Coronavirus: Oxford University researchers claim positive results from COVID-19 vaccine trials
Research published in the journal Lancet claims an experimental vaccine — labelled ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 — was tested on more than 1000 people and prompted a protective immune response in those aged 18 to 55. “The vaccine was safe and tolerated,” researchers wrote.
“Preliminary results from a phase 1/2 trial involving 1077 healthy adults found that vaccine induced strong antibody & T cell immune responses up to day 56 of the ongoing trial,” the Lancet wrote when announcing the breakthrough on social media on Monday night.
“These responses may be even greater after a 2nd dose, according to a sub-group study of 10 participants.”
The director of the Jenner Institute Oxford University, Dr Adrian Hill, said the results were hugely promising.
“What this vaccine does particularly well is trigger both arms of the immune system,” Dr Hill said.
He claimed the vaccine causes a reaction in the body’s T-cells which help to fight off the coronavirus and that a partnership was already underway with a drug manufacturer to produce millions of doses.
The trial took place between April 23 and May 21. Half of the 1077 participants were given the experimental vaccine.
The scientists wrote that “preliminary findings show that the candidate vaccine given as a single dose was safe and tolerated”.
“No serious adverse reactions ... occurred. The majority of adverse events reported were mild or moderate in severity, and all were self-limiting.
“We show that a single dose of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 elicits an increase in spike-specific Antibodies by day 28 and neutralising antibody in all participants after a booster dose.
“Further studies are required to assess the vaccine in various population groups including older age groups, those with comorbidities, and in ethnically and geographically diverse populations.
“We will also evaluate the vaccine in children, once sufficient safety data have been accumulated in adult studies. Phase 3 trials are now underway in Brazil, South Africa, and the UK and will evaluate vaccine efficacy in diverse populations.”
The BBC reports that the vaccine is made from a genetically-engineered virus found in chimpanzees that was altered to resemble the coronavirus.
The research is based on the theory that the immune system can learn how to attack the coronavirus when presented with a virus that resembles it.
SOURCE
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Bankruptcies have already reached 2008 levels, and leftists want another shutdown
Americans are getting a trial run of socialism right now.
Businesses have been told whether they can or cannot open and at what capacity they may operate by governments. Trillions of dollars have been spent, put into the hands of workers, business owners, and those who fell victim to the destruction of jobs from the COVID-19 shutdowns. With enhanced unemployment, the Paycheck Protection Program, and other “pandemic supplements,” the reality is setting in.
When capitalism is shelved and state-run economies prevail, Americans don’t thrive and businesses close — permanently.
Bankruptcies are up to the same level of the 2008 financial crisis, with almost 3,500 in Chapter 11 protection already this year. Worse, there are almost certainly more to come, especially if leftists achieve their desired second shutdown.
A survey published by the National Federation of Independent Businesses reveals that 46% of small businesses that received government assistance anticipate a continued need over the next year in the current environment of uncertainty. Restaurants and small businesses are particularly impacted with not only forced shutdowns and slow reopenings but with a reduced capacity despite much of the overhead and expenses remaining fixed. These statistics and trials will only grow and worsen with a deliberately socialist agenda, global pandemic or not.
Our small foray into socialism is exactly what Marxist Democrats want for our nation. They understand that this election cycle is about capturing power to make policies, controlling the very principles that govern our key institutions, education, the family, entertainment, mass media, and the various sectors of our economy. The current crises are serving as a springboard for what could, with a Democrat-led government, become the fulfillment of their desires — the death of capitalism entirely.
The socialist Left would have Americans choose between Liberty and safety — the ability to earn a living and dependence. Patriots are being asked to sacrifice life, liberty, and pursuits of happiness along with private property and wealth.
As November approaches, observe the contrast between those invested in dread, dismay, and destruction and those encouraging renewal, rebuilding, and results. Democrats are invested in failure, economic collapse, and government dependence. Republicans aim to quickly return to the economic expansion that marked the three years preceding COVID-19. What will voters choose?
SOURCE
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Democrats: Make Illegal Immigration Great Again
Despite the economic devastation borne by Americans, Dems are pushing for illegals.
The United States Department of Labor revealed last Thursday that more than 1.3 million Americans filed initial unemployment claims the previous week, marking the 17th consecutive week such claims have topped one million. Since the pandemic began, approximately 51 million people have filed for unemployment benefits. One might think such numbers would engender an all-hands-on-deck response to help those Americans. Unfortunately, one would be totally wrong as far as Democrats are concerned. The party that has long prioritized the needs of immigrants, refugees, and “migrants” remains wedded to that agenda — this time on steroids.
Presidential candidate Joe Biden leads the way, and the recently released Biden-Sanders unity policy recommendations are indicative. They promise Democrats will “rescind President Trump’s fabricated ‘National Emergency’” that allocated $3.6 billion from military construction projects toward the construction of the wall on our Southwest border. Democrats will put an end to building the wall because it is “unnecessary.”
The Biden-Sanders plan also embraces catch-and-release for illegals, promoting such efforts as “community-based alternatives to detention.” That even The Washington Post admits 44% of illegals never show up for their immigration court appointment — the same courts it characterizes as “under a mountain of backlogged cases” because “hundreds of thousands of Central Americans continue to arrive at the border each year”? That the same plan would further enhance catch-and-release by rescinding the Trump administration’s Supreme Court-approved Migrant Protection Protocols that required some asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico while their claims were being processed? That the plan would expand ObamaCare to cover DACA illegal aliens? That all of these efforts incentivize illegal immigration and would undoubtedly swell the ranks of what might be as many as 22 million illegals already here?
The real agenda is laid bare, with the plan stating, “Democrats believe it is long past time to provide a roadmap to citizenship for the millions of undocumented workers.”
Not undocumented workers. Illegal aliens. Illegal aliens Democrats are more than willing to exploit in their pursuit of unassailable power, even when that pursuit hurts millions of Americans forced to compete with illegals for jobs. Jobs that have become exponentially harder to secure during the pandemic.
And just like Democrat politicians who sit idly by while their cities are looted and burned by “protesters,” party leaders wish to reward the wholesale lawbreaking that mass amnesty represents. Biden himself will also sit idly by, as the plan promises to halt all deportations during his first 100 days in office. And while such a halt is occurring, Democrats intend to reward employers who hire illegal aliens. The plan promises to “end workplace and community raids.”
Merit-based immigration is also on the chopping block as the plan promises to “immediately halt enforcement of and rescind the Trump Administration’s un-American immigrant wealth test.” Wealth test is Demo-speak for self sufficiency — as in the party has no problem whatsoever with immigrants coming to America and immediately accessing our welfare state. Moreover, Democrats also remain committed to chain migration policies that vastly expand the number of family members who can come here.
That chain migration has quadrupled the 250,000 immigrants coming to America per year in the 1950s and 1960s to more than one million annually since 1990? The more the merrier, self-sufficient or not, and the millions of Americans forced to deal with the consequences — even when their own backs are against the wall — be damned.
Refugees are part of the agenda as well. The Biden-Sanders plans would raise the current cap from the 18,000 that Trump approved for fiscal 2020 to a whopping 125,000 per year.
When one looks at those who lead Biden’s immigration task force, such policies should come as no surprise. One member is Javier Valdes, an executive director of Make the Road, an open-borders group that supports abolishing ICE — and letting illegal aliens vote in state elections. Another is Marisa Franco, who ran the organization Not1More Deportation. It advocated a complete moratorium on deportations, and it currently wants to abolish ICE. The immigration task force’s cochair is Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, which also champions amnesty. It is partially funded by open-borders champion George Soros.
House Democrats are also hard at work promoting the causes of immigrants, even as the pandemic rages and Congress is forced to consider another round of relief checks necessitated by the lockdowns and wholly arbitrary definitions of what constitutes an “essential job.” Thus, the party is demanding another round of funding cuts for ICE, while aiming to undo key Trump policies that helped mitigate last year’s border surge. In short, the aforementioned new standards for asylum-seekers and deals made with Mexico and Central American nations that slowed down the massive flow of people toward our border are on the chopping block.
North Carolina Democrat Congressman David Price insisted such efforts were necessary to push back on the administration’s “cruel and arbitrary immigration policies.” He added, “We haven’t seen anything like this before.”
Oh yes we have. When the initial $3 trillion coronavirus relief package was being negotiated, Democrats demanded job protections for “essential” illegal-alien workers and the employers that hire them. They also insisted that the next round of stimulus checks should include those who file taxes via an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) rather than just a Social Security number, because that would enable illegal aliens excluded from round one to receive one in the second round.
How any of this helps Americans, who are enduring one of the most trying times in our nation’s history, is anyone’s guess. But as one of the final provisions in the plan reveals, to question Democrat motives is to embrace “systemic racism.” It states, “Democrats believe that our fight to end systemic racism in our country extends to our immigration system, including the policies at our borders and ports of entry, detention centers, and within immigration law enforcement agencies and their policies and operations.”
“These proposals would break the back of American workers and reduce much of the population to welfare status,” warns columnist Daniel Greenfield. “They represent the worst attack on the American working class in history.”
SOURCE
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IN BRIEF
"I am tolerating chemotherapy well": 87-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg battling cancer again (USA Today)
Lawmakers are far apart on a new coronavirus relief bill. The sticking points are direct payments, liability reform, aid for state and local governments, school reopenings, and small-business relief. (NPR)
Trump expediently demands payroll tax cut while GOP eyes benefit cuts for unemployed (The Washington Post)
Pentagon bans Confederate flag in a sly way to avoid Trump's wrath (AP)
China expands its amphibious forces in challenge to U.S. supremacy beyond Asia (Reuters)
CDC test kits generate 30% false positive and 20% false negative results, peer-reviewed findings confirm (Business Wire)
"Strike for Black Lives": Tens of thousands to walk off job today to protest nonexistent "systemic racism" (AP)
Federal Trade Commission is considering deposing top Facebook executives in antitrust probe (Reuters)
Lawlessness-enabling Portland mayor accuses Trump of "absolute abuse" of federal law enforcement, demands officers leave as city's nightly violence continues (National Review)
Seattle rioters damage and loot stores while injuring 12 police officers (Fox News)
Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan (D) implicated in massive bribery scandal (The Blaze)
Bubba Wallace booed at NASCAR race as Confederate flags fly (Washington Examiner)
Less than 30% of Americans say Redskins should change their name (The Federalist)
The family that owns The New York Times were slaveholders (New York Post)
Nearly 50% of Americans believe mail-in voting is vulnerable to significant levels of fraud. The other 50% is delusional. (The Daily Caller)
GOP gallery of nightmares: 10 policies Biden and Democrats would ram through after axing filibuster (Washington Examiner)
Vandalizing American history: A list of 64 toppled, defaced, or removed statues (The Daily Signal)
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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
**************************
Wednesday, July 22, 2020
Tuesday, July 21, 2020
Radiation emerges as an intriguing — and divisive — treatment for Covid-19
Back in 2013, toxicologist Edward Calabrese and a colleague at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, were combing over a cache of century-old data on low-dose radiation therapy, hunting for evidence on the scientific idea that small doses of certain poisons might actually be beneficial. They found small amounts of radiation were surprisingly successful in combating pneumonia. Again and again, doctors reported symptoms subsided within hours of a single X-ray.
Hardly anyone took notice. Calabrese’s ideas had sometimes been brushed off by his peers as too out-there, and the idea of low-dose radiation as therapy had long been dismissed in favor of more modern treatments. The paper only gained a smattering of citations.
That all changed when Covid-19 snowballed into a crisis, fueling fresh interest in anything that might ease the devastating cases of pneumonia in some patients. At least 52,000 of the more than 135,000 deaths due to Covid-19 in the U.S. have involved pneumonia, according to federal health data.
“Back in February, I started getting just dozens and dozens and dozens of emails from radiation oncologists —people who treat cancer patients with targeted radiation. And they had come across our paper and they thought that this might be a vehicle by which they could help suffering and dying Covid patients perhaps survive,” he said. “Clinical trials are now going on across the country.”
There are at least a dozen trials worldwide testing low-dose radiation therapy, or LDRT, as a treatment for pneumonia related to Covid-19, some spurred by the same historical data Calabrese and colleagues scoured years ago. The theory: Targeted radiation to the lungs will halt the out-of-control inflammation responsible for the devastating pneumonia that bookends the course of some Covid-19 patients.
But the revived interest in radiotherapy has sparked a debate among physicians and researchers, who are divided on whether the idea is even ready for test-driving in clinical trials. With little known about the way LDRT works on inflamed lungs, some experts say it might exacerbate respiratory damage, while introducing the additional risk of cancer. Others say patients participating in the trials may suffer by missing out on more promising treatments.
On the other side, though, are experts who say there’s a clear and urgent need for Covid-19 treatments that work, particularly for cases that become severe. Antibiotics can help treat cases of pneumonia from bacterial infections, but not those caused by viruses. Those experts argue compelling historical data gives LDRT a promising head start.
