RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-response-josh-hawley-plan-fix-relief-bill/

A lot is going wrong with the recent coronavirus bill.

T he COVID-19 relief bill was supposed to help workers affected by the crisis in two different ways. First, it offered loans to businesses to keep them solvent, promising the loans would be forgiven to the extent that these companies kept their employees on their payrolls. And second, workers who nonetheless lost their job would be eligible for expanded unemployment benefits.

The first approach should have had priority, because it keeps people attached to their employers and ready to go when this is over. That’s a key ingredient to a speedy recovery. Yet the bill’s business provisions have stumbled out of the gate, while the unemployment boost is proving more attractive than it probably should. Smoothing out the implementation of these measures should be a major short-term goal, and Congress should consider reforming, replacing, or supplementing them as soon as practicable. As it happens, Senator Josh Hawley already has a proposal in the latter spirit.

Immediately upon the bill’s passage, it was clear that these programs were less than ideal. Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out that the business rescue probably didn’t have enough funding to help all the businesses that needed it. And some Republican senators raised the alarm about the structure of the unemployment expansion: It gave out $600 per week on top of other benefits, which is more than many workers make if they stay on the job; and while it’s normally very hard to get unemployment if you leave a job voluntarily, the bill expanded eligibility to include those who had kids home from school or other COVID-related reasons for quitting. The senators thought the mismatch between unemployment benefits and wages was a “drafting error,” but it turned out to be an intentional kludge: States’ unemployment systems aren’t capable of implementing a complicated new benefit formula quickly, so the bill’s drafters resorted to the brute simplicity of $600.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/06/arkansas-gov-asa-hutchinson-resists-pressure-to-issue-stay-at-home-order/

“Given that Arkansas isn’t a densely populated area, the spread of the virus here has been below projections. People are socially distancing absent a stay-at-home order. Businesses and other organizations that remain open are responding with voluntary measures to slow the spread. ”

In a time when following the herd is lauded as courageous, Gov. Asa Hutchinson is exhibiting actual leadership.

U.S. Surgeon General Vice Admiral Jerome Adams issued a stern warning about the coming week. “Well, it’s tragically fitting that we’re talking at the beginning of Holy Week because this is going to be the hardest and the saddest week of most Americans’ lives, quite frankly. This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localized. It’s going to be happening all over the country. And I want America to understand that.”

Adams continued, “It’s why we put out these ‘30 days to stop the spread’ guidelines. These are essentially our national stay-at-home order. And we’re working with governors to figure out their needs, their desires.”

https://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2020/04/05/gilead-covid19-coronavirus-remdesivir/?

In response to intensifying demand, Gilead Sciences (GILD) has been ramping up production of its experimental remdesivir treatment that is being tested to combat the novel coronavirus.

The drug maker now has 1.5 million individual dosages that could be used for more than 140,000 patients and is supplying the medicine, which is being made available through clinical trials and special access programs, at no charge.

“Providing our existing supplies at no charge is the right thing to do, to facilitate access to patients as quickly as possible and in recognition of the public emergency posed by this pandemic,” Gilead chief executive officer Daniel O’Day wrote in an open letter released Saturday night. He added the 1.5 million doses will be donated for “broader distribution” following any potential future regulatory approvals.

In coming months, the company expects to increase supplies as raw materials become available and, as a result, has set an “ambitious goal” of producing more than 500,000 treatment courses by October and more than 1 million by the end of this year. Toward that end, Gilead said it is building a “geographically diverse” group of suppliers to expand global capacity for raw materials and production.

There is some evidence remdesivir, which previously failed to show benefit in Ebola virus patients, benefits Covid-19 patients, and the company has been working with researchers and several governments to get several clinical trials running. Results are expected this month.

https://www.city-journal.org/coronavirus-vaccine

The biopharmaceutical industry will be able to make a Covid-19 vaccine—probably a few of them—using various existing vaccine technologies. But many people worry that Covid-19 will mutate and evade our vaccines, as the flu virus does each season. Covid-19 is fundamentally different from flu viruses, though, in ways that will allow our first-generation vaccines to hold up well. To the extent that Covid does mutate, it’s likely to do so much more slowly than the flu virus does, buying us time to create new and improved vaccines.

Every virus has a genome composed of genetic material (either RNA or DNA) that encodes instructions for replicating the virus. When a virus infects a cell, it accesses machinery for making copies of its genomic instructions and follows those instructions to make viral proteins that assemble, with copies of the instructions, to form more viruses (which then pop out of the cell to infect new cells, either in the same host or in someone new).

There is a critical difference between coronaviruses and flu. The novel coronavirus genome is made of one long strand of genetic code. This makes it an “unsegmented” virus—like a set of instructions that fit on a single page. The flu virus has eight genomic segments, so its code fits on eight “pages.” That’s not common for viruses, and it gives the flu a special ability. Because the major parts of the flu virus are described on separate pages (segments) of its genome, when two different flu viruses infect the same cell, they can swap pages.