PODCAST: Visit Ground Zero of Virus Response with DHS’s Chad Wolf

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Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf has his hands full with the coronavirus, but there’s one group of people he’s not about to go into disaster relief mode without: clergy. Find out why he made them “essential personnel” as well as the challenges he’s encountered with a full-blown, 50-state emergency.

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EDITORS NOTE: This FRC-Action podcast is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Notre Dame prof hails Islamic law, asks international law judges to consider “referring to parts of Sharia”

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“Notre Dame’s Emilia Justyna Powell, an associate professor of political science and concurrent associate professor of law, an expert in both international law and the Islamic legal tradition, traveled to many Muslim-majority nations to research how the two systems work together in practice.”

Now Powell is on a mission to teach Westerners that Sharia is similar to international law and in some ways superior. For this dubious endeavor she is lavishly featured in the Notre Dame University newspaper. Powell’s canvassing for Sharia has led her to ask “some international court judges” if they “would ever consider referring to parts of the Sharia.”

Powell’s interest in researching Islamic law further is driven, in part, by the bias she sees toward Western law to the point of absolute exclusion of any facets of Islamic law in international law. In fact, some international court judges she interviewed were irritated when she asked if they would ever consider referring to parts of Sharia. “Out of all the religions of the world, we’ve contributed to a large-scale misunderstanding of their legal tradition,” Powell said. “Islamic law and international law share many more similarities than they are given credit for.”

Powell’s skewed view of the Sharia is deceptive, propagandistic and dangerous. There is no comparison between international law (which is democracy-based) and Sharia (which is authoritarian and discriminatory). The violence, human rights abuses and murders committed throughout history in the name of Islam are not an aberration. They are reflections of normative Islam, fully backed by Islamic jurisprudence, which teaches the murder of apostates and gays, the conquest and subjugation of infidels, and the inferiority of women, including the head coverings (Quran 24:31, Quran 33:59) about which Powell fallaciously rambles.  The arrogance displayed by Powell is also an affront to Muslim dissidents who face (and experience) imprisonment (and worse) for opposing the human rights abuses sanctioned by Islamic law. Powell’s potential influence on the young minds who must listen to her propaganda in the classroom is concerning. And she is not unique; in fact, in many colleges and universities today, she is the norm.

“Islamic law and international law share many similarities, Notre Dame Professor says,” by Colleen Sharkey, Notre Dame News, April 8, 2020:

The very term Sharia conjures negative images in the minds of many Westerners, in part due to its association with extremist groups. However, an in-depth look at Islamic law, as practiced in the vast majority of Muslim-majority countries, reveals that it is interpreted in different ways depending on the country, its culture and the very people conducting the interpretation.

Notre Dame’s Emilia Justyna Powell, an associate professor of political science and concurrent associate professor of law, an expert in both international law and the Islamic legal tradition, traveled to many Muslim-majority nations to research how the two systems work together in practice. Her findings were published earlier this year in the volume Islamic Law and International Law: Peaceful Resolution of Disputes.

Powell uses the differences in how women dress in various Muslim-majority countries as an analogy for the various interpretations of Sharia.

“A perfect visualization is women’s head coverings. The Taliban encourages women to cover top to bottom, not even showing the eyes. In Saudi Arabia, sometimes eyes are visible but not much else,” she said. “I was recently in Bahrain where I witnessed a new trend: Women are unzipping their abayas and you can see Western-influenced clothing underneath like jeans, ruffles and lace. Many women don’t wear the hijab scarf there and some only wear it halfway on. But who’s to say which is correct? Bahrain is no less Islamic than Saudi Arabia, for example, just different. People in all Muslim-majority countries interpret and, thus, practice the Muslim faith differently.”

International law itself is based on a broad set of norms agreed upon by people from many different nations and cultures. It is also heavily based on Western law which, itself, has deep roots in Christianity — a religion that originated at a time when Roman law was already well established. “Islam, on the other hand, had no a priori legal system to work with other than unwritten tribal customs,” Powell writes. And, while international law has moved to a more secular model, Islamic law remains based in the writings of the Quran and the sunna as well as ijma (judicial consensus) and qiyas (analogical reasoning).

“However, disconcerting the dissonance between the Islamic legal tradition and international law may appear, there are more similarities between these two legal systems than the policy world and the scholarship take into account,” she writes.

