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April 2020

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What Is The True Level Of Mortality Caused By The Covid-19 Virus? Francis Menton

By on April 28th, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-4-27-what-is-the-real-level-of-mortality-from-the-chinese-flu

Several commenters on yesterday’s post express a strong interest in learning the true level of mortality from the Chinese Virus. Are the numbers reported at sites like Worldometers as “Coronavirus Deaths” accurate and reliable, or are they inflated? Or, for that matter, could it be that the number of “Coronavirus Deaths” is under-reported for reasons that could include people dying at home without ever being tested?

My answer is that it is impossible to know at this point. The best indication we will get will come when the CDC issues final data for deaths from all causes in the U.S. for the month of April. When we get that number, we can subtract from it the approximate “normal” number of deaths that would have occurred anyway during April. The difference will be a good estimate of the number of excess deaths attributable to the virus. My prediction is that that number will be far less than the number of “Coronavirus Deaths” being officially reported. I’ll bet on about half or even less; but I’m the first to admit that I could be proved wrong.

The problem with attributing deaths to the virus begins with the fundamental problem of all scientific endeavor, which is that events in the real world have not just one but many causes. As a common example closely related to the subject of this post, many patients with cancer get pneumonia at the final stage of their disease. Did they die from the cancer or from the pneumonia? Or from both? When you look at the CDC statistics, you will see that each death has been assigned uniquely to just one of the major categories. In this case, each death has been assigned either to cancer or to pneumonia, not both. But how did someone decide that death A was from cancer, but death B was from pneumonia, when the patients had both and were in terminal condition? Generally, there is not much riding on the decision, and if it is made arbitrarily — half to one, half to the other — that’s probably fine.

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VIVA THE PROTESTERS BY SYDNEY WILLIAMS

By on April 28th, 2020

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Protests have been around for centuries. The Protestant Reformation in northern Europe in the early 16thCentury was a protest against the universality of the Catholic Church. Americans protested England, beginning with the Boston Tea Party in 1773 and ending at Yorktown in 1781; the French stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789. The Russian Revolution of 1917 toppled the Tsars. Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution in China in 1949 forever changed that country, killing an estimated 20 to 40 million people. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 followed protests. In our country, in the past half century, we have seen marches for civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights. We have had anti-war protests. More recently we had the Tea Party movement, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Woman’s March and March for Life. How productive they have been is a matter of debate. Writing last year in “Perspective Magazine,” Chaya Benyamin wrote: “Protest rhetoric is more about preaching to the choir than it is about changing hearts and minds.” A Harvard study of the Tea Party movement, three years ago, had similar nebulous conclusions. But, as an observer, it seems that all these protests resulted in change, some revolutionary.

A reader in Louisiana, a retired lawyer, e-mailed a week ago: “President Trump’s having essentially accepted the epidemiologists’ over-reaction to an admittedly dangerous virus will be historically judged to be by far his greatest first-person policy error.” I tend to agree. Never before, in the history of this Country, was a decision made to intentionally shut down the nation’s economy. In an essay titled “Innovation versus the Coronavirus,” Bill Gates referred to the current pandemic as “the first modern pandemic.” But is it? The 1957-1958 H2N2 virus was called a pandemic, as were the 1968 H3N2 virus and the 2009 H1N1 pdm09 virus.  Those three pandemics killed 2.25 million people worldwide, including 230,000 in the U.S.

The President was put in an untenable position. In early January, when China knew of how contagious and deadly the virus could be, scientists and medical experts around the world, including the WHO, CDC, FDA and Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIAID downplayed its malignancy, as did politicians from both Parties. It wasn’t until February that models, many using erroneous data inputs, began showing horrific projections. So personal and political fears, as well as the dread of litigation, obviated a calculated, rational response. Politicians did U-turns, with the media, which had been largely silent in January, jumping aboard. Lockdowns were imposed. Executive Orders were issued and, if not obeyed, offenders could be arrested. In truth, the virus was worse than Pollyanna’s first claimed, but not as bad as Cassandra’s later suggested.

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Anthony Fauci should explain ‘$3.7 million to the Wuhan laboratory’ Cheryl K. Chumley

By on April 28th, 2020

https://outline.com/UtUaaZ

President Donald Trump’s legal counsel, Rudy Giuliani, in a recent chat on “The Cats Roundtable” on New York AM 970 radio, suggested a good U.S. attorney general move about now would be to investigate key members of the past Barack Obama administration on the Wuhan, China, laboratory, to see what they knew and when they knew it.

And then he mentioned Dr. Anthony Fauci specifically.

And then he accused the prior Team Obama of sending $3.7 million to the lab in 2014 — at a time when that same Team Obama had banned the funding of any lab that was involved in virus experimentation.

And then he named Fauci as the guy who gave the money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

This — after Fox News reported more than a week ago that federal authorities have “high confidence” in the fact that COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, originated at Wuhan.