“It seems to be such an almost emotional topic,” said Dörthe Schaue, a radiation oncologist at UCLA, on the debate raging over LDRT. “You get two extremes on the spectrum and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, where you have to consider all the pluses and minuses.”
The new wave of low-dose radiation trials are registered at academic centers and hospitals around the world, including in Italy, Spain, Iran, India, and the U.S. The studies are recruiting anywhere from five to 106 Covid-19 patients with pneumonia, and half require participants to be at least 40 years of age.
Arnab Chakravarti, chair of Ohio State’s radiation and oncology department, is spearheading two of the four LDRT trials in the U.S. The first trial, PREVENT, will enroll around 100 oxygen-dependent Covid-19 patients at up to 20 hospitals around the country. The second trial, VENTED, is limited to Ohio State, where it will recruit 24 critically-ill patients who require ventilator support. Unlike PREVENT, VENTED is open to participants as young as 18.
Chakravarti hypothesizes that LDRT will tamp down the unchecked inflammation that ultimately overwhelms the lungs of some Covid-19 patients. In these individuals, immune cells overreact to the virus and secrete a dangerous excess of proinflammatory cytokines, known as a “cytokine storm.”
“The severe illness and death that we see from Covid-19 pneumonia appear to be mostly due to the inflammatory response to the infection in the lung tissues,” said radiation oncologist David Kozono, who is launching a LDRT trial at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “The idea is that low-dose lung radiation has the potential to reduce this inflammatory response.”
Some experts have theorized that small amounts of radiation might flip a switch on these immune cells so that they release soothing, anti-inflammatory cytokines instead, though this is just one among many proposed mechanisms.
“The history of the utilization of ultra-low-dose radiation for viral pneumonia actually dates back to the 1920s and ’30s and ’40s — just post the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918,” Chakravarti noted. He said literature from that era indicates that LDRT was effective in 75 to 90% of influenza-induced viral pneumonia cases, though the therapy “fell out of favor” after the development of antiviral therapies and vaccines.
Beyond historical data, Chakravarti said that his hypothesis is staked in recent evidence from an interim analysis of a clinical trial at Emory testing low-dose radiation in ten patients with Covid-19. All of the first five patients, averaging 90 years of age, were alive two weeks after treatment, and researchers reported three patients were weaned off oxygen within 24 hours of receiving radiation.
SOURCE
***********************************
Why many medicines are so costly
Question: How much do drug companies spend on research and development to bring a new medicine to market?
Findings: In this study, which included 63 of 355 new therapeutic drugs and biologic agents approved by the US Food and Drug Administration between 2009 and 2018, the estimated median capitalized research and development cost per product was $985 million, counting expenditures on failed trials. Data were mainly accessible for smaller firms, products in certain therapeutic areas, orphan drugs, first-in-class drugs, therapeutic agents that received accelerated approval, and products approved between 2014 and 2018.
Meaning: This study provides an estimate of research and development costs for new therapeutic agents based on publicly available data; differences from previous studies may reflect the spectrum of products analyzed and the restricted availability of data in the public domain.
Abstract
Importance: The mean cost of developing a new drug has been the subject of debate, with recent estimates ranging from $314 million to $2.8 billion.
Objective: To estimate the research and development investment required to bring a new therapeutic agent to market, using publicly available data.
Design and Setting: Data were analyzed on new therapeutic agents approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) between 2009 and 2018 to estimate the research and development expenditure required to bring a new medicine to market. Data were accessed from the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Drugs@FDA database, and ClinicalTrials.gov, alongside published data on clinical trial success rates.
Exposures: Conduct of preclinical and clinical studies of new therapeutic agents.
Main Outcomes and Measures: Median and mean research and development spending on new therapeutic agents approved by the FDA, capitalized at a real cost of capital rate (the required rate of return for an investor) of 10.5% per year, with bootstrapped CIs. All amounts were reported in 2018 US dollars.
Results: The FDA approved 355 new drugs and biologics over the study period. Research and development expenditures were available for 63 (18%) products, developed by 47 different companies. After accounting for the costs of failed trials, the median capitalized research and development investment to bring a new drug to market was estimated at $985.3 million (95% CI, $683.6 million-$1228.9 million), and the mean investment was estimated at $1335.9 million (95% CI, $1042.5 million-$1637.5 million) in the base case analysis. Median estimates by therapeutic area (for areas with ≥5 drugs) ranged from $765.9 million (95% CI, $323.0 million-$1473.5 million) for nervous system agents to $2771.6 million (95% CI, $2051.8 million-$5366.2 million) for antineoplastic and immunomodulating agents. Data were mainly accessible for smaller firms, orphan drugs, products in certain therapeutic areas, first-in-class drugs, therapeutic agents that received accelerated approval, and products approved between 2014 and 2018. Results varied in sensitivity analyses using different estimates of clinical trial success rates, preclinical expenditures, and cost of capital.
Conclusions and Relevance: This study provides an estimate of research and development costs for new therapeutic agents based on publicly available data. Differences from previous studies may reflect the spectrum of products analyzed, the restricted availability of data in the public domain, and differences in underlying assumptions in the cost calculations.
SOURCE
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If there is a second wave of Covid, the Swedish approach will have been right all along
Not going into lockdown was described as “a mad experiment” at the time, but Sweden can look to the winter with less trepidation than most
There have been times during this pandemic that I’ve felt as if my memory is playing tricks on me. I’m sure I remember scientists telling us that a second wave was inevitable. I could have sworn I saw a graph at the press briefings showing a scary bell curve of infections in the spring and an even scarier one in the winter. I’m sure I heard experts explaining that the only way COVID-19 would disappear would be when herd immunity was achieved, either through natural antibodies or vaccination.
Official documents reassure me that I am not going mad. The minutes from a Sage meeting in March say: “Sage was unanimous that measures seeking to completely suppress the spread of Covid-19 will cause a second peak.” As far as I can tell, this is still their view. Suppressing a wintry virus during the sunniest spring on record could turn out to be no great achievement. The worst may be yet to come.
One country can look to the winter with less trepidation than most. Last week, a study suggested that 30 per cent of Swedes have built up immunity to the virus. It would help explain why Covid-19 has been fizzling out in Sweden. If a measure of herd immunity also helps them avoid the second wave, Sweden’s take-it-on-the-chin approach will be vindicated.
Not going into lockdown was described as “a mad experiment” by Marcus Carlsson of Lund University in March. Dr Cecilia Söderberg-Nauclér of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute accused the government of “leading us to catastrophe”, and predicted that the healthcare system would collapse unless a lockdown was introduced. Every model predicted an exponential rise in infections.
With half of humanity living under lockdown, photos of Swedes socialising in bars and restaurants seemed like communiqués from another dimension. Aside from a ban on gatherings of more than 50 people, life carried on as normal. Children aged under 16 went to school. No one wore a mask. This, surely, was the calm before a terrible storm.
The catastrophe never arrived. As in most other European countries, Sweden saw a peak in Covid-19 deaths in the first half of April followed by a steady decline. Shown on a graph, the pattern of mortality is indistinguishable from that of many countries that locked down. Its daily death toll rarely exceeded double figures and has been below 30 since mid-June. As in Britain, half the deaths were in care homes and two-thirds of those who died were aged 80 or over.
Once it became clear that their apocalyptic prophecy had failed, critics of the Swedish approach turned to post hoc rationalisation. They cited low population density and a high rate of single person households as the explanation for Sweden’s lucky escape. Some claimed that social distancing was a natural part of Swedish culture or that Swedes did not talk enough for virus droplets to be transmitted. Some of this was true and much of it was nonsense, but none of it had been mentioned in March when Sweden was said to be doomed.
It is now considered gauche to compare Sweden to Britain, Italy, Spain or any other country that had a higher death rate. You are only allowed to compare it to its immediate neighbours where the death rate is lower. Mention the UK or, heaven forbid, Belgium (which locked down a week before the UK and has the highest COVID-19 death rate in the world) and you will be told that they should have locked down sooner. The proposition becomes unfalsifiable. Heads they win, tails you lose.
The goalposts have shifted. The purpose of lockdowns is no longer to protect health systems, but to prevent death at any cost. New Zealand has managed to eradicate the virus for the time being, but only by kissing goodbye to its biggest export industry – tourism – which sustains ten per cent of its economy and fourteen per cent of its workforce. Isolated from the rest of the world, it is a prisoner to a vaccine that may never be found.
Australia thought it had beaten the virus, but parts of Victoria are back under lockdown after new cases were found. There have been resurgences in the United States, Israel and South Africa, to name but three. Winning the battle against the first wave may prove to be like the invasion of Iraq, merely a prelude to a long war of attrition that wastes more money and lives.
If there is hope of avoiding a second wave, it lies in contact tracing, but the NHS Test and Trace remains unproven in summer, let alone winter, and businesses will still be faced with crippling social distancing rules and – worst of all – the public’s fear of going out. For all the talk of ‘Super Saturday’, only five per cent of us went to the pub last weekend. A recent survey found that only 21 per cent of us would be comfortable eating in a restaurant.
And what of the costs? Sweden will not be unscathed by the global recession. Its GDP is expected to decline by 5.3 per cent this year. But GDP is expected to fall by 8.7 per cent in the Eurozone, by 9.7 per cent in Britain and by more than 10 per cent in Italy, France and Spain. Sweden has not put its children’s education on hold. It has not put its citizens under soul-sapping house arrest. If a vaccine goes into production by autumn, the Swedes will look reckless. But that is not going to happen - and winter is coming.
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
**************************
Back in 2013, toxicologist Edward Calabrese and a colleague at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, were combing over a cache of century-old data on low-dose radiation therapy, hunting for evidence on the scientific idea that small doses of certain poisons might actually be beneficial. They found small amounts of radiation were surprisingly successful in combating pneumonia. Again and again, doctors reported symptoms subsided within hours of a single X-ray.
Hardly anyone took notice. Calabrese’s ideas had sometimes been brushed off by his peers as too out-there, and the idea of low-dose radiation as therapy had long been dismissed in favor of more modern treatments. The paper only gained a smattering of citations.
That all changed when Covid-19 snowballed into a crisis, fueling fresh interest in anything that might ease the devastating cases of pneumonia in some patients. At least 52,000 of the more than 135,000 deaths due to Covid-19 in the U.S. have involved pneumonia, according to federal health data.
“Back in February, I started getting just dozens and dozens and dozens of emails from radiation oncologists —people who treat cancer patients with targeted radiation. And they had come across our paper and they thought that this might be a vehicle by which they could help suffering and dying Covid patients perhaps survive,” he said. “Clinical trials are now going on across the country.”
There are at least a dozen trials worldwide testing low-dose radiation therapy, or LDRT, as a treatment for pneumonia related to Covid-19, some spurred by the same historical data Calabrese and colleagues scoured years ago. The theory: Targeted radiation to the lungs will halt the out-of-control inflammation responsible for the devastating pneumonia that bookends the course of some Covid-19 patients.
But the revived interest in radiotherapy has sparked a debate among physicians and researchers, who are divided on whether the idea is even ready for test-driving in clinical trials. With little known about the way LDRT works on inflamed lungs, some experts say it might exacerbate respiratory damage, while introducing the additional risk of cancer. Others say patients participating in the trials may suffer by missing out on more promising treatments.
On the other side, though, are experts who say there’s a clear and urgent need for Covid-19 treatments that work, particularly for cases that become severe. Antibiotics can help treat cases of pneumonia from bacterial infections, but not those caused by viruses. Those experts argue compelling historical data gives LDRT a promising head start.
“It seems to be such an almost emotional topic,” said Dörthe Schaue, a radiation oncologist at UCLA, on the debate raging over LDRT. “You get two extremes on the spectrum and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, where you have to consider all the pluses and minuses.”
The new wave of low-dose radiation trials are registered at academic centers and hospitals around the world, including in Italy, Spain, Iran, India, and the U.S. The studies are recruiting anywhere from five to 106 Covid-19 patients with pneumonia, and half require participants to be at least 40 years of age.
Arnab Chakravarti, chair of Ohio State’s radiation and oncology department, is spearheading two of the four LDRT trials in the U.S. The first trial, PREVENT, will enroll around 100 oxygen-dependent Covid-19 patients at up to 20 hospitals around the country. The second trial, VENTED, is limited to Ohio State, where it will recruit 24 critically-ill patients who require ventilator support. Unlike PREVENT, VENTED is open to participants as young as 18.
Chakravarti hypothesizes that LDRT will tamp down the unchecked inflammation that ultimately overwhelms the lungs of some Covid-19 patients. In these individuals, immune cells overreact to the virus and secrete a dangerous excess of proinflammatory cytokines, known as a “cytokine storm.”
“The severe illness and death that we see from Covid-19 pneumonia appear to be mostly due to the inflammatory response to the infection in the lung tissues,” said radiation oncologist David Kozono, who is launching a LDRT trial at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “The idea is that low-dose lung radiation has the potential to reduce this inflammatory response.”
Some experts have theorized that small amounts of radiation might flip a switch on these immune cells so that they release soothing, anti-inflammatory cytokines instead, though this is just one among many proposed mechanisms.
