White evangelicals want a puncher, not a preacher, in the Oval Office

Earlier this year at a huge "Evangelicals for Trump" rally in Miami, Florida, a pastor welcomed the President by shouting a prayer that sounded like the introduction to a heavyweight title bout: "Lord I thank you," he bellowed. "America did not need a preacher in the Oval Office, did not need a professional politician in the office. It needed a fighter and a champion for freedom and Lord that's exactly what we have." Cheers of adoration resounded.

This moment captured much of what is complex, confusing and disturbing about the highly politicised religious landscape of America today and the bearing it will have on the presidential election. Eighty-one per cent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and that figure looks like holding. That statistic is the accentuation of a pattern that has existed since the 1980s when an alliance emerged in the Republican Party between big business, populism and the religious right.

You can't understand America without understanding its religion and that, you might say, is something of a riddle. The non-conformist origins of the US spawned a bewildering array of denominations and expressions of belief. Even the term "evangelical" means so many different things depending on who is using it. Traditionally it signified a devout faith that, as historian David Bebbington describes it, prioritises conversion, the Bible and a personal relationship with God. But in popular usage today it most often simply means "politically conservative Christian".

The Republican Party has most successfully captured those who self-identify as evangelical. (That's if the person is white. Black protestants, themselves often theologically conservative, reliably vote Democrat to the tune of nine to one). The widely held perception among believers is that the Democratic Party has become secularised to the point where there is no room for the specific commitments of religious adherents.

Andy Crouch, former editor of Christianity Today Magazine, a leading evangelical publication, believes the brutally contested nature of contemporary American politics signifies something much deeper than the surface issues surrounding presidential elections and the appointment of Supreme Court judges.

"The best word I can think of is respect or recognition," he tells me. "The recognition of parts of our society that feel very unseen, or when seen, feel held in contempt … And the people who feel least respected and feel least included by the systems and institutions of American life … are looking for someone to validate them, and say, I see you. I recognise you. You matter." Crouch says this is by no means limited to religious people but says all kinds of groups who feel left behind in American life are looking for someone in their corner.

When it comes to evangelicalism as a cultural and historical movement, Kristen Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation believes this desire for a strong leader to offer protection and power has led to a distorted faith that favours rugged masculinity, of the John Wayne-type, alongside a misplaced Christian nationalism. "Love your enemies" and "turn the other cheek" can start to sound a bit awkward in such an environment. "Jesus becomes the warrior Christ and he's going to slay his enemies," says Du Mez. "And so they actually change the Jesus of the gospels to fit this ideal and in doing so, I argue, change Christianity itself."

A figure like Donald Trump fits perfectly the image of tough masculine protector uninhibited by virtues of kindness or self-control.

But not all believers buy it. Christians against Trumpism and Political Extremism is a recently birthed movement of influential Christian leaders who are calling for an end to the poisonous rhetoric and "extreme and dangerous methods of civic engagement" they see as characteristic of the current administration. The movement says it stands against political extremism of both "left" and "right" that uses "violence, chaos and degrading language", seeking instead justice, truth and unity.

It remains to be seen exactly what role religious communities will play in the election. But Christianity at its best centres on its founder who defied easy categorisation – being socially conservative and politically radical, as he was.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/white-evangelicals-want-a-puncher-not-a-preacher-in-the-oval-office-20201014-p5650z.html

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From Tiffany to Target, stores are boarding up windows in case of election unrest

Retailers in Democrat cities are boarding up shops in preparation for a Democrat election loss. Lefties know they are the violent ones

Retailers across the US are stepping up security measures to try to head off any damages to their stores during election-related protests in the coming days. Tiffany, Saks Fifth Avenue, CVS, Target and Macy's are among the chains that are boarding up some of their stores' windows in preparation.

"While we intend to remain open where possible, out of an abundance of caution the windows of select stores in key cities will be boarded in anticipation of potential election related activity," said Nathan Strauss, spokesperson for Tiffany.

Stores around the US were damaged this summer, and merchandise was stolen during protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Retailers are hoping to prevent this from happening again.
CVS said it is boarding up stores in areas where they have been damaged by unrest in the past. Stores where windows are covered "will continue to be open to serve customers as long as it is safe to do so," said CVS spokesperson Mike DeAngelis.

Tom Buiocchi, CEO of ServiceChannel, an online platform that connects retailers with local contractors, said 750 stores have requested orders on the platform to board up their windows around the country since October 27, with the most in California, New York and Illinois.

https://www.9news.com.au/national/us-election-2020-shops-boarding-up-stores-bracing-for-election-day-protests/c59b7e46-5016-435f-bb10-5775f2a8ec3c

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My Kid Has Cancer and ObamaCare Is Making Everything Worse

‘Before ObamaCare went into effect, the private marketplace offered us a wide range of relatively inexpensive plans.’

Joe Biden has been running an ad in which he says he can’t imagine what it would be like to have a child with cancer and no health coverage. I don’t have to imagine. Under the health “reform” championed by Biden when he served as President Barack Obama’s vice president, I live that reality every day.

Twice over the past three years, ObamaCare has had no plans to sell us that covers little girls ravaged by cancer or recovering from that ordeal—and it might leave us floundering again.

In November 2015, my wife got the most dreadful call a parent can get. The doctor knew why our daughter Colette, then 2 ½ years old, hadn’t been feeling well: Blood work had revealed leukemia.

Thanks to ObamaCare, we were already in financial straits. In 2014, the law had eliminated a great plan we had had for years. Before ObamaCare went into effect, the private marketplace offered us a wide menu of relatively inexpensive plans that covered specialist care, even out of state.

Afterward, however, all that was left were increasingly costly plans with fewer benefits. Premiums swelled. In 2017, I took my family into the ObamaCare marketplace to escape at least the crushing premiums.

But things were about to get much worse than expensive. In mid-2017, President Trump merely suggested scrapping massive ObamaCare subsidies to insurance giants that only delivered lousy care at ever-greater cost. In response, every insurer in northern Virginia with a family plan pulled out for the following year.

That is, except one. But Cigna Connect wouldn’t cover Colette at Inova Fairfax, the one hospital in the region with a pediatric cancer ward. Under ObamaCare, our daughter was effectively without coverage for cancer.

Panicked, we called the politicians, the media and Cigna. We retained an attorney. Nothing changed. No full policy coverage from Cigna. Without options, I shut down part of my consulting business and started work at a friend’s organization for its group insurance—and got saddled with monthly premiums far in excess of what we could afford.

Thanks to the publicity and some strong-arming by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), Cigna agreed to cover the hospital—but it was too late for us. Then, for 2020, we purchased a better plan from Anthem, newly returned to the ObamaCare marketplace. We thought we might be done with insurance crises.

How naïve. In mid-March, with the novel coronavirus sweeping the country, Colette’s cancer doctors told us Anthem had decided that, in two weeks, it would no longer cover her clinic. Once again, thanks to ObamaCare, we were left without coverage for our daughter recovering from cancer.

Perhaps the marketplace would grant us a waiver to buy the Cigna plan still for sale in our ZIP code? Nope. So, like in 2017, we were forced to turn to Warner, to bully Anthem into its covering the clinic—at least through April 1, 2021.

After that? Who knows.

Open enrollment for next year starts Nov. 1. I could beg Warner to gear up for another round of veiled threats to a private company, to force one to cover us. Perhaps President Trump could issue an executive order prohibiting the insurance companies from pulling out of the market midyear, leaving children stranded.

But none of these is the right long-term answer. We must repeal ObamaCare and put into the hands of Americans real, automatically renewable insurance products curated to individual needs. Too many Colettes will suffer, and possibly die, waiting for the personal carve-outs only a few of us can ever get anyway.

To solve the inherent instability of ObamaCare, the state could just take over all medical facilities. It’s called single-payer. But then we would all be at the mercy of the same government bureaucracy that has been working for years to slowly kill my daughter.

And that has taught us a lesson. Turns out there is a nightmare worse than one’s watching cancer brutalize one’s little girl. It’s having Obama’s law—which his vice president rightly claims as his own—collude with the disease against her.

Mr. Biden, you might try imagining what that feels like.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13305&omhide=true

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Does vitamin D protect against COVID-19?

Recent studies have found a link between low vitamin D levels and an increased risk of COVID-19 infection, but they don't prove that the vitamin is protective.

In the absence of a COVID-19 cure or vaccine, scientists are investigating whether vitamin D can reduce the risk of COVID-19 infection or the severity of the disease. Indeed, the idea of taking a vitamin to ward off COVID-19 infection certainly is appealing.

But although some recent studies have suggested a link between low vitamin D levels and a higher risk of catching the disease, experts say it's not enough to prove that vitamin D itself protects against the disease, or if other factors are playing a role.

One study, published Sept. 3 in JAMA Network Open, found that the risk of COVID-19 infection in people with vitamin D deficiency was nearly two times higher than in people with sufficient levels of the vitamin. Another study, published Oct. 27 in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, found that hospitalized COVID-19 patients had higher rates of vitamin D deficiency than a control group of patients who didn't have COVID-19 but whose vitamin D status was measured pre-pandemic.

These associations don't prove that vitamin D deficiency causes increased COVID-19 risk, said Adrian Martineau, who studies respiratory infections and immunity at Queen Mary University of London, and , who was not involved with either study. "But it's suggestive and it's enough to justify doing further research to find out whether or not there is a true cause-effect relationship," Martineau told Live Science.

A protective effect?

There are several reasons to hypothesize that vitamin D might reduce COVID-19 risk, Martineau said. Vitamin D has been shown to boost the immune system's response to viruses and dampen its inflammatory response; an excessive inflammatory response characterizes severe COVID-19 cases, he said.

