CTH | Governor Gretchen Whitmer from the
Michigan Directorate has threatened to turn the eye of the state upon
any doctor or pharmacist who would attempt to prescribe chloroquine to
treat their patients suffering from coronavirus. Medical licenses may
need to be revoked.
The agency’s March 24 letter
warns physicians and pharmacists of professional consequences for the
prescribing of hydroxychloroquine (and chloroquine). Beyond the rational
recommendation against hoarding, the letter includes threats of
“administrative action” against the licenses of doctors that prescribe
hydroxychloroquine.
MICHIGAN
– Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory
Affairs warns that prescribing hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine for
treatment of COVID-19 ‘without further proof of efficacy’ may be
investigated for administrative action; reaction from Dr. Jeff Colyer,
former Kansas governor. (video)
It should be remembered that comrade
Whitmer was selected by the party apparatchik to deliver the State of
the Union rebuttal on behalf of the DNC’s totalitarian interests. Heir
Whitmer’s foreboding warnings are in the interest of the State comrades.
However, in defiance of the
dictates from governing officials intent on increasing the body count
to retain narrative favorable to the state, several independent medical
communities have gone rogue.
Studies have shown
significant reduction in viral loads and symptom improvement when
combining these medications in COVID-19 patients. Though these studies
do not prove efficacy, the results were so promising the authors of the most famous study concluded:
“We therefore recommend that COVID-19 patients be
treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin to cure their infection
and to limit the transmission of the virus to other people in order to
curb the spread of COVID-19 in the world.”
Additionally, it is
certainly interesting that Bayer gave the US Government 3,000,000
Chloroquine tablets. According to the reports at the time 750,000 doses
went to NY, the rest were never discussed (whereabouts unknown). [LINK]
Why would Bayer provide U.S. authorities 3
million tablets of a medication if there was no curative value to the
distribution? Think about it…
asiatimes | What’s going on in the fifth largest economy in the world arguably
points to a major collusion scandal in which the French government is
helping Big Pharma to profit from the expansion of Covid-19. Informed
French citizens are absolutely furious about it.
My initial question to a serious, unimpeachable Paris source, jurist
Valerie Bugault, was about the liaisons dangereuses between Macronism
and Big Pharma and especially about the mysterious “disappearance” –
more likely outright theft – of all the stocks of chloroquine in
possession of the French government.
Respected Professor Christian Perronne talked about the theft live
in one of France’s 24/7 info channels: “The central pharmacy for the
hospitals announced today that they were facing a total rupture of
stocks, that they were pillaged.”
With input from another, anonymous source, it’s now possible to
establish a timeline that puts in much-needed perspective the recent
actions of the French government.
Here’s the timeline:
On January 13, Agnes Buzyn, still France’s Health Minister,
classifies chloroquine as a “poisonous substance,” from now on only
available by prescription. An astonishing move, considering that it has
been sold off the shelf in France for half a century.
On March 16, the Macron government orders a partial lockdown. There’s
not a peep about chloroquine. Police initially are not required to wear
masks; most have been stolen anyway, and there are not enough masks even for health workers.
In 2011 France had nearly 1.5 billion masks: 800 million surgical masks
and 600 million masks for health professionals generally.
But then, over the years, the strategic stocks were not renewed, to please the EU and to apply the Maastricht criteria,
which limited membership in the Growth and Stability Pact to countries
whose budget deficits did not exceed 3% of GDP. One of those in charge
at the time was Jerome Salomon, now a scientific counselor to the Macron
government.
On March 17, Agnes Buzyn says she has learned the spread of Covid-19 will be a major tsunami,
for which the French health system has no solution. She also says it
had been her understanding that the Paris mayoral election “would not
take place” and that it was, ultimately, “a masquerade.”
What she does not say is that she didn’t go public at the time she
was running because the whole political focus by the Macron political
machine was on winning the “masquerade.” The first round of the election
meant nothing, as Covid-19 was advancing. The second round was
postponed indefinitely. She had to know about the impending healthcare
disaster. But as a candidate of the Macron machine she did not go public
in timely fashion.
In quick succession:
The Macron government refuses to apply mass testing, as practiced with success in South Korea and Germany.
Le Monde and the French state health agency characterize Raoult’s research as fake news, before issuing a retraction.
Professor Perrone reveals on the 24/7 LCI news channel that the stock
of chloroquine at the French central pharmacy has been stolen.
Thanks to a tweet by Elon Musk, President Trump says chloroquine should be available to all Americans.
Sufferers of lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, who already have supply
problems with the only drug that offers them relief, set social media
afire with their panic.
Morocco buys the stock of chloroquine from Sanofi in Casablanca.
Pakistan decides to increase its production of chloroquine to be sent to China.
Switzerland discards the total lockdown of its population; goes for
mass testing and fast treatment; and accuses France of practicing
“spectacle politics.”
Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice,
having had himself treated with chloroquine, without any government
input, directly calls Sanofi so they may deliver chloroquine to Nice
hospitals.
Because of Raoult’s research, a large-scale
chloroquine test finally starts in France, under the – predictable –
direction of INSERM, which wants to “remake the experiments in other
independent medical centers.” This will take at least an extra six weeks
– as the Elysee Palace’s scientific council now mulls the extension of France’s total lockdown to … six weeks.
If joint use of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin proves definitely
effective among the most gravely ill, quarantines may be reduced in
select clusters.
