Well, it's no way to run a country, lying your ass off all the time, as the results show.
I have long been mystified by the political hacks here faith in the efficacy of bullshit for
running a country. But then I realized that is not what they want to do, they want to exploit
the country and get rich, and then depart like their 3rd world collaborators. And bullshit is
what they do.
"That's something that I don't think we could possibly do in the United States, I can't
imagine shutting down New York or Los Angeles, but the judgement on the part of the Chinese
health authorities is that given the fact that it's spreading throughout the provinces it's
their judgement that this is something that in fact is going to help in containing it.
Whether or not it does or does not is really open to question because historically when you
shut things down it doesn't have a major effect."
By mid-summer, all had reversed course and encouraged mask-wearing in the general public as
an essential tool for halting the pandemic. Fauci
essentially conceded that he lied to the public in order to prevent a shortage on masks,
whereas other health officials did an about-face on the scientific claims around masking.
Anthony Fauci 's
decimal error in estimating Covid's fatality rates (March 11)
Fauci testified before Congress in early March where he was asked to estimate the severity
of the disease in comparison to influenza. His testimony that Covid was "10 times more lethal
than the seasonal flu" stoked widespread alarm and provided a major impetus for the decision to
go into lockdown.
The problem, as Ronald Brown documented in an
epidemiology journal article , is that Fauci based his estimates on a conflation of the
Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) and Case Fatality Rate (CFR) for influenza, leading him to
exaggerate the comparative danger of Covid by an order of magnitude. Fauci's error –
which he further compounded in a late February article for the New England Journal of
Medicine – helped to convince Congress of the need for drastic lockdown measures,
while also spreading panic in the media and general public. As of this writing Fauci has not
acknowledged the magnitude of his error, nor has the journal corrected his article.
Anthony Fauci credits lockdowns for beating the virus in Europe (July 31)
In late July
Anthony Fauci offered additional testimony to Congress. His message credited Europe's heavy
lockdowns with defeating the virus, whereas he blamed the United States for reopening too early
and for insufficient aggressiveness in the initial lockdowns. As Fauci stated at the time, "If
you look at what happened in Europe, when they shut down or locked down or went to shelter in
place -- however you want to describe it -- they really did it to the tune of about 95% plus of
the country did that."
The message was clear: the United States should have followed Europe, but failed to do so
and got a summer wave of Covid instead. Fauci's entire argument however was based on a string of falsehoods
and errors.
Anthony Fauci touts New York as a model for Covid containment (June-December)
By all indicators, New York state has suffered one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the
world. Its year-end mortality rate of almost 1,900 deaths per million residents
exceeds
every single country in the world. The state famously bungled its nursing home response
when Governor Andrew Cuomo forced these facilities to readmit Covid-positive patients as a way
to relieve strains on hospitals. The policy backfired as most hospitals never reached capacity,
but the readmissions introduced the virus into vulnerable nursing home populations resulting in
widespread fatalities (to this day
New York intentionally undercounts nursing home fatalities by excluding residents who are
moved to a hospital from its reported numbers, further obscuring the true toll of Cuomo's
order).
New York has also fared poorly during the fall "second wave" despite reimposing harsh
restrictions and regional lockdown measures. By mid-December, its death rate shot far above the
mostly-open state of Florida, which has the closest comparable population size to New York. All
things considered, New York's weathering of the pandemic is an exemplar of what not to do.
Cuomo's policies not only failed to contain the virus – they likely made it far more
deadly to vulnerable populations. Enter Anthony Fauci, who has been asked multiple times in the
press what a model Covid response policy would look like. He gave his
first answer on July 20th : "We know that, when you do it properly, you bring down those
cases. We have done it. We have done it in New York."
Fauci was operating under the assumption that New York, despite its bad run in the spring,
had successfully brought the pandemic under control through its aggressive lockdowns and slow
reopening. One might think that the fall rebound in New York, despite locking down again, would
call this conclusion into question. Not so much for Dr. Fauci, who told the
Wall Street Journal on December 8 : "New York got hit really badly in the beginning" but
they did "a really good job of keeping things down, and still, their level is low compared to
the rest of the country."
This has been a year of astonishing policy failure. We are surrounded by devastation
conceived and cheered by intellectuals and their political handmaidens...
The errors number in the thousands, so please consider the following little more than a
first draft, a mere guide to what will surely be unearthed in the coming months and years. We
trusted these people with our lives and liberties and here is what they did with that
trust.
Anthony Fauci says lockdowns are not possible in the United States (January
24):
"That's something that I don't think we could possibly do in the United States, I can't
imagine shutting down New York or Los Angeles, but the judgement on the part of the Chinese
health authorities is that given the fact that it's spreading throughout the provinces it's
their judgement that this is something that in fact is going to help in containing it.
Whether or not it does or does not is really open to question because historically when you
shut things down it doesn't have a major effect."
US government and WHO officials advise against mask use (February and March)
When mask sales spiked due to widespread individual adoption in the early weeks of the
pandemic, numerous US government and WHO officials took to the airwaves to describe masks as
ineffective and discourage their use.
By mid-summer, all had reversed course and encouraged mask-wearing in the general public as
an essential tool for halting the pandemic. Fauci
essentially conceded that he lied to the public in order to prevent a shortage on masks,
whereas other health officials did an about-face on the scientific claims around masking.
While mainstream epidemiology literature stressed the ambiguous nature of evidence
surrounding masks
as recently as 2019 , these scientists were suddenly certain that masks were something of a
magic bullet for Covid. It turns out that both positions are likely wrong. Masks appear to have
marginal effects at diminishing spread, especially in highly infectious settings and around the
vulnerable. But their effectiveness at combating Covid has also been grossly exaggerated, as
illustrated by the fact that mask adoption reached
near-universal levels in the US by the summer with little discernible effect on the course
of the pandemic.
Anthony Fauci 's
decimal error in estimating Covid's fatality rates (March 11)
Fauci testified before Congress in early March where he was asked to estimate the severity
of the disease in comparison to influenza. His testimony that Covid was "10 times more lethal
than the seasonal flu" stoked widespread alarm and provided a major impetus for the decision to
go into lockdown.
The problem, as Ronald Brown documented in an
epidemiology journal article , is that Fauci based his estimates on a conflation of the
Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) and Case Fatality Rate (CFR) for influenza, leading him to
exaggerate the comparative danger of Covid by an order of magnitude. Fauci's error –
which he further compounded in a late February article for the New England Journal of
Medicine – helped to convince Congress of the need for drastic lockdown measures,
while also spreading panic in the media and general public. As of this writing Fauci has not
acknowledged the magnitude of his error, nor has the journal corrected his article.
"Two weeks to flatten the curve" (March 16)
The lockdowners settled on a catchy slogan in mid-March to justify their unprecedented
shuttering of economic and social life around the globe: two weeks to flatten the curve. The
White House
Covid task force aggressively promoted this line , as did the news media and much of the
epidemiology profession. The logic behind the slogan came from the
ubiquitous graph showing (1) a steep caseload that would overwhelm our hospital system, or
(2) a mitigated alternative that would spread the caseload out over several weeks, making it
manageable.
To get to graph #2, society would need to buckle up for two weeks of shelter-in-place orders
until the capacity issue could be managed. Indeed, we were told that if we did not accept this
solution the hospital system would enter into catastrophic failure in only 10 days, as former
DHS pandemic adviser Tom Bossert claimed in a widely-circulated interview and Washington
Post column on March 11.
Two weeks came and went, then the rationale on which they were sold to the public shifted.
Hospitals were no longer on the verge of being overwhelmed – indeed most hospitals
nationwide remained well under capacity, with only a tiny number of exceptions in the worst-hit
neighborhoods of New York City.
A US Navy hospital ship sent to relieve New York departed
a month later after serving only 182 patients , and a pop-up hospital in the city's Javits
Convention Center
sat mostly empty . But the lockdowns remained in place, as did the emergency orders
justifying them. Two weeks became a month, which became two months, which became almost a year.
We were no longer "flattening the curve" – a strategy premised on saving the hospital
system from a threat than never manifested – but instead refocused on using lockdowns as
a general suppression strategy against the disease itself. In short, the epidemiology
profession sold us a bill of goods.
Neil Ferguson predicts a "best case" US scenario of 1.1 million deaths (March
20)
The name Neil Ferguson, the lead modeler and chief spokesman for Imperial College London's
pandemic response team, has become synonymous with lockdown alarmism for good reason. Ferguson
has a long track record of making grossly exaggerated predictions of
catastrophic death tolls for almost every single disease that comes along, and urging
aggressive policy responses to the same including lockdowns.
Covid was no different, and Ferguson assumed center stage when he released a highly influential model
of the virus's death forecasts for the US and UK. Ferguson appeared with UK Prime Minister
Boris Johnson on March 16 to announce the shift toward lockdowns (with no small irony, he was
coming down with Covid himself at the time and may have been the
patient zero of a super-spreader event that ran through Downing Street and infected Johnson
himself).
Across the Atlantic, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx cited Ferguson's model as a direct
justification for locking down the US. There was a problem though: Ferguson had a bad habit of
dramatically hyping his own predictions to political leaders and the press. The Imperial
College paper modeled a broad range of scenarios including death tolls that ranged from tens of
thousands to over 2 million, but Ferguson's public statements only stressed the latter –
even though the paper itself conceded that such an extreme "worst case" scenario was highly
unrealistic. A telling example came on March 20th when
the New York Times's Nicholas Kristof contacted the Imperial College modeler to ask about
the most likely scenario for the United States. As Kristof related to his readers, "I asked
Ferguson for his best case. "About 1.1 million deaths," he said."
Researchers in Sweden use the Imperial College model to predict 95,000 deaths (April
10)
After Neil Ferguson's shocking death toll predictions for the US and UK captivated
policymaker attention and drove both governments into lockdown, researchers in other countries
began adapting the Imperial College model to their own circumstances. Usually, these models
sought to reaffirm the decisions of each country to lock down. The government of Sweden,
however, had decided to buck the trend, setting the stage for a natural experiment to test the
Imperial model's performance.
In early April a team of researchers at Uppsala University adapted the Imperial model to
Sweden's population and demographics and ran its projections. Their result? If Sweden stayed
the course and did not lock down, it could expect a catastrophic 96,000 deaths by early summer.
The authors of the study recommended going into immediate lockdown, but since Sweden lagged
behind Europe in adopting such measures they also predicted that this "best case" option would
reduce deaths to "only" 30,000.
By early June when the 96,000 prediction was supposed to come true, Sweden had recorded
4,600 deaths. Six months later, Sweden has about 8,000 deaths – a severe pandemic to be
sure, but
an order of magnitude smaller than what the modelers predicted . Facing embarrassment from
these results, Ferguson and Imperial College attempted to distance
themselves from the Swedish adaptation of their model in early May. Yet the Uppsala team's
projections closely matched Imperial's own UK and US predictions when scaled to reflect their
population sizes. In short, the Imperial model catastrophically failed one of the few clear
natural experiment tests of its predictive ability.
Scientists suggest that ocean spray spreads Covid (April 2)
In the second week of the lockdowns several newspapers in California promoted a bizarre
theory: Covid could spread by ocean spray (although the paper later walked back the
headline-grabbing claim, it is outlined
here in the Los Angeles Times ). According to this theory – initially promoted by a
group of biologists who study bacterial infection connected to storm runoff – the Covid
virus washed down storm gutters and into the ocean, where the ocean breeze would kick it up
into the air and infect people on the nearby beaches. As silly as this theory now sounds, it
helped to inform California's initially draconian enforcement of lockdowns on its public
beaches.
The same week that this modern-day miasmic drift theory appeared, police in Malibu
even arrested a lone paddleboarder for going into the ocean during the lockdown – all
while citing the possibility that the ocean breeze carried Covid with it.
Neil Ferguson predicts catastrophic death tolls in US states that reopen (May
24)
Fresh off of their exaggerated predictions from March, the Imperial College team led by Neil
Ferguson doubled down on alarmist modeling. As several US states started to reopen in late
April and May, Ferguson and his colleagues published a new model predicting another
catastrophic wave of deaths by the mid-summer. Their model focused on 5 states with both
moderate and severe outbreaks during the first wave. If they reopened, according to the
Imperial team's model, New York could face up to 3,000 deaths per day by July.
Florida could hit as high as 4,000, and California could hit 5,000 daily deaths. Keeping in
mind that these projections were for each state alone, they exceed the daily death toll peaks
for the entire country in both the fall and spring. Showing just how bad the Imperial model
was, the actual death toll by mid-July in several of the examined states even fell below the
lower confidence boundary of its projected count . While Covid remains a threat in all 5
states, the post-reopening explosion of deaths predicted by Imperial College and used to argue
for keeping the lockdowns in place never happened.
Anthony Fauci credits lockdowns for beating the virus in Europe (July 31)
In late July
Anthony Fauci offered additional testimony to Congress. His message credited Europe's heavy
lockdowns with defeating the virus, whereas he blamed the United States for reopening too early
and for insufficient aggressiveness in the initial lockdowns. As Fauci stated at the time, "If
you look at what happened in Europe, when they shut down or locked down or went to shelter in
place -- however you want to describe it -- they really did it to the tune of about 95% plus of
the country did that."
The message was clear: the United States should have followed Europe, but failed to do so
and got a summer wave of Covid instead. Fauci's entire argument however was based on a string of falsehoods
and errors.
Mobility data from the US clearly showed that most Americans were staying home during the
spring outbreak, with a recorded decline that matched Germany, the Netherlands, and several
other European countries. Contrary to Fauci's claim, the US was actually slower than most of
Europe to reopen. Furthermore, his praise of Europe collapsed in the early fall when almost all
of the lockdown countries in Europe experienced severe second waves – just like the
locked down regions of the United States.
New Zealand and Australia declare themselves Covid-free (August-present)
New Zealand and Australia have thus far weathered the pandemic with extremely low case
counts, leading many epidemiologists and journalists to conflate these results with evidence of
their successful and replicable mitigation policies. In reality, New Zealand and Australia
opted for the medieval ' Prince Prospero' strategy of
attempting to wall themselves from the world until the pandemic passes – an approach that
is highly dependent on their unique geographies.
As island nations with comparatively lower international travel than North America and
Europe, both countries shut down their borders before the as-of-yet undetected virus became
widespread and have remained closed ever since. It's a costly strategy in terms of its economic
impact and personal displacement, but it kept the virus out – mostly.
The problem with New Zealand and Australia's Prince Prospero strategy is that it's
inherently fragile. All it takes to throw it into chaos is for the virus to slip past the
border – including by accident or human error. Then heavy-handed lockdowns ensue, imposed
with maximum disruption at the spur of the moment in a frantic attempt to contain the
breach.
The most famous example happened on August 9 when New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda
Ardern declared that New Zealand had reached
100 days of being Covid-free . Then just two days later a
breach happened , sending Auckland into heavy lockdown. It's a pattern that has repeated
itself every few weeks in both countries.
In early December, we saw a similar flurry of stories from Australia announcing that the
country had beaten Covid .
Two weeks later, another breach occurred in the suburbs around Sydney,
prompting a regional lockdown . There have been embarrassing missteps as well. In November
the entire state of South Australia went into heavy lockdown over a single misreported case of
Covid that was mistakenly
attributed to a pizza purchase that did not exist. While both countries continue to
celebrate their low fatality rates, they've also incurred some of the harshest and most
disruptive restrictions in the world – all the result of premature declarations of being
"Covid-free" followed by an unexpected breach and another frantic lockdown.
"Renewed lockdowns are just a strawman" (October)
In early October a group of scientists met at AIER where they drafted and signed the
Great Barrington Declaration , a
statement calling attention to the severe social and economic harms of lockdowns and urging the
world to adopt alternative strategies for ensuring the protection of the most vulnerable.
Although the statement quickly gathered tens of thousands of co-signers from health science and
medical professionals, it also left the lockdown supporters incensed. They responded not by
scientific debate over the merits of their policies, but with a
vilification campaign .
They answered by
flooding the petition with hoax signatures and juvenile
name-calling, and by peddling wildly false conspiracy theories about AIER's funding (the primary
instigator of both tactics, ironically, was a UK blogger known for promoting
9/11 Truther conspiracies ). But the lockdowners also adopted another narrative: they began
to deny that lockdowns were even on the table.
Nobody was considering bringing back the lockdowns from the spring, they insisted. Arguing
against the politically unpopular shelter-in-place orders in the fall only served the purpose
of undermining public support for narrower and more temperate restrictions. The Great
Barrington authors, we were told, were arguing with a "strawman" from the past.
Over the next several weeks in October a dozen or more prominent epidemiologists, public
health experts, and journalists peddled the "lockdowns are a
strawman" line . The "strawman" claim saw promotion in top outlets including the New
York Times , and in an op-ed by two
principle co-signers of the John Snow Memorandum, a competing petition that lockdown
supporters drafted as a response to the Great Barrington Declaration.
The message was clear: the GBD was sounding a false alarm against policies from the past
that the lockdowners "reluctantly" supported in the spring as an emergency measure but had no
intention of reviving. By early November, the "strawman" of renewed lockdowns became a reality
in dozens of countries across the globe – often cheered on by the very same people who
used the "strawman" canard in October.
Several US states followed suit including California, which imposed severe restrictions on
private gatherings up to and including meeting your own family for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
And a few weeks after that, some of the very same epidemiologists who used the "strawman" line
in October revised their own positions after the fact. They started claiming they had supported a
second lockdown all along, and began blaming the GBD for
impeding their efforts to impose them at an earlier date. In short, the entire "lockdowns are a
strawman" narrative was false. And it now appears that more than a few of the scientists who
used it were actively lying about their own intentions in October.
Anthony Fauci touts New York as a model for Covid containment (June-December)
By all indicators, New York state has suffered one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the
world. Its year-end mortality rate of almost 1,900 deaths per million residents
exceeds
every single country in the world. The state famously bungled its nursing home response
when Governor Andrew Cuomo forced these facilities to readmit Covid-positive patients as a way
to relieve strains on hospitals. The policy backfired as most hospitals never reached capacity,
but the readmissions introduced the virus into vulnerable nursing home populations resulting in
widespread fatalities (to this day
New York intentionally undercounts nursing home fatalities by excluding residents who are
moved to a hospital from its reported numbers, further obscuring the true toll of Cuomo's
order).
New York has also fared poorly during the fall "second wave" despite reimposing harsh
restrictions and regional lockdown measures. By mid-December, its death rate shot far above the
mostly-open state of Florida, which has the closest comparable population size to New York. All
things considered, New York's weathering of the pandemic is an exemplar of what not to do.
Cuomo's policies not only failed to contain the virus – they likely made it far more
deadly to vulnerable populations. Enter Anthony Fauci, who has been asked multiple times in the
press what a model Covid response policy would look like. He gave his
first answer on July 20th : "We know that, when you do it properly, you bring down those
cases. We have done it. We have done it in New York."
Fauci was operating under the assumption that New York, despite its bad run in the spring,
had successfully brought the pandemic under control through its aggressive lockdowns and slow
reopening. One might think that the fall rebound in New York, despite locking down again, would
call this conclusion into question. Not so much for Dr. Fauci, who told the
Wall Street Journal on December 8 : "New York got hit really badly in the beginning" but
they did "a really good job of keeping things down, and still, their level is low compared to
the rest of the country."
Dr. Anthony Fauci,
the epidemiologist revered almost religiously as a hero by mainstream media outlets and
Democrat politicians, has admitted that he lied to Americans to manipulate their acceptance of
a new Covid-19 vaccine.
The intentional deception involved estimates for what percentage of the population will need
to be immunized to achieve herd immunity against Covid-19 and enable a return to normalcy.
Earlier this year, Fauci said 60-70 percent – a typical range for such a virus –
but he moved the goalposts to 70-75 percent in television interviews about a month ago. Last
week, he
told CNBC that the magic number would be around "75, 80, 85 percent."
When pressed on the moving target in a New York Times interview
, Fauci said he purposely revised his estimates gradually. The newspaper, which posted the
article on Thursday, said Fauci changed his answers partly based on "science" and partly on his
hunch "that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks."
"When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd
immunity would take 70 to 75 percent," Fauci said.
Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, 'I can nudge
this up a bit,' so I went to 80, 85.
Fauci added that he doesn't know the real number but believes the range is 70-90 percent. He
said it may take nearly 90 percent, but he won't give that number because Americans might be
discouraged, knowing that voluntary acceptance won't be high enough to reach that goal.
... ... ...
But the doctor's changing story on herd immunity is only the latest in a series of Covid-19
flip-flops, including 180-degree shifts on such core issues as whether members of the general
public should wear masks and whether children should be sent back to school.
Just as his tone on herd immunity changed, his view on prospects for a return to normalcy
shifted dramatically. A few days before the November 3 presidential election, he echoed Biden's
gloomy Covid-19 outlook and implied that the Democrat challenger would deal with the crisis
more seriously than President Donald Trump. After the election, he turned far more
optimistic.
... ... ...
"This is not the first time that Fauci has admitted to deceiving the public for
utilitarian purposes in regard to coronavirus," journalist Ari Hoffman tweeted . Another
observer agreed, pointing out Fauci's flip-flop on masks. "The fact that people still listen to
these experts is the most worrying thing," he said.
Setting expectations for getting economic activity back to normal is virtually impossible
without realistic projections for the vaccination rate that would provide herd immunity. Dr.
Moncef Slaoui, chief scientific adviser for the Trump administration's vaccine rollout,
said in late November
that "true herd immunity" would take place without about 70 percent of Americans being
inoculated, which might be achieved by sometime in May 2021.
Fauci's admitted Covid-19 deception is symptomatic of how government officials
"infantilize the American people," one commenter said . "We're going to
be in trouble when we don't have Trump to blame everything on and people have to find a way to
cope."
Marek Weglinski 22 hours ago 24 Dec, 2020 09:09 PM
Dr. FRAUDCI is the face of chaotic, contradictory and completely bungled approach to this
pandemic, in the country which infamously claims the top spot of the number of the dead and
infected. Not any hero (what did he contribute beside the lies and misinformation?), and
definitely nothing to celebrate. His leadership and that of most other decision makers',
thoroughly failed the American people, during this challenging time. The real heroes are the
UNKNOWN, -those who put their lives on line to save others (mostly medical personnel).
It's me 23 hours ago 24 Dec, 2020 08:32 PM
And the next day, Dr Fraudci did a video: Had a good nights sleep, but the arm was a bit sore
(grabbing his RIGHT arm) but it's not that bad. Really, you can't remember which arm you got
Jabbed after 1 day. Normally you can't move the arm that gets jabbed with a needle without a
lot of pain.
ClairvoyantHW It's me 4 hours ago 25 Dec, 2020 03:39 PM
I don't unterstand why they can't use a real placebo in the studies when Fauci just recieved
one..
Fauci is presented as trustworthy, intelligent and a hero, all because of his status as part of the Authority: The WHO, Bill Gates,
Economic Forum & Fauci
Healthy Jean
751 subscribers
SUBSCRIBE
If you want to find out more about the
#casedemic
https://healthyjean.com/corona/
.
Sorry, but I do not have more context about this video. I will tell you that Kary hated Fauci because Fauci is one of the
main people behind the AIDS scam. Read here straight from Kary's website
https://www.karymullis.com/pdf/On_AID...
On AIDS Regarding AIDS I have published a hypothesis wherein the Retroviridae in general, rather than a particular species,
is the problem. This was published in Genetica 95:195- 197, 1995. It offers a mechanism for how the disease develops, and
importantly makes predictions that can be experimentally confirmed or falsified easily in rodents. This hypothesis may or
may not be true but it illustrates the nature of a useful scientific hypothesis. This is in contrast to the current AIDS
establishment's "It's the virus, stupid!" No experiments were ever done or even suggested to test the HIV hypothesis. The
fact that antiretroviral therapies may prolong the lives of some people infected with retroviruses says nothing more than
the fact, that. in other cases they are not at all useful. Something is going on here that we don't understand. Scientists
have to keep that in mind. If you want to see another great video on this topic of Kary then go
https://youtu.be/zYYmpT2y7Io
.
It talks about how the PCR is not really a test. He clearly states the PCR is not being misused. What Fauci and the others
are doing is amplifying the tests beyond what should be done. The issue is they use these results as is they are meaningful
is the problem. He also states that the measurement is not exact. He is clearly talking about how the results are being
used to say someone has AIDS when they clearly do not. Again, the interpretations are the issue. The PCR not meant to
diagnose, period.
Here is a link to a larger excerpt of this interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IifgAvXU3ts
However, this isn't the entire interview. I will try to find the entire interview.... everyone start searching. In any
case, I think THIS part of it might not be in the link I just posted (I haven't checked yet). Because a few months ago I
watched this video and I don't remember him going after Fauci this hard. But I will rewatch it to see. We need to find the
original video interview as a whole, that would be best.
Are not so called asymptomatic cases mostly a side effect of excessive amplifications in PcR
tests? So they are healthy people who were "false positives" in PcR test. If this is true they
present no danger.
Thanks in part to a massive investment in research by the British government, a lot of
interesting data has come out of the UK, including a study which supposedly found evidence that
immunity to
COVID 'degrades' in the months after infection . Now, other studies have come to
seemingly contradictory conclusions . It's just another reminder how fraught and
complicated the process of study and research can be during an unprecedented pandemic.
It should also be a reminder, particularly as all the world's top COVID-vaccine
manufacturers reassure the public that their vaccines will work against the more infectious
mutated strains allegedly discovered in the UK and South Africa, among other places, that the
leading scientific and public health authorities aren't always 100% certain when it comes to -
as they like to call it - "the science".
Some members of the public might remember all the way back in February and January when
public officials first speculated that mass mask-wearing might not be that helpful unless
individuals were actually sick. They famously back-tracked on that, and - for that, and other
reasons - decided that we should all wear masks, and that lockdowns were more or less the best
solution to the problem, even as millions of Americans continued to flout the new "rules"
daily.
But for those who don't, this paper makes one thing clear: For all the talk in the press
about asymptomatic people being infectious, which included a heavy-handed rebuke of a WHO
scientist who nonchalantly said a few months back that asymptomatic people don't spread the
virus as effectively, there haven't been many large-sample-size longer-term studies that study
how "asymptomatic" patients actually spread the virus vs. how "symptomatic" patients do, since
most public health agencies don't even collect data on whether people who test positive are
asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic, or symptomatic (a specification which, as most people probably
know by now, can vary widely).
Since the pandemic has only been ongoing for less than a year now, researchers have instead
tried conducting "meta studies" - that is, comparing data collected in dozens of studies
examining some aspect of the virus's functionality. In the paper noted above which examined 54
separate studies with nearly 78K total participants, the authors claim that "The lack of
substantial transmission from observed asymptomatic index cases is notable...These findings are
consistent with other household studies reporting asymptomatic index cases as having limited
role in household transmission."
This is of course not the first time we have heard this. Aside from the WHO scientist
example cited above, two British scientists recently published an editorial in the BMJ
imploring scientists to rethink how the virus spreads "asymptomatically".
That's not to say that asymptomatic people can't spread the virus, it's just to say that
maybe there is a significant difference in risk levels in terms of exposure . Of course, public
health officials at this point seem to be afraid to acknowledge anything that questions the
notion that everybody is potentially a threat. To be clear, the WHO's current guidance on the
issue is that "while someone who never develops symptoms can also pass the virus to others, it
is still not clear to what extent this occurs, and more research is needed in this area" - but
at this point, they have changed their guidance and flip-flopped so many times, who even knows,
understands or cares what they say?
Anyway, it's just some more food for thought next time somebody tries to lecture you about
"the science".
adr 1 hour ago (Edited) remove link
Asymptomatic people can not spread a viral infection.
This was considered fact until 2020.
valjoux7750 1 hour ago
Friend of mine passed away from non covid illness and the hospital offered to pay all his
medical bills if allowed to record as covid. His wife accepted.
Robespierre2020 23 minutes ago
They will never, ever admit that asymptomatic actually means false positive. They must
keep the case count up at all costs to keep stoking the fear.
Itchy and Scratchy 1 hour ago
The Big Lie is mutating quickly! Hide the women & children!
Newstarmistagain 1 hour ago
Anybody else get the feeling that this coronavirus nonsense is really nothing more than a
huge Pavlovian experiment being conducted on the entire population? You do realize that
Pavlov's dogs ended up catatonic, and in a state of perpetual fear, eh goiyim cattle?
PanGlossius 1 hour ago
Right on. This smells like the brute simplicity of Skinner or Pavlov programming. Crude,
careless, short time horizon. Like the practitioners are just running out the clock.
namrider 1 hour ago remove link
Conflicting reports and information because it = PSYOP
MrBoompi 33 minutes ago
What is a "covid patient"? Someone who tested positive? The pcr test doesn't detect live
viruses. Why would someone who is not sick, aka asymptomatic, be considered a patient?
According to analysis by data expert Justin Hart, who has been following COVID-19 data
for months , demonstrated in a Sunday Twitter thread that states with mask mandates had a
greater number of COVID cases per 100,000 people than states without mandates .
And while there were some objections to Hart's analysis - such as whether there might be
bias towards getting tested for mask-wearers, or regional differences in population density,
many of the replies to Hart's thread support his findings:
Maybe the CDC, WHO, Dr. Fauci and the Surgeon General were right in February when they said
masks don't work? On the other hand, they're so useful for other things...
It's an intuitive hypothesis Since the mask doesn't kill virus, it just collects them
reversing your natural defenses of expelling virus with large droplets that hit earth. The
mask accelerates evaporation through capillary action making smaller droplets 2 allow deep
inhalation.
In effect, the masks are a viral trampoline making the virus exponentially more infective and
reaching deeper into more thrombotic tissue. Some evidence Kanas jumped on this trampoline in
the summer.
Zacharias Fögen @ZachariasFoegen · Dec 14 You can translate the german intro with
google if you want. The study is written in English. https:// reitschuster.de/post/studie-er
hoehen-die-masken-die-sterblichkeit/
@Kevin_McKernan At best,
we can say for aerosolized virus that mask does nothing. At worst, worse after mask
saturation. For non-aerosolized virus, it would actually do some good. On the other hand,
airborne transmission of this type is minimal. Handwashing, good hygiene take care of the
rest.
@Kevin_McKernan
Interesting paper. It's somewhat difficult to disambiguate increased CFR from the Foegen
effect or another confounding variable (e.g., poor aseptic technique). The mathematical
comparison does a good job normalizing the two groups. Plotting as a function of time may be
of use.
Much heralded COVID-19 model-student South Korea saw
new infections with the virus rise again to more than 1,000 cases per day, dramatically higher
than during the first wave in February and March.
Here's
CNN : "In Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, South Korea, Japan and other Asian nations, mask
wearing is uncontroversial, near universal, and has been proven effective ..."
Here's Forbes : " What South Korea teaches us is that ... mass production and distribution
of face masks and the promotion of their use, are winning strategies in this battle. "
Here's
NYTimes : "The country showed that it is possible to contain the coronavirus without
shutting down the economy... Television broadcasts, subway station announcements and smartphone
alerts provide endless reminders to wear face masks ..."
The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has hailed South
Korea as demonstrating that containing the virus, while difficult, "can be done." He urged
countries to "apply the lessons learned in Korea and elsewhere."
As Statista's Willem
Roper notes , the country has been praised extensively for reducing cases of COVID-19
, but a continuously climbing case count shows how the threat of new outbreaks looms even after
flattening the curve (twice before).
After a second outbreak in August and September was squashed, South Korea had already
tightened restrictions again.
The highest number of daily new cases in the initial wave was recorded at 813 on Feb 29.
Still, these cases being recorded now are only a sliver of those detected daily in the U.S.
and Europe. There, daily new case counts of COVID-19 are still in the tens of thousands...
so keep wearing your
masks!!!
🔥 🔥 🔥!!!!
This is insane! Every country that introduced mandatory masks had their case numbers
explode after!! Mask don't work!
-- The Epigenetic Whisperer
👉The Bodhisattva Bastard (@epigwhisp) December 16,
2020
ebworthen 14 hours ago (Edited)
Because masks don't do a beaver dam thing.
Never have, never will. Especially not "surgical" masks, or cloth rags.
Symbolic only. Symbolic for oppression of the individual and the freedom of choice.
skizex 14 hours ago
and makes beaver eatin difficult if not downright unpleasant.
afronaut 13 hours ago
Thats submissive and unhygienic
Billy the Poet 13 hours ago (Edited)
Has it gotten cold enough yet for masks to start freezing to the faces of folks out in the
wind waiting for a bus?
xious 11 hours ago
In the summer, I almost drowned in one. Then I quit my job the next day. Haven't worn a
mask from that day, and never will again.
hawkinsse6543 7 hours ago (Edited)
Point three percent according to a Danish Study
.3% effective
I heard zinc impregnated masks work so it will increase effectiveness to what? I'm Too lazy
to do the math
Sunshine, D3, Tonic Water, C, wash hands (only thing proposed I agree with) moderate
preventives not a cure. But the virus goes where it goes and lets promote stopping smoke with
a chicken wire fence.
artless 2 hours ago
99.8% survival rate or as we say in there real world...
a cold virus. A flu.
all BS from day one.
exactly correct about sunshine, D3 ( also known as sunshine) and if really concerned a
zinc supplement as prophylaxis along with all the Vit C you want. Same as every winter as all
my 51 years. Currently on a 36-38 years streak of NEVER having a flu and I have worked in
every possible situation in which I should have gotten sick. Never have. never will.
Arising 2.0 13 hours ago
Masks are the elites pointing and saying 'look there' with the their right hand while
stealing wealth, your freedoms and your capacity to fight back with their left hand.
dude675 13 hours ago
Wag the dog
metaforge 10 hours ago
Choke the Chinkkkkk
KirkPatrickN 8 hours ago
We're all prisoners of China, forced into solitary confinement with matching outfits.
trailer park boys 13 hours ago
If masks worked, that box of masks you bought at the drug store or online would say so.
They don't. In fact, just the opposite, disclaiming any protection against any virus,
including covid.
JuliaS 13 hours ago (Edited)
Masks and lockdowns worked. They weakened immunity to the point where a common cold now
puts a person in a coma.
Slaytheist 13 hours ago
Fvcking NPC yelling at people to put a scrap of cotton on their face to contain a virus,
because the science is settled. Maybe eugenics isn't a 100% bad thing.
Free lead for NPCs! That's a government program I could get behind.
freedommusic 10 hours ago
Masks can't stop a psyop.
They can only measure it's effectiveness.
Fireman 8 hours ago
Best comment today!
chemist46 7 hours ago
How can they possibly work?
They are NOT designed to stop particles as small as a virus.
Surgical masks were not designed as filters and were not intended to be used as filters.
Surgical masks were designed to be used by surgeons standing face down over an operating
table holding a patient with an open wound. The surgeon wearing the mask would be able to
talk to others in the room without discharging spittle droplets into the patient's wound.
Spittle droplets are large and can cause infection.
I witnessed a test of surgical masks. Small plaster particles were generated in a room.
They were visible as a white dust in the air. A man was properly fitted with a surgical mask
and spent a short time in the room. When he came out the mask was removed. A camera was
focused on the man's face. The entire area that had been covered by the mask was coated by
the white dust. The camera showed that his nostrils and his mouth had been penetrated by the
white dust. The dust particles were measured and found to be around 40 micrometers in
diameter. The particles that penetrated the mask were the same diameter.
Covid-19 virus molecules are about 0.1 micrometers in diameter. That is 400 times smaller
than the plaster particles that penetrated the mask.
Surgical masks will not prevent the wearer from inhaling or exhaling viruses or bacteria.
They provide absolutely no protection for either the wearer or anyone nearby. They create a
very dangerous false sense of security for everyone. They also force the wearer to rebreath
carbon dioxide. Which will over time reduce the wearers blood oxygen level. That can become
very dangerous especially for older people.
This farce is being promoted by sleazy politicians who believe that if they can convince
people that they are protecting them or creating a safe environment for them by pushing this
mask farce those people will re-elect them.
All politicians pushing this dangerous mask farce should be voted out of office as soon as
possible.
Grand Solar Minimum 4 hours ago
Minor correction.
All politicians pushing this dangerous mask farce should be jailed soon as possible.
That's better.
Nature_Boy_Wooooo 13 hours ago
They rushed mask science out faster than the vaccine.
Worse...they debunked actual science done on N95 masks 4 years ago that said masks don't
work..... without a single scientific experiment.
They should never have lowered the bar for education.
@Amen 13 hours ago
It's not the masks. USA and most western countries forced their citizens to wear them,
most of them do, without visible results. Could it be that drinking green tea and taking zinc
really helps? (ZH wrote about it months ago). Everyone can get the virus, mask or no mask,
but the difference in consequences is quite startling.
In Deaths per million population, the leader is Belgium, with 1,582 / million, USA is in
12th place, with 958 per million.
Boosting one's immune system from cheap and easy-accessible sources would not make the
elite and big corporations rich, nor make the would be dictators in governments and
regulatory agencies so powerful, second to God.
So, we keep dying, destroying our economy, and voting for the mass murderers again and
again.
Happy 2021!
FightClubPanties 13 hours ago
Whadda bout ChyNa?
@Amen 12 hours ago (Edited)
China has 3 deaths per million, you make the judgement about the accuracy of their
reporting. Nevertheless, they drink mostly green tea and eat stuff rich in zinc. And they
have undestricted partying for months now, even in Wuhan.
and, so far, it works for me here in Canada. Costco supplies green tea (from Japan) and
Walmart zinc tablets, about 6 bucks for three months worth of prevention. And I don't plan to
take the vaccine, even if its free here.
Table 6. I-MASK+ Prophylaxis & Early Outpatient Treatment Protocol for COVID-19
PROPHYLAXIS PROTOCOL MEDICATION
lvermectin RECOMMENDED DOSING
Vitamin D3 Vitamin C Quercetin Zinc Melatonin
Works!
Snaffew16 10 hours ago
It's quite obvious that people should be exposing themselves to this predominantly non
lethal virus as much as possible. Herd immunity has likely already been achieved here in the
US and globally, but there is so much money to be made on these untested, genome altering
vaccines that they will not stop the propaganda. The incredible surge in power and control
over the populations has also enabled them to up their game in regards to ripping every
freedom imaginable from the populace and stepping the bullsh*it up to hyperdrive---
If you have already tested positive, then there is absolutely zero reason to get a
vaccine. if you had just recovered from the flu, do you run out and get a flu vaccine?
Nope...there is no reason to.
KirkPatrickN 7 hours ago
Even if masks worked for more than the first few minutes, that would mean we'd become
dependent on them.
afronaut 13 hours ago
Fvk I've had enough of this ****.
Cobra Commander 12 hours ago
"This tweet is from a suspended account. "
Thanks for nothing, Twitter. I just wanted to see the graph comparing mask wear with
positive cases.
Oh, is that too dangerous for me to see?
Cobra!
metaforge 10 hours ago
Wow when even Cobra Commander calls someone evil? They MUST be evil.
Cobra!
louie1 PREMIUM 12 hours ago
If you are at risk then take precautions. Everyone else- get on with life and tell the
government to go **** themselves.
Corn Popp 12 hours ago (Edited)
The corporations wont do that. and people have to work. There are not enough jobs outside
those businesses. and those businesses are forcing employees to wear face diapers or get
fired. It has to be a top down movement against the progenitors and they must be held
accountable, otherwise none of the states and business will follow thru to restore individual
rights
metaforge 10 hours ago
Only good comment I've seen from a premium tagged Kappo yet.
Tigbits 13 hours ago
Amazing that after nine months they still want to keep beating the mask drum.
Exhausting.
Corn Popp 13 hours ago (Edited)
I'm sure you are aware by now that all it ever was is a clear sign of your submission to
them. As well as a training tool to get you to accept whatever they push on
you...ie..mandatory vaxxing for sterilization, control and culling.....the next step. Well,
and to have a good laugh and masturbate to misery and suffering. It's what gets them off
KirkPatrickN 8 hours ago
Read the ZH article on the nurse collapsing and sort by Worst comments.
These people pushing vaccines will literally giggle as you drop dead.
Alan Cruiser 11 hours ago
The conclusion is wrong, if cases are still climbing so much, then apparently the masks
don't work because everybody is already wearing them. I am getting so tired of the
nonsense.
Taffer 12 hours ago
Liberal God Fauci in April: "Masks don't work! Only healthcare workers need to wear them
or even should be wearing them."
Liberal Keebler elf Fauci in May: "Masks work! Everyone should be wearing a mask!"
Seriously, you can't make lies on this level up. The man says this on national tv, calls
himself an expert, and the useful idiots lap it up like CNN propaganda.
halcyon 11 hours ago
Fauci co-authored a paper in 2008 that showed that napkin wearing increased prevalence of
bacterial pneumonia.
Maybe he just forgot about it...
Patmos 13 hours ago
Psychological warfare techniques from The Cold War to The War on Terror, compared to COVID
restrictions:
But ignore that, because this is all about safety. [/sarcasm]
FightClubPanties 13 hours ago
go look at the compliance rates for Covid-Burqas. The US is among the very highest
compliance.
Oh-Globits 14 hours ago
Wear a face diaper...it's patriotic!
afronaut 13 hours ago
It looks like underwear to me. I'd be too embarrassed to put one on in public. Its dirty
and looks retarded
KirkPatrickN 8 hours ago (Edited)
I've never worn one. My (no) mask is to protect YOU (from tyranny).
Mrgior31513 14 hours ago
Masks are simply worse for a blatantly obvious reason: they provide false confidence and
therefor breed irresponsible behavior from the perceived sense of safety.
FightClubPanties 14 hours ago
Reusing any mask defeats the claimed purpose. And everybody is wearing filthy pieces of
cloth; stuffing in their purses, pants, fingering them on and off.
KirkPatrickN 8 hours ago
Some people hang them on their rear view mirror and I saw one with several shades of
lipstick on the inside.
I'd like to see a bacterial analysis of these masks people are wearing, and see them under
a black light.
"We did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing
laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source
control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility ( Figure 2 ).
However, as with hand hygiene, face masks might be able to reduce the transmission of other
infections and therefore have value in an influenza pandemic when healthcare resources are
stretched."
It was known from the beginning. Are you tired of the lies and tyrrany yet? Stand up like
men and stop it.
Pater-Mater 7 hours ago
A 2008 study in Turkey showed a significant reduction in oxygen intake or rather carbon
monoxide respiration. This directly lowers the immune system making infection much more
likely. Do circumvent this oxygen is pumped into operating rooms..
Secondly, in medical practice the mask is changed every twenty minutes and not touched at
all. This is now followed.
Lastly, the virus has mutated to a benign form, it is highly likely that everyone has it,
thusly the likelihood of any further great event or health crisis is next to none. Aannd,
RLF-100 trial will be over soon, it's already proven effective, it's cheap, there are no long
term consequences, it will cure nearly all intensive care situations.. the propaganda is
obvious.
Cincinnatuus 9 hours ago
The number of cases of the China Flu is inversely proportional with the number of hours of
sunlight.
Supplement your Vitamin D (5,000 IU), and when you get it, you won't even know you had
it!
KirkPatrickN 7 hours ago
Exactly. Cold symptoms ARE Vitamin D deficiency. Covid victims have proven to be
deficient. Staying inside and wearing masks outside only hurt matters (you shameless,
shivering RETARDS).
What's the best natural source of, or supplement for Vitamin D?
Obake158 11 hours ago
So I can see the plan from the Globohomos already. They are going to lower the PCR test
thresholds from 45 to 20 and claim that the vaccine has substantially lessened the severity
and prevalence of Democrat Meme Flu. The cat is out of the bag now regarding the fake testing
regimen and people are waking up to the PCR testing amplification thresholds being set way
too high thus a massive wave of false positives. My state tests at 45 cycles. Anything over
around 20 renders the test useless with so much background noise as to almost ensure everyone
testing will be positive for viral RNA. So here is the next leg of their plan, mass inoculate
the fearful NPCs and then claim success while quietly manipulating the testing regimen.
metaforge 10 hours ago
My state's "cases" were already dropping fast from the "winter peak" even before the BS
vaccine. So that won't fly here, even if they try it.
Dash8 6 hours ago
Masks are for virtue signalling libtards.
The end.
KirkPatrickN 4 hours ago (Edited)
Masks never would have become a thing had we not let all the women become obese parasites.
For years the grocery store has been depressing as countless women of every race scramble to
buy free things with their EBT cards while hating on wh ite men. These creatures willingly
covered their faces because they are embarrassed to be seen.
AVmaster 13 hours ago
"The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has hailed South
Korea as demonstrating that containing the virus, while difficult, "can be done.""
Umm... we are way past the phase of containment...
... covid 19 is everywhere in the world...
wtf are you really talking about you idiots...
Fizzy Head 14 hours ago
So what happens when the ICU nurses become the patients? Well now we have a problem...
You could've had a functioning economy and a disease. You chose only the disease. Now the
healthy won't be able to help the sick, and will see how long the saved grandma will last
after her grandkids commit suicide due to depression, or overdose on drugs.
Thanks for saving the world.
KirkPatrickN 7 hours ago
It's the equivalent of a pilot of a loaded jumbo jet announcing "This is the pilot
speaking. Due to my fear of catching sniffles I've decided it's just too dangerous to land.
Ever."
Lore 12 hours ago
"Case" doesn't mean beans, because the polymerase chain reaction was never intended for
use as a "test." You might as well use a black box electronic device to tally votes in a
national election. Oh, wait...
Show us the data for deaths sans co-morbidities and fudge, and then we'll talk. In the
meantime, it's just another layer of BS.
asteroids 13 hours ago
One way or another, you WILL get the virus. Resistance is futile. Wake me up when "masks"
are as effective as birth control.
metaforge 10 hours ago
Not me bitch. I'm superdosing C, D, Zinc, Echinnacea, etc. That fvcking virus ain't
jumping this wall!
pods 7 hours ago
Careful on zinc. Too much is not good.
Magnum 13 hours ago
Twitter suspended The Epigenetic Whisperer now that he's pointed this out.
FightClubPanties 14 hours ago
I have no idea if their reporting isn't fraudulent, any more than the Japanese or
chinchongs.
writeround 7 hours ago
The increase d number of of cases is irrelevant unless presented as a percentage of the
number of tests. More tests/more cases?
Usuage of masks is usless if missused. Daily use of the same mask/turning mask inside
out/close proximity in enclosed places/not washing or sanitsing hands are all transmission
methods.
Pater-Mater 7 hours ago
So is reduced oxygen intake, increased carbon monoxide intake and a reduced immune system.
Why wouldnt infections increase?
kellys_eye 8 hours ago
... because wearing a mask that doesn't work to prevent an illness that doesn't exist (or
at worst has a 99.8% recovery rate i. e. better than the flu/influenza) is all our
'exceptional leadership' can come up with?
The problem isn't the virus - the problem is and always has been the MEDIA.
NIRP-BTFD 8 hours ago
No the problem are corrupt politicians that work for the 0.1% instead of the people. The
media of course is owned by the 0.1% so they are an issue as well.
Fireman 9 hours ago
Oxygen Deprivation Therapy ....all that can save US now.
Remember oh tax chattel, as Onkel Adolf said "Hypoxia und Hypercapnia macht frei."
Sieg Heil.......same as it ever was.
Onward to your doom, rag mouths coz the satanists need y'all dead.
hypoxia
[hi-pok´se-ah]
diminished availability of oxygen to the body tissues; its
causes are many and varied and includes a deficiency of oxygen in the atmosphere, as in
altitude sickness ;
pulmonary disorders that interfere with adequate ventilation of the lungs; anemia or
circulatory deficiencies, leading to inadequate transport and delivery of oxygen to the
tissues; and finally, edema or other abnormal conditions of the tissues themselves that
impair the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between capillaries and tissues. adj., adj
hypox´ic.
1. An abnormally high concentration of carbon dioxide in the blood, usually caused by
acute respiratory failure from conditions such as asthma and obstructive pulmonary disease.
It can lead to seizures and death if acute and untreated.
2. Carbon dioxide poisoning due to abnormally high concentrations of carbon dioxide in an
organism's environment.
Maybe it has something to do with even mask manufacturers have a disclaimer on their
surgical/cloth masks stating "does not protect against viruses".
Ledlak 8 hours ago
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." -
Voltaire
Fireman 8 hours ago (Edited)
Despite the herd of self-harming, virtue-signalling masked mutton that surrounds you there
are indeed millions of aware and decent people around the planet that get it. You are not
alone, we are 5%, as much of the population as the ruling psychopaths and sociopaths i.e. the
disgusting, Satanic pedovores like Schwab, Gates, STASI "Erika" Merkill, Bozo the clown,
banksters, presstitutes and almost all political mutts the sheeple call their "leaders" and
the rest of the evil Rothschild enablers.
The docile herd can be turned like a weathervane and will be turned again...that is the
beauty of the balance built into nature. Evolution has created a mass of ignorant, pliant
human livestock with a purpose. 10% of the naked apes can more or less reason and act upon
that reasoning for good or bad...the rest will be turned like sheep and always have been.
Look at the history of pedovores running the Catholic Church and yet the peasants flock to
these evil bastards on a Sunday to "commune" with God....god help us. Ask yourself the
question; would you prefer to live in a world with 90 wolves and ten sheep, or a world with
90 sheep and 10 wolves? As for the evil Klaus "Schwab", the geriatric bastard progeny of NAZI
Germany... his NAZI spawners also hallucinated about their wondervoll 1000 Year Reich
dystopia and if I recall...they and their anglozionazi backers may have slaughtered millions,
but in the end we are still pissing on their NAZI graves.
Ultimately what I think you're saying is that masks are not the be all and end all to
ending the covid pandemic.
And with that I wholeheartedly agree.
But where we differ is on the conclusions from this counter-intuitive fact.
Ultimately what masks do is they reduce the transmission of the virus. I say this from the
following observation...
It makes sense logically that masks prevents a lot of transmissions of the covid virus
because at the end of the day only sick people can infect others. It has been shown on the
Japanese broadcaster NHK that the particles thrown out by a sick person coughing when masked
up vs. non-masked is exponentially less. Infra-red cameras show that masks block a lot of
particles and thus even if a person is sick, their likelihood of infecting others through
spraying particles everywhere around them, is greatly reduced.
And it makes logical sense without overthinking it (a good example of Occam's razor) - if
you have some fabric that blocks your coughs, isn't it logical to presume that pretty much
all the spit and phlegm that usually accompanis a cough would be blocked by that same fabric?
(I mean why else do tissues get wet when u sneeze or cough in them?)
So the effectiveness of masks is in that they prevent a lot of dangerous situations from
turning into a transmission event. Its a preventative measure, people! That's the fundamental
thing you need to understand!!!!!
Is it gonna prevent every ******* roll of dice from turning into a transmission event? Of
course not.
There'll be instances where due to present circumstances a potential infection turns into
an actual infection. That is not something we can avoid. Something will always get through
the gates - how many times has a seemingly impregnable defence been breached throughout
history? I can name the Maginot Line and the Multiple Walls of Constantinople.
The point we all have to understand is that there is no silver bullet to this piece of
**** virus. We can't keep arguing about the fundamental fact that masks help prevent
transmissions. It prevents but does not eliminate - elimination is impossible. This ******
will eventually, always get through the most carefully laid traps.
We just need to learn that effective prevention means that half the war has already been
won.
on't tell me you actually think
deadcat2 8 hours ago
A truly stupid comment. What you should be asking is, When is a case, positive test or an
infection an actual illness. Who is supervising the labs which do the tests? Who decides on
what the size of the 'amplification should be? Karry Mullis, the world famous scientists and
Nobel prize winner who actually invented and designed the PCR test said, amplifications above
30 are useless. Currently, all countries are amplifying above 45 and some even as far as 50.
Lets put it this way: if there were no tests there would be no virus numbers. The only
numbers that would matter would be hospital admissions. Did you know, that here in the UK a
hospital admission is counted even if the patient is discharged the same day !!
The evidence shows that hospital admissions are the same this year (for the UK and the US
at least) as they have been on average for the last ten years.
KirkPatrickN 8 hours ago (Edited)
Science is not based on your personal observation of what your female brain considers
logical.
It's about a double blind, placebo controlled study to PROVE something.
There is no silver bullet for these piece of **** people pushing lockdowns, masks and
vaccines over sniffles based on their innermost feelings.
KirkPatrickN 8 hours ago
Look at the side view of people in masks. There is a direct path to their mouth. Their
breath is now pushed sideways (see physics) and probably goes even further (just like
whistling is louder than breathing).
Galieo 7 hours ago
+5
Masks help a lot, distance is even better.
Pater-Mater 7 hours ago
You are looking at a single element justifying everything. If people can't be helped to
not sneeze on someone it's a bigger issue... Then why aren't only sick people wearing them?
What about oxygen deprivations? Increase risk and cases of bacterial infection?(from masks)
carcinogens of surgical masks??
Masks are not a solution, there is no science to back this, only the opposite.
MCDirtMigger 6 hours ago
From the CDC website:
In our systematic review, we identified 10 RCTs that reported estimates of the
effectiveness of face masks in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza virus infections in
the community from literature published during 1946–July 27, 2018. In pooled analysis,
we found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks (RR
0.78, 95% CI 0.51–1.20; I2 = 30%, p = 0.25)
If you live somewhere cold, put your mask on, go outside and exhale a big breath of air,
come back and tell us what you see. Don't be an idiot.
pictur3plane 13 hours ago
The facts haven't changed: unless you are wearing a properly fitted N95 respirator your
mask is doing little to protect you or other people. While it is better than no mask as there
is the chance it will somewhat reduce to viral inoculum and possibly the severity of
infection, it gives people a false sense of security. The media/celebrity mantra of "JUST
WEAR THE MASK" gives the impression that is all you have to do to protect yourself. Also,
most people are so incredibly stupid. Have you seen people try and drive a car correctly? And
you think these people are well versed in how invisible disease is spread? I can't tell you
how many times I see people take their mask off unless someone comes in the office. They
don't get it. They are morons. It is kind of a miracle only 300,000 people a day are getting
infected in this country.
adr 13 hours ago
N95 respirators are not designed for and can not filter virus. Anyone saying so is lying.
The literature packed with every real N95 mask even says in the warning that they are
designed to filter specific particles and will not protect from biological agents.
The manufacturers aren't going to open themselves to billions in liability lawsuits for
making a claim that can not be backed up with evidence and an actual standard.
No mask outside a full on respirator with disposable filters will help you. If you are
infected, they are worthless because they only filter incoming air, not exhaled. So you will
be contaminating anything you breath on.
Cloth masks will not reduce the severity of an infection, they will make it worse. You
will increase the load of any respiratory pathogen as you breath it into the cloth and
breathe it back in.
Studies done on surgical masks found that they had no effect on preventing bacterial
infections of surgical wounds. The only purpose of a surgical mask is to prevent expelled
fluids from open body cavities from entering a surgeon's nose and mouth.
Sorry to break the bad news.
pictur3plane 12 hours ago
There is no such thing as free floating virus particles. They are attached to respiratory
droplets which are large enough to be filtered by N95 masks.
The idea that you would somehow increase your viral load by wearing a mask and
re-breathing particles back into your lungs is whatever the opposite of known science is.
KirkPatrickN 8 hours ago
While you are at it, why not drink your own urine to help stop the droplets from
spreading. And wear a diaper instead of using the rest room. My Depends are to protect
YOU.
KirkPatrickN 8 hours ago
N95 masks have a release valve. They don't help others.
pictur3plane 6 hours ago
It really is quite a spectacle to watch complete morons who don't know what they're
talking about strut around like hillbilly peacocks in the ZH comment section.
KirkPatrickN 4 hours ago
Dear angry, pudgy woman: please explain how N95 masks (specially designed with a VALVE on
the front) "protect others". What study proves they do?
Meanwhile, Surgical masks only work for 15 minutes in a STERILE environment. Hint: your
hand and Walmart are not sterile. What study proves masks do any good whatsoever? We know
filthy spit wads do lots of harm by cutting off children, oxygen and humanity.
KirkPatrickN 4 hours ago
I've had a box of 3M N95 masks since 2014 (back when they had an Asian guy on the box -
how you say Kung Fru?). Never wore one because it says right on the side of the box "DOES NOT
PREVENT COVID OR FLU".
pictur3plane 3 hours ago
A box of masks for 2014 says "DOES NOT PREVENT COVID", huh?
Go back to your NASCAR videos.
KirkPatrickN 4 hours ago
Describe how any study could possibly prove that "masks help others". Fat girls made that
up after donning them willingly to cover their fugly faces. Then they wanted the pretty girls
to do the same thing. Now: equality!
FightClubPanties 14 hours ago
A couple of thousand cases among 30 plus million. give me a break. And we don't even know
what their cycle threshold is if using the PCR test.
Delusion Spotter 3 hours ago (Edited)
Not Wearing Masks = today's Freedom Fries!
Think the more important issue is Lockdowns, which destroy businesses, livelihoods, and
the Economy.
Definately need legislation that would impose prison on any politician that proposes
Lockdowns for any reason in the future (Is immediate public Burning at a Stake after due
process / legal trial too extreme??)).
NumbNuts 10 hours ago
Masks don't beat phony test results.
trada101 11 hours ago (Edited)
Why do people have such short memories??? There is nothing surprising about the winter
surge. How many dumbasses are out there? People have been warning about the winter surge
since the summer.
Since you idiots don't seem to understand why, it's precisely BECAUSE
1. People spend more time with each other indoors during colder months leading to
increases viral load.
2. People also spend more time indoors for get togethers with friends ad family and not
wear masks.
metaforge 11 hours ago
#1 right
#2 half right
and not wear masks
You apparently missed the whole point of this article: masks don't work .
Cincinnatuus 9 hours ago
3. People don't get enough vitamin D in the winter. Supplementing with 5K UI of D will
fend off any virus...
KirkPatrickN 8 hours ago
Cold symptoms ARE Vitamin D deficiency symptoms. There is no vaccine for a vitamin
deficiency. We still have to eat a healthy diet.
Solio 11 hours ago
Relying on the bs that we have been fed for 75 years makes the garden fertile for total
idiocy.
Amel 14 hours ago (Edited)
My experience is transmission is primarily occurring in high traffic indoor spaces.
I wore a 3M industrial grade respirator inside a bulk food store last week stocking up for
the apocalypse and within hours my eyes were feeling infected, again. Being my second
exposure to covid, I know how my symptoms manifest. It did not get into my lungs because I
used a respirator, not a mask. I treated myself with a sinus rinse 10 drops betadine (Iodine)
per 1 cup water as per my ENT's direction for ANY sinus infection that night. The next 24
hours were pretty rough but after that I was fine,
If you have to line up to get inside a building in a dense urban area, use a respirator
and goggles inside. Masks are a joke, respirators work. Ebay has lots of respirators for
sale, they are hard to find locally.
FightClubPanties 13 hours ago
And those respirators, i.e. N95 cannot be reused.
adr 13 hours ago
Sure buddy. You might want to pull Fauchi's rod out of your mouth.
If the virus was floating in the air, everyone on Earth would have been infected 100 times
over by June.
Stranded Observer 13 hours ago
Great story. You are a lucky man to have cheated death like that. It must have been
terrifying
KirkPatrickN 8 hours ago
You're "stocking up for the apocalypse" that people like YOU created by trembling in fear
for 10 months and counting over sniffles?
"It did not get into my lungs because I used a respirator, not a mask. "
Are you sure it's not because you weren't wearing panties that day, because of your GRINDR
date?
-OMG - DeBlasio clip on FOX (sound off because of those gdamned "you can catch covid
...here'" PSAs))
urging faith leaders to push the vax! 'Spread the word!" J.C.!
Overpowered By Funk 14 hours ago
Why don't we just do what the Chinese did? It seems to have worked. Whatever it was they
did.
Crush the cube 14 hours ago
Pointed an accusatory finger at the weapon wielder and threatened to expose.
Mrgior31513 14 hours ago
Make tests read negative most likely.
JuliaS 13 hours ago
Chinese men in biosuits sprayed mystery syrup everywhere and then they were confident the
virus was gone. Safe to assume that if the lab worked on the virus, they also knew what the
antidote was.
waterwell 1 hour ago
Why is it that the entire continent of Africa appears to have been able to avoid the high
rates of cases and deaths caused by the Covid-19 virus.
Totin 3 hours ago
Why is it that with all the Brown Shirt enforcement in Kalifornia that they are suffering
the worst?
somedude 3 hours ago (Edited)
Maybe the Chinese put something in those made in China masks.
Americans buying masks from the Chinese is like **** buying masks from the Nazi.
RIGHTPOWER 3 hours ago
as long as housing prices keep crashing all is well
thimbus_xyz 4 hours ago (Edited)
So let me make sure I understand this correctly.....
South Korea, a country with over 5x the population density of the US , has 1,100 new cases
per day (or .002% of population ).
The US has 280,000 new cases (or .085% of population ), that's 43x the rate of South
Koriea
And the conclusion of this idiot is masks don't work.....hmm interesting. I see the
republican strategy of dumbing down our education is getting the desired results.
Still, these cases being recorded now are only a sliver of those detected daily in the
U.S. and Europe. There, daily new case counts of COVID-19 are still in the tens of
thousands... so keep wearing
your masks!!!
🔥 🔥 🔥!!!!
Uh no, in the US we count new cases in the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS.
USA USA USA BITCHES.
SweetDoug 3 hours ago
'
'
You just watch the spread/infection rate increase. Learn a bit aboutr infection spreads.
Think oil on water and the increasing size of the diameter/area.
Give it a few months...
Everyone is gonna get this, sooner or later schmuck.
You stay in your basement.
OJO
V-V
thimbus_xyz 3 hours ago
That's a lot of words to say nothing.
What exactly did I get incorrect? That would be nothing. Facts is tough that way. LOL.
" The disproportionately higher rates of COVID deaths among American Indians and Alaska
Natives, 7 for example, are due to higher rates of obesity, diabetes, asthma and
heart disease than among more privileged U.S. communities."
Research 8 suggests even mild obesity can influence COVID-19 severity, raising
the risk of respiratory failure by 2.5 times and the risk of needing intensive care by nearly
five times. Inflammation triggered by obesity is also thought to be responsible for the
threefold greater risk of pulmonary embolism (blood clots in the lungs) seen in obese
COVID-19 patients. 9,10
Certain groups -- particularly the elderly and those with darker skin -- are also far more
prone to the illness due to the fact that they're also at highest risk for vitamin
D deficiency .
It's a Chinese bioweapon. Military tribunals and GITMO for TRAITORS.
Alice-the-dog 6 hours ago
As if there was a test for COVID that was remotely reliable. Both exhibit an abundance of
false positives. THE CASES THE CASES THE CASES, and deaths for that matter, are adjustable to
fit the needs of any tyrant that has any control over the number of tests administered. Need
more control of your subjects? More tests, more cases, more deaths. Want to make your vaxx
look good, or the unelected POTUS look good? Reduce testing, fewer cases and deaths.
flat earth guy 6 hours ago
Viruses are not alive, they are not contagious. Its a detox of the body.
Masks are stupid to use for viruses.
Terrain theory was allways right germ theory is wrong
TRM 7 hours ago
Can't retweet
"This Tweet is from a suspended account. Learn more
Justus_Americans 8 hours ago
Taking A Stand Against the Stand 2020 Whoopi and King can kiss my Trump voting a** Not
Viewing View https://youtu.be/_Mxa3bCprWc
Yup, the Thanksgiving Superspreader Doom was a nothing burger, just like the Trump rally
superspreader doom. They are LIARS! And the ones at the top... traitors.
Slapper 11 hours ago remove link
In WW1 and WW2 the same people marched you off to a war...
Nona Yobiznes 12 hours ago (Edited)
Argentina has worn masks since April or even March. Their cases didn't stop rising. In
fact they rose exponentially until a few weeks ago, which coincided with late spring for
them. Seasonality overrides all other factors.
KirkPatrickN 8 hours ago
Obesity doubles Covid risks. Should we mandate diets? I know it's inconvenient, but suck
it up, people. It's to save lives.
If you are generally aware, the PCR test is used to amplify small amount of genetic
material so as to recognize patterns of DNA by "cycling." (Also, for RNA virus, the RNA is
converted to DNA in order to be detected, it's just the way the test works) This is how we
have been able to recognize the genomes in Egyptian mummies and Wooly Mammoths. It works
because if you amplify and cycle enough times to "grow" legitimate DNA fragments, you get
something with with a fair amount of specificity. W hat is becoming more and more apparent is
that the PCR test was not designed as a diagnostic tool for infection, and really cannot
function as one without having a huge amount of false positives, period.
When it comes to COVID, the presence of viral particles picked up by the PCR technique
does not and has not been quantitatively linked to an active "symptomatic" infection. It
simply cannot be so, because infection threshold as a result of viral load is different for
each patient. It turns out, if you "cycle" over around 25 times, the false positivity of
COVID infection starts getting very high.
I and others have explained in blogs how people can be exposed to virus, and mount a
simple innate immune response and never know any differently. When you test these people with
very low viral loads, who are not sick, you can find the viral RNA code that is used to
"diagnose" if you cycle enough times. The last I read, Labcorp cycles at least 40 times to
detect viral genome fragments. The PCR test was never intended for diagnosis of infection but
as a qualitative test for presence of parts of a virus genome. I know there has been some
confusion circulating the net about what the inventor Kary Mullis had said about that. But we
walk daily with people who have any number of parts of killer virus or bacterial genomes
which one could pick up with a PCR test if one had the specific test for it. Would we claim
that that individual was an infected patient? No!
So given all that, PeakProsperity's Chris
Martenson explains below , in great details, the answer to the most important question you
should ask if you or a loved one gets a positive PCR test result .
"What's the Cycle Threshold (CT) value for that test?"
Sounds wonky but it's actually really important to understand. A low CT value means someone
is loaded with virus. A high value, oppositely, means less of a viral load.
Beyond a certain level the load is insufficient to either infect someone else or be of any
clinical or epidemiological relevance whatsoever.
The problem? Governments all over the country and world are basing their decisions on CT
values that are very high. Too high.
Jon Rappoport (excellent blog) nails it in some of his recent posts.
.
"July 16, 2020, podcast, 'This Week in Virology': Tony Fauci makes a point of saying the
PCR Covid test is useless and misleading when the test is run at '35 cycles or higher.' A
positive result, indicating infection, cannot be accepted or believed.
"Here, in techno-speak, is an excerpt from Fauci's key quote: ' If you get [perform the
test at] a cycle threshold of 35 or more the chances of it being replication-competent [aka
accurate] are miniscule you almost never can culture virus [detect a true positive result]
from a 37 threshold cycle even 36 '
"Too many cycles, and the test will turn up all sorts of irrelevant material that will be
wrongly interpreted as relevant.
"That's called a false positive.
"What Fauci failed to say on the video is: the FDA, which authorizes the test for public
use, recommends the test should be run up to 40 cycles. Not 35.
"Therefore, all labs in the US that follow the FDA guideline are knowingly or unknowingly
participating in fraud. Fraud on a monstrous level, because millions of Americans are being
told they are infected with the virus on the basis of a false positive result, and
"The total number of Covid cases in America -- which is based on the test -- is a gross
falsity.
"The lockdowns and other restraining measures are based on these fraudulent case
numbers.
play_arrow
GenuineAmerican 3 hours ago
Fauci has lied again the PCR maximum cycle for a accurate test results is 25 NOT 35. PCR
is run, or should be run at 21-25 cycles everything else will give a false positive. Had a
friend in Scottsdale MAYO. I had to go to this god-forsaken place to get him out. They were
running the PCR at 42 cycles to keep him in the hospital because he had very, very good UNION
insurance!! The health industries are all crooks, lying to people to get more money being
paid to the orgainizations by the feds.
BaNNeD oN THe RuN 7 hours ago
IQ tests were always seriously flawed, just like the PCR test
U.S TOTAL DEATHS
2015: 2,602,000
2016: 2,744,248
2017: 2,649,000
2018: 2,839,205
2019: 2,909,000
According to usalivestats(dot)com, there are 2,486,700 so far this year. There could be a lag
in reports, but I doubt enough to fulfill their doomsday claims. The CDC still admits only 6%
of these "COVID" are without 2 or more comorbidities, so that's about 25,000 or so. This is a
mild flu season. Here are the recent flu numbers:
FLU DEATHS 2010's
2010: 36,656
2011: 12,447
2012: 42,570
2013: 37,930
2014: 51,376
2015: 22,705
2016: 38,230
2017: 61,099
2018: 34,157
choctaw charley 5 hours ago remove link
so what's the purpose behind the bogus plandemic. In order to institute a one world
plantation several things have to happen. Foremost is the sense of "nationhood". a nation can
be thought of as modeled on the family unit. We look similar, we share religious beliefs,
economic and political views and we have a common history which we take pride in. We trust
rely on and help another. If you have half a brain you don't need me to describe how all
these are under attack. So how does the plandemic play into this? Yesterday you neighbor was
your neighbor. Today he is behind a mask because the government tells you that he is a threat
to you and your family and you to his! The plandemic was used to to hugely expand the mail-in
ballot fraud further driving in the wedge suspicion. Then there is this: when you get your
covid test there will be a permanent file created with your name on it. It will contain your
genetic code and the test result. this will become the social register that is all over
Europe. Get a traffic ticket; late in making a payment; engage in disapproved political
activity as I am doing at this moment? All these will find their way into your file and will
in the future determine the rate you pay on your home mortgage whether you can be employed in
a government job, what you have to endure to board a commercial aircraft etc. There is also a
great likelihood that contained in the vaccine will be a tracking component. Consider also
population segment most vulnerable to covid: older retired people drawing on an already
bankrupt social security ponzi scheme. Hitler referred to these as "Useless Eaters". He had a
system in place to rid society of these. Later these faciliries were expanded to include the
Jewish population.
flyonmywall 9 hours ago
I've done lots of PCR in my life. If you have to do over 35 cycles to detect or amplify
something, you're probably barking up the wrong tree or there is something wrong with your
assay.
Once you ramp up the cycles to past 35-40 cycles, you're just amplifying non-specific
competing amplification products, of which there are always some.
You could have the best designed primers in the world, there is always some random ****
that happens to get amplified at high cycle counts.
Zero-Hegemon 4 hours ago
False positives are beneficial for obtaining COVID money and creating hysteria.
KimAsa 9 hours ago (Edited)
these psychopaths have redesignated the normal course of annual deaths from heart disease,
and other common ailments that old people die from, to Covid 19, to create the illusion of a
deadly pandemic. they claim to have isolated this virus out of one side of their mouth, out
the the other side they claim it has mutated (how many times?) so can't produce proof that
this virus even exists. and out of their ******* they claim to have developed a vaccine?
this is and always has been about the vaccinating the public for free moral agency
prevention.
Ride_the_kali_yuga 9 hours ago
Covid "tests" are an efficient way to feed the false pandemic narrative with nonsensical
numbers of "contaminations". Masks are a mark of submission.
africoman 9 hours ago
Re-posting someone's comment from this article
Here
If the masks work -- Why the six feet?
If the six feet works -- Why the masks?
If both of the above work -- Why the lockdowns?
If all three of the above work -- Why the vaccine?
If the vaccine is safe -- Why protect it with a no liability clause?
If the vaccine is safe---Why not test it on animals first before using it on
humans?
If SARS-CoV-2 exists -- Why has it never been isolated?
If SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated -- How can an effective vaccine be
developed?
If the RT-PCR test works -- Why so many false positives?
If Kary Mullis, the inventor of the RT-PCR test who conveniently died in August 2019,
says his test shouldn't be used to diagnose infectious diseases -- Why use it to detect
SARS-CoV-2?
If there is an epidemic---Why so many empty hospitals?
If large numbers of people are dying from SARS-CoV-2---Why so many fake causes of death
on death certificates?
If SARS-CoV-2 exists -- Why give doctors financial incentives to diagnose
SARS-CoV-2?
If the official COVID-19 narrative is defensible -- Why censor people who dispute this
narrative?
by John Wear, (retired) lawyer, accountant, and author.
Excellent points, now let's threw a monkey wrench in it to the Operation Warp Speed
play_arrow
Schooey 6 hours ago
Its all BS
KimAsa 9 hours ago (Edited)
these psychopaths have redesignated the normal course of annual deaths from heart disease,
and other common ailments that old people die from, to Covid 19, to create the illusion of a
deadly pandemic. they claim to have isolated this virus out of one side of their mouth, out
the the other side they claim it has mutated (how many times?) so can't produce proof that
this virus even exists. and out of their ******* they claim to have developed a vaccine?
this is and always has been about the vaccinating the public for free moral agency
prevention.
Ms No 8 hours ago
They actually murdered people with the lockdown too though. Knowingly and
premeditated...certainly some of those were also declared covid.
smacker 8 hours ago
" this is and always has been about the vaccinating the public "
Correct.
That has become clear. What we are only now slowing learning is what the sinister motive
is.
kellys_eye 9 hours ago
Is the test for Covid or Covid-19. Can it tell the difference? The 'normal' flu and
influenza are both corona viruses and this is the 'high season' for such cases in the
Northern hemisphere.
Strangely (or not) the incidence of actual flu and influenza are suspiciously MUCH lower
than they should be.
Ergo - tests that prove 'positive' for Covid are likely either false OR reporting on the
flu/influenza.
The LIES keep mounting and mounting.
Harry Tools 5 hours ago
there is no pandemic
RedNeckMother 3 hours ago
I will add another: FDA: 40 recommendation for testing
And let's not forget the comments by Fauci that if they're testing at 35 they're going to
get a lot of false positives.
There's an attorney in Ohio who has filed a FOI to obtain all the ct levels used by the
labs testing in Ohio. It will be very interesting once that is revealed - I'm sure our
governor already knows the answer. If I recall, the NYT itself did an article on this very
topic awhile back and estimated that 90% of the positive results in CT and NY were bogus. And
going from 40 to 35 I believe reduces positives by 63%.
We're being played.
MoreFreedom 5 hours ago remove link
Dr. Martenson's videos are very good. He's clear.
As for "the science" and scientists, we all make mistakes. If we didn't make mistakes, we
wouldn't have scientists pointing out other scientist's mistakes. But it's not a question of
whose science is correct, it's that science is no excuse for taking away peoples'
liberty.
SRV 7 hours ago
The inventor of the test (Dr Kary Mullis) was very outspoken that it was NOT developed for
human virus confirmation...he died of cancer just weeks before the first Covid cases
(hmmmm).
The test procedure was developed as a screening tool in lab research, and he won a Nobel
Prize for it!
It's in your face proof of the scam we're all being subjected to that almost no one ever
questioned (brilliant move really)... ONE cycle above 35 (each cycle doubles the
amplification) will explode the the false positives.
And... if you have no symptoms you DO NOT have the virus (remember how much play the
"asymptomatic" BS story got early on... another psyop). Notice how none of the athletes never
get sick and are back in two weeks... yet it's never questioned by a soul paid to look the
other way!
smacker 9 hours ago
" What is becoming more and more apparent is that the PCR test was not designed
as a diagnostic tool for infection, and really cannot function as one without having
a huge amount of false positives, period. "
This is not knew and didn't need to become "more and more apparent".
The inventor of the PCR test Kary Mullis is on video record stating it. Sadly his
expert
knowledge has been wilfully ignored by the political elites and countless talking heads
and "experts" because it doesn't suit them and didn't fit their agenda.
It's time to prepare the gallows and stock up with rope.
smacker 7 hours ago remove link
The PCR test is used precisely because it can be manipulated to produce as many "cases" as
wanted.
Just turn the dial up on "amplification cycles" and hey presto, you get as many positives
as you want.
The cases are not genuine cases but simply PCR positive tests, but are reported as "cases"
and then
"infections" by MSM who are "In On It".
The idea is "FEAR Management" which allows draconian CovID rules like lockdowns and tiers
and
social distancing to be introduced which accustoms people to being managed and
controlled.
It then ramps up demand for vaccines which is the ultimate objective. Initially (or soon
after), the
vaccines will contain nano-technology - dust-chips - which will be used for surveillance and
control.
Some say they will also contain ingredients to render people infertile (ie population
control).
We are seeing in plain sight the biggest coup ever against mankind.
It must be stopped.
smacker 7 hours ago remove link
The PCR test is used precisely because it can be manipulated to produce as many "cases" as
wanted.
Just turn the dial up on "amplification cycles" and hey presto, you get as many positives
as you want.
The cases are not genuine cases but simply PCR positive tests, but are reported as "cases"
and then
"infections" by MSM who are "In On It".
The idea is "FEAR Management" which allows draconian CovID rules like lockdowns and tiers
and
social distancing to be introduced which accustoms people to being managed and
controlled.
It then ramps up demand for vaccines which is the ultimate objective. Initially (or soon
after), the
vaccines will contain nano-technology - dust-chips - which will be used for surveillance and
control.
Some say they will also contain ingredients to render people infertile (ie population
control).
We are seeing in plain sight the biggest coup ever against mankind.
considering cuomo was responsible for spreading the virus exponentially in the early days, he probably has had more
influence on all of our lives than the others
Story about Fauci, at least at the time was that it was so hospitals wouldn't be liable for deaths among medical
staff. But I think it was completely bad what both Cuomo and Fauci
Dr. Fauci was the trusted expert who intentionally lied to the American people and made things far worse. Cuomo is
directly responsible for why New York's response to the virus was so bad and cost many lives. Bullshit award.
Stringent COVID-19 control measures were imposed in Wuhan between January 23 and April 8,
2020. Estimates of the prevalence of infection following the release of restrictions could
inform post-lockdown pandemic management. Here, we describe a city-wide SARS-CoV-2 nucleic
acid screening programme between May 14 and June 1, 2020 in Wuhan. All city residents aged
six years or older were eligible and 9,899,828 (92.9%) participated. No new symptomatic
cases and 300 asymptomatic cases (detection rate 0.303/10,000, 95% CI
0.270–0.339/10,000) were identified. There were no positive tests amongst 1,174
close contacts of asymptomatic cases. 107 of 34,424 previously recovered COVID-19
patients tested positive again (re-positive rate 0.31%, 95% CI 0.423–0.574%). The
prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Wuhan was therefore very low five to eight weeks
after the end of lockdown.
my emphasis
This study comes supporting early (June 2020) official statements by WHO where:
We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing.
They're following asymptomatic cases, they're following contacts and they're not finding
secondary transmission onward. It's very rare and much of that is not published in the
literature. From the papers that are published there's one that came out from Singapore
looking at a long-term care facility. There are some household transmission studies where
you follow individuals over time and you look at the proportion of those that transmit
onwards.We are constantly looking at this data and we're trying to get more information
from countries to truly answer this question. It still appears to be rare that an
asymptomatic individual actually transmits onward.
There existing or not "asymptomatic transmission" is a key piece of information because
there lies the fundamental justification for isolation measures imposed on asymptomatic
individuals with positive rtPCR test results. Further, without asymptomatic transmission,
general confinements can not be scientifically justified for the purposes of slowing
down/flattening the curve as has been claimed .
This recenters the pandemic response where it should be all along: properly diagnosed
cases.
It is very curious that no later than 24 hours, WHO, was backtracking on the original statements ,
letting us know that models [as opposed to actual epidemiological studies] suggest otherwise
but since they were models they were not mentioned. I'll chalk that up as excess zeal at
best.
The supplementary material the study published in Nature was also revealing in terms of
the rtPCR testing protocol, which employed, following Chinese National Guidelines, Ct values
of ~35/34 (ORF and N genes respectively) on average. This arcs back to the question that has
been haunting us, why are these tests being threshold at such high Ct values. In the Chinese
case there appears to be an explanation. As the very title of the study mentions, these
are tests made for screening purposes not diagnostic .
The following is very enlightening, contrast the following case definitions:
Mild case The clinical symptoms are mild and no pneumonia manifestations can be
found in imaging .
Moderate case
Patients have symptoms such as fever and respiratory tract symptoms etc., and pneumonia
manifestations can be seen in imaging .
Severe case
Patients who meet any of the following criteria: dyspnea or respiratory rate ≥30
breaths/min; oxygen saturation ≤93% at a rest state; arterial partial pressure of oxygen
(PaO2)/oxygen concentration (FiO2) ≤300 mmHg. Patients with >50% lesions progression
within 24 to 48 hours in lung imaging should be treated as severe cases.
Critical case
Patients who meet any of the following criteria: occurrence of respiratory failure
requiring mechanical ventilation; presence of shock; other organ failure that requires
monitoring and treatment in the Intensive Care Unit.[at this severity they apparently
dispense with imaging]
Clinically-diagnosed cases
The clinically-diagnosed cases were only allowed for the cases in the Hubei Province for
the period of February 9 to 19 based on the 5th edition of the Scheme released by the
National Health Commission of China released on February 8 and abolished on February 19. A
presumptive case was defined as meeting the following criteria: (1) recent travel history
to Wuhan City or Hubei Province; or close contact with a confirmed or probable case; or
cluster transmission; (2) fever and/or respiratory symptoms; (3) laboratory evidence of
normal or decreased number of leukocytes and/or lymphopenia. Those presumptive cases
with further radiographic evidence showing pneumonia but without a positive RT-PCR test
result were defined as clinically-diagnosed cases .
my emphasis
-------------------------------------------------------
The take away: The Chinese rely on radiological imaging to confirm COVID-19 cases NOT on
rtPCR tests which they limit for screening purposes, as opposed to the European which use
radiological imaging to define a probable case and rtPCR testing to confirm. The Chinese
rely on a tried and tested method for confirming diagnostic and the European rely fallible
method generaly used for screening to confirm diagnostic .
This whole coronavirus thingy is becoming ridiculous. I don't think it's a complete fake ;
yes, there is coronavirus named COVID-19, yes it is highly contagious, yes it's a health
hazard.
But to sum it up, we have here a new coronavirus which is slightly more dangerous than the
flu, which kills practically only very old people with comorbidities, with 99,98% chances
(ok, 99,95% if you like) of surviving it. given these odds, I'll pass on the vaccine, thank
you.
From the beginning, the whole treatment of this thing stank to high heaven. I'm sorry, but
the only meaningful explanation I can give is this one : big pharma and its various shills
(politicians or doctors) recognized the opportunity such a virus would mean ; they then set
out to systematically downplay or kill any possibility of cheap and effective treatments, and
cleverly directed the firehose of dollars which was poured onto the laboratories developing a
vaccine.
Some facts :
- in France, we had two large-scale studies, Discovery and Hycovid, which were started (very
reluctantly) and were pratically forced to include HCQ+AZ in their panel.
- In the weekend following publication of the fraudulent Lancet newspaper, our health
minister ordered a full stop.
- Since then, months have gone by; NOT ONE JOURNALIST has either 1) investigated who were the
accomplices of the Lancet fraud 2) questioned why all national and international authorities
reacted in lockstep 3) and most importantly WHY THE DECISIONS TO STOP THE STUDIES WERE NOT
REVERSED following the Lancet's retractation.
-In October, we learn that the EU Commission gave a cool 1 billion to buy remdesivir. ONE
WEEK before the WHO study concluding on the ineffectiviness of remdesivir came out.
I'm sorry, but this is becoming a little too much. One coincidence OK, but here we are
talking about a string of improbable events, with NO ONE analyzing with a cool head what
happened or reversing decisions that were taken based on obvious frauds.
Three weeks ago, our president solemnly declared that our OR would be saturated in
mid-November with 9000 people under respiratory assistance, no matter what we do. Well here
were are, and the tally is 4.800. Not a good situation, but still only half ; and with nobody
pointing out that every winter, our OR are saturated anyway due to the flu and the
influenza.
I think we should all grow up and do a more level-headed analysis of the pros and cons.
The most ridiculous thing perhaps is to see all those politicos sanctimoniously declare the
sanctity of life ; in a world where you can abort babies at your convenience, practices
eugenics, and where euthanasy is aggressively pushed into the mainstream, this is perhaps the
most hypocritical bullshit I have ever heard.
@Posted by: Avid Lurker | Nov 17 2020 13:53 utc | 117
Meh...Fauci is a political creature who has talked on both sides of his mouth on many
$ubject$, and goes with the (money)flow as long as he can get away with it without reducing
his credibility too much.
I wonder if Fauci is *still* singing the praises of Gilead's remdesivir, that $3K per
treatment apparent snake oil, according to critics:
Dr. Eric Topol, vice president for research at Scripps Research sez:
Most likely a game changer:
Portugiese court rule against PCR-test
Sorry, guys, this is a link to one of the best real-left Corona blogs, but in German
language. In Portugal a court decided that a PCR-test cannot be accepted as a proof of a
viral infection. Now think about its consequences!
The Great Revenge - How Tony Fauci F*cked Donald TrumpLiberty Blogger , Nov
16 2020 20:12 utc |
2
In January 2017 the CIA claimed that Russia had kompromat on Trump. Trump shot back at the
CIA. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer then
warned the incoming president:
"You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday to get back at
you," Schumer, a New York Democrat, told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. "So even for a practical,
supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this."
As the years after the warning passed by it proved to have been valid. The CIA 'whistle
blowers' put a great effort into sabotaging Trump's presidency. But they were largely
unsuccessful.
The CIA failed to sabotaged Trump's reelection. It was health community, including parts
of Trump's administration, which did that.
Trump had especially angered Dr. Fauci, the well known infectious-disease expert and
member of the government's coronavirus taskforce. Fauci's advise had been ignored and efforts
were made to hold him back from making public pronouncements.
On November 1, two days before the election, Fauci gave a widely distributed
interview to the Washington Post :
President Trump's repeated assertions the United States is "rounding the turn" on the novel
coronavirus have increasingly alarmed the government's top health experts, who say the
country is heading into a long and potentially deadly winter with an unprepared government
unwilling to make tough choices.
"We're in for a whole lot of hurt. It's not a good situation," Anthony S. Fauci, the
country's leading infectious-disease expert, said in a wide-ranging interview late Friday.
"All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season,
with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more
poorly."
Fauci's interview was not the first intervention he made. In October two leading vaccine
companies were ready to announce the success of their vaccine trials. But with at least the
knowledge of Fauci and the Federal Drug Administration both companies deviated from their
clinical protocols to intentionally move their success announcement to a date after the
election.
During the summer Trump had been hopeful that a vaccine against the Covid-19 disease could
be announced before the election. It would have been proof that his strategy to (not) fight
the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic had at least one success. The announcement of a vaccine was part of
President Trump's planned 'October
surprises' to win the election.
Trump's summer hope that a vaccine success could be announced during October was not
unreasonable. Two important vaccines candidate, one from Pfizer with BioNTech and one from
Moderna, had been successful tested in their first phases and were ready launch their large
phase 3 trials.
In a phase 3 vaccine trial several ten thousand people are put into two groups. The people
in one group receive the vaccine, the people in the other one a placebo. One then has to wait
and see how many people will get the disease. At certain points a statistical team will look
at those cases and check how many occurred in each group. The differences of the number of
people in each group who catch the disease is a scale for the vaccines efficacy. For a known
group size one can estimate in advance after how many disease cases determinations should be
made to show statistical significance.
Pfizer had published its clinical
protocol for the phase 3 trial which foresaw four points of interim analyses (IA) during
which it would become clear how well the vaccine was working:
During Phase 2/3, 4 IAs are planned and will be performed by an unblinded statistical team
after accrual of 32, 62, 92, and 120 cases. At each IA:
[Vaccine efficacy] for the first primary objective will be evaluated. Overwhelming
efficacy will be declared if the first primary study objective is met. The criteria for
success at an interim analysis are based on the posterior probability (ie,P[VE
>30%|data]) at the current number of cases. Overwhelming efficacy will be declared if
the posterior probability is higher than the success threshold. The success threshold for
each interim analysis will be calibrated to protect overall type I error at 2.5%.
Additional details about the success threshold or boundary calculation at each interim
analysis will be provided in the SAP.
The time plan, on which Trump was certainly briefed, foresaw that the first interim
analysis would likely occur in late September or early October.
However Pfizer did not publish
any results when the first two interim analysis points were met. On November 9, after the
election, Pfizer
announced very positive results at the third interim analysis point:
Pfizer and partner BioNTech said Monday that their vaccine against Covid-19 was strongly
effective, exceeding expectations with results that are likely to be met with cautious
excitement -- and relief -- in the face of the global pandemic.
The vaccine is the first to be tested in the United States to generate late-stage data.
The companies said an early analysis of the results showed that individuals who received
two injections of the vaccine three weeks apart experienced more than 90% fewer cases of
symptomatic Covid-19 than those who received a placebo.
...
The story of how the data have been analyzed seems to include no small amount of drama.
...
The first analysis was to occur after 32 volunteers -- both those who received the vaccine
and those on placebo -- had contracted Covid-19. If fewer than six volunteers in the group
who received the vaccine had developed Covid-19, the companies would make an announcement
that the vaccine appeared to be effective. The study would continue until at least 164
cases of Covid-19 -- individuals with at least one symptom and a positive test result --
had been reported.
However, the announcement at the two first interim analysis points was never made.
[William Gruber, Pfizer's senior vice president of vaccine clinical research and
development,] said that Pfizer and BioNTech had decided in late October that they wanted to
drop the 32-case interim analysis . At that time, the companies decided to stop having
their lab confirm cases of Covid-19 in the study , instead leaving samples in storage. The
FDA was aware of this decision. Discussions between the agency and the companies concluded,
and testing began this past Wednesday. When the samples were tested, there were 94 cases of
Covid in the trial.
This means that the statistical strength of the result is likely far stronger than was
initially expected. It also means that if Pfizer had held to the original plan, the data
would likely have been available in October, as its CEO, Albert Bourla, had initially
predicted.
In October Pfizer already knew from its first interim analysis that its vaccine was
successful. But it intentionally held back on the announcement of its success. The FDA knew
of this!
Today Moderna announced the success of its Covid-19 vaccine. This is a vaccine in which
Dr. Fauci's organization is directly involved in. It seems that Moderna had, like Pfizer,
held back its very positive results until after the election:
The drugmaker Moderna announced on Monday that its coronavirus vaccine was 94.5 percent
effective, based on an early look at the results from its large, continuing study.
Researchers said the results were better than they had dared to imagine.
...
Moderna, based in Cambridge, Mass., developed its vaccine in collaboration with researchers
from the Vaccine Research Center, part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the institute, said in an interview: ...
...
Moderna had planned a first interim analysis of its trial data when the number of Covid-19
cases among participants reached 53. But the recent surge in cases drove the number to 95 ,
and it is likely to speed completion of the study.
Moderna, like Pfizer, skipped the announcement of the results at the first interim
analysis point in its clinical protocol.
The FDA and Dr. Fauci were involved in Pfizer's as well as the Moderna's decision to
deviate from their clinical protocols. Any change in these protocols must get the FDA's
approval. If the companies had not changed their plans the announcement of the good efficacy
of both vaccines' would have come before the election.
Trump's well planed vaccine 'October surprise' was sabotaged by two pharmaceutical
companies with at least the approval of Dr. Fauci and the FDA.
This might well have cost him his reelection.
It was the health community that really had 'six ways from Sunday' to get back at
Trump.
Posted by b on November 16, 2020 at 19:54 UTC | Permalink
How many ways did the vultures steal the US election?
The Big Guy will ensure Americans continue to pay twice as much for pharmaceuticals. His
10% is doubled too, after all.
The Corporate State envelopes the administrators of the MSM, Medical and Academic
Institutions, and State and Local Governments, in order to create and enforce a largely
fictitious health emergency -- the latest in a series of Disaster Capitalist scenarios
designed to rob us blind.
"... A staggering 9.2 million jobs could be lost in the U.S. Travel & Tourism sector in 2020 if barriers to global travel remain in place, the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) revealed. ..."
A staggering 9.2 million jobs could be lost in the U.S. Travel & Tourism sector in
2020 if barriers to global travel remain in place, the World Travel & Tourism Council
(WTTC) revealed.
The new figure comes from WTTC's latest economic modelling, which looks at the punishing
impact of COVID-19 and travel restrictions on the Travel & Tourism sector.
According to the latest data, 7.2 million jobs in the U.S. have been impacted. If there is
no immediate alleviation of restrictions on international travel, as many as 9.2 million jobs
– more than half of all jobs supported by the sector in the U.S. in 2019 – would be
lost.
WTTC has identified the four top priorities which should be addressed, including the
adoption of a comprehensive and cost-effective testing regime at departure to avoid
transmission, the re-opening of key 'air corridors' such as between New York and London, and
international coordination.
The challenge of restoring safe travels in the new normal is one of the biggest issues
facing the U.S. as it grapples with a depressed economy devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic,
which has hit the Travel & Tourism sector particularly hard.
The WTTC Economic Impact Report for 2019 revealed that Travel & Tourism contributed
$1.84 trillion to the U.S. economy and was responsible for more than one in 10 (10.7%) American
jobs.
"Surgeons have been using surgical masks since their introduction in 1897. It has for
some years been customary for surgeons and nurses to wear surgical masks in the operating
theatre and to change masks part of the way through any procedure lasting more than a few
hours.
"The dangers associated with mask wearing were assessed by five doctors and published
in the journal Neurocirugia in 2008.
"Although it is customary for operating theatres to be fitted with air conditioning
systems, the writers of the article, entitled, Preliminary Report on Surgical Mask induced
Deoxygenation During Major Surgery, pointed out that it is known that heat and moisture are
trapped beneath surgical masks and concluded that 'it seems reasonable that some of the
exhaled carbon dioxide may also be trapped beneath them, inducing a decrease in blood
oxygenation'.
"A total of 53 surgeons, of both sexes, all employed at university hospitals and aged
between 24 and 54 years of age were tested. All were non-smokers and none had any chronic
lung disease. The test involved pulse oximetry before and after the course of an operation.
The study showed that the longer a mask was worn the greater the fall in blood oxygen levels.
This may lead to the individual passing out and it may also affect natural immunity –
thereby increasing the risk of infection.
"The masks used were disposable, sterile, one-way surgical paper masks. To eliminate
the effect of dehydration over a several hour surgical operation, the surgeons were allowed
after every hour to drink water through a straw.
"The authors of the paper concluded that, 'When the values for oxygen saturation of
haemoglobin were compared, there were statistically significant differences only between
preoperational and post operational values. As the duration of the operation increases,
oxygen saturation of haemoglobin decreases significantly."
From "Proof That Face Masks Do More Harm Than Good" by Dr Vernon Coleman (which was
published on "Smashwords" but was suddenly removed the book in an gratuitous act of
censorship even though the book was entirely factual)
You fail to address the question of W H Y we are told lies or misrepresentation
about the disease, and Western governments (especially USA) have failed while other
governments (Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, Japan, New Zealand, etc.) have been much more
effective.
I have proposed that:
Trump allowed the virus to spread so that he could declare a national emergency that
allowed him to bailout Wall Street (which was facing tens of billions of dollars in bad
loans) and Boeing;
Trump/US Deep State find it desirable to blame China - more deaths = more outrage;
healthcare for older people is very expensive - early deaths save the government a lot
of money (Trump's military build-up has been very costly);
Poor, mostly people of color are the other category of people most likely to have bad
outcomes from SARS-COV-2 - they are just not important in USA;
funneling money to Big Pharma.
FYI My explanation is very different that the proposition set forth by the
astro-turfed Libertarian mob: that governments want to control us by making us wear
masks (referred to derogatorily as "muzzles" or "diapers") and destroying our ability to earn
a living.
Jackrabbit@9 - Your first two reasons are most likely a factor but I would not include
Trump in the calculation as he is not capable of that level of planning. Your third reason
end of life care is how the system wrings out every last penny of the elderly, gov pays very
little of that.Your las two reasons are not wrong.
IMO the why is this;
Terrain Theory - nutrition, environment, healthy lifestyle, strong immune system, add it
all together and it is maybe a couple billion dollars for the economy.
Germ Theory - healthcare industry, medical devices, hospitals, pharma, insurance, equals
hundreds of billions and in fact Terrain Theory directly threatens those hundreds of billions
so it is roundly dismissed at every turn.
True enough Trump bailed out Wall Street and more importantly, it's wealthiest globalist
customers. The strength of the dollar is tied to the religious monetary faith of dollar
holders.
Obama ditto.
Biden will do the same.
The biggest difference between Trump and Biden is Biden will also re-establish
"normalized" relations with China by ending the trade war. Oh sure, there will still be
political frictions and trade issues, blah blah blah ad nauseum, but the silliness of Trump's
playing off the cuff loosely and for pure politics is destructive to him as well as his
supporters.
Biden's ending of the trade war will unleash the stock markets around the globe and
provide increased riches for the wealthiest and middle class investors, while the poorest of
the poor will pick up the tab, as they always will under the globalist structure.
Trump's trade war was...by far...his biggest mistake, an unforced error of untold
proportions. In comparison, the COVID crisis will be considerably less important as time goes
on and the world learns to cope.
Trade wars accomplished nothing positive (as anyone with even a passing understanding of
economics always knew it couldn't) and forced Trump to also bail out corporate agriculture
with billions in tax payer subsidies. High end manufacturing jobs can't be re-shored until
the USD permanently weakens and is no longer the reserve currency. And even then this will
take a sustained period of time of retrenchment if in fact the USD loses that status which
won't happen even in our grandchildren's lifetimes, imo. The general view at the bar that the
US is so decrepit and teetering on collapse is the fanciful wishful thinking of economic
illiterates who absorb too much poilitical propaganda.
China has little desire to be the world reserve currency. They are in fact ever more
linking closely to world debt and equity markets where the USD is entrenched and anyway the
world's wealthiest will never place their faith in the renminbi to the extent necessary for
this to occur. The Chinese economy is well situated under the status quo, minus the trade
war. They are in development growth mode and can better accomplish their long term goals
hitched to global markets and their emerging bourgeois class gains from the weakness of the
renminbi because of the often quoted (and generally misunderstood) PPP leveraging the value
of the onshore yuan to keep domestic wages low.
The US will face political collapse well before economic collapse. Remember you read it
hear first.
On another note, this will be the last post I make at MoA. My work is done. The bosses
have reassigned me.
Covid-19 is a dangerous disease and I take precautions to protect myself. However, the public
depiction of the disease in the media and the actions being taken by most governments cannot
but raise some very serious questions.
For example, you see everywhere how many "new covid cases" are being detected. The problem
is manifold.
1) in reality the number they are citing is the number of positives in PCR test - IT IS
NOT THE NUMBER OF CASES. A "case" in epidemiological sense is when medical intervention is
needed or when a patient dies. If "case = infection" then one wouldn't need two
epidemiological parameters IFR (infection fatality rate) and CFR (infection fatality rate).
Furthermore, roughly 30% of the world population harbor the tuberculosis bacterium. Yet, I
have never heard that the global TB case is several billions. Only a very small fraction of
those harboring the bacterium will get the disease called TB, when it will become a case. So,
why is COVID-19 is being treated differently in the media as well as by authorities?
2) The PCR test DOES NOT diagnose a disease called Covid-19. It simply identifies
fragments of RNA of the virus called SARS-COv2 in a person indicating that HE MAY have had
the virus in his body. This is very different than saying that he has a disease called
Covid-19.
3) PCR tests are neither validated, nor standardized - therefore, there are too many false
positives.
4) PCR test IS NOT APPROVED AS A DIAGNOSTIC TEST. If you combine the first four bullet
points then how can you not think that there is something wrong in the whole picture?
5) Most vaccines have taken 10 years to be developed (I believe that there is a single
case where it was developed in 5 years). And after 30 decades we still do not have a vaccine
for AIDS virus. So, when governments are on record having said from the beginning that we'll
get back to normal only after a vaccine will be available - then you cannot but question
their motive.
Intentionally or otherwise, Fauci put his thumb on the electoral scale by painting a
doomsday picture of the nation's Covid-19 outlook and suggesting the Democrat candidate is
more focused on the pandemic than is the Republican incumbent. Asked about differences between
the two on the virus issue, Fauci praised Biden for "taking it seriously from a
public-health perspective," and said Trump looks at it from the standpoint of "the
economy and reopening the country," according to the Post, which published its article
Saturday evening.
Fauci, who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,
echoed Biden's predictions of a "dark winter," saying, "We're in for a whole lot of
hurt. All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season,
with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more
poorly."
The doctor didn't specifically attribute his gloomy assessment to Trump's policies, but
Biden has made the virus outbreak the centerpiece of his campaign, repeatedly blaming the
president for the nation's Covid-19 death toll, which stands at more than
230,000.
Fauci complained to the Post that Trump is increasingly leaning on medical adviser
Scott
Atlas for advice on the pandemic. "I have real problems with that guy," Fauci said.
"He's a smart guy who's talking about things that I believe he doesn't have any real insight
or knowledge or experience in. He keeps talking about things that, when you dissect it out and
parse it out, it doesn't make any sense."
Fauci said in April that Trump had immediately backed all the Covid-19 mitigation
recommendations made to him by US public health officials, including Fauci himself. In
September, he said the president had taken the outbreak very seriously from the beginning.
White House spokesman Judd Deere blasted Fauci for "choosing three days before an
election to play politics," after previously praising Trump's actions.
"As a member of the (White House coronavirus) task force, Dr. Fauci has a duty to express
concerns or push for a change in strategy, but he's not done that, instead choosing to
criticize the president in the media and make his political leanings known by praising the
president's opponent – exactly what the American people have come to expect from the
swamp," Deere told the Post.
Fauci said in February that the risk of coronavirus in the US was "relatively low,"
and told CBS's 60 Minutes program in March that "people should not be walking around with
masks." By October, he was voicing support for a national mask mandate.
Atlas contended in an interview with RT's Going Underground show
that Covid-19 lockdowns have been an "epic failure" and are "killing people"
without curbing the spread of the virus.
"The public-health leadership have failed egregiously, and they're killing people with
their fear-inducing shutdown policies," Trump's coronavirus adviser said.
Investigative journalist Jordan Schachtel took to Twitter to criticize Fauci for attacking
Atlas while offering "zero evidence, data, etc," calling the comments "a little
character-assassination attempt by the tiny totalitarian."
Tweet See new Tweets
TweetJordan Schachtel @JordanSchachtel
· 19h Fauci has complete
breakdown, resorts to crying to the media. Notice his little rant (loaded with extreme amounts
of professional jealousy) has zero evidence, data, etc. A little character assassination
attempt by the tiny totalitarian. Quote Tweet Maggie Haberman
@maggieNYT · 21h "I have real problems with that guy," Fauci said of Atlas. "He's a
smart guy who's talking about things that I believe he doesn't have any real insight or
knowledge or experience in...when you dissect it out and parse it out, it doesn't make any
sense." https:// washingtonpost.com/politics/fauci
-covid-winter-forecast/2020/10/31/e3970eb0-1b8b-11eb-bb35-2dcfdab0a345_story.html 18
Two
young sisters stabbed a security guard at a Chicago athletic store 27 times and hit him with a
trash can after he demanded they put on masks and use hand sanitizer before entering. Their
lawyer argued it was self-defense.
Jayla and Jessica Hill (18 and 21, respectively) have been charged with one count of
attempted first-degree murder each and were ordered to be held without bail on Tuesday
following their arrest. The incident, which was caught on surveillance camera at the Snipes
athletic store in the Chicago suburb of Lawndale, happened on Sunday as the store was about to
close.
Older sister Jessica is accused of stabbing the store's security guard 27 times with a "
comb knife " while her younger sister Jayla held him by the hair to stop him from
moving. Both the store manager and the guard himself reportedly pleaded for the young women to
stop attacking the guard, to no avail.
When he finally broke free, the sisters allegedly kicked him in the head and body, while
Jessica declared he was a " b***h " who'd been " f***ed up " by her and her
sister. Despite his wounds, the guard himself apparently stopped the pair from running away
before the police made it to the scene.
The unnamed man was treated at nearby Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was listed in critical
condition even though he did not require surgery for the wounds on his neck, back and arms. The
sisters, too, were treated for " minor lacerations " at St. Anthony Hospital.
The women were stopped by the security guard as they attempted to enter Snipes around 6pm on
Sunday and became confrontational when he asked them to put on masks and use hand sanitizer.
Jayla took out her phone to start filming and can reportedly be heard on the footage inviting
someone (presumably her sister) to " kick his ass " as the 6 foot 5 (1.96 meters),
270-pound (122.5 kg) guard attempted to grab the phone from her.
The sisters were then asked to leave, and one can apparently be seen on surveillance footage
hitting the guard in the face with a trash can before Jessica took out her weapon and started
stabbing him. Other outlets have reported one of the girls punched the guard.
The Hills' lawyer has argued they acted in self-defense, reasoning that Jayla filmed at
least part of the incident and no one planning a murder would go out of their way to create
video evidence of the crime. The girls are also bipolar, the attorney told the court. Both
recently graduated from Chicago Public Schools, and local media described them as "
college-bound ."
The judge declined to release the girls on bail, noting that while they may not have any
criminal history, the " sheer number " of stab wounds indicated something " too
random and quickly escalating " for their release to take place in " conditions that
would protect the community ."
" It's the complete randomness of this ," Judge Mary Marubio said in her decision on
Tuesday. " It's terrifying. "
While local media has reported neither sister had a criminal record, Heavy.com noted that
the Chicago Police Department has a record for Jessica Hill's
arrest in October 2017 for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. She was bailed out on a
$1500 bond.
Already a high-crime city, Chicago has seen homicide rates spike 50 percent over the past
year, and 139 percent in July alone, a microcosm of nationwide trends. During last month's
Labor Day holiday weekend alone, some 51 people were shot, 10 fatally, down slightly from the
previous weekend that saw 55 people shot. Amid the carnage, one man was killed by police as he
attempted to stab an officer. 5ohswi 5 hours ago "The Hills' lawyer has argued they acted in
self-defense, reasoning that Jayla filmed at least part of the incident and no one planning a
murder would go out of their way to create video evidence of the crime." ... Just like nobody
would abandon a laptop at a computer shop when it is loaded with incriminating e-mails and
photos of himself engaged in sex acts with underage girls. Or maybe they are just not that
smart. Maybe they are not really college bound. Juan_More 6 hours ago I think that the side
effect of the zombie apocalypse must be mass stupidity. Most people will only be in the shops
for a few minutes, wearing a mask helps keep the shops open and people employed. If you don't
like the hand sanitizer then just don't go into that shop. Three shops where I live demanded
that I use the hand sanitizer, two provided an alternative (hand washing). I haven't been back
to two of them and the third maybe because a buddy owns the shop. There is no need for violence
but then that is the American way. If convicted they won't have to worry about what type of
sneakers they want. They will be provided without laces.
Jayla and Jessica Hill (18 and 21, respectively) have been charged with one count of
attempted first-degree murder each and were ordered to be held without bail on Tuesday
following their arrest. The incident, which was caught on surveillance camera at the Snipes
athletic store in the Chicago suburb of Lawndale, happened on Sunday as the store was about to
close.
Older sister Jessica is accused of stabbing the store's security guard 27 times with a "
comb knife " while her younger sister Jayla held him by the hair to stop him from
moving. Both the store manager and the guard himself reportedly pleaded for the young women to
stop attacking the guard, to no avail.
When he finally broke free, the sisters allegedly kicked him in the head and body, while
Jessica declared he was a " b***h " who'd been " f***ed up " by her and her
sister. Despite his wounds, the guard himself apparently stopped the pair from running away
before the police made it to the scene.
The unnamed man was treated at nearby Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was listed in critical
condition even though he did not require surgery for the wounds on his neck, back and arms. The
sisters, too, were treated for " minor lacerations " at St. Anthony Hospital.
The women were stopped by the security guard as they attempted to enter Snipes around 6pm on
Sunday and became confrontational when he asked them to put on masks and use hand sanitizer.
Jayla took out her phone to start filming and can reportedly be heard on the footage inviting
someone (presumably her sister) to " kick his ass " as the 6 foot 5 (1.96 meters),
270-pound (122.5 kg) guard attempted to grab the phone from her.
The sisters were then asked to leave, and one can apparently be seen on surveillance footage
hitting the guard in the face with a trash can before Jessica took out her weapon and started
stabbing him. Other outlets have reported one of the girls punched the guard.
The Hills' lawyer has argued they acted in self-defense, reasoning that Jayla filmed at
least part of the incident and no one planning a murder would go out of their way to create
video evidence of the crime. The girls are also bipolar, the attorney told the court. Both
recently graduated from Chicago Public Schools, and local media described them as "
college-bound ."
The judge declined to release the girls on bail, noting that while they may not have any
criminal history, the " sheer number " of stab wounds indicated something " too
random and quickly escalating " for their release to take place in " conditions that
would protect the community ."
" It's the complete randomness of this ," Judge Mary Marubio said in her decision on
Tuesday. " It's terrifying. "
While local media has reported neither sister had a criminal record, Heavy.com noted that
the Chicago Police Department has a record for Jessica Hill's
arrest in October 2017 for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. She was bailed out on a
$1500 bond.
Already a high-crime city, Chicago has seen homicide rates spike 50 percent over the past
year, and 139 percent in July alone, a microcosm of nationwide trends. During last month's
Labor Day holiday weekend alone, some 51 people were shot, 10 fatally, down slightly from the
previous weekend that saw 55 people shot. Amid the carnage, one man was killed by police as he
attempted to stab an officer. 5ohswi 5 hours ago "The Hills' lawyer has argued they acted in
self-defense, reasoning that Jayla filmed at least part of the incident and no one planning a
murder would go out of their way to create video evidence of the crime." ... Just like nobody
would abandon a laptop at a computer shop when it is loaded with incriminating e-mails and
photos of himself engaged in sex acts with underage girls. Or maybe they are just not that
smart. Maybe they are not really college bound. Juan_More 6 hours ago I think that the side
effect of the zombie apocalypse must be mass stupidity. Most people will only be in the shops
for a few minutes, wearing a mask helps keep the shops open and people employed. If you don't
like the hand sanitizer then just don't go into that shop. Three shops where I live demanded
that I use the hand sanitizer, two provided an alternative (hand washing). I haven't been back
to two of them and the third maybe because a buddy owns the shop. There is no need for violence
but then that is the American way. If convicted they won't have to worry about what type of
sneakers they want. They will be provided without laces.
Fall enrollment has
plunged , some colleges are shuttering operations, revenues across the entire higher
education industry are collapsing, and the shift from physical to virtual education due to the
virus pandemic could prick the next bubble: the student housing debt market.
Our warning about the coming implosion of the higher education industry (see here
from 2014) , as a whole, has become louder and louder over the last six-plus years as the
student debt bubble has recently swelled to more than $1.6 trillion. Years ago, no one at the
time, could've forecasted a virus pandemic would doom colleges and universities.
Credit rating agency Moody's recently downgraded the entire higher education sector to
negative from stable, and the American Council on Education estimates colleges and universities
will experience a $23 billion decline in revenues over the next academic year.
Bloomberg outlines the increase of virtual education in a virus pandemic has resulted in an
abundance of empty dorms at colleges and universities, creating a $14 billion headache for the
student housing debt market.
"West Virginia State University, already hit with a 10% enrollment drop, plans to give
money to a school foundation so it can meet its bond covenants for residence hall debt. A
community college in Ohio is using part of a $1.5 million donation for a financially-strapped
student housing project. And officials at New Jersey City University, which serves largely
first-generation and lower-income students and has recorded years of deficits, are prepared
to shore up a dorm there," Bloomberg said.
The squeeze on university finances comes as the National Student Clearinghouse Research
Center
warned about a 16% drop in first-year undergraduate students enrolled for the fall
semester. This means new revenue streams are quickly drying up for overleveraged colleges and
universities.
"The limiting factor is some of these schools themselves are facing uncertainty with many
of their revenue streams," S&P Global Ratings analyst Amber Schafer said in an interview.
"It's a matter of not only willingness, but if they're able to support the project."
"Typically, privatized student housing debt is paid off by the revenue generated by the
dorms -- meaning there's little recourse for bondholders if things go south," Bloomberg said.
With occupancy rates already declining as coronavirus cases are surging, well, this could be
bad news for colleges and universities heading into 2021.
"Borrowers have begun revealing how empty residence halls are as the pandemic spurs many
campuses to keep classes online. According to the school foundation that sold the debt, West
Virginia State University's dorm is 71% full, putting it about 20 percentage points from
where it needs to be to satisfy debt covenants. Other privatized student housing projects,
like two on Howard University's campus, are virtually empty due to online-only instruction
there," Bloomberg said.
Bloomberg warns: "Privatized dorms are struggling the most given that they weren't
structured to withstand 20% to 30% drops in occupancy -- or no students at all."
"West Virginia State University may have to step in to help student housing bonds at risk
of violating a debt service coverage ratio, Moody's warned this month. The historically-black
college faces "considerable" challenges in backstopping the bonds, Moody's said.
The nearly 290-bed residence hall with rents of $3,881 per semester was just 71% occupied
this fall, while it needed to be about 92% occupied, said Patricia Schumann, president of the
university foundation that sold the debt. Schumann said the university is projected to
provide a $75,000 payment in January. In the meantime, she said the school was working to
bolster its financial position and boost recruitment and donations.
"We're not standing still," she said.
Ohio's Terra State Community College, which has more than 2,100 students, was downgraded
deeper into junk over the risk posed by a dorm owned by a nonprofit, given that the school
"appears to provide an unconditional guarantee" to meet the debt obligations, Moody's said.
The project was financed through a bank note.
The dorm's occupancy fell to 62%, and the college is using a previously-received donation
to cover a shortfall in project revenue amounting between $500,000 to $600,000, the ratings
company said in a report this month.
At New Jersey City University, a student housing project financed though a separate entity
will likely miss a required debt service coverage ratio. The public school having to step in
to help the bonds would be a challenge, but a surmountable one, said Jodi Bailey, the
university's associate vice president for student affairs. The student housing bonds aren't a
debt of the university, so the school would be choosing to provide financial support,
according to bond documents .
The school is working to cut expenses related to the dorm. "Is it a harder year? Most
definitely," she said.
The student housing bonds, issued by West Campus Housing LLC in 2015, were
slashed deeper into junk in September by S&P, which said in a report that residence halls'
occupancy there had fallen to 56% so the school could accommodate social-distancing
guidelines," said Bloomberg.
To summarize, plunging enrollments, resulting in falling occupancy rates for dorms, is a
debt bomb waiting to go off for many overleveraged colleges and universities that are panicking
at the moment to divert enough funds to service debts, as the usual revenue streams, that being
rent checks from students, are nowhere to be found as virtual learning keeps young adults in
their parents' basements and out of dorms.
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If occupancy rates continue to slide through 2021, then we must revisit what we said months
before the virus pandemic began in the US:
Not being American I decided to do some research as to whom is responsible for the health
response to COVID-19 in the US. The MSM and Democrats put the blame for the high death toll
squarely on
The Tenth Amendment states that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it
to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Meaning that: As University of Texas law professor Bobby Chesney has recently reminded us, the states
are independent entities within our system of federalism, not mere subordinate jurisdictions
of the national government. In areas reserved to the states, he says, the federal government
"cannot coerce the states into taking actions to suit federal policy preference."
https://www.google.co.za/amp/s/www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/03/25/trump-or-governors-whos-the-boss/amp/
What powers does the president have: As we have seen, the president can restrict international travel, harden the borders, and
invoke national emergency powers such as the Defense Production Act. Without federal
leadership, the states will have hard time coordinating their policies on the many aspects of
the current pandemic that cross state lines.
So the way understand it while the federal government can block overseas travel and
co-ordinate policy between states and increase production of essential medical equipment it
is up to the states to determine the response to COVID-19. If the states want to implement a
lockdown they can and if they want to make mask wearing mandatory they can. This applies too
to social distancing and other measures to prevent COVID-19. These measures are entirely the
prerogatives of the state and not the federal government.
Now at least 40% of the deaths have been elderly living in nursing/cares homes. This
interesting article takes a look at why that is:
Nursing homes were already struggling with infection control before the pandemic hit. A
Government Accountability Office report published in May found that more than 80 percent of
nursing homes were cited for infection-prevention deficiencies from 2013 to 2017. About half
of those homes had "persistent problems and were cited across multiple years." The report
describes, among other incidents, a New York nursing home where a respiratory infection had
sickened 38 residents. The home did not isolate or maintain a list of those who were sick,
and continued to let residents eat meals together. https://www.google.co.za/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/613855/
The nursing homes it seems to me are the responsibility of the state they are in. Meaning
that any COVID-19 prevention measures need to be taken by the state in which the homes are
based and not the federal government.
It was the governor of New York who forced nursing homes to accept COVID-19 positive
patients when they did not have the means to deal with this crisis as seen in the article
above. It is not surprising that COVID-19 spread like wildfire in these already poorly
maintained nursing homes. At least 6000 people died in nursing homes in New York and that
figure only includes those who died in the actual nursing homes. The governor of New York was
not the only one who did this. Michigan did the same and I think a few other states.
Take into account that when Trump did try and ban overseas travel from China he was
pilloried for it. Biden called him a xenophobic. Pelosi in late February was telling people
to join her for festivities in China Tiwn. De Blasio did the same. It is clear the Democratic
leadership did not take COVID-19 seriously at the beginning of the pandemic and neither did
many governors.
@ Down South #4 Not being American I decided to do some research . .
And you did your research perfectly, putting many Americans to shame IMO.
It is a fact that the USA is a republic of states, and a "state" back in those days was a
country. So the citizens who are blaming Trump for everything that goes wrong disregard the
simple facts that you present in your comment.
The president is an executive, executing the laws that Congress passes in those areas listed
in Article I, Section 8 -- "The Congress shall have Power To . ." and public health is not on
the list. The president should not be considered as an autocrat making decisions on
everythng. This is supposed to be a democracy.
Public health, like public education for example, is a function of the states, and they
failed us to a great extent. . . .good job!
That's too broad of a headline. The real question is under which conditions masks help and
under which they do not or can be harmful. For example in public transport I think they are
definitely useful as they prevent spreading of virus from an infected person to others. The same
is probably true for shops and other closed spaces.
But outside they are harmful and can be increase your chances of getting an infection.
One of the biggest questions in the world right now is whether the use of masks is
beneficial in preventing contracting the China coronavirus. A study attempted to do just that
but publishers will not take it on and are preventing it from being published. A large mask
study out of Denmark is complete but being delayed in publishing. Although the size of the
study and the study's design are well within the parameters of a solid study, publishers will
not take it on:
The purpose of the study was once and for all to try to clarify the extent to which the
use of masks in public space provides protection against the corona infection.
Advertisement - story continues below
One of the authors of the study is upset the study has not been published for peer review.
The world needs to know the results of the study and should be provided a chance to challenge
it and determine its viability:
Advertisement - story continues below
Alex Berenson shared that the study should be released – we need to know if wearing
masks is harmful:
We can guess right now why the study is not being published – because masks don't work
in preventing the spread of the China coronavirus and likely are harmful to your health.
After Dr. Anthony
Fauci gave an interview in which he claimed the White House was controlling his media
appearances, the president lashed out at him, even taking to comparing how each of them throws
a baseball.
"Dr.Tony Fauci says we don't allow him to do television, and yet I saw him last night on
@60Minutes," Trump tweeted on Monday, referencing the interview where Fauci made his claims
about being limited in who he can talk to.
"He seems to get more airtime than anybody since the late, great, Bob Hope," the
president added, referencing the late comedian known for his near-constant rotation on
television while he was alive.
Trump said he wants Fauci to "make better decisions" and claimed the original
strategy to defeat the pandemic suggested by Fauci was "no masks & let China
in."
... ... ...
In the campaign call, Trump reportedly called Fauci a "disaster" and said people are
tired of coronavirus and hearing from "Fauci and all these idiots."
While Fauci has been frequently criticized by conservatives for his support of lockdowns to
battle Covid-19, his popularity with Democrats has been growing. Presidential candidate Joe
Biden has said he would give Fauci the opportunity to continue working with the White House on
the pandemic if he won the election.
Thus, Democrats have not taken Trump's latest criticisms of the doctor all that well with
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and others targeting the president on social media.
"After deceptively using Dr. Fauci's words in a TV ad last week, now Trump is attacking
him as a 'disaster.' For what? For telling the truth. We all know who the disaster is here, Mr.
President. You," Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) tweeted .
Biden also released a statement condemning Trump's Fauci comments and claiming he is waving
the "white flag" on the pandemic.
garyo550 1 hour ago Some time ago-this year-Fauci
was outed as having endorsed, 15 years ago, Hydroxychlorquine as a drug that would kill AIDS,
Ebola, SARS and a legion of other bugs. What has changed? Filthy lucre is one reason touted.
During a conference call with campaign staff that White House reporters were bizarrely
allowed to listen in on, President Trump complained that "there's a bomb" every time Dr.
Anthony Fauci goes on television, which is most days.
This is far from the first time President Trump has complained about the good doctor. But it
might be the first time he's offered some direct commentary on exactly why he won't fire Dr.
Fauci, even as Trump seems to have moved on with a new COVID-19 advisor, Dr. Scott Atlas, who has
faced persecution by Big Tech for his views on how to approach COVID-19.
Though he conceded that the good doctor is "a nice guy" who has "been around for 500 years",
Trump said the problem with Dr. Fauci is that every time he goes on TV "there's a bomb", yet if
you fire him, "there's an even bigger bomb".
"People are saying whatever...just leave us alone. People are tired of COVID... People are
tired of hearing Fauci and these idiots, all these idiots who got it wrong...every time he goes
on television there's always a bomb, but there's a bigger bomb if you fire him. This guy's a
disaster."
With less than 3 weeks to go before election day, Trump also asserted that the American people
are moving on from COVID-19 as cases rebound, while hospitalizations are also starting to creep
higher. However, so far at least, deaths have been mostly subdued.
Confirming that he was speaking mostly off the cuff, Trump added after that if there was a
reporter on the call (he didn't seem to realize that multiple WH reporters were apparently
listening) they could report it "just how I said it."
"If there's a reporter on you can have it just the way I said it, I couldn't care less,"
Trump said.
The NYT also brought up an interview with Dr. Fauci on '60 Minutes' last night where the
doctor refuted Trump's claims that the end of the outbreak is just around the corner.
Trump also reportedly called an NYT article claiming Trump was becoming increasingly
dissatisfied with some of his aides - which followed Trump hinting that he might not bring back
AG Bill Barr if elected for a second term due to his inability to charge any of the FBI officials
involved with Operation Crossfire Hurricane despite the mountain of evidence suggesting some
skulduggery was afoot as the FBI tried to put together an "insurance policy" to protect the
nation from Trump.
"I love Mark Meadows," Trump reportedly said (the NYT report focused on frictions between the
president and his chief of staff).
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Finally, Trump also told staff that the Wall Street Journal - which is controlled by Rupert
Murdoch, who also owns and controls the New York Post, the paper the published the string of
damning reports about Hunter Biden's influence-peddling abroad - is working on "an important
story".
artvandalai , 5 hours ago
....If there's a reporter on you can have it just the way I said it, I couldn't care less,"
Trump said.
And that, my friends, is why Trump won the first time and will win again.
He was APPOINTED to lead Trump's Corona virus task force.
spqrusa , 3 hours ago
Trump did not appoint Fauci - Fauci is a permanent fixture in government protected from
firing by your know... "laws"
What a crock - the President HAS the Authority under the Constitution to FIRE ANYONE under
his command.
Les D , 3 hours ago
Yup, sure did, and too many others.
Wray, Barr, Bolton, Kelly, McMaster, Sessions, Tillerson, Cohn, Mattis, Kelly, Mooch,
Kiersten and her successor McAleenan; CIA Brennan lap dancer Haspel; promoted Rosenstein to 1st
Asst who then took over; Minarosa or whatever her name was.
Add who I'm forgetting. The worst performance of any president, brings in one snake after
another. Gorsuch will be the next one that becomes obvious. His first majority opinion sounded
the alarm. PT, Gorsuch said publicly Justice Kennedy, a 100% traitor turncoat, who he clerked
for and swore him in, was his Judicial Idol. Donald, duh?
Inept, inattentive, betrayed, too trusting--choose your analysis but his people decisions,
his favorite word: "A disaster".
BaNNeD oN THe RuN , 3 hours ago
@spqrusa
Correct, ultimately Dr. Fauci reports to the Director of the Department of Health &
Human Services and Trump could insist that he be fired.
"... and that sumbytch got fired."
Pig Circus , 4 hours ago
Love him or hate him The Trumpster tells it like it is. Most transparent President in
history.
My wife is in a bad way, is still on a ventilator and an IV drip, but her condition is
slowly improving. Her temperature is now normal.
Yesterday, a man from the Moscow health authority paid us a visit. He was dressed all in
white in hazmat gear from head to toe, wearing goggles and a proper medical hazard mask, not
a waste-of-time piece of paper "surgical mask.
He was here a long time. A very decent type of bloke he was. He spent ages filling out
medical forms for me, Vova, Lena and Sasha. He checked out our state medical insurance
policies and my passport and right of residence permit here as a foreign citizen. Having done
all of this paperwork, which business took over an hour -- we left him alone at my elder
daughter's writing desk in her room: I felt sorry for the poor bugger, for I thought he must
be sweating like a pig inside all that safety gear -- he then, having first taken all our
temperatures and pulse rates, stuck a swab on the end of a long stick up each of our
nostrils, and did a swab of our throats.
We then each had to sign 5 times our copious documents that he had completed for us.
We have to go to our local state polyclinic, which happens to be right next door to our
housing block, in a couple of days for the results.
Vova asked him if it was true that you can have covid yet show no symptoms: he said it was
and that's why we were being checked out because their mum was in hospital with covid.
I feel like crap: head aching all the time and my lungs have started wheezing. My
temperature is normal, however.
My lungs are partly buggered up in any case, as I have already long ago long described on
here, the result of chronic bronchitis, which is endemic in that place where I was raised,
and my previous occupation.
I went down with pneumonia here around 2001, I think, and the doctors here found a shadow
on one of the lobes of my lungs, which the bastards in the UK never thought worth mentioning
to me the last time I had a compulsory mineworker's lung X-ray in 1983.
My wife's friend Oksana has it as well; all the people I actually know who have it are in
Russia. Oksana (who lives in Dalnegorsk) said that she felt weak all the time, and lost her
sense of smell, which they tell me is a fairly common symptom. I think she is doing okay and
we are confident she will recover fully as most non-compromised people do. I'm rooting for
you and your family; take care of yourself.
Goodness, you don't sound too good and yet here you are posting impressive news every day.
I am in awe.
I have heard the same, that initial COVID-19 symptoms include loss of senses of smell and
taste, along with dry cough, fatigue and fever. Nausea and diarrhoea may be present.
Paraesthesia (pins and needles sensations in skin) and chilblains sensations in fingers and
toes have been reported as well.
Wishing your wife a comfortable and speedy recovery. Take care of yourselves and I wish
you all well.
I fear I have contracted coronavirus. I have just spent a night in semi-delirium. I am
cold. My limb extremities are very cold. I cannot keep warm in bed. I am shaking and feel
very weak. I have had to put on a sweater whilst in bed and a lambswool shawl. My head is
aching all the time and I nearly fall over when I try to get up and walk around. However, I
do not think I have a high temperature.
I expect you have, considering a family member with whom you have been in close contact
has it. You should probably notify the hospital if you have not already done so, as you may
have to be admitted. You are, by your own description, in a high-risk group, although even
people who are getting on a bit are at relatively low risk if they are otherwise in good
health. You walk everywhere and do not smoke or drink. Your immune system should be
relatively solid and maneuvering to do battle.
Your symptoms sound very much like a conventional fever, which surely you have had before.
It's no fun, but you have shaken it off in the past. That's not intended to downplay the
necessity to notify medical authorities.
I was almost certain I had already had it as well, but it would have been back in late
November/early December, long before there were any cases here. Still, for a transportation
worker who comes in contact daily with travelers from far-flung corners, it's possible. It
was the worst chest cold I have ever had; coughing hurt so badly that I would breathe in tiny
sips of air so as not to trigger a coughing response, which seemed to happen every time I
drew a deep breath. No fever, though, or headache.
Since there was no coronavirus panic then, I did not take any special precautions; the
Mate on the same ship also had it, and probably I either gave it to him or got it from him.
No other crew members were affected that I know of. No family members caught it. The Mate was
away from work for a day or two – in my case, the only day I was too sick to go to work
happened to be a day off, so I did not miss any work; the next day I felt well enough to
answer the call of duty, although still a bit ropy. After that, I recovered quickly and
completely.
It may not have been coronavirus, but it may have been. However, different regions
experience different mutations of the virus, and mine might be nothing like yours. Of course
I cannot give you advice as I am not a medical professional, but it seems to me you are doing
all you can do, and the correct measures you can take on your own against what sounds like a
fever minus the sweating, which you usually do not see until it is getting near breaking
anyway. Courage, and keep up your nourishment.
headache
warm forehead
chills
aching muscles
general feeling of weakness
sore eyes
loss of appetite
dehydration
swollen lymph nodes
Sounds like you have a fever – your body fights infection and ends up becoming too
cold. Try taking a hot shower / bath and Parecetomol to help your temperature normalise
It's also about the time you are supposed to get your winter flu jabs too. Normally I wear
a scarf and hat indoors to try and keep my temperature constants.
Like you lot, I think I've also had COVID-19 as I felt bad for a couple of weeks back in
March which is way, way longer than the usual two to three days.
Best wishes for a quick recovery to ME and Da Missus.
Eh, I cannot write properly today. This might be because the dog cat ikes fighting me. I
meant to write that When I have the flu or whatever I wrap up indoors. And have a very hot
curry.
Pneumonia is no fun, but it's not COVID. It will take more than pneumonia to kill an old
bastard like you. Drink a cup of cinnamon tea, and do 50 jumping jacks as penance.
Lemon, ginger and honey tea is good too if cinnamon tea is not to your taste. You need to
have lots of hot tea drinks and wafting the steam to your nose (but don't burn your hand or
your face) will help clear your nasal passages and make breathing easier.
Keep well and I hope the rest of the family is staying well too.
I woke up in the night feeling bad but by 6 a.m. my temperature was normal. I've been
taking the medication. Seems to be working. In the end, I conceded to my wife, after her
continuously nagging that I go to hospital. I told her I would cure myself at home, but she
doesn't want a 71-year-old geriatric with pneumonia in the flat with her children.
I was about to get ready to set off, when the local clinic phone with the results of the
coronavirus test that Vova, Lena, Sasha and I had undergone a few days ago.
Apart from Vova, we all have coronavirus. The clinic said we must not leave the flat and
that a doctor would visit us later today. As regards being hospitalized because of pneumonia,
the doctor who is going to visit us will decide.
Coronavirus does cause pneumonia as there are such things as viral pneumonia, or it can
weaken the lungs for bacteria to cause bacterial pneumonia. Please get some rest as there is
not much that can be done to cure a viral infection except rest (although in Russian and many
American hospitals they now give a steroid which lowers the immune system overresponse and
seems to work really well).
I highly doubt you are in a 'real' risk group, since you are too young, and also don't
drink and are not overweight, but please take it easy nonetheless. Coronavirus symptoms can
come and go and it can drastically increase the heart rate all of a sudden (because it can
get into the blood stream), so it's best to just lie in bed as much as possible to lower the
risk of cardiac problems and wait until your immune system makes antibodies.
Sobyanin has urged elderly Muscovites to stay at home because of coronavirus
12:28 25.09.2020
MOSCOW, September 25 – RIA Novosti. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has called on
elderly Muscovites and people with chronic diseases to change over to remote work or take a
vacation owing to to the coronavirus situation. The new rules will take effect on 28
September.
"Muscovites over 65 and younger citizens suffering from chronic diseases should not
leave the house or leave their garden plot without a special need for doing so. Please
temporarily refuse making contact with relatives and friends who live separately. Walking and
physical exercise in the fresh air is restricted", says the personal blog of the
mayor.
Yeah, well I'm not a Muscovite -- so bugger off!
They've told me and my 3 children to stay put in our flat.
The doctor has still not come though. When he does, I 'm sure he'll say there's no need to
go to hospital. My temperature is now normal .
In my CT analysis that I have now finally read from top to bottom, it says that
observations of my scan "may correspond to the manifestations of viral pneumonia".
It was, and she wasn't the least interested in me and told me so. I proffered her my CT
analysis and she said that she needed nothing off me, that she was a paediatrician and was
only interested in my children's health. So I said to her: "I'm a big kid really!"
She may not have understood me because because I said that to her in English.
And she thought I was their ancient grandpa as well, which always pisses me off.
She wasn't aware that Vova was getting ready to bugger off to the dacha for the weekend
with the delightful Anastasia, albeit he is supposedly confined to barracks as well. As soon
as she had left, he was away to the country with his girlfriend.
By the way, Vova is the only one in my family who has not been registered as
corona-positive. That must be because when he was in the Crimea for the first 11 days in
August, 3 days before he was due to return here, he fell ill and his temperature rocketed. he
had breathing difficulties and they took him to a coronavirus clinic in Sevastopol, from
where they sent him to a lung hospital in Balaclava. They gave him a CT scan there and said
he he had pneumonia and he needn't go into isolation and could fly back to Moscow. So he must
have immunity now.
Thousands of Britons who suffer heart attacks and strokes are dying at home instead of
seeking medical treatment, a new study has found, as new government figures show 75,000 are
projected to die as a result of lockdown measures.
Stay-at-home orders prompted countless people suffering from serious medical conditions to
avoid hospitals, according to the study's findings, which were published in the Heart medical
journal and first reported by the Daily Mail. The paper noted that deaths from heart disease in
private homes surged by 35 percent from March to July, resulting in 2,279 more fatalities on
average over the past six years. However, heart and stroke deaths in hospitals dropped by
around 1,400 during the same period, suggesting that some who chose to stay home would have
died anyway even if they had been hospitalized. The researchers calculated that in total, there
were 2,085 excess deaths in England and Wales that could be linked to heart attack and stroke
sufferers who refused to seek out medical treatment. This means that between March 2 and June
30, every day 17 people died needlessly from heart attacks.
Protests potentially nullified all potential positive effects from lookdown in large cities
like NYC, if such exist. So all economic damage was in vain and lockdown was just a capricious
and arbitrary move by ambitious and power hungry Dem politicians. And that fact alone make the
major on NYC and the governor on NY state look like completely politicized idiots.
If the crowd is dense, as often is the case in riots at places of confrontation with the
police cordon, it does not matter much if people are indoor or outdoor, what matters if the
length of the contact. Add to this that looting happens indoors.
...On Wednesday, Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh called out CNN's
hypocrisy on this matter, noting that "if people can protest in the streets by the tens of
thousands, if people can riot, if people can gamble in casinos, then certainly they can gather
peaceably under the First Amendment to hear from the president of the United States."
Butthurt from this exchange, CNN Newsroom drafted in "medical analyst" Leana Wen , who
happens to be a former Planned Parenthood president, to explain why science means COVID doesn't
affect BLM protests as much as Trump rallies.
"It does not care why it is that people are gathering but it does care about the conditions
under which they're gathering," Wen argued, adding "outdoors much safer than indoors and
wearing masks obviously much safer than not wearing masks."
"I would also in this case would distinguish between the behavior of the participants while
at protests versus rallies," she continued, arguing that BLM protesters are more "aware" of the
risks than Trump supporters.
"At protests many people are aware of the risks and doing everything they can to reduce that
risk versus at many of the rallies we are seeing people going in defiance," Wen claimed.
Testifying before the Senate Appropriations Committee Wednesday morning, CDC Director Robert
Redfield entered further into quack doctor territory, claiming that wearing a mask protects the
wearer against the novel coronavirus, even more so than a high-efficacy vaccine.
"These facemasks are the important, powerful public health tool we have," Redfield said,
while touching both sides of his mask and unconsciously contaminating it with his hands. "I
might even go so far as to say that this facemask is more guaranteed to protect me against
COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine," he added.
This appears to be another "scientific" evolution on masks from the "public health expert"
class. At first, we were advised not to wear masks. Then, the "my mask protects you. Your mask
protects me" mantra became the widely disseminated narrative. Now, masks apparently have the
incredible power of protecting the mask wearer from the virus.
In the February hearing, Redfield told Americans not to buy medical-grade
masks , saying there's "no role for these masks in the community."
There remains zero evidence that cloth masks or the earloop masks displayed by Redfield
helps to slow the spread of COVID-19 or protect the wearer from infection. No country in the
world has proven a link in slowing or stopping the spread due to mask wearing mandates, which
are in effect in countless nations.
Given the lack of demonstrated evidence supporting it, mask-wearing has become a cult-like religious
movement in the United States , one that relies on complete subservience to total
mysticism. Members of the mask movement frequently target Americans who engage in
non-compliance, likening these individuals to evil, plague-carrying menaces. Redfield's
testimony will only add fuel to the mask mania that is sowing discord in America.
In his testimony, Redfield added that a COVID vaccine probably won't be available to the
general public until
at least the second or third quarter of 2021.
"If you're asking me when is it going to be generally available to the American public, so
we can begin to take advantage of vaccine to get back to our regular life, I think we're
probably looking at third, late second quarter, third quarter 2021," he testified, adding
that first responders may have access to the vaccine before the end of the year.
Like many institutional bureaucracies in the federal government, the CDC has become plagued
with corruption and "woke" politics. A whistleblower recently revealed that the CDC was forcing
its staff to undergo "critical race theory" training.
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Under Redfield's leadership, the CDC dropped the ball on preparing Americans for the U.S.
coronavirus outbreak, as shown through
internal emails displaying the bureaucracy as an organizational mess.
* * *
Thanks for reading! I would be honored if you are willing to support my work and subscribe to The Mass
Illusion, my newsletter for people concerned about our "new normal."
American Thinker has run several articles like
this one about Dr. Anthony Fauci's political bias (which is his right). But the Miami
Herald published an article that was aimed at undermining President Trump , which actually
contains compelling evidence that Fauci's bias or ignorance is affecting what he is telling the
American people about Covid-19. In the article,
Dr. Fauci: 'I have to disagree' with Trump on coronavirus , the author writes:
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious diseases expert, disagreed on Friday with
President Donald Trump's assertion that the country is "rounding the corner" on the
coronavirus pandemic.
"I really do believe we're rounding the corner," Trump said
during a White House briefing on Thursday. He added that newweekly cases have gone down
by 44% since July.
"I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with that because if you look at the thing that you
just mentioned, the statistics, Andrea, they're disturbing,"
Fauci told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell on Friday.
"We're plateauing at around 40,000 cases a day and the deaths are around 1,000.
From his interview with Andrea Mitchell Friday, the Herald quotes Fauci as stating, "We're
plateauing at around 40,000 cases a day and the deaths are around 1,000."
In fact, he is very wrong : the average daily new cases for the past two weeks have been
31,411, dramatically less than Fauci's 40,000 number; and the average daily deaths for the past
two-weeks have been 697, a full 30% less than Fauci's 1,000.
More significant, do these graphs of weekly average new cases (blue graph) and deaths (red
graph) from Bloomberg look like we're "plateauing?"
Source: Bloomberg
Fauci has a right and obligation to express his views about the current situation and the
future risks, but he should not mislead the public about the facts.
"We've been through this before," he said. "Don't ever, ever underestimate the potential
of the pandemic. And don't try and look at the rosy side of things."
"I keep looking at that curve, and I get more depressed and more depressed about the fact
that we never really get down to the baseline that I'd like," he said.
EmmittFitzhume , 59 minutes ago
Deep State Fauci has to go. Perhaps to prison
GoldenDebt , 58 minutes ago
Dr FRAUDci is non stop lying and flip-flopping
SMSpiff , 42 minutes ago
It's safe to come out of your basement now, Joe.
Pope Innocent III , 37 minutes ago
The nature of the Fauci scam is the total intentional destruction of induction and
deduction.
Jerky Miester , 32 minutes ago
You've been ****ting up this board for 3 years 7 months, you little phaqqot. Time to get
out of the basement and earn an honest living....unless you make your bread and beer money
being a pro troll. KYS now.
NotAGenius , 39 minutes ago
This is the legal argument to indict Fauci on mass murder charges, justified but justice
no longer exists in the USA, written by a legal writer. These comments and Fauci's crimes
would convict Fauci of mass murder and sentence him to prison for life:
Zeroes want Fauci's head on a stick...but decry liberals who interfere with the free
speech rights of conservatives on college campuses.
Free speech or no free speech - which is it, Zeroes?
knopperz , 55 minutes ago
The flu vaccination is now 78 years around.
The flu is still there.
Next Stop --> 78 Years wearing a diaper in your face.
Get used to it suckers.
All those people pushing the Corona Narrative should be hanged by the Balls.
CheapBastard , 53 minutes ago
We are obviously rounding the corner with fewer cases and fewer deaths. Most businesses
trying to reopen. Fauci is political hack and was from the start. he's also totally
incompetent or a liar giving Americans completely wrong advice from the start. The MSM loves
him because he's anti-Trump.
2hangmen , 54 minutes ago
Fauci has been wrong since day 1 on Covid. He's done multiple 180s on policies, and the
fact this is NOT a deadly virus in comparison to all other virus outbreaks. He's still
playing politics and he's still making millions from Big Pharma and the Deep State. Fauci,
please say good bye, and ride off into the sunset with your ill gotten gains.
NotAGenius , 44 minutes ago
Trump can't fire Fauci. He is a career government employee. Trump gave him a platform in
the beginning. Trump has been right about Fauci now and mostly about this cold virus too,
advocating the best medicine possible for it - hcq - while Fauci prevented Americans from
getting this cheap commercial safe and effective medical treatment. Fauci has committed mass
murder by withholding a life-saving medicine from Americans. The FDA is criminal too, same
reason. FDA has also been paying hospitals $39,000 for every patient they kill with the fatal
ventilators, killing more than saving according to records. But the government wants more
deaths for bigger numbers. The American medical system is actually a genocidal organization
now, trying to kill as many Americans as possible in many different ways, many associated
with this medical fraud. Fauci should be imprisoned for life were any justice to exist in
America. At best, Trump can minimize and ignore him and arrange for him to have no venue to
spout b.s. and lies publicly. That's what we basically need: Fauci minimized if not
disappeared.
blueapples Staff , 33 minutes ago
Why would he ever fire the fall guy? If he fired him, you'd still have the push for
lockdowns, the policies based on flawed statistical models, and all the other nonsense.
Except then without a guy like Fauci to place blame on, the administrations role in this
becomes much more apparent.
It makes more sense to have a guy like Fauci on board to deflect to, especially given his
career as a government employee, so that it looks like there's some nefarious underlying
force that is working against the administration when the reality is that that nefarious
underlying force is working in tandem with it.
JaWS , 49 minutes ago
Damn the cases. I know about 10 people that have tested positive for covid19. Most cases
are not much more than a cold. Some not even that bad. Look at the deaths. That's where the
narrative should go. They are significantly down from the peak.
"Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious diseases expert ..."
I have to disagree with this.
SummerSausage , 36 minutes ago
If they left off the word "expert" it would be an accurate statement.
Bollixed , 6 minutes ago
Fauci is an expert. An 'ex' is a has-been and a 'spert' is a drip under pressure. He fits
the bill perfectly.
curtisw , 9 minutes ago
"Because I have a vaccine to peddle."
-- A. Fauci
scottyji , 19 minutes ago
FAUCI BELONGS IN PRISON.
Fauci's narcissisticly obsessed with his "expert image" and his lucrative role as pimp for
Big Pharma = total Napoleon Complex, two-faced, stinkin' bureaucrat of the Deep State.
Ergo I.C. , 28 minutes ago
Because Fauci and his buddy Bill Gates are trying peddle vaccines worth billions of
dollars.
adr , 39 minutes ago
Since Fauchi is supposedly an expert, maybe he can tell us why people suffering from hay
fever are being told they have Covid.
In our systematic review, we identified 10 RCTs that reported estimates of the
effectiveness of face masks in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza virus infections in
the community from literature published during 1946–July 27, 2018. In pooled analysis,
we found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks (RR
0.78, 95% CI 0.51–1.20; I 2 = 30%, p = 0.25)
Of the 29 studies analyzed by the Lancet meta-study, seven studies are unpublished and
non-peer-reviewed observational studies that should not be used to guide clinical practice
according to the medRxiv disclaimer (references 3, 4, 31, 36, 37, 40 and 70; see table
above).
Of the 29 studies considered by the meta-study, only four are about the SARS-CoV-2
virus ; the other 25 studies are about the SARS-1 virus or the MERS virus, both of which
have very different transmission characteristics: they were transmitted almost exclusively
by severely ill hospitalized patients and not by community transmission.
Of the four studies relating to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, two were misinterpreted by the
Lancet meta-study authors ( refs. 44 and 70 ), one is
inconclusive ( ref. 37 ),
and one is about N95 (FFP2) respirators and not about medical masks or cloth masks (see
detailed analysis below).
The Lancet meta-study is used to guide global facemask policy for the general
population. However, of the 29 studies considered by the meta-study, only three are
classified as relating to a non-health-care (i.e. community) setting . Of these three
studies, one is misclassified ( ref. 50 , relating to a
hospital environment), one showed no benefit of facemasks (
ref. 69 ), and one is a poorly designed retrospective study about SARS-1 in Beijing
based on telephone interviews ( ref. 74 ). None of these
studies refer to SARS-CoV-2.
The authors of the Lancet meta-study acknowledge that the certainty of the evidence
regarding facemasks is "low" as all of the studies are observational and none is a
randomized controlled trial (RCT). The WHO itself admitted that its updated facemask policy
guidelines were based not on new evidence but on "political lobbying" .
In view of these shortcomings, University of Toronto epidemiology professor Peter Jueni
called
the WHO study "methodologically flawed" and "essentially useless".
In the US state of Kansas , the 90 counties without mask mandates had lower coronavirus
infection rates than the 15 counties with mask mandates. To hide this fact, the Kansas
health department tried to
manipulate the official statistics and data presentation.
Consuelo , 36 minutes ago
Fauci has been torpedoed here --- even without his lying numbers (of cases & deaths).
With the actual non-LYING numbers, he should be stripped of his medical license and
prosecuted for gross negligence, even gross-er Incompetence, and for potential Criminal $Gain
off his rather cozy relationship with Big Pharma and Bill Gates...
This whole thing was a $SCAM of the highest order.
aelfheld , 34 minutes ago
Fauci's a bureaucrat.
Bureaucrats have unqualified immunity.
Everybodys All American , 43 minutes ago
During the Spanish Flu of 1918 no one as I can tell was advocating for everyone to be
vaccinated either for or against their will. That tells you everything about this Dr. Fauci
imo. He should be removed from the planet.
drstrangelove73 , 6 minutes ago
I've posted about Tony several times this year.I spent an academic quarter as a medical
student on his service at the NIH,then saw him again many times in the 80's when I returned
as a fellow.He is a lifelong democrat,and card carrying member of the deep state who has
played politics with the management of viral infections for 40 years.Let that sink in.He has
been the director of the same NIH institute for 40 years.No one else in the history of the institute has been a director
for half that long.You think he doesn't know
how to play the game? _arrow
asteroids , 14 minutes ago
How does Fauci explane Sweden? The number of new cases is very low. Their death rate is
almost zero. Sweden now has herd immunity without a vaccine.
Hyzer , 9 minutes ago
He pretends it doesn't exist, just like the MSM.
TannyDanner , 3 minutes ago
He's trusting the plebs won't do their own research. I'm looking at the data almost daily
and am beyond thankful that Sweden had the balls to go about it the way they did and not bow
down to the bullies.
legalize , 18 minutes ago
Fauci himself has said that asymptomatic cases are "not the driver of infection"
We keep measuring "cases" instead of symptomatic cases
Therefore, I could give **** all about "case numbers"; I want to know about number of
people who are infectious/symptomatic
Useful_Idiot714 , 35 minutes ago
700 mostly old people with other diseases are dying from this each day in a country of
325,000,000. Sounds like we need mail in voting so that the frightened commies can vote early
and often to save us by electing a senile racist rapist pedophile.
SummerSausage , 46 minutes ago
Panic is Fauci's objective.
Democrats love big government which means more power for Fauci, more taxes and less
freedom for you.
Robert Paulson , 30 minutes ago
Panic is too unpredictable, and disruptive.
The "hope" is for respectful, solemn acceptance that Big Brother/Sister can save "us" from
ill health, poverty and international "enemies."
I mean **** was broken across most institutions throughout Western Civilization before the
flu was weaponized into a means of control. But the whole theater has become absurd.
The casedemic is pure and blatant FUD targeted towards Trump and Americans.
JamcaicanMeAfraid , 27 minutes ago
I predict on November 4th and if Dementia Joe is elected Fauci and his super ego will
stand before any microphone put in fromt of him and say "Joe Biden has put a stop to covid,
he has conquered the virus."
aelfheld , 44 minutes ago
Fauci sees the statistics as disturbing because they indicate an endpoint to his
prominence.
JaWS , 51 minutes ago
There are 4 men in my county that were tested positive within about 3 days of each other
and they had to quarantine for 14 days. About a week into it they started meeting everyday
down at the local fishing hole to fish while no one else was around. One of these men is 80
years old. The other 3 are in their 70s. Does this sound like something to shut the entire
country down?
GoldenDebt , 1 hour ago
Dont be a moron
Dr Fraudci is all politics and he's LYING. Dr FRAUDci also never condemned the protests as
being potential SUPER-SPREADER events
He's a criminal
moneybots , 13 minutes ago
"I really do believe we're rounding the corner," Trump said
during a White House briefing on Thursday. He added that newweekly cases have gone down
by 44% since July.
"I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with that because if you look at the thing that you
just mentioned, the statistics, Andrea, they're disturbing," Fauci told Andrea Mitchell on
Friday.
The statistics say Trump is right, according to the chart. Why is Fauci lying to the
American people?
Thalamus , 45 minutes ago
Fauci's worst case prediction of 1.7 million deaths from Covid-19 kind of came up short at
only 10K; but at least he didn't yell fire in a crowded theater .
Zerogenous_Zone , 48 minutes ago
which statistics?
to quote the great Mark Twain (now classified by the leftists as a rassiss)...
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics ."
the one statistic that is relevant, is the decrease in mortality...
and I for one, would like to know how they created a Covid-19 specific test...wait...what
was that?
THEY HAVEN'T?! it is an antigen test...that is, if you have any residual from your LAST
flu shot (they inject you with lysed virus to build up your antibody count...antigens!) you
could test positive...
and probably a majority of the tests are at issue since the test is highly
inaccurate...
but who cares? the virus is out of the box and here to stay...so you have either already
been exposed, or you will soon be exposed...and NO vaccine will be sufficient (since viral
strains mutate almost immediately)...especially the comment cold (news flash!! the 'common
cold' is a CORONAVIRUS!!)
At what point does the man on the street realize that he has been had? It took me about 2
weeks, 6 months ago to realize what Fauci and his cronies were saying was nonsense. Smart
people that I know, took months to reach the same conclusion but many people are still buying
the disinfo.
Choomwagon Roof Hits , 3 hours ago
Once I started getting into the influenza-like-illness data and realized this was
spreading exponentially worldwide since at least November - there were probably millions or
tens of millions of people infected and recovered in the US by the time the first cases were
identified.
fackbankz , 3 hours ago
The scam just gets bigger and more absurd every week.
Wait until cold and flu season when people freak out over every little case of the
sniffles. Many will have forgotten completely that one year ago it was normal for people to
catch cold, and nobody worried about it.
Just when the fear starts to subside, and growing public skepticism seems to push governors
into opening, something predictable happens . The entire apparatus of mass media hops on some
new, super-scary headline designed to instill more Coronaphobia and extend the lockdowns yet
again.
It's a cycle that never stops. It comes back again and again.
A great example occurred this weekend. A poll appeared on Friday from the Kaiser Family
Foundation. It showed
that confidence in Anthony Fauci is evaporating along with support for lockdowns and mandatory
Covid vaccines.
The news barely made the headlines, and very quickly this was overshadowed by a scary new
claim: restaurants will give you Covid!
It's tailor-made for the mainstream press. The study is from the
CDC, which means: credible. And the thesis is easily digestible: those who test positive
for Covid are twice as likely as those who tested negative to have eaten at a restaurant.
"Eating and drinking on-site at locations that offer such options might be important risk
factors associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection," the study says.
Very scary!
Thus the implied conclusion: don't allow indoor dining! Otherwise Covid will spread like
wildfire!
After six months of this Corona Kabuki dance, driven by alarmist media and imposed by wacko,
power-abusing governors and mayors, I've become rather cynical about the whole enterprise, so I
mostly ignore the latest nonsense.
In this case, however, I decided to take a closer look simply because so many millions of
owners, workers, and customers have been treated so brutally in the "War on Restaurants."
It turns out, of course, that this is not what the study said. What's more interesting is to
consider exactly what's going on here. The study was based on interviews with 314 people who
had been tested of their own volition. It included 154 patients with positive test results and
160 control participants with negative test results.
The interviews took place two weeks following the tests, and they concerned life activities
two weeks prior to getting the test.
Before we go on here, remember that what alarmed people about Covid was the prospect of
dying. The study says nothing about this subject, nor about hospitalization. It's a fair
assumption that the positive cases being interviewed here got it (presumably, if the tests are
accurate, which they are not )
and got over it.
This alone is interesting simply because it reveals how much the whole subject has been
changed: the pandemic has become a casedemic.
Now, to the question of life activities. In the study, based on answers to a survey, the
following were not correlated in any significant degree with positive cases of Covid:
Wearing a mask or not wearing a mask
Going to church
Riding on public transportation
Attending large house parties
Going to the gym
Going to the office
Going to the hair salon
Going shopping
Now one might suppose, if you think the study has any merit, that this would be the
headline.
The massive power of the state has been deployed all over the United States and the world to
force the closure of churches, gyms, offices, salons, and malls. This all happened and is still
happening. Also mask mandates became the new normal. The public has been invited by health
authorities to jeer at, denounce, and turn in anyone who doesn't have a cloth strapped to his
or her face.
All of this happened in complete contradiction to every commercial right, property right, or
normal human freedoms. We threw it all away in the name of virus control. Our lives have been
completely upended and our assumptions about our rights and liberties have been overturned.
And yet here is a study that is unable to document any correlation between these life
activities and catching the disease.
That's an amazing conclusion that could have generated headlines like:
Salons Won't Get You Sick, CDC Reports
You Won't Catch Covid at the Gym, CDC Shows
No, Your Hairstylist Doesn't Spread the Coronavirus
Scared to Go Shopping? Don't Be, Says the CDC
Your Mask Is Pointless, New Study Says
Church Goers Shouldn't Fear Sickness, Scientists Reveal
Study: Your House Party Didn't Spread the Virus
And so on. But none of this was to be. Not one single story in the mainstream press said
anything like this, even though this was all implied by the CDC study.
The one place that the study revealed a positive correlation between positive cases and life
activities was going to restaurants.
So that's what got the alarmist headlines. Yes, these are all real.
And so on for thousands of times in every mainstream venue. They are all competing for
clicks in the great agenda of extending lockdowns and feeding public fear as much as possible.
So the worst-possible spin on this slightly sketchy study gets all the headlines.
Thus is it burned into many people's minds that restaurants are really disease-spreading
venues. Go out to eat and you might die!
And here is what makes this even stranger. The interviewers never asked the people in the
survey whether they were eating indoors or outdoors, as incredible as that seems. The authors
admit this:
"Of note, the question assessing dining at a restaurant did not distinguish between indoor
and outdoor options."
Why not? Did they just forget to ask? What's going on here?
Which is to say that even if the results are meaningful – and there's so much about
this study that is murky and error prone – they are practically useless for knowing what
to do about it. If there is no distinction between indoor and outdoor, all speculation about
ventilation or crowds or the presence of food and so on, is utterly pointless.
Without knowing that, we are at a loss to figure out any answer to the question of why and
what to do. Instead, the message comes down to: don't go out to eat.
Here is how bad the science has become. In the discussion, the authors write the
following:
"Direction, ventilation, and intensity of airflow might affect virus transmission, even if
social distancing measures and mask use are implemented according to current guidance. Masks
cannot be effectively worn while eating and drinking, whereas shopping and numerous other
indoor activities do not preclude mask use."
Here is what is weird: the study itself supports none of that paragraph.
The survey never asked about ventilation because the people who made the survey somehow
forgot to make a query concerning indoor vs. outdoor dining . As for masks, the study did in
fact ask respondents about mask wearing and the results showed no correlation between the
sickness and whether and to what extent people were wearing masks!
In other words, that paragraph in the discussion is contradicted in two places by the
authors' own study.
In addition, the authors themselves point to an intriguing issue: the people in the survey
might have biased their answers based on their personal knowledge of the test results.
Think about it this way. The people who had a positive Covid test are more likely to ask
themselves the great question: how did I get this? Going to restaurants is such a rare activity
these days that it stands out in one's mind. When the survey asked people if they had gone out
to eat, it is possible that the memory of the Covid positive person might be more likely to
blame the restaurant, whereas the Covid negative person might be more likely to have forgotten
the locale of every meal in the last 30 days.
In other words, the real result of the study might be: Covid patients are more likely to
scapegoat restaurants than gyms, churches, and salons.
Alas, none of these interesting considerations appear in the media-rendered version of this
study: panic and keep the lockdowns in place!
Lockdowns have become a conclusion in a desperate search for evidence. Imagine if you
undertook a study of C-positive vs. C-negative cases and asked the people if they mostly wear
lace-up or slip-on shoes. If you come up with some positive correlation, the CDC will publish
you and a media panic will ensue.
This is precisely where we've been for six solid months now. The media has become the
handmaiden of lockdown tyranny, blasting out simplistic versions of sketchy studies to keep the
panic going as long as possible. And the public, which is far too trusting of the media and its
capacity for rational and accurate reporting, eats it up.
For now. Once the dust settles on all of this, it seems highly likely that media science
reporting will lose credibility for a generation. It certainly deserves that fate.
"Cloth masks that are used to slow the spread of COVID-19 offer little protection
against wildfire smoke. They do not catch small particles found in wildfire smoke that
can harm your health."
Just checking if that's the same CDC.
LA_Goldbug , 3 hours ago
Wow !!!!!
Nice find :-)
honest injun , 3 hours ago
At what point does the man on the street realize that he has been had? It took me about
2 weeks, 6 months ago to realize what Fauci and his cronies were saying was nonsense. Smart
people that I know, took months to reach the same conclusion but many people are still
buying the disinfo.
Be it Resolved, the scientific community has overreacted to the threat of COVID-19 and the
data prove it...
Six months into a global pandemic and 63,000 scientific papers later, scientists and
medical researchers continue to be perplexed by COVID-19. There are many unknowns with the
virus, and one of the most controversial is how deadly it really is. Since the beginning of
the pandemic, leading health institutions such as the World Health Organization and the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have warned that COVID-19 is much more
dangerous than the seasonal flu and that, without expansive public health measures, millions
of people around the world could die from the virus.
But there are some in the scientific community who disagree. And they say they have the
data to prove it. Antibody testing of large population groups indicates that we could be
grossly underestimating the number of people who have been infected by the virus –
which means we are dramatically overestimating the death rate. Given these findings, they
question whether sweeping public health controls are the way to approach a possible second
wave of COVID-19 this autumn.
GUESTS
To understand the true prevalence of COVID-19 infections in the United States, Jay
Bhattacharya has recently undertaken several seroprevalence studies (the study of antibodies in
a population). You can read about his study of Santa Clara County in California
here and his study of 5,600 Major League Baseball employees
here .
Sten Vermund has published numerous scholarly studies on infectious diseases, which you can
view here
.
During the debate both Jay and Sten speak about COVID-19's "infection fatality rate" (IFR).
IFR is one of the most important characteristics of an infectious disease in determining its
severity. It is basically the ultimate measure of a disease's ability to cause death. You can
learn more about IFR and how it is estimated here
. In the debate, both Jay and Sten agree that the current estimates of the COVID-19 infection
fatality rates are overestimated and therefore misleading. To learn more, read Jay's Wall Street
Journal op ed.
During the debate, Sten points out that between March and May of 2020 there was a 19 per
cent excess death rate in the United States. Excess death rates refer to
the difference between the observed numbers of deaths in specific time period and expected
number of deaths in the same time period. According to Sten, the excess rates are probably 28
per cent higher than the official deaths tally of COVID-19 because so many cases are not
reported. This
Nature.com article supports this view.
Jay argues that part of the science community's overreaction to COVID-19 has been censorship
of unpopular scientific views . Jay refers to an op ed in the New York Times by
Michael Eisen that expresses concern about how scientific study pre-prints are being
released before they are peer reviewed, and calling for the establishment of a scientific
"rapid review" service for pre-prints.
One of the scientists Jay identifies as having an unorthodox view on COVID-19 is Gabriela
Gomez, She speaks about her research on herd immunity occurring when as little as ten percent
of the population has been infected with the virus here
and you can read her research article
here .
Sten and Jay disagree with each other about the feasibility of isolating the most vulnerable
members of society, particularly the elderly, while letting the rest of the population continue
to live normally . Sten refers to a
New York Times article by David Katz which supports the strategy of "vertical
interdiction", where those over 60 are "preferentially protected."
Jay refers to the recent release of findings from a
Public Health England study that found negligible spread among one million students who
returned to school in June.
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From comments: "Article is poorly written by someone who does not know medical science. There
are no viral "cells" so the headline is a put off right away. The comment about "sensitivity" is
misplaced as PCR tests are too sensitive: ergo false positives. I believe "specificity" is the
word the author was searching for. If a test lumps true positives with false positives, then it
lacks specificity."
That's because new research from the University of Oxford's Center for Evidence-Based
Medicine and the University of the West of England has found that the swab-based technique used
for most COVID-19 testing is at risk of returning "false positives" since copies of the virus's
RNA detected by the tests might simply be dead, inactive material from a weeks-old infection.
Although patients infected with COVID-19 are typically only infectious for a week or less,
tests can be triggered by virus genetic material left over from a weeks-old infection.
The team's research involved analyzing 25 studies on the widely used polymerase chain
reaction test. PCR tests use material collected with a swab - the most common type of test
around the world, and especially in the US - then utilize a "genetic photocopying" technique
that allows scientists to magnify the small sample of genetic material collected, which they
can then analyze for signs of viral RNA.
What the researchers here have effectively found is that these PCR tests just aren't
sensitive enough to distinguish if the viral material is active and infectious, or dead and
inert.
For those who desire a more comprehensive understanding of how these tests work, the chart
below can be helpful.
Professor Carl Heneghan, one of the authors of the study, said there was a risk that a surge
in testing across the UK was increasing the risk of this sample contamination occurring and it
may explain why the number of Covid-19 cases is rising but the number of deaths is static.
"Evidence is mounting that a good proportion of 'new' mild cases and people re-testing
positives after quarantine or discharge from hospital are not infectious, but are simply
clearing harmless virus particles which their immune system has efficiently dealt with," he
told the Spectator.
Professor Heneghan added that international scrutiny might be required to avoid "the dangers
of isolating non-infectious people or whole communities." ZKnight 14 minutes ago
Fake science. How about purify the virus first and establish a gold standard for testing
first. No, of course not because the CDC has a patent for Covid-19 and nobody is allowed to try
find it to see if it exists. play_arrow LogicFusion 27 minutes ago
Everybody is a Covid-19 / Coronavirus expert now!
Read about the failed coin dealer and convicted felon's performance. It's hilarious!
Covid -19 has been so politicized that I don't believe a word of any publication for or
against testing, existence of the Virus, or anything that provokes testing or issues opinions
about locking down communities. Just like the riots, Covid news is just plain boring.
play_arrow ominous 3 hours ago
"Give me control of a nation's money, and I care not who makes the laws" - Mayer Amschel
Rothschild. play_arrow play_arrow tangent 4 hours ago remove link
People who recommend a vaccine for an entirely cured virus should lose their license to
practice medicine. 99.9% cure rate applying to people who take it before being hospitalized is
one of the biggest success stories in the history of medicine for HCQ. Not only that, but there
are multiple other likely cures that simply have not been studied well. You'd think people
would appreciate the fact that the common cold has been cured, but instead they just whine that
big pharma isn't getting those bucko bucks.
I honestly expected a ticker tape parade like in the movies when that first cure study came
out. But instead they took a massive **** on the study and on the doctor... ****ty world we
live in. ay_arrow Pair Of Dimes Shift 2 hours ago
An exec (55+) at my company is gung ho about the vaccine.
Unfortunately, I just had to give him a "wait and see" response although I know vaccines for
coronaviruses are impossible. play_arrow 2 play_arrow ThanksIwillHaveAnother 4 hours ago
(Edited)
Viruses are not full cells. They are DNA/RNA wrapped with a protein the clings to a cell
then the cell imports the DNA/RNA to start making its proteins. So what is inactive? If that
person sneezes on another person depending on immune system status that other person could get
a bad infection. y_arrow 4 CrabbyR 3 hours ago
viruses utilizes CELL structures and host DNA to replicate dna or rna according to the
viruses genetic code, the protein jacket is the final product to
disguise the virus from detection and to bind on another cell after the compromised cell
RUPTURES, there's more to it but if it cannot copy itself effectively it can become nonviable
and unable to infect another cell. It replicates DNA inside a host cell, It is not a complete
organism and cannot replicate unless it can inject its DNA into a host cell. Antibodies cling
to viruses and destroy this ability to bind to a target cell. A non viable virus has a damaged
coat or DNA RNA that has to many Dimers (damage or code breaks) Bacteria is more in line with
what you think a virus is y_arrow onewayticket2 4 hours ago (Edited) remove link
they lost me when they changed the definition of "death" to include "presumed, untested"
cases (while bI@#$% ing at me that we needed to "follow the science")....and even got busted
for the laughable motorcycle accident being classified as a covid death and the Labs that were
sending in 100% positive results. (until they were caught) play_arrow OutaTime43 4 hours ago
remove link
The test detects RNA. Not necessarily viable virus. Also, it will detect RNA presence in an
individual who may already have antibodies and may be immune. We are bombarded daily by viruses
of which we already have immunity. play_arrow sun tzu 10 hours ago
Shocking news that the South Koreans already discovered and published back in May. Western
big pharma driven medicine is garbage 😂😂😂
Interesting play_arrow play_arrow Jack Mehoff 1 more time 9 hours ago
Business as usual play_arrow play_arrow Argon1 7 hours ago
Preparation for agenda 2021 in 2017. play_arrow 1 play_arrow CrabbyR 4 hours ago
WOW.......ties a few strands from other sources together into a real ugly picture play_arrow
play_arrow Welsh Bard 10 hours ago
The professor who won the Nobel prize for work in this field, said that the way this test is
being operated with over forty cycles, means that any results are entirely meaningless.
In Britain, having spent over £15 billion setting up PCR testing systems and a shaky
test and trace apparatus on top of that, it appears that 90% of positive results now appear to
be false. This is compounded by the fact that when a hot spot develops, more testing is done to
show a rapid increase in more false positive results, meaning further new lockdowns and even
more testing to prove yet more false positive results ad infinitum.
Now whether this is by design or ineptitude, people must decide for themselves but the
outcome is utter chaos.
For those countries who have not followed the Swedish model especially countries like
Australia and New Zealand who have set up complete isolation, now face a future perpetually cut
off from the rest of the world.
Okay, new techniques will and are coming along to treat the disease like HCQ when used
correctly maybe as a prophylactic and a vaccine that will need to be constantly upgraded like
the Flu vaccine, means that the whole world has painted itself into a corner unless drastic
revision is now made to the whole sorry mess.
In the meantime, we will now be stuck with digital currency and the introduction of ID
Health Cards that will limit people in how they travel where they work and access to a whole
heap of things like government services.
Welcome to the new world order! play_arrow 1 KuriousKat 11 hours ago (Edited) remove
link
Don't tell the Shameless Aussie gov that after arresting hundreds for simply voicing doubt
on need to lockdown entire city...Next time it will be thousands and not a damn thing they can
do to stop it..These people are trickling us the truth how worthless the tests are when pretty
much everyone knows. play_arrow espirit 12 hours ago remove link
Lessee.
WHO
Imperial College
John Hopkins
CDC
Line all those peeps up against the wall, and the first one to rat gets to live.
I'll provide my own ammo... ay_arrow Sick Monkey 6 hours ago
Not everyone working in these agencies are dishonest but like you and I we have to work and
eat.
Most of them are trapped in this mess with bills to pay threatened by NDA.
play_arrow 1 Urban Roman 12 hours ago
Not particularly new news. Been talked about since April at least -- it's an RNA virus, it
has its own polymerase, and it leaves lots of RNA fragments in its wake.
The Corona family of viruses make 5 or 6 strands with partial copies of their RNA molecule.
negative copies are made first, and then copied again into positive copies. Finally the one big
RNA is made with the entire genome on it.
So about a dozen RNA molecules are made for each finished virus particle that is produced.
And finally, a variety of different primers are used for the PCR tests, some are matched to the
small partial RNA copies and others are matched to various features on the large whole-virus
RNA. They can give different results for the same sample.
So, someone who registers on a PCR test has probably been exposed to the virus, but the test
gives no clue as to whether it is an active infection, or the person is contagious, or they are
just coming down with it, or they got over it six months ago. play_arrow 4 play_arrow 1
10 play_arrow gordo 12 hours ago remove link
Sweden, no masks, no lock downs, ALL SCHOOLS OPEN, herd immunity, no second wave.
Still think your masks and lock downs are working muppets?
1 play_arrow The 3rd Dimentia 13 hours ago
https://youtu.be/sjYvitCeMPc
SARS-CoV2 and the Rise of Medical Technocracy. Lee Merritt, M.D. play_arrow 3 play_arrow
hugin-o-munin 13 hours ago
I'm glad to see that many are starting to counter the official narrative.
We've been asleep for too long and allowed these agendas to fester to the point we're at now
where a college dropout software salesman and a former 3rd world communist terrorist (neither
of whom have any medical degree) are dictating to the world how everyone needs to get a DNA
altering vaccine and a medical ID. It's completely nuts and bonkers yet more or less the entire
planet's governments follow in 'lockstep' with ever more draconian laws and regulations
incarcerating people in their own homes, making them wear masks causing oxygen deprivation and
shutting down the entire world economy.
lay_arrow Warthog777 , 13 hours ago
Article is poorly written by someone who does not know medical science. There are no viral
"cells" so the headline is a put off right away. The comment about "sensitivity" is misplaced
as PCR tests are too sensitive: ergo false positives. I believe "specificity" is the word the
author was searching for. If a test lumps true positives with false positives, then it lacks
specificity.
Anyone who would use the term "virus cells", has no clue what they're talking about and
should be completely disregarded. Viruses are not cells. PCR tests are searching for
something your body produces in response to a virus as well. They are not produced
specifically for a singular virus either. The entire concept of PCR testing is garbage. This
**** was a scam from the get-go.
hugin-o-munin , 13 hours ago
Yes it is evident now that this entire pandemic is false and political. The goal seems to
be to vaccinate entire populations and the question people need to ask is - why? what for?
Aside from the obvious economic motives there are some more sinister plans that most people
will have a hard time accepting but these need to be looked at. Several years ago there were
a group of doctors and researchers that died of suspicious suicides who were collaborating
and studying vaccines and the link to autism.
The effort was led by Dr.Jeffrey Bradstreet who was researching the natural substance
GcMAF and how this could boost the immune system. What he discovered was that many vaccines
had a compound/substance called Nagalase in them that is unnatural and has a detrimental
effect on the immune system and function of GcMAF (which is produced by our own bodies) and
has no business at all being in vaccines. Just before he was able to blow the whistle on this
he also died of a suspicious 'suicide' and today most of the clinics and research groups
working on GcMAF have been destroyed and ruined. Draw your own conclusions.
snblitz , 14 hours ago
Dr. Kary Mullis invented the PCR test. He said it was ineffective for this purpose.
Though he was addressing its use in a prior virus hoax unleashed upon the world.
I bet you didn't know this scam has been used before.
That is why I was able to call out the scam right from the start. The second I saw them
using the PCR again, I knew it was from the same playbook.
snblitz , 14 hours ago
So many lies.
Viruses are not alive. They have no metabolic functions. They cannot move.
Don't believe me? Get a degree is virology or microbiology or just a read a book on the
subject. Or capture a wuhan-virus yourself and watch it under a microscope. It won't move. It
won't consume anything. It will just sit there inert.
The problem is that you are being lied to at a scale you cannot imagine.
I know, off to the fema re-education camp for me for spreading false information about the
wuhan-virus.
Though I am not the one spreading fear and hysteria.
aldousd , 13 hours ago
There article is confused, but the work of the doctor is not. Viruses use your cells to
reproduce. When your immune system targets the virus it actually kills your own cell which
has become host to the virus. The virus particles and markers, and the DNA of the virus can
be detected in these dead cells, but dead cells cannot serve as a factory for more viruses.
So it's effectively a dead virus infected cell. Not a dead virus cell.
So while the transcription of the idea here was done by an idiot, it's not an idiotic
idea. The tests cannot tell if the virus came in a living cell that is actively producing
more viruses or a dead host cell that has been assassinated by your immune system. That's
what they're talking about here.
mstyle , 11 hours ago
what about the chromosome 8 stuff that has been mentioned lately?
(since you appear to be rather intelligent)
hugin-o-munin , 11 hours ago
Thanks. Well the chromosome 8 discovery in the PCR test specifications/details is strange
and worrying because it makes you wonder why it's part of this at all. Some believe it's to
get more false positive results while others believe it is what the mRNA vaccines are
intended to target and if that's right then it's really sinister. What exactly is the plan?
To make all of us get Downs Syndrome? I don't know but judging by all their other lies and
schemes it wouldn't surprise me.
IRC162 , 14 hours ago
Fuggin progressives and their pandemic political prop. But really this reaction is the
same as their reaction to 'racial injustice'. They focus on feelings before the facts are
known in order to achieve their end, and then do their best to bury/ignore the facts when
they are gathered later.
94% COVID deaths with multiple comorbidities.
10 unarmed blacks killed by police in 2019 (6 were in self-defense).
adr , 15 hours ago
Why didn't you mention that nearly all labs are running 35-40 cycles which guarantees a
positive test, simply from noise.
The inventor of the test said if you don't find anything after 15 cycles, it probably
isn't there. After 20 cycles the noise starts to be greater than any real information. By 30,
the test is mostly noise. More than 35, the test is completely worthless.
Of course I've been saying this for five months, but most people didn't listen. After the
NYT article came out, people I know started saying, "How did you know?"
I said, "Because I have critical thinking skills. Why didn't you believe me? Name a time
I've steered you wrong."
Antiduck , 14 hours ago
333 labs in florida had 100% positivity. (stupid word.)
ZenStick , 12 hours ago
Exactly correct.
Nobody will touch this line of reasoning in public or on media.
Bastages.
Identify as Ferengi , 15 hours ago
See above, Born2Bwired.
The PCR test is not useful for what they are using it for apparently. This has been
known since the beginning. Here is quote regarding AIDS:
"Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in Science for inventing the PCR, is thoroughly
convinced that HIV is not the cause of "AIDS". With regard to the viral load tests, which
attempt to use PCR for counting viruses, Mullis has stated: "Quantitative PCR is an
oxymoron." PCR is intended to identify substances qualitatively, but by its very nature is
unsuited for estimating numbers. Although there is a common misimpression that the viral
load tests actually count the number of viruses in the blood, these tests cannot detect
free, infectious viruses at all; they can only detect proteins that are believed, in some
cases wrongly, to be unique to HIV. The tests can detect genetic sequences of viruses, but
not viruses themselves.
What PCR does is to select a genetic sequence and then amplify it enormously. It can
accomplish the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack; it can amplify that needle
into a haystack. Like an electronically amplified antenna, PCR greatly amplifies the
signal, but it also greatly amplifies the noise. Since the amplification is exponential,
the slightest error in measurement, the slightest contamination, can result in errors of
many orders of magnitude."
In six or twelve months a majority of people will start to get that they were had. It will
be too late.
afronaut , 15 hours ago
Doubt it. Unless the media or government says it
palmereldritch , 14 hours ago
There will be mask wearing long before then for totally different reasons.
mstyle , 11 hours ago
There's a rather large percentage of the US population that's going to die with a mask on
their face, a BLM sign in their yard, and a Lemon on their screen.
Sad :-(
_wayfarer , 9 hours ago
They were had with 9/11, never got it.
Salisarsims , 5 hours ago
Most of the United States where had by 9/11, and still are.
BlueGreen , 15 hours ago
End lockdowns around the world now! Lockdowns kill. Never again. Sweden's death rate is
lower than US, and many other countries.
Gaedamfukn democrap virus. Botox face carcinogenic hair dyed fossilized demented nasty
wicked witch of the west ... and her army of flying monkey stooge guvners and mayors keeping
their states shut down to oust Orange Julius and they could give two diarrhea schitz about
you and your family All these terds care about is power
NoDebt , 15 hours ago
It's not just that the (government) response to this virus has ****** a lot of people
royally, it's the absolute certainty that they will do it again in exactly the same manner,
pretty much every damned year moving forward forever.
MaF , 15 hours ago
In many blue states they can do it until 2022 when they are voted out...unless the people
rise up.
drendebe10 , 15 hours ago
Sheeple rise up? Phat phukn chance
PaulDF , 15 hours ago
Hey, some people think that as long as Trump is gone ~ it doesn't matter what it takes.
Nothing is too extreme.
palmereldritch , 14 hours ago
The MS-DOS virus subscription model.
Sound familiar? lay_arrow
Implied Violins , 15 hours ago
The Nobel Prize winner, Kary Mullis, who developed the PCR test called out Fraudci for his
******** during the AIDS crisis on Nightline back in 1994:
Even then that ******* was practicing fraud in order to garner more tax dollars. His
"test" ruined hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives.
Fraudci deserves to be EXECUTED for his BS.
EuroPox , 16 hours ago
Who cares how many 'cases' there are? The virus is not lethal except for a tiny number of
people, who already have other problems. Quarantine them and let the rest of us get on with
it.
"... Meanwhile, as politicians forced lockdowns, the city's restaurants and shops went dark, along with theaters, museums, stadiums, and the other organisms that made up the city's rich ecosystem of daily life. ..."
"... The prospect of midtown perhaps permanently abandoned by office workers made an eventual return to normality even less plausible. After four months of virus, the June riots and looting that followed the horrific death of George Floyd sealed the deal, with the luxury stores on Fifth Avenue smashed up and burgled. Who would reopen such a business when riots and looting could break out over a fresh pretext at any time? ..."
"... All of that completely changed the business model for the owners of skyscrapers -- whole floors going empty and now the ground-floor businesses shut down, too. These buildings, with their massive maintenance costs, no longer produced enough revenue to operate them. ..."
"... The situation also harmed the condominium model for residential towers. Without the ground-floor rents, the homeowner's associations would have to steeply raise the monthly maintenance fees for each apartment owner, while significantly lowering each unit's resale value if the owner had to move out. All of this would thunder through the banks and REITs (real estate investment trusts) which owned and managed many of these properties, and ultimately through the city's dwindling treasury coffers. ..."
"... Many like to believe that office towers can be easily converted to apartments. That's just not true. Apart from purely physical issues, like the layout of plumbing stacks, the coming scarcity of capital will obviate these ventures, and, anyway, tower apartments only exist because they're companions to office towers, which may now be permanently obsolete. ..."
"... The pre-virus 21st century New York was a grandiose product of the financialization of the economy, including the global money-laundering orgy that incentivized the luxury condo tower building boom. That's over too. With so many other legacy economic activities flickering out, Wall Street was all that remained. All that held up Wall Street's stock and bond markets was "liquidity" (i.e. money in figment form) prestidigitated by the Federal Reserve. And now even Wall Street had little incentive for maintaining its headquarters on Wall Street, with its wealthy denizens trading and finagling via the Internet from comfortable perches in the Hamptons and the Connecticut hinterlands. ..."
"... For the moment, a lot of former city people are seeking refuge in the suburbs. That will prove to be a bad choice. The suburbs, too, are headed for trouble -- and I'll take that up in next month's commentary. ..."
"... Wow, there's like no facts in this article. Dense living is actually cheaper than sprawl. You need significantly less infrastructure to supporter tall buildings than you do for the same square footage spread out over acres. ..."
"... Less heating and cooling is needed as well since the building have smaller surface areas (1 roof and 1 ground touching floor compared to 50 roofs and floors for a 50 story building). The writer works in a low margin, low innovation industry. Major cities dominate the high innovation industries, that will continue. ..."
"... Higher population density means there are more people to tax to pay for infrastructure maintenance. I've read about suburbs that are struggling to pay for essential maintenance. ..."
"... These are awfully big conclusions to be drawing from not quite six months of crisis: NYC is making progress on reopening, helped considerably by widespread (though not perfect) adoption of the basic public prevention methods. Restaurants have taken a hit, but the survivors are investing in outdoor spaces, which are being enthusiastically patronized. Museums are reopening (Met this week, others in the next four or five weeks). People are starting to see their friends in person again. ..."
"... Cities make it effective for industries that thrive on collaboration AND competition. I work for a software company that works with other software companies (and competes with). Apple and Google both collaborate with hundreds of companies near them. Really thousands. ..."
"... What makes cities disappear is the breakdown and disintergration of the state-order. For example, many cities went into a major decline after the fall of the Western half of the Roman empire. ..."
"... Depending on the definition of "mega-city", I'm not sure its age ever arrived. A town only needs a population of five thousand to qualify as "urban" - when I was growing up, it was half that - which means much of the urban population consists of small towns. ..."
Urban life has always been about the concentration of life and work, but it doesn't have to
be at the colossal scale.
In just a few months, New York City became the poster-child for what's shaping up to be a
staggering transformation of the American urban scene. Our giant metroplex cities are set to
contract and go broke in the years ahead. The trend was already clear before Covid-19 came on
the scene, but the virus accelerated the complex dynamics behind it. Of course, most of our
cities occupy important geographic sites, so something will remain; but they will be smaller
and increasingly troubled places as the agonizing process plays out. And eventually, they may
be better places, in a different way.
The short version of the story is that our biggest cities have exceeded the viable scale of
their operation as we enter an era of resource and capital scarcities that will inescapably
shrink economies. Their infrastructure is too complex and costly to maintain. The skyscrapers
and megastructures that were built to accommodate a particular way of organizing work have very
suddenly gone obsolete. The cities face default on their ruinous debt obligations and pension
promises. Social and ethnic conflict has turned ugly, and both life and property are at risk as
public order founders.
By May 2020, The New York Times reported that 420,000 residents had fled America's
largest city, not a few of them permanently (my literary agent among them, whose pre-virus life
revolved around eating lunch with editors every day). The wealthiest neighborhoods were the
biggest losers -- and they were the city's leading taxpayers. Of course, the initial impetus
for flight was fear of catching Covid-19 in an environment densely packed with people. But as
corporate offices shuttered, many of these refugees performed their work duties at home over
the Internet, and it dawned on the corporations that perhaps it was a waste to lease expensive,
high-status headquarters in Manhattan. The iconic Time-Life Building at 1271 Sixth Avenue had
accommodated 8,000 workers before Covid-19. In mid-summer 2020, 500 people were showing up
there.
Meanwhile, as politicians forced lockdowns, the city's restaurants and shops went dark,
along with theaters, museums, stadiums, and the other organisms that made up the city's rich
ecosystem of daily life.
The prospect of midtown perhaps permanently abandoned by office workers made an eventual
return to normality even less plausible. After four months of virus, the June riots and looting
that followed the horrific death of George Floyd sealed the deal, with the luxury stores on
Fifth Avenue smashed up and burgled. Who would reopen such a business when riots and looting
could break out over a fresh pretext at any time?
All of that completely changed the business model for the owners of skyscrapers -- whole
floors going empty and now the ground-floor businesses shut down, too. These buildings, with
their massive maintenance costs, no longer produced enough revenue to operate them.
Overnight, they were transformed from assets to liabilities.
The situation also harmed the condominium model for residential towers. Without the
ground-floor rents, the homeowner's associations would have to steeply raise the monthly
maintenance fees for each apartment owner, while significantly lowering each unit's resale
value if the owner had to move out. All of this would thunder through the banks and REITs (real
estate investment trusts) which owned and managed many of these properties, and ultimately
through the city's dwindling treasury coffers.
Many like to believe that office towers can be easily converted to apartments. That's
just not true. Apart from purely physical issues, like the layout of plumbing stacks, the
coming scarcity of capital will obviate these ventures, and, anyway, tower apartments only
exist because they're companions to office towers, which may now be permanently obsolete.
The age of giantism is over. Cities are certainly about the concentration of life and work, but
it doesn't have to be at the colossal scale. For many centuries it wasn't.
The pre-virus 21st century New York was a grandiose product of the financialization of
the economy, including the global money-laundering orgy that incentivized the luxury condo
tower building boom. That's over too. With so many other legacy economic activities flickering
out, Wall Street was all that remained. All that held up Wall Street's stock and bond markets
was "liquidity" (i.e. money in figment form) prestidigitated by the Federal Reserve. And now
even Wall Street had little incentive for maintaining its headquarters on Wall Street,
with its wealthy denizens trading and finagling via the Internet from comfortable perches in
the Hamptons and the Connecticut hinterlands.
All American cities are not the same, of course, and they will get to downscaling in their
own special way, subject to different combinations of forces. For instance, Sunbelt cities like
Atlanta, Miami, and Dallas are mostly composed of low-rise buildings. But they owe their
stupendous growth since 1950 to the phenomenon of universal air-conditioning and mass motoring,
both of which will prove to be extraordinary short-lived luxuries of the cheap fossil fuel age.
Los Angeles will be challenged by ethnic friction, water problems, and its extreme car
dependency (and you can forget about solving that with electric cars). All the cities will be
plagued by an epic loss of tax revenue and the failure of government to maintain essential
services.
The foregoing suggests epic demographic shifts. People will be on the move -- they already
are -- as the cities decant. If the current political mood is any index of things to come,
those movements will occur against the background of considerable disorder. That has already
begun, too, in the summer of 2020 as looting, burning, and anarchy spread from one place to
another. For the moment, a lot of former city people are seeking refuge in the suburbs.
That will prove to be a bad choice. The suburbs, too, are headed for trouble -- and I'll take
that up in next month's commentary.
About 15 years ago, I started telecommuting several days a week. Our employer, the National
Institutes of Health, even provided PCs and subsidized our ISP fees. That started me wondering
why businesses kept building office buildings when it would be less costly to work from home.
NIH likely got more work out of me because I did not have to drive to lunch, and time
telecommuting was often spent working. Even before telecommuting, Skype meetings were at least
a weekly occurrence as we had projects in foreign countries, and professional activities
included collaboration with overseas colleagues across the US.
The best answer I could come up with I derived from my years of organizational surveys for
FAA and the White House. Most supervisors opposed telework because they had no metrics to
ensure people were not slacking off. This struck me as odd, because slacking off would be
readily apparent in a drop off in productivity, or increasing customer complaints, or even
co-worker complaints. Those are crappy metrics, but they are better than nothing - yet bosses
wanted to visually count noses.
Of course, there were other signs that office buildings were going obsolete. For example,
Chicago started renaming the iconic John Hancock building and the Sears Tower. Something was
not right. The pandemic merely hastened the wake-up call that nobody needed a headquarters
anymore. Cities turned deserted factories into lofts. I wonder what they will used empty
skyscrapers for.
It's an interesting view, and may come to pass. Do you think this will be the case in
Chinese cities which dwarf most US cities, but are centrally controlled? Or in European cities
which have been on a drive for space & livability instead of high-rise, and public
transport or biking instead of cars?
Wow, there's like no facts in this article. Dense living is actually cheaper than
sprawl. You need significantly less infrastructure to supporter tall buildings than you do for
the same square footage spread out over acres.
Less heating and cooling is needed as well since the building have smaller surface areas
(1 roof and 1 ground touching floor compared to 50 roofs and floors for a 50 story building).
The writer works in a low margin, low innovation industry. Major cities dominate the high
innovation industries, that will continue.
Also what is he talking about an era where we lack capital? We have tons of capital. We are
the reserve currency. If he's talking about social security and can print out own money and
haven't seen inflation still. We have massive room to raise taxes too. We're at the highest
level of inequality seen in a century and far outstrip other developed countries on this
metric.
Yes and no. From a high-level perspective, cities should be cheaper to provision
infrastructure for. In practice, at least in the US, infrastructure projects are immensely
expensive in big cities.
It gets even worse when you look at the provisioning of public goods like K-12 schools and
policing.
Regardless of what you think about the cost of infrastructure projects, they are expensive
where wherever you do them. Rural areas are the most expensive areas to do infrastructure in
America.
you are correct. There is a reason broadband in rural America either lousy, expensive, or
both. Low densities make it problematic on a per capita basis. Hence why Congress appropriated
$20b for rural broadband - no provider wants to build where they can't turn a proft
Higher population density means there are more people to tax to pay for infrastructure
maintenance. I've read about suburbs that are struggling to pay for essential
maintenance.
"Major cities dominate the high innovation industries, that will continue."
I would substitute "major metropolitan centers" for "major cities" (see examples below):
Google--Menlo Park,CA
Facebook--As above
IBM--Armonk, NY
Microsoft--Redmond, WA
Apple--Cupertino, CA
Google, FB and Apple are located in the SanFran-Oakland metro area, with IBM and Microsoft
located in suburban New York City and Seattle respectively. There are many tech companies in
Boston strewn along both the outer I-495 and inner I-95 belts, both of which wrap around Boston
(Raytheon is based in Waltham, MA, just east of I-95). as well as the famous Raleigh-Durham
Research Triangle. Tech companies need space-"campuses" as they are called-in order to do their
work. Such space is limited in big cities, especially older cities.
The vast majority of the high tech stuff in Boston is within Cambridge, not those old rt 128
buildings. Almost the entire biotech/pharma industry is within a few miles in Cambridge. Google
has a location in Cambridge. The IBM Watson lab is in Cambridge. All that biotech requires lab
space. There is a ton of it within the city.
Rte 128 had a good shot until Ken Olsen came to the conclusion that nobody would ever want
to have a computer in their home.
The proximity to world class Universities and Colleges will ensure that the Boston/Cambridge
metro area will remain attractive.
The majority of those jobs have moved into the city now. There are still huge amounts of
high tech jobs being produced in Boston. I work in Pharma in business development. You HAVE to
have a presence in Boston if you're going to be on the cutting edge of biological research. The
universities are spinning off companies left and right. California is leading in computer based
tech for sure but Boston is leading in biotechnology.
Google has a massive three-city-block facility in NYC, with plans to expand, Twitter has a
good-sized building a few blocks away (the one Laura Loomer chained herself to briefly). Disney
has leveled a full city block a bit to the south of that and is currently building a new
massive structure on the site.
Tech is an area where competition for top workers is ferocious. Possible that it's easier to
recruit people to live in Chelsea than in Armonk?
"And that to Congress' recent expansion of H1B visas these cities will soon resemble
Bombay."
That's got to change. Unemployment is the worst in almost a hundred years, tens of millions
of Americans. H1B and all the other foreign worker visa program should have been abolished long
ago, at the very latest after the pandemic started, but our corrupt politicians keeps letting
them come.
There should be no foreigners or foreign workers here now. None. Americans need every job in
America, the law should state and enforce that, and American executives who evade it with
outsourcing tricks and falsified visa affidavits should be in prison.
Long ago, when the unemployment rate was the best in a long time? It'd perhaps be good to
have mechanisms that tie visas to unemployment in some impartial way, that sentiment I can
agree with as a practical matter, but the rest of your statements about foreigners are
ridiculous. Moderated immigration of talented, ambitious people is a big net gain. I grew up
around people like this and you better be on your toes and push yourself because they leave you
in the dust otherwise. Agribusiness, tech, media, ie America's biggest cash cows are all
heavily reliant on immigrants.
Extreme positions like 'no foreigners!' play right in to the uncoordinated duct taped system
we have now. You need to realize that everyone has a seat at the table, and consensus is needed
for action.
Just so you know, Raleigh-Durham isn't a huge tech leader at least as measured by VC
funding. It only constitutes .5% of all VC spending. Atlanta is a bigger deal as far as VC
spending than the research triangle.
Google, FB and Apple are located in the SanFran-Oakland metro area,
They are located in the outskirts of what grew from Sand Hill Road. Silicon Valley has San
Francisco as an amenity, not the other way around.
This supports your point, though.
IBM and Microsoft located in suburban New York City and Seattle respectively.
I didn't think of Armonk as a suburb before, but you're right. I suppose you'd probably
drive to White Plains and then take the train, or something like that.
IBM has a very distributed workforce, though, including a highrise in NYC's midtown, so
there may be an element of confirmation bias at work here.
Tech companies need space-"campuses" as they are called-in order to do their work. Such space
is limited in big cities, especially older cities.
This might be wrong. Google owns the Port Authority building in NYC. It's a full city block
and 20 floors, which competes in terms of raw space with their campuses.
In Mountain View their hiring consolidation combined with NIMBYism has sent housing prices
through the roof. In NYC Google's hiring doesn't make a dent because they're spread over a
large city with companies and people coming and going all the time. The housing bubble and low
quality of life in Mountain View is an international joke.
The "campus" model is good for a stable company that will exist for multiple generations
without changing size so housing can be built for the workers of that company and not peak or
crater in value. When the company implodes the town is destroyed. People's accumulated home
wealth is destroyed with it so the individual people are not more mobile than the homes they
live in. I think this happens too often, and somewhat by design. Our laws around companies make
them easy to start and easy to fold up. I don't think a company stable enough to warrant a
company-town campus, like Armonk was and is or like Mountain View has recently become, exists.
This concept was also a bubble that had a culty appeal in that brief span between when it was
invented and when the first company-town companies started to implode.
We don't want towns to become dependent on any one company, and the companies are becoming
huge. That means the convenient and sustainable commuting radius of the town needs to be huge
in terms of number of people, not miles. It could be a dense place with bad trains like NYC or
a sprawling place with good trains like Washington DC.
I look forward to seeing the "new urbs" take on this arrangement. Will we work and live in
the same town? If not, how will we get around?
Interesting. I've heard that about Mountain View, by the way. Also, I understand that
apartment rentals in San Francisco have gone through the roof with the influx of high paid
tekkies who commute to/ from Silicone and who can't afford to buy.
People who work in high tech industries are disproportionately likely to be married to
spouses with similar levels of education and income these days. Usually they don't work at the
same company. They need to live near other areas with high end job opportunities for their
spouses. It's known as the two body problem.
JHK has written multiple books on the topic of sprawl, cities, and urban development. His
writing is informed by plenty of facts. I suspect that he has read, thought, and written more
about the topic than you have.
Yes the guy who had been wrong about everything forever pens another just so story boldly
stating fictions and making predictions about the future without a date in sight. Capital
scarcity? Resource scarcity? Any evidence for either with both interest rates and commodity
prices in the dump? No, who needs evidence when there's a story to tell.
These are awfully big conclusions to be drawing from not quite six months of crisis: NYC
is making progress on reopening, helped considerably by widespread (though not perfect)
adoption of the basic public prevention methods. Restaurants have taken a hit, but the
survivors are investing in outdoor spaces, which are being enthusiastically patronized. Museums
are reopening (Met this week, others in the next four or five weeks). People are starting to
see their friends in person again.
We're still a long way from the full menu - live performances, for example are still a long
way off - but the things that draw people to the city and keep them here are coming back
online.
No one thinks the old normal is going to be the new one, but I'm more optimistic about the
city's future than I was back in April.
In the long run, fossil fuels are likely to go up and up in price, as they get more
expensive to extract. Even if we disregard the effect on the environment, do you really doubt
that a great many of the conveniences we now take for granted may be far more expensive in the
future? This is barring our finding some effective substitute(s) for coal, natural gas, and
petroleum, of course. Can't be ruled out, but we are taking our chances by continuing to live
our current lifestyles, I'd say.
I've gamed out the possibilities a bit, it's an interesting topic to me.
Anything hard to transition off of 100% petroleum I think will have a hard time first. Air
travel and international shipping. Perhaps alternatives will develop, but they won't be nearly
as efficient as before. Economies will localize again.
Electricity is the most able to replace generation fuels but as others decline that's going
to place huge reliance on just one key system for almost everything. Even if we did get solar
and wind and backup power reserves roaring at a decent price, which I think we can, everything
is riding on that one basket and the increasingly complex delivery. Hydro is a gold mine if
you're lucky enough to have it (US really does not in most parts).
Also there's the mining angle, eventually some resources are just going to be economically
exhausted. Solar panels can't be made of wood...yet.
Considering the lack of facts in this article and assuming lots of 'trends' over the last 6
months, this does very little to convince people.
1) Since 2000, we have heard endless articles about the end of mega-cities and it never
happens.
2) Looking at the population growth of Texas cities and suburbs the last 20 years, seems like
cities/urban areas continue to grow even if New York's population is flat.
3) What the heck is 'the challenged by ethnic friction?' What if it does not happen? This just
like Trumpian good Housewife talk.
4) Mega-cities have not only grown in the US, but they have grown in all developed nations.
I think the writer fails to mention or understand that cities have gone thru changes in the
last decade or so.
For example the economies in the Bay Area California grew and changed so much to pull into
the regions around it.
They call it a super region that connects Sacramento, San José, etc. New York has
something similar. I know folks who commute from Sacramento to San Francisco for work and vice
Cerda.
Cities make it effective for industries that thrive on collaboration AND competition. I
work for a software company that works with other software companies (and competes with). Apple
and Google both collaborate with hundreds of companies near them. Really thousands.
As long as industries keep hiring (and paying decently) these regions and industries will
continues to drive markets.
If anything cities are becoming effective at catering to certain industries.
What I hope to see is more allowance and leeway with remote work. So people can work from
places where they can afford a home.
My company used to avoid having too many workers working remotely. But we are struggling to
find talent that now we look remotely. COVID added to that push now as well.
I wouldn't trust this swan song on metropolitan demise. In the long run, plagues are
momentary disturbances - they are frequently over in a year or less despite horrific loss of
life in between. The same goes for aerial bombardment of European cities during WW2. Once war
was over, the cities rebuilt fast. Only few were arguing it was too dangerous to live in a city
anymore.
