Sunday, April 19, 2020




Protesters have continued to gather across the United States, ignoring social distancing rules, to demonstrate against lockdown orders they call 'tyrannical' and 'worse than the virus'

Crowds of people - many decked out in MAGA hats and with Donald Trump posters -  have met up in Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Utah and Wyoming this week with more crowds in Virginia Thursday.  

The organizer of demonstrations in Michigan, Meshawn Maddock of the Michigan Conservative Coalition Quarantine, called the lifesaving quarantines 'tyranny'.

The group say they are 'Republicans who want our party to stop moving left'. They run associated groups called Michigan Trump Republicans and Women for Trump. Maddock told Fox News: 'Every person has learned a harsh lesson about social distancing. We don't need a nanny state to tell people how to be careful.'

A startling image from Ohio shows a baying crowd at the window of the Statehouse Atrium on Monday. Two protesters wearing Trump hats, other wave American flags and one is in the V for Vendetta mask.

And in Virginia ReOpen Virginia, End The Lockdown VA and Virginians Against Excessive Quarantine organized a protest Thursday against Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam's lockdown.

New York residents also took the streets Thursday despite the Empire State being the epicenter of the virus with more than 12,000 deaths.  A group of protesters gathered in Albany calling for 'communist' Governor Andrew Cuomo to lift the lockdown. The Democrat later extended it to May 15.

Republican Larry Meyers, who organized the grassroots event and ran for Senate, said it was to 'assert our God-given, Constitutionally-protected rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, religious freedom, the right to contract, and the right to use our property as we see fit so long as we do not harm others'.

And in Kentucky protesters stood outside the window Democratic Governor Andy Beshear as he spoke the state's residents about the ongoing lockdowns.

Hearing their shouts of 'facts over fear' Beshear said: 'Folks, that would kill people. That would absolutely kill people.'

Utah: Protesters gathered in Utah on Wednesday. Gov. Gary Herbert has closed down public schools for the rest of the year and ordered businesses to shutter; protest signs read 'Resist like it's 1776' and 'America will never be a socialist country

Republican Larry Meyers, who organized the grassroots event in Utah has also run for Senate. Meyers describes himself as a 'leading conservative voice' and has 'previously protested Planned Parenthood', and organozed to 'oppose illegal immigration'.

The organizer of demonstrations in Michigan , Meshawn Maddock of the Michigan Conservative Coalition Quarantine, called the lifesaving quarantines 'tyranny'.

The group say they are 'Republicans who want our party to stop moving left'. They run associated groups called Michigan Trump Republicans and Women for Trump.

 A Reopen North Carolina Facebook page has more than 42,000 members. The grassroots group say: 'We are residents of North Carolina that stand for The Constitution.'

ReOpen Virginia, End The Lockdown VA and Virginians Against Excessive Quarantine helped to organize the protest.

Each group has thousands of Facebook followers. One page states: 'We are tired of the misinformation & fear mongering...Time to take our power back!!'

One supporter desrcibes herself as a 'die hard Forever Trumper'.

In Wyoming protesters led calls to 'defend liberty' and urged Gov. Mark Gordon to not 'flatten the economy'. Protester Cathy Ide, from the Natrona County Campaign for Liberty, told The Casper Star-Tribune: 'You drive through Casper, it's like a ghost town compared to what we usually are. 'You don't have the usual hustle and bustle, and it's just sad.'

On Wednesday protesters defied social distancing and gathered outside Michigan's State Capitol to demand Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer end her strict stay-at-home orders because it restricts their freedom, and they insisted people are smart enough to make their own decisions.

Many said the closure of home improvement stores, greenhouses, hairdressers, landscaping companies and the banning of boating and fishing was the source of their anger.

The governor criticized the protesters for risking themselves and others taking part in the protest by touching each other, handing out food with their bare hands and blocking an ambulance. She also said it was ironic that a group rallying against her stay-at-home order 'may have just created a reason to lengthen it'.

The gathering was an angry response to Whitmer's executive order last Thursday where she imposed one of the strictest set of lockdown guidelines in the country

She stopped people in Michigan from returning to work, barred residents interacting with neighbors, restricted interstate travel, and prevented constituents from fleeing to their cabins in the country.  

Whitmer also announced that lawn care, construction, fishing, boating with a motor, home improvement and gardening were non-essential activities - while alcohol and lottery tickets were deemed essential.

The activists complained that the rules violated their civil liberties and freedoms, expressed anger over which businesses were allowed to remain open, and frustration over the cancellation of Easter and Passover services.

Most protesters expressed their desire to get back to work as unemployment in the country has skyrocketed by more than 16 million over the past three weeks. 

Whitmer's executive order was met with immediate backlash led by Republican state legislators who found her rules draconian and excessive.

On Tuesday, a group of four Michigan residents filed a lawsuit against her saying her order infringes upon First and Fourth Amendment rights.

President Donald Trump said in March he had a 'big problem' with Whitmer referring to her as 'that young, a woman governor'.

