Health & Medicine – Page 34

If the government is paying for drugs with my tax dollars, they should be made in the US by American workers.

White House preparing executive order requiring certain essential drugs be made in U.S.

The White House is preparing an executive order which will require certain essential drugs be made in the U.S., two sources familiar with the matter told CNBC on Thursday.

One of the sources told CNBC’s Kayla Tausche the order could come out as soon as Friday. The applicable time frame for reviewing the order will be 90 days, the sources said.

The administration has a wide-ranging supply chain effort underway for products in a variety of sectors seen as national security issues, including drugs, medical supplies, semiconductors and defense equipment, the sources said.

About 72% of pharmaceutical ingredient manufacturers supplying the U.S. are located overseas, including 13% in China, according to an October congressional testimony by Janet Woodcock, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

Although it is unclear whether it is the same executive order President Donald Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro is pushing for, Navarro has previously said he wanted an executive order that would reduce U.S. dependency on foreign-made drugs.

“This Big Pharma spin is simply a desperate attempt to stop President Donald J. Trump from moving the production of our essential medicines and medical equipment and supplies to the U.S,” Navarro told CNBC in an interview in which he spoke out against Big Pharma’s attempts to lobby against his executive order.

The executive order Navarro is planning will streamline regulatory approvals for “American-made” products and look to impose similar FDA restrictions on U.S. facilities as those abroad. It will also encourage the U.S. government, including the Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Veterans Affairs, to only buy American-made medical products.

‘Rules for Thee, but Not For Me’ corrupt demoncrap elitism strikes again.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker acknowledges family members have been in Florida and Wisconsin during coronavirus shutdown

Gov. J.B. Pritzker for the first time Friday acknowledged his wife and daughter were in Florida before Illinois’ statewide stay-at-home order took effect in March and just recently returned to Chicago.

He said he was being “very private and very reserved” about his family “because there are threats to my safety and to their safety.

“You have seen that there are people that stand outside the Thompson Center and stand outside the Capitol in Springfield, holding, I mean, hateful signs that reference me personally and that suggest, if not say, but suggest the potential for violence,” he said.

On April 29, Pritzker testily responded to a question about a Patch.com report that his wife and family had gone to Florida amid the governor’s stay-at-home orders.

“My official duties have nothing to do with my family. So, I’m not going to answer that question. It’s inappropriate and I find it reprehensible,” he said of stories about his family.

That response prompted an outcry from Republican and right-leaning groups that the Democratic governor’s own wife wasn’t heeding the mandates of Pritzker’s stay-at-home order, though Pritzker never imposed an outright travel ban for residents.

“If his family can’t even heed the guidance of his own stay at home order, how does he expect Illinois voters to do the same?” said a May 4 email from the Republican National Committee with the subject line: “Governor Pritzker can’t take the heat.”

Pritzker said on Friday he hoped that an unnamed Republican super political action committee “that’s pushing stories like this about my family, would stop doing it because they are putting my children and family in danger.”

But he also acknowledged his family had only recently left Florida, where they had been staying since at least early March, before his stay-at-home order was issued. He owns an equestrian farm there.

This is three (3) THREE weeks after he ended his exord and Georgia began reopening.

Gov. Kemp: Pandemic numbers headed in the right direction — down

Governor Brian P. Kemp Monday reported the lowest number of ventilators in use and Covid-19 positive patients hospitalized in Georgia since hospitals began submitting data to the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency (GEMA) on April 8.

As of Monday, May 11, there are 881 ventilators in use; 1,134 Covid-19 positive patients hospitalized statewide; and 1,987 critical care hospital beds in use across Georgia.

On Friday, May 1, there were 989 ventilators in use, 1,483 Covid-19 positive patients hospitalized statewide, and 2,119 critical care hospital beds in use across Georgia.

“This data shows that we are headed in the right direction in our battle with COVID-19. Every day, Georgians are recovering from the virus, freeing up hospital space as we continue to safely reopen our state and ramp up testing and contact tracing.”

Coronavirus pandemic may actually be bringing families together.

When Ramona and Mario Singer had a nasty divorce four years ago, no one thought they would even speak again.

Yet now they are sheltering in place at his Florida home with their daughter, looking for all the world like a cozy couple.

Friends whisper that, after two months of quarantine, the “Real Housewives of New York” star might be in love again.

“It’s going pretty well,” she told a reporter last month. “Much better than I anticipated. We’re really bonding.”

Jimmy Fallon also has declared that isolating at home has brought him closer to his wife of 12 years, Nancy Juvonen.

“It’s been very bonding . . . We were like: ‘We actually like each other! We chose well!’”

Such is family life in a global pandemic. The reality is a remarkable repudiation of the gloom and doom pumped out by relationship experts, child shrinks and divorce lawyers.

As if the nuclear family were a malignant threat to health and sanity, they predicted the worst from close confinement: domestic violence, child abuse, “irreversible” damage to intimate relationships, and a divorce epidemic.

But anecdotal evidence is that children are happier, and a lot of families are getting along better than ever. Enforced isolation has brought a newfound appreciation for family life that is the silver lining to this wretched pandemic.

You can see clues in the sales figures; board games like Monopoly selling like hotcakes and a surge in communal sports equipment such as basketball hoops and footballs.

The craze for home baking has sparked a flour shortage. Without easy access to fast food, families are making their own bread and eating meals together, as fresh produce flies off the grocery shelves.

At a time of national crisis, Americans have had to slow down and turn inward, and those lucky enough to live with family are counting their blessings.

Senator Rand Paul Questions Dr. Fauci, Drops a Bomb in Senate Hearing

Senator Rand Paul had the best five minutes in the first two hours of the hearing in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee today. It is clear he has been abiding by shelter in place orders because his hair and beard look dangerously close to qualifying him to join the cast of Duck Dynasty. However, his questions could not have been more on point.