“The history of the utilization of ultra-low-dose radiation for viral pneumonia actually dates back to the 1920s and ’30s and ’40s — just post the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918,” Chakravarti noted. He said literature from that era indicates that LDRT was effective in 75 to 90% of influenza-induced viral pneumonia cases, though the therapy “fell out of favor” after the development of antiviral therapies and vaccines.
Beyond historical data, Chakravarti said that his hypothesis is staked in recent evidence from an interim analysis of a clinical trial at Emory testing low-dose radiation in ten patients with Covid-19. All of the first five patients, averaging 90 years of age, were alive two weeks after treatment, and researchers reported three patients were weaned off oxygen within 24 hours of receiving radiation.
SOURCE
***********************************
Why many medicines are so costly
Question: How much do drug companies spend on research and development to bring a new medicine to market?
Findings: In this study, which included 63 of 355 new therapeutic drugs and biologic agents approved by the US Food and Drug Administration between 2009 and 2018, the estimated median capitalized research and development cost per product was $985 million, counting expenditures on failed trials. Data were mainly accessible for smaller firms, products in certain therapeutic areas, orphan drugs, first-in-class drugs, therapeutic agents that received accelerated approval, and products approved between 2014 and 2018.
Meaning: This study provides an estimate of research and development costs for new therapeutic agents based on publicly available data; differences from previous studies may reflect the spectrum of products analyzed and the restricted availability of data in the public domain.
Abstract
Importance: The mean cost of developing a new drug has been the subject of debate, with recent estimates ranging from $314 million to $2.8 billion.
Objective: To estimate the research and development investment required to bring a new therapeutic agent to market, using publicly available data.
Design and Setting: Data were analyzed on new therapeutic agents approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) between 2009 and 2018 to estimate the research and development expenditure required to bring a new medicine to market. Data were accessed from the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Drugs@FDA database, and ClinicalTrials.gov, alongside published data on clinical trial success rates.
Exposures: Conduct of preclinical and clinical studies of new therapeutic agents.
Main Outcomes and Measures: Median and mean research and development spending on new therapeutic agents approved by the FDA, capitalized at a real cost of capital rate (the required rate of return for an investor) of 10.5% per year, with bootstrapped CIs. All amounts were reported in 2018 US dollars.
Results: The FDA approved 355 new drugs and biologics over the study period. Research and development expenditures were available for 63 (18%) products, developed by 47 different companies. After accounting for the costs of failed trials, the median capitalized research and development investment to bring a new drug to market was estimated at $985.3 million (95% CI, $683.6 million-$1228.9 million), and the mean investment was estimated at $1335.9 million (95% CI, $1042.5 million-$1637.5 million) in the base case analysis. Median estimates by therapeutic area (for areas with ≥5 drugs) ranged from $765.9 million (95% CI, $323.0 million-$1473.5 million) for nervous system agents to $2771.6 million (95% CI, $2051.8 million-$5366.2 million) for antineoplastic and immunomodulating agents. Data were mainly accessible for smaller firms, orphan drugs, products in certain therapeutic areas, first-in-class drugs, therapeutic agents that received accelerated approval, and products approved between 2014 and 2018. Results varied in sensitivity analyses using different estimates of clinical trial success rates, preclinical expenditures, and cost of capital.
Conclusions and Relevance: This study provides an estimate of research and development costs for new therapeutic agents based on publicly available data. Differences from previous studies may reflect the spectrum of products analyzed, the restricted availability of data in the public domain, and differences in underlying assumptions in the cost calculations.
SOURCE
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If there is a second wave of Covid, the Swedish approach will have been right all along
Not going into lockdown was described as “a mad experiment” at the time, but Sweden can look to the winter with less trepidation than most
There have been times during this pandemic that I’ve felt as if my memory is playing tricks on me. I’m sure I remember scientists telling us that a second wave was inevitable. I could have sworn I saw a graph at the press briefings showing a scary bell curve of infections in the spring and an even scarier one in the winter. I’m sure I heard experts explaining that the only way COVID-19 would disappear would be when herd immunity was achieved, either through natural antibodies or vaccination.
Official documents reassure me that I am not going mad. The minutes from a Sage meeting in March say: “Sage was unanimous that measures seeking to completely suppress the spread of Covid-19 will cause a second peak.” As far as I can tell, this is still their view. Suppressing a wintry virus during the sunniest spring on record could turn out to be no great achievement. The worst may be yet to come.
One country can look to the winter with less trepidation than most. Last week, a study suggested that 30 per cent of Swedes have built up immunity to the virus. It would help explain why Covid-19 has been fizzling out in Sweden. If a measure of herd immunity also helps them avoid the second wave, Sweden’s take-it-on-the-chin approach will be vindicated.
Not going into lockdown was described as “a mad experiment” by Marcus Carlsson of Lund University in March. Dr Cecilia Söderberg-Nauclér of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute accused the government of “leading us to catastrophe”, and predicted that the healthcare system would collapse unless a lockdown was introduced. Every model predicted an exponential rise in infections.
With half of humanity living under lockdown, photos of Swedes socialising in bars and restaurants seemed like communiqués from another dimension. Aside from a ban on gatherings of more than 50 people, life carried on as normal. Children aged under 16 went to school. No one wore a mask. This, surely, was the calm before a terrible storm.
The catastrophe never arrived. As in most other European countries, Sweden saw a peak in Covid-19 deaths in the first half of April followed by a steady decline. Shown on a graph, the pattern of mortality is indistinguishable from that of many countries that locked down. Its daily death toll rarely exceeded double figures and has been below 30 since mid-June. As in Britain, half the deaths were in care homes and two-thirds of those who died were aged 80 or over.
Once it became clear that their apocalyptic prophecy had failed, critics of the Swedish approach turned to post hoc rationalisation. They cited low population density and a high rate of single person households as the explanation for Sweden’s lucky escape. Some claimed that social distancing was a natural part of Swedish culture or that Swedes did not talk enough for virus droplets to be transmitted. Some of this was true and much of it was nonsense, but none of it had been mentioned in March when Sweden was said to be doomed.
It is now considered gauche to compare Sweden to Britain, Italy, Spain or any other country that had a higher death rate. You are only allowed to compare it to its immediate neighbours where the death rate is lower. Mention the UK or, heaven forbid, Belgium (which locked down a week before the UK and has the highest COVID-19 death rate in the world) and you will be told that they should have locked down sooner. The proposition becomes unfalsifiable. Heads they win, tails you lose.
The goalposts have shifted. The purpose of lockdowns is no longer to protect health systems, but to prevent death at any cost. New Zealand has managed to eradicate the virus for the time being, but only by kissing goodbye to its biggest export industry – tourism – which sustains ten per cent of its economy and fourteen per cent of its workforce. Isolated from the rest of the world, it is a prisoner to a vaccine that may never be found.
Australia thought it had beaten the virus, but parts of Victoria are back under lockdown after new cases were found. There have been resurgences in the United States, Israel and South Africa, to name but three. Winning the battle against the first wave may prove to be like the invasion of Iraq, merely a prelude to a long war of attrition that wastes more money and lives.
If there is hope of avoiding a second wave, it lies in contact tracing, but the NHS Test and Trace remains unproven in summer, let alone winter, and businesses will still be faced with crippling social distancing rules and – worst of all – the public’s fear of going out. For all the talk of ‘Super Saturday’, only five per cent of us went to the pub last weekend. A recent survey found that only 21 per cent of us would be comfortable eating in a restaurant.
And what of the costs? Sweden will not be unscathed by the global recession. Its GDP is expected to decline by 5.3 per cent this year. But GDP is expected to fall by 8.7 per cent in the Eurozone, by 9.7 per cent in Britain and by more than 10 per cent in Italy, France and Spain. Sweden has not put its children’s education on hold. It has not put its citizens under soul-sapping house arrest. If a vaccine goes into production by autumn, the Swedes will look reckless. But that is not going to happen - and winter is coming.
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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Monday, July 20, 2020
Left-Wingers Are Hysterical About Federal Agents Policing Protests in Portland
The New York Times headline is scary: “Federal Agents Unleash Militarized Crackdown on Portland.” They’re “unleashing” a “crackdown”? Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Naturally, the hysterical left is having a cow. While a decent argument could be made that even if Portland authorities aren’t doing their jobs, the feds should keep their noses out of local police matters, this is too much.
Fox News: One protester, Mark Pettibone, told The Washington Post men in green military fatigues and generic “police” patches jumped out of an unmarked minivan early Wednesday and arrested him as he walked home from what he characterized as a peaceful protest. He told the Post he was scared because he did not know who detained him. Reports of similar incidents have drawn condemnation from civil rights groups.
Some Democratic officials accused the Trump administration of sending unidentifiable agents.
“Authoritarian governments, not democratic republics, send unmarked authorities after protesters,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., on Twitter, along with a video of a protester being arrested and placed into an unmarked van. “These Trump/Barr tactics designed to eliminate any accountability are absolutely unacceptable in America, and must end.”
DHS says that’s nonsense, that their agents were uniformed and identified themselves. The spokesman said they weren’t wearing name badges because of fears for the agents’ personal safety. The same reasoning justifies an unmarked van. In a city where cop cars are being lit up like 4th of July fireworks, it’s a wise move to use an unmarked van.
The situation in Portland was bad — is bad. Federal property has been vandalized and destroyed. And since the local authorities appear powerless to stop the mayhem, someone in the federal government — presumably the president of the United States — decided that order had to be restored.
But is that really his job to do? Portland is not a federal city. It’s a city in the sovereign state of Oregon. The governor, the mayor, or the chief of police could put a stop to the demonstrations all by themselves. They are not powerless. But they have chosen not to.
It’s not for the president to say if it’s a wise choice or a good choice. That’s for the people of Oregon to decide. The local and state authorities have not requested federal assistance. They have, in fact, asked all federal law enforcement personnel to leave. They claim that the presence of federal law enforcement is not helping “to contain or de-escalate the situation, it’s obviously having exactly the opposite impact,” according to Mayor Ted Wheeler.
Well, that may or may not be true. Wheeler doesn’t acknowledge the counter-argument that is equally valid: that doing nothing encourages the violence. Be that as it may, it’s still troubling that any federal law enforcement personnel are assigned to do anything more than protect federal property. These CBP agents appear to be ranging far afield to protect federal structures.
CBP agents were sent to Portland to protect federal property. Federal officers have charged at least 13 people with crimes related to the protests so far, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported Thursday. Some have been detained by the federal courthouse, which has been the scene of protests. But others were reportedly grabbed blocks away.
On Thursday night, federal officers reportedly deployed tear gas and fired non-lethal rounds into a crowd of protesters hours after Wolf’s visit.
Wheeler and local officials are deluding themselves if they think playing nice with anarchists and barbarians will do anything except encourage more violence and destruction. The proof is in 50 nights of lawless behavior, including the destruction of property, which Wheeler and his cohorts might not look at as important. But people’s lives are being ruined because the mayor isn’t doing his job.
But enough people in Portland are apparently satisfied with what Wheeler is doing. There are no clarion calls for his resignation from his fellow politicians. So the question becomes: if the people of Portland are OK with what’s going on, why should the federal government care?
SOURCE
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Florida Health Officer Labels Motorcycle Crash Victim a Coronavirus Death
An individual who was killed in a fatal motorcycle crash in Florida was recently listed as a COVID-19 death for the Sunshine State, according to a state health official.
The truth about the death was brought to light after FOX 35 News asked Orange County Health Officer Dr. Raul Pino whether the two individuals in their 20s who were listed as coronavirus deaths had any underlying conditions.
“The first one didn’t have any,” Pino said. “He died in a motorcycle accident.”
Pino was then questioned on whether the data from the individual who passed away in the motorcycle crash had been removed from the system, to which Pino said, “I don’t think so. I have to double-check.”
SOURCE
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Trump's Outstanding Deregulation Record
Deregulation has been one of President Donald Trump’s best calling cards over the last three-plus years, especially given how much he has done to undo the work of his predecessor. Trump’s reelection pitch is that we need to move forward, not backward. In remarks Thursday on the South Lawn of the White House, he declared, “For every one new regulation added, nearly eight federal regulations have been terminated” by his administration. He insisted, “We must never return to the days of soul-crushing regulation that ravaged our cities, devastated our workers, drained our vitality right out of our people, and thoroughly crippled our nation’s prized competitive edge.”
Ever the showman, Trump recited a long list of his deregulatory accomplishments while flanked by blue and red pickup trucks, symbolizing the two parties. Both were heavily laden with stacks of weights, though a crane labeled “Trump administration” lifted the burden from the red truck to deftly illustrate the massive weight of regulation.
Trucks were an appropriate metaphor given that, earlier this year, Trump rolled back Barack Obama’s onerous fuel-economy standards. Arguably more significantly, Trump’s biggest move this week was to cut environmental red tape for infrastructure projects. “Environmental review” would routinely bog down infrastructure building for an average of 4.5 years and in many cases far longer. Trump has now reduced that to no more than two years for environmental impact statements, and just one for environmental assessments. It’s hard to overstate the positive impact this change will have on building highways, gas pipelines, and other needed projects.
