Mask Mandates are a Public Health Menace

image credit: insidepulse.com

At BizPacReview, Michelle Malkin has a good common sense take on the face mask mandates, such as the one issued by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine:

Contracting COVID can be fatal or debilitating for the elderly, immune-compromised and physically challenged. But there is no catastrophic public health emergency justifying sweeping government orders and ordinances that would force healthy citizens to wear masks in an increasingly oppressive climate of manufactured fear — completely untethered from pragmatic realities and risk assessments.

. . .

Watching young, healthy people jogging or hiking on isolated trails in mid-July around Colorado Springs in cloth and surgical masks drives me nuts. They’re not protecting anyone else and are likely making themselves sick. In what sane world is breathing through moist bacteria traps and cutting yourself off from vitally needed oxygen a public health virtue? Vulnerable kids especially are being lied to by panic-mongers and exploited as human shields.  . . .

The evidence does not support broad mask mandates. Yet, now we free-thinkers and free-breathers face jail time and witch hunts for dissenting. It’s all about politics, power, and control.

Read Ms. Malkin's article here.  As for me, I’ve been wearing my mask around my chin. 

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Weaponizing the virus

The Wuhan virus, a/k/a COVID-19, has been weaponized by the Progressive left. More masks, more lockdowns – all driven by politics.  And telling the truth can be hazardous to your health.  Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media reports: 

Minnesota State Sen. Scott Jensen (R-Carver County), a doctor who was named the Family Physician of the Year in 2016, now faces an investigation for alleged “misinformation” and “recklessness” in his public statements about the coronavirus pandemic. The Minnesota Board of Medical Practice is investigating him for warning that coronavirus deaths may be inflated due to financial incentives to put “COVID-19” on death certificates and for comparing COVID-19 to the common flu.

“Less than a week ago, I was notified by the Board of Medical Practice in Minnesota that I was being investigated because of public statements I’ve made,” Jensen announced in a video posted Sunday. He said the complaints were anonymous, so he will not be able to face his accusers.

. . .

. . . “Hospital administrators might well want to see COVID-19 attached to a discharge summary or a death certificate. Why? Because if it’s a straightforward, garden-variety pneumonia that a person is admitted to the hospital for – if they’re Medicare – typically, the diagnosis-related group lump sum payment would be $5,000,” Jensen wrote on Facebook. “But if it’s COVID-19 pneumonia, then it’s $13,000, and if that COVID-19 pneumonia patient ends up on a ventilator, it goes up to $39,000.”

On April 21, FactCheck.org concluded, “The figures cited by Jensen generally square with estimated Medicare payments for COVID-19 hospitalizations, based on average Medicare payments for patients with similar diagnoses.”

Later that month, New York funeral directors told Project Veritas that they had seen “COVID-19” marked as a cause of death on death certificates even when the patient had not tested positive for coronavirus. The funeral directors said there was a financial incentive to twist the facts. When The New York Times named 1,000 coronavirus victims on its front page in May, it included a man whose death police are investigating as a homicide.

. . .

In his video, Dr. Jensen claims, “I’ve got the Department of Health in Illinois where one of the directors says, ‘Just because we put COVID-19 on the death certificate as the cause of death, that doesn’t mean the patient died of COVID-19.'”

As for the claim that Jensen engaged in “recklessness” by comparing COVID-19 to the common flu, the doctor and state senator quoted Dr. Anthony Fauci in an editorial published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases [for COVID-19] is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of COVID-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%),” Fauci wrote.

The rest of the report is here.  And I do not trust Gov. DeWine's "orders."

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Panic Porn and the COVID Experts’ Credibility

Matt Vespa at Townhall is right.  The health experts were wrong, and we should all be preparing for our post-lockdown Fourth of July picnics and celebrations.  From his article “And That's Why the COVID Experts’ Credibility Is in Smoldering Ruins”:

People were shamed for going outside. They were selfish, right? People wanting to re-open their businesses were going to get people killed. The overreaction was already apparent by mid-May. And now, with how the medical community has responded to the Floyd demonstrations, it’s now quite clear we’ve been had. Is it still contagious? Yes, but why the blasé attitude towards the Floyd rioters? Where was their public shaming which was shared ad nauseum on social media? The medical experts have been exposed as being no better than CNN, MSNBC, or the entire Democratic operative class. For the millions who lost their jobs to see a narrative reverse overnight because “orange man…bad,” I would be furious. To those who lost their businesses, couldn’t attend graduations, or even funerals—I would be livid as well. In general, we all know that racism isn’t as deadly as a virus. You don’t need to be a doctor to know that, but these clowns think so. We had medical workers clapping and kneeling with protesters. That’s the kill shot to this entire lockdown narrative. We were told to stay home and help not overwhelm the hospitals—and this is the end result. 

The liberal media, Democrats, and the medical expert community, who are now no better than DNC operatives, are trying to weaponize the virus to trash the markets in order to hurt Trump again. They want us back inside. Don’t go back inside, folks. Go outside, go shopping, go to the lakes, go to the beach, and do whatever. The experts have no authority, no high ground—nothing. You cannot sit there and make the argument that protesting in the streets in support of liberal causes is fine, but any other activity is going to spread the virus. You look like a total clown if you do. The experts are finished. So, they can peddle the panic porn all they want. People should do whatever they want because they have zero credibility. 

Panic Porn.  Good phrase.  Read the rest of Mr. Vespa’s article here.

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Continue the lockdown or re-open?

photo credit: Times of India

Once again, Heather Mac Donald is a voice of reason during the destructive lockdown. Her article appeared in The Hill the other day, and here’s part of it:

Who has the burden of proof regarding the economic lockdowns: Those who argue for continuing them or those who want to lift them?  

. . .

. . .both sides of the lockdown debate are motivated by public health concerns. Pace [Gov. Andrew] Cuomo, his ornately complicated reopening plan does have a trade-off. Lives are being lost to the lockdown, a toll that will mount the longer the economy remains shuttered. Some doctors estimate that the closure of hospitals to non-coronavirus cases and the reluctance of patients to burden 911 have increased mortality as much as the virus. The global depression will devastate life expectancies in the less-developed world. Overdose deaths and suicides brought on by joblessness and loss of hope will rise, as more and more businesses fold permanently.  

The rhetoric of lockdown proponents is growing more apocalyptic. “A Virus Tightens Its Deadly Grip” announced the lead print headline in Wednesday’s New York Times — even as the data keep reinforcing the case against universal shutdown. Infection outbreaks are occurring in highly specific locales, not universally: nursing homes, meatpacking plants and prisons. Deaths are tragically concentrated in the former.   

. . .

The demographics of COVID-19 allow for a targeted response. Nursing homes and all congregate facilities must be kept immaculately clean and protected. Over the long term, Americans will need to rethink how they care for elderly parents and how much they are willing to pay for such care. But if the proponents of universal lockdowns had to prove the case for continuing to destroy the complex web of transactions by which human beings flourish, the economy would reopen and millions of livelihoods would be saved. 

Ms. Mac Donald’s full analysis is here.  Highly recommended.

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The COVID-19 Crisis Un-masked

image credit: michiganradio.org

Today’s Must Read: “Well, That Unraveled Fast” by Jeffrey A. Tucker at the American Institute for Economic Research, which begins:

Thinking back to February 28, 2020, and the New England Journal of Medicine. It published an article called “Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted” signed by Anthony S. Fauci (THE Fauci), Clifford Lane, and Robert R. Redfield.  

It reported an existing COVID-19 case fatality rate of 2% but further pointed out that infections show “a wide spectrum of disease severity.” “If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%” or perhaps as high as the flu seasons of 1957 and 1968, but is nowhere near “a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.” To be sure, they said, mitigating the disease could require “isolating ill persons (including voluntary isolation at home), school closures, and telecommuting where possible.”

Now, what precisely happened between February 28 and two weeks later? This will be studied for many years to find out precisely how governors and mayors, through a series of unscientific, panicked, unjustified, and morally egregious actions, crushed under foot the world’s strongest economy while the media cheered. We’ll be discussing the whys and whats for a generation. 

The point is that it is all unraveling as fast as it came. 

. . .

In this case, it made the U.S Constitution and human rights generally null and void for a full thirty days. And we had no choice but to comply. It was a grotesque experiment in totalitarianism. Families ripped apart, people’s businesses and jobs destroyed, essential surgeries delayed, despair spread throughout society. 

Now we know. Never again. 

Mr. Tucker’s full article is here. 

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Malkin: Social distancing: effective or futile?

As usual, Michelle Malkin hits the nail on the head:

Mandatory mass isolation (or at least the illusion of it) is an efficient way to instill hysteria and disrupt lives but a poor means of actually protecting the most vulnerable. Selective social distancing is a futile exercise in virus virtue signaling. 

Either we’re all in or we’re all out. You can’t attribute curve-flattening to “social distancing” if huge swaths of people never practiced it or opted out when convenient.

How long must we carry on the charade? Public health autocrat Anthony Fauci insists we must continue living like this until there are “no new cases” and “no new deaths” — and until a vaccine (which his control-freak pal Bill Gates is working overtime to foist on the world) is in place. This is nuts. The zero-cases/zero-deaths standard doesn’t exist for any other pandemic. We’re strangling ourselves in CAUTION tape, riddled with holes, for show. Pretense is a pointless cure worse than any infectious disease.

Read the entire column here. (Note: Link is to a new web address for Ms. Malkin).

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Doctors and Doctored Numbers

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At American Greatness, Conrad Black zeroes in on why this lock-down is due to both misdiagnoses (e.g., on the projected fatality rate of COVID-19) and bureaucratic over-reach:

the number of “confirmed cases”—meaning cases that have come to the attention of the medical profession—tells us nothing about the number of people infected. Nor does that number tell us what happens to the gamut of those infected. Nor is the number of deaths “hard,” because it does not distinguish between those who die of the virus and those who die merely with it (that is, they might have died even without it).

. . .

The most important fact about COVID-19, its true mortality rate, is the number who die of the virus divided by the number infected by it. No algorithms. Simple arithmetic.

In short, [Dr. Anthony] Fauci, et al., are showing themselves to be typical of our bureaucracy: over-credentialed, entrusted with too much power, and dangerously incompetent.

Learning the true figures about precisely what danger the virus poses to whom must begin by taking into account one thing we know for sure about COVID-19: that many, if not most, of those infected by this unusually contagious virus show few or no symptoms. This suggests eventual near-universal contagion.

. . .

Fauci showed how thoroughly he and his cohorts have subordinated common sense to bureaucratic authority. Having strenuously campaigned to deny the usefulness of hydroxychloroquine, having been confronted by the fact that physicians on the front lines of the battle against the virus are using it themselves, and having been asked whether he—were he to come down with illness from the virus—would use it, he weakly conceded that he would but only as part of an approved study. He cared less about describing what the drug can do and cannot do than about affirming his agency’s and the FDA’s prerogatives.

Backed by the media, Fauci and company have contended that actions by anybody, ordinary citizens, elected officials, or physicians that do not follow proper bureaucratic procedures are illegitimate. Who the hell do they think they are? We belong to ourselves. Not to them.

Black's article is here.

But maybe there is a light at the end of the tunnel.  Headline at Breitbart:  

Donald Trump Thinking of 2nd Coronavirus Task Force 

Focused on Reopening Country

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