Really the history of this when we look back will be wrong prediction after wrong prediction after wrong prediction starting with Ferguson in England. I think we ought to have a little humility in the belief we know what’s best for the economy.

As much as I respect you Dr. Fauci, I don’t think you are the end all. I don’t think you are the one person that gets to make a decision. We can listen to your advice, but there are people on the other side saying there is not going to be a surge and we can safely open the economy. The facts will bear this out.

But if we keep kids out of school for another year, what’s going to happen is that the poor and underprivileged kids who don’t have a parent that can teach them at home are not going to learn for a year. I think we ought to look at the Swedish model. It’s a huge mistake if we don’t open schools in the fall.

Dierenbach: Is it time for a new approach to coronavirus?

In New York City, an antibody survey found that 21% of the city’s population had been infected with the coronavirus. This indicates that over one and a half million of New York City’s 7.2 million residents under the age of 65 had been infected. Furthermore, approximately 78% of them had no underlying medical condition that puts them at risk from coronavirus. Around the time of the antibody survey, New York City had recorded only 58 deaths of people under 65 with no underlying condition.

In the U.S., 79% of coronavirus deaths are people 65 and older. In the 23 states releasing long-term care facilities data, 27% of deaths have occurred in such places. The Washington Post reports the share of fatalities in nursing homes may be 50%. In Colorado, the share is 50%.

Yet our reaction isn’t to protect the elderly and those with underlying conditions. No, instead we decide to force over 214 million people under 65 with no underlying condition who are under virtually no threat from coronavirus to restrict their activities, socially distance from each other, and go into lockdown.

Instead of targeting the vulnerable population for assistance and infection avoidance, we shut down our economy. Many of the vulnerable are elderly and out of the workforce, yet we target the workforce and push 33 million people out of their jobs. We destroy countless small businesses, risk food shortages due to the supply disruption, drive oil prices so low that it could devastate thousands of Coloradans and cause political instability and international conflicts to rise, scare people who need medical attention away from emergency room visits, and cause domestic violence to rise.

What we’re doing is unsustainable.

Protests against the lockdowns are erupting across the country. Lockdown supporters call the protesters self-centered murderers who only care about getting haircuts or going to bars. Arbitrary orders create confusion and social unrest. In Michigan, you couldn’t sell seeds, while in Colorado, you can have a gathering of 10 people, but they aren’t allowed to play a game of basketball. The mayor of Los Angeles has threatened longer lockdowns as punishment for disobedience.

In the beginning, the logic behind locking down was sound. Coronavirus is a highly transmissible disease with a significant number of carriers who are asymptomatic and contagious at the same time. The experts said if the virus remained unchecked, it would produce a surge of victims that would overwhelm our healthcare system and result in excess deaths due to lack of care for both coronavirus sufferers and others needing medical attention. News from China and Italy confirmed this possibility.

But “flatten the curve” morphed into “hide until solution;” the solution being a possible vaccine or effective treatment at some undeterminable point in the future. States that never saw a surge went into lockdown and remain there today. New York City, which is well past their peak medical usage, remains on lockdown. Many states that are ostensibly opening up are doing so at an extremely slow pace. Colorado, which is supposedly opening up (but not really), is attempting to keep the coronavirus cases at a level that is so low, herd immunity might not be reached for years.

To combat the virus, every state is pulling the social distancing lever trying to figure out what level of distancing can slow the spread of coronavirus such that they are able to reach their goal of managed herd immunity, or slowing the spread while waiting for a medical solution. Some states pull hard and lockdown tight, while other states try to move forward with a lighter touch. But even the lighter touch states are acting in a way that kills jobs and restricts freedom to an unsustainable degree. For example, Texas has announced it is opening up again, but mandates restaurants only operate at 25% capacity.

A new approach is needed.

This difference in effects of coronavirus between people under 65 with no underlying conditions and those with underlying conditions and/or over 65 should be the primary driver of policy.

Extrapolating the New York City data, if the 214 million plus healthy U.S. citizens under 65 all contracted coronavirus, they would suffer around 10,000 deaths. Two thirds of our population would have immunity and we would be well on our way to herd immunity. By contrast, if 214 million randomly selected Americans were infected at New York State’s estimated infection fatality rate of 0.5%, over 1,000,000 people would die. The actual rate is likely closer to 0.36%, but even at that rate, there could be 770,000 fatalities.

This begs the question: What if the people who won’t die from coronavirus abandon social distancing? And totally abandon it: no masks, have social get-togethers, attend basketball games, start shaking hands again, etc. Is that possible and what would it look like?

The program would look like this: if you are not elderly or vulnerable, you would not practice social distancing among the non-vulnerable. If you get the disease, you get over it and move on.

If you are vulnerable, for at least the next several weeks as we push toward herd immunity, when in public wear a mask, self-quarantine as much as possible, and practice social distancing. A mask would be the sign to everybody that you wish to avoid the disease. The non-vulnerable population would respect your wishes and practice social distancing in your presence. At work, non-vulnerable employees could wear masks when they know they will be close to vulnerable co-workers. In parks and other public situations, the unmasked could be asked to respect those with masks and maintain their distance. Subways or buses could have special cars or sections where people with masks could maintain safe distances.

What this plan would do is speed up the process of achieving herd immunity while protecting the vulnerable to a degree comparable to what we are doing now. We have learned how to do social distancing over the past several weeks; we all understand the methods and reasoning. We can now take that skill and apply it in a targeted fashion to protect the vulnerable, potentially lowering fatalities significantly, perhaps by hundreds of thousands. Instead of waiting a year or more to achieve herd immunity, we could do so in weeks or months.

A first reaction may be that “targeted” social distancing is not social distancing at all since it is not being performed by everybody in society and therefore will not be as effective at protecting the vulnerable. However, that isn’t accurate: targeted social distancing still requires everybody, vulnerable and non-vulnerable, to participate.

