Locked-down in France!

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Dear friends,

Greetings from the south of France! Christina and I have been held under house arrest since March 17 for a crime the French government has yet to inform us we have committed. Virtually all flights into and out of Nice have been cancelled until further notice. The French president, Emmanuel Macron (whom the French call le petit Macaron, or Little Cookie), has abdicated his constitutional responsibilities to a 12-member Scientific Council, who argue amongst themselves but seem to have one thing very much in common: they love power.

And power is what the French lock down is all about. The interior minister yesterday announced that the security forces, police and gendarmes, have carried out over 9 million identity checks (Papers! Now! Achtung!), reminiscent of the Nazi occupation of France. Assuming that each stop involved two people, that’s nearly one-fourth of the entire population. The minister also revealed that police had issued more than 500,000 tickets. The minimum fine for traveling without your special government-issued “attestation” is 135 euros. Repeat offenders are fined ten times that amount; and egregious violators – more than 4 forbidden excursions – up to 5,000 euros and six months in jail. What a wonderful way to ensure the coronavirus gets spread to the prison system! One woman was given a ticket this week because she had to buy sanitary napkins. The police didn’t consider that to fall into the category of shopping for “necessities,” one of the few reasons they allow you out of your house.

But please don’t misunderstand me: Christina and I can’t complain. We are healthy, we are in love, and we have 16 beautiful acres to roam and work on. (Below is a picture of me and the Blue Trumpster, and another using my Stihl FS400 brush cutter to clear an area of our hillside I have neglected for nearly 15 years….!).

Also, the forced stay in France has allowed me to complete the final edit of my new political thriller, The Election Heist, which is still scheduled to be released in August by Post Hill Press. Have a look at the wide variety of endorsements on the amazon.com page, here. And don’t forget to pre-order the book. This is very important. Only by pre-orders do publishers these days determine the size of the print run. And the bigger the print run, the more bookstores that will carry the book.

If you think the Democrats are going to sit back and let Donald Trump get re-elected this November, think again! Although The Election Heist is an “entertainment,” it is based on very real, well-known flaws in our voting systems.

As we listen to the news and talk to our local shopkeeper, what I find astonishing is the ease with which the French have surrendered their freedoms to the state. And for what purpose? It remains the opinion of the Scientific Council – the opinion, mind you – that the lock-down is preventing the collapse of the [Medicare-for-all-style] public health system, and that alone justifies shutting down the whole country and most of the economy and unleashing the police state.

Hardest hit, of course, are small business owners and the self-employed. It also just so happens that this part of the population tends to be the most conservative, perhaps because they depend on themselves for their livelihood and not a big employer or the government. Do you see a pattern here?

Oh well. We have been keeping up with our Lectio Divina during Lent, and look forward to celebrating our Risen Lord on Easter – by illegally lunching with neighbors! (Ssshht!)

“Surely he will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence….” (Psalm 91)

Yours (still) in freedom,

Ken

PS: And don’t forget to have a look at the amazon.com page for The Election Heist and to pre-order the book!

© All rights reserved.

For all articles by Ken Timmerman please CLICK HERE.

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

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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:

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 >>

  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!

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

Studies: The Shutdown Is NOT Lives vs. Dollars, It’s Lives vs. Lives

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“If you’d like to die for the sake of the economy you go right ahead and do that. I, on the other hand, have no intention of sacrificing myself or any of my family or friends for the economy.”

This common sentiment, expressed on Facebook, is the wrong formulation. It is the false equation of money or lives. It’s not only wrong, it’s deadly.

Here’s how: Unemployment increases the death rate. This is a known truism among economists — who are not much en vogue right now but economics really needs to be. It turns out, this correlation has been studied extensively since at least the 1970s. Maybe earlier. That it is true is not in doubt. The only question is how much does it increase deaths. What’s the ratio?

According to one meta-analysis of 42 studies involving 20 million people — I told you there are a lot — the risk of death increases 63 percent when you lose your job. Please note, not 63 percentage points, but 63 percent from a fairly small percentage. However, when applied to raw numbers the totals become surprising, as we will get to shortly.

From the meta-analysis from National Center for Biotechnology Information abstract: “We extracted 235 mortality risk estimates from 42 studies, providing data on more than 20 million persons. The mean hazard ratio (HR) for mortality was 1.63 among HRs adjusted for age and additional covariates. The mean effect was higher for men than for women. Unemployment was associated with an increased mortality risk for those in their early and middle careers, but less for those in their late-career.”

A controlled study at the University of Helsinki concluded: “In a recent study, an excess mortality of 47 percent was observed among men unemployed or working part-time for reasons other than illness after adjustment for age, geographic region, social class, cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, weight and known pre-existing disease.” So this study backed out as many factors as possible to isolate the impact of just being unemployed.

