WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A New Path to Venezuelan Democracy The U.S. State Department proposes Maduro and Guaidó both step aside and make way for free elections. By Elliott Abrams

Posted By on March 31st, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-path-to-venezuelan-democracy-11585645210?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

As the coronavirus spreads around the world, it’s easy to forget the Venezuelan people’s suffering at the hands of Nicolás Maduro’s regime. The Trump administration hasn’t. Today we are announcing a Democratic Transition Framework to help Venezuelans escape from the national crisis that falling oil prices and the coronavirus have now deepened.

We present this framework as a path for Venezuela to emerge from years of repression and political conflict. It proposes that both Mr. Maduro, the former president who has clung to power, and Juan Guaidó, the interim president, step aside so that the elected members of the National Assembly from both sides can create a Council of State to serve as the transitional government, which would hold free and fair presidential elections. In last year’s negotiations, the team representing Mr. Guaidó and the National Assembly proposed this path forward toward the restoration of democracy.

Democracy isn’t only about elections. A new, balanced and independent National Electoral Council is also critical, and an independent Supreme Court must replace the current one, which is but an arm of the Maduro regime. A vibrant democracy also demands a free and independent media with an end to the regime’s pervasive censorship.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

An FDA Breakthrough on Treatment The agency finally approves anti-malarial drugs for Covid-19.

Posted By on March 31st, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-fda-breakthrough-on-treatment-11585609832?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The Food and Drug Administration on Sunday green-lighted two malaria medicines that have shown some promise treating the novel coronavirus, and the emergency approvals couldn’t come soon enough. Expanding their use could bring quicker relief to patients and hospitals while allowing scientists to better assess their efficacy.

The malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine (HC) and chloroquine have been around for more than five decades, so their safety is well documented. New evidence suggests that they could also help fight the novel coronavirus, as op-eds by Dr. Jeff Colyer on these pages have reported. Both chloroquine and HC in vitro block the replication of RNA viruses like the novel coronavirus.

Hydroxychloroquine nowadays is often prescribed for the autoimmune conditions lupus and rheumatoid arthritis that result from the body’s immune system attacking its own cells. Scientists have also documented an overreactive immune response in severely ill coronavirus patients.

Notably, a study in France of 80 coronavirus patients given HC and azithromycin, an antibiotic for upper respiratory infections, documented “a clinical improvement in all but one 86 year-old patient who died, and one 74 year-old patient still in intensive care unit.” Doctors have also reported anecdotal evidence of the malaria drugs’ efficacy.

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How Isaac Newton Turned Isolation From the Great Plague Into a “Year of Wonders” Kerry McDonald

Posted By on March 31st, 2020

https://fee.org/articles/how-isaac-newton-turned-isolation-from-the-great-plague-into-a-year-of-wonders/?utm_source=ntnlrvw&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=nationalreview_partnership

In 1665, “social distancing” orders emptied campuses throughout England, as the bubonic plague raged, killing 100,000 people. Isaac Newton, a 24-year-old student from Cambridge, was among those forced to leave campus and return indefinitely to his childhood home.

College students around the world left campus this month, unsure when they would return and what daily life would look like until then. Forced to leave their friends and classmates behind and return to their childhood bedrooms, young people, who on average are less impacted by COVID-19’s dire health effects, may understandably feel angry and resentful. Free and independent, with their futures full of possibility, these students are now home and isolated. It can seem wholly unfair and depressing. But the story of another college student in a similar predicament might provide some hope and inspiration.

Isaac Newton’s Quarantine Experience

In 1665, “social distancing” orders emptied campuses throughout England, as the bubonic plague raged, killing 100,000 people (roughly one-quarter of London’s population), in just 18 months. A 24-year-old student from Trinity College, Cambridge was among those forced to leave campus and return indefinitely to his childhood home.

His name was Isaac Newton and his time at home during the epidemic would be called his “year of wonders.”

