Free Republic

In October, Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, hosted a conferenceopens in a new tab or window on the lessons of COVID-19 in order "to do better in the next pandemic." He invited scholars, journalists, and policy wonks who, like him, have criticized the U.S. management of the crisis as overly draconian. Bhattacharya also invited public health authorities who had considered his alternative approach reckless. None of them showed up. Now, the "contrarians" are seizing the reins: President Donald Trump has nominated Bhattacharya to lead the NIH and Johns Hopkins University surgeon Marty Makary, MD, MPH, to run the...

...Neither Kerry nor running-mate John Edwards is being truthful with the American people about this issue. If they were, they'd have to look to their major allies — the tort-lawyer lobby — as a major source of the problem. Back in the 1960s, 26 companies made vaccines in the United States; today, only four do — and none makes flu vaccines. The two sources for flu shots are firms in Britain and France. What changed? As The Weekly Standard reported last week, it was a new legal concept called "liability without fault" that began emerging four decades ago. This held...