There are mountains of these studies. It’s astounding that apparently none of our intrepid media members have ventured to search this out and report on it.

So what are the actual numbers? Well that’s a lot trickier. The range I’ve found in this research goes from a few thousand up to 37,000 deaths for every one percent increase in the unemployment rate.

And it’s dicey because even the unemployment rate is iffy being dependent on the labor participation rate — the total number of people employed divided by the total size of the labor force. When people get discouraged and stop looking for work, they are no longer counted as unemployed because they are no longer in the labor force. Those non-workers who are not labeled unemployed anymore would probably also have some increase in the death rate, but I can find no studies of that segment, perhaps because it is so malleable.

The high end number of estimated deaths comes from a 2011 textbook called “The American Economy: How It Works And How It Doesn’t,” by Wade L. Thomas and Robert B. Carson. Citing Bluestone, Harrison and Baker’s book, “The Causes and Consequences of Economic Dislocation,” they conclude that for every one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, there are 37,000 deaths — the largest single source coming from heart attacks, presumably from stress, but another 1,000 from suicides and another 650 from homicides. The rest are not categorized, likely due to a lack of underlying data.

On the lower end, if you take data from the Great Recession, you find that the unemployment rate in 2015 had returned to its level before the financial crisis and downturn in 2009. (Remember, this lowered unemployment rate was with a greatly diminished labor participation rate, which is why it did not “feel” like a strong economy.) In those seven years, inclusive, there was an increase of 195,000 deaths in total, which means an average of 27,900 deaths per year. The unemployment was different each year, so we cannot say how much correlates to a percentage point, but clearly much less than 37,000. But this is back-of-the-napkin figuring and the actual studies are more reliable.

What all these studies conclude, to varying degrees, is that this economic shutdown will, absolutely, kill Americans just as COVID-19 is killing Americans. The rate of death due to forced unemployment is unknown, and maybe cannot be known, although I hope it will be researched a lot more after this unique event so we can understand the trade-offs next time.

Economists such as Larry Kudlow use a rule of thumb of 10,000 deaths for every one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate. That doesn’t seem unreasonable given the study ranges. The U.S. unemployment rate may surpass 30% in the second quarter of 2020 due to the broad shutdown. That’s higher than the Great Depression.

So if we apply the 10,000 rule just for ease of estimating, and start with a 3 percent unemployment rate, we can estimate that the 27 percentage point increase in unemployment could cost 270,000 lives over the course of a year. That is now much higher than the estimates of COVID-19’s death toll.

Few people think we will be shut down at this level for a year, but what will be the rate of increase once we re-start? That will not be overnight. We can see how, right now, almost assuredly the shutdown itself is taking American lives and will take thousands more.

Unfortunately Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that we cannot start to “relax” social distancing until there are “no new cases, no deaths.” This is a horrific formulation — the syndrome that arises from someone who is only looking at one side of an equation and who’s held the same job since 1984.

Fauci’s formulation would keep us either in a lockdown or social distancing that includes closed restaurants and public areas, for many months or even years, which would undoubtedly mean multiple times more deaths from the cure than from the disease.

So the proper formulation is not to suggest we are trading money for lives. Everyone can feel quite righteous about that — particularly if they are not living paycheck to paycheck. But clearly the idea that we would be “dying for the economy” is just ignorant.

The proper formulation is that we are trading lives for lives. We are trying to save lives from COVID-19, but we are costing lives from unemployment. How many is unknown, but as death estimates from the coronavirus in the U.S. continue to fall, it makes the correct formulation, with perhaps better numbers than I have gleaned, all the more critical.

The question our leaders need to ask and get an answer for is: What do the death toll estimates and unemployment numbers look like if we transition to practicing social distancing, no handshaking, no major events, but otherwise everyone younger than, say, 65 returns to work — including restaurants and retail — while those over 65 or with preexisting conditions remain self-quarantined until we have very effect treatments or a vaccine?

At some point, we will be killing more people by closing the economy than we are saving by closing the economy — if we are not already there.

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

A Physician Investigates: Should You Take Hydroxychloroquine?

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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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Covid-19 and Easter Hope

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These are very trying times. There is an enemy out there at the microscopic level, wreaking all kinds of havoc in people’s hearts and minds and lives. The economic consequences alone of the coronavirus could possibly be felt for years to come.

The big problem in life, of course, is the threat of death.

But the coronavirus is not going to cancel Easter—though it may cancel our traditional celebrations of it. But Easter hope defangs the threat of the coronavirus because Jesus has taken the sting out of death.

After a bee stung a boy one day, his young brother was frightened as the insect continued hovering around him. But his father told him not to worry—there was only one stinger in that bee, and his older brother had already received it.

