As Jerry Dunleavy of the Washington Examiner reports, House Republicans are calling for an investigation of National Institutes of Health funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The GOP members said in statement: “We are gravely concerned about the NIH’s relationship with both EcoHealth and WIV, and the Agency’s handling of allegations that the COVID-19 pandemic was potentially caused by an NIH-funded laboratory at WIV. We also are alarmed that WIV is eligible to receive additional funding from the NIH through 2024.”

The Congressional Budget Office has issued its 2021 Long-Term Budget Outlook months ahead of its usual schedule. The CBO forecasts that the publicly held portion of the national debt will grow to more than double the size of the U.S. economy during the next 30 years.

The world-renowned astrophysicist Siegfried Fred Singer (1924–2020) passed away on April 6, 2020, at the age of 95. Fred was Emeritus Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Virginia, and since 1993 we were proud to have him as a dear friend and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have de-platformed some (most notably, Donald Trump) and have been censoring the posts of others. Google has adjusted their “search algorithms” so that left-leaning results dominate sources from the political right. I’ve seen a lot of people who lean toward limited government support government intervention to limit the bias those platforms seem to show (most recently, here), but doing so would be a mistake. It would shift to government the power that these dominant social media platforms now have.

Google, Facebook, and the others are private companies and people voluntarily choose to use their services. Freedom-loving people should not advocate interfering with those voluntary relationships. If people dislike using those platforms because of their biases, they have the right to start their own. People of a certain age will remember when Myspace was the dominant social media platform, only to be displaced by Facebook.

As its name implies, the FBI is all about investigation, but a recent case raises questions about the bureau’s performance in that role.

February 21 marked one year since Department of Homeland Security whistleblower Philip Haney, author of See Something Say Nothing, was “found deceased” in Amador County, California. Initial reports of suicide were false, and the sheriff found a firearm at the scene, along with Haney’s computer, a thumb drive, and a trove of documents. The sheriff gave the devices and documents to the FBI.

In March 2019, an experimental drug designed to treat Alzheimer’s disease named aducanumab failed a futility test during the process for approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Facing seemingly little hope for success, aducanumab’s producers Biogen and Eisai strongly considered abandoning the project.

However, when the drugmakers conducted further analysis on a larger dataset, they found that aducanumab reversed Alzheimer’s symptoms in some patients. Other Alzheimer’s treatments can only (at best) delay symptoms.

Adam Smith fulminated against the injustice of slavery in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, speaking of the slave traders as the refuse of the jails of Europe:

There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished. (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 206-7)

What happens when you put the foxes in charge of the henhouse?

The answer to that riddle is nothing good, unless you’re one of the foxes. In economics, that question is built into a concept called regulatory capture, which is a bad thing. Here’s a good definition:

Regulatory capture is an economic theory that says regulatory agencies may come to be dominated by the industries or interests they are charged with regulating. The result is that an agency, charged with acting in the public interest, instead acts in ways that benefit the industry it is supposed to be regulating.

“Cuba’s socialist approach to developing vaccines against Covid-19 differs strikingly from that of capitalist nations of the world developing vaccines. Socialist Cuba’s production of four vaccines is grounded in science, in a dedication to saving the lives of all Cubans, and in international solidarity.”

That quote is from “Cuba develops COVID-19 vaccines, takes socialist approach,” in the February 4 People’s World, a continuation of the Daily Worker, founded in 1924. According to its author, W. T. Whitney — a “Cuba solidarity activist,” and former pediatrician — the technology used in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines “may be less safe than the one used in Cuban vaccines.”

The American approach to producing and distributing Covid-19 vaccines, Whitney contends, is not like that of Cuba, a country not subject to the profit motive. All told, the People’s World piece is not far removed from the story on Cuba’s “homegrown” vaccination program by Dr. Marianne Guenot in the February 15 Business Insider. 

I had mixed feelings when I queued up the action movie Run Hide Fight on the Daily Wire. I knew this narrative film about a high school mass shooting, if done well, was likely to hit a raw nerve.

After all, I am a martial-arts trained self-defense coach, a faculty member at a public university whose office sits just a few hundred feet from the site of a deadly school shooting, and mentor to students who have lost friends in other mass shootings (including the Parkland high school and the Tallahassee Hot Yoga shooting). School shootings and their trauma are not fantasy.

The movie, as expected, hit a raw nerve. But the story is well-crafted, and the content is tailored to contribute to an important contemporary social issue. It’s grounded in certain uncomfortable realities that should be in the forefront of current discussions on school violence and how to respond to active shooters. In short, Run Hide Fight hits notes sorely missing in public discourse on school violence.