#Joe’s ‘counterproductive’ vax move … and other commentary

Libertarian: Joe’s ‘Counterproductive’ Vax Move

As the pandemic continues to ravage the developing world, “the Biden administration has reportedly chosen, counterproductively, to cave to the demands of progressives at home and of a group of countries led by South Africa and India” and back waiving patent rights to the COVID-19 vaccines, sighs Reason’s Ronald Bailey. Yet only six countries are currently producing the vaccine, and “fewer than 25 have the capacity to produce any vaccines at all.” All the Team Biden gesture will do is to “discourage future investment and innovation and do nothing to speed COVID-19 vaccines to the people who need them.”

Conservative: Biden’s Racialized Science

President Biden’s pick “to head the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the largest funder of the physical sciences in the US, is a soil geologist at the University of California, Merced,” with “no background in physics, the science of energy or the energy sector” and no experience “as a scientific administrator,” Heather Mac Donald fumes at City Journal. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe lacks any of the normal qualifications, “but she is a black ­female, who has won ‘accolades for her work to promote diversity in science,’ as [the journal] Science puts it.” This is a clear bid to impose race-based decision-making on scientific grants; “if Berhe will not commit to hiring and grant-making on the basis of scientific expertise alone, irrespective of race and sex, senators should vote her appointment down.”

Media watch: Censorship’s Journalist Allies

Facebook’s Oversight Board upheld former President Donald Trump’s suspension “in a decision about as predictable as death, taxes and the sun rising in the east,” snarks The Hill’s Joe Concha. After all, we saw which 2020 candidate social-media companies preferred “with, for example, their surprising outright censoring of the New York Post’s bombshell stories on Hunter Biden’s alleged influence-peddling.” About 70 percent of Americans are Facebook users; “considering his loss of 88 million followers on Twitter and tens of millions more on Facebook and Instagram, it’s impossible” for Trump to “make himself the center of the conversation again.” The media “should be universally up in arms over the censoring of public figures or other news outlets.” Instead, some journalists are “actually cheering” the “increasing tendency” of individuals and enterprises “to engage in a Soviet-style squashing of those with whom they disagree.”

From the right: Nix This Radical for Justice Dept.

“The Senate should reject leftist lawyer” Kristen Clarke to head the Justice Department’s civil-rights division, urge the Washington Examiner’s ­editors. She has been accused of extremism for her “animus” against police and alleged ties to black radicals and anti-Semites and was “almost surely fibbing when she told senators” her “racist collegiate writings” were satire and an opinion piece she wrote calling to defund police was meant to oppose defunding. Yet new evidence suggests more questionable statements: She claimed she had no role at a conference lauding cop-killers, but its itinerary lists her as a moderator. She also told senators she didn’t serve alongside “Marxist, anti-Semitic poet Amiri Baraka” on a journal, when she did. “The only thing worse than an anti-police radical is an anti-police radical who lies repeatedly.”

Campus beat: Welcome to the Segregated U

It’s college-planning time for high-school seniors, and those “scanning the amenities of the campuses they’ve chosen may be surprised by a particular feature they hadn’t expected: dorms and events for persons of color only, no whites allowed,” laments First Things’ Mark Bauerlein. “It sounds like the ­return of Plessy v. Ferguson and a betrayal of the integrationist ­vision of the civil-rights movement. It’s spreading, however, because students of color themselves demand separate treatment.” What’s going on? These students yearn for “grounds and foundations, reassuring origins and forebears. They need a solid world and a momentous history and an ­enchanted reality” — things, in other words, that they’ve been deprived of by official multiculturalism, consumerism and secularism. If these longings aren’t “answered soon. . . the hostility is going to get worse.” 

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board