RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/rep_dan_crenshaw_politely_destroys_bill_mahers_blame_game_against_trump.html

We all know that decisions are based on best guesses about future events.  We don’t get to make prospective decisions with the benefit of hindsight.  Some decisions when made are manifestly stupid (no smart decision ever began with the phrase “hold my beer”), and even some thoughtful ones reflect bad reasoning (“I have returned from Germany with peace for our time”).

However, when dealing in real time with an unknown disease playing out in countries with different population demographics, different health care systems, and different record-keeping (and, in China’s case, lots of lies), it’s unlikely that there will ever be a perfect response.  Nevertheless, the newest Democrat position is that, because Trump’s response failed to block the Wuhan flu from landing on our shores, he is a blundering, blustering incompetent who is ready for another impeachment.

When someone comes flying at you with that kind of broad accusation, one grounded in emotion and historical rewrites, it’s hard to marshal the appropriate facts and make a sensible argument.  Or maybe it’s hard only if you’re not a former Navy SEAL like Dan Crenshaw, a House representative from Texas.  While most of us have been tested solely in the crucible of mean words and dirty arguments, he was tested under fire, and, as his debonair eye patch shows, he paid a high price during that test.

On the same show during which Bill Maher earned deserved kudos for attacking mainstream media’s execrable, emotion-laden, dishonest coverage of the Wuhan virus, he made the mistake of trying to debate Rep. Dan Crenshaw about whether Trump’s response to the Wuhan virus was timely.  If we could all learn to debate as Crenshaw does, the world would be a better, more logical, well ordered, and well run place.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/15/bill-gates-oh-boo-hoo-rails-trump-pulling-who-fund/

Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder who recently cut his board of directors ties to his company so that he could focus in part on curing the world of disease — such as through the Decade of Vaccines his foundation helped pioneer to develop and administer vaccines around the world — just called out President Donald Trump’s decision to pull U.S. funding from the World Health Organization as abysmal, “dangerous” and deadly.

Hmm. There’s an entirely unexpected and shocking reaction — not.

His condemnation isn’t rooted so much in a “watching out for America” kind of view as it is in a “protecting self and self-interests” panic.

Yes, even billionaire philanthropists can have agendas.

Fact is, Gates is a huge funder of WHO.

https://www.bizpacreview.com/2020/04/19/let-us-work-protests-spread-all-across-the-us-this-weekend-demonstrators-labeled-as-far-right-910354

As protests against coronavirus-based lockdowns continue spreading across the country (and globe), authorities are growing increasingly despotic and arguably fascist in their enforcement of “stay-at-home” orders, with police in one community arresting a woman for simply planning a protest.

That woman, Kim Pagan of New Jersey, reportedly faces charges for “organizing a prohibited event” that involved protesters gathering in order “to demonstrate against” Gov. Phil Murphy‘s potentially unconstitutional coronavirus restrictions.

“Pagan has to answer to the charge in Muncipal Court. Violations of emergency orders constitute a disorderly persons offense carrying a potential sentence of up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine,” Fox News reported.

On Friday, New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal posted a tweet in which he seemed to mock Pagan and other locals who’ve been charged for violating the governor’s authoritarian decrees:

But try as he and other officials might to infringe on the American people’s constitutionally guaranteed right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” protests continue to blossom throughout the country, from Nevada to Idaho, Texas and even California.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/adam_schiffs_dirty_impeachment_tactics_coming_to_light.html

Rep. Adam Schiff spent months launching secret impeachment hearings, never thinking his conduct would be called into question.

He is now caught in the crosshairs of a formidable government agent, Mr. Brendan Carr, Federal Communication Commissioner. The impeachment may be over, but Mr. Carr is formally investigating Rep. Schiff for violating privacy laws — more like obliterating ethical boundaries — by setting up his own surveillance state to target the president’s allies.

Carr is currently uncovering the diabolical nature of the congressman’s “surveillance state.” At the time, Schiff resorted to such desperate measures because he didn’t have much of an impeachment case: Therefore, he issued secret subpoenas to phone carriers hoping to mine the private data of his political opponents, or in effect ransacking their private lives.

The objective was to obtain and publish the calls of Trump’s allies.

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2020/04/covid19-lethality-unhysterical-data-are-emerging/

Multi-billionaire software savant, Bill Gates—hardly the infectious (or any other) disease expert he fancies himself—commented with acid hysteria, several weeks ago (3/24/20), on the mere prospect of lifting draconian “covid19”, Wuhan coronavirus-related shutdowns, to reduce the economic havoc they have wrought:

“It’s very tough to say to people, ‘Hey, keep going to restaurants, go buy new houses, ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner. We want you to keep spending because there’s maybe a politician who thinks [gross domestic product] GDP growth is what really counts.”

Mr. Gates’ self-righteous fulmination, notwithstanding, his morbid, grotesque exaggeration, captures a widely prevalent, critical ignorance of the actual SARS-Cov2  (Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 of the genus Betacoronavirus, which causes Covid19 disease) virus’ lethality embodied in what is known as the infection, or case-fatality ratio (CFR). 

Simply and accurately defined, the CFR is the ratio of the number dying from a severe infectious illness, the “numerator,” to the total number infected, the “denominator.” Clear evidence of infection, no matter how severe or mild (even unnoticed by the infected person), is determined, typically, by “immunoassay”, ablood “seroprevalence” test that measures the presence of so-called “antibodies” to an infectious agent such as SARS-Cov2. It is understandable, during the early throes of an outbreak like covid19 disease, that rapid tests which detect (ostensibly) “live virus antigen” (i.e., specific fragments of its genetic code “RNA”), in readily accessible body fluids (eg., from the throat, or mouth), among the most ill, are prioritized, often to the exclusion of blood seroprevalence antibody testing.

