RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/does-militarys-secret-biodefense-lab-hold-key-future-coronavirus

Though often omitted from public conversations about pandemic solutions, the U.S. military has a huge stake in fighting deadly infectious diseases and quietly has been researching novel treatments for years at its secretive biodefense lab at Fort Detrick.

The reasons are mission obvious. With soldiers deployed in exotic locations around the world where novel viruses like Ebola, Zika or bird and swine flus can strike with lighting speed and alarming fatality, the Pentagon wants to make sure it has treatments to keep its forces from being disabled

It’s from that body of research that an intriguing potential remedy, an organic extract, has emerged. And of all sources, it comes from the common but toxic flowering plant oleander.

Dr. John Dye, chief of viral immunology at the USAMRIID lab at Fort Detrick, confirmed to Just the News that his team began testing the extract known as oleandrin a few years ago and found it was effective in fighting the Ebola and Marburg viruses. The Army lab is now ramping up a rapid plan to test oleandrin against COVID-19.

“We found that at non-toxic concentrations, oleandrin was efficacious at slowing and halting viral growth in tissue culture assays” for the Ebola and Marburg viruses, Dye said in emailed answers to questions.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/barack-obama-who-botched-two-pandemics-criticizes-response-to-coronavirus/

On Wednesday afternoon, Barack Obama criticized the Trump administration for failing to create a “coherent national plan” during the coronavirus pandemic.

“While we continue to wait for a coherent national plan to navigate this pandemic, states like Massachusetts are beginning to adopt their own public health plans to combat this virus––before it’s too late,” he tweeted.The funniest thing about this tweet is that Barack Obama is the last person in the world who should be criticizing the federal response to a pandemic. Does he think we’ve forgotten he botched not one, but two pandemics? Barack Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services declared the H1N1 pandemic a public health emergency on April 29, 2009, but didn’t declare it a “national emergency” until October—two months after the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic, and after a thousand Americans had already died, and millions already infected. If you think he was taking the outbreak seriously at the time, the facts beg to differ.

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/pandemic-is-but-one-of-americas-security-concerns/

The world was a dangerous place before the coronavirus pandemic, and it will still be dangerous after it.

While Americans debate the proper ongoing response to the virus and argue over the infection’s origins, nature, and trajectory, they may have tuned out other, often just as scary, news.

Many Americans are irate at China for its dishonest and lethal suppression of knowledge about the viral outbreak. But they may forget that China has other huge problems, too.

Its overseas brand is tarnished. Importers can never again be sure of the safety or reliability of Chinese exports. They will know only that their producer is a serial falsifier that is capable of anything to ensure power and profits.

Even China’s vaunted propaganda machine that slanders its critics as racists and xenophobes no longer works. The sheer number of countries that have suffered huge human and financial losses from Chinese lying won’t believe another word from Beijing.

How will China collect its Silk Road debts from now-bankrupt Asian and African countries? Most of them are accusing China of being racist and responsible for the global epidemic that wrecked the very economies from which China planned to harvest profits.

China was beginning to lose the trade war with the U.S. even before the virus struck. Americans think that China is huge, powerful, and rich. In truth, Chinese per capita income is about a sixth of America’s.

China produces only about two-thirds of the nominal GDP of the United States despite having more than four times as many people. Hundreds of millions of rural Chinese remain trapped in poverty.

The U.S. has the 33rd-highest mortality rate, measured as deaths divided by total cases, out of the 134 countries tracked by Johns Hopkins. That means more than 100 countries have lower mortality rates than the U.S., although many of those countries reported comparatively few cases. When compared only to the ten countries with the most cases, the U.S. ranks as the second-lowest mortality rate as a percentage of total cases. That means eight of those countries hardest-hit by the coronavirus have higher mortality rates than the U.S…When mortality is measured per 100,000 people among the ten countries with the most cases, the U.S. ranks seventh, with Iran, Germany, and China reporting lower numbers of deaths per 100,000 people…the lack of testing in the United States could lead to an undercounting of overall COVID-19 cases. If the total number of cases is actually higher, that would mean the current data might be overstating the death rate.

https://www.city-journal.org/covid-19-point-of-care-rapid-test

In June 1981, the rapid-response newsletter of the Center for Disease Control, the Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, published news of an unusual pneumonia in otherwise healthy young men in Los Angeles. It would take four years from those first recorded cases of AIDS to the first FDA-approved test for HIV, and over a decade before the first rapid test. And so, if just a year ago, any of my colleagues had told me that we could have a point-of-care rapid test after mere months of a new pathogen’s emergence, I would have regarded it as hopelessly optimistic.

Yet that is what the first-of-its-kind alliance between the U.S. biotechnology industry and the federal government has delivered. Just four months after the emergence of Covid-19, a dizzying array of tests is available to patients, physicians, and researchers. The initial tests, dependent on identifying the viral genome, have now been supplanted by much faster, much less expensive antibody tests. Unlike genomic tests, which require laboratory equipment and take several hours to complete, the new antibody-based tests are portable, and some don’t require any special materials other than saline. The antibody tests may answer questions not only about a patient’s current state but also about whether he has been exposed in the past by measuring antibodies that the immune system creates in response to the coronavirus. Finally, just today, the FDA announced that it is granting authorization for the first Covid-19 test that can be taken at home, affording an opportunity for many people in at-risk groups who have forgone testing up to now. By all measures, the emergency regime set up by the FDA has opened the floodgates of innovation on one of the most vexing problems of responding to a viral outbreak, and with great success.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/1-in-5-new-york-city-residents-infected-with-ccp-virus-antibody-testing-shows_3324032.html

Preliminary results from antibody testing in New York state found a 13.9 percent infection rate, officials announced Thursday, suggesting 2.7 million in the state have been infected by the CCP virus.

