Marty Makary

Monday

Ben Domenech

Could abortion pills be the sleeper issue for the midterms?

The politics of the abortion issue in the post-Dobbs environment has been dramatically altered, both by the introduction of state-level restrictions in Republican states and by pressure campaigns in Democrat-dominated states to increase the subsidization and solidification of existing lax abortion policies. But the most significant development in the abortion space in recent years wasn’t a decision that came from the Supreme Court, but from the Biden administration – first temporarily (with Covid as the justification) and then permanently granting the ability to dispense abortion-inducing pills via telehealth, without the previously required visit to a doctor.

Thursday

Spectator Editorial

The heterodox cabinet

As Inauguration Day approaches, the second Trump administration is staffing up. The president-elect’s picks are more or less what everyone expected, outside of a few curveballs. To be honest, the lack of outrage from Trump critics is the big surprise: apparently Trump Derangement Syndrome is a passing fever; even many who’ve argued against him seem to see some logic in the administration of outsiders he’s been signaling he’ll pick for years. In Washington, where almost nothing changes from administration to administration, these cabinet picks might actually be able to effect some meaningful disruption. In almost every role that matters, Trump has opted for a nominee who has been an extreme critic of the very body he or she is set to oversee.

cabinet
Covid
Neal Pollack

The Covid cabinet

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.