RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/our-dysfunctional-race-relations-bruce-thornton/

Commentator and radio host Larry Elder recently posted an insightful tweet: “It is a sign of progress that today in America ‘race relations’ pretty much comes down to just one thing: how black people feel about white people––and how white people feel about how black people feel about white people.”

Unpacking this comment will reveal how dysfunctional “race relations” and racial discourse have been for half a century since legal segregation was ended.

First, I suspect the word “progress” carries a double edge. Of course, the condescending and patronizing sensibility that underlies “white” America’s obsession with black people’s opinions of them is a tremendous improvement over the indifference and neglect at best, and at worst the daily demeaning humiliations and physical violence of the past.

But the goal of the Civil Rights Movement that brought down legal segregation wasn’t for blacks to become “mascots,” to use Thomas Sowell’s metaphor, of enlightened white people’s moral preening, or superficial compassion, or need for racial redemption and absolution. Rather, it was for black people to be in full possession of the unalienable rights upon which the country and the Constitution were founded, and hence to be politically and legally equal to other Americans. The color of their skin, then, would be irrelevant to their political and national identities and the “content of their character.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/the-left-politicizes-covid-irony-abounds/

The ‘follow the science’ Democrats care more about politics than science.

Where has the coronavirus gone?

Nowhere. The pandemic has gained a second wind, even as it is mysteriously scarcer in post-election headlines. If anything, COVID-19 seems more contagious as cold temperatures arrive, people stay in indoors, and perhaps their vitamin D levels taper off.

Whatever one’s views on the virus — whether it remains an existential threat or, contrarily, prompts overreactive lockdowns that are more harmful and maybe even deadlier than the virus itself — nothing much has changed since Election Day.

Or did viral perceptions suddenly change? The pandemic certainly no longer serves as an election lever to demagogue President Trump as a veritable killer.States such as California are under a nearly complete lockdown. Draconian measures will abbreviate Thanksgiving gatherings in a way unprecedented in U.S. history. Yet elites such as California’s Governor Gavin Newsom and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) have violated the quarantines they themselves have endorsed.

Following the media announcement that Joe Biden would likely become president, crowds swarmed into the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. They violated every state mandate requiring masks and social distancing. Authorities did nothing — just as they had done nothing during the summer-long protesting and rioting. Apparently, some outdoor gatherings were correct; others, not so much.

A similar warping of science accompanied news about the possible rollout of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Julie Kelly of the conservative website American Greatness has documented the changing narratives about the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Pfizer is one of five companies in line to receive massive federal funding under the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed program to hasten mass vaccinations. Such an ambitious program is unmatched in the history of viral epidemiology. On November 16, another company in the program, Moderna, announced promising results from a clinical trial.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla predicted in early September that by the end of October, his company would offer a preliminary announcement concerning the safety and effectiveness of his company’s vaccine. His forecast was met with apprehension on the left. Any positive assessment was seen by the Left as political, validating, shortly before the election, the Trump administration’s rapid response to the virus.

Yet on October 27, a week before the election, Pfizer corrected Bourla’s earlier estimate. The company claimed any such declaration would follow rather than precede the election.

https://dianebederman.com/you-racist-karen-the-devolution-of-civility-and-the-declin

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “Without ideas held in common there is no common action and without common action there may still be men but there is no social body in order that society should exist and a fortiori that a society should prosper it is necessary that the minds of all the citizens should be rallied and held together by certain predominant ideas.”

Grandiose infantile delusions of entitlement; what a spectacular expression. I first learned it in the 1990s when I took my 2000 hour residency in clinical pastoral education to be a hospital chaplain. And here we are in the 2020’s and the entitlement has expanded. Now it includes calls for the right to free stuff: education, healthcare, housing, food and a get out of jail free card. My, my, aren’t we so entitled.

But this entitlement has taken on a more sinister meaning because of critical race theory and diversity politics. “Critical race theory (CRT), the view that the law and legal institutions are inherently racist and that race itself, instead of being biologically grounded and natural, is a socially constructed concept that is used by white people to further their economic and political interests at the expense of people of colour. According to critical race theory (CRT), racial inequality emerges from the social, economic, and legal differences that white people create between “races” to maintain elite white interests in labour markets and politics, giving rise to poverty and criminality in many minority communities. The CRT movement officially organized itself in 1989, at the first annual Workshop on Critical Race Theory, though its intellectual origins go back much further, to the 1960s and ’70s.”

https://www.wnd.com/2020/11/4871000/
After listing his credentials, a Cambridge University-trained virologist spoke in a public forum against the extension of a mask mandate in one of Canada’s largest cities, calling comprehensive lockdowns, masks and other mitigation efforts against the coronavirus “utterly unfounded public hysteria driven by the media and politicians.”

“It’s outrageous. This is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting population,” said Dr. Roger Hodkinson, the CEO of Western Medical Assessments.

He was speaking via telephone during an Edmonton City Council Community and Public Services Committee meeting last Fridayregarding the Alberta city’s move to extend its face-covering bylaw.

Hodkinson began with a summary of his credentials to ensure he not be regarded as a “quack.”

