90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, March 28, 2020

NIH failed to test coronavirus drugs, studied drunk monkeys, soap operas, and tailgating instead

Expert warned agency as much as 87.5 percent of biomedical research was wasteful.

On a steamy summer day inside the lecture auditorium of the storied National Institutes of Health headquarters, Dr. Michael Bracken delivered a stark message to an audience that dedicated its life, and owed its living, to medical research.

As much as 87.5% of biomedical research is wasted or inefficient, the respected Yale University epidemiologist declared in a sobering assessment for a federal research agency that spends about $40 billion a year on medical studies.

He backed his staggering statistic with these additional stats: 50 out of every 100 medical studies fail to produce published findings, and half of those that do publish have serious design flaws. And those that aren’t flawed and manage to publish are often needlessly redundant.

“Waste is more than just a waste of money and resources,” Bracken preached to the audience back in July 2016, according to the NIH’s official account of the speech. “It can actually be harmful to people’s health.”

Nearly four years later, Bracken’s sweeping indictment about the financial management, organization and conduct of federal medical research looms large over a series of “what if” questions about the deadly and ever-spreading COVID-19 pandemic:
What if the research community hadn’t bet all its marbles on the next pandemic coming from a flu instead of a version of the coronavirus?

What if NIH or other agencies had funded research into the efficacy of drugs like chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, and HIV cocktails that had shown promise against coronavirus dating back to 2003?
What if more pressure had been applied by the medical governance world to develop vaccines aimed at coronavirus?
What if the medical community had simply adjusted its outdated modeling that predicted coronavirus would spread slowly and could be contained to account for the massive growth in global air travel the last decade that transported this virus from China to the West in treacherously fast time?

Correspondent Christine Dolan laid bare in an article Thursday in Just the News how the major failures, miscalculations and bad bets that the official science world made on coronavirus are now coming back to haunt the current pandemic.

As Dr. Carlos Del Rio, the Emory University infectious disease specialist and former CDC disease hunter, aptly noted: “There are multiple faults. And in the end, we were woefully...

Chuck Woolery On Mueller's Gestapo Tactics On An Elderly, Law Abiding Citizen...

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Heh, Chuck Woolery Favorited One Of My Tweets....Made My Day!

FACT-CHECK: CNN runs a misleading 'fact-check' on Trump's coronavirus testing levels claim

Yes, the United States has tested more people than any other country. CNN Makes Fake News To Suit Their Corrupt Agenda.

CNN incorrectly "fact-checked" President Donald Trump in real-time during his daily coronavirus task force briefing on Friday. As the president was discussing testing levels in the United States, the network ran a misleading chyron indicating he was wrong to claim the U.S. led the world in coronavirus testing.

What did President Trump say?

For several days, Trump has noted that the U.S. is surpassing South Korea and other countries when it comes to coronavirus testing. For instance, at a press conference on Wednesday, he said:

Just reported that the United States has done far more 'testing' than any other nation, by far. In fact, over an eight day span, the United States now does more testing than what South Korea (which has been a very successful tester) does over an eight week span.

The claim has been echoed by members of his administration, including Dr. Deborah Birx who indicated on Tuesday:

We now have 370,000 tests that have been done. The majority of those -- over 220,000 in the last eight days, which, those of you who have been tracking the South Korea numbers, put us equivalent to what they did in eight weeks that we did in eight days.

Trump and Birx are clearly comparing testing levels in absolute — not per capita — terms.
What's wrong with CNN's 'fact-check'?

"TRUMP INCORRECTLY SAYS U.S. HAS TESTED MORE THAN ANYONE; PER CAPITA, SOUTH KOREA HAS DONE 5X MORE, ITALY 4X MORE," CNN's chyron read.

The network, and other media outlets, have run similar fact-checks in news articles:

While the US has overtaken South Korea in total numbers of coronavirus tests administered, it has conducted far fewer tests per capita given the US population is more than six times larger than South Korea's.

In other words, CNN and others are accusing Trump of lying for using absolute figures (raw totals) when comparing the numbers of tests performed across countries, rather than per capita levels. But the president never claimed the U.S. leads the world on a per capita basis. Plainly stated, he is being "fact-checked" on something he never said.

CNN "Reporter" Kate Bennett

What the data show: U.S. and South Korea

According to the COVID Tracking Project which collects testing data from the public health departments of all 50 states and U.S. territories, the U.S. has performed 672,449 as of Saturday morning that have produced either a positive or negative result. If you add the number of pending cases, the figure comes out to 730,799 COVID-19 tests that have been performed in the U.S.

The number may be even higher. As the COVID Tracking Project notes, reporting standards vary by state with some doing a better job at sharing data from commercial and university labs than others.

Meanwhile, official data from the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (질병관리본부) shows that South Korea has performed 387,925 COVID-19 tests through March 28.

So yes, Trump and Dr. Birx are both correct. The U.S. has surpassed South Korea in the number of coronavirus tests and is testing at a faster rate. As Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith explained on Twitter, on March 26, South Korea performed 12,019 tests or 235 per million population on March 26. In comparison, America performed...

The Cheapest Way For President Trump To Save U.S. Oil

The President of the United States has the power, at his sole discretion without any other authority, to place a fee on imported oil or products. It becomes variable when a base price (floor price) is set and a fee is paid on any imports where the price on imports is below the base price. If the base price for oil was set at $50.00 per barrel and the import price is $30.00 per barrel, then an import fee of $20.00 per barrel would be paid to the United States Treasury. Likewise, if the import price (world price) is $50.00 a barrel, then no fee is paid. Thus, the fee is variable depending on the price paid for an imported barrel.

