A very depressing example of how propaganda works on the American public

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: You may have noticed earlier today that the blog was down for a while. It was a server problem, supposedly fixed, but time will tell. My apologies.]

I write a lot about the large and continuing influence of the MSM on American public opinion, an effect accomplished through what the MSM chooses to cover, the manner in which it covers it, and what it purposely doesn’t cover (for example, see this post from yesterday).

I can think of no better illustration of the principal than the results of a recent poll reported on by Mollie Hemingway:

Evidence of that [MSM] power and how irresponsibly it is used is found in a recent Harvard-Harris poll for April 2020. A majority of Americans, 53 percent, believe the Christopher Steele dossier “was real in its findings of Trump colluding with the Russians.” Only 47 percent of Americans chose the factually correct option that it was Clinton-funded campaign oppo fueled by disinformation.

Please read the whole article.

You can quibble about the sample selection in the poll and about whether it’s valid, but in this case those details are hardly the point. The percentage of people saying the Steele dossier’s findings were “real” and that Trump “colluded with the Russians” should have been something in the nature of 10%. Clearly, it is not. Whether it’s an actual majority or just close to a majority is irrelevant. The point is that the MSM knows that it can create a false narrative that a lot of Americans – perhaps a majority – will believe.

This matters a great deal. And it is why they persist, even when they are proven to have been lying time and again. The lie gets halfway round the world before the truth has time to get its boots on, and those boots are made for walkin‘ – and running – a marathon.

A good example of how opinion can be formed through omission or minimization and/or framing can be found here:

Ronna McDaniel may be the GOP Chair, but her voice is small compared to that of the networks she is critiquing. And they know it.

Another great COVID survival story

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “AesopFan”]

I love this:

Rose Leigh-Manuell calls herself blessed.

The vibrant great-great-grandmother is 101 years old.

Her medical staff at Good Samaritan/Catholic Health Services in Sayville believes Leigh-Manuell’s strength and drive battled and beat the coronavirus. But she credits them.

“The doctors and nurses, everybody taking wonderful care of me,” she said.

Not only did Leigh-Manuell conquer COVID-19, she survived the Spanish flu the year she was born.

“1918. December 31st, 1918,” she said…

So was there a secret to her recovery?

“She loves any junk food. But her Oreo cookies, primarily vanilla or golden Oreos, are her favorite,” said her son.

Please read the whole thing.

I think the real secret was the Oreos

I’m serious. My mother lived to almost 100, and for most of her life she ate Oreos with great regularity and equal gusto. In her case, it was the chocolate ones. When she was almost 90 she was forced to give them up (that is, I forced her to give them up) because she developed migraines in reaction to chocolate. She was plenty mad, too, and used to sneak them for a while. But she’d been having migraines every day and they stopped on a dime when she stopped eating chocolate (mainly those Oreos), and so there really was no choice.

I used to tell her she was lucky – she had to stop eating chocolate at around 89, but I had to stop eating chocolate in my 40s because of migraines. She wasn’t particularly sympathetic with that argument.

[NOTE: My mother was a youngster during the 1918 flu pandemic, but she never spoke about it.]

More on Flynn. And still more.

The New Neo Posted on by

I know there’s other news today, too, besides the Flynn case. But it’s the Flynn case that’s on my mind.

It seems to me it illustrates the fact that, step by slow step over the last couple of decades (maybe longer), but particularly since the Obama years, this nation has lost its way. And by “this nation” I don’t just mean the Deep State or the government, I mean the people as well. Maybe that’s even mostly what I mean.

I spend a lot of time on this blog blaming the MSM. And they are most definitely very much to blame, although they are not solely to blame. Long ago, and with increasing boldness, they dropped any objectivity they might have once had and have become purely partisan actors, convinced of their own rightness as well as their own righteousness, and willing to spread any lie and to cover up any politically inconvenient truth in the process.

