Forget Vaccines, Catch a Cold Instead

An interesting suggestion from  Jon N. Hall

The Wuhan pandemic has been compared to the devastating Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, but the two differ in their victims. The Spanish flu hit young adults aged 20-40, a group that the Wuhan virus mostly doesn’t prey on. The Spanish flu also hit children, which our virus virtually ignores. I’m not an epidemiologist, but when compared to the Spanish flu, COVID-19 seems almost “benign.”

The Spanish flu had a fatality rate of 2.5 percent, while the seasonal flu usually has a fatality rate of just 0.1 percent. Some research suggests that the fatality rate for Covid will ultimately turn out to be more in line with the seasonal flu than with the Spanish flu. And note that there’s a vaccine for the seasonal flu while scientists have yet to develop one for Covid.

So if the latest fatality numbers hold, then Covid will turn out to be much less lethal than the Spanish flu. But calculating the fatality rate is difficult, and can involve a lot of guesswork. To get a taste for the problem of putting a number on the fatality rate, read “Covid-19 Is Not the Spanish Flu” at Wired.

In his novel The Andromeda Strain (1969), Michael Crichton dreams up a pathogen which, in the small town it invades, spares no one except for two individuals. Perhaps the Wuhan virus, the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that has been flown around the globe on commercial airliners to infect the entire planet, might be thought of as a “reverse Andromeda strain,” in that it spares just about everyone except for old folks. If that sounds wacky to you, then you haven’t kept abreast of recent research which suggests that Covid has already infected far more of the population than had been thought.

In Crichton’s fiction, the two survivors of his Andromeda bug aren’t saved by having superior immune systems, but rather by another biologic factor (which I’ll leave for those who haven’t read the novel to discover on their own). Because the Wuhan virus is new, one might think that Covid’s survivors are protected by the immune systems they were born with, i.e. their innate immune systems.

The exquisite defense system that we were born with is a general system. But when that general system of innate immunity neutralizes a pathogen, it creates a second line of defense, an antibody that targets that specific pathogen. Antibodies are part of the adaptive immune system, which is acquired. I know of a hair stylist who swears that the reason she never gets sick is because her clients continually cough and sneeze all over her. The gal may have developed adaptive immunity.

It’d be interesting to see what kinds of antibodies are present in people who work in close proximity to others, like our hair stylist. I’m not an immunologist, but because the Wuhan virus is new, what could account for the ease with which some throw it off, often not even knowing they’ve contracted anything? Is it innate immunity or something else?

On May 14, the website for the journal Science ran “T cells found in COVID-19 patients ‘bode well’ for long-term immunity” by Mitch Leslie. The article cites research suggesting that T cells which fight Covid could have been developed in response to other coronaviruses, like the common cold:

T cells, in contrast, thwart infections in two different ways. Helper T cells spur B cells and other immune defenders into action, whereas killer T cells target and destroy infected cells. The severity of disease can depend on the strength of these T cell responses. …

The researchers think these cells were likely triggered by past infection with one of the four human coronaviruses that cause colds; proteins in these viruses resemble those of SARS-CoV-2...

Before these studies, researchers didn’t know whether T cells played a role in eliminating SARS-CoV-2, or even whether they could provoke a dangerous immune system overreaction. [Link added.]

On May 21, The Federalist ran “Stop Fear-Mongering: Kids Are Safer From Covid-19 Than Everyone Else” by Phil Kerpen, who wrote that “recent papers suggest they [i.e. children] may either have innate immunity or effective partial immunity from recent exposure to common cold coronaviruses,” and he cites much foreign research to support that. But nowhere in his lengthy article does Mr. Kerpin mention T cells. However, on June 2 Kerpen tweeted “A lot of people beat SARS-CoV2 with just T cells.”

On June 3 at Business Insider, science reporter Aylin Woodward wrote:

Some people's immune systems may have a head start in fighting the coronavirus, recent research suggested.

A study published last month in the journal Cell showed that some people who have never been exposed to the coronavirus have helper T cells that are capable of recognizing and responding to it.

The likeliest explanation for the surprising finding, according to the researchers, is a phenomenon called cross-reactivity: when helper T cells developed in response to another virus react to a similar but previously unknown pathogen.

In this case, those T cells may be left over from people's previous exposure to a different coronavirus --- likely one of the four that cause common colds.

The Wuhan virus affects different groups in markedly different ways. Responses range from the asymptomatic to death. If you’re weathering the “cytokine storm” and a hospital puts you on a ventilator, you’d best have your “affairs in order.” To more completely understand this virus, we might study those in each group who respond differently than the group as a whole; that is, study the anomalies.

Are there any commonalities held by the anomalies in each group? The main group that Covid attacks is the elderly, but it also has a taste for males, the obese, and those with underlying conditions (comorbidities), such as diabetes. So, if Covid were to sweep through a nursing home and kill off every last patient except for an obese 70-year-old man with diabetes, we’d have ourselves an excellent anomaly to study, (which might even put one in mind of Crichton’s Andromeda strain.) Likewise, a grade schooler who succumbs to Covid while his classmates don’t even know they’ve contracted it, or a fit pro football player who is laid low by the virus, such as Mark Campbell, would also be an anomaly to investigate.

The “experts” tell us that we can’t get back to normal until we get a vaccine. But often the yearly flu shot is ineffective more than half the time. And there’s no guarantee that science will be able to come up with a vaccine. The experts weren’t able to develop vaccines for other coronaviruses, such as those responsible for SARS and MERS and the common cold.

Americans are being asked to wait for a vaccine which the vast majority of them don’t need due to their innate immunity, their antibodies from growing herd immunity due to having already contracted the virus, and their T cells. Also, this hoped-for vaccine might quickly become useless if the virus mutates, as viruses are wont to do. Are we just supposed to remain in lockdown while we wait until the so-called experts say it’s safe to go outside?

Think of how devastating the Wuhan virus would have been if it had hit the younger still-productive part of the population. Think of the heartache were it to have preyed on kids, wiping out classrooms in the way it wiped out nursing homes. If I were a virus, or a cannibal, I think I’d be more attracted to the young and succulent rather than to the old and stringy. So, as far as viruses go we’ve been lucky with Wuhan, given its choice of victims. Be that as it may, to boost your killer T cells: man up, leave your bunker, and go out and catch a cold.

SOURCE

*********************************

UK: One steroid, and all Europe, says lockdown must end

The discovery in Britain that a £5 steroid, dexamethasone, can be effective in treating COVID-19 marks a potential breakthrough in our understanding of the virus.

Much remains to be learned about the wider potential of the drug but the claims made about its success are striking: that it reduces deaths by one-third in patients on ventilators and by a fifth in ­patients receiving oxygen only.

It has not been shown to benefit COVID-19 patients who do not require oxygen, but this can still, in a global pandemic, mean thousands of lives saved.

There are two further points to be made. With COVID-19, there is a better chance of finding a treatment for the virus than of finding a vaccine. Second, the gathering and interrogation of this data can be of huge use in finding out what works and what does not. The British study looked at the role of old ­familiar generic drugs.

Pharmaceutical companies understandably focus on developing new products: that is their ­raison d’etre. There is no real money to be made in the discovery about the role of steroids.

It is understandable that Health Secretary Matt Hancock has been so keen to tell the world about dexamethasone. Some 4000 COVID patients are dying each day across the world, and if even a small fraction of those lives can be saved with a widely available drug then every day counts.

But another mass experiment is going on, which is also worthy of the British government’s attention. In schools, too, every day counts. Lockdown is being eased all over the world, without much sign of the second wave that so many feared.

In hundreds of thousands of classrooms, children are being taught in the same way as they were pre-COVID, without any viral backlash. The 2m rule should now be abolished and lighter regulations put in place, with schools first in line for a return to normal.

The evidence of London, too, needs to be taken into account. For two weeks now, the number of new lab-confirmed COVID cases has been, on average, two dozen a day — in a city of nine million. Nor have mass protests in Britain over the past fortnight ­resulted in the faintest flicker of a resurgence in new cases. There has been no triggering of the early warning systems (specifically in calls to the 111 hotline that mention COVID-­related symptoms).

We know this because the government is better now at collecting data. And the data should embolden ministers to move faster in reopening society.