In general, Obama’s heavy-handed regulation stagnated the economy for eight long years, whereas Trump’s red-tape cutting unshackled businesses and led to a solid economic expansion — an expansion that put our nation in position to withstand the dual assault of a pandemic and the resulting shutdowns.
Remember, regulation is a form of taxation. The president claimed, “Our historic regulatory relief is providing the average American household an extra $3,100 every single year.” By contrast, according to The Washington Times, “The Trump campaign said Thursday that the federal government during the Obama administration’s eight years imposed $872 billion in new regulations on the U.S. economy, creating 583 million hours’ worth of paperwork to comply with.” Trump said that “cost the average American an additional $2,300 per year.”
Joe Biden wants to turn back the clock and restore his former boss’s punishing regulatory regime … and then some. His newly proposed Green New Deal alone would hamstring the economy in disastrous ways, all while costing future generations big time.
“Our entire economy and our very way of life are threatened by Biden’s plans to transform our nation and subjugate our communities through the blunt force instrument of federal regulation at a level that you haven’t even seen yet,” Trump warned. He added that if Biden and a Democrat Senate are elected, “The American Dream would be sniffed out so quickly and replaced with a socialist disaster.”
Indeed, that kind of tyrannical economic devastation is on the ballot this November. Unless voters reject it.
SOURCE
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Lying is what Leftists do
White House press secretary says science matters. Leftmedia reports the opposite
It isn’t news that the mainstream media is pulling for Clueless Joe Biden, or that it reflexively assumes the worst in every bit of reporting on the Trump administration. What’s news, though, is just how brazen it’s become in its willingness to lie.
A White House press briefing yesterday provided just such an example. Indeed, it was the confluence of two opportunities — a chance to attack Donald Trump’s press secretary and a chance to help the Left keep our kids out of the classroom this fall — which made the media’s urge to lie irresistible. As The Daily Wire reports, “Several left-wing reporters misleadingly quoted White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Thursday, falsely asserting that McEnany indicated that the administration’s position on opening schools was that science regarding the COVID-19 pandemic should not be taken into consideration.”
Now, before you dismiss this as a complicated case of she-said, that-Trump-hating-army-of-anti-American-scoundrels-said, let’s spend a minute — just a minute — looking at the videotape evidence from The Washington Post itself.
What part of a statement that includes “The science is very clear on this” and “The science is on our side here” and “We encourage localities and states to just simply follow the science” would cause an honest human being — much less a group of them — to instead run with a headline reading, “The science should not stand in the way of this”?
Yet that’s exactly what the Post did. And what The New York Times did. And what USA Today did. And what NBC News did. And what Yahoo! News did. And what PBS News Hour did. And what C-SPAN did. And what CNN’s Jim Acosta did. And, well, you get the idea.
Hey, media: Collude much?
It got so bad, though, that even CNN’s Trump-deranged Jake Tapper felt compelled to call out his colleagues. “Folks,” he tweeted, “read the ENTIRE McEnany comment about ‘the science should not stand in the way’ of opening schools. She’s arguing that the science is on the side of those who want to open them, she cites a JAMA study. I’m not taking a position on the matter but be fair.”
Two cheers for Jake.
It’d be encouraging if those in the media were sufficiently ashamed of this episode to do some soul searching, but the scorpion can’t not sting the frog. It’s what they do.
Power Line’s John Hinderaker summed it up best: “It is impossible to overstate how low ‘journalism’ has fallen in the United States,” he began. And he ended with this: “A sound adage holds that you should never assume malice when stupidity is a sufficient explanation. Here, the only explanation is malice. No one is as stupid as America’s reporters and editors pretend to be. The sooner their companies go out of business, the better.”
SOURCE
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IN BRIEF
Donald Trump's list of 42 disastrous things Joe Biden would do as president (Breitbart)
Republican National Committee restricts convention attendance over virus concerns (AP)
Attorney General William Barr deservedly slams Hollywood and Big Tech for "kowtowing" to the Chinese Communist Party (The Federalist)
U.S. drug overdose deaths resurge to a record 72,000 in 2019 (The New York Times)
Who'd a thunk it? Vaping rate among naturally rebellious youth increased with anti-vaping campaigns (Competitive Enterprise Institute)
Florida and Texas both set coronavirus death records Thursday — but both are still far short of New York and New Jersey (Forbes)
Even mild obesity linked to severe coronavirus infection and death (Newsweek)
U.S. workers filed 1.3 million jobless claims last week as pandemic intensifies (National Review)
Fixed 30-year mortgage rates fall below 3% for the first time ever (UK Daily Mail)
Retail sales pop 7.5% — more than expected in June (CNBC)
Additional hospitals face bankruptcy due to moratorium on elective surgeries and ER volume drop (Washington Examiner)
"Does not have the legal authority": Georgia Governor Brian Kemp sues Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms over defiant face-mask order (NPR)
But by all means, let's concentrate on a harmless nickname! More than a dozen women allege sexual harassment and verbal abuse by former Washington Redskins team employees (The Washington Post)
Three churches sue Governor Newsom after California bans singing in places of worship (Fox News)
What could possibly go wrong? Prison populations down 8% amid coronavirus outbreak (AP)
ViacomCBS fires rapper Nick Cannon for "hateful speech" and spreading "anti-Semitic conspiracy theories" (CNS News)
Doh! Iranian spies accidentally leaked videos of themselves hacking (Wired)
United Kingdom ISIS bride can return to country to challenge citizenship annulment after leaving for Syria in 2015, court rules (American Military News)
New York City eliminated its anti-crime unit. Violent crime has surged. (The Daily Signal)
Lockdowns and protests causing big spike in child trafficking (The Federalist)
Policy: The State Department's human-rights report marks a turning point (National Review)
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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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Sunday, July 19, 2020
BRITAIN may already have enough herd immunity to prevent a second wave of coronavirus, scientists have claimed
Experts suggest a sizeable number of people may have immunity because of Covid-19's similarity to the common cold. This confirms the theory of Swiss researcher Beda M Stadler, covered on this blog on July 8
While super-spreaders infect many, it appears some people are effectively super-blockers and enjoy natural resistance to the killer bug, say Oxford University boffins.
The scientists have written about "host resistance" to the new virus and a possibly lower threshold of herd immunity needed to fend off further devastating Covid-19 outbreaks.
Their paper, published on Medrxiv, says that it is widely believed the threshold needed to enjoy herd immunity against the new disease is more than 50 per cent.
But, its research suggests that if just 20 per cent of the UK's population has in-built resistance to Covid-19, a second wave is not inevitable.
Herd immunity refers to where enough people in a population have immunity to an infection to be able to effectively stop that disease from spreading.
For herd immunity, it doesn’t matter whether the protection comes from vaccination, or from people having had the disease. The crucial thing is that they are immune.
The Oxford Uni study suggests the epidemiological limit to reach herd immunity "may be greatly reduced if a fraction of the population is unable to transmit the virus".
This is feasible, they add, if people have inbuilt "resistance or cross-protection from exposure to seasonal coronaviruses".
The report says: "Significant reductions in expected mortality can also be seen in settings where a fraction of the population is resistant to infection."
Results "suggest that sufficient herd-immunity may already be in place to substantially mitigate a potential second wave", the researchers add.
"It has been evident from the outset that the risk of severe disease and death from Covid-19 is not uniformly distributed across all age classes.
"The bulk of deaths among the over 12 million cases reported worldwide are occurring among older age classes and those with [pre-existing conditions].
“It is further becoming clear that risk of infection is also not uniformly distributed across the population," the reports says.
Scientists at Oxford point to those managing to fend off the virus as having "high functioning immunity".
And, if antibodies to the disease are built up in "10-20 per cent" of the population, "this is entirely compatible with local levels of immunity having approached or even exceeded the herd immunity threshold.
"In which case the risk and scale of resurgence is lower than currently perceived," say the researchers.
SOURCE
The journal article behind the story above:
The impact of host resistance on cumulative mortality and the threshold of herd immunity for SARS-CoV-2
Jose Lourenco et al.
Abstract
It is widely believed that the herd immunity threshold (HIT) required to prevent a resurgence of SARS-CoV-2 is in excess of 50% for any epidemiological setting. Here, we demonstrate that HIT may be greatly reduced if a fraction of the population is unable to transmit the virus due to innate resistance or cross-protection from exposure to seasonal coronaviruses. The drop in HIT is proportional to the fraction of the population resistant only when that fraction is effectively segregated from the general population; however, when mixing is random, the drop in HIT is more precipitous. Significant reductions in expected mortality can also be observed in settings where a fraction of the population is resistant to infection. These results help to explain the large degree of regional variation observed in seroprevalence and cumulative deaths and suggest that sufficient herd-immunity may already be in place to substantially mitigate a potential second wave.
SOURCE
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Media Should Do a Mea Culpa as French Analysis Offers a Stunning Observation About Hydroxychloroquine Use
We have been told repeatedly by health experts to demonstrate the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and the other meds prescribed with it we need strict clinical trials. These are studies where some patients receive medication, and some do not. For many healthcare providers, this is a noxious thought if there is evidence to believe a treatment may work.
How do you ethically deny a potential treatment to an eligible patient to conduct a study? So-called double-blind studies described above are the preferred method advocated by Dr. Fauci. These double-blind studies allow people to die in the name of “science” if a drug is effective. They are in the “control group.”
There are ethical issues with this approach that researches at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center addressed with a new concurrent trial based on machine learning developed following the H1N1 pandemic. This method has been ignored by the NIH and FDA approval processes.
Such was the fate of the hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc combination. Scientifically there was every reason to believe it would work. Clinically, doctors saw results when directly treating patients. Several recommended that the drug be produced in sufficient amounts and given early and outpatient.
President Trump expressed optimism based on studies in France and China, and the media freaked out. The president’s political opposition would go on to cling to any proof the drug would not work and suppress any information that it would. This politicization culminated in the horrific study published by Lancet that the publication quietly retracted.
However, the damage was already done. The World Health Organization suspended trials immediately after the study published in Lancet. Switzerland, which had been using the treatment, prohibited the use of the drug in COVID-19 shortly after that on May 27th. The retraction was so stealth that the ban was not lifted in Switzerland until June 11th.
This window allowed French researchers to analyze what happened in the entire population of COVID-19 patients during the ban. They used the case fatality rate (CFR) as the measure observed. The graph is stunning.
hydroxychloroquine
It also the only period where the Swiss CFR approached or exceeded that in France where there has been no use of hydroxychloroquine outside a few isolated trials.
The CFR returned to the highest level it had been since early in the pandemic at over 15%. Upon resumption of treatment with hydroxychloroquine, it returned to below 5%.
For those who are not convinced of the observational result, we conducted a statistical difference test by comparing the three periods: May 28th – June 8th, June 9th – 22nd, June 23rd – July 6th . The period from June 9th till the 22nd is that in which the index increased some 13 days after the suspension of hydroxychloroquine. There is of course an effect of delay between stopping the prescription of the drug and possible deaths, which explains the delay of 13 days.
We therefore observe that for the period from the 28th of May till the 8th of June, the index is 2.39% and then drops to 11.52% or 4.8 times more and then drops to 3%.
When testing for statistical significance between the various observations, the difference is significant at 99% with a p <0.0001. 13 days after the HCQ prescription was resumed, the index dropped to 3% and this was again a significant effect.
For those who have forgotten statistics, a p-value of 0.05 or less indicates statistical significance. If the graph is not convincing, a confidence interval of 99% in a statistical analysis based on full population data should be.
Between this information and a study published by researchers in India, it is time for the media to do a mea culpa. Their hysteria convinced politicians in the United States to ban or restrict the drug. As Dr. David Samadi said on The Larry O’Connor Show, the decision to use this treatment needs to be left between a doctor and a patient. He has been disturbed by the interference by the government into the doctor-patient relationship.
Dr. Samadi re-emphasized the use of hydroxychloroquine cocktail is effective in early COVID-19 according to clinical experience and multiple studies. The FDA and NIH need to tell governors and other officials who have banned its use to lift their bans ASAP and tell pharmacists to stop questioning doctors who prescribe it.
It is far preferable to keep people out of the hospital using an old, inexpensive, and demonstrably safe and effective medication combination. There is no reason other than profit to wait until patients are hospitalized to get a new medication IV. If the media or the public health agencies cared about public health, this would be broadcast loudly and often. It is becoming increasingly clear they care more about politics.
