Joe Biden has been out of office for almost two years now — so why does everything still feel so expensive?
As midterm elections draw nearer, that’s the question on the top of American minds, and BlazeTV host Ron Simmons has some answers.
While prices are up, Simmons points out that this all began under Biden, where “prices rose about 21%.”
“That’s over 5% a year. And since that time, since the second administration of President Trump, they’ve grown a little over 2% a year, about 2.5% a year,” he explains.
“When prices grew to 21%, so if something cost a dollar and then when Biden left it cost a $1.20, it didn’t go back down to a dollar when President Trump got elected,” he says.
“What he has done, and his administration have done, is they’ve just reduced how fast it’s increasing,” he adds.
Simmons explains that prices will go down when demand goes down.
“If you remember back to 2008, 2009, when they had the huge housing crisis, well, in 2007, do you know what interest rates were for mortgages at that time? Guess what they were. They’re right what they are right now, a little over 6%,” he explains.
“People lost their jobs and things, and there was more supply than there was demand,” he continues. “So they dropped interest rates and they brought interest rates down, probably too low, honestly — artificially low — and so you could buy a house at a 3% mortgage.”
“Then when the economy got better, and the fact that we pumped a lot of unnecessary money into the economy, interest rates went up because there ended up being more demand than there was supply,” he adds.
When the demand is high, the interest rates remain high.
“Now, what we don’t want to happen is another huge recession, obviously, but just remember how this happened,” he says, pointing out that Democrat policies have led us here.
“Housing has become dramatically more expensive during the Biden years,” he continues, noting that the Heritage Foundation has reported that the cost of financing a medium-priced home has risen 114% since 2021.
“At the same time, consumer prices have risen about 20%, which we talked about, and it costs about $13,300 more per year to purchase the same house, interest-rate-wise, than it did in 2021,” he says.
“Immigration was a part of this,” he explains. “When they opened the floodgates, more people coming into the country means there’s more demand for goods and services, and that increased the cost of living and housing.”
However, Simmons points out that the most expensive cities — San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, New York, and Boston — are all run by Democrats.
“So just remember when you’re voting this time,” he adds.
To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
Throughout the Biden administration, Google was locked in two antitrust cases — one over its search engine dominance and another for its digital advertising business. For remedies, Google was at risk of divesting some of its most prized products, including Chrome and Google Ads. However, a new decision will let Google keep its toys in the end.
To understand the scope of this story, we have to go back to October 2020 when the first complaint was filed by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. The document accused Google of a Sherman Act violation — the bill that bans monopolistic practices — and ultimately aimed to bring action against the tech giant for “unlawfully maintaining monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising in the United States.”
Google risked divesting several of its major products and services.
The case would ultimately go to trial in late 2023 with Obama-appointed District Judge Amit Mehta presiding, but not before a second antitrust case tried to bring Google to its knees once more.
In early 2023, another complaint was filed, this time aimed directly at Google’s online ad business. It claimed that the company:
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The collective charges from both cases resulted in multi-year trials, each with major repercussions mounting for the tech giant. At one point, Google risked divesting several of its major products and services, including the Google Chrome browser, the Android mobile operating system, and Google Ads. And somehow, bit by bit, Google clawed its way out of total calamity.
In September 2025, District Judge Mehta ruled that Google would not have to sell Chrome or Android. However, the company was still found guilty in that it “harmed Google’s publishing customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” according to a press release. To atone, Google was forced to:
Things were looking up for Google, but it wasn’t out of the woods yet. The second case was still underway, and after Clinton-nominated District Judge Leonie Brinkema found the company guilty again, a new batch of devastating remedies were on the table. This time, Google risked having to:
RELATED: How Google went from American innovation to tech stagnation
Fast-forward to September 2026, and now the final major repercussion is no longer in play. District Judge Brinkema ruled that Google will not have to sell its ad business after all, allowing the company to keep all of its main products and services intact.
