Tag: COVID-19
Cracks Form in the New World Order

Cracks Form in the New World Order

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The Beijing Olympics have helped focus world attention on China’s concentration camps where it interns, rapes, tortures, enslaves, and otherwise abuses its Uyghur minority. But it’s not just China that has concentration camps. The former democracy known as Australia has them, too. Other countries, including both the U.S. and Canada, have considered setting them up, and a number of countries, including another former South Pacific democracy, New Zealand, have maintained draconian quarantine and border controls.

The modern plague known as coronavirus, AKA SARS-CoV-2, AKA COVID-19, for more than two years now has served as the perfect pretext for petit dictators and power hungry politicians to pursue very undemocratic agendas. Not just the virus, but autocratic and dictatorial attitudes and techniques more associated with Communist China than Western democracies, emerged and flourished across the globe over the course of the pandemic.

Some looked to the pandemic to usher in what can be called a New World Order. One book, co-authored by the founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum and a colleague at the same organization, is titled COVID-19: The Great Reset, which tells you how many so-called global influencers and elites have seen the pandemic. As most ordinary people wanted nothing more than to get back to their normal lives, those people and many in positions of power saw it as their chance to reshape the world in their own vision.

Read some of the reviews of the book and you’ll see how readers, both in the U.S. and overseas, have seen through the book’s premise.

“Know your enemy,” one reviewer warns, “this is their manual. I think they have greatly underestimated the fact that populations will return to their own normal, or close to it, naturally. Opportunistic malfeasance by the Davos ‘elites’ will be their own downfall.”

More succinctly, another says, “Technocratic Totalitarianism on a Global scale. This was horrifying, and they’re using this pandemic to do it .”

Events on the ground, almost anyone now can see, confirm that this has been the agenda being pushed by not just governments, but by Big Tech, Big Pharma, and, almost universally, the complicit media establishment.

Cracks Appear, and Spread

Now stunning events of the past few weeks are showing that serious cracks are forming in the push toward the New World Order. Mass demonstrations in places as far-flung as Australia and Western Europe and Africa were the first harbingers that people had had enough. And then, on Jan. 21, Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin announced the country was lifting most of its COVID restrictions, effective the next day. In short order, the U.K. — prompted by the scandal of PM Boris Johnson being caught violating his own rules, which was far from the first time the COVID autocrats put their hypocrisy on full display — lifted its restrictions, followed by the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Norway, and Sweden. Even Greece loosened some of its rules.

Meanwhile, holdouts remained. Along with China and the repressed Antipodes, Democrat-controlled states in the U.S., and our neighbor to the north, Canada, remained among the most restrictive stalwarts. And then a convoy, reportedly 43 miles (69 kms) long, of Canadian truckers began their journey from the West Coast to the national capital in Ottawa, igniting the spirit of freedom-loving people not just in Canada but around the world, and the cracks really began to spread. What started out as a protest against a Canadian government mandate requiring truckers crossing the U.S.-Canadian border to be vaccinated or go into forced quarantine morphed into a more broad-based protest against all COVID restrictions and mandates. While not all Canadians support the truckers, the country’s mass media, like good toadies to the power structure, have painted the truckers as right-wing crazies.

Once the convoy, now called the Freedom Convoy, entered Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cowardly fled the capital to an undisclosed location, and then attacked the truckers, implying that they were racists — this coming from Monsieur Visage Noir lui-même — and neo-Nazis. This now seems to be the language of discourse, on both sides of the border, as employed by the autocratic left to discredit anyone who disagrees with them.

The truckers appear to have started a movement as other convoys have blocked border crossings between Alberta and Montana, shut down the busiest international crossing, the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan, and invaded Québec City. Meanwhile, other trucker convoys sprang up in the Netherlands and New Zealand, truckers in the latter threatened with arrest in just three days by the dictatorial government there. At the same time, New Zealand’s autocratic PM and media darling Jacinda Ardern announced that the country would reopen its borders, sort of, to returning Kiwis and some others, after vying to be a Hermit Kingdom for most of the pandemic.