The new cases, when they ­arrive, are isolated. Last week, we had news of an outbreak in Beijing, which may lead to the city being locked down in the way that Wuhan was in January. Bizarrely, China has responded by halting the import of European salmon. But overall, it is remarkable how little resurgence there has been in countries that have gradually eased their way out of lockdown or other restrictions.

Weeks ago, Prime Minister Boris Johnson suggested the COVID-19 crisis might not be solved until a vaccine was found. No one knows when that will be, yet the announcement on dexa­methasone reminds us that therapeutic drugs can go a long way to make up for the lack of a vaccine.

Look at HIV/AIDS. In the 1980s, a vaccine was thought to be four or five years away. It still hasn’t been found, but in the meantime retroviral drugs have done a pretty good job of suppressing the virus within individuals, to the extent that new infections have fallen sharply.

Given the success other European countries have had in relaxing lockdowns without rekindling the virus, it is puzzling that the British government is proceeding so gingerly. The level of infection in the population is now so low that it does not qualify under the definition of an epidemic. That has been the case for several weeks, yet non-essential shops have only just reopened, and there is no firm date for reopening bars, restaurants, theatres, hotels — only a promise that it won’t happen before July 4.

Johnson began this crisis seemingly unaware of the medical havoc it might cause. Now he risks seeming to ignore the economic and social damage it has already caused — and the even greater havoc it will cause if lockdown is not lifted soon. Businesses can keep going for only so long without income. Should lockdown be imposed for much longer, we will begin to see a cascade of collapse.

Six months ago, Johnson won an election partly by promising to be the entrepreneurial candidate, who would lead us away from the EU’s precautionary principle towards faster growth. It is time he finds the resolve shown by European counterparts — and leads Britain out of lockdown so the recovery can begin.

SOURCE

**********************************

IN BRIEF

Justice Department proposes rolling back protections for Big Tech (Reuters)

Trump signs bill protecting Chinese Uighurs on same day John Bolton claims he gave President Xi Jinping approval on detention camps (The Daily Caller)

Dick Durbin gives token apology to Tim Scott after "token" remark about police-reform bill (Washington Examiner)

Senate Democrats silent when asked if they condemn Dick Durbin's "token" comment (The Daily Caller)

Hypocrite Nancy Pelosi pours $180,000 into Facebook ads while calling for advertisers to boycott the site (The Washington Free Beacon)

Ex-Atlanta police officer who killed Rayshard Brooks charged with felony murder (CNN)

Georgia Bureau of Investigation says it was not consulted by the DA before charges were filed against officers in Brooks case (11alive.com)

"There are officers walking off": Atlanta cops vote with their feet on indictments (Power Line)

Dumb and dumber: Seattle adds concrete barricades to safeguard the militant group CHOP (Bearing Arms)

Cornell law professor censured by dean after criticizing Black Lives Matter movement (The College Fix)

***************************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

**************************

Coronavirus is weakening, could die out on its own without a vaccine and patients now survive infections that would have killed them at start of the pandemic

I suspect that what the good doctor is noticing is that all the very vulnerable to the virus are now dead.  So he is now seeing what is left, people who were less vulnerable to it in the first place

But it is certainly true that viruses evolve and it certainly true that a form of a virus that does not kill its host will itself survive better. So a non-lethal form could well become dominant

The coronavirus, once an 'aggressive tiger' of a disease, has weakened and become more like a wild cat, according to a top Italian doctor.

Professor Matteo Bassetti said he is convinced the virus is 'changing in severity' and patients are now surviving infections that would have killed them before.

And if the virus's weakening is true, Covid-19 could even disappear without a for a vaccine by becoming so weak it dies out on its own, he claimed.

He has said multiple times in recent months that patients with Covid-19 seem to be faring much better than they were at the start of the epidemic in Italy.

Professor Bassetti suggests this could be because of a genetic mutation in the virus making it less lethal, because of improved treatments, or because people are not getting infected with such large doses because of social distancing.

But other scientists have hit back at the claims in the past and said there is no scientific evidence that the virus has changed at all.

Professor Bassetti, the chief of infectious diseases at San Martino General Hospital in Genoa, Italy, told The Sunday Telegraph the virus could wither away on its own.

He said: 'It was like an aggressive tiger in March and April but now it's like a wild cat. Even elderly patients, aged 80 or 90, are now sitting up in bed and they are breathing without help. The same patients would have died in two or three days before.'

Italy was one of the worst hit countries in the world during the pandemic's early stages, and has now recorded more than 238,000 positive cases and 34,000 deaths.

Scientists have said the elderly population there, the virus spreading in rural areas and the suddenness of the outbreak contributed to the country's high death toll.

Professor Bassetti suggests that one of the reasons the virus might be causing less serious illness is a genetic mutation which has made it less damaging to people's lungs.

Or, he said, people may simply be receiving smaller amounts when they get infected, because of social distancing and lockdown rules, making them less sick.

This theory depends on the severity of someone's illness being affected by their 'viral load' - the amount of virus that gets into someone's body when they're first struck by it.

Professor Bassetti said: 'The clinical impression I have is that the virus is changing in severity.

Viruses are known to change over time because they are subject to random genetic mutations in the same way that all living things are.

These mutations can have various effects and many will only happen briefly and not become a permanent change as newer generations of viruses replace the mutated ones.

However, some of the mutations might turn out to be advantageous to the virus, and get carried forward into future generations.

For example, if a virus becomes less dangerous to its host - that is, it causes fewer symptoms or less death - it may find that it is able to live longer and reproduce more.

As a result, more of these less dangerous viruses are produced and they may go on to spread more effectively than the more dangerous versions, which could be stamped out by medication because more people realise they are ill, for example.

The mutation may then be taken forward in the stronger generations and become the dominant version of the virus.

In an explanation of an scientific study about HIV, the NHS said in 2014: 'The optimal evolutionary strategy for a virus is to be infectious (so it creates more copies of itself) but non-lethal (so its host population doesn’t die out).

'The "poster boy" for successful long-living viruses is, arguably, the family of viruses that cause the common cold, which has existed for thousands of years.' 

'In March and early April the patterns were completely different. People were coming to the emergency department with a very difficult to manage illness and they needed oxygen and ventilation, some developed pneumonia.

'Now, in the past four weeks, the picture has completely changed in terms of of patterns.

'There could be a lower viral load in the respiratory tract, probably due to a genetic mutation in the virus which has not yet been demonstrated scientifically.'

But other scientists did not welcome the idea and said there was no evidence to back up Professor Bassetti's claims.

Dr Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, from the University of Wollongong in Australia, told MailOnline that the idea the virus has disappeared 'seems dubious'.

The epidemiologist warned Italy - which was the centre of Europe's coronavirus crisis in March - was still recording new Covid-19 cases and deaths, showing the virus was still a danger.

At the start of June, in response to Professor Bassetti's claim, Dr Angela Rasmussen, from Columbia University, tweeted: 'There is no evidence that the virus is losing potency anywhere.'

She added less transmission means fewer hospitalisations and deaths - but warned: 'That doesn't mean less virulence.'

The virulence of a virus is how dangerous the illness is but may not directly relate to how contagious it is.

Dr Oscar MacLean, of the University of Glasgow, added: 'These claims are not supported by anything in the scientific literature, and also seem fairly implausible on genetic grounds.

SOURCE

**************************************

It’s been more than three weeks since mass protests started in the US, sparking fears of a surge in infections. The data so far is surprising

No surprise.  The rioters were mostly young.  The coronavirus is almost always a disease of the elderly

On May 26, the day after George Floyd’s death, people started to stream onto America’s streets to protest against police brutality and racial discrimination.

Before long those streets were brimming with protesters. Day after day, tens of thousands of people were marching together in more than 100 cities across the country.

They were also jammed together like proverbial sardines – well inside the 1.8-metre distance dictated by their government’s coronavirus guidelines.

That created an obvious fear – that the protests would cause a huge surge in infections, just as the United States was trying to open up again.

Government officials allowed the demonstrations to continue; they were too big to shut down anyway. But several did express deep concerns.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti warned the protests could become “super spreader events”. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms told protesters they should all get themselves tested for the virus. Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said she worried the mass gatherings could cause “spikes in coronavirus cases” later.

“Two weeks from now, across America, we’re going to find out whether this gives us a spike and drives the numbers back up,” Maryland Governor Larry Hogan said at the end of May.

Well, here we are, almost three weeks later. The US currently has 2.2 million confirmed cases of the virus, and its death toll stands at more than 120,000.

