Wednesday, April 15, 2020






Trump’s Winning Coronavirus Bet

Donald Trump’s bold gamble on hydroxychloroquine (HC) appears to be paying off. Medical professionals in New York tell Judicial Watch that doctors battling the pandemic are increasingly reporting benefits from the drug. They’re prescribing it for themselves, for patients, and for frontline personnel.

HC is a decades-old drug used in treating malaria, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis. It’s largely untested against the coronavirus. President Trump has been enthusiastically promoting it for weeks, calling it possibly “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine” and “a very special thing.” The president’s embrace of the drug apparently began with a conversation in March with Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison and quickly escalated to exchanges with Dr. Mehmet Oz, Rudy Giuliani, Laura Ingraham, and friends in New York. A small study in France indicated the drug could be effective in fighting the virus, though French authorities later backpedaled.

Critics of the president and much of the health-care community were aghast. A president with a medical opinion! HC had serious side effects, they noted, including possible heart attack. Critics complained that Trump sidelined the cautious approach to the drug recommended by Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top White House medical advisers.

Trump insisted on pushing forward. He pounded the White House bully pulpit and lobbied the conservative media. He leaned on the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration. Result? The CDC issued new guidance on HC and the FDA eased restrictions on the drug, issuing an emergency authorization allowing doctors to broadly prescribe it and ramping up larger clinical reviews. He pressured India, the largest producer of HC, to keep its markets open to the U.S. In March, India approved HC for its own frontline personnel: the order noted that HC was “found to be effective against coronavirus in laboratory studies and in-vivo studies.”

In New York, the epicenter of the pandemic, HC is now in wide circulation and a big clinical trial is underway. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is a fan, saying anecdotal evidence suggests the drug is “effective.” Others are less enthusiastic. The European Union, American Academy of Clinical Toxicology, American College of Medical Toxicology, and American Association of Poison Control Centers, among others, have issued warnings.

Is Trump right? Is HC an effective drug in the fight against the coronavirus? In some ways, the HC episode perfectly encapsulates the Trump presidency—his preference for outside channels, distrust of experts, deregulatory impulses, use of social and conservative media. We’ll have answers soon enough about HC. But for now, it looks like the president has placed a winning bet.

SOURCE 







Hydroxychloroquine latest exclusive interview with Dr Vladimir Zelenko and Gregory Rigano



Hundreds of thousands of Americans are infected, and thousands are dying from Covid-19

Verifiable results from several doctors, acting independently of each other, indicate that a combination of three drugs—Hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc sulfate could dramatically cut the need for hospital admissions and ventilators, saving countless lives





Coronavirus: What's the latest with Brexit and other big stories?

Over the past few months, the coronavirus pandemic has absorbed all the energy of the news cycle. There hasn't been an event like it in our lifetimes.

But this isn't to say that it's the only important thing happening in the world right now. So what's going on elsewhere - and what happened to some of the other big news stories of the year?

Remember Brexit?

For about three years you hardly heard about anything else in the UK. Now, of course, the focus is on the coronavirus pandemic. Despite Prime Minister Boris Johnson requiring hospital treatment after contracting Covid-19 and the European Union and UK chief negotiators only recently coming out of coronavirus quarantine, Downing Street insists it will stick to its original timetable.

The UK formally left the European Union on 31 January. But we are now in a transition period up to 31 December, during which the UK is still treated pretty much as an EU member while negotiations continue.

Britain's government says an EU-UK trade deal must be in place by the last day of the year. But even if not, the UK won't prolong the transition period beyond that deadline.

The idea behind the transition period was to minimise disruption caused to business and travel between the UK and the EU. It can be extended by a year or two - which the EU thinks would be a sensible move under the circumstances.

There has only been one round of EU-UK trade negotiations so far. They restart this week via video conference and both sides say they'll do their best to make good and speedy progress. But time is slipping away.

Brussels also asks whether UK and EU businesses - already struggling with the upheaval caused by the coronavirus - need another big change come the end of this year. But whatever they think, EU leaders won't formally ask the UK for an extension. The tight timetable was decided by Boris Johnson, they say. A decision to delay - if there is one - must come from London.

SOURCE 






We may be over-reacting to an unremarkable coronavirus

Comment from Australia

Stay safe. Keep well. Perhaps a hysteria has gripped the nation, at extraordinary cost, when we’re telling each other to take special care over a disease that in three months has killed about 60, in the main quite unwell elderly people.

Even in coronavirus hot spots in Europe and the US, there’s greater chance of being killed in a car accident than being harmed by COVID-19, according to research published last week by Stanford scientist John Ioannidis.