'I love Michigan, one of the reasons we are doing such a GREAT job for them during this horrible Pandemic. Yet your Governor, Gretchen 'Half' Whitmer is way in over her head, she doesn't have a clue. Likes blaming everyone for her own ineptitude! #MAGA,' he tweeted.   

SOURCE 





The Time Has Come for Free-to-Choose Medicine

If the COVID-19 crisis has taught us one thing—aside from the need to wash your hands often—it is that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval process for much-needed medicine to those with debilitating and terminal diseases is in dire need of imminent reform.

Of course, naysayers will argue that expediting FDA’s drug approval process will result in drugs and therapies hitting the market before they have been adequately tested for safety and efficacy. In short, these people are flat-out wrong.

Moreover, some will say legislation such as the Right to Try Act, which allows patients with terminal illnesses to access potentially life-saving treatments, has already solved this problem. Although Right to Try is a step in the right direction, it does not go nearly far enough in rooting out the decades of rot that has infiltrated and contaminated FDA.

In general, as the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, FDA’s drug approval process is so laden with red tape and unnecessary regulations that it takes on average 12 years and almost $3 billion just to bring a single drug from lab to market.

Think about that for a moment. Apparently, FDA’s drug approval process has become so insanely expensive and burdensome that it takes more than a decade and a whopping $3 billion for a single drug to be deemed safe.

Now, if you are one of the millions of Americans with a horrific disease such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, or ALS, would you rather wait for 12 years for a bunch of bureaucrats to allow you to take a medicine that could literally save your life or would you desire the freedom to choose whether or not you would like to voluntarily take a drug that could slow, if not cure, your condition?

Fortunately, for those in favor of the latter option, The Heartland Institute’s Free to Choose Medicine project provides a commonsense outline to rework the hopelessly antiquated FDA drug approval process for those with terminal conditions who have exhausted all FDA-approved treatment options.

In short, Free to Choose Medicine allows patients and doctors, not busybodies employed at the FDA, to determine the best course of treatment after all other “approved” options have been tried and failed. FTCM would also create a Trade-Off Evaluation Database, with rigorous privacy protections, so doctors and patients can track, in real-time, the progress of drugs and therapies to help them make better-informed decisions concerning treatment options.

Now, just imagine that you (or a family member or friend for that matter) has COVID-19. As of now, treatment options for this deadly disease are few and far between. However, there are drugs (such as Hydroxychloroquine) that have helped some patients recover.

Although FDA has not rigorously tested the efficacy of such drugs for use by COVID-19 patients, if you are on death’s door due to COVID-19, shouldn’t you have the ability to try anything (within reason) that could assuage your ailment?

Because there is no vaccine for COVID-19 yet, millions of Americans could potentially experience a situation like the dilemma described above. In America, the land of the free and home of the brave, it is incredible that we remain at the mercy of FDA regulators when it comes to the choice of taking a drug that could prevent needless pain and suffering, let alone death.

By no way whatsoever am I trying to portray FDA officials as cold-hearted apparatchiks who worship rules and regulations over the health and safety of their fellow Americans. Of course, without a doubt, FDA functionaries are simply abiding by agency protocols.

However, that in and of itself is a massive part of the problem. As Americans, we must not let the bureaucratic process take precedence over commonsense. To make this point as vivid as possible, if an American is suffering from a terminal form of cancer, he or she should have every right in the world to try anything that could prevent his or her death, as long as his or her doctor give the go-ahead.

The doctor-patient relationship is sacrosanct. Doctors take a sacred oath that they will do everything in their power to ensure the health and safety of their patients. Last time I checked, FDA officials were not held to the same standard.

Long story short, for those with COVID-19 or any other potentially life-threatening disease, the groundwork and notion within Free to Choose Medicine should be the status quo, not the rare exception.

SOURCE 






Is remdesivir the drug that can kill the coronavirus?

AN EFFECTIVE DRUG to treat covid-19 would transform the battle against the pandemic. Without one, whole countries have had to lock themselves down to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus which has infected more than 2m people and killed nearly 150,000, according to official records; the real toll is probably much greater.

An effective treatment would allow countries to loosen some of the restrictions that are strangling their economies. They would be able to risk more people catching the virus in the knowledge that they could be cured.

This hope has energised the hunt for a drug against covid-19 since the early days of the pandemic. President Donald Trump, for one, has touted hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug. But it is remdesivir, an experimental antiviral drug, that is proving the most exciting. The share price of its maker, Gilead Sciences, shot up by 12% on April 17th after a leak in STAT, an online medical publication, of a discussion suggesting impressive results of a trial with the drug.

Unlike drugs like hydroxychloroquine, which were made to treat other conditions but might have antiviral effects, remdesivir was designed from the outset to kill viruses. It is a molecule known as a “nucleotide analogue”. Its structure mimics the letters that are used to make up the RNA sequences of the virus. The idea is that when viruses try to use these pseudo-letters it gums up their works. Gilead, a drugmaker from California, developed remdesivir to treat Ebola. Although it performed poorly in this, laboratory tests have shown it to be effective against a range of viruses. Thus there is a reasonable hope that it will work against the new coronavirus, called SARS-CoV-2.

