RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

…or at least partial economic recovery.   As a physician, it has long been my humble opinion that a reasonable response to COVID-19 would be for our government to strongly urge anyone over 65 with medical co-morbidities to strictly stay at home, self-quarantine, and become compulsive hand-hygiene and disinfection Nazis!  And then I’d allow everyone else — with some relatively few exceptions noted below — to pretty much go about their daily lives, while continuing to voluntarily observe the commonsense protective measures we’re all very familiar with by now.

At this point in time, we have a pretty solid way to test the efficacy and safety of such an approach.  We already have a study group readily available.  For the last two-plus months, a substantial number of Americans have indeed continued to go about their daily business while observing commonsense protective measures.  An off-the-cuff list would include such people as clerical and administrative health care workers, bank workers, supermarket employees, gas station and convenience store employees, tire and auto repair shop employees, delivery service employees, truck-drivers, and utility workers — and a large number of local, state, and federal government employees.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/they-developed-their-coronavirus-vaccine-in-salks-shadow-11586557454?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Pittsburgh

Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine at a University of Pittsburgh lab. The deadly disease that crippled infants disappeared almost overnight, and Salk became a hero. He wasn’t Steel City’s only history-making physician. Thomas Starzl, who performed the first liver transplant in 1963, joined the Pitt faculty in 1981.

As the world faces another terrifying disease, Pitt medical scientists are again at work on a potentially revolutionary vaccine. Louis Falo and Andrea Gambotto, respectively a dermatologist and a surgeon, have developed a Covid-19 inoculation that rapidly produces large numbers of coronavirus antibodies when injected in mice. A peer-reviewed paper describing their work appeared in the journal EBioMedicine, which is published by The Lancet. They await approval from the Food and Drug Administration to conduct human trials on their vaccine candidate, which is delivered via a unique skin patch containing 400 tiny needles.

“This is a collision of two stories,” Dr. Falo says. “We’ve been developing the delivery technologies for this for the past several years and working with Dr. Gambotto in trying to use the skin as the ideal target for vaccine delivery. While we were doing that, Dr. Gambotto has been working on SARS and MERS.” The two physicians’ labs are next door to each other.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-disinformation-fed-the-fbis-trump-investigation-11586548963?mod=hp_opin_pos_3

Senator Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Declassified footnotes to a Justice Department inspector general report show that the Federal Bureau of Investigation team investigating members of the Trump campaign received classified reports in 2017 identifying key pieces of the Steele dossier as products of a Russian disinformation campaign. This might be only the tip of the iceberg because other recently declassified information demonstrates that even more disinformation may have been planted in Christopher Steele’s reporting.

Let that sink in. The FBI knew that at least some of its evidence against the Trump campaign, and maybe more, was likely part of a Russian disinformation campaign—evidence from a source that was “central and essential” for getting the first FISA warrant. It isn’t clear what if anything the FBI did to determine whether their investigation was based in substantial part on Russian disinformation.

Yet the FBI assistant director in charge of the investigation, Bill Priestap, told the inspector general that as of May 2017 (when Robert Mueller took over as special counsel), the FBI “didn’t have any indication whatsoever” that their evidence was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/492247-trump-to-convene-council-focused-on-reopening-the-country

President Trump on Friday confirmed he plans to convene a new council of business and medical leaders intended to guide his administration toward reopening the U.S. economy.

Trump teased the new group at a White House news briefing, saying he would dub it the “Opening Our Country Council.” The members would be announced Tuesday, he said.

“We’re also setting up a council of very, very great doctors and businesspeople,” he said, saying the group’s focus would be “beyond economic.”

Trump suggested the group would be bipartisan and be diverse in terms of geography because of the way the coronavirus has impacted certain parts of the country differently.

The formation of the group was expected, with reported members including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump’s daughter and senior adviser Ivanka Trump, as well as private-sector figures.

The president and his top aides have in recent days been pushing to reopen parts of the economy as early as the start of May as unemployment skyrockets and businesses across the country remain shuttered due to the virus outbreak.

https://canadafreepress.com/article/after-four-years-of-democrat-treachery-i-smell-a-corona-virus-rat
Test time boys and girls. Hint…there is only one right answer––if you don’t get it right, you flunk! And so does America!
Which person, foreign or American, predicted three years ago, in 2017, that President Trump would be challenged by a “surprise global-disease outbreak”?
o Enemy of Trump Cong. Adam Schiff (D-CA)
o Enemy of Trump House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
o Crazed enemy of Trump Hillary Clinton
Answer: None of the above. It was Dr. Anthony Fauci!
Which person, foreign or American, said that the collapse of the American capitalist system as a result of the corona virus plague would be “inconvenient”?
 American adversary Xi Jing Ping, President of China
 American adversary Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran
 American adversary Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President of Turkey
Answer: None of the above. It was Dr. Anthony Fauci!

Which person, foreign or American, said on January 21, 2020, that the corona virus “was not a major threat to the United States” and on January 23rd downplayed the virus’ potential impact on the U.S?
 U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams
 TV host Dr. Mehmet Oz
 The entire staff of the NY Times

A primer

‘When can we end social distancing and get back to normal life?” It’s the question on everyone’s mind, and one without a clear answer at this time. Here’s what we do know: An effective treatment against the novel coronavirus would make a big difference in getting us there.

Remember the old adage, “There’s no cure for the common cold”? Well, the common cold is caused by a mild strain of coronavirus. The version of coronavirus we’re dealing with here is far more dangerous — but possibly just as difficult to treat.

In order to talk about therapies, it’s important to distinguish between the virus itself — the infectious agent — and the disease caused by the virus. (Think of HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus that causes the illness known as acquired immune-deficiency syndrome, or AIDS.) In our present case, the World Health Organization has named the novel coronavirus “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2,” or SARS-CoV-2. The WHO calls the illness caused by SARS-CoV-2 “COVID-19.” (“COVID” stands for “coronavirus disease”; “19” comes from the fact that the disease was first identified in Wuhan in late 2019.) To repeat: Virus, SARS-CoV-2; disease, COVID-19. 

There are two broad categories of ongoing clinical development related to the pandemic. Vaccines, which help people achieve immunity to the virus, are the farthest off. A vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 won’t be ready until late 2021 at the earliest. That’s because vaccines need to be painstakingly tested in clinical trials to ensure that they make patients better, not worse. Flawed vaccines can lead to dangerous overstimulation of the immune system, or can make someone even more sensitive to coronavirus exposure. And since you can’t ethically expose someone to coronavirus, you have to give the vaccine to hundreds or even thousands of people and wait to see evidence of whether the vaccine achieves a statistically significant reduction in the number of people who get infected. Furthermore, coronaviruses mutate frequently, meaning that a vaccine developed in one year would likely be less robust, or even completely ineffective, in future years.