Roy Exum
At the Wednesday meeting of the Hamilton County Commission, Sheriff Jim Hammond’s request for an estimated $14,000 raise in this last year of a 30-year career with the sheriff’s department was met as cruelly as anything I can imagine. The Commission, most good friends of mine, granted a $25,000 raise for the sheriff but only to go into effect when Hammond’s term ends. I can’t imagine any human being holding another public servant up to such ridicule. This isn’t who the people of Hamilton County are.
In the next story on Chattanoogan.com I read where interim schools superintendent Nakia Towns has named Justin Robertson as the “interim deputy superintendent” in an equally embarrassing hypocrisy. Dr. Robertson has the majority of votes on the school board right now to be appointed, as he most rightly should. Dr. Towns – who has applied for a number of jobs in recent years -- is certainly “feathering her nest,” isn’t she? Nakia can stand on her own two feet as a beautifully-qualified educator but to sully water with a central office appointment so transparent is regrettable. People well educated hardly need to act like carnival barkers.
I have no idea what courses through the County Commission’s circle but, again, it is beyond my understanding. Everybody at the meeting noticed County Mayor Jim Coppinger, who has worked with the sheriff in tandem for years, did not come to his defense during the harangue, and the fact octogenarian Jesse Jackson is to appear here in September to lambast the sheriff is duly noted but he is an innocent as driven snow.
Nonetheless, we do not have to act this way in Hamilton County. And the taxpayer/voters should condemn scurrilous behavior at every level.
Now, for what it’s worth …
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SCIENCE ON MASK USAGE INDICATES SCANT BENEFIT
(note: This story on student mask usage appeared yesterday – Aug. 18, 2021 – on the highly-informational website, Tennesseestar.com, a news website originating every day in Nashville).
Witten by Brad Vasoli
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended that all schools require mask-wearing indoors by teachers and students, vaccinated or unvaccinated against COVID-19.
And many school districts are adopting that requirement, to the dismay of many parents. But how well do masks protect children?
For starters, data gathered throughout the pandemic indicate that the chances of a child experiencing serious illness as a result of the novel coronavirus are extremely low. The CDC’s own numbers show a higher death rate for American kids and teenagers from influenza during the “moderately severe” 2018-19 flu season than from COVID. That same institution reports that one out of every 1,738 deaths resulting from the virus since the onset of the pandemic was a child or teenage fatality.
Still, there has been a rise in COVID infections among children. From July 29th through August 5th, 93,824 child COVID-19 cases were reported in the U.S. That’s up from 71,726 new child and teen infections during the prior week. And 38,654 were reported the week prior to that.
But according to statistician Jeffrey H. Anderson, the evidence that masks will provide much protection even to populations that are particularly vulnerable to COVID is slim. The problem, he writes in a review of relevant research in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, is that governmental organizations like the CDC and the World Health Organization have relied too little on randomized controlled trials (RCTs). In such tests, subjects are selected on a random basis to mask or not mask, and the rates of infection can be objectively compared between the two.
“It’s striking how much the CDC, in marshaling evidence to justify its revised mask guidance, studiously avoids mentioning randomized controlled trials,” Anderson observes.
Two RCTs to date have specifically tested the effectiveness of masking in preventing those around the mask wearer from getting a respiratory infection. One, conducted in Beijing in 2016, didn’t produce results that Anderson found very illuminating, as only two individuals in the entire study — one masked and the other unmasked — developed a flu-like infection. A French study conducted in 2010, however, found about 16 percent of individuals in the experiment who were selected to mask contracted flu-like illnesses and about 16 percent who were selected to go unmasked also contracted them. Other RTCs similarly showed masking made little to no difference.
Only one RCT to date has tested mask-wearing’s utility for the mask wearer against COVID-19.
This Danish study, involving 4,862 participants last year, found that 1.8 percent of those wearing masks and 2.1 percent of those not wearing masks became infected with the coronavirus — i.e., a very slim difference.
Anderson’s examination of the results of all 14 RTCs conducted to date that have investigated the usefulness of masks in protecting against respiratory ailments concludes that eleven of those studies indicate masks are either “useless … or actually counterproductive.”
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Bradley Vasoli is a reporter at The Michigan Star and The Star News Network. Follow Brad on
Twitter at @BVasoli.
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Informed minds make wiser decisions.
royexum@aol.com