RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/gavin-newsoms-license-to-misinform-on-covid

Last summer, while trying to survive a recall effort, California governor Gavin Newsom claimed that Texas middle-class families “pay more taxes than middle-class families in California” and challenged doubters to “look that up.” A few months later, he swore that “violent crime and property crime” is “higher in Texas than in California.”

The facts didn’t land on his side. Comparisons showed that taxes are a greater burden in California, and there’s little difference in crime between the states in recent years.

Because Newsom is a media darling, his exaggerations didn’t hurt him politically. So he’s free to continue to dish out misinformation. “We’d have 40,000 more Californians dead” if he had followed Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s approach to the pandemic, Newsom said last month while appearing on ABC’s The View. Though Newsom seems to have pulled that 40,000 number out of the ether, it is true that California did do a little better than Florida when looking at Covid deaths per 100,000 residents (California’s number currently stands at 110, against Florida’s 128—both of which are below the national average of 138). But if he believes that his lockdown regime was the reason for California’s lower rate, he’s deluding himself.

A year ago, one media outlet called California “the most locked down state across the country,” and San Diego County “the most locked down county in the state, with Los Angeles County about the same.” It might be hard to recall now, but California was the first state to shut down its economy and movement of people, and it appears that it will be the last to restore those lost liberties. While Newsom and other public officials were telling Californians that they were better off hiding under their beds, people were “flocking to Florida to find freedom, as other states and countries continue to keep their citizens locked down,” according to the James Madison Institute. In the spring of 2020, while Newsom was increasing his powers through executive orders, making a dodgy $1 billion mask deal with a Chinese company, and holding his made-for-TV performances every day at noon, DeSantis was already easing restrictions. By September of that year, all statewide rules in Florida were gone, never to return.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/11/its-time-to-ask-were-any-of-the-covid-mandates-closures-lockdowns-worth-it/

With COVID deaths now topping 910,000, the Biden administration and the rest of the Democratic left are deciding to ease up on their mandate regime. We need to learn to live with COVID, they say – repeating advice President Donald Trump issued back in October 2020.

We’re all for ditching the left’s COVID police state, even if Democrats’ reason is political, as we pointed out in this space yesterday.

But that leaves us with a question: Was any of it worth it? Did any of the guidelines, mandates, orders, shutdowns, cancelations, lockdowns do anything to alter the course of the disease, or change in any way the number of people who died from it?

Was it worth the massive disruption to our jobs and lives, the education losses suffered by our children, the trillions in debt piled up? Was it worth shutting down dissent by Tech Giants? Or the unleashing of mask scolds? Or vaccine passports? Or the divisiveness all of it fueled?

After all, even with all that in place, Centers for Disease Control data show that more than 77 million Americans have contracted COVID, and 910,373 deaths are linked to the disease.

What would have been different if we’d done nothing, other than encourage people to use common sense?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pig-medicine-organ-donation-kidney-heart-transplant-xenotransplantation-end-state-renal-disease-medicare-11644439815?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

I had my first kidney transplant in 2004. It gave out after 10 years. The replacement, which I received in 2016, functions well but won’t last forever. “May your organ outlive you,” older transplant patients tell each other. Otherwise, you may not survive the queue for a new one.

That’s why recent breakthroughs in xenotransplantation—the implantation of animal tissues and organs across species—have been exhilarating. In September, doctors at NYU Langone Medical Center attached a pig kidney to blood vessels in a dead woman’s leg (with her family’s permission). It produced urine and cleared waste products during the 54-hour observation period. Two months later, they repeated the procedure.

Also in September, a team at the University of Alabama at Birmingham implanted the first-ever genetically modified pig kidneys into the body of Jim Parsons, 57, of Huntsville, who had been left brain-dead by a motorcycle accident. The new kidneys turned “beautiful and pink,” the lead surgeon said. The experiment lasted 77 hours.

Then, on Jan. 7, surgeons at the University of Maryland transplanted a heart from a genetically modified pig into David Bennett Sr. , who doctors said had exhausted all other treatment options. Mr. Bennett, 57, is still alive.

More than 90,000 Americans are waiting for a kidney. In 2021 fewer than 25,000 received one, and some 41,000 were added to the national waiting list. On the average day, around a dozen people on the list die.