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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

It’s Time for the White House to Focus on Drug Approvals . By Ryan Streeter

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/18/its_time_for_the_white_house_to_focus_on_drug_approvals_142941.html

In this COVID-19 era, it’s the scientists who will ultimately get us back to work. It is time for the Trump administration to acknowledge this and adjust its public communication strategy accordingly. It is hard to envision a scenario looking like the “normal” we all crave until we have therapeutics to protect us from the coronavirus’s effects as we await a vaccine to prevent us from catching it. Once we all know we can take a drug that will minimize symptoms and possibly prevent infection in the first place, we can interact safely in ways that even a ramped-up testing regime will not allow.

Daily White House briefings, and as a result the media and the American public, have been fixated up to now on the response to the pandemic from the administration and Congress. These updates primarily focus on three of the four main categories of activity: federal aid to businesses and displaced workers, needed supplies and equipment for our health care system, and the social distancing regimen complete with handwashing and homemade masks. The two medical faces of this crisis, Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, have concentrated on the last two and keep faithfully explaining what the administration is doing, or should be doing, to increase testing, equip frontline workers, and ultimately flatten the curve. 

We hear much less about the fourth category of activity, that is, the race to find a therapeutic solution to combat the virus while we await a vaccine. Therapeutics include anti-viral drugs that inhibit the coronavirus and antibody therapies that boost immunity to the virus, and possibly off-label use of existing drugs. 

Top coronavirus model significantly lowers total estimates of US deaths in new projection By Adam Shaw

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/coronavirus-model-estimates-us-deaths-down

A key coronavirus model has lowered its estimate of total U.S. deaths in its latest projection of how many will die due to the contagious virus.

The revision will likely fuel criticism from skeptics that initial projections were overblown, and one that government leaders may use to say that efforts to combat the spread are working.

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) lowered its projection of total deaths from 68,841 (with an estimate range of 30,188 to 175,965) to just over 60,308 (with an estimate range of 34,063 to 140,381) in an update published Friday.

The institute said that change was partially driven by both higher estimates in states like New York and New Jersey, and lower projections in states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, Georgia and Florida.

“By incorporating the trend in cases alongside COVID-19 deaths in our model, many locations are now predicted to have longer peaks and are taking longer to move down the epidemic curve to zero deaths,” a statement from the institute said. “Subsequently, these places now have higher projections for cumulative COVID-19 deaths through the first wave.”

It’s our right — and duty — to question those deciding America’s fate By Douglas MacKinnon

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/493195-its-our-right-and-duty-to-question-those-deciding-americas-fate

When in the United States of America did it become objectionable, or considered outright wrong, to question the wisdom and policies of our politicians, bureaucrats and “experts”?  If “we are all in this together,” as people have been declaring about the fight against COVID-19, then shouldn’t we all have a say in our collective fate? That should be the right of every American citizen, even those who disagree with states’ shelter-at-home and business closure orders.

When did it become wrong, or a crime punishable by arrest, for Americans to peacefully protest a governor’s stay-at-home order, as happened recently in Raleigh, N.C.? Evidently our right to peacefully protest has become a “non-essential activity” to be broken up by the police. In Lansing, Mich., protesters against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order used vehicles for their “Operation Gridlock.”

To curb the spread of COVID-19 in America, we have temporarily surrendered our lifestyles, livelihoods, life savings, mental health and even our very freedoms to the dictates of politicians, bureaucrats and public health experts. “For our own good,” they have put in place orders to control the movement and actions of most of the nation’s 330 million people.  

No one can deny that COVID-19 is a dangerous, highly-infectious virus. That said, the solutions to curb the contagion seem to be holding Americans hostage. Are we still allowed to contrast what’s happening with this pandemic to those of the past and ask logical questions?

Keeping the coronavirus death toll in perspective By Heather Mac Donald

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/493370-keeping-the-coronavirus-death-toll-in-perspective

As governors and mayors debate when to lift their coronavirus stay-at-home orders, public health experts predict a flood of deaths should businesses be allowed to reopen before universal testing or a vaccine for the disease is available. These are the same experts whose previous apocalyptic models of coronavirus fatalities and shortages of hospital beds and ventilators have proved wildly inaccurate. It may be useful to look at some numbers for perspective. 

