DV Journal

“There is a Chinese curse which says ‘May he live in interesting times.’ Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty, but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind,” Robert F. Kennedy said in 1966.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic reached our shores, the country and the Delaware Valley have been living in “interesting times,” to say the least. Everything from shopping to education to sports has been seen through the lens of COVID, and whether it might lead one to contract it or would mitigate the virus.

Local and state governments collected numbers and issued mandates. Schools were locked down, reopened, and some locked down again. One of the biggest political stories the Delaware Valley Journal covered in 2021 was the rise of parent power. Parents objected to COVID lockdowns and masks at school board meetings, parents opposed to Critical Race Theory, and shocked parents asking school boards to remove what they deem as pornographic books from school libraries, along with school boards limiting parents’ free speech rights.

This also gave rise to election victories for school board candidates who promised not to shut down schools again and the successful statewide political strategy of Back to School PA PAC, which gave about $700,000 to back those candidates’ campaigns.

Another big story this year is crime and violence in Philadelphia, arguably driven by progressive prosecution—or lack thereof—by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office headed by DA Larry Krasner, who was re-elected in November. As of this writing, 555 people were victims of homicide in Philadelphia in 2021—a horrific new record.

At the state government level, voters sent a clear message to Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf in May when they approved ballot initiatives limiting his emergency powers. It was a also the year when amazing numbers of Republican candidates began vying for the governor’s seat in the 2022 primary, along with similarly large  fields of hopefuls of both parties seeking the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican Pat Toomey. The Senate race, which may tip the balance of the Senate, could become one of the most closely-watched political contests in the U.S.

The 2021 election process in some DelVal counties also came under fire as delays, mistakes, and mail-in ballots caused consternation.  That has also been a huge issue nationwide since former President Donald Trump questioned the validity of the election process that resulted in his defeat in the swing states, including Pennsylvania. And a lawsuit was filed against Delaware County officials alleging malfeasance in the handling of the 2020 election there.

Another statewide issue in the DelVal Journal was Wolf’s unilateral plunge into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a move that will undoubtedly limit Pennsylvania’s job growth and drive up energy costs for businesses and residents.

RGGI is supposed to reduce greenhouse gases by an auction process for power producers and industrial plants in 12 states, which buy credits to offset emissions. But those other RGGI states are not energy producers like Pennsylvania, with its wealth of natural gas.

And we have closely followed the controversy over the $6.1 billion Mariner East II pipeline. Some residents who live in the vicinity of the pipeline along with public officials have fought the pipeline, while overlooking clear benefits from the pipeline for employment, safety over rail or truck transport, and reduced energy costs. Luckily, for the economy of the DelVal region those efforts appear to have failed and the project is on track for completion.

Locally, Hurricane Ida hit some DelVal areas hard with flood damage as streams overflowed their banks while tornadoes pummeled parts of Bucks and Montgomery Counties.

National issues of inflation and supply-side woes also affected the Delaware Valley region as the Biden administration’s energy and regulatory policies began to be felt here.

In Norristown, the DelVal Journal broke a story regarding Norristown Area School Board President Shae Ashe sending sexually suggestive messages on social media to an underage Norristown High School girl. In the wake of those articles, Ashe resigned from the board and, although he was re-elected, did not return to it.

In Delaware County, the new Health Department, promised by Democrats who were elected to a majority in the county council in 2019, is taking shape and expected to open in 2022. It will cost taxpayers an estimated $10 million its first year.

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COVID-19 has provided a best-of-times, worst-of-times experience for expertise. The science has been spectacular, but discourse on that science has often been abysmal.

The same-year development, testing, and approval of vaccines was remarkable. The mRNA platform behind the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could become the Swiss army knife of therapeutics. It’s already being mobilized against cancer and genetic illnesses.

I’m no virologist or geneticist, but experts I respect persuaded me of the vaccines’ safety and efficacy. I got jabbed as soon as possible and regret that others chose not to. I wear masks in some situations, and not others. I see people socially but avoid large crowds. I favored lockdowns and school closings in early 2020 but think they lingered too long. My guess is that jurisdictions focused on the most vulnerable populations (elderly, immunocompromised, etc.) will seem wiser in hindsight than those that applied draconian mitigation strategies over their entire populations.

I think I’m right on these things, though I recognize that future evidence might say otherwise. I’m grateful for the scientists who developed the vaccines but strive to maintain an open mind on all scientific matters, along with a sense of humility and a generous spirit toward those who disagree with me. A proper understanding of science demands no less.

The history of medicine offers ample reasons to avoid smug certitude which, unfortunately, is abundant on social and traditional media. Science is always about likelihood and never about certainty, though word apparently hasn’t reached Twitter and TV news.

Then there is the flagrantly political demeanor of so many COVID experts. I’m not at all prepared to say whether red states or blue states were wiser in their public policies. Too many confounding variables. I’ll make one exception, which is to say that the press and others besoiled themselves by relentlessly lionizing ex-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Today, few Democrats or Republicans quote his tweet from May 5, 2020: “Look at the data. Follow the science. Listen to the experts. … Be smart.”

