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These Drugs Are Helping Our Coronavirus Patients The evidence is preliminary on repurposing two treatments. But we don’t have the luxury of time. By Jeff Colyer and Daniel Hinthorn

Posted By on March 23rd, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/these-drugs-are-helping-our-coronavirus-patients-11584899438?mod=trending_now_4

A flash of potential good news from the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic: A treatment is showing promise. Doctors in France, South Korea and the U.S. are using an antimalarial drug known as hydroxychloroquine with success. We are physicians treating patients with Covid-19, and the therapy appears to be making a difference. It isn’t a silver bullet, but if deployed quickly and strategically the drug could potentially help bend the pandemic’s “hockey stick” curve.

Hydroxychloroquine is a common generic drug used to treat lupus, arthritis and malaria. The medication, whose brand name is Plaquenil, is relatively safe, with the main side effect being stomach irritation, though it can cause echocardiogram and vision changes. In 2005, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study showed that chloroquine, an analogue, could block a virus from penetrating a cell if administered before exposure. If tissue had already been infected, the drug inhibited the virus.

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Former UK PM Accused of Letting Muslim Rape Gangs Roam Free in Exchange for Saudi Money Whatever the motivation, he and others certainly let them roam free. Robert Spencer

Posted By on March 23rd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/former-uk-pm-accused-letting-muslim-rape-gangs-robert-spencer/

Gordon Brown, who was Prime Minister of Britain and leader of its far-Left Labour Party from 2007 to 2010, has been accused of making a dirty deal with Saudi interests that resulted in a hands-off order to British police regarding the Muslim rape gangs that have plagued the once-sceptered isle for years.

The UK news site Politicalite reported Saturday “during Gordon Brown’s short tenure as Prime Minister he borrowed money from the Saudi’s [sic] – but the deal had BIG strings attached.”

Politicalite quoted an anonymous source that it said was connected to the world of finance, claiming: “In return for the money, the condition they insisted on, was that Muslims in Britain must be free to do anything they like.”

It sounds unbelievable – or does it, really, after all we have seen “public servants” do in the last few years, up to and including the attempted deep state coup against President Trump? And whether it was because of Brown or for some other reason, there is no doubt that British authorities for years were notably unwilling to do anything about the rape gangs, despite the fact that thousands of British girls had their lives destroyed.

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Is The Media Ignoring Good News On Coronavirus? John Merline.

Posted By on March 23rd, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/23/is-the-media-ignoring-good-news-on-coronavirus/

There has been some tantalizingly good news about the coronavirus in the past few days, not that you’d know it from the end-of-the-world treatment it gets in the press.

Of the 10 countries with the most COVID-19 cases, six showed declines in new reported cases over the past few days, including the United States. In France, the number has been flat for three days.

There hasn’t been a new case reported in China since early March, according to data from Worldometers.info. In South Korea, the number of new cases has stabilized at around 100 a day.

Meanwhile, data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that – when measured by date of onset rather than the day officially reported — the number of new COVID-19 cases peaked on March 9 at 194, then dropped to 172 on March 10. It was 174 on March 11. It plunged to 122 on March 12, although the CDC cautions that there may be people whose onsets haven’t been reported yet. In any case, all this was before the most draconian restrictions were put in place.

It’s far too early to draw any conclusions, but it certainly doesn’t look like an out-of-control plague, as commonly depicted by the press.

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Seeking a sense of proportion about coronavirus deaths in America By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on March 23rd, 2020

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

Every evening during the Vietnam War, the nightly news anchor would announce the number of wounded and dead Americans on that day. Doing this imparted a sense of immediacy to those numbers that undoubtedly helped drive the anti-War movement.

In our coronavirus era, the media are doing the same with the numbers for those stricken or dead. For example, in the Daily Mail’s Sunday night article about the Democrats’ refusal to approve a $1.8 trillion coronavirus economic relief bill, we read this line:

The impact of coronavirus in the U.S. have [sic] skyrocketed in the last week to more than 30,200 confirmed cases and nearing 400 deaths.  

Various websites also keep a ticker tape of the “wounded” and dead. Avi Schiffmann, only 17, put together a simple, yet almost awe-inspiring, website that tracks all the coronavirus statistics from around the world. It’s so accurate that you can practically see people sicken and die in real-time.