SOURCE
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IN BRIEF
Trump shakes up campaign leadership, demotes manager Brad Parscale and promotes Chris Christie campaign veteran Bill Stepien (The Hill)
Liberty University slaps New York Times with $10 million suit for "made up" coronavirus story (Washington Examiner)
U.S. weighs sweeping and deserved travel ban on Chinese Communist Party members (The New York Times)
"Disrupt and destroy MS-13": DOJ announces first-ever terrorism charges in nationwide gang crackdown (Fox News)
The Trump administration said it would no longer require foreign students to attend in-person classes during the coronavirus pandemic in order to remain in the country (The New York Times)
Florida department of health exposed for massively overreporting positive cases (The Blaze)
"I feel fine": Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt tests positive (The Daily Wire)
Can you get infected twice? Researchers say possibility is "certainly real" (USA Today)
China economy expands 3.2% after 6.8% contraction in previous quarter (Time)
August surprise: Tsunami of bankruptcies forecast as government aid runs dry (The Washington Times)
As frivolous lawsuits surge, liability reform remains top GOP priority (Washington Examiner)
Walmart will require shoppers to wear masks; other retailers urged to follow (NPR)
Atlanta police charge suspect in the perverse death of eight-year-old black girl Secoriea Turner (Fox News)
National Museum of African American History and Culture publishes multi-racist graphic linking "rational linear thinking" and "nuclear family" to white culture (National Review)
Court renders unconstitutional part of major Virginia gun control measure that would have virtually outlawed private handgun purchases for people under 21 (The Washington Free Beacon)
Policy: Joe Biden bends the knee to AOC on climate (Washington Examiner)
California rejected 100,000 mail-in ballots because of mistakes (AP)
Banks stand to make $18 billion in PPP processing fees (The Intercept)
NBA bans custom jerseys with "FreeHongKong," but allows "Burn Jews" and "KillCops" (The Federalist)
Local governments weigh major tax hikes to plug coronavirus-induced shortfalls (Fox News)
Policy: The two-party system isn't the problem. It's nationalization. (Washington Examiner)
Mainstream media mocks rise in crime, victims (Boston Herald)
Los Angeles County's black DA blasts Black Lives Matter for targeting her, showing up at her home, and speaks out against abolishing police (The Blaze)
Wisconsin's vote-by-mail looked bad. It was actually worse. (Hot Air)
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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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Friday, July 17, 2020
Hebrew U. scientist: Drug could eradicate COVID-19 from lungs in days
New research by Hebrew University Prof. Ya’acov Nahmias and Sinai’s Dr. Benjamin tenOever revealed that the FDA-approved drug Fenofibrate (Tricor) could reduce SARS-CoV-2’s ability to reproduce or even make it disappear.
SARS-CoV-2 is the scientific name for the novel coronavirus.
“Viruses are parasites,” Nahmias explained to The Jerusalem Post. “They cannot replicate themselves. They cannot make new viruses. They have to get inside a human cell and then hijack that cell.”
As such, Nahmias and tenOever spent the last three months studying what SARS-CoV-2 is doing to human lung cells. What they found is that the novel coronavirus prevents the routine burning of carbohydrates, which results in large amounts of fat accumulating inside lung cells – a condition the virus needs to reproduce.
“By understanding how the SARS-CoV-2 controls our metabolism, we can wrestle back control from the virus and deprive it from the very resources it needs to survive,” Nahmias said, noting that it also may help explain why patients with high blood sugar and cholesterol levels are often at a particularly high risk to develop COVID-19.
The team then reviewed a panel of eight already-approved drugs that could possibly interfere with the virus’s ability to reproduce. Tricor caused the cells to start burning fat, Nahmias said. The result was that the virus almost completely disappeared within only five days of treatment.
The experiment was done in lab studies both in Israel and New York and was replicated several times with different lung samples. Nahmias said there is a strong indication that the experiment is highly repeatable in other labs.
The team is advancing to animal studies in New York and hoping to fast-track clinical studies in both Israel and the US within the next couple of weeks, since the drug is already proven safe.
The study is being published in this week’s Cell Press’s Sneak Peak. The work is being funded by the European Research Council, the Nikoh Foundation and the Sam and Rina Frankel Foundation.
SOURCE
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Why Have Blue States Been Hit Hardest by COVID-19?
In March, data guru Nate Silver wrote about the different ways blue states and red states were experiencing the COVID-19 epidemic, noting that “states Clinton won do have considerably more total reported cases.”
COVID-19 was not just a blue state problem though. Silver pointed out that cases in red states were increasing far more rapidly.
“Nine of the 10 states that have seen the most rapid increase in coronavirus from Monday to Thursday are states that voted for Trump in 2016,” Silver wrote.
Days later, The Atlantic published an article titled “The Coronavirus’s Unique Threat to the South.”
The article saw similar ominous signs for red states, particularly a “four-state arc of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.”
Months later we have a more complete picture of the data, which shows blue states have borne the brunt of the COVID devastation.
Eleven of the 12 states (including the District of Columbia) with the highest COVID-19 fatality rates are traditional blue states. Leading the way, unsurprisingly, is New York, which posted the highest deaths, total (31,346) and per capita (1,611 per 1M).* New Jersey is not far behind New York, however (1,478/1M). These states are followed by Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia. Just one red state—Louisiana, seventh highest with 680/1M—cracked the top twelve.
The question is, why?
After all, blue states tended to have the most stringent lockdowns. Indeed, eight red states—Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming—declined to issue stay-at-home orders at all (though some took less severe measures).
None of these states were among the states hardest hit by COVID-19.
The data could lend support to epidemiologists—John Ioannidis. Anders Tegnell, and others—who have expressed skepticism on the efficacy of lockdowns.
“Blind lockdown of entire populations has questionable added benefits,” Ioannidis, the C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention at Stanford University, recently wrote in the medical journal BMJ.
A second reason could stem from other policy decisions. Several states hardest hit by the coronavirus were among those that passed controversial policies that prohibited nursing homes from refusing to admit patients released from hospitals because they had the coronavirus.
Public health experts and trade association leaders had questioned the policies, noting older populations were the most at-risk and most nursing homes lack the resources to effectively quarantine COVID carriers. One 31-year-old health care worker told The New York Times the policy was “a sentence of death for all the older patients.”
The policy could explain why several states—New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, among them—experienced higher rates of fatality.
“The policy of sending recovering Covid patients back to nursing homes is the only policy of which I’m aware that seems unambiguously relevant for explaining differences we’ve observed between states with outlier death rates and the rest of the country,” Jeffrey Clemens, a Harvard trained economist and associate professor at the University of California-San Diego, told me in an email interview.
Following public outcry of the policy, many states shifted course. Politico recently reported that many states, including Massachusetts and Michigan, are now prodding eldercare facilities to admit COVID carrying residents by offering financial incentives, “raising the risks of spreading infections and substandard care for seriously ill patients.”
A third possibility is that blue states tend to have higher urban density, which in theory could make spreading of the virus easier. Eight of the states hardest hit by the coronavirus—New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts. Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware, New York and Pennsylvania—are also among the ten densest states in the US.
While urban density might seem like an obvious link to the spread of COVID-19, a recent World Bank report analyzing data from China suggested this was not actually the case.
“On the contrary, cities with the highest coronavirus infection rates were those with relatively low population densities, in the range between 5,000 to 10,000 people per square kilometer,” the authors found.
Dr. Mary T. Bassett, director of the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard, agreed, saying it’s a mistake to blame population density for the spread of COVID-19, noting population density is not the same as overcrowding.
“Everything we know so far about the coronavirus tells us that blaming density for disease is misguided,” Bassett wrote in The New York Times.
The truth is we don’t yet know with any degree of certainty why blue states have suffered more throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s safe to say numerous variables—health care system quality and access, underlying health and age of the population, policy decisions, habits of hygiene, etc.—all play a role.
It also must be noted that we’re still not through the pandemic. Cases continue to climb—in part due to increased transmission, and in part through expanded testing, which increased from 345,000 tests per day in May to 478,000 in June—and red states could yet see similar results.
For now, however, the record is clear: blue states have experienced far worse devastation from COVID-19.
*All numbers current as of June 24, 2020.
SOURCE
***********************************
IN BRIEF
"The underlying reasons for the split are pretty self-evident": Andrew Sullivan, who (rationally) believes in genetic differences between races, to leave New York Magazine (The Hill)
The media don't just overpraise Democrat governors; they overpraise the wrong ones! (National Review)
Despite escalating Taliban-government violence, U.S. closes five military bases in southern and eastern Afghanistan as part of peace deal (Fox News)
"We've never seen everything go perfectly": Is too much hope being put into a coronavirus vaccine? (Yahoo News)
Moderna Phase 1 results show coronavirus vaccine safe, induces immune response (Reuters)
Travel from New York City seeded the nationwide crisis, research shows (Washington Examiner)
More collusion: Wuhan lab that researches COVID-19 won't be visited by WHO investigators looking into origin of virus (Independent)
Seattle just passed a new tax on jobs in the middle of an economic crisis — but exempted government workers (Foundation for Economic Education)
Apple wins major tax battle against EU; second-highest court invalidates $14.8 billion tax bill (Fox Business)
An already outrageous prosecution in Atlanta turns scandalous: Embattled District Attorney Paul Howard is suspected of issuing fraudulent grand jury subpoenas (Power Line)
Media blackout notwithstanding, black leaders rally to save Washington, DC's, Emancipation Memorial (The Daily Signal)
New York City black activists call on de Blasio and city council to "take your handcuffs off of the police" (Washington Examiner)
Federal judge rejects Harvey Weinstein's inadequate $19 million settlement with alleged victims (NPR)
In Tennessee, court halts "arguably the most conservative, pro-life piece of legislation in the country" 45 minutes after it was signed (Forbes)
Federal judge permanently voids Georgia "heartbeat" abortion restriction; governor to appeal (WRCB)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator resigns after he is accused of racism for saying he would still collect art from white men (Reason)
Wave of violence overwhelms NYC: Contrary to what Bill de Blasio and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggest, criminal behavior is not an economic phenomenon (City Journal)
Most "dreamers" broke U.S. law on purpose to get ahead in the citizenship line (The Federalist)
Former VA health worker pleads guilty to murdering seven veterans with insulin poisoning (Military Times)
Record numbers of Americans try to buy guns (Fox Business)
At least 17 people shot in NYC on Monday as lawlessness soars (New York Post)
Washington state police officer killed, another injured by assailant (Fox News)
Wise decision: UK reneges, will purge Huawei from 5G by 2027 (Reuters)
China begins "mass production" of new stealth fighter jet in effort to dominate airspace (Washington Examiner)
Iran's nuclear facilities are "mysteriously" under attack (we have a pretty good idea of the perpetrator) (Fox News)
For first time ever, U.S. officially rejects China's "unlawful" South China Sea claims (American Military News)
The cost of China's intellectual-property theft (National Review)
Using face masks is still a good idea. Mandating them isn't. (The Heritage Foundation)
Governor Newsom orders closure of indoor activities across California (Fox News)
The WHO, which suppressed early information, sounds alarm as coronavirus cases rise by one million in five days (Reuters)
CDC's "best estimate" is 40% of infections are asymptomatic (Fox News)
Out-of-touch Beltway dweller Dr. Anthony Fauci says U.S. coronavirus cases are surging because nation didn't totally shut down (CNBC)
Asia ramps up coronavirus curbs as new clusters erupt (Reuters)
*********************************
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
**************************
New research by Hebrew University Prof. Ya’acov Nahmias and Sinai’s Dr. Benjamin tenOever revealed that the FDA-approved drug Fenofibrate (Tricor) could reduce SARS-CoV-2’s ability to reproduce or even make it disappear.
SARS-CoV-2 is the scientific name for the novel coronavirus.
“Viruses are parasites,” Nahmias explained to The Jerusalem Post. “They cannot replicate themselves. They cannot make new viruses. They have to get inside a human cell and then hijack that cell.”
As such, Nahmias and tenOever spent the last three months studying what SARS-CoV-2 is doing to human lung cells. What they found is that the novel coronavirus prevents the routine burning of carbohydrates, which results in large amounts of fat accumulating inside lung cells – a condition the virus needs to reproduce.
“By understanding how the SARS-CoV-2 controls our metabolism, we can wrestle back control from the virus and deprive it from the very resources it needs to survive,” Nahmias said, noting that it also may help explain why patients with high blood sugar and cholesterol levels are often at a particularly high risk to develop COVID-19.
The team then reviewed a panel of eight already-approved drugs that could possibly interfere with the virus’s ability to reproduce. Tricor caused the cells to start burning fat, Nahmias said. The result was that the virus almost completely disappeared within only five days of treatment.
The experiment was done in lab studies both in Israel and New York and was replicated several times with different lung samples. Nahmias said there is a strong indication that the experiment is highly repeatable in other labs.
The team is advancing to animal studies in New York and hoping to fast-track clinical studies in both Israel and the US within the next couple of weeks, since the drug is already proven safe.
The study is being published in this week’s Cell Press’s Sneak Peak. The work is being funded by the European Research Council, the Nikoh Foundation and the Sam and Rina Frankel Foundation.
SOURCE
*******************************
Why Have Blue States Been Hit Hardest by COVID-19?
In March, data guru Nate Silver wrote about the different ways blue states and red states were experiencing the COVID-19 epidemic, noting that “states Clinton won do have considerably more total reported cases.”
