RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-bumbling-biden-fails-the-monkeypox-test-covid-trump-vaccines-jynneos-stockpile-rct-doses-smallpox-medicine-public-health-treatment-11661108794?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Donald Trump was unlucky that a once-in-a-century pandemic struck in his re-election year. And Joe Biden is lucky that the current monkeypox outbreak is relatively mild. But his administration’s bumbling response belies Mr. Biden’s 2020 argument that he would have handled Covid better.

Monkeypox, first identified in lab animals in 1958, is a close relative of smallpox, though it is less lethal and contagious. Periodic outbreaks have occurred in Central and West Africa, where the virus is endemic and spreads among wild animals. Humans can catch it through direct contact with the skin lesions of an infected animal or person.

A small U.S. outbreak in 2003 was linked to rodents imported from Ghana by an exotic pet dealer. The virus infected 71 Americans but was quickly contained with the help of the smallpox vaccine. No one died.

The outbreak, coupled with growing concerns about bioterrorism, prompted Washington to seek a safer, more effective vaccine against smallpox and monkeypox. The federal government began to support the development of Bavarian Nordic’s Jynneos vaccine. In 2017 the Trump administration awarded Bavarian a 10-year contract for freeze-dried vaccines, giving the U.S. rights to an estimated 13 million doses. The Food and Drug Administration approved the vaccine in 2019, and the Trump administration in 2020 ordered 1.4 million doses in case of emergency.

So when the first monkeypox cases popped up in mid-May, the U.S. had the benefit of scientific knowledge, experience and a ready-made vaccine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported 14,115 cases nationwide as of Aug. 18, probably an underestimate since the virus can look similar to other diseases. No deaths have been reported in the U.S. But Biden officials’ inept response has made the outbreak far worse than it might have been.

On May 22, four days after the first case was identified, Mr. Biden said monkeypox was “something that everybody should be concerned about,” although reports indicated that the virus was mainly spreading among gay men.

Officials then rushed to tamp down a brewing panic. “This is a virus we understand,” White House Covid response coordinator Ashish Jha said. “We have vaccines against it. We have treatments against it. It’s not as contagious as Covid. So I am confident we’re going be able to keep our arms around it.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/19/the-cdcs-big-fail-on-covid-19-wheres-the-real-accountability/

Americans, good natured as they are, often assume that government agencies deserve an implicit trust from the public that they’re sworn to serve, and that they will not violate that trust. When they do, there have to be consequences. That’s certainly the case after our two-and-a-half year COVID-19 nightmare.

It can no longer be denied that our government’s bureaucratic response to the dreaded Wuhan flu was inadequate at best, near-criminal at worst. And now the reckoning has begun.

That can be seen in the Centers for Disease Control’s new “guidance” on COVID, which is essentially an institutional mea culpa for mistakes that cost thousands of people their lives and sowed panic while doing little to halt the spread of the nasty virus.

“The new guidance, released Aug. 11, rescinds and alters a number of key recommendations, including treating unvaccinated and vaccinated people differently for many purposes, explicitly stating that people with previous infection have protection against severe illness, and removing 6-foot social distancing advice,” the Epoch Times reported in a summary the changes.

In short, it unwinds nearly all its previous COVID guidance.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fauci-and-walensky-double-down-on-failure-covid-pandemic-evidence-data-lockdowns-mask-mandates-restrictions-public-health-experts-11660855180?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention belatedly admitted failure this week. “For 75 years, CDC and public health have been preparing for Covid-19, and in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations,” Director Rochelle Walensky said. She vowed to establish an “action-oriented culture.”

Lockdowns and mask mandates were the most radical experiment in the history of public health, but Dr. Walensky isn’t alone in thinking they failed because they didn’t go far enough. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president, recently said there should have been “much, much more stringent restrictions” early in the pandemic. The World Health Organization is revising its official guidance to call for stricter lockdown measures in the next pandemic, and it is even seeking a new treaty that would compel nations to adopt them. The World Economic Forum hails the Covid lockdowns as the model for a “Great Reset” empowering technocrats to dictate policies world-wide.