The only French company that still manufactures chloroquine is under judicial intervention.
That puts the chloroquine hoarding and theft into full perspective. It
will take time for these stocks to be replenished, thus allowing Big
Pharma the leeway to have what it wants: a costly solution.
It appears the perpetrators of the chloroquine theft were very well informed.
armstrongeconomics | One of the people who has assisted in this panic over the coronavirus has been Neil Ferguson, who led the @imperialcollege
authors who warned of 500,000 deaths and 2.2 million people would be
infected from the coronavirus. Now, low and behold, Ferguson has himself
tested positive for the virus and has suddenly announced a change of
view. Ferguson has been a major contributing factor in causing the world
economy to collapse. He has advocated locking down the economy which has been behind the movement around the world.
I find this very curious that he would
advocate shutting down the economy when he knows the economic damage
this would have. The number of people whose jobs will be lost, and small
businesses destroyed around the world is incalculable. Ferguson
now says both that the U.K. should have enough ICU beds and that the
coronavirus will probably kill under 20,000 people in the U.K. and
interestingly he now admits that more than half of whom would have died
by the end of the year in any case because they were so old and sick.
Ferguson now predicts that the epidemic in the U.K. will peak and
subside within “two to three weeks” after advocating 18+ months of
quarantine would be necessary.
nakedcapitalism | We can make a highly suggestive correlation between globalizers and COVID-19 if we look at two simple maps. First, as is
well known, one of the main distinctions between the places that are “optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward”
(i.e., globalizers) and the
dull provincials in flyover is the possession of passports. (A passport
is a likely marker for the sort of person who asks “Why don’t they just
leave?”; “front-row kids,” in Chris Arnade’s parlance, as distinguished
from, say, grocery workers, who he calls
“back-row” kids.) Here is a map of passport ownership by state:
The correlation is rather neat, don’t you think? It
makes sense that the first case was in a globalist, passport-owning
city like Seattle on the West Coast; and it makes sense that the world
capital of globalization, passport-owning New
York City, now has a major outbreak.
SCMP | Doctors in the central Chinese city of Wuhan plan to embark on a long-term study of
the effects of the coronavirus on the male reproductive system, building on small-scale research
indicating that the pathogen could affect sex hormone levels in men.
Though
still preliminary and not peer reviewed, the study is the first
clinical observation of the potential impact of Covid-19, the disease
caused by the coronavirus, on the male reproductive system, especially
among younger groups.
In a paper published on the preprint research platform medRxiv.org,
the researchers – from Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University and the
Hubei Clinical Research Centre for Prenatal Diagnosis and Birth Health –
said they analysed blood samples from 81 men aged 20 to 54 who tested
positive for the coronavirus and were hospitalised in January.
The
median age of the participants was 38 and roughly 90 per cent of them
had only mild symptoms. The samples were collected in the last days of
their stay in hospital.
Using
the samples, the team looked at the ratio of testosterone to
luteinising hormone (T/LH). A low T/LH ratio can be a sign of
hypogonadism, which in men is a malfunction of the testicles that could
lead to lower sex hormone production.
The average ratio for the Covid-19 patients was 0.74, about half the normal level.
Testosterone is the main male sex hormone critical for the development
of primary and secondary sexual characteristics including testes,
muscle, bone mass and body hair. Luteinising hormone is found in both
men and women, and best known for its ability to trigger ovulation.
securityreform | On March 13, the White House declared the COVID-19 pandemic a national emergency. The profound impact of the outbreak will persist for months, and steps to contain and mitigate its effects have been hampered by congressional, presidential, and federal agency malfeasance. In every sense, the crisis is both national and an emergency.
In that respect, the situation differs markedly from the nearly three dozen ‘national emergencies’ that the U.S. government currently recognizes. As a result of congressional indifference and the expansion of the national security state, Donald Trump today claims extraordinary emergency powers to address ‘emergencies’ that were declared as far back as 1979, or in response to issues ranging from “the anchorage and movement of vessels” to the U.S.-Mexico border. In terms of urgency, these are outliers. Most of the national emergencies that remain active are simply procedural vehicles to slap sanctions on foreign government officials. All of this begs the question: are any of these ‘emergencies’ at all relevant to the health, well-being, or livelihoods — to say nothing of the actual physical security — of the majority of Americans? When weighed against a genuine public health crisis like COVID-19, do these events even constitute emergencies, in any meaningful sense of the word?
Taking a hard look at what the U.S. government considers a national emergency — and who has the power to define them[1] — says a great deal about the conditions that our government and the leaders of both parties deem to be ordinary and sustainable. The record is not encouraging.
None of the 34 currently active national emergencies relates to the persistent crises of healthcare access, social mobility, and student debt. No emergency proclamation addresses the immanent risk of climate change. Instead, each emergency was declared by the president (Republican or Democrat) over the narrow policy preferences or political interests of the national security establishment. As it turns out, the bipartisan security framework that allows the president to declare emergencies with virtually unchecked impunity is itself a perpetuation of working-class insecurity.
Emergencies all the way down
The U.S. has been in a state of persistent national emergency since November 1979, when President Jimmy Carter declared the first national emergency of the modern era, in response to the U.S. embassy takeover in Tehran. Following the declaration, Carter seized Iranian government assets and set off on an unsuccessful covert mission to free the U.S. diplomatic staff and intelligence operatives held captive in Tehran. Without doubt, the hostage-taking constituted an acute crisis for those involved, but compared to the steady erosion of personal dignity and economic stability caused by the austerity policies of the post-war period, such an event is hardly an emergency, and it is by no means national.