As of 3 p.m. Eastern on April 16, there were 30,920 coronavirus deaths in the U.S. New York state accounted for 14,198 — or 46 percent — of those deaths. New York City accounted for 11,477 of New York state’s deaths and 37 percent of national deaths. This week, New York City started counting deaths as coronavirus fatalities if the patient had not been tested for the disease but was suspected postmortem of having it. This relaxed standard increased the U.S. death count by 17 percent. Other jurisdictions will inevitably follow suit. 

The national coronavirus deaths represent a death rate of 9.4 per 100,000 of the U.S. population. Take out the New York fatalities and the New York share of the national population, and the coronavirus death rate for the rest of the country is 5.4 per 100,000 of the U.S. population.

The Ventilator Shortage That Wasn’t By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-crisis-ventilator-shortages-have-not-come-to-pass/

The ventilator shortages of which we were all gravely warned have not yet come to pass.

In March, one of the most feared aspects of the pandemic was the widely reported coming shortage of ventilators. One well-publicized estimate, repeated by the New York Times, the New Yorker and CNN, was that the U.S. would need roughly one million ventilators, or more than five times as many as we had. Gulp. Ventilators are expensive, they’re complex machines, and they can’t be churned out in the thousands overnight.

In the state that (as of today) has one-third of the country’s confirmed COVID-19 cases, New York governor Andrew Cuomo sounded the alarm for ventilators repeatedly. On March 27, he acknowledged “I don’t have a crystal ball” but said his state desperately needed 30,000 ventilators, maybe 40,000, but had only 12,000. When President Trump noted that Cuomo’s state had thousands of unused ventilators it hadn’t even placed yet, Cuomo admitted this was true but said he still needed more: “Yes, they’re in a stockpile because that’s where they’re supposed to be because we don’t need them yet. We need them for the apex,” Cuomo said at the time. On April 2, Cuomo predicted the state would run out of ventilators in six days “at the current burn rate.” But on April 6, Cuomo noted, “We’re ok, and we have some in reserve.”

Now New York appears to have passed the apex. Deaths, a lagging indicator, crested at 799 on April 9 and hit 606 on April 16, the lowest figure since April 6. Hospitalizations are also declining, and on April 16 also hit their lowest level since April 6. Cuomo today has so many ventilators he is giving them away:

Stanford study suggests coronavirus is more widespread than realized If SARS-Cov-2 is already endemic in the population, there is nothing we can do to stop it — but no great reason to try to stop it, either Ross Clark

https://spectator.us/stanford-study-suggests-coronavirus-more-widespread-realized/

Another day, and yet more evidence has appeared that could indicate the number of people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, might be vastly higher than official figures suggest. This time a Californian study suggests the figure in one county could be more than 50 times the number who knew they had had the virus.

A team from Stanford University and other colleges recruited volunteers in Santa Clara County via Facebook adverts and produced a sample of 3,000 representatives of the county as a whole. They were then invited for blood tests to detect the presence of antibodies to the virus. The result was positive in 1.5 percent of cases. Adjusting for age, gender and ethnicity the results suggest that 2.8 percent of people in the county had already had the virus. That might not seem many, but at the time of the study — on April 4 and 5 — only 1,094 people in the county were recorded as having the virus. The study suggests the real figure is between 48,000 and 81,000.

Like many studies which have been pre-published in order to aid understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic, the paper produced by the Stanford-led team has not yet been peer-reviewed. Moreover, it took place in a part of the United States where very few people have so far tested positive with the virus. It would be interesting to see the experiment repeated in New York City, where recorded infections are far higher.

Coronavirus Update: Encouraging Results for Treatment By Daniel Tenreiro

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-update-encouraging-results-for-treatment/

Yesterday, STAT News reported positive results for the antiviral medicine remdesivir. A clinical trial at the University of Chicago treated 125 patients with the drug, developed by pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences.  Of the 113 patients in severe condition, most were discharged, and only two died.

While the complete results of the trial have yet to be released, and the drug will still have to go through further studies, these results are an encouraging sign as policymakers plan to reopen the economy. Stocks rallied on the news.

