To all staunch supporters and allies of TOTUS: Your “leader” is leading you down the “Jim Jones” path to the fatal “kool aid”. TOTUS is self promoting you and the rest of us to a worse outcome than you can imagine. His irritation at not being able to hold rallies has morphed into contentious and unhelpful “press conferences” which instead of informing us is again (still) misleading us about a National Health issue. If you are following the “Trump” news organization, then you should realize there are few real scientists involved in the pronouncements from the on air personalities. It is apparent to most of us that we really do not have a National leader but we do have a self serving miscreant aided and abetted by a party line Congress. This election is crucial to the survival of our country with all of its “faults” perceived or real. This could be a great moment for a impotent leader but as usual the baser instincts over ride what little (if any) common sense that may be there. The Presidency is not a personal position, it is a National one that extends to our allies in the rest of the world.
We have heard the phrase ” did you get the memo?” in movies and real life so I am sending this one out now and hopefully you get it!
The past three years of TOTUS’ administration has given us no reason to rejoice as the governing style has been shown erratic, dis jointed and totally with no real merit. Therefore on the net election day we need to get some new people in place from the Congress to the White House. It should be apparent that this administration has brought the country to an unprecedented low in production and world status. It is incumbent on the voters to correct this lean towards right or left. VOTE!.
A major US mask manufacturer, 3M, says the government has asked it to stop exporting US-made N95 respirator masks to Canada and Latin America.
The request had “significant humanitarian implications”, it warned, and could prompt other countries to act in kind.
On Thursday, the US invoked the Korean War-era Defence Production Act to demand that 3M provide more masks.
Canada’s prime minister said stopping 3M’s exports would be a “mistake”.
President Donald Trump said he had used the Defence Production Act to “hit 3M hard”, without providing additional details. The law dates back to 1950 and allows a president to force companies to make products for national defence.
In a statement on Friday, 3M said the government had invoked the act “to require 3M to prioritise orders from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) for our N95 respirators”, and had also requested that 3M import more respirators made in its overseas factories into the US. It said it supported both moves.
However, 3M added that the government also requested that it stop exporting respirators made in the US to Canada and Latin America.
“There are significant humanitarian implications of ceasing respirator supplies to healthcare workers in Canada and Latin America, where we are a critical supplier of respirators,” it said.
3M added that such a move “would likely cause other countries to retaliate and do the same”, which would lead to the overall number of respirators being made available to the US decreasing.
The company says it manufactures about 100 million N95 masks per month – about a third are made in the US, and the rest produced overseas.
The Trump administration has not provided details on its communications with 3M. On Thursday night, Mr Trump tweeted: “We hit 3M hard today after seeing what they were doing with their masks… Big surprise to many in government as to what they were doing – will have a big price to pay!”
Meanwhile, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said on Thursday: “We’ve had issues making sure that all of the production that 3M does around the world, enough of it is coming back here.”
Canada does not manufacture any N95 masks domestically, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters on Friday that “it would be a mistake to create blockages or reduce trade”.
“There are thousands of nurses in Windsor who work in Detroit every single day, and Americans depend on them. There are medical products and other essential goods that move across the border in both directions… these are things Americans rely on.
Those of you of a certain age will doubtless remember a time when it was universally acknowledged that wearing masks would not protect you or anyone else from the coronavirus pandemic. By “certain age” here I mean all living Americans born on or before April 1, 2020, which according to my notes is when it became possible to express a contrary position in polite society.
This was always nonsense. The White House is now suggesting that all of us should wear masks whenever we leave our houses. We are even stealing vast stockpiles of them from the Germans, who have been wearing them in public for around a month on the rather more numerous occasions when their leaders exempt them from house arrest. People who can’t get proper masks (apparently the kind people wear when they spray for bugs) are being encouraged to make their own. If nothing else, this has given tedious DIY addicts something else to be self satisfied about. No one cares how quaint and interesting you think the piece of cloth meant to protect you from a disease is, okay?
Whether the journalists and other apparent experts who enthusiastically spread this apparent lie about masks knew it was false is very much an open question. Some of us found it odd that the same people were also saying that masks should be reserved for use by medical professionals. If masks don’t do anything, why do doctors and nurses need them? Are they an ornamental part of a dress uniform? The mind reels.
