Vaccines

Thursday’s explosive congressional Weaponization subcommittee hearing didn’t uncover any new evidence on government censorship, but it did serve as an unofficial excommunication of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from the Democratic Party.  During the House Judiciary Committee's three-hour hearing, Kennedy was relentlessly characterized by Democrats as a racist bigot spewing misinformation and hate. He was repeatedly denied the opportunity to respond to accusations or even answer questions by members of his own party who no longer claim him.  For House Democrats, it seems that Kennedy is the new Donald Trump.

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.

When Cockburn turns on the television these days, something is missing. Then he realizes — that (very) little something is Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose 400-plus media events during the Covid pandemic made him a fixture of the tube. Then one day, after we made him the highest paid employee in the federal government, Fauci upped and left, abandoning us to figure out on our own if we should stay home when we’re sick. or if coughing on our ancient relatives is a good idea or not. But if you thought you’d seen the last of Fauci, never fear — the man has reemerged like an Omicron variant, this time as a motivational speaker.

Why would a candidate for the presidency purposefully undermine his greatest achievement in government — one that required the movement of heaven and earth, one that his opponents deemed impossible, but one that he ultimately delivered to the broad benefit of the American people? It seems ridiculous. Yet that is what Donald Trump seems to be doing, in his typically scattershot way. You have to ask: why? Trump, via his TruthSocial account, has been posting at record pace criticizing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — whom he maintains he voted for — as a "globalist," knocking DeSantis for favoring lockdowns (which he didn't) and for pushing people to get vaccinated (which he did).

House Republicans have launched an all-out war on the remaining Covid vaccine mandates being enforced by the Biden administration. So far they have won some important concessions, but are pushing for more. The Spectator spoke with several key players involved in the legislative battle, which they claim forced the Biden administration to finally declare an end to some of its coronavirus emergency powers later this year. The Republicans, however, want them shut down right now.

I have a question for New Zealand’s outgoing prime minister Jacinda Ardern: can you take President Biden with you? Ardern announced this week that she would be resigning from her post, ten months before her term ends in October. She acknowledged in her resignation address that her five and a half years have been filled with difficult challenges. Since Ardern’s election in 2017, New Zealand has dealt with terrorist attacks, natural disasters and of course the Covid-19 pandemic. But Ardern stressed the fact that she is not leaving because of the difficulties of the job. Rather, she is departing because... well, to put it simply: she can’t cut it anymore.

“Was it a mistake in so many states, in so many localities to see schools closed as long as they were?” an ABC reporter asked Dr. Anthony Fauci on October 16. His response: “I would say that what we should realize, and have realized, that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that…” That was news to all of us parents who were called racists for raising the issue when it counted. For speaking of “deleterious consequences” during the height of the pandemic, we “open schools" parents were demonized and shut down. As the Chicago Teachers’ Union put it in a characteristic (but now deleted) tweet from December 2020, our push to reopen schools was “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.

They walk among us. The last of the Covidians. We see them every day, masked while walking their dog in the park, or alone in their car. We have that friend or loved one who badgers us about vaccines and boosters like a mid-level PR executive at Pfizer. There is also the social media warrior who will never admit they got anything wrong about lockdowns, that even with our economy and education system in shambles, we should be grateful. Let’s not forget the public health officials like Holy Saint Fauci, who we recently learned had a mega-millions windfall while Americans’ purchasing power plummeted into the poorhouse. “Oh no,” they warn, “don’t get complacent now! Winter is coming!