And yet, in news as welcome as it is baffling, so far there is little sign of the protests having the effect health experts feared.

According to America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, someone can carry the virus without symptoms appearing for as long as a fortnight.

So, let’s take the example of Minneapolis, which was the site of Mr Floyd’s death and the initial epicentre of the protests. It has been 26 days since the demonstrations started there.

So far more than 10,000 Minneapolis protesters have been tested for the virus, and fewer than 2 per cent of those people were infected.

“We’re delighted that we are not seeing a huge increase in cases,” Kris Ehresmann, director of the Minnesota Department of Health’s infectious disease division, told reporters at a briefing on Wednesday, though she did say officials wanted to be “cautious” about drawing conclusions.

The statistics are similar in Philadelphia, Seattle and even New York.

Al Jazeera recently looked at a selection of cities where major protests took place. Its analysis is about a week old now, but still accounts for the virus’s expected incubation period. Again, there was little evidence of a protest-related spike.

SOURCE

****************************************

Most Americans do not want to “defund” the police

But they support other reforms

“DEFUND THE POLICE”, a slogan that might once have appealed only to America’s left, has gone mainstream. Since George Floyd’s death on May 25th, protesters across the country have called for police departments to be “defunded”, or for a portion of funds to be diverted to social programmes. Others want departments abolished altogether. Some lawmakers appear to have listened. On June 7th Bill de Blasio, New York City's mayor, pledged to redirect some of the city’s $6bn police budget to youth and social services. The same day members of the city council in Minneapolis, where Mr Floyd was killed, vowed to dismantle the city’s police department entirely. The Los Angeles City Council is also researching how to cut its police department’s budget by $100m-150m.

But the proposal has yet to win over a majority of voters. A recent survey by YouGov, a pollster, found that only a quarter of American adults are in favour of cutting funding for police departments outright. (When respondents are alerted to arguments from opponents of defunding that it might lead to a rise in crime, the proportion drops even lower.) A larger share favour redirecting funds from police to alternative first responders, such as social workers, drug counsellors and mental-health experts. Nearly half of Americans approve of this approach, though support is split along party lines with 68% of Democrats in favour, and 55% of Republicans opposed.

Other police reforms enjoy broader support. Another survey, also by YouGov, found that large majorities of Americans favour training police officers to de-escalate conflicts (88%), equipping them with body cameras (87%), identifying troublesome officers sooner (80%) and banning restraint of suspects’ necks (67%; Mr Floyd was choked by an officer’s knee). Two bills introduced by the House and Senate, on June 8th and June 17th, respectively, include all of these ideas in one form or another. The Senate bill encourages de-escalation training; the House bill boosts funding for investigations of police misconduct; both encourage the use of body cameras. The House bill bans chokeholds and neck restraints outright, whereas the Senate one discourages chokeholds by blocking federal grants if used.

Yet when it comes to reforming the police, congressional powers are limited. Most of America’s 18,000 law-enforcement agencies are governed locally, so lawmakers in Washington can only regulate them in roundabout ways—for example by collecting data, prosecuting abuses of power or restricting access to federal grants. Some reforms passed in Congress could be ignored.

Things may not get that far. Democrats and Republicans in Congress struggle to pass controversial legislation even in amicable times, let alone during an election year. President Donald Trump, who recently signed an executive order creating a national database to track misbehaving police officers, could veto whatever legislators come up with. On the day the Democratic-led House unveiled its bill, Mr Trump tweeted his disapproval: “the Radical Left Democrats want to Defund and Abandon our Police. Sorry, I want LAW & ORDER!”

SOURCE

************************************

IN BRIEF

Nancy Pelosi orders removal of four portraits of Confederate House speakers — Democrats Robert Hunter, Howell Cobbs, James Orr, and Charles Crisp — from the Capitol (NBC News)

Only the beginning: Senate Democrats move to gut the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (National Review)

Europeans are working with the U.S. to restructure the World Health Organization (Reuters)

Fifty-five percent believe that Biden potentially has early stages of dementia (The Daily Wire)

Politico agrees that polls are underestimating Trump just like in 2016 (The Daily Wire)

Senator Marco Rubio introduces the Fairness in Collegiate Athletics Act to address name, image, and likeness in college sports (Rubio.senate.gov)

Olympia, Washington, Mayor Cheryl Selby, who supported Black Lives Matter, gets home vandalized during riots, calls it "domestic terrorism" (The Daily Wire)

Major fumble: Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy foolishly apologizes for "pain, discomfort" caused by sporting a T-shirt emblazoned with One America News (ESPN)

Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, said she would issue an executive order that would take effect before the November election, ending Iowa's distinction as the last state to deprive all former felons of voting rights for life (The New York Times)

Notre Dame Law School establishes Religious Liberty Clinic (Notre Dame News)

Massive spying on users of Google's Chrome shows new security weakness (Reuters)

Border violence could spur India to help U.S. counter China (Washington Examiner)

Policy: Reform our cities, not just the police (National Review)

**********************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

**************************

Incentives for innovation will eventually defeat Covid-19

Matt Ridley

It will be an innovation that eventually defeats the virus: a new vaccine, a new antiviral drug — or a new app to help us avoid contact with infected individuals.

So the one thing the world needs more than anything else is an incentive to innovate. Here’s an idea for how to do so.

The problem is that innovation is an uncertain, unpredictable process. I argue in my new book How Innovation Works that you can rarely summon an innovation to order when you need one.

We would love to have flying cars that run on water, or cheap ways to suck carbon dioxide out of the air, but necessity is not the mother of invention after all.

Take vaccines. Some viruses prove impossible to vaccinate against after decades, while others succumb quickly.

“Vaccine development is an expensive, slow and laborious process, costing billions of dollars, taking decades, with less than a 10 percent rate of success,” according to Wayne Koff, president of the Human Vaccines Project, writing just before the pandemic began.

There are lots of different teams working flat out on developing a vaccine for COVID-19. Some are using whole virus particles, killed or attenuated, some are using protein molecules manufactured in bacteria, some are using messenger RNA fragments that instruct human cells to make viral proteins to alert the immune system.

It is impossible to say which will work, if any.

So governments and venture capitalists have a problem: which horse to back? Giving grants and subsidies to those that shout loudest — or have the best connections — is regrettably, all too often the way innovation gets funded. But by trying to pick winners, governments all too often end up picking losers.

Luckily, there is a new idea out there for how to incentivize innovation without trying to pick winners. It’s called the Advance Market Commitment and it is the brainchild of the Nobel-winning economist Michael Kremer.

It is basically a prize, but not in the form of a lump sum, rather in the form of a contract at an attractive price to produce the innovative product once — if — it gets invented.

Earlier this month the global vaccine alliance, known as GAVI, launched an appeal to fund exactly this kind of reward for a vaccine for COVID-19. It aims to raise $2 billion through a financing instrument that would effectively guarantee sales of the new vaccine in developing countries where healthcare systems often cannot afford the costs of new vaccines.

Exactly such a venture, funded by various governments and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, achieved a remarkable breakthrough a few years ago in the search for a vaccine for pneumococcus, a bacterium that kills large numbers of children in the poorer parts of the world.

Hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved. The same idea also helped the development of a vaccine for Ebola, though the epidemic ended before that vaccine could be fully tested.

These Advance Market Commitments are surely the way to go to fund innovation more generally. They have the advantage of being agnostic about the means by which an innovator achieves his or her end.

Indeed, the ancestor of all such schemes, the famous Longitude Prize in 18th century England, demonstrated neatly how solutions to problems can come from unexpected directions.

Mariners were unable to measure longitude while at sea, resulting in a disaster in 1707 when a naval squadron turned out to be farther east than its commander thought and was wrecked on the Scilly Isles. The government offered the huge sum of £20,000 (over £4 million in today’s money, and over $5 million US) for the first person to solve the problem of measuring longitude.

To the consternation of the scientific establishment, it was eventually won not by an astronomer or mathematician, but by a clockmaker from Yorkshire, John Harrison, who pointed out that all you need to know is what time it is back in Greenwich and compare that with local time (by measuring when noon occurs) and you know how far west of Greenwich you are.

So good robust clocks that kept good time even on board ship were the solution, and so it proved.

Let’s solve lots of our problems in this way: not with grants and subsidies, but with prizes.

