Pandemic journal: Down With the WHO!
“The response to COVID was the greatest mistake in the history of the public-health profession,” thunders City Journal’s John Tierney — and now the World Health Organization, chief author of the catastrophe, “wants new authority to make its bureaucrats’ whims mandatory” and “to censor those who disagree.” That’s via a “a new treaty governing pandemics” to be voted on in May; signatories “would promise to ‘cooperate’ in ‘preventing misinformation and disinformation,’ which presumably means silencing” uncooperative scientists. “Rather than empowering these officials, we should be disarming them.” “Until the WHO acknowledges its pandemic blunders and holds China accountable, the U.S. should suspend any further financial contributions.” Endorsing “the WHO’s power grab at the meeting in May” ensures “there will be many more emergencies in our future.”
Conservative: The Fetterman-RFK ‘Resistance’
“It says something that today liberalism’s most vocal champions of Israel” are Democratic Sen. John Fetterman and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., snarks The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn. Neither has “succumbed to progressive pressure” to turn against the Jewish state. When Vice President Kamala Harris opposed a planned Israeli attack on Rafah, Fetterman tweeted, “Hard disagree.” Likewise, Kennedy sees no need for a ceasefire. Zionist Organization of America President Morton Klein sees nothing “shocking” about “a principled man” siding with Israel but is shocked “that Joe Biden is aiding the Hamas terrorists” by seeking a cease-fire and a Palestinian state. Asks McGurn: Does “the Fetterman-Kennedy resistance” mark “a restoration of support of Israel to its place in American liberalism — or a dying last gasp”?
Education beat: Schools Wasted COVID Relief
“President Biden’s signature education initiative has proven to be a costly failure for students,” groan Aaron Garth Smith & Christian Barnard at The Hill, yet the prez wants “more money to make up for the blunder.” School districts spent much of the federal “cash on teacher bonuses and backfilling budgets” instead of “investing in services that could address learning loss”; as a result, research suggests that, despite the massive aid, students have only “recovered one-third of their learning-loss in math and one-quarter of their learning-loss in reading.” In short, the feds “gave public schools a massive slush fund” with few strings attached and “the dollars were spent accordingly.” Biden proposes a new cash bath, but it’s naïve to think “another round of COVID-19 relief funding will do the trick.”
From the right: Fink’s Retreat on ESG
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink became “famous as an enemy of fossil fuels and an advocate for a ‘green’ energy transition” as he took Environmental, Social, and Governance investing “from a fringe investment strategy to a mainstream movement,” notes Stephen Soukup at American Greatness. But Fink “doesn’t appear to care much for his newfound fame.” He has tried “to roll back his and his firm’s reputation as the authorities on ESG” and became “more aggressive” after “the Texas Permanent School Fund announced . . . it would be removing $8.5 billion from [BlackRock’s] management” thanks to the firm’s ESG record. Fink’s “much-anticipated annual letter to investors” on March 26 “sought to put distance between him and ESG/sustainability.” “Fink is tired of being famous for all the wrong reasons.”
From the left: Retire Now, Justice Sotomayor
“It is Sonia Sotomayor who is the greatest liberal to sit on the supreme court in my adult lifetime,” argues the Guardian’s Mehdi Hassan. “She has blazed a relentlessly progressive trail on the highest bench in the land,” but, at age 69, should retire now. Remember: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg “refused to quit the court despite calls to do so from leading liberals during Barack Obama’s second term,” then died while Donald Trump was president, paving the way for Amy Coney Barrett to take the seat. “With Joe Biden trailing Trump in several swing states and Democrats also in danger of losing their razor-thin majority in the Senate, are we really prepared for history to repeat itself?”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board