Very good news.

No doubt it will soon be widely published. But that’s no reason why we shouldn’t help it spread.

The New York Post reports:

Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine believe that they’ve found a potential vaccine for the new coronavirus. The researchers announced their findings Thursday and believe the vaccine could be rolled out quickly enough to “significantly impact the spread of disease,” according to their study published in EBioMedicine.

The vaccine would be delivered on a fingertip-size patch. When tested on mice, the vaccine produced enough antibodies believed to successfully counteract the virus. …

While the mice have not been studied over a long period of time, the vaccine was able to deliver enough antibodies against the coronavirus within two weeks, according to the researchers.

The study’s authors are now applying for an investigational new drug approval from the US Food and Drug Administration. They hope to start human clinical trials within the next few months.

Researchers said they sided with using a patch, rather than a traditional needle, to deliver the spike protein to the skin, which elicits the strongest immune reaction.

The patch contains 400 tiny “microneedles” made of sugar and protein pieces. It would be applied like a Band-Aid with the needles dissolving into the skin.

The vaccine would be “highly scalable” for widespread use, the researchers said in a news release.

Will President Trump put a rocket under the FDA and get this necessary anti-coronavirus thing to all of us quickly, as he got hydroxychloroquine quickly to the infected?

Is the cure for the coronavirus worse than the disease?

This video explores the question intelligently.

https://youtu.be/RkJELpndAOs

Comments?

While President Trump bears the heavy responsibility of dealing with a pandemic – and doing so very competently – the Democrats whinge and carp at every step he takes and sneer at him for everything he says. All their efforts are made with the object of obstructing and discrediting him. They don’t give a toss for the people they ache to govern.

In an article at Front Page titled America’s Superb Unappreciated President, John Perazzo writes:

The coordinated campaign of premeditated lies and smears that the Democrats and their media mouthpieces have been waging against President Trump ever since the word “coronavirus” first entered the American people’s consciousness, has been obscene. But there is something else that also needs to be addressed. Have you noticed that even now — after the life-and-death dangers inherent in the Democrats’ open-borders, catch-and-release immigration policies have been thoroughly laid bare by the current crisis — Democrats in public office have been utterly silent about those dangers? Have you noticed that they have not ventured even to speculate that perhaps President Trump’s pre-coronavirus warnings about the need to regulate our nation’s borders were well-founded and had absolutely nothing to do with racism?

This is because the Democrat narrative never changes in any significant way. It merely makes minor adjustments for the sake of political expediency. So because right now it would be politically inconvenient to link racism to the type of border security that is very obviously a matter of life-and-death for many Americans, the Democrats have simply found a new way of framing their “racism” charade. Thus have we heard one Democrat after another intone their latest mantra-of-the-moment: the notion that Trump’s use of the term “China [he says ‘Chinese’] virus” is damnable proof of his “racism”.

The Democratic Party has devolved into something quite diabolical. Its very considerable energies are now spent on little more than a constant stream of frenzied efforts to cover their political foes in rhetorical bird droppings. Aside from that, the party has nothing to offer the American people.

And Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

Trump once enraged liberal sensibilities by issuing travel bans against countries in the Middle East, Iran, Nigeria, and North Korea as they could not be trusted to audit their own departing citizens. His notion that nations have clearly defined and enforced borders was antithetical to the new norms that open borders and sanctuary cities were part of the global village of the 21st century.

Trump certainly distrusted globalization. He has waged a veritable multifront war against the overreach of transnational organizations, whether that be the European Union or the various agencies of the United Nations. Even relatively uncontroversial steps, such as greenlighting experimental drugs and off-label uses of old medicines for terminal patients drew the ire of federal bureaucrats and medical schools as potentially dangerous or irrelevant in cost-benefit analyses.

Yet since the outbreak of the virus, Trump’s idiosyncratic sixth sense has come in handy. The country is united in its furor at China—even if it is giving no credit to Trump for being years ahead of where it is now.

