Coronavirus Commission Offers 5-Phase Plan for Getting America Back to Normal


National-Coronavirus-Response-a-Road-Map-to-Recovering


The National Coronavirus Recovery Commission announced a five-phase plan to get the American economy and public health “back to normal” after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 17-member commission established by The Heritage Foundation had its first formal and virtual meeting Thursday.

“Americans want to ensure their families are kept safe and healthy,” said commission Chairwoman Kay C. James, president of The Heritage Foundation.

The five phases outlined by the commission are:


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  1. Return to a more normal level of business activity at the regional level based on scientific data.
  2. Slow the spread of the coronavirus while expanding testing, reporting, and contact tracing.
  3. Continue to build the science.
  4. Establish U.S. leadership in leading the free world in economic recovery.
  5. Reduce future risks of pandemics.

“The commission agrees that it is critically important to build the American people’s confidence that we can safely return to some semblance of normal soon,” James said, adding:

The way to build that confidence is to adopt a phased approach that mitigates the spread of the coronavirus, vastly improves testing, expands our capabilities to quickly find treatments and possibly a cure, and then allows Americans to gradually return to work. We must also look at ways to ensure we are better prepared to confront future pandemics.

For the first phase, Americans’ gradual return to the workplace would be done only after stabilizing the health care system; establishing enhanced testing, reporting, and contact tracing; and continuing to follow guidelines on mitigation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

During a conference call Wednesday with reporters, Dr. Bill Frist, a physician and former Senate majority leader who is on the commission, said the return to former work habits and places would be “community by community, not state by state.”

Slowing the spread, the second phase, is achieved by following the guidelines for hand-washing, social distancing, and other precautions set by the Trump administration’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The third phase would increase and expedite the availability of new diagnostic tests while supporting acceleration of proven therapeutics and vaccines.

The fourth, establishing U.S. leadership, will involve implementing “risk-informed measures to reestablish international travel while limiting threat of reinfection,” according to the commission.

The commission also suggests partnering with key strategic allies, including Western Europe and the Indo-Pacific, empowering economic freedom and partnerships in free markets.

The National Coronavirus Recovery Commission proposes to reduce future risks of pandemics by investing in national and state stockpiles, reforming supply chains, developing the supply of antiviral agents, seeking to develop vaccines for coronaviruses, and investing in an international biosurveillance network to detect and contain emerging infectious diseases through coordination and cooperation.

The commission, which is set to meet again April 20, is accepting suggestions from the public at CoronavirusCommission.com.

The Heritage Foundation established the commission—which includes experts from government, public health, disaster response and relief, academia and education, business, and the faith community—to provide policymakers and the public with recommendations on steps needed to move prudently toward recovery from the pandemic.

The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>


EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

A Physician Investigates: Should You Take Hydroxychloroquine?

A controversy has arisen regarding the utility of using chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.

On the one hand, there are the purists who maintain that these medications ought not be employed until the proof of their benefits has been established. On the other, some advocate for the aggressive and immediate deployment of these medications. With these two very valid competing arguments proffered by sophisticated scientists and healthcare providers, the question for the rest of us mere mortals is what should we do?

The first step in addressing this question is to evaluate the state of the literature on the topic. An early indication that hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine in combination with azithromycin could be helpful in the treatment of CORVID-19 infection comes from a randomly controlled study from France involving 40 patients with early infection.  All patients in the experimental group improved and did better than those in the placebo group, except for one who was 86 years old and received the medicines in an “advanced form” of the disease.

But the study suffered from its small size and lack of a peer review process.

Other studies seemed to support the French conclusion.  In the laboratory, evidence demonstrates that chloroquine helps defeat the virus by increasing a cell’s internal pH and interfering with the penetration of the virus into the cell. Another study, this time out of China, showed the effectiveness of chloroquine and another medication, Remdesevir, against the SARS-CoV-2 virus (the COVID-19 virus) in Vero E6 cells taken from African green monkeys. Yet another preliminary study out of Wuhan showed that the time to clinical recovery, body temperature recovery time, and cough remission time were shorter in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine than in untreated controls.

There’s also experiential evidence suggesting that people who take chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine in low doses may be prevented from even developing the disease.  Additionally, informally reported observations find that patients who regularly take these medications for other conditions such as lupus are generally not contracting COVID-19.

But conflicting scientific information has also emerged. One study suggests no benefit to the administration of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin in patients with severe infection. The severe nature of the infections in these patients is notable, as it appears that the damage to the body goes beyond what an antibiotic can improve.

In light of all this emerging information regarding the potential benefits of administering the drugs it is tempting to conclude that we should treat all COVID-19 patients with these medications.  But what about the potential harm? Here, there is extensive evidence of the safety of taking chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine. Yes, either medication can cause retinopathy and changes in heart electrophysiology, but these effects are exceedingly rare and take place in patients who consume the medication at higher doses and for much more protracted periods of time.  In reality, the use of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine in the recommended doses and projected administration times for COVID-19 is very safe.

So should we be taking chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine?  Well, the answer actually comes in three packets.

  • First, with the data available, those patients in respiratory failure ought definitely be treated with a regimen of chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.  They should also be placed on Remdesevir. These patients, of course, are generally being treated in the intensive care unit setting, and the optimal management controversy does not apply to the general public.
  • Second, for those patients who are not in respiratory failure, but are nevertheless infected with COVID-19, the more proper approach is one of drug administration.  Although treatment should be undertaken under physician supervision, there is little question that the balance between risk and benefit strongly lands in favor of benefit, especially when one considers the potential imminence of patient demise.
  • Third, there is the question of preventive treatment or prophylaxis. Here again, there is a strong suggestion of benefit and a very remote risk of harm particularly when one considers the exceedingly low doses required for prevention.  The conflict here lies in supply. Do we have enough chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to meet the demands from such a broad swath of the population? Ideally, it would be preferable that everyone takes one of these medications, but in light of supply limitations, at the very least, those coming into frequent contact with COVID-19 patients and elderly persons should be on a prophylactic dose.

What about those on chronic regimens of these medications?  Should they be kept from accessing chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine as many in the media claim is taking place?  They shouldn’t. But even in light of temporary shortages, the prophylactic use of these medications should still be considered.

Let’s face it.  We are looking at a massive pandemic that is devastating the national economy and able to take some victims with great haste.  A short-term interruption of treatment on chronic patients is generally not going to result in their rapid demise, but the contraction of COVID-19 may.  Here, urgency considerations definitely fall on the side of the COVID-19 patient and its prevention.

In the end, these are prescription medications so the decisions for administration or not lie with the physician.  Ultimately, each physician is going to have to make up his or her mind. However, although there is still some room for debate, the answer presently is falling on the side of administering rather than withholding these potentially life-saving medicines.

© All rights reserved.

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The Coronavirus Curse May Spell the End for Media as We have Known it . . .

