Posts published in “National Newspapers”

It is darkest before dawn. COVID is surging, particularly in the Northeast. Yet, it is not a wild-eyed prediction to say that this will be COVID’s last gasp. While the virus will be around for a long time, it will cease to be a serious threat.

Why? Because of vaccines and because of two relatively unheralded medical advances.

Continue Reading:

• Read and comment here on The Red Line
  
• Read in Real Clear Politics
  
• Read in CT Examiner
  
• Read in Journal Inquirer
  
• Read in Republican American
  
• Read in The Day
  
• Read in Greenwich Sentinel
  

Biden Administration generals are fighting the last war. Last Thursday, they mandated that large businesses and health care facilities require that their workers get vaccinated for COVID-19.

The next day, Pfizer announced an antiviral pill to treat the virus. Pfizer’s pill is 89% effective. A Merck antiviral pill for COVID-19 (with only about 50% effectiveness) is already in use in Britain.

COVID-19 treatment pills destroy any vestige of logic or justification for Biden’s vaccine mandates.

No matter how someone contracts the virus, these pills prevent serious illness – hospitalization and death. With double lines of defense against the coronavirus – vaccination, and, now, these new antiviral treatment pills – mandates have become unnecessary.

Last Saturday, the Fifth U.S. Court of Appeals issued an emergency stay of the Biden business mandate, saying it raises “grave statutory and constitutional issues.”

Quite apart from the legal issues, the mandates ignore science and logic. The logic of vaccine mandates has always been weak and self-contradictory insofar as their implied purpose of protecting vaccinated people from unvaccinated people. If vaccines are effective (95% effective in Pfizer’s case), then, vaccinated people face little risk from unvaccinated people.

If the vaccines are ineffective, then why should anyone get them?

Continue Reading:

• Read and comment here on The Red Line
  
• Read on Real Clear Politics
  
• Read in CT Examiner
  
• Read in CT Hearst newspapers
  
• Read in The Day
  
• Read on ZeroHedge
  
• Read in Journal Inquirer
  

President Biden has issued a flurry of executive orders related to climate change, including one designating climate change a national security threat andone rejoining the Paris Accord.

The primary security threat by this new climate-change name looks the same as the leading national security threat in traditional terms: China. The totalitarian Communist dictatorship is responsible for almost 30% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

China’s emissions are not only the world’s most, but they are increasing every year. U.S. emissions are about half as much and have been decreasing for over a decade.

Continue Reading:

• Read and comment here on The Red Line
  
• Read in Washington Examiner
  
• Read in Republican American
  
• Read in Republican American
  

President Trump finalized a "most favored nation (MFN)" or "best price," prescription drug pricing rule on Nov. 20. The goal of the MFN concept is to deliver fair drug prices to Americans. The MFN best-price concept mandates the same price for Americans and wealthy Europeans, who have been paying about one-third of what Americans pay. It does so by empowering Medicare to require drug sellers to give it the "best" (lowest) price charged any other buyer.

The MFN construct does not diminish drug company profits, which fund critical R&D and discovery of new life-saving drugs. The concept does not impose government-set prices upon drug manufacturers, who would be free to set whatever price would maximize sales and profits.

While there is controversy as to whether the just-finalized rule genuinely implements the concept, the MFN approach should be followed. Opponents of the rule should work to improve it, not oppose it.

Continue Reading:

• Read and comment here on The Red Line
  
• Read in The Hill
  
• Read in CT Examiner
  
• Read in Republican American
  
• Read in The Day
  
• Read in CT Hearst newspapers
  

“The Only Good Thing About Donald Trump Is All His Policies.” So proclaimed an opinion column headline in 2018. The converse might be said of apparent President-elect Joe Biden. He may be likable but he offered little vision and said nothing about policy in his victory speech a week ago— nor much during his entire campaign.

Biden, so far, is defined by who he is not: Donald Trump.

Biden’s message consisted almost exclusively of a still-life image of safe sequester in a well-disclosed secure basement location.

Biden claims a mandate, but his prime raison d’etre will depart 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. on Jan. 20. Then what?

Continue Reading:

• Read and comment here on The Red Line
  
• Read in The Hill
  

THE question in the 2020 presidential race is whether the polls are missing “hidden” Trump supporters, just as they did in 2016.

If they miss again, a big part of the overlooked population may be the nation’s 800,000 cops. Randy Hagler, President of the Fraternal Order of Police in North Carolina, the largest police union in the state, says, “I never answer poll calls. If I do by mistake, I hang up right away. I think most police do the same.”

If polls are failing to capture the police, they are missing something hidden in plain sight. Every major police organization has endorsed Trump. Police groups nationwide have endorsed Republicans in overwhelming numbers at all levels of government. In this year’s 46 races for U.S. senate and governor, major police organizations have endorsed only three Democrats, including two whose Republican opponents have also received major police endorsements.

Continue Reading:

• Read and comment here on The Red Line
  
• Read in Real Clear Politics
  

President Trump challenged Joe Biden in the first debate to name one police endorsement he’d received. Mr. Biden couldn’t—virtually all police organizations have endorsed Mr. Trump. Police groups are endorsing Republicans at every level of government, many for the first time and by overwhelming votes.

The nation’s largest police organization, with 355,000 members, is the Fraternal Order of Police. Patrick Yoes, the national group’s president, tells me every officer among the FOP’s membership has a vote. The process starts with officers voting at 2,100 local lodges, each of which votes at the state level. Then, at the national level, every state lodge casts a vote -- this year, unanimously for Mr. Trump.

Continue Reading:

• Read and comment here on The Red Line
  
• Read in The Wall Street Journal
  

In the Senate hearing last week on the country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Tenn.) challenged the preternatural influence of Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), saying: "You are not the end-all.”

Paul was rude, but right. The nation has become transfixed by Fauci and his approach to the pandemic, which Paul described accurately as a “one-size-fits-all” policy. Almost the entire nation has been ordered to stay home and socially distance, and almost the whole economy has been shut down. You can’t get more one-size-fits-all than that.

It is a marvel that the nation has followed such a uniform policy in the face of a virus which afflicts different population segments in such wildly different ways. Over three-quarters of all serious cases and deaths have befallen people over age 65, who comprise only about 16 percent of the population. And it is just plain common sense that people with serious prior conditions would be at greater risk, and that transmission would be greatest in densely populated urban areas and residential settings. To offer a uniform policy is like a shoe store selling only size-8 shoes.

The dramatic imbalance was clear before the U.S. shutdown began. Data out of China and Italy were unambiguous that the virus attacked the elderly and spared those younger. Moreover, our first reported outbreak occurred at the Life Care Center nursing home in Washington state, i.e., among seniors in a dense residential setting.

Tragically, the U.S. has failed to protect precisely those population segments whose high risk was obvious from the start. While the damage already sustained – both in terms of lives and livelihoods – cannot be undone, it need not be compounded. From the start, many people saw a targeted approach without a total economic shutdown as a better approach – and they still do.

Unfortunately, partisanship has crept into the debate over the best policy, with Democrats supporting Fauci and many Republicans the targeted alternative. Let’s look at the targeted alternative -- not as presented by a Republican or a conservative but, rather, by Thomas Friedman, renowned opinion columnist for The New York Times, a generally left-leaning newspaper.

Continue Reading:

• Read and comment here on The Red Line
  
• Read in The Hill