According to a meta-analysis by Martineau, first published in 2017 in the journal BMJ and updated to include more recent studies this July on the preprint server medRxiv, vitamin D supplementation reduced the risk of acute respiratory tract infections in general compared with a placebo. (However, the meta-analysis did not include studies about COVID-19.)

Additionally, there's an overlap between the groups of people with higher risk of vitamin D deficiency, such as older people and people with darker skin, and those at higher risk for COVID-19, Martineau said. "People put two and two together and thought, 'Well, this is quite a striking coincidence, if it is indeed a coincidence.".

An earlier study published May 6 in the journal Aging Clinical and Experimental Research found that in 20 European countries, the lower the average vitamin D levels, the higher the rate of coronavirus cases and deaths were for a given country.

Still, not all studies have suggested a protective effect. A study published May 7 in the journal Diabetes & Metabolic Syndrome found no statistically significant association between vitamin D levels and COVID-19 risk once the researchers took into account other factors that could affect COVID-19 risk.

https://www.livescience.com/vitamin-d-covid-19-risk.html

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IN BRIEF

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a top swing-state newspaper, hasn't endorsed a Republican in almost 50 years — but is backing Trump now (The Blaze)

Twitter restores New York Post account — and all it took was a Senate hearing (Washington Times)

Trump adviser Jason Miller hints legal battle to stop Dems from stealing the election (Washington Examiner)

Biden pledges to "collaborate" with the Chinese Communist Party (Free Beacon)

Scranton Joe's final Philly gaffe: says he's wearing an Eagles jacket, but it's a Delaware Blue Hens jacket (Washington Examiner)

Biden staffers can't stop calling Kamala "the next president" (Post Millennial)

Facebook removes 29K-member pro-Trump group, reinstates after Trump blasts on Twitter (Disrn)

Boston Globe columnist suggests no "difference" between Trump supporters and ISIS (Fox News)

Gavin Newsom sends kids back to class at fancy private school while public schools remain closed (Daily Wire)

Walmart reverses decision to remove guns and ammo (The Hill)

Study finds 20% of grocery workers had coronavirus, most without symptoms (New York Post)

Kyle Rittenhouse, dubiously charged with killing two Kenosha protesters, extradited to Wisconsin (NBC News)

Fraudster attempts to register dead Americans as Democrat voters in Florida (Fox News)

U.S. Postal Service likely lost thousands of Pennsylvania mail-in ballots (Free Beacon)

So close: Alyssa Milano dresses as RBG for Halloween, misspells name. Deletes and reposts. Misspells name again. Deletes. (Daily Wire)

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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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‘Hermit nation’: World’s astonishment at Australia’s response to COVID-19

The NYT has oversimplified, as one would expect. It was only the State of Victoria that had severe lockdowns and a significant death toll (819). In my home State of Queensland deaths were negligible (6) and there were few everyday restrictions. I live my life pretty much as I ever did

Even in Victoria however there is a huge contrast with Europe and the USA in the death rate. Deaths in Victoria seem to have ceased now in fact. As I read of the huge difficulties elsewhere in the world, I feel I am living in an oasis of civilization

The world is flabbergasted by Australia's response to COVID-19, but one major newspaper reckons strict rules have turned us into a “hermit nation”.

Articles published internationally over the weekend highlighted Australia's monumental success, reporting that Saturday was the first day of no community transmission cases of virus in 145 days.

The New York Times ran a piece saying Australians now embrace the isolation they tried to escape for so long, but that our rules are so strict they’ve essentially turned us into a “hermit nation”.

The author wrote that our rules were so strict they “seem like something out of China or North Korea”.

“The virus has turned this outgoing nation into a hermit. Australia’s borders are closed, internationally and between several states.” the author wrote.

“Rather than chafing against isolation, though, Australians these days are more willing to smile in the mirror. Island living looks like a privilege when the world is pestilent. “

American current events opinion website Business Insider said we had an advantage over most countries from the start.

“It’s an island with relatively low population density,” they wrote. “But its rules were still far stricter than in many other countries.”

With Victoria reporting another day of zero cases on Sunday, it appears the state is on track to easing restrictions this coming weekend.

More rules are set to be scrapped on November 8, including the 25km travel radius for Melburnians, and now it has been revealed that even more restrictions could be eased than previously thought.

Chief Health Officer Professor Brett Sutton said on Sunday that some of the rules around gatherings could also be changed on November 8.

“We can always make consideration of what the caps might be in certain settings, what the density quotients might be and some of the specific industries that might come on board in terms of being able to operate,” he said.

Australia’s success comes amid sharp rises across the rest of the globe.

The US reported 99,321 new Covid-19 cases today – the highest single day number of cases recorded for any country to date. It marks an alarming jump of almost 11,000 more cases compared to yesterday.

Meanwhile the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced a national lockdown after passing one million coronavirus cases, and France is recording around 50,000 new cases daily.

https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/australia/coronavirus-hermit-nation-worlds-astonishment-at-australia/news-story/1f4b4b491a3d4f2c3c75833ad6347403

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Eastern Europe Fights for Its Life Against a Virus It Thought It Had Crushed

The leaders of seven eastern European countries who gathered in Bled, Slovenia, at the end of August were so certain they’d overcome the coronavirus that they staged a panel called “Europe after Brexit and Covid-19.”

Less than two months later, that confidence has been shattered. Despite having beaten back the initial wave with some of Europe’s fastest and strictest lockdowns, countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea are suffering an explosion of new cases.

Their early advantage squandered, governments across the region are struggling with the same issues as their western counterparts -- or often worse.

Soaring death tolls and a spate of high-profile infections are eroding trust and feeding into a communist-era tradition of skirting rules, exacerbating the crisis.

Field hospitals are popping up as the virus threatens to overwhelm health-care systems and measures that devastated economies this spring are returning..“The coming months, quarters -- I hope it isn’t years -- will be the toughest Poland has faced in decades,” Polish Premier Mateusz Morawiecki told parliament last week.

Morawiecki was on stage at Bled along with leaders from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia. Since then, coronavirus cases have more than tripled in Poland to exceed a quarter of a million on Monday. Deaths there more than doubled to 4,438, according to the World Health Organization.

And it’s not even the region’s worst-hit country. The Czechs now lead the European Union both in new cases and deaths per capita, followed by Hungary.

It didn’t start that way. When Slovakia reported just five cases of the virus on March 9, its capital Bratislava closed elementary schools. Within a week, the Czechs shut schools and banned public gatherings, Hungary declared a state of emergency and Serbia postponed elections.

All of that happened before France closed its schools, even though it had recorded more than 3,000 cases and 79 fatalities.

It was a textbook plan to fight a pandemic: Eastern European governments shut borders, shops and factories and imposed social-distancing restrictions.

With the virus raging in Italy, the U.S. and the U.K., newspaper headlines in the continent’s former communist half declared sympathy while boasting of their countries’ resilience and wisdom in following rules.

That resolve melted in the summer and millions went on holiday abroad as soon as borders reopened. Those who stayed home thronged beer gardens, mountain huts and national parks.

Hoping to rebuild after the lockdowns decimated economies and to save key industries such as tourism, politicians urged people to get back out and spend. Having opened the state’s coffers to help businesses and furloughed workers, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, Hungary’s Viktor Orban and other leaders vowed that even if the virus returned, they’d avoid strict lockdowns.

Leaders in Western Europe are experiencing a similar sense of dismay. Italy and Spain, had sworn off any second lockdowns. Looking at the situation getting exponentially worse with their eastern neighbors, they too are coming to terms with the idea of whether they also declared victory too soon.

By mid-September, the number of new daily cases in the Czech Republic exceeded those in Germany, a country with almost eight times as many people. They did in Poland too, where President Andrzej Duda won a second term after his allies in the government had to postpone elections.

He’s now quarantining after testing positive for the disease.Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov -- another Bled attendee -- is also convalescing with Covid-19, which is on track to kill as many people in his country in September and October as in the first six months of the pandemic combined.

Governments, however, are reluctant to return to the playbook that served them so well in the spring, or to tap into what the pandemic has taught the world in the past seven months.

Their mixed messaging, along with frequent rule-breaking by leaders, has spread public doubt about the effectiveness of restrictions. That’s especially dangerous in a region where people spent decades circumventing official decrees under communist governments, according to Jan Hartl, chairman of the Prague-based researcher the STEM Institute.

“People in former communist countries perceive authorities differently than citizens in the West,” he said. “They intuitively rebel against strict orders from the government since they intuitively consider them stupid. That’s a heritage of totalitarianism.”

At the weekend, as Czech soldiers completed a 500-bed field hospital near a shopping mall in the Prague suburb of Letnany, images flooded media of throngs at a farmers’ market in the city center

https://www.bloombergquint.com/politics/east-europe-fights-for-its-life-against-virus-it-thought-crushed

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The Great American Recovery: Third Quarter GDP Blows Past Expectations

After releasing his plan to reopen America safely in April, President Trump remarked that prior to the Coronavirus pandemic, the United States had “built the greatest economy anywhere in the world . . . and we’re going to build it again.”

At that time, the consensus among economic forecasters was that pandemic-induced lockdowns would result in a sharp economic contraction in the second quarter, and that the economy would experience tepid growth in the third quarter as it slowly clawed back pandemic losses. But because of the President’s pro-growth policies that set a strong pre-pandemic foundation—and the extraordinary speed and scale of the Administration’s support for America’s families and businesses—our nation’s recovery continues to exceed expectations.

This morning’s release of U.S. GDP for the third quarter of 2020 from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) affirms President Trump’s statement that “we’re coming back, and we’re coming back strong.”

The BEA estimates that real GDP grew 7.4 percent (33.1 percent at an annual rate) in the third quarter, the largest single quarter of economic growth on record and roughly twice the prior record of 3.9 percent (16.7 percent at an annual rate) set in the first quarter of 1950. This growth follows the most severe pandemic-induced contraction on record in the second quarter of 2020, which occurred as the government mandatorily shut down all but nonessential services, and Americans made sacrifices to slow the pandemic.

