Brownstone Institute
The Djokovic Outrage

BY
Tennis champion Novak Djokovic, who played in the 2021 US Open final, will not play in the 2022 U.S. Open, because of a Biden administration rule that bans unvaccinated non-resident foreigners from entering the U.S. Unvaccinated citizens and foreign permanent residents, who are covid-19 positive, are allowed to enter.
CDC now says the unvaccinated should be treated like the vaccinated
The Biden administration’s excuse is that they are just religiously “following the science.” But, that excuse is no longer available as earlier this month the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) altered its covid-19 guidance saying that the unvaccinated should be treated as the vaccinated:
“CDC’s COVID-19 prevention recommendations no longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status because breakthrough infections occur, though they are generally mild, and persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection.”
Despite this reversal from the CDC, the Biden administration still bans unvaccinated non-resident foreigners, like Novak Djokovic, who test negative for covid-19. Welcome to the anti-science, anti-freedom world of Novak Djokovic Vax Mandate Land.
Even more hypocritical is the Biden administration’s present immigration policy that makes exemptions for foreigners who enter illegally south of the U.S. border. Where does “the science,” say that someone unvaccinated who enters illegally is not a health threat, and a foreigner who attempts to enter legally is? That the Biden administration allows unvaccinated, possibly covid-19 positive (untested) foreigners to enter the country illegally via the Southern border with Mexico, but bans an unvaccinated foreigner that tests negative for covid-19, from entering the country legally is unjust in principle and makes a mockery of the rule of law.
Why doesn’t Novak just get vaccinated?
Before he implemented his diet and lifestyle changes, Djokovic’s body tended to break down in long matches as I saw in his 2005 US Open match. I first saw Djokovic play in the 2005 US Open in the first round against French tennis superstar Gael Monfils, where his body broke down in the 4th set which he lost 0-6. After a medical timeout, he did come back to win in the 5th. His early history of breaking down led former US Open champ, Andy Roddick, to quip about Djokovic: “back and hip injury, cramps, bird flu, common cold, and SARS as well.” Today, Djokovic is recognized as the “iron man of tennis,” thanks to his meticulous attention to how he treats his body.
For people who are young and healthy, and do not have compromised immune systems, covid-19 presents a relatively lower threat to their health. This point is made in the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020:
“We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza. As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity….The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.”
Covid-19 vaccinations are not the panacea that those who religiously mandate universal vaccinations make them out to be, and are also not without their dangers. In some groups, particularly young athletes they have been correlated with heart issues. Though it is a rare phenomenon, it is one that must be considered.
Given that Djokovic has already recovered from a previous covid-19 natural infection, he has natural immunity which, according to a pivotal Israeli study in 2021, is as good as and even superior to artificial immunity:
“This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 [Pfizer-BioNTech] two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.”
Hundreds of other studies have confirmed similar results of protection from natural immunity over-vaccination alone. So, neither does Djokovic’s status as unvaccinated pose a threat to himself.
Vaccination, like any medical treatment, is a personal decision, to be made by the individual. Given that Djokovic has natural immunity from a previous infection (which is superior in terms of protection to double vaccination), covid-19 is far less dangerous to a younger, healthy athlete (covid-19 primarily affects the elderly with a “more than a thousand-fold difference in covid-19 mortality between older and younger people”), and some athletes have had health issues after injecting the relatively new vaccine, it makes sense that Djokovic chose not to get vaccinated despite what the chattering classes and armchair doctors opine. (As a sidenote Gael Monfils was temporarily sidelined for most of 2022, in part, after significant health issues that appeared after he received his third booster shot.)
If one gains natural immunity from prior infection and thus is “naturally vaccinated” why does the U.S. government not treat such “natural vaccination” the same as “artificial vaccination?” The answer is revealed by Dr. Paul Offit – a member, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, of the FDA panel that advises the Biden administration on dealing with covid-19 – when he explains how the FDA panel came about the decision to not recognize natural immunity: it was not a scientific decision, but a bureaucratic one.