What makes cities disappear is the breakdown and disintergration of the state-order. For
example, many cities went into a major decline after the fall of the Western half of the Roman
empire.
Yes and the experience of the Roman Empire simply isn't relevant today. At the time of Rome,
the vast majority of the population was illiterate. The people who were knowledgeable and were
pushing the empire forward technologically were a very very small constituency in the
population. The knowledge that they had was all contained in analogue format so a fire burning
down a library really could destroy hundreds of years of work. This isn't a possibility today.
We now have hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers capable interpreting the
innovative science we produce and knowledge is distributed around the world and is much easier
to reconstitute.
Still waiting for Detroit and Gary, Indiana to reconstitute, as you put it. In NY, shootings
are getting out of control. In Chicago, over the past 18 months, shootings, muggings, and
assaults have skyrocketed in the 1st and 18th Police Districts (where the fancy people live).
Folks are afraid to walk at night. I live in Chicago near the lake.
On any typical night within a quarter mile of my home there will be police reports of "man
with a gun," "woman assaulted," "woman with knife," "man using bottle as weapon," or "group
fighting." Not the stuff you want to hear if you want to take a 9:00 PM jog through Grant Park
or along the lake.
I good friend of mine had her cell phone grabbed out of her hand during the middle of the
day in the skate board park at the South End of Grant Park. Crime of this sort is what drives
people out of cities. The promise of downtown Chicago was you could walk or rely on public
transportation. You cannot do either when people are mugged every day on public transportation
or along the main city streets in downtown.
To your credit, maybe a big City like Houston can survive. Reality is, however, Houston is
more a sprawl than any kind of connected city. Major employers in Houston actually have rules
against walked to work (because of the heat).
Well yes, breakdown of the state-order is an important factor. As the proverbs state: "pray
for the welfare of the government: if not for the fear it inspires, man would swallow his
neighbor alive."
Depending on the definition of "mega-city", I'm not sure its age ever arrived. A town
only needs a population of five thousand to qualify as "urban" - when I was growing up, it was
half that - which means much of the urban population consists of small towns.
For significantly larger cities, it has long been the case that the population of the
suburbs and exurbs tends to be at least half of the total metropolitan area. Jacksonville and
Albuquerque may be exceptions to this rule, but they are in the minority, and anyway I doubt
that James Kunstler has them in mind when he writes of mega-cities. I seriously doubt that
there was ever a time in America when the megalopolis dweller was in the majority, or even the
plurality.
Did Fauci and Birx knew something about origin or the virus that we do not know and that's why they panicked?
Notable quotes:
"... When you are over 75 years old, you are going to succumb to serious underlying conditions covid or no covid. Those who's deaths are being attributed to covid are primarily in that age group. It is disingenuous to create a panic over a virus that almost exclusively contributes (at most) to the deaths of the elderly with underlying serious conditions. Many of those who have died, succumbed to the underlying condition, but incidentally had covid. ..."
"... Actually, Laura, when you are over 75 years old, the risk of dying increases, period. Once you're into the 85 year old and over bucket, which many covid deaths are, you were probably going to die regardless; unless you're a vampire or some other inhuman death defying creature. Is this really news to anyone? ..."
"... CDC has an annual budget of $12 billion. Then there are public health budgets at NIH and other federal, state and counties. ..."
"... How come there was no agreed upon pandemic response plan? If there was, why wasn't it executed? Do public health authorities have a plan now that can be executed? ..."
"... It would appear to me this was a failure across all segments of society. The public because they so easily succumbed to fear. The media for fanning the flames of hysteria. Private healthcare for not providing realistic and alternative views. The government for not executing a coordinated response. ..."
"... dan of Steele - a contributory factor in the death toll in Italy might be the mandatory influenza vaccine. In the autumn/winter 2019, a super influenza vaccine (4 strains in one dose) was administered to old people and health care workers in Italy. Research suggests that influenza vaccine derived virus interference is significantly associated with coronavirus. ..."
"... For some reason, the authorities want COVID-19 to be recognized as The New Black Death. Rising numbers of 'cases' substitute for deaths in order to keep the fear factor high (as far as I can make out) when higher case numbers are an unsurprising consequence of ramped-up testing. There are allegedly high numbers of false positives, and many if not most of the cases uncovered by testing are in people who are asymptomatic or not very sick, certainly not in danger of dying or even having to be hospitalized. ..."
"So get this straight – based on the recommendation of doctors Fauci and Birx the
US shut down the entire economy based on 9,000 American deaths to the China coronavirus." The
Gateway Pundit."
"... the coronavirus fatality rate reported by the liberal mainstream media was completely
inaccurate and the actual rate more like a typical seasonal flu – the media was lying
again.
Doctors Fauci and Birx were next to push ridiculous and highly exaggerated mortality rates
related to the coronavirus:
Dr. Tony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx used the Imperial College Model to persuade President
Trump to lock down the ENTIRE US ECONOMY.
The fraudulent model predicted 2.2 million American deaths from the coronavirus
pandemic.
The authors of the Imperial College Model shared their findings with the White House
Coronavirus task force in early March
Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx then met with President Trump privately and urged him to shut down
the US economy and destroy the record Trump economy based on this model
But the Imperial College model Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx pushed was garbage and they
recommended the destruction of the US economy using this model." Gateway Pundit
----------
Hmmm ... The Fauci is a god crowd will heap scorn on this but, thing about it. pl
Yes, Col Lang., as you know, this is what I've been saying for months. It is what the good
data and analysis (not that CDC garbage) reveals. However, no one wants to believe the evil
capitalist private insurance companies. They think government is far more trustworthy and
competent. More of that conditioning of attitude and perception by the powers that be in the
plan to implement a big global govt.
The govt could have worked with the insurance companies to understand this thing. Seems
like the logical move if you have poor quality data and insurance has good data, and you
really believe there is a lethal pandemic on the loose.
When you are over 75 years old, you are going to succumb to serious underlying conditions
covid or no covid. Those who's deaths are being attributed to covid are primarily in that age
group. It is disingenuous to create a panic over a virus that almost exclusively contributes
(at most) to the deaths of the elderly with underlying serious conditions. Many of those who
have died, succumbed to the underlying condition, but incidentally had covid.
Another new report has come out that shows a significant proportion of covid positive
tests are showing positive for minuscule viral loads in the system; not enough to cause
illness (or serious illness). How many of those elderly that died of underlying conditions
fall into that category? Many of the tests show false positives.
This whole thing has been one big scam - and I believe deliberately.
Actually, Laura, when you are over 75 years old, the risk of dying increases, period. Once
you're into the 85 year old and over bucket, which many covid deaths are, you were probably
going to die regardless; unless you're a vampire or some other inhuman death defying
creature. Is this really news to anyone?
We must look at years of expected life lost, not raw body counts. That approach reveals
covid to not be a threat to society.
The numbers are consistent because the strategy has been carefully worked out to have
consistent documents. There will not be 20 million COVID cases requiring hospitalization
because a high percentage do not get sick. In re the IO, been there done that myself. My
question is, which group or constellation of groups is running the op.
"Here in old Europe it seems we are on the verge of a new outbreak. Some people have gone
on vacation and the number of daily new cases is on the rise."
The number of daily new cases in Germany has recently doubled because the number of daily
tests has also roughly doubled. The share of positive tests among all tests has remained
constant at around 1% for 3 months now.
Must be a very strange "new outbreak". The number of Covid patients in the ICUs of German
hospitals have been stagnating at a very low level (around 250 patients in the whole country)
for several weeks.
What has intrigued me about the Wuhan virus is the panicked, off-the-cuff response. A
pandemic is not new. We've had several in the recent past. SARS, H1N1, H2N2.
CDC has an annual budget of $12 billion. Then there are public health budgets at NIH and
other federal, state and counties.
How come there was no agreed upon pandemic response plan? If there was, why wasn't it
executed? Do public health authorities have a plan now that can be executed?
It would appear to me this was a failure across all segments of society. The public
because they so easily succumbed to fear. The media for fanning the flames of hysteria.
Private healthcare for not providing realistic and alternative views. The government for not
executing a coordinated response.
Money is never the issue in the USA. No one spends like us on healthcare, education,
national security. Outcomes are a different matter altogether. Value for money is poor since
there's a high "corruption" factor.
We've had many "wars". War on Poverty. War on Drugs. War on Terror. We've spent huge
amounts on each. They've all been failures!
Laura, When you get to a certain age, everyday you wake up to most of obituaries being for
people younger than yourself. It is a landmark point in one's life.
Before they were all so old. Now they are all so young. And no, they did not die "of
covid". The died. Fate played out their final hand. And you ask not for whom the bells toll
............. you just praise every single blessed day that is still yours to enjoy.
182,000 did not die "of covid" in the US. CDC played games with the numbers from day one.
The only mystery is why? And why did we let them do this. Because we did - Brix admitted up
front on TV they tossed anyone suspected of "covid" into the covid basket.
Any screw up were not facing covid, but overkilling "covid". The leftist cabal made sure
no other points of view were allowed. If a covid report did not include or imply
OrangemanBad, it never reached the airwaves. Please don't have selective memory problems
about any of this. Or else you have come to the wrong place to push them.
So now tell us where the new CDC data is flawed (9K deaths), and why that is justification
for believing their prior data is not flawed. (182K deaths)
I don't have a dog in this fight. I do hope that one day we will find out what is really going on with this covid-19. I
merely look at worldofmeters corona virus page and watch the numbers of new cases, serious cases, and deaths. Those numbers
were horrible for Italy for a long time and after months of being locked down hard, the numbers got better.
15 August is a very famous Italian holiday with everyone going to the beach, having picnics, and so on. Oddly enough a week
to 10 days later the numbers of new cases went up...quite a bit. Happily the deaths have not gone back to the 1000 a day from
the early days but I am holding my breath. In our little village we have 4 active cases and 21 in quarantine. They were
infected by people who had gone on vacation somewhere else.
as for Germany, my son lives near Hamburg and he is mostly teleworking and overall they are quite good at implementing good
pandemic control measures. Testing was free but I believe they are starting to charge for it again. My brother in law went to
Cyprus on his vacation this year and upon return he and his family were all tested.
believe me, I don't want this crap to go on any more than you do. It does not affect me all that much as I am finally
retired and have a single family home with a yard. being somewhat of a recluse anyway didn't make it worse.
"New outbreaks" that lead to herd immunity are a good thing; when the death rate remains
static or declines. Which is what is happening right now.
As long as every passing day adds more very elderly with 3.5 co-morbidities to the body
count, one can assume this flu is taking its normal course through this population
demographics.
As it does every single year, since the flu was always previously known as "the old man's
friend". Sad, of course. Any death is sad. Very sad.
For reflection on eternal life however, take a look at the Czech opera "The Makropolus
Case". The diva lives for 300 years, and when it comes time to take the magic potion again
that keeps her eternally alive, she muses about the trials, tribulations and practical
burdens of her eternal life.......... and she finally decides to .......?????
Always hate it when media reports a percentage increase - "twice as many cases" -- but
never mentions the numbers. 2 case is twice as many as one case. Zut alors! We need new cases
to finally reach herd immunity.
Cases are okay. In fact, it is relief we are finally existing outside of this artificial
bubble, and at a time we now know a lot more about treatment and to stop killing people with
forced ventilator abuse.
Original game plan - flatten the curve - end up with the same numbers of cases, but over a
longer period time to ensure health care delivery would not be overwhelmed should they all
happen at once. That was the bargain - flatten the curve, but not change the numbers
infected.
When did "someone" demand we flat-line the numbers of infections, until they reach
absolute zero? Who, what, where, when, how or why did that change?
Will anti-Trump riots after Trump's 2020 re-election push "covid" off the front pages?
How many of the 500,000 attendees at Bike Week died of this, it's been three weeks
already? How about all those 'mostly peaceful' protests? (Not counting than the two who died
of the AR15 virus in Kenosha)
dan of Steele - a contributory factor in the death toll in Italy might be the mandatory
influenza vaccine. In the autumn/winter 2019, a super influenza vaccine (4 strains in one
dose) was administered to old people and health care workers in Italy. Research suggests that
influenza vaccine derived virus interference is significantly associated with
coronavirus.
For some reason, the authorities want COVID-19 to be recognized as The New Black Death.
Rising numbers of 'cases' substitute for deaths in order to keep the fear factor high (as far
as I can make out) when higher case numbers are an unsurprising consequence of ramped-up
testing. There are allegedly high numbers of false positives, and many if not most of the
cases uncovered by testing are in people who are asymptomatic or not very sick, certainly not
in danger of dying or even having to be hospitalized.
The WHO admitted publicly that the chief reason it declared a pandemic was that too many
countries were - in its opinion - not taking the threat seriously enough. Therefore, even the
declaration of a pandemic was for scare value. When COVID-19 was at its peak for infections
and deaths, the WHO (Dr. Fauci himself, actually) claimed that medical-grade masks were not
necessary for the public, because the WHO deemed it necessary to reserve the supply of masks
for medical use. I don't think anyone would disagree that non-medical cloth masks have much
less filtration capability. But then Fauci reversed himself, and now a plethora of 'experts'
claim it is proven that non-medical cloth masks work to reduce the spread of COVID-19, and
there is growing and relentless pressure from the busybody sector to make them mandatory wear
in all public settings. Now, when the death rate is steadily dropping. No clinical trials
have ever achieved results which demonstrate that cloth masks do anything to stop the spread
of an airborne virus - not masks and only masks. Trials in which the subjects regularly
washed their hands, avoided touching their faces after touching other surfaces AND wore a
mask demonstrated a somewhat reduced infection rate. Tests in which only masks were used
showed either a statistically insignificant difference or no difference at all, but were not
proper clinical trials as the sample size was comparatively small and the masked group
contained a significant number who admitted they did not wear it all the time. But forcing
everyone to wear a mask has become a test of will for public authorities against a public in
which many do not want to wear them and are afraid compulsory wear will become the norm. Once
again, there is NO PROOF that they work, as the theory has never been properly tested, I
don't care what 'expert' is telling you the results are in, and masks work.
For those 'COVID warriors' who label all dissenters 'maskholes' and 'Covidiots', cite me a
proper clinical trial that establishes masks on their own significantly reduced the infection
rate of an airborne virus. That means show me how uninfected people wore a mask and did not
take other precautions, in the presence of an infected person (without touching them or
handling objects infected people handled) and remained uninfected. While you're at it, find
me where the '6-foot rule' came from. Nobody seems to know how that number was arrived upon,
the WHO says it did not come from them, and how does it account for different environments
such as the presence or absence of wind? People have to stand six feet apart outside while
waiting to be allowed in to the grocery store. How does that protect you from an airborne
virus that theoretically can only travel six feet in still air?
I am always willing to have my mind changed by actual science. But so far I am not seeing
it. Just a lot of politics.
"... It's time to stop fetishizing scientific methods. We have to accept that there are many elements of Covid-19 that science may never understand and if we wait for it to do so, we will never again be able to live a normal life. ..."
"... Science, if it is working properly, will not come to a conclusion that is wholly wrong. But not everything that is true can be established by a randomized control trial followed by peer review. Take the theory, popularized by Dr John Lee's work in the Spectator , that Covid has become less deadly as it spreads, and is now basically inert. ..."
"... People need to accept this about Covid (and hopefully later, much else) and stop fetishizing the scientific method at times when a bit of common sense would do the job. ..."
"... Consider this article , written by three scientific minds. It is a measured and 'data driven' analysis of whether Covid is becoming less deadly. But is blinkered by an assumption that only official data, no matter how muddled, can be relied upon. All you really need to do is ask doctors whether they are seeing people come in with Covid, or if they are dying of Covid when they do. Instead it focuses on case numbers, which are not worth the paper they are written on. ..."
"... So many people have been so frightened – understandably – by exaggerated accounts of the threat posed by Covid-19, and it will take a lot to persuade them that they have been sold a pup. But they need to be persuaded, so that can get their old lives back. The present regime will never take on this responsibility because it would center on an admission of massive guilt on their part. ..."
"... What is needed now from all sensible people is calm but insistent argument, with friends, relations and authorities alike, for the total abolition of all coronavirus-related restrictions. We saw some of that in London and Berlin over the weekend, and it was fantastic to see such well organized and clear minded dissent against the sinister 'new normal'. ..."
By Peter Andrews , Irish science journalist and writer based in London. He has a
background in the life sciences, and graduated from the University of Glasgow with a degree in
genetics
It's time to stop fetishizing scientific methods. We have to accept that there are
many elements of Covid-19 that science may never understand and if we wait for it to do so, we
will never again be able to live a normal life.
The Covid-19 outbreak is largely over, and man's attempts to slow, stop or understand the
virus have failed. Science will eventually discover more about the pandemic but it is a slow
process.
Science, if it is working properly, will not come to a conclusion that is wholly wrong. But
not everything that is true can be established by a randomized control trial followed by peer
review. Take the theory, popularized by Dr John Lee's work in the
Spectator , that Covid has become less deadly as it spreads, and is now basically
inert.
This would perfectly explain why so many people died of Covid-19 in a short period of time,
and why deaths have basically flat-lined since April. It fits with many Covid studies
confirming fast
evolution , different strains and reinfection .
Furthermore, a change to the virus itself could explain why the same patterns in deaths have
been seen everywhere, irrespective of lockdowns, demographics, contact tracing or any other
scheme.
In fact, with each passing day it is increasingly probable that the virus has mutated to a
milder form. The trouble is it would be nigh on impossible to establish this with the
instruments of science, now or any time soon. The vagaries of individual human bodies and
microscopic particles are just beyond the scope of exact science.
People need to accept this about Covid (and hopefully later, much else) and stop fetishizing
the scientific method at times when a bit of common sense would do the job. We are paralysed by
a need for the World Health Organization or Public Health England to conjure up some
peer-reviewed study or other confirming to 99.9 percent likelihood that we can go back to
normal now. That will never happen, but we have to get back to normal.
Consider this
article , written by three scientific minds. It is a measured and 'data driven' analysis of
whether Covid is becoming less deadly. But is blinkered by an assumption that only official
data, no matter how muddled, can be relied upon. All you really need to do is ask doctors
whether they are seeing people come in with Covid, or if they are dying of Covid when they do.
Instead it focuses on case numbers, which are not worth the paper they are written on.
Here is another paper ,
co-authored by the brilliant Professor Carl Heneghan of the University of Oxford's Center for
Evidence-Based Medicine. He has been tireless in his questioning of the government's
interpretation of coronavirus statistics, although it has taken far too long for him to be
given any kind of
platform from which to address the public.
The study, while no doubt accurate and valuable for establishing fine points of detail,
seeks to answer whether the infection fatality ratio has been falling in the UK. A
comprehensive review of the limited data suggests that it has, but so what? What does that mean
to the average Joe, confused as to whether they should send their child to school in the
morning, or whether it would be irresponsible to give their elderly parents a
hug?
So many people have been so frightened – understandably – by exaggerated
accounts of the threat posed by Covid-19, and it will take a lot to persuade them that they
have been sold a pup. But they need to be persuaded, so that can get their old lives back. The
present regime will never take on this responsibility because it would center on an admission
of massive guilt on their part.
What is needed now from all sensible people is calm but insistent argument, with friends,
relations and authorities alike, for the total abolition of all coronavirus-related
restrictions. We saw some of that in London and Berlin over
the weekend, and it was fantastic to see such well organized and clear minded dissent against
the sinister 'new normal'.
Like this story? Share it with a friend!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
he US Justice Department is mulling civil rights investigations of four Democrat-run
states whose governors forced elder care homes to take in Covid-19 patients, potentially
contributing to thousands of deaths.
The governments of New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania have been ordered
to turn over Covid-19 data to the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division as the agency
weighs whether to pursue the probes, according to a statement released on Wednesday.
Investigations would be launched under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act
(CRIPA), a law meant to protect the rights of those living in state-run nursing
homes.
Likely the responses will be "We didn't know " or "How could anyone accuse us
compassionate/all-caring/liberty-affirming of doing nothing but good ".
Now, there is a campaign weapon the Trump team should wield like a sledge hammer. It will
be high quality protein for the us conspiracy-theory folks as well.
Worth quoting from the above: All four states' Democratic governors infamously required care homes to admit patients
from hospitals without testing them for Covid-19, despite knowing that the virus could
– in the now-immortal words of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo – spread through
the facilities "like fire through dry grass."
As public outcry grew with awareness of the NY governor's order, Cuomo tried to blame
virus-stricken care homes for not disobeying him and refusing Covid-19-positive patients. The
order itself was even stealthily deleted from the New York healthcare website amid the
outrage.
While Cuomo has tried to defend his policies by arguing New York actually had a lower
percentage of deaths in nursing homes than other states, recently-released federal statistics
suggest the state dramatically undercounted its care home fatalities by omitting residents
who died in hospitals from the totals. While the official tally of 6,600 care home deaths is
already the highest in the nation, an AP report earlier this month suggested the real number
may be as much as 65 percent higher.
Per the internet, total Covid deaths in New York State is currently about 35,000. Per the
above, nearly 11,000 were killed in nursing homes or in hospitals after being infected in
nursing homes. Most of those were apparently in the early stages of the pandemic thus perhaps
accounting for a majority of the deaths.
Per the internet, over 40% of all fatalities were related to nursing homes
nation-wide.
I have to say, the behavior of governments in the COVID 'crisis' has been appalling.
Formerly polite and reserved Canada is no more, and I would say it is just like America if
America had not reached for new levels of bizarre that still just barely edge it out –
let's settle for saying Canada is just like America was just before the
COVID/BLM/pre-election frenzy of hyperbole. Check this out;
"But Ball went too far. He responded with amendments to the province's Public Health
Protection and Promotion Act that looked more like something from a police state than a
democracy. The new law suggested inspectors could pull people over, scroll through their
cellphones, copy their private information and forcibly perform COVID-19 tests. The law made
clear that if two ministers decided that a person had contravened the act, he or she could be
imprisoned or expelled from the province without a hearing. The province also began barring
non-Newfoundlanders from entering, contrary to the division of powers set out in the
Constitution Act, 1867, and without any regard to the interprovincial mobility rights set out
under Section 6 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This unconstitutional order meant that
a woman who lived in Nova Scotia -- which was nearly COVID-free -- couldn't attend her
mother's funeral."
The 'crisis' has encouraged people who could not be trusted to look after your cat while
you're in Little Rock to assume limitless powers, to the point where jumped-up jackass
'ministers' have the power to expel you from your province if they determine you have
contravened some 'Act' they just made up. If they don't look out, they'll have an armed
insurrection on their hands, just like our neighbours – threatening to 'deport' people
because they are suspected of spreading a virus that most people have a better than 99%
chance of surviving and which global medics are trying to kill by suppression, by denying it
victims. Everyone has lost their minds.
There is at the present time not a single soul in the Canadian political stable who is
worth the effort of casting a ballot. Democracy is just another word for nothing left to
lose. Political parties everywhere should be starved to death the way they are trying to
starve the coronavirus – by waking up to find the entire electorate stayed home and not
a single vote was cast. It'll never happen, because too many people are sheep and buy that
'change is coming' bullshit that accompanies every election the way flies swarm on dung. But
'democracy' has descended too deep into farce to be saved.
It has happened so fast! One must assume that there is a renewing reservoir of people with
a propensity to become petty tyrants when it was safe and the opportunity was there to do so.
What a profoundly sick society!
However, I will vote and vote for Trump. Heck, I might even put a Trump in 2020, 2024 and
2028 sign in my yard (although we live at the end of a dead end street so hardy anyone will
see it). Why? If this country is heading for a civil war, lets get it on.
All of this happens just days after WSJ published a lengthy piece of "analysis" examining
dissenting views on
the efficacy of lockdowns?
The problem with "science" is it's often in flux, and such is the situation right now with
SARS-CoV-2, a mysterious virus that continues to confound even seasoned epidemiologists and
virologists.
But now, Dr. Fauci - in his latest attempt at playing mediator - is saying he believes the
CDC guidelines are being misinterpreted. Though he also told CNN that the decision was made
without his direct involvement, because he was in surgery.
"I was under general anesthesia in the operating room and was not part of any discussion
or deliberation regarding the new testing recommendations," Fauci told CNN's Dr. Sanjay
Gupta.
He reiterated that asymptomatic spread is of "great concern", and that people shouldn't get
the wrong message just because the guidelines on testing have changed slightly.
"I am concerned about the interpretation of these recommendations and worried it will give
people the incorrect assumption that asymptomatic spread is not of great concern. In fact, it
is," the doctor added.
We suspect this will be an even bigger deal tomorrow.
One thing that is definitely Not Happening is the psychopaths in both parties, the media,
the medical mafia, Wall Street, and corporations taking responsibility for their crime spree
and fraud.
Now the medical community has been fully exposed to be less legitimate than crack dealers,
because at least crack dealers are not pretending to cure people like the medical mafia is
all based on blatant scientific fraud!
Now that these evil fraudulent psychopaths have totally destroyed the lives of hundreds of
millions locking the country down resulting in people losing their businesses, jobs, homes,
and apartments let Nuremburg 2 trials begin!
"... the government is owned by finance people. I guess we can't really stop them from using the money to pay for military stuff but the idea that any of this has any relationship to what's good or bad for "Americans" has been proven to be a complete crock of bull. ..."
"... We are all basically squatters in the parking lot of a shopping mall living in RVs and eating whatever food they sell at the nearest convenience store. That's all America is for me these days. ..."
One thing that is definitely Not Happening is the psychopaths in both parties, the media,
the medical mafia, Wall Street, and corporations taking responsibility for their crime spree
and fraud.
Now the medical community has been fully exposed to be less legitimate than crack dealers,
because at least crack dealers are not pretending to cure people like the medical mafia is
all based on blatant scientific fraud!
@No Friend Of The Devil ree-for-all for cash where you don't even have to be a US citizen
to get benefits anymore What exactly is the point of having a military other than it's just
another way to spend loads of cash. I definitely wouldn't support any kind of war on behalf
of "American Interests" now.
We have been swamped by illegal immigrants and the government is
owned by finance people. I guess we can't really stop them from using the money to pay for
military stuff but the idea that any of this has any relationship to what's good or bad for
"Americans" has been proven to be a complete crock of bull.
We are all basically squatters in
the parking lot of a shopping mall living in RVs and eating whatever food they sell at the
nearest convenience store. That's all America is for me these days.
Nobel-laureate Dr. Michael Levitt (Chemistry and structural biology at Stanford) has made
another prediction on July 25, 2020:
"US COVID19 will be done in 4 weeks [Aug 25] with total reported deaths below 170,000. How
will we know it is over? Like for Europe, when all cause excess deaths are at normal level
for week. Reported COVID19 deaths may continue after 25 Aug. & reported cases will, but
it will be over."
Yes this is the same person who on May 04, 2020 said:
"If Sweden stops at about 5,000 or 6,000 deaths, we will know that they've reached herd
immunity, and we didn't need to do any kind of lockdown."
Contrary to claims by the media and the ego maniac Dr. Fauci about a tidal wave of Covid
infections, I have first hand, albeit anecdotal evidence, that there is a lot of bullshit
surrounding reports of people who have "tested" positive for Covid.
Some 260 cases of the coronavirus have been tied to attendees and staff at a North Georgia
YMCA children's camp in June, according to a report released Friday by the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, one of the largest known superspreading events in the state.
The report details how COVID-19 spread rapidly among children and teens within the camp and
raises questions about the effectiveness of safety protocols as school districts and colleges
contemplate reopening for in-person instruction this fall.
YMCA Camp High Harbour, identified in the report as Camp A, suffered an outbreak at its Lake
Burton location in late June. As of July 10,
about 85 cases of the virus had been linked to the camp, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
previously reported, a figure that has since tripled. Explore Complete coverage of COVID-19 in Georgia
The CDC study of 597 campers and staff from Georgia found the camp did not follow its
guidance to require campers wear masks, though staff did.
Three-quarters of the 344 attendees and staff for whom the CDC was able to obtain test
results tested positive for the virus.
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The CDC said the overall attack rate of the virus was 44%, though the agency acknowledged
that's an undercount because it includes more than 250 for whom they had no results.
"This investigation adds to the body of evidence demonstrating that children of all ages are
susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and, contrary to early reports might play an important role
in transmission," the report said.
Brian Castrucci, CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, a Maryland nonprofit that assists public
health agencies and a former epidemiologist in Georgia, said the report is a warning for local
school districts and others about the potential for spread in congregant settings.
"This should show you how actively kids can transmit it," he said. "If you have a low
prevalence in your community, you can start to do things. If you have rampant and rapid
community spread, then there is no opening school, there is no opening colleges. It is not
going to work."
Ga. OK'd camps with restrictions
Gov. Brian Kemp initially allowed
day camps to open for the summer as part of the state's broader reopening plan. An
executive order in May later allowed overnight camps to operate, but outlined health and
hygiene guidelines, including temperature checks and a requirement for campers and staff to
have a negative COVID-19 test within 12 days of the start of camp.
Though many camps opted not to open, some, including High Harbour, did.
Spokespeople for Kemp did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
"This investigation adds to the body of evidence demonstrating that children of all ages are
susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and, contrary to early reports might play an important role
in transmission."
- New CDC report
Dr. Harry J. Heiman, clinical associate professor at the Georgia State University School of
Public Health, said spread of the virus was growing in June, presenting a high likelihood the
virus would spread in a camp setting.
"We know that congregate settings, particularly indoor congregant settings, are among the
highest risks," he said.
High Harbour followed the governor's executive order, the federal report said, but the camp
did not follow CDC recommendations for universal masking of campers or for increased
ventilation in buildings. Staff were required to wear masks, the report said.
"Relatively large cohorts sleeping in the same cabin and engaging in regular singing and
cheering likely contributed to transmission," the CDC said. "Use of cloth masks, which has been
shown to reduce the risk for infection, was not universal."
The CDC said its investigation is ongoing and will attempt to identify specific sources of
exposure, the course of the illness and "any secondary transmission to household members."
"Physical distancing and consistent and correct use of cloth masks should be emphasized as
important strategies for mitigating transmission in congregate settings," the report said.
Statement of regret
The YMCA did not make anyone available for an interview. In a written statement, Parrish
Underwood, chief advancement officer for the YMCA of Metro Atlanta, said the organization now
regretted holding the camp.
"We made every effort to adhere to best practices outlined by the Centers for Disease
Control (CDC) and the American Camp Association," and the governor, Underwood said.
"Attending Camp High Harbour is a tradition numerous generations of Y families look forward
to every summer," Underwood's statement said. "Many of these individuals reached out to our
staff to express their desire for us to open our residential camps in an effort to create
normalcy in their children's lives due to the detrimental impact of COVID-19. This weighed
heavily in our decision to open, a decision in retrospect we regret."
The YMCA said it notified parents that a counselor tested positive for COVID-19 on June 24.
The camp told parents they could pick up their children early. The YMCA closed its Lake Burton
and Lake Allatoona locations.
The YMCA said the counselor passed required health screenings, as did all other campers and
staff.
Parents who have spoken to the AJC have said they did not think the YMCA showed enough
urgency. The camp was not immediately closed. Parents were given the option of picking up their
children over a period of a few days before the camp closed for the season.
Fever, headaches and sore throat
The CDC study offered some caveats to the infection rates. Georgia suffered high rates of
spread at the end of June, and some of the infections might have occurred prior to or after the
camp.
Information about the conditions of infected campers and staff also was limited, and the
report did not detail the severity of infections.
But the report said of the 136 cases with symptom data, about a quarter reported no
symptoms. Of the three-quarters reporting symptoms, fever, headache and sore throat were the
most common.
The median age of campers was 12 and staffers was 17. There were seven staffers between the
ages of 22 and 59.
Fifty-one kids, or roughly half, of the children aged 6 to 10 tested positive. About 44% of
children aged 11 to 17 tested positive and a third of the remaining people from 18 to 59 tested
positive, the report said.
Cases of COVID-19 tend to be milder for children and young adults than for the elderly, but
the disease isn't without risk.
There have been 12,290 confirmed cases among children 5 to 17 in Georgia, with 165
hospitalizations and one death, an analysis of state data shows.
To date, 186,352 people in Georgia have tested positive for the coronavirus, including about
4,000 announced Friday. There have been 3,752 deaths, including 81 reported on Friday.
Georgia in the 'red zone'
Knowledge of transmission between children and adults is not well understood, but health
experts have told the AJC they fear infections in children and adults can easily spread to more
vulnerable people.
Though people over 60 make up the largest cohorts of hospitalizations and deaths, a recent
Emory University
study said children and adults under 60 are much more likely than the elderly to spread the
disease to others.
Some schools are pushing forward with August opening plans, while allowing home instruction
or blended in-person and distance learning.
Other systems, including Atlanta Public Schools, announced plans to
delay the start of the school year and to begin instruction online amid substantial
community spread of the virus.
On July 24, the CDC published guidance endorsing the full reopening of schools, citing risks
to children's health and education that could be inflicted by not having schools open for
in-person instruction. That guidance came after pressure from President Trump, who has called
for full reopening of schools.
The CDC guidance called for keeping students in small groups, staffed by a single teacher
and to use outdoor spaces for learning. The guidance includes recommendations for masking and
other hygiene protocols and plans for when a student contracts the virus.
But many independent public health experts, while acknowledging the importance of in-school
instruction, have been critical of the new CDC guidance.
Heiman, the Georgia State professor, said schools often have poor ventilation. Reopening for
in-person instruction endangers students and their family members and school staff.
Georgia is one of 21 states outlined in a White House task force report in the "red zone"
for coronavirus spread. That report has recommended the state mandate masks and close bars,
nightclubs, entertainment venues and put stricter limits on indoor dining and groups.
Kemp has so far decided not to mandate masks, though he has encouraged face coverings. He
also has balked at new restrictions on the movement of business and people.
A group of more than 2,000 medical professionals have called on Kemp to implement the White
House task force's recommendations and to allow local jurisdictions to enact stricter
measures.
"Many of us have said all along that unless we can get the level of COVID-19 down in
communities, it is not safe to open schools and colleges," Heiman said. "This (report)
certainly reinforces that."
WASHINGTON -- An investigation released Friday by House Democrats says President Donald
Trump's administration overpaid by up to $500 million on
ventilators as the
coronavirus pandemic first struck the United States.
Click to expand 00:00 00:47 Fauci
optimistic on COVID-19 vaccine availability
In a review of thousands of pages of internal administration documents, Democrats on the
House Oversight Committee said Phillips North America was contracted to deliver 43,000
ventilators to the federal government for a significantly higher price than it did under
previous contracts for functionally identical ventilator models delivered under contracts
dating to President Barack Obama's administration.
"The American people got ripped off, and Donald Trump and his team got taken to the
cleaners," said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., whose subcommittee led the investigation.
"The Trump Administration's mishandling of ventilator procurement for the nation's stockpile
cost the American people dearly during the worst public health crisis of our generation."
Phillips denied the report's findings, saying the company did not raise prices in relation
to the pandemic, and argued the increased price of the ventilators actually represented a
"discount."
Frans van Houten, CEO of Royal Philips, said in a statement the company did "not recognize
the conclusions in the subcommittee's report, and we believe that not all the information that
we provided has been reflected in the report."
"I would like to make clear that at no occasion has Philips raised prices to benefit from
the crisis situation," van Houten said.
According to Phillips, the list price of the ventilator ordered under the contract is
$21,000 and was supplied to the Trump administration for $15,000, which the company called a
"discount" given the rushed production schedule.
The report, however, disagreed with Phillips' claim. A functionally identical ventilator was
delivered to the Obama administration under a 2014 contract for $3,280. Based on the report's
review of purchases between December 2019 and May 2020, other small purchasers, even those that
purchased only one ventilator of the same model, secured them for as low as $9,327.
"No American purchaser paid more than the U.S. government," the report said.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere told USA TODAY in a statement the report was
"misleading and inaccurate."
"Because of the President's leadership, the United States leads the world in the production
and acquisition of ventilators. No American who needed a ventilator was denied one, and no
American who needs a ventilator in the future will be denied one."
Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Ryan Murphy said the Trump
administration's efforts ensured the "federal government procured enough equipment to care for
all hospitalized patients in the United States who needed a ventilator for respiratory support
related to COVID-19 infections."
Some of the ventilators ordered under the contract were already in use to treat COVID-19
patients, he added.
Murphy declined to comment on an ongoing contract, but said HHS follows "all Federal
Acquisition Regulations for Strategic National Stockpile contracting efforts."
The Trump administration has frequently touted the production of ventilators as evidence of
its response to the coronavirus pandemic.
"When you look at the United States response, you look at the fact that we were supposed to
have a ventilator shortage. In fact, we had a ventilator surplus," White House Press Secretary
Kayleigh McEnany said at a Friday briefing.
Phillips had first signed a contract with the Obama administration to deliver 100,000
ventilators in the event of a pandemic by June 2019, but the delivery date was pushed back,
eventually to June 2021, as the company missed deadlines, the report said. Phillips approached
the Trump administration about moving up the delivery date in January 2020, when the first
coronavirus cases were reported in the United States, but the Trump administration ignored the
offer, according to the report.
Then, in March 2020, the Trump administration agreed to extend the ventilator delivery
deadline to September 2022, but did not ask Phillips to produce more ventilators or move up
delivery times. Instead, in April 2020, the Trump administration negotiated a new contract with
Phillips to deliver 43,000 ventilators at a price of $15,000 per ventilator.
According to the report's review of documents, "the Administration accepted Philips' first
offer without even trying to negotiate a lower price."
According to emails released by the committee, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who
served as the lead negotiator with Phillips, offered to prepay half of the total cost, or over
$323 million, to Phillips before a single ventilator was even delivered. Department of Health
and Human Services staff later reduced the amount prepaid to 10% of the total cost of the
contract, or about $65 million.
N95 Masks DO WORK, and the Proof is Available All Over the Net!
There has been so much oh-so-earnest and so much oh-so-authoritarian nonsense bruited
about on this site about the non-effectiveness of the N95 masks that it's getting really,
really disgusting. It also calls into question either the honesty (trolls?) or the
intelligence of those who could so easily have just looked up the information from, and
about, the inventor of the N95, Dr. Peter Tsai.
If they had done just that little bit of research, they would have discovered that the N95
works because of an inner layer of plastic fiber that carries an electro-static charge that
attracts and destroys the virus, and that can be cleansed and sterilized for re-use by a
number of different techniques.
Please do not believe any of the contra-factual and sometimes dangerous nonsense being
spewed about by people who don't know what the hell they're talking about.
Oh, and N95 masks are not all "vented to breathe straight out without filtration." Not
those intended for medical use, for certain. There are some vented N95 masks that are
intended for firefighters and other non-medical usages, and not for protection against
viruses. And as you can see below, the electric charge attracts even sub-micron particles, so
the idea that the mask cannot trap viruses because they're too small is simply more nonsense
from uninformed and/or deviously motivated individuals.
//
Here's just a small sample of information that's easily found all over the net:
Brief bio: Peter Tsai, Ph.D.
Employment: Research faculty, Joint Institute of Advanced Materials, The University of
Tennessee, Knoxville
Expertise: Development of meltblowing (MB) systems and the electrostatic charging (EC) of
materials for making air filter electrets. The MB and the EC developed by Tsai have been used
in the industries worldwide making tens of billions of pieces of N95 respirators or face
masks. He has received three prestigious awards from UT in recognition of his contribution to
technology innovation. Tsai is a Fellow Member of American Filtration and Separation Society
and a member of Electrostatic Society of America.
https://utrf.tennessee.edu/information-faqs-charged-filtration-material-performance-after-various-sterilization-techniques/
//
Peter Tsai and the Electrostatic Filter Mask
https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2020/04/peter-tsai-and-electrostatic-filter-mask.html
"Prof. Tsai's innovation was to find a way to take a cold pre-fabricated mat of non-woven
material and subject it to two electric discharges of opposite polarity, one after the other.
Under the right conditions, this process embedded quasi-permanent electric charges into the
plastic fibers and made them very attractive to even sub-micron particles, like the
100-nanometer-diameter SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. The charge is durable and will
persist even if the masks are sterilized with steam, according to a new article that Prof.
Tsai just put up on a University of Tennessee website.'
//
The retired inventor of N95 masks is back at work, mostly for free, to fight covid-19 https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/07/07/peter-tsai-n95-mask-covid/
//
More technical information for those curious enough: https://aim.autm.net/public/project/53844/
//
Finally, let's dispense with a couple of other oh-so-popular misconceptions:
"Q: Do face masks cause oxygen deficiency?
"A: The prolonged use of medical masks when properly worn, does not cause oxygen deficiency
nor CO2 intoxication, according to WHO. Make sure your face covering fits properly and that
it is tight enough to allow you to breathe normally.
" 'This is a common misconception being perpetuated that has no evidence behind it,' said
Krutika Kuppalli, a Palo Alto infectious disease doctor and a biosecurity fellow with the
Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
"Q: Does wearing a face covering put you at risk for carbon dioxide poisoning?
"A: No. CO2 molecules diffuse easily through everything from bandannas to medical masks to
N95 respirators, allowing for normal breathing." Aidin Vaziri. San Francisco Chronicle
Thanks b. The mask - a simple and elegant precaution in high risk environments. But so
much foaming hysteria and opposition from pumped up nay sayers its just like the response to
the early motor car or the mandatory seat belt. Extraordinary, hyperventilated nonsense and
inflamed debating points.
I assume this noise is to distract from calling it by its proper name - Fort Detrick
Flu.
Mr Gohmert then wondered if his mask was to blame for contracting COVID-19.
"But I can't help but wonder if my keeping a mask on and keeping it in place, that if I
might have put some germs or some of the virus onto the mask and breathed it in -- I don't
know. But I got it, we'll see what happens from here, but the reports of my demise are very
premature," he said."
about a decade ago there was outbreak of TB in Seattle I was a nurse at the time. We were
told by infection disease at the time if we were to see TB patients we had to wear an
individually fitted respirator... every nurse was fitted and red pepper was sprayed around
the masks to test the fit. I couldn't wear one ... and was told I could wear a surgical mask
but that it would only provide about 30 min of protection and then I would need a new mask...
Now tell me why me way a fashion mask, a bandanna or scarf can protect me or another from a
virus (which is much smaller than a TB bacteria?
I just drove from coast to coast across the US. I avoided large cities and felt perfectly
comfortable with social distancing. I was in two states that never had a "true" lock down and
no mask mandates,,,, and you know what people weren't dropping like flies, people weren't
afraid... they were just acting respectful to one another"s personal space.
Let's see now... we have an aerosolized pathogen; shades of the discussion in 2001
regarding weaponized Antrax! We have, seemingly, a very low number of mutations; it's either
been out there or cultured for some time. No one has any 100% accurate test; the test
criteria of Koch's Postulates seem to have
been forgotten or ignored. In the dearth of trustworthy data, the deluge of untrustworthy
data, and the general level of greed-generated-mistrust towards all western societal
organizations, no one in the general public has the proper knowledge to make life-or-death
decisions concerning themselves or their families. Perhaps, rather than the "Trump flu" that
the partisan-oriented commenter proposed previously, if a large group of people called it
instead the "Fort Detrick Flu," western governments might be persuaded to seek and/or
spread truthful data.
The purpose of the mask is to stop (asymptomatic) carriers of the disease from spreading
it, or at least dramatically reduce the spreading. The mask limits outgoing aerosols,
not incoming ones.
Moreover, rural areas where people spend a lot of time outdoors and generally meet only a
limited amount of different people are much less likely to be affected by the initial phase
of a pandemic than densely populated cities where most people spend most of their days
closely packed with numerous other random people in badly ventilated indoor places such as
offices, factories, subways.
This new disposition of things, which we are quite unprepared for, will demand a revival of
the building wisdom of the ages. It will be a vast improvement over the anxious, neurotic
exercises that can now be plainly described as yesterday's tomorrow . The necessary
return to traditional modes and materials will yield a revived architecture of grace notes,
humility, and decorum. Wait for it!
TAC seems to publish an article deriding modern architecture on a monthly basis. Like
jazz or cilantro, modern architecture is something you either love or hate. Waste of space
to argue about it.
There's actually a specific group of olfactory genes (OR6A2) that people have or don't
have, that changes the taste of cilantro and causes this whole differentiation.
The thing I find about modernist architecture is that some of it is quite beautiful such
as the early BauHau and Art Deco design aesthetic. If you compare lets say a band or an
entertainers early work which is smart, crisp, new, innovative to their later works which
often arent good. They look like copies of earlier successes (resting on ones laurels so to
speak). In modernist architecture which was truly innovative at the time incorporating
large plate glass windows (from floor to ceiling) integrated the outdoor environment with
the indoor environment. It created rooms with lots of natural light and unobstructed views
which made older buildings which were gorgeous on the exterior with architectural
embellishments and gorgeous moldings, wallpapers, paint colors, fabrics moldings, etc
adorning the interior, look like windowless caves or coffins. Modern and Contemporary
Architecture (form, fit, function) was innovative because it deconstructed all architecture
down to the skeletal structure and windows but then comes the problem. A design can only be
deconstructed so much before its sterile, bland, dead. Its why some of the great modern and
contemporary architecture is surrounded by older buildings that have more embellishments
which magnify the clean lines of the structure. Its hard to achieve urban density with
modern buildings because the clean lines and large windows require some open space between
the buildings. As with most art and design movements, the best of the prior movements will
be incorporated into something new....but instead of deconstructing...a new architectural
movement will be adding rather than subtracting
Salingaros published ATOA in 2006, and has published several books since. Not
that his writing isn't timeless, but there are no details in this piece to tease out what
is new.
Easy to overlook is the role of building designers in pushing their idea of
..whatever... and the role of developers especially in wanting things built as quickly and
cheaply as possible. The latter are primarily responsible for strip malls, which are truly
awful, but utilitarian..
I'll be reading both these books, but the key failures of contemporary design and
planning aren't really about style, its about building codes, land use laws, transportation
and the way development is financed. Why does the strip look like the strip? Because its
the preferred mode of planning commissions, tax collectors and, most of all, banks who are
lending the money.
I agree with the author that modern architecture is ugly, but this is not some isolated,
mysterious ailement. Architecture is a form of art, and modern art is every bit as ugly,
inhuman and soul killing as modern architecture. I recently spent a seven month stretch
working inside many very expensive homes in Aspen Colorado. These multi-million dollar
homes are full of the most ugly and repugnant examples of modern art you could ever
imagine. There are paintings that sell for over a million which literally look like someone
vomited on the canvas. I don't have to tell that today's music is mostly garbage. All of
this reflects perfectly the modern world view. Namely, there is no God, there is no Truth,
there is no beauty. Humans are just accidental, meaningless beings, living pointless lives
in a pointless universe. As long as modern society clings to these awful lies, art in it's
many forms has no chance of making a comeback. When we earnestly return to God and
reverence for the eternal beauty of his creation, we will again seek to honor God and our
fellow humans with works of love and beauty. It's not complicated really.
The taste of the rich does not stand separate from their relations with the rest of us.
In acknowledging the turning point about a hundred years ago, Kunstler overemphasizes WWI
and under-emphasizes the 1917 Communist revolution in Russia. Before that year, Marxism was
a fringe movement that had never held power anywhere. Given that atheism was part of its
philosophical foundation, people of faith could not believe it would ever be anything else.
After that year, the elite realized that God was not protecting their supremacy and began
to fear the common people. Therefore the old aesthetic which allowed the elite to have the
same taste as everyone else but just express it more expensively was supplanted by a new
aesthetic that upheld tastes acquired and formed through an expensive education. The point
was not to impress the common people but to confuse them. It was part of the Cult of the
Expert. Its purpose was to convince the common people that they could not understand what
was going on at the elite levels and therefore they were not fit to rule. I remember some
British writer who called sunsets "sentimental", which puzzled me until I figured out that
this writer was part of (or was mocking) a movement to narrow the definition of beauty to
that sort of beauty that only people of refined (i.e., elite) taste could appreciate, while
beauty that could be appreciated by everyone was downgraded by renaming it
"sentimentality". After the decline of the Soviet Union became obvious in the 1980s,
ornament and detail were allowed to return, but only in an ironic or whimsical way. There's
still an element of confusion there, of calculated incomprehensibility.
At a time like this one, beauty is still being produced but on the fringes. Surrealism
lives on in the works of artists like Jesse Allen and Susan Seddon Boulet, who don't rate
Wikipedia pages but whose paintings are easily googled. Michael Reynolds builds Earthships
(conservationist architectural fantasies in the mode of Antoni Gaudí) out of literal
trash. (It's no accident that Reynolds, like Christopher Alexander and many other
architectural innovators, went to the Southwest, where snobbery-informed building codes
have historically been lax or non-existent. Traditional musicians from around the world
connect with each other and cross-fertilize to produce the genre known as world music. If
you don't care what the elite like, it's actually a glorious time for the arts.
Modern architecture neglects the person and substitutes visual ideas as its mission for
providing places to foster human well-being, delight and comfort.
The whole game is given away by an exchange with one of my design tutors while studying
architecture: we gave our presentations of our displayed projects (that is, pretend
buildings) and the tutor remarked that none of us talked about people. We had all tried to
mimic the journals (picture books usually) that we read and pretended to be abstract
sculpture artists. Crap, of course.
But being cheeky, I piped up and said "its because you guys never talk about people!"
We had been taught that buildings are 'walk-in scupltures' where as they are places for
meaningful personal purpose.
During an in-depth interview that will air Tuesday night on ABC News as part of a primetime
special, "American Catastrophe: How Did We Get Here?," Fauci was pressed to explain why, months
after COVID-19 first reached U.S. soil, the U.S. government is still struggling to provide
adequate testing for Americans and sufficient personal protective gear for essential
workers.
"We keep hearing when we go to these task force meetings that these [issues] are being
corrected," Fauci said. "But yet when you go into the trenches, you still hear about that."
Fauci said he does not have a "good answer" and "cannot explain" the discrepancy, especially
since those matters are not part of his "day-by-day" responsibilities, but part of the problem
stems from the fact that "many of the things that we needed were not produced in the United
States."
The U.S. government ended up competing for those materials with other nations stricken by
the pandemic, and the White House ultimately had to invoke emergency powers to push U.S.
companies to help.
Those challenges were exacerbated by what Fauci admitted were early missteps on testing by
the Centers for Disease Control, which developed tests that "didn't work" initially because
– it turned out – their results were based on potentially contaminated samples.
That forced the federal government to further rely private companies.
Asked about any missteps he may have made himself – including initially telling the
public that the average American didn't need to wear a mask – he said such decisions were
"based on the information at the moment."
In a segment due to air this
weekend, 'America This Week' host Eric Bolling sat down with Dr Judy Mikovits, a disgraced scientist who believes that the
coronavirus pandemic was orchestrated by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Dr Anthony Fauci and Bill
Gates to push vaccines on the population – a theory she set out in the documentary film 'Plandemic,' which has been effectively
censored off the internet.
Bolling called Mikovits' claims "hefty," and brought on medical contributor Dr Nicole Saphier to refute them, but CNN
claimed
the
host didn't push back hard enough against Mikovits' "baseless conspiracy theory," and hammered Bolling for allowing Mikovits to
"continue to make her case."
As CNN's article circulated
on Twitter on Saturday morning, the network's liberal audience called for a boycott of Sinclair. The broadcaster initially stood
by its decision to run the segment, declaring that
"at no juncture are we aligning with or
endorsing the viewpoints of Dr Mikovits."
However, within an hour,
Sinclair bent the knee and pulled the episode from the air until additional content could be added to counter Mikovits.
"All
stations have been notified not to air this and will instead be re-airing last week's episode in its place,"
Sinclair
tweeted. For good measure, the company added
"we valiantly support Dr Fauci and the work he
and his team are doing to further prevent the spread of Covid-19."
Sinclair is an incredibly
powerful organization to have been swayed by an online outrage campaign. The company and its partner organizations own nearly 300
local TV stations around the country, and reach 40 percent of American households.
Proponents of the boycott
celebrated their victory on Twitter, declaring that
"we shamed them into doing the right
thing."
Amid a recent upsurge in
'cancel culture,' few campaigns have brought a company to its knees as fast as Saturday's blitz by CNN. Similar campaigns have
been mounted against Fox News'
Tucker
Carlson
– with an advertiser boycott and attempts by journalists to doxx his family among the most recent moves, but Carlson
remains on the air and unapologetic.
For Bolling and his
colleagues at Sinclair on the other hand, it's back to the studio to reshoot their offending segment at CNN's behest.
I'd be interested on peoples views on this important link.
One hour long. A whistle blower nurse in a hospital in New York ! I have watched 10 mins and
am already shocked, disgusted and sickened. I'll get back to it when I'v calmed down.
The real problem is masks that don't measure up.
This article says half of the masks manufactured in China don't actually capture 95% of
particles. Since all of my masks are from China, that is concerning to me. However, even if a
mask only does 50%, that's still better than most non-respirator masks.
Mask-wearing obligatory in confined public spaces in France from today .Initially
announced by Macron in his july 14th speech for the first of August,but over the weekend
Health minister said it is in application from this monday 2 july.Fine is 135 euros.This will
lead to more gigs cancelled,unless they are in the street.How can one sing masked?
Well,I tried wearing one saturday,but it is a sloppy experience and I don't think I will wear
one correctly,it hangs down from my nose,it is to escape french fines.Before people start
insulting me for that,i have to tell you that I see practically nobody,apart from going to
supermarket once a week....
I pointed out that cloth masks were ineffective relative to N95 months ago here. The
hierarchy is N100, N99, N95, surgical masks, then anything else. There is a reduction of
maybe 25% in effectiveness per level (except for the N masks.) T-shirts are almost useless,
having an effectiveness of maybe 10-15%.
*Doesn't mean they shouldn't be worn.*
People don't seem to understand that avoiding infection is a game of probabilities. It's
not a binary either-or situation. Anything you can do to impede the progress of a viral load
from the environment to your vulnerable surfaces is worth doing if it's practical. Wearing a
mask is practical.
Minor repeated reductions in oxygen or increases in carbon dioxide is not going to kill
you and is unlikely to have long-term physical effects. And there's a good chance that
eventually we'll stop wearing them once the virus has been reduced in the environment.
Asians have been wearing masks frequently for a long time. Health workers wear masks
frequently for extended periods. Cite a study where that has had long-term negative health
effects.
"But there is a graph here that if I explain this properly, it'll make sense to you. This is
from the Centers for Disease Control. And it is death counts attributable to COVID-19 through
July 11th. The week ending July 11th, which is the most recent date for data. They run about,
you know, a week to two weeks behind here.
So throw the chart up. This is by age. All sexes by age. So if you look at the top line, the
red line, the very top, that is the week ending April 11th. You can't see this on the chart. Go
ahead and put the chart up there, Brian, switch it over. The top line is red. You can't even
probably tell that. But, trust me. The top-most line is red, and it occurs on April the 11th.
That is the peak death rate, and it's probably about 6,000 . I don't know in what interval that
this thing is reporting.
Probably Eh, it's in a week. The key is to go all the way over to the right side. You see
the peak of death rates was April the 11th. It isn't now. The peak death rate was April 11.
That red line is people 85 years and older. The line under it is people 75 to 84. That's the
yellow line. The blue line underneath that is people 65 to 74. We're under 4,000 now in a week.
So the top line is people 85 and older.
If you go to the This is where I'm not gonna There are two reds, but you can't tell the
difference in them. Just trust me. Let's move to the far-right side of the chart. That's July
11th, and you'll see that the death rate is not even 500, right now, per week -- CDC -- in all
ages, in all demographics, says the CDC. We're not at peak death rate. The peak death rate was
April the 11th to April the 18th." Limbaugh
I see now we are being encouraged to ignore "death rate" as unimportant. What we are told to
panic about is a higher incidence of "positives" among population under 40 years of age. This
population apparently doesn't have as bad an outcome (hospitalization/death) and that's "bad"
because they don't get contact traced and thus have "community spread".
I just love how AP/NYT and local journos all quote seemingly random "experts" with no
discussion of just what their "expertise" consists of, other than perhaps a credential (and the
relevance of the credential to the "expert statement" (more correctly opinion) is never
provided).
Sir, Yes. You are thinking right about Cuomo murdering the elderly that cost the state so much money
- many having the homes and medical treatment paid for by Medicaid (Medicare only pays for 30
days). Only it wasn't just Cuomo it was also Witmer in Michigan and Murphy in New Jersey. They
killed off the costly elderly and got the bonus of more deaths to raise the fear of the virus
and gain subsequent control over the lives of citizens + via twisted logic, try to give Trump a
black eye. Those govs are are morally sick people. It is a no brainer, if you care about the
elderly, to not place people with what you believe is a deadly highly contagious virus in homes
full of elderly infirm people. I mean what is there to even consider or weigh about that
decision?
Had those murderers handled the nursing homes correctly (like Florida did) the virus would
have been a lot less deadly.
Btw, with regard to schools re-opening, note that the line of the graph for school and
college age people is basically synonymous with the X-axis; meaning they didn't die from the
virus even at its peak lethality.
To know what Fauci [don't wear a mask it don't help; wear a mask it helps] would say, let's
look at how Aristotle would help us elucidate this answer.
Q: What can one conclude from [the mouth of] the liar [Fauci]?
A: Answer: nothing Absolutely Nothing. +++++++++++++++ And on this basis, from his mouth, our national "pandemic" "strategy" was thus formulated, from
Mr. Nothing aka Fauci.
And onto more black humor, and the wearing a mask as virtue signalling -- since they can
only slow down by at most ten minutes any disease transmission of the novel coronvirus, there
is this "gem" spoken by someone who apparently believes the mask kool aid? I D K . . . --and
for me at least, his essay, Attorney Jonathan Turley, was funny to read, irrespective of
whether that was his intent:
[[There is a new form of protests sweeping across the country as individuals put on
anti-Mask masks to defy mandatory mask rules. The anti-masks are made of thin material, mesh or
even crochet and are advertised as having no protective qualities for Covid-19. The question is
whether they are legal. They appear to be so.]]
Whether you like it or not, the world is going for "herd immunity." Unfortunately, there is
no other viable option; there will be no vaccine, there will be no miracle cure and besides,
the virus isn't even all that dangerous if you are young and healthy. Simply put, COVID-19
won't flame out until 50 to 80 percent of us get it (the precise number is open to debate).
For the past century, most people have accepted that from time to time they'll get a cold or
flu. It was considered a fact of life and an inconvenience. Somehow, in this age of fake news
and social media, a disease that's a bit worse than the annual flu, has taken on a persona
that's terrifying. I understand why that's happened; the media and various "influencers" sell
fear and astute politicians harness this fear for votes. Meanwhile, anyone with a dissenting
voice is marginalized. Along the way, data has been tampered with and facts have become
bastardized. Is anyone else disturbed that the Democrats and Republicans each support different
miracle cures? Basic science hasn't been this politicized since Galileo opined about celestial
bodies.
... ... ...
Now, I don't intend this post to be political; you can twist most data to prove almost any
spectrum of facts. Rather, let me throw out a strawman; let's assume COVID-19 led to almost
certain death, do we have the ability to stop it? We could quarantine all of humanity for
years, but COVID-19 would still be out there; it wouldn't die out -- there would always be new
flare-ups as people got sloppy or ignored the rules. We tried an aggressive quarantine in
America and did little more than "flatten the curve." Unlike smallpox or polio, there will
never be a vaccine (there has never been a COVID vaccine for a variety of reasons) --
therefore, as soon as quarantine ends, we'd all begin to spread it again, as there will always
be infected humans. Countries that hermetically sealed their borders would not be immune either
-- they've simply deferred infection. Eventually, there would be an accident -- one single
pathogen would undo years of work. You can quarantine a village in Africa and stop a disease
like Ebola that strikes fast and often kills the host. You cannot stop the spread of something
that tens of millions of global citizens unknowingly have, while lying dormant for up to three
weeks.
I think it should be obvious that you cannot stop COVID from spreading, at best, you can
slow it down so that hospitals do not become overwhelmed. Instead, governments are passing
draconian and arbitrary laws that do little to slow the spread, yet destroy businesses and
communities. If anything, this takes a biological crisis and turns it into an economic one.
The the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was actually on sidelines and
did not yet contribute anything signigicat in understadning this coronavirus
The level of subservience of Fauci to Big Pharma is open for review
WASHINGTON -- Dr. Anthony Fauci on Monday rejected President Donald Trump's
recent criticism of him in which he called the infectious disease expert an "alarmist."
... Fauci warned last week that the coronavirus pandemic could be as bad as the
1918 flu pandemic, which is estimated to have killed at least 50 million people worldwide. He
also warned late last month that the number of
COVID-19 cases could top 100,000 a day.
Is the high share of 70% asymptomatic cases really confirmed?? The last time I heard
something about that isue it whas claimed to be 15-20% with no evidence for high numbers of
undiscovered asymtomatic cases. The extensive testing with a low percantege of positives
seems to confirm this.
If the asymptomatic cases were really around 2/3 then this would mean the number of real
cases is much higher the the number of officially counted cases, by the factor of 3
roughly.
And this Big Pharma stooge was right: in open spaces unless you are inthe dence coud there is no reason to wear any mask
Notable quotes:
"... No – for a solid hour, I heard the following: that COVID19 – in reality, at most, a moderately serious flu virus – is the worst medical threat the United States has ever faced. ..."
For anyone who has forgotten, Fauci told 60 Minutes that:
There's no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you're in the middle of an
outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little better and it might even block a
droplet, but it's not providing the perfect protection that people think it is. And often
there are unintended consequences – people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep
touching their face."
But he does make an astute point:
"Recently I had the poor judgment to turn on National Public Radio for about an hour, under the impression that I was
going to learn something about the day’s news.
... No – for a solid hour, I heard the following: that COVID19 – in reality, at most, a moderately serious flu virus – is
the worst medical threat the United States has ever faced.
...
But the real theme of the hour was masks, masks, masks: how to make them, how to wear them, their different types, who
doesn’t seem to have enough of them, and why muffling our faces (even though no such thing was ever demanded of us during
dozens of past viral outbreaks) is absolutely, positively good for us all."
When it comes to the topic of clown cars, we'd say Dr. Fauci gets a limo version all to himself...
Yesterday he uttered the following incoherent babble, saying the recent surge in new cases is because the Virus Patrol didn't
go far enough in throwing 50 million Americans out of work:
'We did not shut down entirely,' Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said. 'We need
to draw back a few yards and say, "OK, we can't stay shut down forever." You've got to shut down but then you've got to gradually
open.'
Got that?
What does this pretentious old windbag think - that the blooming, buzzing mass of a $21 trillion economy can be calibrated up
and down by the week via some magical dimmer switch?
Never mind because he was then on to this preposterous comparison:
Fauci also said he expects the public to compare the Covid-19 pandemic to the 1918 pandemic flu, which killed around 50 million
people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Well, it so happens that the US death rate from the Spanish Flu was 655 per 100,000 persons (675,000 deaths in a population of
103 million). That's obviously orders of magnitude larger than the 39 per 100,000 deaths to date from the Covid.
In fact, the impact of the Spanish Flu was not only 17X greater in terms of the overall mortality rate, but it was also a true
Grim Reaper in the sense that it struck across the entire age spectrum of the population (dark blue bars).
It actually started in the giant domestic military training compounds stood up by Woodrow Wilson to join a European war that was
none of America's business, but the virus did kill tens of thousands of 18-30 year-old draftees in their own barracks long before
they got to the killing fields of France.
By contrast, as we now surely understand, and you would think Fauci would, too, the Covid (light blue bars) is primarily a harvester
of elderly persons already struggling with life-threatening respiratory, heart, vascular, renal and diabetic illnesses.
Accordingly, among the 191 million Americans under the age of 45 years, there have been only 1.5 WITH-Covid deaths per 100,000,
while for the elderly, the opposite is true. Nearly 70,000 or more than 60 percent of all WITH-Covid death have been among the 75
years and older population, resulting in mortality rates as follows:
85 years & Over: 581 per 100,000 persons;
75-84 years: 200 per 100,000 persons;
Now, you don't need to take a single class in epidemiology to understand a core truth: That is, when nearly 60 percent of the
population under 45 years accounts for only 2.5 percent of the reported WITH-Covid deaths and has a rounding error mortality rate,
while the 6.5 percent of the population 75 years and older accounts for 60 percent of the deaths -- you don't fight the disease with
a one-size-fits all strategy of generic lockdowns, quarantines, and social regimentation.
And surely you don't shutdown the schools, gyms, bars, restaurants, movies, ball games, concerts, beaches, theme parks etc. because
the vulnerable elderly don't patronize these venues in appreciable numbers anyway, and could easily be warned to stay strictly away.
The key point, however, is that this whole unspeakable Lockdown Folly does not remotely stem from the "science", as the MSM supporters
of Fauci claim.
It's just a hair-brained experiment in social control that happened because the Donald was too weak, ill-informed, distracted,
and innumerate to send Fauci and his camarilla of doctors and vaccine-peddlers packing when the mid-March guidelines were first issued
by the CDC.
Yes, the Donald's political enemies in the ranks of big city mayors and Blue State governors have feasted upon the chum Fauci
& Co have persistently tossed into the fetid waters of national politics, but that doesn't let Trump off the hook.
If the truth be told, this is the Trump Lockdown Folly and ranks among the greatest blunders ever committed by a US President.
That's because even at this late date nearly four months into the resulting economic disaster:
there is no evidence that asymptomatic persons are transmitters of the virus,
there is powerful statistical evidence that 95 percent of the population can cope with the disease and recover if they do become
infected.
Yet, the twin pillars of Fauci's hare-brained social regimentation scheme assumes they very opposite: Namely, that healthy Americans
must be put under house arrest because they are silent spreaders and killers of their fellow citizens; and that the disease is so
virulent that its #1 enemy -- the powerful immune system of every healthy American -- cannot be trusted to do its job if the virus
is permitted to follow its natural course of contagion and eventual herd immunity.
As to the silent spreaders trope, here is how the very head of WHO's COVID-19 Task Force, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, recently explained
that transmission of the virus from asymptomatic patients appears to be very rare:
It still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual."
For crying out loud. That knocks the very rationale for stay-at-home orders to hundreds of millions of healthy citizens into a
cocked hat.
In a constitutional democracy, where the liberties and properties of citizens are protected by law, you need overwhelming proof
of an existential threat to society before ordering mass house arrests. But in this instance, the head of the WHO task force–the
agency that fomented the whole coronavirus hysteria in the first place–has said quite unequivocally: No cigar!
In a word, Dr. Fauci is peddling dangerous humbug under the banner of pseudo-science, and should have been shut-up and forced
into retirement long ago. The unfortunate truth, however, is that the Donald is too chicken to use the Fake "your fired" tool that
made him a short-lived TV star, if not a successful businessman.
His defenders, of course, mumble that his hands are tied because Fauci is a member of the legally protected Senior Executive Service
(SES). That's Jimmy Carter's gift to insubordinate bureaucracy, which your editor happily voted against back in the day -- but the
excuse is poppycock.
Under Federal law, Fauci can be fired if he is found to have engaged in --
misconduct, neglect of duty, malfeasance, or failure to accept a direct reassignment or to accompany a position in a transfer
of function", is or to be "less than successful [in his] executive performance.
If not "malfeasance", what would you call the absolute savaging of the livelihoods and life's work of tens of millions of American
workers and small businessmen for no good reason of state, which have resulted from Fauci's idiotic pronouncements and guidelines?
The thing is, after four months Fauci's blatherings and instructions to state and local authorities have fomented an outright
public Hysteria of biblical proportions.
It is not just that officialdom has closed restaurants and gyms via unconstitutional "takings" of their owners' properties. By
now, Fauci's Virus Patrol and its megaphones and misanthropes in the MSM have rendered large portions of the American public fearful
about leaving their own homes.
And, needless to say, they have also given the Donald's legions of rabid political enemies license to stage malign theatrics in
the name of Covid-fighting that would be unthinkable under any other circumstances.
For instance, it has now been announced that the school districts of Los Angeles and San Diego, which collectively serve nearly
one million students, will not have in-person teaching to start the school year.
But if you are conversant with any facts at all, you can only sputter: WTF!
There are nine million school age children in California, and not a single WITH-Covid death has occurred among them.
That's right. There have been 27,400 positive tests among these nine million kids, but all of them, positively all of them, have
been either asymptomatic or mildly ill -- as children are wont to become -- and have recovered.
Yet here is where America's growing fleet of clown cars comes in. It seems that the politicization has gone so far off the deep
end that the LA teachers union–35,000 strong -- is now taking the schools hostage for their own parochial ends.
They recently proclaimed that no schools should open in LA until there is a Charter School freeze; the police are defunded; Medicare-for-all
is adopted by the US Congress; new state taxes on the wealthy are enacted; and there is a Federal bailout of the LA school district.
You can't make this stuff up. And while they were taking the children hostage in the name of Covid-fighting, they also insisted
that the already dysfunctional schools of LA become completely pointless:
The union outlined numerous major provisions it says will be necessary to reopen schools again, including sequestering students
in small groups throughout the school day, providing students with masks and other forms of protective equipment, and re-designing
school layouts in order to facilitate 'social distancing.'
Of course, the latest outbursts of this kind of mindless social destruction has been fueled by the absolute mendacity of the Virus
Patrol and its MSM megaphones with respect to the so-called outbreak of new cases in the Sun Belt states.
But the whole brouhaha is a crock. There is no public health crisis in the so-called hot spots, as the up-to-date chart below
makes abundantly clear.
Yes, the 42-day trend of "new cases" has risen sharply in tandem with far more testing, and repeat testing of the same individuals
-- outcomes that were inherent in re-opening plans, which required employers to have their employees tested as a condition of operating.
But, alas, the death count trend in these 50 counties has not risen at all - except for the last few days when a lot of "catch-up"
data for earlier fatalities was thrown into the data hoppers by some of the counties involved.
That hasn't stopped the Covid-Howlers from proclaiming a phony medical crisis in Texas and elsewhere, with the same old tropes
about overflowing hospitals and strained ICU capacity in places like Houston.
But as the eagle-eyed maven of the corona-data, Alex Berenson, tweeted this AM, it's just a big fat lie. While CNN may have managed
to find one or two crowded facilities in the whole of the Houston-Harris county region of some 5 million souls, there are actually
still more than 2,500 empty hospital beds in the area.
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Here's the thing. The Virus Patrol has switched from the death count to the "case" count because the latter is not at the 3,000
per day predicted by the CDC in early May, and ballyhooed by the NYT and MSM as the leading edge of a horrid "second wave" coming
down the pike.
In fact, during July to date (thru the 14th), the daily WITH-Covid death count has averaged 613, or only one-fifth of the projected
June-July-August surge; and even that level is suspect, given the growing evidence that many local jurisdictions are doing retrospective
death audits to pad their case counts.
In any event, the readily available state-by-state data tells you all you need to know. This so-called Sun Belt wave of cases
is, indeed, the equivalent of the normal flu.
In the case of Florida, for instance, during the first 14 days of July, there have been 139,195 new cases reported, but only 4,322
new hospitalizations. So that means only 3.1 percent of this ballyhooed surge of cases was sick enough to even require hospitalization.
Needless to say, that's not a crisis; it's just one more part of the indictment against Fauci and his gang of malpracticing doctors.
They have put the anti-Trump press into a rabid feeding frenzy, and that coverage, in turn, has caused the American public to head
back into their Covid holes.
As it happened, three of the nation's largest banks reported their totally confected earnings for Q2 this AM, but the one thing
that stood out as meaningful was a collective $28 billion provision for future loan losses. That is, they see the massive wave of
defaults set in motion by Fauci's misbegotten Lockdown Nation strategy, and are getting prepared for the worst.
Meanwhile, the Fed's lunatic $3 trillion injection of liquidity into the canyons of Wall Street since the Lockdown Nation incepted
in mid-March continues to do its mischief, fueling a stock market bubble that gets more ludicrous (and dangerous) by the day.
We noted yesterday that during the Monday's great reversal on the stock market that Tesla had gained a "GM" ($38 billion) in the
morning spike, but lost a "BMW" ($42 billion) in the afternoon.
A timely piece by Bloomberg this AM helps explain how this kind of madness actually happened:
Almost 40,000 Robinhood accounts added shares of the automaker during a single fourhour span on Monday, according to website
Robintrack.net, which compiles data on the investing platform that's much beloved by day trading millennials.
The frenzy in interest means that as of the end of Monday's trading session, there are now roughly 457,000 users on the Robinhood
app that hold shares of the company in some form. That makes it the 10th-most popular stock on the platform, ahead of even Amazon.com
Inc., which is held by 358,000 users.
The one-day return may not have turned out so well. Tesla was up as much as 16 percent at one point before paring gains through
the day and finishing 3 percent lower. It was a rare losing day for the high flying stock, which has surged 56 percent over the
past 10 days.
So how did these mindless gamblers reason about a company that has never, ever made a four-quarter profit, and which reported
Q2 volumes well below last year, in coming to a peak valuation of $325 billion Monday morning?
Well, a sell-side analyst explained both that question, and the large fleet of clown cars now cruising up and down Wall Street
about as well as could be expected. Said this master of the crystal ball:
'At the current price, Tesla's stock reflects an expectation of 2030 volume of 5 million units, which is more than ten times
what the company appears on track to achieve this year,' Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said.
Why, you don't say!
Then again, projecting EV car sales in the year 2030 is probably as good a use for Wall Street's clown car riders as any other.
Certainly, it would not dawn on them to ask whether a stock market held up by the Terrific Ten, and especially the FAANGs and
Microsoft, has anything at all to do with the dire state of the US economy.
It seems these trading sardines make up a quarter of the S&P 500 index by value, but just 8 percent of its composite revenues
and a mere 1 percent of jobs in the American workforce.
So, yes, the Acela Corridor has the clown cars coming and going - even as the stock bubble which will take down this whole fantasy
reaches its historic asymptote, as we will essay further in Part 3.
Nearly 71,000 Americans died from drug overdoses last year...
Soaring overdose deaths in the US have helped drag down average life expectancy for 3
straight years, and by the looks of it, No. 4 might be right around the corner.
play_arrow
sbin , 1 hour ago
St Floyd died of an overdose.
2 years of drug overdose killed as many Americans as plandemic.
Work for funeral homes many more overdose and suicide deaths 20 to 40 year olds than covid
+70 and most were already dead but still breathing and making nursing home money.
Lucius Quinctius , 1 hour ago
The Chinese have a legitimate grievance ,(actually several), with regards to the
deliberate introduction of opium into their country by the British, in the 1800 s,as a means
to repatriate sterling used to pay for tea .Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank,(HSBC),very central
to funding this traffic as well as a Jewish-British banking family, the Sassoons, originally
from Baghdad ,directly involved.The immiseration of millions of Chinese in opium addiction as
well as the failed Chinese attempt To free themselves from this in the Opium Wars has left
them bitter,rightfully.
So, introducing fentanyl to the west is payback. Two years ago I looked up on Alibaba ,out
of curiosity ,the cost , quantity and availability of a common antibiotic, Vancomycin. It was
amazing, at least 30 responses, producing in quantity, hundreds of kilograms, cheap ....,,you
want it when? The Chinese pharmaceutical production capacity is enormous. Fentanyl is no
problem to produce in huge quantity for these folks. They, in their minds, have reason to
send it our way. We are at war.
MerLynn , 1 hour ago
yes its a Bio Chemical War.... and all Bio Weapons come from the Barrel of a Needle
Sid Davis , 1 hour ago
If you are free, that means you can make good choices for yourself and bad ones, too.
When you are a slave on the big government run plantation we call the USA, pain from being
subjugated encourages escape, and since the underground market in drugs is one of the few
remaining free markets, you still have the freedom there to make bad choices.
It isn't much solace to those you leave behind that you managed to permanently escape your
pain.
Off topic, but yesterday on Newsmax network in the US the guest COMPLETELY ripped into
Gates and Fauci. Newsmax is a major conservative media outlet that has both a TV network and
website with millions of viewers/readers. You can watch it here: https://twitter.com/KarluskaP/status/1283315374025515008
"And when Fauci was telling the White House Coronavirus Task Force that there was only
anecdotal evidence in support of hydroxychloroquine to fight the virus, I confronted him with
scientific studies providing evidence of safety and efficacy. A recent Detroit hospital study
showed a 50% reduction in the mortality rate when
the medicine is used in early treatment.
Now Fauci says a falling
mortality rate doesn't matter when it is the single most important statistic to help guide
the pace of our economic reopening. The lower the mortality rate, the faster and more we can
open." Navarro in USA Today
-------------
"Laputa's population consists mainly of an educated elite, who are fond of mathematics,
astronomy , music and
technology, but fail to make practical use of their knowledge. Servants make up the rest of the
population.
The Laputans have mastered magnetic levitation. They also are very fond of astronomy, and
discovered two moons of Mars. (This is 151 years earlier than the
recognized
discovery of the two moons of Mars by Asaph Hall in 1877.) However, they are unable to
construct well-designed clothing or buildings, as they despise practical geometry as "vulgar
and mechanick". The houses are ill-built, lacking any right angles, [6] and
the clothes of Laputans, which are decorated with astrological symbols and musical figures, do
not fit, as they take measurements with instruments such as quadrants and a compass rather than with tape measures . [7] They
spend their time listening to the music of the spheres. They believe in astrology and worry
constantly that the sun will go out." wiki on Gullivers Travels.
--------------
Ah, I see it now! Dr. Fauci is a Laputan seer! He is devoid of any real comprehension or
respect for the ordinary humans trying to deal with actual pandemic problems rather than "the
music of the spheres."
Is he a Democratic Party operative? I doubt it. He is simply "out of it." pl
Fauci doesn't matter. Over the weekend the WH tried to strongarm parents to get on board
with school reopening. They are fucking with the wrong interest group.
There is a better, albeit a more difficult way to undermine Fauci. Educate the people that
this issue has vast economic consequences and we must factor in those consequences when
crafting an over-all policy. Fauci, I expect, will openly admit he is approaching the topic
from a purely medical perspective...which is exactly what he's supposed to be doing.
As is, Trump is leaves himself wide open to the obvious counter: Neither he nor his
economic adviser have any medical expertise.
"Tony Fauci has many, many vaccine patents and there's one vaccine patent that he has that
is a way of packaging a coronavirus with some other vaccine in a protein sheet and then
delivering it through a vaccine he somehow ended up owning that patent Tony Fauci will be
able to cash in . So Fauci's agency will collect half the royalties for that vaccine [related
to the coronavirus]."
"Sunderland co-founded the VC firm, known for making ambitious investments, after having
led program-related investments for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided
financial support to Moderna while she was there. Since 2010, Moderna has been working on
developing messenger RNA (mRNA) that allows the body's cells to act like reprogrammed
biological factories, producing antibodies needed to battle diseases, including viruses.
"The nice thing about big bets is that they play out over time. ... We made an investment
five years ago in Moderna, and mRNA was a big bet, and you see it playing out in terms of
their ability to get a rapid vaccine for Covid. ... You have to take those big bets,"
Sunderland said."
"The other thing that is amazing in its evolution is the amount that we've learned about
HIV pathogenesis, the reservoir, the potential for controlling the virus, either in the
absence of antiretroviral [treatment] or in a modified regimen that takes away the need to
have a single pill or multiple pills every single day. The thing that remains the holy grail
of unaccomplished goals is the development of a highly effective, safe vaccine. And that is
something that's not surprising because of the very special situation with HIV, that the body
-- as much as we study pathogenesis and understand it so incredibly well -- the body does not
make an adequate immune response against HIV, which is the reason why no one has yet
spontaneously cleared the virus by their immune system. And so what we need to do, and where
we're combination putting a lot of effort into, but also struggling with, is the issue of the
development of a vaccine that would be effective enough to be able to be deployed.
We have one situation that took place, well after that meeting in San Francisco, where a
trial of a candidate vaccine -- in a trial named RV 144 that took place in Thailand -- showed
a 31% efficacy, which gave us some great hints of correlates of immunity and are the basis
for a number of subsequent trials, but still was not good enough to deploy. So we have a
number of very large vaccine trials, going on now throughout the world, including a heavy
concentration in southern Africa. But we also are pursuing another line of vaccine research,
which is the attempt to present to the body, in the proper conformation with sequential
immunizations, the capability of making broadly neutralizing antibodies. And if we're
successful in that, then I think we have a really good chance of developing a vaccine that
would have an efficacy and safety profile good enough to actually deploy it."
I think over time mrna "vaccines" will change medicine. Are we opening Pandora's box?
Possibly.
Navarro wrote in the
op-ed for USA TODAY Tuesday that "Fauci has a good bedside manner with the public, but he
has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on."
...
The White House's deputy chief of staff for communications, Dan Scavino, who has been by the
president's side since the 2016 campaign, on Sunday posted a cartoon on Facebook depicting
Fauci as a running faucet washing the U.S. economy down the drain.
"Sorry, Dr. Faucet! At least you know if I'm going to disagree with a colleague, such as
yourself, it's done publicly -- and not cowardly, behind journalists with leaks. See you
tomorrow!" Scavino wrote in a caption accompanying the cartoon.
"... The cash must be Russian sourced , per the NYT, because a couple of low level Taliban types, who were likely tortured by the Afghan police, have said that it is so. ..."
There is particular danger at the moment that powerful political alignments in the United
States are pushing strongly to exacerbate the developing crisis with Russia. The New York
Times, which broke the story that the Kremlin had been paying the Afghan Taliban bounties to
kill American soldiers, has been particularly assiduous in promoting the tale of perfidious
Moscow. Initial Times coverage, which claimed that the activity had been confirmed by both
intelligence sources and money tracking, was supplemented by
delusional nonsense from former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice, who asks "Why
does Trump put Russia first?" before calling for a "swift and significant U.S. response." Rice,
who is being mentioned as a possible Biden choice for Vice President, certainly knows about
swift and significant as she was one of the architects of the destruction of Libya and the
escalation of U.S. military and intelligence operations directed against a non-threatening
Syria.
The Times is also titillating
with the tale of a low level drug smuggling Pashto businessman who seemed to have a lot of
cash in dollars lying around, ignoring the fact that Afghanistan is awash with dollars and has
been for years. Many of the dollars come from drug deals, as Afghanistan is now the world's
number one producer of opium and its byproducts.
The cash must be
Russian sourced , per the NYT, because a couple of low level Taliban types, who were likely
tortured by the Afghan police, have said that it is so. The Times also cites anonymous
sources which allege that there were money transfers from an account managed by the Kremlin's
GRU military intelligence to an account opened by the Taliban. Note the "alleged" and consider
for a minute that it would be stupid for any intelligence agency to make bank-to-bank
transfers, which could be identified and tracked by the clever lads at the U.S. Treasury and
NSA. Also try to recall how not so long ago we heard fabricated tales about threatening WMDs to
justify war. Perhaps the story would be more convincing if a chain of custody could be
established that included checks drawn on the Moscow-Narodny Bank and there just might be a
crafty neocon hidden somewhere in the U.S. intelligence community who is right now faking up
that sort of evidence.
Other reliably Democratic Party leaning news outlets, to include CNN, MSNBC and The
Washington Post all jumped on the bounty story, adding details from their presumably
inexhaustible supply of anonymous sources. As Scott Horton
observed the media was reporting a "fact" that there was a rumor.
Inevitably the Democratic Party leadership abandoned its Ghanaian kente cloth scarves, got
up off their knees, and hopped immediately on to their favorite horse, which is to claim loudly
and in unison that when in doubt Russia did it. Joe Biden in particular is "disgusted" by a
"betrayal" of American troops due to Trump's insistence on maintaining "an embarrassing
campaign of deferring and debasing himself before Putin."
The Dems were joined in their outrage by some Republican lawmakers who were equally incensed
but are
advocating delaying punishing Russia until all the facts are known. Meanwhile, the
"circumstantial details" are being invented to make the original tale more credible, including
crediting the Afghan operation to a secret Russian GRU Army intelligence unit that allegedly
was also behind the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury England in 2018.
Reportedly the Pentagon is looking into the circumstances
around the deaths of three American soldiers by roadside bomb on April 8, 2019 to determine
a possible connection to the NYT report. There are also concerns relating to several deaths in
training where Afghan Army recruits turned on their instructors. As the Taliban would hardly
need an incentive to kill Americans and as
only seventeen U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan in 2019 as a result of hostile action, the
year that the intelligence allegedly relates to, one might well describe any joint
Taliban-Russian initiative as a bit of a failure since nearly all of those deaths have been
attributed to kinetic activity initiated by U.S. forces.
The actual game that is in play is, of course, all about Donald Trump and the November
election. It is being claimed that the president was briefed on the intelligence but did
nothing. Trump denied being verbally briefed due to the fact that the information had not been
verified. For once America's Chief Executive spoke the truth, confirmed by the "intelligence
community," but that did not stop the media from implying that the disconnect had been caused
by Trump himself. He reportedly does not read the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB), where such a
speculative piece might indeed appear on a back page, and is uninterested in intelligence
assessments that contradict what he chooses to believe. The Democrats are suggesting that Trump
is too stupid and even too disinterested to be president of the United States so they are
seeking to replace him with a corrupt 78-year-old man who may be suffering from dementia.
The Democratic Party cannot let Russia go because they see it as their key to future success
and also as an explanation for their dramatic failure in 2016 which in no way holds them
responsible for their ineptness. One does not expect the House Intelligence Committee,
currently headed by the wily Adam Schiff, to actually know anything about intelligence and how
it is collected and analyzed, but the politicization of the product is certainly something that
Schiff and his colleagues know full well how to manipulate. One only has to recall the
Russiagate Mueller Commission investigation and Schiff's later role in cooking the witnesses
that were produced in the subsequent Trump impeachment hearings.
Schiff predictably
opened up on Trump in the wake of the NYT report, saying "I find it inexplicable in light
of these very public allegations that the president hasn't come before the country and assured
the American people that he will get to the bottom of whether Russia is putting bounties on
American troops and that he will do everything in his power to make sure that we protect
American troops."
Schiff and company should know, but clearly do not, that at the ground floor level there is
a lot of lying, cheating and stealing around intelligence collection. Most foreign agents do it
for the money and quickly learn that embroidering the information that is being provided to
their case officer might ultimately produce more cash. Every day the U.S. intelligence
community produces thousands of intelligence reports from those presumed "sources with access,"
which then have to be assessed by analysts. Much of the information reported is either
completely false or cleverly fabricated to mix actual verified intelligence with speculation
and out and out lies to make the package more attractive. The tale of the Russian payment of
bribes to the Taliban for killing Americans is precisely the kind of information that stinks to
high heaven because it doesn't even make any political or tactical sense, except to Nancy
Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff and the New York Times. For what it's worth, a number of
former genuine intelligence officers including
Paul Pillar, John Kiriakou , Scott Ritter , and
Ray McGovern
have looked at the evidence so far presented and have walked away unimpressed. The National
Security Agency (NSA) has also declined to confirm the story, meaning that there is no
electronic trail to validate it.
Finally, there is more than a bit of the old hypocrisy at work in the damnation of the
Russians even if they have actually been involved in an improbable operation with the Taliban.
One recalls that in the 1970s and 1980s the United States supported the mujahideen rebels
fighting against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. The assistance consisted of weapons,
training, political support and intelligence used to locate, target and kill Soviet soldiers.
Stinger missiles were provided to bring down helicopters carrying the Russian troops. The
support was pretty much provided openly and was even boasted about, unlike what is currently
being alleged about the Russian assistance. The Soviets were fighting to maintain a secular
regime that was closely allied to Moscow while the mujahideen later morphed into al-Qaeda and
the Islamist militant Taliban subsequently took over the country, meaning that the U.S. effort
was delusional from the start.
So, what is a leaked almost certainly faux story about the Russian bounties on American
soldiers intended to accomplish? It is probably intended to keep a "defensive" U.S. presence in
Afghanistan, much desired by the neocons, a majority in Congress and the Military Industrial
Complex (MIC), and it will further be played and replayed to emphasize the demonstrated
incompetence of Donald Trump. The end result could be to secure the election of a pliable
Establishment flunky Joe Biden as president of the United States. How that will turn out is
unpredictable, but America's experience of its presidents since 9/11 has not been very
encouraging.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that
seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website ishttps://councilforthenationalinterest.org,address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]
.
The Deep State vermin who pulled-off the violent, proxy overthrow of Yanukovych in 2014,
and who are also behind the Arab Spring, Syrian Rebels, ISIS, and the ongoing domestic unrest
Stateside, are the descendants of the vermin who overthrew Christian Russia in 1917 using the
same modus operandi of color revolution and “peaceful protests.”. Putin undid all
their hard work in Russia and kicked them out and seized their ill gotten gains: this,
coupled with their congenital hatred of Russia, is the reason for the non-stop, bipartisan
refrain of “Russia, Russia, Russia.”
It is probably intended to keep a “defensive” U.S. presence in Afghanistan,
much desired by the neocons, a majority in Congress and the Military Industrial Complex
(MIC), and it will further be played and replayed to emphasize the demonstrated
incompetence of Donald Trump.
There are other reasons for wishing to stay in Afghanistan. Generals don’t like
losing wars. It is personally humiliating to retreat. The whole country is also worn down by
lost wars and the psychological blow lasts for over 10 years like during the post-Vietnam
era. Keeping 10,000 troops in Afghanistan permanently won’t win the war but it will
prevent a defeat and potentially humiliating last minute evacuation when the Taliban retake
Kabul.
Also Al-Qaeda is still present in Afghanistan: “Al-Qaeda has 400 to 600 operatives
active in 12 Afghan provinces and is running training camps in the east of the country,
according to the report released Friday. U.N. experts, drawing their research from interviews
with U.N. member states, including their intelligence and security services, plus think tanks
and regional officials, say the Taliban has played a double game with the Trump
Administration, consulting with al-Qaeda senior leaders throughout its 16 months of peace
talks with U.S. officials and reassuring Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, among others, that
the Taliban would “honour their historical ties” to the terrorist group.”
https://time.com/5844865/afghanistan-peace-deal-taliban-al-qaeda/
While the melodrama about trump=pro Russia and dems=anti Russia makes good political
theater to keep folks running in circles chasing their tails, this is not the main reason for
the continuous attacks on Russia by organs of the zpc/nwo. The main reason is Russia is not
owned by them. Not a colony. The main reason for the psywar is not about trump vs dems, it is
about keeping the Russia=bad guys theme seeded in the propaganda. That was the main reason
behind “Russiagate”, as well. And as with that scam, both “sides”
knowingly played their part hyping the theater to keep that Russia=bad guy propaganda theme
in the mind of americans.
I can’t imagine that any intelligent person believes this bullshit about Russia. I
completely tune it out the same way I tuned out any news about “CHAZ.”
“So, what is a leaked almost certainly faux story about the Russian bounties on
American soldiers intended to accomplish? It is probably intended to keep a
“defensive” U.S. presence in Afghanistan, much desired by the neocons, a
majority in Congress and the Military Industrial Complex (MIC), and it will further be
played and replayed to emphasize the demonstrated incompetence of Donald Trump.”
Let’s say for the sake of argument that the story is true. So what? I don’t
see how it can be used as justification to double down on a pointless war. (Reasonable people
might see it as another reason to get out of Afghanistan sooner rather than later).
Moreover, I don’t think they’d have to create such drama to get Trump the
imperialist to keep the troops in Afghanistan (if he actually had any intention to withdraw
them in the first place).
This propaganda effort reminds me of the Skripal affair. Perhaps Trump’s handlers
and enablers realize that he’ll lose the election (if we have one) so they’re
trying to manipulate him into escalating tensions with Russia (just as they are with China,
Iran and Venezuela).
The Americans were always very proud and upfront about how they organized, trained,
equipped and financed the Taliban to oust the Russians from Afghanistan. In view of this, why
do they act so surprised should the Russians do something similar on a much smaller
scale?
Obviously, the whole story was concocted in Washington, but so what?
Anyone with half a brain should know that the Americans are in Afghanistan because the
Americans control the world trade in narcotics. Columbia is the cocaine end of the
business.
I do wish some smart chemists would synthesize heroin and cocaine in a laboratory and put
the CIA out of business.
“and it will further be played and replayed to emphasize the demonstrated
incompetence of Donald Trump”
The demonization of a democratically-elected President by the zionist-owned New York
Times , Washington Post and CNN is somewaht reminiscent of the demonization of a
certain Austrian in the Western media after the 1933 World Jewry’s declaration of war
on Nazi Germany.
“He who controls the narrative controls the consciousness”
With Wolf Blitz’s, Bolton’s, and this week’s release of Trump’s
relative’s book discrediting his mental health. How many books is that now???
But, times have moved on. Trump can ride this wave by learning the dark art of playing
the victim using the mantra ‘look how hard I’m trying’ and appealing to
US voters as their ‘law and order’ president.
Geopolitically speaking, if the US Zio-cons were smart, rather than suffering from
‘Groupthink’, they would be trying to entice Russia away from its partner, China,
and draw Russia into playing a greater role in Europe. Recall that Putin had asked if Russia
could join NATO.
But, alas, they’re still making the same mistake they did in 1991 after the collapse
of Central Industrialism in the former USSR.
The Mujahudeen morphing into Al Qaeda is a new one on me that I have never heard before. I
had read and heard countless times that it was Al Qaeda all along in Afghanistan that the
U.S. assisted to fight against the USSR. It does not make sense either, since the MEK (
Mujahudeen ) is a twisted Shiite cult Iranian, and Al Qaeda is Arabic and twisted Sunni cult.
So, the language and religious differences do not make any sense that one became the
other.
I guess that it makes perfect sense to say anything at all, regardless of the facts, to
the Terrible Trio in the DNC, just to keep the focus on themselves, rather than on Biden.
Initial Times coverage, which claimed that the activity had been confirmed by both
intelligence sources and money tracking, was supplemented by delusional nonsense from
former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice, who asks “Why does Trump put
Russia first?” before calling for a “swift and significant U.S.
response.” Rice, who is being mentioned as a possible Biden choice for Vice
President, certainly knows about swift and significant as she was one of the architects of
the destruction of Libya and the escalation of U.S. military and intelligence operations
directed against a non-threatening Syria.
The pathetic Rice has plenty of company. During a 7/5 CNN puff segment with Dana Bash,
Tammy Duckworth (another potential Biden VP), out of the blue said that the Russians put out
a bounty on US forces. Of course, Bash didn’t challenge Duckworth.
Downplayed in all of this is the fact that Russia was one of the first, if not the first
nation, to console the US on 9/11, followed by Russian assistance to the US military
operation in Afghanistan.
“…the kind of information that stinks to high heaven because it doesn’t
even make any political or tactical sense, except to Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff
and the New York Times.”
Pelosi is the proud daughter of a shabbos goy father; Schumer is “shomer” or
professed guardian of Israel; Schiff is the decendent of the Internationale Banker who
supported Trotsky’s take down of the Czar; the NYT is what happens when Hebrews learn
to write English. The Jews have been trying to rule Russia for almost 200 years as
Solzhenitsyn would have told us if he could have gotten a publisher in the Jewish American
publishing industry. If Stalin hadn’t thrown the Bolshevik Jews out, there might not
have been a cold war. Watch out Gentiles. These people have taken us into 3 wars for their
interests and they NEVER change.
And, of course, the “conservative” maggots are going along with the obvious
liberal lies once again. There has never been a group of more cowardly and worthless
individuals than American “conservatives”.
Russia
The hope of the world.
Edgar Cayce
Famous US psychic.
As the USA continues its path into a political, moral and military cesspit of pure
corruption, lies, violence, mass murder and sheer evil, it is increasingly difficult to argue
with Cayce.
He was certainly on to something, and that something was like, 80 years ago.
One can even put more belief and trust in a psychic these days – than anything being
claimed or reported by the USA alphabets, government or MSM
Sickening and frightening really.
There are other reasons for wishing to stay in Afghanistan. Generals don’t like
losing wars
You would have thought by now the American Generals would have got used to ‘losing
wars’.
They haven’t won one other than Grenada in living memory.
The Russians even had to win WW2 for them….
Russia and China would eat them alive today.
So we are now down to sheer bullying, bluster and illegal economic sabotage.
Venezuela springs to mind.
Yes, but they also hate Putin for liberating Russia from its rapacious oligarchs, nearly
all of whom were Jews. The present artificially created hatred for Russia in the US is in
reality the hatred of the frustrated Jewish Mafia.
“I can’t imagine that any intelligent person believes this bullshit about
Russia”
Lenny is clapping his hands excitedly.
“Oy believe it, George ! I do – I do – I do !”
George grunts, clears his throat & spits with some force & accuracy at a scrunched up
copy of the NYT.
“Let’s say for the sake of argument that the story is true.”
For amusement’s sake, lets wonder what would happen should the Russians offer a bounty
to US & allied troops to kill each other . A kind of cash incentive to bring back
the final years of the Vietnam war.
It sure will be entertaining to watch Joe Biden try to cope with the duties of the
presidency. He makes the fictional President Camacho from the movie “Idiocracy”
look like a statesman with the intellectual skills of a Teddy Roosevelt by comparison. I can
picture his inaugural address in my head, as he inevitably loses his place on the
teleprompter and starts babbling about pony soldiers and you know, the thing. After a grope
fest at his inaugural ball, instead of the Oval Office he will immediately be consigned to
the White House basement for the duration of his term. If you thought an inarticulate
President Donnie made for good reality TV, just wait till a totally incoherent President Joe
has the whole world rollicking with laughter. Plus, Republicans get their turn to amuse with
grid lock of the Congress and the discharge of mass quantities of bog sediment at the
administration every single day for four solid years. It’s a win for comedy no matter
which candidate is elected!
Ann, you’ve got the quote wrong. Here is what he actually wrote:
“So, what is a leaked almost certainly faux story about the Russian
bounties”
I’m going to assume you didn’t mean “forks” but actually
“faux”.
Using “faux” is here is not incorrect. Giraldi could have meant the NYT article
was “not real, but made to look or seem real” — which goes considerably
further than “false”.
However, that does not necessarily mean that other users of “faux” are not
indulging themselves in a “silly fashion”.
@Emily
to consecrate Russia to the heart of Mother Mary – which still hasn’t fully been
fulfilled, btw – is another indication of Russia’s leadership in a community of a
shared future for humanity, aka Community of Common Destiny (CCD), as advocated by the
Russian President’s ‘double-helix’ partner, China’s President Xi
Jinping.
Compare and contrast that with, then President, Obama’s words to Putin: “The
United States has exclusive rights to anywhere in the world.”
@Alfred
family bankruptcy when every pharmacist knows they re-branded and off-shored their loot
several years ago. Their fine was pocket lint to them.
But that fake allowed the corporate-government axis to make ALL serious painkillers
effectively illegal, including the ones being used safely before Purdue Pharma came
along.
Narcotics are safe when used properly, but where’s the CIA’s take there? So
they killed their competitors and made your family doctor an agent. And sell lots of dope.
Because the nation the CIA protects is in terminal debt, agencies need hard cash from
somewhere .
That’s why the democrats and the left fight to keep the southern border open ,the
hordes of third world peasants are just a “bonus”……look at who the
drugs are destroying i.e. the target
The Democrats have predictably been outdone by the anti-Trump Republicans in this matter.
You can’t sink any lower in Russia-baiting than the Lincoln project’s recent
release, “Fellow Traveler”. Beyond stupid and revolting. Gives you a clue of
their very low opinion of the American voter
There is a dangerous illusion – characterized in part by demonizing rivals –
and that is the developing crisis is merely a re-run of the Cold War. After the Napoleonic
wars the Congress system was established to maintain peace in Europe. It worked reasonably
well, interrupted significantly by the Crimean war, but finally buried with the outbreak of
WWI in 1914; it did not prevent that cataclysmic conflict. Then came the League of Nations
for a short time; it did not stop WWII. The United Nations and other post-war institutions
were established in the 1940s. Now we are in the approaches to WWIII. But very few see. The
apocalyptic conflict feared during the Cold War is nearing. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
Russia Hoax 2 is supposed to keep our minds off the Uniparty’s anarcho-tyranny, but
it’s awfully hard to fear Putin with orcs and shitlibs running amok wrecking statues of
racist elks.
@Robert
Dolan olostomy Bag, or were able to steal it on election night, Trump would be spending
the rest of his life in prison right now.
And Russia would have acquiesced to, though more likely quietly assisted, the frame-up.
What we don’t know at this point is what generational geopolitical payoff Russia was
promised by Brennan in March 2016, for its participation. My suspicion is that Nord Stream II
was merely a down payment.
I don’t envy Barr or Durham. How do they resolve this greatest political scandal in
American history when at the center of it you have a former CIA Director who is a Russian
mole.
If you review the New York Times editorial page and its oped pieces you will see more half
of the content each day is anti Trump. The Times has also played up the civil rights aspect
of the BLM movement while playing down the hooliganism of Antifa and the looting by Blacks
which has accompanied it. Many neighborhoods in Manhattan were trashed and looted far beyond
what The Times reported. So promoting the “Russian Bounty” lie doesn’t
surprise me at all. Remember also Times employees went absolutely crazy when the paper
printed an oped by Sen. Tom Cotton. What a bunch of lying flakes and chicken shits.
@tyrone
of more and more of the total of products and services produced in the US economy every year
(GDP) goes to capital, i.e., the holders of wealth, rather than workers, which in turn
creates a drag on further GDP – so eventually it becomes self defeating.
Think: Vicious Cycle of Poverty, as opposed to Virtuous Cycle of Prosperity.
But that explains why neither the Dems / Repubs are determined to do anything about the
1,000,000+ illegal immigrants crossing the US-Mexican border every year.
As said many times by many others: ‘The US has one political party – the
business party, with 2 wings.’
The Soviets actually had to stop the Wehrmacht cold (very cold, indeed) and be ready to
start rolling it back before the USA even dared to join the war.
US Ziocons movement is a family affair. They’re into the second and third
generation, who are still following their daddy’s’ or grandpa’s playbook.
Original ideas are hard to come by with this lot.
The Democrats are suggesting that Trump is too stupid and even too disinterested to be
president of the United States so they are seeking to replace him with a corrupt
78-year-old man who may be suffering from dementia.
Good one but what do you mean may be suffering ? (Grin)
Not only replace Trump with Biden but with all the radicals now infesting theDemo’krat
party and manipulating demented, sleepy Joe.
These are all made up stories. By the time one fake story is laboriously dismantled
another one is made up. It’s always a game of playing catch-up. Russia makes a good
boogyman and has served well in that role for three generations now so it’s a tested
formula. It’s a dangerous game since all these idiots could sleepwalk us into an armed
clash with Russia somewhere. Then of course there’ll plenty of problems but perhaps
there’s a calculation that something like that could benefit this band of war
inciters.
I know old liberals have ate up all things Russia, Russia, Russia. Have the POBs (people
of brown)? Have all those post ’67 immigrants? They all vote democrats, and are now the
future demographic of America. Its their kids that have to wanna die for the war machine now.
Has the Yiddish propaganda sheet worked its magic on them? The 1619 Project sure did. My
humble guess is no, despite their voting. Most just want money.
Folks, it is time to get your love ones to stop enlisting and re-enlisting in the US
military. It is the only boycott we can do that will actually hurt.
For what it’s worth, Pillar got shitcanned and rusticated by Cofer Black, Kiriakou
got locked up, Ritter got framed as a pedo, and McGovern got the shit beat out of him by my
DoS goons. So shut the fuck up a little, OK?
So, what is a leaked almost certainly faux story about the Russian bounties on American
soldiers intended to accomplish?
To sound like a broken record again , the CABAL hates Russia and specifically Putin
because he re-established Christian Orthodoxy as the de facto state religion of Mother
Russia. They would get The USA into a hot war with Russia if it meant hurting Putin, never
mind what it would do to us. Their hatred is so strong that they could care less what it
would do to America, the snakes that they are.
All Russians would have to do to exploit the current unrest in America would be to knock
out a social media platform or two, or perhaps to leak dirt on the people ginning up war.
Those targets are absolutely hated by the American people outside the Imperial City.
@Zarathustra
and historically illiterate pseudo-intellectual BS about 1619 and Evil America that, because
its evil, should change the names of the military bases where those soldiers trained under
the impression they were going to defend their country!
The Hostile Elite is a rabid dog so totally out of control it needs to be put down
immediately.
Whatever happens, no one should ever take the moral condemnation of psychopaths
seriously.
Battered Wife Syndrome?
I give you Battered Nation Syndrome.
Time to prove to the world it’s possible to recover from it and move into a larger
freedom.
@No
Friend Of The Devil not called al-
Qaeda at this stage but some other name. Apparently the name al-Qaeda was first used by the
FBI to reference this group due to some sort of misunderstanding, but it eventually became
the name they adopted for themselves since that was what everybody was calling them anyway
when they became famous after further adventures.
The above should be taken with a grain of salt since this is only what I have been able to
glean from reading various articles. Presumably what is called al-Qaeda today are the
descendants or associates of personnel from this particular group as opposed to other groups,
but I don’t know.
When Russia was controlled by Marxists, Leftists and Liberals loved Russia, defended
Russia, excused Russia, promoted Russia. Now that Russia has survived Marxist totalitarianism
and begun rediscovering Russian cultural heritage, which features Christianity, Leftists and
Liberals HATE Russia.
Who coulda thunk it possible?
More important is that our Neocons and our old guard Yank ‘conservatives’
– who control foreign policy for both Republicans and Democrats – in the military
and the spy game see Russia today exactly as the Leftists and Liberals see Russia.
Both the Neocons and the Yank WASP Country Club types in the so-called
‘conservative’ arena agree with Leftists and Liberals about Russia.
There’s plenty of meaning there for those with ears to hear and eyes to see.
The Dem’s election strategists are grasping at straws again.
The deplorables they despise the most are flyover Americans who go to church or who serve
in the military. These are the people they think are stupid and easily manipulated by wild
tales and false flags.
The “bounty on American soldiers” is hogwash to gin up what they perceive to
be a voting bloc of gullible whites.
The Dems weakness with working class whites is one they will try to shore up by crassly
fake, flag-waving appeals to bedrock patriotism.
@anonymous
equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men
are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to
this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty
– to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base
alloy of hypocrisy.”
With Russia abolishing serfdom and slavery at the time – and much later than Western
Europe – something had to be done to not be outdone by the Russians, of course. The
hypocrisy would indeed have been unbearable. It still is.
@Really
No Shit the mass of whites before the post-WW2 era, then you are ignorant. If you think
the current Deep State is entirely Jewish, or even majority Jewish, you are ignorant.
Without any doubt, Jews now, and for decades, have per capita dominated the American Deep
State. But they did not create it, nor did they create its evil. The Mossad did NOT
create MI6 and the CIA. British Secret Service created the CIA and the Mossad.
America has a Deep State that flowed naturally from the British Deep State. The Brit
Empire was the Anglo-Zionist Empire Part 1. America is the Anglo-Zionist Empire Part 2.
US strategy at the end of WWII included letting Germans and Soviets wear each other down
and kill as many of each other as possible, without US forces involvement. Obviously
“we”, various US investors and the US taxpayer still gave the Soviets too much
stuff, that propelled USSR economic success claims for the next 20 years.
Just more Liberal/Dim/Zio/CCP sponsored horsesh*t, to drive US and Russia apart, to drive
Russia toward China, when US would be better off trying to treat Russia neutrally (hang our
CCP paid dems).
The Deep State vermin who pulled-off the violent, proxy overthrow of Yanukovych in 2014,
and who are also behind the Arab Spring, Syrian Rebels, ISIS, and the ongoing domestic
unrest Stateside, are the descendants of the vermin who overthrew Christian Russia in 1917
using the same modus operandi of color revolution and “peaceful protests.”.
Spot on!
But, a more accurate name than The Deep State is Judeocracy Inc.
followed by Russian assistance to the US military operation in Afghanistan.
Few people seem to understand the logistics of the war in Afghanistan. The US and their
allies were hugely dependent on the Russian railway system. It is just so ridiculous to
listen to these monkeys who pretend to be statesmen and women.
Susan Rice clearly uses skin whitener and hair straightener to look as much as possible
like those she hates so much.
Unfortunately, the matter with Russia is settled. And while I did not think there was
evidence to support the matter. The current executive sign an intel report that accused the
Russians and Pres. Putin specifically with sabotaging US election and murder and attempted
murder. Unless our executive can reconcile that matter by extracting some manner of penance
for hat behavior — reconciling with Russia is just a flat water tide.
Their actions constituted acts of war and while I may disagree with the assessment
—
that is the US disposition on which nothing Russia says can be taken further than a
pipe.
That intel report which this executive signed locks our posture in place regarding Russia.
We kill people in this country for being suspects.
I don’t think the US citizen would look to kindly on shaking hands with a saboteur
and murderer.
Whether the signing was a matter of political expediency is irrelevant,. The executive
openly cited Russia as an enemy of the US. For me it was one of the most painful memories of
the executives tenure, because
1. destroyed a large portion of our foreign policy agenda of toning down our presence
anywhere
2. demonstrated the executive was not as string as I believed he needed to be.
If they were willing to interfere in our election and engage in political murder in allied
states —there’s no reason to doubt that they would support the murder of our
troops in a conflict one.
———————-
It was a devastating moment when the executive agreed to that intel report.
@mike99588
r Germany.
And vastly profiting from both sides – shamelessly.
Britain and the Commonwealth faced Germany alone through dark days indeed until Russia became
our ally – before the USA incidently – conveniently overlooked..
The Americans finally came in Dec 1941 after Russia was already standing with us.
It has not been forgotten in Britain to this day.
The USA bled this country for decades, paying for what was so much crap amongst all
else..
Lend lease – what a scam that was!!!!!
Whilst you traded and supported the nazi war machine against us.
When you work that into the British Empire acting to prevent Russia from forcing the Turks
out of Europe and thereby liberating Constantinople, and acting to harm Russia deeply in
order to win ‘The Great Game,’ you perhaps will then see that back to Oliver
Cromwell and the Puritans that WASP Empire is Anglo-Zionist Empire.
Well, unlike the JewSA, Russia isn’t enthralled with the Jews. Putin and company
kicked out Soros and his Open Society as well as the Rothschild bankers. Lastly the four
billionaire Jew oligarchs who were running the Yeltsin economic shitshow were also shown the
door. Perhaps the “Assad must go” flop played into Jewish ire as well.
Amusing to see Democrats so deeply concerned over the “Russian threat”. I was
in the Agency during the Cold War. When the Soviets REALLY were a threat, most of those same
Democrats urged retreat, compromise, submission. It makes my guts churn to see these
“patriots” making hysterical claims against Russia. It is almost as if they
resent the fact that Putin has rejected their entire Globalist plan, re-Christianized Russia,
and locked up at least a few of the so-called “oligarchs” who were looting the
Russian people of their patrimony. The case of Bill Browder deserves some attention. This Red
Diaper baby (his grandfather was Earl Browder, chief of the CPUSA) has been one of the
cheerleaders in the campaign to demonize Russia. Following the family tradition of a lack of
loyalty (he holds British and U.S. passports, just in case!) this weasel used his
granddad’s old Soviet contacts to make hundreds of millions carting off anything of any
value left in the old Soviet Union. Of course, he worked with an equally greasy gang of
former Soviets to do this, including one Sergei Magnitsky, a “tax advisor”
working with Browder who assumed room temperature in a Russian jail after he was nabbed by
the tax police. I really wonder if some of these Democrats and others who so denounce Putin
had visions of sugar plums and hundreds of millions of dollars dancing in their heads, dreams
rudely brought to earth by Putin?
Oct 20, 2009 Taliban Is Getting American Troops Hooked On Heroin
It diminishes the effectiveness of our troops as well as raises money for the Taliban, who
are the ones growing the poppy. How can the US combat this new strategy?
LONDON— Recent news item: The Justice Department is investigating allegations that
officers of a special Venezuelan anti-drug unit funded by the CIA smuggled more than 2,000
pounds of cocaine into the United States with the knowledge of CIA officials.
@EliteCommInc.
e accused is served by having his lawyers present. Since the defendants have refused to
appear in person – three of them disputing the Dutch jurisdiction — the defence
lawyers should withdraw.”
@Emily
t was only done to get into a position to share the spoils. Britain was no more than a vassal
state of the US after WW I, and in no position to defeat Germany. Only Russia could, and they
did, and would have done so with or without the Anglo-Americans. Stop whining about suffering
you brought onto yourself. Besides, Britain suffered very little compared to the continent,
including Germany, and European Jewry, and all of them would have suffered less without the
British arrogance that they had to defend their national honour. Hope they stay out of
European affairs now but it doesn’t look good at this fake Brexit moment
Wisely, Agent76 said, “The CIA Drug Connection is as Old as the Agency.”
Re; above, I suggest Grandfathered by Operation Gladio and it’s Vatican Bank money
laundering component???
Am aware how an England bank, USBC, was caught laundering the Afghanistan drug trade
billions and got a “slap on wrist.”
Linked below is an obscure article on President Putin’s special (on scene)
Afghanistan envoy, Zamir Kabulov, who accused US intelligence in Afghanistan of drug
trafficking.
@No
Friend Of The Devil to attack Iran. They are totally despised by ordinary Iranians. They
are a cult with something in common with the Cambodian Pol Pot way of life. Very dangerous
people. They have absolutely nothing in common with the Taliban who are trying to liberate
their country from the Americans.
@Gidoutahere
ld bring to an end a fledgling democracy and a return to the Cold War days.
“In return, Maxwell’s massive debts would be wiped out by a grateful
Kryuchkov, [Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB] who planned to replace Gorbachev. The KGB
chief wanted Maxwell to use the Lady Ghislaine, named after Maxwell’s daughter, as a
meeting place between the Russian plotters, Mossad chiefs and Israel’s top politicians.
? Apparently the Rothschilds/Israel Deep State wanted Gorbachev or Yeltsin.
Events are so tangled and interconnected, as Ghislaine is still a Israel Deep State
operative.
Funny, I don’t see White Russians hating themselves or other Whites for being proud
of their heritage.
Funny, I don’t see White Russians tearing down monuments and statues or desecrating
their flag.
Funny, I don’t see White Russians wanting their country to be invaded by hordes of
hostile nonwhite WMD.
Funny, I don’t see White Russians apologizing or backing down from identifying
themselves as a Christian nation.
Oh, I get it. This is why the so-called, “Deep State” and “Neo-Cons aka
Neo-Commies” hate Russia so much. I get it now. It burns (((their))) collective asses
that there are actually some largely homogeneous and traditional White nations still around
who aren’t willingly accepting their own genocide or apologizing for being evil White
racists. My gawd, this is my epiphany, this is MY AWAKENING ( shout out to Dr. Duke’s
EXCELLENT BOOK), now I know why Russia is so vilified by (((our media.))) (((Our media))) is
racist against Whites, and (((they))) hate the idea that a traditional White Christian nation
still exists, especially a powerful nation like Russia. Oh dear, how could I be so gullible
not to see this one. I’m Irish American and I am told I must hate the Russkies to be
patriotic by other patriotic Israel Firsters.
It has to do with two things, and only those two things, all other rubbish about
“human rights”, “international law”, blah blah blah, is propaganda
meant for the common man.
1) Russia is white, that means it can easily be demonized and is demonized.
2) The jews that fled Russia are an especially virulent strain of the jew, their hatred for
Russia has few equal.
Maybe someone has already stated the obvious. Regardless of the validity (or lack of) a
bounty program; it’d be real hard to affect US troops if there were no US troops in
Afghanistan.
@Erzberger
ica and the Balkans.
Fourth, had the Admiral Canaris led traitors not been hiding munitions or sending them to the
wrong place, the Soviets may not have recovered even with the US re-supply.
If there is something to yawn about, it is the WWII narrative is tiresome. Stalin
wasn’t a “good guy”, and neither were Churchill or Roosevelt. The reality
is that it took the “world” to defeat Germany. The Italians were of no help, and
the Japanese were as much a drain as a resource to Germany. Germany was destroyed to allow
the advancement of Marxism, which had already embedded itself in the UK and US.
The zionists are pissed that Russia has saved Syria from the zionist mercenaries aka AL
CIADA aka ISIS, which are creations the CIA and the MOSSAD and MI6 and NATO and so the anti
Russian propaganda, pouring out of the zionist owned MSM.
Obviously “we”, various US investors and the US taxpayer still gave the
Soviets too much stuff, that propelled USSR economic success claims for the next 20
years
The Russians paid for all the “giving” with gold. Kindly stop repeating lies.
Even the British went almost bankrupt repaying the Americans for their
“generosity”.
It will be interesting to see how the Russians will treat the Americans when the USA
experiences feudalism. I suspect the Russians will be far more generous than the Americans
deserve.
@neutral
kids.
Hilary Clinton has been a very effective butcher of Libyan and Syrian population at large;
young children and pregnant women were the greatest victims of Clinton’s subhuman
policies.
Susan Rice was good at promoting mass slaughter in Syria, and, along with H. Clinton, S. Rice
should be credited with the slave markets in Libya.
Nuland-Kagan helped to make Ukraine into the poorest country in Europe, where zionists and
neo-nazis found a complete mutual understanding. So much for holobiz squealing.
What’s wrong with the US? How come that the US society produced these
monstrosities?
Being that America kills other countries’ soldiers (and civilians) all the time, why
can’t Russia (or any other country) do the same thing? What goes around comes around,
right?
Some things (Russiagate) are just too silly to bother with.
I agree – except that I’m getting quite a chuckle these days at the sheer,
utter desperation of the “Russia did it”, “Saddam did it”, “Bin
Laden did it”, “Assad did it”, etc. etc. etc. noise from the crowd who DID
do it.
Shlomo is cornered and exposed – and that IS worth the subscription fee to watch,
FINALLY.
“There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states.” General
(((Wesley Clark)))
Obviously a patriotic “American” General like Mr. Clark has no problem with
the racist state of Israel.
Just another COHENcidence? Nah, after finding about “6 million” COHENcidences
you start thinking for yourself, stop dropping the idea that “conspiracy
theories” are “conspiracies” and start realizing you have been fed a load
of horseshit for a century and counting. We don’t have a Russia problem but Houston, we
do have a problem. Wonder what that problem is?
@Tom
Welsh te Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, at a time when that meant something. He also wrote
(presumably without the assistance a ghost writer) some 40-odd books, as Tucker Carlson
pointed out in a recent monologue.
I think by any standard, these achievements indicate a fairly high level of intellectual
skills.
Whether or not he was a nutcase is another matter, and not mutually exclusive of his
having considerable intellectual skills. A good place to start on this question is to read
what H.L. Mencken wrote about him.
And it is said that Roosevelt is included in the Mt. Rushmore tableau because he was
friends with Borglum the sculptor.
@Trinity
of different nations. But they live in harmony. Their common language is Russian. When Putin
goes to visit the Dagestan, he tells them that their men are brave and their women beautiful.
They love it. And they love Putin for it. Sadly, Google and Youtube seem to have cleaned up
this stuff.
The current news that the Brutish govt has approved new arms sales to Saudia because Saudi
mass killings of Yemeni civilians are all “isolated incidents” so it’s
quite proper to sell them the means seems to prove your point.
“Your decision, Mr President, to grant the Soviet Union an interest-free loan to the
value of $1,000,000,000 to meet deliveries of munitions and raw materials to the Soviet Union
is accepted by the Soviet Government with heartfelt gratitude as vital aid to the Soviet
Union in its tremendous and onerous struggle against our common enemy — bloody
Hitlerism.” (here)
The US is in central Asia for much more than that, it’s about blocking China and
Russia, as well as partially cutting off Iran on it’s eastern flank. Iran is almost
surrounded by US bases. The US wants to have more control point/choke point control over
continental transport routes in Asia. (One such prize would be the Dzungarian Gate, but
that’s a little too ambitious for the moment. ) Afghanistan does have resources, but it
would be a target without them, as it is so valuable as a (potential) transit corridor.
@Emily
ulture/history/item/4691-china-betrayed-into-communism" rel="nofollow"
href="http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/4691-china-betrayed-into-communism">Marshall’s
doing all in his power to ensure the victory of Mao over Nationalist forces in 1949
U.S. civilian leaders seem to swoon over enemy sanctuaries for some strange reason. Kill
U.S. troops in theater. No problemo but pinky swear we won’t go after you if you go
back across the border.
God bless Richard Nixon and his destruction of NVA base areas in Cambodia. Thereafter,
enemy activity ceased around my camp and all through MR IV.
Reading your comment, Wally, I find your name extremely apt.
None so blind as those who refuse to even read.
You can take a horse to water but cannot make him drink.
You can put all the proof necessary but if you refuse to check it out – well –
stay a ‘ Wally’.
I guess you subscribe to the philosophy of ‘Ignorance is bliss’.
@Curmudgeon
Wehrmacht, the Warsaw Rising they so strongly encouraged would not have happened, and not
have led to the disaster it was for the city and its inhabitants
“Stalin wasn’t a “good guy”, and neither were Churchill or
Roosevelt. “ no objections
“The reality is that it took the “world” to defeat Germany. “ Much
of Europe fought on the side of Germany because they realized that Stalin, Churchill and
Roosevelt weren’t good guys, and they had nothing to look forward to but a horrible
peace in case of their victory. Why do you think the EC got together so quickly after the
war?
Also: the sheer idiocy of claiming that poor little “Britain and the
Commonwealth” stood alone against the German monster state! Do you ever look at a map?
at human and natural resources? This should have been a turkey shoot if your side had not
been as lacking in courage as it was, and as incompetent. And if the rest of Europe
wasn’t to a very large extent in the German camp, as it is today
Scott Ritter has a separate article at consortiumnews noting that the Russians have been
giving money to the Taliban (AID) to fight Americans, the CIA and their ISIS proxies since
2014. Surely Obama and/or Biden would have stopped these Russian “bounties” if
they were important.
“Please at least proofread your gibberish. Some of it might even make
sense.”
The executive in the WH has agreed that Russia sabotaged the US election process and
engaged murder and attempted in states of our allies.
There is no turning the clock bank unless Russia makes some gesture of amelioration
— there behavior constitutes an attack on the US. As such they are active enemies of
the US.
Unfortunately anyone seeking some manner of Russian love fest — should probably
forget it. Whether the executive signed for politically expedient reasons simply
doesn’t matter.
“If you believe any of the Skripals nonsense and the MH-17 false flag, you are
either gullible or a troll.”
Uhhhh, wholly irrelevant. My position in opposition to the contend that Russia sabotaged
the US election was vehemently dubious. My comments at the time make my position abundantly
clear. The evidence for the case against Russia in the US simply no there. But at the end of
the day, the executive choose to go the other direction. That is unfortunate. But it was also
a sign of things to come concerning the executives ability to stand.
And my comments today make that very clear. Your knee-jerk response that I believe what
the executive signed onto is incorrect. I knew that his choice destroyed a good deal of his
foreign poliy admonition to reduce tensions.
But that was his choice mistake or not he made that choice and as I expressed at the time
— we would have to live by it.
——————————————–
In fact, if I were on the opposition, I would like nothing better for the executive to
start behaving as though the intel report doesn’t exist. Because I would pull out that
report with his signature and commence calling him a weakling, indecisive, and a danger to
the US — who is to toothless to hold Russia accountable for her acts of terror in the
US and Europe.
I would then commence a campaign explaining why the executive wants to decrease troops ion
Europe — he wants to cede our allies over to Russian domination —
But then I am not on the opposition. It was a mistake on the facts for the executive to
sign that report for which there was little to no evidence supporting it.
Now if you have a response that gives the president some manner of face saving as he makes
nice with a country that overthrew a US election in the US, and engaged in murder and
attempted murder — have at it.
—————
Minus some kind of amelioration by the Russians or an about face by the current executive
(and tat would really be interesting) no peace and love and understanding can move forward. I
can say with certainty
Russia, Pres. Putin has no intention of apologizing for something they most likely did not
do regarding US elections.
Though I am sure he will once again have reason to chuckle.
Those of you angry, frustrated, irritated . . . and yada I suggest you take that up with
the WH They made that choice.
But by all means name call as opposed to deal with the obvious reality.
The US can not make nice with Russia until Russia makes amends for sabotaging the US
election and engage in acts of murder or attempted in murder in the sovereign states of our
allies. So says the executive in the WH. In fact he says that Pres. Putin ordered the
sabotage and murder.
I think you understand.
There is no way for the current executive to move forward with better relations with
Russia without extracting some admission and compensation for sad acts without reaping
serious political damage — I would say a loss of credibility, but that is already in
question – sadly.
Interestingly, whoever invented this lie about Russia and Taliban not only did not know
the realities of Afghanistan, but was stupid enough not to consult someone who knows. There
is no such thing as a bank transfer in Afghanistan. It exists in the Middle Ages (democracy,
my foot!), so the only form of money that functions there is cash, in hand, in a case, or in
a bag, depending on the amount.
The USA is quickly going to find itself in a corner. There is no realistic path away from
a total confrontation with Russia. No politician will dare dissent. I hope Russia is prepared
for this.
“The deplorables they despise the most are flyover Americans who go to church or who
serve in the military. These are the people they think are stupid and easily manipulated by
wild tales and false flags.”
Well let’s face it, they usually are. These are the milch cows the MIC relies on to
keep its funding secure.
Everyone knows that Americans are the most dumbfuck stupid people on the planet. It is
more shocking to think that propaganda would NOT affect most of the population.
Anecdotally, when my family lived in England in a village near London in 1957-58 we were
treated like royalty. I’ve always assumed it’s because we were the beloved Yanks
who saved Britain’s behind in the war. That doesn’t undercut what you say about
the underlying resentment, but my clear impression and that of my parents was that the
post-war Brits loved them some Yanks.
Another anecdote, this one not so feel-good. In 1956 we lived on Lakenheath AFB in the UK.
During the Suez crisis the base was on full stand-by alert in case we had to go to war with
Britain. Seriously.
@Patagonia
Man re in Washington is beyond repair. The despicable sinister schemes, backstabbing,
lies, fake facts in a quest for power has nothing to do with democracy but criminality.
It is time to galvanize support for direct voting…enabled by evolving technology.
That process would eliminate:
@ need for electing deceiving proxies that always betray their promises to represent the
public interest.
@ Washington proxies making decisions…should be reduced to debating issues.
@ the special interest groups, lobbies self-serving agenda.
@ sending our young people dying on far away places in unnecessary wars.
When was Paul Craig Roberts last an insider? Do you think him capable of picking cover
stories generically, that is without relevant particular knowledge of inside stuff?
And you seem to claim to have that ability to pick a cover story. So…. how? What
are the generic indicia?
Oh gee, your point would make one think that no other pagan Christian Church has
produced such mass murderers, or in fact, even greater ones… which would be ludicrous as
per history, yeah?
The real source of such satanic evil should be traced to Whitevil (including their Judevil
cousins of course) supremacy and their in-house “niggas,” such as the witch you
mention.
Looks like a lot of the blonds here except the ones here date thugs and run around til
they’re 24ish from dude to dude til they discover the joys of pills & meth and take
the full bath into the toilet….
@Ann
Nonny Mouse political dancing around and inventing another culprit as criminals always do,
successfully disappeared them. Don’t hope they will ever appear again.
And this is the Brutish government that killed another Russian by polonium poisoning and of
course invented another culprit, again as criminals always do.
And is now selling weapons for mass killing to Saudia says mass killings are merely
incidentals.
Consistently, modern Britain makes Nazi Germany look angelic. Consistently.
These are not Christian moral values. What religion or ritual system or control system acts
like this once it takes charge?
@Wizard
of Oz The same person also fuzzes up threads by pretending to be more than one commenter,
the technique known as “sock puppetry.” See under Mr. Derbyshire’s February
15, 2019, article comment ## 28, 42, 43, 44, 68, 122, where he/she/they got sloppy also posting
as “Anon[436].”
Over time, Wizard has emerged as sympathetic to the international bureaucracy of the
Establishment of which he may even be a (former?) part, the type of “diplomat”
exemplified by Mrs. Nuland’s Ivy League cookie caddy in Ukraine. He broke character a
while back, showing emotional hostility to China. But who can be sure? Among this
website’s oddest, sophisticatedly trollish commenters.
You will find that Roosevelt privately was giving both the UK & France assurances that
if either were attacked, the US would come to their aid well before 1938 – even
tho’ US multinational corporations were still trading with the NSDAP in Germany well into
1941.
As you can’t even get the Julian Assange bit right I don’t suppose it’s
any use asking you to justify your bald assertions or even flesh them our with detail. Let
alone explain when Britain became “modern” and ceased to be the country which is
rightly credited with ending theslave trade and led the way in abolition of slavery.
Yes, several governments have treated Assange contemptibly but he is remanded without bail
pending the resumption of the extradition hearing, not imprisoned for life in cruel or any
conditions. How can you waste readers time with such garbage?
How much credit do you give to someone who sloppily uses the term “terrorist in that
context referring to the equovalent of precision bombing in contrast to area bombing without
precise aiming?
I am really not qualified to comment on the internal wrangling of the various factions in
the USA. I look at their foreign policy actions, not proclamations, with much greater
interest.
@Erzberger
ut down war industry was started by Germany, arguably in Belgium in August 1814 but certainly
in December 1914 when German cruisers indiscriminately shelled three North East England towns.
An aberration? No. It was followed by Zepellin raids on London and the use of Big Bertha
against Paris. Then, what message and implicit set of rules do you find in the destruction of
Guernica? And many civilians were killed in the bombing of Warsaw. Even the virtually symbolic
bombing of Berlin was a response to bombs dropped on London, the only point in your favour
there being the fact that those bombs were probably not meant to be dropped on London.
How intriguing. Not having your obsessive interest in warning about Wizard of Oz I have
failed, at my level of diligence, to find any evidence at all of emotional hostility to China
or indeed, about anything much except perhaps the hypocritical mistreatment of individuals like
Julian Assange by governments. Can you help?
The Germans couldn’t believe how inept the average French, American, and British
soldier really were, even British described how frightened many of the America soldiers, most
barely old enough to shave, appeared. The German was appalled at the physical fitness of the
British soldier as well, describing them as weak and frail for the most part. Here is the
truth, Western Europe and America fought the German B team at best, often these Germans were
little more than schoolboys in some cases. Everyone knows that the bulk of the serious fighting
was done on the Eastern Front. Think if tiny Germany hadn’t had to fight on two fronts
against what must have seemed like half the world. It doesn’t speak well that it took so
many years to defeat a country as small as Germany, a country that was at an extreme
disadvantage. The average Western soldier, be it a Frenchmen, a Brit or an American was nothing
special to say the least. This isn’t a I hate America thing, but merely the truth. The
average German soldier was head and shoulders above the average Brit or America G.I.
Finally, seven days after its ‘scoop’, the NYT ran another story on the
subject, entitled ‘New Administration Memo Seeks to Foster Doubts About Suspected
Russian Bounties’, which was published on July 3 and buried in the bowels of the
paper.
Its opening paragraphs sought to back up the original story, claiming that an intelligence
memo had said the “… CIA and the National Counterterrorism Centre had
assessed with medium confidence – meaning creditable sources and plausible, but falling
short of near certainty – that a unit of the Russian military service, known as the
GRU, offered the bounties.”
It was only in the last paragraph that the real story – that there was no story
– was revealed: “The agency did intercept data of financial transactions that
provide circumstantial support for the detainee’s account, but the agency does not
have explicit evidence that the money was bounty payments.”
So the blood libel lasted a week!
One of the greatest things about the Trump Presidency was to carve the ‘Fake
News’ meme on the MSM’s forehead.
Mister/Miss, since when the zionized Congress of the US serves the citizenship of the US?
Thank you for reminding (and you do this regularly) of the unfortunate fact that the US is an
occupied territory and the US Congress is a nest of liars, war profiteers, and rabid
zionists.
Les Wexler, Ben Cardin, Chuck Schumer, and Clintons have inflicted more harm to the US than
any Maria Butin and such. And don’t forget Dick Cheney and Co, the committed traitors and
profiteers by any means.
In my experience people who are sloppy with language are sloppy with thinking. I thought you
might have had similar relevant experience unlike most commenters here. For example, if you
were employing a director of research or even just a junior researcher for a committee of
inquiry would you not rate their careful use of language as a qualification? You want to be
able to rely on the facts they turn up and their reasoning underlying proposed conclusions do
you not?
I am content to know that you don’t read my comments and are as sloppy and inaccurate
in calling me hasbara as the person who called destroying an Iranian nuclear facility
“terrorist”. To extend my last comment, you wouldn’t even be on the long list
for assisting any inquiry I chaired.
Do you know at least, what were you fighting for in Vietnam? How Vietnam threatened US
shores?
Do not tell me fighting communist ideology, because the same Nixon and Kissinger that bombed
Cambodia civilians embraced that communist ideology in China with grave consequences. We have
lunatics in Washington and it is time for direct voting – majority rules.
@Wizard
of Oz as right in the sense that despite the British and French declaration of war, not
much happened – other than the naval blockade and the lame French invasion of the Saar
region. Neither Britain nor France had the courage to follow up on their war declaration, for
fear of unpopular casualties or further destruction of land and people (France), and both hoped
to gain a cheap victory by starving out the German war effort. Had they actually opened a
second front in the fall of 39, the Germans would have collapsed, and the war would have been
over before Christmas.
The GErman victory over FRance surprised everyone, including the Germans
I think the EC got together so quickly because the US wanted to impose their economic model
on Europe with the illusion of control. The Marshall Plan was unraveling as the swindle it was,
and the EC was the answer to keep up the illusion. While the UK was in on the scam, they were
the front for the Americans, as the idiot Churchill had pissed away the Empire to buy his 15
minutes of fame.
Once the shooting starts there are no good guys. Like all wars, WWII was an economic war. The
German economic system could not be allowed to succeed, it was catching on.
You must must have quite a deteriorated mind when Russia can influence your vote. Tell me
the logistics of the process. You must have equally deteriorated mind believing what CNN,
MSNBC, WP or NYT and others dishonest outfits tell you – they are a propaganda machine
for a small unpatriotic parasitic group.
There is a hierarchy in the blame game . Trump isn’t on the top . If he were, the vile
Democrats would be asking review and discussion by broader media ,Dept of Justice and Treasury
either to discredit or confirm the following story
in–“Venezuela’s interim government wants access to funds confiscated in
the US from corrupt officials, saying it belongs to the Venezuelan people. But US officials
appear to have other plans. The Treasury Department diverted $601 million last year from its
forfeiture fund to help build President Trump’s border wall. (Leer en español)
https://www.univision.com/univision-news/latin-america/legal-battle-over-venezuelas-looted-billions-heats-up
Since the United States initiated a coup attempt against Venezuela’s elected leftist
government in January 2019, up to $24 billion worth of Venezuelan public assets have been
seized by foreign countries, primarily by Washington and member states of the European Union.
President Donald Trump’s administration has used at least $601 million of that looted
Venezuelan money to fund construction of its border wall with Mexico, according to government
documents first reviewed by Univision Univision reviewed US congressional records and court
documents and found that the Trump administration tapped into $601 million of the Treasury
Department’s “forfeiture fund” to supplement the wall constructio https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/29/trump-stolen-venezuelan-money-border-wall-mexico/
Reason no-one is doing it is because hating Trump could always be swapped for worshipping
something more sinister and idiotic .
We would have heard a similar story only if Russia extracted something like this from
Ukraine or Libya .
I suggest you seek treatment for you pathological hate. Russia want to be a friend in
peaceful coexistence but it is sinister players in Washington that constantly need/create
enemies to build military industrial complexes instead of consumer goods which are supplied
from China.
I have been a supported of the current executive before he considered running. And his
choice to agree with the intel report and more was a fairly tough pill to swallow. As it turns
it was but one of many.
No I found the intel dubious. And I think the executive could have challenged in a manner
that did not call the CIA and other agencies DIA, etc. or damage his ability to curtail his
policy agenda. But having signed — he essentially states Pres Putin and the Russians are
active enemies of the US given that scenario
one would draw on our behavior in Afghanistan hen we supported the Taliban with weapons to
kill Russian soldiers —-
@Trinity
fought more effectively and efficiently than the novice American soldiers. Then there were
technical factors which were naturally advantageous to the more experienced military. For
example the famous 88mm anti-aircraft gin turned anti-tsnk gun was never matched by the Allies
(I thin) and the German tactics for its use were also superior. Germany, though less than the
Soviet Union had another advantage over Britain and France. It’s population went on
growing fast for a generations beyond the end of high growth in Britain and, especially,
France. For example there were 2 million Germans born in 1913 to provide young men for the army
in the 30s.
Yes, as I’ve said repeatedly, the ‘sinister players’, the Judaic NEOCON
cabal want to keep America and Russia apart mainly for their hate of Christianity and gentiles,
and try to destroy them both.
@Curmudgeon
uld be a return to what was indeed Hitler’s scheme of continental autarky and a more even
distribution of wealth, and a democratic model much more in line with the Prussian model, the
latter bearing significant resemblance with the Chinese Mandarin system. The Chinese Communists
are really doing nothing different than the old emperors running a meritocracy rather than an
idiocracy. Western democracies, esp the US, with their insane and horrendously expensive
election circuses tend to achieve the latter. I hear Kanye West is running for president now.
The problem with China is not Communism but their adoption of Western state-capitalism.
I am sure President Putin would be delighted to draw international attention to this new
symbol of a Christian resurgence in Russia. President Trump would appreciate the splendor of
such a backdrop for his meeting with another major head of state. Many of the Evangelicals
among Trumps’s base would be gobsmacked to learn that Mr. Putin is not running a godless,
soulless Communist hellstate. And many of people in the US State Department and the rest of the
Swamp would utterly sh*t their pants.
True dat. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the exceptionals.
And Cheney’s daughter burns the midnight oil in order to keep the pot boiling in
Afghanistan. MUST have U.S. troops there to oppose “terrorists” with AKs.
NYT is a rental rag that always favored Soviets and now CCP, why cite it anymore?
The Russia distraction distracts from Piglosi, Feinstein, Biden, Bushes, congress and corps
etc etc being in bed$ with China. With the side benefit of Russian alienation from the US
driving Russian goods into the China slaughter house on the cheap.
@Derer
pants over Assad’s or Gaddafi’s purported authoritarianisms like they’re
skunk pie. Eeeww!
You’re right that we have lunatics in Washington but I don’t think “direct
voting” is the answer. Devolution plus draconian anti-trust enforcement. crucifixion of
the Antifa filth, massive deportations, ending black privilege, brutally honest debate over
black failure, draconian anti-vote fraud operations, and naming and neutralizing the role and
power of organized Jewry and its wealth seem more likely to get us back on track. Please be
more creative then “majority rule.”
Jesus. “Choke points” can be dealt with from afar. It takes a while to rebuild
railroad bridges. The concept of the Russian and Iranian enemies has worn a little thin these
last few days. It’s just assumed that Russia is a malignant force just as it’s
universally assumed that “special sauce” is the way to go on McDonalds’
hamburgers. I accept neither proposition.
I want troops on the U.S. southern border not on the “flanks” of Iran or
policing “transit corridors” here and there but that’s just me.
@Wizard
of Oz a refuses to extradite a woman to Britain for actual homicide. Zero grounds to hold
him.
From their political standpoint the safest way out is for Assange to simply die in the
maximum-security prison, so the extradition proceedings can simply be dropped. All problems
solved.
So, he is in actual fact in prison for life.
Never mind that Britain did something virtuous in the distant past. Today is today. And
notice that serial murderers can be friendly and courteous between murders but that nice
behaviour doesn’t exonerate them for the murders. Nazi Germany looks angelic relative to
the Britain of today.
“The Gulf of Tonkin “event” was a lie, so there’s that.”
No. It in reality, it was a series of confused messages from the patrol boat. But was used
to support a defense of S. Vietnam — the matter is of no consequence. The US was going to
defend S. Vietnamese sovereignty regardless of the Tonkin event.
Today on TruNews Rick interviews Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, a free speech
alternative to the tyrants at Twitter. They discuss how the Silicon Valley elite use their
satanic bias to silence opposition and have a mission to purge Christianity from their
platforms.
FYI while BLM and RG draw our attention and now RABAS have made all other conspiracies
recede into Corona graveyard
( Russia gate and Russia Afghan Bounty American Solider )
Kushner stoke and his DNA repaired the monetary damages back at home of origin .
Israel lobby organizations such as the Zionist Organization of America ($2-5 million),
Friends of the IDF ($2-5 million) and the Israeli American Council ($1-2 million) are grabbing
huge 100% forgivable loans from the CARES Act PPP program.
According to SBA data released on Monday, Israeli’s Bank Leumi has doled out a quarter to
a half billion dollars under the PPP program, despite being called out for operating in the
occupied West Bank.
Leumi has given sweetheart deals to fellow Israeli companies Oran Safety Glass (which defrauded
the US Army on bulletproof glass contracts) and Energix, which operates power plants in the
occupied Golan Heights and West Bank.
This exchange took place today on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal.
This video clip with additional information is available on IRmep’s YouTube
Channel.
Grant F. Smith is the author of the new book The Israel Lobby Enters State Government. He is
director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy IRmep in Washington, D.C. which
co-organizes IsraelLobbyCon each year at the National Press Club.
@geokat62
– colonial expansion,
– rolling genocide of the Palestinian people, witness 2014 Operation Protective Edge,
– terrorist attacks of neighboring Arab/Muslim states – Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq,
Occupied Territories, Iran & Syria;
– terrorist attacks on Western nations, incl. the UK, the US, & France (since its
Parliament voted to recognize Palestine as a state in 2014), and
– sponsoring of terror organizations e.g, ISIS, to continue its proxy war on
Syria.
– etc, etc
In addition to Constantinople, years later defending Ottoman remnants in Bosnia and Kosovo
against the Christians by “cigar” Clinton and warmonger Blair that introduced the
Islamization of Europe.
@Erzberger
e lines of making distinctions e.g. between deliberate murder of harmless civilians and forcing
choices on them (starve Russian prisoners and ration food to mothers and children e.g.). Of
course the choice to get rid of their government and stop the war is unrealistic even in the
post Cold War world. What did sanctions on Iran produce?? Just civilian deaths.
** it is only recently that I discovered that it made a big contribution to diverting German
effort from the Eastern Front though it is not surprising that Stalin thought the absence of a
Second Front in France was meant to help the Germans savage the USSR.
@Patagonia
Man he approx dozen Israeli dual citizens he alleges are in the Australian Parliament
contrary to the provisions of the Australian constitution.
So, don’t encourage him Geo, by thanking him. That Israeli nonsense is enough to brand
him as a nutter.
As to Quadrant, what does it matter that, in the 50s, and maybe till about 1970, it was
given some financial support by the CIA? Really, what is the point in the 21st century? Does it
matter to current affairs that Robert Maxwell owned the Daily Mirror till the 90s?
If I don’t reply to all the rubbish no one should infer the truth of anything
Patagonia Man alleges.
He takes various commandments of God and distills it into a silly… Debt = Sin.
Indeed, it is true that one can take anything and make it fit their delusional way of thought.
E.g. the 3 in 1, of the pagan Trinity.
Of course, that does not mean, Usury (extortionate moneylending) ≠ Sin, which it most
certainly is.
The Ten Commandments were about debt? A silly interpretation. They are primarily about
Monotheism and a righteous way-of-life, and refraining from usury is just one aspect of it.
Christianity got perverted? Yes, it most certainly is a pagan perversion of True
Monotheism.
“Sure, Poland bears major responsibility for WW 2, and lending themselves to now
hosting US nukes and troops to be moved over from Germany signals that they once again have not
learned a thing from their past.”
— Stepping on rakes as a national pastime.
@Ann
Nonny Mouse an associated organisation whose stated objective is to ‘maximise support
for the State of Israel within the British Liberal Democrat Party’…
Spaight claims that drawing the war to the British isles was done in solidarity with the
Soviets. This is nonsense but a timely propaganda move at a time when German defeat was
assured. Stalin did no fall into that trap. He lknew about Operation Pike and Operation
Impossible, and had zero reason to trust the British. Wikipedia has a page on either
Operation
Denialist? A careful textual analysis tells me you are saying WoZ denies what you assert,
which is that there are about a dozen Israeli dual citizens in the Australian Parliament,
contrary to law. Instead of coyly dancing around the issue what about meeting the challenge to
name at least some?
@Erzberger
Thanks. Mind you I think the Blitz was pretty indiscriminate bombing before Britain was in a
position to inflict much damage on Germany. I gather attacks on London from the start were a
strategic error by Hitler because the Liluftwaffe should have kept up its attacks on Britisk
airfields. Interesting that Albert Speer, in the “World at War” series, said that
four more raids like the 1000 bomber raid on Hamburg (or maybe it was Cologne) would have
finished the war. Why couldn’t Bomber Command do I it? Maybe it was because Eisenhower
won the battle to have bombers diverted to bombing the Pas we Calais (mostly) and Normandie.
“Mind you I think the Blitz was pretty indiscriminate bombing before Britain was in a
position to inflict much damage on Germany.”
Wrong.
BTW, the Blitz is a misnomer. Blitzkrieg is tactical air support for ground troops. Neither
applies to the air attacks on German cities in May 1940, or the German retaliation, several
months later, that we know as the Blitz.
Richard Overy though has argued that the German Blitz showed the British how it was done
efficiently, so they improved their bombing strategy accordingly afterwards. Whatever
Aren't they counting now everyone who doesn't say "No, I don't have the virus"? It's
strange to me that they shift the narrative every time - even including all the tricks they
use - it looks like it's finally over.
Wearing mask(if it eventually ingrains itself as a widespread public behaviour) will bring
deathknell of all the facial recognition hardware & softwares? What will happen to the
millions of webcams which were capturing 24x7 in the public spaces but cant capture now!
All investment lost ? It seems to me this is a battle by some TPTB vs some other TPTB.
Much as I love MofA's work I am getting rather fed up with the horror stories with no sense
of scale over Covid.
What proportion have been infected to date? 5% 15% 25%. No comment from MofA.
Is there a proportion of the pop that is simply immune (like most kids seem to be)? No
comment from MofA.
Assume everyone caught it how many would that kill? No estimate from MofA.
Of course it is fair to say that no scare mongers talk about these things, not
governments, not the mainstream media that is terrified of challenging the Fear factor. But
I have learnt to expect proper analysis from MofA.
6 months in, we are still debating Public policy and personal policy without even
discussing the potential scale.
My guess is that if nothing is done to prevent everyone being exposed to Covid, then on
average we will have our lives reduced by 2 months per person. Which sounds pretty awful
for someone in the last 2 years of their life, but frankly is nothing given the big gains
in life expectancy in the last couple of decades (excluding US).
I'll happily debate that 2 month estimate with anyone who dares to discuss estimates of
the crucial scale factors above.
But recall the CDC implied estimate of death rates per infection is 0.26% - and I haven't
seen one scare monger accept a 1% number yet.
It's called CULLING! There are no jobs, it's Marx's 'reserve army of the unemployed',
surplus to requirement (by capitalism). Once more, it's NOT THE VIRUS that's killing
Americans, it's CAPITALISM!
@1 - Indeed. Hit the nail on the head. More than any previous (corrupt) administration, the
Trump administration is a kleptocratic enterprise designed, in part, to enrich himself and
his business cronies. They have, and will, use any event positive or negative to that end.
@Kevin (multiple) - 1) Use any search engine. USA Today is reporting that 56 Florida
hospitals have hit peak ICU capacity. That's just in Florida. 2) You clearly know nothing
about the American system of jails/prisons. You're lucky to get a meal that consists of
more than 6oz. of week-old Frito pie (look it up if you're not American). Furthermore,
masks were incredibly hard to come by and the Trump administration had, in fact, shipped a
buttload of them over to China in secret while they were in short supply in the USA. And
finally do you think that they'd give masks to prisoners even if they had them? LOL if
so.
I'm sorry to the doubters; it's time to accept that this thing is real and that masks
work in more ways than one provided they are used properly and sterilized correctly if
needed. But I feel more sorry for the people who suffered and died (will die) as the result
of the shoddy American political and medical systems.
So why have the absolute number of covid-19 deaths been in decline since mid-April? Where
are all the stories of overloaded hospitals?
Posted by: Kevin | Jul 8 2020 18:12 utc | 4
That's your homework. Go to your local hospital and ask where Covid19 are being kept.
You want to disprove something you're going to need hard evidence to back your own
claim.
If masks are effective, why was it necessary to release prison inmates to prevent them from
getting covid-19?
Posted by: Kevin | Jul 8 2020 18:14 utc | 5
This is dunning Kruger effect. You must have heard your assertion somewhere instead of
coming up with that yourself.
Virus are spread through droplets either from your mouth or noses. Wearing masks can help
to contain said droplets spread to others or into public space where many people can be at
risk. The virus did not hover in the air through fine dust particles.
Where did anyone read that the "absolute number of COVID-19 deaths" (in the USA) is in
decline? The count increases every single day.
If what they mean is why is the death rate falling, presuming it is and stays that way,
then the answer is complex and still unfolding, but on a high level it's because they are
finally able to test more people and many of the positive tests are the asymptomatic or
light cases. Hence, we just *know about more* of the actual cases, not to mention that
lockdowns, bar and beach closures, and mask mandates have also helped slow it down. For
now. The fall and winter could be horrible.
White House officials also hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll and
learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day, according to three people familiar
with the White House's thinking, who requested anonymity to reveal internal
deliberations. Americans will "live with the virus being a threat," in the words of one
of those people, a senior administration official.
That's also Boeing's strategy post-737 MAX. Be aware with its soon to be re-licensed
planes.
US has currently raging Covid fires in Florida, Texas, Arizona. Cali and S Carolina and
Louisiana are not far back. Forget about deaths for a minute. The large # of daily
infections and hospitalizations will still put a major strain on US healthcare, logistics,
food supply and then economy.
The hospitalizations should be a huge wake up call alone. Only 130 ICU beds in entire
Arizona left available. A state of 7 million inhabitants.
It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that at the very least there will be a
huge hospital bed shortage in US for months and months.
Businesses will keep closing and going out of business for then foreseable future.
Even if we get zero deaths for Covid from today on, this is still a clusterf....
MofA topped my dailing reading during the Syria war and until February.
No longer, as other readers I am sick and tired of the Covid paranoia spread on this
blog. The coverage shows a complete lack of political, economic and even statistical
analytical skills. Almost as if there are two different authors.
Read Swiss Policy Research for a realistic, science-based assessment of this election
year propaganda hoax.
Within the Outlaw US Empire, there's been some consistently accurate reporting done by
USA Today , but it's clear the Troll Brigade's talking points remain the same; and
quite frankly, they are becoming very tiresome, allowing today's Global Times
editorial to invoke a Chinese Proverb that:
"describes someone as quenching one's thirst with poisoned wine, and now the proverb can
be used on the hysteric US government....
"while US society has become accustomed to it and even cooperated with it, which is
degeneration ."
"Just like on the field, success will depend on how many players are safe at home.
"'That's going to be the biggest challenge for this game to move forward -- the
off-the-field stuff and what guys do,' said Vincent, an eight-year major league veteran.
'It's just going to take one team to mess it up for everybody. I hope everybody gets that.
It'll take five guys to get a whole team sick, and then if a whole team is sick, that could
end the season for everybody else.'"
And COVID-19's growth is almost completely related to "community exposure." I think it's
rather important for b to echo the message of the linked editorial:
"The Trump administration is leading the country to 'co-exist with the novel
coronavirus.' But we must tell Americans that such inaction is terrible . People's
understanding of the virus is insufficient, but it has been proven that it can spread fast
and infect humans, and the death rate of COVID-19 is much higher than the common flu. If
the US keeps the status quo, its number of deaths will be incalculable, and so will be the
lasting of the raging virus and its long-term impact on the economy ." [My
Emphasis]
I see Chicago now requires a 14-day quarantine of people arriving from the same states
as does New York:
"Effective Monday, July 6, travelers from the following states are directed to
quarantine upon arrival in Chicago: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Florida,
Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Nevada, South Carolina, Tennessee,
Texas, and Utah."
The new book coming out about Trump is titled correctly: Too Much and Never Enough:
How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man .
Much as I love MofA's work I am getting rather fed up with the horror stories with no sense
of scale over Covid.
What proportion have been infected to date? 5% 15% 25%. No comment from MofA.
Is there a proportion of the pop that is simply immune (like most kids seem to be)? No
comment from MofA.
Assume everyone caught it how many would that kill? No estimate from MofA.
Of course it is fair to say that no scare mongers talk about these things, not
governments, not the mainstream media that is terrified of challenging the Fear factor. But
I have learnt to expect proper analysis from MofA.
6 months in, we are still debating Public policy and personal policy without even
discussing the potential scale.
My guess is that if nothing is done to prevent everyone being exposed to Covid, then on
average we will have our lives reduced by 2 months per person. Which sounds pretty awful
for someone in the last 2 years of their life, but frankly is nothing given the big gains
in life expectancy in the last couple of decades (excluding US).
I'll happily debate that 2 month estimate with anyone who dares to discuss estimates of
the crucial scale factors above.
But recall the CDC implied estimate of death rates per infection is 0.26% - and I haven't
seen one scare monger accept a 1% number yet.
Posted by: Michael Droy | Jul 8 2020 18:37 utc | 7
You don't have to fear it but you shouldn't forgoes the medical guidelines against
pandemic either. Else you might contributed to catastrophic healthcare system
overloading.
What's your plan other than going into hospital once you're sick ? There are no over the
counter medicine that are effective against this new diseases.
It is simply not true that there are 1 Million tests in Germany per week. There is no such
thing like mass testing in Germany. Only if you feel ill or in the few cases of contact
tracing tests are being conducted, I personally know no one who has been tested at all. Due
to the low numbers of active symptomatic cases numbers of tests should be low accordingly.
Greetings from Germany !
There were approximately 100,000 test-positive deaths in the United States by the end of
May. The overall mortality rate since the beginning of the year was, however, in the range
of the strong flu season of 2017/2018 (see chart below).
In an open letter, over 600 doctors warned US President Donald Trump of the dangers of
an extended lockdown. The lockdown was itself a "mass casualty incident".
@_K_C, Why would more testing drive the number of deaths down? Is there some miracle
treatment that they are keeping a secret? Consider also the generous criteria for
classifying a death as resukting from covid-19.
Actually, the case in Florida seems to be even more dire than what is indicated here -- at
least according to a report I saw from the Independent:
The data, which comes from the state health authority, show that more than four dozen of
Florida's hospitals have now hit full intensive care capacity, while more than 30 are at
90 per cent capacity. And in just the last few days, the statewide percentage of ICU beds
available has dropped from 20 per cent to 17 per cent.
We need to look at the DEATH RATE, NOT the number of infections, or the so-called EXCESS
DEATHS and the problem is that they (the US and the UK) no longer record the actual CAUSE
of death, because the state doesn't give a fuck! In the UK, over half of all deaths have
been in CARE HOMES, ditto the US. Again, they've been CULLED!!!! Offered no protection to
their carers or to the ones they care for. This is EUGENICS or to use it's common name;
FASCISM.
The rich don't give a fuck that more people are now dying from all other kinds of
things, from untreated heart attacks, to starvation.
Hospitals get a significantly higher Medicare reimbursement rate for patients diagnosed
with covid-19. So we are supposed to believe that the healthcare system motherfucks us
every time EXCEPT when it comes to being incentivized with higher covid-19 reimbursement
rates, especially at a time when revenue from other medical procedures is down?
I might add that a lot of people are dying because their immune systems have been fucked by
the foul food, air and water, not to mention the stress of living under a dying capitalism.
div> Im a working class stiff, most people in america simply cant isolate
themselves cuz they need to work to pay the bill a couple weeks without pay is a disaster.
What im concerned about is as a person who got laid of, federal unemployment assistance runs
out at the end of july, after that ill be getting only 300$ a week from the state.which is
not enough
Im a working class stiff, most people in america simply cant isolate themselves cuz they
need to work to pay the bill a couple weeks without pay is a disaster. What im concerned
about is as a person who got laid of, federal unemployment assistance runs out at the end
of july, after that ill be getting only 300$ a week from the state.which is not enough
The microwave generated steam decontamination method (MGS) is confirmed by many studies.
I saw the study you (b) posted, before one month.
It supports up to 20 decontaminations cycles without loss in filter performance and mask
fit.
I use that method for mask decontamination too. It only works for respirator masks
though. Presence of metal on the respirator mask is not a problem, the steam makes sure
that there are no sparks, as studies and myself found.
For surgical masks, the microwave steam decontamination method did not work for me
though, and it destroyed the surgical mask. According to studies, you can use another
method for up to 10 decontaminations of surgical masks - put the mask for 5 minutes over a
steam flow created by boiling water. But do not touch the boiling water with the surgical
mask, just steam it.
For cloth masks - wash the mask in washing machine at 60 C, for at least 30 minutes. You
can put some disinfectant in the washing machine, such as commercial Heitmann solution for
disinfection or Hydrogen Peroxide instead.
I quote the Chief Medical Officer for the UK, Chris Whitty:
For the vast majority (85%) the virus is NOT life threatening, most don't even know
they've had it. Even most of those with co-morbities, survive, the overall death rate (not
the total numbers) is around 0.1%
"Nationally, levels of influenza-like illness (ILI) and COVID-19-like illness (CLI)
activity remain lower than peaks seen in March and April.."
Notice they conflate the statistics of ILI and CLI- together to fudge numbers?
"Mortality attributed to COVID-19 decreased compared to last week"
Increased testing will inevitably find more cases despite b's claim to the otherwise
There have also been recent reports from Oxford
Link
that this virus has been around for some time already- as evidenced in sewage
samples
"Dr Tom Jefferson, senior associate tutor at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine
at Oxford University, and visiting professor at Britain's Newcastle University, says there
is growing evidence the virus was elsewhere before it emerged in Asia"
Dr Jefferson believes that the virus may be transmitted through the sewerage system
or shared toilets, not just through droplets expelled by talking, coughing and
sneezing.
"There is quite a lot of evidence of huge amounts of the virus in sewage all over the
place, and an increasing amount of evidence there is faecal transmission. There is a high
concentration where sewage is four degrees, which is the ideal temperature for it to be
stabled and presumably activated. And meat-packing plants are often at four
degrees.
"These meat-packing clusters and isolated outbreaks don't fit with respiratory
theory, they fit with people who haven't washed their hands properly.
"These outbreaks need to be investigated properly. You question people, and you
construct hypotheses that fit the facts, not the other way around."
As for Germany their R number was up weeks ago- despite their massive fines and mandatory
mask policy.
Still the mask psychosis persists
Corrected for population, the 1957/58 Asian flu killed over 230,000 Americans, and the
1978/69 Hong Kong flu killed about 170,000. COVID-19 is a bad epidemic, but it is only the
third worst since WWII. 230,000 would be a death rate of 0.007%.
B and of none of the non-American commenters and most American commenters do not
understand that the US has a real federal government with local police and health matters
in the jurisdiction of the States. Within the States themselves counties and cities have a
great deal of independent control. Most health and crime enforcement is at the city/county
level. My sheriff has more authority over me than the state police. And my county health
department has more authority than the federal government. The federal government has very
little authority in local matters. The response to the coronavirus is almost entirely in
the purview of the state governors, and the feds authority is mostly advisory. So look to
the Governors to assign blame.
About half fo all the US cases and deaths are in the NYC metro area, so it was the
Cuomo/De Blasio screw ups that mattered. They also got bad advice and faulty test gear from
the CDC. Notably, public transit was not shut down anywhere, and in NY nursing homes were
forced to accept elderly COVID patients. Over 40% of the deaths in America have occurred in
nursing homes.
The lockdowns are not a panacea. There has been truly massive economic losses, which
made take a decade to retore. Continued lockdowns will precipitate a Worl Great
Depression.
Geographical spread. The early infestation was in the north-east, and now it's less a
problem there, if I understand correctly. Now it's in the south and southwest, which
weren't touched before.
"The goal is to convince Americans that they can live with the virus -- that schools should
reopen, professional sports should return, a vaccine is likely to arrive by the end of the
year and the economy will continue to improve."
Anyone know how us americans can purchase n95 masks from europe? They are still unavailable
here and it will get worse. I get a long while of intermittent use of each so dont mind the
$6 pricetag
@ Posted by: barovsky | Jul 8 2020 19:11 utc | 27; @ Posted by: R Rose | Jul 8 2020 19:16
utc | 32; @ Posted by: Kevin | Jul 8 2020 18:52 utc | 16; @ Posted by: Kevin | Jul 8 2020
18:12 utc | 4; @ Posted by: Roberto | Jul 8 2020 18:56 utc | 19
Your argument is irrelevant, for the simple fact that the extra risk of death is still
greater than zero (i.e. a person with COVID-19 still has a greater chance of dying than an
exact copy of that person without COVID-19).
The American economy is consumer-based, i.e. it can only grow as long as people keep
buying things they don't need in ever greater quantities in money-terms. That makes the
opportunity cost of consuming something you don't need too great even if, in absolute
terms, you could argue the risk is still at the safe zone.
Even if COVID-19 mortality rate was similar to the common flu (it isn't: it's more than
10 times the common flu's mortality rate), you still have to face the fact that we're not
at flu season, and that two flu seasons are deadlier than one flu season. The opportunity
cost of consuming things you don't need still applies: people are not going to the
restaurant at a random Sunday if that means they have a +1.5% chance of dying because of
that. Keep in mind that this +1.5% chance of dying going to the restaurant piles up over
the other risks (of being murdered by a robber, by being ran over by another car, by being
hit by lightning etc. etc.) - it doesn't offset them.
I thought the stories of Cuomo having nursing homes being forced to accept covid-19
patients was conservatard ranting. But even the NY Times admits it.
Then you need to be more precise/correct with your language. You said, in your original
post "So why have the absolute number of covid-19 deaths been in decline since
mid-April?"
Perhaps you don't know the difference between "average daily deaths" and "absolute
number of deaths." The latter is increasing every day. The average number of deaths,
however, is indeed *currently* in decline after a previous spike and that is due in part to
all of the preventive measures that the "Troll Brigade" (as karlof1 has dubbed them) are
constantly claiming don't work. Masks, closures, more testing and quarantine/isolation,
etc.
I already know you're not going to read the "in part" in my previous paragraph, so I
thought I'd make sure to repeat that the situation is complex and it is completely
reasonable, even without evidence from other countries on those counts (which does in fact
exist and has been posted ad nauseum here), to conclude that the decline in deaths per day
as we speak is partly due to the measures mentioned.
Another fact about COVID-19 that I found very interesting. It's a lot more complex than the
average virus. And thus has capacities which the average flu virus doesn't.
The SARS-CoV-2 genome is a strand of RNA that is about 29,900 bases long -- near the
limit for RNA viruses. Influenza has about 13,500 bases, and the rhinoviruses that cause
common colds have about 8,000. (A base is a pair of compounds that are the building
blocks of RNA and DNA.) Because the genome is so large, many mutations could occur during
replication that would cripple the virus, but SARS-CoV-2 can proofread and correct
copies. This quality control is common in human cells and in DNA viruses but highly
unusual in RNA viruses. The long genome also has accessory genes, not fully understood,
some of which may help it fend off our immune system.
With the US now at 10% of its peak death-rate and falling, despite the known rapid spread
of the virus for at least a month now, Covid-19 is barely newsworthy at this stage.
Good timing, b.
Vic.gov's credibility tanked last week in the wake of a fiasco involving a silly lapse of
'medical security' at a hotel being used, exclusively, to quarantine infection suspects. It
turns out that the people hired to manage/supervise the inmates' adherence to best practice
were casual security guard types with no relevant skills and 5 minutes of 'training'
i.e. a cheap solution.
Being low on the pay-scale pecking order, these people lived in low-rent suburbs. A
sufficient number of them lived in high-density, 20-storey public-housing complexes that
they carried the infection into 9 such complexes. It wasn't until residents began testing
positive for COVID-19 that Vic.gov realised the magnitude of this thrift-induced blunder.
The residents of the apartment blocks received i hour's notice of their forced confinement.
What began as a policed lock-down of 9 apartment blocks became a lockdown of 10
Melbourne postcodes (40 to 50 Northern suburbs) on June 30, and escalated into a panic-mode
lockdown of most of metro Melbourne announced pm on July 7, effective midnight on July 8.
So now Melburnians are back to April restrictions - only reasons to leave your place of
residence/suburb are Work, Essential shopping, Medical issues, exercise.
So everyone is feeling very pissed off and very, very perplexed. The measures imposed
have a reasonable chance of working but 6 weeks of lockdown is going to expose some
psychological cracks. Imo.
Anyway, I have sufficient masks to quarantine 3 masks per day for 7 days. I have yet to
wear one but expect to be doing so fairly soon...
Those doubting the importance of this dangerous pandemic are simply attempting to justify
the preservation of neo-liberal capitalism at the expense of human lives. When 'Droy' says
that the net effect will be to lower life expectancy by an average of two months he is
trivialising the agonising deaths of hundreds of thousands of people due to occur in the
coming months.
As b points out in the coming months the US Healthcare non-system is headed for a
monstrous car crash, a catastrophic collapse in the face of hundreds of thousands of people
who are going to need treatment which is likely to be unavailable. This will have a knock
on effect on large numbers of others, whose needs for medical attention will go unsatisfied
because there is no spare capacity and the system has already been strained beyond its
limits.
Then there will be the victims of poverty inevitable in an economy in which few have
savings and subsistence depends upon the labour market-with demand for labour declining,
unemployment will increase and consumption go into further decline, a vicious circle
leading to famine and the sort of malnutrition which undermines societies for generations
to come.
And the cause is very simple: for decades accountants and politicians have preached
against 'waste'. And 'waste' has come to mean any expenditure not immediately justifiable
by actual demand. Thus a spare bed in an ICU is waste; a nurse on a coffee break is wasting
her time; a stock of PEP held in reserve is waste; investment in virus prevention between
pandemics is waste (far better to spend resources on acne or anti-wrinkle creams.
Everybody knew this pandemic was coming. Everyone knows that more health emergencies are
going to arise.
But some (rhymes with scum) dispute the importance of millions of people dying. They see
it is sad and unfortunate but nothing like the inconvenience that a major regulation of
private property rights in order to prevent rich people from eating poor people would
entail.
The last time this happened in the United States was in the 1930s. Then, finally, kicking
and screaming, the capitalist class was forced, in fear of its imminent demise, into
conceding the basic reforms needed to bring society through the Depression without millions
more dying of starvation and hypothermia. But the opposition never gave in-those who fought
the New Deal finally prevailed in the 1980s, first they re-conquered the Republican Party,
then they took over the Democrats too. As a result there has been forty years of serial
de-regulation and privatisation so that society is defenceless in the face of the
pandemic.
Defenceless in terms of resources (not enough doctors, not enough nurses, not enough
material resources) and defenceless too in terms of intellectual resources- nobody in
government has any idea of what to do. The leadership of society is so thoroughly
brainwashed to reject social solutions and to search, at every sign of danger, for ways to
incentivise the market to solve problems, that it cannot bring itself to recognise how
simple it would be to follow in China's footsteps and mobilise the enormous spare capacity
in the economy into a public health campaign. (These are the idiots whose response to
climate change was the creation of a market for carbon credits.)
Hoist on its own petard, the United States blunders towards its demise.
Can the federal system survive the experience of a Katrina in every county?
Can the states rights blowhards live down their failure to produce local solutions to local
problems?
Can capitalism live on after its cannibalistic nature has been fully revealed?
The system is in crisis and the point is to change it, to come up with something better and
to refuse to accept the repair of the most evil system of government that the world has
ever seen. The first global iteration of a society organised to protect the wealthy and to
kill any dissent from their victims.
@_K_C - By absolute, I mean none of those pesky numerators or denominators. If the cases
are exploding, why are the deaths declining. I have yet to hear an explanation for this.
@Passerby - Death statistics are not necessarily released on the day they occurred,
particularly if they occurred over a weekend or holiday. That is why the average number of
deaths is smoothed.
Those doubting the importance of this dangerous pandemic are simply attempting to justify
the preservation of neo-liberal capitalism at the expense of human lives.
Bullshit!
I've seen quite a spectrum of very reasonable argument about this. The 'defense of
capitalism' is a vicious strawman. What I see being defended is the only system
currently in place and viable to get supplies to masses of people. Yeah, it sucks that
Bezos gets richer, but you can't just abandon noxious structures if the alternative is
anarchy, especially if your aim is to prevent death and destruction.
I agree with you about wearing masks. But think for a moment about ll the ridiculous
double-talk and outright lies the our government has spread about make wearing, and I think
perhaps we can understand why so much of the public is skeptical.
At first we were told point blank that masks didn't work - this was a 'little white lie'
to save masks for health care professionals, the official line is now that masks do work,
but what kind of message does this send about the honesty and reliability of anything we
hear from the government?
Just the other day I read an "official" statement saying that private citizens shouldn't
use medical grade masks, they should use home-made masks and save the masks that really
work for health care professionals. Seriously. So if home-made masks aren't effective - or
not as effective as medical grade ones - why are we being asked to wear them? Is this just
to keep morale up? Again, this is such obvious double-talk that skepticism seems in
order...
And the big problem with the mask shortage are all these "free" trade agreements that
shipped all the factories making masks (and tests and reagents for making tests etc.etc.)
to China. So is the government moving to bring medical manufacturing back to this country?
They are not! Last I heard, they have formed a cartel of private companies, that would
import masks from China and use their legal quasi-monopoly power to force hospitals etc. to
bid up prices given a scarce supply. Again, our elites are not interested in increasing the
supply of masks, they just want to make sure that the right people can make a quick buck
profiteering from the limited supply.
And if masks are important, why the heck aren't we making better ones? Surely we can
make a mask that is as protective as an N95, yet as comfortable to wear as a regular
surgical mask. We could do this with only a modest research effort, but of course, nobody
is even trying.
Bottom line: the real rot is that our elites - on both sides of the aisle - just do not
care about the general public. Remember again how their first order of business, was to
pass massive tax cuts and subsidies target exclusively to the super rich. Gotta have your
priorities, right?
@ Liberty Blogger 44 : July 7 deaths were 993, up from 500..600 peaks the weeks before, all
time peak April 21 was 2749, so rather 36% than 10%. Herd immunity is far away, and
different from Sweden, the USA have a broken health insurance system with tens of millions
uninsured, and at least hundred million so underinsured that a hospital treatment may ruin
them.
That is one of the major problems. Would the US have granted every Covid19 (and suspect)
case free medical treatment, they would have some chance to control the epidemics. Too
late.
"There are no over the counter medicines that are effective against this new disease." -
Lucci 17.
Dead wrong! There are at least two already well proven: Dr. Didier Raoult's
hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and zinc cocktail, tried and proven in his Marseilles
hospital; and large-dose vitamin C, given either intravenously or by mouth if you want to
do it yourself. See 'Doctoryourself.com' for more details. Take the white powder form of C
if using diy: ascorbic acid or sodium ascorbate: AT LEAST 30 grams - sic! - per 24 hours,
in water, stirred and sipped repeatedly, every quarter hour. Note: there is no known
(genuine) LD50 for C; and no really serious bad effects. As safe as anything can be. In my
80th year I've just used this approach to see off an attack of what I believe to be covid,
in three days. But I have no co-morbidities, and a strong immune system, still.
Naturally the cocktail is contested, thoroughly deceitfully, by the Big Pharma shills;
and no-one ever hears about the C approach, because both these ***effective*** treatments
would knock the bottom out of the slavering anticipation of huge vaccine profits amongst
the gics (the gangsters-in-charge) who are treating us all like sacrificial cattle.
@Passerby - Why is there a need to bet? Why not just give your prediction of the magnitude
of the spike and the specific reason for the spike. Neither you nor I have any control over
what future policies will be enacted, revised definitions/classifications of coronavirus
diagnosis will be used or testing technologies be employed.
I am saying that, based on the data that we have, there is a disconnect between the
increasing number of cases and the indisputable decline in deaths that has not been
explained. If it is because most of the vulnerable (such as in nursing homes) have either
already died or are now under better protection, we should see the deaths decline or reach
some low level.
Actually I don't agree with that. The Europeans waited until the infection and death
rate descended to a low level, as opposed to US and UK.
I wouldn't say they were totally right, as someone I know in the ambulance service in
France told me today that if anything the number of cases is increasing. COVID ia a very
resistant virus; there'll be a lot of local new outbreaks until it's finally finished.
Death rate usually lags hospitalisation by 15-20 days. A rise in US hospitalisations
started before 16 days. Therefore my estimate is of average death rate spiking by at least
70 % compared to before 20 days. That higher death rate period will last at least one
month. It can continue further, depending on hospitalisations continuing to increase or
not.
bevin makes very salient and timely observations @46 above.
I am not a very good wordsmith but I would add to his post the following:
1) Eliminating "waste" is not just about "actual demand" but also about maximizing
immediate (appearance of) profit for a select few including majority shareholders, upper
corporate management and psuedo-banks like Goldman and the like. As long as the few can
extract the weekly, monthly, quarterly profits by cutting "waste" (including domestic
jobs), they will continue to do so. There is plenty of actual demand for numerous things
including ICU beds for example (or any commoditized service/good for which the market will
not bear excessive profit to be made) and the owner class, the few, doesn't care. They
don't respect the free market because such a thing doesn't exist. They are bailed out every
time they screw up while the people/workers are left in the lurch. Hence, screw supply and
demand as well as long-term profits/economic health. Only highly profitable goods/services
will be produced/provided and the basic necessities are ignored.
2) The sad irony of people/workers propagandized into voting and speaking in a manner
that conflicts with their own economic/health interests and favors the few is now more
evident than ever; in fact just a look at some of the comments here under COVID-19 related
posts is evidence enough. The "working class" has not only been divided along racial and
religious lines, but a good portion of them spend a great deal of time preaching on behalf
of their masters, often if not always not even realizing they're doing it.
such a great blog on so many topics but the covid fear-mongering & shaming of
skepticism is deeply disappointing. In my location, OC (SoCal) 369 deaths of which 281 are
age 65 & over in a pop. ~3.17 million. I do not think this is sufficient to destroy
lives, families, jobs, futures etc & I am certainly not "simply attempting to justify
the preservation of neo-liberal capitalism at the expense of human lives"
I can only go by what is written, and "absolute number of deaths" means the running
total, which again is continuing to rise.
There are many unknowns regarding the death rate and it is way too early to claim
victory considering the developing situation and accompanying news. It is simply a fact
that numerous hospitals are at full capacity with COVID-19 patients in the USA. What
happens if it keeps growing and people are unable to access intensive hospital care? Well,
for one thing the death rate will begin to increase again, perhaps dramatically.
Obviously there is not normally a huge demand for ICU beds. There is, however, the need
to maintain capacity of basic needs like that as well as capability and
inventory of services and staples (access to clean air, water, food, etc.), which is
intentionally left by the wayside to varying degrees in Western late stage capitalist
economies/political systems. Waste is continually redefined and we are propagandized
constantly that "the markets" constitute the real economy, when in fact we could move on
just fine without them, or at least with keeping them and making them play by the same
basic rules that the rest of us do.
Nonsensical. Ignoring the epidemic is a wilful decision (akin to Obama's "wilful
decision" to 'ignore' the growth of ISIS).
We should ask qui bono. Big Pharma, the US government (they pay for the healthcare of
many older people), and the Deep State as described by Peter AU1 @Jul8 19:53 #48
Trumps calculation is to separate US from China and take China down. Coronavirus is his
ally rather than enemy.
<> <> <> <> <>
Also note: herd immunity among the plebs is ultimately more likely to protect the
wealthy in their gated communities more than 'at risk' populations that are susceptible
(which include younger people).
Class war? Or just a series of innocent 'mistakes' and unfortunate 'ignoring'? Decide
for yourself.
We in America are so fukd, and it is raw and unfiltered stupidity that is killing us more
than the virus. These people cannot perform simple arithmetic with integers, much less
visualize how geometric progressions work. Even worse than that is they do not have the
capacity to see beyond the end of their nose where this is going.
The US is going to get quarantined by the international community. A million
international students per year will stop coming here. 80 million tourists per year will
find less diseased places to visit. America will be the national version of a leper.
What I don't know is how other counties will handle the US military bases on their
territories. These bases will be serious vectors for disease for other countries even after
the virus has run its course in America and killed a few million there.
Why are COVID cases increasing while deaths are decreasing? The answer is simple. It's
called Simpson's paradox and it's the result of incorrectly pooling data and arriving at a
false conclusion.
If we accept your premise of a .26% infection death rate, and let's say only half the US
ever gets infected ultimately, that's "only" about 455,000 deaths. No way of knowing how
many will have serious health problems. And this is your own optimistic scenario. When
100,000s of thousands dead are considered minor, then you know the culture is down the
sewer. IMO, the callous national non-response to US torture and mass murder abroad has
prepared the US population to have exactly this attitude. The war comes home now.
The desensitisation of the general public will be instrumental in how this will be spun.
It is easy to deny any culpability when torture and mass murder take place in some far away
country. A far different story when the ravaging is happening at home. It will be
interesting to see how much harder they will lean on the "China" blame game and how their
exceptionalism will carry them through. I'm sure things will be concocted to deal with the
large numbers of international students who won't be showing up in September for colleges
and universities in the US. Not to mention the apparent appearance of Covid in Barcelona
far earlier than December in Wuhan.
Thanks for the post b. I am surprised by the level of hostility in the comments... surely
this, of all issues, can be approached rationally? This is MoA after all.
I work in healthcare administration in the US so have some perspective on a couple
things. First: the number of "available" ICU beds is not informative. In normal times ICUs
are 90-95% occupied, and administrators constantly look for ways to increase occupancy rate
(because that's how they make money!). If the ICU is full and a new patient comes in, there
are overflow units already set up throughout the hospital to take them in. Doubling or
tripling ICU capacity is very doable, especially in the current situation when most
non-covid patients are avoiding the hospital. There is a lot of space available in all US
hospitals right now because all the "elective" procedures have been cancelled. This is just
a fact taken out of context by journalists to sensationalize their headlines.
Second: the pandemic is very real. Those poo-pooing it in the comments are off base.
Hospitals are devoting huge amounts of resources to treating patients and you really,
really don't want to get infected. I'm with b 100% on that front.
However, this does NOT necessarily mean that lockdowns are the correct approach. That is
an extremely complicated question. For example, if all the lockdown does is slow the
progress of the disease, but the same number of people get infected in the end, then
lockdowns make things worse. The same number of people will die but there will also be
major economic losses- a herd immunity strategy would have the deaths happen sooner, but
without the economic disruption. But this is ALSO complicated by the fact that even if the
government does not declare a lockdown, many people will act "locked down" of their own
accord, so there will likely be some amount of economic consequences anyway. How severe,
and how does that balance against an extra 1-2 months of life for the fatalities? To make a
judgment you would also need a model of how quickly herd immunity kicks in. For example,
the most likely people to become infected are those who interact with many others. But if
they become immune early on in the pandemic, then a 5% population infection (for example)
could lead to 20% herd immunity. How much infection is needed before herd immunity
overwhelms and the disease starts to die out? etc. etc.
The certainty being expressed by commenters on the right course of action for the
government is out of place. These are extremely challenging calculations and different
models will reach different conclusions. I think it is fair to say that Trump will pay a
political price because he has not visibly taken strong action. But whether or not he is
doing the right thing is far more difficult to determine. I urge everyone to be a little
more aware of the complexity of this issue, and a little more conscious that you might not
have the full picture.
re cleaning masks: What is the matter with putting alcohol in a spray bottle and hitting
the mask with that at night?
Posted by: c | Jul 8 2020 20:58 utc | 64
Do not use alcohol to clean respirator and surgical masks. It destroys the electrostatic
charge and the filtration capacity of the mask.
You can use alcohol (between 60 % and 80 % alcohol) for simple cloth masks disinfection
though. Best is to use washing machine for at least 30 minutes at 60 C with some commercial
disinfectant or 100 ml 30% hydrogen peroxide disinfectant.
If you want to use a spay bottle for the cloth mask put 6 % hydrogen peroxide in the
bottle and store that bottle in a dark place.
==================================
Methods to clean respirator masks:
5 hours in container witn hydrogen peroxide vapor (use vaporizer using 6 % liquid
hydrogen peroxide) (20 cycles)
30 minutes in the oven at 80 C with the mask put in heat resistant plastic container
with some wet piece of toilet paper in it to increase humidity within the container (20 -
50 cycles)
2 minutes under microwave generated steam as described in b's article (20 cycles)
Ordinary steam - put above boiling water (5 cycles)
Methods to clean surgical masks:
5 hours in container witn hydrogen peroxide vapor (use vaporizer using 6 % liquid
hydrogen peroxide) (20 cycles)
30 minutes in the oven at 80 C with the mask put in heat resistant plastic container
with some wet piece of toilet paper in it to increase humidity within the container (20 -
50 cycles)
Ordinary steam - put above boiling water (10 cycles)
Do not wash respirator and surgical masks, do not use dry microwave heat, do not use
bleach.
bevin@46
Can the states rights blowhards live down their failure to produce local solutions to local
problems?
Can capitalism live on after its cannibalistic nature has been fully revealed?
Yes to both queries on condition that the virus "gsin of function" continues to be a
lowering of the death numbers. This does not impress the enemies of the New Deal who will
still regard the pandemic as "creative destruction" and continue to preach the gospel of
lemons into lemonade. Capitalism is sociopathic at its core, but this sociopathy can only
persist if the damage isn't too severe, and this pandemic is just not nasty enough to
expose it. The story the Idiot in Chief is telling himself and others is that this virus is
in process of just disappearing. He got this notion from Sylvia Browne, famous psychic.
More people are testing positive, but still there are few people who personally know some
one dead from covid19. So we can live with it, like humanity has lived with pandemics
throughout history, and the fundamental sociopathy of capitalism will persist unless.....
the virus turns nastier. It is my belief that this is a bioweapon, perhaps the first
humankind has experienced. It does not behave like viruses familiar to scientists. Many of
those who recover never truly recover to their former levels. Those societies that
currently boast of a victory over covid do not realize they are engaged in a game of
whack-a-mole. Things have to get worse before the capitalist pigs will finally concede
their system just doesn't work. They may never make that concession speech. Yes, I pray
that Trump & Bolsonaro get really sick and that the creative destruction of this
pandemic will be the elimination of these types of sociopathic individuals from positions
of power & influence.
In conclusion, our study provides nationwide and regional estimates of SARS-Cov-2
dissemination in Spain, showing remarkable differences between higher and lower
prevalence areas. One in three infections seems to be asymptomatic, while a substantial
number of symptomatic cases remained untested. Despite the high impact of Covid-19 in
Spain, prevalence estimates remain low and are clearly insufficient to provide herd
immunity.
This cannot be achieved without accepting the collateral damage of many deaths in the
susceptible population, and overburdening of health systems. In this situation, social
distance measures and efforts to identify and isolate new cases and their contacts are
imperative for future epidemic control.
"Deaths, which health experts say are a lagging indicator, continued to fall nationally
to 3,447 people in the week ended July 5. A handful of states, however, have reported
increases in deaths for at least two straight weeks including Alabama, Florida, South
Carolina, Texas and Tennessee."
Posted by: Digital Spartacus | Jul 8 2020 21:07 utc | 68
A well reasoned response. Though I'm sure many here will prefer to pick it apart to suit
their own personal narratives.
You made me read bevin's post.
I am not convinced. USA is not the only place that adopted JIT/Kanban workflows and
practices. They are adopted and practiced everywhere including here in Canada, in Germany
and of course in Japan who invented them. Yet Canada, Germany and Japan did way better than
the US and Brazil dealing with the epidemic.
So blaming capitalism and corporate cost management does not cut it - there is something
else about USA and Brazil that made them such a disaster. I think it is incompetent
political leadership. Both Trump and Bolsanero are idiots and incompetent clowns and they
formed their administration accordingly.
This is the very type of catalyst that could begin the breakup of the United States. I
believe the northeastern states already have this trend in the back of their minds...
"More and more people will know someone who died of Covid-19. The economy will continue to
only limp along as long as people fear to get infected."
This is why Trump's policy, and herd immunity strategy "to save the economy" are complete
lunacies. The economy will tank, because a lot of people will get infected, will know
people who suffered tremendously or died, and will freak out.
And the "Let's decouple US from China" strategy is just as insane. Most of the world,
most other Western countries to begin with, will have far less covid cases and won't want
to risk more exposure from risky countries. US people basically will be stuck in the good
old USA for the next year and won't be allowed to travel abroad, while the rest of the
world tries to organize between countries that managed to avoid a complete coronavirus
catastrophe, which isn't exactly how you help your own economy to survive.
Heck, I tend to really dislike the USA and I still despair and lament such a stupid and
unnecessary bloodbath.
At least it made you go back and read his post. I feel you could also find many
detractors to the Canadian and German responses as well. But it seems you have found
something in the post to serve your own narrative. I'm not suggesting that there is
something inherent in the approach of both Brazil and the US that makes them the outliers
in that group of countries. It seems you're angry of having to go back and read another
posters opinion though.
If we accept your premise of a .26% infection death rate, and let's say only half the
US ever gets infected ultimately, that's "only" about 455,000 deaths. No way of knowing
how many will have serious health problems. And this is your own optimistic scenario.
When 100,000s of thousands dead are considered minor, then you know the culture is down
the sewer. IMO, the callous national non-response to US torture and mass murder abroad
has prepared the US population to have exactly this attitude. The war comes home now.
1. Not my rate, the CDC's rate as implied by its advice to the health organisations.
2. I reckon lower and I reckon there is an immune section of the community (as shown by
children who typically catch respiratory diseases very easily and spread amongst themselves
in schools).
3. And I reckon we are in many places already at 20% infections rates so we are nearly
halfway there.
But I am happy to argue the details with anyone willing to put up their own estimates (I
recommend the effort - it can be quite cathartic).
Anyway either my guess of <250k or your number of 455k.
2.8m Americans died in 2017 So we are talking 5-16% extra deaths for one year total (but
lower deaths in 2021).
Half of the deaths so far have been in nursing homes and I would expect half of the
remainder to be the same. Add in the many with co-morbidities and over half of the deaths
are of people who have <2 years life expectancy without covid.
Compare gun deaths in a decade - 360k many of which are of healthy young people.
Very similar numbers of traffic deaths per year.
600k cancer deaths every year (many more next year after the near closure of treatment
centres this year)
2 million in prison each and every year with I'd guess half there only because crack is
punishable 18X as long as cocaine.
This is a one off event - and half over already. Forget the masks and concern yourself
about the next pandemic - or better still about Iran, Venezuela and Yemen.
One use masks are one use - gross stupidity to think that you can 'sterilize' a 'one use
mask' multiple times & it will still maintain it's integrity.
Home made masks - as touted here previously - a fashion statement at best.
Hoarsewhisperer | Jul 8 2020 19:47 utc | 45
Gross incompetence - the 'Judicial Inquiry Into Hotel Quarantine Program' allows all the
responsible parties to duck for cover. By the time any findings are made public the
relevant clowns will be long gone with their massive tax payer funded payouts.
82 posts later, lol... thanks b... you are wrong to say germany is doing 1 million tests a
day.. they have only tested a little less then 6 million since they started testing, so
either you worded it wrong, or you are just wrong on that...
i agree with @ 71 sabre.. i don't understand why people can't just talk this out without
all the hostility... read @sabre last few sentences to get the gist of it..
@ 46 bevin.. i like your posts, but you do use the same rant on neo-liberalism as the
problem here.. i am not saying neo-liberalism is a good thing, but it does diminish your
position when you always use this as the backstop to why the usa or brazil has this problem
with the pandemic.. might it also be that they have a couple of leaders that really
downplayed the seriousness of this too? i think so... i would lay the numbers on their
leadership style more then anything... as @78 hophely - some other neo-liberal countries
are doing better, so clearly neo-liberalism isn't the main problem here...
@ kevin... you've made 11 or 12 posts in this thread... that is over 1/10th the posts of
the thread! it is true the death rate in the usa is going down, but i would be cautious of
just using this barometer in the present to make any wider prognosis on where we are headed
going into the fall here... watch @ 66's Boothroyd's youtube link on just how difficult it
is when using stats to come to any conclusion... and, i think it is really premature to
come to many conclusions here, other then that the number of cases is definitely increasing
in the usa... some of that is probably due greater testing and some is probably due that
many more are infected, but unaware of it... going for herd immunity is a nice theory, but
i don't know if it is going to work out the way those hoping for herd immunity wish...
we'll see...
some of my own thoughts - well i agree with passer by in general and @65 william gruff
in particular... i think the usa is doing itself no favours here on the international
stage.... but maybe this is just how it has to unfold moving forward... it seems to me if
it was a war on communism, terrorism or drugs - the usa would be down with it in a heart
beat, but a war on covid - clearly it is considered irrelevant... surely the pharm industry
can figure out a way to make a ton of loot off it? i heard usa gov't gave a lot of money to
the top tier as a consequence of covid, so maybe it is serving a purpose after all... then
there is the issue of how this pandemic disproportionately is a much bigger problem for
black and hispanic people then for white people.... i wonder how that gets processed in it
all? i agree with bevin - thinking this is about saving 2 months of everyone's life is a
really rotten way to trivialize all the old and not so old people who have died from this
because more measures weren't taken...
and about the n95 masks - @ 67 Ljag is correct.... they don't work in this situation
when someone is asymptomatic...
Meanwhile, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation S. Lavrov at the last
meeting
with the Chairman of the Chamber of Deputies of Libya A. Salekh officially announced that
the activities of the Russian Embassy in Libya would resume. At the moment, the functions
of ambassador will be performed by an interim attorney. Geographically, he will be located
in Tunisia. It is stated that the function of the ambassador will include the
representative of the Russian Federation throughout Libya.
The USA is in a pre-revolutionary condition.
Expect to see alternative media on USA platforms closed down.
As we can see here at MoA there will be an avalanche of trolls.
The potential for a Presidential campaign via open access media will be terminated.
No third party candidates will get MSM airtime (as usual).
The economy will tank and statistics manufacturers will rise.
Mercer Media and Statistics will become the standard 'reliable' source.
The evil will continue to pollute the planet like runoff from a copper mine.
Crunch the numbers, all the numbers. The virus is doing what viruses do; it's spreading,
and as it does so, it weakens. The virus has already picked all the low-hanging fruit,
killing a large number of extremely old, unhealthy people who would have died in 2020
anyway. My uncle passed, and he was 86 years old, had advanced Alzheimer's disease, and was
in hospice (palliative care). B's analytical competence, formidable in many areas, has
completely disappeared with this issue.
US Coronavirus Cases: just over 3 million
US Coronavirus Deaths: just under 135,000
US Coronavirus Recovered: just under 1.4 million
US Coronavirus Active Cases: just over 1.6 million
*******US Coronavirus Serious/Critical Cases: 15,392 (That's less than 1%,
folks!)************
US Daily New Deaths (3-day moving average):
April 17: 2,513
July 6: 302
World Deaths: 550,000
World Deaths (2017 flu season): 600,000
US CDC: "According to new estimates published today, between 291,000 and 646,000 people
worldwide die from seasonal influenza-related respiratory illnesses each year"
I don't think many people here are getting the problem, which is that a random person won't
incur to itself an extra risk of dying over something it doesn't need (superfluous
goods/services).
I'm not going to risk my life to go to a restaurant. I doesn't matter if that risk is an
extra 10% or an extra 0.26% - it is an extra risk I don't need to take, for the simple fact
going to the restaurant is a superfluous commodity. This is simple game theory, has nothing
to do with ideology.
It's different when the risk is necessary and calculated: I need to drive to work, I
need to cross the street to work, I need to go to the pharmacy at night in a dangerous
neighborhood because my grandma needs the medicine. It's a completely different scenario
when the goal is a superfluous one.
The fact is that the USA's economy is simply too highly leveraged on hyper-consumerism,
i.e. over too much superfluous commodities (goods + services). Economies that are more
dependent on superfluous junk are suffering more with the pandemic, for the simple fact
most of them didn't need to work or consume in the first place: they are not essential, not
needed. They are disposable. Western Europe is observing the same phenomenon: even
countries that adopted a more laissez-faire policy over the lockdown are suffering -10% GDP
falls. The EU will suffer a -8.2% fall in its GDP this year - those are projections for
now, and I still think they are still optimistic.
Countries with more solid economies, more industrialized, less consumer-dependent, with
more solid bases, with a people with a sense of community and purpose, are recovering
faster and will see a V-shaped recovery. They suffered initially only because the rest of
the world suddenly stopped importing their products - but once they begin to consume more
domestically, this will be quickly mitigated, i.e. probably in just one generation's time.
Those countries are: China and Vietnam (I don't have Cuba's data right now, so I won't make
my judgement here).
Countries like Brazil, Turkey, Mexico et al are mere warehouses/annexes of the Western
First World nations and will suffer the most. They sold their souls to the Western powers,
and will pay the price accordingly. Brazil is expected to fall -10% this year (too
optimistic in my opinion). Speaking about those countries is a complete waste of time; they
are completely artificial nations, that shouldn't even exist.
The disaster for the Western nations is only not greater because many of those
superfluous services can be delivered through the internet. If it wasn't for the technical
reserve they had (still good infrastructure of internet, electricity, water, sewer,
completely automated financial system, delivery system know-how from decades of experience,
etc. etc.), the catastrophe would be complete.
I have come to the conclusion that Trump is now actively homicidal. Everything he says or
does seems designed to accelerate the spread of the virus and cause more deaths. It should
go without saying that a homicidal maniac is unfit to serve as President, and he should be
removed from office under the provisions of the 25th amendment to the Constitution. Of
course doing so would create a massive firestorm amongst the Trump cultists, but I say
"fuck them all."
This might be of interest to some of the non protectors with arguments about other places
or whatever: I live betwixt and between four native communities and just went to shop for
groceries here in Northern New Mexico passing two of these. There are tents set up with
masked officials at each entry point to the two pueblos monitoring that only the residents
of each are permitted into the village. They are checking everyone. The larger community in
which I reside has signs at all entry points for 'local traffic only,' but no monitoring. I
also noticed for the first time a large sign on a major highway that said 'visitors must
selfquarantine for x number of days' (I forget how many.)
Okay, nay sayers, why bother? And I will post Sabre's statement @ 71 first, then give my
own thoughts.
"...if all the lockdown does is slow the progress of the disease, but the same number of
people get infected in the end, then lockdowns make things worse. The same number of
people will die but there will also be major economic losses- a herd immunity strategy
would have the deaths happen sooner, but without the economic disruption..."
me:
1. It is by no means clear that 'herd immunity' is a verifiable. Were it so, I might
agree.
2. However, one of the reasons for the death count diminishing could be that better
treatments have become accepted and more readily available. In that case, any prolongation
of time before you or I encounter the virus will be to our advantage. Already ICU protocols
have changed for the better.
3. The virus itself has shown remarkable adaptation, but if we limit its ability to
spread, and masks among all the other precautions do that, the strong possibility will be
that we starve the beast.
4. What the pueblos are doing is to contain populations in small communities which can
be closely observed. That seems the ideal relationship to have to this nasty and extremely
communicable threat. If I remember correctly it was also a strategy used when ebola was
raging in Africa. New Zealand, being an island country, is monitoring its borders in the
same way.
Hooey on your 'economic disruption' Saber. People's lives are at stake. And what b says
above is paramount -- "Protect yourself!" Because sometimes governments, for whatever
reason, have lost the capacity to do that.
Yeah, they are doing more testing, and yeah, the percent of positive tests are increasing,
so they say
The problem is they dont report positivity by test. At the end of May it was disclosed
by CDC that they were combining antibody tests with PCR tests. This counted past and
current infections together, thereby inflating cases while lowering positive percentage.
Even PCR tests dont indicate a current infection as its not differentiating between live
infectious particle and long dead non-infectious particles
What they are doing now I dont know. If they are still combining antibody tests, well of
course, the number of those who have antibodies will increase and so will positive
percentage. This is a good thing. Closer to herd immunity
They are testing many people who are healthy and young. They dont get very sick. Its
just a cold to them. They dont spread it without symptoms, WHO says asymtomatic spread is
rare.
Everone who gets admitted to hospital or ICU gets tested, even if they are having knee
surgery or had a heart attack . If you test positive you get listed as a COVID
hospitization or ICU case, even if you are not sick from COVID.
As for masks, according to this immunologist
"Those young and healthy people who currently walk around with a mask on their faces
would be better off wearing a helmet instead, because the risk of something falling on
their head is greater than that of getting a serious case of Covid-19."
Anyways, deaths are trending lower, getting to pre-epidemic/lockdown status. Its ovah
for corona. May she rest in peace although she has made a lot of billionares richer so she
will no doubt be replaced. They got a good thing going, not stopping here.
We badly need advice about the pandemic from an expert who is in a position to speak out.
One such is Dr. Sukharit Bhakdi, a retired professor of microbiology at the University of
Mainz. He was interviewed by Austrian TV not long ago. I suggest all here take a look at
what he had to say:
On June 10 Germany was doing 425,000 tests per week with plans to double that, so they may
be doing 850K per week if they have doubled it, but this sounds like a new thing and their
success has nothing to do with testing (US is and had been doing more), and increased
testing in healthy people leads to false positives and unintended consequences
>But media - and USA health officials - have been silent about long-term effects of
SARS-COV-2
I find it a very cruel irony that Fauci of all people is in charge of the virus
non-response. He was a boat-anchor at NIH during the initial response to the AIDS crisis. He
has been instrumental in wrecking the NIH research program for ME. For example, he kicked the
ME research program out of his institute in Oct 1999:
"Dr. Anthony Fauci, NIAID Director, met with the Dr. Harold Varmus, Director of NIH, and
concluded that CFS was more complex and activities should be relocated from a single NIH
institute." (CFSAC minutes Sept 2003)
The NIH research program has been in limbo ever since, subject to an unworkable
multi-institute something-or-other designed to make sure no one has authority or
responsibility to actually do something.
