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April 2020

Don’t be deceived by COVID stats — we know a lot less than the numbers suggest We risk being misled by bad data James Ball

https://spectator.us/deceived-covid-stats-less-numbers-suggest/

There is a concept at least as old as computing itself — Charles Babbage, the father of the field, expressed the sentiment, if not the words themselves — ‘garbage in, garbage out’. The idea is not a complicated one: no matter how advanced the calculation machine, no matter how good the statistical model, no matter how intricate the formulae, if the data on the way in isn’t reliable, the calculation that comes out will be suspect at best — and is liable to be outright wrong. We are regularly told that figures for economic growth were wrong and have to be dramatically revised. So what hope do we have of predicting coronavirus?

There is no reason to doubt either the skill or the dedication of the academics working to produce figures and forecasts to shape the response to the virus. But we do risk being misled by bad data. The daily influx of statistics, of infections, of deaths etc starts to build for most of us a false impression. It suggests to us that coronavirus is knowable, that we understand what is happening, that we have a plan. This impression begins to erode the second we examine the bedrock upon which it is built. Even the most reliable-looking of the figures we see tells us far less than it should.

It only takes a second of thinking about numbers of new cases to know they cannot be comparable across countries: how can they, if the death rate for the same disease is supposed to be 10 times higher in Italy than in Germany? The infection numbers will only ever be the tip of an iceberg. In the UK, officially only those being considered for admission to hospital are eligible for coronavirus testing — with even National Health Service front-line workers unable to get tested before that stage, even if certain celebrities, politicians and others seem to get tests without much struggle.

No coronavirus vaccine can inoculate against anti-vaxxers As the world ails, the movement against vaccinations is alive and well. By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/no-coronavirus-vaccine-can-inoculate-against-anti-vaxxers-623377

In a televised address on Wednesday evening, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued the latest of what have become additional near-daily directives aimed at preventing the contracting and spreading of COVID-19.

“Citizens of Israel, we are still at the height of an international tsunami,” he said. “The coronavirus pandemic is washing powerfully over continents and countries…. All of us are making a gargantuan effort to overcome the virus… but this doesn’t mean that the danger is behind us. We cannot fall into the trap of complacency.”He added that Israeli is at a crossroads from which it either can progress or regress.

“Over the past day in New York alone, a person died every four minutes. In Spain, the situation is similar…. We are doing everything in our power not to reach that point.

I know that this has caused severe economic damage… but our first priority is to save the lives of thousands and thousands of Israelis.”

Netanyahu then demanded that everyone wear masks in public. Those who don’t possess store-bought ones can improvise with scarves or other face-coverings, he said, “to minimize the spread of the virus to others.”

He also stressed that only family members already sharing a household may celebrate Passover together, even if it means forfeiting the presence at the Seder of daughters, sons, siblings and particularly grandparents, who are in the highest risk group.

Himmelfarb’s Enlightenment Keith Windschuttle

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/2/gertrude-himmelfarb-the-enlightenment

The beasts of modernism have mutated into the beasts of postmodernism—relativism into nihilism, amorality into immorality, irrationality into insanity, sexual deviancy into polymorphous perversity. And since then, generations of intelligent students under the guidance of their enlightened professors have looked into the abyss, have contemplated those beasts, and have said, “How interesting, how exciting.”
                  —Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss, 1994

When Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote about the abyss consuming the intellectual and moral traditions of her own time, she was one of the first to recognise how seductive was its appeal and how depraved its outcome. In her book On Looking into the Abyss, she attributed the original insight to the critic Lionel Trilling, who detected it in the early 1960s in the underbelly of the modernist movement that had dominated literature and the arts since the early twentieth century. Himmelfarb, however, came to her own recognition from another direction entirely, partly from her study of the history of ideas in Britain’s Victorian era but also from the apparently unlikely field of the history of social policy that led the Victorians to define poverty as a social problem. In the process, up to her death on December 30 last year, aged ninety-seven, those who knew her work came to regard her as not only one of the great American historians of her time but one of her nation’s most compelling moral critics. In American political circles she was best known as Bea Kristol, wife and mother, respectively, of the neoconservative authors and editors Irving Kristol and William Kristol.

Modernists, from their earliest public manifestations in London’s Bloomsbury, had regarded the Christian morality of the English-speaking world as the greatest obstacle to the bohemianism of “free thought” and “free love” they craved.

