First major post-coronavirus cruise sets sail with new safety rules

Cruise ships are coming back online after coronavirus outbreaks erupted on numerous vessels back in the spring, bringing the multi-billion dollar industry to a grinding halt. 

Switzerland-based MSC became the first major cruise company to welcome customers in several months when the Grandiosa set sail from the port of Genoa in northern Italy for a seven-day trip around the Mediterranean on August 16.

MSC implemented a slew of safety precautions to prevent the ship, which was christened last year and can carry more than 8,000 passengers and crew members, from becoming a breeding ground for the virus. 

As other companies prepare to re-enter the high seas, new rules on the Grandiosa offer a look at what customers can expect for post-coronavirus cruises - including pre-boarding COVID-19 testing, face masks and social distancing in common areas and strict restrictions for port excursions.

The ship managed to complete its journey without any reported coronavirus cases - providing hope that the cruise industry could safely return sooner than most people expected. 

'We've created sort of this bubble,' Ken Muskat, chief operating officer at MSC Cruises USA, told The Points Guy last month.

On its first post-coronavirus voyage, the Grandiosa welcomed 3,000 passengers who were each tested for COVID-19 via a primary antigen test and a secondary molecular test prior to boarding.

Anyone who tested positive, had a fever or exhibited other coronavirus symptoms on a mandatory health questionnaire was barred from the boat.

One embarking passenger tested positive at both screening stages, according to MSC Cruises representative Luca Biondolillo.

'In accordance with the protocol, the passenger, as well as his traveling party, were denied boarding,' Biondolillo told CNN.

'Additionally, other passengers who had reached the ship with the same van were denied boarding as they were close contacts of the one passenger who tested positive.'

Crew members were also tested prior to boarding and spent time in quarantine on the boat before passengers arrived.

Cleaning protocols on the ship were ramped up with the additions of hospital grade disinfectant and the use of UV-C light technology to detect the virus.

All on-board activities were limited to smaller groups and passengers were required to wear masks in areas where social distancing isn't possible.

Each guest and crew member was be given a wristband that 'facilitates contactless transactions around the ship as well as providing contact and proximity tracing', MSC said.

The Grandiosa made stops at the Italian ports in Naples, Palermo and Sicily and at Malta's Valletta port - where passengers could disembark for the day, but were kept on a tight leash.

Each off-board sojourn was pre-planned and no one was allowed to stray from the group. Biondolillo said one family that broke the rules during a day trip was not permitted to re-board. 

'The health and safety protocols are put in place for the benefit of every single person,' the MSC spokesman said. 

'There can be no breaking of the rules. These people risked jeopardizing everybody else's holidays and health.'

Most passengers appeared to appreciate the precautions that made them feel safe throughout the journey.

'I think cruises could be the safest holiday right now,' Valeria Belardi, who was on the cruise and owns a travel company, told CNN.

The Italian government gave cruise companies the green light to resume service last month, but limited capacity to 70 percent. 

Cruise ships and the business they bring to many Italian cities during port excursions make up an important segment of Italy's vital tourism industry. An estimated 12 million cruise ship passengers arrived or departed from Italian ports last year.

MSC chose to limit its guests to the residents of Europe's 26-nation Schengen visa free travel zone.

SOURCE 

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Don’t Run Away, Conservatives

In case one has not heard, there is a culture war going on outside from which no man, woman, or child is safe. Even seemingly innocuous facets of life—including one’s choice of razor, home improvement store, or canned beans—have been converted into active fronts where boycotts, hashtags, and innumerable opinion pieces are mercilessly deployed by the Left and Right.

Conservatives are happy to forgo Starbucks or stock up on black beans in a show of solidarity. But when it comes to the fights that actually matter, those over the cultural institutions upstream of politics, increasingly, the Right seems to have taken to strategic retreat—or at least that is how conservatives are selling it to themselves.

A little over a month ago, “controversial” New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss resigned. Her somewhat-acrimonious resignation letter depicted a hostile work environment and confirmed what many have suspected for a while: that there is tremendous pressure to conform to progressive doctrine from The New York Times staff and online readership, as well as that the Overton Window at the “paper of record” is rapidly shifting as a result.

Three days later, former New York magazine columnist Andrew Sullivan wrote his farewell column, describing a similar work environment. Unlike Weiss, Sullivan did not leave his post of his own accord, but he was quick to look on the bright side, announcing that he would be reincarnating his old blog, The Dish, as a weekly newsletter. As Sullivan noted, his decision to leave blue chip media and publish independently is part of a trend: “There is a growing federation of independent thinkers and writers not subject to mainstream media’s increasingly narrow range of acceptable thought.”

Because Weiss and Sullivan’s exit stories align with their suspicions of mainstream media, conservatives and others concerned about the growing ideological imbalance and rigidity of the industry have largely found their departures cause for celebration—or, at least, cause for a cathartic I-told-you-so.

I am not so sure the elation is warranted.

Weiss and Sullivan will be fine. Their lives may even improve—not least because they have removed themselves from unwelcoming work environments. Both have large followings and may gain some notoriety as high-visibility victims of cancel culture. Maybe their future success will even serve as a rebuke to The New York Times and New York. But it feels myopic to interpret this as a larger victory or cheer for more of the same, especially if the ultimate goal is to restore some sense of ideological pluralism to mainstream institutions. In reality, both reputable publications were further homogenized by Weiss and Sullivan’s departures.

It is a mistake to assume that just because legacy media and other institutions are losing currency with conservatives that their perceived legitimacy is in decline across the board. They still matter, and their status cannot be replicated by upstart outlets. These institutions do not simply relay information; they shape truth, to an extent. Withdrawing from them voluntarily—or encouraging the few heterodox thinkers who remain in their employ to do so—is an own-goal, a forfeiture of cultural influence that will leave the Right sequestered to niche or overtly ideological publications, while allowing progressive activists to inherit the mantle of presumed viewpoint neutrality unopposed (provided they are so interested).

Can retreat in the face of institutional adversity ever make sense? I think it can, provided a realistic goal to structurally reorient an institution and the possibility of support from beyond activist circles. Writing at the American Mind, Inez Feltscher Stepman outlines such a plan, advising parents to join what she believes will be a large exodus from public schools, which she characterizes as anti-American propaganda mills. But, crucially, she does not simply want conservative parents to opt out of the public school system: She wants to leverage their departure (and others’, for it must be said that dissatisfaction with public schools is not limited to conservatives) to pressure legislators to reallocate resources from school districts to parents. She writes:

“Conservatives should step directly into this opening. If parents are being asked to shoulder the duties of actually educating their children, the tax dollars allocated for that purpose should flow directly to them to use for learning pods, private school, homeschooling equipment and curricula, tutors, or any other educational purpose they see fit…

Providing families with a portion of the state funds that currently flow directly to districts, whether they’re serving families or not, would allow parents of all income levels to hire teachers for small-group, in-person learning, alleviating both fears about risk from the virus and some of the equity concerns now raised by unions and The New York Times.”

Whatever one thinks of this idea ideologically, it is strategically superior to a fit of quixotic martyrdom that results in a loss of power and influence over American institutions. If the cultural Right thinks it has something valuable to offer to America, it should make its case and try to exercise some influence over institutions. Or, at least, it should stop confusing retreat with victory.

SOURCE 

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Democrats And ‘The Big Lie’

If Democrats have the truth on their side, why do they need to lie so much? It’s a question for the ages. Every time you turn on the news or open a paper, some headline is blaring about how President Trump is a disaster. You name it – Coronavirus, trade, the economy, race relations, the military, schools – and there is a liberal Democrat with a press credential telling you how those things and more are bad, and have never been worse, no matter the evidence to the contrary.

Adolf Hitler called it the “Große Lüge,” or “Big Lie,” and the political left has embraced it once again, this time flooding the zone with it.

The idea of the big lie was once again laid out in a 2017 column by the detestable Charles Blow of the New York Times. Blow was using it to accuse Trump, ironically enough, of using the tactic (Democrats are always doing what they accuse Republicans of doing).

Quoting a more recent translation of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” Blow wrote, “It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”

Blow’s conclusion, that the President’s strategy is, “Tell a lie bigger than people think a lie can be, thereby forcing their brains to seek truth in it, or vest some faith in it, even after no proof can be found,” is like a vampire staring into a mirror and convincing himself he has nothing in his teeth.

Democrats have lied to the American public for decades, all politicians do, to one degree or another. But lies, to the degree that they work, only work when mixed in with the truth – the pill mixed in some raw hamburger to get a dog to eat it. They’re the burnt chip that gets past quality control, not the whole bag. For the left, it’s all they offer now.

“There aren’t riots, they’re ‘mostly peaceful’ protests.” “Donald Trump wants people to die.” “Donald Trump hates the military.” “President Trump is a puppet of Vladimir Putin.” “The President is trying to start a race war.” You name the lie and there’s a Democrat telling it.

Big lies always come with delusions of grandeur and a martyr complex. “I’m the only one willing to tell you the truth, and I’m risking my life to do it,” is the trick used to garner credibility. “I said several weeks ago, the man would shoot us if he could,” Joe Scarborough told his audience last week. The implication being he and his current wife, Mika Brzezinski, are such heroes willing to “speak truth to power” that the powerful would like to take them out. (Why would anyone want to put Joe and Mika out of their misery? They deserve each other, at least for as long as they can make this marriage last.)

There is no lie too big or small to tell about the President, each serves the role of reinforcing the others. The echo chambers created by those telling the lies and those desperate to believe them is a testament to just how they hate the man’s existence.

