The media is taking one of the world’s essential medicines—hydroxychloroquine (brand name Plaquenil)—and making it out to be a threat to humanity. Why? Because Trump was touting it. Now he’s taking it! Trump, at particular risk from exposure to SARS-CoV-2, and because his age leaves him at heightened risk for serious complications from the virus if infected, is taking hydroxychloroquine as a prophylaxis under the supervision of a physician. Smart. He is telling the country that he will stop after 14 days, the time since he was possibly exposed to SARS-Cov-2.
Joe Biden says Trump taking hydroxychloroquine is like injecting Clorox. “It’s like saying ‘Maybe if you inject Clorox into your blood, it may cure you,’” Biden said at a Yahoo News town hall on COVID-19 and food insecurity with celebrity chef José Andrés. “C’mon, man! What is he doing? What in God’s name is he doing?” It is nothing of the sort. Trump is one of several million Americans taking the drug. The media isn’t making this fact well know, of course, so I must—even if it makes me appear as if I am a Trump supporter when I am not. Partisan rules put truth-tellers in odd spots.
Ask yourself: why are authorities allowing more than 5 1/2 million Americans (and millions more around the world) access to a drug annually if it’s dangerous? Are we to believe that the experts haven’t known until now that the drug is a problem? Are the World Health Organization and the United Nations going to take the drug off of the list of the world’s most essential medicines? The situation is absurd. They’ve been giving hydroxychloroquine to pregnant women in all trimesters. That’s how safe it is! Even children as a matter of course of travel to places in the world where malaria is a problem are advised to take this drug. Hydroxychloroquine has save countless numbers of lives from a organism that kills more people annually than the doomsayers could even hope for COVID-19.
Follow the CDC link and click on the tab “Chloroquine” to educate yourself. Hydroxychloroquine is an essential medicine. Not just for malaria. People take hydroxychloroquine to treat rheumatologic conditions, for example. That’s not all. We know doctors are prescribing this drug to protect from SARS-CoV-2 infection and front-line doctors are even using it themselves.
Doctors have good reason to take an interest in hydroxychloroquine. This study published in premier medical journal The Lancet: Chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine for prophylaxis of COVID-19 tells us why: “In-vitro studies have shown that chloroquine is effective against several viruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV). Multiple mechanisms of action have been identified for chloroquine that disrupt the early stage of coronavirus replication. Moreover, chloroquine affects immune system activity by mediating an anti-inflammatory response, which might reduce damage due to the exaggerated inflammatory response.”
If you’re very sick and on a ventilator or very old or suffer from the relevant underlying conditions, hydroxychloroquine is not likely to help you. Studies using subjects at their end find the fear they seek to manufacture. It’s a cynical exercise. That’s not for the most part how this drug is being used and the media know it.
The media also know that, aside from a handful of states, long-term care, an obvious indicator of old age and severe chronic conditions, is the most dangerous situation to be in. Indeed, between 40-80 percent of deaths across the majority of states have occurred among the very old and infirm, those trapped in long-term care facilities. It is highly unlikely that any study of hydroxychloroquine in a hospital for veterans, for example, could demonstrate efficacy and safety. Yet these are the studies the media reports.
Official irrationalisms run deeply through this bizarre episode of history. Don’t you find it astonishing that public health experts and hospital administrators didn’t consider what would happen if they cancelled thousands of elective procedures? I could see the consequences from way off and I’m just a jagoff sociologist. From a study in the United Kingdom to be published in the Annals of Oncology (I tremble thinking of the numbers in the United States): “Per year, 94,912 resections for major cancers result in 80,406 long-term survivors and 1,717,051 life years gained. Per-patient delay of three/six months would cause attributable death of 4,755/10,760 of these individuals with loss of 92,214/208,275 life.” I think I discussed in a podcast my personal story with staring cancer in the face and how crucial it was that doctors caught it early and initiated prompt treatment. I shutter to think of what my chances would have been in the current context. It will suffice to say not very good at all.
The deceit is obvious. Progressives tell us to listen to doctors and scientists. But they don’t really mean it. If a doctor or scientist tells you to be wary of corporate-pushed drugs or vaccines, they’re dismissed as quacks and cranks. What progressives really mean when they tell you to listen to doctors and scientists is that you should only listen to the doctors and scientists and technocrats who advance the establishment’s profit-driven agenda. To put this Orwellian terms, the Ministry of Truth will select the experts for you. This is the scientific-industrial complex I have been writing about on my blog. It is not to be confused with the scientific method.
The establishment enjoys an army of science-as-religion zealots out there working the grassroots with memes and insults. Doctors and scientists who don’t toe the official line the Ministry dictates are ignored, marginalized, deplatformed, defamed. Ask Dr. Erickson of Accelerated Urgent Care. If you listen to the doctors and scientists not pre-approved by the industry, then you’re mobbed and mocked. The greatest irony of all is when you’re attacked for not being trained specifically in the area you must be an expert in by people who are not only untrained in that area themselves but don’t appear to understand the field at all, which—and this is key here—one does not need to be an expert in to understand. Seriously, if you have to depend on media-selected experts, then why should I trust your judgment? You could not have picked them based on your own grasp of the issue. It’s appeal to authority and confirmation bias down the line. Sure, you can share a meme. But I have the ability to read and grasp science.
Bottom line: the corporate media is lying to you, systematically and audaciously and with purpose and eve malign intent from a criminal law standpoint. You simply cannot trust the mainstream media. They look down on you as the unwashed masses. You’re the rabble. The deplorables. They tell you that you can’t understand medicine and science so you must trust them to tell you which doctors and scientists to listen to—trust the industry experts they put before you. For them, medicine is like any other commodity. The propagandists and functionaries promote the problem the corporate state rises to meet. Need to warehouse the burgeoning industrial reserve thanks to technological displacement? “War on crime!” Need to access resources in a recalcitrant foreign country? “Democratic tsuiami!” This is the force that is selling out the worker and destroying the republic.