Ouch. Politically speaking, the perception of one of this administration’s loudest voices on the coronavirus front — the one calling for shutdowns and shut-ins and contact tracing-slash-government-tracking of American citizens — well, it doesn’t look good to have him tied financially to Wuhan.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

ONLY HERE- BY DANIEL GORDIS *******

By on April 28th, 2020

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/only-here/

As we heard our Jerusalem neighbors’ Sabbath prayers, I thought: we are locked down in the one place Jews would want to be locked dow

It sounded as if the voice was coming from the stones.

Every evening, as nightfall comes to Jerusalem, the buildings here, chameleon-like, change their colors. The streets in our neighborhood are quiet on Shabbat in any event, but lately, they’ve been almost ghostly, eerily silent. Nothing about the neighborhood has changed, but everything is different. So when Shabbat began the week before last, with that slightly golden tint coloring the buildings as the angle of the light shifted before the sun was gone, my wife and I stepped outside onto the terrace to breathe it all in.

We’d expected the usual quiet, the sound of little more than the birds and those proverbial Jerusalem cats. They were there, to be sure, but then, as we stared out over the railing towards the building next door and the street below, there was a voice. You could have mistaken it for the muezzin we often hear around here, bellowing from amplifiers and speakers in mosques closer to the Old City, but this was no muezzin. This was Hebrew.

We craned our necks, to no avail. We couldn’t see where it was coming from, but as the voice grew clearer, we quickly realized – it was Kabbalat Shabbat. From a porch somewhere, or from a window, maybe even a rooftop – who knows? – someone had taken it on himself, with all the synagogues shuttered, to gather together all the neighbors who couldn’t see (and maybe don’t even know) each other, to sing and to pray together. It was Shabbat in Jerusalem, after all. We were in isolation, whoever-he-was was saying, but we weren’t going to be isolated.

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Ruthie Blum :Israeli Memorial Day: Mourning in masks and ‘Ikea-Gate’ Public protests are allowed, even under coronavirus rules, since they involve the civil right to express dissatisfaction with the government.

By on April 28th, 2020

https://www.jns.org/opinion/israeli-memorial-day-mourning-in-masks-and-ikea-gate/

For the first time in the history of the Jewish state, mourners did not descend en masse upon the country’s 53 military cemeteries on Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism. Instead, small ceremonies—with the president, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, and other soldiers and dignitaries wearing surgical masks—took place on Monday evening at the Western Wall and on Tuesday morning at the Mount Herzl national cemetery.

This was not by choice.

As was the case ahead of Passover and Holocaust Remembrance Day this month, the Israeli government—at the urging of the Health Ministry—imposed a ban on gatherings due to the fear of a spike in COVID-19 infections. To explain each such restriction, health officials pointed to the drastic increase in the number coronavirus patients who caught the disease during the Purim holiday on March 9-10.

In spite of widespread disappointment, most of the public was obedient. Many connected with family and friends virtually via the video conferencing app Zoom. Those among the more stringently Orthodox or less computer-literate remained removed and forced to celebrate, or grieve, on their own.

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MY SAY: PEAKED AND PIQUED

By on April 28th, 2020

Well two items of potential good news:

Apparently in New York City the pandemic has peaked and hospitalizations are down, testing is up both for Covid and for antibodies.

Also what would appear to be good news:

Deaths from organ failure, heart disease, end stage cancer, strokes and autoimmune disorders are way down. Or, are they really?

And here is what I’m piqued about: The aforementioned illnesses have not abated. What is happening throughout New York hospitals is that many death certificates indicate Coronavirus, even if other serious maladies caused death.  I have heard this from doctors and other medical personnel.

This is scandalous! It will make gathering of real data and critical statistics virtually impossible. It requires a serious media or hospitals investigation.  rsk

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The COVID-19 Tragedy at the Nation’s Nursing Homes Julie Kelly

By on April 28th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/27/the-covid-19-tragedy-at-the-nations-nursing-homes/

Rather than focus on how to safeguard the most vulnerable among us, politicians have been preening for cable news cameras, blaming the president, halting the sale of vegetable seeds, and warning against small dinner parties in private homes. A tragedy, a failure, and a disgrace.

When the full history of how experts and politicians handled the spread of COVID-19 is written, the account will be littered with missteps, overreach, and unintended consequences.

Decisions that must be included on that long list of failures are the reliance on the disastrous charts produced by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, also known as the Murray model; the unprecedented quarantine of tens of millions of healthy Americans; the abrupt and devastating shutdown of the world’s most powerful economy; and freedom-destroying actions by power-grabbing politicians from governors down to judges and small-town mayors. It’s very possible, in terms of containing the disease and preventing future outbreaks, nearly everything we’ve been instructed to do has been wrong.

But the gravest mistake, historians likely will conclude, has been the deadly decision to knowingly mix COVID-19 patients with uninfected residents and health care workers in nursing homes.

The total death count due to COVID-19 in the United States, according to several tracking sources, is roughly 50,000 people since March 1. About 25 percent of the total fatalities tallied so far stem from nursing homes.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s Space Threat is the Problem By Brandon J. Weichert

By on April 28th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/27/irans-space-threat-is-the-problem/

One can expect Iran to launch many more satellites into orbit over the next year or so to complete the constellation it is developing. At that point, both North Korea and Iran would have the capability to threaten the technological American military with certain defeat.

The Trump Administration has issued an edict to the U.S. Navy: sink any Iranian vessel that harasses U.S. warships operating near Iran. The last two American presidents had to deal with Iranian brinkmanship at sea. Yet, never before has the White House given such an explicit order.

What changed?

First, the coronavirus pandemic not only has crippled the United States, it also has eviscerated the leadership of Iran, which already was grappling with an economic decline caused by the sanctions imposed by the Trump Administration for its wanton pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Second, as the global price of oil collapses, Iran’s economy is suffering even more than it already was (oil is a key commodity for Iran). This creates a negative feedback loop, making Iranian aggression more likely in the region.

Third, Iranian aggression against American forces in the region not only is on the rise, but Iran passed a major milestone recently: the country has placed its first indigenously produced satellite into orbit. Many believe that the satellite launch was merely cover for the testing of an Iranian ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear payload over any target in the world.

This is certainly a possibility.

But there’s something more to this launch that has American strategists concerned beyond the expected concern over Iran progressing in the critical domain of reliable ballistic missile capabilities.

More Than a Nuclear Threat

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Applying Israeli Sovereignty: Changing the ‘When,’ Not the ‘What’- Shoshana Bryen

By on April 28th, 2020

https://www.jns.org/opinion/applying-israeli-sovereignty-changing-the-when-not-the-what/

The presumption was that exchanges of “land for peace” would happen after an agreement with the Palestinians. But that left the timing up to them; if they didn’t agree, then it wouldn’t happen. And so far, it has not.

European Union foreign-policy chief Josip Borrell put forward a surprise resolution on Israel’s new government that included the following: “The E.U. does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over the occupied West Bank. The E.U. reiterates that any annexation would constitute a serious violation of international law.” But E.U. statements have to be unanimous, and Borrell was thwarted by members of his own club. The details aren’t clear yet, but Hungary and Austria were definitely opposed, and an Israeli diplomat noted that the largest number of E.U. delegates to date opposed a resolution aimed at Israel.

It was the second time Borrell made such a move, and the second time countries of the European Union opposed him. In February, Borrell had met with Iranian leaders and shortly thereafter tried to ram through a condemnation of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Mideast peace plan. Of the 27 E.U. members, six refused, including Italy, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic.

In an apparent “sop” to Israel, Borrell’s latest statement also said that the European Union is willing to continue cooperation with Israel on fighting the coronavirus. He appears to have been channeling Omar Barghouti, founder of the BDS movement, who blatantly compromised his anti-Semitic principles because Israel appears set to create something he wants to use. Barghouti said, “If Israel finds a cure for cancer, for example, or any other virus, then there is no problem in cooperating with Israel.” Borrell’s point is the same—the European Union will happily benefit from Israel’s medical and high-tech innovation, as well as use Israeli security mechanisms (including intelligence that has saved countless European lives by thwarting planned terrorist attacks). Nevertheless, criticism of Israel will be attached to everything it says.

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Coronavirus: China’s Global Intimidation Campaign The European Union Self-Censors to Appease China by Soeren Kern

By on April 28th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15943/coronavirus-china-intimidation

Chinese envoys have been especially aggressive on Twitter, which they are using to attack, intimidate and silence Western journalists, lawmakers and think tank scholars — essentially anyone who contradicts China’s official version of events.

Under pressure from Chinese officials, Esther Osorio, a communications adviser to Josep Borrell, the head of the EU diplomatic service, personally intervened to delay the release of the initial report. The EU was reportedly hoping to get better treatment for European companies in China. On April 25, however, the South China Morning Post, which also obtained a copy of the original report, revealed that Beijing had threatened to withhold medical supplies from Europe if the section on China was not removed.

On April 15, Germany’s most popular newspaper, Bild, published an article titled, “What China Owes Us So Far,” which suggested that China should pay Germany €150 billion ($162 billion) in reparations for the coronavirus pandemic. The article included an itemized list of economic damage, including €50 billion for losses to small businesses and €24 billion for lost tourism.

“You rule by surveillance. You wouldn’t be president without surveillance. You monitor everything, every citizen, but you refuse to monitor the diseased wet markets in your country.” — Julian Reichelt, editor-in-chief of Bild, “You Are Endangering the Entire World,” addressed directly to President Xi Jinping.

The European Union has caved in to pressure from China and has watered down a report on Chinese efforts to deflect blame for the coronavirus pandemic. Officials in Beijing reportedly threatened to block the export of medical supplies to Europe if the report was published in its original form.

The revelations come as Chinese diplomats around the world are waging an aggressive disinformation campaign — described as a “Wolf Warrior” style of diplomacy, named after a Chinese nationalist action film series — aimed at controlling the narrative about the origins of the coronavirus.

Chinese envoys have been especially aggressive on Twitter, which they are using to attack, intimidate and silence Western journalists, lawmakers and think tank scholars — essentially anyone who contradicts China’s official version of events.

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