Cumulative Confirmed COVID-19 Cases

Monday, March 18, 2024

Joshua Namm on Democrat Antipathy Towards Israel

Here's an excerpt from Joshua Namm's Substack column titled Hard Facts About "Tough Love";
What part of "sovereign nation" do Democrats not understand?

"One of the most frustrating aspects of Joe Biden’s Israel rhetoric, continually regurgitated by his administration, has been the effort to cartoonishly portray Benjamin Netanyahu, and not Hamas, as the villain in Israel’s war in Gaza. A key element of that propagandistic fantasy is that the Israeli people do not support Netanyahu, or his policies, and that that he alone, not Israel’s three-member war cabinet, is the sole decision maker.

"The administration, media, and other Democrats have dutifully behaved in every way possible to attempt to portray the propaganda as truth. For ridiculously hyperbolic media headlines on the subject, you can go here, here, and here. Each portrays Israel not as a sovereign nation, and a partner equal to America (or any other Western nation), but instead as a recalcitrant child who must be disciplined. The most common, and patronizing, phrase used to describe this attitude is “tough love.”  In other words, Israel is a problem child, and not a highly sophisticated, modern, Western democracy that was savagely attacked. It is a wayward teen, not the planet’s only Jewish state whose people were barbarically murdered, raped, and mutilated in a one-day genocide that represented the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

"One of the more hypocritical aspects of all of this is the calls from Democrats for “regime change” in Israel. Late last week, many of us were shocked by the news that Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, also a Democrat, not only called for the removal of the democratically elected Netanyahu government, but also compared Bibi to Hamas itself and to Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. Schumer’s attack included a fourth prong to his so called “obstacles to peace”: right wing, meaning mostly observant, Jews.

"So religious Jews, and the Jewish prime minister of Israel, are equivalent to the terrorists who carried out the 10/7 attacks, and the leader of Fatah, who would like to carry out (G-d forbid), another 10/7, and spent much of the first several decades of his life helping to murder Jews. Schumer also referred to members of Netanyahu’s cabinet as “bigots” and “extremists.” Maybe he thought that Jonathan Glazer wasn’t embarrassing us enough and felt inspired to adopt a similar vibe. In retrospect, this should not have been that surprising coming from a man who once directly threated Justices of the Supreme Court. Fortunately, there are indications that the strategy backfired, at least in Schumer’s case, as more liberal Jewish organizations, and some Democrats criticized the speech.

"Schumer, like the media, and like lesser Democrats, was echoing Biden’s talking points, many of which were expressed during a March 10 MSNBC sycophantic fawn-fest interview with human water droplet Jonathan Capehart. For context, this is the same interview in which El Presidente apologized for calling an illegal immigrant murderer “illegal,” and claimed that illegal immigrants “built the country.” (It is truly amazing how many “did I just read that correctly???” moments this man inspires)

"He also bizarrely claimed that he has known Bibi “for fifty years.” They must have met during Biden’s, a junior senator at the time, super-secret, and also imaginary, trip to Israel in 1974 (where twenty-five-year-old Netanyahu was living at the time). More heinously, he said that “In my view, “(Netanyahu) is hurting Israel more than helping Israel by making the rest of the world—it’s contrary to what Israel stands for. And I think it’s a big mistake.” The “it” being Netanyahu not paying enough “attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken.”

"The reality: protecting Jewish life is exactly what Israel stands for. He is obviously setting up a false dichotomy with Bibi and the reality of Israel on one side, and the leftist, fantasy version of Israel on the other.

"To end things on a low note, Biden once again quoted, as he had during the State of the Union, Hamas’ FALSE casualty numbers.

.....

"What’s behind their enthusiasm for attempting to meddle in the internal affairs of another nation? On March 10, an Israel expert claimed that he had been asked by a “serious administration figure“ about “what "it is that will force the Netanyahu coalition to collapse.” In what universe does the democratically elected leader of the world’s largest democracy seek to topple the government of the Middle East’s only democracy? Apparently, anything is on the table as a campaign strategy for an incumbent president who knows that he is in deep trouble and is trying desperately to please his antisemitic far-left base, while also simultaneously trying to retain whatever loyalty to the party remains among pro-Israel Democrat voters and mega-donors.