Jesus is our older brother, and He has taken the sting of death upon Himself. As the Apostle Paul would say, “Oh death, where is thy sting?”

Easter hope is not just a pious sentiment. There is ample reason to believe that Jesus bodily rose from the dead, historically.

For Christian television, I once interviewed Dr. Dana Harris of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in the Chicago area. She told me, “Christianity rests on the historical proclamation that Jesus rose from the dead.”

Harris added, “I would say that it’s virtually impossible to maintain the idea that we can separate religious truths from historical facts and it has to do with the nature of Christianity. Christianity is fundamentally dependent on historical truths. In other words, if Jesus is not resurrected from the dead, then we don’t have Christianity.”

But what about the idea, promoted by skeptics, that perhaps this was just a legend from the ancient world? One man has an interesting take on that. Lee Strobel, former legal affairs editor for The Chicago Tribune, received his legal training at Yale Law School.

When his wife started going to church, he worked hard to disprove the faith, so he could reclaim her, and the two could live happily ever after, as agnostics.

But his quest to disprove Christianity had an unexpected result: He became a believer in the very thing he tried to falsify. He wrote all this up in his classic book, since made into a motion picture, The Case for Christ.

In an interview for D. James Kennedy Ministries, Strobel noted, “One very powerful evidence is that we have a report to the resurrection of Jesus that has been dated back by scholars to within months of His death. So, what we have is, in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, starting in verse 3, a creed, a report of the early church that says, Jesus died—why? For our sins, He was buried, and the third day He rose from the dead. And then it mentions specific individuals and groups to whom He appeared.”

Strobel adds, “And if that creed developed so early, the beliefs that make up that creed go back even earlier. Probably, one of the greatest classical historians who ever lived, A.N. Sherwin- White of Oxford, studied the rate at which legend grew up in the ancient world. And he determined that the passage of two generations of time is not even enough for a legend to grow up and wipe out a solid core of historical truth.” With the Christian reports of the resurrection, notes Strobel, “We’ve got a ‘news flash from ancient history.’ So that is a very powerful bit of evidence.”

The interesting thing about the resurrection of Jesus is that the earliest skeptics of the event were the disciples themselves. They were only convinced because Jesus appeared to them over and over. Then they became so convinced, they went out and became unstoppable in their proclamation—in some cases, even when it meant they would be put to death for their testimony.

As Lee Strobel puts it, “We have nine ancient sources inside and outside the New Testament confirming and corroborating  that the conviction of the disciples is that they encountered the resurrected Jesus. That is an avalanche of historical data. When you consider most of what we know from ancient history is from one or two sources, but nine ancient sources inside and outside the New Testament [corroborating the disciples’ conviction], that is a convincing amount of evidence that convinced me that the disciples encountered the resurrected Jesus. It changed their lives, it changed everything about them.”

Covid-19 may have set the world’s teeth at edge. And ultimately it is a reminder of our mortality. We are not going to escape this world alive. But thank God for Jesus, the elder brother, who has taken the sting out of death for those who believe.

Nothing, including Covid-19, will ever cancel Easter.

© All rights reserved.

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

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….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

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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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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.

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Where Will the First Coronavirus Vaccine Come From?

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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

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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?

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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

Why Accepting Even Two Million Covid-19 Deaths May be Better Than a National Lockdown

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We’ve heard much during the Wuhan flu crisis about a “worst case scenario” of two million dead Americans, a staggering number. But missing from the national conversation is something equally important:

What’s the worst case scenario given our present course of action, largely locking down the country and freezing life like an insect stuck in amber?

What if worse coming to worst means a great depression, descent into tyranny, millions more dead from other causes and a permanently impoverished nation?

Almost the entire virus debate has centered around whether the experts are correct about the infectivity and virulence of the disease and in their projections (which have often been drastically wrong). But even if we assume that the experts having the government’s ear — and there are dissenters who don’t — are absolutely inerrant in their expressed judgments, there’s a problem with just “listening to the health professionals’” prescriptions:

Like most everyone else, these individuals have only a narrow range of expertise; they are epidemiologists, virologists, infectious disease specialists, etc.

They are not epidemiologists-cum-philosophers/political scientists/sociologists/economists.

So they provide counsel on how to achieve a narrow goal contemplated from a narrow perspective. This is not a put-down. It is their job to do just that.

Congruent with this, these experts consider the health related consequences of the disease, not the civilizational-health related consequences of their cure — which may be worse than the disease.

The latter is the job of statesmen, commentators, academics and the wider population. All these groups, unfortunately, are found wanting in this.

Unemployment claims are at a record high, but I don’t have to tell you how the current lockdowns are ravaging our economy. Many businesses and jobs will never come back, yet this concern not only is just the iceberg’s tip, it isn’t even, as critics may say, just about “money” — because money isn’t just about “money.”