Shops and other businesses could have special hours where extreme care would be taken to observe social distancing rules and provide an environment that is as clean as possible. For example, a grocery store could have early morning shopping where carts and commonly touched surfaces are vigorously disinfected and social distancing and mask wearing is strictly enforced, but could operate normally for the remainder of the day. Having the special time in the morning would allow for disinfection, both through active efforts and through the passage of time since the previous day’s crowds.

If the lockdowns ended for most of the population, government assistance could be targeted at the at-risk individuals. For example, a teacher with hypertension who wishes to isolate could be allowed to work from home teaching vulnerable students that are also staying at home. An at-risk store clerk could be given unemployment benefits. Such targeted assistance would be far less costly and more efficient than the current policy of mass disbursements.

Why delay the inevitable?

Most all of us are going to get coronavirus eventually, so why destroy our economy to delay the inevitable when the delay itself means higher risk for the vulnerable people? The risk for healthy people is miniscule and almost entirely non-existent for children. Healthy people are hiding from a phantom threat at the real cost of prolonging the very real threat to the vulnerable. Every day that goes by with coronavirus prevalent in our society is another day it has an opportunity to rip through a nursing home.

Finally, this isn’t ignoring the danger to others or claiming coronavirus is a hoax. The virus is absolutely deadly to the elderly and those with underlying conditions. This also is not trading lives for jobs. By accelerating the attainment of herd immunity via healthy, younger people, this path saves lives and jobs. It allows the economy to start up again and results in less loss of life than any other approach out there.

This is the healthy acting together and taking on risk to protect the most vulnerable among us in the most efficient and effective way possible. I understand doing nothing to protect yourself from a known virus is frightening, but if you are not part of the vulnerable population, the odds of being killed by coronavirus are incredibly low. This is the best possible solution to a horrific problem. We the healthy should accept the slight risk associated with a possible coronavirus infection, both to protect the vulnerable like our parents and to preserve our quality of life for our children.

Governor Polis relies on the COVID-19 Modeling Group to provide to him estimates of outcomes for various responses to the pandemic. The Group is comprised of public health experts, mathematicians and others. So far, it appears if they have presented various options where everyone in Colorado practices the same level of social distancing. The Group should model a bifurcated social distancing regimen where the vulnerable self-quarantine and remain in lockdown, the non-vulnerable practice social distancing when in the presence of the vulnerable, and the non-vulnerable abandon social distancing among themselves.

As described above, this plan could potentially reduce overall fatalities and economic hardships so please urge the Group and the Governor to at least explore the possibility.

The Bottom Line

All government exists only with the consent of the governed.

That’s always true. You might need to back that up with your life, but it remains true. There are never enough cops to force the issue otherwise and further, not all cops will agree with an order either.

PA is finding this out:

Some local officials don’t agree with the tiered strategy, though. They plan to use their power to proceed with their own reopening plans, despite the fact that Pennsylvania confirmed 1,323 new coronavirus cases in a single day on Friday.

Lebanon County officials and some Republican lawmakers, including state Sen. Dave Arnold and Reps. Russ Diamond, Frank Ryan and Sue Helm, delivered a letter Friday to the Democratic governor informing him of their plans.

“Lebanon County has met the requirement of your original Stay-at-Home Order, which was to flatten the curve of the COVID-19 outbreak and allow hospitals the time to gear up for COVID-19 patients being admitted to the ICU and in need of ventilators,” the letter reads.

The original argument for all of these orders was to prevent overwhelming the health care system. That’s a contract, and the people have the absolute right to drag any official who moves the goalposts after obtaining agreement out of office by their hair if necessary, or simply to ignore said order as a violation of that agreement and be willing to enforce that refusal by whatever means are necessary.

Governments have fairly-broad public health powers. But those powers have never extended, because they can’t, to imprisoning — which is what a quarantine is for a person who isn’t sick — when applied to people who aren’t ill. The government bears the burden of proof in every instance when it wishes to restrict your freedom. There are no exceptions, ever, to this fact.

It’s time to stop the bull****; the Constitution is not the “10 Suggestions.” State and local governments also obtain their power only by mutual consent of essentially all of the population. If even a single-digit percentage of the population disagrees that government is toast should those people decide that they really mean it.

This bull**** show has laid bare the real purpose of all manner of “licensing”; it is not to protect the public at all but rather a cudgel that can be applied when an unrealted insult is perceived by the government. Threatening to yank a liquor license for something having nothing to do with the laws surrounding the legal age of consumption of alcohol is proof positive that such “licenses” lack any sort of actual merit upon which they were based and issued in the first instance.

Think this doesn’t apply to driving too? The hell it doesn’t.

It is time to stop pretending folks; that which made America unique is gone, and it up to us, as a body politic, to decide whether we insist that it both return immediately and that those who choose to try to obstruct that will face just punishment, irrespective of whether they agree with said punishment or not (of course they won’t initially — duh!)

There is much hardship coming. The actions of Congress, the President and Federal Reserve over the last couple of months with regard to monetary and fiscal policy guarantee that. There is no easy way out of what they’ve put in motion; all choices are hard, but some are a lot harder than others, and the longer we sit back and think it will be all ok the worse its going to get.

It is time to choose, in short, before the choices are forced upon you by others who claim to be your “betters.”

But luckily, a scapegoat has already been selected

Gov. Cuomo admits he was wrong to order nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has finally admitted — tacitly and partially, anyway — the mistake that was state health chief Howard Zucker’s order that nursing homes must admit coronavirus-positive patients.

On Sunday, Cuomo announced a new regulation: Such patients must now test negative for the virus before hospitals can return them to nursing homes. Yet the gov also admitted that COVID-19 cases might still go to the facilities via other routes, and didn’t explicitly overrule Zucker’s March 25 mandate that homes must accept people despite their testing status — indeed, couldn’t even require a test pre-admission.

The gov’s people say that a home that simply can’t accommodate coronavirus patients never had to take them — though they are obliged to help those people find a place that will, with help available from the state if needed. That is: Zucker’s mandate was never more than a “don’t discriminate” rule.