The Washington Examiner’s Byron York correctly pointed out the absurdity of a “study” trying to claim that 93 percent of protests were peaceful by highlighting there were 570 riots over the last 3 months. “Investigative reporter” David Kay Johnston replied it was “typical” of York’s “mendacity” to highlight the real number rather than a meaningless percentage. Attorney John Huber highlighted the absurdity of Johnston’s argument by pointing out, “4 flights out of 40,000 on 9/11 means 99% of flights were peaceful.”

Nothing the left claims stands up to even basic scrutiny, which is why the echo chamber is so important to them. Should anyone wander outside it they risk being exposed to reality, and reality is their kryptonite. Ever wonder why other outlets spend so much time attacking Fox News? This is why. They are desperate to convince anyone snared in the web that someone like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, or Laura Ingraham are racists so they won’t bother to see for themselves. “We watch so you don’t have to” is really “We show short, out of context clips and lie about them in the hope that you’ll never watch yourself.” They’re terrified their audiences will catch an unfiltered look at the world.

Dorothy and the gang truly believed in the Wizard, right up until they caught a glimpse of that man behind the curtain. Everything Democrats are doing now is in a frenzy to prevent anyone from being exposed to the reality they’ve so hysterically spent 4 years obscuring. The election is so close now they can taste it. But they’ve got a queen-sized blanket trying to cover a king-sized bed; too much of that reality is creeping through. Too many people are seeing the mob burning cities and beating people, liberal politicians preaching one thing and doing another, and the economic comeback. But it’s too late to change tactics now, they’ve already pushed all their chips into the center of the table. With 2 months to go, the big lies are only going to get bigger.

SOURCE 

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

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

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Here's How We Know The Atlantic's Hit Piece on Trump Is Pure Fiction

The Left are putting into Trump's mouth their own thinking

A report published Thursday by The Atlantic cited anonymous sources claiming that President Donald Trump didn’t want to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 because the troops there who died in battle were “losers” and “suckers. The media has largely reported on this story as though it were true or at least likely to be true.

“The Atlantic Magazine is dying, like most magazines, so they make up a fake story in order to gain some relevance,” Trump tweeted on Friday. “Story already refuted, but this is what we are up against. Just like the Fake Dossier. You fight and fight, and then people realize it was a total fraud!”

Even CNN’s Brian Stelter seemed to acknowledge that the claims of anonymous sources aren’t as convincing.

“But it is also incumbent on the sources, on the people that are talking to [Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey] Goldberg, on the people that are talking to other outlets — the president’s denying it explicitly, so it’s put up or shut up time,” Stelter said. “Why aren’t these people coming forward and putting their names to these quotes?”

Perhaps because it’s a lot easier to lie when your name and reputation aren’t on the line. But there are at least five witnesses who have gone on the record disputing the allegations made in The Atlantic.

Coincidence? Hours After The Atlantic’s Hit Piece on Trump Came a Pre-Produced Commercial
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary, called The Atlantic story B.S. on Twitter, “I was actually there and one of the people [who were] part of the discussion – this never happened. I have sat in the room when our President called family members after their sons were killed in action and it was heart-wrenching,” she said. “These were some of the moments I witnessed the President show his heart and demonstrate how much he respects the selfless and courageous men and women of our military. I am disgusted by this false attack.”

Dan Scavino, White House deputy chief of staff for communications was also with the president that day. “I was with POTUS in France, with Sarah, and have been at his side throughout it all. Complete lies by ‘anonymous sources’ that were ‘dropped’ just as he begins to campaign (and surge). A disgraceful attempt to smear POTUS, 60 days before the Presidential Election! Disgusting!!”

Jordan Karem, personal aide to President Trump, also denied the allegations made in The Atlantic story. “This is not even close to being factually accurate. Plain and simple, it just never happened.”

He tweeted about the allegations again, saying, “I was next to @POTUS the whole day! The President was greatly disappointed when told we couldn’t fly there. He was incredibly eager to honor our Fallen Heroes.”

Also present during the event was Trump’s former deputy White House press secretary, Hogan Gidley, who called the allegations “disgusting, grotesque, reprehensible lies.”

“I was there in Paris and the President never said those things,” Gidley said. “In fact, he would never even think such vile thoughts because I know from firsthand knowledge that President Trump absolutely loves, respects, and reveres the brave men and women of the United States military. He always has and always will. These weak, pathetic, cowardly background ‘sources’ do not have the courage or decency to put their names to these false accusations because they know how completely ludicrous they are. It’s sickening that they would hide in the shadows to knowingly try and hurt the morale of our great military simply for an attack on a political opponent.”

White House Senior Advisor Steven Miller called the story a “despicable lie.”

“The president deeply wanted to attend the memorial event in question and was deeply displeased by the bad weather call,” Miller said in an interview with The Washingon Examiner. “The next day, he spoke at Suresnes American Cemetery in the pouring rain and refused an umbrella. No one has a bigger, more loving, or more loyal heart for American veterans and fallen heroes than our president.”

But perhaps the most convincing evidence that The Atlantic’s absurd story is completely false comes from a rather unlikely source: Former National Security Advisor John Bolton. Bolton is someone who undeniably has had an axe to grind with Trump and he even wrote about the event at which Trump allegedly made those comments in his anti-Trump memoir, but made no mention of them.

While Trump’s supporters have countered many claims in Bolton’s memoir, it’s beyond dispute that, had Trump actually made the remarks alleged in The Atlantic‘s smear piece, Bolton would have had every incentive to include them in his description of the events.

Documents released as the result of a FOIA request also debunked the allegation that weather wasn’t the true reason behind his canceled visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery.

Despite the story being debunked, former Vice President Joe Biden pounced on the anonymous allegations. “When my son volunteered and joined the United States military as the attorney general and went to Iraq for a year, won the Bronze Star and other commendations, he wasn’t a ‘sucker,'” Biden said Friday. “The servicemen and women he served with, particularly those who did not come home, were not losers.”

“Quite frankly, if what is written in The Atlantic is true, it is disgusting. It affirms what most of us believe to be true — that Donald Trump is not fit to be the commander in chief,” Biden added.

Rather than move on to address other issues, Biden pressed on as though the allegations were true. “President Trump has demonstrated he has no sense of service, no loyalty to any cause other than himself. If I am honored of being the next commander in chief, I will ensure that our American heroes know I will have their backs.”

Joe Biden should apologize to President Trump for being so desperate as to rely on a debunked story based on anonymous sources to launch an attack.

SOURCE
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/09/04/heres-how-we-know-the-atlantics-hit-piece-on-trump-is-pure-fiction-n890999

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What you need to know about "promising" convalescent plasma and COVID-19
 
President Donald Trump announced on Sunday that the Food and Drug Administration has issued an emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma in the treatment of COVID-19.

Convalescent plasma is the fluid component of blood that is isolated from the donated blood of those who have contracted and recovered from COVID-19.

This fluid is rich with the antibodies that previous patients had produced to fight the virus and is transfused into current patients to aid their immune systems and help them to recover as well.

The announcement of the emergency use authorization came at the end of several months of convalescent plasma’s use in clinical trials and as part of an expanded access program, also known as “compassionate use.”

To date, more than 100,000 hospitalized COVID-19 patients have been treated with convalescent plasma as part of the expanded access program at the Mayo Clinic. The data from the program “shows promising efficacy,” according to FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, and it helped to justify the emergency authorization.

The study of this data, available as a preprint, included 35,322 patients who received a transfusion of convalescent plasma between April and July.

Researchers measured the different mortality rates at seven and 30 days between groups. Although there was no control group that received either a placebo or standard of care, researchers divided the patients into either those who received transfusions before or after three days, or into three different groups that received transfusions with high, medium, or low levels of antibody. Those levels were not known at the time of transfusion.

Researchers found that mortality was lower among those who received the transfusions earlier and among those who received the highest antibody titers, or concentrations.

Comparing those who received transfusions before and after three days, mortality on Day Seven was 8.7% in the early group and 11.9% in the later group.

In other words, earlier transfusions were associated with a 27% lower risk of mortality than later transfusions.

On Day 30, the difference was smaller, but still associated with about a 21% mortality-risk reduction for those receiving transfusions earlier, compared with those receiving transfusions later.

Mortality was also found to be inversely proportional to levels of antibody (as measured by antibody titers). That is, the higher the antibody levels in the plasma, the lower the risk of mortality. Comparing the mortality from the high-titer group, which was 8.9%, to the low-titer group, which was 13.7%, there was 35% relative risk reduction in mortality. 

These are all extremely promising numbers, but do not yet prove definitively that convalescent plasma is an effective treatment.

With more than 35,000 patients involved, there is a tremendous amount of data that showed statistically significant improvements in those who received transfusions earlier with higher antibody titers.

This is certainly enough to justify an emergency use authorization—but still not that “gold standard” of medicine, which is the randomized, controlled trial.

As an example of potential confounding, those who were enrolled in the study later in its course were more likely to be treated concomitantly with remdesivir, which has been shown to decrease the time to recovery and may have affected the clinical outcome of patients in this study.

And getting to the bottom of that information might be difficult because more than 1,800 sites were involved in this study, each with different attending physicians treating their patients based on compassionate use, rather than on strict study protocols.

Still, the vast number of patients involved in this study helps to negate confounding factors and gave the FDA enough information to determine that convalescent plasma met the requirements to issue an emergency use authorization to it.

