[Hat tip: Scott Johnson at Powerline]
Funny, and sadly true:
Treatments that show promise…
…don’t always pan out.
But this definitely shows promise for those COVID patients who are in dire straits:
Six critically ill coronavirus patients in Israel who are considered high-risk for mortality have been treated with Pluristem’s placenta-based cell-therapy product and survived, according to preliminary data provided by the Haifa-based company.
The patients were treated at three different Israeli medical centers for one week under the country’s compassionate use program and were suffering from acute respiratory failure and inflammatory complications associated with COVID-19. Four of the patients also demonstrated failure of other organ systems, including cardiovascular and kidney failure.
[Hat tip: commenter “sdferr.”]
“Just anecdotal”…
…but powerful nevertheless:
However, from everything I’ve heard and read, the medication combination is probably most effective if given before things really go south. If a person is already on a ventilator, for example, the amount of lung damage that has already taken place may often make it very difficult for any drug to do its work.
At a certain point, “anecdotal” evidence – in a situation in which we have few other tools to fight a disease that kills too many people – becomes very compelling. To not treat, and to wait for large-scale controlled studies, considering that the drug has already been approved for 60 years and is generally considered extremely safe, is hard to justify. Not only that, but although controlled experiments are necessary to really understand whether it’s helping at all and to what degree, is it ethical to have untreated controls in a situation like this?
It’s a very real dilemma.
When the left speaks so forcibly against Trump’s mentioning that the drug has shown promise, I think they have two motives. The first is obvious: anything Trump says might be good is by definition bad. The second is a little more subtle: the left positions itself as the science-based group and has put out a relentless message that Trump and his supporters are anti-science. That message has been received by liberal Democrats; I have heard it many times from friends and family, and increasingly in the past week or two. Controlled studies are definitely science-based, so that’s another way in which the left wants to position itself as champions of science as opposed to charlatan Trump.
Now of course, Trump never said not to do controlled trials. It doesn’t have to be either/or. But the left needs to pretend that’s the situation. To do so, though, they have to work against the emotional appeal of stories such as Dr. Siegel’s, as well as the tale told by Michigan state Rep. Karen Whitsett.
However, if this drug combination does end up being proven effective against COVID-19, I wouldn’t be surprised if the MSM and the Democrats pretend they never criticized it, and that in fact Trump was too slow to recommend it and therefore has blood on his hands.
“How the Wuhan Virus Will Change the World Order”
Here’s an excerpt:
We don’t know exactly when Beijing officials learned about Wuhan’s troubles, but it was probably early- to mid-December. They didn’t learn earlier because local officials know the surest way to lose your position is to give your boss bad news. So they withheld it. When Beijing did learn, it intensified the crackdown and enforced stay-at-home orders. The CCP then delayed telling the world. It also refused multiple offers of medical help. Some say they refused out of national pride. Perhaps, but they also feared what outside professionals might find.
Meanwhile, Beijing continued to send official delegations around the world, including one to the White House and a huge one to Davos, long after it knew the dangers. Far worse, it allowed more than 750,000 people to fly to the U.S. in December, January, and February, again, after CCP officials knew the virus was highly contagious and spreading quickly. Where did they fly, besides America? Well, Italy, for starters. Wherever Chinese people like to vacation. And wherever China has economic and strategic interests. The first global hot spots show exactly where they landed. The contagion spread its deadly tentacles from there.
Why didn’t the World Health Organization sound the alarm? For two reasons: It had bad information (from China) and it never confronts Beijing, which effectively controls the organization, even though it is a far-smaller donor than the U.S. The CCP has a crucial say over who holds senior positions at the WHO, and it shows. That’s why a top official there actually hung up — on camera — when a reporter had the temerity to ask about Taiwan’s success in combating the virus. That’s why, in mid-January, the WHO was still telling the world exactly what China told them: The novel-coronavirus did not spread by human-to-human contact. The WHO probably believed that, but by then Beijing must have known it was false. The WHO also opposed President Trump’s decision to block travel from China, the most important early step to limit the pandemic in America.
The WHO’s fecklessness mattered. According to Dr. Deborah Birx, reports from the WHO and China led U.S. health officials to think, wrongly, that this problem was much like SARS, serious but manageable. It was far worse than that and far more contagious. We should have been told.
Much much more at the link.
Bret Easton Ellis: political changer
Here’s another changer – a recent one, author Bret Easton Ellis – telling his story. I was alerted to this by a helpful reader:
It seems paradoxical to enforce social distancing rules…
…by trying to strangle someone:
A doctor in Louisville, Ky., was arrested and charged with strangulation after a fight ensued with teens over not following social distancing measures amid the coronavirus outbreak.
The Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) was alerted Monday to a video showing a group of teens being cursed at by a man while he shoved them and put his hands around the neck of a girl, according to local CBS affiliate WLKY.
I assume the strangulation wasn’t successful, or the charges would have been somewhat different.
The paradox here is a double one. One element is that this is a doctor: “first, do no harm.” Another is that in order to strangle someone – unless your arms are very long and you are wearing protective gloves – you ordinarily have to get up close and personal.
But it illustrates something I’ve noticed, which is the spark of anger people often feel nowadays when someone comes too close or otherwise violates the rules. Once things go “back to normal,” I wonder if some of this feeling of danger when strangers are near will linger, and whether the sense of a safe amount of personal space will have permanently changed.
Bernie does what he does best: drops out of the race
Remember that old Timothy Leary prescription – “turn on, tune in, drop out”? I bet Bernie does.
Today he announced he’s dropping out of the race, although he remains on the ballot for the rest of the primaries.
“I wish I could give you better news, but I think you know the truth. And that is that we are now some 300 delegates behind Vice President Biden and the path to victory is virtually impossible,” Sanders said.“I have concluded that this battle for the Democratic nomination will not be successful, and so today I am announcing the suspension of my campaign.”
He said that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic had hastened his decision to suspend his campaign, saying that continuing his presidential bid would only distract from efforts to combat the outbreak and damage it has done to the U.S. economy.
“I cannot in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot win and which would interfere with the important work required of all of us in this difficult hour,” he said.
The most important work of all, of course, is to unite in criticizing Trump’s handling of the health crisis.
Truth is, Bernie was the front runner until the DNC became alarmed and decided to marshall its considerable forces – including the MSM – to do Sanders in.
So now they are left with a lot of angry Sanders supporters, Joe Biden, and a Possible Player to be Named Later.
Trump wasted no time:
Bernie Sanders is OUT! Thank you to Elizabeth Warren. If not for her, Bernie would have won almost every state on Super Tuesday! This ended just like the Democrats & the DNC wanted, same as the Crooked Hillary fiasco. The Bernie people should come to the Republican Party, TRADE!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 8, 2020
This has been the strangest campaign season in my memory. And it’s not over yet. Now that the DNC has stopped Bernie, will they manage to stop Biden, which is a bit more complex procedurally but could be done? And if not, will they manage to drag him over the finish line somehow? Will the long push to get the public to hate and reject Trump be successful, even with Biden nominally at the helm? And if not Biden, than who?
What a mess.
RIP John Prine
I’ve loved this song for a long, long time:
This article says he died of COVID-19 complications. That last word is a bit confusing. He had a history of successfully treated lung cancer from 2013, so it’s not clear how that factored into it. Prine had been hospitalized with COVID-19 since March 26 and on a ventilator since March 28.
Once more, with feeling: Updike on Kundera
[NOTE: This is a repeat (slightly edited) of a previous post. It seems timely, as I think you’ll see as you read it.
Maybe it’s always timely.]
I’ve quoted the following excerpt before, because it’s one of my very favorites. It’s from the Czech author Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which he wrote in the late 1970s:
Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.
I first came across The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in an excerpt published in The New Yorker around the time of the book’s English publication, 1980. The first paragraph of the book in its New Yorker version hit me with great force as soon as I read it, which is unusual for me. I understood immediately that I was in the presence of brilliance of a particular and unusual sort, a writer who said things in a way that resonated deeply with me. The work managed to mix political and philosophical observations with a fanciful fictional narrative (not exactly a novel but rather a series of linked and unconventional stories) all told in the idiosyncratic and blunt voice of an exceedingly perceptive and reflective author.
I’ll leave it to another perceptive and reflective author—John Updike, in his original review of the book—to describe it:
This book…is brilliant and original, written with a purity and wit that invite us directly in; it is also strange, with a strangeness that locks us out…
…[T]he mirror does not so readily give back validation with this playful book, more than a collection of seven stories yet certainly no novel, by an expatriate Czech resident in France, fascinated by sex, and prone to sudden, if graceful, skips into autobiography, abstract rumination, and recent Czech history. Milan Kundera, he tells us, was as a young man among that moiety of Czechs–“the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better half”–who cheered the accession of the Communists to power in February 1948. He was then among the tens of thousands rapidly disillusioned by the harsh oppressions of the new regime: “And suddenly those young, intelligent radicals had the strange feeling of having sent something into the world, a deed of their own making, which had taken on a life of its own, lost all resemblance to the original idea, and totally ignored the originators of the idea. So those young, intelligent radicals started shouting to their deed, calling it back, scolding it, chasing it, hunting it down.”
