Policy

Policy articles provide in-depth analysis of social and public policy, examining their wide-ranging impacts on economics, social life, public health, individual liberty, evidence-based decision-making, and institutional accountability.

We cover critical areas such as healthcare and vaccination policies, pandemic responses and WHO, economic subsidies, national security strategies, withdrawals from international bodies, and pathways to reform that restore freedom, truth, and human dignity over centralized control.

All articles from Brownstone Institute are translated into multiple languages to support global access, foster international dialogue on governance and reform, and empower readers worldwide to challenge flawed interventions.

emergency declaration end

One Thousand One Hundred Thirty Five Days

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The Covid pandemic policies have had far-reaching impacts on our society. People now have lowered trust in public institutions, raised worries about privacy and freedom of speech, and the financial ramifications will persist for a long time. As we tally up the damage, it’s vital to draw lessons from these missteps so future responses are more balanced, open, and successful in tackling public health crises without compromising civic rights and public confidence.

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big pharma

Big Pharma’s Co-Pay Coupon Racket

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Drugmakers rely on shady promotional gimmicks to keep the cost of brand-name medicine high, and you’ve seen them in action. In the many, many, many television commercials you’ve seen for various drugs—and Big Pharma is the second largest advertiser by industry—consider how many mention a coupon the manufacturer offers. In fact, the share of brand-name prescription drug spending that included a coupon rose from 26 percent in 2007 to 90 percent in 2017.

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Tragedy of the Brooklyn Literary Scene

The Tragedy of the Brooklyn Literary Scene

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Because lies embraced our whole culture since 2020, and because public intellectuals for the most part did not stand up to the lies at the time, and because many even participated in the lies (hello, Sam Harris); since horrible things happened to those of us who did stand up to the lies — most public intellectuals at this moment cannot address the really important events of the recent past.

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congress

Congress Has a Leverage Point on Pandemic Policy

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Unlike the PREP Act and the other emergency pandemic powers, this one is set to expire at the end of September. In other words, absent any action, PAHPA and all its authority to wage biomedical warfare are finished, thereby providing House Republicans with tremendous leverage to clip the agency’s wings. How can Republicans move on from this disaster and reauthorize the agency that is responsible for the worst tyranny in American history?

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foreign traveler vaccine requirements

Visit the US by Sea or Land If Not by Air

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The vaccine requirement for foreign travelers may be one of the most ineffective and capricious “public health” policies ever created. It still exists to the detriment of binational families kept apart by its draconian prohibitions and at a cost of billions of dollars in revenue to the US economy while not having any effect on preventing disease. 

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Swedish

Salute to Swedes for Standing Up to Project Fear

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While almost everywhere else people cowered in their homes, schools were closed, mask mandates the norm, the Swedish went on with normal life. The panic that had gripped the rest of the world left Sweden mostly untouched. The pseudo-science of ‘stopping the virus’ by masking people and locking them up didn’t affect the policies of the Swedish Public Health Agency, and despite defamation and even death threats, Chief Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell never swayed. ‘Judge me in a year,’ he said in an interview with Unherd in July 2020.

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society pause

They Hit the Pause Button and the Music Stopped

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Society is not a machine that anyone can control. It has no pause button. Attempt to treat it as if it does and you end up creating something distorted and possibly terrible, certainly the end of material and cultural progress but probably something much worse. It was utter folly for anyone to imagine that what they thought they were doing should ever be done. It is even more egregious that so many played along when they should have refused the pause. 

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WHO’s Proposals

Why Legislators Should Reject the WHO’s Proposals for Pandemics

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The WHO’s funding arrangements, its track record, and the perverse nature of its proposed pandemic response should be enough to render these proposed agreements anathema in democratic States. If implemented, they should make WHO unfit to receive public funding or provide health advice. The international community can benefit from coordination in health, but it would be reckless to entrust that role to an organization clearly serving other interests.

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Focused Protection: Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff

Opposition from Left Journalism 

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Within days of the pandemic’s inception, criticism of lockdowns and other restrictions became conflated with right-wing politics. This put lefties in a bind: if they didn’t support the restrictions, they might be mistaken (the horror!) for a conservative—or worse, a soldier in Orange Man’s army. They latched onto the mask, the left-wing answer to the MAGA hat, as a badge of their political allegiance. 

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Democracy Under Stress

Democracy Under Stress in America and India

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For decades, the US has tried to export and universalise bedrock American values like the rule of law, civil liberties, political freedoms and democratic practices. Now it is internalising some foreign policy vices like selective justice against unfriendly regimes while running protection for friendly ones.

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travel restrictions

Tragically, US Travel Restrictions Remain in Place

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To make this abundantly clear for the public: Presidential Proclamation 10294 requiring non-citizen non-immigrants be vaccinated to enter the US will only end if President Biden rescinds it, Congress repeals it, or the Judiciary strikes it down. To date, no lawsuits have been filed challenging the ban on foreign visitors. 

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