Fauci will soon be working overtime together with the UK psychobabblers to discredit
the personal reports of the COVID Longhaulers. They will be diagnosed with "stress" and given
a course of "computerized" CBT, which will tell them to ignore symptoms and carry on, until
they collapse.
When patients don't come back, doctors always assume they got better. Honest to god,
doctors have said that to me. It does not occur to them that patients get too sick to go to
the clinic, or they got tired of being fobbed off.
"... The study analyzed 2,541 patients hospitalized among the system's six hospitals between March 10 and May 2 and found 13% of those treated with hydroxychloroquine died while 26% of those who did not receive the drug died. ..."
"... Among all patients in the study, there was an overall in-hospital mortality rate of 18%, and many who died had underlying conditions that put them at greater risk, according to Henry Ford Health System. Globally, the mortality rate for hospitalized patients is between 10% and 30%, and it's 58% among those in the intensive care unit or on a ventilator." Detroit News ..."
"... A long "take down" of Fauci: https://www.unz.com/audio/kbarrett_ken-mccarthy-tony-fauci-is-corrupt-to-the-core/ ..."
"... This is not Fauci's first rodeo. He's been pumping hysteria for 36 years. He always gets it wrong. He was wrong about swine flu. He was wrong about bird flu. He was wrong about Zika. He was wrong about Ebola. He wildly exaggerated AIDS. And he always is wrong in the favor of pharmaceutical companies. And he's always wrong in favor of 'we've got to develop a vaccine now. We have to throw out all the rules. ..."
"... Observational studies are never the equivalent of double-blind randomized studies; but there can still provide important and fare more readily obtained early information about these connections and conditions. ..."
"... This stuff is hard. There are lots of variations in patient populations and treatment protocols. We have to consider doses, concomitant meds (such as azithromycin), patient status at time of treatment, age, and, comorbidities. ..."
"... the recently halted NIH trial was randomized, double-blinded; this was in a hospital setting. The prophylactic trial reported at the beginning of June in NEJM (author Boulware) was also randomized, double-blinded; this was in a prophylactic setting. ..."
"A Henry Ford Health System study shows the controversial anti-malaria drug
hydroxychloroquine helps lower the death rate of COVID-19 patients, the Detroit-based health
system said Thursday.
Officials with the Michigan health system said the study found the drug "significantly"
decreased the death rate of patients involved in the analysis.
The study analyzed 2,541 patients hospitalized among the system's six hospitals between
March 10 and May 2 and found 13% of those treated with hydroxychloroquine died while 26% of
those who did not receive the drug died.
Among all patients in the study, there was an overall in-hospital mortality rate of 18%, and
many who died had underlying conditions that put them at greater risk, according to Henry Ford
Health System. Globally, the mortality rate for hospitalized patients is between 10% and 30%,
and it's 58% among those in the intensive care unit or on a ventilator." Detroit News
There will be no accountability: The b-stards have set the standards.
https://www.bcazlaw.com/surgical-mishaps/ Medical malpractice is a legal term used to describe a medical professional's failing to
uphold the acceptable standard of care in a situation. Doctors must adhere to accepted
medical community standards concerning treatment methods and technique, and failing to
do so can leave them liable for any resulting damages.
https://www.lynchlawyers.com/blog/hospital-medical-malpractice/ When a patient is under a hospitals care, the facility must operate at a level that meets the
medical community's standards for treating patients. This means the hospital or its
staff members cannot cause the patient harm as a result of negligence.
https://www.fortheinjured.com/blog/common-medical-errors/ When a doctor or medical facility's
failure to meet these standards results in a
patient's injury or death, the at-fault party can be held liable for medical malpractice
.
https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/map/TheCommunityStandard.html The community standard is the older standard and reflects the traditional deference of the
law toward physicians. It is based on what physicians as a group do in a given circumstance.
The community standard requires that the patient be told what other physicians in the same
community would tell a patient in the same or similar circumstances. "Community" refers both
to the geographic community and to the specialty (intellectual community) of the
physician.
It'll be 37 years this year he's had the same job in the federal bureaucracy.
There are two million people getting a paycheck from the federal government as
employees. Who do you think the third highest paid employee in the entire federal
bureaucracy is? It's Tony Fauci.
So just to sum all this up: This is not Fauci's first rodeo. He's been pumping hysteria
for 36 years. He always gets it wrong. He was wrong about swine flu. He was wrong about
bird flu. He was wrong about Zika. He was wrong about Ebola. He wildly exaggerated AIDS.
And he always is wrong in the favor of pharmaceutical companies. And he's always wrong in
favor of 'we've got to develop a vaccine now. We have to throw out all the rules.
And his wife is Christine Grady, chief of the Department of Bioethics of the National
Institute of Health and the head of the section on Human Subject Research. She is the
person that makes decisions on what's ethical to do with human subjects. That's his
wife.
Uncharted research: areas where anti-malarial drugs are sold widely over the counter - in
malaria prone parts of the world - eg: Central America, SEA and Pacific Islands. How do their
covid rates relate to these specific localities (not just generalized country numbers), where
ongoing prophylactic sales of OTC anti-malaria drugs are most prevalent?
Why does the CDC travel and tourism website info still recommend taking anti-malarial
drugs, when the other hand of our deep state bureaucrats are screaming these drugs will kill
you?
Observational studies are never the equivalent of double-blind randomized studies; but
there can still provide important and fare more readily obtained early information about
these connections and conditions.
No comment/s needed perhaps. But deliciously anticipated. Here, from the Committee, and
especially from the MSM. Even if only silence. Because "silence is really violence" in this
case.
https://www.yourdailyshakespeare.com/2020/06/08/the-world-upside-down/ And here is an example, a reported 'case-study'. A prince of Persia had melancholia and
suffered from the delusion of being a cow. He would moo like a cow, crying "Kill me so that a
good stew may be made of my flesh," and would never eat anything. Avicenna was persuaded to
treat the case and sent a message to the patient, asking him to be happy as the butcher was
coming to slaughter him. The sick man rejoiced. When Avicenna approached the prince with a
knife in his hand, he asked, "Where is the cow so I may kill it."
The patient then mooed like a cow to indicate where he was. He was then laid on the ground
for slaughter. When Avicenna approached the patient pretending to slaughter him, he said,
"The cow is too lean and not ready to be killed. He must be fed properly and I will kill it
when it becomes healthy and fat. The patient was then offered food, which he ate eagerly and
gradually gained strength, got rid of his delusion, and was completely cured.
How relevant may be the Avicennian case study to the current dynamics of the pandemic I will
leave it to my possible and patient readers to decide.
Dr. Marc Siegel a medical correspondent for Foxnews told T. Carlson weeks ago that an
emergency treatment of this drug saved the life of his 96 year old father who was at the
point of death, cured him overnight in fact.
It is a fact that cancer drugs are not uniformly effective in all patients.
The causes must be sought in the genotypes of the patients.
The differential response as well as effectiveness are not reasons to discard a
therapy.
In further news on COVID-19 Treatments I have 2 items to report:
First one:
The 3-drug mixture of Azittomycin, Naproxen, and prednisolone (oral or injectable) have
been used successfully for reduction of the inflammation of respiratory system.
3 systematic trials have been undertaken and results were conclusive in expediting faster
recovery.
Second one:
Clinical trials in Iran (in Masih Daneshvari hospital) – indicated 100% cure of
COVID-19 in 20 patients using a combination of ReciGen and Cultera (sic?) which is an AIDS
drug.
A second group of patients – 152 – had a reduction in mortality of 20% as
compared to those who were only receiving Cultera (sic.?)
This stuff is hard. There are lots of variations in patient populations and treatment
protocols. We have to consider doses, concomitant meds (such as azithromycin), patient status
at time of treatment, age, and, comorbidities.
A big difference: the Ford study was not randomized, not double-blinded. They used a
statistical technique to try to make the groups comparable on factors believed to be
relevant, but this is after fact. (It's a nice technique, I've used it myself, but it doesn't
magically solve all of the difficulties of retrospective analysis.)
In contrast, the recently halted NIH trial was randomized, double-blinded; this was in a
hospital setting. The prophylactic trial reported at the beginning of June in NEJM (author
Boulware) was also randomized, double-blinded; this was in a prophylactic setting.
Hydroxychloroquine is the active ingredient in the tonic portion of gin and tonics, which
I've been drinking for prophylactic purposes since the pandemic began.
"... Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent . He has also contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting , The Guardian , Salon , The Grayzone , Jacobin Magazine , Common Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary . ..."
alifornia-based pharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciences has
announced that a five-day course of its antiviral drug Remdesivir -- shown in tests to
effectively fight COVID-19 -- will cost $3,120 to Americans with health insurance and $2,340 to
those on Medicaid. Yet
research published in April calculated that the drug could be produced at a profit for as
little as $0.93 per day.
The study, led by Dr. Andrew Hill from the Department of Translational Medicine, University
of Liverpool, U.K., and published in the
Journal of Virus Eradication , found that a five-day course of lifesaving Remdesivir
could be mass-produced for less than the cost of a Subway sandwich. So cheap is the drug that
the saline solution and the syringe needed to administer it would be more costly.
MintPress spoke with Dr. Hill, who was dismayed by the company's announcement.
We are in a health emergency. We can't have a situation right now where people are unable
to access medicine because the prices are too high. Remdesivir is a drug that has had its
development costs paid for, in large part, by independent donors like governments and
ministries of health in China, the WHO, and the U.S. government. So why should a company be
making money in the middle of a pandemic by selling a drug which has largely been developed
independently of them?" he said.
News of the decision led to an explosion of public anger. "As Gilead charges $3,120 for its
COVID drug, Remdesivir, remember that the drug was developed with a $70,000,000 grant from the
federal government paid for by American taxpayers. Once again, Big Pharma is set to profit on
the people's dime," wrote former Secretary of Labor
Robert Reich. "This isn't healthcare. It's extortion," appeared to be the overwhelming sentiment
on social media.
Gilead itself, however, seemed not to share this sentiment. Indeed, its
press release on the subject positioned its decision as a selfless and magnanimous gesture
of corporate philanthropy. "We approached this with the aim of helping as many patients as
possible, as quickly as possible and in the most responsible way," said its CEO, Daniel O'Day,
adding that, "under normal circumstances" the company would have charged the public $12,000 per
patient.
"A new low"
Remdesivir is an intravenous antiviral drug that has been used to fight other coronaviruses
like SARS and MERS and has shown some effectiveness against Ebola. Although far from a miracle
treatment, studies have concluded that it aids
recovery, reducing the average hospital visit for COVID-19 patients from 15 days to 11 days
when compared to a placebo. Like with everything coronavirus-related, there is no absolute
scientific consensus. In late April, the WHO accidentally leaked a
Chinese study that suggested Remdesivir may not be as effective as Gilead claims it to be.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration has now bought
up the entire world's stock of the drug, effectively confiscating it and shutting out every
other country from the medicine.
"I've been working in medicine for 32 years and I have never seen anything like it. I've
never seen a country be that brazen. We have to work together. This could be a taste of the
future. They've tried to also do this with advanced orders of vaccines. Imagine if we had a 100
percent effective vaccine and it only went to Americans," Dr. Hill told MintPress
.
At the moment people don't quite understand the gravity of the decision that the American
government has made. This is a worldwide epidemic and we have got to remember that the
clinical trials of Remdesivir were not just conducted in the United States; they were
conducted around European and Chinese centers. Patients put themselves at risk to take part
in an experimental drug trial, and the gratitude we get as other countries after our people
were involved in these studies is to be shut out of the future supply of the drug?! It is
simply ethically unacceptable. I think there are serious questions to be answered. This is a
new low ground, unfortunately," he added.
Gilead has been under considerable public scrutiny of late. The company, which
announced profits of $5.4 billion last year, has increased its value by $15 billion since
the pandemic began. In December, MintPressreported
that it was being sued, accused of deliberately holding back a lifesaving HIV drug to extend
the profitability of their previous, inferior one. With shades of the Remdesivir announcement,
the drug is sold in Australia for $8 per month, but the company charges Americans around $2,000
for the same dosage. "Gilead has a long history of profiteering," said Dr. Hill. "Its CEO is a
billionaire and has been accused of tax avoidance; by keeping their intellectual property in
Ireland they avoided $10 billion in taxes in 2016 and they sell drugs for between 100 and 1,000
times the cost of production. And nobody is stopping them. I think this is a taste of things to
come if we don't have better controls on the pharmaceutical industry's excesses."
As of Wednesday morning, there have been 2.73 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the
United States, the six worst days for the virus in terms of infections all occurring in the
previous week.
Feature photo | A lab tech displays a package of the Remdesivir at the Eva Pharma Facility
in Cairo, Egypt June 29, 2020. Amr Abdallah | Reuters
Deaths from just *Pneumonia* from Feb1st to June20/20 =*119,174* Deaths from just Covid by
its self for same time period = 109,188 And for this time period 1,232,269 Deaths from all
causes. The numbers Fear game,obviously is being played up large by the DemoTards and we know
why! Funny how the Fake News,never speaks of this.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113051/number-reported-deaths-from-covid-pneumonia-and-flu-us/
Arch_Stanton , 47 minutes ago
Fauci should have had his microphone taken away months ago. A testament to the power of
big pharma.
razorthin , 59 minutes ago
Little Fascist Koxucker.
"Please understand the people who have built this international order reject natural law,
so they do not like sovereign citizens. They do not believe people have inherent rights or
sacred liberties. Most frankly find God anathema and believe in no higher authority than
themselves and the heartless arithmetic they serve. So, while they have happily plundered
America of blood and treasure which we were foolish enough to provide in copious quantities,
they have no love or need of our nation or antiquated concepts such as those enshrined in the
Constitution and Bill of Rights. In their calculation, America needed to be taken down in
order to realize the global project, and as you see the first glimmers of a national effort
in opposition to that, a positive limited effort struggling to overcome the bureaucrats who
betray us all at every opportunity, it becomes clear the Left would rather collapse America
than see us oppose the new world without borders where everyone intermingles under a
controlling network of agencies. No guns, no resistance, no free speech, and no problems is
what they want. Only we stand in the way of the fulfillment of this Orwellian vision, and as
each day's hysteria on the news reveals, the powers that be are working overtime to push the
Left into revolt to topple America into a conflict that will remove us from prominence on the
world scene. Should they win, our rights are gone. Should they fail, the rest of the world
will have consolidated against us, save those few brave nations trying to fight themselves
free of the same entanglements that brought us low. This is where we are today, and it is one
hell of a dilemma for a person who cares about this country and our historic values. No
matter what we choose, any path but submission and surrender only leads to greater conflict,
so this makes us consider the first important question: What are we willing to fight to
preserve? Individuals and families will have to answer this question in the coming months and
years in a much more meaningful way than has been required in generations. The easy days are
coming to an end, and while the economy is booming and we're enjoying an Indian Summer for
our embattled nation, these questions will only become more pressing in the days ahead."
-- The Coming Civil War by Tom Kawczynski
nsurf9 , 1 hour ago
The nasolacrimal duct (also called the tear duct) carries tears from the lacrimal sac of
the eye into the nasal cavity. This virus seems to be able aerosol its particles more readily
than other viruses so as to spread its RNA/DNA in the air - as well as being normally
contracted through fluid droplets.
The eyes are large wet areas, perfect for collecting dust and viruses. If you're a part of
an at-risk demographic or just worried, make sure you cover you eyes. And, upon returning
home, I rinse the eyes out with water along with washing my hands.
Right now, I'm using some tight-fitting fishing glasses with my n99 mask, when I go into
stores or hi-density areas - but, looking for something better.
IvannaHumpalot , 1 hour ago
Rinsing your eyes wont help
yes you can get it through your eyes but that is very difficult via aerosol and
unlikely
far more likely is you touch a contaminated surface after some dirty person without a
facemask has been talking and breathing out their infected droplets earlier
those droplets fall to the surface and you touch it then touch your eyes, nose or
mouth
or you breathe in an infective dose by not wearing a mask to reduce viral load
exposure
or you walk it home on your shoes
IvannaHumpalot , 1 hour ago
Herd immunity at 80%
america has 328 million
That means 262 million must get infected for fantasy herd immunity
US infected is now at 2.7 million infected
let us be generous and say 10x havent been diagnosed but have it
so the US is at 27 million infected
27 out of 262 million
there goes the stupid herd immunity sham
Wear a facemask, avoid catching or spreading it
tranium , 1 hour ago
Dr. HOAX is spreading plandemic.
ZKnight , 1 hour ago
Does anyone even believe this sleazy little man who's corona predictions were 20x off?
He single handedly destroyed the economy and people's jobs over a false alarm all to try
and get his vaccine's in.
WhiteHose , 1 hour ago
Hes been wrong on everything since Jan!
hugin-o-munin , 1 hour ago
We applaud the approval of chemical sweeteners, fluoride, GMOs, antibiotic saturated meat
products and poultry, not to mention the continued use of Glyphosate on just about all food
products. Eat and drink your industrial sugar and chemicals. Now we need a global vaccine
schedule and license linked to passports to make sure everyone on the planet is inoculated
all the time before we can allow them to buy and sell. This is all done out of pure love and
care for all people.
/s
JamcaicanMeAfraid , 1 hour ago
Fauci's ego may start to encroach on the king of all egos, Barry Soreto
Peak Finance , 1 hour ago
This:
"tremendous burden" that the US health care system might face this fall if COVID-19 and
the flu are circulating at the same time.
This man is truly a fool and should be arrested.
Death rates and statistics do not work that way
This coming flu season is going to be the MILDEST EVER because of Covid, as, the people
that WOULD HAVE DIED this season have ALREADY PASSED
Similar to the "Demand-pull" concept in economics
Random ZH posters smarter than people in the upper reaches of government
Fauci and Redfield are complete pieces of s h i t. So much misdirection and lies.
RTP , 2 hours ago
Gallo + Fauci = AIDS swindle
Fauci + Gates = COVID-19 swindle
How much longer will this poisonous dwarf ruin the future of mankind?
k3g , 2 hours ago
Question in March: Doc, you've been a Director at NIH infectious disease unit for 36
years. You're our top virologist. You're in the spotlight, your moment to shine, to show why
we've paid your salary and bene's all these years, we're counting on you. First question:
should we wear masks, would that help?
A: Dunno. Have to study it.
Q: Well, if we want to wear masks, how to we get them? When will the gubmint release masks
from the billions it has in storage?
A: Dunno. Not sure if we have any masks. Have you tried Home Depot?
The government and the FED dumping TRILLIONS of dollars to all these corporations,
meanwhile they can't even provide FREE MASKS for everyone. If they really wanted to help,
they could have given everyone masks. That's how you could have helped prevent it. And MASKS
are expensive why not subsidized it, and maybe we would have this in control and are
re-opening sooner.
On Monday, Gilead disclosed its pricing plan for Gilead as it prepares to begin charging for
the drug at the beginning of next month (several international governments have already placed
orders). Given the high demand, thanks in part due to the breathless media coverage despite the
drug's still-questionable study data, Gilead apparently feels justified in charging $3,120 for
a patient getting the shorter, more common, treatment course, and $5,720 for the longer course
for more seriously ill patients. These are the prices for patients with commercial insurance in
the US, according to Gilead's official pricing plan.
As per usual, the price charged to those on government plans will be lower, and hospitals
will also receive a slight discount. Additionally, the US is the only developed country where
Gilead will charge two prices, according to Gilead CEO Daniel O'Day. In much of Europe and
Canada, governments negotiate drug prices directly with drugmakers (in the US, laws dictate
that drug makers must "discount" their drugs for Medicare and Medicaid plans).
But according to O'Day, the drug is priced "far below the value it brings" to the
health-care system.
However, we'd argue that this actually isn't true. Remdesivir was developed by Gilead to
treat Ebola, but the drug was never approved by the FDA for this use, which caused Gilead to
shelve the drug until COVID-19 presented another opportunity. Even before the first study had
finished, the company was already pushing propaganda about the promising nature of the drug.
Meanwhile, the CDC, WHO and other organizations were raising doubts about the effectiveness of
steroid medications.
Months later, the only study on the steroid dexomethasone, a cheap steroid that costs less
than $50 for a 100-dose regimen, has shown that dexomethasone is the only drug so far that has
proven effective at lowering COVID-19 related mortality. Remdesivir, despite the fact that it
has been tested in several high quality trials, has not.
So, why is the American government in partnership with Gilead still pushing this
questionable, and staggeringly expensive, medication on the public?
Nine News Perth
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I am not an ORSA (I can talk from my BS studies, and a few electives at grad level)
occasionally I used the USAF version usually A&AS contractors and/or FFRDC of you guys.
I would not talk models unless they showed the 'pedigree'.
I do not know your model, nor do I know how CDC or WHO validates or accredits a model
for CoV SAR-2 when there is little agreed to on CoV SAR 1 from 2003. Post Docs in
Universities.......?
NY metro, my home town and of 1/2 my grandkids', is "enjoying" very low new cases and
for a number of weeks has seen steeply declining hospitalizations and ICU demand. The dead
for NY state is well over 1500 per million, consider that during most of the shelter in
place the center of NY state cases was the NY metro area (say 12 million souls) more than
half NYS population in the shelter in place regime, you may disagree but I put dead for
million in NY metro closer to 2700 than NY states' 1500 in round numbers. Sweden is around
10 million.
NY metro failed at 'lock down', mass transit continued to operate, unlike Wuhan which
shut it all down. "Essential" workers travelled, came home often to multigenerational
homes, crowding and general breaking of the curfews denied most of the 'benefits' seen in
Peoples Republic of China and Taiwan, where if one tested positive you were put in a "Covid
hotel" totally out of 'circulation'.
Some ideas:
Estimates are that 20% of NY metro residents now have anti bodies, that is large number
of cases with none to minimal symptoms. That is the (not so) hardest observation to explain
what is happening in NY metro.
Another theory comes out of Italy is with social distancing many 'subjects' get a small
exposure to the virus and the subjects develop immunity. Another theory is 50 or so percent
of the population has sturdy T cell response and beats the virus. I think Italy's, along
with France and Spain, turn in the pandemic is a miracle! Thanks to Pope Francis.
Son with PhD theories, his words:
"Cell paper suggesting 40-60% of people have innate immunity ranging from cellular
response (lysozyme, TLR pathway, etc.) to cross-reactive T-cells. A pet theory of mine is
ACE2 receptor polymorphism as a possible factor; I saw an early Chinese paper suggesting
east Asians carried an ACE2 membrane domain very similar to that of bats, though have not
found much follow-up to that. Like with SARS-1, there will be many years of study and still
no good answers."
The above is from a dialog with his childhood friend, now an ER MD in a Massachusetts
hot spot, I used to take them to Boy Scouts 30 years ago.
I disagree with my son, the recent "success" in NY metro is a miracle: NY metro changed
nothing; kept the subways running but 'turned the corner' in a big way!
In North Texas where I live, the number of shoppers who have abandoned masks at the grocery
stores is increasing. Half wear masks and half don't. The smaller organic food stores look
safer with more mask wearers. I have worked as a substitute teacher for a long while; but
this year the emails from the local school district are advising staff of a new protocol that
will include both virtual classrooms and real ground classes. When parents register their
kids this summer, they will have the option of choosing normal classes at School, or to keep
the kids home, and let them interact with teachers on the computer.
Without my school gig there is no possibility to pay rent. From a practical, mundane view
the necessity to accept the risk seems hard to avoid. The school district has promised to
provide masks and gloves to staff. They may be hesitant to keep teachers and substitutes who
are older people, because the older folks face a greater risk from the disease. It is hard to
know what to do.
I'm sure this precarious sense of the future is one which is worrying million of
people.
A summer spike is a particular worry in places such as Arizona and Texas, which have
reported a surge in hospitalizations in recent days, weeks after state officials relaxed
stay-at-home rules.
"It's 100 degrees in Phoenix right now, 95 degrees in Houston, [and] people are being driven
indoors more, so you're having more congregate settings inside, and that could also be
contributing to the spread," former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb
said Thursday on MSNBC.
There is evidence that the coronavirus doesn't fare well in natural light, and
epidemiologists have been hoping warm weather and higher humidity levels will knock virus
droplets to the ground faster, akin to how other viruses behave. Being outdoors also provides
the benefit of "unlimited dilution" of the virus with the wind.
But sometimes it's just too steamy outside. Experts say people should increase ventilation
when they head inside, especially if they are gathering with others.
"Open your windows, bring in more fresh outdoor air. In your car, roll down your window.
When you're outside, we get that benefit already," Joseph Allen, assistant professor of
exposure assessment science in the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard T.H. Chan
School of Public Health, said in one of the school's daily COVID-19 briefings.
The benefits of airflow are why public officials are closing streets to give restaurants
more outdoor seating, or cafes are directing customers to their patios.
Inside, scientific studies have shown businesses that open bay doors and opposing windows
can sweep away other pollutants, such as diesel exhaust or byproducts from metal-working
fluids.
If open windows aren't an option, the goal with air conditioning systems is to increase
airflow from clean sources and to use the best filtration settings.
"Indoors, you're primarily looking at diluting the virus or any pollutant by adding air, and
ideally air from outdoors is better than recirculated," said Pete Raynor, a professor of
environmental health sciences at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.
'Cooling centers'
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has an entire web page dedicated to
preventing COVID-19 transmission at "cooling centers" that provide relief from another public
health threat: extreme heat.
The agency urges centers to put people who exhibit COVID-19 symptoms into separate rooms.
Everyone at the centers should maintain physical distancing of 6 feet or more.
The agency says that, if possible, the centers should have high ceilings and use
high-efficiency filters in their HVAC systems.
Generally speaking, experts say anyone who is stuck inside should wash their hands
frequently and adhere to social distancing. Wearing masks can also help slow the spread.
President Trump's reelection campaign announced Thursday that it will hold its first rally
since March at the BOK Center, an indoor arena, in Tulsa on June 19.
The press announcement did not outline any social distancing measures, but the general
admission request for tickets asks attendees to assume the risk of infection.
"By clicking register below, you are acknowledging that an inherent risk of exposure to
COVID-19 exists in any public place where people are present. By attending the rally, you and
any guests voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19 and agree not to hold
Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.; BOK Center; ASM Global; or any of their affiliates,
directors, officers, employees, agents, contractors, or volunteers liable for any illness or
injury," the webpage says.
Meanwhile, Vice President Mike Pence, who leads the White House coronavirus task force,
caused a stir by tweeting a Wednesday photo of himself with a large group of maskless Trump
campaign staffers who packed together in an indoor office building. The tweet was later
deleted.
"The vice president yesterday was photographed with campaign staffers in a tight space, no
social distancing, without anyone wearing a mask," said Senate Minority Leader Charles E.
Schumer, New York Democrat. "The very least the administration could do is lead by example and
often cannot even manage that much."
Mr. Schumer demanded a briefing on the national COVID-19 situation from key scientists on
the White House coronavirus task force, Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, saying the U.S.
needs to refocus on the issue.
"The disease is spiking in a number of states around the country. Arizona officials have
warned that its hospitals could be filled by next month," he said. "Texas has gone three
straight days with record numbers of hospitalizations. North Carolina, New Mexico, California,
Oregon and several other states are experiencing a resurgence, or peak-levels, of
COVID-19."
Experts fear the lack of social distancing is fueling cases, as business reopenings bring
people into closer contact. There have also been massive protests against police brutality in
the wake of George Floyd's death in Minneapolis, fueling fears of increased transmission among
the densely packed crowds.
Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said even without any
spikes over the summer, there will continue to be 800 to 1,000 deaths per day in the U.S.
related to COVID-19.
"Over the next three months, we will cross the 200,000 mark," he told NBC's "Today" program
on Thursday. "Sometime in September, we're going to cross 200,000, and we still won't be
done."
He is concerned about upticks in cases in states such as Arizona, North Carolina, South
Carolina, Texas and Florida.
"I had hoped that the fact that people are spending more time outside, that it's summer, we
would not see such a big increase so fast," he said. "It's more concerning than I had hoped we
would get at this point."
"... The Elite are gambling that a lid can be placed on the unrest by police/mercenaries, surveillance, and propaganda until a for-profit treatment or vaccine becomes available. That the hundreds of thousands of Americans, Britons or Swedes are dying is of no matter to the top 10% in these nations. ..."
"... The Western Establishment is also in full blown denial. The Empire has fallen. North and South America are sick continents that will have to be quarantined from the coronavirus free nations for the foreseeable future ..."
I think Thierry
Meyssan says it best here . The economic portion alone of the US reaction to the latest
thing we're all supposed to be freaking-out over should be sufficient to cast doubt on the
entire narrative. I make no claim to being the sharpest blade in the drawer, but frankly
something stinks about all this.
As to mask wearing, well I had to continue showing up to work (a grocery co-op) when
everything hit the fan, and mask wearing in all sections has been required.
It's true that US culture doesn't encourage regard for others in ordinary times, hence the
infrequent use of masks by those who are ill even when there isn't a pandemic in town
(hence my suspicion that this SARS2, or whatever has already been going around and resulted
in me being infected by those who'd continue showing up for work while still sniffling and
coughing, without masks ).
Couple this with the lack of humanely adequate, publicly mandated sick leave and it's easy
to see how diseases can get out of control.
So yes, I agree that mask wearing by those who are experiencing symptoms , is every
bit as conducive to common health (and courtesy) as covering ones mouth when sneezing or
coughing, along with frequent hand washing. Making mask wearing an overarching
requirement might be pushing things, imo. I guess my reasoning behind this is the
tendency to social ostracism that can result from making such societal wide requirements
(full disclosure; I wear the mask when required, too). In short, yes by all means wear an
effing mask if you're feeling sick, or if the allergies are particularly bad; you don't want
to get anyone else sick, and it's the nice thing to do. But do not give in to panic every
time someone sneezes, or your local flu season comes calling.
Most would agree that the US has been overtaken by cynical "political correctness (witness
the recent laughable displays of 'solidarity' from legislators and capitalists)." There's a
great line in the Tao De Jing ; "when there is an overabundance of morality, hypocrites
abound." This recent trend toward hyper-morality is being exploited once again by authorities
to keep the population at large divided against itself, same as "left" vs. "right" or "black"
vs. "white" have been so exploited. It is this sort of division that keeps the usual scumbags
happily in power over everyone else, and the future of our collective civilization can't take
it much longer.
Once again, humble thanks to you b. for being here and doing what you do, and thanks for
letting me blab on. Peace and health, barflies.
The only way to fight the coronavirus pandemic is with a functional national government
implementing public health measures of universal testing, contact tracing and isolation of
the infected. Where corporate neoliberalism is in control, the USA, UK and Sweden, a
conscious decision was made not to give power back to the national governments to tax,
regulate and use these old fashion methods to defeat the virus. These nations are following
their amoral aristocratic ideology and are allowing their citizens to die in order to keep
the rich in the money.
The Elite are gambling that a lid can be placed on the unrest by police/mercenaries,
surveillance, and propaganda until a for-profit treatment or vaccine becomes available. That
the hundreds of thousands of Americans, Britons or Swedes are dying is of no matter to the
top 10% in these nations.
The Western Establishment is also in full blown denial. The Empire has fallen. North
and South America are sick continents that will have to be quarantined from the coronavirus
free nations for the foreseeable future .
The Corruption of Science. The Hydroxychloroquine Lancet Study Scandal. Who Was Behind
It? Anthony Fauci's Intent To Block HCQ on Behalf of Big Pharma By Prof Michel Chossudovsky Global
Research, June 10, 2020 Global Research Region: USA Theme: Media Disinformation ,
Science and
Medicine
The Guardian has revealed the scandal behind the hydroxychloroquine study which was intent
on blocking HCQ as a cure for COVID-19. "Dozens of scientific papers co-authored by the chief
executive of the US tech company behind the Lancet hydroxychloroquine study scandal are now
being audited, including one that a scientific integrity expert claims contains images that
appear to have been digitally manipulated. The audit follows a Guardian investigation that
found the company, Surgisphere , used suspect data in major
scientific studies that were published and then retracted by world-leading medical journals,
including the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. .
several concerns were raised with respect to the veracity of the data and analyses
conducted by Surgisphere Corporation and its founder and our co-author, Sapan Desai, in our
publication. We launched an independent third-party peer review of Surgisphere As such, our
reviewers were not able to conduct an independent and private peer review and therefore
notified us of their withdrawal from the peer-review process
The study was allegedly based on data analysis of 96,032 patients hospitalized with COVID-19
between Dec 20, 2019, and April 14, 2020 from 671 hospitals Worldwide. The database, according
to the Guardian could not be verified. It was false.
"I did not do enough to ensure that the data source was appropriate for this use. For
that, and for all the disruptions – both directly and indirectly – I am truly
sorry."
CEO Dr. Sapan Desai took the blame. Who was behind him?
The Surgisphere Scientific Scam. Who was behind it? Who "commissioned" this Report?
Was the pharmaceutical industry and vaccine lobby group behind this initiative? The Lancet
acknowledges that the study received funding from the William Harvey Distinguished Chair in
Advanced Cardiovascular Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital which is held by Dr. Mandeep
Mehra. In this regard, it is worth noting that Brigham Health has a major contract with Big
Pharma's Gilead Sciences Inc , related to
the development of the Remdesivir drug for the treatment of COVID-19.
The Gilead-Brigham Health project was initiated in March 2020 .
Was the Surgisphere
study intended to provide a justification to block the use of HCQ, as recommended by Dr.
Anthony Fauci, advisor to president Trump? Upon reading the study (prior to its retraction),
"Dr Fauci, grinned as he told CNN that "the data shows hydroxychloroquine
is not an effective treatment "Referring to the Surgisphere report: "The scientific data is
really quite evident now about the lack of efficacy for it [HCQ]," said Dr. Fauci. (quoted by
CNN ).
Here is the CNN's authoritative assessment of Surgisphere's
report (prior to The Lancet's Retraction):
"Seriously ill Covid-19 patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine
were more likely to die or develop dangerous irregular heart rhythms, according to a large
observational study [by Surgisphere] published Friday [May 22, 2020] in the medical journal
The
Lancet .
Dr. Anthony Fauci who is the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases (NIAID) , has from the very outset led the campaign against hydroxychloroquine
(largely on behalf of Big Pharma) invoking similar "scientific arguments" against HCQ, saying
categorically there was no cure to COVID-19, and the only solution was the vaccine.
The campaign to destroy hydroxychloroquine has been waged relentlessly, both by competitor
pharmaceutical companies and those who want to destroy the US economy to advance their
political agenda. It is shocking that it has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and billions
of taxpayer dollars. But although the corruption of science for political and/ or financial
gain has become a defining characteristic of our age, it is not a new story.
The publication of the Surgisphere study had an immediate impact: According to
the Guardian , "Surgisphere data led to global trials of hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19
being halted in May, because it appeared to show the drug increased deaths in Covid-19
patients".
"Higher Risks of Death" if you take HCQ, according to the study. In the days following the
fake Surgisphere Lancet report on May 22, several countries including Belgium, France, Italy,
acted to halt the use of hydroxychloroquine. The study had concluded patients taking the
anti-malaria drug had a higher risk of death than those who were not taking the medication
It is worth noting that prior to the conduct of the Surgisphere study, Dr. Fauci
stated categorically that the use of HCQ had not been studied in relation to the coronavirus.
"No proven drug": "Not Enough Known" . Nonsensical and false statements.
What Fauci failed to mention is that Chloroquine had been "studied" and tested fifteen years
ago by the CDC as a drug to be used against coronavirus infections. Chloroquine was used in
2002 and tested against SARS-1 coronavirus in a study under the auspices of the CDC published
in 2005 in the peer reviewed Virology Journal. The main conclusion of the article was that:
Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread. It was used in the
SARS-1 outbreak in 2002. It had the endorsement of the CDC.
The main author Dr. Martin J. Vincent together with several of his colleagues were
affiliated with the Special Pathogens Branch of the Atlanta based CDC together with co-authors
from a Montreal based partner research institution. The main conclusions of this study are that
Chloroquine is a tested drug and can be used for SARS-corona virus infections.
Dr. Anthony
Fauci has not put forth a treatment which could be applied against COVID-19. What he is saying
is that there is no treatment. And then he endorses the fake scientific study by Surgisphere
which was subsequently retracted by The Lancet. Lancet: the article was retracted
Dr. Anthony Fauci has been deliberately blocking a drug which was endorsed by the CDC 15
years ago for treatment of SARS-1 Coronavirus. More recently, it has been used extensively in a
number of countries in relation to the Coronavirus or SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19) outbreak. Whose
interests is he serving?
"... In other words, the period of decrease from Jun 08 to Jun 12 that you are referring to, in this sense, was kind of an anomaly. June trend in the USA is a slight increase, not decrease due to the factors we do not know about. ..."
It has become a widespread meme that the many protests over the murder of George Floyd and
other racially based police brutality will show that it is fine to end all shutdowns related to
the pandemic and end all rules about social distancing and wearing face masks. Here we are
reaching two weeks since these protests with thousands of people involved, supposedly all
violating those rules, and we are not seeing a surge of Covid-19 cases coming out of the
locations where these big protests have happened.
Well, it turns out, that while the reports are scattered, apparently at many of the protests
many people wear face masks, not only that, there is apparently a lot of trying to keep some
distance from each other as well, although based on the performance of nations in East Asia, it
is pretty clear that the wearing of face masks is the most useful. Among other cities with
large protests where this has been observed is Philadelphia. But in many places there has been
much urging of this.
It is a mere anecdote, but I can report that I attended one such protest, admittedly in
peaceful Harrisonburg, VA where I live where we have a black mayor and a black police chief.
But I attended a peaceful protest with over 1000 people. Almost everybody was wearing a mask,
and most people were keeping distance from each other. There has been a lot of this.
So, this meme widely spouted with great arrogance by many observers is just misleading. It
is quite likely we shall see no spike of cases following most of these protests, although
possibly in some locations. But that does not mean this will hold for places where reopenings
coincide with lots of people imitating our president and not wearing face masks or maintaining
social distancing. And indeed, we are seeing surges of cases in many such states, with the vast
majority of those being where we have seen such attitudes and policies.
Barkley Rosser
likbez , June 20, 2020 11:24 am
There are several factors in play here:
Protests were conducted in the open air, which greatly diminished the chances of
getting infected. Infections predominantly occur in closed spaces.
Most protesters are young and with the exception of a tiny percent of young women
are not morbidly obese :-)
Summer is the time when most coronavirus epidemics subside.
Many protestors are wearing masks to make face detection more difficult.
Most protesters are reluctant to undergo any tests. Especially looters :-) So we
might see family clusters but much later.
Anne note about 33K new positive tests means little as number of daily cases is a very
unreliable metric. Many cases are reported with the delay of up to three days, which can
create accidental bumps.
Five or 20 days averages are better metrics.
BTW in no way, they are equal to cases of infections; they are at least 20% higher as
many people are tested several times, and the reliability of the test itself is only
around 80%.
The general level of incompetence and fearmongering of the USA MSM is such that a
positive test is viewed as the case of infection, and the population now views them as
equivalent. This is incorrect.
BTW the 20 days average for June is around 23K a day, and is about the same as in May,
so from this point of view we can't talk about increases in new cases but only about the
plateau reached.
This is also true because the quality of data (especially for deaths) is very low (the
error margin should be assumed to be +-10% at least ).
likbez , June 20, 2020 3:17 pm
@rjs June 20, 2020 12:54 pm
Likbez, your 5 and 20 day averages are rising too new daily cases bottomed June 7 thru 9
at around 19,000 a day and have been rising since
Yes, you are right.
Five days average increased from ~22700 (Jun 1) to ~27000 (Jun 19)
20 days average from ~22500 to ~24000.
The increase actually started from May 30, and ended the period of decrease from May 5 to
May 29, so I would not attribute the increase from Jun 13 to protests
As Bert Schlitz mentioned the number of participants in them was too small to make a
statistically significant difference for sample of the size of the USA population.
20 days increase for the period Jun 1-Jun 19 is just 4%, 5 days – 15%. So only 5-days
average increase might be statistically significant.
Even so, what factors are in play is unclear and attributing them to BLM protests IMHO is
pseudo-science.
In other words, the period of decrease from Jun 08 to Jun 12 that you are referring to, in
this sense, was kind of an anomaly. June trend in the USA is a slight increase, not decrease due to the
factors we do not know about.
BTW you can get artificial increase by just increasing the scope of testing and/or the
lowering the quality of the mass used tests (not all tests are created equal)
If you test all the population of the USA with the average quality tests and we assume the false positive rate is 20% you will get 330*0.2=66 million of "infected"
people.
If you lower the quality to 30% you will get 100 million of "infected" which are completely
fake.
Why the focus on cases?. Most cases are simply mild flu. Deaths are in decline and most
hospitals , especially outside of urban areas are near empty. Unfortunately tracking
hospitalizations and ICU usage seems hard to do with my Google skills.
So long as they do more testing case counts will rise. These tests have false positives so
many cases are false positives. Hard to calculate how many when we don't know the tests
specificity (self validated by mfr) or the disease prevalence
33% of Covid deaths occurred in urban areas of 5 cities having 6% of the countries
population (NYC, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Philadelphia). 40% of covid deaths occurred in
long term care facilities for the elderly .
According to CDC DATA Only 5 states had 10% or more excess deaths and 37 states had no
more than 5% excess deaths
40% of these excess deaths were in nursing homes, and as many as 25% excess deaths in
areas like NYC were attributed to the lockdowns themselves (stress induced heart
attacks/strokes, delayed or denial of health care, suicides, etc)
Curiously deaths among infants nationwide declined up to 40% by June (150 fewer deaths per
week from the normal 400 per week) possibly due to fewer vaccinations when they may cause
more harm in the first year of life
Anyways, one should expect an uptick in cases as those coming out of lockdown now get more
exposure (with suppressed immune systems due to lack of sun exposure and low Vit D) and
states ramp up testing. The goal should not be to eliminate cases but to keep the HC SYSTEM
operating and its far from being overloaded. Its Best people get exposed in summer before the
anticipated 2nd wave. That way there will be fewer folks to infect as they will be partially
immunized. Many people indeed are naturally immune and don't even produce antibodies to clear
the virus (relying on innate and cellular defenses), so antibody tests drastically
underestimate community exposure.
"... I stopped going to movies years ago when all that coming out were mind-numbing ear-shattering fit-inducing spectacles aimed at teenage boys with no redeeming values (the movies or the boys). ..."
AMC will not mandate that all guests wear masks, although employees will be required to do
so.
...
"We did not want to be drawn into a political controversy," said Aron. "We thought it might
be counterproductive if we forced mask wearing on those people who believe strongly that it
is not necessary. We think that the vast majority of AMC guests will be wearing masks.
The primary function of a mask is not to protect the person who wears it, but to protect
the other persons who are around.
Theaters are closed rooms in which people sit together for a longer time in often somewhat
sticky air. Like churches they are prime location for potential super-spreader events. One
infected person who does not wear a mask in a theater can infect many other attendants, even
if they do wear masks.
If AMC does not make mask wearing mandatory and consequently checks that the rule is
followed throughout the show one can only recommend not to visit their theaters. From a
marketing perspective AMC's policy is self defeating. AMC will end up with empty
theaters.
Your contention that "The primary function of a mask is not to protect the person who
wears it, but to protect the other persons who are around" is illogical. You're saying that
an infected person wearing a face mask cannot spread the coronavirus into the air, however,
that implies that the face mask can filter the virus out of the air if it is exhaled but
can't filter out the virus if one is inhaling through the mask.
I'm not aware of face masks having this magical one-way filtering property. They either
filter out the virus or they don't. Face masks should be worn by people who are coughing or
sneezing.
The American Medical Association (AMA) has stated that masks should only be worn by sick
people who are coughing and sneezing and not by those who are well.
For those who are sick and coughing and sneezing, the mask helps to contain the macro-
and microscopic fluid droplets ejected, all of which may contain infectious
micro-organisms.
I have my doubts about the efficiency and effectiveness of using masks. In fact,
I haven't even ruled out the chances that this virus was made in the laboratory. However, as
long as we don't have really serious studies, reliable information and scientific consensus
(if there ever will be), it is best to do what we can and what is within our reach to protect
ourselves and others (empathy). I really doubt that these cheap masks that are sold around
here protect a lot. But the little that can protect everyone is already valid. I've been
willing all along to protect myself and everyone around me. I followed the booklet, the
safest protocols .... But now I want answers. I need to work, go out on the street, get some
sun ..... kiss a girl ....
I am tired of scientism, politics, left versus right, geopolitics, conspiracy theories
...... When will everyone converge on the same side? is that even possible? I know that there
are good people fighting for simple and humble people like me, but I see very little of these
people being heard or involved in really important positions that could make a
difference.
Anyway, peace for everyone! We are different, we have different cultures, we believe in
different things, but we don't need to kill ourselves because of that. Keep up the good work
and the high-level discussions that I see here. Learning a lot by reading this blog and the
comments.
Big hug (from Brazil) to everyone and thanks for everything.
I stopped going to movies years ago when all that coming out were mind-numbing ear-shattering
fit-inducing spectacles aimed at teenage boys with no redeeming values (the movies or the
boys).
Don't be an idiot. Wear a mask in public. It's proven to reduce transmission, and if
everybody did so, the virus would quickly die out when R0 went less than 1. As it did in
South Korea.
"This announcement prompted an intense and immediate outcry from our customers, and it
is clear from this response that we did not go far enough on the usage of masks," Aron said
in a statement on Friday. "At AMC Theatres, we think it is absolutely crucial that we
listen to our guests. Accordingly, and with the full support of our scientific advisors, we
are reversing course and are changing our guest mask policy."
. . .
AMC said that it will also sell masks for $1 at its box offices.
My solution to the covid disaster is the 'Joyce shemagh' (or just 'Joyce scarf'). The
'shemagh' is a pure cotton scarf, worn to cope with a variety of environmental challenges,
including dust storms. I ordered mine on eBay. You wear this around tour face and fasten it
in the back with a fat rubber band. It's folded about four times, forming almost a blanket.
You wear it damp, almost on the verge of wet. The active ingredients are plain water and
(hopefully unscented) dish detergent. The detergent (or soap) will bring water molecules into
direct contact with the virus's waxy lipid envelope, causing it to fall apart (actually
unravel) and thus 'die'. I use about 8% by volume of the dish soap. But before I add in the
dish soap, I mix enough fructose type sugar into the water, enough to make it a little bit
'thick'.
Fructose is one of the super-hydrophilic sugars, meaning it holds on to water and
causes it to be very slow to dry out. (And the water contact is what actually destroys the
virus.) Well, that's what I wear, and it's far, far more comfortable that the typical mask.
(I should warn people that even though my doctor approves of this shemagh mask, there are
people who will insist that it will poison you, or cause you to contract pneumonia (water
being very dangerous. So don't let on what you are doing.) You are probably protecting both
yourself and those around you. If the virus contacts the damp soapy shemagh, it dies.
The covid 19 virus is rather unique in several ways. It can survive extreme cold, and
extreme heat, almost to the boiling point of water at room temperature. Yet, soapy water
simply unravels its envelope.
Careless thinkers wonder why the masks are far more effective in preventing sick people
from spreading the virus that they are at protecting the uninfected. The answer is really not
very complex. A sick individual will, simply by normally breathing, fill his/her mask with
100,000,000 virus particles. The mask of an uninfected individual in the same room will only
screen out perhaps a dozen virus particles.
"The primary function of a mask is not to protect the person who wears it, but to protect the
other persons who are around.
Theaters are closed rooms in which people sit together for a longer time in often somewhat
sticky air. Like churches they are prime location for potential super-spreader events. One
infected person who does not wear a mask in a theater can infect many other attendants, even
if they do wear masks."
I am a bit more understanding of mandatory mask wearing on public transportation or retail
outlets. People don't have many choices to travel or shop so I go along with it.
However, going to a movie theater is a choice. I am a big believer in Freedom of Choice.
If you choose to attend a theater knowing in advance masks are not mandatory, thats your
choice. For a healthy person under 55 the risk of death or hospitalization from this virus is
not any greater than flu. Those are facts from CDC. If you want to protect your eyes from
viruses wear goggles.
I personally cant wear a mask for long periods because i feel oxygen deprived. Real or
imaginary I cant say, but I saw one study with surgeons where prolonged wearing of
surgical
Masks significantly reduced lung oxygen levels. Some medical conditions make mask wearing
dangerous. Oxygen is necessary to clear infection in the lungs and nasal passages so I am not
confident prolonged mask wearing might not increase the risk of infection or worsen an
existing infection. Sadly there are few useful studies. I guess not enough of a profit motive
to fund them.
Kay Fabe, "I am a bit more understanding of mandatory mask wearing on public transportation
or retail outlets...Masks significantly reduced lung oxygen levels."
Masks just need to stop droplets can be cloth based, they don't have to be super
impermeable but still only you can say what you consider comfortable. A movie is about 2 - 3
hrs of non-strenuous activity, I don't see how it is so different from wearing it on an
airplane, or long bus / train trip.
I heard a doctor make an interesting claim that contrary to popular belief, the air on a
passenger jet is very pure, highly filtered and blows downward and therefore very safe. It
makes me wonder about the air system in a theater, if it is good then AMC should lead with
that.
...Of course, if someone directly coughs in your face, then presumably you get hit with a
full load. That's why we maintain distance. But even the, the primary route will be through
the nose and mouth. It's also likely that a far bigger load goes through the nose and mouth
than the eyes, and it is speculated that the likelihood of infection depends on the viral
load.
In any event, I wear glasses, which likely provides a fair amount of protection from
random airborne virus particles.
...For the most part, however, the vast majority of persons who caught it appear to have
gotten it directly from being near an infectious person for at least ten minutes, inhaling
their breathing/talking/singing/yelling air, with a much smaller percentage getting it from
touching an infected surface (estimated at only ten percent of cases.) So getting it from
food is likely an even more distant probability.
That said, as I've said before, getting this thing is a crapshoot. It's a matter of
greater or lesser probabilities. As they say, "to play the odds, you have to know the odds."
So I take steps that would minimize my risk, but in the end there's only so much you can do.
I assume some people have caught it by wildly improbable methods.
It reminds me of the Marty Feldman skit decades ago. He goes to visit an insurance agent
and proceeds to drive the agent crazy by asking if the insurance being offered would protect
me from insanely unlikely events, such as "being struck by a meteorite whilst sunbathing at
the beach" or "falling into a pit filled with hedgehogs whilst playing cricket." Eventually
he asks if he is protected against an enraged insurance agent, whereupon the agent says,
"No!" and proceeds to strangle him.
That's not entirely true, we just do not believe in fraudulent agenda driven traitors like
you!
Fauci's estimates were so off that the only 2 conclusions can be formed, gross negligence
or intentional deception, either way he has zero credibility left!
Locker up , 1 hour ago
I remember when the pandemic started Fauci said "Masks don't protect you and the front
line health workers need the masks for their protection". I think that statement caused him
to lose all credibility with the public. Fauci still sounds like he's drowning in mucus. They
should get a healthy honest scientist to talk to the public.
MsCreant , 1 hour ago
This guy should just step down.
He is now saying masks are good. They were not good when there was a shortage of them.
If he can't see the logic of why he is not trusted, he is incompetent. lay_arrow
Dumpster Elite , 1 hour ago
"How DARE you serfs and peasants question the authority and wisdom of your masters!!!
INSOLENCE!!!!"
Max UK , 1 hour ago
Yeah Fauci, nobody has done as much to destroy trust actually, as YOU!
NumberNone , 1 hour ago
There are 57 genders...is that the science we don't believe in? Asking for a friend.
Lt. Frank Drebin , 1 hour ago
What a jerk. This dude has Napoleon syndrome, i.e. only he is right, everyone else is
stupid.
Tarzan , 38 minutes ago
Fauci TEST ified that, although they are TEST ing more, there has been more positive TEST
s then before they were TEST ing more, and We're all crazy science deniers for recognizing
his inconsistent TEST imony.
Fauci clearly is a charlatan, a researcher who long ago became a politician and now cheats
like Pompeo. His mask wearng fiacto characterize him as a person who is unable to admin that he
was wrong. and admin the he lied in order to cover the shortage of masks for medical personnel
and complete unpreparedness of the country to the epidemic.
He also look like a boy who cried "wolf,wolf" way to many time, when no wolf was around.
This guy did absolutely nothing to understand and prepare for the epidemic from January to
Late March and then pushed for excessive measures like total quarantine. he should be fired for
incompetence. He is implicitly guilty for Ciumo idiotism in NY (horror hospital beds are running
out we need million of ventilators) and similar idiotism in NJ and other parts of the country,
which unnecessary closed businesses where wearing masks would suffice.
This charlatan never admitted his role in promotion of "gain of function" experiments and
financing them in Wuhan biolab.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the polarising director of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases, slammed everyday Americans for refusing to go along with 'authority' on
medical matters, and accused people of 'amazing denial' when it comes to 'truth'.
Speaking on a podcast called Learning Curve , produced by the Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS), Fauci charged that "unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science
bias that people are -- for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not
understandable -- they just don't believe science and they don't believe authority."
"So when they see someone up in the White House, which has an air of authority to it,
who's talking about science, that there are some people who just don't believe that -- and
that's unfortunate because, you know, science is truth, " Fauci asserted.
"It's amazing sometimes the denial there is, it's the same thing that gets people who are
anti-vaxxers , who don't want people to get vaccinated, even though the data clearly indicate
the safety of vaccines," Fauci proclaimed, adding "That's really a problem."
Fauci also has a long history of being the front man for a network of powerful Big Pharma
and Big Medicine interests, pushing vaccines
and medicines in a clear conflict of interest.
* * *
Following Fauci's blame-scaping the anti-science bias of (implicitly ignorant) Americans,
Thiel Capital MD Eric Weinstein unleashed a barrage of uncomfortable truths on Twitter
How dare this man.
Do you want to know why they are learning to hate scientists for real Dr Fauci?
Because your group lies about science & your ilk drove the truth telling scientists
out of their rightful places inside the institutions calling bullshit on your lying about
masks. pic.twitter.com/VJLTGT0GOe
Scientists like me who don't go along with cowards & crowds cannot disrupt your
group's lies because we are outside. Imagine if I was tweeting from the National Science
Foundation or MIT. It would be a national news story about how your cabal lies and degrades
faith in science: https://t.co/leYsCerG3o
"But you prattle on. We will one day find out later that you suspected all along that the
Wuhan BS-L 4 virology lab might well be involved, but that you didn't say so for this or that
political reason.
Because you aren't a scientist. You play one. You are an MD turned actor.
Even when I agree with the conclusions of your institutional pseudo science cabal, you
cheat to get to our shared conclusions on vaccines, viruses, climate, etc.
So you want people to believe in science again? Ok. Call-yourself-out. Admit that your
crowd **lied** about our masks.
And not to put too fine a point on it: your group is sitting in chairs reserved for people
who don't do what your cabal just did.
You just don't have what it takes sir. I'm sorry. But science isn't acting. It's not a
beauty pagent. It's not politics.
Science requires courage ."
y_arrow 1
Whoa Dammit , 2 minutes ago
Like the other many things that Mr.Fauci has gotten wrong, he fails to recognize the truth
that Americans don't believe him
Boing_Snap , 6 minutes ago
People don't believe Fauci, never been in the real world, vaccine patent holder,
TruthHunter , 6 minutes ago
Fauci, you're not a scientist. You're a politician...stop whining when you're treated like
one
JoePorkChop , 6 minutes ago
Are scientists and authority some incorruptible special breed? A very skeptical eye
towards any power structure is very neccesary, always.
artytom , 6 minutes ago
Good man Weinstein.
HowardBeale , 7 minutes ago
Is he phucking joking? Fauci has no idea what Fauci will say tomorrow...
SuperareDolo , 8 minutes ago
I don't know if it would surprise Fauci to know that the majority of epidemiologists are
among those he says, "Don't believe in science, or authority."
Combining those two terms is very telling. Science is skeptical empiricism, not belief.
It's kind of self-contradictory to believe in conclusions, since he's not talking about
belief in the validity of skeptical empiricism. He's talking about his authority, which he
wants people to believe in, because he's a scientist. That's technocracy, and nobody should
accept that.
diogi23 , 9 minutes ago
Fauci is the John Bolton of science. Why does Trump keep him around??
aelfheld , 6 minutes ago
Science is a process, not 'revealed wisdom'.
I d----d sure don't put much faith in scientists who try to speak ex cathedra .
ze_vodka , 11 minutes ago
I require evidence based reasoning to be presented for Science...
and
I require that those who seek to be called an "Authority" demonstrate the ability to lead
well with kindness and humility.
So...
I firmly reject arbitrary Totalitarianism... which is exactly what Fauci espouses and
proclaims.
Demystified , 12 minutes ago
Fauci is a medical MEATBALL, his credibility is in the toilet. A Flush is needed
urgently.
ze_vodka , 11 minutes ago
I require evidence based reasoning to be presented for Science...
and
I require that those who seek to be called an "Authority" demonstrate the ability to lead
well with kindness and humility.
So...
I firmly reject arbitrary Totalitarianism... which is exactly what Fauci espouses and
proclaims.
Demystified , 12 minutes ago
Fauci is a medical MEATBALL, his credibility is in the toilet. A Flush is needed
urgently.
YouThePeople , 13 minutes ago
Fauxi is a corrupted paid stooge...and a bad actor.
Slayer666 , 14 minutes ago
Old School Americans aren't very fond of blindly following authority. They/We have a
rebellious streak. That's why the globalists/NWO want to import a new, more docile
population. But if America falls, don't expect the rest of the world to remain the same. Yeah
I know a lot of people would welcome that, but don't be too sure that what comes into that
power vacuum wouldn't be way worse.
hugin-o-munin , 6 minutes ago
There is a big difference in allowing the US economy to fail and having the US fail. Two
different things. In fact I think the best remedy to the current hyper corrupt system is to
let the dollar implode. That removes these fvckers' power in a clean sweep move and then
something more genuine and honest can take its place.
Distant_Star , 15 minutes ago
What ********. I believe in Newton's laws of motion. I believe in the laws of
thermodynamics and many other scientific rules. I believe in the periodic table. I believe in
Avogadro's number and Boyle's Law.
I don't believe in the "China model" that Fauchi, the corrupt WHO, the inept CDC with
their flawed Chinese test kits and the progressive politicians worshipped from day 1. I don't
believe it was necessary to lock down whole populations. I don't believe in the political
jihad against hydroxychloriquine because Trump said it might have value, mounds of anecdotal
evidence supported its use, and many physicians endorse it.
I don't subscribe to the globalist horesehit from the Gates Foundation with his push for
undeveloped vaccines and quantum dots, and statements that, "we have to vaccinate 6 billion
people." I have contempt for craven people who demand that everyone else be locked down for
their benefit, and whine about how "We can never go back to the way it was. Boo-hoo."
I question the ever changing, often contradictory narrative on this virus. I heap scorn on
their wildly inaccurate models that caused this economic and social disaster. I call
horse**** on the "scientists" and progressive authoritarians who joyfully locked down
populations and businesses when it was not necessary. These same fools then remained totally
silent when thugs, demonstrators, looters, arsonists, anarchists and mobs filled the street
for a "higher cause." I condemn those such as the "hero" Andrew Cuomo who put infected people
into nursing homes where old and vulnerable people died by the thousands for no reason. I
guess that makes me and millions of others science "deniers." On the other hand, maybe
ordinary people know a ship of floundering fools when they see one, and express genuine
concern. You don't need scientific method to see a disaster in motion. Screw Fauchi.
theboxseat , 12 minutes ago
I believe in:
Fool me once shame on you...
Darn who can remember Dubya's version of this
LA_Goldbug , 11 minutes ago
He's busy looking for WMD with Colon Powell in Iraq. He'll be back in 50 yrs. because it
is there and he will not stop looking.
ken , 9 minutes ago
Lies, just remember the lies, and that stupid look on his face while he tells them.
hugin-o-munin , 5 minutes ago
“There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in
Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you
can't get fooled again.”
Rocbottom , 15 minutes ago
SCIENCE doesn’t say jack ****. SCIENTISTS do. And this “scientist” is a
PROPAGANDIST not a doctor. THAT IS WHY no one believes what he says. He’s a paid
liar.
SteveNYC , 18 minutes ago
Joke of the day "American don't believe authority"
Tony, WHAT DO YOU EXPECT? When you've been lied to, on a massive scale since 2001,
additional lies of which were put on steroids starting in 2016 - you'd be a FOOL to believe
"authority" or "EXPERTS" like you pal.
It's over.
k3g , 11 minutes ago
Lives Matter.
hugin-o-munin , 10 minutes ago
You must be a racist. :)
ken , 3 minutes ago
...not so much according to the Georgia Guidestones, the BMGF, U.S. Foreign Policy, and
the sacrificial babies used in blackmail to force it, by Israel.
sun tzu , 21 minutes ago
What science told the states in the northeast to send thousands of infected patients into
nursing homes?
Trezrek500 , 22 minutes ago
Science isn't about blind ideology.
B52Minot , 23 minutes ago
Faucci is nothing but a spoiled brat....and now he has a tantrum because Americans could
care less about what he says....why?? he wonders....Because Faucci has shown us the dark side
of science....how it can ruin you if you make the wrong decision about its true validity. If
we knew that the original estimate of deaths from COVID was a fraud Trump would never had
declared an emergency and agreed with a shut down....This entire COVID response has been one
big disaster....and a fraud with Faucci out there thinking he runs the place...
Time after time HE HAS BEEN WRONG..and his trust in the WHO and CHINA too has been
corrupted if not a fraud too...SO WHY IS HE STILL TRYING TO TELL US WHAT TO DO....Because he
thinks he is some sort of expert yet so flawed it oozes out of every pore...and NO ONE should
listen to him on anything. Just another crying kid having a tantrum....GO HOME and retire
Faucci...you really are worthless...and shut the hell up.
sun tzu , 24 minutes ago
Science is the truth, but scientists can and do lie.
BAMCIS , 24 minutes ago
Science has a PR problem. Mainly due to it only being accountable to itself and the fact
that for all it lofty aspirations, Science has not been able to achieve escape volatility
from the bounds of corruption that only Big Money can impose.
Plus Americans are culturally hard wired to view Science as an enemy. Luke, a dumb hick
farmer who used his faith and tenacity to destroy the crown jewel of the evil technocrats,
namely the Death Star. In most (if not all) James Bond movies the villains are mad scientists
or industrialists using science for "evil". In "The Hunger Games", Katniss Everdean is again
a bumpkin who wages war against the fancy people with their shiny tech in their decadent
cities. Its the Urban/Rural dichotomy. Same as it ever was.
bh2 , 27 minutes ago
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." -- Feynman
vampirekiller , 29 minutes ago
No one believes a queertard that attempted to attribute a 100% preventable queer disease
confined to the queer population to the majority heterosexual population. No one believes a
queertard when current empirical data refutes his fearmongering.
Lux , 29 minutes ago
I'm still wondering why Fauci is even alive. Then again, the entire Pentagon is populated
by traitors with offshore bank accounts, so..
smacker , 33 minutes ago
Someone needs to tell Fauci the reason why people don't believe the science is because it
keeps changing and contradicts itself.
There is no centre of competence on this virus and conflicting advice, including from
him.
Voice-of-Reason , 35 minutes ago
Science originally said we didn't need masks and now we do. The problem I have with Mr
Fauci's form of science is that it is too easily manipulated by politics.
adr , 38 minutes ago
Hey Fauchole, is this science?
Upwards of 60% of people have natural immunity to Covid due to antibodies produced from
four or more common coronaviruses.
I reject your "science" and replace it with real research.
Well, yeah Dr. Fausti. We certainly did believe you. We didn't want to. But we are playing
along. You know like at work. And like living like free citizens in a supposedly free
country. By obliging you with shut-ins and shutdowns. And you terrorizing and bankrupting
millions. Yeah I think we played along. And had faith in government and science. Cuz you said
so. And would jail or punish those who did not. Take kids away. Send swat. Stuff like that.
Had bills to pay. Those bills just keep on coming. And the nerve of those people wanting to
like pay them! On time!
Government is only effective with the consent of the governed. You should know that. You
should also say something about how that was shown to be very selective enforcement. Cuz
riots or something. Do or don't matter? Confusing. They apparently can live of a billion
dollars from bank of America and starkbucks and Wal-Mart. Or just not pay their bills at all.
Or work. At a job. Where you have to show up on time, wear a mask and not burn **** down.
Stuff like that.
You are throwing a tantrum. Because everyone, not quite everyone. Still doesn't obey you.
Enough. To willingly line up for your vaccine. When it is ready. Of course. Seeing a little
scary times ahead for your authority. Who do you answer to Dr. Fausti? Are they getting a
little hot under your collar? Cuz science, right? Is what you most believe in. Not like
something else. And as long as we are here. Why do you work for Trump? Or more to the point.
Why does he employ you? Very confusing. Since he wants to maga. Supposedly.
Hal n back , 41 minutes ago
I wonder how he treats his subordinates who have different views
R2U2 , 40 minutes ago
Webster’s Dictionary, 1828:
JES'UITISM, noun
1. Cunning, deceit; hypocrisy; prevarication; deceptive practices to effect a purpose
"Two cankers are biting the very entrails of the United States today: the Romish and the
Mormon priests. Both are quietly at work to form a people of the most abject, ignorant and
fanatical slaves, who will recognize no other authority but their supreme pontiffs. Both are
aiming at the destruction of our schools, to raise themselves upon our ruins. Both shelter
themselves under our grand and holy principles of liberty of conscience, to destroy that very
liberty of conscience, and bind the world before their heavy and ignominious yoke.
The Mormon and the Jesuit priests are equally the uncompromising enemies of our
constitution and our laws; but the more dangerous of the two is the Jesuit—the Romish
priest, for he knows better how to conceal his hatred under the mask of friendship and public
good; he is better trained to commit the most cruel and diabolical deeds for the glory of
God.”
--Abraham Lincoln, 1864; "Fifty Years in the Church of Rome,” Charles Chiniquy,
1888.
The CIA is roughly half Mormon and half Roman Catholic.
Stan Smith , 43 minutes ago
The reason people don't trust institutions is because they fail us time and time
again.
All why sucking up resources for research (good) and making sure people inside the system
are taken care of (less good).
The more Fauci talks the more he sounds like Al Gore. Not a good thing.
Lying about masks was bad. But lying about HC + Zinc is worse, at least in my mind.
To be fair to Fauci, that industry isnt the only one filled with dishonest schiesters.
They are everywhere.
Institutions aren't trusted because they've earned the distrust over decades. It's well
earned.
Sid Davis , 46 minutes ago
Fauci is a complete fraud.
He graduated from medical school and then spent 2 years working in hospitals. That is the
extent of his medical experience. For the last 50 years he has been a bureaucrat. He
obviously has a conflict of interest because of his ties to the Gates Foundation, Big Pharma,
and the Wuhan Lab where this mess started.
This guy belongs at the end of a rope, not at the top of the response team to this
scamdemic.
He is a sociopathic conman, and not even very good at that.
Stillontheroad , 50 minutes ago
Hey Fucci. How much money to you stand to gain from all your patents, all granted when you
worked for the Federal Government but because you had friends in Congress a law was passed
giving you the proceeds from those patents when in the real world said patents belong to the
USA
Voice-of-Reason , 52 minutes ago
Mr. Fauci,
We believe science. We just don't believe governmental controlled shutdowns are the answer
to this pandemic and that it ultimately does more damage to the economy than it protects
people from Covid19. And yes, we do not believe authority because they lie constantly, are
corrupt and generally are incompetent.
Krink26 , 53 minutes ago
When authorities weaponized everything including science, for political gain, people will
not trust your authority.
VideoEng_NC , 53 minutes ago
"Speaking on a podcast..."
This is the level of media Fauci seems to be relegated to plus his ever-welcoming friends
for interviews with the MSM. Would appear Hungarian Pengos here on ZH was correct on his
05/21 post regarding the ulterior motives behind the announcement of Pence staffers getting
the Wuhan virus making Fauci self isolate...for good. He doesn't even get to bake tree
cookies.
Longdriver , 1 hour ago
Fauci's true colors are being shown now. He's getting testy because he is watching his
future personal profits go up in smoke in controlled vaccines.
DoctorFix , 1 hour ago
"Dont believe science"? Sure, Dr. Falsey! I believe in the "science" you represent. The
science of lies and criminal deception. The science of propaganda and manipulation. The kind
of sciences that you wholeheartedly embrace.
k3g , 1 hour ago
Fauci's turn came, and he proved himself to be incompetent, a bureaucrat, a fraud.
**** you Tony. You flat out suck.
What is The Hedge , 1 hour ago
What Fauci is really saying is that Americans are no longer accepting the false narratives
promoted by those in charge. Maybe there's hope.
Lumberjack , 1 hour ago
Mr. Fauci;
I’m your age and have a pretty strong background in engineering, science and some
other practical skills.
Over the last 30 years science has been bastardized by politicization and liberalism has
finally reached the point of teaching kids 2+3= anything they want.
Political science is based on fraud and bull$hit and now the real deal is as contaminated
as Fukushima.
Your comment about “authotity” screams of idiocracy. Try watering your crops
with gatorade and fertilizing with MDMA.
I know and knew real Phd’s who were real scientists and that’s when science
was based on theory, tests, duplication and verification.
That is no longer the case. It’s idiots like you, book smart field stupid (
I’m being kind with book smart), The only thing you a$$wipes are looking for is 10
minutes of fame, a bunch of money and molesting your interns and students with big boobs that
need a passing grade.
When as usual your astrological prognotications are bad (which are 99% of the time), you
find convenient parties to blame.
It’s time to put real science into both science and leadership.
I have high hopes that this will happen sooner rather than later.
Kid’s take note and see how many times they claimed eggs are bad for you and then
they said eggs are good for you. That goes for many other items and issues too.
Yesireebob, You screwed the pooch Mr. Fauci and I’m calling PETA right now.
Lj
NotAGenius , 1 hour ago
Why the hell does ZH give Fauci the incredibly dishonest cruel idiot any venue. He's a
liar and is the cause of the destruction of the USA by telling Trump we'd have a million
covid-19 deaths unless it was shut down and everyone stayed home. So Trump wiped out the
country and all of our lives on Fauci's b.s. That is what Fauci is, at best. Do not give him
any public platform to lie even more yet to the cowardly stupid clueless Americans. Fauci
does not deserve any recognition or platform for lies anywhere in the USA. But he's given the
stage because the government apparently supports his lies. They are all guilty of treason and
mass destruction of civilization. I want both executed at best, or at least humiliated with
public avoidance.
brian91145 , 1 hour ago
he is owned by the Rockefllers and Gates. That's a fact
radical-extremist , 1 hour ago
Scientists that can never bring themselves to say "I don't know." , are not
scientists...they're blathering charlatans pumping their brand and feeding their egos. Fauci
is much like Paul Krugman. He speaks with such confidence and certainty about everything,
that surely he must be right. And when proven wrong will do it again with the opposing view,
ignoring the fact he ever said it to begin with...as if there's no internet.
SurfingUSA , 1 hour ago
Yes true scientists are extremely humble and cautious, bec. they know how much they don't
know.
FragNasty , 1 hour ago
Hee hee, greatings to all.
Science is meant to be based on evidence rather than faith. Maybe Fauci himself doesn't
believe in science with his inclination to the contrary. "Americans don't believe ..." The
man is a maniac! Maybe he is accidentally confessing to the state of "science" as a
counterpart to religion in it's role as an ideological control mechanism within the state of
politics today, more precisely the breakdown of such a control mechanism.
Often is man's best wisdom to be silent , 1 hour ago
Marionettes can easily be transformed into hanged persons. The ropes are already
there.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
BaNNeD oN THe RuN , 1 hour ago
He is right...
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political
and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is
just as good as your knowledge.
~ Isaac Asimov
But he is also one of the reasons that the anti-intellectual movement can maintain
momentum. Too many of the "authoritative voices" in positions of power are total
charlatans.
Itchy and Scratchy , 1 hour ago
This yap flappin’ freak show in on the board of Gates controlled WHO & various
other big pharma boards! His crooked snoot is buried so far into the cash flow trough it
ain’t even funny! Embezzlement poster child!
Handful of Dust , 1 hour ago
"Fauci the Fraud" will go down in history who will not remember him kindly.
Totally_Disillusioned , 1 hour ago
Fauci doesn't seem to understand WE DON'T BELIEVE HIM ANY LONGER!
SuperareDolo , 6 minutes ago
You never should have believed him. He was behind the attempt to steal credit for the
discovery of HIV by his underling, Gallo. There's a long story there.
Yog Soggoth , 1 hour ago
I believe Fauci gave the Wuhan lab $3.7 million.
We_The_People , 1 hour ago
That’s not entirely true, we just believe fraudulent agenda driven traitors like
you!
Fauci’s estimates were so off that the only 2 conclusions can be formed, gross
negligence or intentional deception, either way he has zero credibility left!
We do still need to worry about the coronavirus's spread. But how can we when the experts
have completely forsaken our trust? Dr. Anthony Fauci (L), director of the National Institute
of Allergy and Infectious Diseases speaks next to Response coordinator for White House
Coronavirus Task Force Deborah Birx, during a meeting with US President Donald Trump and
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards D-LA in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington,
DC on April 29, 2020. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Since the pandemic began, I've been described as a so-called "COVID warrior," which makes
some sense. After all, I've defended the shutdowns of large gatherings. I've insisted that it's
wise to temporarily close churches and postpone funerals and other ceremonies. I've argued that
extreme caution is necessary -- that to do anything else would be to blatantly and selfishly
ignore the
scientific information at our disposal. I've held the opinion that, although it has caused
irrevocable harm to the economy and caused millions of people to suffer, business owners
who close up shop for fear of spreading contagion are in the right.
Now I feel like a fool.
By no means am I a coronavirus denier -- more than 100,000
and counting have died from the COVID. But with conflicting reports about everything from
wearing masks to the
spread of the virus through surfaces coming out of the World Health Organization and the
CDC almost weekly, my head is spinning. Nothing seems to make sense anymore.
For fear of spreading the virus, health experts have consistently recommended shutting down
and avoiding public spaces, including
schools ,
playgrounds ,
public pools , and
public transportation . They've also advocated for
limiting large gatherings and closing anything that might draw crowds. It's advice that's
been repeated for months -- to the point that those ignoring it have been
reviled and accused of experimenting with "
human sacrifice ."
That's because asymptomatic carriers of the virus, though they may feel all right
themselves, can become
mass spreaders of the deadly contagion, especially in large groups. This is why Michigan
residents
protesting their state's lockdown in Lansing were deserving of shame -- they likely
caused mass immiseration and sickness, right?
Wrong. Turns out, health officials didn't really believe any of that.
Just last week, the WHO
announced that it's extremely rare for asymptomatic spreading of the coronavirus to occur.
If you feel fine, then you're probably not a grave threat to anyone, especially if you're
wearing a mask and gloves. Then the WHO backtracked on that statement, ultimately arriving at
the completely unhelpful determination that "
this is a major unknown ." Health experts simply don't know to what extent the disease is
transmitted by asymptomatic carriers -- yet they
still feel confident that the risks of the coronavirus shouldn't impact our protesting of
police brutality.
One rightly wonders how, within a span of weeks, we went from shaming people for being out
in the streets to shaming those who won't join the
crowd .
What's more,
contact with infected animals and surfaces is
unlikely to cause COVID-19 to spread, and
chlorine kills the virus upon contact, so clean pools are also safe. But of course, many
schools, playgrounds, pools, and businesses were forced to close.
Livelihoods have been destroyed, children are paying a
high price through a loss of time and key social-educational development, and mental health
across the country is on
the decline .
And now some journalists from prominent publications -- the same ones that have been
demanding oh-so-extreme caution -- are performing breathtaking gymnastics in an effort to
backtrack,
explaining that there's no evidence of outdoor coronavirus spread. Now, it's "prolonged
indoor close contact" that we have to worry about.
They may be right. Maybe protesters really shouldn't worry (though they probably
should ). But that doesn't excuse what seems to be a disgusting hypocrisy that trampled on
the livelihoods of more than
30 million Americans. Understandably, many are outraged and have
lost all faith in the experts.
Health advice can't shift with politics -- COVID-19, cancer, and the flu don't know party
lines. The virus is either unmanageable or manageable. That's it.
Now, with Trump
aiming to restart his so-called "MAGA rallies," we'll inevitably have -- and
already have had -- another round of tut-tutting from the media about how horribly
irresponsible it is to gather in crowds. But who can possibly blame those who shrug these
warnings off? MAGA rallies very well could spread COVID-19, but in the event they do, the
George Floyd protests will be equally culpable. Expert credibility has been lost.
Maybe we should, as many of my more classically liberal friends have been saying all along,
allow people to make their own choices, take their own risks, open their own businesses back
up, hold their own protests against injustice.
Whatever the case, given the whiplash the public has experienced over these past few weeks,
we certainly won't be running to health experts as readily as before. Certainly, social
distancing practices have
helped flatten the curve, but living your life based on the inconsistent messaging of the
WHO and the CDC is a recipe for disaster. If a second wave does appear, it will be cautious
individuals and community innovation that provides the solutions -- not those who have done
nothing to earn our trust.
Anthony DiMauro is a freelance writer based in New York City. His work has appeared
in The National Interest , Real Clear Media, and elsewhere. You can follow him on
Twitter @AnthonyMDiMauro.
"... "We've seen a small number of laboratories that are charging egregious prices for Covid-19 tests," said Angie Meoli, a senior vice president at Aetna, one of the insurers required to cover testing costs. ..."
"... The second outcome is huge price variation, as each doctor's office and hospital sets its own charges for care. One 2012 study found that hospitals in California charge between $1,529 and $182,955 for uncomplicated appendectomies. ..."
"... "It's not unheard-of that one hospital can charge 100 times the price of another for the same thing," said Dr. Renee Hsia, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and an author of the appendectomy study. "There is no other market I can think of where that happens except health care." ..."
"... But American patients will eventually bear the costs of these expensive tests in the form of higher insurance premiums. In some cases, they are paying for additional tests, for flu and other respiratory diseases, that doctors tack onto coronavirus orders. Those charges are not exempt from co-payments and can fall into a patient's deductible. ..."
"... Those kinds of bills could make patients wary of seeking care or testing in the future, which could enable the further spread of coronavirus. In an April poll, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that most Americans were worried they wouldn't be able to afford coronavirus testing or treatment if they needed it . ..."
Most Coronavirus Tests Cost About $100. Why Did One Cost $2,315?
U.S. health care prices are unregulated, opaque and unpredictable. When Congress required
insurers to cover Covid-19 testing, a few providers decided to take advantage.
By Sarah Kliff
In a one-story brick building in suburban Dallas, between a dentist office and a family
medicine clinic, is a medical laboratory that has run some of the most expensive coronavirus
tests in America.
Insurers have paid Gibson Diagnostic Labs as much as $2,315 for individual coronavirus
tests. In a couple of cases, the price rose as high as $6,946 when the lab said it mistakenly
charged patients three times the base rate.
The company has no special or different technology from, say, major diagnostic labs that
charge $100. It is one of a small number of medical labs, hospitals and emergency rooms
taking advantage of the way Congress has designed compensation for coronavirus tests and
treatment.
"We've seen a small number of laboratories that are charging egregious prices for
Covid-19 tests," said Angie Meoli, a senior vice president at Aetna, one of the insurers
required to cover testing costs.
How can a simple coronavirus test cost $100 in one lab and 2,200 percent more in another?
It comes back to a fundamental fact about the American health care system: The government
does not regulate health care prices.
This tends to have two major outcomes that health policy experts have seen before, and are
seeing again with coronavirus testing.
The first is high prices over all. Most medical care in the United States costs double or
triple what it would in a peer country. An appendectomy, for example, costs $3,050 in Britain
and $6,710 in New Zealand, two countries that regulate health prices. In the United States,
the average price is $13,020.
The second outcome is huge price variation, as each doctor's office and hospital sets
its own charges for care. One 2012 study found that hospitals in California charge between
$1,529 and $182,955 for uncomplicated appendectomies.
"It's not unheard-of that one hospital can charge 100 times the price of another for
the same thing," said Dr. Renee Hsia, a professor at the University of California, San
Francisco, and an author of the appendectomy study. "There is no other market I can think of
where that happens except health care."
There is little evidence that higher prices correlate with better care. What's different
about the more expensive providers is that they've set higher prices for their services.
Patients are, in the short run, somewhat protected from big coronavirus testing bills. The
federal government set aside $1 billion to pick up the tab for uninsured Americans who get
tested. For the insured, federal laws require that health plans cover the full costs of
coronavirus testing without applying a deductible or co-payment.
But American patients will eventually bear the costs of these expensive tests in the
form of higher insurance premiums. In some cases, they are paying for additional tests, for
flu and other respiratory diseases, that doctors tack onto coronavirus orders. Those charges
are not exempt from co-payments and can fall into a patient's deductible.
Those kinds of bills could make patients wary of seeking care or testing in the
future, which could enable the further spread of coronavirus. In an April poll, the Kaiser
Family Foundation found that most Americans were worried they wouldn't be able to afford
coronavirus testing or treatment if they needed it .
Absolutely nothing about how the US has responded to the Corona Virus could be mistaken for being based on data. I mean
getting into the "spike" people are talking about, in Alabama where I live this is no spike, this is a continuation of
the trend we've been seeing since March. Cases never significantly declined, and instead we've just seen steady growth
in deaths, active cases, and new cases. The increases we've seen have followed 2 weeks after what was basically the
final wave to reopening (Which, really isn't, but public perception was that life could go back to normal based on
statements from the state), almost perfectly. I am sure we'll see trends continue as protesters who were exposed start
getting sick. It will just compound with the day to day effect that can easily be directed at the miscommunication of
what the threat is to the public. Make no mistake, Saagar is right to be annoyed but there is Nothing here that has been
handled remotely well. Nobody communicated this well, nobody planned well, nobody reopened well. Front to back, top to
bottom this has been an embarrassing failure for the US.
Glenn Greenwald's video on the intercept about this was excellent. The medical and public health establishment need to
be neutral, people aren't going to trust them again.
The truth is covering up the truth is the job of the MSM. Update: A person on twitter mentioned that the question asked
is more general in nature. "Did you attend an event where they were likely to be exposed" . Now this seems entirely
reasonable as it gets higher quality results. If this is indeed the case, then this is fake news. Somebody with an
agenda planted the seed and it grew here.
People KNOW that our leaders are liers, at a time when all we want and need is honesty. We can do better. Lets vote
EVERY SINGLE INCUMBENT OUT and start fresh.
I told others at the time we were told wearing masks wasn't necessary that that makes no logical or empirical sense.
Persons more educated than me believed it.
Totally agree with Saagar here. But I don't regret staying home. I think quarantine kept cases down. And now, 2-3 months
later, we know more and have more information.
It is a great indicator of where we are at as a country, when a pandemic marches on, and all our leaders can do is try
to manipulate numbers for political gain. Dem's and Republicans have taken dysfunctional to 11!
Dave Chappelle pointed out in his latest standup that those we depend upon for information lie to us. CNN, Fox News and
the like are all meant to polarize the citizens. Obviously it has been working!
Absolutely nothing about how the US has responded to the Corona Virus could be mistaken for being based on data. I mean getting
into the "spike" people are talking about, in Alabama where I live this is no spike, this is a continuation of the trend we've
been seeing since March. Cases never significantly declined, and instead we've just seen steady growth in deaths, active cases,
and new cases.
The increases we've seen have followed 2 weeks after what was basically the final wave to reopening (Which, really
isn't, but public perception was that life could go back to normal based on statements from the state), almost perfectly. I am
sure we'll see trends continue as protesters who were exposed start getting sick. It will just compound with the day to day effect
that can easily be directed at the miscommunication of what the threat is to the public.
Make no mistake, Saagar is right to be
annoyed but there is Nothing here that has been handled remotely well. Nobody communicated this well, nobody planned well, nobody
reopened well. Front to back, top to bottom this has been an embarrassing failure for the US.
Glenn Greenwald's video on the intercept about this was excellent. The medical and public health establishment need to be neutral,
people aren't going to trust them again.
Dave Chappelle pointed out in his latest standup that those we depend upon for information lie to us. CNN, Fox News and the
like are all meant to polarize the citizens. Obviously it has been working!
I had this discussion with my best friend in March. I was questioning how is it the masks can be useless for those trying to
prevent infections, but was efficient for those that had infection. Yet medical workers were using surgical masks while working
around covid patients. It was easy to conclude that it was to prevent panic buying. Even if the MSM was truthful (I do not condone
them lying), IMO people would have still bought out all of the masks. Just as they did with all the toilet paper and hand sanitizer.
Bikes at large U.S. retailers like Wal-Mart and Target have been missing from shelves for
weeks. Independent shops are also doing "brisk business" and are selling out of bikes,
according to
AP . In fact, over the last two months, bike sales have seen their biggest spike since the
oil crisis of the 1970s.
Ending Emergency Unemployment Insurance Supplements
By DEAN BAKER
The Republicans have been working hard to ensure that the $600 weekly supplement to
unemployment insurance benefits, which was put in place as part of the pandemic rescue
package, is not extended beyond the current July 31 cutoff. They argue that we need
people to return to work.
They do have a point. The supplement is equivalent to pay of $15 an hour for someone
working a 40-hour week, and this is in addition to a regular benefit that is typically
equal to 40 to 50 percent of workers' pay. The supplement translates into an even larger
hourly pay rate for workers putting in shorter workweeks, which was the case for most
laid off workers in the restaurant and retail sectors.
It is hard for employers in traditionally low paying sectors to match these pay rates.
Even those of us who are big proponents of higher minimum wages would not advocate a jump
to more than $20 an hour at a point when businesses are crippled by the pandemic.
However, there is also the point that we don't want workers to have to expose
themselves to the coronavirus. That was the reason for the generous supplement. We wanted
to make sure that workers, who in many cases were legally prevented from working, did not
suffer as a result.
There is an obvious solution here. Suppose we reduce or end the supplement in areas
where the pandemic is under control.
This would not be determined by some Trumpian declaration that the pandemic is over,
but by solid data. The obvious metric would be positive test rates. Suppose that the
supplement was reduced or eliminated in states or counties where the positive test rate
is less than 5 percent. (This may not be the right rate.) This would mean that workers
going back to work would face relatively little risk of contracting the virus. It would
also give states incentive to conduct vigorous testing programs, as well as other control
measures, in order to get their positive rates down.
Our unemployment insurance system is badly broken and it would be desirable to have
more generous benefits, and also to focus more on work sharing, as other countries have
done. We can recognize this point and still agree that an arbitrary supplement to all
benefits is not the right long-term fix even if it was very good policy in the
pandemic.
However, low-wage workers were two to three times more likely than high-wage workers –
workers earning over $40/hour – to lack other forms of protections, including access to
masks, hand sanitizer, training on how to prevent Covid-19 transmission or regular hand-washing
opportunities.
L ow Wages, High Rates of Infection
In our study, we surveyed over 1,600 essential workers in western Massachusetts,
a hot spot for Covid-19 , who were at work between April 17 and April 24, 2020. We wanted
to learn about the experiences at work and at home of those who stayed on the job.
We reached essential workers through targeted Facebook advertisements, a method that allows
researchers to engage with emerging or hard-to-reach groups of people .
Although they do essential jobs, many essential workers are low-wage, earning under $20 an
hour. While there are several ways to define low-wage, this is the definition we used in our
study.
Infection risks & Food Insecurity
Not surprisingly, low-wage workers reported feeling less safe at work than high-wage
workers. While 44 percent of high-wage workers reported not feeling safe, this percentage
increased by 10 points to 54 percent for low wage workers.
Low wages were also a key indicator of food security. One in three low-wage respondents
reported that they were unable to provide for themselves or their family in mid-April.
One of our survey respondents wrote, "We are risking infecting our family by working, and
they don't give us anything extra in our paychecks to be able to buy more food. What we earn is
for paying rent, electricity, insurance, and the rest is barely enough to buy food."
Others wrote that unemployment checks would be higher than they are paid as essential
workers.
Over the past few months, Covid-19 has exposed and exacerbated inequities, including the
safety of low-wage workers. From our perspective, safety is not just an issue for essential
workers' health. It fundamentally impacts our ability to reopen and stay open.
And not only do the higher paid have better ppe, they don't even need ppe in most cases,
because they're working AT HOME, that's the best advantage of all that they enjoy. And if you
narrowed it down to under 15$, the inequality would be even greater. Something that makes me
lose faith in people is when I grocery shop and half of the customers don't wear ppe, stupid
for themselves, but the equivalent of giving the middle finger to store employees. While our
government and business leaders have failed us, our own citizens are failing to be cautious
also, it drives me crazy, the pandemic here is so much worse than it has to be, so much is
and has been preventable, but it'll never get better until everybody is on the same page.
After all these months of information about how the respiratory virus spreads available to
anybody, those who still go out regularly w/o ppe I can only assume are puppets of
conservative media, or just really, really dumb, and perhaps both.
The practical benefit is small: the cargo is modest amounts of PPE that could have been
delivered by truck in about 20 minutes. But this is a big deal, because it required a waiver
from the FAA for the planes to operate fully autonomously and beyond visual line-of-sight --
just launch and forget. It is happening in proximity to an airport no less.
The article notes it's America's "first drone delivery operation to be approved to fly in
airspace where all air traffic is actively managed by the FAA."
But meanwhile, another
headline this week at the Washington Post tells us that Google-backed drones "will drop library
books so kids in Virginia can do their summer reading." Wing, a company owned by Google parent
Alphabet, started delivering household goods and meals [and prescriptions] from Walgreens and
local restaurants to a limited area of the southwest Virginia town that covers several thousand
homes last October. The company has seen a jump in demand during the pandemic as people are
increasingly staying home and avoiding crowded spaces like grocery stores, said Keith Heyde,
head of Virginia operations for Wing. The company reached a high of 1,000 deliveries globally
in a single week this spring, he said.
And they're not the only companies experimenting with drone deliveries, according to Forbes:
UPS and CVS have also paired up with a focus on medical products. The two companies are
partnering to use drones to deliver prescriptions to residents of The Villages in Florida, one
of the country's biggest retirement communities. The deliveries come from a CVS store about a
half mile away and mark the first paid residential deliveries by UPS's drone unit Flight
Forward. The drones drop the prescriptions to a central location, where a Flight Forward
employee will ferry them by golf cart to homes.
Chennai, India, and Surabaya, Indonesia have tried using drones to spray disinfectant in
crowded cities. But Forbes reports that around the world, "the biggest use case has been the
deployment of drones to enforce social distancing and monitor crowds." Although at least one
Paris prefect complains that there's still one problem with the drones. "Sometimes they are
attacked by birds, which mistake them for rivals."
The origin of this panic seems to have been a report from CNN on January 26 of an
alleged statement by China's health minister Ma Xiaowei that people who are (supposedly)
infected by the virus can infect others without themselves showing any symptoms of illness.
If that were true then you could be infected just by walking down the street -- clearly a
reason to panic. Ma didn't explain why he thought the virus can be spread before someone
has symptoms, but that didn't stop Dr. William Schaffner, a longtime adviser to the CDC,
from taking this claim seriously -- in effect endorsing it. Other CDC officials took up the
theme. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases picked up the ball and ran with it. Dr. Fauci is quoted as saying, "the Chinese
did not tell U.S. health authorities that the virus could spread before someone is
symptomatic", thus implicitly suggesting that indeed that was the case. This was denied by
epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm, who stated, "I know of no evidence in 17 years of
working with coronaviruses ... where anyone has been found to be infectious during their
incubation period." On January 30 the New England Journal of Medicine published a
letter from 16 German doctors claiming that a symptomless Chinese woman (arriving from
China) had infected a German man in Munich, but when they got around to actually asking
her, she said that while in Munich she had in fact shown symptoms, which worsened on her
return to China. Thanks to CNN, Dr. Fauci,and the German doctors, the rumor of symptomless
transition morphed into "fact" among government officials and the general public. From then
on the MSM issued increasingly alarming reports of deaths due to this (allegedly) new
illness, ignoring the fact that people were (as usual) dying of the (not reported) seasonal
flu.
John Nolte: Dr.
Fauci Is Either a Liar or a Fraud And for a devastating exposé of the 36-year
career of this vile quack doctor see the final article in William Engdahl's Covid article
compilation
here .
In February, as Italy began reporting infections, Prof. Neil Ferguson, Head of the
Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London, dusted off a
computer program he had written 15 years ago implementing a model for infectious disease
spreading. Using data available from Italy he concluded (following his history of vastly
over-estimating deaths in previous epidemics) that 510,000 people (2.5 million in the U.S.)
could die if the U.K. government didn't abandon its strategy at that time of allowing the
disease to spread. On February 23 in Italy the first lockdowns and compulsory "social
distancing" began. Early in March Britain also imposed lockdowns, later extended to the
entire U.K., despite the fact that Prof. Ferguson had revised his death toll estimate from
510,000 down to 20,000.
The term "lockdown" normally means keeping prisoners locked down in their cells,
typically following a riot. It was also used in the MSM following the Boston Marathon
Bombing in 2013 (likely a false flag) to confine people to their homes until given
permission to come out -- a trial run?
On March 7 one Dr. James Lawler (U. of University Medical Center) misinformed the world
(to the delight of the MSM) that about 96 million Americans could become infected with
coronavirus, of whom about half a million would die. On March 11 the WHO, after much delay,
declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. On March 15 New York mayor Bill de Blasio declared
(with no evidence) that the virus can spread rapidly through "close interactions," and
issued an order (which was soon after repeated by governors of many other states) to close
restaurants, bars and cafes. On March 16 most European countries imposed lockdowns and
border closures. On March 20 New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (along with governors of many
other states) shut down all "non-essential businesses", thereby depriving millions of
people of their jobs and their livelihoods, leading to bankruptcies and suicides. By March
30 approximately 265 million Americans were under indefinite lockdown and martial law in
all but name.
In late April a 'revised' version of the computer code written by Ferguson to predict
510,000 deaths in the U.K. was released to the GitHub code repository. It was examined
by an anonymous ex-Google software engineer, who found numerous flaws and bugs, in
particular that, from the same input data the program would produce very different outputs.
This makes it useless for scientific purposes, and also worse than useless as a basis for
political decisions (and consequently as a justification for government orders). Further
details at
Computer model that locked down the world turns out to be sh*tcode.
A
comment (by Frito) on Zero Hedge about Ferguson's shoddy code:
The thing that really has me pissed off, is that my government [the U.K.] (and many
others around the world), jumped in and spent hundreds of billions of dollars and
suspended the civil liberties of millions of people indefinitely and destroyed the
livelihoods of countless small business people based on just one unverified source [that
is, Ferguson]. There was ZERO due diligence done. The first thing that should have been
done was to require the production of the full source code for the simulation software
(as it was run, not this "cleaned up" stuff), and all input data so that it could be
verified. If they didn't want to provide it, then the simulation results should have been
discarded.
Ferguson's "scientific" advice was bogus, and Boris Johnson was criminally negligent in
accepting it and ordering the lockdown of the entire U.K. But will they ever see jail time
for wrecking the U.K. economy and ruining the lives of millions of people? No way.
This is one of the critical issues involving office workers' return to on-site operations
imho.
Another: Pre-boarding crowding, especially if a limit on no. of passengers per trip is
imposed.
Another: Office buildings whose windows don't open.
So to recap, office workers will be faced with the following sources of possible
infection: (a) public transportation (most use the subway); (b) waiting in crowds for the
elevator; (c) the elevator; (d) the office itself.
One of my children works in NYC on the 15th floor of a 20-floor building. The organization
has approx. 200 employees. There are three elevators serving these 20 floors, one of which is
permanently out of service, leaving two (one or the other of which is also out of order on
any given day).
Assuming about 200 people working on each floor, that's 4,000 people to get up (and down)
daily. With 5 persons per trip, that's 800 trips – 400 per elevator, assuming both are
in service (infrequent).
Just for one floor, an elevator would require 40 trips (40 x 5 = 200); assuming 3 min. per
trip, that's 120 minutes total, i.e. 2 hours to get a single floor of employees up in
(relatively) safe conditions if only one elevator is functional, and an hour if both are.
And that's before an employee has even started their workday in an open-plan office space
without outside ventilation.
My wife's work, at 18 floors, had an estimated 3.5 hours to get everyone into the building
following all procedures, and then another 3.5 to get everyone out. It's just not feasible.
She is wfh through 2020, and likely until we totally give up on protections.
This article gives good reasons for the success of Paris and Japan public transit in
avoiding becoming superspreader sites – maybe worth noting in a discussion around
riding elevators:
The article completely misses the point. The primary transmission of the virus is not by
touching surfaces. It's by inhaling droplets. COVID-19 could be stopped in its tracks if
everyone simply wore a mask.
It needn't even be an N-95. Those cheap surgical masks that are in boxes outside hospital
rooms will catch saliva and prevent it from being transmitted.
The illustration shows a person, not wearing a mask!
Repeat this slogan until it sinks in: MY MASK PROTECTS YOU. YOUR MASK PROTECTS ME. WEAR A
MASK.
Then you won't have to walk up and down 40 flights of stairs or try social distancing in
an elevator box.
The mask problem in the USA has a much simpler origin: the USA simply don't have the means to
give masks for everyone anymore. It is heavily deindustrialized.
The CDC actually advised against wearing masks until April 6, even though there were studies
showing that some types of home-made masks were 70% effective against molecules the size of
Corona. N95 were found to be 95% effective.
Wearing a mask helps with protecting oneself but even more importantly helps to protect
others. One might be carrying and spreading the disease without knowing it. We all release
fine droplets when we speak, sneeze or cough. Masks prevent one's droplets from spreading
out.
There was and still is a lot of cultural resistance in 'western' societies to wearing
masks even as it seem obvious that masks help to prevent infections. But while there was
evidence that masks work in certain situation there was no scientific research that
showed the effects general mask wearing would have on the growth of the epidemic. We did not
know how much general mask wearing would 'flatten the curve'.
We now have a sound answer. There is now a study that compares a city which ordered everyone to
wear masks with a similar city that had no 'mask-up' order during the same period of the
epidemic.
On April 6 the German city of Jena with a population of 110,000 people ordered everyone to
wear a mask in all public settings. The announcement of the order was made
a week earlier and was followed by a local awareness campaign - "Jena wears mask!"
No other city in Germany did this at the time. The states of Germany only ordered
mandatory mask wearing between April 22 and 26.
For 20 days Jena was different than the rest of the country but experienced the same
epidemic. That made it possible to test the effect the mask order had on the number of new
cases in Jena.
To be able to make a one to one comparison with Jena researchers from the University of
Mainz constructed a 'synthetic city' of the same size and demographic characteristics as Jena
from the weighted data of six other German cities (selected from a bigger pool). They then
compared the Covid-19 case data from Jena with the case data from the synthetic city.
At the beginning of the pandemic in Germany the synthetic city and Jena had similar
developments. But ten days after the announcement of the order and four days after its
mandatory implementation the case numbers in Jena dropped away from those of the comparison
city.
The people in Jena started to wear masks before other German cities did so. It nearly
immediately paid off.
At the time of the announcement of the mask campaign Jena and the synthetic control city
each had 93 cases. On April 6 Jena had 142 registered cases compared to 143 cases in the
synthetic control city. On April 26 Jena counted 158 cases and the synthetic control city had
205 cases. It shows a significant reduction in the growth of the epidemic.
The authors conclude:
We believe that the reduction in the growth rates of infections by 40% to 60% is our best
estimate of the effects of face masks.
...
We should also stress that 40 to 60% might still be a lower bound. The daily growth rates
in the number of infections when face masks were introduced was around 2 to 3%. These are
very low growth rates compared to the early days of the epidemic in Germany, where daily
growth rates also lay above 50%. One might therefore conjecture that the effects might have
been even greater if masks had been introduced earlier.
Japan and South Korea both brought the epidemic under control without ordering harsh
lockdowns. The people there all wore masks from very early on even without being ordered to
do so. The two countries also did extensive testing and contact tracing for each new case.
Together these measures were enough to stop the outbreak.
Why didn't we copy them?
It was 'western' arrogance that prevented our societies from learning from China and other
Asian societies. We should have used the time China had given us .
The economic and human price for not having done so is very high. No doubt the masks help in
preventing the spread when used properly, as well as gloves and distancing, but I wouldn't
put too much faith in any studies.
The lockdown approaches themselves may have done more, but even those vary in method from
one state to the next. Additionally, closing of borders to potential carriers from other
countries seems important, as well as the virulence of the particular strain. Then there
seems to be a massive divergence in counting and testing for the virus and recording virus
deaths.
There are a lot of variables to control for an reliable study. And I seriously doubt any
study has done so, particularly given the politicization of the crisis and the venal
opportunism of Big Pharma and its bought and paid for medical journals.
Western arrogance, sure, but is that the most important factor?
Since US peons live in a democracy, let's review the meeting minutes and memos and emails
of our dear leaders to see what their thinking was. Oh wait. There are no meeting minutes.
Everything is secret and opaque so as to not worry the pretty little heads of peons.
Guess we are once again reduced to speculation and gossip. Let the rumors begin.
I don't think the mask problem has anything to do with Western arrogance. Not at all.
The mask problem has a much simpler origin: the Western nations simply don't have the
means to give masks for everyone anymore. It is heavily deindustrialized.
Had they had mask manufacturing sectors at home, you bet your soul the Western governments
would be buying them at inflated prices (to enrich the local capitalist) and enforce their
use with an enthusiasm never seen before. A cultural shift towards daily mask use would
sprout overnight and no westerner would complain.
I know this because we have countless examples in History. The substitution of alcoholic
beverages for tea in industrial England. The creation of the leisure and entertainment
industries during the rise of Fordism. The invention of the concepts of infancy and
adolescence. Etc. etc. etc.
We observed the lack of masks crisis in the West immediately. The USA begun to intercept
ships loaded with masks (and ventilators) from China in Malaysia. Spain and France begun to
resort to Aliexpress test kits to have the quantity necessary and lost the money with subpar
masks and kits. Healthcare workers are without adequate PPE in the UK, USA and probably many
other Western countries (at least, I've never seen any Western doctor or nurse with nearly
the equipment of their Chinese counterparts).
The West's problem is called deindustrialization. Culture is always fixable - survival
generally being the best teacher. But lack of resources cannot be solved just with sheer
will.
Ergo amongst other things, your royal "we" also believed they could pin the deaths and
economic pain on Trump alone and then ride that all the way to an election victory on
November 3.
And now it has backfired/not gone as planned.
If journalists are worried about Covid-19 all over again, why don't they ask their beloved
Fauci why he didn't tell the rioters and looters to wear a face mask or "social distance"
during last week when they were all outside running amok and spreading Covid-19?
But he suddenly pops up this week and the fear mongering starts again... and the feeble
fall in line again lol
Anyway. Maybe Dr Fauci will give a press conference next week dressed in Kente
clothing....
I swear 2020 is like we are living in a simulation lol
The CDC actually advised against wearing masks until April 6, even though there were studies
showing that some types of home-made masks were 70% effective against molecules the size of
Corona. N95 were found to be 95% effective.
What stupidity!!! Who in his right mind would counsel against using a 75% effective mask,
when it was the only readily available option?!?
It's like counseling against wearing condoms because they're not 100% effective.
The virus has peaked in Germany a long time ago and in fact before the lockdown. By now, herd
immunity is reached, achieved by about half, or more, of the population not being susceptible
to this type of coronavirus. A fair amount, perhaps 60%, never were due to background
immunity from prior conoravirus infections, others have built it since, most of those without
realising as symptoms or rare and if occurring, mostly mild. The authorities can find as many
"cases" as they want, at any day they want, by adjusting testing activity. It's the most
easily manipulated number. Seeing our host trust precisely that number (and base a story on
it) from a government that has been persistently lying about this winter's flu, and has
broken the constitution multiple times to ram through the measures, is surprising.
Deaths from delayed surgeries and medical treatments are estimated up to 125,000 - in
Germany alone, suicides are already spiking. Abuse of children and women at home is at
alarming levels, doctors report injuries so severe as usually seen in car crashs.
The measures are nothing short of carefully planned (Event 201), premeditated mass
murder.
What about masks? Here a snapshot of the science on it:
On the effectiveness of masks
Regardless of the comparatively low lethality of Covid19 in the general population (see
above), there is still no scientific evidence for the effectiveness of masks in healthy and
asymptomatic people in everyday life.
A cross-country study by the University of East Anglia came to the conclusion that a mask
requirement was of no benefit and could even increase the risk of infection.
Two US professors and experts in respiratory and infection protection from the University
of Illinois explain in an essay that respiratory masks have no effect in everyday life,
neither as self-protection nor to protect third parties (so-called source control). The
widespread use of masks didn't prevent the outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan, either.
A study from April 2020 in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine came to the conclusion
that neither fabric masks nor surgical masks can prevent the spread of the Covid19 virus by
coughing.
An article in the New England Journal of Medicine from May 2020 also comes to the
conclusion that respiratory masks offer little or no protection in everyday life. The call
for a mask requirement is described as an "irrational fear reflex".
A May 2020 meta-study on pandemic influenza published by the U.S. CDC also found that
respirators had no effect.
The WHO moreover declared in June that truly "asymptomatic transmission" is in fact "very
rare", as data from numerous countries showed. Some of the few confirmed cases were due to
direct body contact, i.e. shaking hands or kissing.
In Austria, the mask requirement in retail and catering will be lifted again from
mid-June. A mask requirement was never introduced in Sweden because it "does not offer
additional protection for the population", as the health authority explained.
And we must remember what Nassim Taleb pointed out...even if your mask is only 30% effective,
if the person you're interacting with also has a mask which is only 30% effective, the
multiplicative properties of probability means the actual probability of neither of you
getting infected is much greater than 30%.
I ordered my first batch of ten masks from Aliexpress on April 4, followed by an order of
five more (expensive ones at $7 each) from LA Police Gear on April 6 and five more from LAPG
on April 14. So I have enough masks to rotate them daily for two weeks. So I don't have to
worry about washing them or whatever, per the advice of the guy who invented the filter who
said leaving a mask unused for at least 4-5 days should be sufficient to to enable any
collected virus particles to die.
As for the study, I'm not sure it is reliable, given the possible factors surrounding
entire cities. A "simulated city" just might not be accurate enough, especially when
referring to relatively low numbers of cases per city. It would be more persuasive if there
was a country that wore masks and one that didn't. But then we've already seen that: the US
versus any Asian country.
In my observations, most people are wearing masks, but they seem to be doing so rather
haphazardly. A lot of people wear them for a bit, then let them hang around their necks when
they get tired of the heat buildup inside the mask. I had to stop yesterday during a supply
run when my nose started running and I had to shift the mask off partly in order to deal with
that. That made me concerned coming close to my nose with a tissue, not knowing whether there
might be any virus particles on the plastic gloves covering my hands. Normally I don't touch
my face when out of my room, and once back in the room I immediately wash my hands, remove
the mask, then apply hand sanitizer. Interrupting that process did not make me happy.
A lot of people, especially blacks and the homeless, aren't wearing masks at all. The
homeless obviously have little ability to acquire them (at least manufactured ones), and a
certain number of lower-class blacks are seemingly oblivious to the risk, despite blacks
being hit harder than whites by the virus.
In fact, the nationwide decline in "the curve" of daily new cases, from a peak of 35,000 in
early April to around 20,000 in recent weeks, has been obfuscated by the fact that four
states with 40% of the nationwide case total -- New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and
Illinois -- experienced significant declines.
"That is hiding the fact that the majority of other states are either increasing their
numbers or fluctuating in fits and starts around a peak," says Mark Cameron, PhD, an
immunologist and medical researcher in the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve
University in Ohio. "Our victory lap has started too quickly."
The nationwide curve was flattened thanks to stay-at-home orders and other preventive
measures, Cameron says. But rather than continuing to bend the curve down, as many other
countries have done, ours is on a "disappointing plateau," he says, a "slow burn" that's
putting seeds of the virus in every nook and cranny of the country.
That means the current wave of infections could be far from over, Cameron says. It might
simply persist at current daily case levels, or even possibly swell this summer and then,
if it recedes at all, roar back as a larger wave this fall.
..but: Despite this evidence, a group called "masks4all", which was founded by a "young
leader" of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Davos, is advocating worldwide mask requirements.
Several governments and the WHO appear to be responding to this campaign.
While for medical purposes it's a waste of time and resources (might even lead to
additional health problems), the masks are more likely to have a psychological or political
function ("muzzle" or "visible sign of obedience") and that wearing them frequently.
A few days ago, I was talking to someone for work, and they started ranting about how the
"whole coronavirus thing" is a conspiracy. How it's blown out of proportion and isn't any
worse than the seasonal flu. I inwardly rolled my eyes. Later that day, I mocked him while
talking to my wife.
But not so long ago, I was that guy. Sure, he's got to have his fact-resistance turned
up to a nine or ten to still be in denial at this point. But it would be hypocritical of me
to get too self-congratulatory.
(MSM actually reflects advice not too badly; plus, it is what the public saw.)
April 6. WHO publishes 'interim guidance.' PDF.
excerpt.
"Studies of human coronaviruses provide evidence that the use of a medical mask can
prevent the spread of infectious droplets from an infected person to someone else and
potential contamination of the environment by these droplets. There is limited evidence that
wearing a medical mask by healthy individuals in the households or among contacts of a sick
patient, or among attendees of mass gatherings may be beneficial as a preventive measure.
However, there is currently no evidence that wearing a mask (whether medical or other types)
by healthy persons in the wider community setting, including universal community masking, can
prevent them from infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19. .. Medical masks
should be reserved for health care workers. .The use of medical masks in the community may
create a false sense of security "
"synthetic control city": total bullshit. So many arbitrary parameters you can get any result
you like. Why not do a real comparison?
And: Japan had no "extensive testing and contact tracing" at all. In fact Japan had the
LEAST testing of all industrial countries. No testing, no panic, no problems.
Wuhan is using way more masks than Japan (also due to air pollution). How did that stop
the outbreak?? Not at all.
MoA has been consistently wrong with every aspect of this pandemic. Even worse, it totally
failed to recognize the huge political dimension.
Many states do not have the contact tracing capacity needed to reopen safely. At the
beginning of May, NPR created a map of states whose contact tracing forces met the need
estimated by public health officials, and the vast majority did not meet them. Some states
are working to increase their contact tracing capacity, but some experts interviewed by
STAT news cautioned that it's not enough.
Bottom line: The US botched the initial response by being too slow, and it is not botching
the re-opening. We can assume it will botch the second wave. Trump has already said there
will be no lockdown even for a second wave (not that it matters what he says now.)
It's like the old line: "Cheer up, things could be worse. So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse." Well, I didn't bother "cheering up" in the first place. My
procedures to deal with this remain in place and will remain in place until there is 1) a
vaccine, or 2) an effective treatment that prevents death and severe long-term effects of
infection.
Thanks b! The study proves the obvious, IMO. The behavior exhibited by those inhabiting
Western nations proves the degree with which they care for themselves, their families, and
their neighbors in the most damning manner. Clearly collectivist societies will perform
better than individualist societies, all other things being equal.
Trailer Trash @2--
I beg to differ as there're two very good timelines documenting TrumpCo actions in the run
up to the outbreak that proves beyond reasonable doubt that the policy employed was a
Treasonous Do Nothing Policy that runs totally against the rationale for the Constitution and
the government it established--the very instrument Trump swore to obey and uphold. I've
incorporated both into the essay I'm currently writing.
This one compiled by Raw Story is the more detailed of the two as this example
shows:
"On February 1, 2018, the Washington Post reported that 'CDC to cut by 80 percent efforts
to prevent global disease outbreak' (6): 'The global health section of the CDC was so
drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off (7) and the number of countries
it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10. (8) Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S.
Agency for International Development and its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire
from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. (9) And though Congress has so
far managed to block Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service
Commissioned Corps by 40 percent (10), the disease-fighting cadres have steadily eroded as
retiring officers go unreplaced.'"
And as you see from the date, that was just the beginning of the dismantling of what was
erected to "provide for the common defence."
Posted by: poor moa | Jun 11 2020 20:47 utc | 14 Wuhan is using way more masks than Japan
(also due to air pollution). How did that stop the outbreak?? Not at all.
When the outbreak started, Wuhan hospitals were not using KN95 - they were using surgical
masks. Thousands of medical personnel were infected.
When the Chinese government brought in scores of thousands of additional medical
personnel, they wore KN95 masks. None were infected.
Actually, the "study" you cite (it's not published anyway) refutes itself right away. They
say all German cities introduced masks between April 20 and 29. Then why did cases not drop
to zero as they claim for Jena? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Germany
Cases in Arizona are up 240% in last two weeks and hospitalizations are up 77% this past
month, 31% this week alone. The positive rate for Covid-19 testing is increasing. That's
not a great combination.
The largest hospital system in the state has been ringing the alarm. That they are
running short of ICU capacity. Loudly.
Meanwhile, other states and Puerto Rico have had their largest number of daily cases since
this started, according to the Washington Post.
Yet we still have idiots proclaiming their bullshit here. b is going to have to do a lot
of "cleansing" today.
Maria Van Kerkhove, PhD, the World Health Organization's technical lead for the coronavirus
response and head of the emerging diseases and zoonoses unit, clarified that when she said
asymptomatic spread was "very rare" on Monday, that she was answering a question asked in a
presser, and not sharing an official WHO policy or statement.
She added that some modeling groups have estimated that 40% of transmission may be due
to asymptomatic spread, but that is a mathematical modeling estimate and a definitive
answer is still unknown, in part because data from contact tracing studies remains
limited.
It's important to note that asymptomatic people who never exhibit signs of Covid-19 are
different from pre-symptomatic people who initially don't have symptoms but develop them
later. It's difficult, from a research standpoint, to tease these two groups apart.
Masks are fine. They build confidence when people are threatened with an awful death and
where 'experts' give conficting advice. They are personaly empowering. Wear one now.
The WHO is not looking good.
The Lancet and NEJM are trashed.
The China response was a brilliant example to the world.
The mask is a mighty useful response.
Sunlight is wonderful.
Alright, on page 28 in annex C they compare the effect of masks in other German cities, and
found no effect. In some cities infections got even worse after introducing masks. It is
clear Jena is a special case, perhaps they stopped testing or people stopped interacting or
whatever.
The study is another fraud, and Moa once again fell for it. What a shame. I'm sure he
didn't even read until page 28.
I hope you won't delete my comments, everybody should decide for themselves if this study
has any merit.
The WHO stated the obvious: the vast majority of people remain asymptomatic, and asymptomatic
people don't spread the virus (which is why children don't spread the virus). Pre-symptomatic
is possible if you get really close, but this is true for common cold as well.
So what paranoid folks like you really need to show is if mandatory mask is any better
than masks only for sick people or sick people simply staying home. Hint: it isn't.
Quote from the "study": "In addition to Jena, we test for treatment effects in Nordhausen,
Rottweil, Main-Kinzig-Kreis, and Wolfsburg (compare Figure 1). --- As the figure shows, the
result is 2:1:1. Rottweil and Wolfsburg display a positive effect of mandatory mask wearing,
just as Jena. The results in Nordhausen are very small or unclear. In the region of
Main-Kinzig, it even seems to be the case that masks increased the number of cases relative
to the synthetic control group. " (page 28)
So obviously, masks aren't important at all. Other factors are at play.
I blame it on the communists - Jena is in what was formerly East Germany and the inhabitants
of Jena are still oppressed by their communist upbringing. Communism in Jena must be rooted
out and the German citizens of Jena must be free to die from COVID-19 just like the
freedom-loving morons in the good old U S of A, y'all. Yee haw. USA! USA! USA! Would you go
all the way for the U.S.A?
If journalists are worried about Covid-19 all over again, why don't they ask their beloved
Fauci why he didn't tell the rioters and looters to wear a face mask or "social distance"
during last week when they were all outside running amok and spreading Covid-19?
But he suddenly pops up this week and the fear mongering starts again... and the feeble
fall in line again lol
Anyway. Maybe Dr Fauci will give a press conference next week dressed in Kente
clothing....
I swear 2020 is like we are living in a simulation lol
He intentionally broke the moratorium on the gain of function research studies and then
paid 3.7 million to china's virology lab in Wuhan to continue it. Where did this pandemic
start from again? He is guilty and should be thrown into a pit.
And Dr. Faucci is still lieing when he says that he didn't realize that it was so
transmittable early on because he was heavily invested in the Wuhan Lab for a long time
before the outbreak! And heavily invested in the WHO at the same time!
The only issue that I see is that Dr. Fauci wasn't lied too by the W.H.O. He was in full
know of what was going on and because of his role in the research in China, he went along
with the the guidelines the W.H.O. Its all a cover up and Dr. Fauci needs to be investigated
as well.
He was told in USA to stop developing covid 19 in the USA So.... he paid to send the
unfinished virus to China And they finished the job. Research & let me know if this isn't
the truth . If it is true find out why he did & then before you cut off his head for
treason inject him with vaccines he developed & leave for 1 year & watch results
Fauci is entirely too elderly (and out of experience) to be making judgement calls for the
entire country. One man alone should not be making decisions as he is doing.
"... The purpose of the mask is that if the wearer has the virus and is a carrier, the mask protects others from that carrier. The person infected wearing a mask coughs, splutters, sneezes into the mask which captures most of virus and reduces its spread to other people. ..."
The thing about masks is not that it protects the wearer, of
course, it does not protect the wearer, especially with the extra fiddling that Fauci
alludes to.
The purpose of the mask is that if the wearer has the virus and is a carrier, the mask
protects others from that carrier. The person infected wearing a mask coughs, splutters,
sneezes into the mask which captures most of virus and reduces its spread to other
people.
Hospital staff have traditionally worn masks to protect patients, who may have a poor
immune system, from any illness that the doctor/nurse may be carrying.
I have done lots of travelling over the past few months, and
have not seen one person coughing or sneezing. Fauci said very clearly that people should
not be wearing masks. If someone thinks they are infected with a virus, they should not
being going out in public.
Reply
Because I completely blocked out mainstream media when the
quarantine started, this is actually the first time I've heard Fauci speak he reminds me of
Mel Brooks or of some bad actor in a bad sit-com he doesn't seem that smart is he smart?
Big news in CA is that "Grinning" Gavin Newsom is on the verge of being sued by the
PROFESSIONAL BEAUTY FEDERATION OF CA a coalition of tens of thousands of nail salons who
feel that Newsom is treating them unfairly on top of that, 80% of CA nail salons are
operated by Vietnamese immigrants, who are among the most patriotic individuals in America
the groundswell against Newsom is finally palpable
"The top teams rushing to develop coronavirus vaccines are alerting governments, health
officials and shareholders that they may have a big problem : The outbreaks in their countries
may be getting too small to quickly determine whether vaccines work
A leader of the Oxford University group, one of the furthest ahead with human trials, admits
the reality is paradoxical, even "bizarre," but said the declining numbers of new infections
this summer could be one of the big hurdles vaccine developers face in the global race to beat
down the virus.
Even as new cases are growing worldwide, transmission rates are falling in Britain, China
and many of the hardest-hit regions in the United States -- the three countries that have
experimental vaccines ready to move into large-scale human testing in June, July and August."
Washpost
---------------
Well, pilgrims it would seem that the Post staff does not see the irony in their own
writing, or perhaps they do. There have been scattered evidences of rationality there lately.
Even as Democrat governors and mayors across the country drag their feet on the re-opening of
the American economy, infection rates are falling. In the Faucibirxist view of things
everything depends on vaccine development (or herd immunity post holocaust). But, alas there
just aren't enough new, vibrant infections to make development of the vaccines convenient. What
will happen to the flow of government money to these projects if this phenomenon becomes
general knowledge. Someone at the Post should be disciplined for this indiscretion. pl
"What will happen to the flow of government money to these projects if this phenomenon
becomes general knowledge."
Well Fauci is almost 80 so I think he's set for life. I hear the left wants lots of
redevelopment funds and jobs programs, with the attendant opportunities for graft that comes
with them, for thier cities which we are all assured had neither rioting nor looting.
Thank you Col. Lang for all the posts on novel coronavirus.
For shining light on this, this utter failure by the medical community and their various
and sundry enablers in government and in business.
On these liars and charlatans and killers and criminals.
The video below is about an hour long. It is a nurse, who worked in NYC hospital, the
alleged epi center of epi centers.
She basically says, without saying directly, but points to the fact that doctors were
murdering patients there, it seems.
She paints a picture of doctors not as scientists but as zealots, as neo neanderthals, as
craven monsters, who care not about life, the elderly, the sick, the least among us.
As Nurse Ratchets
Towards the end of video, she recounts her last day at this hospital, discussing a patient
she had nursed for many days, and who was doing fine, making progress, . . . and how she was
removed from his bed on direct orders, sent to the ER where she was not assigned, and 20
minutes later, the man she was caring for is dead.
These sorts of stories abound; this rage is not going away anytime soon. This is the rage,
and what caused it, that our "lords and masters" who censor us and tell us black is white,
and want to destroy our country. . . this is the rage they don't want to see expressed and
exposed. Will they get their way?
Well...they can always test their vaccines in the USA. We seem not to be faring as well and
can help out. (I believe this is a glass half-full moment.)
Trump needs to stop the $600 a week federal bonus to the unemployed. My neighbor told me
about how his daughter-in-law worked one day a week as a barmaid before the virus shut the
bar down and made a little over a hundred a week. Oregon unemployment pays her 150 a week and
with the added 600 she now makes over 7 times what she did working. How many protesters and
rioters are just as flush getting paid to party in the street? Most i'd say. That makes these
government funded protests a powerful voice and recruitment tool for the Democratic Party.
Ending the federal subsidy to the unemployed would reduce, if not stop, the demonstrations
and mau-mauing of the country.
Absolutely. There were howls of protests before Minneapolis when Georgia, Florida and
Texas started tellling people that if they recieved a recall to work notice from an employer
and refused to go they would be considered a voluntary quit and no longer eligable for
unemployment insurance payments. They'll howl again when they figure out this is all taxable
income.
Take everything the WaPo claims with a grain of salt. There is no real worry over lower covid
infections. What made Covid decrease was the lockdowns. Remove the lockdowns and covid
infection rates will climb, as we are seeing in the already reopened states.
Then when fall rolls around, and people are stuck indoors again, rates will skyrocket.
There will be plenty of test subjects for a vaccine.
With the spread rate of the coronavirus, any outbreak of the infection will peter out once
the total immunity rate of the population approaches 65-70 percent.
In Bergamo (Italy), 57 percent a population sample have tested positive for coronavirus
antibodies, which means that they must have had the infection before and are now most likely
immune.
If you are a Karen, then don't listen to me, but take it from the German government's very
own propaganda outlet, Deutsche Welle:
"Out of nearly 10,000 Bergamo residents who had their blood tested between April 23 and
June 3, 57% had antibodies, indicating they had come into contact with the virus and
developed an immune response.
Health authorities said the sample size was 'sufficiently broad' to be a reliable
indicator of the presence of SARS-CoV-2 among Bergamo province's population."
So we had two major pandemic exercises last year projecting almost exactly what did happen
with the corona virus. First was Crimson Contagion Jan thru Aug 2019
Then Event 201 the international war gaming of a global pandemic almost exactly like what
happened which took place only months before the real pandemic on October 2019
"Black lives matter" should understand that obese people of color have been particularly hit
hard by the Coronavirus. The number of obese females in the protests is considerable.
One mitigating factor is that the protests were being held outdoors, where the virus could
have a tougher time transmitting between individuals.
Thousands of protesters, many without protective masks, have
gathered and marched in close proximity to each other. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes
the COVID-19 disease , is
chiefly transmitted via respiratory droplets that are spread when people talk, cough or
sneeze.
"Crowded protests, like any large gathering of people in a close space, can help facilitate
the spread of COVID-19, which is why it's so important participants wear masks, eye protection
and bring hand gel," Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at George Mason
University's Schar School of Policy and Government, wrote in an
email to The Washington Post .
Another prediction from Fauci. This "Black Lives Matter" vs coronavirus puzzle will unfold in
14 days from now. In any case quarantine was send into the dust bin.
Some protesters might pay the price for Dem Party sponsored protests
Fauci, who sits on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, says he finds the protests across
the nation "very concerning" and a "perfect recipe" for a surge in Covid-19
cases.
"... The British scientist known as Professor Lockdown has undermined the draconian policy he unleashed on the world by confessing that Britain hasn't fared any better in tackling the disease than the laid-back Scandis. Professor Neil Ferguson probably woke up this morning breathing a massive sigh of relief because he hadn't been ripped to shreds again in the British newspapers for this second time in just under a month – this time over his startling admission that there has been no significant difference in the levels of Covid-19 suppression when comparing the UK and Sweden. ..."
"... In other words, in the type of roundabout waffling way you'd expect from a bumbling boffin, the scientist – dubbed 'Professor Lockdown' after he cajoled Boris Johnson into bringing the British economy to a screeching halt – reckons Sweden has essentially coped very well without being forced into any draconian lockdown, thank you very much. ..."
"... At the moment, the biggest accusation they could face is needlessly making a hames (for those of you who aren't Irish, this means a 'big mess') of the economy. Even Sweden's state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell has since said that, while he regrets not implanting stricter measures to stop the spread of Covid-19, he "still would not have gone as far as other European countries did." ..."
"... He might've been dubbed "Dr Strangelove" after that embarrassing slip up – but now he just comes across as a nutty professor after his latest confession. These strong words might just come back to haunt BoJo when he next goes before the electorate. With a crippled economy thanks to the draconian measures, he's going to find the next election will be all about his mishandling of Covid-19, and specifically, "the economy, stupid." ..."
The British scientist known as Professor Lockdown has undermined the draconian policy he unleashed on
the world by confessing that Britain hasn't fared any better in tackling the disease than the
laid-back Scandis.
Professor Neil Ferguson probably woke up this morning breathing a massive sigh of relief because he
hadn't been ripped to shreds again in the British newspapers for this second time in just under a
month – this time over his startling admission that there has been no significant difference in the
levels of Covid-19 suppression when comparing the UK and Sweden.
During his
evidence
to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on Tuesday, he said:
"They
[Swedish scientists] came to a different policy conclusion based really on quite similar science. I
don't agree with it but scientifically they're not far from scientists in any part of the world."
He then acknowledged that the Swedish authorities had
"got a long way to the same effect"
without a full lockdown.
In other words, in the type of roundabout waffling way you'd expect from a bumbling boffin, the
scientist – dubbed 'Professor Lockdown' after he cajoled Boris Johnson into bringing the British
economy to a screeching halt – reckons Sweden has essentially coped very well without being forced
into any draconian lockdown, thank you very much.
So where was the indignation about how his recommendations f**ked up the economy and made people
prisoners in their own homes? It certainly wasn't to be seen splashed across any British front pages.
Indeed, it was hard enough to find much, if any, coverage of this very significant news story on
Wednesday.
It was buried inside the Daily Telegraph on page seven, running across a third of a page or less,
with a very accurate subheading
stating
in clear black and white:
"Professor admits radical Scandinavian policy worked as well
as British policy of shutting down."
The
evidence
from the two countries' differing approaches has left the professor with little escape
route. UK (full lockdown/businesses shut down): 579 Covid-19 deaths per million of population. Sweden
(softer restrictions/businesses kept open): 442 deaths per million.
But why make such a startling confession now, when he could have wriggled away by saying it's too
early to assess the data as the disease is still running its course? The cynic in me wonders if Dr
Ferguson's matter-of-fact admission that a full lockdown probably didn't make a blind bit of
difference was fueled by ulterior motives. Seeing as his own reputation is already in tatters, was it
a warped act of revenge against Boris Johnson for being forced to fall on his sword after being caught
breaking lockdown with his married lover?
Or here's one for conspiracy theorists: instead of wanting to throw BoJo under the bus, could it
have been a case of wanting to hide something else that's about to come down the track? With America
now burning in the wake of the atrocious murder of George Floyd, the confession at this juncture
reminds me somewhat of how a British government spin doctor sent out a memo only 30 minutes after the
second plane hit the Twin Towers on 9/11 with the cynical recommendation
that
"it's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury."
At the moment, the biggest accusation they could face is needlessly making a hames (for those of
you who aren't Irish, this means a 'big mess') of the economy. Even Sweden's state epidemiologist
Anders Tegnell has since
said
that, while he regrets not implanting stricter measures to stop the spread of Covid-19, he
"still would not have gone as far as other European countries did."
But the Swede being plagued with self-doubt sounds much more like someone racked with guilt about
"what ifs?"
like an Oskar Schindler type of character who was pictured crying at the end of
the Spielberg
film
because he was convinced he could've done better.
According to Aric Dromi, CEO of the Sweden-based Tempus Motu Think Tank, both the UK and Sweden's
response to Covid-19 is
"ego driven and lacking in strategy."
He told me:
"Differences in
the social structure between the UK and Sweden should have made a bigger impact between the numbers
infected. The Swedish economy, for example, far from being protected by remaining open, has still been
badly damaged as it relies heavily on exports, despite the lack of a lockdown. For both countries, it
represents a human sacrifice on the altar of economics, and it is wholly unacceptable."
It all reminds me of when John Cleese in the 'Gourmet Night' episode of 'Fawlty Towers'
told
guests that there were only three different types of duck on the menu that night – with
orange, with cherries or
"surprise,"
which turned out to be
"duck without oranges or
cherries."
And if you don't like duck? As Basil Fawlty
quipped
,
"Ah, well, if you don't like duck, uhhh, you're rather stuck."
At the end of the day, it might still be too early to fully know which was the right way to go,
which begs the question: Why did Prof. Ferguson jump the gun and heap such fulsome praise – no pun
intended here – on the Swedish model? Whatever way you spin it here, he has, once again,
"
undermined
"
the lockdown just like he did
"
after
violating quarantine he designed to meet married lover."
He might've been dubbed
"Dr Strangelove"
after that embarrassing slip up – but now he just
comes across as a nutty professor after his latest confession. These strong words might just come back
to haunt BoJo when he next goes before the electorate. With a crippled economy thanks to the draconian
measures, he's going to find the next election will be all
about
his mishandling of Covid-19, and specifically,
"the economy, stupid."
If you like this story, share it with a friend!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Jason O'Toole
has
worked as a senior feature writer for the Irish Daily Mail, a columnist with the Irish Sunday Mirror
and senior editor of Hot Press magazine. He's also the author of several best-selling books.
CDC consist of overpaid idiots. On 20 January, the first confirmed case in South Korea was
identified as a 35-year-old Chinese woman. The first South Korean national to be infected
occurred three days later was a 55-year-old man who worked in Wuhan and returned for a checkup
with flu symptoms. The two infection reports were publicly released on 24 January.
[1] At
this point team of CDC researchers should already be in South Korea. But nothing was done.
The technology was old, the data poor, the bureaucracy slow, the guidance confusing, the
administration not in agreement. The coronavirus shook the world's premier health
agency , creating a loss of confidence and hampering the U.S. response to the crisis
"World's premier health agency"?
I think the illusion the C.D.C. was the "world's premier health agency" comes from the
fact that the USA has, by far, the largest and most powerful pharmaceutical sector in the
world (which Americans call "Big Pharma"). If you have the biggest pharma, you will have the
most sheer volume of human trials and new drug patents. This, by osmosis, puts your country's
C.D.C. at the forefront of most drug regulation - which the rest of the world's C.D.C.s will
simply copy and paste for obvious reasons (i.e. they won't do the same work twice). That
doesn't mean your C.D.C. is "the premier". For instance, it could simply be the most corrupt,
the C.D.C. which is at the right place, the right time. An example for this is the USA's
airplane equivalent to the C.D.C., which sold itself off to Boeing, resulting in the 737 MAX
fiasco.
We were told for months we'd never gather in public again 'because Covid-19.'
...Media, politicians and celebrities who spent the past three months lecturing Americans
about the importance of staying home and keeping at least six feet away from all other humans
lest they catch or spread the deadly coronavirus have suddenly pivoted on a dime –
seemingly as one – to cheering on those Americans defying their advice to pour into the
streets and join nationwide protests...
Michael Levitt is Professor of computer science and structural biology at Stanford Medical
School and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
He has been a close observer of the pandemic and the response from the outset through its
movement to Europe, the U.K., and the U.S.. Last month, speaking to the Unherd podcast and
youtube channel, he offered some compelling thoughts and observers, and a striking
conclusion.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/bl-sZdfLcEk
Below is a transcript of the parts I found most relevant.
Q: So you noticed that the curve was less of an exponential curve than we might have
feared, in those early days?
A: In some ways there was never any exponential growth from the minute I looked at it,
there were never any two days that had exactly the same growth rate -- and they were getting
slow of course you could have non exponential growth where every single day they're getting
more than exponential -- but the growth was always sub-exponential. So that's the first
step.
Q: [In the UK] we talk endlessly about the R-rate -- the reproduction rate -- and
apparently that began very high, maybe as high as 3, and [we've now] got it down below 1 in
the UK. Intuitively, if there's a high reproduction rate, you should see that exponential
curve just going up and up.
A: Well no, wait, okay. The R-0, which is very popular, is in some ways a faulty number.
Let me explain why. The rate of growth doesn't depend on R-0. It depends on R-0 and the time
you are infectious. So if you are twice as long infectious and have half the R-0 you'll get
exactly the same growth rate. This is sort of intuitive, but it's not explained, and
therefore it seems to me that I would say at the present time R-0 became important because of
a lot of movies -- it was very popular -- talked about R-0.
Epidemiologists talk about R-0 but, looking at all the mathematics, you have to specify
the time infectious at the same time to have any meaning. The other problem is that R-0
decreases -- we don't know why R-0 decreases. It could be social distancing, it could be
prior immunity, it could be hidden cases.
Q: You've been observing the shapes of these curves and how the R-0 number tends to come
down and the curve tends to flatten in some kind of natural way regardless of intervention.
Is that what you are observing?
A: We don't know. I think the big test is going to be Sweden. Sweden is practicing a level
of social distancing that is keeping children in schools, keeping people at work. They are
obviously having more deaths in countries like Israel or Austria that are practicing very
very strict social distancing but I think it is not a crazy policy. The reason I felt that
social distancing was unimportant is practicing very very strict social distancing, but I
think it is not a crazy policy.
The reason I felt that social distancing was unimportant is that I had two examples in
China to start with and then we had the additional examples. The first one was South Korea
(yeah), and Iran, and Italy. The beginning of all the epidemics showing a slowing down, and
it was very hard for me to believe that those three countries could practice
social-distancing as well as China. China was amazing, especially outside Hubei, in that they
had no additional outbreaks. People left Hubei, they were very carefully tracked, had to wear
face masks all the time, had to take their temperatures all the time, and there were no
further outbreaks.
So this did not happen in either in South Korea or in Italy or in Iran. Now, two months
later something else suggests that social distancing might not be important, and that is that
the total number of deaths we're seeing in New York City, in parts of England, in parts of
France, in northern Italy -- all seem to stop at about the same direction of the population
so are they all practicing equally good social distancing? I don't think so.
The problem I think is outbreaks occurring in different regions. I think social distancing
that stops people moving from London to Manchester is probably a really good idea. My feeling
is that in London, and in New York City, all the people who got infected, all got infected
before anybody noticed. There's no way that the infection grew so quickly in New York City
without the infection spreading very quickly. So one of the key things is to stop people, who
know that they're sick, from infecting the others. Here again, China has three very, very
important advantages that are not high-tech that don't involve security tracking of
telephones.
What they involve is, number one, the tradition in China for years, of wearing a face mask
when you're sick. As soon as the coronavirus started everybody wore a face mask. It doesn't
have to be a hygienic face mask it just has to be a face covering to stop you spraying
saliva, micro droplets of saliva on somebody you talk to. The second thing in China is that
because they were so scared of the SARS epidemic in most airports, stations where you pay
tolls et cetera, there are thermometers. Infrared thermometers that that measure your
temperature. So having your temperature measured at every single store entrance -- either
with a handheld thermometer or with something mounted on the wall -- is something completely
standard in China. And the third thing is that almost all payments in China are made not
using a credit card, so in some senses it is very much easier there to practice social
distancing. Of course, in addition they know where people are.
Q: What's your view of the lockdown policy that so many European countries and states in
America have introduced?
A: I think it is a huge mistake. I think we need smart lockdowns. If we were to do this
again, we would probably insist on face masks, hand sanitizers, and some kind of payment that
did not involve touching right from the very beginning. This would slow down new outbreaks
and I think that for example they found as I understand, that children, even if they're
infected, never infect adults, so why do we not have children at school? Why do we not have
people working? England, France, Italy, Sweden, Belgium, Holland, are all reaching levels of
saturation that are going to be very, very close to herd immunity -- So that's a good thing.
I think the policy of herd immunity is the right policy. I think Britain was on exactly the
right track -- before they were fed wrong numbers and they made a huge mistake.
I see the standout winners as Germany and Sweden. They didn't practice too much lock down,
they got enough people sick to get some herd immunity. The standout losers are countries like
Austria, Australia, Israel that actually had very very strict lockdowns but didn't have many
cases. So they have damaged their economies, caused massive social damage, damaged the
educational year of their children, but not obtained any herd immunity.
I think in many ways the European countries are fine. They didn't need to have lockdown
but they have all reached a high enough level of infection not to have to worry about further
future attacks of coronavirus. The United States seems to be heading that way, they're
certainly that way in New York City but they still have a long way to go
Q: What you're saying is that, you believe success -- as we are currently measuring it
which is as few cases as possible and as small a spread of the virus as possible -- is
actually failure?
A: I think if you really control your epidemic, for example, California, it's now had
lockdowns for six weeks, and wants another four weeks, they have so far less than a hundred
deaths, that means they don't have more (let's say a hundred thousand) in people, that is not
enough to give them significant herd immunity. They didn't need to do all that lock down.
The lockdown is particularly hurtful in countries that don't have good social
infrastructure, countries like the United States and Israel . Many, many people have been
really really hurt -- especially young people. You know I think that everybody panicked --
they were fed incorrect numbers by epidemiologists and you know this I think led to led to a
situation.
There is no doubt in my mind that when we come to look back on this, the damage done by
lockdowns will exceed any saving of lives by a huge factor. One very easy way to see this is,
and again I am getting into a sensitive territory here, but economists have a very simple way
of looking at death. They don't count people. They come to the conclusion that if you're 20
and you die that's a greater loss than if you're 85 and you die. It's a hard issue, but in
some ways are we valuing the potential future life of the 20 year old? Are we valuing the
loss of more senior persons by what's called daily disability-adjusted life years. Basically
if somebody is in their 80s, has Alzheimer's disease, and then dies from pneumonia (perhaps
due to corona) that is less of a loss than if a 15 year old is riding his motorcycle bike and
gets run over. This is an important way of looking at death.
It's also you know, right now, the number of excess deaths is around 130,000 up to
yesterday, [May 1st]. This is for all of Europe, for a population of around 330 million
people. So an excess of 100,000 for this whole year, is actually not that much. In some of
the worst flu epidemics we get to those kinds of numbers -- sometimes it's a bit more,
sometimes a little bit less.
Now, I'm not saying flu is like coronavirus, I'm just simply saying that the burden of
death of flu is like coronavirus. Especially when we correct for the fact that people who die
from coronavirus are older on average than people who died from flu . Flu kills young people,
it kills two or three times more people under 65 than does coronavirus. If we put those facts
into the situation we find that the burden of death from coronavirus and Phillip Shaw will,
in Europe, where we have good numbers in less than that of a very flu.
Another factor which has not been considered are all the cancer patients who aren't being
treated, or all the heart cardiology patients who aren't being treated. I've got estimates of
tens of thousands of people who are basically going to be dying because of lack of that
treatment -- and generally again the age group who die of cancer are younger than the age
group who die of coronavirus.
There's one very easy way to sort of summarize coronavirus. I put an article in the medium
by the pretty famous British statistician Sir David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge [University]
and he had said that the numbers coming from Ferguson suggested that we had to lose about one
year of people. It turns out that I immediately wrote an article in the same medium and
replied to him, saying that in fact the answer was actually one month, not one year. So
basically my feeling is, and it's being supported by the numbers, is that the amount of
excess death you need to reach saturation, I'm not going to call it herd immunity, where the
virus by itself stops, is on the order of four weeks of excess. Now to give you some idea in
the European area where there is good monitoring, by a website called EuroMoMo , run out of Denmark, which covers about 300
million people. Every week in Europe in that area there's around 50,000 natural deaths. So in
four weeks there will be about 200,000 extra deaths in that year -- and it looks like
coronavirus in Europe where it's no doubt that it's the most severely hit area in the world
-- we'll probably reach around 200,000 or 4 weeks worth.
Q: So what happens if what you're saying is there's a sort of statistical observation
which is around four weeks of excess death and then the pandemic seems to peter out, or begin
to flatten out. What does that mean policy-wise for these European countries then?
A: If we could protect the old people perfectly, then the death rates would be very, very
low. So for example in Europe there were about 140,000 excess deaths in the last nine weeks.
The number of those excess deaths who are younger than 65 is about 10%. So basically 13,000
of 130,000 deaths are actually under 65 years old and if we had simply been able to protect
elderly people then the death rate would have been much much less . But the key thing is to
have as much infection for as little possible death and also do whatever you can to keep the
hospitals full but not overflowing. It's a difficult calculation and the trouble is that in
Sweden there's no political concerns.
The trouble is is that in Israel and I know as well in the United States, everything is
political and therefore nobody could say something like this. They would say, " Ah, but you
are not valuing death -- the thing that should have been done is for the media to stress to
people that everyday somebody dies. These people are essentially in the same age band, and
they die from Corona and other comorbidities, other diseases.
I've become a huge fan of Twitter. I'd never used twitter before and for me Twitter is the
best discussion forum I had seen since I was a student at the Cambridge Laboratory of Natural
Biology. Which is a 26 Nobel Prize winning lab. The best lab in the world. The Twitter
discussion is phenomenal and I'm getting documents from Italy showing that many of the Covid
deaths were either dead before they were tested or else they had up to three other
conditions. There is nothing wrong with this, people die for all sorts of reasons, but the
news should be stressing this and maybe they should be counting it as a 0.1 Covid death.
Countries seem to be racing to have as many Covid deaths as they could, and this is a huge
mistake. In the flu season no one cares about these people. I mean, the total number of Covid
deaths in Europe will be very similar to a severe flu season, and you know, this is serious.
Flu is a serious disease. Maybe we should just shut down the economy during the flu season. I
mean people should have been made to understand it. Unfortunately I think in Britain they
started out wanting to go for herd immunity without too much lockdown, there was then a scary
paper -- which is likely to be retracted -- which influenced Italy as well where basically it
was claimed they were -- [Interviewer interrupts]
Q: I know you had some specific queries about Neil Ferguson's paper; we had him on the show last week . So,
what did you think he got wrong in those models and predictions?
A: His work was on modelling, and around the 10th of February he had his first paper (that
I saw) and in there he was getting a case fatality ratio of around 15%, whereas all my
observations were saying that it was around three or four percent. So I was suspicious: I
looked at the paper very carefully and in a footnote to a table it said "assuming exponential
growth for six days at fifteen percent a day." Now, I had looked at China, and never, ever
seen exponential growth that wasn't decaying rapidly so I was suspicious. My numbers were 10%
of the numbers that Ferguson had obtained. I pointed this out, in a reply in the medium --
which was out there, it's clear nobody has ever seen it but it's there, and I didn't hide it
it just didn't get any likes and this said that it was much more like one month than one year
and have an exchange with Spiegelhalta and Ferguson, where I tried to show my case.
But all I was doing was just simple proportionality using exactly the same profile of --
different ages have different death rates, so there's a profile saying that people over 80
have a certain fraction of the disk [deaths] people between 17 and 80 have a different
fraction -- just using that data and simply saying we want the number of deaths that occurred
on the Diamond Princess to be the same number that we found which was 7 or 8. If you do that,
and then you apply that proportionality to Britain and the USA, you find that for Britain the
half a million drops to about 50,000 and in the United States the two million drops to
200,000. Essentially a year dropping to a month.
Q: And so the the argument that is made here is that whether you believe the infection
fatality rate is point three percent or whether you believe it's point eight percent there is
still a big chunk of the population, the majority population who hasn't had been exposed to
the disease or hasn't had it and therefore if we just let it rip there will be many many tens
possibly even further hundreds according to Professor Ferguson of thousands of deaths and
that's why it's politically totally not an option to be at do anything other than follow this
ultra cautious approach.What do you say to that?
A: The World Health Organization, and epidemiologists in general, can only go wrong if
they give [politicians] a number smaller. If I said it's going to be 1 billion deaths from
coronavirus and it's, "oh, you guys have done what I've said and there's only gonna be a
hundred thousands," that is considered good policy. They overestimated bird flu by a factor
of a hundred, or ten thousand in The Guardian . The Guardian wrote about this. Ebola was
overestimated by a factor of 100 I think. They see their role as scaring people into doing
something. I can understand that and there's something to be said for it. I f you could
practice lock down with zero economic costs, and zero social costs -- let's do it. But the
trouble is that those costs are huge, we're gonna have fatalities from hospitals being closed
down, additional children in trauma, businesses damaged -- maybe less so in the UK because of
the compensation policy -- but certainly massive economic damage in the USA and in Israel,
and in other countries. So you need to balance both of these things.
That is what I don't think is responsible. I n my work if I say a number is too small and
I'm wrong or a number is too big and I'm wrong, both of those errors are the same. If I'm 10
percent too high or 10 percent too low that is okay. It seems that being a factor of a
thousand too high is perfectly okay in epidemiology, but being a factor of three too low, is
too low.
Q: I'm trying to think about what this means for the UK and for these countries that are
trying to work out what to do next.Is your view then having looked at the numbers that if we
had not implemented lockdown we would have seen a fall off anyway is that a fair summary?
A: We could have had smart lockdown. Sweden, for example, doesn't allow gatherings of more
than 50 people. I think a football game would be a really bad idea right now, because people
shout and therefore spray saliva on everyone around them, and they could infect a lot of
people. But you know Sweden is doing fine, their deaths again are very localized to nursing
homes, like they are in England -- it's the same profile.
I think that you know again it's Sweden so all the evidence suggests that. So my
contradiction is the following: Britain, if they had done nothing would have had reported
deaths. Now remember there's a difference of reported death, my numbers are all reported.
This would have four weeks of additional reported death when the numbers actually came in
from what were the real axis death. My guess is they would be less than that so it would not
have been double. It wasn't in the month but maybe one and three quarters or so on. So that
is my feeling -- we're seeing this in Europe we will know the answer in three or four weeks
time. We will know for all of Europe exactly what the excess death of coronavirus was, right
now it's a hundred and thirty seven thousand.
Q: Do you find when you've been making these points -- in the media that you received a
lot of backlash? Do you think there's a lot of political pressure, as an academic and as an
academic you know they're one of your colleagues in Stanford dr. Ioannidis has also put out
studies that seem to become skeptical and has received a lot of political blowback.
A: I went on CNN once when he was CNN Vicky Anderson out of London. I appeared on Fox News
a couple of times basically said this is all just common sense because I appeared on Fox News
CNN wouldn't have me anymore. So basically I have had very clear of things. I had one article
in the Los Angeles Times which did great but since I was not saying things that were too
extreme none of the East Coast newspapers wanted me, they quoted me, but they wouldn't have
me. What's disconcerting is, a few of my academic colleagues -- even relatives -- were very
upset with me. Because in my earlier writing I published a report, the medium report from the
22nd of March but on the 13th or 14th of March I distributed a 19 page report,and three
academics got very upset with me. I think they were totally panicked, and they felt that if
anyone thought this was true they wouldn't lock down as tightly as they should, I'm in fact
friends with all the people again, there are no hard feelings.
Q: Let me leave you with one final question: what's your prognosis, what do you think is
now gonna happen with this what happens next?
A: There will be a reckoning. Maybe countries will start to see that they need governments
that are not necessarily great in rhetoric, but actually thinking and doing. I often go back
and think about what Socrates said 2,400 years ago: use your common sense instead of
listening to the rhetoric of leaders. We have become very influenced by [rhetoric] that. I
think this is another foul-up on the part of the baby boomers.
I am a real baby-boomer, I was born in 1947, and I think we've really screwed up. We cause
pollution, we allowed the world's population to increase three-fold, we've caused the
problems of global warming, we've left your generation with a real mess in order to save a
really small number of very old people. If I was a young person now, I would say, "now you
guys are gonna pay for this."
We have my family whatsapp and very early on I said this is a virus being designed to get
rid of the baby boomers. You know I don't know, I think my wife thinks this is going to be a
take it to the streets thing,and we're gonna have the young people on the street saying you
guys have really screwed up it's time to go. And I always joke with her, saying well at least
I've made lots of friends among the young people, I'll be okay.
But quite frankly you know I've had a great life, and I must say this to all the young
faces in front of me. I have a grandson who's 17. I'd much rather have young people live for
a very long time. That said I do have a mother who's a hundred and five years old living in
London with my brother, she's in lockdown and I talk to her by whatsapp every single day on
FaceTime, and she's fine. She still uses her phone and so on so you know these differences
but
You guys should get out there and do something don't accept this anymore we screwed up too
much
Sound like wishful thinking. Looks like cutting US military budget is impossible as "Full
spectrum Dominance" doctrine is still in place and neocons are at the helm of the USA foreign
policy. COVID-19 or not COVID-19.
The other day an aerospace industry analyst asked me whether I thought the defense budget
would start to go down, courtesy of the huge cost of dealing with the pandemic and the massive
deficits the nation faces. I said it was unlikely and he agreed.
This is not the conventional wisdom in DC. Some national security analysts and advocates for
higher defense budgets have
warned that the defense budget
is now under siege . Critics of the Pentagon and its spending are equally
convinced that the pandemic opens the door to necessary, deep, sensible
cuts in defense in order to fund the mountain of debt and take care of pressing needs for
income, employment, health care, global warming, and other major threats to the well-being of
Americans.
Whatever the nation's strategy, critics argue, the pandemic has changed the face of the
threat to America. COVID-19 is an invisible, lethal threat to human security, a viral neutron
bomb that spares buildings but kills their occupants.
Congress has appropriated more than 20 percent of the nation's gross domestic product, so
far, to cope with this threat. Additional funds for the military, ironically, have become a
"rounding error" in this spending -- little more than $10 billion of the more than $4 trillion
appropriated to date. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper
warned about the likelihood of defense cuts and wanted more funds for the Pentagon, but
Rep. Adam Smith, Chair of the House Armed Services Committee
said there was no way defense would get more funds through the pandemic bills.
So it looks bad for defense, and good for the advocates of cuts. But not so fast. Yes, it is
true; history shows that defense budgets do decline. It happens, predictably, when we get out
of a war – World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War. Even when we left Iraq in 2011,
the budget went down.
There is a secret ingredient in defense budget reductions: they seem to happen, as well,
when the politics of deficit reduction appear. Defense also declined after Korea because a
fiscal conservative, Eisenhower, was in office, with five virtual stars on his shoulders,
making it possible to put a lid
on the budgetary appetites of the services.
In fact, in 1985, well before the end of the Cold War, Congress, focused on the deficit,
passed the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, which was then was reinforced in the 1990 Budget
Enforcement Act that set hard spending limits on domestic and defense spending. It had to cover
both parts of discretionary spending or Congress could not agree. It was 17 years before the
defense budget
began to rise .
Put the end of war together with a dollop of deficit reduction and defense budgets will go
down. They become the caboose, rather than the engine, of the budgetary train. But beware of
what you ask for. The price of constraints on defense has been constraints on domestic
spending, as the nation has learned over the past three decades. In fact, the Budget Control
Act of 2011 constrained domestic spending, while allowing defense to
escape almost unscathed, thanks to war supplementals.
When attention shifts to debates over priorities and deficits, it opens the door to a real
discussion about defense. But they do not ensure cuts. While the military services may not see
their appetite for real growth of 3-5 percent fulfilled, it is unlikely to decline very
much.
There is a floor under the defense budget. But you need to change the level of analysis to
see it and look at who actually makes defense budget decisions and why they make the decisions
they do. It's about something I called
the "Iron Triangle."
We all like to think that strategy drives defense budgets. For the most part, however,
defense decisions are made inside a political system involving constant,
relatively closed interaction between the military services, the Congress, and the
community and industry beneficiaries of defense spending.
In outline, budget planners in the military services start with last year's budget and graft
on new funds, rarely giving up a program, a mission, or part of the force. This dynamic points
the budgets upwards over time. Secretaries and under-secretaries work to add preferences and
projects, like national missile defense, to the services' budget plans. On top of that,
presidents have made promises, adding such things as bomber funds (Reagan) and space forces
(Trump) the services do not want.
Then there is the second leg of the triangle: Congress. For all their efforts to cut
Pentagon waste, progressive members do not drive defense decisions in the Congress. The defense
authorizers and appropriators do. The associated committees are dominated by defense spending
advocates, deeply interested in the outcomes, encouraged by industry campaign contributions and
community lobbying. These outside interests are the third leg of the triangle. Contracts and
community-based impacts give them a deep stake in the outcomes.
This system is not a conspiracy; it is a visible part of American politics, similar in shape
to the players in farm price supports or health care policy. But it is a system that operates
somewhat separately from and parallel to the politics of deficit reduction and has a major
impact on the content and levels of the defense budget. And its work bakes a kind of sclerosis
into efforts to have a broader debate over spending priorities.
The politics of the Iron Triangle will set limits on the defense budget debate making deep
cuts unlikely. So what might be the options to end-run this system? Politics, of course. If the
advocates of deeper defense reductions want to change America's spending and budgeting
priorities, they will need to join forces with advocates of a "new, new deal" in America -- one
that would put priority on the national health system, infrastructure investment, climate
change, immigration, and educational reform. Only a very
large, very deep coalition has a chance of overcoming the inertia imposed by the Iron
Triangle.
And that coalition will need to focus on Joe Biden. The president is the key actor here,
particularly at the start of an administration. As Bill Clinton learned, the first months are
critical to changing overall budget priorities, before the departments, including Defense, can
begin the Iron Triangle dance.
Even then, major cuts in defense budgets are an uphill fight. The opening for a broader
priorities debate has been provided by the COVID-19 pandemic. The outcome depends significantly
on bringing this kind of focus to actions over the next seven months.
Why New York Suffered When Other Cities Were Spared by Covid-19
The mayor, the CDC and a New York disease expert weigh in
By
Drew
Armstrong
,
Henry
Goldman
, and
Keshia Clukey
May 28, 2020, 9:51 AM EDT
Pedestrians walk through the Times Square on March 12.
As of this week, at least 21,000 New Yorkers are dead from Covid-19, with a few dozen added
to the city's count every day. More than 3,000 have perished in nursing homes, many more in
hospitals. Some died at home. The most brutal toll came among those who were old, poor and in
the outer boroughs.
The city's deaths are 10 times those of Los Angeles County's. They've surpassed the 16,000
lives lost in Italy's hard-hit Lombardy region. In the U.K., eight times as populous as New
York City, about 37,500 have died.
With New York's outbreak eclipsing others around the world, it's logical to look for somebody
to blame. The mayor, the governor, the president -- a human foil for a microscopic villain. But
that would be a simplistic approach to accounting for a new virus hitting a dense city, full of
people who'd never faced a pandemic threat, enjoying a decade-long stretch of prosperity.
Medical workers move the body of a deceased patient to an overflow morgue in
Brooklyn on April 2.
Photographer: Angus Mordant/Bloomberg
"There's blame to go all around," said
Jeffrey Shaman
, director of the climate and health program at Columbia University's Mailman
School of Public Health. "We haven't been confronted with an infectious-disease threat like
this for 100 years."
There are glimmers of optimism emerging. The virus's spread is slowing, and New York is
moving toward the early stages of reopening by mid-June, Mayor Bill de Blasio said during a
Tuesday news briefing.
But a crucial question remains for America's financial and cultural epicenter: What went so
wrong? Bloomberg reviewed past comments by those involved in the pandemic response, and asked
the question of disease experts, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and de
Blasio.
Here's what they said about the major factors that led to New York's outbreak.
Outbreaks can't start without a spark. The U.S. shut down most travel from China on Feb. 2,
when there were
at least 14,000 cases
there. But it left open travel from most of Europe until March
13. During that time, Italy went from two known infections to
more than 15,000
.
In the week ended March 13, 274,000 people arrived at New York-area airports from Europe,
and another 174,000 came from the U.K. and Ireland, according to U. S. Customs and Border
Protection's New York field office.
"We
closed the front
door with the China ban, which was
right," New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on April 24. "But we left the back door open."
Using genetic analysis, it's possible to trace the lineage of the virus like a family tree
with branches around the world.
One analysis
, from researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, showed that one
branch emerged directly from China, with U.S. cases concentrated in Washington state. But a
second branch of the virus grew in Italy, and was then imported to New York, rapidly becoming
more prevalent.
"We tested people all through February, but it turns out we weren't testing the right
people," de Blasio said in an emailed statement. "It's painful to think about how things might
have been different had we been able to test someone returning from Europe a month sooner."
Jay Butler
, the CDC's deputy director for infectious diseases, compared the city to dry
kindling in a wildfire.
"New York City is a global destination and had the opportunity for multiple introductions of
a virus," Butler said in an interview. "Because of the amount of travel to New York,
particularly related to the increase of disease in Europe, there were multiple sparks landing
at once."
2. "Ride the Subway, Take the Bus"
Wash your hands and cover your cough: That was the main advice given to New Yorkers early in
the outbreak to prevent the virus's spread.
"We want New Yorkers to go about their daily lives, ride the subway, take the bus, go see
your neighbors," New York City Health Commissioner
Oxiris Barbot
said on March 2.
The mayor gave the same guidance. "From what we do understand, you cannot contract it
through casual contact, so the subway is not the issue," de Blasio said March 3. Days later, he
said, "It has to go from someone who is infected to another person directly into their mouth,
their nose, or their eyes."
A commuter wears a mask while riding a subway train in New York on March 9.
Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg
Health experts have now almost totally reversed that understanding. The CDC told people to
begin wearing face coverings in public on April 3, at which point there were more than 5,000
new cases a day in New York. Later that month, the agency updated guidance to say that touching
contaminated surfaces didn't appear to be the primary mode of transmission. There have since
been multiple case studies showing clusters of transmission in offices, at churches and other
high-density settings.
"Hindsight is 20-20. If we knew everything we knew now, probably there would have been more
intervention earlier, but we didn't have that crystal ball at the time," said the CDC's Butler.
"Now we know people can be infectious before the onset of symptoms."
3. Perfect Environment
With the virus's easy transmission, New York's shared spaces were a perfect vector to bring
the infection from one family to another.
Subways and buses, concert halls, elevators, offices, crowded bars, apartment towers -- while
other U.S. urban areas have natural social distancing built into their structure through the
prevalence of cars and less-dense buildings, New York is defined by crowding.
"In a place that doesn't have a car culture, that relies on mass transit, there are more
opportunities for it to get into households and move around," said Columbia's Shaman.
A bus driver wears a protective mask while working in New Rochelle, New York on March 16.
Photographer: Angus Mordant/Bloomberg
A May 8
CDC report
drew a similar conclusion. The agency noted that the four most dense counties in
America are New York City boroughs. Combine that with public transit, three major
transportation hubs and 1.6 million daily commuters into Manhattan, and it's a perfect human
mixing bowl.
In his emailed statement, de Blasio said the city's mass transit system had been a major
factor.
"New York's subway system stands alone," de Blasio said. "New York City is different than
Los Angeles and Seattle and pretty much everywhere else for how heavily the population relies
on travel by subway. The subway has been a lifeline for our essential workers, but we also now
know that prolonged, close contact during a commute may have been an issue long before we knew
the virus was even in the city."
4. Slow to Close
For all of New York City's risk, its leaders moved late on shutting down the city.
Cuomo and de Blasio -- who have had a long-running, often public feud -- disagreed for days
over how and when to act. The city closed the schools on March 15. Two days later, de Blasio
raised the possibility of a stay-at-home order. Cuomo disagreed, saying it was the state's
decision and that he had "no interest whatsoever or plan whatsoever to contain New York City."
On March 20, he announced that the state would shut all non-essential businesses, and told
people to stay home.
Commuters walk inside a subway station in New York on March 17.
Photographer: Demetrius Freeman/Bloomberg
Butler said those decisions are difficult at the early stages of an outbreak. "When we
evacuate a city for a hurricane, we don't do it based on when there's something out off the
coast of Africa," he said. "We do it when there's much clearer visibility of when it's going to
happen. It's much harder with an infectious disease, particularly a brand new one."
In hindsight, the city's actions came late. The day the stay-at-home orders were announced, New
York City reported 4,000 new cases -- despite a significant shortage of testing. The outbreak
was well into the acceleration phase. And with a bigger head-start, the virus kept growing in
the city, with new cases peaking 17 days later on April 6.
5. Nursing Homes
As the virus swept through nursing homes -- and the city was in an urgent search for hospital
beds -- the question arose of what to do with elderly patients who recovered.
On March 25, the state made what now appears to be an ill-fated decision to send those
people back to nursing homes once they were well enough to leave the hospital. Two months
later, Cuomo said the state had followed the federal government's guidance, and made the rules
when the state was scrambling for hospital bed space.
"Is the best use of a hospital bed to have somebody sit there for two weeks in the hospital
bed when they don't need the hospital bed, because they're not urgently ill? Cuomo said at a
press briefing on May 20. "They're just waiting to test negative."
Statewide, there have been 5,980 presumed and confirmed Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes and
adult-care facilities as of May 24. New York has now changed its rules for sending patients
back to the homes, saying hospitals can't do so until a patient tests negative for the virus.
Unknowns and the Future
Even with the factors that made New York a hot spot, it's still unclear why it got hit
harder than other similarly dense areas. Also unknown are how weather, potential variants of
the virus, testing and counting of cases and other factors play a role. And the outbreak is
just now breaking over new hot spots like Brazil.
"It's important to recognize the pandemic isn't over yet," Butler said. "Some areas are
going to be hit earlier than others."
Much of New York City's risk from an outbreak remains. It will forever be a tightly packed
city dependent on public transportation, defined by public spaces and close human interaction.
Mayor Bill de Blasio
Photographer: Demetrius Freeman/Bloomberg
"What caused New York City to be hit so hard is something we'll be studying for a long, long
time," de Blasio said in his statement. "On the one hand, it's frustrating to think of how
things may have been different had we known any of this earlier. On the other hand, it's
informative as we move to reopen."
In its push to resume activity, the city and state are now considering how to stop the
transit system from becoming a disease vector again.
"We anticipate just phase one is easily hundreds of thousands of more people going to work,
and then phase two even more so," de Blasio said. "We still have to make sure that we don't end
up with a lot of crowded subway cars and buses. It's got to be very systematic. You need the
frequency of the service, you need the face coverings, you need some way to make sure that
there isn't overcrowding."
Shaman said he's optimistic that some of the tools are in place to better manage the virus,
but that the U.S. hasn't succeeded so far -- though to be fair, few countries have.
"We failed on both ends," Shaman said. "We disrupted the economy and haven't controlled the
disease."
"... The failure of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) against COVID-19, with nearly four times the annual budget of the WHO, is visible to the world. The CDC failed to provide a successful test for SARS-CoV-2 in the critical months of February and March , while ignoring the WHO's successful test kits that were distributed to 120 countries. ..."
"... Trump has yet to hold his administration and the CDC responsible for this criminal bungling. This, more than any other failure , is the reason that the U.S. numbers for COVID-19 are now more than 1.5 million and about a third of all global infections. Contrast this with China, the first to face an unknown epidemic, stopping it at 82,000 infections, and the amazing results that countries such as Vietnam and South Korea have produced. ..."
"... Taiwan was the first to inform the WHO of human-to-human transmissions in December, but was completely ignored. ..."
"... "Just how evil does this situation become? Is the general leadership of the American political economy trying to be evil just for the fun of it?" ..."
"... And at what point does the general indifference to this state of affairs that still, incredibly, obtains, turn over into mass outrage and condemnation? Skrelli, Bayer, and all the rest are frelling evil. Extortion writ large, with easily preventable death and suffering. ..."
"... As you note it's about profits. One of the disturbing condemnations of the now fading American Century, which most USians remain contentedly oblivious to is that during their watch as global hegemon, the US, in what can be seen, in the best light, as bad faith, worked to undermine the democratic functionality of international cooperative organizations like the WHO, the UN, etc. ..."
"... The intention of granting copyrights and patents was noble, to provide a limited monopoly on an invention or literary work for a limited period. IP has been distorted and twisted, extended to insane time limits to protect works that for any common sense thinkers have already become public domain (see, e.g. the Happy Birthday song, Mickey Mouse or re-formulation of a drug that's gone out of patent). Software should have had its own IP regime but that ship has sailed (thanks Bill G.). ..."
Donald Trump launched a new vaccine war in May, but not against the virus. It was against
the world. The United States and the UK
were the only
two holdouts in the World Health Assembly from the declaration that vaccines and medicines
for COVID-19
should be available as public goods , and not under exclusive patent rights. The
United States explicitly disassociated itself from the patent pool call, talking instead of
"the critical role that intellectual property plays" -- in other words, patents for vaccines
and medicines. Having badly botched his COVID-19 response, Trump is trying to redeem his
electoral fortunes in the November elections this year by promising an early vaccine. The 2020
version of Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan is shaping up to be, essentially, "
vaccines for us" -- but the rest of the world will have to queue up and pay what big pharma
asks, as they will hold the patents.
Trump has yet to hold his administration and the CDC responsible for this criminal
bungling. This, more than any
other failure , is the reason that the U.S. numbers for COVID-19 are now more than 1.5
million and about a third of all global infections. Contrast this with China, the first to face
an unknown epidemic, stopping it at 82,000 infections, and the amazing results that countries
such as Vietnam and
South Korea have produced.
One issue is now looming large over the COVID-19 pandemic. If we do not address the
intellectual property rights issue in this pandemic, we are likely to see a repeat of the AIDS tragedy . People
died for 10 years (1994-2004) as patented AIDS medicine was priced at $10,000 to $15,000
for a year's supply, far beyond their reach. Finally, patent
laws in India allowed people to get AIDS medicine at less than a dollar a day , or $350 for a year's supply.
Today, 80
percent of the world's AIDS medicine comes from India. For big pharma, profits trumped
lives, and they will continue to do so, COVID or no COVID, unless we change the world.
Most countries have compulsory licensing provisions that will allow them to break patents in
case of epidemics or health emergencies. Even the WTO, after a bitter fight, accepted in its
Doha Declaration (2001) that countries, in a health emergency, have the right to allow any
company to manufacture a patented drug without the patent holder's permission, and even import
it from other countries.
Why is it, then, that countries are unable to break patents, even if there are provisions in
their laws and in the TRIPS Agreement? The answer is their fear of U.S. sanctions against them.
Every year, the U.S. Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) issues a Special
301 Report that it has used to threaten trade sanctions against any country that tries to
compulsorily license any patented product.
India figures prominently in this report year after year, for daring to
issue a compulsory license in 2012 to Natco for nexavar, a cancer drug Bayer was selling
for
more than $65,000 a year . Marijn Dekkers, the CEO of Bayer, was quoted widely that this
was "theft," and "We did not develop
this medicine for Indians We developed it for Western patients who can afford it."
This leaves unanswered how many people even in the affluent West can afford a $65,000 bill
for an illness. But there is no question that a bill of this magnitude is a death sentence for
anybody but the super-rich in countries like India. Though a number of other drugs were under
also consideration for compulsory licensing at that time, India has not exercised this
provision again after receiving U.S. threats.
It is the fear that countries can break patents using their compulsory licensing powers that
led to proposals for patent pooling. The argument was that since many of these diseases do not
affect rich countries, big pharma should either let go of their patents to such patent pools,
or philanthropic capital should fund the development of new drugs for this pool. Facing the
pandemic of COVID-19, it is this idea of patent pooling that emerged in the recent World Health
Assembly , WHA-73. All countries supported this proposal, barring the
United States and its loyal camp follower, the UK . The
United States also entered its disagreement on the final WHA resolution, being the
lone objector to patent pooling of COVID-19 medicines and vaccines, noting "the critical
role that intellectual property plays in incentivizing the development of new and improved
health products."
While patent pooling is welcome if no other measure is available, it also makes it appear as
if countries have no other recourse apart from the charity of big capital. What this hides, as
charity always does, is that people and countries have legitimate rights even under TRIPS to
break patents under conditions of an epidemic or a health emergency.
The United States, which screams murder if a compulsory license is issued by any country,
has no such compunction when its own interests are threatened. During the anthrax scare in
2001, the U.S. Secretary of Health issued a threat to
Bayer under "eminent domain for patents" for licensing the anthrax-treatment drug
ciprofloxacin to other manufacturers. Bayer folded, and agreed to supply the quantity at a
price that the U.S. government had set. And without a whimper. Yes, this is the same Bayer that
considers India as a "thief" for issuing a compulsory license!
The vaccination for COVID-19 might need to be repeated each year, as we still do not know
the duration of its protection. It is unlikely that a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 will
provide a lifetime
immunity like the smallpox vaccine. Unlike AIDS, where the patient numbers were smaller and
were unfortunately stigmatized in different ways, COVID-19 is a visible threat for everyone.
Any attempt to hold people and governments to ransom on COVID-19 vaccines or medicines could
see the collapse of the entire patent edifice of TRIPS that big pharma backed by the United
States and major EU countries have built. That is why the more clever in the capitalist world
have moved toward a voluntary
patent pool for potential COVID-19 medicines and vaccines. A voluntary patent pool means
that companies or institutions holding patents on medicines -- such as remdesivir -- or
vaccines would voluntarily hand them over to such a pool. The terms and conditions of such a
handover, meaning at concessional rates, or for only for certain regions, are still not clear
-- leading to criticism that a voluntary patent pool is not a substitute for declaring that all
such medicines and vaccines should be declared global public goods during the COVID-19
pandemic.
Unlike clever capital, Trump's response to the COVID-19 vaccine is to thuggishly bully his
way through. He believes that with the unlimited money that the United States is now willing to
put into the vaccine efforts, it will either beat everybody else to the winning post, or
buy the company that is
successful . If this strategy succeeds, he can then use "his" COVID-19 vaccine as a new
instrument of global power. It is the United States that will then decide which countries get
the vaccine (and for how much), and which ones don't.
Trump's little problem is that the days of the United States being a sole global hegemon
passed decades ago. The United States has shown itself as a
fumbling giant and its epidemic response
shambolic . It has been unable to provide virus tests to its people in time, and failed to
stop the epidemic through containment/mitigation measures, which a number of other countries
have done.
China and the
EU have already agreed that any vaccine developed by them will be regarded as a public
good. Even without that, once a medicine or a vaccine is known to be successful, any country
with a reasonable scientific infrastructure can replicate the medicine or the vaccine, and
manufacture it locally. India in particular has one of the largest
generic drug and vaccine manufacturing capacities in the world. What prevents India, or any
country for that matter, from manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines or drugs once they are developed
-- only the empty threat of a failed hegemon on breaking patents?
Clearly the Trump and Johnson administrations are completely wrong in not supporting that
all COVID vaccines and medications be declared as public goods. This is an unprecedented
global threat requiring unprecedented global response.
But as a Canadian I have to reluctantly admit, there are legimate reasons to oppose the
WHO. Trump like a broken clock can be correct twice a day, even if he is wrong the other 1438
times a day.
The worst offence is that the WHO (World Health Organisation) is suppose to represent the
world, and yet it deliberately excludes Taiwan, which it a known part of the world with 24
million people.
Taiwan was the first to inform the WHO of human-to-human transmissions in December, but
was completely ignored. And Taiwan has best handled its response to the pandemic.
Personally I think that all countries should stop supporting the WHO until it restores
Taiwan's observer status it previous had until 2016. The only other reasonable option would
be to create an alternative health organisation to the WHO which does not exclude any part of
the world.
The WHO also has other failings, including corruption, exorbitant travel expenses, and an
unqualified president beholden to the CCP. But these failings pale in comparison to Taiwan's
exclusion, and hopefully the other failings can be fixed within the organisation.
"Just how evil does this situation become? Is the general leadership of the American
political economy trying to be evil just for the fun of it?"
And at what point does the general indifference to this state of affairs that still,
incredibly, obtains, turn over into mass outrage and condemnation?
Skrelli, Bayer, and all the rest are frelling evil. Extortion writ large, with easily preventable death and suffering.
it did NOT begin with trump.It's been there for most of my life. What will it take for ordinary people to get mad enough about it all to do something about
it?
Even in this article, the unspoken assumption is that our hands are somehow tied that these
corps have agency far beyond anyone else's but those corps can be seized, and exist only at
the pleasure of governments in the places they pretend to exist in.
They are a human creation an Egregore, set tottering about as if it were willful and
alive
but even Lefties treat them as untouchable godlike entities "oh, well lets appeal to
"Benevolent Capital, instead "
"Behold, I show you the last man.
'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man,
and blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race
is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest.
'We have invented happiness,'say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions
where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs
against him, for one needs warmth
One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the
entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much
exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.
No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels
different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.
'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink
One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one
has a regard for health.
'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink.""
As you note it's about profits. One of the disturbing condemnations of the now fading
American Century, which most USians remain contentedly oblivious to is that during their
watch as global hegemon, the US, in what can be seen, in the best light, as bad faith, worked
to undermine the democratic functionality of international cooperative organizations like the
WHO, the UN, etc.
Thus when emergencies arise such as international diplomatic crisis or pandemics, it is
found these organisations have been rendered untrustworthy, corrupted and unreliable;
unsuited to purpose. American exceptionalism?
It is clear now that the USA will not fund a national public health system to fight the
coronavirus epidemic. The only conclusion is the reason is to allow Pharmaceutical
Corporations to make huge profits by marketing patented drugs and vaccines to treat the
illness; if and when, they become available sometime in the future.
Due to incompetence, lack of money and bad messengering; the economic reopening of the USA
could kill close to a million Americans. To Republicans and Libertarians, this is of no
concern. Democrats may acknowledge the deaths but say they are unavoidable.
For the Elite keeping their wealth is more important than spending a portion to prevent
the huge costs in lives and treasure that will come once the Wuhan Coronavirus is established
across North America like the related common cold.
This is a teachable moment on the immorality of all "intellectual property". I am pleased to see that so many countries – other than the US and the UK –
can get together on the common decency of allowing everyone to live, and set that above the
"justice" of paying off intellectual property assignees. But these countries still have some
ways to go in understanding that this applies to all information. That the creation of
information can never be a living – in contrast to a living based on the creation of
essential goods and services, about which we are learning so much right now! – and that
information can never be owned.
They do not yet fully comprehend that all claims to own and extract rent from information
are in fact crimes against humanity.
The intention of granting copyrights and patents was noble, to provide a limited monopoly
on an invention or literary work for a limited period. IP has been distorted and twisted,
extended to insane time limits to protect works that for any common sense thinkers have
already become public domain (see, e.g. the Happy Birthday song, Mickey Mouse or
re-formulation of a drug that's gone out of patent). Software should have had its own IP
regime but that ship has sailed (thanks Bill G.).
Either a giant reform is due or people will ignore the law and infringe the IP. Chinese
companies do it with impunity. Maybe they're right to do so.
Patent applications for the top 20 offices, 2018
Rank Country Patent applications
1 China 1,542,002
2 U.S. 597,141
3 Japan 313,567
4 South Korea 209,992
If one sums up USA patent applications vs Asia (China, Japan, SK), it is USA 597K vs Asia
2066K.
So Asia is putting in patent applications, vs the USA, at a 3.46 multiple vs the USA.
It will be interesting to see if the USA attitude about the sanctity of intellectual
property changes when important key patents are held by the rest of the world.
Teachable moments. This could get really interesting if China or a non US & associated puppets develops
an effect Covid treatment first.
I will dream of something like this: China develops vaccine, offers it free to US on condition it reduce it's Dept of War &
Aggression by 80% and honor all existing and recently existing arms control agreement, and
withdraws it's Naval forces though out the world and confines them to the North Atlantic and
California coast.
I wonder if a geopolitically powerful nation/bloc of nations such as China/India/etc might
announce that they disregard pharma IP, & announce that they will adhere to the economist
Dr Dean Baker-type policy of open source pharma R&D/recipe publication, any private
manufacturer may manufacture & sell the resultant pharma SKU. I am referring to any type
of pharma or medical device (such as ventilators), not just a COVID-19 vaccine. I would
guesstimate that the "soft power" & goodwill generated by such a policy would be
extremely beneficial to those nation(s). Furthermore, the US if it tried to retaliate via
sanctions or other threats would get a corresponding additional decrease in soft power.
To be honest, in some instances Indian govt practices on pharma are quite bad. It is
extremely hard in some instances to recoup investments at prices they ask for.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has stealthily attempted to rewrite history, deleting his
controversial order requiring nursing homes to admit Covid-19 patients from the state health
website and blaming facilities for obeying it. After being lambasted in the press for the March
25 executive order that forced New York elder care facilities to accept patients infected with
the highly contagious virus, Cuomo attempted to blame the nursing homes for not disobeying his
orders during a Wednesday press conference.
" The obligation is on the nursing home to say, 'I can't take a Covid-positive
person,' " the governor insisted. " If they said 'I can't take the person,' they can't
take the person! So that's how it works ."
The coronavirus has cut a devastating swath through New York's nursing homes, killing more
than 5,800 people in long-term care facilities since the pandemic began - nearly a fifth of the
state's Covid-19 deaths so far, according to AP statistics compiled on Thursday. The policy
ultimately sent over 4,500 recovering coronavirus patients to nursing homes, which Cuomo
himself called " the optimum feeding ground for this virus ."
But the executive order itself leaves little room for disobedience, reading (in underlined
text, no less), " No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the [Nursing
Home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19 ." Elsewhere in the
document, facilities are advised they " must comply with the expedited receipt of residents
returning from hospitals " so long as they've been deemed medically stable - no excuses
allowed. Facilities aren't even permitted to test incoming patients.
But that same order, titled " Advisory: Hospital Discharges and Admissions to Nursing
Homes ," was apparently removed from the New York healthcare website early this month,
according to Fox News, which discovered its absence on Tuesday. Unfortunately for Cuomo's
revisionism, it's still available in the
Wayback Machine . The governor issued a revised directive on May 10, barring hospitals from
sending patients back to nursing homes unless they tested negative for the virus. However, his
communications director denied the more recent order represented a " reversal " of the
old one so much as " build[ing] on " it.
By Saturday, however, Cuomo was blaming the Trump administration for the ill-advised
Covid-19 mandate, declaring New York was merely " following the president's agencies'
guidance " and " follow[ing] what the Republican Administration said to do. "
While the governor's office claimed he was referring to a March
directive from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, that order merely required
nursing homes to " admit any individuals that they would normally admit to their facility,
including...from hospitals where a case of Covid-19 was present " and even advised setting
aside a unit to quarantine patients returning from hospitals - a safety measure notably missing
from Cuomo's executive order.
"... A prominent Oxford epidemiologist has reportedly called for a more rapid exit from Britain's lockdown, saying the coronavirus pandemic is "on its way out" of Britain after infecting as much as half the population. ..."
A prominent Oxford epidemiologist has reportedly called for a more rapid exit from Britain's
lockdown, saying the coronavirus pandemic is "on its way out" of Britain after infecting as
much as half the population.
Professor Sunetra Gupta says there would be a "strong possibility" that pubs, nightclubs and
restaurants in Britain could reopen without serious risk from Covid-19.
The professor of theoretical epidemiology at the University of Oxford said the UK had most
likely erred on the side of over-reaction in its handling of the crisis, suggesting imposing
the lockdown itself was one such misstep.
Prof Gupta told unherd.com the Government
had brought in the lockdown based on the worst-case scenario modelling of the Imperial College
London.
In March, Imperial College's workings suggested Covid-19 had a deaths-to-cases ratio of as
high as 1.4%, reducing to 0.66% when allowing for undiagnosed cases.
Prof Gupta's Oxford team produced a rival model, also in March, speculating as much as 50%
of Britain's population may have already been infected, and suggesting an infection fatality
rate as low as 0.1%, which she says would be far lower now.
Asked for her updated ratio, Prof Gupta said the epidemic had "largely come and is on its
way out in this country" and that the rate would be "definitely less than one in 1000 and
probably closer to one in 10,000", or between 0.1% and 0.01%.
Prof Gupta said the Government's defence of the lockdown was that it was based on a
plausible, "or at least a possible", worst case scenario.
"The question is, should we act on a possible worst case scenario, given the costs of
lockdown?
"It seems to me that given that the costs of lockdown are mounting, that case is becoming
more and more fragile," she said.
Prof Gupta called for a "more rapid exits from lockdown" based on factors such as "who is
dying and what is happening to the death rates".
She said it was feasible Britain could have fared better with the Covid-19 crisis by doing
"nothing at all" or at least by concentrating on protecting the people most vulnerable to the
disease.
"Remaining in a state of lockdown is extremely dangerous from the point of view of the
vulnerability of the entire population to new pathogens," she said.
"Effectively we used to live in a state approximating lockdown 100 years ago, and that was
what created the conditions for the Spanish Flu to come in and kill 50m people."
Whilst accepting it hard to prove on current evidence, Prof Gupta said there was a "strong
possibility" the UK could return to normal without great risk. Panic Mode , 42 minutes
ago
If you are being furlough and hoping you will getting your job back, Good ******* luck. I
will put my money 80% furlough people won't get their jobs back. This is your government
doing, those ******* politicians.
The government have surely flattened the curve - THE ECONOMY.
AG17 , 43 minutes ago
Finally we are approaching end of Feardemic...
The Shodge , 41 minutes ago
You wish. Better get ready for The Second Wave of Government Terror
Louhnatique , 43 minutes ago
You can tell by these experts' point of view who's paying their bills. None are
independent.
Panic Mode , 52 minutes ago
Yeah, I can't wait for the restaurants to open and see how much fears government have
injected to the consumers, totally destroy their industries. For those who have completely
lost their career, livelihood and their kids future, this is on government, those *******
politicians.
Thanks to the government listening to crook like Neil ******* Ferguson.
Canoe Driver , 53 minutes ago
5,000 government douchebags are now feverishly looking for a different expert.
They have to know already that there are not many 80-year old chain smokers at the local
pub. The continued lockdowns are mostly because they can't be seen to admit it was all a
mistake and a horrible overreaction. Oh, and because they are the ones obsessed with
defeating Trump. Sucks to lose a family business so Gavin Newsom, et al., can try to win a
pissing war with Republicans. But that is what it's come to.
funkyfreddy , 1 hour ago
I guess she thought south Korean clubs could reopen safely until that one guy infected
numerous people at multiple clubs in one night causing them all to be shut again?
Governments throughout the world and across the US justified extreme, draconian,
undemocratic, and unconstitutional (in most US states) "lockdown" and stay-at-home orders on
the grounds that the COVID-19 virus was exceptionally fatal.
In March, the World Health Organization (WHO) was claiming that the fatality rate was a
very
high 3.4 percent .
Yet as time went on, it became increasingly clear that such high estimates were essentially
meaningless because researchers had no idea how many people were actually infected with the
disease. Tests were largely being conducted on those with symptoms serious enough to end up in
emergency rooms or doctor's offices.
By late April, many researchers were publishing new studies showing that the number of
people with the disease was actually much higher than was previously thought. Thus, it became
clear that the percentage of people with the disease who died from it suddenly became much
smaller.
Now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released new estimates
suggesting that the real fatality rate is around 0.26 percent.
Specifically, the report concludes that the "symptomatic case fatality ratio" is 0.4
percent. But that's just symptomatic cases. In the same report, the CDC also claims that 35
percent of all cases are asymptomatic.
Or, as the Washington Post reported this week:
The agency offered a "current best estimate" of 0.4 percent. The agency also gave a best
estimate that 35 percent of people infected never develop symptoms. Those numbers when put
together would produce an infection fatality rate of 0.26, which is lower than many of the
estimates produced by scientists and modelers to date."
Of course, not all scientists have been wrong on this. Back in March, Stanford scientist
John Ioannidis was much, much closer to the CDC's estimate than the WHO. The Wall Street
Journal noted in
April :
In a March article for Stat News, Dr. Ioannidis argued that Covid-19 is far less deadly
than modelers were assuming. He considered the experience of the Diamond Princess cruise
ship, which was quarantined Feb. 4 in Japan. Nine of 700 infected passengers and crew died.
Based on the demographics of the ship's population, Dr. Ioannidis estimated that the U.S.
fatality rate could be as low as 0.025% to 0.625% and put the upper bound at 0.05% to 1% --
comparable to that of seasonal flu.
Not that this will settle the matter.
Proponents of destroying human rights and the rule of law in order to carry out lockdowns
will continue to insist that "we didn't know" what the fatality rate was back in March. The
lack of evidence, however, didn't stop proponents of lockdowns from implementing policies that
destroyed the ability of families to earn a living, and which also created social conditions
that caused child
abuse and
suicides to spike.
But for more sane people, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Those who
have claimed that lockdowns are "the only option" had virtually no evidence at all to support
their position. Indeed, such extreme over-the-top measures such as the general lockdowns
required an extreme level of high-quality, nearly irrefutable evidence that lockdowns would
work and were necessary in the face of a disease with an extremely high fatality rate. But the
only "data" the prolockdown people could offer was speculation and hyperbolic predictions of
bodies piling up in the streets.
But that became politically unimportant.
The people who wanted lockdowns had gained the obeisance of powerful people in government
institutions and in the media . So actual data, science, or respect for human rights suddenly
became meaningless. All that mattered was getting those lockdowns. So the lockdown crowd
destroyed the lives of millions in the developed world -- and
more than a hundred million in the developing world -- to satisfy the hunches of a tiny
handful of politicians and technocrats.
The evening of March 19 he began feeling feverish and developed a headache.
"My immediate thought was, 'Oh, I hope it's not Covid.'"
Each day he felt more tired, his fever hovering at about 100 degrees.
"It hit me like a bus. Extreme exhaustion, like every cell in your body is
tired. And my scalp was very sensitive -- it hurt if Heidi touched it. That's a neurological symptom."
It was a new feeling. Despite all the time he has spent in mosquito-riddled
climes, "I'd never been seriously ill in my life," he said. A regular jogger and apparently healthy he
joked, "This is the first time in my adult life I didn't drink wine for a month."
Image
Dr. Larson
in the office of the Vaccine Confidence Project in London last year.
Credit...
Edu
Bayer for The New York Times
Dr. Larson, on the other hand, has survived a fusillade of tropical diseases
in her travels: cerebral malaria, hepatitis E, typhoid and dengue.
"I knew how a lot of the symptoms Peter had felt -- how you hold your head
when it hurts, how fatigued you get just moving across the room. So if he asked for water, or anything, I
dropped what I was doing and got it immediately. Time is a different experience when you're not well -- every
minute matters."
At the time, it was almost impossible to get tested; the few kits available
were reserved for hospitals.
On March 26, he finally found one through a private doctor. It was positive,
and his fever kept rising.
Although he did not feel short of breath, his oxygen saturation was only 84
percent, dangerously low. An X-ray showed fluid in both lungs in a pattern that suggested bacterial
pneumonia.
His blood tests "were really bad," he said. His levels of C-reactive
protein, which indicate inflammation, and of D-Dimer, which indicate blood clots forming, were both very
high.
"I instantly changed from doctor to patient," he said. He was put on oxygen
and sent upstairs on a gurney.
"That was when it hit me in the stomach," Dr. Larson said. She had been
allowed to stay while he was assessed but could not venture upstairs.
Normally Britain's National Health Service hospitals "are as crowded as
Indian buses," Dr. Larson said. "But they had a campaign saying, 'Don't come to the hospital unless you're
in the 11th hour,' so it was almost empty."
"But when I saw Peter go through the double doors on that cart -- I had the
same feeling as the Ebola families we knew in Sierra Leone: They were hiding their relatives because they
didn't want to be separated from them emotionally, knowing they might never see them again."
At first, Dr. Piot said, he was so exhausted he was apathetic. He asked for
a single room, but was told they were reserved for people who had not tested positive, for their protection.
He was put in a 20-by-22-foot room, one bathroom, with three other men.
"They call the N.H.S. 'the great equalizer,'" he said. "The food was bangers
and mash -- awful. And my roommates snored a lot."
Image
Dr. Piot,
second left, in Yambuku, present-day Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1976.
Credit...
Joel
Breman
Dr. Larson went home that night to
hear on the news
that Dr. Gita Ramjee, a well-known South African AIDS researcher, had just died of
Covid-19. Dr. Ramjee was an honorary professor at Dr. Piot's school and had led a symposium there before
falling ill.
"She was my age, and I suddenly felt an acute sense of 'it could happen to
me,'" Dr. Larson said.
Dr. Piot was struggling with his own fears.
"All you can do is lie there thinking, 'I hope it's not going to get
worse.'"
He got intravenous antibiotics and high-flow oxygen, and was roused every
two hours for checks on his a blood pressure and other vital signs.
"I was particularly anxious that I not be put on a ventilator," he said.
"Ventilators can save lives, but they can also do a lot of harm. Once you're on one, your chances of
surviving are the same as of surviving Ebola -- about one third."
The Coronavirus Outbreak
Frequently Asked Questions and Advice
Updated May 27, 2020
What are the symptoms of coronavirus?
Common symptoms
include fever, a dry cough, fatigue and difficulty breathing or shortness of breath.
Some
of these symptoms overlap with those of the flu, making detection difficult, but runny noses
and stuffy sinuses are less common.
The C.D.C. has also
added chills, muscle pain, sore throat, headache and a new loss of
the sense of taste or smell as symptoms to look out for. Most people fall ill five to seven
days after exposure, but symptoms may appear in as few as two days or as many as 14 days.
How can I protect myself while flying?
If air travel is unavoidable,
there are some steps you can take to protect yourself.
Most important: Wash your hands
often, and stop touching your face. If possible, choose a window seat. A
study from Emory University
found that during flu season, the safest place to sit on a
plane is by a window, as people sitting in window seats had less contact with potentially
sick people. Disinfect hard surfaces. When you get to your seat and your hands are clean, use
disinfecting wipes to clean the hard surfaces at your seat like the head and arm rest, the
seatbelt buckle, the remote, screen, seat back pocket and the tray table. If the seat is hard
and nonporous or leather or pleather, you can wipe that down, too. (Using wipes on
upholstered seats could lead to a wet seat and spreading of germs rather than killing them.)
How many people have lost their jobs due to coronavirus
in the U.S.?
Over 38 million people have filed for unemployment since March. One in five who were
working in February reported losing a job or being furloughed in March or the beginning of
April,
data from a Federal Reserve survey released on May 14 showed
, and that pain was highly
concentrated among low earners. Fully 39 percent of former workers living in a household
earning $40,000 or less lost work, compared with 13 percent in those making more than
$100,000, a Fed official said.
Is 'Covid toe' a symptom of the disease?
There is an uptick in
people reporting symptoms of chilblains,
which are painful red or purple lesions that
typically appear in the winter on fingers or toes. The lesions are emerging as yet another
symptom
of infection with the new coronavirus. Chilblains are caused by inflammation in
small blood vessels in reaction to cold or damp conditions, but they are usually common in
the coldest winter months. Federal health officials do not include toe lesions in the list of
coronavirus symptoms, but some dermatologists are pushing for a change, saying so-called
Covid toe should be sufficient grounds for testing.
Taking one's temperature to look for signs of fever is not as easy as it sounds, as
"normal" temperature numbers can vary, but generally, keep an eye out for a temperature of
100.5 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. If you don't have a thermometer (they can be pricey these
days), there are
other ways to figure out if you have a fever, or are at risk of Covid-19 complications.
Should I wear a mask?
The C.D.C. has
recommended
that all Americans wear cloth masks if they go out in public. This is a shift
in federal guidance reflecting
new concerns that the coronavirus is being spread by infected people who have no symptoms
.
Until now, the C.D.C., like the W.H.O., has advised that ordinary people don't need to wear
masks unless they are sick and coughing. Part of the reason was to preserve medical-grade
masks for health care workers who desperately need them at a time when they are in
continuously short supply. Masks don't replace hand washing and social distancing.
What should I do if I feel sick?
If you've been exposed to the coronavirus or think you have,
and have a fever or symptoms
like a cough or difficulty breathing, call a doctor. They should give you advice on whether
you should be tested, how to get tested, and how to seek medical treatment without
potentially infecting or exposing others.
Charity Navigator
, which evaluates charities using a numbers-based system, has a running
list of nonprofits working in communities affected by the outbreak. You can give blood
through the
American Red Cross
, and
World Central Kitchen
has stepped in to distribute meals in major cities.
Every day, he talked to Dr. Larson or his grown children. He did get to
watch episodes of a new BBC series about a Sicilian detective, "
Inspector
Montalbano
," that his wife recommended.
"If this had happened before cellphones, can you imagine the loneliness?" he
said. "It's like being in prison. Look, I know I'm privileged, and I know I'm not going to be stuck here for
27 years like Nelson Mandela. But the world shrinks to the essentials. All you can think is: 'How is my
breathing going?'"
Finally, Dr. Piot said, his oxygen saturation came up to 92 percent. He was
discharged on April 8.
"They wanted to call me a taxi, but I said no, I wanted to breathe the now
non-polluted air in London."
He took a train home.
"It was a shock, like Stockholm syndrome," he said of his survival. "When I
got home, frankly, I started crying. It was so emotional."
But his body wasn't through with the disease.
Before the hospital released him, he had tested negative for the virus. But
now something else was going on -- a delayed immune reaction.
"Gradually, I became short of breath," he said. "We live in an old Georgian
house, with three floors, and I had a hard time getting upstairs."
Dr. Larson bought a pulse oximeter, a fingertip monitor that measures blood
oxygen levels.
She recently tested positive for antibodies to the virus herself, although
her illness was so mild that she's not sure when it peaked. She had two bouts of bad headaches, the first in
late March and the second in mid-April. The second time, she also had itchy red eyes, which are
a rare but recognized symptom
and may indicate
infection through the eyes
.
On April 15, Dr. Piot's heart started to race to 165 beats a minute. The
percentage of his blood oxygen dropped to the mid-80s again.
He and Dr. Larson went to the University College Hospital where he had a
chest X-ray.
This time, instead of distinct bacterial masses on each side, "my lungs were
full of infiltrates, and they were a real mess. It's called '
organizing
pneumonia
.'"
The tiny sacs that grow like bunches of grapes throughout the lungs, he
explained, were oozing signaling proteins -- he was having a "cytokine storm." Those drew voracious white
blood cells into the spaces between the air sacs so they threatened to block the paths oxygen normally takes
to his red blood cells.
His doctors thought about rehospitalizing him -- an outcome he dreaded.
"My grandfather fought in the trenches in World War I -- in those poppy
fields in Flanders," Dr. Piot said. "He said the worst part was going home on leave -- and then realizing
what you had to go back to."
But hospitalizing him on oxygen might have been fruitless -- his lungs were
"stiffening" and perhaps unable to absorb it.
Instead, Dr. Joanna Porter, who specializes in difficult pneumonias, put him
on an intravenous steroid to reduce the inflammation, along with an anticoagulant to prevent blood clots
from his atrial fibrillation.
Britain's N.H.S. bureaucracy forbade her from discussing Dr. Piot's
treatment, though he gave his permission. He is still under her care. Last week, a PET scan, CT scan and
bronchoscopy showed that parts of his lungs have not completely cleared. "And," he added, ever the universal
health care booster, "tell your American audience: All these expensive tests are free from the N.H.S."
The steroids appear to be working, but taking them for too long can have
side effects, including muscle wasting, weakening of bones and diabetes.
Image
"... "Consumption and hiring started to tick up "in gross terms, not in net terms," Furman said, describing the phenomenon as a "partial rebound." The bounce back "can be very very fast, because people go back to their original job, they get called back from furlough, you put the lights back on in your business. Given how many people were furloughed and how many businesses were closed you can get a big jump out of that. ..."
"... IMO Trump now realizes that he was snookered by the medical equivalent of the Holy Office. Our Auto da Fe has been impressive and nearly fatal but not quite. Trump's statement that he will never shut the economy down again indicates to me that the "scales have fallen" from his eyes. ..."
"... One thing to note are all the diffusion indexes will show large upticks, because of the base effects. U6 will likely be more stubborn. ..."
"... he believes, the way to think about the current economic drop-off, at least in the
first two phases, is more like what happens to a thriving economy during and after a natural
disaster: a quick and steep decline in economic activity followed by a quick and steep
rebound.
The Covid-19 recession started with a sudden shuttering of many businesses, a nationwide
decline in consumption, and massive increase in unemployment. But starting around April 15,
when economic reopening started to spread but the overall numbers still looked grim, Furman
noticed some data that pointed to the kind of recovery that economists often see after a
hurricane or industry-wide catastrophe like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill." politico
******
"Consumption and hiring started to tick up "in gross terms, not in net terms," Furman
said, describing the phenomenon as a "partial rebound." The bounce back "can be very very
fast, because people go back to their original job, they get called back from furlough, you
put the lights back on in your business. Given how many people were furloughed and how many
businesses were closed you can get a big jump out of that. It will look like a V."" politico
--------------
Well, pilgrims, there you have it. If Politico thinks so, it must be so. Do I think the
Democratic Party grandees are deliberately suppressing the economy as long as they can and
bitching and whining as the GOP tries to crank up the machine? Yes, I do. Is that criminal?
Should it be criminal? IMO it should be but to prevent the disintegration of the Great
Republic, we must not treat it as such.
IMO Trump now realizes that he was snookered by the medical equivalent of the Holy Office.
Our Auto da Fe has been impressive and nearly fatal but not quite. Trump's statement that he
will never shut the economy down again indicates to me that the "scales have fallen" from his
eyes.
