NYC nurse: Andrew Cuomo is no hero. He spent years slashing hospital capacity

The Wuhan Virus Escaped from a Chinese Lab

Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: 

What Xi didn’t say is that the coronavirus that has sickened more than 76,000 and claimed more than 2,200 lives escaped from one of the country’s bioresearch labs.  But the very next day, evidence emerged suggesting that this is what happened, as the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive entitled “Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.”

As Mosher points out, not only is the Wuhan lab China’s first level-4 facility, but it is the only one, and it is under close and active supervision by the Chinese military:

[T]he People’s Liberation Army’s top expert in biological warfare, Maj. Gen. Chen Wei, was dispatched to Wuhan at the end of January to help with the effort to contain the outbreak.

First of all, Wuhan is a place and not a race, and to identify the coronavirus by its place of origin, like naming the Ebola Virus for a river in Zaire, is not racist or xenophobic — it’s merely accurate.  There is no racism or xenophobia in labeling an infection “Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever” or calling something “Lyme Disease” after a nearby town in Connecticut.

What calling this latest virus the Wuhan Virus is is a reminder of the multiple contagions China has spawned and released on an unsuspecting world.  Nor is connecting some very big, ugly, and obvious dots just another conspiracy theory to be dismissed out of hand.

From the beginning China has been less than forthcoming about this virus and resisted sharing critical data and access to WHO and CDC specialists.  And have we forgotten Dr. Li Wenliang, the 33-year-old ophthalmologist based in Wuhan, the epicenter of the contagion, who tried to tell the world that China was hiding something malevolent, only to be silenced and imprisoned by Chinese authorities for allegedly fabricating lies about the disease’s deadly potential?  He would later die of the disease he tried to warn us about and the Chinese tried to keep under wraps:

In an interview with the Communist Party–controlled Beijing Youth Daily newspaper in late January, Dr. Li recalled seeing reports in December of an unusual cluster of pneumonia cases linked to an animal market in Wuhan.

On Dec. 30, Dr. Li told the newspaper, he sent a message to former classmates on WeChat, a popular messaging app, warning them of new cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.  He later corrected that, saying it was an unknown coronavirus.

(more…)

It May Not Be the Virus That Kills Me

Many lives depend on the medical supply chain, which Covid-19 will severely test.

Just over a year ago, long before the term coronavirus had entered our collective vocabularies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that in just a few short weeks of the 2018-19 winter season, the flu had sickened between 6 million and 7 million Americans. About half of those had gone to the doctor for help. Somewhere between 69,000 and 84,000 had been hospitalized. The good news, the CDC announced, was that it wasn’t nearly as severe as the year before.

The previous year, 2018, the CDC reported 49 million Americans had been sickened by the flu. 960,000 were hospitalized and over 80,000 ended up dead. You read that right, in 2018 over 80,00 people died from the flu in the United States. Most of the victims were geriatric, many with compromised immune systems. There were a handful of pediatric deaths, most with immune systems not yet fully developed. All tragic deaths. All flu related.

Fast forward to 2020 and we find our world in utter panic due to something called the coronavirus. Monday morning the New York Stock Exchange halted trading when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by nearly 1900 points (7%) in the first 15 minutes of trading. Coronavirus induced panic.

The organizers of South By Southwest — which draws hundreds of thousands of visitors and some of Hollywood and music’s biggest stars to Austin, TX at this time each year — announced last Friday they had canceled the annual arts and technology festival, saying they’re “devastated” but recognize it is necessary to prevent a serious threat of contagion. This recognition came despite the fact Austin Public Health had stated as recently as Wednesday that “there’s no evidence that closing SXSW or any other gatherings will make the community safer,”

What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa: Trump Is Right

By Tevi Troy      Tevi Troy, a former deputy secretary of health and human services, is a fellow at the Hudson Institute and at the Homeland Security Policy Institute. –

The Washington Times

Thursday, September 15, 2011

“Contagion” was the No. 1 box-office movie on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 – and with good reason. The New York Post’s Lou Lumenick called the Steven Soderbergh-directed thriller about a killer virus “easily the scariest of the disaster films” since Sept. 11, and the film keeps viewers squirming and in suspense until the revealing and harrowing final shot.

One of the reasons the movie is so frightening is that it is so realistic, and verisimilitude clearly is something the filmmakers were striving to attain. The film thanks the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Defense for their assistance, suggesting that those entities did not have significant disagreements with the way the film portrayed the government’s earnest but not always effective response to the film’s fictional MEV virus. Nor should they. For the most part, the film shows U.S. officials to be smart, hardworking, dedicated and self-sacrificing, and the government plays a key role in the creation of an anti-MEV vaccine that helps humanity fight back against the deadly viral threat.

Based on my experience with U.S. biopreparedness efforts, the U.S. government’s role is depicted fairly accurately in the film. At the same time, even though the government comes off pretty well in “Contagion,” the scariest part of the film is the vulnerabilities the film highlights in our current system. Despite spending $60 billion in biodefense efforts since the 2001 anthrax attacks, we still are not fully prepared for a full-on bioevent, whether it be made by man or by nature. The film identifies at least four biopreparedness weaknesses, all of which could be addressed by smart government planning: (more…)