Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! The news cycle is getting hotter than August’s central-Florida swamp weather. Today’s mid-week roundup includes: the University of Michigan’s plan to let freshman transcripts take the Fifth — the grades will exist, the school will keep them, and the outside world will be told only that something happened for four months and nobody was hurt — because nothing says rigor like a diploma with its own witness-protection program; the Fauci group chat that Rand Paul just hauled up into the daylight, in which three of the most-quoted men in America privately kicked around first-trimester miscarriage in January and then spent April running the most confident trust me, I’m a doctor campaign since the house call; and the settlement Ken Paxton wrung out of Texas Children’s Hospital, in which the hospital agreed to pay $9 million, bar five doctors for life, admit in writing that it broke the law, cut a check to the nurse who reported it, and then — my personal favorite — spend five years running a free clinic devoted entirely to undoing its own work, which in the settlement business is roughly the equivalent of being sentenced to eat everything you cooked.
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Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “To Improve Student Mental Health, University of Michigan Eases Grading.” To be clear: they eased it all the way. And before we continue: this is absolutely not a Babylon Bee story. I checked three times. I even looked in the back of the pantry, where satire hides when it is embarrassed by how little work it has left to do.
The University of Michigan’s massive College of Literature, Science, and the Arts is proposing that, starting in fall 2027, every first-semester freshman’s external transcript will report only “pass” or “no credit.” Students will still receive ordinary letter grades and their professors’ feedback; Michigan will record the real grades internally, but the transcript will toss a little privacy blanket over them, and their first-semester grades will not count toward GPA.
In short, the grades exist, somewhere, but they will be treated like your daughter’s ex-boyfriend. Nobody will ever mention them again.
The school is piloting so-called “grade covering.” Covering, like with a pillow, until they stop moving. The school’s own announcement describes the goal as helping incoming Wolverines “acclimate,” supporting their “well-being,” and promoting the “joy of learning.” Uh huh.
Dean Rosario Ceballo (fake name alert) said the policy would address “the alarming rates of stress, depression and anxiety among our students.” This is a humane concern.
Like all humans, college students sometimes have real mental-health challenges, sometimes serious ones (though one wonders whether people with serious mental health problems should be in school instead of a treatment program). But “covering” their grades is also the educational equivalent of covering the Check Engine light with duct tape, then announcing that the vehicle has been cured of feeling judged. Everything is fine. And don’t call me crazy!
The Times appeared to be not completely on board with the awesome new plan. The story quoted psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert, who offered the obvious criticism: “feeling bad isn’t the same thing as being unwell.” That is true. Disappointment is not a psychiatric event. Disappointment is what teaches us to take mild criticism from the boss without applying for emergency counseling and a therapy ferret. (During my research, I discovered that proponents refer to ferret therapy as “ferrapy.” And definitely do not call them weasels.)
Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, was even more blunt. He deemed Michigan’s approach “exactly the wrong diagnosis.” Rick warned that coddling students “creates entitlement” and removes “productive tension,” although I suspect most students have a different kind of productive tension in mind. But I digress.
Michigan, like the salmon, is swimming upstream. It’s bucking the trend, like a gerry-rigged mechanical bull in a low-rent moonshine bar. As you may recall, Harvard recently moved in the opposite direction, tightening its grading curve and limiting A’s to roughly 20% of grades in undergraduate courses, since the Ivies had inflated marks so enthusiastically that “A” was starting to stand for “Arrived Mostly Sober Near Campus.”
Other big schools are bringing back SATs in admissions, having “evolved” in their thinking right back to where they started. What would we do without credentialed experts?
🔥 Michigan, however, is charting its own path: not a race to excellence, but snowboarding to the bottom (after flattening the slope for safety).
It’s kind of a bad look for Michigan. The school’s new motto should be: U. Mich.— Turning high school students into snowflakes. Which, come to think of it, would be on-brand for Michigan, given its wintery disposition. (At least, that’s how we Floridians see things.) The big public schools are beginning to look less like rigorous and challenging institutions of higher learning where boys and girls are forged into men and women, and more like attractive wellness retreats coupled with a reality-TV show called College Kids Gone Wild.
But stop complaining, dummies. They mean well. U. Mich. is doing it all for the children. It’s a selfless and altruistic institution! This definitely has nothing whatsoever to do with the demographic cliff the universities are staring down like it’s the barrel of a .45 semiautomatic held by a meth junkie with a nervous tic. Headline from NPR, from the same month Trump arrived in office last year:
Over a year ago, NPR’s experts forecast a stunning -20% decline in high-school graduates in Michigan— worse than the national average, a trend expected to worsen through the 2040s. College has become a buyer’s market.
Michigan’s DEI-dazzled administrators could have responded to this distressing demographic news in two different ways. First, the school could have invested in a stem-to-stern reimagining of its course material, classes, professors, and prep programs, and focused with laser intensity on the singular goal of training its graduates for top-dollar starting jobs. But that would be ridiculous!
The other option was to just market Michigan as a party school. Eureka!
