Commentary: The Sad Reasons Americans Give for Not Having Kids

Parents teaching child how to ride a bike

The baby bust is here.

The reality is clear: Americans are having fewer kids. In 2023, America had 2 percent fewer births than in 2022, hitting a record low, according to newly released finalized data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Four Years Later, CDC Documents on COVID-19’s Origin in China Emerge as Oversight Wanes

Newly released documents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal early evidence and analysis four years ago in which U.S. government officials indicated that COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, China.

These findings in the CDC documents obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, dating from about six months after the disease’s initial outbreak, are coming to light only now because of the government’s repeated delays in releasing relevant documents through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

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Feds Bet on Wrong COVID Horse Again as Pfizer’s Own Research Casts Doubt on Pricey Paxlovid

Pfizer Research and Development lab La Jolla, CA

There may be a reason Pfizer chose that curious tagline in the drugmaker’s once-inescapable commercials for its COVID-19 oral antiviral – the subject of a “Saturday Night Live” parody – which cost U.S. taxpayers at least $12 billion before the feds tightened the spigot last fall and Pfizer jacked the price to $1,390 for a five-day course.

The nirmatrelvir-ritonavir combination marketed as Paxlovid does no better against so-called long COVID than a placebo taken with ritonavir, according to a new “original investigation” quietly released Friday in JAMA Internal Medicine, published by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

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Commentary: Faith’s Proven Role in Overcoming Mental Illness

Therapy Session

by Carrie Sheffield   “There is an important body of conservative thought that is now nearly or completely absent on the faculties of many eminent universities,” former Harvard University President Derek Bok wrote in Harvard Magazine following Hamas’ terrorist attacks Oct. 7 in Israel and the ensuing campus chaos. He recommends “some immediate progress by trying…

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Prominent Epidemiologist Says Data Proves COVID Lockdowns Failed, and Hurt Population

Dr. Harvey Risch

Dr. Harvey Risch, Professor of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, says lockdowns failed to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic and had “serious repercussions for substantial fractions of the population.”

“The measures that need to be monitored for a pandemic of this sort are the number of deaths, serious hospitalizations, and serious outcomes of the infection, not the infection itself,” Risch said on a “Just the News, No Noise” special on Friday.

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South Carolina Environmental Health Department Asking for Help to Track West Nile Virus

Mosquito

The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) is asking for the public’s support in tracking the West Nile virus. 

South Carolinians are asked this spring and summer to submit certain species of dead birds to DEHC to test for the potentially deadly virus.

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COVID Vaccine ‘Adverse Events of Special Interest’ More Common than Expected: CDC-Funded Study

COVID Vaccine

Rep. Debbie Dingell developed a severe nerve condition from a mandatory swine flu vaccine, which initially made her “scared to death” to get a COVID-19 vaccine, she told a congressional hearing last week. 

The Michigan Democrat might want to reconsider her now-unquestioning enthusiasm for COVID vaccines, including those made through traditional methods, in light of a massive international study of “adverse events of special interest” funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and set to be published in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal Vaccine.

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CDC Overrules Mask Advisers and Its Own Research Finding ‘No Difference’ Between N95, Surgical

Grocery Shopping Masks

Nearly a year ago, the respected research collaborative Cochrane drastically reinterpreted its own “systematic review” of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on masking in response to media pressure, deeming them “inconclusive” after the review team found that masks make “little to no difference” against COVID-19 or influenza.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is following Cochrane’s lead by publicly pressuring its advisers to revise their recommendations on masking in healthcare settings, which are based on its own systematic review that now undermines CDC preferences.

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Commentary: Gun Owners End 2023 Proving Gun Control Advocates Wrong

Hunting

As 2023 drew to a close, millions of peaceable Americans geared up for a new year that will bring with it many new limitations on their constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

In California, for example, Jan. 1 was the date to ring in the state’s plethora of new restrictions on carrying concealed firearms in public, courtesy of SB 2, a law passed in the wake of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen to punish concealed carry permit holders for having their rights vindicated by the Supreme Court.

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