But Zucker publicly presented it as “must accept” — and Cuomo’s remarks regularly implied there must be something wrong with a home that couldn’t handle corona patients.

So, while the gov’s people imply that some homes simply misunderstood the rules, the real message to operators was that declaring themselves overwhelmed would put their licenses at risk.

Notably, the chief of one Cobble Hill facility not only had his request for PPE denied, he got turned down cold when he then asked to transfer patients.

Then, too, Zucker’s Department of Health has issued other heartless orders during this crisis — the now-rescinded “don’t even try to resuscitate” mandate to EMTs for cardiac-arrest cases, as well as telling at least one home it was OK to keep staffers on the job after they’d tested positive.

Also telling: The gov has ordered an investigation that’s plainly supposed to pin all the blame on nursing and adult-care facilities: It’s led by state Attorney General Tish James, who got her job with Cuomo’s crucial assistance — and it’s only looking at what homes did wrong.

We’re sure James will uncover plenty of real horrors: Everyone (who cared to know) has long been aware that many New York nursing homes leave a lot to be desired. But that was all the more reason for Zucker & Co. to focus on policing and assisting these facilities from the start — rather than issuing edicts that led to repeated and needless tragedies.

Consider the mighty power of ‘and‘.

Are Endless Lockdowns the Result of Malice or Stupidity?

In a harrowing article for PJ Media, Dennis Prager argues that the COVID-19 global lockdown is “possibly, the worst mistake the world has ever made,” leading to a mortality rate eclipsing anything the virus could have delivered. Widespread famine in Third World Countries and extreme poverty across the globe are now imminent, “all because of the lockdowns, not the virus.” A study released on May 4 by the nonprofit research institute Just Facts confirms Prager’s argument, concluding that “the total loss of life from all societal responses to this disease is likely to be more than 90 times greater than prevented by the lockdowns.”……..

Prager writes: “The lockdown is a mistake; the Holocaust, slavery, communism, fascism, etc., were evils. Massive mistakes are made by arrogant fools; massive evils are committed by evil people.” I suspect the razor applies to many government leaders who simply did everything wrong and then doubled down on their error rather than admit mortal fallibility. They were stupid—and too proud to acknowledge their mistake. They ensured that the remedy would be worse than the disease, but they cannot be blamed for malice aforethought.

The same acquittal would not apply to the denizens of the hard left, whether in government or the media, who are certainly actuated by malice and, quite possibly, by evil. Many government officials—whether national, state or local—may prolong the lockdown to enforce their hold on power, entailing the consequent reduction of a free and prosperous citizenry to a debased condition as wards of the State, a tactic dear to leftist administrations.

In any event, the motives of our political and media elites are as suspect as their credulity; it is no surprise that they readily adopted the false Coronavirus models and statistical projections of a charlatan like British science guy Neil Ferguson, with the result of near-universal social and economic calamity.

Why You Can’t Find Rubbing Alcohol
The U.S. now has vast surpluses of a sanitizing liquid that consumers aren’t allowed to buy.

One of the few everyday consumer items still not available at most stores is good old rubbing alcohol. Unlike the toilet paper shortage caused by irrational hoarding, the coronavirus pandemic has greatly increased the actual need for germ-sanitizing alcohol.

What makes the shortage particularly frustrating is that the U.S. is, by far, the world’s largest producer of alcohol. That distinction is a result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which required fuel producers to blend four billion gallons of corn ethanol into their gasoline by 2006 and 7.5 billion by 2012. The immediate result was a spike in the price of corn and an increase in food prices world-wide. U.S. farmers soon solved this problem by diverting millions of acres of land to growing corn. Ironically, this increased overall CO2 emissions, much to the chagrin of the environmentalists who had championed the mandate as a way of fighting global warming.

Long before policy makers had seen their error, however, farm states had so fallen in love with ethanol that they successfully lobbied the federal government to raise the mandate to 32 billion gallons a year by 2022. Keep in mind that the oil industry would gladly pay billions of dollars in extra taxes each year not to use it.

The negative effects of this forced usage of corn-based ethanol in refined petroleum include higher gas prices (alcohol costs more than oil per British thermal unit) and more than 30 million acres lost to subsidized corn production—an area that vastly exceeds all the land lost to urban, suburban and exurban “sprawl” over the past century. And while the U.S. now has inordinate supplies of excess alcohol, fuel producers can’t use it, since adding any more to gasoline will damage car engines.

Surely now, with people clamoring for germ-sanitizing alcohol, this excess supply can be put to good use. Not so fast. The Food and Drug Administration and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have prohibited the use of ethanol in place of isopropyl alcohol even though both are equally effective as germ-killers.

On April 3 the FDA announced that “ethanol made at plants producing fuel ethanol can be used as rubbing alcohol if it contains no additional additive or chemicals from the plants and they can ensure water purity and proper sanitation of equipment.” But it’s unclear how much supply will increase, since the FDA also stated that it would “consider each plant on an individual basis and grant approval only if a plant meets quality control specifications.”

Worse yet, the FDA reversed course on April 16, announcing additional restrictions that effectively prevent any sales, even though ethanol companies had already produced and shipped millions of gallons of high-grade alcohol for hand sanitizer. With U.S. ethanol inventories at all-time high of about 900 million gallons, you’d think the FDA would let us have a little for our hands.

Messrs. Doti and Iannaccone are economics professors at Chapman University.

This is an article by a Brit so you’ll just have to deal with their idea of spelling.

What Neil Ferguson’s booty call tells us about modern politics
His hypocrisy is staggering. But it’s his scaremongering we should hold him to account for.

The conspiratorial left, convinced the world is run by secret cabals of bankers and cigar-chomping media moguls, thinks the Neil Ferguson story is a ‘dead cat’. In other words, they think the Daily Telegraph – Evil Tory Rag – revealed that Ferguson carried on bonking his mistress in defiance of a lockdown that he himself bears much responsibility for in order to distract attention from Britain overtaking Italy with the highest Covid death toll in Europe. A ‘dead cat’ strategy is when a sensationalist story is introduced to the mix to divert attention from a far more serious political crisis. Ferguson’s sexual antics are the Tory regime’s dead cat to Britain’s corona death toll, apparently.

This sums up the political infantilism of the left. It is actually incredibly important news that Ferguson, the Imperial College modeller who said it was possible 500,000 Brits would die if we didn’t lock down, defied the lockdown. It deserves the frontpage treatment it is getting today. For Ferguson’s booty call with his married lover actually reveals a great deal about the 21st-century elites and how they view their relationship with the masses. It’s one rule for them and another for us. They can carry on enjoying sneaky freedoms because their lives and jobs are important; we can’t because we are mere little people, whose silly work lives can casually be disrupted, whose love lives can be turned upside down, and whose families can be ripped apart. The Ferguson affair provides an illuminating insight into the new elitism.

It’s worth thinking about the largeness of this scandal. Ferguson’s scaremongering, his predictions of mass death if society didn’t close itself down, was the key justification for the lockdown in the UK. It influenced lockdowns elsewhere, too. Of course, this isn’t all on Ferguson. He does not exercise mind control over Boris Johnson. It was a combination of disarray among the political class and the wild clamouring of the media elite for the severest lockdown possible that led to the working people of Britain being decommissioned and almost the entire population being put under an unprecedented form of house arrest……………

Ferguson bought into the political use of his work. He backed the lockdown. Ferociously. Without it, he said, hundreds of thousands would die.

And yet it seems the lockdown didn’t apply to him and his lover. No, just to us, the plebs, the irritants sitting on park benches or going for more than one jog a day, us potential virus-spreaders who so annoy the pro-lockdown media by committing such crimes as shopping twice a week or sitting on a near-empty beach. We must be locked down, but not them; not the clever people; not the people who work at prestigious institutions like Imperial and know how to make disease models. That’s the message of Ferguson’s grotesque hypocrisy. Or, more strikingly still, perhaps he doesn’t really believe the lockdown is necessary. If the man known as Professor Lockdown doesn’t adhere to the lockdown, why on Earth should anyone else take it seriously?

And yet while Ferguson’s hypocrisy is important, especially for what it reveals about the arrogance of the new expert class, it is really his promotion of fear that he should be challenged on. It increasingly looks like his models were iffy, to say the least. According to the models, unlocked-down Sweden should have had 40,000 deaths by now – in fact it has had around 2,850.

This is a catastrophic level of error. That seemingly unreliable or worst-case models have been used to wreck economies and institutionalise an authoritarian era so grave that one cannot leave one’s own house without good reason is a matter of the utmost public interest.

This doesn’t mean to race down to the store, buy mass quantities and eat it like it was candy. Although you just know some idjit will do that and then try and blame Trump for it.

Northwestern Univ.: Vitamin D appears to play role in COVID-19 mortality rates.

After studying global data from the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, researchers have discovered a strong correlation between severe vitamin D deficiency and mortality rates.

Led by Northwestern University, the research team conducted a statistical analysis of data from hospitals and clinics across China, France, Germany, Italy, Iran, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States.

The researchers noted that patients from countries with high COVID-19 mortality rates, such as Italy, Spain and the UK, had lower levels of vitamin D compared to patients in countries that were not as severely affected.

This does not mean that everyone — especially those without a known deficiency — needs to start hoarding supplements, the researchers caution.

“While I think it is important for people to know that vitamin D deficiency might play a role in mortality, we don’t need to push vitamin D on everybody,” said Northwestern’s Vadim Backman, who led the research. “This needs further study, and I hope our work will stimulate interest in this area. The data also may illuminate the mechanism of mortality, which, if proven, could lead to new therapeutic targets.”……….

Backman and his team were inspired to examine vitamin D levels after noticing unexplained differences in COVID-19 mortality rates from country to country. Some people hypothesized that differences in healthcare quality, age distributions in population, testing rates or different strains of the coronavirus might be responsible. But Backman remained skeptical.

“None of these factors appears to play a significant role,” Backman said. “The healthcare system in northern Italy is one of the best in the world. Differences in mortality exist even if one looks across the same age group. And, while the restrictions on testing do indeed vary, the disparities in mortality still exist even when we looked at countries or populations for which similar testing rates apply.

“Instead, we saw a significant correlation with vitamin D deficiency,” he said.

By analyzing publicly available patient data from around the globe, Backman and his team discovered a strong correlation between vitamin D levels and cytokine storm — a hyperinflammatory condition caused by an overactive immune system — as well as a correlation between vitamin D deficiency and mortality.

“Cytokine storm can severely damage lungs and lead to acute respiratory distress syndrome and death in patients,” Daneshkhah said. “This is what seems to kill a majority of COVID-19 patients, not the destruction of the lungs by the virus itself. It is the complications from the misdirected fire from the immune system.”

This is exactly where Backman believes vitamin D plays a major role. Not only does vitamin D enhance our innate immune systems, it also prevents our immune systems from becoming dangerously overactive. This means that having healthy levels of vitamin D could protect patients against severe complications, including death, from COVID-19.

“Our analysis shows that it might be as high as cutting the mortality rate in half,” Backman said. “It will not prevent a patient from contracting the virus, but it may reduce complications and prevent death in those who are infected.”……………

Backman is careful to note that people should not take excessive doses of vitamin D, which might come with negative side effects. He said the subject needs much more research to know how vitamin D could be used most effectively to protect against COVID-19 complications.

It’s almost like it the scenarios were thought up for possible basic planning for whichever disaster just happened to pop up.
Naah, that couldn’t be, could it?

