Month: March 2020

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My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell announced his factories will be cranking out 50,000 N95 masks by Friday in an effort to help Americans during a time of crisis.

President Trump called Mr. Lindell up to the lectern to speak for a few minutes on Monday at his Rose Garden press conference and the media went crazy.

Lindell said he dedicated 75% of his manufacturing to produce cotton face masks: “In 3 days I was up to 10,000 a day — by Friday I want to be up to 50,000 a day,” he said.

Mr. Lindell said he was “proud to serve the nation” during this time and beamed with pride over his American-made products.

But CNN abruptly cut away as Mike Lindell began to speak.

WATCH:

CNN cuts away from the coronavirus task force press conference when My Pillow’s Mike Lindell gets up to speak about how his company repurposed its factories to produce N95 masks pic.twitter.com/atpVElzfYH

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) March 30, 2020

Lindell also encouraged Americans to turn to God and read their Bibles in this time of crisis.

“God gave us grace on November 8, 2016, to change the course we were on. God had been taken out of our schools & lives, a nation had turned its back on God. I encourage you to use this time at home to get back in the word. Read our Bibles…” said Lindell.

Here’s the full video aired on Fox News:

After saying that My Pillow’s factories will be producing 50,000 N95 masks by Friday, Mike Lindell encourages us to read our bibles and spend time with our families.

"With this administration and all the great people in this country praying daily, we will get through this" pic.twitter.com/f1mdtqLYzE

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) March 30, 2020

The snakes in the media became triggered and attacked Lindell.

Trump just called the “My Pillow” guy up to the podium in the Rose Garden. You cannot make this stuff up.

— Ali Velshi (@AliVelshi) March 30, 2020

The post CNN Abruptly Cuts Away as ‘My Pillow’ CEO Mike Lindell Announces His Factories Will Crank Out 50,000 N95 Masks by Friday (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

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On Monday, CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta stepped back in the ring for Monday’s White House Coronavirus Task Force daily briefing and, as usual, he made a fool out of himself. Fortunately for our collective sanity, the ordeal lasted less than two minutes and ended with President Trump torching Fake News Jim for his “nasty, snarky question” about the President’s past statements at what was then a disturbing but evolving pandemic.

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Contrary to the impression one forms from immersion in the news of the day over the past four years, we are quite certain President Donald Trump is not accorded sufficient credit where he is generally found most wanting, particularly by his media critics: on matters of reason and judgment.

The coronavirus crisis that now consumes his administration has shown the president to be a man of some courage and intellectual dexterity. He promptly exercised his authority to limit travel of foreign nationals from China into the United States by a proclamation issued on Jan. 31. He seems to be the only observer giving himself credit for the decision.

That same day, Joe Biden admonished Trump for his xenophobia and other alleged sins: "We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science—not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency." When Trump subsequently referred to "the Chinese virus," Biden further criticized Trump for "xenophobic fear-mongering."  In a March 27 fact check, PolitiFact counseled that "experts say" Trump’s reference to "the Chinese virus" could "foster discrimination toward people of Chinese or Asian origin."

Even when Trump is right, he’s wrong.

Though derided for his disinclination to follow the advice of experts, Trump has relied on the medical experts advising him on the crisis to defer the easing of current social distancing restrictions he had argued for just days before. Having expressed the hope that he could ease the restrictions by Easter, the president reluctantly came to the conclusion that prudence dictated an extension of the current regime devastating the economy—an unprecedented economic contraction that is entirely self-inflicted, but necessary. We will cut off a limb to save the rest of the body.

Addressing Trump’s decision to extend the current guidelines, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN that he and coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx "made it very clear to him that if we pull back on what we were doing and didn’t extend [the social distancing guidelines], there would be more avoidable suffering and avoidable death. So it was a pretty clear decision on his part."

Fauci put it this way: "We showed him the data, he looked at the data and he got it right away," Fauci said. "Dr. Debbie Birx and I went in together and leaned over the desk and said ‘Here is the data, take a look.’ He looked at them, he understood them, and he just shook his head and said ‘I guess we got to do it.’"

Sounds like a reasonable decision. If we had to guess Trump’s way forward, we think that Trump will follow the path charted by Scott Gottlieb and his colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute. Perhaps that is because it’s the only one we’ve seen so far, but it seems to balance caution with necessity. It’s reasonable.

The problem, however, is that we can’t go on like this indefinitely. As Trump has observed—reasonably—the cure threatens to be worse than the disease. The press didn’t give him any credit for that observation either. If only it were interested in getting the White House to flesh out the cost-benefit analysis implicit in the scenarios it is contemplating, it might yet serve a true public purpose. Yet the press prefers to play the fool for Trump.

The post Trump’s Unheralded Reason appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

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With COVID-19 spreading through the United States, state and federal officials took extra precautions and shut down non-essential services to preserve medical equipment necessary to combat the disease.

In some states, this shutdown includes abortion clinics, since they use personal protective equipment needed by health workers confronting the new coronavirus.

As of this writing, government officials in Ohio,
Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi have included abortion clinics in their lists
of nonessential services, effectively shutting down the facilities for the time
being.

At least 11 Planned Parenthood clinics in California have shut down due to the coronavirus, but some clinics in Texas and Ohio say they will continue abortions, despite the orders. An abortion clinic in Louisiana was caught trying to facilitate an abortion, defying the ban put in place by state officials.

Abortion advocates are outraged at the closures, and
the defiance and reaction raise the question: With so many lives at risk and so
much uncertainty right now in the medical field, why must abortions, of all
things, continue?

Of course, pro-choice activists claim abortions must continue because of the obvious medical implications of pregnancy: Babies continue to gestate whether or not there’s a global pandemic. Although pro-life advocates would say this growth is one of the many miracles of life and a reason we must continue to promote life at every stage, abortion clinics want to use it is a reason to continue.

The Washington Post reported that Amy Hagstrom Miller, president of Whole Woman’s Health Alliance, which operates three clinics in Texas, said: “Emergency actions during a global pandemic should advance health and safety for us all, not force people to delay much-needed care and possibly exacerbate their health situations by doing so.”

It’s unfortunate that pro-choice activists still want clinics to perform abortions with the excuse that doing so is medically necessary, or that its saves the mother’s life when, in fact, these types of abortions are rare.

In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported over 90% of abortions are performed during the first trimester, and not for medical reasons at all.

The news media pretended to be aghast that the coronavirus affected abortion procedures, of all things. Politico reported that “Anti-abortion forces led by Republican governors” led to the closure of clinics. The New York Times reported that the coronavirus has become an “excuse to restrict abortions.”

The progressive left is so committed to continuing
abortions for the sake of women’s health that it is willing to risk women’s
health by doing so even as the globe is threatened by a highly contagious virus
that few understand or can predict.

If this doesn’t communicate hypocrisy to women in
general and abortion advocates in particular, I don’t know what will.

Even the most ardent defender ofRoe v. Wadeshould be
willing to understand the gravity of this moment, take a stand for the health
of our entire society, and support a temporary pause of abortions so that
medical supplies needed to slow this pandemic can go to facilities that are facing
down coronavirus in real time.

Failure to do this says as much about the innate
self-centeredness of the abortion movement as it does their misunderstanding of
what health care really means.

For whatever it’s worth right now, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said his office isn’t having any disobedience about abortion. Reeves, a Republican, said he would take action if the state’s one remaining abortion clinic fails to comply with his order to stand down.

“We’ll take whatever action we need to protect
not only the lives of unborn children, but also the lives of anyone who may
contract this particular virus,” he said.

The abortion debate can and will continue another
day. For right now, when specific medical equipment is needed to save hundreds
of thousands of lives and abortion clinics take that equipment unnecessarily,
this is the only correct response.

The post Why Must Abortions Continue During a Pandemic? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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As a physician, I have observed the nature of many epidemics since the early 1960s, when I entered medical school. As a child, I witnessed my parents’ fear of dreadful diseases such as polio and scarlet fever.

The sheer horror of those diseases–especially the polio virus,
which condemned children to an immobile life and death in iron lungs–is seared
into my memory.

Our medical school campus at the University of Texas at Galveston
had a tuberculosis hospital. As a student, I spent a month at that hospital
practicing strict isolation procedures while learning about TB.

Those hospital officials were proud of the fact that no person
working in that facility, from those who kept the hospital clean to the medical
director, ever had contracted tuberculosis in the course of their duties.

In the 1980s, I began my tenure as an officer of the American
Medical Association during the outbreak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. We again were
dealing with a new and deadly virus. In the early stages of the disease of AIDS,
before medical science was able to deploy effective drug therapies, it was almost
invariably fatal. Naturally, the AIDS epidemic provoked fear and prejudice, and
we had to sort out the parameters of the infection in that environment.

I recall a demonstrator declaring that the only vaccine against
the epidemic was education. Our American Medical Association was a steadfast
advocate of leveraging science and education to find a way forward and to
arrest that terrible disease. 

History is our best teacher. David McCullough, a great popular
historian, wrote an excellent account of the construction of the Panama Canal, “The
Path Between the Seas.” The workforce on that gigantic project was
struck by yellow fever and malaria. 

McCullough recounts the story of how Dr. William C. Gorgas handled
both epidemics, and how his great work as an Army physician enabled this
historic project to proceed without the horrendous toll of disease and death
that existed before his intervention.

As with previous epidemics, America’s pathway to success in
battling the new coronavirus is education. Our investigative capabilities have
become so sophisticated that a large amount of knowledge has been gained about
the virus in a short period of time. As in the past, our management of the
threat became driven by data and was applied with knowledge of previous
experience.

It didn’t take long to figure out that certain segments of our population,
older Americans and others with underlying medical conditions, are particularly
vulnerable to this dangerous disease. Some segments seem to be spared from
clinically apparent disease, and the great majority of those who contract the
disease have a relatively mild form.

As an octogenarian, a member of one of the groups at high risk, I
have a big target on my own back.

It has been gratifying to see how those at little or no risk have been so quick to cooperate with measures designed to protect the elderly and otherwise vulnerable part of our population.

As a physician, it has been even more gratifying to see how the American people have been willing to sacrifice to keep our health care system from being overwhelmed.

With the interruption of trade, travel, and commerce between
China and the rest of the world, it was inevitable that severe economic damage
was forthcoming. With the severe and growing threat of contagion, we realized
that slowing the spread was essential to protect our health system, and that
meant shutting down a great deal of our social activity.

We are on the verge of another major public policy debate. It is
going to be a debate over how to strike the right balance: how to balance the
need to protect both the vulnerable population and the capacity of our health care
institutions to care for the sick with the pressing need to restore our usual
daily social lives and our livelihoods. Striking the right balance is the task
of true statesmen; it requires sound practical judgment and common sense.    

We are all in this together, like it or not. As I approach my
82nd birthday, I humbly offer some advice.

We old folks, and those of us who have other vulnerabilities,
should continue our self-isolation for as long as we–meaning our leaders and
their public health experts–think necessary and desirable.

Just as many young people have been willing to sacrifice for us
by isolating themselves, I am confident that, in return for being able to go
back to school or to work, they would be willing to continue to bring food to
our doorsteps. I believe they also would be willing to help in other ways if we
face prolonged isolation.

Unlike previous generations, we also are blessed with modern
technology. While isolation is ubiquitous, our young innovators have figured
out that we can have virtual cocktail parties on Zoom. We can FaceTime with our
family members. We can still go out for a walk safely, if we do so when all the
kids are back in school and their parents are back at work.

Think about it. Is it so bad for the elderly and otherwise
vulnerable to keep to ourselves for a little longer while we let the less
vulnerable return to life as we want it? Isn’t the magic word here “balance”?

Take it from an old doctor. A balanced, nuanced approach to
battling this COVID-19 pandemic is a reasonable path forward. And a big tip of
the hat to all of those who have been willing to sacrifice to protect those of
us at increased risk.

Bless them all.

The post Here’s an Old Doctor’s Advice as We Battle COVID-19 appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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The Arizona woman who said that she and her 68-year-old husband ingested a substance used to clean fish tanks after hearing President Donald Trump tout chloroquine as a cure for the coronavirus has given thousands of dollars to Democratic groups and candidates over the last two years.