“The risk of dying from coronavirus for a person under 65 years old is equivalent to the risk of dying driving a distance of nine to 415 miles by car each day during the COVID-19 fatality season,” he concluded.

Yet many of those under-65s have had their lives pulled apart, including loss of 195 million jobs around the world this quarter, according to the International Labour Organisation.

In Australia at the very least, with so few deaths and infections, the response to the virus is starting to appear to be a damaging over-reaction. Last month’s draconian response by officials — inducing a recession, destroying millions of jobs and businesses, and locking us all up — was at least politically understandable. The hankering for total lockdown, cheered on largely by those who would be relatively unaffected by it, was irresistible.

Yet as more real data rolls in — as opposed to the wildly inaccurate epidemiological forecasts of millions of deaths globally and many thousands locally — justifications for massive interventions, fiscal and civil, are dwindling.

We were told lockdowns were needed; otherwise hospitals would be swamped. But during the first 11 days of the month, the number of people in intensive care in NSW has fallen to 30, of whom 21 were using ventilators. That’s 2 per cent of available ventilators, even before 3000 more arrive.

Fears of a Spanish flu-like pandemic, which killed almost 40 million people a century ago, are looking exaggerated as the global death toll from COVID-19 approaches 120,000, which is 0.2 per cent of the 60 million people who will die this year from all causes (including more than three million from respiratory infections).

Yes, the lockdowns and social distancing in theory must have slowed the spread. But evidence is thin. Sweden and Japan, for instance, have not imposed lockdowns yet have far fewer deaths as a proportion of their populations than Spain, Italy or France, which have.

The Spanish flu killed 1.2 per cent of Italians, according to new research by Harvard economist Robert Barro, equivalent to 720,000 people today. Almost 20,000 Italians have died of (or with) COVID-19 so far, putting the virus more on par with flu pandemics of the late 1950s and 60s, when governments refrained from destroying their economies. The weakness of the virus itself, rather than wise government action, is the likelier reason the death toll is not as grim as first predicted.

“The likelihood of someone dying from coronavirus is much lower than we initially thought,” Ioannidis told Greek media this week, forecasting that “the mortality rate will be slightly — but not spectacularly — higher than the seasonal flu.”

Indeed, almost 80 per cent of the population of Gangelt, a German town highly exposed to COVID-19, was recently tested to see if they had had the virus. About 15 per cent had, without any symptoms, implying an infection death rate of 0.37 per cent — about four times as bad as seasonal flu but much lower than figures of 1 per cent to 3 per cent first feared.

The first officially detected case of COVID-19 in Australia was in January, eight weeks before lockdowns took effect. Does anyone seriously think only 6400, yesterday’s domestic tally, have been infected? It’s the infection fatality rate — not the official rate of infection — that matters: official tallies are meaningless when so many are asymptomatic.

“I am much more concerned about the consequences of blind shutdowns and the possible destruction of a (Greek) economy where 25 per cent of the GDP is based on tourism,” Ioannidis said.

For the Australian economy, the costs of the response to COVID-19 will be profound too, quite aside from the significant additional debt burden. Joblessness soon will likely double, based on a Roy Morgan survey for last month. The costs of loneliness and inactivity are harder to measure.

“Another month of mass isolation will cost the West at least the equivalent of a million deaths in terms of reduced quality of life,” says Paul Frijters, a professor of economics at London School of Economics using his index of wellbeing. That’s too bad for Victoria, where Premier Daniel Andrews has extended the nation’s most severe lockdown for another four weeks.

If Austria and Denmark — each with many more total deaths and more new infections than Australia — can see the sense in beginning to lift restrictions, so should we. Hospitals have plenty of capacity and new infection rates have tumbled.

Everyone has a right to a view on this fundamental question. Disease experts’ forecasts have proved hopelessly wrong anyway.

It’s not certain a vaccine will ever emerge, but we obviously can’t stay locked down for six months. The longer it lasts, the harder it will be to switch the economy back on. The businesses won’t be there. The economy isn’t a machine like the bureaucracy but a complex set of relationships that will atrophy.

Why not let sport occur without crowds, parliaments sit, young people swim at the beach, businesses reopen, provided they observe social distancing principles? No one is saying “let it rip”; clearly insulating the vulnerable from this virus is a high priority. But it appears less likely the virus will wipe out 5 per cent of India, or 3 per cent of Indonesia, as the Spanish flu did.

We urgently need randomised testing to see how widespread the coronavirus already is. The Prime Minister has said COVID-19 is akin to a one-in-100-year event. It’s unlikely that’s true of the virus, but it’s looking true of damage caused by hysteria.

SOURCE  

******************************

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

************************************



No comments: