There's an old anti-vaccine trope that the only way to know if a vaccine is safe and effective is to use a placebo-controlled clinical study, in which some people receive the vaccine and others receive an inert substance, such as a saline shot, before the results are compared. HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has embraced this trope and ordered that all new vaccines have placebo controls.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is still recommending COVID vaccines for healthy children, according to the CDC's latest published immunization schedule. read more
Conservative analyst Jessica Riedl says tariffs damage economies by "raising prices, distorting markets, and encouraging foreign retaliation" against US exports, but Americans don't see the "swamp-infested cronyism" as lobbyists "seek exemptions for individual businesses." These businesses, she said, include the farming industry, whose participants knowingly voted for the tariffs they now want to be excluded from.
The MAGA movement's top economic guru is not happy about the GOP's "big, beautiful" domestic policy bill passed by the House early Thursday.
"I liken it to a death march through a series of choices that nobody really wanted to be making," said Oren Cass, the chief economist of the right-leaning think tank American Compass and a leading proponent of conservative economic populism among allies of Donald Trump.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday blocked a bid led by two Catholic dioceses to establish in Oklahoma the nation's first taxpayer-funded religious charter school in a major case involving religious rights in American education. read more
Putin must be advising the Department of "Justice."