreme Court declined to apply heightened scrutiny. In language directly relevant to this case, the Court specifically held that “awareness of consequences” is not enough to show discriminatory intent and that a plaintiff challenging a facially neutral policy must show that a decisionmaker acted “at least in part ‘because of,’ not merely ‘in spite of,’ its adverse effects upon an identifiable group….”
Nor does the fact that the current policy may have been adopted, at least in part, with the expectation that it would “increase Black and Hispanic enrollment” change this analysis…. UnderFeeney, the question is whether the decisionmaker acted “at least in part because of [a race neutral policy’s]adverseeffects upon an identifiable group,” 442 U.S. at 279…, and the Coalition has never claimed that the challenged policy was motivated by or has any sort of adverse effect on Black or Hispanic applicants.
The most significant flaw in this argument is that Judge Heytens ignores extensive evidence that Fairfax school officials were in fact motivated by a desire to reduce the number of Asian-American students admitted. That reduction was not merely an incidental side effect of the new policy. I summarized some of that evidence here:
[E]vidence [shows] that some decision-makers were also motivated by bias against Asian-American students, such as claims that having too many of them would damage TJ’s “culture,” negative stereotypes about Asian-American parents and students, and state legislator Mark Keam’s fulminations about the “unethical ways” Asian-American parents “push their kids into [TJ],” when those parents are “not even going to stay in America,” but instead are “using [TJ] to get into Ivy League schools and then go back to their home country.” Keam’s sentiments are relevant because, as Judge Hilton found, Fairfax County school officials were influenced in part by pressure from the state government.
Longstanding Supreme Court precedent holds that such evidence of unconstitutional motivation for “facially neutral” policies shifts the burden of proof to the government to show that they would have enacted the same policy even in the absence of illicit motives.
In addition, there is a big difference between the Feeney case and the TJ litigation. In the former, not only did the Court conclude that the state was not motivated by any desire to harm women. It also reasoned that the policy in question (job preferences for veterans) was not motivated by a desire to help men, as such. By contrast, extensive evidence shows that Fairfax County officials were motivated by a desire to promote racial balancing at TJ by increasing the percentage of students from some racial groups, particularly African-Americans and Hispanics. Even if you set aside specific anti-Asian motives, it is inevitably the case that discriminating in favor of racial Group A disadvantages other groups, and does so deliberately. If a public school adopted a facially neutral policy deliberately intended to increase the number of white students, thereby reducing the number of blacks, Judge Heytens would surely have to agree that it is presumptively unconstitutional – even if the evidence showed only that officials wanted to help whites and did not display any special hostility towards blacks.
I think Judge Allison Jones Rushing dealt with these issues much more persuasively in her dissent:
When motivated by discrimination, facially neutral policies like TJ’s admissions plan “are just as abhorrent, and just as unconstitutional, as [policies] that expressly discriminate on the basis of race.”N.C. State Conf. of NAACP v. McCrory, 831 F.3d 204, 220 (4th Cir. 2016);cf. Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356, 373– 374 (1886) (prohibiting discriminatory enforcement of facially neutral laws). A “[c]hallenger[] need not show that discriminatory purpose was the sole or even a primary motive” behind the policy, “just that it was a motivating factor.”McCrory, 831 F.3d at 220….
Based on the undisputed evidence before it, the district court found that the Board pursued the policy change “at least in part ‘because of,’ and not merely ‘in spite of,’ its adverse effects” upon Asian Americans.Pers. Adm’r of Mass. v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979). Specifically, the court determined that the Board acted with an impermissible racial purpose when it sought to decrease enrollment of “overrepresented” Asian-American students at TJ to better “reflect the racial composition” of the surrounding area.As the court explained, Board member discussions were permeated with racial balancing, as were its stated aims and its use of racial data to model proposed outcomes.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized that racial balancing for its own sake is unconstitutional.SeeFisher v. Univ. of Tex. at Austin, 570 U.S. 297, 311 (2013); Parents Involved in Cmty. Schs. v. Seattle Sch. Dist. No. 1, 551 U.S. 701, 729–730 (2007)…. Racial balancing is no less pernicious if, instead of using a facial quota, the government uses a facially neutral proxy motivated by discriminatory intent.And while the Supreme Court has endorsed certain race-based motivations—specificallytoremedypastintentionaldiscriminationor,inhigher education, to obtain the benefits of diversity—neither motivation is at issue here.