He said he is a medical specialist in pathology, which includes virology, who trained at Cambridge University in England. A Royal College certified pathologist in Canada, he is the former chairman of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons committee in Ottawa. Hodkinson served as CEO of a large private medical laboratory in Edmonton, Alberta, and now runs MutantDx, a molecular diagnostics company in North Carolina that provides COVID-19 tests.

Hodkinson warned that what he was about to say was “lay language and blunt” and “counter-narrative.”

“There is absolutely nothing that can be done to contain this virus other than protecting older, more vulnerable people,” he said.

“It should be thought of as nothing other than a bad flu season,” said Hodkinson. “This is not ebola. It’s not SARS.”

https://healthy-skeptic.com/2020/11/18/flash-on-the-danish-mask-study/

This is the fuller post.   The headline result–wearing a mask makes no difference in cases or in level of transmission in the community.   It is obvious to all of us now, that this is true, as we can see the case growth in areas of the country with extremely high mask-wearing rates.  Here is the cite.  (Danish Mask Study)  Coupled with the withdrawal of the county study which purported to show a benefit based on limited time period study, this should put an end to any Governor claiming that mask mandates are backed by science and data, but it won’t.  As I noted in my flash report, people are already coming out with all kinds of BS criticisms of the trial. It is amusing in a sense, that people who just accepted all the mask modeling “research” without any quibbles or skepticism are finding all kinds of criticism directed at an actual randomized trial attempting to answer a real-life question–what is the effect of wearing a mask in the community.

Before describing the study and its findings, let me make a couple of preliminary observations.  I have been reading medical research for 40 years and science papers for even longer.  When you read this study and you know the history of the attempt to get it published, you are immediately struck by what the authors must have been forced to do to get any reputable journal to publish it.  They were clearly forced to constantly refer to limitations and caveats about the study and there is a discussion about the confidence intervals around the results that you absolutely never see in the published reports of research.  What kind of science is it that decides in advance what the results have to be and tries to suppress any research that challenges those pre-ordained results?  When I complain that science has become completely politicized, what happened to this study is Exhibit A.

https://www.citizenfreepress.com/breaking/massive-study-masks-may-actually-increa

Sean Davis

@seanmdav
A massive Danish study on mask usage found no statistically significant difference in coronavirus infection rates between mask-wearers and non-mask-wearers. In fact, according to the data, mask usage may actually increase the likelihood of infection. https://acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/the-covid-vaccines-bernies-crooks-to-the-rescue/

“Progressing from discovery of a novel virus to safe and effective vaccines utilizing a new technology in just ten months demonstrates the innovative power of the private market to discover, develop, and deliver life-saving new products. The regulation and price controls Bernie Sanders and his fellow travelers prefer would destroy the incentives and profits needed for continued innovation and leave us unprepared for the next pandemic.”

The regulations Sanders & Co. seek would destroy the incentives needed for innovation and leave us unprepared for the next pandemic.

Bernie Sanders has described pharmaceutical companies as “crooks” who are “literally killing people every day.” So I guess we have some pretty nefarious characters to thank for the unprecedentedly rapid development of safe and effective vaccines that promise to bring the COVID-19 pandemic to an end. These innovative companies have invested years of work and billions of dollars that put them in a position to create new vaccines in record time.

It normally takes ten years or more to develop new vaccines for novel viruses. But now, only ten months after China identified the hitherto unknown SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for COVID-19 and shared its genetic sequence, 53 COVID-19 vaccines created by a variety of new and old vaccine-making techniques are being tested in humans in 18 countries. Eleven of these are in the most advanced stage of trials (Phase 3).

Two private companies have just announced promising results in their ongoing trials. On November 16, Moderna, based in Cambridge, Mass., announced that preliminary data show its COVID-19 vaccine is 95 percent effective. A week earlier New York based Pfizer with its German partner BioNTech announced their vaccine is 90 percent effective in preventing COVID-19 in a preliminary analysis. Today Pfizer announced final results indicating that its vaccine is 95 percent effective and causes only rare and mild side effects. It was effective for different races, ethnic groups, and ages — unlike many older vaccines that do not work well in the elderly, the Pfizer m-RNA vaccine was 94 percent effective in people over 65, the group at highest risk for severe COVID-19 illness and death. Pfizer plans on seeking emergency-use authorization within days. Neither the Moderna nor the Pfizer trial has reported severe side effects.

From former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, the second installment in the best-selling series that offers hard data about the coronavirus epidemic – rather than hysterical predictions of doom.

While Unreported Truths Part 1 focused on how many people are dying from COVID-19, this section discusses an equally important but even more complex topic: the history of lockdowns, and the evidence that they work as intended. Like Part 1, this section draws on primary sources like Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization reports, along with news articles, government documents, and scientific papers.

In three chapters, this section explains the surprising scientific debate around lockdowns BEFORE March, along with the evidence that they did or did not work as intended to reduce the spread of the coronavirus and save lives. If you have been wondering whether lockdowns made any difference – as the media has loudly insisted – Part 2 will give you the truthful, accurate and well-sourced information you need to make up your own mind.

Please note: This booklet contains only the second section of Unreported Truths. Part 1 is available separately.