The medical data from the U.S. has been mixed. While the number of new cases increased yesterday, the number of new deaths fell.

There is variation across states. In New York, daily deaths have been falling of late, whereas deaths in the rest of the country have increased. This heterogeneity accentuates the difficulty of coordinating a federal pandemic policy. The White House has published guidelines for states to reopen, including a sustained reduction in cases and robust testing and contact tracing. The reopening of the economy will be staggered as states assess their capacity to prevent further waves of infection.

While almost all the hardest-hit states have seen case growth fall to around 5 percent a day, the number is considerably higher in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Louisiana and Florida, which both appeared slated for massive outbreaks, seem to have avoided the worst.

However, testing has plateaued, which makes it difficult to gauge the actual number of cases. Until we have widespread testing, including serology tests for immunity, we won’t know how vulnerable the population is to further waves of infection.

We Need A Manhattan Project To Create a Coronavirus Vaccine Chris Buskirk

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/16/we-need-a-manhattan-project-to-create-a-coronavirus-vaccine/

It’s a sign of institutional failure and a lack of cultural vitality that we resort to the most draconian, most primitive response to a virus. And instead of science, we get scientism—the ritualistic display of competence rather than truth. We can and must do better.

There are only two ways human action can get the SARS-CoV-2 virus permanently behind us and return to normal life: we either develop a knock-out therapy that kills the virus dead in people who have contracted it, like powerful antibiotics do with bacterial infections, or we need to develop herd immunity. Without one of those, we are left hoping that the virus simply burns itself out and disappears. That would be foolish. But a knockout drug—a cure—is highly unlikely. There is no such drug for the seasonal flu or for the rhinoviruses that cause the common cold. So while effective therapies should be a part of the strategy to combat the ill effects of this virus, and sensible precautions like masks can prevent its spread, the only way to permanently defeat it is through herd immunity.

Doctors and public health officials all know this. So do politicians. Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) said during a press conference describing his plan for reopening California: “Normal it will not be. At least until we have herd immunity and a vaccine.”

Most people think, having “flattened the curve” and avoided the dire predictions of millions dead made just weeks ago, that we’ve defeated the virus. We haven’t. What we did was slow the infection rate and that’s good; but the virus is still circulating and countries with much better testing and tracing systems like South Korea and Singapore have experienced further outbreaks after reopening which, in turn, have led to more lockdowns. We want to avoid both of those things. Escaping that unhappy fate means getting to herd immunity quickly.

Hillary, Comey And Brennan Must Face Justice For Deep-State Spying On Trump

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/17/hillary-comey-and-brennan-must-face-justice-for-deep-state-spying-on-trump/

The media have been saturated with coronavirus news for weeks now, with literally hundreds of stories each day about the pandemic. But while you’re quarantined and self-distancing yourself from the dreaded COVID-19 virus, you might not have noticed something big: the investigation into the Russian spygate fiasco is coming to a head.

As the old saying goes, the wheels of justice turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine. Some time after our nation reopens for business in a few weeks, the wheels will turn when the Durham report on the Russian collusion case will be released and hit the front pages.

If recent revelations are any indication, it will be a blockbuster, potentially leading to indictments of former senior intelligence and justice officials.

By now, most of us know that top officials in the Justice Department, FBI and CIA pursued an investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign for alleged “collusion” with Russia to tilt the 2016 election in Donald Trump’s favor.

The main premise of that investigation proved to be false, as the subsequent Mueller report showed conclusively.

That’s bad enough. But new revelations show that not only did U.S. officials wrongly pursue the investigation and spy on the Trump campaign, they did so knowing that it was based on Russian disinformation.

And why did they do it? To aid the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, which financed the spurious anti-Trump “dossier” put together by former British spy Christopher Steele.
Damning Footnotes

As investigative reporter Sara Carter recently noted, “Newly declassified footnotes from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December FBI report reveals that senior Obama officials, including members of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team, knew the dossier compiled by a former British spy during the 2016 election was Russian disinformation to target President Donald Trump.”

The FBI used the bogus evidence anyway to convince a FISA court to let the FBI spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Page resigned as a Trump adviser in September 2016. But by spying on him, the FBI opened a backdoor into Trump’s entire campaign.