======================

I loathe Biden, Blinken, and now Schumer along with the "Squad" and other Dems, with their anti-Israel, anti-Netanyahu rhetoric and their demands and insults. So I was glad to read this excellent article on the subject. Make sure you read the whole thing.

Let's  hope Biden doesn't get re-elected, because he will continue destroying Israel in the process of destroying everything else.

Julia Doubleday on Long COVID Awareness Day

Actually, March 15 should have been called Long COVID Denial Day due to all the desperate attempts to downplay the seriousness of this disease.

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Here's Julia Doubleday's March 18 column at The Gauntlet: Media celebrated Long COVID Awareness Day by denying its existence; Long COVID is a thorn in the side of "back to normal." Attempts to silence patients are intensifying.

"Just a week ago, in response to an NPR piece that framed a disabled man’s existence in an inaccessible society as a burden to those around him, I wrote:

"Long COVID is the faulty, load-bearing beam in the rickety pandemic denial superstructure. Were the public to grasp how common and how severe it is, the entire post-pandemic facade would come crumbling down.

"Therefore, as Long COVID patients become louder, as their presence becomes more undeniable, as their numbers grow, the COVID normalization project must pivot from attempting to disappear these victims to steadily stigmatizing them.

"Four days later, on March 15 aka Long COVID Awareness Day, outlets across the globe chose to elevate an unpublished, un-peer-reviewed, observational text-message based “study,” and its absurd claim that Long COVID is nothing new and everyone should stop talking about it.

"This political choice- elevating a single unpublished study which examined a total of zero patients and ran a total of zero tests- when tens of thousands of others contradict its findings, is unsurprising. The political choice to do so on a day intended to draw attention to the suffering of tens of millions of people is cruel in the extreme.

"Long COVID Awareness Day intended to do just that; create awareness through organized actions, many of them put on by disabled people struggling with day-to-day activities. Major media outlets ensured that the top “Long COVID” results on Google that day would be minimizing, unscientific propaganda instead of news about activists, their work, their message, and their illness.

"It feels tiresome to continually relitigate those tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of studies demonstrating the existence of post-COVID health impacts and in particular the cluster of symptoms known as Long COVID. Viral persistence, microclots in the blood and endothelial dysfunction, immune system dysregulation, mitochondrial damage leading to severe fatigue and exercise intolerance, blood-brain barrier disruption have all been documented in Long COVID patients. The CDC’s most recent data found that 6.8% of Americans are currently suffering from Long COVID, or approximately 24 million people. There is no legitimate scientific debate, whatsoever, about whether Long COVID “exists.”

"If it feels like a waste of time to debate every minimizer and grifter popping up to proclaim COVID, a novel virus that has killed tens of millions of people since 2020 in one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, can’t possibly harm “healthy” people (whatever that means), it is. It is the same propaganda playbook used by Big Tobacco and Big Oil. Deny, deny, deny. Get people arguing with you about their very existence; they won’t have time to argue about their rights.

"While we might expect the NYPost to run such propaganda- in their case under the disgusting headline, “On Long COVID Awareness Day, Remember This: Long COVID is Fake!”, more respected outlets like The Guardian ran the same story with the same message, albeit under the more liberal-friendly “Time to stop using term ‘long COVID’ as symptoms no worse than those after flu.” The average person is infected with COVID 5-10 times more frequently than flu, for the record. So even if post-COVID effects were comparable to post-flu effects (they aren’t), we’d still have a public health issue 5-10 times as large, on top of the pre-existing burden of flu.

"None of this is about evidence, papers, studies, charts, or data. If it were, media would splash “Long Covid and Impaired Cognition”, the self-explanatory title of a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine, across their front pages. Is it not front-page news that a disease we’ve all been encouraged to repeatedly contract, for the rest of our lives, causes cognitive damage? Aren’t there some concerning implications to the scientific finding that people are losing cognitive ability with every infection, and the entire public is being repeatedly infected with no end in sight?

