Going For The Brass

Hopefully the cartoon is self-explanatory, but we'll add that we support Simone Biles' tough decision to step aside from Olympic competition. Her gymnastic feats not only break the laws of physics, they flirt with serious injury or death if she's unable to perform less than perfectly.

She didn't let anyone down, and we wish her nothing but success and mental peace in the future.

THE MOST IMPORTANT NEWS IN THE WORLD?

Interested in "Following the Science" about Covid? Because here's the science: there is a safe, cheap, effective treatment and preventative that could have prevented millions of Covid deaths and serious infections. Science has known this for over a year but the news has been, and continues to be, suppressed by politicians, "experts," the news media, and social media censors.

We didn't need to shut down (or at least could have re-opened far sooner). We didn't need to be subjected to nonstop panic-stoking from the government and the media. We didn't need to crush the American work ethic, nor did we need to throw election laws to the wind last year because of the "special circumstances." And God knows we don't now need untold trillions of "Covid relief" dollars to come back from this needless (but fully intentional) nightmare.

The truth of this is incontestible. The reason it's happening and who's behind it - still a mystery - is surely one of the most important and urgent issues for which we should all be demanding answers right now.
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Why is the FDA Attacking a Safe, Effective Covid Treatment?
By David R. Henderson and Charles L. Hooper
Wall Street Journal July 28, 2021 12:34 pm ET

The Food and Drug Administration claims to follow the science. So why is it attacking ivermectin, a medication it certified in 1996?

Earlier this year the agency put out a special warning that “you should not use ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19.” The FDA’s statement included words and phrases such as “serious harm,” “hospitalized,” “dangerous,” “very dangerous,” “seizures,” “coma and even death” and “highly toxic.” Any reader would think the FDA was warning against poison pills. In fact, the drug is FDA-approved as a safe and effective antiparasitic.

Ivermectin was developed and marketed by Merck & Co. while one of us (Mr. Hooper) worked there years ago. William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering and developing avermectin, which Mr. Campbell and associates modified to create ivermectin.

Ivermectin is on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines. Merck has donated four billion doses to prevent river blindness and other diseases in Africa and other places where parasites are common. A group of 10 doctors who call themselves the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance have said ivermectin is “one of the safest, low-cost, and widely available drugs in the history of medicine.”

Ivermectin fights 21 viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the cause of Covid-19. A single dose reduced the viral load of SARS-CoV-2 in cells by 99.8% in 24 hours and 99.98% in 48 hours, according to a June 2020 study published in the journal Antiviral Research.

Some 70 clinical trials are evaluating the use of ivermectin for treating Covid-19. The statistically significant evidence suggests that it is safe and works for both treating and preventing the disease.
In 115 patients with Covid-19 who received a single dose of ivermectin, none developed pneumonia or cardiovascular complications, while 11.4% of those in the control group did. Fewer ivermectin patients developed respiratory distress (2.6% vs. 15.8%); fewer required oxygen (9.6% vs. 45.9%); fewer required antibiotics (15.7% vs. 60.2%); and fewer entered intensive care (0.1% vs. 8.3%). Ivermectin-treated patients tested negative faster, in four days instead of 15, and stayed in the hospital nine days on average instead of 15. Ivermectin patients experienced 13.3% mortality compared with 24.5% in the control group.

Moreover, the drug can help prevent Covid-19. One 2020 article in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications looked at what happened after the drug was given to family members of confirmed Covid-19 patients. Less than 8% became infected, versus 58.4% of those untreated.
Despite the FDA’s claims, ivermectin is safe at approved doses. Out of four billion doses administered since 1998, there have been only 28 cases of serious neurological adverse events, according to an article published this year in the American Journal of Therapeutics. The same study found that ivermectin has been used safely in pregnant women, children and infants.

If the FDA were driven by science and evidence, it would give an emergency-use authorization for ivermectin for Covid-19. Instead, the FDA asserts without evidence that ivermectin is dangerous.
At the bottom of the FDA’s warning against ivermectin is this statement: “Meanwhile, effective ways to limit the spread of COVID-19 continue to be to wear your mask, stay at least 6 feet from others who don’t live with you, wash hands frequently, and avoid crowds.”