Paradoxically, even as their lies become more blatant and more easily disproved, and public polls indicate that the vast majority of the public has lost faith in the press’s veracity, the MSM’s enormous influence continues. The fact that their propaganda works as well as it does is in turn a reflection of other collapses in our society in the realms of education, morality, religion, the family, entertainment, literature, and art.

A seamless whole, working together.

The vicious campaign that’s been going on among Democrats, the left, and the MSM (but I repeat myself) during Trump’s term as president to get the American people to not just disagree with him but to hate him has – and I know this from personal observation – caused many otherwise (seemingly) sane and kindly people to wish him dead. And if he can’t be made dead, then at the very least any method of getting him out of office is completely okay and even laudable. The accomplishment doesn’t have to be consistent with any previous rule of law or procedure put in place to protect us all. The ends fully justify the means, although the people who support that are probably loathe to admit it in quite those terms. But if Trump is a figure of supposedly Hitlerian evil, then anything is justified in order to take him out.

And anything is justified in order to take out anyone who has had anything to do with him. Which brings us round once again to Flynn.

As terrible as the Deep State’s actions against Flynn (and Trump) have been, I have come to a point of cynicism so deep that I believe the majority of Americans (or at least a very large number) who hear about them will either ignore them, applaud them, justify them, or excuse them, and we will slide further and further down this terrible path.

I’m sorry to be so pessimistic. I hope I’m being too pessimistic.

Now that I’ve aired my gloom, I’m going to add more details on the Flynn case. Sean Davis at The Federalist writes this:

New evidence released Thursday shows that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), closed its criminal counterintelligence investigation of retired Gen. Mike Flynn on January 4, 2017, only to have it reopened by Peter Strzok…

“No derogatory information was identified in FBI holdings,” the memo stated.

According to the FBI document, the federal law enforcement agency also asked a redacted agency, likely the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to conduct a similar search of its own records for derogatory information against Flynn, who at the the time was the incoming National Security Adviser for then-President-elect Donald Trump.

“No derogatory information was reported back to the FBI,” the memo concluded.

The case was about to be closed because after an enormous amount of digging and hunting, there was nothing. Nada. You’d think that would be the end of it.

But no:

“Hey if you haven’t closed RAZOR, don’t do so yet,” Strzok texted at 2:14 p.m. on January 4, 2017.

“Razor still open,” Strzok immediately texted to Lisa Page, a former assistant to fired former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. Strzok and Page reportedly had an adulterous affair that was captured by their text messages to each other.

Additional texts from Strzok on February 10 also confirm suspicions that Strzok personally rewrote the official FBI account of his and FBI agent Joe Pientka’s interview of Flynn on January 24, 2017.

I will note, for what it’s worth, that January 4, 2017, the day Strzok wrote to make sure the Flynn case would stay open, was one day after Schumer’s statement made on Jan 3, 2017:

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

This re-opening occurred about 20 minutes after a draft of the document closing the case was circulated around the FBI.

The Flynn case: Nice son. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to him.

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s almost too much news on the Flynn case to digest at once.

Yesterday some documents were revealed, and today some more.

Here’s the basic story that broke yesterday:

Schumer was right, for once (Jan 3, 2017):

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

This case involves not just a determination to get Flynn convicted of something (anything) while all the time uncovering nothing, but also the following: an attempt to get at Trump through Flynn, a perjury trap set for Flynn, a coerced guilty plea (through a threat to prosecute Flynn’s son), the contemplation of prosecuting Flynn on a law that has never been enforced against a US citizen (and should be inapplicable anyway to someone who is part of a president-elect’s security team, as Flynn was), the long-term withholding of information from Flynn that he was entitled to, various seemingly corrupt lawyers on both prosecution and defense (Flynn’s first defense team, that is), and a large group of “public servants” in the FBI and elsewhere who seem to have no respect whatsoever for the law except how to use it to snare their perceived enemies.

And I doubt I’ve covered it all.