Are his attempts too little and too late? That could be. Or, maybe not.
The brawny beast that is America is gathering itself up, and looking once again at what
CAN BE, not at what is forbidden us by the Globalist nitwits who would destroy us and make us
into building blocks for their utopia. pl
What I don't understand is how prolonging the lockdown of reliably blue states like my own
WA furthers the Democrat election strategy -- assuming it is what you suggest.
It seems to me that when people in those states feel the totalitarian pinch on their own
livelihood, they might be more inclined to vote against the party that's doing it to them,
tipping the state into the purple or even red column.
Same goes for the battleground states. Seems like a surefire way to throw the election,
not win it.
Can someone explain how this is supposed to work?!?
One thing to note are all the diffusion indexes will show large upticks, because of the
base effects. U6 will likely be more stubborn.
The best comparisons will be unit volumes relative to prior to lockdown. For example,
number of flights or gas consumption prior to and after lockdown ends.
One indicator that I track is used car prices. It is starting a nice uptick particularly
for full size trucks. With all the incentives and financing options I would bet we'll see
growth in even new truck volumes .
On the flip side, IMO, the increased debt and the trillions that the Fed printed up for
Wall St will constrain growth in the medium term.
With respect, I don't agree with your view of what has happened from an economic and
medical sense although I agree with your view of the political machinations of the
democrats.
I said when all this started that the economy would bounce back quickly. I still believe
it will. I also believe that the lockdown was necessary, but now it is thought possible to
open up because the medical system and logistics have now caught up with the pandemic. The
lockdowns bought us time.
Fauci, Birx and Co. were talking of easing up three weeks ago at one of President Trumps
press conferences, I watched most of them live. I don't see the medicos as malevolent
globalists or anything other than public health officials doing their jobs under great
pressure and public scrutiny. I don't think they have drunk any of the numerous glasses of
kool aid that were proffered. They appear to me to have stuck stubbornly to the science.
We too are easing lockdown rules - allegedly in "a controlled and measured manner" but
that is actually BS. Everyone is sick of being cooped up and can't wait. We too have one
State leader - a leftist "democrat" that is dragging their feet in Queensland for political
reasons, our equivalent of Florida. Their borders are currently closed - when they reopen
there will be an absolute avalanche of tourists heading North, us included, to get some warm
weather, that will provide a huge economic spike.
Problem is things were frothy before covid, financial markets were well overextended, the
deficit was out of control, oil won't come back anytime soon. In many ways Trump is a lucky
general, gets to blame the slowdown on the virus and any faltering in the recovery on Dem
governors.
Here is a link to a poll that suggests the globalists have screwed up again (see bottom 1/3
of the link). A large % of Americans polled say they will now avoid products made in China
and would be willing to pay more for the same product if it's made in the USA. They also
think that trade restrictions and tariffs are a good idea. Basically, they like the Trumpian
model. China Joe and his boy Hunter are going to be perceived as being on the wrong side of
this issue by Trump.
you are right. We do not agree. IMO the country wide shutdown was never necessary. What
was needed was a strategy of protection for the vulnerable. The rest could have taken care of
themselves with anti-flu like treatment while therapies and vaccines were developed.
The Democrats deserve it and BTW I don't agree with any of the negatives you state with
regard to the pre-COVID state of things. You just don't like Trump. Neither do I
It is the strategy (poorly conceived) of people whose ideology blinds them to extant
reality, and who think they can mold that reality to their whims through sheer fervency of
their belief in their moral superiority to other, "lesser types." I can't think of a single
historical example where such a strategy has worked out, but there you have it. Then again,
according to them, history also fits into that concept of "malleable reality" as they see it.
They are the makers of history in their own estimation, rather than part of and subject to
it. This is why the Left has never been able to grapple with, and is often outright hostile
to, the notion of unforeseen consequences.
This past weekend our hotel parking lots were pretty full, this is normally a slow time in SW
Florida. It's likely restaurants will be allowed 100% capacity seating with bars opening this
coming Monday.
Reasonable people who want a real economy in the USA should all be voting for President
Trump. If he wins, and I think he will, we're going to have a real boom as smart EU money
moves into USA equities, particularly the NASDAQ.
" blame the slowdown on the virus "
Not gonna happen. He's going to blame the Democrats who issued all those EO declaring who was
essential and who was "seperate but equal". He'll blame China, rightfully so, for spreading
this as far and wide in the West as possible; he'll blame the academics and professional
"resistance" within and without the government for their incompetence and intransigence.
Corky,
"Seems like a surefire way to throw the election, not win it."
it doesn't matter who votes, it only matters now who counts them. Thus the statewide mailings
of ballots to maximize ballot harvesting. At the very least lots of local elections will get
stolen, probably a congressional one too, even if WA doesn't go for Trump in November.
"Both viruses remove marker molecules on the surface of an infected cell that are used by
the immune system to identify invaders, the researchers said in a non-peer reviewed paper
posted on preprint website bioRxiv.org on Sunday. They warned that this commonality could
mean Sars-CoV-2, the clinical name for the virus, could be around for some time, like
HIV...that the coronavirus was showing "some characteristics of viruses causing chronic
infection"."
It appears that an Intelligence report that's come out regarding the CCP and their virus by
French Intelligence (DGSE) isn't getting the traction it deserves.
Eleven years, , 'eleven years'BEFORE the EU signed off on the PRC/CCP Wuhan
lab construction, French DGSE warned that the PRC/CCP's lab was a construction leak and
bio-weapon making facility disaster waiting to happen.
Why was nobody listening at the time? Where were the FIVE EYES in all of this, were they
ignoring French Intelligence's warning, what? Where was the CIA in this? They're supposed to
be the 'external' watchdog, right? It was the Tenet/Goss handover time frame, 2004. But
surely the DGSE warnings had to have been 'flagged' by Langley for a closer scrutiny, right?
What was DIA's read on this at the time?
..."French diplomatic and security advisers, who argued that the Chinese reputation for
poor bio-security could lead to a catastrophic leak.
They also warned that Paris could lose control of the project, and even suggested that
Beijing could harness the technology to make biowarfare weapons."...
Another interesting cavet in the article relates to P4 labs everywhere (including U.S.
facilities)..... "A source told the newspaper: 'What you have to understand is that a P4
[high-level bio-security] laboratory is like a nuclear reprocessing plant. It's a
bacteriological atomic bomb."
An interesting development yesterday: Twitter have flagged a couple of Trump's tweets on
mail-in ballots as "Misleading". A link at the bottom of each tweet says "Get the facts about
mail-in ballots" and directs you to a piece written by Twitter on the subject quoting CNN
& WaPo as having contrary views to the President - hardly news in itself.
Are we seeing the beginning of another insurance policy, in case the economy recovers? It
appears to put Trump in a bind, as shutting down or sanctioning Twitter as a whole would not
only deny Trump his (until yesterday) unfiltered comms channel to his base, but also invite
cries of censorship by the MSM. If he does nothing, what is to stop Twitter 'correcting' more
of this messages? In a later tweet Trump directly
accused Twitter of "..interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election". It will be very
interesting to see how this develops. Here is the first of the offending tweets:
@Barbara
If Israel, Mexico, Great Britain, China, Ukraine, Canada, et.al can interfere in American
elections, and the USA can interfere in the elections of any nation it wishes, why should the
Masters and Commanders of the internet be forbidden the same hobby?
Have you never watched Network? https://americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechnetwork4.html
Same as it ever was.
This is a very interesting virus. IMHO curves by the country does not tell us much as
local conditions drastically differ within each single country. Like in 'Lies, damned
lies, and statistics" :-)
As death rates in many countries include both from COVID-19 and "with COVID-19" those
curves can even be misleading. Only excessive deaths rom previous years average make some
sense in country to country comparison.
First of all, the spread is highly concentrated in large multi-million cities. For
example, NYC metropolitan area accounts for ~40% of attributed to COVID-19 deaths and
essentially dominates the country stats.
But the situation in NYC and Hudson river area of NJ is not all the USA. Outside large
cities and their immediate suburbs the USA is affected much less.
For example, in many towns 70 miles west from NYC nobody knows even one person who
became infected.
The second interesting feature of this virus is that it mainly kills old (and,
especially, very old) as well as obese ("diabetic" in the USA is, in a way, a code name
for the morbidly obese), and hypertonics. Those three categories cover around 80% of all
deaths, Add to them people with other serious medical conditions and you probably get
90%.
As such, they reflect as much the level of inequality and "aging population"
phenomena, as the government reaction..
If so, the question arise whether the sacrifices forced by prolonged quarantine are
justified by the severity of the epidemic (the first month was probably justifiable as it
was unclear what kind of danger we face) ?
Also Fauci fake prognoses (based on now discredited Ferguson models) now became
serious liability both for him and for Trump (Fauci probably is a goner; hopefully Trump
is too )
And while Trump administration as a whole demonstrated amazing incompetence in the
process, states amplifies it with arbitrary measures of their own and idiotic moves.
Remember Cuomo stupid (and expensive) quest for more ventilators, for more hospital beds,
and his controversial directive ordering nursing homes to admit COVID-19 patients..
I also doubt that opening shops in the areas with zipcodes that registered zero or
single digit of cases can change something. Just look how unequal the NY counties
are:
For example, I doubt that there is much value in continuation of quarantine in the
bottom dozen of counties in this table.
There is no surprise that in many western counties the NY and NJ governors are now
viewed as enemies of people and effigies were burned on Memorial day
At the same time the problems for NYC and vicinities are not gone. They now look even
more serious. Homeless, subways, packed buses and elevators are pretty efficient means of
spreading the virus and will remains so. Population density is also a huge,
insurmountable factor.
So here one size definitely does not fit all and the work should be done differently
in individual areas.
In may areas closing shops and restaurants was probably redundant and closing of
entertainment (especially night clubs and cinemas) and churches (which are mostly
attended by old people) as well as special protection measured for nursing homes and
prisons might be sufficient.
But don't you think you are being a wee bit devil-may-care with your hotdoggin'? Lol.
...
Russ is also a fantastic writer but whereas his post above and his prior during the
pandemic have focused on the brutality of the lockdown, I'm afraid he has missed the boat on
its net-positive effects, although he has rightly noted that being a bachelor during this
time is a far different experience than a family man (the same goes for apartment dwellers
vs. homeowners):
- As the breadwinner, I have never been home as much as I have with the fam. I'm exploring
fatherhood, long hair and a patchy and itchy beard, and enjoying myself more than anyone
should during the lockdown.
- I have seen more use at public parks, tennis courts, dog walking, family-outing than
ever before. They say that street foot-traffic is down but I beg to differ. Perhaps
consumerism and strip-mall venturing is way down, but f*** that vacuous endeavor I say
anyhow.
- People are cooking again. Fast food has more or less been relegated to treat-status
where it rightfully belongs
- More time at home allows the family to see the benefits of parenting at home and how NOT
to rely on public school raising your child in absentia. Our public school system desperately
needs a wake-up call. It needs to end the trend of politically-charged mission-statements and
remove itself back to second-fiddle status when it comes to raising our children.
- The fact that this being a great social experiment has been lost on those decrying the
lockdown. We are still unpacking the effects of it, but I will repeat that the gov't has
essentially blown its wad for all to see. Future generations will be able to judge this event
more accurately, but there are those now who are more politically active than they have ever
been and so will be more fully enraged during the NEXT encroachment on our liberties. And do
you think that the gov't will be able to repeat this lockdown in the near future with the
same acquiescence from the people? I think not. Indeed, a powder keg has been borne out of
this and it is propelling us out of our collective consumer-driven apathy. And the fact that
those decrying this event have failed to understand how disrupting the course of this
spirit-trough we have all been dwelling in the past decades could actually be a boon for
consciousness, I'm afraid says more about them and their need of the status-quo than anything
else. FFS, how long do you think the gov't can enforce such a policy? How long before it goes
to far and creates a reaction that reinvigorates the sleeping masses? My argument is that it
is getting closer every day and that their goal during this event will backfire spectacularly
on them in the near future.
- As the lockdown peters out, and liberty to frequent parks, forests, and the right to
disperse camp is restored, one wonders what the point of barring us from such activities for
just under three months was for other than piss people off? These activities would never
stand a snowballs chance to be removed permanently, so one can only wonder why? All it did
was further cast a spotlight on their idiocy and further reinforces my point above that, in
effect, they blew their wad.
- Small businesses have suffered. Money is printing so fast to go out of style in the near
future. Oh well, if your margins were that thin so as not to weather a couple months
hiatus/sabbatical, where the gov't has been alleviating the burden of such a time, then you
should probably rethink your business venture and decide whether it is 1) needful,
2)worthwhile, 3)non-superfluous. We need to eliminate the novel enterprises of a
late-capitalist society where hard work is shunned and luxury is all. Toughening up and
becoming lean-and-mean is not necessarily a bad idea, especially when it comes to the
powder-puff society that we find ourselves in.
Now with the coronavirus, we see a similar misplay between earnest elites and raucous
masses. When the severity of the crisis became apparent to all in early March -- some alarmist
statistical models
were predicting millions of deaths–it seemed obvious and necessary for federal and
state officials to follow the advice of the earnest elites and to order lockdowns; as for the
raucous masses, they were initially too bowled over by the apparent menace to raise much of a
protest. After all, nobody wanted to be outdoors during a zombie apocalypse.
Of course, in the absence of zombies, or of people dropping dead in the streets,
anti-lockdown protests soon erupted; in this country, somebody is always protesting something.
At first the protesters seemed to be little more than surviving Tea Partiers, flecked with
neo-Confederates -- a perception that the media was only too happy to reinforce -- and yet over
the past few weeks, it's become clear that the reopen movement is broader than just the anti,
the angry, and the Trumpy.
Indeed, as
this author noted last week, blue-state politicians, including incumbent Democrats, are now
in favor of reopening, albeit in a sometimes inconsistent and arbitrary fashion. In fact, some
recognized members of the earnest healthcare policy elite have gone so far as to write
in The New York Times , "As circumstances have evolved, so has my thinking" -- that is,
time to open up.
Yet in the meantime, populists -- aided by Republican researchers -- are tallying up
incidents of blue-state condescension and hypocrisy, as the woke and the wealthy have imposed
one set of rules on the proles, even as they themselves live by another set of rules.
For instance, there were the orders about
closing down churches, but not liquor stores . And there was the governor's wife who
ignored her husband's lockdown order and flew by private jet to her equestrian farm in
another state. And there was the state public health chief who
pulled her mother out of a nursing home even while ordering such homes to accept Covid-19
patients. (That official was the first transgender person to hold such a post, so she gets
extra points for wokeness, if not for fairness.)
Indeed, the comedian Ruth Buzzi -- best known for her appearances on the Laugh-In TV
show in the late 60s and early 70s -- tweeted about some of the
many weirdnesses of the current situation: "Marijuana is legal and haircuts are against the
law. It took half a century but Hippies finally won."
In the meantime, many people -- including Elon Musk ,
who defies ideological categorization, and including as well
African American partiers in Florida, not likely to be Republicans -- are simply ignoring
the remaining restrictions. The hard-pressed police, betwixt and between the rulers and the
ruled, can't arrest them all.
It's in this environment that The Washington Examiner
took note of a Gallup poll showing that a whopping 63 percent of Americans support
reopening, if new cases of the virus are declining. To be sure, that's a big "if," and yet for
the time being, it doesn't seem coincidental that Gallup also finds that the approval rating
of President Trump -- who has mostly supported reopening and who has always been contemptuous
of those earnest elites -- has edged into positive territory.
Thank you Russ @66. I always appreciate your comments.
I'm going to repost something I wrote this morning about how one can be a skeptic but not
be an asshole about it:
Did you know it is possible to be skeptical about the pandemic but not be an asshole about
it?
I'll use myself as an example.
I wear a mask when I'm in commercial spaces, even when it's not required. I understand and
respect how irrationally fearful people are, and I also understand how the mask has been
turned into a politically divisive symbol of freedom vs. tyranny. I'm not going to waste
energy on opposing mask-wearing when the real threat is a mandatory vaccine program cooked up
by sociopaths and administered by the military.
I don't bring my little germ-sponges–aka, children–into stores with me when
I'm shopping. My oldest, half-jokingly, said he wants to go into Target for his birthday as
his birthday gift. Not to buy anything, just to be in a store.
I'm not rushing into bars and restaurants and cram-packed swimming pools in the Ozarks now
that things are reopening. I stay at home, play with Legos, and drink box wine like a good
adult male with kids and no social life.
Since there is a reopening going on, and a subsequent media effort to highlight the most
obnoxious visual examples of violating our NEW NORMAL social distancing requirements, let me
offer a personal example of what reopening looks like for me.
Yesterday I hosted a social gathering. My friend came over with his two girls, and another
friend came over with his partner. The kids played and laughed over a fart gun. We ate
hotdogs and had a fire. It was great.
We talked about the risk of our gathering in our backyard to eat hotdogs and to let the
kids play. I think we understand the risk as best we can, considering how dubious much of the
information has been, and how flawed the models were.
Should I be ashamed of this gathering? Am I being an asshole by hanging out with a few
friends who have social lives that are about as exciting as mine?
I'm sure some will think yes, yes I am being an asshole. And that's fine. But until the
freedom to hang out with other people is completely removed, I'm going to take the risk of
doing what social herd animals need to do in order to maintain my mental health.
According to
the Telegraph , Michael Levitt correctly predicted the initial trajectory of the pandemic,
but was ignored by now-disgraced Imperial College epidemiologist Niall Ferguson, whose warnings
were embraced by the UK government as justification for the lockdown, despite the fact that the
projections proved to be extremely flawed and dramatically overestimated the virus's potential
for devastation. As early as march, Levitt warned that Ferguson's projections had
over-estimated the potential death toll by "10 or 12 times".
Instead of helping the situation, Fergusons' projections created an unnecessary "panic
virus" which spread among global political leaders, Prof Levitt told the Telegraph.
Prof Levitt, a British-American-Israeli who shared the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2013
for the "development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems", has said for two
months that the planet will beat coronavirus faster than most other experts predict.
"I think lockdown saved no lives," said the scientist, who added that the Government
should have encouraged Britons to wear masks and adhere to other forms of social
distancing.
"I think it may have cost lives. It will have saved a few road accident lives - things
like that - but social damage - domestic abuse, divorces, alcoholism - has been extreme. And
then you have those who were not treated for other conditions."
Data from various studies has offered a mixed picture about the effectiveness of the
lockdowns. The number of cases and deaths has undoubtedly plunged in the US and across Europe
since strict lockdowns were almost universally enacted, but many wonder whether governments are
being overly cautious, perhaps to a dangerous degree.
Though his models have been vindicated by the passage of time, Levitt said his initial
concerns about Ferguson's models were largely ignored due to what he calls the "panic virus",
despite the fact that there's recent precedent for epidemiological models over-estimating the
impact of other outbreaks, including H1N1 and Ebola.
Having assessed the initial outbreak in China and from the infected Diamond Princess
cruise ship, he predicted by March 14 that the UK would lose around 50,000 lives. Prof
Ferguson's modelling that same week estimated up to 500,000 deaths without social distancing
measures.
"I think that the real virus was the panic virus," Prof Levitt told the Telegraph. "For
reasons that were not clear to me, I think the leaders panicked and the people panicked and I
think there was a huge lack of discussion..
The 73-year-old has no background as an epidemiologist, but he assessed the outbreak in
China and prepared a paper based on his own calculations. Most countries, he predicted, would
suffer a Covid-19 death rate worth around an extra month in excess deaths over the calendar
year.
"In Europe, I don't think that anything actually stopped the virus other than some kind of
burnout," he added. " There's a huge number of people who are asymptomatic so I would
seriously imagine that by the time lockdown was finally introduced in the UK the virus was
already widely spread. They could have just stayed open like Sweden by that stage and nothing
would have happened."
Professor Levitt has now analysed the data from 78 nations with more than 50 reported
cases of coronavirus. His investigations proved the virus was never going to achieve the type
of exponential growth that the researchers at Imperial were predicting at the same time.
At this point, Levitt believes the virus has reached a point of saturation across Europe and
parts of the US making lockdowns much less effective. At this point, they're probably causing
far more harm than benefit.
The virus "has saturated", he believes, across Europe. "I think the lockdown will cause
much more damage than the deaths saved," he added. "When I saw the briefing (from Prof
Ferguson) I was shocked. I had a run-in with him when I actually saw that Ferguson's death
rate was a year's worth - doubling the normal death rate. I saw that and said immediately
that's completely wrong. I think Ferguson over-estimated 10 or 12 times. We should have seen
from China that a virus never grows exponentially. From the very first case you see,
exponential growth actually slows down very dramatically.
"The problem with epidemiologists is that they feel their job is to frighten people into
lockdown, social distancing. So you say 'there's going to be a million deaths' and when there
are only 25,000 you say 'it's good you listened to my advice'. This happened with Ebola and
bird flu. It's just part of the madness."
Prof Levitt says the global evidence shows the virus fades in dry heat and in much of the
western world "there seems to be some kind of immunity". "The main worry I would have would
be in China," he said when asked about the prospect of a second outbreak. "I am 73 and I feel
very young," he added. "I don't care about the risk at all. As you get old the risk of dying
from disease is so high that this is the time to buy a motorcycle, go skiing!"
Even as the NYT and WaPo search for every shred of evidence to support the view that the
reopening in the US will lead to a second wave, they're finding that there's not nearly as much
as they'd hoped - which is why projections are their new favorite tool.
"It all points to social economic status and poverty," Gray Molina said.
This is probably true. It was one argument against shutting down economies so drastically.
This is less of a problem in the wealthier countries for the moment, but in a second or third
wave, you will probably see more deaths among the below 60s due to increasing poverty caused
by poorly managed lockdowns this time around.
"... "According to CDC, the disease of obesity affects about 78 million Americans 1 and the ASMBS estimates about 24 million have severe or morbid obesity." ..."
And the government botching of this crisis continues...
'How Could the CDC Make That Mistake?' The government's disease-fighting agency is
conflating viral and antibody tests, compromising a few crucial metrics that governors depend
on to reopen their economies. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, and other states are doing the
same. https://tinyurl.com/y92ea59f
Nearly half of US states haven't contained their coronavirus outbreaks, a new study
finds https://tinyurl.com/yc72pd8t
And no, Sweden is not doing better...
Just 7.3% of Stockholm had Covid-19 antibodies by end of April, study shows
Official findings add to concerns about Sweden's laissez-faire strategy towards the
pandemic https://tinyurl.com/yahnmb3a
Finally, a large scale study on HCQ - 86,000 patients, with 15,000 receiving HCQ...
Blacks are *twice* as likely to get it as whites and Latinos. American Indians are *five
times* more likely to get it. They conclude the best indicator is poverty.
From The Lancet, a study of New York patients... Epidemiology, clinical course, and
outcomes of critically ill adults with COVID-19 in New York City: a prospective cohort study
https://tinyurl.com/yblmszsx
Between March 2 and April 1, 2020, 1150 adults were admitted to both hospitals with
laboratory-confirmed COVID-19, of which 257 (22%) were critically ill.
The median age of patients was 62 years (IQR 51–72), 171 (67%) were men. 212 (82%)
patients had at least one chronic illness, the most common of which were hypertension (162
[63%]) and diabetes (92 [36%]).
119 (46%) patients had obesity.
As of April 28, 2020, 101 (39%) patients had died and 94 (37%) remained
hospitalised.
203 (79%) patients received invasive mechanical ventilation for a median of 18 days (IQR
9–28), 170 (66%) of 257 patients received vasopressors and 79 (31%) received renal
replacement therapy.
The median time to in-hospital deterioration was 3 days (IQR 1–6).
In the multivariable Cox model, older age (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR] 1·31
[1·09–1·57] per 10-year increase), chronic cardiac disease (aHR
1·76 [1·08–2·86]), chronic pulmonary disease (aHR 2·94
[1·48–5·84]), higher concentrations of interleukin-6 (aHR 1·11
[95%CI 1·02–1·20] per decile increase), and higher concentrations of
D-dimer (aHR 1·10 [1·01–1·19] per decile increase) were
independently associated with in-hospital mortality.
Note: 36% had diabetes; 46% were fat. Like I've said before, "diabetes" is a code word for
"fat." And how many people in the US are fat and thus at risk? "According to CDC, the
disease of obesity affects about 78 million Americans 1 and the ASMBS estimates about 24
million have severe or morbid obesity."
So much for "let's just isolate the elderly"...so we can attend our baseball games this
summer and stuff ourselves with crap food...
New UnHerd interview up , this time
with Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford. From their summary:
It's the biggest question in the world right now: is Covid-19 a deadly disease that only
a small fraction of our populations have so far been exposed to? Or is it a much milder
pandemic that a large percentage of people have already encountered and is already on its
way out?
If Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College is the figurehead for the first opinion,
then Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, is
the representative of the second. Her group at Oxford produced a rival model to Ferguson's
back in March which speculated that as much as 50% of the population may already have been
infected and the true Infection Fatality Rate may be as low as 0.1%.
Since then, we have seen various antibody studies around the world indicating a
disappointingly small percentage of seroprevalence -- the percentage of the population has
the anti-Covid-19 antibody. It was starting to seem like Ferguson's view was the one closer
to the truth.
But, in her first major interview since the Oxford study was published in March,
Professor Gupta is only more convinced that her original opinion was correct.
As she sees it, the antibody studies, although useful, do not indicate the true level
of exposure or level of immunity. First, many of the antibody tests are "extremely
unreliable" and rely on hard-to-achieve representative groups. But more important, many
people who have been exposed to the virus will have other kinds of immunity that don't show
up on antibody tests -- either for genetic reasons or the result of pre-existing immunities
to related coronaviruses such as the common cold.
The implications of this are profound – it means that when we hear results from
antibody tests (such as a forthcoming official UK Government study) the percentage who test
positive for antibodies is not necessarily equal to the percentage who have immunity or
resistance to the virus. The true number could be much higher.
Observing the very similar patterns of the epidemic across countries around the world
has convinced Professor Gupta that it is this hidden immunity, more than lockdowns or
government interventions, that offers the best explanation of the Covid-19
progression:
"In almost every context we've seen the epidemic grow, turn around and die away --
almost like clockwork. Different countries have had different lockdown policies, and yet
what we've observed is almost a uniform pattern of behaviour which is highly consistent
with the SIR model. To me that suggests that much of the driving force here was due to the
build-up of immunity. I think that's a more parsimonious explanation than one which
requires in every country for lockdown (or various degrees of lockdown, including no
lockdown) to have had the same effect."
Asked what her updated estimate for the Infection Fatality Rate is, Professor Gupta
says, "I think that the epidemic has largely come and is on its way out in this country so
I think it would be definitely less than 1 in 1000 and probably closer to 1 in 10,000."
That would be somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%.
If she is right, antibody tests are a poor measure of the true virus spread, and the
declining death rate Sweden and many other countries have seen this past month is from
immunity -- not measures -- lowering the effective reproduction number. Time will tell.
To summarise: corona infects less than 5-10% of people, more under ideal virus circumstances
in cold, dumpy ski resorts or in NY-London tenements. Among infected it kills about 1%,
almost all over 65, with those over 80 having a 10-20% chance of dying.
And they shut down the world, because ' corona '. This is a policy of 'do anything
to protect the old' even if it means enslaving the young, a gerontocracy that would be
unthinkable in the past.
It is dawning on even the most fanatical corona fans that the data won't change. Now we
hear about a 'second wave' – why only one more? Or that the restrictions stopped a
disaster – one of those 'what if' historical speculations. But the best one lately is
that ' we didn't know anything, nobody knew '.
Right, who knew? One can justify anything by embracing ignorance: "I know nothing, but
you must do what I say." This is one is better than WMDs, lier loans, or Putin personally
flipping votes in Michigan in 2016 West is really growing intellectually. I can't wait for
the next one
To summarise: corona infects less than 5-10% of people, more under ideal virus
circumstances in cold, dumpy ski resorts or in NY-London tenements
That is in 2-3 months since initial infections and it was enough to completely overwhelm
organized healthcare in some places and strain very hard in most places, then all those
loathed protective measures kick in and the spread slows because of it. If there were no such
any measures taken anywhere in the world growth would become explosively exponential very
soon and those 5% would increase tenfold.
A couple of thoughts (and apologize if they may be in some of the links you
mentioned):
While it's good to know what the "average" IFR is, IMO it's as important from a policy
point of view to know what the conditions in which it varies and how much (based on current
treatment options) it can vary by. Speaking purely statistically, a mean of 1% with a 95% CI
of 0.9-1.1% is significantly different from one of 1% with a 95% CI of 0.01% to 2%.
Here are some factors that we already know significantly impact
hospitalizations/mortality:
Inherent Factors:
– Age (easily the biggest known variable for impacting IFR, likely correlated with
immune system response)
– Gender (men more susceptible than women (around 30% more?)
– Co-morbidity (correlates with pre-existing damage to tissues throughout the body and
sensitivity of receptors/immune response)
– Prior coronavirus history (??? One paper claims that recent infection with
coronavirus that causes the common cold may offer cross-reactive antibodies to SARS-Cov-2
https://www.lji.org/news-events/news/post/first-detailed-analysis-of-immune-response-to-sars-cov-2-bodes-well-for-covid-19-vaccine-development/
)
– Blood groups (??? Contradictory/not fully vetted data claiming for example those with
ABO antigen type A more susceptible to infection progressing than type O, B, AB)
External Factors
– Early detection and treatment before severe symptoms
– Medical care availability
– Tailored treatment cocktails (evolving but reports that each country/region gaining
experience on identifying optimal treatment regimens depending on patient)
– Optimal use of ventilators (reports that though low blood oxygen is first presented,
automatic intubating may often make things worse)
– Lethality/Infectiousness of different strains (?? Non-peer reviewed studies claim for
example at least three major strains that differ in infectiousness/severity which are found
dominant in different regions.
There may be more (eg BCG vaccine (a theory I don't buy for reasons too long to go into
here); past use of nicotine etc; ethnic genotypes etc).
But the point is, based on even current, rapidly evolving knowledge, IFR varies widely
based on known/speculative factors, which should inform response policy from severity/types
of lockdowns/social restrictions to medical responses in addition to efforts to prevent
infection in the first place.
@AP The interesting
& important thing to note is that fatalities are heavily tied to the related factors of
pre-existing conditions and advanced age. For example:
With CQ/AZ/ZN available everywhere, the bulk of the economy could reopen immediately with
or without masks. Given that psychology is important, odds are mask wearing will make
the restart more effective. However, masks provide partial protection at most.
Let us talk about this again, basically, how much of international travel is really
necessary, the cheap labor travel? White pedos vacationing in Thailand? A lot of mass tourism
just leads to places like Queenstown, Kyoto, and Venice being trashed, driving the locals
out, and losing their local culture, and 95 percent of business travel are really junkets
that can be replaced by videoconferencing.
@james wilson Given
that the current crap state of Western culture is that responsibility of SJW millennials and
zoomer maybe it is they that should be sacrificed? How much will the world lose anyway? The
world was much better off before they came here. They are the ones who are responsible for
things going off the deep end the past decade or so. Look at how much better Star Trek the
next generation was compared to the crap now by JJ Abrams.
I liked very much the paper by the Berkeley physicists: Modi, Chirag, Vanessa Boehm, Simone
Ferraro, George Stein, and Uros Seljak. Epidemiologists and all kinds of statisticians could
learn from them how to write transparently. One of the reason there are so many papers
written poorly is that the authors often have to obfuscate as they do not really understand
what they are doing. People can be taught how to use statistical software packages like SAS,
SPSS, R w/o really understanding the underlying mathematical routines.
Millennial Millie investigates the deep conflicts of interest and connections Bill Gates has
with the coronavirus and his proposed 'vaccine' to cure the pandemic.
If Nigerian hackers can steal that much money, Israel, Chinese, and Russian, intel agencies
probably are in the most Fed information systems doing what they want ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... officials in Washington State may have lost "hundreds of millions of dollars" to fraudsters filing bogus unemployment claim ..."
officials
in Washington State may have lost "hundreds of millions of dollars" to fraudsters filing bogus
unemployment claim s – all the way from Nigeria.
"Grandma Killer" Cuomo Sent 4,300 Patients Back To Nursing Homes Despite Positive
COVID-19 Tests by Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2020 - 17:25 Earlier
this month, a reporter at one of NY Gov Andrew Cuomo's daily press briefings asked the governor
about reports that the state issued guidance calling for hospitals to return thousands of
patients who had tested positive for COVID-19 to nursing homes or long-term care facilities
where they lived.
Somehow, despite the horrifying notion that Cuomo deliberately sent patients back to nursing
homes where they unleashed some of the deadliest outbreaks in the country, the governor readily
owned up to the decision, and insisted public health officials believed this to be the best
option to prevent the patients from just hanging around the hospital.
With the benefit of hindsight, we now see that the hospital bed shortages that the US had
prepared for never came to pass. So, not only did this decision lead to thousands of deaths, it
was also totally unnecessary.
Because as the Associated Press reported Friday morning, an investigation discovered that
more than 4,000 nursing home patients who had tested positive for COVID-19 were returned to
their care facilities due to this state order.
More than 4,300 recovering coronavirus patients were sent to New York's already vulnerable
nursing homes under a controversial state directive that was ultimately scrapped amid
criticisms it was accelerating the nation's deadliest outbreaks, according to a count by The
Associated Press.
AP compiled its own tally to find out how many COVID-19 patients were discharged from
hospitals to nursing homes under the March 25 directive after New York's Health Department
declined to release its internal survey conducted two weeks ago. It says it is still
verifying data that was incomplete.
The issue has become a huge problem for Cuomo, who has been labeled "the grandma killer" by
critics. When confronted with the data by the AP, the state health department declined to
comment. One individual quoted by the AP called it "the single dumbest decision" made during
the response to the pandemic.
And guess what - this decision had nothing to do with President Trump. While Cuomo of course
tried to deflected criticism to the Trump administration by claiming that the decision stemmed
from federal guidance, the AP pointed out that "few states went as far as New York and
neighboring New Jersey, which has the second-most care home deaths, in discharging hospitalized
coronavirus patients to nursing homes. California followed suit but loosened its requirement
following intense criticism."
Whatever the full number, nursing home administrators, residents' advocates and relatives
say i t has added up to a big and indefensible problem for facilities that even Gov. Andrew
Cuomo -- the main proponent of the policy -- called "the optimum feeding ground for this
virus."
"It was the single dumbest decision anyone could make if they wanted to kill people,"
Daniel Arbeeny said of the directive, which prompted him to pull his 88-year-old father out
of a Brooklyn nursing home where more than 50 people have died. His father later died of
COVID-19 at home.
"This isn't rocket science," Arbeeny said. "We knew the most vulnerable - the elderly and
compromised - are in nursing homes and rehab centers."
Told of the AP's tally, the Health Department said late Thursday it "can't comment on data
we haven't had a chance to review, particularly while we're still validating our own
comprehensive survey of nursing homes admission and re-admission data in the middle of
responding to this global pandemic."
Cuomo didn't reverse the order until May 10. According to the directive, nursing homes could
"refuse" to take in the patients if they weren't "equipped" to handle them. But unsurprisingly,
no nursing homes did so - since this would be tantamount to admitting that the facilities
weren't safe .
Cuomo, a Democrat, on May 10 reversed the directive, which had been intended to help free
up hospital beds for the sickest patients as cases surged. But he continued to defend it this
week , saying he didn't believe it contributed to the more than 5,800 nursing and adult care
facility deaths in New York -- more than in any other state -- and that homes should have
spoken up if it was a problem.
"Any nursing home could just say, 'I can't handle a COVID person in my facility,'" he
said, although the March 25 order didn't specify how homes could refuse, saying that "no
resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the (nursing home) solely based" on
confirmed or suspected COVID-19.
Over a month later, on April 29, the Health Department clarified that homes should not
take any new residents if they were unable to meet their needs, including a checklist of
standards for coronavirus care and prevention.
And according to the AP, even the most well-equipped nursing homes in the state saw the
trickle of COVID patients turn into a flood that quickly overwhelmed their ability to cope.
Across the country, thousands of nursing home residents and staff have succumbed to the
illness.
Gurwin Jewish, a 460-bed home on Long Island, seemed well-prepared for the coronavirus in
early March, with movable walls to seal off hallways for the infected. But after the state
order, a trickle of recovering COVID-19 patients from local hospitals turned into a flood of
58 people.
More walls were put up, but other residents nonetheless began falling sick and dying. In
the end, 47 Gurwin residents died of confirmed or suspected COVID-19.
The state order "put staff and residents at great risk," CEO Stuart Almer said. "We can't
draw a straight line from bringing in someone positive to someone catching the disease, but
we're talking about elderly, fragile and vulnerable residents."
Nationally, over 35,500 people have died from coronavirus outbreaks at nursing homes and
long-term care facilities, about a third of the overall death toll, according to the AP's
running tally.
Bottom line: Irony of ironies, the most sanctimonious blue-state governors, who used every
conceivable pretext to bash President Trump, also allowed the largest numbers of vulnerable
patients to die because of what amounts to sheer bureaucratic idiocy.
The scandal has earned Cuomo a new nickname that has been heavily suppressed by the likes of
Google, Facebook and Twitter: The "Grandma Killer".
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is facing new criticism after the Associated Press reported Friday that a
state directive led to over 4,300 still recovering coronavirus patients being sent to New
York's "already vulnerable nursing homes."
"It was a death sentence," tweeted Daniel Choi, a doctor at
the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. He called the directive
a "horrendous idea" and "definitely not something any doctor taking care of nursing home
patients would have signed off on."
The state health department
directive (pdf), issued March 25, barred nursing homes from requiring patients deemed
"medically stable" from being tested for Covid-19 prior to admission. Cuomo, a Democrat,
rescinded the order May 10, but not before thousands of infected patients likely entered
nursing homes and contributed to the coronavirus's spread.
The estimated number tallied by the AP amounts to what would have been a "big and
indefensible problem for facilities," the outlet reported.
From the AP :
"It was the single dumbest decision anyone could make if they wanted to kill people,"
Daniel Arbeeny said of the directive, which prompted him to pull his 88-year-old father out
of a Brooklyn nursing home where more than 50 people have died. His father later died of
Covid-19 at home.
"This isn't rocket science," Arbeeny said. "We knew the most vulnerable -- the elderly and
compromised -- are in nursing homes and rehab centers."
CBS New York reported
Friday that the conoravirus has taken the lives of almost 5% of nursing home residents in the
state, and this week the Cuomo tried to deflect blame for the directive.
"Why did the state do that with Covid patients in nursing homes?" asked Cuomo. "It's because
the state followed President Trump's CDC guidelines. So they should ask President Trump."
In an
op-ed at the Guardian on Wednesday questioning the recent accolades heaped on the New York
governor -- including suggestions that Cuomo run for president -- journalists Lyta Gold and
Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs magazine write that "Cuomo should be one of the most loathed
officials in America right now. "
Gold and Robinson argue that blame for New York's high death toll from the virus should sit
largely with Cuomo.
"Federal failures played a role, of course, but this tragedy was absolutely due, in part, to
decisions by the governor," they wrote, citing as examples his failure to take swift action,
delays in imposing social distancing measures, Medicaid cuts both before and after the start of
the pandemic, and his partnership with Silicon Valley billionaires to "reimagine
education."
"This is the problem: for too long, Democrats have measured their politicians by 'whether
they are better than Republicans,' wrote Gold and Robinson. "This sets the bar very low indeed,
and means that Democrats end up settling for incompetent and amoral leaders who betray
progressive values again and again."
But what about the snitches and the virtue signalers and the screamingly fearful faux
celebrities, and how can you be so cruel to the currently essential who if we re-open have to
return to being just another bunch of working stiffs. Have you not seen the vasty deep
outpouring of love and affection we are currently piling on the Nurse Ratcheds and Dr. Evils
of the world for their virtuous and self effacing tv commercials and the many glorious PSAs
with paeans and "we're all in this together" sophistries from various health insurance
companies and makers of very expensive symptom mollifiers?
I am sorry sir, but I must disagree. We must not only keep closed that which is currently
closed, we must use the power of the IC and the various state and federal militaries and
national guards to close down all the open and partially opened states and cities and towns
and farms and counties and any other political subdivisions of this great nation until we are
truly "all in this together".
Or
We could just open all of it, now.
If we did, we would be back to normal in about 60 days, some places would open with new
management, some folks would enjoy continued unemployment until they were called back.
I, personally, expect that except for Ca and NY the country will be reopen about 90 days
prior to the election.
The liberal media and legislators applied the 100% solution to 1% of the population, if that
much.
That was failed leadership; that was slavish "following orders". That was a loss of the
maxim "trust, but verify" maxim. This powerful legacy of the Reagan era, must be put back at
the forefront of any public decision process. Question authority needs repeating as well.
Our public education system failed us completely for too many decades. Teaching
generations of Americans to be critical of America, is not teaching them critical thinking
skills. We need to own up to that, from our local school boards on up.
These non-science , not thinking, hateful liberal media and politicians deserve the 100%
solution - 100% voted out of office in 2020. Liberal media and legislators must get a new
message. Voting and boycotting are the two primary tools we have. Some stunning upsets in
primary races are already occurring. It will be morning in America again.
But may we never forget why so many were so willing to shoot ourselves in the foot. For
what end purpose? Were we ever so collectively scared as a Nation in the past, that we were
willing destroy ourselves as we witnessed happening these past few money - no nuance, no
graduated response, no scalpel wiled with professional precision.
What happened to our true grit as Americans? How did we get into this devastatingly false
dichotomy - total submission or we are all going to die.
Will there be a post mortem examination of the corpse of our once vibrant nation? This
requires honest soul searching. I honestly don't think we have the tools to do this any
longer. I hope I am wrong. In fact I would be greatly comforted to be proven wrong.
Will current national leadership rise to this challenge? Or has the Black Swan yet to
arrive. Or do we start this soul-searching right here and right now, one by one. "Stronger
together". Will the Karens stop demanding we go through their menopause danger years with
them.
It is astonishing that no one is talking about the death profile from covid19 (or as it
should have been named - the Wuhan coronavirus). Over there in the UK, the median age of
death from covid is 83-84.
There has been a lot of talk about Children dying of covid. Only 2 (two) children under
the age of 10 have died from covid since it started and they probably had other conditions.
This is in a total population of 65million.
Fully 90% of the deaths from covid19 are in the ages of 65+ and that segment of the
population doesn't, by and large, participate in production in the economy (of goods or
services). While death is always sad and it will lead to grieving, we have to understand that
people always die, especially the old and infirm. Anyways, no one is suggesting that they
should be left to fend for themselves, the older people and those with conditions makes them
high risk should be isolated.
The UK closed the massive Nightingale hospitals that were set up to handle thousands of
patients. The one in London handled a total of 54 before shutting down. Clearly, we had
over-provisioned for the outbreak (as we should) but very clearly we are past the worst.
Please OPEN UP THE ECONOMY. And do it NOW. The deaths being avoided are not worth keeping
the economy shut down, not only in the UK but across the world.
People point towards the Spanish flu where most deaths happened in the 2nd wave. Well,
most of those deaths would not have happened had antibiotics been invented then. The deaths
were due to subsequent bacterial infections (usually pneumonia) after the virus weakened the
immune system.
We need to start going back to normal and we need to do it now!
Democrats - the Dream Killers. Meanwhile immigration is our strength, multi-national
corporations may operate, private businesses may not - "for the common good" as Deborah
Dingell, former GM lobbyist and now successor to John D's hold on power in Congress and the
DNC, likes to repeat daily on her FB stream of concousness - along with exhortations to
obedience.
"By prolonging the coronavirus shutdown long after its core mission was accomplished, Gov.
Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have plunged tens of thousands of New Yorkers into
poverty."
Poverty apparently doesn't kill anyone infected with this virus, but it sure is killing
our freedoms and thanks to Cuomo and Whitmer it has killed thousands in nursing homes. The
press is all praise for them, and tries to gin up stories about other governors, such as De
Santis of Florida, or ignores them, as they are going with the story in Georgia.
Sir,
I was a fence sitter/agnostic until the end of February or early March. Then there was enough
data in to be able to understand that the elderly needed to be protected and the rest of
should go about life as normal. When you first posted about panic, I wasn't seeing a panic as
I would define it. Then a few days later lockdowns were announced. You had the jump on that
one!
Just to summarize what I have been saying since the lockdown started, there are going to
be more deaths (and many more years of life lost) from all of the people not able and/or too
afraid to engage in regular healthcare services than there will be killed by the virus - and
from the effects of economic destruction.
The Mayor of Ithaca, NY - not a conservative by any means - made an appeal to Cuomo to
open the economy back up and to allow students to return to colleges. He says his college
town (includes Cornell U) had the best economy in all of NY up to the lockdown (lowest
unemployment, etc). Now he can't collect enough tax revenue to pay police and other public
servants.
And that's what I don't get about this scheme to establish a new [socialist] normal. How
do the socialists think they are going to generate revenues to pay for everything they want?
It's almost as if they don't understand economics 101. Will they turn on their limousine
faction and confiscate their wealth along with that of conservatives? Do they really imagine
that no one is going to fight back (I mean with votes, pitchforks, guns...whatever)? For that
matter, same goes for the non-scheming sincere useful science geek/idiots. They are supposed
to be engineer types, but where are the sober calculations of costs and benefits? What are
they thinking?
Re:
A lot of people die every day of a variety of causes. This virus is a reaper that culls the
population, eliminating the weak and the old. The great majority of healthy, productive
people survive infection with little or no apparent effect.
The last or only time this brushed me was with polio in Detroit in the 50's. Following
your "re-open the country, all of it" swimming pools and Belle Isle would never have been
closed would have remained open in August and September to allow nature to thin-out
Detroit's/the country's weakest.
Yeah, too bad about all those doctors and nurses dying. Easily replaced, I'm sure.
It's just math, folks. Epidemics are math...you can either go with the math or try to
change the equation and the outcome of the math. I, personally, would rather try to change
the equation.
"The greater good ..." How many doctors and nurses really? How many? You should remember
about me that I am accustomed to sacrificing people for the greater good. That is MY
professional deformation.
New York City is still getting hundreds of new cases and hospitalizations a day. How many
people will want to go to crowded indoor places? If there is social distancing with lots of
empty chairs and spaces, how many closed places could make any money if they opened?
There's been a lot of uncertainty and guesswork involved with this new virus and that will
continue. We came through the first round with some hotspots but most places doing OK. I
think we were right to shut down when we did and that we need to be careful in opening back
up. I still trust Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx.
Certainly it's time to start relaxing restrictions in most places. But we need to remember
that this is a new virus with many unknowns and that we are all vulnerable because there's no
proven ttestment that works, cure or vaccine.
I have to say that this crisis has taken on a symbolic importance for some. It has not for
me. I think this will lead to a lot more disagreement about what should be done in the
future, particularly if we have addition waves. That makes me feel uneasy -- very uneasy. I
am not assuming we're going to have a very effective vaccine within a year so we may be
living with this threat for a long time.
Eric, socialists in California have one standard answer when confronted with funding for
their schemes: They'll find the money. .
End of all practical discussion. When asked for details, they will invariably add .. "you
had money for the Vietnam war .... the military etc. Just use that money."
Only two decades of total socialism in this state has this done to our fiscal literacy.
"Just tax the rich" gets anything passed. Cruel fact in this state, the rich - just the top
1% in this state pay 50% of all state revenues. Only a handful of people pay half the
bills.
Should any of this top 1% leave, like Musk recently threatened, shock waves will reach the
state's executive suite. But this threat will fall on deaf ears in the state's Democrat
super-majority legislature.
Voters finally are catching on - they lost their livelihood due to government actions, but
government employees never missed a paycheck. How this translates at the ballot box remains
to be seen. Two Democrats getting recently tossed out is a good start, but is it a trend?
My own local city council yesterday just gave all SEIU employees a raise; while our entire
economy, much of it dependent on tourism, has been totally trashed. This is what a Democrat
one party state looks like.
"How do the socialists think they are going to generate revenues to pay for everything they
want?"
Eric,
Simple. Print money. As they've been doing since the GFC at scale. The added benefit is
that the biggest beneficiary of socialism - the titan of capitalism - Wall St - will get the
lion's share as they're getting now with the Wuhan virus lockdown. Average Joe peon should be
thankful they got $1,200.
Powell on 60 Minutes says there's no limit to the Fed printing money. He like Bernanke
loves to click Print on the keyboard. And no pesky Congressional authorization either. MOAR
& MOAR!!
It's feeling pretty normal here in SW Florida now, rumor is Jun 1st the bars will open up and
that makes it 100% normal. I know of at least 6 restaurants in Port Charlotte/Punta Gorda
that will not re-open. We go through the restaurant closings every year anyway, "Season"
ended early this year with the lock down. Memorial Day usually is when we get the closings.
But, they will reopen with new owners who have recently retired and "have always wanted to
own a restaurant" not understanding that the restaurant business is for the younger, just as
life is.
I feel awful when I see the little old ladies driving alone in their cars with their masks
on, victims of the MSM that are truly a national security threat.
Sir,
The fact of the Khmer Rouge and the mentality behind it (at bottom, same as Mao, same as
Stalin same others that brought death, destruction and misery to their societies) is another
reason to get back to normal in this country - and accept any casualties that might result.
This has become a war for the heart and soul of the country. Actually, it's a war for
everything; even material prosperity. Whatever the casualties might be in the short run, they
will be far less than the long run if we allow the Khmer Rouge to continue (which, of course,
is one of your key points).
One of my objectives on social media has been to try to gain insight into the Khmer Rouge
and young pioneer psychology. I can now recognize it when I see it; even when it tries to
disguise itself, but I truly don't understand such people. IMO it is some kind of twisted
spiritual illness that seeks dominance as it replaces God with themselves. That much I can
see. I guess it has to do with the battle between good and evil. Evil always seeks to control
and manipulate and disrespects the sanctity of each soul. It seeks to enslave and cut off
from freedom and recognition of divinity around each of us and in each of us. Its sycophants
are attracted to the sense of power; false as it may truly be.
Our natural capacity for threat perception and assessment is warped by the media's need to
generate headlines. The virus is a gift to them which they have enthusiastically embraced.
Most of us have a vanishing small chance of it killing us off, yet this single risk dominates
the public discourse to the exclusion of almost all else.
Social media is particularly insidious, the effects of which far too few are prepared to
counter. The feedback loops of hysteria it generates must be assessed as a threat in their
own right - to our ability to make sound judgments.
A destroyed economy is not a direct threat to any one individual's survival, but it's
collapse is an inevitable consequence if the lockdowns are allowed to continue. In this case
many will die and very many more will experience a great deal of misery. Sadly the headlines
carrying these stories will only come after it is far too late.
Turn off the Tee Vee news, treat social media 'news' with great skepticism and read the
opinions of people who see the bigger picture. You are in the right place for the last of
these.
Open it up-It never should of closed. What we have done is to prolong the inevitable. You
either get it or you don't but it is still here waiting for those cowering in their homes.
Prudent actions and awareness of your situation will get one through most of life's
events.
The next thing we will here is Oh Folks, get out there and enjoy the summer while you can as
it's coming back in the fall. No schools, Sheltering in Place, minimize the essentials, where
are those ships and tent hospitals, we need PPE, start the printing etc etc cause the vaccine
ain't ready Folks.
It will all be fine, don't worry. Keep in mind it has only taken a 100,000 out 330,000,000
a very low ratio.
The US government will issue 3 trillion $ of new debt in this quarter alone. The banks
will buy these bonds, then sell them back to the US Central Bank (that's called "quantitative
easing", the quoted article talks about the expectation that the central bank will announce a
new bond purchasing program soon because the current one is far too small to absorb all the
new debt), and the cycle repeats.
That's not sustainable, but that's the only plan that exists. If the shutdown of the
economy continues indefinitely, it will end in economic collapse by bankruptcy of the federal
government, or hyperinflation, which is really just a different way to reach the same painful
end point.
Same story here in Europe, just with the added complication that there are conflicts
between the different national governments of the Eurozone when the European Central Bank
does the very same thing.
You can open up the city when everyone starts to wear a
mask . Covid-19 is proving to be an airborne killer... which simplifies things
enormously. Consider it an instance of CBW. And of course the children's inflammatory
syndrome is just collateral damage.
Master Slacker--And now there is some evidence that the inflammatory syndrome is hitting
teenagers and young adults, too.
turocpolier--The numbers aren't comprehensive (or even good) on the national toll of
doctors and nurses and aides and CNAs, etc. in health care/hospitals. Too bad our government
can't get everyone to report in a uniform manner!!!! (Not that any other administration has
been successful with this either.) It certainly would be helpful in the middle of a novel
pandemic to know if we were going to have enough front line responders to stay in the
fight.
And I NEVER forget that you are a professional "sacrificer for the greater good." That is
why I appreciate what you have to say...it is a worthy perspective and not one that I default
to!
So "my body, my choice" is for abortion only now, because your fear is greater than my
rights? "stay home, stay safe" negates my need to wear a gag in your presence. I reccomend
Kevin Drum go out and drum up some antifa support for the socialist distancing policing. They
ought to be well rested and ready for some agit-prop and agent provocateur actions by
now.
A progressive organization of 23,000 physicians from across the U.S. demanded Thursday that
the American Hospital Association (AHA) divest completely from a dark-money lobbying group that
has spent millions combating Medicare for All and instead devote those financial resources to
the fight against Covid-19 and to better support for patients and healthcare workers.
Dr. Adam Gaffney, president of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), said in a
statement that "the Covid-19 pandemic has stretched hospitals' resources to the limit, and the
AHA should not waste precious member hospitals' funds lobbying against universal health
coverage" as a member of the Partnership for America's Health Care Future (PFAHCF).
Because Medicare for All would provide a lifeline to hospitals in underserved areas that
have been hit hard by Covid-19, Gaffney argued, the AHA "cannot claim to represent hospitals
while also opposing a single-payer system that would keep struggling hospitals open." The AHA
represents around 5,000 hospitals and other healthcare providers in the U.S.
As Common Dreams
reported earlier this month, public health officials are accusing the Trump administration
of directing billions of dollars in Covid-19 hospital bailout funds to high-revenue providers
while restricting money to hospitals that serve low-income areas.
Tenet Healthcare, an investor-owned hospital company that has donated hundreds of
thousands to PFAHCF, has received $345 million in Covid-19 bailout funds, Axios
reported last month.
"The AHA should immediately leave the PFAHCF," Gaffney said, "and redirect that money to
supporting patients and frontline healthcare workers."
"As physicians, we can no longer tolerate a health system that puts profits ahead of
patients and public health," Gaffney added. "It's time for health professionals to hold
accountable the organizations that claim to represent us."
Formed in the summer of 2018 by an alliance of pharmaceutical, insurance, and hospital
lobbyists with the goal of countering the push for universal healthcare, PFAHCF's anti-Medicare
for All " army "
has grown rapidly since its founding, with the AHA joining the fray in 2019.
As The Interceptreported last
October, the for-profit hospital industry has played an "integral role" in the corporate fight
against single-payer.
"America's Patchwork Pandemic Is Fraying Even Further" [
The Atlantic ]. "America spent much of April on a disquieting plateau, with every day
bringing about 30,000 new cases and about 2,000 new deaths .
This pattern exists because different states have experienced the coronavirus pandemic in
very different ways . The U.S. is dealing with a patchwork pandemic. The patchwork is not
static. Next month's hot spots will not be the same as last month's.
I spoke with two dozen experts who agreed that in the absence of a vaccine, the patchwork
will continue. Cities that thought the worst had passed may be hit anew. States that had lucky
escapes may find themselves less lucky. The future is uncertain, but Americans should expect
neither a swift return to normalcy nor a unified national experience, with an initial spring
wave, a summer lull, and a fall resurgence. "The talk of a second wave as if we've exited the
first doesn't capture what's really happening," says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the
Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. What's happening is not one crisis, but many
interconnected ones.
A patchwork was inevitable, especially when a pandemic unfolds over a nation as large as the
U.S. But the White House has intensified it by devolving responsibility to the states. There is
some sense to that. American public health works at a local level, delivered by more than 3,000
departments that serve specific cities, counties, tribes, and states. This decentralized system
is a strength: An epidemiologist in rural Minnesota knows the needs and vulnerabilities of her
community better than a federal official in Washington, D.C.
But in a pandemic, the actions of 50 uncoordinated states will be less than the sum of their
parts. Only the federal government has pockets deep enough to fund the extraordinary
public-health effort now needed. Only it can coordinate the production of medical supplies to
avoid local supply-chain choke points, and then ensure that said supplies are distributed
according to need, rather than influence
The pandemic patchwork exists because the U.S. is a patchwork to its core . New
outbreaks will continue to flare and fester unless the country makes a serious effort to
protect its most vulnerable citizens, recognizing that their risk is the result of societal
failures, not personal ones." • A must-read.
Andrew Cuomo may be the most popular
politician in the country. ... All of which is bizarre, because Cuomo should be one of the
most loathed officials in America right now. ProPublica
recently released a report outlining catastrophic missteps by Cuomo and the New York City
mayor, Bill de Blasio, which probably resulted in many thousands of needless coronavirus cases.
ProPublica offers some appalling numbers contrasting what happened in New York with the
outbreak in California. By mid-May, New York City alone had almost 20,000 deaths, while in San
Francisco there had been only 35, and New York state as a whole suffered 10 times as many
deaths as California.
Federal failures played a role, of course, but this tragedy was absolutely due, in part, to
decisions by the governor. Cuomo initially "reacted to De Blasio's idea for closing down New
York City with derision", saying it "was dangerous" and "served only to scare people". He said
the "seasonal flu was a graver worry". A spokesperson for Cuomo "refused to say if the governor
had ever read the state's pandemic plan". Later, Cuomo would blame the press, including the New
York Times for failing to say "Be careful, there's a virus in China that may be in the United
States?" even though the Times wrote nearly 500 stories on the
virus before the state acted. Experts told ProPublica that "had New York imposed its extreme
social distancing measures a week or two earlier, the death toll might have been cut by half or
more".
But delay was not the only screw-up. Elderly prisoners
have died of coronavirus because New York has failed to act on their medical parole
requests. As Business Insider documented:
"Testing was
slow . Nonprofit social-service agencies that serve the most vulnerable
couldn't get answers either . And medical experts like the former CDC director Tom Frieden
said 'so many deaths could have been prevented' had New York issued its stay-at-home order
just 'days earlier' than it did. On March 19, when New York's schools had already been
closed, Cuomo said 'in many ways, the fear is more dangerous than the virus.'"
The governor has failed to take responsibility for the obvious failures, consistently
blaming others and at one point even saying " governors
don't do pandemics ". (Actually, some governors just don't read their state's pandemic
plans.) But much of the press has ignored this, focusing instead on Cuomo's aesthetic
presentation: his poise during press conferences, his dramatic statements about "taking
responsibility" (even when he obviously hasn't), and his invisible good looks. ...
There's something disturbing about Cuomo being hailed as the hero of the pandemic when he
should rightly be one of the villains. As Business Insider notes, he is now only able to attain
praise for his actions because his earlier failures made those actions necessary. He's lauded
for addressing a problem that he himself partly caused. Of course, part of this is because
Donald Trump has
bungled the coronavirus response even more badly , so that Cuomo – by not being a
complete buffoon – looks like a capable statesman by contrast. But this is the problem:
for too long, Democrats have measured their politicians by "whether they are better than
Republicans". This sets the bar very low indeed, and means that Democrats end up settling for
incompetent and amoral leaders who betray progressive values again and again.
President Donald Trump told Republican senators during a private lunch Tuesday that he is willing to let expanded unemployment
benefits expire at the end of July, a decision that would
massively slash the incomes of tens of millions
of people who have lost their jobs due to the Covid-19 crisis.
The Washington Post
reported Tuesday that the president "privately expressed opposition to extending a weekly $600 boost in unemployment insurance
for laid-off workers affected by the coronavirus pandemic, according to three officials familiar with his remarks."
House Democrats passed legislation last week that would extend the beefed-up unemployment benefits through January of 2021 as
experts and government officials -- including Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell --
warn the
U.S. unemployment rate could soon reach 25%. The unemployment insurance boost under the CARES Act is set to expire on July 31, even
as many
people have yet to receive their first check.
"With nearly 1 in 5 Americans out of work, Donald Trump's plan is to cut off the boost to unemployment benefits and shower his
wealthy buddies with more tax cuts," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of the architects of the unemployment insurance expansion,
toldHuffPost . "This is the worst economic crisis in 100 years and Donald Trump is doubling down on Herbert Hoover's economic
playbook and pushing workers to risk their health for his political benefit."
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) -- who
declared earlier this month that Congress will only extend the boosted unemployment insurance "over our dead bodies" -- said
after the private lunch that Trump believes the benefits are "hurting the economic recovery." Graham was one of several Republican
senators who
opposed the initial expansion of unemployment benefits as too generous.
An
analysis
released last week by the Hamilton Project, an initiative of the Brookings Institution, found that expanded unemployment benefits
offset "roughly half of lost wages and salaries in April." Unemployment insurance has "been essential to families, and is vital for
keeping the economy from cratering further," the authors of the analysis noted.
Ernie Tedeschi, a former Treasury Department economist,
estimated that "come July 31, if the emergency
UI top-up isn't extended, unemployed workers will effectively get a pay cut of 50-75% overnight."
"It's increasingly looking like there won't be enough labor demand to hire them all back at that point," Tedeschi tweeted.
The latest Labor Department statistics showed that
more than 36 million
people in the U.S. have filed jobless claims since mid-March as mass layoffs continue in the absence of government action to
keep workers on company payrolls. Despite the grim numbers, the Post 's Jeff Stein reported Tuesday that the White House
is "
predicting a swift economic recovery " as it resists additional efforts to provide relief to frontline workers and the unemployed.
On top of rejecting an extension of enhanced unemployment insurance, Trump last month
publicly voiced opposition to another round of direct stimulus payments, instead advocating a cut to the tax that funds Social
Security and Medicare.
Demanding McDonald's prioritize public health and worker safety over profits, hundreds of
employees at the fast food chain
went on strike Wednesday, a day before the company was set to hold its annual shareholders'
meeting.
Instead of distributing dividends to its shareholders, the striking employees are calling
for the company to use its massive profits to pay for safety and financial protections for
workers, scores of whom have contracted Covid-19 in at least 16 states so far.
Employees and strike organizers at the fair wage advocacy group Fight for $15 are demanding
hazard pay during the pandemic of "$15X2," paid sick leave, sufficient protective gear for
workers, and company-wide policy of closing a restaurant for two weeks when an employee becomes
infected, with workers being fully paid.
The strike is taking place at stores in at least 20 cities. Fight for $15 and the SEIU,
which is also supporting the action, say it's the first nationwide coordinated effort targeting
the company since the coronavirus pandemic began in March.
The coerced economic "shutdowns" - enforced with fines, arrests, and revoked business
licenses - are not the natural outgrowth of a pandemic. They are the result of policy decisions
taken by politicians who have suspended constitutional institutions and legal recognition of
basic human rights. These politicians have instead imposed a new form of central planning based
on an unproven, theoretical set of ideas about police-enforced "social distancing."
None of that is being considered, however, since it is now fashionable to have governments
determine whether or not people may open their businesses or leave their homes. So far, the
strategy for dealing with the resulting economic collapse is no more sophisticated than
record-breaking
deficit spending , followed by debt monetization via money printing. In short, politicians,
bureaucrats, and their supporters have insisted a single policy goal -- ending the spread of a
disease -- be allowed to destroy all other values and considerations in society.
Has it even worked? Mounting evidence says no.
In The
Lancet , Swedish infectious disease clinician (and World Health Organization (WHO) advisor)
Johan Giesecke concluded:
It has become clear that a hard lockdown does not protect old and frail people living in
care homes - a population the lockdown was designed to protect. Neither does it decrease
mortality from COVID-19, which is evident when comparing the UK's experience with that of
other European countries.
At best, lockdowns push cases into the future, they do not lower total deaths. Gieseck
continues:
Measures to flatten the curve might have an effect, but a lockdown only pushes the severe
cases into the future -- it will not prevent them. Admittedly, countries have managed to slow
down spread so as not to overburden health-care systems, and, yes, effective drugs that save
lives might soon be developed, but this pandemic is swift, and those drugs have to be
developed, tested, and marketed quickly. Much hope is put in vaccines, but they will take
time, and with the unclear protective immunological response to infection, it is not certain
that vaccines will be very effective.
As a public policy measure, the lack of evidence that lockdowns work must be balanced with
the fact that we have already observed that economic destruction is costly in terms of human
life.
Yet in the public debate, lockdown enthusiasts insist that any deviation from the lockdown
will result in total deaths far exceeding those places where there are lockdowns. So far, there
is no evidence of this.
In a new study titled "Full Lockdown Policies in Western Europe Countries Have No Evident
Impacts on the COVID-19 Epidemic," author Thomas Meunier writes , "total deaths
numbers using pre-lockdown trends suggest that no lives were saved by this strategy, in
comparison with pre-lockdown, less restrictive, social distancing policies." That is, the "full
lockdown policies of France, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom haven't had the expected effects
in the evolution of the COVID-19 epidemic." 1
The premise here is not that voluntary "social distancing" has no effect. Rather, the
question is to whether "police-enforced home containment" works to limit the spread of disease.
Meunier concludes it does not.
The question the model set out to ask was whether lockdown states experience fewer
Covid-19 cases and deaths than social-distancing states, adjusted for all of the above
variables. The answer? No. The impact of state-response strategy on both my cases and deaths
measures was utterly insignificant. The "p-value" for the variable representing strategy was
0.94 when it was regressed against the deaths metric, which means there is a 94 per cent
chance that any relationship between the different measures and Covid-19 deaths was the
result of pure random chance.
Overall, however, the fact that good-sized regions from Utah to Sweden to much of East
Asia have avoided harsh lockdowns without being overrun by Covid-19 is notable.
Another study on lockdowns -- again, we're talking about forced business closures and
stay-at-home orders here -- is this study by researcher Lyman Stone at
the American Enterprise Institute. Stone notes that areas where lockdowns were imposed either
had already experienced a downward trend in deaths before the lockdown could have possibly
shown effects or showed the same trend as the year prior. In other words, lockdown advocates
have been taking credit for trends that had already been observed before lockdowns were forced
on the population.
Stone writes:
Here's the thing: there's no evidence of lockdowns working. If strict lockdowns actually
saved lives, I would be all for them, even if they had large economic costs. But the
scientific and medical case for strict lockdowns is paper-thin.
Experience increasingly suggests that a more targeted approach is better for those who
actually want to limit the spread of disease among the most vulnerable. The overwhelming
majority -- nearly 75 percent -- of deaths from COVID-19 occur in patients over sixty-five
years of age. Of those, approximately 90 percent have other underlying
conditions . Thus, limiting the spread of COVID-19 is most critical among those who are
already engaged with the healthcare system and are elderly. In the
US and Europe ,
more than half of COVID-19 deaths are occuring in nursing homes and similar institutions.
This is why Matt Ridley at The Spectator quite reasonably
observes that testing, not lockdowns, appears to be the key factor in limiting deaths from
COVID-19 . Those areas where testing is widespread have performed better:
Yet it is not obvious why testing would make a difference, especially to the death rate.
Testing does not cure the disease. Germany's strange achievement of a consistently low case
fatality rate seems baffling -- until you think through where most early cases were found: in
hospitals. By doing a lot more testing, countries like Germany might have partly kept the
virus from spreading within the healthcare system. Germany, Japan and Hong Kong had different
and more effective protocols in place from day one to prevent the virus spreading within care
homes and hospitals.
The horrible truth is that it now looks like in many of the early cases, the disease was
probably caught in hospitals and doctors' surgeries. That is where the virus kept returning,
in the lungs of sick people, and that is where the next person often caught it, including
plenty of healthcare workers. Many of these may not have realised they had it, or thought
they had a mild cold. They then gave it to yet more elderly patients who were in hospital for
other reasons, some of whom were sent back to care homes when the National Health Service
made space on the wards for the expected wave of coronavirus patients.
We could contrast this with the policies of Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York, who mandated
that nursing homes accept new residents
without testing . This method nearly ensures that the disease will spread quickly among
those who are most likely to die from it.
Meanwhile, Governor Cuomo saw fit to impose police-enforced lockdowns on the entire
population of New York, ensuring economic ruin and ruined health for many non-COVID patients
who were then cut off from vital treatments. Yet, disturbingly, lockdown fetishists like Cuomo
are hailed as wise statesmen who "acted decisively" to prevent the spread of disease.
But this is the sort of regime we now live under. In the minds of many, it is better to
abolish human rights and consign millions to destitution in the name of pursuing trendy
unproven policies. The prolockdown party has even turned basic fundamentals of policy debate
upside down. As Stone notes:
At this point, the question I usually get is, "What's your evidence that lockdowns don't
work?"
It's a strange question. Why should I have to prove that lockdowns don't work? The burden
of proof is to show that they do work! If you're going to essentially cancel the civil
liberties of the entire population for a few weeks, you should probably have evidence that
the strategy will work. And there, lockdown advocates fail miserably, because they simply
don't have evidence.
With economic output crashing worldwide and unemployment soaring to Great Depression levels,
governments are already looking for a way out. Don't expect to hear any mea culpas from
politicians, but we can already see how governments are quickly moving toward a voluntary
social-distancing, nonlockdown strategy. This comes even after politicians and disease
"experts" have been insisting that
lockdowns must be imposed indefinitely until there's a vaccine .
The longer the lockdown-created economic destruction continues, the greater will be the
threat of social unrest and even economic free fall. The political reality is thst the current
situation cannot be sustained without threatening the regimes in power themselves. In an
article for Foreign Policy titled "
Sweden's Coronavirus Strategy Will Soon Be the World's ," authors Nils Karlson, Charlotta
Stern, and Daniel B. Klein suggest that regimes will be forced to retreat to a Swedish
model:
As the pain of national lockdowns grows intolerable and countries realize that managing --
rather than defeating -- the pandemic is the only realistic option, more and more of them
will begin to open up. Smart social distancing to keep health-care systems from being
overwhelmed, improved therapies for the afflicted, and better protections for at-risk groups
can help reduce the human toll. But at the end of the day, increased -- and ultimately, herd
-- immunity may be the only viable defense against the disease, so long as vulnerable groups
are protected along the way. Whatever marks Sweden deserves for managing the pandemic, other
nations are beginning to see that it is ahead of the curve.
Don't forget 'Covidiots'. The frontline-worker-lovin', government-narrative-believin'
social-distance welcomin' simpletons are endlessly inventive when it comes to coining
contemptuous nicknames for those who don't buy into their embrace of madness. I am happy to
be able to say I thought the virus was bogus from the first, and said so to anyone who
would listen.
That's too simplistic. You should agree that religious nuts who attend the church in large
groups despite the risk can and should be called "Covidiots". Because they are. And the
people who are trying to preserve their meager income generally should not.
Why religious nuts can't move to outdoors for the same purpose like first Chirstians did,
is unclear to me ;-). Not sure about Orthodox Jews, which is pretty closed sect in any case
so if they want to infect each other, be my guest.
The virus causes specific for it virus pneumonia which is no joke. People who recovered
still have fibroses in this lungs of different degree. That's why people who were
hospitalized with COVID-19 are ineligible to serve in US army. So for those unlucky who get
virus pneumonia that's a crippling disease. You can't deny this.
For around 15-20% of people over 65 infected with COVID-19 it means the death sentence --
they will never recover and either die in hospital or soon after. Men over 65 are two third
of those so for old men the risk can't be discounted.
So the question is what forms and length of quarantine was optimal, not whether it should
or should not be enforced. I doubt that you want to argue that night clubs should remain
open. Or that wearing masks in closed spaces is redundant (in open spaces they generally are
redundant, unless you are standing in line, etc)
You also need some timeout to collect the vital information about the disease using first
cases, enhance the protection of medical personnel, and access the level of actual risk to
the population and the economy (the USA generally wasted it and Trump was inapt; so the
effect of quarantine is more questionable for this particular country).
It was not that clear in March that the risk is generally low, although we can't deny that
Fauci and Co were caught without pants (or, for some sinister reason were intended to be
caught this way as if they waited until epidemic got to a certain point that masks something
else )
That does not excuse incompetence of Trump administration and very strange behaviors of
Fauci, who spent two months and then woke up and suddenly start crying Wolf, Wolf, but the
USA is very mysterious country and in no way Canadians can understand it
The Argument Against the Argument Against Facemasks
Resistance rooted in liberty clashes with the unalienable right of life https://tinyurl.com/yctjydmx
Masks help stop the spread of coronavirus – the science is simple and I'm one of 100
experts urging governors to require public mask-wearing https://tinyurl.com/yah8orzo
More than 80% of Americans support closing non-essential businesses. Support for limiting
restaurants, closing schools, canceling sporting and entertainment events, and group
gatherings exceeds 90%. A total of 94% strongly or somewhat approve asking people to stay
home and avoid gathering in groups; 92% support canceling major sports and entertainment
events; 91% approve closing K-12 schools; 91% approve limiting restaurants to carry-out
only; 83% approve closing businesses other than grocery stores and pharmacies. There are
some partisan differences on these items -- Republicans are somewhat less supportive, but
even among Republicans large majorities support all of these measures; and, as summarized
below, support is largely consistent across every state.
A bipartisan consensus opposes a rapid "reopening" of the economy. Only 7% support
immediate reopening of the economy, and the median respondent supports waiting four to six
weeks. There is a bipartisan consensus on waiting (89% of Republicans as compared to 96% of
Democrats opposed immediate re-opening), and Republicans support a somewhat faster
re-opening of the economy than Democrats, where the median Republican supports waiting two
to four weeks versus median Democrat six to eight weeks. As discussed below, even in those
Republican-led states which are moving toward re-opening, few people support reopening
immediately
Generally, Americans report adhering to social distancing, indicating that they had minimal
social interactions with people outside of their households. That said, 56% reported
encountering at least one person from outside of their home in the preceding 24 hours (and
7% reported encountering 10 or more persons); the survey did not contain information on the
circumstances of those encounters (e.g., was it at grocery stores? were the individuals
wearing masks?). Generally, there were not large differences with respect to age, gender,
race, income, partisanship or education. An exception was that Asian Americans were
substantially less likely to encounter other individuals, and more likely to avoid contact
with other people. There were significant racial differences reported in wearing face masks
outside of the home, with 51% of whites reporting following recommendations very closely,
along with 62% of Hispanics, 64% of African Americans, and 68% of Asian Americans. There
was also an age gradient in this regard, ranging from 50% face mask wearing for 18-24 year
olds to 60% of those aged 65 or higher. There were also partisan differences: 51% of
Republicans, compared to 64% for Democrats, reported wearing face masks outside the home.
I find the racial differences interesting, especially since in my observation fewer blacks
are wearing masks. However, since I was specifically looking at blacks (due to the
disproportionate number of blacks dying) in my walks, I may have under counted the number of
whites not wearing masks. Also I suspect it varies between cities, states and more suburban
or rural areas.
In any event, not enough people are wearing masks to re-open the economy - and we damn
sure don't have enough testing, tracing and isolating capability and probably won't until
September, according to one report I read.
A number of other interesting results. Check it out.
One of the key things to understand in thinking about the value of masks is the concept of
the viral dose. While it seem logical that a single viral particle hitting a person's
mouth, nose or eye could cause an infection, strong laboratory and empirical evidence says
that this is not the case -- it takes a big dose of virus to launch a case of Covid. This
happy fact means that masks for everyday use don't need to block 100% of pathogens in order
to prevent the disease from spreading. (Even the medical grade N95 masks don't block every
viral particle, but they block enough to protect the user, even when caring for patients
with known Covid-19.)
A simulation by De Kai and colleagues makes the case that masks are most effective if at
least 80% of people are using them. The figure below maps the rate of transmission with the
expected deaths from Covid-19 in a nation the size of the UK. According to the simulation,
social distancing alone without masking would lead to 1.16 million deaths by May 31st.
However, with 50% of the population masking, the projected death figure drops to 240,000.
With 80% masking, there are 60,000 deaths. If Professor De Kai's mind-blowing video (below)
doesn't convince you of the virtue of mask wearing, I just don't know what to tell you.
Video referenced above:
Visual simulations show why we all need to wear masks now #UniversalMasking #masks4all
#COVID19
42,341 views •Apr 26, 2020 https://tinyurl.com/yc89vf9c
The Argument Against the Argument Against Facemasks
Resistance rooted in liberty clashes with the unalienable right of life https://tinyurl.com/yctjydmx
Masks help stop the spread of coronavirus – the science is simple and I'm one of 100
experts urging governors to require public mask-wearing https://tinyurl.com/yah8orzo
More than 80% of Americans support closing non-essential businesses. Support for limiting
restaurants, closing schools, canceling sporting and entertainment events, and group
gatherings exceeds 90%. A total of 94% strongly or somewhat approve asking people to stay
home and avoid gathering in groups; 92% support canceling major sports and entertainment
events; 91% approve closing K-12 schools; 91% approve limiting restaurants to carry-out
only; 83% approve closing businesses other than grocery stores and pharmacies. There are
some partisan differences on these items -- Republicans are somewhat less supportive, but
even among Republicans large majorities support all of these measures; and, as summarized
below, support is largely consistent across every state.
A bipartisan consensus opposes a rapid "reopening" of the economy. Only 7% support
immediate reopening of the economy, and the median respondent supports waiting four to six
weeks. There is a bipartisan consensus on waiting (89% of Republicans as compared to 96% of
Democrats opposed immediate re-opening), and Republicans support a somewhat faster
re-opening of the economy than Democrats, where the median Republican supports waiting two
to four weeks versus median Democrat six to eight weeks. As discussed below, even in those
Republican-led states which are moving toward re-opening, few people support reopening
immediately
Generally, Americans report adhering to social distancing, indicating that they had minimal
social interactions with people outside of their households. That said, 56% reported
encountering at least one person from outside of their home in the preceding 24 hours (and
7% reported encountering 10 or more persons); the survey did not contain information on the
circumstances of those encounters (e.g., was it at grocery stores? were the individuals
wearing masks?). Generally, there were not large differences with respect to age, gender,
race, income, partisanship or education. An exception was that Asian Americans were
substantially less likely to encounter other individuals, and more likely to avoid contact
with other people. There were significant racial differences reported in wearing face masks
outside of the home, with 51% of whites reporting following recommendations very closely,
along with 62% of Hispanics, 64% of African Americans, and 68% of Asian Americans. There
was also an age gradient in this regard, ranging from 50% face mask wearing for 18-24 year
olds to 60% of those aged 65 or higher. There were also partisan differences: 51% of
Republicans, compared to 64% for Democrats, reported wearing face masks outside the home.
I find the racial differences interesting, especially since in my observation fewer blacks
are wearing masks. However, since I was specifically looking at blacks (due to the
disproportionate number of blacks dying) in my walks, I may have under counted the number of
whites not wearing masks. Also I suspect it varies between cities, states and more suburban
or rural areas.
In any event, not enough people are wearing masks to re-open the economy - and we damn
sure don't have enough testing, tracing and isolating capability and probably won't until
September, according to one report I read.
A number of other interesting results. Check it out.
There is a statistical possibility a vaccine comes out next year. But his possibility is
remote. The key here is that a vaccine must be tested to the exhaustion before being ok'd by
any government for mass use. Any mistake can result in a number of deaths that will make this
pandemic look like child's play. My opinion is that the NYT is feeding too much enthusiasm to
its readers.
The Moderna Vaccine the media is touting as a promising, miracle breakthrough that has only
been tested on a limited group of 45 people, aged 18 to 55 has Grade 3 adverse effects in 100
and 250 microgram dosage.
So they're going to lower dosage to 50 micrograms and test it on the 56 to 70 and over 70
age groups. What about the group most Americans are in: the KFC, McDonald's, IHOP group?
Fauci jumped the gun with the Moderna vaccine promotion.
Notable quotes:
"... Former Harvard Medical School professor and founder of the university's cancer and HIV/AIDS research departments, William Haseltine dared to speak out today about the high level of bullshit and damage that is being done to "trust" in "scientists" and even dared to break the one holy writ that shall go un-mentioned, throwing some shade a Dr.Fauci. ..."
"... But, but, but... the CNBC anchorette blubbered, "are you questioning Dr. Fauci who also said that this was encouraging news?" ..."
"... "Whether [Fauci] shaded what should should have been done, I think is an important question. He's obviously under enormous pressure for positive results but it was not the right thing to do if you can't see the data." ..."
"... The most recent example is Moderna's claim Monday of favorable results in its vaccine trial, which it announced without revealing any of the underlying data. The announcement added billions of dollars to the value of the company, with its shares jumping almost 20 percent. Many analysts believe it contributed to a 900-point gain in the Dow Jones industrial average. ..."
"... The Moderna announcement described a safety trial of its vaccine based on eight healthy participants. The claim was that in all eight people, the vaccine raised the levels of neutralizing antibodies equivalent to those found in convalescent serum of those who recovered from covid-19. What to make of that claim? Hard to say, because we have no sense of what those levels were. This is the equivalent of a chief executive of a public company announcing a favorable earnings report without supplying supporting financial data, which the Securities and Exchange Commission would never allow. ..."
"... There is a legitimate question regarding what Moderna's unsupported assertion means. The scientific and medical literature reports that some people who have recovered have little to no detectable neutralizing antibodies . There is even existing scientific literature that suggests it is possible neutralizing antibodies may not protect animals or humans from infection or reinfection by coronaviruses. ..."
"... The National Institutes of Health announced last month that the drug remdesivir offered a clear benefit to covid-19 patients with moderate disease, shortening the length of their hospital stay by several days. But did it really? Twenty days after the announcement, the supporting data has still not been published. Without the data, no doctor treating a patient can be sure they are doing the right thing. ..."
"... Another paper , published the same day, found that remdesivir had no measurable effect on patient survival or the amount of virus detectable in nasopharynx and lung secretions. What then should a practicing physician do? Follow the unsupported advice of a news announcement or a medical report published in a leading scientific journal? This is not an idle question: The NIH announcement triggered a global stampede for limited supplies of the drug. ..."
"... The media also bears responsibility. Asking experts to opine on unsubstantiated claims is not useful. Medicine and science are not matters of majority opinion; they are matters of fact supported by transparent data. This is the backbone of scientific progress and our only hope to end this pandemic. We can't give up on our standards now. ..."
At a moment in time when narrative-following "scientists" are lauded
like unquestionably omniscient supreme beings enabling dumb-as-a-rock-partisan-politicians to
play omnipotent overlords without fear of blowback, the world needs more people like William
Haseltine.
The last two weeks have seen markets and politicians jump exuberantly at the hope of every
press release from a biotech firm that proclaims one of their pet rabbits didn't die when they
fed it their latest DNA-reshaping test material (oh that is except if anyone dares say anything
positive about hydroxychloroquine but that is a topic for another discussion) as the fate of
global citizenry rests on a vaccine (and definitely not herd immunity, don't even mention
it).
Barstool Sports' Dave Portnoy said it right - when did we shift from "flatten the curve,
flatten the curve, flatten the curve" to "we have to fund a cure or everyone's going to
die."
And so, that is where we find ourselves... Every talking head proclaiming the same malarkey
- we will re-open carefully, with PPE, and social distancing, and whetever else is mandated
from on-high "until we find a vaccine in 12-18 months" at which point the world will be made
whole again and Kumbaya...
All of which brings us back to the man of the day in our humble opinion.
Former Harvard Medical School professor and founder of the university's cancer and HIV/AIDS
research departments, William Haseltine dared to speak out today about the high level of
bullshit and damage that is being done to "trust" in "scientists" and even dared to break the
one holy writ that shall go un-mentioned, throwing some shade a Dr.Fauci.
Reflecting on Moderna's press release this week (which was immediately followed by massive
equity raises across numerous biotech firms and upgrades from the underwriters, surprise),
Haseltine said:
"If a CFO had tried to get away with such an opaque and data-less statement it would have
bee treated with derision and possibly an investigation."
The CNBC anchor desperately tried to guilt him into the official narrative of clinging to
any hope as long as it lifts stocks - no matter its utter bullshittiness - but Haseltine
destroyed her naive party line:
"we all know its an emergency, and in an emergency it's even more important to be clear on
what you know and what you do not know."
Moderna did not follow the process:
"you don't know what happened, we don't know what happened, there is no data."
But, but, but... the CNBC anchorette blubbered, "are you questioning Dr. Fauci who also said
that this was encouraging news?"
"Whether [Fauci] shaded what should should have been done, I think is an important
question. He's obviously under enormous pressure for positive results but it was not the
right thing to do if you can't see the data."
The full interview below is a must-watch by all who care about their freedom being
controlled by a narrative directed by fearmongering elites in the name of "science" when the
"science" is a) being ignored, b) being bastardized to meet a political need, c) being treated
as if handed down on high from the man himself, or d) being manipulated explicitly.
Faith in medicine and science is based on trust. But today, in the rush to share scientific
progress in combating covid-19, that trust is being undermined.
Private companies, governments and research institutes are holding news conferences to
report potential breakthroughs that cannot be verified. The results are always favorable, but
the full data on which the announcements are based are not immediately available for critical
review. This is "publication by press release," and it's damaging trust in the fundamental
methods of science and medicine at a time when we need it most.
The most recent example is Moderna's
claim Monday of favorable results in its vaccine trial, which it announced without
revealing any of the underlying data. The announcement added billions of dollars to the value
of the company, with its
shares jumping almost 20 percent. Many analysts believe it contributed to a
900-point gain in the Dow Jones industrial average.
The Moderna announcement described a safety trial of its vaccine based on eight healthy
participants. The claim was that in all eight people, the vaccine raised the levels of
neutralizing antibodies equivalent to those found in convalescent serum of those who recovered
from covid-19. What to make of that claim? Hard to say, because we have no sense of what those
levels were. This is the equivalent of a chief executive of a public company announcing a
favorable earnings report without supplying supporting financial data, which the Securities and
Exchange Commission would never allow.
There is a legitimate question regarding what Moderna's unsupported assertion means. The
scientific and medical literature reports that some people who have recovered have little to no
detectable neutralizing antibodies . There is even existing scientific literature that
suggests it is possible neutralizing antibodies may not protect animals or
humans from infection or reinfection by coronaviruses.
Such "publication by press release" seems to be a standard practice lately.
The National Institutes of Health
announced last month that the drug remdesivir offered a clear benefit to covid-19 patients
with moderate disease, shortening the length of their hospital stay by several days. But did it
really? Twenty days after the announcement, the supporting data has still not been published.
Without the data, no doctor treating a patient can be sure they are doing the right thing.
Another paper
, published the same day, found that remdesivir had no measurable effect on patient survival or
the amount of virus detectable in nasopharynx and lung secretions. What then should a
practicing physician do? Follow the unsupported advice of a news announcement or a medical
report published in a leading scientific journal? This is not an idle question: The NIH
announcement triggered a global stampede for
limited supplies of the drug.
The case is more nuanced for the vaccine developed by the Jenner Institute at Oxford
University, though the mileposts remain the same: It started with a public
pronouncement of favorable results from an early study, this time in monkeys, well before
any data was publicly released. An NIH scientist working on a trial of the Oxford vaccine gave
an interview to the New
York Times , claiming the drug was a success.
But the data, released as a prepublication version more than two weeks after the story ran,
didn't quite live up to the early claim. All of the vaccinated monkeys became infected when
introduced to the virus. Though there was some reduction in the amount of viral RNA detected in
the lungs, there was no reduction in the nasal secretions in the vaccinated monkeys. So the
positive result reported by the Oxford group turned out not to be protection from infection at
all, something most would agree is what a successful vaccine would do. Instead, it lowered only
the amount of virus recoverable from the vaccinated monkey's lung.
To the Jenner Institute's credit, it does warn visitors to its website
that there have been many false reports about the progress of its vaccine trial. Still, having
a scientist working on the trial paint preliminary results in such a positive manner without
having yet released the full data is cause for concern.
We all understand the need to share scientific and medical data as rapidly as possible in
this time of crisis. But a media announcement alone is not enough. There are ways to share the
data quickly and transparently: posting manuscripts before review or acceptance on publicly
available websites or working with journals to allow an early view. Publishing in this manner
allows doctors and scientists to reach their own conclusion, based on the evidence
available.
The media also bears responsibility. Asking experts to opine on unsubstantiated claims is
not useful. Medicine and science are not matters of majority opinion; they are matters of fact
supported by transparent data. This is the backbone of scientific progress and our only hope to
end this pandemic. We can't give up on our standards now.
* * *
So, by all means, trust in "science" but choose your "scientist" well...
Pure Evil, 13 minutes ago
It seems the more this hoax is exposed. The more Gates/Fauci appear as money grubbing
opportunist vaccine pushers the more the MSM and the government double down on the whole
false narrative.
hanekhw, 13 minutes ago
Look around at the moral climate and ask yourself if lying about everything for profit was
not required for success how can we stop it without pain, suffering and violence? There
really IS no free lunch and there never has been nor ever will be. We pay one way or another
but we ALL pay.
Enraged, 15 minutes ago
Fake media, fake Big Pharma, fake banksters, fake government, fake breasts, fake stock
"market", fake medical agencies, fake wars.
Assume they are 100% wrong unless there is substantial evidence they are correct, which
will be on very rare occasions.
Few things can be more annoying than answering the phone while you're in the middle of
something -- and then being greeted by a recording. If you receive a robocall trying to sell you something
(and you haven't given the caller your written permission), it's an illegal call. You should hang
up. Then, file a complaint with the
FTC and the National Do Not Call
Registry.
From phony positive Covid-19 test results to deceptive offers of financial relief, robocalls
have proliferated amid the pandemic, separating Americans from millions of precious dollars at
a time when few can afford to lose money.
One particularly nasty scam sees the target receive a text or phone call warning them
they've been exposed to the virus, tricking them into providing personal information while in a
state of panic. Another cruel variant dangles the possibility of virus-related financial relief
if they just give up their bank account details or wire the scammer a small " fee "
– a tempting prospect at a time when half of American workers are unlikely to see a
paycheck this month and upwards of 36 million have filed for unemployment since the pandemic
began. Phony treatments – in which the target orders a miracle cure, only to never
receive it – comprise some 22 percent of coronavirus-related robocalls, making them the
most common pandemic scam.
Even those who haven't been personally scammed by a robocaller
have experienced stress because of them, Provision found; 70 percent of millennials are
concerned a parent or grandparent will be preyed upon by the automated scammers, who frequently
impersonate government authorities like the Social Security Administration or the Internal
Revenue Service in order to con their targets out of bank account information or other personal
data. In fact, nearly two in five robocalls (39 percent) claim to be the SSA, with 38 percent
impersonating the IRS and 33 percent pretending to be debt collectors.
The Covid-19 scams are apparently quite effective, robbing Americans of over $13.4 million
of their hard-earned cash in the first three months of 2020 alone, according to the Federal
Trade Commission. That number doesn't include scams that haven't been discovered by their
victims, or those that go unreported to the FTC – meaning the real figure is likely much
higher.
Beware of fake contact tracers, N.J. officials warn.
New Jersey officials warned residents on Wednesday to be wary of fraudsters identifying
themselves as contact tracers in order to obtain financial information.
In recent weeks, as health departments have hired
legitimate tracers to track the spread of the coronavirus, fake tracers have been sending
people text messages looking for insurance information and bank account and social security
numbers, said Judith Persichilli, the state health commissioner.
Real contact tracers do not ask for such things, the state said.
A legitimate tracer will call, identify themselves as part of a local health department, and
explain to the person on the phone that they may have come into contact with someone who tested
positive for the virus.
Scams around the virus, unemployment benefits and stimulus checks have proliferated
nationwide , the authorities say.
Gov. Philip D. Murphy said "there is a special place in hell" for people who would scam
others during the pandemic.
Mr. Murphy also reported the state's daily virus fatalities: 168, bringing the overall death
toll to 10,747.
Stochastic" is simply defined as "randomly determined; having a random probability
distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely."
In other words, they begin with a presumption, and therein lies the FIRST error. Ferguson's
assumption was wrong, to begin with. Then this mode is so old, they recommend that it be run
only on a single CORE processor as if we were dealing with an old IBM XT.
Effectively, you start the program with what is called a "seed" number which is then used to
produce a random number. Most children's games begin this way. In fact, this is a version of
what you would be similar to the game SimCity where you create a city starting from scratch and
it simulates what might happen based upon the beginning presumption. There are numerous bugs in
the code and the documentation suggests to run it several times and take the average. This is
just unthinkable! A program should produce the same result with the same data from which it
begins. Therefore, there is no possible way this model would ever produce the same results. In
reality, this model produces completely different results even when beginning with the very
same starting seeds and parameters because of the attempt to also make the seed random. This is
not even as sophisticated as SimCity, which is really questionable. This is where the Imperial
College claims that the errors will vanish if you run it on an old system in the
single-threaded mode as if you were using a 1980s XT.
In programming, you run what is known as a regression-test, which is re-running a functional
and non-functional test to ensure that previously developed and tested software still performs
after a change. In market terminology, its called back-testing. In the most unprofessional
manner imaginable, the Imperial College code does not even have a regression-test structure.
They apparently attempted to but the extent of the random behavior caused by bugs in the code
to prevent that check? On April 4th, 2020, Imperial College noted:
" However, we haven't had the time to work out a scalable and maintainable way of running
the regression test in a way that allows a small amount of variation, but doesn't let the
figures drift over time."
This Ferguson Model is such a joke it is either an outright fraud, or it is the most inept
piece of programming I may have ever seen in my life. There is no valid test to warrant any
funding of Imperial College for providing ANY forecast based upon this model. This is the most
UNPROFESSIONAL operation perhaps in computer science. The entire team should be disbanded and
an independent team put in place to review the world of Neil Ferguson and he should NOT be
allowed to oversee any review of this model.
The only REASONABLE conclusion I can reach is that this has been deliberately used to
justify bogus forecasts intent for political activism, or I must accept that these academics
are totally incapable of even creating a theoretical model no less coding it as a programmer.
There seems to have been no independent review of Ferguson's work which is unimaginable!
A 15,000 line program is nothing. I will be glad to write a model like this in two weeks and
will only charge $1 million instead of $79 million. If you really want one to work globally, no
problem. It will take a bit more time and the price will be at a discount – only $50
million on sale – refunds not accepted as is the deal with Imperial College.
So just one more narrative about how the virus was so horrific, used to justify the
lockdowns, is shown to be utter bullshit. Remember "the immunity doesn't last, you can get
reinfected, the next time it's lethal"?
So, contrary to that, lots of people have immunity before they even get exposed to it.
From the common cold. So the idea that the corona immunity is a short term and unreliable
thing was just a bunch of uninformed blather, or worse, targeted and manipulative
narrative.
Fearmongering bullshit that is 95% wrong needs to get called out constantly.
Even in New York there was not the "catastrophic death count" that I see people writing
about as if it were true.
Hey! Let's talk about duct tape and plastic sheeting! Remember that idiotic bullshit scare
narrative?
"We have met the moment and we have prevailed," said President Donald Trump Monday, as he
supported the opening of the U.S. economy before the shutdown plunges us into a deep and
lasting depression.
Tuesday, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation's leading expert on infectious diseases, made
clear to a Senate committee his contradictory views.
"If states reopen their economies too soon, there is a real risk that you may trigger an
outbreak that you may not be able to control," said Fauci. "My concern is that we will start to
see little spikes that might turn into outbreaks of the disease (and) the inevitable return of
infections."
Fauci is talking of the real possibility of a second and even more severe wave of the
pandemic this summer and fall, if we open too soon.
There is evidence to justify the fears of Fauci and Dr. Robert Redfield of the Centers for
Disease Control, who told the same Senate committee, "We are not out of the woods yet."
Yet, there is a case to be made for the risks that Trump and red state governors are taking
in opening up sooner.
The Washington Post daily graph of new deaths nationally has been showing a curve sloping
downward for a month from April's more than 2,000 a day. On no day yet this week did the U.S.
record 2,000 dead from the virus. On some days, there were fewer than 1,000.
The graph for new coronavirus cases, which was showing more than 30,000 a day in April, is
now closer to 25,000.
Also, hospitalizations and ICU occupancies are not as high as they were. Hospitals put up in
Central Park and the Javits Center seem not to have been needed. There was and is no shortage
of ventilators. The Navy hospital ships Comfort and Mercy are returning to their home
ports.
Also, not all states are suffering equally, nor are all communities in the hardest-hit
states. There have been three times as many COVID-19 cases in New Jersey as in Texas, though
New Jersey is a fraction of the size and has a fraction of the population of Texas.
There are twice as many cases in Massachusetts as in Florida, the nation's third-most
populous state with one of its highest percentages of retirees and elderly. There have been
five times as many cases in New York as in California.
It is the nursing homes filled with the elderly and ill that have proven to be the real
killing fields of this virus. According to The New York Times, one-third of all deaths from
COVID-19 have come among residents and staff of nursing homes. Beyond these are the meatpacking
plants and the prisons where social distancing is almost nonexistent.
Moreover, while Fauci and Redfield are specialists in epidemics, Trump's portfolio goes far
beyond that.
He is chief of state, head of government and commander in chief, responsible for the
security and defense of the nation. His portfolio is broader and deeper than those of Fauci and
Redfield.
ORDER IT NOW
In the first hours of the Normandy invasion, General Eisenhower must have been rightly
alarmed about the high U.S. casualties on Omaha Beach. But he also had to concern himself with
the failure to capture the Port of Caen to bring ashore the armor to stop any German
counterattack that might turn D-Day into another Anzio.
Ike could not worry about casualties alone.
According to The Washington Post, economists already project that 100,000 small businesses
have shuttered, never to reopen.
"(D)eeper and longer recessions can leave behind lasting damage to the productive capacity
of the economy," warned Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday. "Avoidable
household and business insolvencies can weigh on growth for years to come."
Ultimately, Fauci is not "The Decider" here. Trump is.
It is he who is accountable to the nation for weighing the losses, both human and material,
due to his decisions.
Fauci may be the best at what he does, but he is still only an adviser. As John F. Kennedy
said after the Bay of Pigs, it is the president who ultimately bears responsibility for what he
does and fails to do, while "the advisers may move on to new advice."
Believing he can do no more than his White House is now doing to contain the incidence of
cases, hospitalizations and deaths, Trump has decided his primary job is to prevent the nation
from a catastrophic economic collapse from which it might take years to recover.
The country is slowly moving in Trump's direction, slowly opening. And he will be
responsible for whether the policy succeeds or opens the floodgates to a second and worse wave,
should it come.
As Abraham Lincoln put his situation: "I mean to keep going. If the end brings me out all
right, then what is said against me won't matter. If I'm wrong, ten angels swearing I was right
won't make a difference."
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and
Broke a President and Divided America Forever."
Fauci says that, "My concern is that we will start to see little spikes that might turn
into outbreaks of the disease "
The problem with his statement is the first two words. A science advisor is supposed to
provide advice based knowledge and science. It is not part of his job description to voice
his feelings.
In this case, it doesn't matter who is "right" only one of them is POTUS! I get it that
Trumps perch on his seat is tenuous and exactly how much real control he has over the
government he supposedly heads is open to speculation, but at the end of the day Trump is
POTUS and this is no time to be thinking of political futures he must be focused on the
future of America.
We need not only an end to the lockdowns, but an end to the media campaign to demoralize
the country by hyping the non-event known as corona virus. It is all hype. when you get past
the spin and media blitz, there is nothing about this virus that would justify any kind of
response beyond your doctor testing you for covid along with the flu when you go to the
doctor with flu symptoms. That's it.
This is simply not the life altering virus that is being hyped. The enemy here is NOT the
virus, it is the (((elites))) who are trying to destroy us. It is time people it is time.
Gen. Flynn is the perfect example of how far these gov't agencies will go to protect a lie
and those frauds involved in the cover up/hoax. Trump was there target, the pathetic part of
all this is just how many republicans knew about the fraud before Trump did and did nothing
to protect him or Americans.
President Trump said Wednesday the coronavirus
crisis is worse than the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and Americans won't allow it to go on any
longer.
"I don't think people will stand for it," Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval
Office. "The country won't stand for it. It's not sustainable."
He said the pandemic "is worse than Pearl Harbor."
...Asked about soaring unemployment being a potential liability for him in an election year,
the president replied, "Nobody's blaming me for that. I built the greatest economy and I'm
going to rebuild it again. This was an artificially induced unemployment."
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is not
cited anywhere as an inventor or patent owner of the drug and has not authored any research
studying remdesivir.
While Fauci has also said that early trials of remdesivir on coronavirus patients are a
positive sign, he has also cautioned against prematurely celebrating.
"I was very serious when I said this was not the total answer by any means, but it's a very
important first step," Fauci said on April 30 about the NIH study on
remdesivir.
As remdesivir is wholly owned by Gilead Sciences, Fauci is not legally entitled to any
profits from remdesivir.
Fauci was
the director of NIAID during the 2013-14 Ebola outbreak and spearheaded the department's
research and response to the virus. NIAID supported research into a range of potential Ebola
treatments, including remdesivir, as
recently as December. That said, Fauci did not directly conduct this research; neither he
nor the NIH stand to profit from its results.
The National Institutes of Health confirmed that Fauci has not authored any studies on
remdesivir and does not own stock in any biomedical or pharmaceutical companies.
Owning financial assets in pharmaceutical firms like Gilead would also be required to be
publicly disclosed per the
agency's ethics policy .
Amidst the storm of controversy raised by the lab-origin theory of COVID-19 extolled by such
figures as Nobel prize winning virologist Luc Montagnier, bioweapons expert Francis Boyle, Sri
Lankan Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith and the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, an elaborate
project was undertaken under the nominal helm of NATURE Magazine in order to refute the claim
once and for all under the report 'The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2'
.
This project was led by a team of evolutionary virologists using a line of reasoning that
"random mutation can account for anything" and was parroted loudly and repeatedly by Fauci, WHO
officials and Bill Gates in order to shut down all uncomfortable discussion of the possible
laboratory origins of COVID-19 while also pushing for a global vaccine campaign. On April 18,
Dr. Fauci (whose close ties with Bill Gates, and Big Pharma have much to do with his control of
hundreds of billions of dollars of research money),
stated :
"There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly
qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as
they evolve. And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally
consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human."
I think at this moment, rife as it is with speculative arguments, confusion and
under-defined data, it is useful to remove oneself from the present and look for higher
reference points from which we can re-evaluate events now unfolding on the world stage.
"... Sara Cunial, the Member of Parliament for Rome denounced Bill Gates as a "vaccine criminal" and urged the Italian President to hand him over to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. ..."
"... In an extraordinary seven-minute speech met with wide applause, Sara Cunial, the Member of Parliament for Rome said that Italy had been subjected to a "Holy Inquisition of false science." ..."
Sara Cunial, the Member of Parliament for Rome denounced Bill Gates as a "vaccine criminal"
and urged the Italian President to hand him over to the International Criminal Court for crimes
against humanity.
She also exposed
Bill Gates' agenda in India and Africa, along with the plans to chip the human race through
the digital identification program ID2020.
In an extraordinary seven-minute speech met with wide applause, Sara Cunial, the Member of
Parliament for Rome said that Italy had been subjected to a "Holy Inquisition of false
science."
She roundly criticized the unnecessary lockdown imposed on her fellow Italians in the
service of a globalist agenda. She urged fellow political leaders to desist in any plans to
compel citizens to surrender themselves to compulsory COVID-19 vaccination at the hands of the
corrupt elite – whom she identified as the Deep State .
Below is the transcription of the full speech delivered to the Italian Parliament by Sara
Cunial, the Member of Parliament for Rome.
Hobbes said that absolute power does not come from an imposition from above but by the
choice of individuals who feel more protected renouncing to their own freedom and granting it
to a third party.
With this, you are going on anesthetizing the minds with corrupted Mass Media with
Amuchina (a brand of disinfectant promoted by Mass Media) and NLP, with words like "regime",
"to allow" and "to permit", to the point of allowing you to regulate our emotional ties and
feelings and certify our affects.
So, in this way, Phase 2 is nothing else than the persecution/continuation of Phase 1
– you just changed the name, as you did with the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). We
have understood people, for sure, don't die for the virus alone. So people will be allowed to
die and suffer, thanks to you and your laws, for misery and poverty. And, as in the "best"
regimes, the blame will be dropped only on citizens. You take away our freedom and say that
we looked for it. Divide et Impera (Divide and Rule).
It is our children who will lose more, who are 'raped souls', with the help of the
so-called "guarantor of their rights" and of CISMAI (Italian Coordination of Services against
Child Abuse). In this way, the right to school will be granted only with a bracelet to get
them used to probation, to get them used to slavery – involuntary treatment and to
virtual lager. All this in exchange for a push-scooter and a tablet. All to satisfy the
appetites of a financial capitalism whose driving force is the conflict of interest, conflict
well represented by the WHO, whose main financier is the well-known "philanthropist and
savior of the world" Bill Gates.
We all know it, now. Bill Gates, already in 2018, predicted a pandemic, simulated in
October 2019 at the "Event 201", together with Davos (Switzerland). For decades, Gates has
been working on Depopulation policy and dictatorial control plans on global politics, aiming
to obtain the primacy on agriculture, technology and energy.
Gates said, I quote exactly from his speech:
"If we do a good job on vaccines, health and reproduction, we can reduce the world
population by 10-15%. Only a genocide can save the world".
With his vaccines, Gates managed to sterilize millions of women in Africa. Gates
caused a polio epidemic that paralyzed 500,000 children in India and still today with
DTP, Gates causes more deaths than the disease itself. And he does the same with GMOs
designed by Monsanto and "generously donated" to needy populations. All this while he is
already thinking about distributing the quantum tattoo for vaccination recognition and mRNA
vaccines as tools for reprogramming our immune system. In addition, Gates also does business
with several multinationals that own 5G facilities in the USA.
On this table there is the entire Deep State in Italian sauce :
Sanofi, together with GlaxoSmithKline are friends of the Ranieri Guerra, Ricciardi, and of
the well-known virologist that we pay 2000 Euro every 10 minutes for the presentations on Rai
(Italian state TV. She's probably talking about Burioni). Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline sign
agreements with medical societies to indoctrinate future doctors, making fun of their
autonomy of judgment and their oath.
Hi-Tech multinationals, like the Roman Engineering which is friend of the noble Mantoan,
or Bending Spoons, of Pisano, which are there for control and manage our personal health
datas in agreement with the European Agenda ID2020 of electronic identification, which aims
to use mass vaccination to obtain a digital platform of digital ID. This is a continuation of
the transfer of data started by Renzi to IBM. Renzi, in 2016, gave a plus 30% to Gates Global
Fund.
On the Deep
State table there are the people of Aspen, like the Saxon Colao, who with his 4-pages
reports, paid 800 Euros/hour, with no scientific review, dictates its politics as a
Bilderberg general as he is, staying away from the battlefield. The list is long. Very long.
In the list there is also Mediatronic, by Arcuri and many more.
The Italian contribution to the International Alliance Against Coronavirus will be of 140
million Euros, of which 120 million Euros will be given to GAVI Alliance, the non-profit by
Gates Foundation. They are just a part of the 7.4 billion Euro fund by the EU to find a
vaccine against Coronavirus – vaccines which will be used as I said before.
No money, of course for serotherapy, which has the collateral effect of being super cheap.
No money for prevention, a real prevention, which includes our lifestyles, our food and our
relationship with the environment.
The real goal of all of this is total control. Absolute domination of human beings,
transformed into guinea pigs and slaves, violating sovereignty and free will. All this thanks
to tricks/hoax disguised as political compromises. While you rip up the Nuremberg code with
involuntary treatment, fines and deportation, facial recognition and intimidation, endorsed
by dogmatic scientism – protected by our "Multi-President" of the Republic who is real
cultural epidemic of this country.
We, with the people, will multiply the fires of resistance in a way that you won't be able
to repress all of us.
I ask you, President, to be the spokesperson and give an advice to our President Conte:
Dear Mr. President Conte, next time you receive a phone call from the philanthropist Bill
Gates forward it directly to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. If
you won't do this, tell us how we should define you, the "friend lawyer" who takes orders
from a criminal.
"If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now, [the scientific
evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or
deliberately manipulated," Fauci said in an interview with National Geographic
"Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus]
evolved in nature and then jumped species," the U.S. government's leading epidemiologist
added.
His statements are in line with those set forth by the World Health Organization (WHO), a
United Nations agency that ratified on Monday that the coronavirus is of animal origin. "The
coronavirus circulates ancestrally between bats.
"That is something we know based on this virus's genetic sequence. What we need to
understand is which animal... was infected by bats and transmitted it to humans," the WHO
Emerging Diseases Department Director Maria Van Kerkhove said.
Demand Trump's incompetent, unqualified son-in-law be removed from the coronavirus
response team! #care2
https://t.co/TN8jpMIw2p
Nevertheless, Trump insists that the U.S. government has evidence that the virus was created
in a laboratory in Wuhan (China), something that the Intelligence Directorate also
rejected.
Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda?
On Tuesday morning, the U.S. president also reacted angrily to a video titled "Mourning In
America" produced by The Lincoln Project (LP), a conservative group opposed to Trump's
reelection which blames him for mishandling the COVID-19 pandemic.
"There's mourning in America - and under the leadership of Donald Trump, our country is
weaker, sicker, and poorer," the LP video points out and adds that the United States is on the
brink of a new Great Depression.
In response to the above, Trump released his discomfort by calling the Lincoln Project
members "losers."
Should everyone be wearing face masks? It's complicated.
Why
don't masks protect the wearer? Paul Glasziou, Professor of Medicine, Bond University and Chris Del Mar, Professor of
Public Health, Bond University, AU
also endorsed by epidemiologists in UK, CAD.
[.] There are several possible reasons why masks don't offer significant protection. First,
masks may not do much without eye protection. We know from animal and laboratory
experiments that influenza or other coronaviruses can enter the eyes and travel to the nose
and into the respiratory system.
While standard and special masks provide incomplete protection, special masks combined
with goggles appear to provide complete protection in laboratory experiments. However,
there are no studies in real-world situations measuring the results of combined mask and
eyewear.
The apparent minimal impact of wearing masks might also be because people didn't use
them properly. For example, one study found less than half of the participants wore them
"most of the time". People may also wear masks inappropriately, or touch a contaminated
part of the mask when removing it and transfer the virus to their hand, then their eyes and
thus to the nose.
Masks may also provide a false sense of security, meaning wearers might do riskier
things such as going into crowded spaces and places.[.]
Got goggles or a Visor? Eye protection is essential.
"... > How about we follow WHO's rule zero: test, test and test? ..."
"... Why the USA did not implemented entry/exist temperature checks (even at airports) I do not understand. The richest nation in the world has the government which is probably the most inept and disfunctional ..."
"... It looks like this is mainly the disease of megacities and industries with closely packed people (ships, meatpacking plants, Amazon warepuses) . And a large part of large cities infrastructure such as subways and air-conditioned building, hotels and shops are ideal environment for spreading of the virus. ..."
"... Another interesting feature of this virus is that it simply revealed how unhealthy the USA population generally is. For example, the epidemic of obesity now is tightly intermixed with the epidemic of COVID-19. Within the limits of the neoliberal social system very little can be done about it: for profit medicine makes is more fragile and create multiple avenue of abusing people. ..."
Do you understand that the current polymerase tests have 20-30% of false positives?
So if everybody in the USA is tested around 60-80 million people in the USA would be
deemed infected. I suspect that a very large percentage of "asymptomatics" are in reality
false positives.
We need to distinguish between the necessary measures and fearmongering. I suspect that in
the case of polymerase test the mantra "test, test, test" is close to the latter. This is s
rather expensive test and money probably can be better spend distributing masks to the
population. That would instantly give a larger effect. The simple measure that in the USA was
not done. Just for that Fauci should be fired and probably tried, IMHO.
The same is probably true with the distribution of oxymeters too: people with lows reading
need oxygen. As simple as that. That probably will cut hospitalizations in half.
My impression is that temperature and oxymeter testing might be a proxy for polymerase
testing and much cheaper: if oxygen saturation is less then 90% the person need to be
isolated/treated with oxygen
Why the USA did not implemented entry/exist temperature checks (even at airports) I do
not understand. The richest nation in the world has the government which is probably the most
inept and disfunctional
It looks like this is mainly the disease of megacities and industries with closely
packed people (ships, meatpacking plants, Amazon warepuses) . And a large part of large
cities infrastructure such as subways and air-conditioned building, hotels and shops are
ideal environment for spreading of the virus.
Even reasonable prophylactic measures do not work that well in large cities. Slums and
homeless are and will be hotspots.
Even at work enforcing prophylactic measures is non trivial. You need to change mask each
2 hours when you are working inside. How many people will do that ?
I think there is not way out other then clench your teeth and go forward adapting the
behavior as new information about the virus emerge.
For example individual supply of air in planes, trains and buses (which existed in old
planes and some buses ) might be an important psychological (and with better filters medical)
measure required.
Also Cruise ships "experiments" suggest that only around 20% of population is susceptible
to the virus. Even among Wuhan medics who started working with coronavirus patients without
wearing protective equipment only around half got the disease. The simplistic assumption that
100% of people is susceptible is just a myth propagated by fearmongers for fun and
profit.
Another interesting feature of this virus is that it simply revealed how unhealthy the USA
population generally is. For example, the epidemic of obesity now is tightly intermixed with
the epidemic of COVID-19. Within the limits of the neoliberal social system very little can
be done about it: for profit medicine makes is more fragile and create multiple avenue of
abusing people.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will be checking
passengers' temperatures at select airports next week.
People familiar with the matter told The
Wall Street Journal that additional details would be unveiled in the near term. The program
is expected to roll out at 12 airports next week and will cost $20 million to implement.
Thermal check fees will be waived for travelers and likely expensed to the federal
government.
The first message is that covid19 is terrifying, unique, an existential threat to the human
race.
This message is never sourced to much fact, because the facts about the virus don't really
support it. If it cites anything solid it's the appallingly sloppy and discredited Imperial
computer model, or some generic research into the pathology of severe infections or rare viral
syndromes, which it tries to spin as being unique to covid19, even though it is not. But mostly
it doesn't cite anything at all. Or really claim anything at all.
It just tells people to be afraid. Very afraid. Of death, of uncertainty, of the 'virus', of
other people, of 'fake news'.
The fear being encouraged is not rooted in facts, and is therefore impervious to
them.
2. 'THERE IS NOTHING TO BE AFRAID OF '
The second message is that covid19 is actually pretty harmless and no big deal.
This message is rooted in a great deal of fact, because, as we have been pointing out since
day one, pretty much all the data coming out about this virus supports exactly this
conclusion.
No official body has ever denied this, and most of them readily admit it. Regularly and
unambiguously.
Here and here
and here and here .
Chris Whitty above is only one of many and this is not even his first go (see here ) at
explaining clearly that covid19 is only dangerous to a very very small minority of people, and
that most who get it will be just fine.
• Over the whole epidemic, even if there is no vaccine, a high proportion
will not get it.
• Of those who do, a significant proportion (exact number not yet clear)
have no symptoms.
• Of the symptomatic cases, the great majority (around 80%) a mild-
moderate disease.
• A minority have to go to hospital, most need only oxygen. The great
majority of these survive.
• A minority of those need ventilation.
• A minority of every agegroup sadly die with current treatment, but even
of the oldest group most do not.
[T]he great majority of people will not die from this and I'll just repeat something I
said right at the beginning because I think it's worth reinforcing :
Most people, a significant proportion of people, will not get this virus at all, at any
point of the epidemic which is going to go on for a long period of time.
Of those who do, some of them will get the virus without even knowing it, they will have
the virus with no symptoms at all, asymptomatic carriage, and we know that happens.
Of those who get symptoms, the great majority, probably 80%, will have a mild or
moderate disease. Might be bad enough for them to have to go to bed for a few days, not bad
enough for them to have to go to the doctor.
An unfortunate minority will have to go as far as hospital, but the majority of those
will just need oxygen and will then leave hospital.
And then a minority of those will end up having to go to severe end critical care and
some of those sadly will die.
But that's a minority, it's 1% or possibly even less than 1% overall.
And even in the highest risk group this is significantly less than 20%, ie. the great
majority of people, even the very highest groups, if they catch this virus, will not
die.
And I really wanted to make that point really clearly
Yes, Ken Garoo @26, the fearmongers have blood on their hands, not just in the UK, and this
is a massive life-and-death crisis. More evidence, from another unimpeachable source various
MoA stalwarts will now have to claim is a hack:
"...According to a stark report published in Lancet Global Health journal on Wednesday,
almost 1.2 million children could die in the next six months due to the disruption to health
services and food supplies caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
"The modelling, by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and
Unicef, found that child mortality rates could rise by as much as 45 per cent due to
coronavirus-related disruptions, while maternal deaths could increase by almost 39 per
cent.
"Dr [Stefan Peterson, chief of health at UNICEF] said these figures were in part a
reflection of stringent restrictions in much of the world that prevent people leaving their
homes without documentation, preventing them from accessing essential health care services.
...
"...Covid is not a children's disease. Yes there are rare instances and we see them
publicised across the media. But pneumonia, diarrhoea, measles, death in childbirth, these
are the reasons we will see deaths rise."
The reason NYC appears to be such an outlier could be a combination of all the possible
reasons PO mentions – bad healthcare system; runaway spread in nursing homes that maybe
weren't being run very well in the first place and were employing people on low wages or
contracts so they were forced to work long hours and ended up being exposed to large viral
loads and were passing the disease from one person to the next – plus reasons
particular to NYC itself as a large city (poor communities densely packed in sub-standard
housing with little or no access to the most up-to-date and accurate information on COVID-19,
and unable to practise the hygiene and social distancing measures needed to stop transmission
of the virus; air pollution issues).
Some mainstream news media reports I have seen state many poor communities in the US have
particular issues with obtaining necessary healthcare because (a) they have experienced
discrimination (racial, religious, whatever) in the past from hospitals or clinics and are
reluctant to go again, so they delay and delay until their situation becomes critical; and
(b) they have no medical insurance so again they delay seeking help. The situation in NYC
does seem to be the result of myriad factors, some particular to the city itself, others
particular to NYC because it is a large city with dense population clusters in particular
neighbourhoods with problems of discrimination that impact on their health, and still others
that are general, all of them having an impact on one another.
A significant factor, embarrassing to us Americans, is the link between obesity and its
related health issues to the fatality rate of the virus. Bluntly put, obese people appear
much more likely to succumb to the virus. If Russia has a significantly lower rate of
obesity, it would only be logical that they would also have a significantly lower rate of
mortality. I have not seen this factor mentioned in the blizzard of discussion on the
difference in death rates between NCY and Moscow.
But obesity is not nearly so prevalent in the UK as it is in the USA, and it is clearing them
out like nobody's business – their death rate is significantly higher than Russia's.
The UK, also, follows a practice of assigning the death to COVID-19 if the patient dies even
if obvious underlying conditions are present, and it may have a similar financial system in
place, in which the hospital receives a payout if a patient is deemed to be suffering from
COVID-19, and a much larger payment if the patient has to be put on a ventilator.
Let's say lower obesity, generally better fitness, more effective planning, better medical
response and possibly other factors (e.g. TB vaccination) could explain the difference.
Tp support the foregoing, differences in mortality between racial group is generally
attributed to differences in the level of obesity and related health issues so general levels
of obesity is a factor, perhaps a major factor. It may be a little morbid but it would be
interesting to understand the correlation between obesity and Covid-19 deaths in the US, UK
and Russia.
Absolutely the case that the US and the UK authorities have an enormous financial interest
in exaggerating the mortality rate for short term gain and long term sustainable profit
through massive and likely unnecessary vaccination programs of hundreds of millions of people
generating $10 of billions revenue. And it would almost be a certainty that a new deadly
virus will pop up at a rate that match the available capacity of Big Pharma to crank out new"
life saving" medicines. To be clear, Big Pharma is only one of the nefarious groups
benefitting from a public cowering in fear.
I read somewhere years ago that Big Pharma's long term goal is to have every American on a
prescription drug(s) from cradle to grave. And Big Data wants every American to be enslaved
by their smart phones and social media. Bastards.
Hurrah! I have my blogroll back! I'm just starting to build it. At some point in the frequent
rollouts of new WordPress features, they added a 'WP Admin' button, which gives access to the
'Links' page and allowed me to eliminate those irritating default links, as well as add new
ones. So, I'm just getting started, but among the must-sees I stumbled across while starting
out with links I knew I wanted to add right away are one discussing the coronavirus (haven't
even read all of it myself yet) at Club Orlov;
and a great article, very much on point with this post, at Irrussianality, detailing the
absolutely flabbergasting Joint Statement on the Anniversary of the End of the Second World
War, on the USA's State Department website. The Nazis get one mention – the rest is
non-stop Russia is evil.
https://irrussianality.wordpress.com/2020/05/08/joint-statement-on-the-75th-anniversary-of-the-end-of-the-second-world-war/
I'm not sure what Dmitry Orlov does for a living, but if he is exclusively a writer when he's
not sailing around, I suppose he is entitled to charge a fee for his product, and I have
found it consistently excellent and well-sourced, much like John Helmer's work (although that
is still free). Orlov's blog is only $2.50 a month at the basic level of subscriber, and
that's cheap enough for me. I encourage readers to subscribe at the same level, because it's
an excellent resource. In this case, I had just skipped over it very quickly, because I
wanted to add it to the blogroll. I read the first couple of paragraphs, divined that it was
not only about the coronavirus, but vindicated many of my own beliefs, and went elsewhere to
add another site. I did not notice until I came back to it that it was now
subscription-only.
So I'll copy a few salient points for everyone, and they can judge for themselves if they
are willing to pay a couple of bucks for that kind of content. It was not all about the
coronavirus – it started out about that, and sort of segued into the precarious
position the USA is now in economically. So that's why it may look like two different posts;
I am just excerpting at random: the entire post is much too long to copy. Presuming you have
read as much of the post as was already included as a teaser before it became
subscriber-only
"First, let's handle the question of vaccination. There is a measles vaccine, yet it
kills 140,000 a year. There is a pneumococcus vaccine, yet it kills between 2 and 2.5 million
a year. There is a hepatitis B vaccine, yet it kills 140,000. There is a tetanus vaccine, yet
it kills 89,000 annually. There is a rotavirus vaccine, yet it kills 800,000. There is a HPV
vaccine, yet it kills 250,000. There is a tuberculosis vaccine, yet it kills 1.5 million.
There is an influenza vaccine, yet it kills 650,000 to 1 million a year. None of these are
considered pandemics, cause entire economies to be shut down, or call for any extraordinary
measures at all.
And then there is the novel coronavirus which has killed 218,187 people to date (the
vast majority of them very old and/or very sick) -- and this is considered to be a problem to
be solved with all possible haste. Some infectious disease experts have suggested that the
entire populace may be required to shelter in place until a vaccine becomes available.
Meanwhile, deaths from the novel coronavirus largely fit within the usual mortality of the
flu season. The northern hemisphere winter was warmer than usual, and some of the elderly and
sick people who would have been killed off by any of the usual influenza viruses (including
other coronaviruses) during any of the previous three flu seasons were claimed by the novel
coronavirus.
But even this is uncertain because it is unclear whether these 218,187 deaths were
actually caused by the coronavirus or whether the coronavirus just happened to be present in
their bodies at the time of death. Furthermore, a lot of people were diagnosed as suffering
from this coronavirus based on symptoms which are not too different from those caused by
other viral agents. Lastly, the vast majority of those who have died from it had what are
called comorbidities. Elderly immunocompromised morbidly obese diabetics with high blood
pressure, cancer and other potential fatal ailments have been particularly susceptible. If
you discard all fatal cases with comorbidities and only consider young healthy people, then
the number of deaths where the new coronavirus is obviously the root cause may turn out to be
as low as zero.
Confirmed novel coronavirus cases number less than 3,147,626 worldwide, which is 0.04%
of the world's population. This barely adds up to a cough and a sneeze. As this virus has
spread throughout the world the increase in cases has slowed, but the number of confirmed
cases could yet double or even triple, adding up to as much as three coughs and three
sneezes. But then the World Health Organization enters the fray. The WHO makes gratuitous use
of appellations such as "world" and "health" but is actually a semi-private entity lavishly
financed by Bill Gates and Big Pharma, which is owned by a handful of highly inbred
oligarchic entities that include Vanguard, BlackRock, Capital Group, Morgan Stanley, Goldman
Sachs, Northern Trust and State Street, which in turn own each other in various convoluted
ways. WHO's main function is to scare people into getting vaccinated and accepting expensive
drug regimens (barely half of which do any good at all), thus funneling resources toward Big
Pharma.
The World Health Organization establishes thresholds to determine whether to declare an
influenza epidemic that range between 2.5% and 5%. The novel coronavirus misses the mark by a
thousand-fold, yet the WHO has declared it to be the cause of a global pandemic. If this
seems like an extreme overreaction, that is because this is an extreme overreaction. Some
conspiratorially-minded people may surmise that this is a conspiracy, but it isn't. It is yet
another blatant attempt to confiscate a chunk of the world's wealth by requiring it to buy
something worthless, just like this same set of medical/financial interests did with the
relatively worthless Tamiflu antiviral medication during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic of
2009-10 which caused a mere 18,036 deaths worldwide. This is a specific group pursuing its
own group interests."
Then he went into how the Chinese and the Russians are respectively manipulating the
coronavirus in their own countries for their own ends
"The Chinese have taken the novel coronavirus outbreak as a chance to train for
repelling a biological warfare attack. To argue that this coronavirus is indeed the agent of
a biowarfare attack is to argue for something extremely stupid because it just isn't
effective as a biowarfare agent. It's almost as bad as Novichok, which was touted as being
able to wipe out entire armies but only managed to sicken five people and kill just one of
them. It doesn't matter whether this coronavirus leaked out of a dead bat or a biowarfare
lab, or both -- it just isn't any good as a weapon. But the Chinese government imposed
extreme, unprecedented controls over much of the population and the economy. The Russians
followed suit, with the difference that while the Chinese saw these extreme measures as
temporary, setting up makeshift hospitals, the Russians seized on them as a chance to
fundamentally upgrade the entire health care system, setting it up to effectively handle any
future biological warfare attacks.
In doing so, the Chinese and the Russians pursued different goals. The Chinese need to
find a way to stop shipping actual physical manufactured goods to the US in exchange for
pieces of paper or promises to pay, all of which are about to become worthless, without
triggering a dangerous escalation. The need to do so with all necessary haste became obvious
in mid-August of 2019, when it turned out that banks were no longer willing to accept US
Treasury debt instruments as collateral for overnight loans. These were supposedly the safest
investments in the world that made up the world's largest and most liquid financial market --
until it turned out that they weren't that at all."
And on the American economy
"There are two important global processes which, while they will affect the US
particularly severely, go far beyond its geographic confines. One is the still relatively
gradual process of dethroning the US dollar from its position of dominance. Until the
coronavirus pandemic disrupted much of the global economy, most of its participants were
interested in preserving some measure of stability to the dollar system. But now that trade
has already been disrupted, an opening has been created to dump the dollar without
necessarily causing economic damage significantly worse than already exists. The actions of
the Federal Reserve, which is in the process of monetizing a large proportion of existing US
government debt and virtually all of the new debt being issued to cover the ever-growing
budget deficit, are undermining the dollar as well. Although the term "debt monetization" is
being used to describe what's happening, issuing currency with which to buy up worthless
promissory notes stretches the definition of "debt" beyond any reasonable limit, while
"monetization" is far too dignified a term for such a desperate delaying tactic. As a
consequence, some analysts do not see US dollar-based global financial system holding up too
far beyond this year.
The other process is the rapid transition of the US from the world's largest producer
of oil to one of the smallest, because the fracking bonanza has largely run its course. It
has never really made any money, since fracked oil is, for technological reasons, always too
expensive to sustain economic growth. And now, with an economic depression setting in,
economies at a standstill and oil futures trading in the negative territory (where market
participants are willing to pay producers to get out of having take delivery of the oil when
the contract matures) the fracking industry is going bankrupt, production is falling, and in
less than a year it is likely to be down by as much as 70%. At that point, any attempt at
economic recovery in the US will involve having to start importing large quantities of oil
from a world supply that, with the exception of fracked oil from the US, hasn't expanded much
since 2005."
My view is that despite this being all highly disruptive, it will prepare us all for the
inevitable outbreak of a truly deadly virus that will also kill the young and healthy too
(hopefully not cats). The world is becoming ever more globalized, transmission chains and
time seriously shortened. There will be no escape even on the periphery. A biological version
of Neville Shute's On the Beach.
Handling this well (in future) is eminently doable without even losing a (metaphorical)
bollock. It is basic stuff and really shouldn't be 'a thing.' The WHO is a redirection
nothing burger for those who are responsible for the abrogation of national competence.
Decisions are still taken at the national level, no? The WHO is a spokesbody and therein it
does have a role to play. It is neither free from political inteference or influence just
like every other international organization.
Fortunately, Asia has shown the common-sense that we in the old world have lost through
our own arrogance and self-importance. We should be humiliated, but we are not. We're too
busy blaming others.
This CoVid-19 outbreak has provided everyone with a crystal clear warning of precisely how
incompetent many nation states are over basic provision of health and pandemic planning in
the 21st Century. This isn't 1918. Things are supposed to have moved on a bit but it has
exposed the ideology of cuts, penny-pinching and not-give-a-f/kery over common-sense by those
elected (by us) to provide responsible government. They've been warned multiple times about
the risks, not to mention the series of other outbreaks in this century. Still, they're
rather more interested in squeaking out ever leaner efficiencies to maximize
profit.
I'm not worried about the planet, we'll knock ourselves off first.
My initial feeling was that the initial reaction of Putin, Trump and Johnson was to let the
thing burn itself out and maybe put the effort into looking after the most at risk. The
Imperial College thing seems to be the reason why Trump and Johnson went to lockdown and that
left me puzzled why Putin did. Orlov's piece gave me the idea that maybe, after talking to
Xi, Putin decided to use it as a test of Russia's ability to handle a bioattack. Notice that
Russia is actually building specialised hospitals around the country rather than just (as in
the West) temporarily re-purposing large facilities. We'll probably never know but it's a
thought I will keep in the Maybe File.
Agreed; I could think of no good reason for it, and consequently Orlov's speculation came as
a revelation. Again, it's only speculation on his part, but it does make sense and fits with
the Sino-Russian concept of every experience being a teachable moment, to be wrung for such
lessons as it may yield.
It is fairly well-known that Johnson's initial plan was to go for herd immunity and just
say bollocks to social distancing, but something caused him to abruptly reverse himself after
the UK had already started a pretty respectable infection curve. I'm not familiar with the
'Imperial College thing'; could you enlighten me? I do know that impatience at being shut in
with no job is increasingly unpopular with people everywhere it prevails, and governments are
having a harder time keeping the lid on. I can only imagine it is the same for Putin's
government.
I see; thanks for that. I remember reading mentions of a study which forecast incredible
death tolls, but didn't realize that was it. Well, no way they could have done anything else,
in the face of that – 2.2 million deaths in the US, and more than half a million in the
UK.
I don't suppose they will ever be called to account for their fearmongering quackery. To
nobody's surprise, I'm sure, the Imperial College receives generous grants from the Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation, the most recent in March of this year – just shy of $80
Million, to develop a new tool for malaria control and elimination in sub-Saharan Africa.
Nor was that the only one, by a long chalk; 80 donations between 2006 and 2018. This
website does ask that a disclaimer be included that the data are preliminary; final
development is not expected to be achieved until 2022. But at first glance, it looks like the
full amount will run into quite a few decimal places.
An under-reported fact in the US is the abundance of empty ICUs and now a surplus of
ventilators. A nearby city is laying off 2,500 medical personnel for lack of work (presumably
mobilized for the pandemic).
IIRC, a local story blew the whistle on a staged waiting line for Covid-19 testing; most
of the people in line (including medical volunteers who had nothing to do) were asked to to
stand in line to provide video footage for a network news team.
Yes, that's correct: Cherry Health, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The article points out that
Cherry Health stands to lose millions as a result of the crisis.
Ha, ha!! Dear God. Well, I hope he doesn't lose his tasty bit on the side over this –
he'll probably top himself. She looks quite yummy. But it's always the same, innit? Those who
make up the rules get a great kick out of it, but feel free to disregard them themselves as
soon as they get in the way.
Makes one wonder if the virus response is being managed at some level to cull the old and
frail to reduce health care costs. The obvious vulnerability of nursing home residents
combined with the apparent lack of resources specifically devoted to protecting those
individuals suggests high level scheming in that regard.
It was only a few months ago that we exceptional people were told that masks were useless
and unneeded (except for health care workers who desperately needed them for
self-protection). It is likely that policy lead to a rapid spread in the vulnerable
population.
It is remarkable how quickly the "masks are useless" directive has been officially
forgotten. Now, it's all about how China allowed us to mishandle the situation.
I would think not, only because no apparent effort has been made to ensure infection of the
homeless in their cardboard cities, and wipe them out. Here, as I have mentioned before,
Mayor Helps has given them a city park to use as their own squalid state, constantly refers
to them tenderly as 'our most vulnerable', and provides them no end of services, all for free
on the taxpayer. If your ambitions are modest, there is no real incentive to work.
If it were all part of a diabolical plan, you would think that plan would allow for taking
out the 'useless eaters' among the poor and helpless, as well as the old.
It certainly looks that way but such a plot requires a competence that our political elites
(at least in the UK) just don't have. Unfortunately, we're led by the shallow, ignorant and
inexperienced who responded to a serious health problem with blind panic. It's common sense
that a virus, which is particularly dangerous for the elderly, shouldn't be let out to play
in care homes; that steps should have been taken to protect the vulnerable rather than
putting everyone under house arrest while destroying their livelihoods. But common sense is a
bit like common courtesy, not actually that common when you get right down to it.
Professor Neil Ferguson (he of the 500,000 deaths forecast) and his Imperial College team
have a dire track record of forecasting in previous health crises, consistently wrong by an
order of magnitude. Yet it seems that no-one in government or our once highly competent civil
service had either the skills or time to query his forecasting model and the assumptions he
made. The fact that he broke the lockdown, introduced as a result of his forecast, in order
to dally with his mistress, does kind of suggest he doesn't believe in his own figures.
Yes, it sounds as if you are right. I suppose one reason it looks like a well-managed
conspiracy is that it was such a startlingly stupid thing to do – it's difficult to
imagine people would willingly cause such destruction without the slightest look to the
future.
Johnson is an idiot, but his first instinct – or apparently so, I suppose it might
have been just paralysis – was the correct one; proceed as normal, no reason to believe
this is the Black Death.
It's almost like the 'pandemic' is just an excuse for something, and the rest is just going
through the motions.
On relaxation of restrictions, it's mostly a game of feeling for the level of restriction
the public will tolerate, because it is so grateful for the degree of freedom allowed it. I
imagine when stores are opened, they're going to want Soviet-style lineups outside,
social-distancing 6 feet apart, because only 50 people are allowed inside at any one time. So
they can social-distance inside as well, as if that were somehow an effective
contagious-virus countermeasure, the way grocery stores are now. And 50 seems to be the magic
number no matter the size of the store, except for kiosks which are only allowed to serve one
person inside at a time.
The local pizza hotspot, Romeo's, seems to be doing a land-office business, and is
probably making money. They only serve take-out now, no inside service, so they only have to
pay the cooks and perhaps two counter-service persons; no waitresses or waiters or busboys.
And the line outside frequently is about a quarter-mile. But they still have to pay their
rent based on the size of the building, which is wasteful – look for perhaps quite a
few businesses switching to take-out only in the course of time, and renting smaller
premises. Because of course The Authorities are going to want social-distancing inside
restaurants as well as we emerge, to preserve the illusion that they knew what they were
about.
Case in point. America has a surveillance state but it refuses to use it to save lives.
Instead, it uses it to save Wall Street and protect the extractive elite from any TRUE REAL
threat. I relish the notion of this virus running rampant across America until it ravages,
and decimates actually, the Praetorian Guard Class, the managerial class if you will, that
licks the ass of the extractive elite for some bread crust, discarded steak fat and a Tesla.
I want to see them truly suffer for their sins.
After weeks cooped up at home following governors' orders to contain the coronavirus
outbreak, U.S. residents appear eager to get moving again. As more states began to relax
restrictions, about 25 million more people ventured outside their homes on an average day
last week than during the preceding six weeks, a New York Times analysis of cellphone
data found .
In nearly every part of the country, the share of people staying home dropped, in some
places by nearly 11 percentage points.
As the death toll from this pandemic rises in America with no end in sight, Wall Street,
as reflected in the DJIA, doesn't even blink and actually cheers. It doesn't get any sicker
than that. Wall Street sees the carnage as an opportunity to make more profit off of death
and the extractive elite see it as an opportunity to concentrate wealth even further and rid
the world of burdensome useless eaters. It's sick. It's sadistic. It's malevolent. It's evil.
It's our reality.
I certainly don't think that people should be coerced back to work if they don't want to,
though I do think we need to end these lockdowns as soon as possible. What we need is more
clear public messaging, from the government: making it clear to people that this disease
isn't actually that dangerous and that unless they are in an at risk group they really have
very little to be concerned about. Cards should be sent out with green, red, amber marking
where people can fill it out with their BMI, their underlying health conditions, chronic
diseases etc. and this will give them a picture for whether or not they and their household
is actually at risk.
People are talking about this disease like its the black death; as though it threatens
everyone and kills indiscriminately. This way of talking has created a completely unfounded
mass hysteria in the population. We are talking about a disease which has a case fatality
rate of 0.3% (according to the most detailed serological studies, such as the one carried out
in Gangelt) so it's a little more deadly than the flu. Of course, it will be a significant
killer for the next couple of years – but so is influenza, and nobody panics like this
and announces crackers lockdowns during a bad flu season.
Part of the problem has been the medias failure to adequately contextualise the data they
are presenting, so people just hear a large number of deaths and don't know what to make of
that number. Reporters need to be more clear about the fact that 800,000 people die every
year in the UK and that deviations of 5% on either side of this are not uncommon. We need to
be reminded that at 43,000 the number of excess deaths in the UK is about the same as the
number of excess deaths during the 2014/15 flu season – and still falls short of the
number of excess deaths during the 2017/18 flu season (excess deaths then were around
50,000). That context allows people to make sense of the data they read about without
panicking – how scared were you of going to work during the 17/18 flu season? Most
people probably didn't even notice.
The other problem is that the government has completely failed to give a serious
explanation for the lockdown to the public. They are spouting rubbish about "save lives"
without actually explaining why the lockdown would "save lives". As a result the public have
been given the wrong impression that just extending the lockdown on and on will save lives.
This is nonsense. Eventually the lockdown will be lifted and then the same people who would
have died before would die a bit later – so no lives would be saved apart from for a
few months. There are two explanations that could have been given for why we were
implementing the lockdown. Firstly, it could be to ensure that hospitals don't get overfilled
as happened in Wuhan and Northern Italy. If that was the aim, then a short lockdown (or a
local lockdown in London and some of the other cities with severe outbreaks) would have been
sufficient. It has been clear for at least the last three weeks that the government has
overestimated ICU needs, most hospitals around the country – including the Nightingale
in London – are completely empty. There are no more concerns about shortages of
ventilators as it is now clear they are not actually a good way to treat most cases. If there
is another severe outbreak in another city in the UK we can always just announce a small
local lockdown of that city. Secondly, it could be argued that lockdowns save lives because
they give us time to build up a testing capactiy so we can trace down cases and stop really
severe outbreaks from happening; but at 500,000 or so tests per week the UK is now testing a
lot of people and has the capacity to test even more. Apart from that I can't really think of
any other reason why a lockdown would "save lives".
So, no I don't think we should coerce people to go back to work. But once people are given
accurate information and this hysteria calms down, people will just go back to their lives as
normal. No coercion will be needed.
Posted by: fairleft | May 14 2020 0:35 utc | 253 So because you didn't read the word
"healthy" in my description of the truth about Covid-19 (which I note you do not deny),
you've stupidly decided I'm a troll.
No, you've been pushing this "only the elderly are at risk" *crap* since forever. *Of
course* healthy people are at limited risk. That's been known since almost day one from
China. As soon as the first statistics came out, we knew that *most* people don't die from
it.
What you *deliberately* have ignored and continue to ignore is the number of people who
*are* at risk from re-opening the economy too soon. I have cited the *millions* of people who
are at risk several times in these threads. The numbers aren't hard to find. And every expert
who has written about risk factors since the first statistics came out have pointed that
out.
But it doesn't fit your agenda, so you ignore it.
"And I'm not writing about Amerikkka moron."
Nice try. You were referring to the Galbraith piece in the top post which is explicitly
referring to the US. Moron.
Typical troll behavior. Deflect, deny, make counter accusations, continually re-assert the
same positions no matter how many times they are debunked.
Why b hasn't kicked your ass to the curb is beyond me. Few people here are posting more
nonsense than you - and you have even less actual evidence.
In Germany a huge scandal is growing. I'm surprised that this didn't emerge here yet (as far
as I can see).
An official in the Ministry for Interior has blown the whistle. After trying to forward a
study about the effect of the lockdown measures to his superiors, including Minister for
Interior Horst Seehofer, and being ignored, he leaked the study to a non-mainstream online
magazine. The study has reached the mainstream meanwhile.
Stephan Kohn (who was fired immediately of course) assesses the German reaction as
"Fehlalarm" (false alarm), claims that the lockdown has charged/will charge many more deaths
than the virus itself. It was a grotesque overreaction, not only in Germany, but in many
other countries.
I will just take one point, which the majority here, AFAICS, has never taken into account:
collateral damage. In Germany, in March/April 2020, 90% of important, in part life-saving
operations have not been conducted because the beds were reserved for the expected giant
Corona wave that didn't arrive. This means between 1,5 Million and 2,5 Million people are
affected, and it is only a matter of statistics how many lives have been lost or shortened
due to the delayed operations. Cohn estimates between 5000 and 125000 premature deaths which
easily outweigh the 7000 Corona deaths.
And this is just one point.
Like so many virologists, he says Corona is not worse than a strong flu.
"... In light of such a history of distrust – the president who'd promised to not only shutter the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison but also end the seemingly eternal wars in the Middle East had not only failed to deliver on those promises, but actually launched several new wars in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Sudan – it's no surprise Americans are reluctant to embrace the Trump administration's Covid-19 narrative. ..."
"... Like the fabled boy who cried wolf, it doesn't matter if the emergency is real this time – the government has simply worn out its welcome by making demands on false pretenses. ..."
Just over a third of Americans trust President Donald Trump's information about the
Covid-19 pandemic, according to a new poll. But given decades of crises mishandled by the
government, the only surprise is that it isn't lower. A CNN poll showing that just 36 percent
of Americans trust Trump for reliable information about the coronavirus was held up
triumphantly by the president's critics on Tuesday as proof his credibility is circling the
drain. But it's more likely to be the fallout not just from Trump, but from the two preceding
presidential administrations' misrepresentation of crises, that has created epidemic levels of
distrust among the people.
Trump's own approval rating is hovering around 45 percent, according to the poll, conducted
by CNN in conjunction with SSRS and released on Tuesday. While it's been presented as a
scathing mass rejection of Trump, the same pollsters are actually seeing an uptick in support
for the president – the approval rating last month stood at 44 percent, and the previous
month's was 43. But Americans can't be faulted for distrusting the Trump administration's
narratives, given prior presidents' tendencies toward crying wolf in ways that have invariably
left the American people worse off.
The last time Washington tried to mobilize the US with the threat of an invisible enemy was
during George W. Bush's 'War on Terror' after the September 11 attacks. While it soon became
apparent that the many deaths that occurred on that day had nothing to do with the subsequent
US invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq, it was too late by the time Americans found out they
had been lied to. Not only had the Afghan government willingly offered up Osama bin Laden, but
Saddam Hussein was found to have had no 'weapons of mass destruction', and the entire narrative
was the concoction of a secretive entity that had been set up to create a casus belli for war
with Iraq despite the facts.
Bush's approval ratings declined
steadily following 9/11, as the nation was forced into one war after another on false
pretenses. At his lowest point, just 25 percent of Americans trusted him. The 'invisible enemy'
of terrorism – supposedly lurking around every corner and requiring Americans to
practically disrobe at entrances to airports – had lost its luster, and Bush's poor
handling of real-life crises like Hurricane Katrina put the final nail in the coffin of his
credibility.
While Barack Obama entered office on a high note with a promise of " hope and
change ," his approval rating also plunged quickly – especially when he refused to
stand in the way of the wildly unpopular 2008 'Wall Street bailout' –
sinking to 41 percent in 2011 as Americans grew restive after years of recession with no
change in sight. By 2014, 70 percent of
respondents to an MSNBC poll stated the country was headed in the wrong direction, with 80
percent singling out the political system as the primary culprit. Congress enjoyed an
appallingly low 14 percent approval rating.
In light of such a history of distrust – the president who'd promised to not only
shutter the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison but also end the seemingly eternal wars in the
Middle East had not only failed to deliver on those promises, but actually launched several new
wars in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Sudan – it's no surprise Americans are reluctant
to embrace the Trump administration's Covid-19 narrative.
Another invisible enemy that requires
them to sacrifice their livelihoods – a
third of Americans couldn't pay their rent last month, while even the paltry $1,200
stimulus checks supposedly heading to 130 million Americans have apparently not reached
half their intended recipients yet – is reminding Americans of what happened last
time they were told to put aside their real-life concerns and fall in line behind a narrative
that turned out to be false.
Like the fabled boy who cried wolf, it doesn't matter if the
emergency is real this time – the government has simply worn out its welcome by making
demands on false pretenses.
Less than a day after he whined during his daily press briefing about having the worst
mortality rate from the virus in the country (he doesn't), NJ Gov Phil Murphy has on Wednesday
seemingly taken a major u-turn, moving ahead with a plan to partially reopen the state on
Monday after pledging to wait for more testing.
Specifically, the state will allow construction workers and more 'non-essential' retail
workers to report to work, with shoppers able to shop via 'curbside' pickup.
Data shows that we are ready to begin to restart our economy. From the peak:
📉New hospitalizations down 2/3
📉Total hospitalizations down nearly 1/2
📉Patients in ICU are down
📉Patients on ventilators down
📉Positive cases down nearly 70%
📉Deaths have decreased more than 1/3 pic.twitter.com/CAl0kK31DC
The coronavirus reminds us that the gap between what we think we know and what we
actually do know is enormous.
Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response
coordinator, shows off charts with members of the coronavirus task force during a briefing in
response to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the
White House on Tuesday, March 31, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The
Washington Post via Getty Images)
May 13, 2020
|
12:01 am
Matt
Purple St. Louis Federal Reserve watchers, rejoice! And yes, I'm talking to both of you. The St.
Louis Fed is freshly relevant this week thanks to a paper it
published back in 2007 that examined the economic effects of the 1918 Spanish flu. Drawing
on old newspaper articles, local surveys, and other studies -- national data back then was
scarce -- the report found that the damage done to businesses by the outbreak was both severe
and short-lived. The impact on the next generation, however, was longer-lasting. Those in utero
during the pandemic went on to attain less education and lower incomes than had previous
generations.
What we wouldn't give for that kind of glimpse from the future today. The coronavirus has
killed hundreds of thousands while sledgehammering the economy, leaving close to a quarter of
working-age Americans either unemployed or
underemployed. And we still have no idea how it will end. It may be that this recession is
similar to the one in 1918, cutting deeply but easing rapidly. Or it may be that we're in for
another lost decade of stubborn unemployment and stagnant growth. It may be that the virus is
seen off this summer, remembered as a frightening but ultimately brief ordeal. Or it may be
that it lurks into the autumn, whereupon it comes roaring back.
We don't know, and we hate that we don't know. Consequently a cottage industry has sprung up
around our uncertainty, hawking models, projections, expert opinions. These things have valid
scientific purposes, of course, but thrown down the rabbit hole of our popular discourse,
they've taken on a kind of hysterical clairvoyance, supposedly able to tell us what's coming
and how we should respond. With climate change, we grew accustomed to the idea that scientists
could see into the future. Now we're demanding they do the same with the coronavirus. That's
despite the fact that so far, none of these projections have demonstrated any greater
predictive ability than your average call to Miss Cleo.
Take the government's official death toll projections. Back in January, the White House was
largely complacent over the coronavirus, with President Trump comparing it to the seasonal flu
and his health secretary
saying that Americans need "not worry for their own safety." Then in late March, the
pendulum swung towards apocalypse. Actually, the White House said,
200,000 Americans could die. Two weeks later, the death toll projection fell
to a far rosier 60,000 , and the country breathed a sigh of relief ahead of Easter weekend.
Then the projections ticked upwards yet again. Today, IHME, the White House's principal
modeler, predicts that 147,000 Americans will be killed
by August 4.
Some of the issue here may be the choice of models. IHME has been
criticized by epidemiologists , as have the Imperial College modelers in Britain (who have
lately been distracted by, er, more
extracurricular activities ). But the bigger problem is best summed up in a quote
to Politico by the head of IHME, explaining why his organization's projections
were so wrong. "We had presumed, perhaps naively," he said, "that given the magnitude of the
epidemic, most states would stick to their social distancing until the end of May." In other
words, the models are premised on assumptions that can be scrambled by real-world events,
whether political decisions or acts of God or the caprices of the virus itself. They aren't
showing us the future so much as extrapolating off of a snapshot, one that can easily change.
Yet we treat them as practically mystic. "200,000 could die!!" scream the headlines, with
"could" ever the weasel word.
We don't just do this with the death toll. On the economy, too, we seem hopelessly confused.
Here's a smattering of headlines from the past two months: "Unemployment rate could exceed 20%
by June, top White House adviser says." "Economists see uneven jobs recovery, high U.S.
unemployment through 2021." "Top JPMorgan investment advisor: It will take '10 to 12 years' for
U.S. employment levels to return." "The coronavirus recession will be deeper and faster than
the financial crisis." "Economists say quick rebound from recession is unlikely." "Trump's
baseless claim that a recession would be deadlier than the coronavirus." "U.N. warns economic
downturn could kill hundreds of thousands of children in 2020."
Stare into this blurry puddle long enough and you might conclude that no one has any idea
what the hell they're talking about. Or you might fall back on your own biases, choosing to
believe stories that buttress your political beliefs and speak to your own personal
circumstances. Either way, this kind of confusion can have long-reaching effects. Consider, for
example, a new study that was released last week, which found that there could be 75,000
so-called deaths of despair -- meaning suicides and drug and alcohol overdoses -- as a
result of the coronavirus recession. It called to mind another
social science finding , one of the most consequential of the last decade: that life
expectancy among less educated, middle-aged, white Americans was declining, driven primarily by
those deaths of despair.
That claim, courtesy of researchers Anne Case and Angus Deaton , made
its way around the internet. It fed into the narrative of the populist right and Donald Trump.
It provided an empirical grounding for "American carnage." But wait: a less noticed study a
year later, which took Case's and Deaton's data and adjusted for age, found a more mixed
picture. According to research from
Columbia University , while middle-aged white women had indeed seen increased mortality
rates, middle-aged white men had reversed this trend back in 2005. And then came another study, in the
American Journal of Public Health , that challenged the very concept of "deaths of
despair," warning that "the gap between deaths of despair as a claim and deaths of despair as a
rigorously tested scientific concept is wide."
There is a Grand Canyon-sized gap between what we think we know and what we actually know.
How to navigate this chasm? Two maxims can help.
The first comes from Friedrich Hayek: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to
men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." Hayek was concerned
with what he called the "fatal conceit," which he defined as the belief "that man is able to
shape the world around him according to his wishes." We might add a corollary: that man is able
to anticipate the world around him according to his wishes. Because knowledge is
complex and dispersed, Hayek argued, no one can ever marshal enough of it to centrally plan an
economy. Likewise even a sophisticated model can't have enough data to foresee how a pandemic
will play out. There are simply too many variables, drawing on too many areas of life.
The second maxim comes from a very different source: John Dickinson, perhaps our most
conservative founding father. "Experience must be our only guide," Dickinson said. "Reason may
mislead us." Of course, by reason, he didn't mean vast computer algorithms struggling to track
contagion across seven continents; he was thinking of 18th-century rationalism, which he
contrasted with the more reliable yardstick of historical experience. While what seemed
philosophically sound in the abstract could be tainted by personal bias or disconnected from
real life, precedent was far more settled. How something had worked in the past was a good
indication of how it would work in the future.
Unfortunately we have very little precedent when it comes to the coronavirus, though the
Spanish flu can perhaps offer some clues. The 1918 influenza, like the current pandemic, began
in the spring, only to enter a second wave in the fall that killed more people than the first.
A third wave then began that winter and stretched into the summer of 1919. That's chilling, yet
there's good news too: the recession that followed was short and quickly blossomed into the
1920s, one of the most dizzying economic expansions in our history.
So top hats and flapper dresses all around? Who knows? It's called the novel coronavirus for
a reason. The awful truth is that we have very little idea how long this will go on and how it
will ultimately turn out. And the reason for that is that we know so very much less than we
think we do.
"Paul's challenge encapsulates the debate between elected officials eager to open up businesses and willing to accept the risk
that more people will die, and public health experts committed to lowering infection rates and keeping the public as safe as possible.
" People are hurting and we're destroying our country ," Paul told reporters outside the hearing room. "We've got to open up business
we got to let people vote, and we're not going to live in a perfect world without infectious disease, we're still going to have it,
but we got to open the economy and that's the number one message I have."
The Kentucky senator, an opthamologist, told Fauci he didn't believe there would be a surge in cases if schools opened, which
is not what public health experts say. Paul dismissed predictive models of the virus. "The history of this, when we look back, will
be of wrong prediction after wrong prediction after wrong prediction ," Paul said.
Paul then targeted Fauci personally: "As much as I respect you Dr. Fauci, I don't think you're the end-all, I don't think you're
the one person that gets to make the decision . We can listen to your advice. But there are people on the other side saying there
won't be a surge and we can safely open the economy." CNBC
--------------
IMO, there may or may not be an effective vaccine developed against COVID-19. Some virus bugs are never countered effectively
by vaccines. There are no vaccines for the common cold, the Spanish Influenza of 1918, and many other virus strains. Some diseases
must burn themselves out in a population by establishing herd immunity. Bubonic Plague is a bacterial infection, but the same thing
was true of it. It ravaged Europe, but eventually the fire of infection burned out in Europe and those of us who are descended from
Europeans are the descendants of the herd survivors.
COVID-19 is nothing like the Black Death or the Spanish Influenza in lethality except for the old and infirm. Suck it up, people!
Cowboy up! Grow a pair! Fauci is a techno dweeb who would keep the US shut down economically until the survivors of COVID-19 would
be living in a post-apocalyptic world of small communities living in poverty, a dystopian nightmare.
Rand Paul is also a doctor, and a survivor of the disease.
The Democrats are having a good time playing with Trump while the country burns to the ground economically.
Biden? Pelosi? Juan Williams? Northam? You want them? If you do, and you want to hunker down until the country dies, well then,
Bless You! You will deserve what you get.
SWMBO and I, and the doggies are unlikely to be here to share your pain. pl
LA County apparently wants to extend the lockdown by another 3 months. This is just insane!
Old guys like me could hang out more at the ranch but the youth need to be out and about.
There's no perfect risk-free scenario as you point out. Unfortunately we have cultivated a nanny state of big government and
big business that are quite rapacious in reality. Has any state actually passed legislation to enforce lockdowns? These are just
executive orders at the state and local levels. It would appear that these orders suspends the constitution? I'm surprised no
one has yet challenged these orders in state and federal courts.
We sure are an afraid lot. What happened to the derring-do?
maybe they could do a special ufc - wrestling type show with paul and fauci.. the american public seem very keen on this sort
of thing and would eat it up..
can someone explain how herd immunity works?? i've never heard of people being referred to as a herd... i missed that in school..
BTW, notice how Ukraine has vanished from the national conversation.
Who needs to keep yapping about how Trump let down (one faction in) Ukraine when they can blame him for the economic calamity
which, in point of fact, is due to the vast overreaction that has been pushed by the media and Dem politicians.
For example, failing to point out that New York has unique demographics, which directly and conclusively led to its high hospitalization
and fatality rate.
A key point the media doesn't adequately emphasize, IMO, is the sharpness of the dependency on age.
In Virginia, there have been, to date, roughly 900 deaths attributed to the virus.
Of those deaths, over half were to people over 80.
Roughly one quarter were people in their 70s.
About 15% were people on their 60s.
Less than 10% were people under 60.
There were ZERO deaths of people under 20.
To see a bar chart which shows the exact numbers, visit https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/coronavirus/
Then click on "Demographics", then set "Select Measure" to "Deaths".
"public health experts"
These folks appear to be expert only at guaranteeing thier jobs. The backpedaling, double speak and out right fraud is beyond
shameless. I notice we aren't talking about the Georgia death count any longer but St. Travoon of the skittles accolyte. This
thing is over but for NYC and the politicians in the democratic death traps being governed by fools. Ordering infected elderly
patients back to nursing homes, which experts advised that to Cuomo and Whitmer? Suicide, drug overdoses, those deaths don't count?
"Biden? Pelosi? Juan Williams? Northam? You want them?" No, nor Whitmer nor Newsom. If we get them I won't be around much longer
than your doggies and I'm much younger than you and SWMBO.
I think a big part of the problem is the total lack of any deeper philosophic debate, as part of a normal social functioning.
People want answers not truths, so there are plenty of politicians and priests, but philosophy is neutered and left to the back
alleys of academia.
We are linear, goal oriented creatures in a cyclical, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, in which there is this organic interplay
between competition and cooperation, as well as public and private functions of society, etc. So when we impose this goal oriented
model on those facts of life, we end up with a bunch of absolutist ideologs running the world and using the other side as boogymen
to rally their cultists. Rather than appreciating such interplay is fundamental to life.
When we have such a fundamentally primitive understanding of how reality functions, having nuanced discussion of life and death
issues is not possible.
The people won't stand for Fausti's nonsense, nor the Democrats'. They will just open their businesses and local governments -
especially county level - will allow it. Already happening in PA. Heck even some states are doing it. As counties and states open
up, the populations of those that do not will become increasingly agitated and begin to break "the rules". There will be a ripple
effect. The cowards and social media magnates and leftists will call them names and wave fingers at them, but the people won't
care. Actually they will continue to open with even more fervor just to give give these "elites" the finger.
As always, the socialist/dictator class ignores human nature and believes people can be programmed. As always, they are wrong.
People are no longer buying the models and case rates BS, etc. that the "scientists" put out there. Geekery ain't cutting it any
more.
Hopefully, this will all occur peacefully with the socialists/dictators just throwing up their hands. If they double down,
then the tree of liberty gets watered. Probably the outcome that needs to happen, terrible as it is. Right now Pelosi is trying
to develop a plan to bribe the people into staying locked down and vote democrat. It will fail.
LA County apparently wants to extend the lockdown by another 3 months. This is just insane!
Old guys like me could hang out more at the ranch but the youth need to be out and about.
There's no perfect risk-free scenario as you point out. Unfortunately we have cultivated a nanny state of big government and
big business that are quite rapacious in reality. Has any state actually passed legislation to enforce lockdowns? These are just
executive orders at the state and local levels. It would appear that these orders suspends the constitution? I'm surprised no
one has yet challenged these orders in state and federal courts.
We sure are an afraid lot. What happened to the derring-do?
maybe they could do a special ufc - wrestling type show with paul and fauci.. the american public seem very keen on this sort
of thing and would eat it up..
can someone explain how herd immunity works?? i've never heard of people being referred to as a herd... i missed that in school..
BTW, notice how Ukraine has vanished from the national conversation.
Who needs to keep yapping about how Trump let down (one faction in) Ukraine when they can blame him for the economic calamity
which, in point of fact, is due to the vast overreaction that has been pushed by the media and Dem politicians.
For example, failing to point out that New York has unique demographics, which directly and conclusively led to its high hospitalization
and fatality rate.
A key point the media doesn't adequately emphasize, IMO, is the sharpness of the dependency on age.
In Virginia, there have been, to date, roughly 900 deaths attributed to the virus.
Of those deaths, over half were to people over 80.
Roughly one quarter were people in their 70s.
About 15% were people on their 60s.
Less than 10% were people under 60.
There were ZERO deaths of people under 20.
To see a bar chart which shows the exact numbers, visit https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/coronavirus/
Then click on "Demographics", then set "Select Measure" to "Deaths".
"public health experts"
These folks appear to be expert only at guaranteeing thier jobs. The backpedaling, double speak and out right fraud is beyond
shameless. I notice we aren't talking about the Georgia death count any longer but St. Travoon of the skittles accolyte. This
thing is over but for NYC and the politicians in the democratic death traps being governed by fools. Ordering infected elderly
patients back to nursing homes, which experts advised that to Cuomo and Whitmer? Suicide, drug overdoses, those deaths don't count?
"Biden? Pelosi? Juan Williams? Northam? You want them?" No, nor Whitmer nor Newsom. If we get them I won't be around much longer
than your doggies and I'm much younger than you and SWMBO.
I think a big part of the problem is the total lack of any deeper philosophic debate, as part of a normal social functioning.
People want answers not truths, so there are plenty of politicians and priests, but philosophy is neutered and left to the back
alleys of academia.
We are linear, goal oriented creatures in a cyclical, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, in which there is this organic interplay
between competition and cooperation, as well as public and private functions of society, etc. So when we impose this goal oriented
model on those facts of life, we end up with a bunch of absolutist ideologs running the world and using the other side as boogymen
to rally their cultists. Rather than appreciating such interplay is fundamental to life.
When we have such a fundamentally primitive understanding of how reality functions, having nuanced discussion of life and death
issues is not possible.
The people won't stand for Fausti's nonsense, nor the Democrats'. They will just open their businesses and local governments -
especially county level - will allow it. Already happening in PA. Heck even some states are doing it. As counties and states open
up, the populations of those that do not will become increasingly agitated and begin to break "the rules". There will be a ripple
effect. The cowards and social media magnates and leftists will call them names and wave fingers at them, but the people won't
care. Actually they will continue to open with even more fervor just to give give these "elites" the finger.
As always, the socialist/dictator class ignores human nature and believes people can be programmed. As always, they are wrong.
People are no longer buying the models and case rates BS, etc. that the "scientists" put out there. Geekery ain't cutting it any
more.
Hopefully, this will all occur peacefully with the socialists/dictators just throwing up their hands. If they double down,
then the tree of liberty gets watered. Probably the outcome that needs to happen, terrible as it is. Right now Pelosi is trying
to develop a plan to bribe the people into staying locked down and vote democrat. It will fail.
"... The forcible prevention of Americans from doing anything except what politicians deem "essential" has led to the worst economy in American history since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is panic and hysteria, not the coronavirus , that created this catastrophe. And the consequences in much of the world will be more horrible than in America. ..."
"... That would be enough to characterize the worldwide lockdown as a deathly error. But there is much more. If global GDP declines by 5%, another 147 million people could be plunged into extreme poverty, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute. ..."
"... Foreign Policy magazine reports that, according to the International Monetary Fund, the global economy will shrink by 3% in 2020, marking the biggest downturn since the Great Depression, and the U.S., the eurozone and Japan will contract by 5.9%, 7.5% and 5.2%, respectively. Meanwhile, across South Asia, as of a month ago, tens of millions were already "struggling to put food on the table." Again, all because of the lockdowns, not the virus. ..."
The idea that the worldwide lockdown of virtually every country other than Sweden may have
been an enormous mistake strikes many - including world leaders; most scientists, especially
health officials, doctors and epidemiologists; those who work in major news media; opinion
writers in those media; and the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people who put their
faith in these people - as so preposterous as to be immoral.
Timothy Egan of The New York Times described Republicans who wish to enable their states to
open up as "the party of death."
That's the way it is today on planet Earth, where deceit, cowardice and immaturity now
dominate almost all societies because the elites are deceitful, cowardly and immature.
But for those open to reading thoughts they may differ with, here is the case for why the
worldwide lockdown is not only a mistake but also, possibly, the worst mistake the world has
ever made. And for those intellectually challenged by the English language and/or logic,
"mistake" and "evil" are not synonyms. The lockdown is a mistake; the Holocaust, slavery,
communism, fascism, etc., were evils. Massive mistakes are made by arrogant fools; massive
evils are committed by evil people.
The forcible prevention of Americans from doing anything except what politicians deem
"essential" has led to the worst economy in American history since the Great Depression of the
1930s. It is panic and hysteria, not the coronavirus , that created this catastrophe. And the
consequences in much of the world will be more horrible than in America.
The United Nations World Food Programme, or the WFP, states that by the end of the year,
more than 260 million people will face starvation -- double last year's figures. According to
WFP director David Beasley on April 21:
"We could be looking at famine in about three dozen countries...
There is also a real danger that more people could potentially die from the economic
impact of COVID-19 than from the virus itself " (italics added).
That would be enough to characterize the worldwide lockdown as a deathly error. But there is
much more. If global GDP declines by 5%, another 147 million people could be plunged into
extreme poverty, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Foreign Policy magazine reports that, according to the International Monetary Fund, the
global economy will shrink by 3% in 2020, marking the biggest downturn since the Great
Depression, and the U.S., the eurozone and Japan will contract by 5.9%, 7.5% and 5.2%,
respectively. Meanwhile, across South Asia, as of a month ago, tens of millions were already
"struggling to put food on the table." Again, all because of the lockdowns, not the virus.
In one particularly incomprehensible act, the government of India, a poor country of 1.3
billion people, locked down its people. As Quartz India reported on April 22, "Coronavirus has
killed only around 700 Indians a small number still compared to the 450,000 TB and 10,000-odd
malaria deaths recorded every year."
One of the thousands of unpaid garment workers protesting the lockdown in Bangladesh
understands the situation better than almost any health official in the world:
"We are starving. If we don't have food in our stomach, what's the use of observing this
lockdown?"
But concern for that Bangladeshi worker among the world's elites seems nonexistent.
The lockdown is " possibly even more catastrophic (than the virus) in its outcome : the
collapse of global food-supply systems and widespread human starvation" (italics added).
That was published in the left-wing The Nation, which, nevertheless, enthusiastically
supports lockdowns. But the American left cares as much about the millions of non-Americans
reduced to hunger and starvation because of the lockdown as it does about the people of upstate
New York who have no incomes, despite the minuscule number of coronavirus deaths there. Or
about the citizens of Oregon, whose governor has just announced the state will remain locked
down until July 6. As of this writing, a total of 109 people have died of the coronavirus in
Oregon.
An example of how disinterested the left is in worldwide suffering is made abundantly clear
in a front-page "prayer" by a left-wing Christian in the current issue of The Nation: "May we
who are merely inconvenienced remember those whose lives are at stake."
"Merely inconvenienced" is how the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, a Protestant minister and
president of the North Carolina NAACP, describes the tens of millions of Americans rendered
destitute, not to mention the hundreds of millions around the world rendered not only penniless
but hungry. The truth is, like most of the elites, it is Barber who is "merely inconvenienced."
Indeed, the American battle today is between the merely inconvenienced and the rest of
America.
Michael Levitt, professor of structural biology at Stanford Medical School and winner of the
2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry, recently stated, "There is no doubt in my mind that when we come
to look back on this, the damage done by lockdown will exceed any saving of lives by a huge
factor."
To the left, anyone who questions the lockdown is driven by preference for money over lives.
Typical of the left's moral shallowness is this headline on Salon this week:
"It's Time To Reject the Gods of Commerce: America Is a Society, Not an 'Economy,'" with
the subhead reading, "America Is About People, Not Profit Margins."
And, of course, to smug editors and writers of The Atlantic, in article after repetitive
article, the fault lies not with the lockdown but with President Donald Trump. The most popular
article in The Atlantic this week is titled "The Rest of the World Is Laughing at Trump." The
elites can afford to laugh at whatever they want. Meanwhile, the less fortunate -- that is,
most people -- are crying.
So-called immunity passports would bring back the worst civil liberties abuses of the past
and result in a crime wave. Credit: M.Moira/Shutterstock
May 13, 2020
|
12:01 am
Bill
Wirtz The coronavirus lockdown drags on, yet only a few fringe fanatics (and France, but I
repeat myself) support continuing complete shutdowns of the world's economies. However, even
those countries that have opted to end forced quarantines still present a range of worrying
responses. One of these ongoing debates surrounds the so-called "Corona apps," with which
authorities intend to track and trace the movements of their own citizens. In Poland, the
government is
mandating that those infected with COVID-19 install an app and use it to send a selfie on a
regular basis. If they do not comply, they face a visit from the law enforcement.
The nightmarish infringements on civil liberties are set to continue with "immunity
passports." The German Robert Koch Institute, along with other researchers and blood donation
services, is
working on a large-scale study to establish immunity in COVID-19 patients. Those found to
have built immunity, either because they've already had the disease or through antibody
testing, could be issued paperwork that exempts them from lockdown restrictions.
CNN's medical analyst Saju Mathew counts himself as convinced by the concept, and quotes a
noted beacon of human freedom to back it up: "In China, for example, QR codes have been used to
loosen restrictions in Wuhan, where the pandemic originated. People assessed to be healthy have
been given a green QR code, indicating they can travel within the province."
From a law enforcement level, the existence of immunity passports would extend indefinitely
the practice of questioning citizens without reasonable suspicion at any time. "Papers please"
wouldn't be experienced only because one is crossing a border, but merely because one is
outside. If you were worried about rogue police abusing power before, wait until stop and frisk
becomes the norm all across the United States, at any time of the day.
In the United Kingdom, Professor Peter Openshaw, a member of the government's new and
emerging respiratory virus threats advisory group,
told The Guardian that "people granted the passports would have to be kept under
close observation to ensure they were not becoming reinfected." In practice, this would amount
to daily identification checkpoints and mandatory home visits. Any pretense of individual
liberty and fundamental rights would go out the window.
But beyond that, on a more practical level, the measure would be inoperable.
In a scientific brief published at the end of April , the World Health Organization (WHO)
-- known to be warm on authoritarian measures such as those used by China -- preliminarily
rejected the idea of these passports. Current antibody tests, the WHO warned, could confuse
immunity with one of the six existing coronaviruses, four of which cause the common cold. The
WHO also noted that such paperwork would give citizens the impression that they do not need to
abide by social distancing guidelines, giving them a false sense of security. Professor
Openshaw adds that immunity passports would incentivize people to try and deliberately catch
coronavirus, which could end up overwhelming the health sector, exactly the scenario that the
lockdowns are meant to prevent.
There's also a massive opportunity for crime under such a proposal. In 2015,
50 million travel documents were either lost or stolen. In 2014, the UK recorded a five-year high of
counterfeit passport seizures. Fake passports fuel organized crime and have long been available
on the black market. Immunity passports would be far more valuable, since they would grant not
just the ability to go to other countries, but other basic freedoms of movement, going into
shops or meeting friends. The idea that people would pay a pretty price for their freedom would
be an understatement. In turn, the government could only react to such a flood of false
documentation by becoming more authoritarian, casting us into yet another spiral of increasing
state control.
There is no instance in which the systematic control of citizens has not ended in police
abuse, or plain and simple authoritarianism. There is a genuine fear about the coronavirus.
That said, we cannot allow such fear to rid us completely of our fundamental rights. States of
emergency were and are designed to be temporary, and in that, to be short.
If the debate is over whether to radically overturn the Bill of Rights and human rights
conventions, then let us have that debate. Let us talk about rewriting the rules, instead of
just plain ignoring them.
Bill Wirtz comments on European politics and policy in English, French, and German. His
work has appeared in Newsweek , the Washington Examiner , CityAM, Le Monde
, Le Figaro , and Die Welt .
The Current Situation in the United States: May 2020
James K. Galbraith
Two weeks ago week the US death toll from Covid-19 exceeded that of US soldiers in
Vietnam, 1955-1974. On May 1 the one-day toll reached a new high, greater than that in New York
City on September 11, 2001. Meanwhile economic output has collapsed and over thirty million
Americans had filed unemployment claims as of April 30, 2020. On the public health front,
testing remains inadequate, contact tracing non-existent, treatment options appear stalled and
millions remain uninsured. The federal bailouts have worked well in one way only: to spur a
modest revival of stocks and to forestall massive defaults on bonds.
The failures of the public health system border on sabotage. Test kits were available
from the WHO in January; the US elected not to use them. The first production of tests from the
CDC was botched. Testing was deliberately limited as community transmission grew, so that the
virus escaped from early containment that might have been possible. Lockdowns and quarantines
came late, were poorly organized and weakly enforced. Supplies of PPE were not allocated to
hospitals and health care providers according to need; the Defense Production Act was not
deployed in timely and effective manner to ramp up home production; no effective federal system
to manage international medical supply chains exists to this day. While some firms have no
doubt done their best, reports of profiteering and scams are rampant.
The push to reopen the economy is a further mark of failure. As food supply workers
were not properly protected, unacceptable levels of sickness and workplace contamination have
occurred, notably in meat. Food banks are in crisis, while milk, eggs and other perishables are
wasted. State governments facing fiscal catastrophe press businesses to reopen on terms that
cannot be profitable, because capacity is constrained for health reasons. The openings are
calculated to force workers off of unemployment insurance, which can be revoked if they decline
to return to risky jobs. Many smaller businesses are deciding not to reopen; they will face
bankruptcy instead and disappear. Although evictions and foreclosures are technically deferred,
many landlords have ignored this and in any event rent, mortgages, utility bills and other
debts continue to accrue.
Models of the pandemic now openly predict infections rising further as lockdowns are
relaxed, to the point of testing the capacity of health care systems even in parts of the
country not yet severely affected. Whether this will happen or not is not yet clear; the public
may continue, as a general rule, to practice safe contact behavior, and if the transmission
rates hold below 1, as they presently are estimated to be in almost all of the American states , the pandemic may continue to
decline. But if the models are borne out, death rates will rise by many multiples of their
current values. These events are projected to lead to further lock-downs on a rolling basis,
until such time as a vaccine or therapy is available. There is no guarantee of
either.
Even if the pandemic is now contained the economy will not revert to "normal." The
United States is a premier producer of energy, aerospace, advanced information technologies and
financial services. It assembles many million automobiles, appliances and other consumer
durable goods every year. The oil sector has suffered a price collapse and borders now on mass
bankruptcy; when fracking wells are capped they will sand up and become very costly to reopen,
so the US energy-based economic expansion is over. Airplanes are lined up in parking spaces; no
new civilian passenger airliners will be needed indefinitely. Households who are either
unemployed or working from home (and therefore not commuting) or that face deferred rent and
mortgages will not soon be in the market for new cars; in any event the old ones will last
longer as they are being driven much less. As office buildings remain empty, new ones will not
be built. Similarly for retail stores, already driven to the wall by on-line ordering and
deliveries. The banking sector is on the hook for energy loans gone bad, and for household
debts, and for corporate loans that will be at risk once the bailout money runs low. The debts
built up during the pandemic will be defaulted in many cases, ruining credit for the households
affected. All of which foretells a long depression even under the best foreseeable public
health conditions. A cycle of infections and lock-downs will make all of this that much
worse.
There is an illusion about, that the recent prosperity can be revived by "reopening." But
many industries – aircraft, airlines, hotels, automobiles, appliances, commercial
construction, energy – will definitely shrink, whatever happens now and no matter how
much money they receive. The bailouts were a measure predicated on the idea that these
industries were facing just a temporary interruption. But it is difficult to see how
bankruptcies and liquidations can be avoided if there is no revival in the demand for product.
And large-scale production relies on interlinked supply-chains, so that if a single major
producer (for example one of the majors in the automotive sector) fails, there is a risk of
cascading liquidations (for example in auto parts), making operations difficult – perhaps
impossible – for the survivors. In these industries the supply chains and subcontractors
are much larger in the aggregate than the assembly operations of the final production firm.
Higher education, a large sector in America, faces a crisis of high costs, collapsing
enrollments and the actual alternative of cheap on-line instruction in many fields. This was
already in the works for demographic reasons, and is now being accelerated by the loss of
household wealth. Health care, ten times larger, also faces financial difficulties as millions
are losing their insurance and – for the moment anyway – as accidents, other
infectious diseases and such are down, depriving doctors and hospitals of reimbursements.
Service industries from restaurants to retailers cannot function profitably at one-quarter of
capacity; bars, nightclubs, and most sporting venues cannot reopen at all.
Federal decision-making has failed at every level. In the executive branch, it has
been at best a complex of incompetence, denial, and political motivation. At worst,
decisions were taken and are still being taken in full knowledge of the projected death rates
and potential for private profiteering, both in the medical sector and in the larger financial
economy. It is known that some private speculators made over three hundred billion dollars
shorting the stock market before the February collapse, and that some Members of Congress sold
their holdings based on information provided in intelligence briefings. Congressional action
has been slow, marred by politics, lobbies, regional rivalries, poor judgment and a
misdiagnosis of the economic issues, as Congress reached for legislative models used in past
business downturns, especially the crisis of 2007-2009, which had no quarantine or other public
health component.
The specific policies implemented were plagued by problems. To calculate payments
under the first CARES Act, the IRS had to use filings from tax year 2018, and also ran into
printing bottlenecks for paper checks that had to be mailed to those without direct deposit.
Unemployment insurance benefits were made relatively generous, and the state unemployment
insurance web-sites could not handle the crush, so they crashed, leaving many without the
ability to access the program. Instead of simple wage replacement (which would have protected
health insurance and union membership) the Small Business Administration issued rules that
appeared unusable for many firms, banks gave preference to favored clients, and in the first
round also the money soon ran out. In short, the effort to save the economy by pouring money
into it through conventional channels was inadequate, ill-considered, inefficient, and in some
respects corrupt. The best that may be said is that it was much better than doing nothing at
all.
As events progress, the usual pattern of property sales and purchases cannot proceed. So
property values will collapse, leaving millions of homeowners without equity; as this happens,
mass foreclosures and property seizures are inevitable under the present legal rules. Predatory
private investors will buy distressed assets at firesale prices and the American population
will revert, largely to renter status. For those with means, private tutors and doctors will
remain available; the others will manage as they can. Needless to say, depression, despair,
drug abuse and suicide will prevail.
Or maybe they won't . In the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, it was possible
– barely possible, but possible – to shift the blame from the bankers to the
victims, from those who built a massively fraudulent financial system to those who took out the
loans that they could not repay. But there was no viral element, no public health trigger, to
that crisis. This one is different. Every development described above is a consequence, direct
or indirect, of the coronavirus. Those who were laid off, and who went home, and who broke the
transmission of the disease, did their part, just as health-care professionals and grocery
clerks did theirs. Their legal case for relief remains weak. But the moral case is strong and
the economic case is beyond dispute. Even the incumbent Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, a
foreclosure-predator of the first water after 2008, has stated that
the economic crisis "is no fault of American business, it is no fault of American workers, it
is the fault of a virus." This is true but it does not mean that things will return to the past
if the virus can be made to go away.
To move forward, first of all, debts incurred before and during the pandemic will
have to be written down. The energy sector and transport sectors will have to be rebuilt, based
far more on renewables and sources other than oil. A large share of basic industries –
especially in the health sector – will have to be repatriated so that basic sufficiency
exists in this country. Millions of people will be needed to monitor and support public health;
jobs for them must be organized and funded by the government. State and local governments will
have to be federally-funded, in substantial part, to provide basic public services. New and
sustainable housing must be built, in new community structures. High speed broadband must be
provided to all. A new financing model – cooperative, with public support – will be
required to re-establish small businesses. Local, decentralized cultural and sporting venues
will have to replace mass-based experiences; these too will require cooperative structures and
public support. In short, the only way out, remotely acceptable to the population at large,
will require a comprehensive restructuring of the economy on a cooperative foundation, with the
government stepping up to guaranteed funding, employment, and public investments.
Disaster capitalism is being tried, and the worst case is now the likely case. But there is
a scale beyond which disaster capitalism cannot go. At a certain point, the carnage becomes too
great to neglect, impossible to avoid and lethal to overlook. At a certain point, ordinary
people will stand up and refuse to be bullied any more. That point has not quite arrived; we
are still in the mind-set of "getting back to normal," even as the pandemic continues. The
contradiction between normality and public health is on people's minds; the impossibility of
returning to the previous abnormal-normal has not yet settled in. It will, in due course. At
that point, the question of alternatives will have to be faced.
>Patient #1 was a 35 year old male who presented at a Seattle (WA) clinic on Jan 15, 2020
A month later Fauci was still proclaiming in public that the evil virus was less of a
problem than the annual influenza. Someplace there is a video of Fauci saying this, right
around Feb 15.
I can not understand how even complete incompetents manage to make exactly the wrong
decision at every opportunity. In the UK there was a policy to send elderly patients, both
suspected and known to have the virus, to care homes, without even warning the care home
people. Supposedly it was to make room for corona patients who were even sicker than the ones
going into care homes. This is straight-up criminal negligence.
The governor -- who himself has described nursing homes as a "feeding frenzy'' for the
deadly coronavirus -- said that the facilities can't challenge a state regulation
forcing them to admit patients with the contagion .
The CEO of a hard-hit Brooklyn nursing home, where 55 patients have died from the
coronavirus, told The Post last week that he'd been warning state Health Department
officials for weeks he had staffing and equipment issues -- yet received little help.
"There is no way for us to prevent the spread under these conditions,'' the head of the
Cobble Hill Health Center, Donny Tuchman, wrote in an e-mail to the department on April
8.
He said he asked to move some patients to the makeshift wards at Manhattan's Javits
Center and aboard the city-docked USNS Comfort amid the pandemic, only to be told those two
spots were receiving only patients from hospitals.
"I made specific requests to transfer patients, and it didn't happen,'' Tuchman told The
Post. "There weren't options."
Deliberate policy decisions have killed and continue to kill people. That is perfectly
clear, even while the origins of the virus and the intent of decisions are hiding in the
muck. Will relatives of the dead just accept this as "an act of god", or will they come to
understand these events as "acts of dear leaders"?
For two months Dear Leaders have claimed that destroying the economy, house arrest, and no
care home visitors are for the express purpose of protecting ... care home residents. But
most of the dead were care home residents, along with plenty of their care workers.
Yes it sounds melodramatic but I keep seeing black-and-white images of people being herded
into shower rooms in order to get showered with Zyklon B. Please tell me why we are not
witnessing state-sanctioned murder.
"... Paul, who also has a medical degree, called for "a little bit of humility in our belief that we know what's best for our economy," questioning Fauci's support for a prolonged economic shutdown during a Senate hearing on the government's coronavirus response on Tuesday. ..."
"... With all due respect I don't think you're the end-all, I don't think you're the one person who gets to make a decision. ..."
"... "I hope that people who are predicting doom and gloom and saying oh we can't do this there's going to be a surge will admit they're wrong if there isn't a surge," the senator continued, calling for the Trump administration to listen to experts who disagreed with the "doom and gloom" predictions of Fauci and his ilk. ..."
"... Paul added that continuing the lockdown would widen the class divide, explaining that if children are kept out of school for months on end, then "the poor and underprivileged kids who don't have a parent that's able to teach them at home aren't going to be able to learn for a full year." He also said that the catastrophic narrative painting Covid-19 as a killer necessitating mass shutdowns had gotten started with "wrong prediction after wrong prediction," starting with the British scientist Neil Ferguson's apocalyptic forecasts – even as the British scientist had been meeting secretly with his mistress in violation of the lockdown he'd been championing. ..."
Republican Senator Rand Paul has challenged National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases director Dr Anthony Fauci on the nation's Covid-19 policy, suggesting the US is
waiting too long to reopen. Paul, who also has a medical degree, called for "a little bit of
humility in our belief that we know what's best for our economy," questioning Fauci's support
for a prolonged economic shutdown during a Senate hearing on the government's coronavirus
response on Tuesday.
Sen. Paul argues school decisions should be made district by district, tells Dr. Fauci: "I
don't think you're the end all."Fauci: "I'm a scientist... I think we better be careful if we
are not cavalier in thinking that children are completely immune to the deleterious effects."
pic.twitter.com/dIjXwkM5AU
With all due respect I don't think you're the end-all, I don't think you're the one
person who gets to make a decision.
"I hope that people who are predicting doom and gloom and saying oh we can't do this
there's going to be a surge will admit they're wrong if there isn't a surge," the senator
continued, calling for the Trump administration to listen to experts who disagreed with the
"doom and gloom" predictions of Fauci and his ilk.
" In rural states, we never really reached any sort of pandemic levels in Kentucky and
other states ," Paul pointed out, even as he acknowledged that " New England " had
been hit hard by the virus. " We have less deaths in Kentucky than we have in an average flu
season. "
" We don't know everything about this virus ," Fauci countered, challenging that
children in some parts of the country were turning up with " a very strange inflammatory
syndrome " similar to Kawasaki syndrome.
" You're right in the numbers that children do much much better .but I am very careful,
and hopefully humble, in knowing that I don't know everything about this disease, and that's
why I'm very reserved in making broad predictions ," Fauci continued.
Paul added that continuing the lockdown would widen the class divide, explaining that if
children are kept out of school for months on end, then "the poor and underprivileged kids who
don't have a parent that's able to teach them at home aren't going to be able to learn for a
full year." He also said that the catastrophic narrative painting Covid-19 as a killer
necessitating mass shutdowns had gotten started with "wrong prediction after wrong prediction,"
starting with the British scientist Neil Ferguson's apocalyptic forecasts – even as the
British scientist had been meeting secretly with his mistress in violation of the lockdown he'd
been championing.
Fauci's supporters took to social media to slam his opponent, noting that Paul had gone to
the Senate gym while infected with the coronavirus and perhaps infected others. They also cited
high numbers of Covid-19 cases in Paul's home county of Warren County, Kentucky.
Watching Republicans cheer on Rand Paul "taking on" Dr. Fauci almost perfectly
characterizes the anti-intellectual, anti-reason, anti-fact, and frankly degenerate state of
the Republican Party.
Warren County, Kentucky – where Rand Paul lives – has more COVID-19 cases per
capita than 51 of the 67 counties in New England states.Senator Paul is wrong and the
ignorant message he is peddling is dangerous. There is no special immunity to this virus
based on where you live. https://t.co/l9u5RBYR2J
Rand Paul absolutely destroys Dr. Fraudci. "I don't think you're the end all. I don't
think you're the one person who gets to make the decision." pic.twitter.com/nvljuGAy5u
Federal 'social distancing' guidelines were lifted at the end of April, but hotspots like
New York and California have extended their economic shutdowns as lesser-hit states have begun
to relax restrictions.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
"... X22 Report Fauci's Connections To Wuhan Ready To Be Exposed - Episode 2171c ..."
"... I don't remember Fauci ever apologizing his remarks concerning - you don't need to worry, you don't need masks - masks are bad, the virus can't be spread easily, his models predicting millions would die in the US. ..."
"The history of this when we look back will be wrong prediction after wrong prediction after wrong prediction... As much as I
respect you, Dr. Fauci, I don't think you're the end all, I don't think you're the one person that gets to make a decision,"
said Paul - who added that we need to "observe with an open eye what happened in Sweden, where the kids kept going to school."
"The mortality per capita in Sweden is actually less than France, less than Italy, less than Spain, less than Belgium,
less than the Netherlands, about the same as Switzerland. But basically I don't think there's anybody arguing that what
happened in Sweden is an unacceptable result. I think people are intrigued by it, and we should be."
"I don't think any of us are certain when we do all these modelings - there have been more people wrong with modeling
than right. We're opening up a lot of economies around the US, and I hope that people who are predicting doom and gloom
and saying 'oh, we can't do this, there's going to be a surge' - will admit when there isn't a surge."
Watch:
Sen. Rand Paul:
"The history of this when we look back will be wrong prediction after wrong prediction after wrong prediction... As much as I
respect you, Dr. Fauci, I don't think you're the end all, I don't think you're the one person that gets to make a decision."
pic.twitter.com/SP9T638y2B
Fauci responded, (25 seconds in below), saying "Sen. Paul, I have never made myself out to be the end-all & only voice of this.
I'm a scientist, a physician, and a public health official."
He then offered a 'but, the children!' argument - latching onto Paul's comment that we don't know everything
about the virus, and that "we really better be very careful, particularly when it comes to children."
"Because the more and more we learn - we're seeing things about what this virus can do that we didn't see from the studies in
China. Or in Europe. For example, right now children presenting with COVID-19 who actually have a very strange inflammatory symdrome,
very similar to Kawasaki syndrome. I think we better be careful that we are not cavalier in thinking that children are not immune
to the deleterious effects.
"I never made myself to be out the end all.
I’m a scientist, a physician, and a public health official.
I give advice according to the best scientific evidence. "
I have not promoted the
#FireFauci movement.
I've defended him.
But now...
Fauci responded to a factual-based inquiry by @RandPaul w/an egregious
allusion to some mystery Kawasaki-like disease & tripled-down on his aversion to a 2020-21 school session.
Why isn't anyone asking directly about the 'gain of function' studies that NIH was doing on the US prior to outsourcing the
experiments to Wuhan and illegally funding it via the NIH....why is there a need to lockdown 300m people for a relative small
number of deaths which in turn are focused on the elderly with prior illnesses...what is the relationship betwe3n the CDC and
the European CDC... does the European CDC pay European hospitals for every diagnosis and every ventilator use.... its all BS...hopefully
people are beginning to smell a rat and through these bums out....
Al Agent, 3 minutes ago
True. Fauci wasn't elected to make policy; in fact, he wasn't elected at all! He was employed to advise on what happens under
different scenarios. Trump's economic advisors weren't elected to make policy; in fact, they weren't elected at all! They are
employed to advise on what happens under different scenarios.
Congress and The President decide on policy. They were elected to do that.
Templar X, 16 minutes ago
There will never be a vaccine for COVID-19 which is safe, effective, and worthwhile.
The fastest a vaccine has ever been developed in the past was four years after the first appearance of a new infectious disease.
Four years from now people will either have herd immunity or they will be dead.
Within a year or two, the COVID-19 virus will likely mutate itself to death, or it will weaken and become no worse than a regular
flu virus.
COVID-19 is, apparently, less harmful to people under 65 years of age and those with no underlying health conditions, which,
of course, is also true of the common flu.
theWHTMANN, 32 minutes ago
How come no one asks Fauci straight to his face regarding all the deaths that will happen because of the lockdown (missed surgeries,
suicide, famine, et al.). What is this con man's response? He doesn't care? What if non-COVID deaths because of the lockdown are
3x or 4x the COVID deaths? What then? Does anyone ask this fool Fauci whether he will take responsibility for anything?
mrpc, 30 minutes ago
Like Fauci says himself, in the interview, he gives advice. He doesn't make the decisions.
sun tzu, 34 minutes ago (Edited)
Where's the carnage in Georgia, Florida, Texas, and South Carolina from reopening? I see no massive surge in the hospitals
or deaths. The only carnage I see is in the nursing homes in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts all states run by Democrats
PerilouseTimes, 8 minutes ago
I made an appointment for a procedure this week and had to go in for covid pretesting today. It was my second test in three
months. I worked with and personally interacted with, people that tested positive for covid in mid March. I was unusually sick
in January and have talked to many others that was strange sick in January as well. After speaking with the health professionals
and the people I know in and around this, I am convinced that this is all a load of ****. I had covid in Jan, and so did many
of the others I worked with. The nurse I just talked to said to me that her and her family along with many people that she is
testing was convinced that they had it between Dec. and Feb. I'm in GA and it is long past time to get this show on the road.
Those experiments were going on in the United States until 2014. They were Dr. Anthony Fauci's projects. President Obama
ordered that to stop because they had a lot of lab escape problems in 2014 from three different labs
Instead of stopping as he was ordered, Fauci moved those operations to the Wuhan lab in China and continued to do those
experiments right up until the time that the coronavirus [pandemic occurred]. In fact, [infectious disease expert] Ian Lipkin
was doing those experiments over there when [COVID-19] exploded. And I'll tell you exactly what happened because it's very
suspicious."
---ZerooreZ---, 56 minutes ago
I am genuinely impressed with the American spirit, that everything covid related has happened at double the speed in the USA
compared to the UK - you were the last to get this thing and seem to be the first to open back up (well done!). I guess because
you guys have lived with guns your whole lives, you are braver than the average UK citizen who literally have been the most obedient
and most scared bunch I have experienced. People literally throw themselves off the pavements into the road to avoid someone walking
the other way, they would rather be
I don't remember Fauci ever apologizing his remarks concerning - you don't need to worry, you don't need masks - masks are
bad, the virus can't be spread easily, his models predicting millions would die in the US.
Newsweek reveals that as recently as last year, the US funded scientists at the Wuhan
Institute of Virology in 'gain of function' research on bat coronaviruses.
The source of that funding? The National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease,
headed by.....(drumroll please)....Dr Anthony Fauci, lead medical expert for America's Covid-19
task force.
President Donald Trump's legal counsel, Rudy Giuliani, in a recent chat on "The Cats
Roundtable" on New York AM 970 radio, suggested a good U.S. attorney general move about
now would be to investigate key members of the past Barack Obama administration on the
Wuhan, China, laboratory, to see what they knew and when they knew it.
And then he mentioned Dr. Anthony Fauci specifically.
And then he accused the prior Team Obama of sending $3.7 million to the lab in 2014
-- at a time when that same Team Obama had banned the funding of any lab that was
involved in virus experimentation.
And then he named Fauci as the guy who gave the money to the Wuhan Institute of
Virology.
Ouch. Politically speaking, the perception of one of this administration's loudest
voices on the coronavirus front -- the one calling for shutdowns and shut-ins and
contact tracing-slash-government-tracking of American citizens -- well, it doesn't look
good to have him tied financially to Wuhan.
Giuliani, as RedState noted, said this:
"Back in 2014, the Obama administration prohibited the U.S. from giving money to
any laboratory, including in the U.S., that was fooling around with these viruses.
Prohibited. Despite that, Dr. Fauci gave $3.7 million to the Wuhan laboratory.
And then even after the State Department issued reports about how unsafe that
laboratory was, and how suspicious they were in the way they were developing a virus
that could be transmitted to humans, we never pulled that money."
Giuliani said if he were attorney general, he'd open an investigation.
It's a common refrain: We have bubble-wrapped the world . Americans in particular are
obsessed with "safety." The simplest way to get any law passed in America, be it a zoning law
or a sweeping reform of the intelligence community, is to invoke a simple sentence: "A kid
might get hurt."
Almost no one is opposed to reasonable efforts at making the world a safer place. But the
operating word here is "reasonable." Banning lawn darts ,
for example, rather than just telling people that they can be dangerous when used by
unsupervised children, is a perfect example of a craving for safety gone too far.
Beyond the realm of legislation, this has begun to infect our very culture. Think of things
like
"trigger warnings" and "safe
spaces." These are part of broader cultural trends in search of a kind of "emotional
safety" – a purported right to never be disturbed or offended by anything. This is by no
means confined to the sphere of academia, but is also in our popular culture, both in "
extremely
online " and more mainstream variants.
Why are Americans so obsessed with safety? What is the endgame of those who would bubble
wrap the world, both physically and emotionally? Perhaps most importantly, what can we do to
turn back the tide and reclaim our culture of self-reliance , mental toughness , and giving one
another the benefit of the doubt so that we don't "bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for
absolute security," as President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about
?
Coddling and Splintering: The Transformation of the American Mind
There is an interesting phenomenon involved in coddling: Australian psychologist Nick Haskam
first coined the term "concept creep." Basically, this means that terms are often elastic and
expand past the point of meaning. Take, for example, the concept of "trauma." This used to have a very
limited meaning. However, "trauma" quickly became expanded to mean even slight physical or
emotional harm or discomfort. Thus the increasing belief among the far left that words can be
"violence" – not "violent," mind you, but actual, literal violence.
In the other direction, the
definition of "hero" has been expanded to mean just about anything. Every teacher,
firefighter and police officer is now considered a "hero." This isn't to downplay or minimize
the importance of these roles in our society. It's simply to point out that "hero" just doesn't
mean what it used to 100 or even 30 years ago.
Once this expansion of a term occurs, there is never any kind of retraction. Trauma now
means just about anything, and violence will soon be expanded to include lawful, peaceful
speech that one disapproves of. Once this happens, there will be no going back. In the words of
Sam Harris :
"We (as a society) have to be committed to defending free speech however impolitic, or
unpopular, or even wrong because defending that is the only barrier to violence. That's
because the only way we can influence one another short of physical violence is through
speech, through communicating ideas. The moment you say certain ideas can't be communicated
you create a circumstance where people have no alternative but to go hands on you."
It is extremely dangerous to begin labelling everything as violence for reasons of free
speech, but perhaps even more dangerous is the notion that when anything is violence, nothing
is violence. Redefining words as "violence" means that we have little recourse for when actual
violence occurs.
The Coddling of the American Mind notes some other concepts that are important as we speak
of America's obsession with "safety" above all else. First, that coddling combined with
splintering means that people's political views are much more like fanatical religious views
than anything. They don't see themselves as having to debate ideas or seek common ground.
Rather, the opposing side and its proponents are seen as "dangerous" and must be discredited at
all costs. It is worth noting that this is much more common among the left than the right or
the center, which has now become more the place where "live and let live" types congregate.
The problem with this goes beyond simply being irritated by irrational people barking at you
or at someone else: There is an entire generation of people who are seriously lacking in
critical thinking
skills . They think that labelling people and name-calling are excuses for a reasoned
argument. In the words of Voltaire, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you
commit atrocities."
These problems are hardly confined to political radicalism or academia. Indeed, the
corporate sector is no stranger to this kind of safety obsession. There is the phenomenon of
"woke capital," where the corporations find the latest celebrity cause-du-jour and use it as a
marketing strategy.
