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The Unelected Can’t Wash Their Hands   Jack Weatherall

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/05/the-unelected-cant-wash-their-hands/

“The true measure of all that has been inflicted upon the Australian people will emanate from the above narrow infections/death parameters well after the hysteria around this virus has dissipated. Australians thrown on the scrap heap will not forget. There will be constant reminders of the damage that has been wrought and the misery inflicted, and continuing to be inflicted, upon millions. Public health authorities will not be able to hide behind their corrupted models and their ‘saving lives’ mantras when exactly the opposite is both true and obvious. The attempts now by Australian public health authorities to decouple the ruinous effects of their heavy-handed response from the social and economic fallout will not go unchallenged.”

 

 

As the back-slapping of state and commonwealth public health authorities and their politician overlords echoes through the mainstream media the real costs of their misguided approach to managing COVID-19 are starting to emerge. While our politicians and CMO’s daily pronounce their efforts in “flattening the curve” and “saving lives”, they focus as the measure of their self-determined success on two numbers alone — confirmed cases of COVID-19 and associated deaths as the only measures of their success.

The World Health Organisation now concedes the virus is likely to become yet another endemic coronavirus that is here to stay. Antibody prevalence studies from Spain to New York indicate that prevalence of the virus is ten- to twentyfold greater than officially confirmed cases. In Spain this means there are 2.5 million cases, rather than 220,000. To add to the implausibility of containment as a strategy, a whopping 26 per cent of Spanish cases were entirely asymptomatic. The containment strategies have failed and the horse has bolted. Extrapolated globally, this would indicate 50–100 million cases, and that is probably wildly conservative as the virus runs unchecked in many Third World nations. Yet the impact on lives, health and wellbeing through the asphyxiation of the real economy has rippled throughout the whole of Australian society, resulting in an outcome that is profoundly and incalculably negative. The obsession with infections and deaths in assessing the impact of this response is as scientifically absurd as the models that informed it.

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China Threatens GOP Lawmakers. Their Responses Are Perfect.     Leah Barkoukis

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2020/05/15/china-threatens-gop-lawmakers-crenshaw-says-bring-it-n2568863

Republican-led efforts to hold China accountable for the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus are being watched closely by the communist regime.

State-run media reported Thursday that Republican lawmakers will “face severe consequences” for speaking out against China, pursuing lawsuits, and pushing “anti-China” legislation.

“Republicans who have been groundlessly accusing China and inflaming the ‘holding China accountable’ political farce will face severe consequences, sources said, noting that the aftermath will also impact the upcoming November elections, while business and trade between Missouri and China will be further soured,” the Global Times, a branch of the Communist Party of China’s People’s Daily, wrote in an article. 

The article focused on efforts by Missouri’s Attorney General Eric Schmitt who sued the country last month on behalf of the state arguing the communist country is responsible for Missourians’ suffering, death and economic hardship.

“The Chinese government lied to the world about the danger and contagious nature of COVID-19, silenced whistleblowers, and did little to stop the spread of the disease,” Schmitt said. “They must be held accountable for their actions.”

The article also singled out Sens. Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton and two other members of Congress over legislation that would allow Americans to sue China, saying they will be added to the country’s sanctions list. 

Reps. Dan Crenshaw, Chris Smith, Jim Holzapfel, Greg McGuckin and John Catalano as well as Sens. Marsha Blackburn, Rick Scott, Martha McSally, and Lance Gooden were also named in the piece over their support of legislative efforts that would let U.S. citizens sue China. 

“We must resolutely hit back at those politicians who, for no reason, undermine China-US ties for their own political benefits. For those who promote anti-China legislation, we need to find out what the business ties are between those officials or their families with China,” one research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences told the paper. “We can’t just strike back symbolically, but should impose countermeasures that could make them feel the pain.”

Republicans were unfazed by the threat. 

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New Hydroxychloroquine Trial Could Be Destined to Fail By Stacey Lennox May

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2020/05/14/new-hydroxychloroquine-trial-could-be-destined-to-fail-n392407

The politicization of hydroxychloroquine has been one of the most frustrating aspects of Trump Derangement Syndrome during this pandemic. Early studies in France and clinical outcomes from multiple treating physicians using a combination therapy that included the drug provided hope to combat the virus. However, it made President Trump hopeful, so it had to be obliterated.

Crappy studies of the drug given to the most severe patients were touted as proof the president was wrong. Then there was Fish Tank Cleaner Gate. This is the problem with political reporters covering press briefings about a pandemic. They either aren’t provided an internet connection by their employers or are too lazy to do 15 minutes of research.

