Subject: Who really runs the Democrats👹Subject: Fwd: Who really runs the Democrats👹
Saturday, July 25, 2020
George Soros
George Soros
Thursday, July 23, 2020
current information from the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal that should be a baseline for your decision-making.
This is current information from the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal that should be a baseline for your decision-making.
My comments on each item presented by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are appended for your consideration. To make it clear which materials come from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and which are my comments, I have capitalized my comments after each New York Times and Wall Street Journal item
1.“The virus is not going to disappear,” said Dr. Fauci. THE IMPLICATIONS OF DR. FAUCI’S STATEMENT ARE CLEAR…. WE MUST LEARN TO LIVE WITH AND OPERATE IN AN ACTIVE CORONAVIRUS ENVIRONMENT . THAT MEANS OPENING OUR BUSINESSES, OUR SCHOOLS, ETC AND WORKING OUT THE NECESSARY COMPROMISES BETWEEN ASSURING OUR ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL SURVIVAL AND THE MINIMIZATION OF INFECTIONS, DISABILITIES AND DEATHS.
2. Is the coronavirus airborne? The coronavirus can stay aloft for hours in tiny droplets in stagnant air, infecting people as they inhale, mounting scientific evidence suggests. This risk is highest in crowded indoor spaces with poor ventilation, and may help explain super-spreading events reported in meatpacking plants, churches and restaurants. It’s unclear how often the virus is spread via these tiny droplets, or aerosols, compared with larger droplets that are expelled when a sick person coughs or sneezes, or transmitted through contact with contaminated surfaces, said Linsey Marr, an aerosol expert at Virginia Tech. Aerosols are released even when a person without symptoms exhales, talks or sings, according to Dr. Marr and more than 200 other experts, who have outlined the evidence in an open letter to the World Health Organization. THIS STATEMENT IS CORRECT BUT IT HAS BEEN USED IN VERY MISLEADING WAYS. EXTENSIVE CHINESE TRACKING DATA SHOWED THAT ONLY ONE INFECTION IN MORE THAN 7,000 CASES TRACKED WAS ACQUIRED THROUGH AN OUTDOOR CONTACT. WORLDWIDE STUDIES SEEM TO CONFIRM THAT FINDING. OTHER STUDIES SHOW THAT VERY MILD BREEZES DISRUPT ANY POSSIBLE LINGERING AEROSOLS. OTHER STUDIES INDICATE THAT EVEN WHEN THERE ARE STATIC CONDITIONS OUTDOORS THE MOMENTUM WAVE CREATED BY A MOVING PERSON PUSHES THE AEROSOL AWAY, SIMILAR TO THE WAY A BOAT CREATES A WAVE WHEN MOVING AND PUSHES THE WATER ASIDE. OTHER STUDIES INDICATE THAT INTENSIVE CONTACT [ 15 MINUTES OR MORE] IS REQUIRED FOR THE VIRUS TO BE TRANSFERRED FROM A CARRIER TO A VICTIM. THIS WOULD MAKE THE WEARING OF MASKS OUTDOORS COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY. IT ALSO MEANS THAT ADEQUATE VENTILATION SUCH AS AIR SCRUBBERS, CLEAN ROOMS, ETC. COULD DUPLICATE INDOORS THE OUTDOOR ENVIRONMENT NECESSARY TO MAKE SUCH SPACES NEARLY 100% SAFE. SINCE THE TECHNOLOGY IS WELL KNOWN AND INEXPENSIVE IT CAN BE APPLIED TO NEARLY EVERY SCHOOLROOM, OFFICE, FACTORY, MALL, STORE, ETC.
3. Dr. Fauci said a coronavirus vaccine will not be ready until at least the end of this year or early 2021, reiterating the timetable he has given in the past. He said he was “cautiously optimistic” about meeting it. He also pledged to lawmakers that he would not allow any vaccine to go to market until it was proved both safe and effective. Also, there may be different vaccines for different populations, and some may require booster shots. APPROXIMATELY 100 VACCINES ARE NOW UNDER DEVELOPMENT. MANY OF THEM HAVE ALREADY PROVED TO BE SAFE. ALSO, MANY OF THEM ON PRELIMINARY TESTING APPEAR TO BE “EFFECTIVE”. THE FDA HAS TALKED ABOUT REQUIRING PROOF, THROUGH EXTENSIVE TESTING, OF AT LEAST 50% EFFECTIVENESS BEFORE APPROVAL FOR USE. THE FLU VACCINE THAT I TOOK LAST YEAR, ( WHICH WAS DESIGNED TO COMBAT THE FLU OF TWO YEARS AGO ) WAS A COMBINATION OF FOUR SEPARATE VACCINES. CONFRONTED WITH A SIMILAR SITUATION, MY MILITARY ORGANIZATION WOULD HAVE DETERMINED WHICH OF THE SEVERAL PROMISING DEVELOPMENTS COULD WORK IN COMBINATION AND THEN WOULD COMBINE SEVERAL OF THESE INTO COMPOSITE PACKAGES FOR MASS UTILIZATION. THIS MEANS SEVERAL MILLION VACCINATIONS. IF ANY OF THESE PACKAGES WORK THIS WOULD HAVE AN IMMEDIATE AND SUBSTANTIAL EFFECT ON BLOCKING THE PROGRESS OF COVID- 19. IN PERFORMING TESTS, THE CONCEPT OF POOLING IS A WELL KNOWN TECHNIQUE FOR SUBSTANTIALLY INCREASING THROUGHPUT. DR. FAUCI HAS JUST BEGUN TO MENTION THE POSSIBLE USE OF THIS TECHNIQUE. THERE ARE PROBABLY HUNDREDS OF EQUALLY IMAGINATIVE AND POSSIBLY VERY USEFUL SUGGESTIONS THAT ARE NOT BEING CONSIDERED, GIVEN THE STOVEPIPE ARRANGEMENTS OF THE CDC BUREAUCRACIES.
4.Dr. Hahn pushed back against the suggestion by Democrats that the White House had pressured the Food and Drug Administration in its handling of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which Mr. Trump has promoted as a treatment.
A.. ACCORDING TO THE WASHINGTON POST DR. BRIGHT PUBLICLY MADE THE FOLLOWING REMARKS: “I INSISTED THAT THESE DRUGS BE PROVIDED ONLY TO HOSPITALIZED PATIENTS WITH CONFIRMED COVID-19 WHILE UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF A PHYSICIAN. THESE DRUGS HAVE POTENTIALLY SERIOUS RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH THEM, INCLUDING INCREASED MORTALITY OBSERVED IN SOME RECENT STUDIES IN PATIENTS WITH COVID-19.”
B.. BY HIS OWN ADMISSION, DR. BRIGHT IS UNILATERALLY INFRINGING UPON THE MEDICAL JUDGMENT OF THOUSANDS OF PHYSICIANS.
C. THE FOLLOWING “ANECDOTAL” REPORTS[ 3 EXAMPLES OF MANY] HAVE BEEN SUBMITTED BY LICENSED PHYSICIANS AND SUMMARIZES THEIR EXPERIENCE WITH THIS MEDICATION. IN ADDITION, A REPUTABLE INTERNATIONAL SURVEY[ SERMO] SHOWS THAT THIS MEDICATION IS UTILIZED IN TREATMENT FOR COVID-19 THROUGHOUT THE WORLD AND IS REGARDED AS EFFECTIVE BY THOSE USING IT.
(a) CORONAVIRUS AT TEXAS NURSING HOME – HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE TREATMENT SAVES ALL BUT 1 PATIENT. A NURSING HOME IN TEXAS HAS A HOPEFUL STORY FOR THOSE SUFFERING WITH CORONAVIRUS.THE RESORT AT TEXAS NURSING HOME HAD AN OUTBREAK OF CORONAVIRUS THAT INFECTED 56 RESIDENTS AND 33 STAFF MEMBERS. DR. ROBIN ARMSTRONG IMMEDIATELY ADMINISTERED HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE TO THE RESIDENTS AND STAFF MEMBERS ALONG WITH ZPAC AND ZINC. ONLY ONE NURSING HOME PATIENT DIED SINCE THE DOCTOR PRESCRIBED THE HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE. 55 MADE IT. "DR. ARMSTRONG AND OTHERS AT THE RESORT AT TEXAS CITY NURSING HOME KNEW TIME WASN’T ON THEIR SIDE.'TWO OF OUR RESIDENTS HAD SYMPTOMS AND THAT’S WHEN WE TESTED EVERYBODY,' SAID NURSING HOME EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR JAN PIVERAL. 56 RESIDENTS AND 33 STAFF MEMBERS WERE COVID-19 POSITIVE. 'OUR GOAL WAS TO MAKE SURE WE COULD SHELTER THEM IN PLACE SO WE DON’T SPREAD IT TO OTHER PEOPLE,' ARMSTRONG SAID. 'THEN ALSO AT THE SAME TIME TREAT THEM SO THEY WOULD GET BETTER.’ ARMSTRONG SAYS HE KNEW RESIDENTS WHO ENDED UP IN THE HOSPITAL HAD A HIGHER MORTALITY RATE. 'OUR GOAL WAS TO KEEP THEM HERE AND TREAT THEM WITH THE MEDICATIONS WE HAD AVAILABLE,' HE SAID. WHEN ARMSTRONG BEGAN ADMINISTERING HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE, IT WAS CONTROVERSIAL BUT APPEARED PROMISING. 'IF WE DIDN’T MAKE THE DECISION QUICKLY THEN WE COULD POTENTIALLY LOSE 15 TO 20% OF THE RESIDENTS WHICH WAS NOT AN OPTION' SAID THE DOCTOR. ARMSTRONG’S APPROACH WAS TO BEGIN ADMINISTERING HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE A ZPAC AND ZINC JUST AS SOON AS A RESIDENT FIRST STARTED SHOWING SYMPTOMS.ARMSTRONG DOESN’T CALL THE HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE A CURE AND IS AWARE OF ALL THE RECENT REPORTS THAT SAY THE DRUG SHOULDN’T BE USED TO TREAT COVID-19.BUT HE POINTS OUT ONLY ONE OF THE NURSING HOMES COVID-19 PATIENTS HAS DIED.'EVERYONE WHO GOT ON TREATMENT WHO STARTED ON TREATMENT IS ACTUALLY DOING REALLY WELL,' HE SAID."
(b) INFORMATION FROM MONROE, NEW YORK. SINCE 3/15/20, MY TEAM HAS SEEN APPROXIMATELY 1354 PATIENTS IN MONROE, NEW YORK WITH EITHERTEST PROVEN OR CLINICALLY SUSPECTED CORONAVIRUS INFECTION. THE MAJORITY OF THE PATIENTS WERETREATED WITH ONLY SUPPORTIVE CARE. THE PATIENTS WITH SHORTNESS OF BREATH OR WHO ARE IN THE HIGHRISK CATEGORY WERE TREATED WITH THE ABOVE REGIMEN (APPROXIMATELY 405 PATIENTS AT THIS POINT)..
OF THIS GROUP AND THE INFORMATION PROVIDED TO ME BY AFFILIATED MEDICAL TEAMS, WE HAVE HAD TWO
DEATHS, SIX HOSPITALIZATIONS FOR PNEUMONIA, AND FOUR INTUBATIONS (ALL EXTUBATED NOW). IN ADDITION,
I HAVE NOT HEARD OF ANY NEGATIVE SIDE EFFECTS OTHER THAN APPROXIMATELY 10% OF PATIENTS WITH
TEMPORARY NAUSEA AND DIARRHEA. IN SUM, MY URGENT RECOMMENDATION IS TO INITIATE TREATMENT IN THE OUTPATIENT SETTING AS SOON AS POSSIBLE IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE ABOVE. BASED ON MY DIRECT EXPERIENCE, IT PREVENTS ACUTE
RESPIRATORY DISTRESS SYNDROME (ARDS), PREVENTS THE NEED FOR HOSPITALIZATION AND SAVES LIVES.
