NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

NIH begins clinical trial to test hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 By Nathaniel Weixel –

Posted By on April 10th, 2020

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. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Maybe there’s a reason why dire projections about COVID-19 have been wrong By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on April 10th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/maybe_theres_a_reason_why_dire_projections_about_covid19_have_been_wrong.html

COVID-19 has proven to be a brutal flu for those unlucky enough to get it. Any new disease that’s successfully left animals behind for human-to-human transmission is highly risky. Nevertheless, the current insanity gripping the world is based upon highly dubious computer models, making those models as dangerous as a virus.

On April 8, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes attacked Trump for trying to manipulate downwards the expert projections about COVID-19 deaths. One month later, Hayes was back, attacking Trump for intentionally manipulating the numbers upwards:

Hayes is an unprincipled moron who will say anything to hurt Trump but his monomania highlights how very wrong the original high-death predictions have proven to be. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump tried to explain away one set of wildly inflated predictions by saying that the experts’ were accurate but that later behavioral changes caused lower numbers:

The problem is that the model Bump looks to assumed 100% social distancing, which hasn’t happened:

Alex Berenson, a former New York Times writer, is also taking apart the modeling. He most recently focused on Ohio’s attempt to do statistical time traveling:

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

COVID-19 Projection Models Are Proving to Be Unreliable By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on April 10th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-pandemic-projection-models-pro

To describe as stunning the collapse of a key model the government has used to alarm the nation about the catastrophic threat of the coronavirus would not do this development justice.

In a space of just six days starting April 2, two revisions (on April 5 and 8) have utterly discredited the model produced by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. I wrote about the IHME’s modeling at National Review on Monday, the day after the first revision — which was dramatic, but pales in comparison to Wednesday’s reassessment. This was not immediately apparent because the latest revision (April 8) did not include a side-by-side comparison, as did the April 5 revision. Perusal of the new data, however, is staggering, as is what it says about government predictions we were hearing just days ago about the likelihood of 100,000 deaths, with as many as 240,000 a real possibility.

As I noted in my last post on this subject, by April 5, the projection of likely deaths had plunged 12 percent in just three days, 93,531 to 81,766. Understand, this projection is drawn from a range; on April 2, IHME was telling us cumulative COVID-19 deaths could reach as high as approximately 178,000. The upper range was also reduced on April 5 to about 136,000.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UN’s Irrelevance in Corona Crisis Invites a Rethink of the World Body By Benny Avni

Posted By on April 10th, 2020

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/uns-irrelevance-in-corona-crisis-invites/91088/

“If there were no United Nations we’d have to invent one” is an overused Turtle Bay cliche worth examining now, as the UN is MIA in the face of the worst global crisis since its founding 75 years ago.

As a pandemic threatens the globe with loss of life on a biblical scale and economic collapse, a behemoth that fancies itself as “the world body” is nowhere to be seen.

Start with the Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, who immediately sprang to “action,” vaingloriously calling for a global ceasefire to enable the world to focus on the pandemic. No major combatant heeded his call. So, next, he asked member states to fund a $2 billion UN-based initiative for a global humanitarian response. That fund is yet to materialize.

The Security Council, the UN’s most prestigious body charged with ensuring global peace and security, is also yet to respond. It failed to unite behind Mr. Guterres’ global ceasefire and couldn’t even muster a generic statement on the pandemic: China opposes any reference to the origin of an outbreak that America insists calling the “Wuhan virus.”

HISTORY Comments turned off

Whittaker Chambers through the Eyes of Rebecca West By Peter Baehr *****

Posted By on April 9th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/04/20/whittaker-chambers-through-the-eyes-of-rebecca-west/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

West understood more clearly than anyone the allure of Communism for educated Westerners

Bolshevism’s appeal to Western intellectuals is a mystery we still struggle to explain. Why did artists who despised patriotism show a larger loyalty to Russian chauvinism? Why did writers defend a regime that repeatedly imprisoned, tortured, and killed writers? In short, why did intelligent people who lived in free countries worship at the altar of despotic states? Few thinkers studied this enigma more carefully than the British critic Rebecca West (1892–1983).

That is not an achievement we associate with her name. Rebecca West is more likely to be recalled for The Return of the Soldier (1918), an innovative psychological novel; or for Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), that grand bio-travelogue of Yugoslavia on the cusp of war. Her reports on the Nuremberg trials, and the post-war trials of British fascists, also continue to find readers, especially among students of journalism. West’s writings on Communism, by contrast, lie unread, unsung. Many of them sparked controversy in her own day, and are well worth revisiting in ours.

In articles, book chapters, and book reviews spanning six decades, she returned to the allure of Communism for educated Westerners. (Its attraction for militant members of the industrial working class was no real puzzle, she said, not least because Marxism deified the proletariat.) Reviewing the second volume of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago for the Sunday Telegraph, West bitterly recalled that “25 years ago a large part of the Western European and American population of intellectuals were, with disgusting single-mindedness, pimping for Stalin.”

HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

We Still Are Not Controlling the Borders By Kevin D. Williamson

Posted By on April 9th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/trump-administration-border-security-us-borders-still-not-under-control/

Another American murdered by an illegal immigrant, despite Trump’s promises to end this kind of crime.

D onald Trump rose to political power waving the bloody shirt of Kate Steinle, who was shot and killed by an illegal immigrant from Mexico, one who already had been convicted of a raft of felonies and deported five times. Donald Trump promised he would put a stop to that.

He hasn’t.