The truckers have made an impact, with four provinces — Alberta, Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island, and Québec, Trudeau’s home province — lifting all or some restrictions, with Ontario and Manitoba saying they are considering following. At the same time, a number of repressed blue states in the U.S., led by New Jersey and California and spreading to include Oregon, Illinois, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, and Pres. Biden’s home state of Delaware — most red states, such as my own state of Florida, have already been free — loosened, almost in unison, the bulk of their own restrictions. As they do, some of the same idiotic inconsistencies that were hallmarks of the restrictions throughout the pandemic were left in place. One of the biggest sources of discord remains over masking mandates of school children, still existent in some states, even as other restrictions are lifted.

Retrenchment

All these developments might be viewed positively, and for the moment they are. But given the hunger for control that the elites and autocrats have developed throughout the pandemic, and some of the more insane and irrational and often counter-productive restrictions they put in place, it would be a mistake to think that they’re going to quietly give up the field to the common rabble without a fight. The current phase might be better seen as a strategic retreat, and actually it would not be the first time such a retreat (anyone remember “two weeks to stop the spread”?) has been made over the course of the past 24 months.

The elites can sense the prevailing winds, whether it’s the Freedom Convoy in Canada or parents and students raising hell and staging walkouts in the U.S., or massive street demonstrations in other countries. They see the polling numbers, and can feel the winds blowing against them that those numbers represent. But they also know the power of fear, and how they’ve managed to instill it in a large proportion of the population. They count on that segment to push back, to call for continued restrictions, to keep those elites and autocrats in power and calling the shots.

See the photo at the head of this section? That’s one of Australia’s COVID concentration camps. How, one wonders, can such a thing come to exist in a democratic country unless there is a significant number of Quislings ready to carry out the repression for the autocrats? And who, during this ordeal, has not run into a Mask Nazi or Vaccine Commissar?

The real irony — a better word would be tragedy — is how most of the restrictions imposed on people have had little to no positive effect and have resulted in massive social, economic, and human costs. One of the points I’ve made since the beginning of all this is that costs need to be balanced against benefits: The cure can’t be worse than the disease. But what we’ve seen is that, more often than not, the costs have been worse, far worse, than the benefits obtained. We now have the Johns Hopkins University study – widely ignored by the mainstream media — which looked at 24 different studies. The Johns Hopkins researchers concluded that lockdowns, which did so much economic and personal damage, prevented just .2 percent — two tenths of one percent — of COVID deaths in the U.S. and Europe. Clearly the benefits did not outweigh the cost.

“We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality,” the researchers said in the report.

It’s been known from the beginning — even the revered if thoroughly erratic Dr. Anthony Fauci said it — that cloth masks have little or no effect in blocking the virus. And now, after all the mask sturm und drang of two years, finally the CDC has come out and said it: Cloth masks don’t work. Meanwhile, many states and school boards continue to force school children — the segment of the population least vulnerable to COVID — to wear masks in schools, even when it is known, and has been for at least a year, how much damage masking does to kids. This is but one negative consequence that results when the media and Big Tech conspire to block any information that deviates from the official orthodoxy, no matter how wrong that orthodoxy is.

As for closing borders, it has been clear to me for some time that the draconian measures taken in Australia and New Zealand were only postponing the inevitable. And we’re now seeing the evidence of that as cases surge in both New Zealand and, especially, Australia (look particularly at the charts at the bottom of those linked pages to see the dramatic trend graphically depicted), with deaths trailing as the case load grows exponentially.

At this juncture, let’s hope the forces of sanity and freedom prevail and they make those cracks grow bigger and more durable and life all over can return to some semblance of normalcy. Sometimes People Power does hold the autocrats in check. Maybe it will now. Nothing less than the future of the world depends on it.