Tests of potential coronavirus vaccine spur growth of virus-fighting antibodies Mark Johnson

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/04/02/researchers-develop-potential-coronavirus-vaccine/5112675002/

A potential vaccine for COVID-19 has been developed and tested successfully in mice, researchers reported Thursday.

“We’d like to get this into patients as soon as possible,” said Andrea Gambotto, associate professor of surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and co-author of a paper announcing the vaccine in the journal EBioMedicine.

As far as reaching clinical trials, “we would like to think a month, give or take. Maybe two months. We just started the process,” said co-author Louis Falo, a professor and chairman of the Department of Dermatology at the University of Pittsburgh.

Thursday’s announcement, more than three months into a pandemic that has killed 50,000 people and sickened almost 1 million worldwide, presents an urgent challenge to government regulators, who must weigh how much to speed up the vaccine approval process.Vaccines often take years to receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Yet on March 16, the first four healthy volunteers in Seattle received a different potential COVID-19 vaccine, made by a company called Moderna and administered in a small clinical trial at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute.

Former Obama adviser Plouffe predicts ‘historical level’ of turnout by Trump supporters BY JOE CONCHA

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/490810-former-obama-adviser-plouffe-predicts-

Former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe on Thursday predicted that supporters of President Trump will turn out “at a historical level” on Election Day, creating a “very dangerous” scenario for former Vice President Joe Biden.

Plouffe, speaking on the “Fox News Rundown” podcast shortly after record-high jobless claims were announced, said Trump voters will head to the polls to cast their ballots for the president despite the coronavirus pandemic and economic fallout.

“You look at the economic situation and say, ‘How can an incumbent win in that?’ But, you know, no one’s blaming Trump for the damage,” Plouffe said. “I think if you can lay his crisis response at his feet and connect that to the economy, I do think that’s some headwind he’s got to run into.”

Plouffe, who was considered the architect of former President Obama’s successful 2008 White House bid, said Trump is still well positioned for repeat victories in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin “because his base is so solid.”

A strong US 5G sector promises good jobs and better security BY REP. RAJA KRISHNAMOORTHI (D-ILL.)

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/490745-a-strong-us-5g-sector-p

On Dec. 12, 1901, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated the very first transatlantic radio-wave transmission and ushered in a new age of wireless communications. More than a century later, wireless technology still is one of our primary sources of communication. But as our radio-wave highways become increasingly congested, each new generation of wireless technology is forced to ascend into higher and higher frequencies. The fifth generation of wireless technology, known as “5G,” will expand into spectrum bands Marconi could never have foreseen.

Because it will allow data to be transmitted more quickly and efficiently than ever before, 5G technology has the potential to improve everything from search and rescue missions and medical care to transportation, real-time language translation and precision farming. It could allow firefighters to use thermal imaging to see through smoke and locate victims more easily. It could help specialists perform remote robotic surgery on patients who are far away. And it could help American soldiers on the battlefield, giving them real-time information about their adversaries while monitoring their status and location. Such developments could revolutionize the technological landscape and pump trillions of dollars into our global economy. Perhaps most important, 5G could create millions of new U.S. jobs and become integral to our competitiveness in the global marketplace.

But like any new technology, 5G is not without risks. Currently, the only global company that is competitively producing all of the equipment necessary to fully implement 5G is China-based Huawei. While Huawei calls itself “employee-owned,” Chinese laws require companies to assist in national intelligence work unbeknownst to their customers — potentially rendering the equipment unsecure. This presents a major challenge for 5G implementation in the United States, since American companies either have to invent their own equipment or utilize Huawei’s — knowing that it could be accessed by the Chinese government.

Just say no to typical Washington move: A ‘9/11 Commission’ for coronavirus By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/490694-just-say-no-to-typical-washington-m

NBC News reports that preliminary discussions have begun on Capitol Hill regarding the establishment of a 9/11 Commission-type inquiry about the coronavirus outbreak in the United States. The discussions are said predominantly to involve Democrats and to be focused on the Trump administration’s performance. As outlined, the exercise would smack of the worst aspects of the 9/11 Commission: the partisan blame-game, which eventually petered into the look-like-we’re-doing-something creation of bloated and ludicrously expensive new bureaucracy.

The 9/11 Commission was a brainchild of the political class, which is why Washington remembers it fondly. To be fair, the report it generated was well written, as these extravaganzas go. It was remarkably gimlet-eyed about radical Islamic ideology (what would be more accurately described as sharia supremacism) as the instigator of jihadist terrorism — indeed, much more willing to confront this challenge than the progressive political class’s typical approach of reimagining Islam into a relentlessly “peaceful” creed to which terrorism is anathematic “anti-Muslim activity.”