People who test positive are believed to have had the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes the COVID-19 disease, in the past. Some patients with virus never show symptoms and have no idea they were infected. Experts believe past infection could make people immune to the virus, though that theory has not been confirmed.

Preliminary results from 3,000 tests carried out across 19 New York counties found 13.9 percent of those tested have antibodies against COVID-19. But that figure climbed to 21.2 percent in New York City and dropped to 3.6 percent in counties outside the city, Long Island, and Westchester and Rockland counties.

The percent positive on Long Island was 16.7 percent and 11.7 percent in Westchester and Rockland counties combined.

Forty three percent of those tested were in New York City, 14.4 percent were on Long Island, 9.8 percent were in Westchester and Rockland counties, and 32.8 percent of them were in the rest of the state.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/23/looks-like-trump-was-right-about-the-coronavirus-fatality-rate/

Two new studies suggest that President Trump was right in early March when he guessed the fatality rate for coronavirus is under 1 percent.

In early March, President Donald Trump was lambasted for saying on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show that he had a hunch the coronavirus fatality rate, which the World Health Organization pegged then at 3 to 4 percent, was in fact much lower, under 1 percent. Many commentators, myself included pointed out that the beginning of a pandemic medical crisis was not the time to be floating hunches. But, as we always knew was possible, it looks now like the president might well have been right.

New data from random antibody tests conducted in New York State suggest that as many as 2.7 million people statewide have had the coronavirus. That along with the just over 15,000 deaths that have occurred leads to a fatality rate for the virus of .5 percent according to Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Here is what Trump said on March 4:

“Well, I think the 3.4 percent is really a false number. Now, and this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don’t even call a doctor.”

He went on to say:

“I think that that number (the WHO number) is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1 percent.”

Democrats and media pundits blasted Trump for spreading “misinformation.”

While this data is preliminary, it is backed up by another study in Los Angeles that found 40 times more people had carried the virus then were previously known. This dropped the fatality rate in LA from 4.5 percent to .1-.3 percent.

It is difficult to stress how important these findings are. The 5-week lockdown that has destroyed the American economy was put in place by contemplating what looks to be rather absurd numbers by the WHO.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/22/the-chinese-coronavirus-is-this-generations-tiananmen-test/

We are suffering a catastrophe of the Chinese Communist Party’s making. It must be held accountable, made to pay for the destruction it has caused, putting every lever of American power on the table to ensure it.

Observers of the Chinese coronavirus crisis have cast it, with good reason, as a potential Chernobyl for General Secretary Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party regime.

America, too, is faced with a challenge with relevant historical parallels, separate and apart from the wartime comparisons regarding the mobilization and sacrifices of our countrymen.

As with the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, we are once again at an inflection point in our relationship with China, faced with the carnage caused most directly by a malevolent CCP.

The Chinese coronavirus crisis may well represent this generation’s Tiananmen Square test.

The test is as follows: With the CCP inflicting incalculable costs in blood and treasure through its unique role in spreading the coronavirus, and its related menacing behavior, will we demand reparations, or will we let the regime off scot-free, emboldening it, and encouraging it to act with impunity and still more reckless abandon in its quest for hegemony going forward?

We failed this test in 1989.

Then, when presented with the image of “Tank Man,” we did something even worse than turning our back on him. Our immediate response to the CCP’s massacre of democracy protesters was toothless. But ultimately, we proceeded still further to embrace the Communist regime, effectively rewarding its villainy by integrating it into the global economic, financial, and geopolitical system.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/22/the-deadly-costs-of-extended-shutdown-orders/

The focus on saving “just one life” from the coronavirus to the exclusion of all other considerations likely will prove a catastrophic failure of policymaking. The devastation to individuals’ ability to flourish or even survive may soon become irreversible.

More than a dozen governors extended their economic shutdown orders recently into May and beyond. Those officials should have publicly addressed the following questions first:

How many coronavirus deaths do you expect to avert by the shut-down extension?
What will your state’s economy look like after another month of enforced stasis?
How many workers will have lost their jobs?
How many businesses will have closed for good?
How many of your state’s young residents, seeking employment for the first time, will be unable to find it?

Instead, the announcements of the prolonged shutdown were representative of government decision-making during the coronavirus crisis: opaque, lacking in criteria for measuring success and failure, and bereft of any attempt to measure the benefits of mitigating one particular health problem against the costs—including other health problems.

New York’s tele-ubiquitous governor, Andrew Cuomo, for example, announced on April 15 that New York’s economy would now be shut down through May 15, instead of reopening on April 29, as previously scheduled. How did he arrive at May 15? It is a mystery. Other governors had just as inscrutably chosen May 3, May 4, May 8, May 20, or June 10 for their extensions.