Don's Tuesday Column

          THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   5/19/2020

    For open minds, please consider

“Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson,” featured doctors and medical experts on the controversy over “Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ)” vs. “Remdesivir.” President Trump mentioned the potential positive and negative results for HCQ—and the need for medical/scientific research; the partisan news media collectively determined to “debunk” it.

In fact, HCQ has a malarial treatment track record with zero side effects; it’s use against Covid-19 should be researched without controversy. The Trump-Deranged, agenda-driven news media cannot tolerate that anything Trump says or does be correct; leftist minions harass scientists over HCQ treatment for Coronavirus. Look up, “If Hydroxychloroquine Definitely Doesn’t Work, Why Is The NIH Starting A Clinical Trial To Study It?” by Sarah Lee, May 17.

A VA “study”—essentially anecdotes of severely ill, elderly veterans that didn’t improve after given HCQ—had zero clinical value but was touted as “proof” that Trump was wrong. Clinical studies in France and elsewhere offer hope but those results will, because of anti-Trump bias, be ignored.

The “Full Measure” medical guests fairly mentioned another potential drug, Remdesivir, in trials but lacking a record of antiviral treatment. However, many CDC medical advisors on the pandemic had financial connections to Gilead Science, the Remdesivir developer. HCQ is generically (and cheaply) available; Remdesivir has big potential financial benefits for those medical professionals. Conflict of interest?

Her doctors criticized news outlets that take sides in a serious pharmacological debate, saying that the public is ill served by “journalists” advocating for or against treatments. Read “Social Media Platforms Are Censoring Legitimate Scientific Dissent About COVID-19” (S.J. Cheah, May 3).

“YouTube Censors Noted Anti-Lockdown Epidemiologist,” Dr. Knut M. Wittkowski, former head of biostatistics, epidemiology and research design at Rockefeller University (New York Post, May 16). “We could open up again and forget the whole thing; Shutting down schools, driving the economy against the wall — there was no reason for it," Knut Wittkowski said in an interview.

“Coding that led to lockdown was 'totally unreliable' and a 'buggy mess', say experts; The code, written by Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London, was impossible to read, scientists claim,” by H. Boland and E. Zolfagharifard, Telegraph.co.uk, May 16. The modelling behind the lockdowns, stay-at-home orders and massive unemployment “has been slammed by a series of experts, as ‘totally unreliable…something you wouldn’t stake your life on.’”

To writers that predicted infections spreading from the “Yee Haw Revolution,” aka the Cottonwood Rodeo: a friendly challenge. Shasta County had/has 31 cases. Hence, we have a local test of the accuracy of writers on this page; I never believed such a “spike” was likely in counties with marginal Wu-flu rates. Will writers admit if their forecasts err? I’ll be wrong if Wu-flu spreads.

This column has made accurate observations and predictions, except thinking that McCain or Romney would beat Obama. However, I mistakenly said: 1) Gen. Mike Flynn was Trump’s Intelligence Director—he was National Security Advisor; and 2) Jeffrey Toobin supported dropping the charges against Flynn—it was Jonathan Turley. Such corrections are no shame. I have predicted for many months that Trump will win big, hold the Senate and bring back a Republican House.

On Biden’s accuser, according to the inviolable rules of the #MeToo supporters against Brett Kavanaugh—and the rules that Biden imposed on colleges that presumed the guilt of young men accused of sexual assault by female students—there is no refuting Biden’s culpability. Right?

Read “Coronavirus Deaths Are Artificially Inflated in Two Ways, or Just How Inflated Are Coronavirus Death Counts, Exactly?”  by Tyler O’Neil, May 15, pjmedia.com. Opinion polls show Democrats believing the counts are low, and Republicans thinking they are high; Republicans are right because the tally of Wu-flu deaths are in fact overcounting those dying “with” Covid-19 as dying “from” it. Disagree? Take it up with Jared Polis, Colorado’s “Democrat Governor [who] Calls Out CDC For Inflating Coronavirus Deaths.” His Health Dept. reduced their states deaths by 23.7 percent for that exact reason.

“The governors of Georgia and Colorado have at least one thing in common. They both took steps to reopen their states' economies in late April amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. But for some reason, the media's coverage of Gov. Brian Kemp (R., Ga.) has been slightly different from the media's coverage of Gov. Jared Polis (D., Colo.).

“Kemp, for example, has been accused of experimenting with ‘human sacrifice.’ (Headline, The Atlantic, April 29); [it] accuses Kemp of turning Georgia residents into ‘unwilling canaries in an invisible coal mine, sent to find out just how many individuals need to lose their job or their life for a state to work through a plague.’” (From “Spot The Difference: Two Governors Reopened Their States, Only One Was Accused of ‘Human Sacrifice’” by Andrew Stiles, May 14, Freebeacon.com)

Also: “Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp are the two Republican governors that liberals love to hate. They are openly rooting for an increase in the coronavirus death toll in those two states because DeSantis and Kemp are reopening their states for business while blue-state governors are blaming Trump for all their problems.

“But DeSantis is pushing back and giving as good as he’s getting. Fox News: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had a message on Thursday for other governors who have implemented ‘really draconian, arbitrary restrictions’ during the coronavirus outbreak, saying, ‘You don’t have unlimited authority and people do have rights.’” (“Gov. DeSantis Has a Few Choice Words for the Acela Media,” by Rick Moran, May 15)

More truth: “COVID-19 Cases Decline in States Ending Their Lockdowns,” by Brandon Morse, 5/14; and “Why No Spike As States Reopen?” by John Hinderaker, 5/17. America’s deaths have declined from about 2,500 to 1,400 per day—it’s a good trend (worldometers.info).