Oh, and watch this smarmy arrogant expletive-of-your-choice bragging about what he did:

You can read more here as well as here. And in a caricature of itself in the “Republicans Pounce” and “Republicans Seize” mode, the NY Times headlines its own article: “Flynn Lawyers Seize on Newly Released FBI Documents” (I’ve passed my free article limit this month so no, I haven’t read the actual article).

As Andrew C. McCarthy points out:

What we are seeing is a meticulously planned-out scheme to try to get a 33-year combat veteran of the United States to say something that was inaccurate so that they would have a basis to try to charge him with false statements or otherwise get him fired”…

They did not have a legitimate investigative reason for doing this and there was no criminal predicate or reason to treat him [Flynn] like a criminal suspect…

They did the interview outside of the established protocols of how the FBI is supposed to interview someone on the White House staff…

“People should understand,” McCarthy explained, “if General Flynn was a gangbanger or Mafia guy, they would have sat down with them or they would have told him, ‘This is a criminal investigation,’ they would have identified themselves as FBI agents, told him the reason for the interview, told him he had a right not to answer questions and told him if he made false statements, that could be grounds for prosecution. And if he made true statements, that can be used against him in a prosecution.

“They would do all of those things for criminals,” he added.

Not for Flynn. And that’s what Comey was laughing about.

There’s more from McCarthy here. I could quote almost any passage, but I suggest you read the whole thing. Here’s a tidbit that doesn’t appear in the other pieces I’ve read, and that reflects McCarthy’s special insight as a former prosecutor:

These passages cited in Powell’s exhibits tend to corroborate the claim of an agreement not to prosecute Flynn’s son. It is fair, then, to infer that the threat of such a prosecution was indeed used to pressure him. The exhibits also strongly suggest that the prosecutors did not want an explicit acknowledgement of such a commitment — which would make sense only if they planned not to disclose the commitment in future cases in which they anticipated calling Flynn as a cooperating witness.

In other words, they hoped in the future to use Flynn to testify against other people, and if it was discovered that his confession and cooperation were coerced through a threat to his son, it might undermine his credibility in the eyes of the public. So they took pains to hide it by having an outside agreement about it that did not appear in the official court records.

I would say that all of these revelations are profoundly shocking except that we on the right already pretty much have known most of the scenario for years. But the MSM covered up, the FBI stonewalled, and it was only Flynn’s newer lawyer Sidney Powell and Barr who forced these documents out into the open. I think it’s a safe prediction to say that the MSM and the Democrats will continue to ignore it, excuse it, twist it, do everything they can to negate it in people’s minds (prosecutors pounce!), and hope enough people will believe them.

It’s worked before. It might work again.

But this is the fall of the rule of law, the utter politicization and corruption of the agencies of both the DOJ and the FBI under Obama, and so far the perpetrators have gone scot free. It offends any sense of decency or fairness, and it is an outrage if the people involved continue to walk.

And I think they will, except perhaps for the smallest of fish.

You might think them stupid to not have destroyed these papers long ago. After all, they had plenty of time to do so. But I think they thought the evidence was too well hidden and would never come to light. In addition, they were so arrogant, so full of themselves, and in particular so very sure that even if the information did come out, the press and the Democrats would cover for them no matter what. So they felt no need to destroy them.

This isn’t ordinary corruption. This is something for which I don’t have a proper word. “Evil” is too general. “Depraved” isn’t quite right, either. It doesn’t fit the definition of “treasonous” either, not exactly. I see it as operatic or even Shakespearian in its hubris, its scope, and its triumphant malignity. That’ll have to do for a description.

Will it be operatic or Shakespearian in its consequences for the perpetrators? In other words, will hubris lead to nemesis? I very much doubt it.

Good news on remdesivir

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember those drug trials that are going on regarding COVID-19? One of them concerns the antiviral remdesivir.

First results are in:

New results from a clinical trial conducted by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases establish the drug as the standard of care for Covid-19, which has killed 50,000 people in the U.S. so far, said agency Director Anthony Fauci. He likened the good news about remdesivir to the discovery of the first medicine found to help treat HIV more than three decades ago.

