It’s a simple but powerful principle—patients with rare illnesses should never be forced to beg for permission from government bureaucrats to access potentially life-saving cures. Now, lawmakers in Washington, D.C., can make that important principle the law of the land by passing the Goldwater Institute’s Right to Try for Individualized Treatments, or Right to Try 2.0, which was introduced in Congress this week.
Introduced by U.S. Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R-TN) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), the landmark legislation offers a much-needed lifeline for patients with rare and ultra-rare diseases to access gene-based treatments designed just for them. Right to Try 2.0 builds off Goldwater’s original Right to Try legislation, which was signed into federal law in 2018 and allows terminally-ill patients to access treatments that have gone through Phase 1 clinical trials but are not yet FDA-approved. However, today’s cutting-edge treatments include highly specific, individualized treatments—treatments that by their nature cannot go through the FDA’s one-size-fits-all regulatory frameworks in a timely manner
Already, nearly 20 states have passed Right to Try 2.0, allowing patients to access personalized medicine and providing them with much-needed hope. The Goldwater Institute will continue fighting to ensure every American has that same pathway.
Autonomous vehicles are already making it easier for Americans move around and transport goods safely and efficiently—after all, driverless vehicles don’t get drowsy at 2 a.m. or miss breaking cues because they’re distracted. But, as the Goldwater Institute’s Brian Norman warns, a coordinated labor union campaign threatens to slow the implementation of this innovative technology and deny Americans its many benefits.
Writing in the Washington Examiner, Norman, Goldwater’s director of state affairs, exposes the Teamsters’ campaign to pass bills from coast to coast requiring union drivers to remain behind the wheel of autonomous trucks. Supporters say these “driver-in” mandates are safety measures, but the unions’ deeper purpose is often explicit: to protect union jobs from technological change.
The fact is, if autonomous trucks can’t operate safely, they shouldn’t be allowed on the road at all. But early reports show that driverless vehicles are typically safer than human-driven vehicles. Simply put, autonomous vehicles should be judged by their safety and performance, not by whether they preserve old labor arrangements.
“The future of freight should be faster, safer, and less expensive,” Norman writes. “Policymakers should let it arrive.”
It was meant to be a compromise—the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, was intended to ensure the respectful treatment of Native ancestral remains while preserving science. But the 1990 law has spiraled wildly beyond its purpose, Elizabeth Weiss, Ph.D., the author of the Goldwater Institute’s new NAGPRA report, recently told author and journalist Michael Shellenberger on his podcast.
Shellenberger is just one of the many reporters, writers, and radio hosts who have spoken to Weiss about her Goldwater report, The Reburial of the Southwest: Closing Off Native History and Archaeology.
Weiss told Shellenberger that NAGPRA was intended to repatriate identifiable remains and sacred artifacts to Native tribes. But, she said, the law has been hijacked by a “postmodern woke agenda,” leading museums and universities to turn over countless objects not covered by the law: photographs, recent books, modern crafts, a porcelain fragment from a Chinese bowl salvaged from a wrecked Spanish galleon off the California coast. One activist even suggested that digital tokens should be turned over because images or replicas of sacred artifacts “can entice the spirits to enter in them, so they could be living,” Weiss told Shellenberger
The weaponization of NAGPRA is emptying museums and grinding archaeological research to a halt. “There is a real danger,” Weiss told Shellenberger, “that we’re going to lose some skills that are really essential to medicine, to forensics, and who knows what else.”
