Billions in COVID relief haven’t been spent … but Biden still demands more!; Study: Red States Were Right – Schools That Stayed In-Person Didn’t Lose Academic Ground, and other C-Virus related stories

AP

Billions in COVID relief haven’t been spent … but Biden still demands more!

That great sloshing sound you hear is the tens of billions of dollars of unspent COVID-19 relief funds slopping around federal, state and local government coffers. But the Biden administration wants to appropriate billions more and is resorting to scare tactics to get it.

The federal government has appropriated roughly $4.8 trillion in six COVID-relief laws, the most recent being President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in March 2021. In January, the Government Accountability Office reported that only 87% of the total was obligated — legally committing the US government to pay — and only 76% was spent.

Contrary to what most Americans probably believe, little of the total was allocated for COVID vaccines, treatments and testing. Only 11% ($484 billion) was routed to the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency most directly involved with responding to public-health emergencies. By the end of November, HHS had only obligated 80% and spent 47% of its funds.

Amazingly, little of the HHS funding was directed to prevention or treatment and most remains unspent. Of the $41 billion allocated for vaccine research and development, procurement and distribution, less than a third had been spent. Of the $17 billion earmarked for drug and therapeutics research, development and procurement, less than 30% had been expended. And only slightly more than a quarter of the $58 billion allotted to procure and distribute tests and setting up community-based testing programs had been spent. --->READ MORE HERE

K. Betancur, L. Gonzalez, J. Raedle, S. Eisen/Getty; R. Bowmer/AP

Study: Red States Were Right – Schools That Stayed In-Person Didn’t Lose Academic Ground:

A report issued by a team of researchers from institutions including Harvard University found that economic and racial learning gaps in states such as Texas and Florida did not widen due to schools largely maintaining in-person classes during the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. Harvard Professor Thomas Kane explains: “Where schools remained in-person, gaps did not widen. Where schools shifted to remote learning, gaps widened sharply. Shifting to remote instruction was like turning a switch on a critical piece of our social infrastructure that we had taken for granted.”

In November 2020, for example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced that schools were required to remain open for in-person learning in the spring as the state continued to battle the coronavirus.

As a result of maintaining in-person classes, schools lost little ground academically, according to the study, which also noted that high-poverty schools in America held many fewer in-person classes, and suffered large losses in achievement due to the increase in remote learning.

Now, experts are predicting that these results will foreshadow a widening of the racial and economic achievement gap in the United States.

The report was a joint effort of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, and NWEA, an educational research nonprofit. --->READ MORE HERE

Follow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:

UK ditches daily COVID figures and moves to twice a week updates

GOP presses Biden on canceled $142M contract for COVID-19 therapies

USA TODAY: Coronavirus Updates

WSJ: Coronavirus Live Updates

YAHOO NEWS: Coronavirus Live Updates

NEW YORK POST: Coronavirus The Latest

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