That’s a pretty strong endorsement. And because it’s Fauci saying it and not Trump, the MSM might be a bit less likely to go on the attack.

More here:

Hospitalized patients with advanced COVID-19 and lung involvement who received remdesivir recovered faster than similar patients who received placebo, according to a preliminary data analysis from a randomized, controlled trial involving 1063 patients, which began on February 21. The trial (known as the Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial, or ACTT), sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, is the first clinical trial launched in the United States to evaluate an experimental treatment for COVID-19.

An independent data and safety monitoring board (DSMB) overseeing the trial met on April 27 to review data and shared their interim analysis with the study team. Based upon their review of the data, they noted that remdesivir was better than placebo from the perspective of the primary endpoint, time to recovery, a metric often used in influenza trials. Recovery in this study was defined as being well enough for hospital discharge or returning to normal activity level.

Preliminary results indicate that patients who received remdesivir had a 31% faster time to recovery than those who received placebo (p<0.001). Specifically, the median time to recovery was 11 days for patients treated with remdesivir compared with 15 days for those who received placebo. Results also suggested a survival benefit, with a mortality rate of 8.0% for the group receiving remdesivir versus 11.6% for the placebo group (p=0.059).

Several things seem important here. This was a trial of the drug against placebo, one of the first of that type. The patients who received it were already in dire straits, and so it is particularly impressive in that population. The change in death rate isn’t up to what one might hope (it isn’t up to what I hoped, anyway). But it’s still in the right direction, and it’s highly possible that if the drug were given earlier it would be more effective in that regard.

Remdesivir is not an innocuous drug (in fact, I don’t think there is such a thing). So I don’t think it will necessarily be given to patients with mild symptoms, because of possible side effects involving liver enzyme and GI problems. But ultimately it might be very helpful for those with moderate to serious symptoms, and I believe there will be additional drugs proven to be of value as well.

De Blasio and “the Jewish community”: a tale of two tweets

The New Neo Posted on by

The genesis of de Blasio’s admonition to “the Jewish community” – a pretty diverse group, and in NYC a fairly large one – was apparently a funeral for a rabbi held in Brooklyn by an ultra-Orthodox sect called the Satmar. Not only are they not “the Jewish community” at large, they’re not even “the Orthodox Jewish community.” The NY Satmar are based in Willliamsburg, and they are such an extreme sect that they could correctly be called not just ultra-Orthodox but ultra-ultra-Orthodox. They are so Orthodox they are radical, if that makes any sense (among other things, they don’t recognize the state of Israel). It’s hard to get a bead on their numbers in Brooklyn, but let’s just say that although it’s in the thousands, it’s a miniscule percectage of the Jews of New York City. They no more represent the Jewish community than the Branch Davidians represented the “Christian community.”

But that didn’t stop de Blasio from referring to them that way. It is no accident, either, although he tried to backtrack somewhat when howls of protest ensued regarding his addressing Jews in general. De Blasio may be mayor of New York, but he’s a leftist of the Corbynesque variety, and anti-Semitism is part of the genre.

Oh, and by the way, the Satmar said they had a police permit for the event and tried to make the crowd conform to social distancing rules:

Neither de Blasio nor his police commissioner, Dermot Shea, addressed reports that the funeral procession had actually been coordinated with the New York Police Department and the knowledge of City Hall. Shea said that 12 summonses had been issued for refusal to disperse and for violating social distancing. “That event last night never should have happened,” he said. “It will never happen again.”

The mourning event in the Williamsburg neighborhood Tuesday night was organized by followers of the late Rabbi Chaim Mertz. Organizers said that they thought the procession would conform with social distancing guidelines because they asked everyone to stay six feet away from each other. The police department cooperated by barricading streets and putting up street lights, according to David Greenfield, the CEO of a Jewish anti-poverty organization and a former city councilman.

Video of the event showed that funeral marchers were also guided by members of Shomrim, the Jewish community security organization. A Hasidic source who is familiar with the Shomrim’s preparations for the funeral, but not authorized to speak publicly, told the Forward that the Shomrim and NYPD had worked together in planning the funeral.