CONCLUSION: TREAT AS EARLY AND AS AGGRESSIVELY AS POSSIBLE IN THE OUTPATIENT SETTING
1- HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE 200MG TWICE A DAY FOR 5 DAYS 2- AZITHROMYCIN 500MG ONCE A DAY FOR FIVE DAYS
3- ZINC SULFATE 220MG ONCE A DAY FOR FIVE DAYS
(c) INFORMATION FROM TARZANA CALIFORNIA : SO FAR IN MY CLINICAL EXPERIENCE, I CAN TELL YOU THAT HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE/AZITHROMYCIN COMBO HAS BEEN 100% EFFECTIVE FOR MY COV PATIENTS, WHEN USED IN CONJUNCTION WITH ALL OF THE INTEGRATIVE .... I EMPLOY. NEEDS TO BE GIVEN EARLY ENOUGH IN THE COURSE OF THE ILLNESS TO BE MAXIMALLY EFFECTIVE. MUCH LIKE A FIRE EXTINGUISHER CAN PUT OUT A SMALL KITCHEN FIRE, BUT IF A HOUSE IS ENGULFED IN FLAMES, YOU NEED A FIRE HOSE. DOESN’T MEAN FIRE EXTINGUISHERS DON’T WORK FOR HOUSE FIRES, JUST NEED TO BE USED EARLY IN THE EVENT…...
AS WE NO LONGER HAVE THE DOMESTIC CAPACITY TO MANUFACTURE THESE MEDICATIONS [HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE/AZITHROMYCIN] IN THE QUANTITIES NEEDED ON THE TIMELINE REQUIRED, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHOULD IMMEDIATELY WORK TO RE-TOOL US CHEMICAL FACTORIES THAT ARE CAPABLE OF RETROFITTING TO MANUFACTURE THESE TWO DRUGS. THE RAW MATERIALS OF THESE MEDICINES CAN THEN BE SHIPPED DIRECTLY TO VITAMIN MANUFACTURERS WHO HAVE THE CAPACITY TO CONSERVATIVELY AND COLLECTIVELY MAKE 5 - 10 MILLIONS PILLS DAILY. AS A CONTRACT MANUFACTURER OF VITAMINS, I KNOW FIRST HAND THAT THESE FACILITIES FOLLOW STRICT FDA GUIDELINES THAT ARE EQUIVALENT TO THE REGULATIONS OF BIG PHARMA. THEREFORE, QUALITY CONTROL WILL NOT BE A CONCERN. COMPOUND PHARMACIES ARE ALSO CAPABLE OF PARTICIPATING IN THIS EFFORT.IF THIS PROTOCOL WERE TO BE ADOPTED, SOME 150M DOSES OF THESE LIFE-SAVING MEDICATIONS WOULD BE AVAILABLE IN THE NEXT TWO WEEKS TO TREAT ALL PATIENTS IN NEED AND ANY FIRST RESPONDER/FRONT LINE HEALTHCARE WORKER.
WHILE NOT SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN, IT HAS ALSO BEEN ANECDOTALLY OBSERVED THAT CHLOROQUINE MAY OFFER SIGNIFICANT PROPHYLAXIS SO THAT THOSE MOST AT RISK (THE VULNERABLE PATIENTS AND FRONT-LINE HEALTHCARE WORKERS) MAY NEVER DEVELOP A PRIMARY INFECTION DURING THE EPIDEMIC. THIS PREVENTIVE INTERVENTION SHOULD BE IMMEDIATELY OFFERED TO VULNERABLE POPULATIONS AND HEALTHCARE WORKERS IN AN OPEN-LABEL, OBSERVATIONAL STUDY.
WITH THE CURE IN THE HANDS OF PHARMACIES, HOSPITALS AND FIRST RESPONDERS, THE CONCERN FOR THE HEALTH AND WELLNESS OF THE VULNERABLE POPULATION (WHOSE CHARACTERISTICS HAVE BEEN WELL DESCRIBED) CAN BE ASSURED. BY TREATING THESE VULNERABLE PATIENTS IN THE EARLY PART OF THE 5 DAY PRODROME (WHEN MILD SYMPTOMS BEGIN), DEMANDS ON HOSPITAL RESOURCES WILL BE EFFECTIVELY COUNTERED.
(d) MORE THAN 2,304 PHYSICIANS WHO ARE CURRENTLY SUCCESSFULLY TREATING PATIENTS INFECTED WITH THE COVID-19 REPORTED THEIR "ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE" OF THEIR SUCCESS WITH THEIR PATIENTS UTILIZING HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE --AN INTERNATIONAL SURVEY CONDUCTED BY SERMO, A GLOBAL HEALTH CARE POLLING COMPANY, OF 6,227 PHYSICIANS IN 30 COUNTRIES FOUND THAT 37% OF THOSE TREATING COVID-19 PATIENTS RATED HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE AS THE “MOST EFFECTIVE THERAPY” FROM A LIST OF 15 OPTIONS. THE POLL FOUND 23% OF U.S. MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS HAD PRESCRIBED THE DRUG, WHICH HAS BEEN FDA-APPROVED FOR MALARIA, LUPUS AND RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS. HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE, WHICH IS SOLD UNDER THE BRAND NAME PLAQUENIL, WAS PRESCRIBED MAINLY IN THE UNITED STATES FOR THE MOST SEVERE CASES, BUT NOT SO IN OTHER COUNTRIES.“OUTSIDE THE U.S., HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE WAS EQUALLY USED FOR DIAGNOSED PATIENTS WITH MILD TO SEVERE SYMPTOMS WHEREAS IN THE U.S. IT WAS MOST COMMONLY USED FOR HIGH RISK DIAGNOSED PATIENTS,” THE SURVEY FOUND.THE 30 NATIONS SURVEYED INCLUDED THOSE IN EUROPE, ASIA, NORTH AMERICA AND SOUTH AMERICA, AS WELL AS AUSTRALIA. NO INCENTIVES WERE PROVIDED TO PARTICIPATE IN THE POLL, CONDUCTED MARCH 25-27, ACCORDING TO SERMO. HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE USAGE WAS MOST WIDESPREAD IN SPAIN, WHERE 72% OF PHYSICIANS SURVEYED SAID THEY HAD PRESCRIBED IT, FOLLOWED BY ITALY AT 49%, AND LEAST POPULAR IN JAPAN, WHERE 7% HAD USED IT Tod COVID-19.
(e) QUOTING SERMO CEO PETER KIRK [ WHICH WOULD BE DIRECT COUNTER TO DR. BRIGHT’S INSISTENCE THAT THESE MEDICATIONS BE ONLY PROVIDED TO HOSPITALIZED PATIENTS] “PHYSICIANS SHOULD HAVE MORE OF A VOICE IN HOW WE DEAL WITH THIS PANDEMIC AND BE ABLE TO QUICKLY SHARE INFORMATION WITH ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD,” HE SAID. “WITH CENSORSHIP OF THE MEDIA AND THE MEDICAL COMMUNITY IN SOME COUNTRIES, ALONG WITH BIASED AND POORLY DESIGNED STUDIES, SOLUTIONS TO THE PANDEMIC ARE BEING DELAYED.”
5. Small Businesses Brace for Prolonged Crisis, Short on Cash and Customers. Small businesses such as restaurants, dog-care centers and manufacturers brought back staff beginning in mid-April, believing they could get back to business. Now, many are shutting down or slashing jobs again as local officials and consumers pull back and the pandemic shows no signs of abating. More government support may help in the short run, but many business owners are facing make-or-break challenges. Many may not last. An estimated 1.85 million U.S. businesses closed their doors or temporarily suspended operations in the second quarter, according to Oxxford Information Technology Ltd. in Saratoga, N.Y., which tracks roughly 32 million U.S. businesses of all sizes using data from credit bureaus, surveys and government sources.
Total losses this year will be greater than in the last recession, when 20%, or roughly 4.5 million businesses, disappeared in just over a year.
Small firms are especially vulnerable now and will account for most of the losses. Most lack the working capital to survive the downturn or to meet customer needs when the economy recovers. Just two-fifths of small-business employees who had worked in January were logging hours in early April, according to Homebase, a provider of scheduling and time management software. The roughly 500,000 employees it tracks are mostly hourly workers in restaurants, retailers, hair salons and other Main Street businesses. Enterprises with fewer than 500 employees accounted for almost half of private-sector employment in 2017, the most-recent data, according to the Census Bureau. Small firms also employ a majority of the workers in industries such as restaurants and personal care that are most affected by capacity restrictions.
I AM PRETTY SURE THAT THESE BASIC STATISTICS AND FINDINGS APPLY TO THE CITY OF TORRANCE IN OTHER WORDS WHAT WE OPEN UP OR WE DIE AS AN ECONOMY AND AS A ROBUST SOCIAL COMMUNITY.
6.COVID-19 cases are overstated by one hundred percent because of indiscriminate testing. The corona viral dna tests have a reported 4% false positive rate that, when applied to the nearly 50 million tests done so far result in 2 million falsely labelled as having COVID-19.
Link All tests in medicine have a certain number of false positives, meaning that the test is positive but that the patient does not have the disease. COVID-19 News reports that 48.3 million tests have been done in the United States as of Monday. Four percent, or over 1.93 million are false positives. These patients are not infected. The same publication alleges that about 3.9 million Americans have been infected with COVID-19. They did not subtract the nearly 2 million false positives. Fewer than 2 million Americans have truly positive tests for COVID-19 (but it’s not always certain which ones.) Link, VirusNCov.com
Erwin Haas is a retired infectious diseases doctor, former Kentwood City commissioner and flight surgeon in Vietnam: "The scam starts when one individual is tested and is found to be falsely positive. All of his contacts will then be traced and tested. If there are 25 contacts, one of them is likely to be falsely positive as will, in turn, one of his 25 contacts.The entire chain is actually negative but this kind of creative and unwarranted testing does swell the numbers. This is playing out as a manufactured epidemic in rural United States where a new population of COVID-19 cases has arisen in the last 2 months; Many of the new cases are in younger healthy individuals tested as part of contact tracing. To invent a meme; It’s not the same COVID-19 that we knew in the old days…..A better gauge of COVID-19 disease levels is the death rate. This is dropping. Michigan, as an example, reports one or two new deaths per day but on many days also reports a half dozen deaths retrieved in chart reviews of cases from February or March. This gives the false impression of a high mortality. "
"Some final notes; 1) We need to re-evaluate the positives that have been generated as a result of our misunderstanding of basic statistical principles. 2) This is a money maker for the labs and newly trained, well paid profession of contact tracer. These constituencies will fight against correcting this fluke in statistics. 3) I would not expect politicians or journalists to understand the problem of false positives but experts at the CDC, NIH and at the various universities who squawk loudly about the “pandemic” and how “we must destroy the economy” can be mocked for not understanding basic statistics and Bayesian Theory. “
TO MAKE MATTERS WORSE, THE FUTURE OF TORRANCE APPEARS TO DIRECTLY DEPEND UPON HAPPENINGS, DATA, REPORTS, ETC. THAT ARE BEING TABULATED COVERING GEOGRAPHIC LOCATIONS IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY IN AREAS THAT ARE HAVING FAR DIFFERENT LIVING AND PUBLIC HEALTH EXPERIENCES THAN IS ACTUALLY OCCURRING IN TORRANCE. THEN, ANONYMOUS DEPARTMENT WORKERS IN SACRAMENTO TABULATE AND INTERPRET THIS COMPOSITE DATA AND PLACE ENTIRE COUNTIES SUCH AS LOS ANGELES COUNTY ON 'WATCH LISTS” WHERE THEY WILL REMAIN UNLESS THE THE ENTIRE COUNTY MEETS SOME ARBITRARY MEASURE FOR A "14 CONSECUTIVE DAY PERIOD". IN OTHER WORDS THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA [ANONYMOUS BUREAUCRATS] ISSUE ARBITRARY DIRECTIVES WHICH THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES THEN ADDS TO AND RE-BROADCASTS WHICH THE CITY OF TORRANCE THEN ACQUIESCES TO. EXAMPLES OF SUCH OVER-KILL DIRECTIVES INCLUDE GOV. NEWSOM’S UNILATERAL DETERMINATION THAT A ROAST BEEF SANDWICH DOES NOT QUALIFY AS A “MEAL” WHEN SERVED IN A BAR—A STATE-MANDATED REQUIREMENT TO ALLOW THE BAR TO STAY OPEN. ALSO, THE EXACT FROZEN DINNER THAT IS SERVED BY MANY RESTAURANTS, DOES NOT QUALIFY AS A “MEAL” IF IT IS SERVED BY A BAR. ALTHOUGH GOV. NEWSOM MANDATED THAT PET GROOMERS AGAIN SHUT DOWN, TO THIS DATE THE GOVERNOR HAS NOT A SINGLE DOCUMENTED INCIDENT TO SERVE AS A BASIS FOR HIS SHUT DOWN ORDERING DECISION.]