With the historic third-quarter growth, the United States in a single quarter has now recovered two-thirds of the economic output lost due to the pandemic during the first half of the year (Figure 1). In the recovery from the 2008-09 recession, it took 4 times as long to regain the same share of lost economic output.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/great-american-recovery-third-quarter-gdp-blows-past-expectations/

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Las Vegas Oddsmaker Announces Final Prediction: Trump Electoral Landslide Coming

It's all there. All the cards fell into place. Liberals and the biased and bribed mainstream media are just too blind to see it.

It's Donald Trump's win over Hillary Clinton all over again. It's George H.W. Bush overcoming a 17-point deficit to beat Michael Dukakis all over again. It's the final days of Ronald Reagan versus Jimmy Carter, when all of America broke for Reagan at the same time.

At this moment, if you're not blind, deaf or very dumb, it's clear that in these final days up to the election, a majority of American voters, certainly crucial voters in battleground states, are breaking to reelect President Trump.

It's all adding up to a Trump electoral landslide.

And I'm not just talking about tightening polls, the few polls that show Trump actually in the lead or battleground states where Trump is outperforming his numbers from his race against Clinton four years ago.

Much more importantly, I'm talking early-voting numbers. Trump is doing extraordinarily well in early voting in Florida, Nevada, Iowa, North Carolina and Arizona. Trump and Republicans are outkicking the coverage. In other words, they're kicking the Democrats' butts -- with the physical votes on Election Day still to come. And we all know Republicans rule on Election Day.

If Florida is representative of battleground states all over the country, Trump is about to win both the Florida popular vote and an electoral landslide. Democrats are panicking in Florida and all over the country.

Trafalgar Group, which ran the most accurate state-by-state poll of 2016 by factoring in the "shy Trump voters" (people afraid to tell a stranger on the phone they support Trump), shows Trump taking the lead this week in Florida, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Rasmussen shows Trump's approval rating at 52%, five points better than former President Barack Obama's at this same time in 2012 when he was heading for reelection victory.

On Friday, Poll Watch came out with its electoral map, which shows a Trump landslide of 312 electoral votes to 226.

https://townhall.com/columnists/wayneallynroot/2020/11/01/las-vegas-oddsmaker-announces-final-prediction-trump-electoral-landslide-coming-n2579146

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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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A contagion of hatred and hysteria: SUNETRA GUPTA tells how she has been intimidated and shamed for backing shielding instead of lockdown

(Professor Sunetra Gupta is an infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford)

Lockdown is a blunt, indiscriminate policy that forces the poorest and most vulnerable people to bear the brunt of the fight against coronavirus. As an infectious diseases epidemiologist, I believe there has to be a better way.

That is why, earlier this month, with two other international scientists, I co-authored a proposal for an alternative approach — one that shields those most at risk while enabling the rest of the population to resume their ordinary lives to some extent.

I expected debate and disagreement about our ideas, published as the Great Barrington Declaration.

As a scientist, I would welcome that. After all, science progresses through its ideas and counter-ideas.

But I was utterly unprepared for the onslaught of insults, personal criticism, intimidation and threats that met our proposal. The level of vitriol and hostility, not just from members of the public online but from journalists and academics, has horrified me.

I am not a politician. The hurly-burly of political life and being in the eye of the media do not appeal to me at all.

I am first and foremost a scientist; one who is far more comfortable sitting in my office or laboratory than in front of a television camera.

Of course, I do have deeply held political ideals — ones that I would describe as inherently Left-wing. I would not, it is fair to say, normally align myself with the Daily Mail.

I have strong views about the distribution of wealth, about the importance of the Welfare State, about the need for publicly owned utilities and government investment in nationalised industries.

But Covid-19 is not a political phenomenon. It is a public health issue — indeed, it is one so serious that the response to it has already led to a humanitarian crisis. So I have been aghast to see a political rift open up, with outright abuse meted out to those who, like me, question the orthodoxy.

At the heart of our proposal is the recognition that mass lockdowns cause enormous damage. We are already seeing how current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.

The results — to name just a few — include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health.

Such pitfalls of national lockdowns must not be ignored, especially when it is the working class and younger members of society who carry the heaviest burden.

I was also deeply concerned that lockdowns only delay the inevitable spread of the virus. Indeed, we believe that a better way forward would be to target protective measures at specific vulnerable groups, such as the elderly in care homes.

Of course, there will be challenges, such as where people are being cared for in their own multi-generational family homes.

I am certainly not pretending I have all the answers, but these issues need to be discussed and thrashed out thoroughly.

That is why I have found it so frustrating how, in recent weeks, proponents of lockdown policies have seemed intent on shutting down debate rather than promoting reasoned discussion.

It is perplexing to me that so many refuse even to consider the potential benefits of allowing non-vulnerable citizens, such as the young, to go about their lives and risk infection, when in doing so they would build up herd immunity and thereby protect the lives of vulnerable citizens.

Yet rather than engage in serious, rational discussion with us, our critics have dismissed our ideas as ‘pixie dust’ and ‘wishful thinking’.

This refusal to cherish the value of the scientific method strikes at the heart of everything I, as a scientist, hold dear. To me, the reasoned exchange of ideas is the basis of civilised society.

So I was left stunned after being invited on to a mid-morning radio programme recently, only for a producer to warn me minutes before we went on air that I was not to mention the Great Barrington Declaration. The producer repeated the warning and indicated that this was an instruction from a senior broadcasting executive.

I demanded an explanation and, with seconds to go, was told that the public wouldn’t be familiar with the meaning of the phrase ‘Great Barrington Declaration’.

And this was not an isolated experience. A few days later, another national radio station approached my office to set up an interview, then withdrew the invitation. They felt, on reflection, that giving airtime to me would ‘not be in the national interest’.

But the Great Barrington Declaration represents a heartfelt attempt by a group of academics with decades of experience in this field to limit the harm of lockdown. I cannot conceive how anyone can construe this as ‘against the national interest’.

Moreover, matters certainly are not helped by outlets such as The Guardian, which has repeatedly published opinion pieces making factually incorrect and scientifically flawed statements, as well as borderline defamatory comments about me, while refusing to give our side of the debate an opportunity to present our view.

I am surprised, given the importance of the issues at stake — not least the principle of fair, balanced journalism — that The Guardian would not want to present all the evidence to its readers. After all, how else are we to encourage proper, frank debate about the science?

On social media, meanwhile, much of the discourse has lacked any decorum whatsoever.

I have all but stopped using Twitter, but I am aware that a number of academics have taken to using it to make personal attacks on my character, while my work is dismissed as ‘pseudo- science’. Depressingly, our critics have also taken to ridiculing the Great Barrington Declaration as ‘fringe’ and ‘dangerous’.

But ‘fringe’ is a ridiculous word, implying that only mainstream science matters. If that were the case, science would stagnate. And dismissing us as ‘dangerous’ is equally unhelpful, not least because it is an inflammatory, emotional term charged with implications of irresponsibility. When it is hurled around by people with influence, it becomes toxic.

But this pandemic is an international crisis. To shut down the discussion with abuse and smears — that is truly dangerous.

Yet of all the criticisms flung at us, the one I find most upsetting is the accusation that we are indulging in ‘policy-based evidence-making’ — in other words, drumming up facts to fit our ideological agenda.

And that ideology, according to some, is one of Right-wing libertarian extremism.

According to Wikipedia, for instance, the Great Barrington Declaration was funded by a Right-wing think-tank with links to climate-change deniers.

It should be obvious to anyone that writing a short proposal and posting it on a website requires no great financing. But let me spell it out, since, apparently, I have to: I did not accept payment to co-author the Great Barrington Declaration.

Money has never been the motivation in my career. It hurts me profoundly that anyone who knows me, or has even a passing professional acquaintance, could believe for a minute that I would accept a clandestine payment for anything.

I am very fortunate to have a house and garden I love, and I couldn’t ask for more material wealth than that. Far more important to me are my family and my work. Yet the abuse continues to flood in, increasingly of a personal nature.

I have been accused of not having the right expertise, of being a ‘theoretical’ epidemiologist with her head in the clouds. In fact, within my research group, we have a thriving laboratory that was one of the first to develop an antibody test for the coronavirus.

We were able to do so because we have been working for the past six years on a flu vaccine, using a combination of laboratory and theoretical techniques. Our technology has already been patented and licensed and presents a rare example of a mathematical model leading to the development of a vaccine.

Even more encouraging, however, is that there is now a groundswell of movements — Us For Them, PanData19 and The Price of Panic, to name but three — seeking to give a voice to those, like me, who believe that the collateral damage of lockdown can be worse than the virus itself.

On Thursday, a broad coalition was launched under the banner of Recovery. Drawing people from across the mainstream of political views, the movement is calling for balance and moderation in our response to Covid-19, backed by a proper public debate and a comprehensive public inquiry.

I am delighted that it has received such a level of support.

For, ultimately, lockdown is a luxury of the affluent; something that can be afforded only in wealthy countries — and even then, only by the better-off households in those countries.

One way to go about shifting our perspective would be to catalogue all the ways in which lockdowns across the world are damaging societies. At present, I am collaborating with a number of colleagues to do just this, under the banner www.collateralglobal.org .

For the simple truth is that Covid-19 will not just go away if we continue to impose enough meaningless restrictions on ourselves. And the longer we fail to recognise this, the worse will be the permanent economic damage — the brunt of which, again, will be borne by the disadvantaged and the young.

When I signed the Great Barrington Declaration on October 4, I did so with fellow scientists to express our view that national lockdowns won’t cure us of Covid.