….which means there is a great opportunity for any of you who want to launch your own web-based media either national or more importantly state and local websites and blogs.

I have for years—a dozen actually—been urging all of you to consider writing your own blogs.

There is a crying need for citizen investigative journalists who would follow various government programs as watch dogs.

And, as local newspapers die, you should consider becoming the news outlet in your own community, county or state. What are you waiting for!

There may be silver linings to be found with this COVID crisis after all.  Small local newspapers are likely to go down, see here at The Hill last week:

Local news outlets struggle to survive coronavirus fallout

Sad (maybe), but if your city or county is like mine, the local newspaper was long ago gobbled up by a Left-leaning mega media company blatantly putting its slant on the local news.

Enough of the nagging, here is what I wanted you to see that should bring a smile to your faces.

From Kurt Schlichter writing at Town Hall (hat tip: Paul):

Our Super Smart Elite Shines During This Pandemic!

We Americans are truly blessed by having a mainstream media full of brilliant renaissance men, women, and gender non-specific entities who are masters of so many varied and intermittently useful skills and who are eager to share their knowledge with us benighted souls. The pandemic has revealed that every urban Twitter blue check scribbler, MSNBCNN panelist, NYT/WaPo doofus, and barely legal “senior editor” of a website you never heard of, is a Nobel Prize-winning epidemiologist, a master logistician, and a diversity consultant too boot.

They may all be lousy journalists, but damn it, they are also lousy at other jobs that they didn’t even pretend to train to do.

It’s awesome to see people with zero life experience in any relevant field weighing in as if we shouldn’t just laugh in their pimply faces.

[….]

The media largely fell for the Imperial College Apocalypse Flu scenario, but then they wanted to. It’s more fun to be chronicling the Fall of Rome than Just Another Day in the Third Century A.D. under Emperor Elagabalus. The doomsayers ended up walking back their zillion dead to a few thousand dead, and the media just sort of ignored it because “Phew! Dodged a bullet!” doesn’t have the same resonance as “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE (and it’s Trump’s fault, not our ChiCom friends’ fault).”

[….]

Our media is garbage, full of clowns and dilettantes with no experience and less common sense. The media is now complaining that the pandemic is hurting its industry badly and that some of the media may go under because of the Woking Pneumonia.

Read it all because we all need a good laugh these days!

EDITORS NOTE: This Frauds, Crooks and Criminals is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Coronavirus Commission Examines How to Get America Back to Work

Before many Americans are able to go back to work, the country will have to reach four goals amid the COVID-19 pandemic, former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said as the National Coronavirus Recovery Commission began to study related issues.

“No. 1, we need to stop the spread. That has not been stopped,” Frist, a physician who is a member of the commission assembled by The Heritage Foundation, said of the new coronavirus Wednesday in a conference call with reporters.

Second, Frist said, the nation must gear up “contact testing.”

“We have to identify who has the disease and then who they have been in contact with, and we need to develop that infrastructure in every community across America,” the former senator from Tennessee said.


In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>


“No. 3, we need to define the science,” Frist said, adding: “So we need to further define how long a person has been exposed [and] how good their immunity is in going back to work.”

Fourth is a gradual return to work “community by community, not state by state,” following stay-at-home orders at the state and local levels, he said, while the federal government is encouraging social distancing and coordinating the national response.

The National Coronavirus Recovery Commission includes experts from public health, business, and government who will identify steps needed to rebuild the economy after the pandemic.

The commission’s first formal meeting, to be held remotely, is set for Thursday.

The meeting comes ahead of what the federal government expects to be the peak week for deaths from COVID-19. The United States has logged 419,975 confirmed cases of the disease caused by the new coronavirus and 14,262 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Commission member George Allen, a former U.S. senator and governor of Virginia, said a short-term goal for the nation is to increase production of protective masks and COVID-19 tests to meet the need.

“We need a Manhattan Project approach on antiviral therapeutics that could be produced four to six months before the winter onslaught when recurrence occurs, because the vaccine is going to take over a year and that’s assuming this coronavirus doesn’t mutate,” Allen said during the conference call.

The Manhattan Project was the name of America’s secret effort during World War II to develop the atomic bomb.

Allen predicted that some moderate social distancing is “here to stay,” while teleworking likely is going to be more common even in the long term.

“It’s going to change our society the same way 9/11 has changed our society,” he said of COVID-19.

Allen also called for breaking American dependence on China for pharmaceuticals and other medical supplies.

“We as Americans should no longer be vulnerable to adversarial countries for our supply chain of medicines, pharmaceuticals, and medical services,” Allen said, adding:

Heck, people wouldn’t even feed their dogs dog food from China or want Sheetrock from China. So why should we have our medicines and some of these masks and so forth coming in from China when we can make it here? If not here, then our neighbors in Canada and Mexico can make it.

Two policy experts from The Heritage Foundation, Paul Winfree and Charmaine Yoest, serve as executive directors of the commission.

“We believe fundamentally that good public health policy is going to lead to good economic policy,” said Yoest, vice president of Heritage’s Institute for Family, Community and Opportunity and former president and CEO of Americans United for Life.

“The two have to move forward hand in hand,” said Yoest, who served for almost a year as assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services early in the Trump administration. “Once the American people are confident of the health approach, they’ll start feeling confident about going back to work and jump-starting the economy.”

The “big question” the commission will confront is how to expedite an economic recovery through the actions of federal, state, and local policymakers, said Winfree, director of Heritage’s Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, who was deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council during the first year of the Trump administration.

“One of the questions that has come out of the Trump administration is this question about whether we are going to see a V-shaped recovery or whether we are going to experience it for a longer season,” Winfree said.

“I think it’s critical for anything we end up doing from here on out, [to] make sure that folks remain attached to their places of work so that whenever we defeat the disease, ultimately we can get America back to work and cooking again as quickly as possible,” he said.

Heritage Foundation President Kay C. James is the commission’s chairwoman. James was director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management under President George W. Bush and Virginia secretary of health and human resources while Allen was governor.

Commission members also include former U.S. Rep. J.C. Watts, R-Okla.; John A. Allison IV, former CEO of BB&T Bank and retired president of the Cato Institute; Lawrence J. Blanford, president of Green Mountain Coffee; Kevin P. Chavous, president of academics, policy, and schools at K12.com; former Heritage Foundation President Edwin Feulner; and Timothy E. Flanigan, chief legal officer for the Cancer Treatment Centers of America.

Also members are Noe Landini, CEO of Rex Management; the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference; Nelson J. Sabatini, former Maryland secretary of health; Joni Eareckson Tada, founder and CEO of Joni and Friends International Disability Center; and Frances F. Townsend, executive vice president of MacAndrews and Forbes Holdings.

The commission also includes former White House physician and retired Brig. Gen. Richard J. Tubb; Gail Wilensky, economist and senior fellow at Project HOPE; and Robert L. Woodson Sr., founder and president of the Woodson Center.

The Daily Signal is the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation.