"Media outlets, their corporate owners and their editors have one view of COVID-19: the crisis is over. Therefore, any evidence that might indicate otherwise is presented quietly, if at all. Evidence that confirms their pre-conceived notions- notions which just happen to align with the worldview that all is well, and our beneficent capitalist overlords are ruling wisely- will be loud and unavoidable.

"We see the same phenomenon with climate reporting, for the same reasons; although there is more coverage now of the looming catastrophe, it has never been presented with the urgency merited. The people behind these publications do not understand the true nature of the climate emergency, because they still believe in the “meritocracy” they sit atop. To question its doings, to ask aloud if this system might just kill us all in the end, is to question their own identity and sense of superiority. In other words, they simply cannot believe that those in charge could be so stupid and so wrong, to take us down a path so destructive and so irrational. It’s important to internalize that those in charge have done so with climate and are doing so with COVID; there are no adults taking care of us, only oligarchs squeezing profit from us.

"The dehumanizing debate over the existence of Long COVID patients assumes, first and foremost, that Long COVID patients cannot and should not speak to their own experiences. The Guardian’s piece does quote a dissenting doctor, toward the end of its article. It does not quote a single patient living with this disease that they are once again encouraging people to ignore, dismiss, and doubt. Articles like these aren’t simply insulting or offensive; they have material impacts. Every suffering patient going to the ends of the Earth to convince their family members, friends, and even doctors that yes, they have a real disease, is set back by these articles. They are materially and violently harmed by such pieces.

"Many people living with Long COVID cohabit with people who do not understand or believe in it; the wife from NPR’s article is one relatively benign example. Although she does want to force her husband to risk lifelong disability to eat in the inside part of the restaurant, she does at least still mask in many places. She does not believe Long COVID is “fake,” but also does not seem to fully internalize the risk of exposure. Other patients deal with angry, mocking family members who refuse to test or mask at all, who purposely expose them, who believe they are lying or malingering. Articles like this reinforce their beliefs and behavior.

"Additionally, such misinformation harms those who do not yet have Long COVID. Most Long COVID patients will tell you that they did not know that COVID could leave them long-term ill or disabled when they got sick. Four years into the crisis, that’s not an oversight. There is a deliberate, highly successful effort to misinform the public that COVID cannot harm them. President Biden has mentioned the words Long COVID aloud once or twice. A quick search of his twitter account reveals it has never been mentioned there. To this administration, the inconvenient victims of “letting COVID rip” with zero mitigations in place simply do not exist. The press is doing the necessary ideological and social work of convincing the public that anyone who claims otherwise is lying or crazy.

"It’s hard to think of anything more awful than attacking people your policies already disabled. But discrediting victims is the only way to continue to double down on forever COVID infections. 

"If we take a step back- back from the years of blinding, top-down propaganda, back from the inane questions, back from the social denial- the absurd basis of the entire push to disappear Long COVID patients is the idea that a dangerous virus cannot hurt anybody. That instead of listening to all the millions of patients who’ve been harmed and are trying to warn us, we should listen to a handful of prominent minimizers who want you infected. That is what the press, in a thousand different ways, with a thousand different tactics, continually tries to impress upon the public. COVID won’t hurt you. If it hurt someone else, it’s because they’re unlucky, bad, lying, or insane. The political purpose of this is to encourage you to risk COVID, again and again and again. It is a comforting fantasy; stripping away the years of unscientific reporting, you should be able to see it for what it is: a complete absurdity.

"Never in the history of public health have citizens been encouraged to contract and spread disease. Never in the history of viral illnesses, outside of anti-vaxxer spaces, have people been encouraged to believe that pathogens improve the immune system (they don’t!). Never in the history of humanity have societies welcomed disease and disease spread as a good or neutral event. These outlets are brainwashing you not only to accept COVID, but to accept that nothing can be done about it, and that those who want something to be done about it are bad and crazy. They are brainwashing you, in fact, to accept and embrace COVID; why else are those wearing masks treated as freaks for wanting to avoid it?

