RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/gavin-newsom-masks-1-billion-ppe-deal-chinese-byd-lloyd-billingsley/

“We’ve been competing against other states, against other nations, against our own federal government for PPE — coveralls, masks, shields, N95 masks — and we’re not waiting around any longer. And we’re no longer interested in the progress that we were seeing in the past.”

That was California governor Gavin Newsom in an April 7 MSNBC appearance with Rachel Maddow.  As Newsom added, “In the last 48 hours we have secured –through a consortia of nonprofits and a manufacturer here in the state of California – upwards of 200 million masks on a monthly basis that we’re confident we can supply the needs of the state of California, potentially the needs of other western states.”

As it happened, the manufacturer wasn’t exactly “here in the state of California.”  The manufacturer was BYD, “Build Your Dreams,” a Chinese company not known for making personal protective equipment. Newsom wasn’t revealing details of the $1 billion deal, which as John Myers of the Los Angeles Times noted, “will cost taxpayers 30 percent more than the governor’s January budget allotted for infectious diseases for the whole fiscal year.”

The day after Newsom’s MSNBC appearance, San Francisco Democrat Phil Ting, chairman of the Assembly Budget Committee, told reporters, “We don’t have any information as to how many masks we’re buying, who we’re buying them from, at what price. What are we obligated? For how long are we obligated?” Los Angeles Democrat Holly Mitchell, chairwoman of the Senate Budget Committee, fired off an official letter demanding details. Newsom wasn’t talking, which prompted an escalation.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/does-militarys-secret-biodefense-lab-hold-key-future-coronavirus

Though often omitted from public conversations about pandemic solutions, the U.S. military has a huge stake in fighting deadly infectious diseases and quietly has been researching novel treatments for years at its secretive biodefense lab at Fort Detrick.

The reasons are mission obvious. With soldiers deployed in exotic locations around the world where novel viruses like Ebola, Zika or bird and swine flus can strike with lighting speed and alarming fatality, the Pentagon wants to make sure it has treatments to keep its forces from being disabled

It’s from that body of research that an intriguing potential remedy, an organic extract, has emerged. And of all sources, it comes from the common but toxic flowering plant oleander.

Dr. John Dye, chief of viral immunology at the USAMRIID lab at Fort Detrick, confirmed to Just the News that his team began testing the extract known as oleandrin a few years ago and found it was effective in fighting the Ebola and Marburg viruses. The Army lab is now ramping up a rapid plan to test oleandrin against COVID-19.

“We found that at non-toxic concentrations, oleandrin was efficacious at slowing and halting viral growth in tissue culture assays” for the Ebola and Marburg viruses, Dye said in emailed answers to questions.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/barack-obama-who-botched-two-pandemics-criticizes-response-to-coronavirus/

On Wednesday afternoon, Barack Obama criticized the Trump administration for failing to create a “coherent national plan” during the coronavirus pandemic.

“While we continue to wait for a coherent national plan to navigate this pandemic, states like Massachusetts are beginning to adopt their own public health plans to combat this virus––before it’s too late,” he tweeted.The funniest thing about this tweet is that Barack Obama is the last person in the world who should be criticizing the federal response to a pandemic. Does he think we’ve forgotten he botched not one, but two pandemics? Barack Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services declared the H1N1 pandemic a public health emergency on April 29, 2009, but didn’t declare it a “national emergency” until October—two months after the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic, and after a thousand Americans had already died, and millions already infected. If you think he was taking the outbreak seriously at the time, the facts beg to differ.

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/pandemic-is-but-one-of-americas-security-concerns/

The world was a dangerous place before the coronavirus pandemic, and it will still be dangerous after it.

While Americans debate the proper ongoing response to the virus and argue over the infection’s origins, nature, and trajectory, they may have tuned out other, often just as scary, news.

Many Americans are irate at China for its dishonest and lethal suppression of knowledge about the viral outbreak. But they may forget that China has other huge problems, too.

Its overseas brand is tarnished. Importers can never again be sure of the safety or reliability of Chinese exports. They will know only that their producer is a serial falsifier that is capable of anything to ensure power and profits.

Even China’s vaunted propaganda machine that slanders its critics as racists and xenophobes no longer works. The sheer number of countries that have suffered huge human and financial losses from Chinese lying won’t believe another word from Beijing.

How will China collect its Silk Road debts from now-bankrupt Asian and African countries? Most of them are accusing China of being racist and responsible for the global epidemic that wrecked the very economies from which China planned to harvest profits.

China was beginning to lose the trade war with the U.S. even before the virus struck. Americans think that China is huge, powerful, and rich. In truth, Chinese per capita income is about a sixth of America’s.

China produces only about two-thirds of the nominal GDP of the United States despite having more than four times as many people. Hundreds of millions of rural Chinese remain trapped in poverty.