Regardless of the personal honesty of those involved in it, this propaganda campaign should never have been conducted in the first place. It is one thing to debate what should be empirical questions, such as the efficacy of wearing protective equipment in an attempt to forestall the spread of viral infections; it is another for people to bang on about whatever the latest current corona wisdom is with the same tedious certainty that not long ago made us a nation of Logan Act scholars and experts on the non-existent criminal law implications of the emoluments clause. These manias do roughly as much for public health as those kids — there was at least one in every first-grade class — who relentlessly ssshh everyone else in line do to improve schoolyard behavior.
The 180-degree shift in acceptable public opinion about masks is in line with how the rest of this crisis has unfolded. Masks won’t help. Everyone needs a mask. It’s not worth shutting down travel to and from China over the virus, and Trump is just being a xenophobe here. Trump should have done more to prevent the virus from coming to these shores. It’s less dangerous than the flu; calling it less dangerous than the flu is a right-wing meme, perhaps even (one shudders) “misinformation.” Human beings can’t even transmit the virus directly to one another; it originated with animals in Chinese open-air “wet” food markets. Talking about the wet markets is racist, except when Dr. Fauci does it.
Can we please stop talking this way? As I write this our paper of record is all but publiclyrooting for the failure of anti-malarial drugs that appear to have been successful in treating some coronavirus patients. It is not against “science,” whatever that may be, for the president or anyone else to observe that certain medicines or treatments have worked. It is not for science, either. It’s just a fact that may or may not have limited application depending upon what happens over the next few months. A bit more epistemic humility would be welcome all around.
As would more of I will bluntly call adult behavior. We must put an end to the idea that the best way to get through this crisis is to say things we know are not true in the hope of getting people to behave a certain way. This means not saying masks are useless when what you really mean is, “Masks are in short supply, please consider before you start hoarding them whether you really need them at present and if so how many.” Ditto the painfully relentless attempts to give young people the impression that they are horribly likely to die from the new virus. Even in Italy, the country with the worst measured fatality rate so far, around 86 percent of all the deceased have been aged 70 or older, and 50 percent were at least 80. We do not need to zero in on statistical anomalies or otherwise engage in scaremongering. It should be enough to say, “Even though you are very unlikely to die from coronavirus, remember that you could contract the disease and spread it to more vulnerable people without even experiencing symptoms, so please don’t revel with 5000 strangers at the beach and then run home to give Grandma a hug.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke out against President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in response to their suggestion that the impeachment trial distracted the United States government from addressing the threat of the coronavirus in a timely manner. According to Pelosi, the slow to take action by the president’s team is not a responsibility they should waver from and they “should not try to hide behind an excuse.”
“I think that’s an admission that perhaps the President and the majority leader cannot handle the job,” Pelosi told Anderson Cooper in an interview with CNN on April 1. “We have a life and death situation in our country and they should not try to hide behind an excuse for why they did not take action, but it does admit that they did not take action,” she continued. “Right now we have to work together to get the job done.”
The statements came in response to comments made by Trump and McConnell shortly before. In an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt on March 31, McConnell said that the crisis “came up while we were tied down in the impeachment trial. And I think it diverted the attention of the government, because everything, every day was all about impeachment.”
Later that same day, Trump expressed a similar opinion in a press briefing. “I think I handled it very well, but I guess it probably did [distract me],” said Trump before adding, “Did it divert my attention? I think I’m getting A+’s for the way I handled myself during a phony impeachment, okay? But certainly, I guess, I thought of it and I think I probably acted – I don’t think I would have done any better had I not been impeached, okay?” Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives who charged him with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress on December 18, 2019. He was acquitted on all charges by the Senate on February 5.
U.S. intelligence agencies reportedly issued dire warnings to the Trump administration via classified documents in January and February about the inevitable global threat posed by the coronavirus that now has more than 200,000 confirmed cases and at least 4,500 deaths in the U.S. alone. President Trump and lawmakers allegedly played down the severity of the issue which resulted in a “too little too late” response to containment, reports the Washington Post.
While intelligence reports didn’t predict an exact timeframe for the dissemination of the virus or offer a specific course of action for its containment, it did track its spread in China and later onto other countries. It also warned that Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the outbreak’s severity.
