By Editorial Board, NY Post
Libertarian: FDA’s Medical Interference
“Secreted within the 2023 omnibus appropriations bill,” notes Joel Zinberg in The Wall Street Journal, “is a 19-line section that could change the way medicine is practiced.” The hidden measure gives the Food and Drug Administration “the authority to ban some of these off-label uses of otherwise approved products” thus undermining “medical innovation and patient care.” The statute empowers the FDA to not only engage in “banning devices for particular uses” but allows “it to ban off-label uses of drugs as well.” Off-label uses are routine in oncology and pediatrics, “where scientific, ethical and logistical concerns preclude conducting large trials for approval in children.” Letting government bureaucrats overrule the judgment of physicians “will discourage attempts to use approved products in new and beneficial ways and deprive patients of valuable treatments.”
From the right: Time for ESG Antitrust Action
“A handful of investment managers who manage trillions of dollars of corporate and state pension fund assets” are “raising the price Americans pay for gasoline and home heating,” charges Robert H. Bork Jr. at RealClearPolitics, via “Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) directives that force companies to reduce gas exploration and production in the name of climate change.” It’s “a blanket attack on U.S. industries and jobs that produce all hydrocarbons, attempting to de-bank small- and medium-sized American energy producers while seeking replacement fuel from dirtier industries abroad.” And: “While consumers and energy workers lose out, these artificial market restrictions swell the energy profits of the very investors who are so nobly calling for action.” This is “a public violation of federal law, which prohibits companies from colluding on group boycotts or conspiring to restrain goods.”
