RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/04/28/to-prepare-for-covid-19-vaccine-lets-ensure-manufacturing-capacity-will-meet-demand/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=to-prepare-for-covid-19-vaccine-lets-ensure-manufacturing-capacity-will-meet-demand?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWXprd1l6azRaalV5T1RSayIsInQiOiJMUitrRE9ySFlCczlwQlcra0pERXd5WE9NNTU5aEJcL0llbWVmQUhvU2dMSnpVVEF6dWg5R0ppZVZBaG82aHpkZG5FWkdqY1Ntc1BnR29kRkhGdkMxbmY5emJLZDllY1l5dFZJMXVcL0VnU2xRZ2ZHU3pTSTdFSmJaNmRLVlVsRlwvWSJ9

Pharmaceutical and biotech companies, in collaboration with scientists in academia and government, are working flat-out to develop drugs and vaccines to treat or prevent COVID-19.

Although a vaccine is still months away, policymakers and the public should ask now: If and when their efforts succeed, will there be sufficient manufacturing capacity to meet the likely enormous demand?  

Fortunately, thanks to legislation passed by Congress back in 2004, President Donald Trump and his administration already have the authority they need to support and incentivize private companies with the relevant expertise and skills to build out manufacturing capacity as quickly as humanly possible.

Private industry faces significant risks in building manufacturing capacity at this stage. Given the national interest in making a vaccine available, the president should task his administration with acting now to prepare this capacity. 

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

How It Works

The Project BioShield Act of 2004 gave the Department of Homeland Security authority to determine if a chemical, biological, or radiological agent presents “a material threat against the United States population sufficient to affect national security.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/joe-bidens-dr-death/

Ezekiel Emanuel has some unsettling beliefs.

Does Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel believe Joe Biden would be better off dead?

That would be a peculiar position for Biden’s chief adviser on medical issues and a member of the candidate’s Public Health Advisory Committee to take. But if we accept the reasoning behind Emanuel’s infamous 2014 essay, Biden is nothing more than a resource-sucking shell of himself who should stop trying to prolong his life.

I suspect that if one of Trump’s advisers on coronavirus had once taken to the august pages of The Atlantic to reason that men who reach the age of 75 are useless to society, the press would be vigorously exploring and amplifying his position. Reporters have rarely bothered to bring it up with Emanuel, who is constantly on TV — or with Biden, who is now “sheltered in place” and trying to prolong his life.

It’s quite simple: Does Emanuel believe that Biden, aged 78 on Inauguration Day, is faltering or declining, or in a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived? Does Emanuel consider Biden to have been robbed of his ability to contribute to work, society, and the world? Does he believe that Biden will now be remembered as feeble, ineffectual, and even pathetic? Is Biden’s creativity, originality, and productivity pretty much gone? Surely a younger person, according to Emanuel’s own societal prescription, would be better prepared for the job.

While some of us believe age is catching up to Biden — time waits for no one, etc. — we still believe his life is more than political aspirations. Does Emanuel?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-crisis-americas-high-risk-high-cost-project/

America has never undertaken its like — a high-risk, high-cost endeavor launched amid uncertainty, panic, and pessimism.  Whatever we eventually call it, there is a coronavirus “project.”

Chemotherapy
It’s a race to identify the origins, nature, and danger of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the best way to treat, vaccinate against, and mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 disease — all without destroying America to save it.

However the Corona Project is defined, it remains different from all previous existential American efforts. We are not building any new weapon or infrastructure or deliberately adopting a radical new policy. Much less are Americans fighting a visible enemy, poverty, or just bad habits.

Instead, we are giving ourselves massive social and economic chemotherapy to weaken or retard the virus within us before our massive therapeutic shutdown kills the U.S. economy — a sort of neutron bomb that destroys human interaction without incinerating visible infrastructure. In other words, we the patient apparently must be sickened to the point of near death in order to survive the disease.

It is certainly difficult to compare similar American mass efforts in the past. Their costs are murky — and not just because of inadequate record keeping, the adjustment of prior dollars to current time and inflation, or the need to consider the relationship between lives and money. In addition, the tab for past “wars on” something or other (e.g., alcohol, illiteracy, smoking, poverty, drugs, etc.) usually rippled out for years, both positively and negatively.

https://nypost.com/2020/04/27/ive-worked-the-coronavirus-front-line-and-i-say-its-time-to-start-opening-up/

I’m an emergency physician at St. Barnabas Hospital in The Bronx. I have been in the ER every day these last few weeks, either supervising or providing direct care. I contracted a COVID-19 infection very early in the outbreak, as did two of my daughters, one of whom is a nurse. We are all well, thank God.

COVID-19 has been the worst health care disaster of my 30-year ­career, because of its intensity, duration and potential for lasting impact. The lasting impact is what worries me the most. And it’s why I now believe we should end the lockdown and rapidly get back to work.

From mid-March through mid-April, the ER staff at St. Barnabas huddled in groups of about 20 every morning. We asked ourselves what had happened over the previous shift. We generated a list of action­able tasks for the following 24 hours. At first, we addressed personal protective equipment and the management of patients with mild illness who were seeking COVID-19 tests.

Then came the wave of critically ill patients in numbers none of us had ever seen. This lasted for two weeks. The number of patients on ventilators accumulated in the ER and throughout the hospital. We witnessed an unprecedented number of deaths. The tone of the huddles became more somber. We became accustomed to the morbidity; we did our jobs.

It is precisely what I have witnessed that now tells me that it’s time to ease the lockdown. Here’s why.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/04/27/why-illinois-is-in-troubl

Illinois could soon be the first state in history to have its bonds rated as “junk.” Last month, both Moody’s MCO and Standard & Poor’s downgraded Illinois debt to just one notch above junk status.