LOCK STEP: This is No Futuristic Scenario

Whatever has occurred inside China at this point it is almost impossible to say owing to conflicting reactions of the Beijing authorities and several changes in ways of counting COVID-19 cases. The question now is how the relevant authorities in the West will use this crisis. Here it is useful to go back to a highly relevant report published a decade ago by the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the world’s leading backers of eugenics, and creators of GMO among other things.

The report in question has the bland title, “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development.” It was published in May 2010 in cooperation with the Global Business Network of futurologist Peter Schwartz. The report contains various futurist scenarios developed by Schwartz and company. One scenario carries the intriguing title, “LOCK STEP: A world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback.” Here it gets interesting as in what some term predictive programming.

The Schwartz scenario states, “In 2012, the pandemic that the world had been anticipating for years finally hit. Unlike 2009’s H1N1, this new influenza strain — originating from wild geese — was extremely virulent and deadly. Even the most pandemic-prepared nations were quickly overwhelmed when the virus streaked around the world, infecting nearly 20 percent of the global population and killing 8 million in just seven months…” He continues, “The pandemic also had a deadly effect on economies: international mobility of both people and goods screeched to a halt, debilitating industries like tourism and breaking global supply chains. Even locally, normally bustling shops and office buildings sat empty for months, devoid of both employees and customers.” This sounds eerily familiar.

Then the scenario gets very interesting: “During the pandemic, national leaders around the world flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets. Even after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities stuck and even intensified. In order to protect themselves from the spread of increasingly global problems — from pandemics and transnational terrorism to environmental crises and rising poverty — leaders around the world took a firmer grip on power.”

A relevant question is whether certain bad actors, and there are some in this world, are opportunistically using the widespread fears around the COVID-19 to advance an agenda of “lock step” top down social control, one that would include stark limits on travel, perhaps replacing of cash by “sanitary” electronic cash, mandatory vaccination even though the long term side effects are not proven safe, unlimited surveillance and the curtailing of personal freedoms such as political protests on the excuse it will allow “identification of people who refuse to be tested or vaccinated,” and countless other restrictions. Much of the Rockefeller 2010 scenario is already evident. Fear is never a good guide to sound reason.

Reynolds, Trump predict meatpackers ‘fully back up’ in 10 days or less

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and President Donald Trump predicted Wednesday, during a meeting at the White House, that meatpacking plants would be “fully back up” within a week to 10 days.

“Maybe sooner,” Trump said.

Reynolds said South Dakota plants are coming back on board “and we’ll have most of our facilities up and going and … we’re going to hopefully prevent what could have been, you know, a really sorry situation where we were euthanizing some of our protein supply and really impacting the food supply not only across the country but throughout the world.”

Reynolds said the response from the industry and government “I think has really maybe prevented what could have been really a serious situation.”

Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue agreed, although he noted that meatpackers that have experienced outbreaks will take time to be operating at full capacity.

“But we think the stores will see more variety and more meat cases fully supplied,” he said.

Reynolds added, “We’re still monitoring it. We’ve turned a corner.”

Trump said Reynolds had “a great talk with the owners of the plants. The top people. Big people, these are big companies actually, you wouldn’t believe how many plants they have. And I think it was a very strong talk and I think they got the message.”

The remarks come a day after Iowa’s largest grocery store chain announced it would limit customer purchases of meat due to supply interruptions and customers stockpiling food during the COVID-19 pandemic. Iowa public health officials reported Tuesday that more than 1,650 workers in four meatpacking plants had tested positive for COVID-19, including 58% percent of workers tested at the Tyson Fresh Meats plant in Perry.

Reynolds noted that the Perry plant “came back up at 60 percent capacity, which is really, that’s a strong startup.”

Vice President Mike Pence praised the president’s Defense Production Act executive order that “made it clear that our objective was to keep meat processing plants open.”

Asked whether workers were really being protected, Pence cited the deploying of Centers for Disease Control personnel to plant sites and federal assistance in supplying workers with personal protective equipment such as face masks. “In most of these meat processing plants, we end up testing everyone in the facility and the people that are healthy are able to return with new countermeasures and new protection” such as masks and gloves.

Pence referred to Reynolds as a “great heartland governor” and said, “One of the great stories of the coronavirus outbreak has been how our food supply has continued to work every day from the field to the fork, from the grocers to the meat processors and thanks to the president’s decision to use the Defense Production Act, we now have uniformity and the objective is to work every day to keep those meat processing plants open and the ones that are coming down are going back online.”

Asked by a reporter about the soaring price of beef, Trump said he’d asked the Justice Department to investigate. Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller on Tuesday joined attorneys general in 10 other states seeking an investigation into what they called possible price manipulation by meatpackers.

“I’ve asked them to take a very serious look into it because it shouldn’t be happening that way and we want to protect our farmers. But they’re looking into that very strongly.” Trump said. “They looking into the disparity, what’s going on. Are they working with each other? What’s going on.”

Supreme Court declines to lift Pennsylvania order closing non-essential businesses

The Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to lift an executive order by Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf that mandated all non-essential business close in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

A conservative political action committee and a group of businesses petitioned the Supreme Court to remove the executive order, saying it “has and is continuing to cause irreparable harm.”

The Supreme Court denied the request without comment and there were no known dissents.

Wolf’s order mandated all non-life-sustaining businesses temporarily close while those that remain open were ordered to comply with social distancing standards.

The businesses filed an emergency request with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, alleging the order was unconstitutional.

The state court denied the request, leading the businesses to call on the U.S. Supreme Court to review the lower court’s decision. The plaintiffs said the order “permits the continued closure of petitioners and tens of thousands of other businesses across Pennsylvania and as such constitutes severe, immediate and ongoing deprivation of their rights under the U.S. Constitution.”

Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Josh Shapiro, filed a response to the justices earlier this week urging the Supreme Court not to intervene.

“Applicants seek to upend the status quo and force Pennsylvania to prematurely reopen all businesses locations, regardless of public health data and contrary to the phased reopening currently underway based on that data,” Shapiro wrote.

Rethinking emergency powers should be high on legislature’s list.