Let the irony of that sink in. U.S. officials knowingly colluded with Russian intelligence using tainted evidence to prove that Trump colluded with the Russian government to weaken Clinton’s campaign.

If so, they were willingly duped by former KGB agent Vladimir Putin.

In addition, the footnotes show that these same senior officials “were aware of the disinformation when they included the dossier in the Obama administration’s Intelligence Communities Assessment.”

Under the legal “fruit of a poisonous tree” doctrine, evidence obtained illegally cannot be used as a predicate for legal action. That means the whole Trump investigation, including the tapping of Trump campaign officials’ communications, was illegitimate if not downright illegal.

The upshot of all this is that former FBI chief James Comey, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA top spy John Brennan and an array of their underlings knew the information that came from the Steele dossier was tainted, but used it anyway.
Spying On Trump To Help Hillary

They did so again not for reasons of justice, but to prop up Clinton. In essence, the FBI, CIA and Clinton campaign formed a cozy little cabal using taxpayer money and federal investigative agencies to take down Trump’s campaign.

Moreover, it never ended. Even after Trump was elected, a ring of senior officials plotted ways to remove Trump from office. To us, it was little more than a silent coup attempt.

But ask an attorney: That’s called “conspiracy,” and it’s a felony.

Just look at how Steele, who worked in Moscow for Britain’s MI6, got paid for putting together his bogus dossier. He was paid $168,000 for his work with the political opposition research firm GPS Fusion. But that came from an even bigger chunk of money, $1.02 million to be exact, paid to Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., a business intelligence firm staffed by former spooks.

All this money came from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. To hide its true source, payments were “facilitated” by the left-leaning Seattle-based Perkins Coie law firm, which worked both for the DNC and Clinton.

Contrary to later reporting in the mainstream media about Steele being “trusted” and “professional,” the FBI had repeated warnings going back all the way to 2015 that Steele’s contacts included sketchy Russian underworld characters and untrustworthy intelligence sources.

Spying on a presidential campaign was one of the most disgraceful episodes of recent American history, exceeding even the burglary of the DNC by former President Richard Nixon’s campaign.

For those who engaged in this unlawful and unethical behavior, things just got real, as the saying goes.
Barr’s Shot Across The Bow

Speaking to Laura Ingraham earlier this week, U.S. Attorney General William Barr called the FBI-Clinton spying on Trump “one of the greatest travesties in American history.”

He promised that the current investigation of wrongdoing by U.S. Attorney John Durham would “bring to justice people who were engaged in abuses” in the Russia investigation, and that those who broke the law would be “prosecuted.”

This should include Clinton, who has become an increasingly unhinged and vocal critic of all things Trump. If there was indeed a Deep State conspiracy, wasn’t she at its very center?

In addition to resolving the Russia spygate mess, which Clinton helped set in motion, the Justice Department said it will not block depositions by former Secretary of State Clinton and her deputy Cheryl Mills, as recently ordered by a federal judge.

The depositions are in response to a Freedom Of Information Act suit brought by the legal watchdog group Judicial Watch over Clinton’s possibly illegal use of an unsecured private email server to conduct State Department business.

Stay tuned. The Russian collusion investigation, which was in fact a partisan witch hunt funded by public money, is coming to an end. And it may lead to one or more major former public officials being indicted and going to prison.

For a nation based on the idea of one standard of justice for all, this reckoning is long overdue.

Fauci time and the coronavirus vaccine By Howard Richman

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

The American coronavirus vaccine’s Phase 1 clinical trials are bogged down. They began on March 3 and are not scheduled to end until June 1, 2021.

Why fifteen months for the first American vaccine’s clinical trials? The reason is simple. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases), is conducting them in Fauci Time.  (Fauci is also conducting the clinical trials to see if Remdesivir is effective against COVID-19 in Fauci Time – those trials are not scheduled to end until April 1, 2023.)

Normally, during a health emergency, the U.S. gets out a vaccine within months. Take the H1N1 (Swine Flu) pandemic of 2009. The CDC has published a timeline:

April 15. First human infection.
May 5. School closings affect 607,778 students.
July 22. Clinical trials begin.
September 15. Four vaccines approved.