Libertarian Leanings

Bafflingly Silent?

In a column in Reason Magazine, Robby Soave asks the question, "Why Are the Mainstream Media Ignoring Tara Reade's Sexual Assault Accusation Against Joe Biden?"

On September 14, 2018, The New York Times reported the existence of an unverified sexual misconduct allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The story cited three people who had read a letter sent by the accuser—Christine Blasey Ford—to Sen. Diane Feinstein (D–Calif.). Ford was not interviewed for the story; indeed, she wasn't named.

Unconfirmed reports of a teenaged Kavanaugh assaulting a teenaged Ford evidently merited coverage from The Times. This prompts an obvious question: Why is the paper of record now declining to publicize a very troubling allegation against former Vice President Joe Biden?

The Times is hardly alone in this regard. The mainstream media have remained bafflingly silent about Tara Reade, a former member of then-Senator Biden's staff who claims that he sexually assaulted her in 1993.

What is so baffling?  News outlets are going broke left and right.  Find out who is propping them up.  Billionaires can lose money on media ventures if those media ventures return value in some other form.

Israel's Coronavirus Vaccine Prototype

The Jerusalem Post reports that Israel is testing a coronavirus vaccine prototype on rodents at a defense laboratory.

JERUSALEM - Israel has begun testing a COVID-19 vaccine prototype on rodents at its bio-chemical defense laboratory, a source said on Tuesday.

 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR), in rural Ness Ziona, to join the fight against the coronavirus pandemic on Feb. 1, prompting an easing of its secrecy as it cooperates with civilian scientists and private firms.

 

 

In a statement, Netanyahu's office said IIBR director Shmuel Shapira had informed him of "significant progress" in designing a vaccine prototype and that the institute "is now preparing a model for commencing an animal trial."

 

A source familiar with IIBR activities told Reuters that trials were already under way on rodents.

Israel has reported 4,473 cases.  There have been 19 deaths

 

FDA Approves Hydroxochoroquine and Chloroquine for COVID-19

From the WSJ, An FDA Breakthrough on Treatment.

The Food and Drug Administration on Sunday green-lighted two malaria medicines that have shown some promise treating the novel coronavirus, and the emergency approvals couldn’t come soon enough. Expanding their use could bring quicker relief to patients and hospitals while allowing scientists to better assess their efficacy.

The malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine (HC) and chloroquine have been around for more than five decades, so their safety is well documented. New evidence suggests that they could also help fight the novel coronavirus, as op-eds by Dr. Jeff Colyer on these pages have reported. Both chloroquine and HC in vitro block the replication of RNA viruses like the novel coronavirus.

Dr. Vladimir Zelenko has had impressive success treating patients afflicted with the Wuhan Virus.  Of 699 patients treated with the combination of hydroxochloroquine, zinc, and azithromycin, no one died and no one had to be intubated.

Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin

From this morning's WSJ, An Update on the Coronavirus Treatment: Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin continue to show results for patients.

For my entire career, I have taken a conservative approach to medicine. I don’t want to give false or premature hope. All of this is subject to further refinement as more information arrives. But likewise I can’t ignore the available evidence. This appears to be the best widely available option for treating Covid-19 and not merely easing the suffering from the disease. It would be irresponsible not to pursue this option aggressively.

The author, Dr. Jeff Colyer, is a practicing physician who served as governor of Kansas from 2018 to 2019.

Hydroxychloroquine, Zinc, Azithromycin

In a study conducted by Dr. Vladmir Zelenko, a board-certified family practitioner in New York, 699 coronavirus patients were treated with a combination of hydroxychloroquine sulfate, zinc, and azithromycin.  No patients died, no patients were intubated, and only four were hospitalized.

More Coronavirus Hoarding

It's not just toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and paper towels that have been flying off store shelves.

Updated March 24, 2020: As the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has spread across the United States, its impact can be seen in every community. Businesses and schools are closed, the stock market is exceptionally volatile, and store shelves are empty as the American public has scrambled to prepare for the worldwide pandemic and social distancing prescribed by the WHO and CDC.

While people have stockpiled toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and pantry essentials, they've also purchased ammunition at an unprecedented rate. Here at Ammo.com, our growth in sales directly correlates with the rise of COVID-19 and its spread across the country. Starting on February 23rd, sales began to increase as the search term “coronavirus” gained traction, according to Google Trends. This increase in sales has continued as follows:

• 720% increase in revenue
• 434% increase in transactions
• 334% increase in site traffic
• 27% increase in conversion rate
• 45% increase in average order value

Read the rest here.

It's Not Hysteria

Are we over reacting with our self imposed quarantine?  Well, it sure looked like hysteria as toilet paper and paper towels disappeared from store shelves with lightning speed. 