Looks like we are crawling out of our home arrests. Which also means the Colorado legislative season will soon restart, too.

Since some are predicting a resurgence of COVID as the weather grows cold again in the fall, the legislature should learn from our recent experiences and use their prolonged session to adjust our laws for the next potential “emergency.”

Here are three suggestions for the legislature to tackle immediately.

Only elected officials should have emergency powers: Many of us were surprised to learn that unelected bureaucrats had the authority to place us under house arrest.

Before Gov. Polis ordered his statewide lockdown order, the tri-county health department, servicing Adams, Arapahoe and Douglas counties, ordered businesses closed and people locked in their homes. They did so over the objections of elected county commissioners whom they supposedly answer to.

It is unthinkable that under current law technocrats with no direct accountability to the people have such unchecked power. No one who can’t be voted out of office or recalled should have the power to declare emergencies and rip away basic liberties.

A top priority for the legislature must be to change the law so that only people directly elected by voters have the final say in exercising “emergency powers”.

Why this isn’t already the law is simply repugnant. It is likely a result of the many laws passed last time people were rushing to trade liberty for a false sense of secure after the 9-11 attacks.

Make 120 days, 120 days again. We the people passed the GAVEL Amendment in 1988 limiting the legislative session to 120 calendar days to, among lots of other good reasons, ensure that we have citizen legislators with real jobs outside of the gold dome.

After the COVID shutdown the Colorado supreme court nonsensically ruled that the term “calendar days” is “arbitrary” and can be re-interpreted by the legislature. When we passed the amendment back in 1988 it was made clear to voters, as it is clear in every loan you’ve ever signed, that “calendar” days are consecutive days.

The legislature needs to return the session back to a limited, consecutive 120 days, or even shorten it to 90 days as many states have. Since this may require clarifying the state constitution the legislature may have to refer it to the fall ballot for voter approval…………

Emergencies demand more transparency, not less: During an emergency, people — some literally making life-and-death decisions — need information more than ever. The need for governmental transparency is dire and immediate.

Throughout this crisis our leaders have been trying to balance competing interests. No easy task and I don’t envy them. But they have been rather covert about how exactly they make those decisions.

Virus Deaths in Democratic versus Republican States

When controlling for the differences in population across states, the number of deaths from coronavirus is over three times higher in states with Democratic governors than in states with Republican governors. As of Sunday, April 26, states with Republican governors have experienced 57.53 coronavirus deaths per million of population, states with Democratic governors have 179.74 deaths per million of population. Even excluding the state of New York as an extreme outlier, states with Democratic governors have 138.58 deaths per million from coronavirus, still over twice as many coronavirus deaths per million as deaths in states with Republican governors.[1]

It merits emphasis from the get-go that this relationship is obviously not directly causal. The inauguration of Kentucky’s new Democratic governor on December 10, 2019 did not triple the state’s subsequent mortality from the coronavirus relative to what it would have been had Republican incumbent Matt Bevin been reelected.

The dramatically different death rates between states with Republican and Democratic governors, however, illuminates two issues concerning state-level responses to the coronavirus. First, the dramatically lower death rates in Republican states account for the willingness of Republican governors to consider relaxed shelter-in-place policies relative to governors in Democratic states. As is appropriate in a federal system where significant policy responsibility continues to be exercised at the state level, a shelter-in-place policy appropriate for New York would not necessarily work well in Wyoming. Governors should be encouraged, not condemned, for pursuing policies tailored to the unique characteristics of their states.

Secondly, however, the question, “what did he know and when did he know it,” is not merely a question to ask the President regarding national-level policy responses to the coronavirus threat since February. The near-certainty of a global pandemic of some sort has been well-known in policy circles for decades. The unique demographic characteristics of each state that make them more or less susceptible to pandemic contagion are best known to state politicians, especially state governors. In the U.S. constitutional system in which state governments uniquely hold police powers—defined to be general authority to protect the health, safety, welfare and morality of the people (a power that the US national government does not have today and has never had)—it is a fair question to ask why so many state governors were caught unprepared. Particularly governors in states that had well known characteristics, like large, cosmopolitan cities, likely to exacerbate the risk of pandemic contagion.

Tocqueville observed that the U.S. has a “complex constitution.” Note the small “c.” In discussing the nation’s complex constitution, he was not writing of the complexity of written state and national Constitutions. He was rather discussing how the entire system of governance in the U.S. was constituted – state governments with the national government. Needless to say, the size of the U.S. national government is dramatically different today than it was in the 1830s. At the same time, it remains completely false to suggest that states no longer retain significant authority over vast domains of policy within their states. This is true as a formal Constitutional matter in that the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently denied that the U.S. national government has police power and continues to insist only state governments hold that power—except in limited areas where delegated to the national government. And it is true empirically as well.

For as large as the national government is, state governments nonetheless spend almost as much in total as the national government spends. Even in the exercise of power over everyday life, criminal and civil matters continue to be overwhelmingly defined and litigated under the authority of the states and not under the authority of the national government.

The advantage of a federal system is that it combines the advantages that large nations enjoy with the benefits of small ones. It is a virtue of federal systems that states can craft policies to their unique circumstances. Tocqueville observed that “In centralized great nations, the legislator is obliged to give a uniform character to the laws which does not encompass the diversity of places and mores.”

If the Democrats were so smart and caring, then why this huge divergence of death rates between Republican and Democratic states?

……………

The idea that a nation as large and diverse as the U.S. should have a one-size-fits-all national “shelter-in-place” policy is absurd on its face. Yet so much of the mainstream media’s commentary ignores the variation in state-level experience, and criticizes Republican governors for precipitately re-opening their states. This does not mean that Republican governors are necessarily right, but they’re certainly not wrong simply for not aping the policies of Democratic governors.

Good luck getting any people to volunteer in the future, Noo Yawk.

