“For science to thrive and progress, we must be open-minded and allow vigorous and passionate debate,” says Martin Kulldorff, a former professor of medicine at Harvard. “Why should taxpayers subsidize universities that don’t allow that?” Kulldorff, an eminent epidemiologist, lost his job at Harvard after he became an early and outspoken critic of pandemic policies. In 2020, he joined with Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford, to write the Great Barrington Declaration, a critique of lockdowns that was signed by tens of thousands of scientists and physicians.
Bhattacharya, who has a Ph.D. in economics as well as an M.D. from Stanford, hung on to his job as professor of health policy at the latter’s medical school, but his views were taboo on campus. After he and colleagues did a field study at the start of the pandemic showing that the Covid fatality rate was much lower than the doomsday number used to justify lockdowns, they were vilified by academics and journalists, and Stanford subjected them to a two-month inquiry by an outside legal firm. (They were vindicated by the inquiry and also by subsequent research confirming their findings.)
Also applauding the nomination of Jay Bhattacharya to head the NIH is Reason‘s Christian Britschgi.
In this unfortunate era of industrial policy, it’s good to be a politically favored company no matter your commercial prospects. Consider the Biden Energy Department’s stunning $6 billion loan to struggling Rivian Automotive to make electric vehicles.
We had fun calling Rivian a “government unicorn” three years ago when it went public and surged to a fantastic $120 billion market valuation. Rivian at the time had sold a mere 156 vehicles despite being in business for 12 years. Its shares are now worth $11.8 billion.
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Even Rivian seems to harbor doubts about its future. It warns that current and potential competitors have “significantly greater financial, technical, manufacturing, marketing, or other resources.”
The DOE loan program is supposed to help promising startups. But the Biden team is financing a struggling company with a known credit risk that is competing in a well-developed auto industry. Rivian’s debt maturing in 2026 carries an effective interest rate of 12%, but DOE is lending to it at the Treasury rate.
The Economist rightly writes that Javier Milei is a true liberal and emphatically not appropriately lumped in with Trump. Three slices:
Javier Milei has been president of Argentina for a year. He campaigned wielding a chainsaw, but his economic programme is serious and one of the most radical doses of free-market medicine since Thatcherism. It comes with risks, if only because of Argentina’s history of instability and Mr Milei’s explosive personality. But the lessons are striking, too.
The left detests him and the Trumpian right embraces him, but he truly belongs to neither group. He has shown that the continual expansion of the state is not inevitable. And he is a principled rebuke to opportunistic populism, of the sort practised by Donald Trump. Mr Milei believes in free trade and free markets, not protectionism; fiscal discipline, not reckless borrowing; and, instead of spinning popular fantasies, brutal public truth-telling.
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What is fascinating is the philosophy behind the figures. Mr Milei is often wrongly lumped in with populist leaders such as Mr Trump, the hard right in France and Germany or Viktor Orban in Hungary. In fact he comes from a different tradition. A true believer in open markets and individual liberty, he has a quasi-religious zeal for economic freedom, a hatred of socialism and, as he told us in an interview this week, “infinite” contempt for the state. Instead of industrial policy and tariffs, he promotes trade with private firms that do not interfere in Argentina’s domestic affairs, including Chinese ones. He is a small-state Republican who admires Margaret Thatcher—a messianic example of an endangered species. His poll ratings are rising and, at this point in his term, he is more popular in Argentina than his recent predecessors were.
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Perhaps the biggest lesson is about courage and coherence. Like them or not, Mr Milei’s policies align with each other, which magnifies their effect. Unlike Mr Trump, he has not promised to unleash the power of markets and consumers in one breath, and to protect businesses from competition in the next. By winning the argument for tough but vital reform, he has shown that voters used to sugar-coated banalities can in fact be trusted with hard truths.
Christine Rosen makes a strong case that “the Democrats have a woman problem.” Three slices:
What went wrong for Harris?
In addition to her general lack of skill as a retail politician, Harris’s campaign neglected to consider how its messaging would sound to women outside the world in which Harris lives, with its wealthy, well-educated, decidedly left-leaning Democratic voters.
She was inauthentic. Much of the enthusiasm that supposedly surrounded the Harris campaign was manufactured, and while it briefly energized crowds at the Democratic National Convention in August, it was unsustainable for even the few months that Harris needed to convince voters she was presidential material.
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Scolding men is a strategy, but it assumes that most women have fathers, husbands, and sons whom they fear and mistrust rather than love. Thankfully, that’s not the case. Political culture on the left has long demonized traditional masculinity (calling it toxic and patriarchal), and many leftists assume the rest of the country shares such views. No wonder they thought that ignoring stories about the second gentleman’s ungentlemanly past behavior and slapping a camouflage hat and flannel shirt on a performative, progressive, and not-so-masculine Minnesota governor would persuade men and women to vote for Harris-Walz, or that they might move votes by targeting men directly in ads featuring hired actors who awkwardly pretended to do manly things while endorsing Harris. The result: Democrats lost even Walz’s home county in Minnesota to Trump. Women didn’t buy what the Harris campaign and the legacy media tried to sell about the new Democratic version of masculinity.
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In truth, Democrats who refuse to acknowledge just how nontraditional and uncommon their party’s values have become have only themselves to blame for Harris’s loss. “The Democrats really are no longer the party of the common man and woman,” as Ruy Teixeira put it. “The priorities and values that dominate the party today are instead those of educated, liberal America which only partially overlap — and sometimes not at all — with those of ordinary Americans.” In other words, while Democrats scorn “trad wives,” most American women and men are concerned about the deterioration of values in this country, and they voted accordingly; a study from Cambridge University’s Political Psychology Lab found that nine out of ten Trump voters believe that “American values and beliefs are being undermined and cherished traditions are under threat,” compared with 45 percent of Harris voters who hold this view.
The abdication of duty is bipartisan. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have shown genuine commitment to restoring fiscal responsibility. Basic oversight functions, like passing individual appropriations bills on schedule or conducting rigorous cost-benefit analyses, are regularly ignored. And, of course, very few in Congress want to take the steps needed to stabilize the major drivers of the government’s future debt: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
