Category Archives: politics

Clean Sweep of an Advisory Board

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HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr, announced his plan to remove all 17 current members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the CDC advisory panel that advises on vaccine schedules. The nice editors at The Wall Street Journal have termed this a “not-so-clean sweep.” They rationalize their characterization in large part with this:

Mr Kennedy’s beef seems to be that the committee’s members know something about vaccines and may have been involved in their research and development. “Most of ACIP’s members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines,” he writes.
Some members have been paid by vaccine makers—typically sums less than their salaries—to assist with clinical trials in which they help evaluate the vaccines for safety and efficacy.

I’ll ignore the opening bit of disingenuous snark. I’ll leave aside the naïve belief that folks, including government bureaucrats, are immune to chump change bribes. These editors should know better than that. Instead, look at the facts included in the snippet: some committee members being involved in the R&D of the vaccines on which they now advise in the name of the government, and some members having been paid by vaccine makers. That many of the studies in which those then-paid members were involved were double-blind is irrelevant: those members were paid by vaccine makers, and now those members advise on those vaccines.

These are clear conflicts of interest, and even the august editors of the WSJ should be able to understand that.

The editors did point out that current members have recused themselves from considerations in which they (think they) have a conflict of interest. Such recusals, though, always are judgment calls on the part of the bureaucrat considering his own recusal. There’s no need for such judgment calls when there are no conflicts of interest.

In an ideal world, such conflicts—large or small—would have no influence on government-advising bureaucrats. In that ideal world, we would have no need for conflict of interest rules. We live in the real world, however, and Kennedy is entirely correct to seek to reduce as far as may be the existence of such conflicts. It’s much too early in the process to begin criticizing his move, even a knee-jerk beef triggered by it being an RFK, Jr, move.

In the end, Kennedy has appointed eight members to the revamped ACIP:

  • Joseph R. Hibbeln, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who worked in nutritional neurosciences at the National Institutes of Health.
  • Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist who used to work at Harvard Medical School.
  • Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management.
  • Robert Malone, a biochemist who helped with early research of mRNA vaccine technology.
  • Cody Meissner, a professor of pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and former ACIP member.
  • James Pagano, an emergency medicine physician with 40 years of clinical experience.
  • Vicky Pebsworth, the Pacific region director of the National Association of Catholic Nurses, who previously sat on the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.
  • Michael Ross, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University.

 

Some Editors are Worried

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Some editors, here The Wall Street Journal‘s, worry that a criminal investigation into Biden White House staffers’ apparent coverup could get those staffers to clam up and not talk. They’re happy with House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer’s (R, KY) civil-oriented investigation into the coverup and worry further that a criminal investigation could interfere with the civil one.

Maybe, maybe not. The only way the staffers could clam up in a criminal investigation would be to plead the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination. They could otherwise slow-walk their testimony, be evasive in their answers, fail to remember things, and on and on. But they can do those things in Comer’s investigation, too—especially, plead the 5th.

The editors closed their piece with this:

Learning more about how the White House covered up Mr Biden’s decline matters, but raising American incomes matters more.

The two are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, increasing American incomes depends critically on a mentally competent President. Learning how the last President’s mental decline occurred, and especially how it was covered up and by whom—the positions as well as the incumbents—is critical to maximizing our chances of having mentally competent Presidents in future.

And that requires a criminal investigation, also, to determine if any criminal laws were broken, if so by whom, and locking those persons up. They’ve done their damage, criminally or civilly, but locking up those who broke criminal laws would discourage future staffers from doing the same thing.

Resist

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That’s what the tech industry honchoes are doing vis-à-vis Republican moves to cut or eliminate altogether clean energy tax credits. They want to maintain their handouts.

The Data Center Coalition, a group that includes Microsoft, Alphabet’s Google, Amazon.com and Meta Platforms, recently made its pitch in a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R, SD), according to a copy viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The group asked him to preserve tax credits and loan funding that would be aggressively phased out in the version of the bill passed by the House of Representatives last month.
The bill is fueling industry concerns about rising prices and power shortages if planned investments don’t materialize.