No longer is there a national debate over the evils of “protectionism” and “nationalism”, but rather over how quickly and effectively can the U.S. return the manufacturing of key medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, strategically vital technologies, and rare earth metals to American shores. Offshoring and outsourcing are now more likely synonymous with tragedy than smart investment strategies. …

When Trump issued the key January 31 travel ban that suddenly stopped the arrival of 15,000 visitors per day to the United States from China, the Left was as outraged as it had been with the ban against Libya, North Korea, and Iran. Candidates Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders saw an opening against their presumed 2020 opponent, and quickly sought to demagogue voters with “here-we-go-again” rhetoric that racist Trump is banning free travel of a marginalized people in his habitual “xenophobic” and “racist” fits. …

How odd that no prior critical major newspaper, network, or politician has now called for the end of such unnecessary and hurtful bans and the resumption of travel from China without further interruption …

We are learning, belatedly, that Trump was also rightly wary of transnationalism. The World Health Organization in the early weeks of the outbreak was mostly a paid-for Chinese megaphone. Its functionary director propagandized, on Chinese prompts, that the virus was likely not transmissible from human to human and that travel bans were ineffective and thus reflective of Trump’s repugnant views.

Americans were startled at how quickly the brotherhood of the European Union collapsed. Within days, individual countries were ignoring the Schengen open-borders rules and reinvented themselves as nations. None were eager to welcome in their neighbors. Few were willing to share medical supplies and key pharmaceuticals across ancient boundaries. …

The quite diverse manner in which Germany and Italy respectively reacted to the virus showed very little European commonality, but reflected that both were unique cultures and societies as they had been for centuries. …

Here at home, under the present lockdown conditions, Americans worry about finding their needed but long-ago outsourced prescriptions and medical supplies, but they are not so fearful of running out of food or fuel for their vehicles and heat for their homes. Was it good then to have demanded expansions of native gas and oil production, to have supported pipeline construction and more fracking and horizontal drilling? Was it in retrospect wise or foolish to have tried vehemently to stop California authorities from releasing precious state and federal reservoir water out to sea thereby shorting the irrigation contracts of the nation’s most important food producer?

At such times as these, was it smarter to trust in bureaucracies like the CDC to issue test kits or to encourage private enterprise to step forward and become creative producers?

… as President Trump has done.

Could counties and states adapt better to the local and regional differences of the virus’s manifestations than a monolithic federal government?

President Trump believes counties and states can adapt better to local needs.

[The president’s] suspicions about China and globalization, his distrust of bureaucratic regulations, his support for domestic production of key industries, his promotion of the interests of farmers and frackers, and his vehement opposition to increased gun control, all reflect a world view of national and self-independence, in which Americans can only count on themselves and their fellow citizens.

He has been right all along.

Yet still half the nation fails to appreciate that he is a superb president.

The admirable Senator John Kennedy discusses on Fox News the House Democrats’ response to the economic crisis brought about by the coronavirus pandemic.

His anger at how the Democrat majority exploited the emergency to serve their own petty interests at the expense of the tax-payer is justified. The Republican minority had to give in to their  absurd demands in order to get the urgently necessary bill enacted into law.

Which is the party of true compassion could not be clearer.

Lauren Ell is the founder and director of Republican Atheists. At their website, she recently published two articles about our editor-in-chief, Jillian Becker:

https://republicanatheists.com/jillian-becker-lecture-the-freedom-association/

https://republicanatheists.com/rare-photos-atheist-jillian-becker/

We are very grateful to her. She has made us better known among Republicans.

Most atheist organizations, clubs, networks and websites are on the Left. (Though no political ideology flows logically from atheism.) They are often vituperatively antagonistic to atheists on the Right, their political opinions being far more important to them than their anti-religious opinions. (As ours are to us, but we are far more tolerant and civil.)  Some of them have been viciously aggressive, personally, towards Lauren Ell as director of Republican Atheists.

We regard Republican Atheists as our closest ally, and recommend that our readers visit their website and give them moral support, as they have done for us.

Lauren Ell

*

March 31, 2020: This press release has just been issued by Lauren Ell:

Here’s press release about a new atheist organization known as ATHEISTS WE ARE.

PRESS RELEASE

Contact: Lauren Ell
Email: [email protected]

It is a very good thing that, in this time of danger to the health of the people, the president of the United States is neither a doctor nor an economist. As a highly competent administrator who strives to do whatever he does to a high standard, President Trump seeks the knowledge of doctors and economists, and then decides what to do for the good of the nation’s health and economy.

An article by Ruth Papazian* at American Greatness, shows why experts must be asked for their knowledge but not be allowed to make the decisions:

During the daily briefings of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, repeatedly referred to reports from frontline clinicians that the combination of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin can completely clear coronavirus from the body within six days as “anecdotal” evidence.

And, as such, inadequate. As she puts it, “To a political journalist, ‘anecdotal’ evidence is unsubstantiated hearsay.”