Yet these oppressive measures were taken against the longstanding advice of public-health experts, who warned that they would lead to catastrophe and were proved right. For all the talk from officials like Dr. Fauci about following “the science,” these leaders ignored decades of research—as well as fresh data from the pandemic—when they set strict Covid regulations. The burden of proof was on them to justify their dangerous experiment, yet they failed to conduct rigorous analyses, preferring to tout badly flawed studies while refusing to confront obvious evidence of the policies’ failure.

U.S. states with more-restrictive policies fared no better, on average, than states with less-restrictive policies.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-centers-for-disease-politics-rochelle-walensky-center-for-disease-control-and-prevention-covid-vaccines-11660859044?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Regrets, Rochelle Walensky has a few, though apparently too few to specify. Amid bipartisan criticism over her agency’s bumbling virus response, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director said Wednesday she’ll reshuffle the bureaucratic deck with an emphasis on “action” and “equity.” Her diagnosis and prescription are both wrong.

Not much of the U.S. government works well these days, but the CDC once had a reputation for excellence. Covid blew that up. Its bureaucracy, with 11,000 employees and some two dozen divisions, impeded a rapid and effective response to the virus.

One problem is that bureaucracies always seek to expand their power and reach, often at the expense of their core mission. The CDC is no exception as it has sought to address social and environmental issues that are better left to the states or other agencies. Meantime, it has failed in its core responsibility, which is to track diseases, collect data to inform decision-making, and deploy resources to support local public-health responses.

At the start of the pandemic when public officials were blind to the virus spread, CDC employees failed to follow standard lab operating procedures and contaminated Covid tests. Even after the agency realized its blunders, it refused to share virus samples with private commercial labs to help develop and deploy tests.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/a_moral_call_to_arms_about_the_transgender_revolution.html

People who do not follow conservative news are unaware that our entire medical system has joined teachers in embracing the fantasy of transgenderism, and this is true whether the people involved are true believers, power junkies, or enthralled by the possibility of the millions of dollars tied to drugging and surgically mutilating children. Whatever the motives, it’s time for ordinary people to push back very hard.

I have Libs of Tik Tok on my daily reading list. I go there regularly because it helps me remember why, sometimes at great personal cost, I don’t retire to knitting and travel but, instead, spend most of my waking hours thinking about politics and trying to persuade people to see politics as I do. The importance of Libs of Tik Tok is that she travels through the internet looking at what leftists are proud enough to boast about—and then exposes those boasts to a larger audience than the leftists intended.

A significant portion of the leftists whom Libs of Tik Tok exposes are members of the LGBTQ+++ community or their “allies.” Over the past few years, these people have been increasingly vocal about the goal of “transing” kids. Teachers boast about bringing pronouns to kindergarteners and making sure that their students know that the teachers, with their transgender grooming, are the students’ “real” parents. Crazed parents boast about raising gender-neutral children or realizing that, when their two-year-old son said, “I like pink,” he was desperately saying that he’s really a girl.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-american-academy-of-pediatrics-dubious-transgender-science-jack-turban-research-social-contagion-gender-dysphoria-puberty-blockers-uk-11660732791?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

A spate of headlines this month declared that America’s surge in transgender identification wasn’t being caused by a social contagion. These articles were prompted by a new study by Jack Turban and colleagues in Pediatrics, flagship journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. The study claimed that social influence isn’t the reason that as many as 9% of America’s youth now call themselves transgender. Thus, Dr. Turban argues, efforts in conservative states to regulate on-demand puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery must be resisted.

Yet Dr. Turban’s study is deeply flawed and likely couldn’t have survived a reasonable peer-review process. The swift response from the scientific community made both points clear—with even those who support hormones and surgery for gender-dysphoric youth noting that Dr. Turban’s shoddy science undermined their cause.

Nevertheless, the media have promoted his work as a refutation of the claim that the wildfire spread of transgender identity is an example of social contagion—a phenomenon in which members of a group (mostly young and female) mutually influence one another’s emotions and behavior.

The Turban study rejects the social-contagion theory on the grounds that more biological boys than girls identified as trans in 2017 and 2019, according to data collected from 19 states by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey. But the researchers who helped design the CDC questionnaire explicitly warned that youths who identify as transgender may list their sex as their gender identity, making it impossible to discern who is male-to-female or female-to-male (a limitation Dr. Turban has acknowledged in the past).