By its broad nature, international law allows for interpretation based on norms in individual countries. And many Muslim-majority states have their own declaration of human rights, she notes.

“Sometimes international law promotes the peaceful resolution of disputes, but does not give specific rules or cite specific laws for how to do so. Countries can mediate, peacefully, via negotiation in compliance with international law. Sometimes Muslim-majority countries will also sign international treaties but place restrictions on them — what are technically called ‘reservations.’”

For example, some Muslim-majority countries use reservations to remove “freedom of religion” clauses, because their religion is inextricably part of their culture, with the assumption (often part of the country’s own understanding of human rights) that many of their citizens are all Muslim. In this way, Powell says, they are complying with some international norms but allowing for their identity to remain intact.

Powell also examines how Muslim-majority nations in different geographical areas use Sharia and work within the international law framework. In general, Powell finds that if an ILS (Islamic Law State) country has a secular court system and their constitution mentions peaceful resolutions of disputes, they possess a more favorable attitude toward international courts.

“The Islamic milieu is not a monolith. In each of the ILS, secular law and Islamic law coalesce to create a unique legal framework. Every one of the ILS is different in how it negotiates the relationship between these two legal forces — the religious and the secular — along with their respective differences in socio-demographic and political characteristics. Historically, every one of the ILS has worked out its own unique answers to the question of the balance of Islamic law and secular law,” she writes.

The examples Powell gathered through interviews shed light on the cultural and religious lenses through which many Muslims view courts….

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

REVIEW: The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’

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The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’, exposes fifty of the most sinister leftist, Islamist, globalist interconnecting attacks on America deceitfully disguised as altruism. Goudsmit’s warning is designed to ensure an informed American electorate in advance of the pivotal 2020 presidential election. The Book is a powerful éxpose of the deceptive policies and practices of the Leftist/Islamist/Globalist axis attempting to destroy America from within.

Goudsmit’s unique talent is deciphering the many political hoaxes being played on us by those who present themselves as our advocates but who are, in fact, America’s enemies. This remarkable book tells us the many ways in which we’ve been had–but don’t know it. The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’, describes the corrupt underbelly of the Leftist/Islamist/Globalist axis attacking America, American democracy, and America-first President Donald J. Trump. Written in her signature conversational style, each hoax chapter unmasks a distinct and destructive axis policy deceitfully presented to an unsuspecting public as humanitarian. Americans do not like being duped. Linda Goudsmit is the consummate truth-teller in an era of profound political deceit.

The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’ should be compulsory reading in advance of the crucial 2020 U.S. presidential election.

ENDORSEMENTS

“Linda Goudsmit connects all the dots of political ideology, human psychology, and social engineering in her stunning, prescient, and personal warning to the American electorate. The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’ is a must-read in advance of the crucial 2020 American presidential election. If you really want to understand the motives underlying the outrageous shenanigans in the world of politics, then you HAVE to read Ms. Goudsmit’s brilliant book. Humanitarian Hoaxes is a twenty-first-century affirmation of Abraham Lincoln’s nineteenth-century Gettysburg defense of liberty and hope that ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’”

—Steve Emerson, counterterrorist investigator, author of thousands of articles and six books, producer of two documentaries, Jihad in America and Grand Deception, and Executive Director of Investigative Project on Terrorism • InvestigativeProject.org

“Trenchant and incisive, Linda Goudsmit has a penetrating style all her own. She doesn’t mince words and never shies away from spotlighting stark reality. Goudsmit has a uniquely disciplined, hard-punching way of teaching while at the same time providing singularly unusual insights into each topic that she approaches. Reading Linda Goudsmit’s new release, The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’, is commensurate with attending high-level college classes in political science, psychology, history, current events, and classic philosophy all at once. For those of us who remember professors who caused us to ‘sit up and take notice,’ we can relate those experiences to Linda Goudsmit’s writings. She is a ‘born teacher’ and all of her work reflects her native talent and depth of knowledge. The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’ offers intriguing, thought-provoking new ways to think about current events and critical issues of our era that threaten America’s unique culture. Each chapter reinforces Goudsmit’s consistent theme of hoaxes masquerading as benevolent systems of governance designed to collapse America from within. It is an essential read before the critical 2020 U.S. presidential election. I enthusiastically endorse Linda Goudsmit’s outstanding new release, The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’.”