"To pretend COVID- like any other disease- cannot be mitigated- is bizarre, unscientific, defeatist logic, and it is, in fact, a lie! We have the technology to drastically reduce airborne disease spread; we are choosing not to use it because it requires spending money on the public. After several years of strange, upside-down world messaging in favor of reinfections, people are siding with a fantasy over the shouts of the many harmed, and siding with COVID over their own health."

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If only more people thought the way she does! Instead we have to deal with the "COVID is over", "Long Covid is just another respiratory illness", "Let's just move on" mentality.

Pass this column on, and make sure you subscribe to this great newsletter as well so that you're always well-informed.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Dr Ruth's COVID news & more newsletter for 3/16/24

Here are some excerpts from the newsletter of the dependable Dr Ruth Ann Crystal:

"This week, March 11 marked four years since the WHO declared a global pandemic for COVID. Remember the run on toilet paper and cleaning supplies? We have come a long way since then, but COVID is still a serious disease. 

"JN.1 and its descendants still make up most COVID cases now. Emergency department visits are down more than 21% this week and hospitalizations are down 13.6% from the week prior. The CDC’s wastewater monitoring shows that the entire United States is down to a “MODERATE” level of wastewater SARS-CoV-2 virus now. We see from Sara Anne Willette’s analysis that Tennessee’s wastewater SARS-CoV-2 levels are extremely high, followed by high levels in Kansas, Virginia and Georgia. Here in the Bay Area, levels have come down in most places to a moderate level.

"According to JP Weiland’s March 15th update, COVID infections continue to decrease significantly to “Medium” levels in most places and he calculates that about 1 in every 77 people is currently infected reflecting 430,000 new COVID infections each day in the United States. 

Variants

"New variant BA.2.87.1 was found in South Africa and Asia, but it does not have the ability to outcompete dominant variant JN.1. In the future, it may or may not pick up mutations, but for now it does not appear to be a threat. 

"There is a new variant called KP.2 that is JN.1 with an additional “FLiRT” (F456L and R346T) mutation in its spike protein that is growing exponentially in some places. According to Mike Honey, “Globally, KP.2 is showing a very strong growth advantage of 14% per day (101% per week)” over JN.1 and other Pirola (BA.2.86) descendants. He predicts that KP.2 could take over as the dominant variant sometime in late March. I am interested to see if the 2023-2024 XBB.1.5 vaccine will protect against KP.2 as it does against JN.1. Some seniors are waiting to get their next booster of the XBB.1.5 COVID vaccine, but it may be wise to get the booster sooner if future studies show that it protects against KP.2.

"JP Weiland posted yesterday regarding the evolution of mutations in SARS-CoV-2 variants. He said “What we've seen over the past 2 years is an evolutionary pattern of big saltations (a new variant appears with many new mutations all at once) , then a lot of quick convergent evolution to optimize the new variant. I can't think of another virus that has a similar trend.  Usually they have stepwise mutations.”

Acute COVID infections, General COVID info

"With the fourth anniversary of COVID being announced as a global pandemic, some authors have written summary articles of what we have learned over the last 4 years of the COVID pandemic. In a post titled “Covid, 4 years on”, Eric Topol MD looked at partisan gaps in COVID death rates, the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and the fact that vaccines protect not only against COVID infections, but also against blood clots, heart attacks, heart failure and strokes in the post-acute phase of the disease (see below). He also reflected on his disappointment with the CDC's March 1st recommendations that tell COVID positive people that they can return to work if they have no fever and have improving symptoms. I wholeheartedly agree that it makes no sense for people with COVID to return to work before they are negative on a rapid antigen test.

"COVID infection is known to increase the risk of heart attack, strokes, blood clots and other cardiovascular complications acutely and in the long term. Looking at 10 million vaccinated people vs. 10 million unvaccinated people from the UK, Spain, Estonia, vaccination was found to significantly reduce (by 45–81% in the acute phase and 24-58% in the post-acute phase) the risk of blood clots and cardiac events including heart attack, heart failure and stroke. “If you are vaccinated, your risk of having post-Covid cardiovascular and thromboembolic complications is reduced quite dramatically,” Prieto-Alhambra said.