Fast forward to the present (and several dozen ‘emergencies’ later), in February 2019, President Trump declared that “the current situation at the southern border presents a border security and humanitarian crisis that threatens core national security interests and constitutes a national emergency.” Thus, a caravan predominantly consisting of tired, hungry, and poor asylum seekers and migrants was deemed to constitute a ‘national emergency’. Meanwhile, the moral emergency presented by the ineptly mismanaged and criminal system of child detention centers that was a byproduct of this border policy was entirely ignored.
Not only do these emergency declarations signal the moral indifference of the national security establishment, they also reveal the overlap between parochial military, diplomatic, and corporate interests.
bloomberg | The billionaire Tom Golisano was smoking a Padron cigar on his patio in Florida on Tuesday afternoon. He was worried.
“The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be
worse than losing a few more people,” said Golisano, founder and
chairman of the payroll processor Paychex Inc. “I have a very large
concern that if businesses keep going along the way they’re going then
so many of them will have to fold.”
President Donald Trump says he doesn’t want the cure for the
Covid-19 pandemic “to be worse than the problem,” and some of America’s
wealthiest people and executives are echoing his rallying cry. They want
to revive an economy that could face its worst quarterly drop ever --
even if it means pulling back on social distancing measures that public
health officials say can help stop coronavirus. These investors aren’t
prizing profits over lives, they say, they’re just willing to risk some
horrors to avoid others.
“You’re
picking the better of two evils,” said Golisano, who wants people to go
back to their offices in states that have been relatively spared by the
coronavirus, but remain at home in hot spots. “You have to weigh the
pros and cons.”
In New York, where hospitals are at a tipping point and getting pummeled by patients, Governor Andrew Cuomo says the economy shouldn’t be restarted “at the cost of human life” and that he’s developing a plan that “lets younger people get back to work.”
The question is when they should do it.
Trump, guided by a
group of hedge fund and private equity titans, wants the country up and
running again by Easter, though public health officials warn that’s too
soon for a virus that’s killed more than 18,400 and infected at least
400,000 worldwide. Only companies with less than 500 employees are
required to provide paid sick leave for workers out with Covid-19.
Economists from Northwestern University calculated that keeping social
distancing practices in place until cases decline could save 600,000
lives nationwide.
nola | Toilet paper shortages – and hoarding – during the coronavirus
outbreak have apparently led to the clogging of New Orleans area sewer
pipes, as residents have increasingly turned to nonflushable paper in
the bathroom.
The Sewerage & Water Board said Friday it has
been dealing with more sewer backups than normal, and urged residents to
"think before they flush."
"As a reminder, only human waste and
toilet paper are flushable," an S&WB spokeswoman said. "Baby wipes,
paper towels, and even 'flushable' wipes may clog your sewer line and
cause overflows."
The Jefferson Parish sewerage officials said the same thing this
week. Residents living in apartments and other concentrated areas need
to be especially careful.
The backups come as New Orleans area
grocers have struggled in recent weeks to keep toilet paper in stock.
Shoppers at Walmart, Rouses and elsewhere have been seen filling entire
carts with the toilet paper packages that have been placed on shelves.
Others seeking the household staple have had to go without. The scenario
has led to physical fights in some stores, and now, to sewer backups.
CTH | How weak and tenuous does a corporate financial position need to be such
that being closed for one week means informing all nationwide landlords
of your inability to pay the rent next week? Consider this example:
CALIFORNIA
– The Cheesecake Factory, one of the most popular sit-down restaurant
chains in the country, says it will not be able to make upcoming rent
payments for any of its storefronts on April 1 because of significant
loss of income due to the coronavirus crisis.
[…]
Company chairman and CEO David Overton writes, “Due to these
extraordinary events, I am asking for your patience, and frankly, your
help.” He continues, “we appreciate our landlords’ understanding given
the exigency of the current situation.” The letter says that the company
hopes to resume paying rent as soon as possible.
[…] The Cheesecake Factory was founded in Beverly Hills
in 1972 and maintains its original location on Beverly Drive, with 39
locations in California. In total, it operates 294 restaurants in 39
states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Toronto, Canada.
In 2019, the company also acquired Phoenix-based Fox Restaurants,
including North Italia, Flower Child, and The Henry. Most of the
company’s landlords are malls, including Simon and Westfield. (read more)
This is one small example; however, it is
an opportunity to imagine the beginning of a process were Blue team
corporations start to tell Red team financiers they are refusing to pay
their debts.
jacobinmag | Let’s look at the state of things for a second. The world is currently
grappling with a deadly global pandemic, one that has already led to
cities across the world being placed into lockdown, and looks to be
leading to an unprecedented economic crisis. Despite bungling the response
in a way that could be called criminal, the president has now gotten
out in front, holding daily press briefings that have allowed him to feed misinformation directly to the public, and taking steps that, while grossly inadequate
for the moment, have already outstripped the Obama administration’s
economic response in 2008 — with the result that, for the moment at
least, a large majority of Americans now approves of Trump’s handling of the crisis.