There is currently an extreme risk aversion in management science. Companies will now do
basically anything to avoid "a kid getting hurt" or someone's delicate sensibilities being
offended.
Education from kindergarten up to the universities is increasingly about teaching doctrines
and ideology, rather than critical thinking and problem solving skills. All of this is a
dangerous admixture that combines the full weight of the academic, cultural and business elites
in this country. And its consequences are far reaching.
Trigger Warnings and Safe
Spaces
For those unaware, a "trigger warning" is a person's advisory that disturbing content is
going to be posted. However, in an example of concept creep, the meaning of "disturbing" has
become expanded to mean, well, just about anything that might offend a leftist. It is also
sometimes known as a "content warning," "TW" or "CW."
A similar concept is that of a "safe space." What used to be a term used for a place where
people in actual danger of physical harm could express themselves, a "safe space" now means a
place where there is no room for disagreement or questions because language is literally
violence.
This might all sound very silly and we definitely agree that it is. However, it is quickly
becoming de rigeur not just in academia, which is increasingly functioning as a bizarre
combination of a daycare center for 21 year olds and an indoctrination program, but also in the
corporate world and in the media.
It's not surprising that such foolishness has reached our corporate elites, because so many
figures within that world come from the Ivy League. Harvard Law, for example, was the center of
a controversy where
they were urged not to teach rape law or even use the word "violate" (which makes it pretty
hard to talk about violations of the law). A Harvard professor argued that greater anxiety
among students to discuss complicated and nuanced séxual assault cases was impeding the
ability of professors to adequately teach their students. This in turn would lead to poorly
prepared attorneys for rape victims in the future.
Beyond a simple discussion in the academic sphere, there are student groups on campus who
urge students not to attend or participate in class discussions focused on séxual
violence. The same student groups advocate for warning students in advance so they can skip out
on class and even to exclude "triggering" material from tests. Once again, the real victims
here are the victims of séxual assault whose attorneys will be ill-prepared to advise
them, to say nothing of the cumulative effect on the prosecutorial environment.
Another key term to understand here is "microaggressions" which means just about
anything. Offensive statements under this umbrella include things like "I don't see race,"
"America is the land of opportunity" and "I believe the most qualified person should get the
job."
To readers of Generation X or older, this all might sound like a resurgence of political
correctness and, indeed, to some extent it is. However, there is something different about the
current anti-speech craze sweeping not just campuses, but also boardrooms: Political
correctness was, at least in theory, about the elimination of so-called "hate speech" (for
example, using "mentally disabled" instead of "retarded" or "little person" instead of
"midget") and also about broadening the canon of literature to include more women and
minorities.
One doesn't need to agree with either objective or be as generous as we are to see that the
West has entered a new, accelerated and intensified version of the old political correctness
that is qualitatively more dangerous. The "safe spaces" phase of this is about eliminating
anything and everything that might be emotionally troubling to students on campus.
This assumes a high degree of fragility among American college students. But perhaps this
assumption isn't totally off base.
The Road to Safety Obsession
If you were born before 1985 or so, your childhood was vastly different than of those born
after you. As a child, you probably came and went as you pleased, letting your parents know
where you were going, who you would be with and when you might be home. You rode your bike
without a helmet and if you were bullied at school there's a good chance that you view this as
a character-building experience, not one of deep emotional trauma.
So what happened?
A few things. First, in 1984, the "missing child" milk carton
was introduced. America became obsessed with child abduction in response to several
high-profile child kidnappings over the period of a few years. Etan Platz , Adam Walsh and Johnny Gosch are just three of the names
known to Americans during this time period. In September 1984, the Des Moines, Iowa-based
Anderson Erickson Dairy began printing the pictures of Johnny Gosch and Eugene Martin on milk
cartons. Chicago followed suit, then the entire state of California. In December 1984, a
nationwide program was launched to keep the faces of abducted children front and center in the
American mind.
Some of the protocols established out of this were useful, such as AMBER Alerts and Code Adam .
Awareness of child abduction in general was raised and as a result there's significantly fewer
child abductions today than there were in 1980. Indeed,
stranger abduction is incredibly rare in the United States . But this has come with a dark
side.
You might be familiar with the myriad of cases in suburban America where children playing
alone are
arrested by the police because they don't have adult supervision. The parents are then
questioned by the police or, in some cases, the state's Child
Protective Services .
And so the result is that there are at least two generations of American children raised in
a protective net so tight that they not only have trouble expressing themselves, but also
being
exposed to failure and discomfort . What began as a good-faith effort to prevent child
abduction and increase overall child welfare has ended up, as a side effect, creating a world
where children were raised in such safety that they can't even handle being upset.
This has not only insulated children from the consequences of their own actions and the
normal pains of growing up, but also gives the impression that no matter what their problems,
"adults" are ready to step in and save the day at any moment.
There are two other cultural phenomena worth exploring: The television series Cops and the
24-hour cable news cycle. As of April 2020, Cops is still on the air, having moved from Fox to
Spike TV in 2013.
Cops was more than just a TV series, it was a cultural phenomenon that changed television.
The cinéma
vérité style used by the show was to be copied in the 90s by virtually every
reality show you can name. Curiously, it came out around the same time that crime rates had
plummeted comparatively to the 70s and 80s. And just at that time, people started having the
worst in human behavior beamed into their homes for entertainment every Saturday night.
At the same time, CNN was bringing news into your home 24 hours a day without end. This
meant they had to fill programming around the clock – and most news is bad news. So in
addition to a hugely popular program centered around chasing criminals in the act, Americans
also had a constant stream of bad news and dangerous events pumped into their homes. The result
was the end of the "free range child," the kind who learned through play and discovered risk
management through trial and error. This was replaced with children whose entire existence was
micromanaged by adults, with little to no unsupervised play time.
The ability to learn through failure is a well-established principle going back to the
Greeks, who called it pathemata mathemata ("guide your learning through pain"). The knowledge
and wisdom gained through failure and pain are arguably more lasting and valuable than those
learned in school.
The Generation Gap: Millennials and Gen Z
Older generations (Generation X and Baby Boomers) have a tendency to conflate Millennials
and Gen Z (also known as "Zoomers"). However, there are two key differences, one cultural and
one clinical: First, Zoomers are much more digital natives than their Millennial counterparts.
They didn't get constant internet access or mobile access at college. They've had it since they
were in middle school in many cases.
While this is bound to create secondary cultural differences, we know of one clinical
difference between Millennials and Zoomers: Zoomers are much more prone to mental illness ,
specifically depression, anxiety, alcoholism and self-harm.
The Baby Boomers and Gen Xers created an environment where it is safer than ever to be a child ,
but at what cost? There has been widespread and verifiable psychological damage done to the
younger generation, which is likely being compounded by the coddling taking place in our
nation's universities.
Screen Time and Social Media
"Screen time" is the new obsession for parents, especially among, ironically, those who work
in high-tech Silicon Valley jobs such as Steve
Jobs, father of the iPhone . But there seems to be an emerging consensus among those who
have actually studied the topic that the problem isn't "screen time" per se, but rather the
more specific use of it in the form of social media . This has
been identified as the cause of depression and anxiety, particularly among girls.
Why is social media usage particularly impactful among girls? Dr. Haidt and others postulate
that it's because they are more sensitive to the "perfect" lives being lived by beautiful social
media influencers – at least the lives that they lead online. What's more, there is a
lot of exclusion and bullying taking place on social media. In days past, you only heard about
the party you didn't get invited to, but now you get to watch it unfold in real time on
Snapchat or other platforms. And cyberbullying
is much harder to track and police than its real world equivalent.
There's a related bubble wrapping going on with regard to a different sort of screen time:
Kids today are often forbidden from playing with plastic guns or even finger guns. There is the
notorious case of the 7-year-old child who was
suspended for biting a Pop Tart toaster pastry into the shape of a gun . But millions of
children come home (from the same schools where finger guns can warrant a suspension) to play
Grand Theft Auto for hours on end.
Indeed, there is some evidence that suggests that
violent movies and video games can trigger violent thoughts in some, but not all, people
who view them. The National Institute of Mental Health has done an extensive study detailing the
impact that violent media has on those who view it.
A Nation Divided
There's not much hyperbole in saying that America is barely a single nation anymore. We talk
about "red states" and "blue states," but the divide is much deeper than that. Even the coastal
states largely have an urban college-educated Democratic population and a rural
non-college-educated Republican population.
While some animosity between different areas of the political spectrum, or even resentment
of cities by the countryside and vice versa, is
nothing new , the rancor took off sharply in the early 2000s following the controversial
election of George W. Bush and his expanded imperial presidency after
9/11 .
Social media
makes it easier for extremes to amplify their anger. What's more, it's much easier for
people to become part of an online crusade – or witch hunt – than it is for them to
do so without it.
This is a big part of what is behind the string of disinvitations and protests on American
college campuses. No one, especially young people (where "young" means "under 30"), can bear to
listen to the opinions of someone they don't agree with. Disinvitations aren't limited to
highly controversial figures like MILO and Richard Spencer, or even the decidedly much more
vanilla Ann Coulter. Condoleeza Rice , the first black
female Secretary of State, was disinvited in 2014, as was the first female head of the IMF and
the first female finance minister of a G8 nation, Christine
Lagarde .
Because Americans increasingly refuse even to listen to arguments from the other side,
inserting instead a strawman in favor of reasoned debate , there is no reason
to believe that the American political and ideological divide will not increase.
The
Evolution of Victimhood Culture
America and the West have largely adopted a victimhood culture. It is worth taking a minute
to trace this radical transformation of values in the West from its origins.
The earliest societies in the West were honor cultures. While it sounds like a no-brainer
that we should return to an honor culture, we should unpack precisely what this means. An honor
culture usually means a lot of interpersonal violence. Small slights must be dealt with through
dead violence – because a gentleman cannot take any kind of stain on his honor. Dueling
and blood feuds are common in these kinds of cultures.
This is superseded by dignity culture. Dignity culture is different, because people are
presumed to have dignity regardless of what others think of them. In a dignity culture, people
are admired because they have a "thick skin" and are able to brush off slights even if they are
seriously insulting. While we might find ourselves offended, even rightfully so, it is
considered important to rise above the offense and conduct ourselves with dignity. Everyone
heard some variant of "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me"
growing up as a child. This is perhaps the key phrase of a dignity culture.
Victimhood culture is concerned with status in a similar manner to honor culture. Indeed,
people become incredibly intolerant of any kind of perceived slight, much in the manner of an
honor culture. However, in a victimhood culture, it is being offended, taking offense, and
being a victim that provides one with status.
Victimhood culture means that people are divided into classes, where victims are good and
oppressors are bad. There is an eternal conflict with eternal grievances that can never fully
be corrected or atoned for. People feel the need to constantly walk on eggshells and censor
themselves. This leads to an overall emphasis on safety, as even words become "violence"
– we need trigger warnings and safe spaces to protect us.
Victimhood culture is closely associated with safety culture. Safety culture is, above all
else, debilitating . Those who choose a marginalized identity – and in the contemporary
West, a marginalized identity is almost always a choice – become more fragile and more
dependent on the broader society. At the same time, the powerful elements in society gain a
stake in reinforcing this marginalized identity.
The Great Society provides a case study in this dynamic.
Those who do not receive the so-called "benefits" of safety culture are frequently more
prepared for the real world. Who would you rather hire? Someone who studied hard in a rigorous
discipline for four years or someone who spent four years being coddled in what is basically a
day care center for twentysomethings? With this in mind, it's not too big of a leap to see that
straight white men might actually have become "privileged" through the process of not having
access to the collective hugbox in higher education.
The Role of Lawyers and
Litigation
There is a relationship with the litigious society in which we live with warning labels
everywhere, often for hazards that would seem incredibly obvious to most observant people. In
previous generations, even power tools didn't come with warnings to roll your sleeves up or
take off your watch. This information was either common sense or passed along in high school
shop classes or on the job.
However, the American legal system has no penalty for frivolous lawsuits, which has led to
an explosion in the number of lawsuits. There is a massive army of lawyers in the United States
(which has a surplus
of some 40 percent ) whose profession revolves around finding aggrieved parties who weren't
properly "warned" – or indeed to be able to help write the warning labels themselves.
These labels do not even exist for actual safety. The same type of person who is going to do
the thing being warned against is likely the same type of person who doesn't read warnings. The
labels are simply there as a form of "CYA" for the firms who make them.
That said, to a certain degree, the "litigious society" is a myth. The oft-cited McDonald's
coffee burn is actually more
reasonable than people are aware : The elderly woman in question who was burned simply
wanted McDonald's – who kept their coffee extra hot to prevent people from taking part of
their "free refills" policy – to pay for her skin graft resulting from the burn. When
McDonald's refused to settle this out of court and the case went to trial, they were rewarded
for their efforts at stonewalling with punitive damages.
So the main example of frivolous lawsuits is a big strawman. But to be clear –
frivolous
lawsuits are real . One great example of an actually frivolous lawsuit was the man who sued
his dry cleaner for $67 million because they delivered his pants to the wrong person .
There was no actual damage here and it's difficult to express just how ridiculous the dollar
figure claimed was. This case was thrown out of court, as most of these types of cases are.
Still, litigants pursue them either to get media attention or to harass the defendant or both,
a phenomenon known as "lawfare." And these cases clog up genuine claims in the courts.
Civil trials are long and drawn-out things. And with 40 million of them in the United States every
year and over a million lawyers ,
it's unsurprising that the system has become clogged with lawsuits, many of which are either
totally frivolous (remember – there's no penalty for filing a frivolous lawsuit in
America) or just the type of thing that should be either settled or handled through binding
arbitration.
While the litigious society exists in parallel to the "safe spaces" of college campuses, it
is worth noting because it is part of the larger bubble wrapping of the American landscape. The
same kids who were raised with helicopter parents and a general sense that they had a "right"
to never be offended were likewise raised in an environment where people could be sued for
anything or, at the very least, this was the public perception. It is just another factor of
risk aversion in American life.
There are other consequences of having too many lawyers around and having them congregate
within our political class: Words are chosen to obfuscate and laws proliferate, as legislation
becomes a sort of "jobs program" for lawyers. The more laws we have, the less free we
are and the less social trust we have. As laws, regulations, and agencies take
the place of civil society , the state grows at the expense of everything else and the less
trust we have in our society.
Overreacting to the Wuhan Coronavirus
In 2020, the Wuhan Coronavirus
broke out of China and spread all around the world. The world had not seen a deadly, contagious
virus with such scope since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 to 1920 . At
first, the response was denial and apathy. However, this quickly gave way to what could be
considered a massive overreaction: Shutting everything down.
There was a certain logic to this: If people gathering together were what was spreading the
virus, then simply keep people apart until the whole thing blows over. However, this is also
potentially a huge overreaction. It is a medical solution in the
driver's seat without any nod to the economic, social or military consequences that flow
from it. Even if one agrees that medical solutions are to be the primary driver, it does not
follow that they are the only driver.
Because of the lopsided and often hysterical reaction, many of the proposed solutions don't
even make sense: For example, telling everyone they can go to the supermarket while prohibiting
them from going to small offices, or shutting down the border
between the United States and Canada – two countries with highly infected populations
and a sprawling border that is largely unpatrolled.
A brief disclaimer: None of us are epidemiologists or virologists. And we defer to their
superior knowledge on this subject.
However, during the Spanish flu pandemic, life did not shut down quite so completely as it
has during the Coronavirus pandemic. The methods used during the Spanish flu were isolation of
the sick, mask wearing in public, and cancellation of large events. In places where these were
practiced rigorously, there was a significant decline in the number of infections and death.
St. Louis in particular is known as an exemplar of what to do during an easily
transmissible epidemic.
"The economy" has been cited as a reason the total shutdown of life during the Coronavirus
pandemic was a poor idea. This might sound frivolous, but the mass unemployment not only leads
to destitution for those when the economy is so paralyzed that there are no other jobs
forthcoming. It also leads to a spike in
the suicide rate . There is a certain calculus that must be done – how much
unemployment is worth how much death from Wuhan Coronavirus?
The reaction to this virus is noteworthy, because it is the first major pandemic of this
new, insulated and coddled age. Rather than reasonable measures to mitigate death, the choice
made was to do anything and everything possible to prevent death entirely. Not only might this
be an unwise decision, it might be a fool's errand: The virus seems to be much
more contagious than was previously thought, as well as much less lethal .
More than one reasonable person has asked what would happen if we all just went about our
lives making reasonable precautions, such as hand washing, mask wearing, social distancing, and
the cancellation of large events like sports and concerts. This is effectively what Sweden has done
and it appears to work, especially when contrasted with
their neighbors in Finland who have done basically the same as America. How much sense does
it make to have the entire community converge upon its grocery stores while not allowing anyone
to go into an office, ever? Compare this with what has passed for reasonable reaction: Closing
down every school, every dine-in restaurant, and the government dictating which businesses are
essential and which aren't.
A big motivator of this is a compulsion to not lose a single life to the Wuhan Coronavirus,
which is a totally unreasonable goal. People are going to die. The question isn't "how tightly
do we have to lock the country down to ensure no one dies," but rather "what are reasonable
measures we can take to balance public safety against personal choice and social cohesion?"
The splintering and division of America in practice has meant that the
establishment conservative media was largely in denial over the virus for weeks . It is not
a liberal smear to say that the amount of denialism from establishment conservative media,
pundits, think tanks, bureaucrats and elected officials has in practice meant that America
responded much more slowly and conservatively than it might have with a more unified America
body politic.
At the beginning of spring 2020, the virus seemed poised to
devastate the American South , which largely stuck with the early conservative media
denialism, eschewing social distancing, shuttering of certain public places and mask wearing.
Again, a more united body politic and the media and trust in the media that goes along with
that might have prevented a lot of illness and death.
Imagine the impact of Walter Cronkite or Edward Murrow going on television and telling the
American public to mask up and maintain distance versus the impact of Rachel Maddow and Tucker
Carlson doing it.
What Is Vindictive Protectiveness?
"Vindictive protectiveness" was a term coined by Haidt and Lukianoff to describe the
environment on America's college campuses with regard to speech codes and similar. However, it
can refer more broadly to the cultural atmosphere in the United States and the West today. From
the college campus to the corporate boardroom to the office, Americans have to watch what they
say and maybe even what they think lest they fall afoul of extra-legal speech and thought
codes.
Perhaps worst of all, an entire generation is being raised to see this not only as normal,
but as beneficial . This means that as this generation comes of age and grows into leadership
positions, that there is a significant chance that these codes will be enforced more
rigorously, not less. And while there may be ebbs and flows (political correctness went into
hibernation for pretty much the entire administration of George W. Bush – though to be
fair, there was an imperfect replacement in the form of post-9/11 jingoism), the current
outrage factory is much more concerning than the one that sort of just hung around in the
background in the 1990s.
Put plainly: the next wave will be worse. We may not have Maoist-style Red Guards in America quite yet,
but we're not far off and the emphasis should be on "yet."
"... "Our outcomes are similar to the state of Pennsylvania, where the median age of death from COVID-19 is 84 years old. ..."
"... "COVID-19 is a disease that ravages those with preexisting conditions – whether it be immunosenescence of aging or the social determinants of health. We can manage society in the presence of this pathogen if we focus on these preexisting conditions. ..."
i wonder if the average age of our government was say 30, do you think they would have
chosen to lock down the country? No.. Its because the average age of our government is more
like 68.. We are sacrificing ourselves to protect the old, the least productive part of our
society.
Im 33, i have had the virus, it was mild.i have had worse colds. Im running out of money!
unlike pensioners who get there cash regardless i need to earn it. Furthermore the pension
these people currently draw i will never see, we realise now that pensions as they were
cannot be sustained, but yet they still have them. If they are like my grandparents they
retired over 20 years ago.. 2/3 of my life, and have drawn private/public pensions since,
they consume the vast majority of the NHS resources so they can stay alive another day and
continue drawing pensions. The old people of my country also own the majority of the
property, i rent my house of a couple in there 70s, i pay them over £1000 per month to
live here. i cannot afford to buy.
When i do get a little bit of work at the moment i head out to find the roads and shops
populated with fucking pensioners, all driving around in there stupid tall and narrow cars
doing 40mph in a 60 oblivious to the world and economy that is around them paying them their
pensions and protect them.
my attitude is simple.. if you dont want to catch it, dont go out.. no need to lockdown
everybody, just the ones who fear this.. like you B. Its my right to live or die as i chose,
not under the kosh of the fucking gray mafia.
ive already given up following the 'rules' fuck em all.
"Our outcomes are similar to the state of Pennsylvania, where the median age of death
from COVID-19 is 84 years old. The few younger patients who died all had significant
preexisting conditions. Very few children were infected and none died. Minorities in our
communities fared equally as well as others, but we know that this is not the case
nationally. In sum, this is a disease of the elderly, sick and poor. ...
"COVID-19 is a disease that ravages those with preexisting conditions – whether
it be immunosenescence of aging or the social determinants of health. We can manage society
in the presence of this pathogen if we focus on these preexisting conditions.
"What we cannot do, is extended social isolation. Humans are social beings, and we are
already seeing the adverse mental health consequences of loneliness, and that is before the
much greater effects of economic devastation take hold on the human condition."
- Dr. Steven Shapiro, University of Pennsylvania Medical Center chief medical and
scientific officer
Pretty easy to spot the tattoo-sleeved, cranial-pierced, hipster baristas with no productive
skills in here as they are manically demanding that everyone else go to work. After
all, they cannot go back to slinging idiot-proof pre-measured lattes until real working
people are out and about, so they shriek for everyone else to go back to normal.
But isn't the current situation just a huge basket of opportunities for real bold
entrepreneurs? If one is some hero type like the guy above who has "given up following the
'rules'" , then the marketplaces are theirs for the taking, what with all of the
competition shut down. If one wants the capitalists' economy to be "re-opened" , then
they need to be like the fabled entrepreneurs that worked for their wealth and take the
initiative oneself instead of demanding that others do it for them.
Or are the whiners demanding that the economy be "re-opened" really just kids
wishing their parents would go back to work because that is who actually pays the rent on
their hipster apartments?
Something these individuals will have to confront is that things are never "going back
to normal" . A new normal is being born, and it ain't very normal.
Something strange here: virions do not travel as single units. They travel "en mass" within
water droplets. They also prevent spread of aerosol from sick people. So the professor is barking
on a wrong tree.
Moreover single virion is so small that it will be affected by Brownian movement which make it impossible
for it to travel in a given direction at all -- it will he chaotic movement. So this physics
professor looks like very weak in physics
Interview with Professor Denis Rancourt
by Kim Petersen / May 8th, 2020
A health professional told me back in March that face
masks were ineffective but that respirators (the N95) were. Because of the source, I thought
there must be validity to this. However, it seemed counterintuitive. I reasoned that there
would be differentials between using any type of mask versus no mask because no mask usage
would allow aerosols to penetrate unabated, whereas a mask should capture much of the aerosol
and reduce risk of spread to others and presumably should also function to mitigate breathing
in viral-laden droplets. Because of the greater density of respirator material, the
prophylactic would be reasoned to be greater.
However, what I had not considered was how extremely small the virion was in relation to
the porosity of the material in the masks and respirators. I also had not looked at the
scientific literature on the subject until now.
Denis Rancourt, an eminent physics professor , former
anarchist, and author, examined the scientific evidence for using face masks and respirators
as preventative of contracting respiratory influenza-like disease, or respiratory illnesses
believed to be transmitted by minuscule droplets.
What I have noticed is that Rancourt is wedded to the evidence, and he is unafraid to make
known his conclusion even though it goes against the mainstream consensus. His article, "
Masks Don't Work: A review of science relevant to COVID-19 social policy ," is Rancourt
at his iconoclastic finest. He concludes,
No RCT [randomized control trial] study with verified outcome shows a benefit for HCW
[health care workers] or community members in households to wearing a mask or respirator.
There is no such study. There are no exceptions.
The virions are super tiny, tinier than the pores in the respirators. Rancourt writes,
if anything gets through (and it always does, irrespective of the mask), then you are
going to be infected. Masks cannot possibly work. It is not surprising, therefore, that no
bias-free study has ever found a benefit from wearing a mask or respirator in this
application.
Rancourt's article is fascinating and anyone curious abut the efficacy of masks should
read it.
*****
Kim Petersen : Recently, American vice-president Mike Pence was criticized for walking
around the Mayo clinic accompanied by mask-wearing staff although he did not wear a mask. He
excused his refusal to don a mask based on the frequent testing he undergoes, so presumably
he would not be a danger to others. Given what the science reveals on mask wearing, how do
you view the reaction to Pence's refusal to wear a mask?
Denis Rancourt : In my article "
Masks Don't Work: A review of science relevant to COVID-19 social policy ", I show that
there have been many randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and meta-analyses of RCTs, which
were designed to detect any benefit from wearing a mask, in terms of reducing the risk of
being infected by a viral respiratory disease.
In the many studies, in which the known bias of self-reporting is eliminated by using
laboratory-confirmed infection detection, no statistically meaningful advantage is ever
found, in either health-care or community settings, with either surgical masks or N95
respirators. No study, and there have been many, has been able to establish any advantage of
wearing a mask or respirator, with viral respiratory diseases.
This means that, even in controlled professional health-care settings, any benefit is too
small to be detected by science, and that other factors must be overwhelmingly more
important.
Regarding all viral respiratory diseases -- which are both known to be transmitted by
small aerosol particles (i.e., "droplets" of less than a few microns in diameter) and known
to be highly infectious in terms of the so-called minimum-infective-dose (i.e., the number of
virions that will likely be sufficient to cause illness or detectable infection) -- in plain
language, this means "masks don't work". (A "virion" is a single virus unit, the RNA and its
shell.)
Therefore, any societal debate about the virtue or responsibility of wearing a mask to
reduce the risk of infection, whether it involves Pence or anyone else, is occurring in a
science vacuum. It is a political and psychological debate, not one that is
science-based.
Likewise, no unbiased RCT has ever shown any advantage for a confirmed-infected person to
be less likely to transmit a viral-respiratory-disease infection to susceptible (i.e., not
immune) persons if the infected person wears a mask.
Studies that show that cough and sneeze droplets are physically intercepted by masks are
irrelevant in this regard, because they do not represent the reality of actual person to
person transmission, nor do they measure actual transmission.
In my article, which has been read more than 70 K times on Research Gate, I also review
what is known about the physics and biology of transmission of this class of diseases. I
argue that, on this basis, one should not expect masks to work. Likewise, if masks cannot
stop inward transmission (into the lung), then, by the same physics, they cannot stop outward
transmission.
However, it is important to distinguish a RCT that evaluates risk of actual
person-to-person transmission of confirmed infection, as one class of study, and the
necessarily simplistic arguments based on hypothetical scenarios using physics and biology.
And the "masks intercept droplets" studies are useless in the relevant context. Masks
intended to stop a surgeon's spit from impacting an incision area are a completely different
question.
Coming back to Pence, a face mask is a powerful psychological symbol of submission (to
both the invisible disease and any State policy directives), such that it is understandable
that many political leaders would not want to wear masks in front of media cameras.
KP : You write that there has been no randomized controlled trial that shows a benefit for
anyone (doctors, nurses, regular folks, et al.) wearing a mask or respirator. The reason
proffered is because the mask/respirator material is too porous for virion particles. The N95
respirator blocks at least 95 percent of very small (0.3 μm) test particles, but the
virion particles (from 0.06 μm to 0.14 μm) (See Na Zhu et al., " A Novel Coronavirus from Patients
with Pneumonia in China ," 20 February 2020, NEJM, 382:727-733.) can pass through.
I am trying to visualize this on a larger scale. If I kick a soccer ball at a chain-link
fence, all soccer balls will be blocked. But if I throw a handful of sand at the chain-link
fence, almost all grains of sand will pass through. Is this an apt analogy for the mask and
the virion?
DR : The many RCTs show no statistically valid benefit from wearing a mask or N95
respirator, and show no differences in RCT comparisons between surgical masks and N95
respirators, regarding risk of infection from this class of diseases. That is a separate
question from any hypothetical mechanistic explanation as to why any benefit from wearing a
mask would be so small as to be undetected. In other words, that masks don't work must be
discerned from the question of why masks don't work. The former is a scientific outcome of
the studies, irrespective of what we believe or infer about the latter.
Nonetheless, regarding a discussion of the hypothetical mechanisms, one can say the
following things:
There can be little doubt that the overwhelmingly dominant path of infection is via
small aerosol particles of less than approximately 2 microns in diameter.
Such a particle can contain many and up to hundreds of virions.
One virion is approximately 0.1 microns in size.
Such small aerosol particles stay suspended in air in-effect indefinitely, as part of
the fluid air; as would virions themselves, subject to chemical adsorption and
aggregation.
Regarding the masks and respirators, pore-size of the filtering material is not the
relevant bottleneck in practice.
The seal to the face is never perfect, and the mask is regularly moved by pressure
differences, by the user for reasons of discomfort, and by normal facial and operational
movements.
Inhaled and exhaled air will flow mostly through the paths of least resistance (or
fluid impedance): through the breaks in the seal, through the sides of a mask, and though
the larger pores or stretches or micro-tears in the filtering material.
The minimum-infective-dose is expected to be less that a single small aerosol particle,
and can be as little as a single undamaged virion.
Thus, it is not difficult to conclude that mask and respirators should not work, even
leaving out the complex particle-mask-material interactions that can occur, mask aging and
wear considerations, and so on.
KP : You cite possible harm from dictates requiring the wearing of masks. Could you
elaborate?
DR : My answer is in two parts. First, there is potential medical harm to the individual
from the wearing of a mask. Second, there is societal and psychological harm from being
forced to wear a mask in public.
In one large RCT in Japanese health centers, health-care workers who wore respirators
suffered significantly more headaches than the cohort of workers who did not wear
respirators. This was a statistically significant outcome. Furthermore, professional
health-care workers self-report significant discomfort from wearing respirators, and
therefore often adjust them or remove them, contrary to protocol. If healthcare workers, in
circumstances in which there is no scientific basis for wearing respirators, suffer headaches
and discomfort, then this can only negatively impact the intended health care.
More broadly, the potential health hazards of population-scale extended personal mask use
have not been studied. Potential health hazards include such factors as:
constriction of breathing itself, including both flow restriction, and recycling of CO2
and vapour-laden breath
breathing-in the particles, fibres and chemicals from the mask-material itself, both in
a new mask and for aging, used, washed, and sun-bleached masks
retention of particulates and adsorbed substances in proximity to the face, which would
normally be expelled in the exhaled breath
collection, concentration and retention of particulates and adsorbed substances from
the environment onto the mask, in proximity to the face
reactions of particulates and adsorbed substances on the mask, including shedding of
virions or virion-carrying nano-particles from larger mask-captured droplets
and so on
Such factors have not been studied, yet population-scale policies of extended mask-wearing
are being implemented.
From a societal perspective, what are the consequences of government coercion ("education"
and enforcement) to wear masks in public, given that there is no scientific basis for any
benefit from mask wearing, in terms of reducing the risk of being infected by a viral
respiratory disease?
How is this not an arbitrary application of power, which directly infringes or denies
personal freedom? What are the long-term consequences of habituation to arbitrarily applied
violations of personal freedom?
The recent scientific study of Hickey and Davidsen (2019) (" Self-organization
and time-stability of social hierarchies ") in my view provides a theoretical foundation
that such habituation to arbitrarily applied power is part of a progressive degradation
towards an extreme totalitarian state, depending on the degree of authoritarianism (whether
contestation is effective) and the degree of violence (magnitude of the penalty for
disobeying).
We should rollback arbitrary State powers. I would say: If an individual evaluates or
believes that a mask constitutes health or privacy or religious protection in public, then
the individual should be free to wear a mask, but how can forcing all individuals to wear
masks be justified, beyond government pronouncements? Security cannot be based on arbitrarily
forced behaviour of everyone. This is the classic recipe for totalitarian rule.
In fact, the present case of pandemic mask laws or policies is a case where a health
pretext and stoked fear are being exploited by governments, in a globalized corporate
environment in which there are billions to be made from vaccines and other treatments, and
where legal liabilities for the treatments have largely been socialized. Regular vaccination,
for diseases that have always been kept in check by the human immune system, are a hard
method of creating dependence on the State, involving seasonal violations of bodily
integrity, which could become forced.
KP : You point a finger at governments, monopoly media, and institutional propagandists
for deciding "to operate in a science vacuum, or select only incomplete science that serves
their interests." Which institutional propagandists do you refer to?
DR : The main institutional propagandists here are the arms and legs of the pharma-medical
complex, from the WHO and CDC, through the medical schools, to every hospital, research
laboratory, clinic, community health center, and doctor's office. The medical establishment
is a major network of the high-priests that structure and control modern society. In their
book, "health" is a dependence on the health system, not healthy living conditions, contrary
to all the science regarding the determinants of public health. I mean, Pharma and medical
errors are the third leading cause of death in the Western world, after heart disease and
cancer, and that is not a "pandemic"? It is not even on the radar, except in specialized
conferences and journals.
As another example of institutional and professional alignment with top-down directives
and recommendations, John Ioannidis showed in 2005 (" Why Most
Published Research Findings Are False ") that most of the scientific research that finds
marginal benefits for expensive and dangerous treatments is incorrect.
In the case of the on-going COVID-19 saga, several top researchers and experts have broken
rank, and these professionals have been profiled in a series of three articles in
Off-Guardian , for example. Generally, these contrarians who insist on practicing
science, have been avoided by the mainstream media, and have had to be featured in the
alternative media, and on YouTube. John Ioannidis and Knut Wittkowski are just two of the
names that stand out for me.
KP : Given that the conclusion of your review of meta-analyses is accurate, why would so
many health care professionals, who presumably have been trained in evidence-based practice,
disregard the absence of evidence for the efficacy of masks and respirators?
DR : It is a myth that medicine is an evidence-based practice. This myth is propagated by
the medical establishment. It has never been the case in the history of medicine, and it is
not the case today. In practice, medicine is whatever the profession can get away with and
profit from.
From a political perspective, the public-relations statement about being "science-based"
is a propagandist mantra applied in training those initiated into the profession. It is
designed to deliver legitimacy in the public's mind and among other professions, and means
that the profession will attack, destroy or capture competitors that are not in the
profession, such as homeopaths, nutritionists, acupuncturists, chiropractors, psychologists,
councillors, life coaches, etc.
There is a large litigation record of this reality. If you litigate against or attempt to
discipline an MD or a medical specialist for a practice that is not science based, then you
find that the in-court or administrative-tribunal argument will never be about the science
itself or whether a scientific basis exists. None of the actual medical researchers will be
called as expert witnesses, and they would be seen as irrelevant and thus inadmissible.
Instead, a complete defence will be based on whether or not the hired expert witnesses for
the defendant will be of the opinion that the impugned practice is within the spectrum of
actual practice in the field, irrespective of whether there is a scientific basis. In order
to win, you will need to prove that the impugned act or practice is egregiously contrary to
what is generally done or officially recommended by a certifying body; again, irrespective of
any scientific-basis consideration. "Scientific basis" is given lip service, nothing
more.
For example, when a drug or procedure is convincingly and unavoidably proven to be
unacceptably harmful after being put into practice, and this harm is reported in the
mainstream media, and there is organized public outcry, then the practice is changed but no
practitioners are ever found to have been at fault. This means that the practitioners are not
responsible to evaluate and establish a scientific basis for their prescriptions and
treatments. They are only bound to do what one does in the profession. If mechanical
ventilators are the treatment for critical COVID-19 patients, then we kill those patients
with those mechanical ventilators until the proverbial shit hits the fan ("
New study finds nearly all coronavirus patients put on ventilators died ," The
Hill , 23 April 2020).
The history, to this day, of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is exhibit-one regarding the extent to which
medical practice is distinct from any scientific basis. The said Manual is the
pseudo-scientific organizational pretext for a large pharmaceutical project of managing the
mind, which relies on heavy-handed "precautionary" prescriptions, made by any army of medical
practitioners. For example, see Gary Greenberg (2013) ( The Book of WOE: The DSM and the
Unmaking of Psychiatry ).
I could go on for days. Coming back to the masks, medical commentators, like politicians,
will say whatever seems advantageous at the time, in terms of propping up their own
legitimacy and popularity, and in terms of avoiding public-perception liability. If it is
politically risky to recommend masks, then masks are out, and there is no evidence that they
work. If it becomes risky to go against masks, then masks are in, and we must all do our part
to protect those who are most vulnerable, etc.
KP : Since there is evidence that viruses flourish during dry periods, might the use of a
humidifier be a recommended preventative measure during seasons when humidity is low?
DR : There is conclusive evidence that viral respiratory diseases and flu-like diseases
predominantly propagate via small aerosol particles, which are stabilized in dry air, and
that this is why these diseases are seasonal in mid-latitude regions. The reproduction
number, R 0 , can vary four-fold during a season, in accordance with absolute
humidity of the atmosphere. This oft-confirmed discovery was initiated with the landmark work
of Shaman et al . (2010) .
Closed buildings such as hospitals, residences for the elderly, and day-care centers are
proven to have large densities of virion-laden aerosol particles suspended in the air, in the
dry season. In addition, air-flow has been shown to play a role regarding transmission, in
restaurants and airplanes.
Therefore, it is not unreasonable to examine the use of controlled absolute humidity, and
air-flow management in critical facilities housing many persons at risk of severe
complications if infected. A high humidity would in-principle draw-out virtually all the
aerosol particles, by condensation, particle growth, and gravitational removal. In principle,
what was an environment of high-density of aerosol particles, would become an environment of
low-density of aerosol particles. Only a true RCT comparative study, with
laboratory-confirmed infection determinations, could demonstrate whether such measures can be
effective.
Literally every human concern - every social, psychological, spiritual concern; every
political, constitutional, rule-of-law concern; every concern of human and civil rights,
civil liberties, human freedom; every concern of children's healthy development; and
literally every health concern except for this flu - have been eradicated from the
propaganda and evidently from the minds of the police-statists.
Their minds have been scoured clean of literally every thought except for a threadbare
fanatical obsession with quantity of life (an obsession they pursue in defiance of all the
evidence; their lockdowns don't work even according to their own terms, let alone according
to the terms of ecology, biodiversity, sound epidemiology; even their arch-ideologue and high
priest Neil Ferguson was caught admitting that he regards his entire agenda as nothing but a
Big Lie), and a grossly reductive notion of "opening the economy", which they deploy in order
to slander the rapidly increasing number of people who are questioning, criticizing, and
rejecting the lockdowns for a vast diversity of reasons I only briefly surveyed above.
The fact that the police-statists are utterly unwilling to meet any of these concerns
except for the economic, and are willing to meet that one only in the most reductive,
fraudulent, slanderous way which expresses total contempt for the vast numbers of people
being economically destroyed beyond any hope of recovery (which is a major purpose and goal
of the terror campaign and lockdowns), says it all about the total bankruptcy of their
position. As in every other case, police-state authoritarianism has nothing but brute thug
force, including in its ideas.
2001 His predictions on the Foot & Mouth Epidemic led to the needless 'voluntary'
slaughter of 12 million animals. This in turn led to countless bankruptcies and suicides
amongst small farmers. It also helped accelarate the concentration of farming into the hands
of Big Farmer.
2002 He predicted 'up to' 50,000 would die from aka variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease aka
'Margaret Thatcher disease'. The total from 1990 to 2017 was actually 178.
2005 He predicted 'up to' 200 million people worldwide would be killed by H5N1 aka 'bird
flu'. By 2006, WHO had reported 78 definite fatalities out of 147 eported cases.
2009 He predicted 'up to' 65,000 deaths in the UK from H1N1 aka 'swine flu'. In reality,
457 died from it in the UK.
2020 He predicted 'up to' 500,000 deaths in the UK (and 2.2 million in the US) from
Covid-19, used by the UK government to justify the lockdown. UK to date ~31,000 (probably
~85% exhibiting multiple comorbidities and dying 'with' Covid-19 rather than 'from' it).
Still it is early days, and ignoring the new death rate has been decreasing since ~ April 15,
give it another 4 years and we will be there!
So his score is 0 out of 5. Truly impressive.
The underlying question remains, why did the UK government take his advice when he has
been proven grossly wrong time after time?
It looks like Fauci is a political hack. But that not all. He also helped to deepen the
current recession.
Notable quotes:
"... Perhaps one way to help see through the professional obfuscation, and identify just exactly how political Dr. Fauci is, would be to: compare and contrast Dr. Fauci under President Obama in September 2009 after 3,000 to 4,000 H1N1 deaths in the USA -vs- Dr. Fauci under President Trump in March 2020 after 200 to 300 COVID-19 deaths. ..."
Perhaps one way to help see through the professional obfuscation, and identify just
exactly how political Dr. Fauci is, would be to: compare and contrast Dr. Fauci under President
Obama in September 2009 after 3,000 to 4,000 H1N1 deaths in the USA -vs- Dr. Fauci under
President Trump in March 2020 after 200 to 300 COVID-19 deaths. WATCH:
Now, to better absorb the information . According to the CDC final estimate of 2009 U.S. H1N1
cases ( published
in 2011 ): from April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010 approximately 60.8 million U.S. cases,
274,304 U.S. hospitalizations, and 12,469 U.S. deaths occurred due to H1N1. That's the
empirical data.
The concept of "flattening" the virus curve; the presumptive reason for social distancing
and shutting down the U.S. economy; is based on a theory to extend the spread of COVID-19 to a
lesser incident rate over a longer duration, thereby lessening the burden on the U.S.
healthcare system. Hence, 'flatten' the spike in infections.
Put another way: "Flattening" means the same number of people eventually contract the virus,
only they do so over a longer period of time, and the healthcare system can treat everyone
because the numbers do not rise to level where the system is overloaded. In theory that seems
to make sense.
However, no-one is asking: what is the current stress level on the healthcare system right
now? Where are we in that capacity? and what is normal capacity level during a high-level flu
outbreak? and Where are we when compared against that baseline?
♦ Remember in 2009
there were over 61 million cases of H1N1, more than 274,000 hospitalizations and 12,469
additional deaths specifically attributed to that strain of flu virus in the U.S. [ DATA HERE ]
The premise to extend the virus duration in an effort to lower the infection rate and spread
the virus over a longer period of time needs to measured against: (a) where the healthcare
system is at any given moment; and (b) under traditional high-flu seasons where are we during
those historic events.
♦ STRESS LEVEL – The healthcare 'system' per se, is expending an awful lot of
time on mitigation efforts. As Dr. Birx noted: the current negative test rate for coronavirus
among those showing symptoms who are tested is 94 to 98 percent. That means of all the people
taking coronavirus tests, 94/98 out of 100 are symptomatic (they are sick) but they are not
infected with coronavirus. They are normal flu cases.
Our healthcare "system" is expending an incredible amount of resources on a mitigation
effort. According to Dr. Birx and the current U.S. test results, 94 to 98 percent of those
mitigation efforts are not engaging with coronavirus. They are dealing with regular flu
(perhaps a strong flu).
If you extract the mitigation effort from the overall effort, the current stress level on
the healthcare system doesn't seem to be overwhelming. What is stressing the system is a
coronavirus mitigation effort with a rate of 94 to 98 percent testing negative.
♦ Dr. Fauci's theory is self-fulfilling .
If the viral spread never exceeds the capacity of the healthcare system to deal with it, he
can claim success. Look, our flattened curve worked.
However, when contrast against flu outbreaks, no-one knows what the COVID-19 capacity
threshold is within the healthcare system. There's no way to disprove Fauci's theory.
Given the nature of the baseline for overall U.S. sanitation and hygiene, which is
significantly higher than Italy, S-Korea and China; and given the higher standards of food
safety (U.S. is the world leader); again significantly higher than Italy, S-Korea and China;
and given the nature of the U.S. healthcare system (more capacity per person); is it really a
fair comparison to overlay a COVID-19 outbreak, without also overlaying a traditional flu
outbreak?
Any theory that cannot be scientifically tested; and is simultaneously self-fulfilling; is,
by its nature, a false theory.
This is not to say that Dr. Anthony Fauci is intentionally misleading anyone; however, it is
absolutely true that no-one will be able to quantify if trillions of dollars of economic wealth
lost; and trillions more in economic activity lost; and trillions more in deficit spending; and
that might all be done just to follow the fantastical whims of a doctor who is directing the
mitigation of an ordinary flu-virus/season, and appears to be quite full of his own sense of
self-importance.
Does Dr Fauci enjoy indirect financial ties to Gilead? Does he own the stock?
Notable quotes:
"... Basically, this was a negative trial. Of the 255 patients screened, 237 met the eligibility criteria, and 158 were assigned to the remdesivir group, with 79 assigned to placebo control. Unfortunately, remdesivir treatment was not associated with a shorter time to clinical improvement, and mortality was not different between the two groups. ..."
"... It does look very fishy to me. Endpoint or outcome switching, particularly late in a clinical trial is a huge red flag. ..."
"... There are also other reasons to question this trial, including how no confidence intervals were reported, that not even an abstract was published, just a press release with, as Heathers put it, "two results in four lines": ..."
"... I remain very suspicious that the NIH study was announced the same day that a negative study out of China of remdesivir was published. It just seems too convenient. Maybe I'm being overly suspicious. Maybe I'm too suspicious. Maybe I'm falling prey to conspiracy mongering. However, in the Trump era, when the Trump administration has politicized previously (mostly) apolitical government agencies as never before, it's hard not to wonder. ..."
"... He was unimpressed by remdesivir's modest benefit. "It was expected to be a whopping effect," Topol added. "It clearly does not have that." ..."
"... Indeed, given that the pre-test probability of remdesivir having a significant effect was low, meaning that this trial is probably just noise: ..."
"... But Gilead will make billions and billions of dollars ..."
"... Could Anthony Fauci explain why the investigators of the NIAID remdesivir trial did change the primary outcome during the course of the project (16th April)? Removing "death" from primary outcome is a surprising decision. ..."
"... The most common adverse effects in studies of remdesivir for COVID-19 include respiratory failure and blood biomarkers of organ impairment, including low albumin, low potassium, low count of red blood cells, low count of platelets that help with clotting, and yellow discoloration of the skin. Other reported side effects include gastrointestinal distress, elevated transaminase levels in the blood (liver enzymes), and infusion site reactions. ..."
"... So, if it does shorten duration, is it worth potential liver damage, respiratory failure and organ impairment? In other words is the cure potentially as bad as the disease. ..."
"... For yet another drug that was supposed to be a game changer, I am unimpressed by its results. The whole mechanism is wrong. A drug with this mechanism would need to be almost a prophylactic for it to be hugely effective. ..."
"... Fauci didn't seem to have any problem cautioning against unwarranted optimism for CQ/HCQ even while DJT was championing the stuff. What is different about this? . ..."
"... So, what did Fauci say about chloroquine? ""We've got to be careful that we don't make that majestic leap to assume that this is a knockout drug. We still need to do the kinds of studies that definitely prove whether any intervention is truly safe and effective," Fauci, who is also a member of the White House coronavirus task force, said during an interview on "Fox & Friends. . . "We don't operate on how you feel, we operate on what evidence and data is," Fauci said, adding that it was "not a very robust study" or "overwhelmingly strong."" (Concha, 2020 Apr 3) ..."
"... Now, what did he say about Remdesivir: "Speaking to reporters from the White House, Fauci said he was told data from the trial showed a "clear-cut positive effect in diminishing time to recover." Fauci said the median time of recovery for patients taking the drug was 11 days, compared with 15 days in the placebo group. He said the mortality benefit of remdesivir "has not yet reached statistical significance." ..."
"... Disappointingly, the lock down seems to have made a number of people irrational. Just a quick post to expound on my Fauci post for those who see the world as binary – ie: black or white. These people think you either support Fauci 100% or 0% and a single criticism of any Fauci statement means 0% support of Fauci. I do not happen to worship at the altar of Fauci or any scientist and recognize all are subject to errors – including myself. I view the world in a more nuanced manner than those with the black/white delusion. I find I can disagree with some things a person says or stands for and agree with some other things they say or do. ..."
"... I am of the opinion that Fauci made a mistake here. The evidence for Remdesiver is nowhere near good enough for it to become the standard of care. ..."
"... On the other hand, watching the White House performance from afar, I can see the administration is dysfunctional and is run by a narcissistic bully, who will publicly turn on anyone who disagrees with them. ..."
"... I believe that is the main thrust of this Orac article – that the evidence for Remdesiver efficacy is sorely lacking. ..."
Remdesivir: Gilead wins with unimpressive results announced by press release On Wednesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced positive
results for the antiviral drug remdesivir treating COVID-19. They were unimpressive and, suspiciously, announced by press release
rather than scientific paper. It's all very fishy, but one thing's for sure. Gilead Sciences will make boatloads of money.
I've been writing a lot about the unjustified and
premature hype
over hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug with mild immunosuppressive activity that is also used to treat rheumatoid arthritis
and other autoimmune diseases and how the drug probably doesn't work against COVID-19, despite its being
hyped by President
Trump and his sycophants, toadies, and lackeys on Fox News,
Dr. Mehmet Oz ,
Dr. Phil , Dr. Didier Raoult
, and a
bevy of irresponsible fame seeking doctors who have no idea how to do a proper clinical study.
There are, however, other drugs
being hyped out there, drugs that might actually have a better chance of turning out to be effective treatments for COVID-19. Chief
among these is remdesivir, the experimental antiviral drug being tested by Gilead Sciences.
Remdesivir is an adenosine (a nucleotide) analog that inhibits
viral RNA polymerases. It is incorporated into RNA made by the virus, causing the premature termination of the RNA molecule, thus
interfering with viral replication. The drug was originally developed to treat Ebola and Marburg but was ultimately found to be
ineffective against these viruses . Because it inhibits the replication
of a number of RNA viruses, it was only natural that it would be considered as a possible treatment for COVID-19, and Gilead has
been relentlessly promoting it as such as the company has been working to carry out clinical trials.
White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday that data from a coronavirus drug trial testing Gilead Sciences'
antiviral drug remdesivir showed "quite good news" and sets a new standard of care for Covid-19 patients.
Speaking to reporters from the White House, Fauci said he was told data from the trial showed a "clear-cut positive effect
in diminishing time to recover."
Fauci said the median time of recovery for patients taking the drug was 11 days, compared with 15 days in the placebo group.
He said the mortality benefit of remdesivir "has not yet reached statistical significance."
The results suggested a survival benefit, with a mortality rate of 8% for the group receiving remdesivir versus 11.6% for the
placebo group, according to a statement from the National Institutes of Health released later Wednesday.
"This will be the standard of care," Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, added. "When
you know a drug works, you have to let people in the placebo group know so they can take it."
My skeptical antennae started twitching immediately, because on the same day a study from China was published in
The Lancet that
was far less impressive. In fact, it was a negative trial. What also got my skeptical antennae all aflutter twitching away was how
the results of the remdesivir trial were announced. Normally, when a study is announced to the press, it's upon publication of the
paper, and the press release is issued either the same day or the evening before publication. As of last night, as I wrote this,
however, the actual paper reporting the results of the clinical trial had not yet been published. As I perused Twitter on Wednesday,
I found even more reasons for skepticism.
So, before I get to the study touted by Dr. Fauci, let's review some history.
Remdesivir: The early days versus COVID-19 (like, you know, three weeks ago)
The first data published on remdesivir was a single-arm uncontrolled trial that somehow got published three weeks ago in
The New England Journal of Medicine . This was
peak COVID-19 publishing, when an uncontrolled case series of patients with severe COVID-19 treated with remdesivir under compassionate
was published in a super high impact journal like NEJM and made headlines as a result. Be that as it may, the case series examined
61 patients with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection who had an oxygen saturation of 94% or less while they were breathing room air or
who were receiving oxygen support. They received a 10-day course of remdesivir, consisting of 200 mg given intravenously on day 1,
followed by 100 mg daily for the remaining 9 days of treatment. (Remdesivir is an intravenous drug.) The authors reported clinical
improvement in 68% of evaluable patients:
Of the 61 patients who received at least one dose of remdesivir, data from 8 could not be analyzed (including 7 patients with
no post-treatment data and 1 with a dosing error). Of the 53 patients whose data were analyzed, 22 were in the United States,
22 in Europe or Canada, and 9 in Japan. At baseline, 30 patients (57%) were receiving mechanical ventilation and 4 (8%) were receiving
extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. During a median follow-up of 18 days, 36 patients (68%) had an improvement in oxygen-support
class, including 17 of 30 patients (57%) receiving mechanical ventilation who were extubated. A total of 25 patients (47%) were
discharged, and 7 patients (13%) died; mortality was 18% (6 of 34) among patients receiving invasive ventilation and 5% (1 of
19) among those not receiving invasive ventilation.
The case series also did not collect viral load data to confirm potential antiviral activity in humans or any association between
declines in viral load and clinical improvement. Basically, when you get right down to it, this study was not really much better
than Didier Raoult's crappy
study of his hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin combination, but that didn't stop the authors from concluding that comparisons with
contemporaneous cohorts "suggest that remdesivir may have clinical benefit in patients with severe Covid-19." In reality, like Raoult's
trials, this trial said nothing about the efficacy of remdesivir against COVID-19 other than that the drug could be given to COVID-19
patients with a reasonable safety profile.
Less than week later, as
related by Derek Lowe , came news that two clinical trials of remdesivir in China, one for
severe disease and one
for moderate disease
had been suspended. (They still are.) Lowe noted that both trials had the notice: "The epidemic of COVID-19 has been controlled well
at present, no eligible patients can be recruited." The apparent explanation was "the stringent inclusion criteria for the trials
– apparently patients had to have no previous therapy with any other experimental agent to enroll, and that eliminates a lot
of people." Around the same time, Adam Feuerstein and Matthew Herper published a story in STAT,
Early peek at data on Gilead coronavirus drug suggests patients are responding to treatment :
The University of Chicago Medicine recruited 125 people with Covid-19 into Gilead's two Phase 3 clinical trials. Of those people,
113 had severe disease. All the patients have been treated with daily infusions of remdesivir.
"The best news is that most of our patients have already been discharged, which is great. We've only had two patients perish,"
said Kathleen Mullane, the University of Chicago infectious disease specialist overseeing the remdesivir studies for the hospital.
Her comments were made this week during a video discussion about the trial results with other University of Chicago faculty
members. The discussion was recorded and STAT obtained a copy of the video.
Derek Lowe
discussed this story in depth, and I largely agree with him that the leak of the video to STAT was a serious breach of clinical
trial ethics and protocol. (I'm not alone in suspecting that it was almost certainly intentional to jack up Gilead's stock price,
a result that was achieved.) Lowe also noted:
But now that it's out there, let's talk about what's in the leak. Gilead stock jumped like a spawning salmon in after-market
trading on this, and one of the reasons was that that 113 of the 125 patients were classed as having "severe disease". People
ran with the idea that these must have been people on ventilators who were walking out of the hospital, but that is not the case.
As AndyBiotech pointed out on Twitter,
all you had to do was read the trial's exclusion criteria
: patients were not even admitted into the trial if they were on mechanical ventilation. Some will have moved on to ventilation
during the trial, but we don't know how many (the trial protocol has these in a separate group).
Note also that this trial is open-label; both doctors and patients know who is getting what, and note the really key point:
there is no control arm. This is one of the trials mentioned in this post on small-molecule therapies as being the most likely
to read out first, but it's always been clear that the tradeoff for that speed is rigor. The observational paper that was published
on remdesivir in the NEJM had no controls either, of course, and that made it hard to interpret. Scratch that, it made it impossible
to interpret. It will likely be the same with this trial – the comparison is between a five-day course of remdesivir and a ten-day
course, and the primary endpoint is the odds ratio for improvement between the two groups.
Again, these data, such as they are, are no more useful than Didier Raoult's data on hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin to treat
COVID-19, but this brings us to the Chinese trial published in
The Lancet on Wednesday.
The Chinese randomized clinical trial
The Chinese trial
published two days ago is the first randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial of remdesivir to treat COVID-19,
but it was also one of the studies halted. Eligible patients were adults admitted to the hospital with laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2
whose symptoms had lasted less than 12 days before enrollment and who had an oxygen saturation on room air of 94% or less or a ratio
of arterial oxygen partial pressure to fractional inspired oxygen of 300 mm Hg or less (another measure of hypoxia), and radiologically
confirmed pneumonia.
Patients were randomly assigned in a 2:1 ratio to intravenous remdesivir at the same dose as the NIH trial touted
by Dr. Fauci or the same volume of placebo infusions for 10 days and were permitted concomitant use of lopinavir–ritonavir, interferons,
and corticosteroids. The primary endpoint was time to clinical improvement up to day 28, defined at the time from randomization to
the point of a decline of two levels on a six-point ordinal scale of clinical status (from 1=discharged to 6=death) or discharged
alive from hospital, whichever came first. An intention-to-treat analysis was carried out.
Basically, this was a negative trial. Of the 255 patients screened, 237 met the eligibility criteria, and 158 were assigned to
the remdesivir group, with 79 assigned to placebo control. Unfortunately, remdesivir treatment was not associated with a shorter
time to clinical improvement, and mortality was not different between the two groups. Subgroup analysis looking for hypotheses found
that there was a trend towards a shorter duration of symptoms (not statistically significant) in patients treated with remdesivir
who had had symptoms for less than ten days. Most disappointingly, there was no detectable difference in viral load between the remdesivir
groups and the placebo controls. Again, basically this was a negative study with only the barest hint that remdesivir might -- I
repeat, might -- work if administered earlier in the course of COVID-19. That's some pretty thin gruel.
Which brings us to the NIH trial of remdesivir touted by Anthony Fauci.
The NIH press release for its remdesivir trial.
The results of the NIH remdesivir trial can, unfortunately, only be gleaned from the press release and
news stories so far:
For the first time, a major study suggests that an experimental drug works against the new coronavirus, and U.S. government
officials said Wednesday that they would work to make it available to appropriate patients as quickly as possible.
In a study of 1,063 patients sick enough to be hospitalized, Gilead Sciences's remdesivir shortened the time to recovery by
31% -- 11 days on average versus 15 days for those just given usual care, officials said. The drug also might be reducing deaths,
although that's not certain from the partial results revealed so far.
"What it has proven is that a drug can block this virus," the National Institutes of Health's Dr. Anthony Fauci said.
"This will be the standard of care," and any other potential treatments will now have to be tested against or in combination
with remdesivir, he said.
Here is the
press release , posted to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases website:
Hospitalized patients with advanced COVID-19 and lung involvement who received remdesivir recovered faster than similar patients
who received placebo, according to a preliminary data analysis from a randomized, controlled trial involving 1063 patients, which
began on February 21. The trial (known as the Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial, or ACTT), sponsored by the National Institute
of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, is the first clinical trial launched in
the United States to evaluate an experimental treatment for COVID-19.
An independent data and safety monitoring board (DSMB) overseeing the trial met on April 27 to review data and shared their
interim analysis with the study team. Based upon their review of the data, they noted that remdesivir was better than placebo
from the perspective of the primary endpoint, time to recovery, a metric often used in influenza trials. Recovery in this study
was defined as being well enough for hospital discharge or returning to normal activity level.
Preliminary results indicate that patients who received remdesivir had a 31% faster time to recovery than those who received
placebo (p<0.001). Specifically, the median time to recovery was 11 days for patients treated with remdesivir compared with 15
days for those who received placebo. Results also suggested a survival benefit, with a mortality rate of 8.0% for the group receiving
remdesivir versus 11.6% for the placebo group (p=0.059).
More detailed information about the trial results, including more comprehensive data, will be available in a forthcoming report.
As part of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's commitment to expediting the development and availability of potential COVID-19
treatments, the agency has been engaged in sustained and ongoing discussions with Gilead Sciences regarding making remdesivir
available to patients as quickly as possible, as appropriate. The trial closed to new enrollments on April 19. NIAID will also
provide an update on the plans for the ACTT trial moving forward. This trial was an adaptive trial designed to incorporate additional
investigative treatments.
As you can see, the difference in mortality was not statistically significantly different, although that could just be because
of inadequate numbers. It's also very important to note the part about the adaptive trial design of this trial, which puts Dr. Fauci's
comment about how remdesivir will become the "standard of care" going forward into the proper context. In this
particular trial , multiple different drugs can be
compared to placebo or standard of care. The idea is that, if a signal of efficacy is found with one drug, that drug becomes "standard
of care" and the trial is adapted to study how adding other experimental drugs compares to the "standard of care." So what Dr. Fauci
meant was that, based on the finding, going forward remdesivir will become the "standard of care" arm for the trial and the experimental
arm will become remdesivir plus another experimental therapeutic. However, given that the FDA is on the
verge
of issuing an emergency use authorization for remdesivir to treat COVID-19, it looks as though remdesivir will become standard-of-care
in general soon.
But back to the results. Derek Lowe observed:
it's worth noting that had there been "clear and substantial evidence of a treatment difference" during the trial that the
DSMB was to have halted the study at that point. We can infer that nothing rose to that level, then: we have a difference, but
not substantial enough to have ended the trial prematurely.
It's also worth noting some things posted on Twitter about the trial. For instance, Waller Gellad noted:
It's very odd that the primary endpoint was changed:
Thread that summarizes my concerns with Remdesivir press release (not science) as well.
Changing the endpoint midtrial this way is like hosting a race for one destination then declaring wherever you end up after
running for an hour is the finish line. https://t.co/XMUXYW3njp
I'll summarize, so that you don't have to scroll through a Twitter thread if you don't want to. As James Heathers and Waller Gellad
noted, the original primary outcome of the trial when it was registered on March 20. The original primary endpoint of the trial was
an 8-point severity scale (death, on ventilator, hospitalized with oxygen, all the way down to discharged with no limits on activity)
but was changed to time to recovery. There's still a similar scale for the secondary endpoints, but no numbers for that were reported.
(Any bets on whether the results are negative?) This change was apparently made on or around April 16.
Gellad also notes:
last thing:
Here is the results table for the negative lancet trial of remdesivir. The highlighted results are what the primary outcome for
the NIH trial was until 2 weeks ago. https://t.co/niQ65zgLF2
It does look very fishy to me. Endpoint or outcome switching, particularly late in a clinical trial is a huge red flag.
Don't get me wrong. There can be legitimate scientific reasons to switch primary endpoints of a trial. as James Heathers
puts it:
Sometimes it becomes clear after you start that the registration is incomplete or wrong. Sometimes you have a better idea after
you start. Sometimes your thinking changes.
Other times, you're trying to cherry-pick the results.
There are also other reasons to question this trial, including how no confidence intervals were reported, that not even an abstract
was published, just a press release with, as Heathers put it, "two results in four lines":
(2) the results in the press release. I call this 'two results, four sentences' – press releases describe the results in incredibly
brief terms, usually the two most positive outcomes w the briefest explanation possible. He's me bitching about it earlier.
https://t.co/FQlaAQaytG
Basically, if you have two "good" results and twenty "bad" or uninterpretable results, what do you do? What are you going to tell
people? The two "good" results, of course!
Gary Schwitzer has
a nice
summary of the negative reactions to the trial and how it was announced.
The bottom line
I remain very suspicious that the NIH study was announced the same day that a negative study out of China of remdesivir was published.
It just seems too convenient. Maybe I'm being overly suspicious. Maybe I'm too suspicious. Maybe I'm falling prey to conspiracy mongering.
However, in the Trump era, when the Trump administration has politicized previously (mostly) apolitical government agencies as never
before, it's hard not to wonder.
Adding to my suspicion is the fact that the study was reported in a press release, rather than being published, which makes me
wonder if the press release was written to counter the negative study from China that would certainly have tanked Gilead's stock
prices. Yes, I know that the press release reported that this decis, apparently the announcement was decided upon after April 27
meeting of the data and safety monitoring board overseeing this trial, but the outcome switching so late in the trial makes me very
suspicious. Yes, the explanation, which should have been in the press release, along with an acknowledgment that the primary outcome/endpoint
had been changed, but wasn't is not unreasonable:
Then there was
this news report in which Fauci claimed that concerns about leaks fueled the announcement:
He expressed concern that leaks of partial information would lead to confusion. Since the White House was not planning a daily
virus briefing, Fauci said he was invited to release the news at a news conference with Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards(D). "It
was purely driven by ethical concerns," Fauci told Reuters in a telephone interview.
"I would love to wait to present it at a scientific meeting, but it's just not in the cards when you have a situation where
the ethical concern about getting the drug to people on placebo dominates the conversation."
An independent data safety and monitoring board, which had looked at the preliminary results of the NIAID trial, determined
it had met its primary goal of reducing hospital stays.
On Tuesday evening, that information was conveyed in a conference call to scientists studying the drug globally.
"There are literally dozens and dozens of investigators around the world," Fauci said. "People were starting to leak it." But
he did not give details of where the unreported data was being shared.
I smell bullshit here. What probably really happened is that he was under enormous pressure to release the results. It was also
unwise to discuss the results with so many scientists until the manuscript reporting the results of the trial had at least been submitted
for publication. I agree with the scientists who had "expected it [the trial data] to be presented simultaneously in a detailed news
release, a briefing at a medical meeting or in a scientific journal, allowing researchers to review the data." I also agree with
Dr. Eric Topol, referring to the Chinese RCT and this one:
"That's the only thing I'll hang my hat on, and that was negative," said Dr. Eric Topol, director and founder of the Scripps
Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California.
He was unimpressed by remdesivir's modest benefit. "It was expected to be a whopping effect," Topol added. "It clearly does not have that."
Indeed, given that the pre-test probability of remdesivir having a significant effect was low, meaning that this trial is probably
just noise:
Unfortunately, by the time you are symptomatic with a virus, you are usually already high/peak viral load. So, when you give
an antiviral to someone who is already ill, the damage from the virus is largely done. It's there in big numbers and in the cells.
Indeed, I'm not only unimpressed with the modest benefit reported, I question whether there really was any benefit at all, particularly
in light of the Chinese trial, which found zero difference in viral load in the remdesivir group.
The whole thing looks damned fishy, and we can't judge the study until it's actually published. Meanwhile, whatever the true reasons
for releasing the study results this way, mission accomplished. The negative effect of the Chinese study on Gilead's stock price
was successfully countered and remdesivir becomes a de facto standard of care for patients hospitalized with COVID-19. Worse, no
further trials of remdesivir versus placebo will be possible, because it's been declared that remdesivir "works" against COVID-19
and is the new standard of care! As Mark Hoofnagle put it in a great Twitter thread, that echoes my thoughts:
By the end of the day, reports that FDA is going to emergently approve remdesivir for treatment of COVID.
Gilead gets what they want. No one will want to be in a control arm in further trials and they will argue all future trials
must be noninferiority.
Absolute genius. You have to salute them. On the day a negative trial of their drug is reported, based on a press release they
took over the news cycle, and with some midstream edits to their endpoints their now "positive" trial wins them FDA approval and
a halted trial.
It's worse than that. If remdesivir is now the "standard of care" for hospitalized COVID-19 patients, it now becomes unethical
to randomize them to a placebo group testing ANY new drug for COVID-19. Trials will now have to compare remdesivir alone to remdesivir
plus experimental drug. We'll probably never know now for sure if remdesivir is truly effective against COVID-19.
But Gilead will make billions and billions of dollars.
Drs. Vladimir Zelenko and Stephen Smith have been claiming that hydroxychloroquine is a miracle drug based on anecdotes. Their
shoddy, poorly reported case series are not evidence of efficacy.
President Trump's COVID-19 advisors include Dr. Oz, Rudy Giuliani, and Peter Navarro, the latter an economist who thinks he can
science better than Anthony Fauci. Can science- and evidence-based medicine prevail with respect to hydroxychloroquine and coronavirus?
By Orac Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone,
somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to
himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as
David Gorski
...
In long twitter exchange mainly led by James Heathers, has anyone noticed that there are a series of tweets by Didier Raoult ?
One tweet reads:
Could Anthony Fauci explain why the investigators of the NIAID remdesivir trial did change the primary outcome during the
course of the project (16th April)? Removing "death" from primary outcome is a surprising decision.
In a quick search of the web I found the following two:
WHAT ARE SIDE EFFECTS OF REMDESIVIR (RDV)?
In the Ebola trial, researchers noted side effects of remdesivir (RDV) that included:
Increased liver enzyme levels that may indicate possible liver damage
Researchers documented similar increases in liver enzymes in three U.S. COVID-19 patients
The most common adverse effects in studies of remdesivir for COVID-19 include respiratory failure and blood biomarkers of organ
impairment, including low albumin, low potassium, low count of red blood cells, low count of platelets that help with clotting,
and yellow discoloration of the skin. Other reported side effects include gastrointestinal distress, elevated transaminase levels
in the blood (liver enzymes), and infusion site reactions.
Other possible side effects of remdesivir include:
Infusion‐related reactions. Infusion‐related reactions have been seen during a remdesivir infusion or around the time remdesivir
was given.[8] Signs and symptoms of infusion‐related reactions may include: low blood pressure, nausea, vomiting, sweating, and
shivering.
Increases in levels of liver enzymes, seen in abnormal liver blood tests. Increases in levels of liver enzymes have been seen
in people who have received remdesivir, which may be a sign of inflammation or damage to cells in the liver.
So, if it does shorten duration, is it worth potential liver damage, respiratory failure and organ impairment? In other words
is the cure potentially as bad as the disease.
And, as Orac and many commenters have made more than clear, one more example of Trump's government, ignoring science, and jumping
to conclusions.
For yet another drug that was supposed to be a game changer, I am unimpressed by its results. The whole mechanism is wrong. A
drug with this mechanism would need to be almost a prophylactic for it to be hugely effective.
One thing they discovered is that the proteins involved have zinc atoms incorporated into their structure. This won't surprise
any biochemists, as zinc-containing proteins are common. But there's been a steady flow of fringe treatments for the disease --
including some involving chloroquine derivatives -- in which zinc was a key component. We'll have to see whether that changes
now that it's clear that zinc is needed to make copies of the virus (assuming that fact registers at all with the people
prone to promoting fringe therapies).
What is that saying about zinc? I've always heard that zinc was a good thing to have a high intracellular level of it to protect
against viruses besides also being needed to make NO.
So: "Fauci just dropped down a level or two in my estimation of his commitment to rationality."
Let's look at the "Reality": "America needs a federal government that assertively promotes and helps to coordinate that, not one
in which experts like Tony Fauci and Deborah Birx tiptoe around a president's tender ego."
I wouldn't want to be in Fauchi's shoes. If he openly criticizes Trump, he is out and staying in allows him to have some effect.
Damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. So, he has to balance his "committment to rationality" to trying to modify/reduce the
insanity of Trump. If he resigned or was fired, could he have more of an influence? Maybe, maybe not. I would not want to be in his
shoes! ! ! Personally, I would probably resign and try to get our media to listen to me. Just standing next to Trump would turn my
stomach.
So, maybe you should live up to your "name" and evaluate "reality" not an idealistic world.
So you wouldn't say what Fauci said and would quit, eh, Joel?
I wouldn't say what Fauci said about "standard of care" which is basically his endorsement of this.
I believe Orac wouldn't make that statement endorsing Remdesivir as the "standard of care".
I don't know of any self-respecting scientist who would make such a statement no matter what the pressure.
If I was pressured by DJT I would object but maybe agree to not make any statement pro or con about the subject – so as to keep my
position and influence but if someone asked me to say something I thought was not true I would not do it and refuse.
. Fauci didn't seem to have any problem cautioning against unwarranted optimism for CQ/HCQ even while DJT was championing the stuff.
What is different about this?
.
You write: "Fauci didn't seem to have any problem cautioning against unwarranted optimism for CQ/HCQ even while DJT was championing
the stuff. What is different about this?"
Yep; but the only studies promoting CQ/HCQ was a fraudulent one in France and an in vitro study.
What about Remdesivir? First it is a nucleic acid analogue designed to directly disrupt replication of the viral genome. Chloroquine/Hydroxychloroquine
were not even remotely designed to target viruses, though they have a moderate dampening effect on immune reactions, so they work
for autoimmune diseases (e.g., lupus, rheumatoid arthritis); but, as I wrote in a previous exchange, the immune response in an autoimmune
disease compared to a cytokine storm is like comparing 20 mile per hour winds to a category 5 hurricane, 160 mph winds. In addition,
chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine have a large number of mild side-effects and some really serious major ones.
So, what did Fauci say about chloroquine? ""We've got to be careful that we don't make that majestic leap to assume that this
is a knockout drug. We still need to do the kinds of studies that definitely prove whether any intervention is truly safe and effective,"
Fauci, who is also a member of the White House coronavirus task force, said during an interview on "Fox & Friends. . . "We don't
operate on how you feel, we operate on what evidence and data is," Fauci said, adding that it was "not a very robust study" or "overwhelmingly
strong."" (Concha, 2020 Apr 3)
Now, what did he say about Remdesivir: "Speaking to reporters from the White House, Fauci said he was told data from the trial
showed a "clear-cut positive effect in diminishing time to recover." Fauci said the median time of recovery for patients taking the
drug was 11 days, compared with 15 days in the placebo group. He said the mortality benefit of remdesivir "has not yet reached statistical
significance."
The results suggested a survival benefit, with a mortality rate of 8% for the group receiving remdesivir versus 11.6% for the
placebo group, according to a statement from the National Institutes of Health released later Wednesday. "This will be the standard
of care," Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, added. "When you know a drug works, you have
to let people in the placebo group know so they can take it." "What it has proven is a drug can block this virus," he said. (Lovelace,
2020 Apr 29)
"The data shows that remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery," Fauci said
at the White House on Wednesday. The data he referred to is from a large study of more than 1,000 patients from multiple sites around
the world. Patients either received the drug, called remdesivir, or a placebo.
Dr. Michael Saag, associate dean for global health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said the results seemed promising.
Antiviral drugs such as remdesivir tend to work earlier in the course of an illness, so "the thing that I think is important in this
study is the patients had advanced disease," said Saag, who is not involved with any remdesivir trials. (NBC News (2020 Apr 29)
Hospitalized patients with advanced COVID-19 and lung involvement who received remdesivir recovered faster than similar patients
who received placebo, according to a preliminary data analysis from a randomized, controlled trial involving 1063 patients, which
began on February 21. The trial (known as the Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial, or ACTT), sponsored by the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, is the first clinical trial launched in the United
States to evaluate an experimental treatment for COVID-19.
An independent data and safety monitoring board (DSMB) overseeing the trial met on April 27 to review data and shared their interim
analysis with the study team. Based upon their review of the data, they noted that remdesivir was better than placebo from the perspective
of the primary endpoint, time to recovery, a metric often used in influenza trials [my emphasis]. Recovery in this study was defined
as being well enough for hospital discharge or returning to normal activity level. . .
Results also suggested a survival benefit, with a mortality rate of 8.0% for the group receiving remdesivir versus 11.6% for the
placebo group (p=0.059). the group receiving remdesivir versus 11.6% for the placebo group (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases (2020 Apr 29).
So, first I'd bet you don't understand how nucleic acid analogues work?
Second, though I tend not to rely on one study, this one was fairly large and the shortening of time to recovery was clinically significant,
"defined as being well enough for hospital discharge or returning to normal activity level." And Dr. Michael Saag: "Antiviral drugs
such as remdesivir tend to work earlier in the course of an illness, so "the thing that I think is important in this study is the
patients had advanced disease,"
Standard of Care is more a legal definition than a clinical one. Basically it reduces risk of malpractice lawsuits.
While I probably would not have called it "standard of care", instead clearly stating that based on the recent trial, it is currently
the best we have to offer or something to that effect.
So, Fauci didn't call it a cure, didn't claim it reduced mortality, though indications it did, and based on over 1,000 patients,
found it reduced hospitalization and return to normal life by a clinically significant margin, the standard used for flu studies.
Again, I would have been more cautious in my working; but your rank attack on a man who knows more about infectious diseases that
you, I, and many others, a man who has dedicated his life to preventing and dealing with them is just plain sickening. Your black
and white view of Fauci is how antivaccinationists and other adherers to unscience see the world. And an MPH probably means a couple
of lower level epidemiology courses. So, the old saying: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, coupled with a personality that
prefers a dichotomous world is very very problematic.
Only time and further studies will tell if Remdesivir really does shorten recovery time and, perhaps, also lowers mortality. Right
now, we have nothing else and I wouldn't jump on something because of this; but the over 1,000 patient study isn't nothing.
Just to be clear, Orac's critique is valid; but, as he says, by this time one becomes perhaps overly skeptical given Trump's insanity.
How cautious should Fauci have been? People are becoming desperate. The risks from Remdesivir are extremely low, so currently, either
use it or continue as is.
If there were significant risks and the one study had been one a much smaller group, the scales would be
different. And, though Orac is right they changed the outcome points, as mentioned, shortening of recovery time is a criterion used
for treatment of flu, so, though not, perhaps, the best end-point, it is certainly not the same as some studies using endpoints such
as lowered cholesterol without looking at deaths. They did look at deaths and though not significant, in the right direction. By
the way, do you even understand significance levels? Though only one study, p=0.059 isn't far from p=0.05.
References:
Concha, Joe (2020 Apr 3). Fauci warns there's no 'strong' evidence anti-malaria drug works on coronavirus
Lovelace, Berkeley (2020 Apr 29). Remdesivir coronavirus drug trial: Dr. Fauci says it will set new standard of care. CNBC
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (2020 Apr 29). NIH Clinical Trial Shows Remdesivir Accelerates Recovery
from Advanced COVID-19
Disappointingly, the lock down seems to have made a number of people irrational. Just a quick post to expound on my Fauci post
for those who see the world as binary – ie: black or white. These people think you either support Fauci 100% or 0% and a single criticism
of any Fauci statement means 0% support of Fauci. I do not happen to worship at the altar of Fauci or any scientist and recognize
all are subject to errors – including myself. I view the world in a more nuanced manner than those with the black/white delusion.
I find I can disagree with some things a person says or stands for and agree with some other things they say or do.
My criticism of Fauci in regard to his remdesivir endorsement does not mean I have 0% support for Fauci it means that with that
statement and some others my positive view of him is now ~80% but not 100% and I will have to check up on what he is endorsing
to make sure that I agree with it just like I do with any other scientist/person.
BTW – If some were to check my Disqus account history (Reality022) you would find posts strongly defending Fauci against the Loony
Libertarians who seem to think he is the debil.
.
Now to a second point:
There appears to be a group of Fauci apologists who, to excuse Fauci's statement, say it is due to 'pressure from Trump/the administration'.
I do not subscribe to this excuse and think it is a horrible thing to say for 2 reasons:
1) There is absolutely no evidence that this statement was made under pressure. That idea is totally invented in the minds of
the Fauci apologists in their attempt to exonerate Fauci.
2) It is a horrible thing to say about Fauci. I take him at his word. If he said it he meant it. The excuse actually means that
Fauci's word is so untrustworthy that he can be pressured into being dishonest about his scientific opinions and only the apologists
can tell us when he is lying or actually relating his honest view. The apologists are basically saying Fauci is dishonest.
I have much more respect for the man and believe he is honest but in this case merely wrong.
.
That is all I'm going to say about this subject as some people are going off the rails with their binary view of the world. (snicker)
And you continue to miss the point that "Standard of Care" is mainly a legal term. Are you that dense? It is you who stated your
opinion of Fauci sank, so your binary view of the world. Try reading my other comments, closely, maybe you will learn something;
but I doubt it. "Reality", lacks reality testing.
Reply
I tend to agree. I am of the opinion that Fauci made a mistake here. The evidence for Remdesiver is nowhere near good enough
for it to become the standard of care. But then I am not the one having to make these decisions under difficult circumstances.
I don't pretend to understand why Fauci might have made the comment, so don't see a lot of point in speculating about it.
On the other hand, watching the White House performance from afar, I can see the administration is dysfunctional and is run by
a narcissistic bully, who will publicly turn on anyone who disagrees with them. I also see there are people within and around the
White House who are happy to tell whatever lies they think Trump wants to hear, either through fear or hope for advancement. I understand
why people would add 2 and 2 and come up with 5.
Chris Preston said, "I am of the opinion that Fauci made a mistake here. The evidence for Remdesiver is nowhere near good enough
for it to become the standard of care."
I believe that is the main thrust of this Orac article – that the evidence for Remdesiver efficacy is sorely lacking.
Quoting Orac's article above: "In reality, like Raoult's trials, this trial said nothing about the efficacy of remdesivir against
COVID-19 other than that the drug could be given to COVID-19 patients with a reasonable safety profile."
.
I agree with your 2nd paragraph and think that Fauci is not one of those administration toadies and is being honest and has merely
made a mistake perhaps brought about through grasping-at-straws desperation as described in a current SBM article.
I, as well, do not know why Fauci made the statement but to me it is very disrespectful of the man to use as an excuse that he
is dishonest enough to lie like a toady when pressured by Trump.
I think we are essentially in agreement about this matter.
Have fun.
re dysfunctional administration.. narcissistic bully et al
It seems that the aforementioned will now " wind down" the Covid task force ( The Hill reports) but Drs Fauci and Birx
will still be involved in some capacity.
AS though the battle is already won. Hah! CA and the NY area are reporting lower numbers of deaths and hospital admissions BUT
whilst
other areas are increasing theirs.
Maybe the Orange One imagines that if we discuss Covid less, people will think it's gone, go back to work, buy stuff and the economy
will flourish. Ignore it and it'll go away. Wishful thinking as usual.
Apparently you lack understanding of English. As I explained even grandfathered in medical treatments with no hard scientific
evidence are considered the standard of care, that is, if a doctor uses them he/she lessens risk of lawsuits. Standard of care doesn't
mean a high level of scientific validity.
I guess I am wasting my time. Think of it this way, if allowed for compassionate use advised by ones doctor, then doctor may not
be protected against lawsuits. Unfortunately, as something I read a long time ago, even in Colonial times Americans would rather
sue than eat breakfast. Just one more sickness of American exceptionalism, so maybe, just maybe, all Fauci was doing was trying to
reduce this risk.
Not to mention that CDC closed the lab. So CDC is not part of great vaccine conspiracy, after all. Huge news, I would say.
One could mention, too, that Johnson & Johnson get COVID vaccine contract. So Dorit Reiss' plots are not very effective, ater
all. Reply
You write: Hmm . Problems with the Wuhan Lab and those nasty bats back in 2018. Just another coincidence, I suppose.
Weird. So many coincidences."
From a recent article in the Atlantic:
scientists have also identified about 500 other coronaviruses among China's many bat species. "There will be many more
-- I think it's safe to say tens of thousands," says Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, who has led that work. Laboratory
experiments show that some of these new viruses could potentially infect humans. SARS-CoV-2 likely came from a bat, too.
It seems unlikely that a random bat virus should somehow jump into a susceptible human. But when you consider millions
of people, in regular contact with millions of bats, which carry tens of thousands of new viruses, vanishingly improbable
events become probable ones. In 2015, Daszak's team found that 3 percent of people from four Chinese villages that are close
to bat caves had antibodies that indicated a previous encounter with SARS-like coronaviruses. "Bats fly out every night
over their houses.
Some of them shelter from rain in caves, or collect guano for fertilizer," Daszak says. "If you extrapolate up to the
rural population, across the region where the bats that carry these viruses live, you're talking 1 [million] to 7 million
people a year exposed." Most of these infections likely go nowhere. It takes just one to trigger an epidemic.
Note. he links to peer-reviewed journal articles. So, as the second paragraph makes clear, antibodies to bat coronaviruses
exist in the population, etc. Add this to the sequencing of the genome that shows just how close it is to the 2003 SARS
corona virus and to bat coronaviruses and, as usual, your moronic "coincidences" just lacks any validity.
Note also that his article links to many other good ones.
As I've written before, nature is quite capable of creating really nasty microbes.
Oh this guy needs a dishonorable mention, Harvard traitor, Charles Leiber. "has received more than $15,000,000 in grant
funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Department of Defense (DOD)." Our tax dollars hard at work for
this POS.
This is our guy: Charles M. Lieber Semiconductor nanowires: A platform for nanoscience and nanotechnology MRS Bulletin
Volume 36, Issue 12 (Laser micro- and nanofabrication of biomaterials)December 2011 , pp. 1052-1063 DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1557/mrs.2011.26 So COVID 19 was not involved. One should indeed not serve two masters, DOD and a Chinese university
Reply
Note that he links to a number of excellent articles, including the two that the following is based on:
"scientists have also identified about 500 other coronaviruses among China's many bat species. "There will be
many more -- I think it's safe to say tens of thousands," says Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, who has
led that work. Laboratory experiments show that some of these new viruses could potentially infect humans. SARS-CoV-2
likely came from a bat, too.
It seems unlikely that a random bat virus should somehow jump into a susceptible human. But when you consider
millions of people, in regular contact with millions of bats, which carry tens of thousands of new viruses, vanishingly
improbable events become probable ones. In 2015, Daszak's team found that 3 percent of people from four Chinese
villages that are close to bat caves had antibodies that indicated a previous encounter with SARS-like coronaviruses.
"Bats fly out every night over their houses. Some of them shelter from rain in caves, or collect guano for fertilizer,"
Daszak says. "If you extrapolate up to the rural population, across the region where the bats that carry these
viruses live, you're talking 1 [million] to 7 million people a year exposed." Most of these infections likely go
nowhere. It takes just one to trigger an epidemic."
So, 3 percent of people had antibodies to bat corona viruses. As the above explains, it is quite probable that
the current virus came from someone infected by a bat. Now, since sequencing of the current SARS-Cov-2 has found
its genome quite close to the 2003 SARS virus and to several bat coronavirus genomes, goes against your sick need
to blame the Chinese. A coincidence is not even close to any type of proof, except in the mind of a moron like
you looking to place blame. And there is a great book on "coincidences": David J. Hand (2014). "The Improbability
Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day." Basically, what someone might think is
a rare coincidence isn't.
And, the major blame for what is happening in the U.S. is a combination of Trump and overall American unappreciation
for Public Health and, thus, pandemic preparedness. When it comes to cutting funding, first to go.
I realize that real research, logic, etc. have NO effect on moron's like you; but, hopefully, others monitoring
this exchange are open-minded.
And as Aarno pointed out, you attacked someone who had nothing to do with COVID. He worked with the Wuhan Institute
of Technology; yep, in Wuhan and that's it. It's a large city dimwit. More importantly, he has been charged, not
found guilty. I realize that the old adage innocent until proven guilty doesn't apply to anyone you chose to attack.
You just don't know when to stop. YOU ARE DESPICABLE!
Reply
"... Dr. Judy Mikovits is the central figure of 'Plandemic,' which basically claims that "billionaire patent owners" are stoking the spread of the coronavirus, all in the name of forcing "experimental poisons" on the population in the form of vaccines. ..."
"... Mikovits' central argument – that an eventual vaccine for coronavirus will kill "millions of people" ..."
"... "donated the entire amount to charity." ..."
"... However, amid the half-baked theories, Mikovits touches on some truth. The federal government does in fact pay hospitals a set amount of money to treat coronavirus patients, about $13,000. This amount rises to $39,000 if the patient is placed on a ventilator. Mikovits insists that ventilation is the wrong treatment for coronavirus patients, and is only carried out to boost revenues – something the ER doctors would disagree with. ..."
"... It doesn't help that many of the claims are disjointed, and rather than working towards its main goal of demonstrating a sinister plan by Fauci and vaccine evangelist Bill Gates to poison the masses, the documentary instead just lumps together anything critical of the mainstream consensus on the virus to paint Fauci in a bad light. ..."
"... For instance, it's been widely reported that Fauci's organization did give millions of dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to finance its study of coronaviruses, after the federal government banned such research in the US. However, no smoking gun linking Fauci to the current outbreak is provided. ..."
"... "When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say." ..."
"... "bypass the gatekeepers of free speech," ..."
Pulled from YouTube, censored in internet searches, and denounced by every single mainstream
media outlet, what kind of information could make everyone so mad about 'Plandemic'? We watched
it to find out. A 23-minute teaser clip of the documentary went viral on Wednesday evening,
notching up tens of millions of views across multiple platforms. However, a media outcry soon
followed, with mainstream media outlets deploying their 'fact-checkers' to debunk its claims,
and Facebook and YouTube removing the video, citing their new rules on Covid-19
"misinformation."
Yet censorship is also a sure-fire way to generate interest in the very thing you're trying
to censor – and multiple copies and versions of 'Plandemic' began to appear like
mushrooms. So who's behind it and what's in there?
A doctor with quite a reputation
Dr. Judy Mikovits is the central figure of 'Plandemic,' which basically claims that "billionaire patent owners" are stoking the spread of the coronavirus, all in the name
of forcing "experimental poisons" on the population in the form of vaccines.
The claims are quite bold, but it doesn't help that Mikovits herself is far from an unbiased
source on the subject. She's been active in anti-vaccine and fringe circles for years, even
while insisting she's not "anti-vax" herself.
Once an active cancer researcher and (mainstream) virologist, Mikovits was disgraced in 2011
for publishing what others in the scientific community called false research into Chronic
Fatigue Syndrome. The dramatic events that followed – a search and arrest in her
California home – are used in 'Plandemic' to establish her alleged conflict with Dr.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and
President Donald Trump's coronavirus adviser.
Mikovits claims Fauci personally "paid off" law enforcement officials to arrest
her and detain her without trial. She was indeed arrested in November 2011, but for allegedly
stealing lab materials from the Nevada laboratory she worked at before her dismissal (which
Mikovits claims were "planted" in her house). Criminal charges brought against
Mikovits were later dismissed – but this has been tied to the legal troubles of her
former employer, Harvey Whittemore.
Evidence-free claims galore
Of course, the central part of the video – something being discussed in every
'Plandemic' piece and review – is made up of an array of Covid-19-related claims that
Mikovits makes.
These range from claims that wearing face masks "activates your own virus" (there's
no evidence of that) to the assertion that the devastating coronavirus outbreak in Northern
Italy can be linked to the uptake in flu vaccination the year before (a claim which appears to
be based on a misleading interpretation of one tangentially-related study, not any fresh
research).
Mikovits' central argument – that an eventual vaccine for coronavirus will kill
"millions of people" – is unprovable, and her assertion that Fauci will
personally profit from any vaccine is outright false. Mikovits accuses Fauci of profiteering
from royalties on an AIDS treatment he patented in the 1990s, but Fauci only placed his name on
the patent because regulations required him to, and "donated
the entire amount to charity."
However, amid the half-baked theories, Mikovits touches on some truth. The federal
government does in fact pay hospitals a set amount of money to treat coronavirus patients,
about $13,000. This amount rises to $39,000 if the patient is placed on a ventilator. Mikovits
insists that ventilation is the wrong treatment for coronavirus patients, and is only carried
out to boost revenues – something the ER doctors would disagree with.
It doesn't help that many of the claims are disjointed, and rather than working towards
its main goal of demonstrating a sinister plan by Fauci and vaccine evangelist Bill Gates to
poison the masses, the documentary instead just lumps together anything critical of the
mainstream consensus on the virus to paint Fauci in a bad light.
For instance, it's been widely reported that Fauci's organization did
give millions of dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to finance its study of
coronaviruses, after the federal government banned such
research in the US. However, no smoking gun linking Fauci to the current outbreak is
provided.
Boost by censorship
Yet, when information like this is declared verboten, that's what people will think. There's
a popular quote by 'Game of Thrones' author George RR Martin: "When you tear out a man's
tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he
might say."
When right-wing polemicist Alex Jones and his conspiracy-laden news site Infowars were
essentially banned from the internet in 2018, the Infowars app shot to the top of both Apple
and Google's app stores.
The phenomenon is known as the 'Streisand effect,' named for a 2003 lawsuit in which singer
Barbara Streisand sued a photographer who shot an aerial snap of her California mansion for
invasion of privacy. The lawsuit backfired, and led to hundreds of thousands of people
downloading the picture. Before the case, it had only been viewed six times.
Likewise, the documentary's producers will spin the furor over 'Plandemic' to their
advantage. Already, their website urges viewers to "bypass the gatekeepers of free
speech," and slams the "overlords of big tech" for silencing them.
Forbidden knowledge is tempting, and by wiping 'Plandemic' from the internet, Silicon Valley
will only increase its notoriety.
The connection of Dr Fauci to the Wuhan lab is also well established. He moved viral "gain
of function" research to Wuhan after it was closed down in the USA by the Obama Regime.
The virus reportedly swept across NYC in February and early March, when Mayor de Blasio was
still dismissing it as a non-issue and encouraging foreigners to hop on those planes and cruise
ships and giddy up on over here, partner. If de Blasio was so proactive about combating the
virus, how come it was discovered on the west coast first?
New York City's coronavirus outbreak grew so large by early March that the city became the
primary source of new infections in the United States, new research reveals, as thousands of
infected people traveled from the city and seeded outbreaks around the country.
The research indicates that a wave of infections swept from New York City through much of
the country before the city began setting social distancing limits to stop the growth. That
helped to fuel outbreaks in Louisiana, Texas, Arizona and as far away as the West Coast.
The findings are drawn from geneticists' tracking signature mutations of the virus, travel
histories of infected people and models of the outbreak by infectious disease experts.
"We now have enough data to feel pretty confident that New York was the primary gateway
for the rest of the country," said Nathan Grubaugh, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of
Public Health.
Well, you were indeed right. And your reporting better than most if not all MSM articles
written by other laymen. And all without any professional experience. Just by trusting in
scientific methods, data and knowledge, instead of making a conspiracy out of thin air.
In those times, that is an amazing achievement.
But when i hear how few people are tested, when i hear of multiple deaths in my circle of
people, and see the society unable to unite against such a threat, i dont have much hope for
how this will go on.
The last 4 sentences say everything about our western societies, including us Germans.
The only profiteers are the rich, toilet paper and noodle merchants, and politicians (who now
race each other in opening up BEER GARDENS and CONCERTS with 100 people).
Many people today willingly prefer to go to concerts and beer gardens than to deny themselves
those small joys in favor of their compatriots.
Our society is doom. The neoliberal dogma of "Freedom for the nihilistic narcissistic ego
individual over everything else" destroyed what was left of it.
"..At one New York City nursing home, the Isabella Geriatric Center in Manhattan's
Washington Heights, nearly 100 of its 705 residents have died..."
"..In Medfield, Massachusetts, north of Boston, COVID-19 has killed 54 residents over the
past four weeks at the Courtyard Nursing Care Center. An additional 117 residents and 42
employees have tested positive for the virus..."
" A shocking 84 residents have died at the facility since the virus outbreak. Eighty-one
employees have tested positive for the coronavirus.
"... deaths at the Soldiers' Home were initially hidden from both the mayor of Holyoke and
local health officials, who only became aware of the developing situation when employees at
the facility reached out to them. Staff said management at the facility refused to provide
them with PPE and instructed them to crowd patients together from multiple wards into a
single ward as a solution to staffing shortages due to infections..."
"..A particularly gruesome discovery took place in mid-April when police found 17 corpses
piled up at the Subacute and Rehabilitation Center in Andover, New Jersey. The bodies were
stacked in a small morgue designed to hold a maximum of four bodies. The more than 2,000
deaths of staff and residents in New Jersey's long-term facilities account for about 40
percent of the state's coronavirus-related deaths."
There's more much more. And not just from the United States either.
A Yale University epidemiologist is calling into question the legality of US President
Donald Trump and his administration's response to the COVID-19 novel coronavirus, appearing to
suggest that federal government officials could be tried under international law. Hours before
Trump
took to Twitter to announce the Coronavirus Task Force would "continue on indefinitely,"
Gregg
Gonsalves , an assistant professor of epidemiology of microbial diseases at the Yale School
of Public Health, posed a series of questions to fellow netizens on the social media site
regarding Washington's handling of COVID-19.
How many people will die this summer, before Election Day? What proportion of the deaths
will be among African-Americans, Latinos, other people of color? This is getting awfully
close to genocide by default. What else do you call mass death by public policy? #COVID19
#coronavirus
As of this article's publication, the US has tested over 7.5 million individuals for the
novel coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins University . Data provided by the
university details that the country has confirmed 1.2 million cases of the novel coronavirus
and suffered over 71,400 associated deaths. At least 189,791 recoveries from COVID-19 have been
observed in the US.
Gonsalves' emphasis on the COVID-19 deaths of Black Americans, Latinos and other people of
color in the US stems from the fact that there has been a disproportionate amount of novel
coronavirus deaths in the Black community.
"Social conditions, structural racism, and other factors elevate risk for COVID-19 diagnoses
and deaths in black communities," wrote a team of epidemiologists and clinicians in a new study
analyzing novel coronavirus cases and death on a county level, as reported by CNN. The
scientists found that counties where Black residents made up more than 13% of the population -
about the percentage of the total US population that is Black - suffered 52% of COVID-19
diagnoses and 58% of associated deaths in the country.
"Structural factors including health care access, density of households, unemployment,
pervasive discrimination and others drive these disparities, not intrinsic characteristics of
black communities or individual-level factors," noted the researchers.
It's worth noting that the findings are preliminary, as the study still needs to go through
the peer review process.
"So, what does it mean to let thousands die by negligence, omission, failure to act, in a
legal sense under international law?" asked Gonsalves in another tweet
Wednesday morning .
The conduct of Trump and his administration has been called into question over the past
several weeks after reports revealed that the president and federal officials were briefed on
the novel coronavirus, and its potential threat to the US, several weeks prior to the
declaration of a national emergency on March 13.
Recently, Dr. Rick Bright, the former director of the US Biomedical Advanced Research and
Development Authority,
said that he alerted Department of Health and Human Services officials in January about
the US' unpreparedness for a possible COVID-19 outbreak. Bright said that he was met with
"indifference which then developed into hostility" from the administration and, in his
opinion, was the reason for his demotion within the agency.
While Trump is pushing for more Americans to return to their workplaces and restart the US
economy - which some believe could lead to a second wave of infections - Gonsalves wondered if
there could be some kind of intervention or charges brought against the federal government on
an international level.
"And I am being serious here: what is happening in the US is purposeful, considered
negligence, omission, failure to act by our leaders. Can they be held responsible under
international law?" he asked .
"The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's heading up to about nine billion. Now if
we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could
lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent!" - Bill Gates
"men and women need a common motivation, namely a common adversary against whom they can
organize themselves and act together"
"new enemies have to be identified, new strategies imagined, and new weapons
devised"
"in its present form, democracy is no longer well-suited for the tasks ahead. The
complexity and the technical nature of many of today's problems do not always allow elected
representatives to make competent decisions at the right time"
"In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that
pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fill the
bill"
"The real enemy then is humanity itself."
Excerpts from "The First Global Revolution" – I would add, a wonderful marxist
propaganda for the NWO.
Ms No, 4 hours ago Listen to this medical chick that saved millions from the EU and their
swine flu vaccine that caused brain damage. They tried to have her "psychiatrized" which means
locked away as crazy and probably tortured for the rest of her miserable life, being banged
with blood draw needles, forced meds and put in a straight jacket. Close to Assange
treatment.
https://youtu.be/Hlk_Zfz7xhU
harleyjohn45, 4 hours ago She may have Fauci by the short hairs. He is deeply embedded in the
national health care oligarchy. Not my favorite person, had a lot to do with destroying the US
economy along with MSM. DaiRR, 5 hours ago The big pharma crime syndicate, embedded in
government health agencies with operatives like Fauci, is a mega-billion dollar enterprise and
those dollars buy off thousands of people like Fauci. People smarter than me need to figure out
how to stop this once and forever.
Meanwhile, if you don't realize Google and Facebook and all their offshoots are your enemy,
you are the enemy too. wdg, 5 hours ago (Edited) Dr. Judy Mikovits is just the tip of the
iceberg as more and more doctors and reserach scientists are speaking out and exposing the BIG
PHARMA CRIMINAL SYNDICATE that includes the WHO, CDC, NIH and many other so-called health care
and research agencies around the world, and Drs. Fauci and Birx not to mention the leadership
of most western government who have been bought off by this Criminal Syndicate which has
murdered and debilitated millions of people. These are crimes against humanity carried out at
the highest levels of governments, corporations and governmental agencies. Watch the powerful
video interview of Robert Kennedy Jr. below which provides a window into the evil world we now
live in. Big Pharma and the medical profession which sold their souls for money are both
finished because the trust is gone. Class action suits will bankrupt the lot.
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Robert Kennedy Jr. Destroys Big Pharma, Fauci & Pro-Vaccine
Movement
Your Wikipedia and all your stupid marxist propaganda is fake, yep!
5 hours ago Why is the video doctored right at the end to make Fauci say a damning sentence.
You can see his head jerk to new positions as they piece together bits of video.
That fake ending just negated all credibility for the video.
Take a look at the original video where he told that (the part of interest is at the very
beginning starting at 2:50 and is ending at 3:40) and you shall see that the meaning (when the
parts where he brags about his past and future were removed) of what he actually have told in
that part was not altered in any way - the meaning is exactly the same. Due diligence in these
times is actually quite easy in cases like these, hence you should probably do the same prior
to posting
4 hours ago (Edited) I have zero tolerance for fake news. It's not up to me. If I spot it, I
call it. You just confirmed I was right. It's up to them to not fake video of a person they are
disparaging. There is no way for him to comment about that doctored section at the end.
Edit: I thank you for doing that research but it shouldn't be up to you either. This is not
the time for fake anything.
Commercialization of research including allowing patenting the research so that you can extract revenue stream from licensing
the patent and which became a binge addition in universities creates "academic entrepreneurs" which are very similar to Soviet
Mafiosi.
One thing that should be abundantly clear by now is that any thoughts, opinions, or speculation which challenges the official
narratives regarding COVID-19 will be promptly silenced by Silicon Valley, under the guise of protecting the public - which apparently
can't be trusted to absorb information and form their own opinions.
The most recent example of censored wrongthink is a new documentary, Plandemic, which features former chronic fatigue researcher
Judy Milkovits, who claims that Dr. Anthony Fauci - head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) - is
spewing 'absolute propaganda' about COVID-19.
In the video, Mikovits claimed Fauci perpetrated propaganda that led to the deaths of millions of people in the past. She also
raised questions about how COVID-19 deaths are being counted.
However, one of her biggest beefs against Fauci dates to the battles for credit over the discovery of HIV in the early 1980s.
In the video, Mikovits claimed she isolated HIV from the saliva and blood of patients in France but that Fauci was involved
in delaying research so a friend could take credit, which allowed the HIV virus to spread. These claims are not proven. They were
also disseminated in April by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy alleged on the Children’s Health Defense website (where he is chairman) -Heavy
Google's YouTube is currently playing whack-a-mole with a 25 minute promotional vignette for the documentary which has gone viral
- deleting new versions seemingly as fast as they pop up. The original version had over 1.6 million views when it was censored.
Facebook, however, hasn't deleted it (yet):
As noted by Heavy's Jessica McBride, Mikovits has a new book out,
Plague of Corrpution, which currently has 4.5 / 5 stars on Amazon.
Mikovits, who has
a new book out, was featured in the first vignette released to promote the movie. Her controversial career in the scientific
community has been punctuated by an arrest, lawsuit, retracted research study, allegations against Fauci and clashes with the
founders of the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease, which is located in Reno, Nevada. -Heavy
Mikovits has claimed that she published a "blockbuster" study which revealed that "the common use of animal and human fetal tissues
were unleashing devastating plagues of chronic diseases," and that the "minions of Big Pharma" have been waging war against her to
destroy her "good name, career and personal life."
In the Plandemic video, Mikovits makes other claims, including that patents are a conflict of interest, and she criticizes
the concept of mass vaccines. “They will kill millions, as they already have with their vaccines,” she said, stressing she was
not anti-vaccine. She claims there is a financial incentive in COVID-19 strategies to not use natural remedies in order to push
people to use vaccines.
Mikovits co-wrote a book called Plague: One Scientist’s Intrepid Search for the Truth about Human Retroviruses and Chronic
Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), Autism, and Other Diseases
and claims 30% of vaccines
are contaminated with retroviruses.
The book contains a forward from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The book was No. 2 on the Amazon bestseller list on May 6. -Heavy
Plandemic has received both praise and criticism,
however Google thinks it's best if you leave the thinking to them.
Fauci works for Bill Gates, and will push a vaccine & medications that he will profit from. I don't like him. However, the
end of this woman's video takes Dr. Fauci's 2017 remarks out of context. Fauci wasn't saying he knew this Plandemic would occur.
He was merely saying that every 4-8 years there is a new type of virus or flu strain in the world. (which is fearmongering in
a way -- with every new administration he needs to push for more funding by saying there will likely be an outbreak)
"Dr. Fauci, it turns out, has been a key cheerleader for this "death science" research for decades. He has also been credibly
accused by Dr. Judy Mikovitz and other virologists of stealing intellectual property and stifling whistleblowers who sought to
expose the truth about NIH-funded research and how it threatens humanity."...
Mokovitz has written a new book called, "Plague of Corruption". The hardcopy is "sold out" EVERYWHERE. I find this fishy. I
wonder if the kindle version has been edited to be less damaging to Fauci, et al. It wouldn't be hard for the government to buy
up all the copies. Plus, the website for the book does not load.
"The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines,
health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent!" - Bill Gates
"men and women need a common motivation, namely a common adversary against whom they can organize themselves and act together"
"new enemies have to be identified, new strategies imagined, and new weapons devised"
"in its present form, democracy is no longer well-suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many
of today's problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time"
"In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming,
water shortages, famine and the like, would fill the bill"
"The real enemy then is humanity itself."
Excerpts from "The First Global Revolution" – I would add, a wonderful marxist propaganda for the NWO.
xxx Ms No, 4 hours ago
Listen to this medical chick that saved millions from the EU and their swine flu vaccine that caused brain damage. They tried
to have her "psychiatrized" which means locked away as crazy and probably tortured for the rest of her miserable life, being banged
with blood draw needles, forced meds and put in a straight jacket. Close to Assange treatment.
She may have Fauci by the short hairs. He is deeply embedded in the national health care oligarchy. Not my favorite person,
had a lot to do with destroying the US economy along with MSM.
DaiRR, 5 hours ago
The big pharma crime syndicate, embedded in government health agencies with operatives like Fauci, is a mega-billion dollar
enterprise and those dollars buy off thousands of people like Fauci. People smarter than me need to figure out how to stop this
once and forever.
Meanwhile, if you don't realize Google and Facebook and all their offshoots are your enemy, you are the enemy too.
wdg, 5 hours ago (Edited)
Dr. Judy Mikovits is just the tip of the iceberg as more and more doctors and reserach scientists are speaking out and exposing
the BIG PHARMA CRIMINAL SYNDICATE that includes the WHO, CDC, NIH and many other so-called health care and research agencies around
the world, and Drs. Fauci and Birx not to mention the leadership of most western government who have been bought off by this Criminal
Syndicate which has murdered and debilitated millions of people. These are crimes against humanity carried out at the highest
levels of governments, corporations and governmental agencies.
Watch the powerful video interview of Robert Kennedy Jr. below
which provides a window into the evil world we now live in. Big Pharma and the medical profession which sold their souls for money
are both finished because the trust is gone. Class action suits will bankrupt the lot.
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Robert Kennedy Jr. Destroys Big Pharma, Fauci & Pro-Vaccine Movement
Your Wikipedia and all your stupid marxist propaganda is fake, yep!
xxx 5 hours ago
Why is the video doctored right at the end to make Fauci say a damning sentence. You can see his head jerk to new positions
as they piece together bits of video.
That fake ending just negated all credibility for the video.
Take a look at the original video where he told that (the part of interest is at the very beginning starting at 2:50 and is
ending at 3:40) and you shall see that the meaning (when the parts where he brags about his past and future were removed) of what
he actually have told in that part was not altered in any way - the meaning is exactly the same. Due diligence in these times
is actually quite easy in cases like these, hence you should probably do the same prior to posting
xxx 4 hours ago (Edited)
I have zero tolerance for fake news. It's not up to me. If I spot it, I call it. You just confirmed I was right. It's up to
them to not fake video of a person they are disparaging. There is no way for him to comment about that doctored section at the
end.
Edit: I thank you for doing that research but it shouldn't be up to you either. This is not the time for fake anything.
This imperial college that consults with the CDC and WHO and others should have also looked
at previous forecasts... No one serious should have paid any attention to this Ferguson guy
because his modelling was off by factors.. He has now destroyed hundreds of millions of
lives, cost countries trillions. Mostly only Africa was saved because they have lived
thorough westerners saying they dont know what they are doing and stopped listening. Death
rates at a very few areas that were published were higher but were the same everywhere else.
In fact over the course of the next few years the effects of this will be widely felt as
above average death rates due to the factors. Far above even without anything being done at
all.
In 2009, one of Ferguson's models predicted 65,000 people could die from the Swine Flu
outbreak in the UK -- the final figure was below 500. potential death toll during the 2005
Bird [avian] Flu outbreak. Ferguson estimated 200 million could die. The real number was in
the low hundreds.
The clinical epidemiology tradition cautions that primitive model typically mislead us -- for
instance, by smuggling in unproven assumptions that have not been empirically established in
human populations.
The latter camp has won significant media attention in recent weeks. Bill Gates -- whose
foundation funds the research behind the most visible outbreak model in the United
States, developed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University
of Washington -- worries that COVID-19 might be a "once-in-a-century pandemic."
A notable detractor from this view is Stanford's John Ioannidis, a clinical epidemiologist,
meta-researcher, and reliable skeptic who has openly wondered whether the coronavirus pandemic
might rather be a
"once-in-a-century evidence fiasco." He argues that better data are needed to justify the
drastic measures undertaken to contain the pandemic in the United States and elsewhere.
You might be interested in this little tidbit, Quy. From the CDC . You do "trust" them,
don't you?
Just one question for you. Why didn't we shutdown everything in 1968?
1968 Pandemic (H3N2 virus)
The 1968 pandemic was caused by an influenza A (H3N2) virus comprised of two genes from an
avian influenza A virus, including a new H3 hemagglutinin, but also contained the N2
neuraminidase from the 1957 H2N2 virus. It was first noted in the United States in September
1968. The estimated number of deaths was 1 million worldwide and about 100,000 in the United
States. Most excess deaths were in people 65 years and older. The H3N2 virus continues to
circulate worldwide as a seasonal influenza A virus. Seasonal H3N2 viruses, which are
associated with severe illness in older people, undergo regular antigenic drift .
"The estimated number of deaths was 1 million worldwide and about 100,000 in the United
States."
Reading some of the other comments, I see many recognize the incredible specificity involved
here in outcomes, treatment, etc. Lockdown is an indirect way to impact those variables but
locking down without specific actions to shield the vulnerable will yield no better results
than no lockdown or the sweden approach. A sweden approach that does protect those vulnerable
is likely more effective than a lockdown that does not.
NYC has nursing homes that are 700 and more persons. Large nursing homes should be banned
if we want to stop this sort of thing in the future. Residents of such facilities should be
moved to smaller temporary housing. NY State allowed persons who tested positive for Covid to
go back to nursing homes -- disaster. Employees of such facilities and visitors would ideally
be tested. Employees of such facilities should not be taking the NYC subway to get to work as
Subways are major transmission points. Nosocomial infections were a big part of the problem
in NYC as well. We needed separate facilities for suspected covid patients. 88.1% of those on
mechanical ventilation in NYC (according to a JAMA study) died. That's junk medicine and it
was implemented in part out of fear of spreading and probably for financial gain....ick.
There are a lot of things that could and should be done but we don't talk about that
because it doesn't fit the media narrative of fear, panic, fear, lockdown, lockdown, lockdown
or bust.
The media has done us and the elderly a great disservice......again
When
the CIA wanted to circumvent possible Chinese bugging of its offices in Beijing in the 1980s,
it came up with a voice protector or "hush phone," essentially two masks with tubes running
between them. It worked, but no one would use it. George Shultz said he felt "ludicrous"
wearing something that made him look "like Siamese-twin elephants joined at the trunk." Even
during planning for Reagan's state visit in 1984 when secrecy was essential, staff in Beijing
simply refused to use a device that made them sound like Donald Duck.
And good for them. There were logistical reasons to reject the hush phone, like the
impossibility of more than two people talking to each other at a time, but there is also
something creditable about whatever part of Secretary Shultz said: I am a grown man, and I have
some dignity.
Everyone is wondering what life will look like at the end of the month. Lockdown
bitter-enders insist that the return to normal will not be like flipping a light switch, to
borrow Maryland governor Larry Hogan's expression. Instead, they say, we will need to spend an
indefinite period in a twilight zone of half-freedom where lockdown orders have been lifted but
aggressive safety measures remain -- a "new normal."
Based on descriptions of the new normal, I am not sure we should allow ourselves to get used
to it. As eager as we are to get the lockdowns over with, we must not let desperation compel us
to put up with things we shouldn't.
Ross Douthat thinks that
long lines outside grocery stores of people waiting to come inside and shop "may become a
permanent feature of the semi-normal landscape." That's absurd, and, like the hush phone, there
are both good reasons and gut reasons why.
One-way aisles and occupancy caps don't do much to stop the spread of disease considering
how little transmission takes place between shoppers who pass like ships in the night. Also,
queuing down the block for groceries is just too grimly Soviet.
Social distancing measures should remain in place even after schools and businesses reopen,
many say. But enforced by whom? Continuing to make cops responsible for enforcing a
six-feet-apart rule will only lead to more viral videos like this week's from New
York, which depicts the violent conclusion of what started as a social distancing stop.
The New York City Police Benevolent Association says officers shouldn't be
enforcing "vague guidelines and mixed messages." It wants the mayor to "get cops out of the
social distancing enforcement business altogether." The PBA is right. The alternative is for
Americans to get accustomed to being hustled along by police for the crime of picnicking on the
grass or reading a book on a park bench, which would be an ominous thing to start shrugging
off.
Australia is making its new normal conditional upon citizens downloading a location-tracking
app modeled on Singapore's. The prime minister insists the app is voluntary, but business
groups like Restaurant and Catering Australia are already considering requiring diners and
shoppers to download the app before being served.
The government says its goal is for 40 percent of the population to download the app, a
target still more than halfway off after its first week in the app store. "Downloading the
COVIDSafe app is the major obstacle now between us freeing up a lot of these restrictions in a
cautious way," Prime Minister Scott Morrison said, not disguising the ultimatum.
The last time the Australian government requested emergency permission to track its
citizens' phones was the metadata retention law of 2015. As with COVIDSafe, repeated assurances
were made about privacy and civil liberties. Later it was revealed that users' metadata had
been used by local city councils in order to track down litterbugs and other mundane offenders
who had nothing to do with the law's original justification, counter-terrorism.
The United States is not Singapore, and there are certain restrictions on our liberty that
we won't tolerate. A government location-tracking app should be one of them. Such excessive
post-lockout safety measures are not needed to deal with a disease that is no longer in danger
of overloading our hospital capacity. More importantly, Americans' gut aversion to being
overpoliced is worth preserving. Ordinary aspects of pre-coronavirus life should not be
sacrificed in order to give those still attached to the lockdowns a psychological on-ramp or a
face-saving pretense that their doomsday forecasts were more accurate than they were.
Except for open plan offices. Ban those permanently, for the good of the nation's
health.
It is interesting if perhaps concerning that of all the comments on the Peter Turchin article
"A
Tale of Two Countries [Denmark and Sweden]" , the one comment B chose to zero in on and
highlight for his post is one by Richard England who refers to the lockdown of fiat and the
lockdown of fear but provides no link to any information (such as polls, questionnaires or
surveys) that would support his argument of most Swedes complying with recommendations and
regulations voluntarily out of fear.
Turchin started his comparison of the progress of COVID-19 in Denmark and Sweden expecting
that the death rates in Denmark compared to those in Sweden would support his belief that a
lockdown was necessary. He did not expect to see that by 1 May 2020, the trends in new cases,
transmission rates and even death rates in Sweden were actually comparing well with
equivalent data in Denmark.
One commenter on the Turchin article, Ernst Nilsson, says that 80% of COVID-19 deaths in
Sweden were of people aged 70+ years and that Swedish authorities have acknowledged that
people in aged care homes and similar facilities had not been well protected.
Karl Kling points out that in Sweden, aged care facilities are the responsibility of
municipal governments that have been cutting labour costs in those places by using workers,
many of them on hourly contracts and / or not being fluent Swedish speakers. It is likely
then that these workers have been spreading the virus among the people they care for because
they are working long hours to make ends meet, are being exposed themselves to the virus more
than they would be if they were working regular hours on their shifts and were being paid
adequately, and do not have a good understanding of what they should be doing to avoid being
infected and spreading the disease in their own languages because Swedish authorities failed
to communicate adequate information about COVID-19 to immigrant communities and foreign
workers.
Other commenters point out that Sweden has a large immigrant population ( Wikipedia
states that the immigrant population and their children make up at least 24% of the total
population; incidentally this means comparisons between Sweden and other Nordic nations,
where the immigrant population and their children are about 15%, of dubious worth) and
sections of this population may be behaving differently in ways that exacerbate COVID-19
incidence and mortality. The Somali community in Sweden is known to be very hard-hit by
COVID-19 due in large part to living in dense and crowded housing in impoverished communities
where access to healthcare, other social services and information about the disease is
poor.
That aged care facilities and immigrant communities have been badly affected by COVID-19
disease is not a consequence of not having a lockdown or shutdown but is rather a consequence
of past Swedish policies in allowing nursing homes and similar institutions to be rundown or
badly managed, and in neglecting other vulnerable groups by not giving them information about
the disease in ways they can access. That immigrants are also working in aged care facilities
helps to circulate the disease among vulnerable groups.
Sweden is a valuable case. I see three categories of measures which can be combined:
- top down centrally managed/enforced
- self organized
- negotiated
The first relies on central planning and as central planning goes, it can be powerful and at
the same time crude and wasteful. The second resembles more the 'free market' approach , it
has the advantage of 'on the terrain' adjustments which can be much smarter than in the
centrally organized case but it does not necessarily work in the desired direction. Much
depends on the feedback mechanisms which are available.
The third is where a group of people is willing to do their sacrifices for the greater
good(or the lesser evil) but they should expect something in return from other groups of
people because it shifts the balance of power.
An example of the difference between 1 and 2 is how masks were handled in Belgium vs
Czechia. Czechia took the more trusting decentralized approach. Belgium followed the WHO and
was more guided by fear that people would do it wrong, with the scarcity and all. But people
perform better if you give them trust and responsibility. Also using masks is a learning
process so now you see in Belgium it takes time to get it going.
The main flaws in thinking about Sweden is that it relied entirely on the second group,
that this second group by itself should be able to fix it all, and that this second group did
not hit the economy hard. But for the cinema owner it does not make a big difference if they
have to close down because nobody is allowed to visit, or because there are only 2 people in
the theater anyway. In the restaurant sector the self organizing approach will have softened
the blow. I read visitors dropped to 1/3.
I think Sweden has used a variety of measures with a variety of results. They flattened
the curve without lockdown. We can learn from them, or to put it differently, steal ideas
from them.
so maybe Japan's strategy was better than the others ... delayed "lockdown" with very low
testing ratio per million resident (even after promising about 20000 tests per day last
April, to this date J-lawmakers blame lack of manpower and preparation for not being able to
reach that objective). we got low numbers ... and reported infections have been declining in
Tokyo.
the "lockdown" is simply a request for people to follow 3密 (san mitsu). people have
explained that Japan can force the people to lockdown. the government does not have the
authority. most people followed the requests ... i don't know if it's because they respected
the request of the gov't or just because of fear.
GW just finished, it is a yearly migration of people from the cities back to their home
towns. or people trying to refresh, go on vacation/travel. i traveled from Kanagawa (where I
live) to Tokyo and was surprised at how empty it was. the trains, train stations, the areas.
locally in Kanagawa, the parks are full of people, under sun shades, kids playing around.
J-media highlighted 2 cases where asymptomatic person died in self isolation in Saitama,
and has now modified the requirements for getting a PCR test. i myself would like to get an
antibody test ... well waiting, that is.
waiting to be able to apply for the 10万円 (100000 thousand yen) being given
by the government.
i am still waiting for my アベノマスク (Abenomask).
distribution is delayed because the masks were soiled/moldy/dirty. a failed stunt which cost
466億円 (466 billion yen).
the best place to buy masks now is in Chinatown ... price is high ... but there is supply
... and there is demand. Sharp (TV/LED maker) is making masks, but has to raffle it off
because of the demand.
Abe-extended the State of Emergency to enf-of-May ... but if they think everything is
clear they can lift the SoE as early as May 15.
I usually don't read The Atlantic , but I was shocked its staff writer George Packer wrote this : "We Are Living in
a Failed State: The coronavirus didn't break America. It revealed what was already broken."
It's a special preview of the June issue, so I don't know how long it'll be at the link. Yes,
the title foretells the content!
PIF GADGET comics magazine(a famous French comics anthology magazine for children produced by
the French communist party) predicted the corona virus epidemic back in one of its January
1979 issues, not sure which, because they came out weekly. It was in Doctor Justice series,
about a doctor named Benjamin Justice who travels around the world helping poor nations. It
even had a drawing of a corona virus. Interesting.
Back in the 1970s, growing in a communist country, we were repeatedly warned that
Americans want to wage bio war against the communists countries using viruses and bacteria.
We were told they will try to spread the bio weapons around. And here we are, 2020. Seems the
communists KNEW.
Not yet. Uncle Sam still has a near-monopoly on violence. But civilians with 400 million
guns (really, more guns than people) might have something to say about that in the near
future. Meanwhile, sheriffs in Arizona have announced that they will not arrest or fine
people who violate the governor's virus diktats. Police always have discretion to charge or
ignore any crime, but this is a direct challenge to the governor.
If an individual directly challenges the police, over anything at all, they will be
abruptly dealt with. Failure to Obey is the second worst crime, right next to killing a cop.
So what can a governor do, call out the National Guard against the sheriffs? That would be a
big deal. But he can't let a direct challenge to his authority go unanswered. That is
unthinkable in a rigid hierarchy.
We have little experience in taking such measures. The model builders do not know how much
each of those restrictions will contribute to the lowering of the peak. They have to estimate
those parameters. Until this month it was not even clear if children could get infected or were
infectious. Arguing for closing schools without knowing that is quite difficult.
Clinical epidemiologists, who mostly work on randomized trials which produce hard data,
are often critical of the model builders. They dislike the many assumptions that go into
modeling and demand more hard data. Stanford's professor John Ioannidis, who ran the
Santa Clara antibody study , is one of them. He is somewhat right. All models are wrong,
but some are useful. A recent Boston Review piece looks at the
differences between the two tribes of epidemiologists. It finds that we need both.
When the politicians take measures they are only in part based on the predictions the
modelers made. They also have to look at economic outcomes, at other security issues and they
have to take public opinion into account. Quite strict measures were taken in many western
countries. They worked well in some of them. Germany has hardly any 'excess death' from
Covid-19. Other countries, like Britain, acted too late or not to a sufficient degree and had
to pay the price for that.
As the epidemic now starts to recede a bit there is quite a lot of criticism of the lockdown
in Germany. 'The models were wrong,' some people claim. 'The lockdown measures were
unnecessary.' Then follow demands for the immediate lifting of most restrictions.
"There is no glory in prevention" is the frustrating aspects in the life of an
epidemiologist. If they do their job too well everyone will bash them.
A month ago Max Abrams saw this development coming and commented :
A month ago Max
Abrams saw this development coming and commented :
Models make assumption of how much people will social distance.
Based on this assumption model predicts virus cases.
More social distancing is practiced than assumed.
Model over-predicts virus cases.
Idiots say models are wrong so we don't need social distance.
Others point to Sweden and claim that its decision to let the epidemic burn without much
intervention was a much better way than to go for lockdowns. But the evidence for that
isn't there
. The numbers show a different picture:
Sweden in fact had the very same problems with its medical systems that some other countries
also had. It had to ration ICU beds by denying them to people above a certain age. Its economy
was hit as bad
as other ones :
The effect of virus-fighting efforts on the Swedish economy has been devastating. A very
large number of small businesses have collapsed. All but essential industries closed down
almost immediately and many face bankruptcy. People have been told to refrain from all
non-essential travel. Virtually all air travel has been suspended. Unemployment figures are
soaring. The opposition parties deem government counter-measures to be too little too
late.
...
Contrary to impressions created in American media, Sweden's approach to handling the pandemic
has not been "relaxed," but essentially the same as in other Western countries. This country
of 10 million has been at least as preoccupied with the pandemic as other countries. Whether
its approach has been as efficient remains to be seen. What may stand out as exceptional in
the end is Sweden's glaring lack of preparedness for a pandemic, especially for protecting
its elderly, and that the dead are disproportionately recent immigrants.
While Sweden may not have ordered everyone into a total lockdown the people have largely
done that by themselves simply out fo fear.
As a comment by one Richard England here (May 6, 2020 at
3:40am) describes that effect:
There are two kinds of lock-down, lock-down by fiat and lock-down by fear (or for that
matter, self-preservation). The importance of lock-down by fear explains why Sweden has not
done as badly as would be expected. Both forms of lock-down are economically destructive.
Lock-down by fiat is usually either too slow or too incomplete to be much different from
lock-down by fear, and both are more than enough to knock over a weak economy. Fear
dissipates, and the economic life resumes more quickly where the disease has been essentially
eliminated.
The effect is also captured in this graph by the German equivalent to the CDC, the Robert
Koch Institute. It shows the replication factor R of the epidemic in Germany and three points
in time where official lockdown measures were taken.
The replication factor of the disease in Germany was already decreasing in mid March before
the more severe measures were ordered. R was below 1 even before March 23 when the government
ordered the lockdown.
The simple reason for that is the people heard the news and watched TV. The pictures and
death numbers from Italy in late February were quite brutal. When herd animals sense that an
epidemic is taken place within their herd they distance themselves from each other. Humans
behave similarly. As in Sweden many people in Germany went into some kind of lockdown and
practiced social distancing even before it was ordered.
Some now claim that the RKI graph shows that the measures were not necessary. They are
wrong. The data was not known when the measures were taken. The first of the simulations shown
in the graph was done on April 1. In late March the R seemed to go again above 1 which meant
that the epidemic was again expanding. Only the lockdown measures taken on March 23 pressed R
below 1 and led to a slow decrease of new daily cases.
Germany is now slowly coming out of its lockdown. The U.S. is doing this too but at a point
of the epidemic where it is way too early. There are economic reasons to do so but the early
lifting of lockdown measures will likely cost the U.S. many human lives.
Fear will help to overrule that overhasty political decision. The news will continue to
report new mass outbreaks in this or that part of the country. The fear will therefore also
continue and the people will keep distancing themselves from each other. How much that will
help to slow down the epidemic is difficult to estimate.
There is now some evidence that the summer will bring some relief from the onslaught of bad
news. A study with data from 166 countries and published in Science of The Total
Environmentfinds :
A 1 °C increase in temperature was associated with a 3.08% (95% CI: 1.53%, 4.63%)
reduction in daily new cases and a 1.19% (95% CI: 0.44%, 1.95%) reduction in daily new
deaths, whereas a 1% increase in relative humidity was associated with a 0.85% (95% CI:
0.51%, 1.19%) reduction in daily new cases and a 0.51% (95% CI: 0.34%, 0.67%) reduction in
daily new deaths. The results remained robust when different lag structures and the
sensitivity analysis were used. These findings provide preliminary evidence that the COVID-19
pandemic may be partially suppressed with temperature and humidity increases. However, active
measures must be taken to control the source of infection, block transmission and prevent
further spread of COVID-19.
A hot and wet summer is likely to lower the number of new Covid-19 cases. But after the
summer come fall and winter during which we are likely to see a new peak. The fear will be
back, social distances will again be practiced and the economic damage will further
increase.
We had the chance to do otherwise. China gave us time to take the right measures. It has,
like Hong Kong, Vietnam, South Korea and New Zealand, practically eradicated the disease within
its boarders. It now has an advantage that will be difficult to beat.
Posted by b on May 6, 2020 at 18:57 UTC | Permalink
"The importance of lock-down by fear explains why Sweden has not done as badly as would be
expected. Both forms of lock-down are economically destructive."
The difference being that where the government plans and controls the lockdown it can
mitigate many of the economic consequences by, for example, ensuring that nobody runs out of
money to buy essentials, subsidising prices in agriculture and buying surpluses arising from
lower demand, and various other measures, including rationing, which will ensure that the
'lockdown' does not lead to the deaths of anything except marginal businesses.
Many and sincere thanks, b, for these thoughtful and prescient posts. Yours has been a
rare voice of sanity and social responsibility in this pandemic. It is to be hoped that even
those who disagree with your conclusions recognise the honest and agonising analysis behind
them.
Regarding the imposed versus fear lockdown: Spain had (has) an imposed lockdown, but from the
first day the new PSOE/Podemos government announced unprecedente measures to prevent
evictions, layoffs, and provide income support that would help working people, including the
irregular "gig economy" types that usually fall through the cracks of many such efforts. Big
diference from 2007_8. The battle is now with the EU. We Will see if the Dutch and
Germán bankers Will pull their heads out of their collective asses, or take the while
EU down.
One really needs to take a closer, deeper look at Sweden and most every place. The lockdown
vs. not lockdown mentality is overly simplistic and inaccurate.
Sweden has a high level of obesity (21%) and 44% of Swedes are overweight. Norway is
similar but Denmark has 9.5% obesity. Sweden has a larger immigrant (% pop) than Norway and
probably than Denmark. Immigrant population in Sweden did not seem to listen to the measures
sweden took. Nearly 50% (maybe more now)of the deceased in Sweden are from nursing homes and
Sweden's nursing homes are on average bigger (200 plus persons) compared to those in Norway
(about 45 people). The Swedes failed to take actions to protect those nursing homes until it
was too late and 1/3 had infections. Its worth pointing out that immigrants are over
represented among employees of said institutions too.
The over simplification is a tool lockdown advocates are using to ignore the basic
reality. Deaths are ultimately about percent of vulnerable in the population (elderly mostly)
and success in protecting them from the Virus. The virus yields asymptomatic to mild results
in 95% of more of the population so its really all about the vulnerable population. If you
want a meaningful chart, then you need to chart deaths vs over 65 population and vs persons
with comorbidities.
NY/NJ shut down and still had a lot more deaths per capita than Sweden. NY/NJ failed in
the same way Sweden failed. They did not protect the vulnerable.
When I was in Sweden last summer, I was perplexed how unhealthy many Swedes look. The picture
in Denmark was completely different. Curiously, the Covid-19 incidence rates in Denmark,
Norway and Sweden mostly mirror my (superficial and subjective) impression of the health of
the citizens of these countries. Lots of obesity in Sweden, lots of cyclists in Denmark.
By April, the country had changed. A virus that had gained footing overseas had spread like
wildfire in major cities, forcing bars and restaurants to shutter their doors. The long days at
the office were gone. Economic stability had disappeared. At night, the news organizations
displayed images of corpses wrapped in white bags being loaded into refrigerated trucks in the
once-busy streets of New York City. They showed video footage of people in biohazard suits
placing bodies into a mass grave on
Hart Island . The gears in the clock were moving at a fast pace in high-density parts of
the country: alive this month and dead the next. By May, those who resided outside of the
coronavirus hot zones though, who didn't have to see the deadly virus's grim threats on a daily
basis, yearned for their old ways of living.
I can't imagine that the lockdown will last much longer then end of May. A month, perhaps, to
enable governments to row back and gradually feed the change of planned course through the
media.
Neil Ferguson is the chief hack with an unbroken record of failure in his epidemiological
projections (and therefore always failing upward, as is typical of the system's most useful
propagandists), whose prescriptions have been instrumental in pushing the lockdown ideology
and program.
Now we learn that he himself doesn't believe in his own lies, as he has felt free to flout
the same restrictions he has insisted must become the totalitarian "new normal".
"Professor Neil Ferguson, high priest of liberal hospital management and inventor of the
generalized containment against Covid-19. Professor Ferguson is still the European reference
for epidemic modelling.
- Yet it was he who, in 2001, convinced Prime Minister Tony Blair to have 6 million cattle
slaughtered to stop the foot-and-mouth epidemic (a decision that cost 10 billion pounds and
is now considered an aberration).
- In 2002, he calculated that mad cow disease would kill about 50,000 British people and
another 150,000 when transmitted to sheep. There were actually 177.
- In 2005, he predicted that bird flu would kill 65,000 Britons. There were a total of
457."
His Corona terror-mongering will become known as his ultimate failure and lie.
Update (1045ET): In video of Trump's Tuesday morning scrum with reporters, the president can
be heard telling a reporter that he is allowing Dr. Fauci to testify before the Senate - and
not the House - because the House is "a set up".
REPORTER: Why won't you let Fauci testify before the House?
TRUMP: "Because the House is a set up. The House is a bunch of Trump haters ... they,
frankly, want our situation to be unsuccessful, which means death." pic.twitter.com/G3G5OoV5IV
And Fauci has already been awarded the dunce cap with his 1980s assertion that HIV was going
kill us all. So I guess for his most recent action he gets the dunce cap with slide rule
cluster.
"The project was run by EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit research group, under the
direction of President Peter Daszak, an expert on disease ecology. NIH canceled the project
just this past Friday, April 24th, Politico reported. Daszak did not immediately respond to
Newsweek requests for comment."
These models are nothing more than curve fitting tools that have limited predictive value.
Basically the models are derived from Neil Ferguson and his modelling group at Imperial
College, in addition to being backed by WHO, receive millions from the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation.
Ferguson was the source of the "prediction" that 2.2 million Americans would likely die if
immediate lockdown of the US economy did not occur. Based on the Ferguson model, Dr Anthony
Fauci of NIAID confronted President Trump and supposedly pressured him to declare a national
health emergency. Much as in the UK, once the damage to the economy , Ferguson's model later
drastically lowered the US fatality estimates to between 100,000 to 200,000 deaths which has
since been reduced further.
Ferguson and his Imperial College modelers have a notorious track record for predicting
dire consequences of diseases. In 2002 Ferguson predicted that up to 50,000 people in UK
would die from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, "mad cow disease", possibly to 150,000 if
the epidemic expanded to include sheep. A total of 178 people were officially registered dead
from vCJD. In 2005, Ferguson claimed that up to 200 million (!) people worldwide would be
killed by bird-flu or H5N1. By early 2006, the WHO had only linked 78 deaths to the virus.
Then in 2009 Ferguson's group at Imperial College advised the government that swine flu or
H1N1 would probably kill 65,000 people in the UK. In the end, swine flu claimed the lives of
457 people.
As for China. They need a Fake Cold War. Have to give people an external enemy so people
wont figure out who the real enemy is. To the extent China was involved it was as an equal
partner.
I was on the ground in the US for less than 36 hours, but saw enough to be alarmed. If I
hadn't forcefully volunteered that I had just come from living in China, I don't think
anyone would have checked me for fever before entering the US.
Once I declared myself, I was escorted to a "CDC line" for a cursory temperature check
(with a large group of Mormon missionaries returning from Europe), given a Centres for
Disease Control and Prevention flier about Covid-19 symptoms and asked to stay home and
minimise my trips outside for 14 days.
...
Finally, after we promised not to leave our flat, our passports were returned to us, and
at 4.03am, some 16 hours after landing, we were home. That morning, a young woman in a
hazmat suit knocked on our door and took our temperatures at 10am. She returned at 3pm to
take our temperatures again.
This routine was repeated for 14 days before we would be permitted to circulate in the
general Shanghai population. We chatted occasionally with our temperature takers (they were
a rotating cast of 20-something women). Initially, a man would accompany them to film the
temperature reading, but by the final few days the women came alone.
A few days after our return, we discovered that authorities had placed a sensor on our
door. And more than a week after the start of our quarantine, we received a note informing
us we were not to open our door more than five times a day.
There's a lot more on the epic journey to pass through Chinese airport/immigration/nCOV
control procedures, but just this last bit makes it clear what the difference is.
Has anyone out there seen or heard of any nCOV quarantined people in the US even being
checked on once to see if they are maintaining quarantine? Much less twice a day for 14 days
by a live person, plus a sensor on the door?
Note that this is a much easier setup than contact tracing.
Thanks for this very helpful tracing of US propaganda.
Those projections are very suspect, especially Deaths Per Day, where the model is way off
the mark for Past data on deaths per day! Any decent model would at least account for the
past data, but that one predicted a fifth of the deaths, and shows the rate dramatically
increasing when reported deaths are slowly decreasing.
In the US, some states (Guam, Hawaii, Vermont) have suppressed the virus spread very well,
some (Florida, Washington state) have a slow decline in new cases, and just a few
(Massachusetts, Virginia others) are still increasing in new cases per day. Fortunately, the
rate is increasing in the District of Corruption, but not fast enough to reduce the
corruption much.
"The basis of reassuring the public about re-entry is repeating the facts about the threat
and who it targets . By now, studies from Europe
and the U.S
. all suggest that the overall fatality rate is far lower than early estimates. And we know who
to protect, because this disease – by the evidence – is not equally dangerous
across the population. In Michigan's Oakland County , 75 percent of deaths were in
those over 70 years old; 91 percent were in people over 60, similar to what was noted in
New York . And younger, healthier people have virtually zero risk of death and little
risk of serious disease; as I have noted before, under one percent of New York City's
hospitalizations have
been patients under 18 years of age, and less than one percent of deaths at any age
are in the absence of
underlying conditions.
Here are specific and logical steps to end the lockdown and safely restore normal life:
First , let's finally focus on protection for the most vulnerable -- that means nursing home
patients, who are already living under controlled access. This would include strictly
regulating all who enter and care for nursing home members by requiring testing and protective
masks for all who interact with these highly vulnerable people. Specifically, nursing home
workers should be tested for COVID-19 antibodies, and if negative, for virus to exclude
infection, to ensure safety of senior residents. No COVID-19-positive patient can resume
residence until definitively cleared by testing.
We should continue to inform the public about what they have already successfully learned
regarding the at-risk group. That means issuing rational guidelines advising the highest
standards of hygiene and appropriate social distancing while interacting with elderly friends
and family members at risk, including those with diabetes, obesity and other chronic
conditions.
Second , those with mild symptoms of the illness should strictly self-isolate for two weeks.
It's not urgent to test them -- simply assume they have the infection. That includes
confinement at home, having the highest concern for sanitization and wearing protective masks
when others in their homes enter the same room." Dr. Scott Atlas in The Hill
---------------
It should be mentioned that Dr. John Ioannides, a leading epidemiologist at Stanford agrees
with Dr. Atlas.
I saw Atlas on a news program a day or so ago. The anchor looked frightened by what Atlas
was saying. This is understandable. The COVID panic is now so deeply embedded and pervasive
that to question the rationale for the shut-down of the economy is equivalent to heresy in a
theocratic state.
IMO the road back economically is going to be slow and difficult. I hope I am wrong. pl
I hope you are wrong, too. I am tired of the drama and hysteria.
Still, I do want the investigations into China's culpability for the
result of their "accident" or of their planned upheaval of the rest of the world.
I just want to trust some designated "expert" to tell us when when we can put away the
masks and can take up hugging our friends and shaking hands while smiling and meeting new
acquaintances. What is a church service without that and all the stories of Christs care and
concern for the "untouchables" of the world?
Seems the CCP's MSS's think-tank CICR compiled an Intelligence Report of their own warning
of possible armed conflict with U.S..
IMO it's hoped that our IC will realize that this virus doesn't jump ship into the human
sphere on its own naturally without 'human tweaking in a lab' which then provides a bridge
from which the virus could go from bats to the human sphere. And why would the CCP/MSS play
such a dangerous game? -- Bio-weapons R&D.
There can be little doubt that the fascist/socialist/anti-Trump elements in this country have
seized upon the presence of the virus to attempt to destroy Trump's chances in November and
to bring about greater state control of citizens. This immediately after the lame impeachment
plot failed to remove Trump; which was right after the lame Russian collusion plot failed to
remove Trump.
I don't think it's paranoid to consider that China released the virus on the US at a time
when President Trump is engaging in a major trade war with the Chinese, as a tactic in
fighting that war.
The Ionides/Atlas clinical perspective has been known to be correct - based on data -
since March, yet the Democrat controlled states continue to double down on state control of
their populations and destruction of their economies.
The Left has become a collection of kamikazes. The elites can ride this out. They have
money. They are hoping that when the economy is in ashes, all of the starving little people
will come into their open arms.
In 1968 another Asian virus, known as the Hong Kong flu, arrived in the US. It began
killing Americans noticeably in 1969. As this was occurring, the Woodstock music festival was
planned. The festival went off with now famous record crowd numbers during the peak of the
virus. No one seemed to care. That virus ultimately killed 100,000 Americans (not Woodstock
attendees); more than covid, even if you believe the artificially inflated covid figures.
That was at a time when the population of the US was far less. So a far greater % died than
covid.
We've been here before folks. It's the reaction that is different this time. The reaction
is driven by internal and external political objectives of massive importance for our future
as a free society.
Free people need to be able to make these decisions on their own. Give them clear
information and let them decide their next move. Keep the government "experts" out of the
decision making process. I believe that as the weather improves and the economic hardship
increases, Americans will turn on the fascist/socialist elites and take their lives back. The
vulnerable and the cowards will self-isolate. I further believe Americans will do what they
need to to get the economy going again, buying American made only, patronizing small
businesses beyond what they normally would and voting for pro-American candidates (i.e. the
Democrats lose big time).
What have we done every flu season that has resulted in very similar numbers and
population groups affected. How, in fact, is this one materially different.
Mnuchin said today that it is too early to say whether international travel will open back up
before the end of the year . Coincidentally, I also came across a Twitter poll of
15,000 people with the the following question & results:
"Hypothetically, if everything opens up tomorrow when would you fly again?"
- Immediately 25%
- 2-3 months 20%
- 3-6 months 26%
- 1 year or more 29%
Hardly scientific and I've no idea of the demographic or geographic spread of respondents,
but it seems pretty clear many people remain fearful.
The Democrat-media hysteria HAS been deeply ingrained.
The mass of people have - not surprisingly - turned out to be lambs (baby sheep).
Each person is responsible for managing their own life - which includes risk.
Unfortunately, the population of lambs has been trained over the years to look for mommy
government to manage their risk - mandatory seat belt laws come to mind.
Ben Franklin said it succinctly:
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve
neither Liberty nor Safety."
There is widespread criticism of Ioannides two Covid studies, including the use of an
unapproved antibody tests which is known to give false positives; statistical flaws, and
recruiting volunteers for the sampling via Facebook, as well as the wife of a study co-author
to call and recruit parents from her kids school.
Here is an excerpt from an article on the controversy.
""My quick take is that something really odd is going on with Ioannidis," wrote Alexander
Rubinsteyn, a geneticist and computational biologist at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, in an email to Undark. Rubinsteyn suggested that Ioannidis may simply be "so
attached to being the iconoclast that defies conventional wisdom that he's unintentionally
doing horrible science."
He added: "Pretty much no one with statistical acumen believes these
studies.""https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/23/coronavirus-antibody-studies-california-stanford
In areas where the health system is not under stress this makes perfect sense. I would give
the hugging, handshaking and church services a miss and maintain the social distancing at
work and when out of the house as far as is practical. It needs to be done with lots of
testing, contact tracing and case isolation. Knowledge and common sense on everyone's part
will work. Limited local shutdown may be needed if cases start climbing in some areas.
Our restaurants open today in most of Florida. In spite of needing our hair attended to, we
will eat out both lunch and dinner. Sadly, some of our restaurants are closing for good. My
wife tells me that local Facebook is about evenly divided about going out now. I don't get it
as these folks have been gathering in the supermarkets the whole time.
"I just want to trust some designated 'expert' to tell us when when we can put away the
masks and can take up hugging our friends and shaking hands while smiling and meeting new
acquaintances. What is a church service without that and all the stories of Christs care and
concern for the 'untouchables' of the world?"
I think that "expert" you seek is going to have to be the person you see in the mirror
every morning. The "designated experts" have no interest in encouraging you to go back to
living a life you love. As Eric Newhill stated, it's going to be up to free-thinking adults
to make those decisions for themselves. If you expect or hope for "experts" to protect you
from yourself, then you have too much faith in "experts" and in government. Take sensible
precautions as they relate to your own risk demographic and respect other people making those
choices for themselves. Otherwise let's all get on living like Americans.
Even in blissful 'pre rona' December the Fed's repo market had been sounding the alarms that
a serious bubble recession was coming. Nothing apparently was fixed from the last wall street
megadooshbaggery meltdown. See:
This means that even those who built up real estate equity will have a difficult time
short term liquifying that equity, which means that Chase, Wells Fargo, et al have a lot of
pessimism about the US real estate market, the thing they have made so much money on last few
years, and which they were supposed to have fixed.
well pilgrims ;) not only is the economy enduring sudden searing pandemic pain, it is also
feeling the beginning of a big bubble popping recession, which everybody in the financial
world was already freaking about well before the rona arrived. Perhaps endless Fed QE can
prop up equities markets through November, perhaps, but then it's all bets off into 2021 as
numerous wall street debts scams will have to be deleveraged.
Sir,
In the spirit of fairness, anti-body testing would allow scientists to identify who has the
anti-bodies and then track them to see if they become re-infected and, if so, at what level
of severity. That would shed light on the "herd immunity" theory (i.e. is there such a thing
and, if so, to what extent?).
Otherwise, calls for "universal testing" are just sound bites born of confusion and panic,
at best; another means of violating the rights of Americans at worst (e.g. making people wear
yellow stars, carrying papers that allow them to enjoy full or truncated societal
"privelges").
Widespread antibody testing will show covid-19 is more contagious than a lot of diseases,
but not not near as deadly as most people think. People will see they had it, didn't even
know it and are now immune to it at least in the near term. Fear will be deflated. We will
then have a known large segment of the population known to not capable of further spreading
the virus and a ready supply of antibody serum as an effective treatment for those who do get
infected. That will also diminish fear.
Covid-19 and our response to it is as much a political issue as it is a public health
issue. Trump was going to run on a booming economy. If he wants to get back to that strategy,
he has to banish the fear of the virus. That will get everyone back to work so they can eat
and pay rent, as well as continue to piss away their money on crap they don't need. Our
economy depends on all that. If Trump is smart, he best get to stepping and institute a
nationwide antibody testing program.
And Fauci has already been awarded the dunce cap with his 1980s assertion that HIV was going
kill us all. So I guess for his most recent action he gets the dunce cap with slide rule
cluster.
A cruise passenger interests website offered another informal poll - are you willing to
cruise again: 64% said as much as in the past; 10% said they would cruise even more to help
get the industry back on its feet. Therefore, in this obviously interested sample, 75% want
the cruise industry to start up again. Yesterday. 25% will choose to wait or not cruise
again.
The cruise industry passenger base remains willing and loyal. In fact they are probably
better trained in personal hygiene habits than most having had to deal with noro (aka
tourista ) in the past and a typical URI complaint commonly called" cruise crud" that
was most likely picked up on the air flight to get to the cruise port. The real numbers of
disease and mortality overall within this industry do not support the screaming head llnes
and lurid reporting.
It remains to be seen if one infection makes an individual immune for some time. IMO we
should follow the Atlas/Ioannides formula. I noticed in re-reading "Sharpsburg," that Hunter
McGuire appears therein.
What does an anti-body test do? I just had one last week and awaiting the results - was a
cruise passenger and international air passenger during the month of January in a later
suspected area. (not Asia).
Here is why I did the anti-body test: (Quest Labs - fee service, no RX- 99% accuracy -
drawn blood vial test)
1. Helps substantiate dates and areas of transmission that may not yet be in the data
pool.
2. Tracks the rates of asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic cases occurring among the
"elderly", in order to see if there is an enhanced risk of not in this age group, if there
are no underlying co-morbidities.
3. Adds demographic data specific for the travel industry.
4. Allows possible donation of anti-body serum for research and perhaps mitigation of
those who are affected.
5. Personal peace of mind -been there and done that. Freedom to move about.
6. Provides baseline for duration of immunity; resilience of immunity or data showing
re-infection can be possible.
Primarily it is for data gathering to help stop the hysteria. That was worth the time,
money and blood donation for me. We will never know the true extent of this virus, its
impacts, its initial modeling accuracy until we start plugging facts into the "expert"
hypotheticals.
Taking one for the team is the way I see it. Will I now become a local Typhoid Mary and
our house burned down if this data becomes known? Or will people stop walking out into the
roadway in faux deference to my advanced age as I pass by, from our deliciously virtue
signaling "progressive" population in blue state California.
Am I right or wrong in thinking that when the injected liquidity plus existing cash
exceeds the amount of money that would haven been in the economy at this point then the
currency will begin to inflate?
"Provides baseline for duration of immunity; resilience of immunity or data showing
re-infection can be possible. Primarily it is for data gathering to help stop the hysteria."
Yes
Colonel, you are NOT wrong. The oil business in America is going to take a very long time to
recover. There are complete shutterings of businesses, bankruptcies and more - all while we
were in the middle of a downturn. Personally, I just folded up my tent because my my active
client list went from 21 to zero over this last month (and that includes intl clients).
As the number one buyer of US steel, the oilpatch represents much more than people
realize. We have also been the number one buyer of many other items - where sales have
disappeared as company quietly and reluctantly face the reality of the current induced
glut.
I'm being forced to change livelihoods - interesting for me, as I am short of the age to
get my SS check and too old to employ by most corporate masters....
Yes, I noticed Hunter Holmes when I reread Chancellorsville this time. I knew nothing
about him until you mentioned him a while back. He also founded what is now the VCU Medical
Center and was president of the AMA for a time. There is a statue of him on the State Capitol
grounds, but i haven't seen it yet.
It's likely Fauci's incorrect simply because just as central planners routinely failed when
it came to planning economic outcomes in the 20th century, so does that same central planning
fail now. Fauci once again may be brilliant, but he's no match for a U.S. economy comprised of
hundreds of millions of individuals making infinite informed decisions every second of every
day.
The same applies to Bill Gates. Some believe that his undeniable genius as a businessman
positions him to knowledgeably opine on how we the U.S. and the world can come back from the
virus. Gates has observed that businesses would be troubled with or without the lockdowns,
unemployment would be higher with or without them, so the plan should be to continue them until
we're better situated in terms of a vaccine.
Is Gates right? It's once again difficult to know. For one, his analysis ignores the
"unseen"; as in what would individuals and businesses have done had the response of politicians
to the virus been something like "You're all adults. Be careful."
If so, it's not unreasonable to suggest that Fauci, Gates and other intelligent individuals
would have strongly called for Americans to shelter-in-place, and tens of millions would have
done just that. At the same time, Elon Musk and investors like Michael Burry might have
responded in more intrepid fashion; calling for individuals and businesses to work around a
virus of unknown lethality.
The decision of whether or not to embrace coronamania is not based on statistical analysis
of the specific number of nursing home residents or obese black people that are likely to die.
We are witnessing a mass hysteria. It is collective temporary insanity induced by the media.
The gulf between skeptics and true believers is underlined by personal disposition; those who
are inclined to prioritize personal responsibility, freedom and suspicion of authority are
pushing back against the lockdown, while those who are prone to neuroticism, risk aversion,
safety prioritization and trust in authority are embracing the hysteria. For most people, the
data becomes simply a post-hoc rationalization for a position that was already determined by
their psychological profile. Given the masculine/feminine dichotomy, it has also become a
partisan political issue, which has poisoned any public debate over the merits of the various
claims.
...As a healthy and athletic 35-year-old, I am not at risk for dying. According to the CDC's
own numbers, I have less than a 1 in 1000 chance of dying, even if I get sick enough to go to
the hospital. This is approximately
the same risk I have of dying from drowning or burning to death in a fire. By CDC math, I
am ten times more likely to die in a car crash than I am to die of the coronavirus. For me
personally, the coronavirus falls squarely into the category of "acceptable risks." I believe
that I had a right to make that choice. However, here I sit, locked in my house, because people
like Brad Griffin lobbied for this insane experiment.
This government that Brad Griffin demands we hand over total control of our lives to has
overseen the mass import and distribution of opioid drugs, which are now killing 70,000 people
a year. This government refuses virtually any regulation of the food industry, which leads to
the deaths of 650,000 people every year from heart disease. This government sent thousands of
young Americans to die in Iraq and Afghanistan for the purpose of forwarding the regional goals
of Israel, based on a series of hoaxes. It's very difficult for me to buy the idea that this
government is particularly concerned about my health.
Ezekiel Emmanuel, a dual Democrat political operative and credentialed expert, has been a
prime evangelist for this lockdown. He was at the forefront of changing the narrative from
"prevent the hospitals from being overwhelmed" to "we must continue the lockdown until the
virus is eradicated." He is currently serving as Joe Biden's chief advisor on medical issues.
While developing Barack Obama's healthcare plan, Emmanuel was the core proponent of what became
known as "death panels," a policy that would limit end of life care for the elderly in the name
of prioritizing the greater good of society. And he is now concerned about old people dying of
the flu?
Brad Griffin claimed in his gotcha manifesto that anyone who even dares ask questions about
whether or not it is desirable to surrender all control of our lives to this government, all
the way down to our ability to feed ourselves, is a "libertarian." I assert that even if you
actually believed that this coronavirus is a Biblical plague, that the only possible solution
to it is to lock everyone in their houses (while also letting them gather whenever they want at
supermarkets), including healthy young people whose chance of experiencing complications from
the virus is statistically nonexistent, and you were fine with sacrificing the entire economy,
putting what will probably amount to at least 50% of the population out of work, destroying
virtually all small businesses, creating a massive new homeless population that is going to
number in the millions and vastly inflating the suicide and drug abuse rates – even then,
it would be appropriate to ask if this government is going to take advantage of this
situation.
Brad Griffin's position is that we all just need to shut up and do as we're told.
While claiming that there is no chance whatsoever that the government will exploit this
situation, Brad Griffin also takes the position that this will not collapse the economy. He's
the only person on the entire internet I've seen saying that. The fun part is, whereas we will
never know if we would have had as easy of a time as Sweden if we did as they did and refused
the lockdown, we are going to know very soon whether the government is going to agree to give
us all of our Constitutional rights back and whether or not the economy has collapsed. You will
all be able to come back here and see my position in contrast with Brad Griffin's position, and
decide who was right and who was wrong.
I have no idea why Brad Griffin and the rest of the costumed neo-Nazi community is promoting
a total surrender to the government in the name of safety. Some people might say, "the
COINTELPRO chief should be fired, because this has gotten ridiculous."
I won't say that. I'll just say this: Brad Griffin, you are not my mommy. I already have a
mommy. In fact, we all have mommies. We all love our mommies, but none of us are looking for a
second mommy.
Dunno Andrew. This is not rocket science and we all doesn't have to be Werner Von Einsteins
(sic) to figure it out. Because if nobody is an expert, but the experts, so what?
It's called jujitsu.
IOW are the so called experts self consistent and coherent?
Rather, the WHO/CDC organizations and the IMHE and Imperial College reports are bought and
paid for hirelings of Bill Gates. The same who took how many times and versions before he got
Windows right?
Fauci in 2000 was still calling AIDS a plague threatening the world and likewise the 2009
Swine Flu.
(That something that was transmitted by sticking something in your arm or up the poop chute
was supposed to seriously threaten heterosexuals who weren't drug addicts passed expert peer
review is par for the course.)
Likewise for anybody who has lived through the Asian, Hong Kong, Swine, Bird, Nile River,
Zika, AIDS, Ebola, SARS, MERS etc. epidemics, some herd immunity has been developed regarding
the Chicken Little/Boy Who Cried Wolf fairy tale
So at first it was 2-3 Million – even with mitigation i.e. cower in
place/anti-social distancing etc. – then 100-200 k and now 60-80k which is a bad flu
season. Hmmm.
Neither does "flattening the curve" reduce the overall numbers. It only spreads them out.
So now the hospitals are empty/going broke.
And we're going to empty the jails so the criminals don't get sick there is
room for all the people that don't wear masks.
But what I really want to know is if there really is a mask shortage, how come nobody has
snitched on Antifa and the KKK. It would seem that this is the time for them to come into
their own as the real heros of the debacle. (Nah, cops and robbers is only for kids.)
IOW give me liberty or six feet and a mask blindfold so we'll shut
up/suck it up.
People and governments always invoke the safety and security of the majority when they are
taking away rights for "our own good," just like the Patriot Act did. It's an old
playbook...
There is
science which should be informing decisions. But while claiming a small rally in Denver
will cost lives, or Florida will kill people by opening its beaches, the same voices remain
silent as NYC keeps its subway running 24/7. The public beach versus public transportation
debate came as a new study showed
that NYC's "multitentacled subway system was a major disseminator -- if not the principal
transmission vehicle -- of coronavirus infection," seeding the virus throughout the city.
Without a superspreader like the subway it can be contained locally. It is tragic when the
virus rips through a nursing home or meatpacking plant (it is a virus after all, it will go
viral), but all of those together barely touch a week's body count in New York. Shut down mass
transport.
We can put most people back to work with limited risk; the protesters are right. The virus
kills a very specific patient. About half the
dead are over age 65. Less than one percent of deaths are under age 44. Almost
94 percent of the dead in any age group had serious underlying medical issues (about half
had hypertension and/or were obese, a third had lung problems). The death toll in NY/NJ under
total lockdown: over 27,000. Death toll in much more densely populated Tokyo with "smart"
lockdown: 98.
About
22 percent of New Yorkers already have the virus antibody and thus expected immunity. One
logical implication of this -- that large numbers already have or had the virus, and that it is
harmless to them -- is simply ignored. Quarantine/social distancing should be for those most
vulnerable so we can stop wrecking all of society with cruder measures. Hospitals should
separate patients by age. No need to keep kids from school, especially if that means isolating
them inside a multigenerational household. Let them wear soggy paper masks to class, even tin
foil on their heads, if it makes things easier. Online
classes are lame and
America doesn't need a new generation dumber
than the current one.
The New York-New Jersey area, with roughly half the dead for the entire nation, practices
full-on social distancing while Georgia was one of the last states to implement a weaker
stay-at-home policy. Yet as Georgia re-opens, the NY/NJ death count is over 27,000 . Georgia is 892. NYC
alone continues adding around 500 bodies to the pile every day, even with its bowling alleys
closed.
We judge risk versus gain for every other cause of death. We wear condoms. We watch our
diets. Time to do the same for the virus. As for lockdowns, we may not even be judging them
accurately. Some 22 states have had fewer than 100 deaths. Only 15 states had total deaths for
the entireduration of the crisis higher than NYC's current 500 a day. The
original goal of lockdowns, to buy time for the health care system (and most resources were
never needed due to over-estimates of the viral impact), has passed. If the new goal is Virus
Zero it will never come. If the real goal is to harm Trump we'll have to put up with this
without serious discussion until November.
A Stanford doctor
nails it: "Strictly protect the known vulnerable, self-isolate the mildly sick and open
most workplaces with some prudent large-group precautions. This would allow the essential
socializing to generate immunity among those with minimal risk of serious consequence, while
saving lives, preventing overcrowding of hospitals, and limiting the enormous harms compounded
by continued total isolation."
We are fretting and frittering away our national muscle watching TV about a bigamous tiger
keeper. There are too many who want this isolation to continue indefinitely, a pathetic nation
whose primary industries for its young people are camming and GoFundMe. Politics focuses on
viral deaths, but the Reaper keeps a more accurate tally: deaths from despair, from hunger (two
million new people became food insecure in NYC
since the virus), financial losses (26 million Americans have filed for
unemployment ), mental health issues, and abuse (domestic
murders during the viral months in NYC outstripped the total from 2019). In some ultimate
irony, parents are postponing standard childhood
vaccinations for fear of bringing their kids to medical facilities.
It is the reaction to the pandemic that exhausts us, not the pandemic itself. So when
someone claims it is Money vs. Life they miss the real answer: It's both. It should not be
taboo to discuss this.
This is a classic identification problem, and efficacy depends on two things: false positives
and false negatives.
False positives: Any app will have a precise definition of a contact: let's say
it's less than six feet for more than ten minutes. The false positive rate is the percentage
of contacts that don't result in transmissions. This will be because of several reasons. One,
the app's location and proximity systems -- based on GPS and Bluetooth -- just aren't
accurate enough to capture every contact. Two, the app won't be aware of any extenuating
circumstances, like walls or partitions. And three, not every contact results in
transmission; the disease has some transmission rate that's less than 100% (and I don't know
what that is).
False negatives: This is the rate the app fails to register a contact when an
infection occurs. This also will be because of several reasons. One, errors in the app's
location and proximity systems. Two, transmissions that occur from people who don't have the
app (even Singapore didn't get above a 20% adoption rate for the app). And three, not every
transmission is a result of that precisely defined contact -- the virus sometimes travels
further.
Assume you take the app out grocery shopping with you and it subsequently alerts you of a
contact. What should you do? It's not accurate enough for you to quarantine yourself for two
weeks. And without ubiquitous, cheap, fast, and accurate testing, you can't confirm the app's
diagnosis. So the alert is useless.
Similarly, assume you take the app out grocery shopping and it doesn't alert you of any
contact. Are you in the clear? No, you're not. You actually have no idea if you've been
infected.
The end result is an app that doesn't work. People will post their bad experiences on
social media, and people will read those posts and realize that the app is not to be trusted.
That loss of trust is even worse than having no app at all.
It has nothing to do with privacy concerns. The idea that contact tracing can be done with
an app, and not human health professionals, is just plain dumb.
After WWI, the distinguished British economist Edwin Cannan was asked, somewhat
reproachfully, what he did during the terrible war years. He replied: "I protested." The
present article is a similar protest against the current lockdown policies put into place in
most countries of the Western world to confront the current coronavirus pandemic.
Here in France, where I live and work, President Macron announced on Thursday, March 12,
that all schools and universities would be shut down on the following Monday. On that Monday,
then, he appeared on TV again and announced that the entire population would be confined
starting the very next day. The only exceptions would be "necessary" activities, especially
medical services, energy production, security, and food production and distribution. This
policy response was apparently coordinated with other European governments. Italy, Germany, and
Spain have applied essentially the same measures.
I think that these policies are understandable and well intentioned. Like many other
commentators, I also think that they are wrongheaded, harmful, and potentially disastrous. An
old French proverb says that the way to hell is plastered with good intentions. Unfortunately,
it seems as though the present policies are no exception.
My protest concerns the basic ideas that have motivated these policies. They were clearly
enunciated by President Macron in his TV address of March 12. Here he made three claims that I
found most intriguing.
The first one was that his government was going to apply drastic measures to "save lives"
because the country was "at war" with the COVID-19 virus. He repeatedly used the phrase "we are
at war" ( nous sommes en guerre ) throughout his talk.
Secondly, he insisted right at the very beginning that it was imperative to heed the advice
of "the experts." Monsieur Macron literally said that we all should have to listen to and
follow the advice of the people "who know" -- meaning who know the problem and who know how
best to deal with it.
His third major point was that this emergency situation had revealed how important it was to
enjoy a state-run system of public healthcare. How lucky are we to have such a system and to be
able to rely on it, now, in the heat of the war against the virus! Unsurprisingly, the
president insinuated that this system would be reinforced in the future.
Now, these are not the private ideas of Monsieur Macron. They are shared by all major
governments in the EU and by many governments in other parts of the world. They are also shared
by all major political parties here in France, as well as by President Macron's predecessors.
Therefore, the purpose of the following remarks is not to criticise the president of this
beautiful country, or his government, or any person in particular. The purpose is to criticise
the ideas on which the current policy is based.
I do not have any epidemiological knowledge or expertise. But I do have some acquaintance
with questions of social organisation, and I am also intimately familiar with scientific
research and with the organisation of scientific research. My protest does not concern the
medical assessment of the COVID-19 virus and its propagation. It concerns the public policies
designed to confront this problem.
As far as I can see, these policies are based on one extraordinary claim and two fundamental
errors. I will discuss them in turn.
An Extraordinary Claim
The extraordinary claim is that wartime measures such as confinement and shutdowns of
commercial activity are justified by the objective of "saving lives" that are at risk because
of the burgeoning coronavirus pandemic.
Over here in Europe, we have heard American presidents use such expressions since the 1960s,
as in "the war on poverty" or the "war on drugs" or "the war on terrorism" or more recently
"the war on climate change." Odd language of this sort seemed to be one of America's many
eccentricities. It also did not escape our notice that none of these would-be wars have ever
been won. Despite the great sums of money that the US government has spent to fight them,
despite the new state institutions that were put in place, and despite the great and growing
infringements on the economic and civil liberties of ordinary Americans, the problems
themselves never went away. Quite the opposite; they were perpetuated and aggravated.
Most of the European governments have now joined ranks with the Americans and consider that
they, too, are at war -- with a virus. It is therefore appropriate to insist that this is
metaphorical language. A war is a military conflict designed to protect the state -- and thus
of the very institution that is commonly held to guarantee the lives and liberties of the
citizens -- against malicious attack from an outside power, usually another state. In a war,
the very existence of the state is under attack. Clearly, this is not so in the present
case.
Moreover, there can be no war with a virus, simply because a virus does not act . At most,
therefore, the word "war" can be used here metaphorically. It then serves as a cover and
justification of infringements of the very civil and economic liberties that the state is
supposed to protect.
Now, in the traditional conception, the state is supposed to protect and promote the common
good. Protecting the lives of the citizens might therefore, arguably, justify massive state
interventions. But then the very first question should be: How many lives are at stake?
Government epidemiologists, in their most dire estimates -- whose factual basis is still not
solidly established -- have considered that about 10 percent of the infected persons might be
in need of hospital care and that a large part of those would die. It was also already known by
mid-March that this mortal threat in the great majority of cases concerned very old people, the
average COVID-19 victim being around eighty years of age.
The claim that wartime measures, which threaten the economic livelihood of the great
majority of the population and also the lives of the poorest and most fragile people of the
world economy -- a point on which I will say more below -- are in order to save the lives of a
few, most of whom are close to death anyway, is an extraordinary claim, to say the least.
Without going into any detail, let me just highlight that this contention squarely
contradicts the abortion policies that Western governments have applied since the 1970s. There,
the reasoning was exactly the other way around. The personal liberty and comfort of the women
who wished to abort their children was given priority over the right to lives of these yet
unborn children. According to World Health Organization (WHO) figures, each and every year,
some 40–50 million babies are aborted worldwide. In 2018 alone, more than 224,000 babies
have been aborted in France. However serious the current COVID-19 pandemic may yet become, it
will remain a small fraction of these casualties. Not only have governments neglected to "save
lives" when it comes to abortions. They have in point of fact condoned and funded the killing
of human beings on a massive scale.
They still do so now. Here in France, all hospital services have been run down to free up
capacity for the treatment of COVID-19 victims -- all except one. Abortion services run
unabated and have recently been reinforced by the legal obligation for hospital staff to
provide abortions (previously it was possible for individual doctors to refuse this out of
personal conviction).
The pretention that drastic policies are justified in order to "save lives" also flies into
face of past policy in other areas. In the past, too, it would have been possible to "save
lives" by allocating a greater chunk of the government's budget to state-run hospitals, by
further reducing speed limits on highways, by increasing foreign aid to countries on the brink
of starvation, by outlawing smoking, etc. To be sure, I do not wish to make a case for such
policies. My point is that it has never been the sole or highest goal of government policy to
"save lives" or to extend them as much as possible. In fact, such a policy would be utterly
absurd and impractical, as I will explain further below.
It is difficult to avoid the impression that the "war to save lives" is a farce. The truth
seems to be that the COVID-19 crisis has been used to extend the powers of the state. The
government obtains the power to control and paralyse all other human concerns in the name of
prolonging the lives of a select few. Never has this principle been admitted in a free country.
Few tyrannies have managed to extend their power this far.
The current beneficiaries of these new powers are the elder citizens and a few others. But
make no mistake. It is likely that their destinies only serve as a pretext to justify the
creation of new and unheard-of powers for the state. Once these new powers are firmly
established, there is no reason why the elderly should remain especially dear to those in
power. It must be feared that the very opposite will be the case.
Now, in order to avoid any misunderstanding, I do not claim that the present French
government seeks to grab power over life-and-death decisions, or dictatorial powers to
introduce socialism through the backdoor under the cover of COVID-19. In fact, I cannot imagine
that Monsieur Macron and his government are driven by sinister motivations. I think they have
the best of all intentions. But the point here is precisely that there is a difference between
doing good and wishing to do good.
A Grave Error: Rule by Experts
So far, I have commented on a political issue. But there are also matters of fact. And this
brings me to the two aforementioned errors.
The first fundamental error is to hold that is that the experts know and all the rest of us
should trust them and do as they tell us.
The truth is that even the most brilliant academics and practitioners have in-depth
knowledge only in a very narrow field; that they have no particular expertise when it comes to
devising new practical solutions; and that their professional biases are likely to induce them
into various errors when it comes to solving large-scale social problems such as the current
pandemic. This is patent in my own discipline, economics, but not really different in other
academic fields. Let me explain this in some more detail.
The kind of knowledge that can be acquired by scientific research is just a preliminary to
action. Research gathers facts and yields partial knowledge of causal connections.
Economics tells us, for example, that the size of the money stock is positively related to the
level of unit prices. But this is not the whole picture. Other causes come into play as well.
Real-world decision-making cannot just rely on facts and other bits of partial knowledge. It
must weigh the influence of a multitude of circumstances, not all of which are well known, and
not all of which are directly related to the problem at stake. It must come to balanced
conclusions, sometimes under rapidly changing circumstances.
In this respect, the typical expert is no expert at all . How many laureates of the Nobel
Prize in economics have earned any significant money by investing their savings? How many
virologists or epidemiologists have established and operated a privately run clinic or
laboratory? I would never trust a colleague who had the folly to volunteer to direct a central
planning board. I do not trust an epidemiologist who has the temerity to parade as a COVID-19
czar. I do not believe a government that tells me that it somehow knows "the experts" who know
best how to protect and run an entire country.
Furthermore, consider that scientific knowledge is, at best, a state of the art. The
precious thing about science is not to be seen in the results, which are hardly ever final.
What is crucial is the scientific process , which is a competitive process based
on disagreements about the validity and relevance of different research hypotheses. This
process is especially important when it comes to new problems -- such as a new virus
which spreads in unheard-of ways and has unheard-of effects. It is precisely in such
circumstances, when the stakes are high, that the impartial confrontation and competitive
exploration of different points of view is of paramount importance. Research czars and central
planners are here of no use at all. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
A government which bets the house on one horse and hands the management of a pandemic over
to a single person or institution achieves, at best, only one thing: that all citizens receive
the same treatment. But it thereby slows down the very process which leads to the discovery of
the best treatments, and which makes these treatments rapidly available to the greatest number
of patients.
It is also important to keep in mind that academics -- and this includes epidemiologists
just as much as economists and lawyers -- are typically government employees and that this
colours their approach to any practical problem. They are likely to think that serious
problems, especially large-scale problems touching most or all citizens, should be solved by
state intervention. Many of them are in fact incapable of imagining anything else.
This problem is reinforced through a nefarious selection bias . Indeed, those
academics who opt for an administrative or political career, and who make it into the higher
ranks of the civil service, cannot fail to be convinced that state action is suitable and
necessary to solve the most important problems. Otherwise they would hardly have chosen such
careers, and it would also be virtually out of the question that for them to end up in
leadership positions. A good example among many others is the current WHO director Tedros
Adhanom, who I understand is a former member of a communist [party in Ethiopia] organisation.
The point is not that a WHO director should have no political opinions or that Dr. Adhanom is
an evil or incompetent person. The point is that it is unsurprising that men like him occupy
leadership positions in state-run organisations, and that the approach he envisions to deal
with a pandemic is likely to be coloured by his personal political preconceptions, not only by
medical information and good intentions.
Another Momentous Error: Neglect of Economics
Along with such selection bias comes a peculiar ignorance in regard to the functioning of
complex social orders. This brings me to the second fundamental error that vitiates the
COVID-19 policies. It consists in thinking that civil and economic liberties are some sort of a
consumers' good -- maybe even a luxury good -- that can only be allowed and enjoyed in good
times. When the going gets tough, the government needs to take over and all others should step
back -- into confinement if necessary.
This error is typical for people who have spent too much time among politicians and in
public administrations. The truth is that civil and economic liberty is the most powerful
vehicle to confront virtually any problem. (The notable exception is that liberty does not help
to consolidate political power.) And the reverse side of the same truth is that governments
typically fail whenever they set out to solve social problems, even very ordinary
problems. Think of state-run education or housing projects. I will return to this point further
below.
Because of the mechanics of the political process, governments are liable to overreact to
any problem that is big enough to make it into the news and to become an issue for voters.
Governments will then typically zoom in on this one problem. In their perception, it becomes
the most important of all problems that humanity has to solve. If such a government has no clue
about economics, it is liable to propose one-plan technical solutions that completely neglect
the social and political dimension of what it means to solve a problem. In the present case,
the "experts" have blithely proposed to shut down the entire economy because this is what
"works."
Now, I do not contest that shutdowns are effective in slowing down the transmission speed of
a pandemic. I have no opinion at all on the most suitable way to deal with pandemics or other
problems of virology or medicine. But as an economist I know the crucial importance of the fact
that there is never ever only one single goal in human life. There is always a great and
diverse array of objectives that each of us pursues. The practical problem for each person is
to strike the right balance, most notably to act in the right temporal sequence. Translated to
the level of the economy as a whole, the problem is to allocate the right amounts of time and
material resources to the different objectives.
For most people, protecting their own lives and the lives of their families has a very high
importance. But irrespective of how important this objective is, in practice it cannot be
perfectly achieved. To protect my life, I need food. Thus, I need to work. Thus, I need to
expose myself to all kinds of risks that are associated with leaving the safe space of my house
and encountering nature and other humans. In short, human lives cannot be perfectly
protected, even by those who are ready to subordinate everything else to doing so. It is a
practical impossibility. When it comes to protecting lives, the only question is: How
much am I willing to risk my life and the lives of those who depend on me? And it more than
often turns out that by risking much one protects best. What holds true for the eternal life of
one's soul also holds true for the mundane material life down here on earth: "For whoever
wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it"
(Matt 16:25).
Now, most people do not actually cherish the preservation of their lives, or the extension
of their life spans, as the single highest goals. Smokers, meat eaters, drinkers prefer a
shorter, more joyful life, to a longer life of abstinence. Policemen, soldiers, and many
citizens are more than often driven by the love of their country and by a love of justice. They
would rather die than live under slavery or tyranny. Priests would risk their lives rather than
forsake their commitment. A believer in Christ would rather risk death than apostasy. Sailors
risk their own lives to provide for their families. Medical doctors and nurses are willing to
risk their lives to help patients with infectious diseases. Rugby players and racecar drivers
risk their lives not only for the glory of winning, but also for the excitement and
satisfaction that comes with performing well under danger. Many young men and women gladly
trade the excitement of dance for the risk of catching COVID-19.
All of these people, in one way or another, make material contributions to the livelihood of
all others. Smokers and drinkers ultimately pay for their consumption, not with money (which
serves them only as a tool for exchange with others), but with the goods and services that they
themselves provide to others. If they could not indulge in their consumption, their motivation
to help others would diminish or vanish altogether. If policemen, soldiers, sailors, and nurses
did not have a relatively low risk-aversion, their services would be provided only at much
higher cost, and possibly not at all.
The preferences and activities of all market participants are interdependent. In the market
order, each one helps all others in pursuing their goals, even if these goals may ultimately
contradict his own. The meat eater might be a mechanic who repairs the cars of vegetarians, or
an accountant who does the bookkeeping for a vegetarian NGO. The soldier also protects
pacifists. Among the pacifists may be farmers who grow the food consumed by soldiers, etc.
It is impossible to disentangle all of these connections, and it is not necessary. The point
is that in a market economy the factors determining the production of any economic good are
not just technical . Through exchange, through the division of labour, all production
processes are interrelated. The effectiveness of doctors and nurses and their assistants does
not only depend on the people who directly supply them with the materials that they need.
Indirectly, it also depends on the activities of all other producers who do not have the
slightest thing to do with medical services in hospitals. Even in an emergency situation, it is
therefore necessary to respect the needs and priorities of these others. Locking them away,
locking them down, far from facilitating the operation of hospitals, will eventually come to
haunt the latter as well when supply chains wither and consumer staples start lacking.
Now one might contend that such consequences only obtain in the longer run and that a
government confronted with an emergency situation needs to neglect long-run issues and focus on
the short-run emergency. This sounds reasonable, which is why governments have appealed to
arguments of this sort with great regularity in other areas, most notably to justify
expansionary macroeconomic policies, which also trade off the present against the future.
But the reasoning is flawed in the present case. The root of the error is to consider the
COVID-19 virus an immediate threat to human lives whereas the lockdown policies are not. But
this is not the case. How many people have committed suicide because the lockdown measures have
driven them to depression and insanity? How many did not receive life-saving treatments because
hospital beds and staff were restricted to COVID-19 victims? How many have become victims at
home because of the lockdown-induced aggression of their spouses? How many have lost their
jobs, their companies, their wealth, and will be driven to suicide and aggression in the months
to come? How many people in the poorest countries of the world economy are now driven to
starvation because households and firms in the developed world have cut back demand for their
products?
The inevitable conclusion is that, even in the short run, lockdown policies are costing the
lives of many people who would not otherwise have died. In the short and in the long
run, the current lockdown policy does not serve to "save lives," but to save the lives of
some people at the expense of the lives of others .
Conclusion
The lockdown policies are understandable as a panic reaction of political leaders who want
to do the right thing and who have to make decisions with incomplete information. But upon
reflection -- and certainly in hindsight -- they are not good policy. The lockdowns of the past
month have not been conducive to the common good. Although they have saved the lives of many
people, they have also endangered -- and are still endangering -- the lives and livelihoods of
many others. They have created a new and dangerous political precedent. They have reinforced
the political regime uncertainty -- to use Robert Higgs's felicitous phrase -- that bears on
the choices of individuals, families, communities, and firms in the years to come.
The right thing to do now is to abandon these policies swiftly and entirely. The citizens of
free countries are able to protect themselves. They can act individually and collectively. They
cannot act well when they are locked down. They will greet any honest and competent advice on
what they can and should do, upon which they will proceed responsibly, whether alone or in
coordination with others.
The greatest danger right now is in the perpetuation of the ill-conceived lockdowns , most
notably under the pretext of "managing the transition" or other spurious justifications. Is it
really necessary to walk through the endless list of management failures of government agents?
Is it necessary to remind ourselves that people who have no skin in the game are irresponsible
in the true sense of the word? These would-be managers should have stayed out of the picture
from the very beginning. Instead, so far, they have managed to get everybody else out of the
picture. If they are allowed to go on, they might very well turn the present calamity -- big as
it is -- into a true disaster.
The historical precedent that comes to mind is the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then, too,
the free world was confronted with a painful recession, when the implosion of the stock market
bubble entailed a deflationary meltdown of the financialised economy, along with massive
unemployment. This recession , dire as it was, could have remained short, as all the
previous recessions in the US and elsewhere had been. Instead it was turned into a multiyear
depression , thanks to folly of FDR and his government, who had the pretention of managing
the recovery with government spending, nationalisations, and price controls.
It is not too late. It is never too late to recognise an honest error and correct a wrong
course of action. Let us hope that President Macron, President Trump, and all other people of
goodwill may rapidly come to their senses. COVID-19
Lockdown: A Global Human Experiment *
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your
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This article was
originally published on LewRockwell.com.
[.] "For lack of a 75-cent piece of equipment, we're losing lives and putting more lives
at risk," said Lisa Lattanza, MD, chair of the Department of Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation
at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.
I purchased masks this week that [usually cost] 75 cents per mask that were being sold for
$5.50, $6 on the market. We had to pay it. It's either that or not have the masks," she
said.
Lack of Masks Shows Lack of Value."[.]
That WHO basically fucked up because of Western pressure more than because of China is
obvious. Just look at the most recent idiocy they promoted: masks are useless. China would
never claim that - both because they rely massively on them and because they produce and sell
a lot of them. On the other hand, Western governments who were asleep at the wheel and never
bothered to store or produce facemasks were desperately trying to convince their sheep flock,
I mean, people, that they were all good, managed the crisis as best as anyone could, and that
there wasn't any shortage of masks because these weren't useful to begin with.
Case closed.
And for the eternal record of universal history: China's dictatorship obviously cared more
about its people than self-claimed democratic governments. Let that sink in for a minute.
There's a lot of trash science out there re:Covid- it was founded on trash science.
Maybe next post you could go into the trash science of the fraudulent tests
themselves.
In the mean time this is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what is
going on- one of the most concise pieces on the subject to date:
The WHO makes gratuitous use of appellations such as "world" and "health" but is
actually a semi-private entity lavishly financed by Bill Gates and Big Pharma, which is owned
by a handful of highly inbred oligarchic entities that include Vanguard, BlackRock, Capital
Group, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Northern Trust and State Street, which in turn own each
other in various convoluted ways.
WHO's main function is to scare people into getting vaccinated and accepting expensive
drug regimens (barely half of which do any good at all), thus funneling resources toward Big
Pharma.
The World Health Organization establishes thresholds to determine whether to declare an
influenza epidemic that range between 2.5% and 5%. The novel coronavirus misses the mark by a
thousand-fold, yet the WHO has declared it to be the cause of a global pandemic.
If this seems like an extreme overreaction, that is because this is an extreme
overreaction.
Some conspiratorially-minded people may surmise that this is a conspiracy, but it
isn't. It is yet another blatant attempt to confiscate a chunk of the world's wealth by
requiring it to buy something worthless, just like this same set of medical/financial
interests did with the relatively worthless Tamiflu antiviral medication during the H1N1
swine flu pandemic of 2009-10 which caused a mere 18,036 deaths worldwide. This is a specific
group pursuing its own group interests.
Last month, the state paid Yaron Oren-Pines $47,656 per ventilator for 1,450
ventilators, three times the normal asking price,.....
...Oren-Pines has no known capability or expertise in making ventilators. According
to BuzzFeed, his social media shows expressions of support for Trump since at least
2015.
He has not provided the ventilators, and New York state is attempting to recover the
money, BuzzFeed reported. Oren-Pines would not comment to the online news site.
An unnamed official for the New York state government said the recommendation to deal
with Oren-Pines came directly from the White House coronavirus task force. A spokeswoman
for Vice President Mike Pence, who heads the task force, denied any involvement in making
the recommendation.
The carpetbaggers are always in the lead if not the instigators. Perhaps he was on the
last flight home.
"The U.S. has had sclerotic political leadership during this crisis. The U.S. is being
offered the "choice" between Trump, 73, and Biden, 77. Its other major political players are
Pelosi, 80, and McConnell, 78 .
Trump of course bears most of the blame for the Covid-19 Crisis.
But the Dems and liberal media also share a lot. Trump dithered for many crucial weeks after
China's CCP very belatedly shut down Wuhan on January 23, many weeks after the virus emerged
What were the Dems and liberal media doing during those crucial weeks? From December 18 to
February 5 they culminated three years of wasting the nation's time trying to impeach Trump for
Russia- and Ukraine-gate, as the virus picked up steam.
The Dems and liberal media held "debates" and primaries through March 17 in which Covid-19
was barely mentioned except in the context of Sanders' Medicare for All, focusing instead on
such issues as Bloomberg's NDA's (Biden's opponents are now using a similar #MeToo attack)."
• "The duty of an opposition party is to oppose."
In the face of a moratorium in the US, Dr Anthony Fauci – the director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and currently the leading doctor in the US
Coronavirus Task Force –
outsourced in 2015 the GOF research to China's Wuhan lab and licensed the lab to
continue receiving US government funding.
Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,
recently declared the anti-viral drug remdesivir as a "standard of care" based on unpublished
trials. But the judgment was sketchy and has come under question as it seems that the
government
moved the goalposts to achieve this outcome:
Instead of counting how many people taking the drug were kept alive on ventilators or died,
among other measures, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said it would
judge the drug primarily on a different outcome: how long it took surviving patients to
recover.
Death and other negative outcomes were moved to secondary measure status: They would still
be tracked, but they would no longer be the key measure of remdesivir's performance. The
switch -- which specialists said is unusual in major clinical trials but not unheard of --
was publicly disclosed on the government's clinicaltrials.gov website on April 16 but did not
receive much attention at the time.
...
"It raises a lot of flags, and it requires a lot of answers," Walid F. Gellad, a professor of
health policy and management at the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Medicine, said
in an interview, "especially when people start saying it's become the standard of care, and
all we saw was a news release in a trial with an outcome that was changed two weeks ago. It
really is striking."
A Chinese double blind study of remdesivir, previously published
in Lancet , had come to the conclusion that the drug had no statistically noticeable
influence on the length of recovery and the outcome.
One wonders how much White House influence was used to push that drug. White House influence
may also have been used in this ventilator acquisition that was
paid for but never delivered .
Needless to say, you did not need to be entombed in the infectious disease tunnel at the NIH
for 52 years like Dr. Fauci, a pretentious 79-year old windbag who should have himself been put
in a retirement home years ago, to realize that nursing homes are dense-packed with the frail,
disease-afflicted elderly.
So rather than wipe out $4 trillion of GDP via Lockdown Nation they might have started with
say $25 billion of incremental money for Medicare/Medicaid and the state public health agencies
to zero-in on protecting, isolating and treating the nursing home residents.
Hi B,
I think that we don't know if remdesivir works or not. The trial used patients that were very
sick. The virus had done its job and was no longer replicating exponentially. When you look
at these lungs they are full of exudate and superinfection and the damage is done. I am
surprised that there was any effect and the fact that there was is very encouraging. The time
to give a chain terminator like remdesivir is early in the infection as soon as the patient
presents and you have a positive test. You must hit the virus as it is exponentiating in the
nasopharynx. That is when you have to do the clinical trial then the outcome is admission to
ITU or not, then death or survival-- a really big trial.
I agree it is wrong to change the goal posts and it shouldn't have happened --- but the
clinical trial was flawed from the beginning any way.
In defense of remdesivir it works rather well in feline infectious peritonitis (FIP) which is
caused by a corona virus and is 100% lethal in cats. Remdesivir results in 100% survival with
occasional relapse that is still treatable with the drug. In humans, remdesivir will work
only if you give it early-- it is a powerful delayed chain terminator. So I do think the drug
will protect people that are in the early stages of the disease- so everyone will get it and
it will be huge for Gilead.
I think this remdesivir authorization was a genius move by the Trump administration. So
genial even Dr. Fauci must have immediately understood the catch and endorsed it, as it is
probable the drug must not have any grave collateral effects on the patients (as is the case
with hydroxycloroquine).
First of all, remdesivir helps one of America's biggest pharmaceuticals (Gilead).
Therefore, it will also help American capitalist reproduction.
Second, it will trigger a nationwide placebo effect thanks to widespread optimism and
petit-bourgeois euphoria, thus lowering the death rates (though not the infection rates), and
giving Trump an election boost in crucial areas (by the astroturf protests pattern, important
swing states in the Midwest).
Third, by the time the efficacy of remdesivir is debunked, the Trump administration can
simply state they acted with good will, with the "evidence" available at the time, and gently
apologize. It is the perfect plausible deniability.
Fauci should be fired for promoting this crap research on remdesivir. Changing the primary
endpoint is verboten, plain and simple. The only reason to change the primary endpoint is to
cherry-pick data in order to claim "success". Honest journals, if they still exist, will not
publish this rubbish, as it contravenes their industry's "Committee on Publication Ethics"
guidelines. The control arm of the trial was halted, another giant red flag, so there is
nothing to compare their cherry-picked data against.
This trial is now at the quality level of the rubbish research that "proves" homeopathy
"works". How can Fauci not be totally embarrassed by this? There must be powerful financial
forces behind this. No amount of air freshener can cover up the stink...
Trailer Trash,
FAUCI is now prohibited by Trump admin from testifying before Congress on the COVI debacle.
This criminal co-conspirator of Billy Goats owns the patents on the same HIV genes that just
happened to be found as gain-of-function additions to the genome of the Corona virus. PROVING
it is a lab made bioweapon. W/ Fauci's signature all over creation of this WMD. He should get
the electric chair for genocide.
Judy Mikovits gives compelling evidence that Fauci is a criminal that has the power to
retconn virus research. Her new book "Plague of Corruption" should be a great read, but I've
heard parts are hard to underestand.
Posted by: Frank Barnes | May 2 2020 20:28 utc | 12
Judy Mikovits gives compelling evidence that Fauci is a criminal that has the power to
retconn virus research. Her new book "Plague of Corruption" should be a great read, but
I've heard parts are hard to underestand.
Thanks Frank for the info, that is very noble of you!
Fauci did the same with AIDS drugs. Jumped on the first one regardless. Unfortunately, in
those days, people died and HIV was blamed when it likely was the drug. But, he's got almost
the same situation now. If you are deep with the virus, you'll probably die, so the drug used
is excused.
Watch the vaccine the US finally chooses. They are talking already about pushing it out in
this year, when the whole world knows it needs a year of testing.
So was Fauci an enthusiast of "gain of function" research? If so he is probably a criminal.
Notable quotes:
"... Dr. Fauci Backed Controversial Wuhan Lab With Millions Of U.S. Dollars For Risky Coronavirus Research ..."
"... [just] last year, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the organization led by Dr. Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses. ..."
"... In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research that included some gain-of-function work. The program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million. ..."
IMHO, if this
Newsweek article date April 28, 2020, is credible, then Trump and cohorts should tread
carefully:
Dr. Fauci Backed Controversial Wuhan Lab With Millions Of U.S. Dollars For Risky
Coronavirus Research
[just] last year, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the
organization led by Dr. Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and
other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7
million over six years for research that included some gain-of-function work. The program
followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat
coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million.
Many scientists have criticized gain of function research, which involves manipulating
viruses in the lab to explore their potential for infecting humans, because it creates a
risk of starting a pandemic from accidental release.[.]
Dr. Fauci did not respond to Newsweek's requests for comment. NIH responded with a
statement that said in part: "Most emerging human viruses come from wildlife, and these
represent a significant threat to public health and biosecurity in the US and globally, as
demonstrated by the SARS epidemic of 2002-03, and the current COVID-19 pandemic....
scientific research indicates that there is no evidence that suggests the virus was created
in a laboratory."[.]
NIH gave a non-denial, avoidance denial. Congressmen were on Foxnews attacking the
funding. Where there is a whiff of smoke?
Additional articles on U.S. funding:
NPR FoxNews
NationalInterest cites Pompeo on Foxnews defending the funding. Also, UK papers repeat
U.S. funding.
The pessimistic models predicted millions of deaths if no measures were taken to slow the
disease. In nearly every country measures were taken to slow the disease. But now
conservatives complain that hey, no millions of deaths! So why was it necessary to go into
confinement?
The people who cite the success of social distancing measures as the reason social distancing
measures weren't necessary (or were too rigorous) seem to be using the same logic as certain
anti-vaxxers who use the success of vaccinations to buttress their contention that
vaccinations are unnecessary.
It is always safer to go with the worst projections. It is better to give out a sigh of
relief when they do not come true than a scream of pain when they do.
Martin Kulldorff is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. In his opinion,
general lockdown strategies can reduce transmission and death counts in the short term. But
this strategy cannot be considered successful until lockdowns are removed without the disease
resurging. So the best policy is to go for herd immunity. The sooner that is achieved, the
more lives will be saved in the long term.
Herd immunity arrives after a certain still unknown percentage of the population has
acquired immunity. It will never be achieved unless most people who get the disease and
survive, are immune to it afterwards.
1) We don't know whether getting Covid-19 gives you immunity.
2) Going full fledged for herd immunity quickly, i.e. 60-70% infection rate, means in the
U.S. perhaps 1 million dead. One million dead over the course of a couple of months looks a
lot worse for a society than one million dead over the course of a couple of years.
"Going full fledged for herd immunity quickly, i.e. 60-70% infection rate, means in the U.S.
perhaps 1 million dead."
You just proved the author's point.
Also, of course we don't know for 100% certain that having had the virus gives one
immunity since its a brand new virus, but it would be a very rare virus indeed if that
doesn't turn out to be the case. It is overwhelmingly expected, but we don't know for sure
yet.
" we don't know for 100% certain that having had the virus gives one immunity since its a
brand new virus, but it would be a very rare virus indeed if that doesn't turn out to be the
case."
Wish this were true. Alas. There's no immunity to common cold. And it's caused by corona
viruses, among others. This is a truly nightmarish scenario: a common cold-like lack of
acquired immunity combined with SARS-like disease.
We just don't know yet.
Very rare? The common cold doesn't give long term immunity. It's not rare. It depends on
whether the body decides to hold on to the memory cells that cause immunity. Some diseases
They hang around for decades, some for years, some just a few weeks.
And the cold is caused by coronaviruses: the same family COVID lives in. Also a lot of
people who get this virus don't face heavy symptoms and there's some speculation (just
speculation) that the easier it is for the body to handle a disease the less it cares to
remember it.
So not only is it not rare it's also very much possible for this one.
We don't know. But unfounded statements like "it's very rare." Don't help the
discussion.
Immunity is more than just "you don't get it again". Its also "if you get it again the
symptoms are less" as with colds. Also, colds like all viruses, don't stay the same. They
mutate. But with immunity from a previous form, the symptoms are less with the mutation.
You generally don't get the same cold you had, at least not in any immediate time frame.
There are a myriad different cold viruses out there and they mutate over time, so like the
flu, any immunity is fairly short-lived.
It's about 4 weeks on average last I heard and that's of you get hit with the same stand. The
flu is stronger with a few years but there's a mass of stands and mutations so it's hard to
notice when you ignore one of them.
For example a particularly nasty h1n1 stain hit us in 2009. Most people didn't have an
immunity but many older than 60 did. Seems They had been hit with a similar strand in the
past and thus their bodies still remembered it.
This is also why some vaccines aren't given again after childhood as you basically don't
forget it. Others need to be given again after so many years to be sure of immunity.
Tell me if I got this correct. Herd immunity can be achieved if there is rigorous testing
immediately when a hot spot ocurrs. Plus a vaccine must be unavailable when it breaks out. In
addition there must be sufficient data points that indicates if the virus is contained. None
of which is present now.
And do not forget that in the hotspots now, the health care community is getting close to
the breaking point. None of the models can account for the collapse of the health care
infrastructure.
For those who advocate for reopening the economy, what does their model predict if there
are no workers, no managers, no consumers and the like because they are part of the sick and
dead. We just don't know. So it boils down to determing what level of destruction is
bearable. Is anyone willing to trust our stable genius? God save us.
Before the theory of vaccination was understood or even the idea that microbes cause, or can
cause, infectious disease in human beings, herd immunity had to be acquired by exposure. Had
this not been the case, the human race would not have survived.
Right.
Like the herd immunity that prevented smallpox, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, diptheria,
influenza, etc.
Naturally acquired herd immunity was not enough to prevent recurrent epidemics that we
currently prevent with vaccinations (although anti-vaxxers are trying mightily to rectify
that success).
There is good reason to hope a vaccine will be produced for CORVID-19. However, that is not a
certainty and it might be a year or two before it's safe to use throughout the population.
Since the economy can hardly be left in suspended animation until a vaccine is available,
there will be a period during which the acquistion of herd immunity has to proceed by
default.
This is true but it resulted in a lot of death. This is why disease changed so much of our
history. Entire communities and nations have been changed or fallen due to disease.
That was the world that relied on herd immunity. That's why medicine is deemed so precious
as our entire current way of life is based on no longer relying on pure herd immunity.
Talking as if the old way at all worked just as fine as our modern age is a case of just
enough knowledge to know the terms but not enough to know what it really means.
I know how much we owe to the advance of medical science and I am not suggesting a fatalistic
response to this epidemic is desirable. But until a vaccine is produced for this particular
virus and its mutations, we have no alternative but to accept the risk and carry on.
No one is seriously suggesting that the shutdowns must continue until a vaccine is
produced, so draw the obvious conclusion.
"If you advocate continuing the lockdown until a vaccine is available, you should say
so."
Please explain how you take that away from "...let the experts and their science lead"? We're
in uncharted territory in which tens (possibly hundreds) of thousands of lives are at stake-
the "political decision" to reopen should be based on the best advice of scientists.
The "obvious conclusion" which I referred to, had nothing to do with taking the advice of
scientists. If we want to revive the economy, then sooner or later we have no option than to
resume our social and economic actvities. Until a vaccine is produced, this entails risk; but
human life is never as safe as we might wish to believe.
"If we want to revive the economy, then sooner or later we have no option than to resume our
social and economic activities."
Of course, the rub in that profoundly obvious statement is the meaning of "sooner or later".
I'm suggesting we defer to the best expert advice available. Should we infer that you would
leave those decisions solely up to 'experts' like Brian Kemp (who first became aware of
person-to-person transmission April 1)?
It's the government's job to lead; that's what it was elected to do.
This predicament involves a choice between evils - not a simple choice between the crude
economic materialism of politics and the science of saving lives. It's a choice between lives
and lives. Your comments are made in bad faith.
One of us is arguing in "bad faith", and it's not me. I've written- repeatedly- that we
should be deferring to the best judgement of scientists to navigate reopening- whatever
'fuzziness' you infer from that is occurring somewhere between your eyes and your brain
(which is also the source of the somewhat "fuzzy" and undefined "sooner or later" timeline,
when you feel normal activity can be resumed- when is "sooner or later", exactly, and what
are the criteria that would define "sooner" as opposed to "later"?
The Koreans, the Chinese, the Taiwanese, the Australians and the New Zealanders all provide a
counter example of how to deal with it. The path we are on isn't the only path.
I'm not either. I'm actually standing with Trump, or whoever wrote his plan, on this one. Get
a 2 week downturn in cases then open slowly wait for the spikes open more wait for spikes and
so on. Keep buisiness from doing stupid things like making sick people work. That sort of
thing.
I'd prefer longer as manycountries are waiting a month. But we seem to be able to handle
barely what we have now and you have to balance the panicked with the impatient on this so 2
weeks may have to do. The goal is to make sure the public doesn't go crazy or the situation
doesn't go nutty enough to require a new shutdown.
I'm ok for that. If you are ok with that then I'm not your enemy here.