“The plan was to have a specific number of people who could go into one street, then close it down, and have the car go to the next street,” the source explained. The source added that in addition to lights and barricades, the police had also approved having a sound system so that attendees could hear eulogies, but that at the last minute, officers ordered organizers not to use the speaker system.

In their joint news conference, de Blasio and Shea did not respond to the claims of NYPD involvement.

Sounds like it was an event that was held with good intentions but ended up getting out of control, probably through emotion. And de Blasio’s office isn’t wanting to talk about the issue of the government’s supposed involvement.

A few weeks ago I happened across a video on YouTube (don’t recall which it was) about the ultra-ultra Orthodox Jewish community’s response to COVID. It mentioned that initially they were still getting together in large groups because so much of their lives involved such things, but in recent weeks they were practicing all sorts of social distancing, including for deaths and funerals. I even recall their having set up a sort of dial-a-prayer hotline for families with dying members. It was quite heartrending. These groups – and all groups who are accustomed to large social gatherings as part of the fabric of their lives and their worship – are particularly challenged by the social distancing resulting from the COVID rules. It’s not surprising that violations occur, just as they occurred in non-religious settings such as the Blue Angels flyover.

But I also noticed that in the comments to that video about the ultra-Orthodox community – and there were many – every single one expressed fervent anti-Semitism, sometimes of the rabid kind. The internet is one of the main conduits of a vicious sort of anti-Semitism, and these sorts of events are opportunities to unleash it.

[ADDENDUM: The inevitable “Downfall” parody emerges rather quickly.]

Spambot of the day: getting the cling of it

The New Neo Posted on by

You really make it seem so easy with your presentation buut I fid this matter to be actually one thing which I believe I’d nevr understand. It sort of feels too complex and very broad for me.

I am taking a look forward on your subsequent publish, I wiill attempt to get the cling of it!

The cling of it – it has a certain ring, doesn’t it?

I assume that “the cling of it” is an auto-translation program’s version of “the hang of it.”

Sexual allegations: the Democrats, Biden, and Kavanaugh

The New Neo Posted on by

The blatant and politically opportunistic hypocrisy of the Democrats is easily revealed by comparing their position regarding the Kavanaugh sexual accusations versus the Biden sexual accusations.

The Republicans have been relatively consistent in saying about both: take a look at the evidence, and let’s see.

The Democrats shrieked that Christine Blasey Ford was completely believable and that Kavanaugh was unfit for office because of his obvious guilt, but with Biden – crickets. The difference is so stark that it would be funny if it weren’t very very sad and extraordinarily dangerous.

I don’t know if Biden’s accuser is telling the truth, but I do know that her charges are far more credible – and relevant – than those of Christine Blasey Ford. That word “credible” means believable, and it’s been a favorite of Democrats whenever an accusation is lobbed against a Republican in public life. Now, not so much.

In fact:

Every Democrat in the Senate has refused to acknowledge the sexual assault allegations against 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden that were brought forward by a former staffer, even after new evidence lends credibility to the alleged assault.

The Daily Caller contacted every Democrat in the Senate, asking them if they would even consider the allegations by Biden’s accuser, Tara Reade, who has accused the then-senator of kissing her, touching her and penetrating her with his fingers without her consent in 1993. Each Senate office was given 24 hours to respond but not one did…

Every one of the senators contacted, besides Manchin, voted against the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, due to sexual assault allegations.

Why is Reade more credible than Ford was? Here are five reasons, but the obvious ones are that Reade apparently told various people about it at the time it occurred or not too long after the time, and the fact that (unlike Ford, who could not prove she’d ever even met Kavanaugh) Reade knew Biden and had worked for him. What’s more, Kavanaugh was a high school student at the time of his alleged actions and Biden was a fully adult US senator.

But as Ace points out, when the MSM does cover the Reade/Biden story, it’s the usual “Republicans pounce” angle.

