#Vaccine mandates’ huge costs and other commentary

From the left: Vax Mandates’ Huge Costs

Thomas Fazi & Toby Green argue at UnHerd that there’s nothing “progressive about the current move towards compelled — and in places mandatory — Covid vaccinations,” which “are discriminatory against minority communities, many of whom for historical reasons are suspicious of medicine and the state.” Plus, “mandates are also clearly leading to vaccine hoarding in rich countries, where doses are being forced on younger people, who are little at risk from Covid, while elderly and vulnerable people in poorer countries have been deprived access to them.” And “the compulsion element has led to a huge rise in distrust of the medical establishment, which will have serious future consequences for medical care.” Obscenely, “the shared risk from Covid is now being outsourced to Africa through the push for universal vaccination: Poor African countries are required to get into debt to procure vaccines, and vaccinate large numbers of people, in order to protect older and wealthier people in rich countries.”

Court watch: Radical Pick Will Spur GOP Turnout

With Stephen Breyer retiring from the Supreme Court, The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley A. Strassel notes, President Biden “faces a choice. He can pick a qualified liberal in the mold of Justice Breyer or Justice Elena Kagan and take credit for putting a substantive, thoughtful jurist on the bench. Or he can bow to progressive demands” and nominate “an amped-up version of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, all anger, bluster and fiery opinions.” If he does the latter, Republicans will “hang that nominee around vulnerable Senate Democrats’ necks in” November. And with “Senate Democrats’ new promise to kill the legislative filibuster, a firebrand Supreme Court pick could further alienate independents even as it electrifies Republicans.”

Conservative: The Cancer of Identity Politics

Newsweek’s Josh Hammer urges the Supreme Court to rule against Harvard and UNC in the two affirmative-action cases it just took up: “The propagandist assertion that America in the year 2022 is bedeviled by a sprawling, pan-institutional ‘systemic racism’ is a destructive lie, but the ubiquity of affirmative action means that university admissions offices do, in fact, propagate systemic racism.” As did President Biden in saying “that he intends to fulfill his 2020 campaign promise to nominate a black woman — not a black man, not a Hispanic woman, but specifically a black woman — to replace the retiring Jewish male justice.” Among the pitfalls: “How can a justice who knows she was selected purely on the basis of race and gender reasonably be expected to adjudicate cases during her Court tenure that implicate issues of race and gender?”

Iconoclast: Hippies for Censorship

“Hippies,” snarks Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill, “always let you down.” Consider “Neil Young. The one-time cocaine-stained hero of LA’s alternative scene, singer of angry songs about Vietnam and the Kent State massacre, participant with Crosby, Stills and Nash in the Freedom of Speech Tour of 2006, is now basically pleading with a huge corporation to silence people he doesn’t like” by demanding Spotify drop Joe Rogan. “From protest singer to agitator for capitalist censorship? What a fall.” Sadly: “To be countercultural today is to be on the side of fear, on the side of censure, on the side of madly believing that vast, unaccountable corporate machines have the right and the responsibility to determine what the rest of us may hear and see.”

Culture critic: Whither New Music?

“Old songs now represent 70 percent of the US music market,” laments Ted Gioia at The Atlantic. “The 200 most popular new tracks now regularly account for less than 5% of total streams.” Never before “have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact.” It’s a “repudiation of the pop-culture industry,” as was the “cultural response” of “little more than a yawn” when the Grammy Awards were postponed. Even the “moguls have lost their faith in the redemptive and life-changing power of new music. How sad is that?”

— Compiled by Mark Cunningham & Kelly Jane Torrance