I'm arguing against the folks who want to keep throwing out mass media lines like "cure
worse than the disease." Or "it's the flu". I'm against the folks who see the flattening
after this lockdown and somehow conclude that the lockdown did nothing. I'm against the folks
like my Georgia governor that somehow thought that opening salons and theaters are to be
opened no matter that we aren't even sure we peaked no matter how few people will even go
there no matter that it kills the companies' governmental benefits for being locked down or
that it forces people into risk as they can't take UI anymore no matter that it ignores
Trump's own plan.
Also I'm just sick of the (find random country praised by media) they aren't mass dying so
OF COURSE the virus means nothing LIBERATE THE PLANET, LET THE PEOPLE DIE LIKE NATURE
INTENDED.
This virus is here to stay, and we must learn to live with it. In the coming months, until a
vaccine is produced, there will be many hard choices between economic survival and risking
lives.
Only a callous fool would argue that we should let the infection rip and "let the people
die as nature intended."
That's a claim I won't even put on Trump. I'm suspecting he's just trying to find the most
popular position.
Governor Kemp though. I'm suspecting now. We're in the upper end as far as infections, the
worst in testing and most of the flatten we might be in is due to counties and cities
deciding for themselves to lock (my own started once the first case showed up. We're still
pretty empty on infections here): a feature Kemp is now taking away as he unilaterally opens
the state.
That I'm now seriously defending a Trump policy over my governor means something is going
very very wrong.
Trump's only concern throughout this debacle (that can virtually all be laid at the feet of
his administration, given it's inactivity- with the exception of the travel 'sieve'- from
January to March), as well as his entire presidency and life, is and has been Trump. It's not
the most popular decision he's trying to find, he just wants to goose the stock market and
economy enough to eke out another (unpopular) electoral college win- he doesn't give a damn
about the lives of the people who may go back to work, or the loss of lives of people who may
die unnecessarily because of imbeciles like Kemp forcing people back to work prematurely.
And while the Trumps and Kemps are at least honest enough to wear their sociopathy on their
sleeves, you can find it by scratching just about any Republican.
By the way, as a Georgian you might find this article interesting:
https://www.theatlantic.com...
I couldn't read the article fully. It's like watching a close up of a massacare economically.
Even ignoring the health costs it's a boneheaded move. And since Kemp has massive powers as a
governor in an emergency he gets full reign to keep being a bonehead.
I understand why he's doing it. His economy is shattered when he is desperately in need to
fund the promises that got him elected (not many Republicans would offer a 5k raise to all
teachers but there you go). He's in a state constantly whispering of turning blue and he only
won by slivers. And if he can't lock the state government or both Senate seats (the other
retired due to health issues) when the whispers also say democrats are taking the Senate he's
doomed. So he's pulling a Hail Mary.
I get it. So saying he's a callous man ready to kill for a buck is toxic nonsense.
But it's boneheaded.
I have to hopeI'm wrong and Kemp scores and probably saves the state for the Republicans
one more election. Because I have to live in the horrible mess he'd have created if I'm
right.
Person has Heart attack taken to ER does and is called death by C-Virus
Immune system is CRITICAL -that is why older folks suffer more weakened immune functions.
Fear weakens Immune function !!! Play Hide
I work in an ER- despite what Alex Jones may have told you, when people die of a heart
attack, we use the evidence (EKG changes, abnormal labs) to attribute their death to a heart
attack.
On the other hand, it's highly likely that COVID19 deaths have been undercounted:
https://www.businessinsider...
I am deeply dubious that James Pinkerton truly believes in hard, empirical data over modeled
probabilities. His disingenuous logic comes through in his celebration of Ionnadis who, in
recent weeks, is best known for releasing a sloppy study and publishing an even sloppier WSJ
op-ed. He has been criticized by statisticians around the world. Before he had sufficient
empirical data, he went repeatedly on Fox News to shape conservative minds, advocating that
the covid death rate was low and the costs of social distancing too high. There are
statistical rules that define when data is sufficient and significant, increasing confidence
in a projection. Ionnadis failed to do this in a big way, but is celebrated by Pinkerton as
the White Knight of hard data.
Of course, the models vary widely. IT is new, there is new data coming every minute. So some
models become obsolete very quick, and new models have to be made incorporating the new data.
But as a rule, it is better to go with the more pessimistic models. Because as it happens,
there is no way that an optimist can be pleasantly surprised.
Gleaming new tent hospitals sit empty on two suburban New York college campuses, never
having treated a single coronavirus patient. Convention centers that were turned into temporary
hospitals in other cities went mostly unused. And a
Navy hospital ship that offered help in Manhattan is soon to depart. When virus infections
slowed down or fell short of worst-case predictions, the globe was left dotted with dozens of
barely used or unused field hospitals. [ Too bad Cuomo didn't send COVID-19 patients from the
nursing homes to these ships for treatment... ]
In pandemic blame distribution Fauci and the CDC top should get mayor shares.
In financial crash blame distribution the New York FED with its top 5 controller /
bail-out receiver banks have big parts. It still holds the world's other Central Banks
hostage through its reserves and trade in U$ dollars only meme.
In the intelligence area it is not very different: also that branch of the US Deep State
failed.
The jaw-dropping stupidity of the Trump administration regarding the COVID-19 pandemic is
truly mind numbing. There is an old dictum that states that there is no such thing as
'military intelligence.' To that I add there is no such thing as 'intelligence' in Washington
DC either, or the Trump White House for that matter. If you try to look for it, you will only
find hacks, flacks, quacks and certifiable jerks. You would do better to waste your time and
money looking for the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot, or the Tooth Fairy. The prospect that
Trump could get anther four years as president is depressing indeed. All that would be left
is divine intervention, and I don't think that is any more likely than finding the
aforementioned mythical creatures.
"... Among the reported influenza deaths in the US, how many cases were infected with COVID-19? Did the US government cover up the spread of coronavirus with the flu? When will the US government make public the samples of the US influenza virus and its genetic sequence, or allow experts from the WHO or the United Nations to sample and analyze? ..."
1. Regarding the restarted avian influenza virus modification experiment last year, why
does the US release no more updates?
The Science reported in February 2019 that US authorities had quietly approved the avian
influenza virus modification experiment. The research, aiming to transform the H5N1 virus to
be more capable of infecting mammals, was controversial and considered extremely dangerous.
Some experts believe that the modification may increase the risk of human-to-human
transmission of the virus. The question is why the US government decided to unfreeze the
experiment 4 years after it was halted, and why there are no more updates regarding the
experiment.
2. The United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID)
was previously closed. What is the truth behind ?
The Global Biodefence reported in April that the USAMRIID, US Army's primary institution
and facility for biological research headquartered in Fort Detrick, Maryland, has resumed
full operation. The institution was once ordered to halt the study of biological select
agents and toxins (BSATs) last July. In March, there was a petition on the White House
website demanding the clarification of the shutdown of USAMRIID. Given that these issues have
become a primary public concern, what is the US government's response?
3. The US Department of Health and Human Services ran a scenario last year that was
similar to the COVID-19 outbreak. Is this just a coincidence?
In March, the New York Times quoted a draft report obtained from the US government saying
that from January to August 2019, the US Department of Health and Human Services ran a
scenario called "Crimson Contagion" that simulated the fictional outbreak involving a group
of tourists visiting China. They then became infected and flew to various countries,
including the US. Last October, a high-level pandemic exercise named Event 201 was hosted by
a couple of US organizations. The drill simulated a scenario that a fictional virus called
CAPS, which causes more severe symptoms than SARS and transmits via the respiratory route
like the common flu, had caused a pandemic. Like COVID-19, there is no vaccine for CAPS.
Given the fact that the simulated virus is so much like COVID-19, is this just a
coincidence? Another question is, why did it not take enough preventive measures at the early
stages of the coronavirus outbreak since the US has predicted a similar pandemic?
4. US intelligence officials warned of coronavirus crisis as early as last November. Why
the warning was ignored?
In April, according to the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), it was said that, as
early as late November 2019, US intelligence officials had warned the Defense Intelligence
Agency, the Pentagon, and the White House that an infectious disease was sweeping through
Wuhan, China.
Last November, the US National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) issued a report
detailing the coronavirus pandemic, which was later identified as "COVID-19". Some analysts
believed that the outbreak in Wuhan might have evolved into a catastrophic event. According
to the Washington Post, in more than two months from January to February, Trump had received
intensive warnings from the US intelligence agencies about the coronavirus. Why did the US
government not declare a "National Emergency" until March 13?
5. Among the reported influenza deaths in the US, can the US clarify how many cases are
actually infected with COVID-19?
Japanese Asahi Television reported on February 21 that some of the 14,000 people
reportedly killed by influenza in the US might have died from coronavirus, which became a hot
topic soon after.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report at the end of
February, showing that there have been at least 32 million flu illnesses in the US that
winter.
On March 11, at the House of Representatives, Robert Redfield, the director of the US CDC,
admitted that some in the US who were previously thought to have been killed from the flu may
have been infected with coronavirus.
Among the reported influenza deaths in the US, how many cases were infected with
COVID-19? Did the US government cover up the spread of coronavirus with the flu? When will
the US government make public the samples of the US influenza virus and its genetic sequence,
or allow experts from the WHO or the United Nations to sample and analyze?
6. When did the novel coronavirus first appear in the US? Did community transmission of
the coronavirus start sooner than it was reported?
A report released in late April by local health authorities suggests that a 57-year-old
woman from Santa Clara County of California died from COVID-19 on February 6, some 20 days
earlier than the date the US announced its first death caused by the virus.
The Los Angeles Times quoted Santa Clara County health officer Sara Cody in a piece
saying, "we presume that each of them represents community transmission and that there was
some significant level of virus circulating in our community in early February."
County Executive Officer Jeffrey V. Smith said this is evidence that the coronavirus was
circulating in California as early as January or even earlier.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has ordered all counties in the state to review autopsies of
suspected coronavirus deaths dating back to December.
When did the novel coronavirus first appear in the US? Did community transmission of the
coronavirus start sooner than it was reported?
7. How did the US get the virus strains so soon to start the first human testing of a
vaccine against COVID-19?
The Wall Street Journal on March 16 reported that the first human testing of Moderna
Inc.'s experimental vaccine against the COVID-19 had already begun. Experts immediately
raised questions about the speed of the vaccine development, saying that it would not be
possible unless the US had obtained the virus strains from very early on. So how did the US
start the first human testing of the vaccine so soon? When and how did they get the virus
strains?
8. Why did the US government keep downplaying the pandemic while its officials privately
dumped stocks?
According to the Washington Post, US Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr
and his wife sold up to 1.7 million in 33 different stocks just one week before the market
plunged. Why did these officials at the Committee act so quickly while the government was
continually understating the pandemic?
Why is the vital information kept confidential to the public while the government
officials were taking advantage to practice insider-trading?
9. Why are US experts not allowed to discuss COVID-19 in public?
The New York Times reported that the White House began tightening controls for all
coronavirus messaging from health officials on February 27 after Vice President Mike Pence
led the nation's epidemic prevention and control efforts.
Several scientists and government health officials, including the nation's leading
infectious disease expert Anthony S. Fauci, have been asked to make statements or make public
appearances about the COVID-19 only after consultation with the US vice president's
office.
Why does the United States, which claims free speech, not allow experts and scholars to
discuss the novel coronavirus in public? Does the US want to hide something or fear of
something?
10. What research is being done in the US overseas biological laboratories? Why does the
US keep tight-lipped about it?
Natalia Poklonskaya, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Foreign Affairs, has
proposed verifying the legitimacy of US biological laboratories around the world, according
to Sputnik news agency.
Not long ago, a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry expressed concern about the
establishment of a biological laboratory in countries from the former Soviet Union.
Grigory Trofimchuk, a Russian expert in the field of internal affairs, foreign affairs,
and national defense, said the work of these biological laboratories was never disclosed to
the outside world, and that they had caused several problems, with widespread outbreaks of
dangerous infectious diseases such as measles at the laboratory site.
What research is being done in these biological laboratories? Why does the US keep
tight-lipped about the function, use, the safety of these biological laboratories?
The virus is a problem and if you do a general lock down (1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1
year..) you will create 100 further problems. Now you have 101 problems!
The data is in that the virus, in the general community (not counting hospitals), only
kills people over 70 years, or with medical issues.
So quarantine the over 70's, give them free delivered food, a laptop with Zoom so they can
still communicate, and let the rest of the world live their lives. It is insane that two 20
year olds cannot go on a date without being fined, or someone on a rural beach has a chopper
land beside them and they are fined. This is not a medical response, this is a psych-ops,
that is manipulation of the human psyche on a grand scale. Some would say on a Satanic
scale!
Here is what happens when money collapses, when the economy collapses, and in the turmoil
some are going to be richer than Midas.
In the past, an inflationary collapse has usually affected currencies in isolation; but
the modern tendency for governments to coordinate their inflationary stimulations raises a
new factor, of strains between currencies collapsing at the same time but at different
rates.
The most notable experience of it in modern times was in several European countries
following the First World war. The inflations were individual to the nations, but the cause
was the same, and Austria's inflationary collapse ran ahead of Germany's. A passage from a
man who witnessed it, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, in his autobiographical The World of
Yesterday vividly describes the consequences:
Every hotel in Vienna was filled with these vultures [foreign tourists]; they bought
everything from toothbrushes to landed estates, they mopped up private collections and
antique shop stocks before their owners, in their distress, woke to how they were being
plundered. Humble hotel clerks from Switzerland, stenographers from Holland would put up in
the deluxe suites of the Ringstrasse hotels. Incredible as it may seem, I can vouch for it as
an eyewitness that Salzburg's first-rate Hotel de l'Europe was occupied for a period by
English unemployed, who, because of Britain's generous dole were able to live more cheaply at
that distinguished hostelry than in their slums at home. Whatever was not nailed down
disappeared. The tidings of cheap living and cheap goods in Austria spread far and wide;
greedy visitors came from Sweden from France; more Italian French Turkish and Romanian was
spoken than German in Vienna's business district.[ii]
Among the Austrians impoverished in their own communities, the law-abiding starved and
those prepared to break food rationing laws thrived. Savers, who had patriotically bought
government bonds, lost everything. Germans from across the border, whose currency was yet to
enter its final collapse, could swill six litres of Austrian beer for one of German, adding
to the foreign revelry in Austria's misery.
In our contemporary fiat collapse, differences in its rate will create similar openings
for an unsettling life arbitrage. In business dealings, any vestiges of decency and
compassion are early victims as those with an early understanding of the opportunities
provided by a monetary collapse profit from the innocence of the ignorant. But Germany was to
suffer the inflationary fate of Austria the following year. Again, from Zweig:
A pair of shoe laces cost more than a shoe had once cost, no, more than a fashionable
store with two thousand pairs of shoes had cost before; to repair a broken window more than
the whole house had formerly cost, a book more than the printers shop with a hundred presses.
For $100 one could buy rows of six-storey houses on Kurfürstendamm and factories were to
be had for the old equivalent of a wheelbarrow
Towering over all of them was the gigantic figure of the super-profiteer Stinnes expanding
his credit and in thus exploiting the mark he bought whatever was for sale, coal mines and
ships, factories and stocks, castles and country estates, actually for nothing because every
payment, every promise became equal to naught. Soon a quarter of Germany was in his hands
and, perversely, the masses who in Germany always became intoxicated at a success that they
can see with their eyes, cheered him as a genius.
The story of Hugo Stinnes brings us back to our current situation, how markets will evolve
and who will profit.
Unsurprisingly, the Gates Foundation has injected substantial sums of money into both
groups. This year alone, the Gates Foundation has already given
$79 million to Imperial College, and in 2017 the Foundation announced a $279 million investment into the IHME
to expand its work collecting health data and creating models.
Anthony Fauci, meanwhile, has
become the face of the US government's coronavirus response, echoing Bill Gates' assertion
that the country will not "get back to normal" until "a good vaccine" can be found to insure
the public's safety.
ANTHONY FAUCI : If you want to get to pre-coronavirus . . . You know, that might not ever
happen, in the sense of the fact that the threat is there. But I believe with the therapies
that will be coming online, and with the fact that I feel confident that over a period of
time we will get a good vaccine, that we will never have to get back to where we are right
back now.
Beyond just their frequent collaborations and cooperation in the
past, Fauci has direct ties to Gates projects and funding. In 2010, he was appointed to the
Leadership
Council of the Gates-founded "
Decade of Vaccines " project to implement a Global Vaccine Action Plan, a project to which
Gates committed $10 billion of funding. And in October of last year, just as the current
pandemic was beginning, the Gates Foundation
announced a $100 million contribution to the National Institute of Health to help, among
other programs, Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' research into
HIV.
... ... ...
AMY GOODMAN : And the charity of billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife
Melinda is under criticism following the disclosure it's substantially increased its holdings
in the agribusiness giant Monsanto to over $23 million. Critics say the investment in Monsanto
contradicts the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's stated commitment to helping farmers and
sustainable development in Africa.
LAURENCE LEE : The study from the pressure group Global Justice now paints a picture of
the Gates Foundation partly as an expression of corporate America's desire to profit from
Africa, and partly a damning critique of its effects.
POLLY JONES : You could have a case where the initial research is done by a Gates-funded
institution. And the media reporting on how well that research is conducted is done, the
media outlet is a Gates-funded outlet, or maybe a Gates-funded journalist from a media
program. And then the program is implemented more widely by a Gates-funded NGO. I mean . . .
There are some very insular circles here.
LEE : Among the many criticisms, the idea that private finance can solve the problems of
the developing world. Should poor farmers be trapped into debt by having to use chemicals or
fertilizers under written by offshoot of the foundation?
This is no mere theoretical conflict of interest. Gates is held up as a hero for donating
$35.8 billion worth of his Microsoft stock to the foundation, but during the course of his
"Decade of Vaccines," Gates' net worth has actually doubled, from $54
billion to $103.1 billion .
The Rockefeller story provides an instructive template for this vision of
tycoon-turned-philanthropist. When Rockefeller faced a public backlash, he helped spearhead the
creation of a system of private foundations that connected in with his business interests.
Leveraging his unprecedented oil monopoly fortune into unprecedented control over wide swathes
of public life, Rockefeller was able to kill two birds with one stone: moulding society in his
families' own interests even as he became a beloved figure in the public imagination.
Similarly, Bill Gates has leveraged his software empire into a global health, development
and education empire, steering the course of investment and research and ensuring healthy
markets for vaccines and other immunisation products. And, like Rockefeller, Gates has been
transformed from the feared and reviled head of a formidable hydra into a kindly old man
generously giving his wealth back to the public.
But not everyone has been taken in by this PR trick. Even The Lancet observed this
worrying transformation from software monopolist to health monopolist back in 2009, when the
extent of this Gates-led monopoly was becoming apparent to all:
The first guiding principle of the [Bill & Melinda Gates] Foundation is that it is
"driven by the interests and passions of the Gates family." An annual letter from Bill Gates
summarises those passions, referring to newspaper articles, books, and chance events that
have shaped the Foundation's strategy. For such a large and influential investor in global
health, is such a whimsical governance principle good enough?
This brings us back to the question: Who is Bill Gates? What are his driving interests? What
motivates his decisions?
These are not academic questions. Gates' decisions have controlled the flows of billions of
dollars, formed international partnerships pursuing wide-ranging agendas, ensured the creation
of "healthy markets" for big pharma vaccine manufacturers. And now, as we are seeing, his
decisions are shaping the entire global response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Next week, we will further explore Gates' vaccination initiatives, the business interests
behind them, and the larger agenda that is beginning to take shape as we enter the "new normal"
of the Covid-19 crisis.
In pandemic blame distribution Fauci and the CDC top should get mayor shares.
In financial crash blame distribution the New York FED with its top 5 controller /
bail-out receiver banks have big parts. It still holds the world's other Central Banks
hostage through its reserves and trade in U$ dollars only meme.
In the intelligence area it is not very different: also that branch of the US Deep State
failed.
When U.S. President Donald Trump
cut off his government's funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), one of his
grievances was that the WHO -- under Chinese tutelage -- failed to declare the global
coronavirus outbreak as a pandemic soon enough. Not long after the virus brought patients to
Hubei Provincial Hospital, the Chinese medical and public health authorities
brought it to the notice of the WHO. The WHO investigated the virus over the course of
early January, sending a team into Wuhan and making public whatever credible information it
could report.
The WHO's International Health Regulations (2005) Emergency Committee met twice in January,
first on
January 22-23 and then again on
January 30 ; in the first meeting, the committee felt it had insufficient evidence to
declare an emergency, but at the second meeting it took the decision to declare a public health
emergency of international concern (PHEIC). This is the penultimate step for the WHO; on March
11, after it became clear that the virus was spreading across borders, but not before the WHO
made many warnings to governments, the WHO declared a global pandemic.
Trump and his Democratic rival Joe Biden , as well as
a host of other U.S. politicians, made the argument that the WHO did not act fast enough with
its declaration. Whatever problems posed to the United States by the virus were not the
responsibility of the U.S. government, they suggested; the fault lay with the Chinese
government and with the WHO.
Our investigation finds that this argument has little foundation. The WHO's reporting
mechanisms are sound, but the WHO's own ability to make these formal declarations -- a public
health emergency and a global pandemic, which come with serious financial consequences for
member states -- has been circumscribed; those who have constrained the World Health
Organization -- the United States and European nations -- are the very same countries whose
leaders are now complaining about Chinese influence over the WHO.
Revisions
By the 1990s, it had become clear that the WHO's old International Health Regulations --
originally issued in 1969, with only a few minor updates and new editions over the two decades
after that -- were inadequate. For one, these regulations were produced before the emergence of
very infectious, lethal, and recurrent infections such as Ebola and the avian influenzas.
Secondly, these old regulations were made before air travel began to move about 4.3
billion passengers per year, the scale of air traffic now making the movement of viruses so
much easier.
In May 2005, the 58th World Health Assembly revised the 1969 regulations, pointing out that the
new regulations would "prevent, protect against, control and provide a public health response
to the international spread of disease in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to
public health risks, and which avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and
trade."
The North American and European states, in particular, insisted that the declaration of a
PHEIC or global pandemic only be made after it was clear that air travel and trade would not be
unduly interrupted. This restriction, essentially the core foundations of globalization, has
constrained the WHO since 2005.
The 2009 Test
The new WHO regulations were tested when a new influenza emerged out of Mexico and the
United States in mid-April 2009. This H1N1 was a combination of influenza virus genes that had
links to swine-lineage H1N1 from both North America and Eurasia (thus the 2009 outbreak was
commonly known as "swine flu"). It was first detected on April 15 . On April 24, the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention uploaded a gene sequence onto a publicly accessible influenzas
database. On April 25, ten days after the first detection of the virus, the WHO declared the 2009
H1N1 outbreak a PHEIC. On June 11, the WHO said
that a global pandemic was underway.
In 2020, the WHO took a month to declare a PHEIC for the coronavirus and took an additional
two months after that to pronounce a global pandemic. It was slower to announce the emergency,
but it took the same time to declare a global pandemic.
By July 2009, the dangerous H1N1 virus had a less lethal impact than the WHO had feared.
However, for the full year from its first detection, 60.8 million people were infected and
12,469 died.
Almost immediately, the WHO was attacked for the June 11 description of the outbreak as a
pandemic. When the WHO declares a pandemic, governments are expected to do a variety of things
including mass purchase of drugs and vaccines. These are costly.
That December, members of parliament in the Council of Europe opened an inquiry into the WHO
declaration. Fourteen members of the Council charged the WHO with what was essentially fraud.
They said that "pharmaceutical
companies have influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health
standards, to alarm governments worldwide. They have made them squander tight health care
resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly exposed millions of healthy people
to the rise of unknown side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines." "The definition of an
alarming pandemic," they wrote, "must not be under the influence of drug-sellers."
The criticism of the WHO stung. It had declared a pandemic, but the virus had stabilized
very soon after the declaration. The WHO responded to such criticism with humility. "Adjusting
public perceptions to suit a far less lethal virus has been problematic," the WHO responded . "Given
the discrepancy between what was expected and what has happened, a search for ulterior motives
on the part of the WHO and its scientific advisers is understandable, though without
justification."
Trump's Attacks
A WHO official told one of us that the agency had been shaken by the assault in 2009. Over
the past ten years, the agency has struggled to regain its confidence, working through the
Ebola outbreak in 2014 and then Zika in 2016. In neither of those cases was there a need to
make any global declaration.
This year, the WHO declared a global pandemic within three months of the first cases. But
there is no doubt that the attack on the WHO a decade ago has made an impact. Former WHO
employees tell us that fear of being attacked like this by the main donors seriously hampers
the independence of the WHO and its scientific advisers. Trump's current attack is going to
weaken further the ability of the WHO to operate at its own pace and with credibility.
The World Health Organization is not the first UN agency to face the wrath of the U.S.
administration. The Trump administration sent its budget to
Congress with zero dollars for a line item called International Organizations and Programs.
Under this line item comes United States funds for UN Development Program, UNICEF, UNESCO,
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN Women, and UN Population Fund. In 2018,
the United States
stopped funding the UN's Palestine agency (UNRWA). When the UN is useful, the United States
uses it; when the UN goes against United States interests, it will lose its funding.
When Trump said that the WHO is
"China centric," he offered no evidence; he did not have to.
No doubt that the United States is currently facing the wrath of the global pandemic. If the
U.S. government had begun to plan effectively after the WHO declared a public emergency on
January 30 or even when it declared a global pandemic on March 11, the problems would not be so
grave. But there was no planning at all, which is distressing. As George Packer put it
in the Atlantic, the United States in the months after January was "like a country with shoddy
infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head
off mass suffering." From Trump, the U.S. citizenry got "willful blindness, scapegoating,
boasts, and lies." This sums it up. Part of the scapegoating was
directed at China ; it is far easier to blame China -- already part of a dangerous trade
war and a simmering regional struggle in Asia -- than to accept responsibility oneself.
Evil intent and premeditation are perfectly compatible with bad planning and gross
incompetence.
Look at every US war of aggression: It fails utterly at every affirmative goal, but so far
always accomplishes the purely negative goals of mass murder, gross physical destruction and
generating failed states. Same for disaster responses like with Katrina: They couldn't save
any lives or help poor people rebuild, but they could complete the destruction of social
infrastructure which the hurricane hadn't finished off.
That's the US, domestically and around the world. And people really think any kind
of intensive response to an epidemic would have any other kind of outcome?
... it wouldn't surprise me if they deployed this virus in China without assuming, or
caring about, blowback in the US.
karlof1 has speculated along the same lines weeks ago.
My understanding of karlof1's argument is as follows: China turned the "weapon" (assuming
it was a deliberate attack) back on USA by revealing the virus instead of keeping the
outbreak quiet. The result has been the destabilizing of US society because USA leadership
had never planned to respond to the virus in any way that is appropriate to a new virus.
The people need science. The teaching is a legacy of pathologist Rudolph Virchow who was at
the barricades in Berlin in 1848. A journal entry in that year of revolutions reads, "
Medicine is a social
science , and politics nothing but medicine on a grand scale." The pioneering Virchow first
pronounced upon the biological importance of cells in health and disease. He was the "
chief founder of
modern scientific medicine." (William H. Welch, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine 1902),
Virchow inspires today's imperative that the entitled classes not abandon science in the
face of danger nor twist science to fit proprietary uses. This is the Virchow whose study of a
typhus outbreak in Upper Silesia convinced him that class-based oppression – poverty and
lack of education – was responsible for the epidemic, the Virchow who helped form the
German
Radical Party in 1884 and served in the Prussian and German parliaments.
Ask immunologist and virologist Rick Bright about science serving the people. That expert in
preventing viral disease, particularly influenza, on April 21 was removed from his position in
the Department of Health and Human Services. Bright was in charge of the Biomedical Advanced
Research and Development Authority and of efforts to develop an anti-COVID 19 vaccine. He had
63 scientific
articles to his credit.
Bright told the press that, "I believe
this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of
dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically
vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit.
I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science -- not politics or cronyism --
has to lead the way."
He added that, "contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and
hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the Administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack
scientific merit."
Science has been a bit player in the U.S. government's confrontation with the pandemic.
President Trump's anti-science attitudes are far from the whole story, although his cut-off of
U.S. funding for the World Health Organization was as dangerous as it was symbolic.
That government failed to take steps that would have allowed scientific inquiry during the
early stages of the pandemic Early case-finding and tracking of contacts did not take place.
Investigators lacked the raw material that might have allowed them to define the contours of an
evolving epidemic, its special characteristics.
The fact of delay was clear on April 21 when a California medical examiner announced that
COVID 19 had accounted for one death on February 6 and another on February 17. Neither victim
had traveled outside the United States. The onset of their infections was presumably in
mid-January. All along, authorities had regarded a Washington-state patient who tested positive
on February 26 as the first U.S. victim of community-acquired infection. Yet CDC director
Robert Redfield, testifying before a congressional committee on March 11, revealed that some
patients assumed to have died from influenza did die from COVID 19 infection.
Also, the administration's China-bashing and even conspiracy theories about the origins of
the pandemic testify to its dismissal of useful scientist research, particularly the findings
of scientists throughout the world who know about the beginnings of the pandemic, in China.
British and German scientists " reconstructed the early
'evolutionary paths' of COVID-19 in humans." A Cambridge University team "mapped some of the
original spread of the new coronavirus through its mutations, which creates different viral
lineages." Virus genomes were studied " from across the world between 24 December 2019 and 4
March 2020."
The researchers categorized three types of COVID 19. The original Wuhan virus was type A;
its mutated versions showed up in the United States and Australia. Type B, predominating in
Wuhan, stayed put in East Asia. Type C appeared only in Europe, Singapore, Hong Kong and South
Korea. The researchers "traced established infection routes: the mutations and viral lineages
joined the dots between known cases." Such information about the virus's biologic behavior
might have enabled public health officials to identify at-risk populations within the United
States and abroad.
Lead author Peter Forster suggested to a reporter that in Wuhan "the first infection and
spread among humans of COVID-19 occurred between mid-September and early December." His
disclosure has implications for U.S. military athletes participating in the "World Military
Games" in Wuhan in late October. They were among 9308 military
athletes on hand from 100 countries. The athletes might have carried the virus with them on
their return to the various nations.
Zoologist Peter Daszak, president of the New York – based EcoHealth Alliance, does
research in China on inter-species sharing of viruses. He pointed out in 2013 that,
"Coronaviruses evolve very rapidly [and] are exquisitely evolved to jump from one species to
another." At the time, he was reflecting on the SARS
coronavirus epidemic of 10 years earlier.
He offered a suggestion that, if acted upon, might have prevented the COVID 19 pandemic. The
cost, Daszak estimated, would have been "about $1.5bn to discover all the viruses in mammals. I
think that would be a great investment because once you have done it, you can develop vaccines
and get ready with test kits to find the first stage of emergence and stop it."
This story of the U.S. government's abuse of science ends with lessons learned. They are:
(1) science must exist for the benefit of all people and not be left to the mercies of the rich
and powerful, (2) a government restricting and disrespecting scientists, like Dr. Bright, is
dangerous to the people, and (3) a capability to plan is of the essence to a state that would
assure the safety and flourishing of all its people. These basic standards, it seems here, will
be identifying features for those societies that do emerge relatively intact from the pandemic.
The odds favor the socialist ones.
Apr 16, 2020 Dr. Ron Paul Interview: Bill Gates & Tony Fauci Are Determined To Run The
World by Vaccines
Dr. Paul and Spiro discuss the current coronavirus crisis and the political, social and
economic fallout effecting millions of Americans, as people begin to display resistance to
the government lockdown response.
2.3 TRillion Dollars Missing from DOD Day before 9/11/ 2001
SEPTEMBER 10, 2001 Defense Business Practices
Secretary Rumsfeld and other officials talked with reporters about the need to refine the
Defense Department's business practices. An opening ceremony will kick off Acquisition
and Logistics Excellence Week. They answered questions from members of the media
Watch this RT interview with Robert Kennedy to see how corrupt the CDC is. We cannot trust
this corrupt organization with our health. The CDC has a large financial interest in pushing
untested vaccines on the public.
WHO is even more under the control of Big Pharma. The organization is corrupt beyond the
meaning of the word. "The WHO is a sock puppet for the pharmaceutical industry." -- Robert F.
Kennedy Jr.
""Back in 2014, the Obama administration prohibited the U.S. from giving any money to any
laboratory, including in the U.S., that was fooling around with these viruses. Prohibited!
Despite that, Dr. Fauci gave $3.7 million to the Wuhan laboratory -- and then even after the
State Department issued reports about how unsafe that laboratory was, and how suspicious they
were in the way they were developing a virus that could be transmitted to humans,"Giuliani
claimed
So, the guy who is heading up the Corona response personally oversaw the funding of the lab
that created it......COME ON!
xxx 2 hours ago
I am a consistent complainer over the Obama administration's policies but this is one policy
where I admire them. THIS is what I mean when I keep complaining about the scientific
community. Obama had it right and should have been even more vocal in their opposition to
misguided research. If the reports on Fauci funding this are true it should be exposed and
LOUDLY vilified. WHEN are we going to hold the scientific community accountable? Do you know
how many brilliant and decent scientists are being muted because of the likes of these type
scientists that want free reign to do whatever they want?
Here's my point: If a scientist lower in prestige than Dr. Fauci had written a paper
defining "playing with viruses as important research" as unnecessary and dangerous, he/she
would be putting their very careers at risk due to Fauci's power. They've been doing it to any
scientist that disputes climate change models, to the point of even firing editors that allow
varying opinions. I'm not saying scientists are bad, just the opposite. Good Scientists are
being stifled by a small powerful few within their leagues.
The WHO initially opposed, then embraced lockdowns, and now it's apparently back to opposing
them again. Unlike other European states like Italy, Sweden implemented swift and early testing
regimes to weed out infected patients. This allowed it to avoid lockdowns and border closures,
relying instead on social distancing guidance. The country never closed its schools, and
although mortality rates have been markedly higher than its neighbors, the virus never
overwhelmed its hospital system. The Swedish government's approach is widely popular within
Sweden.
The director of the WHO's health emergencies program said the notion that Sweden hadn't done
much to combat the virus is simply not true.
Sweden has put in place a "very strong public health policy", said Dr. Mike Ryan. Unlike
many other countries, Sweden chose to rely on its "relationship with its citizenry" and trust
them to self-regulate. Its healthcare system has not been overwhelmed, he said, adding that its
approach could be a "model" for other countries when lockdowns begin to relax. "There are
lessons to be learnt by our colleagues in Sweden."
Remember the last time the WHO praised a "model" approach to tackling the virus? It was
praising China's strict lockdowns.
These lockdowns have ended life as we know it, no matter which position you take. I do think
it has been a mistake not to quarantine nursing homes, ltc facilities, hospitals, etc..
Including the docs, nurses, workers. Those are the vectors & 50% of covid deaths could
have been prevented, esp in NY, like that. At year-end, we can look at all-cause mortalities
trends, see how this year stacks up. I hope these measures make sense given the extreme
poverty, violence, death they will cause. There will be no permanent vaccine, they've been
trying w/Coronav's for a long time. This thing is a fact of life going forward. It will
mutate like any other cold or flu. Are we going to shut down & go Orwell every time it
pops up? We're f'ed.
Neil Ferguson hasn't been part of b's coronavirus narrative, but his bad statistics (he has a
history) are key to the whole story. Great opinion piece by R.R. Reno
:
"On March 16, Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London predicted a coronavirus death toll
of more than two million in the United States alone. He arrived at this number by assuming
that infection would be nearly universal and the fatality rate would be high -- a terrifying
prospect. The next day, Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis sifted through the data and
predicted less widespread infection and a fatality rate of between 0.05 and 1.0 percent --
not that different from the common flu. The coronavirus is not the common flu. It has
different characteristics, afflicting the old more than the young, men more than women.
Nevertheless, all data trends since mid-March show that Ferguson was fantastically wrong and
Ioannidis was largely right about its mortal threat. [fairleft: Reno goes too far here: data
indicates Covid-19 is worse than the flu for the vulnerable, possibly much worse depending on
age and the severity of their vulnerability.]
"But Ferguson's narrative has triumphed, helped by our incontinent and irresponsible
media. ...
"Our entire ruling class, which united behind catastrophism and the untested methods of
mass shutdown, is implicated in the unfolding fiasco.
"Journalists continue to sustain the pandemic narrative. Ioannidis is still ignored,
though the evidence I outlined above has been building for weeks. ..."
[[U of Oxford prediction: "Taking account of historical experience, trends in the data,
increased number of infections in the population at largest, and potential impact of
misclassification of deaths gives a presumed estimate for the COVID-19 IFR somewhere between
0.1% and 0.36%." All studies so far are flawed and not all are within that range, but here
are basically ALL of them, which generally point to the Oxford prediction being about
right:
NYC shopping center: 0.6%
Santa Clara County: 0.1 - 0.2%
LA County: 0.1 - 0.3%
Oise, France high school: 0.0%
Gangelt, Germany: 0.37%
Bergamo, Italy: 0.57%
Lombardio, Italy: 0.87%
Iceland: 0.05%
UK: 0.9%
China: 0.66%
Boston homeless shelter: 0.0%
US Navy ship: 0.07% ]]
R.R. Reno concludes:
"We've been stampeded into a regime of social control that is unprecedented in our
history. Our economy has been shattered.... As unemployment numbers skyrocket and Congress
spends trillions, the political stakes rise.
"The experts, professionals, bureaucrats, and public officials who did this to us have
tremendous incentives to close ranks and say, 'It is not wise to tell people that the danger
was never grave and now has passed.' Sustaining the coronavirus narrative will require many
lies. It will be up to us to insist on the truth."
I cannot suggest more strongly for anyone seeking the truth about this Corona Virus that you
HAVE to listen to an interview with Dr Mikovits who had originally worked on the discovery of
the Aids Virus and who was bullied and threatened by Fauci. YOU HAVE TO listen to this
Scientist!!!
I am NOT connected to this site in any way but I think this interview HAS to spread
throughout the World because this Scientist knows what she is talking about. AND, it is very
scary.
...This interview with Dr Mikovits tells us what this is all about and why Fauci cannot be
trusted. Only goes for 15 mins. But this is the most damning insight yet to be shared on the
CV
""Back in 2014, the Obama administration prohibited the U.S. from giving any money to any
laboratory, including in the U.S., that was fooling around with these viruses. Prohibited!
Despite that, Dr. Fauci gave $3.7 million to the Wuhan laboratory -- and then even after the
State Department issued reports about how unsafe that laboratory was, and how suspicious they
were in the way they were developing a virus that could be transmitted to humans,"Giuliani
claimed
So, the guy who is heading up the Corona response personally oversaw the funding of the lab
that created it......COME ON!
xxx 2 hours ago
I am a consistent complainer over the Obama administration's policies but this is one policy
where I admire them. THIS is what I mean when I keep complaining about the scientific
community. Obama had it right and should have been even more vocal in their opposition to
misguided research. If the reports on Fauci funding this are true it should be exposed and
LOUDLY vilified. WHEN are we going to hold the scientific community accountable? Do you know
how many brilliant and decent scientists are being muted because of the likes of these type
scientists that want free reign to do whatever they want?
Here's my point: If a scientist lower in prestige than Dr. Fauci had written a paper
defining "playing with viruses as important research" as unnecessary and dangerous, he/she
would be putting their very careers at risk due to Fauci's power. They've been doing it to any
scientist that disputes climate change models, to the point of even firing editors that allow
varying opinions. I'm not saying scientists are bad, just the opposite. Good Scientists are
being stifled by a small powerful few within their leagues.
And we haven't paid our recent 'restaurant bill' now owed to the bankers, payable in about
three years, when we are going to be drained of several pints of financial blood!
And in Australia, with about eighty deaths, the panic borders on the insane!
It really astounds me that the Covid-19 hyperventilators fail to understand that starvation
is 100% lethal, and immune compromised people due to malnutrition are much more susceptible
to any disease that comes along.
As the supply lines collapse, and with winter in the
northern hemisphere coming in a mere 6 months, you can expect that the number of dead by
starvation, and from other diseases attacking mal-nourished people, will utterly dwarf the
number of dead from Covid-19 complications.
Many commenters here don't want us to hold our government accountable for that failure. They
just want to move on.
The ruling-class/establishment always portrays neo-liberal policies as beneficial to the
working class/middle-class. It is generally only superficially so. The fact is, neolib
government policy is essentially:
corporate welfare (like bailouts) and pay-offs to the wealthy (tax cuts);
socialized bads (we're in this together!) among the lower classes.
... ... ...
IMO this is likely because Big Pharma and government budgets benefit from
continuing failures that could best be summed up as culling the herd. Big Pharma could lose
billions of dollars of potential profits from treating old people with expensive and/or
experimental drugs. And governments (wealthy taxpayers, really) could save billions more if
older people die quickly: the last year of care is the most expensive and pensions are
underfunded.
Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has come out in favor of reducing restrictions on freedoms and
businesses, sparking a fierce debate on Twitter. Some lauded him and others chastised him for
putting profits ahead of people's safety. The Tesla and SpaceX founder called on Wednesday for
the US to lift the lockdown, tweeting "FREE AMERICA NOW" and "Give people their
freedom back!"
He also attached links to a Wall Street Journal article suggesting lockdowns were
ineffective and to another praising Texas for announcing more businesses will be allowed to
reopen on Friday.
The billionaire has been known as a vocal critic of the "panic" around the novel
coronavirus, having previously branded the behavior "dumb" and keeping his Tesla
car factory in California running despite local shelter-in-place laws.
But his new string of tweets has managed to quickly divide opinions online. While some
praised Musk for his commitment to liberty, others accused him of being reckless and of placing
profits over people.
There were those who accused Musk of being "drunk with power." Even his supporters,
like one named Sylvia Kane, told the polymath to "get
some sleep" .
What science are you following, EM? Clearly you know something the doctors and scientists
don't
Others chastised the SpaceX tycoon for seemingly choosing to ignore scientific evidence,
with critics like actor Bill Moseley wondering"what science"
Musk was now following, and sports presenter Dave Zirin saying that "wanting your workers to
die for you while you stay in your compound isn't exactly courage."
However, there was no shortage of commenters praising Musk for his commitment to liberty,
with President Donald Trump supporter Melissa A. responding to the tweet by saying "the
scariest thing about this pandemic" was "seeing Americans bow down" to "corrupt
politicians who promise them safety." Musk clearly approved of this take by replying:
"True."
A conservative media host Joey Saladino was quick to claim that
"When the smartest man in the world is saying this, it is time to FREE AMERICA!"
Musk's "FREE AMERICA" comments appear to echo Trump's sentiments about the lockdown,
after the president took to Twitter last week urging several US states to "LIBERATE"
themselves.
Last month, Musk committed to providing California with 1,000 ventilators. However there
seems to have been some confusion over whether or not Musk's aid has actually arrived. The
Sacramento Bee reported on April 14 that no hospitals in the state had received any ventilators
promised by the billionaire.
Musk vociferously denied that accusation, after it was picked up by CNN, saying that Tesla
had delivered hundreds of ventilators.
On Long Island NY, the first deaths occurred in a nursing home because an Uber driver who
drove a virus patient to a hospital worked in the nursing home part-time.
It's very difficult, in USA anyway, to protect vulnerable populations without a lock-down.
USA people not just not disciplined enough and organized enough. And many of the vulnerable
are under-65: they are diabetic, asthmatic, obese, have compromised immune systems, etc. And
there's evidence that there is an adverse effects of the virus on younger people: strokes,
lung scarring (pulmonary fibrosis), and possibly chronic fatigue syndrome (which affected
about 3/4's of those who recovered from SARS).
WHY is there so little interest in CHANGING THE STRATEGY from 'virus mitigation' to 'virus
suppression'? Virus mitigation is basically 'living with the virus' until there's a
vaccine - but we don't even know if a vaccine is possible.
'Virus suppression' is a pro-active approach that has been successful in South Korea,
Taiwan, Iceland, and maybe New Zealand.
AFAICT 'living with the virus' benefits Big Pharma and might save Governments some
money on care for the elderly.
"... As of Thursday, 23 employees at the 4,000-employee VA hospital, had tested positive, according to an update the hospital director emailed to employees. Another 45 employees are home awaiting test results. The hospital declined to say how many of the employees who are positive or are awaiting results are nurses, or name which parts of the hospital they work in. ..."
"... Three VA nurses said they were given N95 respirators for several days early in the crisis in March, but after that they were given surgical masks, which provide less protection from the coronavirus. Another nurse reported wearing only a surgical mask the entire time caring for coronavirus patients. The nurses, who work in a unit that treats COVID-19 positive patients or patients awaiting test results who are suspected to be positive, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to news media and their job security could be at risk if they spoke publicly. ..."
"... The hospital had 73 confirmed coronavirus cases among patients as of Friday, and four inpatient deaths. "Currently every health care system is taking steps to conserve PPE. VA is no different," Hodge wrote in a series of responses by email to questions. Hodge also said that the hospital is issuing surgical masks to all staff who work in non-COVID-19 units. ..."
"... "Those staff are provided one surgical mask weekly to assist in protecting high-risk patients who are asymptomatic," he wrote. ..."
"... Since the number of COVID-19 tests are limited nationwide, there is no COVID-19 testing capability at our CBOC locations. Please call your provider to determine whether you would be a candidate for testing. If so, then you may proceed to the Hunter Holmes McGuire VA Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia where Monday – Friday, 8:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m., a Drive-Thru Clinic is available for screening and testing (if you need it); you will be triaged according to your symptoms. Also, Monday – Friday, 8:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m., you may be directed to be seen in the medical center's High Consequence Infections (HCI) Clinic. Last, depending on your symptoms, you may go to the hospital's Emergency Department or to an Urgent Care Center or Emergency Department in your area. ..."
"... Much of the federal stockpile of PPE sent to the states had passed their expire dates, 2010 for some, and was either useless or had to be repaired. I blame the failure on the person, or persons, charged with monitoring the wharehoused stockpiles. The president only knows what he's told. He can't micromanage the nation. He needs Jack Webb directing him to stick with the facts. ..."
"... I read somewhere the V.A. ordered the masks but F.E.M.A expropriated them on the directions of Jared Kushner, who will later decide who receives the masks...something about the National Emergency Stockpile...what a mess. ..."
Colonel Lang sent me an eye opening link last night concerning the Hunter Holmes McGuire VA
hospital in Richmond. Here are some excerpts from the Richmond Times-Dispatch article.
-- -- -- --
As of Thursday, 23 employees at the 4,000-employee VA hospital, had tested positive,
according to an update the hospital director emailed to employees. Another 45 employees are
home awaiting test results. The hospital declined to say how many of the employees who are
positive or are awaiting results are nurses, or name which parts of the hospital they work
in.
Three VA nurses said they were given N95 respirators for several days early in the
crisis in March, but after that they were given surgical masks, which provide less protection
from the coronavirus. Another nurse reported wearing only a surgical mask the entire time
caring for coronavirus patients. The nurses, who work in a unit that treats COVID-19 positive
patients or patients awaiting test results who are suspected to be positive, spoke on condition
of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to news media and their job security
could be at risk if they spoke publicly.
The hospital had 73 confirmed coronavirus cases among patients as of Friday, and four
inpatient deaths. "Currently every health care system is taking steps to conserve PPE. VA is no
different," Hodge wrote in a series of responses by email to questions. Hodge also said that
the hospital is issuing surgical masks to all staff who work in non-COVID-19 units."Those staff are provided one surgical mask weekly to assist in protecting high-risk
patients who are asymptomatic," he wrote. (Richmond Times-Dispatch)
-- -- --
I'm not surprised by the numbers. Richmond, itself, is a virus hot spot although that is
mostly due to several deadly assisted living/nursing home outbreaks. What shocks me is the PPE
situation. The fact that nurses have to treat known Covid-19 patients with hospital masks
rather than the N95 respirators is only moderately better than third world conditions in my
view. Hospital masks offer the wearer no protection against the aerosolized virus. If the
patients were wearing those masks, it would be more helpful than the nurses wearing them.
Here's a tip. If you can still smell odors like onions or bacon while wearing the mask, the
aerosolized virus can get into your lungs. Hospital masks and other improvised masks protect
those around the wearer, not the mask wearer. The concept behind the universal wearing of such
masks is mutual protection. For any of you who spent time in the infantry, it's the same
concept behind the DePuy fighting positions where you are not defending yourself. You are
forming interlocking fields of fire to protect your comrades to the left and right of you.
Protecting those around you actually provides the best protection for all of you. We wear masks
in grocery stores and other such places to protect the entire community, not just our own sorry
asses.
But back to the situation at McGuire. In the early days of the pandemic in America, the
hospital instituted a screening program at the hospital entrances consisting of temperature and
health interview. We were told to expect delays and to be given a mask for wear in the
hospital. Not long after that, we were called to reschedule our appointments to May or beyond.
By mid-April, this was the COVID-19 testing situation.
Since the number of COVID-19 tests are limited nationwide, there is no COVID-19
testing capability at our CBOC locations. Please call your provider to determine whether you
would be a candidate for testing. If so, then you may proceed to the Hunter Holmes McGuire VA
Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia where Monday – Friday, 8:30 a.m. – 1:00
p.m., a Drive-Thru Clinic is available for screening and testing (if you need it); you will
be triaged according to your symptoms. Also, Monday – Friday, 8:00 a.m. – 4:00
p.m., you may be directed to be seen in the medical center's High Consequence Infections
(HCI) Clinic. Last, depending on your symptoms, you may go to the hospital's Emergency
Department or to an Urgent Care Center or Emergency Department in your area.
McGuire seems to have had all its ducks in a row. It's what I expect. This VA medical center
is well run. The professionalism, pride and morale among the staff is astoundingly high. It
shows among us broke down old vets who show up for care. We are proud of McGuire. That this
fine facility is now forced to ration out PPE to its staff is a travesty. The VA dropped the
ball. The federal government dropped the ball for several administrations. PPE should have been
stockpiled at all levels and those stockpiles should have been replenished by a push logistics
system.
That's the long term screw up. In the more immediate term, the federal government should
have been acquiring that PPE and forcing industry to massively produce supplies back in
January. Trump should have invoked and used the Defense Production Act robustly in January
rather than waiting until March and April to weakly wield that executive authority. Every
hospital and every first responder should have had all the PPE needed. Every household could
have been sent a dozen disposable masks with a note from President Trump telling us to keep
these in case we need them. What a galvanizing message that would have sent across the nation.
Even if Covid-19 proved to be a non-problem, it would have been a message of Churchillian
defiance in the face of a potential threat. A missed opportunity for both the American people
and Trump.
"The proning and the high-flow nasal cannulas combined have brought patient oxygen levels
from around 40% to 80% and 90%, so it's been fascinating and wonderful to see," Spiegel
said."
It isn't just the VA, hospitals all over the country are short of PPE. And that is one of the
problems with opening up the country too soon. Unprotected staff in suddenly flooded
hospitals become ill themselves risking the viability of local health systems.
I read a while back that the key supply chain issue with N-95 masks is that their
essential core material is a synthetic spun fiber that we are completely reliant on China for
sourcing. In addition. the machines that make this fiber are complex, quite expensive and
there is no capability to quickly and significantly ramp up their production. Further they
are challenging to set up and operate.
And for perspective, of the 200 million masks China currently makes a day, only 600,000
are N95 standard masks, used by medical personnel,
So yet another "essential supply chain" item for a critical health system need that simply
can't be ramped up out of this air.
Hopefully some one in the Federal system is looking for all similar needs and working on a
plan to facilitate onshore manufacturing.
I see this as a long term "lack of US preparedness" problem vs. something that could have
been easily addressed if the administration had moved a couple on months earlier..
We have the same problems here in the UK. With people, mainly it seems like in the MSM,
blaming the Government's leadership for the supply issues.
Ignoring totally the management of our respective national health organizations who knew,
at the latest in mid January, that there was probably a nasty contagious problem coming down
the tracks, that would, based on already clear Chinese actions, need more PPE than was on
their shelves.
Bear in mind that, in the UK at least, hundreds of these NHS bureaucrats earn twice what a
Government minister earns and a few twice the PM's salary. In both nations they have failed
their people dismally, seemingly like rabbits trapped in the headlights. None will be
punished of course for failure, they are just pleased that the Government steps up and takes
the blame.
Then we have the academics and think tank personnel. All accepted as impartial and
offering honest opinions based on state of the art models. Again the Governments take what
they are offered as gospel and acts on it. Only to discover that the models are more of the
garbage in garbage out variety, not fit for purpose. Then we find how much funding the
impartial academics are receiving from potentially very interested parties, as there are $Bs
at stake. In the UK there was a Pandemic 2016 exercise to check things out. Result everything
in NHS under control. In the real world under four years later, a shambles. Did you have a
similar last autumn?
The real heroes and heroines in this saga are the doctors, nurses and their support and
ancillary staff who are actually at the sharp end. Many working in appallingly unsafe
conditions. Hats off to them.
For 200 plus years our hospitals utilized laundries to cleanse their medical protection gear
(PPE) until the advent of synthetic PPE. The present generation is taught to utilize the N95
mask and other gear once and then trash it. This was derived as a manner in reducing Sepsis
and MRSA in hospitals and an effective one though those diseases are still present.
Our hearts went out to these young medical personnel without the plastic masks and gear as
they were working outside of what they were taught and they were much more susceptible to the
Covid-19.
Now we all saw every Chinaman walking around Wuhan with a N-95 mask in January and
unfortunately those were our masks that were re-routed to the Chinese people. Hopefully we
have now learned a very hard lesson that Just in Time Inventory does not work for medical
diseases or viruses and that the USA needs to manufacture all PPE and medicine in the USA
amongst other things.
Regarding the political implications I can only say that the guy in the hot seat made things
happen when the chips were down something his predecessors nor his competitor had/have the
ability to do in a timely manner. Coercion worked.
Much of the federal stockpile of PPE sent to the states had passed their expire dates, 2010
for some, and was either useless or had to be repaired. I blame the failure on the person, or
persons, charged with monitoring the wharehoused stockpiles. The president only knows what
he's told. He can't micromanage the nation. He needs Jack Webb directing him to stick with
the facts.
We have two groups of psychopaths vying for political power.
I read somewhere the V.A. ordered the masks but F.E.M.A expropriated them on the directions of Jared Kushner, who will
later decide who receives the masks...something about the National Emergency Stockpile...what a mess.
Around 2,000 people
descended on the Pennsylvania state capitol in Harrisburg on Monday afternoon. They carried
signs declaring, "Don't be a sheeple," "I need a haircut," and the particularly chilling, "Open
businesses anyway."
Even worse, pictures showed protestors tightly packed on the sidewalks with nary a facemask
in sight, except among the jackasses openly carrying AR-15s at a protest that had nothing to do
with gun rights. Young Americans for Liberty posted a video praising the
protests, apparently forgetting the Non-Aggression Principle at the heart of libertarianism.
The protestors' refusal to observe social distancing puts the old and immunocompromised at
risk, and even drive-by protests, a supposedly safer alternative, have reportedly left
hospital-bound ambulances
marooned in traffic .
The condemnations addressed at these Reopeners and their ilk were thick and fierce. One
particularly bewildered NYT opinion writer accused them
of "Protesting for the Right to Catch the Coronavirus" and blamed this incomprehensible
movement on "the modern far-right's donor-funded, shock-jock led liberty movement." Those who
transcend the "Orange Man Bad" contrarianism and achieve some semblance of authentic economic
leftism are even more strident, painting the Reopeners as either brainwashed bootlickers "
demanding the right
to go out and die to keep making the ruling class richer" or as callous McMansionites who would
rather kill off the working class than miss a nail appointment.
The only possible motives, we're told, are idiocy and evil. It's the 2016 election all over
again. Certainly, these motives do exist, and those driven by them deserve all the criticism
they get, but they also aren't the whole story. As with the 2016 election, one can reject these
condescending explanations while still thinking Trump is a divisive jerk who is amplifying the
most toxic voices in American political discourse. Anti-Reopeners are quick to interpret any
doubts about the shutdown's scope as the ravings of an Infowars donor thirsting for
octogenarian blood, but how could they be when even the perennially level-headed Ross Douthat
has voiced them?
Thankfully, the protestors don't speak for all of us or even most of us. According to one
poll , 81
percent of Americans and 68 percent of Republicans would support a national stay-at-home order.
This poll fails, however, to account for a significant population of people smart enough to
reject misinformation and avoid petri-dish protests, but skeptical enough of government
overreach to sympathize, to one degree or another, with those in attendance. It would be a
mistake to conflate the two groups, no matter how politically convenient it might be to do so.
I'm not denying that the protestors in Harrisburg and elsewhere are being murderously reckless
or that kooks were overrepresented among those protestors. I'm just saying that there are
millions of Americans out there who watched the protests on their TV or phone and thought,
"What they're doing is dangerous, but they've got a point."
Even leaving aside the obvious
absurdities of closing public parks to solo hikers and putting a ban on gardening supplies,
there's plenty to be paranoid about. The progressive insistence that the shutdown's sole
purpose is to save lives and that to question authority at a time like this puts lives at risk
sounds well-intentioned, but a moment's scrutiny reveals it to be a smokescreen, and a thin one
at that. They have
no intention of letting this crisis go to waste. "When this is over," John Oliver
says , "this country
is going to need more than band-aids; it's gonna need f*cking surgery! Things need to change
and not go back to normal." Slate
laments that "governments in the West have spent decades deliberately shedding power" and
sees in the 'Rona an opportunity to reverse this trend. Bernie Sanders goes
full accelerationist , appearing positively giddy that the COVID-driven economic collapse
has caused many Americans "to rethink the basic assumptions underlying the American value
system."
These politicians and pundits envision a post-corona world in which expanded state power
over the economy and a beefed-up welfare state become permanent fixtures. Anyone who doesn't
want this, they assume, must have been brainwashed by Koch-funded, free-market-fundamentalist
think tanks into opposing his own best interest.
There is, however, a third possible motivation: the desire for solidarity and
subsidiarity.
"How terrible a thing it is," Dorothy Day
wrote , "when the state takes over the poor!" Anyone with any familiarity with Day's life
and work will know that she was no trickle-down, up-by-the-bootstraps free marketer, but
despite some naïve statements in the early days of the Castro regime, Day was no socialist
either. She was a
distributist , a believer in voluntary cooperation and private property. The socialist is
content to rely on the government. The distributist wants to have something of his own to rely
on so that he doesn't have to. He wants the same thing for his neighbors too, because if push
comes to shove he'd rather rely on them than on the government.
This is an entirely rational sentiment. The last time I talked to my parents, who were
forced to furlough the only two employees of their small business, they told me that the lauded
Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) had run out of money and hadn't been refilled due to partisan
squabbles in Congress. Their employees got a measly thousand dollars each. And they're not the
only ones being failed. Five to seven
million restaurant employees might never get their jobs back. If so many people are falling
through the cracks even in the midst of the biggest bailout in government history, I can see
why people are eager to re-open.
One possible solution, of course, is for government to do more, but that doesn't change the
fact that people would rather depend on voluntary transactions with their neighbors and
employers than on government handouts. It would be nice if there were some way for community
members to support one another in times of crisis other than via the mambo of Keynesian consumerism
, but despite outpourings of private charity, state-administered welfare (necessary, as Christ
said of divorce, because of the hardness of our hearts) is the only other option. Considered as
an alternative to waiting around passively for an indefinite amount of time for money that may
or may not be forthcoming, starting to re-open the economy starts looking awfully tempting,
regardless of one's opinion about the safety and feasibility of such a re-opening.
T.S. Eliot wrote
, "'When the Stranger says: What is the meaning of this city?' / / What will you answer? 'We
all dwell together / To make money from each other'?" That's not a great answer, but it at
least reveals a desire to depend on one another in some way. The need for community, shallow as
that community might be, explains why so many people are loathe to trade a complex web of
interconnected economic interdependency for a direct, one-way dependence on the government. If
buying and selling is all we have to alleviate our loneliness and precarity, it makes sense to
cling to it.
It's possible that many of the Reopeners (and Reopener sympathizers) are hollowed-out
materialists who must consume, whatever the cost, or go insane: "I shop, therefore I am."
Surely, though, some of them are small business owners whose shops and restaurants are no less
paycheck-to-paycheck than the employees they've laid off. They've made a career out of
voluntary exchange.
It's also possible that many of the Reopeners are brainwashed proles willing to die for
their capitalist oppressors, but again, I'm not so sure. It's much easier for me to picture
them as ordinary working people for whom working for their money and then going out and
spending it at local businesses they'd rather not see close is infinitely preferable to
collecting Daddy Trump's Coronabucks (as my wife and I have taken to calling the stimulus
money). These workers have been forced to trade the agency of earning a paycheck for the
helplessness of waiting around while the people in Washington (or Lansing or Trenton or
wherever) decide everything for them.
In short, it seems to me that the shutdown skeptics (though not necessarily the protestors)
are best described as those who would rather put their trust in the people and businesses they
know than in governors and senators they don't. Re-opening businesses and lifting stay-at-home
orders prematurely is still a bad idea, but the sentiment driving the doubters is
understandable, even admirable, especially when those elected paternalists refuse to release
their death grips on each other's throats long enough to save millions of jobs and can't seem
to understand that a man painting his own house isn't going to get anyone sick.
Grayson
Quay is a freelance writer and M.A. at Georgetown University.
Put our trust in the people and businesses we know than in governors and senators we don't?
I don't "know" Smithfields, Target, Cargill or US Bank. But I do know that, at least in my
state, the governor is working in close cooperation with businesses and health officials to
decide when would be a safe time to open. Unfortunately, some corporations don't have the
same regard for human life -- Smithfield's is currently being sued for failing to protect
its workers and for penalizing them for covering their face when coughing and sneezing --
seems they might miss a chunk of meat if they're not paying attention. But the virus has no
class bias, and now Smithfield's and many other meat packing corporations are shut down
because so many workers are infected.
Re: that doesn't change the fact that people would rather depend on voluntary transactions
with their neighbors and employers than on government handouts.
This is an amazingly bizarre statement for which the evidence is exactly nill. Go out
and ask the unemployed of they would prefer to receive unemployment benefits or go out and
panhandle their neighbors up at the street corner. I doubt very few, if any, would say the
latter.
Of course they have a point, but the people they should be screaming at is not Nazi
governors who want to destroy their civil liberties by locking them up in house arrest, but
at an inept and stupid administration that has perversely refused, and still does refuse,
to do what needs to be done to get this virus under control and make it safe to restart the
economy. The only numbers you need to know to understand how true this is, are 250 and
50,000: the number of deaths in South Korea and the U.S. respectively since the day on
which they both reported their first COVID cases.
Ever heard of the federal system? The idea that the federal government possesses some magic
ability to fix everything is is absurd. The only thing that will "get the virus under
control" is herd immunity. Reliable and serious studies that have been done so far - real
infection death rate is about .1-.2%, and herd immunity is well underway. But you'd rather
give power-mad governors and mayors destroying civil and constitutional rights a pass just
because the President is an idiot and world class jackass. Makes sense.
Ted Arison, the Israeli-American founder of Carnival [Covid] Cruise Line is among those
appointed to advise president Trump on how to open up the US economy. Perhaps, as music to
the ears of a seasoned New York real estate shark, he will advise Trump to blame China and
then default on the China debt mountain. Litigation pays as Arison is about to find out.
In a country with Gilded Age level of inequality implementing any meaningful social
distancing is next to impossible. Ghettos prevents that and became permanent hotspots.
See discussion of this problem at
IMHO the number of deaths from COVID-19 in the category "younger then 55" in a given
country correlated well with the level of obesity. In other words the virus hits already
deprive and weakened underclass -- the main consumer of junk food.
So what we see in the USA is far from surprising taking into account the level of
neoliberalization of the country and a large permanent uninsured underclass including
contractors and perma-temps.
Existence of nursing homes is another unsolvable problem. Like ships, they also
automatically became hotspots and medical personnel involved became inflected spreading
the infection in the vicinity.
Here is one interesting comment that I found:
The Grim Joker , says: Show Comment April 23, 2020 at 6:52 pm GMT
... ... ...
Yesterday's Action
My bank now has traffic pylons outside the door. They ask the following questions
if you want to enter:
Have you been out of the country? Answer; How am I going to be out of the
country when the airport is closed?
Do you have any symptoms? Answer: If I had I would be at the hospital
Have you associated with anyone who has the symptoms? Answer: If I thought they
did I would ask them to go to the hospital and so would I.
Sir! There is no need to be rude. Answer: Far from it. You are asking questions
parrot fashion. Questions that do not make any sense.
After getting MY money out of THEIR pockets I proceeded to the auto mechanic for
front brakes.
Joker: Am I allowed to come inside ?
70 Year old Mechanic Unmasked: Sure, you are the only customer today. You can
keep me company while I do the work. I cannot afford to lose customers.
About
31 million people are today uninsured in America and 14 states have not even expanded
Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The healthcare system is seemingly structured in
defiance of the people it should serve, functioning as yet another way to maximize profits at
the expense of millions.
In this coronavirus moment, many more Americans are finally awakening to the bitter
consequences, the damage, wrought when even a single person does not have access to the
resources he or she needs to live decently or, for that matter, survive.
With the spread of a pandemic, the cost to a nation that often treats collective care as, at
best, an afterthought should become apparent. After all, more than
9,000 medical workers, many not adequately protected from the disease, have already
contracted it.
Today, more than 38 million people
officially live below the federal poverty line and, in truth, that figure should have shocked
the nation into action before the coronavirus even arrived here. No such luck and here's the
real story anyway: the official measure of poverty,
developed in 1964, doesn't even take into account household expenses like health care, child
care, housing, and transportation, not to speak of other costs that have burgeoned in recent
decades. The world has undergone profound economic transformations over the last 66 years and
yet this out-of-date measure, based on three times a family's food budget, continues to shape
policymaking at every level of government as well as the contours of the American political and
moral imagination.
...the 53
percent of every federal discretionary dollar that goes to
the Pentagon , the trillions of dollars that have been
squandered in this country's never-ending war on terror, not to speak of the unprecedented
financial gains the wealthiest have made (even in the midst of the current crisis). Of
course, this economic order becomes a genuine moral scandal the moment attention is focused on
the
three billionaires who possess more wealth than the bottom half of society.
Since the government began transferring wealth from the poor to the very rich under the
guise of "trickle-down" (but actually gusher-up) economics, key public institutions,
labor unions , and
the electoral process have been under attack. The healthcare system has been further
privatized, public housing has been demolished, public water and sanitation systems have been
held hostage by emergency managers, and the
social safety net has been eviscerated.
In these same years, core government functions have been turned over to the private sector
and the free market. The result: levels of poverty and inequality in this country now
outmatch the Gilded Age . All of this, in turn, laid the groundwork for the rapid spread of
death and disease via the Covid-19 pandemic and its disproportionate impact on poor people and
people of color.
When the coronavirus first became a national emergency, the Fed materialized
$1.5 trillion in loans to Wall Street, a form of
corporate welfare that may never be paid back. In the following weeks, the Fed and a
congressional bipartisan stimulus package funneled trillions more in bailouts to the largest
corporations. Meanwhile, tens of millions of Americans were left out of that
CARES Act : 48 percent of the work force did not receive paid sick leave; 27 million
uninsured people and 10 percent of the insured who couldn't even afford a doctor's visit have
no guarantee of free or reasonably priced medical treatment; 11 million undocumented immigrants
and their 5 million children will receive no emergency provisions; 2.3 million of the
incarcerated have been left in the petri dish of prison; 3 million Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program recipients saw no increase in their benefits; and homeless assistance funds
were targeted at only about 500,000 people, although eight to 11 million are homeless or
housing insecure. Such omissions are guaranteed to prove debilitating, even potentially lethal,
for many. They also represent cracks in a dam ready to break in a nation without a guaranteed
living wage or universal healthcare as debt mounts, wages stagnate, and the pressures of
ecological devastation and climate change intensify.
... ... ...
Across the Black Belt of the southern states, the poor and black are dying from the
coronavirus at an
alarming rate . In many of those states, wages are tied to industries that rely on now
interrupted regular household spending. They also have among the least resources and the most
vehement anti-union and wage-suppression laws. That, in turn, leaves so many Americans all that
more vulnerable to the Covid-19 crisis, the end of which is nowhere in sight. Chalk this up,
among other things, to decades of divestment in public institutions and the entrenchment of
extremist agendas in state legislatures. The Black Belt accounts for nine of the 14 states that
have not expanded Medicaid and for 60
percent of all rural hospital closures.
Nor are these the only places now feeling the consequences of hospitals being bought up or
closed for private profit. In Philadelphia, for instance, Hahnemann Hospital, which had served
that city's poorest patients for
more than 170 years , was recently bought and
closed by a real-estate speculator who then attempted to extract a million dollars a month
from the local government to reopen it. Now, as the coronavirus ravages Philadelphia,
Hahnemann's beds sit empty, reminiscent of the notorious
shuttering of New Orleans' Charity Hospital in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
However, others are still worried that the easing of restrictions may be coming too
soon. A petition titled 'My child is not a guinea pig' – aimed at keeping children at home for longer –
has already garnered almost 18,000 signatures.
The reopening is expected to be gradual, although all schools are expected to have resumed normal
operations by April 20 for the youngest children.
Hairdressers, gyms, night clubs, restaurants and cafes in Denmark are remaining closed for the
foreseeable future.
The country has so far reported 6,876 confirmed cases of infections, with a death toll of 299. These
figures are relatively low
compared
to
many of its European neighbors.
Denmark's decision comes as other European countries – such as Austria – are gradually beginning to
ease their respective lockdown measures. Austria's schools are expected to remain closed until at least
mid-May, however.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) has recently warned that a speedy return to the
'business as usual' could trigger another wave of the deadly virus. According to the AFP tally, a total
of more than two million people worldwide are now infected with the Covid-19.
Apr 10, 2020 Army's Seattle Field Hospital Closes After 3 Days, Without Treating a Single
Patient
Medical equipment at the CenturyLink Field Event Center is being returned to the Federal
Emergency Management Agency for use elsewhere, but the governor cautioned against reading too
much into the move.
"... A malaria drug widely touted by President Donald Trump for treating the new coronavirus showed no benefit in a large analysis of its use in U.S. veterans hospitals. There were more deaths among those given hydroxychloroquine versus standard care, researchers reported. ..."
"... The nationwide study was not a rigorous experiment. But with 368 patients, it's the largest look so far of hydroxychloroquine with or without the antibiotic azithromycin for COVID-19, which has killed more than 171,000 people as of Tuesday. The study was posted on an online site for researchers and has been submitted to the New England Journal of Medicine, but has not been reviewed by other scientists. Grants from the National Institutes of Health and the University of Virginia paid for the work. ..."
"... Researchers analyzed medical records of 368 male veterans hospitalized with confirmed coronavirus infection at Veterans Health Administration medical centers who died or were discharged by April 11. About 28% who were given hydroxychloroquine plus usual care died, versus 11% of those getting routine care alone. About 22% of those getting the drug plus azithromycin died too, but the difference between that group and usual care was not considered large enough to rule out other factors that could have affected survival. Hydroxychloroquine made no difference in the need for a breathing machine, either. ..."
"... Researchers did not track side effects, but noted hints that hydroxychloroquine might have damaged other organs. The drug has long been known to have potentially serious side effects, including altering the heartbeat in a way that could lead to sudden death. ..."
"... Earlier this month, scientists in Brazil stopped part of a hydroxychloroquine study after heart rhythm problems developed in one-quarter of people given the higher of two doses being tested. ..."
"... The interesting news is that ventilators are not required in all cases and indeed my do more harm for some. BoJo was only on a cpap. The harm mechanism may be impaired hemoglobin ..."
A malaria drug widely touted by President Donald Trump for treating the new coronavirus
showed no benefit in a large analysis of its use in U.S. veterans hospitals. There were more
deaths among those given hydroxychloroquine versus standard care, researchers
reported.
The nationwide study was not a rigorous experiment. But with 368 patients, it's the
largest look so far of hydroxychloroquine with or without the antibiotic azithromycin for
COVID-19, which has killed more than 171,000 people as of Tuesday. The study was posted on an
online site for researchers and has been submitted to the New England Journal of Medicine, but
has not been reviewed by other scientists. Grants from the National Institutes of Health and
the University of Virginia paid for the work.
Researchers analyzed medical records of 368 male veterans hospitalized with confirmed
coronavirus infection at Veterans Health Administration medical centers who died or were
discharged by April 11. About 28% who were given hydroxychloroquine plus usual care died,
versus 11% of those getting routine care alone. About 22% of those getting the drug plus
azithromycin died too, but the difference between that group and usual care was not considered
large enough to rule out other factors that could have affected survival. Hydroxychloroquine
made no difference in the need for a breathing machine, either.
Researchers did not track side effects, but noted hints that hydroxychloroquine might
have damaged other organs. The drug has long been known to have potentially serious side
effects, including altering the heartbeat in a way that could lead to sudden death.
Earlier this month, scientists in Brazil stopped part of a hydroxychloroquine study after heart
rhythm problems developed in one-quarter of people given the higher of two doses being
tested. (AP News)
-- -- -- --
This was not a rigorously designed experiment and from what I've seen, VA patients almost
inevitably have multiple heath problems before they walk into the clinic or VA hospital. We're
a pretty banged up, broken down lot. However, the VA is skilled at doing this kind of
evaluation of their vast patient population. Through their Million Veteran Program, they are
conducting myriad studies involving genetic samples and health records. The results of this VA
study is sobering and seems to help answer Trump's question of what do you have to lose.
In response to this study and several prematurely ended studies, Fauci's "National Institute
of Allergy and Infectious Diseases recommends against doctors using a
combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin for the treatment of COVID-19 patients
because of potential toxicities.
Maybe those with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis will have an easier time getting their
medication. We have to do something with our stockpiled 29 million pills. Still, more studies
need to be done. Perhaps an effective treatment involving hydroxychloroquine will be developed
when we understand Covid-19 better. We're still learning of the full range of damage this virus
is capable of inflicting. Maybe it will be an effective prophylactic, not a magic shield or
miracle potion, but a helpful prophylactic. There's no reason to give up on this or any other
proposed treatment or cure.
More studies, for sure. I always find it interesting other your take on VA matters...thank
you for sharing your perspective to those of us without experience with the VA.
To be clear, the Institue guidance recommends agains the combination of HCQ and AZ. It makes
to recommendation for or against HCQ by itself. These recommendations are only fo
hospitalized pts. There are no recommendations for or against drugs for prophylaxis.
In our own internal studies we found higher rates of arrhythmias on HCQ and AZ, and found
more problems related to AZ. We have stopped that. HCQ is no longer part of our standard
protocol but docs may order it if they choose.
The brazil study was of the Chloroquine diphosphate which has greater side effects than of
the hydroxy form. The big trial is the one in NY state. Those results are not yet in.
The interesting news is that ventilators are not required in all cases and indeed my
do more harm for some. BoJo was only on a cpap. The harm mechanism may be impaired
hemoglobin . These medcram youtubes linked below are topnotch!
Thank you for your thoughtful post TTG. It may still be that the drug has a useful effect. I
know Fauci is infuriating a lot of people, but he is right: a double blind placebo controlled
trial is the only way to really know.
Off topic, but when my wife had breast cancer she took part in such a trial of a new drug.
That involved extra free visits to hospital for testing. We guessed she was given the drug
afterwards because her oncologist and surgeon surprisingly found that her lymph nodes had
been scoured clean of the cancer. It's now about four years of remission. The new drug is
apparently going to be the new standard for treatment of that type of cancer.
I am surprised that "cloroquine phosphate", the name under which I know the drug, is now
suddenly supposed to have serious side effects. When I was stationed in Egypt for one year
with my family back in 1978, we all took cloroquine, as I remember it, once a week.
In my country, Denmark, drug regulation is pretty strict, so we assumed cloroquine was safe.
Still, I went to ask my doctor when I had another one-year stationing to the Middle East
coming up five years later. After looking at the guidelines, my doctor told me that
cloroquine had been used for years without any side effects, and that the only side effects
found after long trials on rabbits were some sort of residue settling in their eyes, though
with no adverse effect on their eyesight.
Lars Moeller-Rasmussen
This is not a controlled study. It is an analysis of medical records. It stands to reason
that there were more fatalities amongst those who were given the drug, because it was
desperation hour, so they therefore got the drug. The French guy says you have to use the
drug early, not as a Hail Mary pass when the virus has done its work and left and all that
remains in the pneumonia.
Oh the end-zone celebration on Morning Joe about this study! I guess you don't need a
double blind six month controlled trial to have absolute metaphysical certainty after all.
People who were given hydroxycloriquine died, said Mika when she spiked the football.
From the CDC website right now: CDC information for travelers who want to avoid malaria:
CLOROQUINE
Drug Reasons that might make you consider using this drug Reasons that might make you avoid
using this drug
Chloroquine
Adults: 300 mg base (500 mg salt), once/week.
Children: 5 mg/kg base (8.3 mg/kg salt) (maximum is adult dose), once/week. Begin 1-2
weeks before travel, once/week during travel, and for 4 weeks after leaving.
Some people would rather take medicine weekly
Good choice for long trips because it is taken only weekly
Some people are already taking hydroxychloroquine chronically for rheumatologic
conditions. In those instances, they may not have to take an additional medicine
Can be used in all trimesters of pregnancy
Cannot be used in areas with chloroquine or mefloquine resistance
May exacerbate psoriasis
Some people would rather not take a weekly medication
For trips of short duration, some people would rather not take medication for 4 weeks after
travel
Not a good choice for last-minute travelers because drug needs to be started 1-2 weeks
prior to travel
The quote cirsium provided above from Didier Raoult is worth repeating with emphasis IMO:
"The HCQ-AZ combination, when started immediately after diagnosis , is a safe and
efficient treatment for COVID-19..". The price of treatment only beginning when sufferers are
bad enough to be hospitalized seems to be a one to two orders of magnitude increase in
mortality rate.
Test, trace contacts & quarantine like the South Koreans and prescribe Didier's magic
elixir to all positives right away. If this isn't accepted medical practice, then change the
accepted medical practice.
"Details of exactly how the tracking will work have not been released -- but, per the
BBC, the location data of people's mobile devices will be collected from telcos by Israel's
domestic security agency and shared with health officials."
Leads me to wonder whether the enthusiasm for smartphone tracking in the UK - HMG seems to
be betting the farm on it - derives from the fact that GCHQ is geared up for that anyway.
This seems to be a version of the American approach to containing local outbreaks after
lockdown has been lifted -
"When we have more tests, we can open the economy in an aggressive way without any
danger and without being surprised – and the moment there is an outbreak in a
residential building or a school, you can go there [and close it] and not the whole city,"
Bennett said.
Also containing a reference to the progress made in ensuring the various tests are more
accurate -
"There have been more than 20 rapid serological tests that have been developed
worldwide – mainly in China – many of which have been found to provide inaccurate
results.
"However, Roche and a handful of companies, such as US-based Abbott Laboratories and
Becton Dickinson and Co., have created more sophisticated serological tests, which are
expected to be validated.
"Ofer said that, "If we run these tests in conjunction with the molecular test, then we
will get a full picture" – and as Bennett explained, "the closures will end."
Those are the roughly the references I put together to submit to an English site. On
another English site I read a reference to how one Canadian area (unnamed) geared up for the
pandemic -
We live in an Ontario health district, about the size of Connecticut (with 200,000
population), in a small city with a medical school. Our public health officer in January
alerted nursing homes and hospitals to prepare, e.g. get supplies and train staff for higher
hygiene standards. Example, auditing handwashing practices in nursing homes. As a result, we
have 50 total positive cases, almost all cases traceable to travel. No nursing home
outbreaks. No deaths. No ICU care. Two people currently in hospital."
So they got going on this back in January. If only ...
There was nothing illegal in the Ukraine call, therefore no need for the IG to report
it. And until someone got a bee under their bonnet, 2nd hand information did not legally
qualify as "whistle-blowing" but someone changed the reporting form (a piece of paper not a
law of Congress) to hide that little problem.
Exactly. Yes, Trump put people in in charge who wouldn't try to sabotage his agenda
– how awful. Trump also put people in charge to stop the corruption and money
laundering of the Obama appointees. For example, EPA funneling money to environmental
groups by settling instead of fighting lawsuits and then these environmental groups taking
that settlement money and funneling it back to Obama and the Democrats.
The people elected Trump not any of these technocrats. Philip Giraldi seems to be
applauding their subversion of the Republic.
But I can't help thinking that it's payback time for those who wasted Americans' time and
mental energy on the impeachment circus. Anyone who advanced the "get rid of Trump" agenda
should have expected to get canned down the road if the game plan didn't work out.
the idea of Israeli companies feeding at the trough is stomach-churning. Again, those who
do not like this picture maybe should have considered that trying to cut trump off at the
knees and breaking a whole bunch of rules to do so might have blowback in the future. And,
there doesn't seem to be anyone in congress with the stomach or cojones or even conviction to
end the Zionist chumming.
Who in Congress is standing up for the interests of Americans as against those of rich
Israeli entrepreneurs who are taking this country for a ride?
I don't give a flying eff about anyone who participated in the "Get Trump" theatrics. Or
about anyone who gave Obama a pass of the same s -- that Trump does.
The show is all ending very badly for the American people, and the world.
@Anonymous
True enough, but neocons -- or neo-Trots, which is more accurate -- are not loyal to Trump,
or anyone else except each other and Israel. And they are certainly not populists, patriots,
or nationalists.
Trump has hired a bunch of fifth columnists, who will stab him in the back at every
opportunity.
If anything, the greatest failing of Trump was that, after he took office, he surrounded
himself with advisors who were opposed to his agenda – and the agenda that the American
people elected him to enact.
It is true, government officials should not be personally loyal to the president. But they
should dutifully try to enact his policies, or else resign in protest. To do less is to
subvert democracy (or at least, whatever is left of it). Although it must be admitted Trump
is increasingly doing the worst of both worlds: surrounding himself with hostile officials
for things the people want (like no more pointless foreign wars), and surrounding himself
with sycophants when its for crony capitalism
As far as stopping immigration being unconstitutional, with respect, unconstitutional is
whatever 500 billionaires don't want. So you see, separating the alleged children of people
illegally crossing the border from their parents is clearly unconstitutional, but separating
people convicted of any other crime from their children is perfectly OK. Because the rich
want cheap labor.
But if the rich no longer need massive immigration to lower wages – which may be the
case for the near future – then the rich will no longer care about 'immigrants.'
Indeed, if illegal immigration hurt the profits of the rich, it would be legal to machine gun
migrants at the border – in fact, it would then be unconstitutional not to!
The Obama-Trump continuities you cite are very relevant here. Both heads of state behave as
figureheads, knuckling under to permit continued CIA impunity (Obama w.r.t. widespread and
systematic torture and murder and aggression, Trump w.r.t. ARCA.) They behave identically in
terms of abuse of function and trading in influence, subjecting all regulators to industry
control.
The only difference between Obama and Trump is their inside v. outside strategy. Obama was
third-generation dynastic CIA nomenklatura, and after his early misstep of promising to obey
the supreme law of the land on torture, Obama took CIA direction without demur, up to and
including the crime of aggression of TIMBER SYCAMORE. Trump, by contrast, follows the Nixon
template, attempting to replace CIA focal points surrounding him with "loyalists." When Nixon
did it, CIA cadres leveled the same charge. But Nixon put Schlesinger in as DCI to extract
the crown jewels and shitcan a bunch of the worst criminals. Carter took the outsider's path
too.
Nixon was purged in the CIA's bloodless Watergate coup; Carter was ousted by CIA's October
Surprise. We should consider whether COVID-19 collateral damage will be used to discredit
Trump, who evidently has less workplace discretion than a McDonald's fry cook. At a key
juncture of the outbreak CIA frogmarched Trump through the synthetic crisis of the Soleimani
assassination.
So of course the government is criminal. It was chartered as a criminal enterprise at
inception in Sction 202, 73 years ago. In the resulting kleptocracy, IGs perform a
superfluous function. And every CIA inspector general is paid specifically to be a criminal
scumbag. The IG reviewing CIA's most open-and-shut crime against humanity, its torture gulag,
criticized it because it didn't work, intently ignoring the supreme law of the land that says
nothing justifies torture.
So let's not get all verklempt about some IGs. IGs are nothing but a Gehlen-type apparat
generating legal pretexts for manifestly illegal acts. Fuck em if they can't take a joke.
@Carlton
Meyer Trump just suspended all immigration due to the China virus. Liberals and employers
are furious and filing lawsuits and asking for emergency preliminary injunctions to overturn
Trumps order. Same old same old that's happened since Trump took office.
Reporters for all media are totally, absolutely anti American born worker and absolutely
totally in favor of a non White foreigner for every possible job from dishwasher to
Doctor.
Except for the evil White Nationalist racist websites frequented by ignorant prole
deplorables like me, I've never seen an anti immigration pro American worker word published
in any mainstream media.
So it's extremely unlikely that a reporter would ask such a question. More likely, a
reporter would ask why the government isn't facilitating more non White immigrants to do the
" jobs Americans just won't do" such as coding engineering, research and medicine.
It is becoming clearer with each passing day that the death toll from the Wuhan virus is not
rising exponentially as the "experts" predicted but only modestly in some places while
levelling off or even declining almost everywhere else in the country --
as well as the world . The incidence of infection borders on nil in the hot and humid
countries, where the number of deaths remains in the double or very low triple digits
four months after the virus emerged from the Wuhan province of China.
Common sense alone indicates that the number of deaths will ultimately be nowhere near the 2
million without "mitigation" or a best case 100,000 to 240,000 with "mitigation" as predicted
by "Tony and Deborah" at the White House press briefings that have fueled nationwide panic.
Tony and Deb have
since revised their "models" downward to predict 40,000 to 178,000 deaths. And that
prediction has already been lowered again as the IMHE model Tony and Deb have been touting
during the briefings now "predicts" 81,766 deaths by August 4. That prediction
would require some 18,000 people to die every month between now and then, even though at 10,000
deaths
since February 29 -- a number consistent with a heavy flu season -- we appear to have
reached the peak and a decline is already evident .
At some point, Tony and Deb will be "predicting" precisely what has already happened, as we
saw with the "models" that first predicted Hillary Clinton was certain to win the Presidency.
And when the final death toll fails even to approach what they first predicted in order to
panic the whole country into a nationwide lockdown never before seen in human history, they
will make the unprovable, non-falsifiable, junk science claim that "mitigation worked."
But it is becoming increasingly clear that "mitigation" has done nothing but cause a
pointless, catastrophic disruption of social and economic life. This seems to delight the lying
media and their Democrat partners, who are striving to keep fear alive, avoid or minimize any
good news about the numbers, overstate the burden on local hospitals (without any unedited
video or other reliable evidence), argue against curative treatment by hydroxychloroquine or
otherwise, get everybody into masks after months of "expert" advice that masks are ineffective,
and generally prolong the economic damage and loss of civil liberties for months to come.
As the actual numbers belie the pseudo-scientific prophecies of doom, however, the lockdown
of America that began with Democrat governors and mayors now exhibits a curious and hardly
coincidental fissure along party lines. As of today, nine states, all headed by Republican
governors, refuse to join the lockdown regime and now provide embarrassing counterfactuals
demonstrating that officially mandated lockdowns were never necessary and have probably made
the situation worse by preventing the development of "herd immunity" to this virus, like all
the others, from the normal interaction of large populations.
The following are the nine states that have refused to impose lockdowns. All of them have
minimal death tolls from the Wuhan virus, including the populous South Carolina, and five of
them have not enacted even local lockdowns:
Arkansas – 14 deaths. No statewide or local lockdowns.
Iowa – 14 deaths. No statewide or local lockdowns.
Nebraska – 8 deaths. No statewide or local lockdowns.
North Dakota – 3 deaths. No statewide or local lockdowns.
Oklahoma – 42 deaths.
South Carolina – 40 deaths.
South Dakota – 2 deaths. No statewide or local lockdowns.
Utah – 8 deaths.
Wyoming – 0 deaths.
[Data as of this writing on April 6 at 9 p.m.]
Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas told the Fake News
New York Times what we have been saying on these pages since the stupid lockdowns began:
"the typical stay-at-home order was a misleading 'illusion' because it includes so many
exemptions allowing people to go out in public, such as for groceries or exercise ordering
people to stay at home would simply leave thousands jobless."
The Times demands to
know why these nine states have seceded from the United States of Mitigation: "Holdout
States Resist Calls for Stay-at-Home Orders: 'What Are You Waiting For?' screams the indignant
headline. Editorial desperation leaps from the page, for the Fake News combine as a whole knows
that these nine Republican-led holdout states are all counterfactual to the panic narrative,
and that what they are waiting for is the rest of the country to discover that they have been
had by the cheerleaders of "mitigation," who live in luxury and job security while the masses
suffer. First and foremost, Deb and Tony, intimate associates of Bill Gates, whose "models"
keep lowering predictions to catch up with the growing embarrassment of the real numbers.
Another embarrassing counterfactual is the Commonwealth of Virginia, now being suffocated by
Democrat Governor Ralph ("Infanticide") Northam's absurd executive orders, which have ruined
the state's economy while attempting to place its entire population under a fake quarantine
that does nothing but create instant unemployment and bankruptcy. The Northam lockdown will
remain in effect until June 10 unless Northam calculates he cannot get away with prolonging his
virus-themed dictatorship past Trump's new control date of April 30. Yet, as of the week of
March 28, the
Virginia Department of Health "has received report of 1,352 pneumonia and
influenza-associated deaths," including five pediatric deaths, during the 2019-20 flu season,
while purported deaths from the Wuhan virus and related pneumonia stand at 54 as of today at 9
p.m., with no pediatric deaths.
Based on the example of Virginia alone, which provides an all-but-irrefutable
counterfactual, it is time to call this fiasco what it is: Coronagate. In my view, Coronagate
will go down as the single biggest fraud in the fraud-ridden history of American politics --
outside of the fraudulent inducement of America's belated entry into World War I, which
sacrificed
116,000 American lives to an epochal disaster that destroyed the last remnants of
Christendom, guaranteed World War II, and led to the rise of the Third Reich and the Soviet
Union.
Meanwhile, the White House press briefings have devolved into a black comedy with the same
script every day: Trump recites a litany of statistics on the number of COVID-19 tests
performed, the mass production and distribution of ventilators and N95 respirators, surgical
masks, surgical gowns and surgical gloves; praises the captains of industry for pitching in
with massive contributions of product; and lauds the branches of the military for their massive
logistical operations, including the building of entire hospitals that remain almost empty.
Pence then delivers another sermon on how to "slow the spread in 30 days." Then Deb drones
on about her ever-evolving models, followed by a very hoarse Tony, who croaks the same
statements he made the day before about "the curve" and "mitigation, mitigation, mitigation"
while assiduously avoiding any suggestion that the "pandemic" could be over any time soon or
that there could be any proven effective treatment.
Then it's the media jackals' turn. Day after day these morons jabber at Trump with
accusations disguised as questions: Why has governor so-and-so or such-and-such hospital not
received enough test kits/ventilators/masks/gowns/gloves/breath mints?
... ... ...
At today's briefing, one reporter attempted to elicit from Fauci a declaration that, no
matter what Trump might think, America cannot "return to normal" without a vaccine whose
development is, conveniently enough for the media-DNC complex, at least a year away. Fauci's
meandering response was a dog whistle that, if he has anything to say about it, the country
will remain under some level of lockdown until there is a largely ineffective or even harmful
vaccine, like the one he advocated
for the swine flu of 2009.
The Fake News media are laboring to elevate Fauci, a star in the Leftist galaxy whose center
is Bill Gates, to the status of Recovery Czar whose "medical opinion" will determine the fate
of the nation
The US is the biggest funder of the World Health Organization and his announcement drew
widespread criticism. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, whose foundation was the second-biggest
funder
of the WHO in 2018-19, called the decision " as dangerous as it sounds ."
Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as
dangerous as it sounds. Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is
stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs @WHO now more than ever.
Trump also faces a battle with Congress, which is actually responsible for allocating
funding. I'm not a fan of Trump, but to some extent he has a point.
There have been plenty of critics of the WHO's handling of the outbreak. The organization's
initial response is now seen as far too accepting of the official Chinese government line in
the first few weeks. In particular, a single social media message has come back to haunt it. On
January 14, the organization said on Twitter: " Preliminary investigations conducted by the
Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel
#coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China. "
Defenders of the WHO point to guidance sent to governments on January 10 and 11, outlining
the way the virus spreads and asking health officials to be alert to any 'evidence of amplified
or sustained human-to-human transmission.' Those WHO supporters also note that Trump himself
had tweeted support for Beijing's handling of the situation in the early days of the outbreak.
For many observers, Trump's attacks on the WHO are self-serving, designed to deflect criticism
away from his initially slow and skeptical response to what he calls the "Chinese
virus."
While the WHO was perhaps too slow on the uptake, we should be wary of critics' implication
that it should be given the job of policing national governments. For now, the WHO is in an
awkward position of having to deal with the politics of different member countries while
responding to health emergencies. Moreover, the WHO 'cried wolf' over the 2009 swine flu
pandemic. The WHO's director general at the time, Margaret Chan, famously said " All of
humanity is under threat " from the outbreak, but it proved to be far less deadly than
feared. A bit more caution over the new coronavirus was probably sensible.
Goldman Sachs
predicts that the economy will shrink 34 percent in the second quarter, with unemployment
leaping to 15 percent.
Notable quotes:
"... Across the US, millions of businesses have been shut down by "executive order" and the unemployment rate has skyrocketed to levels not seen since the Great Depression. ..."
"... What if the "cure" is worse than the disease? ..."
From California to New Jersey, Americans are protesting in the streets. They are demanding
an end to house arrest orders given by government officials over a virus outbreak that even
according to the latest US government numbers will claim fewer lives than the seasonal flu
outbreak of 2017-2018.
Across the US, millions of businesses have been shut down by "executive order" and the
unemployment rate has skyrocketed to levels not seen since the Great Depression.
Americans, who have seen their real wages decline thanks to Federal Reserve monetary
malpractice, are finding themselves thrust into poverty and standing in breadlines. It is like
a horror movie, but it's real.
Last week the UN Secretary General warned that a global recession resulting from the
worldwide coronavirus lockdown could cause "hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths
per year." As of this writing, less than 170,000 have been reported to have died from the
coronavirus worldwide.
Many Americans have also died this past month because they were not able to get the medical
care they needed. Cancer treatments have been indefinitely postponed. Life-saving surgeries
have been put off to make room for coronavirus cases. Meanwhile hospitals are laying off
thousands because the expected coronavirus cases have not come and the hospitals are partially
empty.
This prophecy does not correlate well with his complete inability to predict how coronavirus epidemic unfolded in the USA and
blunders around the road along with sleeping for two months after China informed the WHO about new coronavirus.
Fauci is a pretty sinister, not so much comical figure is we remembers his role in Gain of Function experiments
proliferation
Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases, said there is "no doubt" Donald J. Trump will be confronted with a surprise
infectious disease outbreak during his presidency.
Fauci has led the NIAID for more than 3 decades, advising the past five United States
presidents on global health threats from the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s
through to the current Zika virus outbreak.
During a forum on pandemic preparedness at Georgetown University, Fauci said the Trump
administration will not only be challenged by ongoing global health threats such as influenza
and HIV, but also a surprise disease outbreak.
"The history of the last 32 years that I have been the director of the NIAID will tell the
next administration that there is no doubt they will be faced with the challenges their
predecessors were faced with," he said.
While observers have speculated since his election about how Trump will respond to such
challenges, Fauci and other health experts said Tuesday that preventing disease pandemics
often starts overseas and that a proper response means collaboration between not only the
U.S. and other countries, but also the public and private health sectors.
"We will definitely get surprised in the next few years," he said. 'Risks have never
been higher'
Trump, the real estate developer-turned-Republican politician, has worried some infectious
disease experts with controversial and sometimes unclear views on certain health issues.
Ronald Klain, who coordinated the U.S.'s Ebola response for the Obama administration, said
Trump's virtual silence about the Zika outbreak and harsh comments about American volunteers
infected during the West African Ebola outbreak is "not the kind of leadership we need in our
next president."
Experts speculated about the infectious disease threats Donald Trump will face as
president.
"It's hard to think of a more important time to show a willingness to speak out in the
public health community and the global health community than it is right now on the eve of
Donald Trump becoming our next president," Klain said. "The risks have never been higher, and
the question of his perspective on these issues has never been more dubious than it is with
Donald Trump."
Fauci and others noted some of the disease outbreaks that recent administrations have
faced, including current President Barack Obama, whose administration was tested early on
with an H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009. More recently, the administration was forced to
repurpose almost $600 million in federal funds set aside for the Ebola outbreak when
Republicans rejected Obama's request for $1.9 billion to fund the nation's Zika response.
Current Deputy Homeland Security Advisor Amy Pope, JD, said it was "typical" of the U.S.
government that money meant for the Ebola epidemic was appropriated for Zika because of the
proclivity of populations to worry about what is currently threatening them.
"We shouldn't ask the American public to make those choices in the future," she said. "It
doesn't keep them safe."
Klain said pandemic preparedness should be approached from a nonpartisan angle. A
Democrat, he referenced Republican President George W. Bush founding the U.S. President's
Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and said Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and
Lindsey Graham collaborated with the Obama administration on the Ebola response.
"The mosquitoes don't know if they're biting Democrats or Republicans," Klain said. "They
don't know what party you are."
Other highlights
According to some of the experts who spoke on Tuesday, preparing the U.S. for pandemics
requires proper funding and starts by battling disease outbreaks overseas. This is not just
the right thing to do, but the best way to keep Americans safe, Klain said.
"There is no safety for us and our populace when infectious diseases rage," he said. "The
only way the American people can have safety and security in their lives is to promote safety
and security around the world."
Some other highlights from the forum:
Hamid Jafari, MD, acting director of the Division of Global Health Protection at the CDC,
said the CDC has been productive during past presidential transitions and expects the same
will be true as control of the White House passes from Obama to Trump: "We have room for
optimism that there will be continuing support," he said.
Pope said there is no playbook for fighting emerging infectious diseases: "We never know
what's going to hit us, so we need to be prepared as possible," she said.
According to Pope, some in the health community are wary about working with the security
community because they think it will be detrimental to their work, when the opposite is true:
"Marrying these communities actually leads to more resources and more attention," she
said.
Bill Steiger, PhD, chief program officer of Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon and former director of
the HHS Office of Global Health Affairs, said his first piece of advice for the incoming
administration would be to budget time for HHS to focus on things other than domestic health
issues, because a larger problem is inevitable: "Some international global health crisis will
happen that will divert that attention. It has happened over and over again," he said.
Steiger said the global health agenda, including programs like PEPFAR, is an "easy win"
for the new administration: "Expand the funding if available, but at a minimum keep it
going," he said.
Fauci said he is in favor of a public health emergency fund that would be used to combat
outbreaks like those involving Ebola and Zika: "It's tough to get it but we need it. What we
had to go through with Zika was very, very painful when the president asked for $1.9 billion
in February and we didn't get [funding] until September."
Near the end, Fauci speculated about the possibility that there will be a resurgence of
Zika this summer. The virus has caused many travel-related cases in the U.S. and some locally
acquired cases in Florida and Texas. Fauci said other concerns for the Trump administration
include the potential for a new influenza pandemic and outbreaks of diseases that are not yet
on anyone's radar.
"What about the things we are not even thinking about?" he said. "No matter what, history
has told us definitively that [outbreaks] will happen because [facing] infectious diseases is
a perpetual challenge. It is not going to go away. The thing we're extraordinarily confident
about is that we're going to see this in the next few years." – by Gerard Gallagher
Disclosures: Fauci, Jafari and Pope report no relevant financial disclosures. Infectious
Disease News was unable to confirm relevant financial disclosures for Klain and Steiger at
the time of publication.
"... "No matter what you do for the Do Nothing Democrats, no matter how GREAT a job you are doing, they will only respond to their Fake partners in the Lamestream Media in the negative, even in a time of crisis," ..."
"... "rude and nasty" ..."
"... "He gave them everything that they would have wanted to hear in terms of gaining ground on the CoronaVirus, but nothing that anyone could have said, including 'it's over,' could have made them happy," ..."
"... "They were RUDE and NASTY. This is their political playbook, and they will use it right up to the election on November 3rd," ..."
"... "America will not be fooled!!!" ..."
"... "never been so mad about a phone call" ..."
"... "the administration still doesn't have a plan to track daily testing capacity in every lab in the country, publicly release that data, and put forward a plan and timeline for identifying gaps." ..."
Donald Trump slammed Democrats for a "rude and nasty" phone call with the vice president
over the Covid-19 pandemic, and theorized nothing will satisfy them as they try to "fool"
America in November's election.
"No matter what you do for the Do Nothing Democrats, no matter how GREAT a job you are
doing, they will only respond to their Fake partners in the Lamestream Media in the negative,
even in a time of crisis," Trump tweeted on Saturday.
He added that his working relationship with Democrats during the Covid-19 pandemic has been
"even worse" than before and revealed senators held a "rude and nasty"
conference call with Vice President Mike Pence, who heads the White House Coronavirus Task
Force, on Friday where little progress was made.
"He gave them everything that they would have wanted to hear in terms of gaining ground
on the CoronaVirus, but nothing that anyone could have said, including 'it's over,' could have
made them happy," the president vented.
"They were RUDE and NASTY. This is their political playbook, and they will use it right
up to the election on November 3rd," he continued, adding that "America will not be
fooled!!!"
No matter what you do for the Do Nothing Democrats, no matter how GREAT a job you are
doing, they will only respond to their Fake partners in the Lamestream Media in the negative,
even in a time of crisis. I thought it would be different, but it's not. In fact, it's even
worse...
....them happy, or even a little bit satisfied. They were RUDE and NASTY. This is their
political playbook, and they will use it right up to the election on November 3rd. They will
not change because they feel that this is the only way they can win. America will not be
fooled!!!
Some lawmakers have expressed just as much animosity over the talk as the president. Maine
Sen. Angus King (I) said he has "never been so mad about a phone call" in his
life.
A point of contention appears to be Trump's desire to begin rolling back stay-at-home orders
and reopening the US economy next month, while many Democrats insist more Covid-19 testing must
be done first.
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-New Hampshire) tweeted after the call that she is concerned "the
administration still doesn't have a plan to track daily testing capacity in every lab in the
country, publicly release that data, and put forward a plan and timeline for identifying
gaps."
Various governors, such as New York's Andrew Cuomo, continue to insist more thorough testing
and tracing of the virus is needed before they consider reopening their states and easing back
lockdown orders, while places like Texas, Minnesota, and Florida have already begun dropping
restrictions as more and more citizens take to demonstrating and protesting against the
measures.
Level of mismanaging of epidemic in Trump administration is staggering. Initially they
ignored it, but then switch to full panic mode facilitated by such questionable experts as Fauci.
Panic reaction with "one size fits all" quarantine measures created record unemployment.
BTW NIH fiscal year 2020 budget totals $41.6 billion.
The fact that Fauci did nothing to protect NY metropolitan areas means that he is incompetent
to hold this position.
More than a dozen U.S. researchers, physicians and public health experts, many of them from
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were working full time at the Geneva
headquarters of the World Health Organization as the novel coronavirus emerged late last year
and transmitted real-time information about its discovery and spread in China to the Trump
administration, according to U.S. and international officials.
A number of CDC staffers are regularly detailed to work at WHO in Geneva as part of a
rotation that has operated for years. Senior Trump-appointed health officials also consulted
regularly at the highest levels with the WHO as the crisis unfolded, the officials said.
The presence of so many U.S. officials undercuts President Trump's charge that the WHO's
failure to communicate the extent of the threat, born of a desire to protect China, is largely
responsible for
the rapid spread of the virus in the United States.
There is hope. The coronavirus crisis has exposed the relative merits of nations, so the
entire world can see, for example, how broken and corrupt the US is, with no leadership to
speak of. Dawdling, it failed to prevent needless deaths, then shut down much of the
country, bankrupting thousands of businesses and throwing millions out of work. As a fix,
it throws mere crumbs at desperate citizens, while bailing out the big banks, again.
Texans flocked to the state's Capitol in Austin to protest Covid-19 lockdown measures,
refusing to practice social distancing and cheering for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be fired by
President Donald Trump. In attendance at Saturday's 'You Can't Close America' Rally were
InfoWars founder Alex Jones and host Owen Shroyer, who led the crowd of some 200 people in
chants against the mainstream media and officials like Fauci.
Shroyer, who referred to the doctor as "fascist Fauci," asked the crowd: "Do
you think Anthony Fauci should be fired?" , before leading them in chants of "Fire
Fauci."
Parts of that Wired.com story read like a stenographed PR release so I am not sure really what to make of it. The story seems
to make light of the safety breaches that were occurring at the Fort Detrick lab. While it is likely that most breaches (apart
from the waste disposal issue and the use of chemical rather than thermal treatment of waste) appeared to be minor OHS-type breaches
and appropriate staff training was all that was required, I did get an impression while reading the article that the CDC had its
arms twisted to grant re-accreditation to the facility due to pressure from the White House to get a vaccine ready in time before
November this year.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is extending his state's social-distancing measures to May
15, along with unspecified "other states," while claiming his policies have worked to slow the
spread of the coronavirus. The stay-at-home directives, social-distancing guidelines and
closures of " non-essential " businesses that comprise the governor's " New York
Pause " executive order have been extended a further two weeks, Cuomo revealed during his
daily coronavirus press conference on Thursday. The order was previously due to expire on April
30.
"... FEMA and Homeland Security are but the most glaring example of departments stocked with hacks capable only of crippling the organizations that they are supposed to direct. They even corrupted the Center for Disease Control. ..."
"... The readiness of executives to do anything necessary to protect against exposure of their own failures or illicit actions has become commonplace within our institutions. ..."
"... As to the Crozier scandal, let's be clear: it is not a matter of ethics alone, but also of ability to meet critical obligations. ..."
"... Naval Secretary Thomas Motly – who missed his calling as a political commissar in the old Red Army, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Miley and Chief of Naval Operations Mike Gilday who both are testament to the Peter Principle that determines promotion in today's military. ..."
"... An [neoliberal] "oligarchy" has no interest in the long-term prosperity and strength of the nation - or perhaps, they simply have no faith in it. They are motivated to strip-mine the nation of all wealth while it lasts, because if they don't someone else will. They can live in walled compounds and go to private doctors, and if it all falls apart they can just gather up their loot and sail away on their yachts. ..."
"... After all the agony and hysteria surrounding the election of Trump for 3 years, they will nominate an elderly warmonger with obvious signs of dementia, who can't seem to keep his hands off women in a creepy fashion - as the alternative. It's as if there was a contest on how extreme a "lesser of two evils" can get. Tack on Covid and financial ruin. It's astounding. ..."
"... Come this epidemic and what do we see? What we see is that at least the UK government, the US government and the Canadian government were lying. It is quite clear that they were NOT expecting to be attacked. How do I know they were not expecting to be attacked? They had NO stores of hand sanitizer, NO stores of masks, NO goggles, NO stores of PPE, No factories for making any of them. NO troops of Bio/Chem warfare soldiers ready to spring into action and NO PLANS, as far as I can see. Are we to assume that if they were attacked by, say, the Russians, they were going to rely on the Chinese to supply them? (Sarcasm!) ..."
"... Lol. Trump has under 4 years working for the federal gov. It isn't his system. It is the typical repugs and dingbats system. He is an idiot for leaving his cushy life to join these idiots. It certainly doesn't speak well of his judgement. The people who work there and the people he has hired... Pompeo, Bolton, Esper, etc have worked there for decades. Bolton is an especially rotten character that seems to just keep popping up. ..."
"... i would like to emphasize a key point you make - accountability, and how there is none.. that to me is the number uno issue in the world today and it is very stark with regard to the usa - accountability... of course obama kicked that concept down the road too... no accountability.. it sucks big time.. we need it desperately... ..."
"... Okay... he's not a psychoapath, Don. I'll settle malignant sociopathic narcissist, which means by definition and demonstration that he would not know empathy were it to leap up and smack him in the face. Liar? We can soften that too. He is a serial fantasists living in the worlds he creates and like a spoiled child demands, raging when his wishes are not instantly gratified. ..."
"... When I was young I was always looking up for US, don't know why, maybe I have been fascinated by a culture, lifestyle, innovations.. when I got older and started to read about what actually happens in the world, I realized that US is not what it seemed to be anymore and I think its just getting worse.. ..."
"... Basically, no matter if is there Trump, Obama, Bush, Biden, Hillary or Easter Bunny.. your government to its core is really sick.. ..."
"... Everytime i read about decision US made, how is profit driven at expense of regular people, its a disgrace.. and more and more people in the world can see it.. just Trump himself exposed more the whole thing, chaotic, selfish, rude and arrogant government, not ashamed of anything. ..."
Collective tragedy is always a learning experience. So it has been for great wars, natural
disasters, economic collapses, political revolutions. The COVID-19 pandemic is such a tragedy.
Although the number of casualties may pale compared to the carnage of war, there are ancillary
effects that leave us shocked and sobered. Most obviously, there is sudden onset of a severe
economic depression with attendant social distress whose toll we will be registering for years
to come. Then, there is the exposure of how incompetent our public institutions have become
– the callous inhumanity of those who rule in Washington matched only by their clownish
ineptitude. It is in the realm of these latter intangibles that we should look first for morals
and lessons.
Overriding all else is the spectacle of a President, duly elected by the American people,
who is a malicious psychopath with not a single redeeming trait. A physical, intellectual and
emotional spectre who would defy our imaginative powers were he not on display before our eyes.
He has gathered around him a witch's coven of scoundrels, crooks and crackpots as bereft of
mind and ethics as he is. They also are inveterate liars; Trump himself is a congenital liar
since clinical narcissism is inborn. Yet, we refer to this motley assemblage as an
'administration' – in our impulse to 'normalize' the abominable. No dry bill of
particulars is necessary, nor could it do justice, to the squalid theater we see played out
before us on a daily basis. This man, at this moment, is viewed favorably by 46% of the public.
That reality eclipses everything else.
There is no organized opposition worthy of the name. This is the second great failure of our
democracy. The Democratic Party creaks under the weight of geriatric nominal leaders –
plodding along without conviction, without will, without the integrity to free itself from the
monied interests and the self-serving careerists who have dragged it into the mire. Yes, they
may succeed, come November, in sparing the Republic the coup de grace of four more Trumpian
years. This despite their suicidal instinct in choosing Joe Biden to bear the standard –
a man barely robust enough to keep the banner from dragging in the dust on his slog along the
campaign trail. This bunch can't even get themselves to a microphone for a news clip at a time
of historic crisis aggravated by the atrocious sins of the existing government. Surely, a
first. Worried about Covid-19 contagion? Order a box of alcohol wipes from China. Instead,
Biden makes a call to Trump for what both agree was a 'nice conversation.' What does that get
him?
Cuomo has to placate Trump with soothing words – even at the expense of lying about
how much aid New York actually received from Washington – since the lives of his people
are at stake. For Biden, the opposite is true; avoiding soothing words is crucial since the
November election is dependent on undercutting Trump and discrediting him.
Three, the United States is a poorly governed country. Manifest ineptitude in performing
collective functions is by no means limited to Washington under Trump. It has become a feature
of the institutional landscape. True, the Trumpites have launched a dedicated campaign to
realize the anti-government fanatics' wet dream of disabling all public agencies. FEMA and
Homeland Security are but the most glaring example of departments stocked with hacks capable
only of crippling the organizations that they are supposed to direct. They even corrupted the
Center for Disease Control. Its leaders, evidently eager to curry favor with the madman in the
Oval Office, gave its stamp of approval to the unproven – and dangerous drug HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE that Trump's been promoting as the Silver Bullet to cure Covid-19. (April
4-6) Luckily, saner heads prevailed, or a conscience was pricked, and these panting spaniels
withdrew the recommendation from their website.
... ... ...
At local levels, just look at the condition of infrastructure, of pension funds – of
public health. The extremity – and, frankly, the absurdity - of what's happening in the
health sector is highlighted by what we see elsewhere in the world. Face masks, including ones
that actually provide protection, are readily available throughout East Asia – and
elsewhere. A personal anecdote: relatives in Tunisia are mailing me N95 masks which they
purchased in their neighborhood pharmacies. Indeed, as of April 8, Tunisia had produced by
their own resources, and distributed 30 million masks to a population of 11 million. The
equivalent here would be 1 billion masks! (Minus the 1 million sent express to Israel by the
Pentagon as a ritual gift of fealty.) In America, we are offered instructions on how to sew a
(probably useless) mask out of discarded T-shirts. MAGA!! Hospital directors fire nurses who
buy their own equipment out of concern that they will be upstaged and exposed as the callous,
profit obsessed bozos they are. Yet, we blind ourselves to the realities of other nations
– because to do so is embarrassing, because our so-called leaders are protecting their
behinds, and because we compulsively retain our dogmatic faith in American superiority.*
The readiness of executives to do anything necessary to protect against exposure of their
own failures or illicit actions has become commonplace within our institutions. The current
Corona crisis puts that reality into the headlines – as with the despicable act of the
Pentagon in dismissing summarily Captain Brett Crozier whose petition made known that his
superiors were prepared to sacrifice his crew's lives to the imperative of hiding their own
errors. Is this notion that 'anything goes except accountability' any different from Harvard's
studied silence about its embrace of Jeffrey Epstein or its abrupt sacking of a professor who
dared reveal that the President was sweeping under the academic rug rampant sexual abuses? We
all have personal experience of similar stories.
As to the Crozier scandal, let's be clear: it is not a matter of ethics alone, but also of
ability to meet critical obligations. In the event that the country found itself at war against
a serious enemy, it is a dangerous liability to have in positions of command people like
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper (hack lobbyist for Raytheon and the
Aerospace Industries Association ), Naval Secretary Thomas Motly – who missed his
calling as a political commissar in the old Red Army, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Miley
and Chief of Naval Operations Mike Gilday who both are testament to the Peter Principle that
determines promotion in today's military. They would either be washed out in the wake of gross
failures, or continue to be albatrosses dragging out pointless missions like the 17 bemedaled
but clueless U.S. generals who have proven so useless in Afghanistan. As it is, they seem
unable to keep their warships from slamming into inanimate objects in placid waters.
Here are Motly's last remarks before riding off to join corporate boards: "The men and women
of the Department of the Navy deserve a continuity of civilian leadership befitting our great
Republic, and the decisive naval force that secures our way of life he acknowledged that he
"lost situational awareness" during his address to the Roosevelt's crew." "There is no excuse,
but perhaps a glimpse of understanding, and hopefully empathy. I am deeply sorry for some of
the words and for how they spread across the media landscape like a wildfire." (The New York
Times – ever twisting its hat with eyes averted in the presence of intimidating
Presidential authority – features a long letter from Motly justifying his actions, 4/7.
Only 3, 1 Republican, 2 Democrats, protested Crozier's mistreatment. Among the silent chorus
were the 22/23 aspirants to the Democratic nomination who bored us stiff for fifteen months
with their unceasing calls for "LEADERSHIP!" 'Profiles In Courage' is not a best-seller at the
Capitol. Even Dr. Fauce doesn't have a copy.
Absence of accountability is incompatible with good governance. That is especially true in
democracies where accountability is ultimately downwards. In a country like China, where
accountability is primarily upward, the circle can be squared by the occasional resort to
putting some miscreant up against the wall. We don't have that luxury. Here, it is only the
weak, the indigent and the naïve who need fear punishment – of any kind. The
powerful and well-connected worry less about a last cigarette than about their first.
In compiling a list of factors that have contributed to the drastic decline in the
performance of American institutions, this parochialism figures prominently among them. We put
up with levels of dereliction matched in the developed world only by Britain. Think of the
debate over Medicare-for-All and like proposals. As alluded to in an earlier commentary, the
best national medical insurance systems (as confirmed by the WHO and other independent bodies)
are in Western Europe, Canada and Japan – France topping the list. Yet, their expenditure
on those systems is only 2/3 of what we pay for our own ramshackle non-system. That fact is
ignored. Instead, the political class agonizes over the specious issue of whether we can afford
it. Joe Biden has pledged to veto any such plan on grounds that it would cost $35 trillion
– or whatever number has floated into his fog-bound mind. This lethal combination of
ignorance, dogmatism and fidelity to special interests has come to be a hallmark of how we
approach government and the meeting of collective needs.
A full treatment of the several intertwined, mutually reinforcing elements that have led us
along the path of decline is well beyond the limits of a brief commentary. A few, though, do
deserve to be mentioned for what – one hopes – might be future reference. One is
the 'privatization ' craze. It has become the preferred method for transferring public assets
to private profiteers. The effects are degraded services, the loss of expertise in public
bodies, the exploitation of workers and the abandonment of intelligent planning (ventilators
anyone?). With the COVID-19 affair, we've reached the ultimate privatization: the Federal
Reserve has hired BlackRock to conduct its operations on the bond market as the central
component of its $4 trillion Quantitative Easing strategy (BlackRock itself being the dominant
player on that market). The same effects have been produced by the swarm of hedge funds and
private equity who are parasites feeding on the prostrate host that is the real economy and its
dependents. American society celebrates, and empowers, these critters. Then there are the '
consultants ' – the locust hordes which our culture designates as vital contributors to
the good works of government, of business, of universities, of charities, of sports teams, of
hospitals, of failing marriages, of the US Army that puts guns in their hands. They, too, add
to the toll on public competence and collective services.
Another anecdote: the city of Austin, Texas has hired a consulting firm to advise them on
designs for a reconfiguration of the street that runs in front of the University of Texas.
Should the sidewalks be 8' wide or 10' wide? Curbed or uncurbed? With bicycle racks or without?
These matters evidently are beyond the competence of the city government, and of the
University's 3,000 strong expert faculty.
'My Kingdom for a tape measure!' How about a 69-cent face mask?
*Consider this. During WW II, the Kaiser shipyard in Richmond, CA – along with its 17
counterparts - were able to construct 2,710 Liberty ships between 1941 and 1945 (an average of
three ships every two days), In other words, it took each yard just twelve days to put a ship
in the water. That was the work of Rosie the Riveter and her colleagues. Today, we struggle to
produce a few thousand $1 face masks - much less reliable COVID-19 test kits. Of course, back
then the country was led by responsible adults – not the bunch of clods and delinquents
we're stuck with nowadays.
Posted by b on April 17, 2020 at 14:00 UTC | Permalink
If this virus is not a nasty flu, then what is it? A plague? Similar in effect as the Black
Death? Had 2 members of my family and a dear friend catch this thing. 2 of them suffered just
3 days of a fluctuating fever and cold symptoms. After that it disappeared. Only one, my
aunt, in her early seventies, had to be put on a respirator. But is recovering well. Is it
worth it to bring our economy to absolute devastation, where good people lose everything, end
up destitute, having to live in the streets, with no where to go? \
And rely on bureaucrats,
our government, whether state or federal, Democrat or Republican or Socialist, for their
daily bread? What about people with severe mental health, who need to be away from home, need
a job to maintain their stability, now with no work or money, will fall off the deep end,
even commit suicide because they have no where to turn? Is it worth it ? Everything we've
been doing? Why in other periods in history, with similar diseases, nothing was shut down as
profoundly as being done these days, and life went on? People did die, not to mock their
passing. But it brings me back. If not a nasty flu, is it worth it?
Agree with #1. Our leader, as imperfect as he is, as we all are, is the only leader we have.
If he fails to lead us through this crisis, we all fail. IMHO aside from occasional
politic-ing, answering charges of one kind or another against him, often the opposite from
day to day (e.g. one day he's trying to control everything, now he's abandoned control to the
overwhelmed governors), is doing an acceptable job, considering the problems he;'s
facing.
Couldn't agree more with Don in comment 1, the newfound lust for censorship and evangelism
for official right think found here is disappointing, this seems no longer to be a place to
ask questions and seek truth sincerely.
What is now obvious has for a long time been concealed: the U.S. is not a democracy, there is
no such thing as a "free market", capitalism has proved incapable of meeting the most basic
needs during a crisis, there are no leaders accountable to anyone other than our ruling
oligarchs, the U.S. is anything but a "bastion of freedom", and most other nations have
plenty of justifiable reasons to hate the U.S.
The only question remaining is how long will folks in the U.S. hide from these truths and
do nothing about them?
I agree this is ridiculous. Trump may be a lot of things, but the last thing he would EVER
want to do/happen in this election year where was cruising along home-free, is to have this
horrible pandemic blow up in front of him.
Also, he would NEVER have taken along and risked his entire family on a useless state
visit to India where all they did was attend meaningless photo-op events and watch Indian
kids dance the Hindi cha-cha.
Not even his chief of staff Mike Mulvaney went alond (unheard-of for CoS to not accompany
a potus on official state visits).
This tells me Trump was (kept?) in the dark about true depth of pandemic risk brewing.
An honest economist (back in the day when there actually were still a few) once said that
the key to a nation is whether it ruled by an establishment, or an oligarchy.
An "establishment" is old-money connected etc., but has some sense of ownership and duty.
An establishment is willing to forgo short-term profits in favor of long-term strength,
because they expect that they or their heirs will be around to have a piece of it.
"Establishment" leaders would be FDR, Eisenhower, DeGaulle, Bismarck, Lee Kuan Yew...
An [neoliberal] "oligarchy" has no interest in the long-term prosperity and strength of the nation - or
perhaps, they simply have no faith in it. They are motivated to strip-mine the nation of all
wealth while it lasts, because if they don't someone else will. They can live in walled
compounds and go to private doctors, and if it all falls apart they can just gather up their
loot and sail away on their yachts.
For Trump, Brenner can thank the silver-tongued Obama and his murderous secretary of state,
both of whom are worst kind of liars - the kind that tell people what they want to hear while
doing the opposite.
Thank you for posting this. The US seems to be like coming to your home and finding Bigfoot
seated in a living room chair - with no one expressing any surprise or even interest in his
presence.
After all the agony and hysteria surrounding the election of Trump for 3 years, they will
nominate an elderly warmonger with obvious signs of dementia, who can't seem to keep his
hands off women in a creepy fashion - as the alternative. It's as if there was a contest on
how extreme a "lesser of two evils" can get. Tack on Covid and financial ruin. It's
astounding.
The only positives I can find are evidence that the elite aren't totally in control ( or
there would be no Biden or Trump running) AND that the US is too big and dominant to collapse
anytime soon - a sort of geo-political inertia. Same goes for the dollar, even if they turn
it into high grade toilet paper.
This is the first time I have commented on your site but read daily. This is one of the best
reads I have seen. It defines the failure of the country so clearly, to bad Don was unable to
hear the criticism of his fearless leader and move beyond it. This failure has long roots and
the writer nails it. I remember a few years back sitting down with our commissioner and
having her explain to us why they were getting nothing done. city and state moneys were lower
and the federal government that had always provided grants no longer did. This was under
Obummer.
The long strip mining of the US and the rest of the world by the elite should have made
itself completely obvious under trump but I am beginning to think that we humans are no more
than a plague upon the earth. We seem to be so intent on sticking to our team the Rs or Ds we
are no different then sports fans, who's obsessed behavior and willingness to spend thousands
to watch sports is mind boggling, when often the same people bitch about teachers pay.
Or during the healthcare debates I went to hear the town hall that my congressmen had. 2000
people showed up most screaming about Obama and free hand outs. The 2000 people where mostly
over 65, and in this case military so all these people had theirs but didn't think their own
kids or grandkids should have medical care.. what the hell! The Republican Party built the
montra of evil government well and the Democratic Party used it the build up the pentagon to
the point it takes over 70% of the discretionary budget, to slaughter people in 3rd world
countries so we can strip mine them or threaten Russia and China . The virus shows one thing
the elites have lots of money to build military stuff that they fleece , so what we have is
crap. What the poor soldiers in this country are is fodder for the wealthy.
lol. - Some partisans mount a partisan defense of Trump. I didn't know such incredibly
partisan dummies read MoA. You guys are more than welcome to leave.
Thinking about the Covid-19, it occurred to me that the governments of the UK, the USA, of
Canada and probably many other countries that have had biological warfare labs have all said
to their people "We have to do this research because the USSR, the Russians The Chinese, The
North Koreans or thr Terrorists may use biological/chemical weapons against us and WE MUST BE
PREPARED!!. If they were telling the truth they should have been well prepared as they have
spent billions on this research. So, now we can see they were lying because, THERE WAS NO
PREPARATION WHEN IT WAS NEEDED? Precisely NONE!
Come this epidemic and what do we see? What we see is that at least the UK government, the US
government and the Canadian government were lying. It is quite clear that they were NOT
expecting to be attacked. How do I know they were not expecting to be attacked? They had NO
stores of hand sanitizer, NO stores of masks, NO goggles, NO stores of PPE, No factories for
making any of them. NO troops of Bio/Chem warfare soldiers ready to spring into action and NO
PLANS, as far as I can see. Are we to assume that if they were attacked by, say, the
Russians, they were going to rely on the Chinese to supply them? (Sarcasm!)
The Chinese government which may or may not be developing biological weapons, (I have no
way of knowing) obviously, was relatively well prepared. This is hardly surprising; as they
think they have been under biological attack, on and off since the Korean war when they were
so attacked. They had factories making the kit they needed and it took only days to ramp up
production and get other factories to join in. They had medical troops who were trained and
ready to take an important part in controlling the outbreak. They had plans that enabled them
to build hospitals for mass intensive care in a matter of days and (I would imagine) plans to
turn other structures into holding areas for less serious cases. It also looks as though they
had either very versatile organizers or well laid plans for feeding and monitoring people
under lock down.
You may understandably reject criticism to Your chosen party of faith, but i believe the
essence of his message was not about partisanship, rather an honest appraisal of the current
sad state of affairs, which, if you had bothered reading further, was just as scathing about
Obama et al. as it was about your beloved Stable Genius.
I'm afraid your choice to not read further was a far stronger statement of partisanship
than anything the author laid out. Your loss, and ours too.
Yep, exactly. What they have is the CCP, an army that can be called on command, which
thinks it's job is to govern, not just get paid extra. And legitimacy, the Chinese people
accept their governing, mostly, because they try to do a good job. It's like all this unity
bullshit they feed us here (see above), but it's real.
Lol. Trump has under 4 years working for the federal gov. It isn't his system. It is the
typical repugs and dingbats system. He is an idiot for leaving his cushy life to join these
idiots. It certainly doesn't speak well of his judgement. The people who work there and the
people he has hired... Pompeo, Bolton, Esper, etc have worked there for decades. Bolton is an
especially rotten character that seems to just keep popping up.
If Trump did win another term
I wouldnt be surprised to see him back. Remember when that nutjob from Israel that delights
in murdering defenseless people came over and gave a speech to Congress? He received an
enthusiastic standing ovation. What more needs to be investigated or discussed? It needs to
fail and the people will have to suffer in order for more responsible leadership to
emerge. The US has waged war on the people of Iraq for 30 fucking years.
Everytime the system
is about to collapse from its own corruption they just create more money and threaten other
countries with destruction if they attempt to divorce themselves from the IMF "global"
economy. The idea that the empire exists to help the average citizen is insane and rather
childish thinking. The empire exists to maintain power, control, and a dominant position. By
the way... during all this crazyness has anybody bothered to follow what is going on with
US/China trade? There was a much publicized 1st stage agreement over the easy issues but CNN
warned it might collapse putting the global economy at severe risk. Has the US lost billions
of dollars worth of economic inputs the last couple months? What is the USA going to look
like if that continues? Without China propping up the US economy the US will have to rely on
its own resources. As you mention the US cant produce N95 masks let alone coronavirus test
kits. Testing might allow the powers that be to not feel frightened about coming into contact
with the drooling masses. They might let us out of our cages so we can start foraging for
food.
Your real objection to this, extremely reasonable, statement:
" ...They even corrupted the Center for Disease Control. Its leaders, evidently eager to
curry favor with the madman in the Oval Office, gave its stamp of approval to the unproven
– and dangerous drug HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE that Trump's been promoting as the Silver
Bullet to cure Covid-19. (April 4-6) Luckily, saner heads prevailed, or a conscience was
pricked, and these panting spaniels withdrew the recommendation from their website..."
It is an indication of your general irresponsibility, also exemplified in your casual use
of the internet to give, potentially dangerous, medical advice, that you pretend to be
dissenting from Brenner because he critiques government. You imply that by doing so he is
urging people to support one or other political party. In fact his is a comprehensive
critique of the entire political system, whose purpose, for 230+ years has been to prevent
the people from governing themselves.
It is a pity to see those tireless and sincere campaigners the Yellow Vests of France drafted
into an argument for apathy and defeatism.
thanks michael... i can apply some of these ideas directly to other countries.. i don't care
for the usa centric world point view, but i am sure many readers will get into it.. i would
like to emphasize a key point you make - accountability, and how there is none.. that to me
is the number uno issue in the world today and it is very stark with regard to the usa -
accountability... of course obama kicked that concept down the road too... no
accountability.. it sucks big time.. we need it desperately...
Okay... he's not a psychoapath, Don. I'll settle malignant sociopathic narcissist, which
means by definition and demonstration that he would not know empathy were it to leap up and
smack him in the face. Liar? We can soften that too. He is a serial fantasists living in the
worlds he creates and like a spoiled child demands, raging when his wishes are not instantly
gratified.
His dictatorial moments would be familiar to anyone who ever worked at his jumped
up mom 'n pop real estate shop. His blustering, bullying, blaming, bragging, bloviating, and
berating are on display each day now at the late afternoon campaign commercial
live-from-the-White-House. He's all yours Don.
When I was young I was always looking up for US, don't know why, maybe I have been fascinated
by a culture, lifestyle, innovations.. when I got older and started to read about what
actually happens in the world, I realized that US is not what it seemed to be anymore and I
think its just getting worse..
Im not speaking about regular people, of course not, they have
worries, goes thru hardships in life, same as me here in Europe.. Basically, no matter if is
there Trump, Obama, Bush, Biden, Hillary or Easter Bunny.. your government to its core is
really sick..
Everytime i read about decision US made, how is profit driven at expense of
regular people, its a disgrace.. and more and more people in the world can see it.. just
Trump himself exposed more the whole thing, chaotic, selfish, rude and arrogant government,
not ashamed of anything.
I wish you all.. you good and smart people of the US, to win this struggle, get back on
track and have a better future, god bless you in your fight.
The USA government was paralyzed by Ukrainegate and impeachment in January.
Notable quotes:
"... Another factor was that any real measures against the virus were a huge blow to the neoliberal globalization and the USA as the central force that pushed neoliberal globalization was vary to implement them. ..."
"... Pentagon treatment of the USS Theodor Roosevelt epidemic was worse than incompetent because clearly, this was just the tip of the iceberg. Instead of looking into the core problem, they decided to find a scapegoat. Why they did not react as soon as problems on Diamond Princess surfaced are unclear to me. They failed even to provide masks. That's simply incredible. I think a bunch of perfumed princes of Pentagon needs to be fired. I wonder what is the situation on submarines. ..."
The WHO provided validated working test kits on 16th of January.
Even if I am not happy with the Chinese policy overall, the main problem in most advanced
western countries was and still is that the response of the governments are often poor:
Not implementing a coherent communication strategy. It does not make sense when one
minister tells that the virus situation is an real issue and another minister tell you at
the same time that everything is not so bad.
Downplaying the infection numbers for domestical political reasons. Complete lack of
understanding of an exponential function or more precise the combination of an virus
operating on an exponential function, while the own resources are more or less a
constant.
Too late start of testing, be it a result of faulty administrative structures, rooky
mistakes during test kit development or combination of both.
Fighting a virus is like warfare on the operational level, you start with incomplete
information, but have to make important decisions, time is a very important resource, lost
time is almost impossible to regain.
Fighting a virus is like warfare on the operational level, you start with incomplete
information, but have to make important decisions, time is a very important resource, lost
time is almost impossible to regain.
Very true. But we should not forget the role of Pelosi in this mess: Trump administration was
partially paralyzed in January by impeachment proceedings. She acted like the fifth column in
this respect.
Another factor was that any real measures against the virus were a huge blow to the
neoliberal globalization and the USA as the central force that pushed neoliberal
globalization was vary to implement them.
IMHO, Trump demonstrated some level of courage by closing flights from China on Jan 31. I
guess pressure to postpone this measure further was tremendous. But they missed the time, and
it was too late.
3) Too late start of testing, be it a result of faulty administrative structures, rooky
mistakes during test kit development, or a combination of both.
That's true, and the CDC needs to be investigated for this blunder. But also implementing
social distancing measures and the obligatory wearing of masks in large cities was completely
botched.
Retired persons can be quarantined without a major blow to the economy. And that should
have been done first. The nursing homes are starkly vulnerable to the coronavirus. It was
clear from the beginning. That means that the medical personnel in them need to be provided
with full protection gear and isolated with patients. That was not done. On the contrary,
they became hotspots that spread the disease.
Treatment of medical personnel, who along with patients in nursing homes are the most
vulnerable category, was abysmal. No free hotel stay (for those without children), no special
transportation and free meals were provided for them. Even basic protection equipment was
absent in home hospitals until late March.
The USA did not have strategic storage of masks and, which is more important, equipment to
make them and materials from which they are made. That was a big blunder for which previous
administrations also share responsibility.
Pentagon treatment of the USS Theodor Roosevelt epidemic was worse than incompetent
because clearly, this was just the tip of the iceberg. Instead of looking into the core
problem, they decided to find a scapegoat. Why they did not react as soon as problems on
Diamond Princess surfaced are unclear to me. They failed even to provide masks. That's simply
incredible. I think a bunch of perfumed princes of Pentagon needs to be fired. I wonder what
is the situation on submarines.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump on Thursday is expected to lay out a strategy
to phase out the month-long economic shutdown aimed at stanching the coronavirus pandemic,
despite concerns from health experts, state governors and business leaders about the
dangers of lifting restrictions without widespread testing in place.[.]
The state restrictions have strangled the U.S. economy to an extent not seen since the
Great Depression nearly a century ago. Another 5.2 million more Americans sought
unemployment benefits last week, the Labor Department reported on Thursday, lifting total
filings for claims over the past month to more than 20million.
The Republican president, who has staked his re-election in November on the strength of
the U.S. economy, is scheduled to hold a call with the nation's governors at 3 p.m. (1900
GMT) and said he would announce his plan at a news conference later on Thursday. The White
House coronavirus task force is scheduled to hold its daily public briefing at 5 p.m.
[.]
"The worst thing that could happen would be for us to throw everyone back into the economic
cycle and have to go back to having 97% of our people being told to stay home again,"
Trump's former White House chief economic adviser Gary Cohn told CBS News on
Thursday.[.]
Trump v. Biden. That's the choice and we are doomed.
People will forget all that populism nonsense, and just be grateful for whatever McJobs
they can get to be able to pay the interest on their debts, because, hey global capitalism
isn't so bad compared to living under house arrest!
Hard to imagine that happening in Americastan, where the economy has been completely
destroyed by the lockdown. We'll be lucky 'merely' to have Great Depression levels of
unemployment when this madness finally ends.
For all the MAGApedes out there: Trump had better be seen to be fighting the
lockdown-shysters, not acquiescing to them, if he wants to get re-elected. If he spends the
summer continuing to genuflect before Dr. Falsie, Trump is toast come November.
The Covid-19 pandemic shows that governments that think of security in mostly military terms
are simply wasting money, Mikhail Gorbachev has said.
Defence spending must be cut globally to fund things that humanity actually needs.
The former Soviet leader called on the world to move away from hard power in international
affairs. He remains especially worried about the kind of military brinkmanship that lately has
almost led to a shooting war in the Middle East.
"What we urgently need now is a rethinking of the entire concept of security," he
wrote , in an
op-ed published by TIME magazine. "Even after the end of the Cold War, it has been
envisioned mostly in military terms. Over the past few years, all we've been hearing is talk
about weapons, missiles and airstrikes." The Covid-19 outbreak has highlighted once again
that the threats humanity faces today are global in nature and can only be addressed by nations
collectively. The resources currently spent on arms need to go into preparation for such
crises, Gorbachev said.
All efforts will fail if governments continue to waste money by fueling the arms
race.
"The overriding goal must be human security: providing food, water and a clean
environment, and caring for people's health," he said.
The first thing that nations should do after the coronavirus is dealt-with is to make a
commitment to a massive demilitarization.
I call upon [world leaders] to cut military spending by 10 percent to 15 percent. This
is the least they should do now, as a first step toward a new consciousness, a new
civilization.
Gorbachev, the former leader of the USSR who is credited with de-escalating the Cold War
against the US and with negotiating a dramatic reduction in the nuclear arsenals of the two
powers, shared his opinions and aspirations as the global number of Covid-19 cases surpassed
the two-million benchmark. The pandemic has led to over 130,000 deaths and is projected to
plunge the world economy into a recession of a magnitude unseen since the 1920s.
"... "For this, we scared the hell out of the American people, we lost 17 million jobs, we put a major dent in the economy, we closed down the schools... shut down the churches," ..."
"... "You know, this was not, and is not a pandemic. But we do have panic and pandemonium as a result of the hype of this." ..."
"... "aggressively stupid" ..."
"... "Bill Bennett may be a self-proclaimed ethics expert, but he obviously knows very little about logic and cause-and-effect," ..."
"... "It is deeply irresponsible to air this view on national television," ..."
"... "the hell out of the American people." ..."
"... " crucial" ..."
"... "no need to change anything you're doing on a day-to-day basis." ..."
Former education secretary Bill Bennett has been savaged online for suggesting that the
coronavirus is "not a pandemic," calling for the lifting of lockdown measures, as the debate
rages over reopening the shuttered US economy. More than half a million Americans have caught
the coronavirus, with just over 22,000 deaths. While the numbers are dire, the University of
Washington's forecasters revised their total predicted Covid-19 deaths down to 60,000 last
week, a number comparable to deaths from influenza in 2017-2018, and
significantly lower than the six-figure death toll floated by
President Donald Trump's top medical adviser, Dr Anthony Fauci, last month.
"For this, we scared the hell out of the American people, we lost 17 million jobs, we
put a major dent in the economy, we closed down the schools... shut down the churches,"
Bennett said on Monday's edition of Fox and Friends. "You know, this was not, and is not a
pandemic. But we do have panic and pandemonium as a result of the hype of this."
Fox News contributor Bill Bennett compares coronavirus to the flu, claiming that "this was
not and is not a pandemic." pic.twitter.com/Q4oBcXKISV
The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic on March 11 and it has
been reported in almost every country around the world. Bennett was flayed online for his
"aggressively stupid" statement.
"Bill Bennett may be a self-proclaimed ethics expert, but he obviously knows very little
about logic and cause-and-effect," wrote author Ward Carroll.
Aggressively stupid Bill Bennett may be a self-professed ethics expert, but he obviously
knows little about logic or cause-and-effect.Hey, Billy Boy, do you think there's any
relationship between actions taken and the number of #COVID19
fatalities?And get a haircut, old man.
"It is deeply irresponsible to air this view on national television,"tweeted CNN's
Chris Cillizza, while neoconservative pundit Bill Kristol suggested the low death toll was a
direct result of the government scaring "the hell out of the American people."
Needless to say, if we have "only" 60,000 deaths, it's BECAUSE "we scared the hell out of
the American people," and they radically changed behavior. Or rather: "We" didn't scare
anyone. People were alarmed by the facts and adjusted -- despite dangerous happy talk from
our president. https://t.co/yTeivjA82F
My doctor told me he presumes I had #COVID19 and then
related #coronavirus
pneumonia. I can assure Bill Bennett that even though I exercised and ate well, covid kicked
my ass. It was terrifying. I couldn't breathe and thought I was dying.It was nothing like the
flu, fool. https://t.co/9BjQvC2yyU
Bill Bennett doesn't understand that the only reason my "only" 60,000 people will die is
because we're all stuck at home.I've said before. If the GOP thinks this is a hoax then go
throw a huge party and invite yours entire family and Trump, and see how it goes. https://t.co/6TR3I0MyXC
Modeling the spread of infectious diseases is an imprecise science. While the University of
Washington's researchers attribute their revised predictions to "
crucial" social distancing measures and recommend they remain in place until the end
of May, many initial predictions about the virus were wrong. When it first entered the US in
January, media outlets urged Americans not to panic, warning them that the flu was a more
imminent threat. These same outlets now tell a
different story .
Likewise, Fauci himself said in February that there was "no need to change anything
you're doing on a day-to-day basis." On Sunday, he told CNN's Jake Tapper that the
government "could have saved lives" if social distancing started earlier.
With commentators on the right demanding a relaxation of lockdown rules, and Trump's
advisers telling the president – to quote Fauci – that "the virus decides"
when things return to normal, no clear path forward is obvious.
I am still awaiting a sensible discussion (anywhere not just here) on whether suppression
actually makes sense as a policy. As opposed to a null policy (which is what herd immunity
is).
Does the longer economic depression kill more people younger than the Covid lives saved
from suppression, and does suppression just flatten the infection curve* or does it actually
lengthen it so that just as many get infected and the opportunity costs of devoting hospitals
to Covid for months and months become very high. (Closed health services, the psychology of
unemployment = suicide, and just the known wealth effects on health all come with
suppression).
The unit of such a discussion would be QALYs. If there are government science based
comparisons of Suppression with the null policy, they are certainly calculated in terms of
QALYs (quality-adjusted life years).
If you haven't heard of a QALYs analysis (and I haven't) you can be sure that no existing
analysis supports current policies.
Either they haven't done one (unlikely) or it doesn't come out clearly on the side of
suppression).
What we have instead is policy by Overton's window.
Gotta be seen to be doing something.
*b used to do a nice chart with suppression showing a flatter but much longer curve. We don't
see that here or anywhere else now.
A distinct aspect of the shift in debate from framing in terms of "dual-use research" to
"gain-of-function research" has been focus on biosafety concerns -- e.g., that a devastating
pandemic could potentially result from a laboratory accident involving an especially dangerous
pathogen created via GOFR. In light of Ron Fouchier's claim that the ferret-transmissible
strain of H5N1 he produced is "probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make"
(Enserink 2011 ) and (previous) NSABB
chair Paul Keim's claim that "I can't think of another pathogenic organism as scary as this one
[created by Fouchier's team] I don't think anthrax is scary at all compared to this" (Enserink
2011
), for example, some critics argued that the study in question should have been, and/or that
future similar research should be, conducted in laboratories with the highest bio-containment
level -- i.e., biosafety level 4 (BSL-4), as opposed to BSL-3 ("enhanced") in which this
research was done (Swazo 2013 ). Fouchier has, in
response, pointed out that his research received necessary institutional biosafety
review/approval; and others have argued that his research (given employment of safety measures
beyond ordinary BSL-3, including vaccination of lab workers against H5N1) in effect involved
safety equivalent to BSL-4 (Roos 2012 ). Anthony Fauci
(Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) has concluded that
"the scientists who triggered this debate [including Fouchier] have conducted their research
properly and under the safest and most secure conditions" (Fauci 2012 , p. 1).
No church on Easter for the faithful. The illuminati must feel like they are in heaven.
Their goal of achieving a godless society is in reach. Well, not exactly godless since they
think the elites among them have a mission to become like God, as man was made in Gods image
for the purpose of knowing himself through man. We shall all worship God, which are our
elites, and the priests of this Man-God religion are technocratic scientists. Some call it
scientism or gnosticism or transhumanism
The idea is to transhumanistly "upgrade" humanity, create an Internet of Us, and to
geocybernically control the processes of the earth system (this is known as the Fourth
Industrial Revolution 4IR)
Capitalism. How strange so many here recognize the evils of Bad capitalism, more properly
defined as Monopoly Capitalism, or Neoliberalism to distinguish it from good Capitalism
-which is competitive capitalism well regulated in the interests of society as a whole, with
a dash of socialism and monopoly (state or private) capitalism in certain industries as
needed.
When we talk of Bad Capitalism of the sort Marx no doubt had in mind, we must look back
and recall something Marx never envisioned, perhaps because it was a reaction to the
globalist socialist theories he espoused. That was Mussolini's and then later Hitlers
National Socialism, or economic Fascism. This was more accurately defined as a public private
partnership (P3) that is so often referred to by the Gates funded WOrld Economic Forum and
those talking about UN Sustainable Development Projects, and has become a religion of sorts
in the West and also in China (more about that in a separate comment when I have time) and is
really the essence of todays neoliberalism (not the propaganda you read about neoliberalism
from its supporters)
Back in the 30's Mussolini's economic fascism was greatly admired by the Capitalists of
that day, even FDR who has been mislabelled as socialist and anti-capitalist despite coming
from the financial elite (much like Trump who is mislabelled as nationalist snd
antiestablishment despite being a globalist and financial elite in private life).
Indeed just before and after Hitler took over in Germany with his partnership with German
companies - the Capitalists in the US and UK/France rushed in via cartel agreements with
German companies to invest and transfer technology. FDR did little to stop this.
FDR if we recall was the father of NRA which was his first priority after confiscating the
peoples gold and devaluing the dollar. Fortunately his fascist NRA economy was struck down by
the Supreme Court only to later reemerge during WWII. This is when P3 really crystallized in
the US although it would take decades to morph into todays beast, and required another Pearl
Harbor to gain acceptance for the purpose of keeping us safe from Islamic Terrorism and now
the virus terrorists
One might argue that the difference between Mussolini's and Hitlers P3 and today is the
government was the dominant power then, and today its at best an equal partner or more likely
dominated by the corporate side (in China the private ownership is largely in the hands of
the party elite as individuals and not the state which serves to subsidize their enterprises
while socializing losses and privatizing profits-like the West) . Those in government, after
public retirement go on to lucrative employment on the private side as their reward.
Regulatory agencies are all captured by the private side of this public private
partnership
This is apparent in many industries. Many of you see it with Military, intelligence and
homeland security, Big Tech/Data, finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE), etc.
However, when it comes to Medical -Pharma Industry and other "science" based industries
like the Climate Industry you are blinded by scientism promoted by the MSM spinmeisters
supporting the Green-Virus Globalist Agenda. Yet both of these industries are driven by
Public Private Partnerships to achieve Global Capitalist and Global Government Control
objectives.
As Eisenhower said in his 1961 exit speech where he warned of the dangers of the MIC he
also said "we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could
itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."
So looking specifically at the actors involved in the latest Pandemic, and one sees many
of them are the same players behind the Climate Terror Industry, one sees a tremendous amount
of collaboration between Big Pharma, UN agencies, national health agencies, military,
academia and tax free philanthropic foundations (Gates, Rockefeller, etc).
Government funds basic science via military and health/science agencies to search for new
viruses or enhancing known viruses with gain of function research, that Big Pharma then
exploits to develop vaccines with government and philanthropic funds in the event such
viruses are released. All kinds of money gets spent in preparing for a pandemic, stockpiling
supplies , medicines, vaccines in advance of a pandemic, studying ways to control people once
a pandemic arrives, and studying more ways to control people to prevent another pandemic
(digital id, health certificates, mandatory vaccines) . When a pandemic does arrive, all
those exercises and simulations (Crimson Orange, Event 201, Dark Winter, etc) pay off,
trillions of dollars are unleashed out of thin air thanks to the Fed Reserve and handed out
to the private partners.
Disaster Capitalism at its finest, public private partnership working toward total control
of people and earning plenty of money while doing so. Companies having nothing to do with the
Pandemic but affected (Airlines, hotels) , some of which are already in trouble (Boeing) are
bailed out. Small business owners get crushed.
Trump failed to respond. But in January and February, it was clear coronavirus would hit
NY. Cuomo and de Blasio could have instituted full lockdowns by early March when first cases
appeared. Meanwhile, Washington State and California moved more quickly and saved many
lives.
Countless other state governors didn't close things down as quickly as Newsom in California
and other governors. Florida let spring break go one and once finished no state put kids in
quarantine. The blame for this response falls on many shoulders. And the lack of response is
hiding the biggest transfer of wealth in history. Not here of course. As usual the blue blog
has been on top of most issues and way ahead of others.
I'm very concerned about how this country will look once it's open again. I think it's going
to be unrecognizable because of how many businesses will have permanently closed down and how
many people will stay unemployed. Lots of businesses are going to be bought out at Fire sale
prices by those who got all the money. Like usual. Workers desperate for a job might have to
take less than minimum wage cuz of the demand for jobs. But whoboy congress better be thinking
about that or they will be in for a big surprise. OWS will look like just a warmup for what
might be coming.
Hospitals have been closed down for decades or been asset stripped after they were bought
out by hedge funds. Obama and Biden didn't replenish the supplies for epidemics after they
dealt with the H1N1 flu. Blame goes to both parties and especially their embrace of
neoliberalism.
He's thinking of reopening the country. Hardily and bigly.
"I don't know that I've had a bigger decision. But I'm going to surround myself with the
greatest minds. Not only the greatest minds, but the greatest minds in numerous different
businesses, including the business of politics and reason," Trump told reporters.
Trump's labor leader doesn't want people to get used to being on government assistance and
is trying to restrict who can get unemployment benefits and for how long. Now it takes brass
balls for little Anthony Scalia to say that to desperate people after the corrupt and
especially the banks have gotten trillions! This guy should be embarrassed to show his face in
public ever again. But he isn't.
up 25 users have voted. --
"I will be the best, the best, you know, you know the thing!"
@snoopydawg They
decided to go with their own unnecessarily complex kit instead of going with the Qiagen kit
or some variant (RT-PCR is a pretty routine procedure in labs). They initially stuck with the
influenza model of having the samples sent to Atlanta for analysis. This is fine if you are
just monitoring the flu, but useless for trying to stop a pandemic. Tens of thousands of
people in the US have died and will die unnecessarily.
but he isn't the only one solely responsible for how many people have gotten sick and
have died.
Trump failed to respond. But in January and February, it was clear coronavirus would
hit NY. Cuomo and de Blasio could have instituted full lockdowns by early March when
first cases appeared. Meanwhile, Washington State and California moved more quickly and
saved many lives.
Countless other state governors didn't close things down as quickly as Newsom in
California and other governors. Florida let spring break go one and once finished no
state put kids in quarantine. The blame for this response falls on many shoulders. And
the lack of response is hiding the biggest transfer of wealth in history. Not here of
course. As usual the blue blog has been on top of most issues and way ahead of
others.
I'm very concerned about how this country will look once it's open again. I think it's
going to be unrecognizable because of how many businesses will have permanently closed
down and how many people will stay unemployed. Lots of businesses are going to be bought
out at Fire sale prices by those who got all the money. Like usual. Workers desperate for
a job might have to take less than minimum wage cuz of the demand for jobs. But whoboy
congress better be thinking about that or they will be in for a big surprise. OWS will
look like just a warmup for what might be coming.
Hospitals have been closed down for decades or been asset stripped after they were
bought out by hedge funds. Obama and Biden didn't replenish the supplies for epidemics
after they dealt with the H1N1 flu. Blame goes to both parties and especially their
embrace of neoliberalism.
He's thinking of reopening the country. Hardily and bigly.
"I don't know that I've had a bigger decision. But I'm going to surround myself with
the greatest minds. Not only the greatest minds, but the greatest minds in numerous
different businesses, including the business of politics and reason," Trump told
reporters.
Trump's labor leader doesn't want people to get used to being on government assistance
and is trying to restrict who can get unemployment benefits and for how long. Now it
takes brass balls for little Anthony Scalia to say that to desperate people after the
corrupt and especially the banks have gotten trillions! This guy should be embarrassed to
show his face in public ever again. But he isn't.
This is a case study of bureaucratic incompetence, when conflicting institutions and agenda paralyze any efforts. Trump
incompetence is only the tip of the iceberg. the whole Deep State proved to be too rigid to properly react to the epidemic, because
each measure looked too drastic until it was late to implement it. and then it was implemented anyway. One effect of any large
bureaucracy is that rare oasises of reliable and timely information that exist are to be suppressed. and this is not
Trump fault. This is iron logic of any large bureaucracy.
What is interesting is that the epidemic is localized in few hot spots with the largest being New York metropolitan areas. So
governments could took measures immediately even without federal government prompting them. And that would be much better that
nationwide shutdown. And FBI and CIA have the local governments in pocket anyway (this is a national security state, not something
else after all). So where was the CIA boss when we
needed her ? Or she is just capable of running Russiagate gaslighting operation type of operations? CIA honchos used to have
audacity to launch the efforts to depose Trump. Can we believe that they can't bypass Trump when they need to?
Notable quotes:
"... The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March. ..."
"... Despite Mr. Trump's denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses. ..."
"... By the last week of February, it was clear to the administration's public health team that schools and businesses in hot spots would have to close. But in the turbulence of the Trump White House, it took three more weeks to persuade the president that failure to act quickly to control the spread of the virus would have dire consequences. ..."
"... It was becoming apparent that the administration had botched the rollout of testing to track the virus at home, and a smaller-scale surveillance program intended to piggyback on a federal flu tracking system had also been stillborn. ..."
"... A 20-year-old Chinese woman had infected five relatives with the virus even though she never displayed any symptoms herself. The implication was grave -- apparently healthy people could be unknowingly spreading the virus -- and supported the need to move quickly to mitigation. ..."
"... These final days of February, perhaps more than any other moment during his tenure in the White House, illustrated Mr. Trump's inability or unwillingness to absorb warnings coming at him. He instead reverted to his traditional political playbook in the midst of a public health calamity, squandering vital time as the coronavirus spread silently across the country. ..."
"... Over nearly three weeks from Feb. 26 to March 16, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States grew from 15 to 4,226. ..."
"... The earliest warnings about coronavirus got caught in the crosscurrents of the administration's internal disputes over China. It was the China hawks who pushed earliest for a travel ban. But their animosity toward China also undercut hopes for a more cooperative approach by the world's two leading powers to a global crisis. ..."
An examination reveals the president was warned about the
potential for a pandemic but that internal divisions, lack of planning and his faith in his own instincts led
to a halting response.
"Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic
of this proportion," President Trump said last month. He has repeatedly said that no one could have seen
the effects of the coronavirus coming.
Credit...
Erin
Schaff/The
WASHINGTON -- "Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad," a senior medical
adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email
to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. "The projected size of
the outbreak already seems hard to believe."
A week after the
first coronavirus
case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President
Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing -- a pandemic that is now
forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives -- Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation's
public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.
His was hardly a lone voice. Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly
played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his
government -- from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence
agencies -- identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.
The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act
accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away
warnings from senior officials. It was a problem, he said, that had come out of nowhere and could not have
been foreseen.
Even after Mr. Trump took his first concrete action at the end of January --
limiting travel from China
-- public health often had to compete with economic and political
considerations in internal debates, slowing the path toward belated decisions to seek more money from
Congress, obtain necessary supplies, address shortfalls in testing and ultimately move to keep much of the
nation at home.
Unfolding as it did in the wake of his impeachment by the House and in the
midst of his Senate trial, Mr. Trump's response was colored by his suspicion of and disdain for what he
viewed as the "Deep State" -- the very people in his government whose expertise and long experience might
have guided him more quickly toward steps that would slow the virus, and likely save lives.
Decision-making was also complicated by a long-running dispute inside the
administration over how to deal with China. The virus at first took a back seat to a desire not to upset
Beijing during trade talks, but later the impulse to score points against Beijing left the world's two
leading powers further divided as they confronted one of the first truly global threats of the 21st century.
The shortcomings of Mr. Trump's performance have played out with remarkable
transparency as part of his daily effort to dominate television screens and the national conversation.
But dozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of
emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and
extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:
The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics
received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States,
and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the
size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.
Despite Mr. Trump's
denial
weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29
memo
produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks
of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.
The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned
Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to
the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for
appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist.
Mr. Azar publicly
announced
in February that the government was establishing a "surveillance" system in five American
cities to measure the spread of the virus and enable experts to project the next hot spots. It was
delayed for weeks. The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented
failures to develop the nation's testing capacity
, left administration officials with almost no
insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. "We were flying the plane with no instruments," one
official said.
By the third week in February, the administration's top public health
experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the
American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work. But the
White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were
reluctantly accepted by the president -- time when the virus spread largely unimpeded.
When Mr. Trump finally
agreed in mid-March
to recommend social distancing across the country, effectively bringing much of the
economy to a halt, he seemed shellshocked and deflated to some of his closest associates. One described him
as "subdued" and "baffled" by how the crisis had played out. An economy that he had wagered his re-election
on was suddenly in shambles.
He only regained his swagger, the associate said, from conducting his daily
White House briefings, at which he often seeks to rewrite the history of the past several months. He
declared at one point that he
"felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,"
and insisted at another that he had to be
a
"cheerleader for the country,"
as if that explained why he failed to prepare the public for what was
coming.
Mr. Trump's allies and some administration officials say the criticism has
been unfair. The Chinese government misled other governments, they say. And they insist that the president
was either not getting proper information, or the people around him weren't conveying the urgency of the
threat. In some cases, they argue, the specific officials he was hearing from had been discredited in his
eyes, but once the right information got to him through other channels, he made the right calls.
"While the media and Democrats refused to seriously acknowledge this virus in
January and February, President Trump took bold action to protect Americans and unleash the full power of
the federal government to curb the spread of the virus, expand testing capacities and expedite vaccine
development even when we had no true idea the level of transmission or asymptomatic spread," said Judd
Deere, a White House spokesman.
There were key turning points along the way, opportunities for Mr. Trump to
get ahead of the virus rather than just chase it. There were internal debates that presented him with stark
choices, and moments when he could have chosen to ask deeper questions and learn more. How he handled them
may shape his re-election campaign. They will certainly shape his legacy.
The Containment Illusion
By the last week of February, it was clear
to the administration's public health team that schools and businesses in hot spots would have to close. But
in the turbulence of the Trump White House, it took three more weeks to persuade the president that failure
to act quickly to control the spread of the virus would have dire consequences.
When Dr. Robert Kadlec, the top disaster response official at the Health and
Human Services Department, convened the White House coronavirus task force on Feb. 21, his agenda was
urgent. There were deep cracks in the administration's strategy for keeping the virus out of the United
States. They were going to have to lock down the country to prevent it from spreading. The question was:
When?
There had already been an
alarming spike in new cases
around the world and the virus was spreading across the Middle East. It was
becoming apparent that the administration had botched the rollout of testing to track the virus at home, and
a smaller-scale surveillance program intended to piggyback on a federal flu tracking system had also been
stillborn.
In Washington, the president was not worried,
predicting
that by April, "when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away." His White House had
yet to ask Congress for additional funding to prepare for the potential cost of wide-scale infection across
the country, and health care providers were growing increasingly nervous about the availability of masks,
ventilators and other equipment.
What Mr. Trump decided to do next could dramatically shape the course of the
pandemic -- and how many people would get sick and die.
With that in mind, the task force had gathered for a tabletop exercise -- a
real-time version of a full-scale war gaming of a flu pandemic the administration had run the previous year.
That earlier exercise
, also conducted by Mr. Kadlec and called "Crimson Contagion,"
predicted 110 million infections
, 7.7 million hospitalizations and 586,000 deaths following a
hypothetical outbreak that started in China.
Facing the likelihood of a real pandemic, the group needed to decide when to
abandon "containment" -- the effort to keep the virus outside the U.S. and to isolate anyone who gets
infected -- and embrace "mitigation" to thwart the spread of the virus inside the country until a vaccine
becomes available.
Among the questions on the agenda, which was reviewed by The New York Times,
was when the department's secretary, Mr. Azar, should recommend that Mr. Trump take textbook mitigation
measures "such as school dismissals and cancellations of mass gatherings," which had been identified as the
next appropriate step in
a Bush-era pandemic plan
.
The exercise was sobering. The group -- including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci of the
National Institutes of Health; Dr. Robert R. Redfield of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and
Mr. Azar, who at that stage was leading the White House Task Force -- concluded they would soon need to move
toward aggressive social distancing, even at the risk of severe disruption to the nation's economy and the
daily lives of millions of Americans.
If Dr. Kadlec had any doubts, they were erased two days later, when he
stumbled upon an email from a researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who was among the group of
academics, government physicians and infectious diseases doctors who had spent weeks tracking the outbreak
in the Red Dawn email chain.
A 20-year-old Chinese woman had infected five relatives with the virus even
though she never displayed any symptoms herself. The implication was grave -- apparently healthy people could
be unknowingly spreading the virus -- and supported the need to move quickly to mitigation.
"Is this true?!" Dr. Kadlec wrote back to the researcher. "If so we have a
huge whole on our screening and quarantine effort," including a typo where he meant hole. Her response was
blunt: "People are carrying the virus everywhere."
The following day, Dr. Kadlec and the others decided to present Mr. Trump
with a plan titled "Four Steps to Mitigation," telling the president that they needed to begin preparing
Americans for a step rarely taken in United States history.
But over the next several days, a presidential blowup and internal turf
fights would sidetrack such a move. The focus would shift to messaging and confident predictions of success
rather than publicly calling for a shift to mitigation.
These final days of February, perhaps more than any other moment during his
tenure in the White House, illustrated Mr. Trump's inability or unwillingness to absorb warnings coming at
him. He instead reverted to his traditional political playbook in the midst of a public health calamity,
squandering vital time as the coronavirus spread silently across the country.
Dr. Kadlec's group wanted to meet with the president right away, but Mr.
Trump was on a trip to India, so they agreed to make the case to him in person as soon as he returned two
days later. If they could convince him of the need to shift strategy, they could immediately begin a
national education campaign aimed at preparing the public for the new reality.
A memo dated Feb. 14, prepared in coordination with the National Security
Council and titled "U.S. Government Response to the 2019 Novel Coronavirus," documented what more drastic
measures would look like, including: "significantly limiting public gatherings and cancellation of almost
all sporting events, performances, and public and private meetings that cannot be convened by phone.
Consider school closures. Widespread 'stay at home' directives from public and private organizations with
nearly 100% telework for some."
The memo did not advocate an immediate national shutdown, but said the
targeted use of "quarantine and isolation measures" could be used to slow the spread in places where
"sustained human-to-human transmission" is evident.
Within 24 hours, before they got a chance to make their presentation to the
president, the plan went awry.
Mr. Trump was walking up the steps of Air Force One to head home from India
on Feb. 25 when Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory
Diseases,
publicly issued
the blunt warning they had all agreed was necessary.
But Dr. Messonnier had jumped the gun. They had not told the president yet,
much less gotten his consent.
On the 18-hour plane ride home, Mr. Trump fumed as he watched the
stock market crash
after Dr. Messonnier's comments. Furious, he called Mr. Azar when he landed at around
6 a.m. on Feb. 26, raging that Dr. Messonnier had scared people unnecessarily. Already on thin ice with the
president over a variety of issues and having overseen the failure to quickly produce an effective and
widely available test, Mr. Azar would soon find his authority reduced.
The meeting that evening with Mr. Trump to advocate social distancing was
canceled, replaced by a news conference in which the president announced that the White House response would
be put under the command of Vice President Mike Pence.
The push to convince Mr. Trump of the need for more assertive action stalled.
With Mr. Pence and his staff in charge, the focus was clear: no more alarmist messages. Statements and media
appearances by health officials like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Redfield would be coordinated through Mr. Pence's
office. It would be more than three weeks before Mr. Trump would announce serious social distancing efforts,
a lost period during which the spread of the virus accelerated rapidly.
Over nearly three weeks from Feb. 26 to March 16, the number of
confirmed coronavirus cases
in the United States grew from
15
to 4,226. Since then, nearly half a million Americans have tested positive for the virus and
authorities say hundreds of thousands more are likely infected. The China Factor
The earliest warnings about coronavirus got
caught in the crosscurrents of the administration's internal disputes over China. It was the China hawks who
pushed earliest for a travel ban. But their animosity toward China also undercut hopes for a more
cooperative approach by the world's two leading powers to a global crisis.
It was early January, and the call with a Hong Kong epidemiologist left
Matthew Pottinger rattled.
Mr. Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser and a hawk on China, took
a blunt warning away from the call with the doctor, a longtime friend: A ferocious, new outbreak that on the
surface appeared similar to the
SARS epidemic of 2003
had emerged in China. It had spread far more quickly than the government was
admitting to, and it wouldn't be long before it reached other parts of the world.
Mr. Pottinger had worked as a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Hong Kong
during the SARS epidemic, and was still scarred by his experience documenting the death spread by that
highly contagious virus.
Now, seventeen years later, his friend had a blunt message: You need to be
ready. The virus, he warned, which originated in the city of Wuhan, was being transmitted by people who were
showing no symptoms -- an insight that American health officials had not yet accepted. Mr. Pottinger declined
through a spokesman to comment.
It was one of the earliest warnings to the White House, and it echoed the
intelligence reports making their way to the National Security Council. While most of the early assessments
from the C.I.A. had little more information than was available publicly, some of the more specialized
corners of the intelligence world were producing sophisticated and chilling warnings.
In a report to the director of national intelligence, the State Department's
epidemiologist wrote in early January that the virus was likely to spread across the globe, and warned that
the coronavirus could develop into a pandemic. Working independently, a small outpost of the Defense
Intelligence Agency, the National Center for Medical Intelligence, came to the same conclusion. Within weeks
after getting initial information about the virus early in the year, biodefense experts inside the National
Security Council, looking at what was happening in Wuhan, started urging officials to think about what would
be needed to quarantine a city the size of Chicago.
By mid-January there was growing evidence of the virus spreading outside
China. Mr. Pottinger began convening daily meetings about the coronavirus. He alerted his boss, Robert C.
O'Brien, the national security adviser.
The early alarms sounded by Mr. Pottinger and other China hawks were
freighted with ideology -- including a push to publicly blame China that critics in the administration say
was a distraction as the coronavirus spread to Western Europe and eventually the United States.
And they ran into opposition from Mr. Trump's economic advisers, who worried
a tough approach toward China could scuttle a trade deal that was a pillar of Mr. Trump's re-election
campaign.
With his skeptical -- some might even say conspiratorial -- view of China's
ruling Communist Party, Mr. Pottinger initially suspected that President Xi Jinping's government was keeping
a dark secret: that the virus may have originated in one of the laboratories in Wuhan studying deadly
pathogens. In his view, it might have even been a deadly accident unleashed on an unsuspecting Chinese
population.
During meetings and telephone calls, Mr. Pottinger asked intelligence
agencies -- including officers at the C.I.A. working on Asia and on weapons of mass destruction -- to search
for evidence that might bolster his theory.
They didn't have any evidence. Intelligence agencies did not detect any alarm
inside the Chinese government that analysts presumed would accompany the accidental leak of a deadly virus
from a government laboratory. But Mr. Pottinger continued to believe the coronavirus problem was far worse
than the Chinese were acknowledging. Inside the West Wing, the director of the Domestic Policy Council, Joe
Grogan, also tried to sound alarms that the threat from China was growing.
Mr. Pottinger, backed by Mr. O'Brien, became one of the driving forces of a
campaign in the final weeks of January to convince Mr. Trump to impose limits on travel from China -- the
first substantive step taken to impede the spread of the virus and one that the president has repeatedly
cited as evidence that he was on top of the problem.
In addition to the opposition from the economic team, Mr. Pottinger and his
allies among the China hawks had to overcome initial skepticism from the administration's public health
experts.
Travel restrictions were usually counterproductive to managing biological
outbreaks because they prevented doctors and other much-needed medical help from easily getting to the
affected areas, the health officials said. And such bans often cause infected people to flee, spreading the
disease further.
But on the morning of Jan. 30, Mr. Azar got a call from Dr. Fauci, Dr.
Redfield and others saying they had changed their minds. The World Health Organization had
declared a global public health emergency
and American officials had discovered the
first confirmed case
of person-to-person transmission inside the United States.
The economic team, led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, continued to
argue that there were big risks in taking a provocative step toward China and moving to curb global travel.
After a debate, Mr. Trump came down on the side of the hawks and the public health team. The limits on
travel from China were publicly
announced on Jan. 31
.
Still, Mr. Trump and other senior officials were wary of further upsetting
Beijing. Besides the concerns about the impact on the trade deal, they knew that an escalating confrontation
was risky because the United States relies heavily on China for pharmaceuticals and the kinds of protective
equipment most needed to combat the coronavirus.
But the hawks kept pushing in February to take a critical stance toward China
amid the growing crisis. Mr. Pottinger and others -- including aides to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo --
pressed for government statements to use the term "Wuhan Virus."
Mr. Pompeo tried to hammer the anti-China message at every turn, eventually
even urging leaders of the Group of 7 industrialized countries to use "Wuhan virus" in a joint statement.
Others, including aides to
Mr.
Pence, resisted taking a hard public line, believing that angering Beijing might lead the Chinese government
to withhold medical supplies, pharmaceuticals and any scientific research that might ultimately lead to a
vaccine.
Mr. Trump took a conciliatory approach through the middle of March, praising
the job Mr. Xi was doing.
That changed abruptly, when aides informed Mr. Trump that a Chinese Foreign
Ministry spokesman had publicly spun a new conspiracy about the origins of Covid-19: that it was brought to
China by U.S. Army personnel who visited the country last October.
Mr. Trump was furious, and he took to his favorite platform to broadcast a
new message. On March 16, he
wrote on Twitter
that "the United States will be powerfully supporting those industries, like Airlines
and others, that are particularly affected by the Chinese Virus."
Mr. Trump's decision to escalate the war of words undercut any remaining
possibility of broad cooperation between the governments to address a global threat. It remains to be seen
whether that mutual suspicion will spill over into efforts to develop treatments or vaccines, both areas
where the two nations are now competing.
One immediate result was a free-for-all across the United States, with state
and local governments and hospitals bidding on the open market for scarce but essential Chinese-made
products. When the state of Massachusetts managed to procure 1.2 million masks, it fell to the owner of the
New England Patriots, Robert K. Kraft, a Trump ally, to cut through extensive red tape on both sides of the
Pacific to
send his own plane to pick them up.
The Consequences of Chaos
The chaotic culture of the Trump White House
contributed to the crisis. A lack of planning and a failure to execute, combined with the president's focus
on the news cycle and his preference for following his gut rather than the data cost time, and perhaps
lives.
Inside the West Wing, Mr. Navarro, Mr. Trump's trade adviser, was widely seen
as quick-tempered, self-important and prone to butting in. He is among the most outspoken of China hawks and
in late January was clashing with the administration's health experts over limiting travel from China.
So it elicited eye rolls when, after initially being prevented from joining
the coronavirus task force, he circulated a
memo on Jan. 29
urging Mr. Trump to impose the travel limits, arguing that failing to confront the
outbreak aggressively could be catastrophic, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of
dollars in economic losses.
The uninvited message could not have conflicted more with the president's
approach at the time of playing down the severity of the threat. And when aides raised it with Mr. Trump, he
responded that he was unhappy that Mr. Navarro had put his warning in writing.
From the time the virus was first identified as a concern, the
administration's response was plagued by the rivalries and factionalism that routinely swirl around Mr.
Trump and, along with the president's impulsiveness, undercut decision making and policy development.
Faced with the relentless march of a deadly pathogen, the disagreements and a
lack of long-term planning had significant consequences. They slowed the president's response and resulted
in problems with execution and planning, including delays in seeking money from Capitol Hill and a failure
to begin broad surveillance testing.
Even after Mr. Azar first briefed him about the potential seriousness of the
virus during a phone call on Jan. 18 while the president
was at his
Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Mr. Trump projected confidence that it would be a passing
problem.
"We have it totally under control,"
he told an interviewer
a few days later while attending the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. "It's
going to be just fine."
Back in Washington, voices outside of the White House peppered Mr. Trump with
competing assessments about what he should do and how quickly he should act.
The efforts to sort out policy behind closed doors were contentious and
sometimes only loosely organized.
That was the case when the National Security Council convened a meeting on
short notice on the afternoon of Jan. 27. The Situation Room was standing room only, packed with top White
House advisers, low-level staffers, Mr. Trump's social media guru, and several cabinet secretaries. There
was no checklist about the preparations for a possible pandemic, which would require intensive testing,
rapid acquisition of protective gear, and perhaps serious limitations on Americans' movements.
Instead, after a 20-minute description by Mr. Azar of his department's
capabilities, the meeting was jolted when Stephen E. Biegun, the newly installed deputy secretary of state,
announced plans to issue a "
level
four
" travel warning, strongly discouraging Americans from traveling to China. The room erupted into
bickering.
A few days later, on the evening of Jan. 30, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White
House chief of staff at the time, and Mr. Azar called Air Force One as the president was making the final
decision to go ahead with the restrictions on China travel. Mr. Azar was blunt, warning that the virus could
develop into a pandemic and arguing that China should be criticized for failing to be transparent.
Mr. Trump rejected the idea of criticizing China, saying the country had
enough to deal with. And if the president's decision on the travel restrictions suggested that he fully
grasped the seriousness of the situation, his response to Mr. Azar indicated otherwise.
Stop panicking, Mr. Trump told him.
That sentiment was present throughout February, as the president's top aides
reached for a consistent message but took few concrete steps to prepare for the possibility of a major
public health crisis.
During a briefing on Capitol Hill on Feb. 5, senators urged administration
officials to take the threat more seriously. Several asked if the administration needed additional money to
help local and state health departments prepare.
Derek Kan, a senior official from the Office of Management and Budget,
replied that the administration had all the money it needed, at least at that point, to stop the virus, two
senators who attended the briefing said.
"Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus," Senator Christopher
S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, wrote in a
tweet
shortly after. "Bottom line: they aren't taking this seriously enough."
The administration also struggled to carry out plans it did agree on. In
mid-February, with the effort to roll out widespread testing stalled, Mr. Azar announced a plan to repurpose
a flu-surveillance system in five major cities to help track the virus among the general population. The
effort all but collapsed even before it got started as Mr. Azar
struggled to win approval
for $100 million in funding and the
C.D.C. failed to make reliable tests available
.
The number of infections in the United States started to surge through
February and early March, but the Trump administration did not move to place large-scale orders for masks
and other protective equipment, or critical hospital equipment, such as ventilators. The Pentagon
sat on standby
, awaiting any orders to help provide temporary hospitals or other assistance.
As February gave way to March, the president continued to be surrounded by
divided factions even as it became clearer that avoiding more aggressive steps was not tenable.
Mr. Trump had agreed to give an Oval Office address on the evening of March
11 announcing restrictions on travel from Europe, where the virus was ravaging Italy. But responding to the
views of his business friends and others, he continued to resist calls for social distancing, school
closures and other steps that would imperil the economy.
But the virus was already multiplying across the country -- and hospitals were
at risk of buckling under the looming wave of severely ill people, lacking masks and other protective
equipment, ventilators and sufficient intensive care beds. The question loomed over the president and his
aides after weeks of stalling and inaction: What were they going to do?
The approach that Mr. Azar and others had planned to bring to him weeks
earlier moved to the top of the agenda. Even then, and even by Trump White House standards, the debate over
whether to shut down much of the country to slow the spread was especially fierce.
Always attuned to anything that could trigger a stock market decline or an
economic slowdown that could hamper his re-election effort, Mr. Trump also reached out to prominent
investors like Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chief executive of Blackstone Group, a private equity firm.
"Everybody questioned it for a while, not everybody, but a good portion
questioned it," Mr. Trump said
earlier this month
. "They said, let's keep it open. Let's ride it."
In a tense Oval Office meeting, when Mr. Mnuchin again stressed that the
economy would be ravaged, Mr. O'Brien, the national security adviser, who had been worried about the virus
for weeks, sounded exasperated as he told Mr. Mnuchin that the economy would be destroyed regardless if
officials did nothing.
Soon after the Oval Office address, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former
commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and a trusted sounding board inside the White House,
visited Mr. Trump, partly at the urging of Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law. Dr. Gottlieb's role
was to impress upon the president how serious the crisis could become. Mr. Pence, by then in charge of the
task force, also played a key role at that point in getting through to the president about the seriousness
of the moment in a way that Mr. Azar had not.
But in the end, aides said, it was Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the veteran AIDS
researcher who had joined the task force, who
helped to
persuade Mr. Trump. Soft-spoken and fond of the kind of charts and graphs Mr. Trump prefers, Dr. Birx did
not have the rough edges that could irritate the president. He often told people he thought she was elegant.
On Monday, March 16, Mr. Trump
announced new social distancing guidelines
, saying they would be in place for two weeks. The subsequent
economic disruptions were so severe that the president repeatedly suggested that he wanted to lift even
those temporary restrictions. He frequently asked aides why his administration was still being blamed in
news coverage for the widespread failures involving testing, insisting the responsibility had shifted to the
states.
During the last week in March, Kellyanne Conway, a senior White House adviser
involved in task force meetings, gave voice to concerns other aides had. She warned Mr. Trump that his
wished-for date of Easter to reopen the country likely couldn't be accomplished. Among other things, she
told him, he would end up being blamed by critics for every subsequent death caused by the virus.
Within days, he watched images on television of a calamitous situation at
Elmhurst Hospital Center, miles from his childhood home in Queens, N.Y., where
13 people had died
from the coronavirus in 24 hours.
CB on Sat, 04/11/2020
- 4:46pm Timeline on how Donald Trump completely failed America.
This expose by the New York Times is the best reporting I have seen on Trump's complete
inability and subsequent failure to lead during this time of acute crisis.
An examination reveals the president was warned about the potential for a pandemic but
that internal divisions, lack of planning and his faith in his own instincts led to a halting
response.
April 11, 2020
Updated 4:33 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON -- "Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad," a senior medical adviser at
the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an
email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities.
"The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe."
A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six
long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the
nation was facing -- a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American
lives -- Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation's public health bureaucracy to
wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.
...
The Containment Illusion
By the last week of February, it was clear to the administration's public health team that
schools and businesses in hot spots would have to close. But in the turbulence of the Trump
White House, it took three more weeks to persuade the president that failure to act quickly
to control the spread of the virus would have dire consequences.
...
The China Factor
The earliest warnings about coronavirus got caught in the crosscurrents of the
administration's internal disputes over China. It was the China hawks who pushed earliest for
a travel ban. But their animosity toward China also undercut hopes for a more cooperative
approach by the world's two leading powers to a global crisis.
...
The Consequences of Chaos
The chaotic culture of the Trump White House contributed to the crisis. A lack of planning
and a failure to execute, combined with the president's focus on the news cycle and his
preference for following his gut rather than the data cost time, and perhaps lives.
Analysis by Alexander Dugin
Edited by Pepe Escobar
"I have read virtually EVERYTHING, East and West, in terms of detailed analysis of our
current, game-changing, global stage of siege – not to mention private conversations
with top analysts and the tsunami of think tank reports I have to sift through in my
inbox.
"The insights by my friend Dugin are right at the very top. I am publishing an edited
version in 4 successive, condensed posts. I personally agree with 90% of his
conceptualization – especially the notion of the state in mutation (like the virus)
turning ever more dictatorial, and the collapse of the global liberal world.
"This is an effort to invite an informed discussion with you – a global audience.
Any entity with zero informed comment to offer, or prone to debased ad hominem attacks stay
away – and I'm being very polite about it. For now.
"Part 1:
"The coronavirus has already struck a blow from which neither politics, economics, nor
ideology will recover. The pandemic would have to have been dealt with by the existing
institutions, in normal mode without changing the basic rules:
- neither in politics (meaning no quarantine, no forced isolation, let alone a state of
emergency);
- nor in the economy (no remote work, no stopping of production, exchanges and financial-
industrial institutions or trading platforms, no vacation, etc.);
- nor in ideology (no restrictions, albeit temporary on essential civil rights, freedom of
movement, the cancellation or postponement of elections, referenda, etc.).
"...but all of this has already happened on a global scale, including in Western
countries, i.e., in the territory of the 'world government' itself. The very foundations of
the global system have been suspended.
"For the 'world government' to take such a step, it had to be forced to do so. By
whom?
Part-2:
"The state, mutating as fast as the virus:
"Everywhere in the world - whether openly or by default - a state of emergency has been
declared. According to the classics of political thought, and in particular Carl Schmitt,
this means the establishment of a regime of dictatorship. The sovereign, according to
Schmitt, is he who makes the decision in an emergency situation (Ernstfall), and today this
is the state. However, it should not be forgotten that today's state has until the altogether
recent last moment been based on the principles of liberal democracy, capitalism, and the
ideology of human rights.
"In other words, this state is, in some sense, deciding on the liquidation of its own
philosophical and ideological basis (even if such are for now formalized, temporary measures,
the Roman Empire still began with the temporary dictatorship of Caesar, which gradually
became permanent). Thus, the state is rapidly mutating, just as the virus itself is mutating,
and the state is following the coronavirus in this constantly evolving struggle, which is
taking the situation ever further from the point of global liberal democracy. All the extant
borders which until yesterday seemed to be erased or half-erased are once again gaining
fundamental meaning."
Part-3
"New algorithms engendering a new dictatorial state:
"Over the course of this epidemic, a new state is emerging which is beginning to function
with new rules. It is very likely that in the process of the state of emergency there will be
a shift of power from formal rulers to technical and technological functionaries, e.g., the
military, epidemiologists, and institutions especially created for such extreme
circumstances.
"As legal norms are suspended, new algorithms of behavior and new practices are beginning
to be deployed. Thus is born the dictatorial state, which, unlike the liberal-democratic
state, has completely different goals, foundations, principles and axioms. In this case, the
"world government" is dissolved, because any supranational strategy loses all meaning. Power
is rapidly moving to an ever lower level - but not to society and not to citizens, but to the
military-technological and medical-sanitary level. A radically new rationality is gaining
force - not the rationale of democracy, freedom, the market and individualism, but that of
pure survival, for which responsibility is assumed by a subject combining direct power and
the possession of technical, technological, and medical logistics. Moreover, in the network
society, such is based on a system of total surveillance excluding any kind of privacy.
"Thus, if at one end we have the virus as the subject of transformation, then at the other
end we have military-medical surveillance and punitive dictatorship fundamentally differing
in all parameters from the state that we knew until yesterday. It is not at all guaranteed
that such a state, in its fight against the secular 'plague gods', will precisely coincide
with the borders of existing national entities."
Part-4
"The state of emergency and the collapse of the global liberal order:
"Agamben has been more radical than others and opposed the measures taken against the
coronavirus, preferring even death to the introduction of a state of emergency. He clearly
saw that even a small step in this direction will change the entire structure of the world
order. Entering the stage of dictatorship is easy, but exiting it is sometimes
impossible.
"It is impossible to go back to the world order that existed only recently and which
seemed so familiar and natural that no one thought about its ephemerality. Liberalism either
did not reach its natural end and the establishment of a 'world government', or nihilistic
collapse was its original goal, merely covered by an increasingly less convincing and
increasingly perverse 'humanist' decor.
"The end of globalization will not mean, however, a simple transition to the Westphalian
system, to realism and a system of closed trade states (Fichte). Such would require the
well-defined ideology that existed in early Modernity, but which was completely eradicated in
late Modernity, and especially in Postmodernity. The demonization of anything remotely
resembling 'nationalism' or 'fascism' has led to the total rejection of national identities,
and now the severity of the biological threat and its crude physiological nature makes
national myths superfluous. The military-medical dictatorship does not need additional
methods to motivate the masses.
"The global liberal world has collapsed before our very eyes, just as the USSR and the
world socialist system fell in 1991. Our consciousness refuses to believe in such colossal
shifts, and especially in their irreversibility. But we must. It is better to conceptualize
and comprehend them in advance - now, as long as things have not yet become so acute."
Dugin does provoke the mind to think. I certainly have my own comments to make, but
they'll need to wait for later after today's Easter program here at my hermitage on the
shoreline where it's a superb Spring day and the grill will be lit to flame broil our small
feast.
I've noted before: it isn't really clear to me that the federal government can force all
the states to lock down.
That's not how the government in the United States works.
Nor does the CDC - now or ever - have the operational and legal means to directly do
contract tracing or even force/enforce quarantines on recalcitrant people. They normally work
in conjunction with state and local authorities - serving to provide services which don't
make sense for state/local and to coordinate between different state/local departments.
Trump could have called for a lockdown in January in theory - note called, not forced.
Then the economic consequences - which are guaranteed - would land squarely on his head even
as the implementation would be out of his control.
Hence my question as to what you think - in retrospect from today - what Trump should have
done and when?
Also, you should add that the US has increased its sanctions and war-manoeuvring.
During a pandemic this is despicable, but, broadly, US/Western people are
unconcerned.
Abby Martin does a review of what the US has been up to during the pandemic:
Everybody seems to believe in the 'magic money tree' but I have difficulty in believing in
Santa Claus. If the US economy is in ruins (as it may well be) then, it seems to me that a
military-backed resource grab (a war, in other words) has to happen and that Venezuela is the
most likely target.
I don't believe that Abby Martin covers Ukraine in her video:- Ukraine have abrogated
Minsk II (they would not have done so with US/NATO/West direction), shelling of Donbas
appears to have increased, and the MH17 trial will continue throughout 2020 and possibly
longer.
The MH17 trial outcome is predetermined and, I would imagine, the timescale is largely
under US/NATO/West control - what happens if a verdict is given (effectively against the
breakaway republics and Russia) during the pandemic or depression that follows?
The operative feature of the situation is no oversight, Congress is interested in it's own
affairs, the regulatory agencies are privatized, and journalism is mostly dead. So what you
have is various power centers pursuing their own agendas and feeling entitled to speak for
all about what they consider to be their baliwicks. Every once in a while one of those comes
into conflict with the White House or powerful Congresspersons, and then a head or two may
roll, as with Modly, but nothing much changes institutionally.
Jared's private enterprise in the PPE business is a perfect example, and representative of
Trumpist governance, very old school.
So yeah, I wouldn't expect the privateering to come to much, but perhaps entertaining in a
perverse sort of way.
There does appear to be plenty of piracy already going on in some places, not under cover
of government authority, and USA has been stealing stuff right and left since Trump came into
office, if not before.
Anglo-saxon countries have a very strong culture of individual independence, therefore a
high demand for nursery homes as the population gets older. Contrary to the Latin countries,
old people don't stay to live with their adult children, but are exiled in nursery homes
instead.
Nursery homes are a banquet for the SARS CoV-2. We already had a case of 11 deaths at the
same time in a nursery home in Japan some weeks ago, and also the Seattle nursery home fiasco
when the pandemic first reached the USA, so it's not that this was an unknown unknown.
A German team lead by virologist Hendrick Streeck has now researched the German Hot Spot
Heinsberg. They tested 1000 randomized people and found that a whopping 15% was infected -
most of them without showing any symptoms.
Based on this preliminary findings the scientists conclude that the lethality of COVID-19
is 0,37%. They also conclude that the virus has successfully installed itself in the
population and is impossible to eradicate without a year-long lock down, making herd immunity
the preferential goal to achieve.
Award-winning journalist John Pilger has revealed that the NHS staged an exercise in London in
2016 which proved it was unable to cope with a pandemic like Covid-19, but its findings were
suppressed.
Speaking to RT's
Going Underground
, Pilger said that back in 2016, the UK government ran a
drill in London that showed the health service was incapable of dealing with an outbreak.
He described the failure as a
"crime"
and told host Afshin Rattansi that the findings
from the exercise, titled Cygnus, had been concealed by the government.
"The result of the drill was that the health service was overwhelmed, there weren't enough
beds, there weren't enough ventilators, there weren't enough clinicians in the right places. The whole
system, which had been battered by cuts and privatization for years, failed,"
he said.
The journalist explained that the NHS had been
"devastated"
by the Tory-led government's
decision to bring in the Health and Social Care Act in 2012.
Pilger's scathing comments come a day after the UK recorded its most deaths in a single day since
the crisis began. The 854 fatalities took the total to 6,159.
Projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, US, warned that the UK
could become the European country worst-hit by Covid-19, possibly accounting for 40 percent of the
continent's deaths.
The documentary film maker, whose most recent works include 'The Dirty War on the NHS,' also
blasted successive British governments since the 1980s for slashing NHS funding and pursuing a policy
of privatization by
"stealth."
COVID-19 Outbreak: 70 Test Positive for Coronavirus at San Francisco Homeless Shelter https://tinyurl.com/wot2hmx
This is just the start of an outbreak that will likely result in San Francisco having more
cases than New York...and more deaths.
And then add in the people in SROs...
The outbreak at the MSC South shelter comes after weeks of people pleading with the mayor
to make changes. The shelter is near the corner of 5th and Bryant streets. Mayor London
Breed made the sobering announcement of the large amount of cases during the San Franciso's
daily COVID-19 update on Friday and warned the worst is yet to come.
OVID-19 Outbreak: 70 Test Positive for Coronavirus at San Francisco Homeless Shelter https://tinyurl.com/wot2hmx
This is just the replay of the situation we have in New York and NJ.
And then add in the people in retirement homes and "Houston, we have a problem"...
The outbreak at the MSC South shelter comes after weeks of people pleading with the mayor to
make changes. The shelter is near the corner of 5th and Bryant streets. Mayor London Breed
made the sobering announcement of the large amount of cases during the San Franciso's daily
COVID-19 update on Friday and warned the worst is yet to come.
No shit, you dumb bitch...
Quoting "... that is merely the reflection of the abdication of social responsibility by
whole populations whose disinterest in politics has allowed the [neoliberal] scum to rise to
the top."
BTW the above is a good description of our latest administration. BTW I still can't
understand how with one trillion military budget the navy does not have masks and visors to
protect that sailors on ships. Nothing was supplied since January. And I think we do have navy
intelligence among other agencies.
We also have a problem with this brave soldier Švejk -- Cuomo with this unhealthy
fascination with the number of ventilators instead of solving the problem with hot-spots in
homeless shelters and retirement homes (he wants 40K as if they will fight the infection for
him). I would put him on ventilator just to silence such an incompetent politician ;-)
Ventilator-associated lung injury - Wikipedia
Of couse it is easier to give reommentrations the do the actual fight, but still...
A relative and her husband returned to China recently from UK expecting to go to hotel for
14 days quarantine. Instead another passenger developed symptom on flight so all passengers
isolated for testing. Relative and husband tested positive but were asymptomatic (except she
lost sense of taste & smell). Now in isolation hospital for minimum of 14 days until
given all clear, then they'll spend another minimum of 14 days in quarantine in hotel until
cleared again. How many western countries are doing/planning to do this?
If I comprehend, the issue was that they knew there was a problem in November rather than
December.
Not sure the point really, we are awash in examples of U.S. government incompetence - look up
incompetence on Wikipedia has Pompous' photo (OK but it should).
Realistically:
- the government is slow to respond
- the government is bad at planning
- the government is around 1 million people all pulling in different directions
- it is only when problem is obvious and damaging that the government gets somewhat
focused
- the virus is invisible
- the extent of damage was uncertain
Posted by b on April 8, 2020 at 7:43 UTC | Permalink
The Jpost article that b links to says that a million masks from China (donated by the US
Department of Defense) arrived in Tel Aviv on Tuesday night. But Israel should have already
had two million masks if this report from last weekend is correct: The shipment will include two million masks, landing in Israel on Monday morning, https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog-april-4-2020/
So that appears to be three million masks from China, plus those seized from American
hospitals. Or are they fiddling the figures and pretending that those seized masks were
legally purchased in China?
It appears that Mossad and others have recently acquired about two surgical masks per
Israeli:
"5 April 2020,
(...)Last week, the Health Ministry said that security services and government ministries had
managed to obtain 27 ventilators and a hoard of other medical equipment from abroad.
Hebrew media reported that the Mossad intelligence service, which has been tasked with
securing medical equipment from abroad from unspecified countries amid worldwide shortages,
helped obtain 25,000 N95 respiratory masks , 20,000 virus test kits, 10 million
surgical masks , and 700 overalls for ambulance workers who usually carry out the initial
testing for the virus.
One million masks for the IDF.
Eat your heart out US Theodore Roosevelt and Guam.
US sailors right at the bottom of the Pentagon's priorities, thats for sure.
American military?.
Have one duty - die as required for Israel.
Including death by coronavirus by looks of things.....
More fool them.
Bloody hell. The Pentagon procures a million masks from China, then gives them to Israel -
when US doctors are running low in almost every city - not to mention that the military
itself has soaring coronavirus cases it can't handle.
You gotta know some rich Jewish corporate billionaire was behind that crap and Kushner was
just the conduit to get Trump to agree to it - probably in exchange for a big donation to
Trump's campaign.
If there was ever a country that deserved to be on the end of a US bombing campaign - it's
Israel - a racist, fanatical. colonialist, fascist, illegal terrorist state. Zionists - the
biggest scumbags on the planet. But instead the US bombs everyone else Israel doesn't
like.
But cheer up. Israel is a doomed nation. There is no way they can continue their path
forever, historically speaking. I suspect they won't exist within another fifty years.
They'll either be annihilated by their own nuclear weapons, or transformed into a bi-national
state that is no longer primarily Jewish. And I don't particularly care which.
The U.S. government's efforts to clean up Cold War-era waste from nuclear research and bomb
making at federal sites around the country has lumbered along for decades, often at a pace
that watchdogs and other critics say threatens public health and the environment.
Now, fallout from the global coronavirus pandemic is resulting in more challenges as the
nation's only underground repository for nuclear waste finished ramping down operations
Wednesday to keep workers safe.
Over more than 20 years, tons of waste have been stashed deep in the salt caverns that
make up the southern New Mexico site. Until recently, several shipments a week of special
boxes and barrels packed with lab coats, rubber gloves, tools and debris contaminated with
plutonium and other radioactive elements were being trucked to the remote facility from South
Carolina, Idaho and other spots.
That's all but grinding to a halt.
Shipments to the desert outpost will be limited for the foreseeable future while work at
the country's national laboratories and defense sites shift to only those operations
considered "mission critical."
Officials at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant warned state regulators in a letter Tuesday
that more time would be needed for inspections and audits and that work would be curtailed or
shifts would be staggered to ensure workers keep their distance from one another.
BTW, the Al Quds Post (aka Jerusalem Post to Zionists) has changed the headline on that
article to "Israel brings 1 million masks from China for IDF soldiers" Looks like the "New
York Purchasing and Logistics Division" is part of the Israeli Ministry Of War All The Time.
So the original was a nice story but fake news. Since there was no correction attached to the
new version, it could be that Washington/Tel Aviv reckoned that this was a step to far even
for Trump and the new version is the fake news.
- This news simply confirms again that the US, under Trump, has become more corrupt. But this
is a development that already started years, decades ago before Trump became president.
I think the possibility should be considered that Trump just made preexisting corruption
more visible rather than adding significantly to it. There are elaborate protocols and
circuitous speech that professional politicians learn to use to obfuscate the corruption and
make their own participation in that corruption seem not only acceptable but necessary or
even in the public interest. Trump is either ignorant of these protocols or he just doesn't
care.
Even with all this help (of which most go to the military sector), the Isreali economy can
barely keep itself afloat:
[...] inequality of income and wealth is huge in Israel, the second worst in the 36 nation
OECD group. The relative poverty rate for Haredim and Arabs (25% of the population) is near
50%, and even for other Israelis, it is higher than the OECD average. The gap in median
wage levels from skilled to unskilled; from Haredim/Arabs to others is huge - and yet the
former will constitute 50% of the population by 2060.
And this mask fiasco is the lesser problem for the American working class right now. A
significant portion of its people
is going hungry . That magic USD 1,200 check is not coming soon:
"the checks are not in the mail."
And the problem isn't just in the USA. The periphery of Western Civilization is also going
to suffer:
Germany's economy will shrink almost 10 per cent in the three months to June, according to
the country's top economic research institutes, the sharpest decline since quarterly
national accounts began in 1970 and double the size of the biggest drop in the 2008
financial crisis.
The shutdown of vast swaths of economic activity to contain the spread of the pandemic
is knocking 1.5 percentage points off French growth for every two weeks that it continues,
the Banque de France warned on Wednesday.
After more than three weeks in lockdown, French economic output is expected to have
fallen by the sharpest rate since the second world war, the central bank said, forecasting
that gross domestic product contracted 6 per cent in the first three months of the
year.
Get everyone you know to read "Against Our Better Judgment" by Alison Weir. Absolutely the
best short, supereasy read to open eyes of those who are unaware that they are unaware, I
promise. If you can afford to, buy copies to give away.
Very brief, "b", but one of your best posts. This is an unmitigated outrage. The arrogance of
the ruling class knows no bounds, and they are acting with impunity. Seems the ruling class
doesn't even care anymore how widely known it is that the US has little sovereignty.
This guy is really a fearmonger who after sleeting for two months greatly contributed with
his idiotic interviews to the botched reaction of the US government to this crisis. He should
go
Notable quotes:
"... And now, after the Trump Administration scrambled to ramp up testing capacity and the states worked with the Feds, private entities, and others (including in some cases foreign nations) to distribute ventilators as Gov. Andrew Cuomo painted a horrifying portrait of sickened New Yorkers suffocating to death in hospital hallways because there were no ventilators available. ..."
"... Well, yesterday, NYC Mayor de Blasio said that, after a few days of near capacity numbers, hospitalizations have dropped by such a steep degree that the city believes it has enough ventilators on hand, and won't need any more. ..."
And now, after the Trump Administration scrambled to ramp up testing capacity and the states
worked with the Feds, private entities, and others (including in some cases foreign nations) to
distribute ventilators as Gov. Andrew Cuomo painted a horrifying portrait of sickened New
Yorkers suffocating to death in hospital hallways because there were no ventilators
available.
Well, yesterday, NYC Mayor de Blasio said that, after a few days of near capacity numbers,
hospitalizations have dropped by such a steep degree that the city believes it has enough
ventilators on hand, and won't need any more.
Now on Thursday, Dr. Fauci is taking to cable news to spread the message of optimism that
has lifted US stocks over the past few days: Instead of the 240k figure used by President Trump
as recently as two weeks ago, Dr. Fauci told NBC News that if the public continued to stick to
the "mitigation efforts", that the death toll might be as low as 60k.
