WATCH: Toward a New York City Hypothesis

Open Science Session by Jessica Hockett, PhD

New York City’s spring 2020 mass-casualty event is a global and domestic outlier that warrants closer scrutiny. How do common explanations for a weekly death rate that peaked at 600% above normal hold up against daily events and data points? In this two-part presentation, Dr. Jessica Hockett shares aspects of her hypothesis in progress about what happened - and what it suggests about whether the New York mortality experience is evidence that a global viral pandemic occurred. Content includes data Dr. Hockett has obtained via public records requests, as well as already-public datasets that media and researchers overlook.

Dr. Hockett has a PhD in educational psychology from the University of Virginia. For over 20 years, she worked in and with schools and agencies in the U.S., Canada, and South America, to improve curriculum, instruction, and programmes. Her publications include numerous articles related to the education field, as well as three books: Exam Schools: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools, Differentiation in Middle and High School: Strategies to Engage All Learners Differentiation in the Elementary Grades: Strategies to Engage & Equip All Learners. Jessica’s current work involves policy research and analysis for the National Opportunity Project, a government watchdog and education nonprofit. Her paper on the implementation of federal Covid relief funds for nonpublic schools was released this spring https://www.nationalopportunity.org/eans-funding-report/ A forthcoming paper focuses on politically/ideologically-biased teacher-hiring practices in K12 public schools.

In the Covid-response era, Jessica used her Twitter account and Substack to push against mandates and for common sense. She leveraged her research skills and investigative tenacity to obtain public records, communicate directly with government officials, and gather data that uncovered illegalities and inefficacies of harmful orders and policies. Highlights of her research was exposing the University of Illinois’ false claims to FDA EUA for its Covid saliva test; assisting with a lawsuit against Chicago’s vaccine passport; testifying as a data analyst in a vaccine mandate arbitration case; helping lead the fight for mask choice in schools and churches; homeschooling her two children in 2020-21; and being censored by and banned for almost six months from Twitter.