Good afternoon from Capitol Hill.
The House and Senate are still out of session. Pennsylvania Senate candidates Mehmet Oz and John Fetterman debate for the one and only time tomorrow at 8pm.
If you missed it last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee voted unanimously to add the COVID vaccine and its slate of boosters to the recommended immunization schedule for everyone six months and older. The CDC will now decide to take this advice. Of course, they’re fully expected to do so.
While the CDC provides “guidance” to state health boards and doctor’s offices, our experience with the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that CDC guidance is often enforced as a mandate. More from Karol Markowicz at the New York Post:
Blue cities and states have used “CDC guidance” as cover to implement the most extreme COVID measures since the beginning. And with Democrats controlling the White House, the administration will force as many states as it can to make the COVID vaccine compulsory for kids.
We’ve had a disastrous few years of guidance out of our nation’s politicized health agencies, and this is just the latest example. The Biden team has informed them what decisions they should reach.
From the CDC allowing a special-interest group, the American Federation of Teachers, to craft school-opening policies, to the administration forcing the Food and Drug Administration to authorize boosters for young people, to Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, saying that Joe Biden’s spending bill had to pass before schools could open, White House politicos are running our health policy, and the results have been catastrophic.
Red state governors from Ron DeSantis in Florida to Glenn Youngkin in Virginia have declared the COVID vaccine will remain a parental choice in their states. But that still won’t stop this latest move from backfiring spectacularly onto childhood vaccine efforts more generally, as Vinay Prasad pointed out in Bari Weiss’s substack, Common Sense:
Mandates are concerning for two reasons. First, it is not clear they are ethical. The standard rule in medicine is simple: We do not intrude upon individual autonomy unless that intervention provides sufficient benefit to third parties. This means there must be a large benefit to others— enough so the loss of autonomy is acceptable. Given that the Covid-19 vaccine does not halt virus transmission, the prerequisite is not met. . .
In an effort to encourage Covid-19 vaccination, the CDC may wind up lowering vaccination rates for polio and measles. Why? Because by adding Covid-19 shots to the schedule, the CDC is tacitly implying that this new vaccine is as important to kids as the combination MMR one. This is absolutely false.
There are many stories to be told about the COVID-19 pandemic, but one of them is the way in which our public health institutions and their leadership have utterly discredited themselves. We will no doubt be dealing with the fallout from that for decades to come.
Speaking of discrediting – and unsettling – is the rumor that the Biden administration may seek to subject Elon Musk’s attempted acquisition of Twitter to review over “national security concerns.” These “concerns” suddenly arose after Musk had the gall to tweet suggested terms of a negotiated political settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
There have been a number of speed bumps in this deal, but this latest one sounds increasingly like the American security state admitting that it cannot let Twitter fall into the hands of a free thinker – a tacit acknowledgement of Twitter’s role in shaping opinions and narratives around things like the war in Ukraine.
For the Biden White House to declare the private purchase of a media distribution platform subject to the increasingly openly partisan national security apparatus, and allowing it to exercise veto power on those grounds, seems like it would be an unprecedented pretextual strike on how speech and information travel in America.
Unprecedented, but unfortunately not surprising from an administration that has blown through all previous understandings of how a self-government is supposed to work.
The Latest From Around The Conservative Movement
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- Is critical race theory really being taught in schools? The data says yes.
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One More Thing…
“Peaceful, lawful, honest.” Election Integrity Network chair Cleta Mitchell details how volunteer poll watchers can do their jobs well.