RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/the-left-politicizes-covid-irony-abounds/

The ‘follow the science’ Democrats care more about politics than science.

Where has the coronavirus gone?

Nowhere. The pandemic has gained a second wind, even as it is mysteriously scarcer in post-election headlines. If anything, COVID-19 seems more contagious as cold temperatures arrive, people stay in indoors, and perhaps their vitamin D levels taper off.

Whatever one’s views on the virus — whether it remains an existential threat or, contrarily, prompts overreactive lockdowns that are more harmful and maybe even deadlier than the virus itself — nothing much has changed since Election Day.

Or did viral perceptions suddenly change? The pandemic certainly no longer serves as an election lever to demagogue President Trump as a veritable killer.States such as California are under a nearly complete lockdown. Draconian measures will abbreviate Thanksgiving gatherings in a way unprecedented in U.S. history. Yet elites such as California’s Governor Gavin Newsom and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) have violated the quarantines they themselves have endorsed.

Following the media announcement that Joe Biden would likely become president, crowds swarmed into the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. They violated every state mandate requiring masks and social distancing. Authorities did nothing — just as they had done nothing during the summer-long protesting and rioting. Apparently, some outdoor gatherings were correct; others, not so much.

A similar warping of science accompanied news about the possible rollout of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Julie Kelly of the conservative website American Greatness has documented the changing narratives about the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Pfizer is one of five companies in line to receive massive federal funding under the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed program to hasten mass vaccinations. Such an ambitious program is unmatched in the history of viral epidemiology. On November 16, another company in the program, Moderna, announced promising results from a clinical trial.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla predicted in early September that by the end of October, his company would offer a preliminary announcement concerning the safety and effectiveness of his company’s vaccine. His forecast was met with apprehension on the left. Any positive assessment was seen by the Left as political, validating, shortly before the election, the Trump administration’s rapid response to the virus.

Yet on October 27, a week before the election, Pfizer corrected Bourla’s earlier estimate. The company claimed any such declaration would follow rather than precede the election.

https://dianebederman.com/you-racist-karen-the-devolution-of-civility-and-the-declin

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “Without ideas held in common there is no common action and without common action there may still be men but there is no social body in order that society should exist and a fortiori that a society should prosper it is necessary that the minds of all the citizens should be rallied and held together by certain predominant ideas.”

Grandiose infantile delusions of entitlement; what a spectacular expression. I first learned it in the 1990s when I took my 2000 hour residency in clinical pastoral education to be a hospital chaplain. And here we are in the 2020’s and the entitlement has expanded. Now it includes calls for the right to free stuff: education, healthcare, housing, food and a get out of jail free card. My, my, aren’t we so entitled.

But this entitlement has taken on a more sinister meaning because of critical race theory and diversity politics. “Critical race theory (CRT), the view that the law and legal institutions are inherently racist and that race itself, instead of being biologically grounded and natural, is a socially constructed concept that is used by white people to further their economic and political interests at the expense of people of colour. According to critical race theory (CRT), racial inequality emerges from the social, economic, and legal differences that white people create between “races” to maintain elite white interests in labour markets and politics, giving rise to poverty and criminality in many minority communities. The CRT movement officially organized itself in 1989, at the first annual Workshop on Critical Race Theory, though its intellectual origins go back much further, to the 1960s and ’70s.”

https://www.wnd.com/2020/11/4871000/
After listing his credentials, a Cambridge University-trained virologist spoke in a public forum against the extension of a mask mandate in one of Canada’s largest cities, calling comprehensive lockdowns, masks and other mitigation efforts against the coronavirus “utterly unfounded public hysteria driven by the media and politicians.”

“It’s outrageous. This is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting population,” said Dr. Roger Hodkinson, the CEO of Western Medical Assessments.

He was speaking via telephone during an Edmonton City Council Community and Public Services Committee meeting last Fridayregarding the Alberta city’s move to extend its face-covering bylaw.

Hodkinson began with a summary of his credentials to ensure he not be regarded as a “quack.”

He said he is a medical specialist in pathology, which includes virology, who trained at Cambridge University in England. A Royal College certified pathologist in Canada, he is the former chairman of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons committee in Ottawa. Hodkinson served as CEO of a large private medical laboratory in Edmonton, Alberta, and now runs MutantDx, a molecular diagnostics company in North Carolina that provides COVID-19 tests.

Hodkinson warned that what he was about to say was “lay language and blunt” and “counter-narrative.”

“There is absolutely nothing that can be done to contain this virus other than protecting older, more vulnerable people,” he said.

“It should be thought of as nothing other than a bad flu season,” said Hodkinson. “This is not ebola. It’s not SARS.”