SOURCE 
**************************************

How Germany got coronavirus right

This April, Walther Leonhard got an unusual call from the authorities in Rosenheim, his hometown in southern Germany. He was being given a new job, in a new field, with a title that had just been invented, “containment scout”.

Leonhard, 33, who had been working as a court officer in Munich, was soon back home and hitting the phones. He was the latest recruit into Germany’s army of Kontaktmanagers (tracers) — the foot soldiers of its strategy for containing coronavirus.

Leonhard’s job is to call people who have tested positive — and all those they have recently come into contact with — to tell them to self-isolate for a fortnight. It’s not much fun. A lot of people are scared and confused when he breaks the news.

“They ask how they’ll be able to feed themselves, what they should tell their boss, whether they can go for a walk — and you tell them, ‘No, you have to stay inside your four walls,’ ” he says. “And you say, ‘This isn’t some mean, vile thing the government is doing to you — it’s for your own protection, and to protect those around you.’”

Combined with its six-week shutdown, Germany’s “track and trace” system has been instrumental in stalling the spread of Covid-19 and preventing it from overwhelming the health system.

It has also helped that the country has a well-oiled government, led by Angela Merkel, a physicist, that has avoided the screeching policy zigzags seen elsewhere. On April 17, authorities announced that the pandemic was under control — less than six weeks after Germany’s first deaths from Covid-19.

The country saw its first outbreak in January at the headquarters of Webasto, an automotive supplier near Munich. The source was quickly identified as a Chinese employee who had been attending in-house workshops there.

Some 10 employees ended up getting infected — one after using a salt shaker handed to him by a colleague with the virus. After extensive detective work, those with coronavirus were swiftly isolated, their friends and relatives found and alerted.

“Contact tracing has been important ever since Webasto,” Jens Spahn, Germany’s health minister, tells the FT. “With Webasto, we managed to quickly recognise all the chains of infection and interrupt them. And that meant we were able to stop it spreading all over the country.”

Some experts think it’s not entirely fair to hold Germany up as an exemplar of crisis management. “There are other model countries that have received much less attention, such as Vietnam, which has seen no deaths at all from Covid-19,” says Hendrik Streeck, professor of virology at Bonn University.

A lot of Germany’s relatively good performance was down to luck. “[We] had the advantage that we had more time to prepare,” he says. “We saw the images from China and Italy before the wave hit us too.” But it also reacted more quickly to those images than other countries, he says, with “consistent testing and track and trace”.

The figures bear that out. By June 1, Germany had 183,508 confirmed Covid-19 cases, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, making it the world’s ninth-worst-hit country.

But the number of infected people who have died is remarkably low — just 8,546, or about 4.7 per cent of the total. That works out at roughly 103 deaths per million inhabitants, compared with 430 for France, 554 for Italy and 579 for the UK.

This occurred despite one of Europe’s least draconian shutdowns. Though schools, non-essential shops and restaurants were closed for weeks, a large proportion of businesses and factories continued to operate as normal. Germany also left lockdown more quickly than many of its neighbours.

More importantly, the health system never came under too much pressure. “We never reached the point where we had too many people in intensive care,” says Streeck. “That meant we were never faced with the need for triage — when you only treat those patients with a greater chance of survival. For us, triage was only ever a theoretical possibility, never a real one.”

This pattern was being replicated across Germany. A key role in ramping up preparations was played by the country’s health ministry, led by Spahn, a 40-year-old politician who has long been seen as a potential chancellor. His department intervened early, telling hospitals to postpone all elective procedures. “That freed up a lot of intensive care capacity, which gave us an important buffer at the peak of the crisis,” says Spahn.

The call was backed by financial incentives: the ministry promised hospitals €560 a day for every bed they kept vacant for a potential Covid patient and €50,000 for each additional intensive care bed they created. Even before those measures were introduced, Germany had many more intensive care beds than other big European countries — 34 per 100,000 people, compared with 9.7 in Spain and 8.6 in Italy. This ratio increased in the pandemic, with the number of ICU beds rising from 28,000 to 40,000. There were so many that, in the end, a large number stood empty.

Part of the German system’s strength is how uniform it is in terms of financial resources and the quality of care — a factor that contributed to combating coronavirus. “Our hospital landscape is extremely homogeneous,” says Deerberg-Wittram, who has worked across the UK and knows about regional disparities in the NHS. “There are no real weak spots — the standard of care is the same everywhere.”

Germany’s system also benefits from being much more decentralised than, say, the NHS. Town hospitals are often controlled by elected local mayors, rather than by regional or central government. “The mayor of Rosenheim needs great schools, swimming pools and a great hospital, and that’s the same for the mayors of Hamelin and Münster too,” says Deerberg-Wittram.

Spahn sees the decentralised nature of health provision as an asset. The hundreds of mayors “don’t just get orders from above . . . A lot more people have to take on responsibility and make independent decisions,” he says. “And if they didn’t, they’d have to answer to their voters.”

The prevalence of testing meant cases were identified at a much earlier stage, and people could be admitted to hospital before their condition worsened — one of the reasons why Germany’s death rate has been relatively low.

“In Italy, people waited far too long and by the time they got to hospital they were seriously ill,” says Deerberg-Wittram. “That just overwhelmed the health service there. In Germany it was the opposite.”

Meanwhile, the authorities were gradually ratcheting up restrictions on public life. On March 8, they recommended the cancellation of all big public events. Five days later, most of Germany’s 16 states closed their schools and kindergartens. Then, on March 22, the government closed shops and restaurants and banned meetings of more than two people.

At the same time, Berlin launched a massive economic aid package that, according to the Bruegel think-tank, is equivalent to 10.1 per cent of the nation’s gross domestic product — larger than that of any other western country.

It included a €100bn fund to buy stakes in affected companies, €50bn in direct grants to distressed small businesses and €10bn for an expanded furloughed worker scheme. The aid came in very useful — according to government forecasts, Germany will this year face the worst recession in its postwar history.

While the emergency fiscal response was spearheaded by the federal government in Berlin, shutdown measures were co-ordinated in a series of teleconferences between Merkel and the governors of the federal states, in which the chancellor, whose approval ratings soared during the crisis, deployed her powers of persuasion to reach a national consensus.

“This isn’t in our constitution — it was newly invented for corona,” says Reinhard Busse, head of the department of healthcare management at Berlin’s Technical University. “It became the central organ of crisis management, and ensured that at least at the height of the pandemic, the response was highly uniform.”

Though there were occasional tensions, vicious bust-ups of the kind seen between US president Donald Trump and state governors are unheard-of in Germany.

Much policy was overseen by Helge Braun, head of the chancellor’s office. A trained anaesthesiologist, he worked for years in an intensive care and pain management clinic. “It makes a difference that the chancellor is a scientist and her chief of staff a doctor,” says Busse. “That has shaped our response to this pandemic.”

Jens Deerberg-Wittram says Merkel’s heavy reliance on experts was a critical factor in the crisis. “She said, ‘Before I do anything, I have to understand what’s going on here,’” he says. This meant Germany’s leading virologists played an outsized role in shaping policy. “There was a kind of ‘no bullshit’ attitude that dominated all decision-making,” he says.

Meanwhile, infection rates have slowed: Germany is now reporting a few hundred cases a day, compared with 6,000 a day in early April. As the crisis eases, the unity of purpose that defined the country’s initial approach has broken down. In April, Merkel expressed frustration at the “unthinking” way some states were rushing to ease the shutdown.

These differences broke out into the open late last month when the chancellery sought to extend Germany’s restrictions on social contact till July 5. The states rebelled, insisting they be scrapped by June 29. Some states are now increasingly ignoring Berlin and setting their own rules.