Prior to the emergency use authorization, patients could have access to convalescent plasma as part of a clinical trial or through the expanded access program.

An expanded access program treats the drug as an investigational drug and is intended to allow severely ill or near-dying patients to have access to the drug outside of a clinical trial setting.

In that setting, the focus is on the potential benefit of the drug, and safety may become a secondary concern. Using the drug as treatment requires approval by an institutional review board, which is a formal committee mostly concerned with biomedical research.

In contrast, now that convalescent plasma has an emergency use authorization, it can be used as part of the practice of medicine and outside of a research context. Normal consent is required, and there is no need for approval from an institutional review board. Furthermore, the emergency use authorization is only granted if the FDA thinks that a drug is safe relative to its potential benefits.

In short, as a result of this emergency use authorization, it will be much easier for more patients in more institutions to be treated with convalescent plasma, which is showing great promise.

But as always with COVID-19, optimism should be guarded. The trials are still underway that will show for certain whether convalescent plasma is effective or not.

While we wait for more information to come back from clinical trials, the large amount of existing data we have suggests that we may have another option in the fight against COVID-19.

This emergency use authorization now makes it easier for patients to have access to it

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

"President Trump has made it crystal clear that he has our backs": Trump receives endorsement from the the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation's largest cop union (National Review)

Stars and Stripes funding won't be cut, Trump says (Military Times)

Shoring up a faux narrative: Russian interference could cost us the election, Harris claims (Washington Examiner)

Portland police declare riot on 100th straight night of protests (Washington Examiner)

Portland DA: Antifa shooter "appeared to be targeting" counterprotesters, allegedly stalked murder victim (The Daily Wire)

Iraq War veteran likens Portland to living in a war zone (The Daily Signal)

BLM protesters riot and vandalize in Rochester, New York (Sharyl Attkisson)

Thirty-nine photos capture America's summer of riots, arson, and looting (The Daily Signal)

Here are 31 times the media justified or explained away rioting and looting after George Floyd's death (The Daily Signal)

The sheriff of southern Indiana's largest county has switched to the Republican Party, accusing Democrats of endorsing flag burning, failing to acknowledge God and not supporting police (AP)

Seems legit: Kansas state Democratic candidate says abuse of ex-girlfriend could have been prevented by "Medicaid for All" (Washington Examiner)

Gender reveal party sparked wildfire now burning 7,000 acres in California (Fox News)

Policy: In order to defeat COVID-19, the federal government must modernize its public health data (The Heritage Foundation)

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

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

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Why Is the West So Powerful—And So Peculiar?

I don't find the Henrich theory (below) plausible at all.  I see the Catholic church as a conserving influence, not an innovative one, though I admit that the Dark Ages were not wholly dark. Some innovations did occur then.

I have expounded on my view of Western uniqueness elsewhere but, in brief, I see modernity as being ultimately due to two influences, Germanic traditions and the Reformation.

The Germans lived in the far North of the world so were never overtaken by the despotisms of the ancient world.  Tribal democracy appears to have been normal throughout Europe initially and perhaps even in Mesopotamia.  It was notably present in ancient Greece and Rome.  It could be argued that consultative government in some form is natural but tends to evolve with encroaching complexity, which in turn runs together with increasing prosperity

As is universally held, however, the opportunities and demands of irrigation in Mesopotamia soon led to the deveopment of kings, princes and emperors

And Europe was always in some touch with the despotisms to the east -- principally through trade -- so Eastern ideas were long well-known there.  And when the Roman warm period made Southern European agriculturalists prosperous, Eastern ideas and Eastern prosperity began to look like the new best thing.  So principally in the persons of Phillip of Macedon and Julius Caesr, despotisms arose in Southern Europe. But the Southern despots had little reach Northwards, as the Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald, when an alliance of Germanic tribes ambushed and destroyed three Roman legions, firmly established

So ancient forms of tribal democracy persisted only in Northern  Europe and that underlay the Saxon strike for independence led by Martin Luther and his king.  Saxony was already a kingdom by that time but it had substantially consultative forms and Northern kingdoms were often elective rather than hereditary.  So the independence of mind that Protestantism embodied was simply a reassertion of underlying Germanic democratic values.

As the name implies, Protestantism is a rejection of centralized authority.  In some Christian churches, democratic government persists to this day -- principally among Presbyterians.  I grew up as a Presbyterian so my own extreme independence of mind could be partly cultural

But how do we get to the Industrial revolution from the Protestant reformation a couple of centuries later?  There have been various proposed answers for that but again the influence appears to be religious.  Gradually increasing properity in England, due in part to its "splendid" isolation from Europe's wars, eventually led to a coming of the Puritans and their extreme independence of mind -- and the Puritan role in early English industrialization of England was large.  Their disregard for how things had always been done in religion led to a previously unthinkable openness to innovation generally

And the development from that goes on to this day.  We are all extreme Protestants now.

I have written elsewhere about the political implications of the Henrich theory


Henrich, who directs Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, is a cultural evolutionary theorist, which means that he gives cultural inheritance the same weight that traditional biologists give to genetic inheritance. Parents bequeath their DNA to their offspring, but they—along with other influential role models—also transmit skills, knowledge, values, tools, habits. Our genius as a species is that we learn and accumulate culture over time. Genes alone don’t determine whether a group survives or disappears. So do practices and beliefs. Human beings are not “the genetically evolved hardware of a computational machine,” he writes. They are conduits of the spirit, habits, and psychological patterns of their civilization, “the ghosts of past institutions.”

One culture, however, is different from the others, and that’s modern WEIRD (“Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic”) culture. Dealing in the sweeping statistical generalizations that are the stock-in-trade of cultural evolutionary theorists—these are folks who say “people” but mean “populations”—Henrich draws the contrasts this way: Westerners are hyper-individualistic and hyper-mobile, whereas just about everyone else in the world was and still is enmeshed in family and more likely to stay put. Westerners obsess more about personal accomplishments and success than about meeting family obligations (which is not to say that other cultures don’t prize accomplishment, just that it comes with the package of family obligations). Westerners identify more as members of voluntary social groups—dentists, artists, Republicans, Democrats, supporters of a Green Party—than of extended clans.

In short, Henrich says, they’re weird. They are also, in the last four words of his acronym, “educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.” And that brings us to Henrich’s Big Question, which is really two linked questions. Starting around 1500 or so, the West became unusually dominant, because it advanced unusually quickly. What explains its extraordinary intellectual, technological, and political progress over the past five centuries? And how did its rise engender the peculiarity of the Western character?

Given the nature of the project, it may be a surprise that Henrich aspires to preach humility, not pride. WEIRD people have a bad habit of universalizing from their own particularities. They think everyone thinks the way they do, and some of them (not all, of course) reinforce that assumption by studying themselves. In the run-up to writing the book, Henrich and two colleagues did a literature review of experimental psychology and found that 96 percent of subjects enlisted in the research came from northern Europe, North America, or Australia. About 70 percent of those were American undergraduates. Blinded by this kind of myopia, many Westerners assume that what’s good or bad for them is good or bad for everyone else.

[Read: How a focus on rich educated people skews brain studies]

Henrich’s ambition is tricky: to account for Western distinctiveness while undercutting Western arrogance. He rests his grand theory of cultural difference on an inescapable fact of the human condition: kinship, one of our species’ “oldest and most fundamental institutions.” Though based on primal instincts— pair-bonding, kin altruism—kinship is a social construct, shaped by rules that dictate whom people can marry, how many spouses they can have, whether they define relatedness narrowly or broadly. Throughout most of human history, certain conditions prevailed: Marriage was generally family-adjacent—Henrich’s term is “cousin marriage”—which thickened the bonds among kin. Unilateral lineage (usually through the father) also solidified clans, facilitating the accumulation and intergenerational transfer of property. Higher-order institutions—governments and armies as well as religions—evolved from kin-based institutions. As families scaled up into tribes, chiefdoms, and kingdoms, they didn’t break from the past; they layered new, more complex societies on top of older forms of relatedness, marriage, and lineage. Long story short, in Henrich’s view, the distinctive flavor of each culture can be traced back to its earlier kinship institutions.

The Catholic Church changed all that. As of late antiquity, Europeans still lived in tribes, like most of the rest of the world. But the Church dismantled these kin-based societies with what Henrich calls its “Marriage and Family Program,” or MFP. The MFP was really an anti-marriage and anti-family program. Why did the Church adopt it? From a cultural evolutionary point of view, the why doesn’t matter. In a footnote, Henrich skates lightly over debates about the motivations of Church leaders. But his bottom line is that the “MFP evolved and spread because it ‘worked.’ ” (Henrich’s indifference to individual and institutional intentions is guaranteed to drive historians nuts.)

Forced to find Christian partners, Christians left their communities. Christianity’s insistence on monogamy broke extended households into nuclear families. The Church uprooted horizontal, relational identity, replacing it with a vertical identity oriented toward the institution itself. The Church was stern about its marital policies. Violations were punished by withholding Communion, excommunicating, and denying inheritances to offspring who could now be deemed “illegitimate.” Formerly, property almost always went to family members. The idea now took hold that it could go elsewhere. At the same time, the Church urged the wealthy to ensure their place in heaven by bequeathing their money to the poor—that is, to the Church, benefactor to the needy. In so doing, “the Church’s MFP was both taking out its main rival for people’s loyalty and creating a revenue stream,” Henrich writes. The Church, thus enriched, spread across the globe.

