George Rebane
The C19 timeline again shows that the WSJ does not walk on journalistic water. In its 29jan20 edition the newspaper published a whopping load of bullcrap, reporting that “Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told President Trump the coronavirus epidemic was under control.” Turns out he said no such thing, nor did he say/imply a number of other claims that the article by Rebecca Ballhaus and Stephanie Armour reported. The Federalist has a detailed timeline (here) that should dispel the other lies that also continue from the Left’s lamestream about how Trump’s administration fell down on the job responding to C19. Should be interesting reading, especially for those suffering from chronic TDS.
Death by ‘doctor’. Longtime RR readers know of the respect I have for the medical industry that is lead by the untouchables who hubristically exhibit their exalted position in our society and resort to high dudgeon whenever their opinions or performance is called into question by the lay public. It turns out that I have been a bit soft on the sawbones and the whole lot that supports them when I have cited that they and theirs kill almost 200,000 of us annually through what are swept under the rug as “under-recognized medical mistakes”. Well I was wrong. Johns Hopkins Medicine, you know the data guys on C19, has just concluded a new study that shows “medical errors are now the third leading cause of death in US.” (more here) Almost 10% of all US deaths are due to medical screw-ups. Today that amounts to over a quarter million (251,454 to be exact) buckets kicked prematurely even way back in 2013. What would you say if America’s airline industry plowed three wide-bodies chuck full of passengers into the mud every day, day-in and day-out, year after year? And our political leaders and the media don’t make a peep. They keep their high-flying jobs by making it very hard to get that MD after your name, and reducing the types of available healthcare providers who could more economically minister to our everyday ills. ‘First and foremost, do no harm.’ (Primum non noceres’, as the ol’ Hypocrites used to say.) Hah! Double Hah!
California’s next economic enema. The state is in dire financial straits because of the way it has set up milking its high earners for tax revenues while buying votes from the welfare throngs who pay little or no taxes. The Hoover Institution explains the matter here, and points out that “in every recession, California inflicts its own fiscal wounds by relying on a tax system "that is explicitly designed to collect gobs of revenue during booms, but which completely goes in the tank during downturns, much more so than any other state. … To give you a sense of the inefficiency of California’s tax system, consider California’s economy just after the financial crisis of a decade ago. In fiscal year 2010, California revenue fell by 20 percent, compared to less than a 2 percent drop in state GDP.” And the double dummy Democrats in Sacramento have brought this upon all of us as the decades-long political custodians of the once Golden State.
[26apr20 update] How to respond to the coronavirus pandemic. From time to time RR presents various pieces of generally useful information as a public service. This is a short video that summarizes the comprehensive recommendations from our authorities on how to correctly combat C19 in these trying times.
The C19 interviews with ‘experts’ and talking heads are getting beyond boring. If you can predict exactly how the person will answer, it’s like playing the same record over and over again. And it is very easy to do once you know whether the person is a Lefty or healthcare professional, or a Rightie. If your choice was to add another trillion to the national debt or accept one more C19 death, then the answer for most people is easy and it bookends the dollar value of a human life. And if your choice was to pay $10 more in annual taxes to save a particular person from dying, most people would pay, thereby establishing the other bookend value of a human life. So now that we’ve established that human lives have a dollar value, we can cut the ‘… if it can save even one life, then we should …” crap. The problem that makes TV interviews boring I covered in ‘Fighting C19’ where we illustrated the different utility functions for the Right, the Left, and the healthcare people in the middle. The latter only concern themselves with policies that would save one more human life, so you know what they’re going to say. The Right is concerned with saving the economy by assuming risks to minimize additional C19 deaths; the Left simply wants the economy to tank, preferably while keeping the death rate high. After all November is just around the corner. Meanwhile the pabulum pours out of the boobtube. So, dear reader, if you’re a thinking person, how many additional dollars would you add to national debt to prevent another C19 death?
[27apr20 update] Today’s WSJ reports on a “Secret Group of Scientists and Billionaires Pushing Trump on a Covid-19 Plan." They are working around the clock to cull the world’s most promising research for what they describe as a virus-era Manhattan Project.” (here) This self-identified group of “America’s top scientists and a collection of billionaires and industry titans” with high-access to the Trump administration has been doing a lot of research on C19. They have published a short readable report on their conclusions to date that you can download here – Download Scientists_to_Stop_COVID19_2020_04_23_FINAL. Bottom line, some of their pharma recommendations on repurposing of existing drugs are already dated (e.g. the hoped for effectiveness on Gilead’s remdesivir – here), but their assessment of tests and testing strategies are valid and totally in line with what my fevered brain deduced starting a month ago – no one knows jack about test reliabilities, and effective testing programs require tests administered wholesale and frequently to everyone who desires to be out and about. The rest of today's hyper-ventilation about tests and testing is just that. They give short shrift to herd immunity and see the conquest of C19 to be based on medicines and new vaccines. Until then they accept the RR recommendation I gave (here and here) for getting our economy back on its feet.
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