Money represents resources, people’s capacity to obtain food, shelter, clothing, health care, education and everything else that preserves life and makes it worth living. Note here that poverty is associated with a host of negative health and health-related risks, such as a higher incidence of manifold diseases, depression, anxiety, stress related disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, domestic violence, child abuse and crime.

Yet even more must be considered. Remember now that if the following seems radical, it is a worst case scenario. And if we can consider the worst case scenario on one side of the equation, we must for balance and perspective consider the worst case scenario on the other side as well.

What if locking down the nation means causing a great depression lasting a decade or more?

What if this economic disaster leads, as history teaches it can, to the rise of demagogues and loss of freedom?

What if there are consequently millions more deaths from other causes due to economic malaise and descent toward tyranny?

What if, in other words, we essentially destroy our civilization as we know it?

Will it have been worth it to ensure there’d be fewer Wuhan virus deaths — even two million, shocking though that number is? Civilizational destruction, something permanent, would be a steep price to pay to combat a pandemic, something temporary.

Know that I’m not insensitive to the vulnerable’s plight. Near and dear to me are two people in an extreme high-risk category and a handful of others somewhat at risk, and I have an in-law physician relative who contracted the virus, began treating herself with hydroxychloroquine and is currently hospitalized. But I also recognize the truth of economist Thomas Sowell’s observation that sometimes in life “there are no solutions; there are only tradeoffs.” Are we making the right tradeoff now?

I’ll emphasize that my worst case scenario isn’t at all fanciful. Many are concerned about a depression resulting from our lockdowns and about the erosion of freedom as people, as people will, trade liberty for security. In fact, The New York Times, of all entities, recently ran a headline warning, “For Autocrats, and Others, Coronavirus Is a Chance to Grab Even More Power.”

“Leaders around the world have passed emergency decrees and legislation expanding their reach during the pandemic,” the paper writes in its subhead before asking, “Will they ever relinquish them?”

Anyone who grasps the nature of power — and of the power hungry — won’t bet the answer is yes.

Now ask yourself: If the given amount of power is currently being seized, what would happen in an infinitely worse situation such as lockdown-caused depression and social upheaval?

Speaking of autocrats, the mainstream media have rightly been castigated for doing despotic China’s bidding and touting its “response” to the virus; never mind that China created this problem and that its response’s immediate effectiveness is actually unknown because Beijing lies like it breathes. But what if China has responded rightly, not in its tyrannical measures but in one respect?

What if Beijing’s apparent decision to get people back to work and accept virus related deaths leaves it stronger over the long term? There is some possibility, a scary one, that China could emerge from this as the world’s superpower — a status it craves — under our worst case scenario.

Also consider Sweden. That it continues commerce and life largely unchanged and is striving for “herd immunity” may be instructive. Are we just prolonging the inevitable?

Of course, one lockdown motivation is to slow the virus’s spread so that hospitals aren’t overwhelmed. But Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Wednesday that there won’t be a true turning point until a vaccine is developed. Yet some say this could be 18 months away, an eternity in lockdown terms.

In the meantime, restoring normal commerce and freedom without experiencing increased virus contagion appears unlikely. But since such restoration would be beneficial, focusing on developing herd immunity while pursuing wide-scale testing and the insulating of vulnerable groups may be the wiser course.

Remember, too, that we’ve been through this before. During the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19, 675,000 Americans died; adjusted for today’s US population this amounts to a bit more than two million people — exactly our worst case scenario number.

We weathered that pandemic, of course. But people were far different then, and, correspondingly, we’re far different politically today. If President Trump advocated the Swedish model and there were hundreds of thousands of deaths, never mind two million, every one would be laid at his doorstep and he’d likely be ousted from office (as it is, it was already suggested last month that Trump may be guilty of “negligent homicide”). The same could befall any governor acting likewise, never mind that he might have helped save the future — because the alternate future would never be known.

This is why I know certain things. No, I don’t have definitive answers; this is a fluid, serious situation with many unknowns, and we all should act responsibly and not claim knowledge we don’t possess. But I do know some questions, as posed above, that should be asked and maturely debated. I also know this won’t likely happen, given man’s nature in general and the state of our politics and media in particular.

This is why we’d better hope for a highly efficacious Wuhan virus treatment — and fast. Because if we’re going to lockdown our nation for months on end, well, we may learn the hard way that we might as well have just thrown away the key.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Gab (preferably) or Twitter, or log on to SelwynDuke.com.

© All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: COVID-19 and Prisons A Complicated Issue That Does Not Need Simplistic “Solutions”

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

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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.