Loosened from their roots, people gathered in cities. There they developed “impersonal prosociality”—that is, they bonded with other city folk. They wrote city charters and formed professional guilds. Sometimes they elected leaders, the first inklings of representative democracy. Merchants had to learn to trade with strangers. Success in this new kind of commerce required a good reputation, which entailed new norms, such as impartiality. You couldn’t cheat a stranger and favor relatives and expect to make a go of it.

By the time Protestantism came along, people had already internalized an individualist worldview. Henrich calls Protestantism “the WEIRDest religion,” and says it gave a “booster shot” to the process set in motion by the Catholic Church. Integral to the Reformation was the idea that faith entailed personal struggle rather than adherence to dogma. Vernacular translations of the Bible allowed people to interpret scripture more idiosyncratically. The mandate to read the Bible democratized literacy and education. After that came the inquiry into God-given natural (individual) rights and constitutional democracies. The effort to uncover the laws of political organization spurred interest in the laws of nature—in other words, science. The scientific method codified epistemic norms that broke the world down into categories and valorized abstract principles. All of these psychosocial changes fueled unprecedented innovation, the Industrial Revolution, and economic growth.

If Henrich’s history of Christianity and the West feels rushed and at times derivative—he acknowledges his debt to Max Weber—that’s because he’s in a hurry to explain Western psychology. The bulk of the book consists of data from many disciplines other than history, including anthropology and cross-cultural psychology, to which he and colleagues have made significant contributions. Their Kinship Intensity Index, for instance, helps them posit a dose-response relationship between the length of time a population was exposed to the Catholic Church’s Marriage and Family Program and the WEIRDness of its character. Henrich gets amusingly granular in his statistics here. “Each century of Western church exposure cuts the rate of cousin marriage by nearly 60 percent,” he writes. A millennium of the MFP also makes a person less likely to lie in court for a friend—30 percentile points less likely. Henrich anticipates a quibble about what he calls “the Italian enigma”: Why, if Italy has been Catholic for so long, did northern Italy become a prosperous banking center, while southern Italy stayed poor and was plagued by mafiosi? The answer, Henrich declares, is that southern Italy was never conquered by the Church-backed Carolingian empire. Sicily remained under Muslim rule and much of the rest of the south was controlled by the Orthodox Church until the papal hierarchy finally assimilated them both in the 11th century. This is why, according to Henrich, cousin marriage in the boot of Italy and Sicily is 10 times higher than in the north, and in most provinces in Sicily, hardly anyone donates blood (a measure of willingness to help strangers), while some northern provinces receive 105 donations of 16-ounce bags per 1,000 people per year.

To go further afield: While Europe was first compiling its legal codes, China was punishing crimes committed against relatives more harshly than those against nonrelatives; especially severe penalties were reserved for crimes against one’s elders. As recently as the early 20th century, Chinese fathers could murder sons and get off with a warning; punishments for patricide, by contrast, were strict. Asymmetries like these, Henrich writes, “can be justified on Confucian principles and by appealing to a deep respect for elders,” even if the WEIRD mind finds them disturbing.

Henrich’s most consequential—and startling—claim is that WEIRD and non-WEIRD people possess opposing cognitive styles. They think differently. Standing apart from the community, primed to break wholes into parts and classify them, Westerners are more analytical. People from kinship-intensive cultures, by comparison, tend to think more holistically. They focus on relationships rather than categories. Henrich defends this sweeping thesis with several studies, including a test known as the Triad Task. Subjects are shown three images—say, a rabbit, a carrot, and a cat. The goal is to match a “target object”—the rabbit—with a second object. A person who matches the rabbit with the cat classifies: The rabbit and the cat are animals. A person who matches the rabbit with the carrot looks for relationships between the objects: The rabbit eats the carrot.

You have to wonder whether the Triad Task really reflects fundamentally different cognitive bents or differences in subjects’ personal experience. Henrich cites a Mapuche, an indigenous Chilean, who matched a dog with a pig, an “analytic” choice, except the man then explained that he’d done so for a “holistic” reason: because the dog guards the pig. “This makes perfect sense,” Henrich muses. “Most farmers rely on dogs to protect their homes and livestock from rustlers.” Exactly! A Western undergraduate, probably not having grown up with dogs protecting her pigs, sees dogs and pigs as just animals.

Henrich is more persuasive when applying his theory of cumulative culture to the evolution of ideas. Democracy, the rule of law, and human rights “didn’t start with fancy intellectuals, philosophers, or theologians,” Henrich writes. “Instead, the ideas formed slowly, piece by piece, as regular Joes with more individualistic psychologies—be they monks, merchants, or artisans—began to form competing voluntary associations” and learned how to govern them. Toppling the accomplishments of Western civilization off their great-man platforms, he erases their claim to be monuments to rationality: Everything we think of as a cause of culture is really an effect of culture, including us.

Henrich’s macro-cultural relativism has its virtues. It widens our field of vision as we assess Western values—such as objectivity, free speech, democracy, and the scientific method—that have come under sharp attack. The big-picture approach soars above the reigning paradigms in the study of European history, which have a way of collapsing into narratives of villains and victims. (Henrich forestalls the obvious objections with this jarringly offhand remark: “I’m not highlighting the very real and pervasive horrors of slavery, racism, plunder, and genocide. There are plenty of books on those subjects.”) He refutes genetic theories of European superiority and makes a good case against economic determinism. His quarry are the “enlightened” Westerners—would-be democratizers, globalizers, well-intended purveyors of humanitarian aid—who impose impersonal institutions and abstract political principles on societies rooted in familial networks, and don’t seem to notice the trouble that follows.

It should be said, though, that Henrich can make a person feel pretty helpless, with his talk of populations being swept along by cultural riptides that move “outside conscious awareness.” Cultural evolutionary determinism may turn out to be as disempowering as all the other determinisms; a WEIRD reader may feel trapped inside her own prejudices. But perhaps some comfort lies in Henrich’s dazzling if not consistently plausible supply of unintended consequences. Who would have imagined that the Catholic Church would have spawned so many self-involved nonconformists? What else might our curious history yield? Henrich’s social-scientist stance of neutrality may also relieve Westerners of some (one hopes not all) of their burden of guilt. “By highlighting the peculiarities of WEIRD people, I’m not denigrating these populations or any others,” he writes. WEIRDos aren’t all bad; they’re provincial. Henrich offers a capacious new perspective that could facilitate the necessary work of sorting out what’s irredeemable and what’s invaluable in the singular, impressive, and wildly problematic legacy of Western domination.

SOURCE

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

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

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Going to school ‘does not increase risk of young children catching coronavirus’

Children going to primary school or preschool are at no greater risk of picking up Covid-19 than those staying at home, according to the first results of a national surveillance programme.

Public Health England (PHE) said they had detected only three positive cases — two staff and one pupil — out of more than 12,000 people tested in English primary and preschools in June and early July.

All three had only mild or no symptoms and when their households, class bubbles and wider schools were tested, the researchers did not find any additional cases.

SOURCE

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Sweden has the last laugh

Lockdown-free Sweden's coronavirus case rate is now lower than Nordic neighbours Denmark and Norway with just 12 new infections per million people over the past week

In comparison, Norway saw 14 new infections per million people, and Denmark saw 18, meaning Sweden had an average case rate over seven days lower than its neighbours for the first time since March.

'Sweden has gone from being one of the countries with the most infection in Europe, to one of those with the least infection in Europe,' the country's state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell said at a press conference earlier this week.

Meanwhile, 'many other countries have seen a rather dramatic increase,' he added. 

At the height of the pandemic, Sweden's infection rate dwarfed that of its neighbours, who did implement a lockdown.

At its peak on June 19, Sweden was seeing 108 new infections per million people, compared to Denmark and Norway's eight and three respectively.

The number of deaths in Sweden is now averaging at two to three per day, compared to a peak of over a hundred per-day it suffered in mid-April.

To add to positive signs in Sweden, a test last week of 2,500 randomly selected people found not one had coronavirus.

In comparison, in a similar test, 0.9 per cent were found to have the virus at the end of April and 0.3 per cent at the end of May.

SOURCE

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New Zealand records first Covid-19 death in over three months

New Zealand recorded its first Covid-19 death in more than three months on Friday when a man in his 50s succumbed to the virus.

Health officials said the man was part of a second-wave cluster of infections that emerged in Auckland last month, ending a spell of 102 days free of community transmission in the South Pacific nation.

The death at Auckland's Middlemore Hospital on Friday afternoon takes New Zealand's death toll from the virus to 23, with the most recent previous fatality on May 24.

The man was reportedly the youngest to die from Covid-19 in New Zealand.

Health authorities did not say whether he had a pre-existing medical condition.

The Auckland cluster emerged in a family of four and has since grown to 152, including three new cases recorded on Friday.

While Aucklanders were allowed out of their homes this week, the government limited non-school social gatherings in the city of 1.5 million to 10 people and made masks compulsory on public transport nationwide.

Authorities said earlier on Friday, before the latest death was announced, that the restriction would remain in place until at least September 16.

The source of the Auckland cluster remains unknown but genome testing indicates it is not linked to the virus strain that New Zealand experienced earlier this year, which was largely eliminated in a seven-week lockdown that began in late March.

New Zealand, with its low death rate of 23 in a population of five million, has been hailed as one of the countries most successful in handling the virus.

Its response to the latest outbreak has included a blitz of around 600,000 tests in recent weeks, accompanied by extensive contact tracing and the pre-emptive quarantine of close contacts linked to confirmed cases.