The woman’s most recent donations, in late February, were to a Democratic PAC, the 314 Action Fund, that bills itself as the "pro-science resistance" and has vocally criticized the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and held up her case to slam the White House.

Although local and national media outlets withheld the couple’s names, the Washington Free Beacon established their identities through descriptions in local news reports, where the pair were identified by their first names and ages: Gary, 68, and Wanda, 61. The Free Beacon is withholding their identities at Wanda’s request.

Federal Election Commission records show that Wanda has donated thousands of dollars to Democratic electoral groups and candidates over the past two years, including Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and EMILY’s List, a group that aims to elect pro-choice female candidates.

Wanda told the Free Beacon that she and her husband were both Democrats, not Trump supporters. They heard about the potential benefits of chloroquine, an antimalarial drug, in news reports. She decided at the "spur of the moment" to try taking it, but reached for a fish tank cleaner in her pantry that contains chloroquine phosphate, a different and deadly form of the chemical. The Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency authorization for the use of chloroquine to treat coronavirus on Sunday.

"We weren’t big supporters of [Trump], but we did see that they were using it in China and stuff," Wanda told the Free Beacon. "And we just made a horrible, tragic mistake," she said. "It was stupid, and it was horrible, and we should have never done it. But it’s done and now I’ve lost my husband. And my whole life was my husband."

"We didn’t think it would kill us," she added. "We thought if anything it would help us ‘cus that’s what we’ve been hearing on the news."

In her first national news interview, Wanda told NBC News that she took the fish tank cleaner in a tragically botched attempt to follow medical advice that Trump had relayed in a press conference earlier that week.

"We saw Trump on TV—every channel—and all of his buddies and that this was safe," she said last Monday. "Trump kept saying it was basically pretty much a cure."

During a press briefing on March 19, the president pointed to medical studies indicating that chloroquine, a medication used to treat malaria, may be a "game changer" in treating the coronavirus. Wanda warned others in the same NBC News interview not to "believe anything that the president says."

Wanda’s most recent contributions to Democratic causes came on Feb. 26 and 28. They went to the 314 Action Fund, a Democratic political action committee that describes itself as "the largest pro-science advocacy organization committed to electing scientists" and aims to "promote the responsible use of data driven fact based approaches in public policy."

The group has been highly critical of Trump’s coronavirus policies in recent weeks. In fact, on its Facebook page, the group slammed the Trump administration for the couple’s actions, writing, "There are real consequences to the White House throwing its approval behind an experimental drug trial before it’s time."

In the wake of the incident, media outlets tacitly blamed Trump for the tragedy. The New York Times noted that chloroquine "has been bandied about by President Trump during White House briefings on the coronavirus pandemic as a potential ‘game changer’ in the treatment of Covid-19." Others, like Axios, ran corrections noting that the couple had not ingested the chloroquine in its medical form but rather the form "used in aquariums" after initially reporting that the couple had followed the president’s faulty medical advice.

Wanda does not appear to have a long history of political donations, according to FEC reports. Her contributions to Democrats rose sharply over the past few years. Her first recorded political donation was $150 to Hillary Clinton in 2016, according to FEC records. The next year she gave $550 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Since 2018, she has contributed approximately $6,000 to Democratic electoral groups.

She said she and her husband had decided to stay in their home to avoid catching the virus. They were spending much of their time watching media coverage.

"We were watching the news because we were self-isolating and getting pretty nervous. We were scared. I’m still scared," Wanda told the Free Beacon.

She said she and her husband are not active on social media and don’t read much online news, but they get a lot of their information from television.

"I didn’t know, and I didn’t understand how serious it was," she added. "It was the worst situation I could ever, ever, ever imagine anybody being in."

Wanda told NBC News that her experience was a cautionary tale about taking the president’s words at face value. "Oh my God, don’t take anything. Don’t believe anything that the president says and his people," she said. She told a local news outlet that she was still "pretty much in shock" over her husband’s death.

"We were just having the best day before this happened. I made him his favorite lunch, grilled steak and asparagus and red potatoes, and we were just having the best Sunday," she said.

The post Woman Who Ingested Fish Tank Cleaner Is Prolific Donor to Democratic Causes appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

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