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March 2020

How Isaac Newton Turned Isolation From the Great Plague Into a “Year of Wonders” Kerry McDonald

https://fee.org/articles/how-isaac-newton-turned-isolation-from-the-great-plague-into-a-year-of-wonders/?utm_source=ntnlrvw&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=nationalreview_partnership

In 1665, “social distancing” orders emptied campuses throughout England, as the bubonic plague raged, killing 100,000 people. Isaac Newton, a 24-year-old student from Cambridge, was among those forced to leave campus and return indefinitely to his childhood home.

College students around the world left campus this month, unsure when they would return and what daily life would look like until then. Forced to leave their friends and classmates behind and return to their childhood bedrooms, young people, who on average are less impacted by COVID-19’s dire health effects, may understandably feel angry and resentful. Free and independent, with their futures full of possibility, these students are now home and isolated. It can seem wholly unfair and depressing. But the story of another college student in a similar predicament might provide some hope and inspiration.

Isaac Newton’s Quarantine Experience

In 1665, “social distancing” orders emptied campuses throughout England, as the bubonic plague raged, killing 100,000 people (roughly one-quarter of London’s population), in just 18 months. A 24-year-old student from Trinity College, Cambridge was among those forced to leave campus and return indefinitely to his childhood home.

His name was Isaac Newton and his time at home during the epidemic would be called his “year of wonders.”

Away from university life, and unbounded by curriculum constraints and professor’s whims, Newton dove into discovery. According to The Washington Post: “Without his professors to guide him, Newton apparently thrived.” At home, he built bookshelves and created a small office for himself, filling a blank notebook with his ideas and calculations. Absent the distractions of typical daily life, Newton’s creativity flourished. During this time away he discovered differential and integral calculus, formulated a theory of universal gravitation, and explored optics, experimenting with prisms and investigating light.

The New Chapel Hill Chancellor’s Moment of Opportunity By George Leef

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-chapel-hill-chancellors-moment-of-opportunity/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first

Carol Folt abruptly resigned as UNC-Chapel Hill’s chancellor last year after the turmoil over the statue of a Confederate soldier. She took the side of the students who sought its removal, and left voluntarily.

Folt has been replaced by Dr. Kevin Guskiewicz, formerly the dean of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences. He was recently interviewed by the Martin Center’s Shannon Watkins. It sounds like he could do some good.

Most important, he apparently understands that the university has a problem with intolerance for viewpoints that don’t align with leftist ideas. To that end, Chapel Hill has begun the Program for Public Discourse. Guskiewicz says that it is “focused on our students gaining an appreciation of viewpoint diversity, intellectual diversity, [and] bringing speakers in who sit at certain places along the ideological spectrum.” That’s a step in the right direction. But the acid test will come if far-left students decide to prevent a speaker they dislike from speaking. If Chapel Hill has an incident like that at Middlebury College, will the guilty students get off with just a slight reprimand?

Complicated Mathematical Models Are Not Substitutes for Common Sense By Philippe Lemoine

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-common-sense-dictates-prudence/#slide-1

Uncertainty still reigns, so prepare for the worst. A lockdown would be prudent, not the end of the world.

As of today, half of mankind is confined at home because of the coronavirus pandemic, although the severity of the confinement varies greatly depending on countries and regions. This situation must be all the more disconcerting given that, less than a month ago, many government officials and public-health experts were still claiming that Western countries would be able to weather the storm without any difficulty and encouraging people not to change their behavior because of the virus. On that point, Trump’s handling of this crisis has been atrocious, but as Zeynep Tufekci recently pointed out, he’s hardly the only one to have underestimated the seriousness of the threat.