Clearly, none of us anticipated such a vitriolic response. The abuse that has followed has been nothing short of shameful.

But rest assured. Whatever they throw at us, it won’t do anything to sway me — or my colleagues — from the principles that sit behind what we wrote.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8899277/Professor-Sunetra-Gupta-reveals-crisis-ruthlessly-weaponised.html

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Too little, too late: Bernie Sanders slams the Democratic Party for becoming the 'party of rich, coastal elites' and ignoring working-class people for many years

In an appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers, Sanders criticized the party from getting off track when it comes to meeting the needs of working class people.

Seth Meyers seemed to be in agreement, acknowledging that the party has gotten away from America's working class, to which Sanders nodded in agreement.

Meyers then asked Sanders what former Vice President Biden could do to 'bring the Democratic Party back to serving the working people in this country' if he won the election.

'I think it is fair to say that in many ways the Democratic Party has become a party of the coastal elites, folks who have a lot of money, upper-middle-class people who are good people, who believe in social justice in many respects,' Sanders said, Newsweek reports.

'But I think for many, many years the Democratic Party has not paid the kind of attention to working-class needs that they should've.'

Party demographics have shifted as more donors and businesses fund campaigns, Sanders asserted. He then stressed the need for Democrats in Congress to 'start bursting out of the blocs in an effort to protect working people.'

Sanders emphasized the importance of passing a 'very substantive' coronavirus bill that was similar to the one passed in March by Congress.

Under the Vermont politician's proposal, the weekly $600 payment that supplemented state unemployment benefits would be extended and an additional $1,200 would be given to individuals and families.

Sanders also stressed the need for the government to provide health care to anyone who might have lost it and to provide aid to cities so that they don't have to furlough or lay off workers.

The senator also voiced his support for raising the minimum wage to at least $15 while making it easier for workers to join unions. He also advocated for women to receive equal pay for their work, compared to their male counterparts.

'If the Democratic Party does not stand firmly for working families and have the courage to take on the drug companies and the insurance companies and the big money interests, shame on them,' Sanders said.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8900189/Bernie-Sanders-says-Democratic-Party-party-coastal-elites.html

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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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There’s No Going Back To ‘Normal’ After Trump. The Republican Party Is Changed Forever

No more cringing before the Left

Donald Trump is not a Republican. He never was before, and he is not one now. As the nation speeds toward Nov. 3, members of the GOP have been all over the board with predictions about the outcome, but some prominent Republicans have been consistently negative about Trump’s prospects and even hopeful for his defeat.

Peggy Noonan penned an archetypal anti-Trump article this month, titled “Biden, Pence and the Wish for Normalcy.” Noonan mused almost longingly that America might be headed toward an unprecedented landslide in favor of Joe Biden. If this happens, she said, one of the primary reasons will simply be “that [Biden] is normal … and people miss normal so much.”

Noonan, like many Republicans who don’t like Trump, wants to go back to normal. The reality is we are never going back to “normal.” The old Republican Party is dead. Trump made a new party, and that is the party of the future.

The Old GOP Is Dead

In 2016, Trump hijacked the Republican Party. Although he was billed as Republican, the support propelling him to victory was a new configuration of the electorate. Many mainstream Republicans still don’t understand this, but no other GOP candidate was going to win in 2016. Trump won because he was not actually a Republican.

Both the Republican and the Democratic parties are in the midst of internal civil wars. The extreme left wing of the Democratic Party is hurtling toward socialism and the destruction not only of statues but of American values and the fundamental principles of this country. Indeed, the escalating rhetoric currently employed by the left historically does not just silence dissent, it eventually seeks to eliminate the dissenters. America is in a struggle not only for its identity, but for its life.

While the left remakes itself, Republicans are engaged in their own struggle. When Trump won the White House, many of the anti-Trumpers of the Republican Party pivoted on a dime. For most, it wasn’t a unity move, but a power play for survival. Trump won, so the GOP decided to ride that wave. They stacked the White House with their people, promoted mainstream Republicans toward presidential appointments, and benefited as best they could from the electoral upset, but they never coalesced behind Trump or his new party’s plan for American renewal.

Both the NeverTrumpers and the “ReluctantTrumpers” are hell-bent on holding out until Trump is out of office to return to the “normal” times for which Noonan yearns. What all Republicans need to realize is that the party, as it was, is dead. Its leaders lost the GOP’s soul by following globalist policies and pursuing their personal wealth at the expense of the American people.

While those Republicans were busy chasing their own interests and melding into a ruling elite in Washington, the country, and indeed the world, changed. What has come to be in the GOP’s stead, and what will continue to develop, is a new party. Trump is not a fluke president. He unified a movement and formed a new party that will continue on, even after he leaves office.

The Party of Trump Isn’t All Republicans

The makeup of Trump’s party is new. He didn’t win in 2016 only by motivating greater Republican turnout. Trump flipped voters, pulling them from across the aisle. This excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article provides a striking example:

‘What happened in 2016 is [Trump] got a great many people who had supported Barack Obama and Democrats in the past to vote for him,’ Republican strategist Whit Ayres told me earlier this week by phone. ‘Trumbull County in northeast Ohio is my classic example. Obama beat [Mitt] Romney there by 22 percentage points. Trump beat [Hillary] Clinton there by seven — a 29-percentage-point turnaround. So it was far more changing the allegiance of existing voters rather than generating a substantial turnout of new voters.’

Making this even more clear, after one of his recent rallies in Florida, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel reported that “31.8% [of attendees] were NOT Republicans. 16.3% were Democrat. 24.4% did not vote in 2016. 14.4% did not vote in the last 4 elections.”

Trump’s new party cuts across traditional party lines and draws from every socioeconomic stratum in America. Although Trump’s base remains the strong conservatives who once vitalized the old Republican Party, he has attracted new voters among blue-collar Democrats, immigrants, and minorities. What are the core values of this new Party of Trump?

The “Make America Great Again” slogan captures the spirit that unites these people. Trump’s party retains the core family values of the old GOP but with an additional and robust focus on economic nationalism, strong sovereignty and national security, and smart foreign policy. The people in Trump’s party are risk-takers and wealth-builders, and they truly live the American ideals of independence and free thought.

Trump’s “Promises Made, Promises Kept” theme is a direct rebuke to the years of betrayal by Washington elites, years of big social and economic pledges from politicians on the campaign trail followed by inaction toward those promises or disloyalty to those principles following a successful election. The Party of Trump isn’t interested in politicians who just talk, or even those who merely take some action. This new party wants someone who will deliver.

Never Trumpers Want Their Sinecures Secured

The people who oppose Trump have something in common too. They are predominantly takers. They don’t build; instead, they want the safe route to success. This type of person can also be found in every stratum of society, from politicians like Joe Biden and Mitt Romney, to the middle-class people with safe corporate jobs who have no skin in the game, to the poor who would rather get a handout than a hand up.

The NeverTrumpers within the Republican Party are working hard against the president and his coalition. Just last week, the New York Times highlighted the organized elements of this insurgency in an article titled “The Crowded, Competitive World of Anti-Trump GOP Groups.” Leading the pack are the Lincoln Project, founded by Rick Wilson, George Conway, and their ilk, and Reclaim Our Party, a super PAC run by Greg Schott, “who sold his business software company to Salesforce in 2018 for a reported $6.5 billion” and has poured $1 million into targeted ads trying to convince soft Republicans to vote against Trump.

The type of Republican who does not believe in Trump does not understand how the world has changed and cannot face the crisis we are in now. In addition to those like Noonan, who yearn for a long-abandoned sense of normalcy, they commonly come in one of two other flavors: the corrupt self-interested and the weak. Many of these figures want politics to revert to its former glory, when they held power and made money. Others can’t stand up to the assault of the left because they want to be perceived as having that most-prized trait: gravitas.

Trump’s Is the Party of Fighters

Four years ago, Trump understood something had to change in America, and now it is clear we are in more of a battle than we ever imagined. The unfolding facts of the elite bureaucracy’s attempted coup and the radical resolve of the far-left to destroy our institutions, our history, and perhaps us, too, requires a new kind of Republican.

Politicians today must be fighters. Although Trump is unique in his style, every politician who successfully follows after him in this new party will need to show Americans that he or she is willing to fight for the good of the nation with the same uncompromising and aggressive resolve. Politicians who can take on our new party’s platform will be winners in America.

The old Republican Party is dead. Trump supporters have witnessed the corruption at home and understand the threats we face from abroad, and we see that politics has changed. We cannot go back to “normal” if we want to turn this ship around. Trump’s new party is composed of people who still believe in the American dream for themselves and for each other. This new party is ready to do the difficult work necessary to peacefully but decisively, and without apology or compromise, return this country to its founding principles.

Be wary of the negative assaults of otherwise “good” Republicans, and don’t let them dissuade you. When the chaos of this current realignment settles, it will be clear that they aren’t in our party. Their party failed. Ours is going to lead America back to prosperity and encourage a global movement toward national sovereignty and freedom.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/28/theres-no-going-back-to-normal-after-trump-the-republican-party-is-changed-forever/

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New Data Suggests President Trump May Be Right About Success of Regeneron

When President Trump emerged from Walter Reed Medical Center, he seemed pretty convinced that the treatment he was given was a cure for COVID-19. He reported feeling better almost immediately after being given Regeneron, a polyclonal antibody formula. Yesterday, Regeneron published the results of the first three phases of their trials for treating COVID-19.

Regeneron has completed the required randomized, double-blind studies that Dr. Fauci insisted on. At the end of September, the company reported that the treatment reduced viral levels in a study of 275 patients who had no evidence of an immune response before receiving the therapy:

“After months of incredibly hard work by our talented team, we are extremely gratified to see that Regeneron’s antibody cocktail REGN-COV2 rapidly reduced viral load and associated symptoms in infected COVID-19 patients,” said George D. Yancopoulos, M.D., Ph.D., President and Chief Scientific Officer of Regeneron. “The greatest treatment benefit was in patients who had not mounted their own effective immune response, suggesting that REGN-COV2 could provide a therapeutic substitute for the naturally-occurring immune response.

Now the company is confirming that the treatment significantly reduced medical visits in a trial of another larger group of patients:

“The first job of an antiviral therapeutic drug is to lower the viral load, and our initial data in 275 patients strongly suggested that the REGN-COV2 antibody cocktail could lower viral load and thereby potentially improve clinical outcomes. Today’s analysis, involving more than 500 additional patients, prospectively confirms that REGN-COV2 can indeed significantly reduce viral load and further shows that these viral reductions are associated with a significant decrease in the need for further medical attention,” said George D. Yancopoulos, M.D., Ph.D., President and Chief Scientific Officer of Regeneron.

Once again, patients with the highest viral load and no native immune response demonstrated the most benefit. The antibody cocktail reduced COVID-19-related medical visits by 72% in patients with one or more risk factors. The preexisting conditions included being over 50 years of age, obesity, cardiovascular, metabolic, lung, liver, kidney disease, and immunocompromised status.

The study also showed there was no difference in outcomes between the high-dose and low-dose treatment. The low dose also had no infusion reactions. This is good news because there is a limited supply of the drug as the company moves to obtain an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the FDA. This would allow current production to treat more patients as the company ramps up production.

According to NBC News, Eli Lilly and Co. has a similar therapy and applied for a EUA. Between Regeneron and Eli Lilly, the government has contracted for 600,000 doses of the treatment. President Trump has said he would push for a EUA after his experience with the therapy and wants it to be free for Americans who need it.

Any significant delays in the authorization must be viewed skeptically at this point. The FDA still has a warning regarding the use of HCQ for COVID-19 outside a hospital setting on its website. This causes politicians and professional boards to interfere with its use to treat COVID-19 in the outpatient setting in some states.

This dishonest attack on HCQ, even though millions of patients worldwide have taken this medication safely for decades, is an indictment of the agency. According to Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch:

There is extensive evidence that HCQ, when used within the first five days of symptom onset, produces a sharp and statistically significant reduction in hospitalization and mortality. Seven controlled, well-conducted clinical studies show this: 636 outpatients in São Paulo, Brazil; 199 clinic patients in Marseille, France; 717 patients across a large HMO network in Brazil; 226 nursing-home patients in Marseille; 1,247 outpatients in New Jersey; 100 long-term care institution patients in Andorra (between France and Spain); and 7,892 patients across Saudi Arabia.

All of these studies pertain to the early treatment of high-risk outpatients, and all showed 50% or higher reductions in hospitalization or death. Not a single fatal cardiac arrhythmia attributable to the HCQ was reported among these thousands of patients. In addition, a new summary analysis of five randomized controlled trials has also shown a statistically significant outpatient benefit, proving the case.

The barriers to effective outpatient therapy are becoming unconscionable, and everyone should be concerned that the FDA will drag its feet on Regeneron as well. Our agencies should be making every effort to reduce hospitalizations and the progression to severe illness.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stacey-lennox/2020/10/29/president-trump-said-regeneron-cured-his-covid-19-the-data-suggests-hes-right-n1105914

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IN BRIEF

GOP wins one: Eighth Circuit says absentee ballots counted in Minnesota must be received by Election Night (The Daily Wire)
Leftmedia & Big Tech

Lil Wayne endorses the Platinum Plan (Washington Examiner) | Partisan hacks slam rapper after he appears to endorse Trump (Washington Examiner)

"I'm not an Uncle Tom": Flint, Michigan, Democrat Councilman Maurice Davis endorses Trump (Washington Examiner)

Add Florida to list of swing states where early voting data favors a Trump victory (Washington Examiner)

Twitter shares plunge as user growth slows — and for good reason (Fox Business)

Weekly jobless claims total 751,000 vs. 778,000 expected (CNBC)

Man behind Gretchen Whitmer kidnap plot also wanted to kill Trump (The Post Millennial)

U.S. to allow Americans born in Jerusalem to list Israel as birthplace (The Washington Free Beacon)

California Trump supporters find "Racism Lives Here" signs planted on their properties (Disrn)

Walmart removes guns, ammunition from store displays ahead of election amid concerns of civil unrest (USA Today)

Jerry Falwell Jr. disingenuously sues Liberty University over sex scandal-driven resignation (UPI)

Former Malaysia PM claims Muslims have a right to "kill millions of French people" (The Daily Wire)

Policy: The results are in: Reopening fuels record economic expansion (The Daily Signal)

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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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Trump beats Biden or his predecessors

Says economic historian Martin Hutchinson

The Internet is currently full of so-called “conservatives” either promising to vote for Joe Biden or at best saying they would reluctantly vote for Trump even though in 2016 he was their least favorite of the Republican candidates. For me, the choice is easier. Trump was not my favorite candidate in 2016, but he was no worse than fourth or fifth of the 17 alternatives available. After four years, I have been favorably impressed by his presidency, except in the areas of fiscal and monetary policies. But then, look at the alternatives!

However, the other recent presidents also made both problems worse. George W. Bush appointed Ben Bernanke Fed chairman, despite his already-notorious “helicopter” monetary theories; Barack Obama reappointed him and then appointed the equally sloppy Janet Yellen. George W. Bush diverted the U.S. budget from the sound deficit-free position left by Bill Clinton, and Obama then made the deficit very much worse, also over-regulating the U.S. economy so that it never really recovered from the 2008-09 recession and budget deficits hovered near $1 trillion for a decade.

Today’s monetary and fiscal follies are the ultimate result of John Maynard Keynes. Fiscally, he advocated “stimulus” of more government spending every time the economy hit a hiccup. Monetarily, his fingerprints are less obvious, but his advocacy of a monetary system unlinked to the “barbarous relic” of gold and his belief that rentiers served no useful social purpose together led us to current monetary policy follies. In reality, Keynes said nothing new; there were politicians advocating “stimulus” and funny money opposing Lord Liverpool, 200 years ago (Henry Brougham and the 8th Earl of Lauderdale, to name two). Keynes merely codified the eternal urge of politicians to get something for nothing and pay for favorite boondoggles by looting savers.

We have established therefore that while Trump is in fiscal and monetary policy no better than the general unattractive run of today’s politicians, he is also no worse. We then come to a whole host of other policies, in which Trump is markedly better than other politicians, in some of which he has broken ground that had been thought impossible.

Perhaps of most consequence for the long-term, Trump has nominated three solidly conservative Justices to the Supreme Court. Ever since Dwight Eisenhower nominated Earl Warren in 1953, we have seen that Republican Presidents’ judgement of potential Supreme Court Justices is a very hit and miss affair.

Eisenhower’s two mistakes, Warren and William J. Brennan, ensured leftist control of the Supreme Court until at least 1986, with President Kennedy’s error in the opposite direction, Byron White, being insufficient to offset their effect (White is the only such error by a Democrat President since the New Deal era). Trump’s soundness on Justices would not have been shared by his alternatives; one need only think of George W. Bush’s attempt to nominate John Roberts and Harriet Miers, or his father’s nomination of David Souter, to see how error can easily creep in if a President does not have a sound grounding in principle.

In other areas also, Trump has been distinctly better than the alternatives. On immigration, he has not achieved enough to please Ann Coulter, but he has at least pointed the administration in the right direction, and largely ignored the siren songs of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Wall Street Journal. On foreign policy, he has been both more intelligent and more courageous than the alternatives. He has moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, which numerous Presidents had promised but wimped out of, and has thereby secured two useful Middle East Treaties, very likely with more to come. He has also greatly reduced the U.S. footprint in that misbegotten region, which had cost trillions of dollars, thousands of lives and the bulk of U.S. global credibility, for no significant economic or geopolitical gain.

Trump’s “Art of the Deal” approach to life leaves him over-optimistic, over-borrowed and over-leveraged in economic policy, but in foreign policy it works as well with the world’s thugs and dictators as it does with the shysters in New York real estate.

Two other areas where Trump beats his potential competitors are trade and de-regulation. On trade, Trump has for the first time identified the problems with the economists’ favorite model of globalization, and has taken steps to restore necessary grit to the machinery of the world trading system and thereby shut down the possibility of a totalitarian global state (both those struggles will outlive his time in office, needless to say). His deregulation has been notably more enthusiastic than that of any President since Ronald Reagan; in particular he has taken the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris agreement and ended several damaging “climate change” initiatives, for both of which we can be grateful. In both trade and regulation, the Bushes were far too prone to defer to leftist conventional wisdom perpetrated by the permanent bureaucracy.

“Never-Trumpers” complain that Trump is a man of bad character but compared to what? – these people are politicians! I find his tweets mostly funny and refreshing, and don’t object to his egomania, which is merely more visible than that of most leaders.

https://www.tbwns.com/2020/10/26/the-bears-lair-trump-beats-biden-or-a-bushie/

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The Lockdown Left: socialists against society

There is no doubt that the virus has been a delicious opportunity for the Left. Their entire existence is devoted to finding thihgs to do that will oppress people under the cloak of good intentions

Then the coronavirus fell into their laps. Suddenly there was a golden excuse to oppress people more extensively than they could ever have dreamed of. So they pulled out all stops and adopted the policies of Communist China. Never before had huge lockdowns been imposed to deal with a virus. But the Chinese gave them the precedent they were salivating for

And only the lone figure of Mr Trump questioned the Chinese precedent

As Britain staggers from lockdown to lockdown, the cruelty, destructiveness and wanton irrationality of the policy grows ever more obvious. Yet as spontaneous social and civic resistance to rolling lockdowns continues to grow, it will inevitably fail to cohere into organised opposition without meaningful political representation. Polls that indicate strong public support for lockdown are riddled with inconsistencies, suggesting that respondents are themselves confused and torn in their views on our collective response to the pandemic.

