RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/26/cuomo-deserves-no-plaudits-for-his-handling-of-crisis/

It was a stunning confession.

During a press briefing on Tuesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo admitted that closing schools and colleges in his state was a spur-of-the-moment decision based on a health crisis for which he was not prepared. “What we said at a moment of crisis is ‘isolate everyone,’” Cuomo told reporters while seated in front of boxes of medical supplies. “Close the schools, close the colleges, send everyone home, isolate everyone in their home. [It] wasn’t even smart, frankly, to isolate younger people with older people.”

Cuomo conceded that the reason he ordered public schools and colleges shut down was that he “didn’t have the knowledge [and] we needed to act.” The governor’s comments were made on March 24, more than two months after the first reported case of coronavirus was detected in Washington state.

New York, particularly the city, is the nation’s current hotbed of coronavirus activity. According to one tracking site, nearly 31,000 New Yorkers have tested positive for COVID-19, resulting in 3,800 hospitalizations and 285 deaths. On Wednesday, three army hospitals were deployed to New York and Washington to provide medical support and additional beds if needed.

The third-term Democratic governor, unsurprisingly, is earning media praise for his handling of the crisis.

“Andrew Cuomo shows how to lead during the coronavirus crisis,” swooned the Washington Post’s editorial board this week. Cuomo, according to his hometown newspaper, is the “politician of the moment” whose daily press briefings are must-watch events praised both by Democrats and Republicans like former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. Even Billy Joel is impressed with the tough-talking political progeny. A recent poll places Cuomo towards the top on the list of officials Americans most trust to handle the Wuhan virus debacle.

Cuomo, his new admirers insist, is the antidote to President Trump—a leader who rose to the challenge, spoke the truth, and made the tough choices while the White House ducked and dithered.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/26/faucis-folly/

EXCERPT

“During the daily briefings of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, repeatedly referred to reports from frontline clinicians that the combination of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin can completely clear coronavirus from the body within six days as “anecdotal” evidence.

The coronavirus pandemic is a medical story, not a political story. Yet, there are no medical journalists in the White House Briefing Room. To a medical journalist, “anecdotal” evidence is what doctors in the field are reporting. To a political journalist, “anecdotal” evidence is unsubstantiated hearsay.

Fauci knew—or should have known—that political journalists would report his characterization of clinical reports on the safety and efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin (HCQ+AZ) not as something “you hear out there” but as the president overhyping (or “lying” about) the benefits of the treatment.

Over and over again, Fauci also gave the false impression that the experimental treatment regimen would not, or could not, be given to severely ill patients before data from large-scale, randomized double-blind clinical trials becomes available: “My job as a scientist is . . . to prove without a doubt that a drug is not only safe, but it actually works.”

All well and good, but a clinician’s job is to save lives. And in the midst of a burgeoning global pandemic when speed is of the essence, field experience with two drugs whose safety profiles are well understood suffices to treat patients who are likely to die. For this reason, the FDA-approved chloroquine and remdesivir, an Ebola treatment, for “compassionate use.” Both drugs can be administered immediately to patients who have serious or life-threatening cases of coronavirus. “

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/americas-superb-unappreciated-president-john-perazzo/

It has been a very long time since Americans last saw such a clear distinction between the considerable leadership qualities of their president, and the shameless political maneuverings of an opposition party constantly lusting for power. Let us review exactly what has happened in this country over the past two months, vis-a-vis the coronavirus pandemic.

On January 29, President Donald Trump created a White House Coronavirus Task Force to coordinate the federal government’s response to the virus outbreak and to keep the American people as informed about it as possible.

At that time, you might recall, congressional Democrats were giving precisely ZERO attention to the coronavirus threat. They had not held even a single hearing — for even a single moment — about the matter. Instead, they had spent the preceding four months entirely obsessed with one agenda item: impeaching President Trump and trying to remove him from office. The Senate impeachment trial, which had commenced on January 21, was still in high gear. Since the previous September, the faces of Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer, Jerrold Nadler, Adam Schiff, and a host of other Democrats had become fixtures on every television screen in America as they salivated over the smell of political blood. They talked about nothing but impeachment, as their normal legislative duties were all but forgotten. Coronavirus was, quite literally, the last thing on any of their minds.

Two days later, on January 31, President Trump formally declared coronavirus to be a public health emergency and he implemented a ban on travel from China to the United States. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci later noted that “the very timely decision on the part of the president to shut off travel from China” had “absolutely” gone “a long way” toward limiting the number of coronavirus infections in the U.S. 

