Trade adviser Peter Navarro tears into Fauci in blistering op-ed: ‘Wrong about everything

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trade-adviser-peter-navarro-tears-into-fauci-in-blistering-op-ed-wrong-about-everything

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro tore into Dr. Anthony Fauci in a stunning op-ed on Wednesday, saying the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, who has been a leading voice on the Coronavirus Task Force, has been “wrong about everything.”

“Dr. Anthony Fauci has a good bedside manner with the public, but he has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on,” Navarro wrote in a blistering op-ed for USA Today.

All the Ways the Influential Hydroxychloroquine Study Was Crap

https://gizmodo.com/all-the-ways-the-influential-hydroxychloroquine-study-w-1844378680

A controversial, highly influential study touting the drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid-19—one that helped launch months of research and failed clinical trials—has now been sharply criticized within the pages of the same scientific journal that published it. The new post-publication peer review highlights a variety of serious flaws in the study and concludes that the authors were “fully irresponsible” in how they presented their findings.

The original paper, authored by a team of researchers in France, was published in late March in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents. It was said to involve 20 hospitalized patients with confirmed covid-19 who were treated with hydroxychloroquine, some of whom were also given the antibiotic azithromycin. Compared to a control group of patients, the study claimed, people on hydroxychloroquine had lower levels of the virus on average or cleared the infection more quickly; the addition of azithromycin was associated with even faster recovery.

Though there had been earlier, promising trials of hydroxychloroquine to treat covid-19 elsewhere in the world, the French study sparked massive scientific and political interest in the drug. President Trump himself tweeted about the study the day after it came out, heralding the combination therapy as a “game changer” for the pandemic. Soon after, the U.S. government and others, including the World Health Organization, announced that they would start large-scale trials to test out hydroxychloroquine and the related drug chloroquine.

But it wasn’t long before other scientists began to raise questions about the study, how it was carried out, and the scientists who conducted it, particularly the senior author, a physician and microbiologist named Didier Raoult. Though Raoult had genuinely contributed to important research in the past, he and his lab were also previously accused of glaring errors and misconduct in their published work, with one episode leading to a year-long ban from a prominent microbiology journal. Once his hydroxychloroquine study began making waves, researchers unearthed other alleged examples of data fakery in some of his earlier research.

Rosendaal’s scathing review echoes many of the same criticisms made by outside scientists following the study’s publication. In particular, he condemns the decision by Raoult’s team to exclude from the study’s final results six patients who took hydroxychloroquine, including four whose condition worsened, one of whom eventually died during the study period (none in the control group died). There were also other inconsistencies, such as supplemental material mentioning that a number of asymptomatic patients were included for study while the study’s actual language claimed that it was an examination of hospitalized patients (people without symptoms are unlikely to have been hospitalized for covid-19).

Meah Sharim shteibel sign

Fauci

Ex-Harvard Medical School faculty member warns COVID-19 herd immunity is ‘wishful thinking'

https://www.foxnews.com/health/clay-ackerly-coronavirus-herd-immunity-wishful-thinking

A Washington D.C.-based internist and former Harvard Medical School faculty member has claimed the idea that herd immunity may slow the coronavirus pandemic is "wishful thinking" after a 50-year-old patient was infected for a second time with COVID-19.

"During his first infection, my patient experienced a mild cough and sore throat," Dr. Clay Ackerly explained in an opinion piece for Vox. "His second infection, in contrast, was marked by a high fever, shortness of breath, and hypoxia, resulting in multiple trips to the hospital.

"It is possible, but unlikely, that my patient had a single infection that lasted three months," Dr. Ackerly added. "Some Covid-19 patients (now dubbed 'long haulers') do appear to suffer persistent infections and symptoms.

"My patient, however, cleared his infection — he had two negative PCR tests after his first infection — and felt healthy for nearly six weeks."

 

Israeli Data Show School Openings Were a Disaster That Wiped Out Lockdown Gains

https://www.thedailybeast.com/israeli-data-show-school-openings-were-a-disaster-that-wiped-out-lockdown-gains

The assessment of Israel’s trajectory has direct bearing on the heated debate underway in the United States between President Donald Trump, who is demanding a nationwide reopening of schools for what appear to be largely political reasons, and health authorities who caution it could put the wider population at risk.

Importantly, on May 17 in Israel it appeared the virus not only was under control, but defeated. Israel reported only 10 new cases of COVID-19 in the entire country that day. In the U.S., the debate often is about reopening schools where the disease is not only not in decline, but surging.

On Sunday, for instance, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, “There’s nothing in the data that suggests that kids being in school is in any way dangerous.” But that is not the case in Israel, where the data from June, the last month for which there is a full set of statistics, appear all too clear.

Galia Rahav, who chairs the department of infectious diseases at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv, said in an interview that “what happened in schools is just too much gathering, day after day, and kids come home and infect mom and dad. The top numbers of new infections were in kids.”