That said, consequences still loom for the Big Tech giant. Like in the case before it, Google will have to make behavioral changes to its business model. The exact remedies are still sealed in District Judge Brinkema’s official opinion, which is expected to be released by the end of September.
Regardless of the information contained inside, one thing is clear: Google earned the ire of the courts, got itself slapped down with two back-to-back antitrust lawsuits, and even as it stumbled on the cusp of the biggest company breakup since AT&T, the tech giant still came out with all of its parts attached. Only time will tell if Google can keep its nose out of trouble.
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As Republicans head toward what looks like a perilous midterm election, affordability is on everyone’s lips. The Biden administration never convinced voters that it had brought food and housing costs under control. Some Republicans have tried to pretend the problem does not exist; others have acknowledged it without making meaningful progress.
Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump made choices that worsened the pressure, from expanding federal spending to deepening costly foreign commitments. Neither party has a durable solution. The Congressional Budget Office projects a $1.9 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2026, and debt held by the public now tops 101% of GDP. Spending and inflation are not accidents at the edge of mass democracy. They follow from its incentives, and nothing will change until the incentives do.
In a democracy, giving voters something is the winning strategy, and Trump likes winning.
The affordability crisis has several causes, but much of the immediate pain comes from the cumulative rise in prices. Wages may rise and bank balances may grow, yet each dollar buys less. Inflation is a pernicious tax precisely because it is hidden. Normal taxes must be enacted and collected openly. No one votes directly for inflation, which instead erodes the value of money people have already earned and saved. It punishes careful savers while rewarding borrowers and speculators.
Deficit spending can fuel inflation when government expands demand faster than the economy can supply goods and services. Creating money makes it easier to distribute benefits today, but it can reduce the currency’s purchasing power tomorrow. Inflation also lightens the real burden of government debt by reducing the value of what was borrowed. The average person, however, rarely has early access to new money or the sophisticated financial instruments wealthy investors use to hedge against rising prices. He feels the loss at the grocery store.
The oldest move in politics is to offer people a material reward for their support. Every system does it, but democracy makes the exchange especially powerful because elections confer legitimacy. A politician rarely calls the arrangement a “bribe.” He routes the benefit through a program aimed at groups likely to reward him at the polls. The legal form gives the transaction respectability, but voters still understand the bargain.
Donald Trump recently dispensed with even that pretense. At the Republican midterm convention last week, he promised $5,000 to every adult citizen if Republicans retain the House and Senate. An independent estimate put the cost at more than $1.2 trillion, and Congress would have to approve it. Whether the payments ever materialize is not the point. The offer mocks the fiscal restraint conservatives claim to espouse. Conservative commentators objected, but Trump brushed them aside. He understands the incentives. He promised not to cut Social Security and Medicare because benefits win votes. In a democracy, giving voters something is the winning strategy, and Trump likes winning.
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Warnings about democracy long predate modern America. Plato and Aristotle distrusted rule by the demos, and the American founders built a constitutional republic with layers of insulation against popular majorities. Their fear was simple: Once voters discover they can use the state to transfer other people’s money to themselves, restraint collapses. A republic may survive only if institutions impose limits that elections alone will not.
Is the $5,000 check good fiscal policy? Of course not. It’s a disaster. A transfer approaching $1.2 trillion would widen the deficit and almost certainly worsen inflation, especially in an economy already near capacity. Pandemic-era fiscal stimulus did not single-handedly cause the 2021-2022 inflation surge; supply shocks and monetary policy mattered too. But New York Federal Reserve research found that fiscal support contributed materially.
Is the check good politics? Yes. In a democracy, vote-buying is an optimal strategy, and anyone who refuses it risks losing to someone who will. Democrats have principles that let them hand out money and receive praise — and votes. Republicans profess principles that should forbid it. Sound economics grants no electoral advantage.
