Here are two questions:
How the hell during a pandemic did President Joe Biden name a health secretary with no competence in public health?
And is anyone surprised that HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra is making the monkeypox outbreak worse?
“The shortage of vaccines to combat a fast-growing monkeypox outbreak was caused in part because the Department of Health and Human Services failed early on to ask that bulk stocks of the vaccine it already owned be bottled for distribution”https://t.co/jzf24ZncMS
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) August 3, 2022
Part of Becerra’s incompetence is his inability to clear away red tape or prioritize anything at a time when we were supposed to have learned something about infectious diseases. Another part is his lame political correctness in talking about a disease that is overwhelmingly spread by men having sex with men.
It is not necessary for “every American” to take the Monkeypox outbreak seriously, as Becerra asks. We need HHS and the agencies it oversees to take it seriously, which includes being clear about which specific demographics are at risk and through what channels. https://t.co/5M7KniGcNq
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) August 4, 2022
But Barro’s critique of Becerra gets at the heart of the problem. Becerra (beyond having no competence, experience, or training in public health) can’t fight this fight because he was brought here precisely to be a left-wing culture warrior.
Becerra met Biden’s standards for health secretary because Becerra is an abortion extremist and a culture warrior who relishes in persecuting religious conservatives.
Becerra’s qualification for HHS secretary was pressing a felony prosecution against pro-life activist David Daleiden because Daleiden exposed Planned Parenthood’s trade in the organs of aborted babies. Even the Los Angeles Times called Becerra’s crusade “a disturbing overreach.”
Becerra had a 100% lifetime rating from NARAL and Planned Parenthood, which means he defended partial-birth abortion and adult men taking underage girls across state lines in order to skirt state parental notification laws.
Becerra tried to force pro-life crisis pregnancy centers to advertise abortion.
As I wrote upon his nomination: “In 2007, for instance, Becerra co-sponsored a bill requiring all employers who cover prescription drugs to cover contraception also. This mandate would have allowed zero exemptions for conscience. It would force Catholic parishes to pay for birth control for parish staff, although Catholic teaching rejects artificial birth control as an unnatural and unethical means to divorce sexuality from life-giving family formation.”
Becerra has voted to ensure that states can discriminate against hospitals and doctors for not providing or recommending abortions. Becerra believes taxpayers should have to fund abortions — he has voted against the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.
Xavier Becerra was obviously unqualified to run HHS during the COVID pandemic, and his incompetence is worsening the monkeypox outbreak.
Some commentators are baffled by Biden’s pick, but pro-life conservatives who remember the Obama administration are not. It was HHS that created the contraception mandate, which tried to force nuns to cover birth control. Obama’s health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, was probably the U.S. governor who was closest to the abortion industry. HHS became the abortion-and-contraception agency under Obama-Biden. So, public health wasn’t the focus in picking Becerra.
