CDC

On March 24, 2020, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya co-published an article in the Wall Street Journal, “Is The Coronavirus As Deadly As They Say?” He argued that Covid lockdowns and quarantines had no grounding in scientific fact. That was a rare opinion in those isolated days. Anyone who spoke out against lockdowns, mask mandates, booster shots for toddlers, school closures, business shutdowns and any number of other injustices large and small that stemmed from Covid panic feels vindication today, as Bhattacharya, a sensible, mild-mannered scientist whom former National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins publicly smeared as a “fringe epidemiologist” is about, barring some sort of confirmation calamity, to take Collins’s job.

Vice President Kamala Harris is almost three weeks into her presidential campaign and not only has she failed to hold an unscripted press conference or sit for a media interview, she also has zero policy positions on her campaign website. Democratic strategists have repeatedly assured me that she will adopt whatever platform comes out of the Democratic National Convention, which certainly won’t help the perception that she is a manufactured candidate willing to do whatever it takes to seize power, but I digress. The clear indication we are getting from the early stages of the Harris-Walz campaign is that it is all about “vibes” and the idea that Harris is selling “joy.

Senator Ted Cruz has plans to stymie President Biden’s pick to head up the Centers for Disease Control. The Spectator exclusively obtained legislation the Texas Republican will introduce to force a confirmation vote on the controversial doctor, Mandy Cohen, who Biden wants to succeed the scandal-plagued incumbent, Rochelle Walensky.  In the aptly named "CDC Accountability Act of 2023," Cruz has a simple proposal: change existing law requiring a confirmation vote for the next CDC director in 2025, and instead push it up two years.

Mandy Cohen — the doctor rumored to be President Joe Biden’s successor to the scandal-plagued Rochelle Walensky atop the Centers for Disease Control — loves Anthony Fauci, multiple sources familiar with her record tell The Spectator. Biden’s likely pick to helm the CDC has what many view as a troubling record of politicizing science and unnecessarily supporting draconian lockdown measures, even in the face of scientific reality. Most are seizing on a photo of Cohen wearing a mask emblazoned with a giant picture of Anthony Fauci and a video of her at a briefing (while North Carolina was under a strict mask mandate) in which she looks to see if the cameras are on, pretends to put on her mask, then pretends to take it off. https://twitter.

According to the calculations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 92.2 percent of American adults have received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. But a new report published this month found that as many as one in four Americans have never received a shot. The finding casts doubt on the role that vaccines played in getting the pandemic under control, and further incriminates the CDC’s pandemic response, undermining its trustworthiness. The report was prepared by the Covid States Project, a joint initiative of Northeastern University, Harvard University, Rutgers University, and Northwestern University. They surveyed almost 25,000 people across all fifty states and DC with state-level representative quotas for sex, age, and race.

Don't call it a comeback. Prior to the 2022 midterm elections, there were signs that if Republicans had success, Covid would be roaring back with all its former aspects of fearmongering from the Democratic media complex, requiring more spending, more regulation and the return of rules Americans previously found anathema. This would serve the purpose of said complex in numerous ways: helping them push back against Republican efforts to end those supposedly "emergency" authorities and bureaucratic programs that now must find ways to sustain themselves. Everything from proxy voting to government vaccine requirements to the handwaving justification for the student loan bailout would be at risk, if the fiction that we are in the midst of constant emergency could not be maintained.

For all the confusion caused by President Biden’s recent declaration that “the pandemic is over,” and the familiar sight of administration officials rushing to qualify his comment, it raises a question: where does the Covid emergency actually stand? Having gone from draconian lockdowns to a summer of travel chaos in just over two years — with lots of political squabbling in between — it has been easy to lose track of both the remaining dangers and the precautions many health experts believe are needed going forward. Strictly speaking, Covid is still very much with us. The average number of daily cases in the US has floated between 50,000 and 60,000 since April of this year and the death toll remains fairly constant at 400 per day.

On Friday January 3, 2020, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, phoned Alex Azar, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. With the words, “we have a problem in China,” Redfield broke to the secretary and those of us on his immediate staff news that was about to change the world. At the time, neither Redfield nor anyone else knew much about the characteristics of the virus that would become known formally as SARS-CoV-2, but he knew enough to sense that we needed to respond, and quickly. Thus began an odyssey of pandemic response actions, strategies and regulatory processes that would consume HHS, where I worked, along with much of the rest of the administration, until Inauguration Day 2021.

Senator Marco Rubio today sent a strongly worded letter to Harvard president Lawrence Bacow expressing concerns prompted by a Spectator magazine investigation by this reporter that Harvard may be “actively supporting [America’s] principal adversary,” the Chinese Communist Party. “Throughout the pandemic, we were told to trust the experts," Rubio told The Spectator exclusively. "But what we increasingly see is so-called trusted experts and institutions engaged in highly questionable behavior. This looks really bad, and if it turns out to be true, any last shred of faith that the American people had in these ‘experts’ will be deservedly stamped out.

For a brief moment, America was the cheering mission control room in every action movie. You know the one: the flight controllers stand there nervously, waiting to hear from the wayward rocket. Then, suddenly, the radio crackles: “Houston,” says a voice, “this is Gemini One...we did it. A federal judge in Florida just struck down the mask mandate.” And everyone goes wild. From out of claustrophobic plane cabins and sterile airports this week came unlikely scenes of jubilation as passengers tore off their masks and breathed freely once again.

My wife and seven-year-old son were halfway to Boston to catch a connecting flight to Ireland on Monday when the news came down. Or, as it were, went up, as Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle voided the Biden administration’s widely reviled but recently extended mask mandate on public transportation. After receiving instructions from the ground, the pilot on their plane emerged from the cockpit and announced that masks were no longer required. He then invited the passengers to “go ahead and throw them in the trash.” There was a swell of cheers as the passengers and crew were overcome by a euphoria of deliverance from the tyranny of overzealous Washington.

At the start of this year, I took a flight from London to DC. For its duration, I wore a cloth mask that I had been given for free at a bookstore — the kind of mask that Most Experts now say does not meaningfully prevent viral spread. At one point, shortly after I’d finished eating, a tall male flight attendant asked me to pull my mask up — I, of course, did as asked. A few hours later, while the lights were dimmed and I was drifting off for a nap, my mask slipped to just below my nose, the same flight attendant tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a pamphlet from the airline.

Authorities have finally done something about the aggressive, rabid critters that lurk around our nation’s capital and slink from their dens on the Hill to assault honest people for no good reason. Cockburn has encountered all sorts of such creatures on various Capitol Hill pub crawls, but the type the police just decided to address was neither a blundering elephant nor an indignant jackass. Neither was it a Blue Dog, one of those endangered porcupines that rarely appear in the Swamp, nor even a squawking chicken hawk. It was a red fox. A cute little lady fox with a majestically bushy tail, black-tipped ears and feet, white markings on her chest and muzzle, and shining black eyes. People first started posting images of the fox on Monday.

During the entire past two years of Covid hysteria I never stopped traveling. “Work from home” wasn’t a privilege awarded to me. My love of logic and language was perpetually bothered by a frequent airline announcement: “Federal law requires” mask mandates, a statement most untruthful. There is no law. Congress passed no new legislation; there is only regulation, the demon spawn of power-hungry politicians and a bloated bureaucracy. For those who can’t be bothered with the democratic process of elected officials proposing bills and deliberating, voting and enacting legislation, the immeasurable, and not enumerated, power of the bureaucratic state is an attractive work-around.