Reckless spending is terrible policy, but it can win elections. Conservatives may campaign on austerity, but austerity rarely inspires voters. If progressives alone use the winning strategy, conservative fiscal theory becomes irrelevant. Losers do not write budgets or exercise executive power. Both parties therefore spend when they hold office, though they direct the money toward different constituencies. The democratic incentive is to distribute everything you can while you can, because the other side may take power tomorrow and spend it instead.
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The philosopher Nick Land captured the logic in “The Dark Enlightenment”:
As the democratic virus burns through society, painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial investment are replaced by a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a “reality television” political circus. Tomorrow might belong to the other team, so it’s best to eat it all now.
None of this is hopeful. Conservatives have made preserving mass democracy a principle even as the system rewards policies they oppose. A constitutional republic needs constraints on majoritarian appetite, but there is little political will even for modest spending cuts, much less fundamental limits on the franchise. The brutal truth is that both parties will keep spending recklessly while blaming each other for rising debt and prices.
As long as mass democracy reigns, buying votes with public money will remain one of the surest ways to gain and hold power. Every politician wants power.
It’s National Truck Driver Appreciation Week, when the American Trucking Associations holds its annual hot dog and hamburger lunches for the same drivers it spends the rest of the year screwing through its lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C.
This year, however, drivers might enjoy the free food, cheap swag, and various other perks — if they happen to be in the yard for them — with just a little less cynicism. That’s because the industry’s annual PR stunt happens to coincide with something considerably more valuable: the kind of tangible political "appreciation" that actually produces real change.
Most Americans would probably be astonished by how easy it has been to summon a trucking company into existence.
On Monday, August 31, Vice President JD Vance gave a speech in Sterling Heights, Michigan, in support of Republican congressional candidate Mike Rogers ahead of the midterm elections.
Though Vance started with praise for Rogers and other members of the party, he quickly pivoted to problems in the trucking industry and the administration's efforts to address them, while also highlighting the hard work and sacrifice of American truckers and the displacement they have faced in recent years.
“For too long ... the Biden administration allowed American workers and American drivers to be endangered and have their jobs stolen by foreign fraudsters,” Vance said.
“Today is about restoring the basic principle that if you want to drive a big truck on America's roads, you ought to be able to speak English, you ought to be a legal resident of the United States of America, and you ought to have basic qualifications because trucking is too important to let it go to foreign fraudsters.”
Vance, like anyone else paying attention, can see that the trucking industry has been flooded with foreign labor, helping keep the freight costs of Fortune 500 America low while externalizing the real costs onto everyone else.
The Trump administration's crackdown has illuminated the scope of the problem. A 2025 analysis prepared for J.B. Hunt by transportation economist Noël Perry estimated that the administration's English-language requirements, immigration enforcement, and restrictions on non-domiciled commercial driver's licenses could ultimately remove as many as 614,000 drivers from the industry — nearly 16% of the nation's heavy-truck driver population.
Speaking more freely to Overdrive, Perry said the number could go as high as 800,000 — a figure more in line with estimates I've heard coming from administration insiders.
The obvious losers in all of this have been legitimate American trucking companies. An already brutal freight market has been made even harder by competition from unscrupulous operators willing to cut corners by skirting the licensing, training, labor, and safety standards responsible carriers have to meet.
And the problem is compounded by Mexican trucking companies engaging in illegal cabotage — hauling domestic loads between American destinations using Mexican trucks and drivers.
More than 20 trucking-related companies sought bankruptcy protection during one 30-day period this spring alone, and another 21 transportation and supply-chain businesses filed for Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 between late July and August 25.
The administration's crackdown is finally beginning to tighten the freight market and push rates back up. But in a classic case of you win some, you lose some, diesel prices have now hit record highs.
Vance's speech also coincided with an announcement from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy of a “whole-of-government” attack on another part of the problem: deficient CDL schools churning out poorly trained and sometimes completely unqualified drivers onto American highways.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, a division of DOT, issued immediate shutdown notices to 110 truck-driving schools and put another 160 on notice that they could be removed from operation.
