Free Republic

The White House on Friday launched a website deeming a laboratory leak as the “true” origin of the covid-19 virus, embracing a theory that has become a popular explanation for a pandemic that has killed more than 1 million Americans but remains divisive in the intelligence community and opposed by many virologists. The new website, which features an image of President Donald Trump striding between the words “Lab Leak,” appears to draw entirely upon a report overseen by House Republicans last year, which concluded the outbreak began with a lab leak in China. The White House site also echoes the...

Somewhere on a grocery shelf, or in a restaurant, or on a food-factory floor in America, lurk bacteria that haven’t been detected yet. Perhaps E. coli, which is linked with food poisoning, or more of the cronobacter that led to infant illnesses, sparked a nationwide shortage of infant formula in 2022 and led to major reforms at the Food and Drug Administration.The task of finding those bacteria rests on FDA inspectors, whose jobs have been mostly preserved amid the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal government. But the people who help support those inspections haven’t fared so well. More...

When the next pandemic strikes, Americans will again depend on a cadre of senior health officials to steer the nation’s response and reassure the public. But the team rapidly assembled by President-elect Donald Trump is largely untested, possesses scant infectious-disease expertise and has often questioned vaccines and other interventions overseen by the agencies they have been tapped to lead. Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon and writer who is Trump’s pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration, has been among the agency’s most prominent critics, arguing its response to the coronavirus pandemic was heavy-handed and bureaucratic. Dave Weldon, chosen...

Trump’s former physician and GOP ally is now a retired captain, not an admiralRonny Jackson, the former White House physician turned GOP congressman, regularly touts his military bona fides. “As a retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral with nearly three decades of military service I understand the commitment and sacrifices made by servicemen and servicewomen to serve our country,” the two-term representative from Texas says on his congressional website in a message posted to a page listing his work on veterans issues. But Jackson is no longer a retired admiral. The Navy demoted him in July 2022 following a damaging Pentagon...

Fox News retracted a hit piece against former President Donald Trump and admitted they “inaccurately attributed” an anti-Trump quote to former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price. Fox News’s story had the following headline: “Former Trump Cabinet member tells him to ‘kiss’ his ‘butt.” The since-retracted, purportedly exclusive story read, in part: EXCLUSIVE: Former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price told Fox News Digital there’s “no way” he will support former President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential bid. When asked whether he will endorse Trump, Price said, “After he fired me? No way.” “The only thing that guy has...

On Tuesday morning, a Fox News contributor claimed on Twitter that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was set to mandate that schoolchildren get coronavirus vaccines. By Tuesday evening, the claim was being repeated by the nation's most popular cable news show, and had been amplified to millions more on social media online. "The CDC is about to add the Covid vaccine to the childhood immunization schedule, which would make the vax mandatory for kids to attend school," host Tucker Carlson tweeted, sharing a segment from his show that has been viewed more than 1.5 million times online. But...

Health provisions remain a sticking point in spending package amid efforts to reduce price tag, rally factions Democrats’ sweeping plans to bolster Medicare and Medicaid benefits have been scaled back amid an assault from industry groups and opposition from centrists like Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), with popular coverage expansions likely to be narrowed in hopes of reaching a deal this week. U.S. coronavirus cases tracker and map A proposal to expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing and vision benefits is in danger of falling from the tax-and-spending package rapidly taking shape in Congress. A framework to expand Medicaid to...

@ddiamond “We always ask, what will be the last straw? What will be the moment that we lose the ability to communicate and cooperate?” longtime GOP pollster @FrankLuntz told The Post. “Well, we’ve reached it. This is it … And now people are going to die.”

The Food and Drug Administration on Sunday issued an emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, decades-old malaria drugs championed by President Donald Trump for coronavirus treatment despite scant evidence. The agency allowed for the drugs to be "donated to the Strategic National Stockpile to be distributed and prescribed by doctors to hospitalized teen and adult patients with COVID-19, as appropriate, when a clinical trial is not available or feasible," HHS said in a statement, announcing that Sandoz donated 30 million doses of hydroxychloroquine to the stockpile and Bayer donated 1 million doses of chloroquine. (Please see link, for full...

CRUZ HITS TRUMP ON HEALTH CARE - AND HE'S KIND OF RIGHT - Locked in a close battle in Iowa, Ted Cruz is turning to health care in an attempt to separate himself from rival Donald Trump. A brutal ad airing in Iowa links "HillaryCare" and "ObamaCare" with "TrumpCare" - and uses Trump's own words against him. "Everybody's got to be covered, this is an un-Republican thing for me to say," the ad quotes Trump saying on 60 Minutes last fall. "[And] the government's gonna pay for it." Cruz pushed this message further on several Sunday shows. "A vote for...