RUTHFULLY YOURS

A primer

‘When can we end social distancing and get back to normal life?” It’s the question on everyone’s mind, and one without a clear answer at this time. Here’s what we do know: An effective treatment against the novel coronavirus would make a big difference in getting us there.

Remember the old adage, “There’s no cure for the common cold”? Well, the common cold is caused by a mild strain of coronavirus. The version of coronavirus we’re dealing with here is far more dangerous — but possibly just as difficult to treat.

In order to talk about therapies, it’s important to distinguish between the virus itself — the infectious agent — and the disease caused by the virus. (Think of HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus that causes the illness known as acquired immune-deficiency syndrome, or AIDS.) In our present case, the World Health Organization has named the novel coronavirus “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2,” or SARS-CoV-2. The WHO calls the illness caused by SARS-CoV-2 “COVID-19.” (“COVID” stands for “coronavirus disease”; “19” comes from the fact that the disease was first identified in Wuhan in late 2019.) To repeat: Virus, SARS-CoV-2; disease, COVID-19. 

There are two broad categories of ongoing clinical development related to the pandemic. Vaccines, which help people achieve immunity to the virus, are the farthest off. A vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 won’t be ready until late 2021 at the earliest. That’s because vaccines need to be painstakingly tested in clinical trials to ensure that they make patients better, not worse. Flawed vaccines can lead to dangerous overstimulation of the immune system, or can make someone even more sensitive to coronavirus exposure. And since you can’t ethically expose someone to coronavirus, you have to give the vaccine to hundreds or even thousands of people and wait to see evidence of whether the vaccine achieves a statistically significant reduction in the number of people who get infected. Furthermore, coronaviruses mutate frequently, meaning that a vaccine developed in one year would likely be less robust, or even completely ineffective, in future years.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/05/corona-meltdowns/

As the coronavirus outbreak begins to reach its zenith, it remains unclear whether the measures taken to stem its tide will prove sufficient, insufficient, or an overreaction. What is certain, however, is that a number of individuals and entities have behaved shamefully and demonstrated no capacity for leadership or usefulness in this moment.

Nancy Pelosi: Gone are the mythologies that Nancy Pelosi was a pragmatic liberal voice of reason among the otherwise polarizing American Left, honed after years of paying her dues to the Democratic Party, as the mother of five dutifully ascended the party’s cursus honorum.

It does not matter whether her political and ethical decline was a result of her deep pathological hatred of Donald Trump. Who cares that her paranoia arose over the so-called “Squad” that might align with socialist Bernie Sanders to mesmerize Democrats to march over the cliff into McGovern-like oblivion? All concede that very few octogenarians have the stamina and clarity to put in the 16-hour work-days and transcontinental travel required by a Speaker of the House.

Instead, all that matters is that for a nation in extremis she is now puerile, even unhinged—and increasingly dangerous.

In retrospect, the public will remember how in fear and confusion she reversed course to spearhead impeachment, outsourced the task in the House of Representatives to its most incompetent and perfidious members—Representatives Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)—and wasted weeks of the country’s precious energy and time as it was on the cusp of an epidemic.

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://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/the_first_casualty_of_war_even_war_against_a_virus_is_truth.html

A few comments about how the leftists’ fanatic hatred for President Trump is erasing truth, facts, and debatable ideas.

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” – John Adams

The media has a fetish that Trump lies. According to the Washington Post (no link, because it’s behind a paywall), Trump has uttered more than 16,000 lies.

Drilling down, though, one discovers that, while Trump has lied (what politician hasn’t?), the WaPo’s humorless and biased habit of taking seriously puffery, exaggeration, and jokes turns everything into a lie. What reasonable people understand is that Trump exaggerates or jokes about things that don’t matter, but sticks with the truth about things that do.

Leftists do something even more serious, which is to classify as a lie anything with which they disagree. In other words, they set themselves up as the arbiters of absolute truth. From this pedestal, they shout down or completely censor statements they dislike – even if the statement is subjective or reasonably debatable – on the ground that the statement is a “lie.”

To support this tactic, leftists have to resort to blatant lies themselves. For example, when Trump expressed hope that chloroquine would help fight coronavirus, leftists immediately transformed the drug from a longtime, reputable standby into something evil. That’s how we got the “Trump made stupid American people eat fish tank cleaner” lie. And the “Trump made stupid Nigerian people eat fish tank cleaner” lie.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/senate-passes-coronavirus-bill-proving-pelosi-gambled-with-americans-lives-and-lost/

In the wee hours of Wednesday evening, the U.S. Senate finally passed the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill after a great deal of Democrat stalling and a futile effort by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to put forward a separate bill jam-packed with liberal Christmas wish-list items. The bill provides crucial relief to businesses struggling with the social distancing strategy of stopping the spread of the coronavirus. It now heads to the House.

The stimulus bill is far from perfect, but its passage unmasked Pelosi’s tactics as a disgraceful waste of time during this crisis. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) slammed the speaker for her attempt to jam her liberal pipe dreams down Americans’ throats in the midst of a crisis.

“Democrats wanted to use the coronavirus response package to change election law & implement parts of their Green New Deal. The Senate just passed strong bipartisan legislation that scraps those items, & it’s clear. ⇨ Their delay achieved nothing but more pain for Americans,” McCarthy tweeted.