Now, the NIH has finally announced it will begin a clinical trial using hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin in COVID-19 patients with mild to moderate symptoms. Every clinician who has advocated hydroxychloroquine-azithromycin has said this is the appropriate stage of the disease to use the drug combination. Dr. Vladimir Zelenko began giving it to diagnosed and presumed COVID-19 patients during a severe outbreak in New Rochelle, New York. He started the drug when patients were suffering from mild shortness of breath.

Dr. Anthony Cardillo also explained how he effectively used the drug. His method was to give the medicine with azithromycin and zinc for a specific biological reason. This mineral needs to be added to the NIH trial based on volumes of scientific research on how it works in combination with hydroxychloroquine. Cardillo explained it succinctly:

“It was actually the hydroxychloroquine opening up a channel in the cellular membranes allowing zinc to come into the cells,” he said, “And we do know high levels of zinc inside of the cell that’s infected with the virus shuts down that viral replication machinery.”

The reaction to hydroxychloroquine was very perplexing. The NIH studied drug’s older cousin chloroquine following the SARS epidemic. In 2005 the NIH noted chloroquine had both prophylactic effects for prevention and anti-viral effects in cell cultures:

Conclusion

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Netanyahu’s ‘Houdini’ Act: Once Again at the Helm, Facing Formidable Challenges By P. David Hornik

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/columns/p-david-hornik/2020/05/15/netanyahus-houdini-act-once-again-at-the-helm-facing-formidable-challenges-n393200

Lately they’ve been calling Benjamin Netanyahu “Houdini.” In three elections since April 2019, he hasn’t won. Yet he’s come out on top—again—as prime minister, and his new government will be sworn in early next week.

In all three of those elections, Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc actually soundly defeated the left-wing bloc. Yet, for different reasons, his bloc couldn’t reach a 61-seat majority in the Knesset—first because of a renegade right-wing party that broke away from the bloc, then because of an Israeli Arab party whose electoral gains didn’t leave enough seats for a right-wing parliamentary majority.

This time, though, amid the COVID-19 crisis, with Netanyahu’s popularity soaring because of his successful handling of the crisis, opposition leader Benny Gantz finally agreed to join Netanyahu in a national unity government. In so doing he broke up his own 33-seat party, decimating what’s left of the Israeli left, and took his now only 17-seat Blue and White faction with him.

Under the deal they worked out, Netanyahu is supposed to be PM for a year and a half, followed by Gantz as PM for a year and a half. Because that political deal has no legal standing, many believe that, before his year and a half runs out, “Houdini” Netanyahu will find a way out of it and keep serving as PM. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, the 71-year-old Netanyahu, who was PM from 1996 to 1999, then foreign minister, then finance minister, and has now been PM consecutively since 2009, faces challenges that would overwhelm lesser mortals. The immediate one is—still—to form a government out of competing, clamorous individuals and factions while striving not to bruise egos or leave anyone out in the cold.

And once that incredibly difficult feat has been achieved, the real work begins.

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The Costly Failure to Update Sky-Is-Falling Predictions By Sean Trende

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/15/the_costly_failure_to_update_sky-is-falling_predictions_143215.html

On March 6, Liz Specht, Ph.D., posted a thread on Twitter that immediately went viral.  As of this writing, it has received over 100,000 likes and almost 41,000 retweets, and was republished at Stat News.  It purported to “talk math” and reflected the views of “highly esteemed epidemiologists.” It insisted it was “not a hypothetical, fear-mongering, worst-case scenario,” and that, while the predictions it contained might be wrong, they would not be “orders of magnitude wrong.” It was also catastrophically incorrect.

The crux of Dr. Specht’s 35-tweet thread was that the rapid doubling of COVID-19 cases would lead to about 1 million cases by May 5, 4 million by May 11, and so forth.  Under this scenario, with a 10% hospitalization rate, we would expect approximately 400,000 hospitalizations by mid-May, which would more than overwhelm the estimated 330,000 available hospital beds in the country.  This would combine with a lack of protective equipment for health care workers and lead to them “dropping from the workforce for weeks at a time,” to shortages of saline drips and so forth. Half the world would be infected by the summer, and we were implicitly advised to buy dry goods and to prepare not to leave the house.

Interestingly, this thread was wrong not because we managed to bend the curve and stave off the apocalypse; for starters, Dr. Specht described the cancellation of large events and workplace closures as something that would shift things by only days or weeks.