There’s this, too:

The House bill would require solar, wind, and other projects to begin construction within 60 days of the measure’s enactment to receive tax credits. It would also require the projects to come online by 2028, setting a hard cutoff for any projects placed in service after that year. Under current law, the tax credits phase out over four years, starting in either 2032 or when the US power sector’s greenhouse-gas emissions fall to a quarter of their 2022 levels—whichever comes later.

Here’s the thing, though. This isn’t so much a rescission of the tax credits or removal of “loan funding” as it is a requirement that recipients not dilly-dally about their performance. To get/keep the credits and funding, they actually have to start doing the things—begin construction, for instance—required to “earn” the handouts. Then they have to stop slow-walking their performance, pocketing the money money without anything to show, and instead complete their promised project and bring their “clean-energy” facility on line by a date certain.

Their worry about rising prices and power shortages is a valid concern, but that’s not effectively addressed with tax credits or government loans for their projects. That’s effectively addressed by getting government regulations out of the way of fossil fuel-sourced energy. Natural gas is about as clean as it gets, even counting the fiction that atmospheric CO2—plant food—is a pollutant. Oil-based energy production is nearly as clean, as is modern coal-based energy. The actual pollutants from burning coal have long been cleaned up be well-established technologies.

Fossil fuel-sourced energy is lower priced in no small part because it’s utterly reliable, producing energy whether or not the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and those fossil fuel facilities need no expensive, themselves polluting from mining through disposal, battery storage that lasts only a very few hours into a long-term weather or night-time outage.

Clean energy facilities don’t need the tax credits or artificial government loans any more than do fossil fuel facilities. When they’re ready for market, the market will call for them without taxpayer money being donated to them. The proper resistance is a pushback and retention of the tax credit cuts and rescissions.

Yes, Do That

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A letter-writer in Friday’s WSJ Letters section wants us to stop calling degrees useless and, instead, encourage students to follow their bliss in their courses of study.

He cited principles of education that learning thinking is as important as learning facts and arithmetic. He’s right on this. He also cited statistics that indicate that most formally trained STEM graduates find work in other than STEM fields. Stipulated.

He closed, though, with this:

But if most STEM students leave their field, shouldn’t we stop labelling programs as “useless” and instead encourage students to develop their intellectual strength by studying whichever field they find most interesting?

Yes, do that. But also do this: require each college (including colleges within universities) to publish the median and mean wage/salary incomes at the five year post graduation mark for each major offered, and require each college to be the primary lender to its students or sole guarantor of other lending facilities’ loans to the college’s students.

Let each student know in advance his likely income from following his “most interesting” course of study along with his cost for pursuing that course.

I’d Go One Step Further

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In a Friday letter to the WSJ‘s Letters section, Samuel Estreicher and Rudra Reddy, of the New York University School of Law, reminded us of a suggestion for curbing Federal district judge arrogance in issuing nationwide—universal—injunctions:

Aside from raising the legal standard for issuing such injunctions, the Supreme Court should also consider procedural steps that could be taken to challenge a nationwide injunction once issued, such as an expedited appeal to the regional circuit or to the high court itself.

My one further step is this: automatically stay each universal injunction until its final review by the relevant appellate court and Supreme Court, or by the Supreme Court directly. In conjunction with this, require the appellate court or Supreme Court to take up the case within an explicitly defined number of days (not many) of the injunction having been issued, with that takeup done either by appeal or by the appellate court on its own initiative, whichever is necessary to meet the deadline. Apply the same time-constraint to the Supreme Court in the event of a direct appeal.

I’d give serious consideration, given the serious nature and wide scope of a universal injunction issued at the district level, to having the injunction’s appeal go directly to the Supreme Court. That Court is, after all, the only one with universal jurisdiction, and it’s the only Constitutionally mandated Court in the US.

And an incentive step: in the event the universal injunction is struck down, even if it’s allowed to stand as it applies solely to the litigants, the appellate/Supreme Court should overtly chastise the issuing district court judge for his overreach.