Last week, the Illinois State Senate President Don Harmon (D-Chicago) wrote a letter to Congress requesting a $41.6 billion bailout. Critics balked.

In many ways, Illinois may have already crossed the Rubicon.

Our analysis at OpenTheBooks.com shows that an Illinois family of four now owes more in unfunded pension liabilities ($76,000) than they earn in household income ($63,585). In a state of 13 million residents, every man, woman, and child owes $19,000 — on an estimated $251 billion pension liability.

Our auditors discovered 110,000 public employees and retirees who earned more than $100,000 last year.

We found tree trimmers in Chicago making $106,663; nurses at state corrections earning up to $277,100; junior college presidents making $491,095; university doctors earning up to $2 million; and 111 small town managers who out-earned every governor of the 50 states ($202,000).

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-4-27-what-is-the-real-level-of-mortality-from-the-chinese-flu

Several commenters on yesterday’s post express a strong interest in learning the true level of mortality from the Chinese Virus. Are the numbers reported at sites like Worldometers as “Coronavirus Deaths” accurate and reliable, or are they inflated? Or, for that matter, could it be that the number of “Coronavirus Deaths” is under-reported for reasons that could include people dying at home without ever being tested?

My answer is that it is impossible to know at this point. The best indication we will get will come when the CDC issues final data for deaths from all causes in the U.S. for the month of April. When we get that number, we can subtract from it the approximate “normal” number of deaths that would have occurred anyway during April. The difference will be a good estimate of the number of excess deaths attributable to the virus. My prediction is that that number will be far less than the number of “Coronavirus Deaths” being officially reported. I’ll bet on about half or even less; but I’m the first to admit that I could be proved wrong.

The problem with attributing deaths to the virus begins with the fundamental problem of all scientific endeavor, which is that events in the real world have not just one but many causes. As a common example closely related to the subject of this post, many patients with cancer get pneumonia at the final stage of their disease. Did they die from the cancer or from the pneumonia? Or from both? When you look at the CDC statistics, you will see that each death has been assigned uniquely to just one of the major categories. In this case, each death has been assigned either to cancer or to pneumonia, not both. But how did someone decide that death A was from cancer, but death B was from pneumonia, when the patients had both and were in terminal condition? Generally, there is not much riding on the decision, and if it is made arbitrarily — half to one, half to the other — that’s probably fine.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/27/the-covid-19-tragedy-at-the-nations-nursing-homes/

Rather than focus on how to safeguard the most vulnerable among us, politicians have been preening for cable news cameras, blaming the president, halting the sale of vegetable seeds, and warning against small dinner parties in private homes. A tragedy, a failure, and a disgrace.

When the full history of how experts and politicians handled the spread of COVID-19 is written, the account will be littered with missteps, overreach, and unintended consequences.

Decisions that must be included on that long list of failures are the reliance on the disastrous charts produced by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, also known as the Murray model; the unprecedented quarantine of tens of millions of healthy Americans; the abrupt and devastating shutdown of the world’s most powerful economy; and freedom-destroying actions by power-grabbing politicians from governors down to judges and small-town mayors. It’s very possible, in terms of containing the disease and preventing future outbreaks, nearly everything we’ve been instructed to do has been wrong.

But the gravest mistake, historians likely will conclude, has been the deadly decision to knowingly mix COVID-19 patients with uninfected residents and health care workers in nursing homes.

The total death count due to COVID-19 in the United States, according to several tracking sources, is roughly 50,000 people since March 1. About 25 percent of the total fatalities tallied so far stem from nursing homes.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-reward-states-bad-decisions-11588026132?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Congress has taken significant action over the past two months to address the unprecedented economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

We’ve pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the health-care system, significantly boosted unemployment insurance that directly helps those who have lost their jobs, created a loan program to help small businesses, and provided funding to reimburse states and local governments for coronavirus-related expenses.

There’s more Congress can do, but one thing we absolutely shouldn’t do is shield states from the consequences of their own bad budgetary decisions over the past few decades.

The debate began last week when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made the point plainly. “There’s not going to be any desire on the Republican side,” he said, “to bail out state pensions by borrowing money from future generations.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/criminalizing-politics-the-investigation-of-general-flynn/

The Obama administration detested Flynn and targeted him with trumped-up charges that are falling apart under scrutiny.

Author’s Note: What follows is an excerpt from my book Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig and Election and Destroy a Presidency, published in August 2019. The endnotes have been omitted, though I have included supporting links to several relevant reports that are cited in the endnotes. The excerpt contends that that there was no basis in fact or law for the investigation of General Michael Flynn, an argument I began making when reports about the investigation first emerged in early 2017. As further explained in my column today on the NR homepage, last Friday evening, the Justice Department belatedly disclosed exculpatory information indicating, reportedly, that there was no valid law-enforcement reason for the FBI to interview Flynn in January 2017, and that he later pled guilty under the threat that if he did not do so, prosecutors would charge his son with a crime — an understanding that was withheld from the court at the time of the guilty plea. In making the disclosure, the Justice Department signaled that more disclosures about the case are forthcoming.

Could anything have made the Obama administration giddier than the prospect of making a criminal case on Michael Flynn?

Flynn is a retired Army lieutenant general, who made his mark on modern insurgent warfare by helping revolutionize the rapid dissemination of battlefield intelligence. He was promoted by President Obama to lead the Defense Intelligence Agency. He is also a headstrong man who got himself on Obama’s bad side by questioning counterterrorism strategy, particularly the administration’s weakness on Iran. He was detested by Obama political and national-security officials for calling them out on politicizing intelligence. The FBI was not a fan, least of all Deputy Director Andy McCabe, because Flynn had supported an agent who claimed the Bureau had subjected her to sex discrimination.