According to the Washington Post’s report, Trump first received warnings about the coronavirus in early January; however, an official task force was not assembled until January 29. Meanwhile the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continued to issue increasingly serious warnings to the public about the spread of the virus and how to best protect themselves. Trump continued to make public statements downplaying the severity of the virus until a somber press conference on March 16.
Despite claims that the impeachment hearings — for which Trump was not actually present — affected the carrying out of coronavirus protections, the president’s late uptake of action came with multiple warning signs which seemed to have been ignored.
Comments Off on Trump administration ended pandemic early-warning program to detect coronaviruses
Stable Genius has struck again. In the pursuit of undoing the Obama Presidency and associated actions TOTUS and his minions have put us all in jeopardy. MA
Two months before the novel coronavirus is thought to have begun its deadly advance in Wuhan, China, the Trump administration ended a $200-million pandemic early-warning program aimed at training scientists in China and other countries to detect and respond to such a threat.
The project, launched by the U.S. Agency for International Development in 2009, identified 1,200 different viruses that had the potential to erupt into pandemics, including more than 160 novel coronaviruses. The initiative, called PREDICT, also trained and supported staff in 60 foreign laboratories — including the Wuhan lab that identified SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
Field work ceased when the funding ran out in September, and organizations that worked on the PREDICT program laid off dozens of scientists and analysts, said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a key player in the program.
On Wednesday, USAID granted an emergency extension to the program, issuing $2.26 million over the next six months to send experts who will help foreign labs squelch the pandemic. But program leaders say the funding will do little to further the initiative’s original mission.
“Look at the name: Our efforts were to predict this before it happens. That’s the part of the program that was exciting — and that’s the part I’m worried about,” Daszak said.
“It’s absolutely critical that we don’t drop the idea of a large-scale, proactive, predictive program that tries to catch pandemics before they happen. Cutting a program that could in any way reduce the risk of things like COVID-19 happening again is, by any measure, shortsighted,” he added.
It is unclear whether another five-year grant would have dulled the impact of the current pandemic. But the Trump administration has come under increased criticism for its past moves to downgrade global health security, including proposals to slash funding to science agencies and the elimination of the National Security Council’s key global health post.
A spokesman for USAID said PREDICT was “just one component of USAID’s global health security efforts and accounted for less than 20% of our global health security funding.” He also said a new initiative to stop the spillover of viruses from animals to humans is scheduled to be awarded in August.
The PREDICT project, which operated on two five-year funding cycles that formally concluded last September, enrolled both epidemiologists and wildlife veterinarians to examine the types of interactions between animals and humans that researchers suspect led to the current outbreak of COVID-19.
The pandemic “didn’t surprise us, unfortunately,” said Jonna Mazet, executive director of the One Health Institute in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, who served as the global director of PREDICT for a decade. “The work had been ongoing for some time. And when the crisis hits, everybody stands up and takes notice and says, ‘OK, we believe you.’”
The PREDICT project, launched in response to the 2005 H5N1 “bird flu” scare, gathered specimens from more than 10,000 bats and 2,000 other mammals in search of dangerous viruses. They detected about 1,200 viruses that could spread from wild animals to humans, signaling pandemic potential. More than 160 of them were novel coronaviruses, much like SARS-CoV-2.
They also took blood samples from people in rural China, and learned that, in living among wildlife, they had been exposed to coronaviruses — a clear sign that, if those viruses spread easily among humans, they could take off. That “raised the red flag,” said Mazet.
“Coronaviruses were jumping easily across species lines and were ones to watch for epidemics and pandemics,” she said.
The program also trained nearly 7,000 people across medical and agricultural sectors in 30 countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East to help them detect deadly new viruses on their own. One of those labs was the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the Chinese lab that quickly identified SARS-CoV-2, Mazet said.
The Wuhan lab received USAID funding for equipment, and PREDICT coordinators connected the scientists there with researchers in other countries in order to synchronize tracking of novel viruses before SARS-CoV-2.
The project’s second funding cycle concluded on Sept. 30, 2019, less than two months before the new coronavirus probably began spreading. It was granted a zero-dollar six-month extension — through March 2020 — to write up final reports.