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/17/no-republicans-didnt-let-their-citizens-die-during-covid/

“You forgot to mention that red states had far higher death tolls from COVID. On purpose. Because you’re amoral scum.” – I&I reader Charles Ray in the comments section.

Our editorial pointing out how Red states have done far better than Blue states at recovering from COVID prompted a few readers, such as Charles Ray above, to complain in the comments section that we overlooked COVID deaths. (See, “The Results Are In: Red States Won The COVID Fight, Hands Down.”)

Another reader, Paul Roberts, commented: “did the Red states win the COVID-19 fight? Hardly. Most (not Utah) let their citizens die in higher percentages to show how ‘pro-business’ they were.”

This storyline has been repeated ad nauseam by the leftist corporate media and by those who still believe that mask mandates, lockdowns, and various other government efforts to stop COVID worked.

And, indeed, the top five states in terms of COVID deaths per capita are all solidly Red: Mississippi, Arizona, Alabama, West Virginia, and Tennessee.

At the other end of the spectrum, three of the five states with the lowest per-capita COVID death rates are deep Blue (Vermont, Hawaii, and Washington) and only two are Red states (Utah and Alaska).  

Proof positive that Republican states “let their citizens die,” right?

Wrong.

https://nypost.com/2022/08/14/too-little-too-late-disband-the-cdc-now/

Dissolve the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Last week, the CDC released updated COVID-19 guidance. The agency now believes we should be taking an individual approach to mitigating our COVID risk. In layman’s terms, we are all Florida 2020 now.

The new guidance suggests ending “test to stay” so kids exposed to someone with COVID-19 can remain in school. Of course, this was only related to known exposure. People are exposed to COVID all the time, but only children who were aware of that exposure were punished. Kids lost so much throughout the pandemic because of terrible, irrational CDC guidance like this.

The fresh guidance also says people without symptoms no longer need to be routinely tested.

And the CDC permits us to come within six feet of each other again. Finally! Husbands, tell your wives it’s on!

But most important, the agency has finally faced some truths about the vaccine that it should have long ago. “CDC’s COVID-19 prevention recommendations no longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status because breakthrough infections occur.” And it’s admitted that “persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection.”

Cities across the country fired teachers, firefighters, health care staffers, police officers, sanitation workers and so many others because they refused to get vaccinated. Many of these people had worked through the early days of the pandemic — and contracted COVID many times over — while we baked banana bread and patted ourselves on the back for ordering from Uber Eats. Now the CDC acknowledges this was the wrong thing to do. Whoopsie!

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/public-health/2022/08/the-suppression-of-useful-covid-19-treatments/

The author is Emeritus Professor of Pathology at the University of Newcastle Medical School. He is a member of the Australian Academy of Science’s COVID-19 Expert Database

Eighteen months ago, the first in a series of articles on the management of COVID-19 was published in Quadrant. The constant in these articles was that optimal management combined spaced vaccine administration with effective early drug treatment to cover breakthrough infections. This article compares two groups of drugs promoted as effective in the early treatment of COVID-19: recycled anti-viral drugs that target specific replication and re-purposed drugs of biological origin that render target cells hostile to viral infection.

Background: Those who have followed this series and perhaps others, will recognise how a “vaccine narrative” and its ideology, promoted by the pharmaceutical industry, led to the cancellation of non-patented drugs. These re-purposed drugs had an extensive data base supporting prevention and early treatment of COVID-19. Opposition to their use was unprecedented, denying both science and the established practise of the doctor-patient relationship. This opposition threatened use of “off-label” drugs regularly prescribed with benefit by most doctors. Governments also banned the use of these drugs for treatment of COVID-19, threatening and enacting the deregistration of doctors who opposed the narrative and prescribed ivermectin (IVM) or hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for early treatment of COVID-19 infection. The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), the Australian licensing body, succumbed to pressure by banning use of IVM for treatment of COVID-19, not because it was  ineffective but because “it may interfere with vaccine uptake; it may deprive indigenous patients use for scabies; and there may be confusion re appropriate dosage regimen”. This win for Big Pharma was a loss for thousands of Australians who would benefit, including many at risk of developing serious disease.