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>


EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Where Will the First Coronavirus Vaccine Come From?

I think we can guess, don’t you? The United States, or Israel — as the Iranians say, Great Satan or Little Satan – are the two likeliest contenders. For now, it seems as though a vaccine developed in Israel will be the first off the starting block, ready for testing on humans within two months.

The story of that vaccine is here.

Israeli researchers said [on April 3] they are days away from finishing production of the active component of a coronavirus vaccine that could be tested on humans starting June 1.

“We are in the final stages and within a few days we will hold the proteins—the active component of the vaccine,” Dr. Chen Katz, group leader of the biotechnology group at the MIGAL Galilee Research Institute, told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday [March 31].

The human trials will be conducted on “young, healthy individuals” and will then likely expand to the general population, Katz said, adding that he believes the vaccine will be available first in Israel.

MIGAL said in late February that it would complete production of its vaccine within three weeks and have it on the market in three months, but Katz explained to the Post that the process was delayed because it took longer than anticipated to receive the genetic construct they ordered from China, due to airways being closed and the product needing to be rerouted.

The group, funded partially by a NIS 30 million ($8,225,600) grant from Israel’s Ministry of Science and Technology, is working with regulators to ensure that the vaccine is safe to try on human.

Katz said because it will be an oral vaccine, “the quality of this kind of vaccine should be closer to food regulations than pharma regulations or somewhere in between. We hope that we will not need to go through the complete purification process like in the drug industry because that could delay us.”

Another Israeli company, Kamada, a biopharmaceutical company in Rehovot has announced that it has started to work on developing a blood-plasma derived treatment against the coronavirus; it uses the antibodies found in the plasma of those who have survived the coronavirus.

There are dozens of other Israeli researchers, and Israelis outside of Israel, working on vaccines. There is, for example, Dr. Ofer Levy, an Israeli-American who heads the Precision Vaccines Program (PVP) at Boston Children’s Hospital, where researchers are working on developing a vaccine for the coronavirus. Dr. Levy says that among the worldwide vaccine efforts, his group is uniquely focused on a solution for the elderly, a population Levy defines as age 65 or older.

“Vaccines are not one size fits all,” Levy told The Times of Israel via a conference call on Monday [March 31].“Immune response varies with age.” He said that the elderly are “at greatest risk of severe infection,” and thus he is concentrating on this age group.

A physician and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, Levy and his fellow researchers have been working on a vaccine since mid-January. He estimated that over 40 separate groups are working on vaccines, but as of press time, none are approved.

As we have all come to expect, when it comes to medical and technological advances, Israel punches far above its weight. None of us would be surprised were a vaccine to be developed first in Israel. It could be by the MIGAL Galilee Research Institute; the vaccine it has developed is said to be ready for human trials by June. We would take in stride the news that the antibody-based vaccine of the Israeli company Kamada would be ready for human trials by June, or that the vaccine being developed by PVP (Precision Vaccines Program) that Dr. Ofer Levy directs at the Boston Children’s Hospital might start trials in July. And we expect something to come from the half-dozen other Israeli research groups. We would be surprised not if one or more succeeds, but if they all were to fail.

There are, of course, many other vaccines in the works outside Israel. American researchers include Dr. Stephane Bancel and his team at Moderna (among them at least one Israeli-born scientist). Others who come swimmingly to mind as developers of a coronavirus vaccine include: Dr. Chen Wei and his fellow researchers in Wuhan itself; Russian scientists at the Vektor State Virology and Biotechnology Centre in the city of Novosibirsk; investigators. at Imperial College, London. Again, no surprises. We have only rounded up the usual suspects:  America, Israel, China, Russia, the U.K.

But among the 40 or so research groups now working in a half-dozen countries on a coronavirus vaccine, none were to be found in any of the 57 Muslim countries that are members of the O.I.C. (Organization of the Islamic Conference). You are not surprised. But why should that be? Could it be that Islam discourages free and skeptical inquiry? The fear among Muslim clerics has always been that if ordinary Muslims began to question authority in one area, they might end up by questioning aspects of Islam itself, and that would never do. Islam means “submission,” and the habit of mental submission to that authority – that is, to the Qur’an itself, and to the Hadith – has always been encouraged in Islam. Rote memorization confers prestige; the Believer who memorizes the entire Qur’an is deeply respected as a “hafiz,” as if that empty feat signified learning. Would any of us in the Western world celebrate as a gifted mathematician someone who had memorized pi to the 200th decimal point? Of course not. Memorization is favored in Islam because it reinforces authority; we learn by heart what it is the Qur’an tells us; we do not question it. If you need to find out what is halal or haram, ask a Muslim cleric, in person or at the many such sites on-line), who will supply you with a Qur’anic verse, or an “authoritative” Hadith (from Bukhari or Muslim), to answer your question. That “free and skeptical inquiry” that Islam discourages is the very thing that furthers the enterprise of science. Some Muslims, especially those living and working in the West, manage to acquire the habits of mind of their Western teachers and colleagues, and are able to contribute to scientific advances. Alas, how few they are in number.

Some are enthralled with Muhammad, Messenger of God. Others are more interested in Messenger RNA. It is the latter who will discover the vaccine for the coronavirus.

COLUMN BY

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Politifact Determined to Get It Wrong on Joe Biden and Gun Confiscation

Another week, another dubious “fact-check” from the professional propagandists at Politifact. This time the Poynter Institute project labeled a claim that Joe Biden has admitted to supporting gun confiscation as “Pants on Fire,” their most extreme rating for a supposed falsehood. In their herculean effort to obscure Biden’s support for gun confiscation, the media outlet went out of its way to avoid discussion of the overwhelming evidence of the presidential candidate’s intent to take guns.

Politifact took issue with an article from Conservative-Daily titled, “Watch: Biden Looks Into The Camera And Promises To Take Away Americans’ Guns​.” As evidence, the Conservative-Daily article cited a viral video of Joe Biden and Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, eating at Texas hamburger chain Whataburger. During the video, Biden states “This guy changed the face of what we’re dealing with regarding guns, assault weapons… and I just want to warn [Beto’s wife] that if I win I’m coming for him.”

By narrowly focusing on only Biden’s statement at the Whataburger, while avoiding all context, Politifact came to the conclusion that Biden was only expressing his intent to have O’Rourke be part of his administration and that the video did not show evidence of the former vice president’s desire to ban guns.

When looking at the totality of Biden’s comments on confiscation, this view is untenable.

Just prior to the Whataburger outing, Biden shared the stage with Beto at a campaign rally where the failed U.S. senate and presidential candidate endorsed him for president. Biden told those gathered, “I want to make something clear. I’m going to guarantee you this is not the last you’ll see of this guy.” Biden went on say, “You’re going to take care of the gun problem with me. You’re going to be the one who leads this effort. I’m counting on ya.”

By offering Beto a role on guns in a potential future administration, Biden made clear that he supports Beto’s gun control position. That position is gun confiscation.

