Free Republic

Judge Matthew Schelp of the Eastern District of Missouri issued an injunction halting President Joe Biden's Wuhan coronavirus vaccine mandate for Medicare and Medicaid workers in ten states Monday, citing a lack of approval from Congress. "The mandate requires nearly every employee, volunteer, and third-party contractor working at fifteen catogires of healthcare facilities to be vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 (“COVID”) and to have received at least a first dose of the vaccine prior to December 6, 2021," court documents show. "Congress did not grant CMS authority to mandate the vaccine. Plaintiffs are likely to succeed in their argument that Congress has...

Remember when we were assured that the Wuhan Institute of Virology "lab leak" theory for the origin of COVID-19 was "conspiratorial nonsense" and that we should "believe scientists" like Peter Daszak, who sneeringly told us as much? Those of us who questioned the party line were smeared by people like Daszak, the media and true believers as "conspiracy theorists" or MAGA mental midgets. We aren't physicians or experts in infectious diseases; how dare we doubt the Chinese government, our own government, the World Health Organization or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention? It turns out that our suspicions had...

As resident Joe Biden launches via executive order a sweeping vaccine mandate for all federal government workers, and now a brand-new initiative for private sector mandates, the issue has once again risen to the forefront of the national dialogue. United Airlines, for example, recently became the first U.S. airline to mandate COVID-19 vaccination for all its employees. United Airlines' mandate takes effect on Sept. 27, and it might augur a broader trend: A poll conducted last month by insurance and advisory firm Willis Towers Watson, for example, suggests that 52% of private sector employers surveyed expect to have a workplace...

In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s an undeclared civil war going on in this country - and indeed many if not most places across the globe - about our response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The divide cuts across politics, geography, occupation, gender, race, religion, and even families, and yet it’s arguably as deep and as wide as any issue that has ever faced humanity. It pits the hypochondriacs, the hysterical busybodies intent on using the virus to run everybody’s life, those who favor lockdowns and vaccine & mask mandates while refusing to discuss the science and data that opposes their...

Radical environmentalist groups that actively back Democrats have hunting in their crosshairs. And unsurprisingly, they’re exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic to target this pastime. The Center for Biological Diversity and Natural Resources Defense Council, two organizations who’ve made suing the government a cottage industry, are directly petitioning the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to undermine wildlife management practices, including hunting, here in the U.S. If accepted by the government, they’ll undermine the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation that’s allowed our nation to successfully recover imperiled species and restore critical habitat. Here’s...

The most prominent Catholic high school in Arizona has decided to require masks and COVID-19 vaccines for students and staff, sparking outrage. Brophy College Preparatory, where Governor Doug Ducey’s children attended, announced the policy earlier this month. Any student who refuses to be vaccinated will be required to undergo onerous testing twice a week, and the mask mandate will be in place indoors until at least September 10. Oddly, the girls’ associated high school, Xavier Prep, does not have a vaccine mandate; if the vaccine is so imperative, why are they exempt? The mandate is strange considering there is no...

When you think of places like Australia, you think they’re just like us – they speak English and love freedom. Well, they do speak English, that much is true, but do they really love freedom like we do? Considering Democrats have control of government, it makes me wonder if we really love freedom all that much. Putting that aside, the way governments all across Australia are conducting themselves during this pandemic should make everyone realize that the similarities may well just end at language. More importantly to us, what is happening in Australia is what Democrats would love to do...

Editor's Note: This piece was authored by Justin Begley.With renewed mask mandates and guidelines in place, our policymakers are showing Americans their abandonment of reason. In fact, we are currently living in an age where reason is no longer a virtue, but a vice. In our culture of confusion, elected policymakers, influenced by unelected government bureaucrats, have abandoned their duty to institute policies that actually help Americans, choosing instead to make policy performatively — that is, to impress (or appease) a small minority. They make policy, not on the basis of reason and scientific evidence, but on the basis of...

As best I recall, the sequence of statements coming from the government and "experts" since the beginning of COVID-19 has gone something like this: You don't need to wear a mask and it's no more serious than the flu; you do need to wear a mask, though the virus is so small it can penetrate all but the N95 brand, so you should wear two masks; a vaccine will protect you from catching the virus and, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, you won't have to wear a mask if fully vaccinated; you must still wear a...

Tucker Carlson has an audience of around 3 million viewers, which is more than any other news program and most other programs generally. It is still only 3 million people out of a nation of 330 million people. In the grand scheme of things, Tucker Carlson is influential in the way many others are -- he has a core fan base that listens to him, generally trusts him, talks to other people and posts on the internet. Nielsen ratings showed Rush Limbaugh had tens of millions of listeners, but the TV networks rarely focused on him. They focused on Carlson...

