Day: July 21, 2020

President Reagan’s Words Are Still True Today

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The Science Turns Against America’s Mask Fascists

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“This has been my thinking since day one of this Intentionally Spread Chinese Wuhan Virus. This is America, you decide.  If you want to wear a mask, wear one. Wear two if you choose. If you want to take the vaccine when it is available, take it. If you like, put the vaccine in your cereal every morning.

If I find a reason important enough that I need to go inside a business that requires a mask, I will abide by their rule. BUT…do not tell me I have to wear a mask all the time. Do not tell me that I have to take the vaccine when it is manufactured. Because…IT AIN’T GONNA HAPPEN!”
-Sheila Tolley-

 

Petition · It's your choice and businesses choice to wear a mask ...

No less than the New England Journal of Medicine has dealt a body blow to America’s growing army of mask fascists with the news that “wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection.”
 
The reasons for this are both simple and logical:
 
We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.
 
So there you go… The only real way to catch the China Flu is to hang out with someone infectious for a protracted period of time, so it’s unlikely you will catch it walking along somewhere, like a store or sidewalk.
 
Obviously, as the Journal points out, if you are a healthcare worker, you are going to be dealing with someone infectious indoors, in a closed setting, and not just passing by. So the Journal warns that the “mask is a core component of the personal protective equipment (PPE) clinicians need when caring for symptomatic patients with respiratory viral infections, in conjunction with gown, gloves, and eye protection.”
 
Even so, the Journal’s warning for healthcare workers points out that a mask is still not very helpful “since it does not provide protection from droplets that may enter the eyes or from fomites on the patient or in the environment that providers may pick up on their hands and carry to their mucous membranes.”
 
“What is clear, however, is that universal masking alone is not a panacea. A mask will not protect providers caring for a patient with active Covid-19 if it’s not accompanied by meticulous hand hygiene, eye protection, gloves, and a gown,” the Journal adds.
 
The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) goes even further: “Masks should only be used by health care workers, caretakers or by people who are sick with symptoms of fever and cough,” said Dr. April Baller, a public health specialist for the W.H.O.
 
Baller adds that the danger to a healthy person wearing a mask is a “false feeling of protection” — which is something the CDC warned of early on during this pandemic, back when we were told not to wear masks.
 
Of course, the CDC has flip-flopped completely on the mask issue, which means that what we are now being told by the New England Journal of Medicine and W.H.O. contradicts the latest CDC guidelines, which, after telling us for weeks that masks are useless against the virus, now “recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain.”
 
Since its flip-flop, I have never really bought into the idea that American health “experts” like the CDC and Drs. Fauci and Birx were genuine in their flip-flop on the mask issue. It always seemed to me that public and media pressure forced them into caving.
 
Even today, Fauci can’t bring himself to offer a full-throated mask endorsement, only that the mask is a “symbol” of what “you should be doing” … they are a “valuable safeguard” and part of “respect for another person.”
 
This is a far cry from what he said in March:“There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci told 60 Minutes.
 
While masks may block some droplets, Fauci said, they do not provide the level of protection people think they do. Wearing a mask may also have unintended consequences: People who wear masks tend to touch their face more often to adjust them, which can spread germs from their hands.
 
It would seem to me that the need to wear a mask should be based on how the virus in question operates. If, as the New England Journal of Medicine points out, you need to be in close contact with an infected person for up to 30 minutes in order to get infected with the coronavirus, the mask is unnecessary unless you’re in that situation.
 
Out of concern for my wife, I’ve worn a mask since day one, even when Fauci was telling me not to… And I will continue to, at least for the foreseeable future, even though I hate the damn thing.
 
Sadly, though, this latest science against wearing masks will get no traction in our corrupt corporate media or with the corrupt Democrat politicians who have embraced mask fascism with the unbridled glee that all self-righteous bullies embrace such things, embrace any opportunity to join a pious mob and feels a false sense of superiority while shaming and terrorizing others.
 
Like the fact that the coronavirus is no more lethal to those 50 and under than the seasonal flu, the media will cover up this important information. Like the fact Democrat Govs. Whitmer, Cuomo, and Murphy poured infection into nursing homes, the media well bury this information. But here’s the thing…
 
If you believe a mask will protect you, go ahead and wear a mask. But what do you care if someone else is wearing one or not? As long as you’re wearing one what does it matter? Why can’t we just leave each other alone?

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Brian C. Joondeph, M.D.

 

Media Malpractice on COVID Numbers

COVID-19 data are and have been all over the map since this entire mess gained steam earlier this year. It has gotten to the point that any “numbers” presented as news are suspect at best and fraudulent at worst.

Is this media incompetence or malpractice? Ignorant or deliberate?