"Yesterday, March 15th, was Long COVID Awareness Day. People from the Long COVID community posted photos of themselves before and after they got Long COVID. In Australia, people with Long COVID had a Long COVID Awareness lay down in front of Parliament House in Melbourne. People gathered together in many other countries as well. The CN Tower in Canada and the Shipbuilders of Port Glasgow sculptures in Scotland were lit with teal, gray and black representing Long COVID’s ribbon. In the tricolored Long COVID ribbon, teal represents hope and support, gray represents loss and grief, and black loneliness and isolation. 

"In honor of Long COVID Awareness Day, the CDC posted a message with a photo of able bodied people standing and hugging on a beach looking at the sun with their backs turned to the viewer. Some Long COVID folks on Twitter said that the picture reflected the CDC turning their backs on people with Long COVID. They also commented that people with Long COVID are not represented by this stock photo as they are at home in bed, too weak to walk on a sandy beach and they wear eye masks because light from the sun hurts their eyes and heads.

"On Long COVID Awareness Day, Queensland, Australia’s Chief Health Officer John Gerrard said that the term "Long COVID" is harmful and that long term post-COVID viral symptoms are no different than the flu and other respiratory illnesses."

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These Long COVID-deniers make me so angry!  The term "Long COVID" isn't harmful -- it's the disease of Long COVID that is

I can remember when these LC sufferers, looking for support online early in the pandemic, referred to themselves as Long Haulers and tried to make sense of their symptoms, since they were not believed by doctors. Here it is, 4 years later, and they are still not believed.

Why Doesn't the U.S. Ever Talk About Hamas Like This?

From JewishPress.com: Schumer’s Rabbi Rachel Demands Israelis Dump Netanyahu or Face the Consequences

"Rachel Timoner, the clergy at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) spends Yom Kippur and where his daughter got married, on Saturday told Politico that 'In this speech, he said what most of us think.'

"She was referring to the Senate Majority Leader’s call on Israel to go to new elections ASAP so that they and the Biden administration can finally rid themselves of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu."

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This is just disgraceful. 

We always used to say that Israel was surrounded by enemies. We meant the Middle East.  Now, unfortunately, those enemies include the United States.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

The Next Pandemic? We're Less Ready NOW!

We're "less ready" NOW  Just look at the immediate negative response to the measles, where so-called doctors like Florida's Ladapo tell kids to go to school sick; where illegal aliens are spreading the disease -- and probably other diseases -- in our country; where vaccination is still a dirty word.  Ignorant people who refuse to trust the science are making all contagious diseases even worse, and if we have an even more deadly pandemic that COVID, all bets are off.

From Axios:  COVID backlash could leave the U.S. less ready for the next pandemic. 

"Four years after COVID-19 emerged, the U.S. in many ways is far less ready for the next major viral threat, despite the pandemic era's significant scientific advances.

"Why it matters: Key weaknesses in the country's COVID response have only become more glaring, including the politicization of public health, an understaffed health care workforce and a growing hostility to science.

"The big picture: Experts say it's a matter of when, not if, the world will face another pandemic, and the next one could make the last look mild.

  • The U.S. was caught flat-footed by the arrival of the coronavirus in early 2020 and was hit much harder than other developed nations.
  • The intense backlash against the muddled U.S. response contributed to eroded trust in public health, setting back preparedness efforts in important areas.
  • In a "big picture" way, the U.S. is "less prepared, because so much of this comes down to political will, public trust — public trust in government institutions, public trust in the media, public trust in one another," said CĂ©line Gounder, a senior fellow at health policy nonprofit KFF.

"Yes, but: The country's early struggles with tracking the virus, testing and supply chains, along with the rapid development of vaccines through Operation Warp Speed, yielded important lessons that ultimately have left the U.S. better off, said former Biden administration COVID response coordinator Ashish Jha.

  • "Right now, if we got a novel agent arriving on our shores tomorrow, we could probably pretty rapidly figure out where is it spreading, where is it not," he said, adding that the inability to track COVID was a major reason for harsher measures like stay-at-home orders.
  • "If you think about medical countermeasures, surveillance, we're clearly in better shape," Jha said.