But –

To a medical journalist, “anecdotal” evidence is what doctors in the field are reporting.

… Over and over again, Fauci gave the false impression that the experimental treatment regimen would not, or could not, be given to severely ill patients before data from large-scale, randomized double-blind clinical trials becomes available: “My job as a scientist is . . . to prove without a doubt that a drug is not only safe, but it actually works.”

All well and good, but a clinician’s job is to save lives. And in the midst of a burgeoning global pandemic when speed is of the essence, field experience with two drugs whose safety profiles are well understood suffices to treat patients who are likely to die. For this reason, the FDA-approved chloroquine … for “compassionate use”. …

The combination of HCQ+AZ could cause abnormal heart rhythms and would not be given to patients with known atrial flutter or atrial fibrillation. Research suggests one alternative for these patients: The combination of chloroquine and zinc, which can stop the virus from replicating.

“Anecdotal” evidence typically prompts new, off-label uses (not FDA-approved) of available medications that eventually become standard treatment after the controlled clinical studies are done. For instance, doctors used HCQ off-label to treat lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, and sarcoidosis, and this is now standard treatment for these conditions.

Making the perfect the enemy of the good, Fauci was dismissive both of clinical use of HCQ+AZ in China and South Korea, but also of small clinical trials in China and in France. …

There is one critical clinical trial Fauci should have initiated as soon as it became apparent hospitals nationwide lacked adequate supplies of face masks and shields, gloves, gowns, and other personal protective equipment to handle the pandemic: The prophylactic administration of HCQ to frontline healthcare personnel in coronavirus hot spots.

Doctors and nurses at one hospital in Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York City could be given the anti-malarial drug to see whether they are more resistant to coronavirus infection than their counterparts at another hospital in those cities not taking it.

After 50 years in Washington, Fauci has become an overly-cautious bureaucrat: “It probably would be several weeks and maybe longer before we know whether [containment measures] are having an effect.”

No, we will know by mid-April whether the rate of infection has been significantly slowed by taking bold action to augment containment with widespread clinical use of HCQ+AZ to cure hospitalized patients and reduce the length of time they can pass on the infection to others, as well as to prevent infection in those caring for them.

Not taking these steps will unnecessarily prolong the pandemic, which will unnecessarily prolong and deepen the adverse economic effects of federal and state containment efforts.

We at The Atheist Conservative have no medical expertise, so we are not of course making a recommendation. We will just mention that we are drinking more gin and tonic than usual. The tonic gets its slightly bitter but pleasant taste from the quinine in it. It’s the quinine in hydroxychloroquine that – the medical experts say – helps to overcome the coronavirus. So while it is a pleasure to drink, gin-and-tonic might – just might – also be a life-saver.

*Ruth Papazian is the Republican candidate running for election against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York’s 14th. Congressional District.

We have been told authoritatively that our article, A Fauci farce to force a recession?, was “put in the hands of the President” yesterday morning (Tuesday, March 24, 2020).

It is suspected by some of our readers who helped get it there, that the absence of Dr. Fauci from the President’s daily briefing was directly due to its persuasive message (no doubt along with many other items selected by his advisers).

We trust our informants.

We are happy to have made a contribution to getting America back to work in April and so saving the economy – and maybe frustrating an evil plot of the Left.

Has the Left, through the powerful authority of Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), deliberately worked a wrecking of the economy  by exaggerating the danger of the coronavirus so as to give dictatorial power to government as the only way to save the nation from the disease?

A wrecked economy could be detrimental to President Trump’s re-election. Could the Left be using the pandemic to dislodge him from office, having tried and failed to do so using the Russia hoax and impeachment?

As it turns out, the president’s popularity is rising on the strength of his handling of the crisis. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t such a plan – only that, thus far, it isn’t working as intended. Or only partly working. Damage to the economy has happened and continues to happen. But will American voters turn to the Democrats – specifically to corrupt senile Joe Biden – in the November election to restore it ? Or, rather, to establish socialism in its stead?

Sure this is a conspiracy theory. But could it be true?

In an article at American Thinker, M. Catharine Evans writes:

It seems some viral infection pandemics are more equal than others. At least when it comes to burning a vibrant Trump economy to the ground.

In September 2009, after millions had become infected with the H1N1 influenza and thousands had died, some of whom were young people and children, a relaxed and unalarmed Dr. Anthony Fauci told an interviewer that people just need “to use good judgment.” [See the video here.]

