Who Will Get Blamed?

image credit: poynter.org

Who Will Get Blamed 

If Coronavirus Shutdown Turns Out To Be 

A Massive Overreaction?

The editorial at Issues and Insights asks the big questions:

As the Trump administration tries to figure out when to reopen the economy, and Democrats try to blame President Donald Trump for every coronavirus death, there’s another question lurking in the background. What if we learn that trillions of dollars in economic costs from the coronavirus shutdown bought us little or nothing in terms of public health?

As the disease progresses and our understanding of it increases, that possibility grows.

The editorial then expands on the following topics:

• Death projections were wildly exaggerated. 
• Reports of overwhelmed health care were exaggerated. 
• Death counts are likely inflated.
• The death rate is magnitudes lower than it appears.
• There are clear at-risk groups. 
• It’s not entirely clear how well isolation works.
• Ventilators might be causing deaths.

The editorial concludes:

We are the first to admit that, because this coronavirus is new and early signs about its lethality were worrisome, extra precaution was warranted as coronavirus spread. But not everyone was hitting the panic button, it’s just that voices of calm were ignored. If it turns out that the risks were far less dire, and the disease far more manageable without draconian restrictions, how will the public react? Who will they blame for needlessly crashing the economy?

We know who Democrats will blame, of course. But if the evidence shows that massive shutdowns weren’t needed, there must be a reckoning. And it should start with the public health “experts” who brought them about.

The full editorial is here.

RELATED:  At PJ Media, Dennis Prager came to the same conclusion (“Has The Lockdown Worked?).

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Vote-by-mail and voter fraud

Glenn Reynolds posted this at Instapundit:

“Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” That quote isn’t from President Trump, who criticized mail-in voting this week after Wisconsin Democrats tried and failed to change an election at the last minute into an exclusively mail-in affair. It’s the conclusion of the bipartisan 2005 report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III.

Concerns about vote-buying have a long history in the U.S. They helped drive the move to the secret ballot, which U.S. states adopted between 1888 and 1950. Secret ballots made it harder for vote buyers to monitor which candidates sellers actually voted for. Vote-buying had been pervasive; my research with Larry Kenny at the University of Florida has found that voter turnout fell by about 8% to 12% after states adopted the secret ballot.

You wouldn’t know any of this listening to the media outcry over Mr. Trump’s remarks. “There is a lot of dishonesty going on with mail-in voting,” the president said Tuesday. In response, a CNN “fact check” declares that Mr. Trump “opened a new front in his campaign of lies about voter fraud.” A New York Times headline asserts: “Trump Is Pushing a False Argument on Vote-by-Mail Fraud.” Both claim that voter fraud is essentially nonexistent. The Carter-Baker report found otherwise.

Intimidation and vote buying were key concerns of the commission: “Citizens who vote at home, at nursing homes, at the workplace, or in church are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation. Vote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.” The report provides examples, such as the 1997 Miami mayoral election that resulted in 36 arrests for absentee-ballot fraud. The election had to be rerun, and the result was reversed.

There are more recent cases, too. In 2017 an investigation of a Dallas City Council election found some 700 fraudulent mail-in ballots signed by the same witness using a fake name. The discovery left two council races in limbo, and the fraud was much larger than the vote differential in one of those races. The case resulted in a criminal conviction. . . .

It is often claimed that impossibly large numbers of people live at the same address. In 2016, 83 registered voters in San Pedro, Calif., received absentee ballots at the same small two-bedroom apartment. Prosecutors rarely pursue this type of case.

Mail-in voting is a throwback to the dark old days of vote-buying and fraud. Because of this, many countries don’t allow absentee ballots for citizens living in their country, including Norway and Mexico. Americans deserve a more trustworthy system.

The above extract is via Instapundit; the original article in the WSJ is behind a paywall.

And here’s an article by a reporter who demonstrated how easy it is to game the system: “Mail-in Ballots Make Voter Fraud Easy. I Know Because I Did It”.

Ohio voters had their Election Day cancelled, and voters had nothing to say about it. The most recent Cleveland Tea Party blog on this is here.

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Happy Easter

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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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Ohio cases of COVID-19: Amy Acton guessed wrong

Jeffrey C. Barefoot at the American Thinker blogsite reports:

On March 12, Amy Acton, director of the Ohio Department of Health, and Governor Mike DeWine told Ohioans that there were already 100,000 of us infected with the virus.  The next day, Amy clarified that this number was her "guesstimate." 

. . .

Yes, people in Ohio are getting infected.  Does infection mean automatic admission to the hospital?  Hardly, and numbers don't have to be guesstimated.  Of the 4,043 confirmed Ohio cases, only 27% (1,104) have required hospitalization.  So what percentage of Ohio's population have gotten the virus and required hospital admission?  Less than 1/100 of 1%.  Yes, but what if we haven't peaked?  Even if the hospitalization rate triples in two weeks, the percentage would be less than 3/100 of 1%.  For this, the lockdown has pushed 468,414 Ohioans on to welfare, slammed shut our small businesses and closed our churches for the highest Holy Week of the year.

Amy Acton guessed wrong.  The guess has damaged many lives.  Reason and prudence require an immediate adjustment to Ohio's lockdown. 

Full article is here.  

Contact Gov. Mike DeWine: (614) 644-4357 or by email here

https://governor.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/governor/contact

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Power grab

Cartoon by Pat Cross at Townhall:

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Doctors and Doctored Numbers

image credit: powertaylor.com

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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