During the September 12, 2019 Democratic debate, Beto was asked about his proposal to confiscate commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms. Beto responded in part by saying, “hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15.” The Beto campaign would go on to sell t-shirts with the anti-gun slogan.​

Less than a week later, Beto reiterated his call for gun confiscation on CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time. During an interview, Chris Cuomo asked Beto, “All right, so let’s state the proposition. Are you, in fact, in favor of gun confiscation?” Beto responded with “Yes.”

There can be no doubt that Biden understands Beto would confiscate firearms, as he shared the debate stage with him on September 12.

However, it is not necessary to deduce that Biden supports gun confiscation from his support for Beto’s attacks on firearms rights. Biden has stated that he intends to take firearms.

Biden had the following exchange with CNN’s Anderson Cooper when asked about firearm confiscation during an August 5, 2019 interview.

Cooper: So, to gun owners out there who say well a Biden administration means they are going to come for my guns.

Biden: Bingo! You’re right if you have an assault weapon. 

It is revealing that the purported “factcheckers” at Politifact did not make a full accounting of the facts concerning Biden and gun confiscation. Biden and Beto’s statements on gun confiscation are public and have been made widely available by those who support the Second Amendment. Such actions by Politifact suggest a determined ignorance calculated to protect a favored political candidate.

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EDITORS NOTE: This NRA-ILA column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Might Trump Reopen America Before April 30th?

For weeks, with the exception of Rush Limbaugh, public voices were terrified to question health experts’ predictions of apocalyptic high corona virus deaths. Everyone knew they had better embrace the total shutdown of America or be accused of wanting to sacrifice lives for money.

The good news is we are seeing cracks in fake news medias’ tyrannical wall of doomsday corona reporting. Why? Because the predicted catastrophic high numbers of corona deaths have not happened. Of the 40 million people living in California, only 250 have died of corona; equaling 3 per million. A 104 year old WWII veteran recovered from corona virus.

The majority of people who catch corona virus make a full recovery. And yet, practically every corona news report leads with fear inducing words like “staggering”, “skyrocketing” and “deadly.”

Pundits and politicians are beginning to acknowledge that corona virus models could be wrong.

Meanwhile, fake news media gleefully reported that 10 million Americans applied for unemployment and 700,000 jobs have been lost. Fake news media created corona-madness to crush our economy to stop Trump’s reelection. They do not care about the consequences. Suicide hot lines are spiking because of corona-madness. That is sad and shameful.

Some folks fear Trump is being manipulated by his health experts. I think not. Remember, Trump authored the book, “The Art of the Deal”. Corona-madness is still wreaking havoc. Trump is chomping at the bit to reopen America but realizes that the timing must be right.

My wife Mary said even Trump supporters on Facebook are battling each other. Some are furious that Trump has not reopened America. Others demand a longer shutdown with more unconstitutional restrictions.

I pray that God will tell Trump when to reopen America. The right time may come sooner than expected.

Already, more Americans appear fed up with house arrest. They are realizing that the high predicted deaths were exaggerated. Also, Americans don’t like overlords with political agendas deciding whose job is essential; dictating who can and cannot earn a living. This is reminiscent of Obamacare, in which bureaucrats decide who receives medical treatment; dictating who lives and who dies.

Rush Limbaugh is calling for government to give us a date for when the shutdown will end. People need hope. The Bible says without a vision, the people perish.

Life has taught me that sometimes God gives us good gifts wrapped in ugly wrapping paper. We are receiving remarkable gifts wrapped in corona virus. Not in my lifetime has an evangelist (Franklin Graham) run commercials on TV boldly encouraging people to surrender their life to Jesus.

A new poll says millions believe corona virus is a wake-up call to turn back to God. Americans turning back to God is turning back to our roots. Founding father John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Democrats and fake news media twisted the meaning of “Separation of Church and State” to purge God from our government and culture.

It was thrilling to hear megachurch pastors who never comment about the culture cautioning people not to consume too much of news medias’ doomsday corona virus reporting.

In the Bible, Joseph’s brothers hated him and sold him into slavery, which remarkably led to Joseph becoming a ruler of Egypt. Without malice, Joseph told his brothers, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.”

Driven insane by their obsession with destroying Trump and dispiriting his voters, Democrats and fake news media nuclear-bombed America with corona-madness. They meant it for evil, but God is using it for good. Did I mention that the invasion of illegals from Mexico has pretty much stopped?

More pundits and politicians are saying that it is insane to allow corona-madness to destroy everything people have worked for their entire lives. This could empower Trump to put us back to work much sooner. Stopping the insanity April 30th or sooner would be a wonderful miracle!

© All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: Dispatches of Hope: DOWNWARD Trends on Infections and Deaths

Biden Calls for Lifting Sanctions and Providing ‘Humanitarian Relief’ for Iran Amid Coronavirus Pandemic

Joe Biden has called for the American government to lift sanctions on Iran so that the Islamic Republic might be able to cope better with the coronavirus outbreak, by having enough money to buy masks, gowns, gloves, testing equipment, ventilators, and other medical equipment. Biden does not go as far as his rival Bernie Sanders, who has called for a much broader sanctions relief that would last not only during the entire time of the outbreak but continue even after the coronavirus had ended.

Here’s the story:

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the overwhelming favorite to become the Democratic presidential nominee, came out in favor of humanitarian sanctions relief for Iran to help the embattled country cope with the coronavirus pandemic.

“There are already humanitarian exceptions in place for sanctions, but in practice, most governments and organizations are too concerned about running afoul of US sanctions to offer assistance,” Biden said in a statement. “As a result, our sanctions are limiting Iran’s access to medical supplies and needed equipment. The [Donald Trump] administration should take immediate steps to address this problem and streamline channels for banking and public health assistance from other countries in response to the health emergency in Iran.”

The Iranian regime has been using the coronavirus outbreak – and its own failure to deal adequately with it – as a way to pressure the American government to lift sanctions. It wishes to deflect attention from its own failings, and to ascribe its difficulties to American malevolence in refusing to again lift those sanctions on the regime that Trump had reimposed. We are supposed to believe that it’s not the Supreme Leader, with his crazy conspiracy theories that blame America for creating the coronavirus that “targets a genome possessed by Iranians,” who is to blame And we should pay no attention to the failure of the regime to promptly close down Mahan Airlines flights between Iran and China, flights that allowed the virus to spread from Wuhan to Qom. And we should overlook the failure of the Islamic Republic to impose a quarantine on the city of Qom, which might have prevented students and pilgrims returning home from Qom to spread the virus — as it is now known they did — to Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, Iraq, Syria, Qatar, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. No, none of that matters; the Supreme Leader is right — the epidemic in Iran is entirely the fault of the Americans.

Biden’s statement comes after his one remaining primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called for even broader Iran sanctions relief amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Sanders joined Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and 31 other Democratic lawmakers in a letter to the Trump administration this week urging the president to undo the crippling sanctions he has implemented since withdrawing from the nuclear deal.