Although I think people underestimated the seriousness of the threat until recently, many now seem to underestimate how much uncertainty there is about what is going to happen. To be clear: No matter where we are headed exactly, this is no flu. As of March 29 in France, 2,606 people who tested positive for COVID-19 had died in hospitals alone. Perhaps even more worrisome, there were already 4,632 people in intensive-care units, up from approximately 1,500 one week earlier. Between the number of people who left intensive care because they had died and those who left because their condition had improved, it means that probably almost twice as many people have already required admission to intensive care since the beginning of the outbreak in France. By comparison, during the entire 2018–19 season, 490 people who had the flu died in hospitals, and 2,915 people required admission to intensive care. Not only are we already way past that with the COVID-19 pandemic, but, even in the most optimistic scenario that I consider plausible, those figures will be at least 15 times higher.

Hydroxychloroquine: Help Is On The Way! Kevin McCullough Kevin McCullough

https://townhall.com/columnists/kevinmccullough/2020/03/29/hydroxychloroquine-help-is-on-the-way-n2565926

And as the good news is coming in there is a greater reason for hope!

Here are just a handful of new developments from the last few days and hours.

Dr. Fauci when asked if he would use the Hydroxychloroquine cocktail, answered with resounding affirmation. (Simply because he had asked for better clinical evidence previously did not mean he was unaware of what the data was already showing).
France reversed its previous ban on the drug. When the highly esteemed Dr. Didier Raoult released his first survey’s findings the French medical authorities were resistant. As he released an even larger study, with more patients and improved results from his initial study, the French public health officials had no choice but to give guidance as to its use.
India’s public health guidance granted affirmation for physicians and front line medical workers to begin taking it as a preventative. This use was the very suggestion I recommended as first steps in this column a week ago. Since our own CDC has cited its prophylactic benefits our doctors and front line medical personnel should be taking it now.
Given the increased acceptance here in the states not one, but as many as seven different pharmaceutical companies have agreed to mass produce as much as 250 million doses by mid-April. Given Dr. Raoult’s guidance in both of his studies this would give the globe enough inventory to cure 46,000,000 cases. Presently we have not yet hit one million cases worldwide. Notably Bayer, Novartis and Teva Pharm stepped up, pledging to donate several million doses right out of the chute.
Doctors began prescribing off-label use and in doing so are replicating the clinical results in remarkable fashion. One doctor in Monroe, New York has treated in excess of 700 patients. As of this writing he’s lost zero patients to death, zero to intubation, and only two to hospitalization. Another doctor in New York City has treated in excess of 100 patients with zero deaths.

Nancy Pelosi Just Threatened President Trump With Another Investigation Katie Pavlich

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/03/30/icymi-nancy-pelosi-just-threatened-president-trump-with-another-investigation-n2565955

In case you missed it over the weekend, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi falsely accused President Trump of “fiddling” around and called for an investigation into his handling of the Wuhan coronavirus crisis. 

“President Trump’s denial at the beginning of this was deadly,” Pelosi said during an interview with CNN. “As the President fiddles, people are dying.”

Pelosi is responsible for delaying a $2 trillion relief package for workers and families by a week after blowing up bipartisan negotiations. She then attempted to insert a long list of far-left, radical agenda items into the relief package. Talk about “fiddling,” Pelosi is the queen of it. She’s proving once again House Democrats aren’t interested in working for the American people. Instead, they’re interested in political power. They’ve also shown the only thing they’re capable of is launching investigations, rather than governing.

Further, when President Trump took action in late January to ban travel to and from China, Pelosi joined fellow Democrats and accused him of xenophobia. She also criticized the early March travel ban on passengers from Europe, where the Wuhan coronavirus is still raging.

Pandemic, Plague, and Protests: Will Chile Join the Sh–hole Country Club? Ilana Mercer

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/29/pandemic-plague-and-protests-will-chile-join-the-sh-hole-country-club/

Lower-case, doctrinaire democrats in America doggedly conflate the “will of the people” across the world with liberty. This Disneyfied view of democracy ignores that, in a democracy, the right to vote gives one man control over another’s life and livelihood.

Before the coronavirus pandemic and the plague of locusts came the protesters.