Kundera’s prose presents a surface like that of a shattered mirror, where brightly mirroring fragments lie mixed with pieces of lusterless silvering. The Communists idyll he youthfully believed in seems somehow to exist for him still, though mockingly and excludingly. He never asks himself—the most interesting political question of the century–why a plausible and necessarily redistribution of wealth should, in its Communist form, demand such an exorbitant sacrifice of individual freedom? Why must the idyll turn, not merely less than idyll, but nightmare?
The position of a writer from the Socialist world in the West cannot but be uncomfortable. He cannot but despise us for our cheap freedoms, our more subtle enslavements; and we it may be, cannot but condescend to his discovery, at such heavy cost to his life, of lessons that Messrs. Churchill and Truman so roundly read to us 35 years ago.
That probably tells you more about Updike’s politics and quality of mind (see much more here) than about Kundera. However, I actually think that, although Kundera doesn’t directly spell out the answer to that “most interesting political question of the century,” the answer is inherent in everything he writes. In fact, come think of it, the answer is even subtly implied in that paragraph I quoted at the outset of this post, and it resides in that single word “forced.” In the inevitably vain effort to realize a dream that goes against human nature and reality, one must force compliance or abandon the dream. That necessity for force appeals to the worst in human nature and ultimately attracts the worst human beings rather than the best.
More on China’s media connections
Yesterday I wrote a post that dealt with some of the propaganda efforts of China, and how they have bought influence in news media:
Now there’s this comprehensive article focusing on the American MSM:
The companies that own the major news networks, NBC, ABC, and CBS, all do significant business in China. On the print side, top U.S. newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times have been criticized for running paid China Daily inserts. What they were paid for these inserts is still unknown.
By contrast, conservative news companies are much less involved in China. Conservative radio giant Salem, whose attempt to buy Tribune several years ago provoked an enormous freakout from media reporters over consolidation, is all-American. And Fox, after several troubled attempts to break into the Chinese market—including sending a News Corp team to help build People’s Daily a website—has mostly given up, after selling its Asia-Pacific operations to Disney over the last two years.
Disney owns ABC and has a park in Shanghai. It also owns ESPN, which was criticized for its coverage of China’s retaliation against the NBA earlier this year over one team owner’s support of the Hong Kong protests. But other than ABC, Disney is relatively uninvolved in news.
Comcast, on the other hand, has a much larger footprint in the U.S. media landscape,
More at the link.
The US media has financial reasons and political reasons for defending China. They are, after all, on the left, and the left not only has a natural alliance with China, but since Trump has been clear (long before COVID) that he thinks China is a bad actor on the scene, the MSM wants to defend China in their continual campaign to invalidate Trump’s position.
It’s almost humorous, given the fuss that was made about Trump’s alleged Russian connection. Almost humorous, but not really at all.
COVID-19 as a cause of death
Sometimes a person’s cause of death is obvious. An accident. Cancer. Heart attack.
But in no small number of cases there are choices to make when a doctor gives an official a cause of death. I’ve seen this many times, even among family and friends. When my mother died at almost 100, there were multiple factors, but perhaps the best choice would have been “old age,” although that did not appear on her death certificate. Another relative, profoundly weakened by cancer that was untreatable at that point, succumbed to pneumonia. I never looked at his death certificate, but it could easily have given either cause or both.
Doctors make these decisions all the time, and the sums of their decisions become the official statistics at the CDC.
For COVID-19, this is how it’s been going so far:
In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID–19 cannot be made, but it is suspected or likely (e.g., the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty), it is acceptable to report COVID–19 on a death certificate as ‘probable’ or ‘presumed’,” the [CDC] advises. “In these instances, certifiers should use their best clinical judgment in determining if a COVID–19 infection was likely.”
That clinical judgment, alarmingly, does not require administering a test to confirm the presence of the virus.
“Ideally, testing for COVID–19 should be conducted, but it is acceptable to report COVID–19 on a death certificate without this confirmation if the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty,” the guidelines state.
This is not surprising or unusual – for example, flu deaths are ordinarily based on clinical judgments rather than testing. But it is concerning, because so much is riding on the COVID statistics, reported every day in mounting numbers. In the heat of the moment, treating patients is the primary concern. But record-keeping (both in the US and in countries around the world) needs to be as accurate as possible.
Even if tests were mandatory, however, it still would be difficult in many cases – particularly those involving the elderly and already-infirm – to know whether it was COVID dealing the final blow or something else. Sometimes it’s very clear, for example when a previously hale and hearty person succumbs and the COVID virus has been confirmed by testing. But sometimes it is not clear at all. And it appears that in those cases there is a preference for listing COVID in the absence of knowledge as to whether the person even had the virus.
After all, flu is still going around, and it kills people too. We aren’t ordinarily testing for flu. Are we ascribing some flu deaths to COVID, if the above guidelines are followed? And if so, how many?