More HERE

***************************************

IN BRIEF

A tidal wave of bankruptcies is coming (The New York Times)

China will speed up purchases of U.S. farm goods (MarketWatch)

Thomas Jefferson statue should be removed from NYC Council chambers, lawmakers say (New York Daily News)

Uncle Ben's rice to take black man off box; Cream of Wheat mulls removing black chef (The Daily Wire)

D'oh! Oakland mayor launches hate-crime probe into nooses in trees. Black man says it's exercise equipment he put there. (The Daily Wire)

NYPD cops encouraged to strike on July 4 to give city its independence (New York Post)

10 times Barack Obama acknowledged that DACA was unconstitutional (PJ Media)

Hillsdale College refuses to bow to the totalitarian mob (The Federalist)

Susceptible to fraud: The federal government spent nearly $3 trillion on coronavirus relief. Oversight has been a mess. (Reason)

People would be mentally crushed by second wave, psychologists say (Washington Examiner)

**********************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

**************************

America's new enemy:  The "conservative" Supreme court

Being a justice of the Supreme Court is very much an elite position.  Unfortunately, persons obtaining a position there soon begin to exhibit elite attitudes.  They have recently handed down a stream of destructive Leftist opinions

The DACA decision

In a remarkable moment on the floor of the U.S Senate, Ted Cruz (R-Texas) used his ten minutes to take a flamethrower to the Supreme Court decision over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Calling Roberts’ repeated siding with the liberals on the court a charade, he said, “Everyone knows the game they’re playing. They’re hoping that, come November, there’s a different result in the election, that a new administration comes in and decides that amnesty is a good thing.”

His fiery speech began:

Mr. President, today’s U.S. Supreme Court Ruling, in the Department of Homeland Security versus the University of California Regents, is disgraceful. Judging is not a game. It’s not supposed to be a game. But, sadly, in recent years, more and more, Chief Justice Roberts has been playing games with the court to achieve the policy outcomes he desires. This case concerned President Obama’s executive amnesty. Amnesty that President Obama decreed, directly contrary to federal law. He did so with no legal authority. He did so in open defiance of federal statutes.

He then tore apart the decision itself:

President Obama’s executive amnesty was illegal the day it was issued, and not one single justice of the nin Supreme Court justices disputed that. Not a one. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined by the four liberal justices on the court. This is becoming a pattern. The majority believes that Obama’s executive amnesty is illegal, and then, bizarrely, holds that the Trump administration can’t stop implementing a policy that is illegal.

Cruz points out the legal knots into which Roberts tied himself:

The majority holds that, of course, an administration can stop an illegal policy. “All parties agree”—that’s a quote—all parties agree that “DHS may rescind DACA.” …. The majority then says, “You know what? The agency’s explanation wasn’t detailed enough.”

He also reflects on the pattern of legal mumbo-jumbo Roberts has engaged in to side with the liberals on the court:

That is exactly the sleight of hand that Chief Justice Roberts did, almost exactly a year ago today. In another case where the Chief Justice joined with the four liberals and struck down another one of the Trump administration’s policies. The Commerce Department, which is charged with conducting a census every ten years, wanted to ask a commonsense question: “Are you a citizen of the United States?” That’s a question that has been asked in nearly every census since 1820.

Calling the Democratic Party and the press the party of illegal immigration, Cruz proceeded to destroy that argument too:

What did John Roberts do? He wrote an opinion that says, “Yes, of course the Commerce Department has the authority to ask in the census if you’re a citizen.” Of course they have! …. But, no, John Roberts, a little twist of hand. You know what? The Commerce Department didn’t explain their reasoning clearly enough.

Cruz is clearly onto the game Roberts has played, piercing the veil to reveal him as a pro-amnesty NeverTrumper. Roberts gave us Obamacare, and now he’s given us amnesty too. This allows the Democrats to run out the clock until November, hoping that Uncle Joe can take the White House and save them from the Bad Orange Man, implement permanent amnesty, and turn the United States into the illegal immigration utopia they all envision.

SOURCE 

Redefining Sex

In what dissenting Justice Samuel Alito called one of the most “brazen abuse[s]” of the Supreme Court’s authority, a six-member majority of the court led by Justice Neil Gorsuch has rewritten Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include sexual orientation and gender identity in the definition of “sex.”

Why bother trying to pass the proposed Equality Act when you can get the justices to make law for you?

Title VII prohibits an employer from failing or refusing “to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual … because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

Gorsuch—joined by the four liberal justices, along with Chief Justice John Roberts—decided that employment decisions that take any account of an employee’s sexual orientation or gender identity necessarily entail discrimination based on sex in violation of Title VII.

In Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, which was combined with two other cases, Gorsuch wrote that the straightforward application of the terms in Title VII, according to their ordinary public meaning at the time of its enactment, means that an employer violates the law when it intentionally fires an individual based in part on sex.

In a logical and legal leap, Gorsuch then argued that includes sexual orientation and gender identity, since those concepts are related to sex.

Thus, Gorsuch reasoned, it means the employer is treating individuals differently because of their sex. An employer cannot escape liability by showing that it treats men and women comparably as groups. The employer has violated the law even if it subjects all male and female homosexual and transgender employees to the same treatment.

Gorsuch dismissed as irrelevant the historical fact that none of the legislators who passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 would have ever expected or contemplated that Title VII’s ban on employment discrimination on the basis of sex would apply to a man hired by a funeral home who then told his new employer, the R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Home, that he planned to “live and work full-time as a woman.”

That was one of the three cases before the court. That provision of the 1964 law was intended to stop the blatant employment discrimination rampant against women at that time.

The majority opinion by Gorsuch upending more than five decades of prior precedents was only 33 pages long. Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, filed a blistering dissent in which he said that “there is only one word for what the Court has done today: legislation.” He pointed out that the majority’s claim that it is “merely enforcing the terms of the statute” is “preposterous.”

As Alito undisputedly says, “if every single American had been surveyed in 1964, it would have been hard to find any who thought that discrimination because of sex meant discrimination because of sexual orientation—not to mention gender identity, a concept that was essentially unknown at the time.”

The majority tries to “pass off its decision” as just an application of the term “sex” in Title VII, claiming it is applying the textualism championed by the late Justice Antonin Scalia. But according to Alito, that claim and the majority’s opinion “is like a pirate ship.” He added:

It sails under a textualist flag, but what it actually represents is a theory of statutory interpretation that Justice Scalia excoriated—the theory that courts should ‘update’ old statutes so that they better reflect the current values of society.

Alito said that the majority’s “arrogance” is “breathtaking,” since “there is not a shred of evidence that any Member of Congress interpreted the statutory text that way when Title VII was enacted.”

Neither “sexual orientation,” nor “gender identity” appear on the list of five specified grounds for discrimination in Title VII, and the majority’s “argument is not only arrogant, it is wrong,” he wrote.  The terms “sex,” “sexual orientation,” and “gender identity” are “different concepts,” and neither of the two latter terms are “tied to either of the biological sexes.”

Alito is, of course, entirely correct, as one of us pointed out in a recent article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.

And, of course, Congress knew that “sex” didn’t include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” Alito recalled that there have been numerous bills introduced in Congress over the past 45 years to amend the law and add those terms, but they all failed.

The majority is “usurping the constitutional authority of the other branches” of government and has taken the latest congressional bill on this topic and “issued it under the guise of statutory interpretation.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh also filed a dissenting opinion, in which he wrote that “this case boils down to one fundamental question:  Who decides?”

The issue is whether Title VII “should be expanded to prohibit discrimination because of sexual orientation,” he wrote, adding that responsibility “belongs to Congress and the President in the legislative process, not to this Court.”

Kavanaugh lauded the “extraordinary vision, tenacity, and grit” of the gay and lesbian community for working “hard for many decades to achieve equal treatment in fact and in law.”  But, he added, under separation of powers, “it was Congress’s role, not this Court’s, to amend Title VII.”

Alito made it clear that the “updating desire to which the Court succumbs no doubt rises from humane and generous impulses.” But the “authority of this Court is limited to saying what the law is.”

In their dissents, Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh got it right, and the majority got it wrong. The word “sex”— still today as when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964—refers to our biological reality as male or female. It doesn’t refer to our sexual orientations or malleable gender identities as some see it.

If those terms were contained within Title VII, there would have been no need for Congress to repeatedly try to amend the law to add sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes.

In an act of judicial activism, a majority of the Supreme Court has simply legislated from the bench and amended the statute itself. 

Congress has not legislated such an outcome, and it was wrong for the court to usurp lawmakers’ authority by imposing such an extreme policy on our nation without the consent of the governed.

SOURCE 

Gun rights

The Supreme Court of the United States delivered a blow to gun rights activists on Monday when they turned down the possibility of hearing roughly a dozen Second Amendment-related cases. The last time the Court heard a gun-related case was in 2010 with the landmark McDonald v. Chicago decision.

Below are the cases that were rejected (via Bearing Arms):

Pena v. Horan is a challenge to California’s microstamping law, which took effect in 2012 and has curtailed not only the availability of new models of handguns, but has caused existing models of handguns to be barred from being sold in the state.

