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March 2020

Fauci: Possibly ‘a few months’ until life gets ‘back to normal’ Zack Budryk

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/487625-fauci-possibly-a-few-months-until-life-gets-back-to-normal?rnd=1584276483

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Sunday that it is possible it will take “a few months” before life goes “back to normal” amid the coronavirus outbreak.

“Can you try to help us understand, when will life get back to normal?” ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Fauci on “This Week.”

“It’s going to be a matter of several weeks to a few months, for sure,” Fauci responded.

“If you look at the dynamics of how outbreak curves go, you just need to take a look at China and take a look at South Korea right now,” the health official added. “With China, they went to their peak, and they’re coming down right now. There were, just a day or so ago, 11 new cases in China, which is miniscule compared to where it was.”

South Korea, meanwhile, is “starting to flatten,” Fauci said, adding that the change in the trend occurred over about a month and a half in both countries.

Fear factor: Press and politicians should help pause the panic By Douglas MacKinnon

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/487538-fear-factor-press-and-politicians-should-help-pause-the-panic

Most people have heard of the news-business truism, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Sensational or alarming news stories have proven a profitable attention-getter since the dawn of newspapers — and, later, of radio and television — and preying on our various anxieties has been a staple of the news business ever since.

The same is true of politics: Fear and anxiety are among the surest provocations to get your political base out to vote or to support your campaign. Politicians have used those successfully since the first elections were held.

Knowing both, it sure seems as if the nonstop frightening, even terrifying news and political rhetoric being spread across the globe regarding the newest coronavirus, COVID-19, could be the mother of all cash-cows for some in the news business and in the political world.

Just as a very recent example, we have this news item: “Quarantined couple die of coronavirus two hours apart in Italy.” If the editors were looking for cheap, easy online clicks, then mission accomplished. When I saw the story as it ran this past Thursday morning, it already had well more than 200,000 views.

Those who actually bothered to read the story accompanying the sensational headline would learn that, although the couple did indeed tragically pass within hours of each other, the husband was 86 years of age and the wife, 82. For those who didn’t get that far and only consumed the headline, it was just one more fear-inducing straw being piled upon the thousands of others now sitting atop our troubled minds.

Sydney Williams: Burrowing into Books “A Time to Build,” Yuval Levin

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Yuval Levin is the founder of “National Affairs,” a director of the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor of National Review. His belief is that we need to rebuild our institutions (“The durable forms of our common life”) – families, schools, universities, church, the military, civic organizations and legislatures – into the formative organizations they once were.”

The book (short at 204 pages) is divided into three parts – a description of the crisis, institutions in transition and a suggested path forward. “Everybody,” he writes in the introduction, “knows that Americans have long been losing faith in institutions.”  In losing faith, “…we have lost the words with which to speak about what we owe each other.” These institutions, which were once molds that formed who we were, have become platforms for those who use them for their own purposes. This is not the only problem confronting us, but it is the one, he writes, “…about which we tend to be most blind.”

Yuval Levin takes us through the political world where he claims problems are not so much ones of ideology, but of social psychology, “…unleashed and unmoored from institutional constraints.” Thirty pages of the book are devoted to campus culture where “…our degraded capacity for unity and solidarity is the result of a degraded capacity for accepting differences…The trouble is not that we have forgotten how to agree but that we have forgotten how to disagree.” Abetted by administrations and faculty inculcated with a culture of moral activism that does not allow for dissent, colleges graduate students endowed with a sense of political correctness that was “…utterly unfamiliar in the world of work until the last few years.” Writing of the effect of social media, Mr. Levin notes: “In some important respects, this has been an age of isolation not despite but because of social media.” Social media affirms us, rather than shape us. Shopping on-line is convenient, but is there the same sense of loyalty one has to real stores and the people who work in them?

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AND RESILIENCE

America’s Democracy Will Not Be Put into Quarantine João Lemos Esteves

www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/america_democracy_will_not_be_put_into_quarantine.html

EXCERPT

‘Most importantly now is to appeal to the resilience of American democracy and system of liberties: as opposed to what some  have been claiming, the American electoral process must go on as normally as possible; democracy does not capitulate to any threat, let alone to a virus which the Chinese communists could have avoided if they had been willing to do so. The ongoing primaries both in the Democrat party and in the GOP (with President Trump getting astonishingly high scores for an undisputed election!) cannot be stopped for the sake of the sanctity of the American constitutional system of republican government.  Otherwise, all the tyrants and enemies of freedom around the world would learn how to disrupt American democratic devices and mechanisms — this would actually be real collusion aimed directly at the heart of the government by “We, the People.”

