RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/biden-administration-our-new-vaccination-sites-will-not-include-vaccine-doses/

This morning brings another example of how the Biden administration’s much-touted plan to expand and accelerate the pace of vaccinations is less than meets the eye. The plan to establish 100 federally supported vaccination sites by the end of February means the federal government will deploy tents and staffers . . . but not more doses of vaccine, which is pretty fundamental to running a successful vaccination site.

Eager to protect more people against the coronavirus, health officials in Oklahoma jumped at the chance to add large, federally supported vaccination sites. They wanted them in Oklahoma City, Tulsa and a third, mid-size city, Lawton, thinking the extra help would allow them to send more doses to smaller communities that had yet to benefit.

“We felt like if we could get them in the metro areas, what that would allow us to do is . . . free up a lot of our other resources to do more targeted vaccinations in underserved areas,” said state Deputy Health Commissioner Keith Reed.

Those plans are now on hold after the state learned that the sites would not come with additional vaccines. Instead, the doses would have to be pulled from the state’s existing allocation, and the three sites alone might have used more than half of Oklahoma’s vaccine supply.

“We’re not prepared to pull the trigger on it unless it comes with vaccine,” Reed said.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/alex-berenson-attacks-the-vaccine-that-will-end-the-lockdowns/

Neither argument holds much water. Berenson, who has been right on most issues relating to Covid is not an epidemiologist and Schorr who has been wrong so often is not a virologist. But much is yet to be determined on the relatively new vaccines….rsk

Some people just won’t take “yes” for an answer.

Alex Berenson, an independent writer who was once at the New York Times, has been among the loudest critics of the restrictions that have been put in place to fight coronavirus. And, in some cases, he has been right. Which makes it all the more confounding that, just as the vaccines are making it possible to loosen or abolish those restrictions, Berenson is trying to convince the public that the vaccines don’t actually work.

Berenson argues that our focus should be “on the Israeli data showing thousands of infections and scores of deaths in people who have received both doses” of the vaccine. But this is absurd. Only four Israelis have died two weeks after receiving their second dose, which is the amount of time needed for the vaccine to be maximally effective. All four were over the age of 60 and therefore particularly vulnerable to the disease.

None of this should be surprising to anyone with even the most modest understanding of how vaccines work, or with the slightest willingness to look into the data. Vaccines are not catch-all solutions. Some vaccinated people will get sick, some will die. What the vaccines are meant to do is mitigate risk, and my goodness, do they mitigate a whole lot of risk. A new study analyzing 600,000 vaccinated and 600,000 unvaccinated Israelis showed that “the inoculated group produced 94 percent fewer symptomatic COVID-19 cases, and 92 percent fewer cases of serious illness.” Berenson’s point is that because that number isn’t 99 or  100 percent, it’s not worth taking. It’d be laughable if it weren’t so injurious.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/lockdowns-are-killing-us

We are now nearly a year into the most self-destructive social experiment in the recorded history of human civilization.

On this day a year ago, we enjoyed the greatest economic expansion in our lifetimes. The poverty rate was the lowest in 60 years. The unemployment rate was the lowest in 50 years. Wage growth was the strongest in 40 years. The wage gap was narrowing, with blue-collar wages growing the fastest. Unemployment rates for minority groups and women were the lowest ever recorded.

And then, over the course of just a few catastrophic weeks, our government took a wrecking ball to it all. In the second quarter, GDP plunged by a third — the worst decline in productivity ever recorded. Unemployment exploded to its highest levels since the Great Depression. Tens of millions of people lost their jobs. Trillions of dollars of the nation’s wealth were squandered.

In the months since, our children have been robbed of a year of education. Millions of people have been forbidden from earning a living by their own government. Shopkeepers have seen their life’s work destroyed, and when in desperation they try to hold on, they are led away in handcuffs. Our most cherished rights to worship freely, to assemble peaceably, and not to be deprived of our lives, liberty, or property without due process of law have been destroyed.

COVID-19 didn’t cause this damage. Public officials did. They promised us it was for our own good, that it would save lives.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17071/impeachment-constitution-mcconnell

[I]t is CNN and the other media that failed to understand the distinction between defending the Constitution and defending the person.

To have voted to convict citizen Trump would have given Congress a roving commission to seek out and disqualify any potential candidate who ever held federal public office or who might run for office in the future. McConnell correctly rejected that open-ended power grab.

One does not have to agree with the substance with what President Trump did or said on January 6, in order to correctly conclude that the Senate had no jurisdiction over him once he left office, and that the statements he made — whatever one might think of them — are fully protected by the Constitution.

Back in the bad old days of McCarthyism, anyone who supported the constitutional rights of accused communists was deemed to support communism. That was wrong then, just as it is wrong today to believe that everyone who defends Trump against an unconstitutional impeachment necessarily supports his views or actions.

CNN and other left-wing media went on a rampage after Senator Mitch McConnell delivered his speech explaining why he voted to acquit Donald Trump, despite his belief that Trump had engaged in improper behavior. They accused McConnell of hypocrisy and inconsistency — arguing that if he believed Trump had done wrong, he was obligated to vote for conviction. But it is CNN and the other media that failed to understand the distinction between defending the Constitution and defending the person.

McConnell taught the American people a civics lesson by explaining that the Senate had no constitutional authority to place a former president on trial, even one who had been impeached while still serving in office. In doing so, he echoed a constitutional argument I have been making from the very beginning of this unconstitutional power grab by the Democrat-controlled Congress. The language of the constitution is clear:

“The President … shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”