RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lessons-of-the-long-covid-year-11615506819?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“The pandemic is now easing thanks largely to the ingenuity of American drug and biotech companies. The Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed made the inspired decision last year to invest $20 billion developing six vaccine candidates. This is the best decision government made. Vaccines typically take a decade to develop, but years of private investment and innovation have paid off in advanced technologies that have cut the time to a year.”

When a SARS-like virus was reported spreading in Wuhan in late 2019, most Americans never imagined their own government would soon close schools, churches and businesses, order people to stay home, and spend more than $5 trillion to offset the damage. Yet a year later, here we are.

The anniversary is a moment to consider what the pandemic has wrought and how well the U.S. has responded. Healthcare workers have been courageous, drug companies ingenious, and average Americans resilient. The political class and health experts? Not so much.

*Start with China and the World Health Organization, which is supposed to patrol for global health threats. China lied and the WHO played along. After censoring doctors, Beijing denied there was evidence of human-to-human transmission until shortly before it locked down Hubei province with 60 million people. Many Chinese had already left the country for Lunar New Year.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-covid-advisor-i-would-tip-my-hat-to-trump-admin-for-vaccine-development-distribution/

Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to the White House’s COVID team, on Thursday applauded the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed for the “record time” in which the COVID vaccine was developed, after months of Biden administration officials claiming they had been forced to start from scratch on vaccine distribution efforts.

“We’re grateful for the work that came before us and are doing the best we can to continue it and accelerate it,” Slavitt said on Fox News. “I would absolutely tip my hat. … The Trump administration made sure that we got in record time a vaccine up and out. That’s a great thing and it’s something we should all be excited about.”

The comment contradicts other Biden administration officials who have claimed their predecessors left them “a mess” of a vaccine rollout. The president has previously called Trump’s vaccine distribution a “dismal failure.”

“The sad part is the last administration didn’t leave anything. They didn’t leave a plan,” Biden senior adviser Cedric Richmond told CNN in January. White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said “the process to distribute the vaccine, particularly outside of nursing homes and hospitals out into the community as a whole, did not really exist when we came into the White House.” 

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki similarly called the vaccine situation that the new administration had inherited “much worse than we could have imagined.”

As National Review has previously reported, a look at the Bloomberg vaccine tracker shortly after Biden took office reveals that on the last day of the Trump administration more than 1.5 million Americans were vaccinated. The Biden administration inherited a system that had already reached a pace that would meet the president’s goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans in his first 100 days in office.

Slavitt said Thursday that the Biden administration hadn’t been trying to “point fingers.”

https://spectator.org/

Under the heading “Justice for the Victims of Witch Hunts, Old and New,” the Wall Street Journal describes a movement by European activists, including Human Rights Watch, to rehabilitate the many thousands executed for witchcraft from the 1400s to the early 1800s. They are playing belated catchup with the American colonies.  In 1697 the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared a Day of Contrition of fasting and remorse for the 1692 Salem witch trials and in 1711 formally exonerated those convicted and paid restitution to their heirs. The current activists are hoping to influence non-Western countries like Saudi Arabia, India, Ghana, and Papua New Guinea, where accusations of witchcraft still lead to torture and death.

But before human rights groups here and in Europe focus their attention far in the past and far afield, they would do well to seek apologies, restitution, and justice for the victims of witch hunts much closer in time and space: victims of the sex abuse in day care hysteria that in the 1980s and early ’90s swept the U.S. (and manifested itself to a much lesser extent in Canada, New Zealand, and Europe). One victim, Frank Fuster, remains in prison. He has now served 36 years of a sentence of six life terms and 165 years. (In 2014 the Florida Parole Commission sent him a letter telling him his initial parole interview was scheduled in 120 years.) All this for crimes that existed only in the fevered imagination of his accusers.

These were witch trials just as surely as the much earlier versions, complete with accusations of Satanic rituals tied to the supposed abuse of preschoolers. Robert Rosenthal, the attorney who won reversals on appeal in a number of these cases, still marvels at public credulity: “These cases made normal people abandon their disbelief. In another situation, would they believe this crazy stuff about pentagrams and Satan? But here they believed it.”