Posts tagged as “Column of the Day”

Last week, President Biden outlined new steps to confront the growing spread of Covid-19.

Unfortunately, Biden’s plan failed to include what could be the most important action of all: an all-out effort to make safe and effective anti-viral Covid-19 pills available.

Pfizer’s Paxlovid was authorized by the FDA for emergency use on December 22. But regulatory authorizations are little more than symbolic, if the drugs are unavailable. White House Coronavirus Coordinator Jeffrey Zients said on The News Hour that there would be 10 million courses of Paxlovid available by “late summer” of next year—which is too little, too late.

Related Content: Biden's General Are Fighting the Last COVID War

The White House should immediately act on these potentially transformational drug treatments. The president should invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) to speed their production.

● Read in City Journal

● Read and comment here on The Red Line

In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science.” In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research.

The tale unfolded in October 2020 after the launch of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement by Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya against blanket pandemic lockdowns. They favored a policy of what they called “focused protection” of high-risk populations such as the elderly or those with medical conditions. Thousands of scientists signed the declaration—if they were able to learn about it. We tried to give it some elevation on these pages.

Related Content: Death by Virus or by Shutdown

● Read in Wall Street Journal

‘Follow the science” has been the battle cry of lockdown supporters since the Covid-19 pandemic began. Yet before March 2020, the mainstream scientific community, including the World Health Organization, strongly opposed lockdowns and similar measures against infectious disease.

Related Content: Death by Virus or by Shutdown

A September 2019 report from Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security reached a similar conclusion: “In the context of a high-impact respiratory pathogen, quarantine may be the least likely NPI to be effective in controlling the spread due to high transmissibility.”

● Read in Wall Street Journal

Apparently it's not enough for the political left in Connecticut that nearly all state and municipal government employees are unionized. Last week four state employee unions brought a federal lawsuit claiming that members of the Connecticut National Guard have collective bargaining rights, though federal law makes it a felony for active-duty members of the Armed Forces to form labor organizations.

Related Content: Nutmeg State is "The Public Union State"

The lawsuit sees a loophole in the federal law -- that it applies to National Guard members only when called to federal duty. Accordingly, the suit contends, when National Guard members act only for the state, they have the same collective-bargaining rights as state government's civilian employees.

● Read in Journal Inquirer

● Read and comment here on The Red Line

In his Nov. 10 op-ed, “Column on CRT was misleading,”[shown below] critical race theory (CRT) advocate Thomas Ethier took columnist Red Jahncke to task for his Oct. 20 op-ed, “A primer for CRT resistance.” Mr. Jahncke pointed out flaws in this progressive fad.

Mr. Ethier started by telling us that CRT is nothing but a theory adopted by various fields of scholarship, but he insisted it “… is not being taught in any secondary schools, nor is anyone proposing that it should be.” Mr. Ethier immediately contradicted himself by noting that the U.S. Department of Education advocates and provides incentives for incorporating “CRT themes” in public-school curricula.

Having demonstrated to Mr. Jahncke that what walks and talks like a duck is not a duck, Mr. Ethier next objected to Mr. Jahncke “sneering” at Ibram X. Kendi, an African-American history scholar and author of “How to Be an Antiracist.” I am not sure about the sneering part, but Mr. Jahncke did have the temerity to cite a quote from Mr. Kendi’s book illustrating one of its themes: “The only remedy to past racism is present racism. The only remedy to present racism is future racism." Though Mr. Ethier is an admirer of Mr. Kendi, and has listened to hours of his lectures, he questions whether Mr. Kendi actually wrote these words.

● Read in Republican American

● Read and comment here on The Red Line

While, because of daily changes, we do not yet have the final text of the Democrats’ “Build Back Better” social welfare and climate change legislation, as of this writing we do have enough documentation to assess some of its major themes.

Counting explicit expenditures and scored tax credits for equity and justice items in the legislation, I found 145 separate provisions or programs costing $168 billion (and likely more), which is a tenth of the unofficially estimated cost of $1.75 trillion for the whole BBB package.

The following representative sample of language from the legislation gives a sense of the wokeness at play. Provisions include giving grants, loans, and tax credits, spending money for, and delivering cooperative extensions to “underserved forest landowners,” “tree equity,” “insular areas,” “colonias” (substandard housing developments along the US-Mexico border), “equity commissions,” “frontline grocery workers,” “low diversity workforce,”...

● Read on Real Clear Policy

● Read and comment here on The Red Line

Most of the media has been very careful over the years not to tag as “illegal aliens” the border busters who illegally are crossing what has become a mythical redline (aka “the southern border”) into the United States. The preferred designation is usually “undocumented workers,” since the “workers” have no work visas.

The truth, hovering like a thunder cloud over our politics during the past year, has been painfully obvious to two sets of people: those living in border states whose daily lives have been upturned by a massive influx of “undocumented workers,” many of whom are too young to work in the United States; and voters elsewhere in the country who have eyes to see and ears to hear – excepting, of course, those whose partisan prejudices or political needs have rendered them deaf and dumb.

Among these last is Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.

● Read in Republican American

● Read and comment here on The Red Line