The stakes are much higher than faulty paperwork. According to DOT, non-domiciled drivers who would no longer qualify for licenses under the administration's new rules were involved in at least 17 fatal crashes that killed 30 people in 2025 alone. Yes, 30 innocent Americans died thanks to drivers who can't read road signs, don't know the rules of the road, and have no business getting behind the wheel of what is essentially an 80,000-pound missile. On the other hand, somebody saved a bundle on labor costs.
This summer has been just as deadly. In July, 21-year-old University of Massachusetts Lowell soccer player Tobias “Toby” Forsythe was killed on Interstate 71 in Ohio when a tractor-trailer driven by 42-year-old Bekhzod Asrarov slammed into the back of his car.
Asrarov, an Uzbek national who entered the United States through the diversity visa lottery in 2024, held an Ohio CDL but needed Google Translate to communicate with first responders at the scene. According to court records and law-enforcement sources, he also tried to destroy or conceal his dashcam and other electronic devices after the crash.
Ah yes, another highly skilled, conscientious immigrant doing his part to help alleviate America's fake trucker "shortage."
And the deaths continued during the very week of Duffy's announcement.
In the early hours of September 4, in Mesquite, Texas, 33-year-old Lisa Maldonado was killed in a crash involving a truck driven by Khasan Begbaev, who was working for a subcontractor hauling for Knight-Swift, one of America's largest trucking companies. Begbaev has been charged with manslaughter. Police say he was reversing down a freeway entrance ramp before the crash.
On September 3, 50-year-old Brenda Watson was killed in a head-on collision in Ohio after a semi driven by Manjit Singh pulled out to pass another vehicle and struck Watson's car. Transportation Secretary Duffy subsequently said Singh was being held on an active Homeland Security detainer and that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration was investigating both his carrier and the training school where he received his CDL.
Two days earlier, police in Moab, Utah, stopped 30-year-old Chamkaur Singh (no relation) after clocking him driving a semi-truck 20 miles per hour over the speed limit. When officers ran his name, they discovered a nationwide warrant for vehicular manslaughter stemming from a California semi crash that killed four people. California authorities had reportedly been searching for him for two months.
Also on September 1, a horrific crash took place in Tennessee involving a tractor-trailer pulling an Amazon trailer. The truck crossed the median on Interstate 40, crashed into several vehicles, and burst into flames. Its driver, 35-year-old Farahov Fhsvaisov, was killed and three other people were hospitalized.
The cause remains under investigation, and little has been publicly reported about Fhsvaisov beyond his registered Brooklyn address — an essentially meaningless bureaucratic detail. As for Fhsvaisov's actual citizenship and licensing status, that is precisely the kind of information Kathy Hochul's New York is now suing to keep out of the Trump administration's hands.
And it's not just New York. More than 20 states and the District of Columbia have joined the challenge to federal demands for access to commercial-driver information held in state databases. The states cite privacy concerns and argue that the federal government lacks the authority to obtain the information; the administration says access is necessary to uncover fraud and illegally obtained commercial licenses.
Amazon's apparent involvement in the Fhsvaisov crash can't help but recall long-standing questions about the company's enormous network of outside trucking contractors. A 2022 Wall Street Journal investigation found that frequent Amazon contractors were more than twice as likely as comparable carriers to receive poor unsafe-driving scores; a later CBS News analysis found Amazon contractors had unsafe-driving violation rates at least 89% higher than other carriers in every month of the six-year period it examined.
Yet while Secretary Duffy and other elements of the Trump administration are trying to restore sanity to the trucking industry, truckers are being attacked not only by the forces bringing insourced labor to compete with them, but by many on the left who want to preserve that system.
Truckers are also being threatened by the clumsiness of some of Duffy's reforms as well as elements in the Republican Party that want to replace truckers not only with insourced labor but eventually with robots.
Let's start with licensing.