Gould v. Lipson is a challenge to Massachusetts’ carry laws.

Worman v. Healey is a challenge to the state’s ban on so-called assault weapons.

Rogers v. Grewal, Cheeseman v. Polillo, and  Ciolek v. New Jersey all deal with challenges to New Jersey’s carry laws and “justifiable need” requirement for a carry permit.

Malpasso v. Pallozzi takes on similar requirements in the state of Maryland.

Culp v. Raoul challenges an Illinois law barring residents from 45 other states from applying for a non-resident concealed carry license, while Wilson v. Cook County takes on the Illinois county’s ban on modern sporting rifles.

Mance v. Barr is a case challenging the ban on interstate sales of handguns.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion, which Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined, calling into question the Court's failure to hear firearm-related cases that need clarity.

"The text of the Second Amendment protects 'the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.' We have stated that this 'fundamental righ[t]' is 'necessary to our system of ordered liberty.' Yet, in several jurisdictions throughout the country, law-abiding citizens have been barred from exercising the fundamental right to bear arms because they cannot show that they have a 'justifiable need' or 'good reason' for doing so," Thomas wrote.

"One would think that such an onerous burden on a fundamental right would warrant this Court’s review. This Court would almost certainly review the constitutionality of a law requiring citizens to establish a justifiable need before exercising their free speech rights," he wrote. "And it seems highly unlikely that the Court would allow a State to enforce a law requiring a woman to provide a justifiable need before seeking an abortion. But today, faced with a petition challenging just such a restriction on citizens’ Second Amendment rights, the Court simply looks the other way."

Thomas also cited the lower court's split decision on Americans having to prove they are in need of a concealed carry permit. Having lower courts split on a decision is a prime reason the Supreme Court takes on a case.

"This case gives us the opportunity to provide guidance on the proper approach for evaluating Second Amendment claims; acknowledge that the Second Amendment protects the right to carry in public; and resolve a square Circuit split on the constitutionality of justifiable need restrictions on that right," Thomas said. "I would grant the petition for a writ of certiorari."

Thomas also made the argument that the Heller decision – which states a person has a right to carry a firearm outside of the home for self-protection – provided a framework for lower courts to decide cases.

The justice made it clear he believes these cases are being put off for political reasons, particularly for those on the Court who oppose the right to keep and bear arms.

"Whatever one may think about the proper approach to analyzing Second Amendment challenges, it is clearly time for us to resolve the issue," Thomas stated.

SOURCE 

Sanctuary cities

The Supreme Court on Monday turned down an appeal from the Trump administration seeking to challenge a California “sanctuary law.”

As is the court’s custom, its order declining to hear the case gave no reasons. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. said they would have granted the administration’s petition seeking review.

The California law prohibits state officials from telling federal ones when undocumented immigrants are to be released from state custody and restricts transfers of immigrants in state custody to federal immigration authorities.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled that the federal government is not entitled to commandeer a state’s resources to further its immigration agenda.

Judge Milan D. Smith Jr., writing for the panel, acknowledged that the state law “may well frustrate the federal government’s immigration enforcement efforts.”

“However,” he wrote, “whatever the wisdom of the underlying policy adopted by California, that frustration is permissible, because California has the right."

The Trump administration told the Ninth Circuit that Congress, in enacting immigration laws, expected that states would cooperate with the federal government. “That is likely the case,” Judge Smith acknowledged. “But when questions of federalism are involved, we must distinguish between expectations and requirements. In this context, the federal government was free to expect as much as it wanted, but it could not require California’s cooperation.”

In a petition seeking the Supreme Court review of the case, United States v. California, No. 19-532, lawyers for the Trump administration wrote that the state law conflicted with federal ones and posed a risk to public safety.

“When officers are unable to arrest aliens — often criminal aliens — who are in removal proceedings or have been ordered removed from the United States, those aliens instead return to the community, where criminal aliens are disproportionately likely to commit crimes,” the petition said. “That result undermines public safety, immigration enforcement and the rule of law.”

In response, lawyers for California said the federal government was not entitled to take over the state’s resources.

SOURCE 

**********************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

**************************

UK: Around the world, other countries are opening up with no adverse effects. Why do we think we will be the exception?

Karol Sikora

To some people, a second wave of this pandemic more powerful and deadly than the first is an inevitability. So, hospitals have been instructed to prepare to increase critical care capacity. The Nightingales are ready to re-open. A much more rigid lockdown may be necessary in September. Waiting lists will exceed 10 million for the first time in history.

To even question the strategy is considered blasphemy. And yes, I know predictions are tricky. And the vaccine strategy is not looking good. But despite that, there are reasons to be optimistic.

Just look around the world. In Wuhan, China has tested 10 million residents and found no new cases. A minor outbreak in Beijing is being effectively controlled. In South Korea and Japan, it’s all over, and life is getting back to normal. In the West, countries like Austria and Denmark, which eased their lockdowns two months ago, have seen further declines in infections, with no spikes. The same can be said for Italy, Spain and France, just weeks ahead on their coronavirus journey. Schools are back; restaurants and bars are open. City squares all over Europe are buzzing again

SOURCE 

**********************************

Sweden passes 5,000 coronavirus deaths amid criticism of its lockdown-free strategy – but its death rate per million is STILL behind the UK

Sweden has passed the grim mark of 5,000 coronavirus deaths today as cracks began to emerge in the political consensus the government has until now enjoyed over its softer approach.

The Public Health Agency said it had recorded 5,041 Covid-19 deaths, giving it the world's fifth highest death rate at 499.1 per million inhabitants.

Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, a Social Democrat, insisted in a weekend televised interview that hospitalistions were down sharply and Sweden's strategy of not locking down 'was not a failure'.

The country's leader went on to say that the large share of deaths in elderly care homes 'has nothing to do with the strategy. 'It has to do with failings in society that we are correcting,' including basic hygiene deficiencies in many care homes, he added.

Sweden's political circles broadly supported the decision to not lock down, as did the general population.

But there has been growing criticism in recent weeks over the government's struggles to get mass testing off the ground, which only began in earnest this week.

Parties on the right have also accused the government of hiding behind public health experts and failing to take responsibility in the crisis.

'A leader has to step forward, but Lofven took a step back,' Ebba Thor, the head of the Christian Democrats, said during a recent party leader debate.

The Liberals' parliamentary leader, Johan Pehrson, said Sweden's softer approach 'may have contributed to the high death toll', while the head of the conservative Moderate Party, Ulf Kristersson, has called for a commission to be appointed immediately to probe the government's handling of the crisis.

Swedish officials have stressed that the situation has vastly improved in recent weeks, despite the dire death toll.

The Public Health Agency said the country of 10.3 million had 54,562 confirmed cases on Wednesday, a high infection rate, but said the large majority of new cases were mild ones recorded after testing began to ramp up several weeks ago.

The number of hospitalisations and intensive care patients had gone down dramatically since hitting a peak in April, officials said.

According to the Swedish Intensive Care Registry, there were on Wednesday a total of 218 COVID-19 patients in intensive care units, compared to a peak of 558 on April 25-26.

Doctors in the country also confirmed that their COVID-19 units had passed the peak. 'The number of patients has gone down dramatically,' Lars Falk, head of the ECMO unit at Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, told AFP. 'There are much fewer patients needing ICU care than a couple of weeks ago,' he said.

Anders Tegnell, chief epidemiologist at the Public Health Agency, who has become the face of Sweden's strategy, has repeatedly insisted that lockdowns do not work. Once countries lift their restrictions and normal routines resume, the virus will begin to circulate again, he said. 'You can't eliminate the virus entirely in the long-run,' he told reporters on Tuesday.

Another scientific study published on Wednesday by the Public Health Agency showed that the infection fatality rate in Stockholm for those aged 69 and under was 0.1 percent, and 4.3 percent for those aged 70 and over. That study examined 1,667 people infected with the virus during March 21-30.

The figures come as Britain today announced another 184 deaths from Covid-19, taking the country's total number of lab-confirmed victims past the 42,000-mark.

Department of Health statistics show the daily number of fatalities has dropped 25 per cent in a week, with 245 posted across all settings last Wednesday. Some 233 deaths were recorded yesterday.