Being an election year, there are several things a Democratic
challenger should be doing. One is exuding a sense of calm, stability,
and competence, to convey “presidentialness” and contrast with Trump’s
chaotic behavior. Being the Democratic Party’s prospective leader, they
should be helping to set the legislative agenda and drive the party’s
ideas about the response to this unprecedented emergency. And they
should be communicating with the public as much as possible, providing
reassurance and guidance while denying the president a monopoly of the
airwaves.
Biden, like Sanders, first held a press conference on March 12, the
day the crisis first became real for many people, which started half an
hour late due to technical difficulties. He then held a virtual town
hall the day after, which saw Biden falsely claim credit
for the Endangered Species Act before wandering off camera, an event so
marred by technical difficulties that the “disjoined effort,” in
Biden’s words, had to be ended early. Then came the debate, in which
Biden was allowed by the moderators to brazenly lie about almost every aspect of his record, a contrast from debates in the past.
In the lead up to the last Tuesday’s elections — even as the
coronavirus death toll climbed, cities went into lockdown, and health
and government officials urged people to stay inside at all costs —
Biden’s campaign encouraged voters to turn out, falsely assuring them it was safe. The result was a day of chaos and confusion that almost certainly assisted the virus’s continued spread. Biden then gave a brief victory speech that ended in another odd moment that quickly went viral, now par for the course for the campaign.
And until today, that was the last almost anyone saw of the
Democratic frontrunner. For almost a whole week, as the crisis has
exponentially worsened by day, Biden seemed to have vanished off the
face off the earth, surfacing only last Friday in a call with the press.
He was “desperately” trying to “be in daily or at least, you know,
significant contact with the American people and communicate what I
would be doing,” he told reporters, as if regular, successful livestreaming hadn’t already been accomplished by both his opponent and millions of teenagers.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo blasted FEMA during a press
conference for sending 400 medical ventilators when his state needs
30,000.
However, in 2015 the New York State Department of
Health specifically studied the issue, warned about a critical lack of
ventilators during a pandemic, and the New York Governor made a specific
decision NOT to order them: [pdf link here]
sicsempertyrannis | For the past week it appeared that NY
Governor Cuomo realized it was more important to be an adult and eschew
partisan politics. That was then. He is now in full partisan panic
pandemonium. He is now accusing the Feds of dragging their feet in
getting NYC 30,000 ventilators.
Here is the quote:
"What are you doing sending 400 when I need 30,000 ventilators," Cuomo said. "You're missing the magnitude of the problem."
No Cuomo, you do not understand. For starters, you do not have 10,000
patients on a ventilator now. The number of patients who test positive
does not mean that all will require a ventilator. The numbers available
so far indicate most who test positive for corona virus are not being
hospitalized. That means the numbers for ventilators are not going to
skyrocket and immediately outstrip the existing capability.
But Cuomo is missing a more important point. Shame on him. He has a
duty to help educate his constituency. Let us start with the production
reality--you cannot magically produce ventilators overnight. The
existing manufacturers have limited, not UNLIMITED, capabilities to
expand production. Bringing other companies, like GM on line, will
require about a month to retool and repurpose machinery and quality
control techs.
Producing the machines is the easy part. It is the human
infrastructure that is the problem. If there are 30,000 ventilators up
and running then you need an additional 45,000 ICU qualified nurses and
an additional 22,500 Respiratory Therapy Technicians. (I am assuming one
ICU nurse can handle two patients per shift. There are three eight hour
shifts per day. I am assuming that one Respiratory Therapy Tech can
handle 8 ventilators per shift and there are three eight hour shifts per
day).
NYTimes | About 50 guests
gathered on March 5 at a home in the stately suburb of Westport, Conn.,
to toast the hostess on her 40th birthday and greet old friends,
including one visiting from South Africa. They shared reminiscences, a
lavish buffet and, unknown to anyone, the coronavirus.
Westport, a town of 28,000 on
the Long Island Sound, did not have a single known case of the
coronavirus on the day of the party. It had 85 on Monday, up more than
40-fold in 11 days.
Worry, rumors and recriminations engulfed the town. Political leaders
fielded hundreds of emails and phone calls from residents terrified that
their children or vulnerable family members had been exposed. Who threw
the party, and who attended? They wanted to know. Rumors flew that some
residents were telling health officials they had attended the party so
they could obtain a scarce test.
Officials refused to disclose the names of the hosts or any guests, citing federal and state privacy rules. Mr. Marpe posted a videotaped statement
to the town website on March 20. “The fact of the matter is that this
could have been any one of us, and rumor-mongering and vilification of
individuals is not who we are as a civil community,” he said.
As
the disease spread, many residents kept mum, worried about being
ostracized by their neighbors and that their children would be kicked
off coveted sports teams or miss school events.
One local woman compared going public with a Covid-19 diagnosis to “having an S.T.D.”
“I
don’t think that’s a crazy comparison,” said Will Haskell, the state
senator who represents Westport. He has been fielding frantic phone
calls from constituents.