My comments on each item presented by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are appended for your consideration. To make it clear which materials come from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and which are my comments, I have capitalized my comments after each New York Times and Wall Street Journal item
1.“The virus is not going to disappear,” said Dr. Fauci. THE IMPLICATIONS OF DR. FAUCI’S STATEMENT ARE CLEAR…. WE MUST LEARN TO LIVE WITH AND OPERATE IN AN ACTIVE CORONAVIRUS ENVIRONMENT . THAT MEANS OPENING OUR BUSINESSES, OUR SCHOOLS, ETC AND WORKING OUT THE NECESSARY COMPROMISES BETWEEN ASSURING OUR ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL SURVIVAL AND THE MINIMIZATION OF INFECTIONS, DISABILITIES AND DEATHS.
2. Is the coronavirus airborne? The coronavirus can stay aloft for hours in tiny droplets in stagnant air, infecting people as they inhale, mounting scientific evidence suggests. This risk is highest in crowded indoor spaces with poor ventilation, and may help explain super-spreading events reported in meatpacking plants, churches and restaurants. It’s unclear how often the virus is spread via these tiny droplets, or aerosols, compared with larger droplets that are expelled when a sick person coughs or sneezes, or transmitted through contact with contaminated surfaces, said Linsey Marr, an aerosol expert at Virginia Tech. Aerosols are released even when a person without symptoms exhales, talks or sings, according to Dr. Marr and more than 200 other experts, who have outlined the evidence in an open letter to the World Health Organization. THIS STATEMENT IS CORRECT BUT IT HAS BEEN USED IN VERY MISLEADING WAYS. EXTENSIVE CHINESE TRACKING DATA SHOWED THAT ONLY ONE INFECTION IN MORE THAN 7,000 CASES TRACKED WAS ACQUIRED THROUGH AN OUTDOOR CONTACT. WORLDWIDE STUDIES SEEM TO CONFIRM THAT FINDING. OTHER STUDIES SHOW THAT VERY MILD BREEZES DISRUPT ANY POSSIBLE LINGERING AEROSOLS. OTHER STUDIES INDICATE THAT EVEN WHEN THERE ARE STATIC CONDITIONS OUTDOORS THE MOMENTUM WAVE CREATED BY A MOVING PERSON PUSHES THE AEROSOL AWAY, SIMILAR TO THE WAY A BOAT CREATES A WAVE WHEN MOVING AND PUSHES THE WATER ASIDE. OTHER STUDIES INDICATE THAT INTENSIVE CONTACT [ 15 MINUTES OR MORE] IS REQUIRED FOR THE VIRUS TO BE TRANSFERRED FROM A CARRIER TO A VICTIM. THIS WOULD MAKE THE WEARING OF MASKS OUTDOORS COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY. IT ALSO MEANS THAT ADEQUATE VENTILATION SUCH AS AIR SCRUBBERS, CLEAN ROOMS, ETC. COULD DUPLICATE INDOORS THE OUTDOOR ENVIRONMENT NECESSARY TO MAKE SUCH SPACES NEARLY 100% SAFE. SINCE THE TECHNOLOGY IS WELL KNOWN AND INEXPENSIVE IT CAN BE APPLIED TO NEARLY EVERY SCHOOLROOM, OFFICE, FACTORY, MALL, STORE, ETC.
3. Dr. Fauci said a coronavirus vaccine will not be ready until at least the end of this year or early 2021, reiterating the timetable he has given in the past. He said he was “cautiously optimistic” about meeting it. He also pledged to lawmakers that he would not allow any vaccine to go to market until it was proved both safe and effective. Also, there may be different vaccines for different populations, and some may require booster shots. APPROXIMATELY 100 VACCINES ARE NOW UNDER DEVELOPMENT. MANY OF THEM HAVE ALREADY PROVED TO BE SAFE. ALSO, MANY OF THEM ON PRELIMINARY TESTING APPEAR TO BE “EFFECTIVE”. THE FDA HAS TALKED ABOUT REQUIRING PROOF, THROUGH EXTENSIVE TESTING, OF AT LEAST 50% EFFECTIVENESS BEFORE APPROVAL FOR USE. THE FLU VACCINE THAT I TOOK LAST YEAR, ( WHICH WAS DESIGNED TO COMBAT THE FLU OF TWO YEARS AGO ) WAS A COMBINATION OF FOUR SEPARATE VACCINES. CONFRONTED WITH A SIMILAR SITUATION, MY MILITARY ORGANIZATION WOULD HAVE DETERMINED WHICH OF THE SEVERAL PROMISING DEVELOPMENTS COULD WORK IN COMBINATION AND THEN WOULD COMBINE SEVERAL OF THESE INTO COMPOSITE PACKAGES FOR MASS UTILIZATION. THIS MEANS SEVERAL MILLION VACCINATIONS. IF ANY OF THESE PACKAGES WORK THIS WOULD HAVE AN IMMEDIATE AND SUBSTANTIAL EFFECT ON BLOCKING THE PROGRESS OF COVID- 19. IN PERFORMING TESTS, THE CONCEPT OF POOLING IS A WELL KNOWN TECHNIQUE FOR SUBSTANTIALLY INCREASING THROUGHPUT. DR. FAUCI HAS JUST BEGUN TO MENTION THE POSSIBLE USE OF THIS TECHNIQUE. THERE ARE PROBABLY HUNDREDS OF EQUALLY IMAGINATIVE AND POSSIBLY VERY USEFUL SUGGESTIONS THAT ARE NOT BEING CONSIDERED, GIVEN THE STOVEPIPE ARRANGEMENTS OF THE CDC BUREAUCRACIES.
4.Dr. Hahn pushed back against the suggestion by Democrats that the White House had pressured the Food and Drug Administration in its handling of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which Mr. Trump has promoted as a treatment.
A.. ACCORDING TO THE WASHINGTON POST DR. BRIGHT PUBLICLY MADE THE FOLLOWING REMARKS: “I INSISTED THAT THESE DRUGS BE PROVIDED ONLY TO HOSPITALIZED PATIENTS WITH CONFIRMED COVID-19 WHILE UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF A PHYSICIAN. THESE DRUGS HAVE POTENTIALLY SERIOUS RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH THEM, INCLUDING INCREASED MORTALITY OBSERVED IN SOME RECENT STUDIES IN PATIENTS WITH COVID-19.”
B.. BY HIS OWN ADMISSION, DR. BRIGHT IS UNILATERALLY INFRINGING UPON THE MEDICAL JUDGMENT OF THOUSANDS OF PHYSICIANS.
C. THE FOLLOWING “ANECDOTAL” REPORTS[ 3 EXAMPLES OF MANY] HAVE BEEN SUBMITTED BY LICENSED PHYSICIANS AND SUMMARIZES THEIR EXPERIENCE WITH THIS MEDICATION. IN ADDITION, A REPUTABLE INTERNATIONAL SURVEY[ SERMO] SHOWS THAT THIS MEDICATION IS UTILIZED IN TREATMENT FOR COVID-19 THROUGHOUT THE WORLD AND IS REGARDED AS EFFECTIVE BY THOSE USING IT.
(a) CORONAVIRUS AT TEXAS NURSING HOME – HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE TREATMENT SAVES ALL BUT 1 PATIENT. A NURSING HOME IN TEXAS HAS A HOPEFUL STORY FOR THOSE SUFFERING WITH CORONAVIRUS.THE RESORT AT TEXAS NURSING HOME HAD AN OUTBREAK OF CORONAVIRUS THAT INFECTED 56 RESIDENTS AND 33 STAFF MEMBERS. DR. ROBIN ARMSTRONG IMMEDIATELY ADMINISTERED HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE TO THE RESIDENTS AND STAFF MEMBERS ALONG WITH ZPAC AND ZINC. ONLY ONE NURSING HOME PATIENT DIED SINCE THE DOCTOR PRESCRIBED THE HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE. 55 MADE IT. "DR. ARMSTRONG AND OTHERS AT THE RESORT AT TEXAS CITY NURSING HOME KNEW TIME WASN’T ON THEIR SIDE.'TWO OF OUR RESIDENTS HAD SYMPTOMS AND THAT’S WHEN WE TESTED EVERYBODY,' SAID NURSING HOME EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR JAN PIVERAL. 56 RESIDENTS AND 33 STAFF MEMBERS WERE COVID-19 POSITIVE. 'OUR GOAL WAS TO MAKE SURE WE COULD SHELTER THEM IN PLACE SO WE DON’T SPREAD IT TO OTHER PEOPLE,' ARMSTRONG SAID. 'THEN ALSO AT THE SAME TIME TREAT THEM SO THEY WOULD GET BETTER.’ ARMSTRONG SAYS HE KNEW RESIDENTS WHO ENDED UP IN THE HOSPITAL HAD A HIGHER MORTALITY RATE. 'OUR GOAL WAS TO KEEP THEM HERE AND TREAT THEM WITH THE MEDICATIONS WE HAD AVAILABLE,' HE SAID. WHEN ARMSTRONG BEGAN ADMINISTERING HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE, IT WAS CONTROVERSIAL BUT APPEARED PROMISING. 'IF WE DIDN’T MAKE THE DECISION QUICKLY THEN WE COULD POTENTIALLY LOSE 15 TO 20% OF THE RESIDENTS WHICH WAS NOT AN OPTION' SAID THE DOCTOR. ARMSTRONG’S APPROACH WAS TO BEGIN ADMINISTERING HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE A ZPAC AND ZINC JUST AS SOON AS A RESIDENT FIRST STARTED SHOWING SYMPTOMS.ARMSTRONG DOESN’T CALL THE HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE A CURE AND IS AWARE OF ALL THE RECENT REPORTS THAT SAY THE DRUG SHOULDN’T BE USED TO TREAT COVID-19.BUT HE POINTS OUT ONLY ONE OF THE NURSING HOMES COVID-19 PATIENTS HAS DIED.'EVERYONE WHO GOT ON TREATMENT WHO STARTED ON TREATMENT IS ACTUALLY DOING REALLY WELL,' HE SAID."