Returning to Joe Biden’s hyperbole about Trump injecting Clorox, this is based on a lie. I watched the press conference where Trump was supposed to have said such a thing. I started watching his press conferences as soon as I became aware that the media was just going to lie about them. Trump said he was impressed by the way the disinfectants kill the virus. He wondered if we could do something like that with a medicine. Something like that. Go back and listen. For your convenience here’s what he said: “I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?” This is called analogical thinking. Trump wasn’t being literal. Obviously. He’s not a scientist. But he is a problem solver. He never suggested people inject bleach (or drink fish tank cleaner). People who make that claim are not being honest. They are also not being honest when they mock him for suggesting light therapy. That this is a wacky idea probably comes as quite a surprise to the scientists studying UV light therapy as a treatment for SARS-CoV-2.
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People are lining up for the SARS-CoV-2 test. This and other motives for testing are producing a body of data. But what does testing do for them personally and those around them? If you are testing for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, then that’s a useful test. You can have some confidence that you have or have not contracted the virus in the past and therefore have acquired immunity. Studies show that nearly everybody who has had this viruses probably now carries immunity to it—temporary, perhaps, but immunity nonetheless. But if you are getting tested to determine whether you have the infection, then you can only know if you did or did not have the virus at the time of the test—assuming the viral load was sufficient to register at the time of the test. If the test is negative, which takes several days to determine, you cannot know if you will get the virus tomorrow or in the days after that or that you had only recently contracted the virus and couldn’t produce a positive test.
In other words, unless you are being tested in order to determine course of treatment or are part of an epidemiological study to improve estimates for community spread and infection fatality rates—that is, you just want to know for your own peace of mind or determine whether you are a threat to others—you’re wasting time and resources. What you will learn will not very useful to you and could be potentially harmful to others. You will think you are not infected when you are and could transmit the virus to others. That’s the danger of operating with a false sense of security. (It’s the reason masks were not recommended until recently and apparently only for the propaganda value in promoting virtue signaling to facilitate controlling the masses. See What Lies Behind the Mask? Technocratic Desire.) SARS-CoV-2 isn’t like a hepatitis C or HIV test. Testing for the presence of this infection should be no different than testing a symptomatic patient suspected of an influenza infection in a doctor’s visit or under circumstances of hospitalization—or as part of an epidemiological study to bolster the validity of prevalence estimates and projections.
I recognize that this phenomenon is driven by anxiety and I have a great deal of sympathy for those who have been victimized by the fear-mongering of media and progressive influencers. At the same time, mass irrationalisms are rooted in deeper disturbances in the cultural system which must be theorized and critiqued. This panic reveals the extent of neuroses in Western societies. Obsession is in itself unhealthy. But there is an interesting side effect: as we are accumulating the statistics we can see that infection rates (as measured by testing) are declining and that the infection fatality rate is falling to influenza-like levels (see Hunkering Down for No Reason). I have been saying this all along.
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Is there any greater representative of the double standard than Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi? No, Speaker Pelosi, the president is not “morbidly obese.” He is 6’3” and around 240 lbs, just slightly over the body mass index of 30 (24 or less is ideal, albeit too much less might be a problem). Trump is some eighty pounds away from morbidly obese—that’s a long way off—or about what they call a Nancy weight (the ice cream is for condescension to the proles not for eating). Trump is a George Foreman; only slightly obese and quite capable of a fight. (Maybe Don King is a better analog in appearance and attitude.)
Case in point, the media is floating Stacey Abrams, loser of Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial election (and not by a little), as a possible vice presidential candidate. Abrams a person of color. She is obese. Salon is already accusing the Department of Health and Human Services of racism for noting that obesity is the significant comorbidity with respect to SARS-CoV-2, and that black Americans are disproportionately obese, in part because of lifestyle choices (which you are supposed to blame on white people if you bring it up at all). Abrams would need to be a Republican for any observation about her weight to be anything but racist.
I don’t know if you have picked up on this yet but black Republicans aren’t really black. It’s a priori impossible for a black person to be a Trump supporter—ergo the black Trump supporter is not black. In other words, if the person is Republican, then fat shaming is not a problem whatever the intersection of oppressions. There are different rules for different tribes and only Democrats can say such things without being racist, etc. Douglas Murray has documented the double standard in The Madness of Crowds. It’s a trans-Atlantic phenomenon. Just sticking to this side of the pond, for the candidate running for president on the Democratic ticket, “Me Too” doesn’t apply. You only have to believe the victim if the alleged perpetrator is a Republican. You cannot actually fat shame Donald Trump. And now “some women lie”? It’s like sex in public spaces. Ask Larry Craig about that (Heterosexism and Republican Hypocrisy).
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On Tuesday, May 19, 2020, The Christian Post published: “Pastor dies from coronavirus after laying hands on infected followers, declaring them healed.” Rigobert Che, one of the pastor’s followers, told Voice of America: “This is a pastor that has been laying [on] hands and claiming that he cures COVID-19.”
Che wonders, “If you, the person that claims that you are curing COVID-19, you are dead, what about the fellow people that were affected by the COVID-19? Now that he is dead, I do not know how the people that he was laying hands on will be healed.”
Good question. What are the rules on faith healing? If you heal and keep on living, does this carry more magical power than healing and then dying? The pastor, Frankline Ndifor, certainly could not heal himself. Are faith healers even allowed to heal themselves? Some have thought they can walk on water only to drown or more sensationally by eaten by crocodiles. I confess, I don’t know the answer to this one.
freedom and reason 