RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/03/31/what-would-tom-coburn-do/#53cfcf6b759a

Last Saturday, America lost a true giant and one of the great men in our nation’s history. Dr. Tom Coburn, the legendary former U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, passed away after a seven-year battle with prostate cancer. 

The first time I met Dr. Coburn was at his Senate office on Capitol Hill in 2013. Coburn would soon be listed on the Time 100: Most Influential Persons in the World. I didn’t have a national reputation.

In fact, our organization had only a handful of employees and a small budget. Frankly, I was a little intimidated and uncharacteristically nervous. I had spoken before large groups, but I didn’t know how a national figure like Coburn would receive my ideas.

He immediately put me at ease with his no-nonsense demeanor and heartfelt enthusiasm about what our little citizen-led operation was up to.

ttps://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-truth-national-security-council-pandemic-team/

If anyone is to blame for the spread of the novel coronavirus, it’s ultimately Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party, thanks to its lies and obfuscations. Nonetheless, at this stage in the pandemic, President Trump is responsible for protecting Americans, working with our allies, and mitigating the effects of COVID-19.

Many are already condemning the Trump administration’s handling of the disease. It’s generally too early for that. We won’t be able to see the extent of the wisdom in most of the administration’s decisions and the timing of them until the country gets through this crisis, and we have the benefit of hindsight. Even so, the scale and scope of the domestic response would have been much better informed had we had more information sooner from the Chinese.

As for the matter of containing and mitigating the disease, Americans should have an idea about whether they can have confidence in their government. Dealing with a potentially devastating new disease to which the population has no immunity and of which there are no known vaccines is frightening enough without worrying about the government’s competence.

That’s why this charge from former Obama-administration officials — including Beth Cameron, who served as the senior director for global health security and biodefense on the National Security Council (NSC) under Obama — is so serious: that the Trump administration’s decision to “dismantle” the directorate the Obama administration created to quarterback pandemic responses is to blame for “leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19.”

Former Trump officials, including former national-security adviser John Bolton and Tim Morrison, have disputed Cameron’s characterization.

https://www.city-journal.org/de-blasio-failed-to-equip-ny-for-coronavirus-crisis

New York City is facing a major public-health crisis. The spread of Covid-19 threatens to overwhelm the city’s hospitals, as significant numbers of those infected become severely ill, and sustaining their lives depends on access to a limited number of respiratory ventilators. But the city is short of even more basic medical supplies, including such mundane items as protective facemasks. Nurses are reportedly being advised to rinse their masks in order to reuse them, and police officers reportedly lack access to personal protective equipment. Sanitation workers and other vulnerable city employees are also being asked to work unprotected.

These shortages have led Mayor Bill de Blasio to call for help. On March 16, he asked the United States military to rescue New York, saying “we need ventilators, we need masks, face guards, right on down to more mundane things like hand sanitizer.” The next day, on CNN, he said, “The federal government—I’ve used the word mobilization, nationalization . . . has to ensure that the industries that create those vital supplies are at maximum production and then they’re distributed where they’re needed most as we do in wartime.” At a later press conference, de Blasio made a direct appeal to the public. “If you have even a single ventilator that you can get to New York City or if you have a supply . . . If you have surgical masks, if you have N95 masks, if you have face shields, gloves, gowns, anything that could help us, we need it,” he implored.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/how-obamas-failure-resupply-respirators-federal-stockpile-created-2020

The Strategic National Stockpile, America’s giant medical storage closet for a terrorist or biological crisis, once boasted more than 100 million respirator masks to protect doctors, nurses and other frontline health care workers in case of a contagion.

But when the COVID-19 pandemic started a few months ago, the supply had dwindled down to just 12 million fitted masks, known as N95 respirators, and 30 million surgical masks, a supply deemed to be less than 2 percent of what the nation would need for full-blown pandemic.

The tale of how such a critical supply lapsed, leading the Trump administration to scramble for 500 million new masks in the midst of pandemic, is one of government neglect and competing priorities that began in 2009.

That’s when the Obama administration drew down nearly 97 million of the masks to deal with the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, effectively protecting frontline medical workers from a virus that infected more than 60 million Americans.

But when it was over, the administration decided not to fully restock the respirators, choosing to spend its $600 million annual budget for the stockpile on other priorities such as key drugs and vaccines to deal with smallpox, anthrax and the like, experts said.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/31/hockey-sticks-changing-goal-posts-and-hysteria/

There’s still time to find a balance between public health and the economy: Trump must find it before April 30.

Last year, Glacier National Park in Montana began removing signs that warned visitors the park’s gigantic glaciers would start melting away by 2020 due to global warming. Park officials altered other climate change flair such as brochures and displays to postpone the threat to sometime in “future generations.”

Like so many claims about the catastrophic consequences of anthropogenic global warming, predictions about disappearing glaciers were quickly memory-holed. And, as usual, the experts behind the flawed science that misled millions of people to believe their actions would cause the destruction of one of nature’s most awesome sights didn’t apologize. No scientist or government official even had the guts to stand up and say, “Oops, my bad.”

Quite to the contrary—prophets of nonexistent doom are often cheered as heroes no matter how many times they’ve been wrong.

Take Dr. Michael Mann, for example. The Pennsylvania State University author of the infamous “hockey stick” graph is still considered a god among the international climate change set; his graph launched the modern-day climate movement even though his work has been widely refuted by scientists and hacked emails showed how he and his fellow researchers manipulated data to “prove” their theory.

Now, we have the latest version of the hockey stick graph and it is related to COVID-19. The alarming visual indicates a huge spike in estimated deaths and hospitalizations in the United States from coronavirus infections over the next few weeks. Last week, a researcher at the University of Washington released a study that appears to serve as the scientific justification to extend the CDCs social distancing guidelines until at least April 30.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/virus-crisis-no-good-choices-just-bad-and-worse-bruce-thornton/

President Trump’s suggestions about getting some regions of the country back to work has provoked the usual hysterical hyperbole from the Trump-hating media. One assumes by now that squeals like Chuck Todd’s “blood on his hands” have become white noise for half the country, and so aren’t damaging Trump, whose handling of the virus 60% of Americans approve.

But beneath the usual partisan desperation and bitterness lies a common fallacy: That every political and social problem has a right solution known to “experts,” and only the willful ignorance and superstitions of “anti-science” conservatives prevents them from making the correct choice. The solution, as Barack Obama said, is “science-based policies” created by “experts.”

Take the policy of “self-quarantining” or extreme “social distancing,” which has shut down the American economy and put 3.8 million workers on unemployment. This policy gained traction when epidemiologist Neil Ferguson of Oxford said as many as 2.2 million Americans and 500,000 Britons would die because of the virus. In all fairness, he also said such an outcome was “unlikely.” But the sensationalist media, eager for bad news with which to tar the president, reported the number as though it were a scientific fact rather than an educated estimate thick with caveats. As U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams has complained, the media are too eager to publicize estimates “based on worst-case scenarios.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/political_furor_over_drugs_that_might_help_fight_against_covid19.html

Why would anyone mock a drug that shows promise?

Here’s what we’re dealing with:

“No U.S. city will be spared”
Fauci: Up to 200,000 Americans could die
NYC: Dead bodies being loaded on refrigerated trucks
Nurses die, doctors fall sick as panic rises on front lines
Trump extends social distancing through end of April

Why would anyone mock a drug that shows promise?  Chloroquine and its less toxic derivative, hydroxychloroquine, are existing antimalarial drugs thought to be effective in treating coronavirus.

Dr. Steve Kassapidis is a COVID-19 critical care physician in New York City.  During a recent interview on Fox News, Dr. Kassapidis told Tucker Carlson that he’s taking Plaquenil (hydroxychloroquine) as a prophylaxis.  Many other doctors in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere are taking the antimalarial drugs in hopes of protecting themselves from COVID-19 and are prescribing the off-label medications to patients infected with the disease.

In a March 21 interview on Philadelphia’s AM 990, Dr. Anthony Fauci said, “Of course, I would try chloroquine on coronavirus patients.”  But despite the potential of antimalarial drugs to mitigate COVID-19, politically driven journalists are pooh-poohing them as ineffective treatments touted by a recklessly incompetent president.  Desperately hoping hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine will be a flop, mainstream journalists are ridiculing President Trump over his advocacy of their potential in the fight against the coronavirus.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/how_george_soross_marijuana_advocacy_makes_the_covid19_panic_worse.html

George Soros’s first major effort to reshape America was undertaking the legitimization of illegal drug use, especially marijuana.  Soros initially said his overarching goal was to promote informed discussion of drug policy.  But debate and discussion are not his style and were not his objects.  Instead, he used his resources to fund think-tanks, foundations, and public policy action groups that successfully muddled public opinion enough to change public laws, making illegal drug use legal.

In the early 1990s, the notion of legalizing marijuana in the U.S. was unthinkable and unacceptable.  The voices to legalize drugs were marginal and not in sync.  This changed in 1993, when Soros, who claimed that prohibitionist drug policies are wrong because they contradict his vision of the “Open Society,” launched a $15-million pro–drug legalization propaganda campaign that has made him the new darling of the media left.  Soros and his acolytes have garnered enormous press attention through a barrage of magazine articles, op-ed pieces, and television appearances.  By 1996, the slogans of “medicalization” and “compassion” joined “legalization” and “decriminalization,” as well as “nonviolent drug offender.”  All of these were shaping the vocabulary of the public dialogue.  Soros’s sponsorship provided the credibility theretofore lacking in the movement to legalize drugs.