Watching the numbers tick up is unnerving, but also misleading because it creates an artificial sense of terror. A sense of proportion helps control that terror.

As of this writing, the number of dead around the world is 14,730. Even if China, Russia, and Iran are lying about their mortality numbers, the actual number probably isn’t higher than 20,000. (And the number could be lower because Italy may have been overstating its mortality rate.)

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Is virus information from China, Russia, and Iran too corrupt to be useful? By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on March 23rd, 2020

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

There are reports from China suggesting that the government is lying about having coronavirus under control. Russia’s statistics are so low as to be suspect. And Iran is manifestly lying about its coronavirus data. Is this misinformation affecting the West’s ability to understand the virus and control its spread?

China has boasted that, thanks to its swift reaction, it has managed to stop all new coronavirus infections. (For now, please ignore China’s initial cover-up, which let a plague loose upon the world.) By March 19, both the New York Times and the Washington Post accepted without question China’s report that it had no new coronavirus infections.

Doctors still at work within China, though, were less sanguine:

Report by @appledaily_hk , Japanese news outlet interviewed Wuhan doctors, and confirmed Wuhan has stopped testing, that is why new case = 0 there. They release people in quarantine early too.

China is not alone in publishing suspect information. Russia, which Putin controls with an iron fist, has also touted its success with coronavirus, claiming that it’s tested over 133,000 people and identified only 367 cases, with only one death. Some experts find baffling Russia’s immunity to the disease, given that it shares a long border with China and has over 144 million people.

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How the Coronavirus Changed President Trump and America By Sheldon Roth, MD

Posted By on March 23rd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/how_the_coronavirus_changed_president_trump_and_america.html

The media are piling on President Trump for not instilling confidence during the COVID-19 crisis: “There is no new Trump.”  “Don’t be fooled.”  “The new Trump is the same as the old Trump.”  “He’s incapable of leading us out of it.”  “Trump shrugs off responsibility.”  “He’s putting the blame on the Chinese.”  “Trump is fundamentally unfit — intellectually, morally, temperamentally and psychologically.”  The media could not be more wrong.

As explained in my book, Psychologically Sound: The Mind of Donald J. Trump, his personality — replete with intelligence, imagination, consistency, charisma, organization, and optimism — is well designed for modern America.  But I did not think Trump’s personality would evolve in the Oval Office.  I was wrong, deeply wrong.  He has changed, profoundly, and for the better.

During the March 17 Tuesday White House coronavirus press conference, a reporter asked if President Trump’s mood was more somber on Monday’s briefing.  With great seriousness, Trump outlined how he had been solemn from the get-go — in January, restricting travel with China.  Although he may genuinely believe that self-description, what he has progressively revealed of himself in this crisis is different.

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Vladimir Putin’s Encirclement of Europe By Jakub Grygiel

Posted By on March 23rd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/04/06/vladimir-putins-encirclement-of-europe/#slide-1

‘Strategic autonomy’ will be insufficient to the challenge

Russian propaganda, going back to czarist and Soviet times, often claims that Western powers are encircling Russia, forcing Moscow to be belligerent against its wishes. Russia is the perennial victim of aggressive foreign powers trying to keep Moscow locked in the steppes and, in the worst case, to install themselves in the Kremlin. Undoubtedly, Russia has been invaded repeatedly in the past: Mongol hordes, Napoleon, and Hitler all tried to extend their power over it. But now claims of a potential repetition of such invasions by Russia’s Western neighbors ring hollow. Neither Europe nor the United States has any interest in controlling Russian lands. On the contrary, it is Russia that has managed to extend its reach along a front from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and is projecting power to the Arctic and the Atlantic. Europe is being encircled by Russia — not the other way around.

Russia asserts that it is under siege by the West. Western antagonism, the argument goes, is evident in NATO’s addition of new members, including the latest one, Montenegro, which joined in 2017; in the U.S. and EU support for various “color revolutions” that erupted across a belt of countries from Ukraine to North Africa and the Middle East; and in the U.S.-led wars in the Middle East. In a 2019 speech, General Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian general staff, accused the United States of conducting a “policy of expanding the system of military presence directly at Russia’s borders.” Such a Western policy of encirclement supposedly forces Moscow to lash out to defeat the “Trojan horse” of “color revolutions” and the various military offensives allegedly targeting Russia.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Psychology of Viral Paradoxes By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 23rd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-psychology-of-viral-paradoxes/

There are a lot of known unknowns and paradoxes in these times of uncertainty. Here are a few.