Dennis Carroll, a widely respected scientist who headed USAID’s emerging threats division, oversaw the initiative for its duration, but retired around the time it was shut down. Carroll did not respond to an inquiry from The Times, but told the New York Times last year that by January 2019, the program had “essentially collapsed into hibernation,” and that its conclusion was due to “the ascension of risk-averse bureaucrats.”
Other members of the consortium included Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity and several institutes that manage major U.S. zoos.
Earlier this year, as COVID-19 took off, U.S. lawmakers expressed frustration over the program’s end.
“Addressing and preventing the spread of coronavirus and potential pandemic disease outbreaks is a serious matter that requires adequate resources for and cooperation between experts throughout the federal government,” Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Angus King wrote in a letter to USAID’s administrator earlier this year, asking for details on the decision.
On Wednesday, the PREDICT program was extended through September to offer emergency technical assistance to foreign labs battling the coronavirus pandemic. To date, PREDICT-supported labs in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia are actively testing for coronavirus cases, Daszak said, and he has been sending reagents and other supplies to assist them.
Meanwhile, in Rwanda, scientists who had been trained in the PREDICT program triggered early social distancing measures, Mazet said. “I do think that what we were doing has changed the outcomes for a lot of countries,” she said.
“But unfortunately, not our own,” she added.
Daszak said he’s eager to further examine the hundreds of wildlife samples collected during the PREDICT initiative over the years, looking to identify whether any of them could have been intermediate hosts for the virus currently sweeping the globe.
But with the limited budget and timeline, efforts to continue in-depth field work under PREDICT will be minimal. Most of the extension funding will be focused on squelching the current outbreak, not preventing the next.
“It’s common sense to know your enemy,” Daszak said. “Instead, we’re all hiding inside our houses as we wait around for a vaccine — that’s not a good global strategy to battling a dangerous virus.”
Comments Off on The TOTUS Train Still Running On The Wrong Track
This is the person TOTUS gave the high profile “Medal Of Freedom” the nations highest civilian honor. TOTUS has again reduced the office of President to yet another low point. Coupled with the refusal to extend the enrollment period for ACA aka “Obamacare”, it should be apparent to ALL voters that we as a country are going downhill with the least of us suffering the greatest harm. This is not about party, race, religion or any other malediction uttered by this administration, it is about the health of our country and its future which in my opinion will continue a backwards trend under this administration and its associates in Congress. MA
04/01/2020 07:51 am ET
Rush Limbaugh: Economy Being Destroyed ‘Under The Guise’ Of Saving Lives
The right-wing radio host pushed conspiracy nonsense about Democrats plotting with communists to ruin capitalism in the coronavirus pandemic.
Rush Limbaugh on Tuesday suggested stay-at-home measures to protect people against the coronavirus pandemic were destroying the economy “under the guise” of saving lives. He also gave air to a conspiracy theory that Democrats and communists were plotting the downfall of capitalism.
(See the video below.)
“Are we just going to sit by and watch $22 trillion — that’s the value, that’s the sum total of the GDP, that’s the U.S. economy — are we just going to sit by here and watch it evaporate?” the right-wing radio host said on “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” “Because that’s what we’re doing, under the guise of not losing any unnecessary life — meaning we want to try to save as many lives as we can.”
After fielding a phone call in which the caller said the crisis was the product of “the communist virus” invading America, Limbaugh piled on:
You’re the only person I know who thinks it’s happening without the cooperation of the Democrat Party, however. Most people tell me they think the American left is the worldwide Communist Party now, and that they are willingly subverting this economy and destroying it, for the purposes of eliminating and wiping out capitalism.
And whether that’s happening of — whether that’s the design or not, that is happening. This economy is being shut down. That’s why this is not sustainable. I’m sorry, I’m sounding like a broken record on this, but it is not sustainable.
Are we just going to sit by and watch $22 trillion — that’s the value, that’s the sum total of the GDP, that’s the U.S. economy — are we just going to sit by here and watch it evaporate? Because that’s what we’re doing, under the guise of not losing any unnecessary life — meaning we want to try to save as many lives as we can.
Limbaugh has previously claimed the outbreak was exaggerated to make President Donald Trump look bad. He also had dismissed COVID-19 as “the common cold.”
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