Here’s why they shouldn’t. Science, like a chainsaw, is an exceedingly powerful and useful tool. But “follow the science” makes no more sense than “follow the chainsaw.” The chainsaw doesn’t know the safest way to cut a tree, and science—let alone some anthropomorphic vision of it—can’t weigh the tradeoffs between slowing COVID and shutting down schools and cancer surgeries.

Science informs individual and collective choices, which depend not only on those scientific findings but also on subjective preferences and one’s degree of confidence in those scientific findings. As for “listen to the experts,” Cuomo wrote the book on COVID expertise, and that book’s fall has been as spectacular as its author’s plummet.

Medical history is littered with experts who were spectacularly wrong. When Ignaz Semmelweis suggested that doctors employ antiseptic medical procedures (e.g., washing hands in maternity wards), medical experts were offended and conspired to destroy Semmelweis. When Stanley Prusiner suggested that misfolded proteins could cause mad cow disease and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, he was pilloried as a heretic—a pejorative that didn’t entirely vanish when he received a Nobel Prize for his work. As physicist Max Planck said, “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”

In October, novelist and essayist Ann Bauer wrote a poignant column, “I Have Been Through This Before,” on her discomfort with the parade of cocksure COVID experts issuing ever-changing diktats and pronouncements. When vaccines didn’t end the pandemic, she wrote, “doctors and officials blamed their audience of 3 billion for the disease. The more the cures failed, the greater the fault of the public.”

The title of her column referred to her personal experience as the mother of an autistic son born in the late 1980s. Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim had hypothesized that autism was caused by “refrigerator mothers” who failed to show their children sufficient love—a theory we now know to be nonsense. But for a time, Bettelheim’s ideas were gospel-truth, showering mothers of autistic children with guilt and opprobrium. Today, he is regarded as something of a charlatan, but back then, he was a pop icon and celebrity expert on television. One questioned Bettelheim at one’s own peril.

During the pandemic, yard signs have sprouted with the message, “Science Doesn’t Care What You Believe.” For what it’s worth, chainsaws don’t care what you believe, either.

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While running for President, Joe Biden frequently claimed in his stump speech, “I am going to shut down the virus.” Now, almost a year into his presidency, evidence that he’s made good on his promise is nowhere to be found.

For all his tough campaign rhetoric, the Biden administration’s response to the prolonged COVID pandemic has been largely confusing, disorganized, and has fallen far short of its intended goals.

President Biden is fumbling the ball at the goal line after President Trump drove the ball all the way down the field.

Thanks to the brilliance of President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, America gave the gift of mRNA vaccines to the world and saved millions of lives, but there is more work to be done.

President Biden’s handling of the vaccine booster situation has left many Americans unsure of if and when they’re eligible for such a booster. We’re also behind other nations when it comes to at-home testing. This shouldn’t be the reality for a nation with the resources and ingenuity that America does.

To conquer this disease once and for all, we have to get bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci, who have lost the confidence of the American people, out of the way. President Biden needs to fully unleash the spirit of American innovation to crush this virus.

By now, we should be able to treat those infected with COVID far better, but we still don’t have enough FDA-approved therapeutics to treat people. While the President has made a number of videos with celebrities to promote vaccines, his administration hasn’t shown the same enthusiasm for potentially life-saving treatments.

It’s unfortunate that COVID-19 became political and an excuse for the government and many in the corporate media to control the means of communication to suspend debate.

To make matters worse, recently published emails show the level America’s medical leadership went to silence those who did not prescribe to their ethos. There was a coordinated effort between Dr. Fauci, the media, and tech companies to muzzle dissenting opinions from leading scholars so their ideas could not be disseminated. From the start, therapeutics meant to help with COVID-19 were regularly discounted by the medical establishment, and as a result, many great ideas were squashed and discredited.

President Biden’s message to the American people in the wake of the Omicron variant has been nothing short of fearmongering – and he’s refused to take accountability for his failures.

This summer, while the border crisis raged, President Biden largely ignored the fact that 18 percent of illegal immigrants released from Border Patrol custody tested positive for the virus – a risk to the health and safety of many Americans. But President Biden’s response to the summer surge of cases was instead a number of burdensome vaccine mandates that instead threatened Americans’ livelihoods.

Now, as we watch case counts rise again many Americans are worried we’ll be returning to the lockdowns that crippled their businesses, harmed their children’s education, and stifled their freedoms.

To those pushing lockdowns, I urge you to follow the science. I want our businesses open and students fully in the classroom. I understand the truth, the data, and the science behind combatting COVID better than anyone in this race. Special interest groups have tried to keep America closed, and I am running for Senate to put our businesses, our schools, and our communities first.

To combat this virus, America needs new leaders and new ideas, not just star-studded ad campaigns and a return to the same restrictions that put our lives on hold. I’m committed to using my wealth of experience to pursue policies to help us restore our way of life which will help better the lives of all Pennsylvanians.

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