Featured image: Ottawa police come down on truckers’ peaceful protest. Image taken from New Freedom Media video. Used under Fair Use.

Truckers demonstrate for freedom in Ottawa. Dave Chan/AP via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

Australia COVID concentration camp. Rotter News. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.
Fragging the Commander in Chief

Fragging the Commander in Chief

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If you’re old enough to remember the Vietnam War, or if you’ve done some research on it, you probably know the term ‶fragging.″ While the practice predates the Vietnam War, it became an all-too-common practice during that conflict, and the word ‶fragging″ came into the vernacular during the Vietnam War years.

The term comes from the fragmentary grenades that often were used by American soldiers to kill their own platoon and company commanders who were deemed (rightly or wrongly) to be incompetent or abusive, or who ordered their commands (often acting on orders from above) into situations considered especially dangerous. Estimates of successful and attempted fraggings during the war run from 800 to more than 1,000.

If you’ve been watching or listening to what much of the national media has had to say about Donald Trump during the ongoing coronavirus drama, things amplified by the rank-and-file never-Trumpers in the country and so-called ‶leaders″ of the Democractic Party, you might agree that it is not an exaggeration to call what is going on ‶fragging.″ The President could leave the Rose Garden and walk across the surface of the Potomac River, or declare a cure for cancer, and the media would still pillory him. And it’s not just the President who is being hit by the virtual fragmentary grenades being hurled (and who, to his credit, has generally shrugged them off), but the general U.S. populace and, of graver concern, our very democracy.

At the more mundane level, as a former journalist I am embarrassed by the moronic nature of some of the questions members of the media ask at the daily White House coronavirus news conferences. Many of these alleged reporters are simply uninformed and unprepared, while others are clearly out to pose ‶got’cha″ questions that neither illuminate nor add to public knowledge. These questions clearly are part of a larger campaign to discredit the President who, again to his credit, is quick to bat them back and call out their not-so-hidden agenda.

No accident

With the 2020 elections approaching, this campaign is no accident. It’s the last-ditch attempt by the Democratic Party and its supporters in the anti-Trump media (which, in all fairness, is most of the media) to block the reelection of Donald Trump. To them, this is less a health crisis then a political opportunity, as dodgy as it might be. In the aftermath of one failed attempt after another at undoing the results of the 2016 election, this is their last shot.

As I’ve recounted on this blog, they watched their Russia hoax and the Mueller investigation, the Ukraine non-event, and their crown jewel, the impeachment fiasco, blow up in their faces. Along the way there were the Kavanagh confirmation and border stonewalling sideshows. The closest they’ve come to stymieing the President’s program, if not actually unseating him, was tipping the House of Representatives blue in 2018. But without gaining the Senate, it wasn’t enough for them to accomplish their goals, which was to unseat a duly elected President – just one they didn’t like.

Now picture their dilemma. Faced with the unnerving prospect of nominating a Socialist as their party’s candidate to stand off against Trump – architect of the best economy in anyone’s memory – in November, the party nomenklatura huddled, called in every chit in sight and some that hadn’t yet materialized, threatened, cajoled, and bought off every other candidate in the race, threw their compliant media machinery into high gear, and voila!, engineered the primary victories of the only logical choice they had left: A doddering soon-to-be-78-year-old (17 days after election day, to be precise) former vice president who thinks kids still listen to record players and who has a hard time remembering what state he’s in or what day of the week it is. Or, for that matter, even what office he’s running for.

Jill Biden jumps to defend husband Joe Biden from animal rights activist at Biden campaign rally in Los Angeles, March 3

In pushing Joe Biden to the forefront of the race, the party poobahs were counting on the power of reminiscence for a guy who, despite his paucity of any real accomplishments and being tinged with corruption throughout his career, was enough of a milquetoast that he could provide contrast with the brash Trump. What they probably weren’t counting on was how quickly Biden’s mental acuity was fading and how the man was virtually evaporating right before our eyes. Or that their chosen ‶pro woman″ candidate would be accused of rape.