American Tennis players speak up for Djokovic, as the US Tennis Association (USTA) remains silent
Many American tennis athletes have spoken up for Djokovic including 7-time grand slam champion John McEnroe who voiced his support:
“US Government and USTA must work together to allow him to play. If unvaccinated American players can play, Djokovic as one of the legends of the game must be allowed to play. MAKE IT HAPPEN, USTA!”
Other American players supporting Djokovic, include American number one Taylor Fritz (“So it does seem like, you know, what’s the harm of letting the best player in the world come play the US Open?”), John Isner (the ban is “complete lunacy”), and unvaccinated American tennis player Tennys Sangren (who will be playing in this year’s US Open, unvaccinated), as have American politicians (all Republican).
The world’s number one tennis player, and the reigning men’s US Open champion, Daniel Medvedev has also spoken out saying that Novak should be allowed to play.
USTA should have asked for a “national interest” exemption for Djokovic
The “US Open” is named after the United States of America, a country founded on the idea of the individual’s inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Inalienable means that such rights do not come from the government, but are inherent in the individual by their status as a human being. One does not gain rights by being a U.S. citizen/permanent resident; one does not lose rights by being a non-resident foreigner. The Biden administration’s treatment of Novak Djokovic is a clear violation of those principles.
Given that Djokovic’s immunization status poses a health threat to no one, his presence on U.S. soil violates the rights of no one. Given that the CDC has said it is safe for Novak to play, he should be allowed to play. There were several ways this could have happened; the easiest way was for the Biden administration to “follow the science” that it claims to follow and repeal the vaccine mandate requirement entirely that targets non-resident foreigners. This did not happen for Djokovic.
The USTA could have asked for a “national interest” exemption for Djokovic given his status as a professional athlete and the given circumstances. Given the CDC has said the unvaccinated should be treated the same as the vaccinated, the USTA should have asked Mr. Biden to give Djokovic an exemption to enter the US legally, as Biden does for diplomats, refugees, and hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated illegal immigrants.
Sadly, the USTA refused to make any effort to speak up for Djokovic, as has its figurehead “woman’s rights advocate” Billie Jean King, for whom the US Open tennis center is named. (Sadly, for Djokovic, he both “identifies” as and is biologically a “man.”) Would Billie Jean King, and her virtue-signaling bureaucrats at the USTA be silent if such treatment was fostered on Serena Williams?
“My body, my choice” doesn’t only apply to women when pregnant (as in the case of abortion), but applies to all individuals, in all matters, regardless of sex, including the choice to be vaccinated or not. It appears that the USTA, being staffed by Democrats, does not wish to offend the unpopular Biden as if their lack of criticism would improve his popularity.
As a lifetime member of the USTA, I find their inaction toward the injustice towards Novak Djokovic a moral disgrace. The USTA should consider removing “US” from their name and moving the tournament from the city symbolized by the Statue of Liberty or renaming their tournament “US Closed” to immigrants and foreigners who do not genuflect to the whims of their leader. So much for the nation of “Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The United State Tennis Association’s refusal to speak against Biden’s anti-science, anti-freedom ban of Novak Djokovic from playing in the 2022 US Open is a disgrace.
Novak Djokovic is an international symbol for “my body, my choice”
Djokovic’s unjust treatment by the US government is an imitation of the Australian federal government banning him from playing in the first Grand Slam of the year, the Australian Open, which demonstrated the ban against Djokovic and foreigners like him has nothing to do with science but is purely political. Djokovic was allowed to play in the 2022 French Open and 2022 Wimbledon as the French and British governments have repealed their vaccine mandate policies. Do science and the laws of reality change when one travels to a different country? No, only politics does.
Early this year, it was the anti-freedom, anti-science Australian federal government which harassed, imprisoned, and ceremoniously deported Djokovic (who had a legal travel VISA issued by the Australian government) from Australia preventing him from winning the title on his favorite surface on the hard courts of Melbourne; it was the relatively more freedom-loving, more pro-science British government that allowed Djokovic to enter the UK and win his 7th Wimbledon crown. In the Australian Open’s defense, at least Tennis Australia fought the federal government to get Novak to play. No such effort is being made by the United States Tennis Association (USTA), which is hypocritically silent on the case of the 21-time grand slam champion.