That, in my view, is all that’s happening here. Of course Michigan’s administrators don’t believe their own stupid press releases about “addressing the mental health crisis” by making the first year essentially pass/fail. Sadly, taking that kind of senseless claim seriously is part of the annoying kabuki dance we must all engage in whenever addressing official lying.
No, the school’s revised slogan is: Come to U. Mich., where your first year doesn’t count! So you can acclimate to college by learning how to do keg stands.
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On Monday, Senator Rand Paul’s Committee released about a dozen text messages from Dr. Fauci’s covid-era cell phone. One text message thread instantly set the internet ablaze, and the psyop bots were deployed in force trying to make the flames burn backward. We’ll get to that. But the story touched a social nerve it actually triggered some astonishing corporate media headlines. I’m reproducing this one in full for maximum enjoyment. Headline from the Wall Street Journal, late Monday afternoon:
Spoiler alert: it’s an ugly story, but it is not a smoking gun. Not yet. “The texts show Fauci having real-time discussions in late January 2021 about the pros and cons of the Covid vaccine for pregnant women,” the Journal stonily reported, “with then-Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who at the time led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
In the thread, nobody says anything explicit like “the shots cause miscarriages and let’s lie about that.” The discussion is sure to be characterized as a “normal” scientific discussion of pros and cons and risk balancing. Here’s what the texts show:
(The big one) Fauci fretted that since many vaccinees experienced significant cytokine storm (an immune over-response) and high fever after the second dose, it “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”
Walensky, entirely missing Fauci’s gist, called this “definitely a good point, esp after dose two,” and Murthy quickly agreed it was a really good point. Not that they are Fauci yes-men or anything.
The group described the situation as a “data free” zone, since pregnant women had been excluded from the original vaccine trials. This this case, the less data, the better though.
Fauci cited real anxiety —including among some female health-care professionals— about injecting a “genetic” vaccine very early in pregnancy, plus the ‘misperception’ that mRNA could “get into your genes” and affect an early developing fetus.
Murthy then chimed in, saying he had also been hearing concerns about mRNA causing mutations in the developing fetus.
The next day they discussed a new WHO announcement advising against Moderna’s vaccine for pregnant women due to lack of data; tellingly, Murthy called the strong statement potentially damaging to public confidence. Not potentially damaging to babies.
Fauci responded that, when data are lacking, potential risks must be weighed against benefits. He claimed —without evidence!— that covid presented a worse risk for pregnancy than vaccines, which itself includes a premise of a positive risk from vaccines, and makes one wonder how he even evaluated vaccine risk at all “when data are lacking.”
The texts were the spark. The gasoline was the video clip compilations of the many times Fauci, Walensky, Murthy, and the agencies encouraged pregnant women to take the shots while assuring them it was 100% safe for the baby. So the narrative quickly (and not unfairly) became that Fauci & Co. had lied when they failed to disclose the team’s doubts and concerns, like those potential problems from shot 2’s cytokine storms and shot-fueled fevers.
Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) said that, even after all these years, his investigation is only getting started:
💉 Independent commenters noted that, according to the best available data, which is not easy to come by, miscarriage rates were at least twice as high for vaccinated women. Meanwhile, a fake study showing an 82% miscarriage rate was —in mine and others’ view— intentionally injected into the conversation as malinformation designed to confuse the debate and discredit everyone who fell for it.
Folks also hauled up 2021 studies (which had been forced to be withdrawn) concluding high rates of spontaneous abortion after inoculation, like this one:
Generally, fully justified righteous anger ensued, along with the usual calls for Nuremberg-style prosecutions and the pointing out (correctly) that neither Walensky nor Murthy got pardons. So.
💉 But the countermeasures have been deployed, in the form of a thin but barely credible excuse, based on an overlooked fact. That fact was that the tweeting was in January, but the explicit encouragement of pregnant women to take the “totally safe” shots didn’t start until three months later in April, 2021.
You can see where this is headed, right? Their defense will be: we got new data between January and April that resolved all our concerns. The WSJ basically put it just like that: “The CDC didn’t explicitly recommend that pregnant women get the Covid vaccine until April 2021, citing new safety data.”
Okay. So … let’s see that ‘new safety data.’ Where is it? Unsurprisingly, the Journal didn’t cite it, even though it has become the debate’s crux. I’ll bet you a $20 burrito the “new safety data” was some horrid study that one of Fauci’s pet grant recipients squeezed out at warp speed.
With that in mind, it took about six seconds of research to find the candidate. On April 23, 2021, Walensky recommended shots for pregnant women, citing a single source: the CDC’s own preliminary analysis, published just two days before in the New England Journal of Medicine (Shimabukuro et al). I’m not saying it was all coordinated. I’m just saying.
Even the CDC’s own self-interested study stated in its very first sentence that “data are limited on their safety in pregnancy.” Especially data on first-trimester pregnancies— the exact cohort Fauci was worried about. The authors themselves stated that more “follow-up of large numbers of women vaccinated earlier in pregnancy is necessary.” It was even titled ‘preliminary.’