SOURCE

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Latest Data Proves COVID-19 Doesn’t Justify Postal Bailout

A stream of apocalyptic predictions and strained conspiracy theories have turned the once-sleepy world of U.S. Postal Service operations into front-page news.

Lawmakers focused on the topic are being confronted with an approaching deadline. By the end of 2021, the Postal Service is on pace to run out of funds needed to continue current operations.

Several proposed and potential pieces of legislation would provide a bailout worth tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to the Postal Service, supposedly justified by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yet there’s a big problem with this line of thinking: The pandemic has had a minimal effect on the Postal Service’s bottom line.

As a result, a COVID-19 bailout would be the equivalent of giving someone a blood transfusion while ignoring gaping wounds.

The financial status of the Postal Service burst into view in March, when leadership of the House Oversight and Reform Committee warned that bankruptcy was imminent due to COVID-19. Congress included a $10 billion loan to the Postal Service in the CARES Act based on these fears.

Just a few weeks later, it became apparent that warnings of an immediate collapse were unwarranted. While revenue from letter mail was down, demand for package deliveries increased strongly enough to compensate, meaning that the organization is not going belly-up in 2020.

This trend was confirmed in the latest quarterly report detailing the Postal Service’s performance from April through June. At first glance, the numbers appear grim: In just three months, the organization suffered a $2.21 billion loss.

However, placing that number in context tells a different story. The Postal Service lost $2.26 billion during the same period of 2019, and $4.52 billion for the first three months of 2020.

If COVID-19 were the reason for the Postal Service’s difficulties, we would expect the losses to be worse during the first months of the economic lockdown, not better.

The Postal Service has lost money every year since 2007, even during periods of strong economic growth. There are two big reasons for this troubling trend.

First, as communication increasingly moves online, the number of letters has plunged from its peak in 2001. That means less revenue to maintain postal facilities and pay employees.

Second, Congress has handcuffed the Postal Service when it comes to controlling costs. The largest expense, employees, can be reduced only through layoffs, rather than through lowering the generous compensation of $97,588 per worker.

Many potential operational changes, such as switching from six deliveries per week to five, also are barred by law.

Even when the Postal Service does have the ability to cut costs, it can result in a swift backlash from Capitol Hill. That was evident in recent weeks as lawmakers chastised Postmaster General Louis DeJoy regarding the removal of sorting machines, which was set in motion before he arrived and has been taking place for years.

Rather than drafting legislation to reform the Postal Service and make it financially sustainable, both chambers of Congress seem intent on the shortsighted approach of a taxpayer-funded bailout.

The House passed a $25 billion bailout that wrongly includes further restrictions on cost-cutting. A bipartisan Senate bill provides up to $25 billion to cover postal losses “resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic,” a definition that could potentially be used to cover any postal losses during the pandemic, regardless of the actual cause.

Senate leadership is considering whether to turn the $10 billion CARES Act loan into a grant. That would improve the Postal Service’s bottom line at the expense of adding to the national debt.

DeJoy has requested supplemental funds from Congress to cover additional expenses related to COVID-19, such as providing masks to employees and installing transparent dividers at retail locations. The amount needed to address those costs would not be $10 billion or $25 billion, but instead closer to $1 billion.

Another common justification for a bailout is the upcoming election, which is expected to feature record levels of mail-in voting. DeJoy has repeatedly explained that there’s no need for extra funding to cover mailed ballots.

Even if every vote this year were sent by mail within a few days, that would amount to about 5% of a typical week’s volume. Since mail-in ballots are sent over the course of months, and since letter-mail volume is down this year, the Postal Service will have no problem delivering ballots.

Tackling the Postal Service’s many problems will be no small task. However, this is precisely the sort of problem that we should expect our nation’s leaders to address in a responsible manner, rather than temporarily “fixing” it through pricey bailouts.

SOURCE

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Trump economy adds another 3.7 million jobs in August with 13.8 million total jobs recovered since April as rapid recovery continues

The U.S. economy added another 3.7 million jobs in the month of August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey of Americans reporting they have jobs, bringing the total up to 13.8 million jobs that have been recovered since labor markets bottomed in April, something almost nobody but President Donald Trump was predicting.

The news comes as COVID-19 cases continue to stabilize nationwide, including in Texas, California, Florida and Arizona where cases saw a brief uptick this summer.

At the worst of the coronavirus recession, as many as 25 million jobs were lost by April, and now more thanhalf of those jobs have been regained, as a V-shaped recovery has clearly formed.

In just four short months, almost 14 million jobs have come back in the Trump-Pence economy — thanks to President Trump’s leadership to stabilize the pandemic and get the U.S. economy safely reopened for business.

For perspective, in the Obama-Biden economy, it took almost five years to recover the 8 million jobs that were lost in the financial crisis and Great Recession.

The reason is President Trump had the considerable foresight to work with Congress to implement necessary economic supports, including payroll protection for 5.2 million small businesses that Trump credited with the recovery in his acceptance speech stating, “Thanks to our Paycheck Protection Program, we have saved or supported more than 50 million American jobs. That’s one of the reasons that we’re advancing so rapidly with our economy.”

In addition, unemployment benefits were expanded, critical industries such as airlines were supported and state and local governments were reinforced. Foreclosures and evictions were postponed, and banks were encouraged to grant homeowners forbearance on their mortgages. All this in a bid to encourage Americans to temporarily stay home while an adequate pandemic response including testing and ventilator production was put into place.

Also of note, on the establishment survey which asks employers how many people are on the payroll, businesses report 10.6 million jobs recovered since April. The difference between the two surveys is the establishment survey doesn’t count everyone like those self-employed. For that reason in February before the pandemic closures, the household survey reported 158.75 million Americans having jobs, while the establishment survey reported 152.46 million Americans working. Those differences are well-known, and it might mean the household survey is more relevant to the American people.

With more good news, an additional 765,000 Americans left unemployment the week of Aug. 22, according to the latest data from the Department of Labor. Because that is occurring later in the month, it may not fully factor into the monthly data until the September jobs report out the first week of October.

SOURCE

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IN BRIEF

Trump campaign bracing for legal battle over election, forming "coalition" of lawyers (Fox News)

Washington Post op-ed suggests Americans may need to prepare for war if Biden doesn't win in a landslide (The Daily Caller)

Protesters gather outside Nancy Antoinette's San Francisco home, hang blow-dryers and curlers in a tree (The Daily Caller)

Pelosi and Steven Mnuchin agree on plan to avoid government shutdown (Politico)

U.S. pulls $62 million in funding from the ChiCom-supporting World Health Organization (The Washington Free Beacon)

"A publicity stunt": Kenosha locals give lukewarm reception to Joe Biden (Washington Examiner)

Kenosha speech showed that the difference between Biden with a teleprompter and without a teleprompter is scary (The Federalist)

With the Supreme Court MIA on the subject, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit says "large"-capacity magazine bans are OK; last month, the 9th Circuit said the opposite (Reason)

NPR walks back pro-looting story (The Daily Wire)

CBS censors Andrew Cuomo threatening physical harm to Donald Trump (NewsBusters)

Federal task force kills Portland antifa murder suspect; man pulled gun on agents during arrest (AP)

Body camera footage shows Deon Kay was brandishing a gun when shot by DC police (The Post Millennial)

Cleveland police officer fatally shot; search underway for suspect (Fox News)

Colorado woman beats up child for carrying Trump sign (PJ Media)

Yet another white cultural appropriator: White George Washington University history professor admits she lied about being black (Fox News)

Discover blocks donations to site raising money for Kyle Rittenhouse defense (Fox Business)

In foreboding ruling, appeals court says transgender students may use restroom of choice (The Daily Signal)

Justice Department plans to file antitrust charges against Google in coming weeks (The New York Times)

Court rules NSA phone snooping illegal — after seven-year delay (Politico)

Seems legit: Hot temperatures in minority inner-city neighborhoods are caused by systemic racism, new study says (Campus Reform)

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

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

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Good news: coronavirus-fighting antibodies last longer than scientists thought

Antibodies that people make to fight coronavirus last for at least four months after diagnosis and do not fade quickly as some earlier reports suggested, scientists have found.

Tuesday's report, from tests on more than 30,000 people in Iceland, is the most extensive work yet on the immune system's response to the virus over time, and is good news for efforts to develop vaccines.

If a vaccine can spur production of long-lasting antibodies as natural infection seems to do, it gives hope that "immunity to this unpredictable and highly contagious virus may not be fleeting", scientists from Harvard University and the US National Institutes of Health wrote in a commentary published with the study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

One of the big mysteries of the pandemic is whether having had coronavirus helps protect against future infection, and for how long. Some smaller studies previously suggested that antibodies may disappear quickly and that some people with few or no symptoms may not make many at all.

The new study was done by Reykjavik-based deCODE Genetics, a subsidiary of the US biotech company Amgen, with several hospitals, universities and health officials in Iceland.

The country has tested 15 per cent of its population since late February, when its first Covid-19 cases were detected, giving a solid base for comparisons.

Scientists used two types of coronavirus testing: the kind from nose swabs or other samples that detect bits of the virus, indicating infection; and tests that measure antibodies in the blood, which can show whether someone was infected now or in the past.

Blood samples were analysed from 30,576 people using various methods, and someone was counted as a case if at least two of the antibody tests were positive. These included a range of people, from those without symptoms to people hospitalised with signs of Covid.