—Charlotte Baker, well-known Internet editor, commentator, aggregator, and distributor

“Like a skilled surgeon with a scalpel, Linda Goudsmit has excised the virulent humanitarian hoaxes inflicted on Americans for the last fifty years. Think global warming, zero population growth, open borders, or the New World Order have any legitimacy? Think again! Goudsmit explains the twisted rationales, invasive techniques, and devious methods used in leftist attempts to transform America into a socialist ‘paradise’ on earth. Totally riveting . . . every page!”

—Joan Swirsky, New York–based journalist and author

“Linda Goudsmit is a frequent and popular guest on my CRN digital talk radio show, Talkback with Chuck Wilder. Her sensational new release, The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’, exposes the sinister underbelly of the Leftist/Islamist/Globalist axis attacking America, American democracy, and America-first President Donald J. Trump. Written in her signature conversational style, each hoax chapter unmasks a distinct and destructive axis policy deceitfully presented to an unsuspecting public as humanitarian. Americans do not like being duped. Linda Goudsmit is the consummate truth-teller in an era of profound political deceit. The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ’Kindness’ should be compulsory reading in advance of the crucial 2020 U.S. presidential election.”

—Chuck Wilder, CRN host

“Linda Goudsmit’s extraordinary Humanitarian Hoax series of articles is now a sensational book. Goudsmit has a rare ability to identify the core of conflicts. She knows that whenever something does not produce the results it logically should, something else is going on. Her new release, The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’, is a powerful éxpose of the sinister policies and practices of the Leftist/Islamist/Globalist axis attempting to destroy America from within. Goudsmit’s unique talent is deciphering the many political hoaxes being played on us by those who present themselves as our advocates but who are, in fact, America’s enemies. This remarkable book tells us the many ways in which we’ve been had—but don’t know it. It is a rare author who entertains while educating readers. Linda is such an author.”

—Marilyn MacGruder Barnewall, International Banking Consultant (Ret.), “Guru” of North American Private Banking, started first private bank in the United States, is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who of American Women, Who’s Who in Finance and Business, Who’s Who in the World

© All rights reserved.

EDITORS NOTE: To read Humanitarian Hoax articles by Linda please click here.

Majority of Americans Agree With Trump’s Calling COVID-19 ‘Chinese Virus’

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A majority of American adults agree with using the term “Chinese virus” to describe the coronavirus, despite media members pillorying President Donald Trump for using that term, three polls showed.

Three consecutive national surveys by the Harris Poll found that more than 50% of Americans said they somewhat or strongly agree with Trump using the term “Chinese virus.”

The poll results make for a stark contrast with the national media’s reaction to the term “Chinese virus.”

MSNBC anchor John Heilemann said on air in March that Trump’s use of the term “Chinese virus” is “nakedly racist and obviously racist and blatantly racist.”

CNN opinion writer Jill Filipovic similarly argued that using the term “Chinese virus” was “xenophobic racism,” and compared it to scapegoating European Jews for the Black Death.

Other journalists, from Vox writers to The New York Times editorial board, have denounced the president’s use of the term.

But the American public seems to disagree.

The three Harris polls, all of which are from late March or early April, showed 52%, 54% and 52% of Americans agreeing with Trump.

The most recent Harris poll, which surveyed 1,993 adults between April 3 and 5, also found that an overwhelming majority of Americans hold the Chinese government responsible for the virus’ spread. That’s in line with scientific research on the subject.

One study found that up to 95% of COVID-19’s spread could have been prevented if the Chinese government had acted three weeks sooner than they did.

A majority of Americans, 58%, agree that China should “be required to pay other countries for the spread of the virus,” the most recent Harris poll found.

COLUMN BY

Peter Hasson

Peter J. Hasson is a reporter for The Daily Caller. Twitter: @peterjhasson.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of this original content, email licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

VIDEO: A 35 Minute Interview on Political Islam

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Topics include: Islamic Golden Age; the future of Islam; reforming Islam; the slave trade; Islamic dualism, poverty and Islam; why Macron will not be able to create a European Islam; the difference between opinion and facts; what I like about Islam and the difference between our civilization and Islamic civilization.

© All rights reserved.

Where have all the heart attacks gone? Time we call BS on the ‘scientific-technological elite’!