One of the reasons for the failure to translate this simmering discontent into organised opposition, and to resolve the contradictions of public opinion, is that most ‘oppositional’ forces in the country today support lockdown. This is the Lockdown Left, the core of which is the Labour Party with its allies and flanking supporters within the unions, the media and the liberal professions.

It is worth considering what the absence of meaningful political opposition means in today’s context. For a start, it is difficult to overstate the calamitous consequences of the government’s policies. Boris Johnson’s Tories have overseen an economic collapse worse than what they themselves predicted under a Corbyn government. Their policies have devastated swathes of the service industry, especially in those very same northern English constituencies that lent Johnson their support in the 2019 election, and that the Tories had themselves earlier destroyed with Thatcherite policies of deindustrialisation in the 1980s. The Tories have shredded the civil liberties they supposedly cherish with the draconian Coronavirus Act. They have even sought to organise the population as informants and police auxiliaries, with state snitch lines and ‘Covid marshals’. The policy of ‘Protecting the NHS’ has asked the population to sacrifice its health on behalf of the public-health bureaucracy – a sacrifice whose grim toll has been registered in care-home deaths and countless delayed tests and treatments, the consequences of which we will all be living with for years to come. This is to say nothing of climbing rates of suicide and domestic abuse. One of the reasons the Tories can get away with this gruesome trail of devastation is that they have the support of the Lockdown Left.

Leading figures on the left were demanding a stringent lockdown long before the Tory government lurched into it. Owen Jones broke the bounds of irony itself when he publicly stated that he welcomed the establishment of a Tory police state. As public weariness with lockdown sets in, the Lockdown Left has started to notice the effects it is having, all while remaining committed to the policy. The mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, opposes the government’s punitive lockdown policies against the north, while at the same time demanding a national lockdown. Owen Jones laments the toll that lockdown has taken on our collective mental health, pathetically pleading for a ‘national conversation’ as a substitute for opposition – a conversation presumably for those who have the free time to pontificate online and don’t have to continue working as normal.

That those on the Lockdown Left continue to support the Tory lockdown exposes their deep callousness and misanthropy. For years they have criticised the Tories for the casual cruelty with which they have treated the vulnerable, for their vindictive and punitive economic policies. But when it came down to it, these leftists did nothing to counter the Tories’ grim view of society. The Lockdown Left has done its utmost to realise the old Thatcherite slogan, ‘There is no such thing as society’. While once upon a time Corbynistas would happily compose social-media rhapsodies to the virtues of collective solidarity, human warmth and compassion as the basis for social reorganisation in the wake of Tory rule, when the moment came precisely to maintain those values in opposition to a politics of fear led by a Tory government, they opted instead to collaborate with the Tories in destroying social and civic life and inflating state power.

How did so many self-avowed socialists end up being so hostile to society? If the pandemic has exposed the deep ineffectiveness of the British state, it has also exposed the absence of any genuine solidaristic politics on the left. That the majority of the left has supported lockdown speaks to the fact that many leftists’ politics are defined today not by any belief in our collective capacity to reshape social life, but rather in a vision of us all as fragile, isolated and vulnerable monads, who all threaten each other with our diseases, divergent opinions, toxic attitudes and unhealthy behaviours.

No social change will ever be achieved while we cower behind our laptops. But then again, a fully online society suits the middle-class base of the Lockdown Left very well: they don’t need to leave their home or present a public face to the world outside of the Zoom seminar, and they have a precarious, de-unionised workforce on hand to maintain their standard of living. The Conservative and coalition governments of the past decade must be held responsible for hollowing out public capacity, hobbling any effective response to the pandemic. But the Lockdown Left should also bear some responsibility for embracing the lockdown and the neoliberal, individuated attitude to society that underpins it.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/10/19/the-lockdown-left-socialists-against-society/

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Trump Executive Order Aims to Rein in Bureaucracy’s Role in Policymaking

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday aimed at making federal bureaucrats engaged in policymaking more accountable.

The order is intended to address what Trump administration officials say is a concern about the growth of the federal bureaucracy and about an increasing willingness by Congress to delegate policymaking authority to executive branch agencies.

Because of civil service protections, career federal employees essentially can make and design policy details and rules with little or no public accountability.

“President Trump is delivering on his promise to make Washington accountable again to the citizens it’s meant to serve,” Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told The Daily Signal in a statement. “This much-needed reform will increase accountability in essential policymaking positions within the government.”

Trump’s executive order creates a new category of federal employees involved in policymaking—Schedule F—for the personnel in agencies that write federal rules and regulations.

The federal government has political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president or agency head as well as career employees who cannot be removed without a lengthy civil service process.

The executive order gives federal agencies more flexibility and oversight over career employees in critical positions that affect policy. The new Schedule F will apply to federal employees serving in confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating positions that don’t change when a presidential transition occurs.

The goal is to ensure that federal employees responsible for making policy decisions are held accountable, administration officials say.

The executive order also will make it easier for agency heads to address poor performance by policymaking employees. That’s intended to address the long-standing complaint—even among federal employees—that poorly performing federal workers aren’t held accountable.

Accountability is a major concern. The Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey found that only one-third of respondents said proper steps are taken to address poor performers who cannot or will not improve.

Under the executive order, Cabinet secretaries and federal agency chiefs would make a determination which employees have a role in writing policy. The agency heads then would submit the list to the Office of Personnel Management for review.

The reform is reasonable, said Rachel Greszler, a research fellow in economics, budget, and entitlements at The Heritage Foundation.

“This commonsense change to insert some much-needed accountability could significantly improve the effectiveness of the federal government,” Greszler told The Daily Signal, adding:

Imagine if a CEO was prevented from disciplining or dismissing managers who refused to carry out her directives or who took actions to thwart her initiatives. That’s the case right now within the federal government, where it’s extremely difficult—sometimes seemingly impossible—to fire federal employees.

Federal workers who hold critical policy-related positions, with the power to significantly impact Americans’ lives, should not be immune from accountability. This change is long overdue. It will result in better stewardship of taxpayers’ money, and could improve morale as federal workers show high levels of dissatisfaction with a lack of accountability.

The president has sought to tame the bureaucracy since taking office in January 2017. Among the earliest bills he signed was one that made it easier to fire bad employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Just over a year ago, Trump signed an executive order to rein in actions of the administrative state.

Republican lawmakers, among them Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, also have raised concerns about Congress ceding too much authority to the executive branch and offered proposals to reorganize the bureaucracy.

Under existing civil service law, federal agencies have greater flexibility to hire and fire employees in confidential positions that include determining, making, and advocating policy positions.

However, as Congress has delegated greater policy-related work to executive branch agencies, the interpretation of positions classified as “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating” hasn’t been updated.

The executive order Trump signed Wednesday directs agencies to reclassify those employees.

The order primarily will apply to career employees with substantive involvement in creating government policy, such as employees who draft agency regulations and guidance. Line federal workers without policy-related duties will not be affected, officials said.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/10/21/exclusive-trump-executive-order-aims-to-rein-in-bureaucracys-role-in-policymaking

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My other blogs: Main ones below

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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Biden would finish what Obama started: the decline of US power

Within living memory, the coming US election is by far the world’s most important. It will determine whether we will continue to live in a world where the dominant power is so extraordinarily benevolent that at the end of World War II she made no territorial or financial demands but gave away a massive fortune to allow the defeated powers to restore their countries. Or a world where her predecessor was persuaded by small groups of Christians that slavery was so wrong that the institution was eventually abolished throughout her vast empire and that the task of the Royal Navy would be to end the trade on the high seas.

In their place will be a power which is unbelievably brutal even to its own citizens, forcing some into slave labour for no other reason than that they are Muslims, killing Falun Gong for a despicable on-call live organ trade, tearing down churches, suppressing the very rights she promised to keep in Hong Kong and flagrantly breaching international law to annex vast parts of the South China Sea.

This will be the result of the election of Joe Biden, who as vice-president for eight years was ­second-in-charge of an admin­istration dedicated to the man­aged decline of the US and whose foundation was declared not to be exceptional. This involved accepting and not fighting the transfer of manufacturing, declared never to come back, turning a blind eye to the theft of American IP as well as to currency manipulation and the breach of WTO rules, and going soft on annexations while running down the armed forces. In addition, the administration released massive funds to the world’s leading terrorist state on the basis it would develop a nuclear industry for peaceful purposes. Curious, then, that they would need ICBMs and resist inspections.

In addition, there is good reason to believe the Biden family has long been involved in the sale of access and influence to foreign oligarchs, including Communist China, at the very time they were being favoured by the administration. This was first revealed in two unchallenged books by Peter Schweizer, then by emails in a hard drive obtained by the New York Post. This was corroborated by emails in the possession of two former business partners of Biden’s son as well as his lawyer’s attempts to recover the hard drive. Apart from ludicrous attempts to claim this is a Russian smear, there has been no suggestion the emails are not genuine.

Worse, the Democratic Party is only the latest institution to be the subject of the long march by the left. It is no longer the party of JFK. And from segregation itself, Biden, a lifelong politician, has never demonstrated any strong and consistent belief. To obtain the nomination he agreed to a far-left manifesto with Bernie Sanders, an agenda so socialist it will only accelerate the very decline he and Obama began to preside over. His accession to the White House would soon lead to Beijing assuming world hegemony and woe betide any disobedient vassal. We can already see how we are to be punished for our insolence in thinking we can independently declare our foreign policy without suffering sanctions.