Do not ever forget that authoritarian regimes — like that of China — want democratic states to doubt  themselves; to make us have second thoughts on the value of democratic self-government. They want to persuade everyone that a centralized totalitarian regime with a brutal coercive command structure is far better than democracy and individual self-determination. Let’s not play their game — democracy and individual liberties are not up for debate.  American democracy — due to the resilience, the ingenuity and the bravery of American people — is immune to any virus. Chinese, Russian, Iranian, you name it — viruses will always stop at nothing in their efforts to undermine the government by the people.

The Democrats’ Project Fear Will Fail J.B. Shurk

www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/the_democrats_project_fear_will_fail.html

Have they scared you yet?  Me neither.  Not for want of trying, though.  Project Fear is ramping up, and it’s only going to get worse.  The Democrats and the global establishment class do not care how many lives are lost or how much financial damage results.  They have only one concern: removing President Trump from power, silencing us, and bending the arc of history back toward the plutocratic governing elite.  For them, that is the only moral universe that can exist.

All of us have known this was coming.  From the moment on November 8, 2016, when we looked at each other and smiled, we knew the real war had just begun.  The people with the most power in our country and across the globe had spent six months before that fateful election campaigning on nothing but fear.  They promised economic ruin.  They promised imminent nuclear holocaust.  They promised that internal unrest would lead to civil war, that foreign policy inexperience would lead to global war, and that global warming skepticism would lead to planetary extinction.  They laid all this and more at the feet of American voters, but enough of us had finally grown so furious with decades of ineptitude and betrayal by the federal government that we drew our own red line across America’s timeline and said, “No.”  We did not fall for their scaremongering and delusions; we held our ground and finally pushed back.  

EXCERPT

‘Most importantly now is to appeal to the resilience of American democracy and system of liberties: as opposed to what some  have been claiming, the American electoral process must go on as normally as possible; democracy does not capitulate to any threat, let alone to a virus which the Chinese communists could have avoided if they had been willing to do so. The ongoing primaries both in the Democrat party and in the GOP (with President Trump getting astonishingly high scores for an undisputed election!) cannot be stopped for the sake of the sanctity of the American constitutional system of republican government.  Otherwise, all the tyrants and enemies of freedom around the world would learn how to disrupt American democratic devices and mechanisms — this would actually be real collusion aimed directly at the heart of the government by “We, the People.”

 

Do not ever forget that authoritarian regimes — like that of China — want democratic states to doubt  themselves; to make us have second thoughts on the value of democratic self-government. They want to persuade everyone that a centralized totalitarian regime with a brutal coercive command structure is far better than democracy and individual self-determination. Let’s not play their game — democracy and individual liberties are not up for debate.  American democracy — due to the resilience, the ingenuity and the bravery of American people — is immune to any virus. Chinese, Russian, Iranian, you name it — viruses will always stop at nothing in their efforts to undermine the government by the people.

The bogus, sham and fake Pal-Arabs Pal-Arab propaganda against Israel is one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated, and Mahmoud Abbas is still at it Victor Sharpe

The Holocaust denying head of Terror, Inc (aka Mahmoud Abbas, and titular head of the Palestinian Authority), repeatedly outdoes his erstwhile mentor and arch terrorist, Yasser Arafat, by spewing more of the anti-Israel revisionist history and hallucinatory diatribes at the United Nations Security Council.

It goes as follows:

“We are the descendants of the Canaanites that lived in the land of Palestine 5,000 years ago and continuously remained there to this day.”

We should remember that the late and unlamented blood-soaked Arafat had claimed that the Arabs, who call themselves Palestinians, were also descended from the Philistines. But then the followers of the ‘religion of peace’ will tell you that even Adam was a Muslim. Loony tunes for loony people!

But let’s come back to reality and deconstruct the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.

There is no such thing as a Palestinian people; no such thing as a Palestinian history; and no Palestinian language exists.

