Sometimes the sheer stupidity, posturing, and lack of insight by policymakers are breathtaking. As a form of virtue signaling, the Biden administration has just announced U.S. support at the World Health Organization (under TRIPS, the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) for waivers of patents on COVID-19 vaccines.

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Having spent our adult lives involved with and supporting science and technology, it is frustrating and infuriating to endure uninformed politicians, pundits, and ideologues bloviating about the climate, to say nothing of the pointless dithering about whether we should be referring to climate change or to the climate crisis. But the genuine catastrophe-in-waiting is that the policies they advocate will irreparably damage the economy while leaving the climate essentially unaffected.

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The study of genetics has always been an attempt to understand our biologically determined fate. Many of us know of families with a predisposition to maladies like heart disease or breast cancer. There are many kinds of interventions that can modulate the effects of our genetic endowment, whether directly (as in highly sophisticated gene therapy for genetic diseases) or pharmaceutical treatments, such as human growth hormone for growth hormone deficiency.

But even when such targeted interventions aren't possible, we can modulate the effects of metabolic abnormalities that predispose to disease. Examples include antihypertensive medicines to lower blood pressure and drugs to reduce levels of blood cholesterol and triglycerides.

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The first Earth Day celebration was conceived by then-U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson and held in 1970 as a "symbol of environmental responsibility and stewardship." In the spirit of the time, it was a touchy-feely, consciousness-raising, New Age experience, and most activities were organized at the grassroots level.

Sadly, today's Earth Day shares something with the current political environment: It reeks of divisiveness.

Earth Day has devolved into an occasion for environmental Cassandras to prophesy apocalypse, dish antitechnology dirt, and proselytize for a "woke" agenda. Passion and zeal routinely trump science, and provability takes a back seat to plausibility.

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Joe Biden has benefited from the popular wisdom that he is a consensus builder, promoter of national unity, and an empathetic, straight-talking, working class guy from Scranton, Pennsylvania.

By all accounts, these are notions that should already have evaporated less than three months into his presidency. Bipartisanship has been nonexistent; his political stance has shifted far to the left; and his commission to study Supreme Court "reforms" appears to be a prelude to packing the court, a brazen power-grab. Nevertheless, the presidential speechwriters, flacks, and apparatchiks have obviously been instructed to emphasize Biden's supposed kinder, gentler, collaborative, truthful qualities at every opportunity.

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