Most
residents were exercising recommended vigilance, Mr. Haskell said, but
one call that stuck out to him was from a woman awaiting test results
whose entire family had been exposed to the virus. “She wanted to know
whether or not to tell her friends and social network,” he said, because
she was worried about “social stigma.”
thebulletin | Before
1990, there had been only two BSL-4 labs in the United States: one at
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, and another
at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
(U.S.A.M.R.I.I.D.), in Fort Detrick, Maryland. In the nineteen-nineties,
three were added. In the first seven years after 9/11, the United
States opened ten more. In a 2007 report, Keith Rhodes, then the chief
technologist in the Government Accountability Office (G.A.O.)—the
independent watchdog that conducts research for Congress—observed that
there was “a major proliferation of high-containment BSL-3 and BSL-4
labs is taking place in the United States.” Rhodes counted fifteen known
American BSL-4 labs (including N.B.A.F.) but suggested that there could
be others; the number of BSL-3 labs appeared to have increased even
more. “No single federal agency knows how many such labs there are in
the United States,” Rhodes wrote, and “no one is responsible for
determining the aggregate risks associated with the expansion of these
high-containment labs.” In theory, the Federal Select Agent Program
keeps tabs, since any lab in possession of a substance on its list has
to register; a 2017 report from the G.A.O. counted two hundred and
seventy-six high-containment select-agent labs in the United States. But
the actual number is almost certainly higher, because not every
dangerous pathogen is on the federal list.
In the summer of 2008,
at the same time that D.H.S. was choosing a site for N.B.A.F., the
F.B.I. announced that it had found the sender of the anthrax letters:
Bruce Ivins, a mentally unstable biodefense researcher with high-level
security clearances at U.S.A.M.R.I.I.D. Ivins died of an apparent
suicide before he could be officially charged; subsequently, journalists
have raised questions about some of the evidence against him. All the
same, the possibility of Ivins’s involvement raised disturbing questions
for those who work in biodefense. “A more ominous threat than
terrorists taking up biology,” the epidemiologist Ali Khan wrote, in his
2016 book “The Next Pandemic,” could be “biologists taking up
terrorism.”
Manhattan is surrounded by a
rolling sea of golden grass—the Flint Hills, North America’s last
remaining tallgrass prairie. “No grass anywhere can put weight on cattle
more quickly or more economically,” Jim Joy, a historian of ranching,
wrote. In the nineteenth century, cattlemen from Texas and elsewhere
began driving their herds overland to graze in the Flint Hills. Today,
Kansas is at the geographical center of the American beef industry. It
is the third-largest cattle-producing state in the country, and its
immediate neighbors—Nebraska, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Colorado—are all
in the top ten.
During and
after the N.B.A.F. site-selection process, many scientists found it
baffling that anyone would consider installing a high-containment
animal-disease laboratory in the middle of livestock country. “It
doesn’t make sense—it’s just insane,” Laura H. Kahn, a physician and
research scholar at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global
Security, told me. Abigail Conrad, who was a developmental biologist at
K-State when D.H.S. was making its choice, said that the decision
“defies reason”; her husband, Gary, also a biologist, called it “beyond
ludicrous,” “almost criminal,” and “genuinely stupid.”
Once infected with foot-and-mouth,
animals with cloven hooves—cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, deer, bison—come
down with fevers and painful blisters. A cow’s milk production can
decline. Adult animals can lose weight, and young ones can die. An
animal that recovers can still transmit the disease to others. According
to the authors of a 2013 paper in the journal Preventive Veterinary Medicine,
in countries that are officially foot-and-mouth-free but experience
occasional outbreaks, “the costs involved in regaining free status have
been enormous.” During the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak in England,
exclusion zones made travel difficult; tourism from overseas declined by
ten per cent. The ultimate cost of containing the outbreak was nearly
five billion in today’s dollars. Its source remains undetermined.
In
2007, Britain experienced another, smaller foot-and-mouth outbreak,
with only eight confirmed cases. In that instance, investigators were
able to trace the infection to the Pirbright Institute, a world-renowned
high-containment animal-disease research facility in Surrey. A building
at Pirbright had an aging, faulty drainpipe; heavy rains probably
washed the live virus from the defective drain out into the open, where
truck tires picked it up. According to the G.A.O., one reason to confine
foot-and-mouth study to an island is that “there is always some risk of
a release from any biocontainment facility.” In fact, for just this
reason, foot-and-mouth disease cannot be brought onto the U.S. mainland
without the explicit permission of the Secretary of Agriculture.
slate | Professor John P.A. Ioannidis of Stanford University—by reputation one
of the smartest people in fields ranging from epidemiology to
biomedical data science—published a somewhat controversial piece in Stat News last week that warned of the possibility that our best efforts might end up backfiring:
If the health system does become
overwhelmed, the majority of the extra deaths may not be due to
coronavirus but to other common diseases and conditions such as heart
attacks, strokes, trauma, bleeding, and the like that are not adequately
treated. If the level of the epidemic does overwhelm the health system
and extreme measures have only modest effectiveness, then flattening the
curve may make things worse: Instead of being overwhelmed during a
short, acute phase, the health system will remain overwhelmed for a more
protracted period.
Ioannidis’ piece got some pushback
by public health experts who worried that his questioning might make
people less likely to follow instructions to self-isolate and stay
indoors. But even his critics seem to agree that it is absolutely
critical for us to have better data.
We are currently quite lacking in data and sorely in need of it. We
need to know many more things about the virus and what it does to the
human body, including whom it affects and how to treat it.
We need better testing to figure out how many people in the United
States have it, even as the people on the front lines are realizing that
they themselves have to shift their efforts away from containment
approaches and toward treatment and mitigation of spread.