Away from university life, and unbounded by curriculum constraints and professor’s whims, Newton dove into discovery. According to The Washington Post: “Without his professors to guide him, Newton apparently thrived.” At home, he built bookshelves and created a small office for himself, filling a blank notebook with his ideas and calculations. Absent the distractions of typical daily life, Newton’s creativity flourished. During this time away he discovered differential and integral calculus, formulated a theory of universal gravitation, and explored optics, experimenting with prisms and investigating light.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The New Chapel Hill Chancellor’s Moment of Opportunity By George Leef

Posted By on March 31st, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-chapel-hill-chancellors-moment-of-opportunity/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first

Carol Folt abruptly resigned as UNC-Chapel Hill’s chancellor last year after the turmoil over the statue of a Confederate soldier. She took the side of the students who sought its removal, and left voluntarily.

Folt has been replaced by Dr. Kevin Guskiewicz, formerly the dean of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences. He was recently interviewed by the Martin Center’s Shannon Watkins. It sounds like he could do some good.

Most important, he apparently understands that the university has a problem with intolerance for viewpoints that don’t align with leftist ideas. To that end, Chapel Hill has begun the Program for Public Discourse. Guskiewicz says that it is “focused on our students gaining an appreciation of viewpoint diversity, intellectual diversity, [and] bringing speakers in who sit at certain places along the ideological spectrum.” That’s a step in the right direction. But the acid test will come if far-left students decide to prevent a speaker they dislike from speaking. If Chapel Hill has an incident like that at Middlebury College, will the guilty students get off with just a slight reprimand?

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Complicated Mathematical Models Are Not Substitutes for Common Sense By Philippe Lemoine

Posted By on March 31st, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-common-sense-dictates-prudence/#slide-1

Uncertainty still reigns, so prepare for the worst. A lockdown would be prudent, not the end of the world.

As of today, half of mankind is confined at home because of the coronavirus pandemic, although the severity of the confinement varies greatly depending on countries and regions. This situation must be all the more disconcerting given that, less than a month ago, many government officials and public-health experts were still claiming that Western countries would be able to weather the storm without any difficulty and encouraging people not to change their behavior because of the virus. On that point, Trump’s handling of this crisis has been atrocious, but as Zeynep Tufekci recently pointed out, he’s hardly the only one to have underestimated the seriousness of the threat.

Although I think people underestimated the seriousness of the threat until recently, many now seem to underestimate how much uncertainty there is about what is going to happen. To be clear: No matter where we are headed exactly, this is no flu. As of March 29 in France, 2,606 people who tested positive for COVID-19 had died in hospitals alone. Perhaps even more worrisome, there were already 4,632 people in intensive-care units, up from approximately 1,500 one week earlier. Between the number of people who left intensive care because they had died and those who left because their condition had improved, it means that probably almost twice as many people have already required admission to intensive care since the beginning of the outbreak in France. By comparison, during the entire 2018–19 season, 490 people who had the flu died in hospitals, and 2,915 people required admission to intensive care. Not only are we already way past that with the COVID-19 pandemic, but, even in the most optimistic scenario that I consider plausible, those figures will be at least 15 times higher.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hydroxychloroquine: Help Is On The Way! Kevin McCullough Kevin McCullough

Posted By on March 30th, 2020

https://townhall.com/columnists/kevinmccullough/2020/03/29/hydroxychloroquine-help-is-on-the-way-n2565926

And as the good news is coming in there is a greater reason for hope!

Here are just a handful of new developments from the last few days and hours.

Dr. Fauci when asked if he would use the Hydroxychloroquine cocktail, answered with resounding affirmation. (Simply because he had asked for better clinical evidence previously did not mean he was unaware of what the data was already showing).
France reversed its previous ban on the drug. When the highly esteemed Dr. Didier Raoult released his first survey’s findings the French medical authorities were resistant. As he released an even larger study, with more patients and improved results from his initial study, the French public health officials had no choice but to give guidance as to its use.
India’s public health guidance granted affirmation for physicians and front line medical workers to begin taking it as a preventative. This use was the very suggestion I recommended as first steps in this column a week ago. Since our own CDC has cited its prophylactic benefits our doctors and front line medical personnel should be taking it now.
Given the increased acceptance here in the states not one, but as many as seven different pharmaceutical companies have agreed to mass produce as much as 250 million doses by mid-April. Given Dr. Raoult’s guidance in both of his studies this would give the globe enough inventory to cure 46,000,000 cases. Presently we have not yet hit one million cases worldwide. Notably Bayer, Novartis and Teva Pharm stepped up, pledging to donate several million doses right out of the chute.
Doctors began prescribing off-label use and in doing so are replicating the clinical results in remarkable fashion. One doctor in Monroe, New York has treated in excess of 700 patients. As of this writing he’s lost zero patients to death, zero to intubation, and only two to hospitalization. Another doctor in New York City has treated in excess of 100 patients with zero deaths.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Nancy Pelosi Just Threatened President Trump With Another Investigation Katie Pavlich

Posted By on March 30th, 2020

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/03/30/icymi-nancy-pelosi-just-threatened-president-trump-with-another-investigation-n2565955

In case you missed it over the weekend, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi falsely accused President Trump of “fiddling” around and called for an investigation into his handling of the Wuhan coronavirus crisis. 

“President Trump’s denial at the beginning of this was deadly,” Pelosi said during an interview with CNN. “As the President fiddles, people are dying.”

Pelosi is responsible for delaying a $2 trillion relief package for workers and families by a week after blowing up bipartisan negotiations. She then attempted to insert a long list of far-left, radical agenda items into the relief package. Talk about “fiddling,” Pelosi is the queen of it. She’s proving once again House Democrats aren’t interested in working for the American people. Instead, they’re interested in political power. They’ve also shown the only thing they’re capable of is launching investigations, rather than governing.

Further, when President Trump took action in late January to ban travel to and from China, Pelosi joined fellow Democrats and accused him of xenophobia. She also criticized the early March travel ban on passengers from Europe, where the Wuhan coronavirus is still raging.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Pandemic, Plague, and Protests: Will Chile Join the Sh–hole Country Club? Ilana Mercer

Posted By on March 30th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/29/pandemic-plague-and-protests-will-chile-join-the-sh-hole-country-club/

Lower-case, doctrinaire democrats in America doggedly conflate the “will of the people” across the world with liberty. This Disneyfied view of democracy ignores that, in a democracy, the right to vote gives one man control over another’s life and livelihood.

Before the coronavirus pandemic and the plague of locusts came the protesters.

From the affluent locales—Chile, France, Britain, Hong Kong, Catalonia—to the impoverished ones—Algeria, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Lebanon and more the world was on fire (to borrow from Amy Chua’s brilliant book).

The reasons cited for a worldwide conflagration ranged from the evils of free-market capitalism (says the Left) to the “socialist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela” (says the Right), to “economics, demography, a sense of powerlessness . . . and social media.”

Some experts spoke of a “youth bulge” of overeducated young people chasing too few jobs. In truth, this was more like ill-educated youngsters with useless degrees who thought it chic to don a balaclava and lob hard objects at the police and the property they were protecting.

Chile is the jewel of Latin America. In 2014, it even surpassed the United States on the Index of Economic Freedom, ranking seventh to America’s 12th. Since 1990, economic growth in Chile has been as steady as the stability of its institutions. Poverty rates had plummeted and social services had been extended to the needy.

On the Right, Pat Buchanan has described Chile as “the country with the highest per capita income and least inequality in all of Latin America.”

On the Left—yet still on the side of a competitive market economy—the Economist agrees. Chile “is the second-richest country in Latin America, thanks in part to its healthy public finances and robust private sector.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Bad Regulation, Bureaucracy Slowed The Fight Against Deadly Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted By on March 30th, 2020

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.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Five Ways Out of the COVID Crisis By Robert VerBruggen

Posted By on March 30th, 2020

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!