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April 2020

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It’s almost as if the Democrats don’t want people saved from COVID-19 By Andrea Widburg

By on April 3rd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/its_almost_as_if_the_democrats_dont_want_people_saved_from_covid19.html

The urgent search for a COVID-19 cure means that the usual scientific approach to testing medicines – big studies with careful control groups – is not an option. We can’t wait that long. Instead, trial and error, along with an accretion of anecdotal data, is the best we’ve got.

This method has yielded one significant possibility for treating COVID-19: Chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine (which are similar malaria drugs), along with azithromycin and zinc. (For ease, I’ll refer here to the whole treatment as “chloroquine.”)

Funnily enough, though, the Democrats are incredibly hostile to the chloroquine. One has to wonder if they’re hoping, not for the best, but for the worst.

Fairly early in the COVID-19 pandemic, China said that it had seen some good outcomes with chloroquine. Others began noting the same thing. In early March, UPI reported that South Korean experts recommended anti-malarial drugs to treat coronavirus.

Chloroquine also got a boost when Prof. Didier Raoult, a famous virologist, published a study showing that, of eighty in-patients treated with chloroquine, seventy-eight recovered fully, one died, and one remained ill. Raoult felt so strongly about chloroquine’s benefits that he concluded it would be unethical to have a control group that did not receive the medicine. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that another study from China pointed to chloroquine as a possible cure.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Don’t Count on the Model Prediction for Coronavirus Deaths By Spike Hampson

By on April 3rd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/dont_count_on_the_model_prediction_for_coronavirus_deaths.html

For the first time in decades, Americans who hear the word “model” are more likely to visualize a graph than a woman on a runway.  Now, in the era of the coronavirus, we all are morbidly fixated on the projections that the experts are making regarding the number of people who will contract the virus and the number of them who can be expected to die.

On March 31 at the daily White House briefing, we heard from Drs. Fauci and Birx that the most credible model anticipates a final outcome of 100,000–200,000 American deaths due to the virus.  Subsequent discussion repeatedly stressed that the actual number might be much higher or much lower depending on whether the social distancing guidelines are followed.  The more these two highly respected scientists discussed the matter, the more evident it became that the model cannot be relied on to provide assurance about how the pandemic will play out.  This is not a failure on the part of these two credible scientists; it is a failure of the model.

When one does not know the current level of infection in the population, when little information is available about how quickly the virus can be transmitted from one person to the next, when we remain unsure of whether asymptomatic corona carriers are as contagious as those with symptoms, when nobody seems to know how long the average asymptomatic carrier remains in that state, when we are unable to determine the actual mortality rate among the afflicted — when basic pieces of the puzzle such as these have yet to be inserted into the bigger picture, it is unreasonable to expect this particular model to predict accurately.

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Infectious Disease Specialist Says Use of Coronavirus Drugs Touted By Trump Are ‘Absolute Game Changer’By Debra Heine

By on April 3rd, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/02/infectious-disease-specialist-says-use-of-coronavirus-drugs-touted-by-trump-are-absolute-game-changer/

A noted infectious disease specialist who has treated 72 COVID-19 patients with the drugs hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin is claiming  that the combined use of the antimalarial medication and antibiotic are “an absolute game changer” in the war against the disease.

The results have been so promising, Dr. Stephen Smith, founder of The Smith Center for Infectious Diseases and Urban Health, told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that “this could be the beginning of the end of the pandemic.”

During an appearance on “Ingraham Angle” Wednesday night, Smith pointed out that not a single COVID-19 patient that he put on the hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin regimen for five days or more has had to be intubated, a medical procedure that involves putting a tube into a patient’s trachea and placing them on a ventilator for respiratory support. Most of the people, he said, got better after only two days on the drug cocktail.

“The chance of that occurring by chance, according to my sons Leon and Hunter who did some stats for me, are .000-something,” he said, adding that “it’s ridiculously low.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hydroxychloroquine rated ‘most effective therapy’ by doctors for coronavirus: Global survey Drug known for treating malaria used by U.S. doctors mostly for high-risk COVID-19 patients By Valerie Richardson

By on April 3rd, 2020

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/2/hydroxychloroquine-rated-most-effective-therapy-do/

An international poll of more than 6,000 doctors released Thursday found that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was the most highly rated treatment for the novel coronavirus.