(b) INFORMATION FROM MONROE, NEW YORK. SINCE 3/15/20, MY TEAM HAS SEEN APPROXIMATELY 1354 PATIENTS IN MONROE, NEW YORK WITH EITHERTEST PROVEN OR CLINICALLY SUSPECTED CORONAVIRUS INFECTION. THE MAJORITY OF THE PATIENTS WERETREATED WITH ONLY SUPPORTIVE CARE. THE PATIENTS WITH SHORTNESS OF BREATH OR WHO ARE IN THE HIGHRISK CATEGORY WERE TREATED WITH THE ABOVE REGIMEN (APPROXIMATELY 405 PATIENTS AT THIS POINT)..
OF THIS GROUP AND THE INFORMATION PROVIDED TO ME BY AFFILIATED MEDICAL TEAMS, WE HAVE HAD TWO
DEATHS, SIX HOSPITALIZATIONS FOR PNEUMONIA, AND FOUR INTUBATIONS (ALL EXTUBATED NOW). IN ADDITION,
I HAVE NOT HEARD OF ANY NEGATIVE SIDE EFFECTS OTHER THAN APPROXIMATELY 10% OF PATIENTS WITH
TEMPORARY NAUSEA AND DIARRHEA. IN SUM, MY URGENT RECOMMENDATION IS TO INITIATE TREATMENT IN THE OUTPATIENT SETTING AS SOON AS POSSIBLE IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE ABOVE. BASED ON MY DIRECT EXPERIENCE, IT PREVENTS ACUTE
RESPIRATORY DISTRESS SYNDROME (ARDS), PREVENTS THE NEED FOR HOSPITALIZATION AND SAVES LIVES.
CONCLUSION: TREAT AS EARLY AND AS AGGRESSIVELY AS POSSIBLE IN THE OUTPATIENT SETTING
1- HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE 200MG TWICE A DAY FOR 5 DAYS 2- AZITHROMYCIN 500MG ONCE A DAY FOR FIVE DAYS
3- ZINC SULFATE 220MG ONCE A DAY FOR FIVE DAYS
(c) INFORMATION FROM TARZANA CALIFORNIA : SO FAR IN MY CLINICAL EXPERIENCE, I CAN TELL YOU THAT HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE/AZITHROMYCIN COMBO HAS BEEN 100% EFFECTIVE FOR MY COV PATIENTS, WHEN USED IN CONJUNCTION WITH ALL OF THE INTEGRATIVE .... I EMPLOY. NEEDS TO BE GIVEN EARLY ENOUGH IN THE COURSE OF THE ILLNESS TO BE MAXIMALLY EFFECTIVE. MUCH LIKE A FIRE EXTINGUISHER CAN PUT OUT A SMALL KITCHEN FIRE, BUT IF A HOUSE IS ENGULFED IN FLAMES, YOU NEED A FIRE HOSE. DOESN’T MEAN FIRE EXTINGUISHERS DON’T WORK FOR HOUSE FIRES, JUST NEED TO BE USED EARLY IN THE EVENT…...
AS WE NO LONGER HAVE THE DOMESTIC CAPACITY TO MANUFACTURE THESE MEDICATIONS [HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE/AZITHROMYCIN] IN THE QUANTITIES NEEDED ON THE TIMELINE REQUIRED, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHOULD IMMEDIATELY WORK TO RE-TOOL US CHEMICAL FACTORIES THAT ARE CAPABLE OF RETROFITTING TO MANUFACTURE THESE TWO DRUGS. THE RAW MATERIALS OF THESE MEDICINES CAN THEN BE SHIPPED DIRECTLY TO VITAMIN MANUFACTURERS WHO HAVE THE CAPACITY TO CONSERVATIVELY AND COLLECTIVELY MAKE 5 - 10 MILLIONS PILLS DAILY. AS A CONTRACT MANUFACTURER OF VITAMINS, I KNOW FIRST HAND THAT THESE FACILITIES FOLLOW STRICT FDA GUIDELINES THAT ARE EQUIVALENT TO THE REGULATIONS OF BIG PHARMA. THEREFORE, QUALITY CONTROL WILL NOT BE A CONCERN. COMPOUND PHARMACIES ARE ALSO CAPABLE OF PARTICIPATING IN THIS EFFORT.IF THIS PROTOCOL WERE TO BE ADOPTED, SOME 150M DOSES OF THESE LIFE-SAVING MEDICATIONS WOULD BE AVAILABLE IN THE NEXT TWO WEEKS TO TREAT ALL PATIENTS IN NEED AND ANY FIRST RESPONDER/FRONT LINE HEALTHCARE WORKER.
WHILE NOT SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN, IT HAS ALSO BEEN ANECDOTALLY OBSERVED THAT CHLOROQUINE MAY OFFER SIGNIFICANT PROPHYLAXIS SO THAT THOSE MOST AT RISK (THE VULNERABLE PATIENTS AND FRONT-LINE HEALTHCARE WORKERS) MAY NEVER DEVELOP A PRIMARY INFECTION DURING THE EPIDEMIC. THIS PREVENTIVE INTERVENTION SHOULD BE IMMEDIATELY OFFERED TO VULNERABLE POPULATIONS AND HEALTHCARE WORKERS IN AN OPEN-LABEL, OBSERVATIONAL STUDY.
WITH THE CURE IN THE HANDS OF PHARMACIES, HOSPITALS AND FIRST RESPONDERS, THE CONCERN FOR THE HEALTH AND WELLNESS OF THE VULNERABLE POPULATION (WHOSE CHARACTERISTICS HAVE BEEN WELL DESCRIBED) CAN BE ASSURED. BY TREATING THESE VULNERABLE PATIENTS IN THE EARLY PART OF THE 5 DAY PRODROME (WHEN MILD SYMPTOMS BEGIN), DEMANDS ON HOSPITAL RESOURCES WILL BE EFFECTIVELY COUNTERED.
(d) MORE THAN 2,304 PHYSICIANS WHO ARE CURRENTLY SUCCESSFULLY TREATING PATIENTS INFECTED WITH THE COVID-19 REPORTED THEIR "ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE" OF THEIR SUCCESS WITH THEIR PATIENTS UTILIZING HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE --AN INTERNATIONAL SURVEY CONDUCTED BY SERMO, A GLOBAL HEALTH CARE POLLING COMPANY, OF 6,227 PHYSICIANS IN 30 COUNTRIES FOUND THAT 37% OF THOSE TREATING COVID-19 PATIENTS RATED HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE AS THE “MOST EFFECTIVE THERAPY” FROM A LIST OF 15 OPTIONS. THE POLL FOUND 23% OF U.S. MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS HAD PRESCRIBED THE DRUG, WHICH HAS BEEN FDA-APPROVED FOR MALARIA, LUPUS AND RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS. HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE, WHICH IS SOLD UNDER THE BRAND NAME PLAQUENIL, WAS PRESCRIBED MAINLY IN THE UNITED STATES FOR THE MOST SEVERE CASES, BUT NOT SO IN OTHER COUNTRIES.“OUTSIDE THE U.S., HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE WAS EQUALLY USED FOR DIAGNOSED PATIENTS WITH MILD TO SEVERE SYMPTOMS WHEREAS IN THE U.S. IT WAS MOST COMMONLY USED FOR HIGH RISK DIAGNOSED PATIENTS,” THE SURVEY FOUND.THE 30 NATIONS SURVEYED INCLUDED THOSE IN EUROPE, ASIA, NORTH AMERICA AND SOUTH AMERICA, AS WELL AS AUSTRALIA. NO INCENTIVES WERE PROVIDED TO PARTICIPATE IN THE POLL, CONDUCTED MARCH 25-27, ACCORDING TO SERMO. HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE USAGE WAS MOST WIDESPREAD IN SPAIN, WHERE 72% OF PHYSICIANS SURVEYED SAID THEY HAD PRESCRIBED IT, FOLLOWED BY ITALY AT 49%, AND LEAST POPULAR IN JAPAN, WHERE 7% HAD USED IT Tod COVID-19.
(e) QUOTING SERMO CEO PETER KIRK [ WHICH WOULD BE DIRECT COUNTER TO DR. BRIGHT’S INSISTENCE THAT THESE MEDICATIONS BE ONLY PROVIDED TO HOSPITALIZED PATIENTS] “PHYSICIANS SHOULD HAVE MORE OF A VOICE IN HOW WE DEAL WITH THIS PANDEMIC AND BE ABLE TO QUICKLY SHARE INFORMATION WITH ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD,” HE SAID. “WITH CENSORSHIP OF THE MEDIA AND THE MEDICAL COMMUNITY IN SOME COUNTRIES, ALONG WITH BIASED AND POORLY DESIGNED STUDIES, SOLUTIONS TO THE PANDEMIC ARE BEING DELAYED.”
5. Small Businesses Brace for Prolonged Crisis, Short on Cash and Customers. Small businesses such as restaurants, dog-care centers and manufacturers brought back staff beginning in mid-April, believing they could get back to business. Now, many are shutting down or slashing jobs again as local officials and consumers pull back and the pandemic shows no signs of abating. More government support may help in the short run, but many business owners are facing make-or-break challenges. Many may not last. An estimated 1.85 million U.S. businesses closed their doors or temporarily suspended operations in the second quarter, according to Oxxford Information Technology Ltd. in Saratoga, N.Y., which tracks roughly 32 million U.S. businesses of all sizes using data from credit bureaus, surveys and government sources.
Total losses this year will be greater than in the last recession, when 20%, or roughly 4.5 million businesses, disappeared in just over a year.
Small firms are especially vulnerable now and will account for most of the losses. Most lack the working capital to survive the downturn or to meet customer needs when the economy recovers. Just two-fifths of small-business employees who had worked in January were logging hours in early April, according to Homebase, a provider of scheduling and time management software. The roughly 500,000 employees it tracks are mostly hourly workers in restaurants, retailers, hair salons and other Main Street businesses. Enterprises with fewer than 500 employees accounted for almost half of private-sector employment in 2017, the most-recent data, according to the Census Bureau. Small firms also employ a majority of the workers in industries such as restaurants and personal care that are most affected by capacity restrictions.
I AM PRETTY SURE THAT THESE BASIC STATISTICS AND FINDINGS APPLY TO THE CITY OF TORRANCE IN OTHER WORDS WHAT WE OPEN UP OR WE DIE AS AN ECONOMY AND AS A ROBUST SOCIAL COMMUNITY.
6.COVID-19 cases are overstated by one hundred percent because of indiscriminate testing. The corona viral dna tests have a reported 4% false positive rate that, when applied to the nearly 50 million tests done so far result in 2 million falsely labelled as having COVID-19.