After being unable to do the required testing, one of the largest nursing homes in western Pennsylvania is operating under the
assumption that all of the facility's nearly 800 patients and staff have been infected with COVID-19.
As of Tuesday, three patients had died and at least 42 patients and 10 staff members at the Brighton Rehabilitation and Wellness
Center have tested positive for COVID-19. The center has also stopped listing the number of patients and staff infected along with
the number of deaths on their daily posting.
Family and friends of those in the nursing home are distraught as they are unable to see their loved ones and are now unable to
find out whether they are infected or not.
Keri Boyer, the daughter of 73-year-old Earl Denbow, who died Monday from COVID-19, told Channel 11 news how fast her father died.
"They called me last Monday to say that he wasn't feeling well, and they started him on an IV and he had a slight fever. They tested
him Thursday. They got the (positive) results on Friday. They called hospice in on Sunday, and he was gone yesterday ... that quick."
Nurses and other staff at the facility were outraged at the speed the infection was growing inside the home and the lack of action
by management to stop the spread and provide staff protective gear. Nurses report that they have been sent to work with patients
with COVID-19 and were denied N95 masks.
On Thursday, nurses and other health care workers at the facility walked off the job demanding management provide them with protective
equipment as the coronavirus spread through the 589-bed facility.
Tamera Witherspoon, a nurse, told WTAE-TV that she was sent to work with COVID-19 patients, but was denied access to even a face
mask. "I can't believe I was denied as a health care worker, from another health care worker, to work in unsafe conditions," Witherspoon
told the Pittsburgh TV station.
"I was livid, but I was also on duty," she said. "There are patients that need to be cared for so I'm in a predicament." Witherspoon
told the station that she was angry but continued to care for her patients, but was outraged when she saw administrators wearing
the protective gear.
"You're not doing patient care and I'm at the bedside doing patient care, and I have three kids at home and I ask you and you're
denying me to have an N95? I just think that's deplorable," she said.
Union officials worked quickly to end the walkout and get staff to return to work, promising workers would receive N95 masks and
"frontline" workers' hazard pay.
In a contemptuous press release, SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania President Matthew Yarnell said, "This crisis has highlighted how
vulnerable our health care system is and that caregivers' input and voice is absolutely essential if we want to provide high-quality
care in this country."
Rather than fighting for full protective gear, universal testing and emergency action to stop the spread and protect the patients
and workers, the union works as a second level of management to ensure the nursing home remains running with enough staff.
On Monday, unable to test all the patients and staff that showed symptoms, management at the nursing home, along with local health
officials, decided to designate anyone with symptoms COVID-19 positive and assume that all 450 patients and 300 staff members are
also infected.
While local news is treating this as management finally recognizing the severity of the crisis, in reality they are accepting
the possibility that scores of patients and staff will die while taking no action to further stop the spread of the virus.
No attempt is being made to isolate and remove those who are not yet infected. No additional equipment is being brought into the
home to treat the sick, no facilities are in place to house the staff and protect their families and the community from its spread.
The virus continues to spread through Pennsylvania. State health officials reported that there was a surge in deaths, climbing
48 percent on Tuesday, with 78 new deaths bringing the total to 240. The total number of cases has climbed to 14,669.
"We assume that the true rate of [COVID-19] is much higher than the one we're reporting," State Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel
Levine, said.
Throughout Pennsylvania, 664 health care workers have been infected; 674 people living in nursing homes and other long-term care
facilities outside the Beaver nursing home have also been infected.
A nurse who works at a long-term care home near Pittsburgh, a sister facility of the Brighton Rehabilitation and Wellness Center,
told the World Socialist Web Site that the company only cares about profits and not the patients or the staff.
"To think that they are not providing staff with masks and other personal protective gear is criminal," said the nurse, who asked
not to be identified for fear of losing her job. "They say they don't want to scar the patients, but without protection you are spreading
the virus."
She explained that about a month ago, they had to move one of their patients to the Brighton facility to get her away from another
patient who was bullying her. "We were all sickened when we learned that she was one of the ones who died," she said.
"This is a long-term facility. You get to know all the patients here and they become like family. It is very hard when something
like this happens that didn't have to."
"This wouldn't have happened if we had universal health care," the nurse said. "We could send a patient to a facility that best
suited them. But because this company only wants to make money, she was sent to one of their facilities."
The nurse also explained that the lack of support for staff helps to explain the rapid spread of COVID-19 inside the nursing home.
"Nurses don't get any sick days until they've worked a year."
Aides and other staff in nursing homes are some of the lowest paid and overworked workers in the country. In many facilities,
aides don't even make $15 an hour, with some paid as low as $10, $11 and $12 with little or no benefits.
"Being an aide was the hardest job I ever had," the nurse said. "You are constantly working and in direct contact with patients,
feeding them, taking them to the bathroom, cleaning them, bathing them, getting them dressed."
Without proper protection and training, workers can unwillingly transfer COVID-19 from one patient to another. The center says
that they have only 600 masks and 2,500 surgical gowns on hand, meaning staff will be forced to reuse masks. The cloth-type surgical
gowns will not protect an employee from COVID-19 and can even transfer the virus from one person to another.
Following the line of the Trump administration to downplay the danger, as the pandemic spread throughout Pennsylvania and the
US, neither the local nor state Departments of Health laid down guidelines to protect nursing home patients and health care workers
from COVID-19.
A cluster of Covid-19 cases at the AVP1 facility in eastern Pennsylvania has spooked workers and sparked a
federal investigation.
By
Matt
Day
,
Spencer Soper
, and
Josh Eidelson
Amazon Warehouse Warned Staff Not to Touch Shipments for 24 Hours
A cluster of Covid-19 cases at the AVP1 facility in eastern Pennsylvania has spooked workers and sparked a
federal investigation.
By
Matt
Day
,
Spencer Soper
, and
Josh Eidelson
,
April 08, 2020 2:50 PM
A worker carries Amazon boxes in New York on March 26.
Last week, a manager at an Amazon.com Inc. warehouse in eastern Pennsylvania issued a stark warning to his
team on how to handle shipments from another Amazon facility afflicted with the coronavirus: Don't touch
them for 24 hours.
"As a precaution surrounding Covid-19 concerns, a directive came in today to let ALL loads from AVP1 sit for
24 hours prior to opening/receiving," the manager said in an email reviewed by Bloomberg. "Please do not
process any AVP1 trailers before the 24-hour mark."
The AVP1 warehouse in Hazle Township is among dozens of Amazon facilities where employees have been
diagnosed with Covid-19, including a warehouse on Staten Island that has been roiled by worker protests. But
the cluster of at least 21 positive tests at AVP1 appears to be one of the most severe in Amazon's
sprawling logistics network. With many workers now afraid to come to work, employees said the company is
struggling to keep the facility open and orders flowing, which an Amazon spokeswoman disputed. The Occupational
Safety and Health Administration said Wednesday that it is opening an
investigation
into working conditions at AVP1.
Employees protest at Amazon.com's Staten Island distribution facility on March 30.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
One of 10 such warehouses in Amazon's U.S. fulfillment network, AVP1 is an important cog in the smooth
functioning of the online retailer's logistics machine, according to Marc Wulfraat, a consultant who studies
the company's operations. Extended closures of Amazon facilities could fracture the company's finely tuned
network, delaying deliveries to customers who would rather avoid stores and shop online instead.
Employees at AVP1 were informed of at least 21 cases in their ranks, according to voicemails and text
messages from the facility's management reviewed by Bloomberg. Three employees said more cases disclosed in
meetings may not be included in the tally of 21. The employees, two of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity
for fear of retaliation from their employer, said paranoia is rife that the virus is spreading from employee to
employee in the building, though they have no hard evidence to back up that suggestion. In the meantime,
absenteeism has surged, the employees said.
Andrea Houtsch
Source: Andrea Houtsch
"It's kind of a Petri dish," said Andrea Houtsch, who last worked March 27 and has been taking unpaid time
off so she doesn't catch the virus. "Any time you've got hundreds of people in the same building, breathing the
same air, no matter how far you stay apart, there's that chance." She added: "Amazon is not responsible for
this pandemic, nobody was prepared for this. They just need to be realistic about what's happening here. Once
things get better, I have no problem going back."
Amazon said the guidance about goods coming from AVP1 was a mistake. "This was an error in communication
made locally with positive intentions but was misinformed -- it has since been corrected," Kristen Kish, an Amazon
spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement. "Based on guidance from the CDC, the WHO, and the Surgeon General,
there is currently no evidence that COVID-19 is being spread through packages. It's a belief within the
infectious disease community that if there was transmission through packages there would have been immediate
global spread early in the outbreak, that did not happen and it confirms the risk as incredibly low."
Kish declined to provide a complete count of Covid-19 cases at AVP1 or comment on the OSHA investigation.
Amazon says it has stepped up cleaning measures at all of its facilities, in line with federal
guidance for employers allowed to stay open as state orders close many businesses. The Seattle company has
staggered shift start times, reorganized break rooms and repositioned workstations to prevent employees from
congregating.
This week, Amazon is rolling out temperature screenings and a limited supply of masks for employees to wear
during their shifts. The company has also offered temporary raises and more lucrative overtime to people who
keep working, and said it will give two weeks of sick pay to those diagnosed with Covid-19 or quarantined after
being exposed to someone with the disease.
Still, concerns about getting sick, or infecting loved ones, continue to fester. Hazleton, home to about
25,000 people, has been hit hard by the coronavirus. It is in Luzerne County, which has the third most cases
per capita in Pennsylvania, behind nearby Lehigh and Monroe counties, according to Pennsylvania Department of
Health data. Commodities giant Cargill Inc. this week idled a beef plant located near AVP1 after workers there
tested positive for Covid-19. "People are scared to death," said another employee at AVP1. One worker, afraid
of spreading the disease to family members at home, last week broke down and started crying in the break room,
two colleagues said.
The Hazle Township facility, west of the town of Hazleton, opened in 2008, one of the first in a decade-long
expansion from a handful of warehouses to hundreds across the U.S. AVP1 is the anchor of a cluster of depots
Amazon built in Pennsylvania to take advantage of cheap real estate, a workforce reeling from the loss of
manufacturing jobs and a relatively short trip to major cities like New York and Philadelphia.
Amazon's warehouses are best known for orange robots zipping around, ferrying products to workers who place
them in bins and send them along a conveyor belt to be shipped out. AVP1 is different. Called an inbound
cross-dock, it receives pallets of goods from manufacturers, many of them overseas, breaks them down and then
ships them on to Amazon warehouses. The facility handles all manner of goods, and shipments in recent weeks
included sought-after items such as Lysol wipes, as well as bedsheets, books and toys, workers said.
On March 26, AVP1 staff were informed of the first Covid-19 cases and quickly shared the information with
the
Hazelton News 1
website. More people began calling in sick, or staying home, in the following days as
managers disclosed more cases at impromptu meetings, the employees said. Some people, worried they weren't
being informed of cases from other shifts or departments, started comparing notes on social media and sharing
contact details of local and federal authorities. Amazon said it's informing all workers as new cases are
confirmed.
The next week, dozens of new staffers arrived at AVP1, according to two employees, part of a hiring surge
Amazon has unleashed to keep warehouses open and meet rising demand. Workers said Amazon is using the new hires
to fill gaps left by employees who have chosen to stay away to avoid being exposed or to take care of children
whose schools have closed.
Trainers at AVP1, worried about working with people they don't know or who hail from from the hard-hit New
York area, refused to train the new hires, according to two employees. Instead of six hours of supervised,
hands-on work in small groups, the batch of recruits spent last Monday in the break room watching instructional
videos before a question and answer session with a manager.
Early last week, more than half of one shift's 500 or so workers didn't show up, according to an employee
briefed on the numbers. Then about 30 minutes before the end of the shift, managers announced there were seven
additional Covid-19 cases among their coworkers. That prompted all but a handful of the more than 100 workers
in the shipping department to leave rather than finish their shift, said one employee who was there. Before
long, products started backing up, triggering an alarm and halting the conveyors, the employee said, and
managers had to help clear the backlog and send out the final shipments.
Amazon says it has adjusted staffing at its facilities to make it possible for employees to practice social
distancing.
Meanwhile, workers at a warehouse in nearby Pittston were told to let goods coming from the warehouse sit
for at least 24 hours. "It just made us more anxious," said an employee at the Pittston warehouse. The employee
said the guidance was still in effect as of Tuesday.
Workers at AVP1 last weekend were told by automated text message and voice call of four additional Covid-19
cases. On Monday evening, they were informed of nine more. The messages said the site had undergone "enhanced
cleanings" since the sick employees last worked and that Amazon would send home, with pay, those who have been
in close contact with the sick. The company this week also began encouraging employees to wear face masks, in
line with updated federal health guidance. Employees were welcome to bring their own, and Amazon will also have
"limited quantities" on site, the messages said. (Amazon on Wednesday said it had enough masks for all
employees in its facilities.)
"We understand the risk of exposure is low for those who weren't in close contact with the affected
associate," the message said.
The Interviewer
: John Kirby is the director of FOUR DIED TRYING, a feature documentary and series
on the major assassinations of the 1960's and their calamitous impact on the country. To join the struggle for
justice for Dr. King, Malcolm X, and John and Robert Kennedy.
The Interviewee:
Professor Knut Wittkowski was head of The Rockefeller University's Department of
Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design for 20 years.
Journeyman Pictures sits down with Prof Knut Wittkowski to discuss lockdowns, social-distancing and the best way
to handle the spread of a new disease.
Dennis Brown
,
Another superb contribution by Off Guardian.
In Canada, according to the Covid-19 Daily E.P.I Update
of April 7th there have been 17,046 confirmed cases out of a total population in Canada of 37.6M.
344 have died.
62% of all reported hospitalizations, 62% reported I.C.U. admissions , and 92% of deaths occurred
among individuals 60-79 years of age. 73% of hospitalized cases reported having one or more
pre-existing conditions.
The data in Canada , at least, seems to conform very closely to Prof. Knut Wittkowski's hypothesis
in this video. What a outrage that this information is being deliberately ignored by the mainstream
media!
Thank you again Off Guardian for providing this vitally needed information.
Fair dinkum
,
Oligarchs and their underlings (politicians and corporate types) love to hold court, particularly over
a banquet at their preferred eating establishments.
With most of these establishments closed due to lockdowns, where are the parasites dining?
Do they have five star glutton rooms hidden away?
Will they tire of take away meals?
How can they strut their stuff without the requisite surroundings?
It's a problem that must keep them awake at night.
Gary Weglarz
,
We were moved to tears and ready to go to war when they told us about those non-existent "Kuwaiti
incubator babies" that Iraqi soldiers were throwing on the cold hard ground to die – but weren't!
We were paralyzed and terrified when they told us that steel and concrete buildings can simply
vaporize into billowing dust clouds in mid- air – so we in America gladly became in effect a
surveillance police state complete with torture chambers.
We were filled with anger and fear when they told us about those non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction about to obliterate us at any moment but, uhh, it appears in retrospect they didn't happen
to exist in this particular universe that we currently inhabit! Perhaps in another dimension?
We were revolted and filled with outrage when they told us about Gaddafi's non-existent "viagra
fueled rape camps" – just before we turned Libya into rubble and an open slave market – "in order to
save the women" – who weren't being raped in non-existent viagra fueled rape camps. Many admire
Hillary because she valiantly stood with those women, who weren't being raped, in those non-existent
rape camps – and Hillary of course could not contain her glee when publicly discussing the murder of a
head of state and the destruction of an entire nation – cackling like the psychopath that she is.
We were repulsed when they told us about Assad's deranged non-existent gas attacks on his own
people done for "kicks" no less – as the valiant White Helmeted jihadist crazies we in the West
supported fearlessly slaughtered innocent civilians – well, let's not talk about that right now –
let's focus on something upbeat, like those film awards the White Helmets got for their feature length
– "documentary" – entered in the "complete freaking fantasy" category – always a Hollywood favorite.
And we were no doubt all moved to loathing and contempt and to deranged Cold War deja vu fervor
when they told us for three straight years that – "Russia hacked American democracy" – installing in
office an orange haired, gonad grabbing, "Putin Puppet!" Surely there is a good reason they then gave
said "Putin Puppet" renewed "Patriot Act" powers and more military spending money than he asked for –
all in such defiance of rational thought and argument that it should make one's head hurt. Alas, here
in America the ability to experience cognitive dissonance appears to have evaporated among the masses
simultaneously with the loss of critical thinking abilities.
So buoyed by this brief trip down memory lane we should quite naturally all credulously believe
Western MSM and our political class now as they tell us that "they" – (err, uhh, I mean "the virus") –
crashed the global economy – leading them to then have no choice but to bail out our wealthiest
corporations and our biggest banks – "for our own good" – of course, well, it goes without saying
doesn't it?
And unfortunately they now will have to keep us all under house arrest until this all blows over –
"for our own good!" I mean it is certainly only "for our own good" that they don't want to risk
another Occupy Wall Street insurrection, or want to take the risk that the Yellow Vests might start
building working guillotines in every village and every neighborhood in Paris.
I mean and sure it may kind of look bad that American elites have continued to use amoral sanctions
to brutalize, starve and kill the poor in Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Yemen and elsewhere – WHILE they
are showing their vast concern for the rest of us by placing us under house arrest, but let's face it
– "it is for those poor people's own good," I mean their starvation and dying of course, because we
have to regime-change those folks governments "in order to save them." Or something like that.
I mean think about it, what have our elites ever done to cause us to so much as question their
humanitarian values and actions? Ok, ok, that half million dead Iraqi children "are worth it" shtick
wasn't their best PR moment, but hey, they obviously "meant well" by killing a half a million kids --
right? I mean I'm sure they had their "reasons." Just like they have their reasons for killing poor
people all around the world every day.
– I must confess that I am absolutely stunned and disheartened by how few people I know who are so
much as registering even a faint whiff of skepticism about what is happening globally, and the
narratives being spun by MSM and the political class. I know so few who are asking even the most basic
and fundamental questions about our so called "pandemic," our lock down, and our collective loss of
liberties – even among those who didn't swallow the propaganda narratives on Russiagate or Syria.
Instead we appear to have a massive segment of the American population simply willing to allow the
same amoral always lying war-criminal media and political class – (which ALWAYS serve elite interests)
– to "tell them how to think" and "what to think" and "how high" to jump – and now even "when they can
leave their own home." An absolutely stunning level of obedience – to say the least.
Maxwell
,
"I'm not paid by the [corporation] government, so I'm entitled to actually do science."
Says it all.
Shaking My Head
,
I am not some kind of anti-government conservative at all, but I do think the dependencies
academics, doctors, and scientists have on what can be very uncertain government funding is the
reason why I haven't seen any loud critical voices from them in Canada. All the scholars whether of
humanities or law, where are they in denouncing an obvious transformation into a police state? All
the talk about 'civil liberties' over the years and how they must be protected, where did all of
that go? Not one peep these last weeks! And as for doctors and scientists, why aren't there are any
like the Germans such as Sucharit Bhakdi or Wolfgang Wodarg or Knut Wittkowski, or Americans such
as John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, Michael Levitt, (John/Jay/Michael all at Stanford), Shiva
Ayyadurai (I'm a bit suspicious of his political aspirations though). And there are other Germans I
saw mentioned in the experts article on Off-Guardian or Swiss Propaganda Research article. Yet in
Canada, it's total silence. But if you look on Twitter, there are a number of everyday people from
the US and UK who are criticizing the phoniness and deception as they see it. So if the common
people can call things out, where are the others with more status and reach? It's sickening.
Sam
,
I've been thinking this since this all blew up. Bhattacharya said (in
this
interview) that he got a deal of backlash from colleagues over his WSJ article raising
questions about the fatality estimates: he was told to "get with the program". Groupthink is
very powerful today, more powerful than I remember in my lifetime, and few will buck the party
line. It's indeed sickening and disturbing.
Ken
,
But as self-appointed lord and emperor of the world, Bill Gates, has said we can't have herd immunity.
Bill Gates has also donated to Imperial College (I saw a comment stating he was the biggest
donor but I didn't have time to research that):
https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/gates-foundation-awards-35-million-for-mosquito-research
"With its latest award of $35 million, the foundation has now invested a total of $75 million in
the Target Malaria project, which is based at Imperial College, London"
The WHO had been made aware of Covid-19 by December last year. In January, it posted a tweet
saying: "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear
evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in
Wuhan, China."
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear
evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus
(2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan , #China
🇨🇳. pic.twitter.com/Fnl5P877VG
Then in February, Ghebreyesus declared that there was no need for travel bans, saying the
spread of the virus outside China was "minimal and slow." Fast forward to March 11, and
Dr Tedros was telling the world that coronavirus was officially a pandemic and that he was
"deeply concerned by alarming levels of inaction" as it spread. Days later, he tweeted
that the "pandemic is accelerating."
Then, at a press conference, he said that "all countries should be able to test all
suspected cases" because "they cannot fight this pandemic blindfolded." Perhaps if
countries had been warned about the need for widespread testing sooner; they would have been
better placed to implement such measures?
The #COVID19 pandemic
is accelerating. It took 67 days from the 1st reported case to reach the first 100K cases, 11
days for the second 100K cases & just 4 days for the third 100K cases.These numbers
matter, these are people, whose lives & families have been turned upside down. https://t.co/VydhLBNq36
-- Tedros Adhanom
Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) March 23,
2020
Obviously, hindsight is 20/20 and it is very easy to criticize a person or an organization
for not predicting something after it has happened. But the WHO should have been better
prepared for this, not least because it already had experience of the spread of SARS, MERS,
H5N1 and swine flu in recent years to draw on. Admittedly, none spread as virulently as
Covid-19, but it was obvious from those outbreaks that measures such as testing and restricting
travel would help slow the spread.
Perhaps it was concerned about again being accused of overreacting, as it had been by some
in response to the 2009 swine flu outbreak. Possibly, it too readily believed the low figures
being reported by China during the early part of this year. Maybe it assumed countries were
more prepared to deal with pandemics than they turned out to be. Whatever the reasons may or
may not be, the fact remains that when the world turned to the WHO, it failed. No amount of
publicity stunts, like today's appearance by Lady Gaga, will change that.
WHO will have a special guest at today's #COVID19 press
conference: @ladygaga will be joining us to
announce the One World: #TogetherAtHome
virtual global special on 18 April 2020. 📺 at 15.30 GMT
-- World Health
Organization (WHO) (@WHO) April 6, 2020
Exactly where in the organization's structure the blame lies is impossible for an
outsider to say, but surely the buck must stop eventually with Dr Tedros. His messaging early
on in this crisis hugely downplayed the risks and has without question led to a situation that
at least had a chance of being avoided. When the dust has settled, and the virus is finally
brought under control, a serious question will have to be asked: who can trust the WHO?
Looks like propaganda. As bars are now closed it might well be a fake surge, just a shift in consumption pattern. The surge of domestic violence is
probably very real... But it happens in all countries under quarantine, and the USA in no exception.
Nielsen
data , for the week ending March 14, US liquor and grocery stores saw sales of wine up
27.6%, spirits by 26.4% and beer, cider and malt beverages by 14% compared to the same time
last year. Some of this is a result of people buying in bulk for the purpose of stockpiling,
with sales of 3-liter boxes of wine rising by 53% and purchases of 24-packs of beer increasing
by 24%. Online alcohol sales for that week were similarly up 42% compared to the same time last
year.
Health
researchers caution that the increase in alcohol consumption will have both short- and
long-term consequences on personal health and safety. Because alcohol abuse suppresses the
body's immune system, excessive drinking could increase the likelihood of contracting
COVID-19.
Long-term effects of binge drinking during the coronavirus crisis may include people
normalizing patterns of such behavior, which increases the probability of alcohol dependency
disorders in the future.
Amid the lockdown and higher rates of alcohol abuse, safety risks have also gone up. In San
Antonio, Texas,
domestic violence calls have surged 21% amid the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders.
"... This article is from a Chinese state media outlet repeating some questions regarding the origin of the Coronavirus. The questions are serious ones which can easily topple entire official US narratives on the matter and beyond. ..."
"... If the illness has originated from the US military facility as it has been concluded by some, and the US has covered it up and blamed the illness on China, the US didn't only exposed its own citizens to the virus, but it knowingly caused deaths and sufferings among its own people. It erroneously blamed China for not acting fast enough against the situation, while adding the coronavirus deaths to the US annual flu deaths -- which is always high due to its dysfunctional healthcare system. ..."
"... When a crisis situation is identified in mobilizing the population, one common technique to contain dissenting voices is a use of false equivalency. For example, in discussing the US imperial war against Syria, one might have said that Russia was bombing just like the US. ..."
Lastly, as I describe the historical trajectory of the US empire, one can not not examine
the nature of the current coronavirus situation. Although the event is still very much
developing some of us have already raised many questions.
This article is from a Chinese state media outlet repeating some questions regarding the
origin of the Coronavirus. The questions are serious ones which can easily topple entire
official US narratives on the matter and beyond.
If the illness has originated from the US military facility as it has been concluded by
some, and the US has covered it up and blamed the illness on China, the US didn't only exposed
its own citizens to the virus, but it knowingly caused deaths and sufferings among its own
people. It erroneously blamed China for not acting fast enough against the situation, while
adding the coronavirus deaths to the US annual flu deaths -- which is always high due to its
dysfunctional healthcare system.
According to the allegations, some elected officials might have even profited from this
murderous situation.
Subsequently, it stands to reason to question what has motivated the US to act in such a
drastic manner against the virus after knowingly tolerating the deaths being caused by the
virus for a few months.
Some points to keep in mind are:
A social crisis exacerbates structural violence against
already oppressed population leading to augmentation of ruling class interests. A crisis allows
bailout measures for those who are already being served by the system generously. A crisis
allows codification of draconian policies to further restrict already oppressed population. A
crisis justifies the existence of the authoritarian system. All of the above are various
aspects of capitalist hierarchy to serve itself by harming its own people.
When a crisis situation is identified in mobilizing the population, one common technique
to contain dissenting voices is a use of false equivalency. For example, in discussing the US
imperial war against Syria, one might have said that Russia was bombing just like the
US.
However, needless to say, Russia was invited by Syrian government to fight West backed
al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist groups in Syria. The liberation efforts by the Syrian Arab Army
and its allies brought back Syrian people to their own communities which were devastated by the
US proxy war against Syria.
Instances of falsely equating actions by the Chinese government and that of the US
government must be pointed out in discussing the virus situation. Chinese government detecting
a disease epidemic so that it can allocate sufficient medical care to its people is very
different from the US totally ignoring medical threats regularly and suddenly decides to "care"
in aimlessly draconian ways.
This Facebook post by Phil Greaves concisely lays out the differences. The post refers to
Britain but it also applies to the US.
China: Lockdowns in only the most affected areas.
Quarantine and hospital treatment for ALL suspected cases. Masks provided for everyone, no
"two-meter" bullshit. 200 million CPC members & volunteers mobilised to serve the elderly
& vulnerable with food and medicine. ALL wages paid in full for anyone off work due to the
virus, for the entire duration.
95% production regained after 4 weeks.
Britain:
Nationwide house-arrest. Shuts down nearly the entire economy, sacks millions of
workers, does not guarantee pay for even half of them. Gives the banks hundreds of billions.
Massively reduces healthcare capacity. Allows supermarket chains to exploit panic buyers.
Economic depression inevitable.
It is also very different for the Chinese government to regulate circulation of false
information in order to implement its policies effectively from the US censoring legitimate
questions about its ineffective policies and its active policies to harm its own people and
"others".
A memo from Peter Navarro is the most direct warning known to have circulated at a key moment among top administration officials.
A top White House adviser starkly warned Trump administration officials in late January that the coronavirus crisis could cost
the United States trillions of dollars and put millions of Americans at risk of illness or death.
The warning, written in a memo by Peter Navarro, President Trump's trade adviser, is the highest-level alert known to have circulated
inside the West Wing as the administration was taking its first substantive steps to confront a crisis that had already consumed
China's leaders and would go on to upend life in Europe and the United States.
"The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus
outbreak on U.S. soil," Mr. Navarro's memo said. "This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown
pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans."
Dated Jan. 29, it came during a period when Mr. Trump was playing down the risks to the United States, and he would later go on
to say that no one could have predicted such a devastating outcome.
Mr. Navarro said in the memo that the administration faced a choice about how aggressive to be in containing an outbreak, saying
the human and economic costs would be relatively low if it turned out to be a problem along the lines of a seasonal flu.
But he went on to emphasize that the "risk of a worst-case pandemic scenario should not be overlooked" given the information coming
from China.
In one worst-case scenario cited in the memo, more than a half-million Americans could die.
A second memo that Mr. Navarro wrote, dated Feb. 23, warned of an "increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that
could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1.2 million souls."
At that time, Mr. Trump was still downplaying the threat of the virus. The administration was considering asking Congress for
more money to address the situation, and the second memo, which circulated around the West Wing and was obtained by The Times, urged
an immediate supplemental spending appropriation from Congress of at least $3 billion.
"This is NOT a time for penny-pinching or horse trading on the Hill," Mr. Navarro wrote in the second memo, which was unsigned
but which officials attributed to him. It was unclear whether Mr. Trump saw the second memo, whose contents were first reported by
Axios.
The second memo seemed aimed at members of the White House Task Force established by Mr. Trump to manage the crisis, and reflected
deep divisions within the administration about how to proceed and persistent feuding between Mr. Navarro and many other top officials
about his role and his views.
"Any member of the Task Force who wants to be cautious about appropriating funds for a crisis that could inflict trillions of
dollars in economic damage and take millions of lives has come to the wrong administration," the memo said.
Among other things, the memo called for an increase funding for the government to purchase personal protective equipment for health
care workers, estimating they would need "at least a billion face masks" over a four-to-six-month period.
The administration ended up asking for $2.5 billion. Congress then approved $8 billion.
Mr. Navarro is now the administration's point person for supply chain issues for medical and other equipment needed to deal with
the virus.
The January memo written by Mr. Navarro was dated the same day that Mr. Trump named the task force to deal with the threat, and
as the administration was weighing whether to bar some travelers from China, an option being pushed by Mr. Navarro.
Mr. Trump would approve the
limits on travel from China
the next day, though it would be weeks before he began taking more aggressive steps to head off spread of the virus.
Questions about Mr. Trump's handling of the crisis, especially in its early days when he suggested it was being used by Democrats
to undercut his re-election prospects, are likely to define his presidency. Mr. Navarro's memo is evidence that some in the upper
ranks of the administration had at least considered the possibility of the outbreak turning into something far more serious than
Mr. Trump was acknowledging publicly at the time.
Neither Mr. Navarro nor spokespeople for the White House responded to requests for comment.
The memo, which was reviewed by The New York Times, was sent from Mr. Navarro to the National Security Council and then distributed
to several officials across the administration, people familiar with the events said. It reached a number of top officials as well
as aides to Mick Mulvaney, then the acting chief of staff, they said, but it was unclear whether Mr. Trump saw it.
Mr. Navarro is a well-established China hawk who has long been mistrustful of the country's government and trade practices. Both
Mr. Navarro and Matthew Pottinger, the chief deputy at the National Security Council, were among the few officials urging colleagues
in January to take a harder line in relation to the growing threat of the coronavirus.
But their warnings were seen by other officials as primarily reflecting their concerns about China's behavior -- and their concerns
look more prescient in hindsight than they actually were, other officials argue.
With the subject line "Impose Travel Ban on China?" Mr. Navarro opened the memo by writing, "If the probability of a pandemic
is greater than roughly 1%, a game-theoretic analysis of the coronavirus indicates the clear dominant strategy is an immediate travel
ban on China."
Mr. Navarro concluded at one point: "Regardless of whether the coronavirus proves to be a pandemic-level outbreak, there are certain
costs associated with engaging in policies to contain and mitigate the spread of the disease. The most readily available option to
contain the spread of the outbreak is to issue a travel ban to and from the source of the outbreak, namely, mainland China."
He suggested that under an "aggressive" containment scenario, a travel ban may need to last as long as 12 months for proper containment,
a duration of time that at that point some White House aides saw as unsustainable.
The travel limits subsequently imposed by Mr. Trump did not entirely ban travel from China, and many travelers from the country
continued to stream into the United States.
Mr. Navarro was at odds with medical experts like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who had argued that such travel bans only delay the eventual
spread.
Mr. Navarro alluded to that debate on Saturday during a separate argument with Dr. Fauci in the Situation Room about whether the
anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine was effective in treating or preventing the virus, according to two people familiar with
the events.
In the memo, Mr. Navarro cautioned that it was "unlikely the introduction of the coronavirus into the U.S. population in significant
numbers will mimic a 'seasonal flu' event with relatively low contagion and mortality rates."
He noted the history of pandemic flus and suggested the chances were elevated for one after the new pathogen had developed in
China.
"This historical precedent alone should be sufficient to prove the need to take aggressive action to contain the outbreak," he
wrote, going on to say the early estimates of how easily the virus was spreading supported the possibility that the risks were even
greater than the history of flu pandemics suggested.
The C.D.C. has
recommended that all Americans wear cloth masks if they go out in public. This is a shift in federal guidance reflecting
new concerns that the coronavirus is being spread by infected people who have no symptoms . Until now, the C.D.C., like the
W.H.O., has advised that ordinary people don't need to wear masks unless they are sick and coughing. Part of the reason was to
preserve medical-grade masks for health care workers who desperately need them at a time when they are in continuously short supply.
Masks don't replace hand washing and social distancing.
Cuomo
announced Monday that nearly 600 people in New York died from the virus since Sunday
morning, raising the state's total coronavirus fatalities to 4,758. The state had 130,689
confirmed cases, he said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that rural Americans "tend to have
higher rates of cigarette smoking, high blood pressure, and obesity. They also have higher
rates of poverty, less access to healthcare, and are less likely to have health insurance."
"These are vulnerable populations with poor access to insurance who may have to travel far
to get to a hospital," Kolak said. "It's a bit of a perfect storm with worse access to health
care, less health insurance overall, and slow policies to take COVID-19 seriously."
"... Cramped quarters on drilling rigs leave no room for distancing ..."
"... That's led to worries about the safety of the sites, the biggest of which resemble mini-cities with as many as 200 workers, and the nation's dependence on their output. Oil wells in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico supply about 2 million barrels of crude a day, or 15% of U.S. production. ..."
Cramped quarters on drilling rigs leave no room for distancing
Inside more than a thousand offshore drilling rigs and oil production platforms that dot
the Gulf of Mexico, workers navigate narrow corridors, sleep in shared rooms and dine in
crowded mess halls.
It's an environment designed for efficiency -- not for keeping a lethal coronavirus at
bay.
That's led to worries about the safety of the sites, the biggest of which resemble
mini-cities with as many as 200 workers, and the nation's dependence on their output. Oil wells
in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico supply about 2 million barrels of
crude a day, or 15% of U.S. production.
At least 14,000 people have died and 250,000 have already been hospitalized during the
2019-2020 flu season, according to estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. More than 26 million Americans have fallen ill with flu-like symptoms.
"There is a deadly respiratory virus that is circulating throughout the United States, and
it is at its peak. It is not novel coronavirus," said Dr. Pritish Tosh, an infectious disease
specialist with the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn.
This flu season has come in two waves and has been particularly hard on children, the
experts said.
The season started early, in October, with an unusual wave of influenza B virus.
Influenza B is less likely than other strains to mutate and become more virulent. That means
it poses a greater threat to young people than to older folks, who may have gained immunity
because they encountered the strain before.
The percentage of deaths attributed to flu and pneumonia currently is 6.8%, which is below
the epidemic threshold of 7.3% , according to the CDC.
African-Americans are suffering virus infections at disturbing
rates in some of the largest cities and states in the United States, emerging statistics
show.
In Louisiana, about 70 percent of
the people who have died are African-American, though only a third of the state's
population is black. In the county around Milwaukee, where 27 percent of residents are black,
nearly twice as many African-American residents tested positive for the virus as white people.
And in Chicago, where African-American residents make up a little less than a third of the
population, more than half of those found to have the virus are black, and African-Americans
make up 72 percent of those who have died of the virus.
Data on the race of those sickened by the virus has only been made public in a handful of
places and is too limited to make sweeping conclusions. But racial disparities in cases and
outcomes, researchers said, reflect what happens when a viral pandemic is layered on top of
entrenched inequalities.
"... The US for decades has as a matter of policy tried to reduce the number of hospital beds, which among other things has led to the shuttering of hospitals, particularly in rural areas. Hero of the day, New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo pursued this agenda with vigor, as did his predecessor George Pataki. ..."
"... In a functional system, much of the preparation and messaging would have been undertaken by the CDC. In this case, it chose not to simply adopt the World Health Organization's COVID-19 test kits -- stockpiling them in the millions in the months we had between the first arrival of the coronavirus in China and its widespread appearance here -- but to try to develop its own test. Why? It isn't clear. But they bungled that project, too, failing to produce a reliable test and delaying the start of any comprehensive testing program by a few critical weeks. ..."
"... Thomas Hobbes argued that life apart from society would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Outside poor countries and communities, advances in science and industrialization have largely proven him right. ..."
"... Come quietly to The Gap ..."
"... "notions about parenting changed very drastically in the 80's" ..."
"... "the too-common belief that it is possible to run an operation, any operation, by numbers, appears to be a root cause." ..."
"... A sound banker, alas! is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him. ..."
"... it didn't matter ..."
"... our identities as academics are unavoidably embedded in a form of neoliberal hyperglobalisation. We rely on unrestricted flows of (wealthy) bodies across borders. ..."
"... Variable coronavirus outcomes by nation could suggest a combination of elite incompetence, poor individual judgment, a lack of appreciation of risk in all its Rumsfeldian forms, corruption, a desire by oligarchs for autocratic control and being insulated and divorced from actual operations; or underlying cultural and economic factors. ..."
"... My own view is that we can trace the root cause of policy failure back to the dominant values of leadership and the values of the society/culture which spawned them regarding the relative importance of money in determining policy choices regarding public health and safety. ..."
Leaders in the public and private sector in advanced economies, typically highly
credentialed, have with very few exceptions shown abject incompetence in dealing with
coronavirus as a pathogen and as a wrecker of economies. The US and UK have made particularly
sorry showings, but they are not alone.
It's become fashionable to blame the failure to have enough medical stockpiles and hospital
beds and engage in aggressive enough testing and containment measures on capitalism. But as I
will describe shortly, even though I am no fan of Anglosphere capitalism, I believe this focus
misses the deeper roots of these failures.
Even though there are plenty of examples of capitalism gone toxic, such as hospitals and Big
Pharma sticking doggedly to their price gouging ways or rampant production disruptions due to
overly tightly-tuned supply chains, that isn't an adequate explanation. Government dereliction
of duty also abound. In 2006, California's Governor Arnold Schwarznegger reacted to the avian
flu by creating MASH on steroids.
From the LA Times :
They were ready to roll whenever disaster struck California: three 200-bed mobile
hospitals that could be deployed to the scene of a crisis on flatbed trucks and provide
advanced medical care to the injured and sick within 72 hours.
Each hospital would be the size of a football field, with a surgery ward, intensive care
unit and X-ray equipment. Medical response teams would also have access to a massive
stockpile of emergency supplies: 50 million N95 respirators, 2,400 portable ventilators and
kits to set up 21,000 additional patient beds wherever they were needed
"In light of the pandemic flu risk, it is absolutely a critical investment," he [Governor
Schwarznegger] told a news conference. "I'm not willing to gamble with the people's
safety."
They were dismantled in 2011 by Governor Jerry Brown as part of post-crisis belt
tightening.
The US for decades has as a matter of policy tried to reduce the number of hospital beds,
which among other things has led to the shuttering of hospitals, particularly in rural areas.
Hero of the day, New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo pursued this agenda with vigor, as did his
predecessor George Pataki.
And even though Trump has made bad decision after bad decision, from eliminating the CDC's
pandemic unit to denying the severity of the crisis and refusing to use government powers to
turbo-charge state and local medical responses, people better qualified than he is have also
performed disastrously. America's failure to test early and enough can be laid squarely at the
feet of the CDC. As New
York Magazine pointed out on March 12:
In a functional system, much of the preparation and messaging would have been
undertaken by the CDC. In this case, it chose not to simply adopt the World Health
Organization's COVID-19 test kits -- stockpiling them in the millions in the months we had
between the first arrival of the coronavirus in China and its widespread appearance here --
but to try to develop its own test. Why? It isn't clear. But they bungled that project, too,
failing to produce a reliable test and delaying the start of any comprehensive testing
program by a few critical weeks.
The testing shortage is catastrophic: It means that no one knows how bad the outbreak
already is, and that we couldn't take effectively aggressive measures even we wanted to.
There are so few tests available, or so little capacity to run them, that they are being
rationed for only the most obvious candidates, which practically defeats the purpose. It is
not those who are very sick or who have traveled to existing hot spots abroad who are most
critical to identify, but those less obvious, gray-area cases -- people who may be carrying
the disease around without much reason to expect they're infecting others Even those who are
getting tested have to wait at least several days for results; in Senegal, where the per
capita income is less than $3,000, they are getting results in four hours. Yesterday,
apparently, the CDC conducted zero tests
[O]ur distressingly inept response, kept bringing to mind an essay by Umair Haque, first
published in 2018 and prompted primarily by the opioid crisis, about the U.S. as the world's
first rich failed state
And the Trump Administration has such difficulty shooting straight that it can't even manage
its priority of preserving the balance sheets of the well off. Its small business bailouts,
which are as much about saving those enterprises as preserving their employment,
are off to a shaky start . How many small and medium sized ventures can and will maintain
payrolls out of available cash when they aren't sure when and if Federal rescue money will hit
their bank accounts?
How did the US, and quite a few other advanced economies, get into such a sorry state that
we are lack the operational capacity to engage in effective emergency responses? Look at what
the US was able to do in the stone ages of the Great Depression.
As Marshall Auerback wrote of the New Deal programs :
The government hired about 60 per cent of the unemployed in public works and conservation
projects that planted a billion trees, saved the whooping crane, modernized rural America,
and built such diverse projects as the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, the Montana state
capitol, much of the Chicago lakefront, New York's Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge
complex, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown. It
also built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800
bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields. And it employed 50,000 teachers,
rebuilt the country's entire rural school system, and hired 3,000 writers, musicians,
sculptors and painters, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.
What are the deeper causes of our contemporary generalized inability to respond to
large-scale threats? My top picks are a lack of respect for risk and the rise of symbol
manipulation as the dominant means of managing in the private sector and government.
Risk? What Risk?
Thomas Hobbes argued that life apart from society would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish
and short." Outside poor countries and communities, advances in science and industrialization
have largely proven him right.
It was not long ago, in historical terms, that even aristocrats would lose children to
accidents and disease. Only four of Winston Churchill's six offspring lived to be adults.
Comparatively few women now die in childbirth.
But it isn't just that better hygiene, antibiotics, and vaccines have helped reduce the
scourges of youth. They have also reduced the consequences of bad fortune. Fewer soldiers are
killed in wars. More are patched up, so fewer come back in coffins and more with prosthetics or
PTSD. And those prosthetics, which enable the injured to regain some of their former function,
also perversely shield ordinary citizens from the spectacle of lost limbs. 1
Similarly, when someone is hit by a car or has a heart attack, as traumatic as the spectacle
might be to onlookers, typically an ambulance arrives quickly and the victim is whisked away.
Onlookers can tell themselves he's in good hands and hope for the best.
With the decline in manufacturing, fewer people see or hear of industrial accidents, like
the time a salesman in a paper mill in which my father worked stuck his hand in a digester and
had his arm ripped off. And many of the victims of hazardous work environments suffer from
ongoing exposures, such as to toxic chemicals or repetitive stress injuries, so the danger
isn't evident until it is too late.
Most also are oddly disconnected from the risks they routinely take, like riding in a car (I
for one am pretty tense and vigilant when I drive on freeways, despite like to speed as much as
most Americans). Perhaps it is due in part to the illusion of being in control while
driving.
Similarly, until the coronavirus crisis, even with America's frayed social safety nets, most
people, particularly the comfortably middle class and affluent, took comfort in appearances of
normalcy and abundance. Stores are stocked with food. Unlike the oil crisis of the 1970,
there's no worry about getting petrol at the pump. Malls may be emptying out and urban retail
vacancies might be increasing, but that's supposedly due to the march of Amazon, and not
anything amiss with the economy. After all, unemployment is at record lows, right?
Those who do go to college in America get a plush experience. No thin mattresses or only
adequately kept-up dorms, as in my day. The notion that kids, even of a certain class, have to
rough it a bit, earn their way up and become established in their careers and financially,
seems to have eroded. Quite a few go from pampered internships to fast-track jobs. In the
remote era of my youth, even in the prestigious firms, new hires were subjected to at least a
couple of years of grunt work.
So the class of people with steady jobs (which these days are well-placed members of the
professional managerial class, certain trades and those who chose low-risk employment with
strong civil service protections) have also become somewhat to very removed from the risks
endured when most people were subsistence farmers or small town merchants who served them.
The coronavirus is spreading a dangerous strain of inequality. Better-off Americans are
still getting paid and are free to work from home, while the poor are either forced to risk
going out to work or lose their jobs.
Generally speaking, the people who are positioned to be least affected by coronavirus are
the most rattled. That is due to the gap between expectations and the new reality. Poor people
have Bad Shit Happen on a regular basis. Wealthy people expect to be able to insulate
themselves from most of it and then have it appear in predictable forms, like cheating spouses
and costly divorces, bad investments (still supposedly manageable if you are diversified!),
renegade children, and common ailments, like heart attacks and cancer, where the rich better
the odds by advantaged access to care.
The super rich are now bunkered, belatedly realizing they can't set up ICUs at home, and
hiring guards to protect themselves from marauding hordes, yet uncertain that their mercenaries
won't turn on them.
The bigger point is that we've had a Minksy-like process operating on a society-wide basis:
as daily risks have declined, most people have blinded themselves to what risk amounts to and
where it might surface in particularly nasty forms. And the more affluent and educated classes,
who disproportionately constitute our decision-makers, have generally been the most
removed.
The proximity to risk goes a long way to explaining who has responded better. As many have
pointed out, the countries that had meaningful experience with SARS 2 had a much
better idea of what they were up against with the coronavirus and took aggressive measures
faster.
But how do you explain South Korea, which had only three cases of SARS and no deaths? It
doesn't appear to have had enough experience with SARS to have learned from it.
A related factor may be that developing economies have fresh memories of what life was like
before they became affluent. I can't speak for South Korea, but when I worked with the
Japanese, people still remembered the "starving times" right after World War II. Japan was
still a poor country in the 1960s. 3 South Korea rose as an economic power after
Japan. The Asian Tigers were also knocked back on their heels with the 1997 emerging markets
crisis. And of course Seoul is in easy nuke range of North Korea. It's the only country I ever
visited, including Israel, where I went through a metal detector to enter and saw lots of
soldiers carrying machine guns in the airport. So they likely have a keen appreciation of how
bad bad can be.
The Rise and Rise of the Symbol Economy
Let me start with an observation by Peter Drucker that I read back in the 1980s, but will
then redefine his take on "symbol economy," because I believe the phenomenon has become much
more pervasive than he envisioned.
The most significant transformation for Drucker was the changed relationship between the
symbolic economy of capital movements, exchange rates, and credit flows, and the real economy
of the flow of goods and services:
in the world economy of today, the 'real economy' of goods and services and the 'symbol
economy' of money, credit, and capital are no longer bound tightly to each other; they are
indeed, moving further and further apart (1986: 783)
The rise of the financial sphere as the flywheel of the world economy, Drucker noted, is
both the most visible and the least understood change of modern capitalism.
What Drucker may not have sufficiently appreciated was money and capital flows are
speculative and became more so over time. In their study of 800 years of financial crises,
Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff found that high levels of international capital flows were
strongly correlated with more frequent and more severe financial crises. Claudio Borio and
Petit Disyatat of the Banks of International Settlements found that on the eve of the 2008
crisis, international capital flows were 61 times as large as trade flows, meaning they were
only trivially settling real economy transactions.
Now those factoids alone may seem to offer significant support to Drucker's thesis. But I
believe he conceived of it too narrowly. I believe that modeling techniques, above all,
spreadsheet-based models, have removed decision-makers from the reality of their decisions. If
they can make it work on paper, they believe it will work that way.
When I went to business school and started on Wall Street, financiers and business analysts
did their analysis by hand, copying information from documents and performing computations with
calculators. It was painful to generate financial forecasts, since one error meant that
everything to the right was incorrect and had to be redone.
The effect was that when managers investigated major capital investments and acquisitions,
they thought hard about the scenarios they wanted to consider since they could look at only a
few. And if a model turned out an unfavorable-looking result, that would be hard to rationalize
away, since a lot of energy had been devoted to setting it up.
By contrast, when PCs and Visicalc hit the scene, it suddenly became easy to run lots of
forecasts. No one had any big investment in any outcome. And spending so much time playing with
financial models would lead most participants to a decision to see the model as real, when it
was a menu, not a meal.
When reader speak with well-deserved contempt of MBA managers, the too-common belief that it
is possible to run an operation, any operation, by numbers, appears to be a root cause. For
over five years, we've been running articles from the Health Renewal Blog decrying the rise of
"generic managers" in hospital systems (who are typically also spectacularly overpaid) who
proceed to grossly mismanage their operations yet still rake in the big bucks.
The UK version of this pathology is more extreme, because it marries managerial
overconfidence with a predisposition among British elites to look at people who work hard as
"must not be sharp." But the broad outlines apply here. From Clive,
on a Brexit post, when Brexit was the poster child of UK elite incompetence :
What's struck me most about the UK government's approach to the practical day-to-day
aspects of Brexit is that it is exemplifying a typically British form of managerialism which
bedevilles both public sector and private sector organisations. It manifests itself in all
manner of guises but the main characteristic is that some "leader" issues impractical,
unworkable, unachievable or contradictory instructions (or a "strategy") to the lower ranks.
These lower ranks have been encouraged to adopt the demeanour of yes-men (or yes-women). So
you're not allowed to question the merits of the ask. Everyone keeps quiet and takes the
paycheck while waiting for the roof to fall in on them. It's not like you're on the
breadline, so getting another year or so in isn't a bad survival attitude. If you make a fuss
now, you'll likely be replaced by someone who, in the leadership's eyes is a lot more can-do
(but is in fact just either more naive or a better huckster).
Best illustrated perhaps by an example -- I was asked a day or two ago to resolve an issue
I'd reported using "imaginative" solutions. Now, I've got a a vivid imagination, but even
that would not be able to comply with two mutually contradictory aims at the same time
("don't incur any costs for doing some work" and "do the work" -- where because we've
outsourced the supply of the services in question, we now get real, unhideable invoices which
must be paid).
To the big cheeses, the problem is with the underlings not being sufficiently clever or
inventive. The real problem is the dynamic they've created and their inability to perceive
the changes (in the same way as swinging a wrecking ball is a "change") they've wrought on an
organisation.
May, Davies, Fox, the whole lousy lot of 'em are like the pilot in the Airplane movie --
they're pulling on the levers of power only to find they're not actually connected to
anything. Wait until they pull a little harder and the whole bloody thing comes off in their
hands.
Americans typically do this sort of thing with a better look: the expectations are usually
less obviously implausible, particularly if they might be presented to the wider world. One of
the cancers of our society is the belief that any problem can be solved with better PR, another
manifestation of symbol economy thinking.
I could elaborate further on how these attitudes have become common, such as the ability of
companies to hide bad operating results and them come clean every so often as if it were an
extraordinary event, short job tenures promoting "IBG/YBG" opportunism, and the use of lawyers
as liability shields (for the execs, not the company, natch).
But it's not hard to see how it was easy to rationalize away the risks of decisions like
globalization. Why say no to what amounted to a transfer from direct factory labor to managers
and execs? Offshoring and outsourcing were was sophisticated companies did. Wall Street liked
them. Them gave senior employees an excuse to fly abroad on the company dime. So what if the
economic case was marginal? So what if the downside could be really bad? What Keynes said about
banker herd mentality applies:
A sound banker, alas! is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he
is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no
one can really blame him.
It's not hard to see how a widespread societal disconnect of decision-makers from risk,
particularly health-related risks, compounded with management by numbers as opposed to kicking
the tires, would combine to produce lax attitude toward operations in general.
I believe a third likely factor is poor governance practices, and those have gotten
generally worse as organizations have grown in scale and scope. But there is more
country-specific nuance here, and I can discuss only a few well, so adding this to my theory
will have to hold for another day. But it isn't hard to think of some in America. For instance,
40 years ago, there were more midsized companies, with headquarters in secondary cities like
Dayton, Ohio. Executives living in and caring about their reputation in their communities
served as a check on behavior.
Before you depict me as exaggerating about the change in posture toward risks, I recall
reading policy articles in the 1960s where officials wrung their hands about US dependence on
strategic materials found only in unstable parts of Africa. That US would never have had China
make its soldiers' uniforms, boots, and serve as the source for 80+ of the active ingredients
in its drugs. And America was most decidedly capitalist in the 1960s. So we need to look at how
things have changed to explain changes in postures towards risk and notions of what competence
amounts to.
_____ 1 One of my early memories was seeing a one-legged man using a crutch, with the
trouser of his missing leg pinned up. I pointed to him and said something to my parents and was
firmly told never to do anything like that again.
3 Japan has had a pretty lame coronavirus response, but that is the result of
Japan's strong and idiosyncratic culture. While Japanese are capable of taking action
individually when they are isolated, in group settings, no one wants to act or even worse take
responsibility unless their is an accepted or established protocol.
Ian Walsh has a good take on it – he ascribes it to a new aristocracy, which has
all the vices of the old aristocracy.
Let's chalk this up to aristocratic elites. Aristocrats, unlike nobles, are decadent,
but don't stop with that word; understand what it means.
Elites who are not aligned with the actual productive activities of society and are
engaged primarily in activities which are contrary to production, are decadent. This was
true in Ancien Regime France (and deliberately fostered by Louis XIV as a way of
emasculating the nobility). It is true today of most Western elites; they concentrate on
financial numbers, and not on actual production. Even those who are somewhat competent tend
not to be truly productive: see the Waltons, who made their money as
distributers–merchants.
The techies have mostly outsourced production; they don't make things, they design them.
That didn't work out for England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and it hasn't
worked well for the US, though thanks to Covid-19 and US fears surrounding China, the US
may re-shore their production capacity before it is too late.
I think there is also a lot to be said for historical (and current) memories of crisis.
Both South Korea and Taiwan are countries on a near permanent war footage – both have
genuine reasons to fear an external attack (this is particularly visible in South Korea
– bomb shelters and warnings everywhere). They are simply at a higher level of alert
than most countries and take civil defence very seriously. Much the same applies to
Vietnam.
I've noticed here that so far as I can see, the response in Ireland has been significantly
better than the UK, despite the NHS being a far better system than the rickety, unequal, and
notoriously bureaucratic Irish system. I've noticed that a lot of the official response has
revived old protocols for TB and Polio – both diseases that ravaged Ireland into living
memory – most old doctors of my acquaintance here will tell you horror stories and I
grew up knowing people crippled from polio. While in the UK its fair to say I think that such
horrors have slipped out of bureaucratic memory. People talk about the War, but in reality
they have no real memory of the horrors of seeing neighbours die. So I think there is a lot
to be said for simple institutional memory and practice allowing some countries to respond
that big quicker. And with this virus even just 2-3 weeks extra preparation could have made
all the difference to a country or region.
And they don't have to live where they are from anymore. When Tony Blair wants positive
attention, he jets off to the US or Israel. Claire McCaskill lost a statewide race when the
same electorate passed a minimum wage increase and legalized at least medical Marijuana. She
now opines on Comcast PR about elections.
That does make a difference. After the Celtic Tiger crash in Ireland, the PM (Bertie
Ahern) who was largely responsible ended up banned from his regular pub where he was well
known to have a pint every evening after his day job. The owner explained that if he didn't
bar him, he'd lose the rest of his customers.
Mind you, like all the others he still makes a living on the public speaking circuit and
his chiklit writer daughter got a mysteriously large book deal from a Murdoch owned
publisher..
The Irish case is interesting, because the performance of the state in recent times has
been anything but competent. The bank bailout and the cervical cancer cases allowed by the
botched testing program are examples. I remember a Morgan Kelly lecture where he said, "We
don't do competence in Ireland. You start holding people responsible and you might get
some of the 'wrong' people."
The Irish leadership stratum so far looks as if it has done a better job than even the US.
Your point about the living memory TB and Polio -- in the 50s, my aunt and uncle, visiting
from the US, were advised by the priest not to go to mass because of the danger of picking up
TB -- rings true. I wonder if the recent fails by the state, that seem to have left the
public abidingly angry (the bailout) and aghast (authorities letting women die of cervical
cancer ) have shown elites that they have no political room to fail this time, and that they
must show tangible success.
Plutonium Kun: Thanks for re-posting the Ian Welsh essay, which was posted at Naked
Capitalism a couple days ago–and which has been on my mind since I read it then. I
recall that when I was living on the North Shore, the belt of rich suburbs north of Chicago,
on a whimsy for a few years, the prevailing stance in dealing with others was a kind of
genial incompetence. Shortly after, I returned to Chicago for some grit and consequences.
I woke up this morning thinking of this example of the decadence (a term Welsh describes):
The serious person Hillary Clinton opining on something or other. Where is serious person,
and vision of competence, Hillary Clinton these days? Why isn't she advocating for the little
people? Or at least for her slobbering fan club? Or hoping for another soft-ball interview
that doesn't ask what it was like to be Bill's bag-man all those years as they raked in the
moolah?
The incompetence is a symptom of a morally-degenerate managerial class Infected with bad
ideas and having no sense of responsibility to anyone other than themselves. They plan out
quarter by quarter, loot their companies instead of investing in them, and lie habitually.
This is CORRUPTION. Consider that the ex-CEO of GE, with all his hundreds of millions
garnered by cheating GE employees and offshoring their jobs, looting company funds to enrich
himself and his co-conspirators, was also a tax cheat, buying art for his NY city palace but
claiming it was for his abode in NH and evading NY sales tax. Committing fraud to evade his
fair share. A better model for what ails US America cannot be found than this scum.
And note that Boeing moved its headquarters to Chicago "to be more like GE". Well they've
destroyed the company to be more like the looters and liars and cheats. Nice work if you can
get it.
This post is not just about the private sector. State and local governments are primarily
responsible for public health.
Your theory does not explain Jerry Brown killing the Schwarznegger emergency response
apparatus.
Nor is it adequate to respond to the general idea that "never attribute to malice that
which can be explained by incompetence". Even though it is obvious that America has a lot of
corruption, you omit the notion that a lot of stupid will also explain much of what we are
seeing now.
Thank for your article – due to that we humans tend to compare us to each other, we
are prone to error. Why shouldn't we do, what the others do?
And that's were the incompetence gets it's grip on. Here in Germany we just avoided the
closure of smaller hospitals, because they are not efficient enough – now we are the
lucky ones with the higher number of beds and ICU's and ecma and so on.
That's not only luck, but the preachers of the neoliberal agenda have a hardship nowadays
– and 'we, the people' have a minimum of two years to redesign our societies.
But remember, too, that Brown showed in his first term, in the 70s, that he was a textbook
case of being one of Stoller's progressive post-Watergate Democrats that set aside New Deal
programs and regulation. I remember his deregulation of intrastate trucking from that time,
which the highly unionized truckers opposed. Come quietly to The Gap
I think one of the problems is that financialization and securitization of everything has
effectively separated the managerial class in both private and public sector from knowledge
and experience of actual logistics and execution.Transferring securities with the push of a
button is not the same as getting an industrial plant or phone center built, trained, and
running efficiently. Companies and organizations with a history of doing this well can
completely undo that capability in only a couple of years (e.g. CDC, FEMA, numerous companies
taken over by PE). While my examples below are US-based, I think a lot of the same thought
processes have been going on in much of the OECD (e.g. Brexit debacle).
Once everything is measured in dollars with a maximum of a 1 to 5 years window, then it
becomes really easy to just focus on the little ball needed to become really "efficient"
without thinking about the bigger societal picture. I think the generations that grew up in
WW I, 19189-19 Flu, Prohibition, Great Depression, WW II had a much bigger picture of life
and society. In some respects, things like Vietnam, were an over-reaction (like immune system
going haywire) but on the whole, there was a big focus for 50 years on the potential for
really big, bad things to happen. Once the Berlin Wall fell, much of that dissipated and so
the shocks that come are generally responded to with a combination of bewilderment, lack of
general interest unless it personally impacts you, or the immune system going wild (Iraq
invasion, torture).
He wants universal daily testing of all Americans to prove daily they can be out and
about. This is in a country that can't figure out how to have half the country vote without
standing in lines for hours or hasn't been able to figure out how to even get sick people
tested and waiting a week or more more for the test results to come back. Granted, the 15
minute tests mean that it might be possible to set up a lemonade stand at the entrance to
every subdivision or subway station for people to get their daily test. The logistical
undertaking to do this would be mammoth, although there are at least lots of unemployed
people who could get several months of training to learn how to do such a test.
Once everything is measured in dollars with a maximum of a 1 to 5 years window, then it
becomes really easy to just focus on the little ball needed to become really "efficient"
without thinking about the bigger societal picture. I think the generations that grew up in
WW I, 19189-19 Flu, Prohibition, Great Depression, WW II had a much bigger picture of life
and society. In some respects, things like Vietnam, were an over-reaction (like immune system
going haywire) but on the whole, there was a big focus for 50 years on the potential for
really big, bad things to happen. Once the Berlin Wall fell, much of that dissipated and so
the shocks that come are generally responded to with a combination of bewilderment, lack of
general interest unless it personally impacts you, or the immune system going wild (Iraq
invasion, torture).
I am a design engineer and I have found it is really difficult to get people to engage in
real discussions of potential risks and solutions. Generally the only thing that anybody
wants to know is "What will it cost to be prepared?" Almost nobody wants to talk about low
probability, high impact events because that generally would not show up in the 1-5 years
time limit people care about.
low probability – high impact events and human nature. We just went thru a
surprising 5.6 earthquake – I'm pretty sure we were ground zero because it not only
shook the house like a hurricane for 4 seconds, there was also the sound of a very loud
explosion. Sometimes earthquakes make booms like that. If it had lasted another 2 or 3
seconds the roof would have come down; the gas lines would have pulled apart; the plumbing
would have been disabled and etc. But we just went, Well that was interesting. Lucky there
was no damage. Probably not worth taking out earthquake insurance – it's so
expensive.
State and local government ARE responsible for public health. The local people running
those agencies do not control their budgets. With insufficient funds their experience and
qualifications are wasted by scrambling for stop-gap methods. The political leaders
(Governors, mostly.) are most to blame. So the next time folks are choosing at the ballot box
remember that public health needs vigoroous funding.
As for the incompetence of "managers" and the credentialed, it occurs everywhere in
organizations in America, and beyond. A paycheck is essential while "speaking up" is
dangerous. See: Captain Crozier. Most folks are neither secure enough financially or
academically to voice a contrasting observation.
Yves, this was an excellent post. Decidedly pointed. There are few who dare to take this
challenge. That is why NC is so important. Stay safe!
Are you sure you don't mean Dennis Koslowsky (spelled something like that) who was a CPA
from New Jersey and ran Tyco? At least he did some jail time. The smart ones figure out how
to cheat legally by hiring the well connected white shoe Ivy League lawyers. That is not to
say that GE was not mismanaged but it really was done in by the finance crisis because Jack
Welch bet the company on it which worked really well for a long time until it did not which
covered up the fact that manufacturing in the US is essentially impossible secondary to the
legal system and the health care system, or lack thereof.
If only it was as simple as saying that services operated by the state were fine, it's
private capital where the problem lies.
It's not. This is a societal and cultural problem.
There are employer "pushes" towards the deskilling and degrading of levels of operational
competence. One is employers ( both public sector and private sector) do not want to pay for
training and to retain a body of experienced employees because both of these cost money
up-front with a payoff (in the form of competent, knowledgeable staff) that comes only
slowly, later. And a churn of staff is seen as the sign, wrongly, but this is what the MBAs
sell as snake oil, of a dynamic, healthy organisation which is bringing in (through a process
which never seems to be adequately explained) new talent. Plus, of course, most obviously,
younger and newer employees are cheaper so your average headcount cost is lower which is
usually a management metric -- often one which is incentive-ised through reward.
There are also employee "pulls" -- and again, these are not just observed in the private
sector. You see them in medicine, academia and even, most bizarrely, the arts. An example of
these employee-instigated causes of a reduction in capability is that it becomes
in-cultural-ated that if you spend too long in the same place, you're only doing so out of
necessity because you're so useless, no-one else will employ you. So even if don't really
want to move onto a different organisation or a different field of work outside your
skillset, you feel you have to, in order to avoid looking "stale", "resistant to change",
"stuck in your comfort zone" or any other of the myriad of thought-crimes which you don't
want, in today's job market, to be seen to having evidence of committing. And also, as
collective union bargaining has gone the way of the dinosaur, more often than not, if you
want a raise you have to threaten to quit to get one. But again, more often than not, your
current employer will call your bluff and let you leave. So you have to have another job
lined up to to go to, if you're not to fall into a trap of flouncing off in a huff but having
no other work to walk straight into. While your current employer might not, if they were
honest, want to lose you, the dynamics of the workplace being what they are, neither side can
then climb down from the ultimatums they've just served.
Yes, there are some notable poster-children of how private enterprise has committed
suicide through the wanton bloodletting of its skilled employees (Boeing being a recent
case-in-point). But even if you cast your gaze in the direction of public employers, this
same phenomena can be found in universities, colleges and K-12 schools (where faculties are
no longer bolstered by a strong bench of tenured staff, contract and non-tenured
hire-and-fire disposable staff are now the norm, I won't even go there on the effect of
charter schools) healthcare (even in the UK's entirely public sector NHS, there is huge
reliance on contract and agency staff which the COVID-19 crisis has highlighted and the
government is trying, belatedly and without any clear indication it can do so in the short
term
to redress this and avoid being price-gouged). Or federal and state
regulators which now simply do not understand the businesses they are supposed to be
regulating and have to buy-in external "expertise" (and merely exacerbate the revolving
door problem).
In summary, I wish it were so simple to merely say "private sector bad, government good".
But the rot has set in from top to bottom across all aspects of how we manage our shared
organisational maturity (or, should I say, now, fix our shared organisational immaturity) and
whether or not it started in the private sector, it has well and truly spread to infect the
public sector, too. This was the unmistakable point of the post, so it bears re-reading it
again with a particular emphasis on understanding why this is the case.
devolution by automation. the dystopia we didn't see coming. can't help believing that
automation itself – even though it has often been, or seemed to be, beneficial –
hasn't undermined and/or destroyed what should be a collective human intelligence and
contagious creativity that is the real thing that makes us thrive. But it takes a long steady
progression and we're all too impatient.
In my experience working as a lawyer in government service for 34 years, I saw this
obsession with "new blood" and "innovation" flooding the system with lawyers -- and judges --
who were breezily ignorant of the law, yet supremely confident in their own cleverness.
University faculties dominated by TA's and adjuncts; charter schools taught by
6-week-wonder TFA's; warships piloted by teenagers; Presidents with no experience in
government The list goes on and on.
I blame the instant and consequence-free ego gratification of television-watching for this
phenomenon.
100% on the employer pushes. I've seen this plenty in my 25 years of working in
engineering and manufacturing businesses. And no matter how many "systems" and "quality
functions" they put in place, experience matters. In has happened several times that even
with great and detailed documentation, when a particular machinist retires, a product line
starts having quality issues. Several times we've had layoffs for some reason or another and
they have to bring particular individuals back because there was some function they did that
no one else is qualified or able to do. Also, because we run lean, cross training is
difficult no one has the extra time.
It is disappointing to see these early comments ignore the framing of the post and go for
simplistic takes.
I said at the top that this post was about advanced economies that had poor coronavirus
responses, not just the US. That includes Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, all of which
have much higher fatalities per capita than the US. None of those countries have high rates
of infant mortality.
That's a bit optimistic.You could argue Belgium and the
Netherlands have already plateaued in terms of new cases and deaths. For France the
numbers are not as clear thanks to a one-day spike in reported nursing home cases. But
the US
has shown clear exponential growth in both new cases and deaths thru today. I don't think the
data is in.
For the last week the US has reported 20-30k new cases a day which means the deaths won't
hit for another 1-2 weeks. The number of tests is comparable to the other countries you
listed, so it isn't a matter of overdiagnosis. The East Coast is the only region in the US
doing meaningful testing.
It's not farfetched to think the US will experience a uniquely bad result in terms of
health care and economic outcomes because of its uniquely bad health care system and elite
indifference. Never attribute to malice or indifference that which can be adequately
explained by indifference. Malice is too difficult to prove, and when it comes to enriching
themselves, elites are demonstrably competent. What they are, is indifferent. They simply
don't care about long term outcomes or their population. For them, everything is consequence
free. Coronavirus is just another example in the litany.
2 models dominate the informed universal health care coverage debate: 1) a purely public
(state) model, as in the UK and Italy, in which financing for health care costs is located in
the federal budget where it is allocated from a stream of tax revenues and financing sources;
and 2) a highly regulated non-profit (non-state) model, as in most of Scandinavia and central
Europe, in which financing is located in a pool of premiums and when needed, e.g. for the
very young, poor, elderly who cannot afford to pay premiums, state subsidies.
A variation on 2) is a hybrid of non-profits and private, profit-oriented insurers, as in
Germany and the Netherlands, in which the mix is critical and is subject to regulation.
Something like 90% non-profit, 10% private is IMHO OK though in Germany it might be more like
70/30.
The EU has been blamed for the devastation caused by Covid-19 in Italy. The argument goes
something like, the austerity imposed by the Germans forced Italy to reduce health care
capacities. The Frankfurter Allgemeine argues today that ECB imposed austerity is not to
blame. Rather the purely state model of financing for health care coverage is at fault. The
fact is that in the Italian model many stakeholders want a share of the stream of tax
revenues and financing sources from which funds for the provision of health care are also
drawn. The FAZ notes that Italian state retirement benefits have risen substantially in
recent years while funding for health care has been level.
The rise of the FIRE sectors as a percentage of GDP has been obvious. We are
over-financialized. All this has done is over lay a very expensive layer of debt and interest
payments on the real economy. This is the bubble the pandemic pricked.
Again, this post is not about the US. It is about trying to develop theories as to why
some countries responded reasonably well to the coronavirus crisis and others not.
Italy's banking sector, even with its dud loans not written down, is 1.5 trillion euros v.
a GDP of about 1.9 trillion euros, or 79% of GDP. Unlike the US, Italy does not have a
ginormous securities market nor a big asset management business, so its banking industry is
pretty much the only game in town except for government bond issuance. By contrast, in the
US, banks are a way smaller proportion of financial activity (they represent <15% of
non-farm private loans) but even banking assets alone are a higher % of GDP, 94%.
Your explanation does not fit key facts. Italy, one of the very worst hit countries, is
not heavily financialized. It is also dominated by medium and small businesses
Besides the new aristocracy aspects and a general lack of accountability, I do wonder
about rates of foreign elites being "educated" in the US. When my parents go to Boston, all
they do is complain about how nice it is, but they remember when the nice areas were where
regular people lived. Like US tourists think all Europeans take high speed trains to work,
how much of Euro attitudes by seeing the rise of enclaves in the US?
I'll use UVA and Charlottesville Virginia, but if you never go beyond Preston Ave
(gentrification may have shifted it) away from Grounds, why would a student see poor people
or any lower class employees beyond UVA employees who aren't making a living wage?
Charlottesville has the highest rate of wealth inequality in the state.
Thank you. You analyze it. For years I have called it "playing video games". Years ago I
knew a guy who said it did not matter of what but he had to be a manager.It was some sort of
prestige thing for him. Took him out of the common herd in his way of looking at things.
Yesterday, I read Paul Johnson's short biography of Winston Churchill. Churchill did not like
desk work according to Johnson and every new task he undertook, he went out and learned the
ins and outs of it. He was a relentless inspector and questioner. He taught himself how to
lay bricks. He learned by doing and led from knowledge. He made mistakes. He took
responsibility. Certainly he was not a typical person, but neither did he sit in an office
assuming he knew it all because the model said he did.
That is why Boris Johnson is no Churchill. Churchill was in a lots of was a dilletante,
but he was an informed dilletante. He had hunger to learn, maybe too much of it to be good at
anything.
Johnson's hunger is just to be in the news, to make a history. I do wonder whether he
still believes it worth it now, or in a short future as he's being sedated for intubation
(which would not surprise me).
I do not really have much to add to what you write Yves. The "we lost sense of danger" is
something I have thought of for a long time. IMO, every system that loses feedback will
crash, sooner or later. We have worked really hard to remove not just the feedback, but any
traces of the feedback.
Everyone who asks for *real* feedback is looked at as a weirdo. We need to know shit
happens, we need to have bad shit happen to us now and then (speaking as one who had some
really bad shit happen).
One place you can learn about society is how it treats its kids. Most of the kids today
are way more cosied that even I ever was, and it's getting worse. We want to remove any and
all dangers, and we go to anyone who promises us that, even if we really know it's not
possible.
But we have to be very careful there. I believe that claims "we need suffering" are
bulshit, because most of the time they want to say that suffering is good for us. It's not.
It _may_ be necessary to remind us that bad stuff can happen, the same way as pain does. But
it doesn't mean we'd use it to excuse suffering.
: Grand strategy, according to Boyd, is a quest to isolate your enemy's (a nation-state or
a global terrorist network) thinking processes from connections to the external/reference
environment. This process of isolation is essentially the imposition of insanity on a group.
To wit: any organism that operates without reference to external stimuli (the real world),
falls into a destructive cycle of false internal dialogues. These corrupt internal dialogues
eventually cause dissolution and defeat.
For the central attribute is symmetry: the balancing of incentives and disincentives,
people should also penalized if something for which they are responsible goes wrong and hurts
others: he or she who wants a share of the benefits needs to also share some of the
risks.
. . .
And in the absence of the filtering of skin in the game, the mechanisms of evolution fail:
if someone else dies in your stead, the built up of asymmetric risks and misfitness will
cause the system to eventually blow-up.
I read your use of feedback as >reference to external stimuli (the real world).
With Taleb, I'm reading disincentives as penalties, and that lack of penalty/punishment
warps the selection process of evolution. With respect to the post, that has created a lack
of respect for risk by those who make decisions.
It can be taken a step farther, that the selection process has created perverse
incentives. For example, the bailouts from 2008 made the FIRE sector qliphotically
antifragile. In that scenario, risk becomes rewarding.
I want to be careful here about using the word feedback, its ambiguities could be
confusing. Given that, I'm interested in knowing what you mean about ignoring the
disincentives skin-in-the-game creates. Could you please expand on that?
My problem with Taleb's skin in the game is that, as he well knows, it's hard to
distinguish luck (good or bad) and skill. How can we punish for luck though?
Think of a judge, who gets, through his skill, 99 out of 100 cases right. But the 100th
– which, by pure luck, could be really large case – he gets wrong.
Or, even simpler. Technically, if you do one decision a day, and have 99% success rate,
every three months you get somethign wrong (1-0.99^60 = 0.54) more likely than not. Should
you be punished for this? If we yes, then people will start takin decisions where alternate
history is hard to prove, i.e. you create a selection bias towards "do nothing". You can then
be punished for "doing nothing" but most of the time "do nothing" is a safe choice. (it's a
specific case of "go with the crowd")
Also, in decision making, context is extremely important (which is why courts go to super
lenghts to establish it in judical cases). Taleb should know it, and he should also know that
unless context is taken into account _in_full_ then the skin-in-the-game will not be seen as
fair. But the problem is, the context can never be fully established, and rarely w/o the
participation of the major decision maker. Who will have no incentive to participate. Which
will hamper learning from it.
Skin in the game makes sense when you can clearly separate luck and skill, and clearly
establish context. Even one of those is rare occasion, both is extremely so.
That said, you can often establish post fact when someone blew up (this is what the
various enuiries do). And then you'd treat accordingly. But that's not skin-in-the-game,
because again, the enquiry can establish that you acted in good faith, as most people would
act at the time – and so assign no blame. So you may "fail honourably".
Skin in the game does not let you fail honourably – because it's not skin in the
game anymore (because it can let you game the system again, via doing just enough to pass any
future enquiry as "more could have been done, but there's no clear knowing dereliction of
duty).
TLDR; skin-in-the-game is an attempt at simplictic solution to a complex problem. Taleb
should know better.
I'd like to expand on this a bit, as I think it's deeply related Yves' point on risk and
perceptions of risk. Far as I can tell, notions about parenting changed very drastically in
the 80's when
1) mainstream media companies discovered that endlessly replaying (and sometimes plain
inventing) lurid tales of horrible things happening to children was good for ratings and
required no real journalistic effort or talent.
And 2) I'm not exactly sure how to describe what I'm trying to say, but somehow both
responsibility for rare and terrible tragedies along with childrens' and young adults' agency
got transferred to their parents. As if everything that happened to a child or that a child
did resulted directly from the adequacy of parenting received.
So rather than cozied (which I think of has having all one's needs met and being protected
from awfulness – a good thing), I think many children are micromanaged, isolated from
authentic social interactions, and perhaps worst of all, taught that profound questions of
morality and existence are best ignored (lest they cause distress). This, along with
cultivating an intense desire for approval from authority, seems to have become the default
mode of preparing children for membership in the privileged classes.
Somehow though, at the same time, we were also taught that our life situation is also
wholly the result of our qualities as people. Wondering about a person's station in life? We
were taught not to ask "what happened" but "what kind of person are they?" Are they smart or
dumb, cultured or trashy, attractive or loathsome? Unnattractive and trashy but rich, they
must be really really smart.
I think this combination of dramatically limiting children's opportunities for growth in
competence, confidence, friendships, independence, morality, worldview, and all the other
things that go into discovering who you are and where you fit in the world, combined with
relentless meritocratic mythologizing have raised a couple generations now that are both
terrified of risks yet somehow often heedless of the consequences of their decisions. We're
terrified to speak up in a meeting, but if the result of that meeting harms a lot of people,
well, not our fault, just how the world is.
All that said, there aren't many power brokers I can think of under the age of 65, so
maybe all this generational analysis is beside the point. Have the powers that be always been
so old?
The powerbrokers are (often) elected by the people. Who may be looking for a father
figure, rather than anything else. Someone who would take the responsbilities for them,
because they are too hard to bear (you'd argue that some poor don't vote because they don't
feel the need to offload their responsibilities on others, but it could be a bit
overconvoluted – I think most humans want to dump responsiblity elsewhere).
How to truly accept responsibility for ourselves is IMO one of the most important things
we'd teach out kids, and that we're failing to do so (myself included). It's hard, and
paradoxicaly, our society made it harder.
I think all I described has been hard on parents too. IMO, parents are only the primary
teachers of children in the early years before peers and society take over. To the extent
neoliberalism has a pedagogical philosophy, it's that we can't control things we do have
power over, and can control things we don't have power over. Love and accept your kids, treat
them with respect, listen, help them when you can, and make sure to laugh together from time
to time, and you'll be a parent I'd envy the children of.
"notions about parenting changed very drastically in the 80's"
– Brings to mind a long ago article regarding children raised in hunter-gatherer units,
was it Papua New Guinea? who were from toddler stage spared much of the parental policing now
considered appropriate. Allowed to play with the machete and roam free around the open camp
fire they emerged with far less anxiety and perhaps a more practical and functional risk
assessment process than modern kids.
Playgrounds today are foam buffered and accident proofed as much as possible, football and
hockey helmets and padding are designed to absorb the shock of contact. Automobiles are seat
belted, air bagged, AI driver assisted with back up cameras. Airlines and aircraft
manufacturers rely on ever advancing auto pilot systems, a trade off that dispenses with
higher salaried experienced pilots for lower paid, less flight tested, dial tenders. "the too-common belief that it is possible to run an operation, any operation, by numbers,
appears to be a root cause." -YS
I believe quantum physics has largely, by numbers alone, drifted off into string theory and
multiple universes, all fascinating but of a highly extenuated and dubious relation to
anything real.
We have lost touch with consequences through the intermediary remediation of technology and
virtual modeling, great tools but they have unintended consequences on human behavior.
What's struck me most about the UK government's approach to the practical day-to-day
aspects of Brexit is that it is exemplifying a typically British form of managerialism
which bedevilles both public sector and private sector organisations.
The genetic map of England (outside the major cities) is essentially unchanged since the
Anglo-Saxon invasion.
As a decades-long American ex-pat living in London, it's taken me a long-time to realize,
that despite its modern trappings, England remains a feudal society. The way ordinary
individuals feel a lack of agency and still look up to the aristocracy and Oxbridge graduates
for guidance rather than trusting their own skeptical instincts and standing up for those
such beliefs is astonishing.
The fact that "forelock tugging" (an act of deference to a passing lord) remains a phrase
in common usage says it all.
I've felt that the only thing that enforced competence was the elites credible fear of
communism after world War II. They had to do some things for the public lest their wealth be
seized by the public. And propaganda was used right up to the fall of the USSR. I was fairly
shocked that we then looked to China for all our outsourcing needs. The myth was that
capitalism would make China an open democracy. Whoops! We enabled them to become a great
power without any credible plan to make them any kind of ally beyond some mutual threat of
dual self destruction if a trade war erupts. China is credibly working to become independent
of the US with heavy state planning while we bail out and reward failed financiers and
abandon all public planning to rent extractors. What I wonder is if people will start to look
to another way that will credibly threaten the standard elite disaster capitalism approach
that has been the norm for decades now.
A sound banker, alas! is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when
he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no
one can really blame him. Keynes via Yves
The problem is that the payment system, besides grubby coins and paper Central Bank notes
(e.g. Federal Reserve Notes), must work through private depository institutions or not at
all.
How then can we have a sound economy when it is held hostage by "sound" bankers?
And are not the banks a form of rentier – who rent the Nation its money supply?
Then where are the proposals of the MMT School to euthanize those rentiers?
Right out of college, I got a job at a commodities trading firm on a recommendation from
my "Political Economics" prof. This was just when the PC started getting incorporated into
technical analysis. I learned one of the programs pretty quickly and made a few fortuitous
currency trades for some weird clients. One of my thoughts was, "what if you could just make
this program run and trade automatically?" I think a lot of people had the same thought.
Where has this laziness taken us? (I left after 6 months go to law school but that's another
story).
I see this thought trap how to be more lazy as sort of an alienation that happens when you
don't have to think about what you're doing anymore but how to get around it, and that gets
passed on to others who see that you don't really have to "work" but that it's more about
being clever enough to come up with a solution that pushes the whole process of being
responsible, reflective and hard working on to something – or more likely someone
– else.
I sometimes think we live in a world like Jerry Lewis in the Disorderly Orderly where he's
the only sane one in the asylum, constantly tripped up by insanity from doing the job of an
orderly.
As of incompetence the Brits bought some corona-tests which were just crap.
Seven-And-A-Half million tests just for the bin.
That's were the incompetence has it's home nowadays: 10 Downing St. If everything goes
according to plan, the Brits will be redeemed from the incompetence reigning there in these
days.
I think you hit some critical points about "spreadsheet models" and their disconnection
with reality. Unfortunately, it's not just the business and finance world that's struggling
here. I've seen serious failures along these lines in science and engineering as well.
Unfortunately even experts in those fields (who should know better), routinely interpret
model results very uncritically.
Like with business and finance, I believe the availability of computers for calculation
and plotting has made scientists and engineers a lot more prone to misinterpreting their
results or the results of others. I believe visualization of data via plotting software may
actually facilitate uncritical interpretation of that data. ("Seeing is believing". ) Before
computers, technicians had to construct plots by hand, which often involved close study of
the raw data to determine the best design for conveying that data.
Then there's also the problem of romantization of computation. Particularly recently, a
great many people (technical or otherwise) erroneously assume that a more complicated model
or a model that relies on a broader range of data input will produce more accurate results.
In reality, models involve *abstraction* of real things into data, which often requires
making assumptions and/or discarding information. Proper interpretation of the model results
requires taking the process of abstraction into account, but this is rarely done properly and
is often impractical when complicated models or heterogeneous data sets are involved.
Yet another problem is that scientist and engineer livelihoods often depend more on
abstract deliverables like "peer reviewed" papers (academia), reports, presentations,
demonstrations, etc. The target audience is typically either a non-specialist manager or a
specialist who doesn't have enough time to give proper critical attention to the work anyway.
Hence, there is great incentive to produce "results" for their own sake and typically fewer
negative consequences to the person (in terms of career / money) for "getting it wrong" than
for "failing to deliver".
For me these things are fundamental to the reason that I'm not in a satisfying technical
career. I could have made a whole career out of doing sciency bullshit. I had a very
successful and well-connected Ph.D. advisor and could have been one of a lucky few to score a
"tenure-track" position without doing post-doc work. Unfortunately every time I raised
concerns about the integrity of the methods, he would blow me off with "we can talk
philosophy another time". All he wanted to talk about was how to present the "results" for
maximum "impact". Success in that and many other "scientific" fields depends on marketing
over integrity, and someone such as myself who values integrity will struggle to match
productive output (in terms of prestige and career development) with those who just want to
"win".
I should clarify that I don't believe all scientific fields (or sub-fields, really) are
incompetent as I describe above. I know many aren't. And it's a bit of a mystery to me why
some are very tight and others are full of nonsense. I don't have a good answer.
When the dust settles I do think the scientific establishment will have a lot of hard
questions to answer. The response from official science bodies and advisors has often been
terrible (not just with the face mask debacle). Among other issues, I think a fake form of
'scientism' has taken hold whereby models based on dubious assumptions are treated as a form
of reality.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb has a paper out on the topic of models. His maths is way beyond my
poor skills, but the general point he is making is that there are fundamental problems with
models that extrapolate from past events poorly – in particular the often inbuilt
assumption that the worst case scenario is the worst previous event. There is an entertaining
explainer from a maths teacher in this article .
This is not an easy issue. If one is to review the scientific literature, there was no
lack of risk warnings from specialized scientific sources on the possibilities of new
SARS-like outbreaks. I also believe there were scientists that from the very beginning
worried about this. Once we saw how the outburst in Hubei evolved and watched coming data,
surely many could go and check that we were confronting a new guy with a very different
epidemiological and clinical behaviour compared with SARS. I am not at the forefront in
science but i recall commenting this a couple of months ago here, so I can guess some many
others did exactly the same. I don't think we were short on scientists able to do a good job
on risk assessment. Particularly scientists working in public institutions. What's the
problem then? I believe part of it is that we collectively turn a deaf ear to them. I noticed
from the very beginning a focus on the clinical aspects of the disease but almost full
blindness regarding the analysis of the epidemics. I think it possible that authorities in
Western countries took HC experts for advice to their tables but these experts had no idea on
epidemiology so they could barely give counseling on the dynamics of the outbreak and
couldn't predict the speed of the spread. If someone tried to notice this would have been
received with disbelief as all here were in negationist mood. Still many are. Also, I believe
tha many thought this was a Chinese thing and felt comfort on the fact that Chinese
authorities seemed to control it. Control, hah!
There is a parallel in union organizing. Old school organizers do their workplace charts,
listing every employee, their relationships to one another, and tracking their support for
the union, by hand. Doing so helps makes the organizer retain this "map" in their head.
Younger organizers (myself included) tend to substitute databases and spreadsheets for the
old hand-drawn version. Not saying these are entirely ineffective–I can speak from
experience that they are not. Rather that the pervasiveness of the technological change is
across many boundaries. Woe to the revolutionaries who use a google sheet!
A lot of useful things have already been said, not least by Yves, and I won't repeat them.
But if you think about it there are a whole series of different issues here, and it's
important not to mix them up. For example: how the virus got started, why it spread so
quickly, whether it should have been anticipated, whether it was prepared for, what was
assumed about it, what was done, how quickly it was done, whether the consequences
(especially economic) were foreseen etc. etc. If you're going to argue incompetence (which I
think there has been) you also have to have some idea of what would have constituted a
competent reaction. Simply comparing countries doesn't really help, because there are too
many variables, especially political and administrative ones: the US and China would not and
could not have reacted in the same way, for example. So Italy, for example, has always had a
weak state (to the point where many Italians have seen the EU as their salvation) and this is
probably a more important factor than many more technical ones.
If there's a common thread that links all of these elements, it's dissociation from reality,
which is also the cause of the incompetence on display. Globalization, for example,
responsible for the speed of the spread and much of the economic dislocation, could only have
been forced on the world by people who did not know about, or were indifferent to, the likely
consequences. Some of this dissociation comes just from wealth and power of course (how to
travel the world and see nothing) but some of it comes from ideology. For globalists, and
neoliberals generally, the idea that the market will adjust to meet any short-term
requirements (like masks) is not a simplification in a textbook but a statement of belief.
So, even if globalists were aware that masks, testing kits and ventilators were no longer
made domestically, they would have replied that it didn't matter because the market
would provide.
A corollary of the above is that, if the market will always provide, then there's no real
reason to plan or provision anything, provided you can buy it fast enough when you have to.
Thus, all organizations should concentrate on being as small and "flexible" as possible,
doing only those things that are essential, and thus in turn the stifling obsession with
process and organizational change to the exclusion of actually, you know, doing things, which
is the characteristic of our MBA-ised culture.
And finally, popular and political culture is no longer about anything. Children's books and
TV are purged of anything that might seem threatening, and even adults demand a life free
from even the possibility that something might happen that upsets them. We no longer have the
vocabulary and cultural references to handle collective grief and trauma. Our elites, for the
first time in history, have no personal experience of genuine crisis or deprivation, and,
since the 90s politics and PR have become effectively indistinguishable. Politics has
degenerated into a classically Liberal struggle for power between groups, and political
society is divided into smaller and smaller warring tribes, defined by skin color or genital
arrangement, competing for the spoils.
There's a lot more that could be said but I won't presume any more on the patience of others.
Essentially, though we have been living in Dreamland, and, for all that our elites may think
they've been cleverly manipulating us, they have been faster asleep than anyone. Our elite
and popular cultures, in other words, have long been full of shit. And that mess you see is
what happens when it hits the fan.
Thats a hell of a meaty post, lots to chew on there and I'd agree with all of it. This
virus really has identified the weak spot of so many institutional systems. Its a genuine
game changer in so many ways. It will be fascinating (and not a little terrifying) to be able
to observe this in real time.
And finally, popular and political culture is no longer about anything. Children's books
and TV are purged of anything that might seem threatening, and even adults demand a life
free from even the possibility that something might happen that upsets them. We no longer
have the vocabulary and cultural references to handle collective grief and trauma. Our
elites, for the first time in history, have no personal experience of genuine crisis or
deprivation, and, since the 90s politics and PR have become effectively
indistinguishable.
I belong to some playwrights groups (one is a kind of old-fashioned list-serv). Many of
the writers are waiting for this to blow over, so that they can go back to submitting the
same old, same old. Then they may get a production in which the playwright's background is
made much of. The work of art matters much less than the world of P.R. that now surrounds the
typical rising U.S. writer, playwright, or painter.
What so many of these people don't get is that the New Rococo is over. As you say, "Our
elite and popular cultures, have long been full of shit." It has been fifty or more years of
Rococo paintings of doilies and flourishes and word-salad on stage.
I have these days been writing on a theory that is flying around like an evasive butterfly
on the conditions that may have been at the root of this and other recent outbreaks. I am
replying to your comment because this is the first question in your well organized set of
questions. I think this post touches many points that merit an in depth view and I like yours
as well as many other comments here that add more insights. It seems to me very few are
dedicating a single neurone to these arguments or at least I can only find them at NC.
As for the origin of Covid-19 I have read a solid narrative that says the origin could be
the vulnerabilities of industrial farming practices in China. The world's largest producer of
pork meat suffered in 2019 a devastating African swine fever outbreak that decimated hogs and
very much reduced the most important source for meat production in China. Whether this
resulted in a significant increase in wild animal farming and traffic is not clear because
China doesn't provide data on this. Anyway it could be the case that such hidden practices,
that I think were encouraged by Chinese leadership, could have increased by a lot during 2019
becoming an important business by itself and a relevant source for food in Chinese markets.
This could have increased by much the possibility of a zoonotic outbreak like this.
thanks david ("our elite and popular cultures have long been full of shit"). I'm thinking
we are far too aggressive as a species to stop to examine our equally aggressive fantasies.
What we do best when we are not daydreaming is fight, usually without thinking it through.
(So what happened to that instinct when it comes to fighting a virus? We couldn't switch back
from the daydream in time?) We are either in some bloody confrontation or we are indulging
ourselves in escape. We are totally bipolar. Economically as well. I recommend mandatory
therapy, starting with members of Congress. And it wouldn't hurt to use our instincts as
capitalists right now to do a government sponsored program to produce testing equipment that
is reliable and can be distributed to every household. (Why is Capitalism so AWOL? It doesn't
look like the fault of capitalism, it looks more like the absence of capitalism.) Likewise
for first treatment – if it's hydroxychloroquine every household should have a current
supply. We really shouldn't rely on our schmoozer-in-chief to jet off to India at the very
last moment and cut a deal for drugs – which promptly get confiscated by the Indian
Government. I mean duh.
I deal with a lot of computer modeling, but am also old enough to know how it used to be
done with design charts etc. before computeres were available. The design charts were
developed using human computers like shown in "Hidden Figures". So I spend time with the
junior engineers and scientists teaching them about how the entire infrastructure that they
use daily was designed before computers were even available.
The first thing I look at when somebody gives me calculations is how many significant
digits they are reporting the answer to. If there are more than 1 or 2 after the decimal
place, I go through the entire thing with a fine tooth comb, because that means they don't
understand significant digits and the inherent limitations of modeling and are just
regurgitating whatever the computer spits out at them. There are often significant
errors.
If somebody gives me something to look at that has a detailed computer analysis reported
to one or two decimal places and checked with a simple design chart to ensure order of
magnitude correctness, it is much easier to check and is invariably more than likely to be
usable.
Italy has an historical weakness with the national state structures, and if we look at
national stereotypes we are supposed to be naturally messy and disordered.This is reflected
in our own expression "fare le cose all'italiana" ( to do things the italian way ) , which is
used when somebody acts in a range of ways going from messy , to corrupt ,to shallow ,to
disorganised, to tricky.
As for our political and practical management of the Covid crisis, I see now rolling on the
usual controversies among the factions of decision-makers, such as the ping-pong of blame
between the Lombardy governor and the central government. The issue below ,in my view, is
that NHS was regionalized , hence making it difficult a real joint effort and a joint
national policy, and any decision on the ground was the result of a political wrestling
between them .If there is some link with the article issue is that I tend to think that all
the fundamental policies that have been implemented and publicized in the last decades in
Italy were based on the idea and ideology of the external constraint . If you go on saying
that whatever you are actually doing as a ruling class is because of some external
constraint, you are saying that in the end you are not really responsible of you do in front
of your citizens.This has little to do with the economical structure, or if it has something
to do I don't see it at first sight.
I stopped a long time ago to try to understand whether or not the death count criteria were
worldwide standardised, so I apologize if I'm saying nonsense with the following : when in my
country death toll was approx ten times less than now, I remember that Italian HPA came out
with the official digits that , with 1266 deaths of people with Covid, 2 deaths were with
Covid alone.
A simple and probably useless idea is the effect the jet airplane and it's compression of
time has had an effect on top dog thinking, creating an illusion of being able to simply
avoid risk by running from it. We might also have hit a fulcrum point with financioneers
running out of countries to easily exploit and razzle dazzle although traditional legacy
media may have hit a ditch in the road the googoylemonstyr is simply still just a glorified
electronic yellow pages and bookfaze is the excuse used to explain bad and failed
systemization in media operations There are many outlets for information gathering and most
people outside the oecd have been imf-ed in recent enough history to not be so easily
mesmerized by promises of some mythical sparkle pony happy ending
Finally perhaps also the eloquent ignorance of your correct observation of the notion one
can simply PR problems past the newshole and blurb past the facts. There are more lobbyists
and PR flax then have ever existed in most parts of the world.
Lastly, and perhaps it is just new to moi, but it would appear, despite the facts most
countries outside the big three have multi party parliamentary systems, most have adjusted to
a simple two party system with the hand offs then followed with a loud and proud but "loyal
approved" opposition
"In the remote era of my youth, even in the prestigious firms, new hires were subjected to
at least a couple of years of grunt work."
I think this is hugely important. I'm a big fan of Lave and Wenger's theory of legitimate
peripheral participation: basically that becoming an expert at something requires
apprenticing to a community of practice possessing large amounts expertise, and doing
increasingly consequential tasks until one gains expertise.
I think one major – perhaps the major – casualty of the symbolic economy was
that there isn't any simple way to quantify the years (and in some cases decades) of
apprenticeship it takes to become highly competent at a highly complex, highly consequential
set of responsibilities. Expertise is obviously highly valuable, but let some other suckers
or universities do the training, or substitute a credential, amiright ;)
I'm curious to hear from those of a certain age who are experts at something or other. My
guess is that you can all name a handful of people without whom you never would have attained
your current level of expertise, and that you cannot name a comparable number of young people
that you have similar opportunities to mentor.
In many ways I think this virus has been adept at exposing the weaknesses in nearly every
countries system. In China, the policy of governing by way of top down directives,
interpreted in varying ways by local governments ensured that the initial response was to
suppress news of the outbreak rather than deal with it aggressively. In South Korea the
problem was stubborn religious extremists. In japan, a sclerotic and over-rigid bureaucracy.
In the US, all three.
There are six fundamental questions to which there are two fundamental answers; or there
are 479,001,600 permutations that might describe a given circumstance. Taken one at a time,
each permutation is partially correct, 1/479,001,600. Your thoughts here avoid the error of
examining the errors made in dealing with the pandemic by examining one error at a time and
focus on the factor set that drove the errors. There is no simple single factor to be
altered. There is a factor set that consists of several risks ignored. There is no benefit,
at this moment, in fault finding. Here and now, we need massive testing, we need at least one
reliable treatment regime, and most importantly we need a vaccine. Once we have those things
we can then examine who decided what and hopefully we can examine what we need to do to
preserve protect and defend the grand American experiment in political economy. Our
Constitution calls for a Federal Republic that employs democratic means to achieve a
representative government of, by and for, the people. As my high school civic teacher taught,
you have to read all the words and a multifaceted thing cannot be described by citing only
one of the facets. Consider the recent event, Hillary won the vote and lost the election.
Your thoughts here address much of what we should be contemplating as individuals and as a
society. One might differ with you with respect to one or more of the components; but, taken
all together, you point to a cancer that needs to be eradicated. Thank you.
Ultimately, it's a case of power corrupts. Thinking through all of the above, it was all
enabled by people in power thinking they could get away with something, trying it and then
knowing they can do whatever they want. The power they held let them put greed first, and the
lack of real potential deprivation or threats led them to make money (as opposed to
self-sufficiency or equality or sustainability) the new god. After all, since when has money
not delivered? This is the first time in a long time that money can't buy safety. As Stoller
has said on Twitter, the Fed can't print a vaccine.
The corrective is accountability, or as vlade said, feedback. Elites can't just sit in their
offices, mansions and private jets all day and fail upward, or sideways at worst. We had a
little crisis not 12 years ago, but there was no accountability. So here we are.
Their preparedness did not come from SARS, but from MERS in 2015. That one ended up
killing 30 people, not much these days but enough for a large scare. It included hundreds of
school closures and the like – it looked much larger at the time. There was also a huge
scandal, when it turned out that medical institutions had been hiding infections, and this
added to the scare.
The current Korean epidemic response system was set up after that – it's just a few
years old. It is not deeply rooted in their history or culture or something
Yes, I'd agree with this – in fact, this is precisely what the Koreans authorities
themselves are saying. There is a lot of nonsense being talked about 'confucian values' and
so on – the reality is that South Korea was on much higher alert because of its recent
history (similarly with Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam). This isn't to dismiss the excellent
quality of the response which reflects very well on their government institutions and people,
but a lot of outsiders are reading far too much into it.
Perhaps another Minksy-like pro-cyclical flaw in our current system is underestimating the
marginal cost of incompetence. We can socialize the cost of the occasional minor disaster
made worse by incompetence. Ditto for socializing the occasional cost of a parasitical
rentier class. As with all short term thinking, it works until it doesn't.
As you point out, things like offshoring further undermine our ability to assess costs
(ex. to the local workers, environment). Out of sight, out of mind.
I want to say that a portion of the electorate bear some responsibility here. In addition
to the moneyed influencers, enough of the electorate agreed to put these officials in office.
In the calculus of what the voters thought they stood to lose or gain, they believed they
came out ahead.
Great post. My dad used to say "nothing beats experience" and when I was a younger know it
all–lover of books and libraries–I scoffed. But now I know he was absolutely
right. "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy." The people making the
decisions are divorced from the results and the real world that most citizens live
in–from experience. And so we've gone from a country with a genius for the
practical–"heroic materialism" Kenneth Clark called it–to one where the elites
are going through the motions until it all falls in. It may be falling now.
I'd like to throw a perspective that could be seen as CT onto the barbie, grill away.
This is a use of Howard Becker's Machine Trick: Design the machine that will produce that
result your analysis indicates occurs routinely in the situation you have studied.
This assumes that results are (at least in part) due to the machines functioning exactly
as intended. National differences of responses are a result of different de-facto
policies.
I. The Big Picture.
Rule #2: Go die!
There is a actuarial perspective that letting people die has a net benefit.
The Greeks and Malthus were aware of overpopulation problems. 1972's Limits to Growth
showed that famine was not the trigger for population crash, pollution was. They modelled a
crash date of 2055. The climate crisis is quickening.
The elite case for lowering life expectancy has been established:
: Tobacco Giant's Analysis Says Premature Deaths Cut Costs in Pensions and Health Care :
Critics Assail Philip Morris Report on Smoking
[nytimes.com/2001/07/18/news/tobacco-giants-analysis-says-premature-deaths-cut-costs-in-pensions-and.html]
Note that COVID-19 targets the same demographic that the Philip Morris report does.
Targeting high-energy_usage high-capital_liability individuals give good ROI both in climate
and financial terms. This brings in
II. The Middle Shark
Actions speak louder than words. Those with access to elite information behaved
differently within the US. Feb 28 the President used the word Hoax, four days later the Fed
put the crisis on the same level as 9/11 and the Lehmann fall.
Rule #1: Because markets.
Suppressing the response, both in public perception and in ER's, gave time for the
decisionmakers behind the politicians to array their responses. The selfless perspective is
this is a geostrategic eruption that must be tended. The venal symptom is elites had time to
dump their stocks.
III. The Immediate Threat
A nanoscopic enemy, less than half the size an N95 shield targets. Asymptomatic
invisibility, the false negative/positive problems of tests (if you can get them), the
horrors of the ventilated. A real threat.
I had previously said that, with the obfuscation and miscategorization systematically
skewing downward the perceived incidence of an already blurred enemy, we would have to look
at all-cause deaths to really understand the proximate and ultimate mortality. I did not see
falling death rates coming. In a complex world there are paradoxical effects. So any evil
geniuses are gonna get really frustrated when their plans go awry.
We can already see the opportunistic authoritarians hard at work. I'll close with a couple
paragraphs of Boyd, but first a reminder. This comment is a perspective on why some countries
had a less-lethal response to this virus than others. In a complex world, simple explanations
are incomplete. Boyd:
Remember what I said, without a crisis, they don't have an operation. They've got to have
that crisis. Remember what I said last night? Without anomalies, no mismatch. No mismatch,
no
crisis. Without a crisis, no change.
Remember I said that crisis is important to them because then they can insert, work the
propaganda, tear apart, generate these many non-cooperative centers of gravity.
Yves, you say leaders are showing their incompetence managing two jobs, their medical
response to Coronavirus and their management of countries' economies. I suggest that
perspective can be gained by stepping back further and looking at a bigger job than those two
tasks. How well are humans managing the planet's response to the threat of potential human
extinction caused by extreme planetary warming (too quickly returning to PET-M).
Where I'm headed: collectivism vs. individualism.
It appears to me that an adequate planetary response (If it isn't already too late. That's a
separate discussion.) to the threat of potential human extinction would require a giant
collectivist response. Almost all countries would need to be collectively acting together.
E.g., efforts would fail if a major economy like China or the U.S. continued its polluting
ways.
However, it appears most of our leaders are not collectivists. They appear, instead, to be
individualists who have fought their way to the top by competing against other highly
competitive individualists. Is it in the nature of individualist leaders to seek and join
collectivist activities? Are our leaders actively seeking to join an adequate (rather than
symbolic) collectivist planetary effort to reverse climate change?
Instead, it appears our leaders aim to be among the "winners" who will win by being among
the survivors in their bunkers in the Hamptons or New Zealand.
I'm wondering about how much the culture of collectivist action, collectivist values, in
various countries' medical systems has played in managing their response to Coronavirus. How
much has (predatory) individualism contributed to the incompetent management of
economies?
We humans have it in our nature to seek narratives, stories, that "explain" what we are
witnessing. Stories simplify explanations. Stories give comfort to our minds. We crave that
comfort. The two heroes in your two stories are 1.) losing sight of risk and 2.) using
symbols to separate leaders/actors from reality. IMHO those are excellent heroes.
Is it reasonable to expect successive generations of individualist humans/leaders to
maintain a focus on risk after previous generations appear to have insulated them from
previously known risks? I suggest that a collectivist culture would be much more vigilant
about identifying risk and preparing for it. For example, the collectivist U.S. military has
done considerable work recognizing and preparing for the risks of climate change.
Is it reasonable to expect individualist (predatory) leaders to competently manage the
economy of a country when they're so busy preying on their respective parts of the economy?
Individualists have found a giant tool, symbols substituted for reality, to exploit/prey on
the economies they live in. Is it reasonable to expect those individualists to give up their
competitive predatory tools to embrace collectivist ways to manage economies for the benefit
of all people in their respective economies?
Thanks for this great post, Yves. Managers, CEOS, and politicians losing any sense of risk
or real dangers sounds right. Promoting people incompetent or unfit for task isn't a problem
if there is no risk or danger. They've become the managerial/political equivalent of the
anti-vaxers: they believe no danger can touch them because no danger ever has (so far).
As a young person starting out in the work world, I was as said above, given the
opportunity to do "grunt" work. Put another way, like the old world apprentice system, I was
given the opportunity to understand the mechanics of work before moving on to such things as
planning and strategizing.
Early in my education I had troubles with math. Someone told me to think of numbers as
things, or put another way, every number stood for something in the "real world". Once I
understood this, every math problem could be visualized as a real world thing/concept. After
learning this I learned to love math, and to apply it well. Word problems referred to real
things. Logic and problem solving, thru math, was real. Moving forward to the work world, and
with the move from mainframe computers (which I worked with), to PC's, I became proficient in
very complex spreadsheets, creating them, maintining them, and undertaking complex analysis
with them. But, and someone above hit on this well, unlike today where the numbers are the
thing, or end product, I always envisoned them and understood them, each and every one of
them, as just being a representation of a real thing in the real world. This I think sets my
work generation apart from how things are done today. The loss of connection between numbers
and real things is I think what Yves is referring to as how people have become distanced from
risk and by default, it almost becomes "not risk".
Lastly, when I was younger I always had a need to understand the real world aspects of
anything I did. I had a job in analytics/logistics at an Oil & Gas company, one aspect
was gasoline blending. It wasn't good enough to get reports from the field for me, I had to
go out to the field and see, touch and discuss the actual work. I loved going to
manufacturing plants (refineries), and to the oil rigs. I had to understand everything
because how else can you do the "administrative/planning" side of things if you don't have an
intimate relationship with the actual thing?
Anyway, great post. It isn't the USA, it isn't capitalism, it is a deeper change in society
that knows no boundary or ideology.
kinda like there should only be one number, lets call it 3, and the size of it tells us
everything about the world we live in – so a big 3 is extremely important and requires
mobilization in some way, whereas a little 3 can be dealt with on a smaller scale ;-)
An old (both ways) friend took up CNC work at a local maker space a while back. After a
year or so he is good enough at it to be able to take orders for custom parts, but is now
getting to the 'real world' of numbers. He is, to his indignation, awe, and utter delight,
grappling with calculating the rate of taper he needs for some part, "Cotan, sine, tan --
it's trigonometry !"
There is simply no risk in the game for elites. Trump was slow to act because his risk was
that the stock market would be hurt by his action. He was free to wait because the stock
market would get a bailout in the end. The lives of the public were less important and still
are. The opinion polls of the voting class are all that matter.
The elites have very successfully bought off the voting class by making them small and
insignificant players in the game via the 401(k). They readily take the risk off of elites
because they are taking it off of themselves. They identify with elites and see them as their
protectors.
I think that the dereliction of duty by state actors is a something to be examined in
depth. Unfortunately, I am not today in the mood for doing the thinking effort this post
merits. I would have wanted to think on one of the symptoms of failure (widespread denialism)
and contrast it with the many good observations made in the post. The quarantine and some
personal stress has lately been a shock for me. Unfortunately some of my worst worries have
come true. I was writing something that could be interesting on the conditions that favoured
this outbreak but now I am not sure I can finish it.
Please take care. I am pretty sure I will still need this site to check for some common
sense, good, sensible and critical thinking plus relief from the too abundant disingenuous
widespread disinformation. So I insist, you gals and guys take a lot of care for
yourselves.
Widespread denialism is not hard to figure. Contemporary ruling classes and attached
elites have no regard for honesty and truth, so they lie to the people as default practice.
The people for whom they have so much contempt are smart enough to figure out that they are
being lied to. Given that the authorities cannot be trusted, one might as well believe
anything one wants.
Why the Czech Republic isn't bottom of the barrel, I certainly wouldn't hold us up as
exemplary case either. There are problems with protective equipment as everywhere else, the
testing regime is grossly lagging, contract tracing is nonexistent and just today the leading
epidemiologist and sort of top state science guy for this whole thing floated the idea we
should let 70 % population who are low-risk contract the virus without explaining how he
thinks this could be done without everyone else catching it too.
I would not depict you as exaggerating about the change in posture toward risks. This was
a very good essay. The change in posture about risks was enabled because typically big
political donars (smallish minority) get bailed out of their troubles while those with lessor
political influence (the working poor and middle class) get crushed.
BTW, seduction is the one thing Pres. Trump is really good at. Every news conference of
his I happen to catch (not my objective), it is marvelous, fascinating to watch how he
operates to seduce. It is what he does, even more fundamental than lying.
The lack of investment in public health has been so long standing that it is not the least
surprising to me that the USA has done poorly in pandemic preparation. I knew we had deeply
compromised capacity to respond. I am rather surprised by all the valient fighting for lives
now going on by many health care workers and a few politicians. To me, I feel there is a
mustard seed of humanism and hope in this world because we've purposely crashed our economies
to try and slow transmission, save lives and health care from imploding totally. It is not a
uniform sentiment, but it exists. It surprises me and am glad for it. Still, the
disadvantaged are going to fare worse, suffer worse on account of the risks that others
neglected.
we've had a Minsky-like process operating on a society-wide basis: as daily risks have
declined, most people have blinded themselves to what risk amounts to and where it might
surface in particularly nasty forms. And the more affluent and educated classes, who
disproportionately constitute our decision-makers, have generally been the most
removed.
I see something very similar happening in academia. We align our identities with our
institutions and think in very a short-term, metric-based fashion, seeing "success" (for
instance) in terms of student recruitment (tuition fees paid in). Moreover, we're encouraged
above all to be global in outlook: we look forward to our perennially "busy" international
conference seasons and we emphasise the global and the transnational over the merely local or
national (denigrated as narrow, provincial, and ideologically suspect). We like to see
ourselves as mobile subjects, bodies in constant motion, our minds Romantically untethered
from the confines of any one nation state.
So our identities as academics are unavoidably embedded in a form of neoliberal hyperglobalisation. We rely on unrestricted flows of (wealthy) bodies across borders. Our
institutions (or many of them) have become dependent on international students and their
superior fee-paying ability compared with merely "domestic students." We might agree in
principle with ideas of a GND, say, or take an ecocritical approach to a novel or a play, but
we're certainly not going to cut back on the number of international conferences we attend.
Indeed, many of us go further. We see this form of globalisation, and the benefits that
accrue to us and our institutions from it, as a form of moral necessity : something it
isn't possible even to argue against in good faith. Hence our loud assent to principles like
open borders and always-on mass migration. We have to keep those lucrative international
students flooding in, after all. (Not that we'd ever put it in terms as crassly material as
that; after all, we don't work in university administration .)
Our commitment to the global as a form of moral mission has left us completely unprepared
for what's currently unfolding. We are utterly unused to considering the material constraints
of the economy our livelihoods depend on; that globalisation might come back to bite us; that
the very aircraft that carry us across the world to conference destinations and field work
sites would one day turn off the spigot of endlessly mobile bodies our careers and identities
depend on. Hence the reason why a lot of my colleagues are so lost right now. They're so used
to living on a purely symbolic (or moral-symbolic) level that the materiality of this virus
and its consequences seems like a crude insult. Many stubbornly hold on to their old
commitments, unwilling to admit that the world might have changed. In this respect, I think
of this post over
at Crooked Timber, where John Quiggin (an economist I have a great deal of respect for)
simply cannot bring himself to confront the possibility that the open borders dream might be
dead.
Where we go from here, I have no idea. But the fact that international and Erasmus
students might be gone for the foreseeable future, and the major implications this will have
for the financial viability or our universities, seems to be slowly sinking in. But the fact
that the "export education" model was a disastrous wrong turn will take much longer to be
accepted, I think, because of the widespread commitment I've been talking about here to the
principle of the global as a form of moral necessity.
Intriguing question and hypothesis regarding the reasons behind the variability in
coronavirus infection and mortality rates among nations.
Variable coronavirus outcomes by nation could suggest a combination of elite incompetence,
poor individual judgment, a lack of appreciation of risk in all its Rumsfeldian forms,
corruption, a desire by oligarchs for autocratic control and being insulated and divorced
from actual operations; or underlying cultural and economic factors.
It could also suggest
that other factors either singularly or in combination played a role, including
intentionality based on misjudgment of the agnostic nature of the virus regardless of
demographics, economics and social class; or simply denial of an emerging public health
threat by political leadership that reflected their own psychological characteristics and
cognitive biases that led to a two month delay in implementing containment and control policy
measures.
While they played a role, don't know that blaming the variability among nations entirely
on a narrow set of insular public and private sector leaders who relied on computer
spreadsheets to assess ROI, NPV of alternatives, payback periods, cost vs. benefit analysis,
JIT inventory management of PPE; and the guidance of financial markets is an all-encompassing
answer. Why exactly did they rely on those spreadsheets?
My own view is that we can trace the root cause of policy failure back to the dominant
values of leadership and the values of the society/culture which spawned them regarding the
relative importance of money in determining policy choices regarding public health and
safety.
Unfortunately I expect the social and economic effects of this pandemic and the policy
choices that increased its severity are going to be with us for some time.
The U.S. was not adequately prepared for the current coronavirus pandemic and needs to
address the lack of planning to better prepare for future crises, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.
Chief Executive Jamie Dimon said Monday.
In his annual letter to shareholders, Dimon said he hoped America will "roll up its
sleeves" and start to attack its problems, including a costly health-care system, unequal
access to education, a litigation and regulatory system that burdens small business, failed
immigration policies, and ineffective infrastructure, among shortcomings. The share of wages
for the bottom 30% of Americans has been falling, he said, a problem that needs to be
acknowledged if it is to be fixed
"There should have been a pandemic playbook," he wrote.
Likewise, he added, every problem he noted "should have detailed and nonpartisan solutions."
" 'While conditions may sometimes be unusual and difficult, we are functioning smoothly. In
fact, over the last month in certain parts of our company, we've had the highest volume and
transaction totals we have ever seen.'
The media were just as much in denial as the White House was: Who's
Right: Donald Trump or the Media? - Amren I've seen this posted everywhere; article after article in the mainstream media telling
us to stop worrying about the coronavirus.
The epidemic revealed that there is a lot of incompetence on all levels: The
Death of American Competence - Stephan Walt - Foreign Policy Washington's reputation for expertise has been one of the greatest sources of its
power. The coronavirus pandemic may end it for good.
The long delay in the U.S. reaction has led to a urgent need for personal protection
equipment. The result is a new 'wild west' where stealing and cheating to get PPE is the new
norm:
The neoliberal transformation of the state is also on display with regards to the
distribution of medical supplies. The USG is distributing much needed supplies to private
commercial entities, which then play off various states, municipalities and hospitals against
each other in bidding wars. This is what "public-private partnerships" and "new public
management" have led to: a thorough abdication of institutional responsibility and
capacity-building by the state, which itself has been devoured internally by market
principles.
Without an analysis of capitalism as the central issue in the American crisis we can't
understand how things are playing out.
Stephen Walt gets many things right but he has no sense of the political economy of the
American crisis.
Why? Because his realist theory is bereft of any sociology and political economy.
The thing with the billionaires is that they have demanded and benefitted from the
hollowing out of the state in the neoliberal period, and then they exploit moments of state
crisis to reassert their "importance" (and our dependence on them).
So he sounded the alarm, sending a letter to 19 senior military officials. The gist of that
letter was a recommendation to disembark and isolate the Roosevelt's crew, treating those
infected and subjecting the entire ship to a thorough cleaning to eliminate the virus. "We are
not at war," Crozier wrote. "Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing
to properly take care of our most trusted asset -- our Sailors." While the ship's operational
readiness would momentarily suffer, Crozier was intent on ensuring that none of the men and
women under his command would "perish as a result of this pandemic unnecessarily."
Today, of course, many Americans are dying unnecessarily through the negligence of leaders
at all levels. In the weeks to come, negligence will claim the lives of many more. Crozier
stands out as one leader who was quick to assess the danger at hand and to recommend prompt and
decisive action.
For this he was fired. Needless to say, his letter leaked. Navy officials were thereby
embarrassed. While eventually taking the actions not unlike those that Crozier had recommended,
they gave him the axe. According to acting Navy secretary Thomas B. Modly, himself a Naval
Academy graduate, Crozier lost his job because the Coronavirus outbreak "overwhelmed his
ability to act professionally."
That's one opinion. Mine differs. Faced with a perplexing leadership challenge, Crozier made
a very tough call: This was one instance, he concluded, where Men should come before Mission,
while he unhesitatingly placed his own career interests last. His superiors, up to and
including Acting Secretary Modly, ought to have applauded his actions. That they did not calls
into question their own good judgment.
... ... ...
Of course, my own opinion matters not at all. On the other hand, my guess is that for
Crozier the opinion of his sailors matters quite a lot. As he left his ship for the last time,
in a moving display of support for their former skipper, they gathered spontaneously to give
him a rousing sendoff. Crozier left with their cheers ringing in their ears. The men and women
assigned to the USS Theodore Roosevelt know professionalism when they see it.
Another point of discussion here is The Mission. Me thinks the mission of TR was to show
force, intimidate and cower the Chinese. A very worthwhile job in the time of pandemic.
While the good captain said that the US is not at war, maybe the higher ups know better and
the US is indeed at war with a handful of countries in that area... and in that case The
Mission must take precedence, eh?!
BUT if he had killed civilians, taken pictures with their dead bodies, had every member of
his unit testify against him and been found guilty of war crimes, Trump would have his
back!
He didn't even inform his immediate superior, who lived feet away. He communicated outside
his chain-of-command classified information (yes, mission-readiness is classified.) He
absolutely should have been fired, and also brought up on charges. I expect this guy got
his foot in the door to command via his fealty to Obama, instead of his actual suitability
for command.
Crozier graduated from the Naval Academy in 1992. In his 28 years of military service he's
been a rotary wing pilot (SH-60s), a fixed wing pilot (F-18s), been the exec (second in
command) of a Nimitz-class carrier USS Ronald Reagan), and the the captain of a major ship
(USS Blue Ridge) (Command of a CVN requires both aviation and ship command; his career path
is typical of those groomed for command of a CVN). He's a graduate of the Naval War
College.
I'll go out on a limb here, but considering his background I'm comfortable thinking that
CAPT Crozier understands the chain of command, OPSEC, formal vs informal means of
communication, who to address a message or email to, what items should be and shouldn't be
in an unclassified email, realized the Carrier Battle Group's commander was embarked along
with him and he could walk down the hall to discuss concerns with him, and all the other
items people are raising.
The question should be why did someone with his background and experience consider it
necessary in a peacetime deployment to act as he did to protect his crew, taking actions he
had to have known would result in his being relieved of command and sacrificing his career.
If those above him considered the sickness and death of a number of his crew, along with
reducing the ship and its embarked air wing to an ineffective token, to be an unavoidable
but necessary price to pay for the boat to continue on its deployment without alteration
they need to come forward and say so. I have yet to read any rationale from the navy's
civilian leadership (or military, for that matter; the CNO's office has been silent) where
they have done anything other than note how bad he made them look.
I believe that Colonel Bacevich is right on point with one small error. That is that
Captain Crozier's action wasn't necessarily placing mission behind the men. The Navy will
keep it secret, of course, but a carrier underway with a large fraction of its crew sick,
to some degree, is just as non-mission capable as one sitting in port.
Captain Crozier was in an untenable catch-22 situation. Would the USS Roosevelt have suffered a similar casualty if it's skipper
stayed within his chain of command in attempting to address the burgeoning virus aboard that very well may have impacted it's crews
ability to operate safely? Capt Crozier's naval career was damned if he did and damned if he didn't (ie catch-22). Capt
Crozier made the right decision in putting the health/lives of sailors aboard the Roosevelt ahead of 7th Fleets need to check boxes.
Notable quotes:
"... I am circling around to the view that Crozier's actions were correct, honorable, and laudable, and that they also created a situation that made it impossible for the Navy, notwithstanding the current occupant of the White House, to keep him in his position. ..."
"... The difference between a competent administration and the one we have is that Crozier would not have felt compelled to go outside the chain of command, the SecNav would not be "acting," and the Acting SecNav would not have been so terrified of his own President that he would have acted precipitously against the captain. ..."
"... There is a disheartening present trend on who is promoted (and what comprises their value set) within organizations in America at present. ..."
Robert Farley at LGM has an interesting post on Crozier,
I am circling around to the view that Crozier's actions were correct, honorable, and laudable, and that they also created a
situation that made it impossible for the Navy, notwithstanding the current occupant of the White House, to keep him in his
position.
The difference between a competent administration and the one we have is that Crozier would not have felt compelled
to go outside the chain of command, the SecNav would not be "acting," and the Acting SecNav would not have been so terrified
of his own President that he would have acted precipitously against the captain.
But decisions with strategic consequences
should lie firmly with the very senior leadership of the armed forces, and the civilians that the leadership serves.
Thank you for that link. I agree with that assessment, and I would extend that circumstance to other departments within our government,
and into other sectors like business, education, and non-profits. There is a disheartening present trend on who is promoted (and
what comprises their value set) within organizations in America at present.
In the United States: Under the "Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP)
almost everyone engaged in addressing the pandemic has liability protection. "Specifically,
liability immunity is afforded (1) To manufacturers and distributors without regard to
whether the countermeasure is used by or administered to this population, and (2) to program
planners and qualified persons when the countermeasure is either used by or administered to
this population or the program planner or qualified person reasonably could have believed the
recipient was in this population."
There is a lot more detail in PREP, but it helps to explain Trump's cavalier performances
delivering misinformation to the public, his lavish praise for corporate solutions to the
pandemic and their willingness to be coopted.
I doubt that the USA public has the ability to oppose the rule of banksters.
Notable quotes:
"... A gloss on that one is the idea that NIAID director Anthony Fauci and other medical experts are wicked conspirators bent on destroying American morale by overstating the threat of Covid-19. ..."
"... First of all, that one smacks of the hoary conspiracy theory that Bilderberger bankers are scheming to take over the world – yet these supposedly hyper-clever "puppet-masters" are proving that they can't even run the banks and their own financial ops, which are now crashing down around their ears along with everybody else's. Thirdly, if there is trend anywhere in this collapse scenario, it is for the devolution of power downward, away from floundering centralized power structures and institutions. As they flounder, the faith of their subject peoples ebbs away and the trust horizon shrinks so that the people are no longer willing to depend on distant authorities for anything. ..."
"... Mr. Trump surely has enough problems attempting to manage this crisis, not the least of which is his own unfortunate habit of jumbled impromptu speech that often sounds like sheer blather. Some observers like to call it "plain speech," but in my experience even the common folk of America, the plumbers, truck drivers, and waitresses, express themselves more coherently. It's just not very reassuring. Believe me, I don't want to see the president fail, but I would advise him to stick to the teleprompter. ..."
"... We don't know whether anyone, or any faction, will be able to run the nation's affairs in the months upcoming. The least credible cohort these days are the folks presiding over the financial side of things. There is plenty of debate as to whether the mega bailouts and backstops will bring on inflation or deflation, both ruinous at the grand scale. ..."
"... There's abundant evidence that this flood of money-from-thin-air will do nothing to arrest the unwind of a system so rotten that it casts an odor across the boundaries of history. ..."
"... Wall Street has screwed America's pooch so completely that the poor pooch can't even squeal for mercy anymore. The Federal Reserve crew and their allied banksters have barely a few weeks before an immiserated public comes after them with the modern equivalent of pitchforks. Wait for the breaking news on the cable networks: The Hamptons are burning! ..."
You understand, there will be no meaningful resuscitation of the dear, departed, so-called
greatest boom in history . Ponzi schemes don 't "bounce back," they collapse for the simple
reason that the pieces holding them up were not really there.
Such are the unanticipated consequences of a media over-saturated culture that we were so
easily deceived by appearances.
The emotions entrained by this implacable disaster have barely expressed themselves in the
social arena. The public is still too shell-shocked by the prospect of losing everything
– jobs, incomes, status, chattels, a future – to commence what the shrinks
call "acting out." Anyway, half the country is still acting out over the election of Mr. Trump
three years ago.
But, for the moment, an interesting debate rages internationally as to whether the Covid-19
virus was some kind of engineered event designed to bring about various political
outcomes...
One thread declares that the Democratic Party, its media handmaidens, and a helpful
Chinese leadership used the virus to blow up the US economy and finally, after several
botched attempts, get rid of the vexing Mr. Trump .
It's a tidy story, but I don't buy it, for the simple reason that the entire global
economy has blown up, including China's, so you can file that meme in the Wile E. Coyote
folder.
A gloss on that one is the idea that NIAID director Anthony Fauci and other medical
experts are wicked conspirators bent on destroying American morale by overstating the threat
of Covid-19.
This includes the phrase that the novel corona virus is "just another seasonal flu," and
so ordering people to stay away from work and business was unnecessary. Again, you'd have to
ask yourself why medical experts and other plausibly intelligent people in so many other
countries would do exactly the same thing. They can't all be orcs.
Then there's the one that has Bill Gates so worked up about climate change that he's using
his foundation's deep resources to reduce the world's population by sowing maximum disorder
onto the scene with Covid-19 hysteria.
This one casts Mr. Gates as something like a villain from a James Bond movie, deep in his
Seattle mega-fortress petting a Persian cat as millions perish. Sounds like another case of
Americans confusing movies with real life.
Another story has a shadowy gang of "globalists" using the disorder spawned by the virus
to impose a centralized global uber-government run by international financiers.
First of all, that one smacks of the hoary conspiracy theory that Bilderberger bankers
are scheming to take over the world – yet these supposedly hyper-clever
"puppet-masters" are proving that they can't even run the banks and their own financial ops,
which are now crashing down around their ears along with everybody else's. Thirdly, if there
is trend anywhere in this collapse scenario, it is for the devolution of power downward, away
from floundering centralized power structures and institutions. As they flounder, the faith
of their subject peoples ebbs away and the trust horizon shrinks so that the people are no
longer willing to depend on distant authorities for anything.
That floundering of centralized authorities is exactly what's in process here in the
USA.
Mr. Trump surely has enough problems attempting to manage this crisis, not the least of
which is his own unfortunate habit of jumbled impromptu speech that often sounds like sheer
blather. Some observers like to call it "plain speech," but in my experience even the common
folk of America, the plumbers, truck drivers, and waitresses, express themselves more
coherently. It's just not very reassuring. Believe me, I don't want to see the president fail,
but I would advise him to stick to the teleprompter.
Of course, then, there is Joe Biden, the implausible nominee-presumptive of the opposition.
Who are they kidding with this emperor's new clothes scam? It's obvious now to anyone over
twelve in this land that Joe Biden is missing a few transistors on the old motherboard –
not to mention the slime-trail of grift and money-laundering that he laid down in his
adventures abroad as vice-president . His manner of speech, while different than Mrs. Trump's,
is even more pathetically incoherent. The Democrats' pretense that he is a viable candidate is
the ultimate falsehood in a long train of barefaced falsehoods they've so earnestly retailed
since 2016, making them utterly untrustworthy to run the nation's affairs.
We don't know whether anyone, or any faction, will be able to run the nation's affairs
in the months upcoming. The least credible cohort these days are the folks presiding over the
financial side of things. There is plenty of debate as to whether the mega bailouts and
backstops will bring on inflation or deflation, both ruinous at the grand scale.
There's abundant evidence that this flood of money-from-thin-air will do nothing to
arrest the unwind of a system so rotten that it casts an odor across the boundaries of
history.
Wall Street has screwed America's pooch so completely that the poor pooch can't even
squeal for mercy anymore. The Federal Reserve crew and their allied banksters have barely a few
weeks before an immiserated public comes after them with the modern equivalent of pitchforks.
Wait for the breaking news on the cable networks: The Hamptons are burning!
Trump Weighs Legal Action Against China Over PPE Hoarding As International 'Mask Wars'
Heat Up by Tyler
Durden Mon, 04/06/2020 - 12:55 The Trump administration is considering legal action against
China after leading US manufacturers of medical safety gear say Beijing has prohibited them
from exporting goods in what the
New York Post says was a bid to "corner the world market" in personal protective equipment
(PPE).
"In criminal law, compare this to the levels that we have for murder," said Trump
re-election campaign senior legal adviser, Jenna Ellis, who says that legal options include
filing a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights or working 'through the United
Nations."
"People are dying. When you have intentional, cold-blooded, premeditated action like you
have with China, this would be considered first-degree murder, " she added.
Executives from 3M and Honeywell told US officials that the Chinese government in January
began blocking exports of N95 respirators, booties, gloves and other supplies produced by
their factories in China , according to a senior White House official.
China paid the manufacturers their standard wholesale rates, but prohibited the vital
items from being sold to anyone else , the official said.
Around the same time that China cracked down on PPE exports , official data posted online
shows that it imported 2.46 billion pieces of "epidemic prevention and control materials"
between Jan. 24 and Feb. 29, the White House official said. -
New York Post
In total, nearly $1.2 billion in gear - which included over 2 billion masks and 25 million
"protective clothing" items which came from EU countries, along with Australia, Brazil and
Cambodia according to the White House official.
"Data from China's own customs agency points to an attempt to corner the world market in PPE
like gloves, goggles, and masks through massive increased purchases -- even as China, the
world's largest PPE manufacturer, was restricting exports," they added.
'Mask wars'
The shortage of vital protective equipment has pitted neighboring countries - and even US
states - against each other, resulting in accusations of theft and modern piracy, according to
the CBC . The United States, in particular, has been accused of stymying efforts by allies to
procure said equipment - by allegedly attempting to scuttle European deals for purchases from
China, as well as attempting to halt exports of US-made N95 masks to Canada and Latin America
last week.
That said, a Berlin senator who accused the US of "piracy" by diverting a shipment of
protective masks slated for delivery in the German capital has reversed his position - saying
that no US firms were involved in the case of the still-missing masks.
The CBC suggests that 'the apparent desperation of some of the wealthiest countries on
earth' comes as a surprise which has 'justifiably raised eyebrows in less fortunate parts of
the world' which are now preparing for coronavirus to hit, yet with a fraction of the
resources.
Striking selfishness
"It's normal for countries to take care of their own citizens first," said University of
Ottawa professor of international affairs and former Trudeau adviser, Roland Paris - who added
that the selfishness and lack of coordination among leading countries "is striking."
"We're unfortunately seeing a mad scramble to grab whatever's available, to hell with the
other guy," added Paris, who's apparently unfamiliar with game theory.
Even more stark, the mask wars have seen American and other buyers scuttling European and
Brazilian deals, some even snatching shipments already promised to other jurisdictions by
outbidding them -- even "on the tarmac" as planes prepared to take off. Some shipments
reportedly just disappear. - CBC
Not just masks...
While global PPE supplies have run critically short, nearly half the supply of
hydroxychloroquine - the Trump-touted treatment for COVID-19,
comes from India - which has banned exports of all form of the 'game-changing' drug .
Consequently - while China is without a doubt the biggest antagonist to the US, India is
beginning to grate on Trump's nerves despite his nominally cordial relationship with Modi.
According to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence, 47% of the U.S. supply of the drug last
year came from India makers. Only a handful of suppliers in the top 10 are non-Indian, such as
Actavis, now a subsidiary of Israeli generics giant Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. Still,
it's likely that some of their production facilities are nevertheless located in India.
India's export ban on the drug is aimed at ensuring it has enough supply for domestic use
after the American president's endorsement sparked global stockpiling of the medication. Now,
Trump's decision to tout the drug will cause major shortages in the US.
Imagine if the United States hadn't exported the manufacture of just about everything?
"... In a clip aired on Sunday but filmed a week earlier, nurse Imaris Vera bursts into tears and describes how she quit her job after "none of the nurses" ..."
"... "America is not prepared," she sobbed, "and nurses are not being protected." ..."
"... But dig a little deeper and the story begins to collapse. Vera admitted in a tweet on Saturday that she had actually been assigned an N95 respirator to wear, despite claiming in the video that "none of the nurses" ..."
"... Furthermore, the nurse didn't quit her job after a long and tireless struggle against the coronavirus. Her social media posts revealed that she quit on her first day on the job. According to her Facebook page, the woman had taken a year off, during which time she had built a career as a blogger and Instagram model. Since the virus hit US shores, she's used her Instagram page to promote boutique hand sanitizer and designer nurse's scrubs. ..."
Stories
of human tragedy abound during the Covid-19 pandemic, but in its hunger for tearjerking
moments, CBS has thrown the rulebook out the window and spread some viral "fake news." In a
clip aired on Sunday but filmed a week earlier, nurse Imaris Vera bursts into tears and
describes how she quit her job after "none of the nurses" in a dedicated coronavirus
unit were wearing masks. Furthermore, she called out her Chicago hospital for banning nurses
from using their own protective equipment in the facility.
"America is not prepared," she sobbed, "and nurses are not being protected."
In tears, a nurse says she quit her job after she was asked to work in a coronavirus ICU
without a face mask: "America is not prepared, and nurses are not being protected" https://t.co/ywoSuLOPYP
pic.twitter.com/S5BsnlO5nt
On its surface, the video is a damning indictment of the US government's response to the
pandemic. Indeed, the media have frequently lambasted President Donald Trump for failing to act
quick enough to contain the spread of the virus.
But dig a little deeper and the story begins to collapse. Vera admitted in a tweet on
Saturday that she had actually been assigned an N95 respirator to wear, despite claiming in the
video that "none of the nurses" in her ICU unit were wearing masks. Whether her
hospital banned the wearing of masks in hallways and corridors to preserve supplies is still
unclear.
Furthermore, the nurse didn't quit her job after a long and tireless struggle against
the coronavirus. Her social media posts revealed that she quit on her first day on the job.
According to her Facebook page, the woman had taken a year off, during which time she had built
a career as a blogger and Instagram model. Since the virus hit US shores, she's used her
Instagram page to promote boutique hand sanitizer and designer nurse's
scrubs.
... ... ...
Whether its aim is to mislead viewers or to tug on heartstrings, the media hasn't missed an
opportunity to rush dodgy footage in front of viewers. Such videos may generate clicks, but
they also lend credence to President Trump's oft-repeated assertion that the "fake news
media" doesn't care about the truth.
White House economic adviser got into a massive argument with the
coronavirus task force's Anthony Fauci over the doctor's ongoing resistance to the use of
hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, despite reports of the drug's widespread efficacy.
Numerous government officials were at the table, including Fauci, coronavirus response
coordinator Deborah Birx, Jared Kushner, acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, and
Commissioner of Food and Drugs Stephen Hahn.
Behind them sat staff, including Peter Navarro, tapped by Trump to compel private
companies to meet the government's coronavirus needs under the Defense Production Act.
According to the report, towards the end of the meeting Hahn began a discussion of the
commonly used malaria drug hydroxychloroquine - which was recently rated the '
most effective therapy ' for coronavirus according to a global survey of more than 6,000
doctors .
After Hahn gave an update on various trials and real-world use of the drug, Navarro got up
and dropped a stack of folders on the table to pass around .
According to Axios 's source, " the first words out of his [Navarro's] mouth are
that the studies that he's seen, I believe they're mostly overseas, show 'clear therapeutic
efficacy,' " adding "Those are the exact words out of his mouth.
Fauci - who's not got his own Twitter hashtag, #FireFauci - began pushing back against
Navarro, repeating his oft-repeated contention that 'there's only anecdotal evidence' that the
drug works against COVID-19.
Navarro exploded - after Fauci's mention of anecdotal evidence "just set Peter off." The
economic adviser shot back "That's the science, not anecdote," while pointing to the stack of
folders on the desk, which included the results of studies from around the world showing its
efficacy.
Here's what unfolded next, via Axios :
Navarro started raising his voice, and at one point accused Fauci of objecting to Trump's
travel restrictions, saying, "You were the one who early on objected to the travel
restrictions with China," saying that travel restrictions don't work. (Navarro was one of the
earliest to push the China travel ban.)
Fauci looked confused, according to a source in the room. After Trump imposed the
travel restrictions, Fauci has publicly praised the president's restriction on travel from
China.
Pence was trying to moderate the heated discussion. "It was pretty clear that everyone
was just trying to get Peter to sit down and stop being so confrontational," said one of
the sources.
Eventually, Kushner turned to Navarro and said, "Peter, take yes for an answer,"
because most everyone agreed, by that time, it was important to surge the supply of the
drug to hot zones.
The principals agreed that the administration's public stance should be that the
decision to use the drug is between doctors and patients.
Trump ended up announcing at his press conference that he had 29 million doses of
hydroxychloroquine in the Strategic National Stockpile.
According to a source familiar with the coronavirus task force, "There has never been a
confrontation in the task force meetings like the one yesterday," adding "People speak up and
there's robust debate, but there's never been a confrontation. Yesterday was the first
confrontation."
Meanwhile, 37% of 6,227 doctors across 30 countries felt the drug was the "most effective
therapy" out of 15 options in treating coronavirus,
according to a poll reported by the Washington Times .
The drug has been prescribed in 72% of cases in Spain, 49% in Italy, 41% in Brazil, 39% in
Mexico, 28% in France, and 23% in the USA . Overall, 19% of physicians have prescribed the drug
for high-risk patients, and 8% for low-risk patients.
More from the Sermo poll (via the Washington Times )
***
Sermo CEO Peter Kirk called the polling results a "treasure trove of global insights for
policy makers."
"Physicians should have more of a voice in how we deal with this pandemic and be able to
quickly share information with one another and the world," he said. "With censorship of the
media and the medical community in some countries, along with biased and poorly designed
studies, solutions to the pandemic are being delayed."
The survey also found that 63% of U.S. physicians believe restrictions should be lifted in
six weeks or more, and that the epidemic's peak is at least 3-4 weeks away.
The survey also found that 83% of global physicians anticipate a second global outbreak,
including 90% of U.S. doctors but only 50% of physicians in China.
On average, U.S. coronavirus testing takes 4-5 days, while 10% of cases take longer than
seven days. In China, 73% of doctors reported getting rest results back in 24 hours.
In cases of ventilator shortages, all countries but China said the top criteria should be
patients with the best chance of recovery (47%), followed by patients with the highest risk of
death (21%), and then first responders (15%) .
It make sense to wear mask only for a limited time (no more then 2 hours for a single mask)
and only in public places. Should always be combined with strict hand hygiene. Without hand
hygiene wearing of masks can be counterproductive.
Notable quotes:
"... Given the potential loss of effectiveness with incorrect usage, general advice should be to only use masks/ respirators under very particular, specified circumstances, and in combination with other personal protective practices. ..."
Conclusions: Despite a further review of all the available evidence up to 30 November
2012 there is still limited evidence to suggest that use of face masks and/or respirators in
health care setting can provide significant protection against infection with influenza when in
close contact with infected patients. Some evidence suggests that mask use is best undertaken
as part of a package or 'bundle' of personal protection especially including hand hygiene, the
new evidence provides some support to this argument particularly within the community or
household setting. Early initiation and regular wearing of masks/respirators may improve their
effectiveness in healthcare and household settings, again an argument marginally strengthened
by the updated evidence.
The effectiveness of masks and respirators is likely to be linked to consistent, correct
usage and compliance; this remains a major challenge – both in the context of a formal
study and in everyday practice.
Given the potential loss of effectiveness with incorrect usage, general advice should be
to only use masks/ respirators under very particular, specified circumstances, and in
combination with other personal protective practices.
... ... ...
None of the trials found, in the main analyses, a significant difference between
non-intervention and mask-only arms (surgical masks or N95/P2 respirators) in either clinically
diagnosed (influenza-like-illness/ILI) or laboratory-confirmed influenza. However in four of
the household trials, sub-analyses of the datasets revealed some evidence of protection.
One trial observed that household contacts who wore a P2 respirator 'all/most' of the time
were less likely to develop an influenza-like illness compared to less frequent users.
A second trial found a significant reduction in laboratory-confirmed influenza among
household contacts that began hand hygiene or hand hygiene plus a face mask within 36 hours of
the index case's illness.
... ... ...
One of these studies found that there was a significantly lower frequency of H1N1 pdm09
infection in healthcare workers wearing a mask when compared to those not wearing a mask.
Furthermore, a sub-analysis of nurses and nurse assistants in a seroprevalence study identified
an increased risk of acquiring H1N1 pdm09 infection when not wearing a mask, however while the
authors described this result as significant (p-value significant), the confidence interval was
not significant
... ... ...
There is some weak evidence to suggest that facemasks may be protective when they are used
early (after recognition of an index case in a household setting); if better compliance (using
the masks for longer periods of time) is achieved, and when combined with hand-washing
practicing.
Background
Minimising transmission of influenza requires a range of personal and public health measures
taken by individuals and communities such as respiratory etiquette and hand hygiene and
possibly proactive school closures (and other measures sometimes called social distancing). Use
of personal protective equipment is generally advised according to the risk of exposure to the
influenza virus and the degree of infectivity and human pathogenicity of the virus. A
particularly vexing issue for policy makers has been the paucity of scientific evidence upon
which to base guidance for use of masks and respirators in healthcare and community settings to
prevent transmission of seasonal, pandemic and animal influenzas.
... ... ...
Participants were allocated to wear either a fit-tested N95 or a surgical face mask when
providing care (including aerosol generating procedures) to patients with a febrile respiratory
illness during the influenza season. No difference in influenza infection was detected in the
two groups. The final hospital based study stratified 1441 health care workers across 15
Beijing hospitals to analyse the effectiveness of surgical masks compared to both fit-tested
and non-fit tested N95 respirators (6). The wearers of N95 respirators had lower, but
non-significant attack rates, compared to those wearing surgical masks. However the intention
to treat analysis (when adjusting for clustering of hospitals) identified that non-fit-tested
N95s had a statistically significant protective effect against clinical respiratory illness
when compared to surgical masks in healthcare workers. Additionally a multivariate analysis (
post hoc ) found that wearing any N95 mask type protected against clinical respiratory
illness
... ... ...
A cluster randomized controlled trial in Australia compared household contacts of paediatric
index cases (0-15 years) with a febrile respiratory illness that were randomised to control,
surgical mask or non-fit-tested P2 respirator intervention groups (9). No differences in rates
of influenza-like infection or rates of respiratory virus isolation were observed in an
intention-to-treat analysis. In a survival analysis that evaluated risk factors for
influenza-like illness, use of P2 respirators or surgical masks grouped together was found to
significantly reduce the risk for illness in those household contacts who reported wearing the
device 'all' or 'most' of the time for the first five days; however, the study was underpowered
to detect a difference in efficacy between P2 and surgical masks.
... ... ...
A study in Berlin, conducted across two influenza seasons (2009/10 and 2010/11), randomised
households to three groups; control, face mask or face mask and hand-hygiene with the analyses
stratified by influenza type (seasonal or pandemic cases), season, and early implementation of
interventions (12). This was the only example of a trail that analyzed specific H1N1 pdm09
secondary household attack rates. In the intention-to-treat multivariable analysis, pooling of
both intervention groups resulted in a significant reduction in lab-confirmed influenza when
stratified for either early intervention or pandemic-only cases; however there was no
statistically significant effect of intervention groups on secondary household attack rates.
When a per-protocol analysis was applied the odds ratios in both the mask-only and
mask/hand-hygiene 24 groups were between 0.2 and 0.3 suggesting a strong protective effect.
Although a statistically significant reduction was found in the mask-only groups.
... ... ...
Larson and colleagues examined hand-sanitiser and hand-sanitiser/mask use (both with
education) effectiveness amongst crowded households in upper Manhattan (15). In this study,
both household caretakers and symptomatic individuals were asked to wear masks. The study found
that mask wearing coupled with hand-sanitiser use significantly reduced secondary transmission
of aggregated upper respiratory infection/ ILI and lab-confirmed influenza outcome compared
with control households (education but no intervention) in the final logistic regression model.
Unfortunately there was not a mask-only group, but the observation that hand sanitizer alone
resulted in no reduction in the aggregated outcome suggests that mask use, in combination with
hand-sanitiser had an impact on transmission. There was also limited power to detect
differences amongst the three groups and there was also observed cross-contamination with use
of hand-sanitizer in the control group
... ... ...
It was observed that there was a statistically significant difference in H1N1 pdm09
infection between individuals wearing masks at any point and those not wearing masks (0%
seropositive individuals when using either surgical masks or N95 respirators in comparison to
14% individuals in the no mask/respirator group). The study however lacked power to detect
significant differences between those wearing N95 respirators against those wearing surgical
masks. In addition to this the study suffered for a large number of other limitations such as
potential measurement and recall bias.
"... will know exactly which professor, non-profit boss, esteemed expert, talks sense outta a brain that absorbs information & devises answers, and which ones are little more than industry shills who got lucky once early in their career, who are the notorious plagiarists, who are better at politicking than doctoring etc. ..."
Out in the land of 'distinguished epidemiologists' the types who are charged with doing
the hands on work of developing counters to this virus, will know exactly which professor,
non-profit boss, esteemed expert, talks sense outta a brain that absorbs information &
devises answers, and which ones are little more than industry shills who got lucky once early
in their career, who are the notorious plagiarists, who are better at politicking than
doctoring etc.
"...the intelligence agencies were warning about information derived from medical sources
in China that suggested viruses were developing that might become a pandemic, but the
politicians, most particularly those in the White House, chose to take no action. He writes
that " the Trump administration has cumulatively failed, both in taking seriously the
specific, repeated intelligence community warnings about a coronavirus outbreak and in
vigorously pursuing the nationwide response initiatives commensurate with the predicted
threat. The federal government alone has the resources and authorities to lead the relevant
public and private stakeholders to confront the foreseeable harms posed by the virus.
Unfortunately, Trump officials made a series of judgments (minimizing the hazards of
COVID-19) and decisions (refusing to act with the urgency required) that have needlessly made
Americans far less safe."
"The article cites evidence that the intelligence community was collecting disturbing
information on possibly developing pathogens in China and was, as early as January, preparing
analytical reports that detailed just what was happening while also providing insights into
how devastating the global proliferation of a highly contagious and potential lethal virus
might be. One might say that the intel guys called it right, but were ignored by the White
House, which, per Zenko, acted with "unprecedented indifference, even willful
negligence...."
@bevin #8
In January? Really? Seems like the highly paid and budgeted intelligence agencies should be
able to do a better job of predicting the nCOV threat before China instituted a shutdown on
January 23 due to its view that nCOV was a problem.
Frankly, seems more like intel agency ass covering than anything else.
Additional comments regarding Chinese KN95 and why it's banned in 'murica
Getting type approval means paying for certification so a lot of domestic chinese brands
won't bother going for EN or NIOSH as those markets are stitched up by big names like 3M.
Some lesser brands or importers OEM them from China but will pay for certification for US
NIOSH for example, they would have their branding on it and probably contractual limitation
on market exclusivity, even though they're probably pumped off the same production line.
and because they're made by suppliers serving the domestic market in China, they're about
30% - 40% cheaper than N95
so it begs the question, in times like these why wouldn't you allow a temporary standards
equivalency recognition?
The only motivation I can see beyond red tape is the KN95 masks generally will have
Chinese printing on them (brand, model, certification etc) and how would the US narrative go
when everyone is wearing Chinese masks on the streets?
Sending top shelf ventilators made by a Russian firm under U.S. sanctions? I wonder if
this is some sort of ironic Russian humor, besides being a bridge-building gesture, of
course. If it's a troll, we richly deserve it, IMHO.
Remind me again why we are not working collegially with this talented nation of
Russia.
I will give you 100% TrueUkrainian (the new plucky "democratic" friends of the Great West,
remember?) answer - of course not!
As everybody knows (tm), Russian help is not just useless, but promotes this dreadful,
aggressive "Russki Mir", that stands for everything wrong, compared to the bright* genderless
globalist and eco-friendly progressive future.
Western countries and their populations, that have become the subject of the brutal and
aggressive Russian humanitarian help (that's Italy and US of A) in order to maintain
ideological integrity and robust correct-think, have to adopt a few simple measures, already
tried and tested by the great patriots of the Ukraine:
1) Ask any Russian doctor and member of the medical personnel, that might try to treat
you, about their attitude towards Putin, war in Syria and to whom really belongs the Crimea
(optional for the Westerners – also ask about gays and representation quotas). If the
answer is not 156% ideologically pure, refuse to be treated by such violent satrap of the
Regime!
2) Stage a raid on a warehouse with the medical masks from Russia, and expropriate every
single one of them! In order to prevent innocent bystanders from ever using such vile tools
of Russian propaganda in their daily life, find a new and creative way to dispose of them.
One such use is beloved by all truly patriotic members of the Ukrainian civil society (like
C14 and "UPA-UNSO") – use them to make torches for your next rally!
3) Be proactive citizen – refuse to use Russian lung ventilators! Die a free
person!
_______
*) But not too bright as not to offend epileptics.
US sidestepped OWN SANCTIONS against Russia to save American lives from Covid-19... If only it cared as much about Iranian
lives
Scott Ritter
is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer. He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General
Schwarzkopf's staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter
@RealScottRitter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer.
He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf's staff during the Gulf War, and
from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.
When it comes to saving American lives, sanctions are not an
obstacle to the provision of life-saving medical equipment. Ramping up sanctions on struggling Iran is okay however – which goes
to show the US price tag on human life. It was a sight that warmed the heart of even the most cynical American opponent of Vladimir
Putin's Russia -- a giant An-124 aircraft, loaded with boxes of desperately needed medical supplies, being offloaded at JFK Airport.
When President Trump spoke on the phone with his Russian counterpart on March 31, he mentioned America's need for life-saving medical
supplies, including ventilators and personal protective equipment. Two days later the AN-124 arrived in New York.
As the aircraft was being unloaded, however, it became clear that at least some of the equipment being offloaded had been delivered
in violation of existing US sanctions. Boxes clearly marked as containing Aventa-M ventilators, produced by the Ural Instrument Engineering
Plant (UPZ), could be seen. For weeks now President Trump has made an issue about the need for ventilators in the US to provide life-saving
care for stricken Americans.
There was just one problem -- the manufacturer of the Aventa-M, UPZ, is a subsidiary of Concern Radio-Electronic Technologies
(KRET) which, along with its parent holding company ROSTEC, has been under US sanctions since 2014. Complicating matters further
is the fact that the shipment of medical supplies was paid in part by the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), a Russian sovereign
wealth fund which, like ROSTEC, was placed on the US lending blacklist in 2014 following Russia's intervention in Crimea. Half of
the Russian aid shipment was paid for by the US State Department, and the other half by RDIF.
According to a State Department spokesperson, the sanctions against RDIF do not apply to purchases of medical equipment. KRET,
however, is in the strictest SDN (Specially Designated Persons) sanctions
list , which means US citizens and permanent residents
are prohibited from doing business with it. So while the letter of the sanctions may not have been violated, the spirit certainly
has been.
One only need talk to the embattled Governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, to understand the difficulty in trying to purchase
much-needed medical equipment during a global pandemic where everyone else is trying to do the same. New York has been competing
with several other states to purchase much-needed ventilators from China. "It's like being on eBay" , Cuomo recently told
the press, with 50 states bidding against one another, driving the price up. The issue became even more complicated when the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, entered the bidding war. "They big-footed us" , Cuomo said, driving the price per ventilator
up to $25,000. "We're going broke."
Cuomo estimates that New York will need upwards of 40,000 ventilators to be able to handle the influx of stricken patients when
the outbreak hits its peak. At the moment, New York has 17,000 ventilators available -- including 2,500 on order from China -- and
Cuomo doesn't expect any more. "We're on our own." Plans are in place to begin imposing a triage system to prioritize ventilator
availability if and when the current stockpile is exhausted. These plans include the issuance of an emergency waiver that permits
health care providers to take a patient off a ventilator to make it available for another patient deemed to be more "viable"
-- that is, who has a greater expectation of surviving the disease.
Cuomo's predicament is being played out around the world, in places like Italy, Spain -- and Iran, where the outbreak of coronavirus
has hit particularly hard. The difference, however, is that while the US, Italy and Spain are able to scour the global market in
search of life-saving medical supplies, Iran is not. US sanctions targeting the Iranian financial system, ostensibly imposed to prevent
"money laundering" by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command, which has been heavily sanctioned by the US over the years,
have made it virtually impossible for Iran to pay for humanitarian supplies needed to fight the coronavirus outbreak.
As bad as it is for Governor Cuomo, at least he can enter a bidding war for medical supplies. Iran can't even get its foot in
the door, and it is costing lives. Making matters worse, at a time when the international community is pleading for the US to ease
sanctions so Iran can better cope with an outbreak that is taking a life every ten minutes, the US instead doubled down, further
tightening its death grip on the Iranian economy.
The global coronavirus pandemic will eventually end, and when it does there will be an accounting for how nations behaved. Nations
like Russia and China have been repeatedly vilified in the US media for any number of reasons -- even the Russian aid shipment containing
the sanctioned ventilators has been dismissed as a "propaganda ploy." What, then, do you call the US' blatant disregard
for select human lives?
The callous indifference displayed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other officials to the suffering of the Iranian people
by increasing sanctions at a time when the situation cries out for them to be lifted in order to save lives, when contrasted to the
ease in which US sanctions on Russia are ignored when life-saving medical equipment is needed, drives home the point that, as far
as the US is concerned, human life only matters when it is an American one. That might play well among American voters (it shouldn't),
but for the rest of the world it is a clear sign that hypocrisy, not humanitarianism, is the word that will define the US going forward.
EDITOR'S NOTE: A previous version of this article erroneously stated that entering a financial relationship with RDIF is prosecutable
under the US sanctions regime. In reality, RDIF is under sectoral sanctions that only apply to certain interactions, which, according
to a State Department spokesperson, do not include purchases of medical equipment. The article has been changed accordingly.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
And it has since day 1. As I wrote yesterday, the parent website for
this article will have several each day documenting how TrumpCo's screwing/raping the
public deliberately by various means, twisting Congressional intent by implementing rules
Congress never envisioned in its legislation is one:
"Trump Labor Department Accused of Quietly 'Twisting the Law' to Slash Paid Sick Leave
Amid Pandemic: The Trump administration is robbing workers of the paid sick days and paid
leave Congress passed into law for them. That is unconscionable....
"'In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration is robbing workers of
the paid sick days and paid leave Congress passed into law for them. That is unconscionable,'
DeLauro said in a statement. 'People across the country are struggling to make ends meet, and
essential workers who are still able to work need to know that if they or a loved one falls
ill that they can take time off.'
"'Keeping workers from getting other workers sick is good for employees, employers, and
our broader public health,' said DeLauro. 'Secretary Scalia needs to immediately rescind this
guidance and put workers' needs first.'"
Before that it was the IRS trying to delay checks to seniors. And so on. So, on top is the
Blame everything on China policy and attempted Narrative, while the underlying truth is the
war being waged on the citizenry by TrumpCo, which is part of the ongoing Class War.
But to be fair, the Class war predates TrumpCo; ObamaInc, BushCo and ClintonLtd were just
as immoral, deceitful and murderous. And the line goes back to Truman.
- Trump is a socalled "cheapcheat". One of the things he and his administration don't like is
spending money on Joe Sixpack.
- But now the Trump administration has to "eat crow". And that's why it blames Europe and
China. Trump HATES - I repeat - HATES to admit that he was wrong.
There is a fear that schools are a vector in spreading COVID-19 from one family to
another. But we know that children, especially young children under 10 are almost alway
asymptotic. Wouldn't this mean that kindergartens and primary schools would be unable to
sustain an epidemic? So is there any point in closing schools?
There is one danger. If an infection is transmitted form one adult to another then it
would be untraceable. If a parent of one child is infected, then all parents of his or her
classmates would need to be quarantined.
P.S. - It looks like
social distancing measures in Finland have pushed R0
to 1 or slightly under.
After that peaks people will start to wake up a little from their quartine fear-induced
stupor and some at least will start to notice what's being done economically, some thing
which effects all plebs equally.
Then we can expect the imminent arrival of peak fiscal fear
#coronahoax aka ccp flu will kill the same groups that are always susceptible
Yes but it seems to kill them in far greater numbers. I thus agree about opening society,
but not completely.
The vulnerable are about 5-10% of the population and generally unproductive (retired or
too sick to work). They can self-quarantine (or, if you are an authoritarian statist, use law
– a gun – to force them to quarantine) – importantly, including from
their non-quarantined family members! , who will spread it to them – and everyone
else go about their business.
In this case, the virus will roll over the population during the first season/year. It
will kill some of the non-vulnerable as well – like all flus/diseases do – but
roughly along annual lines. After that year, society will have achieved "herd immunity".
The problem with a partial quarantine is that the virus continues to circulate, and since
the vulnerable and non-vulnerable people intermix (intimately, at home), the vulnerable will
keep getting infected – this could go on for years. The result: vastly more dead, and a
destroyed economy (which the Rulers will buy up for pennies on the dollar – diseases
can be very profitable!).
Like Winston Churchill said " You can always count on Americans to do the right thing -
after they've tried everything else."
We'll get there eventually but will wear out a lot of shovels digging deeper in the
process.
The Army and Marine Corps have shifted from in-person to
virtual recruitment meetings . But the Pentagon has
reversed an initial Army decision to postpone further training and exercises for at least
30 days, and it has decided to continue
sending new recruits from all the services to basic training camps, where they would no
doubt be unable to sustain social distancing.
Esper's decisions reflect a deeply ingrained Pentagon habit of protecting its parochial
military interests at the expense of the health of American troops. This pattern of behavior
recalls the far worse case of the U.S. service chiefs once managing the war in Europe. They
acted with even greater callousness toward the troops being called off to war in Europe during
the devastating "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918, which killed 50 million people worldwide.
"The lack of concern of Washington bureaucrats for the well-being of the troops, as they
pursue their own war interests, appears to be a common pattern."
The public is clearly appreciative. According to Nielsen , U.S. sales of alcoholic
beverages rose 55 percent during the week that ended on March 21, and 75 percent versus the
same period in 2019. Wine and beer sales are up 66 percent and 42 percent respectively.
... According to the
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism , there are 30 million U.S. adults (14
percent of the adult population) who are classified as heavy drinkers, and within that
population, there is a subset of 14.4 million people who are alcoholics. Public health
officials maintain that cutting off individuals who are chemically dependent upon alcohol will
result in panic in the streets and a run on our hospitals due to the unique nature of alcohol
addiction.
... According to the National
Coalition Against Domestic Violence , "1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men will experience physical
violence by their intimate partner at some point during their lifetimes which equates to
intimate partner violence occurring to over 10 million people a year." History shows that these
statistics skew even higher during times of crisis.
As Mother Jonesreports
, since the onset of the coronavirus, 13 cities and counties have reported an increase in call
volume to 911 and domestic violence hotlines. That includes Seattle (22 percent), the site of
the first U.S. coronavirus case; San Antonio, Texas (21 percent); Charlotte/Mecklenburg, North
Carolina (16 percent); and New York City (7 percent).
While we do not have data on how many of
these cases involved alcohol, research tells us this is no small problem. For example, the
World Health Organization found that 55 percent of domestic violence victims surveyed in
the U.S. maintained that their partners were drinking prior to a physical assault.
President Donald Trump lashed out Thursday night on Twitter against 3M, the Minnesota-based
maker of vital N95 masks used in hospitals around the world during the coronavirus pandemic
that has sickened over 1 million people and killed almost 54,000. Trump was apparently upset to
learn that 3M has been exporting many of its masks to other countries instead of offering them
to officials in U.S. states, something the president had complete control over if he had acted
quicker.
"We hit 3M hard today after seeing what they were doing with their Masks," Trump tweeted
late Thursday , without
specifically noting what 3M was doing.
"P Act. all the way," Trump continued, apparently using P to refer to the Defense Production
Act. "Big surprise to many in government as to what they were doing - will have a big price to
pay!"
Previously, the president failed to invoke the Defense Production Act, which allows the
federal government to mandate how U.S. companies produce and distribute essential goods.
Industrial conglomerate 3M
got slammed by President Donald Trump over sending face masks
abroad .
"We hit 3M hard today after seeing what they were doing with their Masks," the
president tweeted . "Big surprise to many in government as to what they were doing -- will
have a big price to pay!"
It sounds bad, and it forced a
response from the company, which has consumer and health-care franchises. It makes masks
and other
personal protective equipment badly needed by front line health-care workers.
"Over the last several weeks and months, 3M and its employees have gone above and beyond to
manufacture as many
N95 respirators as possible for the U.S. market," reads a Friday news release. "Yesterday,
the Administration formally invoked the Defense Production Act (DPA) to require 3M to
prioritize orders from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for our N95
respirators."
That was one of the worst decisions Trump administration made. Now they change their stance. Better later then never...
Notable quotes:
"... Part of the reason was to preserve medical-grade masks for health care workers who desperately need them at a time when they are in continuously short supply. ..."
Until now, the C.D.C., like the W.H.O., has advised that ordinary people don't need to wear
masks unless they are sick and coughing.
Part of the reason was to preserve medical-grade masks
for health care workers who desperately need them at a time when they are in continuously short
supply.
Masks don't replace hand washing and social distancing.
On March 23
we wrote this: " For want of a mask the largest economy in the world has been gutted, with
Goldman Sachs now projecting that U.S. GDP could contract by as much as 24 percent in the
second quarter." Now, in the past two weeks, 10 million Americans have filed claims for
unemployment. Let that sink in, 10 million of our fellow citizens have lost their jobs in just
a two-week period.
In the same article linked above, we showed a photo dated March 4 from the Associated Press
of people packed together on a subway in New York City with almost no one wearing a mask. And
then we explained why:
"On February 29, the Surgeon General Tweeted that the public should stop buying masks
– despite scientific agreement that the virus is spread by sneezing, coughing and
talking. The Surgeon General's advice may have made sense for people living on a 10 acre farm
in New Hampshire but it was dangerous advice for people who can't afford taxis and are forced
to ride a packed subway to work each day in Manhattan."
Because there were simply not enough masks to go around, the Surgeon General effectively
lied to the American people.
Now, New York City is the global epicenter of the coronavirus with more deaths than anywhere
else in the country. As of this morning, the New York Times is reporting a total of 51,810
cases and 1,562 deaths in New York City – which is 25 percent of the deaths in the entire
United States, despite New York City representing just 2.6 percent of the U.S. population.
This past Monday, March 30, MSNBC news host, Chris Hayes, told his viewers this:
"At the beginning of this crisis, the World Health Organization and the CDC came out and
basically said that if you're healthy, you just don't need to wear a mask around public to
protect yourself or others from Coronavirus.
"Now, over the weekend, there was a rumbling the CDC was about to change its guidance to
suggest Americans should wear protective masks, and while the CDC is now denying that
reporting, and saying it is not updating its guidance, it is very hard to ignore the fact
that the countries where masks are most prevalent, particularly in East Asia, are the ones
doing the best job of battling the virus . [Italics added.]
"A prominent Chinese doctor was recently asked by Science magazine what mistakes are other
countries making, quote, 'the big mistake in the U.S. and Europe in my opinion is that people
aren't wearing masks.' "
Yesterday, April 2, the Washington Post published an OpEd by Joseph G. Allen, director of
the Healthy Buildings Program at Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The
title of the OpEd was this: "
You Need to Wear a Mask. Here's How ." Allen wrote this:
"The debate is over. You should be wearing a mask when you go out
"First, masks of any type help prevent the user from infecting others by acting as a
physical barrier that will block large droplets from coughs and sneezes. These droplets can
travel up to 20 feet with a powerful sneeze, so six feet of social distancing is not always
enough. And wearing masks is not just a good thing for those who are actively sick: Any one of
us might be harboring this virus asymptomatically and could transmit it to others, cascading
into a thousand new infections."
Allen also correctly pointed out that "Wearing a mask does not replace other important
public health control measures such as hand-washing, social distancing, covering your cough and
cleaning surfaces."
Allen critically noted that while N95 masks must be reserved for front-line health care
workers, people can and should be making their own masks. Unfortunately, Allen suggested using
a 100 percent cotton t-shirt, which this
tutorial on the proper way to make a mask recommends against . A T-shirt is knit,
thus making it subject to stretching. The tutorial recommends using a double layer of
high-thread-count 100 percent cotton from sheets or pillow cases made out of Percale or a list
of other fabrics.
According to the CDC, the 1918 flu pandemic, known as the "Spanish Flu," resulted in the
death of 50 million people globally and an estimated 675,000 people in the United States. The
photograph above likely explains one of the numerous reasons that the Spanish Flu was not
contained in the U.S. Red Cross volunteers were using highly porous gauze to make masks.
Yesterday, New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio said this: "We're advising New Yorkers to wear
a face covering when you go outside and will be near other people. Let's be clear, this is a
face covering. It could be a scarf, it could be a bandana, something you create yourself."
NBC News is reporting this morning that "The White House is expected to urge Americans who
live in areas of high coronavirus transmission to wear cloth face coverings to prevent the
spread of the virus, a senior administration official told NBC News on Thursday night."
Clearly, the whole country should be wearing properly-made, home-made masks so that their town
doesn't become the next heavily impacted area.
It didn't need to take this long and the loss of this many lives and the U.S. economy to
figure out the obvious. The Surgeon General's negligent Tweet on February 29 should have told
Americans to stop buying N95 masks needed desperately by health care professionals and advised
them on how to properly make their own masks. The Surgeon General should be held accountable
and lose his own job along with the other 10 million Americans who didn't give out dangerously
bad advice.
ot many people were surprised when President Trump signed an executive order that authorized
the Secretary of Defense to mobilize, or call up, the ready or active reserves to help the
country deal with the Covid-19 crisis. After all, the women and men who volunteer to join these
National Guard or Reserve units expect to be activated to deal with crisis at home or abroad.
Moreover, they are not only trained for these missions but receive compensation, benefits, and
retirement credit while they are training and when they are mobilized.
However, the President's order not only authorizes the Secretary to mobilize the guard and
reserves, or ready reserves, but also individuals from the inactive component, or Individual
Ready Reserves (IRR). This week the Army began
contacting them to be called up, on a volunteer basis, for now.
For the most part, many of the approximately 200,000 IRR members do not even know they are
in the reserves, or still have a military obligation. Essentially these women and men are
people who have volunteered to serve in the active forces for a period of time, usually four
years, but often, unbeknownst to them, have incurred a military service obligation of eight
years.
The primary reason many of these brave young people are unaware that they have incurred this
eight-year obligation is that military recruiters rarely emphasize this provision for fear of
scaring off the potential recruit. After all, informing an 18-year old woman or man that by
joining the armed forces, for two or four years, means that she or he will incur an obligation,
of almost half their life, can be a deal-breaker for them or their parents.
If the Secretary has to use this authority to call up some of them, it will mean that an
individual who has volunteered to put his or her life on the line, usually fighting the endless
wars in the Middle East, when the vast number of their contemporaries sat out the global war on
terror, now could be forced to disrupt their lives again in order to deal with another threat
to our country.
While it may be too late to stop many of these women and men from being called up
involuntarily at this time, we should use this opportunity to change this unfair policy once
and for all.
From now on, anyone who volunteers to put their life on the line for a fixed number of years
should be given a choice when they complete their agreed upon term of service. They can choose
to join a reserve or guard unit or remain in the IRR. If they select neither of these options,
they should be allowed to opt out of the military for good. If this policy undermines our
security, perhaps we should consider other options like providing a bonus for those willing to
join the IRR, or pay them some form of retainer pay while allowing them access to commissaries
and exchanges.
Lawrence J. Korb is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress
and served as assistant secretary of defense (manpower, reserve affairs, installations, and
logistics) from 1981 through 1985.
"... By mid-March, the administration was promising at least 5 million tests by the end of the month. An independent analysis of totals on 30 March, however, indicate only a million tests have been conducted. That's more than any other country but the US population is roughly 329 million people. ..."
"... "I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead," he said. ..."
"... In January and February, as the viral outbreak devastated Chinese manufacturing and began exacting a high toll in Italy, the president repeatedly downplayed the threat to the US. Following the first few American cases, Trump and other administration officials said the situation was under control and would dissipate in the summer "like a miracle". ..."
"... College students on spring break from classes packed Florida beaches. New York City residents filled subway cars. A church in Louisiana continues to welcome thousands despite pastor Tony Spell being criminally cited for violating an order limiting the size of gatherings. ..."
"... "If I get corona, I get corona," one Florida beachgoer told CBS News in mid-March. "At the end of the day, I'm not going to let it stop me from partying." ..."
"... Universities that sent students home to their families may have contributed to the spread of the virus by returning infected individuals to cities, neighborhoods and homes not yet in full lockdown. ..."
"... The lack of clarity in the president's order to halt entry into the US from Europe - which at first seemed to apply US citizens as well as foreign nationals - led to a crushing crowds at airports where unscreened infected passengers could easily transit the disease to others. ..."
"... Decisions like those may have had dire consequences, hampering efforts to contain the spread of the disease throughout the nation - the public health equivalent of throwing petrol on an already raging fire. ..."
Masks, gloves, gowns and ventilators. Doctors and hospitals across the country, but particularly in
areas hardest hit by the pandemic, are scrambling for items essential to help those stricken by the
virus and protect medical professionals.
The lack of adequate supplies has forced healthcare workers to reuse existing sanitary garb or
create their own makeshift gear. A shortage of ventilators has state officials worried they will soon
be forced into performing medical triage, deciding on the fly who receives the life-sustaining support
- and who doesn't.
Coronavirus: Lack of medical supplies 'a
national shame'
On Tuesday, New York Governor
Andrew Cuomo complained that states, along with the federal government, were competing for equipment,
driving up prices for everyone.
"It's like being on eBay with 50 other states, bidding on a ventilator," he said.
It didn't have to be this way, says Jeffrey Levi, a professor of health policy and management at
George Washington University. The US government failed to adequately maintain the stockpile of
supplies necessary to deal with a pandemic like this - and then moved too slowly when the nature of
the current crisis became apparent.
"We lost many weeks in terms of ramping up the production capacity around personal protection
equipment and never fully utilizing government authority to make sure that production took place," he
says.
Testing delays
According to Professor Levi, ramping up testing at an early date - as done in nations like South
Korea and Singapore - is the key to controlling a viral outbreak like Covid-19. The inability of the
US government to do so was the critical failure from which subsequent complications have cascaded.
"All of pandemic response is dependent on situational awareness - knowing what is going on and
where it is happening," he says.
Without this information, public health officials are essentially flying blind, not knowing where
the next viral hotspot will flare up. Comprehensive testing means infected patients can be identified
and isolated, limiting the need for the kind of sweeping state-wide shelter-in-place orders that have
frozen the US economy and led to millions of unemployed workers.
Levi says the responsibility for this failure lies squarely with the Trump administration, which
disregarded pandemic response plans dating back more than a decade to the George W Bush presidency and
failed to fully staff its public health bureaucracy.
"The political leadership in this administration really doesn't believe in government," Levi says.
"That has really hampered their willingness to harness the resources the federal government had to
respond at a time like this."
The numbers, particularly on testing, bear this out. The initial tests sent in February to just a
handful of US laboratories by the administration were faulty.
By mid-March, the administration was promising at least 5 million tests by the end of the month. An
independent analysis of totals on 30 March, however, indicate only a million tests have been
conducted. That's more than any other country but the US population is roughly 329 million people.
What's more, because of crush of testing that has followed the initial shortages, the labs that
analyse the results have been overwhelmed, leading to delays of a week or more before tested
individuals can learn if they have the virus.
At his press conference on Tuesday afternoon, Donald Trump offered a grim outlook for the nation.
"I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead," he said.
His public health advisers followed that statement up with charts predicting at least 100,000
American deaths from the virus even under the current mitigating efforts.
The president's comments stood in stark contrast to remarks even just a week earlier, when he
expressed hope that the US could begin to reopen businesses by the mid-April Easter holiday.
In January and February, as the viral outbreak devastated Chinese manufacturing and began exacting
a high toll in Italy, the president repeatedly downplayed the threat to the US. Following the first
few American cases, Trump and other administration officials said the situation was under control and
would dissipate in the summer "like a miracle".
Inconsistent messages from the top are a real problem, Professor Levi says. "Pandemic preparedness
is a constantly changing environment, and sometimes your message does change. In this case, however,
you've also had whiplash around messages that are not necessarily reflecting a change in the science
or what's happening on the ground, but instead reflecting political concerns."
The president has also feuded with Democratic state governors, criticising New York's Andrew Cuomo
and belittling Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer on Twitter. He said state leaders needed to be
"appreciative" of the federal government.
College students on spring break from classes packed Florida beaches. New York City residents
filled subway cars. A church in Louisiana continues to welcome thousands despite pastor Tony Spell
being criminally cited for violating an order limiting the size of gatherings.
"The virus, we believe, is politically motivated," Spell told a local television station. "We hold
our religious rights dear, and we are going to assemble no matter what someone says."
Across the country, there have been numerous examples of Americans failing to heed the calls by
public health professionals to avoid close social contact, sometimes abetted by local and state
government officials who have been reluctant to order businesses to shutter and citizens to shelter in
place.
"If I get corona, I get corona," one Florida beachgoer told CBS News in mid-March. "At the end of
the day, I'm not going to let it stop me from partying."
US students on spring break defy COVID-19
warnings
Even steps taken with the best
of intentions might have had adverse consequences. Curtailing public-transportation services, such as
New York's subway, may have led to trains and busses that were more crowded. Universities that sent
students home to their families may have contributed to the spread of the virus by returning infected
individuals to cities, neighborhoods and homes not yet in full lockdown.
The lack of clarity in the president's order to halt entry into the US from Europe - which at first
seemed to apply US citizens as well as foreign nationals - led to a crushing crowds at airports where
unscreened infected passengers could easily transit the disease to others.
Decisions like those may have had dire consequences, hampering efforts to contain the spread of the
disease throughout the nation - the public health equivalent of throwing petrol on an already raging
fire.
The Navy announced it has relieved the captain who sounded the alarm about an outbreak of
COVID-19 aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Capt. Brett Crozier, who commands the Roosevelt, an
aircraft carrier with a crew of nearly 5,000, was relieved of his command Thursday, but he will
keep his rank and remain in the Navy. Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said Crozier was removed
by his decision.
The US military STARTED the virus at Ft Detrick and then spread it to China via the 320
soldiers they sent to Wuhan in Oct,,,,faq the US military, they work for Israel!!
That makes no sense at all considering that now in Palestine,
the Orthodox Jews are the most infected group and also
considering how the colonizing Jews would love to completely
eradicate the Palestinians, they would have introduced the virus
in the Palestinian community to eliminate them
Umm......"will be"?
Good to know they will be ready for today sometime tomorrow. FFS
Time to cut defense spending in 1/2 and use that money to ACTUALLY help America and
Americans
It's about priorities.
Cost of 1 B2 bomber 1+ billion dollars
Cost of 80,000 ventilators 1 billion dollars
Cost of 1 hospital ship/train 100 million dollars
Cost of N95 respirator 1 dollar 80 cent
So far we have used the B2 to bomb Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.
10 hospital ships/trains could be deployed and save countless American lives in
hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, earthquakes, and yes....pandemics.
1 B2 bomber can bomb a village in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosov....etc, with a GDP less than
50k
It'd sure be nice if we could trade in a couple of B2 bombers for 2 dozen hospitals,
80,000 ventilators, or a couple billion N95 respirators right now
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the
final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not
clothed." Dwight D. Eisenhowe
President Trump on Sunday said he wants Americans to stay at home until April 30, abandoning
his hope of opening up businesses by Easter as modeling suggested the U.S. coronavirus death
toll could reach tens of thousands and peak two weeks from now.
He said the White House will release a new strategy for states by Tuesday and hopes to have
the economy on its way to recovery by June 1.
It's a sudden and somber shift for Mr. Trump, who on March 16 said he wanted Americans to
work and learn at home, avoid nonessential travel and use takeout instead of entering
restaurants through March 31.
The United States Surgeon General used twitter to tell the public to NOT use face masks to
protect against the coronavirus because they don't work, they only work for health care
workers. Now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is considering a recommendation
that people wear masks when in public.
In an astounding plea for help, the captain of the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Theodore
Roosevelt has urged top command of the US Navy to take drastic action after more than 100
sailors aboard the ship have been infected with the coronavirus .
More than a week ago it started with a handful of COVID-19 cases, which by the end of the
week spiked to 36, causing the West Pacific-deployed carrier to dock at a naval station at
Guam, ordering infected crew members out of the some 5,000 total into makeshift quarantine
facilities, including a basketball gym hastily transformed for that purpose. The San Francisco
Chronicle has obtained and published excerpts of an unprecedented plea for help written by the
USS Roosevelt's Captain Brett Crozier
to Pentagon leadership :
"This will require a political solution but it is the right thing to do," wrote Capt.
Brett Crozier, a Santa Rosa native, from Guam where his 1,092-foot carrier Theodore Roosevelt
docked following a COVID-19 outbreak. "We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die. If we
do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset -- our
Sailors."
In the letter Capt. Crozier
warned that "Due to a warship's inherent limitations of space... the spread of the diseast
is ongoing and accelerating." The SF Chronicle described that the letter was issued Monday as
the captain fears there will be possible deaths among crew under his command if more resources
aren't immediately allocated.
It is unclear as yet how many of the crew have been quarantined on land at Guam, and how
many still remain aboard the docked carrier. But it appears the ongoing attempts at quarantine
and containment are not going fast enough, with less than necessary resources employed.
Previously General John Hyten, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
said testing of the entire crew is expected to take a week minimum.
Update (1638ET): Ford is responding to pressure from the Trump administration (after Trump
mostly went after rival GM and its CEO Mary Barra) to step up and build medically necessary
equipment, by announcing that under a partnership with GE, it plans to build 15,000 ventilators
over the next 100 days.
The ventilators will be built at a plant in Michigan in cooperation with GE's healthcare
unit. The companies will then build 30,000 per month as needed to treat patients afflicted with
the coronavirus, but hope to finish at least 15,000 over the next 100 days as they're just
starting up, as
Reuters reported.
Ford said the simplified ventilator design, which is licensed by GE Healthcare from
Florida-based Airon Corp and has been cleared by the FDA, can meet the needs of most COVID-19
patients.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a request Saturday night asking
residents of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut to curtail non-essential travel in order to
help limit the spread of the coronavirus.
It delivered the details of what President Donald Trump called a "strong travel advisory"
for the three states.
" to refrain from non-essential domestic travel for 14 days effective immediately," the
Atlanta-based agency said on its website Saturday around 10 p.m. EDT.
It noted, "This Domestic Travel Advisory does not apply to employees of critical
infrastructure industries, including but not limited to trucking, public health professionals,
financial services, and food supply."
The CDC said the governors of the tri-state area "will have full discretion to implement
this Domestic Travel Advisory."
Apparently a low cost ventilator was constructed years ago by direction of the Federal
government. The company was bought out by another company that produced higher costs
ventilators and the project died.
Looks to me like Dr Francis Collins, director of the US National Institute of Health
He is no longer AWOL? You have seen or read a recent interview? For at least a month or
two, it has been Fauci, Fauci, Fauci, and not a hint of his boss Collins. Perhaps Collins has
been too busy handing out guitar picks.
NIH
Record
At the outset of his... presentation..., NIH director Dr. Francis Collins described new
guitar pick-shaped lapel pins ... popping up around NIH and even on Capitol Hill that tout
"Hope at NIH." These arose not only out of Collins' reputation as a musician, but also as
"insignia that we believe in what we are doing," said Collins. "You want to pick NIH and
you want to pick hope," he said, inviting the group to wear the symbols with pride.
Who needs research or effective planning when we've got "Hope at NIH"?
In 2017 he was been busy promoting
Mind/Music/Magic pseudo-science. Maybe he got lost backstage.
"Music and the Mind," on the intersection of music and science. There will be performances,
presentations, and discussions by Dr. Collins, Ms. Fleming, the National Symphony
Orchestra, neuroscientists, music therapists, and others. Some events are free, open to the
public, and will be streamed online
Too bad he is too busy to run his $35 billion agency. Good thing he has Fauci to do it for
him.
So far in one month The USA has less then 200K cases. So in order to have millions cases
exponential growth need to continue unabated. With the measures taken after March 11 it is
unlearn what will be the trajectory of the virus epidemic.
"But it's such a moving target and you could so easily be wrong...what we do know is we have
a serious problem in New York, we have a serious problem in New Orleans and we're going to be
developing serious problems in other areas. Although people like to model it, let's just look
at the data that we have, and not worry about these worst case and best case scenarios."
Dr. Fauci also cautioned the public about how to interpret models:
"There are things called models, and when someone creates a model, they put in various
assumptions. And the model is only as good and as accurate as your assumptions."
"And whenever the modelers come in, they give a worst case scenario and a best case
scenario. Generally, the reality is somewhere in the middle. I've never seen a model of the
diseases that I've dealt with where the worst case scenario actually came out. They always
overshoot."
Dr. Fauci stressed that Trump's hope to reopen the country by Easter will greatly depend on
whether the public complies with the 'shelter in place' recommendations, though he said he
greatly doubts that the US will be able to reopen by next week (Easter is April 12, still a
couple of weeks away)
Yesterday I ventured into Wal-Mart to shop with the other local deplorable people that the elite child molesters, sexual perverts,
and sociopaths out in Hollyweird, NYC and Washington like to look down on.
Wasn't that crowded and I probably noticed about 10 customers "suited and booted" wearing various masks of different shapes
and styles and latex gloves.
Speaking of "suited and booted", shouldn't these people be wearing one of those full body suits and booties over their
shoes as well?
Baltimore's mayor has called on the city's inhabitants to refrain
from killing one another for the time being, asking them not to "clog up" hospital beds as the
coronavirus pandemic spreads far and wide across the country.
"... DONALD TRUMP: Nobody knew there'd be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion. ..."
"... Trump is like the kid who played video games when he should have been doing his homework, then failed miserably on the test and tried to bullshit his way through the essay questions. ..."
"... As you are probably aware, a handful of elected leaders were selling their stock while assuaging the public about the dangers of the pandemic. We've gone from incompetence, to negligence, to outright profiteering. ..."
Last year, the Dept. of Health and Human Services ran a 7 month long exercise code named "Crimson Contagion," a dry run response
to a global pandemic which started in China and expected more than 100 million Americans to become ill.
Trump is like the kid who played video games when he should have been doing his homework, then failed miserably on the test
and tried to bullshit his way through the essay questions.
As you are probably aware, a handful of elected leaders were selling their stock while assuaging the public about the dangers
of the pandemic. We've gone from incompetence, to negligence, to outright profiteering.
dropping bombs and sanctioning free commerce in other countries is the American way of protecting the proceeds of the sociopaths
not such a good way to stop pandemics. Not in my name congress
@QMS
Fifty-six years dumping an untold number of dollars into "keeping us safe" from a foreign invader and the one time it happened,
not any of the resources were worth a damn.
The problem isn't so much that the real threats are unknown, at least not in broad outline form, but they're not "sexy." Not
amenable to what the military and cloak and dagger spy guys are into. And the perpetual USG budgets for the sexy stuff is far
more profitable. And is better suited to hiding all the graft and corruption (and employing the surplus and unskilled labor that
elite universities crank out) that upset ordinary people fearful that some undeserving person would get something for free from
the USG.
supplies, either. Well, given how the govt likely views our soldiers, I guess that's not surprising.
pandemic war games but no money to implement the most basic stockpiles (thermometers, face masks, gloves) that would be
very helpful in containing a virus. The larger serious shortcomings in the US are mostly intractable due to the "best" health
care system that money can buy.
The shortage could also be a matter of the medical bureaucracy at play. A primary driver in
physicians actions is whether or not they will be sued. If they prescribe malaria medication
for covid-19, a use that has not gone through clinical trials and FDA approval, could they be
sued if someone dies? They may expect it to work, which is why they are hoarding for
themselves and their family. But, if someone dies while being treated by ventilator, they
have no exposure because it is currently within medical guidelines.
In contrast, Chinese doctors can and are solving the problem through trial and error. One
doctor tries a medication on a patient and if the patient recovers he can communicate to
other doctors to try the medication. They dont have a system in which an attorney looking for
cash shows up if an already dying patient dies anyway.
This is a big problem for the US that is going to lead to many unnecessary deaths.
so long as we continue to embrace a lockdown strategy, generous relief is key to securing
widespread support for its maintenance. It will become politically impossible to sustain a
government-mandated lockdown where workers are forced to stay at home, absent some income
support to facilitate compliance with that order."
or failing that
Auerback says: "nor is there provision for the self-employed or the millions of
independent contractor workers who have no employee benefits."
But he has just linked to a NY Times piece that says: "Are gig workers, freelancers and
independent contractors covered?
Yes, self-employed people are newly eligible for unemployment benefits.
Benefit amounts will be calculated based on previous income, using a formula from the
Disaster Unemployment Assistance program, according to a congressional aide.
Self-employed workers will also be eligible for the additional $600 weekly benefit
provided by the federal government.
What if I'm a part-time worker who lost my job because of a coronavirus reason, but my
state doesn't cover part-time workers? Am I still eligible?
Yes. Part-time workers are eligible for benefits, but the benefit amount and how long
benefits will last depend on your state. They are also eligible for the additional $600
weekly benefit."
So, Mr. Auerback, which is it? This will be a matter of life or death for millions of
people, including some in my own family, so please do clarify. Thank you!
It appears that it will take longer for the Treasury to cut us checks than it did to
invade Afghanistan. And the Taliban likely did not even have a TIN on file with the IRS.
You can see exactly what the system is optimized for.
"... Put together, they reveal how big a share of the American markets for drugs, medical devices, and protective gear is controlled by goods made overseas. The big takeaway is that the nation could be in big enough trouble if supply disruptions were to occur in normal times (say, due to natural disasters in manufacturing centers abroad). During a high-mortality pandemic like the CCP Virus, these levels of foreign dependency are high enough to guarantee significant numbers of needless deaths. ..."
"... And in fact, the import penetration trends for these products exemplify the nation's health care security weaknesses. In 2002 -- a good baseline, since that's the first year China was a member of the World Trade Organization -- imports overall accounted for 16.7 percent of all surgical appliances and supplies used in the United States (measured by value, not numbers of masks or pairs of gloves). During the first full year of the Great Recession, 2008, this share totaled 28.08 percent. ..."
"... Keeping this qualification in mind, overall, 32.41 percent of surgical appliances and supplies were imported from other countries by 2011, according to these figures. In 2016, that number reached 41.81 percent of a $33.71 billion U.S. market. It may well be higher these days, as between then and last year, U.S. overseas purchases jumped by more than 29 percent. (Interestingly, in light of domestic shortages, U.S. exports in appliances and supplies actually rose by more than 13 percent during this period!) ..."
"... Ventilators, sadly, have been in the news, too; they and related products like oxygen tents and bronchoscopes and inhalators and suction equipment are found in a big goods category called surgical and medical instruments. In 2002, imports from all corners of the world represented 22.04 percent of American consumption. By 2016, this figure stood at 35.91 percent of a $37.5 billion national market, and over the next three years, imports grew nearly 31 percent. (Exports expanded at a relatively slow 11.84 percent.) ..."
"... exclusive U.S. reliance on China for the chemical ingredients of numerous medicines has now become a major federal government concern. ..."
"... The main foreign suppliers to the American pharmaceuticals market as of last year look encouragingly diversified and encouragingly friendly. For example, Ireland was number one, with 22.15 percent of such shipments, followed by Switzerland with 14.05 percent. But third and fourth, with 8.87 percent and 8.39 percent of imports, were Germany and India, respectively, both of which have limited or embargoed their medical exports this year. And number five, at 7.38 percent, was Italy -- whose current CCP Virus devastation could easily bring about export restrictions. ..."
"... Last year, America's leading foreign supplier of surgical and medical instruments (the ventilators category) was Mexico, which sold U.S. customers 28.58 percent of the $17.62 billion of total imports. But export-curber Germany was number three, at 9.43 percent, and China was sixth, at 6.93 percent. ..."
"... Purely domestic policy steps, like mandating more stockpiling or new recycling and re-use strategies, undoubtedly can add to national medical products supplies. But even these general import penetration figures, along with the shortage reports that keep pouring in, make clear that enduring national health care security can't be restored without a major ramping up of domestic output. And since export-heavy economies like China's and Germany's will undoubtedly work overtime to keep their American health care customers -- including with all manner of predatory economic practices -- it's similarly clear that big, lasting U.S. departures from standard free trade policies will be unavoidable. ..."
Not Just China: U.S. Reliance on Foreign Medical Supplies is Staggering
The government's own numbers tell a frightening tale of how this happened, and when.
Virus pandemic having exposed scary domestic shortages of critical medical
goods ranging from safety masks to ventilators, along with potential shortages of
pharmaceuticals, political leaders across the spectrum are finally regretting having allowed so
much output of these products to migrate offshore.
China's role in global supply chains has understandably sparked much of the alarm, since its
government has all but threatened to withhold supplies of medicines whenever it wishes. But all
told, at least 38 countries (including the 27-member European Union) have curbed exports of
anti-pandemic products at some point since the CCP Virus began dominating headlines.
So
potential foreign chokeholds in the nation's health care-related supply chains appear global in
scope. The federal government's best data make clear just how widespread the problem has
become, and how steadily it's been growing.
The figures come from the government's statistics on industry-by-industry manufacturing
output and on exports and imports. (The output data can be accessed through databases created
by the Census Bureau for its Annual Survey of Manufactures that are located at this link . The
trade numbers can be retrieved at an interactive database maintained by the U.S. International
Trade Commission that's located at this link .)
Put together, they reveal how big a share of the American markets for drugs, medical
devices, and protective gear is controlled by goods made overseas. The big takeaway is that the
nation could be in big enough trouble if supply disruptions were to occur in normal times (say,
due to natural disasters in manufacturing centers abroad). During a high-mortality pandemic
like the CCP Virus, these levels of foreign dependency are high enough to guarantee significant
numbers of needless deaths.
These statistics aren't problem-free. Principally, because the manufacturing output figures
are so granular, and therefore take so long to compile, import penetration rates for these (and
other manufactures) can be calculated only through 2016. Yet the more timely import numbers can
provide a reasonable indication of whether vulnerabilities are worsening or shrinking. At the
same time, the government's main trade data aren't nearly as detailed as the production
numbers. As a result, it's not possible to know the percentage of, say, safety masks used in
the United States that are produced abroad. But it's easy to come up with this number for the
category in which masks (and other protective gear) are grouped -- surgical appliances and
supplies.
And in fact, the import penetration trends for these products exemplify the nation's health
care security weaknesses. In 2002 -- a good baseline, since that's the first year China was a
member of the World Trade Organization -- imports overall accounted for 16.7 percent of all
surgical appliances and supplies used in the United States (measured by value, not numbers of
masks or pairs of gloves). During the first full year of the Great Recession, 2008, this share
totaled 28.08 percent.
Notably, these imports from China were a tiny 1.5 percent in 2002, and had actually dropped
to 0.49 percent by 2008. By 2016, they accounted for a seemingly modest 6.54 percent of
American consumption. But here's where another weakness in the data emerges: they say nothing
about the origin of the materials, parts, and components of the final goods.
Keeping this qualification in mind, overall, 32.41 percent of surgical appliances and
supplies were imported from other countries by 2011, according to these figures. In 2016, that
number reached 41.81 percent of a $33.71 billion U.S. market. It may well be higher these days,
as between then and last year, U.S. overseas purchases jumped by more than 29 percent.
(Interestingly, in light of domestic shortages, U.S. exports in appliances and supplies
actually rose by more than 13 percent during this period!)
Ventilators, sadly, have been in the news, too; they and related products like oxygen tents
and bronchoscopes and inhalators and suction equipment are found in a big goods category called
surgical and medical instruments. In 2002, imports from all corners of the world represented
22.04 percent of American consumption. By 2016, this figure stood at 35.91 percent of a $37.5
billion national market, and over the next three years, imports grew nearly 31 percent.
(Exports expanded at a relatively slow 11.84 percent.)
Again, the China figures are small beans -- the import penetration rate for 2016 was a mere
2.35 percent. But these products often contain lots of electronics parts, and half the world's
printed circuit boards, for example, are made in the People's Republic. In other words, lots of
existing global surge capacity throughout the sector is ultimately controlled by Beijing.
Thanks to the work of researchers like the Hastings Center's Rosemary Gibson and independent
journalist Katherine Eban, heavy and sometimes exclusive U.S. reliance on China for the
chemical ingredients of numerous medicines has now become a major federal government concern.
Indeed, the Food and Drug Administration is keeping an especially close eye on the availability
of no fewer than 20 pharmaceutical products that use Chinese raw materials. (Unfortunately, the
FDA won't say what they are, which calls for some Freedom of Information Act requests,
pronto.)
But the import penetration figures make clear that supply disruptions could also originate
elsewhere. Between 2002 and 2016, drugs produced overseas more than doubled their share of
America's consumption (which stood at nearly $200 billion three years ago), from 17.23 percent
to 38.51 percent. As of 2019, moreover, U.S. drugs imports were 20.34 percent higher than in
2016.
The main foreign suppliers to the American pharmaceuticals market as of last year look
encouragingly diversified and encouragingly friendly. For example, Ireland was number one, with
22.15 percent of such shipments, followed by Switzerland with 14.05 percent. But third and
fourth, with 8.87 percent and 8.39 percent of imports, were Germany and India, respectively,
both of which have limited or embargoed their medical exports this year. And number five, at
7.38 percent, was Italy -- whose current CCP Virus devastation could easily bring about export
restrictions.
Nor is this pattern restricted to pharmaceuticals. Last year, America's leading foreign
supplier of surgical and medical instruments (the ventilators category) was Mexico, which sold
U.S. customers 28.58 percent of the $17.62 billion of total imports. But export-curber Germany
was number three, at 9.43 percent, and China was sixth, at 6.93 percent.
For surgical appliances and supplies (the masks and protective gear category), Ireland
topped the 2019 foreign supplier list, selling the United States 24.09 percent of its $18.21
billion of total imports. But China was second, at 15.29 percent, and in third place, at 9.68
percent, stood Malaysia, which banned mask exports on March 20.
Purely domestic policy steps, like mandating more stockpiling or new recycling and re-use
strategies, undoubtedly can add to national medical products supplies. But even these general
import penetration figures, along with the shortage reports that keep pouring in, make clear
that enduring national health care security can't be restored without a major ramping up of
domestic output. And since export-heavy economies like China's and Germany's will undoubtedly
work overtime to keep their American health care customers -- including with all manner of
predatory economic practices -- it's similarly clear that big, lasting U.S. departures from
standard free trade policies will be unavoidable.
Alan Tonelson is the founder of RealityChek, a public policy blog focusing on economics
and national security, and the author of The Race to the Bottom .
Taiwan was screaming out to WHO in early Jan that China had a new emerging epidemic to no
avail.
Posted by: KiwiKris | Mar 26 2020 3:46 utc | 63
_______________________________________________
You've been soaking up the US disinformation campaign against China. This is timetable for
January:
China reported there was a novel virus to the WHO on Jan. 3 -- is that early enough in
January for you?
China shared the full genome sequence to the WHO and the intl community on Jan 7th.
China invited the WHO to send an investigative team to Wuhan on the 10th. The WHO
investigative team had free access to talk to anyone and go anywhere.
That's what transparency looks like.
I await the day when the US govt invites the WHO to investigate and evaluate its virus
response. It's very transparent that would never happen, but do let me indulge this fantasy
of mine.
International and interregional cooperation and information sharing:
From 3 January 2020, information on COVID-19 cases has been reported to WHO daily. Full
genome sequences of the new virus were shared with WHO and the international community
immediately after the pathogen was identified on 7 January. On 10 January, an expert group
involving Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwanese technical experts and a World Health Organization
team was invited to visit Wuhan. A set of nucleic acid primer sand probes for PCR detection
for COVID-19 was released on 21 January.
I'm 26. Coronavirus Sent Me to the Hospital.
I'm 26. I don't have any prior autoimmune or respiratory conditions. I work out six times a
week, and abstain from cigarettes. I thought my role in the current health crisis would be
as an ally to the elderly and compromised. Then, I was hospitalized for Covid-19.