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/25/lessons-from-the-burst-zika-bubble/

Disease epidemics are messy, fast and frightening, and they’ll keep coming. To prepare for the future, the least we can do at the end of one is to use the benefit of hindsight to assess how well we conducted ourselves.

Sometimes phenomena flare into public consciousness, crowd out other concerns, then disappear. Only later we realize that judicious assessment of the evidence might have saved a great deal of distress.

There are disturbing clues that the Brazilian Zika scare might have been one such phenomenon, fueled by fear, haste, and fallacious conclusions instead of scientific rigor.

The World Health Organization declared the Zika virus a global emergency in 2016 and introduced drastic measures. People panicked not because the mosquito-borne virus causes direct illness—mostly there are no symptoms or just mild malady—but because of the small heads, or microcephaly, that it was believed to inflict on babies born to infected mothers.

The media went wild, and there were calls to cancel the 2016 Rio Olympics. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control told women who were pregnant or might become pregnant to stay away from nearly 100 countries or regions.

The United States spent more than $1 billion battling the virus’s spread. The 6,000 or so Zika-research articles funded and published after 2014 represent 500-times the previous 50 years’ total.

But let’s zoom out 1,200 miles from Rio to look at the northeast Brazil city of Recife with its endemic poverty, tropical temperatures, and mosquito-friendly open sewage-canals. This was ground-zero for Zika and the babies with underdeveloped brains. It was here physicians perceived more small-head-circumference babies being born amongst the poor.

One of the first microcephaly babies to arouse suspicion of a viral cause was a non-identical twin whose brother was completely normal. Microcephaly is usually an inherited genetic condition or caused by the mother’s alcohol abuse or other toxin-exposure. With her personal clinical assessment that the appearance implied infection, a prominent neuropediatrician inferred a novel cause, despite the brother’s normality under identical circumstances.

She teamed up with a clinician who was investigating other neurological problems associated with an unknown mosquito-borne infection. They joined a WhatsApp group of physicians who communicated rapidly between themselves.

A lack of objective science followed. They issued an alert for small-head-circumference babies and gathered an increase in reports. But was the increase real? Clinicians couldn’t check, because Brazil had not been compiling microcephaly data against which to compare. When scientists eventually looked back at reconstructed data, they found no evidence of a Zika-coincident epidemic.

Second, the Zika diagnoses relied not on lab results but on mothers’ recollections of first-trimester symptoms, such as mild rash or fever. Brazil had no experience of Zika, so it was not equipped for unambiguous diagnosis. In any case, serum tests do a poor job of distinguishing whether the infecting virus was Zika, or its flavivirus-”cousin” dengue. Neither can they reveal how recently the infection occurred. The test that specifically detects Zika does so only briefly after the virus infects a patient.

Third, varying criteria seem to have been used to diagnose microcephaly. Perhaps clinicians used medical standards of normal head sizes that came from richer cities with better-nourished mothers and adults about three inches taller? Babies born into poverty tend to be smaller overall due to a gamut of poverty-related ills. Confusing smaller heads with microcephaly is akin to categorizing every short person as a dwarf. Looking back, it’s clear that in Recife the microcephaly prevalence tracked with income.

Furthermore, there were lower rates in parts of Brazil further away from the WhatsApp-axis.

In 2015, there was a perceived microcephaly increase and there were possible Zika or dengue infections. Any meaningful link between the two was vanishingly rare. An international team of researchers reported that in early 2016 there were 4,180 reported cases of microcephaly in Brazil suspected to be associated with Zika infection, of which only a fifth were investigated and classified. In the end, just six babies were positive for both Zika infection and central nervous system malformations.

Medical knowledge is dispositive: Zika is essentially harmless to humans. In the 60 years prior to 2007, only 14 human infections were documented, all mild, and none causing congenital issues.

More common flaviviruses, such as hepatitis-C and dengue, never cause congenital neurodevelopmental problems. Rubella-virus, which does, damages essentially all infected first-trimester embryos. The highest estimate for Zika puts its hit-rate at 7 percent.

This was likely a case of human instincts’ bowling over scientific rigor. The first instinct is to love babies and care for our young. Nobody wants to be responsible for something that delivers new parents their worst nightmare. Another is the tendency to see patterns whether they are there or not—particularly when you’re looking for them. Two tools that rein in this instinct are the scientific method and the analysis of statistical significance. They were not employed.