Link All tests in medicine have a certain number of false positives, meaning that the test is positive but that the patient does not have the disease. COVID-19 News reports that 48.3 million tests have been done in the United States as of Monday. Four percent, or over 1.93 million are false positives. These patients are not infected. The same publication alleges that about 3.9 million Americans have been infected with COVID-19. They did not subtract the nearly 2 million false positives. Fewer than 2 million Americans have truly positive tests for COVID-19 (but it’s not always certain which ones.) Link, VirusNCov.com
Erwin Haas is a retired infectious diseases doctor, former Kentwood City commissioner and flight surgeon in Vietnam: "The scam starts when one individual is tested and is found to be falsely positive. All of his contacts will then be traced and tested. If there are 25 contacts, one of them is likely to be falsely positive as will, in turn, one of his 25 contacts.The entire chain is actually negative but this kind of creative and unwarranted testing does swell the numbers. This is playing out as a manufactured epidemic in rural United States where a new population of COVID-19 cases has arisen in the last 2 months; Many of the new cases are in younger healthy individuals tested as part of contact tracing. To invent a meme; It’s not the same COVID-19 that we knew in the old days…..A better gauge of COVID-19 disease levels is the death rate. This is dropping. Michigan, as an example, reports one or two new deaths per day but on many days also reports a half dozen deaths retrieved in chart reviews of cases from February or March. This gives the false impression of a high mortality. "
"Some final notes; 1) We need to re-evaluate the positives that have been generated as a result of our misunderstanding of basic statistical principles. 2) This is a money maker for the labs and newly trained, well paid profession of contact tracer. These constituencies will fight against correcting this fluke in statistics. 3) I would not expect politicians or journalists to understand the problem of false positives but experts at the CDC, NIH and at the various universities who squawk loudly about the “pandemic” and how “we must destroy the economy” can be mocked for not understanding basic statistics and Bayesian Theory. “
TO MAKE MATTERS WORSE, THE FUTURE OF TORRANCE APPEARS TO DIRECTLY DEPEND UPON HAPPENINGS, DATA, REPORTS, ETC. THAT ARE BEING TABULATED COVERING GEOGRAPHIC LOCATIONS IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY IN AREAS THAT ARE HAVING FAR DIFFERENT LIVING AND PUBLIC HEALTH EXPERIENCES THAN IS ACTUALLY OCCURRING IN TORRANCE. THEN, ANONYMOUS DEPARTMENT WORKERS IN SACRAMENTO TABULATE AND INTERPRET THIS COMPOSITE DATA AND PLACE ENTIRE COUNTIES SUCH AS LOS ANGELES COUNTY ON 'WATCH LISTS” WHERE THEY WILL REMAIN UNLESS THE THE ENTIRE COUNTY MEETS SOME ARBITRARY MEASURE FOR A "14 CONSECUTIVE DAY PERIOD". IN OTHER WORDS THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA [ANONYMOUS BUREAUCRATS] ISSUE ARBITRARY DIRECTIVES WHICH THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES THEN ADDS TO AND RE-BROADCASTS WHICH THE CITY OF TORRANCE THEN ACQUIESCES TO. EXAMPLES OF SUCH OVER-KILL DIRECTIVES INCLUDE GOV. NEWSOM’S UNILATERAL DETERMINATION THAT A ROAST BEEF SANDWICH DOES NOT QUALIFY AS A “MEAL” WHEN SERVED IN A BAR—A STATE-MANDATED REQUIREMENT TO ALLOW THE BAR TO STAY OPEN. ALSO, THE EXACT FROZEN DINNER THAT IS SERVED BY MANY RESTAURANTS, DOES NOT QUALIFY AS A “MEAL” IF IT IS SERVED BY A BAR. ALTHOUGH GOV. NEWSOM MANDATED THAT PET GROOMERS AGAIN SHUT DOWN, TO THIS DATE THE GOVERNOR HAS NOT A SINGLE DOCUMENTED INCIDENT TO SERVE AS A BASIS FOR HIS SHUT DOWN ORDERING DECISION.]
Wednesday, July 22, 2020
Ex-Rep Exposed Obamas, Clintons - Putting Him in Prison Is a Death Sentence Thanks to COVID Richard Viguerie
Ex-Rep Exposed Obamas, Clintons - Putting Him in Prison Is a Death Sentence Thanks to COVID
Richard Viguerie
By the day if not by the hour, conservative movement champion former Texas Rep. Steve Stockman’s situation grows perilously close to a death sentence.
Steve is the only over-60 diabetic prisoner remaining at the Beaumont, Texas, federal prison facility, which also has the highest per capita COVID-19 infection rate of any prison in the country.
And he’s been told by prison officials he will not be leaving on orders “straight from the top” in Washington.
It’s clear someone wants him dead.
Someone in Washington is ordering that his life not be saved by being released to home detention.
TRENDING: Maxine Waters Jumps Out of Car To Harass LA Deputies Detaining Man
There need to be investigations into who it is.
My July 8 article explained why Steve and Roger Stone were American political prisoners. Roger’s sentence has since been commuted. Steve’s situation, on the other hand, has gotten worse.
As of July 14, the number of prisoners infected with COVID-19 at the Beaumont prison facility where he is located was 432, up from the 180 I reported earlier this month.
Steve’s age (63), multiple co-morbidities (diabetes, hypertension, osteoporosis, asthma and more), and the nonviolent, nonsexual nature of his conviction (charges after three grand juries refused to indict him, involving campaign finance and fundraising from two wealthy Republican donors, neither of whom filed complaints) clearly make him eligible for release to home detention, consistent with a March 26 directive from Attorney General William Barr to the director of the Bureau of Prisons for “at-risk” inmates.
Do you think Stockman should be released to home detention?
And despite the known positive benefits of sunlight to fight off coronavirus, Steve has not been allowed outside in many weeks.
Given his age and health, Steve is a sitting duck in the COVID-19-ravaged Beaumont prison.
Releasing Steve to home detention would be a no-brainer. The UCLA COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project reported that over 70,000 people have been released from jail due to the COVID-19 threat and over 33,000 released from prison consistent with federal “compassion” guidelines directed by a very law-and-order attorney general.
Steve has filed and even re-filed the papers for release to home confinement, including a petition for “Compassionate Release” he filed with Warden F.J. Garrido on April 4, to which Garrido responded on April 20. Steve was told on April 24 he’d be placed in pre-release quarantine, but was then turned away at the door by prison staff.
Soon after, and one more time since then, Steve was told by prison officials he will not be leaving on orders from the top.
RELATED: Ralph Benko: President Trump, Do Justice for the Imprisoned Steve Stockman
On May 21 Warden Garrido wrote responding to someone inquiring about Steve’s release, noting that Attorney General Barr authorized the director of the Bureau of Prisons to “maximize appropriate transfers to home confinements of all appropriate inmates” at certain prisons where “COVID-19 is materially affecting operations.”
Garrido’s letter went on to say the Beaumont prison “will take swift action to exercise its expanded home confinement authority for any inmate who is found to be at risk for COVID-19 and suitable for home confinement.”
Steve fits the criteria for release to home detention. The directive “from the top” that he not be released is a death sentence.
Dead men, after all, tell no tales.
Indeed, after the publication of various articles describing his unfair politicized treatment in the justice system, Steve was told by one prison official that he has a “publicity problem.”
One time Steve was sent to solitary confinement. Shortly after he was placed in a jail cell with a notorious murderer.
Why is Steve Stockman being treated in such an obviously discriminatory and almost certainly deadly way?
Writing in for The Washington Times, Rebecca Hagelin explained:
“The 2018 criminal trial of Stockman has laid bare the underbelly of political targeting by the Obama administration’s Department of Justice. As a congressman, Stockman had exposed many instances of high-level corruption by Obama officials. His ability to chase down and hold accountable Obama officials is legendary. Stockman called for the impeachment of Attorney General Eric H. Holder for obstruction of justice and contempt of Congress.”
Over at The Epoch Times, Matthew Vadum reported how Steve’s many supporters in the conservative movement described him as “a victim of a complex, politically motivated runaway prosecution” who “is being punished for his zealous pursuit of Obama-era wrongdoings.”
Former prosecutor Rachel Alexander, writing at Townhall, said:
“[Steve] was known for boldly opposing President Obama. He was a Congressional whistleblower on Obama administration corruption, with such actions as calling for the House Select Committee to investigate the government’s handling of the Benghazi embassy tragedy of lost American lives, exposing President Obama’s payment to the Haqqani terrorist network in exchange for the release of Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl, and revealing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s violation of the Iran sanctions to allow the sale to Iran of specialized steel used in nuclear weaponry.”
Gen. Michael Flynn’s superstar lawyer Sidney Powell is quoted by Michael Tennant at The New American: “It is highly likely [the Justice Department Public Integrity Section] targeted former Congressman Stockman and have been extremely and unreasonably harsh toward him because he was so outspoken in trying to hold Lois Lerner, the Clintons, and Obama accountable.”
Steve’s enemies in the deep state go right to Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. Steve pushed to expose their ties to Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk.
Pinchuk was the largest nonstate donor to the Clinton Foundation, donating between $10,000,000 and $25,000,000, according to ABC News. His Interpipe company engaged in possibly illegal Iranian pipeline transactions under Hillary’s watch and approval while she was Secretary of State. Rory Ross at Newsweek wrote in 2015:
“In November 2014 … Steve Stockman, wrote to the US Department of the Treasury, questioning Interpipe’s dealings with Iran.”
Newsweek has seen a copy of that letter, in which Stockman refers to a “body of evidence” detailing “exports from Interpipe to Iranian entities” that “may have contravened US sanctions to Iran.”
All this stinks, of course, and fits with the larger exposure of how the corrupt deep state under the Obama administration and the corrupt Clinton rein at the State Department used nefarious government tactics to target their political enemies.
Steve Stockman was an outspoken critic of their corruption, and now someone in Washington’s deep state wants their political prisoner to die in jail when instead he should be released to home detention.
Conservatives take action and protect life, especially for those who can’t help themselves.
The entire conservative movement needs to demand investigations into who ordered what is essentially a death sentence for Steve Stockman.
Please reach out to people you know, and who know that corruption exists in the deep state: Attorney General Bill Barr, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Republican senators and conservative or even any honest independent journalists.
Ask them who is executing Steve Stockman? We want names.
U.S. Attorney General William Barr
950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20530
Phone: (202) 353-1555
Chief of Staff Mark Meadows
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
(202) 456-1414
Also, please contact the two Bureau of Prisons officials below, who are or may be likely to know who has ordered that Steve Stockman remain in prison even though he is highly at risk in the COVID-19-infested Beaumont prison.
Tell them that we want names and that we will push for investigations into major abuses in the prison system, including at Beaumont.
Hugh J. Hurwitz
Assistant Director, Reentry Services Division
Federal Bureau of Prisons
320 1st Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20534
(202) 307-3198
Juan Baltazar, Jr.
Director, BOP South Central Region
US ARMED FORCES RESERVE CMPL
344 Marine Forces Dr.
Grand Prairie, TX 75051
(972) 730-8600
Richard Viguerie
By the day if not by the hour, conservative movement champion former Texas Rep. Steve Stockman’s situation grows perilously close to a death sentence.
Steve is the only over-60 diabetic prisoner remaining at the Beaumont, Texas, federal prison facility, which also has the highest per capita COVID-19 infection rate of any prison in the country.
And he’s been told by prison officials he will not be leaving on orders “straight from the top” in Washington.
It’s clear someone wants him dead.
Someone in Washington is ordering that his life not be saved by being released to home detention.
TRENDING: Maxine Waters Jumps Out of Car To Harass LA Deputies Detaining Man
There need to be investigations into who it is.
My July 8 article explained why Steve and Roger Stone were American political prisoners. Roger’s sentence has since been commuted. Steve’s situation, on the other hand, has gotten worse.
As of July 14, the number of prisoners infected with COVID-19 at the Beaumont prison facility where he is located was 432, up from the 180 I reported earlier this month.
Steve’s age (63), multiple co-morbidities (diabetes, hypertension, osteoporosis, asthma and more), and the nonviolent, nonsexual nature of his conviction (charges after three grand juries refused to indict him, involving campaign finance and fundraising from two wealthy Republican donors, neither of whom filed complaints) clearly make him eligible for release to home detention, consistent with a March 26 directive from Attorney General William Barr to the director of the Bureau of Prisons for “at-risk” inmates.
Do you think Stockman should be released to home detention?
And despite the known positive benefits of sunlight to fight off coronavirus, Steve has not been allowed outside in many weeks.
Given his age and health, Steve is a sitting duck in the COVID-19-ravaged Beaumont prison.
Releasing Steve to home detention would be a no-brainer. The UCLA COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project reported that over 70,000 people have been released from jail due to the COVID-19 threat and over 33,000 released from prison consistent with federal “compassion” guidelines directed by a very law-and-order attorney general.
Steve has filed and even re-filed the papers for release to home confinement, including a petition for “Compassionate Release” he filed with Warden F.J. Garrido on April 4, to which Garrido responded on April 20. Steve was told on April 24 he’d be placed in pre-release quarantine, but was then turned away at the door by prison staff.