Covid 19 and the Oil Price War

Recently, two events, the Covid 19 pandemic and an oil price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia have had an unprecedented effect on the price of oil. Covid 19 has had a shock on demand unlike any event since 2001. This, together with Russia and Saudi Arabia flooding the market with excess crude, has sent prices sharply downward. Each event alone would have had a negative effect on oil price, however, together they have shocked the market. The impact the fundamentals of a variable import fee would have on oil price would be somewhat tempered by these two-events combined at the same time. It is the author’s belief Covid 19 will dissipate and world demand will normalize in the short term. The price war could be longer term. Irrespective, a variable import fee would have a positive effect on the oil price, yet it would be far more effective under normal market conditions.

The Effects of the Fee

The majority of the oil in the world is owned by a government and therefor a government will set the price of oil. The United States is the largest consuming nation in the world, however, because our oil is owned by private industry, the United States does not currently have a role in setting the price. We have long been held hostage to the policies of OPEC and other governments. It is estimated that the current consumption in the U.S. is approximately 20 million barrels per day. Production estimates range between 11 and 13 million barrels per day, meaning a deficit between 7 to 10 million barrels per day. If an import fee with a base price of $50.00 per barrel is placed on oil and the US imports of 7 million barrels per day then the price of the imported barrel would be $50.00 (price plus fee). Any seller would seek this price and prefer to sell to the U. S. as opposed to selling at a lower price set by some financial market indices. Likewise, other consuming nations, seeking to maintain supply, would pay a higher price to purchase oil. Purchasers in the U. S., required to rely on imports would in turn pay a higher price for domestic oil than market indices. As such, the world oil price would seek a level set by the United States base price (floor price) as set by the import fee. Accordingly, the United States, would become a vital participant in determining the world oil price.

Is the United States Truly in Balance?

Prior to the crisis of Covid 19 and the price war, there was considerable evidence that production in the United States was...

Hypocritical #MeToo Founder Alyssa Milano SILENT as Joe Biden Accused of Sexual Assault

A couple of years ago Alyssa Milano said, “You can’t pretend to be the party of the American people and then not support a woman who comes forward with her #MeToo story.” Now she’s refusing to support a woman who has accused her “friend” Joe Biden of sexual assault.

Hollywood celebrity and founder of the #MeToo movement, Alyssa Milano, has remained silent as graphic sexual assault allegations against Democrat presidential frontrunner Joe Biden emerged this week.

Milano, who has been vocal about her support for Biden during the Democrat primaries, is widely regarded as the instigator of the MeToo movement, after encouraging “all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘me too’ as a status” on Twitter in 2017.

related: Alyssa Milano Is A Self Righteous ..........

Milano also attended the Senate hearing on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in support of his accuser Christine Blasey Ford. She said she opposed Kavanaugh’s nomination because of unsubstantiated accusations that he sexually assaulted Ford in high school. She even live-tweeted from inside the proceeding, letting her three million-plus followers know: “I believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.“

According to Milano in 2018, “You can’t pretend to be the party of the American people and then not support a woman who comes forward with her #MeToo story.”

But refusing to support a woman who has come forward with her #MeToo story is exactly what Milano is now doing. It seems #MeToo allegations can be conveniently dismissed by liberals if the target of the allegation is a Democrat.

Fast forward to 2020 and Milano is being slammed as a hypocrite on social media for refusing to support Biden’s former Senate aide and #MeToo accuser Tara Reade.

Reade came forward this week with graphic...

If I followed all my doctor’s instructions to the letter, life would be excruciating. It would be tantamount to having Michael Bloomberg make my life choices, which is to say my life wouldn’t be worth living.

Human beings have never been as risk-averse as experts want them to be. We instinctively calculate the costs and benefits of engaging in activities that put our health at risk every day.

The coronavirus crisis, in fact, has been one of the few times in my life I’ve allowed medical experts to completely dictate my actions.

I’m writing this piece bunkered down in my home office, staying inside as much as possible, employing a rigorous hand-washing regime, and keeping far away from my now-menacing neighbors when I walk the dog. Like many Americans, I do this not only for my own well-being but for the well-being of those who are at greater risk.

I’m one of the lucky ones: I have a job and can work from home. Millions of others don’t share that luxury. Many of them are calculating the costs of self-quarantining as it relates to their livelihood, businesses, and futures—and those are completely sane, unimpeachable considerations.

Yet, I’ve noticed pundits and politicians trying to shut down difficult discussions of the trade-offs associated with managing the coronavirus crisis and its economic fallout by demanding that everyone shut up and listen to “doctors” and “scientists,” as if no one else’s opinion was useful.

Let’s set aside the fact that many liberals have spent the past decade degrading the gravity of “science,” a word now most often used by pundits to make wild, Malthusian claims about climate change or argue that there are more than two genders. Even if they hadn’t, science is just one aspect of any equation: We should listen to scientists, but not only to scientists.

If all scientists agreed on how the United States should move forward in combating the current pandemic, which they don’t, that still wouldn’t be the end of the story.

Virologists and epidemiologists concern themselves with the spread of disease and the physiological health of human beings, which is naturally of paramount importance right now. But economists concern themselves with whether those who survive the disease will have houses to live in after it’s all over, which matters quite a bit, too, as do pundits’ concerns about the violation of civil liberties and law enforcement officials’ concerns about the possibility of rising criminality.

Science is most meaningful when we consider it together with morality, economic prosperity, human thriving, and thousands of other factors that make our lives bearable. Those considerations don’t dissipate simply because a new virus shows up. Mankind has dealt with pandemics for...