The survey conducted by Sermo, a global health care polling company, of 6,227 physicians in 30 countries found that 37% of those treating COVID-19 patients rated hydroxychloroquine as the “most effective therapy” from a list of 15 options.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave chloroquine and its next-generation derivative, hydroxychloroquine, emergency-use authorization Monday for treating the novel coronavirus, although the drug was already being used off-label by some doctors and hospitals for COVID-19 patients.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Reviving Racial Preferences in the Golden State Democrats exploit pandemic to dump the SAT, and target the voter-approved California Civil Rights Initiative. Lloyd Billingsley

By on April 3rd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/reviving-racial-preferences-golden-state-lloyd-billingsley/

The University of California will relax undergraduate admissions requirements for students looking to enroll at UC for fall 2020 “and future years as applicable,” the office of the UC President announced this week.

“The COVID-19 outbreak is a disaster of historic proportions disrupting every aspect of our lives, including education for high school students, among others,” said University of California President Janet Napolitano.” UC Board of Regents chairman John Pérez expanded on that theme.

“We want to help alleviate the tremendous disruption and anxiety that is already overwhelming prospective students due to COVID-19,” said Pérez. “By removing artificial barriers and decreasing stressors – including suspending the use of the SAT – for this unprecedented moment in time, we hope there will be less worry for our future students.”

Description of the Scholastic Aptitude Test as an “artificial barrier,” would surprise the College Board, which administers the SAT, a proven objective measure of student achievement. For that reason, politically correct UC bosses have been seeking to junk it. As Saul Geiser of UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education said last year,  “If UC cannot legally consider the effect or race and segregation on test performance, neither should it consider SAT or ACT scores.” So the push to dump the SAT is all about race.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Coronavirus – Another Milestone For a Communist Gulag Brought to you by the mass murderers who spawned the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square. Don Feder

By on April 3rd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/coronavirus-another-typical-milestone-communist-don-feder/

The Coronavirus: Brought to you by those wonderful folks who gave China the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square.

Wuhan is nothing new for a regime that’s been sacrificing innocents to its demented ideology for over 70 years.Politically, nothing has changed since the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed on October 1, 1949.

The PRC is still a totalitarian state where dissent is brutally crushed, the Party is all powerful and human life is cheap.

Less than a year after the PRC was established, Mao sent his “volunteer” army of 3 million across the Yalu River to intervene in the Korean War, prolonging the conflict by almost three years and resulting in tens of thousands of Chinese, American and Korean casualties.

Then came the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962) in which 45 million died in a famine caused by Mao’s insane ambition to match Britain in iron and steel production, and setting fantastic targets for agricultural output. Much of the latter was used to repay debts to the Soviet Union or donated to Third World countries to buy influence.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Whither Woke Culture in an Era of Pandemic? What effect might this plague have on the Left’s pampered soy boys and pussy-hat feminists? Bruce Bawer

By on April 3rd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/whither-woke-culture-era-pandemic-bruce-bawer/

Last week, in the New York Post, Kyle Smith made a thoughtful argument that, in the COVID-19 era, “the woke virus,” too, “is spreading faster than ever.” He quoted a statement on Twitter by actress Fran Drescher that the Chinese virus is a product of capitalism; he noted the “vomitatious ‘Imagine’ video praising open borders, socialism and atheism” that was posted online by Gal Gadot and other C-list celebrities in response to the pandemic; and he cited inane claims by various activists that the coronavirus disproportionately disadvantages women or people of color. “Next year,” Smith concluded, “there will probably be a vaccine for coronavirus. But there will never be an inoculation for woke stupidity.”

He may be right. But during these strange weeks when all the world has been united in being apart, I’ve kept nourishing the hope that woke culture may turn out to be one of the casualties of this plague. In fact I’ve pretty much talked myself into believing that it will be. After all, what could more effectively expose the absurdity of the concept of microaggressions than a macroaggression on the scale of the coronavirus? When an increasing number of Americans are infected by a very real and malignant corporeal contagion, how many people are going to keep buying the leftist fiction that no country on earth is more riddled with the contagion of prejudice than the United States? In a time when we’re all “social distancing” to save our skins, who will dare to carry on about the need for “safe spaces” as protection from mere words? 