Sanders and his colleagues urged Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to relieve sanctions on “major sectors of the Iranian economy, including those impacting civilian industries, Iran’s banking sector and exports of oil,” adding that the relief “should last for at least as long as health experts believe the crisis will continue.”

For now, Biden is only calling for humanitarian exemptions to Trump’s current sanctions regime such as “broad license to pharmaceutical and medical device companies” and “creating a dedicated channel for international banks, transportation companies, insurers and other service firms to help Iranians access life-saving medical treatment.” He also called for new sanctions guidelines and letters for international aid organizations to reassure them that they will not run afoul of US sanctions for supplying humanitarian relief to Iran.

“Looking more closely at Biden’s statement, some of the things he mentioned, such as licenses, are already in place,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “A general license is how the Treasury Department helped work with the Swiss to approve a humanitarian channel that touches even the Central Bank of Iran.”

Joe Biden has apparently overlooked the American offer that has already been made to send humanitarian aid to Iran, which the Supreme Leader at once rejected. According to AP, Khamenei claimed that “ I do not know how real this accusation is [that America was behind the coronavirus epidemic] but when it exists, who in their right mind would trust you to bring them medication? Possibly your medicine is a way to spread the virus more. You might send people as doctors and therapists, maybe they would want to come here and see the effect of the poison they have produced in person.” Khamenei also alleged, having attained the farthest shores of absurdity, that the virus “is specifically built for Iran using the genetic data of Iranians which they [the Americans] have obtained through different means.”

Khamenei was also unwilling to accept the offer of help from Doctors Without Borders, to treat patients at a field hospital the group had brought with it and that it had hoped to install in the most heavily affected region of Iran. Instead, the group was expelled from Iran. The regime apparently wanted to show it can handle the coronavirus outbreak without any foreign help; that is manifestly untrue, and many Iranians have died unnecessarily because of the regime’s refusal to accept such aid from abroad.

Like others demanding that the Administration lift sanctions on Iran, Joe Biden misses the main point. Iran doesn’t need to have sanctions lifted to obtain the money it needs to combat the coronavirus spread. It need only change its priorities. It needs to make a choice: will it continue to send between $10 and $15 billion a year to support proxies and allies in Yemen (Houthi rebels), Iraq (Shi’ite Militias), Lebanon (Hezbollah), and Syria (the Assad regime), or will it decrease, or even end altogether, the funding for this foreign adventurism, and instead apply the billions saved thereby to dealing with the unprecedented coronavirus epidemic? Biden knows all about Tehran’s support for the Houthis, Hezbollah, the Shia militias in Iraq, and Assad’s military in Syria. None of that is secret. And he also surely knows — or he could find out in two minutes of searching the Internet — just how much that costs the Islamic Republic. So why does he fail to mention those sums that Iran might save and use on PPE, ventilators, hospital beds? Does he think it illegitimate to bring up this matter of Iran’s spending priorities? Why?

If Biden were sensible, and also wanted to distinguish himself from Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar et al., he would ask Iran’s leaders something like this:

“Please explain to the American people, and to many others, why it is wrong to expect Iran to concentrate its available resources fully on the coronavirus outbreak, instead of spending upwards of $10 billion a year on supporting proxies and allies in Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, in these foreign campaigns. And think of the amounts spent, too, on the nuclear program. That has been Iran’s choice, and for the well-being of the people of Iran, it has been the wrong one. As for lifting sanctions, that should be discussed, if at all, only after Iran has shown that it has made a different choice, and now will prioritize the health of its own people over supporting military adventurism abroad.”

Yes, “if Biden were sensible…he would ask….”

But he isn’t. So he won’t.

COLUMN BY

RELATED ARTICLES:

The Impact of the Coronavirus Pandemic on the Iranian Economy

U.S. Created Coronavirus to Target Islamic Nations! (And Other Conspiracy Theories)

Malaysia: 40,000 now likely infected with coronavirus from Islamic event attended by 16,000

Newsweek uses the coronavirus pandemic to promote Islam

Islamic scholar, invoking Qur’an, says Muslims should rejoice when unbelievers “died because of the coronavirus”

France: Muslim who stabbed two random people to death was screaming “Allahu akbar,” knelt in prayer after murders

Finland: Muslim rape gang that repeatedly sexually assaulted 12-year-old girl gets short sentences

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

How Capitalism Is Helping US Defeat COVID-19

In times of crisis, Americans don’t look just to the government to save the day.

In certain intellectual circles in the United States it’s become fashionable to decry free markets, laying every economic woe of any American at the feet of “late stage capitalism,” the buzzword used to decry any business practice that seems designed to promote big business over the little guy.

But right now, as our nation struggles to deal with the coronavirus, we’re seeing proof our American companies are stepping up and helping. Businesses, big and small, are trying to do their part to help the U.S. defeat COVID-19. Just consider these examples:

  • MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell announced last week that 75% of his company’s production will be converted to making face masks.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>


  • AK Wet Works in Seabrook, Texas, a small business that makes industrial painting and coating products, is now using its specialty to sanitize public places and other businesses. “We actually came to the idea of, why can’t we take our blast pots and actually create a vapor that can be mixed with a disinfectant, so we can actually sterilize things around us,” operations manager Dennis Hotz told KTRK-TV, Houston’s ABC affiliate.
  • The Young & Yonder distillery in Healdsburg, California, is now making hand sanitizer and giving it to customers who come in for to-go pickups. “The community has been incredible. Most people who came in also picked up a bottle or two of spirits,” said Sarah Opatz, who founded Young & Yonder with her husband in 2013, according to The Press Democrat newspaper of Santa, Rosa, California. “It’s kept our business alive and growing. … We just wanted everybody to stay clean. We had the supply and ingredients.”
  • General Motors, Ford, and Tesla are ramping up production of much-needed ventilators.

Helen Raleigh at The Federalist compiled an excellent rundown of some of the other businesses that have stepped up during this crisis, including fashion companies that will switch over to making masks by the millions and drugstore chains, among them CVS and Walgreens, that are opening up mobile COVID-19 testing sites.

A coalition of CEOs launched the “Stop the Spread” initiative to organize businesses to address the specific needs of society during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Brooks Brothers, which normally makes suits and clothing, will produce masks and gowns. Flex Ltd., a supply chain and manufacturing company, is ramping up production of ventilators and protective equipment. Many other companies are joining in.

Parkdale Mills Inc. has joined efforts with a team of textile manufacturers to ramp up production of face masks and other similar materials.

“This is … a time of crisis that many people have not seen since the time of the world wars, Vietnam, you know, situations like that,” a Parkdale Mills spokesman said in an interview with The Daily Signal on Wednesday. “And [in] these times, there is a call to action. Who is going to step up and supply a need and do the right thing? We are trying to do the best we can to do what we can for the country.”