This ruling is not a definitive resolution of the case. It is just a procedural decision staying the trial court decision. We do not know for sure whether the third member of the panel – Judge Robert Bruce King – agrees with all of Judge Heytens’ reasoning.
That said, it seems very possible that the two judges in the majority will ultimately rule n favor of the defendants on the merits. Likelihood of success on the merits is in fact one of the key criteria for an appellate court to stay a trial court judgment.
If the Fourth Circuit does ultimately reverse the trial court, the case could potentially end up in the Supreme Court, because it raises important issues about the use of facially neutral policies to achieve racial balancing that may be even more significant if – as expected – the Supreme Court issues a decision putting tighter constraints on explicit racial preferences in education, in the near future. That could well happen in the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases currently before the Supreme Court.
NOTE: My wife, Alison Somin, is one of the Pacific Legal Foundation public interest lawyers representing the plaintiffs in the TJ case. As links in one of my previous posts about this case demonstrate, I have been writing about these sorts of issues since long before Alison began working at PLF, and my views are much the same as they were before she did so.
John Ioannidis, a Professor of Medicine, of Epidemiology and Population Health and by courtesy, of Statistics and of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University, lauded for championing evidence-based medicine, has been harshly criticized over the past two years. Like many highly-credentialed health experts, Ioannidis made some predictions during the pandemic that eventually proved to be incorrect. During a once-in-a-century pandemic replete with unknowns, that’s to be expected. But perhaps the greatest reason he has come under fire is for questioning the orthodoxy of strict lockdowns, divisive vaccine mandates, and other restrictive measures to manage the pandemic. Ioannidis is sure to court more controversy with a new commentary published to the European Journal of Clinicial Investigation in which he argues that it’s time to declare the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This does not mean that the problem is inappropriately minimized or forgotten, but that our communities move on with life,” he writes.
“Pandemic preparedness should be carefully thought and pre-organized, but should not disrupt life.”
While Ioannidis recognizes that there are no quantitative definitions for the end of a pandemic like COVID-19, he contends that the amount of immunity now present worldwide exceeds the threshold needed to declare SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, endemic – constantly present but not a public health emergency.
“By end 2021, probably 73-81% of the global population had been vaccinated, infected or both,” he says. Pockets of low immunity, such as in places that pursued zero-COVID policies and/or with limited access to effective vaccines, may persist, causing regional outbreaks, but we will likely never see COVID-19 again trigger a global emergency.
Declaring the pandemic phase of COVID-19 to be concluded means understanding and accepting a new “normal”.
“A decrease of COVID-19 deaths back to typical seasonal influenza levels may not necessarily happen in 2022 or even beyond,” Ioannidis cautions. “With an increasingly aging global population, “normal” may still correspond to higher death counts… This should not be mistaken as a continued pandemic phase.”
Easing out of the pandemic requires a widespread mental shift, as well. This means focusing more on indicators like hospital intensive care admissions to guide policy rather than just infections.
“If perception of risk focuses on number of documented cases, the spurious perception of emergency situations may be difficult to quell,” Ioannidis writes.
Exiting the pandemic also means reducing fearmongering coverage of COVID-19 in the popular media, the propagation of which undoubtedly contributed to the public’s warped perception of COVID’s risks throughout the pandemic. On average, Americans believed in early 2021 that 8% of deaths had occurred in people under the age of 24. The actual percentage as of today is 0.3%. Moreover, a third of the population has consistently believed that COVID leads to hospitalization in over half of infections. During the most recent Omicron wave, the proportion was 3% or lower.
Declaring an end to the pandemic phase of COVID-19 has benefits, Ioannidis says. For example, it could allow public health organizations to refocus their time and money on more pressing global health issues, like poor nutrition and hunger, which collectively claim the lives of 9 million people each year, including 3.1 million children. For comparison, at least 6.2 million people have died from COVID-19 over the past two years, the vast majority over age 65. Accepting endemicity and reducing societal restrictions and disruptions would also permit economies to stabilize more rapidly, alleviating hardship, easing inflation, and reducing global inequality. Lastly, moving on from the pandemic could ease some of the political divisions that have fractured societies across the globe.
