Tag: libertarian
“Abolish the NIH”? Dr. Scott Atlas gives the antiscience game away
Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at the right wing think tank Hoover Institution who came to prominence as a COVID contrarian, recently wrote an op-ed advocating the elimination of the National Institutes of health and leaving the funding biomedical research to the "free market." These are the "ideas" animating this administration's science policy.
MAHA vs. the FDA: Dredging up old anti-regulation revisionist history
Recently, I've noticed articles from outlets aligned with MAHA calling for the elimination of the FDA. It's all recycled "health freedom" revisionist history and ahistorical nonsense.
Donald Trump and Peter Thiel vs. the FDA: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Donald Trump's three most likely picks for FDA Commissioner all favor loosening drug approval standards. Two are cronies of Peter Thiel, of which one believes that the FDA shouldn't require evidence of efficacy, only safety, and the other believes that a "Yelp for drugs" would do a better job than the FDA. The third candidate is a bona fide, honest-to-goodness pharma shill....
Matt Ridley’s not-so-mythical “myth” of basic science
I’m a clinician, but I’m actually also a translational scientist. It’s not uncommon for those of us in medicine involved in some combination of basic and clinical research to argue about exactly what that means. The idea is translational science is supposed to be the process of “translating” basic science discoveries in the laboratory into medicine, be it in the form of...

