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December 2020

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Who Made the Vaccine Possible? Not WHO Pharmaceutical companies and Trump’s Operation Warp Speed deserve the vast bulk of the credit. By Graham T. Allison

By on December 24th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-made-the-vaccine-possible-not-who-11608744603?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

With the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines, a light has appeared in the darkness. A hard winter lies ahead, but this pandemic will soon be over.

How can this be happening only 10 months after the first Covid death in the U.S., rather than the 10 years it took to develop a vaccine for measles? Nine months ago, Anthony Fauci stated unambiguously: “It will take at least a year and a half to have a vaccine we can use.” The public-health community dismissed that as a fantasy. A co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, Paul Offit, noted: “When Dr. Fauci said 12 to 18 months, I thought that was ridiculously optimistic.” A New York Times vaccine timeline went further, declaring: “The grim truth behind this rosy forecast is that a vaccine probably won’t arrive any time soon.”

Those naysayers have been proved wrong and it’s worth considering why. Let me invite the reader to answer a short quiz. When in the months ahead you are vaccinated, to whom should you be most thankful for making this possible?

• The initiative forwarded by the United Nations, Group of 20, World Health Organization and COVAX—an affiliate of WHO and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations—that called for “a ‘people’s vaccine’ available and affordable for everyone, everywhere,” in the words of U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres ?

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ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Science Eats Its Own A top journal retracts a study following a political outcry.

By on December 24th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-eats-its-own-11608765409?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

In 2020 scientific publications have leapt into the political fray. Scientific American gave its first ever Presidential endorsement to Joe Biden, declaring that Donald Trump “rejects evidence and science.” The New England Journal of Medicine said in a pre-election editorial that “our current leaders have undercut trust in science.”

But if populist politicians undercut trust in science, sometimes they are aided by science’s own institutions. Consider the controversy over a now-retracted paper in the prestigious science journal Nature Communications, which shows how political fashions can dictate what research outcomes are acceptable.

In November three NYU Abu Dhabi researchers came under fire for an article questioning the popular academic view that young women scientists are better off with female mentors. Their “science of science” study analyzed the impact of millions of scientific papers with junior and senior authors and drew conclusions about the effect of mentorship on careers.

“While current diversity policies encourage same-gender mentorships to retain women in academia,” the paper says in the abstract, “our findings raise the possibility that opposite-gender mentorship may actually increase the impact of women who pursue a scientific career.”

The authors—two of whom are women—pointed to possible explanations for their findings, including that “historically, male scientists had enjoyed more privileges and access to resources than their female counterparts.”

Yet some scientists erupted on social media at what was perceived as an attack on policies promoting gender equality. One Boston University biologist told Science magazine, “Treating gender itself as a binary is also damaging in today’s climate.” On Monday Nature Communications retracted the article, writing that it wants to make sure “that the review process takes into account the dimension of potential harm.”

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White Coat Supremacy Christmas And a dangerous new year, thanks to doctors Fauci, Birx, Schmidt and Emanuel. Lloyd Billingsley

By on December 24th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/white-coat-supremacy-christmas-lloyd-billingsley/

Dr. Anthony Fauci turns 80 tonight, on Christmas Eve, but by early December he was already gearing up for the occasion. Nobody wanted to modify or shut down the holiday season, Fauci told reporters,  but “we’re at a very critical time . . . we’ve got to not walk away from the facts and the data. This is tough going for all of us.”

Dr. Fauci did not recall his constantly shifting views on masks, social distancing and so forth. Nobody asked him about the dangerous “gain of function” research the longtime National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases boss had authorized, nor the funds NIAID channeled to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The longtime NIAID boss only addressed the holidays, and his Coronavirus Task Force colleague Dr. Deborah Birx also got in the act.

“We cannot go into the holiday season, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, with the same kind of attitude, that those gatherings don’t apply to me,” Birx told reporters. “They apply to everybody.” It had not yet emerged that Birx had violated her own guidelines with a post-Thanksgiving trip to a vacation home with family from two households. As Birx and Fauci locked down Christmas, another white-coat type was casting a darker shadow far beyond the holidays.

“Older populations are whiter. Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

That was Dr. Harald Schmidt of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Schmidt, who identifies as an “ethicist,” did not explain how, exactly, society had been structured in a way that makes “whiter” people live longer. By implication, blacker people do not live longer, which ignores some rather high-profile cases.

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