Yet science remains equivocal about whether this drug actually works for covid-19 sufferers. Two trials in China have already failed, because of lack of enrolment. (China started its trials relatively late in its epidemic, so it was hard to recruit sufficient numbers of patients.) The recent publication in the New England Journal of Medicine, of a study of remdesivir given to 53 severely afflicted patients, reported that 68% of them improved. However the study has proven divisive among scientists. To begin with, errors can be large given the small number of patients. Moreover, the trial was not “randomised”, so there is no way of knowing whether the sample properly reflects the population of severely afflicted patients. Last, there was no comparison group that was given a placebo, ie, a substance with no therapeutic effect, to establish the real effectiveness of the drug.

For all the excitement it generated, the STAT report was little more than a leaked conversation between doctors. It revolved around a trial at the University of Chicago with 125 patients, mostly severely ill with covid-19. One of the doctors is reported as saying that most of the patients had been discharged and only two had died. But even if this is correct, the lack of a placebo group makes it hard to assess the real worth of the drug. The University of Chicago itself warned that drawing any conclusions was "premature and scientifically unsound".

Stephen Evans, a professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, warns that medicine is littered with instances where treatments were incorrectly believed to have strong benefits based on non-randomised data. Luckily, there are some gold-standard trials under way. One global effort, under the auspices of the World Health Organisation, began in mid-March but results are not expected until after June. Another by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in America could come in late May.

Even if the drug proves successful, it is still experimental, and only limited quantities of such drugs are usually available. Gilead has increased production to meet demand for use in trials. On April 5th, it said it had enough to supply more than 140,000 patients. These sorts of numbers are larger than would be required by clinical trials, so suggest that Gilead is ramping up production for clinical use. The firm also said it was hoping to increase output again as raw materials became available. Looking further ahead, at even broader use, the firm has set an “ambitious goal” of producing more than 500,000 treatment courses by October, and 1m by the end of the year, from a geographically diverse group of suppliers.

The best solution to the pandemic is still a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2; it would prevent people from catching it rather than curing them after they fall ill. But an effective medicine, even in small quantities, would make a huge difference—not least because it would speed up the development of a vaccine. The quickest way to test whether a vaccine works is to give it to a group of volunteers (and a placebo to another), and then expose them to the coronavirus. This is ethically dubious for a disease that has no known cure. A good treatment, though, would make such “human challenge” trials much more likely to go ahead.

SOURCE 





COVID-19: The Government Practice of Medicine

By now, about half the states’ governors have handed down edicts restricting physicians’ prescribing or pharmacists’ dispensing FDA-approved drugs if they are to be used for treating or preventing COVID-19. The use of drugs for an indication not listed on the label is part of the practice of medicine, and the FDA does not have the authority to regulate that. If off-label use were not possible, you’d have to throw one-fifth of your prescriptions away.

Still more intrusively, government is banning the practice of medicine altogether for “non-essential” needs if it can’t be done by telemedicine. The authorities define “non-essential.” A doctor who dares to repair your painful but not life-threatening injury could be defending his medical license before the state medical board.

The rationale? The doctor might use a mask or a pair of gloves, and there aren’t enough for caring for COVID-19 patients. So, instead of making more, should we find a  way to seize a few boxes stored in private offices for redistribution?

So, while doctors sit idle, your medical conditions remain untreated. Doctors’ revenues are plunging by more than 55%, and expenses continue. Will your doctor’s practice survive?

Once in the hospital, your care will be dictated by corporate guidelines. However brave and dedicated your assigned doctors may be, their use of independent judgment will be constrained. What about your choices for care? There will be no outside second opinions, no visits by family members to assess your care or your condition first-hand, and limited communication with overstressed staff. Automatic “do not resuscitate” orders are being considered.

Once in the hospital, you might or might not be able to get the forbidden hydroxychloroquine, perhaps only on an experimental protocol. It may be too late, or in the wrong dose, or  without the combination of drugs that might make it more effective, such as zinc and azithromycin.

So, who is really in charge? Governors are probably not making up rules all by themselves. If an independent doctor does or does not do something, he can be held accountable. Generally not so for the shadowy entities  advising the politicians.

Who benefits from the crisis? Big Pharma, scenting billions in profits from new drugs  and vaccines, which would be threatened by use of cheap generics? Big insurance/hospital cartels, whose dominance is threatened by independent doctors? Political entities lusting for more power? Medical organizations whose revenue depends on any or all  of the above?

The FDA, the CDC, the AMA, state governors, and others setting the agenda have no answers, as more patients die. But their edicts are paralyzing the people who can help.

Freedom is the most important casualty, and its loss will assure far more  death and destruction than the coronavirus possibly could.

Government needs to stand down. It should be supporting doctors, not blocking  and threatening them. If independent doctors survive, they can help you survive.

SOURCE 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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