COVID-19 was not just a blue state problem though. Silver pointed out that cases in red states were increasing far more rapidly.
“Nine of the 10 states that have seen the most rapid increase in coronavirus from Monday to Thursday are states that voted for Trump in 2016,” Silver wrote.
Days later, The Atlantic published an article titled “The Coronavirus’s Unique Threat to the South.”
The article saw similar ominous signs for red states, particularly a “four-state arc of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.”
Months later we have a more complete picture of the data, which shows blue states have borne the brunt of the COVID devastation.
Eleven of the 12 states (including the District of Columbia) with the highest COVID-19 fatality rates are traditional blue states. Leading the way, unsurprisingly, is New York, which posted the highest deaths, total (31,346) and per capita (1,611 per 1M).* New Jersey is not far behind New York, however (1,478/1M). These states are followed by Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia. Just one red state—Louisiana, seventh highest with 680/1M—cracked the top twelve.
The question is, why?
After all, blue states tended to have the most stringent lockdowns. Indeed, eight red states—Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming—declined to issue stay-at-home orders at all (though some took less severe measures).
None of these states were among the states hardest hit by COVID-19.
The data could lend support to epidemiologists—John Ioannidis. Anders Tegnell, and others—who have expressed skepticism on the efficacy of lockdowns.
“Blind lockdown of entire populations has questionable added benefits,” Ioannidis, the C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention at Stanford University, recently wrote in the medical journal BMJ.
A second reason could stem from other policy decisions. Several states hardest hit by the coronavirus were among those that passed controversial policies that prohibited nursing homes from refusing to admit patients released from hospitals because they had the coronavirus.
Public health experts and trade association leaders had questioned the policies, noting older populations were the most at-risk and most nursing homes lack the resources to effectively quarantine COVID carriers. One 31-year-old health care worker told The New York Times the policy was “a sentence of death for all the older patients.”
The policy could explain why several states—New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, among them—experienced higher rates of fatality.
“The policy of sending recovering Covid patients back to nursing homes is the only policy of which I’m aware that seems unambiguously relevant for explaining differences we’ve observed between states with outlier death rates and the rest of the country,” Jeffrey Clemens, a Harvard trained economist and associate professor at the University of California-San Diego, told me in an email interview.
Following public outcry of the policy, many states shifted course. Politico recently reported that many states, including Massachusetts and Michigan, are now prodding eldercare facilities to admit COVID carrying residents by offering financial incentives, “raising the risks of spreading infections and substandard care for seriously ill patients.”
A third possibility is that blue states tend to have higher urban density, which in theory could make spreading of the virus easier. Eight of the states hardest hit by the coronavirus—New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts. Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware, New York and Pennsylvania—are also among the ten densest states in the US.
While urban density might seem like an obvious link to the spread of COVID-19, a recent World Bank report analyzing data from China suggested this was not actually the case.
“On the contrary, cities with the highest coronavirus infection rates were those with relatively low population densities, in the range between 5,000 to 10,000 people per square kilometer,” the authors found.
Dr. Mary T. Bassett, director of the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard, agreed, saying it’s a mistake to blame population density for the spread of COVID-19, noting population density is not the same as overcrowding.
“Everything we know so far about the coronavirus tells us that blaming density for disease is misguided,” Bassett wrote in The New York Times.
The truth is we don’t yet know with any degree of certainty why blue states have suffered more throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s safe to say numerous variables—health care system quality and access, underlying health and age of the population, policy decisions, habits of hygiene, etc.—all play a role.
It also must be noted that we’re still not through the pandemic. Cases continue to climb—in part due to increased transmission, and in part through expanded testing, which increased from 345,000 tests per day in May to 478,000 in June—and red states could yet see similar results.
For now, however, the record is clear: blue states have experienced far worse devastation from COVID-19.
*All numbers current as of June 24, 2020.
SOURCE
***********************************
IN BRIEF
"The underlying reasons for the split are pretty self-evident": Andrew Sullivan, who (rationally) believes in genetic differences between races, to leave New York Magazine (The Hill)
The media don't just overpraise Democrat governors; they overpraise the wrong ones! (National Review)
Despite escalating Taliban-government violence, U.S. closes five military bases in southern and eastern Afghanistan as part of peace deal (Fox News)
"We've never seen everything go perfectly": Is too much hope being put into a coronavirus vaccine? (Yahoo News)
Moderna Phase 1 results show coronavirus vaccine safe, induces immune response (Reuters)
Travel from New York City seeded the nationwide crisis, research shows (Washington Examiner)
More collusion: Wuhan lab that researches COVID-19 won't be visited by WHO investigators looking into origin of virus (Independent)
Seattle just passed a new tax on jobs in the middle of an economic crisis — but exempted government workers (Foundation for Economic Education)
Apple wins major tax battle against EU; second-highest court invalidates $14.8 billion tax bill (Fox Business)
An already outrageous prosecution in Atlanta turns scandalous: Embattled District Attorney Paul Howard is suspected of issuing fraudulent grand jury subpoenas (Power Line)
Media blackout notwithstanding, black leaders rally to save Washington, DC's, Emancipation Memorial (The Daily Signal)
New York City black activists call on de Blasio and city council to "take your handcuffs off of the police" (Washington Examiner)
Federal judge rejects Harvey Weinstein's inadequate $19 million settlement with alleged victims (NPR)
In Tennessee, court halts "arguably the most conservative, pro-life piece of legislation in the country" 45 minutes after it was signed (Forbes)
Federal judge permanently voids Georgia "heartbeat" abortion restriction; governor to appeal (WRCB)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator resigns after he is accused of racism for saying he would still collect art from white men (Reason)
Wave of violence overwhelms NYC: Contrary to what Bill de Blasio and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggest, criminal behavior is not an economic phenomenon (City Journal)
Most "dreamers" broke U.S. law on purpose to get ahead in the citizenship line (The Federalist)
Former VA health worker pleads guilty to murdering seven veterans with insulin poisoning (Military Times)
Record numbers of Americans try to buy guns (Fox Business)
At least 17 people shot in NYC on Monday as lawlessness soars (New York Post)
Washington state police officer killed, another injured by assailant (Fox News)
Wise decision: UK reneges, will purge Huawei from 5G by 2027 (Reuters)
China begins "mass production" of new stealth fighter jet in effort to dominate airspace (Washington Examiner)
Iran's nuclear facilities are "mysteriously" under attack (we have a pretty good idea of the perpetrator) (Fox News)
For first time ever, U.S. officially rejects China's "unlawful" South China Sea claims (American Military News)
The cost of China's intellectual-property theft (National Review)
Using face masks is still a good idea. Mandating them isn't. (The Heritage Foundation)
Governor Newsom orders closure of indoor activities across California (Fox News)
The WHO, which suppressed early information, sounds alarm as coronavirus cases rise by one million in five days (Reuters)
CDC's "best estimate" is 40% of infections are asymptomatic (Fox News)
Out-of-touch Beltway dweller Dr. Anthony Fauci says U.S. coronavirus cases are surging because nation didn't totally shut down (CNBC)
Asia ramps up coronavirus curbs as new clusters erupt (Reuters)
*********************************
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
**************************
Thursday, July 16, 2020
Eugenics: An embarrassed silence and a hidden history
Eugenics was one of the great enthusiasms of the prewar Left. In the 1920s and 1930's, Socialists everywhere embraced it, including National Socialists in Germany
The abiding mark of socialists is that they want to change the world -- change it into what they think will be a better place. And eugenics fitted that perfectly. If they removed the "weeds" from the human race, that would make a greatly improved world. And Leftist legislatures worldwide passed eugenic laws of varying severity: Sweden, Germany and the United States being prominent examples
The man who took it furthest was however Adolf Hitler. He killed "useless eaters" in droves. So the military defeat of Hitler led to him and all his works being discredited: So suddenly there were no longer any differences between races and eugenics was immoral. Hitler had been a such a great menace and ended up such an abject failure that any similarities with him had to be denied.
Leftists everywhere dropped eugenics like a sizzling potato. They no longer advocated it. More significant, however was that they succeeded in casting a cloak of silence over it. They succeeded in blanking out all memory of their association with eugenics. Hardly anyone now knows what a great enthusiasm eugenics once was for the Left. Were it well known, their great enthusiasms of the present -- such as global warming and transgenderism -- might also be viewed skeptically
Eugenics and scientific racism in the United States emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century and lasted through the 1930s. It claimed that heredity was the fundamental determinant of an individual’s ability to contribute to society. Eugenics claimed the scientific ability to classify individuals and groups as “fit” or “unfit.” The unfit were defined by race, mental and physical disabilities, country of origin, and poverty. Eugenics was widely accepted by academics, politicians, intellectuals, government, the U.S. Supreme Court, and especially progressives, who supported eugenics-inspired policies as policy instruments to be utilized by an interventionist administrative state to establish a healthy and productive society. Those who questioned the “settled science” of eugenics were dismissed as “deniers,” much like those who question the “settled science” of climate change are today dismissed as “deniers.”
Eugenics and slavery share much common ground in their inherent racist view of blacks; however, the inherent racist perspective of eugenics was broader in that the set of those considered unfit included individuals and groups beyond those who were black. Eugenics provided the scientific foundation for involuntary sterilization policies in thirty-two states, supported the racist immigration policies in the first part of the twentieth century, and supported a variety of de jure and de facto policies designed to limit those defined as “unfit” to less than full-citizenship status. More troubling, eugenics and eugenics-inspired policies in the United States were admired by Adolf Hitler. American and German eugenicists interacted and exchanged views up to the late 1930s, and sterilization laws, immigration restrictions based on race or ethnicity, and efforts to prevent full citizenship to the unfit in the United States became the model for the Nuremburg Laws of 1935. Stefan Kühl (1994) was the first to document in detail the American–German eugenics connection. In Hitler’s American Model (2017), James Whitman extended this research to illustrate how U.S. policies influenced Nazi race law in the 1930s and the Nuremberg Laws in particular. The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left (2017) by Dinesh D’Souza is the most recent effort to bring public attention to eugenics and the American–German connection.
The widespread acceptance of eugenics in the United States, especially by progressives, is a troubling part of U.S. history unknown to many Americans, and the role model America provided for Nazi race law is even more troubling. The conventional wisdom in the United States places blame for scientific racism on Germany, but the opposite is an inconvenient truth that continues to receive little public attention. The fall of the Third Reich revealed the logical outcome of eugenics. Eugenics disappeared almost overnight from public discourse and became an embarrassment to many who had supported it and its policy implications.
I have covered eugenics and related topics in my lectures on the history of economic ideas for many years and have been surprised at two reactions from students: first, many students find eugenics and related topics the most interesting part of the course, and, second, with only a few exceptions the students have never heard of eugenics in the United States and, especially, its relationship to Nazi Germany. This lack of awareness suggests a question and the catalyst for this paper: To what degree are high school students exposed to the history of eugenics?
One would expect that with the current political focus on discrimination and racism, eugenics would be an important topic in U.S. history and related courses at the high school level. Unfortunately, this is not the case. As I show in this paper, high school history textbooks essentially ignore the topic. Although our high school textbooks are impressive in presentation, length, and number of topics covered, eugenics and its influence on public policy in the United States and its relationship to Nazi Germany are ignored and when mentioned are presented as an incidental part of U.S. history.
I first discuss how eugenics emerged from a combination of the political economy of population growth initiated by Thomas Malthus (1798) and subsequent developments in human biology in the second half of the nineteenth century. Next I discuss how the United States became the center of eugenic research and policy, the relationship between eugenics and the progressive movement, and the degree to which eugenics in the United States influenced Germany and the Nuremburg Laws of 1935. Then I look in particular at nine high school textbooks and other textbook materials to determine the degree to which eugenics is covered in high school. In the concluding section, I offer conjectures to account for the omission and the missed opportunities to educate students resulting from the omission.
SOURCE
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Biden’s enthusiasm gap versus Trump may prove to be Democrats’ undoing in 2020
President Donald Trump has two major advantages politically in 2020 presidential election over former Vice President Joe Biden: incumbency and enthusiasm.
The first is easy enough to understand. As the incumbent, President Trump has all the trappings of the head of state. He can do press conferences in the Rose Garden or the White House briefing room, meet with foreign leaders and dignitaries and address the nation in front of Congress or from the Oval Office. And after more than three years in office, the American people have a certain level of comfort with him.
Historically, incumbency has proven to be a major advantage in terms of electoral outcomes. The question for first term presidents like Trump is whether or not voters think it is time for a change.
Which brings us to Trump’s second advantage in 2020: enthusiasm. In a June poll by Economist/YouGov, 68 percent of Trump supporters say they are enthusiastic about voting for him versus only 31 percent of Biden supporters who say they are enthusiastic.
49 percent of Biden voters say they merely satisfied but not enthusiastic, 15 percent say dissatisfied but not upset and 3 percent say they are upset. Whereas, with Trump, just 26 say they are satisfied but not enthusiastic, 5 percent say dissatisfied but not upset and 2 percent say they are upset.
