RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/they-developed-their-coronavirus-vaccine-in-salks-shadow-11586557454?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Pittsburgh

Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine at a University of Pittsburgh lab. The deadly disease that crippled infants disappeared almost overnight, and Salk became a hero. He wasn’t Steel City’s only history-making physician. Thomas Starzl, who performed the first liver transplant in 1963, joined the Pitt faculty in 1981.

As the world faces another terrifying disease, Pitt medical scientists are again at work on a potentially revolutionary vaccine. Louis Falo and Andrea Gambotto, respectively a dermatologist and a surgeon, have developed a Covid-19 inoculation that rapidly produces large numbers of coronavirus antibodies when injected in mice. A peer-reviewed paper describing their work appeared in the journal EBioMedicine, which is published by The Lancet. They await approval from the Food and Drug Administration to conduct human trials on their vaccine candidate, which is delivered via a unique skin patch containing 400 tiny needles.

“This is a collision of two stories,” Dr. Falo says. “We’ve been developing the delivery technologies for this for the past several years and working with Dr. Gambotto in trying to use the skin as the ideal target for vaccine delivery. While we were doing that, Dr. Gambotto has been working on SARS and MERS.” The two physicians’ labs are next door to each other.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-disinformation-fed-the-fbis-trump-investigation-11586548963?mod=hp_opin_pos_3

Senator Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Declassified footnotes to a Justice Department inspector general report show that the Federal Bureau of Investigation team investigating members of the Trump campaign received classified reports in 2017 identifying key pieces of the Steele dossier as products of a Russian disinformation campaign. This might be only the tip of the iceberg because other recently declassified information demonstrates that even more disinformation may have been planted in Christopher Steele’s reporting.

Let that sink in. The FBI knew that at least some of its evidence against the Trump campaign, and maybe more, was likely part of a Russian disinformation campaign—evidence from a source that was “central and essential” for getting the first FISA warrant. It isn’t clear what if anything the FBI did to determine whether their investigation was based in substantial part on Russian disinformation.

Yet the FBI assistant director in charge of the investigation, Bill Priestap, told the inspector general that as of May 2017 (when Robert Mueller took over as special counsel), the FBI “didn’t have any indication whatsoever” that their evidence was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/492247-trump-to-convene-council-focused-on-reopening-the-country

President Trump on Friday confirmed he plans to convene a new council of business and medical leaders intended to guide his administration toward reopening the U.S. economy.

Trump teased the new group at a White House news briefing, saying he would dub it the “Opening Our Country Council.” The members would be announced Tuesday, he said.

“We’re also setting up a council of very, very great doctors and businesspeople,” he said, saying the group’s focus would be “beyond economic.”

Trump suggested the group would be bipartisan and be diverse in terms of geography because of the way the coronavirus has impacted certain parts of the country differently.

The formation of the group was expected, with reported members including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump’s daughter and senior adviser Ivanka Trump, as well as private-sector figures.

The president and his top aides have in recent days been pushing to reopen parts of the economy as early as the start of May as unemployment skyrockets and businesses across the country remain shuttered due to the virus outbreak.

https://canadafreepress.com/article/after-four-years-of-democrat-treachery-i-smell-a-corona-virus-rat
Test time boys and girls. Hint…there is only one right answer––if you don’t get it right, you flunk! And so does America!
Which person, foreign or American, predicted three years ago, in 2017, that President Trump would be challenged by a “surprise global-disease outbreak”?
o Enemy of Trump Cong. Adam Schiff (D-CA)
o Enemy of Trump House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
o Crazed enemy of Trump Hillary Clinton
Answer: None of the above. It was Dr. Anthony Fauci!
Which person, foreign or American, said that the collapse of the American capitalist system as a result of the corona virus plague would be “inconvenient”?
 American adversary Xi Jing Ping, President of China
 American adversary Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran
 American adversary Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President of Turkey
Answer: None of the above. It was Dr. Anthony Fauci!

Which person, foreign or American, said on January 21, 2020, that the corona virus “was not a major threat to the United States” and on January 23rd downplayed the virus’ potential impact on the U.S?
 U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams
 TV host Dr. Mehmet Oz
 The entire staff of the NY Times

A primer

‘When can we end social distancing and get back to normal life?” It’s the question on everyone’s mind, and one without a clear answer at this time. Here’s what we do know: An effective treatment against the novel coronavirus would make a big difference in getting us there.

Remember the old adage, “There’s no cure for the common cold”? Well, the common cold is caused by a mild strain of coronavirus. The version of coronavirus we’re dealing with here is far more dangerous — but possibly just as difficult to treat.

In order to talk about therapies, it’s important to distinguish between the virus itself — the infectious agent — and the disease caused by the virus. (Think of HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus that causes the illness known as acquired immune-deficiency syndrome, or AIDS.) In our present case, the World Health Organization has named the novel coronavirus “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2,” or SARS-CoV-2. The WHO calls the illness caused by SARS-CoV-2 “COVID-19.” (“COVID” stands for “coronavirus disease”; “19” comes from the fact that the disease was first identified in Wuhan in late 2019.) To repeat: Virus, SARS-CoV-2; disease, COVID-19. 

