RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/30/how-bad-regulation-bureaucracy-slowed-the-fight-against-deadly-wuhan-coronavirus/

Amid all the political name-calling and finger-pointing over who’s to blame and how to attack the Wuhan coronavirus, one thing surprisingly gets little mention at all: regulation. But bad regulation not only slowed our response, it likely added to our death count.

We’re happy to note that in recent days and weeks, President Trump has helped ease the regulatory burden of our response to the coronavirus, pushing Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, our main health agencies, to bend, suspend and in some cases upend useless rules.

But that doesn’t mean every useless regulation was excised from the rulebooks. Or that our major health care regulators made good decisions with the billions of dollars entrusted to them for basic research.

Far from it. And the coronavirus pandemic and the public panic that ensued is a case in point. To be blunt, U.S. health care regulatory agencies mishandled the crisis.

Indeed, both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) fumbled the ball early when it came testing for the Wuhan coronavirus, largely because of bad regulations.

“Even now, after weeks of mounting frustration toward federal agencies over flawed test kits and burdensome rules, states with growing cases such as New York and California are struggling to test widely for the coronavirus,” the New York Times noted in a March 11 story. “The continued delays have made it impossible for officials to get a true picture of the scale of the growing outbreak, which has now spread to at least 36 states and Washington, D.C.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-five-ways-we-might-defeat-it/?itm_campaign=headline-testingDon’t be complacent. But do have hope.

R ight now there are plenty of reasons to worry deeply about the toll COVID-19 will take on America. Cases and deaths are spiraling upward. Our main tools for addressing the crisis involve simply locking society down, leading to shocking economic harms. And even if these tools prove effective, the virus may simply begin to spread again when they are lifted, or perhaps rebound in the fall and winter when the weather cools down again. Perhaps most troublingly, there are some reports of people being “reinfected,” raising the possibility that even those who survive COVID-19 are not always immune to it going forward. A worst-case scenario would force us to decide between a year or two of repeated lockdowns while we wait for a vaccine on the one hand, and millions of deaths on the other.

I am not going to tell you this is all a hoax. I am not going to tell you to ignore the restrictions lawmakers have placed on your movements or the advice of public-health authorities. But I am a big believer in capitalism and human ingenuity, so I’d like to provide a quick overview of some routes out of this mess people are working on. I have immense hope that at least a couple of them will pan out, and in that event I also hope the folks behind them become unbelievably rich.

1) Find a drug that fights the virus or treats the symptoms. Vaccines take a long time to develop and test, because each must be tailored to a specific virus, but there are already lots of drugs around that might work to treat or prevent COVID-19. We need to figure out which ones immediately. The World Health Organization has launched a “global megatrial” of four possibilities: remdesivir, a drug developed to treat Ebola that, alas, did not work for that purpose; chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, which are used to treat maladies including lupus and malaria; ritonavir/lopinavir, an HIV drug; and ritonavir/lopinavir combined with interferon-beta, which shows some signs of fighting MERS. If they work against COVID-19, these drugs could reduce the disease’s death toll, lessen pressure on intensive-care units, and change the tradeoffs inherent in reopening the economy. Thank God for Big Pharma!

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/29/viral-prerequisites-and-nationalist-lessons-in-time-of-plague/

Trump’s prior initiatives eased the implementation of many of his most effective orders during this crisis.

President Donald Trump has courted endless controversies for promoting nonconventional policies and entertaining contrarian views. From the outset, he oddly seemed to have believed that having navigated the jungles of the Manhattan real estate market—crooked politicians, mercurial unions, neighborhood social activists, the green lobby, leery banks, cutthroat rivals—better prepared him for the job than did a 30-year tenure in the U.S. Senate.

Certainly, candidate and then President Trump’s strident distrust of China was annoying to the American establishment. The Left saw China in rosy terms as the “Other” that just did things like airports, high-speed rail, and solar panels better than did America’s establishment of geriatric white male has-beens. Many on the Right saw China as a cash cow that was going to take over anyway, so why not milk it before the deluge?

In sum, conventional Washington wisdom assumed that appeasing the commercial banditry of an ascendant China, at best might ensure that its new riches led to Westernized political liberalization, and at worst might at least earn them a pat on the head from China as it insidiously assumed its fated role as global hegemon.

Trump once enraged liberal sensibilities by issuing travel bans against countries in the Middle East, Iran, Nigeria, and North Korea as they could not be trusted to audit their own departing citizens. His notion that nations have clearly defined and enforced borders was antithetical to the new norms that open borders and sanctuary cities were part of the global village of the 21st century.

Trump certainly distrusted globalization. He has waged a veritable multifront war against the overreach of transnational organizations, whether that be the European Union or the various agencies of the United Nations. Even relatively uncontroversial steps, such as greenlighting experimental drugs and off-label uses of old medicines for terminal patients drew the ire of federal bureaucrats and medical schools as potentially dangerous or irrelevant in cost-benefit analyses.

https://time.com/5812365/trump-meghan-prince-harry-security/

U.S. President Donald Trump has offered his opinion on the future of Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, insisting the United States government won’t pay for the couple’s security if they live in the United States.

Responding to reports that the couple has moved to California, Trump tweeted on Sunday: “I am a great friend and admirer of the Queen & the United Kingdom. It was reported that Harry and Meghan, who left the Kingdom, would reside permanently in Canada. Now they have left Canada for the U.S. however, the U.S. will not pay for their security protection. They must pay!”

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

It’s not the job of the Director of Infectious Diseases at the NIH to be opaque.  If a truly persuasive study convinced Fauci that we would exceed 100,000 deaths, that’s an announcement that should be made in a press conference, with references to the sources, not dropped casually into the middle of an interview — where the point he seemed to be making was that there’s no such thing as a reliable model.