In the same poll, among Biden supporters, only 35 percent say they are voting for Biden, whereas 62 percent say they are voting against Trump. For Trump supporters, 81 percent say they are voting for Trump, and just 18 percent say they are voting against Biden.
SOURCE
*************************************
The rise of the White British Saviour
Middle-class white people need to stop hectoring poorer white people about privilege.
The Black Lives Matter movement seems to have hastened the importation of divisive US culture-war politics into the UK. This has led to a number of absurd claims being made which are completely irrelevant to the British context. This includes framing police brutality as a shared UK-US problem, and arguing that the UK’s race relations are as bitter as those across the pond. As a consequence we also seem to be developing our own version of the White Saviour figure: those middle-class white people who lecture other white people on racial issues.
Britain is witnessing the rise of a youthful white middle-class convinced that it represents the height of enlightened thought. This was exemplified by a BBC Sounds segment posted on Twitter yesterday, featuring University of Southampton academic Dr Charlotte Lydia Riley and journalist Amelia Dimoldenberg. Dripping with condescension, the pair proceeded to insult supposedly unrefined and loutish ‘Karens’, those women in need of education on matters of white privilege and socially acceptable behaviour.
Overwhelmed by ‘white guilt’, members of this new tribe strive to spread out culpability for racism among the rest of the white population. Often it is insufficiently woke working-class people who they have in their sights. According to these White British Saviours, even those in deprived coastal towns and former industrial areas, places which have been starved of meaningful public investment for decades, including communities which have witnessed the large-scale abuse of white working-class girls, must be lectured about their supposed privilege.
These people paint an incredibly skewed yet undoubtedly powerful picture of British society. They frame our society as some sort of sinister, white-supremacist superstructure. We should not underestimate how enticing this kind of grievance politics is to many people. But this view of British society is extremely misplaced and unwarranted.
The UK government recently offered a pathway to citizenship for millions of people in Hong Kong, in light of China’s clampdown on freedom there. Moreover, the most recent Crime Survey for England and Wales shows that the vast majority of ethnic-minority people have confidence in their local police force – with a number of non-white groups having even a higher level of confidence than white Brits. In the British workforce, the two highest-earning ethnic groups, by hourly pay, are workers of Chinese and Indian origin.
Contrary to much of the divisive left-wing rhetoric in the media, Britain is one of the most tolerant, anti-racist, anti-discriminatory places on Earth. While Brexit has been portrayed by some as a case of a xenophobic country detaching itself from an oasis of tolerance and open-mindedness in the shape of the EU, the reality is, in many ways, the other way around. A study by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights has found that people of black African descent faced ‘widespread and entrenched prejudice and exclusion’ across the EU. But the UK had one of the lowest levels of reported race-related harassment and violence in the 12-country study.
The co-author of a study published by Frontiers in Sociology, Professor Mariah Evans, concludes that ‘prejudice against immigrant workers or minority or religious groups is rare in the UK, perhaps even slightly rarer than in equivalently developed EU countries’. Using a well-established symptom (or consequence) of prejudice – aversion to ‘outgroupers’ being neighbours – that study revealed that prejudice against immigrants, people of other races, and religious groups such as Muslims, Jews and Hindus, is relatively low in the UK.
Of course, none of this is of interest to the White British Saviour. In fact, these findings are treated as an inconvenience. This is because the members of this ever-growing ‘Brahmin class’ of pseudo-intellectuals are ultimately more concerned with gaining brownie points from fellow snobbish peers, on social media and among their friendship groups, than they are with the facts.
They also frame BAME communities as an oppressed mass, and so ignore, or even scorn, those from minority populations who think differently to them. This is where their neocolonial mindset is laid bare – they believe that non-white people who ‘resist’ identity politics have been duped into sustaining the structures of ‘white supremacy’, as opposed to being independent-minded individuals with agency.
The White British Saviour represents one of the most socially divisive forces in British society today. The flawed identitarian narratives and smug elitism of these people must be robustly challenged. A failure to do so will mean that their influence becomes more entrenched in various spheres of British life.
SOURCE
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NBC, ABC gloss over details in coverage of armed St. Louis couple confronting protesters
“A Missouri couple went viral Sunday for brandishing guns in the front yard of their home as protesters passed — but anyone who relies on NBC or ABC’s evening newscasts for information wouldn’t know all the details, according to the Media Research Center. The couple told police the group broke a gate to get onto the private street in St. Louis, and the pair say they only retrieved their firearms when they spotted ‘multiple’ people who were already armed, department records show. Al Watkins, an attorney for Mark McCloskey, 63, and his 61-year-old wife, Patricia, said the protest was largely peaceful and the pair did not bring their guns outside of the home until two men in particular, both of whom were white, started menacing them.”
SOURCE
*********************************
For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here. Home page supplement
**************************
Wednesday, July 15, 2020
HCQ Helps Contain COVID-19 Cases: Impressive results from India
Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) — the controversial COVID-19 treatment touted by President Donald Trump — might be gaining new traction in the fight against the Wuhan coronavirus.
The latest positive results come from Vadodara, India, where city officials have conducted a major study involving more than 300,000 people, including “health workers and other frontline staff.”
The Indian Express reports:
The administration has analysed a sample of over 1 lakh [lakh = 100,000] residents, who were mostly close contacts of positive persons and the effect of HCQ in containing the transmission of the virus. According to the analysis, of the 48,873 close contacts of positive patients who took one dose of HCQ, 102 turned Covid-19 positive and 12 succumbed to the infection whereas 48 of the 17,776 close contacts of positive patients who took two doses of HCQ turned positive and only one died. The study also states that of the 33,563 close contacts of patients who took three HCQ doses, 43 tested positive and one died.
Local health official Dr. Devesh Patel told the paper, “It has shown positive results. We have the numbers and not one person has complained of complications. The only side effect reported is mild gastritis, which is common with administering heavy medicines and can be effectively handled.”
In other words, anyone who has taken the much more common azithromycin antibiotic for a simple sinus infection has probably suffered about the same distress — all gastric — as a subject of the Vadodara study.
Dr. Mohammad Hussain, who runs Vadodara’s Faith Hospital, told the Express, “There are conflicting studies about the use of HCQ. While initially the US studies rejected it and cited side-effects, European countries backed its prophylactic use. In Vadodara, it has shown positive results. We have been able to restrict cases in clusters. Nagarwada no longer has a huge number of cases.”
Hussain reiterated that no serious side effects were reported.
SOURCE
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Why experts think the MMR jab may save adults from Covid: Childhood vaccine at heart of dramatic new trial
Think of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) jab and one image might spring to mind — a mother cradling an infant as a nurse injects the potentially life-saving vaccine into their arm.
It could soon be the mother receiving the vaccine too — to protect against Covid-19.
Some evidence suggests the triple jab, given to millions of British children since its introduction in the UK in 1988, could be a powerful weapon in the battle against coronavirus, either by protecting adults against infection, or reducing symptoms.
That was certainly the thinking behind the decision by Dr Martin Scurr, the Mail's GP columnist, to have the MMR jab — to 'ginger up' his immunity, as he explained in Good Health last week.
The protective potential of MMR hit the headlines when the crew of the U.S. aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt was struck by a Covid-19 outbreak.
More than 1,100 sailors on board tested positive, yet just one needed hospital treatment, (and later died) according to a report published last month in the journal mBio.
Even allowing for the likelihood that many were young and fit, researchers calculated it would still be expected that about 14 per cent (over 150 in this case) would need to be hospitalised.
But the sailors all had one thing in common; as new recruits mostly in their late teens or 20s, each had been given the MMR vaccine, in line with U.S. military policy.
Some scientists think the jab may have protected many crew members against serious illness and could also explain why so few children develop symptoms from Covid-19. In the UK, children make up less than two per cent of confirmed cases.
Between 80 and 90 per cent of all UK children, teenagers and young adults have had the MMR jab, their first dose aged one, and a booster, at three years.
Now the idea that the readily available and relatively cheap vaccine (it costs about £50 privately) could be used to protect millions of adults against Covid-19 is attracting wider interest.
Last month, doctors at the Kasr El Aini Hospital in Cairo, Egypt, began recruiting up to 200 doctors, nurses and carers on the coronavirus frontline to see if giving them the MMR vaccine protects them against severe coronavirus symptoms. The trial — which will run until October — is the first of its kind.
But how might a vaccine against common childhood illnesses tackle the virus?
Most of the 100 or so Covid-19 vaccine trials under way worldwide focus on specific targets unique to the virus itself, and are made either with traces of the 'spike' protein found on the surface of the virus, or fragments of its genetic material. The idea is the immune system recognises the virus material in the vaccines as foreign and creates infection-fighting cells (antibodies and T cells) should it then encounter Covid-19.
In other words, they are designed to work against Covid-19 and nothing else.
The same applies to most infectious disease vaccines. But a small group of vaccines, including the MMR, the BCG jab given to protect against tuberculosis (TB) and the oral version of the polio vaccine, are different.
These are made with 'live' but massively weakened versions of the viruses or bacteria (in the case of the BCG) themselves.
As well as priming the immune system to produce disease-fighting cells that target the infectious organism, live vaccines pep up the whole immune system so it's more alert to any invading organisms. It's thought this is because the presence of any live virus or bacterium is enough to put the whole immune system on alert.
'It's a bit like an army putting all its snipers on duty, ready to take out anything that is a potential threat,' explains Eleanor Riley, a professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Edinburgh University.
As we reported in March, there are several trials under way globally to see if the BCG jab can soften the blow of Covid-19.
Last week a study found that the BCG vaccine, that was given to teenagers in this country from 1953 until 2005 to protect against TB, may protect against coronavirus. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy Of Sciences, compared the jab's popularity in a country with their rate of infection and death.
The vaccine has previously been found to combat infectious diseases other than TB. A study, published in The BMJ in 2016, found that babies given the BCG jab were 30 per cent less likely to die of any infectious disease in their first year.
News that the jab might also protect people against coronavirus has led to shortages in some parts of the world. Doctors in Japan said they were running out of BCG as so many adults were paying privately to be immunised as protection against Covid-19. But when it comes to MMR, there could be another reason why the vaccine buffers the effects of Covid-19, say University of Cambridge scientists.
They studied blood samples of British patients treated in the early stages of the pandemic —the antibodies made by their immune system were similar in structure to antibodies produced in response to rubella (German measles), one of three viruses targeted by the MMR vaccine.
The Cambridge team believes the rubella antibodies triggered by the vaccine may be seeing off the coronavirus before it does too much damage.
In a paper online (but not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal), the scientists wrote: 'If there is a link, we propose that vaccination of 'at risk' age groups with an MMR vaccination should be considered. 'To create a Covid-19 vaccine will be arduous and may require time which we cannot afford.'
But some UK experts warn against giving the MMR jab without stronger evidence.
There is 'a good chance' this effect on the immune system is short-lived in some people — days, rather than weeks, months or years, says Professor Riley.
'It's also likely that if as an adult or even as a child your immune system has ever come into contact with measles, mumps or rubella in the past, it will not respond as vigorously to another vaccine. There is no good reason for anyone to pay for a private MMR or indeed BCG vaccine in the hope of avoiding Covid-19.'
SOURCE
****************************************
The Authoritarian Left Fears a Level Playing Field
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman’s proposal that Joe Biden shouldn’t debate President Donald Trump unless “a real-time fact-checking team” is part of the mix is an ironic illustration of the closed-mindedness of the left.
Why would Friedman want a candidate who is eager to contrast his views with Trump’s to impose conditions that would make a debate less likely, unless, of course, Friedman realizes that the failing Biden would be particularly disastrous in a debate?
That seems to be the case here, as Friedman’s other condition — that Trump agree to release his tax returns for 2016 through 2018 — is just as unrealistic but not for the reason Democrats would have you believe. It’s not that they think Trump is concealing some sinister criminality but that the returns would be a gold mine for ginning up class resentment against the mega-wealthy Trump and fodder to smear him with innuendo.
Friedman recommends the fact-checkers be approved by both candidates “and that 10 minutes before the scheduled conclusion of the debate this team report on any misleading statements, phony numbers or outright lies either candidate had uttered. That way no one in that massive television audience can go away easily misled.”
He arrogantly implies that his candidate — Biden — would automatically win in a truth contest. But why should anyone assume the confessed plagiarist and policy chameleon would have an advantage here?
The answer is that Friedman knows, perhaps subconsciously, that any such process would be rigged. Like so many terms in the liberal lexicon, “fact-checker” doesn’t mean what progressives want you to think it means.
Invariably, fact-checkers are adjuncts of the liberal media who depict opinions as facts, such as a conservative’s assertion (or progressive’s denial) that we have a crisis on the southern border. At one point, the network-news broadcasts were pregnant with panting anchors apoplectic over the claim and dubbed it an outright lie. As conditions at the border steadily deteriorated to undeniable crisis levels, we heard no retraction from Democrats, much less from the opinion-checkers.