Health workers that volunteered to come to NY during pandemic have to pay state income tax: Cuomo

NEW YORK — Health care workers that came to New York to help fight the coronavirus pandemic at its epicenter will have to pay state taxes, according to the governor.

He addressed the issues Tuesday at a news conference.

“We’re not in a position to provide any subsidies right now because we have a $13 billion deficit,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. “So there’s a lot of good things I’d like to do, and if we get federal funding, we can do, but it would be irresponsible for me to sit here looking at a $13 billion deficit and say I’m gonna spend more money, when I can’t even pay the essential services.”

Even though the state government asked thousands of people to come to New York from out of state to help fight coronavirus, they will have to pay New York state taxes, even on income they might make from their home states that they’re paid while in New York.

Cuomo said he needs help from Washington in order to cover budget deficits from COVID-19, let alone subsidize state income tax for essential workers that flocked to New York’s aid.

“If we don’t get more money from Washington, we can’t fund schools, right, so at the rate we want to fund them. We are in dire financial need,” he said.

The issue first came up when the temporary hospital in Central Park was being erected by Samaritan’s Purse.

“Our financial comptroller called me,” said Ken Isaacs, a vice president of the organization, “and he said, ‘Do you know that all of you are going to be liable for New York state income tax?’

“I said, ‘What?'” Isaacs continued. “[The comptroller] said, ‘Yeah, there’s a law. If you work in New York State for more than 14 days, you have to pay state income tax.'”

“I didn’t know that,” Isaacs told PIX11 News.

“What we’re even more concerned about than the money,” Isaacs continued, “is the bureaucracy, and the paperwork, and I think that once that’s unleashed…once you start filing that, you have to do that for like a whole year or something.”

A top New York City certified public accountant explained the situation further in a FaceTime interview with PIX11 News at the time.

Entities from “these other states will have to register in New York,” said Lawrence Spielman, a partner at the accounting firm Spielman, Koenigsberg & Parker, LLP, “and do withholding here in New York.”

Any out-of-state resident who’s come to the Empire State to work on coronavirus relief is subject to the tax after 14 days here.

There are thousands of emergency workers here who’ve responded to requests by Cuomo and Mayor Bill De Blasio for help. Many of them are collecting paychecks from companies back in their home states, which allowed them to come to New York to volunteer.

Professor Neil Ferguson is a well-known scientist and advisor to the British government. It was Prof. Ferguson’s warning about a possible 500,000 deaths from the Wuhan Coronavirus that caused Prime Minister Boris Johnson to order the lockdown. Now the esteemed professor has resigned his position after the media discovered that he had been violating social distancing rules by having his married lover come to his home for romantic trysts.

“Lockdowns for Thee, but Not For ME!!”

And we’ve seen that in more than one of these elitist idjits who consider their mandates and executive orders don’t apply to them.

Top government scientist Neil Ferguson resigns from SAGE after breaking lockdown rules

Professor Neil Ferguson has resigned from the government’s scientific advisory group (SAGE) after reports he broke coronavirus lockdown rules.

In a statement announcing his departure, the leading epidemiologist from Imperial College London said he had made an “error of judgement”.

It followed claims in The Telegraph that he allowed a friend reported to be his lover, Antonia Staats, to visit him at home – in breach of official rules he contributed to devising. As a prominent member of SAGE, his resignation represents a blow for the group and ministers he is helping guide policy around the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I accept I made an error of judgement and took the wrong course of action,” he said. “I have therefore stepped back from my involvement in SAGE. “I acted in the belief that I was immune, having tested positive for coronavirus and completely isolated myself for almost two weeks after developing symptoms.

Florida isn’t the problem. Georgia isn’t the problem. Wyoming, South Dakota, New Mexico and even California aren’t the problem.
New York is the problem.
The leaders of that state and city have failed. They couldn’t have botched this crisis any more than if they had done it on purpose. And that brings a question to mind.

Over 1,700 more coronavirus deaths reported in New York nursing homes

The coronavirus pandemic’s death toll on New York’s most vulnerable residents living in nursing homes has skyrocketed — with an updated state tally indicating the number of fatalities is more than 1,700 higher than previously reported. Revised state Health Department data reveal that at least 4,813 people residing in 600 nursing homes have died from COVID-19 or symptoms associated with the virus.

Sources told The Post even the new, higher number is likely undercounting cases. Many nursing home residents died after being transferred to hospitals, and industry sources said their deaths are not being fully accounted for. For the first time, the statistics include the deaths of nursing home residents suspected of dying from COVID-19 before a confirmed diagnosis was received. Previously the state did not count so-called presumed cases.

But in a Tuesday press briefing, Gov. Andrew Cuomo sought to downplay his own Department of Health’s accounting of the new cases.

“Just to be clear, I would take all of these numbers now with a grain of salt,” he told reporters in Midtown Manhattan. “What does a ‘presumed death’ mean, right? … How do you presume it to be coronavirus?”

The climbing death toll comes amid finger-pointing who is responsible for what has become an emerging scandal. Cuomo and Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker have come under fire for a March 25 edict requiring nursing homes to admit or readmit recovering COVID patients.

In a rare slap at a successor, former Gov. George Pataki called Cuomo’s nursing home policy a “disaster” that has contributed to nursing home deaths and has called for an independent federal probe of the administration’s actions. The governor has defended the policy, saying nursing homes were obligated to transfer COVID patients elsewhere if they did not have the capacity and safety protocols to house them.

And, asked Tuesday what improvements the state can make going forward with respect to coronavirus deaths in nursing homes, Cuomo was at a loss.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s something we’re studying. … You do everything you can.”

Nursing homes were clearly unprepared, lacking infection control protocols, personal protective equipment and tests to properly identify residents and staff infected with the virus.

At Cuomo’s behest, state Attorney General Letitia James and the Health Department are probing the actions of the nursing homes. The revised list found 22 nursing homes in New York City and Long Island reported at least 40 deaths. At least 12 facilities reported 50 or more deaths.