Perhaps just as importantly in this time of stress and deep uncertainty, innumerable businesses are doing what they can to give additional aid to employees, many of whom are facing the prospect of losing their jobs and salaries.

The owner of Federico’s Pizzeria & Restaurant in Belmar, New Jersey, is dealing with a lockdown in the state by opening up a $50,000 line of credit to continue paying employees.

“It just seemed like the right thing to do,” Bryan Morin, the owner of the pizzeria, said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on the Fox News Channel. “I didn’t want them to worry about me paying my mortgage. I didn’t want these guys … [to] have to worry about paying their rent, their utilities, and insurance, and other stuff.”

The restaurant can still do deliveries, but the potential for employees to get sick and end up in quarantine remains high.

“I just took this [line of credit] out to guarantee that my employees, no matter what, they’ll continue to be able to pay their bills. You’ve got to take care of your employees,” Morin said. “Without your employees, you don’t have a business.”

Smuttynose Brewing in Hampton, New Hampshire, has been forced to close and only do deliveries, but it’s decided to retain and pay all of its full- and part-time staff through the pandemic.

“We feel this was an extremely important decision,” Andrew Hart, Smuttynose director of hospitality, said, according to Seacoastonline. “There is a lot of uncertainty here, and we are in a unique and fortunate position where we are able to financially take care of our employees the best we can.”

There are numerous other stories like this around the country as businesses and employees are doing their best to weather the storm.

The total shutdown of the American economy has few—if any—precedents. If anything, the closest comparison is to World War II, where practically the entire economy was devoted to the war effort in one way or another.

During that war, the power of American government was certainly expanded, as it is now during the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. But America’s strength in war, or at any other time, is not in the power of its government.

The genius of the U.S. war effort was that, rather than relying on the government to fulfill the needs of the nation, the government merely acted to marshal resources to the front lines. Otherwise, the country relied on the surge of private production and the natural inclination of Americans in a crisis to devote all of their energy to tackle the challenge.

As they did in the 1940s, countless businesses, large and small, are now stepping up to aid both in combating the invisible enemy and in helping Americans who are hurting physically and financially at this time.

This is in part the genius of a free market system and why it’s ultimately more successful than, say, socialism. Businesses and free people can quickly respond to the needs of society.

When the need is great, their response is greater and far more efficient than a government-controlled system could ever be. In moments of national crisis, that great and good American system shines through.

During World War II, the auto industry switched production from cars to tanks, planes, and other weapons of war. The results were remarkable.

Edsel Ford, who ran the Ford Motor Co. at the time, vowed that the automaker could produce a bomber an hour at the Willow Run production facility in Michigan, which it did in 1944. It was an incredible achievement.

Today, Ford is making a similar switch in production—not to bombers, but to ventilators to care for COVID-19 patients. Ford is partnering with General Electric to produce 50,000 ventilators in 100 days, according to The New York Times.

“Just as Ford in the last century moved its manufacturing might seamlessly from auto to tank production during World War II, the Ford team is working with GE Healthcare to use its awesome engineering and manufacturing capabilities to voluntarily help this nation solve one of its most pressing problems,” the White House’s Defense Production Act coordinator, Peter Navarro, said in a statement.

There will be plenty in this time of crisis who claim that socialism or other radical solutions are the answer to what ails us in this moment. Some, like Jacobin Magazine, are calling for the nationalization and government takeover of Amazon and other companies.

But Amazon and Walmart, truckers and grocers, and the countless hard-working people who comprise our remarkable supply chain have been keeping the nation fed as the government struggles to meet its basic requirements in this pandemic.

Though many may take this time to attack our generally free market economy, the reality is that even as businesses and industries are decimated, our eventual turnaround will rely on the ingenuity of Americans across the country to reboot when the coronavirus pandemic passes.

It’s time to ignore the haters. Defeating COVID-19 requires joint efforts from both government and businesses—as well as communities and individuals. Private enterprise, as was the case in crises of the past, will play an essential role in getting America back on its feet.

COMMENTARY BY

Jarrett Stepman is a contributor to The Daily Signal and co-host of The Right Side of History podcast. Send an email to Jarrett. He is also the author of the new book, “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.”Twitter: .

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Kowtowing to China on Taiwan and the Coronavirus

Free People Take Responsibility and Solve Problems

Asymptomatic Cases Complicate the Containment of Coronavirus


A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Why Taiwan Hasn’t Shut Down Its Economy

As the Austrian school of economics demonstrates in the calculation theory of socialism, no central planning body has the capacity to organize society based on coercive mandates. The main reason is that the central planner is unable to obtain all the necessary information to organize society in this way, as information has subjective, creative, dispersed, and tacit qualities. This principle is fully applicable to the containment of a pandemic. Individual responsibility along with transparency of information are crucial to stopping a pandemic. Taiwan makes a very good case for how individualism and voluntary cooperation work effectively in resisting the coronavirus pandemic.

At the moment in Taiwan, the infection has been completely contained despite being one of the countries with the highest risk of suffering a pandemic, given that the Republic of China (ROC) is very close to the Chinese mainland (the People’s Republic of China (PRC)). Until January there were flights between Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, and the epicenter of Wuhan, China. However, as of March 21 there were only 153 infected at the same time that Europe, far away from the Chinese mainland, has more than ten thousand affected by the coronavirus. However, in Taiwan and other parts of Asia, including Singapore and Hong Kong, no massive mandatory quarantine or containment has been applied so far.

How did Taiwan achieve this?

The first cause of Taiwan’s success is the transparency of information, which stopped the rapid growth of infection. The containment in Taiwan has been carried out with relatively high transparency. As early as December 31 of last year the Ministry of Health and Welfare of Taiwan began to take serious the potential danger of the Wuhan pneumonia, informing citizens every day about the developing trends of the infection and its status. The information provided by the Taiwanese authority also includes whether the infected in Taiwan contracted the illness from overseas input, which helps people take measures to protect themselves in a timely manner. In the constant press conferences, the Taiwanese government provides different options and recommendation that people can choose to adopt voluntarily but are not imposed coercively. The abundant information provided continuously has allowed individuals to make their own informed and balanced decisions under conditions of uncertainty. In contrast, the governments of the European Union countries reacted slowly and as late as February did not provide sufficient information about the potential pandemic, making the situation difficult to handle.

The type of quarantines established by the Taiwanese government are mostly self-quarantines. The Taiwanese government acknowledges that it is crucial to rely on people’s voluntary actions to resist the pandemic. As we have noted above, most cases of contagion in Taiwan come from outside and are almost always detected at the border.Taiwanese people’s voluntary self-protection is effectively suppressing the spread of the coronavirus in their country, and forced quarantines are usually for the most serious cases, for example, the infected Taiwanese evacuated from the Chinese mainland.

