Most people would agree that drug prices are rising fast. I’m sure my wife would, and I couldn’t argue with her based on what we are paying. But are they really rising?

Dr. Joel Zinberg, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, says no. He’s also director of Paragon Health Institute’s Public Health and American Well-being Initiative and associate clinical professor surgery at Icahn Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Zinberg takes issue with the commonly held belief drug prices are out of control.

Zinberg says the worst thing that could happen now is for President Biden to propose drug price controls to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Although the Build Back Better legislation is on the rocks, the drug price control portion of the bill may survive, if only through executive orders. That’s what you do when democracy stands in the way of your agenda.

President Biden insists such controls are needed because pharmaceutical companies are “jacking up prices on a range of medicines.” He promises to “end the days when drug companies could increase their prices with no oversight and no accountability.” I guess he’s forgotten about free market forces – capitalism – in this era of socialist thinking.

Dr. Zinberg tells us an inconvenient truth – drug prices are lower than when Biden took office. Even as inflation is running rampantly out of control, officially at 6.8% but in reality, much higher (the largest increase in 39 years), prescription drug prices actually fell 0.3%. To understand this fact, you must understand that list prices are not actual selling prices. Although a case can be made for increases in list prices, the availability of discounts and rebates have actually lowered the prices we are paying for prescription drugs.

The best measure of drug prices is the CPI-Rx, which measures price changes in a large basket of drugs over time, accounting for discounts and most rebates. Another strength of the CPI-Rx is that it accounts for price declines that occur when consumers substitute cheaper generic versions for brand-name drugs. Too often, Mr. Biden and others focus on a few high-priced drugs and fail to consider the entire market.

It is true that prices for prescription brand-name drugs are higher in the U.S. than in other countries. These higher prices make it possible to fuel drug innovations that bring us such life-saving drugs as the Covid vaccines. But U.S. regulatory, legal and incentive structures encourage aggressive price competition and switching from branded to generic drugs. As a result, Americans use more generics (9 out of 10 prescriptions) and pay less for them (16% lower on average) than in other developed countries. Nearly all European countries impose price controls on generics, making them less available and more expensive.

Discount coupons have had a large impact in America. Companies such as GoodRx and SingleCare have lowered prices, sometimes drastically, for many commonly used drugs. It is often less expensive to use these coupons than to use healthcare drug insurance. A recent analysis of per-unit prices of 27 types of insulin by GoodRx found that overall retail prices declined by nearly 6% since 2019 because of recent approvals of generic and biosimilar drugs. This is largely due to a strong push to approve more generic drug manufacturing during the Trump Administration by FDA Director Scott Gottlieb.

What will price controls do to drug innovation? This is the most alarming news. University of Chicago economist Tomas Philipson estimates Biden’s proposed price controls could lead to a 29% to 60% reduction in research and development, resulting in 167 to 342 fewer new drug approvals over the next 20 years. Where would we be today if they had done that in the years preceding the Covid pandemic of 2020?

Zinberg says, “Speeding approvals and increasing competition are a far better prescription than price controls that would strangle future innovation.”

The Omicron variant of Covid-19 is spreading like wild fire. Case numbers are steadily rising, though hospitalizations and deaths are not. Is it inevitable you’ll catch the Omicron variant? Is that a good thing?

Rob Arnott, writing in The Wall Street Journal, makes the case for intentionally getting the Omicron variant. He says, “The prudent response to Omicron might be to encourage vaccinated people and even unvaccinated young adults to catch it, while protecting the at-risk population. One measure of a pathogen’s lethality is the case fatality rate – the ratio of the death toll to the known cases. The 28-day average case fatality rate in South Africa, the likely origin of the Omicron variant, tumbled in the past six weeks from 8% to 0.2%, barely higher than the flu. Omicron will assuredly confer new, complementary antibodies on its victims, providing an additional measure of immunity to more lethal Covid variants.”

It is clear that Omicron is fast becoming the “flu bug of the year” – although it is not an influenza virus. We certainly have never taken such extreme measures to avoid the flu in the last 100 years since the pandemic of 1918. In my lifetime of over 70 years there were never any school closings, business closings, mask or vaccine mandates to avoid the flu. In fact, despite having mostly effective flu vaccines for years, only about 40% of the general population usually took the flu vaccine.

To be sure, in an average year about 40,000 Americans die from the flu, though most are elderly and have severe co-morbidities such as immune-deficiency, pulmonary and heart diseases. Yet even in this population, only about 60% received vaccinations. We just never took the flu as seriously as we have Covid-19.