PODCAST: DHS Chief Chad Wolf Hopes to Have 450 Miles of Border Wall Built by End of Year

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Chad Wolf, acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, joined The Daily Signal Podcast at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year to detail progress on President Donald Trump’s wall at the U.S. border with Mexico. Read a lightly edited transcript of the interview, posted below, or listen to the podcast:

Plus: Andy Ngo, the journalist who was attacked by Antifa last June, joins the podcast to reflect on socialism versus the American dream. We also cover these stories:

  • American hospitals struggle to keep up amid the coronavirus pandemic.
  • New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo shares reasons for hope as New York faces COVID-19.
  • California loans 500 ventilators to the national stockpile.

The Daily Signal Podcast is available on Ricochet, Apple Podcasts, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be foundat DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at letters@dailysignal.com. Enjoy the show!

Rachel del Guidice: We are joined today on The Daily Signal Podcast by Chad Wolf. He’s the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Chad, thank you so much for being with us today.

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 >>

Chad Wolf: I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.

Del Guidice: So Chief Rodney Scott, who works at the U.S. Border Patrol, he recently announced that 126 miles of the border has been completed. There are 213 miles under construction and 414 miles on pre-construction. Can you tell us about those landmarks that have been reached?

Wolf: Yeah, it’s very exciting. At the end of this calendar year we hope to have 450 miles built. So that’s [a] new wall system, border wall system. That’s new capability for the Border Patrol agents that they’ve never had before.

So we’re replacing 6-, 7-, 8-foot-high 1970s-era landing mat fence with bollard fencing that’s 8- to 30-feet-high. But it’s not only that physical infrastructure, it’s the cameras, the roads, the lighting, the fiber optic cables. It’s that whole border wall system that gives them capabilities that they’d never had before.

And again, as I go down to the border and I talked to the Border Patrol agents, first thing I asked them was, “What do you need to secure the border?” It’s an effective border wall system is the first thing that they tell me.

Del Guidice: Can you tell us a little bit about all the work that went [into] reaching those landmarks? You all have been busy making this happen. Can you give a little bit of a sneak peek into everything that went into this whole project?

Wolf: Sure. It starts with our operators. So the requirements of where that border wall system will be placed along the southwest border. In what manner? What are the heights, what are the features of it? It all starts with our operators.

So CBP, Customs and Border Protection, takes the operators, takes their input, puts it into what we call our Border Security Improvement Plan, our BSIP. We share that with Congress and then we fund that.

We work with Congress to fund that and I think what’s been actually remarkable from President [Donald] Trump is, as Congress would not fund that or choose to fund it in very small slices, he used the authority that Congress had given him to find additional funding.

So we have about $15 billion today that we continue to build border wall funding. It’s going to include over 700 miles, as I indicated, [we] hope to have 450 [miles] done at the end of this calendar year and we’ll continue to build and continue to work with Congress and others to make sure that that capability and system is where it needs to be along the southwest boarder.

Del Guidce: In your travels to the border as well as throughout the country and all the work that you do, is there a particular story or incident that really captures the severity of the situation and why we need to work on our southern border?

Wolf: Yeah. I was in Tucson on the hundredth mile that we put in, I believe that was in January, and we were in an area that we were replacing what we call Normandy barriers, they’re vehicle barriers.

It’s basically an X, it’s about 4 and a half feet tall. You can jump over it, you can go under it, you go around it very easy. We were replacing that with 30-foot-high bollard wall.

I was talking to the chief there and asking what type of traffic … came through. And that was one of their busiest areas because it was just right across the river. The river is not very large there. And they were saying that individuals would just come over in droves.

What that would require them to do is to surge Border Patrol agents there. And as they did … the adversary would do that for particular reason and then they would sneak in other individuals further down the line.

So we want to make sure that we’re able to make sure we get Border Patrol agents where they need to be. We put up physical infrastructure to funnel them to certain places that are easier to patrol, easier to apprehend individuals. And so that story really hit home to me.

… I’m sure we can show you some photos, as you look at the 4-foot-high wall and then the 30-foot-high, it’s that impedance and denial.

So a lot of individuals talk to me about how walls could be defeated, and I don’t disagree, although this wall was very difficult to defeat. This is all about impedance and denial.

It may take someone seven minutes, eight minutes, 10 minutes, 12 minutes to get above and around that wall. What that allows us to do is [place] the Border Patrol agents waiting for him.

There’s no more hopping the fence in 30 seconds and then getting away into the interior of the country. We have a number of capabilities there that allows that Border Patrol agent be waiting on those individuals that are trying to, again, illegally enter the country.

Del Guidice: I actually was in Tucson about two weeks ago and we met with Sheriff [Mark] Lamb, Pinal County, and he does a lot of work with drug trafficking there.