Due to the large number of infections among children, she noted, “the average age of an Israeli with COVID-19 has gone down to between 20 and 39,” while infections in citizens over 65 have held steady. In Jerusalem, the Israeli city with the highest rate of infection, most of the people with COVID-19 are under the age of 35.

Article 10: Freedom of expression

https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/human-rights-act/article-10-freedom-expression

 Are there any restrictions to this right?

Although you have freedom of expression, you also have a duty to behave responsibly and to respect other people’s rights.

Public authorities may restrict this right if they can show that their action is lawful, necessary and proportionate in order to:

• protect national security, territorial integrity (the borders of the state) or public safety
• prevent disorder or crime
• protect health or morals
• protect the rights and reputations of other people
• prevent the disclosure of information received in confidence
• maintain the authority and impartiality of judges

An authority may be allowed to restrict your freedom of expression if, for example, you express views that encourage racial or religious hatred.

Trump’s Warped Definition of Free Speech

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/trumps-warped-definition-free-speech/612316/

 Palin’s remarks were widely ridiculed at the time. The First Amendment, commentators on the right and the left pointed out, protects the freedom of speech, not the freedom from criticism. You have the right to speak, and others have the right to praise, mock, or ignore you as they see fit.

 

As absurd as it may sound, Palin’s bizarre interpretation of the First Amendment has now been adopted by the president of the United States. On Tuesday, the social-media company Twitter added a label to one of the president’s tweets, which falsely declared that mail-in ballots would be “substantially fraudulent,” urging users to “get the facts about mail-in voting.” Twitter did not ban Trump from the platform, or censor his tweet, although it would have been fully within its rights to do so, and in accordance with its own terms of service. It merely appended additional context showing that the president’s claim was false.

In retaliation, Trump signed an executive order yesterday afternoon directing the federal government to “reconsider the scope” of Section 230, a provision of federal law that shields companies from liability for content posted by their users. The First Amendment was explicitly written to protect the right of citizens to express opposition to their leaders; it says that Congress “shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” But to the president, criticism of his falsehoods is a violation of his free-speech rights. This position reverses the purpose of the First Amendment, turning an individual right of freedom of expression into the right of the state to silence its critics.

 

This should be obvious, but if your freedom to speak depends on the president approving of what you say, then you simply don’t have freedom of speech. The Trumpist defense of state censorship of social media is that if you do not want your kneecaps broken, then you should make sure you pay the protection money. Twitter is hardly the first media company to face this kind of extortion from the president; as my colleague David Graham points out, Trump has attempted to use the authority of his office to silence criticism from the Washington Post, CNN, members of the White House press corps, and even ESPN.

Journalist Bari Weiss skewers New York Times in her resignation letter

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-07-14/bari-weiss-new-york-times-resignation

“Bari Weiss never actually got fired, she is in fact quitting because she’s mad that all the people at the Times who don’t like her *didn’t* get fired. But they’ll still turn this into some kind of crusade to protect people from firing,” tweeted comedian Arthur Chu. “Which is at least consistent, because Bari Weiss herself LOVES trying to get people fired.”

“To say I’m against cancel culture is massive understatement but there is a difference between criticism and getting someone fired. @bariweiss quit, she wasn’t fired. She quit because people hurt her feelings. Seems snowflakey to me. You can’t cancel other people’s speech, either,” tweeted “The Young Turks” host Cenk Uygur.

Judith Miller: Rise and fall of New York Times writer Bari Weiss — a victim of far-left intolerance

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/new-york-times-bari-weiss-judith-miller

Weiss’s departure was quickly hailed by her many critics within and outside of the paper on social media, among them Glenn Greenwald, who has called her a “hypocrite” for her alleged efforts to suppress Arab professors while in college, and for her defense of Israel and some of its controversial policies as a newspaper writer.

TYT Reacts To Bari Weiss' Resignation

Trump Gives Subdued, Rambling Campaign-Style Speech In Rose Garden | The 11th Hour | MSNBC

Arizona Teacher Dies As Trump Pushes For School Re-Openings | The Beat With Ari Melber | MSNBC

Unemployed Should ‘Find Something New,’ Urge Heirs to Fred Trump’s Fortune

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/find-something-new-trump-donald-ivanka-unemployment.html

The White House has started a new campaign urging Americans who have bad jobs or no jobs to “Find Something New.” Ivanka Trump, who has spearheaded this initiative, explains, “There has never been a more critical time for Americans of all ages and backgrounds to be aware of the multiple pathways to career success and gain the vocational training and skills they need to fill jobs in a changing economy.”

Statistically speaking, in fact, you probably will not find something. The labor market is suffering two simultaneous crises: a pandemic that directly prevents a lot of economic activity from taking place and a broader failure of demand rippling through the rest of the economy. The more than 10 percent of working-age adults unable to find regular work are jobless not because they lack the skills for the needed jobs but because there is not enough demand for labor.