However, this viral antigen methodology, and testing scheme, overrepresenting the severe cases, introduces profound biases which may vastly underestimate the “denominator” of total cases, especially the mildest, required for determining an actual CFR. Accordingly, as of 4:30pm, Saturday, 4/18/20, accepting at face value the gross over-counting of covid19 fatalities, absent appropriate validation by Centers For Disease Control(CDC), and individual state (glaringly, out of hospital deaths in New York, and Massachusetts) “guidelines”, the widely referenced Johns Hopkins Corona Virus Resource Center (JHCRC) tallied 37,938 deaths. Applying the concurrent JHCRC enumeration of covid19 cases relying solely on selective “live virus” testing, i.e., 4,690,482, yielded 37,938 deaths/ 4,690,482 cases, a CFR of 1.03%.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-little-more-light-in-a-vast-sea-of-viral-darkness/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_

Almost every day, more studies, strange data, anecdotal reporting, and theories emerge about the virus, many of which could change existing conventional wisdom. In discussions about the nature of any existing seroprevalence in California, and about how even apparently small percentages of those already infected in the population could radically alter rates of epidemic and mortality modeling, this early abstract of a recent study could be of interest. It was co-reported by a rather large team of 16 distinguished researchers conducting an early assessment of their recent antibody testing in Santa Clara County.

They and their publisher cite customary caution due to the preliminary nature of the “unrefereed preprint” of their findings. e.g., “This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review.” (What does this mean?) “It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.” But the concluding paragraph of the abstract could become of interest in its implications for both state and federal policy, especially when the data of such research are finished being peer reviewed and, if substantiated, and the findings possibly replicated in future such studies:

These prevalence estimates represent a range between 48,000 and 81,000 people infected in Santa Clara County by early April, 50-85-fold more than the number of confirmed cases. Conclusions: The population prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Santa Clara County implies that the infection is much more widespread than indicated by the number of confirmed cases. Population prevalence estimates can now be used to calibrate epidemic and mortality projections. (Emphasis added.)

https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/16/early-peek-at-data-on-gilead-coronavirus-dru

A Chicago hospital treating severe Covid-19 patients with Gilead Sciences’ antiviral medicine remdesivir in a closely watched clinical trial is seeing rapid recoveries in fever and respiratory symptoms, with nearly all patients discharged in less than a week, STAT has learned.

Remdesivir was one of the first medicines identified as having the potential to impact SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, in lab tests. The entire world has been waiting for results from Gilead’s clinical trials, and positive results would likely lead to fast approvals by the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies. If safe and effective, it could become the first approved treatment against the disease.

The University of Chicago Medicine recruited 125 people with Covid-19 into Gilead’s two Phase 3 clinical trials. Of those people, 113 had severe disease. All the patients have been treated with daily infusions of remdesivir. 

“The best news is that most of our patients have already been discharged, which is great. We’ve only had two patients perish,” said Kathleen Mullane, the University of Chicago infectious disease specialist overseeing the remdesivir studies for the hospital.

Her comments were made this week during a video discussion about the trial results with other University of Chicago faculty members. The discussion was recorded and STAT obtained a copy of the video.

The outcomes offer only a snapshot of remdesivir’s effectiveness. The same trials are being run concurrently at other institutions, and it’s impossible to determine the full study results with any certainty. Still, no other clinical data from the Gilead studies have been released to date, and excitement is high. Last month, President Trump touted the potential for remdesivir — as he has for many still-unproven treatments — and said it “seems to have a very good result.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-latest-news-04-18-2020-11587197819?mod=hp_lead_pos3

The coronavirus pandemic in America’s hardest-hit state is starting to wane, its governor said, as more U.S. protesters rallied to lift social-distancing restrictions.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at news conference on Saturday that the number of people currently hospitalized in the state for Covid-19, is under 17,000 compared with about 18,000 at its peak

With more than 235,000 reported coronavirus cases, New York accounts for about one-third of all cases in the U.S., according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. It has nearly three times as many as the No. 2 state, New Jersey, despite a population just over twice as large.

But the average person infected with Covid-19 in New York now infects 0.9 other people, compared with 1.4 at the height of the outbreak, according to Mr. Cuomo, indicating that the virus’s spread is now slowing.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8232131/Adherence-social-distancing-spurs-dip-projected-U-S-coronavirus-deaths.html?ito=push-notification&ci=13334&si=5694542

Coronavirus death toll estimate DROPS again: Top COVID-19 model shows predicted US fatalities have fallen by 12% from 68,841 to 60,308 – just a month after it projected that 84,000 would die

The University of Washington’s model projected on Friday that the US death toll will reach 60,308 by August 4
This marks a 12 percent decline from 68,841 deaths forecast earlier in the week
Better-than-expected social distancing practices and strict state shutdowns have helped slow the outbreak and improve the outlook for Americans
States with low death rates could relax some restrictions on May 4, experts said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/trump-to-give-commencement-to-west-point-pence-delivering-speech-at-air-force-academy_3317096.html

President Donald Trump said he will give a commencement speech at West Point, a U.S. military academy in New York.

Trump told reporters in Washington Friday that cadets will be spread out to comply with social distancing guidelines amid the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 is caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, a novel coronavirus that emerged from mainland China last year.

“I understand they’ll have distancing, they’ll have some big distance, so it will be very different than it ever looked. Do I like the look? No, I don’t,” he said.

Eventually, graduations will return to normal, with people “nice and tight,” he added.