SOURCE 

*********************************

Poor Black Communities Devastated After BLM Riots Lead to New Food Deserts

BLM creates poverty and food deserts wherever they go
Weeks of civil unrest, rioting, and looting by Black Lives Matter and antifa agitators in some of the poorest areas of the country have resulted in devastating consequences for the residents, who are mostly black or minority. A video was taken by a woman in an undisclosed location. As she walks through her neighborhood grocery store in tears she describes the wreckage as she looks for milk for her children. “Look at this. Every grocery store looks like this,” she said. “Everything is either on the floor…look at this. I came into the store to buy something because I’m not a thief,” she said. People who already couldn’t feed their kids, now they really can’t feed their kids,” she cried. “I am so devastated right now.”

“We couldn’t even find tissue less than two months ago and now it’s on the floor,” she said as she surveyed the damage. “I feel like an animal and black people made me feel like an animal. Y’all did that!” She continued to berate the rioters, “This is what we’re fighting for…we’re so black and proud that we ain’t never going to be honest and be real about what’s really going on. Y’all are so wrong for this.”

Making black people drive out of state to buy food is….progress?
Neighborhoods near where I grew up outside of Chicago are devastated. One of my friends who lives on the south side of Chicago told me she and her husband have to drive to Indiana to get groceries now. There isn’t a grocery store anywhere near them that hasn’t been destroyed. She’s one of the lucky ones because she has a car. Many in her neighborhood don’t have transportation and they have no options to get to food stores now.

We have been berated and shamed for not supporting Black Lives Matter as an organization and “social movement,” but which is the more racist position: supporting the looting and burning of black neighborhoods where black people will suffer the consequences of more poverty, or supporting law and order and the protection of those neighborhoods and resources?

I’m getting the distinct impression that if you support the protection of these neighborhoods from criminals you are a terrible, no good, rotten, racist who can be fired from your job just for criticizing BLM. But if you support the crime syndicate that destroyed this woman’s grocery store and stores in poor black neighborhood’s all over American cities, you are a virtuous member of society who cannot and will not suffer any consequences for your beliefs that lead to the devastation that black people will now suffer.

BLM is the white leftist’s free pass out of responsibility for food deserts
All one has to do these days to be considered a good and non-racist white person is put a sign in your yard supporting BLM and their ruinous tactics that are hurting black families, keeping food off the shelves, and even milk from babies. It doesn’t matter that the people you support are actually terrorizing black neighborhoods and black mothers like the one in the video. You are allowed to support them openly, agitate with them, support them financially, and prop them up with legitimacy as they burn, loot, and destroy black livelihoods. This gives you the protection to point your fingers at those of us who think it’s a moral injustice to target black people through the destruction of their neighborhoods and call us, inexplicably, racists.

If you are a person who believes that grocery stores in minority neighborhoods should be protected by police, that the poor people living there should be protected from violence and civil unrest, you’re a bad person. Is everyone paying attention? This is the accepted philosophy of our time. If people don’t wake up in the neighborhoods that were just destroyed by agitators pretending to care about minority rights, there is no hope for America.

Republicans aren’t the answer for everything and in general, are feckless and ineffective legislators. They’re terrible at messaging, they don’t know how to deal with controversy and they bend over way too easily to Democrat pressure. But they have never supported the destruction of any neighborhoods by lawless criminals. The majority of Republican-run areas did not get looted and burned. They protected their communities from violence and terror. The Democrat strongholds did not. Remember that when you vote next time.

SOURCE 

******************************

IN BRIEF

Fed-up black business owners wrestle with "defund the police" (Washington Examiner)

Starbucks caves to Social Justice Warriors, will allow employees to wear Black Lives Matter clothing after boycott campaign (National Review)

More than 1,300 Chinese medical suppliers falsified registration information to sell in the U.S. (Washington Examiner)

Amazon is fielding probes from California and Washington over trade practices (Gizmodo)

Oregon governor temporarily halts state's reopening (The Daily Caller)

Illegal immigration rose nearly 40% amid coronavirus reopenings (The Washington Times)

"Faded away into a dark nightmare": North Korea says diplomacy with Trump has failed (USA Today)

Seattle's "autonomous zone" and the Paris Commune of 1871 are ominously similar (Foundation for Economic Education)

Study finds mask-wearing "most effective means to prevent interhuman transmission" (Washington Examiner)

London police call for protest ban after 23 officers injured during demonstrations (Washington Examiner)

Policy: Democrats accidentally make the case against teachers' unions (Issues & Insights)

Adding insult to injury, the Supreme Court refuses to hear Trump administration challenge to California sanctuary law (National Review)

"Looking the other way": Justice Clarence Thomas accuses his colleagues of dodging gun cases (The Washington Free Beacon)

President Trump is considering a new $1 trillion infrastructure "stimulus" plan (Business Insider)

Joe Biden and the DNC raise over $80 million in May, their biggest monthly haul of 2020 race (CNBC)

Trump campaign and the RNC raise $14 million on Trump's birthday, breaking fundraising record (The Daily Caller)

Dow rallies after record retail sales jump of 17.7% in May (CNBC)

Facing huge budget gaps, governments have furloughed or laid off more than 1.5 million workers (The New York Times)

Research finds lockdowns are far worse for health and lives than coronavirus (The Federalist)

"No question it is going to make it harder to defend our religious freedom, as far as an organization being able to hire people of like mind": Conservative Christians concerned over "seismic implications" of Supreme Court ruling (The New York Times)

NYPD commissioner disbands plainclothes anti-crime units (FOX 5)

Orthodox Jews cut locks on closed New York City park to let children play (Washington Examiner)

Patients with underlying conditions were 12 times as likely to die of coronavirus as otherwise healthy people, CDC finds (The Washington Post)

Mutation in new coronavirus increases chance of infection (Reuters)

Mayor Bill de Blasio's "contact tracing team" isn't allowed to ask patients if they attended a protest (The Daily Caller)

Justice Department schedules first federal executions since 2003 for convicted child murderers (Washington Examiner)

NOAA leaders violated agency ethics code in "Sharpiegate," independent panel finds (Washington Examiner)

Supreme Court validates LGBT protections on grounds LGBT activists reject (The Federalist)

U.S. embassy in Seoul removes "Black Lives Matter" banner day after being unveiled (The Daily Caller)

North Korea blows up South Korea liaison office (Fox News)

Policy: SCOTUS's transgender ruling firebombs the Constitution (The Federalist)

**********************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

**************************

FDA revokes emergency use status of hydroxychloroquine

The FDA approved hydroxychloroquine as “safe and effective” (for various ailments) decades ago. No “emergency use authorization” was — or IS — required for doctors to prescribe it as they see fit. FDA is just playing politics here.  If Trump favours it, it must be stopped

“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday revoked its emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, the drug championed by U.S. President Donald Trump to stave off the coronavirus. Based on new evidence, the FDA said it was no longer reasonable to believe that oral formulations of hydroxychloroquine and the related drug chloroquine may be effective in treating the illness caused by the novel coronavirus.

The move comes after several studies of the decades-old malaria drug suggested it was not effective, including a widely anticipated trial earlier this month that showed it failed to prevent infection in people who had been exposed to the virus.”

SOURCE 

*********************************

Coronavirus treatment breakthrough: $50 steroid could save the life of one in every eight patients on ventilators

A steroid treatment for coronavirus could save thousands of lives across the world in what is being hailed as a 'major breakthrough'.

A study of dexamethasone suggests it reduces deaths from coronavirus by a wider margin than any other experimental treatment to-date, and has been described as the most important trial result for Covid-19 so far.

Researchers found the drug - which sells for $57 for 100 pills in the US - reduced deaths by up to a third among patients on ventilators, and by a fifth for those on oxygen.

It has been immediately approved to treat all UK hospitalized Covid-19 patients requiring oxygen, including those on ventilators.

Scientists estimate that if they had known what they now know about dexamethasone at the start of the pandemic, 4,000 to 5,000 lives could have been saved in the UK and thousands more in the US.

They added that, based on their results, one death would be prevented by treatment of around eight patients on ventilators, or around 25 patients requiring oxygen alone.

Currently, at least 2,156 Americans with coronavirus are on mechanical ventilators, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data - and that is likely an undercount, considering the agency's tracking has lagged well behind individual states'. 

The drug could offer hope to these US patient as well as those on oxygen support and the 385 in mechanical ventilator beds across the UK.

SOURCE 

************************************

Rush Limbaugh on American conservatives

Conservative everything has just given up, has just ceded the country, ceded Hollywood, ceded music, ceded television, ceded the media, ceded everything.

