RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-history-of-pfizer-and-penicillin-and-lessons-for-coronavirus-11584723787?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Often lost in election-cycle diatribes against Big Pharma—which come from all sides—is the power of industry to come together in times of crisis and save lives.

Stories of battlefield heroism during World War II are well known. Lesser known, but relevant for today’s fight against the novel coronavirus, is the story of Pfizer’s Jasper Kane and John McKeen. Kane and McKeen pioneered the mass production of penicillin. Their breakthrough, together with others made by scientists and engineers at the nation’s industrial labs, helped reduce the death rate from diseases in the U.S. military to 0.6 per 1,000 in World War II from 14.1 per 1,000 in World War I. That 96% reduction translated into 200,000 lives spared.

There are lessons for today. First, calls by political candidates to make future Covid-19 vaccines free run contrary to the national interest. Low prices for vaccines and anti-infectives have clipped revenue for startups and led many to file for bankruptcy. Investment has plummeted, leaving the U.S. unprepared to fight off bad bugs.

In times of crisis, however, American industry has shown a willingness to invest, as biopharmaceutical companies around the country are doing today. In the 1930s, Pfizer was a small Brooklyn-based chemical company known mostly for making vitamins and the citric acid used in Coca-Cola. In October 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt convened academic and industry leaders, including Jasper Kane, in Washington. Their charge: Solve the penicillin production problem.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-pandemic-us-fatality-rate-steady-about-1-percent/#slide-1

Like many Americans, I’ve been tracking statistical reports about the coronavirus pandemic. In particular, I’ve been closely following Worldometer, which seems reliable, covers the globe, and gets updated frequently. It has been frustrating, though, to try to find good breakouts on fatality rate numbers.

I do not mean to suggest that this information is not out there. It just does not get the same attention as the total number of cases and the total number of deaths.

Reporting those two stats in isolation makes them seem especially alarming. If, hypothetically, on Day One there were 100 cases, and on Day 5 there were 1,000 cases, that would be a very troubling rate of increase, though it could be mitigated by a number of factors. (For example, if testing has improved in the interim, the surge in reported cases could reflect better information about the overall phenomenon, rather than just a rapid spread of the disease.) Similarly, if there were ten deaths on Day 5 after only one on Day One, that jump would seem frightening . . . but it would be a proportional increase in fatalities given the tenfold jump in reported cases — assuming the fatality rate has been reliably established.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/america-is-still-the-best-place-to-be-during-covid-19/

Don’t listen to the media cynics who think coronavirus has turned the U.S. into a third-world country.

The New York Times reports that the United States, and the West, are now the real problem in the fight against coronavirus:

The fear and suspicion directed at China in the devastating early days of the coronavirus outbreak have made a 180-degree turn: It is the West that now frightens Asia and the rest of the world.

The fear and suspicion, of course, were entirely justified, because the Chinese Communist government lied about the existence and scale of the virus, unleashing it on the world. But I’d love to find the insane person who would rather be in Wuhan province or Tehran right now than Ohio or Houston.

There’s a destructive strain of cynicism infecting so much of our media. To contend that the United States was “completely unprepared” for a coronavirus pandemic, as this Politico piece does, or to claim that “America Is Acting Like a Failed State,” as this Atlantic piece does, is journalistic malpractice. I don’t know if these writers, or similarly inclined ones, have some knee-jerk antipathy towards the United States or if partisanship blinds them to state of the world, but none of it aligns with reality.

https://spectator.us/beijing-attempts-elude-blame-wuhan-virus-backfire/

Facing harsh criticism for allowing the novel coronavirus to spread, Beijing has settled on an international communications strategy: smearing the United States by claiming the virus originated with American soldiers visiting China. 

This strategy, based on obvious lies, will not work out well.

Nobody outside China’s state broadcasters and some information-starved viewers could possibly believe it. For good reason: it’s bunk, and vile bunk at that. An infected unicorn is more likely to have started the virus in Wuhan than the US military. Yet that is the story the Chinese Communist party (CCP) is trying to peddle.

 ‘The US pushed out the vaccine so quickly,’ said one ‘expert’ on Central China TV, ‘that only means they have been working on it way before the pandemic.’ The host played right along, ‘So we can conclude that the US had this virus in their possession long ago.’

Yeah, right.

Actually, there is no vaccine yet, though US, Canadian, European, Japanese and Israeli labs are working aggressively to invent one and to produce effective treatments. Nor would all the advanced economies have been forced to shut down if the United States had understood the virus well in advance. We didn’t. Chinese scientists in Wuhan were the first to get samples and when they decoded its genetic structure in early January, their laboratory was shut down. Beijing tried to destroy all their information, but some had fortunately been shared with US scientists before the intellectual iron curtain fell.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/20/federal-prosecutors-drop-charges-in-special-counsels-most-russia-related-case-for-collusion/

he Mueller special counsel created a propaganda coup for Russia through pursuing a politicized indictment, seemingly to justify its existence, and very likely to the detriment of U.S. law.

Under cover of the wall-to-wall coverage of Chinese coronavirus, a central pillar of the already discredited Robert Mueller special counsel investigation has suffered a major blow, further exposing the miscarriage of, and disaster to, our justice system that it represented.

Federal prosecutors have dropped the charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States against two corporate defendants in the Russian “troll farm” case. That case hewed most closely to the special counsel’s mandate in that it showed Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election, although absent “collusion” with Americans.

Recall that in the much-bandied-about case, the Robert Mueller special counsel team indicted 13 Russians and three corporate entities for “defrauding” the United States in allegedly engaging in a cartoonish, low-budget social media political memecampaign. The team presented the case as proof positive that the Russians worked to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election — although there has never been any proof Russia altered one vote nor evidence any American changed his or her vote due to seeing a crude Russian-created meme on social media.

https://justthenews.com/government/white-house/trumps-approval-rating-soars-during-handling-coronavirus

New polling Friday showed President Trump’s approval ratings among Americans have soared during the coronavirus crisis, including his handling of the pandemic response and the economy

A new Axios-Harris poll, released Friday, showed the president with an 53 percent overall approval among U.S. adults surveyed March 17 and 18, compared to 49 percent among those polled March 14 and 15.

Fifty-six percent of respondents in the latest poll said they approved of the president’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, an increase from 51 percent last week. And 60 percent of Americans this week said they approved of the president’s handling of the economy, a slight increase from 59 percent last week. 

Despite stock market declines and rising unemployment figures released this week, the president’s approval rating for “Stimulating Jobs,” remained unchanged at 60 percent among both groups polled.