Instead, this thread was wrong because it dramatically overstated our knowledge of the way the virus worked; it fell prey to the problem, common among experts, of failing to address adequately the uncertainty surrounding its point estimates.  It did so in two opposing ways. First, it dramatically understated the rate of spread. If serological tests are to be remotely believed, we likely hit the apocalyptic milestone of 2 million cases quite some time ago.  Not in the United States, mind you, but in New York City, where 20% of residents showed positive COVID-19 antibodies on April 23.  Fourteen percent of state residents showed antibodies, suggesting 2.5 million cases in the Empire State alone; since antibodies take a while to develop, this was likely the state of affairs in mid-April or earlier.

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New Report Unveils The Extent To Which The CDC And FDA Lost Focus By Tristan Justice

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/15/new-report-unveils-the-extent-to-which-the-cdc-and-fda-lost-focus/

A new report from the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) peels back the curtain on just how much the nation’s preeminent public health institutions have pivoted to controlling lifestyle choices over preventing infectious diseases such as COVID-19.

CEI Senior Fellow Michelle Minton found that a vast majority of congressional funding allotted to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) went towards reinforcing public behavior while only a fraction of the agency budgets were targeted towards fighting emerging pathogens that have given rise to the public health pandemic today.

Of the roughly $7 billion granted to the CDC in 2019, just less than half went to infectious disease efforts where most went to fight existing viruses. More than $600 million focused on animal-related diseases, only a third of which was directed towards emerging threats. In other words, CDC resources for rising pathogens such as the novel Wuhan coronavirus, which is supposed to strike at the core of the CDC’s mission, received far less concern than hyping a moral panic around vaping.

“As its original name, the Communicable Disease Center implies, the initial purpose of the CDC was to assist the states in the control of infectious disease,” Minton wrote, noting that it came to be from efforts to combat malaria. Since its creation in 1946 Minton wrote, he CDC’s focus has expanded “to include conditions and diseases not caused by the spread of dangerous pathogens, but by lifestyle factors such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.”

The FDA meanwhile, is no less guilty. With a broader role to play in protecting the nation’s public health, the agency’s role in perpetuating healthy lifestyle choices such as maintaining a healthy diet and proper nutrition is far more justifiable. Alas, its aggressive action propelling hysteria surrounding electronic cigarettes led by former administrator Scott Gottlieb remains far off from the FDA’s goals or public interest and is killing smokers. Electronic cigarette use is the single most effective form of smoking cessation offering a lifeline to those trapped under addiction to combustible cigarettes which is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States.

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Europe’s Anti-Lockdown Moment By Jorge González-Gallarza Hernández

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/europes-anti-lockdown-moment/

The reopening sentiment is spreading, and it’s not all right-wingers who are doing the protesting.

America’s worship of civil liberties was on display as anti-lockdown protests swept from Lansing, Mich., to San Diego, and from Madison, Wis., to Boston’s Beacon Hill. From London to Seine-Saint Denis, from Munich to Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, a similar defiance of state intrusion is now arising in parts of Europe. As in the United States, the question is still open: Will these protests channel the growing lockdown fatigue into a cogent, constructive case for reopening, or will they descend into paranoia?

A recent hotspot of anti-lockdown fuss has been Germany, where both media and the government have raised the alarm about the far right’s sway in driving people to break the quarantine and social-distancing rules. This past weekend saw radical groups co-opt protests in Dortmund and Munich, where a reporter was attacked and police had to disperse 25 vandals, respectively. A reporting crew from the center-left late-night satirical heute-show was similarly assaulted in Berlin the previous weekend, claiming the popular Moroccan-German comedian Abdelkarim as a victim. Germany’s crippling memory of extremism (so-called Vergangenheitsbewältigung) has a way of penalizing political deviance on the right to this day, and these acts of violence surely didn’t help give the protests a good name in the public eye, either.

Resistance to lockdowns has gotten a bad name in France, too, after a young local from Villeneuve-la-Garenne was thrown off his motorbike and sent to the hospital with a broken leg by a police-car door flung open. The incident sparked a wave of riots across the northern Paris suburbs reminiscent of the three-week-long émeutes in 2005 that saw 8,000 cars set ablaze by restless youths protesting police abuse. The quarantine has brought long-simmering tensions in these largely low-income, immigrant, and poorly housed suburbs to a boiling point, with locals decrying heavy-handed policing, spending cuts in public services, and the unequal impact of school closures that leave low-income kids lacking Internet access with little means to keep up with schoolwork.