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“[ It is] time we call BS on the ‘scientific-technological elite.’” – Daniel Horowitz at Conservative Review

Daniel Horowitz is one of an increasing number of conservative commentators who are asking questions about the draconian policies that are crippling America based on models and scary numbers of supposed COVID-19 deaths daily reported by our scientific elite.

The political fallout is going to be massive (that is an understatement) if the general public begins to feel duped by politicians who are not letting a crisis go to waste and thus pushing America to the socialist Left.

From Conservative Review (hat tip: George):

Horowitz: Dr. Birx: ‘We’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality’

Why would our governing elites be so motivated to overstate the impact of COVID-19 and scare people beyond the unprecedented levels of panic that are already pervasive in this country?

Believe it or not, the coronavirus epidemic does not stop deaths from other causes. While the politicians are shutting down other medical care in this country, they fail to recognize that life and even death go on. Many of us have been concerned that they have been conflating deaths due to coronavirus with deaths of those who have coronavirus but ultimately succumb to other illnesses. In their quest to continue this degree of fascism, plus in the motivation of some hospitals to get more federal relief funds, there is every incentive to code as many deaths as possible as related to COVID-19.

Yesterday, Dr. Deborah Birx finally let the secret out during the daily press conference in response to a reporter’s question. “I think in this country, we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality,” said Dr. Birx, who along with Dr. Anthony Fauci has become the face of this push for a national lockdown.

“There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition, and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU [intensive care unit] and then have a heart or kidney problem. Some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death.”

“The intent is if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death,” concluded Birx.

I just snipped a bit of Horowitz’s hypothesis.  Read it all here and see what cardiologists are saying.

It was posted a few days ago, and if you saw the reports last evening about how the projections for worst case scenarios just may not be coming true, you too might be smelling a rat!

RELATED ARTICLE: Israeli COVID-19 treatment shows 100% survival rate – preliminary data – The Jerusalem Post

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

The Southern Poverty Law Center Hate Hoax

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Former Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) “staffers have admitted that the hate accusations leveled by the SPLC are a ‘con,’ a deceptive scheme to raise money,” writes PJ Media Senior Editor Tyler O’Neil. In his new book, Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center, O’Neil shreds the SPLC’s claims to be an impartial “hate arbiter” and exposes the SPLC as a corrupt, leftist smear merchant.

Established in 1971, the SPLC has established a powerful presence in media, government, and corporations, to the detriment of mainstream conservative organizations slandered by the SPLC as bigots, as O’Neil documents. News organizations such as ABC, NBC, and CNN have uncritically referenced SPLC materials, while Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified before Congress in 2019 about the SPLC as a Google “trusted flagger” of bigotry. AmazonSmile, which donates a percentage of Amazon product purchases to eligible charities, also relied upon the SPLC in 2017 to exclude groups such as the American Freedom Law Center and D. James Kennedy Ministries.

In the public sector as well, Democratic senators including Dianne Feinstein and Tim Kaine have relied upon the SPLC to oppose judicial nominations and support hate crimes legislation. Similarly, using SPLC materials, Michigan’s attorney general and Department of Civil Rights in 2019 launched a “hate crimes unit.” SPLC ideology additionally has entrée into public schools via the SPLC’s 1991-established Teaching Tolerance program.

The SPLC’s ugly reality belies this veneer of respectability. Revelations in 2019 exposed an SPLC rife with racism and sexual harassment in the organization’s Montgomery, Alabama, headquarters. One former SPLC employee described it as a “virtual buffet of injustices,” while previously, during a 1994 journalistic investigation, black SPLC employees even compared it to a “plantation.”

These scandals, which caused SPLC founder Morris Dees to resign from its leadership, were hardly unpredictable, given his character. “The SPLC’s notoriously handsome founder has married at least five women,” O’Neil notes, while documenting in lurid detail the unconstrained libido of this philanderer. Reflecting white southern racist history, this native Alabamian also initially supported segregationist Democrats in the 1950s, and even once defended a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) member in court who had beaten civil rights activists. “Dees represents the truth that people can change—and the SPLC should remember that when they destroy a person’s reputation for a previous association with a ‘hate group,’” O’Neil trenchantly observes.