Meanwhile, as the coronavirus drama accelerated, putting Trump front and center before the nation on a daily basis, Biden has retreated to his basement in Wilmington, issuing intermittent, sputtering, semi-coherent blasts, generating doubts (including by this writer) that he will make it to the convention, much less the election.

Even the usual useful idiots in the media have shown, through their facial expressions, their doubts about Biden as he babbles his way through on-air interviews. Don’t believe me. Listen yourself to the clip on that page. Be sure not to miss the part that begins at minute 1:00. It’s hard to decide whether it’s more amusing or frightening. If nothing else, it might make you feel sorry for this guy and question why his handlers are pushing him (often under the protective shield of his wife, Jill Biden) to make these appearances. Listening to these rambles, can you picture him leading a Scout outing, much less a national response to the coronavirus? The phrase that comes to my mind is, ‶We’re all going to die.″

Setting the record straight

It would be an impossible task to address every lie and every distortion put out daily by the media, but let’s look at just some of the biggies.

Myth: Trump didn’t listen to his medical advisers early on which allowed the virus to spread.

Truth: Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has led the country’s medical response to every viral epidemic since the early 1980s, said on multiple occasions in January and February that no one needed to be concerned about this virus. On at least two occasions, on Jan. 21 and Jan. 26, he told media interviewers that the risk to the U.S. was low.

On Jan. 21 Fauci told Newsmax interviewer Greg Kelly, “Obviously, you need to take it seriously, and do the kinds of things that the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security are doing. But, this not a major threat for the people of the United States, and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.” Then on Jan. 26 he told radio show host John Catsimatidis, ‶It’s a very, very low risk to the United States,″ adding, ‶It isn’t something the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about. Because we have ways of preparing and screening of people coming in [from China].″ Further, CDC Director Robert Redfield has said he agreed with Fauci’s statements at the time.

Fauci continued to make similar statements all the way until late February, including saying on Feb. 29 that Americans didn’t have to make any lifestyle changes due to the virus. Meanwhile, Trump announced the travel ban from China on Jan. 31 and it went into effect on Feb. 2, credited with avoiding many cases and attendant deaths being brought into the country from China. The kudos the media gave him for that? They called the travel ban ‶racist″ and ‶xenophobic.″ and Biden, without specifically referring to the travel ban, also called the President ‶xenophobic.″ On March 11 Trump announced a ban on travel from Europe, and on March 20 the EU, Canada, and other countries finally got around to announcing their own travel bans. By then Italy and Spain were on countrywide lockdowns as deaths already were piling up in those countries.

Myth: Trump was in denial about the danger the virus posed.

Truth: On Feb. 24, Nancy Pelosi, one of the President’s biggest critics, was urging people to attend Chinese New Year festivities in San Francisco’s China Town. “It’s exciting to be here, especially at this time to be able to be unified with our community,” Pelosi gushed at the time. “We want to be vigilant about what is out there in other places. We want to be careful about how we deal with it, but we do want to say to people ‘Come to Chinatown. Here we are, careful, safe, and come join us.’” On the other coast, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, another Trump critic, and New York City Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot were urging city residents to go about their normal lives. Now who, exactly, was more in denial?

Myth: Trump has gutted the CDC and NIH and eliminated the pandemic task force that was attached to the National Security Council.

Truth: There is so much to be said about all his and the truth is so convoluted I’m not even going to try to detail it, except to say that funding for both CDC and NIH actually increased in recent years, mostly because Congress increased their funding against Administration requests to cut unnecessary positions. There has been no gutting. Read the details here.

Myth: Trump has muzzled Fauci and the other medical people on the coronavirus task force.