We shouldn’t ignore Friedman’s ludicrous proposal simply because it will never be adopted, as it provides a window into the progressive mind. Many progressives are frighteningly narrow-minded, intellectually cloistered and authoritarian. They tend to believe their opinions are facts (or so morally superior that they ought to be treated as such) and so are justified in censoring opposing views as inarguably false, immoral, offensive or politically incorrect.
In institutions they dominate, such as academia and Hollywood (or bar associations), they get to define what is offensive and then ban it – by diktat. For example, Cambridge University rescinded a speaking invitation for psychologist Jordan Peterson because of his skepticism about white privilege and climate change. Compounding foolishness with absurdity, the censors claimed they disinvited him to promote an “inclusive environment.”
Similarly, some state bar associations now require, as part of the continuing legal education lawyers must imbibe to retain their licenses, a course in diversity, inclusion and anti-bias. Attorneys must sit through the propaganda, during which certain debatable assumptions are treated as fact and the progressive agenda is advanced. One presenter admonished his captive audience to consider the possibility of bias in every aspect of their law practice — that they should always be mindful of it as they tackle any legal problem, presumably even those that couldn’t remotely touch on the subject. How’s that for thought control?
One takeaway from these examples and hundreds more is that the left, at its core, lacks confidence that its views could prevail in the marketplace of ideas, and so it manipulates the playing field. We see this in its support for the destruction of monuments and erasing our history because it wants to control not only the current narrative but also the historical one.
Friedman’s fearlessness of fact-checkers doesn’t mean he’s confident that Trump’s dishonesty and Biden’s truthfulness will be exposed but that today’s" fact-checkers" will almost always come down on the side of progressives. Progressives are so used to controlling the narrative that they’re confident their subjective ideas will be presented as factual. Perhaps even scarier is that they think their opinions are objectively true.
Why must they control people and their thoughts? Why can’t they allow people to draw their own lessons from history instead of purging it? Why are they afraid of debate viewers deciding for themselves whether Trump’s or Biden’s ideas are more compelling and truthful?
How often do conservatives propose that we erase evidence of our history? That we ban certain speech because they find it offensive? Do conservative business owners ever send employees to sensitivity training because their views aren’t conservative enough?
Tom Friedman’s laughable idea is no laughing matter because he represents the authoritarian progressive mindset. That many such progressives sincerely believe their ideas are superior isn’t the problem. The problem is that they want to limit your freedom to oppose them.
SOURCE
***********************************
For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here. Home page supplement
**************************
Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) — the controversial COVID-19 treatment touted by President Donald Trump — might be gaining new traction in the fight against the Wuhan coronavirus.
The latest positive results come from Vadodara, India, where city officials have conducted a major study involving more than 300,000 people, including “health workers and other frontline staff.”
The Indian Express reports:
The administration has analysed a sample of over 1 lakh [lakh = 100,000] residents, who were mostly close contacts of positive persons and the effect of HCQ in containing the transmission of the virus. According to the analysis, of the 48,873 close contacts of positive patients who took one dose of HCQ, 102 turned Covid-19 positive and 12 succumbed to the infection whereas 48 of the 17,776 close contacts of positive patients who took two doses of HCQ turned positive and only one died. The study also states that of the 33,563 close contacts of patients who took three HCQ doses, 43 tested positive and one died.
Local health official Dr. Devesh Patel told the paper, “It has shown positive results. We have the numbers and not one person has complained of complications. The only side effect reported is mild gastritis, which is common with administering heavy medicines and can be effectively handled.”
In other words, anyone who has taken the much more common azithromycin antibiotic for a simple sinus infection has probably suffered about the same distress — all gastric — as a subject of the Vadodara study.
Dr. Mohammad Hussain, who runs Vadodara’s Faith Hospital, told the Express, “There are conflicting studies about the use of HCQ. While initially the US studies rejected it and cited side-effects, European countries backed its prophylactic use. In Vadodara, it has shown positive results. We have been able to restrict cases in clusters. Nagarwada no longer has a huge number of cases.”
Hussain reiterated that no serious side effects were reported.
SOURCE
*******************************
Why experts think the MMR jab may save adults from Covid: Childhood vaccine at heart of dramatic new trial
Think of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) jab and one image might spring to mind — a mother cradling an infant as a nurse injects the potentially life-saving vaccine into their arm.
It could soon be the mother receiving the vaccine too — to protect against Covid-19.
Some evidence suggests the triple jab, given to millions of British children since its introduction in the UK in 1988, could be a powerful weapon in the battle against coronavirus, either by protecting adults against infection, or reducing symptoms.
That was certainly the thinking behind the decision by Dr Martin Scurr, the Mail's GP columnist, to have the MMR jab — to 'ginger up' his immunity, as he explained in Good Health last week.
The protective potential of MMR hit the headlines when the crew of the U.S. aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt was struck by a Covid-19 outbreak.
More than 1,100 sailors on board tested positive, yet just one needed hospital treatment, (and later died) according to a report published last month in the journal mBio.
Even allowing for the likelihood that many were young and fit, researchers calculated it would still be expected that about 14 per cent (over 150 in this case) would need to be hospitalised.
But the sailors all had one thing in common; as new recruits mostly in their late teens or 20s, each had been given the MMR vaccine, in line with U.S. military policy.
Some scientists think the jab may have protected many crew members against serious illness and could also explain why so few children develop symptoms from Covid-19. In the UK, children make up less than two per cent of confirmed cases.
Between 80 and 90 per cent of all UK children, teenagers and young adults have had the MMR jab, their first dose aged one, and a booster, at three years.
Now the idea that the readily available and relatively cheap vaccine (it costs about £50 privately) could be used to protect millions of adults against Covid-19 is attracting wider interest.
Last month, doctors at the Kasr El Aini Hospital in Cairo, Egypt, began recruiting up to 200 doctors, nurses and carers on the coronavirus frontline to see if giving them the MMR vaccine protects them against severe coronavirus symptoms. The trial — which will run until October — is the first of its kind.
But how might a vaccine against common childhood illnesses tackle the virus?
Most of the 100 or so Covid-19 vaccine trials under way worldwide focus on specific targets unique to the virus itself, and are made either with traces of the 'spike' protein found on the surface of the virus, or fragments of its genetic material. The idea is the immune system recognises the virus material in the vaccines as foreign and creates infection-fighting cells (antibodies and T cells) should it then encounter Covid-19.
In other words, they are designed to work against Covid-19 and nothing else.
The same applies to most infectious disease vaccines. But a small group of vaccines, including the MMR, the BCG jab given to protect against tuberculosis (TB) and the oral version of the polio vaccine, are different.
These are made with 'live' but massively weakened versions of the viruses or bacteria (in the case of the BCG) themselves.
As well as priming the immune system to produce disease-fighting cells that target the infectious organism, live vaccines pep up the whole immune system so it's more alert to any invading organisms. It's thought this is because the presence of any live virus or bacterium is enough to put the whole immune system on alert.
'It's a bit like an army putting all its snipers on duty, ready to take out anything that is a potential threat,' explains Eleanor Riley, a professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Edinburgh University.
As we reported in March, there are several trials under way globally to see if the BCG jab can soften the blow of Covid-19.
Last week a study found that the BCG vaccine, that was given to teenagers in this country from 1953 until 2005 to protect against TB, may protect against coronavirus. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy Of Sciences, compared the jab's popularity in a country with their rate of infection and death.
The vaccine has previously been found to combat infectious diseases other than TB. A study, published in The BMJ in 2016, found that babies given the BCG jab were 30 per cent less likely to die of any infectious disease in their first year.
News that the jab might also protect people against coronavirus has led to shortages in some parts of the world. Doctors in Japan said they were running out of BCG as so many adults were paying privately to be immunised as protection against Covid-19. But when it comes to MMR, there could be another reason why the vaccine buffers the effects of Covid-19, say University of Cambridge scientists.
They studied blood samples of British patients treated in the early stages of the pandemic —the antibodies made by their immune system were similar in structure to antibodies produced in response to rubella (German measles), one of three viruses targeted by the MMR vaccine.
The Cambridge team believes the rubella antibodies triggered by the vaccine may be seeing off the coronavirus before it does too much damage.
In a paper online (but not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal), the scientists wrote: 'If there is a link, we propose that vaccination of 'at risk' age groups with an MMR vaccination should be considered. 'To create a Covid-19 vaccine will be arduous and may require time which we cannot afford.'
But some UK experts warn against giving the MMR jab without stronger evidence.
There is 'a good chance' this effect on the immune system is short-lived in some people — days, rather than weeks, months or years, says Professor Riley.
'It's also likely that if as an adult or even as a child your immune system has ever come into contact with measles, mumps or rubella in the past, it will not respond as vigorously to another vaccine. There is no good reason for anyone to pay for a private MMR or indeed BCG vaccine in the hope of avoiding Covid-19.'
SOURCE
****************************************
The Authoritarian Left Fears a Level Playing Field
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman’s proposal that Joe Biden shouldn’t debate President Donald Trump unless “a real-time fact-checking team” is part of the mix is an ironic illustration of the closed-mindedness of the left.
Why would Friedman want a candidate who is eager to contrast his views with Trump’s to impose conditions that would make a debate less likely, unless, of course, Friedman realizes that the failing Biden would be particularly disastrous in a debate?
That seems to be the case here, as Friedman’s other condition — that Trump agree to release his tax returns for 2016 through 2018 — is just as unrealistic but not for the reason Democrats would have you believe. It’s not that they think Trump is concealing some sinister criminality but that the returns would be a gold mine for ginning up class resentment against the mega-wealthy Trump and fodder to smear him with innuendo.
Friedman recommends the fact-checkers be approved by both candidates “and that 10 minutes before the scheduled conclusion of the debate this team report on any misleading statements, phony numbers or outright lies either candidate had uttered. That way no one in that massive television audience can go away easily misled.”
He arrogantly implies that his candidate — Biden — would automatically win in a truth contest. But why should anyone assume the confessed plagiarist and policy chameleon would have an advantage here?
The answer is that Friedman knows, perhaps subconsciously, that any such process would be rigged. Like so many terms in the liberal lexicon, “fact-checker” doesn’t mean what progressives want you to think it means.
Invariably, fact-checkers are adjuncts of the liberal media who depict opinions as facts, such as a conservative’s assertion (or progressive’s denial) that we have a crisis on the southern border. At one point, the network-news broadcasts were pregnant with panting anchors apoplectic over the claim and dubbed it an outright lie. As conditions at the border steadily deteriorated to undeniable crisis levels, we heard no retraction from Democrats, much less from the opinion-checkers.
We shouldn’t ignore Friedman’s ludicrous proposal simply because it will never be adopted, as it provides a window into the progressive mind. Many progressives are frighteningly narrow-minded, intellectually cloistered and authoritarian. They tend to believe their opinions are facts (or so morally superior that they ought to be treated as such) and so are justified in censoring opposing views as inarguably false, immoral, offensive or politically incorrect.
In institutions they dominate, such as academia and Hollywood (or bar associations), they get to define what is offensive and then ban it – by diktat. For example, Cambridge University rescinded a speaking invitation for psychologist Jordan Peterson because of his skepticism about white privilege and climate change. Compounding foolishness with absurdity, the censors claimed they disinvited him to promote an “inclusive environment.”
Similarly, some state bar associations now require, as part of the continuing legal education lawyers must imbibe to retain their licenses, a course in diversity, inclusion and anti-bias. Attorneys must sit through the propaganda, during which certain debatable assumptions are treated as fact and the progressive agenda is advanced. One presenter admonished his captive audience to consider the possibility of bias in every aspect of their law practice — that they should always be mindful of it as they tackle any legal problem, presumably even those that couldn’t remotely touch on the subject. How’s that for thought control?
One takeaway from these examples and hundreds more is that the left, at its core, lacks confidence that its views could prevail in the marketplace of ideas, and so it manipulates the playing field. We see this in its support for the destruction of monuments and erasing our history because it wants to control not only the current narrative but also the historical one.
Friedman’s fearlessness of fact-checkers doesn’t mean he’s confident that Trump’s dishonesty and Biden’s truthfulness will be exposed but that today’s" fact-checkers" will almost always come down on the side of progressives. Progressives are so used to controlling the narrative that they’re confident their subjective ideas will be presented as factual. Perhaps even scarier is that they think their opinions are objectively true.
Why must they control people and their thoughts? Why can’t they allow people to draw their own lessons from history instead of purging it? Why are they afraid of debate viewers deciding for themselves whether Trump’s or Biden’s ideas are more compelling and truthful?
How often do conservatives propose that we erase evidence of our history? That we ban certain speech because they find it offensive? Do conservative business owners ever send employees to sensitivity training because their views aren’t conservative enough?
Tom Friedman’s laughable idea is no laughing matter because he represents the authoritarian progressive mindset. That many such progressives sincerely believe their ideas are superior isn’t the problem. The problem is that they want to limit your freedom to oppose them.
SOURCE
***********************************
For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here. Home page supplement
**************************
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