The outrage over Steinle’s death was understandable — and, worse, the man who killed her, José Inez García Zárate, was acquitted of murder and manslaughter charges and, incredibly enough, even (on appeal) of the charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm, though he indisputably 1) is a felon, and 2) was in possession of a gun at the time he shot it and killed Kathryn Steinle. Expect to hear a good deal less about the death of 16-year-old Franklin Mercado, who was stabbed to death in what police believe was a gang retaliation and dumped in a park in Dallas.

Among those charged in his death is 25-year-old Jonathan Alexander Gonzalez-Rosales, a gangster from El Salvador, a member of something the U.S. government designates a “transnational criminal organization,” illegally present in the United States, known to law enforcement, and under a removal order.

See if you can spot the weak link: In 2017, Gonzalez-Rosales appeared in a San Antonio court on unrelated charges and came to the attention of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). They filed an “immigration detainer” and issued him a notice to appear. He was released from ICE custody in February 2018 after posting bond, and his hearing was set for July. Of course, he did not show up for his hearing. Of course, the authorities lost track of him. Of course, nothing was done until he had murdered a 16-year-old.

He was picked up Tuesday in Dallas on the murder warrant. He’ll be in ICE custody until he is turned over to Dallas. In theory, he will be deported after the murder case is resolved. Don’t be surprised if he is right back in the middle of another mess on our side of the border.   DON’T BOTHER READING THE REST OF WILLIAMSON’S UNREGENERATE BASHING OF DONALD TRUMP

P.C.-CULTURE, POLITICS Comments turned off

Joe Biden and the End of Tolerance By John Hirschauer

Posted By on April 9th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/joe-biden-lgbt-agenda-end-of-tolerance/

Joe Biden’s ‘Plan to Advance LGBTQ+ Equality’ signals the end of tolerance and the beginning of something else.

Joe Biden’s recently released “Plan to Advance LGBTQ+ Equality” is a collection of ideas, gestures, and slogans that the former vice president (or his handlers) hopes will “advance” the amorphous cause of “equality” for the “LGBTQ+ community.” The plan talks a lot about “equality” — Biden promises, variously, to “resume the march for equality,” support “equality and inclusion,” and “champion global equality” — without once defining what he means by “equality,” or how society at large is supposed to know when we have achieved it.

One of the highlighted sections in the Biden proposal is the former vice president’s pledge to ensure that “the discriminatory lifetime ban on blood donation” for gay men — a ban he claims is “based on stigma” — remains lifted, and promises to implement “regulations [that] are based on science.” The Obama administration first moved to lift the lifetime ban on homosexual blood donation in 2015, and the Trump administration loosened regulations even further, recently dispensing with guidelines that required men to abstain from homosexual sex for at least one year in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Biden never engages with the facts that begot the ban in the first place, namely, that gay men, despite comprising roughly two percent of the American population, make up nearly 70 percent of the national HIV caseload. Since post-donation blood tests occasionally fail to detect the presence of HIV, disqualifying would-be donors who have engaged in homosexual sex was a prudential measure designed to protect the recipients of donated blood.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Another Reporter Masks Affiliation With Chinese Propaganda During Presidential Briefing By Petr Svab

Posted By on April 9th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/another-reporter-masks-affiliation-with-chinese-propaganda-during-presidential-briefing_3305588.html

For the second time, a reporter working for a media controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) failed to disclose this affiliation when prompted by President Donald Trump during his daily press briefing on the CCP virus epidemic.

After Trump prompted the reporter, Ching-Yi Chang, to state his question, Trump asked him where he’s from, seemingly inquiring about the outlet Chang was associated with.

Chang responded he’s from Taiwan.

While that is where he was born, he works for Shanghai Media Group, a company owned by the Chinese regime.

This is the second time in the past several days a reporter from an outlet controlled by the CCP has attended the briefings and was less than forthright about his or her affiliation.

On April 6, a similar incident happened with Youyou Wang, a reporter with Phoenix TV.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Trump Was Right, Cuomo Was Wrong About Ventilator Needs By Mollie Hemingway

Posted By on April 9th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/08/trump-was-right-cuomo-was-wrong-about-ventilator-needs/
The media treated Cuomo’s claims of needing 30,000 ventilators as legitimate, and the Trump administration’s competing claims as dubious.

President Donald Trump was pilloried by the media for questioning whether New York would actually need 30,000 additional ventilators or 40,000 ventilators total as claimed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in late March. New models from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation show that New York already reached its peak projected ventilator usage on April 8, with a projected need of 5,008. The actual use may have been even lower.

As of press time, no media outlets revisited their reporting on the matter.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Who Is WHO Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus? By Jeff Reynolds

Posted By on April 9th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/trending/who-is-who-director-tedros-adhanom-ghebreyesus/

As calls mount demanding the Director of the World Health Organization (WHO) resign, one might be forgiven for asking: Who is the head of the WHO? Where did Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus come from, and what qualifies him to lead the WHO?

As WHO continues to respond to the global coronavirus pandemic that originated in Wuhan, China, the agency has faced increased criticism for its coddling of the communist Xi Xinpeng regime. Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, has had particularly harsh criticism for WHO:

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has also joined the chorus, retweeting President Trump’s speculation that the U.S. should reexamine its funding of the WHO:

Many have questioned why the WHO has repeatedly praised China’s response to the pandemic it caused. The director, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has come under increased scrutiny not only for his questionable response to the pandemic itself, but also for his background, which could go a long way toward explaining why he seems so sympathetic to communist China.