Tag: pandemic

Categories
international affairs

Now Safe to Blame?

Joe Biden, China

Is it safe yet for big media to tell the truth about China’s virus? 

“Beijing’s efforts from the very start of the crisis to hide information, silence whistleblowers, put out false data and thwart any real outside investigation are too extensive to fully recount,” Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin wrote over the weekend, pointedly adding, “the Chinese government’s actions were both reckless and deliberate.”

Leading to many more deaths — the official tally being 2.6 million souls worldwide. So far. 

Yes, the Chinese Communist Party leaders are actually “bad folks.” 

Last year, though, the media treated candidate Trump’s attacks on China as just so much posturing and blame-shifting. The Post, for example complained of “too much political heat” regarding the pandemic — “some generated by China” and “some by Donald Trump in his attempt to distract attention from his catastrophic pandemic response as president.”

A month ago, a World Health Organization team traveled to China to finally look for the source of the contagion. “International experts investigating the origins of Covid-19,” the BBC reported at the time, “have all but dismissed a theory that the virus came from a laboratory in China.” 

It turns out, as the Post explained, “the team lacked the training and forensic skills required to investigate this possibility” and “were under strong pressure from China to steer clear of the subject altogether.” The editorial urged the WHO to renew their investigation and “forcefully insist that China not stand in its way.”

“Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 shattered a fragile understanding between Washington and Beijing,” Rogin had informed readers at the outset of his essay, “and put the most important relationship of the 21st century in the hands of a novice.”

I call that a reprieve.

But the fact that our current prez is an old political pro? 

Worrisome.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* There is “no going back to the stance that the Obama administration had taken toward China in 2016,” Rogin argued, “when . . . most uncomfortable issues were swept under the rug.”

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

More on the Wuhan Lab angle: “Twelve Monkeys in Charge”

Categories
general freedom national politics & policies

For WHO the Toll

flatten the curve, hospitals, Covid, virus, pandemic

When the World Health Organization did an about-face, last week, advising against the lockdowns that have constituted the most-touted and most common extreme pandemic response around the world, many wondered: what could the WHO be up to?

David Nabarro, the organization’s special envoy for Covid-19, explains that lockdowns are useful only to buy time “to reorganize, regroup, rebalance” health care resources, and that we are obviously not in such emergency conditions now.

J.D. Tuccille, writing at Reason, provided us with the most astute news angle from the WHO’s apparent turnabout: “At long last, months into the pandemic, the debates over the proper response to COVID-19 have begun.”

We can hope so, anyway. Enough with bullying by government edict or inane “follow the science” rhetoric!

But what the WHO’s new clue should highlight is how we got here. The lockdowns were first offered as a way to do precisely what Mr. Nabarro said, buy time to reorganize medical resources so as not to induce chaos — you know, “flatten the curve.”

It did not take long, however, before a very different rationale for harsh “mitigation efforts” became the rule: buy time for a vaccine.

This plan was strenuously argued against by a trio of doctors in their eyebrow-raising “Great Barrington Declaration.” Continuing the lockdowns until a vaccine emerges “will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”

The lockdown obsession may misdirect our attention from actual treatments for the disease — which President Trump has touted from the beginning. Indeed, Trump’s quick exit from his own bout with the malady may serve as an effective reminder that our options are not limited to (a) quivering in sequestration till vaccinations roll out or (b) mass death.

There is hope.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall Voting

Worms for Early Bird Voting?

ballot box, voting, democracy, money, pandemic

Election Day is six weeks away. Yet, in my home state of Virginia, voting began last week.

Is it responsible to cast a ballot so early? 

You may know with metaphysical certainty how you’re voting for president — even in the event of some major cataclysm — but have all the state rep and city council and ballot measure campaigns also played out fully enough for you?

Here in Virginia, we get few candidate races in our split-up state and federal elections, much less ballot issues to decide. I could have made all my (very few) choices months ago. But I trust that in a more competitive and healthy representative democracy we would more want to hear out the candidates.

A lot can happen in six weeks. And you cannot change your vote once it’s cast.*

The new Democratic-controlled Legislature — in reaction to the pandemic, to prevent crowding at the polls — expanded the early voting period this year. It started September 18 and ends October 31.** 

There are costs to expanding early voting — including making campaigns more expensive to run and win. Disabled from marshaling advertising into a two-or-three-week period before the vote, campaigns are forced to sustain publicity for a month. Or longer. 

While better-funded incumbents have little difficulty with the added cost, it cripples challengers. It especially handicaps grassroots ballot initiative proponents battling public employee unions or the Chamber of Commerce. 

Make the voting process comfortable and easy for citizens. But let’s be certain not to make it comfortable and easy for incumbents and special interests.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* In Sweden, you can change your early vote, informs my friend Bruno Kaufmann, a journalist and direct democracy advocate. They call it “second voting.” 

