WATCH: Big Tech bias, energy vulnerability and the GLP-1 patent fight

OPINION:

I’m Anat Hartmann, Deputy Commentary Editor for The Washington Times. Here’s a look at some of this week’s op-eds.

First, the Heritage Foundation’s Victoria Coates writes that, given the squeeze Iran has put on the Strait of Hormuz since the start of the joint U.S.-Israeli operation against the regime in Tehran, the U.S. needs its own version of the Petroline.

That’s Saudi Aramco’s 746-mile system that carries crude across Saudi Arabia, built to bypass the Strait in the event of a situation exactly like the one we’re now seeing, Coates says. Recently, Petroline’s capacity surged to 7 million barrels a day, she writes.

The U.S. needs to heed the lesson of Petroline and invest in its own robust and redundant energy infrastructure to ensure we can fuel ourselves and supply our plentiful energy resources to partners and allies.

Next, antitrust expert Ediberto Roman writes a piece on Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson’s recent warning to tech giant Apple about the political slant of its news aggregator offerings.

According to a Media Research Center report cited by Mr. Ferguson, of the 620 top stories Apple News displayed in January, 440 were from left-leaning outlets and precisely zero were from right-leaning outlets, including widely read sources that frequently break major stories, such as Fox News and the New York Post.

The FTC chair, Roman says, isn’t looking for a long, expensive, futile legal battle. He is just putting Apple on notice. Hopefully that’s enough to make the company a little more bipartisan in the curation of its top stories.

Finally, we have a piece by the Pacific Research Institute’s Wayne Winegarden, who discusses the need for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reject pressure to rescind the patent rights of GLP-1 medications, drugs developed to treat diabetes and now used widely to combat obesity. Proponents of patent rescission say it would decrease the cost of the drugs. 

But, Winegarden said, it’s competition that will lower prices. Developing innovative treatments is a long, expensive process that can take up to 15 years and cost $2.6 billion, he writes. 

That’s why the U.S. government grants patents — giving innovators the exclusive right to manufacture and sell their inventions for a set period that lets them recover their cost of capital.

And competition between different GLP-1s is already bringing prices down for consumers, he says.

To read these and other hard-hitting op-eds, visit WashingtonTimes.com/opinion.