Soon after, and one more time since then, Steve was told by prison officials he will not be leaving on orders from the top.
RELATED: Ralph Benko: President Trump, Do Justice for the Imprisoned Steve Stockman
On May 21 Warden Garrido wrote responding to someone inquiring about Steve’s release, noting that Attorney General Barr authorized the director of the Bureau of Prisons to “maximize appropriate transfers to home confinements of all appropriate inmates” at certain prisons where “COVID-19 is materially affecting operations.”
Garrido’s letter went on to say the Beaumont prison “will take swift action to exercise its expanded home confinement authority for any inmate who is found to be at risk for COVID-19 and suitable for home confinement.”
Steve fits the criteria for release to home detention. The directive “from the top” that he not be released is a death sentence.
Dead men, after all, tell no tales.
Indeed, after the publication of various articles describing his unfair politicized treatment in the justice system, Steve was told by one prison official that he has a “publicity problem.”
One time Steve was sent to solitary confinement. Shortly after he was placed in a jail cell with a notorious murderer.
Why is Steve Stockman being treated in such an obviously discriminatory and almost certainly deadly way?
Writing in for The Washington Times, Rebecca Hagelin explained:
“The 2018 criminal trial of Stockman has laid bare the underbelly of political targeting by the Obama administration’s Department of Justice. As a congressman, Stockman had exposed many instances of high-level corruption by Obama officials. His ability to chase down and hold accountable Obama officials is legendary. Stockman called for the impeachment of Attorney General Eric H. Holder for obstruction of justice and contempt of Congress.”
Over at The Epoch Times, Matthew Vadum reported how Steve’s many supporters in the conservative movement described him as “a victim of a complex, politically motivated runaway prosecution” who “is being punished for his zealous pursuit of Obama-era wrongdoings.”
Former prosecutor Rachel Alexander, writing at Townhall, said:
“[Steve] was known for boldly opposing President Obama. He was a Congressional whistleblower on Obama administration corruption, with such actions as calling for the House Select Committee to investigate the government’s handling of the Benghazi embassy tragedy of lost American lives, exposing President Obama’s payment to the Haqqani terrorist network in exchange for the release of Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl, and revealing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s violation of the Iran sanctions to allow the sale to Iran of specialized steel used in nuclear weaponry.”
Gen. Michael Flynn’s superstar lawyer Sidney Powell is quoted by Michael Tennant at The New American: “It is highly likely [the Justice Department Public Integrity Section] targeted former Congressman Stockman and have been extremely and unreasonably harsh toward him because he was so outspoken in trying to hold Lois Lerner, the Clintons, and Obama accountable.”
Steve’s enemies in the deep state go right to Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. Steve pushed to expose their ties to Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk.
Pinchuk was the largest nonstate donor to the Clinton Foundation, donating between $10,000,000 and $25,000,000, according to ABC News. His Interpipe company engaged in possibly illegal Iranian pipeline transactions under Hillary’s watch and approval while she was Secretary of State. Rory Ross at Newsweek wrote in 2015:
“In November 2014 … Steve Stockman, wrote to the US Department of the Treasury, questioning Interpipe’s dealings with Iran.”
Newsweek has seen a copy of that letter, in which Stockman refers to a “body of evidence” detailing “exports from Interpipe to Iranian entities” that “may have contravened US sanctions to Iran.”
All this stinks, of course, and fits with the larger exposure of how the corrupt deep state under the Obama administration and the corrupt Clinton rein at the State Department used nefarious government tactics to target their political enemies.
Steve Stockman was an outspoken critic of their corruption, and now someone in Washington’s deep state wants their political prisoner to die in jail when instead he should be released to home detention.
Conservatives take action and protect life, especially for those who can’t help themselves.
The entire conservative movement needs to demand investigations into who ordered what is essentially a death sentence for Steve Stockman.
Please reach out to people you know, and who know that corruption exists in the deep state: Attorney General Bill Barr, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Republican senators and conservative or even any honest independent journalists.
Ask them who is executing Steve Stockman? We want names.
U.S. Attorney General William Barr
950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20530
Phone: (202) 353-1555
Chief of Staff Mark Meadows
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
(202) 456-1414
Also, please contact the two Bureau of Prisons officials below, who are or may be likely to know who has ordered that Steve Stockman remain in prison even though he is highly at risk in the COVID-19-infested Beaumont prison.
Tell them that we want names and that we will push for investigations into major abuses in the prison system, including at Beaumont.
Hugh J. Hurwitz
Assistant Director, Reentry Services Division
Federal Bureau of Prisons
320 1st Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20534
(202) 307-3198
Juan Baltazar, Jr.
Director, BOP South Central Region
US ARMED FORCES RESERVE CMPL
344 Marine Forces Dr.
Grand Prairie, TX 75051
(972) 730-8600
Tuesday, July 21, 2020
The Ideological Corruption of Science - WSJ
Subject: The Ideological Corruption of Science - WSJ
The Ideological Corruption of Science
In American laboratories and universities, the spirit of
Trofim Lysenko has suddenly been woke.
By Lawrence Krauss
July 12, 2020 Wall Street Journal
In the 1980s, when I was a young professor of physics and astronomy at Yale, deconstructionism was in vogue in the English Department. We in the science departments would scoff at the lack of objective intellectual standards in the humanities, epitomized by a movement that argued against the existence of objective truth itself, arguing that all such claims to knowledge were tainted by ideological biases due to race, sex or economic dominance.
It could never happen in the hard sciences, except perhaps under dictatorships, such as the Nazi condemnation of “Jewish” science, or the Stalinist campaign against genetics led by Trofim Lysenko, in which literally thousands of mainstream geneticists were dismissed in the effort to suppress any opposition to the prevailing political view of the state.
Or so we thought. In recent years, and especially since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, academic science leaders have adopted wholesale the language of dominance and oppression previously restricted to “cultural studies” journals to guide their disciplines, to censor dissenting views, to remove faculty from leadership positions if their research is claimed by opponents to support systemic oppression.
In June, the American Physical Society (APS), which represents 55,000 physicists world-wide, endorsed a “strike for black lives” to “shut down STEM” in academia. It closed its office—not to protest police violence or racism, but to “commit to eradicating systemic racism and discrimination, especially in academia, and science,” stating that “physics is not an exception” to the suffocating effects of racism in American life.
While racism in our society is real, no data were given to support this claim of systemic racism in science, and I have argued elsewhere that there are strong reasons to think that this claim is spurious. The APS wasn’t alone. National laboratories and university science departments joined the one-day strike. The pre-eminent science journal Nature, which disseminates what it views as the most important science stories in a daily newsletter, featured an article titled “Ten simple rules for building an anti-racist lab.”
At Michigan State University, one group used the strike to organize and coordinate a protest campaign against the vice president for research, physicist Stephen Hsu, whose crimes included doing research on computational genomics to study how human genetics might be related to cognitive ability—something that to the protesters smacked of eugenics. He was also accused of supporting psychology research at MSU on the statistics of police shootings that didn’t clearly support claims of racial bias. Within a week, the university president forced Mr. Hsu to resign.
At Princeton on July 4, more than 100 faculty members, including more than 40 in the sciences and engineering, wrote an open letter to the president with proposals to “disrupt the institutional hierarchies perpetuating inequity and harm.” This included the creation of a policing committee that would “oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty,” with “racism” to be defined by another faculty committee, and requiring every department, including math, physics, astronomy and other sciences, to establish a senior thesis prize for research that somehow “is actively anti-racist or expands our sense of how race is constructed in our society.”
When scientific and academic leaders give official imprimatur to unverified claims, or issue blanket condemnations of peer-reviewed research or whole fields that may be unpopular, it has ripple effects throughout the field. It can shut down discussion and result in self-censorship.
Shortly after Mr. Hsu resigned, the authors of the psychology study asked the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science to retract their paper—not because of flaws in their statistical analysis, but because of what they called the “misuse” of their article by journalists who argued that it countered the prevailing view that police forces are racist. They later amended the retraction request to claim, conveniently, that it “had nothing to do with political considerations, ‘mob’ pressure, threats to the authors, or distaste for the political views of people citing the work approvingly.” As a cosmologist, I can say that if we retracted all the papers in cosmology that we felt were misrepresented by journalists, there would hardly be any papers left.
Actual censorship is also occurring. A distinguished chemist in Canada argued in favor of merit-based science and against hiring practices that aim at equality of outcome if they result “in discrimination against the most meritorious candidates.” For that he was censured by his university provost, his published review article on research and education in organic synthesis was removed from the journal website, and two editors involved in accepting it were suspended.
An Italian scientist at the international laboratory CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider, had his scheduled seminar on statistical imbalances between the sexes in physics canceled and his position at the laboratory revoked because he suggested that apparent inequities might not be directly due to sexism. A group of linguistics students initiated a public petition asking that the psychologist Steven Pinker be stripped of his position as a Linguistics Society of America Fellow for such offenses as tweeting a New York Times article they disapproved of.
As ideological encroachment corrupts scientific institutions, one might wonder why more scientists aren’t defending the hard sciences from this intrusion. The answer is that many academics are afraid, and for good reason. They are hesitant to disagree with scientific leadership groups, and they see what has happened to scientists who do. They see how researchers lose funding if they can’t justify how their research programs will explicitly combat claimed systemic racism or sexism, a requirement for scientific proposals now being applied by granting agencies.
Whenever science has been corrupted by falling prey to ideology, scientific progress suffers. This was the case in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union—and in the U.S. in the 19th century when racist views dominated biology, and during the McCarthy era, when prominent scientists like Robert Oppenheimer were ostracized for their political views. To stem the slide, scientific leaders, scientific societies and senior academic administrators must publicly stand up not only for free speech in science, but for quality, independent of political doctrine and divorced from the demands of political factions.
Mr. Krauss a theoretical physicist, is president of the Origins Project Foundation and author of “The Physics of Climate Change,” forthcoming in January.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ideological-corruption-of-science-11594572501?mod=hp_opin_pos_1
Sent from my iPad
Saturday, July 18, 2020
Open and take casualties OR stay closed and die.... the unpleasant and difficult choice
Open and take casualties OR stay closed and die.... the unpleasant and difficult choice facing the city of Torrance and the TUSD
The Orange County decision to open schools and then to not open schools because of the reported death of one student is typical of what will happen. Right now much of the thinking is that Covid-19 will go on for years and that the US strain of the virus is much more contagious than is the Asian strain.
Further, the most current CDC theory of how the virus spreads [in the air -- long-lasting aerosols carried for long distances by the winds] would make the current "control doctrine” [wear a mask; maintain social distance] obsolete. ( I previously sent you a New York Times article, one of nine in the series, detailing the acrimony, backbiting and conflicts between WHO and CDC and among the CDC and the various US research institutions, medical schools and provider organizations. Thus,you should realize that the reason there are so many conflicting guidelines is that decisions which are claimed to be scientifically based are actually based on conflicting assumptions of the various individual scientists.
The bottom line is that current economic and society shutdown cannot go on much longer without creating a greater catastrophe than any that would occur from the spread of the virus and we are wasting time and our limited resources by not developing the techniques that will enable us to live with the virus while minimizing both the casualties and the collateral damage caused by the continuing, overhanging infectious threat.
I included you in a distribution of technical status information. This document makes you as well informed as any one in the field. As you can see, the standard CDC approach stretches out forever and the specific goals that they specify, based on their prior performance in other epidemics, may never be achieved. What is missing is an aggressive survival battle plan similar to the plan at was in force when the United States was actually threatened with a nuclear disaster from a Soviet attack.
