The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is in the final stages of advancing a proposed rule that would ban the sale of menthol cigarettes. Such a draconian prohibitionist policy is not necessary, because smoking rates are among their lowest levels ever recorded in the Tar Heel State. More problematic is that the FDA is...
Maternal mortality rates in North Carolina are climbing at an alarming rate. The CDC reports that over just a two-year span, the number of women who have died within six weeks of giving birth doubled — jumping from 22 deaths per 100,000 births to a staggering 44. And the growing lack of access to care,...
It is nearing a wrap on summer of 2023, and kids are heading back to school. We’ve come a long way in three short years. Three years ago, millions of North Carolinians saw an unsure future for their families here. Today, that dark time is still a reality for some of them. Even if those...
“You can fool all of the people some of the time; you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” The fact that this quote is attributed either to Abraham Lincoln or P.T. Barnum perhaps testifies to its originator’s bona fides at fooling...
Now we’re cooking with gas!” This classic Americanism carries the sense of definite progress, things working according to plan, and being headed to success (perhaps after an uncertain start). It has the same rhetorical heft as “Full steam ahead.” It was popularized by radio stars Bob Hope and Jack Benny in the 1930s, and was...
The last 2.5 years of the pandemic have been dominated by unelected medical bureaucrats making proclamations about lockdowns, social distancing, mask wearing, and other draconian measures based on dogma not data. They are in positions of power in the 3-letter agencies of the NIH, FDA, CDC and WHO with unchecked influence over elected government officials...
Whenever we could, we let the servers, clerks, attendants, small business owners, and others we encountered in our mutually beneficial transactions know that they were welcome to doff the cloth.
Leaders could have opened schools much earlier than they did. They could have admitted that shuttering the economy was devastating, extreme, and wrong.
COVID will be with us always, in one form or another. That realization, based on evidence and, yes, science, isn’t news. Yet finally, politicians and health experts are admitting as much. What took them so long, because something tells me they, too, knew long ago that COVID would not simply disappear? “‘We’ve understood we’re not...
Throughout the pandemic, schools have proven in study after study, across the world, to be among the lowest risk COVID-19 environments.
It’s well past time to try a different approach with COVID, and the Omicron variant in particular. The mainstream media must adjust its reporting, as well, to reflect reality and, well, to infuse some common sense. To stop reporting the rise in cases and hospitalizations, because both are skewed and fundamentally inaccurate. It’s one thing...