That said, the 9/11 Commission was primarily an exercise in partisan politics. That is why, in the actual formation of substantive counterterrorism policy, the commission was ignored once Washington’s virtue-signally objectives were achieved. Quite contrary to the commission’s conclusions, it became de rigueur in the Obama years to shift our national security approach to opposing “violent extremism,” on the premise that fundamentalist Islam is no more likely to spur terrorism than movements derived from other religions or political agendas (e.g., limited-government conservatism, Second Amendment advocacy).

Evil: Pakistani court overturns murder conviction of Daniel Pearl’s killers By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/evil_pakistani_court_overturns_murder_conviction_of_daniel_pearls_killers.html

A Pakistani court covered itself with glory by announcing that the al-Qaeda beasts who kidnapped and savagely killed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl shortly after 9/11 now get their murder convictions overturned and will go free to walk among us again.

Somehow, after all these years, they got it wrong.  The murder never happened, at least not by the slimy hands of these Islamist creeps.  And it was a very bad murder — Pearl was a bright light at the Journal with wonderful parents (we have since learned) who was kidnapped, blindfolded, forced to recite that he was a Jew to his Jew-hating hostage takers, and then beheaded for a despicable al-Qaeda propaganda movie, the better to recruit scumbags who get excited about this stuff.  This dirtbag, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who’s still eating his Froot Loops on Gitmo (why is he even still alive?), is the one who actually did it, but the Pakistani creeps released were the confederates who made it happen. 

Look at how bad it is, according to the Washington Post:

“As per the court’s judgment, Omar Saeed Sheikh has been found guilty of kidnapping and not of murder. The accused was in jail for 20 years,” the defendants’ lawyer Khawaja Naveed told The Washington Post.

Saeed had been sentenced to death for Pearl’s murder but now with just a seven-year sentence for kidnapping, he could be released for the 18 years he has already served.

America Is Still a Global Leader By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-pandemic-america-still-global-leader-time-crisis/

Any laxity in fighting the virus is not to be found with the U.S., but rather with its loudest and most opportunistic critics.

A current global myth alleges that America under the Trump administration is not leading the world fight against the coronavirus in its accustomed role as the post-war global leader.

Yet the U.S. was the first major nation to issue a travel ban on flights from China, with Donald Trump making that announcement on January 31. That was a bold act. It likely saved thousands endangered by Chinese perfidy and soon became a global model. None of the ban’s loud critics are today demanding it be rescinded.

In typically American fashion, as we have seen in crises from Pearl Harbor to 9/11, after initial shock and unpreparedness, the U.S. economic and scientific juggernaut is kicking into action.

Already the U.S. is transitioning from a long, disastrous reliance on Chinese medical supplies and pharmaceuticals. In ad hoc fashion, companies are gearing up massive production of masks, ventilators, and key anti-viral supplies.

The number of known deaths from the virus — for now the only reliable data available — shows a fatality rate of about 7–8 per million people in the United States. That per capita toll is analogous to Germany’s and one of the lowest in the world among larger nations.

Professors, journalists call out Fox News’ coronavirus misinformation in scathing letter US LEE MORAN

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2020/04/02/professors-journalists-call-out-fox-news-coronavirus-misinformation-in-scathing-letter/23968094/

Dozens of professors and teachers of journalism and communications have signed a scathing open letter calling out Fox News’ coverage of the coronavirus crisis, describing it as “a danger to public health.”

Some 77 academics and journalists had signed the letter as of Thursday morning, accusing the widely watched conservative network of contributing “to the spread of a grave pandemic.” 

Oliver Darcy

✔@oliverdarcy

74 journalism / comms professors + journalists have written an open letter to Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch about the network’s coronavirus coverage.”Viewers of Fox News, including the president of the United States, have been regularly subjected to misinformation…”

The signatories, led by Columbia Journalism School Professor Todd Gitlin, call on Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch and his son, company CEO Lachlan Murdoch, “to help protect the lives of all Americans” by ensuring the network airs information “based on scientific facts.”

The letter notes that Fox News’ viewers — including President Donald Trump — have “been regularly subjected to misinformation,” such as:

False statements downplaying the prevalence of COVID-19 and its harms; misleading recommendations of activities that people should undertake to protect themselves and others, including casual recommendations of untested drugs; false assessments of the value of measures urged upon the public by their elected political leadership and public health authorities.