ROGER SIMON: Why ‘The Party of Science’ Disdains ‘Natural Immunity.’
As it happens, Wednesday morning I had the pleasure of talking for 20 minutes or so with an especially sane voice and a newfound hero of mine—Rep. Diana Harshbarger, who is the congresswoman from Tennessee’s 1st District (East Tennessee).
A newcomer to Congress, Ms. Harshbarger spent decades as a pharmacist—indeed a compounding pharmacist, which requires extensive training and licensing—and is a member of the House doctors’ caucus, so she knows whereof she speaks on matters of drug treatment.
She has been leading the charge via legislation to fight the Biden administration’s biased (against red states) distribution of monoclonal antibodies, which are one of the most successful treatments for the disease.
In October, she also introduced a bill in the House to require federal agencies to acknowledge natural immunity to COVID-19, the aptly named Natural Immunity Is Real Act.
So she was a perfect person to ask why she thought the Democrats—aka “The Party of Science,” or so our learned president tells us—ignores natural immunity in favor of taking a militant stand on mandates.
Rep. Harshbarger’s reply: “When it comes to people’s individual rights to control what they put in their body, nobody should say you have to do that. That’s your individual freedom they are trying to take. It’s what’s happening to our country in the loss of our rights over the last nine months, not to mention this month, that we never thought we would ever see.
“They’re trying to dominate us, to take our energy access away. We’re not energy independent anymore. We rely on foreign countries. We’re letting illegals in by the truckload. And now things are going to be rationed.”
And then the congresswoman got to the crux of my question: “I attribute everything to control. The mandate is just part of the process of controlling the narrative of the way our country is going. It’s all about control.”
Indeed, it is. I told Rep. Harshbarger that I couldn’t agree more. It is all about the “c.” It has little or nothing to do to with medicine or health, although those people standing in line on the Upper West Side don’t realize it.
And speaking of the “c” word, the manipulation of science for political ends is hardly new. Most notably, Stalin did it, calling Western genetics a “bourgeois pseudoscience” and imprisoning 3,000 scientists for questioning the work of his loyal communist scientist Trofim Lysenko.
Speaking of whom: Introducing the Minding the Campus Lysenko Award.