The press and the Democratic politicians have been on a mission, and they don’t care about truth or consistency or any of the causes they profess to care about. That includes sexual harassment. The only thing that matters is politics, power, and winning. The rest is just posing, for “the masses” whom they profess to love but for whom they actually have contempt. They believe the public is just that gullible, just that lacking in long-term memory, and just that stupid.

[ADDENDUM: (Hat tip: Ace). Tara Reade might be getting close to her own WalkAway moment. It almost seems that until this point she believed that her allegations might be treated fairly. But disillusionment has set in.

See also this for what Reade has to say about the MSM’s and the Democrats’ hypocrisy;

“I’ve basically had no substantive support from women’s groups that are considered liberal or Democratic. I’ve had no support from any Democratic candidate, although I’ve reached out. And I’ve received either slanted reporting that ended up being talking points for Biden’s campaign or silence from the mainstream media. So that’s my contention and my concern.”

The Biden accuser expressed hope that “the next kind of case” like hers will be approached in a “more educated way and with emotional intelligence.”

Oh Tara, Tara, Tara. Accusations such as yours will continue to be treated in an utterly political manner.

Oh, and as for the Democrats’ approach to someone like Al Franken (whom I defended because I didn’t think his offense was more than a stupid joke), the only reason the Democrats turned on him was that politically it cost them nothing, since he would be replaced by another Democrat. And the Democrats will turn on Biden if and when they figure they have someone to replace him who might have a chance of beating Trump, and a method by which to kick Biden out. The Reade accusations could someday become that mechanism, but not until then.]

Andrew C. McCarthy on the latest revelations in the Flynn case

The New Neo Posted on by

The news that’s been coming out recently on the Flynn case would be shocking if we hadn’t already suspected as much from the start. But here’s the latest:

In the motion, [Flynn’s lawyer] Powell argues that the new information “proves Mr. Flynn’s allegations of having been deliberately set up and framed by corrupt agents.” She elaborates that the evidence that has finally been communicated to her “defeats any argument that the interview of Mr. Flynn on January 24, 2017, was material to any ‘investigation.’ The government has deliberately suppressed this evidence from the inception of this prosecution — knowing there was no crime by Mr. Flynn.”

…[I]t has long been speculated that Flynn — though he did not believe he was guilty (and though the agents who interviewed him also did not believe he had intentionally misled them) — nevertheless pled guilty to false-statements charges because prosecutors from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s staff threatened him. Specifically, Flynn is said to have been warned that, if he refused to plead guilty, prosecutors would charge his son with a felony for failing to register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent. Such a so-called FARA violation (Foreign Agent Registration Act) is a crime that the DOJ almost never charged before the Mueller investigation, and it had dubious application to Flynn’s son (who worked for Flynn’s private-intelligence firm).

Well, Powell now contends that the new disclosures demonstrate that Mueller’s prosecutors — she specifically cites Brandon Van Grack, who now runs Justice’s FARA unit — did indeed promise Flynn that they would not charge his son if Flynn pled guilty. Worse, Powell avers that the prosecutors coerced Flynn and his counsel to keep this agreement secret. That is, this was to be a side deal that would not be written into the plea agreement and therefore would be kept from the court and the public.

Under federal law, all understandings that are relevant to a guilty plea must be disclosed to the judge. It would be not merely a serious ethical breach for government lawyers to fail to reveal such an arrangement. It would be a fraud on the court.

Much more at the link.

No one on the right will be surprised at any of this. No one on the left will care about it. And I’m not the least bit sure anything will be done about it.

And that’s where we stand today.

COVID-19: prison testing results

The New Neo Posted on by

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say.

In Michigan:

Of the 1,403 inmates tested at Lakeland Correctional Facility in Branch County, 785 of them tested positive for the virus. There are about 30 inmates still awaiting results as of Monday morning…

Lakeland is the first of Michigan’s prisons to have all of its inmates tested, prior to this only those who complained of symptoms were tested. The facility is one that Michigan Department of Corrections said it was most worried about considering half of those housed at Lakeland are either elderly or medically frail…

Gautz said the department estimates roughly 80% of those who tested positive for the virus last week were asymptomatic.

