Monday, November 16, 2020
Arthritis drug 'cuts elderly Covid-19 deaths by two-thirds', say researchers - raising hopes that it will save the most vulnerable
An arthritis drug has been found to cut deaths in patients admitted to hospital with Covid-19 by a remarkable two-thirds – giving medics a powerful new weapon in their armoury against the disease.
The daily pill, first earmarked as a potential Covid game-changer by a British firm, reduces deaths by 71 per cent in those with moderate or severe illness, researchers say.
Importantly, it works in the elderly, raising hopes that it will save the most vulnerable.
Called baricitinib, and marketed under the brand name Olumiant, it is a relatively new drug for rheumatoid arthritis that has been available for only three years.
But in February it was identified as a strong candidate to help treat what was then the new threat of Covid-19.
The drug was picked out by London-based BenevolentAI, which examined thousands of existing medicines for signs they might combat Covid.
Its artificial intelligence program predicted baricitinib would ‘reduce the ability of the virus to infect lung cells’.
Now the idea has been validated with pan-European researchers, led by Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, reporting baricitinib slashes death rates in those admitted to hospital with the disease by two-thirds.
Last night NHS cancer specialist Professor Justin Stebbing, of Imperial College London, predicted that baricitinib would help save thousands of lives.
The results, in the journal Science Advances, come from patients hospitalised with Covid-19 pneumonia at two hospitals, in Italy and Spain.
Professor Volker Lauschke, of the Karolinska, who led the study, said: ‘These results are especially encouraging seeing as the study included a large cohort of elderly patients, a group often excluded.’
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Positive lessons conservatives can learn from Trump
Like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher before him, Donald Trump has redefined conservative politics throughout the Western world. Every centre-right party in the West now has a Trumpist faction. Like Reagan and Thatcher, some of Trump’s policy achievements are unlikely to be reversed.
Of course, Trump is no Reagan or Thatcher. It’s easy to forget both Reagan and Thatcher were furiously vilified by the left when they were in office. Reagan was portrayed as a simpleton — “It’s what he knows for sure that just ain’t so,” Walter Mondale wisecracked. Thatcher was regarded as a warmonger, a heartless destroyer of communities and would-be authoritarian, and Thatcherism was an analogue for fascism.
Reagan and Thatcher each won multiple elections, cementing their revolutions. Each was succeeded by a paler, plainer associate.
Reagan and Thatcher behaved properly in public and private life. No one could say that of Trump. Reagan was widely loved.
Trump is still in office. His strange purge of the upper echelons of the Defence Department may be just spite. But they could indicate a big surprise, possibly a sudden withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan.
Overall, it’s not likely, but it is possible. Trump’s actions here, as elsewhere, are weird.
Ultimately, Trump will likely accept Joe Biden’s victory. But still we should marvel at the closeness of the result. Last time, Trump won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, which put him over the top in electoral college votes, by a cumulative sliver of 77,000 votes.
This time he’s behind in Pennsylvania by a bit under 60,000 votes, in Georgia by 15,000 and Arizona 11,000. Those three states would have given Trump victory. In an election of just under 160 million voters, Trump will lose office by a cumulative total of less than 90,000 votes; 90,000 out of 160 million. If it was a fluke for Trump to win in 2016, it’s a fluke that he lost this time.
And, as widely commented, the overall results were very shabby for the Democrats. The Senate now stands at 50 Republicans, 48 Democrats, with two Senate run-off elections in Georgia in January. The Democrats lost the governorship in Montana and did not win one from the Republicans. They did not capture a single state legislature from the Republicans, including critical states like Texas, Michigan and Pennsylvania. They lost eight or more seats in the House of Representatives and now have a narrow and vulnerable majority there.
Trump went backwards in his share of white male voters but went up with Hispanic voters, black men and most other demographic groups. Trump lost, Biden won. It was a narrow result. But beyond the presidency, the Democrats did very poorly.
Out of all this cross-grained complexity and electoral ambivalence, how is it that Trump has transformed conservative politics?
First, there are two lessons out of the Trump phenomenon that conservatives definitely should not learn.
One is that to be successful, a conservative leader or movement must be as aggressive, crude, dishonest and offensive as Trump. That would be a disastrous lesson, for conservatives and for democracy.
However, there is an opposite lesson that also should not be learnt, and that is that in order not to be like Trump, conservatives should not fight, should not be aggressive politically as opposed to personally, should not campaign for cultural values as well as economic or defence policy, that in order not to be Trump they need to become like Charles Dickens’ Uriah Heep, famous for his perennial ‘umbleness.
American conservatism has a huge effect on conservatism all over the Western world. It wasn’t always thus. Because it is so self-consciously a nation of the New World, the US was often thought not to be really conservative at all in the European sense. It lacked traditions of throne and altar, and of close ethnic association with nationality, as in German Germans, Italian Italians and so on.
Today conservatism right throughout the West is profoundly influenced by the US and very often defined in US terms. American conservatives have big think tanks, a continuing conservative rural base, private universities and liberal arts colleges, a thousand journals and a vast multiplicity of activist groups to draw on.
They also have a much higher degree of religious belief and practice than European nations, or Australia. And right throughout the West there is a close correlation between churchgoing and overall conservative attitudes.
I don’t want to be misunderstood. Christianity, in most policy areas, does not adjudicate definitively between centre-right and centre-left parties. But it is a simple sociological fact that one of the best predictors of conservative social and political attitudes in countries with predominantly Christian backgrounds is frequency of church attendance. And the US still has a much higher rate of church attendance than most Western nations, with a very few exceptions such as Poland. What should conservatives therefore make of the Trump period?