From the affluent locales—Chile, France, Britain, Hong Kong, Catalonia—to the impoverished ones—Algeria, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Lebanon and more the world was on fire (to borrow from Amy Chua’s brilliant book).

The reasons cited for a worldwide conflagration ranged from the evils of free-market capitalism (says the Left) to the “socialist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela” (says the Right), to “economics, demography, a sense of powerlessness . . . and social media.”

Some experts spoke of a “youth bulge” of overeducated young people chasing too few jobs. In truth, this was more like ill-educated youngsters with useless degrees who thought it chic to don a balaclava and lob hard objects at the police and the property they were protecting.

Chile is the jewel of Latin America. In 2014, it even surpassed the United States on the Index of Economic Freedom, ranking seventh to America’s 12th. Since 1990, economic growth in Chile has been as steady as the stability of its institutions. Poverty rates had plummeted and social services had been extended to the needy.

On the Right, Pat Buchanan has described Chile as “the country with the highest per capita income and least inequality in all of Latin America.”

On the Left—yet still on the side of a competitive market economy—the Economist agrees. Chile “is the second-richest country in Latin America, thanks in part to its healthy public finances and robust private sector.”

How Bad Regulation, Bureaucracy Slowed The Fight Against Deadly Wuhan Coronavirus

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.”

Five Ways Out of the COVID Crisis By Robert VerBruggen

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!

The coronavirus pandemic versus the climate change emergency By Rupert Darwall

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/490001-the-coronavirus-pandemic-versus-the-climate-change-emergency

Protecting public health was a core function of governments long before the expansion of the state in the 20th century. “Great fears of the sickenesses here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up,” Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary on April 16, 1665. “God preserve us all.” Londoners trying to flee the plague had to obtain a certificate of good health signed by the lord mayor, who also enforced a curfew and a lockdown of plague households. A generation after the Great Plague, Massachusetts was passing laws for the quarantining of smallpox patients.

Nineteenth century urban Britain experienced a huge rise in deaths from infectious diseases. In 1849, more than 50,000 people died from a cholera epidemic that swept London. The previous year, Parliament passed the landmark Public Health Act. According to historians of the act, “public health was not a party matter, nor was the need for comprehensive sanitary legislation controversial.” That year, the physician John Snow made the first great epidemiological breakthrough with his discovery that fecal contamination causes cholera.

A framework of public health law and improved medical knowledge led to the construction of vast networks of clean piped water, high-velocity sewers and recycling of waste. The Victorian sanitation revolution occurred during the zenith of classical liberalism, when public health was understood to mean measures that have to be applied to whole communities and not preventive activity, such as the campaign against the so-called epidemic of childhood obesity. A genuine pandemic, spreading geometrically across the globe in a matter of weeks, shows the phoniness of that “epidemic.” 

What Is Wrong With Biden–Jill Biden ? By Joan Swirsky

https://newswithviews.com/what-is-wrong-with-biden-jill-biden-that-is/

Millions of times a day not only across the United States but the entire world––women taking care of their husbands, doing everything possible to protect them from harm or hurt.

No doubt, that was Jill Biden’s intention when she married the senator from Delaware in 1977, and raised not only the daughter they had together, but his young sons, Beau and Hunter, after the senator’s first wife and baby daughter were killed in a horrific car accident in 1972.

As the years elapsed, Senator Biden became Vice President Biden––for eight years––and the power couple Jill and Joe gained worldwide fame and huge wealth.

But before that, Jill juggled raising their three children with earning a doctoral degree in education and then teaching for years in a psychiatric hospital where her students were emotionally disturbed children and adolescents.

Surely, in both her education and clinical work, she was aware of, sensitive to, knowledgeable about––and protective of––the students whose limitations rendered them incapable of higher function.Surely she became capable of detecting, even diagnosing, thought and speech disorders, dissociative thinking, and incoherent ramblings.

The following examples are sad to witness and once again raise the very serious question: What is wrong with Jill Biden?