I went into Sam's Club on a weekday morning with a plan to stock up on essentials like beer in the event we had to quarantine ourselves.  I forgot the popcorn, but I remembered to pick up enough canned tuna, canned chicken, coffee, evaporated milk, and mayonnaise to last for a couple of weeks.  I'll carefully venture out on an as-needed basis to pick up fresh milk and bread.

Meanwhile Wall Street is going wild.  Somebody's gonna make a fortune, but it ain't me.  My formerly robust IRA account has lost more than 20% since the end of February, and today is shaping up to be another brutal day.  Yes, the market will come back, so in the long run I'm not worried.  Besides, I can scrape by without it.  Still, it's disheartening to see the losses pile up, even though I expect they will never be anything but paper losses.

On a somewhat brighter side Willis Eschenbach posting on Watts Up With That? thinks that things may not be so dire. The source of his optimism is the Diamond Princess cruise ship that was quarantined for weeks with a Coronavirus breakout.

We had a perfect petri-dish coronavirus disease (COVID-19) experiment with the cruise ship “Diamond Princess”. That’s the cruise ship that ended up in quarantine for a number of weeks after a number of people tested positive for the coronavirus. I got to wondering what the outcome of the experiment was.

So I dug around and found an analysis of the situation, with the catchy title

of Estimating the infection and case fatality ratio for COVID-19 using age-adjusted data from the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship (PDF), so I could see what the outcomes were.

As you might imagine, before they knew it was a problem, the epidemic raged on the ship, with infected crew members cooking and cleaning for the guests, people all eating together, close living quarters, lots of social interaction, and a generally older population. Seems like a perfect situation for an overwhelming majority of the passengers to become infected.

And despite that, some 83% (82.7% – 83.9%) of the passengers never got the disease at all … why?

Michael Levitt, said the same thing.  Levitt is an American-British-Israeli biophysicist and Nobel Prize laureate who accurately predicted that the spread of the virus in Wuhan would slow down in February.  Levitt says "the end of the pandemic is near," pointing to the Diamond Princess to reinforce his argument.

The Diamond Princess cruise ship represented the worst-case scenario in terms of disease spread, as the close confines of the ship offered optimal conditions for the virus to be passed among those aboard. The population density aboard the ship was the equivalent of trying to cram the whole Israeli population into an area 30 kilometers square. In addition, the ship had a central air conditioning and heating system, and communal dining rooms.

“Those are extremely comfortable conditions for the virus and still, only 20% were infected. It is a lot, but pretty similar to the infection rate of the common flu,” Levitt said. Based on those figures, his conclusion was that most people are simply naturally immune.

Statistics for the Diamond Princess outbreak can be found in this analysis: Estimating the infection and case fatality ratio for COVID-19 using age-adjusted data from the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship.  I decided to compare those numbers to an earlier epidemic, the 2009-2010 H1N1.  Nothing fancy, just calculated the percentages from the Diamond Princess Coronavirus numbers, applied the percentages to the U.S. population, and compared the results to the H1N1 numbers.  I compiled the following table from those statistics.

 

Diamond Princess Coronavirus Outbreak

Age	Passengers	Infected	Deaths	%Infected	%Deaths
0 - 9	16	1	0	6.25%	0.00%
10 - 19	23	5	0	21.74%	0.00%
20 - 29	347	28	0	8.07%	0.00%
30 - 39	428	34	0	7.94%	0.00%
40 - 49	334	27	0	8.08%	0.00%
50 - 59	398	59	0	14.82%	0.00%
60 - 69	923	177	0	19.18%	0.00%
70 - 79	1015	234	6	23.05%	2.56%
80 - 89	216	54	1	25.00%	1.85%
Totals	3711	619	7	16.68%	1.13%
H1N1 2010	308,745,538	60,800,000	12,469	19.69%	0.0205%
USA 2020	330,000,000	55,044,462	622,474	16.68%	1.13%

 

Seven deaths out of 3,711 doesn't seem like a lot, but actually it is.  When you compare the infection rates of H1N1 to that of the Coronavirus, 19.69% vs. 16.68%, you can see that they are roughly comparable.  However, applying the infection rate, 16.68%, and the fatality rate, 1.13%, from the Diamond Princess to the entire 2020 U.S. population, it turns out there is no comparison to the H1N1.  The Coronvirus is far more deadly with over 622,000 projected Coronavirus deaths compared to 12,469 actual H1N1 deaths. 

OK, it's not apples to apples, comparing the entire U.S. to the Diamond Princess.  Social distancing was nearly impossible on the Diamond Princess, but we are doing it as a country, and it's sure to lower the fatality rate.

