RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lessons-of-the-long-covid-year-11615506819?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“The pandemic is now easing thanks largely to the ingenuity of American drug and biotech companies. The Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed made the inspired decision last year to invest $20 billion developing six vaccine candidates. This is the best decision government made. Vaccines typically take a decade to develop, but years of private investment and innovation have paid off in advanced technologies that have cut the time to a year.”

When a SARS-like virus was reported spreading in Wuhan in late 2019, most Americans never imagined their own government would soon close schools, churches and businesses, order people to stay home, and spend more than $5 trillion to offset the damage. Yet a year later, here we are.

The anniversary is a moment to consider what the pandemic has wrought and how well the U.S. has responded. Healthcare workers have been courageous, drug companies ingenious, and average Americans resilient. The political class and health experts? Not so much.

*Start with China and the World Health Organization, which is supposed to patrol for global health threats. China lied and the WHO played along. After censoring doctors, Beijing denied there was evidence of human-to-human transmission until shortly before it locked down Hubei province with 60 million people. Many Chinese had already left the country for Lunar New Year.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-covid-advisor-i-would-tip-my-hat-to-trump-admin-for-vaccine-development-distribution/

Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to the White House’s COVID team, on Thursday applauded the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed for the “record time” in which the COVID vaccine was developed, after months of Biden administration officials claiming they had been forced to start from scratch on vaccine distribution efforts.

“We’re grateful for the work that came before us and are doing the best we can to continue it and accelerate it,” Slavitt said on Fox News. “I would absolutely tip my hat. … The Trump administration made sure that we got in record time a vaccine up and out. That’s a great thing and it’s something we should all be excited about.”

The comment contradicts other Biden administration officials who have claimed their predecessors left them “a mess” of a vaccine rollout. The president has previously called Trump’s vaccine distribution a “dismal failure.”

“The sad part is the last administration didn’t leave anything. They didn’t leave a plan,” Biden senior adviser Cedric Richmond told CNN in January. White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said “the process to distribute the vaccine, particularly outside of nursing homes and hospitals out into the community as a whole, did not really exist when we came into the White House.” 

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki similarly called the vaccine situation that the new administration had inherited “much worse than we could have imagined.”

As National Review has previously reported, a look at the Bloomberg vaccine tracker shortly after Biden took office reveals that on the last day of the Trump administration more than 1.5 million Americans were vaccinated. The Biden administration inherited a system that had already reached a pace that would meet the president’s goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans in his first 100 days in office.

Slavitt said Thursday that the Biden administration hadn’t been trying to “point fingers.”

https://spectator.org/

Under the heading “Justice for the Victims of Witch Hunts, Old and New,” the Wall Street Journal describes a movement by European activists, including Human Rights Watch, to rehabilitate the many thousands executed for witchcraft from the 1400s to the early 1800s. They are playing belated catchup with the American colonies.  In 1697 the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared a Day of Contrition of fasting and remorse for the 1692 Salem witch trials and in 1711 formally exonerated those convicted and paid restitution to their heirs. The current activists are hoping to influence non-Western countries like Saudi Arabia, India, Ghana, and Papua New Guinea, where accusations of witchcraft still lead to torture and death.

But before human rights groups here and in Europe focus their attention far in the past and far afield, they would do well to seek apologies, restitution, and justice for the victims of witch hunts much closer in time and space: victims of the sex abuse in day care hysteria that in the 1980s and early ’90s swept the U.S. (and manifested itself to a much lesser extent in Canada, New Zealand, and Europe). One victim, Frank Fuster, remains in prison. He has now served 36 years of a sentence of six life terms and 165 years. (In 2014 the Florida Parole Commission sent him a letter telling him his initial parole interview was scheduled in 120 years.) All this for crimes that existed only in the fevered imagination of his accusers.

These were witch trials just as surely as the much earlier versions, complete with accusations of Satanic rituals tied to the supposed abuse of preschoolers. Robert Rosenthal, the attorney who won reversals on appeal in a number of these cases, still marvels at public credulity: “These cases made normal people abandon their disbelief. In another situation, would they believe this crazy stuff about pentagrams and Satan? But here they believed it.”

https://www.aol.com/news/fauci-death-toll-pandemic-anniversary-132621394.html

All the mixed messages, conflicting statistics and predictions and suggestions came from Dr. Fauxi himself….rsk

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday that had he known a year ago what the death toll from Covid-19 would be, “it would have shocked me completely,” and blamed the politicization of safety measures and “mixed messages” out of Washington for the high number of fatalities.

In an interview on NBC’s “TODAY” show on the one-year anniversary of the coronavirus outbreak being declared a global pandemic, host Savannah Guthrie noted that Fauci said exactly one year ago that 27 people in the U.S. had died from Covid-19 and asked what he would have thought then of today’s death toll of more than 531,000.

“I have to tell you quite honestly, Savannah, it would have shocked me completely,” said Fauci, who recounted that he warned at a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing that day that things would get much worse before they get better.

“It was March 11, 2020, that I said that, but I did not in my mind think that ‘much worse’ was going to be 525,000 deaths,” he said.

Asked what went wrong, Fauci pointed to the “divisiveness in our country.”

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-the-threat-to-a-progressive-755

THE ELECT: THE THREAT TO A PROGRESSIVE AMERICA FROM ANTI-BLACK ANTIRACISTS
Serial excerpt No. 4: They will object that they are “dismantling structures” – while enjoying making people cry and dismantling nothing.

DISMANTLING HEGEMONIC STRUCTURES?

To tar The Elect as crazy is lazy. Dumb, even. It recalls Hungarian physician Max Nordau who deemed Wagner, Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Schopenhauer as degenerates seized by hysteria and self-involvement. While Die Walküre and War and Peace are hardly grape soda, none of us would join Nordau today. He wasn’t up to the challenge of his times.

I want us to be. But this will require understanding The Elect in an initially counterintuitive way, just as getting Schopenhauer meant letting go of the easier pleasures of Ruskin. The “advanced” way of getting the Elect is to understand that they are a religion. To see them this way is not to wallow in derision, but to genuinely grasp what they are.

One thing that will discourage a general perception of them in this way is that they themselves will resist the charge so heartily. This is understandable. For one, it will feel unwelcome to them because they do not bill themselves as such, and often associate devout religiosity with backwardness. Then, it also implies that they are not thinking for themselves. However understandable their objections, though, we must not let them distract us, as we roll up our sleeves and fashion a way of living among people devoted permanently to this new, yes, religion.

For one, The Elect will insist that what they are doing is not founding a replacement for Protestantism, but acting upon what I have seen phrased as “an enduring white responsibility for deconstructing our own privilege and the systemic pervasiveness of white supremacy.”