Both the Torrance City Council and the Torrance unified school district can make the choice EITHER to hunker down and commit economic and social suicide OR to take the path of analysis and operational decision-making [which is well-established in public health teaching, as enunciated by Eli Ginsberg, Herb Klarman, etc. and in US military planning as it has evolved over the last 100 plus years ] and identify and integrate the multitude of considerations that would then allow Torrance to derive the best composite long time operational “solution”.
Four articles follow
1. Let them learn - The risks of keeping schools closed far outweigh the benefits | Leaders
Jul 18th 2020 The Economist
ALL AROUND the world, children’s minds are going to waste. As covid-19 surged in early April, more than 90% of pupils were shut out of school. Since then the number has fallen by one-third, as many classrooms in Europe and East Asia have reopened. But elsewhere progress is slow. Some American school districts, including Los Angeles and San Diego, plan to offer only remote learning when their new school year begins. Kenya’s government has scrapped the whole year, leaving its children idle until January. In the Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte says he may not let any children return to the classroom until a vaccine is found. South Africa has reopened casinos, but only a fraction of classrooms.
Many parents are understandably scared. Covid-19 is new, and poorly understood. Schools are big and crowded. Small children will not observe social distancing. Caution is appropriate, especially when cases are rising. But as we have argued before, the benefits of reopening schools usually outweigh the costs.
The new coronavirus poses a low risk to children. Studies suggest that under-18s are a third to a half less likely to catch the disease. Those under ten, according to British figures, are a thousand times less likely to die than someone aged between 70 and 79. The evidence suggests they are not especially likely to infect others. In Sweden staff at nurseries and primary schools, which never closed, were no more likely to catch the virus than those in other jobs. A new study of 1,500 teenage pupils and 500 teachers who had gone back to school in Germany in May found that only 0.6% had antibodies to the virus, less than half the national rate found in other studies. Granted, an outbreak at a secondary school in Israel infected over 150 pupils and staff. But with precautions, the risk can be minimised.
However, the costs of missing school are huge. Children learn less, and lose the habit of learning. Zoom is a lousy substitute for classrooms. Poor children, who are less likely to have good Wi-Fi and educated parents, fall further behind their better-off peers. Parents who have nowhere to drop their children struggle to return to work. Mothers bear the heavier burden, and so suffer a bigger career setback. Children out of school are more likely to suffer abuse, malnutrition and poor mental health.
School closures are bad enough in rich countries. The harm they do in poor ones is much worse (see article). Perhaps 465m children being offered online classes cannot easily make use of them because they lack an internet connection. In parts of Africa and South Asia, families are in such dire straits that many parents are urging their children to give up their studies and start work or get married. The longer school is shut, the more will make this woeful choice. Save the Children, a charity, guesses that nearly 10m could drop out. Most will be girls.
Education is the surest path out of poverty. Depriving children of it will doom them to poorer, shorter, less fulfilling lives. The World Bank estimates that five months of school closures would cut lifetime earnings for the children who are affected by $10trn in today’s money, equivalent to 7% of current annual GDP.
With such catastrophic potential losses, governments should be working out how to reopen schools as soon as it is safe. This should not be a partisan issue, as it has sadly become in America, where some people assume it is a bad idea simply because President Donald Trump proposes it. In some countries teachers’ unions have been obstructive, partly out of justified concern for public health as cases climb, but also because teachers’ interests are not the same as children’s—especially if they are being paid whether they work or not. The main union in Los Angeles urges that schools remain closed until a long wishlist of demands has been met, including the elusive dream of universal health care in America. Children cannot wait that long.
Places that have restarted schooling, such as France, Denmark, China and New Zealand, offer tips for minimising the risks. They let the most vulnerable teachers stay at home. They commonly reduced class sizes, even though that meant many children could spend only part of the week with their teachers. They staggered timetables to prevent crowding in corridors, at school gates and in dinner halls. They required or encouraged masks. They boosted school-based testing and tracing. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has used these to draw up sober guidelines, which include measures such as separating desks by six feet (though the vice-president this week said that schools should feel free to ignore them).
European countries waited on average about 30 days after infections had peaked before they resumed some presence at school. Having started this way, many have since relaxed the rules to let most pupils return to school at the same time. There is no known experience of schools reopening in places where the virus was as prevalent as it is now in Arizona, Florida or Texas. Such places will have to bring the virus under control before the new term begins. This probably means that not all children will be able to go back full-time even then. But a few days a week with a teacher are better than none. And, as in Europe, schools can open up more as covid-19 recedes.
The trade-offs in the global South are even harder. Only a quarter of schools in the poorest countries have soap and running water for handwashing. However, schools in such places are also where pupils are often fed and vaccinated. Closing them makes children more vulnerable to hunger and measles, and this risk almost certainly outweighs that of covid-19. The prudent course for poor-country governments is therefore to act boldly. Face down unions and reopen schools. Conduct loud re-enrolment campaigns, aimed especially at girls. Offer small cash transfers or gifts (such as masks or pens) to ease parents’ worries about the costs of getting their offspring back to class.
Reopening the world’s schools safely will not be cheap. Besides billions of bottles of hand sanitiser, it will require careful organisation, flexible schedules and assistance for those who have fallen behind to catch up. It will cost taxpayers money, but taxpayers are often parents, too. Rich countries should help poor ones with some of the costs. Steep as these will be, they are nothing like the costs of letting the largest generation in human history grow up in ignorance.
******
Jul 18th 2020 The Economist
ALL AROUND the world, children’s minds are going to waste. As covid-19 surged in early April, more than 90% of pupils were shut out of school. Since then the number has fallen by one-third, as many classrooms in Europe and East Asia have reopened. But elsewhere progress is slow. Some American school districts, including Los Angeles and San Diego, plan to offer only remote learning when their new school year begins. Kenya’s government has scrapped the whole year, leaving its children idle until January. In the Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte says he may not let any children return to the classroom until a vaccine is found. South Africa has reopened casinos, but only a fraction of classrooms.
Many parents are understandably scared. Covid-19 is new, and poorly understood. Schools are big and crowded. Small children will not observe social distancing. Caution is appropriate, especially when cases are rising. But as we have argued before, the benefits of reopening schools usually outweigh the costs.
The new coronavirus poses a low risk to children. Studies suggest that under-18s are a third to a half less likely to catch the disease. Those under ten, according to British figures, are a thousand times less likely to die than someone aged between 70 and 79. The evidence suggests they are not especially likely to infect others. In Sweden staff at nurseries and primary schools, which never closed, were no more likely to catch the virus than those in other jobs. A new study of 1,500 teenage pupils and 500 teachers who had gone back to school in Germany in May found that only 0.6% had antibodies to the virus, less than half the national rate found in other studies. Granted, an outbreak at a secondary school in Israel infected over 150 pupils and staff. But with precautions, the risk can be minimised.
However, the costs of missing school are huge. Children learn less, and lose the habit of learning. Zoom is a lousy substitute for classrooms. Poor children, who are less likely to have good Wi-Fi and educated parents, fall further behind their better-off peers. Parents who have nowhere to drop their children struggle to return to work. Mothers bear the heavier burden, and so suffer a bigger career setback. Children out of school are more likely to suffer abuse, malnutrition and poor mental health.
School closures are bad enough in rich countries. The harm they do in poor ones is much worse (see article). Perhaps 465m children being offered online classes cannot easily make use of them because they lack an internet connection. In parts of Africa and South Asia, families are in such dire straits that many parents are urging their children to give up their studies and start work or get married. The longer school is shut, the more will make this woeful choice. Save the Children, a charity, guesses that nearly 10m could drop out. Most will be girls.
Education is the surest path out of poverty. Depriving children of it will doom them to poorer, shorter, less fulfilling lives. The World Bank estimates that five months of school closures would cut lifetime earnings for the children who are affected by $10trn in today’s money, equivalent to 7% of current annual GDP.
With such catastrophic potential losses, governments should be working out how to reopen schools as soon as it is safe. This should not be a partisan issue, as it has sadly become in America, where some people assume it is a bad idea simply because President Donald Trump proposes it. In some countries teachers’ unions have been obstructive, partly out of justified concern for public health as cases climb, but also because teachers’ interests are not the same as children’s—especially if they are being paid whether they work or not. The main union in Los Angeles urges that schools remain closed until a long wishlist of demands has been met, including the elusive dream of universal health care in America. Children cannot wait that long.
Places that have restarted schooling, such as France, Denmark, China and New Zealand, offer tips for minimising the risks. They let the most vulnerable teachers stay at home. They commonly reduced class sizes, even though that meant many children could spend only part of the week with their teachers. They staggered timetables to prevent crowding in corridors, at school gates and in dinner halls. They required or encouraged masks. They boosted school-based testing and tracing. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has used these to draw up sober guidelines, which include measures such as separating desks by six feet (though the vice-president this week said that schools should feel free to ignore them).
European countries waited on average about 30 days after infections had peaked before they resumed some presence at school. Having started this way, many have since relaxed the rules to let most pupils return to school at the same time. There is no known experience of schools reopening in places where the virus was as prevalent as it is now in Arizona, Florida or Texas. Such places will have to bring the virus under control before the new term begins. This probably means that not all children will be able to go back full-time even then. But a few days a week with a teacher are better than none. And, as in Europe, schools can open up more as covid-19 recedes.
The trade-offs in the global South are even harder. Only a quarter of schools in the poorest countries have soap and running water for handwashing. However, schools in such places are also where pupils are often fed and vaccinated. Closing them makes children more vulnerable to hunger and measles, and this risk almost certainly outweighs that of covid-19. The prudent course for poor-country governments is therefore to act boldly. Face down unions and reopen schools. Conduct loud re-enrolment campaigns, aimed especially at girls. Offer small cash transfers or gifts (such as masks or pens) to ease parents’ worries about the costs of getting their offspring back to class.
Reopening the world’s schools safely will not be cheap. Besides billions of bottles of hand sanitiser, it will require careful organisation, flexible schedules and assistance for those who have fallen behind to catch up. It will cost taxpayers money, but taxpayers are often parents, too. Rich countries should help poor ones with some of the costs. Steep as these will be, they are nothing like the costs of letting the largest generation in human history grow up in ignorance.
******
2. German Study Shows Low Coronavirus Infection Rate in Schools
BERLIN — Very few of 2,000 school children and teachers tested in the German state of Saxony showed antibodies to COVID-19, a study found on Monday, suggesting schools may not play as big a role in spreading the virus as some had feared.
Germany began reopening schools in May, though debate continues as to the role children may play in spreading the virus to vulnerable adults at home as well as to older teachers and school staff.
The study by the University Hospital in Dresden analysed blood samples from almost 1,500 children aged between 14 and 18 and 500 teachers from 13 schools in Dresden and the districts of Bautzen and Goerlitz in May and June.
The largest study conducted in Germany on school children and teachers included testing in schools where there were coronavirus outbreaks.
Of the almost 2,000 samples, only 12 had antibodies, said Reinhard Berner from the University Hospital of Dresden, adding the first results gave no evidence that school children play a role in spreading the virus particularly quickly.
"Children may even act as a brake on infection," Berner told a news conference, saying infections in schools had not led to an outbreak, while the spread of the virus within households was also less dynamic than previously thought.
Saxony's Education Minister Christian Piwarz said the study showed schools in the state can re-open as normal following the summer vacation at the end of August with some conditions, such as mask-wearing and social distancing where possible.
Berner said the study was representative for the state of Saxony, which has a relatively low rate of infection compared to other parts of Germany.
For other states with low infection rates, the study suggests schools could be re-opened without causing widespread outbreaks of the virus, he said.
A separate study on antibodies against COVID-19 among blood donors showed that antibodies were found in only 1.3 percent of 12,000 blood samples, the head of the Robert Koch Institute for public health, Lothar Wieler, said on Monday.