When Trump began reinstating border enforcement, when he started construction of the wall on the southern border, when he imposed tariffs, when he renegotiated trade contracts, when he devised a tax policy to repatriate U.S. companies' foreign earned income, it was all with the objective of rebuilding our manufacturing capacity, and helping American workers. All of those things have put us in a position to better withstand our current Coronavirus crisis. We can wait it out.

Open border policies never made any sense before, but now they make even less sense, if that's possible.  And suddenly we make another startling discovery: Rebuilding American manufacturing capacity — for producing our own life saving drugs which are now produced in China, as an example — isn't really such a bad idea.  Things Trump has done to protect American jobs, will help to protect American lives.

The fact is, though, our concern over the Coronavirus is not hysteria.

Don't Call It The Wuhan Virus

Andrew McCarthy:  "But there is a Republican in the White House, so what was mundane yesterday is racist today."

Moreover, the president’s letter elaborates, Congress has explicitly authorized the chief executive, in an emergency, “to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession.”

Not only did history and common sense justify the administration (among others) in noting the origin of the Wuhan coronavirus. Doing so was a legal necessity if the imperative of federal support for beleaguered state governments was to be fulfilled.

Clyburn Brings Home a Winner

In his third try for the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden has finally won a presidential primary, his very first. In yesterday's South Carolina Democratic primary Joe Biden came in first with 48.4% of the vote total, more than double that of the second place finisher, Bernie Sanders.

The full results are as follows:

Candidate	Votes	Percent	Delegates
Biden	255,660	48.4%	33
Sanders	105,068	19.9%	11
Steyer	59,817	11.3%
Buttigieg	43,483	8.2%
Warren	37,285	7.1%
Klobuchar	16,610	3.1%
Others	9,802	1.9%

Biden has been in public office since 1973 when he became U.S. Senator from Delaware.  Over the course of his political career he has run for president three times, first in 1988 and again in 2008, failing each time to win a single state primary election.  But in 2008 Biden hit political pay dirt when he became Barack Obama's running mate and then his Vice President.  It's extremely doubtful that Biden would have taken this third shot at the presidency had he not been Obama's Vice President. 

But, here we are.  At 77 years of age Biden is now the unlikely savior of the Democrats' 2020 election chances up and down the ticket.  Party leaders are nearly distraught that the leading candidate for their nomination is Bernie Sanders, who is actually not a Democrat. His nomination could create a devastating fracture in the Democratic party.

In the face of this looming disaster, Democratic Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina threw his weight behind Biden's candidacy and, perhaps reluctantly, gave him an endorsement. 

A major factor in Biden’s victory was the recent endorsement he earned from South Carolina Democratic Rep. James Clyburn, the House Majority Whip. Roughly a quarter of South Carolina voters polled by ABC said that Clyburn’s endorsement was a “major” factor in the choice on Saturday, but Clyburn still appeared to distance himself from the former vice president during a Saturday hit on CNN.

“We need to do some retooling in the campaign. No question about that. I did not feel free to speak out about or even deal with it inside, because I had not committed to his candidacy,” he stated. “I have now. I’m all in. And I’m not going to sit idly by and watch people mishandle his campaign.”

If the exit polling is accurate, that a quarter of South Carolina's primary voters cast ballots for Joe Biden based on Clyburn's endorsement, Biden and the Democrats may be in some real trouble going forward.

Sanders, the Independent socialist from Vermont, is still in the lead in the delegate tally for the Democratic presidential nomination.  He has been the top vote getter in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, and finishing second in South Carolina.

In all likelihood Biden would have won South Carolina without Clyburn's endorsement, but maybe not in so convincing a fashion.  There are hypothetical scenarios in which Biden loses, but if you simply took the number of voters estimated to have relied on Clyburn's endorsement and subtracted that number from Biden's total, he still wins.

Biden's strong showing gives leading Democrats hope.  If he gains momentum going into Super Tuesday, which is coming up in two days, Biden might continue on to lock up the nomination on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention this summer.  A fatal rupture might then be averted.

Or not.  Sanders has not noticeably lost momentum.  Democrats have been moving left, promoting policies in education, immigration, voting rights, and taxation that aim to build a socialist leaning base.  And now after decades of supporting stealth socialism as the path to everlasting power, Democrats are faced with a real socialist who is picking off their leftmost leaning voters — and he's not even a Democrat.

Unless Biden wins convincingly this Tuesday, Democrats are heading for a showdown between the Democrats who are avowed socialists and the Democrats who pretend they are not socialists.  Bernie Sanders and the avowed socialists will likely lose that battle, and when they do there's little hope that they will kiss and make up with party leaders.  In that case the Sanders voters who don't stay home may very well cross over and vote for Trump.  If Sanders wins out, a significant block of Democrat voters might stay home rather than cast a vote for socialism. 

Whatever the outcome, the November election will be a choice between socialism, either stated or implied, and liberty.  Liberty is going to win.  The only question will be, how big?