In March, the FMCSA issued a new rule limiting who can be issued what is called a “non-domiciled” CDL.
Non-domiciled CDLs began as a narrow exception for drivers who could not obtain a recognized commercial license where they lived, including certain foreign drivers. Under the Obama administration, the old “nonresident CDL” was renamed the “non-domiciled CDL.”
The category became far more consequential over time. In 2019, during Trump’s first term, the FMCSA issued guidance — later endorsed by the American Trucking Associations — allowing foreign nationals with federal work permits to obtain non-domiciled CDLs.
Then came the Biden immigration surge. As the administration extended work authorization to huge numbers of migrants, it also vastly expanded the pool of foreign workers who could take advantage of the non-domiciled CDL system. Investigations into the system through 2025 found that roughly 200,000 drivers had been issued these licenses illegally and would see them revoked, or at least would not be renewed on expiry.
The Trump administration has now effectively closed the broader EAD pathway, limiting non-domiciled CDLs to a much narrower group of foreign workers with specific employment-based visas.
The new rule is now being challenged in federal court. The lawsuit was filed by Public Citizen, the progressive advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader, on behalf of two immigrant truck drivers, AFSCME, and the American Federation of Teachers. It argues that the FMCSA does not have the legal authority to remove such a large class of legally authorized immigrants from CDL eligibility.
For their part, the unions claim to be advocating on behalf of immigrant members who could lose their jobs under the rule. That puts two major American labor unions in the strange position of fighting a reform that could remove a huge pool of foreign labor from competition with American drivers.
How organized labor wound up fighting to preserve cheap foreign competition is a question for another piece. Curious readers might begin by looking into the sprawling network of nonprofits and foundations funding Public Citizen; several of them are also major backers of more permissive immigration policies.
RELATED: The deadly trucker crisis — and why mass migration is to blame
There is, however, a straightforward way for supporters of the crackdown to fight back: Put the reforms into federal law.
Dalilah's Law is named after a California girl who suffered catastrophic injuries after the car her mother was driving was rear-ended by a commercial truck. If passed, the law would tighten CDL standards, reinforce English-proficiency requirements, restrict eligibility for non-domiciled licenses, and crack down on deficient driver-training schools.
It would also address the outsourcing of freight brokerages and dispatch services overseas, a little-discussed but important part of the problem. If a load broker in Serbia or Pakistan fails to perform necessary due diligence in vetting a carrier, holding that broker accountable from the United States can be extraordinarily difficult. Dalilah's Law would bring more of this activity within reach of American regulators.
While all this is going on, the FMCSA has undertaken a revamp of the federal system through which trucking companies register. In an interview with “60 Minutes” earlier this year, FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs described the industry as having a “front door” problem: It has been too easy for bad actors — including so-called chameleon carriers, unsafe trucking companies that shut down and simply reappear under new names — to enter or re-enter the market.
Most Americans would probably be astonished by how easy it has been to summon a trucking company into existence. Just pay the $300 federal operating-authority fee, provide insurance and paperwork, and list a U.S. business address.
On paper, that address has to check out, and within 12 months you're supposed to undergo a safety audit, followed by monitoring for the rest of an 18-month probationary period. But that assumes an overwhelmed system actually gets to you.
To address this, our bureaucrats have decided to bureaucrat some more with a new system called Motus, which has produced the results typical of government: penalizing operators who attempt to obey the rules, while essentially giving a free pass to anyone determined to break the law.
In a detailed examination of the rollout, trucking-industry writer Danielle Chaffin documented legitimate carriers unable to operate because Motus incorrectly showed them as inactive or saddled them with erroneous insurance requirements. At the same time, she found carriers with out-of-service orders — including some with no insurance on file — still showing as active in the new system. As one carrier put it, Motus was “waving the bad actors through the gate and choking the honest ones out.”