"The rise of nongovernmental data surveillance efforts also represented a monumental change in how public health data is handled, and the ease of at-home testing enabled people to take charge of their own health, said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health.

  • "We have seen how individuals can take action to protect ourselves," Nuzzo told Axios. "It's not just a matter of government."

"Still, the public health force is dangerously depleted and burnt out, and growing anti-vaccine sentiment could undercut a key tool for curbing the next pandemic.

"Threat level: Resistance to COVID measures has made it more likely a large segment of the population will ignore public health recommendations.

  • It also spurred GOP-led states to curtail public health authorities in a way that could hamstring future responses.
  • "If you look at some of the revisionist history that's taking hold right now, in a bipartisan way honestly, it seems the new consensus is we did too much to protect the elderly and immunocompromised, and I don't know if we'll have the political will to do that next time around," Gounder said.

"Though the pandemic-weary public has long since moved on from COVID, public health experts worry that the country still hasn't fully grappled with why the U.S. response faltered despite its many advantages — and how to prevent that from happening next time.

  • "There needs to be an accounting, and audit of the response, because some of it is potentially easily fixable," Nuzzo said.

Why Don't You Have Him Stand in The Corner?

It's gotten to the point where I'm afraid to read the latest news about Biden's Insulting treatment of Israel, because it's so infuriating.

Here's the latest example:

Amid deepening tensions, White House weighs how to respond if Israel defies Biden with Rafah invasion

"WASHINGTON — The White House is considering options for how to respond if Israel defies President Joe Biden’s repeated warnings against launching a military invasion of Rafah without a credible plan to protect Palestinian civilians, according to one former and three current U.S. officials.

"The discussions are taking place amid growing concern in the administration and frustration among congressional Democrats that the president’s pleas will simply be ignored. Israel this week inched closer to initiating an incursion into the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip.

Time and again, President Biden calls upon the Netanyahu government to take certain actions, and for the most part, time and again, [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu ignores the president of the United States. And so I think that makes the United States look ineffective,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., in an interview."

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Well, ain't that just too bad!  The United States IS ineffective! You think Israel should drop all its plans in order to cave in to Biden and Blinken just so Biden can get the Muslim vote in MN, MI, and elsewhere?  Nothing doing.  You can't fight a politically correct war -- which, I might remind you, was started by Hamas!

"Deepening tensions"?  Those are caused by Biden's constant interference. Why does he assume that  Netanyahu works for him??

Sit down, shut up, keep out of Israel's business, get out of the way, and let them finish the job of eradicating Hamas once and for all.

And then we can eliminate Biden's destructive presidency in November.

Friday, March 15, 2024

How A Presidential Ally Should Act

By Bassam Tawil at the Gatestone Institute: Biden Should be Threatening Qatar and the Terrorists, Not Israel

* "Biden's reported threat to halt or suspend US military supplies to Israel if the IDF enters Rafah is what encourages Hamas to continue fighting and reject every proposal to release the hostages. When Hamas leaders hear that Biden is threatening Israel to prevent the IDF from entering Rafah, they must say to themselves: 'Why should we make any concessions to Israel? America doesn't want the Israelis to destroy the four remaining battalions. The US administration is opposed to Israel's plan to eliminate Hamas, so let's wait!'

* "A total defeat means the elimination of all of Hamas's battalions. An Israeli victory will never be complete as long as one, or even half, a Hamas battalion remains intact.

* "Biden is actually sending a message to Hamas and Iran's other terror proxies, including Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Houthis, that America is about to throw Israel under the bus. Cutting off US weapons supplies to Israel is the ultimate fantasy of the terrorists.

* "The administration could show impressive leadership and in fact 'bring this to an end as quickly as we can' -- not just for Israel but for all in the region who are seeking peace -- by encouraging Israel to take out the terrorists in Rafah without delay."