Something he mentioned when we were talking with him is how a lot of times when Border Patrol is out working, if an illegal immigrant is caught in the desert, they don’t have enough food or water. They call 911, Border Patrol is called. And he said a lot of Americans don’t realize the amount of humanitarian work the Border Patrol does. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Wolf: It’s actually fascinating and, as you said, … humanitarians are what our Border Patrol agents end up being. They do a number of rescues every single day, rescuing individuals that are making this very dangerous journey.

And we have to think about the individuals that are coming across the border. They’re likely being smuggled from a transnational criminal organization that they’ve paid thousands of dollars. They’ve probably been on a very dangerous journey for many, many weeks, maybe even a month.

They come to our southwest border. Those individuals just turn them over. And so you’re in the middle of the desert, and most cases are in the wilderness, … most cases [are] not near a city. And you’re not sure what to do. So you … get lost, you run out of water, you do a number of things. And Border Patrol are out there saving individuals, again, with local law enforcement.

I will say that our local law enforcement, our sheriffs along the southwest border are also on the front lines of this. It’s their communities that these individuals are coming into either legally or illegally that they have to deal with.

But Border Patrol agents every day are rescuing individuals crossing the river, in the desert, running out of water and the like. So it’s an incredible mission that they do.

[They’re] not only protecting the border, protecting the communities along the border, and protecting the American men and women, but also rescuing migrants that perhaps didn’t really know what they were signing up for as they come into the country.

Del Guidice: On the topic of the humanitarian crisis, I know you do a lot of response with human trafficking issues like that. Can you talk a little bit about the response of Border Patrol when it comes to human trafficking?

Wolf: Sure. What we saw last year is a number of growing incidents of human trafficking. And I think where this really hit home for me is [with] an operation that we discovered. Our ICE Homeland Security investigators discovered along with Border Patrol what we call child recycling.

And these were individuals, again, South of the border, that would use a child to come into the country because, the way our law is written, if you come into the country with a child at that time, you were released into the interior of the country.

So what we saw is an individual coming in with a child, we would see that same child perhaps several weeks later with another adult claiming to be their parent. And then a couple of weeks later, same child.

After time we started investigating and looking at this and it was a ring where they would come in and the child would be sent back to central America, Mexico, and again, using that. So it’s very, very disturbing. Obviously, it’s very, very dangerous for that child. And again, it’s exploiting our immigration system.

So ICE, HSI [Homeland Security Investigations], Border Patrol, they deal with that every day. Human trafficking overall is a very big issue for the department. We released our first ever human trafficking strategies two months ago. We continue to look at that and we continue to do more ICE Homeland Security Investigation. That’s what they do. They investigate human trafficking.

I will say some of the laws that we see across this country, particularly in New York, [are] very troubling where we’ve talked about sanctuary policies or the lack of information sharing with DHS and it impacts enforcing criminal laws like human trafficking, where our law enforcement agents don’t have the information they need to do their job. And it’s very dangerous.

Del Guidice: Well, Secretary Wolf, thank you so much for joining us today on The Daily Signal Podcast.

Wolf: Thank you.

PODCAST BY

Rachel del Guidice

Rachel del Guidice is a congressional reporter for The Daily Signal. She is a graduate of Franciscan University of Steubenville, Forge Leadership Network, and The Heritage Foundation’s Young Leaders Program. Send an email to Rachel. Twitter: @LRacheldG.

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.

5 Things to Know About This Anti-Malaria Drug’s Effect on COVID-19

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The federal government has stockpiled 29 million pills of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as the best known way to treat active cases of COVID-19, and thousands of patients in New York will take it.

But using the Food and Drug Administration-approved drug to treat COVID-19 has sparked an intense political controversy.

President Donald Trump, who has publicly touted hydroxychloroquine since March 19, said of the drug Sunday: “If it does work, it would be a shame if we didn’t do it early. I’ve seen things I sort of like; so what do I know, I’m not a doctor.”

Axios first reported on an internal dispute between White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who is bullish on the drug, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, who is concerned that only “anecdotal evidence” suggests the drug is effective against COVID-19.

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 >>

Ohio state Rep. Tavia Galonski, a Democrat who represents parts of Akron, said she would make a complaint to The Hague that Trump is guilty of crimes against humanity for promoting a drug before all the facts are known.

“I can’t take it anymore. I’ve been to The Hague. I’m making a referral for crimes against humanity tomorrow,” Galonski tweeted Sunday. “Today’s press conference was the last straw. I know the need for a prosecution referral when I see one.”

The Ohio Democrat’s tweet was in response to one from Go-Blue-44, who has fewer than 600 followers, saying: “And an invitation to The Hague for crimes against humanity for pushing a drug that hasn’t been tested for coronavirus patients.”