It seems like decent American companies continue to get stuck in the pincer between the open border policies of the previous administration, and the seeming unwillingness of government agencies to go full Genghis Khan against the bad actors allowed into the industry.
As if displacement and replacement by foreign labor weren't bad enough, we are also looking down the barrel of driver replacement by automation — something the Trump administration is actively encouraging even while it takes steps to protect truckers from foreign labor.
On September 3, DOT released its “National Strategy for Automated Vehicles,” laying out the administration's priorities for automated-vehicle technology through 2030. The document largely concerns the bureaucratic minutiae of regulating vehicles that may or may not accommodate a human driver at all. But it will also help guide how the government deals with autonomous trucks.
Congress is considering the BUILD America 250 Act, a major surface-transportation bill that includes a federal framework for autonomous commercial vehicles. Republicans are also behind legislation such as the AMERICA DRIVES Act, introduced by California Republican Rep. Vince Fong, provisions of which have been incorporated into the larger bill.
The legislation seeks to limit state-level regulatory authority over autonomous commercial vehicles, including state requirements that certain highly automated trucks have a human being aboard.
Supporters argue that a national framework is necessary to prevent a patchwork of state regulations from strangling an emerging American technology. But Republicans should understand why their messaging looks confused to America's truckers and why Fong's bill seems at odds with their usual commitment to federalism.
On one hand, the administration is finally addressing their replacement by foreign labor. On the other, Republicans are working to remove regulatory barriers for technology whose ultimate promise is to move freight without anyone sitting behind the wheel.
Do we have any friends in government at all?
The left appears happy to defend policies that allow American trucking companies to replace domestic labor with cheaper foreign drivers. Republicans are finally addressing that problem, but they also appear remarkably credulous when dealing with autonomous-vehicle developers whose technology could eventually supplant truckers' jobs altogether.
Vice President Vance said in his speech that “we care about America's truckers because for generations they have represented something much greater ... the very best of this country's character, people who spend long hours away from their families.”
“In some ways, truckers are the modern cowboys.”
I would submit to Vice President Vance that the administration's actions thus far have been welcome and helpful for America's truckers, and they deserve to be commended. But the administration needs to do more. It should continue removing bad actors from the trucking industry, pass Dalilah's Law, make sure its own bureaucracy doesn't punish legitimate operators, and be more realistic about what emerging technologies mean for us and for our economy.
The modern cowboys would like to keep on trucking for as long as we can.
The claim that the synthetic mRNA-based COVID-19 genetic therapies were "safe and effective" was repeated ad nauseam not only by former President Joe Biden during the pandemic but by health officials in his administration — including former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, former National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, and former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky.
It may then come as a surprise that not all high-ranking federal health officials were keen on this particular characterization.
'Science doesn't tell you what your actions should be.'
When reached for comment about a new tranche of recently released emails of Anthony Fauci, former Biden administration acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock told Blaze News that she protested the "safe and effective" description.
But first let's rewind. On Sunday, Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) published a May 27, 2021, email sent by Dr. Woodcock to Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins regarding the perceived need to set aside scientific research funds to later investigate COVID-19 vaccine side effects.
"I have been contacted by a number of people who have experienced adverse events post COVID-19 vaccination (from all three of the current vaccines)," wrote Woodcock. "Many are healthcare professionals, some of whom I know. The symptoms do not fit together into a distinctive syndrome and most are not easily quantifiable or evaluated with standard laboratory testing."
Woodcock, who became acting FDA commissioner in January 2021 as the vaccines were being pushed on the nation, was sympathetic to the concerns of some apparent vaccine casualties that "no one takes them seriously, no one knows how to treat them" and that there had been "no effort to study this."
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"I think it would be worthwhile to do a study and evaluate a cohort of these individuals," said Woodcock. "But of course $ need to be made available, and you would need an investigator who is interested in 'medical mysteries.' I doubt the industry would support, for obvious reasons."
Woodcock provided Blaze News with insights into her proposal.