1) Trump is criticized as both “racist” and “xenophobic” in his condemnations of the “Chinese” virus, while he’s also criticized for “appeasing” President Xi when he makes friendly references to their coronavirus chats. How can Trump be both?

Is he merely erratic? Perhaps any smart president at this moment would prefer both to galvanize Americans about the threat of Chinese near monopolies of industries key to the U.S. in extremis (such as medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, and rare earths) and  yet to not to so offend our  only importer that it cuts off a vulnerable U.S. in the middle of a crisis.

2) The media hype the increased number of cases (the denominator) without much attention to the number of deaths (the numerator) caused by, or perhaps mostly by, the virus. The numerator, however, is not increasing daily at a rate that’s commensurate with the denominator, despite a number of important other extenuating criteria:

a) Those seeking tests are mostly those with some sort of malaise or exposure, and yet they test overwhelmingly (so far) negative, perhaps at rates, depending on locale, of 80 percent to 90 percent negative (an increasingly not widely reported fact), and thus they may underrepresent percentages of the infected in the general population.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Virus is Not Invisible, But It’s Exposing Who’s Irreplaceable Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 23rd, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/22/the-virus-is-not-invisible-but-its-exposing-whos-irreplaceable/

When your refrigerator goes out under quarantine and your supplies begin to rot, do you really need another rant from Maxine Waters—or do you rather need a St. Michael Smith and St. Uriel Mendoza to appear out of nowhere as the archangels from Home Depot to wheel up and connect a new one?

In all the gloom and doom, and media-driven nihilism, there is actually an array of good news. As many predicted, as testing spreads, and we get a better idea of the actual number and nature of cases, the death rate from coronavirus slowly but also seems to steadily decline.

Early estimates from the World Health Organization and the modeling of pessimists of a constant 4 percent death rate for those infected with the virus are for now proving exaggerated for the United States. More likely, as testing spreads, our fatality rates could descend to near 1 percent.

There is some evidence from Germany and to a lesser extent South Korea, that it may be possible to see the fatality rate dip below 1 percent. And with the breathing space from the lockdown, better hygiene (the degree of constant and near-obsessive cleaning at businesses that are still open is quite amazing), more knowledge and data, better medical protocols, the use of some efficacious drugs, warmer weather, and experience with the disease will, in perfect-storm fashion, begin to mitigate the effects of the virus.

Should we get the lethality rate down to German levels (currently two to three in 1,000), then we can cautiously assume that those who predicted that the coronavirus could eventually be contextualized as a bad, H1N1-like flu will no longer be demonized as nuts, and life can resume with reasonable precautions and focused quarantines and isolation.

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What makes the Palestinian Authority run? A reminder! Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on March 22nd, 2020

 https://bit.ly/2UuISEO
Is the vision of the Palestinian Authority limited to the establishment of a state in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank)?  Is the vision of the Palestinian Authority amenable to alteration through financial inducements? Shouldn’t the pursuit of peace be based on a realization of the de facto – rather than hopeful – vision of the Palestinian Authority?

The Middle East context

In the Arab/Muslim Middle East – contrary to Western democracies – regimes are authoritarian, suppressing the majority. They are not scrutinized by legislators and constituents, unconstrained by checks and balances, unchallenged by election cycles, and highly motivated by long-term visions. These visions quash constituents’ preference, and supersede tempting Western financial packages.

Therefore, unlike the relatively short-term, election-driven strategy pursued by Western policy-makers, Arab policy-makers are driven by long-term strategy and vision, supported by short term tactics, which frequently aim to mislead, while camouflaging the actual vision.

The de facto, pre-1967 Palestinian vision 

According to the de facto Palestinian vision – as documented by the current K-12Palestinian hate curriculum – Palestine extends from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, erasing the “infidel” Jewish State (The term Palaistine was coined by the Greeks in the 5th century BCE, referring to the Land of Israel).