** Though several other states routinely allow more than six weeks of early voting.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
general freedom media and media people U.S. Constitution

The Rates that Matter

fear, Covid, Coronavirus, epidemic, pandemic, propaganda,

Millions more Americans have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 than are considered “confirmed cases,”* at rates ranging from 6/1 (Connecticut, early May) to 24/1 (Missouri, late April), making the fatality rate of COVID-19 much lower than feared.

Unfortunately, we cannot trust our news sources to be forthright about this.

The “death count” had been the pandemic’s repeated headline for months, Dr. Ron Paul noted yesterday, “all of a sudden early in June the mainstream media did a George Orwell and lectured us that it is all about ‘cases’ and has always been all about ‘cases.’ Death, and especially infection fatality rate, were irrelevant.”

There’s a reason for this re-focus. Since peaking in April, deaths, you see, “had decreased by 90 percent and were continuing to crash. That was not terrifying enough so the media pretended this good news did not exist.”

And the case number increases do look ominous, despite being almost innocuous: “This is not rocket science: the more people you test the more ‘cases’ you discover.”

And that is not the only change of spin regarding the pandemic, as Jeffrey Tucker dramatized on Twitter:

“Flatten the curve!”
“What does that do?”
“Pushes infections to the future”
3 months later
“There are new infections!”
“What should we do?”
“Flatten the curve!”

At Mr. Tucker’s stomping grounds, the American Institute for Economic Research, Gregory van Kipnis wrote last month that the “most frightening aspect of the coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) epidemic in the US is that it brought about exaggeratedly heightened fear of death.”

We have something to fear from the virus and its attack upon the respiratory system, but we have more to fear from fear itself.

That staple of propagandistic media.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

*  A confirmed case is of a patient who has seen a doctor for symptoms of the disease and has tested positive with the diagnosis seconded and logged by scientists associated with a national health agency.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
international affairs national politics & policies

Twelve Monkeys in Charge?

Covid, coronavirus, Dr. Fauci, epidemic, pandemic, vaccine,

Dr. Anthony Fauci, current director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, served as a leader on the “Global Vaccine Plan” through partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Bill Gates, late of Microsoft, Inc., is on record desiring to make a future coronavirus vaccine mandatory for travel . . . and to institute tracking of everyone’s interactions.

After the Obama Administration pressured National Institutes of Health to put a moratorium on “gain of function” research of coronavirus in America, according to Newsweek, Dr. Fauci devoted over $7 million to that very research . . . in Wuhan, China.

The idea? To see if the coronavirus in bats could migrate into humans, using ferrets and other animals to cajole the virus to “gain function,” i.e. transmissibility.

The goal being to prepare vaccines in advance of naturally occurring jumps over the barrier between humans and other animals.

But many scientists regard this kind of research to be morally questionable. 

And 12 Monkeys dangerous. 

In the midst of all this has been one Dr. Charles Lieber, a 61-year-old nanoscience researcher, who recently “has been indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of making false statements and will be arraigned in federal court in Boston at a later date.  Lieber was arrested on Jan. 28, 2020, and charged by criminal complaint.” He allegedly lied about his relationship with China’s Thousand Talents Plan and his role as a “Strategic Scientist” at Wuhan University of Technology in China.

Where SARS-CoV-2 — the coronavirus of the current pandemic — apparently came from.

Nanoscience is the engineering of really, really small stuff. Like strands of RNA and DNA and . . . viruses.

Does this induce confidence about that vaccine allegedly in the offing?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
general freedom U.S. Constitution

Thoughts in Slo-Mo

car, accident,

“Oh my God,” my wife gasped after that eerie instant of calm when things stopped. She told me to call 911 just as I was pressing “9.”

We had been navigating the less-than-usually-clogged interstates up the East Coast when suddenly dirt and debris swept across the asphalt. As we quickly stopped, a small vehicle flipped back onto Interstate-84, rolling over twice, throwing its occupant — a 21-year-old woman — out of the car and onto the road some 30 feet in front of us.

As another man and I got to her, we saw she was breathing. Thankfully, a nurse came forward from the traffic, which would be stopped for hours. Within minutes, emergency personnel were on the scene.

The woman was airlifted to a hospital; she later died. 

Those slow-motion seconds of the accident stay with me, along with the surrealism of the aftermath, standing on a stopped superhighway — helpless — feeling amazingly connected to someone’s precious life. 

And death.

Back on the road, after giving a statement to police, my wife wondered aloud if, what with the current pandemic, the young woman’s parents would even be able to get into the hospital to see her.

Throughout this coronavirus crisis we have heard stories of people dying all alone because of policies designed to “keep us safe” — by keeping relatives and even spouses out. 

We like safety, but if either my wife or I lies dying in a hospital, regardless of the COVID-19 risk, each of us would wish to be with the other.

It’s “till death do us part,” not “till quarantine do us part.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts