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May 2022

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Myth of Biden the Uniter By David Harsanyi

By on May 6th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-myth-of-biden-the-uniter/

When the president was asked yesterday about the Roe v. Wade leak, he ranted about how the “MAGA crowd” was “really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history.”

First of all, does any sentient human really believe that conservatives took up pro-life cause — one that Biden himself championed in the past — in 2015? Candidate Trump had to do a lot of work to allay social-conservative fears over his inconsistent position. This was the entire impetus for releasing a list of potential SCOTUS nominees.

Anyway, Biden, a unifer at heart, noted many in media, had largely avoided such charged rhetoric. This, too, is a myth. It’s Biden who recently said that chasing moderate legislators into bathrooms to pressure them into supporting his agenda was just “part of the process.” It’s Biden who said that supporters of voter-ID laws are backing “21st-century Jim Crow.” He’s the one who calls Republicans “authoritarian” and claimed that we’re “facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole, since the Civil War.” It is hyperbole. It is hyperbole most of the time.

Biden has been a run-of-the-mill hyperpartisan demagogue for a long time. Watch some of his cringeworthy speeches on the Senate floor in the 1980s. Biden has been smearing judicial nominees for decades. When Biden accuses Republicans who disagree with him of “betting against America” or Mitt Romney — Mitt Romney — of wanting to put black Americans “back in chains” he is fueling paranoia, not comity. Biden’s “unity” talk, as it was with his old boss, Barack Obama, is little more than a pseudo-patriotic appeal meant to pressure Republicans into capitulation.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The U.S. Should Not Be Funding The WHO Follies Henry I. Miller and Jeff Stier

By on May 6th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/04/the-u-s-should-not-be-funding-the-who-follies/

The two-years-plus of the COVID-19 pandemic should be a wakeup call that there is something very wrong – irreparable, even – at the chronically inept World Health Organization (WHO). Two recent transgressions show that the bureaucrats there are not getting any smarter.

The first is almost inconceivable. Medicago, a Canadian company, developed a COVID-19 vaccine synthesized in the Nicotiniana plant, a relative of tobacco. In clinical testing, it showed efficacy against all variants studied prior to the emergence of Omicron of 71%, and for the Delta variant specifically of 75%.

Health Canada approved the vaccine for domestic use in February, but its distribution around the world encountered a bizarre obstacle: the WHO said it would not even consider approving the vaccine for wider use because of the manufacturer’s ties to U.S.-Swiss tobacco company behemoth Philip Morris International, which owns a roughly one-third equity stake in Medicago. 

Although wealthy countries currently have plenty of COVID-19 vaccines available, the WHO authorization of the Medicago vaccine, Covifenz, is critical, because only then can the vaccine be part of the WHO’s own COVAX global vaccine program for low- and middle-income countries.  It would be especially advantageous to the countries lacking sophisticated medical infrastructure, because, unlike many of the other COVID-19 vaccines, Covifenz doesn’t require stringent (cold) storage conditions.

It remains to be seen whether a work-around, such as Philip Morris divesting itself from partial ownership of Medicago, can be found, or whether the WHO’s intransigence will prolong misery and death in the very countries that its COVAX program is supposed to benefit.

The second recent WHO blunder is that the (deservedly) much-vilified architect of Sweden’s disastrous, irresponsible pandemic management plan, state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, is now at – wait for it! – the WHO.

These missteps shouldn’t come as a surprise; after all, the WHO is a component of the relentlessly incompetent and politicized United Nations. There are so many examples of U.N. self-inflicted wounds, perhaps most notable its abject inability to respond effectively to Russia’s barbaric, genocidal invasion of Ukraine. But there are so many more; for example, the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti – the first in the country’s history – caused by a sewage leak from a base of U.N. peacekeepers who were there to help after an earthquake earlier in the year. The waste fouled Haiti’s principal river, sickened hundreds of thousands and led to at least 10,000 deaths. (And the U.N. has failed to make good on its commitments to provide compensation.)

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BOOKS Comments turned off

The Real Black Swan of 2020: The Assault on Small Business By Janet Levy

By on May 6th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/05/the_real_black_swan_of_2020_the_assault_on_small_business.html

Most people believe the coronavirus was a Black Swan, an unexpected event of large magnitude with unprecedented consequences. But Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who coined that metaphor, disagrees. Coronaviruses were well known, though the SARS-CoV-2 strain that hit humans was new. And the pandemic wasn’t unexpected. Experts had been warning of one – though not of the coronavirus per se – for some years. In 2019, the government had even conducted months-long pandemic preparation drills. Taleb’s annoyance is at the diminution of his coinage to a cliché.

There was, however, a real Black Swan event in 2020, says Carol Roth in her book The War on Small Business: How the Government Used the Pandemic to Crush the Backbone of America. It was the U.S. government’s reaction to the pandemic – with unprecedented decisions and a lockdown that forced people to stop working and doing business for months on end. The pandemic became a pretext for a politically motivated campaign against small businesses and individuals to hasten the consolidation of power in Big Business, Big Tech, and Big Government. That is the hook and weighty claim with which Roth begins her book.

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