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“Lockdown v. COVID-19” Sydney Williams

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

The world has seen other pandemics, but the response to COVID-19 has been unlike anything the world has ever experienced. It is said we should not put a price on a life. Yet, that happens every day. Emergency rooms constantly make life and death decisions. When a hospital suspends a cancer treatment in favor of a COVID-19 patient, a life and death decision has been made. The closing of a food processing plant in Iowa or the downsizing of a shipping facility in Newark, both for fear of spreading COVID-19 are decisions that will likely cause starvation in underdeveloped countries. Every action has a consequence.

Experts in the field of epidemiology scare us through words. On Monday evening, listening to the president of New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, Dr. David Reich, I grew fearful. He spoke of pathogens and their mutability, and of molecular biology and infections. He lost me in his vocabulary. A friend sent a blog written by Dr. Erin Bromage who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Dr. Bromage wrote of how a single cough releases 3,000 droplets that travel across a room at 50 mph, while a sneeze releases 30,000 droplets that travel across the same room at up to 200 mph. If an infected person coughs or sneezes, 200,000,000 virus particles could be released. It’s enough to scare the bejesus out of the most fearless – that is until one realizes that any expert, in using unfamiliar words, can frighten someone less knowledgeable. As well, we ignore the fact that in our lifetimes, we have been exposed to trillions of virus particles. Perspective and common sense are needed. For example, each cubic meter of air contains ten trillion molecules, and each human is host to about 300 parasitic worms and 70 species of protozoa, many of which are employed in fighting infections. We are complicated beings who through millions of years of evolution have developed sophisticated immune systems. There is much we know, but more we don’t.

As accurate as what Dr. Reich said and what Dr. Bromage wrote, they do not change the fact that politicians unleashed an even deadlier response. We count those who die from COVID-19, but we ignore those who suffer and die from despair, depression and loneliness. It is balance we should seek. John Kass, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune recently wrote: “All I see is the imposition of extremes. Those of us who want to get the country back to work are portrayed as selfish fools who Just Want People to Die. And those who never want the lockdown to end are dismissed as fearful Coronavirus ‘Karens,’ peering through their windows, calling the police if they see someone walking on the street without a mask.”

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World Lives vs lives: the global cost of lockdown Policies that depress the world economy put millions at risk Jayanta Bhattacharya and Mikko Packalen

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

https://spectator.us/lives-vs-lives-global-cost-lockdown/

‘There have been as many plagues in history as there have been wars,’ wrote Albert Camus in The Plague, ‘yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.’ So it was this time. The arrival of a new coronavirus blindsided governments of most advanced nations as they reached for a tool that few had ever really considered before: lockdown. It all happened too fast for a proper discussion about the implications. The biggest question — the extent to which lockdown will claim lives as well as save them — is one you can ask at a global level.

We know the national costs. In the United States, there is joblessness on a scale not seen since the Great Depression, with more than 33 million unemployed. The Bank of England forecasts the UK economy will fall by 14 percent this year — the steepest decline since 1706. Similar trends can be found across the industrial world. The global economy is veering toward an economic depression not seen for generations.

Yet this argument, to many, seems crass. How consequential is an economic loss in balance when lives at risk from COVID-19 are at stake? Understandably, few find such calculations compelling — and tend to side with those who advocate for prolonged lockdowns lasting for months or more. If this were about lives vs money, it would be easy to understand. But look deeper, and this is about lives vs lives — on a scale that has not, so far, been very much discussed. Lockdown will, on a global level, hit the poorest hardest.

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David Bossie: Biden wrong on China his entire career – let’s look at the record ****

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-wrong-china-career-check-record-david-bossie

In April, records from 9/11 mastermind Usama bin Laden’s compound were disclosed detailing his plans to assassinate then-President Barack Obama. Bin Laden’s rationale for his horrific plot was telling: “Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis.” 

Now, a decade since U.S. Special Forces killed bin Laden in Pakistan, it’s my guess that President Xi Jinping of China – our greatest geopolitical foe today – also wants former Vice President Joe Biden to be the next president of the United States. This makes perfect sense when you consider that Xi wants what’s best for China.

Joe Biden has been wrong on U.S. policy toward China virtually his entire career. In fact, Biden and other establishment politicians in Washington have been instrumental in China’s meteoric rise from a developing nation into a Communist power with global ambitions.