We also need data on how our current approach is working and data on
what the costs of this approach really are. We need to know how much our
current version of social distancing, with everyone still going to the
grocery store every few days, is affecting the rate of spread. We need
to figure out how much people being stuck at home might lead to an
uptick in domestic abuse or suicide. We need to know if more women are
giving birth at home, and if more women are being forced to carry
pregnancies that they don’t want as their right to abortion is interrupted.
We need to know how the people who are laid off from their jobs are
getting food, and if they are still willing to access health care when
the financial cost of doing so might be very uncertain. We are all
engaged in an enormous, high-stakes nationwide experiment right now, and
we need all of this data to answer the question: Are we doing the right
thing?
And still, the questions remain: How long can we really do this for? What else could we do? What should we do next?
Academic physicians Aaron Carroll and Ashish Jha have a piece in the Atlantic
in which they consider the various possible scenarios in front of us.
The extremes are helpfully familiar—on one side, do nothing, which we’re
already doing better than; on the other side, stay like this for the
next 18 months or so, the current accepted timeline until there’s a
vaccine. But Carroll and Jha argue that there is a third path available,
somewhere in the middle of these two strategies. They think that once
we do the social distancing necessary to get the initial numbers under
control (which will still take time), we can create a new type of plan, a
middle road that keeps public health manageable without keeping the
country completely shut down.
LATimes | Each winter, some of Mexico’s wealthiest residents flock to the snowy slopes of Colorado to ski, shop and socialize.
This year, at least 14 — and probably many more — came home infected with the coronavirus.
In a country that has not yet been hard hit by the pandemic, the travelers have become a focal point of efforts to prevent the virus from spreading widely.
Several
of Mexico’s most prominent business leaders — including a banking
executive, the chairman of Mexico’s stock exchange and the chief
executive of the company that makes Jose Cuervo tequila — tested
positive for the virus after traveling to Vail, a ski resort west of
Denver.
Public health authorities are now scrambling to find others who
recently returned from the resort, including an estimated 400 people who
flew on two charter planes from Colorado to the state of Jalisco.
“We
need these people to understand that they have a very high probability
of having acquired the virus and are a potential risk,” Jalisco Gov.
Enrique Alfaro said in a video on Facebook in which he implored those
who made the trip to contact health authorities.
“We don’t want this to be the start of a major coronavirus spread,” added Fernando Petersen, Jalisco’s top health official.
The state’s health department said that it has already contacted 73
passengers on those flights and that roughly 40% of them report coronavirus-like symptoms but have not yet been tested.
Of Jalisco’s 27 confirmed coronavirus patients, 11 had been in Vail in recent weeks, the department said.
The
frantic effort to find the ski trip participants has highlighted an
uncomfortable fact: It is people wealthy enough to travel outside the
country who have brought the coronavirus back to mostly poor Mexico. Yet
if the disease spreads, it is those with the least who will probably
suffer the most.
As of Friday, Mexico had confirmed just one
coronavirus death, that of a 41-year-old man who had recently traveled
to the United States and — to the dismay of health authorities — later
attended a rock concert at a stadium in Mexico City.
libertyblitzkrieg | It didn’t take long for the most opportunistic, nefarious and corrupt
actors in the U.S. to turn a pandemic crisis into another massive power
grab attempt. We’ve seen it before; after 9/11 and also throughout the
response to the financial crisis a decade ago. The irredeemable
sociopaths who always make the big, important decisions used those
crises to consolidate wealth and power. They’re going for it again.
There are many examples, but let me list a few:
– The EARN IT bill, by which senators are attempting to
destroy widespread public use of encryption, i.e. private
communications. (EFF)
– The White House and the CDC are asking Facebook, Google and
other tech giants to give them greater access to Americans’ smartphone
location data. (CNBC)
– The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the
ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial
during emergencies. (Politico)
– U.S. Senators are attempting to use the crisis as an opportunity to pull off a gigantic corporate coup. (Matt Stoller, BIG)
We often get distracted debating the implications of Fed actions, and in
the process lose sight of the bigger picture. The real question we need
to be asking is why do we allow a handful of unelected banker welfare
agents the right to shape our entire world? It’s a crazy system, and
until we start questioning the underlying premises of everything about
our world, we’ll remain confused and subjugated.
unz |This
is the contempt these people have for you and me and everyone else who
isn’t a part of their elitist gaggle of reprobates. Here’s a clip from
another article at the WSJ that helps to show how the financial media is
pushing this gigantic handout to corporate America:.
“The Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and banking regulators deserve
congratulations for their bold, necessary actions to provide liquidity
to the U.S. financial system amid the coronavirus crisis. But more
remains to be done. We thus recommend: (1) immediate congressional
action …. to authorize the Treasury to use the Exchange Stabilization
Fund to guarantee prime money-market funds, (2) regulatory action to
effect temporary reductions in bank capital and liquidity requirements…
(NOTE–So now the banks don’t need to hold capital against their loans?)
.. additional Fed lending to banks and nonbanks….(Note -by “nonbanks”,
does the author mean underwater hedge funds?)…
We
recommend that the Fed take further actions as lender of last resort.
First, it should re-establish the Term Auction Facility, used in the
2008 crisis, allowing depository institutions to borrow against a broad
range of collateral at an auction price (Note–They want to drop the
requirement for good Triple A collateral.) … Second, it should consider
further exercising its Section 13(3) authority to provide additional
liquidity to nonbanks, potentially including purchases of corporate debt
through a special-purpose vehicle” (“Do More to Avert a Liquidity Crisis”, Wall Street Journal )
This
isn’t a bailout, it’s a joke, and there’s no way Congress should
approve these measures, particularly the merging of the US Treasury with
the cutthroat Fed. That’s a prescription for disaster! The Fed needs to
be abolished not embraced as a state institution. It’s madness!
