RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/30/how-bad-regulation-bureaucracy-slowed-the-fight-against-deadly-wuhan-coronavirus/

Amid all the political name-calling and finger-pointing over who’s to blame and how to attack the Wuhan coronavirus, one thing surprisingly gets little mention at all: regulation. But bad regulation not only slowed our response, it likely added to our death count.

We’re happy to note that in recent days and weeks, President Trump has helped ease the regulatory burden of our response to the coronavirus, pushing Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, our main health agencies, to bend, suspend and in some cases upend useless rules.

But that doesn’t mean every useless regulation was excised from the rulebooks. Or that our major health care regulators made good decisions with the billions of dollars entrusted to them for basic research.

Far from it. And the coronavirus pandemic and the public panic that ensued is a case in point. To be blunt, U.S. health care regulatory agencies mishandled the crisis.

Indeed, both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) fumbled the ball early when it came testing for the Wuhan coronavirus, largely because of bad regulations.

“Even now, after weeks of mounting frustration toward federal agencies over flawed test kits and burdensome rules, states with growing cases such as New York and California are struggling to test widely for the coronavirus,” the New York Times noted in a March 11 story. “The continued delays have made it impossible for officials to get a true picture of the scale of the growing outbreak, which has now spread to at least 36 states and Washington, D.C.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-five-ways-we-might-defeat-it/?itm_campaign=headline-testingDon’t be complacent. But do have hope.

R ight now there are plenty of reasons to worry deeply about the toll COVID-19 will take on America. Cases and deaths are spiraling upward. Our main tools for addressing the crisis involve simply locking society down, leading to shocking economic harms. And even if these tools prove effective, the virus may simply begin to spread again when they are lifted, or perhaps rebound in the fall and winter when the weather cools down again. Perhaps most troublingly, there are some reports of people being “reinfected,” raising the possibility that even those who survive COVID-19 are not always immune to it going forward. A worst-case scenario would force us to decide between a year or two of repeated lockdowns while we wait for a vaccine on the one hand, and millions of deaths on the other.

I am not going to tell you this is all a hoax. I am not going to tell you to ignore the restrictions lawmakers have placed on your movements or the advice of public-health authorities. But I am a big believer in capitalism and human ingenuity, so I’d like to provide a quick overview of some routes out of this mess people are working on. I have immense hope that at least a couple of them will pan out, and in that event I also hope the folks behind them become unbelievably rich.

1) Find a drug that fights the virus or treats the symptoms. Vaccines take a long time to develop and test, because each must be tailored to a specific virus, but there are already lots of drugs around that might work to treat or prevent COVID-19. We need to figure out which ones immediately. The World Health Organization has launched a “global megatrial” of four possibilities: remdesivir, a drug developed to treat Ebola that, alas, did not work for that purpose; chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, which are used to treat maladies including lupus and malaria; ritonavir/lopinavir, an HIV drug; and ritonavir/lopinavir combined with interferon-beta, which shows some signs of fighting MERS. If they work against COVID-19, these drugs could reduce the disease’s death toll, lessen pressure on intensive-care units, and change the tradeoffs inherent in reopening the economy. Thank God for Big Pharma!

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/29/viral-prerequisites-and-nationalist-lessons-in-time-of-plague/

Trump’s prior initiatives eased the implementation of many of his most effective orders during this crisis.

President Donald Trump has courted endless controversies for promoting nonconventional policies and entertaining contrarian views. From the outset, he oddly seemed to have believed that having navigated the jungles of the Manhattan real estate market—crooked politicians, mercurial unions, neighborhood social activists, the green lobby, leery banks, cutthroat rivals—better prepared him for the job than did a 30-year tenure in the U.S. Senate.

Certainly, candidate and then President Trump’s strident distrust of China was annoying to the American establishment. The Left saw China in rosy terms as the “Other” that just did things like airports, high-speed rail, and solar panels better than did America’s establishment of geriatric white male has-beens. Many on the Right saw China as a cash cow that was going to take over anyway, so why not milk it before the deluge?

In sum, conventional Washington wisdom assumed that appeasing the commercial banditry of an ascendant China, at best might ensure that its new riches led to Westernized political liberalization, and at worst might at least earn them a pat on the head from China as it insidiously assumed its fated role as global hegemon.

Trump once enraged liberal sensibilities by issuing travel bans against countries in the Middle East, Iran, Nigeria, and North Korea as they could not be trusted to audit their own departing citizens. His notion that nations have clearly defined and enforced borders was antithetical to the new norms that open borders and sanctuary cities were part of the global village of the 21st century.

Trump certainly distrusted globalization. He has waged a veritable multifront war against the overreach of transnational organizations, whether that be the European Union or the various agencies of the United Nations. Even relatively uncontroversial steps, such as greenlighting experimental drugs and off-label uses of old medicines for terminal patients drew the ire of federal bureaucrats and medical schools as potentially dangerous or irrelevant in cost-benefit analyses.

https://time.com/5812365/trump-meghan-prince-harry-security/

U.S. President Donald Trump has offered his opinion on the future of Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, insisting the United States government won’t pay for the couple’s security if they live in the United States.

Responding to reports that the couple has moved to California, Trump tweeted on Sunday: “I am a great friend and admirer of the Queen & the United Kingdom. It was reported that Harry and Meghan, who left the Kingdom, would reside permanently in Canada. Now they have left Canada for the U.S. however, the U.S. will not pay for their security protection. They must pay!”