(Reporting by Caroline Copley and Markus Wacker, editing by Ed Osmond)
********
3. July 13, 2020 Some innovative people are moving activities outdoors.
BERLIN — Very few of 2,000 school children and teachers tested in the German state of Saxony showed antibodies to COVID-19, a study found on Monday, suggesting schools may not play as big a role in spreading the virus as some had feared.
Germany began reopening schools in May, though debate continues as to the role children may play in spreading the virus to vulnerable adults at home as well as to older teachers and school staff.
The study by the University Hospital in Dresden analysed blood samples from almost 1,500 children aged between 14 and 18 and 500 teachers from 13 schools in Dresden and the districts of Bautzen and Goerlitz in May and June.
The largest study conducted in Germany on school children and teachers included testing in schools where there were coronavirus outbreaks.
Of the almost 2,000 samples, only 12 had antibodies, said Reinhard Berner from the University Hospital of Dresden, adding the first results gave no evidence that school children play a role in spreading the virus particularly quickly.
"Children may even act as a brake on infection," Berner told a news conference, saying infections in schools had not led to an outbreak, while the spread of the virus within households was also less dynamic than previously thought.
Saxony's Education Minister Christian Piwarz said the study showed schools in the state can re-open as normal following the summer vacation at the end of August with some conditions, such as mask-wearing and social distancing where possible.
Berner said the study was representative for the state of Saxony, which has a relatively low rate of infection compared to other parts of Germany.
For other states with low infection rates, the study suggests schools could be re-opened without causing widespread outbreaks of the virus, he said.
A separate study on antibodies against COVID-19 among blood donors showed that antibodies were found in only 1.3 percent of 12,000 blood samples, the head of the Robert Koch Institute for public health, Lothar Wieler, said on Monday.
(Reporting by Caroline Copley and Markus Wacker, editing by Ed Osmond)
********
3. July 13, 2020 Some innovative people are moving activities outdoors.
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Rice University, in Houston, is building nine big new classrooms this summer, all of them outdoors.
Five are open-sided circus tents that the university is buying, and another four are semi-permanent structures that workers are building in an open field near dorms, Kevin Kirby, Rice’s vice president for administration, told me. Students and professors will decorate the spaces with murals and video projections.
In the fall, the structures will host classes and student activities, while reducing health risks — since the coronavirus spreads less easily outdoors. Kirby describes the construction project as “a statement to the community.” The statement: “We’re creative. We’re resilient. And what we do matters.”
Across the country, many indoor activities are going to be problematic for the foreseeable future: school, religious services, work meetings, cultural events, restaurant meals, haircuts and more. Mask-wearing reduces the risks, but being outdoors can reduce it even more. (Tara Parker-Pope explains the science and offers tips in this recent Well column.)
As Megan McArdle, a Washington Post columnist, has written: “Move everything outdoors — as much as possible and much more than has been done already.” Yes, the weather will sometimes be a problem. But “we’re long past searching for ideal solutions,” McArdle notes. “We’re now hunting for adequate.”
Some creative ideas :
- “In Denmark, schools held spring classes on playgrounds, in public parks and even in the stands of the national soccer stadium,” The Times editorial board writes. (The same editorial urges cities to close streets and use them to hold outdoor classes.)
- Several towns have held meetings outdoors, including Southwick, Mass., which spaced out folding chairs in a parking lot.
- At a Baptist church in Westerville, Ohio, the pastor recently climbed into a scissor lift and conducted a drive-in service while he was 25 feet off the ground, Time magazine reports. And San Diego County has lifted some restrictions on outdoor religious services.
- Many cities have loosened restrictions on outdoor dining. In New York, restaurants — like Melba’s, in Harlem — have responded creatively, building new outdoors spaces that “have temporarily transformed the city,” the Times restaurant critic Pete Wells writes.
- *****
******
Rice University, in Houston, is building nine big new classrooms this summer, all of them outdoors.
|
Five are open-sided circus tents that the university is buying, and another four are semi-permanent structures that workers are building in an open field near dorms, Kevin Kirby, Rice’s vice president for administration, told me. Students and professors will decorate the spaces with murals and video projections.
|
In the fall, the structures will host classes and student activities, while reducing health risks — since the coronavirus spreads less easily outdoors. Kirby describes the construction project as “a statement to the community.” The statement: “We’re creative. We’re resilient. And what we do matters.”
|
Across the country, many indoor activities are going to be problematic for the foreseeable future: school, religious services, work meetings, cultural events, restaurant meals, haircuts and more. Mask-wearing reduces the risks, but being outdoors can reduce it even more. (Tara Parker-Pope explains the science and offers tips in this recent Well column.)
|
As Megan McArdle, a Washington Post columnist, has written: “Move everything outdoors — as much as possible and much more than has been done already.” Yes, the weather will sometimes be a problem. But “we’re long past searching for ideal solutions,” McArdle notes. “We’re now hunting for adequate.”
|
Some creative ideas :
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4. Four Assumptions about the Coronavirus
National Review Jim Geraghty
Where do we stand in our fight against the coronavirus? Here are three safe — but not entirely certain — assumptions about this pandemic, and a fourth that follows from the first three.
1. The most common strain of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States right now is extremely contagious and will prove difficult to contain even with wider and more consistent adoption of best practices.
A study released last month by the Scripps Research Institute concluded that the strains of the virus spreading so quickly in Europe and the U.S. have a mutated S “spike” protein that makes them about ten times as infectious as the strain that was initially identified in Asia. If it seems like the United States is having a tougher time controlling the spread of the coronavirus than Asian countries did in winter and early spring, that’s partially because this version of the virus is tougher to stop from spreading.
More and more researchers are contending that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne, meaning that it is not merely being dispersed by the bodily fluids of those who have it, but also floating about in aerosolized form. It is also possible that the virus is not truly aerosolized, but that it is floating in tiny droplets which are so small and so light that they can easily be carried long distances by air currents. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and World Health Organization are now taking the former possibility seriously, and with good reason: An aerosolized virus would mean that most of our current pandemic-control practices, such as remaining six feet apart, were not enough by themselves to prevent contraction of the virus.
The scale and complexity of the problem should not be understated. The country enacted unprecedented, sweeping lockdowns that kept most Americans at home, at great cost to the economy. These lockdowns slowed the spread of the virus, but did not stop it. Preventing more infections is not just a matter of convincing the president to wear a mask consistently, or shutting down beaches or subways, or requiring quarantines for those who travel between states. At every level of government, the response to the virus has met with mixed success. But it’s important to recognize that no one is ignoring any simple or easy solutions, because such solutions don’t exist. At this point, there is no known method of completely halting the virus’s spread.
2. The death rate for those who catch the virus is extremely low, but with millions upon millions of Americans infected, a low death rate will still add up to a horrific loss of life.
Early on in the pandemic, people argued about whether the death rate associated with the virus was worse than that associated with the flu (roughly .01 percent, though even the accuracy of that oft-cited figure can be debated.) So far, everything we’ve learned through our study of SARS-CoV-2 suggests that it’s been more deadly than the typical seasonal flu. The CDC currently estimates the death rate at between .6 and .7 percent, while a new study puts it between .5 and .8 percent. As of this writing, Worldometers has the United States at 3,642,907 confirmed cases and 140,460 deaths, for a death rate of just under 4 percent.
Some observers will look at the above figures and note that because some infected with coronavirus are asymptomatic, and are less likely to be tested, many more people should be in the sum of total cases, bringing the case-fatality percentage down even further. But even if the “true” fatality rate is as low as 0.2 percent, the highly contagious nature of SARS-CoV-2 means that it represents serious danger for a country with 328 million people. According to the Census Bureau, roughly 252 million Americans are over age 18. If half of those adults — 126 million people — catch the virus before herd immunity kicks in or a vaccine becomes widely available, a 0.2 percent fatality rate would still mean 252,000 deaths.
For a while, optimists could point to a steady decline in the number of Americans dying from the virus. In mid April, the U.S. was seeing 2,500 new deaths per day. By mid June, that had declined to under 1,000 per day. Thereafter, it kept declining until roughly Independence Day weekend, falling as low as 500 to 600 deaths per day. Now, has started to creep up toward 1,000 again.
In theory, more cases of infection do not necessarily mean more deaths, if the newly infected are young and healthy enough and treatment methods continue to improve. But realistically, those young and healthy infected patients will sooner or later interact with older and less healthy people and spread the virus to them, causing the death toll to creep back up. Doctors and medical experts have been warning about this for weeks, and the daily data are now proving them right.
The elderly and those with preexisting health conditions remain at greatest risk of succumbing to SARS-CoV-2, but we will also continue to see tragic and troubling cases of seemingly healthy, not-so-old people dying from the virus. In addition to age and health, the ability of the infected to fight off the virus is likely influenced by genetic factors that will take much more research to identify. There is, for example, a striking, odd disparity in the blood types of those infected.
3. A vaccine is coming as fast as anyone could hope for, but still probably won’t arrive until late 2020 or early 2021.
We continue to hear good news from the hunt for a vaccine. The University of Oxford vaccine candidate might be done with human trials by September, and “AstraZeneca has agreed to sell the vaccine on a not-for-profit basis during the crisis if it proves effective and has lined up deals with multiple manufacturers to produce more than 2 billion doses.” A candidate vaccine developed by the federal government and Moderna appears to be safe and to trigger an immune response, and is entering the final stage of testing trials. The Food and Drug Administration has also fast-tracked two experimental vaccines jointly developed by German biotech firm BioNTech and Pfizer, according to CNBC.
What does this all mean for the timing of a vaccine? An unidentified “senior administration official” told CNBC that U.S. health officials and pharmaceutical companies expect to start producing potential vaccine doses by the end of the summer, and that drug-makers are buying equipment, securing the manufacturing sites and, in some cases, acquiring the raw materials.
Of course, there are reasons to temper our optimism. Once a reliable vaccine is identified, it still will need to be produced and distributed on a truly massive scale. CNBC’s “senior administration official” said the aim is to “deliver 300 million doses of a vaccine for Covid-19 by early 2021.” Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar said recently that the country could have “tens of millions, even 100 million doses of vaccine, this fall, and many hundreds of millions of doses by early next year.” Even if the administration’s wildest dreams come true, though, that timeline suggests that when 2020 ends and 2021 begins, most Americans will still not be vaccinated.
What’s more, the development and distribution of a vaccine are only half the battle. Almost all of the vaccine candidates require two doses administered separately, probably a month or two apart, and the immunity to SARS-CoV-2 may not last, because viruses mutate. Coronavirus vaccinations might turn into something akin to annual flu shots, or they might need to be administered every two to three years. Plus which, there will of course be Americans who refuse to be vaccinated.
4. Our battle with the coronavirus will almost certainly last until at least the end of the year, and could very well last for several more years.
All indications are that Americans should hunker down, because this fight is far from over. If we’re lucky, something resembling normal life will return sometime in early-to-mid 2021. But even after we’ve all been vaccinated, we’ll still be living with the lingering economic, geopolitical, social, educational, and psychological consequences of the virus. Certain industries — tourism, air travel, cruise lines — may never return to their pre-pandemic levels; certain others — casinos, movie theaters, amusement parks, and less popular spectator sports — may be slow to recover.
Once the world is on its way to recovery, one final problem will remain: figuring out how to prevent a similar crisis from happening in the future. We must be aware that the conditions that facilitated the virus’s migration from a bat to the still-unidentified Patient Zero in Wuhan will be almost entirely unchanged when the pandemic ends. We don’t know exactly how that migration happened, but illegal animal poaching and smuggling will continue around the globe, the so-called wet markets in China will remain open, and we will still have to take it on faith that most countries conduct their biological research into contagious diseases safely.
Saturday, July 4, 2020
Undercuover Investigation…. Minneapolis Riot Was Preplanned
Undercuover Investigation…. Minneapolis Riot Was Preplanned
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