In a subgroup that tested positive, further testing found that antibodies rose for two months after their infection initially was diagnosed and then plateaued and remained stable for four months.

Previous studies suggesting that antibodies faded quickly may have been just looking at the first wave of antibodies the immune system makes in response to infection; those studies mostly looked 28 days after diagnosis. A second wave of antibodies forms after a month or two into infection, and this seems more stable and long-lasting, the researchers report.

The results do not necessarily mean that all countries' populations will be the same, or that every person has this sort of response. Other scientists recently documented at least two cases where people seem to have been reinfected with coronavirus months after their first bout.

The new study does not establish how much or which type of antibody confers immunity or protection - that remains unknown.

The study also found:

Testing through the bits-of-virus method that is commonly done in community settings missed nearly half of people who were found to have had the virus by blood antibody testing. That means the blood tests are far more reliable and better for tracking the spread of the disease in a region and for guiding decisions and returning to work or school, researchers say.
Nearly a third of infections were in people who reported no symptoms.

Nearly one per cent of Iceland's population was infected in this first wave of the pandemic, meaning the other 99 per cent are still vulnerable to the virus.

The infection fatality rate was 0.3 per cent. That is about three times the fatality rate of seasonal flu and in keeping with some other more recent estimates, said Dr Derek Angus, critical care chief at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre.

Although many studies have been reporting death rates based on specific groups such as hospitalised patients, the rate of death among all infected with coronavirus has been unknown.

The news that natural antibodies do not quickly disappear "will be encouraging for people working on vaccines", Dr Angus said.

SOURCE

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Cheap hydrocortisone drug reduces deaths in sickest COVID-19 patients, research finds

A cheap and widely available steroid has been found to reduce mortality in the sickest COVID-19 patients.

Hydrocortisone, an anti-inflammatory drug, could save one in every 12 patients and will be recommended for use in NHS coronavirus patients.

It is the second drug found to be effective in reducing mortality in those with severe symptoms of COVID-19.

Researchers from Imperial College London and the Intensive Care National Audit & Research Centre found that patients receiving intensive care who were treated with hydrocortisone for seven days had a 93% chance of a better recovery compared to patients who were not treated with the steroid.

The benefits of hydrocortisone were announced alongside analysis from seven trials involving three different types of steroids - including dexamethasone, which has already been found to reduce mortality and is widely used.

The studies found that treatment with one of dexamethasone, hydrocortisone or methylprednisolone led to an estimated 20% reduction in the risk of death.

Professor Anthony Gordon, who led the research into hydrocortisone, said: "The studies published today show that we now have more than one choice of treatment for those who need it most.

SOURCE

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Australians left to die instead of Trump’s coronavirus cure being used

Andrew Bolt:

Hundreds of Australians may be dying because of Donald Trump. See, the US President last May made a fatal mistake: He backed a drug that could cure the coronavirus.

Sorry, let me rephrase. Hundreds of Australians may be dying because many politicians, medico-bureaucrats and journalists hate Trump’s guts.

Many would apparently rather ignore the studies that now say hydroxychloroquine works than admit Trump may have been right.

Think of that, if you get sick. Or if you watch a loved relative die.

Are you — are they — being denied a cure that almost any chemist in Australia could hand over right now, just to stop Trump from looking good?

In May, Trump said he was taking hydroxychloroquine because he had “heard a lot of good stories”.

Why not try it, he suggested, when “you’re not going to get sick or die” from a drug that has been used by millions since 1955 to protect against malaria, and, later, to treat conditions such as lupus.

From that moment, the media left in the US and Australia demonised hydroxychloroquine to prove Trump’s a fool.

Twitter, YouTube and Facebook even censor posts by doctors saying they’ve successfully used it.

How the pharmaceutical giants must love it. Hydroxychloroquine is a generic drug that earns them peanuts, but a new vaccine, however imperfect, would earn them billions.

The height of this insanity was reached last week when Labor’s health spokesman, Chris Bowen, demanded federal parliament censure Liberal MP Craig Kelly for having said studies showed hydroxychloroquine, given early, saved lives.

For some reason, this news appalled Bowen. He said Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration “strongly discourages the use of hydroxychloroquine” for this coronavirus, and denounced Kelly for spreading “misinformation and conspiracy theories”.

Please stop Bowen becoming our health minister. We’re not safe if our health system is run by a man who hates being told of a cheap cure, and tries to silence any MP trying to show the evidence.

You see, in the week before Bowen tried to silence Kelly, no fewer than five new studies said hydroxychloroquine indeed saves people from dying, even without the zinc that apparently makes it more effective.

In the US, the Hackensack University Medical Center said people given hydroxychloroquine were a third less likely to later need hospitalisation.

In Italy, a study in the European Journal of Internal Medicine said patients needing hospital care, when hydroxychloroquine is less effective, still had “a 30 per cent lower risk of death” when given the drug.

In Belgium, a study in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents of 8000 hospitalised patients also said the death rate was cut by a third.

In Spain, a study of 9644 patients found “hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin (an antibiotic) correlated with a lower mortality rate”.

In France, a study by Aix Marseilles University of 226 sick residents in an aged-care home said hydroxychloroquine halved the death rate.

That’s five studies all saying hydroxychloroquine works — all in the week before Labor called Kelly “the most dangerous man in parliament” for saying the same. How shameful.

Worse, states like Victoria still want to ban doctors from prescribing this drug.

This is sick. This is the cancel culture played for deadly keeps.

Yes, other studies insist hydroxychloroquine is useless. And Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews dragged along Associate Professor Julian Elliott to a press conference last week to defend his state’s ban on it.

Elliott, head of the National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce, obliged, attacking “a particular trend on social media”, and declaring “hydroxychloroquine should not be used” because “there’s now substantial information that it’s not effective, and it does have side-effects”.

But as I’ve noted before, Elliott’s taskforce cherrypicked wildly to dismiss hydroxychloroquine.

It checked only nine studies that showed it had little or no effect, but ignored any that showed it worked.

It relied most on an Oxford study that for some disastrous reason gave very sick patients potentially lethal overdoses — up to 12 times the recommended dose.

Crucially, none of the nine studies included zinc. Hydroxychloroqine is a zinc ionophore — it helps zinc get into cells and stop the virus replicating. The aged, most likely to die of the coronavirus, often have zinc deficiencies.

To repeat: I don’t know if hydroxychloroquine works or not. But I do know it doesn’t kill, if used properly under medical advice, and some experts back it. So why ban doctors and patients from deciding for themselves? Or are hundreds of dead Australians a small price to pay for kicking Trump?

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

Nancy Pelosi visits hair salon, joins long list of hypocritical Democrats blowing off lockdowns (The Federalist)

Trump ignores warnings and tours Kenosha destruction (Washington Examiner)

Appeals court grants Trump delay in financial records case (Politico)

White House slams proposal to alter historical DC monuments, says mayor should be ashamed (Fox News)

Hunter Biden holds stake in Chinese company sanctioned for human rights abuses; Joe Biden has promised to go after companies with ties to China's repression (The Washington Free Beacon)

Kennedy dynasty suffers first loss ever in Massachusetts after Senator Ed Markey wins primary challenge (Fox News)

Hounded out by BLM: Portland's Democrat mayor is leaving his $840,000 condo after it was repeatedly targeted by anarchists (Daily Mail)

Tony Baltimore school buckles to anti-Semitic demands of Black Lives Matter activists (The Washington Free Beacon)

Elvis Presley's Graceland vandalized with graffiti messages including "Defund MPD," "Abolish ICE," and "BLM" (Fox News)

Chicago passes 500 homicides this year (National Review)

Chicago faces record $1.2 billion budget shortfall following "catastrophic" economic collapse, riots, and violence (The Daily Wire)

Divorce rate skyrockets 34% amid COVID-19 pandemic (Fox News)

White House moves to halt evictions through end of year as fears of coronavirus-fueled housing crisis grow (CNBC)

Trump payroll tax deferral finds few takers among businesses (The Hill)

ICE arrests 2,000+ illegal immigrants in sweep, 85% of whom had criminal convictions or charges (American Military News)

Teen Vogue pushes young people one step closer to socialism (Washington Examiner)

What are the Trump and Tim Scott "opportunity zones" that aim to largely help African American neighborhoods? (Sharyl Attkisson)

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

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

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British Government scientist: ‘Lockdown was a monumental mistake’

A scientist advising the government on infectious diseases has said the lockdown was a ‘monumental mistake on a global scale’, in an explosive interview with the Daily Express.

According to Professor Mark Woolhouse, who sits on the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours, lockdown was a ‘panic measure’ and he ‘never want[s] to see national lockdown again’.

Woolhouse originally supported lockdown as a temporary measure, intended to buy time for scientists to come up with new methods for fighting Covid-19. However, he admitted it was done because ‘we couldn’t think of anything better to do’.

Woolhouse believes ‘the harm lockdown is doing… will turn out to be at least as great as the harm done by Covid-19’, if not greater. ‘The cure was worse than the disease’, he added.

He also took aim at the government’s policy of closing schools, saying this was ‘not an epidemiologically sensible thing to do’, and that we should have focused on care homes and not kids.

Woolhouse’s words make a mockery of the government’s claims to be following ‘The Science’ when shutting down society. This rash decision was taken seemingly with little regard to the extraordinary damage it would do to health, education, the economy and other public services.