Parents should not send their kids to school if they’re sick, if you’re sick don’t go to work … avoid places where there are people who are sick and coughing, now that’s a difficult thing to do. … You can’t isolate yourself from the rest of the world for the whole flu season.

That’s quite a change from the esteemed expert’s views on the current virus from China sweeping the world.

It’s peculiar that nowhere in the 2009 video does Dr. Fauci suggest that in order to alleviate the stress on hospital supplies we “force, uh, delay,  if not cancel anything that’s elective, I mean any medical or surgical procedures that need to be done on an elective basis should not be done.”  Dr. Fauci’s statement to NBC’s Savannah Guthrie on March 20, 2020 and his obvious slip of the tongue using the word “force” reveals just how much influence Dr. Fauci has over our daily lives. To date, hospitals, imaging centers, and outpatient departments across the country have cancelled non-emergent testing and surgical procedures.

Additionally, nowhere in the 2009 interview does Dr. Fauci specifically mention restaurants and bars as hot spots for the transmission of the H1N1 virus as he does in his recent interview with Yahoo News: “When I see crowded bars and crowded restaurants, it is a little bit unnerving,” Fauci said. “It’s clear that those are the situations that put people very much at risk.” Talk about wielding power. Take a look around the country. Local and state officials have heeded Fauci’s “unnerving” concern and ordered restaurants to close their dining areas, or adhere to a 10-person limit.  In cities and small towns everywhere, the restaurant industry, which includes owners,  suppliers, chefs, line cooks, waitstaff, and bartenders, has been decimated.

Restaurants and bar owners, along with their employees, are the hardest hit economically by the virus. …

Nowhere in the 2009 interview does Fauci use inflammatory, fear-inducing rhetoric, despite the number of H1N1-infected individuals, increased hospitalizations and deaths occurring at that time. Eleven years later, on March 11, 2020, Fauci is gung ho about COVID-19, warning lawmakers at a hearing on Capitol Hill: “Bottom line, it’s going to get worse.”  Since then, the renowned epidemiologist has been seen daily at White House press conferences and on cable news shows reiterating this message to the public. …

Why did Dr. Fauci not sound the alarm in 2009 as urgently as he has done in 2020?  Why did he not insist we “force” hospitals to cancel elective tests and surgeries to save room for future infected patients during the H1N1 outbreak? Why did he pointedly target restaurants and bars in his concern for the spread of the coronavirus but not H1N1?  As a specialist in infectious diseases, and as a self-described “man of science”, why support the closing of schools, businesses, and home quarantine for one virus and not the other?  H1N1’s duration from April 2009 to April 2010 with 60 million infected and almost 13,000 deaths in the U.S. alone was no less serious than the 2020 coronavirus so why was Dr. Fauci taking a more measured approach in 2009?

The answers may come too late. The economy that was setting records has been broken … The working and middle classes, who only a month ago were celebrating the purchase of a new car, a house, a raise, moving out of their parents’ home or the promise of a better job are wondering if they can hold on, and some are waking up to the realization their lives have been turned upside down over a virus that is no more deadly than the flu they got last year.

Is there an answer to “why”?

Peter Barry Chowka, also writing at American Thinker, provides an answer by offering some evidence that Dr. Fauci may in fact be using his authority to advance the fiercely destructive political plans of the president’s Democratic enemies.

His article is titled: Anthony Fauci, the NIH’s face of the coronavirus, is a Deep-State Hillary Clinton-loving stooge.

He writes:

After seeing a March 9, 2020 tweet by Shiva Ayyadurai, Ph.D., who has four degrees from MIT, I was inspired to take a look back to try to put Fauci’s current work on the coronavirus into some perspective.

In his tweet, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai (“inventor of Email”) said:

As an MIT PhD in Biological Engineering who studies & does research nearly every day on the Immune System, [I think] the coronavirus fear mongering by the Deep State will go down in history as one of the biggest frauds to manipulate economies, suppress dissent, & push MANDATED Medicine!

What did Peter Barry Chowka find out about Dr. Fauci?

One of the first things I found about Dr. Fauci, at the WikiLeaks Clinton email trove, was a gushing 2013 email that Fauci had sent to Cheryl Mills, one of Hillary Clinton;s top aides, praising the then-secretary of state for her congressional testimony on Benghazi.

Cheryl: Anyone who had any doubts about the Secretary’s stamina and capability following her illness had those doubts washed away by today’s performance before the Senate and the House. She faced extremely difficult circumstances at the Hearings and still she hit it right out of the park.