Four and a half minutes into an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN Sunday morning, in the middle of a mini-lecture on the perils of modeling, Dr. Anthony Fauci tossed off an estimate of the death toll in the U.S. from Covid-19:  100,000 to 200,000. 

He said “cases,” then corrected himself, and added “I don’t want to be held to that… We really don’t need to make a projection because it’s such a moving target, and we could so easily be wrong, and mislead people.”  The mentioning of a figure seemed to be entirely at cross purposes from the point Fauci was trying to make.  “To be honest with you, Jake, we don’t have any firm idea,” he replied, when first prodded to provide a number.  “There are things called models, and when someone creates a model they put in various assumptions, and the model is only as good or accurate as your assumptions.”  Why didn’t he leave it at that?

https://www.theepochtimes.com/white-house-extends-ccp-virus-social-distancing-guidelines-to-april-30_3290391.html

The White House on Sunday extended its guidelines for stopping the spread of the CCP virus to April 30.

President Donald Trump announced the extension during a briefing in the Rose Garden. The president cited a modeling estimate that suggests the peak in the death rate for COVID-19 will occur in two weeks.

On March 16, the White House issued a set of social distancing and sanitary guidelines for Americans to follow for 15 days. At the time, the hope was that two weeks would be sufficient to slow the spread of the virus.

“Nothing would be worst than declaring victory before the victory is won. That would be the greatest loss of all,” Trump said, adding that everyone should follow the guidelines. “The better you do, the faster this whole nightmare will end.”

The White House guidelines call on Americans to avoid social gatherings in groups of more than 10 people, refrain from eating in bars, restaurants and food courts, avoid non-essential travel, and to not visit nursing homes. The guidelines also include basic sanitary measures, like washing hands frequently and not touching one’s face.

The president said that the White House will present its plan for the month of April on Tuesday, including the latest data and the overall strategy.

https://spectator.us/consider-costs-coronavirus/

Less than 24 hours after California governor Gavin Newsom closed ‘non-essential’ businesses and ordered Californians to stay inside to avoid spreading the coronavirus, New York governor Andrew Cuomo followed suit. ‘This is about saving lives,’ Cuomo said during a press conference on Friday. ‘If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.’

Cuomo’s assertion that saving ‘just one life’ justifies an economic shutdown raises questions that have not been acknowledged, much less answered, as public officials across the country compete to impose ever more draconian anti-virus measures:

Is there any limit to the damage we are willing inflict on the world economy to mitigate the infection?
What are the benefits of each new commerce-killing measure and how do they compare to the costs?
What are the criteria for declaring success in the coronavirus fight and who decides whether they have been met?

To ask about the costs and benefits of the spreading economic shutdowns guarantees an accusation of heartlessness. But the issue is not human compassion versus alleged greed. The issue is balancing one target of compassion against another. The millions of people whose lives depend on a functioning economy also deserve compassion. Many of the businesses that are now being shuttered by decree will never come back. They do not have the reserves to survive weeks or months without customers. In New York City, many streets were already blighted by rows of empty storefronts. The virus shutdown could knock out the remaining enterprises, as customers acclimate themselves further to ordering on-line. Layoffs are piling up in restaurants, hotels, and malls; on Tuesday, unemployment claims in California were 40 times above the daily average, an increase greater than any coronavirus surge.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/thomas-allen-coburn-11585429731?mod=hp_opin_pos_3

The doctor and Senator was the model of a citizen legislator.

Politics is a lifetime career for most in American government, and then there are exceptions like Thomas Coburn. The Oklahoma obstetrician who became a Senator and then returned to a productive private life died Saturday of prostate cancer at age 72. He was what America’s Founders imagined in self-governing citizen legislators, and that mentality made him far more consequential than the usual congressional seat-fillers.

Coburn worked in his family’s optical-lens firm before going to medical school and setting up an ob/gyn practice. He ran for the House in 1994 in part to oppose the Clinton effort for government health care, served three terms and retired before running for Senate in 2004 for what he said would be no more than two terms. He continued to see patients on weekends and Mondays in Oklahoma until the Senate declared it a (preposterous) conflict-of-interest.

“I don’t think Washington can fix Washington,” Coburn told our colleague Joe Rago in 2014 after announcing his retirement two years early when his cancer recurred. “You’re always going to have this built-in conflict of getting re-elected. Parochial interests will trump the best interests of the nation, and the actors will do what’s expedient to be popular. It doesn’t have to be that way. There’s hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who could do these jobs well. All it requires is common sense and courage.” (The full interview is nearby.)

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/oxford-and-imperial/

My dear old statistics teacher used to say that relying on any model, however good but founded on past data, was like driving by looking at the rearview mirror; fine as long as the future looked like the past. As governments struggle with their response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the $64 trillion question is “which past does the future look like?”

Science writes how models have become supremely important:

Entire cities and countries have been locked down based on hastily done forecasts that often haven’t been peer reviewed.  … The Netherlands … Prime Minister Mark Rutte rejected “working endlessly to contain the virus” and “shutting down the country completely.” Instead, he opted for “controlled spread” of the virus while making sure the health system isn’t swamped with COVID-19 patients.

Other governments have chosen different models and in place of “controlled spread,” bet on total lockdown.

Just how influential those models are became apparent over the past 2 weeks in the United Kingdom. … a group at Imperial College London [recommended an approach] not unlike the strategy the Netherlands is pursuing. … But on 16 March, the Imperial College group published a dramatically revised model that concluded—based on fresh data from the United Kingdom and Italy—that even a reduced peak would fill twice as many intensive care beds as estimated previously, overwhelming capacity. The only choice, they concluded, was to go all out on control measures.

But as new data becomes available the “fog of war” is slowly lifting and rekindling the debate between the models.