What’s even more concerning is Woolhouse’s acknowledgement that the UK government still doesn’t have a strategy for balancing the Covid epidemic with a return to normal life. ‘I would not dignify waiting for a vaccine with the term “strategy”’, he said: ‘That’s a hope not a strategy. But we do need to get on with providing an alternative to lockdown.’

Rather than flail around in search of ideas, the government should end the lockdown for good and allow us to get on with our lives.

SOURCE 

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China emerging as winner in vaccine race as jabs reach phase-three trials

China is pulling ahead in what could be the final leg of the global coronavirus vaccine race, with four of seven possible candidates in last stage human trials – more than any other country.

However, some are concerned about the quality of the vaccines and that they are being used to gain political leverage.

Beijing is so confident in its homegrown inoculations that authorities have been administering vaccines for more than a month before clinical studies conclude, authorities revealed this week.

People deemed to be at higher risk of infection, such as border officials and state-owned enterprise employees working overseas, have received jabs after the government approved them for emergency use, according to state media. Soon, transport and service workers are also expected to be vaccinated.

“Giving untested vaccines means that there is no guarantee that they are going to work, so people could wrongly assume that they are inoculated when they are not,” said Nicholas Thomas, a health security expert and professor at the City University of Hong Kong. “In doing so, they could engage in behaviour that has a higher risk....[and] unwittingly put other people at risk.”

“The reason why vaccines go through phase 3 trials is to reduce the short and long-term risk to the individual,” he said. “Giving vaccine shots without this knowledge places individuals at significant personal risk.”

The Chinese government has provided sparse details on which vaccines are being given to people, and how many have been vaccinated, leading to concerns participation may be forced and not voluntary.

Last week, Papua New Guinea cancelled a flight from China filled with arriving passengers believed to have received a coronavirus vaccine over worries of the unknown health impact to the local population.

In general, “it’s better for a community if there’s more people vaccinated, so there’s less risk of an outbreak of Covid,” said Ben Cowling, division head of epidemiology and biostatistics at Hong Kong University’s School of Public Health. “At the same time, just having some vaccinated people wouldn’t be enough to mean that social distancing could be relaxed.”

Governments are under increasing pressure to find a lasting solution for the devastating pandemic that has swept the world, infecting nearly 25 million and killing more than 830,000. Authorities are also keen to get economies back on track as quarantine measures, though effective in containing the virus, are beginning to impact growth.

“Covid is causing economic damage every week, every month, so the sooner we can start using vaccines, the better,” said Mr Cowling.

For China, there are additional benefits. Coming up with a successful vaccine would help to deflect anger at home and abroad over its pandemic cover-up, while delivering a blow to US Donald Trump’s “warp-speed” plans for a vaccine. Competition is heating up as well with Russia.

The Chinese government “sees science and technology as tools of national greatness,” said Yangyang Cheng, a scientist and postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University.

Winning the vaccine race would underscore government propaganda about how “it’s really a hostile world out there, and we, as in the Chinese people, have to rely on ourselves”.

It would also give China a new tool for diplomacy and potentially bring more allies into the fold. Indeed Beijing has already vowed “to give priority” to a number of Southeast Asian nations – the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam – if it develops a vaccine.

Canada, engaged in a longstanding diplomatic spat with Beijing, had to halt plans to partner in late stage clinical trials as vaccine doses, stalled in Chinese customs, never even arrived.

China doesn’t have a great track record. Rushed exports of medical equipment and protective gear this year have turned out to be faulty. The country has also before been plagued with a number of health and food safety scandals, including expired vaccines and tainted baby formula that sickened 300,000 infants and killed at least six in 2008.

If early inoculations in China end up failing, experts say that could impact global public confidence in the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines in general.

While drug regulators have the power to decide whether or not to approve a Chinese vaccine for use in their own countries, they could come under pressure to fast-track a successful candidate on the market, regardless of who developed the treatment.

Countries, though, that China has agreed to conduct advanced tests with include Brazil, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Peru, Morocco, where regulatory hurdles for vaccines to become available may be less stringent than in Western countries like the US or UK.

Still, experts are optimistic with so many vaccine candidates in advanced testing, which could eventually yield a few options. Over time, it may also emerge that some vaccines are better suited for certain parts of the population; for instance, one type of vaccine could be more effective or suitable for children versus adults, said Mr Cowling.

While results of phase three trials won’t be available for another few months, early orders for vaccines are already coming in as nations seek to secure access for their citizens.

“The vaccine development process is like a marathon,” said Mr Cowling. “Some vaccines are nearing the end of the journey, but it’s unclear if they will finish. Some of these vaccines may not pan out; hopefully they will.”

While the coronavirus “does represent a significant threat to humanity,” infections can be controlled with social distancing and other preventative protocols, said Mr Thomas. “It is just that these have economic and political costs.”

“The urgency narrative being put out by Chinese, Russian and American officials is more about national prestige and avoiding such costs than about the comprehensive testing of a new vaccine.”

SOURCE

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Fight for America—Voters Must Do This to Stop Socialism and Anarchy

For months, the forces of Marxism, socialism and anarchy have terrorized our streets and threatened the values that make America the greatest nation in the world.

The radical left’s ideas could destroy America for generations. The only bulwark that can stop them is an informed and energized citizenry.

If you are alarmed at the state of our nation and if you believe in America, this is the time to fight for America.

Rioting. Vandalism. Bullying opponents into silence. Calls to defund the police, abolish the Electoral College and remake America as a socialist country. It’s hard to believe what we’re now seeing.

For months, the forces of Marxism, socialism and anarchy have terrorized our streets and threatened the values that make America the greatest nation in the world. They have shown no signs of stopping, and many left-leaning politicians, members of the media and celebrities either tacitly accept their behavior or openly cheer it on.

Today, America has a choice of two paths. We can embrace the foundational principles that created this nation of limited government and individual liberty. Or we can veer down the path of those who trash those principles, who teach our children that America was illegitimate from the start, and who want to make the vast majority of Americans subservient to an all-powerful government.

The time has come to fight for America and against the poisonous ideology of the radical left.

But this is not the typical fight between liberals and conservatives over whose vision for America should prevail. This is a much bigger fight.

This is a fight over whether America as we know it continues to exist at all.

This is a fight over whether we have freedom, peace and prosperity, or speech codes, cancel culture and enforced ideological conformity.

This is a fight where conservatives, moderates and even more traditional liberals should be working together on one side to stop the radical Marxists on the other.

Vice President Mike Pence recently summed up this historic point in our history:

“We stand at a crossroads of freedom. Before us lie two paths: One based on the dignity and worth of every individual, and the other on the growing control of the state. One road leads to greater freedom and opportunity, and the other road leads to socialism and decline.”

Or even more succinctly, “The choice we face is whether America remains America.”

The radical left’s ideas could destroy America for generations. The only bulwark that can stop them is an informed and energized citizenry.

Amazingly, many citizens who are concerned about where they see the far left taking this country aren’t even registered to vote. If you are one of those people, your vote is one of the most effective ways you can stop the march toward Marxism.

Register to vote and make it your project to get 10 relatives and neighbors who aren’t registered to do the same. Then show up for your local, state and federal elections—and bring them with you. The best way to fight for America is to vote for America.

If there is a candidate in your area who shares your principles and isn’t afraid to actually fight for them, call the campaign office and offer a few hours of your time each week to hand out brochures, stuff envelopes or put up yard signs.

Additionally, you must arm yourself with facts so you can better understand the issues and you can also help inform your friends, relatives and social networks about them. Let those in your circles know what’s going on. So many of us are so busy in our lives that we can’t pay attention to everything, and the other side counts on that.

If you are alarmed at the state of our nation and if you believe in America, this is the time to fight for America. This is the time to support law enforcement officers, to call for accountability in an education system that indoctrinates rather than educates, and to go on offense against the extremism of the radical left.

This is the time to fight for a nation where freedom and prosperity flourish, where opportunity abounds and where civil society brings out the best in all of us. To fight for a nation of free enterprise, limited government and traditional American values.

These are the principles that have been fought for and preserved by the blood and sacrifice of generations before us. And they are the same principles we must defend and protect today. It’s time to stand up for them, because there is too much at stake to stand on the sidelines.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

DC appeals court rejects Michael Flynn effort to force judge to immediately drop the scandalous case (Washington Examiner)

On a related note: Conservative takeover of appeals courts within reach with Trump reelection (The Washington Free Beacon)

A bumbling Joe Biden walks out after Pittsburgh speech without taking questions (Washington Examiner)

Biden praised for copying Mike Pence's RNC remarks on violent riots (The Federalist)

Riots rivaling coronavirus as top 2020 concern (Washington Examiner)

HarrisX-Hill poll suggests Trump's approval rating with black voters soared by 60% during RNC (The Washington Times)

On the other hand, a Military Times poll shows Trump's Armed Forces popularity slips — and more troops say they'll vote for Biden (Military Times)

Protests erupt in southern Los Angeles after an armed black man is killed by deputies (Fox News)

Stabbing suspect said he "felt the need to find a white male to kill" after watching cop videos (The Daily Wire)

DC mayor pleads with U.S. attorney to ramp up prosecutions of violent protesters (Fox News)

Portland has declared more than two dozen riots since George Floyd's death (The Daily Caller)

Mural to slain black police sergeant defaced in Philadelphia (The Federalist)

More fallout from the fall of Falwell: Liberty University announces independent investigation of Jerry Falwell Jr.'s tenure (National Review)

Almost five million first-time gun owners since January (CNS News)

Double standards: Philadelphia mayor seen dining indoors while city's restaurants can only serve outside (Fox News)

Feds "targeting and investigating" heads of BLM, antifa, and those who fund them (The Daily Wire)

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

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

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Melbourne doctor slams coronavirus conspiracy spreading on Facebook

There are two extreme claims below and each is right in its own way.  The key statistic at issue is the number of people who have died with the virus in them but no other known problems.  Such people are very few but are they the only ones who have been killed by the virus?