"I was thinking, 'Could we find some kind of treatment to offer these folks?' But first, you have to understand what's going on, right? You can't just sort of go out and treat people," Woodcock told Blaze News. "So that was my objective in this. ... I don't think it's probably different than any other immune challenge, and I wouldn't want anyone to think that I felt the vaccine was dangerous or should not be used or anything. By no means. It was simply that if people were having this reaction, we could find a way to study it."
When pressed — in light of her concerns at the time — about the "safe and effective" description, Woodcock responded, "Well, look. I always told our press office, 'Don't call it safe and effective, because no medical intervention is 100% safe.' Even water. You could kill yourself by drinking too much water, literally."
The FDA noted in recent years that it was "confident in the safety and effectiveness" of the COVID-19 vaccines. While apparently hesitant herself to use that phrasing, Woodcock stated in 2021 that "the public can be very confident that this vaccine meets the high standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality the FDA requires of an approved product."
Woodcock offered Blaze News what she regards as a better pitch for the vaccine: "What it is is the benefits far outweigh the risks, and that's the standard for all drugs that are approved, all medicines that are approved, because none of them are free of side effects, which is the kind of ordinary, you know, meaning of the term 'safe.'"
While the former acting commissioner noted that many health experts suggested during the pandemic that the "benefits way outweigh the potential harms" of the vaccines, people nevertheless "do use the term 'safe and effective' a lot, which is a statutory term."
Woodcock emphasized that any intervention "that you do has to be pretty safe, right? But that doesn't mean it's totally without adverse events."
Adverse events were in some cases deadly.
The FDA admitted in an internal letter last year that FDA Office of Biostatistics and Pharmacovigilance career staff had "found that at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination."
Dr. Vinay Prasad, the former chief medical officer at the FDA and director at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in the letter that the OBPV performed an analysis of 96 deaths between 2021 and 2024 and concluded "that no fewer than 10 are related. If anything, this represents conservative coding, where vaccines are exculpated rather than indicated in cases of ambiguity. The real number is higher."
On the matter of takeaways from the handling of the pandemic, Woodcock told Blaze News that while the "development of the vaccines was a scientific triumph," "science doesn't tell you what to do. Scientists often forget that."
"Science just tells you the facts," she continued. "What do to do — especially about society, right — is a value judgement that should take into account the facts, but science doesn't tell you what your actions should be."
HHS and the FDA did not immediately respond to Blaze News' requests for comment.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) recently asked the Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation into the abortion group Plan C.
According to Hawley’s complaint, Plan C teaches Americans how to obtain chemical abortion drugs in violation of state law and advises users to conceal their activity through privacy-focused browsers, virtual private networks, and encrypted email.
Lawmakers are rewarding an industry that treats the isolation of women as empowerment and the removal of medical oversight as progress.
The complaint raises a larger question: How much risk is the abortion industry willing to impose on women and girls in pursuit of unrestricted access?
Recent cases have shown how easily men can obtain mifepristone online and use it to coerce or drug women. Yet the industry continues pressing to remove safeguards, minimize medical supervision, and treat mail-order abortion as ordinary consumer health care.
Congress, meanwhile, recently allowed taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood to resume, despite sustained public opposition to federal support for the abortion provider.
That decision is especially troubling after the New York Times reported last year that Planned Parenthood was “in crisis.” The story described understaffed clinics, poor conditions, inadequate care, and botched procedures. Planned Parenthood has offered little public evidence that those problems have been corrected.
The pattern is difficult to ignore. Again and again, the abortion industry’s demand for fewer restrictions comes at the expense of basic standards of safety, medical care, and accountability.
Republican lawmakers should follow Hawley’s lead. Organizations that facilitate illegal access to abortion drugs or help users evade state safeguards should face scrutiny. Congress and the administration should also restore protections abandoned in recent years.
Chemical abortion offers the clearest example of what deregulation has produced.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration removed the long-standing in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone. Women and girls may now obtain the drug through online providers without first seeing a doctor.