Arnott bases his thesis on the assumption that more lethal variants of Covid-19 than Omicron will come upon us in the future and getting Omicron will increase our natural immunity to these more lethal variants. This is a big unproven assumption. Furthermore, he is assuming no lasting effects from getting the Omicron variant, which is also unproven. Therefore, his “cost-benefit analysis” about Omicron is very speculative.

Cost-benefit analysis certainly could be useful in determining government policies, but sadly this never seems to enter the minds of politicians. Lockdowns are happening again in Europe and Latin America after rising case numbers, even though death rates were falling. Arnott says the latest fatality rates for Europe, the U.S. and Latin America are 0.5%, 0.4% and 0.3% respectively, down from high rates with the Delta variant of 4 to 7% in June, 2021. In truth, the real case fatality rates are much lower since there are legions of people with asymptomatic or mild cases who either never get tested or never report their home testing results. Also, many are dying in hospitals with unrelated diseases who are counted amongst the Covid deaths simply because all hospital admissions today are tested for Covid. This means the actual fatality rates for Omicron are below 0.2%, which is commonly associated with influenza.

I’ve written a lot on the harms that lockdowns cause and won’t repeat that here. (Lockdowns Historically Failed) But more lockdowns are not the answer. It is certainly true that government policies cannot prevent the spread of a highly infectious virus such as Omicron – although vaccinations will help limit the disease in most people to something similar to the common cold or flu. But I wouldn’t recommend intentionally getting the Omicron variant any more than I would recommend getting the flu. To suggest intentionally letting people catch the Omicron variant in order to save lives is a risky public health policy I doubt even our feckless public health officials would recommend.

The Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) is deliberating the constitutionality of President Biden’s vaccine mandates. Many legal scholars believe the Biden Administration is on shaky ground and anticipate SCOTUS will strike down these mandates on legal grounds.

But there may be an even better reason to end these vaccine mandates. Dr. Luc Montagnier and Jed Rubenfeld, writing in The Wall Street Journal, say the nature of the Omicron variant has made these mandates moot. Dr. Montagnier won the Nobel prize in 2008 for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). They say, “It would be irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen they target.”

The mandates were issued on November 5, 2021, when the Omicron variant had yet to be discovered in South Africa. At that time, the Delta variant represented almost all U.S. Covid-19 cases, and both the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services appropriately considered Delta their concern and that vaccines were effective against it. But all of that has changed since then.

These authors say since January 1, 2022, Omicron represented more than 95% of U.S. Covid cases, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Because some of Omicron’s 50 mutations are known to evade antibody protection, because more than 30 of those mutations are to the spike protein used as an immunogen by the existing vaccines, and because there have been mass Omicron outbreaks in heavily vaccinated populations, scientists are highly uncertain the existing vaccines can stop it from spreading.

The legal argument is that SCOTUS held in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) that the right to refuse medical treatment could be overcome when society needs to curb the spread of a contagious epidemic. This is the crux of the case as argued before SCOTUS last week. But mandating a vaccine to stop the spread of a disease requires evidence that the vaccines will prevent infection or transmission. While it is true that the vaccines are effective in reducing hospitalizations and death, they are less effective in preventing infection or transmission.

To be sure, the mandates are defining “vaccinated” as having received at least two shots of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and one shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The protection from getting Omicron is poor with this definition, but improves with booster shots, though it’s uncertain how long this added protection will last.

The good news is that the overwhelming majority of symptomatic U.S. Omicron cases have been mild, according to the CDC. These authors suggest “The best policy might be to let Omicron run its course while protecting the most vulnerable, naturally immunizing the vast majority against Covid through infection by a relatively benign strain. As Sir Andrew Pollard, head of the U.K.’s Committee on Vaccination and Immunization, said in a recent interview, “We can’t vaccinate the planet every four or six months. It’s not sustainable or affordable.”

The main point of these authors is that mandating a vaccine for all workers will not prevent the spread of the Omicron variant and therefore is bad public health policy. In their words, “In other words, there is no scientific basis for believing these mandates will curb the spread of the disease.”

Unfortunately, it seems some of the SCOTUS justices are getting their scientific facts from unreliable sources. Justice Steven Breyer suggested that if mandatory vaccination went forward, that would prevent all new Covid infections – 750,000 new cases every day. Justice Sonia Sotomayor asserted that “we have over 100,000 children. . . in serious condition, many on ventilators.” Both Justices have their facts completely wrong. According to Health and Human Services Department data, there are currently fewer than 3,500 confirmed pediatric Covid hospitalizations, and that includes patients who tested positive but were hospitalized for other reasons.

Hopefully, SCOTUS will decide this case based on the U.S. Constitution, not on misinformation regarding the effectiveness of the vaccines or the number of hospitalizations in children.