Please tell her that we all love her and are very proud to know her.

Warm regards,

Tony

Anthony S. Fauci, MD Director National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

OK, fine. So Fauci’s a typical, deeply embedded administrative state hack who can be expected to be obsequious to his political bosses like Mrs. Clinton. …

Careful observers have noted that after the almost daily White House news conferences with President Trump and members of the Coronavirus Task Force, Fauci, a regular attendee and the task force’s chief medical spokesman, often runs to Trump-hating media like CNN to contradict — usually with a degree of nuance that gives him plausible deniability — what the president has just said. The Daily Mail of London noted this behavior in a March 20 article, “Dr Anthony Fauci caught rolling his eyes and smirking as President Trump rants about the ‘deep state’ during coronavirus press conference.”

But can President Trump be used, fooled, exploited by Dr. Fauci?

If this is a plot to destroy President Trump by destroying the economy, will it work?

We don’t think it will.

(Hat-tip to Cogito]

It seems more than probable that the rickety, corrupt, gynocratic, dictatorial European Union is being finally destroyed by the Chinese Virus.

Its ultimate test came with the pandemic. The country worst affected – even worse perhaps than China itself where the pestilence originated – is the EU member-state, Italy.

In an article published today (March 21, 2020) by Gatestone, titled European Union: The End?, Judith Bergman writes:

Italy appealed [to the EU] for help at the beginning of its coronavirus crisis – and received in return exactly nothing. …

In addition, Germany and France, leading EU member states, even imposed bans or limitations on the export [sic] of facemasks and protective equipment.

The very idea that the countries of Europe, with their different characters, temperaments, languages, histories, traditions, capabilities and cultures, could form a union like the United States of America, was farcical. The attempt to implement it has been a prolonged pretense, a staged sham, a parody doomed to the ugly failure it is now proving to be.

Reality is exposing the make-believe, breaking up the theatrical performance:

When an entire continent is in the midst of a highly contagious virus epidemic, solidarity becomes a more complex issue. Every state inevitably considers whether it can afford to send facemasks and protective equipment that might be needed for its own citizens. In other words, every state considers its own national interest first. In the case of Italy’s appeal for help, EU member states made their own interests their highest priority. This is classic state behavior and would not have caused any outrage prior to the establishment of the European Union.

What the coronavirus crisis reveals is that the member states of the European Union will revert to national interests when extreme circumstances call for it. While such revelations may not spell the immediate end of the European Union, they certainly raise questions about the point of an organization that pledges solidarity as a founding principle, but abandons that principle the moment it is most called for.

And it’s not only the awful reality of a highly infectious disease that is forcing the diverse nations to admit and attend to necessary self interest. There is also the Islamic invasion, now reaching a climax as Turkey threatens to pour a million Muslim immigrants – aka “refugees” – into Europe through the poor EU member-state Greece. Greece found itself standing alone against an incoming human tide. Greek soldiers guarded the border, shot live ammunition into the invading hordes, and even exchanged fire with a Turkish tank or two.

As Judith Bergman says –

Coronavirus, however, is not the only recent issue to put into question the viability of the European Union.

The current crisis on the Greek-Turkish border has shown the EU not only as unhelpful, but an actual liability: The EU left an already overwhelmed Greece to deal with the migrant crisis — manufactured by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for political gain – on its own, despite the apparent rhetorical support by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who called Greece Europe’s “shield”.

President Erdoğan wants Turkey’s admittance to the EU, and billions of Euros in aid. Angela Merkel, still de facto leader of the wealthiest member-state Germany and therefore also of the EU, pays again and again.

Turkey’s migrant blackmail worked surprisingly well and surprisingly fast. …

Erdoğan got what he wanted.

The money, anyway. Five billion euros already given is only a start.

Consequently, on March 18, Erdoğan announced that the migrant crisis that he had orchestrated was officially over: Turkey was closing its borders with Greece and Bulgaria, ostensibly due to the coronavirus. The Telegraph cited reports from Turkish news website Medyascope that around 150 buses had been readied to collect migrants from the border and ferry them back to Istanbul and refugee camps.

Erdoğan can use the same threat as often as he chooses. And it will continue to work for him. Until Angela Merkel goes. Or the EU itself has gone with the infected wind of change.

The EU may not formalize its disbandment for a while yet, but who can continue to believe in its viability now?

Paul Joseph Watson talks about the pandemic of the Chinese Virus:

(Hat-tip to our commenter Jeanne)