The Biden administration’s gross collusion with Big Tech to censor opposing viewpoints is not only blatant tyranny but also obvious hypocrisy.Facebook is killing people, misinformation is rampant, and the only people who can save us from ourselves are the all-wise executives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue whose judgment is infallible and whose motives are pure. That’s the message emanating from the White House and the corporate press.White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced last week that, due to 12 unnamed people on social media posting what the Biden administration considers to be misinformation, the White House is actively “flagging problematic posts...

There are times in history when unjust governmental laws, edicts, orders, and mandates - even duly and lawfully enacted ones - unfortunately aren’t seen as “unjust” by a vast majority of people in an era. This leaves a minority who do understand true justice and the arch of history the often unenviable task of resisting such laws using various forms of civil disobedience. Obvious relatively recent examples of this include the American War for Independence, the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and civil rights. When those movements began, only a small percentage of the existing population supported them. When things...

What happens when a country loses interest in protecting itself? That's what we are living through in America today. COVID-19 has killed 600,000 Americans. Yet the U.S. government and top American leaders have generally been passive, or even uninterested, in learning how it all started. How can that be? It's almost unimaginable that every single American would not want to find out the truth. That so few do is just another example of the sad place we find ourselves. Six hundred thousand dead Americans? Ho-hum. That's the attitude nationally. The debate about the origins of COVID-19 is not purely an...

As the world slowly begins to emerge from the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic and American elites develop an interest in the formerly dismissed Wuhan lab leak theory, it is time to focus attention where it belongs: punishing a rogue Chinese Communist Party for what it has inflicted upon an unsuspecting world. To many of us, it was obvious from the outset that COVID-19 was a "Chinese Chernobyl." Regardless of whether the virus has as its provenance a zoonotic transmission at a wet market or an "escape" from the Wuhan Institute of Virology -- to say nothing of the low,...

Source: Greg Kellog via TwitterOur society was not founded upon lies. It was founded upon truths so fundamental that they have withstood even our own failure to live up to them. Let's start with this one: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."Those are the opening words to our Declaration of Independence. The fundamental truth contained therein -- that all people are created equal -- was betrayed by the existence of slavery,...

“In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?” Anthony Fauci penned these words in a 2012 paper, long before the COVID-19 outbreak, about gain of function research. “Scientists working in this field might say — as indeed I have said — that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.”The benefits outweigh the risks. For research involving scientists extracting viruses from the wild and engineering them to infect humans in order to study potential therapeutics, Fauci determined...

During America's first-ever national lockdown, thousands of unelected bureaucrats, as well as federal and state governments, assumed enormous powers not usually accorded to them. They picked and chose which businesses could stay open without much rationale. They sent the infected into nursing homes occupied by the weak and vulnerable. Their rules for prosecuting those who violated social distancing, sheltering in place, mask wearing or violent protesting often hinged on political grounds. Their spending measures on "infrastructure" and "health care" were excuses to lard up redistributive entitlements. Conservatives moaned that left-wing agendas were at work beneath the pretenses of saving us...

David Frum is the first prominent journalist to fictionalize the debate over the origins of COVID, but he won’t be the last.The Atlantic’s David Frum appears to be first out of the gate in what will likely become a coordinated, aggressive media campaign to defend the people and institutions that got the COVID-19 origin story wrong — and absolve them of all responsibility, however complicit they might be — and instead blame it all on Trump and his supporters.It sounds stupid, I know, but it’s true. Frum thinks Trump and his tens of millions of supporters “are not interested in...

If it weren’t so sad and devastating to people’s lives, we would be living in the middle of one of the greatest comedies of all time. Democrats are scrambling to understand why their policies related to COVID are failing while Republican policies are succeeding. There is no explanation they can see, none they can accept, because leftists are incapable of even entertaining the possibility that they could be wrong. About anything. Infection rates are surging to near record levels…in states with lockdowns and mask mandates, and they are sinking in states without them. So-called experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci can’t...

Set designers were finally able to draw fans into their vivid dream without the constraints of Newtonian physics. Yet virtual reality isn't all wonder.Pandemic lockdowns crushed the concert industry, but things are finally starting to move again. Many of us are optimistic that dense crowds might gather regularly by mid-autumn. The process is already starting in red states. Once everybody who’s anybody “takes the jab,” mass events should spread slowly across the country.All over the world, people are dying for another taste of what Émile Durkheim called “collective effervescence”: the intense thrill we get from a mass gathering with a...