Is this based on the kinds of double-blind studies that the FDA requires for drug approvals? No.
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Mr. Henderson, a research fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, was senior health economist with President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. Mr. Hooper is president of Objective Insights, a firm that consults with pharmaceutical clients.

Derailed Train of Thought

Yeah, he really said all that

I'm still in "looking aghast from the sidelines" mode, but felt like it was time to post a little something to remind people that I'm not dead, dying, nor incarcerated. Yet. Plus, this will give us a nice clean slate for the comments area, where intelligent and well-informed people are still posting the best chat on the Internet.

And despite my ongoing sabbatical, I still hear the drumbeat of ongoing news. Although it might just be my throbbing headache. 

• Nancy Pelosi is single-handedly choosing the (ahem) "bipartisan" members of a committee to investigate the January 6th Patriots Picnic in Washington, which Dems and the media are breathlessly calling "the most deadly assault on the Capitol in 200 years." A ludicrous thing to say, even though it was the most deadly event in Ashli Babbitt's life.

• The Dems look likely to pass Bernie Sanders' 3.5 Trillion Dollar (actually 5.5 Trillion) spending bill soon, meaning the value of Monopoly money is about to surge when measured against the buying power of the American dollar.

• The Olympics are allegedly taking place in empty stadiums, which is a pretty good metaphor for the lack of enthusiasm people are feeling for the event. Personally, I've given up caring about the USA teams because there's been so much political nonsense and so many personal anti-American demonstrations on and off the field leading up to this event.  Here's a wild idea: in the future, howzabout we ask athletes if they have any problem with showing respect to the American flag before putting them on Team USA?

• Although it almost looks like a hint of sanity, I'm not getting my hopes up too much over the fact that Joe Biden ("The Most Popular Man Ever To Run For Office!") keeps seeing his approval ratings fall, recently hitting the 50% mark. Even more telling is a recent poll that shows a majority of Americans (Conservatives, Liberals, and Independents) now view our nation's future pessimistically, with actual optimism falling a full 20 points since May. Nice job of uniting the country, Joe!

• Federal officials have already apprehended ("Welcome to the United States! Here's a plane ticket and some walking around money!") over 1.1 million people crossing our border with Mexico this year. We know that the Democrats' goal is to alter voting demographics permanently, but just how much impact can these "immigrants" have? Here's a fun fact: if you put all of those people in one place and called it a state, it would immediately have a greater population than nine of our existing states do. 

Of course, the Left's goal isn't to create a new state, but rather to ship just enough of those people to existing states to change the demographics, cause redistricting, and sway elections (at the same time the Dems are coincidentally trying to federalize elections to ban voter IDs). Currently, our military is being used to fly these intruders to all 50 states rather than, oh, carpet-bombing our southern border. Which strikes me as a damn shame.

• On a personal note, I'm currently recovering from a very uncomfortable urinary tract infection. I won't go into details, but as a gesture of solidarity, I will never again participate in a weenie roast.

Knock-Knock Jokers

Okay, this cartoon isn't subtle and we're not even sure that it's funny. But Joe Biden's call for the United Nations to investigate (and eventually "control") racism and white supremacy in the United States is beyond the pale. If there is a less racist country than ours in the United Nations, we'd sure as hell like to know what it is.

But no, our alleged president is now saying that racism is at its worst since the Civil War, owing in part to the fact that Texas wants to pass regulations to help ensure honest elections. And it's worth noting that what the media is calling the Texas "voter suppression" law would actually institute less-restrictive voting practices than those in Joe Biden's home state of Delaware.

As a case in point, one of the worse-than-lynching proposals in Texas is to offer drive-thru voting for the convenience of the disabled, but NOT to jam those drive-thru polling locations with able-bodied people who just don't want to get out of their idling, fossil fuel-burning, pollution-belching cars. And somehow this common sense policy is considered racially discriminatory, which raises an interesting question: how are people who allegedly can't get photo IDs legally driving cars?!

But facts don't matter. The Dems have decided to run with the imaginary racism football as far as they can go with it - including, apparently, asking the members of the United Nations to adjudicate our nation's morality while failing to stop ethnic genocide and slavery within their own borders. An idea so insane and offensive that it rockets past hypocrisy and should instead be considered just cause for Joe Biden's immediate removal from office.