Truth: You’d have to be totally gullible and listening only to the media distortions rather than watching the actual daily White House news conferences (which the major networks and some cable networks have stopped carrying, either in full or in part) to believe this one. As in any major crisis-control environment, there is an attempt to coordinate public statements, which is just good management, but Fauci has made it clear that he has never been muzzled. In response to New York Times claims that he had been, Fauci responded, ‶I’ve never been muzzled and I’ve been doing this since Reagan.That was a real misrepresentation of what happened.”

Myth: The Democrats in Congress want to help working people and small business and it’s the Republicans who don’t care about them.

Nancy “Let Them Eat Ice Cream” Pelosi fat and happy while America suffers. What passes for “leadership” in today’s Democratic Party.

Truth: With Democrats claiming, under media cover, that it was Republican desire to turn the multi-trillion dollar stimulus package into a corporate slush fund, the main reason why Congress couldn’t quickly agree to get aid to millions of laid off American workers and closing small businesses was very different. It was because House Speaker and Democratic leader Nancy ‶Let Them Eat Ice Cream″ Pelosi drew up a competing 1,119-page bill stuffed with a Democrat wish-list that had nothing to do with the coronavirus or assistance to people, businesses, or hospitals. On the list were provisions to mandate ‶diversity″ on the boards of companies receiving stumulus funds, same-day voter registration and early voting requirements, collective bargaining for federal employees, carbon-offset requirements for airlines receiving assistance, a bail out of the U.S. Postal Service, paying off student debt, resurrecting the Obamaphone program and, of course, funding for the Kennedy Center in Washington. As House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (the same Jim Clyburn who was single-handedly responsible for putting Joe Biden back on the political map) put it in a conference call with his Dem colleagues, ‶This is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.” Never mind that people across the country were unable to pay their rent or feed their families. This was politics at its abysmal worse (which is really saying something).

Now that the funds earmarked for small business have already been depleted, Pelosi is again holed up in her San Francisco mansion gloating about her chocolates and $13 a pint ice cream stashed in her $24,000 refrigerator, holding up adding more funds to the program while Americans suffer through the biggest financial crisis to strike the country in 90 years. If there was ever more proof of her true priorities, this is it.

The misinformation spills over to hatred

Have no doubt: This campaign of misinformation by the media and the Dems is spilling over to generate further division and outright hatred among what is already a polarized country. You don’t have to look far to see it. To illustrate this consequence, intended or not, here is a random sampling of just a few of the hateful postings I’ve seen online in the past few days (never mind the factual lapses, these quotes weren’t selected for their credibility):

‶Trump is a mass murderer, period, and any person even considering voting for him should lose their voting rights forever.″

‶Trump’s response to the pandemic has been an unmitigated disaster, his press briefings are all about him telling lies about how great he is. His approval ratings have dropped. He will only help states get vital supplies if they suck up to him, while they compete against each other for protective clothing, ventilators, etc. He knew from the 20th of January about the risks, yet he did nothing until near the end of March in terms of social distancing. Even his own party wish he would STFU.″

‶The only political turds in this country are WR0NGIST G0P/C0NS. And only WR0NGIST G0P/C0N turds refuse to see it. You know almost nothing about politics, bro.″

‶the choice is between evil and the Devil Incarnate. the choice is between a lousy crook who has NO vision whatsoever and a racist criminal who is set on destroying our entire way of government, our entire way of economy and our entire planetary environment. I will vote for Biden because not voting or voting for a 3rd party candidate is to give a vote to the Rump in the White House…″

Nice stuff, huh?