The Zika bubble has burst. The failure of the predicted pandemic to materialize is being put down to populations’ developing immunity. But following the initial 2015 Zika outbreak, there was a 2016 spurt of Zika cases in Brazil. In that year, however, according to a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, there was no reported increase in newborns with microcephaly.

No increase was found during the 2018 outbreak in Rajasthan, India, either.

Disease epidemics are messy, fast and frightening, and they’ll keep coming. To prepare for the future, the least we can do at the end of one is to use the benefit of hindsight to assess how well we conducted ourselves.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/coronavirus-and-november-election-bruce-thornton/

Early in the new year, President Trump seemed in good shape to be reelected. The economy was booming, with record-setting stock-market highs and unemployment lows. The over three years of various inquisitions into “scandals” like the Russian collusion or Ukrainian quid pro quo had culminated in no evidence of any crimes, and in a failed impeachment conviction. The opposition Democrats looked increasingly likely to be settling one of two old, rich, white mediocrities as their standard-bearer for November, with nothing to recommend them other than utopian, expensive anti-free market policies and their irrational hatred of Donald Trump.

The more prudent prognosticators knew that despite such tail-winds, Trump still faced the greatest fear of every politician: events. Some are known possibilities, such as an economic downturn, a shooting war, or some Harvey Weinstein level of scandal. But no one foresaw that a pandemic starting in a Chinese wet market would incite mass hysteria and containment policies that have wounded our economy, tanked the market, raised unemployment, and threaten to bring on a deep recession, if not a depression.

What does all this mean for Trump’s chances to be reelected?

On the one hand, economic bad news usually overrides the advantage of being the incumbent, especially when it is accompanied by a foreign policy disaster, as Jimmy Carter learned when his reelection was hampered by, among many other things, the stagflation of the Seventies and the Iranian hostage crisis. But the current economic woes have not been caused by Trump’s or his party’s policies, which in fact created the boom in the first place. Nor does he face abroad anything as serious as the hostage crisis.

The current economic debacle is the consequence of an unforeseen contingency no state can adequately plan for. And unlike Carter’s blunders, Trump’s occasional misspeaking or exaggerations, all hyped and distorted by the media, have been redeemed by his swift move to ban all air travel from China, and a few weeks later from Europe as well. These actions no doubt have saved thousands of American lives.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/covid19_and_the_fog_of_war.html

Every year, many thousands of people die of what is called ordinary flu.  Tens of thousands die in traffic accidents.  Then there are industrial accidents, household mishaps, and huge numbers of avoidable deaths attributed to tobacco and illegal drugs.

We have, sad to say, learned to live with these deaths.  We do not close down society because of them.

The coronavirus (COVID-19), tragic though it is, pales in comparison, so far, with other causes of death.

While we should never downplay the effects of the current pandemic, we must keep it in perspective.  To allow the counter-measures to bring about an economic collapse would kill untold numbers of people, directly or indirectly.  In addition, the economic collapse of one large, bellicose nation could trigger a war, with millions of dead in a short time.

North Korea claims to have had no COVID-19 infections.  Even if that doubtful claim were true, it is but a matter of time before there is an outbreak of the virus there.  Faced with the imminent prospect of his entire army being debilitated, Kim Jong-un, mercurial and reckless in the best of times, is likely to roll the dice militarily.

Iran is another case of modern-day but psychologically medieval leaders with their fingers on triggers.  They hold an apocalyptic view that commits them to bringing about world chaos in order to prompt the return of their Twelfth Imam.  COVID-19 seems to be running rampant in that nation, which rejects U.S. assistance in controlling the disease.  Instead of wearing suicide vests, might the newest jihadis choose self-sacrifice by contagion

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-virus-may-make-trump-stronger-11585149792?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

This is not what his critics expected. At 49% overall job approval in the latest Gallup poll, and with 60% approval of the way he is handling the coronavirus epidemic, President Trump’s standing with voters has improved even as the country closed down and the stock market underwent a historic meltdown. That may change as this unpredictable crisis develops, but bitter and often justified criticism of Mr. Trump’s decision making in the early months of the pandemic has so far failed to break the bond between the 45th president and his political base.