One of the problems with the coronavirus has been maintaining a balance between economic activity and containing the infection. In this regard, different from what the southern European countries such as Italy and Spain do, the Taiwanese government’s policy is not to take preventive measures to stop the outbreak by impeding economic activities. Taking the schools as an example, the beginning of the course was delayed for two weeks at first. Currently schools’ policy is to take students, teachers, and workers’ temperaturesIf fevers are detected, classes in that school are suspended, but massive class suspensions do not occur. At the same time, online teaching is being encouraged, but is not being forced by the government. In many Taiwanese universities, online teaching is being promoted in order to let those who are not able to attend class in person to take courses. Although it is true that online education as a way to avoid infections has already been adopted in other countries, the peculiarity of Taiwan lies in the fact that it has not been imposed by government order. Not everyone is required to study online or telecommute, but there has been strong encouragement to do so. The government’s transparency of information has also given the Taiwanese enterprises the time they need to voluntarily prepare and adopt teleworking progressively. Other countries instead suddenly shut many businesses down through mandatory government orders, as Spain did on March 13, without giving enterprises and their workers time to prepare for quarantine.

The Taiwanese government is controlling the spread of the infection with flexible policies, which leave much room for individuals to take initiative and make their own decisions. Each individual can take the most appropriate measures for their own situation, having their own incentives to be cautious. Likewise, the fact that the Taiwanese citizens have been warned since the beginning of the infection has created a generalized awareness to make the necessary preparations and has given citizens enough time to assume that they must make changes in their lives in order to avoid being infected.

This flexibility in containment and transparency policies has led to a high degree of individual responsibility. Proof of this is not only in the population’s tendency to wear masks that the Taiwanese population, which can be observed in any means of communication, but also in the adoption of new ways of continuing daily activities so as to avoid contagion. Private sectors have also taken quick actions to protect their clients. Most residential buildings have at least one ethyl alcohol dispenser so that everyone who enters can disinfect his or her hands. For example, ethyl alcohol has been available in Uber cars for several weeks.

To conclude, with transparency and diligence the Taiwanese government has avoided many problems. The key is that the Taiwanese government and the Taiwanese people understand that the individual’s own responsibility and actions are essential to suppressing the coronavirus pandemic, not a mandatory massive shutdown. This is what the world needs to learn.

This article was reprinted from the Mises Institute. 

COLUMN BY

BRUTAL: 5 awful facts about the World Health Organization’s Dr. Tedros Adhanom

Rebel News published the following video titled BRUTAL: 5 awful facts about the World Health Organization’s Tedros Adhanom on its YouTube channel.

“WHO” the hell is Dr. Tedros Adhanom, the Director General of the World Health Organization, anyway?

© All rights reserved.

EDITORS NOTE: Go to https://www.RebelNews.com for more great Rebel content.

Florida Gets Full Stock of Medical Supplies, Media Barfs!

The media continues to vomit all over what’s left of their shredded credibility, criticizing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for doing too little for weeks now because he did not panic and shutdown the state, and now casting nasty aspersions at him for, somehow preparing too well.

It’s despicable and true.

The Florida media has harped incessantly that DeSantis is dawdling in not shutting down the state a la New York, California and others. Actually, he’s continuing to navigate the uncharted seas of requiring the closing of businesses and minimizing the infringement on both liberties and the workers who do not have to stay home — such as those in construction.

But now we find that DeSantis has been very aggressive and successful in getting most or all of the medical supplies it appears the state will need for the outbreak. And guess what? Shock of shockers, the media is again hammering him, apparently for being so successful.

In addition to being a Republican, DeSantis is a close ally of President Trump. That alone makes him open season for the Democrat media hounds. But he also seems to be taking a similar tack on handling the disease as the President, not leaping forward too far until the data requires it — if it requires it.

But DeSantis is also like Trump in that he has been successful in his first year and a half as Governor of Florida, getting through a range of issues that the Democrat media hate.

Along these lines, he was quick to order a thorough assessment of the state’s medical needs to deal with COVID-19 and an upcoming hurricane season. Florida requested substantial supplies through Direct Federal Assistance, making a strong case for these needs. It appears as though the state is getting everything it asked for, being stored in a giant, converted warehouse in the centralized city of Orlando, from which the supplies are being distributed throughout the state 24 hours per day.

Here’s the rather impressive list:

  • 5 mobile intensive care units
  • 5,000 ventilators
  • 5,000 hospital beds
  • 50,000 two oz. bottles of hand sanitizer
  • 250,000 coveralls
  • 500,000 gloves
  • 500,000 gowns
  • 500,000 collection kits
  • 100,000 16 oz. bottles of hand sanitizers
  • 150,000 Personal Protective Equipment kits, including coveralls, gowns, and goggles
  • 2 million N95 face masks

In addition, DeSantis and team managed to obtain significant medical supplies from private vendors. They were so successful, infact, that the federal government stepped in and diverted some of those supplies to New York City, whose governor and mayor had not been as successful as DeSantis with the private sector.

(Now however, it appears that some of those private contracts are unfulfilled as distributors from companies such as 3M are profiteering by getting states to bid against each other, or simply not delivering. Florida’s Emergency Management Director called it “chasing ghosts.” There will be a price to pay for that.)

Overall, this all is pretty good news for Floridians, as it suggests the state’s hospitals may not get overwhelmed, despite our large elderly population. Newspapers keep reporting worst-case scenarios and then talking to a nurse somewhere fishing for a quote about how bad it is or could get. But these stories, and model projections that have been shown to be unreliable, frequently don’t comport with underlying actual hard data from the state — such as above.

The Democrat media machine was unable to accept even the blatantly good news that Florida is getting what it asked for from the feds, and spun around to make unsubstantiated insinuations.

This Orlando Weekly headline was one of several I saw around the state, all the same. Headline: “Why did Florida get all the emergency supplies it requested when other states didn’t?” This reporter went so far as to call a hospital in Oklahoma, a state that has received less than requested, to fish for a comment from a nurse saying she was upset because they might not be able to care for their patients. (They will.)

This is the perfect spin because they can malign both President Trump and DeSantis at the same time — the two most hated political figures for the Florida media.

Imagine what these same “reporters” — Democrat operatives with a media platform — would be writing if DeSantis actually failed and got only a fraction of his request and the state was dangerously low on medical supplies. It takes literally no imagination.

Bias partisanship and sensationalism is a toxic combo to media credibility. It’s just not clear they really care anymore.

EDITORS NOTE: This Revolutionary Act column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Watch Live: Trump’s Press Briefing on COVID-19

Do you want to hear directly from President Donald Trump and his advisers about how the fight against COVID-19 is going?

NOTE: President’s COVID-19 briefing begins at the 18:45 mark:


In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>


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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal video is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Mike Lindell, Not the Media, Is the Hero

VIDEO: President Trump’s White House coronavirus briefing to promote corporate allies.


MyPillow CEO Michael Lindell, a self-made former crack addict, is going to transform 75% of his manufacturing capacity to make 10,000 cotton face masks per day by the end of the week, ramping up production to 50,000 a day in a month.