The Food and Drug Administration has expedited use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 patients; most other countries also allow the drug to be used to treat the new disease.

Aside from political musings, here are some facts to know about hydroxychloroquine.

1. What Do Studies Say?

Studies so far have shown varying degrees of promise in using hydroxychloroquine against the coronavirus, said Dr. Kevin Pham, a medical doctor and contributor to The Daily Signal.

Pham told The Daily Signal that existing studies are “small or poorly controlled.”

“The results are promising, but leave lots of questions,” he said.

One French study found that COVID-19 patients treated with a combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin recovered more quickly than others.

However, that study involved only 36 patients, and just 20 took the medicine, considered a small sample.

The French study also didn’t look at patients in intensive care units. Most patients who took the drug improved. However, one patient from the group tested positive after taking the medicine.

A more recent study out of China used a larger but still fairly limited sample of 62 people. Half took the anti-malaria drug, the other half did not.

The 62 patients were treated for five days, their fevers and cough monitored. The study found 25 of the 31 patients who were given the drug improved, versus 17 patients in the control group of 31.

The study’s authors determined that additional research should be done.

Another study out of France, with a larger sample of 80 coronavirus patients, found improvements in all but one patient who used the drug.

2. When Will We Know More?

New York, the hardest hit state in the country, will provide hydroxychloroquine to 4,000 COVID-19 patients. The University of Albany School of Public Health is observing the patients who take the drug.

New York University, meanwhile, is setting up clinical trials, enrolling 2,000 adults at six sites, The New York Post reported.

“Thousands are taking it in New York, and we should know if hydroxychloroquine is effective within about two weeks,” Dr. Lee Gross, a family doctor in Florida, told The Daily Signal. “It doesn’t mean we throw caution to the wind. But we should have a relatively good idea based on New York.”

Gross noted that so far the “data is very limited.”

“In a perfect world, we would do more controlled studies, but you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want,” Gross said. “We are facing a pandemic now. To have all the information we want could take six to eight weeks.”

3. How Do You Take the Drug?

Hydroxychloroquine has been around to fight malaria since the 1950s. It is also used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. So it’s not new on the market.

Individuals usually take a total of 10 pills as part of a four- to 10-day regimen. Typically, the dose is two pills for five days.

This would be followed by taking azithromycin for three days, Gross said.

Gross said he anticipates that one day the drug, if effective against the coronavirus, could become like Tamiflu, an antiviral medicine taken at the earliest signs of the flu for prevention.

“There have been recent articles that this is not effective for the critically ill,” Gross said of hydroxychloroquine. “That might be the case. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t explore this when it’s in the early stages.”

“In India, health care workers take hydroxychloroquine as a preventative measure. I’m assuming, if the data pans out, this may be like Tamiflu, which you have to take 24 to 48 hours after the first symptoms, or it’s useless.”

4. What Are the Side Effects?

“What do we have to lose?” Trump has asked.

For one thing, hydroxychloroquine does have some quite serious side effects.

Those side effects reportedly include fatal heart arrhythmia, vision loss, ear ringing and vomiting, headaches, dizziness, stomach pain, weight loss, and mood changes.

But the medication can be obtained only through prescription, so patients can’t legally access it without medical supervision.

Given that use of hydroxychloroquine is under medical control, the side effects aren’t a major concern. Disappointing the public is a potentially larger problem, Pham said.

“The main downside would be giving people false hope,” Pham said.

5. What Do Respiratory Specialists Say?

Respiratory specialists recommend the use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19, but with caveats.

The American Thoracic Society, a medical society specializing in respiratory diseases, led an international task force researching treatments for COVID-19 that released guidelines Monday.

One guideline was to prescribe hydroxychloroquine to hospitalized patients who have COVID-19.

This only applies, the report says, when “shared decision-making is possible,” “data can be collected for interim comparisons of patients who received hydroxychloroquine … versus those who did not,” “the illness is sufficiently severe to warrant investigational therapy,” and “the drug is not in short supply.”

Dr. Kevin C. Wilson, chief of guidelines and documents at the American Thoracic Society, said existing research is flawed, but nevertheless worthwhile.

“We suggest that, if the drug is prescribed, that it be done in the context of data collection for research,” Wilson said. “We believe that in urgent situations like a pandemic, we can learn while treating by collecting real-world data. … Thus, the bottom line is, whether hydroxychloroquine …  confer benefits to patients with COVID-19 are unanswered questions.”

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.

RELATED ARTICLES:

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One Millennial’s Guide to COVID-19: 8 Ways to Embrace Our New Normal

The Importance of Optimism Amid COVID-19 Crisis

In Hiding COVID-19 at First, China Chose Reputation Over Saving Lives

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.

