NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

New Report Unveils The Extent To Which The CDC And FDA Lost Focus By Tristan Justice

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/15/new-report-unveils-the-extent-to-which-the-cdc-and-fda-lost-focus/

A new report from the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) peels back the curtain on just how much the nation’s preeminent public health institutions have pivoted to controlling lifestyle choices over preventing infectious diseases such as COVID-19.

CEI Senior Fellow Michelle Minton found that a vast majority of congressional funding allotted to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) went towards reinforcing public behavior while only a fraction of the agency budgets were targeted towards fighting emerging pathogens that have given rise to the public health pandemic today.

Of the roughly $7 billion granted to the CDC in 2019, just less than half went to infectious disease efforts where most went to fight existing viruses. More than $600 million focused on animal-related diseases, only a third of which was directed towards emerging threats. In other words, CDC resources for rising pathogens such as the novel Wuhan coronavirus, which is supposed to strike at the core of the CDC’s mission, received far less concern than hyping a moral panic around vaping.

“As its original name, the Communicable Disease Center implies, the initial purpose of the CDC was to assist the states in the control of infectious disease,” Minton wrote, noting that it came to be from efforts to combat malaria. Since its creation in 1946 Minton wrote, he CDC’s focus has expanded “to include conditions and diseases not caused by the spread of dangerous pathogens, but by lifestyle factors such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.”

The FDA meanwhile, is no less guilty. With a broader role to play in protecting the nation’s public health, the agency’s role in perpetuating healthy lifestyle choices such as maintaining a healthy diet and proper nutrition is far more justifiable. Alas, its aggressive action propelling hysteria surrounding electronic cigarettes led by former administrator Scott Gottlieb remains far off from the FDA’s goals or public interest and is killing smokers. Electronic cigarette use is the single most effective form of smoking cessation offering a lifeline to those trapped under addiction to combustible cigarettes which is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europe’s Anti-Lockdown Moment By Jorge González-Gallarza Hernández

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/europes-anti-lockdown-moment/

The reopening sentiment is spreading, and it’s not all right-wingers who are doing the protesting.

America’s worship of civil liberties was on display as anti-lockdown protests swept from Lansing, Mich., to San Diego, and from Madison, Wis., to Boston’s Beacon Hill. From London to Seine-Saint Denis, from Munich to Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, a similar defiance of state intrusion is now arising in parts of Europe. As in the United States, the question is still open: Will these protests channel the growing lockdown fatigue into a cogent, constructive case for reopening, or will they descend into paranoia?

A recent hotspot of anti-lockdown fuss has been Germany, where both media and the government have raised the alarm about the far right’s sway in driving people to break the quarantine and social-distancing rules. This past weekend saw radical groups co-opt protests in Dortmund and Munich, where a reporter was attacked and police had to disperse 25 vandals, respectively. A reporting crew from the center-left late-night satirical heute-show was similarly assaulted in Berlin the previous weekend, claiming the popular Moroccan-German comedian Abdelkarim as a victim. Germany’s crippling memory of extremism (so-called Vergangenheitsbewältigung) has a way of penalizing political deviance on the right to this day, and these acts of violence surely didn’t help give the protests a good name in the public eye, either.

Resistance to lockdowns has gotten a bad name in France, too, after a young local from Villeneuve-la-Garenne was thrown off his motorbike and sent to the hospital with a broken leg by a police-car door flung open. The incident sparked a wave of riots across the northern Paris suburbs reminiscent of the three-week-long émeutes in 2005 that saw 8,000 cars set ablaze by restless youths protesting police abuse. The quarantine has brought long-simmering tensions in these largely low-income, immigrant, and poorly housed suburbs to a boiling point, with locals decrying heavy-handed policing, spending cuts in public services, and the unequal impact of school closures that leave low-income kids lacking Internet access with little means to keep up with schoolwork.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

“Lockdown v. COVID-19” Sydney Williams

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

The world has seen other pandemics, but the response to COVID-19 has been unlike anything the world has ever experienced. It is said we should not put a price on a life. Yet, that happens every day. Emergency rooms constantly make life and death decisions. When a hospital suspends a cancer treatment in favor of a COVID-19 patient, a life and death decision has been made. The closing of a food processing plant in Iowa or the downsizing of a shipping facility in Newark, both for fear of spreading COVID-19 are decisions that will likely cause starvation in underdeveloped countries. Every action has a consequence.

Experts in the field of epidemiology scare us through words. On Monday evening, listening to the president of New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, Dr. David Reich, I grew fearful. He spoke of pathogens and their mutability, and of molecular biology and infections. He lost me in his vocabulary. A friend sent a blog written by Dr. Erin Bromage who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Dr. Bromage wrote of how a single cough releases 3,000 droplets that travel across a room at 50 mph, while a sneeze releases 30,000 droplets that travel across the same room at up to 200 mph. If an infected person coughs or sneezes, 200,000,000 virus particles could be released. It’s enough to scare the bejesus out of the most fearless – that is until one realizes that any expert, in using unfamiliar words, can frighten someone less knowledgeable. As well, we ignore the fact that in our lifetimes, we have been exposed to trillions of virus particles. Perspective and common sense are needed. For example, each cubic meter of air contains ten trillion molecules, and each human is host to about 300 parasitic worms and 70 species of protozoa, many of which are employed in fighting infections. We are complicated beings who through millions of years of evolution have developed sophisticated immune systems. There is much we know, but more we don’t.

As accurate as what Dr. Reich said and what Dr. Bromage wrote, they do not change the fact that politicians unleashed an even deadlier response. We count those who die from COVID-19, but we ignore those who suffer and die from despair, depression and loneliness. It is balance we should seek. John Kass, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune recently wrote: “All I see is the imposition of extremes. Those of us who want to get the country back to work are portrayed as selfish fools who Just Want People to Die. And those who never want the lockdown to end are dismissed as fearful Coronavirus ‘Karens,’ peering through their windows, calling the police if they see someone walking on the street without a mask.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

World Lives vs lives: the global cost of lockdown Policies that depress the world economy put millions at risk Jayanta Bhattacharya and Mikko Packalen

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

https://spectator.us/lives-vs-lives-global-cost-lockdown/

‘There have been as many plagues in history as there have been wars,’ wrote Albert Camus in The Plague, ‘yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.’ So it was this time. The arrival of a new coronavirus blindsided governments of most advanced nations as they reached for a tool that few had ever really considered before: lockdown. It all happened too fast for a proper discussion about the implications. The biggest question — the extent to which lockdown will claim lives as well as save them — is one you can ask at a global level.

We know the national costs. In the United States, there is joblessness on a scale not seen since the Great Depression, with more than 33 million unemployed. The Bank of England forecasts the UK economy will fall by 14 percent this year — the steepest decline since 1706. Similar trends can be found across the industrial world. The global economy is veering toward an economic depression not seen for generations.

Yet this argument, to many, seems crass. How consequential is an economic loss in balance when lives at risk from COVID-19 are at stake? Understandably, few find such calculations compelling — and tend to side with those who advocate for prolonged lockdowns lasting for months or more. If this were about lives vs money, it would be easy to understand. But look deeper, and this is about lives vs lives — on a scale that has not, so far, been very much discussed. Lockdown will, on a global level, hit the poorest hardest.

POLITICS Comments turned off

David Bossie: Biden wrong on China his entire career – let’s look at the record ****

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-wrong-china-career-check-record-david-bossie

In April, records from 9/11 mastermind Usama bin Laden’s compound were disclosed detailing his plans to assassinate then-President Barack Obama. Bin Laden’s rationale for his horrific plot was telling: “Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis.” 

Now, a decade since U.S. Special Forces killed bin Laden in Pakistan, it’s my guess that President Xi Jinping of China – our greatest geopolitical foe today – also wants former Vice President Joe Biden to be the next president of the United States. This makes perfect sense when you consider that Xi wants what’s best for China.

Joe Biden has been wrong on U.S. policy toward China virtually his entire career. In fact, Biden and other establishment politicians in Washington have been instrumental in China’s meteoric rise from a developing nation into a Communist power with global ambitions.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Lie That Launched a Thousand Lockdowns Dan O’Donnell,

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

https://newstalk1130.iheart.com/featured/common-sense-central/content/2020-05-15-the-lie-that-launched-a-thousand-lockdowns/?

The shocking story of how a disastrously flawed Coronavirus model changed government policy overnight and shut down the world for months.

One can pinpoint the exact moment when life in the United States changed, possibly forever. It was the night of March 11th, 2020 and the NBA suspended its season. At about the same time, arguably the world’s most famous actor made a shocking announcement.

Within days, states would begin to issue orders restricting the number of people who could gather together. Shortly after that, they began closing schools.

But it wasn’t until March 16th that governments began to shut down their states entirely. Why did they take such a draconian step? Because of the release of a bombshell report in Great Britain.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Therapeutic Campus Why are college students seeking mental-health services in record numbers?Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

https://www.city-journal.org/the-therapeutic-campus

Before the coronavirus pandemic, before shelter-in-place orders, there was the campus safe space. Students claimed that they needed protection from perceived threats to their emotional well-being. College administrators were only too happy to comply, building up a vast edifice of services to respond to students’ alleged emotional trauma. Last year, Yale University created a safe space that will set the industry standard for years to come. Call it the college woke spa, though its official title is the Good Life Center. Featuring a sandbox, essential oils, massage, and mental-health workshops, the center unites the most powerful forces in higher education today: the feminization of the university, therapeutic culture, identity politics, and the vast student-services bureaucracy. While other colleges may not yet have created as richly endowed a therapeutic space as the Good Life Center, they’re all being transformed by the currents that gave it birth, currents visible even in the reaction to the coronavirus outbreak.

“I don’t know anyone [at Yale] who hasn’t had therapy. It’s a big culture on campus,” says a rosy-cheeked undergraduate in a pink sweatshirt. She is nestled in a couch in the subsidized coffee shop adjacent to Yale’s Good Life Center, where students can sip sustainably sourced espresso and $3 tea lattes. “Ninety percent of the people I know have at least tried.” For every 20 of her friends, this sophomore estimates, four have bipolar disorder—as does she, she says.

Another young woman scanning her computer at a sunlit table in the café says that all her friends “struggle with mental health here. We talk a lot about therapy approaches to improve our mental health versus how much is out of your control, like hormonal imbalances.” Yale’s dorm counselors readily refer freshmen to treatment, she says, because most have been in treatment themselves. Indeed, they are selected because they have had an “adversity experience” at Yale, she asserts.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Why Do Progressives Want To Keep The Economy Shut Down? Francis Menton

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-5-13-why-do-progressives-want-to-keep-the-economy-shut-down

As noted in my post a few days ago (“Republican Governors Are Kicking The Butts Of Democratic Governors On Covid-19 Response”), a clear dichotomy has opened up between left and right over whether and how quickly the economy should reopen, now that our pandemic is in decline. Republicans advocate for a quicker reopening, and many Republican governors are well into implementing that. The President has also come down on the side of optimism and early reopening. On the Democratic side, the response is something like “YOU WILL HAVE BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS!!!”

The upper right-hand corner of the front page of the New York Times is a place where in the old days you would look for the most important news of the day. These days the article occupying that spot generally has little to do with real news, but instead informs you of the official Democratic Party talking point of the day. Today the headline (print edition) is “OPENING TOO SOON POSES DEADLY RISK, SENATE IS WARNED.” Excerpt:

Two of the federal government’s top health officials painted a grim picture of the months ahead on Tuesday, warning a Senate panel that the coronavirus pandemic was far from contained, just a day after President Trump declared that “we have met the moment and we have prevailed.” The officials — Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — predicted dire consequences if the nation reopened its economy too soon. . . .

POLITICS Comments turned off

A Farrago of Democrat Delusions Will Bury Them in 2020 Comparative peace will come after the election; political corpses can’t fight on after the voters have buried them. By Conrad Black

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/14/a-farrago-of-democrat-delusions-will-bury-them-in-2020/

To judge from campaign oratory, it is becoming increasingly difficult to believe that the Democrats and Republicans are contesting for the honor of governing the same country this election year.

The Democrats describe a country where, if the administration had acted more quickly and subjected the entire population to constant testing for the coronavirus even before any of its characteristics were known, Americans would have been spared scores of thousands of avoidable deaths. It is a country where there is now no alternative to a near-complete national shutdown while the whole population submits to constant testing and anyone with whom an identified COVID-sufferer has met in the previous 14 days must be hunted down and forcibly quarantined.

As the U.S. economy withers, poverty will be alleviated by borrowing on the backs of the taxpayers and shoveling out a trillion dollars every two weeks in a straight vote-buying exercise in which Trump will atone for his supposed failure to test in adequate numbers before the pandemic got going by transforming himself into the Herbert Hoover of our time, and go meekly to the electoral slaughterhouse as the father of a new Great Depression.

It is hard to credit that the Democratic Party has adopted this fairy tale until its interpretation of recent legal events is taken on board.

The exposure of the facts that Robert Mueller’s probe of nonexistent Russian collusion was launched by former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at the instigation of fired FBI Director James Comey’s illegal leak of a self-serving, self-addressed memo about a conversation with the president, after they both knew that there was no basis whatever for what Mueller was supposed to investigate; and that they and others had misled the FISA court in seeking warrants to spy on the Trump campaign and transition team, are portrayed as Trump’s politicization of the Justice Department. Joe Biden calls it a “diversion” from the mismanagement of the public health crisis.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why Hamas Loves Human Rights Watch by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on May 15th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16020/human-rights-watch-hamas

The HRW report focuses on only three Arab towns in Israel – Jisr al-Zarqa, Qalansawa and Ein Mahel, with a total population of 50,000. It deliberately ignores the other two million or so Arab Israelis. Moreover, the report fails to mention that the housing crisis affects not only Arabs, but also Jews.

In 2015, the Israeli government decided to implement the Economic Development Plan, a multi-year plan of about $12.3 billion, targeting issues such as planning, employment, transportation and education in the Arab sector. This groundbreaking plan is the largest and most comprehensive ever advanced to close gaps for Israel’s Arab society…. Hamas, meanwhile, has done virtually nothing to solve the debilitating housing crisis of the two million Palestinians living under its rule in the Gaza Strip.

This is the same Hamas that is now using the HRW report to shed crocodile tears over the alleged housing crisis in the Arab sector in Israel…. A terrorist group that has failed its own people on an epic level is pretending that it is worried about where Arabs in Israel will live.

The HRW report, which ignores Hamas’s atrocities against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, is now being used by the terrorist group as “evidence” of why Israel should be destroyed and replaced with an Islamic state.

“[The Middle East is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than any other country in the region.” – Robert L. Bernstein, The New York Times, October 19, 2009.

Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group dedicated to the destruction of Israel, is apparently very pleased with Human Rights Watch (HRW), an international organization headquartered in New York. Hamas is so pleased that this week it issued a statement praising HRW for its systematic and continuous bashing of Israel.

It is rather rare for a radical Islamic terrorist group to heap praise on a Western supposed human rights organization, particularly an American one.

Exceptions exist in all areas, however, and HRW, known for its anti-Israel bias and for peddling anti-Israel hate, stands as an especially blazing one.