The SPLC likewise reflects the business savvy of Dees, who discovered his genius for direct mail operations in mail-order businesses before applying his talents to the SPLC, explains O’Neil. Donations of $500,000 or $1 million from corporations including Apple and JP Morgan Chase, often placed in Cayman islands bank accounts, would make the SPLC “one of the wealthiest charities in the country, if not the world.” “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same thing,” was Dees’ maxim.

As O’Neil shows, Dees’ junk mail pitches have suckered low-income, would-be do-gooder contributors into imagining the SPLC as a “bare-bones place” and led them to make sacrifices for the SPLC, such as foregoing a new overcoat for the cause. Meanwhile, the SPLC’s Montgomery headquarters features a monument to civil rights heroes by celebrity architect Maya Lin, with the quotation “Until justice rolls down like waters” from Martin Luther King. By contrast, cynical SPLC staffers would mock this “Poverty Palace,” saying “Until justice rolls down like dollars.” Meanwhile, one study revealed that the SPLC in the years 1984-1994 never spent more than 31 percent of revenue on programs, contrary to the 80 percent minimum set by the watchdog Charity Navigator.

The SPLC won its reputation by fighting the KKK, but O’Neil examines how the SPLC has worn out whatever laurels it once thereby deserved, as “by the 1980s, the Klan was largely a spent force.” While nationwide KKK membership dropped below 10,000, the deceptive “SPLC easily raised millions by telling liberal donors up north how dangerous the Klan was.” Yet the SPLC’s legal team in 1986 resigned en masse over Dees’ KKK “obsession,” which “idealistic lawyers saw…as a distraction from the issues they really cared about, like getting innocent people off of death row.”

Today O’Neil reveals many of the SPLC’s “hate group” listings as “hilariously sad,” including Kennesaw, Georgia’s “Wildman’s Civil War Surplus and Herb Shop,” run by an unreconstructed pro-Confederacy southerner. The SPLC also once cited Iowa’s historic town of Amana Colonies because white supremacists claimed to have held a book club in a town restaurant. The SPLC will additionally list as a separate “hate group” each organization chapter; thus the grassroots national security organization ACT for America inflates to 47 “hate groups” in the SPLC’s distorted hate group listings. Moreover, several “hate crimes” denounced by the SPLC have turned out to be hoaxes.

The SPLC’s strident leftist biases are apparent in a 2016 SPLC lawsuit against a Mississippi charter schools program (with many black student beneficiaries) as well as in extreme LGBT advocacy. The SPLC has condemned this author’s esteemed colleague Jennifer Roback Morse, president of the Ruth Institute, for defending the Catholic Church Catechism‘s teaching that homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered.” The SPLC has also blackballed as “anti-LGBT” her fellow Catholic, renowned Princeton University intellectual Robert George; O’Neil accordingly wonders whether the “SPLC should call the Catholic Church a ‘hate group.’”

Despite these travesties, the SPLC assumes an aura of authority that others dispute, including former American Civil Liberties Union director Nadine Strossen, who rejected the SPLC “hate group” label for the Alliance Defending Freedom. Facebook spokesperson Ruchika Budhraja likewise told PJ Media that Facebook does not share the SPLC’s “hate group” designations for various groups, including the Family Research Council (FRC). Perhaps if the deranged homosexual Floyd Lee Corkins II had only listened to Facebook, this domestic terrorist might not have relied upon an SPLC “hate list” to target FRC in an attempted 2012 mass shooting.

Yet the SPLC has conveniently cast aside all claims of objectivity in the face of defamation lawsuits by growing numbers of individuals and groups defending against SPLC character assassination. Once cornered in court, the SPLC suddenly claims that its “hate group” judgments are mere free speech expressions of “opinion,” devoid of any legal liability. Nonetheless, British Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz won a $3.375 million defamation settlement from the SPLC in 2018.

To paraphrase the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the SPLC can have its own shoddy opinions, but it cannot have its own facts. These “stubborn things,” as John Adams once called them, patently reveal the SPLC’s fraudulence. In ably assembling these facts, O’Neil has done valuable service for all who oppose the SPLC’s baleful influence.

COLUMN BY

ANDREW HARROD

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

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!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

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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COVID-19 Should Make Us Appreciate Miracle of Life, Not Make Abortions ‘Essential’

A Note for our Readers:

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

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

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

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

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

Where Will the First Coronavirus Vaccine Come From?

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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.

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