Mona Eltahawy and the New Feminist Extremism

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For months, I’ve been wanting to have a conversation about Mona Eltahawy and the new feminist extremism she embodies. There were a number of women’s platforms I could have published this piece on that all cater to women’s issues.

I chose Clarion Project because what I’m about to discuss is not just a niche women’s rights or feminist issue; it’s an issue of extremism.

Since 2018, I’ve broadened the subjects I cover from Islamist extremism, which wants to crush the West, to other types of extremism, including:

  • Neo-Nazis, who want to crush non-Eurocentric races
  • Antifa, which wants to crush White Supremacists (and seemingly a lot of others)
  • And now, feminists, who want to crush men

I can’t ignore that a serious branch of feminism has devolved into another form of extremism.

I can’t ignore that feminism, as it’s represented today, is both psychologically (and sometimes physically) violent.

Feminist extremism isn’t just contempt of men, it’s annihilation

The new feminist extremism didn’t pop out of a vacuum. It’s been here for a while, and it’s been building. It found footing over the arc of time across movements in the last century, including most recently when both well-meaning men and women celebrated phrases like, “The future is female.”

What space is there for men in a future paradigm where the notion of equality and freedom for one demographic is rooted in the annihilation of another? When society embraces phrases like this, they’re unconsciously drafting a blueprint that wipes out the reality of another gender altogether.

Just as I and many others have long advocated for the rights of emerging women — little girls — so too will I now speak about what kind of chaotic, gender-oppressive world we’re creating for our boys.

Half the time, depending on where you’re situated, you’re not even allowed to talk about gender anymore. But let’s talk about gender anyway — briefly.

Much of today’s feminism has abandoned the inherent nature of the feminine. Feminist extremism, specifically, has taken the strengths of what it means to be a woman — our ability to connect, create community, our intuition, our ability to nurture  — and distorted it.

The best way to summarize the new feminist extremism is something I overheard today by a liberal woman who described this type of feminism as a “Hulk Smash.” I couldn’t have said it better.

And this brings me to Mona Eltahawy.

Mona is not some flaming-haired goddess of women’s rights. She is brutality embodied

In December 2019, Vice News featured an article titled, “Mona Eltahawy Would Like You to Fuck Right Off With Your Civility Politics.” The subheading quoting Mona, read, “I refuse to allow those who don’t recognize my full humanity to expect politeness of me.”

OK, we’ve heard this before from folks like Linda Sarsour, who happily dehumanizes Israelis in order to champion Palestinians. This is supremacy; a theme that keeps popping up when one group demands a space at the expense of another.

Yet, the opposite of the opposite is still a mirror reflection of the original — meaning, hyper-aggression, rage and hostility toward men (or one’s ideological opponents) is no different than the brutality shown to women throughout history.

True power rests in creating a new paradigm, not just a foil of a broken, old one. True leadership is inclusivity, creating community and  truth … but also grace. These are inherent female strengths, and yet none of these are characteristics of extreme feminists.

Flipping someone off is neither powerful, nor is it leadership.

As much as I’ve tried to ignore all this, I finally couldn’t. Recently I saw Mona’s brand of feminist extremism featured on Fuuse, a publication belonging to Deeyah Khan.

Deeyah has produced documentaries reaching out to white supremacists and neo-Nazis, so clearly she understands extremism. And that is exactly why it’s so baffling to see Fuuse  — an Emmy-winning and twice BAFTA-nominated media company — glorify another form of extremism.

If we’re going to be leaders in preventing or countering extremism, we need to be able to spot patterns.

The world is rapidly evolving, and it’s not going to spell things out for us

The extremism of tomorrow is not necessarily going to be the neatly packaged extremism of yesterday. It is our duty to spot the patterns and connect the dots, to recognize there is an undeniable new form of extremism rooted in gender identities.

Extremism is often rooted in trauma, and feminist extremism is no different. Mona admitted it herself when in her Vice interview above, she shares, “I always say I was traumatized into feminism.”

As we see with Islamists, neo-Nazis, Antifa  members and other extremists, rather than work through their traumas, these people attach themselves to an ideology, often gain platforms and tend to scream louder than everyone else in the room.

Given that in our current media climate the loudest voices get heard, it’s no surprise that the most psychologically violent, hyper-dominant personalities are framed as icons.

We can do better. We need to do better. I don’t expect Mona to change, but we need to get better at seeing what we’re looking at.

COLUMN BY

Shireen Qudosi

Shireen Qudosi is Clarion Project’s National Correspondent.

RELATED STORIES

Linda Sarsour Uses Nazi Tactics to Dehumanize Israelis

Mona Eltahawy Has An Interesting Definition of Free Expression

Feminism, Hijab and Hypocrisy

EDITORS NOTE: This Clarion Project video is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.