That convenience carries serious risks.
RELATED: ‘Like an Amazon shopping experience’: New investigation uncovers mail-order abortion for teens
Mifepristone can produce dangerous complications when used later in pregnancy or by women with certain medical conditions. It cannot treat an ectopic pregnancy, which may become life-threatening without prompt diagnosis. An online questionnaire cannot perform an ultrasound, conduct a physical examination, or reliably detect coercion.
Many online providers do not require proof that a patient has received an ultrasound or an in-person medical evaluation.
My colleague Dr. Christina Francis, a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist, recently tested one such system. She told an online abortion provider that she was 13 years old and had a history of ectopic pregnancies, cesarean sections, an intrauterine device, and other serious complications.
Any one of those disclosures should have prompted further screening. Her stated age alone should have raised immediate concerns about abuse, consent, and parental involvement.
Instead, the provider accepted her payment and mailed the drugs.
Women and girls have a right to understand what can go wrong before they are left to experience the consequences alone.
The mail-order system has also enabled horrifying acts of coercion and abuse.
An Army captain was convicted after impregnating a subordinate and giving her mifepristone without her consent. A Texas attorney repeatedly slipped abortion drugs into his wife’s drinks. In Louisiana, a young man used his girlfriend’s information to order mifepristone and then isolated and pressured her into taking it. An Ohio doctor forced the drug down his girlfriend’s throat.
Those are just the cases that became public. How many other women have suffered in silence? How many have lost pregnancies without knowing that a partner drugged them? How many were pressured into abortions while isolated from family, doctors, or anyone positioned to recognize the abuse?
Mail-order abortion removes the very people most likely to detect coercion: physicians, nurses, clinic staff, parents, and trusted family members.
It also leaves women to manage bleeding, pain, fear, and possible medical emergencies without direct supervision.
Research cited by pro-life advocates indicates that many women report feeling pressured into abortions they did not want or that conflicted with their values. Whatever the precise scale, coercion is a real and documented danger. Policies should make it easier to detect, not easier to conceal.
RELATED: Takeaways from the latest Supreme Court abortion intervention
Yet prioritizing access over safety increasingly appears to be a feature rather than a bug of the abortion industry’s model.
Plan C says it seeks to “transform access to abortion in the U.S. by normalizing the self-directed option of abortion pills by mail.” That mission statement emphasizes access and normalization. It says nothing about medical screening, coercion, abuse, or the risks of taking the drugs without an examination.
A website that teaches users to order abortion drugs secretly and evade state laws does not merely serve women seeking abortions. It may also serve abusers looking for a discreet way to obtain drugs they can use against women.
The beneficiaries are obvious: organizations that sell or distribute the pills and men willing to use them as instruments of coercion.
Lawmakers have tolerated this system for too long. They have permitted the weakening of medical safeguards, restored funding to Planned Parenthood, and resisted efforts to require in-person care for chemical abortion.
They are rewarding an industry that treats the isolation of women as empowerment and the removal of medical oversight as progress.
Hawley and a growing coalition of pro-life groups are right to demand accountability.
Congress and the Justice Department should investigate organizations that knowingly help users violate state law. Federal regulators should restore meaningful medical safeguards for mifepristone. Lawmakers should also ensure that minors, abuse victims, and women with dangerous medical conditions are not abandoned to an online form and a package in the mail.
Women and girls deserve better than an abortion system built around secrecy, isolation, and plausible deniability.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, has earned a reputation as one of the Senate’s most bipartisan and moderate members. But not even that willingness to work across the aisle spared the longtime senator from being ensnared by the left’s lawfare machine. Leftist propaganda outlet ProPublica dropped a hit piece on Tuesday suggesting Collins and her 2020 […]
Democrats inflate spending on government programs without anyone noticing and then attack Republicans for 'cuts' when they attempt to scale back these stealth spending increases.
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