The alternative to Biden, Donald Trump, came to power with a superb agenda to make America great again. Unlike most politicians, he has fulfilled his agenda to an unprecedented degree. His foreign policy has been an extraordinary success with no new wars, peace breaking out in the Middle East and hitherto recalcitrant allies pulling their weight.

He is a law-abiding president, never using the taxation authorities or wire-tapping to undermine his enemies as others have. He is a federalist, which explains most of America’s failures in responding to COVID-19 — which occurred mainly in Democrat-run states. But little of the truth is reported in most of the mainstream media, which has become the propaganda arm of the Democrats. That’s why most of their polls should be ­ignored, not only because of their poor record but their agenda. The few reliable polls and the enthusiasm only Trump attracts indicate that, once again, he will prevail.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/biden-would-finish-what-obama-started-the-decline-of-us-power/news-story/c329ad5e720996b09040598bf17a8648

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How deadly is covid-19?

September 2020 was the least deadly month in Swedish history, in terms of number of deaths per 100,000 population. Ever. And I don’t mean the least deadly September, I mean the least deadly month. Ever. To me, this is pretty clear evidence of two things. First, that covid is not a very deadly disease. And second, that Sweden has herd immunity.

When I posted this information on my twitter feed, the response from proponents of further lockdown was that the reason September was such an un-deadly month, was because everyone has already died earlier in the pandemic. To me, that seems like a pretty self-defeating argument. Why?

Because 6,000 people have died of covid in Sweden, a country with a population of 10,000,000 people. 6,000 people is 0,06% of the population. If it is enough for that tiny a fraction of a population to die of a pandemic for the pandemic to peter out so completely that a country can have its least deadly month ever, then the pandemic was never that deadly to begin with.

In August, I wrote an article where I proposed that the mortality for covid is only 0,12%, roughly the same as influenza. That number was based on a back-of-the-envelope calculation. I figured that, since the death rate had dropped continuously for months and was at very low levels, Sweden must have reached a point where it had herd immunity. And I figured that at least 50% of the population must have been infected for herd immunity to have been reached. 50% of Sweden’s population is five million people. 6,000 / 5,000,000 = 0,12%

At the beginning of October, one of the World Health Organisation’s executive directors, Mike Ryan, said that the WHO estimated that 750 million people had so far been infected with covid. At that point, one million people had died of the disease. That gives a death rate for covid of 0,13% . So the WHO said that the death rate is 0,13% . Not too far off my earlier back-of-envelope estimation. This of course begs the question why there are continued lockdowns for a disease that is no worse than the flu.

A short while later, the WHO released an analysis by professor John Ioannidis, with his estimate of the covid death rate. This analysis was based on seroprevalance data, i.e. data on how many people were shown to have antibodies to covid in their bloodstream at different times in different countries, which was correlated with the number of deaths in those countries. Through this analysis, professor Ioannidis reached the conclusion that covid has an overall mortality rate of around 0,23% (in other words, one in 434 infected people die of the disease). For people under the age of seventy, the mortality rate was estimated at 0,05% (in other words, one in 2,000 infected people under the age of 70 die of the disease).

As I’ve discussed before, I don’t think antibody data gives a very complete picture, since there are studies showing that a lot of people don’t produce measurable antibodies in their bloodstreams, but still have immunity, either thanks to a T-cell response, or thanks to local antibody production in the respiratory tract. So I think that the fatality rate is significantly lower than what the analysis by professory Ioannidis found, and more in line with what the WHO stated earlier in October.

But even if the antibody based number is the correct number, then covid still is not a very deadly disease. For comparison, the 1918 flu pandemic is thought to have had an infection fatality rate of 2,5%, i.e. one in forty infected people died. So the 1918 flu was 11 times more deadly than covid if you go by professor Ioannidis antibody based numbers, and 19 times more deadly than covid if you go by the fatality rate provided 12 days earlier by the WHO’s Mike Ryan.

And this is missing one big point about covid. The average person who dies from covid is over 80 years old and has multiple underlying health conditions. In other words, their life expectancy is very short. The average person who died in the 1918 pandemic was in their late 20’s. So each death in the 1918 pandemic actually meant around 50 years more of life lost per person than each death in the covid pandemic. Multiply that by the fact that it had a 19 times higher death rate, and the 1918 flu was in fact 950 times more deadly than covid, in terms its capacity to shorten people’s lives.

Ok, I’ve discussed the fatality rate of the 1918 flu pandemic, and compared that to covid. But what about the fatality rate of the common cold viruses that are constantly circulating in society? How does covid compare to them?

Many people think that the common cold viruses are harmless. But in fact, among elderly people with underlying health conditions, they are frequently deadly. A study carried out in 2017 found that, among frail elderly people, rhinovirus is actually more deadly than regular influenza. In that study, the 30 day mortality for frail elderly people admitted to hospital due to a rhinovirus infection was 10% . For frail elderly people admitted to hospital due to influenza, 30 day mortality was 7% .

What is my point? If you are old and frail, and have underlying health conditions, then even that most harmless of all infections, the so called “common cold”, can be deadly. In fact, it often is. Covid-19 is not a unique disease, and does not appear to have a noticeably higher mortality rate than the so called “common cold”.

There is one final aspect to all this that needs to be discussed. And that is the effect of covid on overall mortality. If it turns out that covid has no effect on overall mortality, then that really brings in to question why we are locking down, since we’re not actually preventing any deaths. So, what is the effect of covid on overall mortality?

Let’s look at Sweden, since that is perhaps the country that has taken the most relaxed approach of any to preventing spread, and which should therefore also reasonably be expected to have had the highest impact on its overall death rate. From January to September 2020, Sweden experienced 687 deaths per 100,000 population. The last time Sweden had a deadlier year was 2015. Personally, I don’t remember any big deadly pandemic happening in 2015.

In fact, 2020 is so far one of the least deadly years in Swedish history, and is largely in line with the average for the preceding five years. To be precise, it is 2,7% higher than the average for the preceding five years, which is well within the margin of error. In 2019, mortality was 6% lower than the average, so it should be expected that 2020 would have a slightly higher mortality than average, even without covid.

What does this mean? It means that covid, a supposedly deadly viral pandemic, has not killed enough Swedes to have any noticeable impact on overall mortality.

How can this be explained, when we know that 6,000 Swedes have died of covid?

As I see it, there are two possible explanations. The first is that most people who died “of” covid actually died with covid. In other words, they had a positive covid test and were therefore characterized as covid deaths, when the actual cause of death was something else. The second is that most people who died of covid were so old, and so frail, and had so many underlying health conditions, that even without covid, they would have died by now. There are no other reasonable explanations.

I am not saying that covid is nothing, or that it doesn’t exist. I am saying that it is a virus with a marginal effect on longevity. And yet, public policy in most countries has been driven by doomsday scenarios based on completely unrealistic numbers. To put it simply, we’ve acted like we’re dealing with a global ebola outbreak, when covid is much more like the common cold.

UPDATE (26th October 2020): After SCB updated their numbers it has become clear that September 2020 was in fact the second least deadly month in Swedish history, not the least deadly month. That award goes to June 2019.

https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/10/24/how-deadly-is-covid-19/

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SCOTUS Denies Wisconsin Request to Count Mail-in Ballots After Election Day

Mail-in votes that arrive in the hands of Wisconsin election officials after Election Day, regardless of when the ballots were postmarked, cannot be counted in the 2020 presidential election, according to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling issued on Monday.

Democrats in Wisconsin had requested a six-day extension to the mail-in deadline of November 3. In September, a federal judge granted the request. However, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit overturned that decision leading to a Supreme Court petition from the Democratic National Committee. The Supreme Court voted along party lines with the five conservative justices voting to block the extension. The three liberal justices dissented.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who voted to deny the extension, used the example that voters who "show up at midnight after the polls close on election night do not have a right to demand that the State nonetheless count their votes. Voters who submit their absentee ballots after the State's deadline similarly do not have a right to demand that the State count their votes."

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said that blocking the deadline extension deprived Wisconsin residents of their "constitutionally guaranteed right to vote." "As the COVID pandemic rages, the Court has failed to adequately protect the Nation's voters," Kagan wrote, adding that voters in Wisconsin "deserve a better choice."

Wisconsin is seen as a battleground state in the November election. Donald Trump defeated Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin during the 2016 election, marking the first time a Republican presidential candidate had won the state since 1984.

Some Wisconsin voters have taken advantage of mail-in voting because of the threat of spreading the coronavirus at crowded public polling places. As of Monday, positive cases of the coronavirus had risen within the state. According to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, 3,251 new COVID-19 cases were reported on Monday to bring the statewide total to 201,477 positive cases.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/politics/scotus-denies-wisconsin-request-to-count-mail-in-ballots-after-election-day/ar-BB1aqfll

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My other blogs: Main ones below

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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Amy Coney Barrett confirmed on Supreme Court in big Trump win

The US Senate has officially voted to confirm Amy Coney Barrett as a new Supreme Court judge in a major victory for Donald Trump

Her appointment comes just a week before the Presidential election and is regarded as a major victory for Donald Trump as he celebrates his third conservative appointment to the court.

Despite the controversy over her nomination, polls show a majority of Americans support the Senate confirming her now. The Republican-dominated Senate voted 52-48 in favour of her appointment.

Amy Coney Barrett, 48 and mother of seven married to Jesse Barrett, was appointed to the federal court of appeals for the seventh circuit (Indiana, Wisconsin and Illinois) by Donald Trump in 2017.

He nominated her to sit on the Supreme Court following the death in September if the iconic progressive Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

She will become the 115th judge of the 9-person Supreme Court since it was first convened in 1789.

She will be the fifth female justice in the court’s history and the seventh Catholic.

Conservatives believe she will tilt the ideological balance of the bench for decades — infuriating Democrats.

Mr Trump boasted of the victory hours earlier during a rally in Pennsylvania calling Judge Barrett “one of our nation’s most brilliant legal minds”.