First, of course, Trump is not likely to leave the scene. He has just received more than 72 million votes for president. His overwhelming desire to be the centre of attention means that he will surely tease Americans, and torture the Republican Party, with the prospect of running again for the presidency in 2024, when he would only be Joe Biden’s age now. Indeed, if Biden survives four years in office and runs for a second term, Trump at 78 could still be the youth candidate.
Or if Kamala Harris succeeds Biden as the Democrats’ candidate, will she be able to win states like Pennsylvania and Michigan against Trump? This will be especially the case if Biden’s pro-regulation, pro-green policy bent has damaged US economic growth.
Trump’s likely presence on the national and international stage, perhaps at the head of a new right-wing cable news network or other media ventures, makes it all the more important that conservatives learn the real lessons of the Trump presidency.
Conservatives who dislike Trump must recognise the real achievements of his presidency: lower taxes; deregulation; high economic growth before COVID-19; better enforcement of American borders; conservative black letter law judges; three new Middle East peace deals; a positive revolution in Israel’s position in the Middle East; containing Iran; calling out China; trade deals that help American jobs; onshoring of more manufacturing production in the US; a higher defence budget; putting pressure on NATO countries to increase their defence expenditure; stronger support for pro-life measures and movements than any previous president. It would be a strange conservative who held that list of achievements as nothing. Equally, however, those conservatives who have fallen in love with Trump should acknowledge his substantial failures and disasters.
His response to COVID-19 was chaotic, ineffective, counter-productive on key measures like mask wearing and social distancing generally, and politically calamitous. It’s wrong to blame Trump personally for most US virus deaths, it’s right to say his response was ineffective and chaotic. As well, needlessly and constantly, Trump tells lies. He seems to lie as often as he tells the truth, and indeed seems indifferent as to the difference. He even boasted to Bob Woodward in the book, Rage, that he lied about the severity of COVID in order not to alarm the nation.
Trump often lies about international affairs, as in his ridiculous early boast that he had removed the North Korean nuclear threat by his love-ins with Kim Jong-un.
Trump’s administration was needlessly unstable, with a bewildering and dangerous turnover of key personnel in defence and national security areas in particular. He trashed the value of alliances.
There was also a consistent vindictive nastiness to Trump. It’s one thing to be nasty to The New York Times. It’s quite another to express contempt for the war service of Senator John McCain, who spent five years as a prisoner of war being brutally mistreated by North Vietnamese communists and refusing early release, insisting instead that, according to the rules of war, combat pilots should be released in the order in which they were captured.
And for all that some of Trump’s achievements need to be recognised, his ultimate political fate was that with positive economic reviews, and all the advantages of incumbency, he was still defeated by Biden, who took five states Trump had won in 2016 and won the popular vote by more than five million.
Nonetheless, there are important positive lessons for conservatives in Trump’s politics. One is that nationalism and patriotism are powerful forces that galvanise voters in a positive direction. This is a deep insight that conservatives should embrace more energetically. It is a cleavage between left and right in modern Western politics. Pope Francis, undoubtedly a good and holy man but a pontiff with a left-wing view of politics and economics, in his latest Encyclical, Fratelli tutti (All Brothers), argues for a kind of world government of technocrats to solve international problems.
At the kindest, you would have to say that this formulation is unrealistic, given how despotic and dysfunctional so many national governments are. But it’s also wrong in principle. Pope John Paul II, also a good and holy man but one with a conservative view of politics, argued in his Encyclicals that family and nation were natural states of humanity. They were mechanisms of human solidarity, not to be despised.
Similarly, however coarsely, Trump vigorously rejects the toxic notion that Western societies today are responsible for historic misdeeds of centuries ago, or that their national stories are inherently and intrinsically evil. Trump is not well equipped to make these arguments intellectually, but instinctively he wants to fight such culture wars. He’s right to do so.
Many conservative leaders are scared of these conflicts. But the more they give in to the cultural left, the more they are endlessly apologising, inviting defeat. Conservative politicians shouldn’t make these issues the centre of their politics, but they shouldn’t be scared of them. A bit of fight is no bad thing.
A lesson which it is astonishing that Trump should teach us is that conservative parties must seek out ethnic minority voters.
Trump went backwards with white men but came within an ace of winning a second term by increasing his vote with Hispanics and blacks. He won something like 40 per cent of Hispanics in Florida but also a large share in Texas.
Democrats have thought for decades that demography is their friend. They’re wrong. Conservatives should never accept a vote is lost to them on the basis of a citizen’s ethnicity. Hispanics are natural Republicans — they love the military and enlist in disproportionate numbers, they love religion, family is the centre of their life, they run many small businesses. They don’t necessarily favour illegal immigration. In opposing illegal immigration Republicans must support legal immigrants.
Republicans have been poor at seeking out Hispanic and black voters just as Liberals in Australia have been poor at seeking out ethnic Indian and Chinese voters. Boris Johnson’s government is good at this, as was Canada’s last Conservative PM, Stephen Harper. So long as conservatives are truly colour blind in civic matters, their values should resonate with ethnic minorities much more powerfully than woke, left-liberal, postmodern identity politics obsessions. Most minority voters like law and order.
For all that, economics is the key to everything. Trump had powerful appeal to minorities, and to mainstream voters, because prior to COVID he had provided jobs and wages were rising.
Conservatives must be pragmatic. They are patriotic and socially conservative but they should not be wedded to any government ideology, whether it’s libertarianism, free markets, social welfare cuts or anything else. Trump in 2016 appealed because he promised results rather than dogma.
Finally, conservatives need leaders who command the public square. If in our culture it is now impossible to have cut-through, like Reagan, unless you are nasty, like Trump, then we are in a mess.
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http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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