“The vast majority of prisoners who tested positive last week were confused as to how they were positive because they hadn’t had any symptoms,” Gautz said.”

Just to be clear – the 1403 were basically the entire prison population. This prison was already known to have had a serious outbreak; 12 prisoners there have died, most or all of them geriatric. Of the entire prison population tested, a little over half were positive. That’s not positive for antibodies, that’s for the virus itself. And 80% of those were asymptomatic.

We’re not talking about a previously hale and hearty bunch of people here, either, compared to the general population.

It’s not just Michigan. There’s North Carolina:

…[O]fficials [at Neuse state prison took] the extraordinary step of testing all 700 prisoners at the medium-security facility near Raleigh.

Within a week, infections had surged to 444. Perhaps even more revealing: More than 90% of the newly diagnosed inmates displayed no symptoms, meaning that the deadly virus could have remained hidden had the state followed federal guidelines that largely reserve testing for people displaying common symptoms, such as fever and respiratory distress.

I read both articles rather quickly, but as far as I can tell neither article discussed whether these asymptomatic yet positive patients have been showing symptoms yet. Perhaps not enough time has passed to know. But still, why isn’t the issue even addressed? It seems of the utmost importance, because if these cases remain asymptomatic or only develop mild symptoms, it would seem that herd immunity will be reached in very short order. That would be excellent news.

The bad news would be if this represents the potential in the next week or two for a huge number of deaths, because the testing happened to have been done before the disease reached full flower in the asymptomatic patients, and many eventually go on to develop extremely serious disease.

Similar results to Lakeland’s have occurred in Ohio prisons, according to the USA Today article. And I’ve read of similar findings within the homeless population in a shelter in Boston:

The results? Out of 397 people tested, 146 (36%) came up positive. But even more surprising, they weren’t showing any signs of sickness.

In all these articles, the public health officials and the administrators are very disturbed by the results, and understandably so. The idea that half or nearly half of their populations might have the virus without anyone knowing it – and could be spreading it at a rapid pace – is potentially disturbing. But it’s just as possible that it’s extremely encouraging, as I mentioned before. If the virus spreads that quickly, and if most of the victims – even in a vulnerable population such as prisons and homeless shelters – remain asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic, that would mean we would reach herd immunity quite quickly. Even without achieving full herd immunity, the more people who become immune the less easily the virus can spread.

That’s assuming, of course, that infection with the virus confers immunity. I keep reading that they don’t know for sure. But that merely means they haven’t yet tested for that. If this virus doesn’t confer immunity, it would be highly unusual.

And no, there’s no analogy to flu, because having a certain strain of flu does confer immunity – to that strain. It’s just that flu mutates quickly and in the process changes so much that it effectively becomes a new variety. Although COVID-19 also mutates (as do all RNA viruses), its rate and type of mutation has been slow in pace, and the variations on the COVID-19 theme are minor. In other words, there’s no particular reason to expect that a COVID-19 infection wouldn’t confer immunity for quite some time, probably long enough for a vaccine to be developed. Perhaps longer.

More here:

…[M]ost experts do think an initial infection from the coronavirus, called SARS-CoV-2, will grant people immunity to the virus for some amount of time. That is generally the case with acute infections from other viruses, including other coronaviruses.

With data limited, “sometimes you have to act on a historical basis,” Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a webcast with JAMA this month. “It’s a reasonable assumption that this virus is not changing very much. If we get infected now and it comes back next February or March we think this person is going to be protected.”

And speaking of a vaccine, this seems encouraging:

Researchers at the National Institute of Health Rocky Mountain Laboratory injected the six rhesus macaque monkeys with the Oxford concoction, then exposed them to “heavy quantities” of COVID-19 — exposure that had consistently sickened other monkeys in the lab, the New York Times reported Monday.

But 28 days later, all the chimps were still healthy.

Let’s hear it for the chimps.