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Trump Responds to Schumer’s Coronavirus Criticism: ‘I Never Knew How Bad a Senator You Are’ By Tobias Hoonhout

By on April 3rd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/coronavirus-crisis-president-trump-responds-to-chuck-schumer-criticism-i-never-knew-how-bad-a-senator-you-are/

““If you spent less time on your ridiculous impeachment hoax, which went haplessly on forever and ended up going nowhere (except increasing my poll numbers), and instead focused on helping the people of New York, then New York would not have been so completely unprepared,” Trump leveled. “. . . You have been missing in action, except when it comes to the ‘press.’”

President Trump sent a scathing letter to Senator Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) after the Senate minority leader criticized the president’s coronavirus response and demanded that he establish someone “unpolitical” to oversee the flow of medical equipment to embattled providers.

“No wonder AOC and others are thinking about running against you in the primary. If they did, they would likely win,” Trump wrote. “ . . . I’ve known you for many years, but I never knew how bad a senator you are for the state of New York, until I became president.”

The criticism comes after Schumer claimed Trump was politicizing the government’s coronavirus response, after reports that hospitals and other medical providers are facing shortages of crucial medical equipment. “It is the cruelest irony that this nation is now dependent on China for many of these products,” Governor Andrew Cuomo said at his daily press briefing on Thursday.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Coronavirus Recriminations Come First House Democrats tee up virus investigations before the election.

By on April 3rd, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-recriminations-come-first-11585869942?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

“It’s an election year, so politics was always going to fill up that space in congressional brains where the frontal lobe is supposed to be. But couldn’t Democrats at least wait for the intensive-care units to empty?”

While most Americans under coronavirus lockdown are worrying about their jobs, their groceries, and their local doctors and nurses, congressional Democrats have other priorities. To wit, pin blame on the Trump Administration before the November election.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that she will appoint a House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis. Its task will be to oversee—meaning investigate—the government’s aid efforts, which so far run to more than $2 trillion. “Where there’s money there’s also frequently mischief,” Mrs. Pelosi said. “We want to make sure there are not exploiters out there.”

Some Members of Mrs. Pelosi’s caucus think that every corporation is an “exploiter” of one kind or another. Their goal will not be to protect federal dollars but to highlight unpopular companies that get a grant or loan and then claim it’s the result of political favoritism. The only question is which ones will become the next Halliburton (Dick Cheney during Iraq) or Koch brothers (all-purpose villains).

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Notre Dame’s Critical State: A Visual Guide The famed cathedral remains in danger after last year’s fire, and now the pandemic has paused restoration

By on April 3rd, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/graphics/notre-dame-fix/?mod=article_inline&mod=hp_lead_pos10

Almost a year after last April’s devastating fire, Notre Dame is still in a fragile state. Workers had been racing to stabilize the 800-year-old structure before the effort was suspended indefinitely last month due to the coronavirus pandemic, putting the project in even greater jeopardy.

The fire destroyed a section of the cathedral that acted as the linchpin of its medieval design: its roof and central spire. Like a ballast, the spire and roof pushed downward and outward on Notre Dame’s limestone walls, countering the inward pressure generated by the cathedral’s flying buttresses and massive facade. 

Without the spire and roof in place, the limestone walls of Notre Dame’s nave are at risk of tilting inward and its vaulted ceiling can buckle. Already, about 15% of the ceiling collapsed during the fire and over the summer. Notre Dame’s famous flying buttresses are still pushing against the walls, but without the counterweight of the roof and spire, they are at risk of collapsing if the vaults give way. The gables are also at risk because they are no longer supported by the roof. The north gable nearly collapsed during the fire. 

Water used to douse the flames created fissures in the massive stones that arc above Notre Dame’s nave, and seeped into the joints and mortar, leading to crumbling. Some of that water may have frozen over the winter, potentially weakening the structure further. The cathedral is covered in lead that melted from the roof and spire, which were made of several hundred tons of the toxic metal. Workers doing cleanup wear hazmat suits to prevent lead contamination and shower each time they leave the site. Back outside, charred scaffolding looms at the cathedral’s most vulnerable point, where the spire once rose. It had been erected for restoration efforts before the fire. Now distorted and highly unstable, it has been swaying in the wind and rain. Its collapse would be catastrophic. 

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