Policy ⋆ Brownstone Institute

REPPARE University of Leeds - Brownstone Institute

The WHO and Pandemic Response – Should Evidence Matter?

REPPARE / April 22, 2024 / Policy, Public Health / 9 minute read

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All public health interventions have costs and benefits, and normally these are carefully weighed based on evidence from previous interventions, supplemented by expert opinion where such evidence is limited. Such careful appraisal is particularly important where the negative effects of interventions include human rights restrictions and long-term consequences through impoverishment.

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Dear Colleagues: We Must Revive Sound Science

Bhaskaran Raman / March 26, 2024 / Policy, Society / 7 minute read

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We write this letter to you as a group of academicians, doctors, and professionals on the issue of a recent and extended beating taken by science and rationality, and the resultant current and ongoing concerns.

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Rachel Levine Plays the Race Card on Climate Change

Daniel Nuccio / March 2, 2024 / Policy, Public Health / 3 minute read

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Even if the tactic has become one of self-parody, one only needs to look to Levine to see that we are living in parodic times where quite a few people are willing to embrace the latest slogans and accept all sorts of absurdities as reasonable, even to the detriment of society, if it protects them from being labeled a bigot.

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‘Experts’ Continue to Spread Misinformation

Ian Miller / February 17, 2024 / Masks, Media, Policy / 6 minute read

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Their proposed changes center around very basic guidance on isolation due to a Covid infection. You’d think that a very mild alteration to a policy so small would be widely celebrated, considering most members of the general public have long since abandoned isolation guidelines anyway. But that assumption rests on a misguided understanding of how committed Covid extremists are to pushing endless panic. And some of those extremists happen to work at The New York Times.

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The Great Reset Didn’t Work: The Case of EVs

Jeffrey A. Tucker / February 15, 2024 / Economics, Policy, Society / 7 minute read

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It turns out that the entire bit, including the fake prosperity of the lockdown economy, made possible by money printing and grotesque levels of government spending, was unsustainable. Even sophisticated car companies bought into the nonsense. Now they are paying a very heavy price. The new market depended on a panic of buying that turned out to be temporary.

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Rational Policy Over Panic

REPPARE / February 15, 2024 / Policy, Public Health / 7 minute read

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In view of their influence, international health agencies have a particular responsibility to ensure their policies are well-grounded in data and objective analysis. Moreover, governments have a responsibility to take the time, and effort, to ensure that their populations are well-served. It is hoped that the evaluation in the REPPARE report Rational Policy Over Panic presented with this article will contribute to this effort.

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EU Farmers Rise Against the Climate Cult

David Thunder / February 10, 2024 / Economics, Government, Policy / 4 minute read

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Independently from the merits of EU climate policy, two things are clear: first, EU leaders and environmental activists appear to have vastly underestimated the backlash their policies would spark in the farming community; and second, the apparent success of this dramatic EU-wide protest sets a spectacular precedent that will not go unnoticed among farmers and transport companies, whose operating costs are heavily impacted by environmental regulations like carbon taxes.

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Brownstone Institute - Our Last Innocent Moment

What Killed Informed Consent?

Julie Ponesse / February 5, 2024 / Pharma, Policy, Society / 16 minute read

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In more and less formal ways, COVID was the tool that transformed our supposedly inalienable right to make informed choices about our private lives into a public and readily dispensable good. It was almost as if we had built such a network of infinitesimal choices creating the powerful illusion of choice that we didn’t notice when we were asked to give it all up in an instant.

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Your Tax Dollars for Davos

Aaron Day / February 2, 2024 / Policy, Society / 12 minute read

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Amidst these events, Congressman Scott Perry introduced the “Defund Davos Act.” Initially, I was shocked to learn that we, as taxpayers, were funding the WEF at all. However, further investigation revealed that since 2013, we have provided at least $60 million in taxpayer funding to the WEF.

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The Legal Batteries That Supercharge the Bureaucratic State

Thomas Buckley / January 29, 2024 / Government, Law, Policy / 5 minute read

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There is a legal thing called “Chevron deference” and it has encouraged the massive growth of the power and scope of the bureaucratic state over the past 40 years. Named after a 1984 legal case, the doctrine holds (in a nutshell) that courts must defer to the wisdom of the implied expertise of a government agency when deciding certain legal questions.

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The Loosening of Rules on Informed Consent

Steven Kritz / January 29, 2024 / Government, Pharma, Policy / 5 minute read

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On January 22, 2024, amendments to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations (21 CFR 50) covering Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) were finalized and implemented. The amendments added a new section 50.22 that allows for exceptions to informed consent requirements for minimal risk research.

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Disease X and Davos: This is Not the Way to Evaluate and Formulate Public Health Policy

REPPARE / January 26, 2024 / Pharma, Policy, Public Health / 11 minute read

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To gain legitimacy, public health policy must be vested in institutions answerable to the public and based on reliable evidence. In the case of the recent World Economic Forum (WEF) venture in public health policy advocacy in Davos, neither of these measures of legitimacy were met. Also in question is legitimacy in the media coverage, where the basic tenets of journalism – questioning evidence, corroborating sources, providing context, and awareness of conflict of interest – seem to have gone missing.

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