Finally, on a personal note, I myself, your not-so-humble correspondent, have been the target of some of this hate in the past two weeks, in what might be the unlikeliest (but isn’t) of places. We have this neighborhood online thing, part of the nationwide NextDoor network, ostensibly to promote neighborliness among, well, neighbors. Along with the usual lost-dog postings and pictures of Bambi in peoples’ yards, some in the neighborhood have had the temerity to post things about the coronavirus, understandingly being a subject for conversation, and within a short time the Trump haters have jumped on and do their best to take over the threads and shut down everyone else. Not to exclusively defend the other side, since both sides put up their fair share of misinformation, but in a couple of cases, when I couldn’t stand the verbal fisticuffs any more, I’ve posted something intended to stop the politicization of what should, I think, be considered a national crisis and suggesting that people consider pulling together instead of apart

Some positive comments were posted in response to my postings, and then the anti-Trump haters jumped back on to spew their venom. They just can’t let anyone who disagrees with them or even has another view of things have the last word. In one case the whole thread shortly thereafter disappeared. But in another case one of my efforts was rewarded by having my post, intended to be conciliatory, deleted and my account disabled. Questioning NextDoor why this occurred garnered the fairly predictable blather about ‶neighborliness,″ blah, blah, blah (and, while it wasn’t applicable to my posting, there was boilerplate blather about not referring to the virus as a ‶Chinese virus″ even though we all know where it originated).

While I was being lectured about ‶neighborliness,″ what about its lack in those who got me blocked? I have little doubt but that the haters are probably still there. I haven’t bothered to go back even though my NextDoor-imposed exile has lapsed. I lived perfectly well before discovering NextDoor and I imagine I can live perfectly well without it going forward. And I don’t need more hatred and venom in my life.

I can survive without NextDoor, but can the country and our democracy survive this continual wave of hatred and misinformation? That remains to be seen.

Photo credits: Featured image: Peter Linford/Pixabay, used with permission; Jill defends Joe, Bloomberg/Bloomberg/Getty Images, used under Fair Use; Nancy tells the people to eat ice cream, CBS, used under Fair Use

max-larochelle-uu-Jw5SunYI-unsplash edit big weather story
Bigger Than a Big Weather Story

Bigger Than a Big Weather Story

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When I was a practicing journalist I came to learn that there are few stories bigger than a big weather story. I still remember, more than three decades later, my managing editor at the daily paper where I worked standing in the middle of the newsroom as a tropical storm was headed our way and bellowing, “Blow it all out of proportion!” And we dutifully did.

So what’s bigger than a big weather story? The current furor over COVID-19, AKA the coronavirus, reminds me of our coverage of tropical storms and hurricanes, but on steroids. The media has certainly seen to the task of blowing it all out of proportion, making it bigger by far than a big weather story.

Now I can already hear the protests and mocking retorts. “But, BUT! This thing is deadly! It’s killing people! It’s a pandemic! It will destroy civilization as we know it!”

Yes, yes, I know all that (except the last one, of course), and I don’t mean to minimize the potential for death and destruction that this virus can wreak, any more than I would minimize the potential of seriously bad weather to kill and destroy. I’m also not intending to discourage people from taking reasonable precautions to protect themselves and others, though I am advocating that people not overreact. While some people, mostly older people and those with serious underlying medical conditions, are at high risk, many cases of the virus in the U.S. have been relatively mild. I think it’s both useful and even hugely beneficial to keep things in perspective and not run off the cliff by blowing things all out of proportion.

Striking a balance

As with any emergency, two factors are critically important. One is to recognize the danger and how to best address it, and the other is to stay calm and avoid panic. The kind of media coverage we’ve gotten on COVID-19, for the most part, has been heavy on the former (even as it was late in coming and largely distorted, which it remains), and exceedingly light on the later. I don’t think it has done what it could to make people safer and shockingly little to calm them or put things in perspective. We’ve seen the results of this as people rush to alter their everyday lives in ways that often are gross overreactions while not necessarily making them any safer. Meanwhile, the impact on the economy, with more than a 20% drop in the markets and massive slow-downs and shut-downs of whole industries, appears to be perhaps more harmful to the country than the virus itself.

