RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/14/essential-facts-about-covid-19/

Given the spread of misinformation about COVID-19, Just Facts is providing a trove of rigorously documented facts about this disease and its impacts. These include some essential facts that have been absent or misreported in much of the media’s coverage of this issue.

This research also includes a groundbreaking study to determine the lethality of COVID-19 based on the most comprehensive available measure: the total years of life that it will rob from all people. This accords with the Centers for Disease Control’s tenet that “the allocation of health resources must consider not only the number of deaths by cause” but also the “years of potential life lost.”

On one hand, these facts show that:

The average death rate for people who contract COVID-19 is well below 1% and is much closer to that of the seasonal flu than figures that were commonly reported by the press.
The average years of life lost from each COVID-19 death are significantly fewer than from common causes of untimely death like accidents and suicides.
The virus that causes COVID-19 is “very vulnerable to antibody neutralization” and has very limited ability to mutate, which makes it unlikely to take masses of lives year after year like the flu and other recurring scourges.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/15/this-is-not-america/

What is the United States of America? A society of elitists vs. the rest? A culture that’s given up on itself? A land of censorship? A nation in which policies and orientation are not merely matters of disagreement but causes of internal and irreconcilable turmoil? It was supposed to be none of these. But today it seems a foreign place, with more in common with the many dystopias of literature than anything the founders of a free nation ever imagined.

Just a single quick scan through the blogs and aggregators of the Internet makes us wonder who and where we are as a nation:

Many of those who hold political, economic, and cultural power favor the system of China, where a single-party autocracy “led by a reasonably enlightened group of people” who live privileged lives plan and execute a top-down national plan the entire country is expected to follow without objection.
At the same time, this class believes it is its job to oversee the decline of America.
Voter fraud and election theft have become normalized nationally rather than confined to big cities run by Democrat political machines.
Voters have put prosecutors who refuse to prosecute into office all over the country. It seems to be one man’s objective to foul our communities so completely that we’ll eventually go begging for tyrants to save us.
The Constitution is being tread upon by sort of tyrants we’ll be asking for in the name of keeping us healthy.
Voters have also put a team in the White House that will be beholden not to the country and Constitution it will swear to protect but to China.
Most of both the media and academia have become naked propagandists for one party rather than objective dispensers of news and even-handed educators.
Corporate America is becoming increasingly captured by woke forces and climate zealots, which makes life harder on the middle and lower classes.
Identity politics and a “social justice” are splitting the nation into warring tribes.
Our freedoms to speak and worship freely are being diminished almost daily.
Dissent from hard-left orthodoxy is punished by job loss, ostracization, and on occasion violence.
Rioters, looters and domestic terrorists are being coddled and even encouraged by the media, academia, and rotten-to-the core politicians.
As Pat Buchanan wrote last week, “we are two nations, two peoples seemingly separated indefinitely. Can a nation so divided as ours, racially, ideologically, religiously, still do great things together, as did the America of days gone by, to the amazement of the world?”   

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-isnt-the-one-politicizing-science-11607969209?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Politics has infected many issues over the past four years and has now reached the supposedly objective halls of official medicine. In an editorial for the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Misguided Use of Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19: The Infusion of Politics Into Science,” Dr. Michael Saag claims that “the politicization of the treatment” was more important than the science in promoting the use of the antimalaria drug to treat Covid-19. This evidence-free claim is contradicted by information in the same editorial and the scientific literature.

Dr. Saag doesn’t cite a single source to support his claim that President Trump’s April 4 promotion of the drug influenced physicians’ prescribing decisions. His claim that “no health official” in the U.S. government endorsed use of hydroxychloroquine is contradicted in his next sentence, which notes that the Food and Drug Administration approved an emergency-use authorization for hydroxychloroquine on March 28, one week before Mr. Trump’s comments. The FDA granted that authorization at the request of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or Barda, another U.S. government health agency.

Physicians prescribed hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 because they had reason to believe it could work. In the early days of the pandemic when there were no established therapies, clinicians noted the severe immune response that the SARS-CoV-2 virus elicited in severely ill patients. They began to deploy hydroxychloroquine because it has long been used to treat autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, with a good safety profile.

Hydroxychloroquine and its cousin chloroquine had also been studied as antivirals with activity against the similar SARS coronavirus and other viruses. Several encouraging preclinical studies and small clinical trials, including a French study published in March and cited by Dr. Saag, reinforced physicians’ willingness to try hydroxychloroquine.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“In stage three [of Trump Derangement Syndrome], one is ready to believe anything– anything pernicious or salacious, that is – about Mr. Trump and to reject anything he has done that might be good for the country, if only because of the man who did it.” Joseph Epstein Wall Street Journal July 9, 2020

While I have not fussed much over last month’s election results, I believe, despite the Electoral College certifying the election, that there was fraud and other shenanigans. How else to explain halted vote counting in swing states; election rules changed without authorization from state legislatures; unsigned mail-in ballots, etc. Can we really believe that a candidate who spent much of the campaign in his home received ten million more votes than did Barack Obama in 2012? Congress and state legislatures should ensure that voter laws are explicit and fair. One is left wondering, not only about voter fraud, but about the size of the turnout. Apparently 156 million people voted, or 66% of registered voters, the highest percentage since 1900 and twenty percent more people than in 2016! Now, Mr. Trump’s options are gone; nevertheless, when politics smell fishy, it is usually more than a week-old Mackerel in the trunk of a car.

 Last Friday’s lead editorial in our local paper, The Day, stated: “But Trump has caused profound damage, having convinced tens of millions of people who voted for him that Biden is not a legitimate president.” Whether the statemen is true or not, I do not know, but the hypocrisy of the paper’s editorial board is heavier than a London fog. They, and most of mainstream media, never condemned the “Resistance” that for four years claimed Trump was an illegitimate president. They avoided the subject of Mr. Biden’s noticeable deteriorating mental acuity and stayed away from the Hunter Biden scandal. The Day posits itself as independent. Their masthead reads: “The newspaper should be more than a business enterprise. It should also be a champion and protector of the public interest and defender of the people’s rights.” Sadly, the paper, like so many others, has become a defender of the progressive movement and a foe of the messiness that is natural to the democracy of a free and independent people. In looking for potential threats to liberty, the media has a habit of ignoring peril from the left, like the hairbrained schemes of stacking the Supreme Court and doing away with the filibuster in the U.S. Senate. Wannabe tyrants do not alienate the media and reduce the power of government, as Trump has done with his sarcastic remarks to the press, and as he did in cutting regulations. Budding despots befriend the media, and they increase personal and government power through rules and regulations, like Governors Cuomo and Newsom.