RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/11/its-time-to-ask-were-any-of-the-covid-mandates-closures-lockdowns-worth-it/

With COVID deaths now topping 910,000, the Biden administration and the rest of the Democratic left are deciding to ease up on their mandate regime. We need to learn to live with COVID, they say – repeating advice President Donald Trump issued back in October 2020.

We’re all for ditching the left’s COVID police state, even if Democrats’ reason is political, as we pointed out in this space yesterday.

But that leaves us with a question: Was any of it worth it? Did any of the guidelines, mandates, orders, shutdowns, cancelations, lockdowns do anything to alter the course of the disease, or change in any way the number of people who died from it?

Was it worth the massive disruption to our jobs and lives, the education losses suffered by our children, the trillions in debt piled up? Was it worth shutting down dissent by Tech Giants? Or the unleashing of mask scolds? Or vaccine passports? Or the divisiveness all of it fueled?

After all, even with all that in place, Centers for Disease Control data show that more than 77 million Americans have contracted COVID, and 910,373 deaths are linked to the disease.

What would have been different if we’d done nothing, other than encourage people to use common sense?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pig-medicine-organ-donation-kidney-heart-transplant-xenotransplantation-end-state-renal-disease-medicare-11644439815?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

I had my first kidney transplant in 2004. It gave out after 10 years. The replacement, which I received in 2016, functions well but won’t last forever. “May your organ outlive you,” older transplant patients tell each other. Otherwise, you may not survive the queue for a new one.

That’s why recent breakthroughs in xenotransplantation—the implantation of animal tissues and organs across species—have been exhilarating. In September, doctors at NYU Langone Medical Center attached a pig kidney to blood vessels in a dead woman’s leg (with her family’s permission). It produced urine and cleared waste products during the 54-hour observation period. Two months later, they repeated the procedure.

Also in September, a team at the University of Alabama at Birmingham implanted the first-ever genetically modified pig kidneys into the body of Jim Parsons, 57, of Huntsville, who had been left brain-dead by a motorcycle accident. The new kidneys turned “beautiful and pink,” the lead surgeon said. The experiment lasted 77 hours.

Then, on Jan. 7, surgeons at the University of Maryland transplanted a heart from a genetically modified pig into David Bennett Sr. , who doctors said had exhausted all other treatment options. Mr. Bennett, 57, is still alive.

More than 90,000 Americans are waiting for a kidney. In 2021 fewer than 25,000 received one, and some 41,000 were added to the national waiting list. On the average day, around a dozen people on the list die.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/09/covid-cruelty/

It’s been said that a crisis doesn’t create character, it reveals it. Far too often, the pandemic has shown that many Americans in positions of authority are of poor character. At least we know who the sadists are, since they so helpfully identified themselves.

The line between being overly cautious and just plain cruel has been crossed repeatedly. This is where we are today in what had previously been thought of as civilization:

Hospitals across the country are removing unvaccinated organ transplant patients from waiting lists. Medical ethicists are fine with this, because the patients need to be protected from illnesses while their bodies accept the new organs, and they are prioritized based on their chances of survival. These “ethicists,” however, come off as vindictive, “othering” the unvaccinated in line with the narrative. Moving these patients lower on the list based on a risk they assume seems acceptable, dropping them altogether is not. It’s intentionally punitive and ghoulish. The decisions reinforce, as well, the naked fact that the vaccine mandates are authoritarian power plays.
A Virginia hospital that refused to provide Ivermectin prescribed by a doctor to a dying COVID patient was found in contempt of court before it finally relented and allowed the drug to be administered. It was too late, though. The woman died five days after the judge’s ruling.