That sounds like a patriotic act to me, especially given that Lindell is undertaking the effort without being forced to do so by a federal agency. I hope the guy becomes a billionaire after this is all over.

NBC? Not so much. The headline on its “analysis” of Lindell’s remarks was “Trump fluffs MyPillow in Rose Garden.”

This matched the basic tone taken by a large faction within the political press. Why? Presumably because, at the end of his remarks, Lindell claimed that the Lord Almighty had helped elect Donald Trump president to save our once-beleaguered nation from its alleged depravations.


In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>


Listen, if there is a God, I hope He refrains from tipping the scales of presidential contests. But it’s not surprising to hear an evangelical Christian talking about the world this way—unless, that is, you’ve never met one.

Of course, anyone who shows anything less than hostility toward the president is immediately cast as a reactionary and their actions dismissed as questionable and self-serving.

Many of the CEOs who have stood with Trump at his press conferences—this week, or in weeks prior—hold varying religious and partisan beliefs. The press didn’t have similar qualms about the CEOs of CVS or Walgreens, because they kept their views to themselves.

Lindell is a villain for speaking his truth, as the kids say. Yet the real heroes of our age—White House political correspondents—are applauded for speaking theirs.

Yesterday, PBS’ Yamiche Alcindor, one of the many pundits masquerading as a dispassionate journalist, was chided by Trump during his presser.

Immediately, journalists, who are perhaps the most tribalistic group in American political life, rallied around her with fawning tributes to her bravery and victimhood (because Trump only lashes out at black women, apparently). #WeLoveYamiche is the hashtag, if you’re interested.

Philip Rucker of The Washington Post noted that Alcindor “routinely gets under his skin with probing questions,” as if rattling our irascible president was a noteworthy accomplishment, or an act of heroism, or, in and of itself, a reliable indication that a reporter is doing a good job.

The Post’s media critic, Erik Wemple, meanwhile, was forced to reimagine what Alcindor’s question might have sounded like had it been more coherent. And, simply because Trump had been rude to her, he claimed that Alcindor has now become “the symbol of American journalism.”

Yes, that’s the problem.

It’s Alcindor’s prerogative to try and bait the president, as she has done on numerous occasions over the past weeks, and it’s PBS’ prerogative to send her to ask questions that do absolutely nothing to help the public gain a better understanding of the government’s efforts to fight the coronavirus. But we should not forget that most of her narcissistic defenders are really talking about themselves.

Some journalists are indeed on the front lines of “war zones, refugee crises, genocides,” as CNN’s S. E. Cupp put it recently. But Alcindor, whose Twitter feed is littered with all kinds of absurdity, is not.

She risks absolutely nothing by asking the president questions. Like Jim Acosta, who titled his book, “Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America,” she is stealing valor.

The overall breadth and intensity of the anti-Trump press demonstrates there are few inhibitions and zero limitations on free press (though many in the media do advocate to limit your free speech). No one has been stopped from engaging, investigating, writing, or sharing their antagonism toward Trump. Nor should they.

Some lucky Americans, such as Alcindor, are afforded the benefit of challenging the president personally. That’s fine. I wish the press had exhibited the same level of reflexive antagonism toward every president. They don’t.

But Lindell’s political and religious views do not diminish his patriotic act, just as Alcindor’s ability to make the president mad does not transform her into a hero. It doesn’t even make her good at her job.

Perhaps our media culture has spent so much time politicizing the world that they’ve confused patriotism with victimhood. Or maybe they’re so obsessed with fighting the president that they can’t recognize that his fans might be capable of a good deed.

But if where you stand on Trump is your guiding definition of patriotism and heroism, your moral compass might be broken.

COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM

COMMENTARY BY

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at National Review and the author of “First Freedom: A Ride through America’s Enduring History With the Gun, From the Revolution to Today.” Twitter: .

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RELATED VIDEO: Dershowitz – Demonized by the Left for Defending Trump.


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This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

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The Real Reason For Hospital Shortages In The United States

An article published by the Kaiser Family Foundation on Wednesday showed the United States ranked eleventh in the world in per capita distribution of hospitals.  That article pointed out that the United States had a “lower hospital density than almost all comparable countries.”

Predictably, there are a slew of other hospital-related resources in which the United States is lacking, including the number of hospital-employed nurses and the number of physicians.  Although the Kaiser article does not detail the cause of these shortages, I do so in my new book, The Case for Free Market Healthcare.

The reason is actually quite simple and predictable: government intervention.

Although the details of the dynamics are too extensive to cover in this forum (I therefore urge you to explore them further in The Case for Free Market Healthcare), there are a few observations that can be gleaned regarding the degree of error with which we have approached healthcare delivery in our country.

First, government has been openly hostile to hospitals, particularly private hospitals, viewing them mostly as vehicles for greedy investors to make money off the sick and the poor.  This hostile and destructive attitude led to the passage of the Health Planning Resources Development Act in 1974 that actually rewarded states for implementing “certificate of need” (CON) programs to restrict the abilities of entrepreneurs to build hospitals.

Within a few years, forty-nine states enacted CON laws, and their models for governmental interference have since been shown not to lower prices for inpatient services and not improve hospital financial investment in communities as had been touted by the bill’s advocates.

But the damage still persists. To this day, despite the certificate of need program’s total failure, only thirteen states have rescinded it demonstrating the difficulty of undoing misguided legislation after it has been passed.

Government also has and continues to manipulate the market in ways that have destroyed projects aimed at improving the availability of hospital emergency rooms.  In 2018, the Medicare Payment Advisory Board advised Congress to cut reimbursements to freestanding emergency rooms operating within 6 miles of their parent hospitals by 30%.  Why? Because, according to MedPAC, “such systems would encourage providers to treat lower intensity rooms rather than urgent care centers.” Which begs the question: what business is it of Medicare, an insurance company for seniors and the disabled, where the market decides that it is more efficient to treat urgent and emergent patients?

As a result of MedPAC’s misguided market manipulations, over 250 shovel-ready or unfinished projects were canned, robbing America of greater healthcare access — and a lot more beds to deal with today’s crisis.

To be sure, the federal government has also engaged in a wide variety of activities that favor hospitals over other models, but in each of unnatural interventions, the consequences are the same:  government continues to impose delivery models upon the population and with it, its bias of how healthcare is provided to the consumer.

As a result, the market is not free to respond to consumer demands and cost-saving opportunities in an efficient manner.  Thus, we are never given the opportunity to develop the right number of hospitals and the correct number of physicians, nurses, physical therapists. . .you get the point.

Now, we are faced with the challenges of a pandemic where many, including President Trump, have observed that we were not ready with a coordinated response mechanism.  In point of fact, we weren’t even ready with a baseline set of operating resources with which to handle the larger numbers that would present themselves, and the blame lies squarely on government for attempting to impose upon us its ideas of what those numbers should be, instead of allowing the market to settle upon them by itself.

If it had allowed the market to freely operate, we would have more hospital capacity, more medical personnel and more supplies.

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