The present-day so-called ‘Palestinians’ are an Arab people sharing an overwhelmingly Muslim Arab culture, ethnicity and language identical to their fellow Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, with few if any distinctions. They are primarily the descendants of those itinerant Arabs who illegally flooded British Mandatory Palestine from Arab territories as far away as Sudan, Egypt, Syria and what was Mesopotamia (modern Iraq).

These Arabs were attracted during the late 19th and early 20th century by new employment opportunities created and provided by the Jewish pioneers whose heroic efforts were turning the desert green again, draining the malarial infested swamps and restoring centuries of neglect, which the ancestral Jewish homeland was forced to endure under a succession of alien occupations.

Israelis moving quickly to get out a COVID-19 vaccine By Howard Richman

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/israelis_moving_quickly_to_get_out_a_covid19_vaccine.html

Israeli scientists have outraced the world in creating a coronavirus vaccine.

Israeli scientists at the MIGAL Galilee Research Institute had worked for four years and had successfully developed a Coronavirus vaccine for chickens which passed clinical trials. When they saw the genetic sequencing of the COVID-19 virus, they realized that they could quickly adapt their chicken vaccine to the human virus. Ella Dagan, a spokesman for MIGAL told europorter:

When the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus COVID-19 was published, the researchers realized that the two viruses have the same infection mechanism similarities so they can use it, with small amount of adaptation, to achieve an effective human vaccine in a very short period of time.

Dr. Shahar, one of the scientists at MIGAL saw God’s hand in this. He told nocamels.com:

It’s a little bit like fate that we were working on this coronavirus vaccine at the same time that the world was suddenly hit by this epidemic of coronavirus for humans.

MIGAL created its vaccine by synthesizing two proteins. Unlike vaccines that are created by injecting a dead or weakened disease-causing virus, there is little danger that a synthetic virus will give patients a disease.

Its vaccine creates antibodies in the mucosal immune system of the body which consists of thin permeable barriers to infection in the lungs, gut, eyes, nose, throat, uterus, and vagina. Dr. Chen Katz, MIGAL’s biotechnology group leader, gave europorter a detailed cellular-level description of how MIGAL’s vaccine works:

The scientific framework for the vaccine is based on a new protein expression vector, which forms and secretes a chimeric soluble protein that delivers the viral antigen into mucosal tissues by self-activated endocytosis (a cellular process in which substances are brought into a cell by surrounding the material with cell membrane, forming a vesicle containing the ingested material), causing the body to form antibodies against the virus.

Israel’s Minister of Science and Technology, Ofir Akunis, is expediting the human vaccine through Israel’s approval process. According to eureporter:

Drew Pinsky once again attacks America’s morally corrupt media By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/drew_pinsky_once_again_attacks_americas_morally_corrupt_media.html

Two weeks ago, Dr. Drew Pinsky was sounding an alarm. Unlike the media, though, he wasn’t shouting “We’re all going to die!” Instead, Pinsky sounded an alarm about the corrupt, uninformed, morally reprehensible American press, which was intentionally creating a panic.

A few days ago, Dr. Drew was back, this time on the Washington Examiner’s Examining Politics podcast, with Larry O’Connor hosting. And once again, Dr. Drew was complaining in powerful terms about how terrible the media’s coronavirus coverage is and about the profound disservice it’s doing to America.

While he refuses to speculate about the media’s motives in stoking panic, Dr. Drew wants as many people as possible to know that what the media says is wrong; that the current disease, while definitely serious, is not worse than the H1N1 flu season America survived in 2009-2010; and that common-sense behavior will see America through this flu too.

The following audio is just a little longer than 6 minutes, with Dr. Drew speaking fluidly and intelligently on a topic that can be frightening and confusing. If you have the time, make sure to listen because everything he says is important.

If you don’t have the time, the transcript is below, although it’s not as good reading it as it is listening to an impassioned Dr. Drew.

Dr. Drew: I don’t claim to know what’s motivating the media but, my God, their reporting is absolutely reprehensible. They should be ashamed of themselves. They are creating a panic that is far worse than the viral outbreak. The bottom line, everybody, is listen to Dr. Anthony Fauci of the CDC, do what he tells you, and go about your business. That’s the story.