And
look how the author wants to set up an special-purpose vehicle (SPV) so
the accounting chicanery can be kept off the books which means the
public won’t know how much money is being flushed down the toilet trying
to resuscitate these insolvent corporations whose executives are still
living high on the hog on the money they stole from credulous investors.
This whole scam stinks to high heaven!
Meanwhile
America’s working people will get a whopping $1,000 bucks to tide them
over until the debts pile up to the rafters and they’re forced to rob
the neighborhood 7-11 to feed the kids. How fair is that?
And
don’t kid yourself: This isn’t a bailout, it’s the elitist’s political
agenda aimed at creating a permanent underclass who’ll work for peanuts
just to eek out a living.
off-guardian | The outward story of The Plague revolves around a malignant
disease that breaks out in a town that is quarantined when the
authorities issue a state of emergency. After first denying that they
have a problem, the people gradually panic and feel painfully isolated.
Death fear runs rampant, much like today with the coronavirus. The
authorities declare martial law as they warn that the situation is dire,
people must be careful of associating, especially in groups, and they
better obey orders or very many will die. So the town is cordoned off.
Before this happens and the first signs that something is amiss
emerge, the citizens of the town of Oran, Algeria remain oblivious, for
they “work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich.”
Bored by their habits, heavily drugging themselves with drink, and
watching many movies to distract themselves, they failed to grasp the
significance of “the squelchy roundness of a still-warm body” of the
plague-bearing rats that emerge from their underworld to die in their
streets.
“It was as if the earth on which our houses stood were being
purged of their secret humors; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses
and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails.” To them the
plague is “unthinkable,” an abstraction, until all their denials are
swept aside as the truth emerges from the sewers and their neighbors and
families die from the disease.
“Stupidity has a way of getting its way;” the narrator, Dr. Rieux tells us, “as we should see if we were not always so wrapped up in ourselves …. plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”
The American people are wrapped up in themselves. Nor do they
recognize the true rats. They are easily surprised; fooled would be a
better word.
Camus uses a physical plague to disguise his real subject, which is
the way people react when they are physically trapped by human rats who
demand they obey orders and stay physically and mentally compliant as
their freedom is taken from them.
off-guardian | The rush to elevate self-isolation to Olympian
heights as a way to combat the spread of COVID-19 has gotten to the
celebrities. Sports figures are proudly tweeting and taking pictures
from hotel rooms (Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton being a case in
point). Comics are doing their shows from home. Thespians are extolling
the merits of such isolation and the dangers of the contagion.
All speak from the summit of comfort, the podium of pampered wealth:
embrace social distancing; embrace self-isolation. Bonds of imagined
solidarity are forged. If we can do it, so can you.
The message of warning varies in tones of condescension and
encouragement. Taylor Swift prefers to focus on her cat. “For Meredith,
self-quarantining is a way of life,” she posted on Instagram. “Be like
Meredith.” Meredith, of course, had little choice in the matter.
John Legend delivered a concert on Instagram, wife Chrissy Teigen beside towelled and quaffing wine.
“Social distancing is important, but that doesn’t mean it has to be
boring. I did a little at-home performance to help lift your spirits.”
Then there was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who actually boasted two miniature ponies. “We will get through this together.” So good of him to let us know.
Others, like model Naomi Campbell, can barely hide their revelations, moments of acute self-awakening amidst crisis.
A long dormant, cerebral world, awoken by a virus.
Similarly, singer Lady Gaga has found that within that deodorised, heavily marketed form of celebrity is the heart of a human. “This is reminding me I think a lot of us,” she reflected on Instagram “what it is to both feel like and be like a human being.”
Self-isolation has seen the rich with their entourages making an
escape for holiday homes and vast retreats. Then come the eccentric and
the slightly ludicrous options: the well-stocked and equipped bunker;
the safe room. Such an approach is far more representative of the
estrangement between haves and have-nots.
bloomberg | Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard predicted
the U.S. unemployment rate may hit 30% in the second quarter because of
shutdowns to combat the coronavirus, with an unprecedented 50% drop in
gross domestic product.
Bullard called for a powerful fiscal response to replace the $2.5 trillion
in lost income that quarter to ensure a strong eventual U.S. recovery,
adding the Fed would be poised to do more to ensure markets function
during a period of high volatility.
“Everything is on the table” for the Fed as far as additional
lending programs, Bullard said in a telephone interview Sunday from St.
Louis. “There is more that we can do if necessary” with existing
emergency authority. “There is probably much more in the months ahead
depending on where Congress wants to go.”
Bullard’s grave assessment of the world’s largest economy underscores
the critical need for Congress and the White House to quickly find
agreement on a massive aid program. The Fed last week restarted
financial crisis-era programs to help the commercial paper and money
markets, after cutting interest rates to near zero and pledging to boost
its holdings of Treasuries by at least $500 billion and of mortgage securities by at least $200 billion.
“This is a planned, organized partial shutdown of the U.S. economy in
the second quarter,” Bullard said. “The overall goal is to keep
everyone, households and businesses, whole” with government support. “It
is a huge shock and we are trying to cope with it and keep it under
control.”