The answer in that we do not know,  The truth is undoubtedly somewhere in between.  The incidence of comorbidities is high so it is unquestionable that the virus did not cause all the deaths attributed to it -- but even the most extensive autopsies would not always be able to sort out the cause of death in the patient.  Was it the virus or was it the comorbidity? 

THe high percentage of those who have died with a comorbidity strongly suggests that it was mostly the comorbidity that caused death, not the virus -- but the exact percentage will never be known. 

The important grain of truth that does emerge, however, is that the virus does not usually kill by itself.  So it is true that the official count of cases is greatly overstated.  But by exactly how much we cannot tell

Note that what is written on a death certificate is not always maximally well informed. It is therefore possible that NOBODY died of the virus alone


COVID-19 conspiracy theories are rife. While some people question its origins, others outright deny that it exists.
A top doctor has lashed out at a conspiracy theory spreading like wildfire on social media, picking apart the main arguments behind the theory.

Dr Sara Hassan from Melbourne shared a graphic being spread on Facebook by coronavirus deniers, which claimed that only 6 per cent of the COVID-19 related deaths reported in the US were actually caused by COVID-19.

The US has been ravaged by coronavirus, so far reporting more than 183,000 deaths out of over six million confirmed cases.

“I’m getting on this early because this type of misinformation and outright deliberate mischaracterisation of the facts is already making the rounds amongst conspiracy theorists hellbent on twisting facts to suit their agenda,” Dr Hassan said in a Facebook post.

“Those who spread these mistruths have one intention: To attempt to throw doubt about COVID deaths, minimise the seriousness of the pandemic, and ultimately encourage people to revolt against any mitigation put in place to prevent further deaths.”

Dr Hassan said the claims had come from a chiropractor in the US “who has obviously never completed a death certificate in her life”.

The claims are a screenshot from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showing COVID-19 related deaths in the country since the beginning of the pandemic.

“By focusing on the breakdown of deaths by comorbidity, this chiropractor has concluded that given only six per cent of COVID deaths had no other comorbidity listed on their death certificate (and) that this somehow means that ONLY six per cent of the COVID death tally is attributed to COVID, and the remaining 94 per cent of deaths are not,” Dr Hassan said.

“Such outrageous, ignorant and patently false claims are now spreading through social media by bored conspiracy theorists with a serious case of Stuckhome Syndrome,” she said.

“We know as a fact that people with underlying comorbidities are more susceptible to dying of COVID than those without pre-existing health issues.

“We know that COVID infection in those with underlying cardiovascular disease, chronic lung disease, obesity, diabetes, immunosuppression and chronic neurological conditions results in worse disease outcomes.

“This is clearly evident in epidemiological data coming out of COVID-affected nations,” she said.

Australian data showed 67 per cent of pandemic-related deaths had at least one comorbidity, she said.

However, Dr Hassan said while conspiracy theorists are sharing the screenshot to validate their “false belief that COVID deaths are criminally over-inflated,” she said as a doctor able to interpret the statistics correctly, they show something more frightening.

“The fact that six per cent of COVID victims had absolutely no underlying pre-existing condition is terrifying,” she said.

“They were relatively healthy individuals and they still succumbed to this wildly infectious and unpredictable disease.”

Dr Hassan shared another post from Dr Sara Marzouk on how death certificates are written, saying she was concerned about laypeople misinterpreting information being shared on social media.

“For those whose only interest is to argue with indisputable fact, spread misinformation, encourage life-threatening complacency and erode confidence in our public health authorities/ health care workers/scientists, then please don’t bother commenting as you’ll be automatically blocked,” she wrote.

Dr Hassan’s post has gone viral, attracting more than 1200 reactions and being shared more than 1700 times.

“Thank you Dr! The more real information out there, the better it is for everyone,” one person commented with a heart emoji.

“Just thank you for taking the time to be a voice of reason when those, with a serious case of #stuckathome-itis who are no doubt afraid but horribly misinformed, seemed to be the loudest,” one woman commented on the post.

“This information merely confirms the warning the (World Health Organisation) stipulated at the start of the pandemic, that the elderly and those with comorbidities were at risk,” one man commented on the post. “Well hello! So they were right.”

SOURCE 

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Coronavirus vaccine could get emergency approval before critical testing is complete, FDA says

The head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says that coronavirus vaccines may be given emergency approval before rigorous clinical trials are complete, according to recent news reports.

Only a couple of coronavirus vaccine candidates in the U.S. have advanced to phase 3 clinical trials, which are the most critical tests needed to prove, in tens of thousands of people, that a vaccine is both safe and effective at preventing COVID-19. Typically, a vaccine must pass these advanced trials before given approval — but the pandemic has pushed vaccine development to unprecedented timescales.

"It is up to the sponsor [vaccine developer] to apply for authorization or approval, and we make an adjudication of their application," Dr. Stephen Hahn, the FDA Commissioner told The Financial Times. "If they do that before the end of phase three, we may find that appropriate. We may find that inappropriate, we will make a determination."

Hahn said a safe way to roll out the vaccine prior to results from phase 3 trials, is to issue an emergency use authorization for only a select group of people, according to the Financial Times. "Our emergency use authorization is not the same as a full approval," he told the Times.

Emergency use authorization is permission granted to unapproved products to be used in an emergency to diagnose, treat or prevent serious or life-threatening conditions, "when there are no adequate, approved and available alternatives," according to the FDA. China and Russia have both given emergency approvals to coronavirus vaccines for a limited group of people prior to phase 3 results, according to the Times.

But approving vaccines too soon can be risky, public health officials have warned.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, previously told Reuters that a vaccine should not receive an emergency use authorization before it's shown to be effective. "One of the potential dangers if you prematurely let a vaccine out is that it would make it difficult, if not impossible, for the other vaccines to enroll people in their trial," he said.

"To me, it's absolutely paramount that you definitively show that a vaccine is safe and effective, both," Fauci told Reuters. "We would hope that nothing interferes with the full demonstration that a vaccine is safe and effective."

Last week, the FDA gave an emergency use authorization to plasma therapy, or antibody-rich plasma taken from recovered patients, to treat COVID-19, quickly reversing its announcement that the FDA wouldn't issue an EUA until there was more data that the therapy works, Live Science previously reported. The authorization followed on the tail of President Donald Trump's remarks that the FDA's decision to wait for more data before giving an EUA to plasma therapy could be political, according to the report.

Hahn told the Times that the decision to give an EUA on vaccines wouldn't be politically driven.

"We have a convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic with the political season, and we're just going to have to get through that and stick to our core principles," he told the Financial Times. "This is going to be a science, medicine, data decision. This is not going to be a political decision."

In the U.S., just two candidate vaccines are in phase 3 trials: one made by Moderna and the other by Pfizer and BioNTech, according to a Live Science roundup of coronavirus vaccine candidates in clinical trials. But there are several others that are expected to start phase 3 trials in the coming weeks.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

Trump will visit Kenosha despite Wisconsin governor asking him to "reconsider" (National Review)

Kenosha police union says reporting on Jacob Blake shooting "wholly inaccurate" (Fox News)

Hidin' Biden to resume in-person campaigning as race with Trump kicks into gear (The Washington Post)

Kamala Harris promises unconstitutional national mask mandate if elected (New York Post)

Biden plan would upend traditional 401(k) plans (CQ-Roll Call)

Sarah Palin can sue The New York Times for defamation, court rules (Reuters)

Trump supporter murdered in Portland (Power Line)

Trump rails against "incompetent" Portland mayor (Fox News)

Portland protesters stage sit-in at mayor's home after he and Trump trade barbs (Fox News)

DC BLM anarchist: "Put police in graves." "Burn the White House down." "Take it to senators." (The National Pulse)

Democrat State Rep. Vernon Jones harassed by BLM activists after endorsing Trump (Law Enforcement Today)

Eight police officers have been shot since June 1 in St. Louis (KSDK)

Virginia Republicans sign "Police Pledge" to back the blue (The Daily Signal)

Iowa judge tosses 50,000 absentee ballot requests after Democrat commissioner fills out voter information (The Daily Wire)

California to ban stores from selling flavored tobacco and e-cigarettes (San Francisco Chronicle)

Death toll up to 16 for Hurricane Laura (ABC News)

U.S. to cut troop deployment in Iraq to 3,500, lowest number since rise of ISIS (The Daily Caller)

Another arrest at U.S. university for China connections (Sharyl Attkisson)

China tightens tech export controls, potentially jeopardizing TikTok deal (CNBC)

China has built 268 new reeducation camps, some large enough to hold 10,000 people (Hot Air)

India is becoming the world's new COVID epicenter (Bloomberg)

UAE officially ends boycott on Israel following peace deal (The Daily Caller)

Looming Middle East arms race sparks fear of unprecedented regional war (The Washington Free Beacon)

After decades of dividing America on race, leftists insists the Right is really to blame (The Federalist)

Corporate media didn't report what it's really like in Kenosha, Wisconsin, so I will (The Federalist)

Policy: Black communities around the United States want better interactions with law enforcement, not the abolition of police departments (City Journal)

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

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

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