Daily Briefing: How To Make Sense of All These Inflationary Pressures
Real Vision co-founder and CEO Raoul Pal joins Maggie Lake for today’s Daily Briefing to talk about volatility across markets, the economy, and geopolitics. Stocks closed out their first losing quarter in two years on Thursday, and U.S. bonds had their worst three-month period in more than 40 years. The eurozone’s inflation rate jumped to another record high in March. Although prices dipped for the fifth straight day today, crude oil is 44.7% higher than it was a year ago, up 32% in February alone. The U.S. economy once again added more than 400,000 jobs in March and the unemployment rate dropped to 3.6%, but companies across many industries say they’re struggling to find workers. And war continues to rage in Eastern Europe. What’s Raoul’s take? Get your questions ready, and drop them on the Exchange: https://rvtv.io/3x1pDYm
The Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Fairfax, Virginia.
Yesterday, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit stayed a trial court ruling against the new admissions policy at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Fairfax, Virginia (known as “TJ”). The new admissions policy was racially neutral on its face. But federal district Judge Claude Hilton ruled that it was unconstitutional because it was adopted for the purpose of promoting “racial balancing” and, in the process, discriminating against Asian Americans. I wrote about the district court decision (which I think was correct) in greater detail here.
Yesterday’s 2-1 ruling by a divided Fourth Circuit panel stays the trial decision, with the result that the new admissions system will go into effect for at least one year. It also signals that the Fourth Circuit might well uphold the policy when they get around to deciding the case on the merits (probably sometime in the next few months, or sooner).
The majority did not issue an official opinion of the court (which is not unusual in rulings on procedural issues, like this one). But Judge Toby Heytens did put out a concurring opinion, which explains his reasoning. Here’s a key excerpt:
I… am skeptical of the district court’s conclusion that there is no genuine issue of material factimplicated by its conclusionthat the Board adopted the current admissions policy for a constitutionally impermissible purpose…. The centerpiece of the district court’s analysis on this point is its statement that “the Board’s policy was designed to increase Black and Hispanic enrollment, which would, by necessity, decrease the representation of Asian-Americans at TJ.”…. (emphasis added).
That approach seems flatly inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s decision in Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979). Feeney involved a constitutional challenge to a Massachusetts statute mandating a categorical employment preference for qualified veterans over qualified non-veterans. 442 U.S. at 259. Even though “over 98% of the veterans in Massachusetts were male,” id. at 270—and even though no one claimed that those who crafted and decided to maintain the law were unaware of that fact—the Supreme Court declined to apply heightened scrutiny. In language directly relevant to this case, the Court specifically held that “awareness of consequences” is not enough to show discriminatory intent and that a plaintiff challenging a facially neutral policy must show that a decisionmaker acted “at least in part ‘because of,’ not merely ‘in spite of,’ its adverse effects upon an identifiable group….”
Nor does the fact that the current policy may have been adopted, at least in part, with the expectation that it would “increase Black and Hispanic enrollment” change this analysis…. UnderFeeney, the question is whether the decisionmaker acted “at least in part because of [a race neutral policy’s]adverseeffects upon an identifiable group,” 442 U.S. at 279…, and the Coalition has never claimed that the challenged policy was motivated by or has any sort of adverse effect on Black or Hispanic applicants.
The most significant flaw in this argument is that Judge Heytens ignores extensive evidence that Fairfax school officials were in fact motivated by a desire to reduce the number of Asian-American students admitted. That reduction was not merely an incidental side effect of the new policy. I summarized some of that evidence here:
[E]vidence [shows] that some decision-makers were also motivated by bias against Asian-American students, such as claims that having too many of them would damage TJ’s “culture,” negative stereotypes about Asian-American parents and students, and state legislator Mark Keam’s fulminations about the “unethical ways” Asian-American parents “push their kids into [TJ],” when those parents are “not even going to stay in America,” but instead are “using [TJ] to get into Ivy League schools and then go back to their home country.” Keam’s sentiments are relevant because, as Judge Hilton found, Fairfax County school officials were influenced in part by pressure from the state government.