The U.S. central bank bought $272 billion of government debt last week, of the more than $500 billion authorized, which Bullard emphasized should not be seen as a limit.
A
fellow janitor at 555 California Street, a 52-story office tower in San
Francisco’s financial district, told her he heard that a floor of the
building was being closed because a worker had contracted the novel
coronavirus. At 63, Ms. Santamaria counted herself among those most
vulnerable to a virus that had killed thousands worldwide and was
rapidly spreading across the United States.
Her supervisor at Able Services, the contractor that employs her, reassured her that nothing was wrong, she said.
It was not until five days later that a news article
appeared saying that Wells Fargo had temporarily evacuated its offices
in the building after an employee had tested positive for the
coronavirus.
The bank had notified
building management, which alerted the cleaning contractor. But
according to the employees and their union representatives, no one had
told the janitors.
“I felt as if I didn’t matter,” said Ms. Santamaria, who earns $22 an hour.
While
many Americans are fleeing their offices to avoid any contact with the
coronavirus, low-wage janitors are sometimes being asked to do the
opposite. Although millions of Californians have been ordered to shelter
in place, janitors are still being asked to go into offices to battle
the invisible germs that threaten public health, even as those germs,
and the new, powerful cleaning solutions they are being asked to use,
may endanger their own health.
They
often operate without specialized protective gear. And the increasing
demand for their services is adding new stress and risks.
Janitors cleaning the Amazon headquarters
in Seattle complained that a new disinfectant they were asked to use
made their eyes and skin burn. In San Francisco, janitors said they have
been asked to clean offices without having been told that people who
had or were exposed to the virus had worked there.
Janitors
wonder why they are left in the dark when companies go to great lengths
to ensure that the tech, finance and other workers occupying the
buildings they clean are aware of the most remote possibility of coming
into contact with the virus. It shows, they say, how disparities play
out in a public health crisis — how their lives sometimes seem to be
valued less than those of people with resources and power.
“None
of our families should be treated as second-class citizens,” Olga
Miranda, the president of the Service Employees International Union
Local 87, told the janitors at 555 California last week. She had
gathered the largely immigrant work force in a plaza in front of the
building and told them to walk off the job to protest the cleaning
company’s failure to notify them about the coronavirus case.
themarshallproject |In Houston, the massive
county jail has stopped admitting people arrested for certain low-level
crimes. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, people who usually spend their days fighting
with each other—public defenders and prosecutors—joined forces to get
75 people released from jail in a single day. And outside Oakland,
California, jailers are turning to empty hotel rooms to make sure the
people they let out have a place to go.
Across the country, the coronavirus outbreak is transforming criminal
justice in the most transient and turbulent part of the system: local
jails. Run mostly by county sheriffs, jails hold an ever-changing
assortment of people—those who are awaiting trial and cannot afford to
pay bail; those convicted of low-level offenses; overflows from crowded
prisons.
“Basically, the shit hit the fan,” said Corbin Brewster, chief public
defender of Tulsa County. “COVID-19 is just a magnifying glass for all
the problems in the criminal justice system.”
Local officials’ responses have run the gamut. In the crisis of the
moment, some are adopting measures long urged by criminal justice
reformers: declining to prosecute or freeing people who have committed
drug offenses or nonviolent crimes; releasing the sick or elderly;
trying to reduce the jail population. For example, officials have been temporarily transferring some at-risk detainees to housing units in Kent, Washington, which were built to house homeless people.
But others have stuck to tough-on-crime tactics or rhetoric. The
sheriff in Bristol County, near Boston, argued the incarcerated would be safer locked up, as would the public.
Because millions of people each year cycle in and out of jail,
experts have long warned that these lockups have the potential to be
petri dishes of infection—an assertion coronavirus will test.
nbcdfw | Doctors at Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth say stress from the
coronavirus pandemic may be linked to the six cases of child abuse they
saw this week, one resulting in death.
Dr. Jayme Coffman, medical director of the CARE team at Cook Children’s, said all six cases were related to physical abuse.
They typically consult about eight a month.
“Thursday night, we had one child admitted with unfortunately,
life-threatening injuries, which they succumbed to, as well as four
other children in the emergency department at the same time who were
treated and released,” Coffman said. “It was like, we have to reach out
to the community.”
Coffman said all of the children were 6 years old or younger. Though
she said they could not say with full certainty the impacts of COVID-19
motivated the abuse, “it’s hard to think that it’s just coincidental”.
“There’s no way for us to directly link that, but that’s the concern –
are these families under more stress related to financial issues,
whether it’s lost jobs or concerns for their jobs?” she said. “We also
saw similar types of things happen during the recession where, in our
trauma department, the most common cause of trauma death in children was
motor vehicle collisions. During the recession, that changed to abusive
head trauma, and I don’t want to see that again.”
Shellie McMillon, chief program officer at the Alliance For
Children, described the spike in cases at Cook Children’s as heartbreaking.
“One thing we know is that educators, our school
professionals are the largest group of people who report suspected child abuse
and that makes sense. They’re usually with kids a good portion of the day,”
McMillon said. “Now that kids are not in school, they’re at home – a lot of
times, they don’t have that, what we call a trusted adult, to maybe tell about what’s
going on.”
McMillon said one of the crucial things parents or
caretakers should keep in mind if they are stressed is to not hesitate to ask
for help.
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