We’ve watched on television as people in places, mostly on the West and East Coasts, stripped store shelves bare, as if theynauris-pukis-S0XbrnbUo-g-unsplash close quarters were expecting some sort of plague of locusts to descend on them. By way of comparison, as recently as a few days ago everything remained normal here where I live in North-Central Florida. I felt people were being sensible, given the remote risk involved, and there were no signs of panic. And then the dominoes started falling here as elsewhere. The National Hot Rod Association announced it was postponing the Gator Nationals hot rod races in Gainesville, which particularly pissed me off, partly because I had already bought my ticket, but more because it is an outdoor event, furchrissake. Florida colleges and universities are considering moving all classes online. And then yesterday I visited some of the local stores and, while I wouldn’t characterize the atmosphere as one of panic, it clearly had shifted from the usual norm. I’m not an expert, but I have to think the chance of contracting a virus in the closed confines of a supermarket has to be greater than in the open air.

As in other places, along with water, toilet paper and some other products had been stripped from the shelves. While I can kind of understand and even expected the water – these stores run out of water even in more normal times – but toilet paper? Folks, this isn’t a dysentery epidemic. What possible need for toilet paper, beyond normal consumption, can anyone have? And it turns out this isn’t just happening in this country, but overseas, too. There is the family in Australia who (by mistake) ordered not 48 rolls but 48 cases of toilet paper. By their estimate, 12 years worth of the stuff. Now admittedly the order was placed before the coronavirus furor reached full bore, but the family is finding they’ve become very popular among people who can’t find TP in the stores in Oz and are re-selling the rolls as a fundraiser.

Watching people rolling carts topped to the brim with products, one wonders if they’re planning on withdrawing to underground bunkers to await the all-clear after the radioactive fallout from nuclear war has stopped dropping or for when the invading aliens have returned to their distant galaxy. In large part promoted by the media, this sort of rush is now under way across the country.

One report I got was from my contractor, who described the scene in coastal Mississippi: “I stocked up on enough food and supplies to last a month just in case we have to be isolated but I’ve seen people buying enough to last for the rest of the year. It’s absolutely ridiculous.” Number, as of today, of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Mississippi: 10, at least one of which originated out of state. Number of deaths in the state from COVID-19: 0. Mississippi’s population: 2.99 million.

Ridiculous, indeed.

Putting things in perspective

To further see how ridiculous, let’s put things in perspective a bit. As of today, this county where I live has had a grand total of no cases of coronavirus. The county to the east has had five cases, the county to the north has had one (which came from Georgia, the state, not the country), and one to the southwest has recorded one case. None of the other four counties that border on this county has had any cases, and no deaths have been recorded in any of these counties. The state of Florida, which has about 22 million people, not counting its many visitors, has so far confirmed 76 cases and three deaths, several cases involving people who had traveled abroad or were from other states.

Meanwhile, so far this year, if averages from other recent years can be relied on, in just 75 days something like 630 people have died in road accidents on the state’s streets and highways and another 51,000 or so have been injured. Perhaps if people paid more attention to their driving and less to concern about wiping their butts they’d be a lot better off.

I haven’t even been able to find accurate statistics on how many people have come down from the flu or died from it in Florida, but nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that as many as 49 million people this flu season alone have contracted the flu, there have been up to 23 million medical visits and 620,000 hospitalizations, and 52,000 deaths, including 144 children to date (that includes 12 so far in Florida). By comparison, the CDC is reporting 1,629 cases of coronavirus in 46 states and the District of Columbia, and 41 deaths, with no child deaths in the U.S. Not that any of those cases or deaths are to be dismissed, but the comparison with the illness and deaths from the flu and other things can’t be ignored. In this country, we see more than 67,000 people die each year from opioids.

Hysteria and playing politics

If you look objectively at what the current Administration in the White House has done to control introduction and spread of this virus, it has acted decisively and quickly. When it became apparent that the virus had originated in or around the city of Wuhan in China, the President on Jan. 31 ordered a limited ban on entry into the U.S. by most travelers coming from China, and it went into effect on Feb. 2. This past week, on March 11, the President ordered a similar ban on travel from Europe, with exemptions for travelers from the U.K. and Ireland, both of which were later added to the ban. And on March 13 he declared a national state of emergency, with the effect of releasing additional federal resources and funding to deal with the crisis.