Longstanding Supreme Court precedent holds that such evidence of unconstitutional motivation for “facially neutral” policies shifts the burden of proof to the government to show that they would have enacted the same policy even in the absence of illicit motives.
In addition, there is a big difference between the Feeney case and the TJ litigation. In the former, not only did the Court conclude that the state was not motivated by any desire to harm women. It also reasoned that the policy in question (job preferences for veterans) was not motivated by a desire to help men, as such. By contrast, extensive evidence shows that Fairfax County officials were motivated by a desire to promote racial balancing at TJ by increasing the percentage of students from some racial groups, particularly African-Americans and Hispanics. Even if you set aside specific anti-Asian motives, it is inevitably the case that discriminating in favor of racial Group A disadvantages other groups, and does so deliberately. If a public school adopted a facially neutral policy deliberately intended to increase the number of white students, thereby reducing the number of blacks, Judge Heytens would surely have to agree that it is presumptively unconstitutional – even if the evidence showed only that officials wanted to help whites and did not display any special hostility towards blacks.
I think Judge Allison Jones Rushing dealt with these issues much more persuasively in her dissent:
When motivated by discrimination, facially neutral policies like TJ’s admissions plan “are just as abhorrent, and just as unconstitutional, as [policies] that expressly discriminate on the basis of race.”N.C. State Conf. of NAACP v. McCrory, 831 F.3d 204, 220 (4th Cir. 2016);cf. Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356, 373– 374 (1886) (prohibiting discriminatory enforcement of facially neutral laws). A “[c]hallenger[] need not show that discriminatory purpose was the sole or even a primary motive” behind the policy, “just that it was a motivating factor.”McCrory, 831 F.3d at 220….
Based on the undisputed evidence before it, the district court found that the Board pursued the policy change “at least in part ‘because of,’ and not merely ‘in spite of,’ its adverse effects” upon Asian Americans.Pers. Adm’r of Mass. v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979). Specifically, the court determined that the Board acted with an impermissible racial purpose when it sought to decrease enrollment of “overrepresented” Asian-American students at TJ to better “reflect the racial composition” of the surrounding area.As the court explained, Board member discussions were permeated with racial balancing, as were its stated aims and its use of racial data to model proposed outcomes.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized that racial balancing for its own sake is unconstitutional.SeeFisher v. Univ. of Tex. at Austin, 570 U.S. 297, 311 (2013); Parents Involved in Cmty. Schs. v. Seattle Sch. Dist. No. 1, 551 U.S. 701, 729–730 (2007)…. Racial balancing is no less pernicious if, instead of using a facial quota, the government uses a facially neutral proxy motivated by discriminatory intent.And while the Supreme Court has endorsed certain race-based motivations—specificallytoremedypastintentionaldiscriminationor,inhigher education, to obtain the benefits of diversity—neither motivation is at issue here.
This ruling is not a definitive resolution of the case. It is just a procedural decision staying the trial court decision. We do not know for sure whether the third member of the panel – Judge Robert Bruce King – agrees with all of Judge Heytens’ reasoning.
That said, it seems very possible that the two judges in the majority will ultimately rule n favor of the defendants on the merits. Likelihood of success on the merits is in fact one of the key criteria for an appellate court to stay a trial court judgment.
If the Fourth Circuit does ultimately reverse the trial court, the case could potentially end up in the Supreme Court, because it raises important issues about the use of facially neutral policies to achieve racial balancing that may be even more significant if – as expected – the Supreme Court issues a decision putting tighter constraints on explicit racial preferences in education, in the near future. That could well happen in the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases currently before the Supreme Court.
NOTE: My wife, Alison Somin, is one of the Pacific Legal Foundation public interest lawyers representing the plaintiffs in the TJ case. As links in one of my previous posts about this case demonstrate, I have been writing about these sorts of issues since long before Alison began working at PLF, and my views are much the same as they were before she did so.