Nothing in the April study resolved the concerns raised in the group text. Did they rely on anything more substantial than the April preliminary study? So far, the culprits themselves are keeping their big fat mouths shut:
Here’s what we know for sure: these covid response leaders had a duty of informed consent to disclose their concerns. In January, they did have concerns. They never disclosed those concerns outside the private chats. The April study did not resolve the concerns described in their January tweets. These are all facts.
What remains to be determined is only whether they had some other, better reason to conclude their worries had been resolved.
It matters not whether the shots actually caused spontaneous abortions. Fauci, Walensky, and Murthy still had a duty to disclose what they knew at the time. If they didn’t, they are guilty of crimes against humanity comparable to those recorded in the darkest ledgers of human malfeasance.
So our proper response at this point is deep skepticism— but not overreaction. The texts are more evidence, not proof. Granted, we all intuitively know that, while playing the slogan “if it saves one life” on repeat, they put pregnant women and babies at risk to ‘reduce hesitation.’ If it’s safe for pregnant women, it must be safe for me.
We’re creeping ever closer to proving that our intuition is correct.
💉 Yesterday, Brownstone’s Jeffrey Tucker opined on a podcast that, after reviewing as much of the Fauci material as humanly possible, he now believes that Fauci et al locked the country down, closed the schools, and restricted travel to slow the spread— thereby ensuring that natural immunity couldn’t develop in the world’s population before the shots were ready. In other words, they kept the pandemic going as long as they could to sell more shots.
I find Jeffrey’s admittedly shocking hypothesis too charitable. My developing theory is that Fauci locked the country down to cripple the economy, to ensure that Trump would lose the election. The Fauci documents supply ample evidence of his motive. He hated Trump, he had a savior complex, he knew lockdowns would kill the economy, Trump had already warned him of the political risk, and Fauci’s very favorite people were not his patients but his TDS-afflicted celebrity buddies. What are you doing to make sure Trump won’t get re-elected? He’ll kill us all!
This is all about re-election.
Both of our theories explain the most damning evidence of all— why Dr. Fauci suddenly got amnesia about natural immunity, even after spending decades lauding it. Business Insider, May 2021:
His goofy claims that the mRNA jabs were better than natural immunity turned out to be false, which even a first-year med student could have told him.
This isn’t over. Not by a long shot. As Senator Johnson said, it is just beginning. The obvious next step is to haul Fauci back in for more depositions and grill him about the pregnancy guidance. Which is exactly what Senator Johnson said he plans to do:
It is starting to look like, if Dr. Fauci doesn’t go to jail, he’ll still spend the rest of his life dodging process servers. Jail might be more peaceful.
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Bless Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Late last week, the Houston Chronicle reported, “Texas Children’s Hospital must provide free ‘detransition’ care under settlement.” You could not unfairly describe the settlement as ritual humiliation. Paxton is cutting the hospitals’ woke, defiant berries off.
As a lawyer who’s negotiated more settlements than I could count, this settlement is brutal. The hospital completely caved. Paxton crushed them.
On top of paying the state $9 million, TCH must also pay the legal fees of the whistleblowing nurse, Vanessa Sivadge, who turned them in. Vanessa also gets nearly $2 million from the state’s settlement for being the whistleblower.
Next, the hospital must permanently bar five gender-bending doctors who worked there. Buh bye. Best of luck in your future endeavors. They’re professional pariahs now. And the hospital must release a public statement admitting it illegally provided gender transition care, and take down a previous online statement denying all wrongdoing that claimed the system was only settling “to protect our resources from endless and costly litigation.”
Ouch! Believe it or not, admissions of wrongdoing are unicorns. They are almost impossible to get. The whole point of settling is to avoid being found guilty of whatever you were accused of. That Paxton got Texas Children’s to agree to publicly debase themselves like this is stunning. It’s basically as good as winning in court, except this way the hospital has to also do a lot of things a judge can’t legally order.
But best of all, most humiliating of all, the settlement gives the hospital 90 days to build and then advertise a “detransition clinic” on its website. Then, for the first five years, it must provide free care to any patient from any hospital in any state who got ‘transgender care,’ regardless of age, whether it was surgery or even just hormone therapy.
I suspect Texas Children’s will be providing a lot of psychiatry, hormone stabilization, and breast reconstruction.
In other words, for at least five years, the hospital is having its face shoved into its victims’ pain and suffering, every single day, day after day, with no upper limit. You couldn’t possibly imagine a better deterrent to other defiant doctors tempted by Big Transgender’s siren song of big money.
There’s much more, but we’re out of time. We’ll get together and catch up soon.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! Swing back here tomorrow morning, for an all-new roundup of delicious and nutritious essential news and commentary.
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More evidence that so-called "higher education" has lowered the bar to the ground, and that parents should make sure their kids do something actually productive, other than college. And they need to start with homeschooling, imo.
As part of the Coffee & Covid family for five years now, I just wanted to congratulate Jeff on being #2 in Health politics on Substack, right behind A Midwestern Doctor. I would also like to thank Jeff for all of the content that you share with us who are not able to be paying subscribers-who knows how many lives you've saved at this point. God bless you!