“If one of the conservative billionaires out there has any stomach for saving their country from the mob, they should buy and flip a major media platform, or fund a new one, and make it an unsinkable aircraft carrier of true free speech.”

And I get this a lot. I’ve had this question, “Why doesn’t some wealthy conservative come along and buy CBS or ABC or anything else?” I don’t know. I have no idea. I happen to know that a bunch of people who have bought networks are not flaming leftists and they never do anything to change the news networks that are part of the corporations that they have purchased.

Buck Sexton continues. “We are completely outgunned in the platform wars, and it’s only getting worse. All the major social media and streaming content companies are part of the lib Death Star. Stop sending checks to think tanks that overpay 2nd tier scholars to churn out policy papers five people read.”

He’s thinking about people like Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg and the Never Trump contingent who at one time or another have worked at think tanks, where they have sought your donation on the basis that they and they alone are carrying the conservative banner into battle, when in fact most people have never heard of ’em.

“It doesn’t even have to be –” he says, this new enterprise “– doesn’t even have to be ‘conservative’ in mission, it would soon become dominated by conservatives though if it adamantly refused to censor speech for the woke mob. The Left can no longer debate like sane people, but they don’t have to. They just point, scream, and cancel. Meanwhile, I know ultra-wealthy conservatives who are terrified of anyone finding out what their politics are, because to be accepted among the elites, you have to at least allow those around you to believe you’re woke and lib.”

And, by the way, I can confirm that. I have over the course of my career, I have met and been introduced to some of the wealthiest conservatives, I didn’t even know they existed, in real estate and high finance in California, in whatever business in New York. And the last thing they ever wanted anybody to know was their politics. Some of them didn’t want anybody to know that they supported George W. Bush.

And I remember scratching my head, I said, “Why?” (interruption) They said, “Well, you know, Bush is stupid, he’s an embarrassment. I have a tough time explaining him.” That wasn’t it. That was just a convenient excuse. They valued their social status more than their political portfolio.

He says, “All of this adds up to a massive cultural failing of the right. And where are the older leaders in conservative media building up the next generation? Folks on our side seem obsessed with their own brands, and protecting their turf, which is a small slice of the media landscape. We need more voices with serious platforms that we control.”

Here again I know exactly what he’s talking about. There was a seminal moment — now, you may not agree with this. There was a seminal moment with the passing of William F. Buckley Jr. Now, William F. Buckley Jr. had retired years before he passed away, but he was the, quote, unquote, father of the intellectual conservative movement. And the thing that Buckley had the ability to do was anoint and grant approval to newly arrived young conservatives, and he did, and he bestowed upon them credibility that resulted from him.

He had that kind of credibility. He had that kind of juice that if somebody new came along, he wasn’t threatened by their existence. His National Review empire, he didn’t think, “Oh, my God. I gotta protect — this guy could overtake.” He didn’t think that way. He was truly a movement guy. But when he passed away, all that ended. And what happened, what replaced Buckley was a battle that’s still raging over the smartest conservative in the room and who is it and who gets to decide it.

And there isn’t a conservative movement that has a force leader individual who is attempting to encourage younger members, and even the younger members don’t seem to have much of an ambition. The joke around Washington today among young conservatives is if they can get a Fox News gig and a book deal, they consider their careers to have been made. There’s enough money and enough prestige there to say they’ve made it. Well, what’s not included in a Fox News gig and a book deal is no persuasion, no expanding the universe, no expanding a movement. That’s what Buck Sexton, formally of the CIA, is talking about here.

Where are the older leaders in conservative media who are welcoming and building up the next generation? We have people more concerned with protecting their own brands and their own turf, which individually these conservatives we’re talking about are some tiny and small that nobody knows who they are anyway.

We need more voices. And we need more encouragement for those voices. But the same time the young arrivals are not completely immune from the problem, you know, a book deal and a Fox News gig and that’s the definition of making it. And the two do go together. But it is not the kind of stuff that a building, growing, planting deep roots kind of movement is based on.

He says “When I first got into media -” this is Buck Sexton here, formally of the CIA “–when I first got into media, I thought our side would be like pro sports, generally the veterans would want to bring up the rookies as part of the natural order, to help their team win. Conservative media is more like warring cartels. Many of the big names just want to stamp out the upstarts.”

And Buck Sexton, formerly of the CIA says, “I know you could say, ‘That’s just business,’ but this is supposed to be about more than that too. And in fact some big names out there pretend the fame and money don’t matter at all. It’s just ‘the cause.’ They build brands on that promise to their audience. They’re full of it.

“Our side is losing right now. We have the Left going on a mad cancel spree, nobody is safe from it, the Supreme Court is a lib super legislature, corporate America is in the radical left’s pocket… and we are hoping Trump pulls off a miracle this fall. What if he fails? Whoever wins this fall, we will still be living in a country where you will be tweeting, facebooking, Amazon priming, YouTubing, Instagram posting, Netflix watching, and Hulu streaming based on the curated tastes and activism of the left. We lose if this continues. Full stop.

“An honestly,” writes Buck Sexton formerly of the CIA, “if we don’t do something about this, we deserve to lose. Who thought it was a sustainable plan to just cede 90% of media, all of Hollywood, academia, and now corporate America to the woke mob? We need to build conservative media motherships, right now.”

SOURCE 

**************************************

IN BRIEF

"We're not doing guns": Elmer Fudd stripped of rifle in Looney Tunes reboot (Washington Examiner)

Study claims shutdowns prevented 60 million infections in the U.S. (The Washington Post)

Coronavirus cases on the rise in California, several other states (Fox News)

New Zealand lifted all social and economic restrictions except border controls after declaring on Monday it was free of the coronavirus, one of the first countries in the world to return to pre-pandemic normality (Reuters)

Trump directs Pentagon to pull 9,500 US troops from Germany by September (Fox News)

Marine Corps bans Confederate battle flag: Display of banner "presents a threat to our core values, unit cohesion, security, and good order and discipline" (The Washington Times)

Dr. Anthony Fauci says protests are "a perfect setup" for a second coronavirus peak (The Daily Wire)

Joe Biden spent $1.6 million in one day on Facebook ads condemning Trump for fanning the "flames of white supremacy" (The Daily Caller)

Meanwhile, Biden calls for Facebook to fact-check and remove political ads (The Washington Free Beacon)

Fired State Department Inspector General Steve Linick sent confidential info to his personal email accounts (The Washington Free Beacon)

Twitter admits China used nearly 200,000 fake accounts to influence politics, 150x more than Russia (The National Pulse)

With virus all but eliminated, Australia lifts nearly all restrictions (The Washington Post)

Starbucks bans employees from wearing anything in support of Black Lives Matter (The Hill)

"He was BLM before there was a slogan": Park volunteer outraged over vandalism of Philadelphia abolitionist statue (National Review)

"I haven't seen s—t like this before": Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said rioters are "f—ing lawless" in meeting with panicked officials (UK Daily Mail)

"I don't believe it's the time or place to be doing that": Chicago officers who kneel with protesters could be kicked out of police union (FOX 32 Chicago)

Louisville Metro Council votes to ban no-knock raids three months after death of Breonna Taylor (Washington Examiner)

Can the Minneapolis City Council actually defund the police? No. (Hot Air)

Joe Biden conditions support of reparations on provisions for Native Americans (Washington Examiner)

Biden is demanding that Facebook fact-check political ads. Facebook says no. (Business Insider)

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin says White House "seriously considering" second round of direct-payment coronavirus relief (The Daily Caller)

John Hickenlooper fined by Colorado Ethics Committee for accepting gifts while governor (The Federalist)

Ben Carson says Rayshard Brooks case "not clear-cut" like George Floyd's (AJC)

Confusion reigns as Seattle's seized six blocks known as CHAZ purportedly changes name to CHOP (Fox News)

Black Lives Matter protesters say Seattle's autonomous zone has hijacked message (Fox News)

Protesters in Asheville, Portland, Nashville, and Chicago try to create autonomous zones. Police aren't having it. (The Daily Wire)

Citing the "political climate," 10 members of the Hallandale Beach Police Department SWAT team voluntarily resign (WPEC)

"Repentance is not enough"? Left-leaning Christianity Today calls on churches to lead on reparations (Fox News)

Camden, New Jersey, removes Christopher Columbus statue (Fox News)

**********************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here.  Home page supplement

**************************