President Donald Trump is continuing his consistently inconsistent stance on abortion as his administration’s Justice Department has asked a federal court in Texas to dismiss a case aiming to increase regulations on mifepristone, an abortion pill shown in some rare cases to involve serious health risks. Trump has claimed many times in the past to be pro-life, even saying in 2016 that “there has to be some form of punishment” for abortions.
Birth control may finally become available over the counter in the United States. HRA Pharma, a French drugmaker, hopes the FDA will approve its application for sale of the Opill brand after seven years of tests. You’d think Opill was some new kind of drug, except it’s been prescribed to women for decades. “For a product that has been available for the last fifty years, that has been used safely by millions of women, we thought it was time to make it more available,” commented HRA’s chief strategy officer to the Associated Press. HRA Pharma started lobbying for OTC status in 2016 after purchasing the drug rights from Pfizer. And HRA isn’t the only drug company playing a regulatory game of limbo. Cadence Health planned to start a trial for its drug Zena last year.
As a recession looms, policymakers have predictably turned to entrepreneurs to start new businesses and jumpstart the economy. While this may be a good political talking point, the fact is that new business formation has never shortened a recession or reduced its impact. Some economists have looked to Covid to explain the unprecedented number of new businesses that sought IRS tax IDs during the pandemic. Washington’s touted “surge in entrepreneurship” is proving evanescent, however. Many individuals, facing economic lockdowns and the prospect of extended unemployment, decided to create businesses, often from home. Few of these companies will ever employ anyone except their founders — and rates of new business formation are already falling back to pre-pandemic levels.