“She will defend our rights, our liberties and our God given freedoms,” Mr Trump said. “We were all watching in great amusement as she was so-called grilled by the opposition. That was easy.

“I’m glad she’s not running for president. I’d much rather go against sleepy Joe.”

Democrats were furious, one Senator saying “there will be consequences”.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/business/work/joe-biden-explains-how-donald-trump-can-still-win-us-election/news-story/ee91db516a941ef17ae7c06c978725d2

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The danger of scientific dogmatism

Science that challenges the Covid orthodoxy is being too easily dismissed.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been treated as a Year Zero phenomenon. We were told this was a novel (indeed, an unprecedented) deadly disease that threatened millions of lives. This was the Big One, which demanded an extraordinary response, from lockdowns to the now mandatory wearing of masks.

Given how little we first knew about this new virus, and the ways it attacked the human body, this initial fearful reaction was perhaps understandable. But is it still? After all, we know so much more about Covid-19 now. Yes, it certainly is novel and deadly, particularly for the elderly and those with comorbidities. But unprecedented? Unlikely, if the historical record of other epidemics is taken into account. Indeed, almost every influenza epidemic in the past was, like Covid, initially understood to have been novel, but was later proved, through serological studies, to have had previous eras of prevalence long before its emergence.

Yet this novel coronavirus has been treated as something completely different, as an almost singular pestilence of Biblical proportions. It has been met with the kind of doom-laden fatalism with which Medieval man would have been all too familiar.

But we are not in Medieval times. Mankind is not at the beginning of the scientific revolution. There is a vast amount of accumulated scientific knowledge about past epidemics that we can draw on. And, while it may not provide easy answers, it might at least raise important questions about the wisdom of our response to Covid-19.

Take, for example, the key concept of direct spread through human interaction, which underpins many of the social restrictions in place to combat Covid. This idea has also been used to explain the emergence and transmission of influenza for hundreds of years. But in the late 1970s, the concept of direct spread as the sole mode of influenza transmission was challenged by Robert Edgar Hope-Simpson, a British general practitioner most famous for showing that shingles was a reactivation of the chicken-pox virus.

His highly accessible, pioneering study, The Transmission of Epidemic Influenza, was published in 1992 after a lifetime of study that began with the great epidemic of 1932-33, the years in which he entered general practice.

Hope-Simpson raised several key questions about influenza transmission. How, for example, could direct spread account for the simultaneous appearance of influenza in places far apart – especially before global travel was ubiquitous? The universally observed abruptness of the onset of some influenza epidemics and their equally abrupt endings – without any lockdowns or social distancing – underlined the most puzzling aspect of influenza: how could its seasonal character be explained?

Hope-Simpson’s challenge to the idea of direct spread was first published in 1979 in the Journal of Hygiene, and he published further evidence in support of his case over the next seven years. His key argument was that influenza epidemics are caused by a previous ‘seeding’ of the virus in the community. Symptomless carriers spread the virus around, until seasonal variations in solar radiation reactivate the virus in its human carriers, which allows the virus to emerge among the non-immune. He suggested that the influenza virus is seldom transmitted by the human host because the influenza illness rapidly adopts a persistent non-infectious mode – the ex-patient carries this persistent influenza infection for a year or two before it may be reactivated by seasonal changes.

Hope-Simpson further suggested that the speed of movement of epidemics is therefore unaffected by the speed and complexity of human communications (an idea that, if applied to a coronavirus, would also challenge the conventional tale of Covid-19’s spread from Wuhan in China through human travel).

Influenza epidemics, he contended, must have travelled at the same speed in previous centuries because they are determined by the seasonal stimulus underpinning all natural phenomena, rather than by direct human-to-human spread. The impressive empirical data he gathered from across the globe showed that novel influenza strains appear in different parts of the globe, and that they always spread annually south and then north through the world population. His data showed that tropical regions have very different triggering mechanisms to northern temperate regions, which generate two different prevalence curves.

Hope-Simpson’s challenge to the idea of direct spread was based on the antigenic shift of the influenza A virus and the recycling of its major serotypes. Antigenic shift is the process by which two or more different strains of a virus, or strains of two or more different viruses, combine to form a new subtype. This is what is triggered by the seasonally mediated reactivation of influenza genomes. He hypothesised that an individual person would only harbour the particular influenza A virus genome from their first ever infection. This would explain why only some, rather than all, people become infected when an epidemic is reactivated.

Hope-Simpson was not dogmatic. He was a scientist who made no claim that this was ‘the science’. He was the first to warn that ‘the hypotheses advanced in the new concept are likely to be superseded in part or altogether as more information is gathered. This is the destiny of all hypotheses.’ But he cautioned that ‘it seems certain that the current concept of direct spread is impeding our understanding of influenza’.

What really needs explaining is why the theory of direct spread has remained an orthodoxy, despite both the empirical data that challenges it and its inability to explain many features of influenza epidemics. Hope-Simpson provides a possible answer. In a passing reference, he mentions the research of a Dr John Haygarth, a general practitioner who undertook a detailed study of the spread of the 1775 influenza epidemic in Chester, in north-west England. Haygarth’s subsequent experience during the 1782 epidemic convinced him of its contagious nature. His findings were eventually published more than 20 years later, as Of the manner in which the Influenza of 1775 and 1782 spread by Contagion in Chester and its Neighbourhood. Haygarth writes:

‘But a contrary and, as I think, a very pernicious opinion has lately been supported by physicians of great respectability, and authors of the highest reputation, not, indeed, in this, but in other enlightened nations, have ascribed not only this but many other epidemics, even the plague itself, to a morbid constitution of the atmosphere, independent of contagion. To determine whether this doctrine be true or false, is of the highest importance to mankind. Knowledge, in this instance, is power. So far as it can be proved, that a disease is produced by contagion, human wisdom can prevent the mischief. But the morbid constitution of the atmosphere cannot possibly be corrected or controlled by man.’

This shows that the concept of direct spread was important because it reinforced a sense of human agency. Knowledge was indeed power – the power of mankind to ‘prevent the mischief’. The idea that ‘the constitution of the atmosphere’, rather than human interaction, underpins the seasonal reactivations of influenza was unthinkable. It challenged humanity’s capacity and aspiration to control nature. The concept of direct spread sustained a sense of control even in the face of ignorance about what was causing these epidemics. (It was only in 1933 that the ultramicroscopic parasite that causes flu was discovered.)

Knowledge still is power. But, as with all science, it can ossify and become an orthodoxy that bars the way to further study. And in the battle against Covid-19, there are similar examples of just this process of orthodoxy and dogmatism, which could be holding back our attempts to understand the virus.

For example, on 17 September 2020, the British Medical Journal published an article that received little attention, titled ‘Covid-19: Do many people have pre-existing immunity?’. This questioned whether Covid was a novel pandemic virus and whether there was no pre-existing immunity to it. It highlighted at least six studies that reported T-cell reactivity against Covid in 20 per cent to 50 per cent of people with no known exposure to the virus. These reactivity results were shown to exist in the US, the Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, Sweden and the UK. Evidence of Covid in human sewage was found to have existed in Brazil and in Spain in November 2019.

This is a remarkable finding that would throw much of the current approach to Covid-19 into a tailspin. Alessandro Sette, an immunologist from La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California, told the BMJ: ‘At this point there are a number of studies that are seeing this reactivity in different continents, different labs. As a scientist you know that is a hallmark of something that has a very strong footing.’

And he should know. In late 2009, months after the World Health Organisation declared the H1N1 ‘swine flu’ virus to be a global pandemic, he was part of a team working to explain why the so-called ‘novel’ virus did not seem to be causing more severe infections than seasonal flu. His answer was that pre-existing immunological responses in the adult population prevented its spread: B cells and, in particular, T cells were blunting the severity of the disease. This data forced the WHO and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to change position. Having assumed that most people ‘will have no immunity to the pandemic virus’, they now argued that ‘the vulnerability of a population to a pandemic virus is related in part to the level of pre-existing immunity to the virus’.

In 2020 this lesson seems to have been entirely forgotten. The recent past, let alone the past brought to life by Hope-Simpson, is truly another country.

While it is impossible to draw definitive conclusions from a small set of studies, they are still hard to dismiss. They raise the question and perhaps the exciting possibility that pre-existing immunity could be more protective than future vaccines. This suggests there are many different ways to deal with and react to the emergence of a novel virus. But because of the unquestioning focus on suppressing viral transmission there is very little research now being conducted into pre-existing immunity.

The reason Hope-Simpson’s book is so disquieting is that it raises serious doubts about a still current scientific orthodoxy. He didn’t claim to have all the answers – he was posing questions. But that is how knowledge advances. If there is a wider truth in Hope-Simpson’s influenza thesis that might also apply to a coronavirus, and we have seen in the T-cell immunity studies that there could be, then it raises serious questions about the current social-distancing approach to the pandemic.

But here’s the real concern. For the first time in history, draconian measures to restrict the spread of a virus have been in place throughout the summer, the period when, historically, a virus can circulate with very little mortality impact. This is precisely the period when more immunity and protection could have been built up. This could mean that the impact of Covid this winter could be worse than it needs to be. The rise in cases and hospitalisations globally suggests this is precisely what is happening.

The tragedy here is that mankind’s intervention might not have prevented ‘the mischief’. It could well have become part of the ‘mischief’, amplifying the ‘morbid constitution of the atmosphere’.

This is testament to a deeper problem – namely, that those in control of society no longer see humanity as problem-solvers but as part of the pestilence. Without a belief in human agency, society is left with no option but to hold on to existing knowledge – knowledge that may well now stand in the way of scientific progress.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/10/19/the-danger-of-scientific-dogmatism/

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My other blogs: Main ones below

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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