Joe Nocera

I downloaded my vaccine passport the other day. Of course, it wasn’t called a vaccine passport. Rather, it was an “Excelsior Pass,” issued by New York State. In addition to verifying that I have been fully vaccinated, it has a QR code that ticket-takers can scan when I want to go to Madison…

I spend a lot of time around lawyers, so I can tell you with some authority that they were thrilled by one aspect of their work lives during the pandemic. They stopped flying. Lawyers who spent most weeks jetting from one courtroom to another were suddenly spending their time at home, communing…

In November, I told the story of DemeTech Corp., a family-owned manufacturer of surgical products in Miami. Although the company had never made personal protective equipment, when the pandemic hit last spring, it hired around 600 workers and invested several million dollars to get into the PPE…

Early Wednesday afternoon, as the siege of the US Capitol building was underway, Jay Timmons, the chief executive officer of the National Association of Manufacturers, issued a remarkable statement. The association represents more than 1,000 industrial companies, including Exxon Mobil Corp.,…

If you’re a person of a certain age, you most likely have a vague memory of being vaccinated for polio. Your mother took you to the doctor’s office, where you rolled up your sleeve and bravely let him administer a shot. You tried not to cry. Getting a polio vaccination was a big deal in the mid…

In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, it’s deja vu all over again. On Tuesday morning, the US Justice Department filed its highly anticipated antitrust lawsuit against Google and its parent, Alphabet Inc. Given the antitrust division’s performance during the past four years — such as suing car…

D.A. Henderson was a remarkable man. An expert in bioterrorism, dean of what is now the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and frequent adviser to US presidents, Henderson was best known as the man who eradicated smallpox in the 1970s. His knowledge of infectious diseases was…

Remember when President Donald Trump promised to revive the coal industry? When he vowed to “put our miners back to work” during his 2016 campaign trips to coal country? When he said he would end “the war on coal?” A half-dozen times after becoming president, Trump signed bills and executive orders…