RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/heritage-coronavirus-commission-releases-5-step-plan-to-reopen-america/

On Thursday, the Heritage Foundation’s National Coronavirus Recovery Commission met for the first time. At the meeting, seventeen experts hammered out a general five-phase plan to “save lives and livelihoods” by defeating the coronavirus and jumpstarting the economy. Vice President Mike Pence acknowledged the commission’s work.

In order to slow the spread of the virus, President Donald Trump has urged Americans to stay home, practice social distancing, and avoid going into the office if their work is not “essential.” State and local leaders have issued various orders, and businesses have moved to remote work or laying off employees. Unemployment has skyrocketed, Americans are having trouble paying rent, and millions are hoping America can reopen sooner rather than later. President Trump originally said he hoped to reopen the country by Easter, but that seems too ambitious.

“Good public health policy is good economic policy, and vice versa,” Kay Coles James, president of the Heritage Foundation, said in a statement. “If the economy fails, there will be severe, long-term health consequences; and if the health care system fails, there will be severe, long-term economic consequences. A nation decimated by the disease cannot have a functioning economy, and a catastrophic loss of jobs wreaks horrific damage on both mental and physical health.”

Therefore, the commission announced a five-phase plan to reopen the economy while also combatting the virus.

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/492042-nih-begins-clinical-trial-to-test-hydroxychloroquine-to-treat-covid-19

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has begun enrolling participants in a clinical trial to test the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19, the agency announced Thursday.

The first participants have enrolled in the trial at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn. The study will be conducted by the NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

According to the NIH, the blinded, placebo-controlled randomized clinical trial aims to enroll more than 500 adults who are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, or who are in an emergency department with anticipated hospitalization. 

Participants will be randomly assigned to receive 400 mg of hydroxychloroquine twice daily for two doses (day one), then 200 mg twice daily for the subsequent eight doses (days two through five) or a placebo twice daily for five days.

Hydroxychloroquine is used to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid conditions such as arthritis. However, its effectiveness at treating COVID-19 has never been proven, despite its embrace by President Trump. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/maybe_theres_a_reason_why_dire_projections_about_covid19_have_been_wrong.html

COVID-19 has proven to be a brutal flu for those unlucky enough to get it. Any new disease that’s successfully left animals behind for human-to-human transmission is highly risky. Nevertheless, the current insanity gripping the world is based upon highly dubious computer models, making those models as dangerous as a virus.

On April 8, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes attacked Trump for trying to manipulate downwards the expert projections about COVID-19 deaths. One month later, Hayes was back, attacking Trump for intentionally manipulating the numbers upwards:

Hayes is an unprincipled moron who will say anything to hurt Trump but his monomania highlights how very wrong the original high-death predictions have proven to be. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump tried to explain away one set of wildly inflated predictions by saying that the experts’ were accurate but that later behavioral changes caused lower numbers:

The problem is that the model Bump looks to assumed 100% social distancing, which hasn’t happened:

Alex Berenson, a former New York Times writer, is also taking apart the modeling. He most recently focused on Ohio’s attempt to do statistical time traveling:

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-pandemic-projection-models-pro

To describe as stunning the collapse of a key model the government has used to alarm the nation about the catastrophic threat of the coronavirus would not do this development justice.

In a space of just six days starting April 2, two revisions (on April 5 and 8) have utterly discredited the model produced by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. I wrote about the IHME’s modeling at National Review on Monday, the day after the first revision — which was dramatic, but pales in comparison to Wednesday’s reassessment. This was not immediately apparent because the latest revision (April 8) did not include a side-by-side comparison, as did the April 5 revision. Perusal of the new data, however, is staggering, as is what it says about government predictions we were hearing just days ago about the likelihood of 100,000 deaths, with as many as 240,000 a real possibility.

As I noted in my last post on this subject, by April 5, the projection of likely deaths had plunged 12 percent in just three days, 93,531 to 81,766. Understand, this projection is drawn from a range; on April 2, IHME was telling us cumulative COVID-19 deaths could reach as high as approximately 178,000. The upper range was also reduced on April 5 to about 136,000.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/491665-if-only-hydroxychloroquine-could-cure-trump-derangement-syndrome

Not every Democrat has COVID-19; but they all – uniformly – apparently suffer from TDS, better known as Trump Derangement Syndrome. Symptoms of this wide-spread affliction include the inability to ever concede, or even imagine, that President Trump might possibly be right about something, sometime.  