Despite CDC change in guidance to treat the unvaccinated as the vaccinated, the Biden administration has chosen to follow “vaccine apartheid” fascism over “my body, my choice” freedom.
Vaccinations, like any medical treatment, have their pros and cons and must be considered in the full context, in line with other treatments available, based not on the utilitarian needs of government bureaucrats and their political interests, but on the self-interest (pursuit of happiness) and political rights of the individual.
As a world-class male athlete, Novak Djokovic’s example shows that an unvaccinated individual can be a model of health and sports excellence, and survive a covid-19 infection thus gaining natural immunity, all without being vaccinated for covid-19. Such an example is something no vaccine mandate/freedom-hating government official can tolerate.
Novak Djokovic symbolizes the countless number of individuals whose rights are violated because of unscientific and anti-freedom vaccine mandates. Novak Djokovic is not the villain in this story, he is the hero.
This article has been updated given Djokovic’s withdrawal from the 2022 US Open.
Reprinted from Capitalism Magazine.
Brownstone Institute
If the President in the White House can’t make changes, who’s in charge?

From the Brownstone Institute
By
Who Controls the Administrative State?
President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.
It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.
The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.
How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.
All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.
The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.
Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.
This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.
The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.
The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.
The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.
There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.
Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.
After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?
So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.
What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.
We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.
All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.
What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.
For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.
That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.
There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.
First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.
That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.
Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.
In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.
Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?
Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.
Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.
If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.
The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?
Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.
Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.
Brownstone Institute
Hysteria over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Promise to Make Vaccines Safer

From the Brownstone Institute
By
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterizations of things I have said that are simply not true. When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Within hours, my news feed was populated with angsty articles hand-wringing about the future of vaccines under Kennedy, whom legacy media and the establishment are certain would confiscate life-saving vaccine programs, raising the spectre of mass waves of illness and death.
In particular, this quote from Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the only Republican who voted against Kennedy’s confirmation, appeared over and over again:
“I’m a survivor of childhood polio. In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”
Yet, I could not find one piece of mainstream coverage of this quote that mentioned the astonishing fact that 98% of polio cases in 2023, the most recent year for which we have full data, were caused by the polio vaccine.
You read that correctly. In 2023, 12 wild polio cases were recorded (six in Afghanistan, six in Pakistan), with a further 524 circulating vaccine-derived cases, mostly throughout Africa. This trend is in keeping with data from the previous several years.
An important contextualising detail, wouldn’t you think?

The cause of this polio resurgence is that the world’s poor are given the oral polio vaccine (OPV), which contains a weakened virus that can replicate in the gut and spread in feces, causing vaccine-derived outbreaks.
People in rich countries get the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which does not contain live virus and therefore does not carry the risk of spreading the very disease it’s vaccinating against.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and vaccine-promoting organisations say that the way out of the problem is to vaccinate harder, as the argument goes that outbreaks only occur in under-vaccinated communities.
This may be well and good, but the total omission of the fact from media coverage that the goalposts have shifted from eradicating wild polio (not yet complete but nearly there, according to the WHO) to eradicating vaccine-derived polio (the main problem these days) underscores that this is why hardly anyone who knows anything trusts the media anymore.
A member of my extended family has polio. It’s nasty and life-altering and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
That’s why I would hope that any vaccines given would be safe – contracting polio from the supposedly preventative vaccine is the worst-case scenario, second only to death.
This is Kennedy’s expressly stated aim.
“When people actually hear what I think about vaccines, which is common sense, which is vaccines should be tested, they should be safe, everyone should have informed consent,” he said at his confirmation press conference.
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterisations of things I have said that are simply not true.
“When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Grown-ups who support vaccines can walk and chew gum. From the point of view of the public health establishment, the polio vaccine has prevented millions of cases and has nearly eradicated the disease.
At the same time, the world’s poorest are afflicted with polio outbreaks which we can work to prevent, and the safety of all polio vaccine products on the market should be subject to the rigorous standards applied to all other medicines.
Unless you think that poor people don’t matter, in which case the status quo might suit you fine.
Republished from the author’s Substack
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