To assure a coordinated approach, the President on Feb. 26 had put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the government’s response to the coronavirus, with experts from the CDC and National Institutes of Health (NIH) leading the medical response to the threat posed by COVID-19. If you didn’t see that press conference you should now since I think it was one of the most explanatory and straightforward presidential press conference I’ve ever seen.

You’d almost never know that President Trump was doing anything to address the threat of coronavirus if you only follow the never-Trumpers on the left wing of the media who, along with some on the Democratic side of the aisle in Congress, have disgustingly done their utmost to politicize what is a national crisis. It reached the point where on some networks program hosts blatantly squelched any views that offered support to the President. This was transparently obvious, for instance, to anyone watching as CNN’s Don Lemon – who, in my assessment, would have a hard time beating out a clever hamster in an intelligence contest – repeatedly shut down former Ohio Gov. John Kasich (himself no big Trump supporter) as Kasich attempted to defend the President’s response to the crisis.

Along with the anti-Trump prejudice, we heard such inanities as commentators saying it was “zenophobic” and “racist” to call macau-photo-agency-4I6VHLP5Ws4-unsplash masked familythe virus “the Wuhan virus” or “the Chinese virus,” despite the fact that the origins of the virus in and around Wuhan is little disputed. That encouraged Chinese officials to blast the U.S. for saying the virus originated in China and even to threaten to withhold vital medications from the U.S. Meanwhile, lots of viruses and ailments, including Ebola, West Nile, Zika, and Lyme, not to mention “the Spanish flu” and “the Asian flu” – remember those, from 1918 and 1957, respectively? – have been named after the area in which they originated, and no one ever called those names racist or zenophobic.

Two big scandals exposed by the coronavirus

Not to sugar coat anything, there are at least two big national scandals this coronavirus thing has in fact uncovered, and we should be grateful that it has. One is the lack of our capacity to produce kits to test for the virus on a massive scale. While South Korea has been able to test 20,000 people a day, it is safe to say we don’t really know how many people in the U.S. have been tested. We do know that testing capacity in this country has been severely limited – perhaps no more than 20,000 tests in total performed to date – and this falls squarely on the shoulders of the CDC. Conflicts between the CDC and some states, such as the conflict with Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, at the epicenter of the outbreak, have been reported, and little has been done to tap the capacity of the private sector to produce test kits of sufficient number. Fortunately, on March 13 the FDA approved pharmaceutical giant Roche’s new automated test, which should allow a rapid ramp-up of testing capability as it begins to roll out. Roche says it already has 500,000 tests ready and can produce another 1.5 million of them per month. Going forward, a more flexible approach to developing and deploying testing for various diseases needs to be implemented.

The other big scandal, and perhaps the bigger and more difficult one to address, is how dependent the U.S. has become on overseas production of pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical components, with China holding the lion’s share of production of some key medications. It is estimated that China is the source of 97 percent of the antibiotics used in the U.S., and two countries, China and India, produce most of the pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical materials used in the U.S. Along with the strategic threat this preponderance of source represents, there also have been issues of quality control and corruption in the Chinese pharmaceutical industry. It would seem that moves should begin immediately to domesticate key elements of this country’s pharmaceuticals production, something other countries also should do.

We have learned lessons from previous pandemics, such as the H1N1 pandemic of a decade ago, but sometimes lessons are forgotten and each new pandemic brings with it new challenges. Making systemic fixes to address such obvious and serious problems as these two needs to be a national priority. And that is not blowing things out of proportion.

Photo credits: Featured image: Max LaRochelle/Unsplash; Crowded: Nauris Pukis/Unsplash; Masked Family: Macau Photo Agency/Unsplash