Glen Reynolds notes [1] this morning;
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY (CONT’D): Politico: [2] [2]Sure looks like Biden botched FDA pick — thanks to the Left. [2]
And then he quotes the following:
More than a year after taking office in a pandemic, Joe Biden still hasn’t gotten his pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration confirmed. What’s more, Politico reports, it doesn’t look like the White House is doing much about it. Robert Califf’s limbo has less to do with Republican intransigence and more to do with Biden’s progressive allies. . . .
What in the world does Politico’s team mean by GOP support being a “first public sign of trouble”? Republicans don’t have too many reasons to pull Biden’s chestnuts out of the fire, but they’re not the reason Califf can’t get confirmed. Technically, Democrats don’t need any Republican votes to confirm a nominee as long as Vice President Kamala Harris is in town to cast a tie-breaking vote.
Having four Republicans support a Biden nominee in committee isn’t a “public sign of trouble” — it’s a green light, especially for someone who served in the same position in the Barack Obama administration. The real trouble is coming from the Left, and for the reasons you’d imagine, but you have to scroll down a bit from Republicans pouncing® to learn it. . . .
The key question here isn’t Republican pouncing® or progressives’ ongoing hysteria over the corporations, man. It’s that the White House apparently didn’t care what happened to Califf after nominating him in mid-November, almost ten months after Biden took office in the middle of a pandemic. Califf had to have been on Biden’s Rolodex almost from the beginning, so why did it take so long to nominate him to run the one agency in charge of all the vaccines and therapeutics necessary to deal with the COVID-19 scourge? Or anyone, for that matter? This should have been one of the first appointments Biden made outside of Cabinet officials.
Guys, it’s really not hard to imagine why this is happening. The Democrats including the White House are doing their deer in the headlights number. They seriously don’t know what to do about governmental intrusion into medicine which ultimately resulted in covid-19 being created in a lab in China paid for by United States taxpayer dollars.
This brings up one of two concerns… Anybody they nominate is going to get the blame for unintentional governmental missteps, or be indicted for intentional criminality, such as the authorization of gain of function research.
All this goes to what I’ve been saying for years, it’s well past time for the government to get out of the healthcare business entirely.