There are two broad categories of ongoing clinical development related to the pandemic. Vaccines, which help people achieve immunity to the virus, are the farthest off. A vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 won’t be ready until late 2021 at the earliest. That’s because vaccines need to be painstakingly tested in clinical trials to ensure that they make patients better, not worse. Flawed vaccines can lead to dangerous overstimulation of the immune system, or can make someone even more sensitive to coronavirus exposure. And since you can’t ethically expose someone to coronavirus, you have to give the vaccine to hundreds or even thousands of people and wait to see evidence of whether the vaccine achieves a statistically significant reduction in the number of people who get infected. Furthermore, coronaviruses mutate frequently, meaning that a vaccine developed in one year would likely be less robust, or even completely ineffective, in future years.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8209161/More-18-000-Americans-dead-coronavirus.html?ito=push-notification&ci=12687&si=5381410

More than 18,000 Americans now dead from coronavirus as the infection number increases to 490,000 – as updated projections show TODAY will be peak death day with an estimated 1,900 fatalities
The death had increased to more than 18,000 by Friday with 1,322 death recorded in 24 hours 
There are now more than 490,000 confirmed coronavirus infections across the country after cases increase by nearly 21,000 overnight
Updated projections show Friday will be the peak day for coronavirus deaths 
The new estimates brought forward the peak day of deaths by two days to April 10 with 1,983 people predicted to die from the coronavirus 
The projections were released on Friday by forecasters at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation 
Peak resource use for hospitals is predicted to occur on Saturday where an estimated 86,379 beds, 17,707 ICU beds and 15,414 ventilators will be needed 
Learn more about how to help people impacted by COVID

https://pjmedia.com/trending/dr-fauci-cuts-death-projection-almost-in-half-from-just-10-days-ago/

On March 31, the White House coordinator for the coronavirus task force gave a somber projection of between 100,00 and 240,000 dead Americans as a result of the pandemic.

Dr. Deborah Birx said that even with strict social distancing and a shuttered economy, the best we could hope for is 100,000 fatal cases of the coronavirus.

But today, Dr. Anthony Fauci revised that estimate considerably downward. Fauci now believes — based on two respected models — that the U.S. death toll will be around 60,000.

Bloomberg:

At a White House news conference on Wednesday, Birx said that two prominent models for U.S. mortality from the Covid-19 pandemic — Covid Act Now and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington — had both lowered their fatality projections based on widespread social distancing efforts.

Trump didn’t endorse social distancing until March 16, after many ordinary Americans had already taken up the practices themselves out of fear for the virus. It isn’t clear that the country will obey him if he urges Americans to abandon the behaviors before the outbreak has abated.

“The country” will go back to work if Trump gives the all-clear. It’s not a question of “obeying” or disobeying the president. For most, it’s a matter of survival.

That said, in an interview with CBS, Dr. Fauci was considerably more optimistic than he has been in the past.

Separately, Fauci said in a CBS News interview on Thursday that he sees the U.S. making progress toward a return to normal life in the near future. Federal social-distancing recommendations extend to April 30.

“Hopefully, by the time we get to the summer, we will have taken many steps in that direction,” he said. But he cautioned that different areas of the U.S. may see the outbreak peak at different times, which may require a range of timetables.

Fauci was asked if he can envision Americans returning to beaches, celebrations, and other normal seasonal activities in the summer.

“Yes,” he said, “if we do the things that we need to do to prevent the resurgence.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/heritage-coronavirus-commission-releases-5-step-plan-to-reopen-america/

On Thursday, the Heritage Foundation’s National Coronavirus Recovery Commission met for the first time. At the meeting, seventeen experts hammered out a general five-phase plan to “save lives and livelihoods” by defeating the coronavirus and jumpstarting the economy. Vice President Mike Pence acknowledged the commission’s work.

In order to slow the spread of the virus, President Donald Trump has urged Americans to stay home, practice social distancing, and avoid going into the office if their work is not “essential.” State and local leaders have issued various orders, and businesses have moved to remote work or laying off employees. Unemployment has skyrocketed, Americans are having trouble paying rent, and millions are hoping America can reopen sooner rather than later. President Trump originally said he hoped to reopen the country by Easter, but that seems too ambitious.

“Good public health policy is good economic policy, and vice versa,” Kay Coles James, president of the Heritage Foundation, said in a statement. “If the economy fails, there will be severe, long-term health consequences; and if the health care system fails, there will be severe, long-term economic consequences. A nation decimated by the disease cannot have a functioning economy, and a catastrophic loss of jobs wreaks horrific damage on both mental and physical health.”

Therefore, the commission announced a five-phase plan to reopen the economy while also combatting the virus.

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/492042-nih-begins-clinical-trial-to-test-hydroxychloroquine-to-treat-covid-19

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has begun enrolling participants in a clinical trial to test the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19, the agency announced Thursday.

The first participants have enrolled in the trial at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn. The study will be conducted by the NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

According to the NIH, the blinded, placebo-controlled randomized clinical trial aims to enroll more than 500 adults who are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, or who are in an emergency department with anticipated hospitalization. 

Participants will be randomly assigned to receive 400 mg of hydroxychloroquine twice daily for two doses (day one), then 200 mg twice daily for the subsequent eight doses (days two through five) or a placebo twice daily for five days.

Hydroxychloroquine is used to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid conditions such as arthritis. However, its effectiveness at treating COVID-19 has never been proven, despite its embrace by President Trump.