This Is An Emergency! For the good of the country, and especially for the good of our leaders, we must prorogue Congress. We must do it today! And since we do not know how long this plague will last, we must do it indefinitely. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/14/this-is-an-emergency/

Panics are a species of moral intoxication. Like the physical kind, they are typically followed by a hangover. Not an upset stomach or headache, but a feeling of chagrin and resentment about one’s own gullibility, which quickly translates into irritation and resentment directed at the people who fueled the panic in the first place. ”

At a time of national crisis, it is important that we do everything possible to make sure that the important people without whom our society could not function are safe. I refer, of course, to our politicians, especially our distinguished members of Congress. Where would we be without their wisdom? How could we stagger on without their selfless dedication to the commonweal? Now that the Wuhan virus is cutting a wide swathe through our country, something must be done to protect these great men and women, many of whom are so dedicated to our welfare that they have stayed in Congress for decades—decades, just for us.

As I write, the news has just come in that a total of 50 people—50!—have died from the scourge of the Wuhan virus. No wonder people feel like the procession of flagellants in “The Seventh Seal.” This really is a pandemic akin to the Black Death.

Do you realize that in this country you have a 0.000000155963303 chance of contracting and dying from this dread disease? Especially if you are over 80 and in poor health. We must take action, and we must take action now, to preserve the lives of all those who govern us, who set our taxes, who impose all those rules and regulations that make everyday business such a joy to conduct.

Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer moves up a space to 9th in annual Newsweek ranking of world’s best hospitals.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/276656?utm_source=VeryGoodN

Newsweek magazine has deemed the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer the world’s ninth-best hospital, one place ahead of last year’s ranking, and placing it alongside the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Toronto General Hospital, and more.

Located in the Tel Aviv area, Sheba is israel’s largest medical facility, and also home to more than 25% of all Israeli clinical research.

In its performance rating, Newsweek cited the hospital’s collaborations with biotech and pharmaceutical companies worldwide to develop new drugs and treatments, in addition to its groundbreaking research in cancer, cardiology, brain diseases, genetics and more.

“The selection reflects another year of excellent and advanced medicine, breakthrough research and world-leading innovation,” said Sheba Medical Center Director General Professor Yitshak Kreiss, a former IDF Surgeon General who has headed the hospital since 2016.

“I am happy and proud of each one of our 9,131 dedicated and professional employees who think outside of the box every day. The continued rise in the rankings puts us in line with the world’s leading hospitals. As in every situation, and especially today when we are leading the national effort to treat the Coronavirus, it is a privilege to provide the Israeli population with the best medicine in the world.”

Coronavirus: Europe on Lockdown by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15737/coronavirus-europe-lockdown

The unprecedented restrictions on the movement of people, unimaginable only two weeks ago, is bringing life in Europe to a virtual standstill.

“We have to be prepared for the fact that Europe will be hit hard, that Europe will be hit even harder than China and that we will be dealing with this challenge for months.” — Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz.

“The numbers are growing alarmingly fast.” — Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz.

Europe is now the epicenter of the global coronavirus pandemic that has reached more than 45 countries on the continent. As of March 14, upwards of 42,000 people have tested positive for the disease, according to data from European health ministries.

The so-called Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is spreading extremely fast: roughly 40,000 of the cases (95% of all cases) in Europe were confirmed during just the first 14 days of March.

Italy is Europe’s worst-affected country, followed by Spain, Germany, France, Switzerland and Norway.

In Europe as a whole, more than 1,600 people — 4.0% of those confirmed as having been infected — have died from COVID-19. In Italy, the lethality rate currently is 5.8%, according to the Ministry of Health.

As the scale of the unfolding crisis has come into view, European leaders have started to implement increasingly severe measures aimed at slowing the spread of the disease. The unprecedented restrictions on the movement of people, unimaginable only two weeks ago, is bringing life in Europe to a virtual standstill.

In Italy, the epicenter of Europe’s coronavirus outbreak, where more than 21,000 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 (as of March 14), Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte ordered a nationwide lockdown. The quarantine of Europe’s third-most populous country, with 60 million inhabitants, bans non-essential travel to, from and within Italy; prohibits all public events; requires people to maintain a distance from each other of at least one meter (three feet); and shutters all bars, restaurants and shops (except for grocery stores and pharmacies).