RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/the_kung_flu_panic.html

With some exceptions, the Idiot Left has howled about President Trump’s handling of the ‘Kung Flu.’ As if they’d have done anything differently. They’re only howling because it’s Donald Trump, not because there’s anything wrong with his judgment or his timing. A reporter asks an obvious troll question, Trump shuts him down, and the media scream in agony.

Agonize, baby, agonize.

When Trump shut off travel from China at the end of January, the Left as usual leapt to slash his throat. Then it turned out he had done the best possible thing at the best possible time. Now they’re screaming about shortages of masks, test kits and so on, as if Hillary or Obama or Biden or Liz or Kamala or Buttigieg or Mini Mike would have anticipated all these things. Nobody would have (or could have) anticipated any better than this administration did.

Until we know more about this virus, anticipating it isn’t even possible. From all I’ve read – and that’s been a great deal in the last week or so – the Chinese (both in China and in northern Italy) are especially vulnerable to the virus because their personal hygiene is just awful. Human feces pretty much everywhere, unsanitary food preparation in restaurants, sneezing and coughing on others, etc. These practices aren’t the norm in America and that alone will go far in arresting the spread of the coronavirus in the United States.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-extreme-state-lockdowns-11584745130?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

“These shutdowns are extraordinary and have costs, not least the harm to small business owners. Americans may simply decide to ignore the orders after a time. Absent a more thorough explanation of costs and benefits, we doubt these extreme measures will be sustainable for long as the public begins to chafe at the limits and sees the economic consequences.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-history-of-pfizer-and-penicillin-and-lessons-for-coronavirus-11584723787?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Often lost in election-cycle diatribes against Big Pharma—which come from all sides—is the power of industry to come together in times of crisis and save lives.

Stories of battlefield heroism during World War II are well known. Lesser known, but relevant for today’s fight against the novel coronavirus, is the story of Pfizer’s Jasper Kane and John McKeen. Kane and McKeen pioneered the mass production of penicillin. Their breakthrough, together with others made by scientists and engineers at the nation’s industrial labs, helped reduce the death rate from diseases in the U.S. military to 0.6 per 1,000 in World War II from 14.1 per 1,000 in World War I. That 96% reduction translated into 200,000 lives spared.

There are lessons for today. First, calls by political candidates to make future Covid-19 vaccines free run contrary to the national interest. Low prices for vaccines and anti-infectives have clipped revenue for startups and led many to file for bankruptcy. Investment has plummeted, leaving the U.S. unprepared to fight off bad bugs.

In times of crisis, however, American industry has shown a willingness to invest, as biopharmaceutical companies around the country are doing today. In the 1930s, Pfizer was a small Brooklyn-based chemical company known mostly for making vitamins and the citric acid used in Coca-Cola. In October 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt convened academic and industry leaders, including Jasper Kane, in Washington. Their charge: Solve the penicillin production problem.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-pandemic-us-fatality-rate-steady-about-1-percent/#slide-1

Like many Americans, I’ve been tracking statistical reports about the coronavirus pandemic. In particular, I’ve been closely following Worldometer, which seems reliable, covers the globe, and gets updated frequently. It has been frustrating, though, to try to find good breakouts on fatality rate numbers.

I do not mean to suggest that this information is not out there. It just does not get the same attention as the total number of cases and the total number of deaths.

Reporting those two stats in isolation makes them seem especially alarming. If, hypothetically, on Day One there were 100 cases, and on Day 5 there were 1,000 cases, that would be a very troubling rate of increase, though it could be mitigated by a number of factors. (For example, if testing has improved in the interim, the surge in reported cases could reflect better information about the overall phenomenon, rather than just a rapid spread of the disease.) Similarly, if there were ten deaths on Day 5 after only one on Day One, that jump would seem frightening . . . but it would be a proportional increase in fatalities given the tenfold jump in reported cases — assuming the fatality rate has been reliably established.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/america-is-still-the-best-place-to-be-during-covid-19/

Don’t listen to the media cynics who think coronavirus has turned the U.S. into a third-world country.

The New York Times reports that the United States, and the West, are now the real problem in the fight against coronavirus:

The fear and suspicion directed at China in the devastating early days of the coronavirus outbreak have made a 180-degree turn: It is the West that now frightens Asia and the rest of the world.

The fear and suspicion, of course, were entirely justified, because the Chinese Communist government lied about the existence and scale of the virus, unleashing it on the world. But I’d love to find the insane person who would rather be in Wuhan province or Tehran right now than Ohio or Houston.

There’s a destructive strain of cynicism infecting so much of our media. To contend that the United States was “completely unprepared” for a coronavirus pandemic, as this Politico piece does, or to claim that “America Is Acting Like a Failed State,” as this Atlantic piece does, is journalistic malpractice. I don’t know if these writers, or similarly inclined ones, have some knee-jerk antipathy towards the United States or if partisanship blinds them to state of the world, but none of it aligns with reality.