That night I woke up in the middle of the night with chills, vomiting, and shortness of
breath. By Monday, I could barely speak more than a few words without feeling like I was
gasping for air. I couldn't walk to the bathroom without panting as if I'd run a mile. On
Monday evening, I tried to eat, but found I couldn't get enough oxygen while doing so. Any
task that was at all anxiety-producing -- even resetting my MyChart password to communicate
with my doctor -- left me desperate for oxygen.
While I was shocked at the development of my symptoms and my ultimate hospitalization,
the doctors and nurses were not at all surprised. After I was admitted, I was told that
there was a 30-year-old in the next room who was also otherwise healthy, but who had also
experienced serious trouble breathing. The hospital staff told me that more and more
patients my age were showing up at the E.R. I am thankful to my partner for calling the
hospital when my breathing worsened, and to the doctor who insisted we come in. As soon as
I received an oxygen tube, I began to feel slight relief. I was lucky to get to the
hospital early in the crisis, and receive very attentive care.
@NPleezeThe reason younger Americans are dying is because Americans are extremely unhealthy. I
wager all the very sick younger Americans are obese, probably with diabetes, don't exercise,
and eat unhealthy foods, leading to heart and other weaknesses.
Precisely. We have received several reports recently of young people being hospitalised
and some even dying. However, the reports do not specify the condition of those young people.
In places like the US, the youth are very unhealthy so it would not surprising to discover
the youth requiring hospitalisation are obese or drug takers.
Fiona Lowenstein is a writer, producer, and yoga teacher and the founder of the queer
feminist wellness collective, Body Politic.
From her selfie, she also appears to be an Orthodox Jew, though apparently one of those
classic New York breakaway (sorta) types.
Now, did anyone from the Times validate her story? Of course they didn't. They are
desperate for stories like this. My guess is the entire thing is made up. She looks perfectly
well in her few other hospital selfies on her Instagram. You think people like this wouldn't
rig those photos?
PS -- Her Instagram has a number of bikini shots. Guess what that means.
I'm 26. I don't have any prior autoimmune or respiratory conditions. I work out six
times a week, and abstain from cigarettes.
The highly specific listing of non-symptoms suggests that the patient did have other
co-morbidities, such as obesity, diabetes etc. Did he/she smoke weed? Smoke cigarettes in
the past ?
If he/she had been entirely healthy prior to the infection, he could simply have said
so.
@37
Yesterday I went to Home Depot to buy some water tubing for my ice-maker.
I noticed all doors were blocked with a tape, except one with at least 25 people waiting
to get in and a female employee holding a sign "the line starts here".
I ask the lady what was all about and she said because of the virus etc.
I said to her "You must be kidding" and I start going back to my car.
Some old lady from the line waiting to get in she scream to me something about "we protect
ourselves" and similar nonsense.
I turn around and I said to her: Quit watching TV you idiot. They rob your money on broad
daylight and send your kids to die fighting israels enemies.
The overreaction to the virus makes no sense. Is something being hidden from us? The freak
out over this virus – to the tune of $trillions – is all out of proportion.
2.8 million Americans die every year. Why the obsession with this one virus which may kill
in the thousands?
Something is off. But Trump should have known early if there was some other hidden danger.
If there is some hidden suspicion by the people obsessing over this, please share it!
"... In reality very sick people have compromised immune systems and are far more likely to contract all manner of awful diseases. Until a month or so ago, this was a well established medical fact. It seems forgotten now that it might lessen the panic. ..."
According to the
New York
Times (as of Tuesday), 12% of those who tested positive for Corona in the State of New
York were hospitalized. That number is manageable at present. 23% (750) of those hospitalized
in the State of New York were put into an ICU (or CCU). We do not know how many of those are
in NYC hospitals.
Ked, NY is typical of major cities across the US. ICU/vent room run at 80% "occupancy" in normal
years.
IMO, Larry is correct in all he says. Most important being that Cuomo, like the insane
media, WHO and CDC, is whooping up the public by equating testing positive with needing a
vent. In fact, only a small proportion of those testing positive will even stay in a
hospital let alone be on a vent.
Then you need to understand that many of those who will require a vent because of
covid-19 would have required a vent anyhow - meaning absent covid-19 - because they are old
and very sick with other conditions. So that lowers the number of extra vents needed as
well. Caveat being that most covid ICU admissions may have ended up in the ICU on a vent
anyhow, but it would have been spread out over a longer time frame; maybe a year. It's hard
to say because of all the bad reporting coming out of places like Italy where if you had 8
serious comorbidities and you test positive for corona virus and you die, you are counted
as a victim of the new plague (probably if you test positive and get hit by a bus and die,
you're still counted as a covid-19 victim).
In reality very sick people have compromised immune systems and are far more likely
to contract all manner of awful diseases. Until a month or so ago, this was a well
established medical fact. It seems forgotten now that it might lessen the panic.
Does Cuomo have a crystal ball? Magic tea leaves? Perhaps he has developed remote
viewing skills that he has had a terrible, yet certain, vision of ICU demand?
How many nurses, techs and physicians with the right training are in the states'
National Guard units? Maybe they could be mobilized to NYC should Cuomo turn out to be the
Oracle at Delphi and get his vents on top of that. How about the regular military?
I do not like Andrew Cuomo. He is corrupt hack, that should have been set to jail based on
the "Buffalo Billion" grifter scheme (along with his top aide Todd Howe, the SUNY-Tech
president and Cuomo's benefactors).
Having said that, COVID-19 in NYC is doubling every 3 days. Of those who test positive,
15-20% will need hospitalization (half below age 50) and a smaller fraction on ventilators.
There were 25,000+ infections this morning statewide, 15,000 in the city and much of the
non-city state total is in NYC suburbs (my county, Onondaga, has 60 cases this evening). Of
course the hospitals are not overwhelmed... yet.
But do the Math, Larry. If infections continue at the same rate, there are a million in 2
weeks. Even if social distancing and the partial economic shut down slows transmission, there
will still be hundreds of thousands positives and hospital admissions. And it won't die out
until there is "herd immunity".
It bothers me that you can post yesterday about individual deaths being tragedies. Surely
they are -- I have an elderly mom and in-laws, all very vulnerable.
But it isn't it a Stalinist mentality the "One death is a tragedy but a million deaths are
a statistic". Isn't it?
COVID isn't a political problem, it is a public health problem. Unfortunately there isn't
a dime's bit of difference between the two parties in politicizing this very serious matter.
The US will prove to the world that it is utterly incapable of managing this pandemic. We're
#1! USA!USA!
upstater is correct on the math. The CDC failed back in February and allowed infected persons
to continue daily life in a dense metropolis. Cuomo has been briefed on very unsettling
contingencies in the near future, as has Newsom in California.
Upstater, where are you getting that 15%-20% needing hospitalization? I have not seen that
number or any other number anywhere. People without symptoms are not tested, and are therefor
not included in counts of infected persons. Most epidemiologists admit we have no idea how
many actual cases there are, and I have not seen one citation anywhere of percentages
requiring hospitalization. I would very much like to know your source.
Ratios of infections to hospitalizations and need for ventilation are numbers I have been
searching for since this thing began, and I have been shocked by the total lack of that
information.
JJackson, I think you are just wrong about the disease in every aspect of it.
It is causing ICU hospitalizations and deaths among a very few who are elderly and already
quite sick with other conditions. It is not causing morbidity in the young and healthy. The
analysis I've ben waiting for out of Italy confirms what I'm saying.
"Less than 1% of the deceased were healthy persons, i.e. persons without pre-existing
chronic diseases. Only about 30% of the deceased are women.
The Italian Institute of Health moreover distinguishes between those who died from the
coronavirus and those who died with the coronavirus. In many cases it is not yet clear
whether the persons died from the virus or from their pre-existing chronic diseases or from a combination of both"
Many of these people were already going to be in the hospital, in ICU on vents,dying,
etc.
You're double counting, something that the panic mongers have been doing all along.
If you're concerned about morbidity and mortality among the infirm elderly, then there are
ways to isolate them without interfering with life as usual for the rest of us. It's
relatively easy to do.
when one deals with deep uncertainty, both governance and precaution require us to hedge
for the worst. While risk-taking is a business that is left to individuals, collective
safety and systemic risk are the business of the state. Failing that mandate of prudence by
gambling with the lives of citizens is a professional wrongdoing that extends beyond
academic mistake; it is a violation of the ethics of governing.
The obvious policy left now is a lockdown, with overactive testing and contact tracing:
follow the evidence from China and South Korea rather than thousands of error-prone
computer codes. So we have wasted weeks, and ones that matter with a multiplicative
threat.
Some here have said that the economic cost of a lockdown or other measures that severely
impact the economy exceeds the value of the lives saved. But what is that economic cost, in
reality? People putting off buying a house or a car by six months or a year, resulting in an
unrecoverable loss of GDP? But so what? What important difference does that make?
Americans have been conditioned to never go to the hospital. Even being hospitalized can
destroy one's finances, let alone for an extended period and actually receiving
treatment.
Lack of testing and diagnostics means that it is impossible for people to know their own
condition and the severity of it. We have multiple reports of people just dropping dead in
the US.
Finally, we are just slightly behind on the timeline. NYC will be in Italy/Spain's
position very shortly, followed by states like Texas which are doing even less to contain it.
Expect it to be worse here when it is all said and done.
" If indeed they did" . . . is a very crucial phrase. With these digifraudulent
Democratic Primary/Caucus elections, we will never know.
As for those who really did vote for Biden, decades of 24/7 psyops and infops against a
mainstream population without the knowledge or energy to extract information from beyond the
Media Plantation will create that kind of voting pattern.
You need to get a lawyer, anyone on Medicare so admitted would be covered, they'd be some
co-pays, per the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare. If the hospital accepts Medicare you
were covered and should (sadly less) owe less than 1k. No way a hospital lets you in for that
procedure without knowing it's getting paid. By law all they have to do is stabilize your
vitals and throw you out the back door. Very sorry and upset to hear of this.
"The number of idiots everywhere on the Internet proclaiming the following:
1) The virus won't prove to be any more dangerous than ordinary flu..."
Yeah sure, we should have just shut up and believed...
Russia interfered in the election
Russia invaded Crimea
Russia invaded Georgia
Iran is making nuclear bombs
The Skripals were poisoned by Russian agents
Assad is using chemical weapons
Saddam has weapons of mass destruction
"etc, etc., ad nauseum.
I could go on and on. The number of people who just *have to have an opinion* is staggering.
And they'll argue that they're right until the cows come home."
@99 Michael Weddington
"The virus deniers here remind me of the global warming deniers."
Why not holocaust deniers? In fact, since you didn't say holocaust deniers you must be an
antisemite holocaust denier nazi, right? It's not like you two are at CNN's website, you're
in the alternative media, where we actually questions things instead of just having blind
faith.
jackrabbit @33 -- "Coronavirus Drives the U.S. and China Deeper Into Global Power Struggle"
I would rephrase that to "US uses coronavirus to deepen global power struggle against
China"
NYT -- "These officials warn that a fast-growing China, under Mr. Xi's increasingly
authoritarian rule, seeks military, economic and technological domination over the United
States and its allies."
What weasel-speak! Repeating a big enough lie often enough, and you get distracted
citizens to fall in line behind you for when you launch a sneak attack on China. This is
nothing but a case of projection by parties who are themselves seeking to dominate the world,
the better to eat other people's lunches.
| The truth is always less glamorous than the
perception. And the truth about 9/11 is that it was first and foremost a failure of
bureaucracy.
As early as spring 2000, the CIA had learned that two of the future
hijackers had traveled to Malaysia for an al-Qaeda summit. Both men had U.S. visas yet the
information was never acted on. In California, the pair roomed with an undercover FBI agent. In
Oklahoma, one of them was pulled
over for speeding . Mere days before the attacks, they were hunkered down in Laurel,
Maryland, not far from the National Security Agency's headquarters.
They were never stopped, nor were several of the other soon-to-be hijackers who were cited
for traffic violations and raised eyebrows at flight schools, more Rocky and Mugsy than
SPECTRE. After 9/11, a congressional
investigation found that the attacks could have been prevented were it not for FBI and CIA
ineptitude. According to that and subsequent reports, the agencies had failed to share
information with each other, gotten bogged down in turf wars, and lacked outside-the-box
thinking.
They did this because this is how bureaucracies work. The state isn't some enchanted
repository of our national priorities; it's a sprawling network of individuals, who, like the
rest of us, tend to place their own interests before the common good, show reluctance in the
face of innovation, cling to rote procedure even under extraordinary circumstances, abuse their
power. And just as the predictable failures of the security bureaucracy allowed 9/11 to happen,
so too are the predictable failures of the medical bureaucracy enabling the coronavirus to
spread.
Start with the feds' delayed reaction to the virus's outbreak in Washington State. There,
the first case of COVID-19 in America was confirmed all the way back in January, and an
infectious disease expert in Seattle, Dr. Helen Chu, had an idea. According to the New
York Times , her lab had been using nasal swabs to research the flu; were they to
repurpose the tests, they could check for the coronavirus. The team quickly sought the approval
of the CDC, which kicked them over to the FDA. The FDA then denied their request, citing both
privacy concerns over the swab results and the fact that the labs were not certified for
clinical purposes. After weeks of the agency refusing to budge, the team decided to do that
most American of things: ignore the government. They tested for coronavirus and found a
positive. The bureaucrats promptly told the team to stop; they later relented but only in
part.
Those FDA rules may be in place for good reason -- patient privacy must be protected, labs
must be classified correctly -- but such rationales should quickly fall to the floor when an
epidemic is raging. Because they didn't, Chu's team was forced to waste valuable time. And even
those laboratories approved for clinical work were having a tough go of it. They still had to
apply with the feds for emergency approval to develop their own tests, and were being stymied.
"This virus is faster than the FDA," grumbled one researcher to the Times . So are
turtles with polio. It's worth pointing out that all this transpired well after the government
had declared the coronavirus a public health emergency.
The root of the problem seems to be that the bureaucracy underestimated just how widely the
coronavirus would spread. Initial tests were limited to those who had just returned from China.
Warnings from local officials that the virus was proliferating were ignored. The CDC,
meanwhile, developed its own test, but the kits were quickly determined to be faulty and
retracted. Precious weeks slipped by. Had measures been implemented, had people started social
distancing earlier and the infected been identified and quarantined faster, the coronavirus
could have been better contained. Instead the FDA tried to control the process, only to find
that it couldn't. Private labs were brought in too late and struggled to meet demand, forcing
them to ration tests. It wasn't until last week that the FDA started
permitting companies to market tests without federal blessing, though they still must get
the agency's approval within two weeks.
The process remains hamstrung by that most bureaucratic of problems: lack of coordination.
Only whereas prior to 9/11 it was agencies failing to coordinate with each other, now it's the
government failing to coordinate the supply chain. The labs, the medical providers, the supply
manufacturers -- all need to be in harmony in order to develop tests and distribute badly
needed equipment. Instead hospitals warn of
ventilator shortages . Masks are running dangerously low, with Vice President Mike Pence
announcing only last
weekend that the government had at last placed an order for hundreds of millions more. A
run on supplies following the FDA's belated easing of restrictions on private labs caused
shortages,
according to the Wall Street Journal . Tom Rogan at the Washington Examiner
reports that pallets of medical equipment are sitting unused in warehouses because the FDA
hasn't loosened its inspection protocols .
Contrast all this with South Korea, which
streamlined its medical bureaucracy following the MERS outbreak in 2015. There, officials
sounded the alarm in January and
one week later a private lab had developed a test. Today, about
10,000 South Koreans are tested daily , many of them at drive-through diagnosis centers,
compared to just a small fraction of that number in the United States.
Yes, the fish rots from the head down. Donald Trump's complacent reaction to the virus set a
terrible example. His pronouncement that the outbreak was "like a miracle, it will disappear"
now sounds insane. Yet the president can also only reach so far down into the bureaucracy; some
of those gears need to align on their own. And they clearly failed to do so. This also can't be
blamed on a lack of funding, given that Trump's supposed cuts to the medical bureaucracy
never
actually happened . Amid a massive federal budget and trillion-dollar deficits, we're
paying more than enough to expect the government to do better than this.
I know we've convinced ourselves that the country would run better if only the damned
libertarians would get out of the way, but it may be that the real problems are less trite than
that. And one of them is clearly that the government has mummified itself in its own red tape.
This happened despite the bright minds running its departments, human genome pioneer Francis
Collins at the NIH and the oncologist Stephen Hahn at the FDA. So now the bureaucracy is taking
a more deregulatory approach, lifting roadblocks to private labs,
easing restrictions on trucking,
lifting barriers to telehealth. They're about two months too late. Those early weeks were
critical and the feds spent them methodically tripping over their own banana peels.
After 9/11, the nation consoled itself by establishing a new government agency with a fancy
name, the Department of Homeland Security. Anyone who's ever talked to a DHS employee knows the
confusion and bureaucratic jostling that reigned there for years. Instead of doing the same,
once the coronavirus has passed, Congress should take a cue from another post-September 11
authority: the 9/11 Commission. Establish a body to investigate the government's blunders.
Mimic South Korea and clear away the clutter. Because this time the costs of bureaucracy aren't
just abstract notions of productivity and GDP; they're human lives. about the author
Matt Purple is the managing editor of The American Conservative . emailleave a comment
More than 250,000 people are hospitalized for pneumonia annually in the US. The mortality
rate for pneumonia in the US population (all ages) is 15.1 deaths per 100,000.
An estimated 50,000 Americans die of pneumonia annually (137/DAY). 7500 Americans per day die
of all causes.
In Lombardy, the precrisis total ICU capacity was approximately 720 beds (2.9% of total
hospital beds at a total of 74 hospitals); these ICUs usually have 85% to 90% occupancy
during the winter months. The number of intensive care units has dropped by half over the
last 20 years, dropping from the highest to the lowest number of beds per capita in Europe to
around 230 per 100,000 inhabitants (23 , 000 beds in lombardi -700 icu beds) with population
of 10 million
The US has 15% ICU based on total hospital beds and runs at 60-77% capacity depending on
hospital size (higher in winter months)
The United States has 25 ICU beds per 100 000 people (75,000), as compared with 5
-7 per 100 000 in the United Kingdom and Italy
U.S. ventilator capacity exceeds its number of ICU beds, according to data from the
Society of Critical Care Medicine
Tests being used to detect COVID 19 are self validated by the manufacturer. FDA states
they have not review the validation data. There is no reported specificity. A chinese study
showed expanded testing of those with mild symptoms or asymptomatic were false positives.
More testing yields more cases and deaths. Even with influenza only 1% of those who get it
are laboratory tested.
Populations unable to think can not maintain a Democracy and Freedom, and will be doomed
to serfdom. Lock Step will pave the way for the transition.
"... This is specifically about coronavirus testing. In fact, CDC very much screwed up -- its test had a contaminated assay, the negative control, which made it unusable. ..."
By CNN's count, at least 13 states and 13 municipalities in the US have ordered 144,522,931
people to stay home as a result of the pandemic, according to data compiled by CNN using US
Census population estimates.
Update (1324ET): President Trump on Tuesday once again tried to
deny that his administration dropped the ball on the coronavirus response, while saying he
would like to see the country re-open by Easter.
Of course, the CDC's botched handling of the tests has been well-documented, and the fact
that nobody in the administration acting to overule the CDC and start stockpiling tests from
elsewhere might be remembered as one of the administration's biggest screwups in handling the
crisis.
Trump: "We did not screw up."
This is specifically about coronavirus testing. In fact, CDC very much screwed up --
its test had a contaminated assay, the negative control, which made it unusable.
World Health Organization offered us test it had been using in China.
US President Donald Trump has finally given a date for when he would like America to at
least partially reopen after the Covid-19 shutdown: April 12. Otherwise, he argued, the
depression would cause far more deaths than the virus. "I would love to have the country
opened up and just raring to go by Easter," Trump said on Tuesday during a Fox News virtual
town hall.
We have to get our country back to work. Our country wants to go back to work.
This follows his remarks on Monday night at the White House press briefing, when he would
not name a date, but said he was debating loosening the restrictions in the coming weeks in
order to prevent a complete economic collapse of the US.
Anxiety and depression from the economic crisis would cause deaths "in far
greater numbers than we're talking about with regard to the virus," Trump argued.
The US is currently on Day 8 of the government's "15 days to stop the spread "
program, with tens of millions of Americans either working from home or furloughed – some
without pay – to encourage " social distancing."
A $2 trillion financial relief package was proposed by the Senate with the intention of
sending cash payments to Americans to make up for income lost due to the shutdown. It was
blocked by Senate Democrats on Sunday and again on Monday, however, as the House Democrats
sought to push their own proposal, which included a laundry list of policy priorities unrelated
to the pandemic.
On the morning of March 11, US author Kurt Eichenwald tweeted
As I said, @ GOPLeader – and other GOPrs – were told in a political
consultants memo to start using name "Chinese Virus" as part of some stupid political
strategy.
Everyone: Go to McCarthy's twitter feed and ask "How can we trust GOP when you dont even
know the disease's name?
And just as expected, over the next few days government officials and politicians, including
the respected President of the United States, started using the term "Chinese Virus".
This usage is against the new naming convention released by the WHO in 2015.
Dr Keiji Fukuda, Assistant Director-General for Health Security at WHO said in 2015
regarding the new naming convention, "We've seen certain disease names provoke a backlash
against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to
travel, commerce and trade, and trigger needless slaughtering of food animals. This can have
serious consequences for peoples' lives and livelihoods."
Unfortunately, the political strategy has succeeded. Instead of talking about how absolutely
incompetent the US response has been, the talking point has been shifted to Americans fighting
over whether its right to call it Chinese Virus, with one side saying it stigmatises innocent
Asians and instigates hate crime, and the other claiming its a liberal PC agenda.
This, coupled with the spread of fake news regarding how China "covered it up for weeks",
(which I wrote about here )
has successfully diverted anger away from the US government and shifted the blame to China.
For good measure, a short recap of the US's incompetence:
Censorship and misinformation (which Americans claim China is doing)
"- USA classified all discussion related to preparation for the virus;
"- suppression of testing;
"- failure to prepare despite urgent warnings;
"- blaming China for US/West lack of preparation (they have sufficient info);
"- failure to acknowledge and implement treatment;
"- rush of aid to Wall Street and corporations while slow-walking money to ordinary people
(will we ever see that money?).!!"
Jackrabbit@15
It is not clear what you are trying to communicate. But I assume that you are arguing that
"the Crisis is fake."
The 'reasons' that you give are not reasons at all- far from proving that the crisis is fake
they are simply features of the crisis itself.
Far from being fake the crisis is as plain as day. While there may be debate over whether
or not the disease is exaggerated, even falsified and nothing more than another seasonal
virus, the crisis, internationally and locally is obviously real.
And the proof of this is that millions of people are not working or working from home, the
streets are empty in the cities, the healthcare systems are dangerously overstrained, there
is an obvious need to devise food distribution networks and to substitute alternatives for
reliance on the marketplace to make decisions and the invisible hand to govern. And thousands
are dying-which is very real.
All these things are real. Much more real than your irresponsible claim (@33) that
'inexpensive Chloroquine' will treat the problem. You don't know that, just as I don't know
that it won't-though the weight of opinion is against what you advise which might well, in
the unlikely event that anyone takes you seriously, prove to be fatal.
Why is it that I feel like all leaders at Municipal, State, Provincial, Regional, and Federal
levels in whatever country should watch Governor Andrew Cuomo's daily briefings? Why
do I feel it's required viewing for the length of the pandemic? Why is it I feel like all
leaders should cover the pandemic as thoroughly and efficiently as he's covering it? And I'm
not even a big fan of the Cuomos! Only the truth matters to me, not personalities. If he's
doing it right; I don't care who it is!
You probably missed that ALL NYS residents (over 19 million people) have been ordered to
stay home. An unnecessary measure when the virus can be treated effectively.
And if you're sick, you're told to stay home until/unless it worsens, which allows the
virus to progress to the point where treatment with inexpensive Chloroquine is less
effective.
I would point out that China is doing both lockdowns and extreme tracking.
South Korea is doing extreme tracking/testing with no lockdowns.
The US is doing lockdowns with no tracking and "voluntary" testing - it seems most of
the West is also doing lockdowns but without the China/South Korea extreme tracking.
Russia has been very aggressive from the start with extreme tracking but hasn't had any
lockdowns yet.
The economic consequences of lockdowns in the US - I've noted before - are going to be
extreme in the US because of its high cost of living and highly complex, interdependent
economic value chains.
Secondly, China has both high savings rates (albeit skewed by income inequality) as well
as much lower cost of living. Some interesting details TAMU study - including that
Chinese households had more assets in total than US households... in 2010!
"... 1) Pompeo and Grenell reportedly arguing that coronavirus has created window of opportunity for a direct strike on a weak and divided Iran. ..."
"... Deputy Health Minister Alireza Raisian has criticized the #UK for not delivering millions of masks #Iran bought in preparations ahead of #Covid19 outbreak. The London govt. refused to deliver them citing US sanctions! Note that Germany took supplies meant for Switzerland, The US via the Italian Mafia (I suppose) gets masks from Bergamo. etc. ..."
I just think that the US "Intelligence" and most of the US Administration just haven't got it. I suppose when you are waiting
for the "rapture" anything that can add to the chaos is to be included.
1) Pompeo and Grenell reportedly arguing that coronavirus has created window of opportunity for a direct strike on a weak
and divided Iran. They were arguing about the severity of the strike.
2) Deputy Health Minister Alireza Raisian has criticized the #UK for not delivering millions of masks #Iran bought in preparations
ahead of #Covid19 outbreak. The London govt. refused to deliver them citing US sanctions! Note that Germany took supplies
meant for Switzerland, The US via the Italian Mafia (I suppose) gets masks from Bergamo. etc. Wonderful show of
world-wide solidarity.
Pompeo should hold his "rapture" in his hot little hand and .....
Countries can't simply lock down their societies to defeat coronavirus, the World Health
Organization's top emergency expert said on Sunday, adding that public health measures are
needed to avoid a resurgence of the virus later on.
"What we really need to focus on is finding those who are sick, those who have the virus,
and isolate them, find their contacts and isolate them," Mike Ryan said in an interview on the
BBC's Andrew Marr Show.
"The danger right now with the lockdowns ... if we don't put in place the strong public
health measures now, when those movement restrictions and lockdowns are lifted, the danger is
the disease will jump back up."
Much of Europe and the United States have followed China and other Asian countries and
introduced drastic restrictions to fight the new coronavirus, with most workers told to work
from home and schools, bars, pubs and restaurants being closed.
In one extreme, we have Spain and France. This is the timeline of measures for Spain:
On Thursday, 3/12, the President dismissed suggestions that the Spanish authorities had been
underestimating the health threat.
On Friday, they declared the State of Emergency.
On Saturday, measures were taken:
People can't leave home except for key reasons: groceries, work, pharmacy, hospital, bank
or insurance company (extreme justification)
Specific ban on taking kids out for a walk or seeing friends or family (except to take
care of people who need help, but with hygiene and physical distance measures)
All bars and restaurants closed. Only take-home acceptable.
All entertainment closed: sports, movies, museums, municipal celebrations
Weddings can't have guests. Funerals can't have more than a handful of people.
Mass transit remains open
On Monday, land borders were shut.
Some people see this as a great list of measures. Others put their hands up in the air and
cry of despair. This difference is what this article will try to reconcile.
France's timeline of measures is similar, except they took more time to apply them, and they
are more aggressive now. For example, rent, taxes and utilities are suspended for small
businesses.
Those disbursements to wage earners are vital for the social cohesion to remain in place.
I thought Tulsi Gabbard championing that minimum basic income strategy was essential as
well.
I empathies totally with USians that are trapped in the vulgar exploitative nightmare
of the usury in that country . Debt Jubilee for all under $100,000 income would be a
start. But that might create a vulgar backlash as well.
The naked ferocity of capitalism in the USA is truly a fearsome thing.
"... By mid-February, it was clear that certain drugs and anti-virals were effective. It was important to have widespread tests so that these drugs could be administered early, especially to vulnerable populations. Yet weeks later, the West (especially USA) was still unprepared to test. ..."
The real danger was always in the possibility that the healthcare system is overwhelmed.
Then you get large numbers of unnecessary deaths.
So a country needs to flatten the curve. The best way to do that is to close the
schools as soon as community spread is detected. In the West, this should've been done in
early February - it wasn't.
By mid-February, it was clear that certain drugs and anti-virals were effective. It
was important to have widespread tests so that these drugs could be administered early,
especially to vulnerable populations. Yet weeks later, the West (especially USA) was still
unprepared to test.
There didn't need to be a crisis or a panic. But a CRISIS! is something that is
politically useful: to direct hate against China; to provide extraordinary support to
favored interests like Banks and Wall Street and Boeing.
In addition, it seems that USA/Trump was hoping that remdesivir, developed by Gilead
Sciences, would be the (expensive) drug of choice to treat Covid-19.
There is a saying the you fight the war with the army you have, not with the army you want.
Notable quotes:
"... Ok. Let me start by stating that I am not a "staunch" Trump supporter. However, I just really despise the constant visceral negative, hatred towards our Country's President. ..."
"... As I am sure you are aware, it is a tremendously difficult job, especially in today's crisis. I would think it would be better serve of your time and efforts to be constructive and optimistic, and hopeful. Rather than pinpointed every single steps and missteps he makes. He is certainly no perfect - but his goal is the same as all of ours: to defeat this virus in the best manner possible with the resources available. ..."
"... For the entire Trump Presidency it was all about the stock market. So, here we are. ..."
20 hours ago Here is a 1 minute 22 second video timeline of Trump's amazing handling of the coronavirus.
Please play this.
It will take less than two minutes of your time.
One missing key quote is a statement Trump made bragging about having natural talent coupled with a proclamation that he could
have been a scientist instead of president.
More Questions:
And where are the tests? The ventilators?
Who at the CDC or in the administration insisted the US needs to develop its own test instead of using an accurate test the rest
of the world was already using?
What about Trump increasing sanction pressure on Iran in the midst of the biggest global humanitarian crisis since world war II?
And what about Trump's rating his administration's handling of this as "excellent".
Mike "Mish" Shedlock
njbr 20 hrs
The dumb-asses in DC still don't get it. "Top" leaders crowding around a single microphone in a stage no larger than a public
restroom. Working toward a 1 time $1200 check that probably wont be issued/delivered for another couple weeks. What about the weeks
after that--are they going to spend the next couple weeks going around about the next check?? Has the production of ventilators actually
been accelerated-who could tell from what has been said? Why are nurses and doctors in my area asking the public for donations of
PPE at the very beginning of the serious phase? What happens when the doctors and nurses start tipping over? Two partially ready
hospital ships may help in one spot each on the coast, but what about everywhere else? Has anyone even checked on the production
capacity for the maybe helpful malaria medicine--has anyone been directed to begin proactive super-production of this product? On
and on.
DeeDee3
20 hrs
hard to prove deliberate neglect when you eliminate all of the evidence. No testing means "no virus" and sadly supported the hoax
theory.
Another doc died in the city today. ER's are unprotected. what conclusion can we draw from all of this?
Zardoz
20 hrs
Thousands will die because of his incompetence... and his followers will blame the Chinese
egilkinc
20 hrs
There should be a tracker of the number of cases [among medical personnle] in the US along with this
Sechel
20 hrs
Oh my g-d. This is excellent! I think Trump has learned some bad lessons from Goebbels. Repeat the lie and repeat it often and
people will take your version of events. This really serves to correct the record! Good work!
PecuniaNonOlet
20 hrs
And yet there will be an avalanche of Trump supporters defending the idiot. It is truly beyond me.
michiganmoon
20 hrs
Actually, Trump should resign and give the GOP a chance this November.
Had Trump not downplayed this and had tests ready, he could have played on a loop Biden on January 31st saying travel restrictions
from Wuhan were racist and xenophobic.
thesaint0013
20 hrs
Ok. Let me start by stating that I am not a "staunch" Trump supporter. However, I just really despise the constant visceral negative,
hatred towards our Country's President.
As I am sure you are aware, it is a tremendously difficult job, especially in today's crisis.
I would think it would be better serve of your time and efforts to be constructive and optimistic, and hopeful. Rather than pinpointed
every single steps and missteps he makes. He is certainly no perfect - but his goal is the same as all of ours: to defeat this virus
in the best manner possible with the resources available.
To criticize previous tweets, interviews, and depict his flaws and errors
does not help the common goal. The nature of some of the questions posed to him during the press conferences should be a bit more
respectful and again, it doesn't serve any positive outcome to try and "catch" him in a lie, and how he may have said something that
was not factual or false.
Again, he's not perfect and neither are anyone of us. However he is our President and we should support
his and all of our common goal to defeat this virus.
Russell
J 20 hrs
Not making excuses for Trump at all but he/we have people who are specialists and are responsible for being ready at all times
for something like this and are responsible for being on the look out for this. Somebody should have came forward, even as a whistleblower.
I've been aware for about 2 months now.
Thank you WWW.PEAKPROSPERITY.COM, MISH and WWW.ZEROHEDGE.COM
This was an epic failure of Trump, his administration and America in general.
ghoffa
20 hrs
Hi, @MishTalk @Mish
I wanted to sincerely thank you MISH from my whole extended family. I have been reading you since 2007 when Ron Paul removed the
scales from my eyes on the Fed and govt., Jekyll Island book, the "financial markets" (all modern day money changers). Every picture
I see of Fed chairpersons, their eyes look dead black sharks eyes (to quote a famous book which I subscribe, the eyes are the windows
to the soul).
In addition our mob style duolopoly govt and for the most part complicit MSM (all with significant influencing billionaire ownership
to control the news - easily searched). I've learned so much from this blog and the many commentors in this space ( a personal fav
is @Stuki ) . Nothing short of brilliant and reminds me of my fav news source Zerohedge and it's articles and commentors.
A special thanks for pointing us to Chris Martenson (peakprosperity.com) as my wife and I have watched every day his free daily
videos since JAN @24th and our extended family is as prepared as we can be. God help us all with what's coming.
For those who haven't watched it, Dr. Martenson has a great 3 min video on exponential growth on YTube. Search his name and exponential.
It will help you prepare for what our govt knows is coming in enourmous exponential growth in fatalities. Even knowing, it will be
an emotional thing to prepare for. Prepping home supplies is one thing, prepping emotionally is also important per Dr. Martenson.
HCWs be damned.
As this impacts people personally, I expect insider leaks to come from many fronts. We're working with neighbors to get prepared
as we're all on our own now as the money changers (evil) bail out the money changers (evil) amidst a system that is so debt leveraged
it can't likely be bailed out. "everything's a nail and the Fed has a hammer".
Lastly this brings a famous quote to mind as the people rise up against corrupt govt, corp bailouts after stock buy backs, etc.
Let alone the monsters upon monsters creating lab viruses (regardless of the source of this virus), and unregulated GMOs changing
the fabric of life.....
"All it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing". Margaret Mead
G
QE2Infinity
20 hrs
Come on! First off, anyone can be made to look bad by taking snippets out of context and stringing them together. That said, Trump
does tend towards braggadocio. If that is off putting to you, he can be annoying. I much prefer a transparent fool to the more sly
variety that plays the part well while sticking a knife in your back.
But let's be honest here. The president can do very little. The bureaucracy of the government is a jobs program for the less ambitious
and politically inclined. It's staffed with incompetent bureaucrats that show up, surf the web and may get around to an hour or two
of honest work. Public unions guarantee they can't be fired.
Obama converted the CDC into a PC jobs program for lefties, just like he converted NASA into a Muslim outreach program.
May one ask: why is a self proclaimed libertarian screaming for more government action? Wouldn't it be great if one of the outcomes
of this crisis is that local communities became more self reliant and more self sufficient!
Sechel
20 hrs
that's from a website called therecount.com looks interesting.
Greggg
20 hrs
For the entire Trump Presidency it was all about the stock market. So, here we are.
The graphic at the end of the video already looks out of date and shows how rapid the spread has been. For March 2020 it shows
5,002 cases in the US (and counting) but right now I'm seeing 24,137 cases.
So much for "in a couple of days the 15 is going to be down close to zero".
njbr
20 hrs
What can the President do?
Force and organize the production of necessary goods.
Act as impartial hub for the distribution of new and stocked items.
Force/fund the emergency super-production of even possibly helpful items such as the malarial drug.
Turn every possible research dollar onto the research into the disease, it's treatments and vaccines.
Fund and distribute tests. Make a way to track the progress of the disease, as opposed to waiting for regional medical systems
collapse under load.
Activate whatever resources are possible to pre-position and set-up field hospitals now.
Develop uniform best-practices for quarantine and treatment.
Prepare the population for the realistic probability of multiple months of the crisis.
Mish Editor
19 hrs
May one ask: why is a self proclaimed libertarian screaming for more government action? Wouldn't it be great if one of the outcomes
of this crisis is that local communities became more self reliant and more self sufficient!
I said what I would do
I would remove tariffs. I would not have had them in the first place.
I would expect our president to act to increase supplies not insist on Made in America.
I would expect our president to behave like an emphatic human being, not a total moron
Mish
Editor
19 hrs
Trump did not Drain the Swamp. He IS the swamp
Mish Editor
19 hrs
Anyone who still supports this President's actions is a TDS-inflicted fool.
Jim
Bob 19 hrs
I've followed Mish for ~ 12 years online and on the radio for brilliant economic analysis. Lately his work has been undermined
by irrational political opinion. Mish has turned into Krugman. I won't be back.
abend237-04
19 hrs
The Donald is obviously afflicted with the same narcissistic megalomania prerequisite for a successful run at any elective office
above County Coroner, anywhere in this country.
That said, he can apparently read a graph, and he's right: The two drug combination of Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin are working
to treat this damn thing, BUT:
It is, indeed, not a Covid-19 preventative.
If you get it, and you dink around at home too long waiting for improvement, arriving at ICU needing ventilation leaves you with
roughly the odds of Russian roulette of surviving, especially if you're older.
Lacking testing, the only remaining means available to knock the transmission rate down quickly is social distancing/lockdown. But,
enough of that prevention can leave us wishing we were dead anyway.
Unfortunately, all the college kids jamming the bars and beaches is setting the stage for continued exponential growth by hordes
of asymptomatic spreaders.
The march of folly continues.
I like what I'm seeing of Cuomo. He'd be a good guy to have in the room in a serious fight; This qualifies.
DBG8489
19 hrs
As someone who hates all politicians, there is zero love lost between Trump and myself. I had hopes when he was elected that he
would make a difference but it was clear based on how he looked after his private meeting with Obama on inauguration day that he
was in over his head.
Having said that, I will say this:
From at least the "major" state level up, it would appear that not one single elected official or the top advisors and bureaucrats
who work for them have shown anything but complete and utter failure in their handling of this emergency.
You have senators selling off piles of stock while either saying nothing or telling the rest of us that it was bullshit. And trust
me - they were not the only ones. If anyone cares to investigate, they will likely find this problem rampant. Elected officials should
not even be allowed to trade stocks when they control the entire economy - not even through alleged "blind trusts" - it's bullshit.
But that's a conversation for another time.
You have congressional reps and senators blaming each other and/or the other party and passing laws and bailouts without even
reading the bills they are passing.
You have the Treasury and the Fed printing money and throwing it at every hole that opens up without the slightest regard for
what the unintended consequences of those actions may entail.
You have governments of the "major" states (CA, NY, NJ...etc) who know they can't simply print money being exposed using any extra
money they had (along with taxes based on tourism that have now disappeared) to fund God knows what now demanding that everyone else
pony up to pay for their failure to plan...
The lack of leadership in the major states and at the Federal level is abysmal ACROSS THE BOARD.
And that includes members of BOTH parties and nearly every single bureaucratic agency involved.
You can single Trump out if you want, but he's not alone. He's just an easy target because 49% of the population hated him before
this started.
njbr
18 hrs
....Top health officials first learned of the virus's spread in China on January 3, US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex
Azar said Friday. Throughout January and February, intelligence officials' warnings became more and more urgent, according to the
Post -- and by early February, much of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA's intelligence reports were
dedicated to warnings about Covid-19.
All the while, Trump downplayed the virus publicly, telling the public the coronavirus "is very well under control in our country,"
and suggesting warm weather would neutralize the threat the virus poses....
...The administration did begin taking some limited action about a month after Azar says the administration first began receiving
warnings, blocking non-citizens who had been to China in the last two weeks from entering the country on February 3 -- a move public
experts have argued at best bought the US time to ramp up its testing capabilities, which it did not use, and at worst had no beneficial
effects at all.
Trump finally assembled a task force to address the virus, putting Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the effort on February
26, and declared a national emergency on March 13. And, just this week -- nearly three months after first receiving warnings from
his intelligence officials -- the president's public tone about the crisis shifted: "I've always known this is a real -- this is
a pandemic," he said Tuesday as he admitted, "[the virus is] not under control for any place in the world."....
Realist
18 hrs
I have been watching political leaders in my own country get on television daily. They have all done a great job of informing
the public about the dangers of this virus. They have all relied on the experts to relay information to the public about what the
government is doing, and what individuals should be doing. This is true at the national, regional, and local levels.
In addition businesses have been sending out emails, radio announcements and tv messages explaining what they are doing in regard
to this pandemic.
In fact, I am amazed at what a good job everyone is doing.
I am also watching what is happening in the US. Every US state governor and city mayor I have seen on tv has done a wonderful
job of presenting the facts to the public and provided instructions as to what they are doing and what the public should be doing.
Then there is the gong show that is Trump. I could not imagine that anyone could be as bad as he is; months of lies, denials,
suppression of the truth, and a complete and utter lack of preparation for something he was warned about many times. Denying one
day that the virus was a pandemic; only to claim the very next day that he had known it was a pandemic for months; and then the very
next day say that no one could have seen this coming; and finally saying that his response to the virus rates a 10 out of 10.
Worst President ever. Sadly, many, many Americans are going to suffer and die because America had this moron in charge.
Mish keeps referring to worldometer to get stats from. Their numbers seem to match up with numbers I see in my own country and
in the US.
Disturbingly, today, the mortality rate for closed cases ticked up 1% to 12%. 12978 deaths and 94674 recovered. That is not the
direction I expected it to go.
daveyp
17 hrs
You get what you vote for. To have such a malignant narcissist of such profoundly limited intellectual honesty and capacity "leading"
your nation through this is truly tragic for your country. Even the hideously vile ultimate Washington insider Hilary would have
done a better job.
truthseeker
17 hrs
Mish I agree with much of the criticism of Trump, yet had he done everything you and others suggest, there is this implied assumption
that everything would have worked out perfectly. You know I am impressed the way the country seems to be uniting to such a great
degree, that I think there is at least some hope for our country's future though there are huge challenges that lay ahead absolutely!
abend237-04
17 hrs
I will now proceed, once again, to bitch about the root cause of our current pandemic, which is causing many to experience cosmic
scale frustration with The Donald, which I share:
Civilization has now been hit squarely in the head with three killer coronavirus outbreaks in 18 years, yet still has no unified
global new viral antigen detection system. We could have if our world "leaders" would make it happen.
Local supercomputers, however massive, will never crack this nut, but the billions of powerful, web-accessible smartphones could
if linked and used by a parallelized, intelligent scheduler to raise the alarm when a new antibody/pathogen is discovered in human
blood anywhere.
Such a system could have lifted the burden from a lonely doctor struggling to raise the alarm in Wuhan, before Covid-19 killed
him, and placed it squarely in front of disease control experts, worldwide. It can be done; We must do it.
Sars cov-3/4/5/6/7/8/9/n could kill us all if we don't.
But she sees this China-bashing as mostly a political reaction:
In reality these people are rallying behind the campaign to blame China for the health
crisis they're now facing because they understand that otherwise the blame will land
squarely on the shoulders of their president, who's running for re-election this year.
instead of a deliberate Deep-State strategy (which is my view).
We can argue who created the virus (I'm still looking for any rebuttal to the Chinese
claim that USA must be the source because it has all five strains of the virus), but the
Empire's gaming of the virus outbreak seems very clear to me.
U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and
February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and
lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the
spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting.
The intelligence reports didn't predict when the virus might land on U.S. shores or
recommend particular steps that public health officials should take, issues outside the
purview of the intelligence agencies. But they did track the spread of the virus in China,
and later in other countries, and warned that Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing
the severity of the outbreak.
If the spy services were really concerned about the issue why did they not warn the
public? Instead of leaking new idiotic fairytales they could have leaked a warning about the
pandemic. Instead we were given this:
If the intelligence services had taken the pandemic seriously they could have warned the
public via their countless stenographers in the media. Instead they kept the media filled
with false anti-Russian stories and told Trump that the Chinese are lying which they were in
fact not.
Trump of course would have not have believed the intelligence reports anyway. Why would
he? The FBI and CIA have for three years tried to get him impeached. They created Russiagate
based on a fake dossier. They lied to get FISA warrants to spy on his campaign. When
Russiagate finally fell apart the CIA sent a fake 'whistleblower' to launch Ukrainegate. In
Trump's place there is no reason to believe a word of whatever any of the 'intelligence
officials' say.
The intelligence services failed to issue effective warnings. But they were not the only
ones. All institution in 'western' countries and their leaders have lacked in their
preparation for a larger outbreak.
China warned us early on. The WHO was informed in late December. On January 3 the director
of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was informed by his Chinese
colleagues. After China recognized that the new SARS-CoV-2 virus indeed jumped from person to
person it took radical measures to get a grip on the epidemic and those measures have worked
well. China has only 3,255 death in a nation of 1.4 billion people. Today all checkpoints
were removed from Wuhan city and life there is slowly turning back to normal.
Since when did the CIA, the NSA, the DIA and the rest of the much vaunted 17 alphabet-named
intel agencies in the US ever provide much in the way of "intelligence"?
The CIA famously failed to foresee the revolution that felled Iranian shah Mohammed Reza
Pahlavi and the role Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini played in it, in 1979. The CIA also failed
to foresee the downfall of Communist govts in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989
and 1991. Instead the CIA spends US taxpayer millions on brainwashing and torture programs
like MK ULTRA and their like in universities and institutions in the US and Canada (McGill
University) from the 1950s onwards.
The current activities of the CIA and FBI in promoting anti-Russia / anti-China
propaganda and propaganda aimed at destabilising these and other nations that don't bow to
the US are equivalent to a global witch-hunt hysteria. The CIA's patron saint should be
17th-century English self-proclaimed Witchfinder General Matthee Hopkins. Senator Eugene
McCarthy probably wouldn't come close to this fanatic.
I thought it was well known that U.S. intelligence services don't exist to warn the public
about possible dangers from abroad. They exist to create dangers abroad and at home.
"The U.S. intelligence services fear to come under questioning for not raising enough
warning about the novel coronavirus pandemic."
Fear being questioned? U.S. intelligence agencies don't fear being questioned--I thought
this was well-known too. It's going to be harder and harder to write articles from the
perspective of being in favor of the U.S. regime using martial law on us without completely
forgetting what the U.S. regime stands for in the first place.
The Corbett Report released a video today about martial law. In it, he shows us a German
document from 2013, entitled:
"Information from the German government – Report on risk analysis in civil protection
2012"
"In it, frightening similarities with what is currently happening can be seen – in
particular by explicitly mentioning the "SARS coronavirus (CoV)". The scenario presented,
in which the spread, course, duration, mortality etc. are described, goes as far as to make
a drastic restriction of fundamental rights necessary.
The scenario states in this respect:"
"The competent authorities, first of all the public health authorities and primarily the
public health officers, must take measures to prevent communicable diseases. The IfSG
[Infektionsschutzgesetz] allows, among other things, restrictions of basic rights, such as
the right to inviolability of the home. Within the framework of necessary protective
measures, the fundamental right of personal freedom and the freedom of assembly can also be
restricted. In addition to these measures to be ordered directly by the public health
officer, the Federal Ministry of Health can order by statutory order that threatened
sections of the population have to take part in protective vaccinations or other measures
of specific prophylaxis, whereby the right to physical integrity can be restricted".
https://www.globalresearch.ca/coronavirus-new-world-order-something-rotten-state-denmark/5706464
Knowing that b is German, I thought this could be of interest to him;)
"The U.S. intelligence services fear to come under questioning for not raising
enough warning about the novel coronavirus pandemic.
IMO, this is a misreading.
I think a better interpretation is that US media is providing cover for Deep State
officials (including high-level intelligence officials) that gamed the virus response. In
that regard, this is the key phrase:
The intelligence reports didn't predict when the virus might land on U.S. shores or
recommend particular steps that public health officials should take ...
= The intelligence services failed to issue effective warnings."
But we know that they were providing very effective warnings: Senator Richard Burr, who is
Chair of Intel Cmte, WAS getting appropriately dire warnings and acting upon those warnings:
trading stock and telling his closest friends and supporters about the looming pandemic and
the terrible effects it would have.
= "But they were not the only ones. All institution in 'western' countries and their
leaders have lacked in their preparation for a larger outbreak."
Well, we shouldn't over look the fact that the top US health officials are all currently
or formerly military officers:
Head of CDC - Colonel, US Army 1977–1996;
Undersecretary for Health - Admiral, Public Health Service Commissioned Corps;
Surgeon General - Vice Admiral, Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.
I expect that top health officials in other Western countries are also be connected to the
military. These officials "failed us" in the same way that our media "fails
us": they serve the interests of the EMPIRE-FIRST Deep State.
"2. All New Jersey residents shall remain home or at their place of residence
unless they are 1) obtaining goods or services from essential retail businesses, as described in
Paragraph 6; 2) obtaining takeout food or beverages from restaurants, other dining
establishments, or food courts, pursuant to Paragraph 8; 3) seeking medical attention, essential
social services, or assistance from law enforcement or emergency services; 4) visiting family or
other individuals with whom the resident has a close personal relationship, such as those for
whom the individual is a caretaker or romantic partner; 5) reporting to, or performing, their
job; 6) walking, running, operating a wheelchair, or engaging in outdoor activities with
immediate family members, caretakers, household members, or romantic partners while following
best social distancing practices with other individuals, including staying six feet apart; 7)
leaving the home for an educational, religious, or political reason; 8) leaving because of a
reasonable fear for his or her health or safety; or 9) leaving at the direction of law
enforcement or other government agency."
Following a hint from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who suggested during a press conference
earlier this week that Connecticut and New Jersey might follow suit with lockdowns of their
own, NJ Gov. Phil Murphy on Saturday signed an executive order barring citizens from leaving
their homes unless they're part of the "essential" workforce.
The stay-at-home order covers all of the state's 9 million residents, and follows similar
mandates that have been handed down in California, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania.
Murphy insisted that residents practice social distancing when they leave the house to buy
food or pick up medicine, or go to perform 'nonessential' jobs.
"We must flatten the curve and ensure residents are practicing social distancing," New
Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said in announcing the new restrictions. But, he added, "Even with
this order in effect...life in New Jersey does not have to come to a complete
standstill."
He told residents not to panic, but added "we are at war."
Starting at 9 p.m. Saturday, New Jersey residents must stay home and all nonessential
businesses have to close indefinitely. All gatherings including weddings, in-person services
and parties, are canceled until further notice, Murphy said. He added that the rules he laid
out supersede all those set by towns or cities or counties in his state, The governor made the
announcement during his Saturday press conference. "We need you to just stay home," he said,
adding that, as of 12:30 pm, the state had counted 1,327 positive tests and 16 deaths.
Including New Jersey's 9 million people, 86 million Americans are under a China- or
Italy-style lockdown, or something closely approximating that.
U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by
the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the
spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting.
The intelligence reports didn’t predict when the virus might land on U.S. shores or recommend particular steps that public
health officials should take, issues outside the purview of the intelligence agencies. But they did track the spread of the
virus in China, and later in other countries, and warned that Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the
outbreak.
Taken together, the reports and warnings painted an early picture of a virus that showed the characteristics of a
globe-encircling pandemic that could require governments to take swift actions to contain it. But despite that constant flow of
reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans. Lawmakers, too, did not
grapple with the virus in earnest until this month, as officials scrambled to keep citizens in their homes and hospitals braced
for a surge in patients suffering from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
Intelligence agencies “have been warning on this since January,” said a U.S. official who had access to intelligence
reporting that was disseminated to members of Congress and their staffs as well as to officials in the Trump administration, and
who, along with others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive information.
“Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him
to do anything about it,” this official said. “The system was blinking red.”
"... "Congress/staff who dumped stocks after private briefings on impending coronavirus epidemic should be investigated and prosecuted for insider trading," ..."
"... "Members of Congress should not be allowed to own stocks." ..."
"... "stomach churning," ..."
"... "For a public servant it's pretty hard to imagine many things more immoral than doing this," ..."
"... "Richard Burr had critical information that might have helped the people he is sworn to protect. But he hid that information and helped only himself." ..."
"... "If you find out about a nation-threatening pandemic and your first move is to adjust your stock portfolio you should probably not be in a job that serves the public interest," ..."
"... "calling for immediate investigations" ..."
"... "for possible violations of the STOCK Act and insider trading laws." ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
In a rare moment of bipartisanship, commenters from all sides have demanded swift punishment for US
senators who dumped stock after classified Covid-19 briefings. Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has called
for criminal prosecution.
As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr (R-North Carolina) has received daily
briefings on the threat posed by Covid-19 since January. Burr insisted to the public that America was
ready to handle the virus, but sold up to $1.5 million in stocks on February 13, less than a week
before the stock market nosedived, according to Senate
filings
. Immediately before the sale, Burr wrote an
op-ed
assuring Americans that their government is
"better prepared than ever
" to handle
the virus.
After the sale, NPR
reported
that he told a closed-door meeting of North Carolina business leaders that the virus
actually posed a threat
"akin to the 1918 pandemic."
Burr does not dispute the NPR report.
In a tweet on Saturday, former 2020 presidential candidate and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard called for
criminal investigations.
"Congress/staff who dumped stocks after private briefings on impending
coronavirus epidemic should be investigated and prosecuted for insider trading,"
she wrote.
"Members of Congress should not be allowed to own stocks."
Congress/staff who dumped stocks after private briefings on impending
coronavirus epidemic should be investigated & prosecuted for insider trading (the STOCK Act). It
is illegal & abuse of power. Members of Congress should not be allowed to own stocks.
https://t.co/rbVfJxrk3r
Burr was not the only lawmaker on Capitol Hill to take precautions, it was reported. Fellow
Intelligence Committee member Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and her husband sold off more than a
million dollars of shares in a biotech company five days later, while Oklahoma's Jim Inhofe (R) made a
smaller sale around the same time. Both say their sales were routine.
Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Georgia) attended a Senate Health Committee briefing on the outbreak on
January 24. The very same day, she began offloading stock, dropping between $1.2 and $3.1 million in
shares over the following weeks. The companies whose stock she sold included airlines, retail outlets,
and Chinese tech firm Tencent.
She did, however, invest in cloud technology company Oracle, and Citrix, a teleworking company
whose value has increased by nearly a third last week, as social distancing measures forced more and
more Americans to work from home. All of Loeffler's transactions were made with her husband, Jeff
Sprecher, CEO of the New York Stock Exchange.
Meanwhile, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York) and Ilhan Omar (Minnesota) have joined the clamor of
voices demanding punishment. Ocasio-Cortez
described
the sales as
"stomach churning,"
while Omar reached across the aisle to side
with Fox News' Tucker Carlson in calling for Burr's resignation.
"For a public servant it's pretty hard to imagine many things more immoral than doing this,"
Carlson said during a Friday night monolog.
"Richard Burr had critical information that might have
helped the people he is sworn to protect. But he hid that information and helped only himself."
As of Saturday, there are nearly 25,000 cases of Covid-19 in the US, with the death toll heading
towards 300. Now both sides of the political aisle seem united in disgust at the apparent profiteering
of Burr, Loeffler, and Feinstein.
Right-wing news outlet Breitbart
savaged
Burr for voting against the STOCK Act in 2012, a piece of legislation that would have
barred members of Congress from using non-public information to profit on the stock market. At the
same time, a host of Democratic figures - including former presidential candidates
Andrew Yang
and
Kirsten Gillibrand
- weighed in with their own criticism too.
"If you find out about a nation-threatening pandemic and your first move is to adjust your
stock portfolio you should probably not be in a job that serves the public interest,"
Yang
tweeted on Friday.
If you find out about a nation-threatening pandemic and your first move
is to adjust your stock portfolio you should probably not be in a job that serves the public
interest.
Watchdog group Common Cause has filed complaints with the Justice Department, the Securities and
Exchange Commission and the Senate Ethics Committee
"calling for immediate investigations"
of
Burr, Loeffler, Feinstein and Inhofe
"for possible violations of the STOCK Act and insider trading
laws."
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
I would say that Germany's testing is far superior
@Marie
to the US. They test a far larger number of people and don't have the restriction of having to
show symptoms before one can get tested. This gives them a larger base of infected so it shows
a lower ratio for deaths/confirmed. Earlier detection will also greatly improve outcomes. The
slope of their new infections is also starting to flatten - unlike the US where it is getting
steeper with each passing day.
These factors are actually a really, really bad warning sign for the evolution of the virus
outbreak within the US. The US, as a fist world country should not have outcomes like a second
world country.
#7.1
COVID-19 infections, but an incredibly low number of deaths and patients in serious
condition. The numbers may be valid but if so, there's an element of luck in Germany's
favor.
@CB
The only country I've seen that has been releasing daily figures on testing is South Korea
and they've been doing it since their first case on 20 Jan 2020. Update 21
Jan 2021 . First confirmed case in Germany was on 28 Jan.
As of 21 Mar:
Germany: confirmed cases 21,854. (population 83 million)
South Korea: confirmed cases 8,799. (population 51 million) Total tests administered
327,599.
So, SK has better contained the internal spread than Germany and has released more
complete information on the imported cases.
At this time, I'm not going to speculate as to why SK's deaths are so much higher than
Germany's. But do note that if Germany's health care for a virus with no cure is so far
superior to SK's, why are there also so few recoveries in Germany - 180 compared to SK's
2,612.
#7.1.2
to the US. They test a far larger number of people and don't have the restriction of
having to show symptoms before one can get tested. This gives them a larger base of
infected so it shows a lower ratio for deaths/confirmed. Earlier detection will also
greatly improve outcomes. The slope of their new infections is also starting to flatten -
unlike the US where it is getting steeper with each passing day.
These factors are actually a really, really bad warning sign for the evolution of the
virus outbreak within the US. The US, as a fist world country should not have outcomes
like a second world country.
"US has 55 million masks" "we should sanitize and reuse them"
China makes N35 masks at the rate of tens of millions per day. They are shipping millions
to other countries around the world. Sinopec even constructed a brand new factory with 12
production lines from scratch in 10 days to manufacture the PP material over a month ago.
Trump bragging about how prescient he was in handling this pandemic.
Lying about China not telling world what was happening for two to three months
despite WHO reports from early January.
He keeps repeating how he acted very early.
Scapegoating China again. What a fucking lying fuckwit.
Still don't know how many or when test kits will come out.
Blaming all problems on previous administration - inherited the deficiencies.
One reporter catches him out on when he knew about China from his public statement on Jan
24.
Watch the following video. Trump knew about the virus at least by Jan 3 (the day it's
genome was published)
out of the reagents to run the tests. So samples can be collected, but may not be
processed. There will be more cover-ups when this becomes generally known. Attention! Forward
fail!
Here's a video of how China ramped up mask production within days of learning about the
COVID-19 infection.
Someone should have the Trumpeter watch this video. He might discover why masks can't be
cleaned and reused.
who make profits as well. I cannot remember exactly when insider trading for
them became legal but it should be no surprise to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention
that they're ALL doing it. That is one reason, at least in my semi-educated opinion, they did
not go after Trump for emoluments during Shampeachment, because THEY ALL DO IT.
That goes all the way to the White House, no doubt.
...Across the United States, the number of reported cases of coronavirus at nursing homes,
assisted living centers and other elder care centers spiked in recent days, with at least 73
facilities in 22 states now reporting infections, according to a review by The Washington Post
of reports from states, local media reports and nursing home announcements.
As of Friday evening, at least 55 coronavirus deaths occurred among people living in
elder care facilities, though the number is probably higher because official counts often omit
a description of the person's last place of residence . That figure represented more than a
quarter of U.S. deaths then attributed to the pandemic, even though fewer than 1 percent of
Americans live in such facilities.
Police stopped and checked 700,000 citizens between 11 and 17 March, 43,000 of whom were
found to have violated the decree, which also ordered the closing of shops, bars,
restaurants, gyms and swimming pools.
One of the most serious cases happened in Sciacca, Sicily, when a man who had tested
positive for Covid-19 was discovered by police while out shopping, despite the strict order
to self-isolate at home. Prosecutors opened an investigation and accused the man of "aiding
the epidemic". If convicted, he could face up to 12 years in prison.
On 10 March a 30-year-old man was stopped by the police in Turin at 2.30am while
soliciting a sex worker.
Police near Venice pressed charges against a priest because he was officiating at a
funeral. Another priest was reported for the same reason in Torre Annunziata in Campania,
together with relatives of the deceased. Funeral services are banned under the decree.
The prosecutor's office in Aosta, in north-west Italy, opened an investigation against a
man for "aggravated attempt to spread the epidemic" because he had not informed his doctors
of suspected coronavirus symptoms before undergoing plastic surgery on his nose. The man
subsequently tested positive for Covid-19.
To put this in perspective: Italy has a population of 60M - so police stopped more than 1 in
100 people in the whole country!
This is not even at China level lockdown.
What will the US do?
Figures refer to specimens tested. Data is updated at noon Mondays through Fridays. The
current report, published on 16 March 2020, includes only consolidated estimates up until
11 March 2020.
"... We must test every person's temperature at airports and trains and build up drive thru testing capacity. If one does not search for the virus one will not find it. We must test, test, test to track all virus carriers down and to stop the spreading. ..."
"... There must be a mandatory isolation of people who are probably infected but do not show symptoms as well as separate isolation of suspected and detected cases with 'mild' symptoms. ..."
"... Telling a probably infected person to shelter with their family, as is now done in the U.S. and the U.K, will only kill more people. 75%-80% of the cases in China got infected through direct family contact. The family chain must be broken to effectively stop the epidemic. ..."
"... The delay between the shutdown in Wuhan and a fall in new daily cases was 12 days . 10 to 14 days from now we will probably see a drop in the number of new cases in European societies and within the shutdown areas in the U.S. But that is not guaranteed unless the additional measures come into play. ..."
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
"... My fear is, that after 30-40 years of neoliberal indoctrination, no solidarity of social resposibility exists anymore here. ..."
"... Earlier, Tehran called on Washington to lift its economic sanctions as they prevent Iran from adequately responding to the Covid-19 outbreak. Other countries, such as Russia and China, have also urged the US to cancel the sanctions against Iran. ..."
Dr. Carl Juaneau, who is specialized in epidemiology, has pointed me to a page where he collects useful information about the
novel Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2 and the current pandemic it causes.
It is quite good. Make sure that you scroll beyond the long country statistic for additional useful information.
---
Eight days after we wrote
Why We Must Shut Everything Down And Do It Now it finally gets done. European countries have closed their borders and told their
people to hunker down. Major car companies like Volkswagen, Peugeot and Fiat have stopped their production as car sales have slumped
anyway. Airbus shut down two of its production sites to revamp them for better protection of its workers. In the U.S. the Bay Area,
New York, Seattle and other major cities have also basically closed down.
Even Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson has changed his mind. Instead of taking it "on the chin" as he had suggested and letting
many people die until the rest achieves 'herd immunity' Britain will now finally try to stop the spreading epidemic.
Racism is the reason that this is happening so late. China, South Korea and Singapore had already show what needs to be done fo
fight the epidemic and how to do it successfully. But Asian voices do not count in 'white' decision making. The political action
in Europe and the U.S. only started to happen after Italy was hit very hard.
And our governments are still not doing enough.
We must test every person's temperature at airports and trains and build up drive thru testing capacity. If one does not search
for the virus one will not find it. We must test, test, test to track all virus carriers down and to stop the spreading.
There must be a mandatory isolation of people who are probably infected but do not show symptoms as well as separate isolation
of suspected and detected cases with 'mild' symptoms.
Telling a probably infected person to shelter with their family, as is now done in the U.S. and the U.K, will only kill more
people. 75%-80% of the cases in China got infected through direct family contact. The family chain must be broken to effectively
stop the epidemic.
Probably infected persons, i.e. those who had contact with another infected person, should be put under quarantine in sport arenas
or exposition facilities to be supervised by medics.
Contact tracing teams must ask each of them with whom they met over the last days and then check on those persons. This requires
lots of people and resources but China has show that it is doable. Tracing cellphones may be useful to help with this.
Community monitoring may be a viable alternative.
Additional hospital capacity must be build. There must be hospitals exclusively for Covis-19 cases and others for people with
different medical problems.
NYT science and health reporter Donald McNeil, who was in China during the shutdown, explains very well how China has beaten the
epidemic in Wuhan. Please watch this:
Organizing all those measures is exactly what our governments should have done since the end of January. Today they are still
only discussing most of those measures.
Two fundamental strategies are possible: (a) mitigation, which focuses on slowing but not necessarily stopping epidemic spread
– reducing peak healthcare demand while protecting those most at risk of severe disease from infection, and (b) suppression, which
aims to reverse epidemic growth, reducing case numbers to low levels and maintaining that situation indefinitely.
Mitigation was the way Boris Johnson had planned to go because he wanted to achieve 'herd immunity' for all of Britain. That is
something that can only be done through vaccinations. The idea was clearly lunatic. The study says that such a 'mitigation' would
have resulted in "hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems (most notably intensive care units) being overwhelmed many times
over."
That leaves suppression as the only way to go. Cut the epidemic down as much as possible and test, test, test to find each and
every new case. Cutting the epidemic down requires a two months shutdown and all the above listed additional measures.
There was by the way nothing new in Johnson's 'new' Imperial College study. Here is Richard Horten, the editor of the famous medical
journal Lancet , telling it like it is (emphasis added):
It said it took a study from Imperial to understand the likely burden of COVID-19 on the NHS. But read the first paper we published
on COVID-19 on Jan 24. 32% admitted to ITU with 15% mortality. We have wasted 7 weeks. This crisis was entirely preventable.
The morning after the dramatic
change in strategy to COVID-19 by this govt, I can't help but feel angry that it has taken almost two months for politicians and
even "experts" to understand the scale of the danger from SARS-CoV-2. Those dangers were clear from the very beginning.
Chinese clinicians and scientists
-- Chen Wang, George Gao, Chen Zhu, Bin Cao -- did the world a great service by immediately sharing their data, warning the world
that SARS-CoV-2 was a dangerous new virus. I'm appalled to say that western "experts" failed to heed their warnings.
Laura Kuenssberg says (BBC) that,
"The science has changed." This is not true. The science has been the same since January. What has changed is that govt advisors
have at last understood what really took place in China and what is now taking place in Italy. It was there to see .
Even with a shutdown the situation for Britain's National Health Service is likely to become catastrophic. The red line in the
graphic below is the actual critical case capacity the NHS has. There are some 10 critical care beds per 100.000 people. All prediction
variants show that it will be exceed several times. Johnson's 'do nothing' strategy would have required 180 critical care beds per
100,000 people. Even with all measures that will now be taken there will likely be a need for several more critical care beds for
each one that currently exists.
"You may live" and "you must die" decisions will have to be made as there is not enough capacity in place.
Shutting down most public life is now clearly the best thing to do. In Italy, the town of Lodi (green) had the first case, and
locked down on Feb 23. Bergamo (red) waited until March 8. See the difference:
Today ANSA reported that there are now no more free intensive care beds in Bergamo, a city with more than 120,000 inhabitants.
The delay between the shutdown in Wuhan and a fall in new daily cases
was 12 days . 10 to 14 days from now we will probably see a drop in the number of new cases in European societies and within
the shutdown areas in the U.S. But that is not guaranteed unless the additional measures come into play.
The late shutdown decisions by 'western' governments come at a very high price. Many more people will die because the time and
information China gave us to prepare was not used to make the necessary decisions. The late decisions will also increase the time
it will take to fight the epidemic down. They thereby also increased the economic damage all this will cause.
People should ask their governments why they disregarded the information and experience from Asia.
Here in a part of South Western rural France the Gendarmes are out and about stopping people. If you don't have written permission
to be outside your residence, e.g. to go shopping, going to the chemist etc, the fine starts at 35 euro. If you get continually
caught the fine increases to 1.330 Euros. France IS taking the virus seriously, better late than never.
thank you b... the video in the middle is good.. china has done everything they can to help... meanwhile, trump refers to it as
the china virus...
boris the chimp is finally on board... i still can't believe the uk people voted for him.. i think we are
on new ground here and as others have said - things are not going to return to normal any time soon.. this is a bigger event then
9-11 in terms of significance and impact.
China's is a perfect example of how to act. We need to kick all capitalist journalists out of the country, and have the US government
take the lead in all future reporting on the virus. Shut down these comment sections immediately. We can only beat this if we
all think exactly the same.
This is just vile. What a complete psychological meltdown. Pure hysteria. Sieg Heil.
For the life of me I can't imagine why those here who have surrendered to this insanity even pretended to oppose the empire,
the "war on terror", creeping and now galloping totalitarianism...
I'd bet any amount of money that deep down it's not really any physical fears for oneself (let alone for others) that has everyone
losing their minds and shrieking for the government to imprison them all in order to save them, but that it's seeing this worthless
economy of junk tottering.
Well, now you have your own White Helmets/OPCW to worship and obey.
Thank god I still know some people in real life who still retain their humanity and vow to continue living as human beings,
even as so many are, in real time, openly screaming that they want to rush to permanent totalitarianism right this moment.
And over NOTHING even remotely comparable as an evil to the "cure" for which they shriek.
I must admit: I clearly am not able to judge this. Both sides are very convincing to me. And both sides are both extremes. What
side is true? I dont have a fucking clue.
But my personal belief as a (young) old school social democrat always is to give preference to social concerns over economy.
As i am in danger myself with having a chronic lung disease, i surely understand that exposing 100,000s of my fellow compatriots
here in Germany to death (which are expected when correlating the death rate and likely spreading in case of no shutdowns), is
no position to take.
Eugenists like the Algo Saxons may differ.
We will only know for sure in some years. But not taking the measures now would be a gamble with the lives of millions all
over the world.
My fear is, that after 30-40 years of neoliberal indoctrination, no solidarity of social resposibility exists anymore here.
That was different long time ago, but the times where our society would have pulled and stood together are long gone.
Going grocery shopping is totally mad now, no more bread, soap, milk, sugar, grain, canned vegetables.. (and ofc the famous toilet
paper hoarders).
Even flu vacs are out, even for risked demographics like me with lung disease.
The veneer of civilization is already coming off, what will be in 2-3 months??
I expected our economy to crash, our society and the EU to disintegrate. But SO SOON? Even i am suprised.
A much clearer description of the Italian situation.
This was updated on 17th of March,
According to the latest data of the Italian National Health Institute ISS, the average age of the positively-tested deceased
in Italy is currently about 81 years. 10% of the deceased are over 90 years old. 90% of the deceased are over 70 years old.
80% of the deceased had suffered from two or more chronic diseases. 50% of the deceased had suffered from three or more
chronic diseases. The chronic diseases include in particular cardiovascular problems, diabetes, respiratory problems and cancer.
Less than 1% of the deceased were healthy persons, i.e. persons without pre-existing chronic diseases. Only about 25% of
the deceased are women.
....
The doctor also points out the following aspects:
Northern Italy has one of the oldest populations and the worst air quality in Europe , which has already led to an
increased number of respiratory diseases and deaths in the past and is likely an additional risk factor in the current epidemic.
Wouldn't it be simpler and cheaper given the death statistics to isolate the at risk population.
Maybe we could avoid the depression that assuredly will follow your prescribed course of action. A depression that will kill
far more people than this virus if we isolate the olds. I happen to be one of the olds and would rather take the risks attendant
on my strategy then risk my child's future with yours.
Thanks b, for your continuing helpful information.
US Healthcare professionals are in fright. On the previous thread I posted the press release from the Society of Critical Medicine-the
system will be overwhelmed by shortage of specialists and ventilators.
That's not the only shortages I see.
The US leadership have a shortage of basic decency. In this COVID-19 pandemic the US should lift sanctions on Iran: Earlier, Tehran called on Washington to lift its economic sanctions as they prevent Iran from adequately responding to the
Covid-19 outbreak. Other countries, such as Russia and China, have also urged the US to cancel the sanctions against Iran.
LINK
I'm with you on everything you said. I think it is possible that both things are true. We have a raging epidemic that needs
to be addressed by all of humanity working together. I would prefer that be voluntary, but as you stated, we may lack the social
responsibility to make that happen. At the same time, the crisis is being used to usurp freedoms that stand a good chance of being
permanently removed.
Based on the information available, I'm pretty certain that this was created as a bio-weapon. How or who released it, if intentional
or not, is not yet known to us. Sadly, as an American, I'm not discounting that my country created and released it against its
perceived enemy (China, Iran). After all, we know that the use of nuclear weapons to conquer Russia has been and still is acceptable
by the USA as long as our losses were only xx million.
Regardless, for now we have two tasks. 1) To do all we can to protect and treat as many people as possible and especially our
health care workers as outlined by b. 2) To demand that any draconian processes that removed our freedoms are thoroughly and immediately
repealed as soon as the crisis abates. We should be pressing our governments on both of these NOW. If we fail in either of these,
we will have succumbed to the will of the NWO.
I see some good that has come out of this situation so far. First, more people seem to be waking up to the desire to care for
others both in their own community and abroad. Second, the awakening to the corrupt and fragile economic system we have. One that
is once again quick to provide socialism for banks and large corporations and capitalism for everyone else.
Good luck to all. If we work together we can beat this.
b--
Although I would not be surprised to learn that racism (and the Great Game hybrid infowars) do play a role; I think another distinguish
feature is the degree to which corporations and neoliberal actors hold sway over Western governments. Even though Korea, Taiwan,
Singapore and China have powerful business combines, I think there is still a sense of a national industrial strategy (that recognizes
the people as a competitive resource). I had expected and hoped to see Russia under President Putin also recognizing that effective
management of the pandemic, and coming out the other side quickly and with minimal damage, to join China and the other effective
responders, might be seen as a source of immense strategic advantage. Then I saw a Russian football stadium jammed with people,
just 2 days ago. So maybe not.
Did Western governments fail for so long to learn from the Chinese example because of racism or because they wanted the epidemic
to occur?
My household has had the foresight to stock up on a few months' worth of rice and beans. Is that hoarding? Should we be made
to share it? Rice and beans are not exactly luxury.
I do not believe we did vote for Johnson. Several indicators include a doubling of postal votes from 19% in 2017 to 38% in
2019, the suicidal remain stance by Starmer (Trilateral Commission member and next leader of Labour), the media telling us there
would be an 80 seat win 48hrs before the vote and Prime Minister Theresa May telling Corbyn "We will not let you become Prime
Minister"
I still ponder just who We is, and how far We goes...
San Francisco and most Bay Area counties have now ordered a "shelter in place" - it will be a misdemeanor offense to go out without
a good reason (although charges will be "a last resort", whatever that means.)
Well, are the Board of Supervisors going to feed us, too? Because I need to go the store today - assuming there's any food
left in the store. I went to my usual convenience store a block away from me that I usually go to, intending to pick up my usual
lettuce and tomatoes. They're completely out of tomatoes, although they still had lettuce.
This is going to be a problem in a lot less than two weeks. And given that this is likely to continue for at least a month,
maybe three or four... Everyone is assuming these measures will only be for two weeks. Good luck with that...
My dental appointment for next Monday was canceled today, as dentists are closing down. They said they would reschedule in
two weeks. Good luck with that, too...
S It really beggars belief that normally sensible people persist in the nonsense that the current crisis was designed to take
away the liberty of Americans.
Any government that has wanted to do that has simply had to ask them: Americans give away liberties, civil rights, legal safeguards
with a relish. Then they re-elect the politicians who stole those freedoms. This was well established by the time of the Palmer
Raids. In the last century Americans have readily agreed to ban socialists in trade unions, watch while primaries are stolen,
allow the President to arrogate the war making power. And anything else a fascist could ever ask for.
And yet, we are suddenly asked to believe, it has now become necessary to arrange a pandemic in order to persuade people to
sacrifice their rights to cough what they want where they want over whomsoever they might choose; to go to work whether sick or
well, because it is their god given right to spread any diseases that they might have acquired.
So far, all that I have seen from the imperialist governments, which are clearly at a complete loss as to what to do, are the
long overdue imposition of sensible restrictions on potential disease spreaders, that were routinely accepted in Chaucer's fucking
day!
As I have noted before, the current crises are a severe and perhaps terminal embarrassment to the capitalist class, which is
beginning to realise that the ideology that didn't work in the late C18th doesn't work 200 plus years later, simply because it
has been rebranded as neo-liberalism.
Now is the time to be pressing for reform, for the sort of responses that b outlines above and for the complete destruction of
the for profit healthcare system from pharmaceutical manufacturing to the "care home" racket. And all in between.
Then we can get to work on providing a social safety net- a week after the SNAP Food Stamp programme was gutted.
If or when they institute drive through testing coupled with online self diagnosis you will see a mad rush of healthy people rushing
for the test like they did for toilet paper. This is a sociologist and psychologists dream. They will be studying this event in
detail for years.
There was distrust from what was going on in China but I think the US did pay attention to what was going on in Korea and Japan.
So far the affects are minimal and only time will tell if this explodes or recedes.
It is easy to be a keyboard quarterback. Getting resources coordinated in a massive country is quite another story.
Your proposal makes a lot of sense, except for one thing:
We don't really know which strain is going to hit us, here in the US. All five of currently identified strains of the virus
have been reported here, while Iran, where a special one is raging, different from the one in Hubei and extremely deadly by the
looks of it (1/2 of total cases are reported dead; what with part of the government getting ill right at the start, these 3 things
are of course feeding the theory that this is some biological war action by Israel and/or the US, and who can blame the theorizers?)
Be that as it may, the fact that we are not sure if we are to be hit by a very virulent or relatively tame virus -- tame for the
population under-65, that is.
Isolating everybody? Not possible for a multiple-month duration.
Yes, I am also very doubtful 'we' voted for Johnson. As well as the ridiculously high, and conveniently spaced, alleged postal
vote, the unseemly hurry to hold that general election in December and the media's orchestrated campaign against the Labour campaign
now looks even more suspicious given subsequent events. Was the plan to clear the decks of UK politics, with Brexit etc, and make
sure all opposition was completely humiliated and neutralised so that a stooge like Johnson could with a free hand collude in
crashing the financial markets and wrecking the economy so the banks could be bailed out again (as I feel will happen)? All under
the cover of the coronavirus.
It is impossible to convince some people, for many they will never be convinced that this is a pandemic, because they do not want
to know what is happening right now in the overwhelming ICU's in North Italy or Madrid, but probably they end up seeing this in
their cities if their leaders do not take draconian measures.
OK some of them even knowing this epidemic will kill hundred of thousands of fellow countrymen will not change their minds,
but may be some o them have a suprise...you never know with this disasters
The armchair epidemiologists are really something else! They're in the same boat as Jared Kushner and TrumpCo as the following
citation
from this article makes clear (Hat Tip to Pepe Escobar):
"For weeks [Trump] resisted telling Americans to cancel or stay away from large gatherings, reluctant even on Thursday to call
off his own campaign rallies even as he grudgingly acknowledged he would probably have to. Instead it fell to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci,
the government's most famous scientist, to say publicly what the president would not, leading the nation's basketball, hockey,
soccer, and baseball leagues in just 24 hours to suspend play and call off tournaments. Mayors and county executives, hospital
executives, and factory owners received no further direction from the president as he talked about the virus in the Oval Office
on Thursday than they did during his prime-time address to the nation the night before. Beyond travel limits and wash-your-hands
reminders, Mr. Trump has left it to others to set the course in combating the pandemic and has indicated he was in no rush to
take further action."
At first, Trump clearly thought he torpedoed China's economy with his bioweapon attack and there'd be few if any desperate
consequences. Pompeo, Pence, and Trump continued to pile on with ubber-arrogant racism and smears of China, while within their
ideologically addled brains they assumed China would never be able to mount the sort of defense and counter-attack that ensued.
Once again, they were 100% wrong, and the coming blowback one hopes will finally force the Outlaw US Empire to succumb.
In addition to the usual closures and orders to increase hospital capacity, he's also
prohibiting utility providers from turning off power, water, heat etc. for nonpayment.
Today I announced additional actions to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in Maryland. They
may sound extreme, and they will be terribly disruptive, but they are also absolutely
necessary to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Details here: https://t.co/XwwTJot69H
I have ordered the closure of all bars and restaurants in the state, as well as fitness
centers, spas, and theaters, effective at 5:00 p.m. today. The order allows for restaurants
to continue carry-out, drive-thru, and delivery services.
We are marshaling every tool in the arsenal of public health to combat this crisis. I have
issued an omnibus public health order that includes increasing hospital capacity, activating
the Maryland Responds Medical Reserve Corps, & lifting restrictions on healthcare
practitioners.
I am prohibiting utility providers from shutting off any residential customer's service or
charging any residential late fees, and prohibiting Maryland courts from ordering the
eviction of any tenant who can show that their failure to pay rent was the result of
COVID-19.
We are marshaling every tool in the arsenal of public health to combat this crisis. I have
issued an omnibus public health order that includes increasing hospital capacity, activating
the Maryland Responds Medical Reserve Corps, & lifting restrictions on healthcare
practitioners.
Apparently, the reason Trump's comment about the ventilators and respirators
earlier - asking states to try and find their own through their own supply chains, as Trump
said during the press conference - touched such a nerve among the governors is because there's
some kind of nationwide "problem" with supplies, according to Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who
discussed the issue with the Washington
Post.
"There is a problem with supplies and ventilators," Hogan said. "There's not enough
supplies. The states don't have enough. The federal government doesn't have enough. They're not
getting distributed fast enough. And that's a problem for all of us.
Roche, the Swiss drug company that is one of several companies working with the
administration to increase the supply of tests, has started shipping tests to labs across the
US.
ROCHE STARTS SHIPMENTS OF COVID-19 TESTS TO LABS ACROSS U.S.
ROCHE BEGINS SHIPMENTS OF FIRST 400,000 COVID-19 TESTS TO LABS
ROCHE: PLANS TO SHIP AN ADDED 400,000 TESTS PER WEEK
ROCHE: SHIPPING OF INITIAL 400,000 TEST KITS BEGAN MARCH 13
BTW, I have not seen any comments here like this speculative admission that I am about to
make:
I suspect that I have in fact contracted the dreaded corona virus. It has been making the
rounds in my area. For the past week and a half I have been unusually fatigued and in the
last week I have felt strange sensations in my lungs, and even felt out of breath
occasionally. No fever, sore throat or coughs. Definitely something unusual in my lungs.
I am 50 years old, no medical issues and generally in good health. I would have applied
for a test, but around here they stopped testing anybody but the bad cases that get admitted
to the hospital.
Girlfriend has been coughing for two weeks and even had a bit of a fever at the onset.
If this is not simply an ordinary case of flu or cold, I wonder what the exposure route
would have been.
GF works with disabled people and did a shift with a group of children who were snotty and
coughing right before she got her symptoms.
A little over two weeks ago I attended a weekend sports event in Belgium with many people
from Brussels and Paris also in attendance, cities that were early hits in Europe.
A few days later, I picked up my parents in the airport in Amsterdam after their flight
back from Atlanta. The had been touring the US and had been on a cruise ship from San Diego
to Fort Lauderdale, via Panama and the Caribean.
What really struck me this afternoon, was the realization that a little while ago,
somewhere in January, a good friend of ours suddenly fell ill with a double pneumonia. She
recovered with antibiotics, but afterwards it turned out that she now has pulmonary fibrosis
as a result of that epsiode. This transpired while the corona virus was a thing far away over
the horizon. Now I wonder about it.
Anyway, no panic. Taking my vitamins and minerals and brewing soups with lots of ginger
and garlic.
Kind of worried about my stepdad who is coughing a lot. He says it's just a cold.
Hmmm...
Dude, I don't give a rat's ass about Donald Trump or any other American political
leader.
Democrat and Republican. They are all scum. All of them.
But the German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, foreign minister Heiko Maas, and the
German Health Ministry are treating this American takeover threat as real:
"At a news conference on Sunday, interior minister Horst Seehofer was asked to confirm
the attempts to court the German company. 'I can only say that I have heard several times
today from government officials today that this is the case, and we will be discussing it in
the crisis committee tomorrow,' he said."
U.S. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer will propose legislation totaling at least $750
billion to combat the coronavirus outbreak and help the economy, his office said in a statement
on Monday. He will present the package as early as Tuesday, the statement said.
The plan would be in addition to an $8.3 billion aid plan that Congress has already passed,
as well as a multi-billion-dollar package the House approved last week, the statement said.
Schumer's plan would include money to address hospital capacity issues, expand unemployment
insurance, increase Medicaid funding, and provide immediate payment forbearance on federal
loans, the statement said. Democrats are a minority in the U.S. Senate.
Shows that had China locked down Wuhan just one day earlier, there could have been 40%
fewer cases to treat or 32,000 cases. This is the reality of exponential spread.
It also arrives at a correlation of 800 current true infections for each death. So Italy
likely has over 1M true infections, as opposed to the 24,000 "confirmed "cases reported
today.
"... His administration, it was argued, or facets of it, including the president himself, had willfully ignored the worst, tail-end risks of the international proliferation of the Coronavirus disease, COVID-19 or Wuhan flu, as stated in more off-color corners, including the Republican leadership. ..."
"... America is a week away from following the example of Italy, now on national lockdown, it's argued. The subtext: a lapse into genuine Third Worldism can not be ruled out, a coming catharsis for years of national breakdown, as well as the outlaw nature of the Trump presidency. ..."
"... Added into the dissatisfaction, in some quarters, is the discordance, ongoing even five years into Trump's national, political career, between Trump on the stump and the more polished parlances of the presidency. ..."
"... For every American concerned that the United States' response is lethargic and embarrassing, and more so than it might have been a generation ago, there's a rival perspective skeptical of an elite class that brought the country the Y2K pandemonium and the Iraq war. ..."
"... Under Trump the CDC has cut its budget for pandemic preparedness by 80% (in 2018) and Bolton oversaw the termination of the heads of pandemic response. I think we can safely assume that these measures weakened the response to the threat (that and Trump's baffling nonchalance when he could have been preparing cannot logically have failed to cost lives as potential carriers went about their day-to-day lives. ..."
"... Finally, he's unable to twist, outrun or scapegoat his way out of reality. Reaping what he is (and sows)... should've tried something a little more diplomatic with China than a punitive trade war... ..."
"... Unfortunately the COVID-19 crisis is showing that Trump really has no real leadership abilities but is only a reactionary. ..."
"... He's not "facing his fiercest trial". He's running away from it. The first thing he did was pass the buck to Pence, who handed it off to a bunch of incompetent political appointees at CDC, who botched it because they were corrupt mediocrities, totally out of their depth, and trying to do whatever they thought would keep Trump happy and maybe enrich some of their own cronies. ..."
"... There will be endless pallets of cash, billions, even trillions. It will be floating all over the place, totally untraceable, like in Afghanistan or Iraq. By the time this virus is finished with us, not only will Wall Street and the New York banks be bailed out again, but screw-ups like Seema Verma and other hacks hired by Trump and Pence will be multimillionaires. You just watch. ..."
"... Aside from the facts that no President has ever been as filthy mouthed, crude and insulting, bum Trump iis actually one of the FI's- a term I think I made up, but whatever- Trump is one of the 'Functioning Insane.' I'm telling you all: this guy, along with Vice President Pence, Jared Kushner and Pompeo and Esper at 'defense,' should be removed because they are mentally socio-pathic. They don't value human life. They're gonna lead this nation to misery that would be truly tragic. Appoint a commission from the Congresses and remove these weirdos now! ..."
he United States government, America's economic infrastructure and the country's character
are being stress-tested. So is the American president.
Let's not be bashful: President Donald Trump addressed the nation Wednesday, a rare salvo
from the Resolute Desk, against a backdrop of belligerent criticism. His administration, it
was argued, or facets of it, including the president himself, had willfully ignored the worst,
tail-end risks of the international proliferation of the Coronavirus disease, COVID-19 or Wuhan
flu, as stated in more off-color corners, including the Republican leadership.
America is a week away from following the example of Italy, now on national lockdown,
it's argued. The subtext: a lapse into genuine Third Worldism can not be ruled out, a coming
catharsis for years of national breakdown, as well as the outlaw nature of the Trump
presidency.
If the president's goal was to put these anxious criticisms at abeyance, he failed Wednesday
night, perhaps through no fault of his own as fewer Americans actually watch these addresses
anymore, relying instead on a clique of viral tastemakers. But his address was marred by
factual slip-ups. Not all travel from Europe, namely by U.S. citizens, is suspended, for
instance, and the government is, apparently, only, at current, willing to pick up the tab for
Corona co-pays, not the entirety of the treatments. Trump also failed to bat down paranoid
speculation that he, himself, is sick.
Added into the dissatisfaction, in some quarters, is the discordance, ongoing even five
years into Trump's national, political career, between Trump on the stump and the more polished
parlances of the presidency.
Formal addresses aren't really his bag. Trump looks like he's in a straight jacket. Which is
quite the manacle for a politician for whom body language -- gesticulation -- is so
central.
He did better Thursday morning.
Even as the market weathered its worst morning since Black Monday, the ruinous '87 crash,
Trump swapped the last night's diminishing digs for a more flattering, extemporaneous
environment. Astride Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, goofily, amidst the crisis, still on hand
for St. Patrick's Day, Trump said, referring to the Europe ban: "It's also possible we could
end it early." Trump noted: "It was an important thing to do." He appeared irked, but, perhaps,
at ease.
And in an intentionally divisive remark, love it or hate it, Trump said: "Well, I think, the
Democrats won't be having rallies." He continued: "But nobody showed up to their rallies
anyways."
For now, America waits. The Corona crisis cuts, deep, both ways.
For every American concerned that the United States' response is lethargic and
embarrassing, and more so than it might have been a generation ago, there's a rival perspective
skeptical of an elite class that brought the country the Y2K pandemonium and the Iraq
war.
Most every observer concedes the tail-end risks, but such trenchant skepticism, some might
say nihilism, seems to define the spirit of this outsiders' administration.
Hard questions will be asked when the dust clears, hopefully, by summer.
Why were American supply chains so, completely vulnerable to the turmoil emanating from a
mafia state such as China? Why was John Bolton, as national security advisor, allowed to take
such a narrow view of
national security that he shuttered a special bureau dedicated to pandemics?
I think he'll go down as one of the worst and most hated presidents in history. Some of
those who will hate him most will be people who voted for him, people like me, people he
betrayed by working for Wall Street and foreign interests instead of putting America First.
Two weeks ago I heard someone float the idea that there are those hoping this is a pandemic
that wipes out millions just so we can finally nail Trump. I wouldn't doubt there are a few
radical crazies who would wish such a thing. Now, as I'm hearing more and more come out and
say this is proof Trump is wrong about everything, that this is sure to spiral us into
recession and that will end the Trump presidency for sure, I'm starting to think it's not
just a few crazies. When politics becomes the all defining everything, I suppose that's
what you get.
"When politics becomes the all defining everything, I suppose that's what you get."
This applies to people on both the left and right.
In my opinion, the long war against Christianity (not only on the left, but some
powerful forces on the right) and the decrease in believers has led to a lot of people
replacing the transcendent with politics. And, some in-betweeners who have blended
Christianity with politics into a blasphemous, toxic cocktail.
So if Hillary Clinton had been elected president, governed as badly as you feared, and then
made a colossal mistake that hurt millions of Americans, you wouldn't be relieved on some
level that at least the one silver lining was that she was going to get kicked out of
office? Being glad for the potential end of something that you see as truly disasterous and
bad for the entire country is just natural, regardless of the reasons.
It never dawned on me to. First, I would make sure the harm was a direct result, and not
just partisan punditry. Second, if she really did make such a mistake that led to the
suffering of millions, of course I would want her to pay. But please, think on this. Last
night we had to calm our ten year old down who was crying in bed. Why? Because this time,
he said, we might all die. This time?, I asked. Yes, because at his age, most of his aware
life he has heard 'Trump and Korea Nukes! We're going to die, everyone to a major target!
Trump, and Russia, he's destroying our nation's democracy! Trump and WWIII, he started
WWIII! We're going to Die! And on and on and on. Right now, teen suicide is at its all time
highest, and for the first time ever, suicide is one of the leading cause of death for
children my youngest's age. For the last going on four years, he and his age group have
been exposed to one catastrophic crisis that will surely kill us all after another. And
last night, it finally got to him.
I remember in school when Reagan was elected. Conventional wisdom was that he would
either destroy our economy, or his war mongering ways would provoke the USSR into a full
nuke war and the end of humanity. They even made a hyped TV movie about it.
That had quite
an impact on my generation. And that was then. I can't imagine what the thrice daily alarm
bells of hysterics and panic that have been used against Trump by his opposition (on both
sides of the aisle) have done to the young ones of our nation. But last night, I got a
pretty good idea. If this does finally work to defeat Trump, I hope the collateral damage
is worth it.
The pre-Gorbachev Soviet leadership certainly bought into the hysteria about Reagan. They
apparently thought he was crazy and would launch a first strike nuclear war.
We all did. That's what got me interested in politics. By the time 1984 and 85 rolled
around, it was obvious that Reagan wasn't 1) going to destroy America's economy and, more
importantly 2) wasn't going to nuke the world. How could so many intelligent people be so
wrong I wondered. That's when I began learning the art of political speech. My opponent
never disagrees with me on the best way to reduce crime. My opponent wants criminals to
escape and kill my family. Things haven't changed much in 30 years.
My husband and I raised a child who was too well aware of world events. I understand your
concern as a parent. There's not much you can do to prevent your child from reading and
hearing what is being said out there - on all sides.
We focused on a stable home life, focusing on school and work around the farm. His greatest
fear - this was before we could legally marry - was that something would happen and our
family would be torn apart. Lots of time spent reviewing contracts and protections with our
lawyer helped on the rational level, but emotionally - it hurt him, badly. Probably one
reason he is, today, a lawyer who works as a public defender.
However - to address your Hillary concerns: We have seen how other advanced countries
deal with health care. We have dispositive evidence that you conservatives did disband
exactly those teams and those offices of the government which were set up to provide rapid
responses to exactly this sort of health crises. We know you conservatives fought health
insurance and sick leave and every other means of breaking that awful exponential curve
from the day Trump took office. So, yes, we have direct cause and effect. Goodness, you
knew about this in December (the briefings given to the White House are now public record,
you can't pretend anymore they weren't) and you wasted all of December and all of January
and all of February.
How much more direct need it get?
You spent the eight years of the Obama presidency making the most outrageous claims about
FEMA death camps and a return to open racism I had thought we'd not see in the USA
again.
Of course commentators are going to speculate on the damage this failure to protect the
American people will do to the Trump re-election, and the sycophants in the Republican
Party. That does not mean anyone wants to see people die.
I, a yellow-dog, would gladly trade another four years of Trump for the lives of those
already lost to this virus and those yet to come. And I am as far to the Left as any
Democrat and have as much anger at the fundagelical Christians as any gay man of my age for
what they did to us during the Aids Holocaust. You're not going to find any large group of
people on the left wishing death and destruction on our fellow citizens just to get rid of
Trump.
Now, asking our fellows on the Left to please set aside purity testing for once and to get
out and vote. That's where you'll find our energies focused.
Who? Me? I never bought into those. And I condemned those who railed against Obama because
of racism. I also railed against those who exploited or encouraged racism and used racism
for political expediency. As for the virus, we'll have to see. Again and again, take
precautions, err on the side of too much caution. But as each and every medical expert
says, stop the panic. And that includes exploiting this, like racism of old, for political
gain.
I'm sure some do. Why not? We have no problem saying some want war in the Middle East just
for oil. Or that some want this or that policy that could hurt or kill minorities because
racism. I'm often taken by the ease with which we will ascribe the most horrible desires
and motives, and then turn on a dime and act shocked when the same principle is applied to
a different group of people. I don't believe the majority do. Though you can't help but
wonder when you hear people smack down any good or positive news and want to emphasize only
the worst case scenarios. Especially when, for the last three years, this is only the
latest case where, largely due to Trump, we're on the brink, we're going to die, and that's
that.
Before that, Obama was creating death panels and the government was creating concentration
camps and stockpiling bullets... this time, though, it's a bit different. There have been
major blunders by Trump but he's managed to push past them. The virus won't be browbeaten
and its cold science to look at the numbers seen elsewhere in the world and draw the
conclusion that this will be most severe, and that Trump's wilful unpreparedness will
contribute to it.
Under Trump the CDC has cut its budget for pandemic preparedness by 80% (in 2018) and
Bolton oversaw the termination of the heads of pandemic response. I think we can safely
assume that these measures weakened the response to the threat (that and Trump's baffling
nonchalance when he could have been preparing cannot logically have failed to cost lives as
potential carriers went about their day-to-day lives.
And I didn't care for such hysterics then, either. The only difference is that when such
over the top hysterics were aimed at Obama, much of the mass media swung in to defend Obama
and attack and marginalize those trying to whip people into frenzies. For the last three
years, however, it's been those same media outlets leading the panic and latest doomsday
sky is falling shout fests. If people are being to slow to take this seriously, it might
just be a little of the old Boy Who Cried Wolf.
OK, I read all that you have said. I lived through the end of WW11, the Korean war, the red
scare( drinking water being poisoned by flouride) hot cold war( getting under desks) the
polio epidemic( touch one's chin to your chest test) the measles, the Cuban crisis, the
Vietnam war, the 68 riots, the killing of students at Kent State, the drug epidemic of the
60's, all of the financial melt downs for the last 70 years, the gas shortages, aids, all
of the middle east wars, all of the stock market crashes, 9-11, the sex revolution, the
civil rights assassinations, segregation, terrorism both foreign and domestic, and too many
other threats to remember. Frankly there have been a few years patched together when life
was generally without one crisis or another. Mostly when I was younger but only because I
didn't understand much about the fact that life is just so messy. My family would be
considered lower middle class alway pinching pennies. I thought we were just like everyone
else though. I do recall being very afraid about epidemics, nuclear war, commies under
every rock and so on. Through all of these things we persisted not because we were
unusually strong but rather because that's just what you do. We had good leaders, not so
good leaders, government was good in most ways not so much in other ways. The American
dream was met by most of my generation , thus there are fewer mountains to climb. Now world
wide data tells us that those measures of progress have improved in ways unimaginable in my
youth of the 40's. Without a question Trump is the worst human being ever to be elected to
the Presidency. Sure there were other deeply compromised leaders, but their private lives
were not on display. This time it is different. The unprecedented lies, the unprecedented
malfeasance permitted to languish, the unprecedented unqualified Presidential appointments
and the like surely makes it seem that we are , this time going down the tubes. I do not
share that view. We will get by, your children should not be scarred for life, you and they
will soldier on, a vaccine will be formulated, the economy will regroup with sound
businesses surving, God fearing people will go to church, schools will continue to muddle
along with some new educational theory implemented. So buck up, remain vigilant, raise your
children to be strong, take it one day at a time. I could go on about the life of my 102
year old father who was born in 1918 during the Spanish flu outbreak that took his life
mother's life. Oh yes , WW11, the great depression of 1929, the dust bowl, and everything
since. He still sees the news. But he is now worried about one thing. Global climate change
brought on by the world's use of fossil fuel. I share the old man's concern. I have
recounted all these things to help put today's problems in perspective. But If we do not
address climate issues, then nothing else much matters to my great grandchildren, and your
grandchildren. As my dad told me yesterday, " good luck and God speed ".
Good for you; I think the response to Obama's 'death panels' etc was probably defensive
because it was clearly entirely based on fever-dreams. Whereas Trump is actually saying
these things. And while there have been some doomsday predictions, this one is the real
thing and the administration response has been not just unproductive (when it could have
been manufacturing ventilators) but counter-productive (rejecting WHO testing kits, making
clear that more tests meant more cases and more cases weren't welcome, telling the nation
Trump had a hunch things wouldn't be bad) and before that, cutting pandemic response
budgets by 80% and getting rid of the team responsible for pandemic response. The latter
two are typically Republican (removing redundancy from government is fairly central to the
platform) but a wrong belief being shared doesn't make it any less wrong.
You have FOX News. You have all the fundagelical churches.
Trump just award the Medal of Freedom to a man who is telling people the COVID 19 virus is
just another cold bug.
I'm just not seeing us liberals and progressives say that the want people to die to be rid
of Trump.
I do agree that we on the Left are deeply concerned about the things Trump has done (and
failed to do.) Global climate change is seen by us as an existential threat.
Of course not. But think of how we assume with ease that any and all criticism of Obama was
likely racism. Think of the speed with which we'll say any involvement in the Middle East
is only because of oil and greed. That's what's called having the institutions that make
the social narrative on your side. I have no doubt there were those who only cared about
oil or didn't like Obama because of racism. But it's absurd to think such foul motives
exist only one on political side. No doubt there are those hoping for a full blown
catastrophe, no matter the cost, in order to beat Obama, just as they hoped for (if not
encouraged) a collapse and ruin in our response to 9/11 in order to make Bush look bad.
Heck, they began yelling Recession for almost three years before it hit in 2008. I doubt
all of it was motivated by pure concern. I have no problem believing that any group has its
worst elements. But right now, my concern is those who are pushing this past the panic that
everyone is warning against, and it's not just liberal opponents of Trump.
I follow quite a few liberal and progressive sites (and TAC, because it's good to be
reminded that there are still some, if only few, sane conservatives left).
The only places I'm seeing such calls are re-posted comments from the far-right, hoping to
incite anger and revenge against us thar libruls.
Nobody on the Left wants a tanked economy, much less people dying just to end the worst
Republican presidency of the twenty-first century.
On a practical level, the only people now left clinging to Trump are the sort who not only
deny global climate change, but believe supply-side economics will solve everything and
COVID 19 causes nothing but a mild cold.
Everyone else is seriously thinking about what to do in November this year. When you've
lost even Dreher, you've lost it. Gay bashing and domination over women will just have to
take a back seat to rebuilding what will be left of our country.
Finally, he's unable to twist, outrun or scapegoat his way out of reality. Reaping what he
is (and sows)... should've tried something a little more diplomatic with China than a
punitive trade war...
Unfortunately the COVID-19 crisis is showing that Trump really has no real leadership
abilities but is only a reactionary. If he was a real leader instead of pretending that
banning Europeans was going to protect the US, which is highly doubtful, he had urged all
schools and universities to close immediately for the next 2-4 weeks as it is increasingly
recognized that healthy children and young adults can be infected with COVID-19 but not
show any symptoms and are therefore a major cause of the spread of COVID-19, in part
because of their personal hygiene practices being less fastidious than adults. Real leaders
make hard choices that are not always popular. Trump seems so lacking in leadership
abilities that he doesn't even seem to recognize the hard choices he has to make if he
really wants to protect Americans.
Y2K pandemonium? Whatever. Coders worked hard to iron out the date glitches before they
caused problems. Planes falling out of the sky was never a real possibility.
As for this...
Why were American supply chains so, completely vulnerable to the turmoil emanating from a
mafia state such as China? Why was John Bolton, as national security advisor, allowed to
take such a narrow view of national security that he shuttered a special bureau dedicated
to pandemics?
That's what happens when you mix corporate greed and Republican-controlled governments.
Both Bush and Trump hired Bolton.
Even if COVID-19 proves to be a "hoax" or just a damp squib, we have now seen with our own
eyes how Trump will react to a real crisis, not just in Puerto Rico but right here.
Suffice it to say, that this evidence does not give us any reason for confidence in our
intrepid leader.
He's not "facing his fiercest trial". He's running away from it. The first thing he did was
pass the buck to Pence, who handed it off to a bunch of incompetent political appointees at
CDC, who botched it because they were corrupt mediocrities, totally out of their depth, and
trying to do whatever they thought would keep Trump happy and maybe enrich some of their
own cronies.
"corrupt mediocrities, totally out of their depth, and trying to do
whatever they thought would keep Trump happy and maybe enrich some of
their own cronies."
Don't say that like it's past tense, "Mid Maryland". It's about to happen. There will be
endless pallets of cash, billions, even trillions. It will be floating all over the place,
totally untraceable, like in Afghanistan or Iraq. By the time this virus is finished with
us, not only will Wall Street and the New York banks be bailed out again, but screw-ups
like Seema Verma and other hacks hired by Trump and Pence will be multimillionaires. You
just watch.
Aside from the facts that no President has ever been as filthy mouthed, crude and
insulting, bum Trump iis actually one of the FI's- a term I think I made up, but whatever-
Trump is one of the 'Functioning Insane.'
I'm telling you all:
this guy, along with Vice President Pence, Jared Kushner and Pompeo and Esper at 'defense,'
should be removed because they are mentally socio-pathic.
They don't value human life.
They're gonna lead this nation to misery that would be truly tragic.
Appoint a commission from the Congresses and remove these weirdos now!
Then new people will be be at the next election for President.
And, I'll say: ever since I came to America when I was seven years old, I'm truly watching
a horror show between big mouth Trump's solving nothing anywhere, just actually...making
everything worse.
By the way, it doesn't bother anyone that Trump's daughter and Kushner, her husband are
deciding wars and so on for America? For America's troops and their families? That Pence is
a strange weirdo 'end of times' extremist religious nut?
I'm thinking now that every other American is an FI.
Trump already flunked "his fiercest trial". He wasted two months denying the reality and
gravity of the threat, and now it's spreading all over the country.
The "trial" is over. Trump is finished. Hopefully the cowardly Republican senators up for
election this year will be kicked out along with the man they voted to acquit. I say this
as someone who voted for Trump with misgivings but also a lot of hope, goodwill, and
prayers. Now I just pray that we will be spared any more consequences of electing him.
"... False and contradictory statements, wrong judgments, bad decisions, a tour-de-force of managerial incompetence ... Trump's virus response has helped to spread the disease. ..."
"... It was never "under control". It isn't under control because of Trump's stupidity and incompetence, and the stupidity and incompetence of the people he hires. ..."
"... Trump has blown many opportunities, but this time he may end up blowing up his chances for reelection, and a lot else, besides. ..."
"... As much as I loathe HRC, I think her administration would have handled this virus situation much better. Believe me, I hate to say it, but I think it's true. ..."
"... In grudging fairness to the casino swindler, this is what comes of a half-century right-wing campaign to gut public services of all kinds, and to paint scientists (as well as intellectuals generally) as an enemy. ..."
"... Now we find that American public health machinery -- perhaps **the** most fundamental function of governance -- can't even competently put together 19th-Century level quarantine measures. This is where 40 years of Reaganism was always going to end up. Same with Trump, who, far from being some kind of Russian puppet, has always been the perfect representative of what the Republican Party truly is . ..."
"... Budget cuts to the CDC budget only became an issue with the advent of the coronavirus. In November, the status of this virus may well determine the outcome of the elections. ..."
The president has repeatedly paired false promises of "control" with inadequate or wrongheaded measures that have contributed
to the worsening of the situation. Last week's announcement of a 30-day ban on travel from some parts of Europe not only caused a
panic among Americans because the president failed to describe the policy correctly, but it also set up a dangerous situation where
returning Americans would face a huge bottleneck at major airports where customs officials were completely unprepared for the influx
of travelers. The lack of resources and manpower combined with the lack of safety preparations meant that thousands upon thousands
of people, some of them infected with the virus, were crushed together for many hours. If the goal had been to enable the spread
of the virus to as many people as possible, one could hardly have designed it better.
Cheryl Benard
recounts her experience at Dulles International Airport as she returned from Europe:
I had thought I was lucky to get one of the last seats home. And I was confident, because Dulles had been identified by the
administration as one of the handful of U.S. airports equipped to test arriving passengers and admit or quarantine them accordingly,
that I would find a rigorous protocol in place upon arrival. Obviously, the administration would not take such a momentous step
without solid preparation.
I could not have been more wrong. Upon landing, I spent three hours in a jammed immigration hall trying to decide which analogy
fit better: the ignorant Middle Ages during the plague years or the most chaotic airport in the least developed country [bold
mine-DL].
The pictures you may have seen only begin to capture the chaos. There was no attempt to enable social distancing; we were packed
closely together. Two giant queues of people -- one for U.S. citizens and green-card holders and one for foreign nationals --
wound their way through the cavernous hall. I counted and came up with approximately 450 people in each section, for a total of
just under a thousand. Many were coughing, sneezing and looking unwell.
When I inched closer to the front, I could see that a scant six immigration desks were in service. Two additional desks to
the left had less traffic. These are ordinarily for people in wheelchairs; now, the wheelchairs were mixed in with the rest. When
I asked a security guard about the other lines, he told me they were for people with a confirmed corona diagnosis. There was no
separation for this group -- no plastic sheets, not even a bit of distance. When your line snaked to the left, you were inches
away from the infected [bold mine-DL].
The mess at Dulles was replicated at O'Hare, DFW, JFK, and elsewhere. There were no preparations made because this administration
never prepares for anything and doesn't think more than one move ahead. Jeremy Konyndyk was understandably appalled by the latest
in a series of debacles:
This is disastrous. Sign of hastily made, poorly planned, terribly executed policy.
https://t.co/IoQ0auLrms
-- Jeremy FLATTEN THE CURVE Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk)
March 15, 2020
Other airports too. Good God. You could hardly invent a better scenario for superspreading events.
Any cases of COVID in these crowds will have a far higher chance of spreading to others in these lines than if they were just
allowed in unchecked. https://t.co/VONae40vHU
-- Jeremy FLATTEN THE CURVE Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk)
March 15, 2020
Meanwhile, one of the things that the government might be doing to get the situation more under control is one of the things that
they keep failing to do:
The US population is estimated at 333 million.
As of Friday afternoon, the @TheAtlantic
could verify only 16,471 people have been tested.
When asked about the testing failure last week, the president infamously
said , "I don't take responsibility
at all." When pressed on the 2018 decision to eliminate the global health security team from the National Security Council that Trump
approved on Bolton's recommendation, the president professed ignorance about it and said that "someone else" had done it. As always,
Trump's own actions are someone else's fault, and he accepts no responsibility for anything while seeking to take all the credit
for other people's work. The president will keep lying to the public that everything is under control while doing as little as possible
to bring the outbreak under control.
In the midst of this ongoing failure, the Surgeon General berated the media for covering the administration's major failures:
The surgeon general just said from WH briefing podium, "no more finger-pointing or criticism" and called for "less stories
looking at what happened in the past.
Criticism and calling attention to mistakes made by the government are the things that are supposed to make our political system
better able to adapt and learn from failure. Understanding how and why government officials made critical errors is essential to
limiting the damage from those errors and, if possible, rectifying them. Telling journalists that they should write fewer stories
about how things got to this point is to tell them that they should give up any pretense of being reporters and just resign themselves
to stenography. If not for the finger-pointing and criticism directed against the administration's slow and inadequate response,
it is likely that things would already be even worse than they are. Were it not for the very public embarrassment that extensive
media overage of the government's mistakes has caused the president and his allies, the administration would have felt no pressure
to change. As it is, the administration is still not moving quickly enough, but if they weren't being pushed by intense public scrutiny
they would be even more behind than they are.
False and contradictory statements, wrong judgments, bad decisions, a tour-de-force of managerial incompetence ... Trump's virus
response has helped to spread the disease.
It was never "under control". It isn't under control because of Trump's stupidity and
incompetence, and the stupidity and incompetence of the people he hires.
It is truly rich that Trump had a golden opportunity to look decisive and presidential, to lead a frightened public to safety,
and in an election year, no less.
A golden opportunity, and Trump blew it.
Trump has blown many opportunities, but this time he may end up blowing up his chances for reelection, and a lot else, besides.
As much as I loathe HRC, I think her administration would have handled this virus situation much better. Believe me, I hate
to say it, but I think it's true.
I must agree. Hillary would not have done much of what I, a liberal Democrat, wanted to see done. Her administration, however,
would have been filled with intelligent, competent people and the plans already in place (thank you, President Obama!) would have
been put into practice in December, when our monitors in China reported what was happening without the spin.
In grudging fairness to the casino swindler, this is what comes of a half-century right-wing campaign to gut public services of
all kinds, and to paint scientists (as well as intellectuals generally) as an enemy.
America has had a hand in.many genuine triumphs of public health over the last century. Yellow fever. Hookworm eradication.
Polio. Lots more. Things you'd think Americans might be proud of. But right-wingers and chest-thumping "patriot" types never seem
to give a damn about those *cultural* achievements. Not "moral" or "patriotic" enough. Doesn't get the blood pumping, apparently.
Now we find that American public health machinery -- perhaps **the** most fundamental function of governance -- can't even
competently put together 19th-Century level quarantine measures. This is where 40 years of Reaganism was always going to end up.
Same with Trump, who, far from being some kind of Russian puppet, has always been the perfect representative of what the Republican
Party truly is .
(More precisely, the right-wing coalition it represents. The Republican Party per se seems to be a kind of administrative husk.)
In grudging fairness to the casino swindler, we should remember that a lot of the readers of this web site voted for Trump in
2016 because he promised to nominate conservative candidates to Federal courts and because he was opposed to abortion. These same
voters helped give Republicans a majority in both the House and Senate for the following two years. Budget cuts to the CDC budget
only became an issue with the advent of the coronavirus. In November, the status of this virus may well determine the outcome
of the elections.
a lot of the readers of this web site voted for Trump in 2016 because he promised to nominate conservative candidates to Federal
courts and because he was opposed to abortion.
Yes. And those Federalist Society-spawned judges will be a valuable asset to corporate boards all around the world,
for years to come! Congrats to those readers, on their big score! But I hope they're not dumb enough to believe that they
are getting a cut of the asset stripping....
Budget cuts to the CDC budget only became an issue with the advent of the coronavirus.
Right. Similarly, the cuts to the fire department budget only became an issue during, you know, fires , when it turned
out that the hoses were full of leaks. An awkward discovery at an awkward time, no?
There is great danger in making a pact with the Devil - and that is precisely what conservative Christians did by putting Trump
in office.
The danger lies not in Satan breaching the terms of the agreement. Just the opposite. The conservative Christians got what they
wanted - judges who will do their damnedest to turn this country into a conservative Christian theocracy. Satan delivered to the
letter.
Unfortunately for the conservative Christians, the mechanism of delivery turned out to be Trump. The price for those judges
is the debasement of the Christian faith for generations to come.
Well played, Satan. Well fooled, conservative Christians.
Pacta sunt servanda...and the bill has just come do. Oh, and I wouldn't count on those judges for too long, either. You have managed
the unthinkable - uniting the Democratic Party.
Agreed, but let's not forget how deeply the Democratic Party bought into the neo-liberal, Reaganite consensus, including privatization
and contracting out hollowing out public agencies and ceding competence and self-policing to the private sector
True, but really theirs are mostly sins of omission and timidity. They're lousy defenders and advocates for public interests,
but they generally don't go wrecking working, useful institutions on ignorant whims.
Classy Trump and the US, trying to buy a German company working on Coronavirus vaccine, but to make it available only for the
US. The German government was not amused:
I love how these gangsters are making my country loathed throughout the world. Gratuitously. I've yet to hear the Trump
cult explain how it can possibly be to **our** advantage, in any situation, to be liked less and disliked more. It's a stunted
eight-year old's concept of "respect". The millisecond high of showing them pesky furriners tends to have lingering, unpleasant,
expensive aftereffects.
"'The American regime has committed an extremely unfriendly act,' said Social Democrat MP Karl Lauterbach, who said that German
health workers on the front lines — as well as people around the world — needed to have access to something developed in Germany,
and that no country should be able to purchase exclusive access to the vaccine."
Until 2001, Lauterbach was a member of Germany's Christian Democratic Union. When's the last time you saw a mainstream European
politician refer to the American government as a "regime?"
"... "I think Americans should be prepared that they are going to have to hunker down significantly more than we as a country are doing," Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on NBC's "Meet the Press." ..."
"... people in areas with "obvious community spread" need to be extremely cautious. All people everywhere still need to be practicing social distancing, including young people who think they're not a high risk for severe infection. ..."
"... "I'm not saying the rest of the country is okay...but if you are in an area where there is clear community spread you want' to be very, very, very cautious." ..."
"... Pressed about the response on "Face the Nation", Dr. Fauci said the "peak" of the outbreak in the US will hopefully be lower than the numbers seen in Italy. "I want to be overreacting," Dr. Fauci said. He added that the US is practicing travel bans and containment and mitigation in the country, and while "it is correct that case numbers will go up" he hopes that the US will never get to that "really bad peak". ..."
"... "If you're elderly...you shouldn't put yourself in a place where you're around crowded people." ..."
"... It may come to the situation that we "strongly recommend...myself personally I wouldn't go to a restaurant because I have an important job to do" Dr. Fauci said. But he didn't say whether all Americans should avoid going out, or if he would support blanket closures. ..."
"... we have a strategic national stockpile of ventilators and things like that. ..."
"... As far as how long it will take for the US to "rev up" testing, he said his understanding of where we are with the "companies who are getting involved" is that we will have "enough" tests in a few days, and that the number will only continue to go up. ..."
Dr. Anthony Fauci has just performed a legendary feet for politicos and public servants in
Washington: On Sunday, he appeared on all five of the major national "Sunday Shows" of the main
news networks: ABC's "This Week", CNN's "State of the Union", CBS's "Face the Nation", NBC's
"Meet the Press" and Fox News's "Fox News Sunday", cementing his role as the face of the
federal response to the coronavirus outbreak that has emptied out super markets and stoked
panic across the US, where nearly 60 have already died.
Overall, his tone was optimistic, but cautious. During his appearance on CNN, Fauci
acknowledged that "it's possible" that "millions could die" from the virus if the US didn't act
quickly to combat the outbreak. During his interview on "Meet the Press," Dr. Fauci said he
would "open" to a 14-day shutdown of schools and businesses in the US. He also said that
Americans should be prepared to "hunker down" for a while.
"I think Americans should be prepared that they are going to have to hunker down
significantly more than we as a country are doing," Anthony Fauci, director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
He told Chuck Todd that all Americans need to be cautious, but people in areas with "obvious
community spread" need to be extremely cautious. All people everywhere still need to be
practicing social distancing, including young people who think they're not a high risk for
severe infection.
"I'm not saying the rest of the country is okay...but if you are in an area where there is
clear community spread you want' to be very, very, very cautious."
Though he said we shouldn't close every school in the country right now, he said local
officials need to remain "ahead of the curve", and even said he would be in favor of some kind
of national shut down, if not for 14 days, but for as "long as we could."
"I would prefer as much as we possibly we could. I think we should be very aggressive and
make a point of overreacting."
On "Fox News Sunday", Dr. Fauci was asked whether he would support a domestic travel ban. He
replied that though it hasn't been seriously considered, he would be open to a domestic travel
ban like what Italy did, and that such a national lockdown wouldn't be "out of the
question."
"That has not been seriously considered - doing travel bans in the country - though we are
keeping a lot of things in mind," Dr. Fauci said, before ending the interview.
While certain members of Congress were encouraging Americans to go out and live their lives,
Dr. Fauci said Americans should avoid bars and restaurants.
"I would like to see a dramatic diminution of the personal interaction that we see in
restaurants and in bars."
He added that any elective surgeries should be cancelled: "Anybody who doesn't need to be in
the hospitals...keep them out of the hospitals" he said on "Meet the Press".
Pressed about the response on "Face the Nation", Dr. Fauci said the "peak" of the outbreak
in the US will hopefully be lower than the numbers seen in Italy. "I want to be overreacting,"
Dr. Fauci said. He added that the US is practicing travel bans and containment and mitigation
in the country, and while "it is correct that case numbers will go up" he hopes that the US
will never get to that "really bad peak".
While the mortality rate in China looked to be about 3%, a number that is "quite high", Dr.
Fauci noted, he hoped the rate in the US would be around 1%, which is still 10x greater than
the flu's 0.1%.
"Overwhelmingly more people recover from this than have serious trouble," Dr. Fauci
said.
Should Americans get on a plane right now? Fauci was asked on "Face the Nation".
Dr. Fauci said vulnerable Americans should avoid all travel and avoid public places whenever
possible.
"If you're elderly...you shouldn't put yourself in a place where you're around crowded
people."
It may come to the situation that we "strongly recommend...myself personally I wouldn't go
to a restaurant because I have an important job to do" Dr. Fauci said. But he didn't say
whether all Americans should avoid going out, or if he would support blanket closures.
Asked what's the plan if hospitals get overwhelmed, Dr. Fauci assured his interviewer that
the government's efforts should prevent this from happening, though he couldn't rule out the
possibility that this would happen...and plan for it.
"We're doing everything we can to make sure that worst case scenario will happen. It's
possible they could be...but if in fact there's a scenario that's very severe, it's
conceivable that would happen, which is why we have a strategic national stockpile of
ventilators and things like that.
"We would not be being realistic if we weren't to say that possibility didn't exist...but
there is planning to prevent that."
As far as how long it will take for the US to "rev up" testing, he said his understanding of
where we are with the "companies who are getting involved" is that we will have "enough" tests
in a few days, and that the number will only continue to go up.
If you think about it, NYC enornment with its high density of population, subway and
recirculating airconditioners is not that different from the environment of the cruise ship like
Daemon princess. So around 10% of population can be affected. That's over one million. assuming
15% of severe cases that 150K patients.
1. FULL RESPONSE
2. MASS MOBILIZATION
3. POLITICAL DETERMINATION
4. TIMELY POLICY ADJUSTMENT
5. EASING ECONOMIC PAIN WHILE FIGHTING DISEASE
6. TRANSPARENCY, COORDINATED ACTION
7. POWER OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY
China is a civilization state making the West look highly immature.
So yes, connect the dots. Why is Italy worse than the US - when the US trades far more?
Because the US sees it as a war about economic supremacy? The US has no problem trading with
China. The problem starts when China trades with other countries. The US is waging a war
against european countries by forcing them to sanction on Russia (while itself trading with
Russia), sabotaging Nord Stream 2, and now we have this mishap in Italy which happens to
trade with China. Connect the dots indeed.
Here is a table showing the "doubling time" of the spread of the virus for various
countries. https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
Italy's doubling time is 4 days, which brought its health care system near to collapse. Note
that the US doubling time is 3 days! And this may be an underestimate because testing has
been hindered, and many case are undetected. The doubling time for China is an impressive 32
days.
It was a somber Donald Trump who spoke at the White House today to declare a "national emergency" and that "we're doing a great
job." Gone was his language about exaggerated fears and a "hoax" surrounding the coronavirus. His own daughter, Ivanka, stayed home
rather than visit the White House because of her exposure to an Australian official who has the coronavirus.
Not only was the shift in tone marked, but Trump also referred constantly to the numerous public health experts and corporate
CEOs flanking him as he faced the biggest crisis of his presidency. Dr. Anthony Fauci indicated that the coronavirus may remain virulent
for another eight to nine weeks: "I can't give you a number. It depends how successful we are." Trump himself sought to convey confidence
by emphasizing that his administration had moved quickly to impede the spread of the coronavirus, including quickly ordering travel
bans. How effective will his emergency declaration prove?
The most important thing that the administration can do is work to remove the uncertainty surrounding the extent of the spread
of the virus. Until there is more clarity, economic activity will be hobbled as investors and businesses retreat from incurring any
additional risk. In this regard, Trump's decision to announce an emergency was a case of better late than never. Failure is not an
option. Left unchecked, the worst-case estimates are that the coronavirus could kill up to 1.5 million people and turn America into
Italy writ large. Writing in the Washington Post today, the Italian journalist Monica Maggioni underscores just how grim that prospect
would be: "I find myself confined in a place where time is suspended. All the shops are closed, except for groceries and pharmacies.
All the bars and restaurants are shuttered. Every tiny sign of life has disappeared. The streets are totally empty; it is forbidden
even to take a walk unless you carry a document that explains to authorities why you have left your house. The lockdown that began
here in Lombardy now extends to the entire country."
Some of the most important pledges Trump made were that he would offer up to $50 billion in federal funding to states to battle
the coronavirus. He indicated that hospitals can now "do as they want. They could do as they have to." He added, "I'm urging every
state to set up emergency operations centers effective immediately." He indicated, in response to a question after his opening statement,
that he himself would undergo a coronavirus test, something that he had previously resisted. Trump also said that up to five million
tests would be available by the end of the month-a lofty goal. The danger for Trump is that, as is his wont, he is overpromising.
Still, the move to establish drive-thru testing at places like Walgreens and Walmart parking lots makes good sense. Trump's weakest
moment by far came when he responded to a question about the lack of testing that until now has badly hampered efforts to stop the
virus-"No, I don't take responsibility at all."
To help prop up the economy, he indicated that government purchases for the strategic reserve would be increased. Wall Street
responded positively to Trump's remarks as the stock market rose, ending up almost two thousand points on Friday. But Trump also
pooh-poohed a multi-billion dollar bill backed by House Democrats to address the coronavirus crisis, remarking that they "are not
doing what's right for the country." Among other things, it does not include the payroll tax relief that Trump is supporting. House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi is vowing to vote on the bill.
For now, the measures that Trump announced today will mark a significant shift in his administration's approach to the pandemic.
Former Food and Drug Administration head Scott Gottlieb tweeted, "Actions by White House today to sharply increase testing capacity
and access, declare a national emergency, implement new steps to protect vulnerable Americans, support assistance for those hardest
hit by mitigation steps, all very important. Will meaningfully improve readiness."
Here's a useful infographic showing the Italian experience of COVID-19. Really drives
home the need for us to support more vulnerable groups, including elderly and those with
chronic diseases. pic.twitter.com/nlk1lPW0Xk
@reiner
Tor Seems people who smoke have made themselves more vulnerable to the bug. They have
done this despite 50 years of vigorous anti-smoking measures and propaganda.
They knew the risks. They rolled the dice. Now they should be sent to the end of the line
and treated last.
My Chinese colleague from work's parents have been holed up in an apartment in Zhengzhou
for 45 days with only minimal freedom to go out for supplies by appointment, then a virtual
battery of heat and temperature tests to get back in the building.
The city (10 million) hasn't had a new case for 2 weeks and they were on the verge of
relaxing the strict isolation rules.
Then some Chinese fella who'd been travelling in Europe returned to Zhengzhou, travelled
home on public transport doing his shopping on the way, and it turns out he's infected.
I don't know the precise translation from mandarin but it was something like "the whole
city want to string him up"
News from an Italian guy in Switzerland: situation in Italy is heavy, people are frightened
but mostly they are following the instructions to stay at home and limit the visits. And
people are also frightened because we do not know exactly how this virus works, how much time
this blockade will last, and what we will do after. Our society is no more accustomed to
turmoils and lack of reliable information.
On the other side of the Alps, still there are less cases but I want to stress that Italy and
rest of Europe are following very different instructions. In Italy, they tested almost
everybody at the beginning, and now only people with symptoms but also everybody requesting a
test for himself. In Europe, in general they are testing only old people with symptoms, while
refusing to test young people. So it is easy that the real number of cases are
underestimated. Looking at the numbers, I guess that this underestimation in United States is
much larger.
Italian government didn't want to be blamed, and probably they want to approve some
controversial laws during this blockade when nobody will go to protest. They didn't care
about economic damages. Other governments in Europe are more worried for the economy,
probably they did a bet to resolve the epidemics while avoiding to discover the real
numbers.
Concerning the number of deaths, in Italy is much higher for at least three reasons: lack of
beds in the hospitals, heavily reduced due to the austerity with respect to the rest of
Europe, an aging population, and the fact that they are ascribing to the virus also deaths
occurred probably for previous illnesses in the presence of the virus as concause. In most of
other countries, they are not checking after death.
We will hold on, meanwhile let us stay tuned also on big markets collapse and, obviously, on
Syria
" While the plans of the federal government remain classified, recent reports have
revealed that the military and intelligence communities -- now working with the NSC to
develop the government's coronavirus response -- have anticipated a massive explosion in
cases for weeks. U.S. military intelligence came to the conclusion over a month ago that
coronavirus cases would reach "pandemic proportions" domestically by the end of March. That
military intelligence agency, known as the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI),
coordinates closely with the National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct "medical SIGINT
[signals intelligence]."
And those are just from today. The Chinese media has been touting this narrative (quick
recover, fast-track resumption of the economy, keep the targets for the year) since the
epidemic started.
Man Walks Out Of 'Quarantine Motel' & Goes Shopping, Hops On Public Bus by
Tyler Durden Sat,
03/14/2020 - 16:25 The pattern in many major cities hard-hit by coronavirus has been to utilize
hotels as quarantine centers as local health facilities become overwhelmed. And yet in some
instances especially in the West, there's ambiguity surrounding quarantine of confirmed or
suspected cases as legally 'mandatory' or merely 'urged' and strongly suggested.
Though nearly unprecedented in recent American history, 'motel quarantine' is fast becoming
a thing in places like Washington State and California, the latter witnessing Gov. Gavin Newsom
issuing an executive order Thursday allowing some city authorities to take over hotels and
motels for medical use , including in places like Sacramento and the San Francisco area. Such
methods are being used especially for returning cruise ship passengers with potential
exposure.
But in an explosive and unusual story which is likely to become a more common occurrence as
'motel quarantine' grows and as the line between civil liberties vs. health authorities'
mandate remains blurred, Bloomberg details that a man walked straight out of coronavirus
quarantine near the hardest hit area near Seattle and onto a public bus .
"In an incident sure to stir debate around the Seattle-area's motel for isolating people who
might have the coronavirus, one of its first tenants walked out, despite a security guard's
attempts to stop him," the Bloomberg
report begins.
"The man arrived Thursday while awaiting test results, according to a statement from King
County, which recently bought the site in a suburb south of Seattle to ease the burden on local
hospitals."
The following morning the man was seen crossing the street to browse a local convenience
store where he allegedly shoplifted.
He then boarded a public bus, which was immediately after taken out of service when
authorities learned of the situation.
According to The Seattle Times , the man's test later came back negative, but not before
causing
a local panic :
By Friday evening, the person's test results had come back negative, but not before
raising questions about how the county planned to address staffing and security at quarantine
facilities as more people become sick.
The person had been experiencing homelessness and was placed at the motel Thursday
night.
The incident underscored what will be a staggering challenge ahead of public officials as
the virus continues to spread: how to quarantine "hundreds or thousands" of people who become
sick in coming months and aren't able to stay in their own homes, or don't have homes in
which to stay .
The Econo Lodge-turned-coronavirus-quarantine site on Central Avenue North in Kent, near
Seattle:
"The fears that we have stated and the concerns we had from the beginning when we knew this
facility was going to be put in Kent at that motel have all come true,"
said Kent Mayor Dana Ralph. "The things we predicted would happen have happened."
The motel had recently been purchased by the county and repurposed as a quarantine site - a
deeply controversial moved which has drawn the ire of local residents, who fear more such
"breaches" involving quarantined and possibly infected individuals.
Hot Topics I am in a city
with a curfew (enforced ?) where only pharmacies, supermarkets and those stores where someone
from China sells all sorts of household stuff are open. Rome hasn't reached the dread levels of
Wuhan and Milan, but the Italian government is trying to get ahead of the curve.
It is strange and alarming that there is little traffic (it is also impressive that Romans
don't obey the traffic code even when there is little traffic). People are really trying to
stay home all the time (I was semi home bound before it was cool).
I have learned about the activities which people consider absolutely necessary. A large
fraction of people walking around are walking dogs. Many people are wearing masks (absolutely
sold out everywhere) and gloves. I discover there are some things I have to touch. These
include an ATM (alarmingly often) and cash.
One striking thing is that people wait outside of the supermarkets and pharmacies. This is a
rule that does not have to be enforced -- people are scared. Good thing it's not cold in Rome
during March (or February or actually ever at all in the globally warmed year of our lord
2019/2020). This makes me notice the high rates of infection in Iceland and Norway. I guess up
there (where I have been in July with a rain coat) the choice is risk of Covid 19 or of
frostbite.
The extreme measures (not just ordered but orders which are actually obeyed, by Romans) are
impressive because as of the day before yesterday there were only 200 cases in Lazio (region
which includes Rome). The fact that one of the cases was governor Zingaretti (also head of the
Italian Democratic Party) might have amde a difference.
The news spreads even faster than the virus. Down here the health care system is under
strain but not overwhelmed (yet) but people read about (and see on TV) reports on how in
Lombardy Triage has reaquired it's original meaning. During World War I, It was red = critical,
yellow = serious monitor but not critical, black = doomed. In normal times black now means
deceased.
In Lois Armstrong Airport New Orleans during Katrina there were living people with black
tags (for will nor survive a flight and so will die here). I was appalled. Now in parts of
Northern Italy there aren't enough respirators for patients who would die without one. This is
part of why the Italian case fatality rate is high. It is also important that Italians have had
low fertility for decades and are old on average.
I guess I haven't written anything that people don't know already. I will update when the
wave of contagion overwhelms us. I fear that I will be giving readers a hint of future action
in their home town.
Reply about conditions in Hattiesburg for Judy2Shoes.
Did some running around the local Medical Industrial Complex this morning. What a difference
a week makes. The attitude about the coronavirus is completely different from last week.
Now there are people walking around the clinic and hospital wearing masks, and some
'rubber' gloves. Signs up everywhere about precautions for the coronavirus. When I went to
pay off a small bill associated with Phyl's leg case, there was a big sign in the glass door
for the Financial Department saying that, essentially, if you show the basic symptoms, do not
come into that office but go to the ER entrance for evaluation.
No signs of panic here yet. This region is still "low information" concerning the spread
and severity of the pathogen, but at least it is now a major concern locally.
Thank you so much, Ambrit. That makes me feel better. I have a lot of relatives in MS, but
their level of concern has been shaped by the MSM. It's so much better to hear from someone
like you, who is actually paying attention.
In my neck of the woods (eastern Washington), I've been trying for weeks to get people to
make prudent purchases of staples to store away – just in case.
One elderly neighbor kept saying people were overreacting, but I kept at her, pointing out
having a few extra supplies on hand might be a good idea and wouldn't be hoarding.
When I told her that Trump wasn't telling the public the truth, she said that people don't
understand that it's his job to keep the public calm. I could have walked her through the
dangerous results of his lying (and everything else he's doing), but I let it go. At least
she started to collect supplies a couple of weeks ago, and now she's in somewhat of an
overreacting mode. I don't care. Whatever keeps her safe.
Less than stellar news addendum.
Do call that 'Assisted Living' place and agitate for your uncle now. This afternoon, local
news announces that Hattiesburg has first probable case in Mississippi. A man who visited
Florida recently is "self isolated at home" after a first positive test result. Secondary
test being done now. Test happening at State lab.
See:
https://www.wdam.com/2020/03/12/forrest-county-man-is-first-presumptive-coronavirus-case-miss/
At least the locals are mentally prepared now
Be strong.
That Lake Havasu travesty is all "Water Over The Dam" now. The real 1930s War was between
the Coastals and the Okies. See "The Grapes of Wrath" for a literary rundown on that one. (No
Pink P -- y Hats in that fight. People were killed.)
Insofar as the States have their own Health Authorities, they could ban certain types of
"contagious" people from entering their environs. I have seen cases of local Organs of State
Security requiring exile from a particular State in return for non-prosecution of certain
non-violent offenses.
The balance of power between the States and the Federal Government is an always evolving
'situation.'
WORTH REPEATING: In 2018, Trump fired the entire US pandemic response team.
These were the experts with decades of experience dealing with precisely the kind of
situation we are in today.
Michael Grunwald @MikeGrunwald
I had forgotten my own reporting that @SenatorCollins
stripped $870M for pandemic preparations out of the 2009 stimulus.
[page image from Grunwald's book, The New New Deal ]
There was some discussion here the other day about who's responsible for the sorry state
of the CDC
and pandemic preparation in particular. Now, the Dems controlled all the WH, Senate and House
in 2009,
so obviously they share some of the blame, but if Collins hadn't demanded this,
it probably wouldn't have happened.
Dr. Brian Monahan, attending physician of Congress, told a closed-door meeting of Senate
staffers this week that 70 million to 150 million Americans -- a third of the nation -- could
contract the coronavirus. Dr. Anthony Fauci testified that the mortality rate for COVID-19 will
likely run near 1 percent.
Translation: between 750,000 and 1.1 million Americans may die of this disease before it
runs its course. The latter figure is equal to all the U.S. dead in World War II and on both
sides in the Civil War.
Chancellor Angela Merkel warns that 70 percent of Germany's population -- 58 million people
-- could contract the coronavirus. If she is right, and Fauci's mortality rate holds for her
country, that could mean more than half a million dead Germans.
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis called Merkel's remark "unhelpful" and said it could cause
panic. But Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch seemed to support Merkel, saying between 40
percent and 70 percent of the world's population could become infected.
Again, if Fauci's 1 percent mortality rate and Lipsitch's estimate prove on target, between
3 billion and 5 billion people on earth will be infected, and 30 million to 50 million will
die, a death toll greater than that of the Spanish Flu of 1918.
There is, however, some contradictory news.
China, with 81,000 cases, has noted a deceleration in new cases and South Korea appears to
be gradually containing the spread of the virus.
Yet Italy, with its large elderly population, may be a harbinger of what is to come in the
West. As of Thursday, Italy had reported 12,000 cases and 827 deaths, a mortality rate of
nearly 7 percent. This suggests that the unreported and undetected infections in Italy are far
more numerous.
In the U.S., the death toll at this writing is 40, a tiny fraction of the annual toll of the
tens of thousands who die of the flu.
But the problem is this: COVID-19 has not nearly run its course in the United States, while
the reaction in society and the economy approaches what we might expect from a boiling national
disaster.
The stock market has plunged further and faster than it did in the Great Crash of 1929.
Trillions of dollars in wealth have vanished. If Senator Bernie Sanders does not like
"millionaires and billionaires," he should be pleased. There are fewer of them today than there
were when he won the New Hampshire primary.
@Carlton
Meyer I've been following a few doctors on Youtube, for about a month now (dispassionate,
evidence-based docs), and their opinions vary on how serious this is.
What I don't is, if this is as contagious as they say (and it does seem to be) and as
life-threatening as they say, then given that there are several cases in NYC, why are we not
already seeing thousands of deaths there- a city where millions are crammed together daily,
many without good hygiene, many who have been for several weeks now, using public
transportation. I don't get it. It would seem the effects of any virus that were as bad as
they're saying, would already be reaching peak zombie level conditions in places like NYC,
Chicago, Boston, SF and DC.
Like the man on viriculture.com used
to say, healthy life =/= long life. We work towards extending one's lifespan, yet we don't
extend their "health span". We just extend the period when one is already falling apart. The
older you are, the more meds you need, the more healthcare you need etc etc.
So the longer the lifespan the bigger the load on healthcare and pension funds.
The main problem is, that our economic and cultural systems are at this point, 90%
biologically incompatible with us. A good chunk of our lives we study (especially so when you
study something like medicine, i believe at this point it's for genuine masochists). By the
time you get to a nice position in your career you're probably going to be older than 35. For
good birth rates etc that's unnaceptable.
So, the solution is to extend the "health-span". Preferably, you need to slow aging down at
least by 10, maybe even 15 years, while keeping the overall lifespan the same. The current way
is simply unsustainable
@Kratoklastes ...Like all the
other viruses that have floated around over the years be this one is being hyped up.
The hype works precisely because of your remark #3 but it will die a natural death after
everyone makes their money and the public gets bored.
I mean if just 1B people get a shot costing $50 that is a whole lot of Yuan. Store owners
also appear to be sneaking that extra markup on soaps and disinfectants and toilet paper. Y2K
also comes to mind and I am sure that Aids /HIV continues to kill more people annually than
this virus ever will. In the meantime I caution all nose pickers to leave those buggers alone
and not report any unusually large specimens. It will only skew the statistics and increase
the panic.
60,000 people die every month in Italy. Many of them old. Now we have 1,000 reported dead
due to the Covid-19. Most of them old. Many of them would have died anyway from some cold
or flu that would further aggravate their poor state of health. This year Covid-19 got
there first.
You request that opinions should be limited to fact based
but in the next sentence you state "The truth is that NONE OF US really knows for a fact what
this virus can do, we are all guessing."
well .whether fact based or speculative here are two alternate views>
"My own view on the Coronavirus situation, is that I trust the Chinese Government to be
doing all it can possibly do, to contain the epidemic.
There are a lot of people there, living in close proximity
In that context, Steve Bannon is just using inflammatory language throughout, to diss the
CCP
I can well understand why the CCP will not allow any US personel anywhere near the
patients, nor allow them to have access to any of the medical data.
If Bannon is implying that the CCP has something to hide, then the CCP also has its own
suspicions as to how this virus suddenly appeared
A lot of stuff has in the past come out of Livermore Labs and in the UK from Porton Down,
which "should not" be released I know of southern coastal cities in the UK being sprayed with
viruses from the air in the 1950s – a deliberate programme supported by the UK
government
The CCP will also be fully aware of British activities within Syria and then there is the
Skripal incident, a home-grown Boris the Buffoon manufactured crisis
If one looks at UK and US official government behaviour towards Hong Kong, then one can
easily surmise that there are attempts to find other means to destabilise China
Just saying "
Another view >
"There was an interesting item on Facebook a few days back, claiming to be written by a
Chinese military official, a staunch supporter of the communist party and the government, but
a man 'with a conscience.'
He claimed the virus was manufactured with a view to causing reduction of higher brain
functions (i.e. lowering the IQ) and inducing docility into those who are protesting in Hong
Kong.
It was first tested, according to his narrative, more discreetly on rounded-up Uighurs in
the prison camps, well away from anywhere likely to be observed, and everyone who was
exposed, died. There was a massive clean-up and cover-up operation
Realising it needed more work if it was to be deployed in HK, they did some further
modifications and had intended to do a new test in Hubei, but this was pre-empted by a
shoot-out near the meat market that has been mooted as the source of the outbreak. Someone,
I'm not sure now who he reckoned it was, attempted to 'kidnap the bio weapon in order to grab
the technology it represented, but the consignment was hit by a bullet and the virus escaped.
Those in charge ensured there were no survivors as witnesses in that area.
He further claimed that the mortality rate is actually 100% but that it has been put about
that it is only 2% – this underplaying being with the complicity of the USA, Russia and
the UK and presumably the EU, in order to forestall mass panic. He claimed only those wearing
hazmat suits stand any chance, and that the pandemic will claim the lives of all but top
officials who have recourse to protective measures. He said that the actual symptoms in the
final stages are up to five days of agonising pain with internal organs haemorrhaging in a
similar way to Ebola.
Of course, the article was anonymously written, as he said his life and that of his family
would be forfeit if he were to be identified. Which makes it a narrative that is easy to fake
but impossible to completely refute. "
Like the Saker, I do not think the corona virus outbreak was deliberate. The first thing that
people crafty enough to unleash this sort of thing would think of is blowback.
Perhaps the depopulationists–but this is a really ineffective way of going about
it.
I do think, however, that it arose in a "laboratory" of tens of millions of human subjects
all undergoing an enormous experiment. Please humor me a moment.
If there were a deliberate element in all of this, it would be the hype and rush be the
first to implement an untested technology about which dire warnings were already being
sounded.
Virologists and epidemiologists have yet to discount that the coronavirus was a bio attack.
This does NOT mean that it was an attack, merely that the possibility of a bio attack cannot
be discounted. While there remains a lot of circumstantial and anecdotal "evidence" that this
was an economic attack perpetrated by America against China, this does NOT prove conclusively
that such an attack took place, nor does it prove that such an attack did not take place.
There is an abstract submitted to ChinaXIV (a research website) that, although not yet peer
reviewed, suggests that the virus dd NOT originate at the Wuhan Seafood Market and that it
was introduced:
Any reference as to who introduced the coronavirus to the market is pure speculation at
this juncture, although the circumstantial and anecdotal evidence could be construed as
overwhelming against the US considering the timing, geographic location and proximity to the
Wuhan Seafood Market of the US soldiers present for the International Military Games.
I am not a virologist or epidemiologist (I am an engineer), however it is not completely
out of the realms of possibility for a virus to make the transition from animal to human
host; and the conditions in which animals are kept in Wuhan and surrounding areas is
certainly not of the same standard as the West – both from the perspective of hygiene
and humanitarian considerations. Another abstract that does looks into the origins of the
virus states:
"The genomic features described here may in part explain the infectiousness and
transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 in humans. Although genomic evidence does not support the
idea that SARS-CoV-2 is a laboratory construct, it is currently impossible to prove or
disprove the other theories of its origin described here, and it is unclear whether future
data will help resolve this issue. Identifying the immediate non-human animal source and
obtaining virus sequences from it would be the most definitive way of revealing virus
origins."
Much mention has been made of the corona-virus in question (COVID-19) binding to the ACE-2
receptors found in the lungs and heart – most particularly in those of Asian heritage.
It would not be outside the realms of science for this to be a logical target for the virus,
given its geographic location, but the hypothesis of it being engineered to target a specific
racial genotype is also not outside the realms of possibility.
"Our findings indicated that no direct evidence was identified genetically supporting
the existence of coronavirus S-protein binding-resistant ACE2 mutants in different
populations (Fig. 1a). The data of variant distribution and AFs may contribute to the
further investigations of ACE2, including its roles in acute lung injury and lung
function12. The East Asian populations have much higher AFs in the eQTL variants associated
with higher ACE2 expression in tissues (Fig. 1c), which may suggest different
susceptibility or response to 2019-nCoV/SARS-CoV-2 from different populations under the
similar conditions."
I agree with Andrei's analysis that a bio-weapon is both unwieldy and difficult to control
when used in a purely military application, but when used as an economic weapon, the
possibility is mentioned in the odious The Project for a New American Century's (PNAC) report
titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century."
"advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform
biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool."
This does not prove that the tragedy unfolding out of Wuhan was a bio-weapon, but
certainly demonstrates the possibility of intent. At this juncture, neither side of the
argument can provide any proof, so the the hypothesis remains pure speculation. The Chinese
government is not directly accusing the US of a bio attack, but it is extremely worrying that
both the Russian and Chinese governments remain highly suspicious.
"CORONAVIRUSES HAVE ALWAYS INFECTED HUMANS, PANIC IS UNWARRANTED"
Posted by agencycyta | Mar 9, 2020 | Science , Featured , Health | 0 |
"Coronaviruses have always infected humans, panic is unwarranted"
According to an Argentine virologist in France, Pablo Goldschmidt, there is no evidence to
indicate that the fatality or morbidity of COVID-19 is superior to that caused by influenza
viruses or the common cold.
(CyTA-Leloir Foundation Agency) -. For the virologist and infectious disease specialist
Pablo Goldschmidt, the panic surrounding the strain of coronavirus identified in China
(COVID-19) is as unwarranted as the one created in 2003 with severe acute respiratory
syndrome (SARS). ) or in 2009 with the influenza A (H1N1) virus.
"The ill-founded opinions expressed by international experts, replicated by the media and
social networks repeat the unnecessary panic that we have previously experienced. The
coronavirus identified in China in 2019 causes neither more nor less than a strong cold or
flu, with no difference until today with the cold or flu as we know it, "says Professor
Goldschmidt, also a biochemist, pharmacist and psychologist graduated from the UBA, volunteer
for the World Health Organization (WHO), former praticien hospitalier of the public hospitals
in Paris and author of the book "People and microbes, invisible beings with whom we live and
make us sick" (2019).
The Argentine specialist lives more than four decades in Europe. At the Faculty of
Medicine of the hospital center de la Pitié-Salpetrière in Paris, he obtained
diplomas in pharmacokinetics, clinical pharmacology, neuro-psychopharmacology and
pharmacology of antimicrobials. At the Université Pierre et Marie Curie Paris VI he
received a doctorate in molecular pharmacology. The theoretical and practical training of the
Paris Curie and Pasteur Institutes also concluded with degrees in fundamental virology and
molecular biology. As a volunteer at the WHO, he integrates humanitarian missions in Guinea
Conakry, Bissau, Pakistan, Ukraine, Cameroon, Mali and the Chad border with Nigeria. And it
aspires to obtain from the Argentine State a mandate to exercise the right to speak before
the international organization.
In dialogue with the CyTA-Leloir Agency, Goldschmidt expresses its tension in the face of
the global terror generated by the quality of information that is disseminated about the new
coronavirus and considers it necessary that the data that is propagated be placed in the
geographical and social context. "You can't create hysteria on the entire planet," he
says.
-Which viruses are considered responsible for respiratory diseases?
Viral respiratory conditions are numerous and are caused by several viral families and
species, among which the respiratory syncytial virus (especially in infants), influenza
(influenza), human metapneumoviruses, adenoviruses, rhinoviruses, and several coronaviruses,
already described years ago. It is striking that earlier this year global health alerts have
been triggered as a result of infections by a coronavirus detected in China, COVID-19,
knowing that each year there are 3 million newborns who die in the world of pneumonia and
50,000 adults in the United States for the same cause, without alarms being issued.
– The fact that it is transmitted by saliva or by cough increased the fear of the
population?
Many microorganisms are transmitted by this route in humans. The cold, transmitted by
saliva and cough, is caused by more than 150 rhinoviruses. Ten million people were infected
by saliva and cough with the tuberculosis agent in 2018, of which 1 million were children and
205 thousand died. The same happened with bacterial meningitis, transmitted by saliva, which
affected more than a million people in a year. Measles is also transmitted by saliva, hence
the urgency to protect the population with vaccines.
-You. Do you consider the international alerts launched due to the coronavirus to be
exaggerated?
Our planet is the victim of a new sociological phenomenon, scientific-media harassment,
triggered by experts only on the basis of laboratory molecular diagnostic analysis results.
Communiqués issued from China and Geneva were replicated, without being confronted
from a critical point of view and, above all, without stressing that coronaviruses have
always infected humans and always caused diarrhea and what people call a banal cold or common
cold. Absurd forecasts were extrapolated, as in 2009 with the H1N1 influenza virus.
And the risk of complications?
A cold can present as a benign, self-limiting disease; but it is known that all
respiratory diseases, however banal they may be considered, can severely affect the frailized
people, people with cardiocirculatory problems over 65 years, people with metabolic
disorders, immunosuppressed, transplanted and, above all , to poorly fed people without
shelter, and to those who do not have access to competent health teams that provide them with
effective medicines. This situation, clearly revealed for so many other diseases, is repeated
in all infections and COVID-19 is no exception.
Why does each individual become infected and react differently to viral infections?
The first step for a virus to infect a person depends on the virus's ability to recognize
"locks" or proteins on the surface of cells in certain organs, not all. Once it attaches to
its lock, it can penetrate the cell and put all the cellular machinery of the infected
subject at its service to replicate itself. It has been determined that there are individuals
with many "locks", others with few and others with easier "locks" to open, which is
determined by the genes. On the other hand, there is a defensive apparatus of proteins
encoded in DNA that is known by the name of "reactoma". In short, all humans are unique
living beings against microbial aggression and against the malignant transformations of our
tissues. Therefore, in certain individuals,
Is the coronavirus detected in China a new agent?
Those who launched the international alerts did not take into account data that shows
whether this virus or other similar viruses circulated in previous years. Or if people who
were already exposed to other coronavirus variants have partial or total protection against
the 2019 strain.
-Why do you not accept the extrapolation from one country to the other of the forecasts
issued by international agencies?
First, it is appropriate to compare the mortality and morbidity data with the number of
positive cases (those confirmed by the laboratory in relation to the number of severe cases
or the number of deceased persons). The first thing that emerges from the data, beyond the
biological criteria referring to the individual capacity to get sick and defend against viral
aggression, are doubts regarding the figures, if it is not considered that the affected
people did or did not have access to competent and equipped health, and if they received
timely treatments with adequate and bioequivalent drugs.
– Would these factors contribute to explain the differences in mortality and
morbidity between countries?
If there is no biological justification for individual predisposition, the difference
could be due to the quality of the medical institutions, the reasons that caused the time to
pass before the affected people go to health centers, or the quality of the training of
medical centers and the availability of resources to treat acute respiratory diseases. We
must impose moderation and use concrete data. There is no evidence to show that the 2019
coronavirus is more lethal than respiratory adenoviruses, influenza viruses, coronaviruses
from previous years, or rhinoviruses responsible for the common cold.
"The troops will help clean and deliver food in the designated "containment area" in a
one-mile (1.6 km) radius around the area where the contagion appears to have originated,
until the lockdown is lifted on March 25."
As part of such efforts, the government decided to designate call centers, clubs, gyms and
other establishments frequented by large numbers of people as high-risk areas and mobilize
more resources to quarantine them.
The move comes after an alarming new mass infection of the novel coronavirus was
reported at the call center in Guro, at a time when reports of new cases in Daegu, the
southeastern city at the center of the nation's COVID-19 outbreak, have been decreasing in
recent days.
My bet is that, since the South Korean government can't do preventive quarantine of
private business (because of the obvious fact it is a capitalist society), they are chasing
the virus where it bursts, quarantining the place where it is already given is a cluster.
That will make the South Korean map look like Swiss cheese - at best.
Might not it be prudent to take all personnel currently in basic training from all branches
and give them basic medic training and oxygen ventilator training and have them ready to
deploy where ever needed. The Lombard region of Italy is already considering lowering the
triage age from 70 to 60.
I know of a Miami emergency room tech who just finished a 72 hour shift, was given a 12
hour break who says they are overwhelmed and getting burned out.
MGM says guest at Vegas's 'The Mirage' tested positive
Denmark closes schools, will send 'non-critical' public employees home to work
New Jersey case total climbs to 23
DC Mayor declares public health emergency
Congressional doctor says up to
Cuomo confirms 39 new cases in NY, raising total to 212
First death in Indonesia
Confirmed cases in France top 2,000
Washington State to ban events over 200
Details of cruiseline industry's 'health and safety proposal' leak
'Waffle House' employee in Atlanta confirmed
UK reports 7th death
Chicago cancels St. Paddy's Day parade
NY sends in National Guard
IADB cancels meeting in Colombia as virus spreads across Latin America
Mnuchin says first part of virus stimulus plan will be ready in 2 days
Dr. Fauci warns virus 10x more deadly than flu and could infect millions if not handled
early
FEMA evacuates Atlanta office over coronavirus scare
3 Boeing workers test positie
Washington DC advises cancellation or postponement of all gatherings with more than 1,000
people
Harvard to prorate room and board for students
US cases surpass 1,000
UK Health Minister catches virus
Ireland, Bulgaria, Sweden report first deaths
Connecticut declares state of emergency
UK total hits 456 following largest daily jump on record (83 new cases)
Global cases pass 120,000
South Korea reports new outbreak in call center
Japan reportedly planning to declare state of emergency
* * *
Update (1650ET): Italy has confirmed that it will order all stores in the country that sell
items other than medicine and food to close. Factories can continue working, but all
restaurants and bars must close as well. The prime minister stressed that there is "no need for
a run on supermarkets."
Update (1635ET): NJ Governor and former Goldmanite Phil Murphy just announced 8 more cases
in the state, bringing its total to 23. The state has also confirmed its first case of
"community spread".
UPDATE: We now have 8 more presumptive positive cases of #COVID19 in New
Jersey.
• 3 female cases, 5 male cases
• 4 cases from Bergen County, 2 cases from Middlesex County, and 2 cases from Monmouth
County
• Range in age from 17- to 66-years-old
We've received $14 million in federal grants from @CDCgov to assist in our ongoing efforts
to contain the spread of #COVID19 . We're
working around the clock with our local, state, and federal partners to protect the health of
New Jerseyans.
b, time for a cooler head. Okay, as the Russian virologist said, a new virus is a 'meeting of
strangers', so we have to get to 'know' each other first and this takes time. So, just as we
got to 'know' the various flu varieties and built immunities to them, so too the virus gets
to 'know' us and undergoes its mutations. After all, if it kills all its hosts, it kills
itself.
The thing about 'bat' flu is that it seems to kill the old and the sick but leaves the
majority with well, flu and I'm one of those old folk (I'm almost 75 and with a bunch of
metal tubes in my heart but with a strong immune system, so wish me luck).
I think you're overreacting somewhat.
Is it because it's only the so-called developed nations that have a high preponderance
of older people that we're seeing this panic, or is because capitalism was on the verge of
meltdown anyway?
My feeling is that the barbarians have no compunction in sacrificing the old and sick.
Social Darwinism Rules OK! And don't forget, the wealthy are mostly old too!!
I'm not trying to minimise the impact, but my feeling is that it has more to do with the
falling rate of profit than the number of sick people.
Bruce Aylward, Deputy DG of WHO, who is interviewed in this article makes eminent sense
but his views have been universally ignored in the West (he spent time in China in February),
I more than suspect because of the West's racist anti-Chinese attitudes, else why ignore
virtually all of his recommendations?
... Massive testing in south Korea, 20k people a day, yields a lot of people in the
denominator who would count as healthy everywhere else. We don't get to have a "South Korean"
death rate unless we have south korean testing. With Euro testing we have to live with a
different Euro death rate. Another question would how many "European" or "American" cases
(i.e., cases in that are symptomatic enough to get officially recorded in Europe or America)
does south korea have? Then we could productively compare death rates.
Also, south korea is doing a lot compared to the west outside Italy:
In south korea right now, mobile testing centers are dispatched to places with new
positive results and widespread testing occurs, followed by isolation of positive cases.
They have closed schools. Universities throughout the country postponed the start of the
semester when only 31 official cases existed. Major buildings have thermal imaging at their
entrances. As many people as possible in public are wearing masks.
To all of that comes the fact that the South Korea outbreak was idiosyncratic, over half
of all cases emerging from Patient 31 associated with the Shincheonji church in a single
city, Daegu, which made containment easier.
Let's keep an eye on Germany since they're essentially doing nothing
Aside from testing, and it is unclear how widespread this is though we are told it is very
awesome and comprehensive and the absolute best. 2,120 cases right now in the earliest stages
of the pandemic.
A looming shortage in lab materials is threatening to delay coronavirus test results
and cause officials to undercount the number of Americans with the virus.
CDC Director Robert Redfield told POLITICO on Tuesday that he is not confident that U.S.
labs have an adequate stock of the supplies used to extract genetic material from any virus
in a patient's sample -- a critical step in coronavirus testing.
"The availability of those reagents is obviously being looked at," he said, referring to
the chemicals used for preparing samples. "I'm confident of the actual test that we have,
but as people begin to operationalize the test, they realize there's other things they need
to do the test."
The growing scarcity of these "RNA extraction" kits is the latest trouble for U.S. labs,
which have struggled to implement widespread coronavirus testing in the seven weeks since
the country diagnosed its first case.
"Italy will close all restaurants, bars and shops across the country in an effort to curb
the spread of coronavirus, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced on Wednesday.
Only pharmacies and supermarkets will be allowed to remain open, Conte added.
Restaurants will be allowed to be operational for food deliveries, but companies will be
required to implement remote working for all jobs, except those that require physical
presence, Conte added."
This sounds that they are getting advice from the Chinese and stopped waiting for the EU
'recommendations'. Next step is that the Italian gov need to offer some help to these
restaurants so that the people working there and those doing the deliveries get correctly
paid and that they and what they carry is clean.
"... One notable prediction: Osterholm lauds the Chinese for successfully working to control the outbreak -- but warns another wave of infection will follow upon workplaces and schools and shops reopening as the society begins returning to normal. ..."
One notable prediction: Osterholm lauds the Chinese for successfully working to
control the outbreak -- but warns another wave of infection will follow upon workplaces and
schools and shops reopening as the society begins returning to normal.
"The troops will help clean and deliver food in the designated "containment area" in a
one-mile (1.6 km) radius around the area where the contagion appears to have originated,
until the lockdown is lifted on March 25."
I find it puzzling that the new virus has spread all over Iran very quickly, whereas in other
countries it is more localised, including in China. It is also curious that it has infected
by far more of its lawmakers and government officials than elsewhere. Is there a reasonable,
rational explanation?
"... As I said on Monday, just looking at the number of COVID19 cases and the number of countries affected does not tell the full story. Of the 118,000 COVID19 cases reported globally in 114 countries, more than 90 percent of cases are in just four countries, and two of those have significantly declining epidemics. 81 countries have not reported any COVID19 cases, and 57 countries have reported 10 cases or less. ..."
"... "We’re in this together, to do the right things with calm and protect the citizens of the world. It’s doable" ..."
Today's WHO press briefing was excellent (link below). The questions being asked by journalists have improved significantly over
the last few weeks which has given the WHO team an opportunity to explain important points.
Today they looked at the situation in Iran, Korea, Italy and the sub Saharan Africa region. They also have officially declared
a Pandemic.
In the past two weeks, the number of cases of #COVID19 outside 🇨🇳 has increased 13-fold & the number of affected countries
has tripled.
There are now more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries, & 4,291 people have lost their lives.
Thousands more are fighting for their lives in hospitals.
In the days and weeks ahead, we expect to see the number of #COVID19 cases, the number of deaths, and the number of affected
countries climb even higher
WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and
severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction
We have therefore made the assessment that #COVID19 can be characterized as a pandemic
Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable
fear, or unjustified acceptance that the fight is over, leading to unnecessary suffering and death
Describing the situation as a pandemic does not change WHO’s assessment of the threat posed by this coronavirus. It
doesn’t change what WHO is doing, and it doesn’t change what countries should do"
We have never before seen a pandemic sparked by a coronavirus. And we have never before seen a pandemic that can be controlled
at the same time.
WHO has been in full response mode since we were notified of the first cases.
We have called every day for countries to take urgent and aggressive action.
We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear
As I said on Monday, just looking at the number of COVID19 cases and the number of countries affected does not tell the full
story. Of the 118,000 COVID19 cases reported globally in 114 countries, more than 90 percent of cases are in just four countries,
and two of those have significantly declining epidemics. 81 countries have not reported any COVID19 cases, and 57 countries have reported 10 cases or less.
We cannot say this loudly enough, or clearly enough, or often enough: all countries can still change the course of
this pandemic"
If countries detect, test, treat, isolate, trace, and mobilize their people in the response, those with a handful of COVID19
cases can prevent those cases becoming clusters, and those clusters becoming community transmission
Even those countries with community transmission or large clusters can turn the tide on this coronavirus.
Several countries have demonstrated that this virus can be suppressed and controlled.
The challenge for many countries who are now dealing with large COVID19 clusters or community transmission is not whether they
can do the same – it’s whether they will.
Some countries are struggling with a lack of capacity. Some countries are struggling with a lack of resources. Some countries
are struggling with a lack of resolve.
We are grateful for the measures being taken in Iran, Italy and South Korea to slow the virus and control their COVID19
epidemics.
We know that these measures are taking a heavy toll on societies and economies, just as they did in China.
All countries must strike a fine balance between protecting health, minimizing economic & social disruption & respecting
human rights
WHO’s mandate is public health. But we’re working with many partners across all sectors to mitigate the social and economic
consequences of this COVID19 pandemic
This is not just a public health crisis, it is a crisis that will touch every sector – so every sector and every individual
must be involved in the fight
I have said from the beginning that countries must take a whole-of-government, whole-of-society approach, built around a comprehensive
strategy to prevent infections, save lives and minimize impact
Let me summarize it in 4 key areas.
Prepare and be ready.
Detect, protect and treat.
Reduce transmission.
Innovate and learn"
I remind all countries that we are calling on you to (1):
activate & scale up your emergency response mechanisms
communicate with your people about the risks & how they can protect themselves
find, isolate, test & treat every #COVID19 case & trace every contact"
I remind all countries that we are calling on you to (2):
ready your hospitals
protect and train your #healthworkers
let’s all look out for each other"
There’s been so much attention on one word.
Let me give you some other words that matter much more, & that are much more actionable:
Prevention. Preparedness. Public health. Political leadership.
And most of all, People"
"We’re in this together, to do the right things with calm and protect the citizens of the world. It’s doable"
There have been a number of graphs out today looking at the rate of Covid infections. It is
exponential so far and appears to be tracking Italy's experience pretty well. If we continue
at this same rate we would reach the level at which other countries closed schools and had
mass transportation shutdowns in one or two weeks. Shutting down schools in particular will
be a tough decision. Kids seem to mostly be spared, but they may be disease vectors. OTOH if
they are shutdown a lot of health care workers will need to stay home. Near as I can tell I
would lose 10% or so of my staff and more on an intermittent basis.
As part of such efforts, the government decided to designate call centers, clubs, gyms and
other establishments frequented by large numbers of people as high-risk areas and mobilize
more resources to quarantine them.
The move comes after an alarming new mass infection of the novel coronavirus was
reported at the call center in Guro, at a time when reports of new cases in Daegu, the
southeastern city at the center of the nation's COVID-19 outbreak, have been decreasing in
recent days.
My bet is that, since the South Korean government can't do preventive quarantine of
private business (because of the obvious fact it is a capitalist society), they are chasing
the virus where it bursts, quarantining the place where it is already given is a cluster.
That will make the South Korean map look like Swiss cheese - at best.
"the US is particularly poorly set up to cope, thanks to our fragmented public health
system and overpriced, privatized and less than comprehensive health care. That bad situation
is made worse by the CDC being short on resources and hamstrung further by the Trump
Administration's PR imperatives."
Basically, it is expected that Europe manages the crisis less badly.
It has been interesting watching Dr. John Campbell's growing realisation & some shock
that everything is not well with the US healthcare system & he has received some abuse
but also support from Americans for his growing criticism.
His listing as requested of his 2 degrees & Phd, never mind his long front line
experience & his books I think shut some up for perhaps thinking that he was only a
nurse, but perhaps he shouda gone to NakedCapitalism.
...It is the overwhelming of ICUs and the whole health care system that makes the new
virus much more deadly than it would be without overwhelmed ICUs.
That is because it is a NEW virus and we do not have a basic immunity against it in our
societies like we do have against common flu viruses.
For your age Pat, the death rate may be 5% with functional ICUs available. With
overwhelmed ICUs the death rate for your age will be above 50%.
Consider that Lombardy, which is now overwhelmed, has now a death rate over all cases of
6% while South Korea, which effectively limited the spread through early testing and is not
overwhelmed, limited the death rate to below 1%.
Whatever you may think of the blogger, he is absolutely 100% correct here. Executive
summary: if you extend the time period over which the epidemic occurs by testing and
quarantining, you reduce the risk that your health care system will collapse, like it has in
Italy. South Korea is the case where testing has prevented their health care system
collapsing. Their health care system has not collapsed. Italy's has.
And now we will wait and see what happens in the U.S. Trump is betting his re-election on
your being right.
"... people who appear healthy can be asymptomatic so are therefore spreading the disease, which I believe that masks would help prevent. ..."
"... The problem is that there are no masks for everybody so these should be available for those who need them the most . This is a F*c*n*gly problematic issue and that is why there must be a campaign against massive mask usage. ..."
"... A healthy mucosal epithelium contains non-specific barriers to virus and other pathogens including our normal microbiota, enzymes and various types of fibers acting as a physico-chemical barrier for virus entry. In winter, these barriers are less efficient. ..."
"... The tide has now gone out, and has revealed that the US is swimming naked. ..."
By
Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She is
currently writing a book about textile artisans.
I was chatting on Facebook the other day about the topic de jour – protecting friends,
family, and myself from coronavirus – with Dr. Sarah Borwein, an old friend and travel
buddy from my Oxford days. Sarah's a Canadian- trained doctor who has practiced family medicine
for more than 15 years in Hong Kong. She co-founded the Central Health Group.
I recently attended Sarah's wedding in that city in early January – and got out just
in time to avoid some of the more draconian travel restrictions that have since been imposed as
a result of the outbreak of the #COVID-19 coronavirus.. At least for now. And just before Hong
Kong imposed drastic restrictions that have allowed it to weather the coronavirus crisis while
recording only three deaths, so far.
She has an extensive professional history of dealing with infectious diseases in Asia. Prior
to commencing her practice in Hong Kong, she successfully ran the Infection Control program for
the only expatriate hospital in Beijing during the SARS period, also serving as liaison with
the World Health Organization. For a fuller account of her career and her thoughts on the
current crisis, see this interview in AD MediLink, Exclusive
Interview on COVID-19 with SARS Veteran Dr. Sarah Borwein .
I thought readers might be interested in some of the things Hong Kong is doing to combat the
virus.
Partial Lockdown
The city has been in partial lockdown from the middle of January, with schools and
universities, shut, employees encouraged to work from home, sports facilities and museums
closed down, and people told to avoid crowds according to the Financial Times, Hong Kong's
coronavirus response leads to sharp drop in flu cases . Hong Kong residents have accepted
these restrictions, since:
Hongkongers are particularly compliant with public health measures because the 2002-2003
Sars outbreak, which claimed almost 300 lives in the territory, is still fresh in many
people's minds.
The partial lockdown is neither easy nor cost-free, but it largely seems to have controlled
incidence of the disease, without paralysing Hong Kong. The city is close to mainland China and
has extensive economic and other ties. But so far, it has recorded only three deaths, according
to the South China Morning Post,
Coronavirus: Hong Kong records third death as five more cases confirmed, bringing total to
114 . And this for a city with population of roughly 7.5 million people.
Testing
There has been extensive texting for the coronavirus in Hong Kong – which is free.
This allows public health austhories to track the spread of the disease, and see that victims
get treated properly and promptly.
This record stands in contrast to the US, which has not yet managed to distribute tests
widely – let alone, as far as I can see, determine who will pay for testing.
The disease seems to have taken hold in In U.S., with cases exceeding 500 and deaths so far
recorded of 22, with 19 in Washington state, according to the New York Times, Cases of
Coronavirus Cross 500, and Deaths Rise to 22 .
The inability to test means that it's not possible to track the progress of the disease
properly, is as to determine from where a patient may have caught it. Nationwide in the US, a
fraction of people who are symptomatic or who may have been exposed to the virus have been
tested. Even India, which has so far managed to limit exposure of its population to foreign
sources of infection, has tested many more people – and is doing comprehensive screening
at its airports.
Which makes a lot of sense, as foreigners – tourists – are principal source of
the infection, Others are Indians returning from foreign climes, carrying with them the
disease. So far, India has reported 39 cases, a large cluster of which is an Italian tour group
that visited Rajasthan. Five other recent cases are non-resident Indians (NRIs), who returned
to India from Venice. We can only help as the temperature slowly rises as we approach the
Indian summer, that increase in temperature slows spread of the virus (see
Coronavirus cases rise to 39 as 5 found infected in Kerala ). Whether this will prove to be
the case is as yet unknown, but as Sarah discussed in her MediLink interview:
It is true that some viruses that are spread by respiratory droplets, as COVID-19 is
believed to, spread more easily when the air is cold and dry. In warm, humid conditions, they
fall to the ground more easily and that makes transmission harder.
But there is still a lot we don't know about exactly how COVID-19 is spread and the
effects climate may have on it. We do see it spreading in Singapore, which is warm and humid,
so who knows?
I should mention that there have been dark musing about the NRIs returning to the state of
Kerala from Venice – as they concealed their travel history and exposure. Kerala Health
Minister K.K. Shailaja has said these victims will be treated, but that this type of behavior
-- the deception – should be considered to be a crime.
Hong Kong has made it a criminal offence to lie to a health care provider about one's travel
or exposure history, according to Sarah; I wonder whether the US will attempt to do the
same?
Most of us have heard the advice for avoiding infection. I'm going to repeat this advice.
Those who know it all already, feel free to skip ahead. Those who've not seen such advice, pay
attention.
Wash your hands, with soap, properly and frequently. I posted this video last week, but some
readers may not have seen it:
WHO handwashing technique. Notice the attention to between the fingers, back of fingers,
and nails:
Hand sanitiser can be used as a stopgap until you can wash your hands, but the World Health
Organization says that only those that are 60% alcohol killl the virus. And hand washing is an
absolute must for hands that are visibly dirty.
Maintain social distance. Avoid crowds.
Cough or sneeze into a tissue, and dispose of it promptly and properly (I'm tossing mine
into my toilet, and flushing them away.).
Pay attention to your overall health. Eat well. Including plenty of fruits and vegetables.
Stay properly hydrated.
Get a 'flu shot if you haven't already. Although this won't protect you from coronavirus,
'flu can be a nasty disease in its own right, and catching it can land you in hospital or
quarantine. Not to mention getting sick with the 'flu overburdens health systems when resources
are needed elsewhere.
The procedures Hong Kong has put in place to control coronavirus have also led to a drastic
decline in 'flu cases,. In fact, its winter influenza season has ended more than a month
earlier than usual. 'Flu cases also dropped during the ARS crisis, according to the FT:
Data provided by the government's Centre for Health Protection show the incidence of
infection with influenza had fallen to less than 1 per cent by the end of February, marking
an end to the winter flu season, which normally extends to the end of March or into
April.
"A similar pattern happened in 2003 during Sars. All respiratory infection diseases were
down between March to September compared to 2002," said David Hui, a respiratory disease
expert from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
"Influenza spread is one of the markers [of the coronavirus containment] as the same
principles of avoiding droplets and social contacts apply."
Ho Pak-leung, a leading microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong, said data showed
the flu season had shortened from an average of 98.7 days to 34 days this year.
Use of Masks?
Masks are not very useful, and many places are out of stock anyway, but Sarah says these can
prevent you from passing along any infection you might have to others. She says the advice to
avoid masks outright is wrong. There is a place for them, they're just not a panacea, and in
any case, if used improperly, they may actually increase your risk.
From her Medilink interview:
The shortage of masks has many people feeling quite anxious and unprotected. But masks are
NOT very effective at preventing transmission of viral infections, particularly when worn by
healthy people. They are by no means the most important measure you can take to protect your
health. In fact, if you wear a mask incorrectly, touch or adjust it frequently, re-use it, or
fail to wash your hands before putting it on and after taking it off, you may actually
increase your risk.
Who should wear a mask:
– People who are sick, to prevent them spreading their viral droplets when they
cough or sneeze.
– People caring for sick people at close quarters.
– In a health-care setting.
– People whose occupation requires them to have close contact with clients.
As it has become socially unacceptable in Hong Kong to NOT wear a mask, there may be
situations in which you might choose to wear a mask simply to make other people feel
comfortable. But in general, healthy people do not need to wear masks, except when they need
to be in crowded places, or with possibly sick people.
Infection Control Protocol?
This to me was the most striking thing I learned from our conversation. I don't think
anything like this infection control protocol is yet in place – certainly not throughout
the US, nor even in high-risk areas. And it it should be.
From a text from Sarah:
We have triage at the door. People with high-risk travel history can't be seen, have to go
directly to government hospital if symptomatic; or if just for routine care, wait 14 days
after return (all of which must be healthy). Low risk people with symptoms we isolate
immediately; they never enter the main clinic. And we wear PPE [i.e., personal protective
equipment] to see them.
In Hong Kong, people are being told to get tested if you think you have been exposed, and/or
are symptomatic. Anyone with a fever or respiratory symptoms is tested as a matter of course,
upon recommendation of a doctor.
To be fair, I should mention that Hong Kong did not initially test so extensively. Sarah
texted me:
Testing has been ramped up gradually. Initially they just added testing of all pneumonia
patients, regarless of epidemiological link. The testing of all mildly symptomatic patients
with no epidemiologic link is relatively new. A few weeks ago they started offering it in the
public hospital A&E's and public outpatient clinics. Then last week they extended that to
private sentinel clinics (of which we are one) and this week have extended it to all private
clinics
But in the US, even if your doctor wants to test you, no testing kit may be available to
conduct the test. This is simply insane, so many weeks, after the disease has taken root in so
many places, and after the World Health Organization made accurate tests available months
ago.
Hong Kong has also made it easier for patients to test themselves, without involving a
health care provider. From a message from Sarah:
They also pioneered a test that patients could do themselves – ie they self-collect
a "deep throat saliva" sample at home. That reduces risk of exposure to healthcare workers,
as taking nasopharyngeal swabs is "aerosol generating"
So there is considerable scope for United States to learn from Hong Kong's experience and
ramp up its testing – without appreciably increasing risk to its health care
providers.
One thing talking to Sarah has driven home to me is how poor the comparative US
infrastructure for dealing with such a disease is – although she didn't say so in so many
words. These are my words, but I don't think she would dispute the conclusion.
Contrast that to Hong Kong. From her MediLink interview:
The situation is much less serious in Hong Kong than in mainland China, especially Wuhan
and Hubei. We are quite exposed here, because of our close ties with the mainland, but we
have a very strong public health system, good resources, and deep experience in managing
epidemics. After SARS, Hong Kong set up the Centre for Health Protection (CHP) , which is our
version of the CDC in the United States .
When COVID-19 emerged, there was already an epidemic management plan in place that just had
to be activated. The four best prepared places in Asia are probably Hong Kong, Singapore,
Thailand and South Korea.
Her MediLink interview is upbeat in some ways. Perhaps a better description would be
measured. She points out that COVID-19 is less lethal than SARS. But because of that fact, it's
much easier to spread:
COVID-19 and SARS do
share some common features: they belong to the same family of viruses, they both seem to have
jumped from animals to humans, they both originated in China and both can cause severe
pneumonia.
But there are some important differences. SARS was more lethal than COVID-19, but less easily
transmitted. It went straight for the lungs, and caused severe pneumonia which became
transmissible only when patients were quite severely ill and usually by then in hospital.
About 10%
died .
COVID-19, on the other hand, seems to be more likely to replicate in the upper respiratory
tract and it seems like individuals might produce a lot of virus when they are only mildly
symptomatic. It's not known how many people with COVID-19 develop pneumonia, but of the ones
who do, about 20% get severely ill and fewer than 2% die. Overall death rates are still not
known for sure, but are probably less than 1%.
So COVID-19 is a lot less lethal than SARS, but harder to control because it spreads more
easily and by people with milder symptoms. That's why, despite being considerably less likely
to kill you than SARS was, COVID-19 has still in total killed
more people in 6 weeks than SARS did in eight months.
We should recognise considerable advances in infection control have been made since that
time. Alas, many countries seem not to have absorbed these lessons – including the United
States. Or if they did, that knowledge has failed to translate into effective responses. From
MediLink:
Another important difference is that medical science has advanced considerably in the 17
years since SARS. In 2003, it took months to identify the virus and develop a test. For
COVID-19 that happened within a couple of weeks. That has made identifying patients a great
deal easier. In addition, there are newer treatments and some vaccine prospects already in
the works.
Epidemic control is something that has confounded the US political system. The relevant
public health officials may know what needs to be done, they're not doing it. That may simply
be, at least in part, because resources are simply not available. It's also due to the way we
divide authority for such problems, with responsibility largelylodged at the state and local
level. And the reflexive reliance on neoliberal, market-based solutions is also at fault. There
are some things government is uniquely positioned to provide, but many are no longer capable of
recognising that simple fact.
Over to Sarah's MediLink interview again:
The most important thing we learned from SARS was that infectious diseases do not respect
borders or government edicts, and cannot be hidden. It requires international cooperation,
transparency and sharing of information to control an epidemic.
We also learned the importance of providing good, balanced, reliable information to the
public. In any epidemic, there is the outbreak of disease and then there is the epidemic of
panic. And nowadays, there is also what the WHO has termed the Infodemic , the explosion
of information about the epidemic. Some of it is good information, but some of it is rumour,
myth, speculation and conspiracy theory, and those things feed the anxiety. It can be hard to
sort out which information to believe, so it is important to choose trustworthy sources.
Panic and misinformation make controlling the outbreak more difficult.
On a day when markets are melting down, and people are succumbing to panic,I can only say,
keep calm. And to remind everyone: wash your hands!
The only query I would have with that is in reference to masks, is that people who appear
healthy can be asymptomatic so are therefore spreading the disease, which I believe that
masks would help prevent.
The problem is that there are no masks for everybody so these should be available for
those who need them the most . This is a F*c*n*gly problematic issue and that is why there
must be a campaign against massive mask usage.
It has to be repeated 100 1000 1000000s times
but we f*c**gl* avoid to understand this necessity.
Today has been a day of overreaction indeed. I would point as an addition to Sarah remarks
on disease spreading that regarding weather, temperature and humidity as important or even
more important than virus air transmission or fomites-led transmission is our susceptibility
to infection.
A healthy mucosal epithelium contains non-specific barriers to virus and other
pathogens including our normal microbiota, enzymes and various types of fibers acting as a
physico-chemical barrier for virus entry. In winter, these barriers are less efficient.
The
same virus load will not have the same effect in winter or in summer in the nasopharyngeal
tract. In this sense HK and NY are not comparable. Regarding the lessons of SARS epidemics,
if one of them is to keep calm that is a goos lesson. If another lessons is to identify the
sites that need stronger protection, that is another good lesson. A third good lesson would
be awareness on precautions to be taken personally. Anyway given differences between SARS1
and 2 in virulence and epidemiology there are not many more lessons to learn. Again comparing
Singapore or HK with NY in terms of potential fatalities is not spot on for weather
reasons.
The main failure in Italy first, or in Spain now, has IMO been on lack of awareness. No
overreaction is needed but good reaction would have made things better if the objective is to
reduce fatalities and avoid HC services being overwhelmed. Focus on safety in hospitals is a
must. Focusing on safety in residences for the elder is a second must (this has been noticed
too late for many).
This evening I will have a discussion with my son that wants to go to a concert next
saturday in a closed ambient. I think that the government will come to my rescue and forbid
this class of events.
Right the major fiasco was with CDC testing kits. I do not see any other. Exaggerating the
threat would only make hoarding panic that engult the USA worse. Of source Trump desire to
protect stock market at any human or other cost was cruel and silly, but Trump is cruel and silly
in many other areas as well.
Quarantine for retired persons might really help in areas with high number of
infections.
Notable quotes:
"... For the last several weeks, we have seen the president and top administration officials presenting the public with misleading and outright false information in an effort to conceal the magnitude of the problem and the extent of their initial failures. The president has been unwilling to tell the public the truth about the situation because he evidently cares more about the short-term political implications than he does about protecting the public: ..."
The AP
reports on more of the Trump White House's bungling of the coronavirus response:
The White House overruled health officials who wanted to recommend that elderly and
physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines because of the new
coronavirus, a federal official told The Associated Press.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention submitted the plan this week as a way of
trying to control the virus, but White House officials ordered the air travel recommendation
be removed, said the official who had direct knowledge of the plan. Trump administration
officials have since suggested certain people should consider not traveling, but they have
stopped short of the stronger guidance sought by the CDC.
There is no good reason for the White House to prevent this recommendation from being made
public. This is another example of how the president and his top officials are trying to keep
up the pretense that the outbreak is much less dangerous than it actually is, and in doing so
they are helping to make the outbreak worse than it has to be.
For the last several weeks, we have seen the president and top administration officials
presenting the public with
misleading and outright false information in an effort to
conceal the magnitude of the problem and the extent of their initial failures. The
president has been
unwilling to tell the public the truth about the situation because he evidently cares more
about the short-term political implications than he does about protecting the public:
Even as the government's scientists and leading health experts raised the alarm early and
pushed for aggressive action, they faced resistance and doubt at the White House --
especially from the president -- about spooking financial markets and inciting panic.
"It's going to all work out," Mr. Trump said as recently as Thursday night. "Everybody has
to be calm. It's going to work out."
Justin Fox
comments on the president's terrible messaging:
The biggest problem, though, is simply the way that the president talks about the disease.
His instinct at every turn is to downplay its danger and significance.
Minimizing the danger and significance of the outbreak ensured that the government's
response was less urgent and focused than it could have been. It encouraged people to take it
less seriously and thus made it more likely that the virus would spread. Then when the severity
of the problem became undeniable, the earlier discredited happy talk makes it easier for people
to disbelieve what the government tells them in the future.
The administration had time to prepare a more effective response, but as I
said last week the administration frittered away the time they had. They were still
preoccupied with keeping the
virus out rather than trying to manage its spread once it arrived here, as it was inevitably
going to do:
"We have contained this. I won't say airtight but pretty close to airtight," White House
economic adviser Larry Kudlow said in a television interview on Feb. 25, echoing Trump's
tweeted declaration that the virus was "very much under control" in the United States.
But it wasn't, and the administration's rosy messaging was fundamentally at odds with a
growing cacophony of alarm bells inside and outside the U.S. government. Since January,
epidemiologists, former U.S. public health officials and experts have been warning, publicly
and privately, that the administration's insistence that containment was -- and should remain
-- the primary way to confront an emerging infectious disease was a grave mistake.
The initial response and the stubborn refusal to adapt to new developments have meant that
the U.S. is in a much worse position in handling this outbreak than many other countries. Max
Nisen
comments on the lack of testing in the U.S.:
Don't cheer just yet. The lower case count doesn't mean Americans are doing a better job
of containing the virus; rather, it reflects the fact that the U.S. is badly behind in its
ability to test people. The Centers for Disease Control stopped disclosing how many people it
has tested as of Monday, but an analysis by The Atlantic could only confirm 1,895 tests.
Switzerland, a country with fewer residents than New Jersey, has tested nearly twice as many
people. The U.K., which has far fewer cases, has tested over 20,000. This gap is particularly
worrisome given evidence of community spread in a number of different states and a high death
count, both of which suggest the number of cases will jump as more tests are conducted.
Capacity is finally ramping up, but only after weeks of delays prompted by unforced errors
and botched early test kits from the CDC. The continuing inability to test broadly is leading
to missed cases, more infections, and an outbreak that will be bigger than it needed to
be.
The administration not only bungled their initial response, but they have also been
extremely resistant to admitting error. Trump's appointees are reluctant to contradict the
president when he spouts nonsense about the outbreak, and that in turn makes it more difficult
for them to communicate clearly and consistently with the public. All of this serves to
undermine public trust in the government's response, and it prevents health officials from
being able to do their jobs without political interference. The federal government's response
has been
hampered by a president who wants to make people think that the problem isn't that bad and
is already being dealt with successfully:
At the White House, Trump and many of his aides were initially skeptical of just how
serious the coronavirus threat was, while the president often seemed uninterested as long as
the virus was abroad. At first, when he began to engage, he downplayed the threat -- "The
Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA," he tweeted in late February -- and became
a font of misinformation and confusion, further muddling his administration's response.
On Friday, visiting the CDC in Atlanta, the president spewed more falsehoods when he
claimed, incorrectly: "Anybody that needs a test, gets a test. They're there. They have the
tests. And the tests are beautiful."
When the president lies about such a serious matter, he is causing unnecessary confusion and
he is sending exactly the wrong message that remedying earlier failures is not an urgent
priority. Because Trump's primary concern is making himself look good in the short term, he is
willing to risk a worse outbreak. During his visit to the CDC, the president went on in an even
more bizarre vein to praise the tests by
comparing them to his "perfect call" with the Ukrainian president last summer that led to
his impeachment:
In an attempt to express confidence in the CDC's coronavirus test (the agency's second
attempt after the first one it developed failed), Trump offered an unorthodox comparison from
the last enormous crisis to swamp his presidency. The tests are just like his
impeachment-causing attempt to pressure a foreign government to help him get reelected. "The
tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This
was not as perfect as that but pretty good," Trump told reporters after falsely stating,
again, that anyone who needed a test right now could get one.
This morning the president was back at it this morning with more self-serving
misinformation:
We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on
CoronaVirus. We moved VERY early to close borders to certain areas, which was a Godsend. V.P.
is doing a great job. The Fake News Media is doing everything possible to make us look bad.
Sad!
The president needs people to think that everything he does is perfect, so he is incapable
of acknowledging his failures and prefers to vilify accurate reporting about those failures. He
cannot help but mismanage
the government response because he cannot put the national interest ahead of his own
selfishness. An untold number of Americans will be paying a steep price for the president's
unfitness for office in the weeks and months to come.
I wish you had thought a bit into the future before you voted him. Did you really think
things wouldn't turn out EXACTLY the way they have? Honestly, it's to rime tell the truth
here.
It's the Democrats who should have thought a bit into the future. It was the identity and
known character and policies of Trump's opponent that tipped my vote to Trump. And no,
obviously I didn't think things would turn out "exactly" this way. I thought if I put up with
his repulsive manner I'd get maybe a third of his main campaign promises and that the GOP
establishment would get the hiding it deserves. Boy, was I wrong.
I take you believe Hillary Clinton was worse than Trump. Fair enough, but do you still think
our country would be in the state it is now? In what way could she possibly be worse than
what we have now with Trump?
It's better for Trumpism to have burst like a zit onto the mirror, no matter how disgusting,
because it was all there anyway under Bush and Cheney, it was there alongside "Barack the
magic... birth certificate!" You can fairly easily wash off the stain of Bush and Rumsfeld,
you can sort of start to forget their sublime horror, the exact same level of lies and utter
mismanagement, but you can't wash off a man like Trump, ever. His portrait will be in the
White House so future Americans can see what we're capable of, and hopefully be more vigilant
about the subtle and polished lies and civilized outrages. We needed this barbaric display to
get some clarity.
"The president has been about the situation because he evidently cares more about the
short-term political implications than he does about protecting the public"
It's no different from the first two years of his presidency. He already betrayed those of
us who voted for the America First promises on immigration and ending the wars. He spent most
of his doing favors for Wall Street, Israel, and Saudi Arabia instead. Now he's going to
betray the many vulnerable elders who voted for him, risking their illness and even death by
his selfish evasions and lies. He's a con artist. A fake.
Testing around the U.S. was hampered when local officials reported flaws in the kits the CDC
sent. Replacements didn't come until weeks later, which left most hospitals and clinics short
of tests. Shifting guidelines for who should get the few tests available also confused
hospitals, Diaz said.
At the time, there had still been just the single case reported in Seattle. Trevor Bedford,
a Harvard-trained researcher and viral genome expert at the city's Fred Hutchinson Cancer
Research Center, wondered why. He had spent weeks analyzing genomes of patients from around the
world, tracing minor mutations to deduce how Covid-19 emerged and spread.
The early work found that infections were doubling roughly every six days, and that for
every three to four rounds of transmission -- or once every 20 to 30 days -- one minor mutation
was occurring, Bedford said in a Feb. 13 interview. "We are watching very carefully for more
local transmission," he said at the time.
They soon found it: a teenager with mild symptoms who attended a high school about 15 miles
from where the first case was identified -- someone who wouldn't have been tested because he or
she didn't meet the criteria. But the results showed up in the Seattle Flu Study, a project on
which Bedford is a lead scientist.
The new case, announced Feb. 28, was genetically identical to the original except for three
minor mutations in the virus. And it contained a key genetic variant that was present only in
two of 59 viral samples from China. This type of circumstantial evidence stops just short of
proving a chain of transmission. It's possible the Washington cluster didn't derive from the
known Patient Zero, but another case that came into Washington the same time and went
undetected. Still, Bedford calculated a 97 percent probability the new case was a direct
descendant -- one that hadn't been spotted because of the narrow testing at that time,
Bedford wrote
in a March 2 post.
"This lack of testing was a critical error and allowed an outbreak in Snohomish County and
surroundings to grow to a sizable problem before it was even detected," he wrote.
... ... ...
All told, 31 Kirkland firefighters -- almost a third of the department -- in
addition to 10 from other communities as well as some relatives have been quarantined, adding
to the stress on emergency teams.
Bedford, the genome expert, is working with University of Washington researchers to
understand the extent of the spread. Last week, the university started using its own virus
test, a modified version of one created by the World Health Organization. When a positive
result is found in a sample, the researchers perform a second round of tests to sequence the
viral genome.
Pavitra Roychoudhury, a university researcher in charge of sequencing, said technicians have
been working late into the night to complete as many samples and sequences as possible. She
puts her toddler to bed and then logs back into her computer.
On a call with reporters on Monday, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC's National Center
for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, called Bedford's theory "an interesting hypothesis"
but said other possibilities have not been ruled out. "There are alternate explanations of the
same findings," she said. There may have been a "secondary seeding" in the community, she said,
as more recent cases in Washington match viral sequences posted in China.
So far, Bedford has reported, sequencing still suggests the transmission is related to the
original patient -- and the number of active infections could reach 1,100 by March 10 and 2,000
by March 15.
What's more, the state's early cases may have seeded infections now exploding on the
cruise ship Grand Princess off California's coast, he tweeted this week. Researchers from
the University of California at San Francisco have said the viral strain from a patient
infected on the ship is similar to the cluster circulating in Washington state. -- With
assistance by Emma Court and Michelle Fay Cortez
As of March 6, there were at least 228
confirmed cases of the new coronavirus -- the WHO has officially
named the disease that this virus causes COVID-19 -- across the U.S, the majority of which
have been in Washington state. Most of the initial cases were people recently traveled to China
or were released from quarantine aboard the Diamond Princess cruise
ship , which experienced an outbreak last month. Increasingly, though, new cases have
cropped up in people who have no known association with outbreak epicenters, suggesting that
the virus is spreading undetected through person-to-person contact and has been for weeks.
COVID-19 cases have been confirmed in 14
states, including Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Illinois, Wisconsin, Massachusetts,
Rhode Island, New York
, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, New Jersey, Maryland, and
Indiana . In Washington State, where most coronavirus fatalities in the U.S. so far has
occurred, it's possible that
as many as 1,500 people may have been infected . There's also an outbreak at a long-term
care facility, the Life Care Center, in Kirkland, Washington, where 50 residents and employees
reportedly have COVID-19 symptoms.
On Thursday, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in New York reached 22, and 2,773
others in the state are under quarantines, the New York
Times reports. The same day, Maryland and New Jersey also reported new confirmed
cases; in total, the former state now has
three cases while the latter has two . Most recently,
Indiana
reported its first confirmed case.
"... During the 2019-2020 influenza season, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 15 million people came down with flu, of whom 140,000 required hospitalisation. 8,200 deaths were recorded. Over a 4-month period, that averages to 2,050 deaths per month. This is in a country with 1/4 of the population of China's. ..."
"... If the White House failed to recognise a major health crisis already simmering on its own doorstep, what hope can be held for when the coronavirus epidemic starts sweeping through the inland US, taking out the elderly, the poor and the homeless? ..."
The White House should not have needed to look very far to China to prepare for a
coronavirus epidemic within the US.
During the 2019-2020 influenza season, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
estimate that 15 million people came down with flu, of whom 140,000 required hospitalisation.
8,200 deaths were recorded. Over a 4-month period, that averages to 2,050 deaths per month.
This is in a country with 1/4 of the population of China's.
If the White House failed to recognise a major health crisis already simmering on its own
doorstep, what hope can be held for when the coronavirus epidemic starts sweeping through
the inland US, taking out the elderly, the poor and the homeless?
The genetic sequences of patients in the Seattle-King County region suggest the virus has
been circulating there since about mid-January, when the first U.S. patient -- a man who
returned from Wuhan -- was diagnosed, Bedford wrote in the analysis, published online6
.
The spread of the virus has gone undetected in part because many infected people experience
only mild infections that could be confused for a cold or the flu, and in part because of
stumbles in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's effort to develop test kits for
state and local public health laboratories, which has meant very little testing has been done
in the country until the past few days.
... ... ...
"January 1 in Wuhan was March 1 in Seattle," Bedford told STAT. "Now would be the time to
start these interventions rather than waiting three weeks."
... ... ...
The stringent actions China took drove down new infections in Hubei province
-- where Wuhan is located -- to low levels, though transmission continues there. Other cities
in the country that started to see cases were able, with the same measures, to avoid the
explosive transmission Wuhan had experienced. Flattening the epidemic curve, as that phenomenon
is called, helps health care systems continue to function. An eruption of cases overtaxes
hospitals, leading to deaths that otherwise could have been avoided.
"China saw not much of an epidemic outside of Hubei because they acted early," Bedford
said.
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Anthony Fauci is shown testifying in a US Senate hearing in September. © Reuters 18 Follow
RT on 
Maggie Haberman
@maggieNYT · 21h "I have real problems with that guy," Fauci said of Atlas. "He's a
smart guy who's talking about things that I believe he doesn't have any real insight or
knowledge or experience in...when you dissect it out and parse it out, it doesn't make any
sense." https:// washingtonpost.com/politics/fauci
-covid-winter-forecast/2020/10/31/e3970eb0-1b8b-11eb-bb35-2dcfdab0a345_story.html 18
FILE PHOTO © Reuters / Mark Makela 59 Follow RT on 
Credible reporting in incredible times.![Donald Trump wearing a suit and tie: President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at the White House.]({"default":{"load":"default","w":"80","h":"53","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB17jamr.img?h=746&w=1119&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=2395&y=851"},"dpi":1.4,"size3column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"42","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB17jamr.img?h=584&w=874&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=2395&y=851"},"size2column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"42","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB17jamr.img?h=584&w=874&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=2395&y=851"}})
© Evan Vucci, AP Images President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at the
White House.
ilsm said...
Bernie
Sanders: An Emergency Response to the
Democrats
join with Trump in bipartisan push for
US nursing home catastrophe: Increasing numbers of
'Immediate danger': Half of world's workforce could
Coronavirus pandemic is 'ACCELERATING,'
The
Decade
3 hours ago (Edited) Just sayen
Ms No, 4 hours ago Listen to this medical chick that saved millions from the EU and their
swine flu vaccine that caused brain damage. They tried to have her "psychiatrized" which means
locked away as crazy and probably tortured for the rest of her miserable life, being banged
with blood draw needles, forced meds and put in a straight jacket. Close to Assange
treatment.
5 hours ago Why is the video doctored right at the end to make Fauci say a damning sentence.
You can see his head jerk to new positions as they piece together bits of video.
After WWI, the distinguished British economist Edwin Cannan was asked, somewhat
reproachfully, what he did during the terrible war years. He replied: "I protested." The
present article is a similar protest against the current lockdown policies put into place in
most countries of the Western world to confront the current coronavirus pandemic.
Parents with their children stand in a queue waiting to get inside
Stengaard School following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak north of Copenhagen,
Denemark, April 15, 2020 © Bo Amstrup via Reuters / Ritzau Scanpix
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