* "Instead of pressuring Israel, Biden should be pressuring his friends in Qatar to force their Hamas puppets to hand over the Israeli hostages and surrender. Instead of threatening to cut off weapons supplies to Israel, he should be threatening the leaders of Qatar with the withdrawal of US forces from the country's Al Udeid Air Base and to officially designate Qatar as a State Sponsor of Terrorism (for its funding of Hamas, Hizballah, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Taliban, Al Shabab, Al Nusra Front, among others).

* "This is the way – the only way – to end the war quickly, as well as to send a signal to America's adversaries looking on, that the US is prepared to uphold the values of civilization, not the values of terror."

Nothing to Celebrate

I don't think this is anything to celebrate or brag about,  and I certainly wouldn't want this "achievement" on my resume:

Kamala Harris becomes first VP or president to visit an abortion clinic: Slams 'extremist' elected leaders who think they can 'tell women what they need' during tour of Minnesota Planned Parenthood

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Obstacle to Peace

Schumer Denounces Netanyahu as an ‘Obstacle to Peace’, Calls for New Elections in Israel

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) denounced Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an 'obstacle to peace' in a Thursday floor speech and called on Israel to hold a new election to replace the Netanyahu-led government amid its ongoing war with Hamas

"'Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel,' Schumer said in a 40-minute speech on the Senate floor, suggesting Israel should elect a new leader who, in his view, can better deal with the threat of Hamas."

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He's another member of the Biden-Blinken School of Blame Israel.

The only "obstacle to peace" is violent Jew-haters and murderous terrorists like Hamas. There never can be peace with those who were raised with a goal in life to kill Jews and wipe Israel off the map.

When you read Schumer's comments, you'd think that no massacre had ever occurred on October 7, and that Israel decided to go to war with Hamas for no reason.

Israel needs to finish the job of destroying Hamas. Her survival is at stake.

A COVID Recap from Dr Topol

At Ground Truths, Dr Eric Topol has a new column titled Covid, 4 years on.

Here are some excerpts, minus the charts and graphs, which I've never been able to figure out how to insert, so click here to read the entire article.

Impact: The global excess mortality has reached about 30 million lost lives attributable to Covid, and the Global Burden of Disease published a major paper this week in The Lancet on the toll it has taken for reducing life expectancy in 204 countries summarized as "The COVID-19 pandemic caused the most severe drops in life expectancy seen in 50+ years." The study did not address disability among survivors, with multiple concurrent studies reinforcing the prevalence of Long Covid in tens of millions of people.

Evolution of the Virus:  The JN.1 variant took over globally and a number of subvariants (JN.1.11.1, JN.1.18, JN.1.13, JN.1.18) are showing up with added spike mutations such as R346T and F456L, but without signs of wastewater levels on the rise or other concerning metrics.

But BA.2.87.1, as mapped below, is the major “Omicron-like” event out there that has been the subject of 5 recent papers/preprints (here, here, here, here and here). That, in itself, should tell you it’s a variant of interest. It’s chock full of new mutations compared with the variants that came long previously, and many of these are deletions

In itself, it is not a threat as there’s no sign it is more immunoevasive or transmissible. In fact, the consensus it that it’s less evasive of our immune response, the current booster works to achieve good levels of neutralizing antibodies, and some of the monoclonal antibodies that were previously found to be resistant to earlier variants my be effective again. That’s great news. But as Yunlong Cao and his team appropriately warned us, “BA.2.87.1 may not become widespread until it acquires multiple [receptor binding domain] RBD mutations to achieve sufficient immune evasion comparable to that of JN.1.”

It’s much too early to know whether (and when) this will take place, but after 4 years if there’s anything to predict, it is that the virus will find its way (through selection) to infect more hosts and repeat human hosts. 

One More Thing: I remain very disappointed and surprised by the recent change (1 March) of CDC policy towards isolation, without regard to using rapid antigen tests. Their own data shows that at least 1 in 3 people will still be infectious at 5 days after symptom onset! That’s by culturable virus, the gold standard, which tracks very closely with the rapid tests. To reduce infecting others, especially high risk vulnerable individuals, no less adding to the toll of Long Covid, rapid tests should be used before people circulate.