The most idiotic recent outbreak of this highly communicable disease surrounds the argument over chloroquine and its less toxic derivative hydroxychloroquine. In mid-March, as the coronavirus surged, President Trump mentioned that the latter anti-malaria drug appeared to have “tremendous promise” as a therapy for treating COVID-19 patients. He said it “could be a game-changer, and maybe not,” acknowledging that the jury was still out.

Trump noted that the drug has been available for decades to treat malaria and thus its side-effects are well known. It is also inexpensive and available from numerous suppliers, all of which might recommend it to our pragmatic president.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/its-the-presidents-prerogative-to-name-a-co

Another media non-story shows the double standard of presidential appointments for Republicans vs. Democrats.

And now, the latest melodrama: Media shrieking over President Trump’s removal of an Obama holdover who had been designated to be the inspector general overseeing the gargantuan spending authorized by the coronavirus relief legislation.

That official, Glenn Fine, a longtime Democratic favorite, is currently working in the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General.

The $2 trillion bill signed by the president in March creates an $80 million fiefdom known as the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. The PRAC will audit government spending. By law, its chairman must be an inspector general or acting inspector general of one of the executive branch departments or agencies. Up until Tuesday, Fine had been DoD’s acting inspector general, a position he assumed during the Obama administration.

Last week, what the New York Times describes as “an umbrella group of agency inspectors general across the executive branch” got together and named Fine to be the PRAC’s chairman. On Tuesday, however, President Trump pushed Fine out as acting IG. That renders him ineligible for the PRAC post.

The president did this by replacing Fine at DoD with Sean O’Donnell, who is currently the Environmental Protection Agency’s IG. Trump also nominated Jason Abend to become DoD’s IG. Pending Abend’s confirmation, O’Donnell will be DoD’s acting IG while continuing to wear his EPA IG hat. Meanwhile, if Fine chooses to stay in government, he will revert to his former position as DoD’s deputy IG. That is the job in which President Obama installed him in 2015. Fine became DoD’s acting IG the next year, but he was never confirmed.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/the-supreme-courts-misunderstood-ruling-on-wisconsins-coronavirus-primary/

There seems to be some confusion about the Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday in connection with Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary. This owes to reporting that suggests, or at least could lead its audience to believe, that the Court’s five conservative-leaning, Republican-appointed justices, over the strident objection of its four left-leaning, Democratic-appointed justices, directed that the primary proceed with in-person voting, despite the coronavirus threat.

That is not what happened.

The state government of Wisconsin, led by Governor Anthony Steven Evers, a Democrat, made the decision to go forward with the primary, and with in-person voting. As the Court’s majority emphasizes, that was not the Court’s call, nor is it the Court’s place to opine on the wisdom of the state government’s decision.

The majority’s unsigned opinion explains that the issue the Court was called upon to decide was a narrow one, pertaining to absentee ballots. Specifically, at the urging of Democratic Party organizations concerned about the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on voting, federal district judge William Conley (an Obama appointee) extended the deadline for receipt of mail-in ballots from Tuesday April 7 (the primary-election day) to Monday afternoon, April 13. That aspect of the district court’s ruling was not in dispute. Judge Conley, however, directed that that absentee ballots were eligible to be counted regardless of when they were mailed in or otherwise delivered, as long as they came in by the April 13 deadline. In effect, that meant absentee ballots could be cast after in-person primary voting had closed on April 7.

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

On January 26, speaking about the coronavirus, Dr. Fauci said the risk to Americans was low, that there was nothing to be worried or frightened about, and that we were prepared (here: 5:08 mark, audio).

By mid-February, Fauci was more concerned about the seasonal flu and continued to say the coronavirus risk to Americans was low, and there was no need, for example, to avoid going to Chinese restaurants.

He also noted that things could change (as if we need an expert to tell us that).  By making such (obvious) statements, he covers himself by leaving the door open to whatever may happen down the road à la, you see, I told you things could change (here).

On April 3, in direct contradiction to a statement made just a few days prior by Dr. Birx that initial reports coming out of China were suggestive of a SARS-like virus and not a global pandemic (here), Fauci claimed that it was clear to him in early to mid-January that this virus was transmittable from human to human, that transmission was very efficient, and that it wasn’t just another SARS or MERS (here: 13:20 mark).

Huh?