Fox News ran a constant side bar in the early days of the pandemic, with U.S. death counts, much in the way cable news business shows run a ticker of the Dow or S&P 500. How morbid, but it provided fodder for media talking heads to run around like Kevin McCallister in Home Alone, waving their arms and screaming in panic.

Now that death counts are dropping to the point that they blend in with normal birth and death statistics, the media have predictably pivoted to case counts as their new hair-on-fire statistic to stoke fear, keep the economy shut down, and hopefully banish their nemesis back to the land of Mordor, also known as Mar-a-Lago.

Total cases are interesting but largely irrelevant without context. And context is anathema to most journalists and media outlets, who prefer the opposite approach, with out-of-context snippets and soundbites, as they did last week with White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnaney.

Context includes what defines a positive COVID test. Is it an actual positive antigen test result or a presumed positive case? Some counties in Texas were classifying a neighbor or co-worker of a test-positive case, suffering from a cough or sore throat, as having COVID, even without an actual test.

This could result in 10 to 20 additional reported positive cases based on only one actual case. Antibody test-positive individuals, having previous, but not current active infections, are also positive cases. That would be like classifying retired military members as active duty.

Context also includes asking whether these individuals are symptomatic or not. We never test asymptomatic individuals or contacts of those with the seasonal flu. In fact, most with the flu treat it symptomatically until they get better, and do not get tested unless they are sick enough to journey to the hospital. Asymptomatic individuals exposed to someone with the flu certainly don’t get tested. Why then is there such a push for COVID testing? Unless the goal is inflated numbers to fuel a media narrative and damage President Trump.

Congressional candidate Jessi Melton tweeted about a friend of hers who went to a lab for a COVID test but couldn’t wait for the test and left, receiving a call later telling her she tested positive. Numerous labs in Florida are only reporting positive test results, not the negatives, giving the impression that everyone in the state is infected with the Wuhan virus.

Not coincidentally, the Republican convention is planned for Jacksonville, Florida next month. If the Florida bureaucracy reports only positive cases and the media run with it, the media narrative will be that Florida is overwhelmed with the virus and the convention needs to be cancelled. And that it is unsafe for Dementia Joe to hold a rally or debate his electoral opponent.

If the convention was planned for Alabama, any bets that we would see the same thing occurring there? Is any of this about the virus or is it all about the November election?

Not only are case numbers inflated but also deaths. Anyone testing positive at the time of death is counted as a COVID death, from alcohol poisoning or a shooting, to someone in hospice with weeks to live, dying from their underlying condition, but testing positive. George Floyd is likely somewhere in the COVID death count as he tested positive at autopsy.

CDC labs were contaminated, leading to false positives and bogus test results. Tests in Tanzania on a goat and paw paw fruit returned positive results. It should be no surprise that the White House told hospitals to bypass the CDC on COVID data and send results directly to the Department of Health and Human Services, reducing the chance of data manipulation.

How refreshing, although unrealistic, if the media reported actual and relevant numbers around the Chinese coronavirus. Alas, that won’t happen as big media’s goal is to create the news rather than report it. As New York Times editor Bari Weiss wrote in her recent resignation letter, “I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.”

The predetermined narrative is Orange Man Bad. Trump as president is an aberration, a fluke, something that must never happen again. Remember when David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager tweeted, “It is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.”

The media is molding news and history to their predetermined narrative that Trump must lose reelection on Nov. 3, regardless of the carnage to our economy, culture, and way of life in the process.

If the media had any desire to report honestly, they would have to go against Bari Weiss’s Rule Two, “Never risk commissioning a story that goes against the narrative.” The narrative is to destroy Trump at all costs, regardless of side effects. In the medical world, this would be malpractice.

Why don’t the media report the case fatality rate (CFR), the number of confirmed deaths divided by the total number of confirmed cases?

The U.S. sits at 3.8 percent, below the world average at 4.3 percent and the EU’s at 10.3 percent. Countries praised by the American left are faring worse – France at 17.3 percent, the U.K. at 15.4 percent, and the Netherlands at 11.9 percent.

Yet the media report how Trump is botching our COVID response. The Washington Post, ignoring reality, claims, “Trump’s performance on COVID-19 looks especially bad compared with the rest of the world.” The CFR says otherwise. Ignorance or media malpractice?

As the enigmatic Q recently asked, what would be the primary purpose of inflating COVID numbers? Who benefits? This is about the election, not the virus. The swamp runs deep, the news is fake, and the war is real.

The media has chosen sides in this war and abdicated any pretense of objective journalism. Elections have consequences and Nov. 3 will be a pivotal day for the future of America.

 

Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a Denver-based physician and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in American Thinker, Daily Caller, Rasmussen Reports, and other publications.