Sen. Paul Slams Biden Over FLA Dispute On Monoclonal Antibodies

P. Gardner Goldsmith | September 20, 2021
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As the Biden Administration and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) trade barbs over Joe Biden’s move to have the Department of Health and Human Services take over the distribution of monoclonal antibody treatment for COVID-19, and as said same HHS drastically reduces availability of the therapy (from Regeneron Corporation and Eli Lilly Corp) in FLA and other states (Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana), the battle over political control of the resource is seeing one US politician emerge as a voice of economic truth that will stand the test of time – regardless of the current crisis.

That voice belongs to Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (R), who appeared Friday, September 17, on Sean Hannity’s FoxNews program to remind people that Biden and the HHS certainly might use this frightening control over medicine to favor state-level political allies and harm political foes, and that this, regardless of the particular medicine or political figures involved, is a timeless lesson about the eternal problem of central planning and collectivist economic systems.

As Dan Hanchett observed for Breitbart, Paul reminded Hannity and viewers that socialized medicine does not allow supply to efficiently match demand, it sees shortages and rationing, and it runs the risk of political favoritism replacing competition, creating a government-connected class of “haves” and a serf-like class of disconnected “have-nots.”

Realize this is the difference between socialized medicine and capitalism. Under capitalism, when there’s increased demand, and Florida has increased demand right now, you increase the supply. Supply matches demand in capitalism. In socialism, you have political reasons. So, it could be that they think there are more deplorable people in Florida, more Republicans or more of the unvaccinated unwashed. And so, decisions will be made for political reasons. But if this were capitalism and this were going out into the marketplace, the companies would be ramping up production and it would be distributed where it’s needed.

Well said. It seems as if certain segments of the world population could benefit from occasional reminders about free-market economic truth and the ethical respect for natural rights, and how these perform to help people, while collectivist controls cause hardship, lower living standards, rationing, and favoritism.

The lesson has been revealed the world over, from the government-created Ukraine famine after the Soviets collectivized what had been known as the Bread Basket of Europe, to the starvation in communist China caused by government control of farms, to subtler US shortages in employment, in housing, and even 1970s American gas shortages made worse by government price controls. If politicians influence the supply, or the price, through claiming outright ownership, through claiming exclusive power to contract, or claiming the power to “regulate” -- i.e. TELL others how high or low they can go to buy or sell something (that includes laborers, who can be locked out of employment when politicians tell them they cannot demand below a certain wage to take a job) -- supply and demand become servants not of personal betterment, but of political favoritism.

Nowhere is this more evident than in healthcare, where collectivist, government-run systems such as England’s National Health System (NHS) repeatedly have been caught not only rationing care, not only trying to hide evidence of said rationing, but also literally withholding life-sustaining nutrients and hydration to older or very young terminally/very ill patients. This process, called the “Liverpool Pathway” sees the high-risk patients die more swiftly, clear a bed, and save the overall system some cash.

And it is the same concept that Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel helped codify into the collectivist Obamacare statute in the form not of so-called “death panels”, but of similar, though euphemistically titled, “best practices panels,” that will dictate care-rationing and give government the power to decide who will get it.

And it is Emanuel -- brother of former Chicago Mayor and Obama-Clinton pal, Rahm – who has, over the past decade, worked with the National Institute of Health’s head of “medical ethics”, Christine Grady, to reshape the concept of informed consent in medicine, adding a strange, collectivist aura to it on more than one occasion.

NIH’s Christine Grady is married to NIAID’s Anthony Fauci.

 

Related: Obamacare Architect Blames Marco Rubio For Rising Premiums | MRCTV

 

These manifestations of collectivist philosophy are not aberrations. They are not just personal preferences inserted into government policy. They are axiomatically endemic to government control of any resource, and doctor/Senator Rand Paul understands this very well.

Beyond that, there is one more lesson to remember.

The Biden v DeSantis debate over monoclonal antibody supplies, and who can tell whom how much will be available, is not one in which any federal politician or bureaucrat is supposed to engage as long as the medicine was made without committing a crime against another person. Biden cannot cite any enumerated power in the US Constitution granting the federal government the power to buy, sell, or regulate a form of medicine during a time when the US Congress has not declared War, and only during such a declared War could one make an argument that their so-called rule book allows the feds to buy medicine for troops – and only troops.

And when it comes to monoclonal antibodies, there is a complicating factor that makes it even more pernicious that politicians would claim the power to buy and sell them. As LifeSiteNews spells out:

To test the antibodies, Regeneron used “immortalized epithelial cells” originally derived from the kidney of an unborn baby girl likely aborted at around 12 weeks in the Netherlands… The “immortalized” HEK 293 cells, cultured at a university in the Netherlands in the 1970s, have been continuously dividing in a laboratory for decades, according to Technology Review. Regeneron produced virus “pseudoparticles” with the cell line to test REGEN-COV against the coronavirus spike protein.

This is a complex issue. The Fourteenth Amendment would stand in the way of abortion if states conformed to it. That would make drugs made through the use of fetal cells legally questionable. Likewise, politicians stretching the Constitution to BUY said products runs hand-in-hand with the erosion of economic freedoms and the assumption of political control over resources.

In the formerly free US, the economics of the free market allowed prices to reflect scarcity. The more in demand, or the more scarce a product was, the higher the price. This wide profit margin incentivized market participants to shift their labor and time and other resources into increasing the supply of those in-demand or scarce items, eventually increasing supply even as competitors eventually worked to reduce their costs-per-unit of production, thus reducing costs.

This is how bounty is created. Contrary to the idiotic ramblings of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who recently took time away from her two giant refrigerators and going to the salon to claim that capitalism “has not served our economy as well as it should,” it is only through the free market that individuals can assess what they value and suppliers can recognize potential profit to increase supply.

Rand Paul has not drilled down into the moral questions about monoclonal antibody development, but he understands that government buying this medicine and controlling its supply is wrong. 

Leftists consistently show that they do not understand morality, the drivers of economics, or the ethics of freedom that allow markets to work.

It’s up to us to spread these lessons.

Related:  Collectivist UK Medical System Now Ready to Deny Aid to Those Deemed 'Racist' or 'Sexist' | MRCTV

 

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