One reason Mr. Trump’s opponents have had such a hard time damaging his connection with voters is that they still don’t understand why so many Americans want a wrecking-ball presidency. Beyond attributing Mr. Trump’s support to a mix of racism, religious fundamentalism and profound ignorance, the president’s establishment opponents in both parties have yet to grasp the depth and intensity of the populist energy that animates his base and the Bernie Sanders movement.

The sheer number of voters in open political rebellion against centrist politics is remarkable. Adding the Sanders base (36% of the Democratic vote in the latest Real Clear Politics poll average, or roughly 13% of the national vote considering that about 45% of voters lean Democratic) to the core Trump base of roughly 42%, and around 55% of U.S. voters now support politicians who openly despise the central assumptions of the political establishment.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/23/use-the-defense-production-act/

President Trump last week invoked the Defense Production Act, a law enacted during the Korean War that allows the federal government to direct American industry to produce products required for the national defense. The president has since declined to use the rights given him under the DPA. He shouldn’t. It’s time to act.

While I appreciate governmental restraint and his hesitancy to use what Peter Navarro called, “the heavy hand of government” to direct private businesses, we are not currently in a period of limited government action.

Government has ordered something like a quarter of the country into lockdown, all “nonessential” businesses are closed in many states, travel is banned between the United States and more than 30 countries, the Congress is on the cusp of passing a $2 trillion emergency spending bill, and the Federal Reserve has committed to unlimited trillions of dollars of quantitative easing in the form of bond market purchases.

Yet, somehow speeding the production and acquisition of medical equipment has been deemed a bridge too far. This makes no sense.

At present there are shortages of critical equipment used by healthcare providers, including N95 respirators, surgical gowns, the ventilators required to keep critically ill COVID patients breathing, along with certain pharmaceuticals, including hydroxychloroquine. That drug has been used in apparently successful small trials in both France and the United States to treat coronavirus both alone and in combination with azithromycin.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/23/can-ron-desantis-bring-some-sanity

No one is speaking for the tens of millions of terrified Americans suffering mostly in silence over fears they will be shamed as uncompassionate or ignorant. It’s time for a real leader to emerge at the state level. Maybe DeSantis will be the one.

Considering its demographics and daily influx of tourists from around the world, Florida should be ground zero for the spread of COVID-19.

The Sunshine State is home to the highest percentage of senior citizens in the country, and that doesn’t include snowbirds from the Midwest and East Coast who seek temporary refuge during the winter months. Given what we know about the higher risk for people over age 65, hospitals in the state should be overwhelmed with coronavirus patients.

Further, as college campuses emptied out in early March and students headed to “Where the Boys Are,” these virus-carrying hedonists should have infected thousands of elderly Floridians. Florida also is a favorite destination for international tourists: Two of the top four U.S. cities visited each year by foreigners—Miami and Orlando—are in Florida. As the virus spread across the globe in the first two months of 2020, it undoubtedly made its way to the state unbeknownst to health officials.

But unlike New York City and a few other hotspots in the country, there is no evidence of a widespread, lethal outbreak of coronavirus in Florida. As of Monday morning, 90 percent of Floridians tested were negative for COVID-19. Only 217 people have been hospitalized and 14 total have died. (About eight people per day commit suicide in Florida according to 2017 statistics.)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kotlikoff/2020/03/21/a-coronavirus-end-game-that-avoids-a-depression/#9543e1f5798f

The federal government is playing tragic catchup with the Coronavirus, which is now quickly turning into economic and health Armageddon. Absent immediate articulation of a clear and effective national health and economic policy, our governors need to step in to guide federal policy with a clear and single voice.

Short of the Trump Administration immediately taking appropriate steps (discussed below) to control the spread of Coronavirus or the discovery of a miraculous cure, we’re heading toward a full-scale depression. Goldman Sachs is forecasting a 24% drop in second quarter GDP. To put this figure in perspective, the maximum GDP-decline in the Great Depression (GD) was 26% and this took three years, not three months. The unemployment rate peaked during the GD at 25%.

In today’s economy, unemployment at such a rate would entail 36 million people out of work. The process has started. Over the past week, claims for unemployment jumped 70,000 — the biggest increase since the Great Recession. Kevin Hassett, former Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisor, believes we could see 1 million people lose their jobs over the next month. Secretary Mnunchin recently raised the specter of a 20% unemployment rate if congress doesn’t pass a fiscal relief package. Since such a package will likely have very little impact on employment, he’s actually simply predicting one in five working Americans will be tossed to the street.