Emphasizing the fact that “the COVID-19 shots do not prevent transmission,” the New York Supreme Court on Friday struck down that state’s covid-vaccine mandate for healthcare workers. [DBx: Note that the New York Supreme Court is a trial court of general jurisdiction; it is not that state’s highest judicial tribunal. Still, this ruling is welcome.]
Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the U.S. FDA’s vaccine advisory committee, has written in the New England Journal of Medicine, the world’s top medical journal, calling for an end to the mass vaccination of anyone at low risk from the virus. In an op-ed titled “Bivalent COVID-19 Vaccines – A Cautionary Tale”, Dr. Offit writes that Covid boosters are “probably best reserved for the people most likely to need protection against severe disease.
Euphoric Recall explains “how the authoritarian Left and wokeism corrupted science.” (HT Jay Bhattacharya) A slice:
Science itself is a process of careful observation, record keeping, logical and mathematical reasoning, experimentation, and submitting conclusions to the scrutiny of others. It requires that we agree upon objective truths, and that we believe in our own capacity to explore the unknown to uncover those truths.
The Science™, however, is an entirely different matter. It amounts to a call for silence, not investigation. Purveyors of the oft-repeated slogan “Follow the science!” don’t mean that we ought to acknowledge the reality of scientific findings, but rather that we accept their preferred solutions and look the other way when they ignore and twist science for their own ideological ends. The Science™ is never invoked to convince, but to bludgeon. It is, as conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro put it, “politics dressed in a white coat.”
Over and over again throughout the course of the pandemic we watched as The Science™ prevailed to the detriment of society.
Eric Boehm decries “the utterly unserious fiscal policy discourse in Washington.” A slice:
The idea of shrinking the discretionary portion of the government back to the size that it was literally just a month ago is “impossible,” according to Politico reporters Caitlin Emma and Connor O’Brien (and their congressional sources), who describe the Republican plan to hold discretionary funding level as relying on “severe cuts” and say the futility of the exercise would “put Don Quixote to shame.”
Theirs is perhaps the most outlandish example of the deeply unserious world of fiscal policy discourse, but it hardly stands alone. The budget rules adopted earlier this week by the new Republican majority in the House lay a foundation for “massive spending cuts,” according to Roll Call. The Washington Post describes the budget plan with similar language, before noting a few paragraphs later that Republicans are merely seeking a return to the status quo of 2022.
Eric Bazail-Eimil reports that Cubans and Haitians are fleeing to the U.S. in staggering numbers.” [DBx: Let’s here note what shouldn’t, but does for too many people, need noting: These immigrants’ actions are powerful evidence against the woke assertion that the United States is today is a racist hell. Racism does still sadly exists in the U.S., and some of it is indeed institutionalized, such as in minimum-wage legislation and the organized opposition to school choice. But at least compared to life in the communist paradise of Cuba and in many other countries, the advantages for poor people of color to live in the U.S. apparently far outweigh the costs.]
George Leef reviews Paul Moreno’s book on the history of the United States Supreme Court.
Ralph Schoellhammer talks with Brendan O’Neill about “the road to eco-serfdom.”
